Cobra Strike

by J. B. Hadley

  “I bet this baby packs some hangover,” he said.

  “Yeah, it’s the impurities in the alcohol more than the alcohol itself that gives you the hangover,” Bryce explained. “Wood alcohol breaks down in the body partly into formic acid, which ants use to sting. You better stick to your expensive aged whiskey, Bob. At least it has a lot of the poisons leached out of it.” He walked toward the bushes at one side of the clearing. “Maybe we better quiet down some. Those boys is likely to come along any minute.”

  All three of them were big men and, none too comfortable, crouched down in the bushes, along with mosquitoes, deerflies, and assorted other bugs to keep them close company. They stayed put for more than an hour before they heard voices coming down the path. Four men walked into the clearing, each toting a fifty-pound bag of sugar on his back. That was all the evidence the two revenuers needed against them. Both men sprang out of the bushes at the two nearest them, knocking them down and walloping the hell out of them, as well as taking some powerful counter blows themselves. This left Bob Murphy to handle the other two moonshiners. At this moment it was clear that Bryce no longer expected him to behave as an uninvolved observer.

  Neither of them had seen Murphy yet in his hiding place. The nearest one to him dropped the sugar sack he was carrying and tried to jump in to help his buddy struggling with Crockett on the ground. Before he managed to lay a fist on the county revenuer, Murphy burst out of the bushes like a tiger. His roar scared this moonshiner, and his right boot did a lot worse. It caught the man in the ribs, snapping a few of them like chicken bones. He was already sinking to the ground when Murphy’s left fist hammered into his right cheekbone. All he could see were bright patterns before his eyes and feel the sharp pain as he went down and instinctively curled to protect himself from further blows.

  None were coming. Murphy was too busy handling the fourth man, who dropped his sack and drew a hunting knife with a six-inch blade. Murphy was kind of relieved to see that it wasn’t a pistol, though he had a lot of respect for any kind of knife. The man made a running lunge at him, and Murphy backed away so fast, he fell over a bag of sugar. Before the blade could reach him as he lay on the ground, his big hands grabbed the fifty-pound bag and held it out on his long powerful arms. He felt a blade thrust penetrate the tightly packed paper sack and climbed to his feet propelling the sugar sack forward and keeping it between him and the knife-wielding moonshiner. Then he heaved the heavy sack, and it took down his adversary with it, flattening him on his back beneath it. Bob gave him a swift kick in the nuts, which made him drop the knife and lose the will to fight.

  Bryce and Crockett handcuffed all four together and got busy busting up the still, turning over the vats of mash, smashing the pump head, and throwing stuff down the well shaft. Murphy felt a bit sorry for the four bootleggers, handcuffed and bruised, watching their equipment being smashed by a pair of experts, so he found the pint bottle of white liquor and offered it to them.

  One shook his head in disdain. “We make that shit to sell, not to drink. You’ll find a new bottle of Wild Turkey in our truck back along the path. We’d sure appreciate that.”

  But Bryce put his foot down about that. Crockett said the bottle and the truck were now state property. He told Murphy that since he had never seen these fellas before, he didn’t want to go encouraging them to stay in his county by treating them too soft.

  After leaving Don Crockett and the four bootleggers at the courthouse, they took the seized truck around to fetch Bryce’s station wagon, returned the truck to the courthouse, and then headed back to the yacht at Hilton Head.

  “You see the amount of work goes into this job?” Bryce demanded to know on the way.

  Bob said that he did.

  “You ready to come out again tomorrow? I’m going to help a county man over in Allendale County.”

  “Sure, I will, but only if you come aboard and talk with the god-awful folks coming aboard this afternoon.”

  Bryce was agreeable until he got to the dock and saw the socialites chattering on the rear deck. “I ain’t going to be able to go through with this, Bob,” he said in a sorrowful voice.

  “You ain’t got no backbone, Bryce.” “Not for that kind of stuff, I don’t.” “See you next time I’m passing through.” Bryce waved and yelled, “Thanks for your help.” Eunice hustled him down to their stateroom to change into something suitable. “You had a call from Andre Verdoux.” Eunice had met Andre and knew what the call probably meant. “I’m going to miss you while you’re gone.” She sighed. “But at least since you will be away for a while, you have no excuse now not to be nice to the guests. And I’m afraid they’re a dreary lot.”

  They both laughed and kissed.

  Baker, Winston, and Turner sat silently on the hillside sipping tea with Gul Daoud. The three Americans had previously agreed on what they had to do. This time they would not let Gul Daoud dissuade them as he had done before. As usual, Baker was their spokesman.

  “Having us here with you is costing you too much, Gul,” Baker said.

  “Without you we could not have destroyed the jet runway,” Gul replied graciously. “With jets landing there we would have even more Russians everywhere than we have now.”

  This was hard to credit. At present all the mountain passes to the east and south had been sealed. Soviet and government troops were conducting sweeps over suitable terrain and house-to-house searches of villages. Where the terrain was too rough and rock cover too heavy to make ground sweeps feasible, helicopter gunships patroled and single-engine observation planes flew along planned coordinates.

  “If we three leave this area,” Baker said, “and show up somewhere else, it will take the heat off you. They’re so damn anxious to catch us alive, they’ll forget about their revenge for the men you killed and choppers you destroyed. And it’s not just your fighting force we have to consider. Practically every man, woman, and child in this region has been made to suffer in some way because the Russians know we’re still hiding here. Once we go, they’ll follow.”

  Gul Daoud shook his head. “I could never allow you to give yourselves up to ease the pressure on us. Never.”

  “We’re not giving ourselves up,” Baker argued. “Give us an escort of armed men and we’ll lead the communist forces away from you. It’s a military tactic; look on it that way.”

  They finally prevailed by promising the rebel leader that they would come back again.

  “I know you will,” Gul said with a sly smile, “because there are not many other places you can go.”

  Two days walk from Gul Daoud’s territory, they and their four-man Afghan escort came across a small army outpost of government soldiers. It reminded the Americans of a miniature version of a French Foreign Legion post in an old movie. It was only a single-story flat-roofed building surrounded quite closely by a twelve-foot-high wall with miniature towers at each of the four corners. Slits in the towers’ curved walls allowed the occupants to fire outside, and a walkway ran inside the wall near the top so that those inside could stand behind it and fire over its edge. A heavy wood door protected the entrance. Considering that it all seemed to be built of sun-dried mud, it was an impressive structure. At most, a dozen soldiers could be stationed there.

  The four Afghans had not brought them here by accident. They seemed to know all about the outpost. All seven of them remained most of the day observing the place from an outcrop of rocks a quarter of a mile away. Through what they saw they were able to interpret what the rebels had been trying to tell them, and they couldn’t understand, Baker being unable this time to make head or tail of their hand signs and facial expressions. They saw that the officer of the outpost had established himself, probably against regulations, in a small private house a few hundred yards from the outpost and at the edge of a small village. No doubt he was eating better food here than his men at the outpost, and perhaps he had even arranged for some other comforts to ease the loneliness and rigors of a military life. The men, abou
t nine in all, and the officer continually went back and forth between the house and the outpost. It was obvious that discipline was slack and none of them felt much threatened.

  All that was really necessary was that the three Americans let themselves be seen by some of these government soldiers. But plainly the four rebels with them had higher hopes, and even Turner, with all his responsibility for Baker’s and Winston’s safety, found it hard to pass by this sitting duck.

  Turner and Winston sneaked down to the house with two of the rebels after dark. Through a lighted window they saw the officer squatting on the floor, eating with his fingers and being waited on by three women. The back door had been left ajar, and all four men eased their way into the kitchen at the back of the house and from there into the room in which the officer was eating. His mouth stopped chewing when he saw the four AK-47 barrels pointing at him by lamplight. The three women were terrified but knew better than to scream. Winston and Turner herded them into the kitchen and spoke soothingly to them in English. They would make good witnesses that the Yanks had been here.

  In the kitchen they heard hammering in the front of the house. Turner went to investigate. The two rebels had driven a nail into the wood crosspiece above the front door and were now stringing up the officer from it on a short length of rope. Gagged by a cloth stuck in his mouth, with his thumbs tied behind his back, all the officer could do was kick desperately against the wood door in his last moments of life. Then he hung limply, swaying and revolving at the end of the rope, his toes almost touching the floor and his nose almost touching the closed door.

  A soldier at the outpost may have heard the kicks on the door, anyway, he was soon outside shouting. When he tried to push the door inward, something unseen prevented it from opening. The soldier heaved it inward, and his hanged officer banged into him face-to-face. A second later the soldier was hauled inside and knifed deeply in the chest. He was left to die on the floor, gasping, convulsing, choking on his blood.

  After a while, when the soldier did not come back, a floodlight came on atop one of outpost’s corner towers. Three men emerged from the big wooden entrance gate and headed for the house. Baker and the other two rebels were hidden nearby but saw no opportunity to get inside the little fort. The three men approached the house cautiously, yet remained in full view in the floodlight. The two rebels inside the house became agitated. Winston and Turner nodded to them, and they opened fire with their AK-47s, taking down all three government solders in a single burst.

  Baker and the others joined them behind the late officer’s house. He said, “Forget the outpost. There’s maybe five guys in it, but they could hold out against us for a week. And you can bet they’ve already radioed for help. I’m starving. You think there’s anything to eat in this burg?”

  Guns at the ready, they walked down the village street. The people stared at them with curiosity and seemed careful to show no support for them. All the same, they showed no hostility, either. They helped themselves to lamb kebabs still on the skewers. When Turner tried to leave Pakistani rupees as payment, the man shook his head, genuinely frightened at such proof that he aided the Americans. He did accept gladly several handsful of AK-47 rounds. Then he whispered something about Allah, which the four rebels whispered back to him.

  Winston said, “Right on, brother.”

  Harvey Waller wanted to kill him—strangle him with his bare hands—as soon as he saw him, but the crowded Wall Street sidewalk in the middle of a business day was neither the time nor the place for that. Even Harvey could see that, and Harvey liked to kill people in places where they least expected to die. Another thing threw Harvey also. The guy seemed glad to see him, and this was a guy he had sworn to kill for having gotten cold feet and betraying him. He had never even known the joker’s last name before. He just knew him as David when they were both members of an ultralight society trying to save America by eliminating known communist agents operating there. David and others had accused Harvey of getting out of control. When the FBI net started closing in, they all bolted like frightened rabbits, leaving Harvey To Whom It May Concern: face the music. Harvey often thought about how surprised they must have been when he eluded the FBI, and on his own, continued liquidating those on the society’s hit list. He had completed the job solo, without their funds or inside information, after they had all scampered off to hide in the woodwork. He didn’t know their last names, but neither could they locate him. He didn’t need the likes of them to zap fucking commies. Harvey could manage right well on his own.

  He still had some high-level contacts in Washington, D.C., and other places who thought like he did. Recently Harvey had read Winston Churchill’s The Gathering Storm, about how nice-guy English politicians had been no match for Hitler, Ribbentrop, Himmler, and Mussolini. Harvey could see himself today, if he had been rich and educated, warning his fellow members of Congress about the Red danger creeping onward all around them, and they yawning during his speeches and leaving the chamber for a smoke, like they did to Churchill. Only difference between him and Churchill was he would have waylaid them in the corridors and kicked their butts.

  Harvey Waller had gone into the Marines as a kid and found himself in Vietnam. He came home to his New Jersey town “funny in the head,” as his stay-at-home friends liked to say. They sneered at him when he pointed out to them that their heads were empty, and soon quit tangling with them because he saw that it was a waste of his time. He kept himself honed and in fighting trim by working as a soldier of fortune, nearly always with Mike Campbell, whom Harvey respected as a man and a soldier, even if they did not see eye to eye on most things. With his regular army combat experience and his skills as a mere, it was only natural that Harvey became the executioner of the nameless ultralight group. This guy David was the only one he had ever seen after they had ditched him, and Harvey was sorry it turned out to be on a crowded city sidewalk.

  The coffee shop where David brought him was not a good place, either. Harvey only stopped thinking about how to kill him immediately when David pushed his business card across the table to him.

  “I’m a corporate lawyer with a big financial house on Water Street. I have a job for you that needs doing right away. Fifteen thousand, half in advance, to cover your expenses and so forth. This man is a dangerous communist plant, Harvey. A mole.”

  They met once again, and Harvey picked up half the cash and all the details. He was to hit the target while David was on a three-day cruise out of Miami. Piece of cake.

  On a plane from Newark to O’Hare, Harvey began to wonder if he hadn’t been maneuvered into all this too easily by that smooth-spoken Wall Street lawyer. By the time he rented a car with a forged driver’s license and Visa card and found his way onto Route 90 northwest out of Chicago, he was convinced he had been suckered into something. It would all have been so much simpler and cleaner if he could just have strangled David without ever getting to talk with him again.

  He drove through the flat farmland of Wisconsin and exited from Route 90 at Madison. His target was a student at the University of Wisconsin who lived in the student residential area on Langdon Street. Harvey Waller found a motel near the edge of town, an inconspicuous place. He left nothing in the room, since he would not return to it if he got his work completed today. The danger of working in a small town like Madison, more than fifty miles from any other sizable town, was that if something went wrong, there was no place to hide and escape routes were easy to cut off. Waller knew he didn’t look like a student at the university or a civil servant working at the State Capitol, and there didn’t seem to be much else happening in this town. But to Harvey, considerations like that only added spice to an otherwise bland job of work.

  He leafed through the copy of the Wall Street Journalhe had bought at O’Hare airport. Harvey used this newspaper only because he could usually find it anywhere he happened to be in the country, not because he had an interest in or knowledge of the financial market. It had only been a coincidence that h
e had met David on Wall Street: Harvey was in the downtown area to visit an electronics store. He found what he was looking for in the classified ads: BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES. He scanned the ads in this column, looking for coded messages. Each of his contacts had their own format, and taking an ad here for a few days in succession was the only way they could signal him. Then he contacted them. His eye settled on one item: ARIZONA DENTAL PRACTICE —Root Canal Work a Specialty—Partner Wanted. He nodded in satisfaction. That was from Andre Verdoux. He’d get this job done fast, then phone Andre from Chicago. He didn’t trust the phone exchanges of anything less than a big city, where everything was beyond control.

  He had to pull into the driveway of the house on Langdon Street because he could find no place to park on the street. From one clapboard house, amplified rock music blasted from a stereo. Not far behind the house, a lake stretched in a calm sheet. Everyone on the street looked nineteen years old. Bicycles were stacked against porches. All these kids looked friendly. They looked like they were having a good time here and had big hopes for the future. Harvey thought that if he had been given a chance, he would have liked to have come here.

  So who or what was this kid he had come to kill? Arthur Putnam. He pressed the bell, one of six with names alongside each. A head and shoulders stuck out of a window upstairs. A big guy, a jock.

  “Who’re you looking for?”

  “Arthur Putnam.”

  “That’s me.”

  Waller pointed to the rented Chrysler in the driveway. “We got to talk.”

  The big lug clumped down the stairs, came out the door in shirt, jeans, and sneakers, and got in the car without asking a question, such as who Waller might be and what he was here for. Did the kid think he was a communist contact? Was he used to strangers showing up like this? He looked more like a naive, well-behaved youth who was used to obeying adults without question.