The Annihilators

by Donald Hamilton

  “Ammunition,” I said. I tapped the magazine of the weapon I held. “Municiones por la ametralladora, por favor.”

  It wasn’t great Spanish, but it got through. Numbly, he fished another of the straight twenty-shot magazines from a pocket of his bandolier—they make a long curved thirty-round magazine as well, and I think there’s even a belt-fed version of the weapon that’ll shoot until it melts, but all I’d seen here had been the straight twenty-shooters. He left the magazine on the ground on the spot I pointed to, rose at my gesture, and backed away a short distance, moving like a zombie. Then I had the fresh magazine in the gun, just in case Eugenio was in shape to make a real firefight of it. I could hear the painful breathing of Ramiro Sanchez. I knew that the sound would have been a mindless, hopeless whimpering if his pride had allowed it. I looked at the boy in front of me.

  “What the hell am I going to do with you?” I asked him in English, and he didn’t understand a word, which was just as well because it was not a serious question.

  “Matt! Drop the gun! Please, Matt, don’t make me shoot!”

  It was the single-minded married lady with the .38 of course, behind me; and of course I should have disarmed her, but who would have thought any one woman could be so stubbornly stupid all by herself? Ignoring her command, I hit the trigger of the Ml6 and practically cut the kid in front of me in two, as the Smith and Wesson blasted behind me and the bullet went over me somewhere.

  ONE.

  I threw myself to the right, and a bullet passed me on the left.

  TWO.

  Eugenio was back in the game, a shadowy figure rising painfully at the far side of the road. I sent a quick three-shot burst his way and threw myself flat in the roadside bushes on my side, and rolled to avoid his answering fire. As I came to a stop, dirt sprayed up about five yards to my right and I heard the ringing muzzle-blast of the short-barreled .38 once more.

  THREE.

  I scrambled farther into the bushes; and Eugenio’s burst brought down a shower of leaves and branches where I’d been. I lay there for a ten-count, found a rock, and pitched it farther ahead of me. I rose as it landed, an old trick; but Eugenio fell for it enough to be just slightly out of position when I appeared. I held the hammering M16 steady against the recoil—it didn’t have a hell of a lot of kick—and put enough of the lousy little jacketed bullets into the dark shape over there to get the job done at last, aware of a .38 slug screaming off an ancient Melmec paving stone at my feet.

  FOUR… FIVE.

  The last one came as I turned to look at Frances. It missed like the rest, high, if it matters. She clicked the mechanism twice more as I stood watching her, before she realized that the revolver was empty. I raised the M16 to my shoulder and looked at her over the dim sights, and knew that I could never do it, at least not now when it was all over, not just to show how terribly hurt and disillusioned I was. I lowered the weapon, but I had to do something to express my feelings—after all, she’d had five shots at me and there was a certain reaction—so I spat deliberately, ashamed of the crude gesture but a little proud of the fact that I still had something left to spit with. I turned from her and walked over to Ramiro.

  He looked up at me, his face greenish gray in the night. “I underestimated you, señor. My humble apologies.” His voice was a ghost of a whisper.

  “You should have stuck to war and revolution,” I said. “Never play another man’s game, Colonel. This is my game.”

  “There is a favor I would ask,” he breathed, “although I have of course no right to any favors from you.”

  I looked down at him. In that moment we were both professional fighting men and the differences in our specialties did not matter. Depending on the seriousness of the bullet wounds, he might have been saved if a well-equipped medical unit had been standing by. Perhaps they could have repaired the knife damage and sewed him up and shot him full of antibiotics—but there was no medical unit, and he would know that even if there had been, with the rest of his command still to be dealt with, I was in no position to indulge in humanitarian gestures.

  All he had to look forward to was, at the best, a painful dying. At the worst he would last long enough to lie there helpless watching the zopilotes gathering in the dawn sky overhead, and circling down on their great black vulture wings and, when he became too weak to frighten them away, squabbling over his intestines and genitals until, at last, one of them would dig deeply enough to sever an important blood vessel and set him free…

  “Of course it is your right,” I said. “It is any man’s right.”

  I set the Ml6 to single fire and shot him through the head.

  26

  I stopped along the dark path to check the hole made by Sanchez’s 9 mm Browning, in the soft flesh below the ribs, but although it was well over to the right, it was still far enough back that I couldn’t have seen it even if there had been light enough to see much by. My fingers merely told me that a certain amount of bullet erosion existed, and that it was producing a certain amount of hemorrhage, which didn’t add much to my previous knowledge.

  I was feeling a little weak and dizzy, but any imaginative man will feel weak and dizzy with his blood running down his ass from an injury of undetermined magnitude. Anyway, I told myself, with three dead men and a treacherous tied-up woman behind me, I had every excuse to feel weak and dizzy from reaction—but I wished there had been some less uncomfortable and humiliating way of dealing with her. Of course I could have tried trusting her. Ha!

  The sentry by the Jeep road had awakened when I reached the Labal clearing. He was standing up, leaning against the same tree he’d used for sleeping purposes; but he didn’t look like a wary man alerted by distant gunfire. The wind was stronger now, not a roaring gale, but a good stiff breeze making plenty of noise in the trees; it would have carried the noise of the fight away from him. He noticed nothing now as I lugged my burden of Ml6s and grenades and laden bandoliers cautiously back along the edge of the jungle the way Frances and I had come. I made my way up the rubble slope to the far end of the Nunnery, reflecting unchivalrously as I passed downwind of it that the ladies’ john smelled just as bad as the gents’.

  I cached the armaments and took out a knife I had liberated from dead Eugenio. An improvement over the little buckle-knife that was again helping to hold up my pants, it was one of the commando-type daggers shaped somewhat like the old Arkansas toothpick—not to be confused with Jim Bowie’s lethal blade, which had been a different breed of edged weapon altogether, long and heavy enough to decapitate a man instead of merely stabbing or slicing him to death. But this was a sticker, not a chopper; and I reminded myself that rumor in the trade said that a lot of knives of this pattern had been manufactured that, while deadly-looking enough, were either so soft they wouldn’t hold an edge, or so hard and brittle that they snapped when too much was asked of them.

  With this in mind, I dealt with the Nunnery sentry very gently after first luring him around the corner of the building with a couple of tossed pebbles—I told myself that I seemed to be getting into a rock-throwing rut, but it still worked. He came in to investigate the faint clattering sounds like a mallard to the decoys; and I got an arm around his head from behind to prevent an outcry, and slipped the dagger into him without any fuss, and held him while he died. The rattle of his dropped rifle, and the scuffle of his last convulsive thrashings, were blown away by that blessed night wind out of the jungle.

  The camp remained dark and silent. The only movement I could see when I looked around the corner of the Nunnery was the steady marching of the conscientious sentry up by the high Citadel. After retrieving my arsenal, and adding the contribution of the recently deceased, I waited for the man up there to start the back portion of his beat, behind the ruin. Then I staggered with my burden along the patio to the fourth little corbeled doorway from the other end and stumbled inside.

  “Guns, anyone?” I asked breathlessly.

  There was a startled gasp from Gloria Jean
and a rustle of movement from her husband—I noted that they were sleeping unsociably on opposite sides of the little chamber, as Frances and I had done. When they sat up, I saw that Putnam seemed to be in underwear shorts; his wife had on some kind of dark pajamas.

  “Sam? What have you got?” Jim Putnam asked, instantly awake and reaching for his pants.

  “Three Ml6s and enough fodder to nourish them for a while. Six or seven grenades, I lost count somewhere along the line. Two handguns and three knives. Can you block the entrance and have you got a light?”

  “We’ve tried the mattress pads; they’ll cover the doorway if we rig them right. There’s a flashlight and a penlight. Glory, why don’t you slip out and tell Paul and the general that we’re in business…”

  I said, “You do it. You don’t have to worry about our local guard, but watch out for the guy up on the pyramid.” When Putnam hesitated, clearly annoyed at having his orders countermanded, I said, “Excuse me, but I’ve got kind of a hole in my back and I’d rather have it tended by a pretty girl.”

  “Serious?”

  I didn’t flatter myself that the quick concern in his voice was due to affection for me. He had plans for using me in the approaching campaign and didn’t want me disabled.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “It happened almost an hour ago and it hasn’t killed me yet, but it’s still bleeding.”

  “I’ll get out the first-aid stuff, what little we’ve got,” Gloria Jean said. I felt her pull my blood-soaked shirt out of my pants, behind. “Sam, turn a little, please… It isn’t very big, but you’d better ask if any of the others have a sterile dressing, say four by four, and some peroxide, Jim. Bring it back with you. We do have some tape.” Then Putnam was gone and she was rummaging in a suitcase behind me. Her soft voice reached me. “Was it bad, Sam?”

  I said, “Like the flyboys say, you never really mind the ones you can walk away from. But the weather got kind of gory out for a while, I will admit.”

  “Tell me if I’m hurting you. I think even without a light I can see it well enough to clean it up a little, if you keep your back to the doorway. I’ve got some water in a bottle if I can find… Ah.” I felt the water cool against my skin. Presently she spoke again. “It’s not a hole, really. Just a kind of furrow about three inches long, but it seems to have got burned…”

  “The muzzle blast did that,” I said. “Probably cauterized it nicely. Ouch!”

  “Sorry… I won’t even ask how you got yourself shot with the gun poking into your side like that.”

  “It’s just as well. It’s nothing you want to hear about.”

  “Sam.” Her voice was hesitant.

  “Yes?”

  “Can I ask you to look after him? Please. He’s in a crazy mood; please try not to let him get hurt. Maybe… maybe some day everything will be all right with us again, but it won’t ever happen if he gets himself killed trying to prove something to me, something I don’t give a damn about, but I can’t make him see that.”

  “I’ll try if I get the chance,” I said. I glanced around, but I couldn’t read her expression in the dark. I said, “So the problem isn’t on your side? If you don’t mind talking about it.”

  She said, “Oh, I feel a little… tarnished, of course, a little… used; but I can live with it if he can. But he feels that he failed me. He thinks I feel that he failed me. My God; all I wanted was for him not to do anything stupid and protective that would get him shot! I wanted him to do just what he did. Hell, I’m not made of glass, Sam, I don’t break that easily. But now he’s made such a big thing of it, and we can’t seem to talk about it sensibly. I don’t know what to do, Sam. Well, it’s not your problem, but please, please, do what you can tonight to keep him from doing something brave and glorious and… and fatal to justify himself in my eyes. Who the hell needs his lousy justification? All I need is him. Alive!” Then she said, “I’m sorry. I just haven’t been able to talk with anybody else about it; I didn’t mean to pour it all out like a hysterical little—Oh, here they come.”

  There was a scuffling sound outside, and Olcott slipped in, and after a minute or two, Henderson and his wife. It seemed unlikely that Mrs. Henderson had received an official invitation to our council of war, but she came anyway. Jim Putnam joined us, and we passed him the mattresses, and he secured them across the opening. Gloria Jean was handed some sterile gauze pads and a bottle of peroxide.

  With Mrs. Henderson holding the penlight for her, she did a quick and competent job of patching me up. I said, as I tucked my shirt back in, “Jim, if you don’t mind, I have a suggestion to make. We need time, and that guy up at the Citadel may get a little nervous if hours pass and he sees no sign of his buddy down here, who happens to be dead.”

  “What’s your idea?” Putnam asked.

  I spoke to his wife. “How strong a stomach have you got, Gloria Jean? He was a smallish man and you’re about the right size. He’s lying in the entrance to the men’s john. Can you strip him and get into his clothes and take one of these Ml6s and bandoliers to complete the costume? Be sure to tuck all that hair into the cap. But before you answer, let me remind you that he didn’t die a natural death. It’ll be a little messy.”

  She hesitated, and spoke very carefully. “Is it all right if I throw up?”

  I grinned. “Puke all you want, as long as you do it where the Citadel boy can’t see you.”

  “Glory…” That was her husband.

  She said quietly. “It’s all right, Jim. I can’t be much help with the fighting; but this is something I can do. I’ll be all right.”

  Somebody handed her the necessary props, and the doorway was cleared enough for her to slip out into the night, after waiting for the sentry on the pyramid to make his turn.

  After a little pause, I said, “I don’t want to hog the floor, Jim, but I’ve just been out there and maybe you’d like my report. You now have eight men to worry about. One whom you don’t have to worry about is Col. Ramiro Sanchez. You can plan accordingly.”

  There was a lengthy silence. We were on a military footing now, I realized, with Olcott the lone civilian—Mrs. Henderson would have been the first to say that she was as military as anybody. Only Olcott regarded me a bit strangely, therefore, as he made the subtraction in his head: Eight live men from twelve live men was four dead men. General Henderson nodded slowly, and his wife inclined her head in royal approval. Putnam whistled softly.

  “You’ve been a busy little fella, fella.”

  “You have no idea,” I said. “Now, you’ll want the layout of their headquarters down there. I got it from Frances…”

  “Where is Frances?” Putnam asked.

  “She’s… waiting down by the Arch of the Emperors where we had a little hassle with Sanchez, never mind the details right now. I saw no sense in her coming back here to get shot at.” I still hadn’t decided exactly what to tell them about her; but at least now they’d know where to look for her if I fell in battle. I went on: “Anyway, according to her, that temple they’re using, the Chapel, is divided by a heavy masonry wall, no connecting doorway, making one large room at the end where they make their cook-fire, and one small one at the end where they park the Jeep. The small one is officers’ country. There’s a tarp hung to give a little privacy to Sanchez’s cot; Barbera sleeps in the other half of the room. A folding table and a couple of chairs. A rack of machetes. Some spare weapons and ammo. So much for the colonels and lieutenants. The men all sleep on the floor of the larger room, the barracks room. Frances couldn’t tell me much about that; she was never inside.”

  “Nice clear report just the same,” Putnam said approvingly. “Carry on.”

  “That’s headquarters,” I said. “As for the rest, well, you can see that our major problem is the Citadel sentry with a bird’s-eye view of everything from the top of his pyramid. We’re lucky that he’s up there not only for prison-guard purposes, but also for military purposes—to spot any rescue teams or Costa Verde army patrols he
ading this way—so that he needs a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view. If he stayed entirely on this side of the temple, we’d have real trouble. We’re unlucky, however, in that we seem to have got us an Eagle Scout up there tonight; that boy takes his duties seriously. The other remaining sentry, when last seen, was parked by a big tree with a kind of whitish trunk where the Copalque road enters the clearing. He’s a sleepy and unobservant chap. I’ve passed within fifty yards of him twice and he’s failed to spot me. He should be easy to sneak up on. Any questions, Jim?”

  “There will definitely be no interference by any of the four you’ve dealt with?”

  “Not unless they’ve learned the secret of instant resurrection,” I said. “Which brings me to a final point I’d like to make, if I may, Captain Putnam, sir. Let’s keep in mind that what we have to have here is, not just victory, but total annihilation. No crips, no captives. Don’t you agree?”

  I saw him start to nod, but Olcott said quickly, “But we can’t just massacre…”

  It was Henderson who spoke, in a crisp, cold voice I’d never heard him use before. “If you can’t, you’re in the wrong church pew, son.”

  I explained what was self-evident to everybody but Olcott: “We not only have to win here, Paul, we have to get clear away before Montano hears about it and sends a couple of hundred of his guerilla fighters to round us up. We can’t afford to let a single one of these men get away to spread the word. And the catch is, we have a bunch of sentimentalists in the party who’ll be bound to scream cruelty if we tie up a prisoner too tightly or tie up a wounded man at all. I wouldn’t put it past some of them to speak up and loosen the bonds in the name of humanitarianism—oops, there goes one prisoner and fourteen lives, our fourteen lives. I’m not kidding one little bit. Some people do think like that, and we’ve simply got to avoid giving them a chance to louse us up. Pat Tolson, for instance, has already betrayed us once for undoubtedly very idealistic reasons of her own; she came damn close to getting me killed tonight.”