The Ambushers Read Online Free PDF Page B

the message—were awaiting us in a grove of trees that seemed too dense for a snake to penetrate. But there was a way in, and in the center was a space like a good-sized room, a kind of arboreal cave.
    I left Jiminez posting sentries and went over to the woman who sat at the side of the space watching over a strange girl lying on the ground. I knew it was a girl because that’s what we’d been supposed to rescue; otherwise I might have hesitated before forming an opinion. There is a point in abuse and starvation beyond which the question of sex becomes meaningless. The woman looked up.
    “She took a little food,” she said in English. “Now she is asleep. Do not wake her unless it is necessary.”
    I didn’t comment on her knowledge of the language. “Can she walk?” I asked.
    “I do not know. We carried her. She would have cut her feet to pieces, since we could find no shoes in the kennel where they had her. She was lying in filth, with only the rags you see. She only became truly conscious long enough to give us the message on the piece of wood. Even then she would not speak. Too much had been done to her, for her to speak.” Anger stirred in the woman’s face. “El Fuerte and his men are beasts, señor.”
    “His men may still be beasts,” I said. “El Fuerte is nothing, now. Not with two 180-grain slugs through the chest.”
    The thought had not really pleased me before. I mean, there had been nothing personal between me and General Jorge Santos when I shot him. But as I knelt beside the unconscious figure on the ground, I took some pleasure in the fact that I hadn’t missed.
    It wasn’t pretty. I knew that our agent who went by the code name Sheila, although I had never seen her before, was normally a rather attractive young woman twenty-six years old. She’d gone to good schools. She’d been married and divorced before she joined the outfit for reasons that were not recorded. According to her dossier, she was five feet two inches tall, weighed a hundred and fifteen pounds, and had gray eyes and shoulder-length brown hair bleached and tinted to gold for this assignment— blondes are rare and conspicuous down there, and she had wanted to be sure of catching General Santos’ masculine attention, which rumor said wasn’t hard to catch.
    At last report she’d vanished into the jungle in a jeep with a native driver known to be favorable to the revolution. She’d been carrying a bag of cameras and a tape recorder, and she’d been posing as a leftist girl journalist doing a story on the heroes of the revolution, in a deliberately provocative blouse and intentionally tight Capri pants.
    It was supposed to be the old Delilah routine. If everything had worked out, sooner or later she’d have been found standing over General Santos’ dead body with his smoking army pistol in her hand, clutching some torn lingerie to her bosom and weeping hysterically. The Federal informers in the village had been alerted to protect her from too-drastic reprisals; in the disorganization that was expected to follow Santos’ death they were to have smuggled her out to safety. If this had worked, I’d never have been called upon to help make up a sniper’s rifle capable of dropping the general in his tracks at three hundred and fifty meters or maybe a little more.
    Everything had not worked out for Sheila. Things had gone very wrong, we didn’t yet know how or why. But she’d obviously been detected and caught somehow; she’d apparently paid most of the usual penalties; and now after a month and a half there was hardly enough left of the carefully planned blouse-and-pants costume to qualify as clothing—and there wasn’t a great deal left of the girl who had selected and worn it, either. The starved, scarecrow figure on the ground before me, rags and dirt included, didn’t weigh more than eighty pounds.
    They’d hacked off most of the phony-gold hair, dark and matted now, with a bayonet or machete, I suppose as a