Authors: Jim Case
Too caught by surprise to even emit a shout of alarm before he was dangling upside-down like bagged game ready to be skinned,
Lund ended up with the top of his head five feet from the ground.
Cody bounded out from cover, the knife already unsheathed, the Weatherby swinging around in a punching arc, used as a club.
The first man, in front of Lund, came around with a snarling oath at the commotion of Lund being hoisted topsy-turvy, but
the guy walked into the sharp smack of the Weatherby’s ventilated rubber recoil pad buttplate across his right temple. His
knees buckled and he went down.
Cody pulled the Weatherby around, down into firing position on the third man before the first had fully collapsed upon the
ground.
Lund swung lazily back and forth, a human pendulum, cursing vividly, attempting to pull himself up and around, reaching up
toward the knotted line around his ankles, but he could not bend himself back up far enough.
The third man had his rifle nearly around in target acquisition, but abruptly ceased all movement like a robot with its juice
cut when he found himself looking into the Weatherby’s muzzle.
This one know weapons, thought Cody. He’ll recognize the rifle aimed at his heart. He’ll know the Weatherby fires a five-hundred-grain
bullet that achieves the highest velocity of any bullet in the world. He’ll know what such a bullet would do to his chest
if he made the slightest wrong move.
“Drop it,” Cody instructed. “You don’t have to die.”
The man dropped it.
Lund continued swaying back and forth, not giving up the impossible task of trying to free himself.
“Cody, damn you, you rotten goddamn sonofabitch. Let me the hell down from here!”
Cody did not take his eyes or the Weatherby’s muzzle away from the bead drawn on the third man’s heart.
“Handgun, too.”
Lund shouted, “Cody, for chrissake—”
“Shut up, Pete.”
He watched the other man reach under his jacket and ever so gently remove a .44 Magnum from concealed shoulder leather. The
man held the pistol by his fingertips, away from his body, and let it drop.
An owl hooted from a tree somewhere nearby.
Cody motioned with the rifle, directing the man to stand near where the unconscious figure of the first one lay sprawled.
“Over there.”
The agent obeyed, his hands raised, his mouth a worried, tight gash across a nervous face.
Lund gave up struggling.
“Jesus H., Cody, what the hell is this? Let me down, damn you—”
Cody kept his peripheral vision on the agent standing with upraised hands next to his unconscious pal. He lowered the Weatherby
so the snout of the muzzle nudged Lund’s nostrils none too gently, like the cold kiss of death.
“You’ve been behind a desk too long, Pete. You bozos were too easy. How did you find me?”
“How the hell should I know?” Lund bristled. “I didn’t find you. I was told where you were and I came, and this is the kind
of a goddamn welcome I get!”
Cody could not hold back a grin that was tight around the edges; the first grin he remembered cracking since he’d come here.
“You’ve still got your balls, Pete, I’ll say that for you.” He applied a degree of pressure and the Weatherby’s muzzle nudged
Lund’s nose not quite so gently. “What makes you think I won’t blow your Company head off for coming up here after me?”
“Hey, hey, relax, John.” Lund’s voice took on a shading of panic that had not been there before.
“Relax!
I’m not with the old unit anymore. They gave me a new job.”
Cody stepped back, removing the end of the Weatherby’s barrel from Lund’s nose, pulling the rifle away.
“I came up here because I don’t want any part of you people, or of anyone else. I want you and these two clowns off my land
or I will blow your heads off and I’ll take real good care of what’s left of you and no one will ever pin it on me. And when
they send the next team, I’ll be ready for them, too.”
“There won’t be any teams,” Lund insisted from his upside-down position. His swaying had stopped when he ceased struggling.
“For godssakes, cut me down from here so we can talk, will you?”
Cody mulled that over for a few seconds. He reached another decision. His right hand flashed across his chest and the knife
blade glinted.
The length of line stringing Lund up was snicked in two.
Lund plummeted head-first down five feet to the ground, emitting a full-bodied
thump
and a full-throated yowl that lifted high above the treetops.
“In a nutshell,” Lund said, some time later, “the U.S. government has decided to do something about its inability to cope
with international terrorism; an inability that has reached crisis proportions.”
Cody and Lund sat at the table in the center of the one-room cabin, Lund nursing with a makeshift ice pack the bruise on his
forehead, Cody nursing a glass of scotch.
The two Company agents Lund had brought with him loitered out front of the cabin near the station wagon, the one having regained
consciousness, and he and the other having both been given their weapons back. Neither had tried to conceal their open resentment
of Cody when Lund had instructed them to wait by the station wagon and keep their eyes open.
Cody did not give much of a goddamn. He was not even sure why he was sitting here right now, listening to Lund.
“I’m all finished working for you people, Pete. No more.”
“I’ve tuned and greased one hell of a sweet machine,” Lund continued, as if he hadn’t heard. “And it’s all on orders right
from the top and I am talking the Man, John. The Oval Office. I’ve been given a free hand. I’ve got the thing organized. I
just need the right people, and it’s ready to happen. I want you in on it from the start—you’ll run the show, and you’ll take
orders only from me.”
Cody returned Lund’s level stare across the table.
“You go to Hell, Pete. You and the Man.”
Lund pretended not to hear that, either.
“I’ve fought every step of the way to bring you back in.” A trace of a grin crinkled the Fed’s grim expression. “They had
to give in, in the end. Every time they put all the specs they wanted into the computers, your name kept spitting back out
at them from the top of every list of those best qualified to head such a unit.”
“Must be a real dirty jobs unit, huh, Pete? Dirtier than Nicaragua?”
Lund sighed.
“You won’t let that one drop, will you?”
“Let it drop?” Cody echoed quietly. “You weren’t down there. You didn’t see four women with their guts splattered out all
over the goddamn—”
“Okay, okay,” Lund countered uncomfortably, “but you did something about that, didn’t you?”
“All except for Gorman,” Cody nodded. “He’s still working for you, I’ll bet, isn’t he? If he’d been a little slower while
I took care of the rest of those scum, he’d be dead meat now, too.”
“There weren’t any reprisals against you, were there, John? You took out Snider. You took out Lopez and those other contras.
It took Gorman six months to recover from the wound where one of your bullets grazed him where he wasn’t protected by that
vest. We deeply regret what happened and we cleaned house. The public never found out about what happened to those nuns. Dammit,
John, you’ve been working for the Company since Nam. You know the left hand never knows what the—”
“I’ve heard all of that,” Cody growled. “And I know the field agent who ordered that massacre bought the farm himself two
weeks later in Grenada. That’s why / didn’t take any more reprisals.”
“You were back at Langley being processed out when that happened,” Lund nodded. “That’s the only thing that stopped you from
taking the fall for that one, and they would have terminated you if they’d thought you were behind that. As it was, they traced
it to the Cubans.”
“And now they want me back.”
“I want you back,” Lund corrected. “I wish I could be as sure about the President. I think he realizes you’re the man for
the job, but he thinks of it more as the evil to fight evil. General Johnson is still the Man’s principle advisor on covert
military operations, and you know what a by-the-booker he is. I don’t think the general ever quite got over what you did down
there in Nicaragua, and he’s got the Man’s ear, too. He seems to think you’re a wild card: that you can’t be trusted.”
“Maybe he’s right. Have you thought of that?”
Lund emitted an exasperated sound.
“You are the sanest man I have ever known. And the meanest, and the most bullheaded. You’re the man for this unit I’ve been
authorized to form, can’t you see that? The computers say so, I say so, and you know it’s so.
“You will be given carte blanch to assemble, prepare and command an elite four-man commando unit intended to strike quick
and hard in a crisis situation.”
“The Army has Delta Force for that!”
Lund shook his head.
“Your unit will be strictly off the record, right from the git-go. You will operate ruthlessly, if necessary, to fight back
as dirty as it gets with only one objective: your team goes in when delicacy or timing preclude use of standard military response
like that of Delta Force; situations where a visible U.S. military response would endanger American security.”
Lund paused; then, studying Cody closely, “Well, that’s my pitch. That’s why I’ve come here. What do you say?”
Cody pushed back from the table, stood and walked over to the cabin’s window, where he gazed out at the two agents by the
station wagon, but he was not really looking at them, or thinking about them.
“You made the trip for nothing, Pete. There was a time when I thought there was a good fight worth fighting. No more.”
He somehow found himself wondering about those words the moment he spoke them.
Lund snorted angrily.
“I may be taking my life in my hands saying this to a berserk guy like yourself, but you are one disgusting sight, do you
know that? All alone up here in your little world while the real world is going to hell because there aren’t enough good men
to fight what you call the good fight. Let me show you something. Come here.”
Cody went back over to stand next to where Lund sat at the table.
Lund reached into an inner pocket and withdrew an envelope from which he extracted a sheaf of six-by-ten-inch glossies, stark
black-and-white wire service photos. He slapped them down on the tabletop one at a time, spreading them out for Cody to see,
punctuating the slap of each grisly photo on the table with a curtly spoken caption.
Slap.
A shot of dead human beings in casual civilian attire; dead human beings—men, women and children—sprawled in what looked
in the black-and-white photo like spreading pools of black oil, in front of a baggage-claim area.
“Rome airport. Two months ago. Four terrorists walked in with concealed automatic weapons and opened fire; the four of them
were killed, too, but not before they did this, and notes on their bodies claimed that this was just the beginning.”
Slap.
Tables and chairs overturned, decorated with inanimate remains only halfway identifiable as human.
“Bomb planted in a London restaurant. No one’s really sure about this one, believe it or not. The IRA and the Libyans both
claimed responsibility. The sick bastards actually fight over claiming atrocities like these as their own.”
Slap.
No bodies this time, only the charred, smoldering remains of a structure that had just finished burning to the ground.
“A children’s hospital in El Salvadore. Twenty-seven dead.”
Lund spread the remaining seven or eight pictures out across the table in front of him, indicating with an angry wave of his
hand what Cody could see was more of the same.
“This is from the last twelve months, and it’s only a sample.
This
is what is happening, John. Can’t you see what you’re doing? You’re giving
them
the edge. You’re helping
them
to get away with these kinds of things by not being out there doing something instead of wallowing up here in self-pity for
a tragedy that wasn’t your fault. I know you’ve been through Hell and it was the Company’s fault, but damn it, John, there’s
more Hell to come and the lines are being drawn. We aren’t perfect, God knows, and that means we need men like you all the
more, don’t you see that? Come back, John. We need you. The whole blessed country needs all the men like you it can find at
a time like this.”
Cody set down the glass of scotch he had not touched since Lund began his pitch. He knew why he had allowed himself to sit
and listen to an old friend who had come so far for something that mattered.
Lund was absolutely right.
“If I had to narrow it down to only three men in the world I’d want to take into combat with me, you know who they’d be.”
An ear-to-ear grin split briefly the Fed’s face, then he got serious and very businesslike again, scooping up the pictures,
returning them to the manila envelope.
“I figured they’d be the same three we went through Nam with when you anchored your team there and I was the guy who handed
you your assignments. Kind of brings back old times, doesn’t it, Sarge?”
“Where are they, Pete?”
“I had the three of them tracked down,” said Lund, “and they may be our next problem. They’re all three kind of unreachable.”
“Last I heard, Caine was SAS.”
“Was,” Lund acknowledged. “They gave him the boot about a year ago. Who knows why; no one talks in that outfit. And guess
who he tied up with when he went looking for a job?”
The glint in his eye gave Cody the clue.
“You saying I won’t have to make that many stops to round up the old team?”
“I mean just that. Caine and Hawkins teamed up to work a bounty-hunter scam out of south Texas.” Lund saw the question marks
that
must have brought and chuckled. “Don’t ask me. Hawkeye says the pickings for fugitive bond-jumpers is overripe down there
and Richard seems to agree. They’ve got a very profitable business going for themselves.”
Hawkeye Hawkins. A Charles-Bronson-goes-Panhandle sort of guy; a coarse, wiseacre Texan who was one of the best fighting men
Cody had ever taken fire with.