That was all he would say about the zombies. For a long time he was silent, carefully studying the terrain to the east. with the glasses. At last, without taking the glasses from his eyes, he began to talk again.
“Come dark, blanc, we three go down to that valley yonder and find a houmfort in the jungle. Ain’t no real building, nothing but a clearing, but it a voodoo church just the same. One that Papa Doc and P.P. don’t know about, i Then maybe you see something else you don’t understand.”
“We got no time for that voodoo junk,” I said. “If we’re going to do this we have to do it fast. Real fast. Luck doesn’t last forever.”
He adjusted the focusing dial on the binoculars. “Where you meet Swan, blanc?”
“New York.” No lie.
“How much she paying you?”
“A thousand a month. A bonus if I get Valdez out alive.” Not bad for off the top of my head thinking.
He peered intently through the glasses. “Hmmm — a thousand bucks a month. Maybe I making a mistake, blanc. Maybe I oughta go mercenary, too, you think?”
“That’s your business,” I said curtly. “I fight for money. I give honest measure.”
“I ain’t quarrelling, blanc. Ain’t quarrelling at all. But fair is fair — you getting all that money you should take the most risks, do the dangerous jobs, eh?”
I agreed to that. I was curious to see where all this was leading.
“You never been in Haiti before, blanc?”
I had, several years before, but I couldn’t admit it. I said no.
Duppy put down the binoculars and leveled his red veined eyes at me. “So you don’t know nothing about Haiti, blanc. Me, I been here a long time. Swan, she born here. So we do the planning, blanc, and you be the stud, huh? You the professional fighting man, me and Swan the thinkers, eh? That the way we do it, blanc.”
He was trying to provoke me for some reason of his own.
I didn’t think he had really bought the Sam Fletcher story, but even so he couldn’t know who I was. Unless Lyda told him. I didn’t think she had, or would. I doubted that she knew who Duppy really was.
I also doubted that Duppy knew that I had spotted him. If he had, or if he knew that I was AXE, he would have moved in on me before now. Forced a showdown. He hadn’t, so I figured that I still retained a small edge. This being so, I didn’t want to force matters either. Not yet. I smoked and played at being relaxed and confident and studied his shoulders and biceps and torso and knew that if I had to go against him in a fair fight it was going to be one hell of a brawl. I knew a lot of tricks, and with this oversize character I would need every one of them.
When Duppy spoke again there was a faint sneer in his voice. He knew I wasn’t going to call him and so he put me down as chicken. I liked that. It gave me a little more advantage when the showdown came.
“So we do it like I say, and like Swan say, blanc. Tonight we go to the valley, into the jungle, and pick up the other blanc. Man name of Hank Willard. I guess Swan tell you all about him? She say how the houngan and the mambo been hiding this white man for a long time now? How he want out bad, and he willing to help us? She say all that to you?”
“She told me.” After we were ashore and half way up the mountain she had told me.
Duppy gave me another blunt stare. “This other blanc, this Hank Willard, he a mercenary like you. Good thing you help save him — all you money blancs should stick together.”
He crawled away and I watched him munch on some cassava bread and then go back to sleep. He didn’t look at me, or speak, again.
Lyda was still sleeping. I wanted to sleep, but couldn’t, so I went back to using the binoculars again.
The village still smouldered. Only the little French church remained, its white stones drenched in sunlight. The straggle of refugees had vanished, as had the jeep and the Tonton Macoute. No sign or sound of the helicopter. At the moment the scene was peaceful, serene, a becalmed patina of old France superimposed on dark Africa. Wild coffee and banana trees grew on the lush slopes and valleys, and breadfruit and orchids entwined in clusters. Beyond the valley at the foot of; our mountain the steep rises were heavily forested and jungled and I could see how Hank Willard could have been concealed all these months.
The thing was — AXE had Hank Willard in the files. Freelance flyer, soldier of fortune, part-time drunk and full-time mercenary. In his late thirties and from a small town in Indiana. One of the footloose and fancy free boys that had flown fighters in the Korean war, had been a double ace, and had never been able to fit back into civilian life. Couldn’t take discipline either, so after the war the Air Force had separated him fast. Since then he had knocked around over the world, flying anything that would get off the ground, and working for whoever would pay him. During the last attempted invasion of Haiti, Willard had flown an old B25 and tried to bomb Papa Doc’s palace in Port-au-Prince.
I couldn’t help grinning as I thought of it now. Hank Willard hadn’t been very successful. He dropped two bombs, missed the palace by a half mile, and both bombs had been duds. A few minutes later the B25, a crate held together with spit and scotch tape, had given up the ghost and Willard had to crash land it in the jungle. Nothing had been heard of him since.
Papa Doc and the Tonton Macoute rounded up the other invaders and gave them a fast trial and hanged them in various parts of the country as a warning. Their bodies had been gibbetted, enclosed in an iron cage and hung in chains and, or so Lyda told me, were still rotting around the country. Papa Doc had put a ten thousand dollar bounty on Hank Willard.
I puzzled about that as I put down the glasses and rubbed my eyes and admitted that at last I was going to be able to sleep. Ten thousand dollars is a lot of temptation! Yet nobody had sold Willard. Went to show how much they must hate Papa Doc. And P.P.
As I was falling into sleep the drums started to tattoo again. A soft tapping and rumble that I couldn’t locate because of the diffuse mountain acoustics. On and on the drums talked, louder and louder, a sullen and endless percussion that finally lulled me into sleep.
A scream startled me awake. Not a human sound. A long drawn-out screaming of air friction on sleek overheated metal. I rolled over and came to my knees, the .45 in my hand. Lyda and Duppy were awake, crouching and staring around.
Duppy motioned me down. He had his Tom gun ready across his left arm.
The girl, brought out of sleep into sudden terror, stared at me with her mouth open. “What in Christ’s name?”
I breathed again. She had come very damned near to! calling me Nick.
Duppy had the glasses and was peering down the slope! behind us, the slope up which we had toiled the night before,! After a moment he beckoned to us and laughed harshly.
“Nothing to do with us, blanc. Swan. Come take a look! Ain’t nothing but junk.”
We crawled to him and took turns with the binoculars. The spent missile had smashed itself to bits in a clump of hibiscus and the immortelle of poinsettias. The white metal, jagged hard garbage now, lay tossed about in sinister contrast to the peace of slow falling dusk.
I was tense inside. I watched Lyda and Duppy. Especially I watched Duppy.
Lyda could be an actress and a poseur, but I didn’t think she was faking amazement now. She gaped at us, her mouth open, her brown eyes wide with question.
“What in hell was it? Is it? Are they shooting at us?”
I let Duppy pick it up. Watching him.
He gave me a sidelong glance as he patted her shoulder. “Papa Doc, and old P.P. they got missiles, Swan. Shoot ‘em off the Citadel over yonder. The zombies built ‘em ramps. A week now they been shooting, practicing, and I don’t tell you before ‘cause I don’t want worry you none. You got too much worry now, I think.”