by Jim Case
The Brit bellied out beside Hawkins, supporting himself on his elbows, sighting in on one of the Jeeps through the M1’s sniper scope.
“Let’s see what some heavy artillery buys us, shall we?”
He sighted in on the Jeep of gunmen roaring in on the left, flicked the selector switch, and triggered, the M1’s report cracking in the open desert air, the recoil jerking his body.
The Jeep on the right blossomed into a forward-moving rolling fireball intensified when the Jeep’s gas tank went as it turned end-over-end, tossing flaming bodies this way and that.
“Not bad shooting,” Hawkeye commented, “for a limey.”
Gallegos could not believe his eyes. A heartbeat earlier the Jeep with Manuel and the four others had been racing along side-by-side with his own vehicle, perhaps two yards away, toward the gringo bastards behind those rocks where they held Jesus.
And then—the explosion out of nowhere, death shrieks swallowed up into the ball of flame and now the earth behind his Jeep littered with human and metal debris, aflame and lifeless.
“To the left, to the left!” he screamed at his driver. “The other side of those rocks!”
The driver careened the Jeep into a two-wheel turn that nearly tumbled every man out of the Jeep, as the vehicle dashed toward the same butte before which the bounty hunters had sought cover, the Jeep heading toward their blind side; the far side of the rising butte.
Gallegos worriedly eyed the horizon behind them but could not as yet discern any sign of the three Jeeps full of men that should at this moment be racing here in response to his radio summons.
The hacienda was no more that ten kilometers from here, so they would be here soon, and then—
His thoughts were interrupted by another heaving explosion rocking the earth, one of the grenades fired by the gringo detonating a shower of earth upon the racing Jeep, a near-miss.
Then they made it to behind the butte, disappearing from the line of vision of the two who had Ruiz on that high ground of boulders.
“Stop here!” Gallegos ordered.
The driver obeyed, flooring the brake pedal, swinging the Jeep around in a 180-degree turn.
Gallegos wondered what he should do. He had never doubted the gringo’s expertise in these matters even before seeing his amigos in the next Jeep getting blown to pieces. El Gato’s hacienda was a veritable desert fortress, and yet these bounty hunters had somehow penetrated his defense perimeter and gotten away with the boss.
Then he saw the three Jeeps full of rifle-toting men turn off the highway, coming high speed in this direction. He recognized the vehicles and laughed. He hopped from the Jeep.
“Come, muchachos! The gringos will have their hands and eyes full with those who approach.” He started hurrying up the incline, gesturing for them to follow, which they did. “We shall outflank the gringos, kill them, save El Gato and the glory will be ours. Let’s go!”
The eastern sky yielded to the purple of oncoming night, the western horizon’s warm red becoming the bleak gray of dusk.
Caine lowered the Ml, having viewed the oncoming Jeeps through the scope.
“Fifteen men,” he informed Hawkeye coolly. “They’ll be in range soon.”
Hawkins shifted to scan in another direction, into the failing light of an ending day, at the spot where the first Jeep had disappeared behind the butte.
“It’s them other boys got me worried. Maybe we oughta wake up sleeping beauty,” he nodded toward Ruiz. “He might make a better bartering chip awake than asleep.”
“My guess is he’ll just go back to telling us how we’re going to get killed,” Caine muttered, “just before we get killed. But yeah, give him a few slaps. It’s about the only chance we’ve got short of standing these blighters off until we run out of ammunition.”
He turned his attention to the nearing vehicles, waiting for them to come into range.
Hawkeye started over toward Ruiz. Movement caught his peripheral vision among some creosote, higher up behind them. He whirled, the Magnum pulling around with him, just as four weapons opened fire from various points along that higher ground.
He snarled, “Son of a fucking bitch!” and then started pulling off rounds from the .44, realizing as he did so that the unseen riflemen from the Jeep were purposely firing high, over their heads, so as not to hit their boss.
Caine rolled onto his back, his Ml opened up on full auto, spraying the leafy shrubbery with a steady rain of lead that momentarily silenced the other gunfire.
Hawkeye reached down and grabbed the unconscious Ruiz as he had before, pulling the disheveled guy around to the other side of the rocks, where Caine had moved to give cover fire.
This side of the cluster of rocks left them exposed to those reinforcements bumping in about a quarter-klick away.
Caine ceased firing to reload, the echoes of the gunfire echoing away to nothing.
“Senors, you are surrounded. Throw down your guns. All we want is El Gato! I, Felipe Gallegos, assure you you will not be harmed—”
Hawkeye aimed across the rock at the source of the sound and fired.
He was rewarded with a death grunt, and one dead Felipe Gallegos toppled into view and somersaulted down the hill until a big rock stopped him.
While the other riflemen up there resumed an automatic fusillade down upon Hawkins’ and Caine’s position, the air filled with the crackle of their weapons, the whistling of projectiles coming too close and ricocheting, and now the engine sounds of the Jeeps from their rear.
The Texan looked sideways at the Englishman, there where they knelt beneath the cluster of boulders. “Uh, y’know, tea bag, maybe you’re right; maybe it is time we gave up this bounty hunting.”
Caine aimed the big Ml around on the approaching Jeeps.
“Maybe it’s bloody well time to die,” he grunted, raising the scope to his eye.
He pulled the rubberized eyepiece away as a sudden new sound boomed into the montage of war in the desert; the unmistakable choppa-choppa-choppa of a helicopter rotoring in low and fast from the north—at the moment blocked from sight by the butte.
Then the chopper thrust into view; a big single-engine jet-turbine Bell Ulti-D “Huey” boasting, Caine’s trained eye spotted at a glance, 40mm cannons and 5.56mm machine guns mounted externally on turrets, the cannons stabbing geysering explosions that loudly chomped up the earth behind the high-ground ridge as the warbird flew by low overhead.
Two bodies flew out, hurled under the impact of the flesh-eating detonations.
The third Mexican drug hood charged blindly out into the clearing to escape and walked into a round from Hawkeye’s .44 that messily lifted off a quarter of his skull and whatever brains went with it.
The Huey continued out, banking gracefully above the three Jeeps that were slowing down in confusion.
Hawkins wheeled around to watch the sight and so did Caine.
“Now who the hell could that be?”
“I don’t know,” muttered the Brit, raising the sighting scope back to his eye, “but I damn well intend to give him some help.”
Cody worked the Huey’s controls, easing the chopper around into a strafing run at the Jeeps on the ground as the drivers tried to separate—but not fast enough.
The gunship zoomed by overhead, its miniguns yammering now, the lines of pounding bullets pulverizing the desert floor, tracking across two of the filled-to-capacity Jeeps, brutally pulping most of the men in one vehicle, the parallel line of slugs crossing the other vehicle’s gas tank, blowing it to smithereens in an orange-red blast that lit up the ascending shroud of night settling across the desert.
At that instant, Richard Caine sent off a grenade from his and Hawkeye’s position over by the rocks, and the remaining Jeep full of Mexican hoods caught another on-the-money hit that banged that moving vehicle off the ground—flying shrapnel devastating the passengers into bloody ruins, flung into the air, not moving after they landed across the ground.
Cody pu
lled up the Huey, easing the warbird into a landing approach toward a level patch of ground near where Hawkins and Caine now stood erect.
He felt a grin and a good feeling coursed through him as he set the chopper down, creating a mini dust storm caused by the backwash of the rotors. He had wondered what kind of shape Hawkeye and Richard would be in when he found them; wondered if they would still have that sharp combat edge he remembered from ten years ago in Vietnam when they had fought together.
Ten years could be a long time. A lot could have changed.
But these two men, he now knew, had not changed.
Perhaps men like Caine and Hawkins never changed, because they had found perfection of mind, body, and spirit in what they did, in being tested by a harsh world, and they would not give that up to anything but infirmity or death.
He touched the Huey down on terra firma and cut the engine to idle, wondering what Caine and Hawkins would think of an offer from the last man on Earth they could have expected to see.
The Huey soared through the night at three-thousand feet above an ocean of black nothing, bearing northwesterly toward El Paso from where Jesus Ruiz, El Gato, had jumped bail after the DEA had managed to bust him.
Ruiz had regained consciousness. He was trussed up for delivery against the rear bulkhead and appeared to have lost all stomach for trying to reason these gringos out of taking him back to the law. One look at what was left of his gang after he came to on the ground just before lift-off had convinced the drug boss that the curtain had come down on this act. He sat back there, apprehensively watching the three up front as if fearful that they might decide on a whim to stroll back and pitch him out.
Cody had just finished calling in their flight plan and ETA to El Paso, relaying the message from Hawkins and Caine to be passed on to the authorities that they were bringing in a bail-jumping fugitive, Class A.
He had obtained the Huey through-Pete Lund’s connections after Lund’s inquiries had tracked down the approximate whereabouts and intentions of the Caine and Hawkins partnership.
He had briefed the two on what he wanted of them before the take-off from that desert kill ground in Mexico, after a warm round of bear hugs and high-fives. He had seen close up that his first impression of the two—that they had not changed a whit since their old combat days together—was correct, but he still was not sure what their response would be to his offer.
Hawkins and Caine had been discussing the proposition between themselves, as he had suggested, and in the pilot’s seat he had not been able to hear them due to the all-enveloping rumble of the chopper’s engine.
At last the two came back to him, shouting to be heard.
“Well, we kicked it around, Sarge,” Hawkeye yelled at his ear.
“And?”
The Texan grinned.
“Well, I woulda said no a couple hours ago, but the way me and the limey here look at it, I reckon we owe ya one. You want to put the old team together and Uncle Sugar’s paying good; hell yeah, we’ll sign up for the fun.”
Caine leaned forward, adding, “I would have said no a couple of hours ago too, because I’d forgotten what it’s like to be in a fight with you, Cody. We were too good a unit to never work again.”
“Question,” shouted Hawkeye. “You told us about Pete. What about Rufe?”
Caine nodded.
“Where is he? He’s not—”
“No, but right now he probably wishes he was,” Cody told them.
And he told them about Rufe Murphy’s predicament, and what they would have to do about it.
CHAPTER
FIVE
Athens, from its crown on the Acropolis hill, spreads across an arid plain in a network of old buildings and circuitous streets that give way to wide modern boulevards and squares.
Omonis Square, with its bouzouki music in the air and sidewalks lined with tavernas where the men sit sipping thick black coffee and conversing animatedly, is the home of Athens’ three major department stores, but has about it a rabble-filled, hustle-bustle atmosphere closer to that of the nearby marketplace of the old town—where the country people come to buy, sell and socialize—than to the swankier tourist environs of Kolonaki Square or the Athens Hilton.
Christus Imports was on Caningos Street, a narrow, relatively quiet thoroughfare two blocks east of the square; an area of some small businesses but primarily residential, which is why Anton Christus had chosen it.
Christus felt a cool chill of premonition touch the base of his spine despite the intense dry heat of midafternoon as he resealed the blond wooden box intended for Farouk Hassan’s people: the Uzis, ammunition enough to stand off an army, hand grenades, pistols, and daggers. He looked around the empty loading dock inside the garage.
No on had come in while he had been making the final check of the shipment.
He slammed shut the back doors of the van. He had waited until his workers were gone on their daily afternoon break before making sure everything was as it should be. Most of them knew nothing of his reputation as Athens’ leading black-market arms dealer.
Now all that remained was the wait on word from the PLGF.
He glimpsed his dark reflection for a moment in the smoked glass of the van’s back doors. His Gallic features, inherited from his mother and as out of place as ever atop the stocky Greek body, wore a pinched, high-strung expression that he tried to erase by consciously telling himself to relax. He always got this way when dealing with the Palestine Liberation Guerrilla Force.
He heard the phone back in his office ring once, and a moment later Apodaka, his driver and the only man in his employ who knew about and assisted with his “second business,” stuck his head out the office doorway at the far end of the dock.
“For you, Anton.”
He hurried to take the call.
“Hello?”
“We are ready,” said a voice that he recognized at once as belonging to Ali Hassan, Farouk’s younger brother and one of the PLGF, Ali’s voice somehow deeper in resonance than Farouk’s. “So are we,” he replied curtly. “Where? When?”
“Right now. We will be parked facing west just east of the corner where Pireos connects with Ermou.”
“But that is too near the Acropolis,” Christus protested. “There will be tourists, crowds all around us.”
“And hundreds going about their daily chores,” Ali Hassan countered tersely. “We will be lost in the crowd. No one will pay attention to laborers transferring a box from one van to another.”
“I don’t like it.”
“These are Farouk’s orders,” Ali replied with utter finality. “We leave for there now. We will meet you there in exactly one half-hour.”
The receiver clicked and Anton’s ear was filled with the irritating purr of the dial tone.
He slammed the receiver onto its base angrily.
“Filthy swine—” he started to say, then he remembered Apodaka’s presence and turned to find the driver staring back at him expectantly from the doorway. “Well, don’t just stand there, get the truck started,” he barked peevishly. “We’re on our way to earn more blood money.”
“There they are,” said Rallis the moment he saw the van emerge from the garage of Christus Imports. “After them.”
Detective Giorgios gunned the unmarked police car to life and waited.
The van, with Apodaka driving and Christus in the passenger seat, turned left into the baking sunlight of Caningo Street, heading away from the police car.
Giorgios slipped the car into gear and pulled into the moderate flow of economy cars and bicycles clogging the street.
One of the two detectives in the backseat leaned forward.
“Think this is it?” he asked Rallis.
“If it’s not,” Giorgios answered for his superior, “it is the first move they’ve made all day.”
Chief Inspector Constantine Rallis, of the Special Affairs branch of the Athens police department, felt the stirring air through the open windows dry the
patina of sweat coating his face.
They had been staking out Christus’s place for two long, hot days, ever since the PLGF informant had contacted Rallis.
Rallis still did not know the informant’s name; it had been but a voice on a telephone two days earlier, but since Rallis was the one who had drawn the assignment of breaking up the terrorist cells, which appeared more and more to make Athens their home base for launching terrorist attacks in the area, he had some time ago reached the decision that he needed all the help he could get, including terrorist informants like the one whose “information” had brought him and the three other men to Caningo Street.
He had risen through the ranks during his fifteen years with the department—due for the most part to his tenacity and skill as a policeman and his record for bringing to a successful conclusion nearly every assignment handed to him—but this terrorist business was something else again. He had learned that the hard way; typical criminals were invariably apprehended because their greed or lust got the better of them and a betrayed woman or a double-crossed accomplice would eventually come forward or be tracked down to supply the pieces of the puzzle.
That was hardly the case with terrorists; their religious beliefs and zeal for their cause generally canceled out their taking up with loose women who would talk. Nor did greed enter the equation, he had come to learn. These were killers who committed their crimes for their people and their faith, not for their pocketbooks, and that kind of motivation was most difficult to crack with standard police operating procedures. There had been some arrests, but nothing of consequence. There had been too little to go on.
That was until the phone call; the whispering voice telling Rallis only that “something very big” was about to happen—a PLGF initiative, is how the caller had put it—the anonymous informant claiming that even he did not know the details. The only information he furnished was that the weapons and armaments for such an operation were to be obtained within the next day or so from Anton Christus, and that had been enough for Rallis to set up this stakeout; for he and his men to perspire profusely in their car across from Christus Imports, waiting, waiting, waiting.