The Annihilators (34 page)

I thought about the ancients who had once populated this area. I thought about a girl who was dead. I thought about one who wasn’t, but might as well be, as far as I was concerned; I hoped her goddamn Archie knew what he had there. I thought about a retribution still to be exacted. I found myself nodding and realized that I was very sleepy…

Suddenly I was awake and alert. My unfocused eyes, scanning the jungle idly, had caught a tiny flash of light in the distance that didn’t belong there. As I watched it came again, and I knew it for what it was: the reflection of sunlight on metal, probably the metal of a machete being used to cut trail for someone disinclined to expose himself on the lone road through this area. I waited a little, but the flash did not come again; I must have been lucky enough to catch it just right through a hole in the brush and trees way off there. I made my way down to the road and headed after the party at a lope, but found they’d made it easy for me to catch up by stopping for lunch. Jim Putnam had come back to join them.

“Trouble?” he asked as I hurried up to him.

“Company,” I said. “Coming up astern, say two miles back. Not too fast; they’re breaking trail instead of using the road.”

“Numbers?”

I shook my head. “All I saw was a reflection off something, probably a machete. Of course it could be a lone Indian out hunting.”

“It’s a nice thought, but we can’t gamble on—Marshall!”

“Yesh, shir, Captain Putnam, shir!”

“While Sam grabs something to eat, you take a hike back to the bend in the road beyond that one you can see, take cover, and listen. Listen hard. If you hear anything at all, come running.”

Marshall Wilder still didn’t like me very much. His mouth was less swollen than it had been, but the scabs where the split lips were healing were not attractive, and the missing teeth still prevented him from talking clearly. Obviously whether I starved or not was the least of his worries, but he jogged off without protest, with an assault rifle at the ready.

Jim Putnam glanced at me, with a brief grin. “He saw Howie Gardenschwartz with a toy and couldn’t bear not to have one like it. I just hope I’m behind them and not in front of them when they open up. Mrs. Henderson’s got one of the Brownings in that big shoulder bag of hers, and Paul’s wife’s got the other. He says she can shoot pretty well even if she talks a little too much sometimes—he was kidding her when he said it. They’re okay.” He was just rambling along while he considered his decision. “Not much choice, is there, Sam?”

“Not much,” I said. “Even if we stick the worst slowpokes in the Jeep, and there’s not room for many, we’ll never outrun a bunch of healthy, jungle-wise characters who are probably about half the average age of this party.” I found a sandwich and a bottle of beer being thrust into my hands by General Henderson. It had been a long time since that morning snack at the Arch of the Emperors; and the big hunks of local bread with some kind of tinned meat between them tasted very good. “Thank you, sir,” I said belatedly.

“Never mind the sirs, son; I’m just the chauffeur around here.” The old man glanced at Jim Putnam. “I gather we have problems.”

Putnam grimaced. “Sam made the mistake of looking back, like the man said not to, and something is gaining on us.”

“Well, we’re in no shape to outrun it, whatever it is, that’s for sure. With your permission, Captain, I’ll get the Jeep under cover.”

“Permission granted. Grab anybody you need to help.” Jim looked around. “Thank God for those indefatigable old pyramid-builders. How about that big one over there, with all the rocks on top? We can hold out up there for a while at least and hope that somebody with a white hat hears the shooting… Oh, Christ, here comes more trouble!”

Elspeth Olcott, who’d apparently been keeping her husband company up ahead, was approaching at a tired run, her blond hair damp around her shiny face. She had to keep holding onto the big 9 mm pistol thrust into the waistband of her smart but rather dusty green slacks. A bunch of middle-aged, inexperienced folks playing jungle fighters; but I had nothing but respect for them now. They hadn’t all endured captivity well; but now they were mostly doing the best they could. Jim Putnam went to meet the breathless woman, listened to the report she gasped out, and came back.

“Motors ahead,” he said. “More than one vehicle approaching, Paul says. It looks as if they’ve got us whipsawed.” He shook his head quickly. “Well, there’s no choice now. We’ll take cover up there. Glory, run and get Marshall back here on the double, please. Howie, jog on up and ask Paul to come in, fast. Everybody else start climbing… To hell with outposts. If we have to shoot, with the amateur talent we’ve got, we want to be able to let them fire at anything that moves in this lousy brush without worrying about whether or not it’s one of ours. Come on, Sam, let’s give Austin a hand…”

Shortly, the Jeep was out of sight, well back in the jungle, covered with brush. The vegetation damaged in getting it there had been hastily replaced or repaired. The noncombatant ladies were safely hidden in the rocks of the fallen temple—if it was a temple—on top of the artificial hill. Unrestored, this pyramid exhibited no steps, just steep rubble slopes covered with scraggly vegetation. The combatant ladies—including Gloria Jean who, at her insistence, had been given a spare M16 and a thirty-second course in how to use it—were stationed around the defensive perimeter with their husbands.

I’d been assigned to help Henderson direct the defense of the rear of our position once things got really tough and we were surrounded up there; in the meantime I crouched behind some tumbled masonry beside the Putnams wondering how, in the rush of events, they’d managed to find time to resolve their personal problem, but it was quite evident that they had: The girl was looking so pretty you could hardly stand it. I reflected upon the fact that love merely turns men unbearably smug, while it turns women beautiful, which doesn’t seem quite fair. We watched the road, since nothing had shown in the jungle behind us since those telltale machete flashes. The sound of the approaching motorized force was quite loud now; and presently the lead Jeep came into sight filled with armed men who looked dangerously tense and alert.

“It’s Montano’s bunch, all right,” Jim Putnam whispered. His face was grim. “No army insignia; and I recognize that bent fender. That’s one of the Jeeps they used to transport us to Labal.” ‘He glanced at me and grinned tightly. “George Armstrong Custer, where are you now that we really need you? Any brilliant suggestions, Mr. Government Agent?”

I said, “Hell, man, why do you think I dumped it all in your lap? You get to make all the fun decisions. Fight and die, or surrender and die.”

“Yes, if we do surrender, I don’t suppose Mr. Montano will be very nice to us after he finds all those dead men. We’d better make as much of a fight of it as we can, and hope for the best.”

I said, “Agency policy has always been to take as many of the bastards with you as you can, when you go. If you simply have to go. But let’s not rush it, they haven’t spotted us yet… Whoa, wait a minute! Let me have those toy binoculars, please.”

The lead Jeep had gone by without seeing us or our hidden vehicle. Now, after a considerable interval, the second Jeep was coming into sight at the end of the straight stretch of road below us. I focused on it with the expensive little folding glasses belonging to Elspeth Olcott, which had been overlooked when our captors relieved our luggage of all other negotiable valuables. Occasional trees and branches intervened—we didn’t have a totally unobstructed view of the road—but I saw that there were three men in the second vehicle and that there was something lashed to the rear of it that reflected silvery glints in the sunlight.

The driver was a small dark man I didn’t know. The man in the rear was, rather to my surprise, an Anglo—as we call the non-Spanish up in my home state of New Mexico. Gringo, if you prefer. I didn’t know him, either. I tried to see the man up front beside the driver, but a tree got in the way, so I swung the glasses onto the car behind. This was a beat-up old armored personnel carrier of some kind, full of lower-class manpower just as the first Jeep had been. The one between the two vehicles was, as I’d thought, the command car. The face of the man in the forward passenger seat came into clear focus…

“Don’t shoot!” I whispered urgently to Jim Putnam. “Don’t let anybody shoot. Slip around quickly and tell them all to keep their heads down and hold their fire no matter what happens… Here, take these.”

He took the glasses and the assault rifle I handed him. “What are you going to…”

I said softly, “Take a quick look at that Jeep and you’ll understand. Just for God’s sake keep everybody from getting trigger-happy. I’ve got to get down there before they get clear past us.”

I went out of there low, keeping cover between me and the road and angling right to cut off the slow-moving Jeep below; also to draw attention away from our hiding place, if I were spotted. I found a solid slab of limestone that had slid down from the ruins on top, and rose up behind it.

“
Hey, Dick Anderson!
” I shouted. “
Hey, Ricardo Jimenez!
”

I threw myself flat behind my protecting slab just in time. As I’d expected, the crowded vehicles exploded like damaged hornets’ nests, men diving for cover in all directions, hosing down the surrounding jungle as they ran: the good old if-it-moves-or-talks-shoot-it syndrome characteristic of green troops under heavy stress. All we needed to have a firefight nobody could stop was a couple of shots from our pyramid fortress; but Jim Putnam had them under control up there and nobody fired back.

As the shooting petered out, I heard orders being snapped below. I raised my head cautiously and shouted, “Tell them to cut it out, amigo, or I won’t push your damn wheelchair any more.”

After a moment, young Jimenez’s voice called back, “Come on down, Matt.”

I drew a long breath and stood up slowly and made my way down the slope to the road, which was now full of revolutionary manpower more or less in uniform. Another vehicle had appeared around the curve to my left; and I thought I could see more behind that. The members of the Army of Liberation seemed a little abashed at the way they’d made fools of themselves, which was a hopeful sign, much better than if they’d been mad at me for being the cause of it.

Ricardo Jimenez was standing beside his Jeep, holding onto it for support, while the driver unstrapped the shiny wheelchair secured behind. He was in a khaki uniform with an officer’s cap more or less concealing his bleached hair, and a big automatic pistol at his hip—a .45 Colt, I noted, rather than the locally popular 9 mm Brownings. Fewer shots, but more authority per shot.

Ricardo made an apologetic gesture. “Sorry about that. They’re a bit keyed up.”

“A bit,” I said. “Tell them to relax, if it’s Colonel Sanchez they’re worrying about.”

Ricardo studied me for a moment. “I see. That is how you come to be free. So Sanchez got careless? We were not informed.”

“We didn’t leave anybody to inform, amigo. That would have been stupid, wouldn’t it? You’ll see the
zopilotes
when you get down the road a ways.” I looked at his military column. “Do I gather there has been a change of command?”

Ricardo nodded. “I… took your advice.”

“Kind of slow about it, weren’t you?” I said. “I waited damn near ten days, until Sanchez forced my hand. I was beginning to think you’d let that two-gun
bandido
beat you to the draw.”

He shook his head. “The situation was never right. I could not, after all, fight with him for the kidnaping he’d used to force Señora Dillman to help me into the country, which I had not known about—I was naive enough to think that she was simply an idealistic and freedom-loving lady—but it had been done for me. It would have seemed ungrateful of me to quarrel with him over that. It was not until I saw your camera case and the Putnams’ jewelry in his quarters, and learned how he was using our revolution for his own profit, shaming and defiling our cause with his cheap thievery and his million-dollar extortion plot…” Ricardo smiled thinly. “Your advice was very useful, Matt. My men were ready when he lost his temper at my accusations and reached for one of his big pistols. They took care of his bodyguards; but it was my shot that took care of him.”

“You’re improving,” I said. “But you’ve got a ways to go, Generalissimo.”

“What do you mean?”

“Shouldn’t that armored job be out front? And what the hell are you doing making a target of yourself in an open car? Well, military techniques aren’t my bag; all I know is that right now you’ve got half a dozen
fusilitas automaticas
or whatever the Spanish for M16 is, looking down your throat. If we’d been Sanchez, you’d be dead, and a lot of your expeditionary force with you.” I glanced at him sharply. “You figured if he’d heard about Montano’s death and your takeover, he’d be laying for you?”

“It was a possibility. Or he would have taken his place quietly enough as my second-in-command and then plotted to displace me. You have done me a favor by removing him. He was an ambitious man, with strong overseas connections; and there are, I’m afraid, some in our ranks who find the Marxist doctrine attractive. There are also some who would prefer as their leader a seasoned military man rather than a crippled boy, even if the boy’s name is Jimenez. They could be right.” He grimaced and looked up at the pyramid. “Up there? Yes, even a group of tourists, properly armed, could have done us much damage from up there. I do have things to learn, I am afraid. But tell them to come down. It is safe now.”

I hesitated. “How about the gang you’ve got coming up behind us? I’d hate to have them blundering in here with their safeties off and their fingers on their triggers, if they’re as nervous as… What’s the matter?”

Ricardo was frowning. “Somebody is following you? I have nobody out there, Matt. You did say you wiped out
all
of Sanchez’s unit?”

“Sanchez, Barbera, and ten men. All we ever saw. I guarantee they’re following nobody. You’d better throw out some scouts between here and Labal and see who the hell is sneaking around out there… Just a minute. I’ve got an idea. How proud are you, Generalissimo?”