The roadway entered the camp by way of a narrow gap — bamboo on one side, a sheer drop on the other: The path rode along this brief shelf and tipped down toward the camp of huts. Nothing short of a wrecking ball could make headway through the thickness of high bamboo that screened it. This was the only way in — easy to command, easy to defend; conceivably a man or two could deny passage to a battalion.
It wasn’t going to come to that. Cielo had no ambition to hold out heroically against an armed assault. Discovery here would mean surrender; he wasn’t prepared to sacrifice his men for nothing. The chief weapons in his arsenals were secrecy and concealment and deception.
There was a man on guard at the gap; there always was; this one waved his hand lazily and didn’t bother to unsling his submachine gun and Cielo reminded himself to have a talk with the man later — they all were slipping toward apathy, taking things for granted, depending on tripwired cowbells in place of vigilance.
Past the gap the road dipped toward the huts. It was a compact area with its back to the cliff, screened by thick growths of high bamboo and trees that soared to vertiginous heights; the cliff was a jagged upheaval of faults and abutments on top of which was a flat granite promontory, an open field beyond which another tier of jungle sloped up steeply toward the heights. The promontory overhung the camp and it was his plan to use it as a helicopter landing pad from which heavy equipment could be winched down and rolled into the cave behind the camp.
When he stepped out of the Land Cruiser he found Julio waiting for him.
“Did you bring me a few books?”
“I’m sorry, I forgot.”
“Damn.”
“Read the old ones again. What difference does it make? You can’t tell them apart.”
“The hell I can’t. A man gets bored up here. Did you give the girls a kiss from their uncle?”
“Sure... sure.”
Cielo went into the command hut with his brother; Vargas and Kruger drifted in and Cielo made his report to them — it contained no surprises except for the possibility that the man in the doorway had been spying on him. This disquieted Kruger more than the others; he was volatile and tended to fret about things. Kruger’s Spanish was even worse than his English, even after all the years, and in his presence they all tended to speak English although their conversation was peppered with common Spanish words and phrases. Kruger said, “If someone’s onto us, who?”
“I’ll consult the tea leaves and let you know,” Cielo said, making light of it.
“Have you no idea at all?”
“None, nor do I care very much. Whoever he is he didn’t follow me up here, did he. Let’s have a look at the cave.”
They all trooped out to the foot of the cliff like an inspector general’s party, everyone suitably deferential. The cave was natural — a fault in the rock cleft by some disturbance aeons ago. It was nearly thirty feet high and extended well back into the mountain to a depth of a city block or more. Its width varied considerably from point to point. The floor sloped up from the mouth toward the back, which was a good thing because it meant rainwater didn’t run into the cave. When they’d first discovered it they’d known it was the best they were going to find. You could crowd quite a lot of heavy military equipment in here. Nothing like airplanes or helicopters, nor would it accommodate more than a few tanks, but they weren’t acquiring anything that heavy anyway. The planes wouldn’t be needed until the very end — and Cielo believed the very end would never come. In the meantime there was room for field mortars and rocket launchers and flame throwers, machine guns and small arms and grenades and a few Jeeps that could be winched down or driven up the pioneer road.
The floor of the cave was dusty with debris. Several men were hammering rock drills into uneven lumps; small explosive charges would be set into them. The floor of the cave in its natural state had been jagged and useless; they were flattening it as best they could and knocking protrusions off the walls at the same time.
He vaguely hoped all this violence wasn’t going to bring the whole thing crashing down. There didn’t seem too much likelihood of that — the cliff was so massive, the cave so small in relation — but Cielo didn’t know much geology and thought perhaps there might be cracks that would be widened by the dynamite. It wasn’t anything he intended to lose sleep over.
He said, “Satisfactory, I think. You’ll be finished in a day or so?”
“As near finished as we need to be,” Julio replied. “We’ve already begun clearing the junk off the floor as you can see. It’ll be ready to receive the armas by tomorrow.”
Kruger said, “Are they delivering so soon?”
“Some of the things will be available tomorrow night,” Cielo said. “Some others will take several weeks.”
They were walking back out onto the open ground. Kruger twisted his head far back on his neck to peer up through the inter-knotted treetops. It was not possible to see properly the promontory above; the outcrop was more of a hint — a darker more substantial mass beyond the matted leaves. The occasional thin finger of sunlight probed down through the mist like a laser; other rays flickered on and off as the breeze stirred the trees. The light here was muted and had a greenish tinge. Sound seemed to be absorbed instantly into the damp cushion of the jungle; the quiet was intense and sometimes distressing — the silence, the dampness, the dim light, the invisibility of the outer world, all these conspired to instill the feeling that one’s senses had been drugged into half service. Cielo found that he slept longer and more often here than he did anywhere else.
Kruger, looking up toward the top, was saying: “I’m still worried about this helicopter delivery system. It’s not secure. A helicopter is so” — he searched for the word — “visible. You know? They have ground radar, don’t they? And anybody can see it going overhead. And it can be heard for miles.”
“I’m not worried about security,” Cielo told him. “Aircraft fly around the island all the time. There are helicopters everywhere these days. The radar can’t follow the helicopter because of the mountains — radar can’t distinguish between one solid object and another. We’ll make deliveries only at night when the clouds are down below us. We can guide him to ground with a flashlight or two, it’s not as if he needs a whole runway lighting system. It’s our good luck Zapatino’s a hell of a chopper pilot — he can do everything but fly upside down, you know. The main risk is weather, of course — we’ll end up aborting flights because of fog.”
Kruger walked away with Vargas; Cielo wasn’t sure he’d reassured the German — Kruger was always looking for things that might go wrong.
When the other two had gone beyond earshot Julio said, “Any news from the old man? Has he mentioned what happened to Emil?”
“No, hermano. Sometimes I hope I’ll never see him again. I wish him to be dead — peacefully — just to have it done with. I don’t have the nerve to tell him he’s crazy. And in the meantime we go through this farce of bringing in weapons by the helicopterload and caching them in this cave, where we both know they will rust away for five hundred years before anybody touches them again. The waste makes me ashamed.”
Julio looked at him harshly. “Are you still thinking of going to the old man and telling him he’s a blind fool?”
“No, I can’t do that. We’ve worked too hard for him for these fifteen years. We’ve earned the money he’s paid us. And when he dies there won’t be any nonsense about waiting for a will to be probated. A man will simply come and give each of us a little booklet containing columns of figures and the numbers of bank accounts in Zurich. Do you think I would jeopardize that? Do you think I want those Zurich bank books burned in his fireplace? We’ve earned that money — and I don’t feel like going back to work guiding tourists or unloading airplane cargos. And I don’t guess you feel like driving a taxi again.”