The Deadliest Game (A Soldier of Fortune Adventure #2), page 1
part #2 of Soldier of Fortune Series
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Professional soldier Jim Rainey went to Argentina because that’s where the action was. Communist terrorists were forcing the Government to hire mercenaries—but only the toughest fighting men needed to apply. With six wars under his belt, Rainey signed on—at $2000 a month—as the leader of a special seek and destroy squad. His orders: take no prisoners.
It was dirty, dangerous work … but Rainey loved it.
SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 2: THE DEADLIEST GAME
By Peter McCurtin
First published by Tower Books in 1976
Copyright 1976, 2022 by Peter McCurtin
First Electronic Edition: May 2022
Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.
This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book
Series Editor: David Whitehead
Text © Piccadilly Publishing
Published by Arrangement with the Author Estate.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
About the Author
Chapter One
IT WAS HELLISH hot in Buenos Aires.
Along the Avenida 9 Julio the pavement burned the feet of pedestrians through the soles of their shoes, and ceiling fans in the mestizo bars and cafes only made the bake-oven air more oppressive with its movement against flushed faces, and any porteno with two pesos to rub together had already left for a long weekend in the back country. The paraiso and jacaranda trees inflamed the boulevards around the Casa Rosada, but there was no one about to admire them in the heat. Further out, in the shanty towns hugging the perimeter of the city, desperate peones roasted alive in their corrugated-iron huts, unemployed and hungry, trying to rationalize a way to blame the government for the inferno summer, while black vultures squatted hulking on the metal roofs and waited for the sun and the poverty to kill something.
At the War Ministry annex in La Boca, though, not far from the Teatro Caminito on the closed street called Vuetta de Rocha, a slow fuse of intrigue was burning that had considerably more potential for trauma to the siesta-lulled civil servants there than the sun’s fiery violence. It was when I first arrived at that small and innocuous building at around 3.30 p.m., to meet an old comrade in arms there, that I first noticed the subtle signs that something explosive was brewing that as yet had not come to the attention of the Ministry employees in their hot offices.
I had come to the annex to lure Burt ‘Gringo’ Quinlan away from his siesta for an hour or two of serious drinking at a nearby cantina before the afternoon was gone. Quinlan was employed in the annex by a sub-department of the Ministry to advise on matters of intelligence—he had been with the American Army’s CIC in early days—and to encode private missives that shuttled back and forth between various offices of the War Ministry. Quinlan and I had had some close calls together in a recent military dispute in Asia, where we were on the same side of a confrontation between two well-armed military units of mercenary soldiers. The fact is, I wage war for other people and fight their fights for a living and Quinlan gets into that kind of thing occasionally, too. Neither of us have ever cared much which side of a political squabble we are on, just so long as the pay is right.
On that hot afternoon in Buenos Aires, though, I was between wars, so to speak, and the last thing I was looking for was trouble. But it seems that quite often that is the time it finds you.
My first hint that something was wrong at the annex was the presence of a grim-faced, dark-suited young man standing just inside the entrance of the building as I entered. He was a swarthy fellow with coal-black eyes and a small scar on his chin, and he kept his right hand underneath his long suit jacket, where he was holding on to something bulky. But it was the way he watched me pass him that aroused my curiosity the most. He was very defensive. Further along the corridor, down towards the rear end of it, another man stood, also trying to look inconspicuous but not succeeding. This one was mumbling something as I approached, even though there was no one near him, and he quit when he saw me coming.
It was then that I recalled the recent violent outbreaks of terrorism in Buenos Aires and Cordoba, most of which was attributed to a political group of extremists called the Cordoba Committee, and it dawned on me that Buenos Aires could be as dangerous as a battlefield, if you got caught at the wrong place at the wrong time. I remembered then that this annex employed almost no military personnel as such, but mostly civilian Ministry office workers, and that there were no guards here, and no guns.
I moved past the second man, and he eyed me darkly, and then I was at the end of the corridor, where Gringo Quinlan worked. I had been there on the previous day, when we had got all the greetings and back-slapping over with, and I had suggested the follow-up meeting, that afternoon. I entered the large room that was crowded with desks and file cabinets and saw that most of the employees had vacated it during siesta in preference for an employee lounge on the second floor of the building. Such, I guessed, would also be the case with the other offices along the main floor. Only two people, a young shirt-sleeved man and a middle-aged woman, had stayed at their desks; and the young man was asleep on his chair. I found Quinlan in his cubicle office on an end wall, with his feet on his desk and nursing a tin cup with tequila in it.
Quinlan grinned widely when he saw me. He was not quite as tall as me, but he was thick-shouldered under the sport shirt with a tie pulled down at the neck. He had balding hair and lines around his eyes and was perhaps ten years my senior, but he was in great shape, and I knew he hated desk work.
‘Hey, Rainey!’ he greeted me. ‘Pull up a chair and we’ll have an appetizer before heading out into that blazing sun.’
I returned the grin, pulled a dilapidated chair up to the corner of the desk, and leaned across a pile of code papers. ‘Is there anything special going on at the annex today?’
Quinlan regarded me quizzically. ‘Special? Hell, nothing we can’t improve on at the El Caballito Blanco down the street. It’s the best place in town for—’
I held my hand up easily. ‘I don’t mean that. You having any special conferences here today, or special visitors?’
His brow furrowed. ‘Well, yeah, Rainey. As a matter of fact, a Ministry of Interior official named Padron is here for a while this afternoon. Talking about some joint facility somewhere out in the boondocks, I hear. Why?’ He got another tin cup out of a desk drawer and poured out some tequila for me.
It was hot in the cubicle. I wiped at my forehead, and ignored the tin cup. ‘Is this Padron of any importance politically?’
Quinlan narrowed his dark blue eyes on me. ‘God, I don’t know. He made a public stand recently against the Commie Cordobists, that’s all I know about him.’
I felt my face settling into straight lines, and I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Inside my light-weight worsted suit jacket, I noticed the sudden weight of the Star .45 automatic pistol resting in its leather holster. I had learned to carry it with me almost always, in the parts of the world I had chosen to move about in, like some people go to church every Sunday no matter what the weather or how they feel. It was a kind of insurance policy against the unknown.
‘Do you know when he’ll be leaving the building?’ I now asked.
Quinlan was beginning to be bored. ‘What the hell, Rainey, you taken to spying for the extremists?’
I leaned further over the pile of papers. ‘Do you know, Quinlan?’
He made a face. ‘I suppose the meeting would be over with just about any time now. The biggies don’t honor siesta. What the hell does all this have to do with our going out and getting drunk?’
‘Do you have a gun?’ I asked somberly.
Now he really gave me a look. ‘Sure, in the desk. But what do I want a gun for? We going to shoot our way into the El Caballito Blanco?’
I ignored the joke and replied quickly and quietly. ‘There are two men in the building. Maybe more. I don’t think they have legitimate business here.’
‘So …?’ Quinlan said.
‘So one of them is hiding what could be an automatic rifle under his coat.’ Quinlan set the tin cup down carefully, and his face changed. ‘The other one was using a walkie-talkie of some kind.’
Quinlan just stared at me for a moment. I could feel the sweat creeping down my side, under my suit, and a fly buzzed around my head. Somewhere outside the big office, a radio played some Spanish music. Quinlan rose carefully from the chair behind the desk, and I stood with him. Then he was suddenly galvanized into action. He grabbed a Colt Cobra .38 Special revolver out of the desk. ‘Where are they?’ he asked tensely.
I drew the Star aut
Quinlan left the cubicle and ran to a window on an outside wall. The woman across the room saw the gun in his hand, and her mouth fell open. Quinlan stuck his head out the open window and looked towards the front of the building. When he ducked back in, there was new excitement in his square face. ‘Two more out on the corner! One looking at a watch. The other guarding something under a raincoat on his arm. The sky is cloudless.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ I said.
‘Let’s get out there,’ Quinlan said, brushing past me.
‘No, the phone. Call and warn Padron back. Where is he, in one of the private offices upstairs?’
Quinlan nodded, and stopped at a desk and grabbed a phone, putting the Colt down a moment. The woman had risen and was staring towards us. ‘Que pase?’ she muttered. The young man had opened his eyes and was yawning widely. Quinlan punched an inter-office number while I strode to the door to the corridor. The fellow who had been speaking into a hidden mic was no longer there. I went out into the corridor and looked down towards the front entrance. There was a small crowd of employees down there now. I turned back to Quinlan, and he was heading towards me with the Colt.
‘We missed him. He’s on his way down.’
We started down the corridor at a run. Now I could see the fellow with the hidden gun, on the near side of the knot of people. No one had noticed him. And down the front stairs came a group of three men.
‘That’s him!’ Quinlan said. ‘Padron and the department head!’
I was ahead of Quinlan, the Star automatic in my hand. The fellow with the hidden gun was now unbuttoning the loose-fitting suit coat, and now I could see several dark-suited men on the small portico outside the front entrance. There was no doubt in my mind now. There was going to be a shooting. I could smell it in the air.
‘Get back!’ I yelled towards the descending officials. ‘Get to hell back!’ Then I remembered my Spanish. ‘Pare! Alto!’
The group of three on the stairs—Padron, the annex chief and an assistant—glanced towards me, then stopped on the last step to the corridor. The fellow who had been unbuttoning his coat now whirled towards Quinlan and me with an AK-47 automatic rifle magically in his hands. But he did not waste any ammo on us. He quickly whirled back towards the officials, aiming the big gun towards them and the group of employees at the bottom of the stairs. The men who had been on the portico, three of them, now blustered into the big wide doorway, one carrying another AK-47 Kalashnikov rifle and the others with sidearms. The one with the AK-47 was in the fore, and he now also zeroed in on Padron and his party and the group between them and him.
‘Hold it!’ I yelled towards them. I stopped and knelt, holding the automatic pistol out at arm’s length before me. Quinlan came up on the other side of the corridor, leaning on it now to steady his aim. The annex chief had now seen the guns, and he grabbed at Padron and pulled him off his feet and they both went falling to the corridor floor among the annex employees, just as the fellow on our side of the group let loose with the AK-47.
There was an ear-ringing banging in the corridor then, as the rifle clattered off its rounds. The slugs punched across the group at the bottom of the stairs and ripped into legs, hips and torsos. One girl was hit in the side of the head in front of the left ear and part of her face was blown away as she pirouetted off her feet into the knot of people beside her. There was a lot of screaming and yelling suddenly, and the smell of acrid gun smoke. I squeezed off two rounds at the side of the nearby gunman, and hit him in the low ribs and then under the arm. While he was still reacting to that trauma, his arms flying outwards, the AK-47 flung awkwardly from his grasp, a slug from Quinlan’s Colt punched him hard in the chest, over the heart. He hit the floor on his side and slid heavily into the small crowd of injured and fallen employees there at the stairs.
Padron had not been hit, but one of the AK-47’s slugs had smashed the annex chief’s right shin, and he was yelling loudly, rolling on the floor. As I sprinted down towards the front entrance, leaping the fallen figures of several of the wounded and the dead gunman, the other AK-47 went off, and one from the pistols of the two backup men. There was more of the loud banging in the corridor, and flashes of fire from the muzzle of the deadly AK-47, as the terrorists tried to shoot past the panicky knot of employees to get to Padron and the annex chief. There was more yelling as three more annex employees went down, at least one dead with a hole in the side of his head you could stick your fist into. There was shrill screaming from the women present, and an attempt to get out of the line of fire by scrambling, away in any direction. Padron started to get up, in panic, and I yelled towards him, over the sound of the clamorous gunfire.
‘Get down, damn it!’
There was another burst of automatic fire, and the slugs were flying everywhere. Padron was hit in the thigh, and the grey-haired annex chief was struck in the belly, and I figured it would be fatal. I leaned against the wall, aimed at the chest of the man with the AK-47, and fired off one round very carefully. The gun banged loudly in my hand, kicking upwards, and the fellow with the big gun jumped backwards as if someone had pulled a rag out from under him. He fell heavily against his nearest companion, and they both went down, the AK-47’s barrel smashing into the face of the other man as they went.
There was a lot of yelling now.
‘Pare!’
‘Madre de Dios!’
‘They will kill us all! Oh, God!’
‘Please, don’t do it!’
‘The gun is silenced!’ when the AK-47-man went down.
The fellow with the big gun tried to get to his feet, despite the mortal hit, and I put another slug in him, just beside the heart where it would explode the aorta. He hit the floor on his back, lying in his own blood. The fellow he had knocked down swore loudly, fired a shot off at me that just missed my head, and then started running after the third man towards the street, jumping down the portico steps. Quinlan had been hit in the arm by a stray bullet, and was off his feet. The Interior official Padron huddled against the dying annex chief, his light-colored suit trousers crimson-smeared, watching me wide-eyed as I moved quickly to the big doorway, knocking a still-standing white-shirted criollo aside as I went. The first terrorist had reached the street and was piling into a waiting military-type vehicle there, but the one who had fired at me was only halfway there. I laid the Star .45 on my left forearm for balance, found his back in my sights, and fired.
The dark-suited figure took a swan dive on to its face, sliding first along the concrete walk and then tumbling head over heels to a thumping stop. A leg jerked hard at the pavement and then he was dead.
The car did not wait to recover the fallen man. With a squealing of rubber, it roared away, a last single shot banging out towards me as it went. A moment later it swerved around a corner and was out of sight.
I turned back to the interior, and it was ugly. The three office workers who were unhurt were now all standing and just staring at the fallen, but the girl of the three looked as if she might pass out at any minute. In addition to Padron and the annex chief on the floor, there were five others down, including the chief’s assistant, who was hit in the right hand. His boss was now dead, fatally gut-shot. Padron held his wounded leg and regarded those around him balefully. Besides the young woman with her face blown away, there was a middle-aged man with about twenty slugs in him. He had been raked twice across the chest and abdomen, and his blood stained the tiled floor in a wide area. Two other younger men had been hit in the legs and hips but were alive.
Padron looked to me from the dead department head beside him. ‘He is dead,’ he said numbly. ‘They killed him.’
‘It’s all over now,’ I told him. I turned to the most composed of the young men near me, the uninjured ones, ‘Call an ambulance.’
‘What?’ he said, staring at me with opaque eyes.
‘I said, call an ambulance. Now.’
He nodded blankly. ‘Yes. An ambulance.’ He turned limply and disappeared into a nearby office to make the call.
