In the back of the last one, Lubeck could see men checking the clips of their weapons. He felt the pull of fear now, and welcomed it, for it would give him the edge he needed to keep going.
The trucks had slowed to a walking pace. He descended to level ground and hung a few hundred yards behind them. He flirted with the idea of radioing the Bogotá station but dismissed the notion until he had something concrete to say.
Lubeck climbed another hillside and moved parallel with the convoy. The town of San Sebastian came into view. Dust whipped up from the poorly paved street and blasted the shuttered windows of the town’s buildings. A church steeple dominated the town’s center, and a bell could be heard chiming softly as windblown pebbles cascaded against it. Lubeck reached for his binoculars.
More military-style vehicles dotted the dusty street. Men in uniforms held their weapons tight and paraded freely, all watching the trucks entering the town’s perimeter. But where were the townspeople?
The grip of fear held Lubeck tight. Something was very wrong here all right. San Sebastian, a simple farming community … His mind kept coming back to that.
The trucks squealed to a halt. Troops piled from the back of all three, arranging themselves in groups, fanning out. The dark-eyed man was barking orders in heavy Spanish. Enough of his words traveled in the wind for Lubeck to string them into context.
“Check the houses! I want them emptied! Lofts too and outhouses! Check every room, every inch! Get to it! Get to it!”
Three quarters of the troops started off.
“Watch for stragglers!” the dark-eyed man shouted after them. He nodded to another phalanx, which moved for the church.
Lubeck let the binoculars dangle at his chest and started running, trying to better his angle. His mouth was dry and he knew all the water in Colombia could do nothing about it. He sensed now what was about to take place, but the why still eluded him.
He stopped on a hill even with the church. He was just a hundred yards from the town now. A group of soldiers was unloading large silver cans from each of the trucks and packing them onto the backs of jeeps. When ten cans had been loaded on them, the jeeps tore off, a man at the back of each working on the cans’ spouts. Lubeck swung his binoculars back around.
The church was emptying. People, virtually all clothed in tattered white rags, swept into the wide street. Soldiers poked their rifles forward, herding the people into a tight mass, keeping them still. The mass swelled. Lubeck saw young children cowering against mothers, teenage boys trying to stand brave by fathers. Older people tripped, fell, were yanked brutally up by the soldiers and tossed forward. Even from a hundred yards away, Lubeck could hear the muttered cries and pleas to God for help. Some of the people were wailing with knees pressed to the ground and hands grasping for the sky. Rifle butts quickly silenced them. Through it all, Lubeck made out one word above everything else:
¿Porqué?… Why?
Several of the other soldiers were returning now with stragglers from the surrounding houses. Perhaps they had been hiding. Perhaps they had simply been missed in the original roundup. It didn’t matter. They were tossed into the mass now and the mass absorbed them. Two hundred people, Lubeck calculated, at least a third of them children.
The soldiers poked at the mass with their rifles until it was impossible to tell one person from the next. No space to breathe, let alone move.
The dark-eyed man shouted an order.
The soldiers backed up into a semicircle and raised their automatic weapons.
The people screamed, cried, begged, tossed their hands about in desperate circles, shoving to find safety when there was no place to go.
Above the screaming, Lubeck heard the dark-eyed man’s one-word command:
“Fire!”
In the drawn-out instant that followed, Lubeck wanted to drop the binoculars from his eyes but couldn’t. The soldiers aimed their rifles straight into the mass and fired without pause. Smoke belched from the barrels, flashes swirling together into a single bolt.
Some of the soldiers changed clips.
The bullets kept coming.
The screaming curdled Lubeck’s ears. Still he couldn’t put the binoculars down.
The first wave of red and white collapsed down and in, the second atop it, clearing the bullets’ path for the next. By the end, there was no place left to fall, and punctured, bloodied bodies stood supporting each other until the wind tumbled them over into the heap.
Lubeck’s steel pincers sliced through the frame of his binoculars. He leaned over and vomited.
Lubeck gazed back down. He didn’t need his binoculars to see the blood spreading outward from underneath the pile and soaking into the dirt street. A young boy rolled off the top of the pile, into the scarlet pool.
Lubeck vomited again.
Down below, soldiers were soaking the bodies with the contents of the same steel cans that had been loaded into the back of the jeeps from the trucks. Lubeck’s mind snapped back to reality, forced out the sickening carnage he had witnessed. He grabbed his pack and was off again.
He stopped a hundred yards farther across the hillside, too close to the town for his own liking. He had to report this, but what precisely could he report? The Bogotá station could never respond in time for it to matter. Time was not the problem. His right hand was trembling and he realized his steel pincers were as well. He pulled his broken binoculars back to his eyes.
Across the town on another hillside there was a brief flash, sun meeting something metallic. Another person obviously, another witness to the massacre. Lubeck wondered who. Then he saw the jeeps with the silver cans. They were speeding over prescribed stretches of land with one man holding the cans’ spouts open, draining them of a clear liquid, which sank into the ground.
The land! Where were the damn—
“Oh, my God,” Lubeck muttered.
It couldn’t be but it was. He grabbed the radio from his pack, switched to the proper frequency, yanked up the antenna, and raised the plastic to his lips.
“Come in, Bogotá station. Come in, Bogotá station.” He fought to hold the transmitter steady. “This is Field Mouse. Do you read me, Bogotá station?”
“We read you, Field Mouse” came a male voice between splotches of static. “But you’re broken up. Can you move closer in range?”
“Negative!” Lubeck roared half under his breath. “No time. Just listen. Are you recording this transmission?”
“Affirmative, Field Mouse. It’s standard—”
“I don’t give a fuck about standard anything. Don’t interrupt me. Just listen. I’m broadcasting from San Sebastian. The whole town’s been taken out.” Down below troops were splattering the buildings with more of the fluid from the cans, drenching the insides as well. “Everyone’s dead, massacred….”
“Field Mouse, did you say—”
“I told you not to interrupt me! It’s on tape, goddamnit! I haven’t got time for a full report now but I think I know why this town can’t exist anymore.” Lubeck grabbed for the binoculars with his pincers and held them against his eyes as best he could. They were going to burn the whole town, he knew now, and with good reason. “As soon as I complete this transmission forward the tape stat to Washington under sterile cover. Use gamma channel. Tell them I will follow as soon as I can with all the details.”
“Acknowledged.”
Lubeck swept the area with his binoculars. Yes, it was starting to make sense now. “San Sebastian was a farming community. I’m in a position overlooking the fields now. It appears that—” Lubeck’s eyes froze. He tried to refocus the binoculars but couldn’t manage it with his pincers. “Oh, my God,” he breathed into the transmitter. “This can’t be! It can‘t be! I’m looking out at—”