Read Online Such Men Are Dangerous by Lawrence Block - Free Book Online Page A

could use the fire to dry my clothes.”
    “It doesn’t work. The sun will dry them in the morning.”
    “I’m staying overnight, then?”
    “Did you have other plans?”
    He laughed. I thought he was going to say something, but he didn’t. He finished his cigarette and was going to flick the butt away. Then he remembered and put it in the fire. That pleased me.
    I said, “Okay.”
    He looked at me.
    “Let’s hear about the operation.”
    “The what?”
    “The Agency thing, the job,” I said patiently. “The reason you’re here. Don’t look surprised. You finally found the right bait, you shouldn’t pretend to be shocked that there’s a fish on the line. You’re trying not to smile. Go ahead and smile. And then tell me all about it.”

SIX
    “P ICTURE A N A RMS shipment,” Dattner was saying. “All U.S. government-issued goods, nothing but the best. The government wants to send them to friends. Instead the bad guys get them.”
    “So?”
    “So the idea is to get them back.”
    I looked at him. “That’s all?”
    “No, of course not, Paul. I just—”
    “Because it doesn’t make any sense. It happens all the time. If I had a dime for every American in Vietnam shot with a U.S.-made gun … a dime, hell, if I had a grain of sand for every one I’d have a beach. It happens everywhere, all over the world. We send guns to guerrillas and the government forces confiscate them. We supply government troops and the guerrillas steal them. Most of the time it’s a case of a government official going bad and turning a fast dollar. Other times the weapons are taken in military action.”
    “And we never try to recover them?”
    “If we do, I never heard about it.”
    “We make a stab at it once in a while, Paul. Mostly we try to buy them back, and you’d be surprised how often it works. But as a general rule you’re absolutely right. Shipments get derailed and it’s part of the game, and we have plenty of factories turning out plenty of guns, and it’s easier to make new guns than chase the old ones. By the time the enemy gets them, they’re generally obsolete, anyway.”
    “So?”
    “So this is different.”
    He picked up a cigarette and made a production of lighting it. He was waiting for me to ask him how it was different. Then he could tell me that was a good question, and I could say—
    What I said was, “Just tell it straight. There are no points given for suspense and dramatic effects. Just tell it.”
    “The direct approach, eh? But sometimes a straight line isn’t the shortest distance between two points. Sometimes a great circle route—”
    “Not here. Not on my island.”
    A smile, a nod. “Okay. To hell with drama. This isn’t ordinary weaponry, conventional stuff. We’re talking about a shipment that’s worth in excess of two million dollars and fits into four trucks. We’re talking about the most highly sophisticated combat devices ever produced for guerrilla warfare. I don’t have to tell you about guerrilla warfare. You had ten years of it. All I have to say is that this gear makes the stuff you used in Asia look like water pistols. They didn’t give you fellows toys like this. They’ve been making them all along, but they were never okayed for combat use. Not because they don’t work. The testing reports would knock you out. But because nobody would buy escalation on that scale.
    “Like atomic grenades, for example. One man throws one and clears three acres. Like nuclear mortars. Gas grenades. Do you realize what you’ve got when you can combine the knockout power of a nuclear blast with the maneuverability of a mortar? Do you realize how effective they’d be against guerrillas? Or how well they’d work for guerrillas?”
    “The real dirty stuff.”
    “Right.”
    “We kept hearing rumors that we were getting stuff like that. Or that the other side was.” I remembered a tangle we had in Laos on a patrol deep in Pathet Lao territory. I tried to imagine what it