The Menacers (22 page)

I looked at her and knew I’d done it at last. She’d forgiven the brutal murder in the sky, perhaps because of the harrowing circumstances, but this was too much for her sensitive nature to bear. It was all right, presumably, to kill a man with one powerful rifle shot, but to do the same thing with four feeble pistol shots was not to be tolerated.

I said, “Do we have to go into all that again, doll? Wounded men have been known to fire guns, but it has never happened with a dead man. I’m not going to get myself shot in the back by a guy I forgot to finish off, like a sentimental TV hero, or something. Okay?”

“No!” She licked her lips. “No, it’s not okay! I—”

I was getting a bit fed up with her moral judgments, not to mention her incessant gasps of surprise or dismay. I said, “Damn it, if you don’t like it, go out there and surrender like I told you in the first place…
Down!
”

I threw myself on top of her, as Tony Hartford opened up with his squirter from a nearby sandpile. The submachinegun burst threw sand all over us.

I said, “Goddamn all amateurs! You were supposed to be watching them, not me! Give me that Browning!”

I rolled to the side, and tossed some sand back at friend Tony with Vadya’s .380. There was a man missing, and that worried me, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it, pinned down by the rapid-fire weapon across the way. Then Carol screamed, and I saw a man aiming a rifle down at us from the knoll that was the highest point of the island.

I rolled aside again, and emptied the .380 fast enough to make him take cover temporarily. This gave us a chance to wriggle farther down into the hollow we occupied, but there was obviously nowhere to go from there, except into the path of somebody’s bullet. Well, that was exactly the way I’d wanted it, wasn’t it?

I looked at Vadya’s empty automatic, and tossed it aside. I’d once had some notion of keeping it for a sentimental memento, or something, but it was a silly idea. I took out Solana’s pistol, and glanced at Carol, huddled down beside me.

“Forgive the imprecations,” I said. “Everything’s working out fine, just fine. We hope.”

Tony Hartford’s voice called: “Helm!”

“Right here,” I said. “Where would I be going?”

“I think you see the situation. If you raise your head, my man will shoot it off. Throw out your gun.”

I hesitated long enough to make it seem as if I were having a big struggle with myself. At last I called back, “It’s empty. They’re all empty.”

“Toss them out anyway.”

I reached for the Browning and lobbed it over the crest of the dune. I pitched the .38 Colt after it, and waited.

“Harsek carried a Luger,” Hartford called. “Let’s see it.” I tossed out the Luger, and he said: “And one more.”

He was trying it on for size; he couldn’t know I had a fourth weapon. I let him wait some more. Then I picked up the Solana gun, kissed it once for good luck, and threw it after the rest. I heard sounds of movement on the other side of the dune.

“So they were all empty!” Hartford’s voice said sarcastically. “Not a bullet in the lot—except for one automatic fully loaded! I ought to shoot you, Helm, just for that!”

I winked at Carol. Our electronic baby had found a home.

“All right,” Hartford called, “all right, send the girl out.” I nodded at Carol, and she got to her feet and walked out there, slipping in the sand. Hartford’s voice came again: “Now you, Helm. Hands up, remember. Way up!”

I stuck my arms into the air and climbed over the ridge. Carol was standing in front of Hartford, looking small and disheveled and scared, with sand clinging to her soggy sweater and skirt. The rifleman was coming down the hill to join us. Hartford swung his ugly little squirt-gun to cover me.

I saw him smile slowly, and I knew he was going to shoot. I could hardly complain. It was the logical thing for him to do; it was exactly what I’d done to Priscilla, for exactly the same reasons. They were still valid. There was nothing he needed me for. Any questions he had to ask, he could ask Carol.

I was just a threat, a potential danger to him and his operation as long as I was alive. Any sensible man would kill me now, and young Hartford, whatever his real name was, whatever his sexual attitudes might be, undoubtedly prided himself on being eminently sensible.

I saw the submachinegun swing and steady, and I braced myself for a last-minute dive to somewhere, not that there was any hope of escape, but I might as well take it moving as standing still. Then there was a single sharp report from down near the shore, and Tony Hartford went to his knees and pitched forward on top of his weapon. The man with the rifle stopped and looked in the direction of the shot. He dropped his gun and raised his hands.

We turned to watch Señor Ramón Solana-Ruiz approach, accompanied by a couple of Mexican soldiers in khakis, one carrying a rifle with a telescopic sight.

“I am very sorry to have annoyed you by saving your life, Señor Helm,” Ramón said in his stiff Mexican way. They insult very easily down there. “I will endeavor not to make the same mistake again.”

I said, “Privately, I am very grateful, Señor Solana. Publicly, all I can say is, it’s a hell of a sentimental way to run a secret service or whatever you’re running.” I walked over to Tony Hartford’s body and retrieved the trick automatic. “Here’s your gun back. I went to a lot of trouble to plant it on that guy, so it would lead you to the right place. I hope you have an alternative solution to our problem.”

He took the pistol and glanced from it to me. “So that is what the fireworks were about.”

“That’s what.”

“You are a brave man.”

I said irritably, “Jesus Christ, what is this anyway, a mutual-admiration society? So I’m brave or stupid or something, who cares? And you’re a great guy, too, and in spite of how wonderful we both are, we still don’t know where the hell these people are going to pull off their big show, whatever it may be.”

“We have this man, here, and the pilot of the boat. A little questioning—”

I said, with a glance at the lagoon, “You won’t have the pilot long. He’s making for the open sea at flank speed.”

Ramón laughed. “Give me a little credit, friend. There’s a patrol boat hidden behind the next island that can outrun him by ten knots. As for the rest, I could not have an American agent killed before my eyes. The reports I would have had to fill out would have interfered with my work for months. Besides, I had promised Mrs. Lujan that if she cooperated, she would be safe, and I was not sure how many people the man was going to shoot down, once he started. Those automatic weapons intoxicate some people.” He glanced out to sea. “Here comes the patrol boat now. You see, the other boat is stopping to surrender. The pilot knows he cannot escape.”

We watched the minor naval drama from the sandhill. Presently the two boats headed our way, bucking the sea that was still running. Below us, in the calm lagoon, even the underwater parts of the wrecked plane were dimly visible, from this height, through the clear water.

Carol said, “But how did you know where to come, Ramón?”

He shrugged. “It was a matter for the experts with the charts. With the help of the electronic device concealed in the pistol, we could trace the course of your plane and extrapolate—I believe that is the right word. We knew the approximate cruising range. Unless you changed course drastically at the last moment, you had to come down in the gulf within a certain area. Presumably there would be somebody to pick you up. A discreet radar search gave us the location of all vessels in the lower gulf. There is not much water traffic. It was not hard to pick out a fishing boat that was heading in roughly the right direction at top speed, and determine its course. Somewhere near the spot where the two courses intersected, there had to be a place suitable for either landing the plane or putting it down in the water. Our experts decided that this island was the most likely choice for an experienced pilot under the prevailing weather conditions. I made arrangements to conceal myself here with a couple of men before daybreak, sent the patrol boat off to hide, and here I am.”

“We’re really very grateful,” Carol said. “No matter what Mr. Helm says.”

“Of course he is perfectly right, señora. I did allow sentiment to interfere with duty. Now we must hope that these men will give the right answers under questioning.”

“Assuming that they know them in the first place,” I said grimly. “Maybe I can shortcut this inquisition a bit. It’s a long gamble, but it may pay off.”

Carol said quickly, “That’s right, you said Priscilla had given you a hint—”

“The little girl with the big bosoms and the ready revolver?” Solana said. “I will be interested to learn what happened to her and the pilot of the plane. Later. What did she tell you, Helm?”

“Not much,” I said. “Just that while their girl Vadya was showing me around Mazatlán, she apparently took me into an area she shouldn’t have. Priscilla thought this was proof of Vadya’s intention to betray everything to me. Of course it wasn’t. Vadya wasn’t the turncoat type. She just knew she was being watched—maybe she knew she’d be condemned no matter what she did—and it suited her sense of humor to tease the bloodhounds a bit. She certainly didn’t say anything to make me think the place had any special significance, except that it wasn’t the kind of place a woman would normally take a man on a romantic evening on the town. Viewing the sunset from Icebox Hill, okay; but watching a rusty freighter being loaded with seeds or grain or something wasn’t likely to do much for the male libido.”

“The docks?” Solana said. “In Mazatlán?”

I nodded. “I can’t remember the name of the ship, if I ever saw it. But you’d better get on the air as fast as you can and check if it’s still there…”

It was; and after all our efforts, the main part of the job got accomplished by the authorities in Mazatlán before we arrived, even though we made it across Cortez’s Sea by boat and plane at speeds that would have curled old Hernando’s hair.

Later that day, after conferring with his local counterparts in Mazatlán, Solana gave me the guided tour of the captured ship. The most spectacular part of the exhibit was a concealed hold up forward that had been fitted out as a kind of assembly line for the manufacture of intriguingly scorched and crumpled scraps of flying saucer—the kind of debris that might have got blown around after such an unconventional aircraft had exploded violently. As might have been predicted, a surprising number of the scraps could be identified as being of U.S. origin, one way or another.

I looked around the gloomy hold and grimaced. “You’d think,” I said, “that if they were going to all this trouble and expense, they’d cook up a couple of real UFOs—I mean actual flying models. I can see that the easiest and cheapest way of spreading the rumors was to get a lot of people to lie their heads off about what they’d seen; but one or two honest-to-God saucers flying around would have helped make the hoax more convincing.”

Solana laughed. “Yes, that occurred to our friends, too. The big trouble was—according to one of the prisoners who has talked—that although they tried, they could not make them fly. The saucer configuration is apparently inherently unstable at any reasonably high speed, at least as far as our technology is concerned. The Martians or Venusians may be able to design such a craft to fly fast in our atmosphere; we can’t. At least, these people couldn’t. They had to be satisfied with the big lie.”

I glanced towards the other side of the cavernous hold. “What’s over there?”

“Those are the fire bombs. And here are the maps that show where in Mazatlán each bomb was to be planted, and where each scrap of flying saucer debris was to be found. The day after tomorrow, after the city had gone up in flames, these remnants would have been clear evidence of American… Yes, what is it?” A man had come up. He spoke to Solana, who said impatiently: “Yes, yes, of course she is to be admitted. Yes, with her cameras. I gave the orders, did I not? She is to be given every assistance.”

We waited, and in a moment Carol came in. She’d changed into a crisp, light, slacks-and-shirt outfit, and she was hung about with photographic equipment until she looked like a joke, but then, most pros do when they’re working. It’s only the occasional sensitive lone-wolf camera artist who can get by with interpreting the world about him, to his own satisfaction, with one camera and one lens. The guy who works for an editor’s satisfaction generally needs all the gear he can drag around.

She said to Solana: “I certainly appreciate your having my stuff flown down, Ramón. Is it really all right if I take pictures in here?”

“In here, out there, everywhere,” he said. “We want full coverage and as much publicity as we can get. When you are through here, you will be transported back to the island, if you wish, to get pictures there. But please be certain you first get some fine, sharp pictures of this UFO factory. For the sake of both our countries, the world must be convinced that this was all an elaborate fraud.”

“Yes, of course.” She made a little face. “That island isn’t my favorite vacation spot, by any means, but you’re right, we should have some shots of it. Can I get some of the people, too?”

“All you want, dead and alive, dear lady.”

“Thank you.” She was silent for a moment, and we all stood awkwardly in the middle of the iron room. Carol glanced at me and said, “Matt, I’m sorry if I said anything… I’m just not used to being involved in anything like that.”

“Sure.”

“I… I’ll see you around.”

I looked at her. She was telling me that it had been nice, this summer, but that was before she’d known what kind of man she was associating with: a coldblooded, ruthless, callous murderous type of guy dealing in guns and blood. Somehow, I found, it didn’t quite break my heart. I’d got a bit disenchanted with her, too, during the course of our adventures. She was a nice girl—well, woman—and I hoped she’d find a nice boy—well, man—and in the meantime she had her cameras and her ideals and her notion of what the world ought to be like, even if it wasn’t.

“Sure,” I said. “Somewhere around.”