Killing Castro - Lawrence Block [47]
The lead Jeep was approaching. It was already level with Taco Sardo, who had the post furthest to the rear. Fenton listened to the motors of the Jeeps and the truck, heard a bird singing in a nearby shrub, drew in his breath sharply when he heard another rebel shift position and snap a twig. It seemed to Fenton that any sound, however slight, would be heard by Castro’s forces, that any noise at all would give away the rebel position. He knew this was ridiculous but he couldn’t help feeling it. He tried to hold his own breath, tried to keep from making any sound at all.
The convoy kept coming. The plan was a simple one—they were to hold fire until the lead Jeep came abreast of the position held by Garth on one side and a man named Jiminez on the other. Then they would open fire. Garth and Jiminez were to shoot down the lead vehicles, blocking the road at the front. Sardo and a few others would be doing the same to the Jeeps at the rear of the procession. That would keep Castro in the middle, would prevent the big Lincoln limousine from escaping either to the front or to the rear.
The rest was up to the rebels in the center, to Manuel and Maria and Fenton and to one or two more. They would level their guns at the Lincoln, going for Castro, for the big fish in the pond. It would be easier with a few grenades or a bazooka, Fenton thought. Something that would stop a Jeep with a single shot. It was harder when you had to make Sten guns do all the work.
And then he stopped thinking, because the time was coming.
The Lincoln was in range now. Fenton looked directly at it, looked at the gleaming metal, the drawn curtains. He steadied himself and his gun, pointing the barrel at one of the windows in the rear. At any moment Garth and Jiminez would start shooting. That would be his cue.
Damn it all, go on!
His heart stopped beating for those two seconds. He had an awful premonition of disaster and death that refused to leave his mind. His hands gripped the Sten gun shakily.
Then a shot rang out.
Fenton turned into a machine. He sprawled on his belly and held the Sten gun’s trigger down, spraying bullets against the window of the Lincoln. But things happened quickly, too quickly. The government forces reacted with the speed of light, almost as if they had been waiting for the shot with the same rapt attention Fenton himself had displayed. The lead Jeep spun off the road against the rocks and soldiers piled out of it, guns in hand. The second Jeep peeled off after it, and the canvas-topped truck barreled off to the other side with men spilling out of it on the way. The bullets didn’t stop Castro’s limousine and the other vehicles weren’t piled up in front of it. The road was unblocked.
And the Lincoln limousine went like the wind. The driver pressed the gas pedal to the floor and the big car responded magnificently with the coiled grace of a striking cobra. The car surged forward, the road clear ahead of it, and Fenton’s bullets didn’t seem to be having any effect at all. He tried for the tires and missed. And he knew instinctively that Castro was on the floor, that he had hit the floorboards when the first shot rang out, that he had escaped the trap.
The Lincoln didn’t stop. More gunfire chased it and more gunfire failed to stop the big car. But now their fire was being returned. The soldiers in the road were caught in the middle, with rebels in the rocks on either side. But there were too many of them—fifty or more, Fenton saw, as Jeep after Jeep emptied out men with guns.
His gun chattered again and men fell in the road. He broke open the gun, put in a