Dean Ing - Soft Targets

by Soft Targets(lit)

  In Victoria, the little man dallied at his lunch, which was evidently filet of shoe sole, but aban-doned it after a few minutes. He walked to his own hotel, tossed a pillow on the floor of his room, and lay with his bare feet touching the locked door. He would need sleep now, to assure alertness that night.

  While the sleeper husbanded his strength, an apartment dweller in Toronto arrived to find her smoke alarm whining in panic. Fire marshals traced the problem, took one look through the door they forced in the apartment below, and radioed the Toronto Metropolitan Police. Within an hour they had conferred with the RCMP which, unlike the generally similar Federal Bureau of Investigation to the south, has more sweeping powers in domestic matters.

  A thorough description of the apartment's contents reached Ottawa early in the evening, and shortly afterward Ottawa sent five new photographs by wire to Toronto. None of the new pictures were from passports or mug shots; all were of a special category of people whose expertise in communication devices fitted the Toronto pattern. Neither the three men nor the two women were thought to be in Canada-until now. Pelletier took the group of new photofaxes, spread them irritably-and howled with delight.

  Pelletier brandished a `known photograph,' distinguished neither by clarity nor recency, and handed it to the RCMP sergeant, who flinched. It was `Trnka,' beyond any shred of doubt. At that moment, there were five men on the case. A few minutes later, after RCMP/Ottawa contacted FBI/Washington, there were over thirty.

  The HP tintinnabulated in the sleeper's ear at ten o'clock, Pacific Standard Time. Presently the little man strolled from the hotel to a dust-covered Pontiac off Wharf Street, and then moved on to the Inner Harbour. He watched a tall figure move across the lights from the cabin of an Islander Thirty-Four, continued his walk, and stopped again as the lights went out. He cursed softly, realizing that Graham intended to sleep aboard the damned boat. He found a coffee shop, wasted an hour, then returned to the Pontiac.

  He dressed inside the car, beginning with the wetsuit, struggling into the zippered black turtleneck and charcoal denims more by feel than by sight. The deck shoes were new, stiff, and uncomfortable. He stuck the Llama auto-matic into his waistband and locked the car, taking one of his three B-four bags with him from the trunk. He sank the bag in shallows, two moorages from the Islander, and brought the other bags.

  The water was cold only on his hands and feet, but he had trouble with the microbubbler in the darkness. Exhalations from SCUBA gear had been a clear signature of manfish since the early Cousteau aqualungs, and a trained ear could identify this signature through a fiberglass hull. The microbubbler changed both pitch and rhythm of exhalations. It was an absolute neces-sity for the job.

  He adjusted flotation on a B-four bag, tugged on his flippers, carefully made his way under two hulls by touch and emerged silently at the third hull. A quick surveillance assured him that he had the right boat; then he submerged again in the friendly blackness. His flashlight played across the great weighted keel and, seeing rings set into the keel, he let fate smile for him. It would be necessary to bond only one ring to have a triangulated lashing. The work went quickly. To be on the safe side he emplaced a second ring with the thermoset adhesive. He did not risk testing the rings too much, but lashed the sodden bag in place and took his bearing again before dousing the flashlight. Then he returned for the second bag.

  It was two in the morning before he eased aching muscles from layers of cloth and rubber. He wiped the Pontiac's interior with a cloth wherever some stray print might have clung, scrubbed his skin with the blue jacket to warm himself. What had he forgotten? Nothing.

  Fool! The HP and the Llama both. The cold had made him stupid. He shoved the pistol into a rubber bag, leaving the zipper open for instant recovery, and set the HP alarm for a three-hour delay.

  First light proved the Parisienne abandoned, strewn with expensive clothing and an empty attach‚ case under a mummy bag. Charles Graham spent most of the morning belowdecks with his spare mains'l, applying spurious United States Registration. He was tempted to abandon this business; it was one thing to snuff someone you actively disliked or who-you suspected-might be setting you up. But it was something else to kill some poor old helpless stranger. It would be a pleasure to put little Baz-tan over the side into Juan De Fuca-but Baztan, he thought, might not be the one who went over. Baztan might also become downright unpleas-ant if Graham did not show up at Port Angeles in the State of Washington. Sighing, Graham scanned the wharf for loiterers while he brewed tea in the galley. He did not think about the Pontiac, or about nearby boathouses.

  At half-past eleven Graham cast off, easing the hull back on her inboard diesel. He was too busy to notice the splop and swirl from a neighboring boathouse, and got underway without the sails. He could crowd on plenty of sail once away from the Inner Harbour and into Victoria Harbour proper, but proceeded slowly until he could get some leeway. The diesel made a scant wake, but enough to hide the myriad of tiny bubbles that closed the gap toward his rudder, then disap-peared torpedolike beneath his portside rail as he lounged at the tiller.

  The Islander's sleek hull was designed to slip easily through the water and Graham assumed that some vagrant current was responsible for her sluggish performance. He would have reconsidered if he had seen the excrescences that rode her keel. A fathom below her waterline, rock-climber's carabiners snapped into place one by one as the manfish struggled to place himself in such a way that he felt minimal force from the water. He was fairly warm in his wetsuit under cotton clothing, but he had not yet felt the currents of Juan De Fuca, cold and treacherous as a spider's bride.

  He felt more vulnerable as the sloop forged ahead. It might have been better to risk a border crossing afoot into Montana or Washington, he thought, but increased border patrols and sens-ing devices had made that chancy, even for Quebecois, who had provoked those precau-tions. He fumbled for a spare tank in the nearest B-four bag, letting the sling straps bite under his shoulders. It might not be such a bad trip, this way-unless his suit heater batteries failed.

  The sloop coursed out from the city, under sail now, on a sou'easterly heading. Near the corner of St. Lawrence and Dallas streets a man watched her progress as he spoke into a telephone. "Yes-sir, no mistake, it's Graham's Bitch. Well, that's her name, Inspector, can I help it? Nossir, she could be on a tack toward Port Townsend or just on a pleasure cruise. Right, sir; not very likely for Charles Graham. All right, I have twenty-power glasses; I'll let you know if he heads for Dunge-ness or Port Angeles." He replaced the receiver, took up the glasses again. For an hour he watched the sloop. Then he made another call.

  Near Buffalo, New York, a tiny craft plunged upward from the concrete airstrip, its pusher engine shrilling eagerly. Small by normal stan-dards, the single-place Bede Five was also ridiculously fast. Its thin airfoils carried the additional burden of a long-range tank cupped flat against its belly. The Bede arrowed westward over Lake Erie, soon overtaking the ancient Republic Seabee amphibian that galumphed along on VFR at one thousand meters altitude. The Bede's pilot throttled back, lazing several ki-lometers in arrears, radioing his position as he passed the New York State shoreline and Route Ninety. He turned back only after learning that the big float-equipped Cessna from Erie, Penn-sylvania was closing from the West and had the Seabee on radar.

  Moments after the Bede had curved away on its homeward leg, the Cessna surged ahead. Its quarry was sinking toward the northern end of Lake Chautauqua, making no effort to pretend otherwise. The Cessna swept over the lake high enough for maneuvering advantage, yet low enough to land quickly. All three men in the Cessna were equipped with chutes and government-issue automatic weapons befitting agents of the FBI. The attach‚ in Ottawa had forwarded an RCMP sergeant's opinion that only a pilot was aboard the Seabee, but it was a capacious craft and might hide a stowaway for days. The pilot had filed a flight plan but had not contacted Customs. The Cessna hung back, wait-ing for the amphib to flare out for its controlled bellyflop.r />
  And hung back. And hung back. The old Seabee droned down the narrow lake, swooping near the shore at picturesque spots and banking out again from time to time. At the southeast end of the lake, the Seabee began its sluggish return, and eventually passed northward back toward Lake Erie. In the Cessna, the three agents traded shrugs; for all its suspicious behavior, the Seabee had broken no law.

  In Juan De Fuca Strait, Charles Graham waited until he was fifteen kilometers from the Cana-dian shore, then started the diesel again and changed mains'ls. Directly below, the manfish fought to free a spare tank from its lashings. Switching tanks under such conditions was a peril he had not fully appreciated and, his hands numb even with the heating elements, he was clumsy. The empty tank, moved by vagaries of the current, bumped hard against the keel and was gone, bobbing in the wake of the Bitch, a perfectly obvious sign to anyone who saw it. Graham was grunting over his halyards and saw nothing else; the huge dacron sail lay flaccid along the mains'l boom and required all his con-centration. The manfish nearly lost his fresh tank as well but finally lashed it to his chest and hung in his straps, hands tucked under his armpits for warmth.

  The crossing took nearly five hours. At one point the manfish saw, with a terror he denied, a great gray mass that levitated toward him from below. He fingered the Sharkill. No fish, he hoped, could possibly be so vast-and then he saw that it was a sandbar, the Bitch gliding so near it she could have run aground. He debated cutting loose to swim for shore which, he felt, must be very near. He waited for surer signs; a wise decision. He was two kilometers from land.

  Port Angeles, huddled in the protecting arm of Angeles Point, sprawls along the Washington State side of Juan De Fuca Strait with its back to the rain-sodden Olympic Mountains. Charles Graham rounded the point in a subtle riptide to see the town, coming about expertly despite the odd sluggishness of the Bitch. He scanned the wharves for `Baztan,' who was much nearer than he knew, and offered a line to a friendly idler who caught it and made it fast. When he had secured the Bitch fore and aft, Graham stepped up to resecure the idler's clumsy work, then strolled away alert for a frail old man with a tough little man.

  The friendly idler waited for a few moments, then shifted the toothpick in his mouth and dallied behind Graham. The FBI was better at tails than at knot-tying.

  Fifty meters from the Bitch, a burly man under a long-billed cap nodded to another man, who adjusted his face plate, clamped his mouthpiece, and slid from his boat into the water. Once they bonded their transmitter just under the water-line near the stern of the Bitch, they could fix her location whenever they liked for as long as the battery lasted. The transmitter was disguised as marine growth. If Graham noticed it he would, at worst, only remove it. Customs and Immigration fretted about Graham on both sides of the border. The burgundy mains'l had almost fooled the watchers in Port Angeles but hull lettering and Graham's features had not changed. His mains'l could be explained as borrowed; a minor viola-tion. Better to give him a long leash and, while they were at it, to check his hull. It would not be the first time a man had run contraband in his keel.

  The manfish had lashed one of the B-four bags to a distant piling and was wrestling with the second bag when he saw, impending above him in the sunlit murk, the second manfish. He quickly released the bag which tumbled slowly out of sight below, fumbled for carabiners on the third bag, saw that he would be too late. He unzipped the third bag, heedless of the masses that cascaded lazily downward, and armed the Sharkill.

  The stubby Sharkill, no larger than a baseball bat with handles, had been an afterthought purchased chiefly for study. It was also said to be effective on even the largest carcharadon, firing a single salvo of small concussion warheads rocket-propelled in a conic pattern. It was a di-rectional pattern, designed to implode flesh, a great hammerwave of water to surround and pulverize a shark's gristle without releasing blood in the water. The Sharkill was an almost-perfect weapon, but its warheads were stupid: they had to be set for the quarry's distance or they would streak away, quicker than bar-racudas, to explode at maximum range. For once, the little man had skipped a detail.

  He kicked backward, shielded by the keel, and aimed the weapon as the new arrival spotted him. It did not matter who the intruder was; better a mysterious underwater explosion now, than an excited SCUBA enthusiast on the wharf in moments. If all but known friends are enemies, then all strangers are enemies. He triggered the Sharkill.

  The young agent saw a silver-gray gleam in the other swimmer's hands. It did not look like a weapon until it fired. Six petals unfurled into streamers that sizzled past him, one passing be-tween his knees, but before he could wheel to escape he felt the distant shocks.

  The warheads continued for thirty meters in the water, two exploding far below, the others slanting outward. Two more broke the surface and, unencumbered by water, detonated in air bursts well beyond the boat that contained the agent in the baseball cap. The last two warheads flanked the FBI boat before triphammering its shallow-draft hull.

  The fleeing FBI agent in SCUBA gear found his own boat settling as he boarded it, nearby tourists too stunned by the air bursts to find his predicament funny. The burly agent in the cap, clambering to the wharf, shook his head to clear the ringing from his ears. In moments he realized the situation, and the wetsuited agent found canisters in his boat before it was completely awash. He tossed the canisters to the wharf. The third agent raced to the Bitch and, arming the canisters, hurled them into the water on both sides of the sloop.

  The manfish saw the canisters fall, saw silent puffs as each discharged several liters of chemi-cal. He knew the chemical was intended for him and did not wait to discover its function. As the material spread, it thickened into a colloidal gel that turned many cubic meters of sea water into salt treacle. It would have immobilized him had he not fled. He swam to the pilings, found his one secured bag, and used churning flipper-strokes to put him as far down the wharf as possible before he turned to proceed along the shoreline a few meters below the surface.

  He continued until his breathing supply was exhausted, the light beginning to fail as shallows forced him near the surface. He lay still then, the bag his anchor in the shallows, gasping the salt air and awaiting his ally, darkness.

  Charles Graham went through predictable stages for the federal agents: anger, innocence, astonishment. He did not believe he had car-ried a human parasite across Juan De Fuca ("He'd freeze his balls off!") until a wetsuited agent recovered damning evidence from below the Bitch.

  They let him reconsider his innocence overnight and began afresh the next morning with a rough-smooth treatment. Chilton, the husky agent, was rough. Polsky, the tier of inferior knots, was smooth. In the cell with Graham, Polsky leaned against the wall. Chilton stood with one foot on Graham's bunk, furry forearms crossed over his knee. "The very least that's going to happen is impoundment of your boat," Chilton finally said with poisonous relish.

  Polsky withdrew the toothpick from his mouth. "Unless you can show good faith," he murmured.

  "At worst," Chilton continued, "you'll end up playing rock hockey with a sixteen-pound hammer in British Columbia Penitentiary."

  Graham looked from one to the other. "I'm clean! Take the Bitch apart, you won't find a thing." He glared at Chilton. "I think it's a frame; you bunch of pussies planned this whole thing!"

  "Somebody sure did," Polsky agreed. He let Graham chew on that for a moment while he chewed the wooden splinter. "It wasn't us, Graham. Chilton thinks it was you." He seemed about to go on, then gave a quick headshake. "Doesn't matter what I think."

  Suddenly it mattered very much to Graham. "What, what? Your guess is as good as mine..."

  "My guess? Somebody knew you were com-ing. Somebody used you. Somebody wanted to make you look like an asshole."

  Graham was silent long enough to fumigate a few details for inspection. The deal with Baztan was dead, now. The Basque could have set him up for somebody, all right. Not Baztan himself, he was already
in Port Angeles. Or was he? A glaze washed over Graham's face. "There was one guy I mentioned it to," he hazarded, and soon found himself checking photographs in a room without bars. Graham had met a few men whose photographs graced the stack, but nobody looked like his client.

  With Graham's help, the agents forwarded a report that included 'Baztan's' habits of packing heat and heavy cash. Graham was released with orders to drop in for a chat with the RCMP in Victoria. As Graham was casting off, young Polsky sprinted down the wharf with a sheaf of fresh photographs from Washington. The wirephotos covered a cross-category of diminu-tive men who had used Basque cover, met the other criteria, and were hoped to be almost anywhere but in the United States. Graham iden-tified the same man Pelletier had, instantly, without doubt. It was an eight-year-old alien registry photo.

  "Arif?" Graham studied the data with the photo. "Who's Hakim Arif?"