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.