A very overweight young reporter with United Press International slammed his fist into the seat. The reporter's jowls went red with anger and frustration. He slammed his fist into the seat again and again. "Another wasted day!"
"We should have gone with Jose," an older journalist said.
"To visit his girlfriend and her family?" A reporter in the next seat asked with a sneer. "You want to spend a week in some godforsaken village with mud up to your ass?"
A kilometer past the village of Lolotiquillo, the young Puerto Rican they knew as Jose Lopez had taken his backpack and stepped out. "See you next week. My amiga lives here." Then he had shouldered his pack and followed a narrow trail toward a cluster of plank and sheet-tin shacks.
"Maybe you could get exclusive interviews," the fat UPI reporter suggested, "with the pigs and flies."
Light flashed in the back window as the second van followed them down the road. Ahead, their headlights shone into a tunnel of rain and mud. Despite the rain, the air inside the van remained sultry. The reporters and photographers sweated in their seats.
They had left Gotera an hour before dark. Because the vans lacked the heavy-duty suspension and powerful engines of the army troop trucks, the road had forced the hired drivers to slow to only a few kilometers per hour to bump over the rocks and ruts. But knowing a scene of terror and murder awaited their cameras and notebooks made the ride worthwhile. Now the frustrated newsmen knew they faced another hour or two in the storm, then an uncomfortable night on the floors of an abandoned hotel. All for nothing.
Lurching and rocking, the van followed the muddy track across the hill. A lightning flash startled the group.
"This is too much rain," the driver shouted back to them. "Too late in year. Very bad for roads."
"What about the international flights?" one journalist shouted out. "Think there'll be flights out tomorrow?"
"If the rain stops," the driver answered.
"Flying out?" a photographer asked the journalist.
"Damn right. I don't get paid unless I file. I'll bounce over to Lebanon and get a story. I'm tight with the Christian militia..."
"The Druze too?"
"All of them. Depends on who I'm talking to. I'll file a story on anyone who's killing people. Maybe I'll go to Libya and see what's doing. There's got to be a war somewhere."
"There's one here. Somewhere."
Guiding the van slowly around a curve, the driver suddenly stomped on the brake.
"What's the problem?"
"What's happening?"
Flicking on the interior light, the driver raised his hands and put his palms against the windshield.
A black form stepped through the headlights.
The journalists saw a rain-soaked black-uniformed man with a rifle. The man wore a black bandana over his face to cover his features. Only his eyes showed.
In the van's second seat, an American journalist who had covered NATO maneuvers recognized the black-clad soldier's rifle as a U.S. Army weapon: an M-16 automatic rifle fitted with an M-203 grenade launcher.
And in a custom plastic and spring-steel shoulder holster, the man wore a NATO prototype weapon distinguished from all other autopistols by the extended magazine and fold-down off-hand grip-lever: a Beretta 93-R with a sound suppressor.
The journalist knew he now witnessed an international headline. This black-uniformed soldier did not represent any of the Salvadoran guerrilla factions. But the American journalist did not speak to the others. He had his own career to advance. This might get him a Pulitzer Prize. Maybe a few appearances on morning talk shows.
Slipping the lens cap off his motorized Nikon, he set the focus ring at three feet and the f-stop at 1.8. He flicked the camera's exposure-mode to automatic. He braced the camera on the seat in front of him and waited to photograph the man he knew to be an American commando illegally operating in the mountains of Morazan.
The black-clad American went to the driver's door and motioned for the driver to roll down the glass. While the rain poured through the open window, the American and the driver whispered together.
The journalist touched the camera's button. He heard the shutter click open. He held the camera absolutely still as it took an electronically metered exposure of the soldier's face in the window.
"Gracias a Dios!" the driver exclaimed. "Gracias por su ayuda! Mi esposa y mis ninos..."
"De nada," they all heard the commando say. "No es necesita a morirse ustedes en esta guerra."
Then the commando left. As he passed through the headlights, the journalist adjusted the focus and snapped two more photos.
"We stop here," the driver announced. He motioned downhill. "If we go, we die. Terroristaswait..."
The driver saw the journalist snapping photos of the departing commando.
Rounding the curve, the second van's headlights revealed another black-clad commando with an auto-weapon. Both men returned to the night and rain, suddenly gone.
Before the journalist could protect the camera, the driver got up, went to him and snatched the Nikon from his hands. The driver then turned and slammed the camera against the dash, again and again. He tore open the film door. A coil of film came out. The driver tossed the smashed camera out the window.
For a second, the journalist only stared at the driver. Then the American newsman screamed, "You know what you've done? That was a United States Army Special Forces commando! Operating in a war zone! In violation of congressional prohibitions! Those photos would have been on the front page of every newspaper in the world! You are fired! You have just lost your job. You will never work again for the news services. You are out of work!"
The driver smiled. The smile became a chuckle, then a laugh." Si, senor. Perhaps now I have no job. But except for that Yankee soldier..." the driver looked to the darkness where Rosario Blancanales and Carl Lyons had disappeared "...I would have no life."
13
From the tree line behind the abandoned cornfields, Lyons and Blancanales observed the squad of assassins. The steep rise of the forested hillside allowed the Stony men to look down on the fields and farmhouse and road.
Lightning flashes illuminated the scene in stark moments of black and arc-light white. A hundred meters of rotting cornstalks and furrows gone to weeds separated Lyons and Blancanales from the flowing mud of the road. They saw forms with bipod-braced auto-weapons sprawled here and there in the tangles of rotting cornstalks. Quesada's militiamen wore black fatigues and black web-gear. Some wore black vinyl raincoats and hats. One man stood on the rise, watching the mountain road for headlights.
Tire tracks cut across the abandoned fields to the farmhouse. A small bus, out of view of the road, parked against the rear of the burned-out house; the overhang of the roof sheltered the passenger door from the downpour. The driver's window viewed the hills. Inside the bus, a cigarette lighter flared.
Lightning flashes revealed a man in a black raincoat walking through the storm. He went from position to position, crouching for a moment with each rifleman. Finally, he disappeared into the darkness of the farmhouse.
"That's the leader," Lyons whispered to his partner. "Checking his squad."
"Perhaps" Blancanales answered. "And perhaps the leader sent out a soldier to check the line."
While Blancanales whispered orders to Ricardo, Lyons checked his weapons and gear. He slung his Atchisson over his back and cinched the sling tight. He tightened his bandolier of 12-gauge mags. Checking the MU-50G controlled-effect grenades in his thigh pockets, he felt the casings click together. He reached out to the ferns around him and pulled off fronds. He shoved them in his thigh pockets as padding to eliminate any chance of the grenades betraying him as he moved.