The Great Game (A Captain Gringo Western Book 10) Read online

  It’s all-out war for Captain Gringo in Venezuela!

  Captain Gringo and his sidekick Gaston have left Brazil, and into Venezuela with a load of weapons, seeking a buyer.

  Instead they become involved in a brewing war between the British Empire and The U.S. Gringo must find out who is involved in order to prevent a war... and get out alive!

  RENEGADE 10: THE GREAT GAME

  By Lou Cameron, writing as Ramsay Thorne

  First Published by Warner Books in 1981

  Copyright © 1981, 2016 by Lou Cameron

  First Smashwords Edition: April 2016

  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.

  Cover image © 2016 by Tony Masero

  Visit Tony here

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Mike Stotter

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  The trade winds hit the north-east shoulder of Venezuela cool and scented with the clean iodine tang of tropic seawater. But as they blew inland across sixty miles of the fetid swamplands of the Orinoco Delta the trades grew sluggish and began to smell like a crocodile’s fart. The noonday sun glared down through a malarial haze as the river port of Tucupita dozed by the sluggish coffee brown waters. It was Siesta Time. The shops and cantinas were shuttered and the streets and boardwalks were deserted. Even the stray dogs and chickens had taken shelter from the merciless sun. Tucupita had a police force. A pretty good one, since it was the provincial capital as well as a major Venezuelan port. But like everyone else with a lick of sense, the cops of Tucupita were home taking La Siesta. For who, by the beard of Christ, would be out in the noonday sun?

  Men with serious business, of course. Professional killers tend to ignore discomforts, and La Siesta was the one time they could move a tripod mounted Browning machine gun in broad daylight without having to answer a lot of embarrassing questions. They had to set up their ambush in broad daylight because that was when Captain Gringo’s steamboat would arrive. It was hot sweaty work getting themselves and the machine gun up to the flat roof of a warehouse overlooking the steamboat landing, but when one’s been sent to assassinate the most dangerous man in Latin America, one does not worry about a little sweat. As they hauled the machine gun up on the gravel-topped roof, one of the killers grimaced and said, “Jesus, it’s like a frying pan up here!” But another shrugged and soothed, “Hey, better the frying pan than the fire, eh? He’ll never expect us to be up here on this hot roof.”

  The leader told them to shut up as he directed them to a spot overlooking the steamboat landing. There was a gap in the brick parapet of the roof. The machine gunner and his loader-sidekick carefully positioned the pads of the tripod before lowering the heavy weapon on to it. The gunner sighted down the water jacketed barrel, traversed to cover the probable target area better, and grunted, “Okay, let’s load and lock.” The leader said, “Load but don’t put that gun on safe. The people who are paying us say Captain Gringo and that little Frenchman he hangs about with can both move like spit on a hot stove. I don’t want to give him any possible break. They say he has an annoying habit of taking advantage of any breaks you give him.”

  Another member of the team asked, “Is it true he once turned the tables on a Mexican firing squad, after they had him against the fucking wall?”

  The leader shrugged, trying to ignore the furnace heat against his shoulders as he said, “They say a lot of things about Captain Gringo. After today, they’re going to say he’s dead, if you boys don’t blow a good thing.”

  But despite his words, and the heat, the leader felt goose bumps as he swept his eyes over his ambush, wondering if he’d covered every bet, and remembering what they’d told him about the man he’d been hired to kill.

  There were seven of them up there waiting to ambush Captain Gringo and his sidekick, Gaston Verrier. None were Venezuelan and the leader wasn’t sure the people who’d hired him were, either. The leader was a one-eyed ex-officer of the Hungarian Cavalry who’d learned private parties paid more for his killing skills than the Emperor Franz Josef. The one-eyed Hungarian was backed by his personal pistol-packing bodyguards. The machine gunner and his assistant, along with the rifle-carrying back-up team were expendable. This gave some comfort to the Hungarian, although he was damned if he could see how two men walking into a seven man ambush had a chance in hell.

  One of his bodyguards wiped a sweaty face and said, “That steamboat is late, Chief. Maybe they tied up, somewhere up the river, to wait out La Siesta, huh?”

  The Hungarian fixed his one good eye on the sluggish upstream waters and said, “That’s ridiculous!”

  “This is a ridiculous country, Chief.”

  The leader shook his head and said, “You don’t stop a steamboat to cool off, damn it. The only decent breeze for miles would be the air flowing over the decks as the boat moved through it. I know these greasers all take to the shade from eleven to three, but they have shade on that boat and the paddle wheel does all the work. They do seem to be running a bit late. That’s to be expected in such an uncivilized country. But sooner or later the boat will get here. Thanks to the wonderful new invention of Professor Bell, we know they passed San Felix early this morning, moving downstream with the river high. They’re coming this way, and fast, even if the paddle wheel falls off.”

  As they spoke, a mass of tangled timber from the flooded lands up the river came around the bend they were covering and as it drifted toward the landing the Hungarian smiled thinly and added, “See what I mean? The greasers crewing the boat don’t have to lift a finger to get here. Just sit tight and it’ll soon be over.”

  The machine gunner wiped his own face and pulled the brim of his straw hat lower to shade his eyes as he chimed in, “It’s a good thing this gun is water cooled. I haven’t fired a round and I’ll bet you could brew tea in the jacket right now. I’ve got the muzzle trained between those two mooring poles they’ll drop the gangplank between, Chief. But it’s likely to be a little messy, from this angle. The guys we’re after will be coming down the gangplank with a lot of other people, no?”

  The one-eyed Hungarian shrugged and said, “That’s their problem. The people we work for don’t care one way or the other about innocent bystanders.” He chuckled and added, “It’s too bad we’re not being paid by the head. But our clients want Captain Gringo bad and we’ll just throw the other killings in for good measure.”

  One of the riflemen, picked for having keen eyes, said, “Smoke plume up around the bend, Chief.” And the leader said, “I see it. Get ready, boys.”

  The machine gunner said, “I’ve been ready long enough to die of sunstroke. One question, though. Didn’t you say this Captain Gringo’s with a dame?”

  “Yes, they call her Bubbles and she’s supposed to be great in bed. How did you think the people we work for knew Captain Gringo was aboard that steamboat? Bubbles phoned from Soledad right after she picked him up in the main salon.”

  The machine gunner squinted down his sights with a frown and observed, “Okay, so the dame fingered him for us, and now she’s with him, and he’s coming down the plank into my sights. Has anybody warned her to stay the hell clear of him? This Captain
Gringo guy’s supposed to be good and you only get to miss him once if you want to go on breathing.”

  The one-eyed Hungarian shrugged again and said, “Don’t miss. I told you nobody cared about the others who might be in the line of fire.”

  “Including the dame?”

  “Of course. Who needs her, now that she’s done her job?”

  The machine gunner didn’t answer. Like his assistant, he’d been recruited for the job from among the drifters and adventurers haunting the Banana Lands in the wake of the Great Depression of the ’90s. He knew the one-eyed Hungarian by rep. He had no idea who he, and they, were working for. He’d been promised a fast five hundred for this job, to be split with his partner after they were paid off. He had no idea who this dame, Bubbles, might be, but he could see how she was getting paid off, and it was making him nervous.

  The steamboat came around the bend as the raft of timber proceeding it passed the landing to lose itself downstream in the sweltering jungles of the delta. Below the killers on the rooftop, a couple of cotton-clad dockhands came wearily out on the landing to wait for the steamboat’s shorelines. The one-eyed Hungarian said, “This is it. Remember what I said about doing the job right. The people we’re working for don’t tolerate mistakes and if Captain Gringo gets by us, we’re all dead.”

  ~*~

  Thirty odd miles up the braided Orinoco, Gaston Verrier swore softly and asked, “Well, my old and rare, do you know any other short cuts?”

  Captain Gringo stared morosely at the quarter-mile-wide channel of muddy water they faced to their north and reached for a cigar in his damp shirt as he muttered, “This wasn’t supposed to happen. I looked at the map when we slipped ashore at Barrancas. We’re supposed to be on the fucking north shore of the fucking Orinoco. That’s the main channel back there behind us, right?”

  “If you say so, my mundane explorer. But regardez, we would seem to be lost in a maze of floodwater channels and as I speak my boots are filling with ooze!”

  Captain Gringo lit his smoke, tipped the brim of his panama hat back to ease his sweaty brow, and wiggled his own toes inside their water-filled mosquito boots as he muttered, “Yeah, we’d better backtrack to higher ground and find some shade while we dope this out.”

  His smaller and older comrade gave a startled, goat like laugh and replied, “Higher ground, in the Orinoco Delta? Surely you jest! Damn it, Dick, I told you we had no business getting off that steamboat this far down the river. It’s a maze of islands even in the dry season. Why do you suppose the early Spanish explorers named the country after Venice?”

  Captain Gringo shrugged and led the way through the reedy saw-grass to a tree-covered hammock they’d passed getting this far north. Gaston followed, grousing, “No doubt we’ll meet at least a crocodile and a barrel of snakes amid that thrice accursed brush, but anything is better than this sun. It’s so bright it blinds me just to look around at all this grass!”

  Captain Gringo said, “They don’t have crocodiles down here. They call them caymans, and they eat snakes, so what the hell.”

  “Merde alors, is there any important difference between a crocodile, or a cayman, once it grabs your leg?”

  “No. But we’re both packing guns.” Captain Gringo grinned, as, suiting actions to words, he drew his double action .38 and kept going. Privately, he was more worried about snakes, but he knew his small French sidekick was still moody about that bushmaster who’d bitten him a while back, so he didn’t mention snakes as they approached the shady glen of moss-hung trees ahead. They had to have shade. He was an old enough tropic hand to know it would be getting hotter before it started getting cooler, and it was obvious they weren’t going any farther north until they’d had time to build a raft. Building a raft without machetes was possible, but trying to do it under an afternoon sun down here was suicidal. As he moved up on the low hammock to higher ground and scouted the sandy surface under the trees he saw no obvious reptiles and said so, adding, “We can hole up here until it cools off.”

  Gaston made an unpleasant remark about the tall American’s mother and said, “Sacré Goddam, it never cools off in these lowland swamps. Why do you suppose all the white people dwell in the highlands, Dick?”

  “Look, we don’t have to stay here in Venezuela long enough to raise a family, damn it! I told you we just have to get to Cunama or some other seaport on the north coast and haul ass out of here!”

  Gaston spotted a fallen log, looked over the far side to make sure nothing important was hiding there, and sat down wearily before he snapped, “Species of idiot, we were on our way to a seaport when you took it into your thick blond head to leave the steamboat and flounder through these swamps! You’re crazy, Dick. I have said this many times in the past, but never with such sincerity! They told us on board the river steamer that ocean going ships put in at Tucupita. Tucupita was just downstream and you had a stateroom with hot and cold running Bubbles. But were you content to glide swanlike into Tucupita holding hands with, or shall we say, blowing Bubbles? Mais non, like a madman you grabbed me away from the lady I was working on in the salon and the next thing I knew, here we are, wherever are is! I thought we were going into that river port to buy a drink, or even more ammo. But this is all too fatigue!”

  Captain Gringo found his own log and said, “Shut up, I’m trying to think.”

  “You mean you really think, Dick? At times I have suspected you of being the natural son of Jack in the Box! Don’t you see that by this time the steamboat, and M’selle Bubbles, have arrived in Tucupita, while we, in turn, face an evening with the mosquitoes out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  Captain Gringo blew a smoke ring, stared morosely after it as it drifted in the still hot air, and said, flatly, “Bubbles was a plant. She was waiting for us aboard that steamboat.”

  “Eh bien, that was to be expected. We made a certain amount of noise adventuring through Brazil with its various factions shooting at us. But when we first met the mystery woman you told me she’d said something about wanting to meet you. She was recruiting soldiers of fortune for some action here in Venezuela, non?”

  “Yeah, that’s what she told me while I was kissing her. She said the people she works for wanted to meet me, in Tucupita.”

  “And so we abandoned ship at Barrancas to squish our way to points unknown? I seem to be missing something, Dick. We are soldiers of fortune. We get paid to meet people in places like Tucupita.”

  Captain Gringo took a drag on his cigar, decided it was shitty tasting, and snubbed the cigar out as he explained, “I didn’t like her story. She kept trying to suck me off every time I wanted to get down to the brass tacks.”

  “If you don’t want that Havana Claro, I’ll take it, Dick. I wish you’d told me how tiresome you found the poor child’s oral efforts. I’d have been willing to sacrifice myself for you. She wasn’t a bad looking diversion. A trifle cheap and stupid, perhaps, but—”

  “She wasn’t all that dumb. Nobody could have been. She was setting us up for something, Gaston. The last time I met a gal who screwed with eyes that calculating, she was an Apache squaw Geronimo had sent to lull what he hoped to be a green cavalry officer.”

  Gaston shrugged and said, “I know your habit of reading minds at the most peculiar times, Dick. But what if she was working on you for her boss? If she wanted you to join some outfit down here, she might have simply been trying to offer you some fringe inducements, hein?”

  Captain Gringo shook his head and said, “Take more than she had between her legs to sell me on a revolution down here! I can’t explain how I knew there was more to it than that, but even if she was on the level, we’re still better off out here than mixed up with her and her whatever. I was talking to that guy we met on board who works for the Venezuelan government, remember?”

  “Ah, oui, the man in the white suit.”

  “Bubbles was trying to keep me away from him. That’s when I began to wonder. Anyway, I did get to chat with some of the other pass
engers, when she wasn’t screwing me silly, and the mess they’re about to have down here is not one any soldier of fortune with half a brain cell would touch with a ten foot pole. It’s not the usual fight between the guys who won the last election and the guys who didn’t. It’s big stuff with the Major Powers involved.”

  “Merde, what major power wishes to overthrow the Venezuelan government? What would anyone important do with this bog if they grabbed it?”

  “Nobody wants Venezuela. But Queen Victoria wants a strategic chunk of it. You know the British own Trinidad, and Trinidad lies just off the mouth of the Orinoco, right?”

  “Oui, but what of it? We can’t go to Trinidad. The British have this distressing extradition treaty with our old countries, and a couple of others who may still be looking for us.”

  “Screw Trinidad—I don’t want it. Venezuela doesn’t want it. But Her Majesty likes neat maps. The Venezuelan delta country lies between her offshore Trinidad and British Guiana, here on the mainland to the south.”

  “You call this mainland? But I see the madness in Queen Vickie’s method. The British do have this odd desire to paint the map of the world pink. I take it they are moving north-west from British Guiana to include the delta in their empire?”

  “That’s what the Venezuelans are afraid of. The Royal Navy seems to think controlling the mouth of the Orinoco makes strategic sense or something. They say the local His-panics aren’t strong enough to hold the delta lands if some other Great Power decided to grab it. So, to save everybody a lot of worry, Britain’s going to grab it first, see?”

  “Trés fatigue. But let us be practique. Who is about to stop the Royal Navy if they decide they’d like control of the Orinoco, Dick?”

  “Uncle Sam. El Presidente Cleveland has just told the Royal Navy to keep its royal mitts off the little kids on his block. The Venezuelans I talked to sure hope he means it.”

  Gaston laughed incredulously and replied, “Trés fantastique, Dick! We all know how tiresome your country can be about its Monroe Doctrine, but surely, this time, you Yanks are bluffing, hein?”