He threw his head back and raised his elbow high to drain the coffee cup. There was a small, solid thud, the sound of something hard and sharp burying itself in something moderately soft. Well, to be honest, I’m not that good at sounds; I’d caught the glint of the throwing knife before it struck. The man dropped his cup. His mouth opened, but no scream came out, just a barely audible—at my distance—gasp of pure agony. Then there was a rattle of dislodged stones beyond him, and a blanket floated into sight, spread out like a cast net. It dropped over his head. Antonia was right with it, wrapping up his head like a presentation grapefruit and holding the muffling serape in place with one arm while the other hand groped for and found the weapon buried under the armpit, wrenched it free, and drove it home a second time. By the time I reached her, she’d laid the man down, freed the serape, and put it back on. She was squatting beside him, wiping her blade on his shirt. She looked up at me. Her eyes were strange and shiny; for a moment she was just another dangerous predator crouching over its kill, not quite human. Or very human, depending on your definition of humanity.
“So, amigo?” she whispered.
“Muy bien, guapa,” I said.
She giggled abruptly. “Your Spanish accent, it is much awful! And I am not your guapa. But I do okay, you think?”
I didn’t feel it was the right time to point out that she’d been very lucky—we’d been very lucky—that the man hadn’t screamed; and that we don’t like that throwing-knife routine even when silence is not required. There’s a lot of bone in a human body, and slipping a blade accurately between the ribs is difficult enough at contact range. From ten or twelve feet away, it’s strictly a game of chance.
“You did fine,” I said.
But she’d been testing me; now she lowered the boom. “So much boolsheet you talk!” she said scornfully. “No give more sooch crap, never! Antonia do all wrong, yes? Is plan to come in fast, use serape to confuse, blind, make silent, then cuchillo, knife, but last five meters all loose rock, impossible to move quiet. So instead make big gamble with the throwing, sorry. A little fright, maybe; very nervous girl, Antonia.”
I said, “Sure. Terrible girl. But the job got done, which is what counts, right?”
She shrugged. “If you say.” She looked down at the body. “Why we kill him, anyway?”
She was really, as I’d said, a terrible little girl; here she’d killed a man simply because I’d told her the season was open on Yankees of a certain persuasion without really understanding why he was needed dead.
“I told you,” I said, “I want to get a certain gent good and mad. Mad enough to commit himself openly instead of hiding in the woodwork the way he’s been doing. In the meantime, it reduces the odds a bit, and they surely do need shrinking. Horatius at the bridge facing the whole Etruscan army had nothing on us.”
She wasn’t interested in any legendary old Romans and their legendary old problems. “Where you think Mondragon hide?”
I gestured toward the jumble of black stone blocks far below us. “Oh, they’ve probably got him waiting down in that mess somewhere, ready to move in with his boys to do the machete-work and take the credit as soon as his gringo allies get us pinned down for him. But let’s not worry about him yet; first let’s find another sniper.”
“Sniper?”
“They’re bound to have at least one more scope-sighted rifle backing up the short-range boys with the automatic M-16s, like this one and the Mexican gent we bypassed. Those two men, and the one whose gun I’m packing, were too high to do any good immediately; obviously they were parked up here to watch, pass the word when we appeared, and then slip down the mountain to take us by surprise if the boys down below goofed and let us get forted up somewhere. But they’d have at least one rifle down where it could get into action right away. Since they seem to go in for standardization, their sharpshooter is probably packing a .243 like mine. That means we don’t have to worry about any really long-range marksmanship—no half-mile miracles—since-with that small caliber, if he knows his stuff, he won’t let them station him much more than three hundred meters from the action.”
I frowned at the big bowl below us; hell, maybe the whole thing was an ancient crater with one side blown out by the original explosion to form the wide notch by which the road entered from the valley below. I started working the binoculars very slowly across the areas where a sharpshooter might be stationed.
I spoke without lowering the glasses: “I figure that originally they were working on the theory that, following Arturo’s instructions, Cody would drive innocently to the picturesque little native village of Piedras Negras to interview some truck drivers about some arms—not knowing that Arturo was playing a joke on him as he had on Will Pierce, and there was no village, and the drivers were dead. So they set their elaborate trap accordingly, using enough men so there was no chance of the old coot escaping them again. There’s a detail that may be bothering them a little now; they knew you’re with me, you heard the man on the radio mention my female companion. Presumably they got the word from Arturo, who’d also have let them know that Señorita Antonia Sisneros is quite aware that Piedras Negras is no center of population, just an overgrown rock pile, and that, while she’s a little shy about admitting it, she’s got particularly good reason to know that Señor Enrique Serafin Ruiz and Company, while present, are not in condition to be interviewed. But to hell with that, they don’t care what game you’re playing, holding out on me, letting me waste my time trying to get information from a bunch of dead truck drivers you shot yourself.”
“Kill so many is hard to say. Afraid you have disgust for Antonia.”
I said, “Cut it out! You saw me shoot that woman in Hermosillo; you knew damn well that a few dead bodies wouldn’t bother me. What’s the real reason you played along with Arturo’s little joke?”
She said a bit sulkily, “If you know men dead, you no come where Mondragon wait, help me kill him.”
I said, “As a matter of fact you were wrong there; I’d have come even if I’d known there was no information about the arms to be had. I told you, I’m tired of being chased; I’m ready to do a little chasing. Anyway, the boys might have worried that you’d spill the beans to Cody, and he’d give up on Piedras Negras, and they’d have all their trouble for nothing, except for the fact that they found our pickup. Clearly Mr. Cody is still coming, limping along feebly on foot. He wouldn’t have left the vehicle if he’d received discouraging information from you and decided to give up on this expedition. So the orders went out to keep the boys in ambush position… Only they didn’t expect us to make as wide a detour as we actually made, and they don’t seem to take their red-alert status very seriously, judging by the ease with which we’ve slipped up on a couple of them already. We can thank the fact that they think they’re dealing with a sick old man and a silly young girl with a .22 pistol who may be sudden death on unarmed truck drivers—if Arturo has told them that much of your story—but can obviously be no serious threat to fine, clean-cut, well-armed, American boys skilled in all the arts of secret mayhem.”
“You no like fine American boys?” Antonia was frowning a little, puzzled. “You no like your country, hombre?”
I grinned. “My country’s great,” I said. “It’s just some of my countrymen who aren’t so terrific, particularly when they start wandering around other people’s countries. It’s a scary thing, the number of Americans who’d blow their collective stacks if a lousy outlander came to the U.S. and had the nerve to start telling us how to run our country, but who feel they have a perfect right to tell him how to run his.” I shrugged. “This particular bunch of improve-the-dumb-foreigner jerks, who’ve been trying to give you Mexicans a change of government they think you need even if you’re too stupid to know it, seem to’ve got their cojones caught in the international wringer. They’re trying very hard to get out of the pinch with their balls intact by eliminating, or getting Mondragon to eliminate, everyone who might be in a position to tel
l Washington about their busybody international activities. They had Pierce killed, that was easy. Now they’re after Cody, but the old guy is giving them a hell of a run. By now they’re desperate enough to give Operation Cody the big treatment—they must have brought a dozen armed men across the border, not to mention the Mexican allies—but unfortunately for them there’s a slight mixup of identities. They’ve set their fancy trap for a wounded old fox, and we’re going to give them wolf all the way… There’s our rifleman.”
I pointed. It was the logical place for a sharpshooter, on the southern point overlooking the gap in the crater wall. From there he could cover the main road out in the valley and the little side road heading up into Piedras Negras—it passed right below him—and he might even be able to cover the whole length of the track into the rocky clearing where the bodies lay, although from our vantage point high up on the opposite wall of the great bowl it was hard to tell what kind of a view he had that way, toward us. He was reasonably well hidden, but it was one of the most likely places for him to be and, keeping the glasses on it steadily for several minutes, I’d finally spotted a movement when he got fidgety and changed position over there.
He was much too far away to reach with a bullet, of course, even with a heavier gun than the one I’d liberated. I’d have to work my way clear around the basin and find a vantage point on the ridge above the point—behind him, since he was facing north—that gave me a clear shot of, I hoped, no more than a couple of hundred yards since I was using a totally unfamiliar rifle, and although, working for an organization like this, the previous owner had undoubtedly sighted it in carefully according to his own theories, I had no way of knowing what they had been.
“Delta One.”
Tunk Rutherford’s voice came softly over the little radio on my belt, as well as from the one on the dead man’s belt. I made a gesture, and Antonia unclipped that and hooked it onto the top of her jeans.
“Delta One. Hey, wake up, Sam, let’s have your eleven o’clock check-in… Delta One. Delta One. Alpha calling Delta One. Sammy, where the hell are you?” There was a little pause; then Rutherford spoke again: “Delta Two. Delta Two.”
“Delta Two is here. See nothing, hear nothing, have nothing to report.” The voice had a strong Spanish accent: this must be the dark-faced gent we’d bypassed. “You wish I check on Señor Gainer? I mean, Delta One?”
“Yeah, get over there, will you, Lupe, and let me know what’s going on… Delta Three. Delta Three. Delta Three, this is Alpha calling Delta Three… What the fuck is going on up on that fucking mountain? Alpha calling Delta Three. Come in, Willy, damn you! Alpha calling Delta Three. Shit… Delta Four, can you see either One or Three from your post? Are you there, Delta Four?”
Antonia had slipped away to retrieve the gear she’d shed to make her stalk. Now, returning, she picked up the dead man’s M-16 and held it out, gesturing toward the various buttons and levers. Wordlessly, listening to the radio, I showed her how to cock it, switch it from safe to full- or semi-auto, and replace the magazine when empty. Meanwhile the radio kept on talking.
“Delta Four. Dammit Hank, come in…”
“For Christ’s sake let a man zip his pants, Tunk.” The new voice sounded slightly breathless. “Into each life a little urine must fall. This is Cramer, I mean Delta Four, what do you want besides my eleven o’clock?”
“What’s wrong with peeing at your post, Dumbo? If you’ve got to be delicate about it and go off somewhere, take the two-way with you, dammit! Now listen, something’s haywire, neither Sam nor Willy are answering. The chances of both of them having radio trouble aren’t real big, if you know what I mean.”
“You think that old fart is cruising around up here with a silent raygun or something?”
“That old fart didn’t need a raygun to get away from us once, and he’s stayed ahead of us even though he keeps leaving bloody footprints everywhere he walks. Maybe he’s carrying a pot of chicken blood to make us think we hit him harder than we did. So you watch it, and don’t let him catch you squatting to shit or something.”
“What about Lupe?”
“If you’d been listening like you should, you’d know that Delta Two is okay; he’s heading over to check on Sam. You slip over and see what’s wrong with Willy, but for Christ’s sake watch yourself.”
“Kind of funny if he got One and Three and skipped over Two, Tunk? Maybe he’s got something against us Americanos.”
“We don’t know he’s got anybody, yet, if there is a he. Maybe it’s a magnetic disturbance or something in this volcanic nightmare and they just aren’t coming through. Get over there and check, on the double. No. I take that back. Take it easy and watch your back all the way.”
“Delta Four out.”
After a moment, Rutherford’s voice came again: “Gamma, Gamma, this is Alpha calling Gamma.”
“Right here, Tunk. I mean Alpha. I’ve been listening. What’s on your mind?”
“Leave the GMC and the Subaru, get in your own heap, and bring the prisoner to HQ. There’s something funny going on, and I don’t want you way off there in left field. Watch it, watch it, watch it. The rest of you guys stay where you were put, and remember, if somebody’s got Sam or Willy, he’s got their radios, so be kind of careful what you say on the air, hear?”
An unidentified voice I hadn’t heard before grumbled: “Aren’t you overreacting, Tunk? Hell, it’s just one old goat with a hole in his back!”
“One old goat who got Ralph and Coonie in El Paso and took your gun away, hotshot. And you seem to have forgotten that we’re also dealing with a cute little Indian bitch who shot four men dead with a lousy .22, right over there in those rocks, and left them for the buzzards.”
Somebody else laughed. “Hey, Tunk, isn’t that the dame who got the drop on you in that motel in Hermosillo…?”
“Alpha, Alpha, Delta Two is call Alpha.”
“Alpha here. Report.”
“Sí, Señor. Señor Gainer has the throat very much cut, with very sharp knife, I think a small one.”
There was a moment of silence; then an unidentified voice in the radio said, “Shit!”
Rutherford’s voice said, “Continue report.”
The heavily accented voice of Lupe, known as Delta Two, said, “Señor Gainer’s food is eat by others, I think, his coffee is drunk, and they have take his weapons, ammunition, field glasses, and radio. Two people, big man in boots, small woman in moccasins. Man do killing. They come from north, leave to south, I think pass well behind where I station. I follow now, maybe?”
Apparently one of Mondragon’s men did not know how to read signs after all; perhaps he just hadn’t been present at the ambush near Cananea.
Rutherford’s voice said, “Okay, try to track them. Watch out for Delta Four heading your way; we don’t want any misunderstandings.”
“Delta Two is out.”
“Delta Four, you heard that?”
“I heard it. I’m still tangled up in these fucking rocks; I’ll be looking in on Willy in about fifteen minutes. Who the hell ever heard of a Texas millionaire making with a shiv like a lousy greaser…? Sorry about that, Lupe. Four out.”
Antonia tapped my shoulder. “He big liar. No fifteen minutes, see right over there!”
I looked where she was looking. At first I could see nothing but a brushy mountainside; then a bush shook a little more vigorously than could be accounted for by the erratic breeze. Delta Four, named Hank Cramer, the man who’d been caught with his pants open. Apparently he wasn’t great on respect or discipline, but he did have a few brains; he was the one who’d noted that we’d moved from Anglo to Anglo, bypassing the Mexican ally, Lupe. And now, knowing that we had at least one radio and were undoubtedly listening in, he’d broadcast a false ETA, hoping that if we were still hanging around it would make us take our time about slipping away, maybe giving him a chance to surprise us.
“Goddamn smarty-pants,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“No kill him?”
“Bloodthirsty, aren’t you?” I shook my head. “Let’s stay with the easy ones as long as we can. This guy is tricky and alert, we’ll let him go.”
She said, patting the M-16, “I take little maquina and, what you call them, clips. You take other gun, okay?”
It was a pleasure to work with a female who had a real regard for weapons. I grinned. “Well, it’s a cinch you can’t pack any more hardware; you’re already loaded like a burro. Sure, I’ll bring the revolver, just in case we have to fight a real war some time. Lead the way. Put me over there behind that sniper, if you can.” Her eye for terrain was better than mine, and I wasn’t too proud to take advantage of it.
“First I think we go down, okay?”
“Sure, this high country seems to be getting a bit crowded.”
Weighed down with a long gun and four short ones counting the .22 that was wearing a hole in my ankle, plus an assortment of .38 and .243 ammunition, plus a walkie-talkie, I felt like John Wayne or Sylvester Stallone heading off to retake Vietnam single-handed. Well, double-handed. Despite her burden the kid slipped through the brush ahead of me like a ghost. I had a hard time moving as silently, but we got away without attracting the attention of Delta Four. We were well down the slope, making our way down a steep gully, when he came on the air with the bad news.
“Tunk, dammit, the bastards got Willie! Another knife job, but I think the dame did it this time; Willie had a couple of long black hairs in his fist. Radio gone, guns and ammo gone. Christ, even if they didn’t bring any of their own, they’ve got a goddamn arsenal by this time. Anybody who walks up on them careless is going to get blasted back into yesterday… Hold the phone; I hear something!”
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