“Mount?” Robert Jordan squeaked in growing panic. “I thought we were walking.”
The truth was, Robert Jordan had always hated horses. Growing up in Montana it was nothing but horses, horses, horses, morning, noon, and night. Robert Jordan was a rebel, a punk, a free spirit — he was no cowboy dildo — and for him it was dirt bikes and dune buggies. He’d been on horseback exactly twice in his life and both times he’d been thrown. Horses: they scared him. Anything with an eye that big—
“Vámonos,” Ruperto snapped. “Or are you as gutless as the rest of the gringo wimps they send us?”
“Leche,” Robert Jordan whinnied, too shaken even to curse properly. And then he was in the saddle, the big, broad-beamed monster of a horse peering back at him out of the flat wicked discs of its eyes, and they were off.
Hunkered down in the bug factory, weeds in his face, his coccyx on fire, and every muscle, ligament, and tendon in his legs and ass beaten to pulp by the hammer of the horse’s backbone, Robert Jordan waited for the cargo plane. He was cursing his grandmother, the Sandinistas, the Clash, and even Sid Vicious. This was, without doubt, the stupidest thing he’d ever done. Still, as he crouched there with the hard black plastic box of the detonator in his hand, watching the pot-bellied crewcut rednecks and their runty flat-faced Indian allies out on the landing strip, he felt a surge of savage joy: he was going to blow the motherfuckers to Mars and back.
Ruperto was somewhere to his left, dug in with the big woman and their Kalashnikovs. Their own flat-faced Indians, led by the flat-faced old man, were down to the right somewhere, bristling with rifles. The charges were in place — three in the high grass along the runway median and half a dozen under the prefab aluminum warehouse itself. The charges had been set by a scampering Ruperto just before dawn while the lone sentry dreamed of cold cerveza and a plate of fried dorado and banana chips. Ruperto had set them because when the time came Robert Jordan’s legs hadn’t worked and that was bad. Ruperto had called him a cheesebag, a faggot, and worse, and he’d lost face with the flat-faced Indians and the old man. But that was then, this was now.
Suddenly he heard it, the distant drone of propellers like the hum of a giant insect. He caressed the black plastic box, murmuring “Come on, baby, come on,” all the slights and sneers he’d ever suffered, all the head slaps and jibes about his hair, his gloves, and his boots, all the crap he’d taken from his yuppie bitch of a mother and those dickheads at school — all of it had come down to this. If the guys could only see him now, if they could only see the all-out, hellbent, super-destructive, radical mess he was about to make…Yes! And there it was, just over the treetops. Coming in low like a pregnant goose, stuffed full of Twinkies. He began counting down: ten, nine, eight…
The blast was the most beautiful thing he’d ever witnessed. One minute he was watching the plane touch down, its wings and fuselage unmarked but for the painted-over insignia of the Flying Tigers, the world still and serene, the sack-bellies standing back expectantly, already tasting that first long cool Bud, and then suddenly, as if he’d clapped another slide in the projector, everything disappeared in a glorious killing thunderclap of fire and smoke. Hot metal, bits of molten glass and god knew how many Twinkies, Buds, and Cups of Soup went rocketing into the air, scorching the trees, and streaming down around Robert Jordan like a furious hissing rain. When the smoke cleared there was nothing left but twisted aluminum, the burned-out hulk of the plane, and a crater the size of Rockefeller Center. From the corner of his eye Robert Jordan could see Ruperto and the big woman emerge cautiously from the bushes, weapons lowered. In a quick low crouch they scurried across the open ground and stood for a moment peering into the smoking crater, then Ruperto let out a single shout of triumph—“Yee-haw!”—and fired off a round in the air.
It was then that things got hairy. Someone opened up on them from the far side of the field — some Contra Contra Contra, no doubt — and Ruperto went down. The flat-faced Indians let loose with all they had and for a minute the air screamed like a thousand babies torn open. The big woman threw Ruperto over her shoulder and flew for the jungle like a wounded crab. “Ándale!” she shouted and then the firing stopped abruptly as everyone, Robert Jordan included, bolted for the horses.
When he saw the fist-sized chunk torn out of Ruperto’s calf, Robert Jordan wanted to vomit. So he did. The horses were half crazy from the blast and the rat-tat-tat of the Kalashnikovs and they stamped and snorted like fiends from hell. God, he hated horses. But he was puking, Ruperto’s wound like raw meat flecked with dirt and bone, and the others were leaping atop their mounts, faces pulled tight with panic. Now there was firing behind them again and he straightened up and looked for his horse. There he was, Diablo, jerking wildly at his tether and kicking out his hoofs like a doped-up bronc at the rodeo. Shit, Robert Jordan wiped his lips and made a grab for the reins. It was a mistake. He might just as well have stabbed the horse with a hot poker — in that instant Diablo reared, snapped his tether, and brought all of his wet steaming nine hundred and fifty-eight pounds squarely down on Robert Jordan’s left foot.
The sound of his toes snapping was unmusical and harsh and the pain that accompanied it so completely demanding of his attention that he barely noticed the retreating flanks of Diablo as he lashed off through the undergrowth. Robert Jordan let out a howl and broke into a string of inspired curses in two languages and then sat heavily, cradling his foot. The time he’d passed out having his nose pierced flashed through his mind and then the tears started up in his eyes. Stupid, stupid, stupid, he thought. And then he remembered where he was and who was shooting at him from across the field and he looked up to see his comrades already mounted — Ruperto included — and giving him a quick sad look. “Too bad, gringo,” Ruperto said, grinning crazily despite the wound, “but it looks like we’re short a horse.”
“My toes, my toes!” Robert Jordan cried, trying to stand and falling back again.
Rat-tat. Rat-tat-tat, sang the rifles behind them.
Ruperto and his big woman spoke to their horses and they were gone. So too the flat-faced Indians. Only the old man lingered a moment. Just before he lashed his horse and disappeared, he leaned down in the saddle and gave Robert Jordan a wistful look. “Leche,” he said, abbreviating the curse, “but isn’t war a bitch.”
THE LITTLE CHILL
HAL HAD KNOWN Rob and Irene, Jill, Harvey, Tootle, and Pesky since elementary school, and they were all forty going on sixty.
Rob and Irene had been high-school sweethearts, and now, after quitting their tenured teaching jobs, they brokered babies for childless couples like themselves. They regularly flew to Calcutta, Bahrain, and Sarawak to bring back the crumpled brown-faced little sacks of bones they located for the infertile wives of dry cleaners and accountants. Though they wouldn’t admit it, they’d voted for Ronald Reagan.
Jill had a certain fragile beauty about her. She’d gone into a Carmelite nunnery after the obloquy of high school and the unrequited love she bore for Harvey, who at the time was hot for Tootle. She lived just up the street from Rob and Irene, in her late mother’s house, and she’d given up the nun’s life twelve years earlier to have carnal relations with a Safeway butcher named Eugene, who left her with a blind spot in one eye, a permanent limp, and triplets.