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

would have been like if we’d had that kind of weaponry.
    Or if they had it.
    “I could go on, Paul, but you wanted it engraved on the head of a pin. It’s choice stuff, the real dirty stuff. The decision to give it to some friends was ultra-top level. It didn’t make the papers. It never will—if the question ever comes up, we’ll deny we ever had it, we’ll insist they made it out of old tire tubes in Burma, we’ll lie our heads off no matter who says what. Hell, giving the stuff out couldn’t get fifty votes in the House or twenty in the Senate.”
    “Keep talking.”
    “I was just noticing the stars. It’s beautiful out here, isn’t it?”
    “Yes.”
    “Peaceful. I could see how a man could enjoy spending nights here, under the stars, sitting beside a fire—”
    “You made your point, Dattner.”
    “George.”
    “You made your point. Get on with it.”
    He flicked ashes from his cigarette. “You can figure out the rest, can’t you? The shipment was dispatched—not, needless to say, through the usual channels. You can also guess who was supposed to receive it.”
    “The hell I can. I haven’t looked at a newspaper or heard a radio in months. For all I know we sent the crud to Canada.”
    “I forget how out of touch you’ve been.”
    “Not out of touch. Call it—no, forget it, forget word games. Where were they supposed to go?”
    “To guerrillas, and in this hemisphere, and now you can guess, Paul, because it’s the same guess you would have made a year ago. You with me?” I was. “But instead of going where they were supposed to go, a wheel came off and they wound up in the wrong hands. At first it looked as though they were going to go to the bad-guy government that our good-guy guerrillas were trying to overthrow, and that would have been more or less terrible, but it turned out that it was worse than that. A lot worse, because we could have made a good stab at blocking that shipment.”
    He put his cigarette in the fire. “Instead it turns out that the new destination of all this hell on wheels is yet another group of guerrillas, but in this instance they’re bad-guy guerrillas who’ll use them to knock hell out of a good-guy government. Four truckloads of this garbage is just about enough to do it, too, but it hardly matters whether they win or lose, because the U.S.A. loses either way. If they make it, we’ve lost the cornerstone of free Latin America. If they flop, a lot of people will want to know what happened. It won’t even help us to deny that these were our goods, not even if anybody’s fool enough to believe us. Because then people will ask how the hell we managed to let the enemy smuggle dynamite like this into the western hemisphere. Did I say dynamite?” He snorted. “It’s about time we changed our lingo. Dynamite is something kids use to celebrate the Fourth of July. Where was I?”
    “If we lose we lose, and if we win we lose.”
    “That says it. There’s only one way to come out of this clean. We have to get the shipment back before delivery is made.”
    “Or prevent delivery.”
    “Isn’t that the same thing?”
    “Not really. If the object is to prevent delivery, all you have to do is destroy it. If it’s in trucks you drop bombs on them. If it’s on a ship you sink it. If it’s in a plane you shoot it down. It sounds like a job in the Air Force, doesn’t it?”
    He grinned. “This stuff is nuclear, remember? You blow it up and you have fallout.”
    “So you say Sorry about that and explain that it won’t happen until next time.”
    “Even if it’s in a friendly country?”
    “Even if it’s in London.”
    “And suppose it’s in the United States. Then what?”
    I stared at him.
    “Because that’s where it’s at, Paul. It’s in the midwest right now, smack in the Heartland of America, as the fellow says. We know the location and we know the players on the other team. We know how they’re going to ship it. We can even make a hell of a