The Espionage Game

by Susan Glinert Stevens

  “Jerry?” Madeline called from the bedroom, “can you help me close my suitcase?”

  “Where did you ever find that?” he exclaimed when he saw the monstrous suitcase, which lay half-closed on the bed. Madeline was struggling to close it.

  “We’re only going to Las Vegas for three days, Honey,” Jerry groaned when he saw how overfilled the suitcase was. “We don’t need everything you own.”

  Madeline glared at him. “It isn’t everything I own,” she retorted frostily. “Besides, you want me to look nice, don’t you?”

  Jerry knew better than to argue. He’d long ago learned not to argue with women about looking nice and in what position the toilet seat should be left at night.

  “Okay.” He walked over to the bed and leaned on the suitcase, forcing it shut. “If this is what you want to take, it’s fine by me. Please get the snaps.”

  Jerry grunted when he tried to lift it. “How the hell are we going to carry this thing?” he complained.

  Madeline laughed. “Men!” she exclaimed contemptuously. “All you can think in is in terms of brute force.”

  Jerry peered quizzically at Madeline; her smile deepened. She was obviously enjoying his confusion.

  “You don’t have to carry it, Sweetheart.” She put her arms around him and gave him a little kiss. “You can use the handle and tow it around on the little wheels built into the bottom.”

  Jerry glanced down at the suitcase and noticed the handle neatly folded into the side. “I guess that’s why I love you—for your brains.” He patted her gently on the fanny and chided, “Now let’s get a move on. We’ve got to shake a leg if we’re going to catch the early evening shuttle flight to Nellis. You said that we have tickets for the nine o’clock show.”

  “Thanks for the ride,” Jerry shouted to the airman who drove them from the Nellis flight line to the parking lot where Jerry had left his car. He and Madeline both waved to the car as it headed back to the flight line.

  “Now all we have to do is get this bag of yours into my car, and we can head down to the Hilton and the bridal suite,” he muttered while he opened the hatchback of his well-used Nissan sport coupe. Madeline gazed at her suitcase silently and then the available space in the car. Privately wishing that she’d chosen a slightly less extensive wardrobe, she smiled hopefully at Jerry.

  “Give me a hand.” Jerry eyed the suitcase and decided that there was a way to get it into the car. “If we swing it sideways,” he suggested as they struggled to lift it, “it just might fit.”

  Across from the parking lot was a small park with several palm trees and a park bench, upon which sat a swarthy middle-aged man. He watched the couple grapple with their luggage while they loaded it into the back of the car he’d been ordered to keep an eye on. Silently, he got up, folded his newspaper and shuffled off toward the building in which he worked as a night janitor. He stopped to make a brief call on one of the pay telephones outside the doors of the cafeteria.

  Jerry glanced up at the mirror yet again.

  “What’s the matter?” Madeline inquired, her concern over his repeated actions mounting.

  “I think we’re being followed.”

  “What?” she exclaimed, peering at the speedometer. “You weren’t speeding, were you?”

  “No,” he replied. “Besides, I don’t think it’s a cop.”

  “Maybe it’s just somebody going the same way we’re going,” she suggested. She glanced over her shoulder and out the back window. A pair of headlamps was just fifty yards behind.

  “I noticed the car pulling onto the road just after we left the gate at Nellis,” Jerry told her as he sped up a little. “He seems to want to stay just about fifty yards behind. There, he just accelerated to keep pace.”

  “You’re not playing a game with me, are you?” Madeline asked suspiciously. A truck going the opposite direction illuminated Jerry’s face. She saw the worried expression on his face. It was no game.

  “We’re almost to Las Vegas Boulevard,” he said. “Let’s go north and see if they follow.”

  Jerry turned right and saw the other car follow. It was a black Pontiac Trans Am, more than a match for his Nissan.

  “They’re following!” Jerry exclaimed. He floored the accelerator.

  “¡Carajo!Prick!” Manuel swore when the little Japanese sports car accelerated. “They saw us!”

  “¡Brava cagalera!What a shitty mess!” Raul replied as Manuel accelerated to catch the fleeing sports car. “We were supposed to follow them to their hotel and grab them there, not chase them like foxes and hounds.”

  “He must have spotted us!” Manuel shouted back as the speedometer shot past a hundred. “We can catch them on this road—it’s almost empty. We can kill the man and take just the woman.”

  Raul found the idea of murdering an unarmed man distasteful. Yet, they had their orders. He reached under his seat and pulled out the Browning Hi-Power pistol he had tucked under it. First, he checked that the pistol was loaded, then he cocked it. Finally, he rolled down the window on his side of the car. Operation Morning Glory was not coming up smelling like roses. In fact, it was developing a decidedly foul odor.

  Jerry watched the headlights grow in the rearview mirror. The Trans Am was easily catching them, although the Nissan was running flat out at a hundred and twenty. Gradually, the lights grew bigger.

  “Maddy, if you don’t have your seat belt on, you’d best put it on now,” he warned. He felt for his own belt and then pulled it tight.

  “Are they after us?” Madeline pleaded in dismay. “What did we do?”

  “Not us,” Jerry answered. “I’m just a fighter jock. My guess is that they’re after you. You invented Cleo, not me.”

  “Oh, god,” she gasped and put one hand over her mouth.

  “Duck down, Maddy,” he ordered, glancing into the rearview mirror, “as low as you can.”

  Manuel’s tongue snaked out and wetted his lips while he concentrated on catching the sports car. “Get ready,” he shouted as he prepared to pass Jerry’s car. “Shoot for the engine. We want to stop them, not kill the woman.”

  Raul knew that a couple of bullets in the engine were more likely to stop the Nissan safely than shooting the man driving it. Since they only had room for the woman, he’d shoot the man after they had stopped him.

  The Trans Am swung out into the other lane and began to pass the sports car.

  “Just a moment, just a moment,” Raul cautioned while they pulled up alongside. The American man was staring at him.

  Jerry saw the cannon. It wasn’t aimed at him, he realized. He jammed the brakes on. The Trans Am shot by and he immediately ducked into the left-hand lane to get out of the gunman’s line of fire. There was a flash, and then another. He didn’t hear any shots.

  “¡Chinga tu madre!Fuck your mother!” Manuel swore as they suddenly roared past the Americans’ car. Raul fired, but the Americans were now well behind them. Manuel braked frantically. “Be careful of the woman,carajo!” He growled at Raul. “She’s no good to us dead!”

  Jerry braked hard. Madeline screamed when he spun the wheel and floored the accelerator, causing the rear tires to break free of the road. Jerry allowed the Nissan to spin like a top for a half turn, executing a nearly perfect bootlegger’s turn in the middle of the road. Now heading in the opposite direction, he snapped his foot off the accelerator, popped in the clutch and downshifted to second. A loud chirping sound told him the rear tires had reestablished traction with the road. He accelerated, burning rubber off the overworked rear tires.

  “YAHOO!” he screamed. “I wasn’t sure I remembered how to do that!”

  “What?” Madeline yelled over the din of the noise. Her face had a distinctly whitish appearance.

  “The bootlegger turn. We used to do it all the time when I was a kid,” he shouted happily. “We used to do it to get away from the cops.”

  Madeline stared at him in disbelief.

  “¡Me cago en la leche de tu puta madre!
I crap in the milk of your whore mother!” Manuel swore, fighting to get the big Trans Am turned around. Untutored in the more aggressive styles of driving an automobile, Manuel was forced to come to a near stop and then make a more conventional turn. That took time. By the time he completed his turn, the taillights of the Nissan were nearly dots. Undaunted, he accelerated hard, leaving two black stripes on the road.

  “Oh, shit! Here they come again,” Jerry swore when he saw the headlight swivel around and then follow.

  “Oh-my-god!” Madeline trembled.

  “They’re not going to be suckered into that trick again,” Jerry said. “On the other hand, they’ll catch us well before we get back to town.”

  “What are we going to do?” Madeline begged, her voice quavering with fear.

  “Go on the offensive,” Jerry replied. He braked hard again and reached down to turn off the headlights.

  “¡Mierda!Shit!” Manuel swore when he saw the taillights of the Japanese sports car flash a brilliant red and then disappear. “What the hell is he doing?”

  Jerry Rodell accelerated with all of his lights off down the center of the road toward other car.

  “Jerry,” Madeline cried in panic. “What are you doing?” She could see his face clearly in the light from the onrushing Trans Am; she barely recognized him. The gentle and sensitive lover she knew so well was gone. His face had changed; he had changed. His face was covered with a hard, cruel scowl. Her gentle lover had become the savage warrior. He planned to kill brutally, without pity, without mercy.

  “Playing a very deadly game,” he replied slowly while he concentrated on the approaching Trans Am. “When I was a kid, we called it chicken.”

  “But we can get killed!”

  “I know,” he replied softly. He reached down to a set of switches by his knee. He let his fingertips rest on them.

  “¡Joder!Fuck!” Manuel swore, straining to see in the dark. “Where did he go?”

  He saw a glimmer of moonlight glinting off a dark shiny surface. It was about three hundred meters away and moving rapidly toward him.

  Jerry judged the distance to be two hundred yards. He waited. At a hundred yards, his fingers snapped up. The four high-intensity driving lamps he’d installed on the front bumper for high-speed night driving flashed on, illuminating the Trans Am with over a million candlepower of light.

  Madeline screamed.

  Manuel was too startled by the blinding light to do anything but react instinctively. He heard Raul yell as he frantically spun the wheel to avoid the onrushing blaze of light headed straight toward them. Moving at well over a hundred miles an hour, the Trans Am swerved, left the road and hit a boulder. It flipped up into the air like a toy car and landed on its roof; gasoline gushing from a smashed fuel line and onto the red-hot exhaust manifold. An instant later, the gas ignited, converting the car into a flaming torch as it rolled and skidded across the desert.

  Jerry instinctively ducked as the large Trans Am raced by them and into the desert. Although he braked as hard as possible, he was nearly a half-mile down the road before he had his car stopped. He turned to look for their assailants. The flaming pyre told him where they were. Madeline was sobbing hysterically. He reached over to comfort her.

  “It’s all over, Maddy,” he said gently. “It’s all over. It’s okay. Everything is just fine.”

  He paused to hold her when he heard a muffled explosion. The other car’s gas tank had burst into a ball of flame.

  “Let’s get back where we belong, Maddy,” he suggested quietly. He turned again to watch the fire. “I don’t think I can take much more of this civilization.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Major-General Randall Teuschler was an ordinary appearing man of average height with closely cropped gray hair. Yet he was exceptional in nearly every way; he was the proverbial exception that proves the rule, and in his case, virtually every rule.

  Foremost among his many distinctions was that he was the highest- ranking Air Force commanding officer who wasn’t a pilot—not that he had planned it that way. Teuschler became nearsighted while still a cadet at the Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs and so could not pass the pilots’ medical exam. Blocked from the traditional career path, he instead became the most highly educated general in the United States Air Force, holding a Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering. Instead of moving from one two- to four-year assignment to another, as did other officers, he spent virtually his entire career at just one base, Groom Lake, a base that doesn’t even officially exist. In time, he became the base commander, a post he held for several years.

  Affectionately known as King Randall by those he ruled for his sometimes autocratic but always paternalistic demeanor, Randall Teuschler developed from a superior engineer into a superb manager and creative administrator, overseeing the often temperamental munchkins and range rats with a strong sense of humor and occasional doses of stern discipline. He knew how to get the best out of his people, and he saw to it that they knew that they were appreciated.

  Randall Teuschler was successful because he genuinely cared for his people and wasn’t afraid to show it. He knew and called almost everyone by their first name. When tragedy struck, as it inevitably did, he also personally visited the families. Moreover, when somebody tried to hurt or injure one of his people, he took a personal interest. Thus it was no surprise that he was in his office very late Friday night, personally investigating the apparent kidnap attempt that occurred just hours earlier.

  General Teuschler looked up from his notes lying on his conference table and faced Madeline. “Do you have anything else to add to Jerry’s comments about last night, Madeline?” His voice was quiet and reassuring.

  She shook her head. “No,” she said slowly, “it all happened so fast.”

  “Did you see the two gunshots?” he inquired politely.

  Madeline wiped the tip of her nose with a hanky. “Yes,” she answered. “I clearly remember two flashes. I believe one of the bullets hit the left front fender.”

  Randall Teuschler glanced toward Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Elliot, his base security officer. “Can you confirm that, Dan?”

  “Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Colonel Elliot replied. “The security police at Nellis found a bullet hole in Colonel Rodell’s car just after he and Dr. MacCauley returned. They also say that the Nevada State Police found a pistol in the burned-out wreck. I have no reason to doubt Colonel Rodell’s assertion that shots were fired.”

  General Teuschler exhaled noisily and faced back toward where Jerry Rodell was sitting on the other side of the table.

  “Jerry,” he began and then hesitated for a second, “you certainly took a risk with Madeline’s life tonight when you pulled that harebrained suicide charge. You might have gotten both of yourselves killed.”

  Jerry appeared uncomfortable, uncertain how to reply to an allegation that was so obviously correct. “Yes, sir,” he acknowledged at last, “I guess I decided that it was a risk I had to take.”

  General Teuschler eyed Jerry Rodell. “Why?” he questioned.

  “I think that they were only after Madeline, sir,” he explained. “I doubt that they would have kept me.”

  “Why do you say that?” the general probed.

  “I think that they were trying to kidnap Madeline because of her knowledge of the CLEO computer system. She probably knows more about it than any other three people alive.”

  General Randall Teuschler nodded but decided against telling either Jerry Rodell or Madeline MacCauley that he already knew that the Russians were indeed after the CLEO computer and might very well have been behind the kidnapping attempt. He couldn’t tell them because they simply did not have the need to know.

  “I’m taking your suggestion seriously, Colonel,” General Teuschler responded. “I’m confining you to base and placing you under armed guard until we get to the bottom of this.”

  He faced toward Madeline. “Dr. MacCauley,” he said formally, “I have no right to restrict you to
base, since you are a civilian employee. However, do you mind placing yourself under the same restrictions I’ve placed Jerry?”

  “No, sir,” she replied with a faint nod of her head.

  “Excuse me, sir,” Lieutenant Colonel Elliot interrupted.

  “Yes,” Teuschler grumbled with a hint of exasperation.

  “The Nevada State Police want to question both Colonel Rodell and Dr. MacCauley. In fact, they’re quite anxious.”

  “I’m not going to expose my people to any unreasonable risks,” General Teuschler snapped. “Tell them that they’ll have to wait until Monday. Perhaps we can arrange for them to talk to Jerry and Madeline at Nellis,” Teuschler added in a softer tone. “And if it happens, it will be only under your auspices. What that means is that they’re to remain under armed guard, and under no circumstances is either to leave Nellis except to return here. Do I make myself clear?”

  General Randall Teuschler paused and then added, “Starting right now, I want an armed guard of six men for the Jerry and Madeline, and I also want the base’s guard doubled—starting tonight and until further notice. And what that means is I want every one of the electronic intrusion alarms investigated. I don’t care if somebody is certain that an alarm is just two amorous jackrabbits going at it in the brush. If an alarm goes off, I want to see a photograph the next morning of those rabbits, and both of them better have contented smiles on their faces.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Elliot made a note on his legal pad; King Randall had spoken.