The Summer Soldier

by Nicholas Guild

  Still, Vlasov did not move. And yet, without changing, his whole carriage seemed to have undergone some subtle change. As if in not moving he had lost the capacity to move. There was about him a tension, a terrible rigidity, as if he were frozen in place.

  Then, slowly, he began to shake his head. And the borrowed light from his spectacle lenses flashed off and on like the warning signals from an oncoming train.

  “No,” he said finally, almost to himself. “No, it was by your hand, not mine.” He raised his bent arm slightly from his lap, and the hand closed into a fist. Perhaps he had wanted to point an accusation, but the fingers, in their individual wrath, refused to open. It seemed so.

  Then he allowed the arm to sink back down into his lap, and he raised his head. The voice, when it came, was hoarse with almost overmastering emotion, and the words seemed directed at no one at all.

  “It was you. She was. . .”

  With the clarity of an hallucination, Guinness suddenly could remember pulling away the sheet that had covered Louise’s face. He could remember the way her eyes had been half open, and the smell of her burnt hair. It was, at that moment, a sustaining memory.

  “Sure, Misha. It was me. I killed her. I wired the dynamite to your ignition switch; I did that. But who put her in the car, Misha? Who handed her in like she was Cinderella going for a little ride in her magic pumpkin? Who married her, hey, babe? And put her right square in the line of fire. Who did that to her, hey, sweetheart?”

  By the end, he was shouting. It was all supposed to be calculated; just a technique, like the tongue lashings he would sometimes give his classes of freshmen when too many of them were late with their homework. But by the end he was seething with a hatred that seemed born out of more grief than just his own. It was just crazy. And then Vlasov was shouting too.

  “You did this,” he half sobbed, his fist, still apparently not able to unclench, shaking in the air. “You murdered her. She never harmed a living thing, she would never. . . and you murdered her. My wife, my wife.” And before his, Guinness’s wrath evaporated.

  “No, you poor silly bastard, you did it yourself. It was my own wife that I murdered, but that’s my problem.

  “Don’t you see, even now? Wives and clear consciences and the right to call ourselves human beings, we don’t have any business with any of them. That’s all for other people, not for you or me or the rest of our kind; it’s what we gave up our share in when we went into our line of work.”

  For a long moment neither of them spoke. Then Vlasov’s fingers, where they were resting on his right thigh, spread slightly. It was probably as close as he would ever come to a start.

  “You are not armed,” he said at last. It was as much a statement of fact as a discovery, like something at once a surprise and obvious. Guinness smiled wolfishly.

  “That’s right, sucker. I’m not.”

  He was already most of the way across the path before he saw Vlasov’s hand begin to drop down for his gun. The shot, when it came, was already perhaps as much as a half second too late and smacked harmlessly into the trunk of a eucalyptus tree.

  Two hundred yards through the fucking trees, downhill and in the dark. Twice he caught his foot on something and pitched over like a drunk in a vaudeville skit, but with all the bobbing and weaving he was up to, he was probably lucky he didn’t plow straight on into a nice, solid, foot and a half thick trunk and knock himself cold. The gods were with him, at least so far.

  Finally he threw himself down and listened. Not a sound. Not enough light to zip your fly by. Vlasov hadn’t come after him.

  But then, of course, Vlasov wouldn’t. Not a dumb thing like that. You do not come charging after a man like that, not through a forest, not in the pitch black, gun or no gun. If you use a light, he can find you easier than you can find him; and if you don’t, what the hell good is the gun? No, Vlasov might be crazy, but he wasn’t stupid. He would find himself a spot somewhere just out of the light and he would settle down to see what happened. It was what Guinness himself would have done.

  Or maybe not. Maybe Guinness would have just decided that the moment was not propitious and would have gotten the hell out of there. Would that be what Vlasov would do? After all, the man wasn’t stupid.

  But he was crazy. And at that moment, crazy mad. Mad like a swarm of bees. He had been teased into a rage by the man who had killed his wife, who had burned her to a cinder right in front of his eyes. He had built his life around his revenge, and no way in the world was he going anywhere until he had had himself the satisfaction of cutting Guinness into inch wide strips with a dull knife.

  And that was his weakness, the poor tormented son of a bitch. That was his one weakness.

  But in the meantime, he had the gun. One must not forget the gun. Guinness brought himself up to a low crouch, his eyes nervously searching for a point of light among the trees. There was none. No light, no sound, nothing. Pity, he almost might have preferred it if Vlasov had just charged in after him, hardware blazing. It would, at least, have settled everything.

  But no. Vlasov had fired once, and he couldn’t afford to fire again unless he had Guinness in his sights. One shot, two maybe, you could get away with; but make it sound like the battle of Culloden and somebody sitting on his back porch three quarters of a mile off is going to phone the cops.

  “Hey, them kids is at it agin over thar in th’ park,” and in ten minutes a couple of squad cars would be nosing in through the main gate.

  No, Vlasov wouldn’t want to be disturbed before he had his business finished, so he could be counted on to be careful about how he popped off his little hand cannon. There might be some small comfort to be drawn from that.

  This wasn’t really an OK Corral type situation, which was another part of the reason Guinness had left his arsenal under the mattress in his motel room. That and the fact that Tuttle and his people had specified that they wanted Vlasov to just disappear from the face of the earth. It’s no cinch to dispose of a body with several large, conspicuous bullet holes in it.

  Slowly, Guinness began to make his circling way through the trees. With the merry go round as the center, he wanted to make as big a sweep as he could in hopes of finding out where Vlasov was laying for him. He went counterclockwise to keep from running into the road—try to get across that open space and you would probably end up a dead man.

  The grove, so far as he could figure, was spread out like a fan, covering perhaps two hundred degrees of the circle, and Vlasov would be in there somewhere. He would want the cover too; and on the other side was a picnic area, with nothing but a lot of two inch high grass you couldn’t have hidden a grapefruit in.

  The grove and the merry go round, then, were to be their little theater of operations, in some dark corner of which friend Vlasov would be sitting on his heels and waiting for his chance. He would stay put for the time being, until he got restless, hoping for Guinness to come wandering into range.

  It was with some satisfaction that Guinness remembered having read somewhere that eucalyptus trees were evergreens. He did not, therefore, have to contend with a two inch carpet of dead, brittle leaves. The ground was reasonably soft, in fact, and if you paid attention to staying clear of the occasional tangles of fallen branches, you could move around quietly enough. A breath of wind to provide a little cover noise would have been nice, but you can’t have everything.

  As it was, it took him a little over forty minutes to find where Vlasov was laying in wait.

  He had picked himself a pretty good spot, but then he would pick himself a pretty good spot—the KGB didn’t make you a full colonel for standing around with your thumb in your mouth. It was about sixty feet down a slope from the merry go round, just beyond the penumbra from the flood lamps, so he had plenty of shadow to hide in and the light was close enough to give him something to shoot by. There were large tree trunks just behind him and to the right, and that particular area happened to be very bushy. It was a very good spot. Guinness might
have stumbled right up to him if Vlasov hadn’t just happened to have picked that moment to move, and if his glasses hadn’t picked up and reflected a faint twinkle of light. Probably after all this time crouched over like a back alley crap shooter, his legs were beginning to give him trouble.

  The two of them were perhaps as much as fifty yards apart, and all Guinness had to do if he wanted to bring on Armageddon was to step on a dead branch. It might as well have been fifty miles.

  Well, that was hardly a big surprise. It’s only in the movies that you can sneak all the way up on the guy who’s waiting in ambush for you—not unless he happens to be deaf, dumb, and blind.

  There was nothing for Guinness to do but make himself comfortable, because it was going to be a long wait. Close at hand was a large rock, approximately the size and shape of a beer keg that had been tipped over on its side and gotten itself half buried, and one end of it was about four inches from the trunk of a tree that probably you couldn’t have closed your arms around. Guinness lay down behind them, resting his head on his crossed forearms so that he could look out through the gap between. From there he could just make out the corner of Vlasov’s left shoulder.

  Time. It was close to one in the morning, and time was on Guinness’s side. If your primary interest in enterprises of this kind is simply to stay alive, then you can always wait. But Vlasov was less interested in surviving than in revenge, so time was against him. Eventually, the high school dropouts and the winos and the bored, dispirited mothers with their five year olds would be back. Someone would come to turn on the merry go round and collect the tickets from the people who wanted to ride on the unicorns and the pink swans. And long before any of that happened, Vlasov would have to have his business settled. He had lost now whatever advantage he had enjoyed from being the hunter. Who could tell—if he walked out of here alone in the morning, the job undone, what would keep Guinness from starting to shadow him? One anonymous phone call to the local Russian consulate and Vlasov would never make it to dinnertime.

  So it was now or never. This was his last chance, and Vlasov would know it.

  He would assume, of course, that Guinness was out there somewhere, looking for him. Guinness wouldn’t have come, wouldn’t have exposed himself like that, just to go skipping off again into the darkness.

  But could he count on that? Might not Guinness just leave, and then make his call? Wasn’t it just possible? And that would put Vlasov in a box.

  The thought would have occurred to him, and eventually he would leave his little nest and go looking for Guinness. He would have to, just to find out. He would have to know for sure, no matter what the risks.

  Of course, Guinness would never leave it to another man to pull Vlasov’s chain for him. The hell with the Russians, and for that matter with Ernie Tuttle; it had to be something he did himself or nothing would make any sense at all, as if it ever had.

  But Vlasov wouldn’t know that. Would he think that he was the only one with a score to settle? Hadn’t Guinness told him that that kind of nonsense was for suckers?

  Screw it. It would have to wait, Guinness thought to himself. He could sort it all out once his head was off the block. Now was the time to concentrate on staying alive.

  Every once in a while, not more than three times in an hour, Vlasov’s shoulder would move in the darkness. Usually up and then down again, as if he might be getting ready to leave the protection of his hiding place and go on the prowl. And every time, Guinness felt his insides turning into ice water.

  He wondered sometimes what must have been going through the poor bastard’s mind, but that was something else that could wait. Tomorrow, if he lived, he could feel all the compassion in the world, but not now. Tomorrow he could yield himself to wave upon wave of sad and sentimental regret, he could rage at life’s injustice and the fatal coils of the gods, but it would have to wait until tomorrow.

  Right now he had to want to kill Misha Fedorovich Vlasov. He didn’t have to hate the guy’s guts—excesses of that sort can get in the way too. It would be enough simply not to like him very much.

  Guinness thought perhaps, for now, he could manage that.

  Finally, at a quarter to five, only an hour or so before the sky would lighten enough to let you make out the line of the horizon, at what he must have judged to be the very last allowable minute, Vlasov began to stir. Keeping his back against a tree, he edged himself up very slowly into a standing position.

  He took his time, peering cautiously into the darkness behind and to either side of him. For a long moment he stared right at the spot where Guinness lay hidden, but then he turned away.

  When apparently he was satisfied, he cleaned his glasses with a handkerchief drawn from somewhere Guinness couldn’t see and pressed them back on the bridge of his nose with a delicate gesture of his middle finger. Grace under pressure.

  Now Vlasov would have to come down into the grove, away from the flood lamps, down where he would have little to shoot at except sounds. And perhaps a little less cautious than he might be, knowing that the dawn was coming and his one chance was slipping through his fingers.

  Guinness waited until Vlasov’s back was turned and then pulled himself up as quickly as he dared. Crablike, he made his way down the sloping ground. Knowing that Vlasov would come down and then begin working his way to the right, since there would be nowhere else to go except out onto the grass, he went that way too. Eventually, Vlasov would come within range, and then they would both see what would happen next.

  The spot he settled on was about fifteen feet above a natural trail that in this dark Vlasov would almost have to follow. There was a good sized tree for cover, and he would have the advantage of the slope.

  A few minutes later Vlasov came. Guinness couldn’t bring himself even to breathe. It seemed forever before Vlasov came even with where he was waiting—and then a little further, just a little. Just enough that Vlasov would have him at his back.

  It was a distance a running man could cover in only a few steps: not more than about twenty feet. He hadn’t gone five before he knew that Vlasov was beginning to turn. In what seemed like slow motion, Vlasov’s right elbow began to come out from his body and he began to step backward with his right foot. They were no more than six or seven feet apart when Guinness could see the gun. It circled around on the end of Vlasov’s arm, as the arm seemed to turn faster than the body. And then it fired.

  21

  The spring semester had ended and summer school wasn’t scheduled to begin for another week, so there were no students on campus. Even at the multilevel parking structure where Ernest Tuttle left his car there was no one in the booth to give him a ticket with his entrance time stamped on the back or to collect his money when he would be ready to leave. Having been out of college long enough to have lost touch with the life cycle that begins in September and ends in June, he was a little surprised.

  From the central quad he looked around at the buildings, mostly flat roofed and modern, with brick facades and tiny oblong windows that made you think of the arrow slits in medieval castles, and wondered which of them was likely to be the Humanities Building and what could have gotten into a man like Raymond Guinness to have made him want to bury himself in a dump like this.

  He shrugged imperceptibly and wandered over to a soft drink machine jammed in under the outside staircase of a thing called McCoy Engineering Hall, and for thirty-five cents he bought a can of Sprite. Lunch had consisted of two tacos and a cup of black coffee, and it had left him thirsty.

  After the first swallow, he made a face and dropped the can into an adjacent trash barrel; the stuff was flat. Well, that figured.

  Tuttle was a practical sort of man; he did not believe in astrological signs, tea leaves, pyramid power, or the efficacy of consulting one’s biorhythms. Things had simply not been going his way of late, that was all. A string of lousy luck that was bound shortly to reach its end.

  In a year or two, with just a few decent breaks, he might be all
finished with this back alley stuff and have himself a nice, safe desk job in the planning end of things, possibly even a regional directorship. It wasn’t unimaginable.

  Over the last three or four years, and especially after a nasty screw up in Vienna, after which he had spent ten weeks in the hospital having shrapnel fragments pulled out of his legs, he had come to see that there was no percentage in fieldwork. How many guys did he know who were doing that kind stuff and had made it to fifty? How many did he know who were dead or basket cases in some veterans hospital somewhere? If you were smart, you got out while there was still time and lined yourself up a soft spot in administration, where you could go home at five o’clock and not worry that some clown might be waiting around the next corner to shoot your ass off.

  And he could do it, too. He had a good record and his papers were on the coordinator’s desk this very minute. If everything had gone precisely as planned on the Vlasov caper, he might have been on his way home right now, with a month’s extra leave in front of him and his own little gig going right in the Washington office the first Monday back. As it was. . .

  Damn California, land of the crazies. Go to the best seafood restaurant in San Francisco and you couldn’t get soft shell clams for love nor money. He wouldn’t be sorry to leave; there seemed to be something in the climate that turned people off their heads.

  If he could have come back with Guinness on a silver platter, they would have been ready to give him the world, and he had halfway promised Prescott in Operations. A shooter of that standing was hard to come by.

  But so far Guinness was being very unreasonable.

  To give him his due, though, in points of technique he was as reliable as a Swiss watch. Tuttle had to admit that the man knew what he was up to, even if he did make everybody around him jump through hoops. This latest thing had been beautiful, like he had never been away.