Cyborg 02 - Operation Nuke

by Martin Caidin

  Oscar Goldman glanced at Jackson McKay. “What do you think?”

  “I think,” he said, “I am going to be sick.”

  Goldman smiled. “Don’t knock it. After all, we wrote the script.”

  The show started as a guaranteed winner. After the introductions it was downhill all the way. The awesome canyon Duane Barker used for a mouth that night was unprecedented—even for him. Hollywood’s hero brought up Steve Austin straight in his chair when he declared his pleasure at the moon program being ended. “Waste of money,” Barker said, and at the same time proclaimed his deep pride at what America had accomplished in Vietnam—and would accomplish in the future against aggression. He bowed to Marty Schiller. “Pride is what I have for men like you,” boomed the box-office sensation.

  Schiller stared at him in seeming disbelief.

  “You have got to be,” Steve Austin said, slowly and distinctly, “the most stupid and pompous ass I have ever met.”

  Live television. All across America. Austin was the man who’d come back from the moon, from the dead. He was entitled to have his say . . . The studio engineers looked at one another, nodded and grinned. They’d been told this might be a hot one, but to let it run unless they got a special signal. Austin and Schiller were untouchable, heroes . . .

  Duane Barker drew himself up to his full six feet six inches and stared down at Steve Austin. “In view of your previous service, Colonel, and the fact that you are handicapped, I’ll try to overlook that, because otherwise I swear to you I’d—”

  Oscar Goldman stared intently at the TV screen. “Now, Steve. Use the left arm . . .”

  Steve was on his feet, facing Duane Barker. For a moment he turned to his side, looking at Marty Schiller. The big man rose slowly and his hands came up from his sides, palms up. He shrugged.

  Steve turned back to Barker, started forward and stumbled, and in the same motion brought up his right hand to grab Barker’s tie. This brought the big man stooping forward, off balance. And made his face a target for a bionics arm.

  They would need to play it back slow motion to see the arm move and Steve’s left fist connect with Barker’s nose, snapping his head back wildly. By the time Steve released his grip on the man’s tie, Barker was unconscious, and collapsing full out on the stage floor.

  Bob Harvey yelled for them to stop it and started toward Steve. As he did so, an oversized hand snapped out, grabbed him by the back of his legs, and with dramatic ease picked Harvey from the floor, held him kicking frantically, then dumped him from sight behind the couch.

  By now members of the network security force were on the scene. Schiller met the first with an open-handed smack across the face that somersaulted the man. Steve took another with a sudden body bend, catching the man with one hand by his jacket and with his other hand grasping him between the legs. Steve, using the other’s momentum, tossed him over his head. He collapsed in a heap some ten feet beyond. The remaining guards, not unreasonably, hesitated, and Marty Schiller grabbed Steve, pointed to the rear exit from the stage. They took it and rushed down the emergency stairway to the ground floor.

  As they went through the door to the street a wall of reporters and TV lights was already in place. A police car pulled up and two officers bulled their way through. Flashguns popped in dazzling succession as Steve took one and Schiller the other. They pushed past the policemen, and Schiller let loose with an ear-piercing whistle at a cab across the street. Newsmen at their heels, they shoved into the cab. “Just get the hell out of here,” Steve said. The cab shot away from the curb with the door still not completely closed.

  They were six blocks away before anyone spoke. “Wow,” the driver said, “ain’t you two sumpin’!” He glanced at them in his mirror. “I seen the whole thing. They had a special big TV set in front of the studio. Saw it all. Man, you two . . .” They saw the grin on his face.

  Schiller leaned forward. “How’s your sense of direction?” he asked.

  “Lousy. What you got in mind?”

  “Kennedy airport. The maintenance hangers. We’ve . . . got some friends there.”

  “Done,” said the cabbie. “You mind some advice?”

  “Shoot.”

  “We don’t go to the airport. Not direct, I mean. Too obvious. We can’t take the tunnels. You know, the toll booths. Maybe they already got my number. So we take the 59th Street bridge. From there I can hit the Northern State Parkway and go past the airport, cut south to the Southern State Parkway. We feed right into the Belt, and we make it to the field from the other direction.”

  Steve glanced at Marty Schiller, who nodded! “Go,” Schiller said. “And thanks. Anyway, it’ll be a good fare.”

  The driver turned to him. “You think you had a fight on your hands tonight? You two jokers try to pay me, and you’ll know what a fight really is.”

  The cabbie worked the back roads of the sprawling airport and let them off near a side door to the giant maintenance hangar of Pan American Airways. They made it to the locker room. At one end of the room was a large laundry bin. Moments later each of them was wearing a soiled maintenance overall. They went back outside, away from the interior of the brightly lit hangar, walking casually to the flight ramp.

  Steve nudged Marty Schiller, nodded toward a work crew that was preparing to tow a Boeing 707 from the maintenance line to the passenger terminal. “You can get a lot of time for hijacking.”

  “Who the hell is hijacking?” Schiller said. “We’re stealing.”

  Steve laughed. “Never thought of it that way. Let’s go.”

  They clambered up the workstand and entered the jetliner. A mechanic looked at them from the cockpit, and Marty Schiller waved urgently for the man to come back into the cabin. Moments later he was lowered gently, unconscious, into a passenger seat. Steve went to the flight deck. Minutes later he gestured to Schiller. “It’s all here. Fueled and serviced for the run to Paris, capacity for a full passenger load.”

  “Charts?” Schiller asked, and nodded with satisfaction when Steve pointed to a bulging case.

  “All here,” Steve told him.

  They carried the unconscious mechanic to the work stand, shouted to a ground crewman that the mechanic was sick and to roll back the stand. Schiller also told the man they had orders to run up the engines and taxi for several minutes and he wanted everything clear. By the time he returned to the cockpit Steve was strapped into the left seat, headset about his ears, going through the check list. The big jets started easily. For another minute Steve held position, studying the gauges, then gestured for Schiller to put on his own headset.

  “We’ll taxi as long as we can with the main door open,” Steve told him. “When I say go, you close it, fast.”

  Steve listened to ground control, got the active runway situated in his mind and started rolling. They were still a thousand yards away from it when someone at PAA got the word to the tower. “We got company,” Schiller said, pointing to his right. Emergency lights. Vehicles racing to them. Steve gave Schiller the word to close the door. He went to tower frequency.

  “Kennedy Tower, PAA Niner-Six here. We have an emergency. Repeat, we have an emergency. We are taking the next intersection onto the active. Clear the runway of all landing and take-off traffic. I repeat, clear the runway of all landing and take-off traffic.” He didn’t wait for an answer, rolling sharply to the right onto the main runway. A huge shape thundered over them as the tower shouted for a landing airliner to make an emergency go-around. Steve hit the brakes, turning left, drifting to the right side of the runway. They’d need the full three thousand feet of extra distance with this ship. At the runway’s end he swung the big Boeing into a tight left turn, straightened out the nosewheel, scanned the gauges.

  By his side he heard Schiller say, “Anybody for Europe?”

  “Why not,” Steve said, and edged the throttles forward, standing on the brakes. Flashing lights came toward them. “Hang on,” Steve said, releasing the brakes and snapping on blazing la
nding lights. The Boeing lurched forward, accelerating swiftly. The chasing vehicles shot to the sides of the runway to escape the monster bearing down on them.

  They watched helplessly as the huge jet rose into the sky.

  Their whole emergency system was set up to deal with hijacking. The alert team met in the airport director’s office, tied in with hot lines to Air Traffic Control and to McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. The Pan American director of flight operations was in a maddening conversation with the Air Force fighter controller at McGuire.

  “But, sir, if it’s not a hijacking—”

  “That’s right,” the PAA man said, “they stole the airplane! Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir. That means no passengers. We already have two fighters scrambled. They’re closing in now. We’re prepared to order the men to turn back or—”

  “Or what? Major, that airplane cost ten million dollars! Ten million! Are you going to pay for the damned thing?”

  “Steve. Off to my right.” Marty Schiller pointed. “You can just make them out. Two of them, it looks like. Fighters.”

  Steve banked the 707 for a better view. “One-oh-sixes, in fact.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “They’ll come alongside. Fly a tight formation. Then they’ll call us on the emergency frequency and warn us to turn back.”

  “Then what?”

  “They got nice people flying those planes, Marty. Wave to them.”

  Which is what Schiller did as the F-106 pilots got their orders from McGuire, peeled off and went home.

  The alert team at Kennedy airport heard the telephone ring. The PAA man jerked the phone from its cradle and snapped his name.

  “Bad news,” a voice said. “There’s a big front over the Atlantic. They’re in it by now. We’ve lost all contact.”

  The PAA man lowered the phone slowly.

  “They’re gone,” he said.

  CHAPTER 8

  The members of the hastily convened United Nations Study of the Side Effects of the Unspecified Nuclear Disaster in Africa had just departed, much to McKay’s relief. Maybe now they could get down to it.

  “Anybody have anything more on the device itself?” He glanced about the table. Charles D. Strong from BCE. The letters came from the letter-numbers of uranium 235, the three numbers corresponding to the second, third and fifth letters of the alphabet. BCE worked as an arm of the American government with the unusual responsibility of coordinating with its opposite number, Atomik, in Moscow, to keep track of international marketing of nuclear devices. It served more as a clearing house than it did as an intelligence organization, but simply gathering and sifting through information had become such a stupendous job that other agencies welcomed the filtering service of BCE. Charlie Strong served another useful purpose; heading an organization that functioned with the blessings of Moscow, he could maintain a working liaison with Interpol without incurring the distrust of the Russians, who also worked with the international police group.

  Alongside Strong of BCE was Drew Stetz from the NUKE office. Stetz played the same role in secret intelligence that Strong did openly with the Russians and the international community. The NUKE people had accounted for—to date—more than seventy nuclear devices lost, stolen or misplaced through remarkably intricate record-keeping.

  Arthur Castalini represented Interpol. He was a no-nonsense professional policeman, and he and McKay had worked together back in the Second World War. Castalini was there wearing the hat of Lisbon director of Interpol—a neat trick for an Italian.

  Two more men made up the conference group. Val Phillips of CIA and Tim Henderson of the Defense Department. Henderson represented all the services and their combined intelligence departments. McKay respected him.

  “All right,” said Val Phillips, “let’s have it, Jackson. What is going on with Steve Austin? We’ve just had an atom bomb exploded by some outfit in Africa and right in the middle of the flap about that one of your favorite projects happens to go haywire and get international headline publicity—”

  “He was not one of our people,” McKay broke in. “I’ve no time to quibble over details of experimental programs with you, Val—” McKay paused, wondering how much of this would be repeated one way or another by Castalini when he returned to Europe. “But what we were planning with Austin was no secret among the agencies . . . You know what we do with amputees. If their other attributes fit our needs we train them for special jobs. Steve Austin, because of his unique background, held great possibilities for us. But it didn’t work out,” McKay said with sarcasm, “as you can perhaps tell from the headlines.”

  Phillips smiled. “The project did not work out, and yet this man is capable of decking somebody nearly twice his size, stealing a 707, and flying it out of the country? Look, we can take this up later if you want, Jackson, but we know you spent over a million on Austin and—”

  “Six million,” McKay corrected him, “and before you further reveal your lack of information, I recommend you brief yourself on a man called Douglas Bader.”

  Phillips showed the question on his face, and Castalini joined in. “Maybe I can help out, Mr. Phillips. The name Douglas Bader is very well known to us in Europe. During World War II he was one of England’s greatest aces. A brilliant fighter pilot.”

  Phillips didn’t like the crossfire. “Your point?”

  “Douglas Bader had no legs. His artificial limbs were of metal and wood. He shot down all the enemy planes after the accident that severed both his legs. By the way, there were eight other pilots in that war who flew with artificial legs. But Mr. Bader is more relevant to the Austin story. Bader was also notorious for trying to break out of German prison camps.” Castalini nodded to McKay. “My apologies. It was really none of my business.”

  McKay waved aside the apology. Val Phillips was off balance and McKay enjoyed that. “You might also call Marty Schiller a failure,” he said to the CIA man. “If you recall, he and Austin took off together.”

  Phillips made a last try. “You said you spent six million dollars on Austin. What for?”

  “We built a testing laboratory,” McKay said wearily. “It was for an entire program. It was coordinated with the Air Force, the Veterans Administration, three hospitals specializing in amputee and paraplegic rehabilitation and—” McKay shook his head. “Look, Val. Austin and Schiller are now being hunted as dangerous criminals. They are no longer my worry. Or yours. Now, do you mind if we get on with it?”

  “We have been searching down a very good lead,” Castalini told them. “By using a combination of all the facilities at our disposal, which includes everything from computers to an old, wrinkled woman from Naples who uses garlic to tell the future”—he shrugged—“who knows, we must leave nothing to chance, any of us. Well, we pursued this lead and it had much to do with aircraft. Especially international cargo flights. There seemed to be pilots from different countries involved. It could have been ordinary, but it did merit attention.”

  Tim Henderson of the Defense Department pushed for more. “Any luck, Arthur?”

  “We did discover a very large flying organization. It has bases throughout southern Europe. We also are of the opinion that there is no purpose to be served in further investigation.”

  “Why not?” Henderson persisted.

  “For one thing, it seems completely legitimate, however extensive and profitable its freight and other operations. And if our suspicions ever should be confirmed,” Castalini said with a grimace, “then the atomic weapon that destroyed Butukama was exploded by the Italian government.” He smiled without humor. “The base, the facility we finally tracked down? It was a field of the Italian Air Force. And we Italians are very frightened of atomic bombs, may I add.” Castalini glanced from Henderson to McKay. “I don’t mean to sound frivolous, but I did need to impress on you that our biggest lead to date doesn’t seem worth much.”

  “I understand, and thank you,” McKay said. “Still, we need something, gentle
men, if only to take the pressure off the President about our own CIA.”

  “Don’t misunderstand,” McKay said quickly. “The Soviet premier has talked directly with the President. The premier said that his intelligence services had concluded that an international group dealing in nuclear devices definitely exists.” McKay shifted position in his chair. “If you’ll recall, Val, there have been occasions in the past when the CIA did establish various front organizations to serve its purposes. In any case, the premier did everything but come right out and say the international group handling such weapons is really a blind created by the CIA. The accusation is that the United States is now playing international criminal politics.”

  To McKay’s surprise there was no angry reaction from the CIA man. Phillips said quietly, “That’s very funny. That was the conclusion we came to about the Russians.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The two men slipped quietly along the chipped concrete wall of the warehouse, stealthy yet sure of themselves. They paused at the corner of the building, flattened against the wall, taking stock of their position. The second man questioned his companion with a glance; the other nodded slightly. Voices carried through fog from a distance, and the Naples waterfront vibrated with the rasping horns of ships moving with heightened caution in the gray mists. It was time. The lead figure motioned and like two wraiths the men reached a thick, large metal door. The second man brought into view a microtorch. They shielded the intense pinpoint of flame with their coats as they burned not through the door but through a concrete section to reach the alarm tripwires. Seconds later the wires were disconnected and the door alarm rendered useless. They eased into the warehouse, closed the door silently behind them. Each man took out a revolver from a shoulder holster. They started slowly forward.