Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

The Vietnamese woman at the airlines office told Holliwell that there were no planes. She invited him to imagine there might be one on Thursday. He drove his jeep back to the hotel and found its precincts quiet; the spies and the contractors were in cover. He bought a bottle of light rum at the bar, went to his bungalow and drank himself insensible.

Sometime after dark a group of men came into his room to awaken him. There were three of them; they turned on his bedside lamp and shook him. In the warm lamplight he recognized Mr. Heath and Soyer. There was a Guardia officer with them, a short, broad-shouldered man with soft eyes.

“Hello, Holliwell,” Mr. Heath said. “Sorry, but we’ve some work to do.”

Holliwell swung his feet onto the floor. The three men who had come into his room watched him as he sat, blinking and nauseated, on the edge of his sweated mattress.

“Dress, will you?” Heath said. “We’re going out.”

Holliwell helped himself to some water from the pitcher on the night table and stood up. The Cuban took a tin of Anacin from his own pocket and offered the pills around. Holliwell took two.

“What’s the difficulty?” he asked them as he put his shirt on.

“Just,” Heath said, “that the job’s over where you’re concerned.”

“I don’t know what you mean by the job.”

“I should pack if I were you,” Mr. Heath told him. “You won’t be coming back here.”

Holliwell discovered that he was still fairly drunk.

“Am I being turned out of the country?” he asked.

The Cuban answered him.

“You’re in danger. We protect our friends. You are our friend, sir.”

When he had packed his bag, he followed them outside; the clamor of night creatures was almost alarming. There was a Guardia jeep at the door.

“What about my bill?”

“Let’s make it quick, Holliwell,” Heath said. “There’s a good fella.”

Holliwell climbed into the rear seat; Heath got in beside him. The Cuban and the Guardia officer sat in front, the officer at the wheel. As they rolled past the main building, Holliwell saw that it was darkened, the tables stacked, the bar closed. When they made the road, a second Guardia jeep fell in behind them, carrying three men in helmets and camouflage fatigues. It carried a mount with a 7.62 machine gun.

“What’s going on?” Holliwell asked Mr. Heath.

“Treason,” Mr. Heath said, in a mock-heroic manner.

“I’m not sure what it has to do with me.”

“Well, you’ll have to be debriefed before you leave. Then we’ll find out, won’t we?”

On the way to town, they passed a Guardia roadblock which had established itself behind two wooden sawhorses and an Aduana sign. Two lines of young Guardia troopers crouched Indian fashion along the edges of the road, squinting into the jeep’s headlights as it approached them. Seaward, a helicopter with a spotlight dodged between the beach and the reef line in figure-of-eight patterns, its light sweeping like a tentacle.

Along the riverfront of Puerto Alvarado there were half a dozen LCVM’s tied up at the docks. The town itself appeared to be going dark although it was only just after seven; the Syrians were locking fast their shutters and the few small neon signs around the plaza were dimmed and the shops closed. The square itself was jammed with soldiers turned out for combat, standing in loose ranks or crouching on the grass. Above them, the cathedral was dark and unavailable behind its great oak door.

At the west end of the plaza, upwards of twenty trucks were parked in rows, and as Holliwell watched, new ones would pull up carrying yet more Guardia. The trucks would be coming from the airport or from some disembarkation point upriver. There were very few civilians on the street.

The jeep in which Holliwell rode pulled up in front of the Municipalidad, escorting jeep behind. As he stepped out, he saw that a crowd of women had gathered in front of the doors of the police station; a Guardia sergeant was addressing them in a low voice. Heath got out after Holliwell, then the Guardia officer and Mr. Soyer. A trooper ran across the street from the square, got behind the wheel of their jeep and drove it out of traffic. The escort jeep pulled out after him. It was all peculiarly efficient.

The crowd of women was blocking the doors of the police station and the sentries began, fairly gently, to clear a way for Holliwell and his party. The sergeant was telling the women that the people they inquired after were not to be found. They were town women of mixed blood for the most part and though it was hard to tell, they appeared to be mainly over thirty. Holliwell glanced over the crowd and recognized among them the young woman who had visited Justin that morning and whom he had taken for a Carib. She was staring at him and her stare was intense, its informing emotion uncertain. As far as he knew she had never seen him before but the look she gave him betrayed recognition. It was a troubled stare and trouble, he thought, was what it portended. The company he was in would not recommend him to associates of Justin.

There were more men on guard inside the police station; its spare outer office looked readied for a siege. Sandbags were stacked around the barred shuttered windows and the Guardia detachment on duty were in jungle fatigues and carried grenades on their belts. The non-com in charge saluted as Holliwell and his acquaintances came in. Holliwell reflected that he had taken a few too many Guardia salutes to be altogether uninvolved in Tecanecan history. The door to the street remained open behind them; their Guardia lieutenant was in a state of some agitation over someone he had seen outside. Holliwell thought it must be the young girl in braids.

Heath went back to see what the trouble was and the Guardia lieutenant pulled him outside.

“Happen to see anyone you know out here?” the Englishman called to Holliwell. Holliwell walked to the door and looked over the sentries’ helmets at the dispersing group of women. He did not see her any longer.

“No. I don’t know many people here,” he said.

“No?” Heath asked.

The Guardia officer jogged across the street to the square and out of Holliwell’s sight. The sentries held the door open until he came back in, then bolted it down.

Holliwell followed them through the barricaded outer office and into a strange windowless room in the center of the building. The oddness of the room was disorienting and it made him even more uneasy. It had stone floors and damp walls of whitewashed brick, the roof was of corrugated metal over a netting of barbed wire that made it feel like a cage. There were two overbright institutional lights in green-painted housings at the center of the metal ceiling such as one might see on factory fences or prison yards. In one shadowed corner was a litter of what appeared to be electrical equipment — extension wires, hand generators and disused batteries lay in a cluster on the slimy floor. Looking more closely at the walls, he saw that there had once been windows along the two longer walls, but the window space and casements had been plastered over. Blackened chips of spackle lined the edges of the floor. There were two desks in the middle of the room — on one was a telephone.

The odd room smelled of mildew and disinfectant and of other things as well, familiar but unpleasant things which he could not quite identify. As soon as it struck him that the room was in fact the central patio of the building nailed down and sealed off from air and light, he realized that the dark stains on the stone floor were bloodstains.

Soyer had Holliwell’s suitcase on one of the desks. He thrust a hand toward Holliwell’s face and rubbed his fingers together.

“He’d like the key,” Heath said helpfully.