The Frighteners (37 page)

“Never mind that,’’ said Kappa. ‘‘Any sign of our man down there? Or the girl?”

“Not any.”

“Well, watch yourself, the guy’s probably gone to cover. The bastard’s slippery as a snake. I didn’t see the dame, maybe they’ve spilt up and somebody’s got her cornered over there, I hope. Don’t get trigger-happy now; I’m coming your way.”

“To hell with you, Buster. You worry about your trigger and I’ll worry about mine. Theta out.”

Redbeard, alias Kappa, started to clip the little radio back onto his belt; then he saw me, because I’d stood up to let him, and froze. I could see him consider his chances with the assault rifle, but he was holding it carelessly by the sight that looks like a carrying handle—maybe it is; they do funny things in the military—and there was no way he could get it into action before I shot him to pieces.

I said softly, “Lay down the radio and don’t dream of touching the transmit button. Place the M-16 and your Colt beside it. I’ve already killed three men today and a fourth won’t bother me a bit, so any games you want to play, have at them.”

He followed instructions very carefully and straightened up. “Listen, you murdering bastard . . ."

I said, “I don’t bum women with blowtorches and I don’t work for anybody who does. Or for a megalomaniac who thinks he knows better than Washington what my country’s foreign policy ought to be; a wild-eyed character who, when he’s caught playing Secretary of State without a briefcase, tries to kill and torture his way clear. Don’t talk murdering to me, Buster. Including this elaborate rattrap, there have been three attempts on my life since I left the U.S. I figured that since you boys are so useless at killing—hell, you can’t even finish off an old man with a big, bleeding hole in his back—you’d like to have an expert show you how. Come over here and sit on that rock. I suppose you’re going to be brave and refuse to get on the two-way and call in your pal below. ”

“Fuck you, mister.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “When you don’t come to him and don’t answer the radio, he’ll come to you. While we wait, you might as well get out the handcuffs you characters seem to carry and snap them around your wrists. In front is okay. That’s a good boy. Squeeze them good and tight and let me hear them click. Now tell me how the hell we’re going to stop this nonsense.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“I’m the guy a guy named Rutherford tried to trap and kill, with Mexican help, near a little town called Cananea. I’m the guy a guy named Rutherford tried to kill, with Mexican help, in a bigger city called Hermosillo. And now he’s got you boys trying it here, and I’m getting kind of fed up with it,” I said. “You’re in a bad spot,
amigo
. You’ve got me on one side and I’m not a very nice fellow when I get mad. And on the other side you’ve got the Mexican authorities, and you know how they are. The old
ley de fuga
still works down here, Mr. Kappa. They’ll give you a running start and use you for machine-gun practice and report that you were shot trying to escape. If they bother to report. Probably they’ll just throw you on the garbage heap with the other stiffs over there and forget all about mentioning you officially.” I hoped Ramón and his fellow countrymen would forgive my slanderous statement. I went on: “The buzzards will love you, Mr. Kappa. They’ll come sailing in to feed in swarms like the bombers over Berlin. The poor hungry things are getting pretty damn tired of picking over the same old human bones; they want some fresh meat.”

I noted that the distant firing had stopped after some final, desultory pop-pop-popping. I hoped the kid had got clear unhurt; if she had, they’d never catch her. If she’d accomplished what she intended, and I was willing to bet she had, they probably wouldn’t even chase her very hard with Mondragon dead. And with the arms located and Mondragon dead, that was two-thirds of my job done.

“Kappa this is Theta, what’s keeping you?”

Redbeard glanced at the radio on the ground ten feet away. I shook my head. He looked at my gun and licked his lips. “What the hell are you trying to say?”

I said, “Bail out, friend. Take a running jump out the door and pull the ripcord. This plane is going down in flames. . . . Shhh, here comes your buddy looking for you as I told you he would. If you warn him, you’re dead, and I’ll hunt him down, too; more meat for the
zopilotes
. Let him come in, talk it over with him. You can both walk away from this, if you walk in the right direction. Otherwise you’ll stay here for good.”

He had one of those red faces that always look like a bad sunburn, and those orangy whiskers, and small blue eyes that didn’t look very trustworthy, but I couldn’t guess who had more reason to mistrust him, Sigma or I. Probably I did. Probably, even if he did say he’d play along, he’d be lying. There’s always loyalty to the organization to consider even if the top man is no prize; in any war, more men fight for their ships or units than for their country, and very few fight for their officers.

The man below clattered another pebble; he was closer than he had been. I picked up the gear Kappa had laid down at my request, emptied his revolver and stuck it back into his holster, and turned off his walkie-talkie and hung it on his belt. I checked the condition of his M-16, ready, and stuck the .38 I’d been holding, long since uncocked, under my belt. The assault rifle was the more impressive weapon; a man might be reckless enough to charge a lousy little revolver, but he’d at least hesitate a bit when confronted with the ugly black military killing-machine.

I looked for a suitable spot in which to lie in ambush this time. The other side of the little clearing looked good. As I stepped forward a bit and paused to check it out from that angle, something struck me hard in the back, on the left side. I was even aware of blood spraying out of the exit wound just above my belt. Everything was suddenly very remote, the ratty brush around me, the stony slopes, the blue sky, the bright sun. It seemed as if I were moving in slow motion as I threw myself down—threw, hell, I kind of floated to the ground. I was aware of a very distant report as I fell, and I heard a second bullet go past, and I knew that I’d made the mistake you seldom survive, the error of overconfidence. I’d thought I had it all figured out. I’d decided that the guy running this show was a creature of habit; all his men packed M-16s with twenty-round magazines and .38 pistols with four-inch barrels. All except the snipers, who carried .243 bolt-action rifles with 3x-9x telescopic sights.

But the son of a bitch had loused me up. In addition to the toy ,243s, he’d brought one real rifle, probably a .30 Magnum, and he’d given it to a man who knew how to use it and stationed him on the point of rocks to the north, on the other side of the entrance, from which he could cover most of the action area including—if his range tables stretched well past six hundred yards—the spot from which I’d chosen to do my shooting. This marksman must have spent a frustrating half-hour while his colleagues died, as he watched me through his big scope and waited for a clear target. He’d probably cursed savagely when I headed down the slope, wishing he hadn’t been quite so perfectionist and taken a hope shot, but I’d come back and finally given him the motionless, unobstructed aiming point for which he’d been waiting.

The man with the red beard was running for cover, awkwardly because of his handcuffed hands. It was too bad, I’d tried to save his life, but we give no freebies. If they wanted me, they’d have to pay the full price on the tag. I cut down Kappa with a lengthy burst; my trigger finger took a long time to react to the cease-fire command. Then I lay there waiting for Theta, but he never came, at least not as long as I remained conscious, which wasn’t very long.

I’d worried a bit about penetrating Sigma’s headquarters, but it turned out to be no problem at all. They took me right to it. The only problem was surviving the ride. Unfortunately my unconsciousness, presumably a reaction to the shock of the bullet wound, didn’t last long enough to help. I awoke, in a dim sort of way, aware of little else than the pain, when Theta rolled me over to disarm me; I heard him comment happily, to the driver of the Japanese jeep that had managed to grind its way up to us, on the number of weapons he found. I was glad I’d acquired enough to please him.

Then the two of them grabbed me under the armpits, dragged me roughly to the vehicle, and hauled most of me aboard, leaving my legs dangling. The little pickup-type bed wasn’t long enough for all of me, particularly since I had to share the space with the late Mr. Kappa. As an afterthought, they took the handcuffs off him and put them on me, just in case, as they said, the sneaky son of a bitch was playing possum. Getting back down the hill was tricky for the driver but not too bad for me since he had to back down the steep grade very slowly so as not to lose control. At the bottom, we acquired another limp passenger, the second victim of my .243.

“God, we look like one of the meatwagons hauling away the stiffs during the Great Plague,” said the man I knew only as Theta. “Never mind Peterson, I heard he’s being picked up.”

“Damn good thing; we’d have had to lay him across the hood,” said the driver. “But I have a hunch Mr. Saturday is going to cure this particular plague pretty damn quick. I mean Sigma. He’s okay, I guess, and goddamn it, somebody’s got to get these fucking greasers to straighten up and fly right, but I wish he’d stop playing these crummy Greek word games. Who the shit wants to go around being called Omicron, for Christ’s sake?”

Finding the headquarters place was no problem, but the driver was no gentle chauffeur like little Lieutenant Ernesto Barraga of Ramón’s
Fuerza Especial
. This hotshot Yankee wheelman had 4WD Grand Prix aspirations, and he sent his vehicle bounding across the roadless basin like a jackrabbit, perhaps figuring that two of the passengers in the rear were in no condition to mind the discomfort and the third had it coming. Then we slowed down to negotiate a narrow cleft between the great stone blocks that brought us into a small, open space, nothing like the wide amphitheater in which I’d seen a few hopeful vultures investigating old bones.

“Here, I’ll get him.” I recognized the voice. It belonged to the big boy, Marion Rutherford, otherwise known as Tunk or Alpha.

Theta and the driver, Mr. Omicron, had been trying to pull my more-or-less live body out from between the two totally dead ones, but we’d got packed into the limited space pretty tightly, like sardines, during the rough ride, and they were having a hard time prying me loose. The fact that their efforts were fairly painful to me was, of course, irrelevant, so I didn’t bother to mention it. Then Rutherford was lifting me out of there like a baby.

“Where do you want him, sir?” he called to somebody.

The shout came back: “Lay him over there beside the woman.”

Okay, I’d made it. This was the voice I’d been wanting to hear at close range, without benefit of electronics. Of course, it wasn’t exactly the way I’d planned the meeting; I had handcuffs on my wrists and a leg that might not support me if I needed to stand on it, although the toes seemed to be wiggleable, and I might even be dying of internal injuries; but I was here with the man I’d been sent to find and dispose of. The finding, at least, was done. Only the disposing remained. Of course, I also had to live long enough to pass the word about where the arms were located.

I lay for a while with my eyes closed after Rutherford had put me down, waiting for the flames to subside. At last I became aware that Tunk had departed and my man was standing there instead, the man I’d expected to see, the only man he could be, under the circumstances. In El Paso he’d dressed the part of a hip young executive with a smart three-day beard; here, still fashionably whiskery, he was costumed as an outdoors type in a tan poplin Great White Hunter suit, the jacket equipped with enough bellows-type pockets to carry sandwiches for a week. Something held him stiffly erect, still a fine, lean—well, almost—figure of a man. I decided that he was wearing either a corset or a bullet-proof vest or both. There was a Browning Hi-Power belted over the jacket. The belt and pistol holster were of handsome russet leather, and there was a russet leather pouch holding two spare magazines, putting something like forty-two rounds at his disposal, if I remembered the magazine capacity correctly. Fuzzy desert boots at one end and rakish safari hat at the other. Big dark glasses. Sigma, Sabádo, Saturday. Well, I had my orders, and if he didn’t like his own name I’d be happy to kill him under any name he chose, but it was amateurish of him to stick so stubbornly to the same initial letter.

Seeing my eyes open, he said, “Well, Helm?”

There was nothing I had to say to him; having seen enough, I just closed my eyes again. He kicked me in the side, fortunately the right side.

“You crazy assassin, did you really think you could kill us all with only a girl to help you?” He kicked me again. “Come on, speak up!”

Jo Beckman’s voice, from the other side of me, protested: “Stop it, can’t you see he’s in shock? Are you just going to let him lie there and bleed to death? If you really want to interrogate him, if you have some sensible questions you want to ask him, you’d better stop the hemorrhaging fast or you won’t have anybody to interrogate.”

“All right, Doctor, I’ll have a man bring you a first aid kit and some water. Do what you can for him.”

“In these manacles?”

Sigma laughed. Mr. Saturday laughed. Señor Sabádo laughed. “Nice try, but it won’t work, my dear. It isn’t as if your hands were shackled behind you. If you can’t manage handcuffed, you’re not much of a doctor. . . . Yes, yes, what is it?” Somebody had come running up; I couldn’t hear what he said. Sigma said irritably, “Well, what are you waiting for, go fetch him in one of the jeeps and bring him here, fast!”

I could hear footsteps moving away; then fingers were tugging at my bloody shirt and performing some mildly painful explorations. Jo’s voice said, “He’s gone. Don’t take my gloomy diagnosis too seriously, darling; I just wanted to impress the peasants. You’re not bleeding enough externally to worry about. Internally is probably another matter, but there’s nothing I can do about that. Somebody who knows how and has the proper instruments is going to have to go in and clean out the wound channel and stitch together whatever needs sewing. For the moment, I’ll just make a bandage of your shirt since this little kit they brought me is kind of limited, and wrap it around you tightly to keep you from leaking too much. ” She laughed shortly. “I seem to recall that we’ve been here before, darling. You seem to attract lead the way a magnet attracts iron.’’