Season of the Machete

The novel opens on April 30, 1980, on the Caribbean island of San Dominica. Two hired killers, a French-accented mercenary called Kingfish and a machete-wielding assassin known as the Cuban, lie in wait at Turtle Bay. They expect high-value targets but instead encounter two American teenagers who have come to swim. A distant figure, the mercenary Damian Rose, shoots both teenagers from a hilltop with a German sniper's rifle. The Cuban butchers the bodies with a sugar-cane machete, then drives the blade into the sand and places a red wool hat on its handle.

A preface jumps to January 1981, when Carrie Rose, Damian's wife and a soldier of fortune in her own right, breaks into the New York office of book editor Bernard Siegel. She offers him a diary she and Damian kept, describing "an awful nest of machete murders. Over a hundred of them" (12), and demands $2 million. Excerpts from this diary appear throughout the novel, providing Carrie's perspective on the crimes.

The main narrative begins in February 1979 at a farmhouse in Nevada, where two powerful factions negotiate an alliance. Isadore "the Mensch" Goldman, a seventy-four-year-old consigliere, or senior adviser, for the Forlenza crime family of the Cosa Nostra, sits across from Harold Hill, a veteran CIA operative who runs a front company called Great Western Air Transport. Hill is accompanied by his aide, Brooks Campbell, a Princeton-educated public safety adviser. Goldman reads aloud from plans submitted by Damian and Carrie Rose, mercenaries known in Southeast Asia as "Les Dements" (The Maniacs), who have proposed two operations for San Dominica: targeted government assassinations and a campaign titled "Machete." Both sides approve the $1.2 million bid, formally partnering the U.S. government with the Cosa Nostra to destabilize the island, with neither side willing to dirty its own hands.

In Paris, Damian spends months planning with obsessive care, hiring over a hundred operatives, none of whom know the full scope of the plan. On April 24, 1979, the violence begins, timed to coincide with a murder trial in which three Black men are sentenced to hang for macheting an American tourist. Rioting erupts across the island. As the condemned men leave the courthouse, a white man in a Panama suit shoots fifteen-year-old defendant Leon Rachet dead, an assassination the Roses orchestrated. That evening, Damian detonates a bomb on the airport runway, destroying a landing jet and killing six passengers.

The next day, Peter Macdonald, a twenty-nine-year-old former Special Forces sergeant now working as a bartender at the Plantation Inn, becomes the operation's critical loose end. During a bicycle ride, he passes a tall blond man standing beside a green sedan with a sniper's rifle. Moments later, Peter sees the Cuban and Kingfish running from the beach, the Cuban drenched in blood from the murder of two American teenagers. Peter's sighting of Damian Rose threatens the entire operation, since the Roses were never supposed to leave witnesses.

Dr. Meral Johnson, San Dominica's Black chief of police and a former schoolmaster, investigates but focuses on Colonel Monkey Dred, a local revolutionary who has claimed responsibility. This misdirection is exactly what the Roses anticipated. When Peter reports what he saw, police dismiss his account. At the American embassy, Campbell also deflects, attributing the violence to Dred. Privately, he recognizes the crisis: Rose has been seen, and the Roses are deviating from the plan.

Over the following days, the violence escalates. The Roses stage threatening-letter deliveries, hiring disposable messengers who are killed after dropping the letters at the local newspaper; the messages, purportedly from Colonel Dred, warn white foreigners to leave. Peter and his girlfriend, Jane Cooke, a former English teacher from South Dakota who also works at the Plantation Inn, are chased through Coastown by the Cuban and Kingfish. After Jane is attacked by assailants seeking Peter's location, Peter breaks into Campbell's villa and forces a partial confession: The Mafia seeks to legalize casino gambling on San Dominica by terrorizing the island into submission.

The Roses supply Colonel Dred with 250 M-16 rifles, positioning him as their instrument. On the seventh day, the climactic massacre occurs. Dred ambushes a tourist bus on a remote highway. Before the attack, Dred executes Kingfish and the Cuban; Rose has paid him to do so with two extra machine guns. Dred's soldiers then massacre 49 bus passengers. As Dred surveys the carnage, Damian shoots him dead from the trees, completing the operation's design. The CIA recommends the Roses be destroyed. Carrie, disguised among fleeing tourists, escapes to Washington.

Part II, "The Perfect Escape," begins on May 8. Carrie takes Hill's wife, Carole, and teenage son hostage in Virginia. Twelve blond male models arrive on San Dominica, hired by Carrie to flood the island with Damian look-alikes and confuse the manhunt. Campbell and Hill launch a massive international search, but its classified nature leads Interpol to nickname it "Bay of Pigs II." The next day, state troopers find Carole murdered, a machete driven into her heart. Damian dyes his hair black, his natural color, leaving only one tall blond man on the island: Clive Lawson, an English mercenary hired months earlier as Damian's physical double. Lawson ambushes and kills Jane as FBI agents escort her from the hospital. Peter, devastated, demands a role in the manhunt, and Hill agrees.

Part III, "The Perfect Ending," unfolds on May 11. In Washington, Carrie hires Betsy Port-Smithe, a London call girl who resembles her, to wait at a hotel with Carrie's identity documents, creating a decoy for the CIA. On San Dominica, Peter, Campbell, and Johnson follow a Forlenza associate's car through Coastown. At the Tryall Club golf course, Damian ambushes the convoy with his sniper rifle, killing Campbell. Peter spots Lawson on a veranda and shoots him. He identifies the dead Lawson as the tall blond man from Turtle Bay, exactly as Damian planned: The two men were near-identical, and Peter had only glimpsed Rose for 15 seconds from a bicycle.

With Damian officially declared dead, his escape reaches its final stage, but Hill has anticipated the move and hides aboard the speedboat Damian has prepared at the Tryall Club's yacht basin for his getaway. When Rose arrives, Hill confronts him at gunpoint. Rose attempts to negotiate, but as he reaches for the dock ladder, a gunshot tears through his skull. Hill looks up to find Peter on the dock above, holding a Walther pistol. Enraged over Carole's murder, Hill hacks Rose's head off with the sugar-cane machete. Peter then shoots Hill and pushes him into the water.

The next morning, CIA agents raid the hotel in Washington and kill the occupant, but the victim is Port-Smithe, the hired decoy. The agents report the mission accomplished. The epilogue reveals that Prime Minister Joseph Walthey is named president for life and the first casino opens near Turtle Bay, fulfilling the Mafia's objective. Swiss banking records confirm that Carrie survived and profited, and that she herself betrayed Damian by phoning Hill with the details of his escape plan, ensuring Rose's death while securing her own freedom. In May 1981, Peter and Johnson sit in a Paris cafe, searching for Carrie Rose. A Frenchman approaches and asks, "You are the men who look for Carrie Rose?" (341), and the novel ends on this deliberately open note, with the hunt for Carrie unresolved.