Flashpoint

by Dan J. Marlowe

  When the second drill punched through and I withdrew it, I took a long-handled dentist's mirror and a penlight from the tool case. I inserted the dentist's mirror through the hole and then beamed the light from it, angling the mirror so that I had a good look at the safe's interior. I wanted no unpleasant surprises.

  I could see nothing but loosely stacked papers and-in the rear of the safe-packets of wrapped money. I found a pair of medical forceps in a pocket of the tool case and went to work extracting documents. The forceps brought the papers to the edge of the hole, and my other hand folded and crumpled them enough to pull them through. Erikson snatched them from my hand as fast as I could produce them.

  "I need more light," his voice said impatiently from behind me. I turned in time to see him carry a double handful of letters and official-looking documents from the liquor storage closet to the living room.

  I went to work with the forceps again. I maneuvered a wrapped packet of money nearer the front of the safe with the forceps, broke the strap, then forced green bills through the hole in the safe a few at a time. I worked fast, not stopping to count or even to stack. I pulled bills through and let go, pulled bills through and let go. The floor at my feet and then my shoes were covered with money. This time there was going to be a payoff on a job I did for Erikson, and not only for Hazel.

  When I couldn't reach any more money packets, I scooped up the money on the floor and stashed it behind a wine rack. I repacked the tool case, brushed the plaster dust off my trouser legs, and went out into the living room. Erikson was reading and discarding papers and documents with increasing haste, glancing at his watch almost with each discard.

  I sat down and picked up a few of the papers he hadn't reached yet. Some were in a foreign language, Turkish probably. A couple were in English, obviously multiple carbons of official UN business Bayak had attended to for his mission.

  "We don't even know what we're looking for!" Erikson snorted as he winnowed through the stack.

  I found myself looking at a sheet torn off from a desk calendar pad. There was a notation on it in bold printing: "Waybill No. 45603, carton marked AEC #3M45D, Hanford, Washington, shipping weight 12 pounds."

  I read it again.

  "Bayak said the package on the truck weighed twelve pounds," I said to Erikson.

  "What was that?" he inquired absently as he continued to riffle through the loose stack of papers.

  I repeated it, and this time it penetrated. Hands stilled, Erikson stared at me. I gave him the desk calendar sheet. "Hanford, Washington!" he exclaimed. "With an AEC number! That's an Atomic Energy Commission shipment!"

  "You mean-"

  "I mean it could be fissionable material, and with a knowledgeable physicist waiting for it in Damascus-" Erikson rose to his feet abruptly, the balance of the papers sliding to the floor. "This thing finally begins to make sense. I'll call Washington right now and verify what's in the shipment, but without a doubt this is what the Turk is after."

  He strode to the telephone. "Any chance Bayak has his own line tapped?" I suggested.

  Erikson froze in the act of reaching for the phone, then picked it up anyway. "Right now I'd settle for scaring him off this job," he said grimly. "Although I'd love to catch him at it."

  "He won't be anywhere near the scene," I objected.

  "Oh, yes, he will," Erikson predicted. "This is Big Casino on everything he's been attempting to do in this country." He removed a card from his wallet. "Operator, this is a priority call." He ratded off a string of numbers, meaningless to me. "I want to speak personally to the Secretary of the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington, D.C."

  I carried the tool case to the elevator and discovered the doorman, whom I'd completely forgotten, flaked out in a chair, snoring. I restored the fuse I'd removed to the elevator's fuse box so we'd be ready to go. "Then I'll speak to his deputy!" Erikson's voice crackled from the living room. "All right, who's there who can answer a question about an AEC shipment? Then put him on."

  He identified himself to the individual at the other end of the line. "This is an emergency," he continued rapidly. "I need to know the freight line and the route for an AEC shipment on Waybill number four-five-six-O-three, carton number three-M-four-five-D out of Hanford. I realize it will take time, but it had better not take too much. No, you can't call me back here." He recited another number. "That's the phone number in our communications car. Call through the mobile operator. And push this thing for all you're worth."

  He hung up the phone, bounded up the steps from the sunken living room, and approached me at the elevator. I indicated the sleeping doorman, but Erikson paid no attention. "You're still the only link," he told me. "If we get the information in time, we can pull you back from the center of the action, but right now it's on to Bayonne." He stepped aboard the elevator.

  "What happens in Bayonne?" I asked as we descended.

  "If we get a call telling us where we can intercept the shipment, we'll divert the truck and you'll be out of it," Erikson said. He looked at his watch in what was becoming a ritual gesture.

  "And if you don't?"

  "I'm supplying you with a car with a transmitter we can home in on from the comcar. We'll be behind you."

  Out on the sidewalk, McLaren and a man I didn't know were standing, watching the entrance to the building. "Get into the first car with McLaren and me, Wilson," Erikson ordered. "Drake will take yours."

  McLaren handed me an object I recognized as one of the beepers I had seen in the equipment room. "If you have to change cars for any reason, take this with you and attach it to the other car, preferably on the outside. It has a magnetic plate so it will stick to any metal you can reach."

  The second man, Wilson, brought a canvas sack from the first car which he handed to McLaren. "This is your acetylene torch and plastic," McLaren said, handing me the sack. "And here's the map."

  He handed me a detailed drawing of a waterfront area. "Don't forget to detail a man to take Abdel into custody, Jock," Erikson said. He took the map from me and marked Pier Twenty-six with a star. "We'll lead the way to Bayonne, to this point." He placed a finger on the map. "Then we'll drop back behind you."

  "Suppose you lose me?"

  "We can't lose you as long as you have the beeper. If we don't flag you down in the meantime, when you make contact with these people, drag it out as much as you can so we can move in close. Now roll it."

  Not for the first time in my association with him, I realized that Karl Erikson would use his own grandmother to get a necessary job done.

  ***

  I made the gatehouse at Pier Twenty-six with sixteen minutes to spare, according to Bayak's timetable. I sat in the car for another seven minutes before anything happened. Then a glare of headlights swept over me in the driver's seat. A sedan pulled in alongside, so tightly I couldn't have opened the door on my side.

  A man jumped out and approached my car on the passenger's side. He rapped on the window. I leaned across the seat to lower it with my left hand, keeping my right close to my.38. Even in partial shadow, I could make out dark features and an Arab cast of countenance. "You have identification?" the man asked when I had the window down.

  I started to ask what he meant, and then I realized. I opened the canvas sack on the front seat and showed him the acetylene torch. He nodded. "Come with us," he said.

  I brought the bag and the beeper with me. When my interrogator opened the door of the sedan, I handed him the canvas sack. He leaned into the car to put it into the back, and I slapped the miniature homing device under the skirt of the rear fender. The man motioned me into the back seat, and I found myself alongside another swarthy individual who was smoking a cigarette that gave off a bitter, disagreeable odor.

  The man who had approached me got under the wheel, and the sedan left the dock area and rolled along for a dozen blocks through a warehouse district. The air polluter in the back seat with me had nothing to say. Then the car swung into an alley and stopped halfway th
rough it. Another turn and the headlights were beamed upon a corrugated steel door. The driver beeped the horn three times.

  The door clattered upward and we drove inside.

  My heart sank when I saw that the building was a steel warehouse.

  If I knew anything about electronics, the steel would form a shield cutting off the beeper signal as effectively as if I'd dropped it into the East River.

  Erikson could never find me now.

  I was committed to the hijack.

  11

  THE interior of the warehouse looked as large as a football field. Powerful ceiling lights at ten-yard intervals gave plenty of illumination. Except for one corner where a green panel truck was parked alongside high-piled crates, the warehouse was empty.

  A man approached our car. He was short, muscular, swarthy, and bold of eye. In appearance he could have been a younger brother of the deceased Hawk. The man listened with no expression on his hard-bitten features to our driver's rat-a-tat-tat explanation of what I took to be an affirmation of my credentials.

  The muscular man nodded finally, threw away the stub of a cigar he'd been smoking, opened up the canvas sack to see for himself the torch and explosives that were my passport, and at last turned to me. "I'm Hassan," he said. "The others will be here shortly and you can conduct the briefing." His English was perfect.

  I didn't say anything. I had rebounded from the low point I'd experienced upon driving inside the steel warehouse, because common sense dictated that the hijack wouldn't be taking place there. When we left for the hijack location, Erikson would once again be able to pick up the bumper beeper signals, if he trusted his equipment and didn't move too far away during the signal black-out.

  Hassan said something to the man who had been riding in the back seat with me. The man went to the green panel truck, opened the rear doors, and removed a folding card table which he proceeded to set up beneath one of the overhead lights. Hassan lit up a fresh cigar before placing on the card table a sheet of paper. Even at a distance, I recognized it as a facsimile of the street plan of the hijack location I'd seen in Erikson's office, but without the circles and squares indicating the placement of men and vehicles.

  There was a triple-beep outside the warehouse. Hassan went to the entrance and punched a button. The huge door slid upward and another car rolled inside. It was just as well that Erikson hadn't been following too closely, I reflected. The second car had obviously been trailing the one which brought me.

  Two men got out of the second car. Both were dressed in nondescript olive-drab jackets and trousers. Facially they could have been twins of the pair who met me at the gate house. One of the newcomers was carrying an M-16 automatic rifle.

  The five men crowded around the card table. "You have the floor," Hassan said to me.

  "Okay. Where's the map of the actual location?"

  "You don't need that."

  "The hell I don't. How am I going to lay out a getaway if I don't know the location?"

  "We'll take care of the getaway." Both his eyes and voice were chilly. "You take care of getting into the truck."

  "Forget it!" I said angrily. "It may be amateur night for you, but not for me. I'm not going to jail for your mistakes."

  "Nobody is going to jail." Hassan drew lengthily on his fresh cigar and examined me through the wreath of blue smoke he slowly exhaled. "This is a military operation, Drake. We take the objective; then we worry about the getaway."

  I started to say something but he kept right on talking. "Iskir thinks you may have something going for yourself on this. I'll tell you now that it will be your last mistake if you try anything. I argued with Iskir about including you, but he insisted that instead of stopping the truck and shooting it out you could finesse us inside it less noticeably."

  "But we'll still have to have a plan for-"

  "The only plan we need is for stopping the truck. We're wasting time. Either you lay out the job and come with us and direct it, or we leave your body here and do it our way."

  I wasn't going to win any arguments with this fanatic. "Have you seen the actual location?"

  "I've seen it."

  "Is there a traffic light?"

  "Yes."

  "Is there a curve on Road A, the road along which the truck will be approaching, either just before or just after the light?"

  He squinted while endeavoring to remember. "There is a curve perhaps one hundred to one hundred and twenty meters beyond the light."

  "How much is a meter?"

  "Approximately three and a quarter feet."

  I did a little mental arithmetic. "So there's a curve three hundred and fifty to four hundred feet beyond the light. Where's the equipment?"

  He gestured toward the corner of the warehouse. "In the truck."

  "Break it out."

  He snapped his fingers and issued a command. Two men went to the truck and began unloading automatic weapons and sawhorses with yellow-and-black signs saying CONSTRUCTION on them. I used the time to _ transfer to the sheet of paper on the card table the rectangles and circles indicating relative positions of the target truck, the men, and the getaway cars.

  "They speak English?" I asked when everyone was around the table again.

  "Enough to understand," Hassan replied.

  "How do we recognize the truck?"

  "Show him the picture," Hassan said to the driver of the car that had brought me to the warehouse. The man produced a colored snapshot of a big jimmy-diesel with R&M Transportation Company prominently lettered on its front and the side that could be seen in the picture.

  "We'll set up on the curve," I said, positioning sawhorses diagonally on the warehouse floor, simulating a gradual closure of the outer lane of traffic on a highway. "That way when we block traffic from the rear, we can stop it far enough around the curve so drivers can't see what's happening to the truck."

  I pointed to the sawhorses. "We force the traffic to move over to the inner edge of the road," I said. "Everything must go past us in one lane, and slowly."

  One of the men nodded. "You four will be waiting here," I continued, pointing to each of the four men in turn except Hassan, and then placing my finger on the first set of circles I'd drawn on the map. "Two on each side of the road. When the truck appears, one of each pair will swing up onto the jump-seat step on each side of the truck cab and hold a gun on the driver."

  There were several nods. "When the truck stops, it will be the responsibility of the second man on the driver's side of the truck to keep the traffic on the opposite side of the road moving. Don't let anyone stop to see what's going on. Do it by arm signals if possible, but keep that traffic flowing."

  I pointed to the second set of circles I'd drawn on the map. "The positions will then be as follows, except for the second man on the inner edge of the road. He will run back up the road around the curve, carrying a sawhorse and will place it across the single lane of traffic so that cars must stop. Some won't want to stop, but they must not be allowed to continue around the curve."

  I looked at Hassan. "You and I will then have four or five minutes to unbutton the truck and get the package." This man would give the order for my erasure when I was considered expendable. I intended to stay close enough to him to make sure the order was never given. "We can't reasonably expect to freeze traffic any longer than that."

  "It is a competent plan," he admitted grudgingly after studying the map and considering my lined-up sawhorses. "What about getting into the truck?"

  "If it's just an ordinary lock on the back doors, a revolver bullet should do it. If it's anything more complicated, we'll need the torch or the plastic. The torch would take about three minutes, the explosive one minute."

  "Then we are ready to proceed," Hassan announced. "Reload the truck, Ahmed. Then blindfold this one."

  "Now wait a minute-" I began.

  "Blindfold him," Hassan repeated. "He has no need to see until we reach the scene."

  Ahmed supervised the reloading of the
green panel truck, then approached me with a grimy handkerchief which he folded deftly. He placed it over my eyes and knotted it at the back of my head, then took my arm and steered me to the front seat of a car. I was relieved to find it was the car I'd come in, the one with the beeper transmission unit. Hassan settled down beside me at the wheel. I knew it was him because of the odor from his cigar.

  If Erikson hadn't received word from Washington about where to intercept the truck, we were in for a bad time. Even if he made the scene while the hijack was going on with another earful of agents as he promised, we were going to be outmanned and outgunned. I'd seen enough automatic weapons aboard the green panel truck for a small-scale war. And because Bayak's suspicion of me had been passed on to Hassan, that hawk-eyed worthy was sure to attempt to punch my clock permanently the moment the shooting broke out.

  I heard the rumbling sound as the warehouse door lifted again. The car backed up, swung around, and rolled forward. I heard a second car, and then a heavier engine that could only be the panel truck.

  "A diesel truck on the highway isn't like a train on a track which runs on a schedule," I said to Hassan. "If there's a long wait, we're bound to look conspicuous waiting alongside the road."

  "The truck won't be late," Hassan replied. "It checks in periodically on its trip across the country. It cost Iskir a lot of money to acquire the check-in information, but we know the time of the truck's arrival at the intersection, give or take five minutes. The next-to-last check-in was made twenty-five minutes ago."

  "How about recognition?" I asked. "Even forcing the traffic to slow down in a single lane, a diesel rolls up on you fast."

  "That is provided for," Hassan answered. "A man with a field telephone in his car is stationed at the brightly lighted intersection. When the truck appears, the man will call the green panel truck. We will have a minimum of thirty seconds warning, more if the traffic light at the intersection detains the truck. But even thirty seconds will be sufficient."