«Dino’s Hills» Chapter 5

Chapter 5
(The Plaza de España)

By 0500 hours we had reached the river. It was still dark, cold, humid, foggy and miserable. I was wondering what the hell we were doing here so close to the border of another country… one that I also won’t name…and whatever for. But I am not here as a tourist and I certainly didn’t plan the trip, so I just sat there and waited, an explanation would come, eventually.

We had descended from the plateau where the city lay by chopper. We flew north east until we reached a clearance in the jungle. There the chopper touched down and we hopped off. A small white van was waiting and a guy dressed in black waved us to it. It was a very dark night…

We were Sandra, Smokey, Zeno and myself. They were these three guys dressed in black that we did not know. Counting the driver, we were eight. One of them, the one in charge, had a sombre look about him, but was very quiet and soft spoken. He looked to be about fifty, with an athletic build and a reddish beard, he looked sharp with his shaved head and tiny round rimmed glasses. Actually he looked somewhat like an XVIIIth Century poet or philosopher. The other guy looked just like him except for the beard and the glasses. He was also sombre and did not speak, at least not to us, I did see him whispering something to number three.

Then suddenly our bald, bearded leader said, “This country has been suffering the effects of a civil war since 1960…” then his words just trailed off. He did not finish the sentence.

The road was dark, no lights, no houses, no traffic, nothing. I was trying not to doze off but I was losing that battle. There was nothing to see, no one was saying anything, so falling asleep, I concluded, was a viable option, after all no one said we couldn’t.

But then I saw lights up ahead. It looked like a police check-point on the road. Our driver slowed down, shut off the headlamps and stopped about sixty metres, I would say, from the police at the check-point. Smokey asked what we would do.

“Silence,” came the quick reply from red beard.

Two of the guys took out their weapons, HK G3’s. They threw open the doors of the van, hit the deck and began firing on who we thought were the police manning the check-point. Sandra, Zeno, Smokey and myself crouched low, as low as we could inside the van, just in case there was return fire. But there was none.

When they stopped firing the two men got back in the van and the bearded one told the driver to continue, to get the hell out of Dodge and fast.

“Ok, so they know we’ve arrived,” he said looking at me.

“Who?”

“The fucking commies.” Said one of the other guys.

I started wondering who the hell these guys were. When the Colonel called me and I met him at his place in the city, Sandra, Zeno and Smokey were already there. We were told to go to a specific location where we would be flown to our destination. Nothing else was said. When we arrived we met red beard and the other two and all red beard said was get in.

“As I said before, this country is in the middle of a civil war. I know it doesn’t look like that in the capital. And with the police walking around with machine guns and with all the private security guards you see guarding banks and stores, you may think things are calm and under control, but they are not. They’ve been trying to implement communism here since 1960, when Castro took over Cuba. They’ve not given up. This nation’s military is, well, doing as much as they can but they don’t have the hardware to fight these Soviet-trained and Soviet armed bastards.” Red beard looked at me as if he was waiting for a reply, but I really had nothing to say.

“We’re here to lend a hand,” said one of the other two, “do you need to know anything else?”

“No sir,” I said.

“Good, then listen carefully, your assignment has changed, shall we say, a bit. You’re going to join the mariachis at the Plaza de Espana in Z—–.”

“What the…”

“We know you play the guitar and you sing and you speak Spanish,” he looked at me and smiled, the red beard looked like it was on fire…

C.2021, 01 DEC 2021, Francisco Bravo Cabrera, Valencia, Spain