The Annihilators (40 page)

Jackson nodded. “Here’s the key. It’s a dupe, just ditch it in a safe place when you’re through with it. You’ll have an observer and a helper. I’ll let you know the routine tomorrow night after I’ve checked with them again.”

“What about a range?”

“There’s a shooting club south of town where they play the silhouette-target game. It’s very popular these days, it seems: using high-powered rifles to knock down metal silhouettes of rabbits, turkeys, deer, moose. Well, I may not have quite the right tin animals, but they shoot them at fairly long distances and have a safe backstop area. You ought to be able to take care of your business there. I’ve made the arrangements.”

“And the rifle?”

“I’ll drive you out in the morning. I’ll bring the gun. And get it to the apartment afterward.” He gave me a quick glance and grinned. “Don’t say it. Yes, sir, I will treat it as if it were made of glass after you’ve got it sighted in. Like as if it were a bottle of nitro ready to blow at a jiggle. I know how you long-range boys are about your precious guns…”

I slept well that night. The chore ahead of me didn’t worry me greatly—you learn not to let them—and you don’t louse up your internal clock flying north and south the way you do flying east and west. In the morning I was informed that the Chicago satellite community of Lake Park had been totally cleared of our people, but not before reports had come in to the effect that the Jimenez establishment out there was now under surveillance by others. Bultman was moving his forces into position, presumably employing the information I’d given him—after doing a little careful checking of his own, no doubt.

I took a ride into the country with Jackson and got bounced around a bit by the big rifle—that .300 Holland and Holland Magnum is considered small stuff by the rugged gents who fire enormous double-barreled guns at elephants in Africa; but it’s still a very potent firearm with plenty of authority at the butt as well as at the muzzle. It took me a full box of cartridges to get it zeroed in properly, since the original telescopic sight, designed for daylight sniping, had been replaced at the last minute by a tricky optical device more suitable for night work. I returned to the Allmand Hotel with my shoulder sore and my ears bruised by the hearing protector I’d worn that Jackson must have borrowed from somebody with a noisy job and a small head.

After a somewhat belated lunch I crawled into one of the big double beds in my room for a nap, since there was a long wakeful night ahead. Around five I was aroused by the telephone and listened to Jackson telling me that Bultman had just confirmed date and time. The Kraut was going in tonight. Well, at oh two hundred; which made it technically tomorrow morning…

I tried very hard to think about Gloria Jean Putnam as I drove the little Datsun in the dark toward the. Chicago suburb where the big rifle awaited me. Why Gloria Jean? Well, she was one of the least disturbing subjects I could dredge up, and I tried to visualize her now, wondering whether or not she really had sent her man off to war.

Of course I could have occupied my mind, but not so safely, with thoughts of Frances Dillman, wondering if she was still keeping our adulterous secret or if she had succumbed to the terrible wifely urge to confess all.

Eleanor Brand would not have been a safe subject for reflection; there was too much disturbing guilt associated with her death to make her good thinking material for a man who’d need to be totally relaxed quite soon. However, even Elly was safer to think about than the shot I’d have to make shortly.

The best way to fluff a difficult shot is to think too much about it. Oh, advance planning and preparation are necessary, of course: The gun must be properly tuned and sighted, and the ammunition must be carefully loaded unless you’re willing to settle for the lesser accuracy of the factory product—perfectly reliable, of course, but in the nature of things it can never be tailored to the characteristics of your particular rifle. The target area must be inspected to make certain that no twigs or branches will intervene to deflect the bullet. The firing point must be selected with care, and a steady rest provided. The probable wind conditions must be studied; and a table of allowances must be prepared for various wind velocities. The range must, of course, be determined with care although, with a powerful, flat-shooting weapon like the .300 H. and H., you do have some leeway.

But once all this has been done, the thinking must stop. In particular, all clever last-minute brainstorms, adjustments, inspirations, and corrective impulses must be strangled at birth.

I could still remember, very clearly, my first shot at an antelope. I was a boy, hunting with my father; and there was the dream buck we’d been looking for. But he looked so
small
compared to the mule deer I’d already hunted successfully! The mental computer went into action unbidden: Looking so small, he must be very far away, best to hold over a hit to allow for the drop of the bullet at that great range. So I shot high, and missed high; and it was another two years before I finally bagged an antelope, not nearly as spectacular as that one. Actually, the target had looked small simply because the pronghorn is a small animal. A dead-center hold such as Dad had carefully instructed me to use would have got me that trophy—the first one lost to me by excessive cerebration, but not the last.

Tonight I knew that I had a particularly dangerous trap to look out for. I’d be shooting from the eighth floor of an apartment building into the front yard of a house four hundred and twenty yards away. It was a downhill shot in a sense; and everyone knows that the tendency is to shoot high downhill, and that therefore you must always hold low under such conditions. Well, this is perfectly true on a steep mountainside where you’re estimating the range along the precipitously sloping ground between you and the target. Gravity does not operate in a slanting direction; bullet drop does not depend upon the slant distance to the target but only upon the horizontal component thereof; so on long shots you have to hold under to allow for this.

But here the range figure I’d been given, and for which I’d sighted the rifle,
was
the horizontal distance from the base of the selected condominium to the Jimenez garage doors. As a matter of fact, the difference between the range measured from the base of the building, and that measured from my eighth-story-window firing point, was insignificant. (I’d actually punched it out on a pocket calculator: 420.0 yards versus 421.3 yards.) So I reminded myself firmly as I drove that when I got up there I must not, repeat,
not
, think of it as a downhill shot even though I was fairly high in the air. In fact I must not think of it at all. The thinking had all been done. All that was required now was the shooting…

There had once been many large estates out in the Chicago suburb known as Lake Park, perhaps even before it was known as Lake Park; but a significant percentage of them had gone for apartments and developments now. The Park Towers occupied, I’d been told, part of what was formerly a model horse-breeding establishment owned by a gent who’d made his money selling some kind of pain-killer pills. The adjacent property was still intact, however it had been owned by a soft-drink king and was now the retreat-in-exile of the former president of Costa Verde, along with his daughter, his younger son, and their well-armed entourage.

I stopped well away from the three tall condominium buildings, first, and got out of the car and walked a small distance up the road. It was a clear night for Chicago, but the stars were dim and distant; we put on a better celestial show out in my home state of New Mexico. I stood quite still for a minute or two, listening to the wind. Well, “listening” is perhaps not quite the right word; but I’ve always found my ears to be most sensitive to air movements, even when the zephyrs are too weak to make a real sound. Now in winter there were no leaves on the trees to respond to wandering breezes; and any pools or ponds that I might have used to get an estimate of wind speed and direction were either drained or frozen. I felt a slight chill on my left ear as I stood there, but it wasn’t strong enough to be significant. The weather boys had got it right for a change: a nice calm night.

I got back into the Datsun and drove around to the parking lot behind the apartment building to the right. I flashed the lights twice before cutting them entirely. Locking the little car, I walked up to a metal service door in the rear of the building, as instructed. It was opened by a husky dark-haired young man in white coveralls, not clean. Whether he actually had a janitorial job there, or was just depending on the fact that nobody pays any attention to a workman around a building like that, I didn’t know.

“Go on up the stairs,” he said. “It’s a climb, but you’ll have plenty of time to catch your breath. I’ll be along as soon as I’ve checked to see if you brought any company with you.”

I climbed the seven flights of concrete stairs, making some use of the tubular iron railings—as I’d been told, it was a climb, but at least the steps were engineered for ordinary human beings, not like some steps I’d climbed recently, which had been designed for priests and gods. A heavy fire door let me into a carpeted hallway on the eighth floor; the key I’d been given let me into the apartment with the proper number. I proceeded through the place without turning on the lights.

In the dining room I found what I was looking for. The dining table, a fairly husky piece of modern furniture, had been pulled over to the window. On it lay the long gun case, a respectable piece of luggage constructed like a good attache case but several times as long. There were also two black binocular cases, some small sandbags, and a couple of little items that turned out to be penlights. Well, all that could wait. As the man had said, there was plenty of time, two hours and twenty minutes to be precise—assuming that Bultman actually hit at the hour he’d specified of the night he’d specified and didn’t get cute and tricky.

I moved to the window. It was a country view, night version, with the landscaping, tennis courts, empty swimming pool, and lighted drives of the condominium complex spread out below me. Beyond them, across the main road, was the businesslike chain-link fence topped with barbed wire guarding the Jimenez property, more rustic and less manicured. A goodly distance behind the fence—four hundred yards is a lot of yards—was the rather elaborate dwelling, with the grounds around it brightly floodlit.

The house had been built in an era when stately country homes, or replicas thereof, were the in thing; it was a two-story manor house in the British tradition. Constructed of stone, it was blocky and impressive. The adjacent swimming pool with its green corrugated plastic windbreak did not really go with the original architect’s design; it had obviously been added later, as had the garage wing with its three blank doors that faced the paved parking area at the end of the drive curving in from the elaborate front gate of the estate, which was complete with a little gatehouse. There was a light inside this, and a man.

I was aware that my colleague of the evening—observer, Jackson had called him—had entered the apartment and come to stand behind me.

“Four-hour shifts at night,” he said. “Two on at a time. Everybody takes turns except the daughter and Jimenez the Elder. That’s Arturo Valdez, the cook, holding down the gatehouse now. Manuel Cordoba is working the perimeter with one of his dogs; the other cut a foot and is kenneled tonight.” He glanced at the glowing display of his digital watch. “We should see Cordoba over by that big pine tree inside the fence, in just a minute… There he comes.”

I reached for one of the binocular cases, got out the big night glasses, and focused them on the distant figure that had just appeared. The dog, walking at heel, was a black Doberman with brown edges, quite a handsome fellow. The man was tall for the country from which he had come, and quite broad; he had a big black piratical moustache. It was a face I’d seen once before in a stolen car from which a dead girl had just been thrown. Oso the Bear. We’d come the long way around, at least I had, but here we both were, although he didn’t know it. Strangely, I found no hatred now. Well, there seldom is any, when the time comes. It’s generally enough just to know that they’ll be dead shortly.

The glasses were heavy 7 x 50s, a Japanese brand with which I was not familiar, but sharp and clear. I watched man and dog disappear again into a thicket of leafless trees.

I said, “Hell, the way the place is lighted, we didn’t really need to go for that crazy night-fighting gadget. A good bright four-power scope with fairly heavy crosshairs would have done the job.”

He thought I was criticizing him and said quickly, “I had to consider the possibility that Bultman would wipe out the lights somehow, or that we might get a night with poor visibility.”

I said, “I wasn’t complaining, just commenting. You’re the one who set it up?”

“Yes, I’ve done more long-distance sniping than Jackson. I’m Marty.”

We shook hands. “I’m Eric,” I said.

He grinned. “Well, if you’re not, I’m in big trouble.”

But I could sense a certain amount of resentment. There always is some, when they have to do all the dirty work and are then asked to roll out the red carpet for the big-shot prima donna marksman who’ll march in at the last moment and take all the credit for making a perfectly easy shot they could have managed perfectly well by themselves. There was also some curiosity. He wasn’t quite sure whom I was here to shoot, although he was guessing hard.

I said, “It’s a good setup. Let me check out the placement of those sandbags—I think I have bigger hands and longer arms than you do—and then I guess I’ll lie down and rest a bit. Wake me if you see anything unusual; if not, kick me in the ass at one-thirty.”

I actually did go to sleep; which I think impressed young Marty more than my gaudy reputation as a hotshot senior operative. Aroused at last, I yawned and stretched and pulled myself together and went into the bathroom and took care of that, no bladder distractions tonight. I wondered idly how many important shots, and great opportunities, had been missed in the course of world history because somebody had to go at the wrong time. It was better than wondering just what the wind was doing out there now, and whether or not the damn gun was going to fire at all. Some haven’t.