The Ambushers Read Online Free PDF Page A

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. I 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.
    “She says the secondary mission was successful,” Jiminez reported. “The prisoner was released, with the loss of one man. There is a message for you. Here.”
    It was a sliver of wood, or reed, with a hard yellowish surface like bamboo. Maybe it was bamboo. I’m not an expert on the flora of the region. On it a pin or tack had scratched a line of shaky capital letters: INVESTIGATE SOMETHING BIG DOWN ROAD PAST VILLAGE SHEILA .
    I looked at Jiminez. “What is the condition of the prisoner?”
    He shrugged. “What can you expect? It has been over a month, almost six weeks. It is a miracle she is still alive. What about this?”
    “I’d like to take a look,” I said. “If it’s important enough for her to make the effort to tell us, in the shape she’s probably in, it’s important enough for us to look at.”
    “We are through here anyway,” Jiminez said. “The rest is routine. The corporal has his orders. He will pull back when he is outflanked and lead them away inland. We will go investigate this big thing.”

4
    It wasn’t so big. It wasn’t as tall as the Washington Monument by any means. Hell, you could have hidden it in an ordinary farm silo, if you could have figured a way to slip it inside. It wasn’t nearly as big as the ones they play with at Cape Canaveral. Still, it wasn’t something you’d take home on the Fourth of July and set off in the back yard to amuse the kiddies. Coming on it cold in a well-guarded clearing in the Costa Verde jungle, I found it impressive enough.
    It looked a good deal like a gigantic version of my .300 Magnum cartridge, standing there, except that it wasn’t brass. They’d given it a fancy coat of camouflage paint to make it harder to spot from the air. But there was the same fat body necked down to the same slim, pointed, bullet-shaped head—the warhead, I suppose. I studied that carefully. Washington would want to know whether it was nuclear or otherwise. I didn’t have enough technical knowledge to tell, but maybe I could spot some detail that would tell somebody else.
    They had a net suspended over it covered with leaves and stuff. Farther back along the edge of the little jungle opening was the truck, also with camouflage paint and a net. It was a six-wheeled tractor with power to all three axles and a big cab, like the ones the non-stop crosscountry truckers sleep in. But I didn’t think the extra space housed a bunk in this case. There were a couple of trick antennas, and I could make out the corner of some kind of a console or control board through the open door.
    Behind the tractor was the long flat trailer with a cradle to hold the bird and hydraulic equipment to set it up. It was a real little mobile, do-it-yourself missile base. There was painted-over lettering embossed on the truck that I couldn’t decipher, neither English nor Spanish. Not only the language but the alphabet was different. Even at