Relentless (7 page)

“I figure to put together the best mobile force of crack guerrilla mercenaries anybody ever saw. And then I figure to hire out to the high bidder and run his war the right way—my way, with no interference from anybody and no Pentagon to court-martial me.”

It took time to absorb. After a while Walker said, “And you don't care who you fight for. Which side, I mean.”

“Sides don't mean anything below the Equator.”

“Well I know that. I hate to sound like a hick but I meant what about right and wrong?”

“Virtues make sense when you can afford them, I suppose. I can't. Anyhow, morality's a pen for sheep, built by wolves. Take what you want and don't look back, that's all that matters.”

Walker blinked. “Why'd you come to me?”

“I told you. I want a pilot.”

“I never flew a combat plane in my life.”

“I wouldn't ask you to.”

It wasn't making any sense. All he knew was that Hargit was playing him, enjoying the' game; and Hargit wasn't about to spell it out until he was good and ready. So Walker tried another tack. “How'd you find me?”

“Does it matter? I traced you through some old contacts.” Then the billfold came out again and Walker was staring at a multi-engine commercial instrument-rated FAA pilot's license, complete with seals and stamps and a description:
Kendall Williams, date of birth 10/27/41, place of birth Albuquerque, N. Mex., ht 5' 11”, wt 160 lbs, hair brown, eyes gray
. Everything had been filled in except the bearer's signature.

Walker's hand, holding it, was not steady; the document fluttered with vibration.

“Where'd you get this?”

“It's a forgery but nobody has to know that.”

“It's a damned good phony.”

“Of course it is. What do you take me for, an amateur?”

“Okay, Major, you're a professional.” He stood up and thrust the pilot's license back at him. “The question is, a professional what?”

“Let's say a professional thief.”

5

“Captain, you've got your tit in a wringer. I'm offering you a way out—enough money to go to Canada or Brazil and start your own bush airline. There'll be a minimum of fifty thousand in it for you and it may come to more. All you've got to do is fly a couple of airplanes and drive a car twenty miles.”

“It's too risky.”

“Nothing's risky if the stakes are high enough.”

“What the hell do you want with all that money anyway?”

“It takes a lot of money to raise an army, Captain. Recruiting, training, equipping.”

“Jesus, the kind of money you're talking about you could forget all that and just retire on it.”

“Some men could.”

It was terrifying to see a Green Beret type go bad. For all those years, in line of duty, he'd been breaking all the rules of civilized conduct, and it gave him a feeling of untouchable immunity from all those rules.

“Do you want me to go over it again, Captain?”

“No. I get the pitch. You're going to rob a bank.”

“Not just any bank. A million-dollar cash bank.”

“And if we get caught?”

“This is a military operation, Captain. We'll be prepared for every possibility. We're not going to get caught.”

“Jesus, I don't know. I never stole anything bigger than a pack of chewing gum.”

“Captain, it may be the last chance you'll ever get at owning your own airline and flying your own plane.” Hargit was an astute and clever judge of weakness and of a man's needs.

“I'm not asking you to turn to a life of crime,” he added. “We pull off one score and that's all. It's the habituals who get caught—the odds catch up to them.” And the Major unfolded the unsigned pilot's license, put it on the desk in front of Walker, took a fountain pen out of his pocket, uncapped it, and handed it to him.

After a while Walker took the pen and signed at the tip of the Major's finger.

6

“But why me?”

They were riding north in the Lincoln on Interstate 10. The speedometer hovered at seventy but it was cool and quiet inside the air-conditioned sedan. The Major drove the way he did most things—with casual and unflappable efficiency. Walker repeated, “Why pick me?”

“Because it's always better to deal with a known quantity. You were a good officer. You know how to take orders, you're accustomed to military operations. There were half a dozen uniformed pilots I could have brought into this thing, but they'd have had to go AWOL and it would have made a fuss. Nobody's going to miss you.”

He didn't think the Major meant anything by that remark but it chilled him, made the little hairs stand up on the back of his neck. He fought the feeling and changed the subject. “Who else is in this?”

“Three others. You may have known two of them.”

“Baraclough?”

“Yes.”

Baraclough had been mentioned in the clipping. He'd been an Army captain, Hargit's second-in-command. He'd been drummed out of the Army by the same court-martial board He remembered Baraclough vaguely: a thin sardonic opportunist with a napalm scar on one arm.

“Who else?”

“Eddie Burt.”

“I don't think I remember him.”

“He was a sergeant under my command.”

“They court-martial him too?”

“No. They thought about it but they had to draw the line someplace—on those charges you could cashier every other American soldier out there.”

“But this fellow Burt stayed with you.”

“He's a loyal man.” You couldn't picture the Major smirking but there was considerable satisfaction in his little smile.

“Who's the fifth man?”

The Major's face changed abruptly. “You've never met him. An ex-convict named Hanratty.” He didn't bother to conceal the contempt in his voice.

7

Baraclough was waiting at The Sands in Phoenix. The three of them had dinner there and talked about old times in Saigon as if they had nothing else on their minds. Baraclough was dressed in casual weekend slacks and sport shirt but both garments, and his shoes, had the look of money. Obviously the operation wasn't being financed on a shoestring.

Baraclough was gaunt, dour, with a twisted sense of humor and curious areas of indifference and sensitivity. He paid great attention to such things as good manners and good diction, and his humor was the self-deprecating kind that often went with a high order of intelligence. He was also capable of gratuitous cruelties: he treated the cocktail waitress like a lower form of life—“Have you thought of having that moustache removed, dear?”—but he left her a lavish tip.

After a while it occurred to Walker that the two men worked well together because they complemented each other: each filled gaps in the other's capacities. They were both cruel men but their brutalities were of different kinds.

Baraclough's sadistic streak was deliberate and malicious and he enjoyed exercising it, but he only did it when the circumstances gave him the edge so that there was no likelihood of retaliation against him.

Hargit's cruelty was that of the predatory carnivore. A matter of indifference. It never occurred to him to be concerned about other people's feelings. Hawked, lithe, violent, charismatic—he had the roughshod instincts of a jungle cat, and the grace.

They drove to Reno with only two gas stops and a half-hour in Las Vegas for lunch. Baraclough did most of the talking, filling Walker in; Baraclough was the one who handled details. He was a superb driver: he kept the needle right on the speed limit and when he had to pass on narrow roads he did it smoothly with no great bursts of power and no sudden braking.

Burt was waiting for them in Reno. Walker remembered him now that he saw him. Burt had a shaven head and a waxy, slightly concave face and the build of an oil drum. He had the stolid unimaginative personality of a career master sergeant, which he had been; the threads on the sleeve of his khaki shirt showed where he had carried nine reenlistment hashmarks.

The house Burt had rented was one of those week-by-week rentals Reno served up to people who set up “permanent” Nevada residences for six weeks to get their divorces. It was six miles out of town, a thirty-year-old hunting cabin set back a mile off the highway in scrub timber, out of sight of neighbors. It had two bedrooms and a large paneled front room with stone fireplace and exposed rafters that gave it the look of a hunting lodge. Hanratty, the fifth man, had arrived a day earlier by plane from Los Angeles and Burt had picked him up at the airport. They had two cars among them—Hargit's Lincoln Continental and a Plymouth that Burt had rented from a Reno agency.

Hanratty was a narrow lizard of a man who had been up the river more times than an anxious salmon—a three time ex-con. It turned out he was Eddie Burt's ex-brother-in-law: Burt's sister had divorced him during his second prison term. Hanratty had a narrow face, rough, pitted all over, the hue of veal. His nose was a teapot snout and he looked as if he had been assembled out of leftover mismatched parts—fat legs and hips, a short torso, matchstick arms and a small nervous face. He talked with his teeth together as ex-convicts invariably do, speaking out of the corner of his mouth like a ventriloquist. He was never without a large revolver.

The reason for Hanratty's presence became gradually clear: he was the one who had proposed the operation.

They had released him from the Florence penitentiary eight months ago and the parole department had helped get him a job in the San Miguel smelter. The company bank's Friday afternoon ritual had drawn his attention from the start. He had begun to think about getting in touch with some of the professionals he'd met in stir but in the meantime he'd run into his former brother-in-law in a Las Vegas casino and somehow the conversation had worked its way around to the San Miguel bank—Hanratty had a habit, he kept talking until he found something to say—and Burt had introduced him to the Major. After that it had been inevitable that the Major would take over.

The others had already been over the ground. Baraclough had Polaroid photographs of the bank and the street. That first night in Reno they sat around the kitchen table and the Major filled in the details of the plan, using a No. 2 pencil as a pointer, outlining the campaign like a field general giving instructions to his battalion commanders.

The next day Baraclough had driven him to the airport to show him one of the planes they were going to use. “We'll use two planes because they may get a fix on the first one. Anybody could spot us—there's always that vulnerable moment just after you take off. Once they know we're using a plane they'll figure we're heading for Mexico. That's where we'll have the edge on them. We'll change planes here—we'll have to set up a second plane, something with enough range to get us up into Canada across the Idaho border. We've already set up a landing strip in British Columbia.”

“How long?”

“The strip? Four thousand feet. One of the lumber outfits used to use it. It's on the weedy side but it'll do, I checked it out myself last week.” They were sitting in the Plymouth beside the runway; Baraclough had his arm across the back of the seat. “I thought I'd leave the choice of the second plane up to you.”

The plane beside the hangar was a Piper twin Apache. “Where'd you get the money to buy that one?”

“Who bought it? I rented it in Pasadena under a phony name. We hired a pilot to fly it up here for us and I told him we'd get in touch with him when we needed him again. He thinks it's something to do with a rich man's divorce case. They do that all the time around here, people hiring private planes to sneak in and out of the state while they're supposedly living here establishing six weeks' residence.” Baraclough took the key out of the ignition and opened the door. “You'll want to have a look at her.”

Walker went over to the plane with him. A mechanic working on a Cessna gave them an incurious glance and went back to work, standing on a ladder propped against the cowling.

It looked all right but appearances didn't mean anything. You couldn't tell much about an airplane by kicking the tires. “You got a key to it?”

Baraclough supplied one and Walker climbed inside, unlocked the glove box on the inside door panel and had a look at the logbooks: three of them—one for the airframe, one for each engine. The plane had quite a few hours on it since its last overhaul. One explosion per cylinder for every two rpm's—after 460 hours, how many explosions? The plane had something like fifteen thousand parts. Walker shook his head. “I'd like to take her up and try her out.”

“Tomorrow. We'll get your documentation fixed up and you can tell the tower you're a Los Angeles pilot we hired. Now what about the other plane? What'll we need?”

They discussed it and settled on a twin Beech. “If we can find one for rent.”

“If we can't,” Baraclough said, “we'll just have to steal one, won't we.”

8

The Major and Baraclough obtained hand grenades and the Mace chemical spray cans from a Guard Armory near Sacramento. They drove over by way of Tahoe and pulled the Inspecting Officer bit. The National Guard sergeant on duty had been conditioned to demand identifications and passes from everyone who tried to get in but the Army had started earlier and spent longer conditioning him to salivate properly to the sound of a high-ranking officer's voice, and Hargit's bluff carried them through. He brought out three grenades and four cans of the chemical in a canvas AWOL bag and the sergeant gave him a smart salute as he left.

There was a suitable Beech for rent in Salt Lake and Burt drove Walker up there to pick it up. Walker was nervous around airports—there were bound to be people around who would recognize him—but he kept his head down and let Burt take care of the paperwork. They brought the Beech back and set it down on a meadow near the rented cabin. Burt went into town, rented a tank truck and brought aviation fuel out to the meadow to fill up the Beech's tanks.