Relentless

by Brian Garfield

  He’d sat in the overturned pilot’s seat, hanging by his seat belt, not feeling a thing, hearing the meatwagon sirens and the wail of tires and the spouting foam of the fire hoses, and then the crash crews had pried the plane open and climbed inside to drag him and the copilot outside. In the ambulance they’d tested him for breaks and concussion but all he had was a few cuts and bruises. The copilot had a gash on his head from the control wheel and for twelve hours he’d been on the critical list, and Walker had waited in the hospital; but the copilot had pulled through, so there was no manslaughter charge against him.

  The downed power line had cut electricity in two factories and four hundred houses and a shopping center. The community was incensed, the insurance company was outraged, and when the government had pulled Walker’s license Or-Cal had kicked him out of the firm. They agreed to charge off the demolished airplane against Walker’s invested capital. They lost money on it but they were willing to do that to get rid of him.

  It put him on the street without even a tin cup. He had no money and no pilot’s license; anyhow the wreck had made it impossible for him to get a job anywhere in the country in any company that had anything to do with airplanes. They didn’t even want him around airports selling tickets.

  The fraternity of airmen had a primitive pride. They didn’t want him around because he was a reminder: It could happen to any of us. Walker’s crash had cost Or-Cal half its contracts and the fraternity couldn’t afford even a hint that this kind of man might be tolerated by them: pilots were always suspect, and partly because of their arrogance they were watched eagerly by groundlings for evidence of recklessness. If it had been only hard luck he might have been protected and supported by his own kind-you rarely heard of a pilot on welfare-but when it was more than hard luck, when it was your own inexcusable stupid failure, there was no room for you because you-had disgraced the fraternity.

  He was bitter, there was no way not to be. But he couldn’t blame them. He had been one of them and he understood.

  And now at twenty-nine he was burnt out. Washed up.

  He’d been in Tucson two months, pumping Texaco gas and drinking up his wages, when the Major had found him.

  4

  “You may not remember me. Hargit, Leo Hargit.”

  “I remember you, Major.”

  The Major had driven into the gas station in a four-year-old Lincoln Continental. It suited him; he had the carriage to bring it off. Steel gray hair close-cropped against a well-shaped skull. Near six feet tall, long-boned, a straight taut body in superb condition. In mufti now, a cool light grey suit that had not come from stock. When Walker had last seen him at Hue the Major had been wearing a Green Beret uniform.

  Hargit had a flashing grin, the teeth as white and even as a military cemetery. He was powerfully handsome with that larger-than-life magnetism which was, in certain men, a force of leadership. His face was big and square and all straight lines.

  He had got out of the car and shaken hands with Walker. He wasn’t a bone crusher but you could feel the power in his grip; he had muscles he hadn’t even used yet.

  “They tell me you’ve had it a little rough, Captain.”

  “I haven’t exactly been sweating the income tax.”

  “Someplace we can talk?”

  Then it wasn’t just an accidental meeting.

  “I’ve got the place to myself till three o’clock or so.”

  The Major glanced at his watch and shot his cuff. “That ought to be time enough.”

  “You want gas in that thing?”

  “Let it wait.” The Major had thrown his big arm across Walker’s shoulders and walked him inside the filling station. There was only one chair, by the telephone desk with its credit-card machines and free roadmap stand. The place was a litter of tools and old batteries and cans of oil; it smelled of lubricants. The Major swept a patch of workbench clear of tools, cocked himself on it hipshot with one foot on the floor, and waved Walker into the chair. It gave Hargit the position of command.

  The doors were open but it was hot and close. The desert sun shot painful reflections off passing cars and the store windows across the boulevard. Traffic was a steady noise.

  “I might have a job for you.”

  “Doing what? Back in the Army?”

  “No. Something else. Flying a plane.”

  Walker’s laugh was more of a snarl. “I haven’t got a license.”

  “I’ll get you one.”

  “It’s not that easy. They took it away from me and they’re not likely to give it back before World War Five.”

  “I’ll get you a license. Hell, a piece of paper?”

  “It’s not that easy,” Walker said again, keeping his face blank, trying not to show the bitterness. His overalls were black and filthy with grease and he found himself wiping his hands on the bib front. His fingernails were inky.

  “It might not be in your own name,” the Major said, watching him unblinkingly.

  Walker’s face shifted. “Just what kind of flying did you have in mind?”

  “Twin-engine. Mostly daylight flying, mostly on radio ranges. You could do it with your eyes shut.”

  “Not according to the FAA.” But he leaned forward, bracing a hand on his knee. “Unless you’re talking about flying somewhere outside of the country?”

  “Partly in, partly out.”

  “Look, Major, I don’t like fencing. The last time I saw you, you had a couple of Special Forces A-Teams working the back hills in Cambodia and Laos. All right, I read the newspapers, I saw where they were recalling the Green Berets and cutting them back.”

  Hargit said drily, “A few lard-ass Pentagon generals decided there wasn’t room in the United States Army for an elite corps. Which was pretty funny coming from charter members of the West Point Protective Association.”

  “Okay, they did you out of a job. But I hear the CIA’s hiring hundreds of former Green Berets to serve in Laos. That’s just what I read in the papers. I don’t know anything. But if you’re traveling around signing up recruits to fight some ass-hole war out in Laos you can count me out. I’ve had my ass shot at enough.”

  The Major laughed, his eyes closing up to slits. “It’s got nothing to do with Laos.”

  “Or the CIA?”

  “Or the CIA.” The Major pulled a flat billfold out of his inside pocket and extracted a folded newspaper clipping. “Evidently you didn’t read all the papers.”

  It was eight or nine months old, starting to yellow and get brittle at the folds. It had a one-column head shot of Hargit in his beret at the top. The caption spelled his name and the headline beneath it said: BERET MAJOR DISCHARGED AFTER VIET COURT-MARTIAL.

  Hargit took it back before he’d had time to read more than a paragraph. He folded it carefully and put it back in the billfold. “Some South Vietnamese civilians got killed and they needed a scapegoat. The details don’t matter, it’s all politics. The gooks were VC at night and law-abiding citizens during the day-you know the drill. But it was supposed to be a pacified hamlet and Saigon raised hell.”

  Walker stared at him. “I’ll be damned. So they threw you out.”

  “Seventeen years in uniform,” the Major said in a dull low voice. “If I hadn’t had a friend or two they’d have put me in the stockade for murder. Murder, for God’s sake-there’s a war going on.” The Major slipped the billfold into his pocket and adjusted the hang of his jacket. “So you see we’ve got something in common, Captain.”

  “You don’t look like you’re hurting.” He couldn’t help it. The big car and the three-hundred-dollar suit didn’t stimulate his sympathies.

  If it angered Hargit he didn’t show it. “Money? I had a little saved up. It doesn’t amount to anything.” He stood up and turned to stare out the plate-glass front window, talking oyer his shoulder. “I could have hired out to half a dozen armies. South America, Africa-plenty of work around for a mercenary who knows guerrilla work.”

  “You were damn good,” Wal
ker agreed. “Why didn’t you do that?”

  “I’m going to. But on my terms, not theirs. It’s always a mistake to get into a position where you’ve got responsibility but not authority. From here on in I don’t take orders from anybody but Leo Hargit.”

  “Easy to say. You going to hire yourself?”

  “Yes.” Hargit turned to face him. There was no reading the expression but the eyes were hard as glass. “There are countries around willing to hire whole armies at a clip.”

  Now it really began to frighten him. “And you’re going to raise an army?”

  “I figure to put together the best mobile force of crack guerrilla mercenaries anybody ever saw. And then I figure to hire out to the high bidder and run his war the right way-my way, with no interference from anybody and no Pentagon to court-martial me.”

  It took time to absorb. After a while Walker said, “And you don’t care who you fight for. Which side, I mean.”

  “Sides don’t mean anything below the Equator.”

  “Well I know that. I hate to sound like a hick but I meant what about right and wrong?”

  “Virtues make sense when you can afford them, I suppose. I can’t. Anyhow, morality’s a pen for sheep, built by wolves. Take what you want and don’t look back, that’s all that matters.”

  Walker blinked. “Why’d you come to me?”

  “I told you. I want a pilot.”

  “I never flew a combat plane in my life.”

  “I wouldn’t ask you to.”

  It wasn’t making any sense. All he knew was that Hargit was playing him, enjoying the’ game; and Hargit wasn’t about to spell it out until he was good and ready. So Walker tried another tack. “How’d you find me?”

  “Does it matter? I traced you through some old contacts.” Then the billfold came out again and Walker was staring at a multi-engine commercial instrument-rated FAA pilot’s license, complete with seals and stamps and a description: Kendall Williams, date of birth 10/27/41, place of birth Albuquerque, N. Mex., ht 5’ 11”, wt 160 lbs, hair brown, eyes gray. Everything had been filled in except the bearer’s signature.

  Walker’s hand, holding it, was not steady; the document fluttered with vibration.

  “Where’d you get this?”

  “It’s a forgery but nobody has to know that.”

  “It’s a damned good phony.”

  “Of course it is. What do you take me for, an amateur?”

  “Okay, Major, you’re a professional.” He stood up and thrust the pilot’s license back at him. “The question is, a professional what?”

  “Let’s say a professional thief.”

  5

  “Captain, you’ve got your tit in a wringer. I’m offering you a way out-enough money to go to Canada or Brazil and start your own bush airline. There’ll be a minimum of fifty thousand in it for you and it may come to more. All you’ve got to do is fly a couple of airplanes and drive a car twenty miles.”

  “It’s too risky.”

  “Nothing’s risky if the stakes are high enough.”

  “What the hell do you want with all that money anyway?”

  “It takes a lot of money to raise an army, Captain. Recruiting, training, equipping.”

  “Jesus, the kind of money you’re talking about you could forget all that and just retire on it.”

  “Some men could.”

  It was terrifying to see a Green Beret type go bad. For all those years, in line of duty, he’d been breaking all the rules of civilized conduct, and it gave him a feeling of untouchable immunity from all those rules.

  “Do you want me to go over it again, Captain?”

  “No. I get the pitch. You’re going to rob a bank.”

  “Not just any bank. A million-dollar cash bank.”

  “And if we get caught?”

  “This is a military operation, Captain. We’ll be prepared for every possibility. We’re not going to get caught.”

  “Jesus, I don’t know. I never stole anything bigger than a pack of chewing gum.”

  “Captain, it may be the last chance you’ll ever get at owning your own airline and flying your own plane.” Hargit was an astute and clever judge of weakness and of a man’s needs.

  “I’m not asking you to turn to a life of crime,” he added. “We pull off one score and that’s all. It’s the habituals who get caught-the odds catch up to them.” And the Major unfolded the unsigned pilot’s license, put it on the desk in front of Walker, took a fountain pen out of his pocket, uncapped it, and handed it to him.

  After a while Walker took the pen and signed at the tip of the Major’s finger.

  6

  “But why me?”

  They were riding north in the Lincoln on Interstate 10. The speedometer hovered at seventy but it was cool and quiet inside the air-conditioned sedan. The Major drove the way he did most things-with casual and unflappable efficiency. Walker repeated, “Why pick me?”

  “Because it’s always better to deal with a known quantity. You were a good officer. You know how to take orders, you’re accustomed to military operations. There were half a dozen uniformed pilots I could have brought into this thing, but they’d have had to go AWOL and it would have made a fuss. Nobody’s going to miss you.”

  He didn’t think the Major meant anything by that remark but it chilled him, made the little hairs stand up on the back of his neck. He fought the feeling and changed the subject. “Who else is in this?”

  “Three others. You may have known two of them.”

  “Baraclough?”

  “Yes.”

  Baraclough had been mentioned in the clipping. He’d been an Army captain, Hargit’s second-in-command. He’d been drummed out of the Army by the same court-martial board He remembered Baraclough vaguely: a thin sardonic opportunist with a napalm scar on one arm.

  “Who else?”

  “Eddie Burt.”

  “I don’t think I remember him.”

  “He was a sergeant under my command.”

  “They court-martial him too?”

  “No. They thought about it but they had to draw the line someplace-on those charges you could cashier every other American soldier out there.”

  “But this fellow Burt stayed with you.”

  “He’s a loyal man.” You couldn’t picture the Major smirking but there was considerable satisfaction in his little smile.

  “Who’s the fifth man?”

  The Major’s face changed abruptly. “You’ve never met him. An ex-convict named Hanratty.” He didn’t bother to conceal the contempt in his voice.

  7

  Baraclough was waiting at The Sands in Phoenix. The three of them had dinner there and talked about old times in Saigon as if they had nothing else on their minds. Baraclough was dressed in casual weekend slacks and sport shirt but both garments, and his shoes, had the look of money. Obviously the operation wasn’t being financed on a shoestring.

  Baraclough was gaunt, dour, with a twisted sense of humor and curious areas of indifference and sensitivity. He paid great attention to such things as good manners and good diction, and his humor was the self-deprecating kind that often went with a high order of intelligence. He was also capable of gratuitous cruelties: he treated the cocktail waitress like a lower form of life-“Have you thought of having that moustache removed, dear?”-but he left her a lavish tip.

  After a while it occurred to Walker that the two men worked well together because they complemented each other: each filled gaps in the other’s capacities. They were both cruel men but their brutalities were of different kinds.

  Baraclough’s sadistic streak was deliberate and malicious and he enjoyed exercising it, but he only did it when the circumstances gave him the edge so that there was no likelihood of retaliation against him.

  Hargit’s cruelty was that of the predatory carnivore. A matter of indifference. It never occurred to him to be concerned about other people’s feelings. Hawked, lithe, violent, charismatic-he had the roughshod instincts
of a jungle cat, and the grace.

  They drove to Reno with only two gas stops and a half-hour in Las Vegas for lunch. Baraclough did most of the talking, filling Walker in; Baraclough was the one who handled details. He was a superb driver: he kept the needle right on the speed limit and when he had to pass on narrow roads he did it smoothly with no great bursts of power and no sudden braking.

  Burt was waiting for them in Reno. Walker remembered him now that he saw him. Burt had a shaven head and a waxy, slightly concave face and the build of an oil drum. He had the stolid unimaginative personality of a career master sergeant, which he had been; the threads on the sleeve of his khaki shirt showed where he had carried nine reenlistment hashmarks.

  The house Burt had rented was one of those week-by-week rentals Reno served up to people who set up “permanent” Nevada residences for six weeks to get their divorces. It was six miles out of town, a thirty-year-old hunting cabin set back a mile off the highway in scrub timber, out of sight of neighbors. It had two bedrooms and a large paneled front room with stone fireplace and exposed rafters that gave it the look of a hunting lodge. Hanratty, the fifth man, had arrived a day earlier by plane from Los Angeles and Burt had picked him up at the airport. They had two cars among them-Hargit’s Lincoln Continental and a Plymouth that Burt had rented from a Reno agency.

  Hanratty was a narrow lizard of a man who had been up the river more times than an anxious salmon-a three time ex-con. It turned out he was Eddie Burt’s ex-brother-in-law: Burt’s sister had divorced him during his second prison term. Hanratty had a narrow face, rough, pitted all over, the hue of veal. His nose was a teapot snout and he looked as if he had been assembled out of leftover mismatched parts-fat legs and hips, a short torso, matchstick arms and a small nervous face. He talked with his teeth together as ex-convicts invariably do, speaking out of the corner of his mouth like a ventriloquist. He was never without a large revolver.