Stunned by shock and the suddenness of it Cielo climbed to his feet on rubber knees and looked left: Vargas was standing up, the man he’d rescued dusting himself off, someone else lying askew with the butt end of a telegraph pole across his chest. The donkey engine died with a sputter and Julio stared at Cielo in horror. Vargas on his big legs stumbled from side to side like a man concussed; but Cielo believed he’d not been hurt.
Juices pumped through him but he forced himself to behave with leaderly calm. He went jogging across to the man pinned under the pole. It was Ordovara and he was quite dead, his rib cage crushed; Cielo turned away, then turned back and laid a finger along Ordovara’s throat to feel for a pulse. There was none. A stink of excrement hung in the air.
He went to the lip and looked down. Two men were manhandling the capsized field gun away from Kruger who lay on his belly with both legs splayed out at weird angles. Even from up here Cielo could hear Kruger’s moans. Well, at least he was still alive but it looked as if both legs had been crushed.
He felt weight behind him. When he turned Vargas was there. Cielo pointed toward the body of Ordovara. “Get that thing off him and bring him down to the camp. Tell the others to clear up — get the equipment out of sight. Put Julio in charge. I’m going down.”
He strode along the rim, not hurrying, heading for the trail they’d cut down the side slope. It would take him fifteen minutes to cover the circuitous course but it was the only way down, short of rappelling down the cliff on a rope.
The fault, he thought, was no one’s but his own; he could lay the blame at no one else’s door. And how do I expiate this sin?
Ramirez was dead, half his face taken off by the whipping cable. The two dead men were not a major problem — only a major grief. It was Kruger who commanded his attention.
It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared it might be — the undercarriage of the field gun had landed square across the back of Kruger’s thighs but it was a pneumatic tire and that had absorbed a bit of the impact; the bones of both Kruger’s legs were broken but the flesh hadn’t been badly severed. Nevertheless he was already swelling up and it was obvious a good many blood vessels had been crushed. With immediate sophisticated medical attention it might be possible to save his legs. Up here there wasn’t much they could do but splint the fractures.
He took Julio aside. “You’d better break radio silence. Call in the helicopter. We’ll have to carry him up there.”
“You want to risk everyone for Kruger?”
“Do you think I should let him lose his legs, Julio?”
“He’s lost them anyway.”
“Now you’re a surgeon, are you?”
“Rodrigo — listen, think what will happen if we break security. The old man, what’ll he think? What’ll he do?”
“I don’t care right now. We owe Kruger a chance to keep his legs. Call Zapatino.”
“What if I can’t raise him?”
“You’ll raise somebody.”
Emil met Cielo at the door. The big youth’s eyes were filled with scorn. He conducted Cielo through the house to the tiled deck where his grandfather sat in a cane chair with a newspaper across his lap. Through an open door Cielo glimpsed the cathode screen of a stock market quotations machine. The old man sat with his chin on his chest and appeared to be dozing but then the newspaper rattled in his hands and he tossed it to the table beside him and lifted his eyes. He did not look well, Cielo thought. It was something other than old age or irritation; a malaise. For some time the old man seemed to have been shrinking into gauntness — Cielo wondered if he had cancer.
The old man said, “How is Kruger?”
“The chances are pretty good, they said.”
Emil said, “It shouldn’t have happened.”
“I know that.” He didn’t want to give Emil a chance to exploit it; he said, “It was my fault.”
“Zapatino tells me it was an accident,” the old man said.
“Accidents don’t just happen. Someone’s careless — then there’s an accident. We should have made surer of the rock before we bolted the derrick to it.”
Emil said, “It’s easy to say that now,” and the old man, misunderstanding him, nodded his head. Then Emil said, “It’s magnanimous of him to take responsibility for it, isn’t it. Now that it doesn’t cost him anything.”
The old man ignored him. “Kruger’s the engineer. It was his fault, then, not yours. Must you burden yourself with feelings of guilt for every mishap that takes place around you?”
“I’m in command. The responsibility’s mine. If it weren’t for me Ramirez and Ordovara would be alive.”
“If it weren’t for me they’d be alive, too,” the old man pointed out, “and if it weren’t for you they might all have died long ago in a Havana dungeon, yourself included. You mustn’t put on sackcloth and ashes for the rest of your life on their account, hijo.”
“One day I’ll get over it,” Cielo said philosophically.
Emil pressed his opening: “Papa, he broke security. We can’t dismiss that so easily.”
“I believe we’ve covered the breach as well as could be done,” the old man said. “We’ve made Kruger out to be a tourist who was changing a tire when the jack slipped in the mud and the car fell on him. It explains the imprint of the tire tread on his legs. It’s not as if he had a bullet in him — there’ll be no official inquiry. Cielo did the right thing. We’re not savages — we don’t leave men to die just because they’ve been injured.”
“All the same. They could have brought Kruger down in the Jeep. They didn’t have to violate radio silence.”
Cielo watched him loom and wondered if the youth would have the audacity to challenge him for the leadership of the group. Not yet, he thought. He’s not ready just yet. He’s preparing the ground now, that’s all.
“Breaking radio security,” Emil said, “that’s a serious mistake.”
“I had to make the decision on the spot,” Cielo replied. “I don’t regret it.”
“Then you’re a fool!”
Cielo laughed at him. It was the only way to deal with him.
The old man said, “Emil has a point, you know.”
“Not realistically. Nobody has direction finders zeroed in on us. Nobody even knows we’re here. The odds were favorable and my concern was Kruger. I stand by the decision.”
“You’re wrong,” the old man said, “at least in part. They know we’re here.”
Cielo looked from face to face. They were both watching him. “I wasn’t told that, was I?”
“I’m telling you now,” the old man said.
Emil said, “It changes things. They’re getting close — we can’t afford sloppy leadership any longer. We can’t afford to allow accidents to happen — we can’t allow security to be broken again.”
The old man lifted a palm toward his grandson. “The most important thing is that Cielo didn’t panic. It must have been a dreadful few moments. Cielo kept his head. That’s why he’s in command.”
It was a vote of confidence but Cielo thought gloomily, I wish you trusted me less.
The old man said, “They’ve traced the kidnaping of Ambassador Gordon to Puerto Rico.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. I’m not blaming you. You have a distressing tendency to shoulder the responsibility for everything — I’m not putting any fault on you. The fact remains, they’ve traced you — at least they know you’re on the island and perhaps they know who you are. I believe you know two of the men involved in the investigation — Glenn Anders and Harrison Crobey. I remember the names from years ago when you trained in Alabama. Your reports mentioned Crobey several times.”