Текст книги "Red Jungle"

Автор книги: Kent Harrington

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Red Jungle

A novel by

Kent Harrington

Diversion Books

A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

80 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1101

New York, New York 10011

www.DiversionBooks.com

Copyright © 2011 by Kent Harrington

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For more information, email [email protected].

First Diversion Books edition June 2011.

ISBN: 978-0-9833371-1-9 (ebook)

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Also by Kent Harrington

Dark Ride (1996)

Dia de los Muertos (1997)

The American Boys (2000)

The Good Physician (2008)

www.kentharrington.com

Epigraph

“Swing me way down south,

Sing me something brave from your mouth.”

–The Dixie Chicks

Table of Contents

EPIGRAPH

PROLOGUE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

PROLOGUE

It all started with the sky, which was immense, devoid of feeling except for a few flat pink clouds that were fierce and pagan looking, the way they can seem in Central America. It started too with a Fado song on the jukebox, the melancholy music playing over the afternoon voices of a jungle barroom that was little more than a shack.

“Only the dead are really satisfied,” the bartender said to Russell.

Across the road, a small group of Indian men worked under a ceiba tree, the tree’s hulking great canopy lording it over them. The men intended to plant a cross where their loved ones had died. A young priest had come with them to bless the spot.

Russell watched as a shirtless, muscular Indian hit the top of the painted white cross with the flat of his shovel. He hit it hard several times; they heard the metal, clang-blong, clang-blong. Like a bell rung for the dead.

The third-class bus on its way to market had crashed into that ceiba tree the week before, on a perfectly sunny day. Five people had been killed on the spot. The bus had been opened like a soda can and the poor people on their way to market had died, gripping their vegetables and chickens. Even the chickens in their cages had been killed.

The bartender told him the story of the crash. How it had happened about that time of day. How everyone in the bar had run out to help. They had saved many people. The bar girls had held the dead in their arms.

The ceiba tree, the bartender told Russell, was hard as a soldier’s heart. He’d been a soldier during the war, he said, and knew something about hard hearts. “You see things. Then you never forget them,” he said. “Things that change you.”

The Indian stood back from the cross and signaled to the kid priest to go ahead and get on with it. The Indians all doffed their worn straw hats and knelt down in the clearing under the tree. The kid priest in his black cassock stepped in front of the cross and spread his arms out. He started praying to his God.

Through the ceiba tree’s lacy canopy, Russell noticed the clouds gathering above the men. He saw the new, raw-looking white cross standing now, saying what it said, marking where the people had died. The clouds didn’t seem to care. They were sweeping in anyway. It was going to rain hard soon. They’d had a lot of rain that winter. Too much here on the Pacific coast, but nothing in the Peten. Even the weather seemed to be conspiring against coffee prices.

Russell Cruz-Price planned to buy a coffee plantation that afternoon from a Frenchman who’d gone bust. He knew it was a foolish act, but he didn’t care. He’d gotten to that place in life where you just stop caring very much. You just try to satisfy yourself, and that’s good enough. You believe what you want to believe about how it will all turn out.

He’d been playing with a double-0 shotgun shell, rolling it back and forth on the bar in front of him. The bartender took his empty beer away. It was hot in the bar and the air smelled of cigarettes and decaying jungle and the perfume the bar girls wore.

After they planted their cross and said their prayers, the men came across the empty road and into the thatched roof barroom for a cold beer. Even the priest came in. This bar was not used to seeing priests pass through its doors; a lot of people came to La Ultima bar, but not many priests. Sudden outbreaks of violence were very common in La Ultima. Men from all classes got drunk together here, then shot each other for petty reasons – usually over the young bar girl’s affections. Couples danced night and day to the juke box on the polished concrete floor. La Ultima never closed its doors. It was a church, someone told Russell once, but for sinners.

“You see the dead, they care for nothing now. They don’t care about sex. They don’t care about love. Not even about food. Nothing,” the bartender said, getting ready to set the Indians up with beers.

Russell had decided to wait here for the American who would guide him to the plantation, for no particular reason other than that he liked the place, and it was right off the Pan American Highway, and the back had a view of the jungle and a river that was entertaining to watch. He liked the way the jungle grew right down to the river’s edge.

A psychiatrist might have suggested to him that he came to places like La Ultima because he had a death wish. He was ignorant of that particular desire, as he was of so much of his psyche. Some desires he was very aware of. Some were sitting around the back of the bar, wore short skirts, and could, under the right circumstances, make you feel better. But not always. The others were less obvious. He sought out fearful situations and now he had the desire to make a great deal of money. He couldn’t explain his seeking out fear, but he was aware of it. It was as if he were trying to prove to himself that he was not a coward, and whatever he did was never enough.

In fact, he thought he was fine. But all his risk taking was a strange way to live, he would have agreed. Other men he knew wanted to feel safe, safe in their occupations and families. He’d always envied those men their children, their wives, their knowing whom they could count on.

Something had happened to him that made the simplest things in life difficult and the harder things easy. He would run towards a fight and away from anyone who said they cared for him. It wasn’t right and he knew it, but it was the way it had shaken out.

The men from the road sat at the bar, and the place livened up. They wanted to put the deaths behind them now. Russell bought them all a round; they thanked him, and said he was “muy Christiano.” Very Christian. He said he was sorry for what had happened.

Fit and tall, Russell had his Guatemalan mother’s thick brown hair and his American father’s rawboned good looks and green eyes. He had a quick, knowing smile that put people at ease right away. He was working now as a financial journalist for a famous English newspaper, which suited him. He could have continued with that, but didn’t want it anymore. He wanted money now, and was going to buy the coffee plantation from the Frenchman.

The afternoon started to crumble into long dull moments, still appallingly hot but overcast. The immensity of the jungle outside reflected the endless tangled nature of existence. Things floated by on the river.

“You want something to eat?” the bartender asked later.

“No thanks,” Russell said.

“You want to talk to a girl?”

“No. Not in the mood.”

“You’re young. You should talk to a girl,” the bartender said. “It’s always fun.” “Maybe later,” Russell told him.

The men who’d planted the cross proceeded to get drunk. The young priest had one polite drink and left for his church. Russell moved to a table and continued to wait for the American while he watched a parade of impoverished plantation workers – men and women – in black rubber boots, some carrying their machetes, walk past the bar toward the town.

Russell knew from his reporting work that the old feudal world his mother had been born into had ended with the destruction of the coffee economy. And yet the coming brave new world, promised by well-dressed young people at the World Bank, was not in place, either. It was a strange time. No one knew what was coming next. The execrable feudal traditions – abhorrent to him – were at least based on a perverted social contract that guaranteed homes and food to the country’s most wretched. To his mother’s class, it had also guaranteed great wealth and leisure.

But now, even that grossly unfair contract was being swept aside by Darwinian “market” forces that guaranteed nothing to anyone. The plantations were closing down, and there seemed to be nothing left for the poor to count on. A hundred and fifty years of history was being carted away, as if by magic.

He’d met the old American in a restaurant in the town. The American had claimed to know Tres Rios, the plantation Russell was going to buy. The old man had offered to guide him. It would save time, and Russell had eagerly agreed to meet him later. He was a man in a big hurry. He wanted to find the Red Jaguar, the Mayan antiquity he expected to dig up there, which would make him rich and allow him to leave Guatemala for good. And the sooner, the better, he thought.

The bartender walked out from the bar and put a new beer in front of him. “I put it next to my girlfriend’s heart,” the bartender said. “It’s ice cold.”

They both laughed. It had started to rain, first softly, then suddenly in a great hostile downpour. The voices in the bar seemed to get louder. Russell could hear the rain striking the building’s corrugated metal roof.

He slid the shotgun shell into the pocket of his jeans and turned and watched a couple dance. Suddenly, and for the first time in his life, he admitted to himself that he was completely lost. He put the idea aside quickly, a little afraid of it.

His mother’s family had owned one of the biggest coffee plantations in the country. His mother, Isabella Cruz, had been raped, murdered and thrown into a ditch by communist guerrillas, while he’d been sitting in a math class a thousand miles away. He’d gotten a long letter at school from his uncle, who’d written him with the news. His uncle’s letter had been very beautiful, but lacked something.

Russell’s mother had died when he was ten. They had been very close, in the oddest way. They had an understanding and sympathy towards each other that went beyond the usual mother and son relationship. There was no possible way to describe it; words do fail sometimes. Because of the war, he’d been sent abroad to school. His relationship with his mother had been epistolary for the most part, although he’d come back here to visit her for all his vacations.

Because he’d been trained not to show “weakness” in the military schools he’d attended, he hadn’t allowed himself to cry when he got the news of her death. Sometimes, however, when he’d glance at his writing desk, he’d felt like it. He’d seen other boys cry, and he hated it. He wanted to slap them. It seemed a violation of everything they’d been taught about being a soldier.

He was eight when he was told that war would make him a man. He’d believed his teachers, the way young boys do.

The school had been brutal, so he’d learned to cope with brutality and physical violence at a very young age. (Every adult on the staff, short of the cooks, had the right to practice corporal punishment on the students, and they had.) He’d become expert at both psychological warfare and the strange, capricious, and often purely sadistic behavior of adults.

Many of his fellow students would die trying to prove how tough they were. One died in Somalia in Delta force, the toughest of the tough. Russell had seen his name in the newspaper. They had been on the cross country team together. He remembered the boy catching him on a hill once in the rain, and they’d raced along together in silence, sharing the pain of a long run.

His school was shut down when the idea of making “soldiers” out of young boys finally went out of fashion. As far as he was concerned, it had been a good education, and prepared him for a world that was less than fair most of the time.

Russell watched the old American’s beat-up, lime green Volkswagen bus pull up in front of the bar, right where the men had planted the cross. The driver’s-side door was bashed in. The old American slid out, locked his bus up and waited for the traffic to clear on the road, then ran across in the downpour.

He must be seventy or even older, Russell thought, watching him run towards the door. He was spry, though. The old man came into the bar and, seeing Russell, approached him with a decrepit bonhomie that was common out here when finding a fellow American who might be better off than oneself. The shoulders of his worn cowboy shirt were stained dark from the rain.

“I don’t care what kind of beer… anything wet. Tres Rios. It’s impossible trying to find it, if you’ve never been up there.

No signs. Nothing to go by. You should get some quality coffee

out of a place like that. You said you were going to buy it?”

“Yes,” Russell said.

“Wow. That takes guts, with coffee not worth shit right now.” The old American looked at Russell from ancient, keen eyes. “Don’ pay too much, that’s all,” the old man said, after they exchanged handshakes. “You can call me Coffee Pete.”

Russell signaled the bartender and ordered him the beer he’d asked for.

“I know the way all right. Don’t worry, I can save you a lot of time, I spent years out near Tres Rios chicken farming,” the old man said. The American’s blue eyes darted around the barroom, landing on a young bar girl in a red tank top and white short shorts, sitting alone.

Russell didn’t ask the old man his connection to the Frenchman who owned the plantation he was going to buy. He didn’t really care if there was one.

“You should listen to me, son,” Coffee Pete said. “Get out of this damn country while you’re still young. Hell! Better places than this backwater. Why don’t you go to New York?”

“I was there,” Russell said.

“No shit. Girls there all had good jobs and big tits – when I was there, anyway.”

Coffee Pete managed to smile and flirt with the young girl halfway across the barroom. “Don’t be like me. I can’t leave now.” The old American was tall, wore dirty khaki pants, and had a short-barreled .45 shoved into an expensive-looking quick draw holster on his right side. The side arm was the only clean-looking thing on him.

He claimed he’d come to Guatemala to train the Cubans for the Bay of Pigs invasion for the CIA and decided to stay on. Russell could see he’d been big and strong and proud once. He was diffident now, not proud anymore, but still dangerous, Russell thought. Maybe it was even true about the Bay of Pigs. But one heard so much bullshit in these bars.

“I guess you can pay me now. Three hundred Q,” Coffee Pete said, putting down his empty beer glass. “If you don’t mind. If I had time, I’d take that girl over there and go have a relax out back.” He smiled, and Russell saw a great animal cunning in the old man’s face.

Russell counted out the money and added fifty quetzales, just because the old man seemed down and out and he felt sorry for him.

“I didn’t think there were people like you anymore,” the old man said, thanking him. “Generous people out here don’t last, as a rule. Only the mean last, kid. ’Cause the mean just don’t give a shit about heaven.” He slipped the money into his shirt pocket, behind taped-up reading glasses. Russell paid the bill and they left. The old man went to the bathroom, telling him to follow him once he got his VW turned around and pointed south.

Russell went out to the parking lot and loaded his combat shotgun with six rounds of double-0 buck shot. He loaded the little Velcro belt built right into the stock of the shotgun, then put more loose rounds on the seat, where he could get to them quickly. When he was finished, he laid his weapon on the seat next to him and looked out at the road. He’d tried unsuccessfully to buy a hand grenade on the black market. In a firefight they made all the difference. He would try again, he thought, waiting. He didn’t want to die defenseless, as his mother had. The war had ended, but not the violence.

Russell watched the old American come out of La Ultima, run to his VW bus, and start it up. It belched smoke. The old man flashed him a smile, then pulled carefully out into traffic and took off. Russell kept expecting, as he watched from the parking lot, for the VW to turn around and come back south. The old man drove off, gaining speed, heading north toward Mexico.

Russell watched him pass a truck and disappear. He thought about chasing him, but decided against it. It would be a race into the town, there were a thousand side roads to turn into and hide, and undoubtedly the old man, like any good rat, knew all the good holes. He took off with only the name of the plantation and a curt description of how to find it. He got that lost feeling again as he drove south, but it passed.

He’d written his mother a last letter soon after her death. He wrote it on her birthday and mailed it. In that letter, he told his mother everything he’d never gotten a chance to tell her. He laid out his plans for the future, telling her that he thought that his years of military school had been good for him, and that he hoped to be a doctor or soldier; something “worthwhile.” There had been a moment after he’d read his uncle’s letter when he’d been gripped with a horrible panic. He thought he might have no future at all.

He’d walked to the duty officer’s room and handed him the letter, which was a “dead letter” even before it was mailed. The older boy—a captain—in mufti, because it was the weekend, was on the phone with his girlfriend. The captain nodded to him, took his letter and threw it on a pile with many others; and that was it. He’d gotten on with his life. He’d gone on. Now he’d ended up back here in his mother’s country, half crazy and not even aware of it.

ONE

October 1, 1972

Guatemala, Plantation “Las Flores”

Isabella Cruz Price, despite all the people around her, felt very alone. She turned the crank of the old-fashioned black telephone in the morning room, trying to get a line.

The Cruz family plantation, Las Flores, was enormous—ten thousand acres. Even now, parts of it had never been planted or exploited in any way; whole tracts lay virginal and untouched. It was a verdant, tree-filled womb, creating oxygen that would fill the lungs of Californians, New Yorkers, and Englishmen without them ever knowing where it came from. The plantation had been bought by her great-grandfather for—it was said—one thousand dollars, long before Isabella was born and sent to the United States to study at a convent school near San Francisco. A nun at that school fell in love with her, because even as a young girl, she was very beautiful. Isabella had thick chestnut hair, very white skin, and exciting blue eyes that pulled you in. The nun—who lost her faith– would die years later still thinking about Isabella, still completely in love with her.

She got a line. The telephone operator put her through to her brother’s apartment in Guatemala City. Isabella heard the phone ring. She pictured the living room of the apartment with its view of Avenida La Reforma, the grandness of that view. The street, a Third World version of the Champs Élysées, had been designed by an architect who hoped Guatemala City might, someday, be the Paris of Central America. He was an intelligent fool, or an extreme optimist; the city would never be anything like Paris.

When they were children, Isabella and her brother would drink lemonade on Sunday, before lunch with the family, watching out for their father’s car—a big black chauffeur driven Buick—as it came down the widest avenue in Central America. They would rollerskate through the halls of the apartment, frantic to greet him. They had been very happy as children, surrounded by three generations of the family and the knowledge that somehow they were important and powerful.

Isabella had kissed the President of the Republic on the cheek in front of that big window in the living room. Isabella had had her first period in that apartment, mystified by the bleeding. Feeling as if she were going to die, she’d run into the arms of her Indian nanny crying, very frightened.

Her brother, Roberto Cruz, had changed some things about the apartment, modernizing many of the rooms after their parents died. He’d sold off some of the old-world furniture. Her brother loved everything new and everything American. He wanted, more than anything, to be a modern American swinger. Isabella loved the heavy antique furniture her grandmother had brought with her from France. It was said that her grandmother had been born and died in the same bed. Her brother had sold the bed and bought something out of a catalog from the United States, with an upholstered headboard and a built-in TV set. The advertisement had claimed that this style bed was used by the stars in Hollywood. The TV set had never worked.

She missed the heavy purple curtains that had hung in her grandmother’s bedroom. The dark curtains seemed in keeping with the somber visits she remembered from an ancient Spanish priest, who had fought alongside Franco and against the Spanish Republic. The priest came every day while Isabella’s grandmother was dying. He would hold Isabella’s hand and tell her that Christ loved her very much. She was glad that Christ loved her. It made her feel good. She knelt by her grandmother’s bed, her skates on, and prayed to Christ, asking him not to take her grandmother away.

Her grandmother died the month they sent Isabella to the United States to go to school. Her grandmother had said something to her in French the morning they brought Isabella in to say goodbye. Isabella never understood what her grandmother had said. She had simply told her granddaughter: “Enjoy life, dear. It is very short.”

Isabella wished she and her baby were in the capital, safe. But they weren’t. There was going to be a war. The air was different now. Even the rain was different now, the way it fell against the coffee patios in unforgiving thunderous moments.

She looked down the hallway of the plantation house towards the bedroom where her infant son, Russell, was sleeping. She wondered if he would always love her. Her son had the blood of two countries: Guatemala, the poor coffee country, and The United States, the great top hat country of Henry Ford and Broadway and jet planes and smoking factories. She called him her little Yankee when she fed him, and would laugh while stroking his white skin. She had bathed her son in the same bathtub she’d been bathed in, a bathtub her grandfather had bought and had carried from Puerto Barrios in 1899, through the jungle, to rest here in the plantation house that hadn’t changed in more than a hundred years. Indians who saw the porcelain bathtub coming up the narrow jungle track —like some porcelain god– would bow, her father had told her, laughing. The Indians, the story went, would run from their houses just to touch its white sides with the magical words “American Standard.”

“Olga. Olga…” Isabella said.

“Manda? ” the Indian girl answered.

Olga Montes De Oro stepped out of the bedroom and looked at Isabella. The two young women had known each other since they could remember. They were born two days apart, there on the plantation. If they weren’t sisters, they were—in Guatemalan terms—something very close. (Isabella’s American husband would never understand these mysterious relationships.) The sight of Olga made Isabella feel a little better. A little reassured. Like the day that Olga’s brother found them lost in the cafetales when they were children, terrified by the red ants they’d found crawling up their naked feet and legs.

“The child?” Isabella asked.

“Sleeping now, Doña Isabella,” Olga said. Isabella was ten when Isabella’s father insisted that Olga begin using the doña when she addressed her friend. The two girls laughed about it; it was as if Isabella had suddenly grown up. Olga was jealous, but never said anything to her friend. She wanted to be Doña Olga. Olga told her father. He said that she would be a doña when Olga saw pigs fly over their house, and laughed, rolling a cigarette with one hand. When Olga asked her father why her friend Isabella was a doña and she wasn’t, her father, a worker who smelled of sweat and cheap alcohol, and who’d never had more than three quetzales in his pocket at any one time in his life, said it was because they were poor and Isabella was rich. He told her it would be that way until the sea dried up and God came back to earth to take them all to heaven, rich and poor alike.

“I may drive us. Drive us to Quetzaltenango,” Isabella said. The two young women looked at each other in a way they didn’t normally. Each had a role to play—each had to give meaning to her society, master and servant. But this morning everything seemed to be different: the air itself seemed charged, dangerous, electric, like the afternoon when they had been lost together. They could hear the rain hitting the roof, and Isabella wasn’t sure that Olga had heard her. She wanted to reach for Olga’s hand and hold it, as she had when they had been children. She wanted to say she was frightened, but she didn’t.

“Did you hear me, Olga?” Isabella said instead.

“Yes, madam.” Olga’s eyes betrayed the obvious—that she was frightened, too. She had heard gunshots, and the radio said the war had started in earnest and that someone called Jimmy Carter was going to help them. In Olga’s mind, she saw Jimmy Carter dressed like a Catholic saint, with a stigmata on his naked side from a Roman lance. He wore a crown of dollar bills.

“I’ve called Don Roberto in the capital, but he’s not answering,” Isabella said. “I’ll try again later.”

The cook came running out of the kitchen, across the wet patio. Also a young girl, the cook was heavy-set, with thick legs. Her stomach pressed against the cheap fabric of her cotton dress, which had cost her exactly two weeks’ wages. She stopped under the awning, her hair shiny and very black. If there was a war, she knew nothing about it. The cook would die in a government ambush, her brain pierced by a bullet made in Indiana in a small factory with no sign. Ironically, the bullet was made by a woman, and fired by a woman who was fighting “in the name of the fatherland.”

Isabella watched the cook hesitate, pull open the screen door, and then walk in. The young woman, who’d also grown up on the plantation, smelled of wood smoke. They used wood in the kitchen to cook tortillas long after they could have used propane.

“Madam, I have the pork for lunch. Will there be anyone else today?”

“No,” Isabella said. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Don Antonio?” the cook asked. “Will he be coming to lunch?”

They heard more shots then, and there was no mistaking them; they were shots and they were coming from the south near the town, less than five kilometers away. The women could hear them over the rain and the rolling thunder, which had broken twice over the house since Isabella had come to use the phone.

Isabella instinctively told herself not to show fear; that if she did, that somehow it would be the beginning of something bad, something she couldn’t control, and the people around her would lose their courage too and they would all be lost. She felt, at this moment, as if she were the center of all their universes. She was the heart and soul of the plantation that her grandfather had left them. After all, she was a Cruz, and had her grandfather’s lion heart. She had the boy in the other room. He was sick. He was too small to be sick here on the plantation, with a war starting. He was fragile. What kind of Yankee was fragile? she wondered.

“I want you to turn on the radio in the living room,” Isabella said to the cook, instead of saying: “God help us. They’re here. The communists are here, and will kill us.”

Her father had died of throat cancer a year before in London. She had loved him very very much.

At that moment Isabella, only twenty-one, felt very young, too young for the shooting and too young for the child. Her father had said he would not die in this wretched country full of communists, and Isabella had cried. He had gone to London and died surrounded by English nurses. He had spoken to them in Spanish, and they had not understood a word of his confession. Whatever he told them went to the grave with him.

He had been close to many presidents of the republic, especially Araña. Perhaps it was about that—the things her father had done to keep people in power. He had helped with the Bay of Pigs invasion. He had died wondering why Castro had won the battle. He blamed Kennedy, but was very sorry when he’d heard he’d been assassinated, because Kennedy was a good Catholic.

“Did you hear me?” Isabella said.

“Sí, señora.”

“Not the records, Maria …the radio. I want to hear the radio. It’s noon, and they play the marimba at noon time. I want to hear it the way papa used to. Do you remember, Maria? With a gin and lemonade before lunch.”

“Sí, señora,” the cook, Maria, said. She passed Isabella, moving into the dark hallway with its yellow wallpaper from Belgium, past the room with the infant and Olga. Maria walked on towards the living room, all of them ignoring the sound of the gunfire. She walked to where the big old-fashioned wooden radio sat in the living room.

Isabella heard the sound of the radio suddenly. A BBC reporter’s earnest voice filled the hallway. Isabella had been listening last night, alone, drinking, waiting for her lover, trying to get some news. She had had many lovers since her divorce, but this one was important because he was the first she felt anything for. She was a modern woman and a failed Catholic. Antonio De La Madrid had called this morning and said that he couldn’t come to lunch as planned. There was no reason to ask why. It was the guerrillas; they were everywhere, he told her. He’d seen them on the road below his own plantation house. He didn’t dare leave his mother alone. He was only nineteen, but was the head of the house because his father lived most of the time in New York, where he raced horses. They had hired some American mercenaries and were hoping for the best, he told her.