Such Men Are Dangerous

by Lawrence Block

  “If they don’t rip, and if you don’t scorch them.”

  He got the pack and opened it. There were seven cigarettes, and two had already come apart. I spread out four alongside of the fire. The last one I kept. I found a piece of firewood that was just burning at one end, and I fished it out and toasted the cigarette with it. The paper got brown in spots but stayed intact. I gave it to Dattner and held the flame while he lit up.

  I asked him if it was all right, and he said he couldn’t remember one ever tasting better.

  I sat back and watched the fire and drank my coffee. I thought suddenly of the paperback dictionary and the possible reasons why I might want one. A dictionary is a book full of words. Words are talk, talk is communicating with other people.

  If Dartner hadn’t told me that I was breaking one of my rules, I would have gone on to tell him that my major preoccupation was with water. I went through three to four gallons of bottled water a week. I needed it for drinking, for washing, for cooking, for coffee. If there was only a way to have a fresh-water source on the island—

  Don’t talk to anyone.

  And that had been such an easy rule, and for such a long time. Something I might like to hear about, he had said. Something I might like to think about, he had meant. Something he might like me to think about.

  He said, “Maybe I could use the fire to dry my clothes.”

  “It doesn’t work. The sun will dry them in the morning.”

  “I’m staying overnight, then?”

  “Did you have other plans?”

  He laughed. I thought he was going to say something, but he didn’t. He finished his cigarette and was going to flick the butt away. Then he remembered and put it in the fire. That pleased me.

  I said, “Okay.”

  He looked at me.

  “Let’s hear about the operation.”

  “The what?”

  “The Agency thing, the job,” I said patiently. “The reason you’re here. Don’t look surprised. You finally found the right bait, you shouldn’t pretend to be shocked that there’s a fish on the line. You’re trying not to smile. Go ahead and smile. And then tell me all about it.”

  SIX

  “PICTURE AN ARMS shipment,” Dattner was saying. “All U.S. government-issued goods, nothing but the best. The government wants to send them to friends. Instead the bad guys get them.”

  “So?”

  “So the idea is to get them back.”

  I looked at him. “That’s all?”

  “No, of course not, Paul. I just—”

  “Because it doesn’t make any sense. It happens all the time. If I had a dime for every American in Vietnam shot with a U.S.-made gun … a dime, hell, if I had a grain of sand for every one I’d have a beach. It happens everywhere, all over the world. We send guns to guerrillas and the government forces confiscate them. We supply government troops and the guerrillas steal them. Most of the time it’s a case of a government official going bad and turning a fast dollar. Other times the weapons are taken in military action.”

  “And we never try to recover them?”

  “If we do, I never heard about it.”

  “We make a stab at it once in a while, Paul. Mostly we try to buy them back, and you’d be surprised how often it works. But as a general rule you’re absolutely right. Shipments get derailed and it’s part of the game, and we have plenty of factories turning out plenty of guns, and it’s easier to make new guns than chase the old ones. By the time the enemy gets them, they’re generally obsolete, anyway.”

  “So?”

  “So this is different.”

  He picked up a cigarette and made a production of lighting it. He was waiting for me to ask him how it was different. Then he could tell me that was a good question, and I could say—

  What I said was, “Just tell it straight. There are no points given for suspense and dramatic effects. Just tell it.”

  “The direct approach, eh? But sometimes a straight line isn’t the shortest distance between two points. Sometimes a great circle route—”

  “Not here. Not on my island.”

  A smile, a nod. “Okay. To hell with drama. This isn’t ordinary weaponry, conventional stuff. We’re talking about a shipment that’s worth in excess of two million dollars and fits into four trucks. We’re talking about the most highly sophisticated combat devices ever produced for guerrilla warfare. I don’t have to tell you about guerrilla warfare. You had ten years of it. All I have to say is that this gear makes the stuff you used in Asia look like water pistols. They didn’t give you fellows toys like this. They’ve been making them all along, but they were never okayed for combat use. Not because they don’t work. The testing reports would knock you out. But because nobody would buy escalation on that scale.

  “Like atomic grenades, for example. One man throws one and clears three acres. Like nuclear mortars. Gas grenades. Do you realize what you’ve got when you can combine the knockout power of a nuclear blast with the maneuverability of a mortar? Do you realize how effective they’d be against guerrillas? Or how well they’d work for guerrillas?”

  “The real dirty stuff.”

  “Right.”

  “We kept hearing rumors that we were getting stuff like that. Or that the other side was.” I remembered a tangle we had in Laos on a patrol deep in Pathet Lao territory. I tried to imagine what it would have been like if we’d had that kind of weaponry.

  Or if they had it.

  “I could go on, Paul, but you wanted it engraved on the head of a pin. It’s choice stuff, the real dirty stuff. The decision to give it to some friends was ultra-top level. It didn’t make the papers. It never will—if the question ever comes up, we’ll deny we ever had it, we’ll insist they made it out of old tire tubes in Burma, we’ll lie our heads off no matter who says what. Hell, giving the stuff out couldn’t get fifty votes in the House or twenty in the Senate.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “I was just noticing the stars. It’s beautiful out here, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Peaceful. I could see how a man could enjoy spending nights here, under the stars, sitting beside a fire—”

  “You made your point, Dattner.”

  “George.”

  “You made your point. Get on with it.”

  He flicked ashes from his cigarette. “You can figure out the rest, can’t you? The shipment was dispatched—not, needless to say, through the usual channels. You can also guess who was supposed to receive it.”

  “The hell I can. I haven’t looked at a newspaper or heard a radio in months. For all I know we sent the crud to Canada.”

  “I forget how out of touch you’ve been.”

  “Not out of touch. Call it—no, forget it, forget word games. Where were they supposed to go?”

  “To guerrillas, and in this hemisphere, and now you can guess, Paul, because it’s the same guess you would have made a year ago. You with me?” I was. “But instead of going where they were supposed to go, a wheel came off and they wound up in the wrong hands. At first it looked as though they were going to go to the bad-guy government that our good-guy guerrillas were trying to overthrow, and that would have been more or less terrible, but it turned out that it was worse than that. A lot worse, because we could have made a good stab at blocking that shipment.”

  He put his cigarette in the fire. “Instead it turns out that the new destination of all this hell on wheels is yet another group of guerrillas, but in this instance they’re bad-guy guerrillas who’ll use them to knock hell out of a good-guy government. Four truckloads of this garbage is just about enough to do it, too, but it hardly matters whether they win or lose, because the U.S.A. loses either way. If they make it, we’ve lost the cornerstone of free Latin America. If they flop, a lot of people will want to know what happened. It won’t even help us to deny that these were our goods, not even if anybody’s fool enough to believe us. Because then people will ask how the hell we managed to let the ene
my smuggle dynamite like this into the western hemisphere. Did I say dynamite?” He snorted. “It’s about time we changed our lingo. Dynamite is something kids use to celebrate the Fourth of July. Where was I?”

  “If we lose we lose, and if we win we lose.”

  “That says it. There’s only one way to come out of this clean. We have to get the shipment back before delivery is made.”

  “Or prevent delivery.”

  “Isn’t that the same thing?”

  “Not really. If the object is to prevent delivery, all you have to do is destroy it. If it’s in trucks you drop bombs on them. If it’s on a ship you sink it. If it’s in a plane you shoot it down. It sounds like a job in the Air Force, doesn’t it?”

  He grinned. “This stuff is nuclear, remember? You blow it up and you have fallout.”

  “So you say Sorry about that and explain that it won’t happen until next time.”

  “Even if it’s in a friendly country?”

  “Even if it’s in London.”

  “And suppose it’s in the United States. Then what?”

  I stared at him.

  “Because that’s where it’s at, Paul. It’s in the midwest right now, smack in the Heartland of America, as the fellow says. We know the location and we know the players on the other team. We know how they’re going to ship it. We can even make a hell of a good guess when they’re going to ship it. It’ll go by air, of course, and takeoff time will be in more than a week and less than three.”

  “If it’s in the States, and you can pinpoint the location—”

  “Let me go on, Paul.” He lit another cigarette, but without theatrics this time. “We could bomb the storage site, of course.”

  “That’s not what I was going to say.”

  “I know, but it’s one of the things we’ve thought about. Our computers estimate it would cost us two-thirds of the population of three counties, plus long-term fallout victims scattered over four states. That’s been tentatively ruled out.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Uh-huh. There are other things we can try. We can let them load the plane and then knock it out of the skies. The plane will be a jet. We know this, too, because the plane is already in this country. We know everything about the plane because they stole it from us. Don’t interrupt me. We know everything, that is, except where they’re keeping it. But we’ll probably spot it when it takes off, and we can probably keep interceptors on its tail. But they’re not idiots on the other team, Paul. They won’t cooperate by flying over water. They’ll stay over land, and we’ll have to try for an intercept over relatively unpopulated South American terrain. We asked the computer to estimate chances of a successful intercept and guess the probably casualties. It blew three transistors. We’ll try for that intercept if push comes to shove, but we look on it as a last line of defense.”

  “Go on.” My head was aching for the first time in months. I wasn’t used to hearing people talk. “Go on,” I said. “Now explain why you can’t throw a battalion of marines and paras around the place.”

  “We could.”

  “Of course you could.”

  “And they’d take all our pretty toys and use them on us.”

  “They wouldn’t have the manpower to hold out.”

  “Right. We’d win. But they’d probably last as long as they could, and it would be expensive for us. We might try it anyway. More likely, we’d try to use para divisions to cut them off when they try loading the plane. Again, it’s something that would probably work, unless there was a foulup somewhere along the line. Which might happen.”

  “If they already stole the weapons and a good-sized cargo jet, I’d say foulups have a tendency to happen.”

  “You’re not the first person to notice that.” He chuckled. “Paul, let me save time. You’re not going to think of a line of defense that either a man or a machine hasn’t already suggested. Some have been ruled out and some are in the planning stage. None is ideal. An ideal operation would recover the weapons intact with no loss of life on our side and no publicity. If it doesn’t work, then the other procedures come into play one by one. What we want you for is the first step, the ideal play.”

  “Which is?”

  “They stole ’em from us, and now we steal ’em back again.”

  “Who is we?”

  “Two men. You and me.” He watched my eyes. “No clever answer?”

  “No.”

  “You on the inside, an unknown. We know they must have men in our camp but no one will know about you. You on the inside and me on the outside. You don’t know the physical plant, you can’t visualize it, but you can take my word it’s feasible. It can be done.”

  “I’ll take your word.”

  “No immediate doubts, No great show of surprise?”

  “None.” I stood up. “I saw it coming.”

  He looked worried.

  “I made a mistake,” I told him. “I should have drowned you before. All I had to do was do nothing, leave you there in the water. I could have used you for fishbait and your boat for firewood and no one would ever have come looking for you. No, don’t get up. Don’t even try, or I’ll knock you down again. They don’t know you’re here. They lost interest in me the day I checked out of the Doulton. You’re all on your own.”

  “Paul—”

  “Shut up. This isn’t an Agency job, it’s your job. All yours. The last time I saw you, the only other time I saw you, you told me my trouble was that I learned how to think. Don’t forget it. You told me I wouldn’t take a black pill. I won’t take one with a sugar coating either. You want me for something, then you give it to me straight and I say yes or no.”

  He started to get up. I let him get most of the way, then kicked his feet out from under him.

  I said, “There are two things you can do. You can stick to your lie or find a new one, and if you do I’ll know it, and I’ll take you out and drown you. Or you can start over without the frills and do it right. It’s your move.”

  “You would drown me.”

  “You already knew that.”

  “We had a meal together, we talked, and you would drown me.”

  “Oh, cut the shit.”

  “You’re a beauty. They never should have let you get away. I knew it the day I talked to you, I saw things that wouldn’t fit on their graphs. I knew you’d crack and I knew you’d mend, and—”

  “Leave me out. Let’s hear it.”

  “Sure,” he said. “You may not like it, but this time it’s straight. And it’s a honey.”

  It wasn’t bad. Everything was about as he had described it, he explained, except that the United States government wasn’t in on it. Both the military and the civilian intelligence people had it on very good authority that the whole shipment had already arrived in South America, and the Agency was busy rushing men to that area to try to minimize the damage.

  “But it isn’t there, Paul. It’s still in the States. I know it, and I have to be the only person who does. Nobody came and told me. There was data coming across my desk, miscellaneous bits and pieces that didn’t add up to anything concrete. You could feed the whole mess to a computer and not even find out what time it was.”

  But he sensed something, enough to make it worth his while to take a quiet little trip west. He nosed around and found out he was right. He already had me traced as far as Florida. A private investigator placed me in Key West, and he did the rest of the detecting himself.

  “You remember that conversation we had? I was talking to myself as much as to you. I could put this package on the right desk and come out neck deep in glory. I don’t want glory anymore. I’d rather be up to my neck in money.”

  He figured a half share would come to a million dollars. A half share was all he wanted. With that kind of money around, all of it tax-free, it made no sense to haggle over a split. A million dollars was a footnote in an administrative budget. It was also his present take-home pay for the next eighty-seven years and seven mon
ths. And it was one half of what he was certain he could get from a well-heeled refugee group in Tampa.

  “They’re in the same camp as the good guys who were originally set to receive the stuff. That’s the real beauty of it, Paul. They’re on the same side. The goods go to their original destination, the U.S. comes out clean, our friends down south avoid getting themselves atomized, and you and I cut up a two-million-dollar pie.”

  There were more details, fine points. I let him finish. Then he asked me what I thought, and I said I wanted to think it over, and he told me that was just the answer he hoped I’d give him. He finished his last cigarette, and I walked him down to the boat to get his other pack. He opened it and flipped the strip of cellophane away. I didn’t say anything about it. He lit up and asked me if I didn’t feel chilly. I said I didn’t, that I rarely noticed temperature changes. He said he wished his clothes were dry. I waited until he had finished his cigarette and flipped it into the water. It was amazing how quickly he forgot to behave.

  “Beautiful out here,” he said. “Really beautiful.”

  “It is,” I said.

  Then I spun him around and stabbed three fingers into his gut two inches south of his navel. I pulled it enough so that nothing would get ruptured. He doubled up in agony but couldn’t make a sound. That’s one of the nice things about that particular jab.

  The next thing he knew he was on his back in two feet of water, just about halfway between the top and the bottom.

  I kept him under for maybe ten seconds. His eyes were open, but it was impossible to catch his expression in that light, not with the water in the way.

  I pulled him up and let him sputter and breathe. I didn’t say anything, and he couldn’t. Then I stuck him under again.

  Ten more seconds and I brought him up. I had never before seen such terror on a human face. I wasn’t doing anything to him, he wasn’t even swallowing any water, but that hardly mattered. He was in very bad shape.

  “You’re about to go down for the third time,” I told him gently. “The third time is the charm. You seem to think that you have to tell me what I want to hear, but all I want to hear is the truth. Forget about persuading me. Concentrate on staying alive.”