Then abruptly it wasn’t the football field, not the tackling players, not even the goal posts. It was a dust-filled road, it was a stinking roaring exhaust, it was the square rear of a waddling, tarp-covered truck moving just beyond the reach of his finger tips, and the H was formed by the white cotton rope that held the trap from being blown off in the wind of the truck’s own making.
Somehow he got his fingers under the rope. Someway he got another hand up higher, taking giant strides as the truck pulled him along. With a great reserve of strength he pulled himself up, got a foot on the edge of the bed of the truck, laid his arms on the canvas top, and hoisted himself to it.
The touchdown had been made.
The roaring crowds were there again, heard dimly as he gasped for breath, and each breath a searing pain in his chest. His team mates were jumping up and down around him gleefully, big thunderous men whose weight moved and stirred the hot earth under him.
Dust was in his nostrils...
Then there was no dust. Only heat.
The earth had stopped rocking.
He was aware that there had been noise. Now there was quiet. The sky above was an empty blue void except for the burning pinpoint that was the sun.
Into his awareness crept a swishing sound, growing in volume until it seemed that hell had broken violently loose directly over him. Then, so close he could almost touch it, a T33 jet trainer blurred across his vision. On one wing he read dimly: “USAF.” As the sound of its passage diminished, he heard a wild cursing below him. In Spanish.
Another swishing roar began. He propped up on his elbows, conscious of coming up out of a tremendous bed of pain, and saw another T33 beginning its run.
Memory flooded back. He knew now that he was on a dusty trap over a stake truck, and that the stake truck contained a cargo of wholesale death. Further than that, he saw the truck was on that part of the Santo Tomas road north which passed through a diabolical upthrust black mass of burnt jagged rock in which lay a small valley the Air Force used as a gunnery range.
He knew that the jets passing over weren’t making runs on the truck, but on the range three miles beyond.
When the next jet swished across with its spine-shivering sound, Randolph hitched himself to the edge of the truck and looked over. Suarez was squatted on the ground below him, his head turning to follow the jet’s path. The cursing was coming from him.
He wasn’t a large man. He was thin to the point of emaciation. He wouldn’t weigh a hundred thirty-five, Randolph judged.
Suarez had the push button in his hand. What, Randolph wondered, was he going to do with it? Bomb a jet?
He hitched himself closer to the edge of the truck. He went over the side in a tight ball, oblivious to pain, oblivious to everything but the necessity to flatten this dangerous subvert who so obviously thought that the swooping jets were directing their efforts at him and the truck.
Primary in Randolph’s reasoning, what there was of it, was the fact that he himself was lying right on top of the impending explosion. Suarez, turning on his heels, was calculating the approach of the next jet with his thumb white-knuckled on the push-button. His wild startled upturned look found Randolph as the big man left the solidity of the truck for the infirmity of the air, dropping down like the two-hundred-pound weight that he was.
He felt the give of Suarez’ squatted, doubled-up thin body under him. He heard his wild scream. He felt the terrible shock of the landing, and then he was blasted on a wave of excruciating pain back into the unconsciousness from whence he had come...
He fought the hands on him until the sound of soothing voices got through to him. He saw a familiar face and found a name to put to it: Haynes.
Haynes said, “They won’t be letting anybody talk to you for awhile, so listen good. A helicopter is setting down over there—” he gestured with his chin “—to take you to the base hospital.”
Then that was the noise he heard — like the beating of a buzzard’s wings, heard from afar in a still place. Except that this was amplified a thousand times.
There were others near, but it hurt him to move even his eyeballs. He concentrated on Haynes.
Somebody threw back the tarp on the truck, and dust fell on his face. Haynes said, “Watch what you’re doing up there!” and gently brushed the dust away while a voice floated down from above, “Sorry.”
Then Haynes said, “When the FBI boys pulled in at the customs house and you and Burkett didn’t show up right away, I went along to see what was keeping you. I saw the blood on the side of the road, and we found Burkett’s body. I read the marks, followed your bloodtrail and footprints, guessed a lot, and we started north. We got here a few minutes after a truckload of technicians. They’re having a field day with the bomb. They had been so close that they saw you take your plunge off the truck onto Suarez. And Suarez talked. He’s over there, with his back broken and his chest caved in. He won’t live.”
A tall man in Air Force uniform was approaching, carrying a black kit. His cool fingers went gently to work on Randolph, who never felt the hypo through his other pains.
Haynes said, “Suarez is afraid that history may never know what he tried to do. So he talked. He had known Henrietta in Havana. There he had been one of Castro’s early underground aides. She was an AEC secretary, on vacation. When she came back to the United States she wrote to him with her scheme to make a fortune. He met her once in Juarez, again in Nogales. Then she married Smetana.”
And the overall plan, Randolph saw now, was what had made her stay with Smetana, no matter what he did to her.
Haynes continued. “Finally, she got him down to Santo Tomas, where Suarez was waiting. But Smetana wouldn’t cooperate. Except that she knew what to do. How she must have hated him! She tortured him until he told them how to build the bomb. After it was built, she shot him. She threatened Suarez, too, who had been waiting until the bomb was finished to tell her he wanted to use it in what he termed a try for world peace. He was fox-crazy. She saw that. She needed help. Gomez was the man to give it to her. Suarez, suspecting she would try to cross him, unloaded the bomb from the railroad car and put it in the truck. He planted Smetana’s body in the ice bunker and called the railroad company and told them to come and get the car. Then a chance to get rid of Henrietta came along. He had already planned to bomb her.
All he had to do was plant some dynamite last night when she was with you. When she stepped on the starter, she blew herself up. Knowing that Gomez would take over her scheme, Suarez drove the truck to an isolated garage. It was bad luck for him that as he later approached the border gate en route to the road that follows the fence down to San Manuel gate, he saw Gomez. He couldn’t be sure Gomez hadn’t seen him, and if he had, Gomez would figure the bomb might be in the truck. So Suarez parked near the railroad track and got out and moved up along the train — he was skinny enough to slide under the gate — and tried to get in close enough to where he could hear what was being said. When Gomez came out and pointed at the train, Suarez thought if they didn’t find anything on the train, Gomez would remember the truck. So he gambled and shot when the train moved out, using the gun Henrietta had used on Smetana. He dropped it and lost it in the darkness. Then he went on to the San Manuel gate, crossed into the United States, and the rest you know.”
The doctor finished, waved in two men with a stretcher, and they loaded Randolph on it. The hypo was taking effect now, making him hazy. He had a thought, even a pitying one, for doomed Suarez, to whom a human life was nothing.