Read The Ambushers for Free Online Page A

killed El Fuerte half a kilometer away. May I take it to him?”
    “Sure,” I said. After all, it was government property. I had no further use for it, and I was sure that a gift to cement inter-American relations would meet with official approval. “Sure. Take it. On one condition.”
    “And that is?”
    “That you or one of your men carry the heavy old bastard out of here. It almost broke my back on the way up.”
    He laughed quickly, and we were friends again, or as close as we were likely to come with our different backgrounds.
    “You are muy hombre, Señor Helm,” he said. “If there have been misunderstandings, I apologize. You are much man.”
    I said, “Good night, Colonel. It’s too bad you couldn’t learn to shoot as a junior officer. I think you’d have made a swell general.”
    In the morning everything was quiet. We started down the hill, carrying Sheila on an improvised stretcher, since she proved incapable of making it under her own power. In the late afternoon, without incident, we reached the river. In the evening, the landing craft came along to pick us up and take us downstream and out to the ship.
    It was a practically perfect operation in every respect, I thought. Two days later I was in Washington learning otherwise.

5
    After a week of it, I wasn’t very eager to get back to the second-floor office on Monday morning and find out from Mac what else I’d done wrong, so I did my duty and visited the recognition room in the basement, as we’re supposed to do whenever we’re in Washington. I went through the files, refreshing my memory about the people in our line of business considered important enough to be given a certain priority. I read up on Dickman, Holz, Rosloff, Vadya, and Basil, all nice people who’d kill you as soon as look at you.
    There were some old names missing, the ones we’d caught up with here and there or somebody had; and there were some new ones who’d just graduated to priority status. Reading about their latest accomplishments made me feel much better. It was like reading about old friends getting up in the world. These were people you could count on, unlike the supercilious sons of bitches in the Pentagon and State Department and elsewhere in this lousy town that had probably been a fine swamp before some fool decided to drain it.
    Mac didn’t disappoint me. He had a new list of criticisms some bright lad in spats had thought up on the golf course over the weekend. Well, I guess I’m being unfair. I don’t believe they really play golf in spats. I stood at the window and looked down at the sunlit street, listening. The girls walking past below looked fresh and pretty in their gay summer dresses or tight, bright pants. They were probably nice enough girls, I reflected. It was unreasonable to dislike them because they’d never seen a man killed, or a woman broken by brutality and systematic degradation.
    I said without turning my head, “Goddamn it, sir, if it was intelligence they wanted, why the hell didn’t they apply to the CIA? I went down there to shoot, not to take notes and photographs. Have they made up their minds what we’re dealing with yet?”
    Mac rustled some papers on his desk. “Your description apparently fits the Rudovic III or IV,” he said. “That is a miniaturized version of the other side’s best intermediate range ballistic missile with some very interesting developments that give it almost the range of the larger prototype. The differences between the two models are internal, affecting the propulsion system and the type of solid fuel used. The later model has a range of some sixteen hundred miles, according to our best information, which isn’t very good. The previous model was supposed to have a twelve-hundred-mile range. It is probable, but not certain, that it was the older Model III that was lent to Castro, one of which he hid out and passed on, perhaps to get it off his hands before his Russian friends learned about it.”
    I