Росс Томас - The Mordida Man

The boat was a twenty-one-foot cabin cruiser. It was painted a light blue with a darker blue trim. Its brightwork gleamed. Dunjee knew little about boats, but he thought it looked fairly new. The name painted on its stern was Maria.

“Who’s the sailor?” Dunjee asked.

“Spiceman,” Keeling said. “He used to have one a little smaller than this in Washington. Kept it docked over in Anacostia.”

Spiceman was the first aboard. He went below and then came back up and turned toward the gauges. “The bilges are okay,” he said. Nobody seemed to care. Spiceman started the boat’s engines. They caught immediately.

Reese turned to Dunjee. “Let’s you and me and Keeling go down and take a look at the goodies,” he said. “Leland’ll take care of the lines.”

There were two bunks on the port side of the cabin and another one forward which could be pulled down. There was also a small galley and a head. On the bottom bunk were two large suitcases. Reese opened the first suitcase. Inside, resting on what seemed to be a thick bed of old bathrobes, were three M-16 rifles. There were also a stack of magazines and a roll of friction tape. Dunjee counted twenty magazines.

Reese looked at Dunjee. “You still know how to work one of these babies, don’t you?”

“I think I remember.”

Reese opened the second suitcase. It held another M-16, ten more magazines, a bullhorn, and six fragmentation grenades. Reese grunted. “They must’ve thought we were going to start a war.”

He picked up a rifle and handed it to Dunjee. “Here,” he said adding, “you’ll need one of these, too,” and handed him a magazine.

“I’ll need two of them,” Dunjee said, just as the boat began to pull away from the dock.

Reese handed him another magazine. “And some of that friction tape,” Dunjee said.

Timble came down into the cabin just as Dunjee was taping the two magazines unevenly together. He clicked one of the magazines into the breech.

“Why do you have them taped together?” Timble asked.

“Because,” Dunjee said, released the magazine, flipped it over, and slapped the fresh magazine into place.

“Oh,” Timble said. “For when you run out of bullets.”

“Dunjee was sort of a hero over in Vietnam,” Reese said.

“Really?” said Timble, interested.

“Really,” Dunjee said.

Spiceman ran the boat aground on the small, narrow rocky beach. Sharp rocks cut a jagged foot-long hole in the boat’s bow. The five men jumped from the bow into less than two feet of water and waded ashore. Alex Reese was the last off the boat. He carried the loudhailer as well as an M-16. No one looked back at the boat as it began to fill with water. Again, no one seemed to care.

There was a full moon, fat and bright. Dunjee turned to Reese. “You lay on the moon, too?”

“No, but I fixed up the weather.”

It was warm, somewhere in the low sixties. The five men were dressed much alike — in jackets and tieless shirts and slacks and ordinary street shoes. Two of the shirts were even white. Dunjee was grateful that his was blue.

They gathered around Franklin Keeling, who had folded the big map down into a thick one-foot square. “There should be some kind of steps leading up to the top of the bluff,” Keeling said.

The bluff started where the rocky beach ended and went straight up for nearly forty feet. The bluff appeared to be smooth solid rock. If there were no steps, Dunjee didn’t think they could climb it.

Keeling had a flashlight. He switched it on and moved its beam over the rock face. He found the first step a little to the left. It was nearly two feet high and very narrow, both in depth and width. The steps were worn smooth and seemed to have been chiseled and hacked out of the rock face a long time ago. “It’s gonna take a goat to get up those,” Keeling said.

“I think we should best start,” Timble said.

Dunjee moved over to Timble. “Let me ask something.”

“What?”

“When we get up on top, who’s going to be in charge? There are three people up there behind stone walls who’re probably going to be shooting at me pretty soon. So I’d kind of like to know who’s going to be running things.”

Timble nodded. “My experience in such matters is limited.”

“I’m glad you appreciate that,” Dunjee said.

“So Mr. Keeling here will be in charge.”

“He gives the orders?”

Timble nodded. Dunjee turned to the big man with the rubbery face who sometimes liked to call himself Arnold. “You’ve done this kind of thing before?” Dunjee said.

“Once or twice,” Keeling said.

“Just curious.”

“I don’t blame you.” He turned to the others. “All right. I’ll go up first. Then Dunjee, then Jack, then Leland. Reese, you bring up the rear.”

Nobody argued. Keeling stepped up onto the first narrow ledge and then went smoothly on up to the top. Dunjee followed. It was easier than he had thought it would be. When he reached the final step, he stopped and slowly poked his head up over the lip of the cliff.

Keeling was almost flat on the ground. He turned his head back toward Dunjee. “See that?” he said.

Dunjee looked. There was a low stone wall some ten yards away. It was crumbling through age and neglect. In some places it was only a foot high; in others two feet; there was even one section which had managed to retain its original three-foot height. The wall ran for twenty feet on either side of Keeling and then seemed to give up. It simply dribbled away into small piles of stones.

“That’s where we set up,” Keeling said. “At the wall. Pass it back.”

Dunjee passed it back to Spiceman and then began crawling on his belly and knees and elbows toward the wall. He cradled the M-16 in his arms as he crawled.

When he reached the wall, Keeling was already peering over it. “Take a look,” he said.

Dunjee smeared some dirt on his forehead before raising the top of his head slowly above the wall until he could see what lay on the other side. It was the farmhouse. It seemed to be some forty yards away. The house was a square flat-roofed one-story structure, simply built of round stones. There was a solid enough looking door, which was closed. On either side of the door were two windows. They were shuttered. Through the cracks in the shutters came some soft light. Dunjee looked for power lines, but could find none, and assumed that the light came from either oil-or battery-powered lamps. Or even candles.

“It’s a fort,” Dunjee said.

Keeling grunted. “If we can’t get in, I guess we’ll have to get them to come out.”

Keeling turned and watched as the other three men crawled toward them. After each of them had taken a quick peek over the top of the wall, Keeling looked at Reese and said, “Remember that time I was telling you about in Luanda?”

Reese nodded. “Want me to try it?”

“Why not?”

Reese picked up the bullhorn. “I’m going to try to talk them out.”

He put the bullhorn up to his lips. “You, inside the house!”

Reese’s bass voice seemed to thunder out of the bullhorn. “This is the U.S. government. You are surrounded. If you throw out your arms and come out with your hands up, you will not be harmed. I repeat. Throw out your arms and come out with your hands up. You have three minutes.”

Halfway through Reese’s invitation the lights in the farmhouse went out. They were thick candles stuck into saucers and it was Ko Yoshikawa who blew them out. “Can you see anything?” he said.

Bernt Diringshoffen was already kneeling at a shuttered window, peering through the cracks. In his left hand was a Kalashnikov assault rifle. “Nothing,” he said.

“I told you,” Françoise Leget whispered fiercely into the dark. “I told you it was a trap. Now they’re going to kill us. I dreamed it night before last. I told you then what was going to happen.”