War Baby (18 page)

Night closing in: there was the hum of mosquitoes, the rattle of automatic weapons, the steaming, fetid breath of the jungle. Ryan chewed a cold tortilla, watched Mickey supervise the loading of the ‘Salvadorean ambulances’ - hammocks slung between two bamboo poles. In one of them a young boy injured in that morning’s A-37 attack was barely clinging to life. There were also two heavily pregnant women and an old man. The medical supplies were loaded into boxes. Anything they could not carry would be destroyed.

Mickey moved along the line of makeshift stretchers, whispering to each of the patients in turn, encouraging them, preparing them for the ordeal ahead. She knelt beside the small boy with the chest wound, held his hand as he moaned.

Ryan crouched down beside her. ‘Come to wish you luck,’ he said.

‘You’re going with Salvador?’

‘I never liked boats. I get seasick.’

‘What about your friend?’

‘I don’t think he’d like you calling me that. He’s dirty on me.’

‘What for?’

‘You, I suppose.’

‘Me?’ There were urgent shouts around them in the gloom as the villagers hurried to finish the preparations to
guindar
. Ryan put a hand on Mickey’s shoulder, felt the answering pressure of her fingers. ‘Stay out of trouble,’ he whispered.

‘You too.’

He felt a sudden need to make promises. But Spider was right, commitments were too easy to make and too easy to regret. He would wait and see how he felt about things at seven o’clock. It was still only quarter to.

* * *

The path was uneven, slippery and overgrown with roots. The pace was slow, and no one spoke. They walked to the rhythmic creaking of bamboo and the soft cries of the wounded. The
sanitarios
had torches, but after an hour or so the batteries were exhausted, and now they stayed together by clinging to each other in the darkness.

Mickey walked in front with one of the
compitas
, the women guerrillas who had been chosen to escort them down the mountain. They were not expecting trouble. The
chuchos
were attacking from the other direction.

Webb would not let them carry him in one of their makeshift stretchers, and when they had first set out he had felt strong enough, was sure he could make it. But for the last half an hour he had been struggling; his leg muscles felt like rubber, and there was no strength in his knees.

Suddenly it was as if his body had been lathered in cold grease. He did not remember falling. Now he was cradled in someone’s arms, and he heard Mickey’s voice. ‘Hugh. Hugh, can you hear me?’

He tried to answer her but his tongue felt too big for his mouth.

‘You must get up. You have to keep going.’

He tried to stand, but his arms and legs would not respond.

‘Take some of this,’ Mickey said. Suddenly her finger was in his mouth, and it was sweet and warm. Honey. ‘A glucose fix. It will help you.’ She gave him more, smearing it along the insides of his cheek.

It seemed funny, mildly erotic. ‘Can we do this again tonight?’ he wanted to say, but it came out an incoherent mumble.

‘Please, Hugh,’ she said, and he recognized the desperation in her voice. ‘Please, please get up.’

Mickey and two of her
sanitarios
helped him to his feet. Distant stars were a blur of light, spinning through the sky.

‘Hold onto my shoulder,’ Mickey said.

They started walking. Only a little further, she had said. He thought he could go on just a little further.

* * *

It was imperative that the small children be kept quiet when they passed through the soldiers’ lines. In previous
guindas
mothers had suffocated a wakeful and crying child rather than have it betray the whole column to their enemy. The surgeon, Ramon, had crushed up his remaining store of tranquillizer tablets, mixed them with honey and had the mothers feed them to their infants. He had to guess how much to give each child, knowing that too little or too much might prove equally deadly.

As soon as all the children were asleep the
guinda
had begun.

Fires were lit in the village and dogs tied to the porches to bark through the night to persuade the
chuchos
that the villagers were still in their homes. When all was ready, Salvador and his remaining fighters led the silent column of refugees into the jungle.

Salvador set a devastating pace, but no one complained. They clung to each others’ knapsacks, the mud sucking at their legs, bare skin sliced by the sharp
zacata
grass. They climbed higher and higher into the mountains. The lights of the giant Fifth of November and Cerron Grande dams appeared in the distance. The rest of the Guazapa controlled zone was in utter darkness.

The
chuchos
play their radios at night, Salvador said, so we will know where they are and not blunder into them by accident. They don’t want to fight us in the dark.

They had been marching for almost an hour when Ryan heard it: music coming out of a pitch black jungle. He recognized the song, it was Stevie Wonder.

The soldiers were cooking their dinner, he could smell coffee brewing and stewed meat. For weeks his diet had consisted of grim maize tortillas, and now all he could think of was food. Never mind the babies alerting the sentries, he thought. They’ll hear my stomach growling in San Salvador.

He heard laughter and the tinny crackle of Spanish over a command radio.

The pace slowed.

They were very close now.

Ramon, the surgeon, was in front of him. He could hear him breathing, very fast. Ryan felt the familiar buzz of adrenalin in his veins. They must be just yards from the soldiers’ lines.

The skeletons of two adobe houses were silhouetted against the lake; phosphor ash from marker rockets glistened on the ground like frost. Beyond the ruins, splashed with silver, a dozen aluminum canoes were pulled up on the beach.

The
sanitarios
loaded their patients. Mickey paddled from canoe to canoe, examining her charges with the one remaining flashlight. The boy with the chest wound was dead. He must have died soon after they left La Esperanza, they had carried him all that way and no one knew. She told two
sanitarios
to take him back to the shore and bury him there.

She picked her way back up the beach to look for Webb. He was sitting on his haunches, against the wall of one of the bombed-out houses, his head between his knees. She had not thought he would be strong enough to make the trip down the mountain; he had collapsed twice and had been delirious for the last part of the journey. But he would not let them carry him.

She shone the torch on his face. ‘You’re all right?’

He nodded.

‘You were saying some strange things coming down.’

‘I’m okay.’

She squatted beside him. ‘The boy died.’

‘Boy?’

‘The kid with the chest wound. Rogelio’s friend. He died.’

Webb ran a hand through his hair. ‘I’m sorry.’

She heard the
sanitarios
scrabbling at the dirt with their bare hands, preparing a shallow grave. ‘We have to get going. I’ll help you into one of the boats.’

He struggled to his feet, then staggered away down the beach. Why Ryan? Why not Webb? She looked up at the sky, saw a part of herself arc away, free-falling in the passage of a falling star.

* * *

Ryan heard the child’s cry, and every muscle in his body froze. The infant had woken from its drugged sleep; perhaps Ramon had misjudged this one dose, erring too heavily on the side of caution. There was a second whimper, quickly muffled as the mother stifled the cry. Then silence. For a moment he thought they would get away with it.

Then he heard the staccato crack of small-arms fire. Salvador said the
chuchos
never fought at night unless they had to, so the
guinda
must have walked straight into their camp.

A frightened
chucho
on the camp perimeter was firing blindly into the jungle. He recognized the familiar booming of an M-60 machine gun, saw blue flashes slicing overhead as the tracers ripped through the dark. There were screams of panic and pain all around him.

Mama, mama!

Ryan had been through this a hundred times before and knew exactly what to do. He had seen too many men die running blindly from a battle. What you did was wait, bide your time. He grabbed Ramon, pulled him down beside him.

The frightened sentry kept his finger on the trigger until the barrel overheated and jammed.

Ryan looked up, saw a flare fall down the sky, silhouetting a dozen terrified
campesinos
as they ran down the trail. Then came the yammer of an M-3 and they were scythed down.

Ryan clung to the earth, breathing it in, the hot, corrupt, beautiful smell of it. He heard the gabble of voices on the soldiers’ radios, recognized that same Texan drawl from a few hours before on Salvador’s scanner. The tracers were so pretty at night.

Ramon was crying, a sound he had heard too many times before, the long
aaah-aaah-aaaah
of a wounded man unable to catch his breath. He put an arm around his shoulders and dragged him through the undergrowth. Bullets sliced through the air over their heads bringing down a rain of branches and leaves and tree bark. He found a fallen tree trunk and crawled over it, dragging Ramon with him. He hunkered down in the mush of leaves and mud on the far side.

Another flare arced overhead. Ryan waited.

He saw a woman running towards them. She staggered, ran on another few steps. There was a child in her arms. She stumbled. Now she was trying to crawl, but there was blood spilling out of her mouth.

‘Stay down!’ he screamed at her.

He left Ramon in the mud hollow, crawled towards her. At that same instant he felt a numbing blow to his left side, knew he had been hit. He kept going. When he reached the injured woman he pulled her over onto her back. The front of her dress was a sodden mess and she was not breathing. He groped for the child. Hardly anything left of it.

He swore, rolled on to his back, grimacing with pain.

His left side felt as if it had been hit with a hammer. Something warm and sticky seeped into the waistband of his trousers. He felt for his arm. It was still there, still attached.

He heard Ramon groaning. He crawled back, cursing himself for a fool for his futile heroics.

‘Shut up!’ he hissed at Ramon. ‘Silencio!’

But Ramon could not hear him. There was a whistling noise each time he breathed. One of the worst kinds of wound, Ryan thought. He took the green towel from around his neck to seal the entry wound and it seemed to help a little.

The numbness gave way to fierce electric bolts of pain in his shoulder. Between the spasms he tried to make his plans. He was sure the soldiers would not venture beyond their perimeter until morning. They might even have convinced themselves that they had beaten off a concerted attack by the FMLN.

If they were to escape they had until morning when the patrols would be sent out to find them. Salvador had been leading them north. But which way was that? He could not see the stars through the rainforest canopy.

Aaah-aaah,
Ramon said. Something bubbled in his throat.

Ryan felt his body prickle with cold sweat. He vomited. Shock. Not a good sign. Spider was right, so much for the lucky towel.

He closed his eyes. Just rest up here for a few minutes, wait for the firing to die down, then start crawling again, deeper into the jungle. A warm gelatin buzz swallowed him up, and he couldn’t fight it off.

Just sleep. For a few minutes.

A boot in the ribs woke him. It was what the medics called ‘response to pain’.

The force of the kick rolled him on his back. He looked up into a scowling peasant face. It could have been one of Salvador’s
compos
, except this one had on US issue camous and he was carrying an Armalite. He saw the surprise on the man’s face when he realized he had captured a gringo.

One of his comrades rolled Ramon on to his back. His eyes were half open, his face livid from rigor. He must have died during the night. The soldiers looked disappointed.

Ryan stared into the brutal young faces. He remembered Salvador’s stories of FMLN prisoners who had been skinned alive with knives. He hoped it was just propaganda. One of them made a jerking motion with his rifle, wanting Ryan to stand. He tried to move, but he couldn’t. His whole left side above the waist felt as if it were frozen.

The soldiers kicked him again, shouting at him.

Either you sit here, Sean old son, and let them kick you to death, or you get on your bloody feet somehow.

He shifted his weight to his right elbow, twisted, and got up on one knee. He launched himself to his feet, cannoned into one of the soldiers, who pushed him backwards with his M-16. The barrel jarred his wounded arm, and he screamed.

The soldier thought that was funny.

Another one moved in and tore the camera off his neck. He almost fainted from the pain, but willed himself to stay on his feet. That’s my only chance, he thought. If they think they’ll have to carry me, they might not bother taking me prisoner.

He looked down at his shoulder. There were two ragged holes in his shirt. Blood had soaked into his shirt down to the waist, but it didn’t look too bad. Perhaps his luck was still holding.

One of the soldiers ripped through his camera bag, found the spare film and the lenses. They shouted something at him in Spanish.

‘
No hablo español
,’ he said. ‘
Inglès.
'

English. He didn’t suppose any of them had heard of Australia and he didn’t want them to think it was part of America.

A gun barrel hit him in his ribs, the universal sign for put your hands on top of your head, shitface. Ryan took this as a good omen. With each passing second the odds of survival were improving. ‘Can’t put my hands on my head, sport,’ he said. ‘My arm’s buggered.’

One of the soldiers got angry. He shouted and hammered his rifle into Ryan’s side a second time.

‘Okay, okay!’ He put one hand on his head, tried to move the other. It reminded him of the time they had tuberculosis vaccinations at school, he couldn’t move his bloody arm after that either. He tried to reach over his left shoulder, grab his other hand, and pull it on top of his head.

They liked that. It made them laugh.

He laughed along with them. See. We’re all mates now. We all like a laugh. We’re practically best buddies.

* * *

There were seven of them gathered around the hurricane lamps in the command post at San Lorenzo; Salvador, one of his lieutenants from La Esperanza, three other
comandantes
from Chalate province, and Webb and Mickey. They leaned on the crumbling adobe walls, lounged on wooden chairs around the trestle table, smoked, drank coffee. The mood was somber.

They had lost so many.

On the government radio it had been announced that the Ramon Belloso battalion had slaughtered the rebels to the last man. In fact, from the column of over three hundred that had left La Esperanza, more than one hundred and eighty had straggled into San Lorenzo that afternoon. It was the rear of the column that had borne the brunt of the casualties. Of the approximately one hundred and twenty who were missing, only twenty were
compas
. The rest were women, children, old men.

They heard the soldiers talking about a captured gringo on the Bearcat scanner. Webb knew what that meant. They had Ryan.

Mickey broke the oppressive silence. ‘What is going to happen to him?’

Salvador looked around at the other men. There was a lot of coughing, spitting, smoking.

‘If he were a
compa
,’ Salvador said, ‘I could tell you with complete certainty what they would do. But he is a
gringo
. So what can I say? Perhaps they will send him back to San Salvador and deport him. Perhaps they will let him take pictures of their great victory at La Esperanza. Or perhaps they will gouge out his eyes and skin him alive, like they did to Ricardo Cayetano.’

‘We have to get him back,’ Mickey said.

‘There are fifteen hundred men in the Ramon Belloso battalion. They have helicopters, grenade launchers and M-16 machine guns. It is quite impossible.’

‘What if they kill him?’

‘Then Señor Webb here will write about his murder in his newspaper and all America will understand the crimes your country commits here.’

Webb listened to the discussion without comment. He doubted the soldiers would content themselves with having Ryan deported, not after what he had seen. Easier to shoot him, say they had found his body in the village after the offensive, claim that the guerrillas had murdered him.

You should be pleased. You said you never liked the bastard.

‘But he has the pictures,’ he heard himself say.

Salvador looked up at him, his face creased in confusion. ‘I do not understand.’

‘He has all the photographs, the proof of what you want us to tell the world. The pictures of that helicopter flying over your village and killing Maria Montez and her child. The time the A-37 strafed the compound near the hospital and Rogelio and the others were killed. It was our record of how you live here, with your wives and your parents and your children, proof that you are not an army, that you are people like people everywhere. Without Ryan’s film I have no proof of what I want to say, and no one will take any notice. No national newspaper or magazine will buy my story because it is pictures that sell.’

Salvador shook his head. ‘As soon as the soldiers find his camera and his film they will destroy them.’

‘His camera, yes. But not the film. He has hidden it.’

‘They will find it.’

‘Only after they’ve skinned him.’

Salvador translated what he thought this meant for the others in the room. There was an argument in Spanish. Webb did not understand all that was said, but from what he could make of it two of the
comandantes
suggested that a small but heavily armed task force should try and rescue him. Someone suggested a diversionary attack, at night, while a small rescue team infiltrated the perimeter and got Ryan out.

‘They will never expect us to risk our lives for one gringo,’ another said. ‘If we get inside their camp they will shit themselves like children until the officers get control again.’

Salvador conceded that the advantage of such a surprise had merit. He smiled grimly, his soldier’s instincts excited at the prospect of striking such a psychological blow against the
chuchos
. ‘But we must ask for volunteers,’ he said. ‘I cannot order any of my
compas
to do this. If you can find thirty volunteers, I will lead them myself.’

Webb could feel Mickey watching him. He wondered if she knew, or had guessed, about the six rolls of film taped to his chest. Love him or hate him, he wasn’t going to leave him behind. If the roles were reversed it was the one thing he knew about Sean bloody Ryan. He’d do the same for him.