Flashpoint

by Dan J. Marlowe

  I'd made a mistake in thinking of these men as amateurs. With the fire power they possessed, a pocket battleship wouldn't have been too much of a problem for them, let alone an unarmored truck. They really didn't need me to get into it for them, either, now that I thought about it. I wondered if the shrewd Bayak's real reason for including me had been simply to supply a dead criminal body to divert the police after the hijack.

  Our car stopped. I thought it was for a traffic light, but then I heard Hassan open the door on his side. "We're here," he stated. There was no emotion in his voice.

  "Already?" I responded, startled. Everything had been on paper to this point. Now for the first time I had the feeling we were really going into action.

  The door on my side opened, and someone leaned in. "Remove the blindfold," Hassan's voice ordered. It was ripped ungently from my eyes. When my vision adjusted, I saw a four-lane highway divided by a median. The night air felt damp. Running figures were unloading sawhorses from the panel truck across the road and setting them up on the highway on our side of the road in the pattern I'd indicated at the warehouse. Other figures were carrying weapons from the panel truck. A man handed a Sten gun to Hassan. I reached across my chest and touched the butt of my holstered Smith & Wesson to reassure myself somewhat.

  Across the median the lights of the parked panel truck flipped on and off three times. "Get out," Hassan said. He still had his half-smoked cigar between his teeth. "It's coming."

  I picked up the sack containing the torch and the plastic which had been in the seat between us, then stepped out onto the shoulder of the road. A car passed us, and then another, slowly, herded over to the edge of the road by the sawhorses. Another set of headlights, wider spaced, appeared on the upper perimeter of the curve. Hassan grunted and walked rapidly toward them.

  A man ran out and placed a sawhorse across the single lane of traffic, sealing it off. There was an immediate shriek of hastily applied brakes as the truck loomed up alongside us. A khaki-clad figure bounded up onto the jump step as the truck came to a stop. The butt of his automatic rifle smashed through the cab window, and the man reversed his gun and leaned inside the cab. The plan called for another man to be holding a gun on the driver from the jump step on the other side, and I was sure that he was there although I couldn't see him.

  Hassan strode to the rear of the truck. Both his hands were free as the sten gun was suspended from a shoulder sling. I followed right behind him. From now on I was determined that the stocky Hassan would never get behind me. Just one more straw in the wind as to my future with this group was the fact that Hassan had made no offer of the locker key to where my money presumably awaited me upon the completion of the hijack.

  Hassan reached the rear of the truck while the sounds of tinkling glass from the truck's smashed cab windows still echoed in the night air. Across the road a man with a red lantern was busily waving-through traffic going in the opposite direction.

  I had expected to be the one to force the door lock, and I would have taken as long as I dared to give Erikson more time to catch up to us by tracing the beeper transmission signal. Instead, Hassan unslung the sten gun and fired a long burst into the lock. It was wasteful but effective. The lock shattered, and we stood there for an instant while spent shells pattered to the roadway like falling rain.

  Hassan flung open the doors and scrambled up into the truck. I turned and looked up the road. No headlights were advancing toward us. Around the curve the road had been sealed off according to the plan. I climbed up into the back of the truck and immediately drew my.38. Whatever was going to happen now was going to happen fast.

  Hassan was prowling the truck's interior with a three-cell flashlight in his left hand. His right hand cradled the barrel of the sten gun still slung on his shoulder. According to the division of responsibilities outlined by the Turk, Hassan shouldn't have known what he was looking for, but he obviously did. Another indication that I was to be left on the scene as a very dead red herring.

  Hassan's flashlight beam moved on past a stack of crates and lingered on a gray package, its shape almost like a miniature coffin. I couldn't see the AEC #3M45D, Hanford, Washington identifying marking, but I didn't need to see it. Hassan's pleased exclamation was identification enough. He started to bend down to pick it up, and then the night outside the truck was pierced by a rattle of machine-gun fire, followed at once by another burst, much closer.

  Hassan froze in his semi-crouched position. His flashlight went out, but not before I saw the barrel of the sten gun start to swing in my direction. I fired the Smith & Wesson three times. The range was six feet. By the gun's flash I saw Hassan's cigar fall to the truck floor from his slack mouth an instant before his body fell. There wasn't much left of his head.

  The machine-gun exchange continued noisily outside. Erikson had arrived, and apparently in force. Right now I was intent upon survival. This was a dedicated group, and I was sure that someone else would be after the AEC package when Hassan didn't appear.

  I dragged his body to the rear doors and flattened myself on the truck floor behind it. A voice snapped an impatient question in a foreign language. I waited,.38 at the ready. A man started to scramble up into the truck. He paused when confronted by the barrier of Hassan's body, then went backward over the tail gate when I put a bullet into his chest.

  A machine gun went off so close to me I could almost feel the heat. Hassan's body jumped and quivered as the slugs ripped into it. Then a waist-high spray of bullets hosed down the truck's interior. I stretched out my arm as I tried to line up on the unseen machine gunner.

  The machine gun suddenly became silent. It took me only a second to see why. Through the open truck doors I saw a brilliant pair of headlights rounding the curve as a big car rocketed down the closed-off, outside lane, bouncing sawhorses to one side or grinding them beneath the wheels. The limousine-type car slid to a halt to the rear of the truck. Two men rushed out; one raised his arm, and lobbed a pineapple-shaped object toward the truck. It landed short, in the roadway, and rolled beneath the truck, out of my line of vision.

  I knew what it was, but I couldn't do anything about it.

  There was a brilliant flare of light as the grenade went off, and a giant hand slammed the truck body upward into my stomach.

  My ears rang and my sight dimmed.

  I could feel the truck disintegrating around me.

  Then blackness descended.

  ***

  I came to with hands patting my body. "He's breathing, and I can't find any wounds," I heard Erikson's voice. "It might be just concussion. How's your leg, Jock?"

  "The bullet must have hit a nerve," McLaren's voice answered. "I can't feel anything below the knee."

  "I'm afraid Bill and Eddie are in worse shape," Erikson said soberly. I rolled over and sat up. "Well, back in the land of the living."

  My throat was dry and there was something the matter with my ears. "Glad to see the U.S. Cavalry made it on time," I croaked.

  "On time, hell," McLaren snorted. He was sitting with one leg stretched out straight in front of him. Erikson had moved to him and was probing at the leg. "Bayak was in that limousine," McLaren continued, wincing. "And whoever was with him recovered the AEC package while you were knocked out. The only break we got was that the grenade explosion blew the truck's gas tank right into the limousine and set it afire."

  I looked outside. I was surprised to find that the twisted truck body was level with the roadway. Up the road I could see the big car burning fiercely.

  "We nailed the man who threw the grenade," Erikson added, "but not before he got the AEC package to Bayak. And Bayak just got away in the car that brought you here. Can you walk?"

  I struggled to my feet and tried it. "Sure."

  "Then let's go. Jock, hold the lid on things here."

  I looked around for my.38 and found it. Erikson took my arm and hustled me to a car parked in front of the truck. Across the road the green panel truck was also burning. Cars
were backed up behind the burning truck, not moving. There was no traffic on our side of the road, either. It would have taken a stupid motorist indeed to encroach on the war zone. A body in olive-drab was crumpled across the median. Another lay in the middle of the road with a submachine gun still grasped in its stilled hands.

  Erikson slid under the wheel, started the engine, and slammed the car down the highway. Beside him, I still felt partly numb and I was having difficulty swallowing. "That car that Bayak's in still has the bumper beeper on it," I reminded Erikson.

  He grunted acknowledgment, took one hand from the steering wheel, and fiddled with a switch on the dashboard. A faint beeping tone sounded. "There he is," Erikson said. "But damn near the outer limit of pickup range." He sounded worried. "If we were in our communications car, I could call ahead and arrange a roadblock, but the comcar was shot to pieces by those bastards. And if we stop to call we'll lose Bayak."

  Under the impetus of Erikson's heavy-footed driving the car was doing eighty. The continuous beeping tone became louder. "We're gaining," Erikson said hopefully. "He'll be driving like a law-abiding citizen in order not to attract attention to himself. But with the start he has-"

  "There's only one place he can be headed," I said. "Kennedy International Airport."

  "The direction is right," Erikson said after glancing at a dashboard compass. "But we can't be sure."

  "The hell we can't. We know his next stop is Damascus. You got any.38 ammunition in this ark?"

  "Try the glove compartment."

  I found a box of.45 bullets and a box of.38's. I reloaded the Smith & Wesson, ignoring the swaying motion of the car as Erikson really pushed it. The speedometer needle flickered near ninety, and the beeping tone increased steadily in volume. "He can't be more than a mile ahead of us now," Erikson said. We had picked up some traffic, and he wheeled the car in, around, and through it with no thought for the brake.

  "I saw the AEC package," I said. I made a shape in the air with my hands. "It looks like a gray miniature casket, about this big."

  "That gets priority," Erikson stated. "Above everything." He hit the horn in a long blast, and cars ahead of us swerved out of the way. I caught a glimpse of drivers' startled faces as we whizzed past them. "If we catch him, Bayak can claim diplomatic immunity, but at least we'll recover the package from him." The beeping sound suddenly filled the car's interior, assaulting the ears almost painfully. "He must be held up at the toll bridge, by God! We're going to get him yet!"

  Erikson rolled down the car window on his side and removed a gold badge from an inner pocket. In three minutes we rolled up on the lights-ablaze toll station with the car's horn blaring steadily. Automobiles scuttled to one side. Erikson picked an empty lane, slowed to sixty, and threw his badge into the collection box as we burst on through. "That'll bring reinforcements," he said when he straightened the car out again after almost driving off the road where it narrowed beyond the toll station.

  The volume of the beeping tone had leveled off. "He's pushing it, too," Erikson said gloomily. "And we're getting close. I'll have to call the tower and stop all outgoing flights while we look for Bayak in the terminal. The hell of it is that he'll have a chance to make some other disposition of the AEC package the second he suspects anything is wrong."

  "Why didn't the package go up when the grenade went off?" I asked.

  "It takes heat," Erikson explained. "Tremendous heat at close range. A simple explosion won't do it:"

  "Lucky me," I said.

  I could see dawn breaking in the eastern sky. A gray world was emerging from the blackness. We were on a six-lane highway, but I didn't know where. The majority of the traffic lights were still on early-morning blinking-yellow patterns. Those that were on red Erikson ran as if they were green. Each time I tensed in the front seat beside him, expecting the crash that somehow didn't come.

  A huge gray mass drifted past on our right. We were past it when it occurred to me that it must be Shea Stadium. We were almost at Kennedy, and there was still no sign of Bayak although the volume of the beeper pings had again increased substantially.

  "How many with Bayak?" I raised my voice above the electronic sound.

  "He's alone," Erikson replied, swerving around a cab and cutting it off sharply. I turned my head in time to see the driver roll down his window and yell something after us. "He can't be more than a couple of hundred yards ahead of us from the sound of that thing, but we're running out of time."

  He edged over to the right lane as a sign said KENNEDY INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT with a pointing arrow. We were still doing seventy when we hit the turnoff. We passed another car that I looked over closely, but it was the wrong type and color. Our tires squealed wildly as Erikson alternately hit the gas and the brakes on the curves.

  A dark-colored sedan appeared ahead of us as the passenger car and taxicab access road widened to a broad area in front of the loading and unloading platform. "There he is!" I exclaimed as I saw the bulbous outline of Bayak's head. A slow-moving bus threatened to separate us from the sedan, but Erikson hit the horn, bullied his way with inches to spare between bus and sedan, and curbed the sedan a hundred yards short of the terminal entrance amidst a shrieking wail of blended fenders.

  I stared across four feet of space into the pasty, strained features of Iskir Bayak. The doors on my side of the car and Bayak's side were jammed together. The fat man clawed his way across the front seat of his car to the other door which he opened. Beside me Erikson bounded out of our car. The Turk straightened up on the sidewalk as Erikson started around the car after him. When he saw Erikson so close, Bayak, with a roundhouse swing of his arms like a two-handed discus throw, sailed a gray miniature casket-shaped object out into the thickening crush of cars and cabs where it bounced, rolled, and slid.

  "Get the package!" Erikson yelled as I slid across the seat to get out on the driver's side. "Get the package!"

  I hit the macadam, gun in hand. Erikson was already halfway to the casket-shaped object, dodging traffic. I started after Bayak who was waddling rapidly toward the entrance, his obesity in jellylike motion in his haste. The Turk turned at the sound of my running footsteps, and he had a small derringer in his right hand. I shot him in the wrist, and he howled as the gun clattered to the sidewalk.

  "Money-in car!" he panted, wringing his bleeding wrist as I confronted him. "All-yours!"

  I shot him in the throat twice.

  He went over backward and literally bounced when he landed. His eyes were more froglike than ever in their bulging as his groping hands tried frantically to shut off the blood spurting from his torn-out throat. Never again would Iskir Bayak condone the knife-torture of a girl. No doctor could put this Humpty Dumpty together again, but he'd linger long enough in the going not to enjoy the passage.

  Erikson thundered up alongside me, the casket under one arm. "Goddamnit, Earl, I wanted him alive!" he rasped at me. "Talk about an international incident!"

  "You said it yourself," I told him. "Once inside the terminal and claiming diplomatic immunity, he'd have walked aboard his plane thumbing his nose at us."

  "Get out of here!" Erikson ordered. "Get lost, fast! Meet me at my office in two hours. Beat it before the terminal police arrive."

  I took a final look at Iskir Bayak writhing at my feet, dropped the.38 into my jacket pocket, and walked the fifty yards to the cab stand just beyond the terminal entrance. A group of bus drivers and cabbies were standing beside their vehicles looking along the sidewalk toward Erikson and the recumbent Bayak. I opened the door of the first cab in line and got into the back seat.

  The driver leaned down to look in at me through the open window. "What's with the guy on the ground, Jack?" he asked.

  "Stepped off the sidewalk into a car," I said.

  "Oh. We thought we heard shots but it must've been backfires." He walked around the cab and got under the wheel. "Where to?"

  I gave him the number of the Turk's apartment building.

  I had a li
ttle unfinished business in Bayak's penthouse.

  Sunlight was bathing the tops of the skyscrapers when we reached midtown Manhattan. We passed Talia's apartment building two blocks from the Turk's. I wondered how she was making out at the clinic. Even in the short run her prognosis was probably no better than Bayak's.

  I handed the cabbie a five-dollar bill in front of the Turk's apartment building and walked into the ornate lobby. At first I thought it was empty as I headed for the penthouse elevator on whose bronze doors I could see two bright-red wax seals with trailing ribbons. "Hey!" a voice said from behind me. "You can't go up there! The government closed it up!"

  I turned to see the same uniformed doorman. When he recognized me, his eyes rolled upward in a "here we go again" routine. I took out my.38 and with its butt smashed the wax of the seals. "Get aboard," I told the doorman. As before, I couldn't leave him behind to sound an alarm.

  We rode up in the elevator. He had nothing to say but I could hear him breathing. "Sit," I told him in the black-and-white foyer, pointing to a chair after I removed the elevator's fuse from the box. He sat, and I descended the stairs to the sunken living room and entered the liquor storage closet.

  It took me five minutes to sort and stack the loose bills I'd pulled through the hole in the side of the safe with the medical forceps and stuffed behind the wine rack. There was nothing smaller than fifties in the collection, and the total came to a tidy $193,000 including Hazel's $75,000.

  I left the closet and ransacked the Turk's mahogany desk. I found a book of address labels and a roll of stamps which I appropriated. In the butler's pantry I scrounged heavy wrapping paper, twine, and cardboard stiffener. Back in the closet, I fashioned a snugly wrapped package of the money after setting aside one thousand dollars in fifty-dollar bills. I tied the package securely, using double knots and affixed an address label after making it out to Mrs. Hazel Andrews, Rancho Dolorosa, Ely, Nevada. Last of all I stuck two dollars worth of stamps to the package.