War Baby (14 page)

San Salvador’s Sheraton Hotel boasted the largest swimming pool in Central America. It was surrounded by tennis courts and gardens lush with bougainvillea and lavender orchids and was built on the slopes of Colonia Escalón, and commanded a breathtaking view of the surrounding volcanoes.

Its lobbies and bars were a favorite meeting place for San Salvador’s élite. That must include the death squads, Webb thought as he climbed out of his Avis car and saw the black Cherokee Chief parked in the forecourt. It was fitted with reinforced steel and plexiglass windows an inch thick.

Three days after the interview with Beltran he had received a phone call from someone who claimed to work for the United States Embassy. They wanted to meet with him. No, he could not have their name or their rank. Be in the coffee shop at the Sheraton at five o’clock. That was all.

Webb had agonized over whether to ignore the summons. The Sheraton was not exactly a safe haven. Two years before an American freelance journalist, John Sullivan, had disappeared from the lobby, and a year later two US officials, in the country to advise on agrarian reform, had been gunned down in the dining room. The killer had calmly walked out through the lobby, unchallenged, and driven away.

As soon as he went through the doors, Webb saw a man striding across the foyer to meet him. He had copper hair, cut very short, and he looked fit and tanned. He held out his hand but he did not smile. ‘Hugh Webb?’

The man’s handshake was like a vice.

‘I don’t think we’ve met,’ Webb said.

‘Smith. John Smith,’ the man said. He led Webb to a table in the lobby. Webb noticed groups of men sitting around, drinking, holding the zippered purses that in San Salvador were not used to carry money or passports or Amex cards but usually contained Browning 9-millimetre pistols.

‘Drink?’ John Smith asked him.

‘Just coffee.’

Smith ordered two coffees. Webb studied him a little more closely. The haircut, the posture, the attitude, told him the guy was military. The tan suit and crocodile-skin loafers were as out of place on John Smith as a tuxedo on a squad sergeant. Webb guessed that whatever post he held inside the United States Embassy, it wasn’t clerical.

‘Can I ask what rank you hold at the mission here, Mr Smith?’

‘It’s classified.’

‘Then how do I know you are with the embassy?’

‘You don’t,’ he said.

The coffees arrived. Smith stirred three sugars into his and leaned forward. ‘I’ll make this brief, Mr Webb. We’ve had some complaints about you.’

‘Who’s we? And who’s making the complaint?’

He ignored the question. ‘The thing is, we expect you guys to play ball with us on this one. We don’t want the press compromising our war effort here the way it did in Vietnam. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Are you saying you lost the war in Vietnam because of bad press?’

‘Perhaps I’m not making myself clear. You either support the United States or you support the communists. It’s quite simple. Who do you support, Mr Webb?’

‘I don’t accept that the situation here in El Salvador is as you’ve just described it to me. You say it’s a battle between the US and the leftists. I say it’s a battle between right and wrong. They’re not the same thing.’

Smith toyed with his coffee cup. ‘You weren’t born in the United States, were you, Mr Webb?’

‘Did my accent give me away or have you been checking on me?’

‘Both.’

‘Well, then ... Mr Smith ... if you have been checking you should be aware that I am a British citizen but that I live and work in Washington, DC. I am neither pro-communist nor pro-Reagan. I like to take the side of truth and justice in any argument, but as yet I haven’t found either in this country.’

Smith stirred his coffee and seemed to be considering one of several replies. Finally he settled on one: ‘Guys like you make me sick.’

Now they were getting down to basics. ‘That doesn’t bother me.’

A smile: the effect was not pleasant. ‘Mr Webb, I don’t think the issues here are complex at all. Right now El Salvador does not have a perfect system of government, but you are not going to bring democracy to a country like this overnight. We are trying to do the best we can with what we have.’

‘And what do you have?’

‘We have a pro-American government fighting against externally supported guerrillas committed to turning El Salvador into a Marxist state. We just cannot afford another Vietnam right here on our doorstep.’

‘I agree with you. You can’t. That’s why I can’t believe you want to make the same mistakes you made last time.’

‘The only mistake we made last time was letting you guys lose that war for us. So we are asking you nicely to get on the team this time and support your adopted country.’

‘You talk about Vietnam as if it was a war we should have won. It was a war we had no place fighting, Mister Smith. There’s a difference there, but I wonder if it’s a little too subtle for you.’

‘What we are talking about here is fighting communism.’

‘No, what you are talking about is supporting fascism. You talk about democracy as if it’s some magical antidote to the Russians. Let me remind you what democracy is. It’s the right, enshrined in law, to speak out openly even if your opinion opposes that of the government of the day. In San Salvador, speaking out against the government is tantamount to signing your own death warrant.’

‘You don’t have democracy without stability. We have to save this country before we can free it.’

‘That’s like fucking for virginity. You don’t stand for democracy by violating human rights. Let me tell you something else: the reason the United States is a free and a democratic country is
not
because of the military. It is because of the free press. In short I am the one that stands for democracy here. You don’t.’

A chill smile. ‘I’ll convey your remarks through the proper channels.’

‘You do that,’ Webb said.

He had talked tough, but in truth he was scared now; scared of men like John Smith, scared of this country. He wondered what sort of pressures might now be brought to bear on the free and democratic press back in the United States that he had so ardently identified with a few moments ago. He threw some money on the table. ‘Coffees are on me. My contribution towards bringing democracy to the free world. Keep up the good work.’

And he walked out.

* * *

When he got back to his hotel he took a phone call from his editor in New York. His last story was good, he said, but too emotive. It would have to be cut. Especially his remarks about Ricardo Beltran, which were possibly defamatory. Also any criticism of Reagan and the United States itself would not be received kindly, especially from a foreign-born journalist.

And tell Daniels to tone it down a little. Most of his shots were too explicit for the national press. But you’re doing a good job. Just try and be a little more even-handed in your approach.

When Webb hung up he tore the connection out of the wall and threw the telephone across the room.

Webb and Daniels were sitting on the canopied porch of a Mexican restaurant in Escalón. The FMLN had blacked out the city again, and the candles on the table provided the only light. Both men only picked at their food, their attention focused on the Cherokee Chief with smoked glass windows that was parked in the Esso station across the road, its headlights extinguished.

‘I thought you ought to know,’ Webb said. ‘I think I was threatened this afternoon.’

Daniels was on his fourth beer. The last few days he had been drinking too much and eating very little. In the guttering light of the candle he looked sallow and ill. ‘Threatened? Who by?’

‘A man who may or may not be called John Smith and who may or may not work for the United States government. In fact, he may or may not have threatened me. I thought about the conversation later and he made no direct statements to the effect that my safety was in question. I just got the feeling. You know?’

Daniels shifted in his chair. ‘You think maybe it’s time we suggested a transfer to another assignment? I think we’ve done all the stories we can here.’

Webb shrugged his shoulders and did not answer.

‘New York is mutilating your copy. Nothing we say or do is going to make any fucking difference.’

‘I don’t want to feel like I’m being chased out.’

‘You’re willing to risk our lives to prove a point?’

‘Not your life, Mike. If you want out, go. I mean it.’

Daniels considered this offer. ‘Okay,’ he said, finally.

There was not much more to say after that. It was what he suspected. He was disappointed in the guy, anyway.

They paid their bill and left, caught a taxi back to the Camino Real. Several times they saw the driver glance in his rear-view mirror and cross himself. The Jeep Cherokee was following them, still without lights.

When they got out of the taxi at their hotel, the Cherokee parked a hundred yards back up the boulevard. When they were inside the lobby, Daniels grabbed his arm. ‘Fuck this. Come out with me. You can’t fucking stay here.’

‘No wonder you’re a photographer,’ Webb said. ‘Your language is terrible.’

* * *

The highway to the airport snaked through lush hills green with jungle and banana groves. Children prodded cows along the side of the road with sticks; squads of brown-skinned men labored over roadside culverts. Every few miles there were army checkpoints where National Guardsmen in tight tunics and high leather boots waved down his car to paw through his passport and check his COPREFA credentials.

El Salvador’s international airport was barely two years old, a legacy of Molina’s National Transformation, a glass mausoleum carved out of the raw jungle. Webb parked the Avis Golf and went inside. The arrivals hall was all marble, the air conditioning frigid. Two soldiers, armed with M-3 machine guns with flash suppressors, did not take their eyes off him.

An Escalón matron cruised the airport gift shop, trying on silk scarves.

Daniels had flown out the previous evening. When Webb had got back to the Camino Real there was a message for him from the IPA office in New York telling him that his replacement would be arriving this morning. Webb was confident he could do the job just as well on his own - after all, he had earned his spurs as a photo-journalist in Vietnam - but it was agency policy that two was the minimum staffing for any bureau, for safety reasons. Webb hoped Daniels’ replacement was someone he had worked with before, preferably someone who knew a little more Spanish than he did.

The morning flight from Miami disgorged its human cargo; wealthy businessmen looking for investments for their coffee or cattle money, or their designer-dressed sons and daughters who had spent the last two weeks in Florida spending it. Webb’s new photographer did not fit in with this crowd; he was taller, not as well dressed, and without the regulation gold ropes at his neck and his wrists.

He glimpsed an horrendous Hawaiian shirt, worn over lavender-colored slacks and accessorized with an expression of complete enchantment. Here was a man immediately enamored with the sight of so many soldiers and police with guns.

‘Fuck,’ Webb muttered.

* * *

Webb and Ryan drove north along the Suchitoto highway. Ryan wanted to get some photographs of government soldiers in action, and COPREFA had just issued a communiqué describing an offensive under way in Chalatenango province. That morning they headed in that direction, despite warnings that the area was strictly off limits to foreigners.

After an hour they saw smoke rising from the hills as US-made A-37s swooped overhead. ‘Here we go,’ Ryan said. ‘Just like old times.’

There was a roadblock just ahead. Webb pulled the Golf to the side of the road, and they both reached into the pockets of their jackets for their passports and COPREFA cards. They did this very slowly; it was not considered wise to startle a teenager holding an M-16.

Both soldiers wore crucifixes, wrapped with green yam, and their olive-drab uniforms were stained with sweat and ochre dust. The younger of the two, a boy with badly pockmarked skin, indicated they should get out while the car was searched for weapons.

When they were done the scar-faced boy handed them back their papers and shook his head to indicate that they would have to turn back. ‘You are not allowed past here,’ he said.

Webb nodded to Ryan. Up ahead he could see a handful of farmers -
campesinos
- running down the road. He thought at first they were dragging a sack, but it was actually an old man with blood on his shirt. They were shouting in Spanish.

‘What are they saying?’ Ryan asked him.

‘They say they were being bombed by government planes.’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘I want to see for myself.’

‘That’s the spirit, Spider. Wave goodbye to the nice soldiers and let’s see what we can do.’

Webb turned the car around and they headed back up the road towards San Salvador. He reached the bend a hundred yards from the roadblock and stopped the car. They both jumped out and ran into the forest and headed back the way they had come.

It took them three hours to circle around the roadblock through the thick jungle, and rejoin the Suchitoto road. Then there was nothing for it but to walk the rest of the way.

* * *

As the day wore on the heat sucked all the moisture out of them, the dust from the road found its way into their eyes and throats. The jets were still patrolling the skies far in the distance.

‘Christ, it’s hot,’ Ryan said. ‘Reminds me of Queensland.’

‘Do you get bombed in Queensland?’

‘Every Saturday night, mate.’

There was corn stubble and deserted bean fields on either side of the road. They passed the smoking ruins of several houses. A cow lay in a ditch with its feet in the air. They held their noses until they had passed.

‘The air force have done a job here,’ Ryan said. He finished a roll of film and began to load another.

Webb grabbed his arm. ‘I don’t like the look of that,’ he said.

The metal skin of the A-37 flashed in the sun against the dark backdrop of the volcano. It banked sharply and began a low swooping dive towards the road. Webb had known too many jet jockeys in Vietnam who had boasted to him about strafing civilians for fun on the way back to base after an operation.

This time it could be our turn.

‘Shit,’ Ryan said. There was another ruined farmhouse about fifty paces away, right on the edge of the jungle. They reached it just in time and threw themselves inside. The jet roared overhead, treetop high, before wheeling away.

‘Bastard,’ Ryan hissed.

Webb sat up. He looked over his right shoulder and found himself staring into the stubby muzzle of an Uzi sub-machine gun.