The Terrorizers

by Donald Hamilton

  Frechette reached out and caught her arm. “Where are you going?”

  “Anywhere!” she said harshly. “Any fucking where away from this bunch of phony playacting revolutionaries. Come see the boys and girls in that great dramatic masterpiece Frechette’s Last Stand. Rat-tat-tat, ratatatat, boom, bang. I should have split long ago. I should have split the day we got tied up with that crummy New York gangster and his coldeyed gunmen, and I do mean you Mr. Ovid or whatever the hell your real name is. We should have told the bastard to go fuck himself right at the start.”

  “You talk as if we had a choice!” Frechette protested. “You know there was no choice, Joanie. With Danny dead we had no way of getting the explosives we needed and nobody who knew how to construct… Anyway, Brassaro had us cold. He’d have tipped off the authorities if we hadn’t agreed to cooperate.”

  “So we took his tricky bombs, and his shitty secondhand machineguns, and used the Grade B movie sets he fixed up for us to hide in—”

  “Mr. Brassaro has been very helpful, and our weapons and hideouts were provided at my request and to my specifications. I’ll have you know I have given a great deal of thought to our needs, Joanie, and while I don’t expect gratitude I think you could at least refrain from criticizing other people’s administrative efforts until you’ve faced a few of the problems yourself.”

  The woman jerked herself free. “I know. All I do is make the stuff go bang while you march around at the head of your ten-man army. Well, you try pushing the bang-button for a change and see what it’s like. Face that problem for a change. Even if I wasn’t sick of listening to you, I’m tired of trying to kid myself that we can struggle for human freedom and dignity and deal with a parasite like Brassaro at the same time.”

  I glanced towards the little man with the shotgun, but he seemed unmoved by the reference to his current employer. Frechette threw him an uneasy glance, also.

  “Maybe Mr. Brassaro’s motives aren’t as pure as we’d like them to be,” he said stiffly, “but he is fighting the same establishment enemy that we face. To that extent he is a logical ally, and if we’re too delicate to use help that’s offered us…”

  “You sound as if it were handed out free of charge.”

  “We fulfill certain conditions,” Frechette said with a show of patience. “We’re told the time and place and signal instead of operating at random as we did when Danny was alive. Is that so important? The psychological effect on our enemies is the same, isn’t it? We’re still softening them up for the day we present our demands. In return for weapons to defend ourselves with, suitable places to hide from their Gestapo, and bombs that fire when they’re supposed to instead of blowing us up by mistake, we sacrifice only a small freedom of choice.”

  The woman made a sharp gesture. “Well, I’m taking what freedom of choice I’ve got left and getting to hell out of here. And I still say you’d better turn that thing off before the batteries go dead on you.” She watched Frechette’s hand go out towards the radio and stop. She laughed shrilly. “What’s the matter? The stuff is miles away. Are you scared of a little bitty crummy radio?” She reached out and pushed the switch, extinguishing the pinpoint of red light. She looked down the table towards Sally and me, but her eyes seemed to be focused far beyond us. Without looking down, she spoke to Frechette: “You’d louse it up, wouldn’t you, Jake? After all the trouble we’ve had setting this one up, you’d go in there and try to fire at the wrong time or from the wrong distance, anything to make it easy and safe. If there’s a way to fuck it up, you’ll fuck it. Because you’re bombshy, aren’t you, Jake? That time Danny’s bomb went off too soon and almost got you, too. You’ve been scared of them ever since, haven’t you?”

  The man surprised me. Instead of becoming indignant, he said quite gently, “I’ll happily admit that, Joanie, if you’ll reconsider. You know we all have tremendous faith in you. We need you.”

  It sounded a little phony and overdone to me, but the woman thought about it quite seriously, frowning. When she spoke, her voice had changed oddly, becoming higher, almost childlike.

  “You haven’t left me much time.”

  “You have several hours yet, dear,” said Frechette.

  “You don’t know what I go through,” Joan Market said plaintively, in that soft, high, new voice. “You never seem to understand that I mustn’t be distracted on these special days. You always argue with me and it isn’t right, Jake. It isn’t right!”

  “I’m sorry, Joanie.”

  “I have to have this time to myself in order to… do you think it’s silly for me to say I must purify myself?”

  “I don’t think it’s silly at all, my dear.”

  “Those people.” She was still staring at us without seeing us. “In the corner. They’re not really worth arguing about, are they? They deserve whatever… Anything you want to do with them is all right. Get rid of them any way you like. I’m sorry I made such a fuss but… It’s a sacrifice, don’t you see? I consider myself… maybe I’m being silly again, but I think of myself as sort of a priestess and all these distractions just tear me apart when I… when I want to get everything straight in my head so I can do it gently and right and with great respect for those who have to die at our hands in order that we may eventually achieve…” She stopped abruptly. She pocketed the radio and turned towards the door. Over her shoulder she said in a perfectly normal voice, “Get the brats, Ruthie, while I warm up the van.”

  She squeezed past Frechettes’ chair and strode past Ovid, at the door; a moment later the outer door to the galley opened and closed. We could hear her stride away along the dock although we couldn’t see her because of the dingy curtains covering the shoreward windows.

  24

  I realized belatedly that we hadn’t been listening to an argument at all. It had been a ritual playlet serving some murky psychological need. The diagnosis was confirmed when I heard the girl with the headband whisper to Manny:

  “Jeez, how many times do we have to watch that crazy bitch psych herself up? She always picks a fight with somebody and scares hell out of everybody with that gadget of hers. You’d think just once she’d go out and push that crazy button without all the preliminary crap, wouldn’t you?”

  Manny nudged her. “Shut up, here comes Fatso.”

  It was hard to take them seriously. They reminded me of a rather ineffectual, bickering camera club of which I’d briefly been a member in my younger photographic days. It was hard to keep clearly in mind that these particular club members dealt in firearms and high explosives and violent protest instead of cameras and films and vague aesthetic theories. There were three submachineguns and a shotgun currently visible in this rustic clubhouse, not to mention the minor artillery that might be worn out of sight and probably was. I reminded myself again that you can be killed just as dead by a mad amateur as by a sane pro.

  Without looking directly at her, I was aware that Ruthie was making her way towards our end of the table, having obviously decided against inconveniencing the chairman at the other end by squeezing her bulk past him as Joan Market had done. Frechette glanced at her, impatient with her heavy, slow progress. He decided not to wait for her, and cleared his throat.

  “So much for that,” he said. “Now let’s get back to the real business of this meeting. As I said earlier, the male prisoner deserves no consideration; we are justified in exterminating him like the ruthless killer he is. As for his female accomplice, let us remember that while she has not actually shed our blood with her own hands, she was instrumental in decoying… What is it, Ruthie?”

  I never learned what Ruthie had stopped to say. When she came to a halt nearby, looking towards Frechette and raising her hand timidly like a child in class, she had everybody’s attention for a moment, and it was time to go. I threw myself forward using the back of Redband’s chair to pull myself off the cot. This flipped the smaller girl backwards between me and Ovid’s shotgun, while I tackled Ruthie’s soft bulk and slung it straight
at the muzzle of Provost’s submachinegun. Very unchivalrous, no doubt, shielding myself between two women, but I was shielding Sally also, and chivalry has no place in the business. Anyway, they do keep saying they want to be treated just like men.

  I was aware that the room was kind of breaking up to my right. Frechette was clawing for the automatic weapon he’d deposited on the table. Manny was rising and swinging around with his chopper. The young black in coveralls, smart fellow, was hitting the floor in anticipation of fireworks to come. A small figure flashed past behind me as I drove the big girl back against the man in the bunkroom doorway: that was Sally darting to the door and out. I felt cold air on the side of my face and heard a reassuring splash. Objective one, achieved. Objective two, personal survival, wasn’t going to be that easy…

  The first gun to fire was the 12-gauge. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Manny crumple… Manny? There was something I should remember, something I’d pushed from my mind and had to bring back, but there was no time for it now. A window broke and a submachinegun opened up. That would be Frechette turning from the confused melee inside the room to go for the clear target of the girl in the water outside. I used all the strength in my back and legs to shove the struggling, gasping, squealing mass of Ruthie and Provost, with an automatic firearm sandwiched between them, through the bunkroom doorway. Suddenly the weapon cut loose, making a single, muffled thumpthumpthump sound. Behind me, I heard the shotgun bellow once more.

  “Ovid, you damned traitor!”

  It was Coveralls’ voice, shrill with fury. A pistol made a sharp single crack out there. Well, I’d anticipated a concealed weapon or two, hadn’t I? Time was running out on me; then there was a sudden lack of resistance as Ruthie collapsed and pitched forward into the bunkroom carrying Provost with her. I tried to stay upright, but one of my legs wouldn’t hold any weight for some reason. Well, I’d been hit more than once already, but I wasn’t quite clear as to where or by what. I went down, landing on something hard: Provost’s chopper. He’d kept a one-handed grasp of it as he tried to free himself of Ruthie’s weight; but I yanked it clear, flipped it around, and hit the trigger as his shape loomed between me and the bunkroom windows. The four-shot burst cut him down. Seven gone out of what had looked like a twenty-shot clip—assuming these inefficient jerks had bothered to load a full clip.

  The pistol spoke again behind me and something slugged me hard in the back. Frechette’s machinegun was chattering again. You see a lot of idiot stuff on the screen, people being tossed around by bullets like leaves in a high wind. Fortunately real bullets don’t pack that much punch until you get into the elephant-gun category. I swung myself around, and everything was still working—I could even get some use out of the leg. I could think and see. I had a freeze-frame picture of them: Coveralls aiming a .38-sized revolver at me, Frechette at the window aiming his squirt-gun at something outside. I swung my borrowed chopper and cleaned out that side of the room like a man painting out a couple of two-dimensional man-drawings on a wall with a well-filled brush.

  When I let up on the trigger, the silence was frightening. All I could hear in the deathly stillness was the gunfire-ringing in my own ears. I pulled myself forward cautiously. The leg would hold if I didn’t ask too much of it. I knew I’d been hit in several other places, but I couldn’t be bothered with that. I was looking at the room and you’ve never seen anything like it. Well, actually, it wasn’t quite the worst I’d witnessed. Once I’d entered a crowded cellar into which somebody had tossed one grenade followed by another for luck. This wasn’t quite that bad. At least they were all intact except for Manny, who’d been almost decapitated by the blast of shot from Ovid’s smoothbore; and if that was supposed to make sense, somebody was going to have to explain it to me slowly and carefully. I saw that Manny wasn’t the only one who’d had shotgun trouble. The girl with the gay red band in her hair had taken most of the load in the body; she lay crumpled on the floor still clinging to the chopper she’d apparently snatched from Manny’s dying hand.

  Ovid. It came to me then. I’d been so busy hating the little man, I’d wanted to keep hating him so badly, that I’d shoved out of my mind the fact that at Inanook he’d saved my life, or at least my sanity, from Elsie’s brain-frying apparatus. Now, apparently, he’d been watching over me a second time…

  I was reluctant to move. I had a feeling that I would fall apart into a large number of little red squishy pieces if I tried to move. I was the last man left alive in hell, a sinner myself knee deep in the burning blood of other sinners. Well, it wasn’t really knee deep but there was plenty of it, and I was in no condition to pick my way around it daintily on tiptoe. I put myself into motion very cautiously, and I didn’t disintegrate but it wasn’t exactly painless. I made my way slowly through the mess towards the galley door, pausing to take Manny’s submachinegun from the dead girl, leaving her Provost’s almost-empty weapon in return. Ovid was sitting there with the shotgun across his knees. There was blood on his shirt. The black guy in the coveralls had been pretty good with that hideout revolver, Ovid’s eyes were fixed on the doorjamb ahead of him, but when I pulled the pumpgun away he looked up.

  “We played hell, did we not, Mr. Helm?” he whispered.

  “Hell is just the word,” I said. “Who the hell are you?”

  He didn’t seem to hear. “Stupid,” he breathed. “I should have known the Negro was armed. Ex-marine… You take a great deal of nursemaiding for a man from W, Mr. Helm.”

  “From what?”

  “W. That is what we call you in the corporation.” His voice came slowly and painfully. “W for Waste. That’s what you do, isn’t it, waste them? We try not to come into conflict with the government at all, but sometimes the risk must be taken. It depends on the agency. But the word is out, if you touch anybody from W, you’re dead. Now or five years from now. They keep a list there in Washington, and they’ll waste you in their own way in their own time no matter how big you are. Fredericks in Reno. Warfel in LA—well, he got put away on a drug charge but his soldier, the one who’d hit a W agent, died with a lot of other people and it didn’t do the corporation a bit of good out there on the West Coast. And in both cases W had a tall, thin trouble-shooter named Helm snooping around… You don’t look that good to me, Mr Helm. I’ve had a very hard time keeping you alive.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’ve been a little under the weather, I guess. Why did you shoot Kitty Davidson?”

  “I had to keep the confidence of this gang of crazies by doing what they wanted until… Brassaro is a fool, to get the corporation involved in something like this. When we lost his man out here and looked for another, the gentlemen of the board said to Otto Renter, give him a good boy, Otto, a boy who’ll fix things for us out there and not let it get any worse, we’ll handle the New York end. And Otto said to me, clean up the mess, Heinie, and don’t for God’s sake let that beanpole of a government man get killed or we’ll have that bunch of pros on our necks. You don’t have to keep him happy, Heinie, you don’t have to keep him in booze and women, but keep him alive. Emilio’s got us into trouble enough without stirring up W too… Well, we cleaned it up, didn’t we, Mr. Helm? We played hell cleaning it up. Tell Otto… Tell Otto…”

  “Yes, Heinie,” I said. “I’ll tell Otto. Thanks.”

  He didn’t hear me. I stood there a moment longer, looking down. The corporation, the syndicate, the Mafia, Cosa Nostra. Pick your own name. It will probably be no wronger than mine. It isn’t my field, exactly, but as Heinie had indicated, I’d tangled with that loose-knit organization of crime a few times. Apparently I’d made enough of an impression, or Mac’s agency had, to save my life today…

  “Ruthie.” The voice was faint from outside, from shorewards. “What’s holding things up, Ruthie? What was that noise? I couldn’t hear inside the truck with the motor… Is anything wrong, Ruthie?”

  I heard somebody say, “No. Go away, damn you. I don’t want to… It’s enough. Go away.”

&nb
sp; The voice was mine. But nobody cared about what I wanted. I wasn’t here to satisfy my wants. I looked at the two guns I held. Shotgun forty yards certain, no more. Chopper maybe a little farther, fifty or sixty. Not good enough. I laid them aside and stepped over Ovid’s body into the galley and got the rifle case I’d seen there earlier. It was on the counter in the galley. I hated to use, at any distance, a weapon sighted in by somebody else, even a pro like Ovid, but I had very good reason to know this gun would hit dead center at two hundred yards; after all, I’d seen one of its targets.

  I slipped the weapon out of the plastic case, took the caps off the scope, and got a box of shells from a zippered compartment. I took out one cartridge, pulled back the bolt, slid the shell into the chamber, and closed the bolt on it. The safety was off. Holding the weapon gingerly, the way you do a piece that’s ready to fire, I moved to the galley door.

  “Hey, Ruthie, what the hell’s holding you, we haven’t got all day? Dammit, Ruthie, what the shit is going on?”

  She was closer now. I opened the door. She saw me, stared at me, picked up her long skirts, and started to run back up the graveled road from the pier. I put the crosshairs in the proper place, applied easy pressure on the trigger, and let the weapon fire when it wanted to, a simple, straightaway shot of about ninety yards. Then I set the gun aside. Somebody was coming up the hatch in the galley floor. I slammed the hatch closed and fastened it down, although bending over was no fun at all. I dragged my weak leg slowly back through the slaughterhouse to the seaward door, and out on deck. I stood looking out at the river, but there was nothing but driftwood to be seen. Good luck, Sally Wong, wherever you are.

  After a while I had to sit down.