Operation Fireball (16 page)

“It’s just the right course, that’s all. We’ll make the intercept just outside the twelve-mile limit.”

“Will they escort us or will we go aboard the Navy ship?”

“They’ll escort us.”

It took me a moment to digest it. Then I walked over to them. “We’re meeting a Navy ship and you knew it?” I said to Hazel. “You knew this man was a government agent?”

“Wasn’t it nice of him to guarantee my fifty thousand dollars?” she said with a smile. She put her hand on my arm. “He came to see me at the ranch after Calkins, the deputy sheriff, found you. He explained things to me.”

“But you know perfectly well I never would have—”

“You wanted something to do and you got it, didn’t you?”

“Take the wheel,” Erikson said to her.

He removed a pair of binoculars from a locker and began to scan the sea both ahead of and behind us. I found a deck chair and sat down. I thought back to The Castaways and Hazel’s acceptance of Erikson’s orders when I had half-expected temper flareups from her. Erikson had undermined me in the area it counted most. Naturally Hazel would prefer to see a government umbrella over part of the project. I knew now why she’d never put up much argument after the single time in San Diego.

The deck was pitched to about 30 degrees as the twin screws dug into the water. I was looking upward at quite an angle past Hazel’s head at the wheel. A widening pink coral color in the eastern sky heralded an explosive Cuban sunrise. At first I thought I was looking at a pair of seagulls that came slanting downward from the rapidly brightening sky, but they were moving too fast and too straight to be birds. “Planes!” I yelled.

Erikson swung his glasses in the direction I was pointing. “Mig-17's!” he shouted above the roar of the engines. The two blunt-nosed, swept-wing fighter craft with their stubby bodies and sloping tails were almost upon us. They smoothed out their dives and leveled out to cross our bow at 100-foot altitude no more than 200 yards ahead of us. A stream of machine gun bullets roiled the water directly ahead of the
Calypso
, and then the planes pulled up into a steep climbing turn.

Erikson pushed Hazel away from the wheel. “Break out the life preservers, then get below!” he roared at her above the noise of the planes. “The next pass means business!”

Hazel opened a locker and I helped her pitch life vests onto the deck. Erikson snatched up the oilskinned packet of cash and lashed it to a life vest. I lost sight of the planes for a moment until I looked over our stern. They were coming straight at us in a shallow dive. One instant they were dark spots against the horizon and then full-grown aircraft the next. Winking spots of fire appeared from ports on either side of the round orifice of the engine air intake. Evenly spaced tracer bullets looked like incandescent perforations of the blue-black sky.

Before I could open my mouth to yell, pieces of the woodwork and the deck and the fantail began to fly in all directions. The cruiser shuddered under hammer blows as the deadly hail chewed at her stern. “Over here, Drake!” Erikson bellowed at me. He thrust a pair of binoculars at me as the planes surged past. “There should be a boat heading toward us! We’re in international waters, and I’m damned if I’m going to be herded back to Cuba because Castro’s pilots don’t respect it!”

I scanned the blue-green water ahead of us even while I felt a chill between my shoulder blades as I anticipated the planes’ next assault. The first sweep of the binoculars disclosed nothing. Then I saw a huge V-wave flung to either side of a knifelike bow proceeding directly toward us. I seized Erikson’s arm and pointed. “Finally!” he exclaimed, and braced himself at the wheel to hold course.

The cruiser staggered suddenly as the bow looked as though it was being gnawed by invisible jaws. I hadn’t even seen the direction from which the planes came. Erikson spun the wheel furiously but the
Calypso
plainly had been knocked off course. “They’ve holed the hull!” Erikson shouted. “Grab the life vests and prepare to abandon!”

I snatched up two life vests and ran aft. I led Hazel from the cabin onto the fantail while we buckled ourselves into the vests. The cruiser began to shudder again. Glass and wood flew as phosphorescent bullets almost cut the boat in two amidships. Erikson jumped down to the fantail to join us in the midst of the deadly hail. He landed on his knees, clasping his left arm. He struggled upright at once, dragging the lashed-in cash in the life vest in his good hand while he stuffed another vest under his armpit.

“Over the side!” he gritted hoarsely. A wood splinter the size of a railroad spike was imbedded in his upper arm. Blood was soaking his right trouser leg from the middle of his thigh. “Be … smaller targets … in the water! Stay … afloat! We’ll be … picked up!”

I pushed Hazel over the railing, waited until I saw Erikson jump, then leaped over myself. We became separated in the water. I wondered if the blood streaming from Erikson would attract sharks. When I found them, Erikson was trying to support Hazel with his good arm while she helped him into his life vest.

A giant hand seemed to push us deeper into the water. There was a dull
whump
from the
Calypso
, now almost dead in the water. Planking flew like popcorn as the forward deck heaved upward and a cone of blue flame flared upward from the ignited interior. The
Calypso
stood up on her nose, then slowly began to disappear.

“Look!” Hazel cried out.

I struggled to turn. The first thing I saw was the gray bulk of a Navy ship with a rapidly diminishing bow wave as she slowed for us. The second thing was Erikson inclined face forward with his head under water despite his life vest. I swam to him and held his head up as we bobbed up and down in two-foot waves. I tried frantically to locate the planes. The next pass would pick us off like Halloweeners ducking for apples. Then I saw two dark dots streaking for the Cuban shoreline. The planes didn’t dare tangle with a U.S. ship in international waters.

My heart stopped beating for an instant as I saw two sleek black figures coursing through the water toward us. Then I saw that they were wet-suited frogmen. “We’ve got him!” the first one said to me, taking Erikson from me and lifting him higher in the water.

“Boat behind you!” the second frogman added.

When I turned, Hazel was being hauled over the side of a Navy gig. A uniformed man in the bow was leaning down toward me. He seized me under the armpits and lifted, and I landed with a thump in the bottom of the boat. I saw that Erikson was being lifted over the other side.

The man who had dragged me aboard was swabbing off his dripping chest. “Man, you folks do get around!” he said.

I found myself staring upward into the rugged features of Chief Petty Officer McMillan, the man Slater had slugged on the destroyer trip to Guantanamo that now seemed to have taken place a hundred years ago.

The gig’s engine purred as the boat headed in a wide arc toward the destroyer.

HAZEL AND I
walked up the broad, shrub-lined walk of the Bethesda Medical Center Hospital. We took the elevator to the fourth floor and found Karl Erikson’s room.

The big man was propped up in a cranked-up hospital bed. His left arm was in a sling, but he had a portable typewriter on his lap. He looked the same except for a slight loss in his usual high color.
“Bienvenidos, amigos,”
he greeted us. He glanced at his typewriter. “Each report seems to breed two more.”

“I hope you’re impressing your bosses by letting them know you have your own personal destroyer caddying for you,” I needled him.

“That wasn’t in the script,” he said. “Someone was supposed to be there, of course, but I had no idea the assignment would go to the same destroyer that ferried us to Gitmo.” He smiled at Hazel. “Has he forgiven you yet for holding out on him on the subject of who his employer was on this little deal?”

“No, he hasn’t,” I said emphatically before Hazel could reply. “She’s got some lumps coming for letting me stick my head into the mouth of that alligator when she knew I couldn’t make a dime out of it.”

“He’ll get over it,” Hazel said calmly to Erikson.

“About the time your bruises start fading,” I told her. “I still don’t see why you let me go ahead when you knew this character here was—”

“I’ll tell you why,” she interrupted me. “You said it yourself when you came to see me at the ranch. You were losing your balls. You weren’t doing anything. I wanted you like you were in Florida. Sure, it was dangerous, but not as dangerous as anything you might have got into by yourself.”

“How was he in Florida?” Erikson interposed.

Hazel smiled. “Tigerish.” She glanced at me mischievously before returning her attention to Erikson. “How’s the convalescence?”

He shrugged. “The doctor tells me I’d have been better off with a drumload of nice clean incendiary bullets in me instead of that paint-soaked chunk of wood, but it’s coming.” He looked at me. “You could have let me drown before the boat from the destroyer reached us.”

“Like you could have left me alone with the soldier in the alley behind the whorehouse.”

“What’s this about a whorehouse?” Hazel wanted to know.

“It’s a Spanish word meaning cathedral,” Erikson said blandly. His eyes were still upon me. “Based on the million you were counting on for your end of the retrieval, your check is going to come up about nine hundred ninety-eight thousand short. The cash is Uncle Sammie’s, but I’ve had you on the department’s thirty-two-dollar per diem since the outset. Hazel’s fifty thousand advance to me will be handled separately.”

“Tell the department I hope they can spare it,” I said. “They didn’t risk a goddamn—”

“You can mail us our checks at the Rancho Dolorosa, Ely, Nevada,” Hazel cut in. “And why don’t you come out for a visit while you’re recuperating?”

Erikson nodded slowly. “I might do that. I just might.”

“Anytime,” Hazel said. She gave Erikson her big, Hazel smile. “Come on, horseman. Before you get into an argument with the government.”

“I’m not so sure about the ranch,” I demurred. “The White Pine county sheriff might still be taking an interest in me.”

“No, he won’t,” Erikson said. “Uncle Sammie may come up short on the cash, but his umbrella has no holes in it.”

“Now, isn’t that nice to know?” Hazel said to me sweetly. She tugged at my arm. “Come on. A girl has to have some privacy while she’s getting her lumps.”

Karl Erikson and I exchanged half-salutes, and Hazel and I walked back down the hospital corridor to the elevator.

Serving as inspiration for contemporary literature, Prologue Books, a division of F+W Media, offers readers a vibrant, living record of crime, science fiction, fantasy, western, and romance genres. Discover more today:

www.prologuebooks.com

This edition published by
Prologue Books
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
10151 Carver Road, Suite 200
Blue Ash, Ohio 45242
www.prologuebooks.com

Copyright © 1969 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.

Copyright Registration Renewed © 1997 by Robert Ragan
All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction.

Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

eISBN 10: 1-4405-4215-5
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4215-2

Cover art © clipart.com