The Language Of Cannibals m-8

by George C. Chesbro

  I glanced across the way, saw Garth whisper something in Mary’s ear. She nodded, then held the gun straight in front of her with both hands, bracing herself with her elbows on the ledge. Garth sidled backward, then disappeared from view around an outcropping of stone. I had a pretty good idea where he was going-down to the road to personally greet Mr. Elysius Culhane, undoubtedly with a fist to the face.

  I glanced sideways at Acton. He seemed somehow different. His brow was knitted, and he appeared to be in deep thought as he stared down at the figure moving on the road below us. I wondered what he was thinking.

  Culhane was perhaps ten yards from the spot where I expected Garth to step out and rudely greet him when I suddenly heard the sound of running footsteps coming down the road from the opposite direction. Culhane heard them too and stopped dead in his tracks. He crouched slightly, brought the shotgun up to waist-high firing position, and waited.

  A few moments later a terrified, haunted-looking Gregory Trex came staggering around a bend in the road. He had obviously found a way to free himself from his bonds, but he had paid a price: both his wrists were bleeding profusely, the flesh shredded by the sharp rocks he must have sawed against to cut through the nylon rope. He'd obviously had nothing on his ruined mind but escape, for he hadn't even thought to take a weapon from the foot locker just inside the cave.

  He saw Culhane and abruptly stopped; suddenly his face was wreathed in a childlike smile of elation and relief at the sight of his friend and mentor, the creator and master of the Cairn death squad. He certainly didn't appear to understand the situation, and definitely didn't understand that he, as the only surviving member of the death squad, was not someone Elysius Culhane wanted to remain alive. Then Trex's smile vanished as a thought seemed to occur to him.

  "You have to go back, Mr. Culhane!" Trex shouted as he waved his arms in the air and again started down the road. "Something's wrong! I think they've set a trap for you! Go back! Take me with you!"

  Culhane hunched his shoulders slightly, glanced quickly, furtively, around him. Then he looked back at the man approaching him, leveled the barrel of the shotgun on Gregory Trex's belly, and pulled the trigger. The slugs from both barrels caught Trex in the pit of the stomach, blew him off his feet and backward even as they doubled him over. The corpse hit the ground, twitched for a few moments, then was still, arms and legs flayed out to either side, blood oozing from the fist-size hole in his stomach and the basketball-size hole in his back.

  Culhane again looked around nervously, then broke the smoking barrel of the shotgun and reached for a fresh shell in a pocket of his vest. I moved around to the other side of the boulder where I'd been crouched at the same time as Garth stepped out from behind a column of rock and into the road.

  Culhane saw Garth, stiffened, then stutter-stepped backward a yard or so as he fumbled with his shotgun and a shell. "Who the hell are you?!” he shouted in a whining, high-pitched voice.

  "That's my big brother, Culhane!" I shouted at the only slightly blurred figure on the road below me. "He's a very nasty man, with a quick trigger finger! We want you alive to answer questions, but dead will do! Drop the shotgun right now!"

  He did. Then he stepped back, bowed his head, and wrapped his arms around his chest, as if he were suddenly cold. Garth walked forward and bent down to pick up the shotgun. As he did so, Culhane was suddenly seized with a spasm of mindless rage and frustration. He threw his head back and screamed, at the same time reaching for one of the grenades dangling from the ammunition belt slung over his chest.

  "Don't do it, Culhane? I screamed at the top of my lungs, knowing that I was too far away to fire on Culhane without risk of killing my brother. "Garth, look-!"

  It was Mary, directly above Culhane, who opened fire on the man. She was able to let loose one quick burst before the shock of the unfamiliar recoil and shattering noise made her drop the machine pistol. But it was enough, because her aim had been true. Bullets tore into Culhane's head and chest, spinning him around like a top. His involuntary jerking pulled the pin from the grenade he was holding, and it dropped to the ground an instant before he fell on top of it. Garth ran three steps, then dove headlong over a sharp ridge of loose stones a moment before the grenade exploded, painting the flesh, bone, and blood of Elysius Culhane across the sheer stone wall below me.

  The echo in the rock cathedral from the chatter of Mary's machine pistol was now joined by the booming echo of the exploding grenade. When the echoes died away, I could hear an approaching siren, very close.

  "That's it," I said, half to myself, as I stared down at the carnage below me. Across the way, Garth had climbed back up to the ledge. He helped a very shaken Mary Tree rise to her feet, then gripped her firmly by the elbow as he guided her toward the path leading down to the road.

  A police car, lights flashing and siren wailing, appeared below on Pave Avenue, then disappeared from sight as it made a sharp turn onto the access road.

  I turned toward Acton, who was staring down at the corpses of Gregory Trex and Elysius Culhane, confusion and concern clearly etched on his features. "Let's go," I said, pointing with the barrel of my machine pistol toward the cleft in the stone wall behind us that was the entrance to the narrow, rubble-strewn rock chute that led down to the road. "It's over."

  Acton looked at me, but he didn't move. "Nothing's changed, Frederickson," he said in a low voice. "Mosely can't give us the protection we need."

  I stepped back a few paces and raised the machine pistol slightly-just enough to give the KGB operative pause in the event he was thinking about making any sudden moves. "What's the matter, Acton? Aren't you relieved that we've eliminated your dreaded KGB assassin? I don't understand your problem."

  "Something's wrong."

  "You're damn right there's something wrong. What's wrong is that you're full of shit. Culhane was no KGB assassin. I saw his face when he found out you were KGB, and I thought he was going to have a heart attack. Unless they teach you people to throw up on command, his reaction was no act. It would have made no sense for the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti to have two of their agents working the same territory, blind to each other, constantly stepping on each other's toes. Nobody has ever confused the KGB with the Keystone Kops. Culhane showed up here because his old buddy Edward J. Hendricks gave him a little courtesy call to warn him that the shit had already hit the fan and that there was no way he could keep the whole story of Culhane's manipulation by the KGB from becoming public. Culhane flipped out. He must have figured that he had one last chance to wipe out all the people who could implicate him in this nightmare and then get away clean, counting on his right-wing buddies to cover up for him. There was never any KGB assassin after us, and there's no massive KGB network inside the ultra-conservative movement-as much as I find the notion enormously entertaining. As Garth and I suspected, there's just you-one very clever, valuable, and enterprising KGB officer looking to make lemonade out of lemons. So let's get out of here. We can all sit down at the Cairn police station and wait for the FBI to arrive."

  Jay Acton still didn't move. "Frederickson, we're all dead if we end up in police custody. Somehow, in some way, the KGB will find a way to kill us."

  On the road below, Dan Mosely was out of his car, talking to Garth and Mary, apparently getting an explanation of what had happened. At the base of the mountain, three patrol cars were parked across Pave Avenue, blocking off access to the quarry. Mosely looked up, saw me, and waved. I waved back.

  "You don't quit, do you?" I said, looking back at Acton. I raised the machine pistol higher, leveled it on his chest. "Get your ass down there. I'll be right behind you. Don't even think of trying to run, because there's no place for you to go."

  Acton walked stiffly across the ledge, paused at the fissure, and looked back to me. "You've killed us," he said tersely, then bent down and slipped through the crack in the stone.

  "Hey, Mongo!" Garth shouted up to me. "You all right? Can you get down?"

&nbs
p; "Yeah!" I shouted back. "Acton's already on his way! It's going to take me a little longer!"

  I slipped through the fissure, started picking my way down through the sharp rubble in the narrow chute. The adrenaline that had kept me going was now fast draining out of my system, and I suddenly felt as exhausted as I had been in the canoe. My headache was returning, along with more pronounced double vision. I almost tripped on a rock and decided it was time for a breather. I sat down on a pile of crushed rock, took a series of deep breaths while I reflected on how nice it was going to feel to soak in a hot tub and then take to my bed for as long as it took for my body to completely heal.

  Jay Acton had certainly been earnest, I thought, a great performer, like his father, but in his own case an actor determined to try to write his own ending to his own play right to the finish. Instead of escaping earlier, as I was certain he could have done, he had opted to save our lives as a necessary first step in trying to lend credibility to a cock-and-bull story that he'd hoped would enable him to burrow his way into the highest echelons of the American counterintelligence apparatus-or, at the very least, to sow a great deal of discord and suspicion.

  "Mongo?!"

  "I'm coming, Garth! Don't be so goddamn impatient!"

  I used the stock of the machine pistol to push myself to my feet, then continued my descent. I came to a spot where there was a cleft in the rock wall to my right, affording me a clear view of the scene below. Acton had arrived and was cuffed, hands behind his back, to the handle on the passenger's door of Mosely's patrol car; he was standing very rigid, staring off down the road. Mosely had taken the automatic weapons from Garth and Mary, laid one on the hood of the car, and was holding the other. I whistled to get their attention, then saluted; Garth and Mosely saluted back, and Mary waved. I stepped around a boulder, continued down.

  It was a damn good thing Acton had tried to be clever, I thought, or Garth, Mary, me, and every member of the Community of Conciliation would be dead. Clever, yes, except. .

  Except. .

  I only had another ten or fifteen yards to go in the rock chute before I reached the road, but I abruptly stopped, sat down again, and tried to sort out the problem in logic that had just occurred to me.

  Assuming Acton had been believed, a massive vetting operation would have been instituted by the FBI, with every member of Congress, and possibly every official in the government, being obliged to prove they were who they said they were. But the process would have been fairly simple, focusing primarily on birth records and early childhood history; for the vast majority of those being investigated, a copy of a grammar school report card would probably suffice. No KGB operatives would turn up. So what had Jay Acton planned for an encore after he was exposed as a liar? Intelligence work as a double agent? No way. As he had pointed out, the CIA would never trust him, and by now Moscow Centre would certainly have learned that he had been blown.

  What could Acton have been planning. .?

  "Hey, Mongo?!"

  "Yo! Hold your horses!"

  Yet Acton had wanted to get straight to Washington, to an even tighter trap, where it would be proved even faster that he was a liar, and where he would be turned over even faster to the friendly ministrations of the CIA, with their walled-in safe houses, drugs, and other unpleasant interrogation techniques. Calling Hendricks to get home delivery of an assassin had been my idea, not his. He hadn't liked the idea one bit.

  "Shit," I said to myself with venom, as I turned and scrambled back up the rock chute to the cleft. I leaned through the opening, whistled and waved.

  "What the hell are you doing, Frederickson?" Mosely shouted, impatience ringing in his voice. "I haven't got all day!”

  Indeed. The police manning the patrol cars at the base of the mountain had to be wondering by now why they had been ordered to stay in place on Pave Avenue for so long, perhaps even wondering why their chief had issued such an order in the first place. Maybe.

  "Chief, I sprained an ankle! Send Garth and Mary up here to give me a hand, will you?"

  Garth started forward, but Mosely abruptly reached out and grabbed his arm, restraining him. Garth wheeled around, them stiffened when he saw the service revolver in Mosely's right hand aimed at his chest. The machine pistol in the man's other hand was raised just slightly, leveled on the ground at Mary's feet.

  "I can't allow that, Mongo!" Mosely shouted in a strained voice. "Until we get this business all sorted out, I have to place all of you under arrest! Throw out your weapon, and I'll let your brother come up!"

  I ducked back as sweat suddenly broke out on my face, ran into my eyes. The muscles in my stomach knotted painfully, and I cursed Elysius Culhane anew-not only for being a KGB dupe in the first place, but for then continuing to be their dupe right up to his death, when he had served as a stalking horse to expose any ambush we might have set.

  And now what was I supposed to do? I thought, trying to choke back the panic I felt rising in me. Even if I could see straight, which I couldn't, I couldn't fire on Mosely without the risk of hitting Garth and Mary.

  "Let's compromise, Chief!" I called, still desperately hoping that I might be wrong about Chief of Police Dan Mosely. "I'm just a little bit nervous after all the commotion we've had up here, and the sight of a lot of cops will make me feel better! Order your men to come up here to join you! And then send McAlpin up here to give me a hand! I'll give him my gun!"

  But I wasn't wrong, and now Jay Acton realized what was happening. I heard Acton shouting in Russian, and I poked my head back up in the cleft in time to see Mosely club him with the barrel of his service revolver. Acton's head snapped back, and he sagged, unconscious. Garth started to react, stopped when the other man's gun came up and was pointed at his head. The machine pistol in Mosely's left hand was now aimed directly at Mary's spine.

  "Throw out your weapon and come down, Frederickson," the KGB assassin who had masqueraded as an officer of the law said in an only slightly louder than normal speaking voice that nevertheless carried up clearly to me. "Do it right now, or your brother and the woman die."

  "Don't do it, Mongo!" Garth called. "He'll kill us all anyway!"

  "I'm not afraid to die, Mongo!" Mary shouted defiantly in a voice that was strong and steady. "Do what you have to do!"

  "Don't you think I'm serious, Frederickson?" Mosely snapped. "Don't you think I'll kill them?"

  I licked my lips, swallowed hard, trying to think of something-anything-to say to stall for time, and keep the other man from pulling the triggers on the weapons he held on my brother and Mary. "At the first sound of gunfire, those cops down below will be all over here, Mosely. They may be up here any moment, as it is. I think I'll wait."

  "But your brother and the woman will be dead."

  "So will you, pal. Give it up. Give yourself up to us, and we'll take you in and see if we can't help you cut some kind of deal. This is a standoff, which means you lose. You have absolutely nothing to gain by killing Garth and Mary, because then I'll blow you away."

  "Maybe, maybe not," the man who called himself Dan Mosely replied in a perfectly steady voice, as if I had suggested he was in danger of nothing more serious than catching cold. "You've got a head injury, and I'm betting you may not be able to see too clearly. All I need to do is get off one burst up that rock chute you're sitting in, and the ricocheting bullets will do the rest."

  "I can see well enough to blow you away with a machine pistol, Mosely. Let it go. What the hell? The KGB makes a point of always getting their own home, so they'll trade for you. Going back to Russia with KGB honors is a hell of a lot better than being dead."

  "I won't negotiate, and I won't give up your brother and the woman as a shield while you're sitting up there with a gun on me."

  "Is that what we're doing, Mosely? Negotiating?"

  "A machine pistol isn't the most accurate weapon in the world at that range, Frederickson. I believe I can kill these two people and escape your burst of fire. Then I'll be the one shooting up
that rock chute. I'm going to count to five. If you haven't thrown out your weapon and started down by then, that's exactly what I'm going to do. The police will be told you all managed to shoot each other."

  "Nobody's going to believe that, Mosely!"

  "They'll have to believe it; there are no other witnesses. I'm the chief of police, remember? One!”

  "Don't come down, Mongo!" Mary shouted, her voice clear and strong. "He means to kill you too! I'm not afraid to die!"

  "Two!"

  I leaned out through the cleft, bracing my elbows against the rock, and used both hands to aim the machine pistol at the point where Dan Mosely would be if Garth's body weren't in the way. I felt paralyzed with indecision. Sweat continued to run into my eyes, stinging them, blurring my vision even more.

  "Don't let him bullshit you, Mongo!" Garth shouted. "Just divide by two and shoot the fucker!"

  "Three!"

  And I knew that the KGB assassin wasn't bluffing; he fully intended to play out his string to the very end. I desperately wanted to plead with the man to give Garth and Mary a few more seconds of life, perhaps even throw out my weapon to buy those seconds for them. But I knew that giving up my own life, which I would surely be doing if I disarmed myself and stepped out onto the road, would be a futile gesture, and would only ensure that I wouldn't be able to avenge my brother's and Mary's deaths. I sighted down the barrel of the machine pistol and prepared myself to pull the trigger at the moment Mosely pulled the triggers of his weapons, killing Garth and Mar)'. I anticipated that he would immediately try to dart to his left, toward the stone wall on my side of the road, and then try to come at me. Tears sprang to my eyes; I blinked them away, choked back a sob.