The Viper Squad

by J.B. Hadley

Genres: Action & Adventure; War & Military; Military Thrillers

Synopsis

Mike Campbell, a Special Forces veteran, organizes a squadron of mercenaries to travel to El Salvador and rescue a wealthy American businessman's daughter.

Release date: September 26, 2009

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 207

Sample

ONE of the two men said something to him in “Spanish. He couldn’t understand a word, but he could see the evil glitter in the
man’s eyes. It was the fat one, holding the car’s rear door open so he could reach in and pull him outside. This was the one
who had sat beside him on the drive to this place, holding a lump of lead in his right fist and rapping him on the side of
the head with his weighted knuckles anytime he made a move. He was dizzy. His head hurt. His groin hurt. He did not resist
as he was pulled out of the car.


They had parked at the summit of an overlook. The city of San Salvador stretched out beneath, and the setting sun looked like
a huge ripe peach in the haze of air pollution. The streetlights in some sections had been turned on.


“Cabron!” the fat man spat at him. “Cornudo!”

The thin man jutted a pistol painfully into his ribs. He found himself being forced to the edge of the overlook.

It was not a sheer drop, as at the edge of a cliff. But if he were pushed, he’d surely break something before he managed to
hang on to a rock or tussock of grass to stop himself rolling down all the way. And there might be
steeper drops farther down which he could not see from up here.


If only they’d try to communicate with him! Were they rightists or leftists? Rightists, he suspected. Yet, he could not be
sure and took no chances. One wrong word could be suicide.


He had shouted his name at them, over and over, coming here in the car. He assumed at first it was a case of mistaken identity
and that when they realized he was not who they thought he was—but an American citizen—they would release him.


Now he had come to think that these two men knew exactly who he was and had abducted him deliberately. Why?

They seemed to have no wish to make themselves understood to him. That was what was so frustrating! If he was going to be
killed, he felt he had the right to know why.


He guessed they were only trying to frighten him. He wished he could find some way of telling them they had already done a
great job. That he wouldn’t cause any more difficulties for them—if he ever had. That he would even leave the country if they
wanted him to. Mariana. Not just manana, but on the first plane tomorrow morning. He couldn’t do any better than that.


He had told them all this in English on the way here. They hadn’t understood a word. Whoever was doing this to him should
at least have sent along someone who knew a little English …


“Monte de mierda!” the fat man snarled at him.

The pistol muzzle snuggled into his left ear, and he felt the thin man watching him with whiplash anxiety—ready to squeeze
the trigger at a split-second’s notice.


The fat man opened a straight razor. Its stainless steel blade mirrored the peach red of the setting sun.

The fat one took a step toward him, with the gleaming razor dangling casually in his right hand. He took an
involuntary half step backward and felt his heels sink as the ground sloped steeply away. He could feel the emptiness of
space at his back. The pistol muzzle pressed harder into his left ear.


The fat man now stood directly before him. His blubbery lips were curled back from his decayed teeth in a look of hatred and
disgust. No one had ever looked at him with such intense loathing before. There was intelligence as well as dislike in those
bloodshot eyes—this man knew who and what he was, and hated him for it. Why?


Faster than he could raise his shirt-sleeved arm to protect his throat, the razor’s honed edge struck at him.

The thin edge of tempered steel flicked through the strap of the light meter hung about his neck. The fat man stooped forward
and caught the instrument in his left palm before it hit the ground. The fat one looked at it closely for a moment and then
sailed it out into the empty air above the city lights.


The motionless, frightened face before him caused a satisfied On to spread from his thick lips to stubbled jowls. His razor
streaked out again.


Before he could react to save himself, he felt the steel blade touch his head above his eyes. It hardly hurt—two light touches
from something that was so precisely thin it was beneath the threshold of pain. The straight razor was withdrawn.


He slapped his hand to his forehead. When he lowered his hand, he saw what was imprinted on his palm. A cross of red in blood.

SALLY Poynings, 20, blond, blue-eyed, sexy, a dropout from posh Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, drew all eyes wherever
she went in El Salvador. She stepped from the bus she and her boyfriend had taken from the city of San Salvador. They had
come to the countryside to see the “real people,” as her boyfriend put it. She looked about her.


Cinder-block huts with galvanized zinc roofs formed three sides of a dusty square. An adobe church with huge cracks running
up the front, from steps to belfry, lay crumbling on the fourth side. A few withered trees leaned in the center of the square,
and a pool of green stagnant water near where she stood gave off a bad smell. She slapped flies from her face and arms. As
usual, people stared at her—thin dirty children with big dark eyes, an overweight woman with a basket of oranges on her head,
a beggar on the church steps with scaly skin who could be a leper, a few men in sweat-stained shirts and battered straw hats.


Bennett, her boyfriend, panned his movie camera; and she obediently held the microphone in the heat-stricken
silence, switching off the tape in time to the camera.


He grinned at her. “Fantastic place.”

She smiled fondly back at him.

Then their bus pulled away, the people inside peering down at them through the grimy windows. Sally watched the clouds of
dust the bus had raised slowly settle.


“Sally, I got a feeling this place is authentic. These people are real people. What we film is going to be valid.”

“Yes, Bennett.”

She looked about again. Everything looked so hopeless. A metal Coca-Cola sign was nailed to the front wall of the nearest
cinder-block hut. The sign’s red color was faded by the sun to pink, and there were clusters of bullet holes about the letter
“o” in each of the words, without a single direct hit. Crumpled cigarette packs and orange peels were trampled into the dust
at the doorway. Bennett was fooling with the camera again, so she pushed open the wood door with its flaking lavender paint
and stepped into the cool, dark interior.


A heavyset middle-aged man sat behind a wooden counter stacked with merchandise. A brown curtain suspended on brass rings
from a bamboo pole cut off the back half of the hut. The front half was lit by a window only a foot square—high in one side
wall—and the interior walls of the hut were the same as the exterior: naked cinder-block. On a calendar picture, a soccer
player was about to kick the ball, and behind glass in a frame a nearly stripped haloed saint was about to have his head chopped
off by an axman whose outlandish costume suggested to Sally he was an Indian maharajah. She bought two Cokes, which were warm,
and asked the name of the town—things like that were important to Bennett’s project; and since he spoke no Spanish, he had
to rely on her.


Back outside again, everything had brightness and intensity
as if the sun were a strobe that never flickered but just stayed blazing so that her eyes hurt.


“What a dump!” Bennett said gleefully.

He grimaced at the taste of the warm Coke, yet did not complain. Now was no time to bitch about conditions, here in the heart
of the Third World. He had come to find the real truth about things in El Salvador once and for all, so he must expect to
suffer a little or at least be inconvenienced once in a while.


“Shit, if I had to live in this hole,” Bennett went on, “I’d be a rebel too.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,” Sally said, looking nervously behind her. “Just because you can’t understand them doesn’t
mean they can’t understand you. What do we do now?”


This was a reasonable question, since the only other person left in the square at that moment was the beggar on the church
steps, and nothing moved except for two small pigs snuffling at the bases of the withered trees. Sally glanced at the pigs
and added, “Don’t say we should hunt truffles.”


Bennett hadn’t noticed them. “Hey, you got a good eye, girl. Let’s use those pigs. Get in close with the sound.”

Sorry she had said anything, Sally adjusted her sound for the low-register grunts and high-pitched squeals of the two pigs.
She was about to dart from the shade of the hut, along with Bennett, onto the burning sands of the square, when an army truck
careened into the open space at high speed. It stopped, and soldiers jumped down from beneath its canvas covering.


Eight soldiers ran to one hut facing the square. One kicked the door off its hinges and all of them ran inside. Four other
soldiers stood around the truck, automatic rifles slung from their shoulders, watchful.


Bennett was filming. Sally hurriedly turned on the sound.

Two men in their early twenties emerged from the hut
with their hands held in the air. A soldier booted the second one in the ass as he came out behind him. Then a woman carrying
a baby in one arm and holding a toddler by the hand was followed by a boy about seven and a girl about nine. Two soldiers
poked them along with their rifle barrels. Finally an old woman appeared, arguing with the five remaining soldiers who brought
up the rear of this procession. The soldier who had been guarding the two young men turned his back on them and returned to
talk to the others.


Bennett spoke in that special tone of voice he reserved for the tape recorder. “The soldiers are now deliberately tempting
the two men to try to escape so they can gun them down.”


The two young men seemed to agree with Bennett’s assessment of their situation, because they looked back and waited for the
woman with the baby and toddler to join them. After this, all of them were hustled by the soldiers into the back of the truck.
Bennett adjusted the lens for a final close-up.


“Senor!” The flaked lavender door of the cinder-block hut behind them opened a few inches. The man’s voice inside rattled
on hoarsely. Bennett heard the words muy peligroso, and even he knew that meant very dangerous. Sally’s reaction was to grab him, spoiling a nice shot of the two pigs fleeing
in tenor across the square in front of the army truck. The driver swerved at one of the pigs with the left front wheel but
missed. With all her might, Sally pushed Bennett before her through the lavender door, and the storekeeper slammed it behind
them.


After a minute, the man opened the door a crack and peered out. “It’s all right, they didn’t see you.”

“What’s he saying?” Bennett asked.

“The soldiers didn’t see us,” she told him. She switched to Spanish. “What will they do to those people?”

The man shook his head sadly. “Those were very foolish people.”


“What did they do?”


“They made fun of the army,” the man said, in an awed tone of voice that indicated the seriousness of this offense. “When
the guerrillas came to this town two days ago, the regular soldiers ran away.”


“The guerrillas were here two days ago?”

“They left early this morning,” the man said matter-of-factly. “Those people laughed at the soldiers for running away. They
said to everyone that the soldiers were not real men, that they were cowards because they were afraid to fight the guerrillas.
It’s not good for you to be here with a camera. You had better leave at once. I could drive you back to San Salvador where
you will be safe, for one hundred Yanqui dollars.”


“You’re crazy!” Sally said. “It cost us about three dollars each to come here by bus.”

“Seventy-five,” the man countered.

Sally thought carefully. She decided to say nothing to Bennett about the rebels having been in the town. If she did, she would
never get him to go back to their San Salvador hotel today. This storekeeper was robbing them, but what the hell, money was
the least of her problems.


“All right,” she said. “Let’s go now.”

“Momentito. Then I show you something on the way.” He pointed to Bennett. “For his camera. It will cost you twenty-five dollars.
Altogether, one hundred Yanqui dollars. If you have it.”


Sally sighed and produced a crisp bill from her purse.

The Salvadoran whistled in admiration at the unused hundred-dollar bill and slipped it behind the picture of the saint about
to be beheaded. Then he looked through the doorway out into the blazing light of the square and beckoned them.


“What’s happening?” Bennett asked.

But Sally was already out the door.

They moved at high speed along the road in a battered green 1970 Buick Skylark with no muffler, which made the
car sound like a powerboat. A few miles down the road, without easing his speed, the Salvadoran swung off the road into a
set of the tracks across the dust, and the car fishtailed and skidded sideways to a halt. The driver smiled and took off again
from a standing start that spun his rear wheels in the dirt before they found traction and rocketed the car forward.


“Great old V-eight,” Bennett said with approval. “They don’t make ’em like this anymore.”

Sally was frightened that if she translated this for the Salvadoran, he would be encouraged to show off more of the jalopy’s
prowess. She pressed her hands against the dashboard, figuring that two broken arms were preferable to a face disfigured by
a splintered windshield.


Round the base of a small hill, they came to the town’s garbage dump. The set of tire tracks swerved into the garbage.

“It looks worse than it smells,” the Salvadoran said, gesturing expansively at the refuse on both sides of the car. “The sun
dries it out after the birds and animals pick over it. The vultures are slow today. Usually they’re the first ones here.”


He looked around carefully as he drove very slowly, and then pointed to some bright patches ahead that stood out from the
camouflage of weathered garbage. He put his foot on the gas and then on the be as they neared the place. He stopped and switched
off the engine, gesturing out his open side window and watching her face closely.


They were the same ones. The two men in their early twenties; the woman still holding her baby; the toddler now about ten
feet away from her, one knee bent, lying on his back; the boy; the girl; the old woman… they all lay on their backs in the
sunshine with bright red blotches on their bodies. Their arms and legs were at odd angles. Their mouths and eyes were open.


Bennett had stuck his camera out the rear side window and was filming them. Sally forgot to turn on the mike,
which didn’t matter because the only sound to be heard was flies buzzing.


Mike Campbell looked at the sun rise yellow through the blowing sand that beat like rain against the pickup’s steel side and
roof. He bit on grains between his teeth and tried to lick them off onto the back of his hand. The wind howled, and a lone
cactus raised its claw at the sky.


He had pulled the pickup off a ruler-straight road that ran from one horizon of Arizona to the other. On the windward side
of the road, the sand had encroached halfway across the traffic lane. Mike had been waiting for daylight before leaving the
road, because headlights made everything look deceptive and unfamiliar off a paved surface. The desert could be tricky enough
to cross at the best of times.


He switched on the engine, shifted into four-wheel drive and started out across the and waste. A tall, lean man in his late
thirties or early forties, his calm gray eyes contrasted with his restless manner. He had a deep tan, his face was heavily
lined, and he had small sharp scars on his neck and arms. Some of them shrapnel. He fixed on a notch in a distant blue mountain
range as his marker. After some miles, the dead-flat land began to undulate in small rises and dips; and pockets of soft sand
caused the pickup to slew and spin its tires.


The sun climbed in the sky, and the beams of heat from its merciless golden eye would miss nothing later in the day. But now
there was still a chill from the desert night lingering in the air. Mike hoped to make it to the first of the canyons before
the heat grew uncomfortable. He had discovered the network of canyons by chance when some powerful thermals took his glider
over backcountry that fliers normally avoided because of its remoteness. From the air, he had seen the canyons running into
one another like cracks in dried mud, till they ended in the river. What
most intrigued Mike about them was that he had not known they were there.


He left the pickup in the same place he had left it on previous trips and descended the steep side of a gulch down to a dry
streambed at its bottom. Cottonwoods, tamarisks and willows grew among sedges and reeds along the banks that contained only
smooth bone-dry stones. As Mike followed the gulch, its walls grew steeper and closer together, until finally he was walking
along the dry bottom of a cool, dark canyon about as wide as a deer trail. The walls of the canyon were of smooth sandstone
and seemed almost to meet far above his head, leaving only a thin strip of blue sky.


Mike followed this canyon till it joined another wider one, and followed that until it too joined a still larger one almost
the width of the two-lane road he had long since left. Some big thunderheads floated in what he could see of the sky. They
seemed a long distance off. He had explored this far and up some side canyons on his previous visits. This time he wanted
to follow the main canyon, which, unlike the others, narrowed as it went toward the river. As he followed the canyon, the
rocks and debris left on its floor made the going hard. He had covered a long, twisting, relatively easy stretch when he stopped
to listen.


The sound was exactly like that of a subway train approaching in a tunnel. Mike felt vibrations in the ground beneath him
and a great roar echoed down the canyon. He looked back but saw nothing.


A huge snake head of red liquid mud suddenly slithered into view along the undercut sandstone wall of the bend behind him.
The serpent of mud twisted back into the center of the canyon and shot forward with deadly speed to consume all in its path.


Mike had time only to rush to the side and scramble on top of some rock debris at the base of one canyon wall. He avoided
the direct impact of the flash flood, which would
have borne him along, battered him with boulders and ground him up fine along the rocky floor.


The flood swept by, three or four feet deep and almost up to his boots where he stood on the rocks. Then he felt the rocks
shift slightly under him from the force of the muddy water. The canyon wall was smooth above him, without handholds. The rocks
beneath his feet shifted again.


Then the water level rose alarmingly. In seconds, it was above his knees. He hardly had time to think before it was at waist
level. Mike decided not to wait to find out which would give way first, him or the rocks beneath, and he hitched a ride on
a heavy tree trunk floating down what was now a swift, muddy river. This proved not so easy as he thought it would be. The
trunk was old and weathered, without bark or branches—and the water made it slippery to grip and rolled it in his grasp when
he did manage to hold on. He cut one hand. This he could tell by the blood on his skin, for he could feel nothing.


A cottonwood, uprooted by the flood, was carried near him and Mike transferred his hold onto it. Its branches acted like outriggers
and prevented the trunk from rolling in the fast-moving waters. He saw two drowned deer float by.


Mike was a strong swimmer and was not greatly concerned by what was happening until the canyon narrowed further and he was
swept down two chutes of water. He knew he was getting into waterfall territory. Even a small waterfall could stun and drown
him—and he would have no chance at all in a fall of any size. He managed to twist the cottonwood around at a narrow neck so
that it became caught securely between both canyon walls. He clung on and let the water break over him.


Very soon the water level dropped. Almost as quickly as the river had come into existence, it began to disappear. Mike let
himself dry, sitting on the trunk still wedged between the canyon walls but now above the water. When
the flow had diminished to a waist-high stream, he jumped down into the water. He shook the cottonwood tree loose and watched
its journey downstream. Then he walked back the way he had come on dry ground alongside one canyon wall.


He climbed beside what was now a ten-foot-high waterfall—it had been a chute when he had passed over it in the headlong rush
of deep water—and upstream from that he came across another. This one, about fifteen feet high, was of smooth sandstone and
not climbable.


Perhaps he would find an easier way out by following the canyon down toward the river. He climbed back down the side of the
ten-foot waterfall and passed the spot where he had wedged the cottonwood between the canyon walls. If he had not pushed the
tree back into the water and watched it float away, he could have hauled it back up the lower waterfall and used it as a ladder
against the smooth wall of the upper fall. Why had he pushed the tree back in the water? The cottonwood itself couldn’t have
cared less one way or the other, yet it was almost as if he had been apologizing to it for delaying its journey and helping
it on its way again.


Mike continued farther down the canyon along the dry strip by the base of one wall until he came to a dark, misty place where
the water disappeared over the lip of yet another fall. Even before reaching it, he could tell by the comparative silence—only
a distant muffled plunging of water—that he was not going to like what he was about to see! He peered over the edge.


The muddy river shot clear of the precipice and descended in a long, wavering spout to smash into foam on rocks more than
a hundred feet below. The top of the fall, where Mike stood, was an overhang he could have managed with a climbing rope. Beneath
the overhang, the walls were sanded smooth by the abrasives carried along in the water over the ages. Mike turned back.


When he passed the place again where he had jammed
the cottonwood between the canyon was, he was shaken by how close he had gotten to the big fall. His maneuver had been just
in time. Then he grew alarmed about his present situation. It might be years before someone came this way and found his bones.
By then, more flash floods would probably have carried his bones down the canyons to the river, and from the river into the
Gulf of California, to rest on the sea bottom, examined by curious fish, till buried out of sight by settling sediment.…


His pickup, in perfect condition in the desert climate, would be his memorial, the only clue to what had happened to him.

He stood for a while, hopelessly, beneath the smooth was of the fifteen-foot fall, the water shrunken now to the size of a
brook, and he could hardly believe it when he saw a big tree trunk with snapped-off branches protrude a few feet over the
top of the fall and then come to a stop, the flow of water being insufficient to carry it over. The trunk moved again and
rolled; a bit more of the heavy trunk stuck out over the top; then it seesawed a little and at last was eased over the edge.
The heavy end hit the pool at the base of the fall, and t. . .