Donald Westlake - High Adventure

Halfway up the slope, Kirby stopped to look back. Valerie and Rosita and Luz Coco were cutting and hacking the sheets into squares or rectangles or ovals, a foot and a half or two feet across. None of them were making the circles he’d asked for, but it didn’t really matter. Half the village was running in and out of huts, looking for string. Tommy and Innocent came together out of one of the huts, each carrying a cardboard carton; they started this way.

Kirby nodded, and hurried on over the hill to start Cynthia.

One of the young men of the village came into the clearing. “Soldiers coming,” he announced.

Everyone stopped what they were doing to stare at him or move closer to him or ask, “Who? Which soldiers? What kind of soldiers?”

“Gurruhs,” said the young man, which was as close as they’d come so far to the word Gurkha .

Twice in the last several months Gurkha patrols had moved through here, short black-haired men who held their shoulders proudly and handled their strange severe weapons confidently and yet smiled with amazingly bright teeth. The Gurkhas were a different kind of soldier, without the sullenness and fear and cruelty and tendency toward petty crime — and sometimes major crime — of the soldiers of their previous world. When the young man said, “Gurruhs,” they all smiled and relaxed. That kind of soldier. Fine.

Valerie, her arms billowing with cloth, came over the barren hilltop and saw Kirby Galway just getting into his plane. Innocent and Tommy were partway down the slope, carrying their cartons. Rosita and Luz followed Valerie with the rest of the cloth, and a half dozen villagers straggled up the slope in their wake, carrying bits of string, cord, twine and rope.

Is this going to work? Valerie frowned, thinking of the innocent villagers about to be slaughtered. Against murderers and machine guns, this? But what else is there to do?

She hurried down the farther slope.

Crouched on the blacktop in front of the van, Vernon shook open the map, holding it by its very edge with his fingertips as he guided it to the ground. It slipped from his grasp; he slapped at it. Just out of sight in the brush, Scottie had found a hollow log to piss resoundingly against. Across the road Morgan Lassiter, the woman journalist, was out of both sight and hearing for the moment, having gone discreetly away with a handful of Kleenex. The other news gatherers strolled around the empty road, yawning and stretching. Hiram Farley, the Trend editor, came over to place his Frye boots beside the map and say, “You know where this place is, do you?”

“Oh, yes,” Vernon said, looking up at him, squinting as though he stared into the too-bright sun. Farley’s face showed nothing, his eyes were level and patient. Why do I feel he knows my soul? But that’s just foolishness; if he knew the truth, he’d stop me.

There was some wistfulness in that idea.

“Everything’s fine,” Vernon said.

Innocent said, “Kirby, this is a crazy idea.” With some difficulty he had climbed up on the wing and was leaning in at the plane’s open door so he could talk to Kirby above the engine noise. Wind whipped at his clothing, and the plane trembled all over. “A crazy idea,” he said, more loudly.

Kirby, studying his instrument panel, gave Innocent an impatient look: “Do you have a better one?”

“Radio the police. Radio the British soldiers at Holdfast,” meaning the small British Army detachment out near the Guatemalan border.

“I’ll do that, once we’re airborne, but it won’t do much good. If Valerie’s right, there isn’t time to send for help. At the very worst, maybe we can slow them down.”

Innocent looked past Kirby at Valerie in the other front seat. She was riding with him because she was the only one with a hope of leading him back to where she’d been. Now, her head was bent forward, she was busily tying strings to cloth. Her profile rang like a gong in Innocent’s soul. “By God, she’s alive,” he said.

“And our deal still holds,” Kirby told him.

Was there something underhanded about the deal if Valerie were not dead? No; nothing you could put your finger on. Innocent sighed. “I suppose it does,” he said.

The false Gurkhas entered the village.

Valerie looked up from her knot-tying as the plane suddenly jolted forward. She looked at Kirby, then out at the Indians backing away from the plane. Innocent St. Michael was out there, waving, offering her a kind of sad smile. She hesitated, then smiled and waved back.

Had she been wrong about him? Was Innocent not the arch villain? His almost pathetic pleasure in seeing her alive — she was sure for just one second she had seen a tear in his eye — could not possibly have been pretense. The plane taxied forward, and Innocent was left behind, out of sight. But if Vernon and the skinny black man had not been obeying Innocent’s orders, then whose? Who was the master-mind behind the plot?

This man Kirby, coming so promptly to the rescue of poor endangered Indians he’d never even met, couldn’t be the ringleader. All you had to do was look at him when he wasn’t waving a sword in your face to see he wasn’t the type.

Who, then?

There came into her memory again the last words she had heard between Vernon and the skinny black man in that filthy shack where they’d been holding her prisoner. The skinny black man had said, “Say it out, Vernon. Say what you want.” There had been a pause, and then Vernon had said, so low she could barely hear it, “She has to die.”

It had been his order.

Vernon was the ringleader? He’d certainly been the one to make that particular decision, but somehow the idea of Vernon as Mister Big...

The plane had swung about, and now it suddenly raced madly out across the dry and bumpy ground, shaking itself to pieces. The angle of the plane was such that from inside it they couldn’t see the ground out the windshield but only the sky; how could Kirby be sure there was nothing in front of them?

The roar, the speed, all were so much more present than in a big sensible airliner, and then all at once the trembling stopped, the roar grew somehow less frantic, and out the side window Valerie could see the ground falling away below.

“Tie knots!” Kirby yelled.

“Oh! Yes, sorry.” She bent her head, tied knots, then paused to look at his profile. He was reaching for the microphone, turning dials on the instrument panel. She leaned toward him: “Do you know someone named Vernon?”

He frowned at her. “Vernon What?”

“Never mind,” she said, and went back to tying knots. He gave her an irritable confused look, then started talking into the microphone in his cupped hand.