The Annihilators

by Donald Hamilton

I looked toward the Citadel and ducked hastily. A man was up there with binoculars, staring my way expectantly, obviously stationed there to warn somebody the moment he saw us returning. He had a weapon slung over his shoulder. Crouching low against the ruined wall, I studied the rest of the visible terrain. They’d put an armed guard at the Jeeps—actually he was one of our original drivers, but he was now holding another U.S.-type firearm in his hands. As I watched he took cover hastily. So did the man on the pyramid high above him…

  Frances and her entourage were obviously approaching the clearing. Frances would be chatting brightly and knowledgeably, I reflected, to keep her charges from sensing the trap into which she was leading them. Don’t ever hate me, she’d said; and I realized that she’d known this was coming when she said it. I drew a long breath and slid down from there, considering the alternatives, but there were no alternatives.

  Warning the group to flee was useless; where would a bunch of mostly middle-aged people flee to? Even if we were willing to leave Miranda and the Hendersons, we were not equipped for either defense or jungle survival. And the chances of my getting clear alone to summon assistance were also minimal. Escape along the single road was unlikely if they’d taken any precautions at all. I didn’t particularly fear the jungle, but I knew damn well that without a machete I’d never make my way through fifteen-odd miles of the tangled, thorny stuff to help, even assuming that there was help to be found back at the hotel. Besides, when they counted their catch they’d know I was missing; and it was their jungle, not mine. With strong machete-men out ahead to clear the way, they’d run me down within a mile.

  I had to assume that an immediate wholesale massacre was not intended. Better to walk into the trap, then, apparently dumb and unaware, hoping for a break later, than to be dragged back by the scruff of the neck of perhaps shot in flight. I looked around and found a hole under a fallen block of dressed stone and shoved the revolver and holster into it, thankful for the clip arrangement that let me slip it all off without having to pull the belt through the undersized loops of my bargain jeans. I remembered the bag of spare cartridges and laid that with the weapon. I shouldered the camera bag again, spent a moment memorizing the spot, and slid down the little hill, but stopped and turned my back to the path and opened my fly as footsteps hurried toward me. When Jim Putnam came into sight, looking annoyed and impatient, I was just zipping myself up again.

  “Frances sent me back to see if you’d broken a leg,” he said accusingly.

  I said, “Hell, can’t a man stop to take a picture and a leak if he wants to?”

  It must have startled and frightened her to find me missing. Knowing that I was armed, she’d be terribly afraid that I’d louse things up for her by some drastic action, even though it could hardly be successful against the firepower that probably awaited us. I followed Putnam along the path, wondering if I should warn him, but I didn’t know him that well. With all those Vietnam war medals, he could be a compulsive hero who, with a little advance notice, would dream up something that would get him killed and others with him. Besides, he was an ex-combat-type, dammit; he should have sensed the ambush himself, without being warned.

  I just hiked along behind him briskly therefore, and we rejoined the waiting group. Frances was very careful not to meet my eyes. She set off again; and we emerged from the shadowy jungle path into the sunlit clearing and strolled innocently toward the waiting Jeeps. Miranda and the Hendersons were no longer visible by the pool, but nobody seemed to notice.

  “If anybody needs a Coke or a beer or something after that walk, we can take a little break,” Frances said. Her voice was admirably controlled. “No? In that case, let’s take a look at the two buildings over here. The massive temple out in the middle of the plaza is called the Chapel; but let’s first examine the long low building on this side, on that raised platform beyond the cenote. It’s a series of small chambers, and we don’t really know what they were used for; but above each doorway you’ll find a well-preserved carving of a different stylized animal. There’s even one we suspect of being a forerunner of the Feathered Serpent of the Aztecs, although the cult of Quetzalcoatl didn’t really appear until much later.” She was speaking rapidly and tonelessly, like a talking doll. “We call the building the Nunnery; but as I was just telling Sam, you shouldn’t take all these names too seriously, most of them have no historical significance…” She looked back to check on us as she walked. A puzzled frown came to her face and she stopped and turned. “Ramiro, what in the world?…”

  Half a dozen men had stepped out of the brush at the side of the clearing as we passed. Their leader, Sanchez, was no longer our natty, rather pompous civilian guide; he was a full colonel in the revolutionary army. The eagles on the collar of his khaki shirt said so; but the fact that he’d taken time to change his clothes for this big moment indicated that his officer act would probably be just as pompous as his guide act. He was wearing a Sam Browne belt supporting a husky Browning 9 mm automatic pistol.

  The slender young man beside him, handsome and delicately moustached in the way that usually indicated a would-be lady-killer—he could have been a Latin stand-in for Errol Flynn—was also more or less uniformed in khaki and also carried the thirteen-shot Browning status symbol. It seemed to be a popular weapon in these parts. The other four men were armed with plebeian Ml6s and less formally dressed.

  Six here, I thought, and the six Jeep drivers, and the man on the pyramid if he’s still there, and probably a sentry or two to block the road and the trail. It was just as well that I hadn’t tried to take them on with a five-shot .38. Even with a few spare cartridges, I’d have run out of ammo before I could finish them all off.

  Ramiro Sanchez cleared his throat. “I regret this very much, Señora Dillman, but you and your friends are all under arrest as enemies of the revolution,” he said. “You should not have allowed yourselves to become pawns of the reactionary American criminals of the CIA who support the fascist murderer Armando Rael. Please stand very still and hold your hands up. Resistance will have very unfortunate consequences, I assure you.”

  Like I’d expected, pompous.

  21

  There followed, of course, the usual you-can’t-do-this-to-me nonsense session. In such a situation, there are always people in any group who feel compelled to announce loudly that nobody’s going to push them around, no sirree, even while it’s happening. Particularly while it’s happening.

  White-haired, red-faced Marshall Wilder, the insurance man, said they couldn’t do this to him; and his rather handsome black-haired wife Betty agreed shrilly that they couldn’t do it to her, either. Thin, intense, gray-haired Pat Tolson, highschool teacher, informed everybody that she was an American citizen and our ambassador would have something to say about it, which showed, I thought, a touching faith in the U.S. Foreign Service. Her stouter, calmer friend Peggy McElder, made of less stern—or less stupid—material, pleaded with her to be quiet, couldn’t she see that those men had guns?

  Big blond Paul Olcott, advertising man and sportsman, knowing firearms and very much aware of the multiple gun-muzzles looking our way, silenced his statuesque blond wife Elspeth when she started to voice her angry objections to the proceedings. Plump, dark Howard Gardenschwartz, the college professor, looked mildly apprehensive and kept his mouth shut. I saw his peasant gray-haired wife Edith, also commendably silent, find his hand and grasp it tightly. Dark Jim Putnam, wealthy disturbed war vet, like Olcott very much aware of the Ml6s he knew better than any one else in our party, had a protective arm about his sturdy young wife, who’d glanced toward him for guidance and, like him, said nothing.

  But the Wilders and the Tolson woman were making enough outraged noises to go around, until a shattering burst of sound silenced them briefly. The thin-moustached young officer beside Sanchez, at Ramiro’s command, had grabbed an automatic weapon from the man beside him and let off a burst, aiming high but not too high. I thought I could hear the cracking sound of the speedy l
ittle .223 projectiles passing overhead, although you usually don’t, so close; the muzzle blast drowns it out.

  “Silencio!” Ramiro snapped. “You are my prisoners; you will obey! I order you to be quiet and raise your hands!”

  Wilder shouted, “Who the hell do you think you are, anyway?”

  They always ask them who the hell they think they are, anyway, and how the hell they think they can get away with it, anyway; and they almost always earn themselves a bullet in the guts, a sap across the head, or a gun butt in the teeth—the last being the reward won by Marshall Wilder for his heroic defense of the principle of free speech. The officer who’d fired the warning burst stepped forward; and Wilder went down with a broken, bloody mouth. His wife dropped to her knees beside him and screamed hysterical abuse at Sanchez until the young man with the Ml6, at his colonel’s nod, stepped forward again. His body blocked the view, but a dull thunk let us know that she’d taken the gun butt alongside the head.

  That took care of the protest movement. Even the Tolson woman, displaying a little sense at last, fell silent. If I seem unsympathetic, it’s because that kind of loudmouthed bravery always seems so damn pointless to me; even if you’ve got courage to burn, why not save it until it counts? Frances had gone to her knees beside Wilder, producing Kleenexes to wipe his blood-dripping chin. She seemed to be getting into a rut of cleaning up the gory wounded, but at least she’d come better supplied today; she had a whole little packet of the stuff.

  Nearby, Mrs. Wilder sat up dazedly, her dark hair—suddenly it was quite obvious that she dyed it—straggling about a face that had suddenly gone old and ugly with pain. She held the side of her head and rocked back and forth, moaning. The young Latin Errol Flynn type who’d done the damage handed the M16 back to the man from whom he’d taken it and stationed him to watch the casualties.

  “Line up!” Ramiro snapped at the rest of us, indicating where he wanted us. “Right there. Hands remaining in the air while Lt. Julio Barbera, here, my second in command, examines for weapons. The ladies will excuse that we have no matron.” His anger was interfering with his tour-guide English. He turned his look on me. “Señor Felton.”

  “Yes, Colonel?” I said respectfully.

  Respect is cheap and, particularly when they belong to armies without official standing, they do love to hear their titles spoken.

  Sanchez said harshly, “We know who you are, a dangerous man, si? So you will come over to this spot, here, and this man, here, will have you as his personal responsibility… shoot him if he moves, Eugenio!”

  “Si, mi colonel!” The soldier, a chunky brown man with a badly scarred cheek, seemed enthusiastic about the idea.

  The special treatment was causing my fellow tour-members to eye me oddly, wondering just what kind of a dangerous man I was. Handsome young Lieutenant Barbera, under the eyes of his colonel, did an elaborate job of searching me, doing the armpits, waist, crotch, and ankles, but missing the funny belt buckle. He was really more concerned with humiliation than exploration; he’d have missed a neck-knife, too, if I’d been wearing one. But hardly a gun.

  Pronouncing me clean, after a quick and questioning glance toward his superior officer that let me know he’d been expected to find something, he went on to deal with the rest of the party. I noted that Frances was subjected to the same treatment as the rest of us; of course they wouldn’t want to point suspicion her way by leaving her out. Colonel Sanchez gave an order, and a man ran off in the direction of the cenote. Presently the Hendersons and Miranda emerged from the brush over there and came to join us, guarded by several of the Jeep drivers, now all armed. Sanchez waited while Barbera did a final, lingering, hands-on job on Gloria Jean Putnam that made her husband’s fists close tightly and the little muscles work along his jaw; then Sanchez summoned his lieutenant back to his side.

  “Now you will listen, all of you,” Sanchez said. “Serious crimes have been committed against the people of Costa Verde. As American citizens whose government supports the brutal dictatorship that oppresses us, you are all guilty of these crimes. But here we are not concerned with your general responsibility, and that of your government, for the evils of the present regime. We have specific charges to make against you, as accomplices of two CIA criminals sent to sabotage and destroy the work of the revolution. Those criminals stand there!”

  Barbera had come up to Miranda; now he gave her a sudden shove that sent her stumbling toward me. I had to catch her and steady her, while Ramiro Sanchez pointed at us accusingly.

  “This man who calls himself Felton and pretends to be a photographer is actually a CIA agent—a CIA murderer—sent by your government to assist the criminal Armando Rael by eliminating one of the leaders of the liberation movement, Ricardo Jimenez, whom you knew as Dick Anderson. And the woman beside him, Matson, who pretends to be a journalist, is actually his associate who has been supplying him with the information necessary to his campaign of assassination.” He glared at me. “Well, Señor Felton, or whatever you call yourself truly, what have you to say?”

  I said, “Colonel, if I am an expert assassin, I must be the slowest and most inefficient one on record. I’ve had the best part of a week to deal with a helpless, handicapped young man and he’s still alive.”

  “Do you deny working for the CIA?”

  “Yes.”

  “We have evidence—”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t work for the United States Government.”

  “You are quibbling, señor!” Outside the U.S., if you do anything for the government, if it’s sneaky and unpleasant, you’re automatically considered CIA, since it’s the only undercover agency they’ve heard of. “Do you deny that the woman beside you is your government accomplice, sent to assist you?”

  I said, “Miss Matson is an old friend and fellow journalist, that’s all. She got in touch with me in Santa Rosalia when she saw my name on a publicity release…”

  “And followed you here to Copalque for old times’ sake, no doubt! And is now trying to use her position as a reporter to locate our revolutionary headquarters for you—and Ricardo Jimenez, the man you have come to kill!” He didn’t wait for my response, but turned slightly to address the others: “As I have demonstrated, whether knowingly or unknowingly, you have allowed yourselves to become involved in criminal counterrevolutionary activities. For this you could be put to death, all of you. However, since it is possible that you were merely unwitting pawns of this man and his vicious agency, you will not be executed if certain fines are paid.” Sanchez stared at them bleakly for a moment, and went on: “The penalty for your offenses against the revolution is one million dollars to be paid into our treasury by Señor James Putnam, since we know he has adequate funds available. How he chooses to be reimbursed by the rest of you is his concern, not ours.”

  There was a long silence. I could hardly keep from bursting out laughing; it was a ridiculous anticlimax. He’d had me scared for a while. Fanatics frighten me, and I’d thought him the genuine, dedicated, patriotic, revolutionary article. But old bandidos die hard; and his master, Lupe of the Mountain, was still as much outlaw as liberator, just as I’d warned Ricardo. Old Million-Buck Montano; and how much of the ransom would really go to the revolutionary cause?

  Looking back, I understood better some of the things that had happened on this trip. It was clear that, somehow, Frances had let Sanchez or Montano or a go-between know that there was a very wealthy individual taking the tour; or perhaps all the conspicuous jewelry had led them to inquire about Jim Putnam. It had probably not seemed important to Frances at the time. She’d always been reasonably well off herself, and other people’s money didn’t impress her. Smuggling Ricardo into the country and keeping an eye on me, according to instructions, had presumably been her major concerns. Under duress, she’d cooperated with the revolutionaries to this extent; but I was willing to bet that kidnaping and extortion had not been in the original bargain she’d made with them.

  My guess was that the ni
ght she’d come to my cottage bruised and half-hysterical had been the night she’d learned that our whole party was to be held for ransom. She’d been slapped down so humiliatingly, not as she’d claimed for reacting arrogantly to Lupe’s insulting comments, but for protesting against the betrayal that was now being required of her…

  “A million dollars?” That was the irrepressible Miss Tolson. “You’ve got to be out of your mind! After I pay for this trip I’ll have exactly three hundred in the bank until my next…” She fell silent abruptly as Barbera took a step in her direction.

  “Well, Señor Putnam?” Sanchez said. “I believe your finances are handled by the Putnam Management Corporation, a Chicago firm. Will you be sensible and write them voluntarily, or do you insist on being coerced?” Deliberately, Sanchez pulled the 9 mm pistol out of its army-type holster. “Need I remind you that you are very vulnerable, señor? It would be a pity if your pretty wife, such a healthy and attractive young lady, were to spend the rest of her life limping badly as the result of a bullet-smashed knee.”

  Whoever started this kneecapping business—I’ve heard he was an IRA Irishman—should have patented it and got rich; it’s getting as popular as the Frisbee. Gloria Jean started to speak quickly, obviously to plead with her husband, but checked herself and stood stiff and silent. Putnam tightened the arm he’d placed about her shoulders; and spoke to Sanchez.

  “It will take time. A week, ten days, maybe more. Chicago is a long ways off, and we don’t keep a million dollars in the ready cash. You’ll probably want it in particular kinds of currency, anyway.”

  “We have the time. And you are—how do you put it?—stalling, señor. Perhaps this will persuade you that I am serious about this matter!”

  He lifted the pistol, and I saw Putnam pull his wife to him and turn sharply to interpose his body between her and the weapon; but Sanchez wheeled and fired twice. Beside me, Miranda gave a surprised little gasp as the bullets struck. She slumped to the ground. I went to my knees beside her, seeing the two small reddening holes just below the washed-out stencil that gave the name and unit of the previous owner of her worn military coverall. Her faded blue eyes looked up at me, hurting, knowing, dying.