Operation Stranglehold (6 page)

I lined guard and driver up at the van’s rear, then prodded them with the butt of the carbine into a frisk position. They leaned ahead precariously, foreheads against the van body, feet spread wide apart, hands clasped behind their backs. There was going to be no quick movement from that awkward stance.

I took the guard’s handgun, then searched them both. Neither had another weapon. I made a twisting motion with my free hand to indicate I wanted the key to the lock on the truck’s rear doors. The guard spat at my feet angrily. He wasn’t quite stupid enough to spit at me directly.

I punched the butt of the carbine hard against his hands. The impact slammed his belly against the truck body, and he gave a stifled yelp as the flesh split on his knuckles and blood started to flow. He sagged to his knees in the dirt of the road, gasping and wringing his hands.

I gestured to the driver. No further example was necessary. The driver dropped down beside the green-uniformed guard and removed a large brass key from one of his pockets. I took the key and unlocked the truck’s doors. I flung one wide, staying behind it to use it as a shield. An older man, also in uniform, stood cringing, carbine held loosely, muzzle down. I reached inside before he saw me and snatched it away from his feeble grip, flinging it over the edge of the road. It whirled end over end and disappeared in the heavy brush far down the precipitous slope. I gave the first carbine an underhanded flip and sent it to join the second.

A wave of the Luger barrel was sign language enough to induce the older guard to climb down from the van’s prison box. His eyes darted nervously to the groveling figure of his companion who was still on his knees. The older man sat down on his heels in the roadway, not an ounce of opposition in him.

The guard’s removal provoked an outpouring of prisoners from the van. They dropped down into the road like ants. At least a dozen hit the dirt. Walter Croswell was the third or fourth one out. Even in dirty khakis he looked pure Ivy League.

I was watching for Erikson. He was the last to climb down, and he did it carefully, moving as though he were fragile. His right arm was done up in a sling made from a black bandanna, and he was supporting the arm with his left hand.

He stopped dead when he saw me. “You!” he said huskily. “How the hell did they ever get to you?”

“They have their ways,” I said drily.

Erikson surveyed the gabbling prisoners who were all talking at once and gesticulating at each other. Then his face darkened when he saw the arrogant-faced young guard whom I’d touched up with the carbine. With more of his usual vigor, Karl strode over to him and kicked him sharply in the ribs. He recovered his balance from the energy expended, then kicked him again. It was so foreign to Erikson’s usual style that I could easily picture what must have taken place to provoke it.

“Get the prisoners moving, Karl,” I said. “We want them scattered through the hills so the roundup effort will be diluted, and so no special importance can be attached to the fact that you and the kid are missing.”

Erikson spoke half a dozen sentences. The ragtag group was moving even before he finished. Walter Croswell was standing beside the van, looking at me curiously when he heard me speaking English. With him was another prisoner. It took me a second look to recognize that it was a girl, despite the fact she had long, straight black hair that fell to her shoulders.

Her hair was confined by a beaded band around her forehead. A fringed leather vest was accentuated by a three-strand necklace of metal and glass beads. A tight-fitting tee shirt, punched out by the nipples of well-developed breasts, was a fine advertisement for the braless look.

“Get rid of the hippie,” I said to young Croswell in the first words I’d spoken to him.

“She’s with me,” he answered. He sounded like Joe College. His tone was cool and patricianlike.

“She
was
with you,” I emphasized. “Get rid of her.”

“Don’t talk to me like that!” he snapped. “My father sent you, didn’t he?”

The arrogance of money, I thought to myself, but it was no time for a debate. We’d been lucky already that nothing had come along the road. I’d take care of the girl myself later. “Let’s move it,” I said to Erikson. “Hazel’s waiting down the road with a station wagon.”

I let the air out of the rest of the truck tires before I joined the others. The driver and the two guards sat huddled at the side of the road. There was no haughtiness in the face of the young one now, just simple fear.

Erikson was moving so slowly when I caught up to him that I sensed a real problem. He stumbled constantly, seemingly unable to put his feet down evenly. His condition was such that I could envision a major complication in the escape effort.

Young Croswell walked along in front of us with his companion. His stride was buoyant, but he stopped several times to let Erikson catch up. I still didn’t like the tagalong aspect of the slim, sad-faced girl. The last thing I needed in addition to the wounded Erikson was an unpredictable female vein-shooter.

“We can make a shortcut ascent over the next ridge to Hazel,” I said encouragingly to Erikson.

I was bringing up the rear of the procession, watching the roadsides and rock overhangs, Luger in hand.

None of the other escaped prisoners was anywhere in sight.

Despite the short distance he’d traveled, Erikson’s face was gray with pain. I changed my mind about leaving the road despite the risk involved in staying on it. “Can’t count on me for much, Earl,” he muttered when he saw me covertly watching him. “All three bones broken in the arm. Might have a couple broken ribs, too. I didn’t get much medical attention because I wasn’t doing enough talking to satisfy the border police.” He smiled tiredly. “Just a bad roll of the dice.”

“What about the guard you planted your boot into?”

“He gave me a lot of attention, none of it good.” Erikson hunched his shoulders as though to gather his strength while we began the climb to the last high point between us and Hazel. “I should have taken lessons from you about a truck hijack,” he went on. “I stopped them all right by stepping out into the road to flag them down. I held a gun on the guard, but the driver started up the van again suddenly and ran into me. Slammed me into a tree.”

“When are you going to learn you can’t be nice to people, Karl?” He shrugged. “What’s with the girl with young Croswell?”

“They were together at the border when he was picked up for possession. She’s an odd type. Very quiet. The boy has all the snootiness you’d expect from heavy money. Feels he has to live up to his image as an athlete and playboy. He got plenty of headlines back home for both.”

The subjects of the discussion were twenty yards ahead of us. The girl had a perspiration-stained knapsack on her back. They had paused at the crest of the hill and were staring down into the valley beyond. When we joined them, one look was enough to see why.

I’d left the Opel with an eye toward a fast getaway rather than total concealment, and the motley crew of escaping prisoners had found it. Jubilant shouts drifted to us faintly as Hazel was shoved roughly out of the way. I stood there helplessly. The action was taking place far beyond pistol range.

The prisoners swarmed over the station wagon, pitching out the extra equipment I hadn’t unloaded. With room made for themselves, they scrambled aboard hurriedly. The Opel lurched from the brush in which I’d left it onto the road and disappeared over the humpbacked arc of the next hill.

“Jesus, I really blew that one!” I exclaimed. “Why the hell I didn’t realize—”

“Look!” Walter Croswell interrupted. He was standing with his arm around the girl’s waist.

A dark object penetrated the low dust cloud hanging over the brow of the hill beyond which the station wagon had disappeared. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I recognized the Opel again. It had reversed direction and was speeding toward us, swaying from side to side with its prisoner-laden weight and coming dangerously close to the precipitous drop at the side of the road.

The reversal carried its own instant explanation: right behind the Opel was a mustard-colored Jeep. The Opel’s rear end slithered wildly, almost uncontrollably at that speed. The more stable Jeep gained rapidly.

The hippie girl exclaimed aloud as the Jeep drew up alongside the station wagon on the narrow road, crowding it perilously close to the sheer drop-off. Erikson muttered something as the Jeep pulled into the Opel, deliberately bumping it. The station wagon swerved, but recovered.

The Jeep bumped it again, and the Opel’s right rear wheel dropped over the rim of the road. Almost in slow motion it tipped upward slowly until it was on its side. It slid to a stop partway over the abyss. I could hear the screams of panicked prisoners desperately bailing out of the upended Opel. Men were still flinging themselves from it onto the roadway when it overbalanced.

“Ohhh-h-h!” the hippie girl exclaimed as the Opel began to slide down the mountainside. It bounced from ledge to ledge. I couldn’t tell if anyone was left in it. A burst of flame appeared at the rear, and then the station wagon vanished from view although we could still hear its metal-crunching descent.

The Jeep had braked to a skidding stop, and uniformed men jumped out, pursuing the wildly scattering prisoners. The sight of the uniforms brought me back to my senses. “Into the brush before we’re seen!” I ordered. Walter Croswell turned around and looked at me. “Into the brush!”

He gave me a sullen look, but he took the girl’s arm and led her off the road. Erikson’s breath hissed sharply as I aided him into the concealing scrub oak and stately pines. The uneven ground sent him staggering despite my hand on his good arm. There was sweat on his forehead when we settled ourselves on our bellies behind brush that still afforded us a view of the action below.

One by one scruffy-looking prisoners were being frog-marched to the Jeep by pairs of uniformed men. I counted six who were rounded up. Erikson was seated with his back against a tree, his eyes closed. I worked my way over to him to check on his condition. “Do you think you can—” I started to say, when Walter Croswell interrupted me again.

“Hey, look!” the blond youth called. “Reinforcements!”

I left Erikson’s tree and crawled over beside him. A black sedan was parked beside the Jeep. Three men in civilian clothes were conferring with the uniformed men. Then the civilians went over to the sad-looking group of recaptured prisoners and began what was obviously an interrogation. I got the impression that the uniformed men didn’t approve of this usurpation of what they probably considered to be their inalienable rights.

There was a grunting sound beside me. When I turned my head, Erikson was dragging himself into position beside me so he could see. The interrogation on the roadway below had proceeded to a brisk punching-around. “D’you think they’re trying to find out if you went over the cliff in the Opel?” I asked Erikson.

“They’re looking for Lisa,” Walter Croswell said. “Her old man is Herr Dokter Levenkol Draznek of the Sloven-ska Vysoka Skola Technicka in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. He’s head of an underground group about to be purged by the Soviet-influenced Czech government. She was on her way to an American consulate to get the word to the right parties when we were scooped at the border.”

I would have asked questions, but the activity on the road below us had stopped. Prisoners were divided up between Jeep and sedan, and then both vehicles turned around to proceed in the direction the Opel had taken originally.

“Damn funny they wouldn’t go up the road to find out what happened to the van,” I said to Karl. “And their own people.”

“Something has a higher priority,” Erikson answered. He was looking at Walter Croswell. “If what he says is true—”

“It’s true,” he insisted.

“We’ve got a priority of our own, and that’s linking up with Hazel,” I said.

We stayed in the woods while we made our way down into the valley and up the opposite steep hill. Young Croswell and the girl scrambled like mountain goats, but Erikson needed a lot of help. He was so pale his lips were blue when we reached the ledge where the prisoners had overrun the Opel.

Hazel advanced to meet us. “Damn, damn, damn, I wish you’d left me your gun, Earl!” she said fervently. “There were just too many of them.” Her keen gaze was cataloguing our group, and her eyes remained longest on the girl. When she transferred her attention to Erikson, the shock she experienced at his appearance was visible in her face. She shook hands with him silently.

I stood to one side while Walter Croswell introduced himself and the girl to Hazel. The redhead confronted the girl for perhaps five seconds, and then she surprised me. She opened her arms, and Lisa ran into them as though she’d come home. They hugged each other tightly.

Hazel doesn’t wear her heart upon her sleeve ordinarily, but I had no time to reflect upon the phenomenon. “All right, everyone,” I announced. “We’re stranded on foot in the mountains, and we’re going to have to walk out.” I waved a hand at the jumbled supplies on the ground where the prisoners had dumped them. “Salvage everything serviceable that can be made up into backpacks.”

“The food too?” Hazel asked.

“Make a meal right now. A cold meal. We’ll have to carry that much less on our backs.” I motioned to young Croswell. “Take the girl and both of you change into anything that fits. Bury what you’re wearing now. Make sure she gets rid of all her hippie trappings.”

Hazel gave Lisa a pair of boots. Walter and the girl picked out clothing and disappeared behind a giant boulder. “How come your Santa Claus mood, baby?” I asked Hazel while she was opening cans.

“She’s just a scared kid, Earl. She’s no groupie.”

“She’s a scared kid with an extra posse of police looking for her in addition to the standard brand we’ve got looking for us. She’s trouble, baby. We’ve got to dump her.”

“Dump her? In these mountains?” Hazel shook her head. “You can’t do it, Earl. She’s just a kid.”

“I don’t care if she’s the second coming of the Virgin Mary!” I said heatedly. “I don’t care—”

I pulled myself up. I’d learned long ago to deflect the redhead’s head-on assaults upon good sense. I’d take care of the girl later.