The Annihilators Read Online Free Page A

plastic case containing a .300. Holland and Holland Magnum rifle with a heavy target barrel and a twenty-power telescopic sight. You may remember the gun. I’d appreciate it if you’d have it delivered to the armorer. Ask him to check it out carefully. It’s been sitting idle for several years.”
    “Yes, I remember the rifle quite well,” Mac said.
    I said, “Ask the armorer, when he’s overhauled it, to make me up a hundred rounds of fresh ammunition. His records will show the load we worked up for the gun—the hundred-eighty-grain bullet. The particular bullet we used isn’t manufactured any longer, so unless he still has a stock of them, he’ll have to find another with the same expansion characteristics. Remind him that I do not want an armor-plated grizzly-bear bullet that won’t open up on lighter game. The primary target will be a not-very-big human male at extreme range, where the bullet will have lost a great deal of its velocity. I want a slug with a light jacket that’ll expand reliably under those conditions and tear a nice big lethal hole through the sonofabitch. There will be some other targets, but let’s set it up for this one. What with the current rules for interstate shipment of firearms, you’ll have to get the weapon to me by courier. I’ll call later and let you know where.”
    “Very well. Anything else?”
    “That’ll do it for now,” I said. “Thank you, sir. Matt out.”
    I passed the instrument to the girl, who replaced it firmly in its cradle. There was a little silence; then she said, “Do you really think you can frighten us?”
    “Not really,” I said. “Some people are too stupid to be scared. But tell your friends, tell your daddy, that unless Eleanor Brand is returned unharmed, I go hunting. Colonel Jimenez has seen me at work. Ask him if he really wants to be at the wrong end of the rifle that finished
El Fuerte
half a valley away. Tell him that if anything happens to my girl, he can just forget about saving the poor suffering people of Costa Verde. They’ll have to make it on their own because he won’t be around to help them. And neither will you, Miss Lioness, or your brother Mister Wolf, or your friend Mister Bear. Don’t start this thing going, señorita. You can stop it right here. Send back Eleanor Brand, unharmed, and we’ll just forget the whole thing. Hurt her and you’re dead.”
    She looked at me for a moment with those lustrous brown Spanish eyes; and I saw that I had failed. She, a Costa Verde patriot, was not to be intimidated by a little secret-agent foolishness, some menacing ballistic jargon, and a few threats. I had hoped—well, just a little—that she might be bright enough to realize that the last thing their lousy revolution, or counterrevolution, needed was a vengeful sniper in attendance; but she was hypnotized by the pure bright image of Costa Verde freedom that now required a human sacrifice…
    “Good night, Señor Helm,” she said politely, turning toward the door. “I regret that we could not come to an agreement. I regret it very much. And I think you will, too.”
    I watched her go; I gave her a small lead; I went after her. If they had any sense at all, any technique at all, any caution at all, it was useless, but I couldn’t pass up the slightest chance of a break, even if it was no chance at all.
    I made it down four flights of stairs in time to see her go out the front door of the building. I followed the slim figure in the plain black trousers and the elaborate white blouse at a suitable distance. There was a filling station on the corner, closed at this late hour. She stopped at the public telephone there that she’d probably used to call me earlier. I prayed, if you want to call it that, that she was not as impervious to reason as I’d thought, as proud and dedicated and intractable. Maybe she could accept failure. Maybe, standing there at the phone, she was now advising delay, reconsideration. Maybe there would at