Killing Castro - Lawrence Block [22]
More footsteps. He saw Garth straighten up, saw Maria raise her gun and brace herself. Manuel was moving to a vantage point and Taco was following his lead. Fenton knew the procedure. Manuel would fire the first shot if the searcher got too close, and then the rest of them would begin. Manuel would wait for the right moment.
The tension was flooding his limbs now, tension and excitement that spread through his cells as cancer had spread through his lungs. Fenton got to his feet silently, crept forward, propped himself up on a boulder and sighted over the top. He could see them now. There were six. Three of them poked at the brush like idiots. The bearded one was looking in another direction through a pair of binoculars. The driver with the dark glasses was behind the wheel of the Jeep. A sixth crouched in the road. He was tying his shoelaces.
Slowly, silently, the rebels moved in. The gap was closed by ten yards, fifteen yards. The Sten gun, handy as it was, worked poorly at long range. You did better in close.
Fenton stopped, dropped to one knee. He sighted in on the driver, the one with the sunglasses. He had to be hit right away, Fenton decided. Or he would simply hit the gas pedal and get away. Why let him get away?
The man in the road finished tying his shoelaces. He straightened up, turned toward the Jeep. Then something stopped him and he turned, his eyes darting like a sparrow. He had spotted movement in the bushes and he rushed forward, his gun at the ready.
Manuel shot him through the chest.
Then all hell broke loose. Fenton squeezed the trigger and let the Sten gun leap and chatter in his hands. His first burst was wide, smashing the Jeep’s windshield, but his second burst took half the driver’s head away. The man slumped over the wheel and died. Garth and Maria had drilled two of the soldiers in their tracks. The bearded one and another were behind the Jeep, returning fire.
Fenton sent a burst at the Jeep, hoping for the gas tank. He missed. A bullet whined over his head and he flattened out, staying close to the ground, holding tight to his gun. Taco Sardo was a short distance to the left. He was trying to circle around, to move in on the two Castristas from the side. Maria was creeping off in the opposite direction. It was a pincer movement, Fenton realized. A spontaneous, intuitive pincer movement, carried out on an individual basis rather than by regiments or battalions.
He heard heavy breathing to one side. It was Garth, moving closer, face flushed with combat fever, eyes stupid but determined. Fenton jammed a fresh clip into the breech of his gun and tried several more rounds on the gas tank of the Jeep. He saw Taco on the left, then heard a quick, sharp rifle shot from the rear of the Jeep. Taco went down, moaning, clutching at his leg. Then a Sten gun, an answering Sten gun. Maria, far on the right, surprising the two soldiers with hot lead. One died with a bullet in his throat. The other, the one with the beard, threw down his rifle and stretched his hands toward the sky.
Now they moved in, all of them. This also called for speed, for guerrilla tactics, for expediency. Manuel and Fenton checked each soldier in turn, made sure the five bodies on the ground were corpses. Maria held her gun on the bearded one. Garth went to check on Taco, then came back.
“The kid’s all right,” he told Manuel. “He got it in the leg. The bleeding ain’t bad and the bone’s okay. I can lug him back and he’ll be walking tomorrow.”
Manuel nodded shortly. Now the bearded soldier was talking, pleading for his life. He did not sound frightened at all. His voice was calm, rational. There were beads of perspiration dotting his forehead but those were the only signs of worry.
“He wishes us to let him to live,” Manuel said in English. “He says he will make no trouble for us. He says not to kill him.”
The bearded man spoke again.
“He says one more death will accomplish nothing,” Manuel translated. “And so we should let him live. So he may return and kill us all.”
The bearded soldier started to protest; evidently he understood