The Annihilators (30 page)

Military men are great at a thousand yards and don’t do too badly at a hundred, but they don’t really expect to have to cope with the enemy at zero range very often. Colonel Ramiro Sanchez of the People’s Liberation Army, or whatever they called it, was probably hot stuff when it came to emplacing a heavy machine gun for a good field of fire, but when it came to dealing with a prisoner at gunpoint he was, like his boy Eugenio, a hopeless amateur. Shoving a gun into a trained man’s back, for God’s sake!

I whirled left while he was still speaking, slamming my left arm through the space between us to knock the weapon aside and, with the other hand, slugging him low as I turned. The Browning fired and I felt a blow against my back, whether a lethal wound or just the muzzle blast I couldn’t tell and I wasn’t waiting to find out. For the moment the human machinery was still operative, and that was all that counted. The little belt-buckle knife, which I’d slipped under the watchband on my left wrist at the time I’d picked up the hidden revolver and grabbed right-handed when my hands came together just now in my dramatic lady-strangling pose, went into Sanchez to the hilt, edge up—or since it had no real hilt, it went in until my knuckles came up against the cloth of his pants. Crowding him, not letting him back clear, I ripped upward savagely.

It was a schizophrenic moment. I had to have the Browning; and I was groping for it left-handed as I moved against him; and all the time I was aware of the well sharpened little knife in my right hand slicing upward, parting the clothing and the skin and the fatty layer underneath and the ridged muscles of the abdominal wall. I hoped the weapon was up to the job. In all respects but one it was an ordinary little buckle-and-blade instrument. You simply unfastened the belt, grasped the buckle a certain way, freed it from the leather a certain way, and the blade that was part of it slipped out of its hidden sheath in the end of the belt, leaving you with your pants falling down, unless they were a good snug fit—mine were—and with a mean little three-inch slicer protruding from between your knuckles. Such hideout knives are not uncommon; the special thing about this one was that it was plastic: a special space-age composition with a silvery coating, the blade bonded to just enough steel to take and hold an edge, meaning that you could stroll past the airport metal-detectors all day and they’d never let out a murmur.

Well, I would be able to report that, although I’d had some doubts, the plastic-and-steel composition was strong enough—assuming that I lived to make a report, which was beginning to seem doubtful because I’d lost the Browning. Aghast at what was happening to him, Sanchez had dropped the pistol before my left hand could find it. He was trying now, desperately, to minimize the damage, to keep the dreadful incision from being further enlarged, grappling for my bloody knife-hand with both his hands. But already the air held the nasty stench you get when you dress out a deer or an elk carelessly and damage the intestines, letting the contents of the digestive tract spill out. Stolid Eugenio was standing by as we wrestled, gun ready, waiting for a safe shot; but I realized suddenly from his tense posture that the nervous dark boy wasn’t going to wait. He was going to save his colonel, he was going to try for it, for me…

I released the buckle-grip of the knife, befouled and slippery now, and dove for the ground as the Ml6 opened up. There was no time to locate the fallen pistol in the dark, let alone retrieve it; I simply hit and rolled, and rolled some more. The kid was swinging with me but shooting high where I’d been instead of low where I was. I heard at least three bullets go into Sanchez as the weapon traversed; and farther away Eugenio was hitting the ground to avoid the wild burst of fire. Abruptly the M16 was silent.

Still rolling toward him, I caught a glimpse of the young revolutionary soldier, face gray in the dark, mouth hanging open slackly, gun muzzle sagging, as he realized that he’d shot his commanding officer. Then I hit him hard and brought him down. When I scrambled up I had a weapon—his weapon—solidly in my hands, a lovely feeling.

I beat Eugenio up by a bare fraction of a second. He tried to bring his weapon to bear, but, still on his belly, he had to shift his whole body first. On my feet, I had no trouble pivoting freely to line up my liberated assault rifle by instinct, firing from the hip, although I prefer to use the sights whenever I can. Here there wasn’t time enough—nor was there light enough—for such refinements; he was already rolling away. My five-shot burst bracketed him for an instant before he disappeared into a depression on the far side of the prehistoric road; but with that small caliber it was by no means a sure kill.

Ramiro was down. There were dark bloodstains on his khaki shirt where he’d been shot, but he seemed unaware of them, concentrating on the knife-torn mess that was his belly as he sat against a roadside rock, holding himself together with both hands. Frances was still standing where I’d last seen her, frozen with shock but apparently unhurt.

I found that even in that moment I was pleased by that, although I could see no reason why I should be. The boy whose weapon I’d liberated was on his knees, vomiting convulsively. I moved to where I could cover him and still keep an eye on the spot where Eugenio had disappeared. The kid soldier wiped his mouth on his sleeve and looked up at me fearfully.

“Ammunition,” I said. I tapped the magazine of the weapon I held.
“Municiones por la ametralladora, por favor.”

It wasn’t great Spanish, but it got through. Numbly, he fished another of the straight twenty-shot magazines from a pocket of his bandolier—they make a long curved thirty-round magazine as well, and I think there’s even a belt-fed version of the weapon that’ll shoot until it melts, but all I’d seen here had been the straight twenty-shooters. He left the magazine on the ground on the spot I pointed to, rose at my gesture, and backed away a short distance, moving like a zombie. Then I had the fresh magazine in the gun, just in case Eugenio was in shape to make a real firefight of it. I could hear the painful breathing of Ramiro Sanchez. I knew that the sound would have been a mindless, hopeless whimpering if his pride had allowed it. I looked at the boy in front of me.

“What the hell am I going to do with you?” I asked him in English, and he didn’t understand a word, which was just as well because it was not a serious question.

“Matt! Drop the gun! Please, Matt, don’t make me shoot!”

It was the single-minded married lady with the .38 of course, behind me; and of course I should have disarmed her, but who would have thought any one woman could be so stubbornly stupid all by herself? Ignoring her command, I hit the trigger of the Ml6 and practically cut the kid in front of me in two, as the Smith and Wesson blasted behind me and the bullet went over me somewhere.

ONE.

I threw myself to the right, and a bullet passed me on the left.

TWO.

Eugenio was back in the game, a shadowy figure rising painfully at the far side of the road. I sent a quick three-shot burst his way and threw myself flat in the roadside bushes on my side, and rolled to avoid his answering fire. As I came to a stop, dirt sprayed up about five yards to my right and I heard the ringing muzzle-blast of the short-barreled .38 once more.

THREE.

I scrambled farther into the bushes; and Eugenio’s burst brought down a shower of leaves and branches where I’d been. I lay there for a ten-count, found a rock, and pitched it farther ahead of me. I rose as it landed, an old trick; but Eugenio fell for it enough to be just slightly out of position when I appeared. I held the hammering M16 steady against the recoil—it didn’t have a hell of a lot of kick—and put enough of the lousy little jacketed bullets into the dark shape over there to get the job done at last, aware of a .38 slug screaming off an ancient Melmec paving stone at my feet.

FOUR… FIVE.

The last one came as I turned to look at Frances. It missed like the rest, high, if it matters. She clicked the mechanism twice more as I stood watching her, before she realized that the revolver was empty. I raised the M16 to my shoulder and looked at her over the dim sights, and knew that I could never do it, at least not now when it was all over, not just to show how terribly hurt and disillusioned I was. I lowered the weapon, but I had to do something to express my feelings—after all, she’d had five shots at me and there was a certain reaction—so I spat deliberately, ashamed of the crude gesture but a little proud of the fact that I still had something left to spit with. I turned from her and walked over to Ramiro.

He looked up at me, his face greenish gray in the night. “I underestimated you, señor. My humble apologies.” His voice was a ghost of a whisper.

“You should have stuck to war and revolution,” I said. “Never play another man’s game, Colonel. This is my game.”

“There is a favor I would ask,” he breathed, “although I have of course no right to any favors from you.”

I looked down at him. In that moment we were both professional fighting men and the differences in our specialties did not matter. Depending on the seriousness of the bullet wounds, he might have been saved if a well-equipped medical unit had been standing by. Perhaps they could have repaired the knife damage and sewed him up and shot him full of antibiotics—but there was no medical unit, and he would know that even if there had been, with the rest of his command still to be dealt with, I was in no position to indulge in humanitarian gestures.

All he had to look forward to was, at the best, a painful dying. At the worst he would last long enough to lie there helpless watching the
zopilotes
gathering in the dawn sky overhead, and circling down on their great black vulture wings and, when he became too weak to frighten them away, squabbling over his intestines and genitals until, at last, one of them would dig deeply enough to sever an important blood vessel and set him free…

“Of course it is your right,” I said. “It is any man’s right.”

I set the Ml6 to single fire and shot him through the head.

I stopped along the dark path to check the hole made by Sanchez’s 9 mm Browning, in the soft flesh below the ribs, but although it was well over to the right, it was still far enough back that I couldn’t have seen it even if there had been light enough to see much by. My fingers merely told me that a certain amount of bullet erosion existed, and that it was producing a certain amount of hemorrhage, which didn’t add much to my previous knowledge.

I was feeling a little weak and dizzy, but any imaginative man will feel weak and dizzy with his blood running down his ass from an injury of undetermined magnitude. Anyway, I told myself, with three dead men and a treacherous tied-up woman behind me, I had every excuse to feel weak and dizzy from reaction—but I wished there had been some less uncomfortable and humiliating way of dealing with her. Of course I could have tried trusting her. Ha!

The sentry by the Jeep road had awakened when I reached the Labal clearing. He was standing up, leaning against the same tree he’d used for sleeping purposes; but he didn’t look like a wary man alerted by distant gunfire. The wind was stronger now, not a roaring gale, but a good stiff breeze making plenty of noise in the trees; it would have carried the noise of the fight away from him. He noticed nothing now as I lugged my burden of Ml6s and grenades and laden bandoliers cautiously back along the edge of the jungle the way Frances and I had come. I made my way up the rubble slope to the far end of the Nunnery, reflecting unchivalrously as I passed downwind of it that the ladies’ john smelled just as bad as the gents’.

I cached the armaments and took out a knife I had liberated from dead Eugenio. An improvement over the little buckle-knife that was again helping to hold up my pants, it was one of the commando-type daggers shaped somewhat like the old Arkansas toothpick—not to be confused with Jim Bowie’s lethal blade, which had been a different breed of edged weapon altogether, long and heavy enough to decapitate a man instead of merely stabbing or slicing him to death. But this was a sticker, not a chopper; and I reminded myself that rumor in the trade said that a lot of knives of this pattern had been manufactured that, while deadly-looking enough, were either so soft they wouldn’t hold an edge, or so hard and brittle that they snapped when too much was asked of them.

With this in mind, I dealt with the Nunnery sentry very gently after first luring him around the corner of the building with a couple of tossed pebbles—I told myself that I seemed to be getting into a rock-throwing rut, but it still worked. He came in to investigate the faint clattering sounds like a mallard to the decoys; and I got an arm around his head from behind to prevent an outcry, and slipped the dagger into him without any fuss, and held him while he died. The rattle of his dropped rifle, and the scuffle of his last convulsive thrashings, were blown away by that blessed night wind out of the jungle.

The camp remained dark and silent. The only movement I could see when I looked around the corner of the Nunnery was the steady marching of the conscientious sentry up by the high Citadel. After retrieving my arsenal, and adding the contribution of the recently deceased, I waited for the man up there to start the back portion of his beat, behind the ruin. Then I staggered with my burden along the patio to the fourth little corbeled doorway from the other end and stumbled inside.

“Guns, anyone?” I asked breathlessly.

There was a startled gasp from Gloria Jean and a rustle of movement from her husband—I noted that they were sleeping unsociably on opposite sides of the little chamber, as Frances and I had done. When they sat up, I saw that Putnam seemed to be in underwear shorts; his wife had on some kind of dark pajamas.

“Sam? What have you got?” Jim Putnam asked, instantly awake and reaching for his pants.

“Three Ml6s and enough fodder to nourish them for a while. Six or seven grenades, I lost count somewhere along the line. Two handguns and three knives. Can you block the entrance and have you got a light?”

“We’ve tried the mattress pads; they’ll cover the doorway if we rig them right. There’s a flashlight and a penlight. Glory, why don’t you slip out and tell Paul and the general that we’re in business…”