Donald Hamilton - The Betrayers

He showed his teeth in a smile. "Just like old times, eh, Eric? That time you wore me down with your dancing around and long-range jabbing. Just try that here, friend."

He was right, of course. Here the advantage was all on his side. There was no place in the cramped cockpit full of bolted-down seats for any fancy footwork, and my longer reach wasn't going to be much help, either. Monk lowered his head and came for me. I just waited for him. There was nothing else to do. I was Horatius at the bridge; I had to stay between him and that glowing red light. Grudge fight or no, I knew him well enough to know that he'd break off in a minute and dive for the firing button if I gave him an opening.

So I just stood there and let him come to me and we tried a few tricks, for a starter, with the edge of the hand and the stiff fingers, and they didn't work. We both knew all the tricks, and time was running out for him. The ship was nearing the harbor again, and we were heading the other way at a good clip, running straight out to sea. He might still be able to fire if he hit it now. If not, he might still be able to swing around and close to firing range, if he got rid of me. But he had to do it fast.

He moved in with the fists to overwhelm me. I blocked some blows and took some and managed to hold my place in the aisle. He glanced around frantically and came in swinging once more with all the power of his big arms and gorilla shoulders, and I weathered that attack, too, but just barely. I looked past him.

"Your girlfriend's gone," I said. "She's lost the rope." He grinned breathlessly. "An oldie, friend. Oh, what an oldie!"

I shrugged. As a matter of fact, I was telling the truth. Behind the boat was only the wooden bar of the tow-rope, dancing along the water. Far back I could see the floating skis and the girl's head. Monk threw a quick glance over his shoulder and saw them, too. Maybe there had been something between them, after all: he rushed me hard once more, this time trying to reach the boat's controls, to steer back there.

In his haste, he slipped and went to one knee, and I brought my knee up under his chin and, using the seats for leverage, kicked him back once more to the rear of the cockpit. That gave me a moment to examine the control board again. I prayed that Mr. Soo's one-mile range was an optimistic estimate and moved one switch from ON to OFF. There were no spectacular displays of pyrotechnics in the direction of the harbor. The red light just went out.

I heard Monk's hoarse cry and looked in his direction. He was bringing his hand out of his pants pocket with a gun that looked very familiar: not one of the fancy stainless-steel jobs that had been brandished so frequently in this business, just a plain old workaday blue weapon with a shrouded hammer. I remember Irma tossing it to him at the time of my capture. Whether he'd simply forgotten that he was carrying it-it seemed to be an easy gun to forget-or whether he'd just wanted to take me barehanded, there was no telling. He had it now.

He pointed it at me. The circuits were off, I hoped; I could risk leaving my post. I moved in on him, and threw my arm across my eyes as he fired, not knowing just what was going to come out of the gimmicked weapon. I heard two sharp little cracks like those of a kid's cap pistol, as he pulled the trigger twice. He tried a third time and the gun blew up.

I mean, it exploded like a bomb in his hand. I felt a heavy blow against my hip, and my bare chest and arm and face were sprayed with powder and scraps of hot metal. What had happened was simple enough to understand: it's as I once said, when you start playing games with firearms, nobody can predict the results.

I remembered reloading the weapon with live cartridges to deal with Pressman and switching the loads back again. But the spare-ammunition gadget holds six cartridges, and the gun only holds five. For a little while, there had been an extra live round in my pocket with the powderless ammo, and somehow I'd managed to get it into the gun. When Monk fired the first two cartridges, one or both of the bullets, with nothing but primers behind them, had stuck in the gun barrel. Then the full-charge load had fired into the blocked barrel. The pressure, with no place to go, had simply blown the weapon to pieces.

I tried to take a step forward, and my leg gave way under me. I caught myself by one of the seats, and saw the Monk standing there, but he was no longer interested in me. Blood was running freely down his face and he was wiping at it vaguely with a shattered hand.

It was almost too easy, after all the years of hate and all the blows that had been traded. I found that my leg would hold me, if I didn't trust it too far, and I moved in and did what I had been sent here to do.

THE WOUND WASN'T too bad. Apparently the whole front end of the revolver-the barrel and part of the frame-had come flying at me, bruising and tearing things a bit but getting no substantial penetration. What really laid me out was a case of some kind of tropical dysentery I seemed to have picked up along the way.

It was a couple of weeks, therefore, before I could limp onto a plane and settle myself for the flight back to the Mainland. As we took off, I looked down at the Honolulu waterfront and the ocean, although what I expected to see down there, after two weeks, I don't know. Of course, the Monk was down there somewhere, but an anchor and twenty feet of chain were taking care of him. It's easier to explain an agent's disappearance than his dead body, particularly when you don't want to answer too many questions about his penultimate activities.

By evening I was in Washington, pretty well exhausted, sitting in a room on the second floor of a familiar building, telling the gray-haired man behind the desk the stuff I hadn't put in my official report.

"So you let the Chinese gentleman go," Mac said.

"Yes, sir," I said. "I didn't figure his detonating device was anything our boys couldn't figure out by themselves, and I owed him a little something for his cooperation."

"Your personal debts are beside the point, Eric. The man might have been able to tell us something."

"Not us," I said. "But he could certainly have told a lot of other people about Monk. I thought you wanted that hushed up, sir. It was either kill him or let him go, so I put him ashore." I shrugged. "As Monk said, there are four hundred million of them. I didn't figure one more was going to outnumber us."

"Um," Mac said. "And the girl? She was never found?"

"No, sir." I was silent for a moment, seeing again two skis floating on an empty ocean. "She was too good a swimmer to drown, and she couldn't have swum out of sight in the time she had. I did see a fin, sir, but I'm not an expert on fins. Even if it was a shark, it could have been a perfectly harmless and friendly one. On the other hand, Irina wasn't there. Just the skis."

Mac said, "You'll be interested to know that when I asked just what it was Monk had put aboard the ship, I was told that it was a security matter."

I grinned. "That's nice. We save their damn transport, and they won't tell us what we saved it from. Well, if you don't mind, sir, I think I'll go to a hotel and sleep for a week."

"Yes, of course." He waited until I'd limped to the door, and said, "Eric. In regard to this business in Asia, just what are your feelings on the subject?"

I laughed. "Sir, the political opinions of an agent are those required by the job at hand."

He gave me his thin smile. "Precisely. I was just making sure you hadn't forgotten. Well, don't forget to stop by the recognition room on your way out."

I was careful not to stare at him reproachfully. I mean, an order is an order and to hell with it-even if I had just crawled out of a hospital bed and flown halfway around the world.