The Ravagers
Page 18
I lay alone, watching Muir’s little vessel buck the waves out there, smashing them into sheets of flying spray. Jenny was gone. This was all too highly classified for her to witness; besides, she wanted to be handy to learn what, if anything, was happening in a town called Greenwich, B.C. Besides, she probably wanted a bath and some clean clothes more than she wanted international secrets; she’d probably had enough of those. I wondered if I would ever see her again.
Far out there, the white boat changed position in the water. The stem rose, the bow settled, and spray ceased to fly. I was aware that Commander Howland had returned to stand over me.
“He’s cut the power,” I said. “He’s stopping.”
“Excuse me. May I look?”
I got up and brushed myself off. Instinctively I looked skyward, but I couldn’t see any planes. There probably was at least one up there, however. Whatever kind of a trap it was they were setting, they wouldn’t rely entirely on shore-based observation. I heard Howland draw a sharp breath, and looked down. He was beckoning me to the scope.
“Take a look,” he whispered, as if he could be heard out there, miles at sea. “Take a good look, fella. There’s a sight you won’t see often. Not outside a top secret Soviet shipyard. One of their latest and best, and we’ve got her. We’ve got her in the bag!”
I lay down again, and got the white boat sharp in the powerful telescope. I saw that it wasn’t alone in the gathering dark. Beyond it lay a great, low, black, wet, monstrous shape. It used to be that automobiles looked like carriages without horses, and submarines looked like real ships that might just duck under the surface occasionally, but this was no ship. It was obviously a creature of the deeps. It was bigger than any pig-boat I’d ever seen, and faster, too. It had been still only a moment; now it was shooting ahead and slipping back under the sea. A moment later it was gone.
“She’s down,” I reported. Then I said, “Muir’s boat seems to be sinking.”
“Yes. He’d have opened the sea cocks before he abandoned her.”
Howland’s voice had a preoccupied sound. I looked up and he was watching, not the sea, but the fancy wrist-chronometer he was wearing. Muir’s boat settled slowly and sank stern first. There was nothing left to see out there. I got up and stood beside the commander. I saw his lips move.
“Now,” he whispered. “Now!”
Nothing happened for a long breath of time. Then a white spot grew on the dark ocean far out there, and out of the middle rose a tremendous geyser of churned-up water. In this water were chunks of black debris. By the time the sound of the explosion reached us, everything was starting to settle back. Presently there was only a widening ring of oily, disturbed water out there. I heard Howland make a funny little sound, and looked at him again. He swallowed oddly, and cleared his throat, and swallowed again.
He said, “Damn, I hate to see a ship die, even one of theirs. You haven’t seen anything, of course.”
“No, sir.”
“If you did see something, it was an accident. A terrible, unexplained accident. Expressions of sympathy will be sent to Moscow, you may be sure, as soon as the local people establish just what it was that blew up in their front yard.”
I said, “I don’t suppose this has anything to do with the U.S. missile sub that went down on patrol a while back. It couldn’t be that our friends tried a bluff of some kind way down in the ocean depths, and we’ve just given them the only kind of answer they understand?”
He looked at me for a moment. Then he said softly, “Let us hope it was a bluff, Mr. Helm. And let us hope and pray they understand the answer, and believe we mean it, as we do. And of course I have no idea what you are talking about, none at all.”
* * *
Back in Washington, the consensus seemed to be that old Helm had lucked out as usual. At least that was the attitude I sensed in a certain office on the second floor of a certain old building, never mind where.
“Everyone seems quite satisfied with your performance, Eric,” Mac said. “However—”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
He hesitated. “Never mind. There is a gentleman named Johnston in town. You will see him tomorrow and tell him whatever seems advisable. Let us try to keep our colleagues happy.”
“Happy,” I said. “Yes, sir.”
“And I have a message for you. A lady wants to see you at the bar at the Hotel Vance at five-thirty this evening.”
“Any particular lady?” I asked.
“She said to tell you that Penelope was safe. I gather she wishes to express her gratitude.”
I almost didn’t recognize her. I don’t suppose I was really expecting to find a disheveled young woman in a dirty blue jumper, after the days that had passed, but I wasn’t prepared for the extent of the transformation. She was wearing something emerald-green and slinky and Chinese-looking, and the freckles were kind of subdued but the thick hair was a shade or two redder than I remembered, very soft and smooth and bright.
“Mrs. Drilling, ma’am,” I said.
She turned from the bar and smiled. I’d forgotten what a pretty woman she really was. “And just what do I call you, Mr. Government Man,” she asked. “What is your name today?”
I said, “Looking like that, you don’t have to call any man by name, Irish. Just snap your fingers.”
She laughed, and stopped laughing. “Penny’s all right,” she said seriously.
“I know. I got your message.”
“She’s with her father. I don’t know how it’s all going to work out, but in the meantime—” She hesitated. She seemed a little embarrassed. She said rather stiffly, “I pay my debts, Dave.”
“Meaning what?”
“We had a... an arrangement, remember? But the payoff was kind of interrupted. Well, you were in my corner when I needed you. You were cruel and ruthless, but I guess you had to be. You accomplished something I couldn’t have.” She hesitated. “What I mean is, you did your part. I’ll do mine. If you’re still interested.”
I looked at her for a moment. Then I signaled a bartender to bring me a martini. I looked back to Jenny, who was watching me, waiting.
I said, very carefully, “You had an arrangement with a shady private dick named Clevenger, who no longer exists.”
A little frowning crease showed between her eyes. “In other words, you aren’t interested.”
“I didn’t say that, Irish. I just mean that you’re under no obligations because of what you may have promised a fictitious character in a moment of stress.”
She said, rather coolly, “Aren’t you being overly honorable?”
I said, “Hell, I’m just setting the record straight. Nobody owes nobody nothing.”
After a moment she smiled slowly. “Yes. I see what you mean. It is better that way, isn’t it?”
She was right. It was.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Donald Hamilton was the creator of secret agent Matt Helm, star of 27 novels that have sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.
Born in Sweden, he emigrated to the United States and studied at the University of Chicago. During the Second World War he served in the United States Naval Reserve, and in 1941 he married Kathleen Stick, with whom he had four children.
The first Matt Helm book, Death of a Citizen, was published in 1960 to great acclaim, and four of the subsequent novels were made into motion pictures. Hamilton was also the author of several outstanding standalone thrillers and westerns, including two novels adapted for the big screen as The Big Country and The Violent Men.
Donald Hamilton died in 2006.
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PRAISE FOR DONALD HAMILTON
“Donald Hamilton has brought to the spy novel the authentic hard realism of Dashiell Hammett; and his stories are as compelling, and probably as close to the sordid truth of espionage, as any now being told.”
Anthony Boucher, The New York Times
“This series by Donald Hamilton is the top-ranking American secret agent fare, with its intelligent protagonist and an author who consistently writes in high style. Good writing, slick plotting and stimulating characters, all tartly flavored with wit.”
Book Week
“Matt Helm is as credible a man of violence as has ever figured in the fiction of intrigue.”
The New York Sunday Times
“Fast, tightly written, brutal, and very good...”
Milwaukee Journal
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Hammer and Velda go on vacation to a small beach town on Long Island after wrapping up the Williams case (I, the Jury). Walking romantically along the boardwalk, they witness a brutal beating at the hands of some vicious local cops—Hammer wades in to defend the victim.
When a woman turns up naked—and dead— astride the statue of a horse in the small-town city park, how she wound up this unlikely Lady Godiva is just one of the mysteries Hammer feels compelled to solve...
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