Authors: Season of the Machete
Tossing aside that report, Hill looked back at a yellow legal pad where he’d been free-associating about the Roses. He looked at a black folder marked “Secret—Sensitive.” Then back at the legal pad. It was 5:00
A.M
., and Hill hadn’t slept since six the previous morning.
At the top of the yellow, blue-lined sheet,’ ‘Carrie & Damian Rose” was centered and underlined in red. The rest of the paper was covered with neat black handwriting in orderly columns. Ideas, phrases, names, reminders … fourteen items.
1. Tall. Blond. English-looking. Has shopped at Harrods.
2. St. Louis Hotel in Paris … Nickie Handy shot by woman in nearby bistro. Carrie? … Handy used by Campbell (1972). Coincidence?
3. Carrie: fair-haired; supposed to be a stunner; tall … beware! Don’t be a chauvinist, shithead! Carrie is as dangerous as Damian.
4. Husband and wife squabbles … absolutely…. So What?
5. Dr. Meral Johnson. Street-smart. Useful? How best?
6. Peter Macdonald should be found today. Cajoled. Useful!!!!
7. Marines from South America. Colonel Fescoe. Hindrance!!
8. Prop planes going out at night. Marijuana to New Orleans. Shoot down? Shoot down.
9. Coast Guard can blockade island effectively…. Search private craft especially…. Would Goldman help Roses escape? Think so….
10. Can’t let Joseph Walthey go crazy executing Dred’s people. This is important.*****
11. Why Damian Rose phone calls to Campbell? Important!
12. Clue in their organized disorganization also. Important! … Stu Leedman coming from L.A…. Czech: killing team on Rose’s level on loan from Interpol. Hindrance!!
13. Lucky 13! Damian probably a psycho.
14. Pattern suggests bigger plays to come. Antipattern suggests no further plays…. Operative word is “play.” Have to learn to “play,” or lose this one in grand style.********
Harold Hill got up and paced around the large oak-and-brass embassy office. VIP office: like presidential suite at famous hotels. Private bath, breakfast nook. The nuts!
There was no way the Roses were going to get off San Dominica, he considered.
No, there was a way, plenty of ways—but Hill was trying to convince himself that Damian Rose had programmed himself to make a mistake before he took one of them…. The telephone calls to Brooks Campbell. Those were the key. Crank calls!
Harold Hill didn’t have very much to go on— but he did have something: Damian Rose was a tall, blond, English-looking megalomaniac. With luck he could be had.
Hill finally put his cream suit jacket over his arm and walked out of the big, cool embassy mansion. He believed that he’d made a beginning, at least. A good night’s work.
A big red sun was just coming over the green hills that rose high over the perfect little city and the sea. It was a loud sun that would eventually give Hill a headache that day.
Two badly trained soldiers stood out by the front gates, laughing and poking at each other. They reminded Hill how little the people of these countries ever got involved in the realities of their situation.
As he passed by the soldiers, Hill tipped his Panama hat and smiled. As he did so, he automatically thought of the famous poster mocking Richard Nixon.
Why is this man smiling?
the poster read. Why indeed?
If everything went as Damian expected it to, we were to meet at the Hilton Hotel in Morocco on or around May 12. If not, not.
The Rose Diary
Cap Foyle, San Dominica
At a quarter past five on May 8, an old James Taylor song was blasting in Peter’s head—“Sweet Baby James.” He was also being mesmerized by the sight of twenty black soldiers guarding the remains of the bus from Elizabeth’s Fancy.
The young American watched the quiet, terrible scene for ten or fifteen minutes, planted it forever in his war atrocities file, then left to forage around for something to eat.
For some disconnected reason, he had the Super Six on his mind: Neddy, Huey, Deli Bob, Bernie, Tailspin Tommy. And little Pete—Little Mac. As he rode away from the ambushed bus, Peter couldn’t help thinking that in his humble opinion, he was way, Way out of his league right now. Even in Special Forces they didn’t prepare you for this kind of miserable shit.
At about that same time, Damian Rose pinched a blue mite off the sleeve of a pale sand overshirt.
At’5:30
A.M
. he stood tall and wide awake inside a phone booth in the neolithic farming village of Cap Foyle. Rose asked for number twenty-six and waited for his connection.
Two sleepy Cap Foyle residents, an old man and a girl, were already pushing skeletal bicycles along the town’s dusty streets. Two cross streets down from them was the sharp green Caribbean.
“Hello … I say hello—”
Damian cut off Brooks Campbell by shouting at the sleepy-sounding man—screaming at the top of his lungs into the telephone.
“you only have eight hours, asshole!
Eight hours to decide to stop chasing us. To live up to your side of the contract…. If you’re looking for us by midnight tonight, I guarantee both you and Hill will be sorrier than you can dream. I guarantee it! You have until midnight to be intelligent for once in your pitiful little grease-stain lives.”
Damian then hung up the phone. The tall blond man walked back to his car, humming a favorite tune—“Lili Marlene.” He was beginning to enjoy his escape plan.
Meanwhile, twelve rather striking-looking men were making their separate ways to San Dominica. They were coming from Miami and New York. From Acapulco, Caracas, San Juan. Each of the twelve was an expensive male model. From the Ford Agency. From Wilhelmina Men. From Stewart and Zoli.
They’d all been hired by Carrie the week before. To pose for brochures for the new Le Pirat Hotel and for the Dragon Reef Condominium Homes. They’d been specially selected off composite and head sheets at rates of $500 plus expenses per day..
The peculiar thing was that all twelve men were between six feet two and six feet four.
All were strikingly blond.
All looked terribly, terribly English.
Part two of the curious adventure had begun. The perfect escape.
Casinos are now being built by all the big motels. The island will have one bad season. Maybe two. Maybe even three. But then it will boom like nothing even they can imagine. The island has four times the area of Nassau and New Providence. It’s twice as beautiful as Jamaica. It should become Monte-Carlo West.
The Rose Diary
These days it is fashionable to be against the Americans. It is my hope to be in the vanguard of a countermovement, which, I suspect, could be equally fashionable one day. That is—to be for the Americans.
Joseph Walthey
Coastown san Dominica
Tuesday Afternoon.
While all this was going on, Brooks Campbell sat hunched over a steaming pot of very strong, very good Blue Mountain coffee from Jamaica. During the morning and early afternoon of May 8, the young CIA man made person-to-person, heart-to-heart telephone calls to some of the best homicide men in the world.
In the big office next door, Harold Hill was doing much the same thing on a slightly larger scale.
Calls went out to Mr. Alexander Somerset, the commissioner of crime at Scotland Yard; to Edward Mahoney in the Office of Domestic Intelligence in Washington; to the Assassination Bureau in Paris. Calls went to the biggest crime men in West Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada….
The subject was top priority and very confidential, the conversations made clear:
“A very large, very private manhunt is now being conducted throughout the Caribbean and South America. The objects of the hunt are two slithery white soldiers of fortune who have taught a ragtag band of guerrillas how to fight and think like Mau-Maus, the PLO, and the Japanese army. Who have, among other things, massacred forty-nine civilians on board a bus. The names are Damian and Carrie Rose.”
The slip-catch was that the United States was handling the search like a top-secret, national security matter. The clear implication: Somebody had goofed again in the Caribbean.
The exact nature of the mistake remained a secret. A top secret.
Before it was over, though, some wisenheimer at Interpol had nicknamed the operation Bay of Pigs II. By Sunday that slogan was a headline in London’s
Observer.
Beginning unofficially at 6:00
P.M
. on May 8, officially at 9:00
A.M
. on the ninth, a straight-faced, very serious attempt was made to take the eighty-one-by-thirty-nine-mile island of San Dominica, turn it upside down, and shake, shake, shake it like a child’s piggy bank.
The long-shot hope was that both Roses and Peter Macdonald would tumble out into the waiting arms of Brooks Campbell and Harold Hill.
Beginning at nine, government sound trucks began to rumble through major cities and the surrounding countryside. These trucks broadcast the politest lilting-voiced descriptions of a tall, blond, English-looking man; of a young American man, Peter Macdonald.
Meanwhile CCF soldiers and U.S. Marines from Georgia and Florida searched the beaches, the grasslands, even the island’s large, steamy rain forest: West Hills. An exhaustive house-by-house, hotel-by-hotel search was begun in the cities of Coastown, Port Gerry, and Cape John.
Also, every country represented on the Elizar beth’s Fancy bus sent some kind of special help: Germany; the United States; England; Canada; France; Israel; Trinidad; Jamaica; Argentina; Texas. Ballistics, riot, and interrogation experts were hurried in from New York and Washington. More federal marshals were flown in to help keep order in the cities. Headhunters, including a special team called’ ‘Czech”—came from as far away as Eastern Europe. Bounties totaling more than $150,000 were set.
Learning that “an English-looking man” was being sought, a small group was set up at Interpol’s Secretariat in St. Cloud, France. Information on known gunrunners and mercenaries was collated and sent out from Interpol’s Criminal Records Department. Extensive checks were made on the dead men, Kingnsh Toone and the Cuban, Blinkie Tomas.
Through all of this, Campbell and Harold Hill’s “lead” on the Roses was never once questioned. Even the bitterest of police-world cynics wouldn’t speculate and couldn’t come up with what had actually happened in the Caribbean.
By early night of the first day, the hunt had turned up eight tall blond men. Two-thirds of the twelve.
Looking in on the eight—all blond, all handsome as hell, all between six feet two and six feet four— Federal Marshal Stuart Leedman of Los Angeles got the feeling that somebody wasn’t telling him everything he needed to know about this grisly case. Something was as fishy as San Diego Sea World, Stu Leedman was thinking.
“Now what do you do for a living?” he asked Antoine Coffey, a wispy blond who had listed his address as the World of Free Spirits.
The blond model seemed confused by the question. “A living?”
“Yeah,” Stu Leedman said. “What do you do for money, Antoine? How do you pay the rent? Get money to go to the movies?”
Coffey smiled suddenly. “Oh,
that”
he whispered. “Thhodomy, you mean.”
Marshal Stuart Leedman stood up in the quiet examination room and screamed at the open door.
“Who ordered in all these blond faggots?” His voice carried up and down the serene, dignified hallway of the U.S. embassy. “What the
fuck, Jesus Christ, shit
is going on around this pisshole?”
It was every bit as maddening and confusing as the machete murders themselves. More so, because it came on top of them … which was exactly the way Damian wanted it.
Port Gerry, San Dominica
Tuesday Evening.
His nose pressed against the cool green glass of the number 9 bus window, Peter watched a row of flowered shirts drift by on Station Street. Stranger in Paradise, he thought.
He saw pink-and-purple shirts like the Spanish in big cities always wore. Leather mushroom caps and tiny fedoras. Black wraparound sunglasses. San Dominican country boys trying to look like the Tonton Macoutes.
People seemed to be forever waiting for buses around San Dominica, Peter had begun to notice. The Elizabeth’s Fancy bus massacre was mind-blowing when you thought about it like that. It was like attacking an interstate highway in the United States. Severing a main artery.
Black women in homemade dresses and sandals were pressed up closer to the station. A nest of young conchie girls. “Queen bees,” they called them around Coastown.
As the number 9 bus started to brake, Macdonald put his hand on the Colt .44 under his shirt. His heart started to thump…. Peter had begun to imagine the tall blond man waiting around every corner, behind every palm tree. Like some slick, handsome bogeyman. Waiting just for him….
The bus station was a wooden shack covered with antique beer and Coke signs worth more than the building itself. Stopping in front, the number 9 bucked and shivered like an old belly dancer. All the people and livestock being transported inside woke up suddenly. Chickens squawked and flapped red-and-white wings like fans. A goat started kicking the seats, and an old black man started kicking the goat.
“Ay maum in dat blue dress!” a Rude Boy shouted out a bus window.
There was a loud
whooshing
of steaming hot air, and the driver said something Macdonald couldn’t follow. People started walking off the bus, though, and Peter guessed that he was there.
This hole-in-the-wall must be the summer capital of Port Gerry.
Eating a thirty-cent meat pie from the station canteen, Peter climbed a dark street with no sidewalks. With dreary two- and three-story limestone buildings on either side.
The pie smelted like bad breath, the street smelted like human sweat. Peter’s body felt as if it would collapse pretty soon…. The last time he remembered feeling so bad was when he’d had dysentery in Thailand.