The Ambushers (4 page)

It was time to reload again, but they were falling back and I had trouble getting the shells into the gun without scorching my fingers. Besides, it wasn’t my picnic any more. The machine-pistol and carbine boys could handle it from here. Jiminez tapped me on the shoulder as I closed the bolt. I looked up to see the younger of the two women squatting beside us, heedless of the stuff that was going through the trees around us. There was blood on her sleeve and she had her hand tucked into the front of her shirt to keep the arm from flopping around, but she wasn’t paying any attention to that, either. They were a hell of a bunch of people. There’s nothing like a pro, in any line of work.

“She says the secondary mission was successful,” Jiminez reported. “The prisoner was released, with the loss of one man. There is a message for you. Here.”

It was a sliver of wood, or reed, with a hard yellowish surface like bamboo. Maybe it was bamboo. I’m not an expert on the flora of the region. On it a pin or tack had scratched a line of shaky capital letters:
INVESTIGATE
SOMETHING
BIG
DOWN
ROAD
PAST
VILLAGE
SHEILA
.

I looked at Jiminez. “What is the condition of the prisoner?”

He shrugged. “What can you expect? It has been over a month, almost six weeks. It is a miracle she is still alive. What about this?”

“I’d like to take a look,” I said. “If it’s important enough for her to make the effort to tell us, in the shape she’s probably in, it’s important enough for us to look at.”

“We are through here anyway,” Jiminez said. “The rest is routine. The corporal has his orders. He will pull back when he is outflanked and lead them away inland. We will go investigate this big thing.”

It wasn’t so big. It wasn’t as tall as the Washington Monument by any means. Hell, you could have hidden it in an ordinary farm silo, if you could have figured a way to slip it inside. It wasn’t nearly as big as the ones they play with at Cape Canaveral. Still, it wasn’t something you’d take home on the Fourth of July and set off in the back yard to amuse the kiddies. Coming on it cold in a well-guarded clearing in the Costa Verde jungle, I found it impressive enough.

It looked a good deal like a gigantic version of my .300 Magnum cartridge, standing there, except that it wasn’t brass. They’d given it a fancy coat of camouflage paint to make it harder to spot from the air. But there was the same fat body necked down to the same slim, pointed, bullet-shaped head—the warhead, I suppose. I studied that carefully. Washington would want to know whether it was nuclear or otherwise. I didn’t have enough technical knowledge to tell, but maybe I could spot some detail that would tell somebody else.

They had a net suspended over it covered with leaves and stuff. Farther back along the edge of the little jungle opening was the truck, also with camouflage paint and a net. It was a six-wheeled tractor with power to all three axles and a big cab, like the ones the non-stop crosscountry truckers sleep in. But I didn’t think the extra space housed a bunk in this case. There were a couple of trick antennas, and I could make out the corner of some kind of a console or control board through the open door.

Behind the tractor was the long flat trailer with a cradle to hold the bird and hydraulic equipment to set it up. It was a real little mobile, do-it-yourself missile base. There was painted-over lettering embossed on the truck that I couldn’t decipher, neither English nor Spanish. Not only the language but the alphabet was different. Even at the distance, I didn’t have much doubt as to what language it was. But the two bearded men squatting beside the truck as if they belonged to it weren’t Slavic types.

“May I look?” Jiminez whispered.

I’d taken back my binoculars earlier. I passed them to him again and watched him adjust them to his eyes, lying beside me in the brush. I couldn’t read his expression. I looked around the clearing. They had a couple of heavy machine guns set up strategically—there had been one nest along the road that we’d bypassed—and there were too many nervous sentries pacing around nursing too many rapid-fire weapons to make an attack seem like more than a forlorn hope. Just to get the two of us this close to the barbed wire undetected had taken all the woodcraft both of us possessed.

A fresh burst of firing inland indicated that Jiminez’ boys were still leading the paper chase away from us. The men in the clearing looked that way, grimly or uneasily according to temperament. They knew the village had been hit; they were expecting to be next.

“Cubans,” Jiminez whispered. “Those two by the truck. With the beards. One supposes they are technicians lent by Castro to his fond
amigo,
General Santos.”

“Along with a nice little Russian toy that somehow got side-tracked when they were all being shipped home as a result of the U.S. blockade of Castro’s island. I wonder what Khrushchev said when his inventory added up one whiz-bang short?” I grimaced. “How did they get it in here?”

“They could have floated it up the river and landed it well above where you were set ashore. There are little-used roads by which a truck like that, assisted by men with axes and shovels, could have brought it the rest of the way. It would take much work but it could be done. Señor Helm?”

“Yes?”

“I am not well acquainted with such weapons. What would be the range of this one?”

“I’m no expert, either,” I said. “But I should think it would shoot at least five hundred miles. Our Polaris goes well over a thousand and it’s small enough to fit on board a submarine crosswise.”

“It would seem, then, that we reached El Fuerte just in time,” whispered Jiminez, still studying the missile grimly. “With this, if it is as powerful as one suspects, he could have blackmailed our government into submission. Our capital city is less than three hundred of your miles from here. He could have threatened to destroy it if their demands were refused.” After a moment, the Colonel said, “I will have to speak to my informants in the village. They should have learned of this.”

I said carefully, “I am thinking, Colonel, that my government would be pleased if something happened to that thing.”

He lowered the binoculars and turned his head to look at me. “I know you are thinking that, Señor Helm,” he whispered. “I am thinking what
my
government would wish me to do. Now that El Fuerte is dead and the revolution no longer has a leader, I am not certain they would wish it damaged. A thing like that has many uses, in the proper hands.” He moved his shoulders. “But we speak of what is impossible. Those men are alerted. We cannot take them by surprise, and we have not enough force to overwhelm them. No. It is my duty to report this. That is all I can do. Come.”

It was no place to argue; and even after we’d extricated ourselves from there, I wasn’t in a very good position for argument, deep in an officially friendly country surrounded by well-equipped representatives of its armed forces. Anyway, stray missiles weren’t really in my line. I’d done my work and, like Jiminez, I’d make my report. Washington could take it from there.

We rejoined the rest of our group and reached the hiding place while the light still held, though it was fading fast. Two of the men of the special contingent that had entered the village, and the older woman—the younger one, wounded, had remained with us after delivering the message—were awaiting us in a grove of trees that seemed too dense for a snake to penetrate. But there was a way in, and in the center was a space like a good-sized room, a kind of arboreal cave.

I left Jiminez posting sentries and went over to the woman who sat at the side of the space watching over a strange girl lying on the ground. I knew it was a girl because that’s what we’d been supposed to rescue; otherwise I might have hesitated before forming an opinion. There is a point in abuse and starvation beyond which the question of sex becomes meaningless. The woman looked up.

“She took a little food,” she said in English. “Now she is asleep. Do not wake her unless it is necessary.”

I didn’t comment on her knowledge of the language. “Can she walk?” I asked.

“I do not know. We carried her. She would have cut her feet to pieces, since we could find no shoes in the kennel where they had her. She was lying in filth, with only the rags you see. She only became truly conscious long enough to give us the message on the piece of wood. Even then she would not speak. Too much had been done to her, for her to speak.” Anger stirred in the woman’s face. “El Fuerte and his men are beasts, señor.”

“His men may still be beasts,” I said. “El Fuerte is nothing, now. Not with two 180-grain slugs through the chest.”

The thought had not really pleased me before. I mean, there had been nothing personal between me and General Jorge Santos when I shot him. But as I knelt beside the unconscious figure on the ground, I took some pleasure in the fact that I hadn’t missed.

It wasn’t pretty. I knew that our agent who went by the code name Sheila, although I had never seen her before, was normally a rather attractive young woman twenty-six years old. She’d gone to good schools. She’d been married and divorced before she joined the outfit for reasons that were not recorded. According to her dossier, she was five feet two inches tall, weighed a hundred and fifteen pounds, and had gray eyes and shoulder-length brown hair bleached and tinted to gold for this assignment— blondes are rare and conspicuous down there, and she had wanted to be sure of catching General Santos’ masculine attention, which rumor said wasn’t hard to catch.

At last report she’d vanished into the jungle in a jeep with a native driver known to be favorable to the revolution. She’d been carrying a bag of cameras and a tape recorder, and she’d been posing as a leftist girl journalist doing a story on the heroes of the revolution, in a deliberately provocative blouse and intentionally tight Capri pants.

It was supposed to be the old Delilah routine. If everything had worked out, sooner or later she’d have been found standing over General Santos’ dead body with his smoking army pistol in her hand, clutching some torn lingerie to her bosom and weeping hysterically. The Federal informers in the village had been alerted to protect her from too-drastic reprisals; in the disorganization that was expected to follow Santos’ death they were to have smuggled her out to safety. If this had worked, I’d never have been called upon to help make up a sniper’s rifle capable of dropping the general in his tracks at three hundred and fifty meters or maybe a little more.

Everything had not worked out for Sheila. Things had gone very wrong, we didn’t yet know how or why. But she’d obviously been detected and caught somehow; she’d apparently paid most of the usual penalties; and now after a month and a half there was hardly enough left of the carefully planned blouse-and-pants costume to qualify as clothing—and there wasn’t a great deal left of the girl who had selected and worn it, either. The starved, scarecrow figure on the ground before me, rags and dirt included, didn’t weigh more than eighty pounds.

They’d hacked off most of the phony-gold hair, dark and matted now, with a bayonet or machete, I suppose as a mark of shame; and they’d done something to the left hand. It was wrapped in some stained and grimy cloth that might once have been part of a feminine garment of silk or nylon. I looked at the hand and at the dark-faced woman. She moved her shoulders matter-of-factly.

“They tried to make her talk, to name her accomplices in the village, señor.”

“Did she?”

“Would we have risked our lives for her if she had?” As I reached out to examine the hand and arm, the woman spoke quickly: “Do not touch her, señor.”

“Why not?”

“You are a man.”

She said it as if it explained everything, and I guess it did. I looked at her for a moment, and she looked right back. She was actually a rather handsome woman, I noted, in a solid, swarthy, and savage way. I gathered she didn’t think much of men. At the moment I wasn’t too fond of them myself.

“Sure,” I said. I took off the pack and opened it, kneeling there. “Well, she’s going to have to swallow her natural and justified prejudice against the sex, just for a moment. I don’t like the looks of that arm. I want to get some penicillin into her right away.”

“I will give the penicillin. I have done it before. She will scream and fight, perhaps harm herself, if you touch her. We had great trouble bringing her away.”

“All right,” I said. “I leave her in your care. Here are the clothes I packed in for her. If you need any help, let me know.”

The woman didn’t answer. Her attitude said that when she asked any man for help, that would truly be the day. Well,
her
psychological quirks were no problems of mine, thank God.

I left the stuff with her and went over to Jiminez, who was in a fine lousy mood, too, maybe because he couldn’t smoke his cigars in here without possibly betraying our hiding place, maybe because we could still hear sporadic firing back in the hills where his men were letting themselves be hunted through the growing darkness to save our skins. Or maybe he had other things on his mind, missiles for instance. Anyway, his small, dark, handsome face didn’t light up noticeably with friendship when I came up.

“How is she?” he asked curtly.

I moved my shoulders. I’m afraid it’s going to be a job for the doctors and psychiatrists. All we can do is bring the pieces home. Maybe they can put them back together. If not, well, we have a place for people who didn’t make it. The problem arises fairly often in our business.”

“You take the ruin of a lovely girl, your associate, very calmly.” His voice was cold. I couldn’t see that the comment required an answer, so I didn’t speak. He said, “But then you are proud and happy tonight, Señor Helm. You were brave today. You shot with great precision. You killed many men.”

“After you’d spotted them for me,” I pointed out. After seeing Sheila, I wasn’t in the best of moods myself.

He drew a long breath. “Yes, that is true. I helped.”

“Are you grieving for Santos, Colonel?”