Authors: Donald Hamilton
Without looking directly at her, I was aware that Ruthie was making her way towards our end of the table, having obviously decided against inconveniencing the chairman at the other end by squeezing her bulk past him as Joan Market had done. Frechette glanced at her, impatient with her heavy, slow progress. He decided not to wait for her, and cleared his throat.
“So much for
that
,” he said. “Now let’s get back to the real business of this meeting. As I said earlier, the male prisoner deserves no consideration; we are justified in exterminating him like the ruthless killer he is. As for his female accomplice, let us remember that while she has not actually shed our blood with her own hands, she was instrumental in decoying… What is it, Ruthie?”
I never learned what Ruthie had stopped to say. When she came to a halt nearby, looking towards Frechette and raising her hand timidly like a child in class, she had everybody’s attention for a moment, and it was time to go. I threw myself forward using the back of Redband’s chair to pull myself off the cot. This flipped the smaller girl backwards between me and Ovid’s shotgun, while I tackled Ruthie’s soft bulk and slung it straight at the muzzle of Provost’s submachinegun. Very unchivalrous, no doubt, shielding myself between two women, but I was shielding Sally also, and chivalry has no place in the business. Anyway, they do keep saying they want to be treated just like men.
I was aware that the room was kind of breaking up to my right. Frechette was clawing for the automatic weapon he’d deposited on the table. Manny was rising and swinging around with his chopper. The young black in coveralls, smart fellow, was hitting the floor in anticipation of fireworks to come. A small figure flashed past behind me as I drove the big girl back against the man in the bunkroom doorway: that was Sally darting to the door and out. I felt cold air on the side of my face and heard a reassuring splash. Objective one, achieved. Objective two, personal survival, wasn’t going to be that easy…
The first gun to fire was the 12-gauge. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Manny crumple… Manny? There was something I should remember, something I’d pushed from my mind and had to bring back, but there was no time for it now. A window broke and a submachinegun opened up. That would be Frechette turning from the confused melee inside the room to go for the clear target of the girl in the water outside. I used all the strength in my back and legs to shove the struggling, gasping, squealing mass of Ruthie and Provost, with an automatic firearm sandwiched between them, through the bunkroom doorway. Suddenly the weapon cut loose, making a single, muffled thumpthumpthump sound. Behind me, I heard the shotgun bellow once more.
“Ovid, you damned traitor!”
It was Coveralls’ voice, shrill with fury. A pistol made a sharp single crack out there. Well, I’d anticipated a concealed weapon or two, hadn’t I? Time was running out on me; then there was a sudden lack of resistance as Ruthie collapsed and pitched forward into the bunkroom carrying Provost with her. I tried to stay upright, but one of my legs wouldn’t hold any weight for some reason. Well, I’d been hit more than once already, but I wasn’t quite clear as to where or by what. I went down, landing on something hard: Provost’s chopper. He’d kept a one-handed grasp of it as he tried to free himself of Ruthie’s weight; but I yanked it clear, flipped it around, and hit the trigger as his shape loomed between me and the bunkroom windows. The four-shot burst cut him down. Seven gone out of what had looked like a twenty-shot clip—assuming these inefficient jerks had bothered to load a full clip.
The pistol spoke again behind me and something slugged me hard in the back. Frechette’s machinegun was chattering again. You see a lot of idiot stuff on the screen, people being tossed around by bullets like leaves in a high wind. Fortunately real bullets don’t pack that much punch until you get into the elephant-gun category. I swung myself around, and everything was still working—I could even get some use out of the leg. I could think and see. I had a freeze-frame picture of them: Coveralls aiming a .38-sized revolver at me, Frechette at the window aiming his squirt-gun at something outside. I swung my borrowed chopper and cleaned out that side of the room like a man painting out a couple of two-dimensional man-drawings on a wall with a well-filled brush.
When I let up on the trigger, the silence was frightening. All I could hear in the deathly stillness was the gunfire-ringing in my own ears. I pulled myself forward cautiously. The leg would hold if I didn’t ask too much of it. I knew I’d been hit in several other places, but I couldn’t be bothered with that. I was looking at the room and you’ve never seen anything like it. Well, actually, it wasn’t quite the worst I’d witnessed. Once I’d entered a crowded cellar into which somebody had tossed one grenade followed by another for luck. This wasn’t quite that bad. At least they were all intact except for Manny, who’d been almost decapitated by the blast of shot from Ovid’s smoothbore; and if that was supposed to make sense, somebody was going to have to explain it to me slowly and carefully. I saw that Manny wasn’t the only one who’d had shotgun trouble. The girl with the gay red band in her hair had taken most of the load in the body; she lay crumpled on the floor still clinging to the chopper she’d apparently snatched from Manny’s dying hand.
Ovid. It came to me then. I’d been so busy hating the little man, I’d wanted to keep hating him so badly, that I’d shoved out of my mind the fact that at Inanook he’d saved my life, or at least my sanity, from Elsie’s brain-frying apparatus. Now, apparently, he’d been watching over me a second time…
I was reluctant to move. I had a feeling that I would fall apart into a large number of little red squishy pieces if I tried to move. I was the last man left alive in hell, a sinner myself knee deep in the burning blood of other sinners. Well, it wasn’t really knee deep but there was plenty of it, and I was in no condition to pick my way around it daintily on tiptoe. I put myself into motion very cautiously, and I didn’t disintegrate but it wasn’t exactly painless. I made my way slowly through the mess towards the galley door, pausing to take Manny’s submachinegun from the dead girl, leaving her Provost’s almost-empty weapon in return. Ovid was sitting there with the shotgun across his knees. There was blood on his shirt. The black guy in the coveralls had been pretty good with that hideout revolver, Ovid’s eyes were fixed on the doorjamb ahead of him, but when I pulled the pumpgun away he looked up.
“We played hell, did we not, Mr. Helm?” he whispered.
“Hell is just the word,” I said. “Who the hell are you?”
He didn’t seem to hear. “Stupid,” he breathed. “I should have known the Negro was armed. Ex-marine… You take a great deal of nursemaiding for a man from W, Mr. Helm.”
“From what?”
“W. That is what we call you in the corporation.” His voice came slowly and painfully. “W for Waste. That’s what you do, isn’t it, waste them? We try not to come into conflict with the government at all, but sometimes the risk must be taken. It depends on the agency. But the word is out, if you touch anybody from W, you’re dead. Now or five years from now. They keep a list there in Washington, and they’ll waste you in their own way in their own time no matter how big you are. Fredericks in Reno. Warfel in LA—well, he got put away on a drug charge but his soldier, the one who’d hit a W agent, died with a lot of other people and it didn’t do the corporation a bit of good out there on the West Coast. And in both cases W had a tall, thin trouble-shooter named Helm snooping around… You don’t look that good to me, Mr Helm. I’ve had a very hard time keeping you alive.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve been a little under the weather, I guess. Why did you shoot Kitty Davidson?”
“I had to keep the confidence of this gang of crazies by doing what they wanted until… Brassaro is a fool, to get the corporation involved in something like this. When we lost his man out here and looked for another, the gentlemen of the board said to Otto Renter, give him a good boy, Otto, a boy who’ll fix things for us out there and not let it get any worse, we’ll handle the New York end. And Otto said to me, clean up the mess, Heinie, and don’t for God’s sake let that beanpole of a government man get killed or we’ll have that bunch of pros on our necks. You don’t have to keep him happy, Heinie, you don’t have to keep him in booze and women, but keep him alive. Emilio’s got us into trouble enough without stirring up W too… Well, we cleaned it up, didn’t we, Mr. Helm? We played hell cleaning it up. Tell Otto… Tell Otto…”
“Yes, Heinie,” I said. “I’ll tell Otto. Thanks.”
He didn’t hear me. I stood there a moment longer, looking down. The corporation, the syndicate, the Mafia, Cosa Nostra. Pick your own name. It will probably be no wronger than mine. It isn’t my field, exactly, but as Heinie had indicated, I’d tangled with that loose-knit organization of crime a few times. Apparently I’d made enough of an impression, or Mac’s agency had, to save my life today…
“Ruthie.” The voice was faint from outside, from shorewards. “What’s holding things up, Ruthie? What was that noise? I couldn’t hear inside the truck with the motor… Is anything wrong, Ruthie?”
I heard somebody say, “No. Go away, damn you. I don’t want to… It’s enough. Go away.”
The voice was mine. But nobody cared about what I wanted. I wasn’t here to satisfy my wants. I looked at the two guns I held. Shotgun forty yards certain, no more. Chopper maybe a little farther, fifty or sixty. Not good enough. I laid them aside and stepped over Ovid’s body into the galley and got the rifle case I’d seen there earlier. It was on the counter in the galley. I hated to use, at any distance, a weapon sighted in by somebody else, even a pro like Ovid, but I had very good reason to know this gun would hit dead center at two hundred yards; after all, I’d seen one of its targets.
I slipped the weapon out of the plastic case, took the caps off the scope, and got a box of shells from a zippered compartment. I took out one cartridge, pulled back the bolt, slid the shell into the chamber, and closed the bolt on it. The safety was off. Holding the weapon gingerly, the way you do a piece that’s ready to fire, I moved to the galley door.
“Hey, Ruthie, what the hell’s holding you, we haven’t got all day? Dammit, Ruthie, what the shit is going
on
?”
She was closer now. I opened the door. She saw me, stared at me, picked up her long skirts, and started to run back up the graveled road from the pier. I put the crosshairs in the proper place, applied easy pressure on the trigger, and let the weapon fire when it wanted to, a simple, straightaway shot of about ninety yards. Then I set the gun aside. Somebody was coming up the hatch in the galley floor. I slammed the hatch closed and fastened it down, although bending over was no fun at all. I dragged my weak leg slowly back through the slaughterhouse to the seaward door, and out on deck. I stood looking out at the river, but there was nothing but driftwood to be seen. Good luck, Sally Wong, wherever you are.
After a while I had to sit down.
Since I had no idea where the barge was, to start with, or even the river, I had no way of knowing the location of the hospital to which they took me, not too far away. It didn’t matter anyway. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. I’d managed to learn the only thing that really concerned me: that Sally had got through okay. It was just as well for me she’d got help moving my way fast, I was told, as I’d been pretty well bled out and wouldn’t have lasted much longer.
Then they pumped a lot of corpuscles into me and dug a lot of lead out. The final tally was one 9mm submachinegun bullet, two .38-caliber pistol bullets, and two little round Number One Buckshot balls. The last two hadn’t done much damage. They’d apparently been strays traveling outside the killing pattern of Ovid’s shotgun that, missing a human target on the first try, had passed through one wood partition and, now lacking escape velocity, had bounced around the bunkroom a bit until, almost spent, they’d found me. Nevertheless, the general consensus seemed to be that I was a hard man to kill. I gathered that some of the more sensitive members of the hospital staff weren’t convinced that this was really a good thing, under the circumstances. I suppose people dedicated to saving life will always find those who take it slightly incomprehensible.
Somewhere along the line, after I was strong enough to hold a telephone, I had a talk with Mac. He laughed when he heard what we were called in syndicate circles, but said that was really a very satisfactory attitude for them to have, and maybe in the long run it would save other agents’ lives as it had saved mine. He said that, judging by the reports that had reached him, I didn’t seem to take my inactive status very seriously so he wasn’t going to. I got the impression he hadn’t even started the necessary paperwork; he’d known I’d be back. We always come back to him in the end.
* * *
“Cut it out,” I said to Ross one day. “You’re talking as if they were people and I ought to feel guilty or something. A terrorist isn’t people. Regardless of how wonderful his motives may be, he’s something that’s resigned from the human race.” I grimaced. “Okay, I’m prejudiced. I feel about them exactly the way some people feel about drug peddlers.”
It was the first time we’d talked at any length. Earlier, I’d been awakened from time to time to answer questions in a groggy way, but today I could see we were going to put it all together and wrap it up with gift paper and red ribbons. There was rain at the hospital windows. I remembered yearning for a tropical isle; but who wants to visit a tropical isle alone?
I said, “Anybody who wants to go out and shoot a specific politician whose policies he doesn’t like, okay. That’s not a terrorist in my book. I may be out there trying to stop him, but okay. He’s got his target identified and he’s taking all the risks involved in moving in for the kill. And if he wants to bag a few specific establishment mercenaries like you, or me, okay again. That’s what we’re hired for; that’s the risk we run. Some of us even wear uniforms to make it easier. I’ll fight like hell to prevent it, but the guy is still a human being as far as I’m concerned, even when he’s trying to kill me. But these creeps are destroying exactly the human values they claim they’re trying to save. They go out and do it the easy way, the coward’s way, just blowing up anybody who happens to be handy, practically without risk, counting on just the concern for human life and dignity we’re not supposed to have… You’ll notice that there’s not a hell of a lot of terrorism in the real authoritarian countries. You can’t scare those governments by exploding a few citizens at random. They won’t hand you the keys to the Kremlin just to keep a bomb from going boom way off in Irkutsk or Petrovsk or wherever. It’s only in our kind of softhearted society that this kind of blackmail works. In other words, they’re trying to profit from exactly the human feelings they claim we don’t have, and to hell with them.”