The Wrecking Crew

Chapter Twenty-eight

AFTER A LITTLE, I glanced at my watch to note the time. It seemed likely that she'd sneak back to see what I'd do next, to make sure she'd really lost me. I therefore made a show of trying to find a safe way around that overgrown muck hole. I circled far to the right, as far as the grasss and hummocks would take me, but there was no solid path across the stuff. I returned to the island, waded out once more the way she'd gone, and retreated with a display of panic after going in to my knees. I made a swing to the left and had no luck there, either. Finally I went back to the island again and stood looking glumly at the spot on the shoreline where she'd disappeared. I restrained myself from shaking my fist at it. You've got to use moderation in these things.

Having put on enough of a performance, I figured, to deceive several tall, beautiful, overconfident young ladies in plaid pants, I turned dejectedly and shuffled back the way we'd come. As soon as I was out of sight, I lay down under a pine tree, put my hat over my eyes, and concentrated on resting up for the next phase of the operation. I tried not to think of anything, not even Lou and the danger she was in. It wasn't something I could allow to affect my actions. There wasn't anything else to think about. The final hand had been dealt. All that was left was to play the cards.

I gave her half an hour by the watch. If she'd been older, or more experienced, or less cockily sure of my general uselessness, I'd have made it an hour; but I was betting she couldn't stay still nearly that long, watching an empty patch of swamp. When the time was up, I rose, put my hat firmly on my head, and waded across the mud flat, following her footsteps, already filling and fading from sight. It wasn't nice stuff at all. I don't know as I'd have tried it, coming on it cold. You kind of expected the whole nasty quivering black mass to split open and swallow you. But what the hell, I had big feet to support me, and if she could do it, I could.

On the other side, I spent a little time remembering my woodcraft and untangling her tracks. As I'd suspected, she'd gone only a short way before returning to watch my antics. I found the place where she'd lain in the shoreline brush, spying on me. Her elbow marks, in the soft ground, even showed the weave of her sweater.

Then she'd got up and started out again; and now, as I'd hoped and planned, having got rid of me, she'd stopped fooling around. We'd come pretty far north while playing tag through the brush, but now her trail ran considerably south of east, angling back toward the highway. Well, I'd never taken much stock in that hideaway six miles back in the boondocks. Lovely Elin was a cross-country type, to be sure, but the little man, Caselius, wasn't. After all, I'd checked him out once, on a dark road, sword in hand; he'd started out strong but he'd faded fast. Even a two-utile hike along a cleared trail would be a hardship for that little fashion plate. He was a lad who worked with his brain and left the muscle to others, except occasionally when there was an interesting spot of shooting to be done. It doesn't take much strength or endurance to pull a trigger.

The sign on the ground said Elin had written me off. She was making no effort at concealment; it simply didn't occur to her that she might be tracked. I could follow the trail at a steady lope. I found it a lot easier to maintain the pace, now that I no longer had to pretend to be on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion. For a while there, puffing and panting, I'd almost had myself fooled.

What the kid hadn't counted on, apparently, was that we've got a few wilderness areas on our side of the water, too. This myth of the soft and helpless American is soothing to European egos, and may even contain a grain of truth, but there are still a few of us left who know the big woods, and the big deserts, too. And while thirty-six might seem ancient by her standards, it wasn't quite senile; and I'd just had a course of training that had put me in pretty good condition, even if my instructors hadn't been greatly impressed. I had another advantage that hadn't occurred to her. I'd spent most of my postwar life exercising my lungs on the thin air of my home in Santa Fe, at an altitude higher than the highest peak in Scandinavia; I had lung-power to burn. And while I'm no proponent of the double standard in other respects, I think the athletic records will bear me out when I say a good man can run down a good woman any day in the week-and if you want to build that into a dirty joke, bud, you just go right ahead.

I won't say it was fun, loping through the arctic forest at that easy jog trot that eats up the miles. Her tracks said she wasn't straining herself a bit to keep ahead of me, never suspecting there was anybody to keep ahead of. She was just walking along at a good clip, making an occasional detour to avoid the bad spots but swinging right back to her line as soon as the going was easy again. She knew her stuff all right, whether she'd learned it in school or elsewhere. It was that kind of rolling country without prominent landmarks in which regiments of hunters get hopelessly lost each year, but her trail never faltered… It wasn't fun, exactly. For one thing, it was work, and I don't like exercise any more than the next guy. F~r another, it seemed likely that I'd have some dirty business coming up before the day was over. Still, after all the play-acting and horsing around, it was nice to be out in the open on a fine day with the end in sight.

Presently I spotted the bright plaid pants ahead of me

– not as bright as they had been earlier in the day, but still a strong alien pattern in the light and shade of the forest. She was moving more slowly now, beginning to tire a little. Every now and then she'd sit down and rest. I had it harder now. I had to move quietly so she wouldn't hear me, and I had to be careful not to overrun her when she stopped. By the time she reached the road she was looking for, I was pretty tired myself.

It was an old, overgrown logging road running approximately north and south. Like any good woodsman, she'd given herself some leeway. Walking across unknown, trail-less country, you can't be sure of striking a given point, like a camp or cabin; I don't care if you're Dan'l Boone himself. You can be fairly certain of intercepting a line of reasonable length, however, like the road leading to said camp or cabin. So you keep well to the safe side until you strike your road, and then follow it home.

She turned north again. I had it really rough, now. She was striding easily along an open trail, not clear enough for vehicles, to be sure, but a paved highway for a walker. I was out in the woods traveling parallel to her course trying to be quiet as I fought my.way through brush and over fallen timber. I didn't know who'd be waiting along that road, and I didn't want my tracks on it in case they had somebody wandering around who could read sign.

The precaution paid off sooner than I'd expected. She went around a bend and up the long straight stretch that followed; she'd almost reached the next turn when somebody whistled softly, calling her back. He'd let her get far enough ahead to make sure she wasn't followed, before announcing himself.

She turned and came back. The man stepped out into the road. His face was vaguely familiar; I thought I'd met him before, or his fist, in the park in Stockholm. Sara Lundgren would probably have recognized him, too. He had a brief conversation with Elin. I couldn't hear what they were saying, but presently he whistled again, and another man stepped out into the road from the other side. They'd had that long straight stretch covered, ready to cut down anybody who started down it. If I'd come wailting along there with Elin, I suspect we'd both have died. Both men were packing automatic weapons, which are notoriously unselective, and it seemed unlikely they'd have risked losing me just to give her time to reach cover.

I felt a funny sense of responsibility, looking at that beautiful screwball kid standing there in her muddy pants and her snagged sweater. She was literally just a babe in the woods. She might talk big about dirty work on the international level, but it had obviously never occurred to her that a man might deliberately use her and shoot her down, any more than it had occurred to Sara Lundgren. I watched one of the men take the packets of film from her. He spoke to her, and started off along the road, and she went with him. The other man watched them go, then stepped back into his hiding place in the bushes.

I suppose I could have left him there, but I needed his weapon; and I don't like leaving men behind me, anyway, when it can be helped. It was an easy stalk. He wasn't expecting trouble. At the last moment, a twig snapped under my foot and he swung around sharply, just in time to catch the blow to the throat that crushes the windpipe. My instructors at the training school would have been proud of me. He never got to make a sound. I even managed to catch his machine pistol before it hit the ground-not that it mattered greatly, since he never got the safety off.

It was a make of gun I'd had no experience with, but the various buttons and levers were self-explanatory: there was the safety, the trigger, and a selector switch to change the piece from full- to semi-automatic. Everybody's gone hog-wild over these ugly little squirt guns lately, and I can never quite see why, except that nobody seems to want to take the trouble to really learn to shoot, so they've got to have weapons they can spray like a hose. Personally, I prefer a scope-sighted rifle for long range; and for closeup work a short-barreled pump or automatic shotgun loaded with buckshot makes a lovely weapon. However, you can't always satisfy your preferences. I had a machine pistol. It would have to do.

I set the thing to fire single shots. The dead man in the bushes was already concealed from the road. I left him lying there and hurried after Elin and her escort. Soon I came to the edge of an open, logged-over space with the stumps still standing, turning gray with age. There was a small lake, little more than a forest pond, and a cabin, little more than a tarpaper shack, with a rusty stovepipe jutting from the roof at a precarious angle. The place had a deserted air. It looked as if it had stood empty for years, sheltering nothing but mice and pack rats, if they had pack rats in this country.

Elin was walking with her companion across the clearing away from me, toward the cabin. She'd obviously had it. Keeping up with the man's long stride was clearly an effort for her. Well, she'd given me quite a run.

I couldn't help thinking, as I watched her, that a girl like this might be kind of nice to have around. She'd outgrow her crackpot political ideas soon enough; and with her looks, who cared about her taste in clothes? I mean, women who can cook and make love are a dime a dozen, but a kid who can strike out across rough country on her own, and hit her destination like a homing pigeon-that's something pretty special. There is a lake up in the Sangre de Cristos where the trout grow to fifteen inches and the deer all come with heads like hatracks. There is a place in the San Luis Valley where the ducks come in with the dawn.

I woke up; it was no time for daydreaming. I had business to attend to. I found a place to lie near the base of a tree, where a fallen log gave me a rest for the gun. I settled myself comfortably, and swung the sights across Elin and the man to the cabin door. I held that sight picture for almost a minute, hoping Caselius would make my job easy by coming out to meet them-after all, my primary business was with him. But he didn't show, and they were getting close, and I couldn't afford to let reinforcements into the place. I swung the piece back to cover the man beside Elin, and pressed the trigger gently.

The squirt gun didn't have much in the way of noise and recoil. It didn't have much punch, either, at that range. I saw my man jerk, and knew I'd got a solid hit somewhere in the thorax area, but that lousy little jacketed bullet didn't knock him down or even stagger him badly. He started to turn, swinging his own weapon toward me. I fired again. He went to his knees, still trying stubbornly to get lined up to shoot back. It took a third bullet to put him down. God damn those lousy little pipsqueak weapons, anyway. Most states back home would call them illegal for deer, but I guess these armaments specialists figure it doesn't much matter what you shoot a man with.

My heart was acting up a little now. The dance was open and the music was playing. I swung back to cover the cabin door, saw nobody there, and looked at Elin von Hoffman. The kid was bending over the fallen man. She raised her head to look in my direction. I thought I could see an incredulous look on her lovely, dirty face, even at that distance. There may even have been something of reproach: after all, she'd given me a break, out there in the woods. She stared at me, or at the spot from which my shots had come, for several seconds. Then she snatched up the fallen machine pistol and ran for the cabin door, just as a blunt automatic poked out there and spat noise and flame.

I don't suppose we'll ever know his precise motives. Maybe he thought she'd betrayed him. Maybe he thought she was attacking him, with that businesslike weapon in her hands. Maybe he was shooting at me-although the range was long for a hand gun-and she just ran into the line of fire. My own theory is that he was merely wiping her out angrily because she'd been inefficient. She'd brought trouble to Caselius; she deserved to die; and he was just the boy to see that she got her deserts.

I could see nothing to shoot at, but I put a bullet through that doorjamb on his side, hoping. Like most hope shots, it was a dud. It was too late, anyway. She was lying there in the sunshine, a small crumpled heap. Beside her lay the machine pistol. Behind her, near the dead man, lay the two packets of film she'd brought such a long distance. I could have felt bad about that, too, if I'd let myself. Well, she'd never know she'd wasted all that effort on blank film. I'd gone over the marked boxes with artgum that morning, and marked up another batch for purposes of bait. I won't say I felt any particular obligation to Grankvist or ° government; but it always helps to keep an ace in the hole, and I had lots of film. Even if Caselius should get me, I'd still have the last laugh when his technicians pulled the stuff out of the soup and he discovered he'd fallen for the same gag twice.

There was silence for a while, after all the noise, but the little man inside made his decision fast. He didn't sit around hoping for help from his guard up the road. He gave me credit, at last, for brains and ruthlessness equal to his own; I wouldn't be out front shooting off firearms loudly if I hadn't already cleaned up the premises. And the day wasn't getting any younger, and I guess waiting for darkness didn't appeal to him. He wasn't a wilderness boy himself, and I'd just proved I was. He had reason to know I could handle a knife, and he wasn't aware I had no blade with me. And there are a lot of otherwise brave men who prefer not to wait for a knifeman in the dark.

He decided to take his chances with the gun, while daylight lasted, and he made the obvious play. The door opened and Lou came out. She looked pretty good at a distance. I could tell that she hadn't been drastically abused, at any rate. She seemed to be kind of dusty, that was all-not surprising, considering the place where she'd been kept. She came out, still wearing her black beatnik outfit, with her hands tied behind her. Caselius, followed, no taller than she, holding his pistol in her back. He was pretty dusty too, and his hair needed combing. It was longer than you'd have expected, meeting him normally; and, disheveled, it gave him a wild look.

Pausing beside the dead girl, he snatched up the weapon she'd dropped, tucking his pistol inside his belt. This put us on even terms, with maybe a slight balance in his favor, since it was a weapon he knew and liked, and he also had Lou. They kept on coming until they reached the dead man on the ground. Caselius spoke a command, and Lou picked up the packages of film. He crouched down behind her as she did so, not exposing himself a bit. They went on past the dead man and a little farther. Caselius gave another order, and Lou stopped, with the muzzle of the gun in her back.

Caselius raised his voice. "Helm. Helm, are you there?"

I called back, "I'm here."

He shouted, "Throw out your gun and come in sight with your hands up. You have ten seconds before I shoot Mrs. Taylor to death. One, two…

I let him hear me laugh. He was running that gag into the ground. He must really have been watching American TV, the corny ideas he kept kicking around.

"Go ahead, little man," I shouted. "When you shoot, she falls. When she falls, you're standing there naked. I've got the sights right in line. I'm waiting."

He stood there a moment longer. He didn't resume his count. Presently he spoke to Lou, and they started moving again. As they came closer, he swung her to one side to keep her between us as they passed my position. My problem was simple enough. I merely had to shoot him. Even if I had to reach him through Lou's body, it was better than letting them get away together. Wounded, she still had a chance of living-she'd already survived one bullet from a weapon similar to the gun I held. If he once got clear, however, and no longer needed her as a shield, she'd certainly die..

But I decided to try less drastic measures first. I stood up in plain sight, to tease him. He'd closed the range enough now so that it was an easy shot for both of us. But of course he was protected by Lou, while I was protected by the fact that his weapon was pressed against Lou's back.

I saw him fight it out with himself and lose. He was thinking, of course, of the long, impossible walk along that brushy road with me hovering nearby, maneuvering for one clear, safe shot. If he could only get rid of me now…

Suddenly he snatched the gun out of her back and swung it toward me one-handed, holding her before him with an arm across her throat. The chopper began to speak, but it was a heavy weapon for a little man to work with one hand. His aim was off. The bullets sprayed dirt to my left, and for the moment Lou was not threatened.

I lowered my aim slightly. I had four legs to choose from. She could have made it easier for me by sticking to skirts, but I got what I hoped was a male pants-leg, steadied down on it, and fired.

He slumped down, carrying her with him. His gun ceased firing. Then, to my relief, Lou was free and running, and I had him at last. He knew it, of course. He knew that the sights were in line and that my finger was bearing hard on the trigger. He made the last play in the book. Kneeling there, he flung the machine pistol violently aside. He snatched the automatic from his belt and threw that away. He stuck his arms high in the air.

"I surrender!" he shouted. "See, I am unarmed! I surren-"

Like I say, he must have been watching TV. Or reading books about sentimental Americans. I shoved the selector to full automatic. The burst cut him short and knocked him down.

Then I stood there for a minute or so, watching him. It's not advisable to walk up on them too soon. But he didn't move, lying there, and I went up and turned him over and saw he was quite dead. Lou had had sense enough to throw herself flat after getting clear. Now, with her hands tied behind her, she was having trouble rising. I went over and helped her up. I had nothing with which to cut the ropes, and she'd pulled the knots pretty tight. It took a little time for me to pick them open.

"All right?" I asked.

"Yes," she said. "Yes, I'm all right."

In real life, somehow, you don't embrace the girl and settle the details of your future together while smoke still trickles from the barrel of your gun and the body of your adversary lies warm on the ground before you. I left her there, rubbing her wrists, and went back to the cabin. Halfway there, I started to run. The smaller of the two figures on the ground had changed position since I'd seem it last.

Elin's eyes were open when I came hurrying up to kneel beside her, but I couldn't be sure they were seeing me until her lips moved.

"You… tricked me, Cousin Matthias."

I had to clear my throat. "You shouldn't ever give a man like me a break, kid. Or any man, when the chips are down."

"A break?" she whispered. "The chips?" The Americanisms confused her. She frowned. "I wish…" she said. "I wish…"

I never did learn what she wished-maybe to keep on living. Her voice just stopped. Her eyes remained open, until I closed them. I found a blanket in the cabin to spread over her.

Lou had already started down the logging track toward the higl~way. When I caught up with her, she was standing quite still, looking at the dead man I'd left in the bushes at the side of the road. His head was at a peculiar angle to his body. Her face was very pale. She glanced at me and started walking again. I fell in step beside her. We didn't talk, all the way back to civilization. There wasn't anything to say that wouldn't keep till later.