A Better Day to Die

The Reverend Leonard Jimson twisted his long fingers together and tried not to let his hatred encompass the dark-haired young woman who sat beside him. 'The curse of this world,' he said with passion, 'is violence. And you are an apostle and advocate of violence.'
'Never an apostle and rarely an advocate, Mr Jimson. I always try very hard to avoid it.' Modesty Blaise spoke absently. She was growing weary of this intense young missionary who sat with her in the back seat of the small ancient bus as it jolted along the rough road which wound north to San Tremino.
'Please don't think my loathing and disgust are directed towards you personally. I assure you they are not,' Leonard Jimson said feverishly, his long bony face staring out through the fly-spattered window into the white glare of the sun. 'I am bound by my calling to love all mankind, and to hate only the evil of their ways. To hate the sin, not the sinner, you understand.'
'Yes,' said Modesty Blaise. It would be a good three hours before the bus threaded its way through the dry and lonely hills to emerge in San Tremino. Arguing with Jimson served only to stimulate his evangelical fervour. Better to hope that he might talk himself to a halt from lack of opposition, even though the hope was slender. He had been at it for over an hour now, almost from the moment of leaving Orsita, and there was still no sign of flagging.
The trouble was that in the earlier and less censorious stages of his discourse she had been unwilling to shut him up with a direct snub, for she was under an obligation to him. And now
it was too late. He was carried away on the foaming flood-tide of his obsession.
It was last night that she and Willie Garvin had arrived by car at Orsita and put up at the one hotel the little town possessed. Their fellow guests were the Reverend Leonard Jimson, in charge of ten well-scrubbed but shabby girls in their middle teens, and the elderly walnut-faced driver of the even more elderly school bus.
Within the first half-hour at the hotel Willie Garvin, whose inquiring nature was matched by his gift for satisfying it, reported that the young priest with the fanatical blue eyes was named Jimson, that he worked for the South American Missionary Society which ran a school for orphaned girls in Saqueta, and that he was taking this small group of school-leavers to San Tremino, where the Society had arranged for the girls to go into service with several of the wealthier families there.
The normal route, the good main road, lay twenty miles to the west, but there the rebels under El Mico were making trouble again, and Jimson had decided to take his flock by the little-used road through the hills. Most traffic was looping far round to the east, but that put a full day on the journey. The mountain road was a sensible compromise.
It was the road Modesty and Willie had planned to take, but that was before Willie had returned on foot from the garage at eight o'clock this morning with a slightly dazed look and said: 'I laid an egg, Princess. I told 'em to service the car last night.'
'That's bad?'
'Bad enough. They ran it up on the ramp an' didn't worry about putting the handbrake on or lifting the stops. So it rolled off the end.'
Modesty winced. The car was a Mercedes. 'Right off?'
'No. Just the front wheels. Then it crunched down.'
She sighed. 'How long to fix it?'
'They reckon six or seven hours.'
'It's too long, Willie love. I want to be in San Tremino by noon or not long after.'
Garcia was dying in San Tremino. The cable from his
daughter had been sent to Modesty in England, but she was in Buenos Aires with Willie Garvin at the time. Her houseboy, Weng, had re-transmitted the cable, and she had left with Willie scarcely an hour after its arrival.
Garcia, dying at sixty, held a very special place in Modesty's past. They had both been members of the Louche group, the smalltime gang in Tangier for which Modesty had spun a wheel in the casino when she was seventeen. When Louche died under the guns of a rival gang it was Modesty Blaise who took over the remnants of Louche's frightened men and held them together.
It had not been easy. Garcia alone had backed her, with words and fist and gun. With his help she had held them, fed courage into them, and remade the gang in a new mould. That had been the beginning of The Network, which in a few years became the most successful criminal organization outside America.
Now Garcia was dying in San Tremino, his home town, where he had retired a rich man when Modesty dissolved The Network. It would make him very happy to see her once again before he died, the cable had said.
The accident to the car in Orsita was maddening. She hated the thought of even a few hours delay. There was nothing to be had for hire. Most of the transport in the little town still consisted of donkey-drawn carts.
Til hitch a lift on that school bus, Willie,' she said. 'You follow on with the car when it's ready.'
'OK. You reckon 'is Reverence won't mind?'
Tm not likely to corrupt his flock between here and San Tremino. Besides, it gives him the chance to play a Good Samaritan.'
The Reverend Leonard Jimson had obliged. He had eyed her warily when she first approached him, and then with a strange startled glance when she introduced herself by name. She had been puzzled by his expression then, but was no longer puzzled. After ten minutes in the bus with him she knew the answer.
Of all the world's clerics she had fallen in with one who, astonishingly, knew her reputation in some detail. His first
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words when they were settled on the bus made that plain. 'We have a mutual acquaintance, Miss Blaise. You know Michael Delgado, I believe?'
'I used to know him.' She did not tell Jimson that Mike Delgado was dead; that in a valley in Afghanistan he had held her at gunpoint and mocked her because she was about to die; and that she had drawn and shot him dead in the blink of an eye as his own bullet tore through her arm. 'I haven't seen him for a couple of years now,' she said.
'Nor I for three years.' Jimson was grimly pleased about that. 'I had the misfortune to spend nearly two weeks in hospital with him in Rio, when he was hurt in a car accident. We were in adjoining beds. He is an evil man, Miss Blaise. A man of violence. And apart from his own exploits, he took pleasure in telling me a great deal about you -- especially when he saw how deeply I was distressed by his tales.'
'He probably exaggerated. You made an ideal captive audience for him, and I've no doubt he'd extend himself to shock a man of your calling, Mr Jimson.'
'Oh, he enjoyed it immensely.' Jimson ground his palms together, jaw muscles twitching. 'But even allowing for exaggeration, I still find myself horrified that any woman should do the things you have done.'
There it had begun. From that point Jimson had developed his theme. It soon became clear that he was more than a pacifist. He was consumed by an obsessive conviction that violence was the root of all evil. He reviled every act of violence, criminal or otherwise, from warfare and gangsterdom down through mugging and what he called the vicious gladiatorial displays of boxing, to the domestic violence of smacking a child.
He rejected motive as irrelevant. Any act of violence, he claimed, whatever the motive, gave birth to concentric ripples of cause and effect, expanding to create further violence.
Half listening, Modesty wished that Willie were there. Willie Garvin's verse-by-verse knowledge of the Psalms with their many ringing martial phrases, a knowledge acquired long ago during a spell in a Calcutta jail with only a psalter to read, would have enabled him to enjoy a ding-dong battle with the Reverend Leonard Jimson.
There was little hope of Jimson running dry, she realized at last. His denunciation had already taken a personal trend, and he had plenty of material to work with.
'You have killed,' he said in a low voice, staring with lost eyes down the aisle of the little bus. The girls in his charge were chattering together in Spanish, taking no notice of him. Perhaps they spoke little English, or perhaps the theme was tediously familiar to them. 'You have killed,' he repeated, and shook his head as if dazed. 'That is an act beyond my imagination, an act so monstrous that it affronts human reason.'
Her boredom was turning to irritation. She said, 'The times it's happened, my reason wasn't affronted. I just took the only alternative to being killed myself.'
Jimson looked at her. 'It were better that you had died,' he said with grave sincerity. 'I see. Thank you.'
'I do not speak personally. Better that 7 should die than that 1 should kill.' 'Better for who?'
'For the world. For humanity. Humanity is far greater than the individual, Miss Blaise. Death comes to each one of us in time. You saved your life with violence--' 'By reacting to violence.'
'It is the same thing I Surely you see that? Reaction against violence is the food by which it grows. Had you submitted, had you not reacted, a root of violence would have withered unfed, a root from which untold acts of violence have since spread like suckers from some evil weed.'
Modesty said patiently, 'But I'd have withered too. And I'd rather stay alive. It may even be that by reacting I've withered a few nasty roots myself.'
Jimson closed his eyes for a moment as if in pain. 'You live by false and dangerous principles, Miss Blaise,' he said heavily. 'There is a day of reckoning for us all, and I think you will pay a terrible price for your principles when that day comes.' 'Then I'd better go on postponing it as long as I can.' She smiled to take the edge off her words, but he did not respond. 'There will be no laughter on that day,' he said. She sat forward a little and plucked at the button-through
shirt she wore outside her skirt, drawing cooler air to her body. She did not object to Jimson's obsession or his opinions, she had no quarrel with him, or with Flat-Earthers or with people who wanted to open Joanna Southcott's Box to solve the world's problems. But she was tired of Jimson's voice.
'You've talked a lot about evil, Mr Jimson,' she said reflectively. 'I wonder if you've ever seen the real thing. In close-up.'
'What do you imagine is the real thing?'
She hesitated fractionally, seeking fresh words to dress up a hackneyed thought, then was annoyed with herself for doing so. All realities were hackneyed, simply because they had been around for a long time.
'It's cruelty,' she said. 'It's the man who can only feel good when he's got his foot on somebody's neck. The man who feels like God when he's holding a gun. Who can only confirm his own existence by squeezing the marrow out of others. Cruelty comes in all sizes, and you find it in little packages all over. But when you see the real thing, in the jumbo king-size packet...' She shrugged and looked at him, eyeing his limp clerical collar. 'Well, then maybe you begin to think there's a Commandment missing. One that might even be more important than stealing or killing or coveting your neighbour's ox.'
She stopped speaking, annoyed with herself again. It was not her habit to open her mind to strangers, particularly in this vein.
Jimson was staring at her wonderingly. He gave a helpless shake of his head, sighed, and then quite suddenly the intensity in his face vanished as he smiled at her with an engaging charm that astonished her. 'Oh dear,' he said. 'I'm afraid we fail completely to communicate.'
Her answering smile was friendly, inviting a truce. 'You're the one who's been trying to, Mr Jimson. We'd better stop wasting our time.'
'Perhaps so.' He sat back and relaxed. After a moment he said, 'I suppose you haven't heard any news of the test?'
'Test?'
'I'm sorry. I mean the Test Match against Australia. The last of the series started at the Oval on Thursday.'
'Oh, cricket!' Again he had surprised her. She searched her memory. 'England were 297 for six wickets at close of play yesterday.'
'You're a fan?' he said with pleasure.
'Only for village-green cricket, I'm afraid. But Willie Gar-vin likes the more sophisticated stuff. He managed to pick up an English news broadcast on the car radio last night. I take it you're a fan yourself?'
'I must confess it's my great passion,' Jimson said ruefully. 'I'm rather ashamed of it really. Fanatics can be terrible bores, whatever their obsession, don't you think?'
'I've suffered occasionally,' Modesty said gravely. 'Do you play cricket yourself, Mr Jimson?'
'I used to play regularly when I was up at Cambridge.' His voice was wistful.
'Were you chosen for your batting or bowling?'
'Oh, a little of each. I'd bat about number six and I wasn't too expensive as a change bowler. But I got in mainly on fielding, I think. I was really very useful in the covers.' He smiled shyly. Then, as if afraid of boring her, took out a worn pocket gospel, settled back in his seat and began to read.
She looked out of the window. They were passing along a broad valley. On each side the scrub-covered rock sloped up and away to a ridge, to vanish and appear again as a higher ridge beyond. The ground was seamed with thin twisting gulleys cut by a thousand rivulets in the wet season.
The road began to rise, turning sharply ahead. The driver changed down, slowed, then down again to take the bend.
Modesty saw the windscreen shatter and the shards of glass fly outwards before the sound of the shots registered. She was lunging down the aisle of the little bus even as her mind analysed the happening. A very short burst, four shots from an automatic rifle, had been fired from the side and just behind the bus as it passed. One shot at least had hit the driver. He was slumping sideways.
The engine stalled. The bus was halfway round the bend. For a moment it stood still, then began to creep slowly back, the engine compression not quite holding it. Two of the girls were in the aisle, screaming, obstructing her. She shouldered
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them aside and reached for the handbrake, but even as she grasped it there came a slow crunching of metal as the rear of the bus ran off the road and hit the rising ground on the outer side of the bend. The bus stopped with hardly a jolt.
Above the screaming babble of the girls she could hear Jim-son shouting in his far from perfect Spanish, trying to calm them. The driver lay huddled at her feet. Blood had welled from a hole in the back of his shirt, mingling with the dark sweat-stain. Ominously little blood. She eased him over gently, saw the exit hole in his chest, and knew that he was dead.
Lifting her head she looked out of the bus. Seven men, well spread out, were moving down the seamed slope towards the road. They wore trousers flared at the ankle and leather jerkins. Some were bare-headed, some wore shapeless felt or straw hats, two wore sombreros. The small-arms they carried were varied. Two of the men wore old-fashioned bandoliers, the rest ammunition pouches. A few carried stick-grenades hanging from their belts.
There came a shout, and a short burst of bullets flew high over the bus. Through the rear window Modesty saw five more men coming up the road from behind. She looked along the aisle. The girls had stopped screaming. They were either silent or whimpering now. Jimson was on his knees, hands clasped, eyes closed, his lips moving. She pushed her way towards him and shook him fiercely by the shoulder. He opened his eyes. There was anxiety in them, but no fear.
She said, 'Get the girls out. You go first with your hands up and waving a handkerchief. That last burst was a warning.'
He nodded, got quickly to his feet and moved towards the door, speaking calmly to the girls, telling them not to be afraid. Modesty collected her handbag and followed. These would be El Mico's men, she thought. A small group which had penetrated deep into the hills. Dangerous men. Guerrillas, rebels, bandoleros - what you called them depended on which side you favoured. She did not know why they had shot up the bus. There did not have to be a reason, except that the bus was there.
The raw mid-morning sun beat down on her as she de-
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scended the step. Jimson was waving a handkerchief, standing in front of the girls as they huddled together outside the door. Modesty stayed behind the girls, using them as a screen. She opened her handbag and took out the little MAB .25 automatic, angry with herself for having left her suitcase for Willie to bring on. There were things in that case and in the car which she would have been glad to have now. Her handbag held only make-up, bare toilet necessities, the automatic and a miniature first-aid kit.
She opened the little first-aid tin and took out a roll of one-inch plaster. Putting her foot on the step of the bus, she pulled up her skirt and pressed one end of the plaster to her thigh. The MAB automatic was no more use than a pea-shooter at this moment, under the muzzles of a dozen guns. But if she could keep it hidden, strapped high up on the inside of her thigh, there might well be a chance to make good use of it later. How long her thigh would remain a safe hiding-place from El Mico's men was not an encouraging speculation.
No more than ten seconds had passed since she climbed from the bus. A voice was shouting again. The men were closer now. With the end of the plaster stuck firmly to her flesh, she reached for the gun which lay on the step beside her foot. A hand reached past her and snatched it up by the barrel. Her head snapped round. Jimson stepped back a pace, holding the gun out to one side as if it might contaminate him.
'No!' he said, staring fixedly at her face so that he should not glimpse her bare thigh. 'No, Miss Blaise!'
'Give it to me, you fool!' she said in a fierce whisper. 'It's the best chance we have."
'No,' he repeated stubbornly, and shook his head. His arm swung. The automatic curved over the bonnet of the bus and disappeared in a patch of scrub twenty paces away.
Salt, black, blinding rage swept her. With an enormous effort she gathered control of herself, clearing her mind to adjust to the new situation, but her hand still shook slightly as she jerked the plaster from her leg and flung it aside.
That was useful, the shaking hand. She let fury rise up within her again, and pressed her fingers into the corners of her eyes. Tears began to run down her face. It was not hard to
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keep them coming as long as she focused on Jimson's lunacy. She dragged her fingers through her hair, wiped a hand through the dust on the side of the bus and smeared her face. There came the clink of metal on metal, harsh male voices, the smell of leather and oil, sweat and guns. She let her shoulders droop, pressed her hands to her cheeks and began to sob. Like a chorus her wailing was taken up by the frightened girls as the guerrillas pushed brusquely among them.
The sun was high in the sky and they had trudged for two miles now along one of the winding tracks which cut into the hills.
The Reverend Leonard Jimson walked at the head of his flock as they moved between two groups of their captors at front and rear. He was singing a hymn with a marching rhythm, encouraging the girls to join him, but gaining only pathetic and spasmodic support.
The girls had stopped crying now, mainly from exhaustion. Modesty Blaise trailed behind them, stumbling, clumsy, fanning flies and mosquitoes from her face with a handful of long torquilla leaves. She felt almost satisfied that she had established herself as the most harmless member of a particularly harmless party.
Almost satisfied, but not quite. On the flank walked a man older than the rest of the guerrillas. Greying hair showed below the straw hat pushed back on his head. He had cold eyes set in a lean wary face, an experienced face. Every now and again he glanced at her thoughtfully. The AKM assault rifle he carried was held easily across his body, ready for immediate action.
Rodolfo was his name. She had heard the others use it. He was not in command of the group. The leader was Jacinto, a big swaggering young man in a sombrero. Modesty took the view that El Mico was not a good picker. Rodolfo should have been in charge. He was by far the smartest man here.
She had not used a word of Spanish. Twice she had called plaintively to Jimson, asking how much farther there was to go. After an exchange with the guerrillas Jimson had twice answered, 'Not very far, I think.'
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She wondered what Jimson was feeling. He had not panicked, and seemed more concerned with quietening the girls' fears than with speculating on what might happen next. Listening to the guerrillas, Modestry gathered that they had been sent across country by El Mico as a strike force to cut the mountain road and deny it to all traffic for twenty-four hours while El Mice's main force carried out some major operation to the south. The twenty-four hours had now passed, and in that time there had been no traffic at all. Except, at last, the bus.
Shooting up the bus had been little more than a reaction to boredom, Modesty thought, though among themselves they were pretending that the attack had been either for some cunning military purpose or for loot. On both counts the results were disappointing.
True, they had found four hundred dollars in the handbag of the crying foreign woman, but the foreign priest and his miserable flock had almost nothing between them. A pity, after such a skilfully executed manoeuvre. It would not do to let the prisoners go, however. That would be for El Mico to decide when he arrived. Perhaps a ransom could be secured for the foreign woman?
One was a rebel and a fighter for freedom, of course, but the practice of holding for ransom had deep roots and it was as well not to discard all the old and profitable traditions of the bandolero too quickly...
Jimson stopped singing. One of the men ahead had spoken to him. He turned, pointed to the flank of a high ridge and said encouragingly, 'We're nearly there, girls. Don't be afraid. We're non-combatants and we have nothing to fear. I shall speak to El Mico when he arrives, and everything will be all right.'
Modesty Blaise gave a tearful, doubtful sniff. The doubt was not assumed. She dropped the remainder of the now sweat-soaked torquilla leaves in a bunch. At the start of the journey, when they had struck away from the road, she had let fall two or three of the broad leaves in the first hundred yards. Since then she had dropped one at each point where there might be doubt about the route they were taking.
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Willie Garvin, even on this scrub-covered waste, would need no help in trailing a single man, much less a whole group. But the dusty, trampled leaves, where no leaves should be, would give him that much more speed and save him casting around where the trail split. Also, the last crumpled few, dropped together, would warn him that he was near die end of the trail and that it was time to move carefully.
The garage people had estimated seven hours to repair the car, but she knew Willie Garvin would never leave them to do it alone - not people who allowed a car to run off a ramp. He would probably take a hand in the work and would certainly supervise. His supervision would be very forceful. There would be no rest for the garagistes of Orsita until the work was done.
Modesty calculated time and distance. The best probability was that Willie Garvin would find the bus and the dead driver in about four hours from now. Allow another hour for him to follow die trail into die hills. So it would be five hours before he arrived on the scene. He would not arrive empty-handed. The Mercedes carried some useful items for emergencies.
But five hours was a long time, in which much could happen. El Mice's men had no reputation for civilized behaviour. Modesty thought it likely that if the bus had carried only men, diey would have been used for target practice on the spot. These guerrillas were young and trigger-happy. The girls, and she herself, had other uses of course, though she fancied that she might be reserved for El Mico. Jimson's chances of survival were very small. His cloth would not save him; he was the wrong brand of priest, an interloper.
They had rounded the flank of the ridge now. After anodier quarter-mile the straggling column passed between two steep slopes of rock. Beyond lay a small valley hemmed by low peaks. Long ago die valley must have been used as grazing ground for a few goats, for on one side stood a dry-stone pen widi a narrow gap in its roughly circular wall. At the far end of the valley a patch of struggling yellow grass suggested some small trickle of water along a gully there.
Not far from the pen was the guerrilla camp - diree pack-mules hobbled near a scattering of bedrolls and bivouac tents.
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And two more men. That made fourteen in all.
Rodolfo, his eyes resting on Modesty as they halted, said, 'Better to keep the prisoners out of die way, Jacinto. Away from the guns.'
Jacinto laughed and shrugged, pushing back his sombrero. 'These?' He gazed at die bedraggled group. 'You are an old woman, Rodolfo.'
'I wish to grow older still.'
Another shrug. 'Do what you please.'
'And you will post a guard for the camp?' Rodolfo pressed, glancing up at die slopes of die valley.
'Of course.' Jacinto snapped out die words irritably and turned away.
The brief exchange confirmed what Modesty already suspected, that Rodolfo was the only competent soldier among diem. The rest were undisciplined bandoleros pretending to be rebels.
Rodolfo looked about him, dien spoke to Jimson and pointed. To one side of die camp die ground rose for about ten feet in a natural ramp, then flattened again to form a small plateau set back in a half-circle of almost sheer rock.
'This way, girls,' said Jimson. 'That's splendid. We shall all be in the shade up there.'
The passing hours had no effect on Rodolfo. He was tireless in his quiet vigilance.
In the camp die guerrillas made a meal, ate, slept and gossiped. They sent a water-bottle to be passed round among die prisoners, and, for Rodolfo, a billycan of chopped meat and beans with dun cornmeal cakes. On a peak opposite die little plateau a man prowled, keeping watch on the approach to die valley. Twice a new man was sent up to relieve him.
But Rodolfo did not sleep, neidier did he seem to want any relief. He sat near the edge of the ramp and to one side, his back to a rock, watching the prisoners, watching Modesty Blaise, the AKM resting across his knees.
Once she rose and began to wander about as if stretching her legs, drawing slowly nearer to him. He lifted die gun and spoke sharply. She pretended not to understand.
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Jimson said anxiously, 'Miss Blaise, he's telling you to go back and sit down, otherwise he'll shoot you. I'm afraid he means it.' She looked scared and hurried back to where Jimson sat in the shade of the valley wall with the girls spread out around him, some of them dozing now.
As time passed their fears had dwindled with the subconscious belief that the longer nothing happened to them the less likely it was that anything would happen. Modesty hoped they were right, but with little confidence. The men were bored. They had eaten, they had slept for an hour or two, and now there was the rest of the day ahead with its long empty hours.
Her wristwatch had been taken. She glanced at the sun, knowing that her estimate of the time would be correct within ten minutes either way. Another hour and a half before Willie Garvin could be expected on the scene.
She thought bitterly of the MAB automatic for a moment. With that, she could have killed Rodolfo from where she sat and reached him in a dozen strides. His gun, the Russian AKM assault rifle firing a short 7.62 mm cartridge, was a good weapon. The average sub-machine-gun on single-shot would at best produce a twelve- to eighteen-inch group at a hundred yards. The AKM would group into six inches at that range. It carried a thirty-round magazine - and Rodolfo had at least two spare magazines in his pouches. She ran over the technical details in her head. Safety-catch mounted on the right-hand side of the receiver. Pushed fully up it was on safe. The middle position, marked by the Cyrillic letters AB, gave automatic fire. For semi-automatic you pushed the safety right down.
The edge of the ramp held a slight hummock, making dead ground on this side. Using that, and using as added cover the rock against which Rodolfo sat, she was reasonably sure that with the AKM she could have held off the whole band for a long time, perhaps even until their losses made them pull out. There would be plenty of losses. The camp was no more than forty yards away and the only cover was the dry-stone pen with its ten-foot diameter and its five-foot wall.
The first thirty seconds of firing would be tactically critical.
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The purpose of it would be to stop as many men as possible reaching the pen, and to drive them back beyond grenade range. A grenade on this confined plateau would be very nasty. Using the AKM on fully automatic wasn't the answer. Too many wasted bullets. She would have to use semi-automatic, quick-fire single shots, choosing the right target for each shot and...
But the MAB lay in a patch of scrub two miles away, and Rodolfo had an instinct about her. He would never let her get within reach of him, in reach of the AKM.
Jacinto and another man came from the camp and up on to the higher level. Smirking, they surveyed the girls. For a moment Jacinto's eyes rested hotly on Modesty, then he shrugged regretfully and looked at the girls again.
So she was to be the first prize, kept for El Mico. Jacinto and his men would make do with second best. Modesty knew with heavy certainty which of the girls Jacinto would choose. Rosa, the plump one with a pretty face, who looked a year or two older than her age.
'Your name?' Jacinto said amiably, pointing.
The girl smiled nervously. 'Rosa.'
'A nice name. We have wine captured from a house we found on our way here, Rosa. Come and have a little drink with us.'
She looked frightened and glanced sideways at Jimson. He stood up and said firmly, 'These girls do not drink strong liquor. I must insist that they stay with me. They are in my care, sefior.'
The man standing beside Jacinto had a rifle slung on one shoulder. He brought the butt up and round sharply, hitting Jimson on the side of the jaw. The girls screamed. Jimson teetered back, fell, then rolled over and got slowly to his hands and knees. He stayed there, mouth wide open, gulping in air and making wordless noises in his throat.
Modesty saw that Rodolfo's gun was lined up on her. She did not move. Jacinto took Rosa by the wrist, speaking smooth words, and began to walk away with her. Her eyes were glazed, she did not resist. The other man followed, grinning. 'Just a drink,' he said. 'It will make you feel very good.'
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Jimson was kneeling up now, eyes dazed, mouth still wide, one hand pressed against a great lump high on his jaw. He seemed to be trying to say something. Modesty looked at Rodolfo, pointed to herself and then to Jimson. Rodolfo hesitated then nodded, watching her carefully. She got up, went to Jimson and said, 'Don't try to talk. Your jaw's dislocated. Just keep still and bear up hard with your head when I press down. Understand?'
He nodded, his face filmed with the sweat of pain. She put her thumbs in his mouth, one on each side, resting on the lower back teeth. 'Ready? Tense your neck and press up ... now.'' She bore down hard, then sideways. There was a click as the bone snapped back into place. Jimson swayed on his knees, hands pressed to his cheeks. She held him till he recovered.
'Thank you,' he panted. 'Thank you. I must fetch Rosa...'
Her hands on his shoulders stopped him rising. She said, 'There isn't anything you can do, Mr Jimson. They'll kill you.'
'Then ... they must do so,' he said hoarsely, and tried to push her hands away.
Rodolfo said calmly, 'Sit down.' They looked at him and he moved his gun slightly. Jerking his head towards the camp he said, 'They are fools. But I want no trouble. You sit down, sit still. Both.' His chin jerked towards a thin, plain girl huddled against the rock wall. 'Or I shoot that one. Not you. Her. And after her, another.'
Jimson shook his head slowly, stunned with horror. 'But...' he said helplessly. 'But--'
He sank back on his heels and put his head in his hands. Modesty sat down. Rodolfo relaxed.
Ten minutes later they heard Rosa laugh. A stupid, giggling laugh that mingled with the deeper voices of the men. Jimson shivered. Another five minutes later Rosa shrieked suddenly. Jimson jumped as if struck by a whip, the blood draining from his face. He said, 'Dear God, what are they doing to her?'
Modesty looked at him. 'What the hell do you think?' she said roughly.
His whole body was shaking. He stammered, 'Please! We -we must stop them!'
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'Stop them?' she said, her eyes on Rodolfo. 'How, Mr Jim-son? If we move, that man there will start shooting the girls.'
He pressed his hands over his ears to shut out the sound of Rosa's shrieking, then took them away again as if finding the silence even more intolerable. 'There must be something!' he cried desperately.
'There's nothing.' She lacked the charity to spare him, but there was neither satisfaction nor malice in her voice as she added bleakly, 'You threw away my gun. On principle. You're having to pay for your principles well ahead of the day of reckoning, Mr Jimson. So are the rest of us.'
He stared at her for long seconds and, strangely, her words seemed to calm him. His eyes became unfocused, gazing through her, and he said in a remote wondering voice, 'Yes ... I am being tested.'
Rage seethed in her, but she held it down and said impassively, 'Rosa should be honoured.'
The screams of protest changed to wild sobbing for a while, then began anew. There were guffaws of male laughter, cries of encouragement and advice. Modesty blanked her mind to the sounds.
On the hill across the valley, three hundred yards away, she saw the sentry come prowling slowly into view, a big man wearing a sombrero, like Jacinto. His brother, perhaps. A bad sentry. They all were. Standing on top of a hill against the background of the sky was no way to keep watch.
A flash of light dazzled Modesty. She blinked, moved her head slightly, but the dazzle was repeated, nickering across her eyes. It came from the man on the hill, a reflection from some ornate belt-buckle perhaps...
Her heart thumped suddenly. She put up both hands and smoothed back her hair, twice. The dazzle stopped. The man in the sombrero put his right hand on his hip, dropped it to his side, put it on his hip again. Modesty kept her head down, watching from under her brows and feeling relief flow through her like a healing draught.
Willie Garvin.
The unfailing Willie Garvin, an hour earlier than she had dared to hope. One sentry disposed of. Willie was wearing the
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man's jerkin and sombrero. Not a reflection from a belt buckle but from the vanity mirror taken from behind the sun-visor of the Mercedes. Willie Garvin had a useful talent for looking ahead.
He stood with the sombrero tilted to shade his face, looking casually around, then brought one hand up slowly to his right ear. What orders?
She waited. He strolled away and passed below the skyline of the hill. Now he would be lying down, invisible in a fold of ground, watching her through binoculars. It took her over five minutes to send the message. The tick-tack code they used would have put it across in a quarter the time if she could have operated freely, but Rodolfo's eye was on her and she had to use the arm and body movements naturally, without emphasis, allowing long gaps between the signals.
At last she folded her arms. The sounds from Rosa were feeble with exhaustion now, just long shuddering sobs, barely audible at this distance. On the hill Willie Garvin stood up, put a hand to his left ear, and melted into the ground again. Message understood.
She turned her head to gaze absently at Rodolfo, and waited, glad that this was to be rifle work. With a hand-gun it was Willie Garvin's resigned boast that he could not hit a barn if he was standing inside it. His short-range weapon was the throwing-knife. With that he was deadly. With any good rifle he was also deadly.
He would have with him the two guns from under the back seat of the Mercedes. One was a CAR-15 carbine, ideal for close quarters. The other was an Ml 4 National Match Rifle, with hooded aperture rear sight, selected barrel and glass-bedded action. It took a twenty-round staggered-row box magazine of 7.62 mm cartridges. With the selector-shaft and lock welded, it could not fire fully automatic. That was not its purpose. On semi-automatic, firing single shots, it was superbly accurate. That was its purpose.
She saw the great exit-wound appear in the side of Rodolfo's head a fraction of a second before the sound of the shot reached her. Even before he toppled sideways she was on her feet and moving fast.
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As she snatched up the AKM she saw that it was cocked, with the safety in the middle position. She pushed it down for single-shot, took the three spare magazines from the blood-spattered pouches on Rodolfo's chest, then rolled his body forward to make an added barrier extending from the big rock on the edge of the ramp, leaving a small gap between his body and the rock for sighting.
Down flat in the firing position. Laminated wood stock cuddled into her shoulder. Behind her a rising babble of hysterical jabbering from the girls. At the rear of the little plateau they were safe as long as they did not stand up. She thought of calling to them to keep down, then shrugged the thought aside. Anybody who needed telling that would hardly be affected by a bullet through the brain.
Less than ten seconds since the shot. In the camp forty yards away the men were on their feet, staring towards the far hill. They had spread out a little and picked up their guns, puzzled rather than alarmed. A shot had been fired from somewhere up there, but they did not know where the bullet had gone. They did not know yet that Rodolfo was dead.
Rosa, stripped, was crouched on her hands and knees on a mattress of blankets. Hers was the only face turned towards the slope of the low ramp. Modesty raised her head and beckoned with a full-arm swing. Rosa got unsteadily to her feet, holding a blanket about her, and began to move forward. The men were talking, asking each other questions that nobody answered. Rosa was halfway to the ramp when one of them turned, saw her, and gave a shout.
Modesty sighted the AKM on Jacinto and lifted her voice, calling in Spanish. 'Jacinto! Tell your men to drop their guns. You're in crossfire.'
It was useless, as she had known it would be, and she sneered at herself for indulging in the kind of stupidity that costs lives. The wrong lives. Rosa's first, perhaps. Jacinto swung his sub-machine-gun up to the firing position. She dropped him with a shot through the chest, sighted on another man kneeling to aim, and fired again. One, two, three quick shots came from the hill, blending with the sound of her own firing.
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Panic among the guerrillas. Three men were down, lying still; another crawling, dragging a useless leg. Rosa ran on, grey-faced, trailing the blanket behind her. Modesty held her fire to cover any man who might try to shoot at Rosa. The guerrillas raced for the dry-stone pen, ducking and swerving.
From the hill Willie Garvin fired steadily, not hurriedly, picking his shots. Six men down. Now the remaining guerrillas had reached cover, scrambling over the wall of the pen. Modesty knocked the last man off the wall as he clambered over.
Rosa was at the top of the ramp, eyes blind with terror. Modesty eased down behind Rodolfo's body and turned her head as the girl went past. Jimson was standing at the back of the plateau, a hand to his head as if dazed with bewilderment. The girls were huddled together, crouching or kneeling. With a wail of relief Rosa ran to them, and they received her among them with little cries of pity and comfort, not untinged by an element of awed fascination at the manner of her recent debut into the ranks of the deflowered.
Modesty said in a low, fierce voice, 'Mr Jimson! We may get a grenade up here. Take the girls behind that huddle of rocks over on your right and make them lie down flat.'
Bullets spattered against the rock that gave her cover. She peered round the base of it, through the gap between the rock and Rodolfo's shoulders. From the hill came a long burst of automatic fire, spraying the pen. Willie had changed briefly to the CAR--15. It would do little harm, unless a lucky shot ricocheted inside the pen, but it served to keep heads down while Modesty studied the situation.
Six men lay scattered about the camp, dead or badly wounded. Willie had dealt with the sentry on the hill. Rodolfo was dead. And she had dropped another as he climbed into the pen. That left five, all under cover now. Even from the hill Willie would not be able to sight them over the five-foot wall. And there were one or two small gaps in that wall where stones had crumpled and fallen out. Good firing apertures for the defenders.
Bullets sprayed the ramp and she felt Rodolfo's body quiver as it was hit. From the hill, single shots again. Willie was back
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to the M14, trying for the apertures, trying for a ricochet in that confined space where five men crouched.
From the back of the plateau behind her came Jimson's voice, desperate and shaking. 'Miss Blaise! For God's sake stop this - this slaughter!'
She said viciously, 'Tell them that, for God's sake!' and she fired for one of the apertures, seeing dust spurt from it. But the angle was wrong, the bullet would have flattened against the inner surface of the hole.
'Miss Blaise, please--!' His voice was nearer. She turned her head and saw with hot anger that he was halfway across the open ground of the plateau, walking towards her. She said, 'Get down, you fool!'
Two quick shots from the hill. Her head snapped round just in time to see a man fall. He had stood up in the pen, and her stomach clenched as she saw why. The black globule of a grenade was soaring lazily through the air. Not a stick-grenade, but an egg-shaped fragmentation bomb. The man had made a good powerful throw in the instant of rising, too quick for Willie's snap-shot to prevent.
The grenade would pass ten feet above her head as she lay. No hope of jumping to catch it. She would be riddled by fire from the pen if she tried. What was the fuse timing? Anything from four to seven seconds. If the grenade exploded while still in the air she would be lucky to live. Very lucky. If it hit the ground first and the blast was reflected upwards, there was a chance for her if she hugged the ground. For her, but not for Jimson. Cheek to the ground, eyes watching the flight of the grenade passing overhead, she saw Jimson seemingly in exactly the same position as before. He could have moved only a single pace in the half-second since she had first shouted to him.
She cried 'Grenade!' and in the same instant she saw him sight it as it curved down, falling towards his right. His pace changed. The whole manner of his gait changed, and suddenly he was moving with assured grace, forward and sideways, fast, not clumsily.
He caught the grenade one-handed at full stretch to his right and no more than eighteen inches from the ground. She saw
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his arm yield with the weight, absorb it, then bend and straighten as he threw, falling sideways and back to put the weight of his body behind the throw.
The grenade flashed by three feet above her head. It was the hard, low-trajectory throw of the cricketer, the first-class fielder making a return, with that characteristic whiplike flick of wrist and arm; the throw of a man able to hit the stumps sideways-on from thirty yards, six times out of ten.
There came a rattle of fire from the pen. Somebody there had glimpsed Jimson's moving figure above the line of the ramp. But he had already fallen and was hidden again. She had flinched instinctively as Jimson's throw sent the grenade skimming above her. Now she saw it hurtle on its way, spinning in the air, dipping towards the pen.
It had just cleared the wall when it exploded, six feet above the men crouched below.
There was an almost dreamlike quality about the silence that lay over the valley as the rending blast and its echoes faded. The silence was broken only by a single voice wailing thinly from within the pen, and the sound of Modesty's running feet. She had absorbed many surprises in her life, but few had been as swift and startling as this. Only long-nourished instinct surmounted the shock and sent her racing down the ramp before the echoes had died. In five seconds she was at the pen, gun ready, circling round to the slit opening at the back. Now was the time to finish things. There would never be a better time.
But there was nothing to finish. The feeble screaming stopped abruptly as she reached the opening in the dry-stone wall. Within was a sight as ugly as any she had seen, and her mouth grew dry even though she had braced herself against the expected nausea. The fragmentation of a grenade does not do pretty things to the human body.
She looked quickly towards the men scattered on the ground by the camp. Nobody was stirring. She lifted her gun and waved to Willie. A crunch of footsteps and Jimson was beside her. He looked into the pen, gasped, and turned away, retching. She did not look round at him but put down her gun and moved into the pen for the gruesome task of checking the torn
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bodies for any sign of life. A minute later Jimson said in a shivering voice, 'Are they ... all dead?'
She lifted a man who lay face-down, then let him fall and straightened up. 'Yes. They're all dead. When you're only six feet from an exploding grenade you don't stand much chance. And the fragments must have ricocheted round this pen like a swarm of hornets.'
'Dear God,' he said shakily, and went down on his knees.
Willie Garvin was making his way down the slope of the hill. The girls appeared at the lip of the ramp. She called to them to stay where they were, picked up the AKM and walked across to the men who had fallen in the first moments of the battle, noting that the hobbled mules seemed to have escaped harm.
Three of the men were alive. One was unconscious. The other two were empty of aggression, their faces pallid with pain and fear. She gathered up all guns lying within reach, moved them to a safe spot, then made a quick examination. Two shoulder-wounds, one leg-wound, all serious. She knelt by the unconscious man and began to cut the blood-soaked shirt away from his shattered shoulder with his own knife.
Willie Garvin came trudging across the valley bottom, M14 slung, carbine swinging in his hand, a rucksack on his back. His gaze searched her keenly as he came up, looking for any sign of hurt.
She said, 'I'm all right, Willie love.'
He nodded, slipped off the rucksack, then surveyed the scene of battle with a look of disgust. 'A right shambles they made of it,' he said. 'I reckon the Salvation Army could've done better. Whoever was in charge of this lot ought to be bloody well shot.'
She looked up from her work to nod agreement. 'He was, Willie.'
There was a lot of blood down the front of the sentry's jerkin that Willie still wore. Dried blood, obviously not Willie's. No point in asking if the sentry on the hill was alive. Willie had probably had to take him at throwing-knife range, and had played for keeps. There had been too much at stake to risk any fancy work.
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He had opened the rucksack and was taking out a big tin box, a well-stocked first-aid kit. She said, 'Let's have a field-dressing, then prop him up while I bandage him.'
Ten minutes later they had done what they could for the three men. Their wounds were plugged and bandaged, and they had been given a fifteen milligram shot of morphia each. Modesty stood up and looked around. Jimson was still on his knees in prayer by the pen. The girls were sitting along the edge of the ramp, watching like birds perched on a branch.
She said, 'Have you got a cigarette?'
Willie took out a packet, gave her one and lit it for her, then surveyed the battlefield again with a frown of professional disapproval. 'They were better at rape,' he said. 'What about that girl? I saw four of them 'ave 'er before we started shooting.'
Modesty looked towards the ramp. Rosa, swathed in the blanket, was on her feet now, standing up straight, gazing at the scene with interest. Just as well it had been Rosa. She was a sturdy peasant type with nerves like sisal. In a little while she might even begin to relish the cachet of having been raped by guerrillas.
'She'll survive,' Modesty said. 'We'd better make a move, Willie. El Mico is supposed to be arriving sometime soon.'
Willie shook his head. 'El Mico's dead.'
'Dead?'
'I 'card it on the car radio just before I found the bus. News flash. Triumphant music. The Army trapped El Mico's main forces in a pass down south. Pretty well wiped 'em out. They found El Mico's body after it was over.'
That made a big difference. With the road safe, they could afford now to be burdened by the wounded. She said, 'Do you think the bus is all right?'
'I 'ad a quick look. Just the exhaust crumpled and the windscreen gone. I could drive that with the girls and the parson while you drive the Merc. We'll still be in San Tremino around sundown.'
'San Tremino?' It had been in her mind to return to Orsita.
'I was thinking of Garcia,' Willie said.
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It was a moment before she remembered that she had been on her way to see Garcia because he was dying. That seemed a long time ago now.
'Orsita's much nearer,' she said. 'I mean for these three.' She looked at the wounded men. 'We can get them down to the bus on the mules. The quicker they get treatment the better.'
Willie said gently, 'They won't live long with the treatment they'll get if we take 'em in, Princess. What they do with rebels around these parts is hang 'em.'
'So they do.' She rubbed an eye with the back of her wrist; her hands were too dirty. 'I'm a bit slow today.'
'It's the weather.' Willie wiped his brow and looked at the sun. 'Too much humidity.'
She threw away her cigarette. Her mind felt sluggish, as if resentful of being set problems now that danger was past. Leave the men here and they would die; take them into a town for treatment and they would die.
Willie Garvin said, 'How did that grenade bit 'appen, Princess? I couldn't see from up there, but it was a fair old clincher.'
She moved her head to indicate Jimson, still kneeling near the pen. 'The parson did it. He used to play cricket for Cambridge. Nice clean catch-and-return in about one second dead.'
Willie whistled softly in astonishment, then grinned and said, 'El Mico could've used a few like 'im.'
'Hardly.' She smiled without humour. 'Until that grenade, Jimson bitched up everything all along the line. I'll tell you about it later.'
She walked across to the pen, Willie beside her. Jimson looked up as they halted, still kneeling with fingers locked in front of him. His eyes were pools of pain. He said in a low, shaking voice, 'You were right in one thing ... I have never seen true evil before. Today I have seen it manifest. Today I have looked into hell.'
He got slowly to his feet. Modesty looked at the carnage in the pen and said tiredly, 'No. They weren't particularly evil, Mr Jimson. Just poor and primitive. And animal.'
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He stared at her, uncomprehending. 'I did not mean them.'
She looked at Willie, then back at Jimson, and lifted an eyebrow. 'Us, perhaps?'
Jimson shook his head, slowly, like a man in agony. 'Not you or your friend. Myself, Miss Blaise.'
Willie's face was blank. Modesty said patiently, 'You got rid of a grenade that would have killed us. It just happened to fall here when you threw it.'
Again he shook his head. 'No ... I could have placed it anywhere,' he whispered despairingly, and bowed his head in his hands. 'I have the blood of five human beings on my head.'
'Better than 'aving yours on theirs,' Willie said cheerfully. 'What they did to the fat girl was just a start. There were only two ways it could end, and this was best.'
'No!' Jimson said feverishly. 'No, it can never be the best way. I have betrayed myself.'
Modesty gave a little shrug. Half her mind was busy with the pros and cons of decision. San Tremino or Orsita? Was Garcia still alive? How long would he last? Take the wounded guerrillas back to hang? Or leave them to die? It was all a muddle.
Strangely, despite the frustrations he had caused her, she found that she felt compassion for Jimson, even a liking for him. He was exasperatingly barmy, but that was not his fault. She respected his consistency and his courage. And perhaps somewhere in his hopelessly impractical obsession there was a grain of truth which might some day grow and flourish - in another time, another world.
But not now. And not here, in today's world.
She touched Willie's arm and turned away. 'Go and get the mules ready, Willie love. We'll load up the wounded.'
'OK. You're taking 'em in then?'
"Yes. The long way, to San Tremino. They might not last, but if the doctor in Orsita is anything like the garage mechanics we'll be doing them a favour. And if they hang...' She moved her shoulders. 'Tomorrow's always a better day to die.'
As Willie went to the mules she lifted an arm and beckoned
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the girls. Rosa would need treatment, too, and there was a hospital in San Tremino.
She hoped Garcia would last.
The sun was still hot, and her head ached. It had been a long, weary day. She walked across and began to help Willie Garvin unhobble the mules.
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