The Ambushers (3 page)

“Señor Helm—”

“Just give me the damn pack. Let’s see what we’ve actually got here. There’s no chance of getting closer, I suppose? What about that point of woods down to the right?”

“There is an outpost right below it. There are patrols. It was determined that the thing would have to be done from here.”

“Sure. Three hundred and fifty meters away. You grow damn long meters in this country, Colonel Jiminez.”

I pulled the pack in front of me for a rest and laid the rifle across it. I had to hunt a bit to pick up my target— those big target scopes have a narrow field—then the third hut was clear and sharp in the glass, but it still wasn’t exactly at arm’s length. It was going to be one hell of a shot, if I made it.

I lay there telling myself hopefully that at least the wind wasn’t blowing. As I watched through the scope, a man walked into the field of the instrument from the right and entered the hut, walking right through the scale and crosshairs. A moment later he reappeared, leaving, but stopped in the doorway, apparently addressed by someone inside. He answered respectfully, saluted clumsily, and walked out of the scope.

“Five hundred and fifty yards,” I said. “Approximately. That, Colonel, is over five hundred of your meters. Your informant was damn near fifty per cent off.”

“You can read the distance?” He sounded more interested than apologetic.

“There is a scale inside the telescope,” I said. “You take a man like that one, approximately five and a half feet tall—at least I hope he wasn’t a pygmy or a giant— and you place the lowest division of the scale at his feet and read the range opposite the top of his head, making allowance for the sombrero. Then you take this figure and enter the table I have attached to the stock of the rifle, here. You learn that to hit a target five hundred and fifty yards away, the way this particular rifle is sighted at this particular time, you must hold over eighteen inches. In other words, I will have to shoot for the top of the head to hit the chest.”

Actually, of course, I hadn’t ever believed their story of three hundred and fifty meters. I’d sighted in the rifle at four hundred and fifty yards, and run my compensation table from three to six hundred, just in case. There has seldom been a spy yet, or a hunting guide for that matter, who wouldn’t underestimate a range badly. You always hope the day will come when somebody will hand you the straight dope, but a fifty per cent error wasn’t much more than par for the course.

“That is truly scientific,” Jiminez said. I couldn’t tell whether he was being ironic or not.

“Sure,” I said. “It assumes I can find a man the right size to take the range from, and that he’s standing up straight, and that I’m not looking at him from too great an angle up or down. It assumes the gun is shooting where it was when I made up the table, a few thousand miles away in a different climate. And at five hundred meters, Colonel, it takes this bullet the better part of a second to reach its target. A running man can cover thirty feet in one second. You’d better pray the guy stands still for us. What do you want me to do afterward?”

“Afterward?”

“Do we pick up and run for it, or do we try to give your boys a hand in stopping the first rush?”

“That is for you to say, Señor Helm. I cannot ask you—”

“If you don’t ask,” I said, “who will? I’m sure as hell not volunteering; I gave that up when I got old enough to vote, or a little before. But El Fuerte’s men have got an open valley to cross, and I’ve got sixty rounds of ammunition nobody told me I had to bring home. Once we’re back in the woods, this gun is useless. With a twenty-power scope, it’s got to be shot from a rest; it’s no good for jungle fighting. But right here I might do some good, if I’m so ordered by my commanding officer, in this case you.”

He hesitated and looked at me for a moment. He laughed softly. “Very well. It is an order. Señor Helm?”

“Yes, Colonel.”

“It is sometimes hard for men of different languages to understand each other. I may owe you an apology. I—”

He stopped abruptly, and picked up my binoculars, hanging from their strap around his neck. He crawled forward to focus them on the road where it came into sight below and to the left of our position on the ridge. I heard it now, the sound of a motorized vehicle approaching from up the valley. Well, that wasn’t anything I needed to look at.

I took off my hat quickly, and dumped the contents of the open box of cartridges into it, and set it where I could reach it easily. I took the other two boxes out of the pack and set them beside it. I closed up the pack again and replaced it to support the gun, and settled myself comfortably behind it. Then I made sure, by counting huts—one, two, three—that I was looking at the right one through the telescopic sight. With high magnifications at long ranges, it’s very easy to find yourself watching the wrong door or window, or even, if they’re all similar, the wrong house.

I shoved off the safety and double-checked, by looking, that it was really all the way off. That’s another mistake that’s been made by people who should have known better, including me.

“Colonel.”

“Yes, señor.”

“The hell with the jeep or whatever it is. Watch the doorway. Confirm the identification fast when he shows. And you’d better slide back a bit if you value your eardrums. This thing is loud.”

Then it was just a matter of waiting. I’m not an iron man; I had the usual quota of palpitation and perspiration. I resisted the temptation to turn my head to watch the progress of the jeep down the valley. One glance had told me it was a jeep, with a native driver and a man in sun helmet and khakis, who looked too tall and blond to be indigenous. That was all the glances I had to spare. I lay there forcing my body to relax along the ground. I was just an eye at the ocular, a finger on the trigger. A man went into the hut to announce the impending arrival and emerged. A moment later another man came into sight in the doorway.

He didn’t come all the way out right away. He had to tease us. He stopped in the shadow of the door to put on his uniform cap. The sunlight was bright on his thick body from the waist down, but the rest was in shade. I couldn’t be sure of my crosshairs and I hadn’t got an identification from Jiminez, anyway. I resisted the urge to ask a silly question. He’d speak when he was sure.

The man took a step forward, and another—and kept walking. My mind went through the calculation rapidly. At two miles per hour, he would move a couple of feet in the time it took the bullet to reach him. If I allowed for his motion, he could stop and it would strike ahead of him. He could speed up and it would strike behind.

“Shoot,” said Jiminez softly. “That is El Fuerte. Shoot!”

I’d worked too hard and come too far to risk my first shot at that range, on a moving target. He was a big man, I saw, not tall but broad and solid, with the shoulders and arms of a gorilla. He had a scraggy, Castro-type beard, but he was a far cry from the lanky Castro type, physically speaking. El Fuerte, The Strong One. He was dressed in suntans, with that uniform cap. General Jorge Santos, pronounced Heneral Horgay Santos. He stopped at the side of the road to wait for the oncoming jeep. A couple of his men came up to wait beside him, one directly in the line of fire.

I could feel the sweat trickling down my face as I lay there, waiting. I heard Jiminez stir impatiently beside me, but he had sense enough to keep his trap shut. Five hundred meters away, General Jorge Santos took one step forward into the clear and turned to look up the road toward us. The crosshairs settled on the fancy insignia on the uniform cap, a tiny, gleaming aiming point so far away. I wasn’t aware of adding the last fraction of an ounce to the pressure already on the trigger, but the big rifle fired.

It made a hell of a noise in the quiet valley; it was like setting off a cannon-cracker in church. It slammed back against my shoulder and cheek. It’s not a fun gun to shoot.

“Call it,” I said, working the bolt fast and trying to pick up my target again in that lousy scope. “Call it, damn you!”

“He is hit,” Jiminez said calmly. “He is going down.”

Then I had my man back in the field. El Fuerte was being supported by his two companions, but his knees were buckling and there was blood on his shirt. His head was hanging and his cap had fallen off. I gave it the same rough eighteen inches of Kentucky elevation and fired again. There was the same damn volcanic eruption and the same piledriver blow against my face and shoulder.

“
Bueno
,” Jiminez said in his calm voice, but he’d forgotten to speak English.
“Muy bueno! Uno mas?”

He was asking for one more, the bloodthirsty little bastard. I yanked the bolt back and slammed it home again, but there were more men around Santos now, and as I waited for a clear opening, the jeep drove up and stopped, blocking my view completely. I looked up. The whole village was stirring, but they didn’t really know what was going on. The thunderous report of the Magnum would have sounded vague and directionless down there, like distant blasting. At that range you can shoot at a deer all day, if you’re that bad a shot, and he’ll never even stop browsing until you land one close.

“Shoot again!” Jiminez hissed. “Shoot at anything. Our people will have heard. They will be entering the village. You must make a diversion.”

I had my eye at the scope again. Since the target didn’t matter, I took the most conspicuous one. I picked up the man in the sun helmet standing in the jeep, and fired, but he was already going to the ground in a long leap as the Magnum roared, and I knew I’d shot behind. When I picked him up again, he was flat on the ground with a silly little pistol in his hand. I could see his face clearly.

It was kind of a shock, because it was a face I’d seen before somewhere, although I couldn’t put a name to it. It was a German face, a Prussian face, the kind that goes with a monocle, a shaved head, no neck, and sometimes an honorable Heidelberg scar across the cheek. With the sun helmet on him, at the angle I had, I couldn’t be sure of the neck or the haircut, but the scar was there all right. If there was a monocle, it was in his pocket.

The pistol was a Luger, I thought. With that face, it would have to be a Luger. They’d liked Lugers better than the newfangled P-38s that shot the same cartridge; and they’d liked riding quirts and polished boots; and they’d thought they could use Hitler to do their dirty work for them, but he’d fooled them and made them do his dirty work for him, instead.

And what was a man like that doing in the Costa Verde jungle, visiting a bunch of Spanish-speaking revolutionaries? The answer was easy. Anywhere else a man like that was apt to die, legally or illegally, at the hands of people who still remembered various things that had happened during World War II. It was a long time to hold a grudge, as far as I was concerned, but then I didn’t have the motives some folks had.

I’d hesitated a moment, looking hard at the face, trying to recall the name; and the moment was too long. He’d been sniped at before, and he knew the crosshairs were on him. He crawled under the jeep. I let him go.

“El Fuerte is finished,” Jiminez reported. “Very good work, señor. Now to the right. To the right of the nearest hut fifty meters. Keep those three men from reaching the forest or we will be outflanked too soon.”

They had my gun located now. The last shot had done it. A bareheaded character with long, wild black hair and waving arms had rounded up half a dozen armed men in the street and was shooing them toward us. More were running to join him. To hell with him and his charge of the light brigade up the valley of death. The automatic weapons could deal with the problem when the time came. But off to the right, a quieter type with a machine pistol was leading a couple of cronies with rifles up the slope for an end run. I led him like an antelope and knocked him over. His pals flattened out in the grass.

“Keep your eye on that pair while I reload,” I said. “Keep them located for me.”

From there on in it was a real wild party. At least I found it so, but you must understand it was new to me. I never fought in the South Pacific jungles; I never even fought in Europe, to call it fighting. We operated there, and we killed people and got shot at, sometimes, but it wasn’t war, our part of it, although war was going on all around us.

This was war—on a small scale, of course, but how big a piece does the average soldier get to see? We had all the war we could handle, anyway, and I reloaded and picked off the two men where Jiminez pointed them out, first one and then the other, as they showed themselves.

“
Bueno
,” he said. “Just a moment, Señor Helm, please.”

I looked his way, and he was cutting off a cigar and lighting it. Then he closed up his damn cigar-case holster, settled down comfortably on his elbows, and put the binoculars to his eyes again, blowing smoke in a satisfied way.

“The second hut,” he said. “On the left. There is a group forming. Put a bullet through it about half a meter from the left corner... I am sorry, señor. I am rude. Do you wish a cigar?”

“Thanks, I don’t smoke,” I said. “Thanks just the same.”

I put a bullet about half a meter from the corner of the hut, and after that I put a lot of bullets in a lot of other places, and people, as he directed in his unruffled voice. They formed in the village and started up the valley to avenge their general under the leadership of the longhaired guy. At Jiminez’ word, I shot the long-haired guy at four hundred yards, and another man took his place, and I shot him at three hundred, holding under a bit, but they kept coming, crawling, running, darting from rock to rock and bush to bush, squirming through the corn or whatever it was.

When they got within reach of the short-range weapons, Jiminez took the cigar out of his mouth deliberately. He blew a little whistle he fished out of the neck of his shirt on a cord, and everything on the ridge opened up. The racket was impressive. All we needed was some heavy stuff to have a real battle. I shot a charging man so close that I had nothing but his shirt in the twenty-power scope; I could see the coarse weave of the cloth.