The Shipkiller

by Justin Scott

  “I’ll warn you right now, Roscoe. I’m going to tear it down and make sure before I pay you.”

  “It’ll work. Guaranteed.”

  “I’ll give you fifty bucks for the service manual.”

  Hendersen grinned. “You got it.”

  “Where do we meet?”

  The private suggested several places which Hardin rejected. Finally, he described a remote spot that sounded safe. Then he said, “You gonna give me a down payment?”

  “No.”

  “What if you don’t show up?”

  “Sell it to the Red Army.”

  “Shit. I don’t know anybody in the—”

  “I’ll show up, Roscoe. You better go get your nose fixed.”

  Hardin went back to the Florida Bar, had a beer with Ronnie, and bought his forty-five.

  It was quiet, but for the calls of birds. Hardin lay in the rafters of a tumbled-down barn and watched an army Jeep trail dust up the narrow dirt road, the driver readily identifiable by the white bandage that wrapped his face between his mouth and eyes.

  Hardin lowered himself to the earth floor, slipped out the back of the barn, and watched the front door through a jagged crack in the stone wall. The Jeep skidded to a stop.

  “You in there?” called Hendersen.

  Hardin waited.

  The big private appeared in the doorway. When he saw the BMW parked inside, he dropped to one knee and fumbled a gun from his pants. Hardin edged around the side of the barn until he could see the Jeep. A long canvas bag lay in the back. He lobbed a rock at the Jeep. It clattered off the hood. Hendersen flung himself to the ground and leveled his gun at the noise.

  “Drop it,” said Hardin.

  Hendersen stiffened. Slowly, he looked over his shoulder, gazed into the cavernous barrel of the army-issue forty-five automatic that Hardin was holding in a two-hand grip, and dropped his gun.

  “Back away from it.”

  Hendersen slithered aside. Hardin left his cover at the corner of the barn, picked up Hendersen’s weapon, and tossed it into the high grass.

  “Wha’d you bring a gun for?” asked Hendersen.

  “For yours. Get up. Open the bag.”

  “You going to pay me?”

  “If you brought what I wanted.”

  Hendersen watched the forty-five as he opened the duffel bag, pulled out some pillows, and slipped the bag from a wooden crate about four feet long and a foot square.

  “Open it,” said Hardin. “On the hood.”

  Hendersen grunted with effort as he lifted the crate out of the Jeep and walked it to the hood. He pried off the lid with a long screwdriver. Hardin stepped closer. The Dragon lay in excelsior and reeked of oil.

  “Go sit under that tree.”

  “You ripping me off?” Hendersen asked miserably.

  “No.” He waved the gun. “The tree.”

  He waited until the private had sat down with his back to the bark. Then he slipped his gun in his belt. Roscoe reached inside his jacket and pulled out something shiny. Hardin froze, kicking himself for not frisking the soldier for another gun.

  “Okay if I have a snort?” asked Roscoe, raising a flask.

  Hardin exhaled. “Yeah. Enjoy yourself.”

  He took out his screwdrivers and pliers and, consulting the NATO service manual, opened the Dragon. Then he probed its secrets with the electronic test equipment he had purchased in Wesel. When he was sure that the electrical guidance system was functional, he put the weapon back together. Then he banged the lid shut on the crate, worked the canvas bag around it, and loaded it into the trunk of the BMW. It was brutally heavy. He backed the car out of the barn, left the engine running, and walked over to the tree, gun in hand. Hendersen watched anxiously, wetting his lips, his eyes shifting from Hardin’s to the automatic.

  Hardin tossed the money at his feet. The private looked surprised.

  Hardin drove straight to the pier at Wesel, loaded the heavy bag onto the Swan, returned the rented car, and by nightfall was motoring smoothly down the Rhine. He stopped at dawn in a quiet cove at the side of the river, tossed the forty-five overboard, stowed the Dragon, and slept for several hours. Then he continued down the river, bypassed Rotterdam on the inland canal route to the North Sea, spent the night in a Dutch fishing village, and the next morning raised his sails and pointed west.

  He made Calais that night, entering the French harbor in the dark, slept, and left at dawn. Driving hard, he sliced a long diagonal across the Dover Strait and reached Eastbourne by nightfall. Southwesterlies prevented him from getting farther than Chichester the next day. He beat out of Chichester in the morning against a stiff west wind and spent a tough afternoon rounding the Isle of Wight.

  He was pleased with the Swan. She would do what he wanted and kept on making tough situations easier, sailing very close to the wind and negotiating the rough chop around the island so smoothly that she could have been on rails. She might do even better without the nacelle disrupting her passage.

  As he neared St. Catherine’s light, a squat, white cylinder in a forest of radio masts on the southernmost point of the Isle of Wight, a fast, steel-hull motor yacht flanked by a pair of lean cutters thundered into view from the direction of the Solent and passed close behind. Their triple wake raced after the Swan. She lifted her stern, rolled angrily once, and continued on the wind, which bore, briefly, the reek of diesel fuel.

  7

  Miles Donner contemplated the drift of sunlight that the rippling waters of Le Havre reflected on the ceiling of Orion’s lavish salon. Though deep in discussion with the twelve men and women aboard the motor yacht, he automatically weighed the technical aspects of photographing the ephemeral effect.

  Donner looked soft. He had sensitive features, full lips, warm eyes, bushy brows, and the easy demeanor of a pleasant, middle-aged English gentleman who did awfully well at something professional—a physician on the Surrey cocktail circuit, or a writer of ladies’ fiction sold in America, or, as he was in fact, a commercial photographer, a master of natural light who specialized in travel promotion. It earned him a good living and it was a perfect cover. With his British passport, he could hop a plane anytime to take pictures anywhere.

  The meeting was conducted in Hebrew. It was a chance to exchange information and be with your own, away from cover. The yacht was registered to a Swedish steel company. Whenever it served the Mossad, it was accompanied by a pair of armed launches capable of matching her thirty knots.

  LaFaur, head of the large French station, had the floor. He was high-strung and vain, and often acted as if he were in charge of European operations, which he was not. That power rested at home. He was describing a Paris field agent’s recent nervous breakdown. The man had suddenly disappeared.

  “I immediately instructed my office to follow the usual search procedures. We quickly learned that neither the Palestinians nor the Russians had done him harm. The same was true of our ‘friends.’ And yet he had vanished. We went so far as to canvas the jails and hospitals in case he had met with a genuine accident.

  “Nothing.” He looked around the table. Donner returned his gaze. LaFaur looked away. “Do you know where we found him?” he asked pompously.

  Grandig of the German station cast Donner the faintest trace of a smile and raised his hand.

  “You found him at Orly Airport.”

  LaFaur’s face fell. “How did you know that?” he snapped. “That information was not released for general consumption.”

  Grandig smiled easily. He had the bluff, round appearance of a Munich tavern owner, a brilliant methodical mind, a low calm voice, and a quiet sense of humor.

  “Where,” he asked, “does a Mossad agent go when he is in trouble?”

  “But—”

  “It was a guess, LaFaur,” he said soothingly. “Something similar happened to us last month in Bonn.” He took the floor, the humor gone from his voice.

  “We’ve suffered some terribly demoralizing fiascos recently. They
increase the pressure on our field people. Our man actually lived in the airport for four days before we found him.”

  “It only took us two days to find ours,” said LaFaur.

  “Perhaps we should strike a medal,” said Grandig.

  LaFaur looked indignantly at Donner. Donner smiled and shrugged.

  Grandig continued. “Our man put his clothing in a locker and shaved and bathed in the men’s room. He wanted to be close to the aircraft, because a Mossad agent’s only friend is the pilot of an El Al airplane.”

  The others nodded. Several stared at the polished table. All had worked the field and all knew the isolation. Donner sympathized with them. Unlike his younger Sabra colleagues, who were raised in Israel and had to be taught the lore of their assigned countries, he was a British subject and England was his natural home. He had been born and raised there, but for a few boyhood years in Palestine. He had read history at Cambridge and had lived in London for the last thirty years.

  He had been a Zionist when Partition had come in ‘48, and he tried to return to Israel for the defense, but his superiors had persuaded him he could do more good in England. At their orders, he had drifted away from his Zionist friends, slowly, the way a man loses interest in a movement, and gradually created the details of an English life. It began to resemble his own life as the years passed, a confusion that kept him in limbo as a man with one home and another homeland, and a man who sometimes felt himself getting old waiting for the end of an endless war.

  “Reputation is our strongest weapon,” Grandig continued. “And the fiascos have blunted it. Killing that waiter in Norway . . . agents arrested . . . our Brussels station head’s desk exploding in his face. We’re too small to say ‘Wait till next time’ the way the big powers can. For us, each time is our only time.”

  “Enough,” smiled Donner. “Tell them the good news.”

  “What good news?” LaFaur asked suspiciously.

  “As you know,” Donner said, “the NATO forces are continuing to phase out the Dragon M forty-seven antitank rocket.”

  “That is not good news,” said the woman who ran the Rome station. “In six months those rockets will be landing on our security patrols.”

  “Wait until Grandig tells you what happened.”

  “Miles helped,” said Grandig.

  The woman from Rome was very beautiful and notoriously short tempered. She wore charcoal-dust eyeliner, the kajal preferred by Arab women, and the vivid border around her dark eyes set them off like flames. “If this is a contest of coyness,” she snapped, “I’ll decree Grandig the winner. Would you please get on with it? We have a lot to do today.”

  “This is a good operation,” said Grandig. “Good cooperation between my unit, and the Dutch unit, and our people in North Africa. We discovered a Palestinian plot to smuggle the weapons. They are buying them from an American master sergeant and paying the ‘Sohn’ of Kohler und Sohn, Landwirtschaftliches Mechanismu-saufnehmen, to hide them in his father’s tractor shipments.

  “The tractors are placed in sealed crates and stored in bonded warehouses in Rotterdam, where they are not required to be inspected by Dutch customs since it’s transshipment. Two days ago, they shipped them out on a Russian freighter to Tunis, where the weaponry will be sorted out of the farm machinery and sent east through Arab territory.”

  “How will we stop them?” asked LaFaur.

  Grandig grinned at Donner. “Miles arranged for a small crate from an English company to be placed aboard the ship at the last moment. I imagine it contained something fulminous.”

  There were smiles around the table.

  “Wonderful,” said the new Brussels man.

  “Until next time,” said Grandig. “There are too many of those weapons around. Right now the Americans have a curious mystery on their hands concerning the Dragon. Or, more precisely, one Dragon.”

  “One weapon,” said LaFaur, “is a German problem.” He lighted a cigarette from the butt he was smoking, and it passed through Donner’s mind that LaFaur might be in trouble himself. He had gotten rather jumpy since the last Station Head party.

  “Any weapon is an Israeli problem until proven otherwise,” Donner said firmly.

  “Go ahead,” said the woman from Rome.

  “A Dragon was stolen, clumsily, from the Seventh Regiment encampment at Aschaffenburg. The Americans were fairly casual about it. They might have disciplined the soldier responsible and left it at that, but the German police, as you can imagine, were not.

  Not with the latest inheritors of the Baadar-Meinhof gang flailing about.”

  “Our interest,” interrupted LaFaur, “is less obvious.”

  Grandig ignored him. “They maintain informers in NATO ordnance sections, as do we, for just such occasions, and when they found out about the theft, they demanded that the American Army assist in a full investigation to unearth the recipient of the weapon.

  “It was rather like artillery where one elevates the barrel to shoot high in the air. The police sent their requests to the top of the Bundeswehr. The results cascaded explosively upon the American base commander.

  “Several soldiers were charged with dereliction of duty and it was suggested to the prime miscreant that he cooperate. He told a preposterous story, which no one believed. As the man was an alcoholic, the Germans employed the simple expedient of denying him drink. His story remained the same.

  “He claims that he sold the weapon—for four hundred dollars, mind you—to an American civilian.”

  “You mean an Arab-American civilian,” said LaFaur.

  “No. The soldier was positive and his description tends to uphold his story. The man was American. Not German. Not Arab-American. Just plain American, if there is such a thing.”

  “A criminal,” said Donner.

  “That’s what I thought,” said Grandig. “But, as the uproar waxed, the American investigators questioned the Military Police who patrol the recreational area where the man made contact. One MP patrol recalled having stopped an American civilian and checking his papers. Only the patrol sergeant actually saw the American passport. Unfortunately, he neglected to record the information.”

  “He remembered nothing?” asked LaFaur.

  “He’s unconscious,” said Grandig. “A stool was broken over his head in a barroom brawl. We are trying to determine if the incidents were related, but all we know so far is that the only person who saw our man’s name is lying unconscious in the base hospital.”

  “Will he recover?”

  “Probably. Policemen are issued hard heads. In the meantime, we have one interesting piece of information that suggests the man might not be a criminal. The other military police said that their sergeant addressed the man as ‘Doctor.’ Or ‘Doc.’”

  “A physician?” asked the woman from Rome.

  “The Americans think so. They tend to reserve the title for medical practitioners.”

  Donner’s eye returned to the ripples on the ceiling. The Dragon M 47 antitank missile system was a TOW—tube launched, optically tracked, and wire guided. And a TOW was a potent weapon. In battle, one man could stop a tank. At an airport, he could destroy a jet liner at a half-mile range.

  The American might be an ordinary criminal. Or he might be a free lance representing IRA provisionals, or the German Red Army, or Italian Red Brigade, or Palestinians. Donner would make the investigation his first order of business when he got back to London.

  Sunlight glanced off the harbor master’s binoculars as Hardin sailed beneath his cliff-top observatory and entered Fowey harbor. Weaving among the anchored yachts and fishing boats, he steered for Culling’s yard, dropped his sails—first the jib, then the main—and drifted to his mooring. By the time he had snared the slimy rope and fastened the double bight, a harbor-patrol boat—an outboard launch—was buzzing alongside. The officer greeted him by name.

  “Good trip, Dr. Hardin?”

  “Fine, thank you.”

  “Where did you go?”
>
  Hardin led him below to his chart table and showed him his course plots.

  “What did you do in Rotterdam?”

  “I sailed right on through to the Rhine.”

  “Unfortunately our EEC dispensations don’t apply to our American guests. Did you make any purchases? Alcohol, tobacco, diamonds?”

  Hardin grinned at the man. “I don’t drink much when I sail, I never smoke, and I don’t have a girl friend.”

  The customs officer smiled back. “Do you mind if I have a look around?”

  “Not at all.”

  He began poking through the Swan and Hardin went back on deck. Culling waved from the dock, a hundred yards away. He was still there, ten minutes later, when the customs man ferried Hardin in, and as the launch skimmed away, he asked, “How did it work?”

  “You were right,” said Hardin. “It’s too big. I felt a tug on the rudder.” He stepped around him and walked to the shed where he had his shop.

  Culling called after him, “Dr. Akanke is looking for you.”

  Hardin kept walking. The trip to Germany had taken longer than he had estimated and he still had to assemble the radar components, build a reflector, run the waveguide, install the new generator, and provision the boat. He had been sailing since dawn, but he sat at his workbench on an upturned box and plugged in his soldering gun. After the days of distance scanning, seeking buoys and landmarks, it took a while for his eyes to adjust to the close work. It had been an exhausting trip.

  He spent several hours soldering new connections for the radar transmitter, the cathode-ray tube display, and the remote controls. Then, after running a battery of electrical tests, he set aside the delicate electronic components, and shaped and bolted several lengths of aluminum tubing into a rectangular frame.

  Next, he took up hammer and crosscut saw and built a rough wooden trough four feet long and a foot wide and bellied a foot deep in the center. Viewed from the side, it had the shape of a uniformly rounded banana. He pressed half-inch chicken wire into the hollow and bent it to the curve of the trough. Then he lifted out the chicken wire, gingerly placed the airy crescent on the workbench, curved face down, and braced it from behind with the aluminum frame.