Soft Targets

by Dean Ing

  Almost.

  It may have been dirt from the jouncing ride, or a whisker of tempered steel projecting like a worrisome hangnail; whatever it was, it altered many futures.

  Hakim dropped the clip and snatched at its twin, missed his footing, and sprawled in the dust. The van of Guerrero impended, crashing around Hakim's wheeled roadblock into the grassy verge, a great beast rushing upon him. Guerrero set the hand brake and exited running as Hakim, his weapon hoary with dirt, essayed a multiple side roll. He was mystified when Guer­rero merely kicked him in the head instead of triggering the automatic.

  Hakim waited for death as he gazed into the murky nine-millimeter eye of the Browning. "Daoudist," he surmised bitterly.

  "I am Fat'ah," Guerrero mimicked, breathing deeply. His face shone with sweat and elation. "And in Panama, a Torrijista, and everywhere, always, KGB." The Soviet agent wiped dust from his mouth, the gun muzzle absolutely unwaver­ing and much too distant for a foot sweep by Hakim. "Rise, turn, hands on your head." Hakim obeyed.

  Guerrero marched him back to his own van and forced him to lie prone in the pungent dust. While Guerrero ransacked the toolbox, Hakim listened for distant engines, voices, a siren. In the primeval mountain stillness he could even hear ticks from his cooling engine, but nothing remotely suggested deliverance.

  Presently, standing above the little Iraqi, Guerrero ordered his hands crossed behind him. Hakim recognized his garrotte wire by its bite and was briefly thankful it was not about his neck. At further orders, Hakim stalked to Guer­rero's own vehicle and lay on his face beside it as he tried to identify a succession of odd sounds.

  "Had you the wit to take a four-wheel-drive path," Guerrero spoke pleasantly as he worked, "you might have escaped. Since the day before yesterday my front differential housing has been full of transceiver gear." Guerrero leaned into his van, arranged the controls, flicked the engine on and stood back. "You wanted coverage, Hakim Arif? Well, turn and stand—and smile, you are live on Soviet television."

  The camera in Guerrero's hand looked very like a ballpoint pen but, unlike the unit he had left in the torture room, it did not store au­diovisual data. It merely fed its impressions to the transceiver equipment packed into the van's dummy differential case. Hakim considered the possibility of a hoax until he heard the fierce whine of a multikilowatt generator over the engine, and then saw the great inflated meter-broad balloon, spidery metallic film covering its lower segment, that sat on Guerrero's horizontal rear cargo door. Almost certainly a dish antenna, he marveled, for a Soviet Molniya satellite in clarkeian orbit.

  Hakim did not show his relief but remained docile as Guerrero shoved him down at the base of a manzanita shrub. Such equipment was fiendishly expensive and tallied well with Guer­rero's claim to be a KGB infiltrator. Hakim was limp with gratification; at least his captor repre­sented law and order, not capricious revenge by some gang of charlies.

  "There was no American blockade," Hakim accused, and drew a hissing breath as the wire tugged at his wrists.

  "What does it matter to whom I turned them? It was neatly done except for the girl, and a bent mount on the differential housing," Guerrero replied, slitting Hakim's sleeves, tearing away the fifty-dollar shirt. "Chaim Mardor is enter­taining the KGB—as you would be, had we known your idiotic choice of sites in advance. We opted against a motorcade; even you might have been alerted by that in Moorpark. And later, they could not bring equipment from Long, Beach in time to pinpoint our location while you slept. Take credit, Hakim, for preventing us a regular transmission schedule." Pride forbade him to add that he had not been furnished with sophisticated receiving gear, so that feedback to Guerrero was relatively primitive.

  "You are a fool, Guerrero; they could have homed in on your unit, had you only kept it going."

  "And so might you, with the noise and mi­crowave interference." Hakim took a stinging slap. "That was for the lecture." Another slap, with an effect that shocked Hakim. "And that was for making it necessary to interrogate you here where the terrain impedes local transmission. I dare not pass that village again before dark."

  Hakim swallowed hard. It was not Guerrero's brawn that bred such terror with each small suc­cessive violence. Hakim and pain were dearer friends than that. Yet he felt a rising sense of dread, and of something else; a betrayal of faith. And how could this be so, when Hakim's only faith was in Hakim?

  Guerrero stepped away and laid the pencil-slim camera on an outcrop of weathered basalt. "You have seen these before," he chided. "A similar device recorded your last tender sessions with the comedian. Later I will retrieve the mi­crocorder and feed those scenes to the Molniya. Ravine or no ravine, the Molniya will receive me then, as it receives us now."

  As he spoke, Guererro took a slender case from an inside pocket. Hakim feared the hypodermic but, far worse, dreaded the fact that he was bathed in sweat. He prepared to flail his body, hoping to destroy the injector or waste its un­known contents.

  Guerrero was far too battle-wise. He chose a nearby stick of the iron-hard Manzanita and, with a by-your-leave gesture to the camera, sud­denly deluged Hakim with blows. It became a flood, a torrent, a sea of torment, and Hakim realized that the thin shrieking was his own. He, Hakim Arif, mewling like any craven Berber? He invoked his paladin's wisdom, ". . . no longer actor, but spectator, thought not to care how my body jerked and squealed."

  Jerking and squealing, Hakim cared too much to feel the prick of the needle in his hip.

  Hakim rallied with great shuddering gasps, rolled onto his back, and fought down a horror he had expected never to meet. His emissary, pain, had turned against him.

  Guerrero leaned easily against a boulder, toss­ing and catching a drycell battery of respectable voltage. "You have long been a subject of KGB study at Lubianka in Moscow," he glowered, "and I am impressed by our psychologists. You built a legend with your vain volunteer anguish, Hakim, and never knew that the operative word was volunteer." His face changed to something still uglier. "You will divulge two items. The first, Fat'ah accounts. The second is your new Damascus site." He raised the stick and Hakim cowered, but the things that touched his naked flesh were merely the drycell terminals.

  Merely an onslaught of unbearable suffering. Hakim needed no verbal assurance to learn that the drug made each joint in his body a locus of gruesome response to even the mildest electrical stimulus. When his spasm had passed he had fouled himself, to the syncopation of Guerrero's laughter.

  "Your funds," Guerrero said, extending the drycell, and Hakim bleated out a stream of in-formation. Squinting into the overcast as if to confirm the satellite link thirty-six thousand kilometers away in its unchanging position overhead, Guerrero grinned. "Coding, I am told, is automatic, and gracias a Dios for small favors. But it may take minutes to check your figures. Perhaps in Los Angeles, perhaps Berne or at Lubianka. But if you lie, you must understand that I will quickly know it. Lie to me, Hakim. Please. It justifies me."

  Raging at himself, Hakim hurriedly amended crucial figures. The pain in his joints did not linger but its memory overhung him like a cliff. Through it all, degrading, enervating, the sinu­ous path of Guerrero's amusement followed each of Hakim's capitulations.

  When Hakim fell silent, Guerrero pressed his demand. "You are learning, I see. Now: the Damascus site, the new one. The Americans would like to know it, too, but they tend to impose order slowly. We shall be more efficient even without Pentothal." Hakim squeezed his eyes tight-shut, breathing quickly, wondering if it were really possible to swallow one's tongue—and then the drycell raked his bicep and jawline.

  Hakim was transfixed, skewered on a billion lances that spun in his body, growing to fiery pinwheels that consumed him, drove all else from his being. Hakim was a synonym of appalling agony. Guerrero, who had previously laughed for the necessary effect, punished his lower lip between his teeth and looked away. He wished he were back soldiering under Torrijos, hauling garrison garbage, anything but this filthy duty.


  Yet appearances were everything and, "Again? I hope you resist," he lied, and had to caution Hakim to answer more slowly. Under torture, the answers came in a fitful rhythm; a phrase, shallow breathing, another strangled phrase, a sob, and still another phrase. Hakim was finished so soon that Guerrero knew embar­rassment. He had hurried, and now he needed only wait. The military, he shrugged to himself, must be the same everywhere.

  Waiting for his van's radio speaker to verify or deny, Guerrero viewed his keening captive with glum distaste. "The girl was more man than you," he said in innocent chauvinism. "Chaim accepted capture, but not she. Another agent took her knife. She fought. When he pointed the knife at her belly, she embraced him. I never heard the sound of a knife like that before, it—"

  "Kill me," he heard Hakim plead.

  "Before I know how truly you betray Fat'ah? For shame."

  "Yes, for shame. Kill me!"

  "Because you were so quick to surrender? Because you are not your beloved Lawrence, but only a small puppeteer? Absurd, Hakim. Think yourself lucky to know what you are, at last: a primitive little executive, a controller—even of yourself as victim. Is it so much more glorious to be a masochist pure and simple, than what you really are?"

  "Enough! End it," Hakim begged.

  "As you ended it for the comedian, perhaps. Let me tell you the greatest joke you will ever hear, Hakim, you snot-gobbling little coward. It is on both of us, but chiefly on you. The big blond one, Kenton, is neither a blond nor a Kenton. I dusted his fingerprints and transmitted them while you sought your damned newspapers. Something about him disturbed me.

  "Last night I received a message which I deciphered twice to be certain—and still I wonder how it can be true: Kenton is your Jewish target, Maurice Everett." Guerrero laughed aloud, slapped his belly in a gesture more violent than pleasant. "I hoped you would learn it for your-self so that I could record more of your butchery. But it was unnecessary. As it was, I waited for days on orders to record your disposal of Charlie George. Without those orders, my work would have been simpler." Guerrero spat in irritation.

  Hakim stared. The Soviet security organ had waited only to obtain audiovisual records of Fat'ah killing the comedian? He fathomed the KGB logic gradually, and concluded that they could use such evidence to justify reprisals in Syria, when and if it suited them.

  Another thought brought a measure of calm: he still had control over Guerrero's future. Hakim exercised it. "It was not my intent to kill Charlie George," he said distinctly. "And we left him alive."

  Guerrero said nothing for ten seconds. "The video record will show that he died," he as­serted, licking lips that were suddenly dry.

  "It will show his breathing tube, and also what we both already know: that he is an actor." Their eyes met in angry silence.

  Guerrero insisted, "The record will vindicate me," and Hakim knew that Guerrero too was posturing for the benefit of the camera pickup. His own effectiveness contaminated by haste, Guerrero would be forced to return—to kill Charlie George himself. And Everett as well, eliminating the last witness.

  Guerrero approached again with the drycell and locked his gaze to Hakim's for the last time. Torture would prove nothing more, and Guer­rero feared what it might seem to prove. The crowning irony was that under further torture, Hakim might only further compromise his tor­turer. Hakim trembled in tears, but did not drop his eyes. Guerrero laid the drycell on a stone.

  Hakim did not recognize the coded sequence from the van but saw Guerrero register relief at a musical signal. In any case, Hakim in his weak­ness had told the truth. Guerrero was lashing Hakim's feet with wire at the time, and resumed the job until his prisoner was positioned; feet spread, knees bent, face up. Enraged at Hakim's revelation, Guerrero had chosen a vengeance op­tion. He enjoyed that choice but did not realize its full expense to himself as he stalked to his van and returned.

  Guerrero tore a strip of tape, placed it dangling from a branch before Hakim's eyes, and stuck a capsule to the tape within range of Hakim's mouth. "Before I knew you, Arif, I would not do what I do now. Let us say it is for Rashid, whom I hated to sacrifice. Did you think the bomb shack­les jammed themselves?" He read the surge of anger that raced across Hakim's face. "So: no, I will not end your life—but you will. I wonder if you are devout, and if your followers in Damas­cus are. In any event, the capsule acts quickly. Exercise your control, Hakim; take one last life on television." With that, he whisked Hakim's van keys away. He brought the drycell near Hakim's side and the Iraqi arched away as well as he might, lashed to bushes by lengths of his garrotte wire.

  The drycell went beneath Hakim's naked back, centimeters from contact. Guerrero trotted away with one backward look and Hakim strained fitfully to hold his arch. Weeping, laughing, Hakim knew that Guerrero had left his own van to permit transmission of Hakim's death option. Presumably Guerrero intended to return for his van later.

  But Guerrero did not know of the toggle be­neath Hakim's dash panel, which reduced the Panamanian's own options to zero.

  There was no sound of starter engagement, only the slam of a door before, a moment later, the heavy concussion wave. The earth bucked and Hakim, muscles already past endurance, fell back. He cared nothing for the rain of metal and flesh that showered around him but, deafened and half stunned by the five kilos of explosive he had buried in the van, Hakim could still exult. The drycell had been turned on its side.

  Hakim spent many minutes scrabbling at de­bris before he managed to grasp a stone that would abrade the garrotte wire. He kept enough tension on the wire to satisfy his hunger for torment, all the while glaring at the Soviet camera. He could perhaps make use of the van equipment. He might find most of the money in the wreckage of his own van.

  And after that, what? His exploitation of media finally smothered, he had known for weeks that his enemy and erstwhile ally, televi­sion, had found an offense that could destroy him. Even before ransacking by the KGB, his coffers were too empty to maintain Fat'ah. The Soviet videotapes would produce hatred and scorn in the people who had previously financed him as easily as they bought English country estates and huge limousines. Hakim would find respect nowhere—not even within himself. There was no more Fat'ah, and Hakim was Fat'ah. Therefore there could be no Hakim.

  The wire parted and Hakim rolled away. Even­tually he freed his feet, then sat squatting by the drycell. He had triumphed over Guerrero, but that triumph was his last. The proof was that he could not bring himself to touch the drycell.

  Hakim took the capsule from the tape with gentle fingers, smashed the camera. "Forgive, El Aurans," he whispered, and swallowed.

  It was minutes before he realized that the cap­sule was a harmless antihistamine, Guerrero's malignant joke. And an hour before he found that the injection, as Guerrero had known from the first, was the slow killer. But by that time Hakim had stumbled twitching into a stream far from the smouldering wreckage and was past caring. The body, a source of concern in some shadowy circles, was never found.

  THURSDAY, 22 JANUARY, 1981:

  Guerrero had been right about Chaim Mardor, in the letter if not in spirit: the wiry Israeli was a compelling entertainment. He had first enter­tained two field agents of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Besopasnostiy when he went into clinically certifiable shock at the suicide of Leah Talith. In that condition he was so far beyond reach with drugs, they found it necessary to feed him intravenously for two days, locked with his clothes in a windowless room of a safe house in Pasadena. The door was sturdy. No one but the physician, who had a key, could go through it.

  Chaim went over it on Thursday morning, bat­tering a hole in the ceiling with his head and shoulders, the minute he returned to his mortal coil and found his clothes. While Maurice Everett had splashed water on his face, fighting his internal panic over Guerrero's broad hints about double identity, the KGB had a full-scale panic in its safe house.

  Chaim Mardor stormed out of the attic that morning, dispatched a balding cipher clerk with a
hatrack and kicked the perimeter guard into jelly before taking the guard's cash and pocket­ing his short-barreled .44 magnum revolver. He had walked several blocks to Colorado Boule­vard before he thought to set the red-smeared hatrack down.

  The mind of Chaim Mardor was aflame with one concept that burned its way down into his belly: Fat'ah was dead. He had seen her self-sacrifice while Bernal Guerrero, the arm of Hakim Arif, stood by to gloat. And Chaim knew where the Iraqi had taken the hostages, to the frame house Chaim himself had furnished in the orchard past Fillmore. Hakim, Guerrero, even the hostages Chaim had never seen, all were culpable. Anyone in the farmhouse or near it would be equally culpable. Chaim Mardor was a death sentence in tennis shoes.

  Chaim hitched a ride with a man in a Volks­wagen bus who was virtually his external twin, discounting Chaim's abrasions; dark shoulder-length hair, jeans, and pullover. The driver took his passenger's catatonic silence for simple dejection, but his profound mistake was in patting Chaim on the knee. The single .44 slug passed a hand's breadth from the driver's nose, momentarily blinding him, precipitating his exit without even tapping the brakes.

  Chaim took the wheel as the little bus sped up the Ventura Freeway. He slid into the vacated driver's seat and took the next turnoff, oblivious to the traffic snarl behind him as cars avoided the man trying to hobble off the freeway with flash burns, lacerations, and a fractured tibia.

  Chaim pawed through area maps in the glove compartment, throwing those he did not want over his shoulder into the cargo section. He found the San Fernando Valley map, located his position on it, and drove for his destination at a pace relinquished to the insane. This was perfect camouflage; everybody in Los Angeles drives exactly like that.

  Had Chaim found the turnoff toward the orchard ten minutes earlier, he might have passed Hakim and Guerrero driving in the other direc­tion toward mutual destruction. More likely, if at all possible, Chaim would have smashed head-on into whichever of them he saw first. El-Hamma and Hakim had created in Chaim Mar­dor the ideal arm of Fat'ah; an arm that could reach out even after the head was severed, re­morseless, selfless, irrational. But Chaim had the road to himself as he neared the orchard sur­rounding the frame house that contained Maurice Everett and Charlie George.