The Wrecking Crew (23 page)

She turned and headed out across that innocent-looking meadow. I followed her. Soon we were jumping from one grassy hummock to the next. Between them the mud was soft and black. This was easy. Then we came to a small stream, bordered by a low but almost impassable tangle of what looked like mountain laurel. You couldn’t break a path through the stuff, you had to do a kind of dance on top of it, putting your feet where the twisted roots and branches looked as if they would bear your weight. If you misjudged, you went through into the mud beneath and had to fight your way back up to the top again.

The stream itself was crystal clear, too wide for jumping and too deep for comfort, and icy cold. After that we had laurel again, and finally we struggled up on dry ground that didn’t last very long. It was only a little piny island in the middle of the bog. Beyond it, after a few more grassy hummocks, was just plain mud, black and shiny.

The area was only some fifty yards wide, but it stretched a much greater distance in either direction. There was no way of getting around it that I could see. On the other side, invitingly near beyond a stretch of marsh grass, was the edge of the forest. But first there was the muck to get across.

I glanced at Elin. She wasn’t a movie heroine; she hadn’t come through the ordeal totally unscathed. But then, she hadn’t even been a spit-and-polish girl. That lousy blue dress in which I’d first seen her had been less becoming than her present splashed and muddy outfit. At least now she’d licked and bitten off that nauseating lipstick she liked to wear. Flushed and bright-eyed with exercise, she looked kind of breathtaking, as a matter of fact.

I jerked my head toward the black stuff. “You’re the guide,” I said. “How do we get around that?”

“Get around?” she said, smiling. “What is the matter, Cousin Matthias, are you afraid?”

She walked directly out there. After two steps she was going in almost to her knees, and the whole great expanse was rippling and wobbling like a bowl of jello. She threw a glance over her shoulder.

“It is all right,” she said. “It is all right, if you keep moving. Of course, if you stop, you will sink very quickly.”

I said sharply, “Come back here!”

She kept on wading, clutching the packages of film. I suppose she should have looked ridiculous. A beautiful girl has no business performing acts of strength and courage; our civilization isn’t geared for it. Women aren’t supposed to do anything that’ll muss their hair or endanger their nylons; and wading through knee-deep mud isn’t exactly a glamorous occupation. Just the same, the kid had guts. I really didn’t like the looks of that stuff at all.

“Come back, you crazy little fool!” I shouted.

I started after her, and retreated quickly. I heard her laugh, and she kept on going. On the other shore she paused to fix a muddy shoestring that apparently had come untied. Then, wiping her hands on the seat of her pants, she straightened up and looked at me across the lake of mud. She pointed to the south, the direction of the highway, the direction I was supposed to go. Then she picked up the packages of film and disappeared into the woods.

After a little, I glanced at my watch to note the time. It seemed likely that she’d sneak back to see what I’d do next, to make sure she’d really lost me. I therefore made a show of trying to find a safe way around that overgrown muck hole. I circled far to the right, as far as the grass and hummocks would take me, but there was no solid path across the stuff. I returned to the island, waded out once more the way she’d gone, and retreated with a display of panic after going in to my knees. I made a swing to the left and had no luck there, either. Finally I went back to the island again and stood looking glumly at the spot on the shoreline where she’d disappeared. I restrained myself from shaking my fist at it. You’ve got to use moderation in these things.

Having put on enough of a performance, I figured, to deceive several tall, beautiful, overconfident young ladies in plaid pants, I turned dejectedly and shuffled back the way we’d come. As soon as I was out of sight, I lay down under a pine tree, put my hat over my eyes, and concentrated on resting up for the next phase of the operation. I tried not to think of anything, not even Lou and the danger she was in. It wasn’t something I could allow to affect my actions. There wasn’t anything else to think about. The final hand had been dealt. All that was left was to play the cards.

I gave her half an hour by the watch. If she’d been older, or more experienced, or less cockily sure of my general uselessness, I’d have made it an hour; but I was betting she couldn’t stay still nearly that long, watching an empty patch of swamp. When the time was up, I rose, put my hat firmly on my head, and waded across the mud flat, following her footsteps, already filling and fading from sight. It wasn’t nice stuff at all. I don’t know as I’d have tried it, coming on it cold. You kind of expected the whole nasty quivering black mass to split open and swallow you. But what the hell, I had big feet to support me, and if she could do it, I could.

On the other side, I spent a little time remembering my woodcraft and untangling her tracks. As I’d suspected, she’d gone only a short way before returning to watch my antics. I found the place where she’d lain in the shoreline brush, spying on me. Her elbow marks, in the soft ground, even showed the weave of her sweater.

Then she’d got up and started out again; and now, as I’d hoped and planned, having got rid of me, she’d stopped fooling around. We’d come pretty far north while playing tag through the brush, but now her trail ran considerably south of east, angling back toward the highway. Well, I’d never taken much stock in that hideaway six miles back in the boondocks. Lovely Elin was a cross-country type, to be sure, but the little man, Caselius, wasn’t. After all, I’d checked him out once, on a dark road, sword in hand; he’d started out strong but he’d faded fast. Even a two-mile hike along a cleared trail would be a hardship for that little fashion plate. He was a lad who worked with his brain and left the muscle to others, except occasionally when there was an interesting spot of shooting to be done. It doesn’t take much strength or endurance to pull a trigger.

The sign on the ground said Elin had written me off. She was making no effort at concealment; it simply didn’t occur to her that she might be tracked. I could follow the trail at a steady lope. I found it a lot easier to maintain the pace, now that I no longer had to pretend to be on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion. For a while there, puffing and panting, I’d almost had myself fooled.

What the kid hadn’t counted on, apparently, was that we’ve got a few wilderness areas on our side of the water, too. This myth of the soft and helpless American is soothing to European egos, and may even contain a grain of truth, but there are still a few of us left who know the big woods, and the big deserts, too. And while thirty-six might seem ancient by her standards, it wasn’t quite senile; and I’d just had a course of training that had put me in pretty good condition, even if my instructors hadn’t been greatly impressed. I had another advantage that hadn’t occurred to her. I’d spent most of my postwar life exercising my lungs on the thin air of my home in Santa Fe, at an altitude higher than the highest peak in Scandinavia; I had lung-power to burn. And while I’m no proponent of the double standard in other respects, I think the athletic records will bear me out when I say a good man can run down a good woman any day in the week—and if you want to build that into a dirty joke, bud, you just go right ahead.

I won’t say it was fun, loping through the arctic forest at that easy jog trot that eats up the miles. Her tracks said she wasn’t straining herself a bit to keep ahead of me, never suspecting there was anybody to keep ahead of. She was just walking along at a good clip, making an occasional detour to avoid the bad spots but swinging right back to her line as soon as the going was easy again. She knew her stuff all right, whether she’d learned it in school or elsewhere. It was that kind of rolling country without prominent landmarks in which regiments of hunters get hopelessly lost each year, but her trail never faltered... It wasn’t fun, exactly. For one thing, it was work, and I don’t like exercise any more than the next guy. For another, it seemed likely that I’d have some dirty business coming up before the day was over. Still, after all the play-acting and horsing around, it was nice to be out in the open on a fine day with the end in sight.

Presently I spotted the bright plaid pants ahead of me—not as bright as they had been earlier in the day, but still a strong alien pattern in the light and shade of the forest. She was moving more slowly now, beginning to tire a little. Every now and then she’d sit down and rest. I had it harder now. I had to move quietly so she wouldn’t hear me, and I had to be careful not to overrun her when she stopped. By the time she reached the road she was looking for, I was pretty tired myself.

It was an old, overgrown logging road running approximately north and south. Like any good woodsman, she’d given herself some leeway. Walking across unknown, trail-less country, you can’t be sure of striking a given point, like a camp or cabin; I don’t care if you’re Daniel Boone himself. You
can
be fairly certain of intercepting a line of reasonable length, however, like the road leading to said camp or cabin. So you keep well to the safe side until you strike your road, and then follow it home.

She turned north again. I had it really rough, now. She was striding easily along an open trail, not clear enough for vehicles, to be sure, but a paved highway for a walker. I was out in the woods traveling parallel to her course trying to be quiet as I fought my way through brush and over fallen timber. I didn’t know who’d be waiting along that road, and I didn’t want my tracks on it in case they had somebody wandering around who could read sign.

The precaution paid off sooner than I’d expected. She went around a bend and up the long straight stretch that followed; she’d almost reached the next turn when somebody whistled softly, calling her back. He’d let her get far enough ahead to make sure she wasn’t followed, before announcing himself.

She turned and came back. The man stepped out into the road. His face was vaguely familiar; I thought I’d met him before, or his fist, in the park in Stockholm. Sara Lundgren would probably have recognized him, too. He had a brief conversation with Elin. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but presently he whistled again, and another man stepped out into the road from the other side. They’d had that long straight stretch covered, ready to cut down anybody who started down it. If I’d come walking along there with Elin, I suspect we’d both have died. Both men were packing automatic weapons, which are notoriously unselective, and it seemed unlikely they’d have risked losing me just to give her time to reach cover.

I felt a funny sense of responsibility, looking at that beautiful screwball kid standing there in her muddy pants and her snagged sweater. She was literally just a babe in the woods. She might talk big about dirty work on the international level, but it had obviously never occurred to her that a man might deliberately use her and shoot her down, any more than it had occurred to Sara Lundgren. I watched one of the men take the packets of film from her. He spoke to her, and started off along the road, and she went with him. The other man watched them go, then stepped back into his hiding place in the bushes.

I suppose I could have left him there, but I needed his weapon; and I don’t like leaving men behind me, anyway, when it can be helped. It was an easy stalk. He wasn’t expecting trouble. At the last moment, a twig snapped under my foot and he swung around sharply, just in time to catch the blow to the throat that crushes the windpipe. My instructors at the training school would have been proud of me. He never got to make a sound. I even managed to catch his machine pistol before it hit the, ground—not that it mattered greatly, since he never got the safety off.

It was a make of gun I’d had no experience with, but the various buttons and levers were self-explanatory: there was the safety, the trigger, and a selector switch to change the piece from full- to semi-automatic. Everybody’s gone hog-wild over these ugly little squirt guns lately, and I can never quite see why, except that nobody seems to want to take the trouble to really learn to shoot, so they’ve got to have weapons they can spray like a hose. Personally, I prefer a scope-sighted rifle for long range; and for close-up work a short-barreled pump or automatic shotgun loaded with buckshot makes a lovely weapon. However, you can’t always satisfy your preferences. I had a machine pistol. It would have to do.

I set the thing to fire single shots. The dead man in the bushes was already concealed from the road. I left him lying there and hurried after Elin and her escort. Soon I came to the edge of an open, logged-over space with the stumps still standing, turning gray with age. There was a small lake, little more than a forest pond, and a cabin, little more than a tarpaper shack, with a rusty stovepipe jutting from the roof at a precarious angle. The place had a deserted air. It looked as if it had stood empty for years, sheltering nothing but mice and pack rats, if they had pack rats in this country.

Elin was walking with her companion across the clearing away from me, toward the cabin. She’d obviously had it. Keeping up with the man’s long stride was clearly an effort for her. Well, she’d given me quite a run.

I couldn’t help thinking, as I watched her, that a girl like this might be kind of nice to have around. She’d outgrow her crackpot political ideas soon enough; and with her looks, who cared about her taste in clothes? I mean, women who can cook and make love are a dime a dozen, but a kid who can strike out across rough country on her own, and hit her destination like a homing pigeon—that’s something pretty special. There is a lake up in the Sangre de Cristos where the trout grow to fifteen inches and the deer all come with heads like hat racks. There is a place in the San Luis Valley where the ducks come in with the dawn…

I woke up; it was no time for daydreaming. I had business to attend to. I found a place to lie near the base of a tree, where a fallen log gave me a rest for the gun. I settled myself comfortably, and swung the sights across Elin and the man to the cabin door. I held that sight picture for almost a minute, hoping Caselius would make my job easy by coming out to meet them—after all, my primary business was with him. But he didn’t show, and they were getting close, and I couldn’t afford to let reinforcements into the place. I swung the piece back to cover the man beside Elin, and pressed the trigger gently.