Certainly, striding up and down the expensive hotel suite with a tumbler of Scotch in one hand, he seemed on effusively good terms with the civilian from the launch who had accompanied him from the customs shed. But the few words Bolan could hear seemed to be based on nothing more sinister than a normal rag-trade relationship.
"…more supple of course if you chose the lamb," the incisive tenor voice intoned. "But, of course, there is the matter of price… different technique of curing… of course we should be happy to… reversed calf is the toughest, but with your color problems…"
The East German's voice was low-pitched. Bolan could hear nothing of his replies. He noticed the man wasn't drinking.
The rumble of traffic from the streets below diminished as the homeward rush thinned out; the few vehicles that passed hissed greasily through a film of sleet that was fast turning to snow. The shoulders of Bolan's pea jacket were sodden and ice-cold rivulets ran between his shoulder blades.
A taxi swished off the street and stopped at the hotel entrance. The phone in the apartment rang. Asticot answered it. The East German rose to his feet, shook hands and left. Two minutes later, over the rim of the balcony, Bolan saw him get into the taxi.
The Beretta was in his hand. He longed to kick open the window and storm in with flame belching from the muzzle. But caution advised there might be other things to learn first.
There were.
Inside the apartment the phone rang again. Asticot spoke only a single sentence. For a moment, for the Executioner, he was out of earshot. He reappeared wearing a topcoat with a fur collar. Seconds later Bolan dimly heard the chimes of a doorbell. Asticot switched off the lights and went out into a hallway. Squinting, with his cheek against the cold glass and one hand shading the reflections, Bolan saw through the crack between the curtains that he had opened the suite's entrance door.
A man was waiting in the corridor outside. Asticot nodded, flipped a switch, stepped outside and closed the door. Bolan had no more than a second to register the features of the caller before the hallway, too, went dark, but it was enough. The visitor who had come to collect the drug baron was Ferucco Lattuada.
Bolan didn't wait to wonder. He hoisted himself up onto the slippery stone balcony rail, squeezing his eyes shut against the stinging sleet, and leaped for the adjoining one. It took him only four minutes to make the fire escape platform. But the sleet was icing up the holes of the iron grille stairway; each step was a miniature skatirtg rink. By the time he reached Asticot's parking spot in the hotel's underground garage, the Mercedes was gone. He collected the BMW and drove slowly back to the docks.
There were watchmen on the gates, but they weren't checking ID. He left the car in a nearby street and tagged along behind a group of drunken Finnish sailors returning to their ship, peeling off into the shadows beside the customs office as soon as they passed the Aegean Queen.
From there he cased the bonded warehouse. Snow was falling fast now. The flakes tumbled remorselessly down through the cones of yellow light cast by the dockside lamps. The dark surface of the wharf was lightening minute by minute, and it was noticeably colder. If he wanted in, if he wanted to check out that consignment before surfaces became too dangerous, or the tracks he left dead giveaways, he had to act fast.
The warehouse had what railroad buffs would call a clerestory roof — a narrow superstructure running the length of the ridgepole, with windows let into the side to provide light for the space below, Bolan reckoned these windows would yield easily enough to the attentions of an experienced penetration agent. The shed, with its tall roller doors and heavy padlocks, was designed to prevent bonded goods from being heisted in bulk — not to keep out the curious who only wanted to look.
The difficulty was making it to the clerestory.
Forty feet of snow-covered roof, sloping upward at an angle between twenty-five and thirty degrees, separated the facade from those narrow windows. And there was no way of reaching the roof in back of the shed. Gantries carrying the mobile cranes were parked on their rails at intervals along the quay. It was from one of these that the Executioner would have to leap to the roof.
The crisscross ironwork was four feet from the corner of the shed. The junction where the upright was married to the horizontal crossbeam was level with the guttering at the foot of the slope.
To a combat veteran with the Executioner's reflexes, in the kind of shape he was in, there was no problem there. Even in the poor light, with the metal grid so cold that his fingers risked sticking to each girder, and the whirling snow fast approaching blizzard proportions, he was able to climb the gantry as easily as a ladder. Easy as falling off a log.
The roof was something else.
The icy slope was too steep to walk up; he would have to lie facedown and inch his way up to the clerestory. And he would be as vulnerable as a fly on a windowpane the whole damn way.
The clerestory had been invented by the designers of Gothic cathedrals to illuminate the nave that ran below it. A medieval intruder, aiming to reach its windows, would be hidden at different times behind spires, towers, balustrades, gargoyles or flying buttresses. The Executioner had no such cover; he would be in full vision the whole distance, if anyone happened to be looking his way.
And someone could be. There was a watch on the Aegean Queen's bridge — a dark shape could be seen in the greenish light from the binnacle — and there would certainly be a lookout on the Finnish freighter beyond.
On top of the gantry, Bolan considered. The leap to the roof was going to make one hell of a clatter. But on the plus side was the fact that the corner itself was masked from the view of anyone on the freighter's bridge by the crane's operating cabin. The hell with it. He jumped.
There was a noise all right. The walls of the customs shed were brick, but the top was a corrugated tin roof. Bolan hit the slope on all fours and slid immediately backward. It was only when his toes lodged in the guttering that he was able to stop himself shooting off the edge and plummeting to the dockside below.
He lay panting. The noise had sounded to him like a galvanized trash can rolling down a concrete stairway, but he heard no shout of alarm, no torchlight flashed, no footsteps raced toward the shed. The sailors aboard the Finnish ship were singing. Away on the other side he could hear the jangle of rock music from a radio. Someone gunned the engine of a truck in one of the basins.
Bolan lay facedown and allowed the snow to cover his back. The whiter he was, he figured, the less chance there was of one of the lookouts spotting him during his hazardous traverse of the roof.
He waited ten minutes, and then began the laborious crawl up to the clerestory windows. It wasn't easy. Sometimes he slipped back more than he advanced. He knew, even if his back was totally blanketed in snow, that this would only reduce the risk of his being seen, not remove it altogether; that the snow he dislodged during his clawing ascent would leave a snail trail as telltale as the sight of a dark body itself. But at last, traversing the ridged metal obliquely, he arrived.
The windows weren't made to open. Bolan knocked out the glass of one with the butt of his Beretta, listened to the fragments tinkle somewhere in the cavernous blackness below, then thrust his head and shoulders through the gap.
He smiled wryly. The last time he had broken a pane of glass and dragged himself through the gap, he had been getting out; this time he was getting in. And the difficulties once he had made it — he shone a penlight down into the shed — were much less this time.
The roof was supported on girders that ran from one side of the building to the other beneath the clerestory. One was immediately below the broken window. And high up against the far wall — he could just make it out at the limit of the tiny flashlight's beam — there was a railed catwalk.
Bolan pulled himself through, shook the snow from his clothes and lowered himself to the girder. It was eighteen inches wide, and although a dark void yawned below, there were no cops waiting for him at the far end and it was relatively e
asy with the aid of the penlight to negotiate the struts and crossbeams and reach the walkway. After that it was just a question of locating the ladder that led down to the floor.
There was a lot of merchandise in the shed. The flashlight beam revealed bales, sacks, crates, individual cartons and packages between tall stacks of identical wooden cases, an entire container bearing the name of a Swedish tool factory. It was no sweat finding the goatskins: the stench was overpowering in the cold, airless shed.
Bolan walked down one of the aisles separating the bonded goods. The trolleys, a dozen of them, were marshaled in a space at the far end. Holding the penlight between his teeth, the soldier lifted the top skin off a four-foot stack on the nearest, then the next, and the one after that, his fingers probing, exploring, squeezing. He found nothing untoward.
It wasn't until he examined the fourth trolley that he hit pay dirt. There was a different feel to the skins on this one. They seemed even stiffer than those he had handled before. The crackle of the desiccated hide wasn't quite the same; there were unexplained irregularities, as though there might be cysts between the inner and outer layers. Bolan unsheathed his knife and made an incision.
The whole of the inner layer was false. On the side of the pelt away from the shaggy hair, a second layer, cut to size, had been glued in place. And between the two were rows and rows of small oiled silk packets. He slit one open. It contained a little more than an ounce of white crystalline powder.
Twenty minutes later he had discovered that four out of the twelve trolleys were loaded with doctored skins. If each skin in each four-foot stack was similarly packed, several million dollars' worth of the hard stuff was on its way to East Germany, whether or not the guy who was importing the skins knew it.
For Bolan's money the man he had seen in Asticot's hotel suite was a patsy, a blameless importer well-known to the East German authorities, who even, according to the longshoremen, manufactured uniforms for the police there — a guy who was being used simply to get the skins across the frontier. After which, presumably, they would be stolen from his warehouse and the drugs distributed through an underworld network — maybe accomplices of Lattuada and his West German scum.
Bolan bit his lip. How many hundreds, thousands, of young lives would be blighted and destroyed by the white powder concealed in these pelts? How many fortunes would be made by the slimebucket professionals selling it?
The rancid stench of the skins, he thought, was nothing to the stink in the nostrils of the world provoked by Asticot, Lattuada and their kind.
Should he destroy the skins and their vile contents?
No way.
They weren't flammable; it would take a holocaust to incinerate them all. To slit the false layers, remove the packets one by one and empty the contents would take hours, perhaps days, and they were being collected at dawn. Tip off the East Germans, then, once they had gone?
How? An anonymous phone call? No good. Not when the cops received hundreds every day — and the guy with the stuff in his possession was in with them anyway.
The local police? The customs people themselves? Probably the best bet. But again, since he dared not make a personal appearance, and time was desperately short, how could he expect a phone call to galvanize them into activity before the shipment?
It would take him some time to get to a pay phone where he wouldn't be under observation. He listened. From somewhere outside he could hear the chimes of a church clock striking midnight.
And something else.
Far away down the dark alley separating the stacks of merchandise, something moved. A scraping noise, quickly stilled, followed by a subdued pattering.
Bolan cut the penlight and whipped out the Beretta. He sidled into the adjoining aisle and catfooted toward the far end of the shed. The light reflected down from the snow-covered roof through the clerestory windows was very faint, but it allowed him to locate an intersection where an alley at right angles to the main passageways cut a swath through the bonded material. For a brief moment he clicked on the penlight, swinging it right and left. The beam sent gigantic shadows dancing across the warehouse walls and up among the girders supporting the roof. But it showed him nothing.
Somewhere in the darkness above him a bird, startled from its perch by the movement, flapped noisily away. Bolan listened again, holding his breath. Outside the shed a ship's siren bleated once out on the sound. A long way off the rock music was still blaring from the radio. Inside there was silence, until once more that sibilant pattering sound manifested itself, nearer this time, a little to his right.
At the corner of the next aisle.
Bolan made the distance in a tigerish leap, switching on the penlight again as he moved, his trigger finger curled and ready to squeeze. He saw corn falling, sliding from a rent in a bulging sack, a changing pattern of grains on the dusty floor.
Rats!
Bolan grinned. He had better things to do than go chasing after hungry rodents. The customs guys should employ a cat if they were going to keep sacks of grain in bond! As far as he was concerned, there were decisions to make. He moved down the aisle.
Wait! If a rat was going to gnaw a hole in a sack to get at the corn inside, surely the rent would be at floor level, or no higher than the animal itself, standing up on its back feet? The rip from which the corn was still trickling in a steady cascade was hip-high to the Executioner. Some rat!
Overhead the bird flapped again, shifting its position for the second time. The man who had inadvertently ripped open the grain sack with the safety catch of his revolver cursed under his breath. He raised the gun carefully, sighting it on the dark silhouette thrown into relief behind the pool of light cast by the penlight. He pulled the trigger.
Bolan saw the livid green flash just before he heard the shocking detonation of the.38 Police Special. He was diving to the floor before the second shot sent thunderous echoes around the shed. He couldn't, of course, have moved quickly enough to beat that first round, but the gunman had miscalculated. His weapon was throwing high and to the right. The slug streaked past the Executioner's left ear as his ingrained combat sense hurled him into action.
The echoes of the second shot were overlaid by the harsh bark of a 3-round burst from the Beretta. None of the four slugs found a mark, but the rapidity of Bolan's response took the invisible killer by surprise and won the warrior time to worm his way between two rows of wooden cases stacked beside the aisle.
The penlight lay on the floor where it had fallen, illuminating a no-man's-land of packages and crates into which neither of the adversaries dared venture.
For perhaps half a minute there was silence in the shed. Bolan wondered who the gunman could be. A watchman, obviously. A customs guard? Negative. Such a man would have called a warning before he fired. Someone left to protect the dope shipment? Probably. But why wouldn't the man have mown down the Executioner on his way in when he was a perfect target against the clerestory window?
Maybe because he wanted to check, had orders to check, that the intruder was someone specifically interested in the skins, and therefore a lethal danger, and not just some sneak thief breaking into the shed in the hope of picking up something, anything, of value. Unless the guy with the revolver was himself such a thief, whom the Executioner had happened to disturb…
But if such a man was going to fire at all, and not just lie low until the new arrival had split, surely he, too, would have pulled the trigger the moment Bolan was in his sights?
The silence was broken.
A slither of feet, somewhere over in the next alley, a rustle of cloth as some garment brushed against wood. Bolan thought he could hear breathing, but he couldn't be certain.
He tensed, crouching low in the narrow space between the packing cases. Those on his right, his exploring fingers discovered, were bound with wire, and he could detect the characteristic sour odor of machine oil between the slatted panels.
Machine tools or armament? There was no way of telling. And,
for all the good it could do him at the moment, the crates could be packed with MU-50 grenades or Heckler & Koch caseless assault rifles. His strategy must be to tempt the hidden gunman to use up all the rounds in his weapon. He knew this was a revolver, but he didn't know whether it was a six- or an eight-chamber. The guy had fired twice already, so there were either four or six rounds to come before he was forced into the clumsy cylinder-reload routine. At which time Bolan, with his superior magazine charge, would wade in to finish it. Unless, of course, the marksman toted two guns…
That was a risk Bolan had to take.
Lying flat on the chilled floor, he inched his way facedown to the far end of the gap, where he was able to peer each way into the gloom of the aisle. No darker shadow was visible among the bulked masses of merchandise.
He reached to touch the crates on his left. They seemed to be of softer, more friable wood than the wirebound ones on the other side. At the full extent of his arm, he pushed the muzzle of the Beretta against the leading edge of the case nearest the aisle. Eventually a long sliver of wood splintered away with a crisp cracking noise.
The response was immediate. A sharp report, and again that bright muzzle-flash. Bolan reckoned it came from an intersection two rows down, where the trolleys were parked near the Swedish container. The bullet thudded into the crate. From the interior he heard a tinkle of broken glass followed by liquid gurgling. The heavy, aromatic odor of rum seeped into the atmosphere.
Three.
Bolan backed up on elbows and knees until he made the alley behind him. He rose stealthily to his feet and ran across to the far side, sinking down behind a rampart of cloth bales. The two shots followed quickly one after the other. Something twitched the upturned collar of his pea jacket as he lowered himself to the ground.
Blowout Page 15