The Annihilators

by Donald Hamilton

  She didn’t answer my question immediately. Instead she said, “You don’t like him, do you?”

  I looked at her and said, “If you were to think very hard, use all those trained brains you’re supposed to have, you might be able to come up with a reason why I wouldn’t be too fond of any guy you were married to.”

  She put her hand on mine lightly. “Matt, I’m sorry.”

  I said dryly, “This is the place where you say you never meant to hurt me—even when you were emptying a .38 Special at my back.”

  Stung, she took her hand away; then I heard her laugh. “Chalk up a point for the tall man with the overnight whiskers. And in answer to your question, yes, I’m sure Archie will agree it’s the sensible thing to do. And we both thank you.” She looked at a piece of paper I held out, a sheet torn out of my little photo-notebook. “What’s that?”

  “Memorize and destroy,” I said. “If there should be any repercussions after we get out of here, and you think I can help, that number will reach me, although perhaps not right away. Or…” I hesitated. “Or if you should ever get into any other trouble where my special talents might prove useful.”

  She shook her head quickly. “Matt, I couldn’t ask you for any more help, ever, you must know that. Not after what you’ve already…”

  I said, “Hell, you might misplace that guy again and want him retrieved. Would you jeopardize his precious life because of some silly qualms about asking favors of the one man you know who might be able to get him back for you?”

  She laughed once more. “You really are prickly today, aren’t you? All right, I’ll memorize your number gratefully, my dear, and thank you again.”

  I said, “You probably don’t want advice, nobody wants advice, but I’ll give it to you anyway. Don’t tell your Archie anything he doesn’t have to know if you haven’t already.” Her slightly guilty look told me that she hadn’t yet found the right moment for the great confession-session and she wasn’t looking forward to it. I went on, “Sure, he should know the general outlines of what happened, so he can help protect you from damaging publicity. But certain demands were made of you that nobody needs to know about, particularly not your husband, if you know what I mean. Confession may be good for the soul, but it can play hell with a marriage.”

  “Says that old married man, Matthew Helm!” Her voice was suddenly sharp.

  “Precisely,” I said. “As it happens, that’s just the reason I’m no longer married. My wife had learned something I’d have kept from her, for her sake, but she did go looking where I’d asked her not to. One of our children was involved, and I’d had to do some rather unpleasant things to save the little monster. The knowledge that her husband was capable of such acts—even with the best motive in the world—was more than my tender bride could bear. Once our baby was safe she started brooding about it. End of marriage.”

  There was a long silence. At last Frances licked her lips and said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know. You never told me you’d been… I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago,” I said. “And you’re sorry, but you’re still going to babble like a brook in spite of all my brotherly advice, aren’t you?”

  She hesitated; then she nodded. “I have to. Don’t you see that I have to? I can’t… can’t soil our marriage with that kind of a lie, that kind of concealment…”

  She was interrupted by the snapping sound of gunfire not too far away out in the jungle. I pulled her quickly down beside me, listening. At last I sat up.

  “Go get your husband and get behind a rock. Tell the others. It isn’t very close, but those little bullets travel a long way; it would be very dumb to get killed now by a wandering slug… Go on, run!”

  On her feet, she hesitated. “Matt, I—”

  “Beat it,” I said. “See you in a nice, dark sacrificial cave some time, Dillman.”

  I got to my feet and watched her reach safety up there before I turned away. I was heading down the slope toward the road when a guerilla fighter, junior grade, came running up to me.

  “Señor Helm?”

  “Si, yo soy Helm.”

  He informed me that El Jefe Menor desired my presence, and I indicated that I would be delighted to grant such a reasonable wish. I followed him at a brisk pace, noting that the shooting had stopped. We found Ricardo about a quarter of a mile down the road in the direction of Labal, sitting in his wheelchair in the dubious shade of a Jeep.

  I raised my hand, movie-Indian-fashion, and said, “How, Minor Chief.”

  He wasn’t amused at first; they tend to take themselves a little seriously down here. Then he grinned and said, “My father—the former president of this country, as you’ll recall—was El Jefe Mayor, or Big Chief. Clearly that makes me El Jefe Menor, or Little Chief.” He stopped grinning and looked at me narrowly. “Are you sure you have no idea who was following you, Matt?”

  I shook my head. “None whatever. Why?”

  “Jim has them pinned down out there, whoever they are,” he said. “There are only about a dozen of them, he thinks. They have sent a messenger; they are willing to parley; but they will speak only to Señor Matthias Helm.” He was still watching me closely. “That is your real name, is it not? Who would be out there in the jungle who would ask for you, Matt? Or Matthew/Matthias, as the case may be?”

  “I have friends in strange places,” I said. “And enemies. But what one of them is doing out there I have no idea. Make up your mind, Ricardo.”

  “The messenger was in civilian clothes, but he had carelessly forgotten to remove his Costa Verde army dog tags. And I do not forget that there could still be a matter between us of a lady who was murdered in Chicago, even though you so generously claim to have absolved me of the guilt incurred by other members of my family.”

  I said, “You’re in a tough spot, Little Chief. You’re going to have to either trust me or shoot me. As I said, make up your cotton-picking mind.”

  He smiled thinly. “Oh, I wouldn’t dare to shoot you, Señor Helm. Sanchez tried it and died with all his men—but now I am wondering if you accomplished that feat entirely without outside assistance.”

  “And then called your attention to my invisible allies out in the jungle so you could make trouble for them?” I shook my head. “Well, it’s a natural doubt, I suppose, but you’ll have to resolve it for yourself.”

  He looked at me for a moment longer and smiled slowly. “Bueno, amigo. It is resolved. I am foolish enough to think that you are an honest man in your way; such naivete will probably destroy me eventually. But go put an end to this stupid shooting before some of my men are killed.”

  I looked at him sitting there; and for the first time I found myself wondering if perhaps his crazy revolution stood a chance. There was more to this wheelchair-bound young man than I’d thought.

  “Any restrictions?”

  He shook his head. “Use your judgment. Execute them or let them go, as you wish. It is up to you.”

  Another young revolutionary in a sweaty uniform guided me along a hastily cleared trail through the dry forest to where Jim Putnam had set up a little field headquarters of sorts.

  “Goddamn shoestring operation,” he grumbled when I came up. “Half the communications gear doesn’t work worth a shit. And the only English-speaking noncon I’ve got I had to send off to straighten out a mess… Well, never mind that. You got the message?”

  I nodded. “Who do you think you’ve got in the bag?” I asked.

  “Hell, there’s no telling in this stuff. Nobody’s had a good look at them.” He slapped an insect that landed on his neck. “They’re about three hundred yards off thataway, in another of those lousy ruins,” he said, pointing through the tangled brush in a southerly direction. “Instant pillboxes. We’ve got a good knot tied around them, and we could clean them out, but they know what they’re doing and we’d take some losses. These are good boys, but they’re awfully damn green. Does Bullet mean anything to you besides wh
at comes out of a gun. Or Metal Pee?”

  “Sounds like a serious urinary problem,” I said.

  “Come over here.” He led me behind a tree to where a wounded man was lying, wearing a loose dirty-white cotton shirt and tattered denim pants. There was a considerable amount of blood. Jim Putnam glanced at me and said, a little defiantly, “Hell, nobody ever told these boys about a white flag. Anyway, it wasn’t until we picked him up that we saw what he was holding.”

  That must have been the shooting we’d just heard. I said, “Well, you’re damn well going to personally unload every gun along your line of battle before I get out in front of your trigger-happy heroes. They’ve had their crack at me for the day.”

  He spread his hands a little. “Okay, okay, they’re a bit wild, I admit it. But you don’t know what a relief it is to have troops that’ll actually pull their goddamn triggers, instead of the tender mama’s boys we used to be sent as replacements over there, who’d let themselves be killed and a lot of good men with them, rather than fire their nasty weapons at precious human targets. At least you know these tough little bastards are going to defend themselves if you give them half a chance; you’re not just sending them out to be helpless dead meat.”

  I looked at him for a moment and realized that he, like Ricardo, had changed considerably in a very short time. Already he was identifying with the inexperienced guerilla fighters he’d had command of for only a couple of hours. Then I looked down as the man at our feet tried to speak.

  Jim said, “See if you can get some sense out of him. Find out who sent him. I hate to let you go out there not knowing who’s there.”

  I crouched beside the wounded man. “Como se llama su jefe?” I asked in my horrible Spanish. “What is the name of your leader?”

  The man seemed to be muttering something about a bullet, using the English word, not the Spanish. Then, realizing he wasn’t getting through to me, he said desperately: “Pie de metall.”

  “There’s your metal pee,” Jim Putnam said.

  The man said very clearly, “Bullet Man.”

  I straightened up. “Okay, that takes care of it,” I said. “Incidentally, pie means foot in Spanish. Why don’t you get this poor bastard back to the road? Mrs. Henderson and your wife both know some first aid; maybe they can do something for him. And tell me when you’ve got those guns unloaded. I’m going in. Where’s that white flag? For what little it seems to be worth around here…”

  A few minutes later I was making my way through the organic barbed-wire entanglement that surrounded us, clearing the way with a machete, my only weapon, unless you call a stick with a soiled white hanky a weapon. The bandaged groove in my back didn’t make my progress any easier, or less painful. When I’d gone about a hundred and fifty yards in the general direction Jim Putnam had indicated, making plenty of noise so as not to catch anybody by surprise, I stopped. There was nothing in sight now but trees and brush and thorny vines. Some of the bushes had thorns on them, too. There were no pretty jungle flowers in sight, or gaudy jungle birds. I wondered why the hell I seemed to be the one who got elected, every time, to risk my vulnerable hide between the hostile armies.

  I drew a long breath and shouted, “Hey, Mr. Metal-foot. Hey, Señor Bullet Man.”

  A voice behind me, quite close, said, “Bitte, lay down the machete, Herr Helm. It is said that you are with it quite skillful… So. Now you may turn. Where is Gregorio?”

  I said, “Hell, you heard the shooting. Sorry. These aren’t the best-trained troops in the world. They even let off a few rounds at me earlier in the day. Your man is alive and being taken care of, but I wouldn’t want to make an optimistic prognosis.”

  I had turned upon being given permission. Now Bultman came toward me cautiously, holding a well-worn P38 automatic pistol, the weapon that might be considered the Germanic successor to the Luger of romantic memory. Actually, it’s a better weapon than the Luger, with its atrocious trigger mechanism, ever was.

  The Kraut looked just like his fuzzy pictures in the dossier I’d studied: the typical tall lean super-Aryan of the old Nazi movies, not the thick-necked Prussian-type villain, but the storm trooper with a conscience, perhaps, who was revolted by the atrocities committed by his comrades, and let the pretty Jewish heroine escape, and finally blew out his brains to resolve the terrible conflict between good and evil within him. He was a rather handsome fellow, not young, but well preserved and in good condition, with a blond, cropped, dolichocephalic head. He was wearing stained khakis, but, like Frances Dillman, he was the kind of person who’d look elegant in rags.

  I said, “I thought you’d be in Chicago by this time.”

  “You know about Chicago?”

  “What else would Rael hire you for? He’s got Echeverria to handle his local assassinations.”

  “Is that why you have been looking for me, hein? Oh, yes, your inquiries have not gone unnoticed. You wish to prevent me from my work accomplishing in Chicago?”

  I said, “Hell, no. I’m all for your Chicago caper; in fact, for personal as well as official reasons I’d like to give you a discreet hand there. But we don’t have time to go into that now. No, the guiding geniuses of a certain well-known undercover organization instructed us to save them from possible public embarrassment by insuring your permanent silence—I think you can guess who gave us those instructions. What the hell made you accept that idiot contract? From those people? You know how they are.”

  The P38 was steady. “You speak so of your own government colleagues?” Then Bultman shrugged his shoulders and spoke wryly: “You know how it is, Helm. One wonders if one could do it. Then one is offered very much money to do it, and it is a great challenge, nicht wahr? To be the one who accomplished it, who actually removed the bearded one at last, after so many had failed…”

  “So you joined the ranks of the failures and wound up with a tin foot and the little publicity-shy lads from Virginia running scared along your trail.”

  “So frightened, apparently, that they did not dare to catch up with me, but sent you instead.”

  I grinned. “Hell, that’s what we’re for. Every so often they remember it. Very reluctantly.”

  “And what do you plan now, Helm?”

  “Why,” I said, “I am going to complete my assignment according to my own best judgment, as my chief instructed me to. Raise your right hand… Oh, for Christ’s sake! I’m unarmed and I’m sure you’ve got a couple of guns covering me besides your own.”

  Bultman hesitated. “I do not understand… Ah, very well.” He switched the automatic to his left hand and held up the other.

  “Good,” I said. “Now swear to me on whatever you hold sacred that you will never, under any circumstances, reveal the identity of the organization for which you were working on that ill-fated mission on which you lost your foot.”

  “Ach, this is stupid!” he said irritably. “I do not betray the names of my principals.”

  I said, “I know that. And you know it. So what harm does it do to swear it?”

  After a moment, he smiled thinly. “Very well. I do so swear.”

  “Danke schön,” I said. “I have now insured your permanent silence as my orders required. There’s my official assignment in Costa Verde, all taken care of. What’s yours? The last I heard, you were in Mexico City, recruiting.”

  “You are well informed. But some of the specialists I needed were not immediately available, so I called my principal here and asked if delay was permissible. I was told that it was; but I was asked if I would be willing to perform a small additional task while I was waiting. At a price, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “This mass kidnaping has come to the attention of my principal. He fears that if the hostages are harmed he will face strong disapproval in the United States on the grounds that he is no longer able to maintain order in his country; he may even lose the American support he requires to stay in power. On the other hand, he cannot afford to allow the prisone
rs to be ransomed. He cannot let one million dollars fall into the hands of the rebels.”

  “So he’s making it as tough as he can for them to transfer the money; and meanwhile he’s hired you to pick a small task force from some crack units of the Costa Verde army and slip in and blast the hostages out.”

  Bultman nodded. “With a generous bonus to be paid if I could manage to eliminate a certain Lupe de Montano in the process. However, when we located the rebel camp the prisoners were not there, and Montano had already been shot to death by one of his associates. We ascertained that the hostages were actually being held by a small guerilla unit at a place called Labal, and hastened there, and found nothing but dead men. That must have been an interesting fight in the place of the arch, Helm.”

  “It was a busy evening,” I said. “So you came after us—”

  “To place you under my protection, ja. When you met this force of rebels I assumed that you had simply recaptured been. I moved in to see if I could take them by surprise and rescue you—only to run into a very skillful ambush here.”

  “Yes,” I said. “You’re on kind of a spot, aren’t you?”

  “You should know; you are responsible.” He grimaced. “I was aware that you were considered expert with edged weapons and very good with long-range firearms; but I had not been told that you had experience in handling troops in this kind of terrain. I thought I was dealing merely with a crippled boy who knows only the textbooks he read in his military school; but suddenly these clumsy guerillas started behaving like jungle-trained veterans. My congratulations.”