Dirty Harry 10 - The Blood of Strangers (16 page)

He realized the futility of trying to shoot his way into the remaining car. Having ridden in a similar model, he was well aware of how resistant it was, particularly to a .38, much less a Makarov.

The limo began to move, but it did not go far. Evidently, the driver was waiting for someone. Half a minute elapsed before the straggler came into view, fighting the crowd to get to the car.

Here was an opportunity of sorts, Harry thought, watching his progress. Of course, if Ellie had been taken away in the first limo, it was no opportunity at all—except, as always, just another opportunity to die.

The man approaching the limo was vaguely recognizable to Harry; he was one of Kayyim’s henchmen who yesterday had escorted him to the basement. In his hand, he was carrying two AKM’s he’d probably pilfered from the burning warehouse.

As soon as the rear door of the limo swung open to admit him, Harry peered in and saw Ellie, squeezed between two men, neither of whom was Kayyim. She was not bound from the looks of it, but she appeared partially immobilized with terror. Harry hoped that she would not freeze at the last minute, because that would only make rescuing her much more difficult.

Now he moved in between the commando and the vehicle; in one hand he held the .38, in the other the Makarov.

The commando was within a few feet of the car when he saw that his path had been blocked and for a moment he didn’t seem to know what to make of this development. Because he had his hands full with the Soviet weapons he’d stolen, he couldn’t react quickly or decisively enough.

One of the men in the car sensed the danger and reached out to shut the door. But Harry, anticipating him, slammed the barrel of the Soviet handgun down on his arm so that he lost his grip on the handle.

Ellie, far from being paralyzed, was quite aware of what was happening, and rather than wait, sprang from the seat and hurtled herself across the lap of the man to her left. Because he was concentrating his attention entirely on Harry, he did not know what she was doing until she was halfway out of the car. Then he grabbed hold of her and attempted to pull her back.

At that point, the commando Harry was keeping at bay made a sudden advance, swinging one of the AKM’s, having no space in which to fire it. Harry saw it coming out of the corner of his eye and lowered his head just in time to avoid the brunt of the gun against his skull. At the same time, Harry fired both his guns, and though he was in an extremely awkward stance, his aim did not suffer.

The commando reeled back under the impact of two chest wounds. At least one of the bullets had penetrated a lung because when he attempted to yell, blood rushed up his throat and bubbled over his lips.

Ellie, meanwhile, was still struggling against her captor who might very well have shot her except that he could not get his hand free to do so. Nor could his companion do it for him, not unless he was willing to risk hitting the wrong person in such close quarters.

Harry seized hold of the man’s left hand, prying it away from Ellie’s wrist, while snapping two fingers back, breaking the bones. The man shrieked and immediately let go. Ellie sort of fell out of the car just as the man sitting on the right fired.

He had begun by trying to hit Ellie, but had reconsidered and raised his weapon in hope of felling Harry instead. This indecisiveness cost him. His bullet burned a sliver of flesh off Harry’s arm, causing enough pain for him to drop the .38, but his grip on the Makarov did not falter and he discharged it. This was just the type of situation the Makarov was designed for; the range was perfect. The man groaned like an old man with severe arthritis who cannot quite get his body to do what he would like it to. He jerked up, clutching his throat, then slumped back. A jet of blood shot out of the wound and clouded the window on his side, and flew all over his friend who was examining his broken, swelling fingers with horror.

There was one other occupant of the car—the driver—and until now he had remained hunkered down behind the bulletproof partition. But as Harry moved to help Ellie up, he opened his door, dropped to the ground and opened fire.

But in attempting to do too much simultaneously, he did not succeed in hitting either of his intended victims. There was one round left in the Makarov. It found a new home in the driver’s head.

Harry helped himself to the driver’s weapon. To his astonishment and delight, he found that it was his .44 Magnum. Evidently, the driver had come into possession of it after it had been confiscated. Harry was grateful that he’d not been shot to death with his own weapon; that, literally, would have been adding insult to injury.

“This is getting to be habit forming,” Ellie remarked as she observed the tumult around them. She was shaken, but still in command of herself. “I am beginning to think all this excitement is getting to be a little too much, Inspector Callahan.”

“Harry, just call me Harry, would you?”

She gave him a faint smile. “All right, Harry, what do we do now?”

“Get the hell out of here before that goddam warehouse blows.”

The warehouse though was impatient to leave the planet; suddenly the earth shook and there was an explosion so powerful that it probably could have been heard as far away as Damascus or Tel Aviv. The sky turned scarlet with the flames that shot up and the air filled with mangled bodies and twisted debris and when gravity asserted itself, the bodies and the debris came dropping down all over the city. It was a rainstorm of the dead.

Disheveled, and drained, and looking more wretched than some of the white-faced figures that lay strewn about them, Harry and Ellie managed to find a café in the European sector from which violence had taken a temporary vacation. Elderly men and chic young women with enviable tans regarded Harry and his companion with obvious dismay; their torn and soiled clothes, their bruised and bleeding flesh, reminded them of what they had come to this place to get away from.

Harry was too wasted to concern himself with the sensibilities of these wealthy Lebanese and European expatriates who wished the war would go away but were helpless to make it do so.

“I need a drink,” said Ellie. “I am not particular. But it should be a very tall drink and very, very strong.”

“I think I will have one of the same. And while we drink ourselves under the table maybe you’ll tell me what the hell you were doing there—”

“In Mr. Cravitch’s warehouse?”

“Mr. Who?”

“I would have thought you’d known. Well, dear, listen carefully and you will discover why you’re going to be at the Sheraton Hotel in San Salvador this coming Sunday.”

C H A P T E R
T w e l v e

I
t was a bad connection and the Small Man was having a hell of a time trying to make himself understood to his unit commander nearly ten thousand miles away. He kept having to shout and still worse, hear the sad lonely reverberation of his own voice come back to him.

“I lost the subject,” he kept repeating with growing insistence.

Gradually, the unit commander seemed to comprehend him. “How did that happen?”

“She was always on the move. She left one room, took another, then I never saw her again until the airport.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, I never saw her until the airport. I was watching the airport for three days. She was with the detective.”

“The who?”

“The detective.”

There was a shrill whine that came through the wires, and if one listened attentively one could catch fragments of any number of multilingual conversations.

“Where did they go?”

“I don’t know. The plane was bound for Cyprus. After that, it’s anyone’s guess.”

“And why didn’t you follow them?”

“I attempted to. But there were complications.”

There was only one complication actually; he had neglected to remove his gun and was halted at airport security. He was not arrested for if they arrested everyone with guns the jails in Beirut would be overflowing and the streets completely empty. But he was prohibited from boarding the Cyprus flight, and could only watch helplessly as it took off.

“Complications!” The unit commander’s anger registered even on a very bad connection. “Well, there is nothing else you can do there. Come back to San Francisco. Sooner or later the subject will return. Perhaps she is on her way back now.”

The Small Man was unhappy with his failure, and he expected that he would be rebuked and possibly purged upon his return. But still he was efficient at what he did, and he resolved that should he ever catch up to Ellie Winston again he would see that she had no opportunity to elude him a second time.

There were a good many reasons not to come to El Salvador and almost none to do so. First and foremost, the man that Harry had been pursuing halfway around the world and back again—Gamal Abd’el Kayyim—might not turn up there. That depended primarily on whether the man with the guns turned up. But Mr. Cravitch might not have survived the blaze that consumed his warehouse, or if he had, his business might not have survived. There was no telling how many millions he’d lost in the fire. But on the other hand, Harry had learned he possessed similar warehouses in various parts of the world, and one or two setbacks could probably be tolerated without fear of bankruptcy.

So already, Harry was contending with uncertainties which cast into doubt prospects for success in Central America.

The U.S. Embassy in Beirut had been cooperative—but only to a point. The proper papers were provided him, he was allowed on the plane without undergoing a security check, and all the necessary tickets were arranged for.

He was warned by the Embassy’s CIA station chief that he was to do nothing—absolutely nothing—in El Salvador until he was contacted by agency operatives there, a condition that Harry had no choice but to agree to if he was to get out of Beirut.

Ellie was in a state of conflict. In one week she had witnessed more violence than she had ever wanted to see in her entire life. So in one sense, she was ready to go home to the security of the KCVO news anchor desk. But that would mean sacrificing the story she had gone to such desperate lengths to obtain. She had come this far; why not go all the way? In the end, she decided as Harry suspected she would, and declared her intention to accompany him to El Salvador.

Like her exasperated boss back in San Francisco, Harry knew better than to object. She had amply demonstrated her persistence and her courage; to argue with her was as mad as—well, as mad as going to El Salvador in the middle of a war.

On this occasion, however, Ellie said that she would be content just to stay in the hotel and not venture out on the streets.

But since they were registering as Mr. and Mrs. Harry Grave—the name not chosen arbitrarily—in the same hotel where Mr. Cravitch and Kayyim were expected to show up, this did not necessarily guarantee her safety. Harry reminded her of this. She just said, “I’ll be a good girl and get a lot of reading done.”

Harry didn’t know how seriously to take her—in terms of this remark or anything else.

They arrived in El Salvador on a sizzling tropical night. The shooting didn’t sound quite as bad as it had in Beirut, but that undoubtedly made no difference to the victims whose bodies would turn up in all sorts of unlikely places once the sun came up. Some of the residents of the capital continually complained about the corpses, often mutilated and riddled with gunshot wounds, that they would have to step over to get out of their houses each morning. This was not the kind of thing to inspire a great deal of tourism.

Just as it had been in Beirut, one never quite knew who one’s enemies were. They might be from the left, but the likelihood was that they were from the right. Often they were members of the nation’s security forces who cloaked themselves in the anonymity of sinister death squads. A banker, a schoolteacher, a minister, a youngster, a young bride: no matter how innocent one might be, if one rubbed somebody the wrong way or happened to keep the wrong company or turn up at the wrong place at a very wrong time, he too might end up on somebody’s doorstep in the morning.

“A couple of Americans down here to advise on land distribution were shot to death in the restaurant in this hotel,” Harry told Ellie. “Somebody walked in, blew them away.” He did not wish so much to frighten her—she might have recalled the story on her own in any case—but he did want her to be more aware of the risks than she’d been in Lebanon.

“I think,” she said after a few moments of hesitation, “I think that I’ll have my meals sent up to me.”

Their room was nicely kept; the maids, squat, dark Indian women with sorrowful eyes, did not stop coming just because of the war. The rates were cheap, too, since it was obviously a buyer’s market.

Harry noticed right off that the bed was a double and not a twin. “I’ll have to call down and see if they can change it,” he said and was about to do so when Ellie stopped him.

“I see no reason to bother them. I think it’s fine the way it is.”

Harry didn’t put the phone down; instead he dialed Room Service. He was rather surprised when someone picked it up. He had begun to wonder whether anything worked in this country except for a relentless killing machine that had claimed in excess of twenty thousand lives.

“I’d like a bottle of your best champagne,” he said. “I don’t care what the cost is.” Turning to Ellie, he added, “Especially since the U.S. Government is footing the bill for it.”

By the time the champagne arrived, conveyed by a mestizo who looked like he’d be deft with a machete, Ellie had changed into something she judged appropriate for a sweltering night in San Salvador. Unlike Harry, who would have chosen a bullet-proof vest as part of his stay-at-home wardrobe, she had elected to wear a cream-colored gown that was slit up both sides. She had only to stand in front of the lamp for the gown to become fully transparent, an effect that she sensed Harry might appreciate for she very rarely moved away from the light.

“You should wear that when you do the nightly news,” remarked Harry. “I’m sure your ratings would go through the roof.”