The Retaliators

by Donald Hamilton

  It seemed as natural as if, as some people do, we'd driven down to Ensenada for the purpose; and maybe in a way we had. After a little, she freed herself breathlessly, stepped back, and helped me unfasten her jacket and blouse. I slipped the garments, together, off her shoulders and arms, and dropped them onto a nearby chair.

  I said, looking at her in the dusk, "My God, I haven't met one of those contraptions in years. I didn't know they still used them."

  Clarissa laughed softly. "I'm just an old-fashioned, brassiere-wearing girl, Mr. Helm," she murmured. "An intoxicated, old-fashioned, brassiere-wearing girl. Go on, before I sober up and lose my nerve. It unhooks behind."

  "Ah, it all comes back to me," I said, reaching around her. "I used to be pretty good with brassieres, if I do say so myself."

  We disposed of the garment in question. Somewhat alcoholic and a bit impatient, I wasn't very good with the zip-up-the-front slacks but with a little help I figured out the combination and we took care of pants and panties. Somewhere along the line she'd shed her shoes, becoming a slightly smaller girl in the process, just about right for a man my height We kissed again, at considerable length. There was something pleasantly illicit about, fully dressed, holding a substantial naked lady in my arms. I patted her lightly in the appropriate place.

  "Go find us a bed, any bed," I said. "I'll be with you in a minute...."

  Some time later, a lot later, she stirred and pulled a sheet and blanket over us.

  "Okay, Mrs. O?" I asked.

  "Okay, Mr. H." She moved a little closer. "Well, I knew, in spite of Oscar, there had to be something nice about it, the fuss everybody makes," she whispered, and went to sleep.

  I didn't sleep right away. I lay beside her watching the last faint stripes of daylight fade from the ceiling and listening to the distant beat of the Mexican band....

  In the morning, having gone to bed early, we woke early. There was a funny constraint between us as dressing, we tried to adjust to our new relationship without discussing it directly. We compared hangovers very brightly instead, and decided that the rumors that the ethnic Mexican booze contained in last night's Margaritas left no aftereffects had undoubtedly been invented by a clever PR man for the tequila-mescal-pulqe industry. A crisis occurred when it turned out that the tough and practical traveling clothes she'd bought herself yesterday were ridiculously small,

  "But I got the largest they had!" she protested, almost tearfully.

  "Six-foot Mexican ladies aren't common," I said, and grinned at the way she looked, standing in the bathroom doorway in the pants that wouldn't zip and the shirt that wouldn't button. I picked up the pile of garments she'd worn previously and tossed it to her. "Here."

  "Mat, I can't go around forever looking like a tramp who's been sleeping in the woodshed!"

  "Why the hell not?" I asked. "This is Baja California, the last frontier. We're driving a rugged, dusty, half-ton truck. If it'll make you feel better, I'll pass up shaving and we'll be wilderness tramps together. In any case, we can't hang around here waiting for the stores to open; we've got a pretty long drive today."

  She made a face at me, and disappeared into the bathroom. Fifteen minutes later we were leaving Ensenada without breakfast, since the hotel dining room wouldn't open until seven. A hundred and twenty-five miles south, at Bahia San Quintin, we found the first of the new El Presidente hotels sponsored by the Mexican government to assure tourists of reasonable accommodations along the newly paved Baja highway. It was an elaborate establishment, and we caught up on the meal we'd missed in a handsome restaurant facing the beach.

  "It's a little late to ask," Clarissa said presently as the waiter filled her coffee cup for the third time, "but where are we actually going?"

  "I told you," I said. "We're going to Guerrero Negro to see the whales."

  "You said something about whales but you never mentioned any Guerrero Negro," she said. "That means Black Warrior, doesn't it?"

  "Something like that," I said. "But we did talk about Scammon's Lagoon, remember? The little town of Guerrero Negro is close by, I'm told. Actually, we aren't going to either the lagoon or the town, although if you really yearn to throw peanuts to the whales maybe we can sneak off this evening for a little. But in the morning, we've got a fancy secret-agent-type rendezvous down a little desert road I hope I can find, where we'll take delivery of some equipment without being observed...."

  The new Baja highway is not a major engineering miracle. The valleys and gorges barring the way are not spanned by soaring bridges; the road just crawls and wiggles down one side and up the other. The hills and ridges have not been blasted apart by high explosives and shoved aside by giant machines; mostly the road just climbs over them. And where there's a desert wash or arroyo where water runs hard during the rare rains, there's seldom a culvert; there are just two sets of stakes marked in meters to indicate the edges of the ford when flooded, and whether or not the stream is too deep to cross.

  In other words, it's no superhighway, just an old-fashioned kind of a road following the curves and contours of the country the way roads used to do before we learned how to move the mountains out of the way. On the other hand, the pavement is new enough not to have acquired too many potholes, and wide enough that you can meet a big semi without taking to the ditch. Actually, it's kind of a fun road to drive if you like to use your machinery hard, sports car-fashion; and we made pretty good time in the husky carryall. We were in the real desert Baja now, and there were few communities to slow us down. There was very little traffic. The only driving problem was caused by the occasional cows, goats, and burros wandering along the unfenced right-of-way and across it, as if they owned the country, and perhaps they did. Certainly there seemed to be very few humans around to claim it.

  We reached the next El Presidente establishment in time for an early lunch, ate, and kept going. It wasn't really spectacular country—there were no tall, snow-capped peaks or vast, deep canyons—but it just had to be, I decided, the densest, biggest cactus garden on earth. We wiggled through a small range of hills and came out on the shore of what seemed to be a tremendous old lake, now dry. It ran off into the distance, gleaming white out there with, presumably, the salt or alkali left behind when the last water evaporated. The next roadside sign pointed to a town off to the right called, without a great deal of originality, Laguna Seca—dry lagoon to you.

  I hit the brakes abruptly. Something was stirring in my mind. Clarissa glanced at me but had sense enough to refrain from asking questions. I was remembering a sentence that had struck me as strange during one of my telephone conversations with Mac—those exercises in reverse double-talk for the benefit of Mr. Euler's electronic snoopers. Speaking of Norma, Mac had said: It isn't likely that her investigation of Ernemann would have led her... to that desolate dried-up seabottom known as the great Southwest.

  My chief isn't exactly what you'd call a plainspoken man. In fact, he can get flowery as hell sometimes, and this could have been one of the times. Still, he'd been trying to pass me information without tipping off the eavesdroppers. It wasn't smart to take anything for granted. He'd strained hard to get a desolate dried-up seabottom into the conversation, and here, on the only land route available into southern Baja, was a desolate dried-up seabottom.

  "The gauge is getting a bit low," I said. "Let's see if they've got some gas in this Laguna Seca place."

  "All right," said Clarissa. "I'm not nosy. Don't tell me if you don't want to."

  I grinned at her, and made a U-turn and headed back to the intersection, and took the dirt road up through the cactus forest. The town wasn't far, less than a mile, under a low ridge. Apparently it had been on the old road but had been bypassed by the highway. It consisted of half a dozen shacks, a little grocery store—the word is abbarotes—and a single, battered gas pump selling the lower grade of Pemex gas. I didn't particularly want the stuff in my tank. Even the top Mexican juice isn't the best fuel you ever tried to burn. However, I wanted a little time
to look and be looked at, so I pulled up and told the boy who came out of the grocery to fill her up.

  Then I stomped around a bit as if getting the driving kinks out of my muscles, making certain that if anyone was watching from inside one of the buildings, or up on the ridge, they'd be able to recognize me if they knew me. Nothing happened. Well, it had been only a hunch, and it doesn't ever pay to ignore your hunches in this business; but following them doesn't always pay off, by any means. Nobody tailed us away from there that I could see. The cheap grade of gas knocked like hell the rest of the day.

  A little before dusk we reached the 28th parallel of latitude, a very significant geographic line in this part of the world. Here, in the arid middle of nowhere—like Laguna Seca, the nearby town of Guerrero Negro had been bypassed by the new road—was a city-type traffic circle surrounding an enormous, stylized eagle: the monument marking the boundary between Baja California Norte and Baja California Sur. There was also another good Presidente hotel, this one with reservations for Señor and Señora Helm. If Ramón ever decided to quit his dangerous profession, I reflected, he'd make a good travel agent or tour director.

  "Well." said Clarissa at dinner, "that was certainly a lot of dessicated real estate decorated by a lot of screwy vegetables. What did you say the tall, skinny cacti were called—if they were cacti? Cactuses?"

  "They were cirios," I said. "Boojum trees to you."

  "I'm a little disappointed," she said. "It really wasn't so very different from Arizona; just a little more prickly growing stuff is all. I thought Baja was supposed to be more spectacular than that."

  "I guess the old road was spectacular," I said. "Anything looks spectacular when you're crawling along a dirt track a million miles from nowhere with a good chance of dying of thirst and starvation if you break down."

  She was silent for a little. She'd showered and put on a long dress she'd bought in Ensenada, a gaudy, sleeveless sheath of some fairly rough cloth. Unlike the unfortunate pants-and-shirt outfit, it fit very well, and gave her body a magnificent, barbaric look that went oddly but interestingly with her rather sweet and innocent face. I saw her glance towards the windows.

  "It's getting dark," she said.

  I said, "The man at the desk told me there are some old docks just beyond the town on the Estero San Jose—estuary to you—where we might be able to catch a glimpse of some ballenas if we hurry. That is, if you're still interested in whales."

  She didn't look at me. She said, "Well, as a matter of fact, I saw a whale once, from a cruise ship."

  I said, carefully expressionless, "Sure. If you've seen one whale, you've seen them all."

  She glanced at me quickly. After a moment, she blushed. If any whales came into the Estero San Jose that evening, they were not observed by us....

  If there's anything I hate, it's directions to places I can't miss. However, apart from pulling that old gag, our tour director had done his job of description well, so well that I'd recognized the turnoff easily when we'd passed it the evening before, about a dozen miles before we reached the hotel.

  In the early morning, with the sky light and clear but the sun still below the horizon, we drove back there and made the turn. There was a tiny community that could hardly be called a town, just a handful of scattered mud huts on the desert, west of the road. The side road had been paved that far, presumably when the new highway was built. Beyond the village there was nothing but cactus, and two ruts across the desert leading towards the ocean, invisible to the westward. The road, if you want to call it a road, was solid enough at first but gradually became softer and sandier. I stopped to shift the transfer case into low range so I wouldn't have to waste time doing it if we hit a bad spot and needed lots of power fast. After a quick glance at my watch, sitting there, I looked towards my silent companion.

  "Still time to bail out," I said. "Say the word and I'll turn around and run you back to the hotel. You can wait for me there, as I suggested in the first place."

  Clarissa studied me curiously. "I thought this was supposed to be just a simple rendezvous to pick up a few things you needed. You're acting as if you expected trouble. Or... or is it that you simply don't trust me?"

  I grinned. "We will now have Secret Agent Lesson Number One—or is it two, three, or four? Anyway, never use the word 'trust.' Just take it for granted nobody trusts anybody, including you. If you want the truth, I don't trust you. I don't trust you not to get in the way if things get rough. I don't trust you not to get hurt. I don't trust you to do exactly what I tell you—remember the way you kept wandering around against orders back there in the New Mexico hills? Amateurs never figure anybody really means what he says."

  Clarissa said, "I promise. Cross my heart, sir. This time I'll do precisely what you tell me, sir. But you are expecting trouble, aren't you?"

  I sighed. "I'd be a fool not to, wouldn't I? I'm heading out across the bleak and trackless—well, almost trackless—Baja wasteland to pick up, among other things, a rifle to kill a guy with; a gent named Ernemann who's a pro like me. Ernemann knows damned well that if I wasn't stopped in the U.S. by his bank account trick, I'll be right behind him here in Mexico, or maybe even a little ahead, waiting for him. Do you think I'm being overly cautious if I assume that he'd rather I wouldn't get my hands on that nice, accurate rifle, or live to use it?"

  "But how would he know—"

  I said, "Unless you know exactly what's going on, Mrs. O, Secret Agent Lesson Number Two says always assume everybody knows everything.... I can't talk you into staying behind?"

  "No."

  I shrugged and put the truck into gear, and drove it away from the just-appearing sun towards the Pacific Ocean, or an arm of it entitled Laguna de la Muerte, the Lagoon of Death. Whose death, the road map didn't say.

  I know something about coaxing a two-wheel-drive vehicle as far as it will go, but we were soon beyond that point. As the ruts got deeper and the sand softer I couldn't help worrying a little. I hoped Ramón knew what he was doing, sending me here. I really had no good notion of what a big 4x4 like mine could do in that stuff. I hoped he did, and hadn't been thinking in terms of the little jeep-type jobs with the big, fat tires. Then the terrain hardened a little, and we came to the first junction Ramón had told me about. I stopped and got out and studied the double goat-track coming up from the south. I got back in, shaking my head.

  "Nobody's come that way in the last day or two," I said, sending the truck westwards once more. We still had caught no glimpse of ocean ahead; apparently the coastal dunes blocked the view. After a moment, I said idly, "I wonder what's happened to the boy scout?"

  "Who?"

  "You remember Euler's boy, Gregory Kotis. Remember how I told him I could track a clean fly across dirty wallpaper?"

  "I remember. Why should anything have happened to him?"

  "Things happen to people who know too much," I said. "I wouldn't want to be the one to insure Mr. Kotis' life unless he's very, very careful. I warned him before I sent him back; but like I just told you, amateurs never figure anybody means what he says, and that goes for a lot of Security men.... Hang on!"

  We dropped into a sudden gully and lunged up the other side. Now the track wound through low sand hills partially covered by some tough, sparse, undernourished brush that squealed along the sides of the carryall in the tight spots. We ground up a ridge and slithered down beyond and stopped at a small lagoon—not Laguna de la Muerte, which covers roughly fifteen miles one way and two or three the other. This was only a narrow, reedy, muddy black puddle running east and west a couple of hundred yards. The dunes were higher beyond, and as I sat there something crawled across the back of my neck. I cut the wheel hard left, hit the gas, sent the blue-and-white monster roaring into the shelter of the nearest dune, and slammed to a stop.

  "You don't have to be so impulsive," Clarissa protested, patting her hair back into place. "What's the matter? The road went down the other side of the pond, the right side. I saw the tracks...." She
stopped.

  "Yeah," I said. "The tracks."

  I rubbed the back of my neck, and there was of course nothing there. It had been just the good, old warning buddy-you're-a-beautiful-target feeling. I got out and, keeping under cover, went back and looked out onto the muddy open flat at the near end of the black pool. One look was enough. I hurried around to the other side of the carryall, yanked open the door, and reached into the glove compartment for my second gun, the Colt I'd taken off Gregory Kotis and neglected to return.

  "Out you go," I said to Clarissa. "We're taking to the brush. Stay with me, and if I say down, you down; I don't care if it's in the middle of a cactus or a mud puddle. Come on...."

  fourteen

  We struggled up the back of a dune and found a neat, brushy hollow just over the top that would, I thought, provide adequate cover for one person. The early-morning chill was leaving the desert as the sun rose, and the face Clarissa turned to me was shiny under the floppy, fashionable hat that now showed stains of perspiration along the band. Her blouse hung open limply, and she'd snagged a knee of her slacks. It was hard to remember the painfully neat, painfully timid woman in the air-conditioned Lincoln.

  "Well, I hope this one is satisfactory," she panted, a big, healthy, sexy girl who'd been hiking hard. "I don't know how many more little sand mountains I'm good for... Matthew!"

  "What's the matter?"

  "This is no time for that!"

  "Well, button your goddamned blouse, then," I said

  She buttoned it and tucked it in, smiling faintly. "Some time you'll have to tell me what's so stimulating about a disheveled wench in the last throes of exhaustion; but right now I'd like to know what the hell we're looking for."