He really didn’t think so. Nor did he think he could, or should, wait for daylight. He was simply too tired to risk circling about for that long a time. If he fell asleep in the air he would hardly notice a crash until it had happened. Moreover, while he would be very likely to survive such a crash, there was essentially no chance he would have a clue where he was once he crawled out of the cockpit.
Once more, Diaz flicked on his red-filtered flashlight. A last time he checked his map and his route. He turned his attention to his compass. Then he eased the stick over and headed, as nearly as he could tell, for the town of Montijo and, he hoped, aid to rescue his father and the others.
Suarez was standing by the wall-mounted main map in his forward command post when the medical orderlies brought in the stretcher-borne, broken and bleeding young man and placed his stretcher across two chairs.
“He’d have been dead, sure as shit,” the fat, balding medical sergeant in charge announced, “except that he landed only a few hundred meters from the field hospital. We were able to stabilize him and stop the bleeding. The tough part was cutting him out of the airplane and unimpaling him from the tree branch that punctured the plane and his gut.”
“Has he said anything?” Suarez asked, though something the sergeant said nagged at him.
“Other than that he’d shoot us if we didn’t bring him to you, no, sir,” the sergeant answered. “We believed him.”
“When did he pass out?”
“Oh, about the time we pulled him off the branch and got his guts back inside him. We probably should have taken him to the hospital but he seemed to think it was really important that we bring him here.” The sergeant shrugged.
Airplane, Suarez mused. Airplane? No airplane can fly anywhere near the Posleen. How the hell…
“Was there an engine on this ‘airplane’? A propeller? Anything like that?”
The sergeant tilted his head to the right and looked up, while he tried to remember. “Yes, sir, but now that you ask, it wasn’t even warm, as if the plane had been flying without it. I wonder how it flew.”
Suarez nodded deeply. “It didn’t fly; it glided. This is one of the young men who saved our asses when we were cut off by the enemy.”
“Ooohhh,” the sergeant said. “Then, if you are going to ask him any questions, you had better hurry, sir. This young man needs a hospital and we owe him better than to let him die.”
Suarez knelt down next to Diaz and tapped the pilot twice on his blood-streaked cheek. This didn’t seem to have any effect so he slapped the boy, as gently as seemed prudent. Diaz’s eyes sprang open, though they seemed to lack focus. The eyes swept around the room, gradually coming to rest — with at least some focus this time — on Suarez’s face.
The boy moved his bandaged head to face Suarez. Rather, he tried to and stopped suddenly, a groan of pain escaping his lips. His eyes closed again and he bit at his cheek to stifle the escape of any more “unmanly” sounds. No human male thinks it is quite so important to appear manly as those so young that they are more boy than man.
Be that as it may, Diaz didn’t try to open his eyes again. Instead, with eyes still tightly shut, he insisted, “I must speak to Colonel Suarez. It’s a matter of life and death.”
The voice sounded familiar. Suarez put that together with the boy’s reported means of arrival and came up with the perfect solution: Julio Diaz, son of the Army’s G-2 and the pilot whose calls for naval gunfire had, more than any other, saved the core of the 1st Division.
“What is a matter of life and death, Lieutenant Diaz?” Suarez asked gently.
Hand trembling and uncoordinated, Diaz reached for the left breast pocket of his flight suit and began fumbling with the zipper. After a few moments of frustration he gave up and asked Suarez to look in that pocket.
Carefully, Suarez reached over, unzipped the pocket and withdrew a small packet of papers, with a map, wrapped in plastic. He opened it and began to read, referring back to the map from time to time as he did so. Every now and again a “Bastards!” or “Pendejos!” or, once, “Motherfuckers!” — in English, no less — escaped his lips. After a short time, he folded the maps and paper up.
“Get this man to the hospital,” he told the medical sergeant.
Diaz risked opening his eyes, winced once again with the pain and disorientation, and then took a death grip on Suarez’s arm.
“You must save my father,” he insisted.
“Your father is important, son,” Suarez answered, “and I’ll save him if I can. But it’s more important — your old man would be the first to agree — to save the country.”
Freeing himself from Diaz’s grip and standing up, Suarez began bellowing orders. “Get this man to the hospital,” he repeated to the medical sergeant. Then, turning to the officer on staff duty in the command post, he said, “And get me every commander in the division down to battalion level. Also alert… mmm,” he consulted the map. “Alert Second Battalion, Twenty-First Regiment. I want them here and in position around the command post within the hour.”
The sun arose on Cortez’s left, shielded by but filtering though the trees that lined portions of the road. There was more pasture than there were trees, though, this being cattle country. Much of the trip was made with bright morning sunlight pouring into the Hummer, burning the back of the coward-general’s neck.
Cortez’s major thought while on the road to Montijo was that Boyd had indeed been funneling extra equipment to the 1st Division. He knew, at some level, that the gringos had begun to pour in more material, and to buy material from other sources, for the defense of the Canal. Seeing just how much of it had gone to 1st Division, though, was something of a shock. On the half-crushed road from Santiago to Montijo he passed what would easily make two battalions worth of modern American armor, possibly twice that in Russian-built infantry fighting vehicles, and two or three battalions of self propelled guns of indeterminate origin. These were lined up to either side in company- and battalion-sized motor parks.
Knowing the approximate strength of what had survived of his division’s soldiers suggested to Cortez that this equipment was, for the time, extra and that the exchange of old materiel for new was already well advanced.
Suarez has been hiding this, the bastard, and the soldiers must have been in on it; there’s just too much here to have kept quiet unless nearly every man were cooperating. And if he has this equipment issued and integrated, even with only forty percent of a division left, it is more than enough to plow through any other formation in the force that might be in position to stop them. Fuck.
Cortez led a convoy of twenty-seven trucks carrying over five hundred of the stockade scrapings such as he had used to effect the arrests. He didn’t delude himself that they would be worth anything in a fight; that wasn’t their purpose. He had very good reason to believe that they would be effective enough at intimidating people into quiet acquiescence, even such people as made up the battle-hardened, hard-core remainder of the 1st Division, provided — at least — that he could catch them unawares and at a disadvantage.
A guard posted by the road stopped Cortez’s American-provided Hummer. After the most cursory check, mere verbal questioning, the guard waved Cortez’s column on, helpfully offering directions to the 1st Division Command Post.