The Annihilators (27 page)

Outside I heard a Jeep drive up. I was glad of the excuse to move to the chamber opening. Looking down from our minor elevation, I saw the vehicle come to a halt in front of the Chapel, in which our captors had now established their headquarters. I recognized Colonel Ramiro Sanchez in the bounce of the headlights before they were turned off. There were four uniformed men with him.

That made it ten men and two officers total, I reflected, wondering if that was more than Putnam was prepared to handle with the armaments he’d requested. The trouble was, the way he was feeling at the moment, after what had been done to Gloria Jean, he’d probably be willing to charge the hordes of Attila the Hun with an aerosol can of roach killer. I had to hope he was professional enough not to let his military judgment be influenced by his personal feelings.

“Sanchez is back,” I said, returning to sit on my rudimentary bed. Frances didn’t speak. I said, “So you covered your husband’s continued absence with the story that he was attending an important conference. And you didn’t confide the truth to anybody. Then your instructions came: You were to include Ricardo Jimenez in your tour group and make sure he entered Costa Verde unsuspected. Then you got further instructions: Get acquainted with me, seduce me, and find out if I was a danger to their plans. But finally Montano’s bandit instincts got the better of him, and he decided to pull a wholesale abduction with your assistance. This time you balked, and he had to knock you around a bit before you’d agree to lead our whole group into the dead-fall. But in the end you did that, too.”

She nodded. Her voice was dull when she spoke: “It wasn’t… wasn’t because of the way he hurt and humiliated me, Sam. I could have stood that. But don’t you understand—you
must
understand—I’d done so much already. I’d already sacrificed my self-respect and my conscience to keep Archie alive. I just couldn’t waste all that by refusing this last request.”

“Where’s your husband now?”

“With Montano and his so-called Army of Liberation. Somewhere not too far from here, wherever their main hideout is located.”

I drew a long breath. “Is there anything you won’t do for this Archie of yours, Dillman?”

Her voice came out of the gathering darkness. “No, Sam. Not anything. Not now, after all that’s happened. I have to see it through, now. Maybe… maybe at the beginning, if I’d known what I’d have to do, what they’d be asking of me, all the awful things they’d be asking of me…”

I said dryly, “Awful things like sleeping with me.”

I thought I saw her smile faintly in the gloom. “Awful things like sleeping with you, of course.” I heard her draw a long breath, like a sigh. “As I just said, maybe if I’d known from the start how it would be, I could have refused and… and let it happen, let him die. But not now. I have too big an investment in it now. I’ve paid too much for it. I couldn’t let it all go for nothing, everything I’ve done to save him. And he is my husband and I do love him dearly. No, Sam, I don’t think there’s any dirty thing in the world I wouldn’t do to get him back unharmed…”

She was interrupted by the sound of a loud voice down at the headquarters temple. Somebody was really catching hell down there in machine-gun Spanish. I couldn’t make out the words that were being yelled, but they were obviously blasphemous and derogatory and should have scorched the hair and shriveled the testicles of the person at whom they were aimed. Then a man, just a dark shape down there, went hurrying across the clearing to the big pyramid and started scrambling hastily up toward the Citadel on top.

A group of three figures, one with a light, moving more deliberately, started climbing the Nunnery slope toward us. As they came closer, I recognized Sanchez, with escort. He headed directly for the Putnams’ cell and, when he reached it, dismissed the two guards stationed there and went inside. Presently he came out and marched along the row of little doorways to our opening and aimed his electric lantern toward me, briefly, and then toward Frances.

He spoke to her in formal tones: “I have come to apologize, señora, for what was done in my absence. I have already presented my profound regrets and apologies to the young lady chiefly concerned, and to her husband. Now I am addressing you as the director of this tour. What was done was not done with my knowledge or by my authority. The so-called officer who perpetrated the atrocity will spend the night on sentry duty on top of the pyramid while I consider what further disciplinary action to take. We are not animals, señora, we are men fighting for the liberation of our country.”

Frances said, “Sometimes it’s a little hard to tell the difference, Colonel.”

“I have made my apology,” he said stiffly. “And I assure you there will be no further molestation of the ladies. I apologize further for the fact that food and water have not yet been made available; they are being brought now. Sanitary facilities, unfortunately crude but I hope adequate, will be arranged on the far side of the building. There will be opportunity during the day for bathing and washing clothes. Later I will discuss the details with you, as the representative of the group.”

Standing in the doorway, he was speaking loudly enough that his words undoubtedly carried to the other cells down the line, as he skillfully laid the groundwork for future consultations.

“As you wish, Colonel,” Frances said.

He went on, “I will let you know the camp rules I expect your people to obey. You will have the opportunity to protest any that you feel will cause undue hardship or inconvenience. We do not intend that you should suffer while we all wait here. If there is anything further I can do for your comfort, please inform me. I am not a harsh man.” He glanced at me briefly. “That is to say, I am not a harsh man unless I am provoked. But if you and your people cooperate in a reasonable manner, señora, I think you will find me reasonable also. And again, my apology for the shameful incident that took place in my absence.”

He turned smartly and marched away, a clever man. Having earlier isolated me from the group, he was now announcing to the rest that they had nothing whatever to fear if they only behaved themselves, since their camp commandant was a fine, compassionate fellow who only shot people occasionally.

There are times in practically every operation when things come to a tired halt and there’s nothing to do but wait patiently for them to get moving again. Not that this was an official operation, aside from the Bultman angle that would have to wait until I had more information and was free to act on it, but the principle was the same.

After a few days in Labal it seemed as if we’d always been there, living in our row of doorless cubicles in the ancient ruin raised a little above the clearing and the jungle. There were sunny days and cloudy days and sometimes windy days. There were no rainy days, because this was the dry season. We ate the simple food that was brought to us and went around the ends of the Nunnery to dispose of the byproducts in the primitive fresh-air toilets that had been constructed for us—the toilet paper provided was the usual Latin-American variety noted for its total slick non-absorbency. We bathed (in bathing suits, modestly) in the cool water of the
cenote
and washed our clothes there, under guard, of course.

To my surprise, that liberated modern career woman, Dr. Frances Dillman, insisted on playing the old-fashioned feminine role and doing my laundry as well as her own. Perhaps she was impressing our captors with the intimacy of our relationship, or perhaps it was a simple gesture of defiance: If the other members of the group wanted to assume that we were lovers simply because we’d been stuck into the same cell, she’d wash out my lousy shorts and shirts in loving wifely fashion and give them all a real treat, the mouthy old gossips.

Or perhaps it was a gesture of apology because, as a matter of fact, ironically, we were no longer lovers now that we were sleeping in the same little room and it would have been easy. It was definitely not my idea. After a couple of nights of purity appropriate to the changed circumstances, I found myself having a perfectly normal male reaction to the presence of an attractive and already quite familiar female body in the darkness a mere six feet away from me. I moved that way hopefully to see if something could be done about it; but when she felt my touch she drew away. After a moment she sat up to face me. I could just make her out in the darkness. She was sleeping in a shirt and her legs were bare.

“I can’t, Sam,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, but I simply can’t, not like this, not with everybody watching us all day and wondering how long it took me to take pity on your masculine needs and betray my husband; and how often we’re doing it now. I want to be able to wash your dirty laundry and look them all in the eyes, knowing that they’re all wrong in their dirty imaginings; and the fact that I’d already been unfaithful to Archie, with you, before we ever got here, is quite irrelevant. I don’t know why, but that’s the way it is.” She reached out and touched my face, with her fingertips. “Please? I know you can… persuade me if you really try. I’m not an iron woman. But please don’t try; and I’ll be as unprovocative and unsexy as I can. I know it’s a lot to ask, my dear, with the two of us cooped up together like this, but I’d really rather not, if you can stand it.” Then she laughed ruefully. “That sounds as if I thought I was irresistible, doesn’t it?”

“You are,” I said, “but I’ll try to resist you anyway, since you ask so nicely.”

It was a rather touching example of feminine irrationality, if you wanted to look at it one way. After all, by any logical standard, Professor Archibald Dillman had already been quite thoroughly betrayed by us, so what further harm could we do him now? Of course there were other ways of looking at it that made it seem not quite so touching; but there was nothing to be gained by confronting her with those. It was no time for confrontations. A low profile had been prescribed, by me. If I didn’t take my own medicine, who would?

So we lived in chastity, with considerable self-control required on my part if not on hers. We ignored the knowing glances that were sent our way, particularly by the Wilders, who resented me bitterly, considering me—or pretending to consider me—the cause of all their troubles. There’s never been a loud-mouth yet who could conceive that he could possibly have got himself slugged in his big loud mouth through any fault of his own. Under other circumstances, I would have felt sorry for the man with his smashed and swollen lips and the gaping emptiness behind them where much of the dental equipment in front had been destroyed. He had a hard time eating and great difficulty in making himself understood, lisping almost unintelligibly; but what he lisped was either obscene or threatening or complaining, so my sympathy soon faded.

His wife also complained, of constant headaches. She was heard to announce that it was a pity, that I, responsible for everybody’s sufferings, hadn’t been shot instead of Miranda Matson. She had further expressed the loud opinion that any decent woman—any
decent
woman, mind you—would have died before allowing herself, as Frances had done in such a docile fashion, to be coerced in accepting such a shamefully compromising situation, particularly one involving a despicable creature like me. It was odd. They’d seemed like perfectly ordinary if not very interesting people until the pressure came on. I couldn’t help wondering how many other perfectly ordinary people had that much vitriol—not to mention that much stupidity—penned up inside them.

I didn’t take much stock in her headaches. She seemed to negotiate the Nunnery slopes without dizziness, she ate well and had no apparent trouble keeping it all down—the symptoms of concussion were nonexistent. But why should her husband get all the sympathy when she had suffered cruel violence also?

I didn’t forget my primary duty; and gradually I worked out a few possible, if rather ambitious, scenarios—all they involved was employing my superhuman strength and diabolical cleverness to dispose of three or four armed men in total silence some convenient night. Nothing to it.

In the meantime, Lieutenant Barbera was undergoing punishment for his offense. It consisted of systematic humiliation. He took turns at sentry duty with the common soldiers and was even required to help them prepare and distribute the food. I suppose it suited the crime in a way, being a form of castration; but I wondered if Gloria Jean Putnam and her husband considered it adequate. They were tragically polite to, and considerate of, each other these days; it was easy to see that they hadn’t come to terms with the disaster that had struck their marriage.

“I want to shake those poor damn kids sometimes.” It was plump, gray-haired Emily Henderson, the general’s wife, wearing a short yellow terrycloth robe over her flowered old-fashioned bathing suit, the kind with a little skirt—no bikinis or tank suits here. It was our bath-and-laundry hour, and we were sitting on the bank of the
cenote
watching the swimming and clothes-washing while a young revolutionary soldier with a thin face and an automatic rifle stood by uncomfortably like a shabby excop guarding the presents at a glittering society wedding. Mrs. Henderson went on crudely: “So somebody else got to put it where he’d been putting it, so what? It’s not the end of the world. I’d like to give them a piece of my mind.” She gave me a quick, sharp look. “And don’t you dare tell me I can’t spare it, young man!”

“You said it, I didn’t,” I said. “And thanks for the compliment.”

“From where Austin and I sit, anything under sixty looks positively juvenile.”

“Now you went and spoiled it,” I said. “You had me feeling like a kid there for a moment. As for the Putnams, they’re still in the ball game, so I think they’re better left alone.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’ll make it,” I said. “If they haven’t said it by now, it’ll never get said.”

“What?”

“The thing that would finish them. She, hurt and shamed and weeping, blurts out:
Oh, God, why didn’t you stop him, what kind of a husband are you?
And he, hurt and angry, snaps back:
Well, it doesn’t look as if you put up such a great fight yourself, what kind of a wife are you?
That would have done for the marriage, but good. But even if they thought it, and I really doubt they did, they obviously held it back; they’ve got a good chance now.”