Donald Hamilton: The Ambushers

I'd worked too hard and come too far to risk my first shot at that range, on a moving target. He was a big man, I saw, not tall but broad and solid, with the shoulders and arms of a gorilla. He had a scraggy, Castro-type beard, but he was a far cry, from the lanky Castro type, physically speaking. El Fuerte, The Strong One. He was dressed in suntans, with that uniform cap. General Jorge Santos, pronounced Heneral Horgay Santos. He stopped at the side of the road to wait for the oncoming jeep. A couple of his men came up to wait beside him, one directly in the line of fire.

I could feel the sweat trickling down my face as I lay there, waiting. I heard Jiminez stir impatiently beside me, but he had sense enough to keep his trap shut. Five hundred meters away, General Jorge Santos took one step forward into the clear and turned to look up the road toward us. The crosshairs settled on the fancy insignia on the uniform cap, a tiny, gleaming aiming point so far away. I wasn't aware of adding the last fraction of an ounce to the pressure already on the trigger, but the big rifle fired.

It made a hell of a noise in the quiet valley; it was like setting off a cannon-cracker in church. It slammed back against my shoulder and cheek. It's not a fun gun to shoot.

"Call it," I said, working the bolt fast and trying to pick up my target again in that lousy scope. "Call it, damn you!"

"He is hit," Jiminez said calmly. "He is going down."

Then I had my man back in the field. El Fuerte was being supported by his two companions, but his knees were buckling and there was blood on his shirt. His head was hanging and his cap had fallen off. I gave it the same rough eighteen inches of Kentucky elevation and fired again. There was the same damn volcanic eruption and the same piledriver blow against my face and shoulder.

"Bueno," Jiminez said in his calm voice, but he'd forgotten to speak English. "Muy bueno! Uno mas?"

He was asking for one more, the bloodthirsty little bastard. I yanked the bolt back and slammed it home again, but there were more men around Santos now, and as I waited for a clear opening, the jeep drove up and stopped, blocking my view completely. I looked up. The whole village was stirring, but they didn't really know what was going on. The thunderous report of the Magnum would have sounded vague and directionless down there, like distant blasting. At that range you can shoot at a deer all day, if you're that bad a shot, and he'll never even stop browsing until you land one close.

"Shoot again!" Jiminez hissed. "Shoot at anything. Our people will have heard. They will be entering the village. You must make a diversion."

I had my eye at the scope again. Since the target didn't matter, I took the most conspicuous one. I picked up the man in the sun helmet standing in the jeep, and fired, but he was already going to the ground in a long leap as the Magnum roared, and I knew I'd shot behind. When 1 picked him up again, he was flat on the ground with a silly little pistol in his hand. I could see his face clearly.

It was kind of a shock, because it was a face I'd seen before somewhere, although I couldn't put a name to it. It was a German face, a Prussian face, the kind that goes with a monocle, a shaved head, no neck, and sometimes an honorable Heidelberg scar across the cheek. With the sun helmet on him, at the angle I had, I couldn't be sure of the neck or the haircut, but the scar was there all right. If there was a monocle, it was in his pocket.

The pistol was a Luger, I thought. With that face, It would have to be a Luger. They'd liked Lugers better than the new fangled P-38s that shot the same cartridge; and they'd liked riding quirts and polished boots; and they'd thought they could use Hitler to do their dirty work for them, but he'd fooled them and made them do his dirty work for him, instead.

And what was a man like 'that doing in the Costa Verde jungle, visiting a bunch of Spanish-speaking revolutionaries? The answer was easy. Anywhere else a man like that was apt to die, legally or illegally, at the hands of people who still remembered various things that had happened during World War II. It was a long time to hold a grudge, as far as I was concerned, but then I didn't have the motives some folks had.

I'd hesitated a moment, looking hard at the face, trying to recall the name; and the moment was too long. He'd been sniped at before, and he knew the crosshairs were on him. He crawled under the jeep. I let him go.

"El Fuerte is finished," Jiminez reported. "Very good work, senor. Now to the right. To the right of the nearest hut fifty meters. Keep those three men from reaching the forest or we will be outflanked too soon."

They had my gun located now. The last shot had done it. A bareheaded character with long, wild black hair and waving arms had rounded up half a dozen armed men in the street and was shooing them toward us. More were running to join him. To hell with him and his charge of the light brigade up the valley of death. The automatic weapons could deal with the problem when the time came. But off to the right, a quieter type with a machine pistol was leading a couple of cronies with rifles up the slope for an end run.

I led him like an antelope and knocked him over. His pals flattened out in the grass.

"Keep your eye on that pair while I reload," I said. "Keep them located for me."

From there on in it was a real wild party. At least I found it so, but you must understand it was new to me. I never fought in the South Pacific jungles; I never even fought in Europe, to call it fighting. We operated there, and we killed people and got shot at, sometimes, but it wasn't war, our part of it, although war was going on all around us.

This was war-on a small scale, of course, but how big a piece does the average soldier get to see? We had all the war we could handle, anyway, and I reloaded and picked off the two men where Jiminez pointed them out, first one and then the other, as they showed themselves.

"Bueno," he said. "Just a moment, Senor Helm, please."

I looked his way, and he was cutting off a cigar and lighting it. Then he closed up his damn cigar-case holster, settled down comfortably on his elbows, and put the binoculars to his eyes again, blowing smoke in a satisfied way.

"The second hut," he said. "On the left. There is a group forming. Put a bullet through it about half a meter from the left corner… I am sorry, senor. I am rude. Do you wish a cigar?"

"Thanks, I don't smoke," I said. "Thanks just the same." I put a bullet about half a meter from the corner of the hut, and after that I put a lot of bullets in a lot of other places, and people, as he directed in his unruffled voice. They formed in the village and started up the valley to avenge their general under the leadership of the long-haired guy. At Jiminez' word, I shot the long-haired guy at four 4iundred yards, and another man took his place, and I shot him at three hundred, holding under a bit, but they kept coming, crawling, running, darting from rock to rock and bush to bush, squirming through the corn or whatever it was.

When they got within reach of the short-range weapons, H Jiminez took the cigar out of his mouth deliberately. He blew a little whistle he fished out of the neck of his shirt on a cord, and everything on the ridge opened up. The racket was impressive. All we needed was some heavy stuff to have a real battle. I shot a charging man so close that I had nothing but his shirt in the twenty-power scope; I could see the coarse weave of the cloth.

It was time to reload again, but they were falling back and I had trouble getting the shells into the gun without scorching my fingers. Besides, it wasn't my picnic any more. The machine-pistol and carbine boys could handle it from here. Jiminez tapped me on the shoulder as I closed the bolt. 1 looked up to see the younger of the two women squatting beside us, heedless of the stuff that was going through the trees around us. There was blood on her sleeve and she had her hand tucked into the front of her shirt to keep the arm from flopping around, but she wasn't paying any attention to that, either. They were a hell of a bunch of people. There's nothing like a pro, in any line of work.