Yet there was something wrong about the setup. Why keep most planes low on fuel at Oristano, except for the interceptors on hot alert, and allow others (faster than the interceptors) to be fully fueled? And within immediate reach?
Steve decided to find out. The Sabreliner they’d flown several times was up for a hundred-hour maintenance check. On the excuse that some handling problems about the airplane bothered him, Steve put on mechanic’s overalls and spent a night working on the airplane with the maintenance crew. He got his own copy of the airplane manual and he went through the ship with the bird dog instincts of a man hunting his own survival.
In a way he found it. He’d spent thousands of hours in the past combing airplanes this way. And the Apollo spacecraft. Steve Austin wasn’t just a pilot; he had his Master’s in aeronautical and astronautical engineering. Combining expertise with experience, he’d eyeballed the guts of airplanes and spacecraft to the extent that he’d developed a sure instinct for the telltale trouble sign.
He found it in the tail. High up in the vertical fin. The Sabreliner had a late-model modification. The maintenance crew had installed an Emergency Locator Beacon inside the fin. Almost all aircraft flying international routes were required to have the ELB. In the event of a crash or a ditching the ELB, responding to shock of impact and deceleration or, activated manually, sent out a screeching radio signal that rescue aircraft could home on.
Steve saw the ELB, checked it out against the manual. Everything looked fine. He got down to exacting specifications, which was when he found it. The ELB he saw in the vertical fin was four inches longer than the model he studied in the airplane manual. He unhooked the wires to the ELB that permitted manual activation. Then he sat before the device with a bright floodlight and studied it. He found the thin antenna, disconnected it. A screwdriver opened the instrument. Steve didn’t care about the ELB system. But that extra four inches.
Plastic explosives. Activated by radio signal.
Steal an airplane. Take off and away.
Sure.
And someone sends a radio signal and the whole tail blows off the airplane. Ships like the Sabreliner don’t carry ejection seats or parachutes.
And there was something else.
He might get away: there were ways to cut the wires to any explosive charge. He could work on an airplane and cut the whole system out and leave that airplane in service. He could pick the right time and place. When the weather was right—rotten enough so he could lose himself in it—he could maybe bust out.
And then what? Pentronics would be on the alert. They might still lose a base. Maybe several of them. As well as some of its people. It could be hurt.
But it wouldn’t be put out of action, which was what counted. Steve knew they had to have some big bombs hidden. Doubtless only a few people knew where they were. And if he messed up what he was here to do and they lowered the boom on Pentronics, he might just be setting up some city for a revenge action. The idea of being responsible for the deaths of a million or more people didn’t sit well with him.
So, time to end the fantasy and stick it out. Steve settled down to what he suspected could be a very long stay.
CHAPTER 16
“You’ll meet them later today. At lunch. Sperry and Kuto.” Sam Franks stood with Steve at the edge of a sheer cliff on the island of Capri, looking across the water to the harbor at Naples. It was a stunning day, fair-weather cumulus reaching the horizon in all directions. “They got in this morning,” Sam continued. “I can tell you now that we’ve been heading for some time toward a major decision in this business. You can get the details later, but you should know you’re involved.” He turned to glance at Steve. “That’s by invitation, Austin.” There was a pause. “I think I’d like this to be the end of the line.”
Sam had said the end of the line, which Steve could only assume referred to those actions of Pentronics that wheeled and dealed in international paramilitary activity. A fancy description for mass slaughter and destruction, he thought, with sudden anger. He wanted to fire a thousand questions but knew better. You didn’t push this man, and so far he’d brought Steve into his confidence at what he thought was the appropriate time.
Back at the villa owned by Pentronics, Steve listened. Little need to speak until these men asked for his opinion. Lunch went quickly, and Steve’s appetite yielded to his fascination for the three men who’d created Pentronics and built into their organization a military force as powerful as that of many leading nations.
Jonathan Sperry, the financial and political mastermind.
Hiroshi Kuto, stocky, physically powerful, facially unreadable. A genius at logistics and industry and international trade, and at manipulating anything that came in big quantities.
And Sam Franks, military and organizational genius.
Steve didn’t learn a thing, and long before the lunch was behind them he understood he’d been present to be studied and judged by Sperry and Kuto.
That night, in an underground room guarded by men personally selected by Sam Franks, in a room where no eavesdropping devices had ever been placed, the three leaders of Pentronics planned their final operation.
“We’re agreed, then.” Sperry looked at his two companions. “It’s time for Pentronics to become what it appears to be to the world—a maintenance operation on Sardinia with NATO contracts as the main sources of revenue. We can let the international charter, cargo and other subsidiary units be dissolved or bought out.”
Kuto nodded. “What else? I have ears everywhere. When governments who have fought each other for years begin to work together against us . . . only a fool does not retreat when his foes become so desperate they will risk anything—even cooperation. Do you know what will happen within a year from now? The Americans and the Russians, and perhaps the Chinese, will create a special force in the United Nations. It will be almost as good as ours, only out in the open.” He indulged himself in one of his rare smiles. “It will have the backing of the great military powers in the world. We have fenced with them, but now they are ready to use the bludgeon.”
Franks nodded. “To wrap it up we do one more operation. That ends it all.”
“But what an operation,” Sperry said. “It will be the strongest ransom note in history. One billion dollars in American currency.”
“You said you had the essentials worked out, Sam,” the Japanese said. “They are still the same?”
“The same. Atlanta, for reasons I’ll detail later, remains the first choice.”
Sperry leaned forward. “I thought you said getting one of the large bombs in there would be, how did you put it, Sam, too much exposure?”
“I’ve worked it out.” He glanced from one to the other. “By the way, what do you think now of Austin?”
Sperry said, “He is the first man I have ever met who frightens me.”
Franks glanced at Kuto. “I agree that he is unsettling.”
“I’m going to use him on the weapon once in the city.”
They stared at him. Franks waited them out. “Come on,” he said impatiently as the silence dragged, “if you’ve got objections let’s hear now.”
“We know the rules,” Sperry said. “Unless we can substantiate an objection we do not interfere with the others.”
“No objections, then?”
“Only visceral,” Sperry said.
“Why Austin?” Kuto asked.
“He’s the best and most skilled weapons man around here, including myself. There’s no way out of it. It’s either him or me with the bomb, and I’ll be too busy, as you know, with other matters.”
Steve Austin was, for the moment, relaxing and, of course, unaware of the conversation between the three men.
He sat with his girl for the trip. Laura was a redheaded beauty, as charming as she was beautiful. They’d had dinner and now sat on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. She sat close to him.
He turned to her, touched her arm, and froze as she leaned forward, slum
ping. The warm sticky substance his fingers had detected was blood. He flattened against the rock, sliding closer to the cliff edge to gain advantage of the slight ledge he’d been seated on.
Another second, he would have been dead. There was no sound, but he saw no farther than an inch from his cheek a sudden pale flash as a bullet slammed off the rock. Instantly gravel clawed his face. He twisted, rolling to the side, placing the girl between himself and the top of the slope where the shots had been fired from. For a moment he felt embarrassed at using her body this way. Body. She was dead.
And she’d saved his life. The lifeless form twitched several times. Someone had a sniperscope on the slope’s edge. The infrared scanner gave him a sight in the dark, and the silencer wiped away most sound. A dull phhht doesn’t carry far in the strong winds blowing across the cliffs of Capri. Steve made certain he couldn’t be seen by anyone looking downslope. He reached up to the girl’s waist until he felt the warm blood from her body, got some on his hand and, keeping his arm low, smeared it across his face and neck. He maneuvered himself so that he lay sprawled on the rock, eyes staring vacantly, mouth open. It didn’t take much to hold his breath. If only they couldn’t hear his heart pounding.
He almost failed to hear the man who came to assure the death of his victims. A rubber sole slid across rock. Steve saw the dull gleam of moonlight from a pistol in a gloved hand. A silencer . . . they were here to guarantee the job.
He moved with his left arm—the bionics limb. His hand shot out. His powerful fingers smacked aside the gun and in a continuous movement closed around an ankle. Steve squeezed with strength enough to burst the skin and crush the bone beneath. He shoved, hurling the man to the side. He didn’t wait to see what happened, figuring that where there was one there were usually two, rolling to his back again.
The second man dove at him with a knife. This was more in Steve’s style. He stayed on his back, drew up his legs and kicked out. He felt something slice into his leg; the sensation told him something had slashed the plastiskin sensors, but the feeling was one of warning rather than pain. His steel-toed feet crashed into the man’s chest, crushing the rib cage and lifting his victim into the air. Steve heard the body thump against the ground, followed by a rattle of stones and a truncated scream as the body fell away from the cliff. There wasn’t time to think, he had to keep moving. He scrabbled along the ground, staying low, to reach his first victim, who had an ankle with white bone protruding in splinters. Steve took hold of the man and lifted him as high as he could.
Almost at once the body jerked as bullets smashed into the neck and head. Blood sprayed and the man went limp. Steve shoved him aside and picked up the pistol. The range was probably too great, but it was worth a try. He risked a quick glance over the ledge—there, barely visible against the skyline. Head down again, he moved to the side, popped up and emptied the gun. The hissing of the shots mixed with tiny splashes of flame. But whoever was looking through that sniperscope would at least know that someone was shooting back. Steve gambled he would run.
He threw aside the gun, took a deep breath, and started up the cliffside in a twisting run, his bionics legs pumping. By the time he reached the top, along the walk, no one was in sight.
Sam Franks studied the shell casing under the light. “Thirty-thirty,” he said finally. “Hunting rifle, high velocity.” He tossed the shell to Mikhail Oleg, who held it in his hand. “You say you never heard any shots?” Franks asked Steve.
“No shots,” Steve told him again. “He had a silencer on the rifle, and the one who came down the hill had a silencer on the hand gun. You got the weapon yet?”
“They’re looking for it now. I hope it didn’t go over the cliff. It might give us a lead. I don’t like this. Not just that someone took a couple of shots at you, Austin. Bad enough. The fact that there were at least three of them. That I especially don’t like.”
“I’m getting the idea that someone doesn’t like me,” Steve said.
“Someone goes after you, it means he doesn’t like us. I was tied up with John and Hiroshi. Mike, here, was inside the villa with some other people. You happened to be the perfect available target. It could have been any of us. The girl is dead, and it’s bad luck you killed both those guys.” He shook his head. “If one of them had lived we would have made him tell us his life story.” Franks looked at Oleg, then back to Steve.
“Got any suggestions? Especially since you were the target?”
“Tighten security?”
“We’re so tight right now a flea couldn’t scratch his rear without our knowing it. This job is from the inside. Someone has managed to get to some of our people.”
“Any ideas?”
“I’ll be working on it. Meanwhile, none of us is ever alone. And if I were you, moon man, I’d sleep with my one good eye wide open.”
They didn’t try again for nearly ten days and then it was in Sevilla, Spain. Steve had yet to be told the details of what he already knew was the culmination of Franks’ operations with Pentronics, but he could dream up some ugly notions by Franks’ order to “get sharp again” studying the systems manual for a 32-megaton hydrogen bomb.
They were in Sevilla for a meeting with Kuto’s logistic people. Normally Steve might not have come along, but after the episode on Capri Sam kept his top team together wherever possible. To sustain security in the hotel, Pentronics rented three complete floors. The Pentronics team stayed in the center floor, in the core of the building. Security people occupied the floor above and the one below, as well as the rooms surrounding the center. Elevators weren’t allowed to open on the three floors unless at least two of Franks’ men were on the scene. Because they would be locked up at the hotel for several days, Franks had also brought along several accommodating ladies, all well known to them and considered beyond suspicion. Franks believed the theoretical security risk was offset by their contribution to easing off the pressure of this highly charged session.
Steve wanted none of it. He still remembered Laura’s blood on him from the shootout on Capri. More than that, more than anything else, was the association once again with the terrifying hydrogen bombs. A 32-megaton bomb doesn’t damage a city. It doesn’t spread death and destruction. It’s a thousand times worse. You think of the bomb and that star raging in its center and that’s bad enough, and then you think about when it’s over, except that it isn’t because one of these things rigged with an outer shell of thorium or dirty U-238 means intense, terrible fallout that persists for longer than anyone wants to know.
Understanding the nature of the beast was Steve’s especial curse. He knew by his study assignment that he’d doubtless somehow be locked in with the weapon. And there wasn’t the slightest consideration on his part of getting out now even if he could, because Sam and his people might already have emplaced the weapon, and he’d picked up hints that this time they were going right into the front yard of the United States. Steve had to go along with it, hope for a chance to frustrate the plan, escape and get to where he could blow the whistle on the entire operation. Most of all, to do something about the bomb when and if that time came. Besides, the closer he was to the States the better. It all added up to his being as sharp as possible concerning the thermonuclear weapon. The more he knew about it the better his chances for pulling the plug when the critical moment came. If only he knew where and when . . . He went to sleep silently cursing the many corridors of possibility. No choice, really, but to push them aside and take things as they came.
Sometime in the middle of the night he heard his door coming open—a string taped on the door to the wall so that when the string moved, as the door opened, it knocked over a glass. Instantly he was awake, a .38 snubnosed special in his hand and the hammer back.
In the dim light of the open door he saw a naked woman. Long blond hair, moving slowly to the bed.
“What the hell do you want?”
“I was told you were expecting me,” she said, moving to his side. He felt stupid with
the gun in his hand as cool, practiced fingers moved along him.
“Someone told you wrong.” Perfume came from her in what was almost a cloud. “Now kindly get the hell out of here.”
“What’s wrong? Don’t you want—”
The warning signals were in his head. He shifted position as she started to her feet; then she turned, looking down at him. Her hands fluffed the pillow. “I could please you,” she said.
“I’ve never shot a woman but there’s always a first—”
She caught him completely by surprise. The pillow ended up across his face. For a moment it blinded him, threw his balance off as he moved to throw it aside. He had only a glimpse of a knife slicing down at his chest. Instinctively he moved his right arm to ward it off. He’d forgotten about the gun as steel slashed his forearm. Burning stabbed him as he spun away from his attacker, rolling off the bed. He tried to bring his right arm up with the gun but he knew he was moving slowly. He saw the blade coming down again and he swung wildly with his left arm. A cry of pain followed the blow, and the woman was gone from sight.
Steve struggled to his knees, dizzy, trying to focus his eye. He heard a door slam. The gun was still in his hand. He lifted his right arm with his left, squeezed off three shots that sent hammering explosions through the room and, he knew, to the other rooms and the corridor outside. If nothing else it would bring the guards. He slumped back against the side of the bed, feeling damn foolish.
The doctor, who was always with them on major trips, told him he was lucky, that he had a deep wound but it was clean and would heal quickly, only six stitches. “Had it gone deeper or even just to the side . . .” He finished the stitches, secured the arm in bandages and finished off with a tetanus shot and massive dose of antibiotics.
Cyborg 02 - Operation Nuke Page 13
