The Rackham Files

by Dean Ing

  Captain Hassan al-Nadwi and several of his crew weren't so lucky in my view but, in their own view, I suppose they found the ultimate good luck. Using automatic weapons, they had tried to prevent a boarding party. One competence the Feds do have is marksmanship. No wonder the remaining crew were so hyperactive that morning; they were going to heaven, and they were going now.

  Dana Martin pointed out to me after I handed over her cracked, useless LOC-8 gadget an hour later, that there had probably never been any intention on the part of the holy warriors to sail beyond the Golden Gate again. Their intent was evidently to start up their enormous doomsday machine and, if possible, set it in motion toward San Francisco's crowded Fisherman's Wharf. The crew would all be dead by the time the Ras Ormara grounded; dead, and attended by compliant lovelies in Islamic heaven while men, women, kids, pets, and birds in flight died by the millions around San Francisco Bay.

  Dana said, "We came to that conclusion after we found that all the Korean crew members but one had reservations of one kind or another to clear out of the area," she told me. "They knew what was coming. Once we realized how much of the major component they must have to react with all that stuff on the trailer, we knew they were using the ship itself as a tank. An external hull inspection wouldn't pick that up."

  "You lost me," I said.

  "You know that most ships are double-hulled? Well, the Ras Ormara is triple-hulled, thanks to a rebuild by the Pakistanis. The main component of the ternary agent was brought in using the volume between the hulls as a huge cargo tank. I think Park Soon must have found the transfer pipes, and they couldn't take a chance on him."

  "Three hulls," I muttered. "Talk about your basic inside job. You think the entire crew knew?"

  "Hard to say, but they wouldn't have to. It doesn't take but a few crewmen to pull away from the slip. The North Koreans helped set the stage, but most of them don't believe Allah is going to snatch them up to the highest heaven," she said wryly.

  "I don't get it. Which one of them did," I prompted.

  "The one who was an Indonesian Moslem," she said. "He was on the truck crew with the perp who passed himself off as Norman Goldman."

  "Then he's a clinker over there." I nodded across the boulevard toward the still smoking ruin. "Really keen of you people, assuring me what a great guy Norm Goldman was. Who did your background checks: Frank and Ernest?"

  She didn't want to talk about that. Journalists had a field day later, second-guessing the Feds who failed to penetrate the "legends," the false bona fides, of men who had inserted themselves into mythical backgrounds twenty years before. And in twenty years a smart terrorist can make his legend damned near perfect.

  Dana Martin preferred to concentrate on what I had done. I had already set her straight on the carnage at the chemical plant. She had it in her noggin that I had started the fire. The truth was, that's exactly what I would have done first thing off, if I'd had the chance. I didn't say that.

  "I still don't see exactly how you detonated your bomb," she said. I responded, a bit tersely, by telling her I didn't have to detonate the damned thing. Acetylene doesn't like to be crowded in a dry tank, and when you try, a little bit of pressure makes it disassociate like TNT.

  "I'm no chemist," she said, "but that sounds like you're, ah, prevaricating."

  "Ask a welder, if the FBI has any. If he doesn't know, don't let him do any gas welding. End of discussion."

  Her big beautiful eyes widened, not even remotely friendly. I knew she thought I'd been carrying some kind of incendiary device, which has been a sore point with Feds for many years, ever since the Waco screw-up. She kept looking hard at me. Well, the hell with her—and that's what I said next.

  "You're under contract to us," she reminded me.

  "You offered to cut me loose early today," replied. "I accepted, whether you heard me or not. Keep your effing money if you don't believe me. Oh, don't worry about sweeping up," I said into her astonished frown. "I'll testify in all this; I've got nothing to hide."

  And while she was still talking, I walked away from there with as much dignity as a man can muster when his clothes are in tatters and his only vehicle lies in smoking shreds.

  Actually I did have something to hide: gratitude. I didn't want to try explaining to Dana Martin how I felt about the brilliant, savage, personable, murderous Daud. I wasn't sure I could if I tried.

  There was only one reason why he would've made me promise to drive the miles to San Rafael for lunch: to make certain I wouldn't be a victim of that enormous, lethal cloud of nerve gas that would be boiling up from the Ras Ormara. And while he could have grabbed my ankles when he set himself alight, he didn't. He told me to run for it.

  He would kill millions of people he had never seen, yet he felt something special for a guy who had befriended him for only a few hours. I didn't understand that kind of thinking then, and I still don't.

  I do understand this: A man must never trust his buns to anyone, however intelligent and friendly, who believes there's a bright future in suicide. And as long as I live, I will be haunted by what Daud said, moments before he died. There are more of us, he said. Wait for us. We are coming.

  Well, I believe they'll come, so I'm waiting. But I'm not waiting in a population center with folded hands. I'm recounting the last words of Daud al-Sadiq to everyone who'll listen. I'm also erecting a cyclone fence around my acreage, and I'm in the process of obtaining a captive breeding permit. That's the prerequisite for a guard animal no dog can ever match.

  VITAL SIGNS

  Before July, it promised to be an off-year. Not an election year, nor especially a war year—either of which seems to enrich bail-bondsmen. Early in the summer I was ready to remember it as the year I bought the off-road Porsche and they started serving couscous Maroc at Original Joe's. But it was in mid-July when I learned that the Hunter had been misnamed, and that made it everybody's bad year. It had been one of those muggy days in Oakland with no breeze off the bay to cool a sweaty brow. And I sweat easily since, as a doctor friend keeps telling me, I carry maybe fifty pounds too many. I'm six-two, one-eighty-eight centimeters if you insist, and I tell him I need the extra weight as well as height in my business, but that's bullshit and we both know it. It's my hobbies, not my business, that make me seem a not-so-jolly fat man. My principal pastimes are good food and blacksmithy, both just about extinct. My business is becoming extinct, too. My name's Harve Rackham, and I'm a bounty hunter.

  I had rousted a check-kiting, bail-jumping, smalltime scuffler from an Alameda poolroom and delivered him, meek as mice, to the authorities after only a day's legwork. I suppose it was too hot for him to bother running for it. Wouldn't've done him much good anyhow; for a hundred yards, until my breath gives out, I can sprint with the best of 'em.

  I took my cut from the bail-bondsman and squeezed into my Porsche. Through the Berkeley tunnel and out into Contra Costa County it was cooler, without the Bay Area haze. Before taking the cutoff toward home I stopped in Antioch. Actually I stopped twice, first to pick up a four-quart butter churn the antique shop had been promising me for weeks and then for ground horsemeat. Spot keeps fit enough on the cheap farina mix, but he loves his horsemeat. It was the least I could do for the best damn' watchcat in California.

  Later, some prettyboy TV newsman tried to get me to say I'd had a premonition by then. No way: I'd read a piece in the Examiner about a meteorite off the central coast, but what could that possibly have to do with me? I didn't even have a mobile phone in the Porsche, so I had no idea the Feebies had a job for me until I got home to my playback unit. The FBI purely hates to subcontract a job, anyway. Especially to me. I don't fit their image.

  My place is only a short drive from Antioch, a white two-story frame farmhouse built in 1903 in the shadow of Mount Diablo. When I bought it, I couldn't just stop the restoration at the roof; by the time I'd furnished it in genuine 1910 I'd also become a zealot for the blacksmith shop out back. By now I had most of my money tied up in
functional antiques like my Model C folding Brownie camera, my hurricane lamps with polished reading reflectors, swage sets for the smithy, even Cumberland coal for the forge and a cannonball tuyere. I had no one else to spend my money on but before I got Spot, I worried a lot. While I was tracking down bail-jumpers, some thief might've done a black-bag job on the place. With Spot around, the swagman would have to run more than seventy miles an hour.

  If I'd had more than five acres, I couldn't've paid for the cyclone fence. And if I'd had less, there wouldn't've been room for Spot to run. The fence doesn't keep Spot in; it keeps sensible folks out. Anybody who ignores the CHEETAH ON PATROL signs will have a hard time ignoring Spot, who won't take any food or any shit from any stranger. I'm a one-cat man, and Spot is a one-man cat.

  I saw him caper along the fence as he heard the guttural whoosh of the Porsche fans. I levered the car into boost mode, which brings its skirts down for vastly greater air-cushion effect. Just for the hell of it, I jumped the fence.

  An off-road Porsche is built to take a Baja run, with reversible pitch auxiliary fans that can suck the car down for high cornering force on its wheels, or support it on an air cushion for brief spurts. But I'd seen Feero on film, tricking his own Baja Porsche into bouncing on its air cushion so it'd clear an eight-foot obstacle. You can't know how much fun it was for me to learn that unless you weigh as much as I do.

  Of course, Spot smelled the horsemeat and I had to toss him a sample before he'd quit pestering me. After we sniffed each other around the ears—don't ask me why, but Spot regards that as a kind of back-slap—I went to the basement and checked Spot's automatic feeder. My office is in the basement, too, along with all my other contemporary stuff. From ground level up, it's fin-de-siècle time at my place, but the basement is all business.

  My phone playback had only two messages. The first didn't matter, because the last was from Dana Martin in Stockton. "We have an eighty-eight fugitive and we need a beard," her voice stroked me; softly annealed on the surface, straw-tempered iron beneath. "My SAC insists you're our man. What can I say?" She could've said, whatever her Special Agent in Charge thought in Sacramento, she hated the sight of me. She didn't need to: ours was an old estrangement. "I can come to your place if you'll chain that saber-toothed animal. And if you don't call back by five p.m. Friday, forget it. I wish they'd pay me like they'll pay you, Rackham." Click.

  My minicomputer terminal told me it was four-forty-six. I dialed a Stockton number, wondering why the FBI needed a disguising ploy to hunt a fugitive fleeing from prosecution. It could mean he'd be one of the shoot-first types who can spot a Feebie around a corner. I can get close to those types but I'm too easy to target. The hell of it was, I needed the money. Nobody pays like the Feebies for the kind of work I do.

  Miz Martin was out mailing blueprints but was expected shortly. I left word that I'd rassle the sabertooth if she wanted a souffle at my place, and hung up chuckling at the young architect's confusion over my message. Time was, brick agents didn't have to hold down cover jobs. Dana did architectural drafting when she wasn't on assignment for her area SAC, who's in Sacramento.

  I took a fresh block of ice from the basement freezer and put it in my honest-to-God icebox upstairs. I had nearly a dozen fertile eggs and plenty of cream, and worked up a sweat all over again playing with my new butter churn until I'd collected a quarter-pound of the frothy cream-yellow stuff. It smelled too good to use for cooking, which meant it was just right. After firing up the wood stove, I went outside for coolth and companionship.

  I'd nearly decided La Martin wouldn't show and was playing "fetch" with my best friend when, far down the graveltop road, I heard a government car. When you hear the hum of electrics under the thump of a diesel, it's either a conservation nut or a government man. Or woman, which Dana Martin most assuredly is.

  Spot sulked but obeyed, stalking pipe-legged into the smithy as I remoted the automatic gate. Dana decanted herself from the sedan with the elegance of a debutante, careless in her self-assurance, and stared at my belt buckle. "It's a wonder your heart can take it," she sniffed. Dana could well afford to twit me for my shape. She's a petite blonde with the face of a littlest angel and a mind like a meat cleaver. One of those exquisite-bodied little charmers you want to protect when it's the other guy who needs protection.

  I knew she worked hard to keep in shape and had a fastidious turn of mind so, "We can't all have your tapeworm," I said.

  I thought she was going to climb back into the car, but she only hauled a briefcase from it. "Spare me your ripostes," she said; "people are dying while you wax clever. You have an hour to decide about this job."

  Another slur, I thought; when had I ever turned down Feebie money? I let "no comment" be mine, waved her to my kitchen, poked at the fire in the stove. Adjusting the damper is an art, and art tends to draw off irritation like a poultice. I started separating the eggs, giving Dana the cheese to grate.

  She could've shredded Parmesan on her attitude. "I can brief you," she began, "only after you establish an oral commitment. My personal advice is, don't. It needs an agile man."

  "Hand me the butter," I said.

  She did, shrugging. "All I can tell you beforehand, is that the fugitive isn't human."

  "Spoken like a true believer, Dana. As soon as somebody breaks enough laws, you redefine him as an unperson."

  Relishing it: "I'm being literal, Rackham. He's a big, nocturnal animal that's killed several people. The Bureau can't capture him for political reasons; you'll be working alone for the most part; and it is absolutely necessary to take him alive."

  "Pass the flour. But he won't be anxious to take me alive; is that it?"

  "In a nutshell. And he is much more important than you are. If you screw it up, you may rate a nasty adjective or two in history books—and I've said too much already," she muttered.

  I stirred my supper and my thoughts, adding cayenne to both. Obviously in Bureau files, my dealings with animals hadn't gone unnoticed. They knew I'd turned a dozen gopher snakes loose to eliminate the varmints under my lawn. They knew about my ferret that kept rats away. They knew Spot. I'd taken a Kodiak once, and they knew that, too. But true enough, I was slower now. I postulated a Cape Buffalo, escaped while some South Africans were presenting it to a zoo worth its weight in Krugerrands to antsy politicians. "I think I'll give this one a 'bye," I sighed and, as afterthought; "but what was the fee for taking it à la Frank Buck?"

  "Who the devil is Frank Buck?"

  "Never mind. How much?"

  "A hundred thousand," she said, unwilling.

  I nearly dropped the dry mustard. For that, I could find Spot a consort and dine on escargot every night. "I'm in," I said quickly. "Nobody lives forever."

  * * *

  While the souffle baked, Dana revealed how far afield my guess had gone. I fed her flimsy disc into my office computer downstairs and let her do the rest. The display showed a map of Central California, with a line arching in from offshore. She pointed to the line with a light pencil. "That's the path of the so-called meteorite last Saturday night. Point Reyes radar gave us this data." Now the display magicked out a ream of figures. "Initial velocity was over fifteen thousand meters per second at roughly a hundred klicks altitude, too straight and too fast for a ballistic trajectory."

  "Would you mind putting that into good old feet and miles? I'm from the old school, in case you hadn't noticed," I grinned.

  "You're a goddamn dinosaur," she agreed. "Okay: we picked up an apparent meteorite coming in at roughly a forty-five degree angle, apparent mass um, fifty tons or so, hitting the atmosphere at a speed of about—fifty thousand feet per second. Accounting for drag, it should've still impacted offshore within a few seconds, sending out a seismometer blip, not to mention a local tsunami. It didn't.

  "It decelerated at a steady hundred and forty g's and described a neat arc that must've brought it horizontal near sea-level."

  I whistled. "Hundred and forty's way above hum
an tolerance."

  "The operative word is 'steady.' It came in so hot it made the air glow, and it was smart—I mean, it didn't behave as though purely subject to outside forces. That kind of momentum change took a lot of energy under precise control, they tell me. Well, about eleven seconds after deceleration began it had disappeared, too low on the horizon for coverage, and loafing along at sub-mach speed just off the water."

  "Russians," I guessed.

  "They know about it, but it wasn't them. Don't they wish? It wasn't anybody human. The vehicle came in over the Sonoma coast and hedge-hopped as far as Lake Berryessa northwest of Sacramento. That's where the UFO hotline folks got their last report and wouldn't you know it, witnesses claimed the usual round shape and funny lights."

  I sprinted for the stairs, Spot-footed across the kitchen floor, snuck a look into the oven. "Just in time," I called, as Dana emerged from below.

  She glanced at the golden trifle I held in my pot-holder, then inhaled, smiling in spite of herself. "You may have your uses at that."

  "Getting up here so fast without jolting the souffle?"

  "No, cooking anything that smells this good," she said, and preceded me to the dining room. "I don't think you have the chance of a cardiac case on this hunt, and I said as much to Scott King."

  She told me why over dinner. The scrambled interceptors from Travis and Beale found nothing, but a Moffett patrol craft full of sensor equipment sniffed over the area and found traces of titanium dioxide in the atmosphere. Silicon and nox, too, but those could be explained away.

  You couldn't explain away the creature trapped by college students near the lake on Sunday evening. Dana passed me a photo, and my first shock was one of recognition. The short spotted fur and erect short ears of the quadruped, the heavy shoulders and bonecrunching muzzle, all reminded me of a dappled bear cub. It could have been a terrestrial animal wearing a woven metallic harness but for its eyes, small and lowset near the muzzle. It looked dead, and it was.