Dirty Harry 10 - The Blood of Strangers

by Dane Hartman

  DIRTY HARRY—

  BREAKING THE RULES

  AND MAKING HIS OWN!

  Terrorists! Airports and public places are their stage. Civilians are their targets. The spread of chaos is their game. Now Dirty Harry wants to play—for keeps. On battlefields from Frisco to Beirut to El Salvador, in the company of a beautiful T.V. newswoman, he leaves a trail of hot blood and bullets as he searches beyond the Libyan connection for the source of this savagery. Dirty Harry—breaking every law to get the criminals, making his law to fit the crime.

  LIFESAVER!

  Apparently Kayyim had come to the end of his speech for there was a scattering of applause that gradually built in intensity. Kayyim nodded in acknowledgment and had turned away from the podium, about to reclaim his seat.

  Harry kept his eyes on the man in the white sports coat. He was not applauding. One hand had slipped under his coat. Harry leaned forward, hoping for a, better look. But a man just in front of his suspect had abruptly risen from his chair, blocking Harry’s view.

  Then he caught sight of him again. He was fully erect, his arm extended. The sun caught a metal object in his hand and glinted off it. Harry wasted no time. He sprang from his seat and into action!

  Books by Dane Hartman

  Dirty Harry #1: Duel For Cannons

  Dirty Harry #2: Death on the Docks

  Dirty Harry #3: The Long Death

  Dirty Harry #4: The Mexico Kill

  Dirty Harry #5: Family Skeletons

  Dirty Harry #6: City of Blood

  Dirty Harry #7: Massacre at Russian River

  Dirty Harry #8: Hatchet Men

  Dirty Harry #9: The Killing Connection

  Dirty Harry #10: The Blood of Strangers

  Dirty Harry #11: Death in the Air

  Dirty Harry #12: The Dealer of Death

  Published by

  WARNER BOOKS

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1982 by Warner Books, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc., 75 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10019

  A Warner Communications Company

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 0-446-30053-5

  First Printing: December, 1982

  DIRTY HARRY #10

  THE BLOOD

  OF

  STRANGERS

  Opening Round

  He was a small man with nothing to distinguish him, so when he wandered into the international terminal at four-thirty in the morning, no one paid him the least bit of attention. Of course, there weren’t many people around at this sad gray hour: a few custodians, a bored security man with a Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand, and a Venezualan couple who had somehow become stranded and were now waiting for a six-thirty flight to the destination they’d expected to reach the night before.

  The Small Man carried with him a worn gray satchel, which also was not unusual. The gray satchel, however, contained an elegantly constructed bomb with a timing device which would have been considered unusual.

  Within hours, the terminal would be packed, as travellers flooded into it, dragging with them children, pets, and bulky luggage. Certainly by eleven, it was likely that the terminal would be as crowded as it was ever going to get.

  The Small Man had been here before, reconnoitering the area at all times of day and night. He compiled the data he required in order that the operation would have maximum effect. Not only was the exact hour important; where the bomb was to be placed was a matter of equal significance.

  In this case, the most strategic location was also the simplest. The Small Man sat down on a bench and pretended to be resting his feet. Unobtrusively, he slipped the satchel beneath the bench, waited for a few moments longer, then continued on his way.

  He was confident that the satchel would not be disturbed. Having surveyed the terminal in advance, he knew that the cleaning crew had already come and gone and that no one was scheduled to mop or carry out a search for forgotten baggage for several hours.

  He proceeded through the complex of terminal buildings until he reached the lot where his friend, Machito, was waiting in a green Chevy. It was parked, with the motor running, far from the glare of the sodium lights.

  Machito quickly started the vehicle when he saw the Small Man approach. Machito was too nervous and too high strung. No matter that he had conducted similar operations like this in Central America and in Europe, he lacked the stamina for such assignments.

  “How did it go?”

  The Small Man shrugged. “What could be the problem? It is no big thing. I put a bomb under a bench. I walk away. What could go wrong?”

  “Plenty,” muttered Machito, “plenty. I have seen so much in my time.”

  The Small Man wasn’t interested. He had worked with Machito before, and the way life was, he would probably work again with Machito. He had heard all he wanted about him. He knew his history and his nervous condition backwards and forwards.

  The Chevy shot out of the lot with a screech of rubber and a noisy shifting of gears. The Chevy was dependable even so and Machito had a way with it.

  The Small Man remarked that he was going too fast.

  Machito grinned. It was blinding to look at him when his teeth were bared like this; there was more gold in his mouth than in Fort Knox.

  With so little traffic on 101, Machito could not resist accelerating, putting as much distance as possible between them and the airport though the bomb would not go off for many hours yet.

  Machito was talking but the Small Man wasn’t listening. He was tired and kept dozing off, having no interest in Machito’s philosophy of life. Which was why he didn’t realize until it was too late, that there was a squad car in back of them. At first, there was only a flashing red light but when it became apparent that Machito had no intention of pulling over, a siren began to scream as well.

  It was the siren that woke the Small Man and it took him several moments to orient himself.

  The squad car was gaining on them. Looking back, the Small Man saw two cops, one of whom was insistently gesturing them over to the side. Otherwise the road was deserted.

  “Pull over,” commanded the Small Man.

  Machito, who had his foot pressed way down on the gas, regarded the Small Man as though he’d taken leave of his senses. “What do you mean pull over? The car is stolen, man. Once they find out, we are fucked.”

  The Small Man’s face was impassive—and unreadable. “You let me worry about that. Pull over.”

  Machito protested again, but this was the Small Man’s show and he did as he was asked.

  It took some time before he could slow the Chevy enough to stop it.

  The squad car came to a halt directly behind it. Gravel flew up in the air with the intrusion of eight tires.

  They were local cops, the Small Man saw right off. That made sense; they had probably entered the city limits a few miles back.

  One of them got out of the car slowly, as though he had all the time in the world, and walked up to the Chevy. He rapped on the window on the driver’s side.

  Machito threw a sidelong glance at his companion.

  “Open it, man, do as he says.”

  Machito rolled the window down. There was a forlorn expression on his face that reminded the Small Man of a starving dog.

  The cop was all business. “License, please?”

  Machito had a license. An international one.

  The cop scrutinized it with his flashlight. He hadn’t been expecting an international driver’s license and seemed not to know exactly what to make of it. “Registration?”

  Machito was too paralyzed to react or
even to speak. The Small Man then opened the glove compartment and pulled out a registration. He handed it to the cop.

  Naturally, the name on Machito’s license and the name on the registration had nothing to do with each other.

  “Are you David Lisker?”

  The Small Man shook his head. “David’s a friend of ours. We borrowed his car.”

  The cop looked every bit as dubious as the Small Man figured he would.

  “Do you realize you were clocked doing ninety-two miles an hour in a fifty-five mile an hour zone?”

  Machito acted surprised. “I am so sorry, I wasn’t keeping track. I will not let it happen again.”

  Not disposed to believe him, the cop said he would be back momentarily.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I just have to check something out, Mr. Sanchez.”

  Sanchez was the name on the driver’s license. Like the car, it belonged to someone else.

  Machito turned to the Small Man. “What happens now?”

  The Small Man reached over the back to remove a .45 automatic from the jacket lying on the seat.

  “I will be back in a moment,” he said and while Machito watched with horrified fascination, he calmly walked towards the squad car. Its signal light was still flashing, making gaudy patterns on the darkened roadway.

  “Excuse me, officer,” the Small Man said, keeping his weapon out of sight.

  The cop had his window open and his radio on, filling the air with static and the voices of various dispatchers. Undoubtedly, he was waiting for the registration number to be processed by computer. It wouldn’t take long. In a minute or so, he’d learn that the Chevy was stolen.

  “What is it?”

  The Small Man noted that the second cop was too bored or else too tired to pay close attention to what was happening. The Small Man was very good at what he did. He had such an air of serenity about him that apprehension was the last thing a person would feel in his presence.

  “I just wanted to explain something about this registration you have . . .”

  “Oh, and what’s that?”

  He pointed to it, causing the cop to look down. At that moment, in one quick motion, he raised the .45 and without hesitation discharged it.

  There wasn’t much noise because of the silencer. The cop lurched forward in his seat, and then sagged to the right so he fell across his partner. His brains were scattered across the back of the seat. The Small Man gave his partner no opportunity to react and shot him squarely in the face.

  The face seemed to fall away. An eye disintegrated. But the cop was not dead. The Small Man fired a second time, completing the execution.

  Retrieving the license and registration, he abandoned the squad car just as the dispatcher was announcing that the Chevy in question was stolen. The men believed to have taken it were “armed and extremely dangerous.”

  “Announcing Pan American Flight 908, for Honolulu and Tokyo, scheduled to depart at 11:45, now receiving passengers at Gate Twelve. Please have your passports and boarding passes ready for inspection. That’s Pan American Flight 908, for Honolulu and Tokyo, scheduled to depart at . . .”

  Several tourists as well as a scattering of somberly dressed Japanese businessmen began gathering their paraphernalia, their cameras and carry-on luggage, in response to the announcement which had given way to Muzak.

  They only partially accounted for the large number of people assembled in the waiting area for departure to Anchorage, Sydney, Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Peking. Among them were tourist groups who looked to their leaders for guidance as they contemplated vast and exhausting journeys to faraway destinations.

  The digital clocks showed that it was 11:22:40.

  A young married couple had taken a place on a bench located not far from the middle of the terminal. They had been married by a justice of the peace in Phoenix, Arizona three days before and were on a honeymoon trip that would take them first to Hong Kong. They were looking forward to a week of sightseeing and bargain hunting and perhaps even some casino gambling in nearby Macao.

  The woman wasn’t pretty but she was clearly the sort that a man would feel safe in bringing home to his family. “I feel that we’ve been running nonstop since Saturday,” she said, and she did look tired. “It’ll be nice when we can settle into our hotel and not have to move anymore.”

  To take the pressure off her feet, she slipped off her pumps. Swinging her left leg back and forth, her heel hit a bag of some kind underneath the seat.

  Puzzled, she glanced down and saw a gray satchel. “Is that yours, Fred?”

  Fred was preoccupied, admiring the passage of a delectable young thing across the floor. “What was that, dear?”

  “This isn’t yours, is it?”

  She pulled out the satchel so that he could get a better glimpse of it.

  The digital clocks indicated that it was now 11:24:03.

  Fred shook his head. “That old thing, are you kidding?”

  The woman glanced around but there was no one anywhere in the vicinity who looked like they might own it. “Maybe we should take it to the claims department, somebody might have forgotten it.”

  “I don’t know, it’s probably better to leave it where it is.”

  At that instant there was a chime, then a woman’s mellifluous voice: “Announcing TWA Flight 760 to Hong Kong via Honolulu, Taipei and Manila, now receiving passengers at Gate Eight. Please have your boarding passes and passports ready. TWA Flight 760 . . .”

  “That’s us, honey,” Fred said, stooping down to gather up his checkered Vuitton case.

  “Thank God, at last,” his wife sighed, although in fact, the flight was right on time. It was exactly 11:25:30.

  “Have you got everything?”

  Fred was impatient, being the sort who believes that a delay of a minute is disastrous.

  “I think so.”

  The woman worried her feet back into her pink pumps.

  “Got the health certificates?”

  “Yes, they’re right here.” She didn’t like him checking up on every little thing. What kind of marriage was this going to be? she wondered. She held them up for him to see. He nodded, apparently satisfied. It was now 11:26:00.

  Which was when the ingenious device in the satchel, triggered by a simple alarm clock, was set to go off.

  The first thing it did as it detonated was to rip through the vinyl bench, sending bits and pieces flying to all ends of the terminal. The second thing it did was to blow apart the newly married couple and their luggage, sending bits and pieces of them flying to all ends of the terminal. And that was only the beginning . . .

  C H A P T E R

  O n e

  The smoke was slow to clear from the interior of the terminal even though firemen had spent close to two hours extinguishing the blaze. Yet already the extent of the damage was becoming obvious to the various investigators who’d hastened to the scene of the blast.

  Half the ceiling had come crashing down and a jagged gaping hole left in its place revealed an incongruously blue sky. The vinyl benches blown apart were now globular heaps, pulverized into such weird shapes that they resembled the sort of sculpture one would expect to find in the Museum of Art on McAllister Street. Of the row of airline counters, nothing was left intact; their metal was twisted and torn apart, and the signs that had proclaimed their identities dangled mockingly over the rubble. In the middle of the floor was a vast crater that looked like it might, at any moment, swallow up whatever was left whole in the wreckage.

  But the physical damage was minor compared with the destruction of human life for those who were unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity of the bomb when it exploded. The total number of casualties was not yet known; this was because several of the bodies had been so dismembered that barring a forensic analysis, no one was able to say just how many dead there were. Even hours after the explosion, investigators were still finding severed arms, legs, and feet—and in one instance, the
head of a middle-aged man whose neck had been cauterized by the intensity of the heat—that had landed far from where their owners had been standing.

  About the floors and the walls, were large swaths of dried blood that were easily distinguished against the charred backdrop.

  It was difficult to linger for long inside the bombed-out terminal. Not only was there a problem with the smoke but there was also the noxiously sweet odor of death, the mixture of blood and cooked flesh.

  Sirens continued to scream in the distance. From elsewhere in the airport, which had been completely evacuated, dogs could be heard barking. No further chances were being taken. Several officers from the bomb squad were searching the complex for additional devices. Though no one had ever understood what it was about explosives that aroused a dog’s olfactory nerves no one questioned the ability of such a trained animal to ferret them out. In this case however, they were just a little too late.

  There was no mistaking Timothy McFadden Connelly. He had all the outward markings of an FBI agent. Possibly, there was an FBI boutique somewhere that outfitted each agent with the same brand trenchcoats, shades, shoes, and wristwatches. In all likelihood, it was located next door to the barber shop where they all received the same haircuts. He was a strapping man who carried himself so erectly that it strained the back just to look at him.

  More by virtue of his posture than his height, he seemed to tower over Lieutenant Bressler. Bressler had an unhappy look on his face. And why shouldn’t he? He didn’t want any part of this mess. Only last night, he’d been awakened by a call that two of his men had been slain on the shoulder of Route 101 by unknown assailants who were presumed to have stolen a ’73 green Chevrolet. The car had been found abandoned. Where the assailants had gone was anyone’s guess.

  But the loss of two cops, while grievous, paled by comparison to this catastrophe. It was certainly one of the worst in the city’s history. The total so far: ten dead, thirty-six injured, eight seriously. And it was entirely conceivable the toll would double before the day was over.