by Dane Hartman
Only Cravitch and Sayers remained where they were, certain that their business partners would deal in an appropriate manner with the spy. Cravitch said to Sayers, “We had better put someone on the back door next time. Our security is getting too lax.” But his quiet well-modulated voice betrayed not the slightest hint of any anxiety on his part.
Ellie knew that she was in trouble and that there was nothing to be gained by this tedious crawl through a maze composed of arms. She still had not been seen and though this was a temporary advantage, she capitalized on it by picking herself up off the floor and running. Only when she was on her feet again did she see that all this time she had been progressing in the wrong direction. She was further from the back of the warehouse than she was before.
They would hear her running, she knew. There were too many of them, and to get from where she was to the exit—assuming they hadn’t already blocked it—was next to impossible.
At one point, she had to break out into the open. As she did so, a man spotted her and fired. His shot missed and punctured one of the crates, causing Cravitch to cry out, “Careful, please, gentlemen! Don’t damage any of the merchandise. Otherwise, I will have to charge you.”
No one seemed to pay heed to his admonition and it appeared that in this case price was no object.
Harry was still contemplating his strategy when he heard the gunshot. It sounded much louder than it would have under ordinary circumstances with so much space inside the warehouse to amplify it.
Harry had no way of knowing what was going on inside, but that was of secondary importance. He had the diversion he needed, however it had come about.
The lone guard in front of the warehouse had heard the gunshot and, thinking that his assistance might be needed, opened the door and went in.
He was astonished to find someone coming up from behind him. But before he could turn to see who it was, Harry brought down the stock of the .38 hard against the back of his head. Not hard enough though. The guard staggered, groaning, but was only stunned. Again, Harry smashed the butt end of the .38 down. This time the guard dropped, his eyes rolling as he did so.
Having never been inside this place, and without knowing what to expect, Harry flattened himself next to the prostrate man he’d just knocked senseless. But not before he was observed by two astonished men in ties and jackets.
“Over here, Gamal!” one of them yelled before vanishing behind a wall of crates. He was followed to safety within moments by his companion.
Harry held his fire, trying to get a fix on the situation. Then he beheld Achmed, his old friend. That was all the fix on the situation he needed.
A man was waiting for Ellie. He wore a kefiiyah, brandished a Baretta, and knew exactly where she would emerge from among the boxes. She rushed right into his outstretched arms. She found herself trapped; she squirmed and fought against him, but he had a solid grip on her, and the tip of the gun stuck in the crook of her back. Actually, he seemed to be enjoying the experience for he had really not expected such a pretty woman, and like a lover, he hugged her closer, so much so that she emitted a cry of pain, soon muffled by the press of the gun against her flesh; it felt as though he were trying to stab her with the muzzle.
To his friends, he shouted something in Arabic, signaling them that he had caught the intruder and that there was nothing more to fear. He had no way of knowing there was another intruder in the front of the warehouse. He brought Ellie out into the center of the warehouse for all to see his catch, laughing with great amusement. His laugh stopped when he saw Achmed.
Achmed obviously had not expected to see Harry again. He raised his gun and sighted it as though this alone would convince him to surrender. It didn’t. Achmed called to Kayyam, who had not yet appeared, probably soliciting his opinion as to what course of action he should take. He kept his gun trained on Harry while Harry kept his gun on Achmed.
Just then Kayyim came into view and Achmed allowed his attention to wander. Harry fired his .38. Achmed leapt into the air and came down in an awkward heap, barely alive. His gun blazed but it seemed that he wasn’t really aiming it anywhere in particular.
The others wisely took refuge behind the crates just as Cravitch and Sayers had earlier.
Harry rolled over to his left, firing simultaneously, this time taking Achmed out of commission altogether. Like a prayerful supplicant, he extended his arms, then flopped over and did not move.
So as to avoid being pinned down, Harry bounded across the floor, performing elaborate choreography as he sought to elude the barrage of bullets directed against him.
Finding cover at last, he realized that he had now managed to equalize the conflict to an extent; for while he was outnumbered, there was no way that Kayyim or his allies could get to him without revealing themselves in the process.
As soon as he glanced around he saw that he had chosen a fortuitous spot in which to seek protection. Immediately to his left, was a half-open box stencilled with Cyrillic letters and a series of numbers, attesting to its Soviet origin. Inside were grenades—RDG-5 anti-personnel fragmentation grenades to be precise.
This should make things more equal, he reasoned, taking one in his hand, pulling the pin from it, and lobbing it toward the other side of the warehouse, just beyond the first row of crates where he judged his enemies to be hiding.
In response there was a savage, useless burst of gunfire, but the grenade continued to sail through the air, arching down behind the crates. A moment passed, then the entire universe seemed to explode as the detonation touched off live ammunition; it sounded something like Chinese New Year’s celebrations on Grand Avenue, only much, much louder. Everything was going up, sizzling for a second, then erupting in a convulsive roar that was accompanied by a brilliant display of fire.
Harry knew he had better get out of this place before the fire spread to something sufficiently volatile to blow the entire warehouse and all its illegal contents sky high.
He was not alone in this idea. No longer concerned about Harry, Kayyim’s party came running out, screaming in panic. One of them lurched a few steps, then collapsed, as flames lapped at his back. What happened to the two men in business suits Harry could not say, nor did he care for all this attention directed to Ellie.
Where she had come from, what she was doing here, was a complete mystery to him. But there was no mistaking her. A man in a keffiyah was dragging her to safety though if one was to judge by the gun he held to her head, safety of only a relative nature.
Harry darted out in hope of intercepting them. The flames were gathering force, leaping into the air with a great fierce crackling, singeing Harry’s hair, his eyebrows, diminishing visibility at the same time, with the warehouse rapidly becoming engulfed in smoke.
Ellie and her captor were moving too quickly for Harry to be able to accurately aim. The smoke protected him from view, which was all well and good, but it obscured his target at the same time.
He scrambled after them. Sirens shrieked in the distance. Harry had no idea what he would discover upon emerging from the warehouse, but precedent seemed to dictate that he would find a small army. Small armies in Beirut generally had the habit of shooting at him, Harry noted. And they didn’t always need to have a good reason to do so.
For a couple of minutes, he lost sight of Ellie, he lost sight of just about everyone. All he could make out were shadowy figures in the smoke and the harsh luminous light from the flames. Ammunition was still detonating with decisive pops, but so far the most combustible elements had not gone off yet. If they ever did, there’d be no doubt about the result.
At last, Harry managed to escape the warehouse. In spite of the firemen who were beginning to mobilize their hoses, he recognized that the danger had scarcely passed, not with the ever increasing likelihood that the whole warehouse would go, probably taking the neighborhood, such as it was, with it.
In all the confusion, no one remarked on Harry or threatened him as he tore through the crowd of onlooke
rs, searching for Ellie.
Then he saw a flash of her white dress. He raced down to where the two limousines had been parked, but found only one when he got there; the other must have pulled away. He couldn’t tell who was in the second limo; he couldn’t see through the smoked glass windows.
He realized the futility of trying to shoot his way into the remaining car. Having ridden in a similar model, he was well aware of how resistant it was, particularly to a .38, much less a Makarov.
The limo began to move, but it did not go far. Evidently, the driver was waiting for someone. Half a minute elapsed before the straggler came into view, fighting the crowd to get to the car.
Here was an opportunity of sorts, Harry thought, watching his progress. Of course, if Ellie had been taken away in the first limo, it was no opportunity at all—except, as always, just another opportunity to die.
The man approaching the limo was vaguely recognizable to Harry; he was one of Kayyim’s henchmen who yesterday had escorted him to the basement. In his hand, he was carrying two AKM’s he’d probably pilfered from the burning warehouse.
As soon as the rear door of the limo swung open to admit him, Harry peered in and saw Ellie, squeezed between two men, neither of whom was Kayyim. She was not bound from the looks of it, but she appeared partially immobilized with terror. Harry hoped that she would not freeze at the last minute, because that would only make rescuing her much more difficult.
Now he moved in between the commando and the vehicle; in one hand he held the .38, in the other the Makarov.
The commando was within a few feet of the car when he saw that his path had been blocked and for a moment he didn’t seem to know what to make of this development. Because he had his hands full with the Soviet weapons he’d stolen, he couldn’t react quickly or decisively enough.
One of the men in the car sensed the danger and reached out to shut the door. But Harry, anticipating him, slammed the barrel of the Soviet handgun down on his arm so that he lost his grip on the handle.
Ellie, far from being paralyzed, was quite aware of what was happening, and rather than wait, sprang from the seat and hurtled herself across the lap of the man to her left. Because he was concentrating his attention entirely on Harry, he did not know what she was doing until she was halfway out of the car. Then he grabbed hold of her and attempted to pull her back.
At that point, the commando Harry was keeping at bay made a sudden advance, swinging one of the AKM’s, having no space in which to fire it. Harry saw it coming out of the corner of his eye and lowered his head just in time to avoid the brunt of the gun against his skull. At the same time, Harry fired both his guns, and though he was in an extremely awkward stance, his aim did not suffer.
The commando reeled back under the impact of two chest wounds. At least one of the bullets had penetrated a lung because when he attempted to yell, blood rushed up his throat and bubbled over his lips.
Ellie, meanwhile, was still struggling against her captor who might very well have shot her except that he could not get his hand free to do so. Nor could his companion do it for him, not unless he was willing to risk hitting the wrong person in such close quarters.
Harry seized hold of the man’s left hand, prying it away from Ellie’s wrist, while snapping two fingers back, breaking the bones. The man shrieked and immediately let go. Ellie sort of fell out of the car just as the man sitting on the right fired.
He had begun by trying to hit Ellie, but had reconsidered and raised his weapon in hope of felling Harry instead. This indecisiveness cost him. His bullet burned a sliver of flesh off Harry’s arm, causing enough pain for him to drop the .38, but his grip on the Makarov did not falter and he discharged it. This was just the type of situation the Makarov was designed for; the range was perfect. The man groaned like an old man with severe arthritis who cannot quite get his body to do what he would like it to. He jerked up, clutching his throat, then slumped back. A jet of blood shot out of the wound and clouded the window on his side, and flew all over his friend who was examining his broken, swelling fingers with horror.
There was one other occupant of the car—the driver—and until now he had remained hunkered down behind the bulletproof partition. But as Harry moved to help Ellie up, he opened his door, dropped to the ground and opened fire.
But in attempting to do too much simultaneously, he did not succeed in hitting either of his intended victims. There was one round left in the Makarov. It found a new home in the driver’s head.
Harry helped himself to the driver’s weapon. To his astonishment and delight, he found that it was his .44 Magnum. Evidently, the driver had come into possession of it after it had been confiscated. Harry was grateful that he’d not been shot to death with his own weapon; that, literally, would have been adding insult to injury.
“This is getting to be habit forming,” Ellie remarked as she observed the tumult around them. She was shaken, but still in command of herself. “I am beginning to think all this excitement is getting to be a little too much, Inspector Callahan.”
“Harry, just call me Harry, would you?”
She gave him a faint smile. “All right, Harry, what do we do now?”
“Get the hell out of here before that goddam warehouse blows.”
The warehouse though was impatient to leave the planet; suddenly the earth shook and there was an explosion so powerful that it probably could have been heard as far away as Damascus or Tel Aviv. The sky turned scarlet with the flames that shot up and the air filled with mangled bodies and twisted debris and when gravity asserted itself, the bodies and the debris came dropping down all over the city. It was a rainstorm of the dead.
Disheveled, and drained, and looking more wretched than some of the white-faced figures that lay strewn about them, Harry and Ellie managed to find a café in the European sector from which violence had taken a temporary vacation. Elderly men and chic young women with enviable tans regarded Harry and his companion with obvious dismay; their torn and soiled clothes, their bruised and bleeding flesh, reminded them of what they had come to this place to get away from.
Harry was too wasted to concern himself with the sensibilities of these wealthy Lebanese and European expatriates who wished the war would go away but were helpless to make it do so.
“I need a drink,” said Ellie. “I am not particular. But it should be a very tall drink and very, very strong.”
“I think I will have one of the same. And while we drink ourselves under the table maybe you’ll tell me what the hell you were doing there—”
“In Mr. Cravitch’s warehouse?”
“Mr. Who?”
“I would have thought you’d known. Well, dear, listen carefully and you will discover why you’re going to be at the Sheraton Hotel in San Salvador this coming Sunday.”
C H A P T E R
T w e l v e
It was a bad connection and the Small Man was having a hell of a time trying to make himself understood to his unit commander nearly ten thousand miles away. He kept having to shout and still worse, hear the sad lonely reverberation of his own voice come back to him.
“I lost the subject,” he kept repeating with growing insistence.
Gradually, the unit commander seemed to comprehend him. “How did that happen?”
“She was always on the move. She left one room, took another, then I never saw her again until the airport.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, I never saw her until the airport. I was watching the airport for three days. She was with the detective.”
“The who?”
“The detective.”
There was a shrill whine that came through the wires, and if one listened attentively one could catch fragments of any number of multilingual conversations.
“Where did they go?”
“I don’t know. The plane was bound for Cyprus. After that, it’s anyone’s guess.”
“And why didn’t you follow them?”
“I a
ttempted to. But there were complications.”
There was only one complication actually; he had neglected to remove his gun and was halted at airport security. He was not arrested for if they arrested everyone with guns the jails in Beirut would be overflowing and the streets completely empty. But he was prohibited from boarding the Cyprus flight, and could only watch helplessly as it took off.
“Complications!” The unit commander’s anger registered even on a very bad connection. “Well, there is nothing else you can do there. Come back to San Francisco. Sooner or later the subject will return. Perhaps she is on her way back now.”
The Small Man was unhappy with his failure, and he expected that he would be rebuked and possibly purged upon his return. But still he was efficient at what he did, and he resolved that should he ever catch up to Ellie Winston again he would see that she had no opportunity to elude him a second time.
There were a good many reasons not to come to El Salvador and almost none to do so. First and foremost, the man that Harry had been pursuing halfway around the world and back again—Gamal Abd’el Kayyim—might not turn up there. That depended primarily on whether the man with the guns turned up. But Mr. Cravitch might not have survived the blaze that consumed his warehouse, or if he had, his business might not have survived. There was no telling how many millions he’d lost in the fire. But on the other hand, Harry had learned he possessed similar warehouses in various parts of the world, and one or two setbacks could probably be tolerated without fear of bankruptcy.
So already, Harry was contending with uncertainties which cast into doubt prospects for success in Central America.
The U.S. Embassy in Beirut had been cooperative—but only to a point. The proper papers were provided him, he was allowed on the plane without undergoing a security check, and all the necessary tickets were arranged for.
He was warned by the Embassy’s CIA station chief that he was to do nothing—absolutely nothing—in El Salvador until he was contacted by agency operatives there, a condition that Harry had no choice but to agree to if he was to get out of Beirut.
