They usually took those heads from men they had killed with the bow.
Yet those native bows were trifling things when compared to the wondrous staves the gringos had brought, all gleaming wood and smooth pulleys. Truth be said, the Chocoes’ bows were little, if at all, improved over the first version carried by Og, the caveman.
Ruiz fell in love with his new bow at first sight. This was something he could understand. This was something he could use… when the caimen-horse devils came, as the gringos insisted they would.
Ruiz shivered despite the warm rain, gripped his bow the tighter and vowed, once again, that it would happen to his people only over his dead body.
“Well, they’re better than bows and arrows,” muttered Bill Boyd as he watched a roll-on-roll-off freighter disgorging old and rebuilt American M-113 armored personnel carriers. Other vehicles, from various nations including the United States, sat guarded but unmanned in open lots near the docks.
Boyd turned a tanned and handsome face skyward, as if asking God to explain the cast-offs being sent to defend the most important strategic asset on the face of the planet from the greatest threat humanity had ever known. Ah, well, he thought, it isn’t all old crap.
In Boyd’s field of view, overhead, heading westward, a heavy lift helicopter crossed Lemon Bay on its way to the newly building Planetary Defense Base, or PDB, at the old gringo coast artillery position at Battery Pratt on Fort Sherman. Beneath the helicopter some indefinable, but obviously heavy, cargo hung by a sling. Landing craft, both medium and heavy, likewise plied the waters of the bay, bringing from the modern port of Cristobal to old Fort Sherman the wherewithal to build that base. Other bases, four of them, were also under construction across the isthmus. Three of these, the one at Battery Pratt and the others at Battery Murray at Fort Kobbe and Fort Grant off of Fort Amador on the Pacific side, took advantage of previously existing, and very strong, bunkers that had once made up the impressive system of coastal fortifications for the Canal Zone. Two others, and these were brand new in every way, were still being constructed atop the continental divide near Summit Heights and out at sea in the center of the Isla del Rey.
Maybe Brazil, Argentina, and Chile — all of them at United States’ Department of State prodding — had suddenly become aware, once again, of the Rio Pact military aid gravy train. Maybe they were siphoning off conventional equipment that could have been used to defend Panama. But the PDBs, which would be gringo manned, were also invaluable for the defense of North America and useful for the defense of South. These were not being slighted.
Boyd turned his eyes from the fast moving, twin-rotored helicopter overhead and looked downward at himself. He wore the uniform and insignia of a major general. It felt strange, odd… maybe even a little perverse. Oh, he had been a soldier, yes. But he’d been a private soldier; a simple, honest soldier. And, too, he had run one of the world’s foremost shipping companies based in the world’s foremost shipping funnel. One would think the two would go together, that the veteran soldier and the veteran shipper would make a single person who felt like a major general.
It hadn’t worked that way, though. Yes, Boyd could plan and supervise and direct the planning of others. He could run a staff. He could give orders that crackled like thunder.
But the general’s uniform still made him feel faintly soiled.
Boyd had always taken great pride in having been a man who had fought bravely for a cause in which he had believed, the defeat of Nazism. And that pride was greater because he had done so without regard for his personal safety, his position or prestige, or his family’s wealth. He had been offered a slot at Officer Candidate School in 1944 and he had simply refused, preferring the low prestige and honest commitment of the private soldier to the higher prestige, power and perks of being an officer. Besides, three months of OCS just might have been long enough to keep him out of the fighting, if the war ended, as it had looked that it might, in 1944. And the whole point of the exercise was to be a part of the fighting.
Even now he remembered those bitter days of battle in the winter of ’44, physically miserable and mentally terrifying though they had been, as the best days of his life. And he had missed them, every day of them, every day since.
Similarly, although scion of one of the foremost families of the Republic of Panama, and although some members of the family had entered into, and — naturally, given the clan’s wealth — been successful at, politics; he had always despised politics and politicians. It wasn’t just that “power corrupts,” though Boyd believed it did. Rather, it was that power had the stink of corruption, of form over substance, of lies sanctified.
And so, outside of the economic realm (where he really had had no choice, given his responsibilities to his clan), Boyd had avoided power, the stench of power, and the falsehoods of power like the plague.
Until now.
I feel ridiculous, he thought, and not for the first time. Every day he looked in the mirror before departing home for the crisis of the day. Every day he saw a seventeen-year-old face staring back at him, a seventeen-year-old face hovering over the uniform of a major general.
“Ridiculous.” And I feel like a fraud. And it isn’t my fault!
In the presidential palace, the afternoon of his rejuvenation, Boyd had tried to beg off, to volunteer as a private soldier again. That, however, had not been an option.
“You can take this job, and the rank that goes with it,” Presidente Mercedes had thundered, “or you can go to prison.”
And so Bill Boyd had found himself a very old seventeen again, but wearing the uniform and accoutrements of an office which he simply did not want.
Mentally, he sighed. Ah, well, it could have been worse. They’re scraping the bottom of the barrel so hard they just might have tried to make me take command of an infantry division. And wouldn’t that have been a disaster?
Boyd paused then, in reflection. He had met all the other generals appointed since the president’s emergency decree. Most of them he knew from private life; knew and cordially despised as one of the greatest band of knaves that ever went unhanged.
Especially that swine, Cortez…
Manuel Cortez, Major General, Armada de Panama, West Point, Class of ’80, and commander of the rapidly raising 1st Mechanized Division, looked with more curiosity than satisfaction at the gringos training the cadre of his new corps in the intricacies of armored vehicle operations.
It was as well that he had the gringos, thought Cortez, because he — West Point education or not — had not the first clue about employment of the armored vehicles and artillery that were to be the core of his new division.
He did know that he wasn’t getting first class equipment, for the most part. His uncle, the president, seemed unaccountably pleased about that; Cortez couldn’t begin to guess why. When Cortez had asked the president, that worthy had merely patted him on the shoulder, incongruous as that was with the president now looking more like a — much — younger brother, and told him not to worry about it.