the Viking Funeral (2001) (34 page)

"Get busy!" Jody shouted.

Shane leaned out one of the broken side windows and aimed his Polish MP-63 up the street at the column of army vehicles. The badly rocking SUV distorted his aim as its tires spun, looking for purchase on a street covered with decaying garbage. He started blasting, aiming blindly with one hand, the bolt clattering maniacally as the machine pistol fired, spewing hot brass out into the street.

It was hard to assess what happened next because it was a blur of spinning tires, rotating landscapes, and chattering gunfire. Jody was heading right at the lead truck, then yanked the wheel to the left at the last second. The radial tires spun garbage out behind them, slushing badly in the rotting muck as the SUV hit a curb and bounced up then, somehow, they were on the sidewalk in front of Sococo's showroom.

Ten automatic weapons broke out simultaneously, shattering the remaining windows in the Toyota. Jody kept his head low while the entire front windshield starred and then rained chunks of glass in on them.

Shane dropped the first clip and jammed his last one home. Tremaine was firing out the window on the far side of the SUV. With the windshield gone, Sawdust was aiming straight out the front, his MP-63 barking loudly inside the car, throwing a stream of spent casings at Paco in the front passenger seat. The sweaty San Andresito screamed in panic as Sawdust's hot brass hit him, the bullets whizzing past his ear. They were now opposite Cortez's two army trucks.

Santander's men had taken cover behind the vehicles and let loose as the Toyota roared past on the sidewalk. The Vikings fired until the weapons were empty and the slides locked open. Heavy 9-millimeter bullet hits rocked the SUV but, miraculously, it didn't stall.

Shane grabbed his Astra and emptied his last clip until he was pulling the trigger maniacally, dry-firing, unaware that he was empty because of the booming retort of the Colt Commander that Sawdust was using right next to his ear. The chattering racket of ten incoming machine guns set up a deadly cacophony only twelve feet away.

"I'm dry!" Shane yelled. They were now past the column of men and trucks. Almost immediately, Jody's P-7 flew over the seat and hit him on the shoulder. Shane scooped it up
,
turned, and kept firing out the back window.

Somehow they got through the violent maelstrom and bounced back onto the street.

"Anybody hit?" Jody yelled.

"Yeah, I'm leakin' some," Lester Wood drawled.

"How bad?"

"Well, it's..
. I
t's..
. I
think I'm okay..."

Jody was making a right turn, back onto Calle 16, heading out of town. The Toyota engine sounded as if it had been hit--running rough and getting worse by the minute.

Sawdust's face was drained of color, but his denim shirt was drenched in red. "This ain't good back here," Shane said. "Sawdust looks bad."

The SUV was losing speed, coughing and bucking.

"We gotta get to that garrison at the end of town," Jody said. "We'll deal with it then."

"No!" Paco said. "No militia."

"I'm through listening to you!" Jody shouted, spinning the wheel to avoid another wandering Hereford grazing on garbage in the middle of the street.

They headed back through town. The Toyota was barely moving when the garrison finally came into view.

Shane could see out the back window that Santander's jeeps had gotten turned around and were now behind them, closing fast. "They're four blocks back," he announced.

The SUV was lurching badly as it bucked and coughed down the street. Shane pried the
Colt out of Lester Wood's hand and emptied it out of the broken back window.

"No! No militia!" Paco shouted again. Jody ignored him and lurched the Toyota onto the paved road leading into the military base. The two gate guards swung their weapons down on polished shoulder straps, aiming them at the Toyota as it pulled to a stop at the main gate.

"Police," Jody said, yanking out his LAPD badge and holding it out the window. "American policia. "

"Necesitamos socorro," Lester Wood rasped.

Santander's trucks pulled into the driveway behind them but slowed down fifty yards away and inched forward like jackals at the edge of firelight.

"Fuck this," Jody said, watching them in the one remaining side mirror. Then he hit the gas. The Toyota bucked forward, smashing the wooden bar arm across the base road, shattering it.

"No!" Paco screamed.

An alarm started ringing, and almost immediately fifteen soldiers ran out of a wooden building slamming banana clips into a variety of automatic weapons, clicking off safeties as they approached. In seconds, they had the Toyota surrounded.

Jody got out of the vehicle with his hands up and his LAPD badge held high. "American policiahe repeated to the soldiers, who were staring in disbelief at the bullet-riddled vehicle. Shane looked back at Santander's truck
s p
arked just a few feet outside the garrison. At first it seemed they were afraid to come closer. Then Shane began to wonder if perhaps they were parked there to block a possible retreat.

"Sawdust, tell this guy we demand political asylum," Jody said. "Tell 'em. Tell these guys we're American cops on a U
. S
. government mission. Go on, do it!"

Shane was studying the dusty look in Lester Wood's vacant eyes. "We're gonna have to find a way to tell 'em ourselves. Sawdust didn't make it."

Chapter
43.

IT WAS AN empty structure: no windows, a tin roof, wooden shelves, and a poured
-
concrete floor. It looked like a supply locker. Once the door was locked, Tremaine sat glumly on the floor while Jody and Shane began pacing.

"What now?" Tremaine challenged, his low voice turned flat and cold as slate.

"Okay, look, this is a Colombian military unit," Jody said slowly. "America has diplomatic relations with Colombia, so we try and get a message out to the U
. S
. embassy, get them to cut through all this, get the embassy to release us into U
. S
. custody." He looked up into Tremaine's angry, disbelieving stare.

"You're kiddin' me, right?" Tremaine glared at Jody. "Didja forget, we're supposed t'be dead."

"We're also laundering fifty million in Colombian drug cash," Shane said. "If we call the U
. S
. embassy, we're not gonna get released; we're gonna get extradited."

"Okay, Hot Sauce, then you tell me.... Whatta you wanna do?"

"I'll tell you one thing," Shane said. "There's something very wrong about this military base. Did you see the weapons those troops were carrying?"

"Yeah, what of it?" Jody growled.

"Some of it was prototype stuff, brand
-
new Beretta 92s. But I also saw some twenty
-
year-old Chinese assault rifles. I think one of those guys even had an antique Lee Enfield. He'd be better off using that thing as a club."

"So what?"

"Doesn't the army of a sovereign nation generally issue standardized equipment?" Shane continued. "Doesn't the Colombian government supply its soldiers with unitized ordnance? These guys are packing everything from auto-mags to slingshots."

"He's right," Tremaine said, looking up with concern.

"So what am I supposed to do about it?"

"Nothing. I'm just wondering why. And what happened to Paco Brazos? They pulled him outta the car with us, but they didn't put him in here. How come?
"

"Maybe he drinks beer with these assholes. Who the fuck knows.
"
Suddenly Jody didn't have very good answers.

"This afternoon we rolled in here with almost a billion contraband cigarettes, right past those guards," Shane said. "Nobody gave a damn. You saw that building of Paco
'
s.... How much contraband had to go past this base, unobstructed, to fill up that warehouse, not to mention all the other San Andresitos?"

"Okay, so somebody's getting paid off," Jody said, frustrated. "Stop asking all these dumb questions."

"Let the man talk," Tremaine said, turning toward Shane. "Whatta you thinkin
'
?"

"You were saying that Jose told you about the political situation in Colombia. I
'
ve read some department one sheets about it--it's supposed to be treacherous," Shane said, still pacing slowly in the locked room. He stopped and looked over at Jody, who was a few feet away, a strange expression on his face. "What is it? Do you know something?" Shane prodded.

"Yeah, that's what Papa Joe told me, too," Jody said.

"What'd he say?" Tremaine demanded.

"To tell you the truth, when he told me, I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention. He said something about--"

"What? Come on, man," Tremaine rose off the floor, moved across the room, the
n g
rabbed Jody's shirt and yanked him up close. "What did Jose tell you, man?"

"Get your hands off me, Inky Dink. Who the fuck you think you're pawing?"

"I wanna know who those green jackets out there belong to." "Then get your fuckin
'
hands off me!"

There was a long, electric moment before Tremaine finally let go of Jody
'
s shirt and took a step back.

"What did Jose Mondragon tell you?" Shane asked again.

"I don't remember, exactly. I
'
d been drinking. Something about two Marxist armies fighting with the government, or some shit. He said there's a lot of kidnapping out here. These Marxist guerrillas snatch people, mostly U
. S
. oil-company executives working on desert drilling rigs, or any Anglo they can get their hands on. They ransom you back to your family or your company--whoever will pay the most money to keep you alive. He was telling me about this insurance you can buy, kidnapping insurance. He said nobody from Blackstone or All-American will set foot inside Colombia without it."

"You tellin' me we coulda got kidnapping insurance?" Tremaine said. Now he was right in Jody's face.

"Inky Dink, you put your hands on me again, I'll knock your lights out. How we gonna buy insurance? We're all supposed to be dead."

"We got aliases. We coulda worked somethin
'
out through Jose,
"
Tremaine shot back.

"We're not a bunch a fucking oil-company pussies. Nobody's got the stones to kidnap us.
"
"Am I just imagining this, or are we all locked in a goddamned windowless room here?
"
Tremaine glowered. "Fuck you,
"
Jody growled. Shane stepped between them. "What else did Jose tell you?
"

"Just that there are these two leftist armies that prey on the San Andresitos and on each other. All the San Andresitos pay a percentage of their black-market profits to the guerrillas so they'll let the contraband go on into Colombia--a political contribution made at gunpoint.
"

"Who are the two armies?
"
Shane asked. "They've both got acronyms..
. O
ne is like RAFC. Stands for something like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. And the other is NLA, the National Liberation Army."

"Sounds t'me like you paid more than a little attention. You got all this down pretty good," Tremaine challenged.

"What're you tryin' to say?" Jody threatened softly. "You got something on your mind, lay it down, asswipe."

"How 'bout we focus on the damn problem," Shane said. "If these guys aren't regular army, then is that good for us, or bad?"

"One other thing Jose told me... There's another guy up here. It's probably not important, but Jose said he's the joker in the deck, an ex--Argentine army colonel who leads
a d
eath squad--a right-wing fanatic with white
-
blond hair. He supposedly trained in the U
. S
. at the School of the Americas, in Fort Benning, Georgia."

"Never heard of it." Tremaine glowered.

"It's some kinda counterterrorist school, run by our Pentagon. Latin American army officers from OAS get nominated by their governments to go there. Instructors from the Pentagon teach greaseball commandos how to get info out of captured commies, how to pull out fingernails with pliers--shit like that."

"I love it," Tremaine said.

"Papa Joe told me this Argentine colonel gets off by torturing and killing."

"What's his name?" Shane asked.

"Don't know his name, but they call him the 'White Angel.' Papa Joe said The Hague finally charged him with war crimes committed while he was in Argentine Intelligence. He was sentenced to death in Argentina, but he escaped and fled to Colombia. He settled up here, in the desert."

"So I guess we got two choices," Shane said. "If these guys are regular Colombian army, we play the American embassy card. If they're Marxist guerrillas, we get down on our knees, start begging, give them a cut of what we got in the bank in Aruba."