The Hamlet Warning

by Leonard Sanders

  A vague, discordant impression nudged Loomis’s brain.

  He nursed the fleeting sensation of unease, fishing for the source.

  Then he made the connection.

  Air-conditioning repairmen in a section that had been without electrical power for three days?

  He remembered that one of the repairmen had looked up, expressionless. Loomis recalled his stance, loose, yet poised, near a toolbox.

  The other repairman had not looked up — not with a helicopter hovering a hundred feet overhead.

  Unnatural.

  And on reflection, that gadget on the floor of the cooling tower seemed too big for an ordinary pump.

  “Give me a phone book!” Loomis said.

  A lieutenant hurried into an adjoining room. He returned with a phone book. Loomis rapidly checked the listings.

  No “El Mickey” air-conditioning service was listed. And Loomis was certain that was the name he had seen on the side of the panel truck parked in the street.

  “Hold the announcement!” Loomis said to Galíndez. “Give me ten more minutes! I’ll radio in!”

  He started for the door, with Johnson following.

  “Oh Lord,” Johnson said. “We’ve got another one of those famous Loomis hunches.”

  “More than a hunch,” Loomis said. “I think this is it.”

  Coon was in the hall by the vending machines, drinking a Sprite and eating potato chips.

  “And grab your physicist,” Loomis said to Johnson. “I have the feeling we’re going to need him.”

  *

  Minus 01:04 Hours

  Zaloudek ran a thin strand of wire to the base of the cover and carefully attached the end with a drop of solder heated with his butane torch. He then measured the wire to make certain that he had not placed the solder in the wrong spot.

  “For God’s sake, hurry!” Arnheiter said from the foot of the ladder.

  “I’m about there,” Zaloudek said.

  He fitted the timer into place and began soldering the connections. Arnheiter came up the ladder far enough to see over the coaming. Zaloudek ignored him, concentrating on what remained to be done.

  Arnheiter had been beside himself with worry over the helicopter. He now began again.

  “Didn’t they look like Americans to you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Zaloudek said, attaching the wires to the energizer. “I didn’t look up until they were gone.”

  “They had to be Americans,” Arnheiter insisted. “Two big guys, looked like pro football players. And a professor-looking little fat guy with a pipe. They looked right at us for a long time.”

  “They looked at a lot of people,” Zaloudek said. “It just seemed like a long time.” Zaloudek had been terrified while the helicopter was overhead, but now that it was gone, his relief was so great he no longer felt concern.

  He had worked too long and too hard for this moment to think of anything else.

  Unstrapping his chronometer watch, he placed it beside the electronic timer. Five minutes after twelve. Thanks to the helicopter and Arnheiter’s irrational worry, Zaloudek was five minutes behind schedule. But they still had fifty-five minutes, plenty of time to reach the mountains.

  “How much longer?” Arnheiter demanded from the ladder.

  Zaloudek didn’t answer. He wasn’t even breathing. He was setting the timer, giving it his full attention. Arnheiter came on up the ladder and stood behind him, blocking off the sun. That helped some. Zaloudek got the timer set precisely right, released the knob, and resumed breathing.

  “The bomb is armed,” he said. “All I have left to do is the cover.”

  “Leave it,” Arnheiter said. “For Christ’s sake, it’s not going to rain.”

  “Won’t take but a minute,” Zaloudek said. “This may be the most important part.”

  Arnheiter waited impatiently while Zaloudek fitted the cover into place. The thin wire snared its track on the first attempt, a stroke of luck Zaloudek hadn’t expected. The aluminum was light, yet tough, offering considerable protection. His ingenious interlocks dropped into place with loud clicks.

  Arnheiter’s nerves jumped. “What the hell was that?”

  “The interlocks,” Zaloudek explained. “The cover fits like a Chinese puzzle. And there’s a trip wire. If anybody finds this thing and tries to disarm it, the wire will trip the trigger.”

  “Jesus,” Arnheiter breathed. “A booby trap.”

  “Right,” Zaloudek said, feeling his pride. “This is going to go in fifty-four minutes, no matter what. I couldn’t stop it now, myself. And I designed it. Nobody can stop it.”

  “Christ!” Arnheiter said. “I wasn’t told anything about that!”

  “It wasn’t in the plan,” Zaloudek admitted. “I thought it up myself.”

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here!” Arnheiter said.

  They climbed out of the water tower, taking the guns but leaving the tools behind. Zaloudek laid his weapon on the graveled roof and climbed back up the ladder to replace the slats, hiding the bomb. He then hurried to catch up with Arnheiter, who was at the door leading into the building. Arnheiter was crouched down on one knee, cradling the walkie-talkie to his ear. Zaloudek assumed he was alerting the crew to return to the van, but when Arnheiter looked up, his face was drained of color.

  “The police,” he said. “Steiner can see them stopped in front of the van. They’re coming in! They’re coming in this building!”

  Zaloudek and Arnheiter froze, staring at each other in indecision.

  Then gunfire erupted on Calle El Conde below.

  Chapter 29

  Minus 00:54 Hours

  The gunman may not have seen Loomis and Johnson pushing their way through the crowd until after he opened fire. Loomis had parked the jeep across El Conde from the El Mickey van, directly beneath the gunman’s window, and below his line of vision. The first of the Policía Nacional arrived a moment later, their little Belgium FN4 armored car winding its way through the throng of jubilant Dominicans. They stopped in front of the van. Loomis and Johnson left Coon in the jeep and had started through the crowd toward the van as the three policemen stepped out of the armored car.

  The police lieutenant had just opened his mouth to speak to Loomis when a burst from a machine pistol passed just over Loomis’s head and made a crimson mess of the lieutenant’s chest. Two sergeants scrambled for the hatch of the armored car. The gunman cut them down inches away from the FN4’s two 7.62 machine guns.

  “Dumb fucks!” Johnson yelled, diving beneath the van, bringing his Heckler around for use. Loomis landed beside him, painfully skinning both kneecaps on the rough pavement.

  The crowd, screaming and yelling in panic, vanished within fifteen seconds. Then an eerie silence settled over the deserted street. Loomis studied the sprawled bodies beside the armored car. All three were apparently dead. He crawled across Johnson’s legs to look back at the jeep. Coon was gone.

  “I told you he had enough sense to come in out of the rain,” Johnson said. “You didn’t believe me, did you?”

  “Where’s the gun?” Loomis asked. “You have him located?”

  “Roughly. Third floor, second window from the right, I think. You and your hunches.”

  “I can’t imagine leaving only one gun to protect your rear on an operation like this,” Loomis said. “There’s probably more.”

  “And above us,” Johnson said. “We better get out from under this thing. That clown may put a tracer into the gas tank. Or somebody might drop a grenade.”

  “If they had grenades, they would have used them by now,” Loomis said. “But you might be right about that tank.”

  “I’m overjoyed you agree. It’s made my day. What the fuck we gonna do?”

  Loomis ducked his head under the muffler and inched toward the curb. “If you’ll keep that gun occupied, I’ll try to make it to the doorway. Then I’ll keep him busy while you come in behind me.”

  “I don’t like the odds,” J
ohnson said.

  Before Loomis could answer, a barrage of bullets splattered along the pavement at the edge of the truck, showering the underside with chips of concrete and shattered bullet fragments. One large chunk put a hole in the muffler by Loomis’s head. Johnson put a hand to his face, where a flying pebble of concrete had drawn blood.

  “Those odds are looking better,” he said.

  “We could wait,” Loomis said. “With all this shooting, plenty of help’s probably on the way.”

  “That thought may have been a great comfort to Custer in his last troubled moments,” Johnson said. “It’s not to me. I’m ready when you are.”

  “All right,” Loomis said. “Go.”

  When he heard Johnson’s Heckler open up, Loomis charged for the doorway, holding his own weapon in his left hand, out of the way. Bullets landed near him, apparently fired from almost straight overhead, but Loomis was moving fast, zigzagging with a sixth sense nurtured through almost three decades of war. He reached the heavy glass door unharmed, yanked it open, and plunged into the foyer of the office building, rolling to the floor as he went, bringing his weapon up to cover the stairway and interior doorways.

  There was no return fire.

  Loomis hurriedly checked the entry. The old elevator cage was on the first floor. The stairway leading up beyond the elevator was deserted. All the doors leading off the foyer were locked. If a lookout had been posted in the foyer, he obviously had prudently retreated. Loomis was alone, at least for the moment, He returned to the front of the building. Using the butt of his gun, he knocked a chunk out of a front window. He then flattened himself against the wall as the machine pistol across the street finished the job, showering the lobby with shards of glass. When the burst ended, Loomis whipped his gun to the hole and fired at the dark shadow framed in the upstairs window. The shadow abruptly disappeared.

  Loomis knew there would be no more gunfire from that source.

  Johnson came running, shooting upward at the balconies overhead. Loomis held the door open, but Johnson stopped in the street, dancing, shooting, a wild man.

  Loomis yelled at him. Johnson raced for the door, grinning. A body fell to the pavement behind him.

  Johnson charged through the foyer and knelt by the stairway, panting hard, looking up at the next landing. “There’s two or three more fuckers up there,” he said. “Fourth floor, I think. And some clown was shooting from the roof with a pistol.”

  Loomis looked at his watch. “Twelve-eleven,” he said. “We’ve got forty-nine minutes.”

  “If those clowns are trapped with it, they may defuse it,” Johnson pointed out.

  “Maybe. But we can’t count on it. We don’t know what kind of fanatics we’re dealing with.”

  “O.K. So what do we do now?”

  “We wait,” Loomis said. “The building will have to be taken floor by floor.”

  Within two minutes the foyer was full of Policía Nacional, government soldiers, and a few marines. On the suggestion of Loomis, the colonel in charge sent a detail to the rear of the building to cut off all possible escape.

  Another detail was left in the lobby to guard the door and the elevator. The colonel, Loomis, and Johnson led the advance up the stairway. On each landing, the colonel delegated men to search the entire floor.

  As they rounded the landing below the fifth floor, they were met by gunfire, hurried and inaccurate.

  “Time is running out,” Loomis told the colonel. “Why don’t we toss them a grenade?”

  Two fragmentation grenades were passed up the stairwell. Loomis pulled the pins, waited two beats, then tossed them. The explosions were deafening.

  Johnson charged up the staircase, shooting. One gunman was dead. The other made only a feeble gesture toward his gun before Johnson stitched him across the chest.

  Cautiously, Loomis led the way on up the narrow stairway to the half-level above. The door leading onto the roof was locked. Loomis had noticed a fire ax on the fourth-floor landing. He called for it to be handed up the stairwell.

  Laying his Heckler aside, Loomis swung the ax, shattering the door near the heavy lock. On the third blow the door swung open. Standing helplessly, his hands full of ax, Loomis saw a tall, lean man on the roof turn and raise an Israeli Uzi machine pistol, bringing the barrel up to point at Loomis’s chest. Then Johnson rammed his way past, knocking Loomis aside, his gun chattering. The man went down.

  Loomis picked up his gun and ran onto the roof. A short, square-built little man was running for cover behind a ventilator. Loomis yelled at him to halt. As an answer, the man stopped and brought up a Luger, aiming at Loomis.

  Loomis fired a brief burst. The man toppled over backward.

  Police swarmed onto the roof.

  Johnson went to the tall, lanky man he had killed and rolled him over.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “Arnheiter. I thought I recognized him.”

  “Does he point to anyone?”

  “Not necessarily. He’s a soldier of fortune in the less inspiring senses of the term.”

  Loomis climbed the ladder to the water-cooling tower and pulled away the slats. A strange, awkward-looking gadget was bolted to the floor of the tower. Tools lay scattered around it.

  “The bomb’s in this tower!” he yelled to Johnson. “Get Coon up here!”

  Johnson trotted to the door leading down. Loomis stepped over the coaming into the water tower. He leaned his Heckler against a corner post and picked his way through the mess of tools.

  The bomb was nothing like what he had expected. No more than three and a half feet long, it was less than three feet wide. A heavy aluminum cover hid the mechanism. Loomis put an ear to the metal. There was no time-bomb tick, only a faint, soft hum, like an electric clock.

  “Señor Loomis!” someone yelled from below. “This man is still alive!”

  Loomis hurried down the ladder. The man he’d shot was propped up against the roof superstructure, bleeding profusely from holes in his upper abdomen and lower chest. The lungs didn’t seem to be affected, but he was losing blood much too rapidly to live.

  He was older than Loomis expected. The photograph apparently had been taken several years ago.

  He looked up at Loomis. “Get me out of here,” he begged.

  “Hello, Zaloudek,” Loomis said. “We’ve been looking all over hell for you.”

  “The bomb,” Zaloudek said. “The bomb will go at one o’clock.”

  “We know that,” Loomis told him. “We’ve got an expert from Los Alamos here. He’s on his way up. You can tell him how to defuse it.”

  Zaloudek shook his head in irritation. “You don’t understand,” he said. “It can’t be stopped. Not by anyone. I designed it. I built it. I know! Even if I had more time, I couldn’t stop it. We’ve got to get out of here!”

  Loomis knelt beside him. There was no doubt in his mind that the man was telling the truth. His fear was so strong Loomis could smell it.

  “How big a bomb is it?” he asked.

  “Forty-nine kilograms.”

  “How big a blast? Hiroshima? Nagasaki?”

  “Less metal than Hiroshima. But more efficient,” Zaloudek said. Despite the fear, there was a trace of pride in his voice.

  Loomis looked at his watch. “Thirty-eight minutes,” he said. “Before we move you, I want some answers. Who is behind this? Who or what is Hamlet? What do they want?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Bullshit! They hired you! They paid you!”

  Zaloudek gripped Loomis by the sleeve. “I’ll tell you all I know,” he said. “I was contacted by a man in Lisbon. He paid me ten thousand dollars to design the bomb. He paid me twenty thousand more when I delivered the blueprints. Then he came back and promised another hundred thousand if I would build it.”

  “Who?”

  “He used a code name. Horatio. That’s all I know!”

  “He’s the only person you dealt with?”

  “Yes.”

&
nbsp; “When did you meet Arnheiter?”

  “Here, in Santo Domingo, last week. I was given the rendezvous and a code word.” He struggled to see the chronometer watch on his wrist. “You’ve got to get me out of here!” he said, pleading. “I’ll do anything!”

  Loomis pulled his sleeve out of Zaloudek’s grasp. Unless he missed his guess, Zaloudek had only a few minutes to live, whether the bomb went or not. “A doctor is on his way,” he said. “We’ll take you with us when we leave.”

  He went back to the bomb. He could hardly believe that the simple-looking device could devastate an entire city. Yet science and history were on Zaloudek’s side.

  Johnson came trotting up the ladder. Coon was behind him.

  “Found him in a fucking bar, for Christ’s sake,” Johnson said.

  “I always have a few drinks before I disarm a nuclear weapon,” Coon said, grinning. “Steadies the hand.”

  “It’s booby-trapped,” Loomis told them. “Zaloudek said it can’t be disarmed.”

  Johnson stared at him. “You shitting me?”

  “No,” Loomis said. “I’m just shitting.”

  Johnson leaned over for a closer look at the bomb. “You believe him?”

  “I believe him,” Loomis said. “He was plenty scared.”

  “Expert, do your stuff,” Johnson said to Coon.

  From a leather folder, Coon took out a device resembling a dental mirror. A small light was coordinated with the mirror. Coon crouched and began probing niches and holes in the bomb and its aluminum cover. He seemed in no hurry.

  “Very ingenious,” he said at last. “Very sophisticated. I had no idea Zaloudek was that good. I’m rather impressed.”

  “I’m sure they did this whole fucking thing just to impress you,” Johnson said. “Can you disarm it?”

  Coon probed another minute before replying. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think I should try. Not until the area is evacuated. You see, the cover is rigged like a Yale lock. Tumblers have dropped into place, locking the cover tight. There is a trip wire that makes it dangerous to fish around inside. Any effort to remove the cover would be virtually certain to trip the mechanism.”