The Demolishers Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Donald Hamilton

  Title Page

  Copyright

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  About the Author

  Also Available from Titan Books

  Also by Donald Hamilton and available from Titan Books

  Death of a Citizen

  The Wrecking Crew

  The Removers

  The Silencers

  Murderers’ Row

  The Ambushers

  The Shadowers

  The Ravagers

  The Devastators

  The Betrayers

  The Menacers

  The Interlopers

  The Poisoners

  The Intriguers

  The Intimidators

  The Terminators

  The Retaliators

  The Terrorizers

  The Revengers

  The Annihilators

  The Infiltrators

  The Detonators

  The Vanishers

  The Frighteners (December 2016)

  The Threateners (February 2017)

  The Damagers (April 2017)

  The Demolishers

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783299935

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781783299942

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: October 2016

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 1987, 2016 by Donald Hamilton. All rights reserved.

  Matt Helm® is the registered trademark of Integute AB.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  1

  Mac was sitting at his desk as usual, with the bright window behind him. This made his expression difficult to read, which was the idea; but I gathered he didn’t feel that the instructions he’d just given me were open to question, although, of course, we were both aware that most instructions given in that office are pretty questionable by ordinary standards.

  I said, “No, sir.”

  He frowned quickly. “What?”

  I said, “No, sir, I won’t go after Herman Heinrich Bultman. If he must be handled, let the CIA handle him; he’s their boy. Or was once; and they still wake up nights sweating, wondering if he’s told anybody who hired him for that Cuba mission that cost him his left foot.” I grimaced. “Bultman was a fool to get sucked into that one; but they do get proud. He’s not the first character in that line of work who’s let himself be conned into trying for The Beard in order to show that he was the best; that he could succeed where everyone else had failed. Of course the money was a consideration, too. But he should have known that, whether he made it or not, and particularly if, as it turned out, he didn’t, those publicity-shy folks down at Langley would figure on silencing him afterwards. Only it turned out they weren’t quite up to the job, so they wished it off on us.”

  Mac made an impatient gesture. “That is ancient history, Eric.” In that office, and while engaged in the exercise of my profession, I’m Eric, although I use other names as well. In my normal civilian life, what little there is of it, I’m known as Matthew Helm. Mac went on: “The misguided attempt on Castro’s life is past and forgotten; it has no bearing on our present…”

  I shook my head quickly. “The boys and girls down in Virginia don’t forget much, sir. Bultman’s still on their shit list and they want him off, permanently. Well, I went after him once for them down in Costa Verde, and got lucky. I outshuffled him and outnumbered him and got the drop on him. I made him swear that he’d never, ever open his mouth on the subject of Cuba. They’d told me to silence him, hadn’t they?” I grinned. “That wasn’t exactly what they’d had in mind, I guess, but I needed Bultman’s cooperation on another project, as you’ll recall. As a matter of fact, whatever else he may be, the Kraut seems to be a man of his word; his promise has turned out to be as good as a bullet in the brain. Now they’ve come up with another important reason for us to eliminate Herr Bultman. Personally, I think they’ll keep finding new reasons to wipe him out until they get the job done. Correction: until they get somebody else to get it done for them. Like us. But not me, sir. The reason they’ve come up with this time isn’t good enough. I want no part of it, thanks.”

  Theoretically, our wants and don’t-wants are quite irrelevant in that office, but I’ve worked for him a long time and have earned a certain amount of latitude.

  Mac said, “You are showing great consideration for a man who’s an assassin for sale, a hired gun.”

  I said, “I’ve killed upon occasion. You should know; you sent me out to do it. Hell, you’re trying to send me out to do it now. And for doing it, when I do it, I’m paid a pretty good salary by the U.S. government. Not what I’m worth, of course, but pretty good. What does that make me? Let’s not have any loose talk in here about hired guns, sir. Anyway, Bultman has retired from the hitman wars.”

  “Had retired.”

  “Well, this isn’t really his old line of work. And who turned him active again, if you want to call it that? And how did they do it? If people are going to be that stupidly, arrogantly vicious, they deserve what they get, even if what they get is a professional killer on the prowl.”

  Mac spoke without expression: “You are the only one of our people who’s had an opportunity to study the subject in action and at close range. Another agent’s chances of success, even of survival, would be considerably smaller than yours.”

  I said, “You don’t have to send anybody, sir. Tell them to take their lousy job and shove it back across the Potomac where it belongs.”

  “We are not here to tell people to take their lousy jobs and shove them, Eric. The lousy jobs are exactly what this organization was created to handle. The ones too lousy for anybody else.”

  Our business is classified as counterassassination by the people who know what we do, but there aren’t many of those. In other words, when the knifers, snipers, and bombers get too rough for other agenc
ies to handle, they call on us.

  I said, “What you said works both ways. I’ve had a chance to study Herman, but he’s also had a chance to study me. It cancels out. The man only has one flesh-and-blood foot, but he was getting along all right with the tin one when I saw him last. I have a hunch he suffered some other injuries on that ill-fated expedition that we don’t know about, or he wouldn’t have gone out of business later the way he did. But regardless, crippled or whole, sick or well, he’s the old lobo from the top of the mountain, as the CIA found out the hard way. And I’m not going to tackle him again for them and a bunch of Caribbean islanders who haven’t got any more sense than to make a deadly enemy of a basically nonpolitical character like Bultman by doing the one thing that would make him blow his stack, stolid Kraut though he is. Those uniformed Latin characters with their casual submachine guns are always a bit trigger-happy, but this time they outdid themselves and really played hell.”

  “There were sound medical reasons for the regulations that were enforced in Bultman’s case; although the enforcement may have been a bit arbitrary.” Mac frowned at me across the desk. “So it’s the dog.”

  I said, “You’re damned right it’s the dog, sir.”

  Mac spoke carefully: “The island of Gobernador—these days the sovereign nation of Gobernador—is an important link in our Caribbean defense system. Whatever your opinion may be, the government of the United States of America considers it more important than one elderly German shepherd dog.” When I didn’t say anything, Mac went on without expression. “Are you aware that the German shepherd is not German and has never been known to herd a sheep? Originally, it came to this country as the Alsatian wolf dog. It found few buyers under that label, so the name was changed quite arbitrarily and inaccurately to make the product sound more attractive. It still, in many specimens, retains its savage propensities.”

  I said, “Sure. There’s always a fashionable devil dog. For a while it was the Doberman pinscher. Then the pit bull became the Monster Canine of the Year. Currently, I believe, the Rottweiler is the beast at the head of the eat-you-up list. I’m just waiting for the day they discover the Homicidal Pekingese. Anyway, the temperament of Bultman’s mutt is irrelevant here. It didn’t bite anybody, it was just there, an elderly German shepherd bitch named Marlene for Marlene Dietrich. It throws an interesting light on Tough-Guy Bultman, his naming his pet for a long-ago movie star. And whatever the U.S. government may think, Herman Bultman considers the lousy island strictly expendable and I don’t blame him. Under similar circumstances, I’d be looking for help to sink it into the sea, myself. Apparently, he’s found his help in the anti-government movement; and more power to him.”

  “You’re being dangerously sentimental, Eric.” Mac cleared his throat and controlled his irritation. He went on with his briefing remorselessly, as if there had been no objection from me. “Gobernador consists of two islands. Isla del Norte is a fairly barren rock, sparsely settled. It contains important U.S. installations of a fairly secret nature—secret enough that we don’t need to know what they are, or so we’re told, as usual. The government of the newly independent nation has given us long-term leases; but if it should be overthrown, those leases could be, and probably would be, abrogated by those who would come to power next, who’d be at least anti-American if not actively pro-communist.” He paused. When I made no comment, he continued: “Isla del Sur is fertile and quite densely populated. It contains the capital city up in the mountains, Santa Isabella; and down on the coast, the principal harbor, Puerto del Sol, where your friend had his trouble.”

  “Hell, he’s no friend of mine,” I said. “Just because I sympathize with his current motives doesn’t mean I like him. That’s one cold, ruthless sonofabitch, and anybody idiot enough to hit him in his one soft spot…”

  “I am certain that, if they had known with whom they were dealing, the port officials would have treated him more tenderly, Eric.” Mac’s voice was tart. “Unfortunately the name Bultman is not a household word in the Caribbean.”

  “If the rumors I’ve heard are correct, it soon will be,” I said.

  Mac winced. “Yes, that is the problem with which we are trying to deal.”

  I went on: “Certain people never learn that if they push enough folks around long enough, sooner or later they’ll start shoving somebody who won’t take it. He’ll blow right up in their faces and demolish them and the surrounding landscape; and they—those who are left—will scream about how misunderstood and abused they are, and why didn’t somebody tell them the guy was dangerous so they could be nice to him? It never seems to occur to them that there’s a very simple answer: just be nice to everybody.” I grimaced. “In Bultman they hit a prime specimen of demolisher; and now that they’ve triggered him they want us to abort the explosion? How optimistic can you get?”

  Mac ignored this foray into philosophy, if you want to call it that. He went on stiffly: “What I am trying to point out is that we have a vested interest in the current government of Islas Gobernador. We do not want it replaced by a less friendly regime, or a steaming hole in the ocean. Apparently Bultman is now busily whipping into shape a motley collection of terrorists and revolutionaries that could never have accomplished anything on their own except the usual kind of protest assassinations and abductions and random bombings. But the man has considerable military experience, as you know, and he’s being allowed to carry out his recruiting and training on a neighboring island that has an interest in fomenting disturbances on Gobernador. Under this protection, Bultman is forming a disciplined strike force that may become a real threat to the stability of the region.”

  “He’s just the boy to do it,” I said. “He’s not a lone-wolf type like me; that time I outmaneuvered him with paramilitary help was strictly an exception. But Bultman always did run his operations like clockwork commando raids, using plenty of manpower, even when his target was a single individual.” I drew a long breath. “Look, sir, it’s no use pulling that anti-commie stuff on me. I’ve had too many missions sold me as the last faint hope of democracy. I think I’ve proved a number of times that I’m as patriotic as the next guy, but you can’t tell me that a few antennas or whatever, on a Caribbean rock, are going to make the difference between our national existence and nonexistence.”

  Mac studied me coldly. “I won’t insult you by suggesting that you are afraid of taking on this mission; but I find your reason for refusing quite unconvincing.”

  I said, “That’s because you’re not a dog man, sir.”

  “I should hope not,” he said. “Nor am I cat man or a ferret man or a monkey man or a parakeet man, or a little-white-mouse man. And I would have thought at your age you’d be cured of that childish pet nonsense.”

  “Age has nothing to do with it,” I said. “A dog can mean just as much to an older person as it does to a kid, maybe more. And calling my attitude names doesn’t change anything. I grew up with hunting dogs and you know it; you may even recall a couple of assignments where my familiarity with dogs came in quite handy. As a matter of fact, I picked up a pup on my recent jaunt to Scandinavia. He’s in a training kennel in Texas right now and I hope to take him duck hunting shortly—the season opens in a couple of weeks—and see just what kind of a retriever my Svenska relatives wished off on me. And even though I haven’t had much time to get acquainted with him, I strongly recommend that nobody lift a finger against him, because my reaction would be exactly the same as Bultman’s.” I stared right back across the desk. “You’ll never understand that, sir. You told me once that you were brought up to be afraid of them; and that it gave you a lot of trouble when you had to revise our methods of dealing with attack and guard dogs.”

  Mac said dryly, “To be frank, my attitude is that of the late W. C. Fields: Any man who hates dogs can’t be all bad. A slight exaggeration, but close enough.”

  “As I recall, Fields included children also.”

  Mac disregarded that, frowning at me across the desk.
“You can’t be serious about refusing this mission simply because the target is a fellow dog lover.” When I didn’t respond to that, he went on sharply: “Nobody is asking you to hurt any dogs, Eric! All you have been instructed to do is deal with a dangerous man…”

  “A dangerous man who, crippled and perhaps not altogether well, had retired from being dangerous,” I said. “Okay, let’s pull it all out and look at it, including the parts you neglected to mention. Bultman was living on board his boat, a thirty-two-foot sloop, and doing no harm to anybody—you never know who you’ll find taking off in a boat these days. He was sailing through the Caribbean by easy stages, alone except for his ancient Alsatian bitch. He got caught by the fringe of a hurricane, his boat sustained some damage, and he limped into the nearest port, which happened to belong to a new island nation that’s free of rabies and hopes to stay that way by keeping all strange canines out. Their privilege; but there’s also an ancient tradition about affording refuge to distressed mariners.”

  Mac said, “Just because an arrogant official exceeded his instructions…”

  I said, “We don’t know what his instructions were, sir. Now it’s being claimed that he exceeded them, now that the shit has hit the fan; but that’s the way of governments everywhere. Anyway, under similar circumstances more reasonable countries with the same kind of antirabies regulations just quarantine the dog. Not Islas Gobernador. Those clowns didn’t even give Bultman the choice of putting back to sea with his damaged boat and his four-legged companion. They simply hauled the old lady shepherd onto the dock and shot her to death right under her master’s eyes.” I drew a long breath. “And Herman Heinrich Bultman kept his temper and said sí, señor, and por favor, señor. He got out of there without killing anybody, and I know exactly why. He didn’t just want the few he could get by grabbing one of the machine pistols that are always waving in the breeze in a place like that, and cleaning off the dock with a few well-aimed bursts. Suddenly they’d given him a new purpose in life, something interesting to do in his retirement. Now he’s going to use everything he learned in all his years as a soldier of fortune and professional assassin to carry off one final, efficient, Bultman operation: wiping out, not only the trigger-happy officials who did the job, but the lousy government that put them there to do it.”