Dead Man's Tale

by Don Pendleton

  "Right. And as they already got back the list, the original, they must've known he'd sent copies here..."

  "And they wanted those," O'Reilly cut in. "Or... No, maybe they knew he'd sent them some unusual way, and they hoped Bolan would know how. That he could tip them off to, well, what you call the key to his visual code."

  "Yeah," Brognola said slowly. "I'd say that's part of it. But it doesn't entirely stack up. How would they know he'd sent them a crazy way? And if they did, why wouldn't they know what key he used? This doesn't tell us one damned thing more, not about the key, not about the reason for Bolan's kidnapping!"

  "What do you aim to do?"

  The Fed thought for a moment, drumming his fingers on the top of his desk. Then a sly smile spread over his face. "I'll tell you what we'll do, Frank," he said. "We'll make a connection ourselves. Bolan's over there, right where the action is. He asked us to send him material in the diplomatic bag. We'll go one better. We'll send it by courier. And the courier will carry a message too, what you might call a briefing."

  "You mean...?"

  "I mean he's there, he's at the center of this mystery. He can have all the help he wants — but let him solve it himself! As of now, Frank, Mack Bolan is on a mission."

  The desk intercom buzzed. "What is it?" Brognola called.

  "The technician from the photo-analysis lab is here, sir," the receptionist's voice replied. "He says they discovered what those plates from Brussels are about."

  "Thanks. Have him come in."

  The middle-aged man who appeared a moment later was short and balding, with a thin face and heavy black-rimmed spectacles. He wore a pleased smile. "Do you know what a hologram is, Mr. Brognola?"

  8

  "A hologram," Colonel Stefan Heller told Mack Bolan, "is in effect a photograph in three dimensions obtained without the use of conventional lenses. Its advantage — or disadvantage in your particular case — is that the finished plate is useless without the original means of producing it."

  Bolan cleared his throat. "I'm familiar with the general proposition, but you'll have to be a little more specific, Colonel."

  "Very well, I'll start with the basics."

  The two men were sitting on stools at an optical bench in a top-secret laboratory hidden inside an old hill fort near Malmedy, which had once been part of Belgium's forward defenses against Hitler's armies.

  Bolan, briefed, supplied with weapons, money and papers for his cover identity as Mike Belasko by the courier from Washington, had driven down from Liege that morning. The fort, perched on a spur that projected from one of the Ardennes escarpments, was one of the most closely guarded of all NATO research centers. Heller had been a professor of optics attached to the Belgian State University at Mons before he was made its director general. He was a short man, compactly built, with immaculately waved silver hair and gold-rim spectacles. He looked — Bolan thought, trying hard to concentrate — so much like a character actor from central casting playing a professor that it was disconcerting.

  "For holography," Colonel Heller was saying, "you have to have the laser. You are perhaps familiar with the laser, Mr. Belasko?"

  "You could almost say intimate," replied the warrior, who had once nearly been carved up by one in a KGB-controlled prison in Sofia.

  "So. Then you will know that the laser is an exceptionally brilliant light source, produced by the stimulation of crystals or gases, in which all the waves are, so to speak, 'in step.' It's what we call coherent light.

  "Holography," the Belgian continued, settling now into his lecturers groove, "is a method of photography employing this light. Only instead of using a lens to record a focused image on the sensitized plate, we record simply a pattern of interference between two separate beams of coherent light directed at the image."

  "Directed at whatever is being photographed."

  "Yes. We record a pattern of interference, I say, as one might record the pattern produced when two stones are dropped into a pool and the widening circles of ripples intermingle."

  "Okay, but I..."

  "Patience, young man!" Heller reproved. "To make a hologram, we set up the object to be photographed and shine our laser beam at it. But not directly! Oh, no. We shine it through some semitranslucent medium that both reflects and refracts...a piece of half-silvered mirror, for instance, a fragment of frosted glass. Even a sheet of plastic."

  "Plastic?"

  "Plastic."

  Bolan reckoned he was getting half the Mons third-year optics course free.

  "Now what happens? Half the light penetrates the medium and goes on to illuminate the subject. And the remainder is reflected back toward the light source, where we allow it to fall on the photographic plate. The light beam that goes on through to illuminate the subject also makes its way back to the photographic plate eventually. And it's the recording of the interference between these two halves of the original beam that creates the hologram."

  "So what's the effect?" Bolan asked. "On the plate, I mean."

  "When it's developed, it reveals what seems to be a meaningless blur. But wait!" Heller raised an admonitory finger. "Ordinarily we would only have to shine the original light source — the laser — at this blur, and presto! We would see the original subject again in three dimensions.

  "But our labs have been working on a new process, developed especially for high-security operations. Using this new system, you must have the original piece of glass that you first used to split the laser beam, in order to redivide it. The divided laser beam is then aimed at the holographic negative to recreate the three-dimensional image. Without that piece of glass — or whatever you used — the negative will remain an indecipherable blur."

  He slipped off the stool and bounded across to his desk and opened a wide, shallow drawer, taking out what appeared to be an ordinary glass photo plate about six inches by four inches and handed it to Bolan. "I'll give you a demonstration."

  Bolan glanced at the plate, which looked like a close-up of a piece of granite or a pattern formed by an asymmetric kaleidoscope, a random assembly of different specks.

  "That," Heller said, "is a hologram." He bustled about between the desk and a series of work tables ranged along one wall. "Now I'll bring it back to life for you."

  He dragged across a heavy box on a tripod, fitted with two dials and a row of switches. Then he plugged a cable into an electrical outlet and attached another cable projecting from the ventilation louvers on the steel side of the box to a complex framework screwed to the bench. In the frame he fixed a metal cylinder twenty inches long and five in diameter, from which protruded what looked like the hood on a camera lens. "This is a helium-neon laser," Heller explained. "Only a small one — thirty joules — since it's for demonstration. But watch what it can do."

  He arranged a shabby, pockmarked mirror three feet away from the laser's output aperture, took back the hologram and slotted it into a groove prepared in the bench surface. He drew black curtains over the windows, handed Bolan dark glasses and killed the lights. A switch clicked. There was a brilliant blue-green flash from the bench, followed by a low humming noise.

  Bolan saw a rose-colored fluorescence surrounding the laser cylinder, then a pencil of painfully intense crimson light pulsed from the aperture and lanced down the bench. Following its path above the polished wood, he sat transfixed.

  Where there had been an empty space above the surface, he now saw a silver tray of coffee and liqueurs laid out — the shine on the bone china, a jeweled highlight lurking in the liquor. He reached out his hand and touched... nothing.

  "I'm impressed."

  "There's more." Heller switched on the lights, fetched a large picture frame from a corner and suspended it from a ceiling hook at the end of the bench. The glass inside the frame, like the smaller hologram Bolan had examined, displayed no more than a jumble of fragments. Yet once Heller had maneuvered the angle of the laser beam and reset some switches, the frame enclosed a perfect 3-D photo — a small-t
own street scene with striped awnings covering market stalls and cars parked by the entrance to an alley.

  "Unbelievable!"

  "It is, yes. But perhaps more than you realize, Mr. Belasko. Come here and look down that alley."

  The warrior whistled in amazement. Moving to his right, around the frame, craning to see down the narrow lane in the photo, he found that he could see the radiator grill of an additional car, invisible before.

  Heller laughed. "Yes, you really do 'see around corners' with coherent light. We have a video demonstration. A man stands in front of his desk and you can step to one side and peer around to see the gun he'd hidden behind his back! There's a big transparency that works in ordinary light. Hang it before a window and you see a life-size portrait of a lady, apparently standing solid in space!"

  "Remarkable," Bolan said, "but as to a document...?"

  "A document? But the same principle applies. A secret document — a blueprint for example — could only be deciphered if the decoder knew precisely how it was made. Suppose the laser light had been refracted and reflected via a sheet of frosted glass. The hologram could only be turned back into blueprint by shining the same light at it through the same sheet of glass, in exactly the same position. It would be very useful for a spy!"

  "Yeah," the Executioner said dryly, "you could be right. You're telling me that it would remain indecipherable unless you had that same piece of glass and shone the same light."

  "Exactly."

  "And if the glass was lost or broken?"

  "If our new system was employed, the hologram would remain a meaningless blur. Even if it fell into enemy hands, there'd be no way he could turn it back into a blueprint without the glass."

  Bolan sighed. "That's our problem. An agent used this new type of holography to copy secret papers. We have the holograms, but the refracting medium was to come by a different route. Now the agent is dead and the medium is lost. If only Zulowski..."

  "Zulowski!" the Colonel exclaimed. "René Zulowski? A dark gentleman about thirty? Always wearing sunglasses?"

  "I guess so."

  "But he was here!" The Belgian was surprised. "One week ago. He had come to see me to ask if he could borrow the helium-neon laser for a half hour."

  "He had to have copied the documents here in this lab."

  "Undoubtedly."

  "Were you with him while he used the apparatus?"

  Heller shook his head. "Alas, no. I had work elsewhere, so I left him in the labs. And when I came back he was gone. But at least I can tell you what wavelength is the light you must use — when you find your medium."

  "Yeah. When and if. Tell me how Zulowski was on laser-borrowing terms with an organization like this." Bolan waved around the high-tech optical installation.

  Colonel Heller coughed. "It was, uh, something of a personal matter. I owed a favor to this commercial attaché in one of the EEC Commissions in Brussels, and it seems that the wife of this gentleman's cousin and Mr. Zulowski's sister were at Geneva..." He shrugged.

  "I get the picture. You don't just do military research here, do you?" Bolan asked, curious.

  "By no means. There are implications in molecular biology. We're working on a system to translate books into international computer language. Rinaldi in Milan is using lasers to analyze the shock waves surrounding supersonic jetliners. And so on."

  "I have to thank you for your help, colonel."

  "It is nothing. A pleasure. It's curious, just the same, that you should be the second person to inquire about this Zulowski."

  Bolan halted on his way to the door. "The second?"

  "Some days ago another gentleman was asking, an industrialist from Cologne, named Latta. He was very upset when we were unable to assist him."

  * * *

  Bolan's rented Alfa Romeo was approaching a sharp curve less than a mile from the NATO installation.

  The road was zigzagging down the escarpment below the guarded perimeter, and he intended to downshift to third. But although the warrior pumped hard with his right foot, the sports car refused to slow.

  He pulled up on the hand brake.

  Nothing. He had no brakes.

  Bolan could think of only one thing: sabotage.

  He double clutched, and slammed the short lever into third. The Alfa slowed enough for him to wrestle it around the curve, the open body canting over, the tires screeching.

  But below, the road dropped like an elevator — a short, steep section terminating in another 180-degree curve so acute and with such an inverse slope on the surface that even with brakes most drivers would have needed two bites at it.

  Despite the engine compression, the weight of the car pushed the speed up almost to 60 mph again. Double clutching once more, Bolan attempted to force the lever across and down into second. The engine screamed in protest as the needle swept into the tach's red line; a hideous noise grated from the gearbox, but the lever remained shuddering in neutral. He tried again, but it still refused to engage. And the hairpin turn was dead ahead.

  With a curse, he banged it back into third and wrenched at the wheel. Lurching, the Alfa Romeo ran out of road at the foot of the grade. As the tail swung out and struck the bank, the tires howled broadside across the pavement. The roadster burst through a stone parapet backward, rose into the air and somersaulted down the hillside in a shower of stones. It smashed into bare earth, bounced onto another road below, shattered a second stone wall and finally crunched to a halt on its back among the rocks.

  Bolan had been thrown clear with the first impact.

  Bruised, shaken, but otherwise unhurt, he crouched behind a boulder, peering through the yellow dust cloud eddying up from the slope. The Beretta 93-R pistol sent to him by Brognola's courier was in his right hand.

  A few pebbles still rattled down the incline. Wind soughed through treetops farther down the hill. But no other sounds were audible.

  Rock splinters suddenly stung his cheek, as a heavy-caliber slug whined off the boulder. Bolan was flat on his face behind the huge stone before the whip-crack of the power rifle high up on the escarpment reached his ears.

  Bolan located the marksman after the third shot rang out. The guy was standing openly, almost insolently, beside a dwarf pine tree on the edge of the escarpment, a sinister figure silhouetted against the sky.

  All three rounds had been uncomfortably close.

  Bolan presented himself deliberately to draw fire, darting out from behind the boulder and diving back. Before he took any action himself he wanted to check out the killer's weapon.

  The bullet gouged a channel in the rock two inches in front of the warrior's foot. By the time the report reached his ears, he was back behind the boulder with his eye to the fissure through which he'd first glimpsed the gunman.

  The guy was breaking the long-barreled shooter, feeding shells into the breech. His weapon was loaded like a shotgun, so it had to be a magazineless sporting rifle, double-barreled: there'd been no time for a reload between the last two rounds. The rifle was firing heavy knockdown rounds, probably .30-caliber softnose material. It was, Bolan estimated, around four hundred yards away. With the scope, it could be as deadly at half a mile.

  In other words, the killer was free to go wherever he liked, as openly as he liked, and keep Bolan totally pinned down, unless and until he came within range of the Beretta — which, at this distance was pretty well useless.

  The Executioner was in a tough situation. There was nothing but a bare slope of shale for twenty yards on both sides of the boulder, and the jumble of smaller rocks beyond that offered little cover, especially if the sniper chose to move lower down the escarpment.

  A steep bank rose above the curve where the Alfa Romeo had burst through the parapet, but it was separated from the boulder by forty or fifty feet of loose stone as devoid of cover as the ground.

  Below there was bedrock until the next loop of road and the ditch, beyond which was the wrecked car.

  Could a desperate man make the
bank, ditch or the battered convertible in twelve to fifteen seconds?

  No way.

  So what was his next move? The killer wasn't going to wait on top of the escarpment until night fell and allow the warrior to get away. He wasn't going to wait until the early shift left the NATO installation and took the road home.

  There were plenty of trees below the Alfa, an ocean of trees washing up to the foot of the escarpment one hundred yards on either side of the bare hillside where Bolan was trapped.

  He had to make it to the trees before the killer did.

  Otherwise all the cards would stay in the gunner's hand. There were several minor ridges between the boulder and the foot of the escarpment, which would offer the sniper cover. Invisible behind these, he could reach a position from which he could fire at the Executioner... from either side. And once he lost sight of him, Bolan wouldn't know which side of the boulder would keep him out of range.

  He moved slightly, advancing a leg and a shoulder beyond the rock buttress. The slug splatted against the stone surface, showering him with tiny fragments.

  Once.

  On hands and knees, he moved into view for an instant on the far side of the boulder.

  The sniper held his fire, so Bolan tried again on the other side. Nothing.

  Bolan cursed. The guy was smart — he was wise to the stratagem — and the warrior didn't know whether he'd used the time to feed back a shell and replace the round he'd used.

  The killer was making his move. Bolan watched him step down from the lip of the escarpment and tread warily along a path traversing the near-vertical face, the rifle's point of balance cradled in the gunner's left hand.

  He made the top of the slope, slid twenty yards in a cloud of dust and pebbles, and approached the first of the ground swells in the hillside. The lower half of the sniper's body was hidden from view as he approached the crest.

  Would he take advantage of the cover, duck down and make for one of the tree belts, leaving Bolan to guess which? Or would he pretend to do that, stay prone right where he was, and gun the warrior down when he made his break?