The Infiltrators

by Donald Hamilton

  I grinned. “Pretty sharp thinking, Admiral,” I said. “You win either way. If Bennett traps me, and kills me, your family is safe. If I trap Bennett and he talks, as he will, your family is safe. I bet you fought some tricky naval actions in your time, sir. Okay, it’s a deal, but I’ll want to see some pictures of the cabin, and a topo map of the area if you have one…”

  27

  In addition to being picturesque in its own right, in spite of what progress has done to it, Santa Fe has a number of tourist attractions, including a well-known opera for the entertainment of musical summer visitors. And then there’s the ski area in the mountains above the town, for the athletic types who arrive in winter. The Chamber of Commerce keeps trying to get the fifteen-mile access road to the run widened and straightened, but the steep Sangre de Cristo Mountains don’t take kindly to being straightened; and a few flatlanders fall off every year, mostly Texans—I suppose because there are more of them. To those of us who grew up driving in that kind of country it seems like a perfectly safe and comfortable thoroughfare, just a little more stimulating to drive than most, although it was even more fun before it was paved, back when you could slide the corners dirt-track fashion.

  I’d left the conspicuous Mazda at the motel and hitched a ride in a flossy four-wheel-drive station wagon called Eagle, distantly related to the old utilitarian jeep. It was well after dark when we got the word. Bob Wills drove. He’d turned out to be more difficult to work with than his boyish appearance suggested, rather impatient and critical, and he was getting on my nerves a bit; but then I always prefer to work alone, given a choice. I guess I’m not really a leader of men at heart.

  Here, of necessity, we had a small military operation going; and I didn’t know any of the friendly forces Bob had recruited, numbering five. Two rode in the rear seat of the Eagle. A third drove the battered old International pickup, vintage uncertain, that followed behind us at a discreet distance. The remaining two were already on station. They’d just let us know by radio that the fish were in the net and we could man the winches and crank them in anytime. Bob wanted to do it now.

  “All we have to do is sneak in and pick them off one by one, damn it,” he said. “Wally’s got most of them spotted already, the way they’ve set up their so-called trap for you around that cabin. These are good boys, Helm, they know the mountains, and they can work in the dark. Those creeps will never know what hit them.”

  I said, “Maybe, but I don’t want to wind up in a firefight. It’s a still night, and any shooting up here on the mountain will be heard clear down in town. We’ve already presented the city police with four dead bodies—well, two weren’t ours but some people would like to give us credit for them, anyway. Five if you include Marty. I’ve managed to smooth all that over after a fashion with the Chief, but I don’t want to have to deal with the county sheriff arid the state cops as well. And the bottom line, as they say, is that if there’s a lot of wild firing in the dark the man who knows what I want to know may wind up among the dead and the whole operation will be wasted; and so will a lady I’d kind of like to keep alive. Where’s this ambush spot your man picked out for us?”

  “Well, if we’re going to do it this way, at least we should block the Aspen Ranch road above, in case they decide to go out that way.”

  I said, “The word is that Bennett rode up comfortably in a Mercedes; and he’ll never get it out that way. That little dirt road is rough enough any time of year; now in the spring it’s strictly four-wheel-drive country. And it’s a considerable detour, so if he did pull a fast one and slip out that way in the heavier vehicle he’s got up there, it would mean he was onto us and ready for us and we’d have a battle we can’t afford before we could take him. Anyway, we can’t spare the men; we’ve got barely enough to do the job here. No, either it works as planned, and they come back down this way and stumble into our hands all unsuspecting, or we go back to the goddamn drawing board and try to figure out something else.”

  “If we wait them out, it’ll be a long night for the lady,” Bob said.

  “It’ll be a long night for everybody,” I said, wincing as a bounce of the car hurt my side. “How far did you say it was to the place where we can set up our deadfall instead of walking into theirs?”

  When we got there, it looked good; and I had them back the Eagle up into the little dead-end stub of a road up a side canyon that other people had used for parking and picnicking. Then I had the heavy old pickup parked in front of it ready to go. I limped around a bit and checked that the vehicle wouldn’t be hit by the lights of a car approaching down the steep main road; in the dark there was a good chance it would pass unnoticed until the time came for it to do its stuff. Good enough. Now if everybody behaved exactly as I hoped, we had it made. The sides of the canyon rose black against the sky around me, and a few stars twinkled up there in a cold and remote fashion.

  After a final conference with Bob Wills, I made my cautious way back to the ambush site and asked the driver of the International to please join his friends in the Eagle. I told him I wanted his vehicle for snoozing; he could have it back when action-time came. He grinned, a nice enough guy, and went back to the station wagon. I struggled up to the pickup’s high seat and tried to make myself comfortable on the cracked pseudo-leather upholstery. The space was too short for my legs, and my ribs hurt, but I reminded myself that somewhere else somebody else was even less comfortable. It’ll be a long night for the lady. You have to work with all kinds, but why did I have to be saddled with a mouthy sonofabitch tonight?

  Once it’s set and running, there’s never any point in wearing out the brain cells thinking about the operation. If you haven’t got it figured out right by that time, it’s too damned late. And there was no point whatever in worrying about Madeleine Ellershaw, what kind of shape she was in by now, what kind of conditions she was enduring, and how she was enduring them. If she was still alive—and what if she wasn’t? So I thought about her anyway…

  “Helm!”

  I realized that, thinking about her, I’d fallen asleep. I sat up groggily. The door of the pickup opened and I could see a dark silhouette, a bit chubby, recognizable as Bob Wills.

  “What’s the word?” I asked.

  “No word, but—”

  I said, “For Christ’s sake! Did you wake me up just because you were lonely?”

  “Look, damn it, it’s well after midnight. We’re just wasting time sitting here doing nothing!”

  I said, “Amigo, if you can’t learn to do nothing for reasonable periods of time, you’d better take up tennis or some other sport where you get to hop around like a flea in a frying pan. Either they come or they don’t. Either we’ll get them or we won’t. Now go play cards or masturbate or something and let me sleep. Close the fucking door as you go out, please.”

  The truck door slammed. I heard his angry footsteps recede. It occurred to me that I wasn’t having much luck of late with my subordinates, if you could call them that: Jackson under interrogation, Marty dead, McCullough off on a private mission I probably shouldn’t have authorized, and myself saddled with this nervous character who obviously considered me a superannuated incompetent, and could be right.

  It was getting to be kind of a rat race anyway, with all these people milling around; who the hell did I think I was, anyway, Eisenhower supervising Operation Overlord? The fine old lone-wolf feeling, me against the world, was all too often missing these days of committee operations. Maybe it was time to pull out while I was still in one piece—well, more or less—and marry the girl if I could get her out of this alive and talk her into it, and settle down to… well, hell, it didn’t matter what, really. Danger pay had been piling up in banks and investment accounts for years. I could live a long, long time, even married, on what I had put away.

  Suddenly I was awake again, realizing that I’d been asleep again. I was sitting up, yawning, when the head of the driver of the truck I was using for a bedroom appeared at the window.

&n
bsp; “Mr. Helm?”

  “Time to go?” I asked, opening the door and checking my watch. Three forty-five.

  He nodded. “We just had Wally on the two-way. They’re giving up on you up there, and pulling out. Three cars. Well, the Mercedes, and the big old crew-cab Ford pickup with a camper shell that we knew about. And a four-wheel-drive GMC Carryall stuffed full: Wally counted nine piling into that one. Nine that we didn’t know about. Must have come up that back road and parked well above the cabin and filtered in without Wally’s seeing them.”

  What he left unsaid was that if we’d made the attack Wills had recommended to me, we’d have been outnumbered well over two to one, with nine unexpected marksmen popping at us from behind the trees. Disaster Alley. “What’s the order of withdrawal?”

  “Ford first, GMC second, Mercedes bringing up the rear. Friend Bennett is letting the troops break trail for him, I guess, just in case there should be somebody waiting along the road with a nasty gun.”

  I said, “Good, then we won’t need the roadblock above. Just the one below, to isolate the Merc and keep the two lead vehicles from coming back to help after they’ve passed. They’d have a hell of a time turning those big heaps around on this narrow road, anyway. Tell Bob… no, I’ll tell him. You get ready here. You’ve got your part all straight?”

  He nodded again. “I block the road when I get the word from Jack that Bennett’s car has passed the bend just above us.” He tapped the walkie-talkie he held. “I just checked it out. Communications loud and clear.”

  “Did Wally say where Bennett was riding?”

  “Rear seat, left side. Behind the driver.”

  “Does everybody know that, in case there should be shooting? We don’t want to hurt the poor little fellow. At least not with a bullet.”

  “Everybody’s got the word. They’ll be careful.”

  I said, “You’d better ride out the crash in the cab. If you try to get out, and they’re coming fast, they could hit the truck and shove it over on top of you before you’re clear.”

  “I know, sir. I’ll be all right. This old wreck is built like a tank; that’s why I picked it off the second hand lot.”

  I eased myself to the ground and looked at him for a moment. I decided that I’d leave the encouraging handshakes and noble before-the-battle speeches to General Eisenhower, wherever he might be. I just gave him a kind of salute and he grinned at me, and mounted to the seat of the pickup in an agile and painless way that made me jealous. I started back towards the Eagle, but saw Bob Wills getting out of it carrying a walkie-talkie of his own, and a submachine gun of some kind that gleamed menacing in the dark. It didn’t seem like exactly the right weapon for capturing a man alive and talking; but if I criticized him now he’d probably get mad and start tossing around hand grenades and vest-pocket nuclear devices. For the same reason, seeing that the other two men had already gone to their stations, I didn’t check what instructions he’d given them, lest he think I was being critical. I’d just have to hope he’d got things organized right in his prima-donna way.

  He passed me without speaking. We’d worked all this out earlier; and I followed him past the parked truck and up the road to a point from which we could shoot out the tires of Bennett’s car, we hoped, in the unlikely event that it came around the last curve so slowly that it managed to avoid collision with the International, which would be blocking the road by that time, and tried to back uphill out of danger. Scrambling up the steep slope in the dark, to the patch of brush we’d picked for cover, was no fun at all. As I eased myself onto a suitable rock up there, I heard the motor of the truck start up, roar a bit, and settle down to steady idling.

  “Jack, come in,” Bob Wills said into his set. To me, he said, “Jack’s around the curve, a couple of hundred yards above us.”

  “I hear you,” said a tinny voice. “Nothing in sight yet. Saw a shooting star, though. Is that supposed to be good luck or bad?”

  “Never mind the heavens, concentrate on matters terrestrial.”

  “Matters terrestrial. Wow! Aye, aye, sir!” After several minutes, the tinny little loudspeaker addressed us again: “We’re in business. Headlights up the canyon. Two sets so far… Still just two pairs of lights. Getting closer, okay here they come. I’ll give you mark as the second one passes so you’ll get an idea how long… Mark! I repeat, that’s the second vehicle, the three-quarter-tonner. No sign of the sedan yet.”

  In the silence that followed, I heard the growling sound as the driver of the waiting International jazzed his idling motor a bit to make sure of it. Then a set of headlights swept by below our hillside perch, and another. I could hardly make out the dark bodies of the vehicles, let alone the faces at the windows.

  “Twenty-four seconds,” Bob Wills said.

  “Get ready, here comes the Merc,” said the radio. “Coming, coming, coming… Mark! Nothing else on the road. Leaving post, heading down to lend a hand. Out!”

  Wills was staring at the parked pickup truck below us, still motionless. “Get out there, you dumb jerk!” he said angrily, but he didn’t say it into his set.

  But the pickup driver, with a clear knowledge of how much time he had to work in, was in no hurry. He waited a few seconds longer, then he eased his clumsy old vehicle forward and halted it where it would block the highway completely. I heard the parking brake go on and the engine stop. His timing was good. We caught the loom of headlights around the curve above us, sweeping out over the canyon as the Mercedes made the turn and headed down towards us at a fair rate of speed for that road, perhaps trying to catch up with the rest of the convoy that had pulled a little ahead of it.

  The pickup seemed to materialize magically across the road as the headlights hit it. The sedan was already below us. Tires screeched and the car went into a skid to the right, heading for the hundred-foot drop-off on that side of the road. I beseeched the driver silently: Get off your brakes, you dumb prick! One of these days I’m going to invent a car without any brakes. It’ll kill fewer people than the ones we’ve got, at least in high-speed situations with stupid auto-jockeys who lock up everything tight and lose control whenever things get a bit hairy. Either the driver heard my soundless plea, or a measure of sanity returned; his wheels started rotating again, his steering recommenced functioning, and he got himself aimed left towards the rear end of the pickup, the light end, the hillside end.

  But he’d overcorrected in his panicky counter-reaction to his first panicky reaction. His left wheels rode up the steep bank and flipped the Mercedes onto its side a moment after it had smacked the back end of the pickup and spun it halfway around. I was already sliding down the rocky slope to the road, stoically ignoring my aching side, heroically interposing my body between Bob Wills’ automatic weapon and the wrecked car, just in case he should be irresistibly tempted to give it a burst.

  I tried to remember which military greats had been shot in the back by their own men. Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, for one; but there had been others. Stonewall Jackson?

  28

  The interrogation van was a blunt, boxy, windowless vehicle with a red paint job that had faded, as had the lettering on the side: GARCIA AND KETTENBERG—PLUMBING. When I opened one half of the rear double door, and hauled myself inside, Bennett was sitting on the narrow cot at the side in his underwear and socks, a costume that left him little dignity. They hadn’t had to work on him very hard, and there wasn’t a mark on him except for a patch of white tape on his forehead at the hairline where he’d hit something when the Mercedes flipped; but his shoulders sagged, his body looked shrunken, and his face was that of an old man with a faint silvery stubble of beard and dull staring eyes.

  “Tell me about the Orosco Grant,” I said. “Orosco with an ‘s’ or Orozco with a ‘z’?”

  “With a ‘z’,” he said.

  “Size?”

  “Several thousand acres, but parts are still under litigation. You know these fucking Hispanos, suddenly rising up now and claiming that th
eir innocent ancestors were screwed by the sneaky Anglos—after they stole the land from the Indians in the first place!”

  There was nothing in that for me. An easterner himself, he was merely parroting what he’d been told by his landowning local associates.

  “Access?” I asked.

  “I already told them—”

  “Tell me.”

  “Turn east off the freeway on State 470. Seventeen miles. Barbed-wire fence, left side. Padlocked gate. Key—”

  “I have the keys they took off you. Go on.”

  He continued to speak mechanically, as if repeating a speech he’d made several times to another audience, as of course he had. They’d have made him repeat every detail endlessly until they were sure they had the truth, as far as he knew it.

  “Dirt road,” he said. “You’ll need four-wheel drive crossing the arroyos. Two arroyos. Deep sand. Proceed nine and a half miles from the gate into the Gabaldon Hills. The old Higsbee Mine.”

  “Landmarks?”

  “Las Dos Tetas. The mine is kind of between them. Actually, the diggings are in the one to the south. Two round knobs closer together, a little higher than the surrounding hills.”

  “What’s left at the mine after all these years?”

  “Not much. A couple of old buildings. Falling down. Piles of dirt. Hole in the hillside, tunnel. Branches. First branch tunnel on right.”

  “Alive?”

  Apprehension flickered in his eyes. “We didn’t hurt her!” he said defensively. “She was alive when we left her there!”