The Annihilators (41 page)

Then it was only to wait by the open window, with the big rifle resting on the sandbags, muzzle well inside the room to contain the blast a bit. Cartridge in chamber. Safety off and to hell with the conventional safety rules. The piece wasn’t going to fire itself lying there, and nervous thumbs have been known not to get that lever all the way to “off” when shooting time came around. Night sight on, and what a Mickey-Mouse gadget that was: our own long-range adaptation of a military gizmo that wasn’t too pretty a design to start with. I’d been assured that the battery was good for hours, even days; and that as a matter of fact the thing should be switched on well ahead of use to make sure the circuits had time to stabilize—well, if you don’t like my scientific terminology, make up your own. Anyway, everything was ready that could be readied; and I was pleased to discover that Marty was smart enough to know this was no time for idle chatter. He busied himself with his binoculars and kept his mouth shut as we waited.

Suddenly he poked my arm. “That man in the gatehouse. I think he’s dead.”

I picked up my own glasses and studied the small, distant, illuminated house. The head of the man inside had fallen over at an odd angle. A very neat and sneaky piece of work. I glanced at my watch. Two o’clock.

I asked, “What about the dog patrol?”

Marty glanced at his own watch. “We’ll know in… three minutes. He should appear by that… There he is, a little ahead of… Christ!”

I had just spotted the man with the dog far off along the perimeter to the right, when the dog fell down. The man started instinctively to bend over the animal, but realized his mistake and whirled, unslinging the machine pistol he carried; but he never got it into firing position. He seemed to flinch and freeze; then he fell down beside the dog. Scratch Oso the Bear. I felt no great triumph. He was merely dead, as he should be; and I always hate to see a dog killed, even a savage guard dog that’s hardly more than an animated weapon. But the dog has no choice. He can’t help it if his fierce loyalty is employed in the service of a bunch of bastards. He can’t resign his job and go find some nice people to work for.

“What the hell are they using?” I asked.

“Arrows,” Marty said, squinting through his binoculars. “For God’s sake, real Robin Hood arrows with feathers on!”

“Probably with poison pods attached, to work so fast,” I said. “They made succinylcholine pods legal for bow-and-arrow deer hunting once, somewhere. Don’t ask me where, and don’t ask me to spell it for you; but you’ll be happy to know that the meat remains perfectly edible… Ah, here comes the main attack. Can’t say the Kraut doesn’t have discipline!”

With the guards out of the way, black-clad shadows were filtering in from the fences they must have cut or climbed, and converging on the big house. The doors delayed them only briefly; then they were disappearing inside. I heard a faint distant tinkling sound: the alarm bells. Then there was a mild rattle of sound like popcorn popping in a skillet several rooms away as the guns went into action. I remembered a tough little brown man, a good soldier, with whom I’d once done a difficult job in the Costa Verde jungle. Well, if they will go the terrorist route because it looks easy, the only answer is to show them how hard it really is.

Hector Jimenez was getting his hard answer now. I felt a little cheap, and a little relieved, because I wasn’t delivering it personally.

Meanwhile the estate gates had opened. Two vehicles entered and moved into the parking area before the garage doors. One was a big Lincoln, the luxurious semilimousine size that’s slightly out of fashion now; the other was a long Ford van. In addition to the driver in front, the Lincoln had a passenger in the rear. I tried to make out his face with the binoculars—I thought it was a man—but you can’t see much through that damn tinted glass.

But it was getting toward time for me to make my contribution to the evening’s performance. I laid the glasses aside and hunched over the big .300 Magnum in the bench-rest shooting position, right hand closed around the pistol grip of the stock to steady the weapon, left hand brought around under the butt in such a way that I could make fine adjustments in elevation simply by clenching or relaxing my fist. The fore-end of the rifle was, of course, solidly supported by the sandbags.

I squinted through the trick electronic scope and saw the idiotic little red dot glowing in the center of a field that looked a bit like a camera ground-glass except that, thank God, the image was at least right side up. The colors were all screwed up. I wondered if perhaps I shouldn’t focus the intense aiming dot a little more sharply. Then I told myself to stop that, leave it alone, cut it out! No final fiddling, dammit! And don’t hold low, you stupid jerk! Stop thinking…

“Oh, Jesus!”

I glanced quickly at Marty. He was staring through his binoculars, fascinated and aghast. Moving carefully so as not to disturb the gun too much, I reached for my night-glasses left-handed and put them to my eyes, and winced. A small pretty figure, elflike and unreal in a single long loose white garment, was stumbling through the gap in the swimming-pool windbreak: a slim young girl with long black hair whose bare arms and feet looked unbearably cold, and whose thin fluttering nightgown was darkly stained. She stopped and turned, waiting for someone, and he came: a young man bare to the waist and barefoot, wearing nothing but a hastily-pulled-on pair of trousers. Well, there they were, I told myself grimly. Leona the Lioness, and Lobo the Wolf.

He was carrying a submachine gun of some kind. As he turned to fire it behind him, he was hit hard and dropped the weapon. He went to his knees. The wounded girl staggered back to him and tried to lift him and lead him away, but her own strength was fading and his weight pulled her down. She managed only to pull him aside a little before she collapsed against the plastic windbreak, sliding down to a graceless sitting position—the girl who’d passed the sentence of death on Elly Brand. Okay, she had it coming, I told myself firmly. So she was a pretty young girl, so what? She still had it coming. I watched her find enough strength to lift her brother’s head into her lap.

The rear door of the limousine opened. Enrique Echeverria got out. There was no mistaking the red beard, even at night at that distance. As befitted his status as observer, he was in ordinary street clothes covered by a sharp-looking gray overcoat. But he was clearly unable to pass up the opportunity to make his own little contribution to the night’s proceedings. He stopped to take out an automatic pistol and haul back the slide to chamber a round; then he walked over to where Dolores Jimenez sat in her bloody nightgown, weakly stroking the unconscious face of her brother Emilio.

I laid the binoculars aside and bent over the big rifle once more. In the weird field of the image-intensifying gadget, as if on a TV screen that badly needed its colors adjusted, I saw Echeverria standing over brother and sister. The girl looked up at him dully, perhaps hoping for help. Echeverria took careful aim and put a bullet into Emilio’s head. He turned to Dolores. I had a strong urge to shoot, to hell with vengeance; but there were bushes along the windbreak and I could not be certain that a branch was not in the way. Anyway, the damn girl had made her choice, and I hadn’t come all this way to make a sentimental gesture on behalf of someone who wouldn’t survive the night anyway. Bultman would take care of her if Echeverria didn’t. No witnesses.

I waited and saw the man’s gun-hand jump with the recoil. Echeverria backed away and stood looking down at his handiwork with satisfaction. Bultman was inside dealing with the old wolf, but he, Enrique Rojo, had made sure of the cubs out here, with pleasure. The floodlight on the nearby roof shone brightly on the back of the natty overcoat, no branches intervened now, and the silly little red aiming dot looked very good, very steady, where I placed it carefully…

The Magnum fired. It made a fearful roar. It slammed back against my shoulder and reared up off its sandbags like an old-time artillery piece lifting its wheels off the ground in recoil. Then it fell back, leaving a ringing silence.

“Call it!” I said.

“Got him!” Marty said. “Dead center. I think you got the spine, the way he fell. Good shot, sir!”

It was the first time he’d called me sir, and he had no business doing it. There’s only one sir in our outfit.

I said, “Start putting this stuff away while I watch what’s happening.”

“Yes, sir. Greg should be along any minute to give us a hand cleaning up.”

I was watching through the binoculars. It had worked out better than we’d hoped, planning it. We’d expected that Bultman would have to coax the man out of the car with some excuse and set him up for me. Of course Bultman could not actually dispose of Echeverria, the representative of his client, himself. That would have been unethical—and if you feel like laughing, I suggest you do it where Bultman can’t hear you. He’s a very ethical guy according to his lights.

But now he could with a clear conscience remind President Armando Rael that he, Bultman, had protested vigorously against having a babysitter inflicted upon him; and if the guy wouldn’t stay in the car as he’d been told but wandered around in the middle of the firefight to exercise his silly little pistol, and stopped a stray slug, it could hardly be called his, Bultman’s, fault or sufficient reason for withholding the balance of his fee.

The withdrawal was a very quick and neat operation. They came running from the house and filed into the long van rapidly. I could see only one casualty that had to be helped. Bultman came last, in black like the rest, limping a little on his artificial foot and carrying a machine pistol that looked like an Uzi. He paused briefly to glance at the two dead young people, and bent for a moment over Echeverria’s body where it lay in a spreading pool of blood. He straightened up, looking in my direction, nodding. Bull’s-eye.

You had to hand it to the guy. For all he knew I was watching him through the night-sight of the Magnum rifle; and as he was well aware, there were people in my government who wouldn’t mind a bit hearing that he was dead. But he was a pro, and I was a pro, and he stood there for a moment allowing himself to be a perfect target; then he turned deliberately and got into the Lincoln. The big car rolled away in the wake of the van.

There was no sign that the single shot had aroused anybody in our building—one shot at that time of night generally just wakes them up confused wondering if they actually heard anything. But I heard a long, wild howl in the distance. The remaining Doberman, that had survived in its kennel because of a hurt foot, was mourning its dead.

Mac thought he was entitled to an explanation. It was morning, and I was sitting on one of the big beds in my big double room in the Allmand Hotel, listening to the familiar voice in the telephone.

“I think I’m entitled to an explanation, Eric.” The voice was stiff and reproving. “Your mission—one of your missions—was to deal with a professional killer named Bultman. I am informed that, after expertly disposing of a fairly prominent Latin-American politician for reasons known only to yourself, you then passed up a very good, shot at your assigned target; and that as far as is known, Bultman is still quite healthy except for the foot he lost in Cuba.”

I said, “Sir, if you’ll review my orders, you’ll find that in the Bultman matter I was instructed to use my own judgment. I made contact with the Kraut down in Costa Verde. I assured myself that there is no way in the world he’ll ever reveal who hired him for his disastrous Cuban venture. That’s what our friends over in Virginia are really concerned about, isn’t it?”

“Do I get the impression that you like the man?”

“Like, no,” I said. “Respect, yes. And without direct orders—none of this use-your-judgment stuff—I’m not going to make a needless touch on a guy who’s done us no harm just because those clowns down there across the Potomac are so blabber-mouthed themselves that they can’t conceive of anybody else keeping quiet about anything. Furthermore, I had a use for Bultman, so I made a deal with him; and I saw no reason to go back on it last night. That was my second mission, wasn’t it, to stage an object lesson for the benefit of anybody else who might try to influence us by kidnaping and intimidation, call it Operation Jimenez?”

“An object lesson hardly serves its purpose if nobody gets the point. That paramilitary attack was very obviously not our kind of operation.”

I said, “People aren’t stupid, sir. At least the people we want to impress aren’t. By now the word has got around that the Jimenez outfit pulled the old hostage routine on us and, when their demands were refused, killed the hostage. Pretty soon the word will go around that a month afterward, the Jimenez outfit was totally annihilated. No matter who actually pulled the trigger, or triggers, nobody who’s thinking of tackling us by that method is going to dismiss it as coincidence, sir, remembering a few other folks who tried to blackmail us like that who didn’t get what they wanted, either, and who are no longer around.”

There was a pause. At last Mac said grudgingly, “Very well, let’s say that you have accomplished your objectives in a reasonably satisfactory manner. However, I still think I’m entitled to an explanation of why the resources of this agency were employed to help you in the quite unauthorized removal of a stray Costa Verde police functionary.”

“Stray, hell,” I said. “That’s an insult, sir. Echeverria didn’t stray one little bit. He came right under my gun because I talked his president and Bultman into putting him there. Incidentally, the bullet seems to have achieved total penetration and nobody seems to be interested in hunting for it. With so many dead bodies on their hands, the authorities are apparently cutting a few corners and attributing them all to submachine gun fire, except the bow-and-arrow jobs of course. But you might tell the armorer we may not have got as much expansion with that new bullet as we should have. If the slug had mushroomed properly, it would have met enough resistance to stay in the body at that range. As it turned out, of course, it was all for the best; but normally I hate to waste bullet energy drilling holes in the scenery behind the target.”