"For you to go diving."
"And when does this happen?"
"Tomorrow morning. Eat your pasta, don't let it get cold."
Eddie obediently rolled another forkful. "This is one hell of an equal partnership. One fisherman and one piece of bait. It's a damn good thing that the fisherman knows how to cook linguine.''
"Just an old family recipe," Vasily said modestly.
"Russian linguine? You still haven't told me what makes the clam sauce so tasty."
"You really don't want to know."
"Why not?" Eddie demanded.
"Chili peppers," Vasily confessed.
One week later, five men sat around an old oak table in the dacha at Zhukovka. The table was covered with paper files, ashtrays, the twisted filters of Russian cigarettes, empty teacups, and the crumbs of a fruitcake recently consumed. Thomas Crowfoot studied a single sheet of paper, then let it slide from his fingers to the table.
"They're pulling a lure," he said. "It's obvious."
"Unquestionably," said Fist.
Major Marchenko nodded his agreement. Colonel Parker looked confused, but he nodded as well. Romeo Arteaga only smiled.
It was the second day of the conference. The first day had been given over to what Colonel Fist called a reunion of old colleagues. The mechanics of the reunion had been simple to the point of genius: a bottle of cognac and a bottle of champagne placed in front of each man, and an overflowing tureen of beluga caviar set on ice in the center of the table. Toast points, grated onion, lemon wedges, and chopped egg completed the arrangements. Only Major Marchenko bothered with the toast; the others happily spooned great gobs of the caviar directly from bowl to mouth.
By midnight, the two Russians had been falling-down drunk,
Parker asleep, and Arteaga slumped in his chair giggling helplessly. Crowfoot, who had drunk glass for glass, then smiled gently at the sight and took the last bottle of champagne from the melted ice in the cooler. He swung it jauntily by the neck as he marched off, slowly but steadily, to the room where the prima ballerina of the Kiev State Ballet Company had been waiting impatiently for several hours.
Now, on the second day, Colonel Fist retrieved the paper that Crowfoot had dropped, and looked at it idly. He had read it twice before.
"Where and what is Cozumel?" he asked.
Marchenko answered him promptly. "A small island off the coast of Yucatan, in Mexico. Well known for underwater sports. Mancuso surfaced there three days ago. He's using the name of Morrison, the same name he used here."
"Almost as if he wanted to be spotted," said Fist.
"Not almost. He wants it, all right," Crowfoot said. "Any sign of Borgneff?"
Marchenko looked again at the paper. "None, but we can assume he's nearby."
"Why?" asked Parker. "He could be thousands of miles away."
Fist looked unhappily at his opposite number. "Tom, would you care to explain the situation to the colonel?"
"Glad to." Crowfoot tilted back his chair and hooked the heels of his boots over the rungs. "Fred, it has to be a lure. Short of an all-out assault, that's the only option they have left. Mancuso is the bait. They figure you and Romeo here will go after him. Borgneff waits in the background and picks the two of you off when you make your move."
"Cabrones," Arteaga muttered. The others ignored him.
Parker asked slowly, "What do you think we should do?"
"I think we should oblige the gentlemen." Crowfoot looked over at Fist. "I had a joint operation in mind."
"Under whose command?" Fist asked.
"Yours and mine at the top. The field commander would have to be one of our people. Romeo is the logical choice. Major Marchenko could second him."
Parker flushed. "You seem to be forgetting something. I'm senior."
"That's just it, you're too senior," Crowfoot said smoothly. "This is a field job, Fred. Calls for a younger man."
Fist joined in the diplomacy. "In addition, I understand that Mr. Arteaga is an expert scuba diver. That skill might be called for."
Romeo said, "He's my meat, Colonel. Let me have him."
Parker sat back in his seat. "All right, I'll go along with it, but I want the record to show that I asked for the command."
"Nobody's keeping any records here, but I understand your feelings," Crowfoot said. "Now, for the backup force, I think a dozen men should be enough. Six of ours, and six of yours, Fist. Naturally, they won't know the true identities of the targets, or the reasons for the hits. Agreed?"
"Agreed," said Fist. "The oldest ploy there is. The trapper is trapped, the fisherman is hooked. It should work." He looked around the table. "Any questions, any discussion? None? Excellent. In that case I suggest that Major Marchenko confer with Mr. Arteaga to work out the logistical details. That will leave the senior officers free to hold another reunion this afternoon."
Crowfoot grinned, and held up his hand. "Before you start popping the corks on the firewater, I have a piece of unfinished business to bring up."
Fist returned the grin, but slyly. "I was wondering when you were going to get to that."
"I assume we're talking about the same thing. How did Borgneff and Mancuso make contact in the first place?"
Fist nodded. "In the days when I still trusted CYBER, I put the question to the machine."
"And the answer?"
"The damn junk heap just laughed at me. All I could get it to say was INSUFFICIENT INFORMATION."
"I'm not surprised. What we have here is an unprogrammed factor. Until we know what it is, we'll be working blind."
"Then I suggest that we exchange dossiers. I give you Borg- neffs, and you give me Mancuso's. Then we cross-feed both machines to see if we come up with a behavior pattern that would explain the contact."
Parker said quickly, "I don't think we could do that without editing the dossiers first. Security, you know."
Crowfoot yawned. "Security, my ass. Do you really think there's anything hot in those files that our friends here don't already know?"
"Or that you don't know about ours?" Fist added.
Parker said stiffly, "I was only pointing out the obvious risks."
"You've made your point, son, and your butt is covered," said Crowfoot, not unkindly. "The responsibility is all mine."
"In that case, on with the reunion!" roared Fist. "Marchenko, get cognac and champagne, and a large plate of zakuski. Two plates. And tell them in the kitchen to put in lots of cucumber. I adore cucumber with cognac."
"With respect, Comrade Colonel, you know how the combination affects your stomach."
"To hell with my stomach. How often do I have a reunion with my old enemy Thomas Crowfoot? Quick, the bottles."
"Let's take it a little easy with the reunion today," said Crowfoot. "You keep forgetting, Fist. You're dealing with one ancient Injun here."
"I know all about ancient Indians." Fist's face split into a huge grin. "I had the pleasure of having breakfast with the lady from Kiev this morning. She tells me that the Oglala Sioux are like fine wines. They only improve with age."
"These Russian squaws talk too much," was Crowfoot's only comment.
15
They call Arteaga the knife man, but he's a lot more than that. For example, he plays chess. All right, you're good, Vasily, you can beat me three times out of four, but Romeo could spot you a rook and trim your ass every time. Back in Havana they called him a budding Capablanca. So he's got the brains as well as the guts. He was the one who wrote the script on how to extract Castro.
I heard about that. Dimethyl sulfoxide and methyl mercury on Fidel's cigars, wasn't it?
That's right—the part he'd hold, not the part he'd smoke. Something like a sixty-day lapse period. Fidel drops dead and there isn't a doctor in the world who can say what did it. When the State Department killed the operation I thought Romeo was going to cry.
What about his diving? How good is he?
He's a pro. I wouldn't stand a chance
with him down there. Just remember that. If he gets to me, I'm finished.
He'll never get to you, I promise. It's my job to see that he doesn't. It's your job to be the bait.
I know. I feel like I've been practicing for it all my life.
Eddie moved slowly along the jagged edge of the coral reef, drifting with the current, glancing up occasionally at the dark shape of the fishing boat sixty feet above him. The water was so clear that he could see down to the bottom, nearly two hundred feet, to where the reef sheered off to yet another level. A myriad of fish swam there in the stillness, singly and in schools: jewellike blue-and-yellow Beau Gregories, gray groupers, banded an- gelfish, and awesome barracuda—like torpedoes with teeth. The sun poured down, blinding him whenever he looked up from the depths. Bubbles floated serenely, reassuringly, toward the surface. The world was as it should always be: calm and beautiful.
"Nice," he murmured.
"Repeat, please," Vasily said from the beach.
"Sorry, I forgot that the Wetphone was on." He spoke clearly into the Scubapro mask. "I just said it was nice down here, even for the bait."
"How is your air?"
"Three hundred pounds. Time to come up. Anything happening on top?"
"Nothing in sight but your boat."
Vasily crouched at the edge of the jungle that ran down to the beach, looking out over the still water. In his left hand he held the microphone attached to the surface unit of the Wetphone. Next to his right hand, propped against a coconut palm, was an SVD Dragunov rifle with a telescopic sight and ten Misch-metal bullets chambered below the breech. Misch metal, a blend of radioactive lanthanum and polonium, that could strike no more than an arm and send the victim into critical shock. If it struck a man's chest, there was nothing left to bury.
"This is the bait calling the fisherman," Eddie said through the Wetphone. "That's it for today, I'm coming up. Make sure to cover me when the boat pulls into the dock."
"Fisherman to bait. You won't see me, but I'll be there."
"The bait is grateful. What time do we meet tonight?"
"Ten o'clock, the beach at your hotel."
"Right. Bait signing off."
Eddie surfaced gently, spat out his regulator, inflated his BC vest, and snorkeled in lazy strokes toward the Santa Ysabel, the fishing boat that bobbed on the swell off Palancar Reef. The owner of the fishing boat, a cheerful, villainous-looking young man named Isidoro, hauled him aboard. The boat had been rented for two weeks at a good price, and the Mexican had asked no questions of the silent little American who broke all the rules by diving alone, carrying a spear gun with which he speared no fish, a Nikonos underwater camera with which he took no photographs, and a Wetphone with no surface unit on the boat. The gringo had said he was looking to photograph a hammerhead shark.
"I find for you," was Isidoro's promise, although he knew that the sharks were asleep for the summer in the caves near Isla Mujeres. To turn one's back on such a blessing—a tourist in the slack season—would have been sinful. A winter paradise, the island of Cozumel was packed with tourists and scuba divers from Christmas through Easter; but this was June. The tourists had been replaced by mosquitoes and torrential afternoon rains.
"Hasta manana," Eddie said to Isidoro when the boat reached the dock at the center of town. Nearby, Los Mariscos Cafe was nearly empty, with only a few stray tourists sitting in the shade drinking beer and eating turtle steak. Eddie checked them out carefully before hailing a taxi and setting out with his diving gear for his hotel. He was dutifully vigilant during the ride as well, but the vigilance was a matter of form only. Neither he nor Vasily expected the attack to come on land. He was too tempting a target, circling baitlike underwater each day. After all, went their reasoning, who would shoot a fish out of water?
He dozed through the rest of the afternoon in his hotel room, dined lightly, and at ten o'clock stood on the soft, warm sand of the beach, listening to the lap of the surf. A shadow moved among the coconut palms, and white starlight slanted off Vasily's bony face. Eddie walked off the beach and into the trees, where the Russian waited.
"Which do you want first?" Vasily asked. "The good news or the bad?"
"Neither. I want to go back to bed and pull the covers over my head."
"The good news is that Arteaga is here."
"You call that good?" Eddie asked, but he was instantly alert. "Where did you spot him?"
"When you docked this afternoon. He was in a parked car across from Los Mariscos."
"Jesus, he could have popped me right then and there."
"He'd never do it that way. He wants you in the water. He wants you to disappear."
Eddie shivered. "You said something about bad news?"
"Your boatman, Isidore. You've got to figure him as being turned. Arteaga spoke to him after you left, then they went off together in a rented car. You'll have to take care of him tomorrow."
"Tomorrow? You think he'll hit right away?"
"Why should he wait? He has you spotted, and he's got your boatman in his pocket. Yes, he'll hit tomorrow."
"Isidore's no problem, just a complication," Eddie said thoughtfully. "But what about Parker? Any sign of him?"
"None, and I don't like it."
"Maybe he sent Romeo solo."
"Perhaps, but I doubt it. In any event, we'll have to play it as if Parker is here. We're not taking any extra chances."
"Okay, we stick to the game plan. Let's run over it one more time."
"Now? You should know it inside out by now."
"Come on, pal, be patient. You're the big, smart fisherman. I'm just the poor, dumb worm."
They spoke for another several minutes under the star-laden sky, and then they parted, Vasily walking down the beach to the Cabanas del Caribe, Eddie going up the beach to the Mayan Plaza. Once in front of the door to his room, he took a six-inch plastic pick from his pocket. He did not use a key to open the door. A key, or any other piece of metal, or the forcing of the door itself, would have set off a nitroglycerin bomb built into a can of Old Spice shaving cream that hung from the inside doorknob. The plastic pick deactivated the detonator, and he was able to enter safely. Once inside the room he reactivated the device and checked a second, similar, bomb that protected the window from intrusion. Then he lay down on the bed and composed himself to wait for the morning. He had not expected to sleep, but he did.
Vasily, at his hotel farther up the beach, had no time for sleep. Once in his room he went to work taking plastic bags and jars from his suitcase and spreading equipment on the bed. In the bathroom sink, with his hands sheathed by rubber gloves, he ground up a kilo of potassium chlorate, sprinkling it with warm water to speed the process. From the bed he took three jars of common Vaseline. Mixing it with the potassium chlorate, kneading it and punching it as a baker makes dough, in ten minutes he had worked the ingredients into a lump of pliable paste, which he divided and pressed into a dozen thin plastic bags.
Then, from the suitcase, he took out three long strips of common fiber-glass insulation and a bottle of sulfuric acid. He dumped the acid into the bathtub, ripped up the fiber-glass into long, spiky strands, and dropped them in to soak. Hardly enough for the purpose, if he wanted to interdict the area completely. He frowned, glancing around the room. There was always something. The mattress? He slit it open with a knife. It contained polystyrene foam in small, soft white chunks. He added three armloads of the foam to the fiber-glass in the bathtub. Still wearing his gloves, he stuffed the wet contents of the tub into two pillowcases and wrapped the rest of it in a blanket which he stripped from the bed. Outside, in the darkness, he loaded everything into the back seat of the Safari. Then he set off for the beach opposite the tip of the Palancar Reef.
The island of Cozumel was in the shape of a fat sausage snuggled north to south against the Yucatan coast. A single narrow road ran around the perimeter of the island, from the hotels bunched on San Juan Beach on the northwest coast, past the yacht-
club basin, then through the town, then south past the El Presidente Hotel and Chankanab Lagoon to the Palancar Reef. The interior of the island was a flat matting of scrub and jungle, with a few seldom-used dirt tracks, hidden Mayan villages, and a scattering of small ruined temples dating from the time before the Spaniards. Vasily reached the reef in darkness, but even as he began to unload the Safari, the weak light of the moon showed through the trees. A faint breeze rustled banana leaves. Battling his way through the brush and creepers, in ten minutes he reached the edge of the beach, sweating, breathing hard. The breeze had died, and the air was thick with heat. Just enough moonlight bled through the jungle mist for him to see.
He worked quickly, removing the doughy substance from the plastic bags and planting each lump a few inches below the cool sand in the open spaces between the palms, then tamping down the sand with his foot—smoothing it out in some places, deliberately leaving his footprints in others. His footprints from the other mornings were everywhere, and he made no effort to obliterate them; they would serve nicely as a guide for the trackers. Wet, the mixture of potassium chlorate and Vaseline was not yet volatile, but the first rays of the sun would begin to dry it. By nine o'clock, the full heat of the morning would harden it into plastique. Using a random pattern, he distributed the load of fiber-glass strands and chunks of polystyrene foam soaked in sulfuric acid. He scattered it from the edge of the jungle all the way to the waterline. Again, the sun would convert it lethally.
He smiled in satisfaction. With his homemade devices he had effectively denied the beach area to any potential intruder. His position for covering Eddie was now secure.
He drove back to his hotel in the starry darkness and parked the Safari off the road. He carried his room key in his pocket and was just passing the lobby desk when the clerk hailed him.
"Sehor Victor? A message for you."
Vasily studied the scrawled handwriting on the small pink slip. It said, I miss you. Call soon. And that was followed by the area code for Washington, D.C., and a telephone number.
"You received this call?" Vasily asked politely.
"No, Seiior. Our telephone operator."
THE DEATH FREAK -- An Eddie Mancuso Thriller (Eddie Mancuso And Vasily Borgneff Book 1) Page 19
