What the hell? he thought. If they don't see me coming, they sure are going to hear me coming.
Several minutes after the last pop emanated from the radio set, Pedro Ramirez was sweating. Something was truly wrong. The one good thing, he thought, was that he handled his own security problems himself. An underling, faced with the absence of hard intelligence, might hesitate over disturbing his superior. Whatever the problem was, Pedro Ramirez had a head start on it.
Working the controls that governed the pan-and-scan function of the video cameras, Pedro set them for wider coverage.
The camera showed nothing at first. Not even the guards. It was as if they had vanished. Then Pedro realized a flaw in the system. The cameras pointed straight out. They were not set to scan the sky or the ground. The ground was where his six guards must be. There was nothing in the sky, because the roof-mounted parabolic mikes hadn't picked up helicopter blades and the sun roof was wide enough to reveal parachutists or hot-air balloons.
Pedro Ramirez has everything covered. But still he sweated. He had lots of enemies.
The oak-tree camera caught a momentary glimpse of something. He adjusted the controls, sending the camera in reverse. When it framed the man in black T-shirt and pants, he froze the gear.
Pedro leaned closer to the color monitor. The intruder was as lean as a two-by-four. He had deep-set dark eyes and high cheekbones. He was walking through the mine field so quietly that Pedro thought the mike system was broken, except that it clearly picked up the sound of a squirrel-dropping hitting a leaf. Pedro relaxed a little when he realized the man was alone. What kind of fool would send one man to kill him? He shrugged. Probably the same kind of fool who would go.
Grinning a little, Pedro Ramirez watched the man. He was walking around the mine field in a twisting path. The idiot. Better to run through in a straight line, if one hoped to avoid the mines.
They were beautiful mines, too. They had been deployed during the Vietnam war specifically to decimate small units. The unique design actually did no physical damage to the man stepping on the mine. It was those who surrounded him who were riddled with shrapnel. Usually the man on the mine was so psychologically devastated that he had to be removed from combat. Tactically, that meant no survivors.
Pedro watched as the man tramped through the grass. What were those things he carried? Pedro wondered, noticing what looked like bags. Perhaps filled with hand grenades, he thought. Well, he would not worry about hand grenades until the man got through the mine field, which of course he would not. After all, if an army couldn't penetrate that field, what could one man do? Especially one who kept stopping to test the ground with his feet. A stupid amateur.
Remo stomped again. He hit the area where, according to the map, a mine should be. Nothing happened.
"It's always something!" he said, annoyed. He trird moving to the left. He stomped the grass. Nothing. He moved to the right, and felt, under his gum-soled shoes, the light depression that was the result of rain tamping down the loose earth that had been redeposited over the buried mine. He pressed firmly. He was rewarded with the warning click that would have frozen his blood back in his Vietnam days. Today he grinned.
The explosion sent dirt, rocks, and fire spraying outward. "There," Remo said, lifting one bundle of human heads and talking to them politely. "That wasn't so bad, was it?" The heads didn't reply. But Remo noticed that the eye of one deceased guard had popped open again. His hands were full and he couldn't shut it. Remo pressed on, searching out more mines.
Pedro Ramirez jumped in his cushioned chair. He was learning that antipersonnel mines designed to destroy and demoralize small units were not equal to every task. The idiot was going out of his way to set off every mine in the field. As soon as he stepped on one, he went on to another. The explosions didn't seem to faze him at all-and it was a miracle that the concussion didn't trigger one of the grenades in those bags.
The realization of those potential weapons made Pedro Ramirez think that it would not be long until the man was knocking at his front door.
It was time to go to the defense of last resort. Not even a man who walked with impunity through a mine field could overcome Big Bonsalmo, who stood gleaming by the fieldstone fireplace.
Remo came up on the side of the log cabin, which generated its own electricity, was supplied by a private well, possessed no telephone lines, and technically did not exist. Except that there it stood.
Remo set the heads down on the grass and dug out the cigarette lighter. Lifting up one head, he applied the lighter's flame to the thick oily hair. It caught instantly. Remo let it burn a little, and then flung it toward a window.
The smoked glass shattered on impact.
Remo set two more of the heads on fire and ran around to the back. He tossed one head in an upper window and the other in a lower window. The other heads, blazing like torches, shattered strategic windows on the other side. Remo saved the sixth head for last. He carefully closed its stubborn baleful eyes and, setting it alight, gave it an overhand toss to the roof.
Pedro Ramirez did not fear the smoke. His eyes were shielded and he breathed pure oxygen through a breathing aparatus. He did not fear the grenades that he knew had smashed the windows, although it was taking an awfully long time for them to detonate. The fire bothered him not at all, although it was rapidly spreading. He started for the front door. When he moved, he clanked.
But when the sun roof broke into glittering shards, his heart quailed. The glass bounced harmlessly off and about him. But the thing that landed at his feet was another matter.
It was Santander. His hair was a ball of flame and as it ate into the darkening flesh of his face, one eye twitched open.
Remo watched until the smoke billowed out of every window and chink in the cabin and then walked up to the door, happy to have free hands once again.
He knocked politely. And waited.
Metallic sounds greeted his ears and he wondered for a moment if Upstairs had slipped up. There had been no mention of a midget tank in the briefing.
The door suddenly slapped open and Remo looked up. Remo was tall-about six feet high-but the thing that greeted him was taller by a solid two feet.
It was silvery-gray and plated like an armadillo. It stood on thick legs that ended in clubby feet. The arms hung crooked, like those of an overmuscled gorilla. The head was a box with round glass eyes and a black rubber appendage like an elephant's trunk. The breathing sounds it made resembled those of a hospital respiration machine. "Do your worst!" the thing said hollowly.
"I beg your pardon?" Remo said politely.
"I said do your worst. I'm not afraid of you!"
"Let's take this from the top, shall we?" Remo said. "I'm here to see Pedro Ramirez, millionaire playboy a chief distributor of crack in the western hemisphere. Could you tell him I'm here, Tobor? Or do robots relay messages?"
"Idiot. I'm Pedro Ramirez."
"You?"
"You're here to kill me, no?"
"Actually, I come bearing options," Remo started to say.
"But I can't be killed," said Pedro Ramirez, smashing a mittenlike gauntlet against his thickly plated chest. It made a bell sound. "Not as long as I'm wearing this. It's titanium plate. Stronger than steel. Over it is bullet-proof Kelvar with a Teflon base. Bullets bounce off. Grenades are nothing to me. I'm impervious to poison gas, fire ... you got it, I spit upon it."
"Actually, I was hoping you'd just surrender to the authorities. The government wants to make an example of you."
"You'll never take Pedro Ramirez alive."
"I'll go with option B if I have to," Remo said, shrugging.
"Just try," boomed Pedro Ramirez. "Go ahead, see if anything works. Why don't you try shooting?"
"Shooting?" Remo asked vaguely.
"Yeah, don't tell me the little cockroach forgot his gun."
"Actually," Remo said, patting his pockets, "I'm not sure if I thought to bring a gun. I was really hoping you'd just surrender, especially after I went to all that trouble with your guards. You did notice that."
"Yeah. So what?"
"I thought it would convince you of the error of resistance," Remo said, continuing to pat his pockets. "Guess not," he added weakly.
Out of his back pocket Remo pulled a folded slip of paper. He glanced at it and tossed it away.
"What was that?" Ramirez asked.
"Nothing much. Just the layout of your mine field."
"How did you get hold of that?"