Goodbye Mexico Read online

  GOODBYE MEXICO

  Jack Armstrong and Gerard Finnegan Gearheardt return in Phillip Jennings’ uproarious new novel

  Wall Street Heat

  Available June 2018

  Also by Phillip Jennings

  The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War

  GOODBYE MEXICO

  A NOVEL BY

  PHILLIP JENNINGS

  Copyright © 2007 by Phillip Jennings

  This edition published by Regnery Publishing in 2017. Originally published in hardcover by Forge in 2007.

  Sample chapter from Wall Street Heat copyright © 2018 by Phillip Jennings.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, website, or broadcast.

  Regnery Fiction™ is a trademark of Salem Communications Holding Corporation; Regnery® is a registered trademark of Salem Communications Holding Corporation

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file with the Library of Congress

  ISBN 978-1-62157-701-0

  eISBN 978-1-62157-720-1

  Published in the United States by

  Regnery Fiction

  An imprint of Regnery Publishing

  A Division of Salem Media Group

  300 New Jersey Ave NW

  Washington, DC 20001

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  Distributed to the trade by

  Perseus Distribution

  www.perseusdistribution.com

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER UNO – SOUTH OF THE BORDER, BUT NORTH OF PANAMA

  CHAPTER THE DOS – EXPLODING CHIHUAHUAS

  CHAPTER TRES – THE ROCKET SCIENTIST’S IDIOT BROTHER

  THE HECK WITH IT—CHAPTER FOUR – AND A DOZEN DEFECTO PERFECTOS

  CHAPTER FIVE – GEARHEARDT BECOMES SANE; WORLD HOLDS BREATH

  CHAPTER SIX – IS THIS A BREAST I SEE BEFORE ME?

  CHAPTER SEVEN – NO SHIRT, NO PANTS, NO MARTA

  CHAPTER OCHO—BECAUSE I LIKE OCHO – WHOSE HAND IS THIS I’M BITING?

  CHAPTER NINE – FOR THE LOVE OF MARTA

  CHAPTER TEN – BEARDING THE LIZARD

  CHAPTER ELEVEN – IN THE HOUSE OF EMPEROR GEARHEARDT

  CHAPTER TWELVE – ON THE TRAIL OF THE TAIL-LESS BURRO

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN – BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A CRENSHAW

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN – WHY DOESN’T CONFUSION MEAN ‘WITH FUSION’ IN MEXICO? SO I GUESS WE WOULD NOW BE UNFUSIONED

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN – GEARHEARDT THE HUMANITARIAN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN – PYGMY DOWN YONDER

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN – DAISY SAY SHE GOT THE WHOLE WORLD BY THE BALLS

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN – TO ASS* OR NOT TO ASS, THAT IS THE QUESTION

  CHAPTER NINETEEN – IF GEARHEARDT WERE POPE, WE’D ALL GET TO WEAR FUNNY HATS

  CHAPTER TWENTY – I’LL BE DOWN TO GET YOU IN A TAXI, HONEY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE – THE LULL BEFORE THE P***ING CONTEST

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO – HIGH LATE MORNING

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE – A DESIGN FLAW IN THE DE-NUTTERS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR – THE ROAD TO HEAVEN IS PAVED WITH GEARHEARDT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE – IS THIS THE LAST OF GEARHEARDT?

  CHAPTER UNO

  SOUTH OF THE BORDER, BUT NORTH OF PANAMA

  Gearheardt looked damned good for a dead man. Same silly grin. Same low slouch in the chair. His left foot, sockless in his penny loafer, rested on the corner of my desk and balanced him as he leaned on the two back legs of the Government Issue, standard low-level embassy employee furniture. His cigarette ash landed lightly on my inexpensive carpet, a gift from one of my Mexican assets, as he waved his arms demonstratively with his story.

  “So the Nungs dragged me out, probably so they could eat fresh-cooked meat, but unfortunately for them I was alive.” Gearheardt spread his arms, illustrating the point that he was living.

  He had walked into my office in the embassy, pulled a chair up to my desk and said, “Jack, you look like a damn bureaucrat. Never thought I’d see the day.”

  I have to admit that after the shock I shed tears of joy, whooping and disturbing the embassy folks, most of whom already did not like me. (No one in the embassy liked the guys who were spooks, assuming that the CIA was busily working against the very programs the State Department was pushing. They were mostly right.) But Gearheardt—alive! It was a miracle. Unless you knew Gearheardt.

  My first reaction was to call my mother back in Kansas. She had always loved Gearheardt (did that put her in the class of bar-women around the world who also loved Gearheardt?). She had the completely unrealistic notion that Gearheardt ‘protected’ me as my best friend. But I knew that she would be thrilled. When I left home after a visit, departing to the hell-spots the Marines sent me, she would say “I just hope that Gearheardt will protect you. Bless his soul.”

  He had last been seen, or so I thought, in the middle of a pile of flaming helicopter in the Laotian jungle near the Mu Gia pass. His Air America mission had been to pick up a group of Chinese mercenaries, Nungs, who had been causing mischief on our behalf along the Ho Chi Minh trail. Letting down into the zone, Gearheardt had taken a dead-on burst from a fifty caliber and cart-wheeled in flames. The Nungs on the ground radioed there were no survivors. Three days later I held his memorial in The White Rose, our favorite Vientiane nightclub, slept with his girlfriend to comfort us both, and, not long after, left Southeast Asia. That was 1969. Now it was 1973 and the dead-man was sitting in front of me. My best friend alive and all in one piece. “You survived that fireball without a scratch?”

  “Actually if you look close, these aren’t my ears. I’ll tell you about that later. I’m thirsty, Jack. Let’s hit a cantina.”

  Gearheardt left the embassy the way he left most places when I had known him before; as if the entire staff was already mourning his departure. He spoke to all of the secretaries and the people who appeared from their offices—although he couldn’t have known any of them.

  Gearheardt had been presumed dead for years. After I left Asia, I had hounded the CIA to let me join the Agency partly, in some way, to continue working with his memory. They had only reluctantly let me join their ranks (The ‘cover’ that Air America was an independent airline might have been breached if I left it and immediately showed up as an agent, they thought). After brief training and a rapid language course, I ended up in Mexico.

  The Marine at the front desk jumped to attention as we approached the exit.

  “Sign Mr. Armstrong and me out, corporal,” Gearheardt said, brightly. “And tell Gunnery Sergeant Wolfe I’ll take him up on his offer next time.” He winked at the grinning Marine and strode out into the afternoon Mexican sunlight.

  I caught up with him after checking to see that the Marine actually signed the two of us out. Gearheardt’s name was not on the log. Only a Pepe Woozley had signed in for admission to my floor.

  “Gearheardt,” I said, “You just got here this afternoon. What’s all this with the Gunny? And who in the hell is Woozley?”

  “The guy I thought I was when I was in Angola, Jack.” He paused to let me exi
t the embassy gate before him. “You ask a lot of questions for a spook.” He joined me and we began walking down the street. The passing Mexicans smiled at Gearheardt, who smiled back. They had always ignored me.

  “Knock off the spook stuff, Gearheardt. I’m here as the embassy’s economic development officer.” I put my arm around his shoulders as we walked down the crowded avenue. I was so damn glad to see him. “You are one rotten bastard, you know,” I said to him. “I had no idea you were alive.”

  Gearheardt laughed. “When the Company disappears you, Jack, no one is supposed to know you’re alive. I’ve had to convince my mother I was writing her from beyond the grave. She was easier to fool than the IRS, by the way. But that’s the price we pay for eternal virginitis, Jack. We’re spooks for our country.”

  “What the hell is virginitis, Gearheardt?” I asked before I remembered he always threw in nonsense words to take your mind off of the fact that the rest of his explanation made no sense. It had worked on me again. But I didn’t care. I was glad to see him. We had almost stopped the Vietnam War together and you get close to a guy when that kind of pressure is on you. We would have stopped the Vietnam War too, except we’d had no idea of what we were doing.

  We turned into a cantina. A small, bright and cool place where I knew the proprietor was discreet (since he was on my payroll) and the beer and tortillas were cold and hot. Gearheardt headed to the back to use the cuarto de baño, and I ordered beer for us both. I was almost school-girlishly excited at seeing my old friend. My sidekick through the thick and thin of the Vietnam War and Air America in Laos. Although there was a part of me shouting Alert! Alert! Gearheardt in the area! since I had never been with him more than five minutes that he didn’t get us both in scalding water.

  “Vaya con perros, señoritas,” Gearheardt was saying to the two young Mexican women he had managed to meet and get to know in the ten yards between the restroom and our table. He plopped down in the seat opposite me, raised his beer glass in a salute and drained it. “Dos mas, por favor,” he yelled to the bartender. Then he leaned toward me and lowered his voice.

  “I need your help, Jack. I’m taking over Mexico.”

  My heart sank. I knew the grinning bastard was dead serious.

  CHAPTER THE DOS

  EXPLODING CHIHUAHUAS

  Gearheardt was well into the beer before he was half through bringing me up to date on his adventures since he narrowly escaped being a ‘pork roast’ on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Beer was such a natural element for Gearheardt that I assumed he bathed and did his laundry in it. That’s how he got along with beer. He never seemed to get slowly drunk. There would come a time when the next beer or the next became a catalyst and he would go from Gearheardt to raving madman; usually signaled by his taking a pistol from his shoulder holster and scaring the crap out of anyone nearby.

  I watched for that signal now, but he was calm, almost mellow, in his description of his duty for the CIA in Africa. Angola to be exact.

  “They slapped a gallon of Unguentine on me, Jack, and packed me off to help the folks in Angola whip the Cubans. I was the chief helicopter flight instructor for the Angolan air force.” He signaled for more beer, but his hand didn’t move toward the shoulder holster I could see beneath his sport coat.

  “You taught helicopter flying to the Angolans?”

  “I would have except they didn’t have any helicopters. In fact, as far as I could tell they didn’t have an air force. Typical damn CIA screw up. You would think that somebody in Washington would check these things out. How hard could it be to send someone to the airport and see if anything lands or takes off?”

  “So what did you do?” I was genuinely curious. Gearheardt was not known for his veracity in the Agency, but his stories were almost always based in truth.

  “I hung around the capital. Pretty boring to tell the truth. The Portuguese are obviously not going to be able to hang on. It’s their last colony I think. Those guys couldn’t administer a hanging in a one rope town. But guess who I ran into.”

  “Gearheardt, I know no one who has been to Angola, is going to Angola, or who wants to go to Angola. Just tell me who you saw.” I was anxious to get him back on the subject of taking over Mexico.

  “The dreaded Gon Norea.”

  “You’re kidding. The Cuban American British Russian spy? That Gon Norea? The one the Koreans put in a barrel and ruined his back?”

  “That’s the man. Good guy too. We chased women around Luanda til we ran out of the CIA’s living allowance. That guy is a tail hound, Jack. One night we had these three—”

  “Gearheardt, could you just tell me the bare bones of what the hell you were doing in Angola and what it has to do with taking over Mexico? Which, by the way, I am not sure is in the U.S. plans for Mexico. But maybe I missed the memo.”

  The cantina was rocking. A number of the embassy people had stopped in and were using the happy hour prices to drink tequila and bitch about their miserable lives as embassy people. Behind the bar Mr. Chavez caught my eye, pointed to his chest and raised his eyebrows. “You need me for work?” he mouthed.

  I shook my head slightly and he went back to bartending. Mr. Chavez was a reliable source of information on the Halcones (the Mexican Secret Police) and various other Mexican government officials. He owned bars and restaurants near most large embassies and across the street from the government offices. Not only did he pick up information coming from the Mexicans and others, if I wanted to plant information in the government or other embassies, I stationed an agent at a table with a bottle and let him talk to his agent companion. The next morning, the information he was ‘whispering’ was sure to be diffused throughout the various institutions. Mr. Chavez didn’t need the small amount of money I paid him for information and an occasional small favor. He said he was happy to help the Americans because his money was all in American stocks.

  Gearheardt laughed when I told him.

  “You know, Jack, it’s getting harder to find an honest man. The Company had me set up a shop in Luanda selling South African passports—forged of course—so that we could get guys across the border to train with UNITA. Half the damn checks I took in bounced.”

  I looked into Gearheardt’s eyes to see if there was a twinkle of irony, pushing aside the image of African Bushmen writing checks for fake passports. There wasn’t. “That is a sad state of affairs, Gearheardt.” I moved my chair closer to the beer bottle covered table. “Gearheardt, you mentioned something about taking over Mexico. What the hell is that all about? Were you just pulling my chain? You do know that I am acting station chief in Mexico City, don’t you?”

  “Congratulations, Jack. Head of the agency’s men in Mexico and you just a poor economic development officer. My, my, what has the agency come to?”

  I stared at him. He sat, unperturbed, lightly tapping his finger against the beer bottle. He wouldn’t look at me, and that worried me. I trusted Gearheardt implicitly. On the other hand, I had trusted my first dog, Roughhouse, implicitly and he had eaten my sister’s rabbit. Dog’s do what dog’s do. And Gearheardt …

  “You know what I like about Mexico, Jack,” he finally began, “it’s those Chihuahuas you fill with candy and then beat with a stick until they blow open and the candy goes everywhere. That’s good clean fun, Jack.”

  “Piñatas, Gearheardt. Chihuahuas are little dogs.”

  Gearheardt didn’t look up from the table, but he smiled. Then he said, “Jack, I need to tell you some things. But when I tell you, then you’ll have to make some tough choices. You and I have always been honest with each other—”

  “No we haven’t. You have lied about every damn thing you’ve talked me into. Just tell me what this taking over Mexico is all about. If it’s a joke, let’s forget it and go get some tacos and margaritas.”

  Gearheardt got up from the table and pulled a wad of money from his pocket. “Let’s take a walk,” he said, dropping the pesos on the table without counting them.

  I nod
ded at Mr. Chavez and followed Gearheardt out the door. The street was crowded and loud. The Zona Rosa was nearby and I suggested to Gearheardt that we head there for dinner.

  “Let’s walk down to the park, Jack. Chapultepec Park is one of the great strolling parks in the world.” He took off down the street, smiling at the Mexicans scurrying along the crowded sidewalk.

  I caught up with him. “How do you know about Chapultepec Park? I thought you said you had never been to Mexico City before.”

  “I told you I had just arrived in Mexico City. I meant this time.”

  “So you’ve been coming here and not getting in contact with me. What an asshole you are, Gearheardt. Didn’t you know I was at the embassy?”

  Gearheardt looked at the scores of speeding cars screaming by in front of us. He stepped into the street and was oblivious to the screeching brakes and chaotic swerving going on around him. I stuck close to his ide.

  “I knew you were there, Jack,” he shouted over the noise of the traffic. “But I needed to get my structure in place before I contacted you. Besides, you thought I was a standing rib roast. And don’t think I don’t know that you slept with Dow after I was dead.”

  Which was true and caught me slightly off guard. “I was just—”

  “If you say you were just horny, I’ll forgive you. I don’t want to hear anything else. I didn’t make up excuses for screwing all of your girlfriends.”

  I needed a minute to think through what he had said, and Gearheardt went on.

  “Let’s talk about Mexico, Jack. Let’s talk about Mexico and Cuba,” he said as we mercifully reached the curb.

  We were in the park. Every night the park was lit like a festival. Bright lights underneath the giant trees. Families and lovers were the main human ingredients. The park’s aura belied its existence in the heart of a frantic downtown Mexico City. At the city end of the park was the Chapultepec Castle where the U.S. Marines once fought. Not far away, on the other side of the boulevard, the National Museum of History was a crown jewel, a world class archeological exhibition palace.