The Silencers

by Donald Hamilton

  Like most novices at murder, he had to admire his handiwork briefly. He couldn’t just shoot one guy and turn to deal with the next, he had to watch the first one fall. Maybe he wasn’t quite sure of his marksmanship; maybe he enjoyed seeing him drop. I had plenty of time to get set, and I got him as he turned.

  I raised both arms and swung the heavy buckle at the end of the strap. It sang through the air like one of those Japanese noisemakers you whirl on a string. It caught him just right, squarely across the face, and with that much power behind it, the foil made no difference at all. I couldn’t have done better, or worse, with a machete.

  He lost the gun and staggered backward, screaming, covering his face with his hands. I took another hop and cut again, laying his hands open. I stood over him as he went down, using the belt as a flail until he no longer moved or yelled. Unfortunately, he had only fainted. The buckle hadn’t cut deeply. But there were a few things to be attended to before I finished the job; besides, I preferred to do it without witnesses—particularly official government witnesses like Romero. Mac had specified a smooth, discreet and competent job, remember?

  I hopped over to the little man, lying doubled up on the floor.

  “How bad, Dad?” I shouted over the steady noise of the big engine.

  He raised his head with an effort. “Just a scratch,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I shouted. “I know those little .32 caliber scratches. Hold this one for me.”

  I sat down beside him and gave him the buckle to hold. There was no more trouble with the foil. Gunther had already helped peel it back here and there; I got the rest of it off without any trouble. Then I cut myself loose, hands and feet, and did the same for Romero. I went over and got Gunther’s pistol. One shot had been fired from it, but he had extra cartridges in his pocket.

  When I got back, Romero was sitting up. His face was even pastier-looking, under the dirt, than it had been.

  “What’s the time?” he yelled. “My watch stopped yesterday.”

  “Ten minutes of ten,” I said, “according to this one, but I don’t guarantee it.”

  “That gives us,” he said, “just ten minutes to get over there and stop them.”

  “Us?” I said. “I came for this jerk and I’ve got him right here. I’ve lost nothing in any churches.”

  He looked startled; then he looked outraged and angry. “You crummy bastard,” he shouted, “doesn’t it matter to you that people are going to get killed, people this country can’t afford to lose?”

  I grinned at him. “The way Naldi talked, there’ll be more damage than that if they’re allowed to go through with the damn test. Wegmann’s doing us all a big favor.” I let him stew a moment longer; then I held out the little gun. “Can you shoot one of these things? First, can you walk?”

  “Don’t worry about me,” he said, getting to his feet. “Amigo,” I said, “about people who try to run me off mountain roads, my worry-quotient is infinitesimal. Five minutes from now you can fall down dead and I’ll never miss you. But in the meantime, can you knock that marksman out of the tower before he gets more than one running shot at me?”

  He looked at me for a moment. Then he grimaced. “I thought you said... Ah, hell. I’ll do the running. You shoot.”

  “You can hardly stand up,” I pointed out. “Besides, a runt like you’d bog down in the snow. I’ve got more road clearance. Let’s hope he’s a lousy shot at moving targets. I’ll head so he has to expose himself to take a bead. Get him when he makes his try. Okay?”

  He took the nickel-plated pistol. “With this? Well, if it won’t shoot that far, maybe I can throw it. What’s the time now?”

  I took my watch off and gave it to him. “You’re so nervous about the time, you keep track of it. Give me a minute, first, while I tie up my specimen.”

  “Make it thirty seconds,” he said.

  I used the odds and ends of rope to do a reasonable job on Gunther, who still didn’t stem very interested in the proceedings. Espionage and sabotage are not our concern, Mac had said. I had no business at all haring off to make a target of myself, leaving my job unfinished. It was an inexcusable neglect of duty, a regrettable display of sloppy humanitarianism, or something, and I felt pretty good as I finished tying the knots and got to my feet. A man’s got to flip it every now and then.

  “Want a Band-Aid or something before we go?” I asked Romero.

  He shook his head. He seemed to be waiting for me to attend to something else. When I frowned at him questioningly, he gestured towards Gail.

  I said, “Don’t be silly. I told you about her. Come on.”

  He looked startled. I saw Gail’s eyes go wide. She may not have caught the words from where she lay, still tightly bound, but she got the meaning all right. I was surprised at both of them. What I was doing with Romero was a breach of orders and a display of poor judgment; I certainly wasn’t going to compound it by turning loose a female who’d already betrayed me once—a woman who, even if her loyalties were in the right place now, had no training, no experience, and could only get in the way.

  I mean, even looking at it from her point of view, she was safer right there, tied up to keep her out of trouble and mischief. The fact that she’d given us a hand just now didn’t buy her any voting stock in the corporation.

  I turned my back on her and went to the door. It all went like clockwork from there. I went leaping through the snow like a gazelle; the rifleman leaned out and got his shot but missed, and Romero, using the doorjamb of the hut for a rest, got a two-handed grip on the little revolver and picked him off like a pipe in a shooting gallery. The sniper swayed against the railing up there. The rifle slipped out of his hands and came down butt first into the snow at the base of the tower.

  This was a little bonus I hadn’t expected. I dropped the belt I was carrying for want of a better weapon, grabbed up the rifle, worked the bolt and was ready when the church door opened. Romero was ready, too. The man in the doorway, hit twice, never even twitched as he fell.

  I went in over his body. A second man fired and made a run for the tower stairway. I fired from the hip and missed; I never can get used to a rifle in close-range work. Romero, coming in behind me, shot at the disappearing legs and— from the sound of the yelp—nicked one of them. The little man could shoot. I looked at the bank of instruments along the wall and raised the rifle butt. Romero caught my arm.

  “No,” he said. There was a thoughtful look on his face. “Not that way.”

  Somebody up in the tower took a shot downward through the rotten roof. The bullet hit the dirt floor behind us. We moved closer to the instrument board. More shots were fired, all misses. I guess they were afraid of scrambling their own circuits with a misplaced bullet. “Make up your mind, amigo,” I said.

  Romero’s face was greenish white. I’d never seen a live man look so ready for burial. I remembered that I owed him an apology for some derogatory thoughts I’d had about security men. A few little guys like this made up for a lot of Peytons. He slipped his hand under his waistband, feeling around in an absent way and brought it out with blood on it. Well, I’d already guessed that. When deer, elk or man hunches up like that when shot, it’s always in the guts.

  “You’ve got your job,” he said. “I’ve got mine, to protect...” He stopped, as pain hit him. I guess the numbness was wearing off. “To apprehend...”

  “Sure,” I said. “Well, if we smash this thing, we protect. We can apprehend later.”

  He shook his head. “Wegmann talked about it,” he said, looking at the rows of knobs and switches. “He told me... he told me... He was proud of it. I told you that.”

  “Yes,” I said. Somebody took another shot through the roof and missed again. “You told me.”

  “He showed me around... I don’t know just what we’d have to cut or smash to make absolutely sure... A lot of it’s only for monitoring. There’s only one thing... one thing...” He drew a cautious breath. “Hell, I’m wandering. Get out of here,
fast. You’ve got about five minutes.”

  “Wegmann?”

  Gunther might be my job, but still I didn’t feel right about leaving Wegmann.

  “Give me the rifle,” Romero said. “I can hold him in the tower long enough, until...” He grimaced with pain. “He’ll be taken care of. I give you my word. They’ll all be taken care of. I know just how to do it. Just run like hell and leave it to me.”

  I said, “It sounds like an attractive proposition, Señor Romero.”

  “Mister,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Mister.”

  “Get clear,” he said. “As far as you can. See you in hell or somewhere.”

  I ran. I mean it was his job, and he talked as if he knew what he was about. I had my own work to do. Somebody took a couple of shots at me from the tower, but it takes a damn good pistol shot to hit a running target at any range. I hurled myself through the door of the generator hut and brought up short.

  Gail was still on the floor, approximately where I’d left her, still bound. By her hands lay a small penknife, open. Beside the penknife lay some pieces of rope, but that was all. There was no sign of Gunther. I went quickly to the door, but of course he was nowhere to be seen. There were, however, some marks in the snow. I studied these for a moment and saw where they led. I grinned slowly.

  I went back to Gail and cut her loose. She sat up and started to rub her wrists, not looking at me. I pulled her to her feet. For a tall and lovely lady, she looked remarkably like a truant kid, standing there defiantly, her face filthy with dust and tears, her sweater grimy and awry, her silly sexy pants smeared with dirt and grease from the engine-room floor.

  “So you helped cut him loose,” I said. “And he left you here to rot, just like I did. Smart man. He knows you, too.”

  “Matt, I—”

  “Never mind,” I said. “Now we run. Make for the truck and pay no attention to those jerks in the tower. They’ll just be shooting at us with pistols, very inferior weapons. Think nothing of it. We’ve only got a couple of minutes, so we’ll do our praying later. Okay?”

  They did their best with what they had, but it wasn’t enough. I saw Gail falter once as a bullet tugged at her sleeve; I had a bad moment when she fell headlong, but that was just a slip in the snow. She was up again and running instantly. I got a hole in one pants leg. Then we were out of pistol range. Laboring towards the truck at a slower rate, we saw bloodstains in the snow ahead of us. There were also stains on the white camouflage canvas covering the truck.

  Well, where else could Gunther hide, when you came to think of it? Cut up as he was, he wouldn’t want any part of the ruckus in the tower. In the truck was stuff that could be torn up for bandages, a means of escape if he had the strength, bedding to keep him warm if he didn’t... I heard a low, shuddering moan from inside the truck. I looked in. Even in the semi-darkness, it wasn’t hard to tell that Gunther was more dead than alive.

  “Matt, look!”

  I turned impatiently. Gail was pointing. The shooting had stopped. Up in the tower, the bowl-shaped antenna had ceased tracing its tricky scanning pattern. For a moment, I thought Romero, below in the church, had managed to cut off the power; then I saw the thing was still moving, but very slowly, tracking something high and distant and invisible coming up fast from the south. It sounds silly to say so, but the gadget had that intent, vibrant, triumphant look that a good quail dog gets when he has the covey located without a shadow of doubt.

  Well, it was Romero’s problem, and he’d indicated he knew how to deal with it. He’d said get clear. Left and out, LeBaron had said. If I didn’t watch myself, I was going to get in the habit of leaving pretty good men behind in awkward situations.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s put it on the road, such as it is.”

  I yanked the white canvas off. They’d left us the keys, which was nice of them. I had to make a swing towards the church, since they’d parked the truck facing that way, but nobody shot at us. They seemed to be very busy up there. Then we were heading up the slope away from the place.

  “Matt,” Gail said, “you’ve got to understand—”

  “I know,” I said. “You told me before. You’re a proud woman.”

  “When you left me like that, after the way I’d humiliated myself trying to help you—”

  There was a pause while the engine roared and the gears screamed and the tire chains fought for traction on the snowy slope. We came over the shoulder of the hill and dropped behind it, following the mountainside to the left. The road was just a snow-covered ledge with a deep ravine to the right. Scattered pines thrust upwards from the steep drop.

  Gail laughed softly. Her hand touched my arm. “Anyway, you came back,” she said.

  I saw the thing coming. I’ve been told you don’t usually see them; that when they’re passing at full thrust they go too fast for the human eye to pick up at close range, but there’s also something called peripheral vision... Anyway, I saw it out of the corner of my eye, sharp and clear for an instant, a wicked, wedge-shaped thing striking out of the sky.

  “Hit the basement,” I said.

  I grabbed her in my arms and dove for the floor, letting the truck take care of itself. I had a moment of regret for the sturdy old vehicle, as it wavered, untended on the steep road; then the shockwave picked it up as if it were a toy and tossed it into a ravine.

  27

  With the usual Washington logic, the underground test in the Manzanitas was postponed. The threat of sabotage was past, the desert roads were passable again, so they put it off another week over Rennenkamp’s screams and howls of protest.

  Experts were called in, and they could detect no harmonic vibrations in the earth’s crust. They stated firmly that the North American continent was no more subject to massive instability, whatever that might be, than any other, and that no continent was in the slightest danger of suffering collapse under the stimulus of such a relative fleabite—compared to real geologic forces— as the explosion of a nuclear weapon anywhere, aboveground or below. The kindest view was that Naldi had simply flipped, poor fellow. There were also less charitable attitudes in evidence.

  Well, all that was none of my business. I spent the week in and around Alamogordo, getting bawled out by people in and out of uniform. They admitted that it might be unreasonable to expect me to produce a complete circuit diagram of a mass of electronic equipment I’d only seen the outside of for about a minute, under fire, but they couldn’t understand why the hell I couldn’t at least produce an accurate sketch of the antenna.

  Somebody turned up a report on Peyton and Bronkovic, two loyal and experienced security men who had been brutally assaulted in a motel room registered in my name. This odd circumstance got quite a play until the official word on the matter came through and the whole subject was dropped into the pool of embarrassed silence reserved for inter-departmental boo-boos.

  The final verdict in my case was that I was probably a well-meaning cluck, but that a man who could retain so little useful information was one hell of an intelligence officer to be working for Uncle Sam. I didn’t bother to point out that I wasn’t an intelligence officer and that my training hadn’t been along the lines of retaining information...

  They let up on me gradually, but warned me to hang around in case they thought of anything else to ask, so I was stuck in Alamogordo. I was drinking alone in the motel bar when a young lieutenant came up. His face looked vaguely familiar; he’d been hanging around in a minor capacity through the interrogations.

  “I guess we gave you a pretty rough time, sir,” he said. “May I buy you a drink by way of apology?”

  “Sure,” I said. “After the past few days, I’ll take anything I can get free from the Army.”

  He laughed as he ordered the drink. “That friend of yours,” he said. “Romero. Even if he was sure he was dying, it must have taken a lot of nerve for him to pull a stunt like that. Reversing the polarity so that the bird would home in on the beam inste
ad of...”

  Anyway, he gave me some technical jargon that sounded like that. I sipped my drink and remembered Wegmann telling me: We can steer it towards us, or away across the valley. There hadn’t been much time, and Romero had had the tracking instruments downstairs with him. There had been no way for Wegmann, up in the tower, to tell that the great bird of death had turned the wrong way. He would have had no warning until he looked up at the last instant, if he did look up...

  “I don’t know why they’re so hot to learn all about that gizmo, anyway,” the young lieutenant said. “After all, it was obsolete. It still worked fine on an old missile like the Wotan, but obviously the new guidance systems had it licked. We haven’t had that kind of a malfunction in over a year. I figure that’s why Wegmann and the people above him decided to blow the works as spectacularly as they could.”

  “Just how do you figure that?”

  “Why, if it was still good, they’d have kept it a secret, wouldn’t they? But they saw we were getting ahead of their interceptor devices, so they decided to get themselves some hot scary publicity while there were still a few missiles flying around that they could work on. At least that’s the way I see it... Well, excuse me, sir, there’s my target for tonight.”

  I hadn’t known that corny old wartime phrase was still being used, or did he think he was originating a new and bright turn of speech that would take the country by storm? He was young enough, and I watched him go to meet a girl who was just as young, in very high heels and a short wide dress bouncing on top of a lot of frilly petticoats. When I was a kid, it practically killed a girl to have her slip show, but nowadays girls seem to consider themselves undressed, without a few lingerie ruffles on display.