Operation Fireball (15 page)

“If it’s fatal, help yourself,” Erikson said curtly.

He slipped his arms into the haversack straps and led the way from the basement. We returned to the opened window on the mezzanine, swarmed down the ladder, and returned to the truck after collapsing the extension. The driver’s hands were shaking as he took the ladder from us and relodged it on the truck roof. Once on the ground, Erikson never let Slater get behind him.

Erikson and I got into the back of the truck again. The driver waited while the headlights of a patrol jeep lazily moving through the area disappeared. Then the truck lurched forward, rolled across the grass, and bounced down onto the roadway with a rasp of ancient springs. The driver put the lights on. “Drive out the airport road,” Erikson ordered him. “We’ll—”

Behind us a siren screamed and a searchlight bounced off the truck, illuminating even the interior. “A Fidelista patrol,” the driver breathed. His voice was a prayer.

“They had us staked out,” Erikson said without emotion. “Wilson talked under torture.” He drew his gun.

I took the butt of mine and knocked out the glass on the street side of the panel. We were racing wide open up a broad boulevard, swaying from side to side, but the jeep gained rapidly on the old truck. The siren sounded again as it came alongside. I put my arm out the window and tried to line up the driver’s head. I had to thread a needle to get the bullet past a soldier standing up on the front seat. Just as I squeezed off the trigger a long burst from a machine gun in the hands of the standing soldier hosed down the front of the truck.

I turned my head in time to see the driver slump down over the wheel with the top of his skull gone. Puffs of dust hemstitched Slater’s uniform shirt from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. Erikson lunged over the back of the seat to grab for the steering wheel. The searchlight disappeared, and I looked out the window. The jeep was careening in a wide arc across the boulevard. It smashed head-on into a building wall and disintegrated.

Erikson had forced himself into the front seat beside the driver’s body while keeping the truck under control. He opened the door and the body dropped out onto the road. The truck’s motor was coughing and spitting. “Took a piece of lead somewhere,” Erikson said, and steered into an alley.

When he saw it was a dead end, he tried to back out again, but the engine quit altogether. He went to the front of the truck and threw up the hood. I got out and opened the door on Slater’s side. He was huddled together with his arms wrapped around himself, and his eyes were already glazing. “No … damn … luck,” he got out painfully. “You’ll have … to kill him … like I planned. He’s … Treasury agent.”

I thought he was delirious. “Who’s a Treasury agent?”

“Karl … Erikson.” Slater swallowed with difficulty. A tiny bubble of blood appeared at one corner of his mouth. “Government … got me … out of Joliet … not prison … break. How … you think … we got through … U.S. part … Gitmo … so easy?”

I thought of Erikson’s continual checking of his watch as though he’d been running on a schedule. I thought of his insistence that no U.S. personnel be killed. And I thought of how easily he had gotten rid of the White Pine County deputy in San Diego.

Blood was dripping down Slater’s chin. “Newspaper … clipping … faked,” he gasped. “Like … tape recording. Treasury … want recover … money … or destroy.” His voice rose a notch. “Gettin’ … dark—”

I drew my .38 again and walked around to the front of the truck. Erikson was listening to the motor, which he had running again after a fashion. “Hello, Mr. Treasury Agent,” I said.

The stare he turned upon me was the iciest I had ever encountered. “Would it make any difference if I were a Chinese Maoist so far as our getting off this island alive is concerned?”

I argued with myself for a long moment before I put the .38 away. When I went back to Slater, he was dead. We took the body from the truck and laid it alongside a building. Erikson got under the wheel, backed out of the alley, and the truck limped along the highway at twenty miles an hour.

“The tank park’s next,” Erikson said. “If we don’t find a command tank with a radio—” he didn’t finish.

I had lost my bearings during the chase, but Erikson knew where he was going. “We’re a block away,” he said finally, parking the truck. “A lot is going to depend on how well this place is guarded. They shouldn’t be worried about anyone stealing tanks, though. Including us.”

“You think the jeep had time to put out a description on this truck?”

“I doubt it. That was a fast bit of action.” He glanced at me. “Wasn’t it convenient that the driver caught it so you didn’t have to eliminate him to make sure Melia got to keep that last bit of money you gave her?” I didn’t answer him.

We came up on the open area I had seen with Wilson that first afternoon. My heart sank at the sight of it. There was a well-lit front gate with a soldier carrying a carbine standing to one side of it. In the fringes of the gate floodlights I could see the barbed wire extending in both directions.

“Rough,” I said. “In the daylight it looked deserted.”

“That wire isn’t meant to stop anyone,” Erikson said. “The strands must be a foot apart. It’s just a deterrent to Cuban civilians.” He turned the corner and drove along a darker street. “We’re lucky this is a tank storage area and not a full-fledged motor park with gas pumps, a repair garage, and a motor maintenance office. That would be really well-guarded.”

From the side street the interior of the open area was dimly lit by bare bulbs under coolie-hat reflectors atop wide-spaced telephone poles. Another corner turned brought us to the rear of the park, which was darker yet. “There they are,” Erikson said. I stared at a dozen low, bulky silhouettes.

Erikson parked a hundred yards away on another side street. “We’ve got to conserve gas,” he explained. “Although there’s got to be at least one more guard inside and I’d like to circle again and try to spot him. Can’t do it, though.”

“So what now?”

“We walk back and slip inside the rear area through the wire. Look for a tank with a pennant flying from its antenna. That means a liaison radio inside.”

It reminded me of something that had been disturbing me. “I asked you this before. What makes you think one of these tank radios can push the signal that far?”

“I’ll change my answer. It may not, but friends of mine will be listening for the signal, too. If it sounds weak, they’ll amplify it so Hazel can’t miss it.”

“Lovely. I suppose your friends are on a battleship a few miles offshore?”

“Not a battleship.”

His coolness riled me. “Why don’t you just have an LST run up on the beach and pick us up?”

“The U.S. Government is not involved in this matter in any way that can be traced, Drake. We’re wasting time here.”

We walked back to the tank storage area. Erikson scanned the interior of the park and the streets on either side. “Go!” he said at last. I crossed the street with a rush, dived between the lowest strands of barbed wire, and rolled beneath the nearest tank treads. I listened for an alarm, but there was nothing.

I had no idea a tank was so big. The treads must have been twelve feet apart. I could see that on the next tank in the lineup the huge metal carcass was at least ten feet tall. Protruding from its front was a barrel-like muzzle brake on a cannon fully fifteen feet long. There wasn’t much headroom underneath. A tank is designed to hug the ground.

There was a thud, and Erikson rolled under the tank with me. “This is an old T-34 Russian model,” he said when he regained his breath. “The radio will be one of three or four types.” He handed me a small wrench. “I won’t need this inside. If you want me to come out in a hurry, tap the bottom of the tank. When I’m ready to come out, I’ll tap. You tap back only if you want me to hold off for any reason. Got it?”

“Got it.”

He wriggled forward on his belly and disappeared. I heard the scrape of leather on metal as he scaled the side of the tank. There was a dull metallic sound that I assumed was Erikson disposing of the hatch cover. After that there was silence.

I had time to think for the first time since the dying Slater’s revelation that Erikson was a government agent. How in the hell had I ever wound up in such a jackpot? Slater had been the perfect bridge, of course. He had wanted out of prison so badly that he agreed to anything Erikson wanted done. Ordinarily I would have firmly resolved to shed Mr. Erikson permanently somewhere along the way, and soon. It hadn’t been a one-way street, though. Twice—first at the time we took over the ambulance and again in the alley behind the brothel—he had saved my life. He had needed me, of course. Still …

Two ringing taps above my head aborted my thinking. The metal-on-metal clangor sounded as though it would carry for three miles. I wormed my way out from beneath the tank as Erikson dropped to the ground. “That should do it,” he said. We covered each other crossing the street on our way back to the truck.

Erikson drove steadily for forty-five minutes. The truck wheezed along at a top of 25 mph. There was an increasing tang of salt in the air. When we neared our remote seashore rendezvous point, we abandoned the truck and walked the final mile through pine trees. Shifting sand underfoot made the walking arduous.

We stopped within sound of the surf while we were still in the pines. We unpacked the clumsy one-man life rafts and spread them out. I saw Erikson take from the haversack the piece of equipment about the size of a cigarette lighter that I had seen him repacking carefully so many times before. “What is that?”

“A frequency probe.” He held it out to me. “Quite a piece of miniaturization. It has a selector switch for various frequencies that can be preset. The small bulb at the bottom lights up whenever a transmitter in the area sends out a signal on the frequency selected. Ours is homed in on the
Calpyso’
s frequency, of course. This unit has a built-in amplitude sensor so the bulb will glow more brightly when pointed directly at the source of the signal. When we’re in the rafts, it will guide us to the cruiser.”

“And right now?”

“We wait.”

I stretched out at the base of a pine tree and tried to relax. The sudden inactivity reminded me how infrequently I had eaten in the past forty-eight hours. My stomach complained audibly.

My thoughts returned to Karl Erikson, Treasury agent. The snow job to which I succumbed in San Diego had been a monumental performance. Even in hindsight, it was hard to see what I might have done differently to avoid being ensnared in a game in which I couldn’t win unless I disposed of Karl Erikson.

After an hour Erikson made frequent trips from the shelter of the trees to the water’s edge, where he made sweeping left-to-right casts along the horizon with his frequency probe. “If that first mate, Redmond, doesn’t make it soon, we’re going to be caught by daylight,” he said quietly after one of these fruitless trips.

On his next try, though, he called me from the shore. “I’m getting a flicker,” he said when I joined him. “Bring the rafts, but don’t inflate them till I’m sure.”

By the time I had lugged the twenty-pound rafts to the edge of the sand, I could see for myself on the frequency probe that the
Calypso
was out there. The tiny bulb flickered weakly when held left and right of our position. Slightly left of center, it glowed steadily.

“Inflate,” Erikson said after another pass with the sensor. I walked knee-deep into the low surge and turned the knobs on a CO
₂
cylinder on each raft. They inflated rapidly. I wasn’t looking forward to what came next, because when we practiced in Key West, the rafts had proved ungainly. They were primarily survival gear, and the only locomotion was provided by paddles strapped to the forearm by elastic bands.

Erikson joined me in the surf. He fastened the rafts together with a length of nylon line. “So we don’t get separated in the dark,” he said. He placed on his raft the oilskin-wrapped package that had never been separated from him since he had acquired it in the basement of the museum. We waded out waist-deep, pushing the rafts ahead of us, then climbed aboard the precariously balanced affairs. I knelt carefully on the thin fabric bottom and strapped on my paddle.

Erikson was much better at it than I was. He kept the nylon line between the rafts taut most of the time. Paddling and trying to keep the raft from spinning around was exhausting work. Once or twice I caught a glow from the sensor Erikson still carried as he aimed us at the steadiest source of light. It was much darker on the water without the beach sand to reflect the luminescence.

Oddly, I saw the
Calypso
before Erikson did. I had been staring at a darker bulk low on the water without realizing what it was. It took me another moment to assimilate the half-seen, half-sensed outline. “There it is!” I called at the same moment white water foamed out from behind the
Calypso
as the previously idling engines speeded up. The pilot had seen us.

Erikson practically towed me the final hundred yards to the cruiser. Even alongside it, the
Calypso
‘s dark paint made it hard to see. Erikson stood up on his bobbing raft and pitched his oilskin-wrapped package up onto the
Calypso
‘s deck. Then he swarmed up the side with the aid of a hand extended down to him.

I banged a shoulder against the
Calypso
‘s side as raft and cruiser came together when I reached up for the helping hand. A strong pull and my own scrambling effort landed me aboard. “Welcome aboard, horseman,” Hazel greeted me. The helping hand had been her hand.

“What the hell—?” I began as the engines roared and the
Calypso
began a sweeping turn. Erikson was at the wheel.

“Redmond chickened out when word came over the radio from Havana about the firing squad execution of the American spy,” Hazel explained. “He said he wasn’t putting his neck into a noose on a Cuban beach. I had to lay him out to keep him from taking off with the
Calypso
. Where’s Slater?”

“He didn’t make it.”

She went to Erikson at the wheel. “That’s not the reverse course,” she said after a look at the compass, which was on due north.