Operation Fireball

by Marlowe, Dan J.

  Erikson parked a hundred yards away on another side street. “We’ve got to conserve gas,” he explained. “Although there’s got to be at least one more guard inside and I’d like to circle again and try to spot him. Can’t do it, though.”

  “So what now?”

  “We walk back and slip inside the rear area through the wire. Look for a tank with a pennant flying from its antenna. That means a liaison radio inside.”

  It reminded me of something that had been disturbing me. “I asked you this before. What makes you think one of these tank radios can push the signal that far?”

  “I’ll change my answer. It may not, but friends of mine will be listening for the signal, too. If it sounds weak, they’ll amplify it so Hazel can’t miss it.”

  “Lovely. I suppose your friends are on a battleship a few miles offshore?”

  “Not a battleship.”

  His coolness riled me. “Why don’t you just have an LST run up on the beach and pick us up?”

  “The U.S. Government is not involved in this matter in any way that can be traced, Drake. We’re wasting time here.”

  We walked back to the tank storage area. Erikson scanned the interior of the park and the streets on either side. “Go!” he said at last. I crossed the street with a rush, dived between the lowest strands of barbed wire, and rolled beneath the nearest tank treads. I listened for an alarm, but there was nothing.

  I had no idea a tank was so big. The treads must have been twelve feet apart. I could see that on the next tank in the lineup the huge metal carcass was at least ten feet tall. Protruding from its front was a barrel-like muzzle brake on a cannon fully fifteen feet long. There wasn’t much headroom underneath. A tank is designed to hug the ground.

  There was a thud, and Erikson rolled under the tank with me. “This is an old T-34 Russian model,” he said when he regained his breath. “The radio will be one of three or four types.” He handed me a small wrench. “I won’t need this inside. If you want me to come out in a hurry, tap the bottom of the tank. When I’m ready to come out, I’ll tap. You tap back only if you want me to hold off for any reason. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  He wriggled forward on his belly and disappeared. I heard the scrape of leather on metal as he scaled the side of the tank. There was a dull metallic sound that I assumed was Erikson disposing of the hatch cover. After that there was silence.

  I had time to think for the first time since the dying Slater’s revelation that Erikson was a government agent. How in the hell had I ever wound up in such a jackpot? Slater had been the perfect bridge, of course. He had wanted out of prison so badly that he agreed to anything Erikson wanted done. Ordinarily I would have firmly resolved to shed Mr. Erikson permanently somewhere along the way, and soon. It hadn’t been a one-way street, though. Twice—first at the time we took over the ambulance and again in the alley behind the brothel—he had saved my life. He had needed me, of course. Still …

  Two ringing taps above my head aborted my thinking. The metal-on-metal clangor sounded as though it would carry for three miles. I wormed my way out from beneath the tank as Erikson dropped to the ground. “That should do it,” he said. We covered each other crossing the street on our way back to the truck.

  Erikson drove steadily for forty-five minutes. The truck wheezed along at a top of 25 mph. There was an increasing tang of salt in the air. When we neared our remote seashore rendezvous point, we abandoned the truck and walked the final mile through pine trees. Shifting sand underfoot made the walking arduous.

  We stopped within sound of the surf while we were still in the pines. We unpacked the clumsy one-man life rafts and spread them out. I saw Erikson take from the haversack the piece of equipment about the size of a cigarette lighter that I had seen him repacking carefully so many times before. “What is that?”

  “A frequency probe.” He held it out to me. “Quite a piece of miniaturization. It has a selector switch for various frequencies that can be preset. The small bulb at the bottom lights up whenever a transmitter in the area sends out a signal on the frequency selected. Ours is homed in on the Calpyso’s frequency, of course. This unit has a built-in amplitude sensor so the bulb will glow more brightly when pointed directly at the source of the signal. When we’re in the rafts, it will guide us to the cruiser.”

  “And right now?”

  “We wait.”

  I stretched out at the base of a pine tree and tried to relax. The sudden inactivity reminded me how infrequently I had eaten in the past forty-eight hours. My stomach complained audibly.

  My thoughts returned to Karl Erikson, Treasury agent. The snow job to which I succumbed in San Diego had been a monumental performance. Even in hindsight, it was hard to see what I might have done differently to avoid being ensnared in a game in which I couldn’t win unless I disposed of Karl Erikson.

  After an hour Erikson made frequent trips from the shelter of the trees to the water’s edge, where he made sweeping left-to-right casts along the horizon with his frequency probe. “If that first mate, Redmond, doesn’t make it soon, we’re going to be caught by daylight,” he said quietly after one of these fruitless trips.

  On his next try, though, he called me from the shore. “I’m getting a flicker,” he said when I joined him. “Bring the rafts, but don’t inflate them till I’m sure.”

  By the time I had lugged the twenty-pound rafts to the edge of the sand, I could see for myself on the frequency probe that the Calypso was out there. The tiny bulb flickered weakly when held left and right of our position. Slightly left of center, it glowed steadily.

  “Inflate,” Erikson said after another pass with the sensor. I walked knee-deep into the low surge and turned the knobs on a CO2 cylinder on each raft. They inflated rapidly. I wasn’t looking forward to what came next, because when we practiced in Key West, the rafts had proved ungainly. They were primarily survival gear, and the only locomotion was provided by paddles strapped to the forearm by elastic bands.

  Erikson joined me in the surf. He fastened the rafts together with a length of nylon line. “So we don’t get separated in the dark,” he said. He placed on his raft the oilskin-wrapped package that had never been separated from him since he had acquired it in the basement of the museum. We waded out waist-deep, pushing the rafts ahead of us, then climbed aboard the precariously balanced affairs. I knelt carefully on the thin fabric bottom and strapped on my paddle.

  Erikson was much better at it than I was. He kept the nylon line between the rafts taut most of the time. Paddling and trying to keep the raft from spinning around was exhausting work. Once or twice I caught a glow from the sensor Erikson still carried as he aimed us at the steadiest source of light. It was much darker on the water without the beach sand to reflect the luminescence.

  Oddly, I saw the Calypso before Erikson did. I had been staring at a darker bulk low on the water without realizing what it was. It took me another moment to assimilate the half-seen, half-sensed outline. “There it is!” I called at the same moment white water foamed out from behind the Calypso as the previously idling engines speeded up. The pilot had seen us.

  Erikson practically towed me the final hundred yards to the cruiser. Even alongside it, the Calypso‘s dark paint made it hard to see. Erikson stood up on his bobbing raft and pitched his oilskin-wrapped package up onto the Calypso‘s deck. Then he swarmed up the side with the aid of a hand extended down to him.

  I banged a shoulder against the Calypso‘s side as raft and cruiser came together when I reached up for the helping hand. A strong pull and my own scrambling effort landed me aboard. “Welcome aboard, horseman,” Hazel greeted me. The helping hand had been her hand.

  “What the hell—?” I began as the engines roared and the Calypso began a sweeping turn. Erikson was at the wheel.

  “Redmond chickened out when word came over the radio from Havana about the firing squad execution of the American spy,” Hazel explained. “He said he wasn’t putting his neck into a n
oose on a Cuban beach. I had to lay him out to keep him from taking off with the Calypso. Where’s Slater?”

  “He didn’t make it.”

  She went to Erikson at the wheel. “That’s not the reverse course,” she said after a look at the compass, which was on due north.

  “It’s just the right course, that’s all. We’ll make the intercept just outside the twelve-mile limit.”

  “Will they escort us or will we go aboard the Navy ship?”

  “They’ll escort us.”

  It took me a moment to digest it. Then I walked over to them. “We’re meeting a Navy ship and you knew it?” I said to Hazel. “You knew this man was a government agent?”

  “Wasn’t it nice of him to guarantee my fifty thousand dollars?” she said with a smile. She put her hand on my arm. “He came to see me at the ranch after Calkins, the deputy sheriff, found you. He explained things to me.”

  “But you know perfectly well I never would have—”

  “You wanted something to do and you got it, didn’t you?”

  “Take the wheel,” Erikson said to her.

  He removed a pair of binoculars from a locker and began to scan the sea both ahead of and behind us. I found a deck chair and sat down. I thought back to The Castaways and Hazel’s acceptance of Erikson’s orders when I had half-expected temper flareups from her. Erikson had undermined me in the area it counted most. Naturally Hazel would prefer to see a government umbrella over part of the project. I knew now why she’d never put up much argument after the single time in San Diego.

  The deck was pitched to about 30 degrees as the twin screws dug into the water. I was looking upward at quite an angle past Hazel’s head at the wheel. A widening pink coral color in the eastern sky heralded an explosive Cuban sunrise. At first I thought I was looking at a pair of seagulls that came slanting downward from the rapidly brightening sky, but they were moving too fast and too straight to be birds. “Planes!” I yelled.

  Erikson swung his glasses in the direction I was pointing. “Mig-17's!” he shouted above the roar of the engines. The two blunt-nosed, swept-wing fighter craft with their stubby bodies and sloping tails were almost upon us. They smoothed out their dives and leveled out to cross our bow at 100-foot altitude no more than 200 yards ahead of us. A stream of machine gun bullets roiled the water directly ahead of the Calypso, and then the planes pulled up into a steep climbing turn.

  Erikson pushed Hazel away from the wheel. “Break out the life preservers, then get below!” he roared at her above the noise of the planes. “The next pass means business!”

  Hazel opened a locker and I helped her pitch life vests onto the deck. Erikson snatched up the oilskinned packet of cash and lashed it to a life vest. I lost sight of the planes for a moment until I looked over our stern. They were coming straight at us in a shallow dive. One instant they were dark spots against the horizon and then full-grown aircraft the next. Winking spots of fire appeared from ports on either side of the round orifice of the engine air intake. Evenly spaced tracer bullets looked like incandescent perforations of the blue-black sky.

  Before I could open my mouth to yell, pieces of the woodwork and the deck and the fantail began to fly in all directions. The cruiser shuddered under hammer blows as the deadly hail chewed at her stern. “Over here, Drake!” Erikson bellowed at me. He thrust a pair of binoculars at me as the planes surged past. “There should be a boat heading toward us! We’re in international waters, and I’m damned if I’m going to be herded back to Cuba because Castro’s pilots don’t respect it!”

  I scanned the blue-green water ahead of us even while I felt a chill between my shoulder blades as I anticipated the planes’ next assault. The first sweep of the binoculars disclosed nothing. Then I saw a huge V-wave flung to either side of a knifelike bow proceeding directly toward us. I seized Erikson’s arm and pointed. “Finally!” he exclaimed, and braced himself at the wheel to hold course.

  The cruiser staggered suddenly as the bow looked as though it was being gnawed by invisible jaws. I hadn’t even seen the direction from which the planes came. Erikson spun the wheel furiously but the Calypso plainly had been knocked off course. “They’ve holed the hull!” Erikson shouted. “Grab the life vests and prepare to abandon!”

  I snatched up two life vests and ran aft. I led Hazel from the cabin onto the fantail while we buckled ourselves into the vests. The cruiser began to shudder again. Glass and wood flew as phosphorescent bullets almost cut the boat in two amidships. Erikson jumped down to the fantail to join us in the midst of the deadly hail. He landed on his knees, clasping his left arm. He struggled upright at once, dragging the lashed-in cash in the life vest in his good hand while he stuffed another vest under his armpit.

  “Over the side!” he gritted hoarsely. A wood splinter the size of a railroad spike was imbedded in his upper arm. Blood was soaking his right trouser leg from the middle of his thigh. “Be … smaller targets … in the water! Stay … afloat! We’ll be … picked up!”

  I pushed Hazel over the railing, waited until I saw Erikson jump, then leaped over myself. We became separated in the water. I wondered if the blood streaming from Erikson would attract sharks. When I found them, Erikson was trying to support Hazel with his good arm while she helped him into his life vest.

  A giant hand seemed to push us deeper into the water. There was a dull whump from the Calypso, now almost dead in the water. Planking flew like popcorn as the forward deck heaved upward and a cone of blue flame flared upward from the ignited interior. The Calypso stood up on her nose, then slowly began to disappear.

  “Look!” Hazel cried out.

  I struggled to turn. The first thing I saw was the gray bulk of a Navy ship with a rapidly diminishing bow wave as she slowed for us. The second thing was Erikson inclined face forward with his head under water despite his life vest. I swam to him and held his head up as we bobbed up and down in two-foot waves. I tried frantically to locate the planes. The next pass would pick us off like Halloweeners ducking for apples. Then I saw two dark dots streaking for the Cuban shoreline. The planes didn’t dare tangle with a U.S. ship in international waters.

  My heart stopped beating for an instant as I saw two sleek black figures coursing through the water toward us. Then I saw that they were wet-suited frogmen. “We’ve got him!” the first one said to me, taking Erikson from me and lifting him higher in the water.

  “Boat behind you!” the second frogman added.

  When I turned, Hazel was being hauled over the side of a Navy gig. A uniformed man in the bow was leaning down toward me. He seized me under the armpits and lifted, and I landed with a thump in the bottom of the boat. I saw that Erikson was being lifted over the other side.

  The man who had dragged me aboard was swabbing off his dripping chest. “Man, you folks do get around!” he said.

  I found myself staring upward into the rugged features of Chief Petty Officer McMillan, the man Slater had slugged on the destroyer trip to Guantanamo that now seemed to have taken place a hundred years ago.

  The gig’s engine purred as the boat headed in a wide arc toward the destroyer.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  HAZEL AND I walked up the broad, shrub-lined walk of the Bethesda Medical Center Hospital. We took the elevator to the fourth floor and found Karl Erikson’s room.

  The big man was propped up in a cranked-up hospital bed. His left arm was in a sling, but he had a portable typewriter on his lap. He looked the same except for a slight loss in his usual high color. “Bienvenidos, amigos,” he greeted us. He glanced at his typewriter. “Each report seems to breed two more.”

  “I hope you’re impressing your bosses by letting them know you have your own personal destroyer caddying for you,” I needled him.

  “That wasn’t in the script,” he said. “Someone was supposed to be there, of course, but I had no idea the assignment would go to the same destroyer that ferried us to Gitmo.” He smiled at Hazel. “Has he forgiven you yet for holding out on
him on the subject of who his employer was on this little deal?”

  “No, he hasn’t,” I said emphatically before Hazel could reply. “She’s got some lumps coming for letting me stick my head into the mouth of that alligator when she knew I couldn’t make a dime out of it.”

  “He’ll get over it,” Hazel said calmly to Erikson.

  “About the time your bruises start fading,” I told her. “I still don’t see why you let me go ahead when you knew this character here was—”

  “I’ll tell you why,” she interrupted me. “You said it yourself when you came to see me at the ranch. You were losing your balls. You weren’t doing anything. I wanted you like you were in Florida. Sure, it was dangerous, but not as dangerous as anything you might have got into by yourself.”

  “How was he in Florida?” Erikson interposed.

  Hazel smiled. “Tigerish.” She glanced at me mischievously before returning her attention to Erikson. “How’s the convalescence?”

  He shrugged. “The doctor tells me I’d have been better off with a drumload of nice clean incendiary bullets in me instead of that paint-soaked chunk of wood, but it’s coming.” He looked at me. “You could have let me drown before the boat from the destroyer reached us.”

  “Like you could have left me alone with the soldier in the alley behind the whorehouse.”

  “What’s this about a whorehouse?” Hazel wanted to know.

  “It’s a Spanish word meaning cathedral,” Erikson said blandly. His eyes were still upon me. “Based on the million you were counting on for your end of the retrieval, your check is going to come up about nine hundred ninety-eight thousand short. The cash is Uncle Sammie’s, but I’ve had you on the department’s thirty-two-dollar per diem since the outset. Hazel’s fifty thousand advance to me will be handled separately.”

  “Tell the department I hope they can spare it,” I said. “They didn’t risk a goddamn—”

  “You can mail us our checks at the Rancho Dolorosa, Ely, Nevada,” Hazel cut in. “And why don’t you come out for a visit while you’re recuperating?”