The Spy Who Spoke Porpoise

by Philip Wylie

  There were surely eyes on the sea bottom, or their electronic counterparts, that had kept track of this porpoise training business. Fortunately it was an event those “eyes” or others like them had certainly watched closely in the past.

  Porpoises were bright; but they could not tell about evidence of human installations at the open end of a lava tube—even if such evidence were there. It would more likely begin far inside the tunnel where only a very inquisitive and daring diver would come upon it—to his fatal misfortune. He was about to take up Sapphire’s offer when sheer accident provided confirmation he scarcely needed.

  Face glued to her scope, she called, “Here comes Mahalo! He’s got something!” In a moment she laughed. “Playing games with me! He saw me and he’s moving to your side, for a joke.”

  “Right. Shall I take whatever he has?”

  “Sure. He’d tease me with it, otherwise.”

  Mahalo’s beaked head broke water, wobbling as the porpoise briefly played keep-away with Grove and then surrendered his trophy—a black rubber glove. “Got it!” Grove grinned. “Diver’s glove.” And he swiftly added, as Sapphire turned for a look, “Can I keep it? Souvenir?”

  “Of course.” Grove shook the glove and concealed it. Her attention was again on Mahalo and the hydrophone signaling device that sent the big, smart animal down for another grab.

  Grove had acted quickly, though with no sign of excitement. The glove bore a stenciled symbol—for its owner, beyond doubt.

  At first glance he had thought the marking was in Cyrillic, in the Russian alphabet. It wasn’t. As he pretended to be absorbed in Mahalo’s next descent he furtively examined the painted strokes. Roman numerals? No. The stencil used had slipped slightly but the result was clear: two Chinese characters, numbers, maybe, on what was certainly a diver’s glove. He pocketed it. He was trembling a little.

  This small bit of luck confirmed everything and it meant his part of the long hunt was finished.

  Rather, all that remained was a phone call to either of the two friends the President had designated for exactly such a purpose. A direct call might, just might, tip off some unknown Eaper agent in spite of Steve’s belief his staff was now clean. And the two intermediaries had special wires for any such need, Grove believed.

  He felt a moment of letdown. It was followed by anxiety. If Solentor’s people knew what he’d now learned they might destroy the tube—and perhaps all Hawaii with it. Or they might even be able to put Neptune in effect! How ready was it? What could it be? He sat sweating, then, hoping the clever porpoises wouldn’t bring any other telltale object to Sapphire—and fiercely impatient for the trip to end. Soon, it did.

  13

  Flunk

  An engine breakdown delayed the return. The predicament was finally noticed, however, and the fast boat towed them in. Sapphire was sorry the money belt had not been recovered. Grove said the trip was worth the loss.

  The sun was gone when they docked and he thanked Sapphire for an “extraordinary experience.” She asked again if he felt well and, again, he said it was nothing. He waited about for a while, quite sure he wasn’t watched but to give the impression that he was in no hurry. He could not be entirely sure his presence at sea had gone unnoted but he had done his best. Even so, there should be nothing in his behavior to make his opponents imagine his perfectly logical trip had been anything else, if they knew of it.

  On the other side of the pali the sun shown. But Waimanalo was deep in its long twilight when he drove his rented car up to his garage. He pressed a button and a door creaked open. Meanwhile, he scanned the roofs and trees above his fence. He grunted. The phone wire no longer stretched from the power pole on the highway to his place. He ran in the car and shut the door—after one further glance that told him his premises had been entered.

  Jenny had gone home early—her Volks wasn’t in the garage or expected to be there. He thought of the tunnel but chose the open yard, after which decision he carried out on his back what seemed merely a large sheet of plywood. He braced it on the bridge evidently for a subsequent lowering to the workshops below. It shielded him while he crossed the lawn and unlocked his doors. But no shots came from the likeliest site for ambush, the steep, thicket-covered slope across the Kalan; his playwood shield would have flattened them, in any case: it had a steel inner layer.

  There are more ways than one to skin a cat, he thought; and grinned at this familiar use of hackneyed and dated phrases.

  Jenny had left a note—about the cold chicken and apple pie. But he read it later. First came a series of efforts—and, next, spoken aloud, “Flunked!”

  Grove’s regular phone line, cut at the power pole, was his only known way of communication, the only way known to his friends and to Jenny. There were three more means. A phone hidden in a workroom had been connected to the line next door, in the house he now owned. That instrument had been removed. They hadn’t wanted to become conspicuous by dropping people’s phone lines, he decided. But he was somewhat shocked to find the third line, its instrument even more carefully concealed and its wire running underground for a considerable distance, had been demolished.

  How had they found that? The answer was, by looking very carefully, in the adequate time available for doing so. They must have moved when the porpoise work started in its special area. Started fast, to cut him off if a time for that had arrived.

  As it had.

  He went to the radio between his double wall—with diminished confidence. He switched it on and for a moment he was hopeful. In that moment, they located his band and drowned it with interference. So that was that.

  To get the word out—word so important he did not dare think of failure—he would have to leave the premises. It was something that needed thought.

  That was when he read Jenny’s note.

  Afterward, he checked the contents of a modest leather case to be sure everything was in place and in precise order. Then he ate some cold chicken and two slices of pie, with a glass of milk. He believed he could break out—but now it was going to be sticky, a valuable and calming word to use instead of many far more appropriate.

  It would be well not to hurry. Waiting would be harder on them than on him, as they would not know what to expect. But they would also be given more time to prepare for eventualities which Solentor would guess as potentially many and bizarre.

  Grove had determined, long since, where an ambush would most likely be set. To be safe, however, he had made additional arrangements. Before his garage door opened, now, for the station wagon, there would be a diversion. It ought, he had been pretty sure, to take care of expected but not certain fire from places across and above the road.

  He could be out and going, if so.

  Getting away afterward would require more surprises. They were ready for more.

  He had eaten in peace and afterward he rinsed his dishes. He checked his protective devices and sat in the red chair, smoking a cigar. He then arranged to leave behind various special messages that would, perhaps, do the trick, if he didn’t manage. He smoked two more cigars, while he read a stretch in Tom Sawyer, an old favorite for crisis time-passing. Then it was eleven o’clock.

  He could guess what they were doing and where.

  They knew, or near enough to it, that they must take all possible precautions against any attempt he would make to communicate with anybody again, ever. The situation was classical, tactical and yet one he should not have allowed to trap him. Rusty, as now was unarguable. He should have phoned when they docked. Collect, to the man on Kauai or the one on the Big Island. Not the White House. Steve still feared Eaper had a tap or an unidentified eavesdropper there. And Grove remembered Steve was on a trip, if the papers were right. A cruise to nowhere—a hush-hush conference.

  He picked up the bag and made for the tunnel to the garage, resolutely.

  A switch lighted it but the light could not be seen from the outside. Three boards in its wooden siding were levers and he pulled them. A red
light came on as each board went down. He locked the house end of the tunnel—a false wall when viewed from the other side—and he did the same when he closed the opposite panel in the rear of the garage.

  He set the leather case in the station wagon and made sure the thick grip was within reach. He started the motor and pressed buttons to raise electrically powered side windows of special glass.

  Outdoors, a soft explosion sent an object sailing over the Kalan and into the thicket far above. It landed and burst into an incredibly intense light. That eye-shattering glare raged behind a row of rocks so the drivers below were not directly exposed; otherwise, there would have been accidents. Men in the area above that preselected target, however, looked, by instant reflex—and could not see at all, afterward, for some while.

  Long enough so that when the electric door of the garage opened and the station wagon shot out and skidded into the northbound lane between a small sedan and a pickup truck no shots came from the dazzled group on guard exactly where Grove had expected them to be. The flare was a type used for air-sea search and rescue. It had been launched by a homemade mortar, carefully placed, concealed and aimed, long before.

  He headed away from the park because the park was his destination, or his first one.

  As he accelerated, he saw a car switch on its lights and start in chase. Grove tore through Waimanalo at a steady sixty, hoping for police pursuit. He raced up the first hill beyond the village, speedometer soon at a hundred ten and still climbing. The following car had lost some distance in the village, more on the sharp turn just before the golf course. Grove went over the crest of the next hill at a speed slightly lessened by its last pitch. He had, he thought, about ten seconds.

  The station wagon braked as no standard vehicle could: it had almost overtaken some cars ahead. Meantime, Grove activated a special control and the original windows were replaced by steel sheeting. The car was stopped dead and off the road when the other swept past: three men in it.

  They ignored Grove’s vehicle because it had changed in appearance. It now looked, in the night at least, like a panel truck, waiting for a tow car, probably, lights flashing as a warning. Its rear end and sides bore large letters in red on a white background. They said:

  JOE OPALANA

  MEN’S TAILOR

  1447 ELUA DRIVE

  WAIMEA

  When the pursuit roared on under the footbridge—as he could see, by its lights—Grove cut the flasher, backed, turned around quickly and took off in the opposite direction.

  He regained speed through Waimanalo and his rear-view mirrors indicated no tail, police or other. As he approached the park, he intended driving in. But that would be expected, possibly; in which case he and Jerry, too, would fail to achieve anything. He surged on.

  The watchman, at first, thought it was teenagers: going past at that crazy speed and blasting their horn steadily, the damn fools. Then he saw the vehicle and knew otherwise. He leaped on his bike and shot from the cove as he soon heard and then saw the pursuers roar past. He ran to the institute where he unlocked a door and made a phone call.

  Grove charged up the curves over Makapuu Point, grinning a little. There hadn’t been any such plan; but maybe Jerry would get the message, anyhow.

  On the long and straight stretch of the Kalan, past the Hawaii Kai Golf Course the late Henry Kaiser had built, Grove saw them coming. It had to be them: in another car, he saw—one that had a radiophone. A car faster than the station wagon; so he slowed.

  The car closed rather cautiously and Grove grinned again. They’d be uncertain of his capabilities, having surely by now taken a look at his dash and its battery of buttons and other controls, of which only five had any use. All the others, twenty-odd, were there to make anyone who’d examined the car hesitate about closing in on it. The man he’d watched making that extensive inspection from a top row at Whaler’s Cove had probably been theirs.

  Grove was waiting now for the long, open stretch just ahead and praying it would be empty, a prayer that was answered. Traffic at this hour was light; still, it was a break. In his rear-view mirror he saw fast, bluish flashes and heard the bullets from the muffled machine weapon hammer on the rear end, the steel plating. He accelerated into the straightaway and worried about his tires, about how much lead even they could absorb without coming apart.

  They chased him and came up. Grove hit a lever, then another.

  From an opened vent in the tailgate burst a tremendous volume of smoke. It expanded but seemed not to thin. Grove looked at the speedometer and decided there would be no sense in trying to slow and leap clear. Meanwhile the venting smoke blacked out a hundred yards of the highway behind, then two hundred and three, when it gave out. He pulled ahead and looked back by mirror, and then, after lowering a panel, by leaning out.

  The chasing car had inevitably plunged into the smoke: no time to slow, even. Its expert driver cursed and tried to see the white center line. He could, for an instant, a few feet of it. Then he hit a stretch of something else: slippery oil. His tires made rain sounds on his fenders. He braked instinctively and professionally, stabbing the pedal and the accelerator, alternately. The stuff was slicker than butter and the car went into a lunging skid that took it off the road and into a ditch where it flipped. None of the three in the car was badly hurt but all were shaken. They slowly recovered, raised a reluctant door and managed to see the taillights of the station wagon as it raced toward the first zigzags around the Blow Hole.

  The radiophone didn’t work. They had a walkie-talkie, however: it did work—after they got it out of the jammed trunk. That took awhile. The long cloud of smoke drifted toward the volcanic mountains. Soon a car approached and passed, unseeing—a boy and girl’s head on shoulder, in rapt togetherness. Two vehicles passed in the opposite direction. The wrecked car was off the highway and if seen was doubtless assumed to be parked, though it was actually on its side. One of the three urgent men took time to walk toward the place where the oil had sent them skidding.

  Whatever it had been, it hadn’t been ordinary oil. Every sign of it had already evaporated. To be sure they’d have privacy, the men now abandoned the overtoppled sedan carried the walkie-talkie into the nearest cover, high grass hummocks and scrubby trees. They cranked a handle and talked.

  A police car cruised past, slowed to a stop, then reversed. An officer got out and looked at the abandoned car, making sure it was empty and that no injured persons were nearby. He had used a big torch. He returned to his car, made a call and continued his patrol. The three men came back after that, and waited till the straightaway was empty. Then they lighted a fuse and ran. The sedan blew up and the shambles caught fire.

  They were sure that a fire engine, if one came, or a wrecker, in the morning, if that would be it, would not have operators sufficiently expert or even suspicious enough to discover that the junk they would finally tow away had once possessed unusual capabilities. Its license would be missing and all its papers consumed.

  That series of activities gave Grove time, more time than he had expected or knew of.

  The switchbacks around Koko Head had to be taken slowly. He came up behind four normally moving cars as he reached the last rise of the Kalan. Shortly, the spangled megalopolis came in view: Hawaii Kai, Kahala, Aina Haina, Waikiki and the fire-tinted aurora over Honolulu. He stayed behind the cars as he drove down into the lights. A short way farther on, he slowed. Peering intently seaward, he realized, with relief, that Jerry had seen his passage, understood it and taken the step Grove hadn’t dared count on, just hoped for.

  There was no road or track where he cut off and thudded toward the sea, merely an open space, not yet developed, a place where heavy machinery had been stranded for months—waiting for fiscal resurrection. He drove behind a truck and stopped. He locked his car as he left and ran: the helicopter was waiting, lights out.

  “Bob?” he called.

  A man in the shadows of the rotor answered, “All set! Hop in! Here!”

>   Grove hopped. The copter had a seat beside the pilot and a longer seat, behind. Its bulby chassis was transparent. Grove could see the highway where the double-eyed traffic streamed. No pair of lights turned off in this direction.

  He was aware of Bob beside him, of a door slam and of the racket as the outsize insect whirled its thin wings. It jumped into the air on a slant and started rising. Bob stopped a slow twist. “Where to?”

  “Kauai.” Grove named the Navy field.

  The man shrugged and reached forward to switch on lights—exterior lights. Inside, it remained dark.

  “No can do,” the pilot yelled.

  “Why not, for God’s sake?”

  The man held out a headset. Grove nodded, put it on, took it off, adjusted it and donned it again. The chopper was climbing and heading away from Kauai. Grove knew that course was wrong. Through the furry headphones the pilot said clearly, “Kauai, sure. Navy field, no.”

  Grove then understood the course: they would have to skirt Oahu before making a turn toward Kauai, more than a hundred miles to the west and a little north around the mountains. The course wasn’t wrong, then; instinctively, he still felt misgivings for which he sought cause.

  He was handed a mike. “Why not the naval base?”

  “Radio’s out.” The man pointed and Grove saw a hole where some rectangular instrument had been removed from the panel. Exposed wires showed when the panel lights finally went on. Some were red and the pilot switched them off. In the remaining glow Grove studied the gap from which, evidently, the radio had been removed. Not a neat removal, he noted—seemed more like the result of violence.

  Boats winked on the sea below. The muffled racket was unbroken. It had sounded, before he’d put on the intercom phones, like a child’s stick, run along a picket fence, intensified a quantum degree.

  So—what was wrong?

  The pursuit and escape had left Grove more shaken than he had expected. Some unfamiliar sensation had smoldered below consciousness for a time. Then it defined itself. He had been scared; scared of dying; reluctant to risk it. This was novel. A middle-aged reaction? Certainly not the old and the often-endured dread that involved capture and what capture meant. This was, simply, the commoner thing, the human thing, that most people felt when they thought of dying.