The Annihilators (36 page)

“Sounds like a serious urinary problem,” I said.

“Come over here.” He led me behind a tree to where a wounded man was lying, wearing a loose dirty-white cotton shirt and tattered denim pants. There was a considerable amount of blood. Jim Putnam glanced at me and said, a little defiantly, “Hell, nobody ever told these boys about a white flag. Anyway, it wasn’t until we picked him up that we saw what he was holding.”

That must have been the shooting we’d just heard. I said, “Well, you’re damn well going to personally unload every gun along your line of battle before I get out in front of your trigger-happy heroes. They’ve had their crack at me for the day.”

He spread his hands a little. “Okay, okay, they’re a bit wild, I admit it. But you don’t know what a relief it is to have troops that’ll actually pull their goddamn triggers, instead of the tender mama’s boys we used to be sent as replacements over there, who’d let themselves be killed and a lot of good men with them, rather than fire their nasty weapons at precious human targets. At least you know these tough little bastards are going to defend themselves if you give them half a chance; you’re not just sending them out to be helpless dead meat.”

I looked at him for a moment and realized that he, like Ricardo, had changed considerably in a very short time. Already he was identifying with the inexperienced guerilla fighters he’d had command of for only a couple of hours. Then I looked down as the man at our feet tried to speak.

Jim said, “See if you can get some sense out of him. Find out who sent him. I hate to let you go out there not knowing who’s there.”

I crouched beside the wounded man.
“Como se llama su jefe?”
I asked in my horrible Spanish. “What is the name of your leader?”

The man seemed to be muttering something about a bullet, using the English word, not the Spanish. Then, realizing he wasn’t getting through to me, he said desperately:
“Pie de metall.”

“There’s your metal pee,” Jim Putnam said.

The man said very clearly, “Bullet Man.”

I straightened up. “Okay, that takes care of it,” I said. “Incidentally,
pie
means foot in Spanish. Why don’t you get this poor bastard back to the road? Mrs. Henderson and your wife both know some first aid; maybe they can do something for him. And tell me when you’ve got those guns unloaded. I’m going in. Where’s that white flag? For what little it seems to be worth around here…”

A few minutes later I was making my way through the organic barbed-wire entanglement that surrounded us, clearing the way with a machete, my only weapon, unless you call a stick with a soiled white hanky a weapon. The bandaged groove in my back didn’t make my progress any easier, or less painful. When I’d gone about a hundred and fifty yards in the general direction Jim Putnam had indicated, making plenty of noise so as not to catch anybody by surprise, I stopped. There was nothing in sight now but trees and brush and thorny vines. Some of the bushes had thorns on them, too. There were no pretty jungle flowers in sight, or gaudy jungle birds. I wondered why the hell I seemed to be the one who got elected, every time, to risk my vulnerable hide between the hostile armies.

I drew a long breath and shouted, “Hey, Mr. Metal-foot. Hey, Señor Bullet Man.”

A voice behind me, quite close, said, “
Bitte
, lay down the machete, Herr Helm. It is said that you are with it quite skillful… So. Now you may turn. Where is Gregorio?”

I said, “Hell, you heard the shooting. Sorry. These aren’t the best-trained troops in the world. They even let off a few rounds at me earlier in the day. Your man is alive and being taken care of, but I wouldn’t want to make an optimistic prognosis.”

I had turned upon being given permission. Now Bultman came toward me cautiously, holding a well-worn P38 automatic pistol, the weapon that might be considered the Germanic successor to the Luger of romantic memory. Actually, it’s a better weapon than the Luger, with its atrocious trigger mechanism, ever was.

The Kraut looked just like his fuzzy pictures in the dossier I’d studied: the typical tall lean super-Aryan of the old Nazi movies, not the thick-necked Prussian-type villain, but the storm trooper with a conscience, perhaps, who was revolted by the atrocities committed by his comrades, and let the pretty Jewish heroine escape, and finally blew out his brains to resolve the terrible conflict between good and evil within him. He was a rather handsome fellow, not young, but well preserved and in good condition, with a blond, cropped, dolichocephalic head. He was wearing stained khakis, but, like Frances Dillman, he was the kind of person who’d look elegant in rags.

I said, “I thought you’d be in Chicago by this time.”

“You know about Chicago?”

“What else would Rael hire you for? He’s got Echeverria to handle his local assassinations.”

“Is that why you have been looking for me,
hein
? Oh, yes, your inquiries have not gone unnoticed. You wish to prevent me from my work accomplishing in Chicago?”

I said, “Hell, no. I’m all for your Chicago caper; in fact, for personal as well as official reasons I’d like to give you a discreet hand there. But we don’t have time to go into that now. No, the guiding geniuses of a certain well-known undercover organization instructed us to save them from possible public embarrassment by insuring your permanent silence—I think you can guess who gave us those instructions. What the hell made you accept that idiot contract? From those people? You know how they are.”

The P38 was steady. “You speak so of your own government colleagues?” Then Bultman shrugged his shoulders and spoke wryly: “You know how it is, Helm. One wonders if one could do it. Then one is offered very much money to do it, and it is a great challenge,
nicht wahr
? To be the one who accomplished it, who actually removed the bearded one at last, after so many had failed…”

“So you joined the ranks of the failures and wound up with a tin foot and the little publicity-shy lads from Virginia running scared along your trail.”

“So frightened, apparently, that they did not dare to catch up with me, but sent you instead.”

I grinned. “Hell, that’s what we’re for. Every so often they remember it. Very reluctantly.”

“And what do you plan now, Helm?”

“Why,” I said, “I am going to complete my assignment according to my own best judgment, as my chief instructed me to. Raise your right hand… Oh, for Christ’s sake! I’m unarmed and I’m sure you’ve got a couple of guns covering me besides your own.”

Bultman hesitated. “I do not understand… Ah, very well.” He switched the automatic to his left hand and held up the other.

“Good,” I said. “Now swear to me on whatever you hold sacred that you will never, under any circumstances, reveal the identity of the organization for which you were working on that ill-fated mission on which you lost your foot.”

“
Ach
, this is stupid!” he said irritably. “I do not betray the names of my principals.”

I said, “I know that. And you know it. So what harm does it do to swear it?”

After a moment, he smiled thinly. “Very well. I do so swear.”

“Danke schön,”
I said. “I have now insured your permanent silence as my orders required. There’s my official assignment in Costa Verde, all taken care of. What’s yours? The last I heard, you were in Mexico City, recruiting.”

“You are well informed. But some of the specialists I needed were not immediately available, so I called my principal here and asked if delay was permissible. I was told that it was; but I was asked if I would be willing to perform a small additional task while I was waiting. At a price, of course.”

“Of course,” I said.

“This mass kidnaping has come to the attention of my principal. He fears that if the hostages are harmed he will face strong disapproval in the United States on the grounds that he is no longer able to maintain order in his country; he may even lose the American support he requires to stay in power. On the other hand, he cannot afford to allow the prisoners to be ransomed. He cannot let one million dollars fall into the hands of the rebels.”

“So he’s making it as tough as he can for them to transfer the money; and meanwhile he’s hired you to pick a small task force from some crack units of the Costa Verde army and slip in and blast the hostages out.”

Bultman nodded. “With a generous bonus to be paid if I could manage to eliminate a certain Lupe de Montano in the process. However, when we located the rebel camp the prisoners were not there, and Montano had already been shot to death by one of his associates. We ascertained that the hostages were actually being held by a small guerilla unit at a place called Labal, and hastened there, and found nothing but dead men. That must have been an interesting fight in the place of the arch, Helm.”

“It was a busy evening,” I said. “So you came after us—”

“To place you under my protection, ja. When you met this force of rebels I assumed that you had simply recaptured been. I moved in to see if I could take them by surprise and rescue you—only to run into a very skillful ambush here.”

“Yes,” I said. “You’re on kind of a spot, aren’t you?”

“You should know; you are responsible.” He grimaced. “I was aware that you were considered expert with edged weapons and very good with long-range firearms; but I had not been told that you had experience in handling troops in this kind of terrain. I thought I was dealing merely with a crippled boy who knows only the textbooks he read in his military school; but suddenly these clumsy guerillas started behaving like jungle-trained veterans. My congratulations.”

“Wrong man,” I said. “You had the bad luck to tangle with a very experienced graduate of Vietnam. You admit that he’s got you trapped, and that he’s got enough manpower to wipe you out?”

Bultman said stiffly, “It will not be so easy. We will give a good account of ourselves.”

I said, “Fuck the heroics. You’re a pro. You don’t want to die bravely, you want to live profitably. Suppose I were to get you out of here, and maybe even arrange it so you get a little credit for bringing us poor hostages out unharmed, would you be willing to cooperate with me on a project I have in mind?”

Two days later I was sitting in my hotel room in Santa Rosalia waiting, like the others, for Latin-American bureaucracy and international diplomacy to cope with the perplexing problem we’d handed them. The phone rang and I listened to the voice of our current man in Costa Verde, never mind his name, reporting that our eager researchers back in the States had made the startling discovery that Dr. Archibald Dillman was not attending the archaeological conference he was supposed to be attending. He also said he’d received some information I’d asked for, and would send it right over.

“And you wanted to know if Bultman showed up at
El Palacio de los Cobernadores
,” the voice said. “He was seen leaving there this morning after having had appointments with Enrique Echeverria and
El Presidente
himself.”

I grimaced at the sunlit window. “It could be good; or it could be the biggest double-cross since the tenth disciple played his dirty trick. Keep an eye on him. Thanks.”

With nothing better to do, I went downstairs to have a drink by the pool. Some of our people were there in swimming attire, reminding me of another pool we’d frequented, actually in prettier surroundings than this tiled patio. I’d just settled down in a metal chair beside a glass-topped table when one of the swimmers came up dripping, drying her hair on a big towel.

“What in the world do you call that?” Gloria Jean Putnam asked. “It’s positively gigantic.”

“Let me introduce you to the local banana daiquiri, Mrs. Putnam,” I said. “Cocktails, dinner, dessert, and after-dinner drink, all in one.”

“I’ll have one, if you don’t mind.” She was in a snug and quite plain black tank suit that did nice things for her well-developed young body. She gave me a straight and steady look. “I need some advice. Please?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s what we’ve got most of. Make yourself comfortable.”

When I returned with her drink, she’d pulled a chair close to the one in which I’d been sitting. “Thanks,” she said, and then: “I feel kind of weird, don’t you? I mean, I feel that any minute now I’ll wake up and discover that I’ve been dreaming, I’ve just been taking a nap up in our little private temple, or whatever it was, and it’s time to grab the dirty clothes and give them a good scrubbing in the
cenote.
”

“I know what you mean.”

She said abruptly, “I’m not really a vengeful person, Sam. It gave me no satisfaction to see that man wounded and in pain. But I had to know that he was dead with… with what he’d learned about me. As long as he was alive, I knew I’d never quite be able to make myself forget it, and neither would Jim.” She shook her head abruptly. “But that’s not what I wanted to talk with you about.” She moved a little, and her towel dropped onto the tiled patio floor. “Pick it up for me, please,” she said. A little surprised at the direct order, I did as she’d asked, bringing my head close to her chair as I bent over. I heard her ask softly, “Is it safe to… to discuss things here, Sam?”

I picked up the towel and gave it to her. “There you are, ma’am.” After a moment, not looking around but considering the surroundings—the nearby bar, the noisy pool, the high wall surrounding the whole patio—I nodded. “I think it should be reasonably safe.”

She said, “I know your real name is Matt, but I still think of you as Sam.” She hesitated. “Does that revolution of Ricardo’s really have a chance, Sam?”

“Not much at the moment, I’d say.” I frowned thoughtfully. “Oh, they can probably hang on out there in the jungle and make themselves obnoxious almost indefinitely, but as far as breaking out and taking over the country is concerned, I wouldn’t put much money on them.”

“Do you mind telling me why you think so?”

“Ricardo,” I said. “Let’s face it, Lupe Montano may have been strictly a robber chief, but he was a seasoned fighter. Ricardo’s heart is very much in the right place, but the poor guy doesn’t get around very well and he doesn’t really know what he’s doing in a military way—hell, look at the way he ran that scouting party right under our guns, a bunch of tourists like us.”