Killing Che Page 7

  “You have no military experience.”

  “And you’re not Bolivian. When the people discover the revolution is being led by a foreigner, they will turn their backs and fail to support it. It will fail because it’s being led by a band of Cuban mercenaries—not Bolivians. It’s our revolution, not yours.”

  “We’re two men sitting around a campfire. In the middle of fucking nowhere. Let’s talk like men.”

  “All right. You fucked up, coming here. The enemy is too strong. The CIA already is in Camiri. Soon the U.S. Army will be here, too. This place, the Ñancahuazú, is a death trap. The country is too hard. It’s too sparsely settled. You’ll die here.”

  Joaquin’s face reddened with anger. Tania scribbled a few notes and wished furiously that she could jab a pencil up Galán’s ass. Only Guevara seemed in control of his emotions.

  “You’re soft, Galán,” he said. “You’ve gone bourgeois. If this country is hard on us, it’s harder on the enemy. Even now the Bolivian army pisses their pants every time they head off-road.” Guevara stood and gestured around them. “If I let you play general, everything we’ve prepared for, everything we’ve gained, would be blown away in a heartbeat. You’re not a revolutionary. You’re a party hack.”

  “I’m the general secretary. I assume control immediately, or the Bolivian Communist Party will not support you. That’s my final word.”

  Guevara dropped his stick into the fire. “Then I’m sorry that your trip has been wasted,” he said.

  Joaquin stood, and Tania as well. In the yellow flicker, Galán’s face was like a weasel’s.

  “I demand the right to address the men,” he said.

  “Why?” Guevara asked evenly.

  “I have come to offer the Bolivian comrades amnesty if they lay down their arms and return with me to La Paz.”

  “Whose goddamn side are you on?” Joaquin said.

  “My side. And the side of the Bolivian people.”

  Guevara said calmly, “Joaquin. Muster the men.”

  In a few moments the men were assembled, twenty-seven, less five on guard and those at the Zinc House. Galán stood before the assembled band of guerrillas. To Tania, he seemed like a little dog yapping before a pantheon.

  “Comrades,” Galán intoned, “the Party finds those joining this effort to be in error. I offer formal amnesty to any Bolivian comrade who renounces armed struggle, lays down arms, and returns with me to La Paz.”

  No one moved or spoke. The fires crackled and snapped.

  Guevara was sitting on a stump nearby. “You heard him,” he said. “It’s over for us. We’re done. Cubans, Bolivians, anybody who wants to sleep in a real bed can pack up your gear and go home.”

  “Go home, shit. I just got here,” Pombo said.

  There was a riffle of assent.

  “Comrade Galán is of the opinion that our efforts will be wasted,” Guevara went on. “Maybe he’s right. Maybe things aren’t that bad here in Bolivia. Maybe Barrientos and his gangsters are about to have an epiphany of justice and reason. Maybe the imperialists will pack up and go back to Wall Street—”

  “Hey, maybe Pombo will quit picking his nose,” Joaquin said.

  There was laughter.

  “We can always hope for a miracle,” Guevara said. His eyes scanned the bright faces before him. “I am a revolutionary. It’s the duty of revolutionaries, and the highest calling of man, to make revolution. What we build here will spread to all the nations of Latin America. One, two, a hundred Vietnams can encircle our enemy. This is where it’s going to start. Here, in this canyon. Tonight. These fires, from this camp, are going to set the continent on fire.”

  Tania watched him speak, transfixed, spellbound, as were all who could hear him.

  “Anyone who wants to go home and eat from the master’s table is free to go. Anyone who wants to kick Barrientos in the ass can stay with me.”

  Someone shouted, and there were smiles and backslapping.

  Galán twitched. “You’re making a mistake,” he said. “You’ll die like heroes. But you’ll all die.”

  “Camba, please escort the good comrade back to the real world,” Guevara said. Camba and a dozen men stepped forward.

  Galán turned to Guevara. “I wish you luck.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  Galán could not withstand Guevara’s eyes. He turned and followed Camba away into the night. Joaquin watched them go with a disgusted, tired look.

  “He’s going to screw us,” Joaquin said. “The little shit.”

  “He’ll try. I want to have the forward detachment on the trail at sunrise. I want all the paths leading to the camp broken down completely. Have the men bury all their personal effects.”

  Joaquin moved off to carry out the order. Guevara and Tania stood in the firelight. The night loomed around them, the fire was like a single bright room in a large, dark house.

  “What should I do?” Tania asked.

  “You’re going to be our only link to the city now. We can’t risk having you return here. Go with Galán back to La Paz. Use the shortwave and tell Havana what’s going on. They’ll have orders for you.”

  “Do you think Galán will inform?”

  “I don’t know what he’ll do.” Tania saw that Guevara’s expression was stern. “Stay in contact with Havana, but don’t bring him back here. For any reason. When we need you, we’ll contact you through Leche.”

  Guevara reached out and cupped her cheek. It was the gesture of a lover, but his fingers were like ice. He held her gaze for a few silent moments. Perhaps words failed him.

  She watched Guevara walk away from the firelight. As the night closed over him, Tania felt like she had watched a man stepping off the edge of the world.

  7

  THE FORTUNES OF the town of Camiri rose and fell with the price of crude oil. Those fortunes had lately been in decline, and it was not difficult for Smith to lease a storefront on the corner of the Avenida Bolívar and the Calle Comercio, near the market. Smith told the landlord that the building would be used by a team of geologists working for the national oil consortium. The cover was serviceable and would explain the comings and goings of several vehicles and the meanderings of sunburned gringos at odd hours of the day and night.

  Beyond Camiri’s cluster of oil derricks and refineries spread the Chaco, an arid, inhospitable wilderness roamed by jaguar, white-tailed deer, and peccary. Unredeemed by culture, climate, or society, it was mainly proximity to the Ñancahuazú that recommended Camiri as a forward operating base.

  Into the second-story rooms of the building Hoyle had placed army cots, and a large closet off the stairs was set aside for the radio. On the ground floor, the rooms adjoining the front door had been made to look like an office, with a desk, typewriter, and telephone. A larger room, reached through a curtain behind the office, held their field desks, files, and weapons. Next to Hoyle’s desk there was a thoroughly disreputable-looking sofa and an electric coffeepot that rarely if ever worked. Both had come from a recently raided whorehouse on the Plaza 15 de Abril.

  The storefront itself was utterly nondescript. Scotch-taped to the front window was a hand-lettered sign that read TOPÓGRAFOS DE PETROLEUM, S.A. Another stuck inside the door glass advised: CERRADO. As much as possible, Hoyle, Smith, and Charlie came and went by the back door. Once a week Hoyle gave a street kid three Bolivianos to wash the front windows clean of the oily grit carried from the road by passing tanker trucks.

  Tonight Hoyle and Charlie returned to the office late after a long, dusty drive from a scouting trip to Lagunillas. Hoyle had given Charlie the night off and was amazed and envious when he seemed positively buoyant, skipping off to meet some cousins he said were staying at the Hotel Boyuibe. Hoyle unlocked the back door, dropped his rucksack in front of his desk, and collapsed onto the couch, exhausted. It was most of an hour before he realized that he had not taken off his boots.

  Hoyle sat up painfully, his head pounding. He opened the icebox and used a
church key hanging from a string to snap the top off a bottle of Postosino beer. He downed a few swallows, the bubbles disagreeable on the back of his throat. Holding the cool bottle against his forehead, he crossed the room.

  Stuck into a cardboard tube on his desk were maps, high-quality topographics produced by the Defense Mapping Agency. He gathered several and unrolled them on the large table in the center of the room. These were proper military photomosaics, marked over by one-kilometer-grid squares, aligned perfectly to geopolar north, detailed Mercator projections that had been photographed by American reconnaissance jets and thoughtfully compiled in the cool quiet of graphic studios in Suitland, Maryland. Drawn to 1:25,000 scale, the maps were suitable for planning artillery bombardments, air strikes, and the plotting of grand military campaigns. As far as Hoyle knew, these maps had not yet been supplied to the Bolivian army, which was in any case unlikely to plan, bomb, shell, or campaign anytime soon.

  Sipping his beer, Hoyle taped together half a dozen of these pages to cover an area encompassing most of the southern expanse of Santa Cruz. Like the map in Señor Lempira’s office, Hoyle’s map too had places incognita, huge swaths of terrain not marked by place-names. On the laminated sheets, mountains, canyons, rivers, and villages were in their places, but almost all were without label: tracts of forest and jungle, hillside, rivers, streams, and stands of forest that were not fixed by language. The hills alone were distinctly identified, each peak bearing a number automatically determined by the radar altimeters of the reconnoitering aircraft. Hill 826, Hill 792, a monotony of numbers.

  Hoyle thumbtacked his creation to the wall and stood back to look at it. He could trace out the Ñancahuazú flowing north to the center. Where it met the Rio Grande, the rivers together resembled the letter Y scribbled by a child. Slightly lopsided, the Rio Grande’s principal tributaries—the Masacuri, Frias, and Hondo—joined from the upper left. At the center of the Y, the Ñancahuazú jaunted east to become the Rio Grande proper, and that river, much enlarged, departed in a slow turn to the north. The watershed occupied perhaps fifty thousand square kilometers and was bound to the east by the Camiri-Santa Cruz Highway and, slightly beyond, the Yacuiba Railway. The highway and railroad were the sole north-south communication in the entire eastern part of the country. For three hundred kilometers north and south and almost two hundred kilometers east and west, the area was wilderness. Not a single road crossed the valley, and not one bridge spanned the Ñancahuazú, Masacuri, or Frias. Somewhere in a thousand-square-mile expanse of territory, a guerrilla band had established a base, perhaps several bases. To fix their location, Hoyle had to now become a guerrilla. He had operated in the bush and knew its requirements. In the field, good guy and bad guy had the same needs and wants. Somewhere out in the Ñancahuazú, his opposite number lived and breathed and slept. He had placed down caches, stored ammunition, food, and medical supplies. At least one of his permanent positions held a radio. He cooked rice, ate what game he could shoot; he took shits, washed his clothes, and cleaned his weapons. Maybe he read letters from home and he sent out reports and estimates to someone, somewhere.

  Hoyle opened another beer and grunted. Okay, fucker. You didn’t just throw a dart at the map. You planned this. Where are you?

  He first plotted the location of the double ambush. After walking the terrain, he had noticed two things. The scene of the first ambush was far from perfect; aside from boulders and scrub, there was little cover. If the site was chosen, it had been chosen badly. The follow-on ambush, the firefight with the reaction force, had been conducted flawlessly. That suggested to him that the ambush of the first truck was a chance encounter. The second engagement, the ambush of Major Buran, had been deliberate. The guerrilla commander had elected to stay and wait, and sprang a second attack with ruthless aplomb.

  Hoyle knew that no competent guerrilla would have lured the enemy into battle if the location were close to his base. Hoyle took a grease pencil and drew a broad circle around the ambush site. Its radius was what he considered a brisk two days’ march, approximately fifty kilometers. It was unlikely that the guerrillas’ main base would be inside this circle.

  Assuming the base area was not close to the initial contact, it would still have the same general requirements: water and food, as well as cover and concealment. This meant, specifically, that the guerrillas’ main camp must be near a river and would likely be hidden in a mountainous, wooded area. There might be one camp, but it was more likely that there were several close together. The requirements of logistical support meant that at least one of the guerrillas’ camps had to be located within half a day’s march of a road head. Without this, a supply line to the city, no guerrilla unit in the field could long sustain itself.

  In the north, the lower edges of the Rio Grande Valley below Samaipata offered both haven and road access. In the east, the Capinirini Mountains between the Santa Cruz Highway and Lake Pirirenda met the necessities of concealment, water, and communications. In the west, the canyons and rolling countryside around La Higuera were not especially good but would suffice. And in the south, the headwaters of the Ñancahuazú above Lagunillas were also a venue. There were several other, less plausible locations, all falling within the approximate rectangle marked out by the leading possibilities.

  His headwork had reduced the guerrillas’ probable base locations from a range of several thousand square miles to an area of several hundred. The entire Bolivian army did not have sufficient forces to cordon and sweep even this reduced area. Nor did they have the expertise to reconnoiter it, in force or clandestinely. The enemy was hidden and kept safe by Bolivia’s formidable terrain and the incompetence of its armed forces.

  Lost in thought, Hoyle had not noticed that it was raining until the door blew open in a sodden gust. Outside, water poured off the roof in a torrent. Smith kicked the door closed and shook the rain off his poncho.

  “Goddamn this place,” he said. He tossed the poncho over a chair back, pulled a folder from under his shirt, and put it on his desk.

  Hoyle watched him wipe the raindrops from his glasses. Smith’s eyes appeared red and small until he threaded the earpieces back over his ears and blinked at the map.

  “You want a beer?” Hoyle asked.

  “I want bourbon,” Smith said. He walked to his desk, officiously unlocked the center drawer, and pulled out two glasses and a bottle of Jim Beam. A somewhat uneasy détente had evolved between them; it was founded more on the necessities of compartmentalized operation rather than friendship. Smith and Hoyle still got along better when they were apart. Still, Smith was happy for the company tonight; he had driven alone all day from Sucre.

  Hoyle watched him pour two tumblers half full of whiskey. “What was up in Sucre?” he asked.

  “I checked with the National Police. Since the state of emergency, they’ve been making foreigners register. You have to get a Vaitmento Abriganda if you’re going to spend the night in town. I checked out a couple of Peruvians who went through a week before the ambush. Dirtbags. I think they were cocaine dealers.”

  “That convoy wasn’t ambushed by druggies,” Hoyle said. “They had their shit together. They engaged a superior force in broad daylight, kicked its ass, and vanished like a virgin on a troopship.”

  “You sound like you admire them, Mr. Hoyle.”

  “I’m trying not to.”

  Smith sat at his desk and swung his feet onto the blotter.

  “At the ambush, they marked out fields of fire with piles of rocks,” Hoyle said. “We used to do the same thing with the Montagnards. That convoy ambush was on-the-job training.”

  “Bolivians and Cubans?”

  “People. People who knew what they were doing and people who did not.”

  Smith made a face. “If it’s locals, somebody’s filled their heads with a lot of Marxist bullshit. They get them spun up, and they grab some guns.” He sipped whiskey and shook his head. “Every time they take a potshot at a soldier, the army burns a village. That�
�s not a revolution—it’s bad math.”

  “It’s only a revolution if you win,” Hoyle said.

  The rain beat down for a few moments. Smith reached for the bottle and said to Hoyle, “Would you—”

  In that instant there was a flash of reddish light. Hoyle was turned to face the map on the wall, so he sensed it with his right eye first. He knew what it was immediately; there was a crack-bang and then a gust of hot, acrid wind as the shock wave of a massive explosion sucked the air out of his lungs. Some piece of debris struck him behind the knees, and his feet were swept out from under him. The explosion roiled through the building, part cloud and part fire, smashing windows and splintering doors.

  For Smith, turned with his back to the front office, the first impression of the detonation was a deep, thudding concussion perceived as much with his chest as with his ears. As the explosion ripped into the room, Smith tumbled forward, instinctively covering his face as a hurricane of shattered glass flew past him. In the resulting chaos, desks were overturned and the typewriter from the front office punched through the back door. The overhead lights were blown out, but incredibly, both desk lamps survived and remained illuminated, pointing up through the swirling smoke.

  Hoyle’s ears were screaming, but he didn’t think he’d been pierced anywhere. He came to his hands and knees, drew his pistol, and half crawled, half dived behind an overturned file cabinet. “Kill the lights!” he shouted. “Kill the lights!”

  Smith kicked out the closest desk lamp and swung his fist down on the other, smashing it like a kid exterminating a particularly annoying insect. Hoyle peered over his cover toward the front window. The street side of the building was torn open. From the Calle Comercio, Hoyle could hear dogs barking and then people yelling.

  Smith was standing, pushing his glasses back up on his nose. He said in a clear, calm voice, “Car bomb.”

  Both men reeled through the debris to the front of the building and out into the street. To the right and left of the offices, shopwindows were shattered, and at the corner of the marketplace, the awnings and stalls of the coca-leaf vendors were in tatters.