The Annihilators

by Donald Hamilton

  She hesitated. “I shouldn’t think so. It’s been here thousands of years, remember. A major explosion deliberately set to shatter the rock walls would be one thing; but I don’t believe just the noise of a little handgun fired in the open cave…”

  “It would be nice if you were sure,” I said sourly, when she left the sentence incomplete. “Well, you lead the way and tell me when to duck. And if you spot anything suspicious, fall flat and roll behind a rock and stay there.”

  It was just about as bad as I’d expected it to be. We passed the shack that housed the pounding generating machinery; and the trail dipped down into a depression in the earth where the underlying limestone had collapsed centuries ago. There was a low cliff ahead, and in the cliff was a hole, and in the hole some lights were burning. We ducked into the opening. The illumination system was not reassuring; just a pair of cheap insulated wires lying alongside the trail, running from one dimestore light socket holding a dirty naked bulb to the next; and not all the bulbs were burning. I was glad of the flashlight in my pocket and the spotlight in Frances’s hand. I wouldn’t have wanted to trust myself in the bowels of the earth with nothing between me and total blackness but that jury-rigged lighting system.

  The passage was low, as Frances had warned; but fortunately for my claustrophobic tendencies it was not narrow. Apparently certain strata had been leached out extensively here, and the path simply followed the deepest part of this considerable horizontal crack in the earth’s crust. Dark passages branched off on either hand; and we began to see ghostly stalactites and stalagmites gleaming in the weak light—I remembered that the tites were the ones working their way down from the top, while the mites were the ones growing up from the bottom.

  As we went deeper, we encountered water seepage both below and above; my hands and the knees of my pants were soon wet and muddy as I went under one low bridge after another on all fours. Dark stains and smudges appeared on the shoulders and back of Frances’ bright blouse as she failed to scrunch down far enough occasionally. I tried not to think of all those tons of dirt and rock above us…

  Frances signaled a stop. “Only about fifty yards farther,” she whispered. “Listen.”

  I heard a distant murmur of voices ahead. “Tell me what’s there,” I said.

  “It’s a rather large underground chamber, quite high, kind of domed. There are four pillars: stalactites and stalagmites that have met and fused together. They look as if they’d been deliberately put there to support the ceiling, as in a cathedral. The sacred calendar wheel is mounted on the large central one. It has been lightly glazed with silicate deposits from ground water running over it, but the inscriptions are still readily decipherable. In front of it is the jaguar altar…”

  “The what?”

  “Like you saw in the Temple of Ixchal, the two-faced god, Life-and-Death, but flattened to form a large sacrificial altar with a blood hole in the middle. There’s also a fire pit. Around the other pillars are many sacred urns and other vessels all coated and frozen in place by mineral deposits from centuries of seepage. Rather eerie, like one of those ghost movies where everything is shrouded with cobwebs, but this is semitransparent stone. Far to the right is the rubble wall concealing Lupe’s revolutionary arsenal; of course he built it back up again after we made our little deal. And straight ahead as you approach, beyond the pillars, is the sacred cenote, a large clear bottomless pool…”

  “Bottomless?”

  “It slants back down under the distant wall of the chamber, we don’t know how far. We’ve picked up a great deal of valuable material from the sloping bottom nearby, but the scuba diver who tried to see how deep it was beyond the dropoff never came back up. It was… rather unpleasant; and the government forbade any further attempts to sound the rear of the pool. We believe that it simply taps into an underground river—there are many in this area—and that the diver was swept away by a current too strong for him to swim against, poor man.” She shuddered, and went on: “Of course there’s also the local theory that the old gods simply punished him, vanished him—poof!—for trespassing on their forbidden domain.”

  “Sure.” I looked around and grimaced. “Do you really plan to bring our whole tour group into this dismal hole?”

  She grinned maliciously. “Darling, they’ll love it. A return to the womb. You forget, there are people who simply dote on exploring underground, and make a hobby of it. For a dangerous secret agent, you certainly have some odd hangups.”

  “Well, at least I’m not scared of a funny-looking little piece of steel with a hole in the end,” I said. I looked at her for a moment. “You realize of course that you’ve done your part now. You’ve served your purpose; you’ve brought me here with my gun. Now you’re entitled to bug out if you want to.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said.

  I shrugged. “Not my fault if people, insist on being stupid. But stay right here until I call you. I mean that. We don’t know what’s down ahead there, who’s down there. If there should be shooting, I want to be able to blast instantly at anything that moves; I don’t want to have to wait until I’m sure it’s not wearing a red shirt and a superior smirk on its face.”

  “And… if you don’t call?”

  “Go back to the hotel and have them open up the bar and have a drink to a pleasant memory. At least I hope it was pleasant.” I kissed her on the nose. “Remember, stay here until it’s over. Keep your head down if there’s any shooting. In here, God knows where the ricochets will go.”

  I moved away cautiously, just keeping low at first, then resorting to the hands-and-knees bit, and finally the belly-and-elbows crawl. Leaving the trail, I worked my way left to a kind of rocky ridge where the floor of the cave rose to within three feet of the roof. Slowly, with the modified Chief’s Special in my hand, I wiggled up to where I could peek between two limestone boulders that had fallen from above sometime within the past few hundred or thousand years, not a nice thought.

  It was, as Frances had described it, a rather impressive underground cathedral. The stalactite-stalagmite columns did look like ornately sculptured architectural features deliberately designed for both structural support and religious decoration. The calendar wheel was a disappointment, however; it wasn’t nearly as large and impressive as the one in the Museo Anthropologia in Mexico City. This was just an eight-foot disc of stone that had been set into the great central pillar in some way—I couldn’t help thinking, disrespectfully, that it looked a bit like a large archery target.

  Facing it was Cortez, lashed to the slimmest of the three subsidiary pillars that surrounded the massive central column. He was bareheaded; and I noticed that his hair was a lot thicker than I expect mine to be if I ever reach that age; it showed very little gray. He was dressed in his customary white pajamas. They were spotted in front with blood that had run down his chin as the result of a couple of preparatory softening-up blows to the face. Even as I watched, the man in front of him slugged him hard in the body.

  This was a big blond man and he liked his work. I could tell by the happy way he went about it; but of course I already knew him by name and reputation. He was Marschak, Rutterfeld’s meatheaded muscle specialist. But Marschak’s happiness wasn’t perfect. Beating on people was fun, but beating on people who moaned and wept and pleaded for mercy was more fun; and the old man made no sound except for an inadvertent gasp as the breath was driven out of him.

  Rutterfeld was supervising the proceedings, standing back a little, as tall as Marschak but much thinner; emaciated and dark and, according to his dossier, very, very mean.

  “Again!” he said, and Marschak struck again. Rutterfeld spoke to Cortez, pointing to the round calendar disc. “This stone, what means it? In a recent speech, the man who found it is reported to have claimed that it holds the secret of the destruction of the civilization by which it was made, a secret passed down by generations of native priests. What is this secret? You are the latest of these priests, you must know, you will tell u
s… Ach, put it into Spanish, Pedro.”

  Pedro Marschak, a nice combination of names for a blond giant, started translating. I looked around for the missing Kronbeck, Rutterfeld’s weapons expert. I found him where a weapons expert should have been, in the rocks below me where he could cover the path and anybody who came along it. He was a small, dark, moustached weasel of a man. Marschak had finished speaking. There was no answer from the old man. I heard Rutterfeld’s sharp command and the sound of another blow.

  ANDALE!

  It was a silent cry for help blasting into my brain: Hurry! It didn’t mean that the old man was afraid; it merely meant, I knew, that his old body had taken about as much as it could, and he had things to do before he died, and I was there to see that he got to do them. What he had to do and why I had to help him were things I didn’t know; but I’ve had blind assignments before. In fact, the times when I know exactly what I’m doing and why are in the minority. I threw a message back: DON’T HONK, I’M PEDALING AS FAST AS I CAN. Whether it went anywhere I didn’t know; that telepathy stuff is not my bag.

  “You will tell us,” I heard Rutterfeld say, seating himself on the sacrificial altar with its two snarling heads. “You will tell us how your ancestors died, old man. It is on that stone, no? They all died, something killed them very fast without a mark on them, I have seen the mural in the Jaguar Temple. You will tell us how they were killed or you will die, too, but there will be many marks on you. My clients, my masters, are very interested in things that kill quickly and efficiently. What was used, what weapon? Is it something ancient that our modern scientists have overlooked? Tell!”

  He gestured to Marschak, who went into his translation act once more, giving the old man a little more time to rest. His voice helped to cover my movements. Actually, the stalk was easy. This was a city team; they should never have let themselves be sent out into the boonies. Kronbeck never knew I was there until I chopped him down from behind; but as he went down he dropped the Browning Hi-Power he was holding and, while it didn’t discharge, thank God, it did make a lot of noise on the rocks. I crouched and took aim as Marschak whirled, producing a Browning of his own with reasonable celerity.

  It was not time for fancy marksmanship, at thirty yards, with a short-barreled weapon I’d never fired before. I simply centered the blunt front sight on the blocky-body and worked the squishy double-action mechanism twice. The double report was impressive in that-vaulted rock-chamber; it seemed to echo and reecho from all sides. I heard some small stones clatter down from the ceiling of the cave, jarred loose by the crashes of sound, but the ceiling itself stayed up. A great relief.

  Marschak dropped his gun and hunched over and hugged himself, the typical gut-shot reaction. Okay, so the piece threw low at thirty, that was something to remember. Rutterfeld had his hand inside his dark windbreaker, but he was a pro after all, he knew he was covered, had to be covered, and would be dead in a moment if he persisted in that dangerous project. The hand came out very slowly, empty. I bent down and picked up Kronbeck’s Browning and slammed it across its owner’s skull, just in case he was entertaining any subversive thoughts about waking up. I stood up.

  “All right, Frances, you can come out now,” I said.

  17

  It seemed disrespectful, if not actually sacreligious, for Frances to rinse my bloody handkerchief—she’d requisitioned it after using up the one tattered Kleenex she’d found in her own pocket—in the sacred waters of the sacred cenote. When I said as much, she laughed.

  “I don’t think they took its sanctity all that seriously,” she said. “Anyway, it’s sacred priest’s blood, isn’t it? And I somehow don’t think this pool is any stranger to blood.” She wrung out the handkerchief and glanced at me over her shoulder. “You’re a bit weird, aren’t you, darling?”

  “Just careful,” I said. “No sense insulting anybody’s gods unnecessarily, particularly in view of the funny things going on around here. I’ve got enough enemies without making more on any level, here or above or below. How is the old gent?”

  “I don’t know. That last blow slammed his head against the stone pretty hard. And there may be internal injuries.”

  “He should have yelled for help a little sooner.”

  “Maybe he didn’t know a little sooner,” Frances said.

  “Well, he knew they were coming for him,” I said. “He told me this afternoon to be waiting for his call.”

  She’d got the gore off the old man’s face and was cleaning it off his coarse cotton shirt. She didn’t look up at me when she spoke again, her neat brown head bent over her work. “You don’t really believe it, do you, Sam? We didn’t really hear him, did we? ‘Hear’, or whatever you want to call it.”

  “Hell, no,” I said. “It never happened. We just imagined the whole thing. But if they could do that, the old ones, what else would they do?”

  “Of course, ESP and telepathy have been studied in some fairly respectable institutions of higher learning by some fairly respectable academic investigators.” Frances grimaced, sitting back on her heels. “Rather inconclusively, as I recall… Now, shouldn’t we be doing something about that one?”

  I glanced toward big blond Pedro Marschak who, hands and feet tied with pieces of the long rope that had been wound around Cortez, was slumped against the nearest pillar, moaning. On either side of him, also bound, sat his friends—if the concept of friendship had any meaning in that company. Marschak’s eyes were closed and his face was greenish. There was a sheen of blood on his dark trousers, but not as much as you’d expect; the real bleeding is almost always internal when they’re shot down there.

  “Whatever you like,” I said. “Pull down his pants and stick some Band-Aids on his tummy, if it’ll make you feel better and you’ve got some Band-Aids.”

  Marschak heard me and opened his eyes and whispered: “You sonofabitch!”

  “But he could be dying!” Frances protested.

  I said, “Lady, I keep telling you, but it doesn’t seem to penetrate: I’m a pro. I don’t go around shooting people just to turn right around and start unshooting them. But as I say, if it’ll ease your mind, go ahead and play Florence Nightingale to your heart’s content. Maybe he’ll make a grab for you and give me an excuse to put the next one right between his ugly eyes.”

  “No mate! No kill!” It was Cortez’s voice. The old man was trying to sit up, a disturbed look on his bruised face. “Please no kill, señor. No dead.”

  There was a brief silence; then Rutterfeld spoke for the first time since his capture, if you disregard a few derogatory terms he’d applied to me while I was disarming and binding him.

  “The old savage has the correct idea,” he said rather smugly. “He knows what his government will do if white foreigners are found murdered by these primitives. The army will seize the excuse to exterminate them all; it has happened elsewhere in these jungles. So you had better get my associate to a hospital rapidly and hope you have not injured him too badly.”

  I said, “Friend Rutterfeld, the only trouble with that reasoning is that I’m the one who’ll be doing the murdering, very cheerfully considering who the murderees are; and I’m no downtrodden primitive. In fact I think you know what my real name is and whom I work for; and the government of Costa Verde treasures its friendly relations with Washington—as well they should, considering the way the U.S. supplies and dollars keep rolling in—so I don’t think anybody in Santa Rosalia is going to object very strenuously to my knocking off a few cheap Marxist spies I find abusing respectable Costa Verde citizens, primitive or otherwise.” I looked down at him grimly. “Moscow must be pretty hard up for weapons, reaching for a prehistoric death ray, or whatever, five thousand years old. Of course, if they really took it seriously, they wouldn’t have sent you and your clowns after it…”

  But Rutterfeld was looking past me. I saw a quick flicker of hope in his narrow eyes; in his position he’d consider any new development hopeful. I sidestepped and turned, gun ready;
but the man who stood there had his empty hands outspread in a gesture of peace. He was a young native man, short and brown and stocky as they all are, dressed in loose white like Cortez, with a sisal bag like a large, heavily-reloaded lady-type purse slung over his shoulder. I didn’t like to think that he’d got that close without my hearing him.

  “I am Epifanio,” he said. “I have come to attend El Viejo.”

  “How did you know the Old One needed attention?” I asked; a stupid question because I knew damn well how he’d known. Well, it beat carrying around walkie-talkies, I guess. I saw that this one had the same classic Melmec-Maya face, although much younger, with the same bold beaked nose, and slanting forehead, and inward-turning eyes. Epifanio. I’d thought that living in the U.S. Southwest most of my youth I’d heard all the Spanish names, but that was a new one for my collection. I wondered what his real name was. Something full of x’s and ch’s no doubt. Like Ixchal, the God of Death. “I think we should get him to a doctor as soon as possible,” I said. “He got slugged pretty hard. I was a little slow getting down here.”

  “It was foreseen,” Epifanio said. “There is no blame. Con permiso?”

  He moved past me and crouched beside the old man. There was a dreamlike quality to the night that was partly due, of course, to the fact that I had to keep closing my mind to the thought of all that rock above me: Subterranean operations are very hard on my nerves. Also there was the fact that, like Frances, I didn’t really believe some of the things that were happening and would have preferred to dismiss them as a lot of psychic bullshit—and probably would so dismiss them, try to forget them because I found them disturbing, as soon as I got the hell out of this miserable hole in the ground and breathed fresh air again. It was foreseen, indeed!

  Epifanio had taken a small cloth pouch from his sisal bag. He loosened the drawstring and reached inside for a pinch of some kind of leaves, which he fed to Cortez, who began to chew deliberately. Gradually the grayness faded from his weathered old skin. He spoke softly to Epifanio in a language I didn’t recognize at all; and the young disciple, if that was what he was, nodded and moved over to Marschak and gave him a quick examination and tried to feed him some of the magic leaves, but the blond man spat them out.