The Retaliators

by Donald Hamilton

  It had been a long, hot, uncomfortable ride, and it took them a while to work the kinks out, take care of the biological functions, and partake of nourishment. There was no conversation to amount to anything. I kept my eyes mostly on Amado, the well-trained human gorilla who'd never been left for dead anywhere, or if he had, it hadn't bothered him much. He was ready to jump me, hobbles or no hobbles, submachine gun or no submachine gun, if I gave him a chance, so I was careful not to. At last I had Ramón tie him up again, using clothesline I'd bought at the grocery since the tape supply had run out. Of course, you can't buy real clothesline any more, not even in deepest Baja. This was slick, white stuff—a plastic sheath around a rope core—but it seemed to have plenty of strength. I took care to check Ramón's knots, however, and I double-checked my own.

  "I won't gag you," I said. "Out here you can yell all you want to. Be my guests."

  I made myself a sandwich and opened a beer and sat down on a corner of the tailgate to have my supper, out of reach of a kick from my captives. The sun was getting well down in the sky, I noticed. I didn't have too much time if I was going to study the airstrip by daylight. On the other hand, it was going to be a long night; I didn't want to start my vigil sooner than absolutely necessary. I was aware that Ramón was watching me.

  "Matthew."

  "Yes."

  "Your assignment is Ernemann, is it not?"

  "Right," I said.

  "You have no orders to protect Díaz."

  "Right."

  "You can shoot when it suits you. If... if you were to wait until after he has finished...." Ramón stopped.

  I was working on my second beer and my second sandwich; no sense steaming into action with insufficient fuel. I glanced at him irritably.

  "Ernemann is a pro," I said. "You're suggesting that I play a game of tag with the rattlesnake before I chop its head off. Can you give me one good reason why I should make my assignment more difficult and dangerous just to oblige a gent who's done his damndest to have me murdered?"

  There was a little silence; then it came, what I'd hoped I wouldn't have to hear: "There is one."

  "Name it."

  "You forget. We hold the Señora O'Hearn."

  I finished my beer and gathered up my two bottles and Ramón's one. I went over and retrieved the one Amado had tossed into the brush in his usual sloppy fashion. I guess I was making amends for the two cans I'd used for target practice that morning and left behind, although it seemed a little screwy to be worrying about ecology while embarking on homicide. I stuffed all the bottles back into the grocery bag. Then I looked down at Ramón once more.

  "I hope I'm not reading you right," I said. "Spell it out."

  "If Díaz lives, Mrs. O'Hearn dies."

  I sighed. "And another man just told me: if Díaz dies, Norma dies. You damned hostage peddlers are really putting the heat on me from all sides, aren't you?"

  "I mean it! I left orders."

  I regarded him for a moment longer; then I shoved his feet out of the way and slammed the tailgate shut. Five minutes later I was hiking off with the bolt-action .270 slung over my shoulder, a box of cartridges in my pocket, and my hands full of everything from groceries to submachine guns. Half a mile from the car, I unloaded the extraneous material I hadn't dared leave behind because the prisoners might have made use of it. A determined man can cut a lot of tape and rope with a broken beer bottle.

  I thumbed five rounds into the magazine of the Remington, slipped one into the chamber, and pressed down the top cartridge in the magazine so the bolt would slide closed over it. I took my bearings from the setting sun and continued my cross-country journey. It was the prickliest damned country I'd ever hiked through. I felt like a human pincushion by the time I reached the airstrip, but I hit it just about where I'd planned, near the inland end. It was a shallow valley, the bottom of which had been flattened and smoothed to make the usual un-paved runway, aimed south towards the ocean.

  I crouched in the brush, studying the situation. With the prevailing northerly winds, a landing plane would have to make its approach from seaward, coming in over the shore, past the hotel and the highway, touching down near the small buildings and tied-down planes at the south end of the strip, and rolling inland until it had lost speed enough to be able to swing around and taxi back. Well, there was nothing in that for me. To be sure, around the north end where I was, there was only brush and cactus. A machine-gunner hiding there could hose down a taxiing plane as it turned, and be gone into the boondocks—to a waiting jeep, say—before anybody could reach him from the inhabited end of the runway. However, Ernemann was supposed to be an expert and conscientious workman. I was willing to gamble that he wouldn't do his job by simply spraying lead all over a bunch of unidentified people in an airplane. A perfectionist, he'd wait until they unloaded, and he could concentrate his fire on the specific target for which he was being paid.

  It took me a while to work it out. I wished for a pair of binoculars, and I wished I knew a little more about automatic weapons and their requirements—I tend to be a one-shot specialist myself. It was almost dark before I'd decided on the two or three locations an experienced chopper man might pick within range of the debarkation area. Then I had to select a spot within easy rifle range; a sheltered spot from which I could pick off a man in any of those locations....

  He came well after midnight. I was sitting in my impromptu blind on the hillside below the rudimentary ridge overlooking the landing strip and the tethered planes. Suddenly I found myself wide awake, knowing that something had changed in the night. There was movement on the slope behind me and to the left. It occurred to me that if Ernemann knew I was there and had come stalking me, the advantage was all his. If he had the kind of chopper or automatic rifle he was reputed to favor, he was all set for night fighting, while my scope-sighted weapon was blind and almost useless in the dark. I reassured myself with the thought that he'd be unlikely to start a lot of shooting now since it would spoil his chances of accomplishing his mission in the morning.

  I sat unmoving in my hidey-hole, listening hard. The faint sounds of his progress passed well inland of me. At last, after chasing a name for over a thousand miles, I saw him: a shadowy, crouching form slipping along the edge of the airstrip below and, finally, ducking back into the brush at just about the spot—well, one of the spots—I'd thought he might pick. The night was quiet again. It was time to take out the final problems and wrestle with them, facing the fact that a simple touch, as we call it, had turned into a complex matter with all kinds of personal and international ramifications.

  Sentimentally considered, the decision I had to make was a terrible one. I had to decide which of two ladies whose favors I had enjoyed, to use the old-fashioned phrase, was to die. A TV hero would, I suppose, have built this up into a dreadful moral predicament. Actually, it was quite irrelevant. Our basic instructions are quite clear on the subject. As Norma herself had pointed out, we just don't play that game. Norma was in Baja under orders. Clarissa had involved herself from choice. They would both have to take their chances. I couldn't afford to consider them any more than I could afford to base my decision, much as I would have liked to, on the fact that the elegant Marquis had slapped my face. I wasn't a private individual here, goddamn it, with private decisions to make; I was an agent of national policy, if I could just figure out what the hell national policy was in this particular case.

  The big question was, granted that I'd been sent here to take out Ernemann, since I might have a choice would Washington prefer to have me work it so Díaz wound up dead, or so he remained alive? It would seem that peace in the Americas, even though it involved the loss of a Mexican general, was a desirable goal. On the other hand, you can never tell about that crazy city on the Potomac, not to mention our fellow toilers in the underground vineyard with their fine estate in Virginia. Hell, for all I knew, the whole Sanctuary Corporation, for all its impressive membership and proclaimed elitist purposes, was just another spook
shop like various captive airlines and trading companies around the world, and we'd been engaged specifically to keep Ernemann from interfering with its carefully planned little jewel of a revolution....

  I didn't seem to be coming up with any answers, and suddenly I knew why. My subconscious was trying to tell me that I was busily engaged in deep-frying my chicken legs while the bird was still running around the barnyard. Instinct was saying to hell with national policy, get your mind back to this Mexican thorn-bush-and-cactus slope on the double, Buster, because something is very, very wrong. And I knew what was wrong. It was the simple fact that nothing was wrong.

  The whole thing was, I realized, much too good to be true. I'd driven the whole length of the Baja peninsula, planted myself behind a convenient bush, and my quarry had immediately and obligingly marched out and set himself down where I could shoot him the minute I had light enough to see. I mean, anybody who'd believe that would have a firm and unshakable belief in Santa Claus.

  I realized that I was acting as if Ernemann were a dope instead of being, probably, the brightest private operator currently in the business. I was forgetting that he undoubtedly knew as much about me as I knew about him, and maybe a little more—after all, I didn't know just what weapon I'd be facing in his hands, but Ramón had certainly told him about the .270 that had been provided me complete with 4X scope. And still I was allowing myself to think that an experienced professional with this knowledge would deliberately put himself into a spot where an accurate long-range rifle anywhere on the hillside could pick him off like a clay pipe in a shooting gallery.

  I drew a long breath and let it out. There was nothing for it but get the hell down there and see what had been so carefully stuck in front of me for a target. It took me the best part of an hour to cover the hundred and fifty yards in perfect—I hoped—silence. The last fifty yards, I had my little knife in my hand for any emergencies that might develop. Then I saw him sitting there, leaning forward a little against the weapon planted butt-down in front of him.

  The silhouette of the gun was clear in the starlight. It was the Russian equivalent of the older German Sturmgewehr, or assault rifle, a kind of junior-grade BAR. Called the AK after its designer Kalashnikov, it's common in most communist and satellite countries. It's even made in Finland where it's called the M60. In China it's known as the Type 56. It's an ugly, businesslike, automatic weapon with a long, forward-curving magazine that takes a special, medium-powered 7.62 mm cartridge—.30 caliber to you—rating about halfway between the feeble pistol ammo used in short-range choppers such as Ramón's PAM-ls, and the big service round used in full-sized machineguns.

  I had plenty of time to dwell on these technical considerations. The man didn't move. Supported by his weapon, he just sat there. I was toying with the uneasy notion that somebody had planted a hunched-over dummy for my benefit, when the shadowy figure gave a small start. I realized he'd been asleep. He was pretty good, however. He didn't throw any sudden, frantic looks around to see what might have sneaked up on him while he was snoozing. He just turned his head very warily, very slowly....

  He wasn't Ernemann.

  twenty-four

  There was no possible doubt about it. To be sure, I'd never met Ernemann; I knew him only from his dossier. However, one fact was pretty well established: the guy had impersonated me successfully at a couple of banks. Even though I wasn't a constant habitue of either Institution, I do come from unmistakably European ancestry, and it seemed unlikely that even Andrew Euler with his violent prejudice could have accepted a frame-up based on a bank teller's description of an Asiatic gentleman calling himself Matthew Helm.

  No, the Chinese before me was not Ernemann. Young and lean, he wasn't even a well-upholstered, moon-faced, middle-aged character sometimes called Mr. Soo. Well, he wouldn't be. Mr. Soo was not expendable, and this youth had obviously been placed here deliberately to draw my fire—Mr. Soo had never been hesitant about risking a little low-grade manpower in a good cause. Apparently, he'd supplied Ernemann with some live bait designed to draw my attention one way so the real expert could dispose of me safely from a totally different direction. But just what the hell was the link between Ernemann and Soo....

  I dismissed the question from my mind. There had been too damned much heavy theoretical thinking already. It had almost got me killed. Right now I had an important practical question to answer: whether or not I should leave the bait alive, or use the knife in my hand. I was tempted to use it. The idea that perhaps, eventually, I would have to deal with two gents armed with fully automatic AK-type weapons—assuming Ernemann had brought a spare—wasn't appealing, since I only had a slow-firing bolt-action rifle.

  On the other hand, this man was now my bait as well as Ernemann's. As long as he behaved as expected, my real quarry would remain unalarmed, I hoped, basking in the security of his own cleverness. Thinking I'd fallen for his trick, he'd be off guard. Well, maybe.

  It took me most of another hour to withdraw silently and reassess the situation, which was now, of course, drastically changed. The great problems that had troubled me were no longer relevant; I no longer had a choice. My primary job was Ernemann, not a stray Chinese gunner—what the hidden young gent did with his AK-47, or Type 56, or whatever variation he had, was no concern of mine. If he was good enough to get Díaz when Díaz landed, Díaz was dead. That meant, of course, that Norma was also dead. This is my assignment as well as yours, she'd said, don't get any funny notions about me. Okay.

  It was time for me to do what I should have done from the start: get into Ernemann's mind and look at the situation from his point of view. Well, like me he had a specific objective, in his case, Díaz. I was simply an obstruction he had to surmount on his way to this objective. That meant that, as a man who took pride in his work, he wouldn't trust a Chinese kid to accomplish alone the job he, Ernemann, had been hired for. He'd place himself where he could deal with me if I showed, sure; but that spot would not be so far away from the plane-loading area that he couldn't back up his young assistant in case of need.

  It became, then, a simple problem in ballistics. If he had another AK-47 or the equivalent—I'd have to gamble on that—the medium-powered cartridge in a handheld automatic weapon would give him only a limited sure-kill range, say two hundred yards. Even that would have been stretching it far beyond the realm of certainty for me—I'm not all that good with the chatter-guns—but I was, after all, dealing with a specialist.

  There was really not much choice. He had to station himself somewhere on the low ridge above the landing area; maybe directly above it, maybe thirty or forty yards either way, depending on how the field of fire looked from up there. From that position he could cover the whole slope and mow me down when I appeared somewhere below him, and he could also reach out, if needed, over the head of his Chinese gunner, and clean up after him if he goofed—or if I managed to get a bullet into the youth before he could get his weapon into action.

  My ballistic problem was equally simple. With my high-powered rifle and telescopic sight, I had three or four hundred yards to play with—assuming I could find a solid rest to shoot from. As Colonel Huntington had mentioned, I'd once done a job at five hundred meters, but that had been a heavy-barreled target-type rifle with a powerful scope, and I'd worked with it for weeks, preparing for the assignment. With a light hunting rifle through which I'd got to fire no more than a dozen practice rounds, four hundred yards was absolute maximum, and I'd be happier with three hundred. Again, there was not much choice. The ridge rose to a little rocky knob inland. From there I could cover the length of it, no matter where my man placed himself along it. If I was lucky, I'd have a two-hundred-and-fifty-yard shot. If I was unlucky, it could be sixty or eighty yards longer.

  It wasn't a bad spot, I decided, when I reached it. The brush gave me cover up there, and a flat rock made an ideal rest for my elbows. Using my knife, silently, I cut away a few branches that might have interfered. Then I settled down to wait. Even with th
e time I'd spent prowling around, it was a long night. This time, I didn't let myself think about anything as I sat—I remembered an Indian guide I'd once had who'd insisted that no white man was ever worth a damn as a hunter because he was always thinking about bills or business or women when he should have been thinking about deer or elk.

  There was no movement down by the airfield. Maybe my young Chinese friend had gone to sleep again. I wondered if he knew he was a decoy, and decided he probably didn't; they work better if you keep them ignorant There was a steady, muffled rumble of heavy machinery from one of the buildings at the end of the field. I'd already determined that it housed the generators that provided the hotel's electricity. Occasional cars drove by on the highway, invisible below the end of the runway, showing only the loom of their headlights. Very gradually, the sky became less intensely black in the east, and the stars began to fade. Some time later, the sun appeared.

  At full daylight, a plane came in for a landing. I saw a little flash of sunlight off a gun barrel as the hidden youth changed his grip on his AK. Obviously, he'd never spent much time in a duck blind or he'd have learned to be more careful of that.

  There was no sign of movement along the ridge. The plane, a single-motor job, swept in from the sea, used about two thirds of the runway, swung around, and taxied to within point-blank range of the Russian-type Sturmgewehr in the bushes. A single man got out, and the pilot handed down a couple of suitcases and a long fishing rod case. A battered old Plymouth station wagon appeared from the direction of the hotel. The driver got out and threw the luggage into the rear and drove off with the new arrival. The plane taxied away towards the ocean end of the runway, turned inland, and took off, disappearing over the desert to the north. At least, I reflected, the boy machine-gunner had self-control; he hadn't mowed down the first target that appeared, although it must have been a temptation.