The Monkey Handlers

by G Gordon Liddy

  “Think what you were saving them from,” Wings muttered.

  “All right, tie ’em off and bring them over here,” whispered Stone. The three of them followed Stone’s instructions and put two bags into the wall opening, starting down below the cut and up to the top. Stone picked up the plastic bag filled with the ammonium-nitrate fertilizer and fuel-oil mixture. “Okay, guys,” he directed, “flatten that stuff out as well as you can.”

  Pappy, Wings, and Arno pressed the plastic bags as flat against the opposite drywall as they could while Stone lifted the final plastic bag—the one with the fertilizer and fuel-oil mixture—in behind them. He broke pieces of the drywall he had cut out to prop the bags in place, then motioned the men out of the way.

  Stone turned to Saul Rosen. “What’s the latest?”

  “They’re away from this wall—anywhere from halfway across the room to the other side of it. Least as far as I can judge from listening to them move around and their voices getting louder and softer.”

  “Okay,” Stone said, “according to the plans, we’ve got a clean wall here, but I’ve already discovered one modification, so be ready for anything. According to the photographs Sara took, there was no apparatus against this wall. The blast will breach it for us, and that and the little surprise we put in front of the explosive should give us the edge. I’m counting on it to delay any attempt to kill the prisoners and to let us get them first. On the blast, everybody move in and double-tap the bad guys.”

  Saul Rosen had divested himself of his listening gear and held the Browning Hi-Power in both hands, cocked, pointed toward the floor. Pappy Saye had his .357 Magnum, hammer down because it was a double-action, in a similar position. Arno Bitt had given Wings Harper back his AK-47 and snicked back the hammer on the big .45 Ballester-Molina. “I still wanna see how you’re gonna set off that fertilizer-fuel-oil shit,” he said to Stone.

  “Watch,” said Stone. He withdrew a silver cylinder ten inches long and one and a half inches in diameter that had been duct-taped to his thigh. The lettering on it read:

  SIGNAL, SMOKE, GROUND, GREEN, PARACHUTE, MI28A1 WARNING: Do not fire this signal if cork sealing disk in end of barrel is loose.

  “Ooooooh, shit!” said Pappy Saye.

  The men moved farther back. Stone angled himself away from behind the plastic bags and against the opposite wall, staying as far away from the hole as he could and still be certain of getting the job done right this first and only time. At one end of the cylinder was a hole. Inside the hole was a primer. Stone slipped off the cap at the opposite end of the silver tube and slid it onto the end with the primer in it, leaving an inch to go. He gripped the tube firmly in his left hand and pointed it at the explosive in the wall.

  “Wings,” he said, “use that AK to cover our ass. All right, people, let’s launch!”

  So saying, Michael Stone slammed the base of the aluminum tube and a rocket fired directly into the plastic bag containing the mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. The shock of the impact and flare bursting detonated the low-order explosive, and it exploded with a characteristic deep bass WHOOOM!

  Inside the laboratory, everyone was rocked by the long, heavy overpressure wave of a low-order explosive, confused by the swirling green signal smoke and then, looking down at themselves, shocked into the momentary belief that they were about to die as they beheld themselves covered with blood and guts they had every reason to believe was their own, not that of the recently slaughtered and disemboweled laboratory animals packed in the plastic bags in front of the explosive.

  Frozen in horror, Letzger and his men did not see momentarily the danger as Stone, Saye, Bitt, and Rosen rushed into the chaotic room and, with machinelike discipline, pivoting like mechanical men in a penny arcade, fired two shots each directly into the heads of the dreaded, white-coated monkey handlers. Some died before they could even distinguish between the explosive blast and the impact of the heavy bullets crashing into their skulls.

  Sara Rosen put her hands to her face and screamed as to the blood and entrails already on her was added the blood and brains of the burst-open heads of the two assistants who had but a moment before been trying to force her into the Lexan chamber with Eddie Berg.

  Dr. Letzger recovered from the shock first. He was standing next to the door to the room containing the acid vat. Hearing the first shots and taking advantage of the thick green swirl of signal smoke, he drew a Walther P-5 9 mm double-action semiautomatic pistol from under his white coat and, to the accompaniment of Sara’s screams and the insistent whining of smoke alarms set off by the green haze from the signal rocket, ducked into the adjoining vat room.

  Saul Rosen ran to his sister and knocked her to the ground, covering her with his body. He did it instinctively, although there was no longer any need to, the surgical shooting over almost as soon as it began. Michael Stone spotted Letzger’s move and went after him. He kicked the door farther open from a position to its side, drawing 9 mm fire from Letzger, who was trying to get around the vat to escape through another door on the opposite side of the vat from the laboratory.

  As Stone moved to return fire, he saw no target. Letzger was nowhere to be seen. Stone’s eyes narrowed as he noted that the opposite door had not been opened. There were no windows. He concluded that Letzger had hoped to trick him into believing he had made good his escape but was, in fact, down behind the far side of the vat, perhaps even moving around it to take Stone from the flank. Stone dropped down himself, crawling beneath the gurney that fed the seething vat, coming to rest squatting with his back to the rim so he could bring his .45 auto to bear in either direction.

  A sound to his right caused Stone to swing his pistol, held in both hands, arms outstretched, toward it, bending his head to clear the top of the gurney above him. Before he could get his sights all the way around, Letzger appeared, inching his way around the rim of the vat in a duck walk, right hand holding his pistol out in front of him, left hand sliding along the side of the vat. Seeing Stone under the gurney, the startled Letzger snapped off a shot that went wild, then sprung upward to hurdle the gurney and make his escape before Stone could get out from under it. As Letzger was in midair above the gurney, the squatting Stone tucked his chin down against his chest and, thrusting upward with his powerful legs, caught the bottom of the gurney squarely with his shoulders and propelled it sharply upward and backward on its hinges.

  The gurney slammed into the airborne Letzger and knocked him backward over the rim. He hung there for what seemed to him an eternity as Stone, stepping to the side and turning to avoid the gurney now on its way back down, faced him. In that instant, the two men’s eyes locked, Letzger’s pleading. From somewhere he thought he had abandoned within himself, Stone found among the icy cold of a clicked-on operational SEAL a flicker of compassion. As Letzger descended, screaming, toward the fuming, roiling acid, Stone fired the heavy Colt. A big blue hole appeared in Letzger’s forehead, and the back blew out of his head. He stopped screaming before the boiling acid reacted violently as it claimed him, as it had his victims so many times before.

  Stone’s eyes widened as he witnessed the destruction of Letzger. He thought back to the incident in the railway-receiving hangar. Jesus! he thought to himself. So that’s what’s been going on here … human experimentation! No wonder they were trying to keep the lid on!

  * * *

  When the overpressure and WharruummP! from the low-order blast six floors below him awakened Helmar Metz, his first inclination was to dismiss it as the sonic boom from a military jet—a common annoyance in Germany, where U.S. Air Force fighters exceed the speed of sound regularly in practice. Then he remembered where he was. At that moment, the telephone rang. Fully alert now, he scooped it up. “Yes!”

  “Mr. Metz, sir, Foley with uniformed security. Plant entrance. We got a multiple smoke-detector report on the twelfth floor, plus I felt something, like something blew up in the plant. I was gonna call the fire department, only in the standing orders h
ere it says for anything on the twelfth floor, you gotta be advised first and authorize it.”

  “Correct,” said Metz. “Well done. Call no one. I handle it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Metz hung up. He had slept in his shirt and trousers. Now he fastened his belt and put on his shoes and tied them with the speed that can come only from years in the military, removed a Walther P-5 from under his pillow and pocketed it, then moved quickly to the conference room where his men were sleeping to rouse them.

  “Twelfth floor!” he commanded. “Come with me.”

  An eager aide rushed toward the elevator to summon a car.

  “Nein!” Metz snarled. “If there is fire, the lift could stop at any time. We use the fire stairs.”

  * * *

  “Mike! Mike!” Saul Rosen shouted through the door. “Come here; you won’t believe what they’ve been doing here. Look!” He pointed toward the Lexan cabinet from which Eddie Berg had been released and was being held by Sara.

  “I know, I know,” said Stone, “human experimentation.” He waved his hand at the laboratory equipment. “Look at the scale of this stuff. It’s all designed for humans. That’s why they were so hot to get those Polaroids back from Sara even though the things were empty. They were afraid someone might compare them with the size of the walls and ceiling and all and catch on that the stuff was human-scale. I mean, Jesus! Look at the size of that drum. I can’t believe I didn’t tumble to it.”

  “No, no, Mike. I mean, yes, you’re right. But that’s not what I mean. Look over here in that chamber they were putting Sara in—where we found Eddie and the others, the Mexicans.” He pointed to two small cylinders, about the size of lunch-bucket thermos bottles, sitting outside the rear of the Lexan plastic chamber. From the top of each, woven metal tubing ran to a valve, then the two pieces of tubing joined each other, and the single tube ran into the chamber through a tight seal and ended, open. Each small bottle bore a label: GB(L)1 and GB(L)2.

  Stone looked at the bottles and the chamber, taking in the tight sealing all around its joints and the door. “Dirty motherfuckers!” Stone said, his face growing dark. “They were gonna gas them all and then dissolve them in that acid back there.” He waved his hand back toward the room holding the vat.

  “No, damn it!” Saul said, exasperated. “Look at the gas bottles. See what it says on them?”

  Stone’s face was blank, uncomprehending.

  “GB! Goddamn it, Mike, GB! Don’t you know what that is? Don’t you remember your training, for Christ’s sake? I’ll give you a hint. Remember all that stuff about these guys talking about Sara before she ever got here? Remember you grilling me about it because of what Ira Levin said? They weren’t talking about Sara, Mike. GB means Sarin, the deadliest nerve gas there is. But that’s not all. There’re two bottles, see? And an ‘L’ in parentheses! Now look at this.” Saul held out a bloodstained notebook, but before he could go on, they were interrupted by the sound none of them would ever forget from Vietnam—a burst of fire from an AK-47.

  Michael Stone used his command voice: “Later! Give me a sitrep!”

  Saul Rosen’s military training snapped in. “Eddie Berg’s blind in one eye but otherwise okay. We got a totally blind Mexican who speaks no English. Sara’s okay. We got another Mexican strapped to a frame over there with a hole in his middle and a picture window in it. I dunno; if we move him, it could kill him.”

  “We don’t, he could end up taking an acid bath,” said Stone.

  “Our people?”

  “Okay.”

  “Wings is engaging some guys tryin’ to get on the floor from the fire stairs,” Arno Bitt offered.

  “Anyone speak Spanish?” asked Stone.

  “I can.” It was Eddie Berg, with a torn piece of Sara’s dress around his eyes. It was an attempt at a bandage but looked more like a blindfold. “I think I know these guys.”

  “Tell ’em to do exactly as you say. We’re gonna try to get them out of here, or at least get them some help.”

  “Okay,” said Eddie. He lifted the cloth up from his remaining eye, squinted and blinked a few times to clear his vision in it, winced, and started to speak to the two men in rapid-fire border Spanish.

  Stone moved rapidly beside Wings Harper, who touched off a two-shot burst as he arrived. “I’ve got one dead for sure. The others are not too eager to get their heads blown off. They’ve gotta be planning an alternative attack if they haven’t figured one out already and started maneuvering.”

  “Yeah,” said Stone. “Only we’re not staying around to find out. When I give you the signal, move back to the elevator.”

  “Gotcha covered,” said Wings. He kept his eyes on the sights of the AK as he spoke, and as he returned to the laboratory, Stone heard another two-shot burst and Wings’s voice calling out, “Make that two dead!”

  Stone led the way out of the laboratory. Sara Rosen was immediately behind him, followed by her brother, then Eddie Berg and the blind Mexican behind him, holding on to his belt for guidance. Bringing up the rear were Pappy Saye and Arno Bitt, rolling the Cermak table between them with the Mexican with the window in his abdomen still strapped to it for his own safety. Both Mexicans trailed dangling sensor wires still taped to their torsos. The group proceeded rapidly to the elevator bank under cover of a burst of automatic fire from Wings Harper’s AK-47 to keep the enemy’s heads behind the door, where they couldn’t see what was going on. “Everybody know what to do?” Stone asked.

  There was no answer to indicate to the contrary, so Stone hit the button to summon the far elevator. Mechanical noise soon confirmed that it was operating. As soon as the door opened, Stone checked the interior and, finding it empty, called out, “Wings!” Then he slipped inside and punched the button marked L, for lobby. The car descended, Stone following its progress by watching the floor numbers click off on the panel over the door. As the car approached the lobby, Stone moved to the front. He positioned his finger on the Door Open button, then turned around and faced the rear, the button panel at his back, so that with the door open, anyone looking into the car could not see him.

  The elevator car slowed to a stop. A moment later, the doors opened, and Stone depressed the Door Open button and held it there. Outside, in the lobby, Foley, the uniformed security guard who had reported the sound of the explosion to Metz, heard the elevator’s electronic tone announcing the arrival of the car and turned from his position at the television-screens monitoring desk in curiosity to see who would be coming down to the lobby at that early hour. Then it occurred to him that it might be Metz himself, and he hastened to greet him.

  Before Foley could get out from behind his desk, straighten up his uniform, and get all the way over to the elevator bank, the door to the car opened and stayed open. There was no one visible inside. Puzzled, Foley moved to investigate, cautiously sticking his head inside the car. It was the last thing he remembered as Michael Stone slammed the heavy slide of the Colt .45 directly into the point of Foley’s jaw, knocking him senseless.

  Upstairs, on the twelfth floor, the other elevator car had been called by Saul Rosen as soon as Stone’s car could be seen to leave. Under cover of the suppression fire of Wings Harper, who had joined them at Stone’s signal, the Cermak table with its Mexican victim still strapped on had been carried to the rear by Pappy Saye and Arno Bitt, then the rest crowded in, and Saul held the Door Open button down, keeping the way clear for Wings to join them when Stone signaled that it was safe to descend.

  With the sound of the electronic annunciator tone for the car Stone had taken came his signal. It arrived back, and its door opened, to reveal the unconscious Foley. Wings Harper slammed his boot heel down on the open half of a spent 7.62 mm AK cartridge casing and quickly jammed it under the door of Foley’s elevator car to hold it open. Then, with a final burst of fire into the fire-stairs doorway, he jumped into the car with the others, Saul removed his finger from the Door Open button, slammed L, and the doors closed. For a moment
that seemed a lifetime, nothing happened. Then, to the massive relief of all, the car descended.

  When the car door opened at the lobby, Wings Harper had the AK at the ready, backed up by the handguns of Saul Rosen and the others, taking no chances on any change in situation for Stone. It was unnecessary. Stone was there to greet them with the prone body of the outside guard shackled hand and foot with his own handcuffs and those of the unconscious Foley, now twelve floors above. The guard’s shoes were off and his socks, rolled neatly enough to win the approval of Aunt May, were stuffed into his mouth as a gag.

  “Did you explain it to him, Eddie?” Stone asked with a nod toward the Mexican on the Cermak table.

  “Yeah. He wanted to be let loose, but I told him if he got up, it might kill him.”

  “Okay,” said Stone. “Out.” All but the strapped-down Mexican were clear of the car within seconds. Stone leaned back into it and said, “Adios, señor,” and pushed the button for the second-level basement, then ducked back out as the door closed and the elevator descended.

  Arno Bitt glanced up at the floor annunciator of the first elevator. “Uh-oh,” he said, “we’re gonna have company in about a minute.”

  “No, we’re not,” said Stone. He darted to the right of the elevator bank and smashed the glass of the fire alarm with the butt of his Colt, then yanked the lever. Immediately a clangorous bell sounded, and the elevator stopped descending. “Y’know those signs in hotels say ‘In case of fire, do not use elevator, use stairs’? Latest thing. They program the elevator to stop operating as soon as the alarm goes off. Saves lives.”

  “Yeah,” said Pappy Saye, “ours.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” said Eddie Berg, now shaking from shock and holding his hand to his dressing-packed eye socket, “let’s get out of here.” The anesthetic was wearing off and his wound was throbbing. He turned away, using his good eye to look at the television-security monitors behind the desk, feigning interest in them to conceal his distress from the others.