by Barry, Mike
Face it: it had been ten years since anyone had done this to him. More than ten. They must have been in the mountains the last time he was struck like this.
Delgado realized he was crying.
V
Wulff knew that something was wrong almost as soon as the helicopter had gained altitude. You had a feeling for things like this; it came with the training. The helicopter was not heading smoothly north or in any particular direction but was merely hanging there, stationary in the air, the man across from him staring impassively, now twirling a gun in his fingers, the aperture to the pilot’s nook closed by canvas. Something was going to happen and Wulff guessed he knew exactly what it was. The man across from him—a short type wearing the uniform of the police—was impassive. He seemed to be chewing gum. Now and then, he checked his watch almost secretively, his gaze never really flicking away from Wulff.
Wulff was pressed back in the cabin. He held his buttocks tight against the walls feeling the protuberances; his shoulder blades likewise were pressed against something that felt like wiring. If you had any experience with helicopters (and Wulff had been in his share in Vietnam) you knew that every motion within them had to be cautious and calculated beforehand. You just did not move suddenly; if you did you might overbalance and even more dangerously the overbalancing might affect the copter itself so that the machine could swing in the air. In the hands of an inept pilot it could even fall out of control. But if he knew this instinctively by now, the man sitting across from him did not. His face, as a matter of fact, was riven in terror. Only his hand on the gun was steady; the rest of him was trembling. Now and then he cast glances toward the canvas but the pilot was not coming out. Early up, as soon as they had achieved altitude, he had dropped the canvas and now the gunman was on his own.
Wulff held himself in place there. He felt utterly calm as he had not with Delgado. The calmness came from the sure knowledge that they were supposed to kill him. The interview with Delgado had been filled with doubt; doubt of the context, doubt of exactly what the interrogator wanted from him and it had been this more than anger which had caused him to strike the man, the lack of sureness, feeling that the situation was shifting beyond him. Now, though, all questions had been resolved. It was a double-cross, had been so from the start. The only reason that he had been in Delgado’s office was to be pumped for information; Delgado thought that he knew Wulff’s situation but wanted to make sure. Perhaps Wulff was not who he seemed to be but an operative for the organization itself. You could not be sure. From Delgado’s point of view the whole thing might have been a test of his own loyalty. How trustworthy was he? How dependable? Delgado was a smooth and professional operator; he would want to check things out to his satisfaction. Now he had.
He had sent Wulff into this copter and the copter had taken him into the air to die.
All right. He had been up against death many times; the odds were certainly better here than he had confronted before. In Delgado’s office he had had, strictly speaking, no chance at all, not against a professional with a gun. Earlier, in the hijacked plane there had been nothing to do but negotiate out the passengers and see what could be managed from there. Any chance would have been no chance at all; he might have been able to take control of that airliner but there had been forty passengers on the flight. Maybe forty-five.
But these odds, Wulff thought grimly, were just a little better. The pilot with the canvas had sealed himself off; the man before him was obviously terrified of flight. Obviously they were waiting for some prearranged point in the journey to be reached before disposing of him, maybe a signal through the radio, otherwise they would have done it already, would do it while the thing was hovering in the air. Maybe Delgado was making one last series of checks before he sent through the killing message. That was most likely. Regardless, the two men were locked into position now. They had no freedom of action; they could not move until given the signal, whereas Wulff had options.
That was very bad procedure. Wulff could have told Delgado that himself if only the man had asked. You never sent out an assassination crew without the full freedom to execute as they saw fit. Any two-bit runner up north could have told him that. No hit man worth a dime on the dollar would take an assignment where he could not make the conditions of the hit, run it out at his own pace, make the necessary decisions.
Things had not really changed that much here after all. The players were different; the ideology had a different label but it was the same thing. If the brutality persisted so did the stupidity.
Wulff measured himself and leapt at the man across him.
He came at him flat and low, compensating for the sway of the copter by carrying himself straight forward and dove into the man’s stomach. The man screamed, his gun hand flailing and he tried to bring the gun down on Wulff’s neck but the surprise had been total and he was terrified of flight anyway. Even the hand that struck him harmlessly on the back trembled like a violinist’s, darted away and the man whimpered with a dog’s wail. Wulff came up then, still carrying himself low, using his head like a bull’s to straighten the man up and fling him against the wall. Something projecting from a bulkhead caught the man in the armpit and he shrieked again, a sound of utter desperation and loss and at this instant Wulff grasped the man’s arm in a lover’s grip, brought his palm down and wrested the gun away. It came into his hand so easily that it might have been a baby playfully handing over a rattle. Wulff felt the gun in his hand curling authoritatively deep into the palm, he stepped away and let the man simply fall.
The man fell straight away from the wall, whining, hitting the deck unevenly, the copter shuddering momentarily. His face was overtaken by pain: somehow he had hurt himself against the bulkhead. Wulff looked at him lying on the floor: a short, anonymous man in a police uniform glazed by his own sweat, the eyes too filled with pain even to plead; Wulff balanced off his decision within a second or less; it was not pleasant but it was necessary. There were only a certain number of unknown factors he could handle at a given time. Granted them not being airborne, granted there not being the presence of the pilot … he might have let the man live or settled only for a shot that would injure. But he could not do it now. Add another body to the list, add another heap to the slag pile of humanity he had left behind him….
He shot the man behind the ear, levelling the pistol close in there so that the bullet would not emerge but go deep into the skull, tear the tissue of the cerebrum, penetrate down past the cerebellum to the throat, carry beyond that all the way into the internal organs, finally lodging somewhere in the hip. Make the man a receptacle. The bullet must under no circumstances emerge from the body because he could not be sure of the stability of the copter if anything was hit.
The shot went in cleanly, inaudible under the shrieking of the propeller, the screaming sound of the copter looking for altitude, and the man died quite silently on Wulff’s shoes, only a small, bright coil of blood to show the violation of the body. His face, terrified under the first impact, smoothed and became a child’s. His uniform looked like a costume.
Wulff cocked the pistol and stepped back, swaying, jammed himself against a bulkhead for stability. The copter was indeed working a swift ascent now, struggling for height, everything not tied down in the cabin swaying and clattering around him, little pieces of metal, burlap, wire stumbling through the cabin. The pilot, aware of what had happened, was trying some desperate maneuver of his own now; he was undoubtedly trying to freeze Wulff with panic but if there was any panic in this copter now it surely was that of the pilot himself for they were beating at the air now like an insect, weaving uncontrollably in a series of motions which betrayed more a loss of control in the cockpit than a reasoning effort to unsettle him. Kicking the corpse aside, Wulff dived through the burlap, looked for the first time at the pilot.
The man was bent over the controls, working desperately lever by lever, playing the copter like an organ, trying to assert some control and Wulff understood in th
at instant before he charged forward that the pilot had had no plans to panic him at all, that the motions of the copter were purely those induced by his terror. Hearing the shot, knowing no doubt what it meant, the pilot had succumbed to nothing more complicated than the fear of his own death and it was this fear which was looping the plane through. He was a small man, even by the standards of the revolution he would have had to be considered underweight, no more than five feet one, hunched over the controls, flinging switches as if they were darts. His mouth was open and over the noise of the craft Wulff became aware that the man was screaming. The copter twisted sideways in the air like a stricken, wounded bird, then began a long, graceless plunge and the pilot, battering at the switches in the midst of his screams seemed almost unable to control it. Wulff closed in on him, showed him the pistol. The air clamored. Above the sounds he shouted. “Level it off:” he said. “Level the damned thing off:”
The pilot said nothing. Frozen at the controls he was dead weight, baggage; quickly seeing this Wulff pushed the man to the side. He fell like a sack to the floor, his hands curling. Wulff looked over the controls quickly, equated them in memory with what he had dealt with in Vietnam, and reaching for what he hoped was the proper lever, shoved it all the way back. The craft hung in the air—its descent braked as if by a giant palm upraised and then backed off—then started to gasp for height. He took the seat behind the controls, ignoring the pilot, ignoring for the moment even his own pistol which he placed beside him, using both hands now to work the switches and, hovering somewhere between recollection and instinct, he balanced off the craft in the air, hung it into a stationary position, the propellers beating over him now like a wing, feeling as if he were suspended by some awkward bird throbbing above and then set all of the switches on stationary, the craft balancing off finally to hang in stasis.
Below him he could see the city shrouded by the same plumes of fog and mist which all of the great cities of America were swaddled in. Further out he could see the backyards, the plains, the dry, empty farmlands and these were, he noticed, nearer now. They had gone from Havana to the outskirts in this wild ride, moving no more than four or five thousand feet in the air; now, suspended, the copter seemed to be both part of the city and removed from it. He reached for his pistol again and then looked toward the pilot. The man was crouched on the floor, hands above his head, features absolutely immobile.
“Don’t shoot me,” he said in unaccented English. “Just don’t kill me.”
“Why not?” Wulff said. “Why shouldn’t I kill you?” Strangely, he felt no pressure now. He would have exactly as much time as he needed; no more but no less. Everything waited for him on the ground but there was no hurry. He could come into it at will.
“I have nothing to do with this,” the pilot said. He held his crouch, showed his palms. “They just asked me to fly the copter. I’m not even Cuban.”
“I didn’t think you were,” Wulff said.
“I’m just a hired hand,” the pilot said. “My name is Bill Stevens and I’m from Detroit. Sometimes I fly helicopters and sometimes I work on heavy equipment. You could say that I’m kind of a mercenary if you want.” He tried a smile but it was ghastly underneath the tension of his cheeks; the cordiality at which he was aiming looked as if it could be shattered by one movement—say, the raise of the pistol. “I have nothing to do with this at all,” the pilot said again weakly.
Wulff looked at the pistol in his hand and then past the pilot to the corpse lying in the cabin. It was bleeding richly now, the blood mingling with burlap, the stink of it beginning to fill his nasal passages above the smoke and decayed-wood scent of the plane in flight. The man would have to be pitched overboard in self-defense if they were to be airborne much longer. “Where’s my valise?” Wulff said to the pilot.
“Valise? What valise?”
“They told me a valise was being taken aboard.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Bill Stevens said. He put his palms flat on his head protectively, as if expecting a bullet. “I just take orders and do my work. But I guess that I won’t be doing any more work for these people now, will I?”
“Will you?” Wulff said, “I don’t know if you will. You can tell me where my valise is.”
“I don’t know anything about your fucking valise,” Stevens said. The copter lurched in a wind current, his face paled. “You better let me off the floor if you want to keep flying in this thing,” he said.
Wulff raised the pistol by the point and hit the man over the shoulder with the barrel. He did it almost gracefully, just pulling the impact at the last moment sufficiently to bring pain but no incapacity. Stevens whimpered, a high, desperate sound in the compartment and then fell full-length, rising to his knees only after he had struck himself on the point of the chin. His head weaved; he seemed about to faint. “That wasn’t necessary,” he said, “you shouldn’t—”
Wulff worked on the controls, levelled off the craft again. They were hitting turbulence; with old instinct he could sense that at some intricate level the very metal of the craft was parting under the strain. They had been sent up in half a copter for half a kill these men; they had no luck, that was all. But Wulff was not going to have any luck either unless he came to terms with the situation. “I’m going to put this thing down,” he said to Stevens, “then we’ll talk.”
“You’d better let me put it down if you want a soft landing.”
“Can you fly?”
“I can fly dead,” Stevens said. He came into a crouch, then used his hands to come into a standing position. “That’s about the only fucking thing I can do. I sure as hell can’t do anything else.” He rubbed his jaw. “Teach me not to take a job like this again.”
“Will it?”
“Maybe I’ll learn something someday. Most likely I won’t.” He gestured toward Wulff. “You want to get away from the controls so I can drive this thing? You can stand over me; you can watch closely, but believe me, I’m not going to try anything. It’s my ass in this thing too, remember that.”
Wulff moved away. It was a calculated gamble, everything in or out of this world was but he trusted Stevens. The man visibly had nothing more to lose nor did he have anything to gain by setting the machine anywere but straight down. A box on a plank above the controls beeped and began to make sounds, very casually Stevens extended a palm and knocked the box to the floor. It smashed.
“Sons of bitches are trying to get through,” he said, “this is a hell of a time.”
“They’re in radio communication?”
“Of course they are,” Stevens said. “I suppose they’re giving final orders or something like that.” He hit a lever; the copter began to move down vertically as if it were descending an elevator shaft. “I don’t give a shit.”
“You just work for them.”
“I’m a so-called mercenary,” Stevens said. “I go where they pay me but I drew a real piece of shit this time around, didn’t I? That’ll teach me.”
Wulff looked out toward the floor of the cabin. Everything was as he had left it except that the corpse was visibly exploding with blood; the blood released in death had coated the body and was pluming toward the sides in little rivulets. He had seen death in many ways before but never, in one body, so much of it. Some died quietly and some like this one disgustingly. You just never could tell…. In that sense death was like sex; you could not tell from appearances how the person would take to it. “What I’d like to know,” Stevens said, working the helicopter in its delicate descent, “is exactly what your plans are from here on in.”
“That’s no concern of yours,” Wulff said.
“I didn’t say it was … I didn’t say it was, friend. I just wonder if you plan to kill me when we get down.”
“I honestly don’t know,” Wulff said, “I hadn’t thought of it.”
“Because if you’re going to, I’d appreciate if you’d make it quick and clean. I can’t stand suffering. I have a horror of physical pain
as a matter of fact—which really makes me a bitch of a mercenary, doesn’t it?”
“Fear has nothing at all to do with it. The more scared some men are, the better.”
“Yes,” Stevens said nodding, “that’s surely true but I don’t know if it applies in my case. Well, that’s hardly the point, it it?” They were about five hundred feet in the air and settling toward a clearing now in what appeared to be a light forest of some sort. Neatly, Stevens headed the copter toward a part in the trees, his hand now working over the controls with assurance and accuracy. He was good, Wulff thought, no question about that. Good enough to do his job without even thinking about it which was the mark of the professional in any line. “I’m sorry about your valise,” Stevens said, “I didn’t know anything about it.”
“I didn’t think you would.”
“That’s the key, isn’t it? The valise.”
“Don’t ask questions. Don’t think.”
“I’m not thinking,” Stevens said, “I’m just making conversation, just idle, casual conversation.” He peered out the window, located some point which apparently satisfied him, nodded once and then dropped the copter into a shallow, straight drive: one moment they were looking down upon trees, the next they were amidst them and then they hit ground with a rolling bump, dodged through the clearing still rolling and came to a stop in what appeared to be a shallow, abandoned strip of farmland just outside the wooded area. Stevens shook his head and cut off the engine, closing switches one by one. “Closer than you think,” he said.
“You did well.”
“Mostly I just try to get through,” Stevens said. With the machine now out of gear he seemed to have lost intensity or even a sense of purpose. He slumped over the controls, propping his chin on an elbow. “Now what?” he said.
“We’ll see,” Wulff said. “Sit tight.”
