The Annihilators

by Donald Hamilton

  Austin Henderson decided to accompany his wife back to their cabin. When we were alone, I grinned at the handsome woman settling herself on the far side of the table.

  “Well, it’s an improvement over the old I-ran-into-a-door-in-the-dark routine. But with that shirt on you hardly have to worry about people looking at your face. That is one loud garment.”

  She laughed. “It’s my guide blouse. I just climb up on a high place and the stragglers all rally to the red standard to hear my next boring lecture.” She shifted position in her chair and winced. “I feel rather like a kid who took a bad spill on a bicycle; I seem to have little hurts all over me.”

  I said, “Curiosity is rearing its ugly head. You still haven’t told me why Lupe Montano hit you.” When she started to speak, I held up my hand and said, “Just a minute, let’s clear the decks first. I’m getting a little tired of all the deceit and disinformation, as the boys out in Langley like to call it. Can we now start operating on the assumption that we both know that Dick Anderson is really Ricardo Jimenez, son of an exiled former president of Costa Verde, imported into this country for revolutionary public relations purposes by Lupe Montano, who feels that his own outlaw image isn’t quite immaculate enough to be used as a shining symbol of national liberation? Can we also assume that you were slugged by Lupe, not by Ramiro Sanchez or a stray Melmec ghost? Although that was quite a convincing spook story you gave me first, I will admit.”

  Frances said, a little stiffly, “Yes, Mr. Felton or whatever your real name is, I think we can commence acting upon those elaborate assumptions.”

  “So both you and Ricardo are working with Montano,” I said. “Well, it’s a relief to know that; it’s a question that’s been bothering me. And now let’s get back to Montano’s reason for hitting you last night. What did he ask you to do that was so bad that you balked at last? Even worse than using your official position to smuggle an escaped political criminal into Costa Verde; even worse than crawling into the sack with one Samuel Felton to gain said revolting Felton’s trust and confidence?”

  Frances started to speak and stopped as the waitress, a handsome, compact, brown lady in a crisp, white, beautifully embroidered native smock and petticoat—they call them huipiles—put my breakfast before me and asked for Frances’s order.

  When we were alone again, Frances said, “Go ahead and eat; don’t let it get cold.” Then she laughed rather bitterly. “But don’t you see, darling, that’s exactly what he did order me to do last night, crawl into the sack with you so you wouldn’t get inquisitive and interfere with Dick’s—Ricardo’s—departure.”

  I frowned. “But why the argument? Whence the necessity for harsh disciplinary action? I realize that sleeping with me is a terrible ordeal for any girl to have to endure; but you’d managed to suffer through it a couple of times already. Why did you rebel last night?”

  She shook her head quickly. “It wasn’t what he asked me to do, Sam, it was the way he asked it. You must have seen what kind of a man he is. He not only ordered me to keep you… amused, distracted, he told me exactly how I should do it, in obscene detail, with some very dirty, sneering, and degrading comments about our relationship that… Well, I was stupid and lost my temper. I got on my dignified high horse: How dare you speak to me like that, you varlet, you? But you don’t use that arrogant-aristocrat act on a peasant-revolutionary like Montano—as I found out at the expense of my dignity and my stockings.” She shuddered reminiscently. “So the battered lady picked herself up humbly and stumbled off to carry out her instructions, to the accompaniment of loud male laughter.” She swallowed hard, and I saw that her eyes were wet and shiny. “Oh, God, darling, it’s such a mess!”

  It was very touching, but it still left the main question unanswered. “I’m still asking why,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Why does the proud and respectable and respected Frances Ransome Dillman, Ph.D., obey the dirty and dangerous instructions of a greasy hill bandit? Why does she allow him to slap her down as if she were a street-corner puta?” I stared at her grimly across the table. “What does this two-bit, two-gun desperado have on you, Dillman?”

  She hesitated, and drew a long breath. “Copalque,” she said.

  The waitress came with her food; and we were both silent until we were alone once more. The dining room was filling up now. I saw the insurance Wilders and the advertising Olcotts having breakfast together in a corner. The Putnams were at a table for two by themselves. Jim Putnam was wearing less jewelry than usual, and instead of his fancy tunic he was wearing a plain blue work shirt—tails out—over his jeans; but his wife clearly intended to tackle the Melmec ruins in her regular costume of wide cotton skirt and big boots.

  “Copalque?” I said at last.

  Frances nodded. “We hacked our way in here with machetes,” she said softly. There was a fond, reminiscent note in her voice. “We thought it was a totally lost and forgotten city—forgotten, at least, by everyone but a few natives like the old shaman, or medicine man, Cortez. Actually, of course, he’s a high priest of one of the oldest religions in the world. We were very careful to look him up, when we heard about him. We let him carry out his purification rites on every tomb and temple we opened. Let him, hell! We were delighted to be allowed to watch him, Sam. We’d thought all the old traditions and ceremonies were dead, and here they were being performed—in a somewhat degenerate and bastardized form, of course—by a living descendant of the ancient people we wanted to learn to understand. It was wonderful, and rather frightening sometimes. When I made up that nonsense about being scared by emanations from ancient tombs I wasn’t altogether kidding. We had some rather weird experiences, pseudopsychic experiences, I guess you’d call them, while that old man was… Well, never mind that.”

  There was something a little shamefaced about her attitude, the look of a scientist who’s encountered something that can’t be explained by her science, but who is trying to convince herself that there must be a rational explanation somewhere. Clearly she didn’t want to discuss it, and I was more interested in other aspects of her story than in some ancient religious mumbo jumbo, no matter how impressive she’d found it.

  “Go on,” I said.

  She drew a long breath. “As I said, we tried to make friends with all the local natives; but we had a feeling that there were people around we never saw as we were opening up the dig. And the workmen we hired from the nearby village were very nervous about something that seemed to have nothing to do with religion or superstition. But the discoveries we were making were wonderful. We were writing bright new pages in archaeological history and getting closer and closer to confirming Archie’s theories about the rise and fall of these civilizations, the basic rhythm of Meso-american history. And then we found the cave and the magnificent triple-calendar wheel, the answer, Sam, the proof! Because, as I’ve already told you, the times of conjunction of those three calendars, once I’d deciphered the number system—it’s not quite the same as the dot-and-dash system later used by the Mayas—and Archie had worked out the mathematics of it on his calculator, coincided almost exactly, as I said, with the sudden downfalls of the three great civilizations that had in turn dominated this part of the world. But of course that still left us with the truly important question to answer, the obvious question.”

  “Obvious?”

  Frances made an impatient, professorial gesture. “Well, it should be obvious! We now knew that the Melmecs had been able to predict the date of their own annihilation, and presumably so had the Olmecs and Mayas after them—but what had destroyed them? We still didn’t know that. But they knew, Sam. The finds we were making showed beyond a doubt that they knew what they were facing. They knew how their deaths would appear, as well as when. And we kept getting hints as we uncovered more and more tablets and murals and bas-relief wall-carvings, hints of something terrible to come. There were scenes of mass destruction, temple courts carpeted with dead and dying, images of men and women writhing
in their final agonies…” She drew a long breath. “And then, as we worked in that cave, we found the most dreadful thing of all. As we pulled away a barrier of loose rubble, surprisingly loose in fact, not compacted at all, we came upon a new arm of the cave behind it. Stacked there in the darkness was case after neat wooden case strapped with metal, each box carefully marked. I had no trouble at all in deciphering those hieroglyphics, Sam. None whatever!”

  I said, “The suspense is terrific.”

  She licked her lips. “The stencils were perfectly clear in the beam of Archie’s flashlight. The nearest one read: SMALL ARMS AMMUNITION 5.56 MM BALL 1000 RDS WT 37 LB.”

  14

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw our two gray-haired schoolteachers approaching, clearly intending to settle in the two vacant chairs so they could impress Frances with intelligent questions demonstrating how carefully they’d been doing the suggested reading. They did it every day. Without letting on that I’d seen them, I hoisted the big camera bag onto the table, pretty well preempting that side of it, and took out of it a small notebook.

  “I’d better write that down, Dr. Dillman,” I said. “You say this temple faces east and west? Which is the better side of it?”

  “The west side of the Temple of Ixchal faces the Great Court and is really quite remarkable… All right, Sam. They’ve gone. You’re a brute to spoil their fun, the poor old dears.”

  “Poor old dears, hell. That Tolson woman has a tongue like a Borgia dagger.” I regarded her for a moment. “So what you found was a nice modern ammunition dump some fifty feet underground—5.56 mm, that’s the .223 stuff they use in the Ml6s.”

  She nodded soberly. “And not just ammunition. There were larger crates, too, and long nasty-looking things wrapped in plastic—rocket launchers or something. We learned later that there was another entrance to the cave. You just climbed straight down into a deep sinkhole and came across through the rock about a hundred feet—they’d enlarged the narrow tunnel they’d found there, originally just a crack in the limestone, to the point where they could actually use carts and dollies and wheelbarrows to trundle the stuff inside after it was lowered into the sinkhole by a truck winch. Of course they camouflaged their tunnel entrance carefully with brush and vines and smoothed away the tire tracks above and covered the trail they’d made through the jungle as well as they could after every use. It was a lot shorter and easier way of getting to the ceremonial chamber than the long slanting underground passage we’d used, and the Melmec priests before us.”

  I asked, “How did you manage to find the cave in the first place?”

  She hesitated. “Well, there had to be a cenote, a source of water; they wouldn’t build a city without plenty of water. We found a couple of nice big ones in the jungle near here, and another at the subsidiary center of Labal about fifteen miles away—we’ll visit that later—and they all showed use, but not as much ceremonial use as you’d expect, considering the size of the city. Archie, who has a feeling for-that kind of thing, as I told you, was sure that there had to be a hidden cenote considered much more sacred. He kept poking into every little hole and depression until he finally—” She stopped, and gave an odd little laugh. “No, dammit, I’ll be honest. I told you about those pseudopsychic phenomena, remember? Well, Archie had a dream one night. In it he saw a file of Melmec priests disappearing into the ground. The face of the high priest was the face of Cortez. Archie recognized the place; he’d looked there and found nothing. So he went back and really looked; and there it was, a passage leading underground so overgrown with brush and thorns he’d never have found it if he hadn’t known exactly where to make his search. And how the hell are we going to put that into a scientific paper, Sam?”

  I looked at her for a moment. “You’re proposing the idea that Cortez sent that dream to your husband?” She gave an embarrassed little shrug. I said, “Accepting that theory as a working hypothesis, just why would Cortez want you to find the cave?”

  “It had already been found by Lupe Montano and his men, remember? Maybe Cortez didn’t like the sacreligious use to which they were putting his underground temple. Maybe he thought we could help him put a stop to it in some way.” She made a little face. “But of course we’re talking nonsense, Sam. We’re sensible people; we don’t believe in dreams that are sent around like telegrams. If I put such foolishness into a serious archaeological report, I’d be laughed out of my profession.”

  “Sure,” I said. “But the people who’d hidden those munitions were presumably keeping an eye on them. They must have known you’d learn their secret once they saw you find the cave.”

  She hesitated. “They’d apparently thrown up that concealing wall of rubble when we started work in the area, hoping that even if we found our way down there, we wouldn’t look behind it; but of course, being so oddly new, it attracted our attention immediately—well, as soon as we started looking around a bit. At first we were simply stunned by the magnitude of the find: the calendar wheel and all the ceremonial artifacts and the cenote itself, the underground pool that we just knew would yield all kinds of treasures. They used to throw their sacrifices into those pools, you know—sacrifices human and otherwise. Many of the great archaeological discoveries in this part of the world have been made by divers working the cenotes…”

  She sipped from her coffee cup thoughtfully, remembering the moment of discovery. She went on, smiling faintly: “At first we were just like kids on Christmas morning, running from one marvelous object to the next, but after a while we got organized—and there was that peculiar wall. Naturally we couldn’t be satisfied with what we had, we wanted more. So we had the men clear away some of the rubble. As soon as they’d made an opening, Archie crawled through and then called to me in an odd voice not to come. Well, I knew what he’d found, of course, some nasty-looking skeletons or mummified bodies—something like that—and he was protecting his tender little wife from the horrible sight, and to hell with him. So I crawled right in after him, and got to my feet beside him, and we stood there with our flashlights, staring in a sick way at all those lousy weapons and crates of ammunition that, we both realized, were going to spoil our wonderful discovery.”

  “Did you ever learn where the stuff came from?” I asked when she paused.

  Frances nodded. “We knew right away. There had been a bandit raid on a government arsenal just before we came. Of course the official word was that the subversive gang of vicious criminals had met with no success and had been slaughtered to the last man… The possibility of danger didn’t really occur to me at first, although I guess it had been in Archie’s mind when he told me to stay back. I was simply grief-stricken and furious at having that beautiful ceremonial cave—our cave—tarnished, contaminated, spoiled, by the presence of all this ugly modern murder equipment.” She swallowed hard. “Then a couple of powerful lights blinded us and a voice told us to put our hands up and suddenly there were armed men all around us. What’s the time?”

  I said, “A quarter of eight. Sanchez will get the bus driver here on time. And today neither of us has to worry about Dick Anderson. Mas cafe?”

  She nodded. The little girl stationed at the nearby coffee-maker—her white huipile was prettily embroidered in blue—was alert and eager for business; she filled both cups and gave us a gentle smile and went back to her post.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “That was how I first met Lupe of the Mountain,” Frances said. “He searched me for weapons as well as Archie. Ugh. Then there was a long debate, in Spanish, of course. I couldn’t follow all of it, it went too fast; but I gathered that the question wasn’t whether or not to kill us. It was merely how we could best be killed without attracting too much official attention. An accident was indicated; but it would not be well to have the inquisitive gringos caught by a rock-fall inside the cave, so close to the hidden munitions. A collapsing ruin a respectable distance away, however, could be made to appear quite convincing; and somebody knew just the right precario
us ruin. And then of course there was the question of whether or not the woman should be utilized, in proper communal fashion of course, before being killed. Unfortunately, it was decided, such a thing could probably be determined by the medical people even on a badly crushed female body, so proper prior utilization would have to be foregone. Que lastima, what a pity.”

  Her voice was quite steady; but I noticed that she sipped her coffee a little too fast, forgetting that her cup had just been refilled. She winced as the hot stuff burned her mouth, and set the cup down hastily.

  “Fun and games,” I said.

  “Yes, indeed,” she said. “I don’t mind admitting that I was… rather frightened. But just as they were about to take us away, there was a kind of gravelly rattling sound in the hole through which we’d come; and there was Cortez. Later we heard that when our workmen fled, hearing us taken prisoner like that, they’d run straight to him with the news. As he stood up and put his hat back on and brushed himself off, Montano gave the order to seize him, but nobody moved. He just looked at Lupe, and Lupe didn’t repeat the order. Cortez started to speak. It was a long speech, and his Spanish is strongly flavored by the ancient language, so I couldn’t really follow it, fast as he was talking, haranguing them. Then there was a question-and-answer period. At last Lupe came forward… What’s the time now, darling? After all the things I’ve said about being punctual, I don’t want to be the one to keep the bus waiting.”

  “Still not quite eight o’clock,” I said. “You don’t have to build up the suspense artificially, Frances.”