The Hamlet Warning

by Leonard Sanders

  One unseen gunman sat behind Elliott, pistol pressing into his ribs. Two more faced him from the far side of the seat. The fourth was up front with the driver, facing to the rear. And the girl was practically in Elliott’s lap, hindering any move he might make.

  “Don’t mind us,” the one in front said. “Go right ahead with what you were doing.”

  He held a pistol leveled at Elliott, resting on the top of the seat: a Colt Python, .38 or .357 magnum. Elliott’s mind registered the fact with trained detachment. The man’s English was slightly modified BBC, with the bare hint of an accent. Hungarian? German? Czech? Elliott couldn’t be certain. The man was square-built, muscular, forceful. A Rod Steiger.

  “At least let the girl go,” Elliott said. “She has nothing to do with this.”

  “Of course,” the Rod Steiger said. “We’ll let the girl go.”

  Something in the way he said it, and in the deadly silence that followed, brought home to Elliott the full situation. He understood that they couldn’t under any circumstances let the girl go. They couldn’t risk her going to the police with the story of an American being kidnaped by four armed men.

  Nor did they intend to let him go, either.

  Accepting these facts realistically, Elliott began to make plans.

  His single-shot .38 pen was useless against such odds. He pushed it out of his mind. He would have to try something else. He kept silent, orientating himself to each man’s location, watching their movements with an eye toward their degree of expertise, evaluating their relationships, and estimating his chances. He still couldn’t see the man pressing against him from behind, but he had the two across the seat pegged. Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine.

  The driver had turned westward. Elliott recognized the entrance to Monsanto Park, and he knew they were on the 24 de Janeiro Road that led to the old fort. At a bend of the road, they stopped.

  “We will leave the girl here,” the Rod Steiger said.

  The girl looked at Elliott, dubious, searching.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  The Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine stepped out on the far side, and Elliott knew they were to be the girl’s executioners. He waited until they helped the girl out of the door and moved away from the car.

  Then he made his move.

  He wheeled to his right, bringing his right elbow high in a vicious arc that caught the man behind him low on the jaw. He felt it crunch just as the pistol went off. A searing, white-hot iron lanced his side, but he was certain he’d managed to escape with only a flesh wound.

  Without pause, he brought his left hand back, reaching for the Rod Steiger’s Python, hoping the man would be too confused, too cautious to shoot.

  He was. Elliott’s hand closed on the gun, holding the hammer immobile, as he brought his right hand across in an open-handed chop to the throat. The blow landed perfectly. Elliott felt the carotid bone and windpipe collapse. He had time for a fleeting sense of satisfaction. The man would do no more breathing unless someone thoughtfully performed a tracheotomy within the next four or five minutes.

  Switching the Python to his right hand, Elliott plunged out of the car, hunting a target as he fell headlong. Both the Lee Marvin and the Ernest Borgnine had turned back toward the car, leaving the girl, who stood frozen by fright.

  “Run!” Elliott screamed at her. Rolling frantically to one side, he squeezed off a shot at the Ernest Borgnine, and heard the bullet hit flesh. The man dropped. Elliott shifted his fire, but he was too late. The Lee Marvin fired, and in the same instant a tremendous blow to his chest slammed Elliott back into the side of the car. His head struck the left rear tire. Holding the Python firm in both hands, he fired. The .357 bullet knocked the Lee Marvin flat.

  Elliott lurched to his feet and began staggering toward the trees thirty or forty yards away. Ahead, in the dim glow from the distant lights of the park, he could see the girl, awkward in high heels in the soft ground, running for cover. She looked back, saw him, and stopped.

  He tried to yell, to tell her to go on, but he had no breath. His chest was an agony of fire and he was certain a lung was collapsed. He stumbled, almost fell, and she moved back toward him. At that instant, the shotgun blast hit him, sending him full length on his face. As he fought to hold onto consciousness, he heard the shotgun fire again and knew that one was for the girl. When he managed to raise his head, he saw her crumpled in the grass a few feet away, her arms and legs askew like a broken toy.

  Elliott was overwhelmed for a moment with the sadness of the senseless waste. He was then swept by a consuming anger, giving him enough strength to turn, bringing the .357 around.

  The driver was approaching him, the shotgun at port arms. A Maurice Chevalier. Elliott struggled to bring the pistol up, but he knew there wouldn’t be enough time. And there wasn’t. The unsmiling Maurice Chevalier calmly raised the shotgun, sighted at Elliott’s chest, and fired from less than fifteen feet. Elliott hardly felt the buckshot hit. He was wondering, vaguely, if he should have taken time to shoot the driver before he plunged out of the car, in the hope he would still have enough time to drop the executioners.

  He was still pondering the question as he sank back to the grass, and oblivion.

  Chapter 18

  Minus 4 Days, 13:28 Hours

  The tanker overshot the Mona Passage. That was the consensus of Johnson’s experts. Simply poor navigation, they said. The ship’s track, monitored in the suite at the Jaragua as reported from Langley, showed that the ship maintained a steady west-southwest heading 22.3 nautical miles beyond the point where a turn to port normally would be expected. The experts assumed that the ship’s captain, uncertain of his exact fix, made landfall to confirm his navigation with visual or radar sightings.

  Loomis suspected otherwise. He pointed out that the ship was equipped with Loran. He believed the ship’s eccentric course might have been for another purpose. But Johnson sided with the experts.

  “They say Loran isn’t all that accurate,” Johnson argued. “Sometimes returns from the ionosphere confuse things. Captains who depend on Loran sometimes wake up lost. Among younger crews, celestial navigation is becoming a lost art. They depend on Loran. And we checked. The ship doesn’t have the more accurate short-ranged Decca system.”

  “What exactly is your constant aerial surveillance?” Loomis asked. “Satellites?”

  “Loomis, if I knew I probably couldn’t tell you. And if I could, you probably couldn’t understand it. My impression is that it’s some sort of infrared, heat-seeking gadget. The experts swear by it.”

  “And you trust the experts.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “The experts told the people in Johnstown that if that old dam did break, it’d only raise the level of the river eighteen inches. The experts told the thirty thousand people in St. Pierre that if old Mount Pelée did blow her top, there was no threat to human lives. The experts …”

  “All right, I get your point. So sometimes the experts are wrong. You have some other way of watching that ship?”

  “What do those surveillance scans look like? You ever see one?”

  “No. But I imagine they’d be gibberish to us common folk — swirls of color and so forth, requiring a high degree of interpretation.”

  Loomis examined the tracks on the plot map and measured distances. “They weren’t far from land here, and here,” he pointed out. “I’d feel much better if we asked your people for a recheck of those two points.”

  “The ship maintained speed each place,” Johnson said. “I don’t see how they could have off-loaded cargo underway at fifteen knots.”

  “Johnson, as an intelligence officer, you have a few shortcomings,” Loomis told him. “Any third-rate deck crew in the navy could do that trick in their sleep.”

  “But the track of any other vessel would show.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I’m guessing. A wooden-hulled diesel, with exhaust discharge under water, moving into the track of a large ship, might not s
how up very well. Not unless the interpreter were looking for it specifically.”

  “All right,” Johnson said. “I’ll ask Langley for a restudy of those points. I’ll tell them the Dominican Republic’s resident expert doubts their competence.”

  *

  With all preparations made, Loomis left the Jaragua suite for the night and returned to his quarters. He showered and sprawled across the bed. When he awoke, María Elena was beside him and the telephone was ringing. Loomis turned on the bedside lamp and picked up the receiver.

  El Jefe’s voice came to him strained and tired. “Both Santiago and San Francisco have fallen,” he said. “La Vega has extremely heavy fighting and may not hold out long. For all effects, Ramón now controls the entire Cibao. He may move on the capital at any moment. We must make preparations.”

  Loomis sat up, struggling against sleep, wondering how much of El Jefe’s panic was from fatigue. He checked his watch. Just after 4:00 A.M. From the open balcony came the faint sound of far-away shooting, and Loomis could see the glare of distant flares floating to earth. “What’s the situation here?” he asked.

  “Relatively quiet,” El Jefe said. “There’s some action the other side of the Duarte Bridge. Ramón thus far has concentrated his full attack in the Cibao. He has drawn our strength. We have nothing left for the distrito.”

  “Ramón may be moving too fast,” Loomis said. “He may not be able to secure or supply what he’s gained. Things may not be as bad as they seem.”

  “I’ve told myself that,” El Jefe said. “But I must face facts. My army consists of only nine thousand men. Three infantry brigades, one artillery battalion, and one antiaircraft battalion. Ramón has engaged one brigade in Santiago, another in San Francisco, and inflicted twenty percent casualties in less than two days of fighting. The survivors of both brigades are demoralized, totally without spirit. The government forces are collapsing. And for the defense of the capital, Colonel Escortia has at his disposal only one infantry brigade and one artillery battalion.”

  Loomis again felt restrained by the limitations of his job. Under the government’s organization charts, his sole concern was palace security and investigation of subversive activities. By law and common courtesy, he was supposed to leave the fighting to the military. Yet, he had far more combat experience than most of El Jefe’s generals. Once more he felt compelled to speak up.

  “Ramón still has a long way to go,” he said. “And thus far, his most important gains probably have been psychological. Your men didn’t expect heavy opposition. They got it. Now, they’re disorganized and confused. Ramón’s men are high and maybe without much reason. Ramón can’t possibly have the logistics established to supply them with food and ammunition for sustained fighting.”

  “What would you propose?”

  “I would make more use of the air force,” Loomis said.

  “Ten old F-100 Super Sabres, twelve Mirage jets, and three old Northrop F-5 fighter bombers,” El Jefe said. “One Huey gunship. Valuable, but practically worthless under the present circumstances. If there were some way of giving close support to the ground forces, I would be willing to risk a few civilian casualties. But the pilots are not well trained, and even on the ground the fighting is chaotic, confused. I simply cannot bring myself to order heavy bombing, to murder innocent people caught in the combat zones.”

  “The planes could be used as a psychological weapon,” Loomis pointed out. “You could fly in supplies to the government forces, right over rebel rooftops. The more trips, the better. Far more trips than necessary. That would convince them government troops are not lacking supplies. You could send the Mirage jets over to rock Ramón’s men with sonic booms. After a warning pass or two, a little light strafing wouldn’t do much damage, but it’d scare them, remind them they’re mortal. And I’d print up some leaflets. It doesn’t matter what the printing says. The real message would be that they could be bombs. I think all that would give your men a much-needed psychological boost, and time to prepare a counterattack. And it’d give Ramón’s men some second thoughts about the whole thing.”

  The intensity of his voice had awakened María Elena. She lay looking up at him, listening.

  El Jefe considered the suggestions. “That might be very effective,” he agreed.

  “There’s something else,” Loomis said. “We may still need to contact Ramón, to inform him of Hamlet.” The line was silent for a moment. Such a thought was contrary to El Jefe’s principles; one never dealt with the enemy. El Jefe had been reluctant in approving Loomis’s earlier efforts to contact Ramón.

  “Will that really be necessary?” he asked.

  “I’m half-convinced the material isn’t aboard the tanker,” Loomis told him. “And if it’s not, we may have to appeal to Ramón for help in finding it. Conceivably, it might be in rebel-held territory. And if he moves on the capital, he’ll hamper our search here.”

  “But how do we know Ramón himself isn’t involved?”

  “Logic. The CIA claims its tangle with the Hamlet Group in Lisbon was one of the biggest confrontations with a clandestine force in years. Ramón simply isn’t in that league. And there is no evidence that the Hamlet people need him.”

  “I’m not so certain,” El Jefe said.

  “Hamlet has money, power, position,” Loomis said. “It’s obviously international in scope. The company just lost a man in Lisbon. He managed to take four Hamlet operatives with him. The Lisbon station picked up two live ones in a caper at Estoril. Octopus had complete dossiers on all six — every one was a veteran mercenary. The two live ones knew nothing except that they’d been hired, and at good pay, to do a job. Look at the logic. Why would the Hamlet people risk their whole worldwide operation by tying it to Ramón’s back-country revolution? It makes no sense. I’m positive Ramón is not involved.”

  “Even so, I still don’t see why we need to bring him into the the matter. What could he do?”

  “If the bomb is planted, and we can’t find it, we may have to ask him to agree to a cease-fire.”

  “I don’t think he would listen. He would suspect a trick.”

  “We could convince him. He’s not stupid. If he sees that the country, or at least the capital, is in danger, he would understand that this is his problem, too.”

  The line was silent while El Jefe wrestled with the matter. “I once tried to get in touch with Ramón,” he said. “At one point, I thought he might listen to reason, that we might find common ground, resolve our differences. I could find no trace of him. I sent word and received no reply.”

  “All the news correspondents are trying to arrange interviews,” Loomis said. “The New York Times and the Washington Post have made contact with him. I’m keeping watch on both. They may lead us to him.”

  “I’ll have to think about it,” El Jefe said. “We can cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  Loomis called the Jaragua suite for a situation report. The tanker had reached the lower end of the Mona Passage and was now heading westward. The Duarte was two thousand yards in her wake, keeping close surveillance. All seemed normal.

  María Elena stirred from the bed and shuffled through Loomis’s music collection. She selected a tape, threaded the machine, and turned up the sound: Segovia playing Villa-Lobos. She came back to bed.

  “I could do it,” she said quietly.

  “Do what?”

  “Contact Ramón. I could walk right out the front door of this place and fly right to him, just like Mary Poppins. I wouldn’t even need the umbrella.”

  “But you couldn’t fly back. Ramón would see to that.”

  “I could get the message to him, though. And he’d believe me. There’d be no other reason for me to go to him voluntarily.”

  “Don’t even think about it,” Loomis said. “We may not need to contact him at all. I just wanted El Jefe aware of what we might have to do. I’m just keeping the options open.”

  “Damn it, Loomis, you’re always spoiling my b
ig scenes,” María Elena complained. “If you hadn’t been along, I might have been martyred there in the jungle. Headlines all over the world. Front page. It would have been a glorious funeral — you’ve probably never seen the dramatics these Latins put into something like that. It would put a crack in the foundations of the Vatican, but the church might have restored me to a state of grace. I would have been buried in white!”

  “The way you describe it, I’m sorry I missed it,” Loomis said.

  “I might have had a theater named after me: the María Elena de la Torre National Theater. I might have made the cover of Time magazine again. They might even have gotten a few facts right. And all my movies would have been rereleased. I might have become a cult! Oh shit, Loomis, why do you do these things to me?”

  “You’ve got a cult,” Loomis said. “Me.”

  “Anyway, I could do it.”

  “There’s no need at this point,” Loomis said. “Maybe I’m imagining things. Maybe the materials are aboard the tanker.”

  “And on the other hand, maybe they’re not,” María Elena said.

  Chapter 19

  Minus 4 Days, 02:00 Hours

  By 11:00 A.M. the tanker was hull-down on the horizon to the southeast, a faint, dirty smudge against the cobalt-blue sea. Johnson stood at the window of the Jaragua suite, oversized binoculars to his eyes, trying to see the ship through the haze of its own stack gas. Loomis didn’t bother with the binoculars. He now knew everything he needed to know about the ship. The search itself was the problem.

  “I can’t see the destroyer yet,” Johnson said.

  “It’s in place,” Loomis told him. He had just received word that the destroyer would overtake the tanker five miles out to demand that the tanker slow to five knots and drop anchor one mile offshore. Loomis moved to the window and looked down at the Jaragua pool, where two fashion models from New York were supplementing quick divorces with Caribbean sun. A retired army couple from Virginia sipped rum and Coke beside the beds of poinsettias under the palms by the pool. Through the motionless upper leaves of the palms, on a level with the third-floor headquarters suite, he could see the approaching tanker, eighteen miles out. In little more than an hour the search would begin. He went back to the tables to study the charts.