The Ambushers

by Donald Hamilton

  “Precisely,” Mac said. “I want you to drive out to the ranch and have Dr. Stern, or his assistant, take a look at that leg. That will put you right in the area. The materials and instructions are not quite ready yet. I will have them sent out while you are en route.”

  6

  The ranch is in southern Arizona. To get to it, you drive first to Tucson and check with a certain telephone number, after which you proceed out of town by a specified route, seldom twice the same. Presently you pass a man changing the tire of a pickup truck or filling the radiator of a jeep or just standing beside an out-of-state sedan to snap a picture. If the door of the vehicle has been left open, you can go ahead. If it’s closed, that means somebody’s tailing you, and you have to go back to Tucson and await instructions.

  The ranch is sanctuary—for some, a next-to-final sanctuary. It is the one place in the world an agent can relax without worrying who’s behind him. Like most Nirvanas, it has its drawbacks, but it’s safe; and every effort is made to keep it that way.

  We got the all-clear signal on the first try and kept going. I had my fingers crossed. The car they’d wished off on me was a tremendous old Pontiac station wagon, built in the days when station wagons were still being made of wood. Now, sixty-odd non-stop hours out of Washington, D.C.—well, I’d occasionally napped on the front seat for an hour or so—it was banging along on only five cylinders and three wheels, or at least that was my impression. It didn’t have to be correct. After wrestling the brute for twenty-four hundred miles, I wasn’t as sensitive to impressions as I might have been. The only thing that could really impress me, at this point, was a bed. I hoped no last-minute breakdown would keep me from it.

  The gate looked like any ranch gate in that country. It had a cattle guard and the usual friendly ranch-country sign: posted, NO TRESPASSING, NO HUNTING, NO WOOD HAULING. From there, the dirt road went back into the desert for five miles. Here was another gate, not a cattle guard this time, but a real, swinging-type gate with another sign reading: PRIVATE PROPERTY—NO TRESPASSING. I got the ancient mechanical monster stopped with some difficulty—the brakes weren’t behaving right, either— and stumbled out, hoping the poor old beast wouldn’t die while my back was turned. Idling, it sounded very sick indeed.

  I got the gate open, remembering how it was supposed to be done, which wasn’t the way you’d normally open a ranch gate. This told the gent watching through binoculars from somewhere up on the nearby hogback that it was okay not to shoot me. I drove through, limped back to shut the gate in a specified way, got back into the wagon, and drove on. After another two miles, the road dipped down into a green valley, and there was the ranch, a great, sprawling adobe structure in a grove of cottonwoods.

  It had once been a guest ranch that went broke. Now it’s supposed to be the property of a rich old crackpot with religious notions who’s often visited by friends as looney as he is. Well, that’s pretty close, except for the religious angle. Actually, the place belongs to rich old Uncle Sam, and I guess we qualify as his friends, and if we weren’t crazy we wouldn’t be in this business. I eased the old heap down the hill on what compression was left in the remaining cylinders, and let it roll to a stop in the yard.

  We were expected. A man in a sports shirt was coming to meet us. The doctors don’t wear white coats at the ranch, and the nurses don’t wear uniforms, but they aren’t hard to spot.

  “You can wake up any time,” I said over my shoulder. “We’re in.”

  I heard my passenger stir in back. The guy in the bright shirt came up. He was young and earnest-looking, with metal-rimmed glasses, and he had all the qualifications of a good doctor except common sense and a sense of humor— well, any kind of sense at all, to be perfectly honest. That’s just one man’s opinion, of course, based on previous visits.

  He was one of the first-name boys. He was Dr. Thomas Stern, and he ran the place with all kinds of authority, but he’d think you were mad at him unless you called him Tom.

  “Hello, Tom,” I said. “She’s in back. Give her a chance to put her shoes on.”

  “How’s she feeling?”

  “I’m just the chauffeur,” I said. “I’m just the guy who gave her a lift because we happened to be going the same way. Telepathy is out of my line... No, I wouldn’t go back there and get helpful.”

  He’d started toward the rear of the wagon. He stopped, frowning. “Why not, Eric?”

  “Get a nurse, anything in skirts,” I said. “She’s gotten kind of used to me, to the point of silent toleration, but I don’t know how she’d react to you.” I limped around to the rear of the wagon and yanked open the transom and dropped the tailgate. “All right, Skinny,” I said. “Out you come.”

  The thin little girl sitting on the blankets in the rear of the station wagon looked a lot more human than the one I’d helped lug out of the Costa Verde jungle, but she wasn’t a jewel of glowing health and perfect adjustment. She just stared at me silently and crawled back to the opening, waiting for me to get well off to one side before she swung her legs over and slid to the ground.

  She was wearing a pair of slim, tapering cotton pants, light tan in color, and a boy’s white short-sleeved shirt. They’d been clean and crisp enough in Washington, D.C., but now they looked kind of like a well-slept-in suit of pajamas. Well, I was in no position to criticize. My costume was no fresher. At least she didn’t have a beard.

  I’d been feeding her milkshakes and stuff clear across the country, whenever she was awake enough to absorb nourishment, but she still hardly cast a shadow. Her left hand was still wrapped in bandages. Her face was all bones and eyes, mostly eyes. Her hair had reverted to a light shade of brown, like the description in the files, and the machete haircut had been repaired as far as possible. Actually, it didn’t look much worse than the short tousled messes some girls pay money to wear on their heads, even in this era of haystacks and beehives.

  But it was the eyes that got you. They were big and gray and shiny, and sometimes they were big and yellow and shiny, and they never seemed to close at all. They were watching all the time, waiting for something dreadful to happen.

  “She’s all yours,” I said to Dr. Stern. “So long, Skinny. Thanks for the company, such as it was.”

  I saw the eyes change, just a little. I was getting to her. If I’d had her for another sixty hours, I might even have made her blink. Dr. Stern was looking at me reproachfully. He obviously thought I lacked tact and feeling. A stout nurse in a print dress was glaring at me.

  “Oh, you poor little thing,” she said to the girl, putting her arm defensively around the narrow shoulders. “Come on, honey, this way. You’re just going to love it here. You’ll see.”

  I could feel the eyes following me as I went to the front of the car to get my hat off the seat. Then the nurse was leading her away. I felt a little funny about it, almost as if I were going to miss her. I’d carried her feet twelve miles through the jungle; I’d driven all of her twenty-four hundred miles. She had still to say a word to me, but I guess you get used to having somebody around even if you mustn’t touch them and they won’t talk.

  “The materials you’re to study arrived yesterday by air. They’re in your room,” Tom Stern was saying. “But you’d better come into the office first. We’re supposed to take a look at that leg.”

  “The hell with the leg,” I said. “Just point me at a bed and stand back out of the way.”

  “Well, in the morning then,” he said. “You’re to call Washington when you’ve done your homework. What do you want done with the car?”

  Sheila was just disappearing into the building, a wraith in pants beside the husky nurse in her print dress. I’ve never been able to work up a great deal of interest in trousered women, but then, she wasn’t really a woman, just a pair of yellow-gray eyes. I looked at the Pontiac and shook my head regretfully.

  “You’d better shoot it,” I said. “It isn’t humane to let it suffer so.”

  I followed one of the ho
useboys into the building. Two people were sitting in wheelchairs on the veranda or, as they call it in that country, portal, with the accent on the last syllable. The man had only half a face, acid had got the rest. The woman looked all right, but I knew, because I’d seen her on a previous trip when I came out for special training, that she’d sit there without moving until they brought her in and fed her and put her to bed. Her eyes didn’t bother me much. They were just dead.

  These were people who’d made the same mistake Sheila had: they’d got caught, somewhere, by somebody. And if you think mixing up the permanent invalids with the agents in for retraining or repairs, like me, was just an accident or an economy measure, think again. We were supposed to see them sitting there, the ones who hadn’t quite made it. It was a gentle reminder of what happened when you goofed. As I say, the place is safe, but it has drawbacks.

  I had a nice big room with a desk. There was a lot of stuff on the desk. I started opening the packages and said to hell with that. And to hell with the fact that there was still daylight at the window. I pulled down the blind, undressed, got into bed, and went to sleep.

  7

  The thing was wearing drifting white robes and stretching out its white arms to me and whispering my name. I couldn’t see its face clearly. I tried to wake up and found that I was awake. That didn’t seem right, somehow. Apparitions ought to stick to dreams where they belong.

  It was still there in the middle of the room, illuminated only by the kickback of the yard lights outside, as much as could penetrate the drawn blinds. I’d been sleeping heavily a moment before, and I wasn’t thinking very lucidly, I guess. I just knew that I didn’t believe in ghosts, and that I had no midnight mistresses in the place, and that tricks were sometimes played here in the name of training and analysis, to see how fast you could react.

  I went for the white thing before it could come for me. I lunged out of bed low, cut it down, wrapped it up, and pinned it to the floor. It was dressed in some material that was coarse to the touch; the idea of a shroud came to mind. The hell with that. Somebody was playing games, and they could damn well go play them somewhere else. Then I felt the weak, panicky struggles and heard the frightened breathing and I knew at last what I had. I let go and got up and turned on the light, feeling foolish and angry.

  “Jesus Christ, Skinny,” I said. “Don’t tell me you walk in your sleep on top of everything else.”

  She was huddled on the floor, kind of tangled in a Navajo rug. I thought she was crying, but the face she turned up to me was dry. The eyes were dry. They were perfectly enormous, and the odd yellow light was in them. She shrank away as I stepped forward to help her rise. I stopped.

  “Relax,” I said disgustedly. “I figure a hundred pounds for the legal raping size. You’re still safe by at least ten pounds. What the hell are you doing here, anyway?”

  She didn’t answer, of course. I went over to my suitcase, found the sandals and dressing gown I hadn’t bothered to unpack earlier, and put them on. When I turned again, she was standing up. They’d given her some kind of a crude, straight, sleeveless cotton gown that reached the floor. So much for my dream of drifting robes. It wasn’t the sexiest garment in the world, but it had a kind of convent simplicity that went well with the thin face and the big eyes and the chopped-off hair. She could have been a martyr on the way to the bonfire.

  She said, “Don’t leave me here.”

  I stared at her for a moment. It was a perfectly good human voice. Well, I should have known she had one somewhere.

  “Please don’t leave me here,” she said clearly.

  I drew a long breath. “I haven’t the slightest intention of leaving you here,” I said. “This happens to be my room and I’m still way behind in my sleep. I’m booting you out into the hall this minute, unless you come up with a very good reason to the contrary, fast.”

  “I mean this place. I don’t want to stay here.”

  “Why not?”

  The big eyes watched me, but they were no longer yellow. They only went yellow when she was scared or mad, I decided. These were gray eyes. If they’d only blinked occasionally, they would have been nice sensible eyes. When she spoke, her voice was quite sensible, too.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “It’s a glorified funny farm, that’s why not! And I’m the newest, cutest inmate, and I’m just going to love it here if they have to kill me to make me. Well, I don’t love it! I think it’s perfectly horrible. Everybody feels so goddamn sorry for me, except you!”

  The blasphemous adjective went oddly with her saintly, ascetic appearance, barefooted in the rough white nightie.

  “What makes you think I’m not sorry for you?” I asked, startled.

  She said, “Because I know perfectly well you think I’m a clumsy little idiot who caused everybody a lot of trouble by botching up a perfectly simple job and getting caught so some people had to get shot rescuing her and others had to get blisters on their hands carting her to safety!” She got it all out in one rush of words while I stared at her. Then she said, “Of course, you’re perfectly right.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. She watched me unblinkingly, waiting. It was funny—in a sense I’d known her for well over a week, but she hadn’t really been a person until this moment. She’d just been some damaged government property for which I’d been more or less responsible, off and on. And now that she’d become a person, she wasn’t at all the person I’d expected. Before either of us spoke, there were footsteps in the hall.

  “There’s a light,” said the voice of the big nurse I’d seen earlier.

  “Please!” Sheila hesitated and stepped forward quickly. It was obviously the bravest thing she’d done in her life, but she managed to force herself to touch me, to take my hand gingerly and turn it over so the half-healed blisters showed. She looked up at my face and whispered, “Please! Why did you bother to carry me out of the jungle, if you were just going to leave me in a dreadful place like this?”

  Then they were at the door, and she let go my hand and shrank back guiltily, as if caught committing a monstrous perversion.

  “Oh, there you are, honey,” said the big nurse. “Don’t you know you had us all worried, disappearing like that?”

  She was an imposing figure in a striped seersucker dressing gown, with her hair in curlers. She’d apparently been called out of bed by the night nurse, a stout little woman trying to disguise her profession in a costume of brightly printed shirt and shorts.

  “We’re a naughty girl,” said the smaller woman. “We promised nursie we’d go right to sleep.”

  “Don’t scold her, Jonesy. It’s hard the first night in a strange place, isn’t it, honey?” The big nurse smiled brightly. “We know you didn’t mean to cause trouble, dearie. You were just looking for a familiar face, weren’t you, honey? Now you come with us and we’ll give you something to make you sleep.”

  She gave me a hard look that said I hadn’t heard the end of this. They all went out of the room. Sheila never looked my way. I didn’t sleep as well the second half of the night as I had the first; in fact, after a while I got up again and went through the stuff on the desk. In the morning I reported to the office according to instructions.

  The orthopedic surgeon they had in the place—Stern wasn’t a scalpel-type doctor—was named Jake Lister. He was about six feet tall and about six feet wide and he’d played pro football to pay for his medical education. He had big white teeth in a black face, and long black fingers that could be gentle and sensitive as a musician’s, but weren’t always.

  “Ouch!” I said. “Why don’t you just pull it off and take it over to the lab for examination? I’ll wait here, holding a hanky over the bloody stump.”

  Lister grinned and straightened up. “Nothing wrong with you that a little exercise won’t cure, man. You’ve been sitting on your behind too much, that’s your trouble.” He went on to prescribe a series of squat-downs and push-ups to be performed, it seemed, continuously day and n
ight.

  “That’s fine,” I said. “When do I sleep and eat?”

  “Ah, hell,” he said. “Why do I waste my breath? Any time one of you sinister characters gets a little seniority, he’s suddenly too proud to do simple exercises. I tell you what, you go over to the gym three times a day as long as you’re here and have the Dago give you an hour’s workout with the foils or sabers. No epée, mind you, that’s too precise and static. The hell with form. Just mix it up fast and sloppy. If Martinelli’s busy, you practice lunging against a wall until your tongue’s hanging out. That ought to take the kinks out of your quadriceps femoris.”

  He went out, leaving me alone in the examining room behind Stern’s office. I’d been told to wait for the top man himself, and if I knew my medical bureaucrats, it was going to be a long wait. They’ve got to put us field men in our places, even if we do get to call them by their first names.

  I took my time pulling on my pants therefore, and I could have taken more. After I’d waited fifteen minutes, a prim young woman came in and told me Dr. Stern had been taken suddenly busy and wouldn’t be able to see me this morning. He was terribly sorry, she said. I said I shared his grief; and I went over to the gym and made arrangements with Martinelli, the edged-weapons trainer.

  He was very glad to have someone to fence with. The current crop of recruits had apparently all been taught never to lead with their rights. It was almost impossible, the Dago said, to make a good fencer or knifeman of a kid brought up to fight left foot forward, in the American boxing tradition. Such a candidate did everything backwards as far as real, permanent mayhem was concerned. All he was good for was punching people in the nose with his lousy straight left.

  I listened to Martinelli’s plaints for a while, knowing that I was stalling. I was trying to make up my mind about something; I was telling myself not to be sentimental and mix into stuff that was none of my business. When I figured I had myself convinced, I got the map coordinates of the nearest security booth, navigated my way there, and called Washington on the direct phone.