“It is all clear to me,” Anselmo said. “I remember it all. Now I go. Keep thee well covered, ‘Inglés’, when daylight comes.”
“When thou firest,” Robert Jordan said, “take a rest and make very sure. Do not think of it as a man but as a target, ‘de acuerdo?’ Do not shoot at the whole man but at a point. Shoot for the exact center of the belly—if he faces thee. At the middle of the back, if he is looking away. Listen, old one. When I fire if the man is sitting down he will stand up before he runs or crouches. Shoot then. If he is still sitting down shoot. Do not wait. But make sure. Get to within fifty yards. Thou art a hunter. Thou hast no problem.”
“I will do as thou orderest,” Anselmo said.
“Yes. I order it thus,” Robert Jordan said.
I’m glad I remembered to make it an order, he thought. That helps him out. That takes some of the curse off. I hope it does, anyway. Some of it. I had forgotten about what he told me that first day about the killing.
“It is thus I have ordered,” he said. “Now go.”
“‘Me voy’,” said Anselmo. “Until soon, ‘Inglés’.”
“Until soon, old one,” Robert Jordan said.
He remembered his father in the railway station and the wetness of that farewell and he did not say ‘Salud’ nor good-by nor good luck nor anything like that.
“Hast wiped the oil from the bore of thy gun, old one?” he whispered. “So it will not throw wild?”
“In the cave,” Anselmo said. “I cleaned them all with the pullthrough.”
“Then until soon,” Robert Jordan said and the old man went off, noiseless on his rope-soled shoes, swinging wide through the trees.
Robert Jordan lay on the pine-needle floor of the forest and listened to the first stirring in the branches of the pines of the wind that would come with daylight. He took the clip out of the submachine gun and worked the lock back and forth. Then he turned the gun, with the lock open and in the dark he put the muzzle to his lips and blew through the barrel, the metal tasting greasy and oily as his tongue touched the edge of the bore.
He laid the gun across his forearm, the action up so that no pine needles or rubbish could get in it, and shucked all the cartridges out of the clip with his thumb and onto a handkerchief he had spread in front of him. Then, feeling each cartridge in the dark and turning it in his fingers, he pressed and slid them one at a time back into the clip.
Now the clip was heavy again in his hand and he slid it back into the submachine gun and felt it click home. He lay on his belly behind the pine trunk, the gun across his left forearm and watched the point of light below him. Sometimes he could not see it and then he knew that the man in the sentry box had moved in front of the brazier. Robert Jordan lay there and waited for daylight.
42
During the time that Pablo had ridden back from the hills to the cave and the time the band had dropped down to where they had left the horses Andrés had made rapid progress toward Golz’s headquarters. Where they came onto the main highroad to Navacerrada on which the trucks were rolling back from the mountain there was a control. But when Gomez showed the sentry at the control his safe-conduct from the Lieutenant-Colonel Miranda the sentry put the light from a flashlight on it, showed it to the other sentry with him, then handed it back and saluted.
“‘Siga’,” he said. “Continue. But without lights.”
The motorcycle roared again and Andrés was holding tight onto the forward seat and they were moving along the highway, Gomez riding carefully in the traffic. None of the trucks had lights and they were moving down the road in a long convoy. There were loaded trucks moving up the road too, and all of them raised a dust that Andrés could not see in that dark but could only feel as a cloud that blew in his face and that he could bite between his teeth.
They were close behind the tailboard of a truck now, the motorcycle chugging, then Gomez speeded up and passed it and another, and another, and another with the other trucks roaring and rolling down past them on the left. There was a motorcar behind them now and it blasted into the truck noise and the dust with its klaxon again and again; then flashed on lights that showed the dust like a solid yellow cloud and surged past them in a whining rise of gears and a demanding, threatening, bludgeoning of klaxoning.
Then ahead all the trucks were stopped and riding on, working his way ahead past ambulances, staff cars, an armored car, another, and a third, all halted, like heavy, metal, gun-jutting turtles in the hot yet settled dust, they found another control where there had been a smash-up. A truck, halting, had not been seen by the truck which followed it and the following truck had run into it smashing the rear of the first truck in and scattering cases of small-arms ammunition over the road.
One case had burst open on landing and as Gomez and Andrés stopped and wheeled the motorcycle forward through the stalled vehicles to show their safe-conduct at the control Andrés walked over the brass hulls of the thousand of cartridges scattered across the road in the dust. The second truck had its radiator completely smashed in. The truck behind it was touching its tail gate. A hundred more were piling up behind and an overbooted officer was running back along the road shouting to the drivers to back so that the smashed truck could be gotten off the road.
There were too many trucks for them to be able to back unless the officer reached the end of the ever mounting line and stopped it from increasing and Andrés saw him running, stumbling, with his flashlight, shouting and cursing and, in the dark, the trucks kept coming up.
The man at the control would not give the safe-conduct back. There were two of them, with rifles slung on their backs and flashlights in their hands and they were shouting too. The one carrying the safe-conduct in his hand crossed the road to a truck going in the downhill direction to tell it to proceed to the next control and tell them there to hold all trucks until his jam was straightened out. The truck driver listened and went on. Then, still holding the safeconduct, the control patrol came over, shouting, to the truck driver whose load was spilled.
“Leave it and get ahead for the love of God so we can clear this!” he shouted at the driver.
“My transmission is smashed,” the driver, who was bent over by the rear of his truck, said.
“Obscene your transmission. Go ahead, I say.”
“They do not go ahead when the differential is smashed,” the driver told him and bent down again.
“Get thyself pulled then, get ahead so that we can get this other obscenity off the road.”
The driver looked at him sullenly as the control man shone the electric torch on the smashed rear of the truck.
“Get ahead. Get ahead,” the man shouted, still holding the safeconduct pass in his hand.
“And my paper,” Gomez spoke to him. “My safe-conduct. We are in a hurry.”
“Take thy safe-conduct to hell,” the man said and handing it to him ran across the road to halt a down-coming truck.
“Turn thyself at the crossroads and put thyself in position to pull this wreck forward,” he said to the driver.
“My orders are—”
“Obscenity thy orders. Do as I say.”
The driver let his truck into gear and rolled straight ahead down the road and was gone in the dust.
As Gomez started the motorcycle ahead onto the now clear right-hand side of the road past the wrecked truck, Andrés, holding tight again, saw the control guard halting another truck and the driver leaning from the cab and listening to him.
Now they went fast, swooping along the road that mounted steadily toward the mountain. All forward traffic had been stalled at the control and there were only the descending trucks passing, passing and passing on their left as the motorcycle climbed fast and steadily now until it began to overtake the mounting traffic which had gone on ahead before the disaster at the control.
Still without lights they passed four more armored cars, then a long line of trucks loaded with troops. The troops were silent in the dark and at first Andrés only felt their presence rising above him, bulking above the truck bodies through the dust as they passed. Then another staff came behind them blasting with its klaxon and flicking its lights off and on, and each time the lights shone Andrés saw the troops, steel-helmeted, their rifles vertical, their machine guns pointed up against the dark sky, etched sharp against the night that they dropped into when the light flicked off.
Once as he passed close to a troop truck and the lights flashed he saw their faces fixed and sad in the sudden light. In their steel helmets, riding in the trucks in the dark toward something that they only knew was an attack, their faces were drawn with each man’s own problem in
