Sledgehammer

by Walter Wager

“What are we going to call this thing, Sam?” he asked.

  “This thing?”

  “The whole deal. The operation has to have a proper code name if we’re really doing it OSS style.”

  Gilman pondered, nodded toward the teacher. He was in command again. Let him name it.

  “Let’s keep it simple,” Williston proposed. “We’re out to demolish a large and well-built totalitarian organization, to smash it to bits. Let’s call the operation Sledgehammer.”

  Then, one by one at thirty-second intervals, they walked out into the warm moonlit night, and Professor Andrew T. Williston closed the door behind them.

  8

  Without bugles, drums, flags, editorials, patriotic songs or even a statement by Allen Ginsberg, their secret war began. Each of the four drove back to his hotel alone, carefully observing the speed limits to avoid any contact with the police. Each of them spent the night in the room he had rented, for it would attract attention to do otherwise. And when Arbolino wanted to telephone to his wife that he’d be away for a while, he walked to a drugstore two blocks from his hotel to call from a public booth. He had no desire for the long-distance call to appear on his hotel bill, even though he too was registered under an alias. Hotels kept records, and the four conspirators were men who must leave no meaningful traces. In the language favored by Soviet espionage professionals, they were already living like “illegals.”

  On the next morning, each of the four men paid his bill—in cash—and left Washington. It was all planned; each had memorized the time and place of the rendezvous. They would meet at the millionaire’s isolated hunting lodge deep in the woods of New York State’s Adirondack Mountains. With 290 acres of land and no other house for nearly three miles, privacy for Phase One of Sledgehammer was assured. Each of the quartet came separately—the stunt man by bus, Williston in his 1966 convertible, Gilman on the New York Central and Carstairs on a Mohawk Airlines flight that put him down in Albany. It was the gun collector who arrived in the area first, rented a Chevrolet panel truck and waited. There was no strain in this, since the teacher had worked out the schedule quite carefully with Gilman.

  At 4:10 P.M., America’s second most eligible bachelor watched the man from Las Vegas emerge from the Albany railroad station and start walking west. A few moments later after observing that no one seemed to be noticing or following Gilman, Carstairs drew up in the truck and called out a casual greeting.

  “Give you a lift, Mort?” the man behind the wheel offered.

  “Thanks. Guess my wife forgot again,” the man who was always right answered with proper husbandly irritation.

  Gilman was not married, not now. He had been—for nearly six years—to a rather intelligent and gifted painter named Judith, a warm, giving woman who could find compassion and acceptance for almost anyone except a man who was always right. They hadn’t taught her that at Bennington, so she’d left with the three-year-old boy and eventually remarried—an easygoing rancher who made lots of mistakes and told her that he needed her. Gilman missed her and his son, and sometimes when he was very tired he realized how wrong he’d been to be right all the time.

  But he wasn’t thinking of this as the Chevrolet rolled away from the city toward The Inferno that warm afternoon. They had named the hunting retreat. The Inferno because it would be through their hard work and suffering there that they meant to reach Paradise. An hour after the truck reached the lodge, Williston picked up Arbolino three blocks from the Albany bus station and pointed his convertible down the route that the gun collector had helped him memorize. It was 7:05 when the tall, thin teacher turned off onto Carstairs’ private road, the journey easy and soothing as the car radio spun out the sounds of old Lena Home albums and the stunt man chatted about his wife, daughters and life in Hollywood. About two hundred yards in from the highway, Williston saw the barbed-wire fence and the heavy steel-mesh gate and he stopped the car.

  Without a word, he handed Arbolino the key that Carstairs had provided. The stunt man opened the padlock, swung back the gate and followed the car through onto the estate. Then he closed the gate, reached through to click the lock shut according to plan. Everything was going according to plan, and ten minutes later the four men sat facing each other in the big timbered living room of the lodge. The two vehicles were parked out of sight in the shed behind the large old house, and the green metal trunk rested on the flagstone in front of the fireplace. Each of the committed quartet had a drink in his hand and a hundred questions in his mind.

  Carstairs spoke first.

  “Welcome to my humble hut,” he announced archly in his capacity of host, ignoring the recent New York Times article that had described the magnificent seven-bedroom house as a “$280,000 masterpiece that is both tastefully simple and luxurious.” He sipped the iced liquor, continued. “This is a place that my father built in 1927 to get away from it all—a charming euphemism for the fact that my mother was sweet but alcoholic,” he explained.

  He looked at Williston, wondering how the psychology professor might react to this confession.

  “I never knew you had a mother, Pete,” the teacher parried.

  Williston didn’t want to, didn’t have to hear about Carstairs’ troubled family or childhood traumas. They were all only too clear in his behavior, career, hobbies and life style.

  “We’ve got two hundred and ninety acres up here, eighty of them woods, plus an excellent shooting range that I installed four years ago. For the automatic weapons and high-powered rifles,” the millionaire added nonchalantly.

  “Automatic weapons?” the muscular stunt man questioned.

  “He’s gun nutty. You know that,” Williston said in quietly bitter tones.

  P.T. Carstairs tugged at the chain linked to his belt, found the right key in the cluster and bent over to open the green metal foot locker.

  “Automatic weapons,” the gun collector announced succinctly.

  Three 1944 German nine-millimeter machine pistols of the MP40 model.

  Two modern L2A3 British submachine guns, chambered to take the NATO standard round.

  Two of the .45-caliber M3 submachine guns with silencers, the General Motors product that OSS used during World War II.

  Three of the new short-barreled Israeli submachine guns, Uzi nine-millimeter parabellums with wooden stocks.

  One of the Soviet Army’s standard nine-millimeter Stechkin machine pistols.

  One Swedish “Carl Gustaf” submachine gun, the Model 45 with the folding steel stock.

  “This is all extremely illegal,” Gilman announced with elaborate gravity, “and the FBI will not like it.”

  “Let’s not tell them,” proposed Carstairs.

  Arbolino and Williston stared at the extraordinary display of weapons, exchanged glances that were identical in significance. This was not normal. Their host was not normal. Of course, Sledgehammer wasn’t a job for the normal, but this private arsenal seemed to hint at some mental or emotional flaw that could prove dangerous to the entire operation.

  “I suppose you’ve got more?” the teacher speculated.

  “Smaller stuff. Revolvers, carbines, a couple of sniper rifles with real good scopes. Got a Bushnell ‘Phantom’ marksman’s scope that works beautifully with my Smith and Wesson K-38 target pistol—and a few odds and ends.”

  How crazy was he? That was the question.

  “No bazookas?” wondered Williston.

  “Nobody I know drives tanks, Andy. I’ll put one on the shopping list.”

  Maybe he wasn’t crazy. In an era in which teen-agers suck on LSD-impregnated sugar cubes to “blow” their minds—perhaps permanently—and California school principals smoke marijuana and police use electric cattle prods to disperse civil-rights demonstrators, was there anything crazy about collecting automatic weapons? With Vassar girls wearing chains around their waists and Congress cutting antipoverty funds and Che Guevara acclaimed as the Jimmy Dean of the guerrilla warfare enthusiasts, Carstairs’ hobby might not be so stran
ge after all.

  “Okay. Okay, we’ve got plenty of guns and we might need them,” the tall, thin teacher acknowledged. “But we also need training—a lot of training. Mentally and physically, we’re in no shape to take Paradise City.”

  The husky stunt man nodded.

  “We’ll build an obstacle course, like the one they had at the Farm,” he proposed.

  “We’ve got a firing range and plenty of ammo, so you can polish your shooting,” chimed in the second most eligible bachelor in the United States.

  “We’re going to need a lot of wire-tapping, bugging and radio equipment, Sammy,” Williston warned. “Can you get it and can you still handle it?”

  The man from Las Vegas nodded, explained that it would be relatively simple to buy the miniaturized electronic gear in Manhattan—if sufficient money was available.

  Arbolino laughed.

  “Petie’s loaded,” he reminded Gilman. “He’s got trunksful—according to Time magazine.”

  The mathematician sighed.

  “I never read those left-wing journals,” he confessed. “What about you, Andy? What will you do in this operation?”

  “R and A, which suits my scholarly nature. Somebody has to prepare the research and analysis studies so we’ll know what we’re getting into. We’d be imbeciles to move in without a detailed report on enemy strength, dispositions, organization and leadership. I mean a full order-of-battle study on the mob that rules Paradise City.”

  Gilman nearly smiled. If the gun collector was eager to return to violence, there was something in the lean psychology professor that responded almost as passionately to the intelligence collection aspect of the mission. Williston’s eyes, voice, eager alertness, all communicated a special enthusiasm. The stocky man from Las Vegas had learned to “read” people in the gambling casinos, and right now it was very easy to read the oddly boyish teacher.

  Sledgehammer, on the other hand, would not be easy.

  Gilman said so.

  “With all the guns and gadgets, money and training,” he warned thoughtfully, “it’s still going to be a very hairy operation. There’ll be no resistance reception committee waiting at the drop zone. In effect, we’ll be ‘jumping blind’ into what Special Forces teams now call ‘denied territory.’”

  Williston shook his head in disagreement.

  “Oh…no, I guess I’m wrong about that,” confessed the man who prided himself on being right. “Andy’s right. We have one contact in Paradise City—the nameless citizen who mailed Andy the clippings.”

  “So we’ve got an agent there,” reasoned Carstairs, “and all we’ve got to do is find him—if he’s still alive.”

  One person among the 110,000, plainly afraid and obviously someone who knew about Eddie Barringer’s career in the OSS so many years ago. As Williston reflected on this, there was a sudden crash of thunder and an embarrassingly dramatic flash of lightning. In an instant, a powerful downpour hammered menacingly upon the lodge’s roof and the storm was upon them.

  It rained for hours.

  9

  Match dissolve.

  That’s a film term for a standard motion-picture transition, say, from the face of a clock in a police chief’s office to the face of another clock in the senator’s bedroom.

  Match dissolve to Paradise City.

  It rained all that night in Paradise City, a gentle, steady fall that dripped softly from the trees and clouded the streets with dim rolling walls of warm mist. The local television station was off the air and the night clubs were closed and the last blank-faced men had left the brothels, for it was 4:20 A.M. and almost everyone was asleep. Two countermen in Arnie’s All Night Diner listened to a long-distance trucker tell a dirty joke that four other drivers had already recounted in the past week, and the countermen prepared to laugh out of pity and commercial sociability.

  Five police cars roamed the empty streets in fixed geometric patterns, floating slowly through the drizzle like yellow-eyed ghosts as they mechanically patrolled their assigned routes. A score of uniformed foot patrolmen yawned and sighed as they walked their silent beats, drowsy and unafraid. They knew that there would be few, if any, armed burglars or desperate junkies to battle in the mist. This was a well-run town, and “Little Johnny” didn’t tolerate free-lance competition. Paradise City had no room for small-time thugs, for petty crime was uneconomical and irritated the taxpayers, who didn’t mind being inmates of Pikelis’ zoo so long as they were not disturbed. Every hoodlum in the state knew better than to work this town.

  The price was too high. The first time that they caught you in Paradise City you might get off with a fractured jaw and a couple of kicks in the lower abdomen, or a pair of broken wrists if you were a car thief. Pickpockets usually had their ankles smashed with clubs, leaving them free to ply their trade elsewhere after they had departed but still emphasizing the Paradise City ground rules. Captain Ben Marton had a sense of humor that wasn’t quite Mort Sahl’s, but then his audience wasn’t quite the same either. As for narcotics peddlers, there simply weren’t any because Pikelis simply wouldn’t tolerate anything that could attract federal attention. After the 1966 discovery of the badly burned trio from Miami, nobody tried to sell dope in Paradise City—not even once.

  As for other illegal activities, an independent entrepreneur might possibly get away with his life the first time he was caught in Paradise City. But the second time that the local cops caught him, they’d shoot him in the belly two or three times and then stand around watching him die. This was reported as “resisting an officer” in most cases, although sometimes—to keep the statistics in line with national averages for towns of this size—such deaths were recorded as auto-accident fatalities or, for variety’s sake, suicides. The obliging coroner was the mayor’s brother-in-law. Whatever quaint fiction was inscribed on the death certificate, everyone knew that being “gut shot” was a painful way to go and very few people risked it anymore—which was the idea in the first place. Larry Lewis, the 260-pound hoodlum whom the AF of L-CIO bounced out in 1962, used to chuckle that Paradise City was truly a closed-shop town.

  In the small hours of this rainy morning, Lewis was asleep beside a blond “model” from New Orleans who’d recently become an “exotic dancer,” and Mayor Roger Stuart Ashley sprawled unconscious after a losing battle with a fifth of Jack Daniels, and Little Johnny Pikelis was dreaming in his penthouse. He dreamt of a splendid society wedding for his twenty-three-year-old daughter who’d soon be returning from a year in Paris. There would be lots of flowers, all kinds of flowers, and imported champagne and a nineteen-piece Meyer Davis band. The fact that pretty Kathy Pikelis wasn’t even engaged in no way reduced the beauty of the dream.

  In the entire town, only ninety or one hundred people were awake as the big clock in the Municipal Hall steeple showed five o’clock. One of these sat by a sixth-floor window, smoking a cigarette and staring out at the wavering wet wall of mist that masked the harbor a mile away. The room was dark, and there was silence for a long moment before the record player clicked again and the subtle George Shearing album dropped into playing position. The music was very, but not wholly, relaxing.

  The clippings had been mailed.

  Now there was nothing to do but wait.

  Just wait and hate and wonder and pray.

  Would they come?

  Would it be soon?

  10

  When the four committed men awoke in the lodge the next morning, they went about the chores that they had so carefully divided among themselves the night before. Cooking the ample breakfast was Arbolino’s assignment—this week. One or another of the quartet would prepare each meal so long as they remained at this training base, for Carstairs had sent his caretaker off on a month’s paid vacation so that the sixty-year-old “outsider” would not see the unusual activities involved in getting ready for their secret war. “Maximum security,” Williston had said firmly, and that compelled the exclusion of anyone not involved in Sledgehammer.


  After breakfast, Gilman and Arbolino set to work constructing the simple body-building devices and the obstacle course. Ropes to climb and swing on, barriers to scale or vault, routes to trot or sprint—all the basic items to build wind and stamina and animal power. While they were working, the teacher and the second most eligible bachelor in the United States drove into Albany—in separate vehicles—to purchase the supplies. They bought in small quantities. Williston went to one Army-Navy store near the African American section of the city to procure fatigues, boots, work shirts, coveralls and other clothing items for himself and Gilman. Carstairs shopped for himself and Arbolino at another “surplus” store thirty blocks away. They assembled a month’s supply of food by dividing their purchases among five supermarkets, two delicatessens and four groceries.

  “If a man walks into a single store and buys three hundred dollars’ worth of food, they’re going to remember that at the shop,” Gilman had warned.

  He was, of course, right. Everything had to be inconspicuous, ordinary, routine. That was the theme that the man from Las Vegas had repeated so many times as he’d reminded them of comrades and allies who’d died for breaking that rule. No big purchases, no checks. Buy in cash, in small bills. Take everything with you. It would be most inconvenient to have deliverymen arrive at the lodge when the automatic weapons were hammering in target practice. Think ahead. Be careful. They’d been over it all fifty times. Always have a plausible “cover story” for everything. When Carstairs had sent his caretaker away, the millionaire had hinted that he needed absolute privacy because some beautiful—perhaps famous or married—woman was arriving. That was entirely believable, and the loyal employee could be counted on to keep the secret—as he had several times in the previous decade.

  And with all the deceptions and precautions, there was still danger, the second most eligible bachelor in the United States thought as he pointed the truck away from the city. Here he was in his own country, land of the free and home of democracy—thousands of miles from any dictatorship or secret police—and he was at war. All police and public authorities were to be avoided, and he had to be alert and wary every instant. Under Williston’s security rules, they couldn’t even carry guns outside the barbed-wire defenses of The Inferno. It was strange—but exciting.