The Annihilators

by Donald Hamilton

  “I think I’m entitled to an explanation, Eric.” The voice was stiff and reproving. “Your mission—one of your missions—was to deal with a professional killer named Bultman. I am informed that, after expertly disposing of a fairly prominent Latin-American politician for reasons known only to yourself, you then passed up a very good, shot at your assigned target; and that as far as is known, Bultman is still quite healthy except for the foot he lost in Cuba.”

  I said, “Sir, if you’ll review my orders, you’ll find that in the Bultman matter I was instructed to use my own judgment. I made contact with the Kraut down in Costa Verde. I assured myself that there is no way in the world he’ll ever reveal who hired him for his disastrous Cuban venture. That’s what our friends over in Virginia are really concerned about, isn’t it?”

  “Do I get the impression that you like the man?”

  “Like, no,” I said. “Respect, yes. And without direct orders—none of this use-your-judgment stuff—I’m not going to make a needless touch on a guy who’s done us no harm just because those clowns down there across the Potomac are so blabber-mouthed themselves that they can’t conceive of anybody else keeping quiet about anything. Furthermore, I had a use for Bultman, so I made a deal with him; and I saw no reason to go back on it last night. That was my second mission, wasn’t it, to stage an object lesson for the benefit of anybody else who might try to influence us by kidnaping and intimidation, call it Operation Jimenez?”

  “An object lesson hardly serves its purpose if nobody gets the point. That paramilitary attack was very obviously not our kind of operation.”

  I said, “People aren’t stupid, sir. At least the people we want to impress aren’t. By now the word has got around that the Jimenez outfit pulled the old hostage routine on us and, when their demands were refused, killed the hostage. Pretty soon the word will go around that a month afterward, the Jimenez outfit was totally annihilated. No matter who actually pulled the trigger, or triggers, nobody who’s thinking of tackling us by that method is going to dismiss it as coincidence, sir, remembering a few other folks who tried to blackmail us like that who didn’t get what they wanted, either, and who are no longer around.”

  There was a pause. At last Mac said grudgingly, “Very well, let’s say that you have accomplished your objectives in a reasonably satisfactory manner. However, I still think I’m entitled to an explanation of why the resources of this agency were employed to help you in the quite unauthorized removal of a stray Costa Verde police functionary.”

  “Stray, hell,” I said. “That’s an insult, sir. Echeverria didn’t stray one little bit. He came right under my gun because I talked his president and Bultman into putting him there. Incidentally, the bullet seems to have achieved total penetration and nobody seems to be interested in hunting for it. With so many dead bodies on their hands, the authorities are apparently cutting a few corners and attributing them all to submachine gun fire, except the bow-and-arrow jobs of course. But you might tell the armorer we may not have got as much expansion with that new bullet as we should have. If the slug had mushroomed properly, it would have met enough resistance to stay in the body at that range. As it turned out, of course, it was all for the best; but normally I hate to waste bullet energy drilling holes in the scenery behind the target.”

  “I will transmit the message.” Mac’s voice was chilly once more. “Was this a personal vendetta, Eric?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “The guy was a bastard, but he never did anything to me, to amount to anything.” I stopped, but Mac was silent, refusing to help me out with leading questions. I said, “Would you agree that, in a sense, Elly Brand died for us, sir? Would you agree that the outfit owes her a memorial gesture of some kind? Of course we could pass the hat for flowers for the grave, although it’s a little late now, or make a contribution in her name to a suitable charity. However, it occurred to me that there was something we could do that would have pleased her more. You may remember that she was always a great girl for human rights and democracy.”

  “Go on, Eric.” His expressionless voice gave me no help at all.

  I said, “I went down there, as you’ll recall, partly to check up on whether or not Hector Jimenez was expendable, as far as his country was concerned. I learned that he was, in the sense that when he was in power he let his old army buddies practically rape the country, financially speaking. On the other hand, there seems to have been none of the brutality and oppression that Rael brought to the office. Jimenez’s regime was corrupt, but it wasn’t vicious. In fact, after all these years of Rael, the people are looking back rather fondly at his kindly, if slightly crooked, predecessor. The Jimenez name is quite popular in liberation circles. They’re remembering the good soldier and forgetting the bad president. And now the older son is trying to follow in his papa’s political footsteps. He’s a bright and conscientious and concerned young man with a lot going for him. He may be able to do something for his country—if certain people in Washington don’t keep supplying his opponent, Rael, with endless quantities of arms, munitions, and just plain old Yankee money.”

  Mac said, “I’m not certain I want to hear this, Eric. International politics are not our concern.”

  I said, “Hell, all I did was put President Armando Rael’s signature on that slaughter out in Lake Park. He can’t very well deny responsibility with the chief of his own secret police force lying dead on the premises holding the gun with which he personally disposed of two of the victims… I hadn’t hoped for that, but it’s working beautifully. Have you seen the Chicago newspapers?”

  “No, but I have seen the television news.”

  I looked at the paper on my bed. It had a photo of the English-style mansion house, and a formal publicity portrait of Enrique Echeverria in Costa Verde army uniform; but the place of honor belonged to a rather distressing photograph, brutally illuminated by the electronic flash that had been used, of a lovely young girl in a bloodstained nightgown sitting against a swimming-pool windbreak with the head of a handsome young man in her lap. The obvious resemblance between the two dead faces made the picture very poignant; it was clear that brother and sister had died trying to help each other flee the terrible massacre taking place inside their house. The fact that they were both cold-blooded murderers in my book was, of course, quite irrelevant.

  I said, “It’s working. Already there are loud editorial outcries against our policy of supporting a regime that sends important government officials at the head of ruthless commandos to massacre political refugees living peacefully in this country. I think it’s going to be a long time before Armando Rael gets another shipment of Ml6s. Or dollars. Elly was always very upset about the way this country of ours always seemed to back the most repressive regime it could find. I think she’d have liked knowing that, because of her, Ricardo Jimenez has been given just a bit of a chance to overthrow the current dictatorship down there. What he does with that chance is, of course, up to him.”

  There was a brief silence; then Mac said, “There seems to be something wrong with this connection. I didn’t hear any of that, Eric. I prefer not to hear it; it’s a totally indefensible perversion of the functions of this agency. Furthermore it shows regrettable sentimentality on the part of one of my senior operatives.” He paused, and went on: “Have you completed your period of mourning now, or can I expect further Machiavellian gestures of atonement?”

  I thought of a small girl lying dead in a dark street. I said, “I think it’s taken care of now. As much as it will ever be.”

  “I certainly hope so,” Mac said. “Get to Washington as fast as you can, please. Now that these minor matters have been dealt with, we have work to do.”

  * * *

  That should have been the end of it, of course; and I had a very busy spring and summer by the end of which I couldn’t have told you the names of all the people with whom I’d shared a brief imprisonment in an odd place called Labal. Only one reminder reached me during those months: an envelope con
taining a brief note signed Emily, and a newspaper clipping concerning the death, after a brief illness, of General Austin Henderson, U.S.A. (ret).

  But one night between forays abroad, resting in my small Washington apartment, I turned on the television for the news and found a very familiar building dominating the screen. As I watched, the charges went off and the massive limestone walls collapsed into piles of rubble while the smoke and dust rose high into the blue Costa Verde sky. Very dramatic. The unctuous voice of the anchorman informed me that I was watching the ceremonial destruction of the infamous prison known as La Fortaleza by elite demolition units of the victorious Costa Verde Army of Liberation.

  We heard a few words from the Commander in Chief of that army, General Jaime Putnam, observing the event with his attractive young wife. The general said that mopping-up operations should be no problem now that Armando Rael had deserted his trapped remnant of an army and fled the country. The youthful political leader of the liberation movement, Ricardo Jimenez, gave an interview from his wheelchair, stating that La Fortaleza had been a symbol of oppression to his country as the Bastille had once been to France; and that he intended its destruction to inaugurate a better and freer life for his people.

  For months I had carefully avoided thinking of Costa Verde. Perhaps it was being involuntarily reminded of everything that had happened down there that made it difficult for me to go to sleep that night. Then I had a violent dream. It was a savage battle in the jungle; and the spearmen had fled as the Spears always do, and the great stone axes were doing their work as we held the causeway by the Arch of the Emperors giving the king and his entourage time to withdraw. Somehow I knew perfectly well, with part of my mind, that it was a phony vision sent to me by an old master showman who could have made his fortune in Hollywood. It had never happened, and if it had happened, it hadn’t happened with those weapons, but it was a hell of a good fight anyway and we Axes made an orderly withdrawal down the fine stone road, the King’s Road, making them pay us high for every inch of it, until somebody kicked some courage into the Spears and sent them in from the flanks…

  ADIOSGUERREROGOODBYE

  The message blasted through, wiping out the dream and bringing me upright in the bed. I reached for the light switch but took back my hand. I wasn’t quite ready to return to Washington, D.C.

  “Adios, Cortez,” I said aloud.

  Then I felt foolish sitting in a dark apartment with traffic rolling by beneath the windows, talking to a primitive old character in a foreign country without benefit of telephone or radio. I mean, who believes that stuff?

  But the believing part of my mind knew what it had heard, if you want to call it hearing. It knew something else, too: There had been another message sent, and the receiver was not far away. I could feel it. I got up and turned on the lights and debated getting dressed, but at one-thirty in the morning there was no sense in that. I just put on dressing gown and slippers, set out a couple of glasses on the little corner bar, got some ice out, and waited. Presently the front door buzzer sounded. I hit the button to release the latch downstairs. Shortly the knock came on the door. I opened it.

  She said a little breathlessly, “I’ve been staying in a hotel a few blocks away trying to make up my mind. Anybody would think I was timid or something. I guess I was afraid of making a fool of myself. I didn’t know if you’d really want to see me after all these months. Then I had a dream and I knew you were having one very much like it, and I knew that I had to… that I was supposed to… Tell me if you want me to go away.”

  I said, “Frances, stop talking nonsense and come inside.”

  She was wearing a light-brown fall coat over a tailored beige dress with buttons down the front—as I learned upon helping her off with the coat. She was wearing heels and nylons, and her legs were as slim and lovely as ever. Her crisp brown hair was very smooth and her lipstick was very neatly applied and she didn’t look a bit as if she’d just tumbled out of a strange hotel bed after a disturbing dream. I made drinks for us and put hers into her hand.

  “What was your dream, Sam?” she asked.

  “A battle in the jungle,” I said. “Actually, it took place by a certain ancient arch I think you remember.”

  She grimaced. “I ought to. I spent enough time there, brutally tied hand and foot. Well, I deserved it.”

  “What was your dream?” I asked.

  “It was…” She stopped, and her eyes avoided me suddenly; and I saw my tall, handsome lady blushing like a young girl. “I don’t think I’ll tell you what it was,” she said a bit stiffly. “Of course I don’t believe a word of it; but he was dying, wasn’t he? Saying good-bye like that?”

  I said, “Me, I don’t take no stock in any of that extrasensory crap either, ma’am; but I wouldn’t want to bet any important money that if we hopped a jet this minute and got ourselves down there, we wouldn’t reach Copalque just about right to find the old High Priest being buried and the new one, Epifanio, performing the ceremony. Cortez took a pretty bad beating that night in the cave; I guess he never really recovered. And Epifanio gets the nice job of doing whatever has to be done, High-Priest-wise, when the three sacred calendars come into conjunction some time in the not too distant future.”

  Frances was silent for a moment; then she asked, “Do you really think he’ll call his people together and pass out the poison as in that other dream we had? And does the prophecy, or whatever you want to call it, apply only to the descendants of the ancient Melmecs, or to the rest of the world as well?”

  I said, “Hell, we don’t need any high priests to order us to poison ourselves. We’re doing it quite voluntarily, using every poison from auto pollution to radioactive junk of one kind or another. And of course we’re all very civilized people and don’t need any old doomsday calendars to tell us when to kill ourselves—and if it should all happen according to that big stone wheel beside the sacred cenote down in the sacred cave of Copalque, it’ll all be just a crazy coincidence, right?”

  She smiled faintly. “Right on, man. Science pays no attention to such foolishness and there’s undoubtedly a simple scientific explanation for everything we’ve seen and heard… Matt.”

  “Yes?” I said.’

  “Just Matt,” she said softly, watching me. “Just getting used to it. I guess it’s all right. But I kind of liked Sam, too.”

  There was a little silence. I stepped forward and gently turned her face toward the light. It was the face I remembered very well, even though I’d expended considerable effort trying not to remember it at all; but there were faint marks of pain I hadn’t seen before.

  “What have you been doing to yourself, Dillman?” I asked; and then I understood and said, “I told you not to tell him.”

  “And I told you I had to. I couldn’t live like that. Not with a secret like that between us. I thought he loved me enough…” She stopped and drew a long ragged breath and said quite without expression, “Matt, he was very big about it. Very big. He was willing to forgive me. Wasn’t that sweet of him?”

  I said angrily, “What the hell did he have to forgive? He as much as told you to do anything you had to in order to save him, didn’t he?”

  She didn’t seem to hear me. She swayed a little, standing there. When I stepped forward to steady her, she made a quick little please-don’t-touch-me gesture and turned sharply away from me. Her voice was harsh when she spoke again.

  “Yes, he was very sweet and noble, Matt; but he said I really shouldn’t have taken him so literally. He said he certainly hadn’t meant for me to do anything like that, and naturally he’d expected me to use a little judgment; and if I wanted to fuck stray government agents, he couldn’t stop me, but I certainly had no right to put the blame on him… But of course, since I was his wife, although I seemed to have forgotten it temporarily, he thought he might be able to forgive me in time, since I’d been honest enough to make a clean breast of my transgression.” She turned back to face me and made a helpless gesture of despai
r. “Oh, God, darling, I loved him. I would have killed for him and died for him—I almost did both—and I had to stand there watching him turn himself into a cheap, cowardly, sneering, pompous little man right in front of my eyes. And afterward I… I stood it for months, my dear, but at last I couldn’t live with that awful condescending forgiveness any more. So I used the number you gave me and got your address and here I am. If you want me.”

  There were things unsaid that didn’t need to be said. We both knew that if one day her husband managed to swallow his pride and jealousy and begged her to come back, she would probably go, even though he’d revealed himself to be something less than the shining knightly figure she had thought she’d married. But that was in the future. This was tonight.

  “Need you ask?” I said.

  She smiled slowly. “A woman always likes to be told.”

  I took her into my arms and told her.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Donald Hamilton was the creator of secret agent Matt Helm, star of 27 novels that have sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.

  Born in Sweden, he emigrated to the United States and studied at the University of Chicago. During the Second World War he served in the United States Naval Reserve, and in 1941 he married Kathleen Stick, with whom he had four children.

  The first Matt Helm book, Death of a Citizen, was published in 1960 to great acclaim, and four of the subsequent novels were made into motion pictures. Hamilton was also the author of several outstanding standalone thrillers and westerns, including two novels adapted for the big screen as The Big Country and The Violent Men.

  Donald Hamilton died in 2006.

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