Donald Hamilton - The Wrecking Crew

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.