The Ambushers

XXIII

IT HAD SEEMED reasonable as a theory. Now that I was putting it into practice, it sounded so ridiculous I couldn't believe it would work. I was taking a long chance on a dueling scar a man had picked up in his 'hotheaded youth, and on that lifelong preoccupation with 'honor and edged weapons that went with a certain Teutonic mentality, I hoped.

"Come out of there!" I shouted. "Cobarde! Schweinhund! Come on out and fight, you slaughterhouse general. What are you stalling for? I suppose you figure if you hide under the bed long enough somebody'll shoot me and save your yellow hide."

It wasn't exactly brilliant invective, particularly since I 'had to deliver it more or less in Spanish for the sake of the gathering audience. But they were gathering, that was the important thing. They were peering curiously out of the caves and sliding down the ladders and forming a circle around me and the tent. There were several rifles aimed at me as I stood waving my stolen machete dramatically, and the tough little sergeant had come up behind me with his fancy burp-gun, but nobody'd killed me yet.

I called, "Okay, you can relax now, Quintana, and stop shaking. Your boys have me covered. Nobody's going to hurt you. But before you give the word to shoot, let me tell you-,'

I told him, in my clumsy Spanish, how his mother was a drunken whore who got impregnated one night by a garbage-eating mongrel dog while lying unconscious in a Berlin gutter. I elaborated on this concept for a while. Then I described his bastard childhood in detail, and went on to tell how he got the scar on his face from a broken beer bottle wielded by a jealous homosexual companion, since everybody knew the Nazis were all fairies; it was a matter of record.

I got a little more fluent as I went along, and out of the corner of my eye I'd catch an occasional faint grin of appreciation. Mexico is a land where the art of vituperation is still respected for its own sake. I was doing okay for a mere gringo. It would be a pity to shoot me while I was affording the camp a certain amount of low-quality entertainment.

One who apparently was not amused, however, was the little sergeant with the machine pistol. I felt his weapon touch me in the back, and I heard the faint click as he released the safety catch.

"That's right, amigo," I said over my shoulder. "That is brave and correct. Shoot me in the back. Save your cowardly chief-"

A stir made me look towards the tent again. Von Sachs stood there, buckling on the belt with the machete and the.45 automatic. There was a certain amount of saluting among the men, to which he responded with an impatient outward thrust of his hand. He looked hard and tough in the growing light. If he felt any effects from the beer, and the mickey Catherine had slipped him, he didn't show it.

"What transpires here?" he demanded in Spanish. "Why is this man loose? Why am I awakened by his crazy bellowing? Disarm him!"

I stepped forward before anybody could grab me. "That's right!" I sneered. "That's the way, Quintana! Take the machete away from the terrible man before he cuts somebody! In a camp of men with firearms he must not be allowed to keep his little knife, it is too dangerous!" I threw back my head and spat in his direction. "You've got one of your own, right there on your belt. Why don't you take mine away from me? Are you afraid?"

Behind me, the sergeant spoke softly, "Jefe, con permiso-" He was asking for permission to shoot. There was a disapproving murmur from the other men.

Von Sachs noted it. There were other things on his mind, of course, like the question of how I came to be standing there free and armed. He wasn't dumb. He glanced quickly towards the tent doorway where Catherine had just appeared, pushing her hair out of her eyes, with 'her crumpled blouse hanging loose outside her shorts, like an open jacket. Von Sachs spoke quickly, and two men took her by the arms.

"Hold the treacherous slut while I dispose of her accomplice!" He swung back to face me. "So you still wish to die quickly, Mr. Evans. But if I were stupid enough to fight you, I would disappoint you. I would cut you to pieces very slowly."

I grinned scornfully. "You scare me! You and that scar. If it wasn't a beer bottle, it's where you dove through a plate glass window because you were frightened by an American bomb five blocks away."

He hesitated. He knew he was being suckered; he knew he'd be a damn fool to risk everything he'd worked for on the outcome of a crazy duel. And still, there was the matter of a Prussian aristocrat's honor. I'd questioned his courage, I'd cast doubts on the 'honorable origins of the betraying scar he'd retained through the years of flight and hiding where a sensible man would long since have had it removed by plastic surgery. There was that, and there was the waiting attitude of the men.

The sergeant with the machine pistol spoke quickly behind me: "Jefe no! Let me shoot him now!"

For answer, von Sachs grabbed his machete by the hilt and pulled it clear. There wasn't any polite on-guard stuff. He just came for me. Suddenly he was all over me, and he was good. It was all I could do to parry the flashing blade coming at me from all sides.

His men surged aside as I retreated. There were murmurs of approval and gasps of disappointment. It was a weapon they all knew, but they'd probably never seen it used by men who'd trained with foils and sabers. At that, von Sachs had the advantage. He'd learned his stuff with a real weapon. Padded and masked, he'd swung a blade weighing several pounds, sometimes dull for practice, but sometimes, as his face attested, honed and deadly.

I'd done my work with the modern fencing saber, a whippy toy not much heavier than a foil, employing a dainty technique that has little to do with blood and death. As a matter of fact, if you hit hard enough to sting your opponent through his thin canvas jacket, you're scolded for being Unsportsmanlike. On the other hand, I did know quite a bit about knives, and I'd done some work with the Japanese fighting stick, a closely related weapon.

He kept coming in, but not as fast as before, and I managed to break up his attack at last and come back at him with a straight-armed lunge that seemed to take him by surprise. He even looked a little disapproving as he beat the point aside and retaliated with a slashing cut to the head, which I parried. I knew I'd learned something, but there wasn't time to analyze it.

I'd weathered the first rush. He'd lost some of his steam, and it was time to think of strategy. It wasn't up to me to skewer him, anyway. I was just the decoy. I started angling my retreat towards the creek bed, well within rifle range of Sheila's position on the north rim.

We were sweating now. The scar was a livid streak on von Sachs' flushed face. I saw Catherine behind him, still held between her guards. That wasn't good, but maybe they'd release her when the shooting started. I didn't look at the canyon wall behind me. Sheila would be there. She'd have been there since the first hint of dawn. I could sense the loaded rifle up there, waiting. I could feel the crosshairs tracking von Sachs as he moved closer, advancing as I retreated.

It made me feel kind of cheap. The man was sincerely trying to kill me in fair fight, and I was just setting him • up for a bullet. Well, it's not a chivalrous age, nor is mine an honorable profession. I wasn't about to risk turning loose a wild man with an army and a nuclear missile because of some boyish notions of fair play. – I had it pretty well figured out now. I had to immobilize him for a moment, to make him a stationary target; and I had to get myself completely out of the way so that the chance of my lunging into the bullet wouldn't make Sheila nervous and hasty. I let von Sachs drive me back towards a spot where the almost dry creek bed 'had a six-foot bank undercut by past floods. I gave ground slowly until I felt the bank start to give; then I let out a despairing cry and jumped back and down, falling in soft sand. That got me out of the line of fire. Six feet above me, von Sachs came to a halt, panting.

He stood there, catching his breath, a beautiful target. I knew a certain regret as I waited for the shot. Good swordsmen are hard to find these days. The regret faded as the shot didn't come.

It was hard to keep from turning my head to look back and up at the rim. Something was wrong up there, terribly wrong, but there wasn't much chance of my seeing the answer from below. I got up slowly, while men crowded to the creek bank on either side of von Sachs, and still the Nazi stood there, machete in hand, and still nothing happened.

It became obvious that nothing was going to happen, presumably because something had already happened to the rifle on the rim or to the small girl behind it.

Catherine's guards had dragged her up to the edge of the wash. Her face told me nothing, but I remembered that she'd wanted von Sachs alive. She'd also said, One day you will pay for Max. I do not forgive you.

She was a clever girl. She must have made a deal with somebody; she must have figured out a different solution to her problem, one that gave her revenge as well as success.

What it was didn't really matter. Whatever she'd done, or had done, to Sheila, there wasn't much I could do about it at the moment. I could do something about von Sachs, however. She was welcome to him after I got through with him.

"Come on down, grandpa," I called, shaking my machete. "What are you waiting for, the boys to bring a ladder?"

He didn't like the implied sneer at his age. He jumped. going to one knee in the sand. I gave 'him a break, I let him get to his feet. Then I moved in to kill him.