Tale of the Thunderbolt (29 page)

“The defenses are strongest to the town side,” Monte-Cristi said, agreeing with Valentine's estimation. “If we can get through the wire before they know we are here — ”

“See all the dog kennels?” Valentine said. “They'd start barking while we were still fifty feet outside the wire.”

“So we turn around?”

The temptation was strong. He'd seen the quickwood work, up close and far sooner than he'd expected. Valentine had no desire to burn the lives of Monte-Cristi's soldiers, who had come so far so fast without letting fatigue wear down their spirits. Valentine couldn't take all the quickwood he could carry and then leave Hispaniola no better off than the day he arrived.

But there was more than duty and orders at stake.

If the Roots accomplished something to make the march worthwhile, won a victory, it might bring more numbers to their cause. A successful raid that didn't involve being ignominiously chased back across the border would hearten the Roots as much as it would dismay the Santo Domingan Kurians. But it had to start somewhere.

“No. We can't blow them out of there, and I can't ask your men for an assault. We'll have to do it another way.”

“I cannot imagine how.”

“With parley.”

An hour later Valentine, Ahn-Kha, and Cercado walked out of the hills to the wire, a white flag in Ahn-Kha's hands. Again and again Valentine blew a small officer's whistle, drawing attention to their movements.

Behind them, Monte-Cristi's men and the Grogs flitted from tree to tree, appearing in as many places as possible. They appeared at the tops of rises, then sank into the long grass to show themselves again behind a tree. Even the bodies of the three Santo Domingan scouts were impressed into the action; they manned a wooden machine gun from the crotch of a branch while leaning behind a tree. Ahn-Kha's Grogs called to each other from a wide semicircle around the armory; their otherworldly voices echoed ominously between the hills.

The multicolored flag of Santo Domingo hung from the flagpole, its white cross visible now and then as the breeze took it. A small house stood before the flag. From it an officer with a braided hat emerged and observed them. Calling a few men around him, the officer strode up to the wire fence, looking toward his towers to see that he was properly covered. As he approached, hand on the pistol at his hip, Valentine took the safety off his drum-fed submachine gun.

“Translate for me, would you, Cercado? My Spanish may not be up to this.”

Cercado nodded.

“What is it? Who are you men?” the officer called to them.

“We represent the free forces of Hispaniola,” Valentine said, and waited for Cercado to translate. “We do not come to fight, but to find friends among those who would oppose Kur. Much of Haiti stands free of their menace, and we look to our brothers on this side of the island to join.”

“Your men have been beaten in battle at the border. You are misguided. It would be best if you surrendered to me, not the other way around,” the officer said.

“Do your generals always tell the truth?” Valentine asked through Cercado. “We give you an hour to decide. You do not have to join us, just leave us this place, intact, and you may go in peace. Though we would prefer for you and your men to join the movement which will see Hispaniola rid of them.”

“Thank you for your terms. Here are mine. I will take your heads, or you will take mine. San Juan has many men, and others will come and drive you out of these mountains. The garrisons at the borders still stand. Two days ago they asked for more ammunition.”

Valentine yelled in Spanish, as best he could: “Have you heard from the garrisons since then, my friend? And was the ammunition delivered? Or did it fall into our hands?”

The officer pursed his lips, but to his credit, he did not look doubtful. “We shall use the hour given to make ready for you. Come at your peril. If I were you, I would leave. Remember what I said about your heads.”

“You can be sure of it,” Cercado called, not waiting for Valentine's answer.

Valentine had his group back up, still facing the fort, and the officer did likewise. The men said something even Valentine's ears could not catch, but their tones were anxious.

Valentine returned to the shadow of a battle line. He would be reluctant to attack the alerted garrison even if he had the men he was trying to feign that he had. Was the officer bluffing as much as he?

He paced for a moment or two, as Ahn-Kha stared down at the armory.

“If they are expecting battle, there is not much sign of it. I've seen the same men go in and out of the center building three times,” Ahn-Kha said.

“They might have sent some of his men to the forward garrisons.”

“Perhaps they need another push.”

Valentine nodded. “He said he'd come for our heads, I believe. Give them a push . . . good idea, old horse. I think I know how to do it. Come with me.”

He climbed up the grassy slope, crunching through strawlike growth burnt by the dry season's sun. Monte-Cristi was at the edge of a steep ravine cutting the side of the slope, urging his men to move the unburdened packhorses down at a noisy, jangling trot and then up again at a walk.

“The hoofbeats echo well, do they not, Captain?” Monte-Cristi asked.

“Very well. Jacques, I think I have a better use for those poor scouts we shot this morning. I need a tent spike out of the baggage. Is there a bellows with the farrier supplies?”

“No, no bellows. Nor an anvil. But we do have tent spikes.” Monte-Cristi got one of his pioneers to retrieve a spike, and joined Valentine as the Cat and Ahn-Kha went up to the stand of trees with the dead bodies.

“Let's get out of sight. Get a good hot fire going,” Valentine said. He looked at the dead bodies, faces peaceful in death. Rigor mortis would soon alter their attitudes.

A couple of the Haitians gathered, looking on with interest. Cercado joined the group. Once the fire had grown, Valentine thrust a tent spike in the center of the fire, and Ahn-Kha blew through one of the hollow pipes used as a haft for Post's pikes, handing it to Cercado when he could do no more. The Grog's capacious lungs aided by Cercado applied enough wind to get the spike hot enough, when held with a piece of leather, hot enough so that when Valentine spat on the point, the spittle jumped off the metal rather than make contact.

Sweating from the fire's heat, Valentine crossed over to the bodies and shoved the spike into the eye sockets of each corpse. He was rewarded with a gruesome sizzling sound and the smell of burning flesh.

Valentine heard the Haitians mutter to themselves when he, evidently not satisfied with the disfigurement, drew his knife and sliced the ears and lips from each skull. He then ordered Ahn-Kha to sever the heads with an ax. Three hearty chops from the Grog and some knife work left the marred objects grinning in the sun.

Still not satisfied, Valentine took up the knife and looked at the three heads for inspiration. The frightening thing was how easy all this was. He expected to feel revolted, but something akin to exultation coursed through his veins. He remembered some lines of Nietzsche about how easily man reverted to savagery. Inspired, he knelt and loosened the uniformed culottes.

“My David, are you sure?” Ahn-Kha asked quietly.

“If I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this all the way,” Valentine said. He took up the first man's genitals in his fist, drawing them as tightly as he could from the bodies. He sawed through the skin under the scrotal sac and in a moment held the awful result in his hand. He returned to the head, and placed his bloody trophy in the dead lipless mouth.

Monte-Cristi looked sickened. One of the Haitians backed away, fingering a crucifix, but Cercado squatted and rubbed his hands in delight.

“We can't attack them where they are,” Valentine growled. “This'll do one of two things. Enrage them so they come up after us, or send them running.” Valentine continued his depredations. He finished by putting the three heads in a sack, and shouldered the bloody burden.

“Their hour has passed. Will anyone come with me?”

Ahn-Kha and Cercado, followed by a Haitian or two, walked down the hill, again covered by the white flag and blasts of Valentine's whistle. Valentine saw rifles pointed out of loopholes in the sides of the buildings, tracking them. Machine guns in the guard towers pointed ugly flared mouths in their direction, ready to spit fire. Valentine spoke into Cercado's greasy ear.

“Far enough!” the officer shouted. “If you seek death, you may come farther.”

“You spoke of heads earlier, my friend. Here! These men served a Whisperer, who now is dead on the mountainside. We will come tonight for the rest.”

Ahn-Kha took the sack in his hands. The Golden One spun like a hammer-thrower and released the sack to fly up and over the wire wall. It landed with a knocking thump before the walls of the armory.

The emissaries scattered, followed by a shot, then a second, from the walls.

“So much for white flags,” Valentine said to Cercado, as the pair took cover behind a hummock of earth. He searched for Ahn-Kha. The Grog lay concealed at the base of a tree.

“You fight as they do,” Cercado said.

“Maybe,” Valentine replied. “Actually, the whole reason I'm doing this is to prevent a fight. But if we have to face them, I want to do it with the advantage.”

“Only two shots. Why not more?”

“Why not, indeed.”

 

The skirmish line hit the wire after sunset. All through the afternoon and evening, Valentine rested and fed his weary men. He watched and waited. The town of San Juan, like most he had seen on Hispaniola through the eyes of his binoculars, was a patchwork of earthquake ruins, banana-leaf huts, and surviving architecture. A few women came to the gate, bearing baskets, but were turned away without admittance and wandered back down the six-mile trail into town.

The Haitians avoided his eyes as he moved among them, disturbed at his treatment of the corpses. Valentine tried to shrug it off as the natural uneasiness of superstitious men who had seen social taboos broken. The bodies had been beyond pain and as dead as Julius Caesar, whatever animating spirit they possessed was gone; their souls could be prowling the happy hunting grounds or barking in hell — he would never know. But their corpses might have saved some of the lives of the men now shifting their eyes whenever he looked at them. In a fit of ill-mood, he considered presenting Ahn-Kha's Grogs with the bodies as a feast —
that would give them something to mutter about!
— but discarded the idea.

With the moon still down and full dark upon the armory, Valentine hit the fence with Ahn-Kha and the Grogs. They threw hides over the wire, and bodily pulled up the posts of the nine-foot-high fence, tearing away a twenty-foot section. The Grogs covered the gap with shotgun and crossbow, and the Haitians poured through. Valentine signaled Ahn-Kha to let the Grogs start their howling. The Haitians screamed like demons as they crossed the compound and made for the buildings.

Not one shot was fired from the walls.

The Haitians poured up and over the stone battlements linking the buildings, using loopholes as footholds or boosting each other up by having two men launch the third over. There were a certain amount of mishaps to the attempt on the wall, but without bullets flying, the bumps and falls were comic rather than tragic. Axes and fence-post battering rams made short work of the wooden doors once the men made it inside the compound, as Valentine and Ahn-Kha's Grogs secured the perimeter and main gate, which gaped open. He heard shouting, splintering wood, and assorted whoops of victory from beyond the peaked roof of the main building.

Valentine was glad to see a corral with animals still in it, but judging from the way the gate was left ajar, only lame animals were left by the departing garrison. As he patted a dejected-looking mare nosing her empty grain bin, he heard the main doors to the armory swing wide. Monte-Cristi and two panting soldiers bowed elaborately.

“The Citadel of San Juan is ours,
mon capitaine,
” Monte-Cristi laughed. “Not a shot fired. Most of the garrison has evacuated. What is left is inside.”

“Send a few men down the road, where they have a good overlook on the trail, but I want them still to be able to see these buildings. Get organized for a quick pullout, I'll blow my whistle, and loud, three times if I want us out of here. Is there electricity?”

“No, just fat lamps.”

“Be sure no one goes looking in the dynamite shed with one, would you?”

Valentine left the gate to Ahn-Kha and passed the main gate into the compound. The hollow-eyed officer lay there, bound hand and foot, with two of his former subordinates holding on to lines tied to his limbs. An old charwoman sat on a step, smoking cigarettes rolled from newsprint as she watched events; a pair of Haitians clubbed the officer who had offered an exchange of heads with their rifle butts.

“Stop that!” Valentine yelled. Another guerrilla squatted before the officer, laughing and taunting the wretch.

“Stop that!” he yelled again, putting his hand on his pistol. The men stood and turned, and backed away, hiding behind each other like children caught at mischief.

“We join, we join, we fight the Capos, you see,” one of the erstwhile Santo Domingan soldiers holding a rope said in French.

Valentine looked at his new recruits — they had probably been bad soldiers for the Santo Domingans, and would be bad soldiers in his Cause, but he had to make do with what he had. Valentine tried to put words together in Spanish.

“Thank you . . . give him freedom,” he managed.