Operation Breakthrough

by Dan J. Marlowe

  I’d landed at the huge military airfield near Washington, D.C., once before on a job with Erikson. Our plane turned onto a taxi strip that led away from the populated area. It rumbled and rolled along for what seemed miles and eventually turned off onto a concrete road that cut between a screen of tall pine trees.

  Still the plane kept taxiing. A quarter mile farther on we entered a vast concrete-ramp area in front of four tremendous hangars. All around the parking area was a collection of strange-looking aircraft. I recognized U-2 spy planes wearing dull black paint, their long, narrow, drooping wings held up from the ground by outrigger wheels at their wingtips.

  Some planes I didn’t recognize. There was a four-engine turboprop transport painted a pale sky blue. A low, squatty, single-seat fighter plane was tucked under one wing of the transport. The fighter had splashes of green, brown, and yellow paint intermixed in such a way its outline could barely be distinguished against the verdant pine tree background. Like the jet that had brought me here none of the aircraft bore identifying marks of any kind.

  Helicopters and reconnaissance planes were jammed together nearby. In front of each plane was stationed an armed guard. Everything in sight looked perfectly capable of taking part in a Skunk Works’ Department of Dirty Tricks operation. I had never know about this area at Andrews before, and I wondered how many people actually did know about this separate installation at one of the country’s busiest military airfields.

  A canopied, flatbed trailer towed by a slow-moving tractor approached us. Mechanics wearing white coveralls devoid of any indication of service or rank dropped off the trailer. One herded our plane into a vacant spot with hand signals. When the engines whined to a stop, the two pilots stepped aside to let me precede them out the opened door. I noticed that around their necks they were wearing plastic cards on beaded chains similar to the ones I’d found in the briefcase, and I put one on, too.

  I ducked under the plane’s wing short of the streamlined fuel pod at its tip to avoid being run over by the inevitable fuel bowser pulling into position alongside. The pilots followed, one carrying a bulging navigation kit. They seemed ready to walk off and forget me. “What do I do now?” I asked.

  Both men looked at me in surprise, then the pilot spoke with seeming understanding. “We got you in here late, you know. Your contact probably figured you weren’t going to make it today and left. You’ll have to call your office. Our job is finished, and we’ve got to check in. It’s been a long day.”

  “Night,” the copilot corrected him.

  “I’ll go with you,” I suggested.

  The pilot tapped the red Q on the plastic card on my chest, then pointed to his own which had a green Omega symbol. “You couldn’t get within twenty yards of the Omega compound with that badge,” he said. He sounded suspicious, as though I were trying to put something over on him. “The only thing a Q card will get you around here is a one-way trip out the gate.”

  Pilot and copilot walked away from me. As I stared after them, I was asked to move by a mechanic trailing a fuel hose. After the pilots’ warning I didn’t attempt to follow them. Confronting me in the opposite direction was a regular obstacle course of sober-faced guards.

  I cruised through the area letting the position of the guards plot my course. I ended up going down a sidewalk to the right of the hangar line. At its end stood a gatehouse hemmed in on either side by double chain link fences with an electronic alarm system located in the eight-foot dead-man’s area between the fences.

  Outside the gatehouse I could see a street and a large parking lot beyond it. I slowed down and watched the procedure followed by men coming from the parking lot into the area where I was. Each one as he approached the gate took the plastic card looped on the chain around his neck and lifted it chin-high to insert it into a slot anchored to a six-foot-high, steel-barred turnstile.

  The men who carried lunch pails placed them in an open-end box imbedded in the gate house wall and left them there until a light above the inspection box turned green. Only after having passed both lunch inspection and establishment of his bona fides with his coded card did the turnstile click open and permit the man to enter.

  Once clued, I could see that an identical arrangement was set up for the exit side. I walked to the turnstile, stuck my plastic card into the slot, and laid the briefcase in the inspection compartment. The light turned green, but the turnstile remained locked. I pushed on the horizontal bars, but they wouldn’t yield.

  In the midst of my struggle with the turnstile I became aware that a guard was watching me. He strolled toward me when he saw I couldn’t open the gate. “Leave the card in the slot and step back,” he ordered crisply.

  I ducked my head out from under the beaded chain and took three paces to the rear. When the guard saw I was clear of the gate, he pulled my card out of the slot, looked at it, turned it over, and reinserted it. The turnstile latch clicked. The guard looked at me pityingly as he would at an idiot child. “Okay,” he said gruffly.

  I reached for the edge of the card that projected from the slot as I approached the turnstile again. My hand closed upon it but the card stuck fast. I pulled harder. My fingers slipped from its slick surface.

  The guard was frowning. “It won’t release until you’ve passed through,” he said. “It’s a one-way pass. Exit only. It’s designed so we can’t fail to pick them up. The gate will release it after you pass through the turnstile, and I’ll send it on to your security section.”

  I stopped with a hand on the turnstile. A one-way pass? That’s what the pilot had said, too. “Listen, I’ve got to get back in here,” I said.

  “Not with that badge, man,” the guard said emphatically. “That’s a passout only.”

  I began to sweat. Once through the gate how was I going to get back inside to keep the rendezvous with Erikson’s man, Baker? From the looks of this place they weren’t about to let me hang around inside the place either. For a second I thought I had an out: I had Erikson’s badge in the briefcase, but then that faint hope faded when I remembered that his badge was identical to mine and was one-way, too. If he had been with me, there’d have been no problem, but now I didn’t know what to do.

  The guard was looking me over closely. “Buddy, get moving, or I’ll enforce section twelve of the new regs and detain you as a suspicious character. What are you trying to pull on me? Are you one of these security guys with your pretend-you-don’t-know-the-procedures gimmick? Go on, get lost. Maybe I ought to run you in anyway. I could use a commendation in my file.”

  I could let him run me in, but what then? Nobody knew Erikson’s business except Erikson’s bosses, and how was I supposed to get in touch with them? And if I let anyone not in the know separate me from the briefcase and its contents, how was I going to interest anyone in Karl Erikson’s plight?

  The guard took a step toward me, and reflex took over. I went through the turnstile like a seed squeezed from a slice of lemon. If I didn’t get out of there, the first thing I knew, I’d be trying to answer FBI questions with no government agency security umbrella in the present and a whole lifetime of unwhitewashed activities in the past.

  I reached the street with the guard’s eyes boring a hole in my back. I looked at the acres of cars in the lot across the street. I hadn’t stolen a car in years, but it looked like my only way of getting away from this birdcage.

  And then along came salvation.

  A taxi pulled up in front of the gate to permit a distinguished gray-haired man in a business suit to alight. I was in the back seat before the driver could produce change for his fare.

  The cabbie looked over his shoulder at me. “Where to?”

  I drew a deep breath. “Downtown Washington. I’ll tell you where later.”

  I needed time to think.

  FIVE

  I WAS in such a mental turmoil at the frustration in not being allowed to make the necessary contact with Erikson’s man that the cab was already crossing over the Fourteenth Street Br
idge when I looked out the window. The fog had thinned, but it was still a gloomy day.

  I still had no idea where to go to get rid of the briefcase.

  I leaned back in the cab and tried to think of everything that Erikson had said when he showed up at Hazel’s ranch. I tried to recall something in his conversation that would give me a clue as to which government agency might have commissioned his trip to Nassau, however unofficially.

  But I couldn’t think of a thing.

  The more I puzzled over it, the more endless the possibilities became. The Central Intelligence Agency certainly couldn’t be excluded, even though the affair seemed to be taking on the dimensions of a police case rather than a matter of national security. One factor pointing to the CIA was the fact that the fishing-in-troubled-waters expedition had taken place outside the continental US, where I assumed the CIA had prime control.

  I had heard Erikson state that the National Security Agency operated almost entirely in the communications-intelligence field with few overt acts, so it was unlikely to be them. The FBI hardly seemed a better possibility for two reasons: (1) I knew they jealously worked alone unless conditions were imposed upon them from the top, and (2) their fiefdom was the forty-eight plus two with British-influenced Nassau outside their bailiwick.

  Experience gained from working with Erikson in the past wasn’t much help in making up my mind either. When we were in Cuba together, the Treasury Department had assigned him the task of recovering a wad of cash sent there years before by the State Department but since disowned by it as a political hot potato. Both departments had taken a more than casual interest in our eventual retrieval of the cash.

  The Atomic Energy Commission had been the agency of prime concern when we stopped an unwholesome type at the UN who all but had his hands on a nuclear weapons core being shipped across the country. The Department of Defense also looked over our shoulders on that one.

  The present situation had overtones of the Treasury Department again since it appeared that income tax evasion could be involved, but it could also be the Justice Department or one of the myriad smaller agencies recently established by Congress to crack down upon organized crime.

  I was struck by another thought. Even if I did learn which agency had sent Erikson to Nevada to recruit me for the safe deposit box job in Nassau, I probably wasn’t in much better shape. No matter which government department was involved, Erikson wouldn’t have been commissioned by a man sitting in an open office for the world to see. Far more likely the man would be layers deep in the internal structure of his organization, hidden away in an office that never saw daylight.

  The cab driver turned on the front seat and looked over his shoulder. We were approaching Constitution Avenue with the Washington Memorial on the left. I still didn’t know where to tell the cabbie to take me. Go left to the Navy Department building and try to get a line on Erikson’s boss via the Bureau of Personnel? Turn right and see if I could do any good at the Justice Department? Or go straight ahead to the Treasury Department on Pennsylvania Avenue since I knew one of Erikson’s jobs had originated there and this one seemed a possible?

  “Where to, mister?” the cabbie said when a red light halted us.

  I didn’t answer him.

  Erikson’s only contact I’d actually met and was able to put a name to was Jock McLaren, a specialist who worked for Erikson out of a supposed export-import office on Fifth Avenue in New York City. If I could reach him, Jock McLaren might be able to steer me in the right direction. He should also have a real concern for Erikson’s present predicament. The trouble was that the Fifth Avenue office had an unlisted phone, and I didn’t know the number.

  The cab driver turned squarely around in the front seat. “You did mean Washington, D.C.?” he demanded sarcastically. “Or maybe you had in mind Seattle, Washington?”

  “How did the nightclub circuit ever miss a comedian like you?” I countered somewhat weakly. “You can let me out right here.”

  The cab crossed Constitution Avenue and pulled in to the curb. “I ain’t got time to count my buttons while you flyboys try to make up your mind which broad you’re gonna shack up with tonight,” the driver grumbled.

  I paid him and got out of the cab, clutching the briefcase. “You don’t want to make us flyboys mad,” I told him, “or the next time we’re up there in a C-5A, we’ll buzz your house and roll our landing wheels up your roof.”

  He grunted something unintelligible and pulled away.

  I waited for the light to change, crossed the street, and began flagging taxis headed the other way. Most were occupied, but I finally caught an empty. “National Airport,” I said as I climbed into the back seat. Even if it hadn’t been instinctive not to let the original cabbie take me from Andrews’ back door to National, I’d have felt like a fool telling the first one to take me back to a point just around the corner from where I’d started.

  I was impatient now that I’d finally decided what to do. At the airport I went directly to the Eastern shuttle window and got myself ticketed. I only had to wait twenty minutes before boarding the next plane to New York. While awaiting takeoff, I amused myself — except that amused wasn’t precisely the word — by counting my diminishing bankroll. It was under five hundred dollars, and if I were the nervous type, I’d have been nervous. To me money means maneuverability, and very shortly I was due to have my options cut.

  The eighty-minute flight to New York was uneventful. I took the airport bus to the East Side Terminal and then caught a cab to 505 Fifth Avenue. I almost fell asleep in the cab. During the past seventy-two hours I’d had a few brandy-fumed hours of sleep at Candy’s, a few uneasy catnaps in the grass outside the fence at Oakes Field, and a few half-awake, half-asleep moments on the flight from Nassau to Washington. Otherwise I’d been on the go almost constantly.

  The small lobby at 505 Fifth Avenue was deserted as usual. The last time I was there I’d been afraid I was followed, and I’d waited in a corner of the lobby to see if anyone followed me inside from the street. This time it wasn’t a problem. I took the elevator to the fifteenth floor.

  When I stepped out into the corridor, even before the hum of the elevator faded from my ears, I could see that it wasn’t business as usual at the office I’d come to visit. That particular door in a long line of frosted-glass doors stood open, and the corridor walls on both sides were lined with heavy steel-strapped crates, leaving only a narrow passage between.

  I walked to the open door. There was no one at the desk in the tiny receptionist’s office. I looked inside the office that had been Karl Erikson’s. There was no one there, either. The large picture on the far wall which had served to conceal the entrance to a hidden room was gone.

  The entrance stood open, and inside I could see more crates. Some were packed, and some in the process of being packed. I was sure they contained the closed circuit television sets, tape recorders, listening devices, snooper-scopes, guerrilla-type weapons, and other sophisticated equipment we had found so useful. Now they evidently were being shipped out.

  The thought of the weapons supply in the formerly hidden room made my mouth water. My own gun was at the bottom of the elevator shaft in the Nassau bank building where Erikson had deliberately dropped it. Certainly Erikson owed me a replacement, and here was a chance to help him fill that obligation without my getting tangled up in logistical red tape.

  I walked into the hidden room. There were only four crates that already had tops screwed onto them. I dug around in the open ones. The first contained various types of microphones; a second smaller one, an assortment of bumper beepers carefully packed in crushproof cartons. But the third held an eyepopping assortment of Beretta .22s, Walther .38s, and Smith & Wesson .38 police specials.

  I grabbed an S&W .38, hefted it, then dropped it into my pocket. My shoulder holster was a tightly rolled lightweight bulge inside my jacket. I was so used to wearing a .38 on my left side that I’d felt lopsided ever since losing it. I found ammunition in
the bottom of the crate, and I took a box.

  I had already started out of the hidden room when I heard the sound of a door being closed across the hall. I reached the entrance between Erikson’s former office and the receptionist’s cubbyhole at the same time a short, roundish man with a pepper-and-salt crewcut bustled through the corridor door. He stopped short at the sight of me. “This is a private office,” he said sharply. His glance lingered briefly on the attaché case in my hand. “Do you have business here, sir?” He looked and sounded like an office manager.

  “I’d like to see Jock McLaren,” I told him.

  “Never heard of him,” the roundish man replied.

  It could have been true, but I didn’t believe it was true. “He worked out of this office,” I tried again. “Sandy-haired, youngish, very good with locks.”

  “Locks?”

  I started to heat up at what I felt sure was deliberate evasion. “Locks,” I repeated. “And at getting into unopened envelopes with knitting needles. And fluoroscoping envelopes to detect trigger mechanisms inside. Recognize him now?”

  “No.”

  “He worked for Karl Erikson,” I continued doggedly.

  “I went to school with a Tom Ericksen,” the roundish man offered. He smirked in what might have been intended as a smile. “But I don’t suppose it’s the same one.” I took a step toward him, and he backed away, an expression of alarm on his puffy face. “Here now!” he blustered. “I’m only trying to help!” His gaze again lingered momentarily on the briefcase in my hand.

  “Like hell you’re trying to help!” I unloaded on him. “There’s probably some sort of password or code word necessary to crack the magic circle around here, but I don’t have it. All I want to do is talk to Jock McLaren.”

  “Sorry,” my opponent said curtly. He appeared to be regaining his courage now that I’d stopped my advance upon him.

  “Sorry he’s not here or sorry you won’t let me talk to him?” I persisted.