The Fighting Man (1993) by Gerald Seymour Page A

again. The sweat streaming on his forehead.
    They climbed again and there was the beat of rain on the porthole window behind Gord’s head.
    ‘Thank you.’
    ‘It was a crap answer.’
    ‘An idiot question . . . Your answer. The end line is to win.’
    Gord talking fast. ‘Right, right, how far? We hit a village? We shoot up a barracks? We let them know we’re around? What, a week, then out?’
    ‘To win, Mr Brown, we must go to Guatemala City. We are going to turn them out of the Palacio Nacional. That is what I mean by winning . . .’
    ‘And it was a crap question.’
    There was just him and Jorge who slapped at his shoulder in amusement, and there was Eff and Vee and Zed, and there was Harpo and Zeppo and Groucho, and there were two men aboard Whisky Alpha . . . Why not?
    ‘We are going to win.’
     
    FROM : Fort William police HQ, Lochaber District.
    TO : Strathclyde police HQ, Glasgow.
    REF : A/0800/79y/4.
    ATTENTION : Special Branch.
     
    Local report that 3 (three) native Indian Guatemalans, giving Havana/Cuba residence, visited Loch Ailort area last week to seek out Gordon Benjamin BROWN, No Permanent Address.
    He understood to be former Special Air Service commissioned officer, no further detail, currently working as fish farm labourer.
    Believed BROWN propositioned to provide military help for proposed invasion of Guatemala (exclaimer). No offence committed in our force area. You may wish to up follow.
    End.
     
    Gord had gone forward.
    It was smooth flying now. Between them, Eff and Vee and Zed could mind the cart.
    He stood, but bowed and hunched, at the back of the cockpit area and braced himself against the backs of the pilot’s and navigator’s seats.
    They didn’t seem to mind him being there. Perhaps they recognized a military man. Perhaps they were both just so damned thankful to be out of the storm belt. The navigator had the flight chart spread on his knee, and sometimes his finger pointed to a position, the crossing of the Honduran coast, the crossing of the Guatemalan frontier. They had flown west of Puerto Cortés, then south of the Guatemalan city of Puerto Barrios. He could see the land mass beneath them, dark with the first sheen of grey settling on their horizon. Dawn coming and fast. There was broken cloud above them. They had lost the protection of the darkness and the bad weather. Twice the pilot pointed to the fuel gauge where the needle had settled at the top of the red-coloured segment. Gord understood that they had to make the wide detour of Belize airspace, because there was modern radar at Belize, and a squadron of Harrier jets on the runway to come up on interception course if they aroused suspicion. They were clear of the threat of the Harriers now because they were over Guatemala.
    He would have admitted it, couldn’t have hidden it, the excitement consumed him. It was the excitement that stretched him and pumped the adrenaline, but private and not shared . . . The landing point was identified on the chart for him. They were low over the water of the Lago de Izabal, perhaps a hundred feet, they would climb immediately on crossing the far shore, over high ground and a National Park, they would cross the road strip that was the principal route from Cobán to the Belize border, and then ahead was only the swamp jungle wilderness, and the airstrip.
    The excitement bulged in him, as it always did when he flew forward to combat. It was why he had come, in truth, to find again the excitement . . . Over the park, a carpet of triple canopy trees, the navigator pointed again to the position of the landing strip and gestured with his hands. Fifteen minutes to the destination. The needle was lower in the red section at the extremity of the fuel gauge. No talking in the cockpit. The light was coming up around them. Gord leaned forward to search the skies, under the cloud fragments, for the second aircraft. He could not see Whisky Alpha. He tapped the pilot’s shoulder, he pointed port