‘Bad news,’ said Hedritch. ‘The place is wall-to-wall crazies in costume. You can’t hear a word. The stage and dance floor are back-lit with strobes.’
‘A security nightmare,’ Spears added.
‘Ridiculous,’ Campon answered, sitting up, ‘you caballeros need to grow bigger cojones.’
Spears mimed the words to himself. He had heard the line often enough. Big balls was Campon’s answer to every crisis.
‘General,’ he said, ‘this is the worst yet. You go in there, we can’t guarantee anything.’
‘Your job is to protect me, not bore me with your problems,’ he snapped. ‘Driver! ‘The door.’
Six men had been guarding Campon since he escaped from Madalena three months earlier. Spears and Hedritch headed the third team that had worked the trick. Three weeks in Fort Lauderdale and Campon was bored. Two weeks in St Louis and he was bored. He had lasted a month and a half in Chicago, and now for two weeks he had been living in a houseboat on Lake Lanier, fifty miles north of Atlanta. Actually it was just as well; moving around like that made it harder to .get a fix on him. The security force of ten comprised Campon’s four bodyguards and the Americans. What was needed to guard a reckless bastard like General Campon was a small army.
‘Six men to cover the insanity inside,’ Spears mumbled as they followed Campon out of the car to where he stood like a ramrod, waiting for his entourage to get in position. He was over six feet tall, making him an easy target, and with the medals on his chest there was no way to miss him.
Campon was hotter than boiling water. The president was browbeating everyone in Congress to approve a $50 million appropriation to back Campon’s planned overthrow of the leftist government that had deposed him. Campon was biding his time, lobbying influential friends with phone calls by day, raising hell every night, while his army, or what was left of it, was cooling its heels across the border in a neighboring country. ‘To throw off his enemies, the Feds had leaked lies to the press: that the general was supposed to be in the Bahamas; that he had moved on to Canada; that he was hiding out n a ranch in the Far West.
At times Spears and Hedritch felt like Campon’s pimps, rounding up women, checking their backgrounds, paying for his sex and for secrecy. But this behavior, appearing in public this way, was a violation of all the rules.
So, what else was new? Hedritch ordered two of his men to go in ahead and work the stage at the back of the dance floor. The other two he sent to the balcony. Spears looked around the shopping center, checking the rooftops, while Hedritch checked out the line. Hell, thought Spears, if they want to get him, they’re going to get him. But they were sure they had not been followed, and that reduced the odds a little. They moved to the door.
‘Names?’ asked the king of the portals.
‘Campon,’ the general said.
The doorman’s finger ran down the list and stopped. ‘Yes, sir, General,’ he said, unsnapping the red cord.
Spears looked at Hedritch with panic as the entourage moved into the club.
‘Did he make a reservation?’ Hedritch asked incredulously.
‘Yes, sir, yesterday,’ the doorman answered.
‘Shit!’ he snapped as they rushed after the general. They caught up with him as Campon was about to enter the main room, a sprawling semicircle of tables crowding up to the dance floor.
‘General, at least go upstairs, please,’ pleaded Hedritch. ‘You can see better from up there and we can cruise the room a lot easier.’
‘The action’s down here,’ Campon answered curtly, following his four beefy men into the club. Spears and Hedritch trotted along behind hum, looking frantically, futilely, around the club as the deposed dictator walked to the edge of the dance floor where he stood watching the madness. He was a stationary target.
‘Shit city,’ Spears yelled in Hedritch’s ear, ‘keep your head on a swivel.’
The general’s gaze swept the dance floor, stopping once on a woman dressed like a giraffe with her bosom swelling over the top of her striped costume. Beyond her, on the far side of the floor, the yellow stork jerked weirdly through the crowd, blurred by the flashing lights. It raised its yellow-feathered wings and turned in a slow circle, bobbing to the beat of the music. Campon laughed and applauded the stork, although it was hard to see it because of the lights flashing in his face.
The stork’s alert eyes checked the general’s entourage, the two men in the balcony, the two men behind it on the stage, as it turned slowly, making a 360-degree survey of the club. The stork was so bizarre, so visible, the security men ignored it.
Campon clapped his hands again and chuckled gleefully at the spectacle. It was the last sound he ever uttered.
Well concealed amid the feathered wings attached to its arms, the stork held a silenced mini.-Uzi. Only a foot long and weighing six pounds, the submachine gun held a thirty-two-round clip and was equipped with a plastic cup to catch the casings. The stork was an expert. It squeezed off three three-round bursts, watching in the slow-motion flashes of the strobes as the rounds splattered into their target. Campon’s head jerked forward as the first three rounds exploded in his chest; his arms swung out in front of him and then he arched backward as two more rounds ripped into his head. The third struck a waiter behind him in the spine and took down two of the bodyguards.
Spears and Hedritch were caught totally by surprise as Campon seemed suddenly to have a seizure. The music continued to thunder. One of the bodyguards spun around and fell against Hedritch.
Oh my God, it’s happening! Hedritch thought.
The stork swung its feathered arms in a slow arc and sent another burst into the crowd. A young woman and her date spun around as the bullets ripped them. She screamed. Somebody else joined the scream. Nobody was aware yet of what was happening Then suddenly the woman yelled, ‘I’m shot!’
Pandemonium.
The second attack created more confusion in the room.
The security men had no idea where the shots were coming from. They saw the young couple fifty feet away go down. The girl started screaming. Campon was on the floor on his back staring up into the darkness above. Guns appeared in the security men’s hands. Hedritch dropped over Campon, felt his throat for a pulse. The screams swept the room like a hurricane blowing through. There was a rush for the door. A table went down. Glasses broke. Panic seemed to explode like a bomb in the room.
The men on the stage jumped into the crowd and raced toward the general’s group. In the balcony the other two men stared down at the figure of the general. In the confusion nobody could tell where the shots came from.
The stork sat down on the stage, pulled off the stilts and whirled behind one of the big speakers. It snapped the back open, dropped stilts and gun into the speaker casing and snapped it shut, then dashed through a nearby fire door. It led to a catacomb of tunnels below the dance floor. As the stork bolted down the stairs, it pulled off the wig and stripped off the wings. It ran to a small door that led to a room full of electrical equipment. The stork jumped inside, still undressing. It peeled off the yellow body stocking, grabbed a garbage bag secreted behind an electrical panel and began stuffing the feathers into it. In seconds the stork was transformed into a young man in jeans and a blue T-shirt. He took a towel soaked in cold cream from the garbage bag and wiped his face clean. Then he rushed down the labyrinth of corridors and back up another set of stairs. When he reached the top, he opened the door a crack and looked into the kitchen. The employees were crowded at the end of the large stainless steel room, peering into the main room.
‘My God,’ one of the cooks said, ‘somebody’s been shot!’
The assassin slipped into the kitchen, stuffed the garbage bag into a large can, slipped a dolly under it and wheeled it out the back door. The chaos had not spread outside yet. He shoved the garbage can among a dozen others, took a quick look at his watch, and walked off into the darkness.
Three and a half minutes. Not bad.
THE HIT
Except for an occasional ‘Hey,’ the big man ignored the pimps, barkers and ladies. Most of them knew him anyway. He passed Jack’s American Star and the San Francisco Bar, where topless go-go dancers performed special ‘shows,’ and turned down a side street, away from the neon glare, the bellowing loudspeakers and the hawkers. It was not a dim street, but it was more Phoenix than New Orleans. Were it not for the signs printed in both English and Thai and the nature of the buildings themselves with their characteristic Thai architecture, this section called Tombstone might have been mistaken for a street in any Western American town. The only thing missing was dirt streets and hitching posts. In fact one establishment did have a hitching post on the edge of the sidewalk.
There was a store that featured traditional Western clothing, including Tony Lama boots and Stetson hats; a restaurant called Yosemite Sam’s, whose menu consisted of barbecue, Brunswick stew and ribs; the Stagecoach Deli, which, although more West Side New York than Western, had swinging doors and an imitation Tiffany window. It might be argued that Langtry’s Music Hall, with its naked Thai and Chinese dancers, was more Patpong than Tombstone, but it too catered to the Western motif that dominated the street. There were old pesters of Lillie Langtry and Eddie Foy beside the color glossies of its star attractions. The entrance was straight out of a John Ford movie.
Across the Street was Pike’s Peak, an ice cream parlor whose decor was perhaps more turn-of-the-century than Western, and the Roundup, a twenty-four-hour corral styled cafeteria specializing in coffee, doughnuts and eggs. The tiny hundred-seat movie house that was next on the block was called the Palace and played old double features, everything from classics to B flicks from the thirties, four shows a day, and changed programs every Tuesday and Friday.
And there was the Longhorn, as Western as a bar could get. It sported the one hitching post on the street. A rowdy Texan had once tied his rental car to the post and, hours later and several drinks drunker, had forgotten and driven off, taking the front of the place with him. Sweets Wilkie, the proprietor, had settled for a thousand dollars and repaired it himself for $346.
On this night Wilkie was in heaven, his gold tooth glittering from the corner of a broad smile. The jukebox was booming ‘Bad Moon Rising,’ by Creedence Clearwater, and the place was jammed to the walls, mostly by some of the five hundred or so expatriate Americans who lived in the city. Few tourists found their way down the Tombstone back street, and if they did, the Longhorn was hardly what they were looking for.
The burly black man, whose inner-tube-size arms strained the sleeves of a blinding Hawaiian shirt, strolled through the noisy Longhorn, nodded to Wilkie, went up the two steps and through the glass-bead curtain into the private sector of the bar known as the Hole in the Wall, a section reserved for regulars. The Honorable was sitting in his personal easy chair, reading the Wall Street Journal. On the table beside him was a bottle of wine and a rack of poker chips.
Two men were shooting eight ball, and beyond them six men were seated around a poker table playing five card stud under the glare of a green shade. The black man didn’t have to check out the players; he knew who they would be. Gallagher, Eddie Riker, Potter, Johnny Prophett, Wonderboy and Wyatt Earp. A strange-looking crew, particularly Wonderboy, who looked like a mime. His face was divided by a thin red line that ran from his hairline down his forehead and the bridge of his nose to his chin. His face was painted black on the left side and white on the right.
The black man pulled up a chair and sat down next to a tall, lean man in a flat-brimmed Stetson. He had white hair and a white handlebar mustache, and wore a black Western shirt, jeans and a tattersall vest, which concealed the .357 Cobra that he called his Buntline Special under his arm.
‘Decided who’s on the roster, Mr. Earp?’ he asked quietly, studying the cards on the table.
‘Early and me for starters, Haven’t decided who the third man’ll be yet,’ Earp answered.
‘You ain’t discriminating, are you?’ the black man asked with half a grin.
‘You went last time, Corkscrew,’ he said.
‘Shit, I’m the best you got and you know it,’ Corkscrew answered with a touch of arrogance.
‘Yeah, I know,’ Earp answered, repeating a line he heard at least once a week from Corkscrew. “I once had every pimp in De-troit right there.” He pressed his thumb down on the table.
“But this ain’t Detroit,” Corkscrew answered with a smile, incanting Earp’s customary reply.
‘Next time I’ll scratch you in,’ Earp promised, turning over his hole card, which, added to the pair on the table, gave him trips and the pot.
Earp looked at his gold Rolex. Nine o’clock. Thirty minutes until show time.
He looked around the table, making his final decision. For the most part, a tough bunch All of them had suffered their share of grief in Vietnam.
‘Take my seat,’ he said and got up.
‘What you got?’ Corkscrew asked.
Earp counted his chips with one hand. ‘Three hundred,’ he said.
‘I owe ya,’ Corkscrew said, slipping into his chair.
Earp had planned this operation carefully, as he always did, and he was feeling comfortable about the whole thing. Keep the team small and run the show fast, that was his motto. It had worked for him for years. He moved away from the orb of light into the shadows, checking out the regulars, also as he always did.
The man who had been sitting next to him was Max Early, who was wearing a light tan safari jacket, which hung open. He had no shirt under it and his trim body, like his hard-angled face, was well tanned — a man who worked in the sun. Unlike the others, who wore their hair trimmed short, Early’s auburn locks tumbled from under a weathered and sagging safari hat down to his shoulders. Early stood quietly when Earp got up. ‘I’m out,’ was all he said, gathering up his chips.
Earp knew all their stories by heart.
Max and the big kid, Noel, and Jimmy, who had a problem with acne, were sitting in the jungle staring down at the hole while the rest of the patrol was shaking out the grass nearby. It looked as if it was abandoned. There were no fresh footprints and Jimmy had been lying on the damp ground with his ear to the hole for ten minutes and didn’t hear a sound.
‘So whose turn is it?’ said Noel, the big hunk of a kid from Oklahoma. Typical Army, picking a man who weighed 270 pounds to be a tunnel rat when he could hardly get his leg down the hole.
‘I went last time,’ said Jimmy, the skinny kid from San Berdoo.
Early was the oldest. He was twenty-six and he felt ninety and he had this feeling that he was responsible for the other two.
‘Shit, I’ll go down,’ he sighed. ‘Ain’t been anybody down this hole for a week or two. Look there, there’s spider webs over the entrance.’
‘You know these gooks,’ said Noel. ‘Lay down in there for weeks, they can.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Early, slapping afresh clip in his M-16 and charging it and checking the K-Bar in his boot and the clip in his .45. He hated dusting these tunnels, hated it more than anything else about the war, but it had to get done and the sooner the better, so why waste time. He tied his hair back with a bandana and quietly slid over the edge of the tunnel headfirst and slithered down into the black pit. He lay, holding his breath, listening. He di
dn’t smell them. And he didn’t hear any breathing. It’s okay, he thought, Charlie left this one behind. He started through headfirst with his knife between his teeth and his M-16 probing the darkness. These tunnels could go forever, sometimes twisting and turning for a mile or two. He hated the darkness and the damp, musty feeling, but he didn’t want to use his light yet, not until he was sure the tunnel was abandoned.
Damn, what’s an outdoorsman from Utah doing in this piss-hole, he thought.
Then he heard the first faint sound.
A scratching sound.
Then a squeak.
Then a flapping.
And then suddenly the tunnel was alive with squealing, flapping, biting, hungry bats, dozens of them, surrounding him in the darkness.
Early screamed a scream of pure terror. He started firing. He emptied his rifle, heard the bullets thumping into the earth as the bats kept coming, started to back up, slashing the darkness with his knife, clawing for his pistol. The screeching creatures were all around him, and his scream was endless and ear-piercing as he thrashed in the darkness. Pulling himself up against the side of the tunnel, he emptied his .45 into the blackness around him, firing blindly. He clawed out another clip as he backed through the tight confines of the tomb toward the entrance. He was disoriented in the dark and his hands were shaking. There were bats in his hair, biting his cheeks. He slammed another clip in the .45 and emptied it. Then he pulled out the flashlight and began sweeping it around the tunnel, hoping the light would scare them off. Finally he could feel the cool draft from the opening sweeping past him and he reached back to get a grip on the edge of the shaft; his hand touched something soft and wet and at first he thought it was mud. He twisted around and flashed the light back. The big kid, Noel, was hanging upside down, his arms resting on the floor of the tunnel. His face was mush. Blood bubbled out of the gaping bullet hole under his eye and poured out of his nose and mouth.
‘Oh God, oh Jesus!’ Early screamed as the bats continued to assault him and flew past him and attacked the dead soldier’s bleeding face. And Early, still screaming, clawed frantically past his fallen comrade, gasping for the fresh air that rushed down the shaft, knowing deep down that in his panic he had just killed his own buddy.
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