Authors: Jim Case
Cody flung the combat knife with his right hand and went into a forward diving roll into that room in the same motion even
as the big blade whistled across the length of the room to bury itself in the young soldier’s heart, driving him backward
against the blackboard, a look of shock and pain frozen into a death rictus across his boyish features. Then his body pitched
forward like a falling piece of timber behind the desk.
Cody came out of his roll in a kneeling crouch, whipping his M-16 in a wide circle to take in the sight of the four nuns where
they sat along the floor against the wall to his left—and the soldier who had been sitting half-awake across from them, against
a connecting wall, who now tried to leap to his feet. He went right back down under the force of Cody, who launched himself
upon this sentry, bearing the guy down to the wooden floor beneath him, bringing the wire garrote from his belt in a two-handed
wrapping around of the soldier’s throat. Cody placed a knee on the man’s chest and began to strangle him to death.
The soldier realized what was happening and hammered frantic survival blows that rained ineffectually upon Cody’s unflinching
chest and face.
The nuns became aware of what was happening, too, even if this rude awakening and the shock of sudden death before their eyes
left them time to grasp nothing else.
Cody heard whimpers of dismay and a plea to stop from that direction, but he did not stop, knowing he had no other choice,
given the odds against them getting out of here alive if his presence was detected. But he made it fast as he could; one savage
jerk broke the soldier’s neck with a dry snap, and the struggle ended.
He let the dead body rest and rewound the garrote, replacing it on his belt, turning from what he had done. He retrieved his
knife, then glanced out the window to see that the small sounds which had seemed so loud in here, two men dying, had not been
loud enough to be heard by those across the way. Then he turned for the first time to face the nuns, four women in their twenties.
Two of the Sisters could not take their eyes from the corpse of the strangled man.
The body made flatulent sounds as gas escaped. The dead man’s face, twisted toward the ceiling, was purple in the glow of
the kerosene lamp. His tongue protruded like an obscene, rotting sausage.
Cody ignored the look in the eyes of the one Sister who stared at him. He rushed over to the back door, motioning for the
four to follow.
“Get a move on, Sisters. We don’t have a hell of a lot of time.”
The one who had been staring at him asked, with a nod to the two dead men, “Was…that absolutely necessary?”
“Sister Mary Francine?” he asked her, recalling the name Gorman had given him of the nun who led this pack and worked most
closely with the antirevolutionary forces.
She nodded. “Yes, I’m Sister Mary Francine, but—”
“No buts or we’re all dead. I came here for you.”
This time she nodded briskly, a new look in her eyes.
“You’re right.” She turned to the other three, who were now paying somewhat more attention to this man who had brought death
into their midst. “Come, we must leave here,” she instructed them. “We have no choice, if we are to continue our work.”
The other three nodded, following their leader. The four of them filed past Cody, out of the door and into the darkness, all
of them avoiding glancing his way, as if they ultimately understood the necessity of what he had done but could not look with
thanks into the eyes of the one who had cold-bloodedly murdered two youngsters.
Cody knew how they felt.
He started out after them when the front door of the classroom building opened inward at the opposite end of the spacious
room.
The government soldier who had been working the field stove across the compound filled that doorway and started to speak something
to the two men he expected to find in here. When he saw their corpses, which took all of about three seconds, he also spotted
Cody and the nuns heading through the opposite doorway.
The soldier blurted something loudly even as he grabbed for his holstered sidearm.
Cody had no choice. He pulled off a three-round burst from the M-16, the assault rifle bucking in his grip, ejecting smoking
spent shell casings, stabbing hot smoke and fire across the length of the room, the pounding reports, almost deafening, reverberating
in the confines of the small building.
The soldier went into a spasming death-jig backward out through the doorway and into the courtyard, his ruptured back belching
out blood and destroyed flesh as he took all three heavy projectiles across the upper chest.
Cody spun from that sight to join the nuns out back of the building, where they huddled in a group, watching him with staring
eyes wide with apprehension and horror. He moved around them.
“This way,” he urged.
They followed with alacrity.
He reached the corner of the classroom structure and peered around the corner at the living-quarters building across the courtyard.
Shouts and a sense of movement rippled through the half-light from over there.
The ridges and undulating terrain of the surrounding mountains were etched in stark relief against the warming horizon to
the east, a dreamy half-light illuminating the mission in these final moments before dawn.
It was seventy feet or so to the front gate, by Cody’s estimation. They would have to try for it. He hoped Lopez had the good
sense to have his men cranking up those vehicles out there for a fast getaway now that this had blown to shit, but he could
not hear any engine sounds outside the mission walls.
The tightening intensified in his gut; he expected something was about to go real wrong.
He blocked that thought, hurling himself away from his cover before anyone could show himself from the building across the
way. He motioned for Sister Mary Francine and the other young missionaries to rush along after him, which they did.
He turned to them.
“There are people waiting outside the gate,” he urged. “Hurry!”
Sister Mary Francine eyed him with new concern.
“What about you?”
He liked her for that. She was a fighter.
Two soldiers appeared on the run from the building across the way, gripping assault rifles, galloping toward the classroom
building, not yet spotting Cody and the nuns because of the angle and the dawning half-light.
“I’m right behind you,” Cody grunted to the nuns. “Just a couple of things to take care of. Now go!”
The head Sister followed his instructions, indicating for the other three to rush along with her toward the archway.
They had made it halfway there when their movement caught the attention of the two soldiers who had almost reached the front
of the classroom building and the dead soldier sprawled there.
Cody had hoped to hold off on the fireworks until the Sisters had made it clear of the courtyard, then possibly withdraw himself
without detection.
That changed when one of the soldiers yelled to the other and they both swung their weapons around toward the nuns, who did
make it to and through the arched entrance to the mission courtyard.
The soldier to Cody’s left triggered off a burst from his AK-47 that sent a line of ricocheting projectiles whining off the
wall right beside the archway and just after the nuns had passed through it.
The soldier to Cody’s right aimed at Cody.
Cody triggered a wide figure-eight burst intended to take out both of these goons of the state, but the one on the right saw
it coming and leaped sideways.
The soldier who had been firing on the nuns started to readjust his line of fire toward Cody but a half-dozen of Cody’s projectiles
slammed the guy and sent him quivering into a backfall, haloed in a crimson spray.
The other soldier got Cody in his sights and fired, but Cody saw it coming with an eyeblink of time to pitch himself to the
ground. The hail of bullets slashed the air where he had been standing an instant earlier.
He supported his aim with both of his elbows to the ground and pulled off a burst that melded with the clatter of the AK.
The soldier was lifted backward off his feet, as if pushed by some giant invisible hand under the impact of the slugs that
pierced and stitched his chest. The guy was a corpse before he hit the ground, but his dead finger remained curled around
his rifle’s trigger for the few seconds it took him to topple, spraying bullets into the sky.
Cody rolled onto his side, spotting the movement of two figures appearing in the front door of the living-quarters building.
The Sandinista officers who saw Cody and what he had done leaped back inside, hurried along by the noisy burst Cody flung
after them, and a moment later both officers knocked out the glass of windows flanking either side of the door to commence
firing at where Cody had been. But by that time Cody had scuttled away from the center of the small courtyard and gained the
side of the building from which the two Nicaraguan officers were hosing down the courtyard with steady streams of automatic
fire, fire that crackled like surreal strobelights in the lifting gloom.
He slinked around the corner of the building and started edging along its face even as the rifle muzzles spat death from the
two busted-out windows, the army officers unable to see Cody. He kept himself against the wall and eased in inch by inch toward
the window nearest him, reaching across his chest to pluck one of his grenades off his webbing.
He wondered where the hell Lopez and his bunch were, now that he could use some backup.
Just as he got to within two feet of the nearest window, the twin streams of auto-fire from inside the building ceased. The
officers must have decided to reload, or were trying to get a bearing on what they were firing at, or both.
He kept his right index finger curled around the M-16’s trigger. He lifted the grenade with his left hand and clamped his
teeth about the grenade’s pin, biting the damn thing free, drawing his arm back for a backhanded pitch through the window.
At that moment, a woman screamed from outside the wall of the mission.
The the sound was swallowed up by the angry chatter of several yammering automatic weapons.
Cody lobbed the grenade in through the shattered window and pulled back.
A thunderclap detonated inside the building, throwing the remaining glass from the window along with chunks of wood and one
of the Sandinista officers who had pitched out partway through the nearest window, the back of his head a bubbly murk like
warm strawberry jelly.
The door burst open again and the other officer reeled out in a cloud of billowing smoke from inside, stunned, injured, trying
to get his bearings.
Cody heard the machine-gun fire from outside the mission taper off to nothing. He fed this goon a head shot that burst the
guy’s skull into a million bloody bits like an exploding melon; then he whirled and rushed for the archway, slapping a fresh
magazine into the M-16.
He hoofed to a stop just short of the archway, pausing to ease one eye and the snout of his rifle around the corner for a
look-see, not knowing what to expect, thinking that possibly some additional Sandinista troops had closed in on the contras
and—
It wasn’t that.
It was a scene from Hell.
It had been less than twenty seconds since the gunfire from outside the walls had ceased. Gunsmoke hung heavy in the air like
a cloud.
The first soft rays of the new day revealed Enrique Lopez and his four contras standing to one side of one of the Soviet Jeep-like
vehicles, the men all in the process of plunking fresh clips into their rifles, and none of the men were looking away from
the gut-wrenching sight of what they had obviously just done.
The four nuns must have been instructed to hurriedly board one of the vehicles
Then Lopez had ordered his men to open fire at point-blank range.
Three of the women had been tossed into wretched positions of sudden, violent death upon the floor of the open vehicle, which
was pockmarked with dozens of bullet indentations and the blood of the dead women who had been literally chopped into stringy,
gory pieces by the close-in barrage of automatic fire.
Sister Mary Francine had been tossed bodily out of the far side of the Jeep by the impact of the bullets, her corpse a gruesome
ruin that palpitated like the others in the throes of postdeath tremors.
The horrible, overly sweet stink of violent death wafted through the air like a tangible thing.
Cody had trouble believing his eyes, but he gave none of that away.
He had long ago lost count of the dead bodies he had seen; of the horrors he had witnessed, and perpetrated. It kept him up
nights if he thought too much about it, but he did not lose his head in its presence.
He crossed over to where the contras had fallen in loosely behind Lopez, who regarded Cody as if nothing in the world was
wrong. Lopez tossed a glance over Cody’s shoulder, through the archway.
“All I have been told about the great John Cody in action is true, it would seem,
Senor.
There were…no survivors?”
Cody answered with one last, long look at the destroyed, ghastly remains of what, less than a minute ago, had been four living,
breathing, vital human beings, then he looked back at Lopez.
“No survivors.”
The contra discerned something in his eyes.
“You did know what was to happen, did you not,
Senor”?
I thought Gorman—”
“Let’s get back to Gorman,” said Cody.
Lopez nodded to that with a grin that was half nerves, half relief.
“In any event,
Senor,
you helped us much, the way you handled those Sandinista swine. It is for the good of our cause, after all.”
“Let’s get back to Gorman.”
Cody turned from the sight and trudged off, back across the clearing, toward the tree line, the way they had come.
He did not look back.
* * *
It was daylight when he and the five contras reached the waiting van.