Operation Breakthrough

by Dan J. Marlowe

  My voice trailed off. What did I know about British-style justice? Candy Kane had already indicated to me some of the crackerbox aspects of Bahamian security. And were Bahamian officials any more immune to the payoff than their US counterparts?

  The conversation lapsed again. We stopped for gas in Austin, and Hazel switched on the headlights when we started up the curving ascent leading through the first of the seven-thousand-foot passes between us and Ely. Night driving in Nevada makes me nervous. Cattle graze freely along the roadsides, and every so often one ambles into a car. Hazel drove with the blithe unconcern of a native.

  It was 9:30 when we passed through Eureka with another seventy-five miles to go. We made it in a whole lot less than seventy-five minutes, Hazel slowing down just slightly on the five-mile stretch between Ruth and Ely with the Kennecott Copper Company’s open-pit mines off to the right.

  She pulled into Ashworth’s Chevron Station in the center of Ely. “I want to talk to Bud about the pickup,” she explained.

  “Okay,” I said, easing out of the Corvette. “I’m going to wet my whistle at Greg’s.”

  Greg’s Club was a few doors up the street. I planked my butt on a bar stool and ordered Jim Beam on the rocks. Greg’s was one of the few places in town that didn’t have even a slot machine on the premises. Greg sold booze, period. He’d been selling it at the same location since 1929, having antedated Repeal by a bit. He told me once he used to sell wine from hogsheads stacked along one wall and even in that sparsely settled area he sold eight thousand gallons. When the sun beats down on Nevada valleys with nothing growing more than waist high, people develop a thirst.

  Hazel came in and sat down beside me, and I ordered a grasshopper for her. “I forgot to tell you I took delivery on the plane while you were away,” she said. “I still say you shouldn’t have done it.”

  “That’s me, kid,” I said. “Not even a box of chocolates in three years, then an airplane.”

  Hazel had been taking flying lessons. I’d come back from New York after my last job with Erikson with a bundle of cash he hadn’t known about, and without saying anything to Hazel I’d ordered ninety-six-thousand-dollar’s worth of airplane for her, a Cessna 301 with special navigational equipment. It was a twin-engine job. Single engines make me as nervous as night driving on Nevada highways.

  “You’ll have to speed up your flying lessons now, to say nothing of getting checked out in the Cessna,” I said. “How long will it take?”

  “A month if there’s good flying weather every day.”

  “Did you pay for it?”

  “Yes,” she confirmed. “Your bankroll didn’t stretch quite that far, so I pitched in the last chunk.”

  She was qualified to do it. Her ranch might not have been too much by Texas standards, but it was a fair piece of property. Most of it was given over to grazing land for beef cattle. After the death of her mother Hazel had been left the original small homestead acreage, her birthplace, by her stepfather.

  She’d added to it from funds acquired as the widow of Blue Shirt Charlie Andrews, the gambler who bet ‘em higher than a duck could fly, and her second husband, a saturnine man of mystery who left her the Dixie Pig, a tavern on the west coast of Florida where I’d first met her, plus stocks, bonds, and cash till she needed a money manager to keep track of things.

  In other words Hazel wasn’t hurting and wasn’t about to be. When we’d first hit it off together, it had taken me a while to break her of the playful habit of leaving hundred dollar bills under my plate for walking-around money. She hated to see me broke because she was afraid I’d go back to my former pastime of robbing banks, which for years had been both vocation and avocation with me. She liked to have me with her at the ranch.

  But that had been before Karl Erikson muscled his way into my life. Hazel liked Erikson and had even abetted his recruitment of me. She had managed at times to include herself in Erikson-generated situations. Her roles were intended to be peripheral, but at least once it had turned out to be a good deal more than that. I knew I was going to hear more from Hazel about Karl Erikson’s present predicament.

  “Another drink?” I asked her.

  She declined. We said good night to Greg and went back to the car. Hazel headed north toward her ranch situated in the higher country between Ely and McGill, the copper-smelting town that processed Kennecott’s ore.

  We turned in from the highway on the dirt road, which was straight as a string for a mile and a half until we left the valley for the hills. I got out and opened the gate when we reached the fenced-in portion, closing and looping it shut again after Hazel drove the Corvette inside.

  The headlights wandered along the curving road to the ranchhouse. To pick me up in Reno, Hazel had been on the road for fifteen hours, another reason I had bought her the plane. Except that the aircraft manufacturer now had my cash for a plane she was probably two months away from flying, and my bankroll consisted of what was in my pocket, not a stimulating amount.

  “Let’s move it upstairs, Earl,” Hazel said when we were in the kitchen. I knew she’d had a hard day, and I was ready for bed myself. I followed her upstairs. She was standing in the middle of the floor in our bedroom when I entered. Her boots were already off, and her vest, levis, and underwear floated onto a chair. She came over to me and put her arms around my waist.

  “I thought you’d be too tired,” I said.

  “I’m never too tired for that, Horseman,” she said in her deep voice. “Horseman” is her pet name for me. We both go way back in wagering on the comparative speed of thoroughbred horses.

  She assisted with my undressing. The feel of her hundred-and-fifty-pound, naked female body in such close proximity to mine sent exciting messages to my nerve ends. I love big women, and Hazel is big everywhere it counts, besides being in better shape than the average pro football player.

  We sat down upon the edge of the bed. Four hands played a brisk duet upon two bodies. Hazel pulled me over backward on the bed, and we wrestled exuberantly, each striving to be uppermost. I pinned her finally and climbed aboard the solid platform of her firm belly.

  “Make it a good one!” she murmured huskily, widening to receive me.

  I wrung myself out in the effort to make it a good one. Hazel’s shrill yips in my ear testified that I was doing something right. Some nights it’s not possible to ford a dry creekbed, and then at other times everything is a wide, free-flowing river. We had antepenultimate, penultimate, and final soft explosions.

  Afterward Hazel extracted two cigarettes from a pack on the night table, lit them, and handed me one. We were side by side on the bed on our backs. “When are we going to Nassau to get Erikson out of that jail?” she said to me.

  “When are we WHAT?” I said it so vehemently I blew a shower of sparks from my cigarette. We both batted at them furiously to keep the bed from catching fire. “What the hell did you say?”

  “You know you can’t leave him there,” Hazel said calmly. “If you can’t get anyone in Washington to act, that leaves you.”

  “The hell it does. I played it by the book. I lugged that damn briefcase all over Washington trying to put it into the right hands and my story into the right ears. I told you what happened.”

  But Hazel has a one-track mind. In all respects. “If no one in Washington is going to help, what would it take to free him?”

  “Why do you keep harping on this?” I demanded.

  “Because I know you, Horseman. In a few days you’ll be sneaking up behind me and mumbling, ‘Look, dear, there’s this little bit of unfinished business in Nassau, and — well — see you later.’ ” Hazel bounded from her back to her knees and glared down at me. “And I won’t have you running out on me. We’re going together.”

  “I’m not going anywhere, baby. I’ve been the route on that damned island, and there’s no future in it. Although if I could just think of something that promised to have a chance of — ”

  “See?” she exclaimed triumpha
ntly. “What did I tell you?”

  “Forget it,” I said.

  “What would it take to get him out? Really?”

  “If Candy was leveling with me, not too much to spring him from the jail. But getting off New Providence would be another sack of spuds. Even a spook plane would have a hard time getting in and out of there again after the commotion I caused when I blew the scene.”

  “You’d think the government would do something for him after all he’s done for them,” Hazel said in a resentful tone.

  “Everyone in the damn government is in a conspiracy to keep me from letting the right people know. That’s the problem.”

  “What about this man McLaren in New York?”

  “I told you I’ve already tried that. His wife wouldn’t give me any information and neither would the Treasury Department.”

  “Suppose I called Mrs. McLaren right now and said I was from Commander Erikson’s office?”

  I hesitated. “I don’t think it would work.”

  “Do you still have the McLaren phone number?”

  “The part of the page I tore from the phone directory is still in my wallet.” Hazel slithered from the bed and padded to my pants on the floor. “Have you forgotten it’s well after midnight there?”

  “All the better. It will sound like a real emergency.” She was going through my wallet. “What happened to your money?”

  “I buried it at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. Don’t be so damned nosy.”

  Hazel sniffed. She came back to the bed, large as life and twice as nude, and picked up the phone. “Person-to-person to Mrs. Albert McLaren in Arlington, Virginia,” she said and gave the number.

  There was a long silence. “It won’t work,” I said. “There must be some sort of code call-in used. There’d have to be.”

  “That’s why hitting her fast this time of night before she gets her brain in gear might pay off,” Hazel said coolly. “If — ” She stopped speaking. From where I was on the bed I could hear the sleepy-sounding “Hello?” from the receiver. I scrambled up and shoved in alongside Hazel who canted the receiver so I could hear, too.

  “Sorry to bother you this time of night, Mrs. McLaren,” Hazel’s rich, confident-sounding contralto rolled across the miles. “I’m calling from Commander Erikson’s office, and it’s urgent that we speak to your husband immediately.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Mrs. McLaren said. “Jock left for Miami this morning, and I know he’s going on beyond that, but I don’t know where.”

  Hazel looked at me. “Hang up,” I whispered.

  “Thanks very much, Mrs. McLaren,” she said smoothly. “We’ll follow through on that.” She hung up. “Well?” she said to me.

  “I’ll bet McLaren is going on to Nassau. I can think of a sequence that might have brought it about, too. If he came back into the New York office after I was there and the office manager type told him about the joker trying to unload a briefcase for Erikson and described me, McLaren might have checked back with his people and found out that Erikson was overdue and unreported. Then he might have been sent to Nassau to monitor the situation and see what was needed to be done. In which case anything we tried to do would just be interference or plain spinning our wheels.”

  “You’re not really buying that selling job you just did on yourself, are you?” Hazel asked scornfully.

  I fixed her with my beadiest eye. “Woman, if you think well of the twenty-one-carat, mint condition of your prodigiously bare ass, don’t bug me. I’m going to sleep.”

  And I did.

  SEVEN

  IN THE cold light of morning, of course, I found myself going all over it again in my mind. I slipped out of bed without waking Hazel, then went down to the kitchen and heated up the coffee that remained in the percolater. I carried a steaming cup to the kitchen window, and not even the battery-acid taste of the coffee could detract from a sky so incredibly blue as to be unbelievable anywhere else except in the high country.

  My thoughts kept running in the same worn channel: there must be something I could do to break through the official barrier of government silence surrounding Karl Erikson. The real problem was that a lot of avenues open to the average individual were closed to me. I couldn’t call the nearest FBI office and tell them to come and get an item vital to the national security. With my background, when they got through asking questions about how I’d acquired it plus a few assorted queries about my past, it wouldn’t take a judge and jury long to decide that I owed Uncle a lot of time. And they’d be right, not that I had any intention of queuing up to pay that piper.

  It was such a beautiful morning that I decided to do something I’d had in the back of my mind for some time, ever since the wasted trip to New York, and that was to sight in the Smith & Wesson .38 police special I’d lifted from Erikson’s old office. On the ranch property a mile away there was a gravel pit used to repair the ravages of wind erosion, rain, and snow on the ranch road, and it made an excellent backstop I’d used before.

  I left the ranch house via the kitchen door and went down the path to the barn, a low, sprawling, added-onto structure behind which were the head-high, split-rail corrals used at branding time. I started up the Jeep and let it idle, then walked to a corner of the barn where an open trailer was loaded with old tires. I ripped up a few cardboard cartons, rounded off the rough sections, and stuffed them into the tire centers to serve as targets.

  I backed the Jeep to the trailer and hitched up to the load of tires. The last thing I did before taking off along the pine-bordered road to the gravel pit was toss three boxes of ammunition into the front seat of the Jeep.

  I drove around the pit to its unscalped side, the side farthest removed from the ranch house. The hillside would serve as a sound baffle. Hazel never likes to hear my target practice. She always construes it as an indication I’ll be leaving the ranch again shortly.

  I stopped the jeep at the foot of the hillside and took a tire from the trailer and set it up on a high bank. I drew a rough circle in the center of the cardboard disk serving as a target, then backed off across the road. Balance and feel is everything in a hand gun, and this one felt right. I sighted in carefully on the circled target, using the right-hand-crossed-over-the-bracing-left-wrist method, and squeezed off five shots.

  The grouping was high and slightly to the right when I crossed the road and examined the target. I turned the tire around and went back across the road. The second grouping followed the same pattern. So this .38 shot slightly high and to the right. Later I’d do something about its sight, but for now it was enough to know it and adjust for it.

  Shooting a hand gun well is not something everyone can do. A lot of people can target shoot as I’d just done, sighting in the .38, but that’s not real shooting. Wing shooting is the payoff. I’d learned this years before in an Oregon logging camp where I was avoiding the attention of a couple of irate police departments. I practiced in the woods every day for eighteen months, and when I came back to civilization, I could do things with a .38 that equaled the best I’d ever seen as a kid in the traveling Wild West shows.

  Accessories are important to the hand-gun user. I’ve had people who are supposed to know tell me they’d never consider using a shoulder holster, which they call the slowest and most awkward place from which to get at a gun in a hurry. But a man has to go with what he knows, and I knew and reacted to my own shoulder holster as if it were a part of my flesh. The fact I was still walking around was fair testimony that a shoulder holster couldn’t be all bad. I’d never been seriously tempted to find an alternative.

  I tossed the target tire aboard the trailer, climbed back into the Jeep, and inched my way in four-wheel drive up a hillside trail slashed out of scrub oak and juniper with my ax and perspiration. At the top I pulled over to one side where I’d constructed a long, wooden, inclined chute which tilted downward over the rocky, brush-filled terrain. I loaded the tires aboard the trailer into the chute one behind the other. Way down belo
w was a dangling rope which operated a bar gate in the chute and permitted me to release one tire at a time to go bounding down the craggy hillside.

  I drove to the bottom of the hill and parked, then walked to the release rope, hefting the .38 balanced in my palm. When I pulled on the rope, a tire rolled from the chute and started down the hillside. It ran low through the brush with only an occasional little bounce into the air until it hit a rock and jumped in a twenty-foot arc. It landed and swerved off at an angle only to hit another rock and zoom skyward again.

  I had set self-imposed limits to a shooting area for these free-running targets, and when they reached it, I never knew whether the tires would be high, low, left, right, or coming right at me. The idea was to let go three shots at each tire-target and score with two. This was wing shooting, and I’d learned it from an old hunter in Saskatchewan, but he was using a deer rifle and my effective range was only a fraction of his.

  For twenty minutes I pulled the rope, released tires, and popped targets. When the chute was empty, I scoured the wooded area at the foot of the hill for the downed tires. I loaded them back onto the trailer. A gratifying number of the cardboard centers contained bullet punctures, some clean from wide-angle shots and others with long, ragged tears from almost head-on snapshots.

  But slogging through the brush, searching for tires, swatting at gnats, I was aware that my subconscious was still at work on the problem of Karl Erikson. I drove back up the hillside in a somber mood and reloaded the chute. When I returned to the house, I was planning to get out another hairpiece and do some experimenting with my makeup kit until I didn’t resemble a war-scarred Vietnam veteran. Not that the syndicate could trace me to the ranch anyway.

  I paused with the last tire in my hands, ready to insert it into the chute. The syndicate couldn’t trace me to the ranch? Hermione had seen my scars and described them to her boy friend. Her description had been detailed enough so that the syndicate had tortured and killed Vietnam veteran William Long who must, in fact, have resembled me. And if Hermione had overheard Candy or Chen Yi mention my partner in a Nassau jail, she had undoubtedly reported that, too.