Brian Garfield: Relentless

“But why me?”

They were riding north in the Lincoln on Interstate 10. The speedometer hovered at seventy but it was cool and quiet inside the air-conditioned sedan. The Major drove the way he did most things-with casual and unflappable efficiency. Walker repeated, “Why pick me?”

“Because it’s always better to deal with a known quantity. You were a good officer. You know how to take orders, you’re accustomed to military operations. There were half a dozen uniformed pilots I could have brought into this thing, but they’d have had to go AWOL and it would have made a fuss. Nobody’s going to miss you.”

He didn’t think the Major meant anything by that remark but it chilled him, made the little hairs stand up on the back of his neck. He fought the feeling and changed the subject. “Who else is in this?”

“Three others. You may have known two of them.”

“Baraclough?”

“Yes.”

Baraclough had been mentioned in the clipping. He’d been an Army captain, Hargit’s second-in-command. He’d been drummed out of the Army by the same court-martial board He remembered Baraclough vaguely: a thin sardonic opportunist with a napalm scar on one arm.

“Who else?”

“Eddie Burt.”

“I don’t think I remember him.”

“He was a sergeant under my command.”

“They court-martial him too?”

“No. They thought about it but they had to draw the line someplace-on those charges you could cashier every other American soldier out there.”

“But this fellow Burt stayed with you.”

“He’s a loyal man.” You couldn’t picture the Major smirking but there was considerable satisfaction in his little smile.

“Who’s the fifth man?”

The Major’s face changed abruptly. “You’ve never met him. An ex-convict named Hanratty.” He didn’t bother to conceal the contempt in his voice.

Baraclough was waiting at The Sands in Phoenix. The three of them had dinner there and talked about old times in Saigon as if they had nothing else on their minds. Baraclough was dressed in casual weekend slacks and sport shirt but both garments, and his shoes, had the look of money. Obviously the operation wasn’t being financed on a shoestring.

Baraclough was gaunt, dour, with a twisted sense of humor and curious areas of indifference and sensitivity. He paid great attention to such things as good manners and good diction, and his humor was the self-deprecating kind that often went with a high order of intelligence. He was also capable of gratuitous cruelties: he treated the cocktail waitress like a lower form of life-“Have you thought of having that moustache removed, dear?”-but he left her a lavish tip.

After a while it occurred to Walker that the two men worked well together because they complemented each other: each filled gaps in the other’s capacities. They were both cruel men but their brutalities were of different kinds.

Baraclough’s sadistic streak was deliberate and malicious and he enjoyed exercising it, but he only did it when the circumstances gave him the edge so that there was no likelihood of retaliation against him.

Hargit’s cruelty was that of the predatory carnivore. A matter of indifference. It never occurred to him to be concerned about other people’s feelings. Hawked, lithe, violent, charismatic-he had the roughshod instincts of a jungle cat, and the grace.

They drove to Reno with only two gas stops and a half-hour in Las Vegas for lunch. Baraclough did most of the talking, filling Walker in; Baraclough was the one who handled details. He was a superb driver: he kept the needle right on the speed limit and when he had to pass on narrow roads he did it smoothly with no great bursts of power and no sudden braking.

Burt was waiting for them in Reno. Walker remembered him now that he saw him. Burt had a shaven head and a waxy, slightly concave face and the build of an oil drum. He had the stolid unimaginative personality of a career master sergeant, which he had been; the threads on the sleeve of his khaki shirt showed where he had carried nine reenlistment hashmarks.

The house Burt had rented was one of those week-by-week rentals Reno served up to people who set up “permanent” Nevada residences for six weeks to get their divorces. It was six miles out of town, a thirty-year-old hunting cabin set back a mile off the highway in scrub timber, out of sight of neighbors. It had two bedrooms and a large paneled front room with stone fireplace and exposed rafters that gave it the look of a hunting lodge. Hanratty, the fifth man, had arrived a day earlier by plane from Los Angeles and Burt had picked him up at the airport. They had two cars among them-Hargit’s Lincoln Continental and a Plymouth that Burt had rented from a Reno agency.

Hanratty was a narrow lizard of a man who had been up the river more times than an anxious salmon-a three time ex-con. It turned out he was Eddie Burt’s ex-brother-in-law: Burt’s sister had divorced him during his second prison term. Hanratty had a narrow face, rough, pitted all over, the hue of veal. His nose was a teapot snout and he looked as if he had been assembled out of leftover mismatched parts-fat legs and hips, a short torso, matchstick arms and a small nervous face. He talked with his teeth together as ex-convicts invariably do, speaking out of the corner of his mouth like a ventriloquist. He was never without a large revolver.

The reason for Hanratty’s presence became gradually clear: he was the one who had proposed the operation.

They had released him from the Florence penitentiary eight months ago and the parole department had helped get him a job in the San Miguel smelter. The company bank’s Friday afternoon ritual had drawn his attention from the start. He had begun to think about getting in touch with some of the professionals he’d met in stir but in the meantime he’d run into his former brother-in-law in a Las Vegas casino and somehow the conversation had worked its way around to the San Miguel bank-Hanratty had a habit, he kept talking until he found something to say-and Burt had introduced him to the Major. After that it had been inevitable that the Major would take over.

The others had already been over the ground. Baraclough had Polaroid photographs of the bank and the street. That first night in Reno they sat around the kitchen table and the Major filled in the details of the plan, using a No. 2 pencil as a pointer, outlining the campaign like a field general giving instructions to his battalion commanders.

The next day Baraclough had driven him to the airport to show him one of the planes they were going to use. “We’ll use two planes because they may get a fix on the first one. Anybody could spot us-there’s always that vulnerable moment just after you take off. Once they know we’re using a plane they’ll figure we’re heading for Mexico. That’s where we’ll have the edge on them. We’ll change planes here-we’ll have to set up a second plane, something with enough range to get us up into Canada across the Idaho border. We’ve already set up a landing strip in British Columbia.”

“How long?”

“The strip? Four thousand feet. One of the lumber outfits used to use it. It’s on the weedy side but it’ll do, I checked it out myself last week.” They were sitting in the Plymouth beside the runway; Baraclough had his arm across the back of the seat. “I thought I’d leave the choice of the second plane up to you.”

The plane beside the hangar was a Piper twin Apache. “Where’d you get the money to buy that one?”

“Who bought it? I rented it in Pasadena under a phony name. We hired a pilot to fly it up here for us and I told him we’d get in touch with him when we needed him again. He thinks it’s something to do with a rich man’s divorce case. They do that all the time around here, people hiring private planes to sneak in and out of the state while they’re supposedly living here establishing six weeks’ residence.” Baraclough took the key out of the ignition and opened the door. “You’ll want to have a look at her.”