The Viper Squad Read Online Free Page B

the trailer park created in the Arizona desert. Mike was a solitary man
     in so many ways, he could live right next to folks and not be much affected by them. He might have been happier living in
     some tumbledown rancho on a lonely mesa, but his woman, Tina, was having none of that. She needed company, running water,
     electricity. Trailer park or mesa, it mattered little to Mike much of the time. It had mattered today. He wanted to be alone,
     so he had gone to the canyons. And almost not come back. Which made coming back now very satisfying.
    He left the pickup at one end of his mobile home and climbed out, stiff and tired. A retired couple looked at him from their
     aluminum lawn chairs, the kind that fold. They usually chose not to speak to him, and they did not do so now.
    “He’s covered with dirt,” the woman observed.
    “I can see that, dear,” her husband replied.
    “Probably been on a drunk for days and lying in a gutter somewhere.”
    “I saw him leave first thing this morning, dear. He looked all right then.”
    The woman nodded as if this information just confirmed her worst suspicions. “He’s been crawling across the border, bringing
     in illegal aliens. Or more likely running drugs.”
    “To me he looks like he might just have been running,” the man said.
    “Phil, don’t take his part in this.”
    “You were pleased enough to be living close to him when those bikers caused that trouble, dear.”
    “Even those lowlifes knew enough to steer clear of him.” That was her final word on the subject.
    Mike overheard fragments of the conversation because working with heavy machinery in the car plants for years had made Phil
     a little deaf and the woman was accustomed to talking loudly with him. Tina had told Mike often about how his actions were
     an important part of the camp soap opera that filled in the days for the retired couple. Of particular interest to them was
     his source of income. “A man of invisible means,” Phil’s wife liked to intone mysteriously; and she never tired of putting
     indirect questions to Tina about him, with transparent hints at mob connections and whatever illegal activity Dan Rather had
     most recently spotlighted on the evening news. The only time Tina had become upset with her was when the old dear developed
     an obsession that Mike was stealing babies in Mexico for an illegal adoption ring in the States. It hadbeen a TV special, and she was sure she recognized Mike in one of the shots.
    Truth to tell, Mike’s doings were both tamer and wilder than the old girl ever imagined. He had been a career officer in the
     Special Forces and had done back-to-back tours in Vietnam. He had been a colonel, already famous as a leader of special missions
     and search-and-destroy forays all over Southeast Asia, when he quit the Green Berets in disgust at the fall of Saigon. He
     had wanted to go back in and do it all over again, but this time the soldiers’ way instead of the politicians’. Instead he
     was told to stay quiet and keep his buttons shiny. So he quit.
    He thought he had seen every fuckup that politicians could manage while he was in Nam, but he found a whole new nest of spineless
     wonders when he went as a mercenary to Angola. After that he had been in Rhodesia, then Namibia, in and out of Central and
     South America, the Middle East, back to Asia. Over the years Mike built himself a rep as a merc to match his legend as a Green
     Beret colonel. As always, his concern was to keep away from publicity—to strike and be gone before the dust settled and people
     began wondering what had happened.
    Mike waved wearily to the old couple decaying in their garden furniture on their miniature lawn in the desert, among the Michigan
     shrubs and flowers they forced to stay alive in this alien soil. The ground in front of Mike’s trailer ran to sand, cholla
     and lizards. Tina had picked up the empty beer cans.
    Tina was fussing with something in the kitchen and barely