“Which son of a bitch? Papa Doc or P.P.?”
“Both!”
She handed me the glasses and rolled over on her back, sighing a deep breath that pushed her soft breasts up beneath the green jacket. She closed her eyes.
“Both,” she repeated. “When the time is right. Soon, I hope.”
The whipping crack of the gun came up the slope to us. I put the glasses on the column and saw a man in the ditch beside the road. His bare black feet were threshing about and as I got the picture in sharp focus the goon standing over him leveled his revolver and emptied it. So slowly and deliberately that I could count each shot. The black feet stopped moving.
Lyda didn’t move. “Those Tonton Macoute don’t fool around,” I said.
Her eyelids crinkled. “Murderers and perverts, all of them. Their time will come.”
I chewed on a flat disc of cassava bread. It tasted sour and moldy, and I hoped they had washed all the hydrocyanic out, but it was better than ancient C ration. Duppy and his party hadn’t brought along much food. Just the cassava bread and some cooked goat meat and a couple of bottles of Barbancourt rum. I couldn’t fault the rum. Barbancourt is the best in the world.
The girl puffed her lips out and said, “Give me a cigarette, darling. My Christ, what a march! I thought I was going to die a dozen times.”
“Not now. Turn over, slowly, and hide your face. The helicopter is coming this way.”
I glanced at Duppy, who was sleeping near us. He was lying on his stomach with his face cushioned on his arms and his ragged bush hat tilted to keep the sun out of his eyes. He was all right.
The helicopter clattered over us, very low from the sound, and we lay unmoving with our faces pushed into the rank grass. From a corner of one eye I watched it go swooping away to the east, toward Sans Souci and P.P. Trevelyn’s estates.
Lyda sat up cautiously. You think they spotted us?”
“No.” I gave her a hard grin. “Not a chance. We would know if they had. They must have machine guns aboard that egg beater.”
She held out a slim brown hand. “Cigarette me, then. 11 suppose it is safe to smoke?”
I lit two cigarettes and handed one to her. “As long as you don’t stand up and blow smoke rings.”
I glanced at Duppy again, wondering if the helicopter had awakened him. He didn’t move. His matte black face looked younger in repose, though I figured him to be in his early forties. One thing — he didn’t look any smaller when he was asleep. I made him about 6–5 and at least 260 pounds. He was wearing faded khaki shorts and a dirty torn tee shirt that was too small for his barrel chest. Weather, I knew, would never bother this man. On his huge feet were a pair of old Army boondockers with no socks. Around his thick waist was an ammo belt and he wore a Colt .45 like the one I carried. One of his outflung hands, looking as big as a tennis racket, rested on a clip type Thompson gun. Nearby was a musette bag full of spare clips and a big hunk of cassava bread.
I relaxed and stretched out beside the girl. It was going to be a long day.
“Whisper,” I said. “How did you square it? No invasion?” It was the first opportunity I had had to speak to her alone.
She was on her belly, smoking slowly and brushing at the smoke as she exhaled.
“No real problem. Yet. I told Duppy that I had changed my mind — that I didn’t want to risk the invasion until after we had Valdez. That I was afraid that they would kill Valdez the moment the invasion started, because they know we want to make him President, and I couldn’t risk that. I think he believed me.”
Her whisper was sibilant, caught up in Ssss, yet no louder than an insect chirping near me.
“You might be right at that,” I said. “The thought had occurred to me. If they can’t keep Valdez, they’re not going to let anybody else have him — alive.”
It was AXE policy exactly, Hawk’s theme, but with a reverse twist.
She crushed out her cigarette and curled into the womboid position she favored. “I’m going to sleep now, Nick. I’m dead. Don’t get into anything with Duppy — and wake me if anything happens.”
A minute later she was asleep, breathing softly with now and then a tiny snore. I turned on my back and looked at the pellucid blue sky. I took a drink of warm, tinny-tasting water from my canteen. I had been pretty well bushed when we reached the ledge, but now I was neither sleepy nor tired. After a few minutes I took the binoculars and crawled to the east as far as the brush offered protection.
Bishop’s Cap and the Citadel was off to my left now. The mountain fell away to a valley, where I could see a few thatched huts, and then there was another green clad mountain. At the foot of this mountain the fence began. I trained the binoculars and focused them and after a time I could pick up one corner of the fence glinting silver in the sunlight. I was impressed. The fence was ten feet high and topped with rolls of barbed wire. Closely knit steel mesh set into a concrete foundation. I had to chuckle sourly. When you are a billionaire you can afford to do things properly.
Both Lyda and Duppy said the fence enclosed some five thousand acres. There was one gate. Just one, and it was heavily guarded around the clock.
Inside the fence, not far from the crumbling and tropic ruined palace of Sans Souci — which Henri Christophe had cooled by diverting a stream to run under the floors — there was another modern palace built by P.P. Trevelyn. The bastard has his own little kingdom! His own army and his own air force. And he had Dr. Romera Valdez.
As I watched the corner of the glinting fence a guard passed leading a police dog on a leash. The guard had a belt holster and a rifle slung over his shoulder and wore a black peaked cap and a black uniform and high black shiny boots. I doubted that his cap insigne was a skull and bones — the distance was too great to make it out — but that black uniform reminded me of one word.
Gestapo! I already had an antipathy for Mr. P.P. Trevelyn and now I found myself actively disliking him. I am a professional and I seldom hate, but I knew it wasn’t going to bother me much if I had to kill Trevelyn.
Duppy settled down beside me, and I knew the blacks had named him right. He did move like a ghost. Nobody ever comes up behind me that way — but he had. This huge man called Duppy who was really Diaz Ortega of KGB.
There was a rank sweaty smell about him. He stared at me with muddy brown eyes, the whites tinged a faint saffron and streaked with red veins. After a moment he gave me a white gap-toothed grin.
“What you think, blanc? We gonna make it in there and get Valdez out?”
I shrugged and fell into the character of Sam Fletcher. “Why not? It don’t look so tough from here. The fence might be a little trouble, but we can whip that.”
Duppy gave me a cast iron stare. “Yeah, blanc. And the guards and the dogs and the zombies.”
I had been going to say something, but I forgot what, it was and my mouth hung open. Then I managed to say, “Zombies?”
He grinned enormously. “Yeah, blanc. Zombies. Old P.P. got ‘em, man. He works them hard, ever sort of work, and he their master and they do anything P.P. say do. You don’t believe in zombies, blanc?”
If he wanted to play games it was all right with me. I grinned back and said, “No, Duppy. I don’t believe in zombies. What’s the gimmick?”
He took his eyes off me at last and fumbled in his pocket for a crumpled pack of Splendids, the local cigarette. The harsh fumes reminded me of Chinese cigarettes. Duppy blew smoke through his wide nostrils and reached for the binoculars.
“I ain’t say I believe in zombies, blanc. I ain’t say I don’t believe in zombies, either. All I say is that P.P. got zombies working for him. Mean bastards, too.”