The Retaliators

by Donald Hamilton

  I dabbed with my handkerchief at a bleeding lip that had encountered the family crest of the Bleus. I said sourly, "It is a great privilege, Colonel."

  "There's only one thing we haven't been able to determine," he said. "Who hired this professional killer to dispose of Díaz?"

  I said, "We're not quite sure of that, either. One theory, for what it's worth, is that Ernemann was hired by Mrs. Clarissa O'Hearn, who then arranged to ride along with me so she could take me out of action if I started getting close enough to interfere."

  "Mrs. O'Hearn?" He was startled. "You mean, Oscar's wife—"

  "Your liaison man isn't really God's gift to matrimony, Colonel. The lady with whom he lives—well, when he's home—hates his guts. Maybe even enough to hire somebody to louse up his pet revolution so she can laugh in his face."

  "Maybe? You're not certain?"

  "No, I'm not," I said. "It's just one theory, and I'm not very fond of it myself. I don't find the motive convincing, after spending some time with the lady."

  "Do you have an alternative to suggest?"

  I shook my head. "My Mexican friend, Solana-Ruiz, seems to figure it's cut and dried, like any cop who's found a plausible solution to a case. He's got a lot of evidence, but I'm not sold, so if you have any suggestions—"

  Huntington hesitated, and said, "Well, come to think of it, there is a certain group down here in Baja that would like to see us fail—apart from the loyal Mexicans, I mean. There is already a large number of foreigners settled here, don't you know, mostly Americans. They are quite satisfied with the status quo. They've complied with the Mexican requirements, they don't want the rules changed, they don't want the waters muddied by any kind of violent intervention. They feel they discovered this picturesque, undeveloped paradise for themselves, and they have no desire to see it taken over by an organization of wealthy refugees from civilization—an organization that, even if successful, could give them nothing they don't already have, and would probably favor its own members over the people already on the ground."

  Monsieur Bleu cleared his throat for attention. He spoke contemptuously and at length. When he was through, I looked to Huntington for the translation.

  The colonel said, "Monsieur Bleu says the great Sanctuary Corporation can't be expected to consider the individual problems of every little Yankee squatter already here. He says some efforts were made, early on, to approach certain leading American residents of Baja, but they weren't interested so let them take the consequences."

  "I see," I said. "What it amounts to is that you've got nothing much to offer these emigrants from the U.S. if you succeed. On the other hand, if you fail, you'll make all foreigners so unpopular in Mexico that they'll probably have to pack up and leave, losing everything they've built here. It's an interesting angle. I hadn't thought of it. I suppose these characters aren't exactly impoverished."

  "Some of them are quite wealthy, I believe."

  "So if one of them came up with a sound plan for stopping your takeover, Colonel, he might be able to finance it—say the fee of a guy named Ernemann—by passing the hat among his well-heeled Americano friends and neighbors. Have you any indications that they're up to something like that?"

  "Not really," Huntington said, "Anyway, the question of responsibility is rather academic, old chap. The fact is that this fellow Ernemann is among us and something must be done about him immediately. He's been reported in La Paz, as you said. He's apparently heading south towards Cabo San Lucas. I don't believe it's a coincidence that General Díaz is scheduled for some important conferences in the area. The general must make an appearance. We need the support of the people he is to meet. We can't recall him; we can't even warn him to be careful. Unfortunately, he's one of these very virile Mexican chaps—what is the word they use so frequently?"

  "Macho?"

  "Righto. To ask our macho general to lie low because there's danger would be to question his courage, don't you know? He's the kind of stupid poseur who fears nothing so much as having somebody think him afraid. I've managed to slip a bodyguard onto the plane under the guise of adjutant and personal secretary to his military highness, but if I were to warn Díaz directly, he'd simply make a point of strutting around in the open like a fat peacock to prove how brave he is." Huntington sighed. "It's always the way, old chap. One can deal with the enemy; it's the friends who defeat one, rather."

  "Oh, rather," I said.

  He smiled thinly. "Since it's practically impossible to protect the fool, I'd like to eliminate the danger to him—this Ernemann—as quickly as possible."

  "Oh, righto," I said. "Just what I was about to do when I was so rudely delayed, old chap."

  He laughed shortly. "To be sure. I apologize again for the misunderstanding. Before you leave, I'll brief you on Díaz's itinerary; then you'll be taken to your vehicle on shore. Your rifle and ammunition have not been touched. Your money and your other weapons will, of course, be returned. Any assistance we can give, you have only to ask for. Satisfactory?"

  "It's a deal," I said.

  There was a barrage of rapid-fire French from the handsome elderly gent with the brass-buttoned blazer and the big signet ring. Colonel Huntington sighed, and said rather reluctantly, "Monsieur Bleu has reminded me of one detail I forgot to mention. The young lady."

  It wasn't hard to guess what was coming. I gave Norma a passing grade in clairvoyance.

  "What," I asked, "about the young lady?"

  "Monsieur Bleu says—I do regret this, my dear fellow, but it's a necessary precaution—Monsieur Bleu says that the girl's life and that of General Hernando Díaz are now very closely linked. Inextricably intertwined, you might say. As long as you keep Díaz alive, you keep your pretty agent alive. If Díaz dies, she dies. Understood?"

  I drew a long breath, and said, "I thought you folks didn't want to antagonize the U.S. by killing any American agents."

  The colonel hesitated. It was the Frenchman who answered, taking my arm and swinging me around to face him. He said harshly, in perfectly clear and only slightly accented English: "If we do not have the figurehead general, we do not have the revolution. If we do not have the revolution, what does it matter whom we antagonize? Comprenez-vous?"

  I comprehended, all right.

  twenty-one

  The track leading back to the main highway that had seemed kind of tricky and risky in Huntington's low-slung limousine was, of course, no problem at all in my high-riding four-wheel-drive truck. I felt strange, however, driving it across the rugged landscape all alone. It had been a real togetherness trip to date. I wondered where Clarissa was being held and how she was bearing up in captivity. I didn't wonder about Norma. I knew where she was being held, and I knew she was bearing up all right because that was what she was paid for. I decided it was better not to think too much about Norma and what she was paid for, under the circumstances.

  I stopped after a couple of miles, as the road emerged on a reasonably level plain suitable for a testing project I had in mind. The sun was almost up; there was light enough to see. Whoever had driven the ambulance down from Mulege with Norma lying in the rear had left a couple of empty Mexican beer cans on the floor. I picked them up, got out, paced off two hundred yards, and set them on a little rocky ridge out there. Hiking back, I slipped the .270 from its cheap plastic case, loaded it with two cartridges, and took a firm rest with my elbows on the hood of the carryall. You don't want to let the barrel touch anything, and even the wooden forearm shouldn't rest against anything too hard and unyielding. There's a lot of whip when a high-powered rifle is fired. Anything that disturbs the natural barrel vibrations will throw the bullet off target.

  It was a calm morning; no windage estimates were required. At my first shot, the left-hand can went spinning away; the second shot took care of the right-hand one. I wished I'd had money riding on those shots; they were actually a little better than they should have been. I hoped I could do as well when it really counted. Anyway, Colonel Peter Hunti
ngton was a truthful man, at least sometimes, and nobody'd monkeyed with my rifle—but it isn't something I like to take anybody's word for when I've got a job to do.

  I wiped off the piece with my handkerchief. It wasn't the most beautiful firearm in the world—a second-hand Remington with the kind of bargain-basement checkering that's crudely stamped into the wood of the stock instead of being neatly cut by hand or machine—but it shot all right, which was what mattered. I slipped the gun back into the case and zippered it up, knowing that I was stalling. I was trying to make up my mind about some things I had learned.

  Ernemann himself didn't worry me too much. There's always a small nagging doubt, of course, when you're going up against a good pro—this could be the time you get unlucky, or simply meet a better man—but I had a reliable, accurate rifle, and the information I'd received about General Díaz's schedule had suggested a fairly promising plan based on the fact that the small, unfenced, and scantily manned airstrips associated with many of the luxury hotels in Baja are practically made for assassination purposes. I couldn't see Ernemann, the chopper expert, passing up a lovely, open field of fire like that to do his work under more cramped and unfavorable circumstances elsewhere. All I had to do was lure him to the right place and be there ahead of him.

  No, Ernemann was a straightforward problem of the kind I was trained to solve. It was the other pieces of the puzzle that had me slightly baffled—Mr. Soo, for instance—but I couldn't spend any more time brooding about them now. I got back into the truck. Soon I was heading south down the main highway at a moderate clip. For a while, it seemed as if I was being followed discreetly at a considerable distance, but eventually the car behind disappeared. I was beginning to wonder if I'd been imagining things when I saw the blocky shape of Ramón's big Japanese boondocks buggy coming up fast astern. There were two people visible inside. I slowed down. The Toyota drove past and ducked off the road and stopped. I swung down there and pulled up behind it. Ramón got out and came back to where I was parked and got into the carryall beside me.

  "We can talk as we drive," he said. "Go on. Amado will follow."

  "How is my friend Amado?" I asked, sending the carryall back onto the pavement. "He wasn't a hell of a lot of help. The black man took him like Grant took Richmond."

  "Grant? Richmond?" Apparently they didn't teach much U.S. Civil War history in Mexican schools, or he'd forgotten what little he'd learned. "Amado is all right," Ramón went on, when I didn't bother to explain. "He has a very hard head."

  "Good for Amado," I said. "How'd you pick me up so fast?"

  "Oh, we've been keeping an eye on the Marquis de Beaupré and his yacht, particularly since we discovered that you were missing," Ramón said. "Amado described the people involved, when he returned to consciousness, so we knew with whom we were dealing. My man spotted you driving away just now and followed a little way to make certain you were heading south, meanwhile calling me on the two-way radio. I was waiting back in Loreto. You gave me quite a chase."

  I saw no need to apologize. "So the Frenchman is a marquis. I thought they'd stopped making them."

  "Raoul Archaimbeau, Marquis de Beaupré. Not a pleasant man but a very wealthy one. He is also supposed to be brilliant in a financial way."

  "The yacht wasn't French. The Esperanza, out of Acapulco."

  "She belongs to a certain Señor Ramirez—Señor Rojo, as he is called by his associates in the Sanctuary Corporation." When I glanced at him sharply, Ramón grinned. "Oh, yes, we know all about the powerful, secret, international corporation. We know about its hired military genius. We know about the network of dissidents established all over South Baja, now being briefed and encouraged by General Díaz personally for the great day of liberation soon to come. We know about the shock troops being trained in the desert, and the supply ships moving towards our coasts, loaded with expensive military hardware." His grin had faded. His voice was harsh. "We know a great deal, amigo, but we can do very little. As I have already told you, we are very busy elsewhere."

  I made a sympathetic sound. "You've got a problem, all right."

  "With a handful of men and a few pesos," he said, "I am asked to perform a miracle; and it must not only be a miracle, it must be a silent and invisible miracle." He went on without waiting for my comment: "As for finding you, it seemed likely that you would be taken to the yacht, particularly after we picked up a trio of damaged California hippies who'd had an encounter with a big Mercedes heading that way. The description of one of the passengers, a very sinister-appearing tall hombre, reminded me a little, just a little, of you."

  "It would have been nice if you'd sent a boarding party," I said, feeling my cut Up.

  "What, interfere with the yacht of the powerful Señor Ramirez, chartered for a pleasure cruise to that influential French financier, the fabulously wealthy Marquis de Beaupré? You must be mad, friend Matthew, to expect such reckless and illegal actions of a poor little underpaid Mexican government clerk."

  I grinned. "So you got the kids in the van to talk. Frankly, although they'd asked for it, I thought it was kind of dumb of Colonel Huntington to take time out from his work to teach them manners. However, he threw a pretty good scare into them to keep them quiet."

  Ramón said, "I throw a pretty good scare myself, amigo."

  "Sure you do," I said. "Sometimes you even scare me. Like when you assign one lone man to save me from a whole revolutionary army—without even a word of warning to me."

  There was a little silence. The car ran on smoothly. The sun was up now, throwing our long shadow ahead of us on the two-lane blacktop road. At the moment we were heading west, inland, away from the Gulf of California; that highway just zig-zags back and forth between one shore of the Baja peninsula to the other.

  "You have my apologies," Ramón said at last, reluctantly. Admitting error doesn't come easy below the border, or anywhere else, I guess. "I miscalculated. I knew they were in the neighborhood, but I could see no reason why they should have business with you, so there seemed to be no reason to tell you." He hesitated. "How did you persuade them to let you go?"

  "They were operating under a misapprehension," I said. "I managed to clear it up, and convince them that our interests were identical."

  "Tell me."

  I told him. It took a little while.

  "I see," Ramón said at last. "So now you must stop Ernemann or your female agent dies."

  I hadn't been too specific about where Norma had been keeping herself, and why she'd been staying under cover, and he hadn't asked for details.

  I shrugged. "Hell, I was going to stop him anyway. That's what I'm here for, isn't it?"

  "Yes, of course," Ramón said. "And you think you can lure him to this one particular airstrip at the Hotel Cabo San Lucas?"

  "The way to catch a tiger, I'm told, is to stake out a fat bullock for bait. I think Ernemann will come to a fat bullock named Díaz. Colonel Huntington is making arrangements for an information leak; plenty of people will soon know that Díaz and his entourage will be landing there tomorrow morning according to plan."

  Ramón said, "He is very trusting, this colonel. He is putting his revolution—the man who represents it, at least—entirely into your hands."

  "Trusting, hell," I said. "I told you, he's got Norma. I've got no choice, and the fact of the matter is, as I said, our interests are identical. He's got to take some risk to get rid of Ernemann, and I was sent down here to take care of just that. Even if I was willing to let the girl be killed, why should I double-cross him? What have I got to gain?"

  "Very well," Ramón said. He glanced at the dashboard. "But if you plan to drive all the way to Cabo San Lucas today you had better get some gas. There's a little town called Ciudad Constitution ahead...."

  It took a while to tank up, since the single station in the town was crowded and we had to wait in line. I paid the bill, which was sizable; it was a big tank, and the better grade of Mexican gas costs around three pesos a liter these days, which w
orks out to very close to a buck a gallon. When I returned to the carryall, Ramón was just climbing back into the copilot's seat.

  "Wait for Amado," he said. "I sent him across the street for some beer."

  "I hope you had him get some for me."

  "Of course, amigo."

  Then the gorilla-shaped henchman was passing a couple of cans through the window. Shortly, we were off again, with the Toyota trailing along behind. I wondered how much trouble they had getting service for the beast. I'd seen Datsun agencies in Mexico, but other Japanese cars did not seem to be well represented.

  I sipped my beer, although I prefer coffee at that hour of the morning. I drove along easily, one-handed, while the barren-looking farms around the town gave way to the cactus desert once more. The traffic dwindled to nothing. There were just our two husky vehicles rolling along the endless road under the blue sky. I glanced at the mirror. Amado was keeping station a hundred yards back. Ramón took a sip of his beer. I hit the brakes hard, locking everything up tight, and throwing him against the windshield.

  By the time the truck had slid to a halt, I had my revolver out. I drew the hammer back to full cock, and pushed the weapon into his side.

  "Keep your hands in plain sight, you treacherous sonofabitch," I said. "Now we wait for that gofer of yours."

  There were footsteps outside the carryall. Something cold touched the back of my head.

  "Drop the gun, Señor," said Amado's voice through the open window. "Drop it or I will shoot."

  twenty-two

  I heard a car approaching from the north. It slowed a bit to pass the two vehicles crookedly stopped on the pavement; then it accelerated hard, receding into the distance ahead. The Mexican driver of the battered heap had either caught a glimpse of a firearm, or had simply disliked the looks of our little party. Whether it was a private holdup, a police arrest, or a military matter, he wasn't about to hang around and watch the show.

  "It is a submachine gun," Ramón said. "It will remove your head from your shoulders if I give the word. So let me have your little revolver, por favor."