Hunter

by Andrew Macdonald

  “Yep, and that’s all she wrote, faggot,” was Oscar’s response as he plunged the ten-inch blade into the center of Carter’s chest. He grabbed the falling man, so that the body would not hit the floor with an audible crash. He left the knife in him and quickly checked his pulse to be sure that his heart had stopped. On his way out he carefully dropped the ballpoint pen with the Arab markings into the bloody mess in the alcove.

  He stopped at home only long enough to shower and change his clothes, then drove to Adelaide’s apartment for dinner. It was after midnight when he pulled into his garage again. As soon as he turned off his ignition he could hear the telephone in the house ringing. It was Ryan.

  “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for four hours,” came the exasperated voice from the other end. “For Christ’s sake, don’t do anything else until I tell you to! What do you think you are — a fucking one-man army?”

  “Well, I thought you wanted me to….”

  Oscar was cut off in mid-sentence by another outburst from Ryan: “God damn it, when I said I wanted you to generate some public outrage I didn’t mean for you to turn the whole country upside down. Have you been watching the news this evening?”

  “Sorry, I’ve been too busy. Am I getting much coverage?”

  “Coverage? They’re going wild. They’re hysterical. The President was on. The Vice President was on. The Speaker of the House was on. A dozen senators were on. They’re calling for martial law.

  Nothing like you did today — yesterday — has ever happened before in this country. Damn, man! It’s really hit the fan.

  “You know, what I thought you’d do is pop one or two of those Yids with your gun, maybe wire a stick of dynamite to a starter or two, toss a satchel charge into somebody’s office. That’s what I was counting on. A slow build-up of hostilities between the kikes and the camel jockeys. Give me time to work the press a little and then move in hard on both of ‘em.

  “But no, you start off by dropping your blockbuster on their number-one facility this morning and wiping out a third of the Mossad’s cadre in the Washington area, using about a thousand per cent overkill. Then, before they’ve even had time to catch their breath from that, you butcher their top — I mean their top — agent in the country and kill their top goy politician besides, not to mention miscellaneous government employees. You’ve escalated things to the thermonuclear stage before I could even get into the act.”

  Oscar did not respond, and there was silence on the line for a few seconds before Ryan continued, somewhat cooler. “I was planning to let this scenario develop much more slowly, while I worked on some other things, such as Black rioters. One good thing about the way you’ve started it off, though, is that you’ve panicked the Israelis. They’re usually pretty levelheaded, and one of my fears was that they’d figure out it wasn’t really the Palestinians who were knocking off their guys. But now you’ve got them so paranoid that they feel forced to take drastic action immediately, and that’ll be their undoing.

  “The Agency is intercepting most of their communications, and we know they’ve already called in a team of 2O of their trained killers from Israel, who’ll be flying here Sunday. Better yet, they’re planning to kidnap Abu Kareem, the chief of staff in the PLO Mission to the UN in New York. They intend to drug him, pack him in a crate, and ship him back to Israel on an El Al flight just the way they did Adolf Eichmann, so they can torture him and find out who snuffed Schwartz and blew up their debriefing center on K Street. If we’re lucky both of those operations will take place simultaneously, and we can nab ‘em in the act. Then, if I’m able to work the media just right, we can go after the rest of their crew. But I can’t afford to have any more surprises until that’s done, Yeager, so just take that quarter of a million you gouged out of me and have yourself a nice, long vacation. Understand? Don’t do anything else now.”

  “Gotcha, partner. Say, did they find my Koran? I left it in the glove compartment, but it looked to me like there wasn’t enough left of that van to put in a matchbox.”

  “Yeah. We found the engine and most of the front end of the van in the basement, and one of our men spotted your Koran almost as soon as we had hoisted the wreckage back up onto the pavement and started going through it. The Israelis were looking over our shoulders the whole time, of course.”

  Then Ryan chuckled, “Probably the best thing you did today was something that wasn’t even part of your assignment, and that was killing Carter. More than anything else, that’ll guarantee me a free hand, with no interference from the bleeding-heart liberals in Congress. Not that Carter was especially liberal, but the one kind of crime those bastards are in favor of cracking down on is crime against themselves. If you or I get knifed by a Black mugger, their main concern is that the cops don’t violate the mugger’s civil rights. But if one of them gets knifed — well, that’s a different story.”

  XXIX

  Oscar followed Ryan’s advice, more or less, for the next four weeks. Instead of taking a vacation, though, he turned his attention toward his project with Saul and began spending much more time with it. The maiden broadcast over WZY-TV on May 10 was an enormous success. Within days it led to positive answers from several of the big Midwestern stations Colleen had been attempting to get Saul on.

  More and more, Saul’s message was tailored by Oscar, who was attempting to coordinate his plans for building Saul’s public power base with other developments more or less beyond his control — namely, those involving Ryan. It was much clearer to Oscar now than it had been six months ago that the country was headed for some major changes in the near future. He wanted to have Saul in position to make a decisive move at the right moment. For the time being, however, he was careful not to let his premonitions of things to come carry him too far too fast.

  Saul’s theme was more austere than Caldwell’s, but it was not really a radically different one. He preached of the danger of God’s punishment striking America soon because of its sins. He chastised the government for its corruption and its inability to curb the country’s continued decline. Other evangelists had gone over much of the same ground in the past, although in recent years they had accommodated themselves to the generally fat-and-happy mood of the country by going easy on the brimstone and appealing more to middle-class materialism and self-indulgence. They were not privy to Oscar’s inside information on the suddenness and severity with which hard times were likely to strike again, and they also were slow to sense the new tide of foreboding and worry which already was beginning to creep into the public consciousness.

  Saul’s real point of departure from the evangelist pack was the undertone of imminent change, the recurring hint of big things to come, which ran through his sermons. A few of the flakier evangelists far out on the fringe had occasionally predicted that Judgment Day was at hand or that some great catastrophe was about to overwhelm the world, but Saul wore the mantle of prophecy differently, not only with more dignity but also with more credibility. His credibility was due in part to his indefiniteness and in part to his affected humility. He was making no specific predictions nor even claiming that he knew what was coming; instead, in keeping with his role of medium, he merely asserted that a great turning point in the affairs of men was at hand, that his evidence for his assertion was his own experience on Easter morning, and that he, along with everyone else, would find out the details only when Jesus chose to utilize him as a medium once again: “I do not know what our Lord will reveal to us or demand of us. I only know that he will speak to us again soon, and that the world will not be the same after that.”

  Saul’s oratorical magic gave an aura of mystery and suspense to this simple statement that left his television audience on the edges of their chairs. Oscar was concerned that the hint of a revelation to come might cause the Jewish media moguls to prick up their ears and be more wary of giving Saul access to that portion of the airwaves they controlled, but his initial audience ratings, together with his strongly p
ro-Jewish and pro-Israel introductory tape, seemed to overcome any misgivings on their part. Colleen was able to buy as much air time as their initial budget would allow. By May 24 Saul’s share of the total evangelists’ viewership had reached just under 50 per cent. The mail donations were beginning to roll in, and it seemed clear that they had a going thing.

  Both Oscar and Adelaide pitched in and helped with the fast-growing secretarial work load. Emily, who had been on the verge of filing for divorce a few weeks earlier, quit her job and devoted all her time to attempting to handle her husband’s torrent of correspondence. The real break came when Saul was able to persuade his secretarial ally in Caldwell’s camp to leave her former employer and take charge of his own office affairs.

  During this time Oscar did not forget about Ryan or the other phase of his own activity. For that matter, few Americans did. Ryan and his affairs were in the public eye almost continually from the end of April. One of the strongest impressions he made was four days after Oscar’s two blows against the Mossad. The big news on that Monday evening was the Agency’s gunfire-punctuated raid on an El Al airliner at Kennedy International Airport, from which a crate containing the drugged body of Abu Kareem was seized after a shootout which left eight Mossad guards and four other Jewish air passengers dead. Ryan really made a show of it, with television cameras recording the scene as the crate was opened and the unconscious, tightly trussed Palestinian was removed. Then the cameras scanned the hypodermic syringes and bottles of drugs found on one of the slain Mossad guards. It was the sort of chilling display which knocked a big hole in the Jew-as-blameless-victim myth which had been so carefully maintained by much of the media to that point, and it made it very hard for even Israel’s most slavish Gentile boosters to complain about the rough way in which the raid was conducted.

  Ryan followed up that same evening with a number of coordinated arrests of members of the Mossad assassination team which had flown in the previous day. Like the El Al raid, the arrests were as violent as Ryan could make them without being obvious about it, and news cameramen accompanied all of the arrest teams. For balance he also had his agents haul in a dozen luckless Palestinians. Afterward he had a lineup of the Israelis and Palestinians who had survived the arrests. As the camera went down the line and halted on each face, filling the screen with a battered and disheveled mug over a number board hung around the man’s neck, a list of aliases and alleged terrorist activities was read off by an Agency spokesman. Then the camera moved to a table on which the weapons seized with the Mossad agents were laid out. The spokesman carefully pointed out the silencers, the poisoned darts, and other grisly tools of the assassin’s trade.

  Finally Ryan himself came on and grimly summarized things. For too long, he said, Americans had tolerated the terrorist war being waged in their midst by the ruthless hirelings of foreign powers. He briskly detailed several bombings of Arab offices in the United States which had taken place over the past five years, none of which had received much news coverage at the time it had happened. In each case scenes of the damage were shown to emphasize the gravity of the act. Then he moved on smoothly to recent events: the bombing of the Mossad offices in the rear of George’s Stationery, the stabbing of Senator Carter, the kidnapping of Abu Kareem, and the influx of professional killers from Israel. He gave a continuity to all of these happenings which left the viewer with the clear impression that the latest outrages were the outgrowth of the earlier bombings and that Israel’s agents really had started the whole process. He concluded his summary by saying that he had been charged with the responsibility for bringing this terrorist war to an end, and he intended to do it, using whatever degree of force was necessary.

  Oscar could imagine the cheering and clapping which must have followed this announcement in working-class bars and middle-class living rooms all over America. Ryan had stage-managed things perfectly, neatly pulling the rug out from under all those who might otherwise have opposed the wholesale roundup of Israel’s agents which the Agency carried out during the next few days.

  The Agency held back from becoming involved in the Black rioting in Miami for more than a week. The governor of Florida had called in National Guard troops to patrol the riot area. They were able to arrest some looters and disperse some crowds, but sniping and arson continued. On the eighth day of the disorders Black youths stopped a car on a highway bounding the riot-stricken neighborhood by throwing a cement block through its windshield from an overpass. They swarmed over the car and beat the White man who had been driving it almost to death, then pulled two teenaged White girls from the back seat and carried them screaming into a nearby housing project.

  After the mother of the girls made a tearful plea on television that evening, the governor called on the Federal government for help.

  The next morning more than 600 men from the Agency were in the riot area, equipped with helmets, flak jackets, and M-16s. Ryan himself was there with them, directing operations from a hastily set up field headquarters. They swept through apartment block after apartment block, blasting the locks off doors and shooting down anyone who did not respond instantly to their orders. By nightfall they had arrested more than 400 Blacks, killed 123, seriously wounded 200 or so, and completely quelled the disorder. It turned out later that Ryan had sent in a dozen Black undercover agents — every Black, in fact, who had come over to the Agency with the Bureau’s former Anti-Terrorism Section — as soon as the rioting had begun; then, while waiting for the most politically opportune time to apply muscle, he had gathered all of the information on the local Black community — in particular, on the key figures who were keeping the riot going — needed to use that muscle decisively.

  The fallout from this action was by no means uniformly favorable to Ryan. Black groups complained long and loud, and they were predictably joined by much of the White clergy. Jews, uncharacteristically, were divided: many smaller groups, especially those with a leftist orientation, and individual Jewish columnists and editors denounced the Agency’s repression of the riot, but the Jewish establishment, including the top media bosses, either remained silent or gave a restrained applause to the restoration of order. The reaction of the White public was so overwhelmingly and enthusiastically favorable, however, that the dissenting voices were thoroughly drowned out. In their eyes it was the first time the government had handled Black rioters the way they deserved to be handled.

  Ryan was becoming a bit of a popular White hero, no matter how hard he tried to avoid that role. It was clear to Oscar that Ryan realized the disadvantage of being perceived as politically ambitious. He needed the cooperation of the media, and he wanted the approval of the public, but most of all he had to retain the confidence of the power structure. He had to seem the perfect guardian of their own interests, nothing more — at least, at this stage of the game.

  Ten days after his Miami action Ryan made another balancing movement by rounding up 35 members of a White survivalist community in a remote part of Idaho. His men came crashing in at dawn in armored personnel carriers while helicopter gunships circled overhead. Camera crews and reporters were everywhere as the sleepy families were hustled roughly out of their cabins and handcuffed. The cameras watched Ryan’s agents unearth a plastic-wrapped footlocker full of firearms and ammunition while an ex-member-turned-informer who had showed them where to dig skulked in the background.

  No direct allegations of terrorism — or even of illegality — were made against the arrested community members; it was all by insinuation. One of the agents who opened the footlocker took a weapon from it and held it up to the camera. “Here’s a machine gun that’ll never be used for terrorism,” he said. Oscar’s experienced eye recognized the weapon as a semi-automatic rifle of a common model, but millions of other television viewers would believe that it was a machine gun intended for terrorist acts. The media people were even more prejudicial in their comments, referring without fail to the community members as “terrorists.” The local sheriff and a representative fro
m a Jewish organization in Boise were interviewed, and they both commended the Agency for helping to end the danger of terrorism in Idaho, again without mentioning any specific crime the community members were alleged to have committed. Their real crimes, it seemed to Oscar, were that they were White, they were armed, and they had opted out of the great multiracial social experiment everyone else in the country was participating in.

  On June 1 the unemployment figures for April were announced. Overall unemployment was up to 9.2 per cent, after the largest one-month increase since the Second World War.

  XXX

  Having Adelaide living with him definitely mellowed Oscar. He could not help but have a more positive outlook now that her lithe, warm body was snuggled up against his seven nights a week instead of two or three and her laughter and grace were present at every meal.

  Did it also take away some of his edge? he asked himself. He thought back over some of the wild things he had done in the past few months and wondered that he had been so daring. Now he hoped fervently that Ryan would not call on him again for any special activity. Was Adelaide to be blamed for this excess of caution? Was he overly fearful of losing the joy that she had brought to his life?

  Perhaps. And perhaps it was at least as much something else: Before he had been striking out from a sense of helplessness, of frustration at not being able to do anything else about the hateful things he saw happening all around him; he lived in a world which had become so intolerable that it did not really matter what he did to it. But now he had a plan, or at least the beginning of one; now he had just a glimmering of hope that he might be able to make a difference, that he might be able to make a better world. And that hope made him cautious. Even the faintest possibility that he might be able to accomplish something of lasting value was too precious to be jeopardized by recklessness.