Killing Che Read online

  “The surviving officer says they were engaged with the enemy for forty-five minutes,” Smith said, almost like a guide in a museum. “He says that once he realized they were surrounded, he ordered his men to cease fire.”

  Hoyle knelt and examined tracks in the roadbed, faint and rained over several times but indicative. The wind blew from atop the hill, and a thin cloud rolled down at them. For a moment the scene of the ambush was swallowed in gray mist. The cloud quickly moved past and when Charlie looked up, there was a rainbow around the sun.

  “You have an opinion?” Smith asked Hoyle.

  “Yeah. Your major is full of shit.” Hoyle looked over the turn in the road. He had laid many ambushes of his own, enough to know that this had been a professional and seriously conducted job. “The firefight was over in two minutes,” he said. “The guerrillas set up in at least two groups.” He jerked his thumb up the road. “Behind us, in the boulder field, and around the outside of the turn.” He removed a spent cartridge from the dirt. “It looks like the bad guys were using American weapons.”

  “You sure?”

  Hoyle tossed him the cartridge. “That’s thirty-cal. Probably from an M2 carbine.”

  Smith scanned the hilltop where Guevara and Joaquin had taken cover.

  “They set a truck on fire,” Hoyle said quietly, “and then they sat and watched the reaction force drive all the way from Abapó.” His gaze fell on a pile of stones at the place the road coiled back on itself. There was another one at the exit of the turn, a small cairn, obviously stacked by human hands. “They used those rocks to mark out fields of fire.”

  Smith followed Hoyle’s finger as he pointed out the area swept by the ambush.

  Almost talking to himself, Hoyle muttered, “So somebody was good enough to rig a cross fire, but they worried that they were going to miss.”

  Smith poked at a piece of debris with his boot. “There’s a village up the road,” he said. “If they moved toward the river, somebody may have seen something.”

  “Nobody saw anything, Mr. Smith.” Hoyle’s tone was not arch, merely factual. “Those people aren’t going to talk to us. All they want to do is get a pig fat for Christmas.”

  “We’re here to find out what happened, Mr. Hoyle. I don’t think the agency will mind if we ask a couple of questions.”

  Charlie stood sheepishly with his hands in his pockets. Smith started back downhill for the Land Cruiser. Hoyle did not move.

  “The road to Vallegrande is a free-fire zone at night,” Hoyle called after him. “This whole grid square is bad-guy country.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  The statement hung in the air for an overlong second. “You think it’s a good idea to go for a drive around here at night?”

  “We’ll be back before dark,” Smith said tartly.

  Charlie watched Hoyle’s lips press together. Smith continued toward the Land Cruiser.

  “Let’s go, Charlie. You’re driving,” Smith said.

  THE LAND CRUISER bumped into Domasco, a cheerless collection of mud-walled and tile-roofed hovels. The dust on the road was like talcum powder. The village, a place that locally was synonymous with bad luck, had missed out on the much-needed rain. As Hoyle climbed from the Land Cruiser, the sun had already slipped behind the ridges to the west, and long shadows projected over the buildings. The town seemed deserted and had an almost stygian gloom about it.

  In the doorway of a tumbledown hut, an Indian woman sat at her weaving. She was apparently the only human in the village. Her steel-gray hair was drawn back into long braids joined together with a tuft of black wool. Hoyle’s eyes found hers as he stopped in front of the shack. Her face was burned red by decades of sun and wind. On her back the woman carried a sack of banded material, an ahuayo, a sort of backpack in which she carried her burden—a small baby, certainly a grandchild. The child slept so still and silent, Hoyle thought at first it might be dead.

  “Hola,” Smith said. “¿Dónde está todos?”

  The woman’s eyes flicked briefly at Smith and then returned to the loom, her gnarled hands working yarn from a spindle. She seemed as uncomprehending as a tree stump.

  Charlie approached and squatted to the right of the woman, careful to kneel with his head slightly lower than hers. “Mba’éichapa, jar-i,” he said quietly in Guaraní.

  The old woman nodded but did not take her eyes from the loom. Hoyle stood by silently, looking out at the empty village. Smith sank down next to Charlie, taking one knee next to the frame of the loom. Smith’s eye fell on a heap of pumpkins on the dirt floor just inside the old woman’s house. “Ask her if she went to market this week.”

  Charlie interpreted, nodding as he did so. The woman answered succinctly, her tongue clicking on her bare pink gums.

  “She went.”

  “The day of the shooting?” Smith asked.

  Charlie again put the question into Guaraní. Hoyle could tell he was being deferential, almost reverent, to the old woman.

  “She didn’t know there was shooting until she came back to the village,” Charlie interpreted.

  “But she came back up the mountain after the ambush. Did she see the burning trucks?”

  The woman answered with one syllable.

  “She saw them,” Charlie said.

  “What about later? Did she see the guerrillas passing? Moving toward the river?”

  The woman’s voice was like the wind through grass. She continued to tug at the loom, intent on it. Charlie listened, his expression showing nothing. “She says it was too dark to see anything when she came back.”

  Smith stood, looking put out.

  Hoyle gently plucked a small lizard from the side of the hut. Its skin was a dull brown, exactly the color of the wall. He held the creature gently, cupping his hand around it. Hoyle said quietly in Spanish, “You know, when I was a kid, I was a champion lizard catcher.”

  The old woman’s hands stopped. Her gaze fell on Hoyle, almost magisterially. He continued, “I don’t suppose you could tell me what kind of lizard this is? I see them all over—funny-looking things. They just lie in the sun.”

  She answered him in Spanish. “They are brujillos. They change color to hide.” Her Spanish was accented but perfect.

  “Where did they go, Señora?” Hoyle asked calmly. “The men who shot at the soldiers?”

  “I didn’t see.”

  “What about the men of your village? Where did they go?”

  “Hunting. In the mountains.”

  “All of them?” Hoyle asked.

  The woman said nothing. Her hands again picked at the loom.

  “Thank you for talking to us, Señora,” Hoyle said. “Thank you for your time.” He placed the lizard carefully back on the wall, and it scurried up and under the eaves.

  Smith and Charlie followed Hoyle back to the Land Cruiser.

  “Tell me something, Mr. Smith. Was everybody at MACV as gung ho as you?”

  Smith’s jaw tightened. “She knows which direction they went after the ambush. You know it.”

  “Her and everybody else,” Hoyle shot back. “Why do you think the village was empty? These people are going to have to live here long after we’re gone.”

  “That’s not my problem.”

  “You’re making it a problem.”

  For a moment it looked like the two men might come to blows. Charlie again put his hands in his pockets.

  Hoyle said, “By tomorrow morning half of Ñancahuazú will know there were gringos in here asking questions.” As he spoke, his voice got lower; it was what he did in anger instead of increasing the volume of his speech.

  “I want the bad guys to know we’re in here,” Smith said. “We can’t track the guerrillas unless they move, and we can’t predict a move unless we provide a stimulus. That’s agency procedure, Mr. Hoyle.”

  “It’s agency procedure to protect our sources. If the Communist Party even thinks she talked to us, that old lady will go before a people’s tribunal.
If the army thinks she failed to cooperate, they’ll cut her tongue out of her head. You might want to remember that the next time you want to stimulate the enemy, Mr. Smith.”

  Smith watched Hoyle climb into the Land Cruiser.

  “Let’s get out of here, Charlie,” Hoyle growled. “It’s getting fucking dark.”

  5

  IT WAS NOT until midafternoon that Che Guevara saw to the departure of Miguel’s group, hauling food and supplies up the escarpa from Camp 1, which was now to be abandoned. The move had been suggested by Joaquin. Camp 1 was close to the river, which after a week of rain had risen dangerously, eroding the banks and flooding the flat stretch behind the farmhouse. Camp 2, located in the Iñao Mountains twelve kilometers north, would now serve as the column’s principal base of operations. It was hoped, also, that radio communications with Havana might be improved, Camp 2 being nearly three hundred meters above the valley of the Ñancahuazú.

  Guevara spent most of the rainy morning making sure the encampment was dismantled, the fire pit and clay ovens broken up, and the ashes dispersed. The storage caves located at the camp were sealed and their entrances camouflaged. Five depots contained ammunition, medicine, spare radio equipment, codebooks, and the personal effects of the Cuban comrades. These caches would now comprise the column’s strategic reserves.

  Early in the afternoon there was thunder, and the rain became constant. Now all that remained of Camp 1 were the rifle pits overlooking the river and a small observation post sited halfway up the trail to Camp 2. The rifle pits were left in place to cover the river crossing, and the observation point had been established so an eye could be kept on the farmhouse in the valley below. It was to this position, and to the duty of sentries, that Guevara assigned two of the Bolivian comrades, Eusebio and Chingolo. They followed the bearing parties from Camp 1 and slogged toward their new posting. As soon as the last of Miguel’s men passed through and were away up the mountain, the Bolivians leaned their rifles against a tree. Birds chirped and clicked in the forest around them and Guevara’s orders to keep watch were forgotten. Exhausted and pelted by rain, the two Bolivians slung their hammocks among the trees and promptly dropped off to sleep.

  Had they chosen to stand guard, the Bolivians could have observed a small farmhouse set down in a scruffy, stump-riddled clearing. From their vantage, the Ñancahuazú Valley ran north and south, one of several basins associated with watercourses in the hilly, wooded departamento of Santa Cruz. The Ñancahuazú River had its headwaters south and west, in the adjacent territory of Potosí, and entered the valley after descending steeply from the hills of the Pampa del Tigre. For much of the austral summer, the river was shallow and slow, transected by sandbars and bound on its banks by rocky bluffs. The river, like the people in the valley, appeared tame but remained capable of casual treachery. As the rains began, the Ñancahuazú swelled and then ran implacably; within a week it was uniformly turbulent and would stay that way until the rains stopped, several long months from now.

  The farmhouse sat squarely in the center of a 3,700-acre parcel of ranch and forest land purchased six months before by two of Guevara’s Cuban lieutenants, Pombo and Tuma. The adobe was roofed with sheets of corrugated calamite, and the comrades had come to call it the Zinc House. Some logging had been carried out for purposes of cover, but the Zinc House was used primarily for storage and as a rendezvous point with urban cadres from La Paz. The land had been purchased with cash, Pombo and Tuma putting out the story that the acquisition had been made for a Peruvian capitalist who planned to build a sawmill.

  The property lay almost 250 kilometers south of the provincial seat of Santa Cruz. An additional hundred kilometers south and east was Paraguay, then the Argentine frontier. The terrain was difficult, precipitous, and filled with places of ambush. Guevara knew that to operate in this country with a force of conventional troops would be a nightmare. Hard country always favors the guerrilla.

  But the guerrilla cannot operate in a vacuum. It did not bode well that the valley was sparsely populated. Worse, few of its settlers could read or write, and all were politically undeveloped. Several small pueblos were scattered about the hills, most adjoining rivers or seasonal streams. The largest of these settlements, Tatarenda, held no more than a dozen shacks. Local agriculture was slash-and-burn and was not always sufficient to keep its practitioners from hunger. Almost without exception, the peasants of the valley were wary of strangers. Worse, much work and little reward had made them hard and covetous.

  Guevara and Moro waited in the remains of Camp 1 for Joaquin to return from across the river. Part of the day had been taken up with physical examinations of the men. After the last of the bearers had trudged away, it was Guevara’s turn. He sat on a log, his fatigue shirt balled up and held in his lap. Above him, rain pattered into a poncho strung up between branches.

  “Open your mouth?” Moro asked politely.

  Guevara tilted back his head as Moro peered down his throat with a penlight and tongue depressor.

  “Ahhhhh?” Moro suggested.

  Guevara made no sound.

  “Make a noise so I can see under your goddamn uvula.”

  Guevara obliged with a lengthy, unchanging grunt. Moro flicked the tongue depressor into the brush and began palpating the glands in Guevara’s neck. He placed a stethoscope on Guevara’s back, moved it several times, and frowned. Finally, he pulled out the earpieces. “How many asthma capsules do you take a day?”

  Guevara lied badly. “Asthma?”

  “Don’t bullshit me,” Moro said. “What do you take?”

  “Theophylline.” Then he added, “Three times a day.”

  “When’s the last time you took any medication?”

  “A couple of days ago. I’m saving it.”

  Moro placed his stethoscope back into his rucksack. “You’re going to kill yourself. You smoke too much, you eat too little, you’re overworked, and there are bats that sleep more than you do.”

  Guevara stood and pulled on his shirt. “I don’t need the lecture. I’m a physician, remember?”

  “Big deal. We’ve got three MDs in the column. We have only one comandante.” Moro dug around in his pack and handed Guevara a vial of pills. “Hydrocortisone. Two of these every morning. If you get worse, I’m going to put you on an adrenaline IV.” He did not know where he could even find adrenaline, and he had only a dozen hydrocortisone tablets. If Guevara’s condition did not improve, Moro would have to send to La Paz for more drugs. A highly uncertain supply route at best.

  Guevara’s expression became troubled. He was not a man accustomed to asking favors. “Moro, look, I—”

  Moro put away his penlight. “My diagnosis stays a secret—if you do what I say. You’re off tobacco, period. You start taking your pills and eating full meals, like everybody else. And let someone else carry the goddamn radio once in a while.”

  “I should have left your ass in Cuba.”

  “I wish you had.” Moro smiled. As Guevara finished buttoning his shirt, Moro said, “It wouldn’t hurt you to take a bath once in a while, either.”

  There was a movement at the fringes of the camp and Joaquin came into the clearing. He had supervised the movement of supplies, getting up at three in the morning to start his task. At forty-one, Joaquin was the oldest man in the expedition, the second in command, and he went out of his way to show the others that he was physically up to the work. His walk today had covered maybe fifteen kilometers, up and down jungle trails and twice across the river.

  As Joaquin drew near, Guevara lifted his pistol belt. Joaquin’s expression was dour.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Pombo has just come from the valley. We have visitors at the Zinc House. Comrade Galán has come from La Paz.”

  Selizar Galán was the general secretary of the Bolivian Communist Party, a man as perfectly contradictory and dilettante as the organization he supervised.

  “Wonderful,” Guevara said.

  Joaquin paused.
“Tania brought him.” Joaquin watched Guevara closely. His attention seemed to waiver, and he made a slight gesture, something like a shake of the head. Joaquin had expected him to ask about the woman, but he did not.

  “There were a dozen bottles of chicha at the Zinc House,” Guevara said, his voice low, like a man suggesting a doubtful thing.

  “There’re still there,” Joaquin answered.

  “Have them brought up to Camp Two.” Guevara’s eyes brightened, but he seemed to frown as he spoke. “We’ll have a party for our guests.”

  Guevara slung his rifle and climbed up the embankment out of the camp. As he made his way up the mountain, wind stirred through the branches and shook rainwater from the leaves. Soon he was alone on the trail, and as he walked through the forest he was happy to have only himself for company. Guevara’s pack and equipment were already at Camp 2, and carrying only his pistol, rifle, and canteen, he made good time. The way led steadily uphill, north, and then abruptly west; the trail had been constructed as much as possible in the cover of the forest.

  At the first switchback, he stopped to catch his breath. There was a cold, hollow sensation in his chest, the foretaste of a fit of wheezing. In his pocket, he found the hydrocortisone tablets and rolled one into the palm of his hand. He bit the tablet carefully in half, swallowing one part and placing the other back in the brown plastic tube. The pill was bitter in his mouth, and searing as it slid down his throat, but he made no complaint.

  Guevara continued up the mountain and a somber sort of emptiness kept close behind him. He turned to look at the trail winding back down into the valley. Touched by slanting light, the cloud bottoms were lowering and above the ridge the sunset assembled itself in shades of gray. It had been over a decade, almost twelve years, since he’d picked up a rifle and committed his life to the Idea. And after all that time, through ten thousand adventures, victory and adulation, frustrations and regret, one thing had not changed: He remained an outsider. The wars he fought, he fought for others. He took up their battles, made their revolution, always and forever in countries other than his own, and now, in this, his fourth month in Bolivia, Guevara was again taking up the struggle.