"Okay. Our turn next. Let's get on the trail."
"No," Antonio said sharply. "I stay here until they're all dead."
He was one hard head. "Look, champ," I said, "if you don't move your ass right now, I'm going to pump a bullet into it. There's no time for arguments. Colonel Vasco's whole damned battalion will be here in a matter of minutes. Now move it."
To emphasize my command, I held the forty five aimed at his head. That surly look came back and he considered resisting even me. But he fired another burst from the Volska, sent a squad of Cubans flying into the dirt, and then hot-footed it up the trail. I went after him.
We reached the high point and I waved the rebels on. Three more had joined us and we took the high point to protect the trail's entrance. Unfortunately, we all ran out of bullets just as a huge gang of Cubans and Nicarxan guerillas reached the point we were trying to protect.
That's when I used Pierre. The little gas bomb sailed above the jungle and lit just in front of the running troops. They began instantly to gag as the pale blue cloud exploded around them. Antonio looked at me, incredulous, then a smile came to erase the surliness.
"Excellent work. You're killing them all."
"Not all," I said. "And if we don't move out of here, that gas will catch up to us on the wind. Let's go — and no arguments this time."
"I am with you," he said.
The five of us ran single file up the trail. It was so narrow that we could have defended it against an army if only we had enough ammunition. At the top of the trail, where the false wall was in place, the other dissidents had stopped, believing themselves to be hemmed in. There was a rumbling of anger as I came into the small clearing. I was the one they thought had led them into a trap.
I put on my best smile and held up my hands.
"Don't be alarmed, gentlemen," I said. "There's a way out. Unfortunately the leaders also know it, so we haven't much time. Listen closely."
I told them they were the nucleus of a counterrevolutionary group to overthrow Don Carlos, kick out the Cubans and make the necessary peace with the Apalcans. I established the high ledge above the valley floor overlooking the main Cuban contingent as our meeting place and soon-to-be command post. Most of them knew where it was.
"All right. As soon as we leave this compound, I want you to fan out on all the trails. Travel in twos. Find weapons and ammunition when and where you can. If you kill, don't let it be a waste. Take the time to search the man you kill. Take all his weapons. We'll meet on the ledge in six hours. That will be at 3 P. M."
They all nodded agreement and then gaped with astonishment as I pulled the huge rolling hunk of jungle from its nest. Laughing and grinning, they began to file through.
Right into the teeth of vicious gunfire.
Colonel Vasco's men had arrived and had sealed off this exit. Antonio's friends were dropping like flies. I felt a sickness seeing the massacre and knowing that I'd caused it, knowing that I was in it.
I neatly panicked then, considering it all lost. But I spotted two full ammo belts dropped by one of Antonio's friends. I snatched them up and grabbed Antonio's arm.
'This way. Back down the trail."
He started to resist, knowing that a return to the compound was probably suicide. But going ahead was certain suicide. He came along, snatching up an extra Volska as we ran.
Everything wasn't lost, though. I had learned one important lesson in traveling jungle trails with their unrelenting walls. The lesson was that jungle walls aren't all that unrelenting. Even the thickest walls of foliage have weak points, but it takes a trained and observant eye to spot those weak spots. On the way up the trail, I had spotted at least two areas where a man could push through and cover himself from behind.
I led Antonio to the nearest, we pushed through and crouched in the dim bower of leaves and vines. We'd no sooner settled on the damp, dark ground when footsteps came thundering past from below. Pierre had done his stuff, but there is a limit as to how long a gas bomb can remain effective. The trail was clear of gas below and the Cubans and guerillas were coming.
We waited, fearful of making a move or a sound. And then came voices, muffled and mumbling at first, then louder and closer. Along with the voices came the thrashing sounds of machetes hacking at the walls of the trail.
"He's still in the compound," came the shrill, angry voice of Colonel Ramon Vasco. "The fucking gringo has outsmarted all of you. Well, by God, you find him or you will all live to regret it. I want that man. Do you hear me?"
Christ, I thought, the whole Caribbean can hear you. I looked around to see if there were a way out of this cul de sac. There wasn't, unless we did a little of our own hacking. But we had no machetes and the noise would have pinpointed our hiding place.
I hadn't outsmarted the colonel's guerillas and Marines. I had outsmarted myself.
The colonel was still belching out orders, telling how he would personally find out the purpose of my mission before performing the indelicate surgical technique known among brutes as disembowelment, evisceration. The machetes were still hacking at the walls of the jungle on either side of the narrow trail, drawing closer to our niche.
I heard a scratching and scraping nearby and saw that Antonio was using his Volska rifle to work at the soft ground behind us.
"Que pasa?" I whispered. "What are you doing?"
"The soil is soft and most roots are not as strong as that which grows above the ground. We can dig our way through the roots."
At first, I thought he'd lost his mind. It would take hours, even days, to go more than a few yards in this thick jungle. Even as I was thinking that, Antonio lifted a huge clump of roots and soil and edged himself past it. He worked almost silently. What small scraping sounds he did make were covered by the shouts of the colonel, the hacking of the machetes and the grunting of the men wielding them.
I put my own rifle to work on a clump of bushes just ahead of Antonio. The dirt came away so easily that we might have been two kids on the beach, scooping out sand to bury the beach bully.
By the time the machetes were alongside our niche, we had progressed twenty feet into the jungle, replacing each bush we had dug up. There was virtually no sign of us having passed through. Or so we hoped.
"Ah, I thought I had found them," we heard a Cuban say, "but it's merely a small opening that leads nowhere."
"Don't dawdle," the colonel belched. "If they aren't there, move on down and find another opening. Find him. Find the fucking gringo."
We were safe. We were also exhausted, hungry, thirsty and very much in need of biological relief. We had worked ourselves into a place so small and tight with vines that we couldn't have worked a sneeze into our regimen without getting a hernia. So we lay there, gazing up through the thick foliage, watching tiny fingers of sunlight try to penetrate the gloom.
In a few minutes, the jungle was quiet, except for a muffled hacking down below. In an hour, there was no sound but the birds that had returned after the passing of the Cubans and the guerillas and the gas. Antonio was preparing to start working his way back to the trail, but I had a hunch that our enemies hadn't finished with the trail.
"Wait."
"For what? They are gone. They search for us elsewhere, and I have to move or I will die right here."
"You won't die unless you do move," I said. "Just wait."
Within minutes, we heard them on the trail again. They weren't looking for us now. They had come back to carry down the dead men, Antonio's friends who had been massacred when I opened up that damned gate.