Operation Fireball

by Marlowe, Dan J.

  I had no better suggestion. “What about the girl when we leave here?” I continued. “What happens to her?”

  “She’s no angel-child. That job she did on Ramirez was worthy of a professional. Don’t get sentimental on me, Drake. We’re here to recover the money. That and nothing else.”

  He had turned out the lantern when Melia left, so I couldn’t see his face. We sat in darkness and in silence until there was a quiet tap-tap at the door. I drew the .38 while Erikson opened the door. Melia entered carrying a small package. “I could get only a few tacos and beans,” she apologized. “Food is a problem. And the stove is not connected, so we will have to eat them cold.”

  “What about a truck?” Erikson asked.

  “My cousin took me to a window washer who has a truck with a ladder. He agreed to meet us tomorrow night at first dark. I showed him the money, but I did not leave it with him. That way he will be sure to meet us. I have bad news of Wilson.” In the next room I heard the creak of the bed as Slater sat up. “The People’s Republic Radio is announcing the capture of a Yankee spy. They promise a quick military trial.”

  “If he talks—” Slater exclaimed from the bedroom.

  “The only thing he can talk about that can hurt us is the museum,” I said. “And one swing around it tomorrow night should let us know if there’s extra guards.”

  The bed springs creaked again and Slater’s bulk appeared in the doorway. “You damn fools think I’m gonna stick my head in that rattrap? Screw the money. I’m savin’ my ass.”

  Erikson crossed the room in two strides and picked up Slater by his shirtfront. I heard Slater’s grunt as Erikson pinned him to the wall. “You’re in this with the rest of us,” Erikson told him coldly. “And the first sign I see of your cutting out, I’ll personally see to it your ass goes nowhere.” He released his hold, and Slater slid halfway to the floor. He went back into the bedroom rubbing his chest.

  “Let’s get some sleep,” Erikson said. “We’ll save the food for the morning.”

  No one joined Slater in the bedroom.

  Erikson, Melia, and I stretched out on the floor using the compactly packed one-man life rafts for pillows. I laid the .38 on the floor beside me.

  It was a long time before I closed my eyes.

  • • •

  I had my hand on the Smith & Wesson before I realized that something had wakened me.

  Melia was bending over Erikson, whispering to him. Erikson followed her to a window at the edges of which I could see both daylight and sunshine. I rose quickly and joined them. Erikson gave me one quick glance, then moved to one side.

  I could see why Melia’s aunt had found the apartment an ideal location for spying on unannounced Fidelista activity. The window looked down over the high prison walls into a part of the compound. In one corner, a squad of soldiers stood with rifles at the ready. Across the way, two more soldiers half-led, half-dragged a limping figure to a post against a scarred wall. They tied him roughly to the post.

  I knew, but I had to ask. “Wilson?” I said.

  “Yes.” Erikson spit it out as he continued to stare down into the prison yard. His face was set in harsh lines. An officer stepped up behind Wilson and tried to blindfold him. Wilson jerked his head from side to side until the officer stopped trying. He moved to one side and made a downward sweep of his arm.

  Puffs of smoke rose unevenly from the leveled rifles. Although it was only a block away, some freak of acoustics kept the sound from being heard. Wilson jerked left, then right as the ragged volley struck him. The officer walked in close again, placed a revolver against Wilson’s head, and fired.

  The whole thing hadn’t taken three minutes.

  It took only another thirty seconds for the same two soldiers to cut Wilson’s body loose from the post and drag it away.

  Erikson put his hand on my arm. “Nothing about this to Slater,” he said.

  I didn’t answer him. We all moved away from the window. Melia had made no comment from start to finish.

  I settled down to wait out what I knew was going to be a long day.

  Chico Wilson had not been an easy man to like, but the callousness of his death made me ask myself what I was doing there.

  In view of what I’d just witnessed, there was no sensible answer.

  • • •

  Erikson repacked the haversacks in the late afternoon. Once again he discarded all but the essentials. These consisted mainly of the one-man life rafts, the plastic explosives, personal gear, and a small, oilskin-wrapped item about the size of a hand compass which I had watched Erikson stow carefully during each of the previous repackings. Melia sat on the floor as motionless as an Indian idol. Her dark eyes were fixed broodingly upon space.

  Slater came out of the bedroom once to complain about the lack of food. Erikson shut him up brusquely, and Slater returned to the bedroom grumbling under his breath. For once I sympathized with him. I was hungry myself, and once on the street, I knew we couldn’t risk a food stop.

  At sundown Erikson rousted Slater and checked the appearance of Slater’s uniform. Melia had found a shapeless black dress of her aunt’s in a closet. She changed into it, leaving behind the more conspicuous dress in which she had escaped from the brothel with us. Erikson and I took five minutes to run through the action we’d planned when we reached the museum.

  Then we waited for darkness.

  There was the same conspicuous absence of pedestrians when Melia led us from the apartment. In the second block the girl turned into a passageway between two buildings. It was far too confined to be called an alley. On the next street, an ancient, rust-pocked truck was parked. Ladders on its roof overhung both front and rear. Melia spoke familiarly to a man standing just inside the edge of the passageway.

  He replied volubly in a staccato burst of language. “What’s his beef?” Erikson demanded, interpreting the tone as I had.

  “He says that after what happened this morning you have not offered enough money,” Melia replied.

  I saw Erikson’s right shoulder drop. “Hold it,” I said. I knew he intended to leave a body in the passageway and take over the panel truck. “We need someone who knows the city better than we do.” I pulled up my shirt, unzipped the money belt, and cleaned it out. I turned up the pouch to show that it was empty, then gave the bills in my hand to Melia. “You can get that from her when the job is done,” I told him. “Understand?”

  “Si,” he grunted. “I unnerstan'.” His pig eyes rested greedily on the money disappearing into the front of Melia’s dress.

  “Good luck,” she said to me.

  “Good luck yourself,” I returned.

  She was walking back through the passageway even before we boarded the truck. Slater got in beside the driver. Erikson and I rode in the back with a collection of dented buckets and dirty sponges. There were small windows in each side panel. The night sky had a luminosity that made it by far the brightest night since we had been on the island.

  The ladders on the roof creaked as the truck started with a jerk. “Where are you taking us?” I asked the driver.

  “She said the National Museum, no?” he said in surprise.

  “Yes. Just checking. Circle it when we get there.”

  “Now,” he said a few moments later. I looked out a side panel window at the museum’s stone massivity. Two night-lights burned steadily inside the front entrance. There was no light in the rear.

  “Drive up on the sidewalk and across the lawn behind the tamarind trees,” I told the driver. “Put out your lights.”

  He half turned to look at me. “Por favor, señor. It is agains’ the law”—he stopped as the ridiculousness of what he had been about to say became apparent to him. The truck bumped over street and sidewalk curbs and rolled across the burned-out grass to the shelter of the trees, which hid us from the street.

  We piled out of the truck. The driver and Slater wrestled an extension ladder from the roof. Its ratchets clicked loudly in the stillness a
s they ran it up the side of the building almost to the top of a second-story window. “When I get inside, you two come up the ladder,” I told Erikson and Slater.

  I swarmed up the ladder rungs and came to a stop head-high with the window. Once more I pulled up my shirt and unzipped my money belt. I removed the last item it contained, my compact tool kit with no item in it longer than eight inches.

  With a roll of adhesive I taped a square on the window glass, mitering the corners. I took a pencil-shaped, diamond-tipped glass cutter and traced the outline of the tape. When I punched the square of glass, it fell inward, prevented from falling to the floor and shattering by the restraining tape.

  I took from the kit what looked like a large fountain pen. It was a miniature torch good for a three-minute burn. I burned off the window lock, shielding the glow from the street with my body. I tried to raise the bottom section of the window, but it was frozen in its tracks from disuse. I reached in through the cut-out square of glass, took hold of the bottom edge of the upper section, and pulled it down. It made only a faint squeaking noise.

  I joggled the top of the ladder along the face of the building to clear a space at the window, then put my head inside and waited until my eyes adjusted to the different kind of darkness. A well of dim light came up from below. The second floor was a mezzanine which looked down on the first floor.

  I climbed higher on the ladder and inched my way inside through the open top section of window. When I lowered myself gently to the floor and looked out, a dark figure was already moving up the ladder. Slater dropped down beside me with a disturbingly loud grunt, followed in a few seconds by the catlike Erikson.

  “We’ll pick the guards off inside the front entrance,” I whispered. I put the beam of a pencil flashlight on the floor so we wouldn’t stumble over anything, then led the way to the balcony railing. We could see about two-thirds of the ground-floor lobby. A whitehaired man was drinking a cup of coffee. Another man was sitting in a booth that contained two chairs and a coffeemaker on a burner.

  I led the way along the mezzanine, aiming the thin beam of light in quick blips. I found the fire door, and we crept down the iron stairway, passed through another fire door, and emerged into the lobby. Erikson moved toward the guard post, circling the lobby to take advantage of the deepest shadow. I followed behind him.

  Both guards were outside the booth, talking. Erikson was within ten feet of them before one man saw him. The guard’s eyes widened, and he tugged wordlessly at his colleague’s sleeve. Erikson’s big hands clamped down on him, then passed him back to me while he aborted an attempt by the second guard to run back inside the guard post.

  There was no fight in either old man. We tied them like cordwood and dumped them inside the booth. Erikson paused in the act of gagging his man. “Where’s Slater?” he asked. We both looked around the deserted lobby. “Where the money is,” Erikson answered his own question grimly. He sprinted across the floor.

  I finished the gagging and hurried to the basement fire door. My flashlight’s thin beam failed to illuminate much of the airless blackness on the stairs. I came to another metal door, which I opened cautiously. Lights and voices were evident inside. Slater’s voice was raised angrily. I picked my way through a jungle of crated and uncrated pictures and statuary to the source of light. Erikson’s lantern was shining upon a shelf in a niche in the basement wall containing a number of large jars discolored by humidity-drippings. Three of the jars were at Slater’s feet. One had been dumped so that loose earth was scattered on the floor.

  Slater was pulling packages of cellophane-wrapped bills from his uniform and slapping them resentfully into Erikson’s outstretched hand. “Goddamnit, Karl,” Slater complained, “you don’t need—”

  “Shut up!” Erikson ordered. “Dump the other jars.” He took Slater’s haversack and began to pack the money in it.

  I watched as Slater kicked through the clotted dirt of the second and third jars to disclose more wrapped bundles of money. “Is that all?” I asked. “It doesn’t look like enough.”

  “It’s not bulky in thousand-dollar bills,” Erikson replied. He hefted the haversack. “There’s about four hundred fifty bills to the pound.”

  “Each of us ought to carry some of that, Karl,” Slater tried again. “Suppose somethin’ happens to you?”

  “If it’s fatal, help yourself,” Erikson said curtly.

  He slipped his arms into the haversack straps and led the way from the basement. We returned to the opened window on the mezzanine, swarmed down the ladder, and returned to the truck after collapsing the extension. The driver’s hands were shaking as he took the ladder from us and relodged it on the truck roof. Once on the ground, Erikson never let Slater get behind him.

  Erikson and I got into the back of the truck again. The driver waited while the headlights of a patrol jeep lazily moving through the area disappeared. Then the truck lurched forward, rolled across the grass, and bounced down onto the roadway with a rasp of ancient springs. The driver put the lights on. “Drive out the airport road,” Erikson ordered him. “We’ll—”

  Behind us a siren screamed and a searchlight bounced off the truck, illuminating even the interior. “A Fidelista patrol,” the driver breathed. His voice was a prayer.

  “They had us staked out,” Erikson said without emotion. “Wilson talked under torture.” He drew his gun.

  I took the butt of mine and knocked out the glass on the street side of the panel. We were racing wide open up a broad boulevard, swaying from side to side, but the jeep gained rapidly on the old truck. The siren sounded again as it came alongside. I put my arm out the window and tried to line up the driver’s head. I had to thread a needle to get the bullet past a soldier standing up on the front seat. Just as I squeezed off the trigger a long burst from a machine gun in the hands of the standing soldier hosed down the front of the truck.

  I turned my head in time to see the driver slump down over the wheel with the top of his skull gone. Puffs of dust hemstitched Slater’s uniform shirt from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. Erikson lunged over the back of the seat to grab for the steering wheel. The searchlight disappeared, and I looked out the window. The jeep was careening in a wide arc across the boulevard. It smashed head-on into a building wall and disintegrated.

  Erikson had forced himself into the front seat beside the driver’s body while keeping the truck under control. He opened the door and the body dropped out onto the road. The truck’s motor was coughing and spitting. “Took a piece of lead somewhere,” Erikson said, and steered into an alley.

  When he saw it was a dead end, he tried to back out again, but the engine quit altogether. He went to the front of the truck and threw up the hood. I got out and opened the door on Slater’s side. He was huddled together with his arms wrapped around himself, and his eyes were already glazing. “No … damn … luck,” he got out painfully. “You’ll have … to kill him … like I planned. He’s … Treasury agent.”

  I thought he was delirious. “Who’s a Treasury agent?”

  “Karl … Erikson.” Slater swallowed with difficulty. A tiny bubble of blood appeared at one corner of his mouth. “Government … got me … out of Joliet … not prison … break. How … you think … we got through … U.S. part … Gitmo … so easy?”

  I thought of Erikson’s continual checking of his watch as though he’d been running on a schedule. I thought of his insistence that no U.S. personnel be killed. And I thought of how easily he had gotten rid of the White Pine County deputy in San Diego.

  Blood was dripping down Slater’s chin. “Newspaper … clipping … faked,” he gasped. “Like … tape recording. Treasury … want recover … money … or destroy.” His voice rose a notch. “Gettin’ … dark—”

  I drew my .38 again and walked around to the front of the truck. Erikson was listening to the motor, which he had running again after a fashion. “Hello, Mr. Treasury Agent,” I said.

  The stare he turned upon me was the iciest I had
ever encountered. “Would it make any difference if I were a Chinese Maoist so far as our getting off this island alive is concerned?”

  I argued with myself for a long moment before I put the .38 away. When I went back to Slater, he was dead. We took the body from the truck and laid it alongside a building. Erikson got under the wheel, backed out of the alley, and the truck limped along the highway at twenty miles an hour.

  “The tank park’s next,” Erikson said. “If we don’t find a command tank with a radio—” he didn’t finish.

  I had lost my bearings during the chase, but Erikson knew where he was going. “We’re a block away,” he said finally, parking the truck. “A lot is going to depend on how well this place is guarded. They shouldn’t be worried about anyone stealing tanks, though. Including us.”

  “You think the jeep had time to put out a description on this truck?”

  “I doubt it. That was a fast bit of action.” He glanced at me. “Wasn’t it convenient that the driver caught it so you didn’t have to eliminate him to make sure Melia got to keep that last bit of money you gave her?” I didn’t answer him.

  We came up on the open area I had seen with Wilson that first afternoon. My heart sank at the sight of it. There was a well-lit front gate with a soldier carrying a carbine standing to one side of it. In the fringes of the gate floodlights I could see the barbed wire extending in both directions.

  “Rough,” I said. “In the daylight it looked deserted.”

  “That wire isn’t meant to stop anyone,” Erikson said. “The strands must be a foot apart. It’s just a deterrent to Cuban civilians.” He turned the corner and drove along a darker street. “We’re lucky this is a tank storage area and not a full-fledged motor park with gas pumps, a repair garage, and a motor maintenance office. That would be really well-guarded.”

  From the side street the interior of the open area was dimly lit by bare bulbs under coolie-hat reflectors atop wide-spaced telephone poles. Another corner turned brought us to the rear of the park, which was darker yet. “There they are,” Erikson said. I stared at a dozen low, bulky silhouettes.