It was no place to argue; and even after we'd extricated ourselves from there, I wasn't in a very good position for argument, deep in an officially friendly country surrounded by well-equipped representatives of its armed forces. Anyway, stray missiles weren't really in my line. I'd done my work and, like Jiminez, I'd make my report. Washington could take it from there.
We rejoined the rest of our group and reached the hiding place while the light still held, though it was fading fast. Two of the men of the special contingent that had entered the village, and the older woman-the younger one, wounded, had remained with us after delivering the message- were awaiting us in a grove of trees that seemed too dense for a snake to penetrate. But there was a way in, and in the center was a space like a good-sized room, a kind of arboreal cave.
I left Jiminez posting sentries and went over to the woman who sat at the side of the space watching over a strange girl lying on the 'ground. I knew it was a girl because that's what we'd been supposed to rescue; otherwise I might have hesitated before forming an opinion. There is a point in abuse and starvation beyond which the question of sex becomes meaningless. The woman looked up.
"She took a little food," she said in English. "Now she is asleep. Do not wake her unless it is necessary."
I didn't comment on her knowledge of the language. "Can she walk?" I asked.
"I do not know. We carried her. She would have cut her feet to pieces, since we could find no shoes in the kennel where they had her. She was lying in filth, with only the rags you see. She only became truly conscious long enough to give us the message on the piece of wood. Even then she would not speak. Too much had been done to her, for her to speak." Anger stirred in the woman's face. "El Fuerte and his men are beasts, senor."
"His men may still be beasts," I said. "El Fuerte is nothing, now. Not with two I 80-grain slugs through the chest."
The thought had not really pleased me before. I mean, there had been nothing personal between me and General Jorge Santos when I shot him. But as I knelt beside the Unconscious figure on the ground, I took some pleasure in the fact that I hadn't missed.
It wasn't pretty. I knew that our agent who went by the code name Sheila, although I had never seen her before, was normally a rather attractive young woman twenty-six years old. She'd gone to good schools. She'd been married and divorced before she joined the outfit for reasons that were not recorded. According to her dossier, she was five feet two inches tall, weighed a hundred and fifteen pounds, and had gray eyes and shoulder-length brown hair bleached and tinted to gold for this assignment-blondes are rare and conspicuous down there, and she had wanted to be sure of catching General Santos' masculine attention, which rumor said wasn't hard to catch.
At last report she'd vanished into the jungle in a jeep with a native driver known to be favorable to the revolution. She'd been carrying a bag of cameras and a tape recorder, and she'd been posing as a leftist girl journalist doing a story on the heroes of the revolution, in a deliberately provocative blouse and intentionally tight Capri pants.
It was supposed to be the old Delilah routine. If everything had worked out, sooner or later she'd have been found standing over General Santos' dead body with his smoking army pistol in her hand, clutching some torn lingerie to her bosom and weeping hysterically. The Federal informers in the village had been alerted to protect her from too-drastic reprisals; in the disorganization that was expected to follow Santos' death they were to have smuggled her out to safety. If this had worked, I'd never have been called upon to help make up a sniper's rifle capable of dropping the general in his tracks at three hundred and fifty meters or maybe a little more.
Everything had not worked out for Sheila. Things had gone very wrong, we didn't yet know how or why. But she'd obviously been detected and caught somehow; she'd apparently paid most of the usual penalties; and now after a month and a half there was hardly enough left of the carefully planned blouse-and-pants costume to qualify as clothing- and there wasn't a great deal left of the girl who had selected and worn it, either. The starved, scarecrow figure on the ground before me, rags and dirt included, didn't weigh more than eighty pounds.
They'd hacked off most of the phony-gold hair, dark and matted now, with a bayonet or machete, I suppose as a mark of shame; and they'd done something to the left hand. It was wrapped in some stained and grimy cloth that might once have been part of a feminine garment of silk or nylon. I looked at the hand and at the dark-faced woman. She moved her shoulders matter-of -factly.
"They tried to make her talk, to name her accomplices in the village, senor."
"Did she?"
"Would we have risked our lives for her if she had?" As I reached out to examine the hand and arm, the woman spoke quickly: "Do not touch her, senor."
"Why not?"
"You are a man."
She said it as if it explained everything, and I guess it did. I looked at her for a moment, and she looked right back. She was actually a rather handsome woman, I noted, in a solid, swarthy, and savage way. I gathered she didn't think much of men. At the moment I wasn't too fond of them myself.
"Sure," I said. I took off the pack and opened it, kneeling there. "Well, she's going to have to swallow her natural and justified prejudice against the sex, just for a moment. I don't like the looks of that arm. I want to get some penicillin into her right away."
"I will give the penicillin. I have done it before. She will scream and fight, perhaps harm herself, if you touch her. We had great trouble bringing her away."
"All right," I said. "I leave her in your care. Here are the clothes I packed in for her. If you need any help, let me know."
The woman didn't answer. Her attitude said that when she asked any man for help, that would truly be the day. Well, her psychological quirks were no problems of mine, thank God.
I left the stuff with her and went over to Jiminez, who was in a fine lousy mood, too, maybe 'because he couldn't smoke his cigars in here without possibly betraying our hiding place, maybe because we could still hear sporadic firing back in the hills where his men were letting themselves be hunted through the growing darkness 'to save our skins. Or maybe he had other things on his mind, missiles for instance. Anyway, his small, dark, handsome face didn't light up noticeably with friendship when I came up.
"How is she?" he asked curtly.
I moved my shoulders. "I'm afraid it's going to be a job for the doctors and psychiatrists. All we can do is bring the pieces home. Maybe they can put them back together. If not, well, we have a place for people who didn't make it. The problem arises fairly often in our business."
"You take the ruin of a lovely girl, your associate, very calmly." His voice was cold. I couldn't see that the comment required an answer, so I didn't speak. He said, "But then you are proud and happy tonight, Senor Helm. You were brave today. You shot with great precision. You killed many men."
"After you'd spotted them for me," I pointed out. After seeing Sheila, I wasn't in the best of moods myself.
He drew a long breath. "Yes, that is true. I helped."
"Are you grieving for Santos, Colonel?"
"Bali!" he said. "El Fuerte was a pig. But his men. Did you see them come, senor? Their leader was 'dead, but other leaders rose among them. We shot those, and still they came, right up to the guns… President Avila would execute them all for rebels and bandits. In this country, you understand, a rebel is a bandit always. And El Fuerte was truly a bandit. But there are times when I remember that those are my people, too-yes, even the ones who did that to your female agent. After all, she came among them to deceive and kill. They had some provocation, senor. Perhaps one day they will find a leader worthy of them. In the meantime-" He grimaced. "In the meantime, I help gringos shoot them down at five hundred meters. You will excuse me. I mean no offense. But I do not like to see brave men die," He hesitated. "One favor, Senor Helm."
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