Such Men Are Dangerous (7 page)

I opened the knot. He turned over, sat up, rubbed his wrists.

He said, “A couple of feet of twine—”

I handed him a pork chop and told him to shut up and eat it. I ate mine. When he was done I threw the bones into the water. I opened the quart bottle of shine and brought him two ounces in an empty tin can.

“Aren’t you drinking?”

“No.”

“I forgot. Two a day before dinner and no more, right?”

“One of the things we won’t talk about is the list.”

“Don’t get angry—”

“I’m just telling you.”

“Sure.” He drained the can in two swallows. “Smooth,” he said.

“Homemade corn.”

“Nothing like it. They make it around here?”

“I don’t know.”

He asked if he could go to the boat for cigarettes. I told him no—he might have a gun there, or might try to get away. He said he would give me his word. I just looked at him. He asked, then, if I would go for his cigarettes. I told him not to be silly. He stopped talking.

I said, “About the twine. You don’t understand anything at all. The cost of it doesn’t matter. It’s the inconvenience. The greatest nuisance in the world is garbage. I don’t throw things into the water unless they get eaten sooner or later. So—”

“What about the bones?”

“They’ll break down. Fish will eat parts of them and pick at the meat and marrow, and the rest will nourish some form of life. And—”

“And my gun?”

“Lesser of two evils. I don’t usually throw guns in the sea. I don’t usually have to. Shut up, will you?” He did. “So with twine, little unusable bits of twine, I have to burn them. That’s easy enough, but it’s something else that has to be done. And twine doesn’t burn that well. They treat the fibers with some sort of crud and it stinks when it bums.

“And if I waste twine, sooner or later I’ll have to buy more twine. Which means remembering to pick it up at the store, and carrying it to the boat, and having it take up so much space in the boat, and carrying it ashore and putting it away again. The less often I have to do this, not just with twine but with everything else—”

“I get the point.”

“Do you? I don’t mean the twine, I mean the real point. That there’s a reason for everything I do. That I have worlds of time out here with nobody in my way. That I’ve gradually worked things out so that my life runs exactly the way I want it to. Whenever I find that I’ve got something in the shack that’s useless, I get rid of it. I use books I’m finished with to start fires. I used to have a fork and a spoon, small ones for eating, and one day I realized that I was eating all my meals with my fingers anyway, or else eating with the cooking fork. So I dug a hole and buried the tableware. I don’t want anything extra around. I don’t want anything to get in my way.”

“It’s an unusual attitude.”

“It works for me.”

“Uh-huh.”

I left to take a leak, and that reminded him that he had a similar function to perform. I told him where to go, and to kick sand over it when he was done. On the way back he said, “Paul? There’s something you might want to hear, but it refers to something you said not to mention.”

“Huh?”

“It refers to, uh, the list.”

“Oh, go ahead.”

He chose his words carefully. “One item there, one of the maxims, was about not talking to anyone. Unnecessarily, that is.”

“So?”

“Well, if you think back over the past few minutes. When you started explaining about the twine, and your views on garbage, uh, and getting rid of useless articles. You didn’t have to bother explaining all of that to me. That was what I suppose would come under the heading of unnecessary talk. Until then you hardly talked at all, but now it’s as if you want to talk, to have a conversation.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m not making any point. I just thought it was something you might like to hear about.”

I didn’t answer him, and he let it lie there. After a while I said that it was getting dark and suggested we move closer to the fire. We did. I asked him if he wanted coffee.

“If you’re having some,” he said.

I poured fresh water into my cast-iron kettle and put it on the fire. When it boiled I added powdered coffee, stirred it, scooped out two cans and gave him one.

“Thanks.” he said.

“I don’t have sugar or cream.”

“This is fine.”

“If you want to get those cigarettes out of your jacket, you can probably dry them out.”

“And they’ll be smokable?”

“If they don’t rip, and if you don’t scorch them.”

He got the pack and opened it. There were seven cigarettes, and two had already come apart. I spread out four alongside of the fire. The last one I kept. I found a piece of firewood that was just burning at one end, and I fished it out and toasted the cigarette with it. The paper got brown in spots but stayed intact. I gave it to Dattner and held the flame while he lit up.

I asked him if it was all right, and he said he couldn’t remember one ever tasting better.

I sat back and watched the fire and drank my coffee. I thought suddenly of the paperback dictionary and the possible reasons why I might want one. A dictionary is a book full of words. Words are talk, talk is communicating with other people.

If Dartner hadn’t told me that I was breaking one of my rules, I would have gone on to tell him that my major preoccupation was with water. I went through three to four gallons of bottled water a week. I needed it for drinking, for washing, for cooking, for coffee. If there was only a way to have a fresh-water source on the island—

Don’t talk to anyone.

And that had been such an easy rule, and for such a long time. Something I might like to hear about, he had said. Something I might like to think about, he had meant. Something he might like me to think about.

He said, “Maybe I could use the fire to dry my clothes.”

“It doesn’t work. The sun will dry them in the morning.”

“I’m staying overnight, then?”

“Did you have other plans?”

He laughed. I thought he was going to say something, but he didn’t. He finished his cigarette and was going to flick the butt away. Then he remembered and put it in the fire. That pleased me.

I said, “Okay.”

He looked at me.

“Let’s hear about the operation.”

“The what?”

“The Agency thing, the job,” I said patiently. “The reason you’re here. Don’t look surprised. You finally found the right bait, you shouldn’t pretend to be shocked that there’s a fish on the line. You’re trying not to smile. Go ahead and smile. And then tell me all about it.”

SIX

“P
ICTURE
A
N
A
RMS
shipment,” Dattner was saying. “All U.S. government-issued goods, nothing but the best. The government wants to send them to friends. Instead the bad guys get them.”

“So?”

“So the idea is to get them back.”

I looked at him. “That’s all?”

“No, of course not, Paul. I just—”

“Because it doesn’t make any sense. It happens all the time. If I had a dime for every American in Vietnam shot with a U.S.-made gun … a dime, hell, if I had a grain of sand for every one I’d have a beach. It happens everywhere, all over the world. We send guns to guerrillas and the government forces confiscate them. We supply government troops and the guerrillas steal them. Most of the time it’s a case of a government official going bad and turning a fast dollar. Other times the weapons are taken in military action.”

“And we never try to recover them?”

“If we do, I never heard about it.”

“We make a stab at it once in a while, Paul. Mostly we try to buy them back, and you’d be surprised how often it works. But as a general rule you’re absolutely right. Shipments get derailed and it’s part of the game, and we have plenty of factories turning out plenty of guns, and it’s easier to make new guns than chase the old ones. By the time the enemy gets them, they’re generally obsolete, anyway.”

“So?”

“So this is different.”

He picked up a cigarette and made a production of lighting it. He was waiting for me to ask him how it was different. Then he could tell me that was a good question, and I could say—

What I said was, “Just tell it straight. There are no points given for suspense and dramatic effects. Just tell it.”

“The direct approach, eh? But sometimes a straight line isn’t the shortest distance between two points. Sometimes a great circle route—”

“Not here. Not on my island.”

A smile, a nod. “Okay. To hell with drama. This isn’t ordinary weaponry, conventional stuff. We’re talking about a shipment that’s worth in excess of two million dollars and fits into four trucks. We’re talking about the most highly sophisticated combat devices ever produced for guerrilla warfare. I don’t have to tell you about guerrilla warfare. You had ten years of it. All I have to say is that this gear makes the stuff you used in Asia look like water pistols. They didn’t give you fellows toys like this. They’ve been making them all along, but they were never okayed for combat use. Not because they don’t work. The testing reports would knock you out. But because nobody would buy escalation on that scale.

“Like atomic grenades, for example. One man throws one and clears three acres. Like nuclear mortars. Gas grenades. Do you realize what you’ve got when you can combine the knockout power of a nuclear blast with the maneuverability of a mortar? Do you realize how effective they’d be against guerrillas? Or how well they’d work for guerrillas?”

“The real dirty stuff.”

“Right.”

“We kept hearing rumors that we were getting stuff like that. Or that the other side was.” I remembered a tangle we had in Laos on a patrol deep in Pathet Lao territory. I tried to imagine what it would have been like if we’d had that kind of weaponry.

Or if they had it.

“I could go on, Paul, but you wanted it engraved on the head of a pin. It’s choice stuff, the real dirty stuff. The decision to give it to some friends was ultra-top level. It didn’t make the papers. It never will—if the question ever comes up, we’ll deny we ever had it, we’ll insist they made it out of old tire tubes in Burma, we’ll lie our heads off no matter who says what. Hell, giving the stuff out couldn’t get fifty votes in the House or twenty in the Senate.”

“Keep talking.”

“I was just noticing the stars. It’s beautiful out here, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Peaceful. I could see how a man could enjoy spending nights here, under the stars, sitting beside a fire—”

“You made your point, Dattner.”

“George.”

“You made your point. Get on with it.”

He flicked ashes from his cigarette. “You can figure out the rest, can’t you? The shipment was dispatched—not, needless to say, through the usual channels. You can also guess who was supposed to receive it.”

“The hell I can. I haven’t looked at a newspaper or heard a radio in months. For all I know we sent the crud to Canada.”

“I forget how out of touch you’ve been.”

“Not out of touch. Call it—no, forget it, forget word games. Where were they supposed to go?”

“To guerrillas, and in this hemisphere, and now you can guess, Paul, because it’s the same guess you would have made a year ago. You with me?” I was. “But instead of going where they were supposed to go, a wheel came off and they wound up in the wrong hands. At first it looked as though they were going to go to the bad-guy government that our good-guy guerrillas were trying to overthrow, and that would have been more or less terrible, but it turned out that it was worse than that. A lot worse, because we could have made a good stab at blocking that shipment.”

He put his cigarette in the fire. “Instead it turns out that the new destination of all this hell on wheels is yet another group of guerrillas, but in this instance they’re bad-guy guerrillas who’ll use them to knock hell out of a good-guy government. Four truckloads of this garbage is just about enough to do it, too, but it hardly matters whether they win or lose, because the U.S.A. loses either way. If they make it, we’ve lost the cornerstone of free Latin America. If they flop, a lot of people will want to know what happened. It won’t even help us to deny that these were our goods, not even if anybody’s fool enough to believe us. Because then people will ask how the hell we managed to let the enemy smuggle dynamite like this into the western hemisphere. Did I say dynamite?” He snorted. “It’s about time we changed our lingo. Dynamite is something kids use to celebrate the Fourth of July. Where was I?”

“If we lose we lose, and if we win we lose.”

“That says it. There’s only one way to come out of this clean. We have to get the shipment back before delivery is made.”

“Or prevent delivery.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“Not really. If the object is to prevent delivery, all you have to do is destroy it. If it’s in trucks you drop bombs on them. If it’s on a ship you sink it. If it’s in a plane you shoot it down. It sounds like a job in the Air Force, doesn’t it?”

He grinned. “This stuff is nuclear, remember? You blow it up and you have fallout.”

“So you say
Sorry about that
and explain that it won’t happen until next time.”

“Even if it’s in a friendly country?”

“Even if it’s in London.”

“And suppose it’s in the United States. Then what?”

I stared at him.

“Because that’s where it’s at, Paul. It’s in the midwest right now, smack in the Heartland of America, as the fellow says. We know the location and we know the players on the other team. We know how they’re going to ship it. We can even make a hell of a good guess when they’re going to ship it. It’ll go by air, of course, and takeoff time will be in more than a week and less than three.”

“If it’s in the States, and you can pinpoint the location—”

“Let me go on, Paul.” He lit another cigarette, but without theatrics this time. “We could bomb the storage site, of course.”

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

“I know, but it’s one of the things we’ve thought about. Our computers estimate it would cost us two-thirds of the population of three counties, plus long-term fallout victims scattered over four states. That’s been tentatively ruled out.”