by Walter Wager
Williston nodded. “Stupid,” he said softly. “Stupid to park the truck here because the area’s full of junkies, and stupid to hurt those two that badly. I’ll have to watch that, I guess. P.T.’s supposed to be our homicidal maniac-in-residence—not me.”
Then he looked up and down the street cautiously.
“Time to go, Sam,” he advised. “We don’t want to explain these two battered bastards to the police.”
They shook hands, and a few moments later Gilman drove off on the first leg of his journey back to the upstate hideout. It was an uneventful ride up the New York State Thruway, pleasantly cool at sixty miles an hour. Gilman reached The Inferno shortly before 3 A.M., approximately half an hour before a restless, thoughtful Professor Andrew Williston was finally able to fall asleep in steamy New York City.
11
Just before noon on the following Friday, the unlisted telephone at The Inferno rang and Carstairs answered it.
“This is Doubleday’s,” a male voice announced. “You asked us to phone you about those Civil War picture books you ordered.”
“You get them all?” the gun collector asked.
“Yessir, and we’re sending them air express as you ordered. They should arrive at the Albany airport on the Allegheny flight due in at six-ten tonight.”
“Could I have the invoice number?”
“Certainly. 322, 9199, 7755.”
“Thank you for your splendid service,” the second most eligible bachelor in the United States declared courteously as he terminated the call.
Then he turned to Arbolino.
“Andy’s on his way. Flying up late this afternoon. We’re to pick him up at the airport at six-ten,” Carstairs reported.
“How did he make out?”
The millionaire smiled as he flashed a V-for-victory sign with two fingers.
“Home run. Got it all, he says. Everything’s groovy.”
The expression on Williston’s face when he entered the lodge that night seemed to confirm Carstairs’ judgment. The men who greeted him looked tan and fit, but the gleam in his eyes was purposeful pride.
“My R and A trio did a good job,” he said as he put down the large Naugahyde suitcase and tapped it approvingly. “Labor of love, you know.”
“I thought it was money—my money,” Carstairs teased.
“Love. Pure love. There’s nothing like the romance between hungry graduate students and the prospect of cash,” the teacher explained. “It’s an awesome passion, totally consuming. Romeo and Juliet, Caesar and Cleopatra, Richard Nixon and his dog Checkers—all nothing by comparison. You’ll see after I’ve had some dinner.”
He changed into the coveralls that were their uniform, ate quickly and questioned the others about their progress. At 8:05, he finished his excellent espresso and opened the suitcase. It was loaded with green-bound Congressional reports, plastic-covered memoranda in multiple Xerox copies, three bulging folders of clippings and photographs plus a blue-gray looseleaf notebook.
“Preliminary situation estimate for Sledgehammer,” he announced crisply as he opened the notebook. “A brief summary and analysis of data on the target area and enemy forces dominating that area.”
His partners leaned back in their armchairs, Gilman and Carstairs puffing on cigars and the stunt man simply listening.
“Paradise City is a community of approximately one hundred and ten thousand people—according to the last census—and is the largest city in Jefferson County. The population is seventy-nine thousand whites and thirty-one thousand blacks, and neither the civil-rights movement nor desegregation of schools or jobs or housing has made any significant progress here. Just token stuff; we’ll go into that later. The city has a small but busy port—mostly coastal shipping and some fishing—but the main industries are a G.E. electronics plant, a synthetic textile mill that’s part of a big outfit based in New York, and a cannery. Vice and gambling are also large, thriving under the rather dynamic and efficient management of the criminal combine that controls the city.”
He paused to catch his breath.
“This organization also controls the municipal government, which is nominally headed by Mayor Roger Stuart Ashley. Take a look,” Williston urged as he extracted a photo from one of the folders and handed it to Gilman. “He claims to be descended from Jeb Stuart, the Confederate general, but if that’s true the family’s descended pretty far.”
“A drunk?” the man from Las Vegas estimated.
“Bourbon for breakfast. Age fifty-nine. Dresses like a Princeton graduate of the nineteen-thirties, which he was. Lots of oratory and no guts. A tiger at bridge, though.”
“As a Southern gentleman should be,” the millionaire commented.
Williston eyed him coldly.
“You’d better let me do all the talking and pay attention,” he ordered, “because I’m going to ask questions later…As I was saying, this criminal group also controls the local police department—there’s a crooked captain named Ben Marton who looks like a pig and lives accordingly—and they own much of the stock in the newspaper, the radio station and the TV station. For our purposes, the mass media are in hostile hands and are being used by the enemy for propaganda designed to discourage any resistance.”
“Labor unions?” wondered the stunt man.
“This mob—the combine—includes the thugs who’ve dominated the local unions for the past fifteen or twenty years. The hoodlums and their phony locals were expelled from the AFL-CIO eight years ago for racketeering—but they’re still in business. Wages in Paradise City are eighteen percent lower than those in the rest of the state,” Williston reported, “and anybody who argues can end up in the Jefferson County Hospital—if he’s lucky.”
Arbolino nodded. “A wonderful place to raise kids,” he reasoned solemnly.
“I’m glad to see that you’re getting into the spirit of the thing,” Williston replied. For the next seventy minutes, the lean professor explained the structure of the criminal syndicate, talked about “Little Johnny” Pikelis, his key associates and the many ways in which they methodically milked the passive city as if it were a defenseless cow.
“There’s a lot more information here,” Williston announced as he gestured toward the pile of documents, “but before we get too involved in those details I’d like to present my first situation estimate of the over-all problem. Here it is, in a nutshell.
“One: Inasmuch as democracy and self-government are basic in the United States and Paradise City is within the U.S.A., it appears that this city has been infiltrated and occupied by agents of a foreign—that is, totalitarian—organization. Morally and politically, the criminal group controlling Paradise City must be considered wholly un-American. These foreign aggressors have succeded in taking over every branch of local government, in part because of the indifference of the indigenous population and in part because the aggressors were skillful and ruthless in their use of both force and bribery.”
The parallel was too obvious to ignore.
“France—nineteen-forty,” Gilman muttered.
“Exactly, and the similarity ought to cheer you up. To continue with the estimate:
“Two: Therefore, if we are to be realistic we must consider Paradise City to be an enemy-occupied town that is totally dominated by a paramilitary fascist organization of criminals and corrupt police. For our purposes, the local police must be considered similar to the Milice, the Vichy police who collaborated so brutally with the Germans from nineteen-forty-one through nineteen-forty-four during the Occupation.”
Something extremely ugly glowed in the gun collector’s eyes.
He remembered the Milice—clearly.
“Bastards. They were all bastards,” he recalled.
“Yes, they were. Three: As for the Pikelis criminal syndicate itself, its power and methods and superior position force a comparison with the Gestapo. As the Gestapo dominated and used the Milice,” the teacher explained, “so the Pikelis group dominates and uses t
he Paradise City police. From this evaluation, we see that Pikelis himself is functioning as the Gauleiter—the head of the fascist apparatus in the region with the same life-and-death powers that Hitler’s gauleiters exercised in conquered territories.”
Fantastic.
Even though it made sense it was all fantastic, Arbolino thought to himself as he listened to the presentation. Almost as strange was the cool, sensible voice in which Williston was presenting this extraordinary material, just as if it were simply another lecture in “Psychology 1—An Introductory Survey.”
“Four: The fascist occupation forces now dominate both political parties, and today these parties are largely sham organizations within Jefferson County. Within Paradise City, Mayor Ashley and all senior officials must be viewed as collaborators—either bought or intimidated. As already outlined, mass media are in enemy hands and Paradise City—like any other town garrisoned by a foreign force—has no recourse to public opinion. No help can be expected from the state government or state police, since the Pikelis group has reached an accommodation with key politicians based on regular ‘delivery’ of the Jefferson County votes.”
The man from Las Vegas shook his head gloomily.
The odds were even worse than he’d calculated.
“There’s more, and it isn’t any jollier,” Williston warned.
Gilman shrugged. “It’s all a bad dream,” he said. “Just a dream, a terrible dream. I’ll wake up in a minute in my little trundle bed in Las Vegas, and I’ll find that this entire thing is a nightmare caused by eating too much smoked salmon.”
“Go ahead, Andy,” Arbolino urged impatiently.
“Five: The enemy armed forces garrisoning Paradise City, uniformed and civilian, number between one hundred twenty and one hundred sixty men, and their support organization probably includes five hundred or six hundred paid collaborators. The garrison is well equipped with modern weapons, operates a fleet of fourteen police radio cars plus the usual criminal investigation laboratory. In the absence of any Resistance organization, it must be assumed that the occupation forces have the skills, equipment and organization for effective counterespionage and counterinsurgency operations. So far as we know, there is only one person even considering active opposition—the anonymous individual who sent the clippings…Now we get to The Problem.”
He glanced up, saw that P.T. Carstairs was still smiling.
The gun collector wasn’t the least bit troubled or discouraged.
“Six: The Problem: to infiltrate covertly the enemy-occupied area that is Paradise City, now totally dominated by a foreign fascist organization; to ascertain and exploit the weak points in this paramilitary organization; to build, train and equip an effective Resistance movement that will cooperate in a vigorous campaign of espionage, sabotage and psychological warfare; to splinter and destroy the fascist organization; to identify and punish the person or persons responsible for the death of Eddie Barringer.”
With his eyes half closed and his internal computer automatically filing the data, Gilman puffed on one of P.T. Carstairs’ excellent Canary Island cigars and gently nodded in agreement.
“A fair and realistic estimate of the situation,” he judged.
“It’s better than that,” the husky stunt man chimed in briskly. “It’s a great situation estimate, but the trouble is that the situation itself stinks. They’ve got us more than one hundred to one, Andy.”
Williston listened silently to their reactions to his carefully factual report, conscious that they were all betting their lives on his appraisal of the situation and dangers. Now he looked at the second most eligible bachelor in the United States.
“We’re outnumbered,” the millionaire admitted, “but we’ve got plenty of the best equipment and weapons. Besides, we’ll never have to shoot it out with their entire force anyway. Guerrilla warfare, not pitched battles, is our bit. We’ll know them but they won’t know us, so it could be fun.”
“You have an odd sense of humor,” observed the man from Las Vegas as he tapped the ash off his Don Diego. “An excellent house brand of cigars but a most peculiar notion of fun. I hope you won’t take it amiss if I suggest that you have your head candled at your earliest convenience. They may find two yolks—or perhaps an entire mushroom omelet.”
Carstairs smiled.
“Scared, Sammy?”
“You bet your silk Sulka shorts I am.”
“Franklin D. Roosevelt said that we have nothing to fear but fear itself,” the gun collector admonished, “and I’m with him.”
“He’s dead—and I don’t want to be. Not this year anyway.”
“All right,” Williston said loudly.
The others turned to look at him.
“All right, let’s cool the small talk. It’s too late for that now; we’re committed,” he reminded them. “Let’s start reading and memorizing these reports and dossiers—now. You guys have a lot of homework to do.”
They walked to the table, each reaching for one or two folders.
“You going to give us a quiz on Friday, Professor?” Carstairs jested.
“Study it all carefully, Pete,” advised the teacher. “Don’t skip a word. To paraphrase an old Cold War slogan, better read than dead—which is what you’ll be if you make any mistakes in Paradise City.”
The four men scattered around the large room, began to read. The second most eligible bachelor in America started with a biographical profile of Pikelis, studied the photo of the “gauleiter” and then smiled when he saw a picture of the racketeer’s lovely blond daughter. Katherine Ann Pikelis was extremely pretty. She was twenty-three, the report noted, and living in Paris.
The report was quite comprehensive, even listing her address in the French capital.
It omitted one fact, an item no outside researcher could have been expected to unearth.
Kathy Pikelis was booked on the next morning’s Air France flight to New York.
12
The new routine at The Inferno began the next morning. They left the obstacle course for practical exercises in jimmying locks, cutting glass, tapping telephones, concealing microphones and using subminiature electronic devices for recording and/or broadcasting. They cut the calisthenics and the shooting to an hour each to leave time for studying the details—physical and human—of Paradise City.
They tacked up large street maps on walls in the living room, dining room, library and kitchen. They carefully memorized the locations of the City Hall, the Police Headquarters, the Fire Department “central,” the Paradise Power generating plant, the gas company’s control station, the telephone exchange, the water control facility, town incinerator, railroad station, bus depot and garage, harbor police dock, television and radio transmitters and studios, commercial airport and nearby Air National Guard field, the Daily Trumpet, the G.E. plant, the Loeb Textile mill, the Blue Star Cannery and the three decent hotels. The enterprising Paradise City Chamber of Commerce had proudly put everything it could think of on the map. This was very useful.
There were other maps, sketches and diagrams. These had been secured, bought or stolen.
Architects’ plans of the police and telephone buildings, the television and radio station.
Sketches of the municipal sewer system and underground tunnels for phone and power cables.
Detailed drawings of the city’s electric generators and their installation. Photos of Paradise City police cars, banks and the Fun Parlor—Pikelis’ largest gambling club.
The four men questioned, tested, helped one another. They read and reread the dossiers on the mayor, Captain Ben Marton, Pikelis and the underworld leader’s key aides. Collectively, these men ran a city of 110,000 presumably free Americans the way a housewife runs a vacuum cleaner—coolly sucking up everything in sight.
The ex-Jedburghs also had to learn—everything—about other men, extraordinary men so new that they didn’t exist yet. These new people were to be invented, designed and produced, original creations similar t
o those that movie industry press agents used to manufacture when nature, heredity, environment and God failed a major Hollywood studio. The men who would covertly invade Paradise City would need much more than glamorous names and expensively capped teeth, however. They required new but ordinary names, new “lives” for cover stories and documents to verify the lies. Each also needed a tolerably good reason for coming to Paradise City. Details—there were so many details, and each had to ring true. Place of birth, father’s name, mother’s name, schools, military records, jobs, girl friends, wives and children, medical history, bank accounts, friends, hobbies, clothing tastes and personal life style—not one of these could be overlooked or minimized.
They were inventing people, a sport widely engaged in during the second half of the twentieth century but rarely played for such final stakes. After the life stories had been debated and refined, they turned to the documents needed to support these synthetic sagas. The Social Security cards were easy to procure—with the cooperation of a Carstairs-owned glass company—and then driver’s licenses in those false names followed after the investment of a few long-distance telephone calls and several hundred dollars. There is a legitimate business in phony driver’s licenses in many states—well-established and flourishing if not entirely legitimate. Next bank accounts were opened in various cities under the various names, producing imprinted checkbooks that added the authoritative blessing of great American financial institutions to the deceit.
More false papers.
More of the latest electronic and infrared gear.
More training sessions.
Now it was time to go.
June 14 had been Flag Day and June 15 Father’s Day and June 21 the first day of summer. July 6 was D-Day for Sledgehammer, the day that the invasion began. Without armadas of gray-hulled landing craft, swept-wing fighter-bombers or heavy transport planes packed with paratroops, the carefully planned operation was launched—quietly. It was so silent that neither the Voice of America nor the alert Huntley-Brinkley news-gathering team noticed or mentioned it, and you couldn’t decently blame Walter Cronkite for missing it either. It just happened. July 6 was a Monday, and every Monday, Wednesday and Friday a National Airlines jet arrived from Atlanta at 5:05 P.M. and left at 5:20 for Jacksonville. July 6 was another hot summer day in Paradise City, bright and humid and almost cloudless. The National flight was one minute late.