The Predator

by Denis Pitts

  Capri is a geological phenomenon, a sudden mountain of granite that a volcano once pushed up a thousand feet above the sea.

  The southern face of its mountain, Monte Solaro, is a sheer cliff, from a small harbor to the very summit. It is rarely climbed because of the danger of rockfalls on the tourist-packed road below. Only teams of skilled alpinists attempt it.

  On this particular day, Jean-Paul decided, for no reason he could think of, that he would climb that cliff.

  He went ashore in the dinghy with the captain and walked through the harbor and turned into a side lane through a vineyard to the very foot of the cliff. Then he began to climb. He had had no training and carried no equipment. His shoes had been designed to grip the deck of a sailing boat, not the jagged, slashing edges of rock which he faced. He moved by instinct, using only his strength and good sense of balance to glue him to that rock face.

  At five hundred feet, he rested for several minutes, sitting on a narrow ledge. The whole island lay sun-sparkling below him; he could hear the shouts of children from a swimming pool.

  The rock trembled with the gear-grinding noise of buses as they struggled up the road to the town of Capri.

  He wondered at his madness, at the sudden obsession that had overtaken him on the schooner. He was not drunk, nor was he doing this for a dare or a bet. Then why was he here? Was he not, after all, the luckiest man in the world? Was he not the heir to a fortune, in love with the most perfect woman in the world? Perhaps, he considered, he was pushing his luck too far. He decided to climb down.

  But as he started to descend, the same infuriating compulsion overtook him. So he began climbing again, this time with even more difficulty, for the rock face is smoother and more slippery toward the top of the mountain, and the grips are sparse and dangerous.

  Toward the very top of the cliff, he ran out of holds and had to edge his way horizontally along a ledge no more than six inches wide, using the suction of his palms against the glasslike granite to maintain a hold. Now he was truly frightened. He knew that even the slightest puff of wind could dislodge him and hurl him a thousand feet onto the road below. He heard himself praying and cursing in the same silent breaths.

  But his luck held. At the end of the ledge at which he expected to find nothing but a void, he came to a vertical chimney in which he could rest before edging himself to the summit.

  There was a party of German tourists on the top of the cliff, driven there by bus. They were eating salami and hard Italian cheese and drinking wine from plastic cups. They watched, startled, as he came over the cliff face and stood, his clothes torn and filthy and drenched with sweat. His face beamed with relief.

  They were even more startled when the blond apparition walked up to them and said in a gentle, civilized voice, “Scusi,” and then picked up a wine bottle and half-emptied it down his throat. He put the bottle down with a “Grazie,” and walked away, laughing.

  OVER MILAN, 1930

  The same area of angry black thunderclouds had moved slightly to the west and south and enveloped the Alps. They had climbed jerkily through its mass and sat above it now, circling again, searching at fifty thousand feet for a patch of airspace in which the radio circuits were free from incomprehensible fuzz and could maintain a steady flow of signals from the ground. They found it at this height, and Becker watched as the computer unscrambled a huge load of deferred radio traffic and transcribed it onto the screen and print-out machines.

  Now he saw that Presto in Britain moved well, although several coaches had been delayed because of football and race crowds. The British division reported that twenty thousand men were now fully mobilized in three main centers. They had taken the news well and there had been only a handful of dissidents.

  Allegro, in France, reported just as enthusiastically. Despite le weekend, the response had been exactly what the computer had predicted. A substantial force of men had arrived at the main bases in Toulouse, Clermont-Ferrand and Rennes, and were already moving through the early evening in fleets of coaches. Soon they would be armed and starting the encirclement of the principal targets.

  This pleased Becker. France had always been the biggest question mark. In a country in which individual ministers controlled complete private armies such as the Campagne République Sécurité, and in which any plot of this magnitude would be almost impossible to hide, he had done better than he had expected.

  The selection system employed by Centra had been compiled by psychologists who had taken into account almost every factor imaginable in creating a questionnaire designed to assess both loyalty and intelligence. These were the two prime factors Becker looked for; he did not want anyone who was too politically involved, either to the left or the right. He sought the kind of person who tended to be conservative, concerned with law and order, and vaguely prudish.

  Centra had discarded applicants by the thousands. Many of them had been bullies of the extreme right; others had been rejected for cynicism, apathy or the lack of any real direction. It was a time of mass unemployment, and the high salaries paid by the Becker security companies, together with the pensions and general working conditions, were an attractive proposition to the massive numbers of men and women who applied.

  There had been a long process of weeding out the dangerous elements in the organizations at the time of takeover. These had been staffed largely by ex-policemen and soldiers, and it had been essential to seek out and dismiss every potentially corrupt officer — and ranker — before the real buildup of the army could begin.

  It was several years before the uniformed sections in each country could be considered reliable enough for Becker to begin the planning of this operation. Slowly, throughout the planning stage, the gentle indoctrination had been underway. Always the emphasis had been on the dangers from within — the possibility that one of the urban, nationalistic or criminal organizations in Europe would make a bid for power.

  With subtlety, the men of the various security armies were taught to despise the regular armed forces, which they saw being reduced in numbers with every national budget. The police forces, suspicious and hostile at first, grew respectful, and envious of the equipment used by these polite and friendly men — not merely guards, but experts in electronics and high-speed communication of the sort that could bring a hundred men to an emergency point in a matter of minutes.

  Becker and his various security directors had been anxious to maintain this relationship with the police forces and had made it a policy to give credit as often as possible to them when arrests were made in cases of bank robbery or hijacking. The fact was that the private-enterprise men had usually been well ahead of the regular law-enforcement agencies; but this aspect was always played down.

  He had created a corps d’élite — one hundred and twenty thousand men and women in four countries who had grown almost to idolize their particular leaders and to respect the power and authority of the multinational corporation which employed them as much as they did their own political leaders.

  As for the leaders, the Englishman had been a natural choice: a public hero, a friend of the monarch, a man discarded by his government for being too efficient. The Frenchman, a colonel respected throughout the French army, had been dismissed for his outspokenness against corrupt government and military crassness. The German baroness had been his biggest gamble. She had spent a weekend in Elba as his guest. It had become abundantly clear that she was in love with him. He resisted the considerable temptation to take her to his bed because he also realized that she possessed the most organized, analytical mind he had ever known; it was this he wanted.

  The choice for Italy had been easy. The admiral had three times been called to act as a mediator in an almost traditional series of crises between the liberal government and the extreme left. Becker had employed him as a consultant to his own companies, with the result that even though most of the trade unions involved in the Becker Italian operations were communist-dominated, the company flourished, and had an e
xcellent labor-relations record.

  The admiral had become one of the most respected high-ranking officers in the NATO command, but, in a country that tended to change governments yearly, and that teetered constantly on the brink of a left-wing revolution, he had become too popular, and had been dismissed.

  High over the Po basin, Becker felt the engines slow the jet almost to stalling speed as it began to circle again in this static-free air space.

  He had chosen well. So far, this operation was going smoothly. A monumental jigsaw was taking shape on the ground below. It had to be finished.

  *

  Heavy rains, which had swept over most of Europe from the eastern plains, made driving difficult, particularly in northern Italy, where the floodwater, racing down from the Alps, uprooted trees and turned most highways into fast-flowing rivers.

  The principal rendezvous for the Adagio divisions in the north was a former German emergency landing strip near the straggling village of Campoformido. The airfield lay in the center of a thousand acres of olive trees owned by Becker Farms.

  The coachloads of men, who wore the bright-red flash of the Cittadella Security Agency on their blue uniforms, began to arrive at the airstrip in the early evening, and their occupants raced through the driving rain to one of two large hangars.

  Once inside, they formed lines between the stacks of olive boxes and waited as four quartermasters wheeled trolleys carrying long crates to tables at the end of the hangar. As the crates were broken open, the weapons were brought out — brand-new NATO rifles, Thompson submachine guns, the extremely lightweight Mauser machine pistols and other handguns.

  The weapons were handed out according to each man’s proficiency and function, already listed in front of the quartermasters. At the next table there were pouches of hand and gas grenades.

  As they waited for more coaches and men to arrive, the men in the hangar checked their weapons, stripping them quickly, examining every part with practiced thoroughness. Satisfied, they lined up at another table, where they handed over every document in their pockets to a team of Cittadella girls. The girls placed each man’s possessions in a buff-colored envelope and in turn handed him an identification disc.

  The men then went into the adjoining hangar, where a fully equipped field kitchen was in full operation.

  Within five hours of being summoned by telephone, four hundred men had been assembled, armed, briefed on their individual objectives and fed. They knew exactly when they would move out, exactly where they would be going and exactly what was expected of them.

  The ten coaches that had brought them from Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ravenna and Venice, and from pickup points in the more distant villages of the flat basin, stood outside. But they had been augmented now by the other accouterments of any army. There were ambulances, field kitchens and a mobile headquarters unit that bristled with aerials. These vehicles, too, were painted in that familiar light blue.

  Similar gatherings were taking place all over Italy. An army was being made ready at a speed that would have been unbelievable to generals who allowed weeks, even months, for mobilization.

  The blue army came together in a disused monastery in Novara, with fifty coaches bringing two thousand men and women from the heavily industrialized northwest. Five thousand gathered in a warehouse complex a few miles off the Appenine Way and were sufficiently confident in their ability to see the operation through that they relaxed over their pasta and talked mostly about football and women and little about the tasks that confronted them.

  They came together in an abandoned hill village that overlooked the Autostrada twenty miles north of Naples and in a mountain village under the slopes of Mount Etna.

  In a top-floor suite in the Excelsior Hotel on the Via Veneto in Rome, the admiral watched this progress with great satisfaction. The Centra microwave radio system allowed for detailed reports to be passed through to his computer terminal at speeds that defied detection.

  When the machine reported that a total of thirty thousand men and women were now operational, he sent a signal to the computer in Elba that was instantly passed on to the control room.

  Only then did he call room service and order a plate of stuffed chicken breasts and a bottle of Salaparuta. He ate and drank alone and in contentment as the machines continued to whir.

  *

  As the admiral wiped his mouth with a linen napkin and rang for coffee, Detective Florio Mazzini, a squat and fattening man in his mid-forties, drove a souped-up police Fiat through the center of Milan and turned into the parking lot of the criminal-investigation department in the Viale Umbria. Mazzini was normally a cheerful man who laughed a lot and enjoyed his food and drink. Like most Italian detectives, he did not allow the job to sour his nature. There were lines of humor on his plump face, and he usually had a friendly greeting for the clerks and junior officers whose desks stood on either side of the passageway that led to his office.

  Tonight, however, he was tight-lipped and looked worried. He walked briskly into the office and did not speak to the staff.

  There was only one other detective in the big office, and he was putting on his hat as Mazzini came in. He watched sympathetically as the shorter man removed a sodden raincoat, jacket and shirt and took a heavy turtleneck sweater from a locker.

  “Bad day?” he asked.

  “Wet,” said Mazzini. “All day sitting in the corner of a muddy field, staking out the Novara rapist, and then — just when he’s leaving his cottage — some fool sets his dogs on me. Who’d want to be a detective?”

  “Tough,” said the other.

  Mazzini walked the length of the office and picked up the heavy day-report book. He carried it back to his own desk and began to thumb through its pages.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Has there been any notification by Cittadella of an exercise today?”

  “The blue brigade? Not to my knowledge.”

  “Don’t they usually tell us when they’re playing soldiers?”

  “Always. Why?”

  “Because something strange is going on.”

  Mazzini eased his feet out of soggy shoes and socks and placed them on the radiator. Rummaging in his locker, he found a pair of carpet slippers.

  “You know the ruined monastery at Trecate?”

  “The one that was bombed?”

  “I came past it tonight. The place was absolutely stiff with coaches and people, all of them in uniform, no one saying a word.”

  “They’re like that when they operate.”

  “But there was something else. Weaponry.”

  “They carry side arms and riot guns.”

  “These weren’t shotguns. The bolts sounded like something much heavier.”

  “Why didn’t you ask?”

  Mazzini flipped a Nazionale cigarette from a white pack and lit it, after several attempts, with a damp lighter.

  “I was going to,” he said. “I thought I might even scrounge a cup of coffee. But there was something about the way they were moving around in the darkness with hardly any sound or lights showing ... something a bit ominous. So I kept my head down and stayed away. I still can’t explain why.”

  “Are you expecting a coup d’état or something?” The other detective laughed, heading for the door.

  “I don’t like private armies,” Mazzini said. “Those people move too freely around Italy for my liking.”

  “Put it in the book and let the morning people look at it. You’re tired, Florio.”

  Left alone, Mazzini sat at his desk and blew several smoke rings at a bared light bulb. Then he picked up his telephone and dialed the number of the Milan headquarters of Cittadella. A woman’s voice answered, but she had not finished announcing the name of the company before he slammed the telephone back on its cradle.

  “To hell with it,” he said aloud. He put on his raincoat and struggled into his damp socks and shoes.

  Driving out of the city toward his home at Monza, he stopped and waited at the traffic lig
hts on the main intersection with the outer Milan ring road. He noticed a large unlit coach going east. Against the lights of approaching vehicles, he saw that there were people in the coach; indeed, it was filled.

  As his light changed to amber and he slammed his foot on the accelerator in true Milanese style, he saw another coach stop on the main road.

  Mazzini pulled up on the other side of the intersection and parked his car on the sidewalk. In his rear-view mirror he watched five coaches, all of them well spaced out, cross in that same direction.

  He was still worrying about them as he drove into the subterranean garage under the apartment block in which he lived.

  *

  Becker received the message from Adagio as the Petite Concorde made the last of a series of soft banking turns and began to punch its way at speed to the north. He was drinking black coffee from a cardboard cup when he felt the acceleration.

  He had ordered the captain to fly north toward England after one of the crew members had brought him a heavy, scrambled, and somewhat worrying message from Presto.

  On any normal day, the forty men of the Standfast organization who guarded the main RAF Support Command base at Lyneham, in Wiltshire, would be brought to and from the base in two small local buses and taken home, having changed guard duties with a fresh detachment, in the same way. It was regular and routine; little notice was taken when a substantially larger force of Standfast men arrived at the base just after six o’clock in the evening in three forty-seater coaches.

  Saturday was normally quiet at the base, and today was no exception. There were six crews on standby in the actual precincts of the airport; but most of the base’s air crews were either on leave or would be out of touch until they arrived back on Monday morning.

  The dull, murky day had turned into a cold, wet October evening. No flying was scheduled. The squadron leader who was duty officer yawned heavily in the ugly green duty office and longed for a gin and tonic. His relief was due in one hour and it was only a short walk through the headquarters building to the mess.