Flashpoint

by Dan J. Marlowe

  Dan J. Marlowe

  Flashpoint

  ***

  I had lived so long on the wrong side Of. the law I felt out of place as a special undercover agent for Uncle Sam. But I had no choice. One of the top brass in U.S. Intelligence had my number. So we made a deal-his silence for my services in tracking down and infiltrating a gang of Mid-East terrorists. Besides, I had a personal interest in this job. They had stolen $75,000 from me.

  So there I was-Earl Drake, bank robber and safecracker, playing on the side of the angels to outwit a bunch of fanatic Turks who were using their embassy for cover.

  I started with a Turkish delight. Talia. I conned her into leading me from the bedroom to their inner sanctum. I wished I hadn't.

  One look at the cold, bulbous eyes in the mound of flesh seated on the cushioned sofa before me told me I had stepped in the path of a rattlesnake. And if I couldn't charm it, I was a dead Drake.

  ***

  Bitemeok (grand book owner & heroic scan provider) & P. (OCR, formatting & proofing) edition.

  ***

  1

  HAZEL had given me almost too many errands to do for her in New York. I was late getting to Kennedy, and then I couldn't find the gate from which the chartered flight was to leave. By the time I asked directions twice and then backtracked the length of the terminal, I had three minutes left before flight time.

  Duke Conboy was waiting when I finally arrived at the correct lower level. Duke is a jowly, impressive-looking man with silvery gray hair. "You really cut it close," he commented from around a cigar stub. "I was just gonna get aboard." He waved at someone behind me. "Glad you could make it, Candy."

  I turned to see a smiling black man approaching us. He wore a lime-green suit, lime-green suede shoes, and a lime-green derby hat. His ruffled shirt was shocking pink as was his wide silk tie. "Candy Kane, Earl Drake," Duke introduced us.

  "Pleased to meet you, mon," the dapper Candy said with a pronounced British accent. We shook hands.

  "Let's go," Duke commanded. He led the way past an unmanned desk where an airline clerk would ordinarily have been checking boarders against a passenger manifest. We passed through a doorway that led to a carpeted ramp. Six feet along the ramp a man in a battered felt hat overflowed both sides of the three-legged stool on which he was sitting. He must have weighed three hundred pounds. He had the cauliflower ears and lumpy brows common to ex-fighters. "Earl's with me, Tim," Duke said as we edged our way past him.

  "Right, Duke," the big man said. He nodded to Candy.

  From the ramp we moved into the interior of the Boeing 727 I had seen from the observation window on the terminal level above. A stewardess greeted us pleasantly. Her hair was blonde but she had Jewish features. Behind her a hard-eyed man with a gold chain looped across the front of his scarlet weskit stepped into the aisle in front of me. "Earl's with me, Sal," Duke repeated. The hard-eyed Sal moved aside.

  A subdued roar of male voices floated outward from the plane's interior to the forward, first-class compartment where he was standing. We moved along the aisle, past the galley where the stewardesses assemble the meal trays. I had a quick glimpse of two white-jacketed, dark-featured men juggling ice cubes and pouring drinks. "That mean-faced little bartender is on something," Candy commented from behind me. When I turned to look, Candy was smiling. "He looks higher than this plane is going to be." The green-ensembled black man sounded amused.

  We passed the galley section before I was able to take a better look at the man Candy had been talking about. The aisle seats of the usual three-abreast seats had been removed in the tourist section, making a wider-than-usual passageway. Even so, we had to step over and around men on their knees with bunched money in their hands. Spinning dice riveted the gamblers' attention, and among the loose bills I could see on the carpeting, twenties and fifties predominated. Four separate crap games were going full blast at intervals along the widened aisle.

  Ahead of me, Duke had to wait for a piece of plywood to be removed from across the aisle where a hand of poker had just been completed. There was no silver on the makeshift table, and the smallest bill I saw was a ten. The traffic grew even thicker as we approached the center of the plane. "Tail section's full up, Duke," someone called. "Max is dealin' blackjack." Duke motioned me to slide into the window seat of a pair of empty seats above the port wing of the plane.

  We had lost Candy, and I looked back along the aisle. The lime-green suit was hunched down at the first crap game. The lime-green derby hat was on the carpeting with a sheaf of bills in its bowl, and Candy's white teeth gleamed as he joked with the man beside him while his quick hands scattered bills as he covered bets.

  "Where'd Candy pick up the British accent?" I asked Duke as we sat down.

  "Candy's from Nassau," Duke replied as he settled his bulk into the thick-cushioned seat. "He flew in for this junket. You'd be surprised how far some of the guys came for this flight. I just saw Bottles Lamoreaux from Quebec. How about a drink?"

  "Bourbon," I said. I had to raise my voice to be heard. The noise level was fantastic. There must have been at least sixty men on the plane. Duke stood up and bellowed an order for two bourbons to someone I couldn't see. The plane lurched and began to move along the taxiway. I hadn't even heard the engines pick up tempo.

  I looked out the double-paned window along the length of the swept-back, tapered wing. The terminal flowed by as we taxied down the ramp. Sunlight glinted off the bright metal surface of the smooth wing, and the glare made me squint. I swallowed to clear my ears as the cabin pressure suddenly increased. The air vent above my head hissed and blew cool, fresh air over my damp face. The thick haze of cigar and cigarette smoke eddied wildly.

  The voice of the stewardess came over the intercom, but the noise inside the plane drowned her out. She was standing between the compartments, a professional smile on her pretty face. She persisted in her effort to make herself heard until the din subsided. "We will not take off until everyone is seated with his seat belt fastened," she warned.

  The games broke up one by one, and the reluctant gamblers slid into their seats. The girl ran through the usual procedure of demonstrating the oxygen mask and pointing out the emergency exits. I noticed a red panel above my window. There was an emergency locking lever recessed behind it. The section of the fuselage next to my window seat was an emergency exit which led out onto the wing's broad surface. I thumped on the section with the butt of my fist. Its solid feel was reassuring. I didn't even like to think about its blowing out four miles up while cruising at six hundred miles an hour.

  We reached the end of the taxiway and then waited so long I began to think something had gone wrong. Around me the gamblers profanely protested the delay in getting back to their games. Then a sleek United Air Lines 707 flashed past my window, its landing wheels searching for the runway. Blue smoke spurted as the motionless tires bit into the abrasive concrete. The plane rose again in a long, graceful bounce. The tires touched down a second time with blowing puffs of smoke as the plane settled down and disappeared behind the tail of our aircraft.

  The quiet hum of the jets behind us picked up volume and intensity. We started to move, and the plane gained speed quickly, the steady acceleration pushing me firmly into my seat. The horizon tilted to a thirty-degree angle and stayed there as the nose of the plane lifted and sighted on a piece of sky dotted with white streamers of cloud.

  The ground dropped away rapidly. By the time we reached the cloud wisps, Manhattan was far behind and obscured by a dirty layer of smog. Above us there was nothing but blue space. The plane leveled off, and the SEAT BELTS and NO SMOKING lights went out. The stewardess hadn't tried to enforce the latter. There was the metallic clashing sound of released belts as the gamblers poured out into the ai
sle to resume their interrupted action.

  Duke leaned forward in the direction of the eight-handed poker game. "I'll take half anyone's action," he announced. "Speak up."

  "You got half of mine," growled a sallow-faced man with a funereal expression. He counted the bills in his hand. "Thirty-four hundred, Duke."

  "I'm in, Toby." Duke removed a wallet from his inside jacket pocket and counted out seventeen hundred-dollar bills. He handed them to the sallow-faced man who added them to half his own roll. Duke grinned at me as he sank back into his cushioned seat again. "Why don't you put Tippy's seventy-five thousand into action?" he asked.

  "The only action Tippy's seventy-five thousand is going to get is when it moves from my pocket into his hand," I told Duke.

  "You could've just given it to me to give to him," Duke said. His tone was injured. "Everyone knows we're partners. Then you wouldn't have had to make this flight."

  "You weren't partners when Tippy was in the gow, doing seven to ten. Anyway, I'm just following orders." I sought for a change of subject. "How come we weren't checked aboard against a manifest?"

  Duke winked. "Officially, we were. Plenty of John Does an' Richard Roes, though. Nobody's under his right name, not even a square like you. Nobody wants any publicity about these gamblin' flights to Vegas."

  He returned his attention to the poker game. I watched Toby raise behind the opener with two pair and make them stand up. On the next hand he ran three jacks into a full house and sat there with a brooding look on his jaundiced face.

  I turned at a tap on the shoulder. One of the white-coated bartenders was dumping a miniature of bourbon into a glass on his tray. He managed to spill a third of it in the process. His eyes were positively pinpoints, and I recalled Candy's remark.

  "Candy thinks that one is on junk," I said to Duke when the dark-faced bartender moved along the congested aisle toward the front of the plane.

  Duke glanced in that direction. "Him?" He shrugged. "Could be. Neither of this pair is part of the reg'lar crew we usually have on this chartered flight."

  "What happened to the stewardess?"

  "Prob'ly up in the cockpit with the crew, out of reach of the grabby-handed types," Duke said wisely.

  "How often do they put on these flights?"

  "For the pros, about twice a year. Vegas is gonna see seventy-two hours of real action when this bus hits the ground."

  "How long does it take us to get out there?"

  "About four hours."

  "What burns me is that if Tippy had only told Hazel he was going to be in Vegas, she wouldn't have sent me to New York with his money," I complained. "I was only a couple hundred miles from Vegas when I started this round trip."

  "Somethin' came up unexpected," Duke explained. He peeled the cellophane from a fresh cigar. "How's Hazel these days?"

  "Never better."

  "I remember when Blue Shirt Charlie Andrews first brought her around," Duke reminisced. "That Andrews was a gamblin' fool, an' even as a kid Hazel was a swinger. Party all night an' then kick your hat off at the breakfast table." He reflected for a moment. "She must still be okay. Not many broads would turn loose seventy-five big ones so easy, even if they knew Tippy Larkin had given it to Andrews to hold while Tippy was doin' time. Hazel always was on the level, though. An' full of hell. I remember one time in El Paso she got the bartender to slip a Mickey to an obnoxious-type who was pesterin' her while Andrews was gamblin' upstairs. Then she boxed the guy in the booth so he couldn't get out without crawlin' over her, an' let nature take its course. Which it did. She-"

  "Good afternoon, gentlemen." The loudspeaker came on over our heads. "This is your pilot, Captain Bernstein, speaking. We are flying at our assigned altitude of thirty-three thousand. Weather ahead is clear. Our estimated time of arrival is five-twelve P.M., Nevada time. Ground temperature is eighty-two degrees. Limousines will be waiting at the airport. Mazel tov."

  The metallic voice stopped. Duke was again watching the poker game. Up the aisle I could see Sal's red weskit clashing with Candy's lime-green suit as money changed hands furiously at the largest crap game. There were few aboard the plane who sat like me with a drink in hand.

  Despite the noise around me, I dozed off. I woke a couple of times and glanced out the window. The ground beneath us had changed from green-and-black agricultural squares to rocky, gray-brown, desolate-looking terrain with few signs of habitation.

  Once when I woke, Duke was counting bills beside me with a satisfied look on his cherubic face. The gamblers plied their trade steadily with never a thought to their surroundings. My nose and throat were beginning to get the dry, stuffed-up feeling associated with prolonged high-altitude flights.

  It was the loudspeaker that woke me from my next catnap. "-as I say!" a harsh voice demanded. There was a thudding noise followed by heavy breathing and a gurgling sound.

  "You-you knifed him!" a girl's voice said tremulously.

  I sat up and blinked the sleep from my eyes.

  "Fly it in where I said!" the same harsh voice commanded. "And get away from that mike button or I'll-"

  The loudspeaker went dead.

  Duke Conboy was staring up at it curiously. I couldn't see that anyone else was paying attention. Duke looked at me and shrugged. "Thought I heard somethin' about a knife."

  "I heard it, too."

  "They got a movie goin' up in the cockpit?" Duke glanced at his watch. "Only about twenty minutes to go. It must've been somethin' about landin' instructions. Yeah, there we go now."

  The steady rumble of the engines had eased off. The squeal of fluid rushing through the hydraulic lines was followed by a series of vibrations. The trailing edge of the wing outside my window dropped away as the flaps began to lower. "Wonder why they didn't tell us to put our seat belts back on?" Duke speculated. His clumsy-looking but nimble fingers refastened his belt.

  Heavier vibrations shook the plane. Thumping sounds indicated that the landing gear had been extended. The back of my seat pushed me forward as the plane took a nose-down attitude and began a rapid descent. I could see barren ground moving upward.

  The aircraft banked steeply as it rushed toward the earth. Under the trailing edge of the wing I saw a black macadam landing strip move backward. At that height it looked no larger than a burnt matchstick, but it grew in size rapidly as we continued to descend in a sweeping turn.

  I had never flown into Las Vegas, but I was sure there must be a complex of landing strips as at every major airport. From where we were I could still see only the single runway. I pressed my face against the cool window-glass to extend my view, searching for the sprawling, gambling city. Beyond the wing tip, in a shallow valley a few miles away, I could see a small town. Its three-block business district was bisected by a ribbon of straight, pale, concrete highway paralleled by a single-track railroad. Both appeared to come from nowhere and lead off over the beige desert to an uninterrupted horizon.

  The engines surged with added power and the plane leveled out. We were so low I could see plainly thin shadows cast by stubby mesquite that dotted the arid ground bordering the runway. The pilot banked again, grinding down more flaps. I had another glimpse of the landing strip as the wing dipped. It looked terribly short. At its near end the twin propellers of a small private plane sent flashes of reflected sunlight from spinning propeller blades. I'd missed seeing the plane before because its dune-yellow color blended it into the parched landscape.

  I turned to Duke. "Where do these flights generally land? Do they have a private strip-"

  There was a jarring jolt followed by a loud BANG! We were on the ground before I realized we were that close. A cloud of brown dust and sand came up over the forward edge of the wing. He's missed the runway, I thought. Then we lifted as the engines burst into a crescendo of noise. I decided that the pilot intended to go round again, but we hit the macadam with a severe jolt for the second time. I was pitched forward against the seat in front of me before I realized that the pilot had re
versed the engine thrust and was applying full power to slow us down.

  Shouts, yells, and curses filled our section of the plane as the unprepared gamblers were stacked in heaps in the aisle. I forced myself back into my seat so I could look out the window again. There was a sharp, explosive noise beneath the plane. A circular metal object flew off to one side from under the edge of the wing and spun away. Trailing it was a black tubular ring. I had to look again before I realized that it was the blown-out tire that had been blasted loose from the dual-wheel landing gear when the retaining rim tore loose from the shock of the hard landing.

  I could feel the brakes being applied in quick jabs as the deep-throated engines tried in vain to check us. "What the hell happened?" Duke yelled beside me. The brakes went on again as the jets kept working at full pitch. We yawed back and forth as brakes and reverse thrust took effect. Then the plane veered hard to the right. It left the macadam and bounced violently over softer, sandy ground. We bobbed across the uneven earth, and I was rammed forward into the seat ahead of me again.

  My shoulder banged into Duke Conboy sitting ashen-faced beside me. The plane sounded as though it was breaking to pieces. It swerved and hit the macadam again, spun around, and finally came to a stop with a long shudder. It was cocked sideways across the last few feet of runway. Forced against the window again, I found myself staring up the airstrip in the direction of the private plane whose glinting propellers were taxiing it rapidly toward us. The plane's pointed nose and defiantly upright tail glittered as the setting sun turned its dune-yellow paint to glistening gold. Even before it came to a full stop near us, a man in khakis climbed out of the passenger side onto the low wing, then jumped down to the ground.

  Slung across his shoulder was a machine-gun.

  The man sprinted toward the rear of our plane and disappeared from my view.