All three of them were near the lead mule, bunched.
"You can live or die," Carter said, low and hard.
They reacted as one, hands clawing for pistols and rifles.
Carter cut the first one nearly in half with a figure eight from the Galil's snout, men tracked right on to number two. He bought it with a fist-sized pattern of 5.56s in his gut.
Pomroy got off one slug that zinged the air where Carter had been. But Carter had already lunged to his right, hit, rolled, and come up firing.
Resignation seemed to fill Pomroy's face just before a solid burst worked its way up over his chest and tore most of his head off.
Carter stood, breathing deeply.
The beach was silent now. Once again only the gentle lapping of the Caribbean broke the stillness.
One by one he gathered up the dead.
There was not a shred of ID on any of them, not even on Pomroy, but that was no more than Carter expected.
Pomroy had five thousand American dollars in big bills and what looked to be a map.
Carter pocketed the money and the map. and then photographed the faces that were still intact enough to be recognizable.
When that was done, he rolled all of them into the pit they had dug to bury the crates.
Weird, he thought, but poetic. They had dug their own grave.
Next he unloaded the mules and wrote down a complete inventory of the arms. When this was done, he dumped everything in the pit on top of the bodies. Then he moved back into the trees to collect the one he had clouted, the one the others had called Tito.
The man was gone.
Somehow he had managed to pull himself together and move out. Carter tracked him over a mile inland to a narrow, one-lane dirt road.
He hadn't quite made it to a one-and-a-half-ton, canvas-covered truck.
Carter checked. The pulse was gone, and he saw why. A blue-black lump just behind his ear had ruptured with the exertion of his run. Had he stayed put, the concussion would have partially passed. As it was, he practically killed himself.
Carter took a quick photo of his face and carried him back to the pit. It took him two more hours to fill in the gaping hole and make the beach look as if it had never been disturbed.
Completely finished at last, he headed inland at a fast jog. It was almost dawn when he reached the jeep and headed out.
All in a night's work, he thought, lighting a cigarette.
But somehow, in the back of his mind, he knew that there would be a phase two.
Three
Carter stood, silently surveying the table piled high with photos and documents. He was dressed in tan slacks and shirt under a lightweight safari jacket. To his right was David Hawk, and on his left, an undercover operative from Spanish internal security, Ramon Cubanez.
They were in the basement of the National Palace in Madrid, Spain. This section of the basement was the enclave of a special task force that had been set up in the last year to halt Spain's internal terrorist activities.
It all fit, loosely, but it did fit.
Identities had been made from the photos of the dead men. Two of them had been made as members of a Basque revolutionary movement. The rest were Latinos for Freedom members.
Through a lot of groundwork, they had come up with the method whereby the Latinos meant to pay for the arms.
Assassination.
But who? That, for the moment, had them stumped.
"All right," Hawk growled, an unlit cigar clamped tightly in his chiseled jaw. "Let's go over the whole damned thing again."
A six-man suicide squad had been dispatched from South America even before Carter had ruined the arms delivery. Their final destination was Spain, but where? Spain was a big country.
The fact that they were in the country and had their target was enough. Just because their arms delivery had been screwed up would not stop them from fulfilling their part of the bargain. It was a face-saving kill.
But again the questions. Who? And where?
The map, a scaled-down version of the area around the Manzanal Mountains in northwestern Spain, was a clue.
"My guess is," Hawk said, "that the map you lifted is the key."
"I agree," Carter said, nodding, "but there is nothing there but wilderness and three tiny villages. I doubt that the Basque terrorists would go to all the trouble of bringing in outside guns to kill a local small-town mayor or police official."
"I think you are right," Ramon Cubanez said. "Although they have done it before, I do not think that is the case now."
The Spaniard had barely finished speaking, when the beeper on his belt went off.
"Let us hope this is it," he said, already heading for the door.
Carter and Hawk stood, silent with their own thoughts, until the man returned.
"We might have it," Cubanez said, beaming. "The target could be Julio Mendez, and the place could be… here!"
Cubanez stabbed a finger at the map in the center of the table.
The young Spaniard's fingernail was resting on a place called Pakolo.
The sun beat down on the dusty street like a blowtorch from the blue-domed sky.
The intelligence on Pakolo had been right on the nose.
High in the Manzanal Mountains, the tiny village seemed as if it had sprouted from another world, an ancient one. Adobe shacks with tin roofs spread randomly over jagged hills and hung precariously on steep cliffsides.
In the village proper, narrow alleys ran like frightened serpents from the main, dirt street.
The hotel was four tiny rooms above a bar. It fronted what served as the village square. From where Carter sat, sipping thick coffee, a false-fronted line of small stores faced him on the other side of the square. Beyond these, more tin-roofed shacks ambled up a steep hilt to the Catholic church and a small monastery nearby.
The square itself was a fifty-by-fifty area that contained the only grass in sight. In its center sat a statue of some long-forgotten hero, and beside it a small platform had been erected.
It was from this platform that Julio Mendez would make his plea for votes in…
Carter's chronometer read 1140 hours.
In twenty minutes, give or take.
Beneath the light safari jacket, the short-sleeved shirt he wore stuck fast to his skin with perspiration. Sweat also ran freely between the skin of his right leg and the 9mm Luger strapped to it.
Just to the left of the rickety porch where Carter lounged, sat the jeep he and Ramon Cubanez had driven up from Astorga the night before. Beneath its two front jump seats, under a sheet of canvas, was a 9mm Beretta Model 12. The sub was carrying a forty-round feeder, and two more full magazines nestled under Carter's armpits beneath his jacket.
Using that model had been at the instigation of Ramon Cubanez. It was light, 6.6 pounds, short, a little over sixteen inches with the stock folded, and it delivered at 550 rpms for good accuracy up close.
But Cubanez had an even more elemental reason for its use.
"The Model Twelve is popular among terrorists in Spain. If we use them and all does not go according to plan, no one can come down on my government for wanton killing. It will be construed as terrorist faction against terrorist faction."
And therein, as far as they could figure it, was the heart of the caper.
Cubanez's department had pieced everything together once they guessed that Julio Mendez was the target and that the tiny village of Pakolo was to be his place of execution.
The Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna — or ETA — had long been the Basque revolutionary movement for independence from Spain. Recently, the leadership within the ETA had split on philosophy.
One side — headed by Julio Mendez — wanted a halt in the use of terrorism and wanton killing. The other side wanted terrorism in Spain escalated.