Blowout

by Don Pendleton

  "Distribution essential well before the next session… time to set up and subvert the chosen… Western connection immediately and unquestionably verifiable… in time for the media to…"

  "Will the ring be unmasked by your own…" the man with the pince-nez began.

  "No!" Benckendorff came into view, halting in front of the desk. "Of course not. We can leave that to the Vopos and the normal security people. We can't even be connected with the tip-off." He started pacing again, and Bolan lost a great deal of the following dialogue because the man lowered his voice. But the snatches he did hear were enough to set his pulse hammering.

  "Straight from the Department A duty officer at the First… although this had to be without the knowledge of the Fourth Department evaluators in Moscow…"

  The pince-nez man behind the desk asked a brief question that Bolan couldn't catch.

  "Certainly not," Benckendorff replied. "If any member of the present Politburo were to guess… even in Berlin Ulbricht would never have…but several of the Directorate chiefs feel that we…"

  Sally Ann laughed. "Too bad for the stuffed shirts in the Fourth Department."

  Bolan straightened. He strode to the spiral stairway and swarmed up it into the room above. If what he now suspected was true, he would need confirmation, some independent verification, preferably documentary, that would confirm his own analysis of the scattered half sentences he'd heard in the library below.

  He found it.

  The room at the top of the spiral was part office, part bedroom. A small bathroom led off it, but there was no other door. Bolan guessed it was here that Benckendorff holed up when he was in the Federal Republic.

  Opposite the stairway entrance a desk stood beneath a window of opaque glass. The top of the desk was covered with papers. He walked across and ran a practiced eye over them. The official press release detailing the results of the inaugural round of disarmament talks in Berlin. A copy of the joint communiqué signed by Eastern and Western leaders. Photocopied digests of speeches made by delegates during the talks. A buff standard-size office folder. A map of East Germany, annotated in blue marker pencil, with certain towns ringed in red.

  Bolan opened the folder. He found a score of paper sheets, each with a color snapshot stapled to the top left-hand corner and a dozen or more lines of text centered on the page.

  The photos were all head-and-shoulder portraits. Some of them were grainy, probably shot with a telephoto lens without the knowledge of the subject; others looked like reproductions of passport pictures. Three were mug shots with police ID numbers. Only two had evidently been taken with the approval of a smiling sitter.

  The subjects were all young, between eighteen and twenty-five years old, Bolan guessed, kids of both sexes who shared a kind of flower power look seasoned with the intensity of the ecologically minded Green Party. Beards and an occasional earring for the boys; headbands, straggling hair and immature mouths in the case of the girls.

  The text in each case had been printed by a dot matrix computer printer. Bolan riffled through the sheets. They reminded him of the typed documents he had found in Zuta's safe, for each contained a thumbnail personality breakdown relating to the subject of the photo above: name, address, place and date of birth, interests, background and so on.

  Despite the wide differences in their backgrounds, the kids all had three things in common. All of them were citizens of NATO countries, all of them were attending temporary courses at East German universities or polytechnics, and every one of them had some past connection with drugs, from a simple caution through possession of marijuana to registered addiction and, in the case of the mug shots, conviction for pushing the hard stuff.

  Bolan's eyebrows rose. He added together what he had learned and what he knew already.

  Department A meant only one thing to him. It was the section of the KGB's First Chief Directorate, on Moscow's Dzerzhinsky Square, which was responsible for the worldwide dissemination of "disinformation." The Directorate's Fourth Department had specific responsibility for West Germany and Austria.

  Benckendorff had spoken of subversion, of a Western connection, of the media. The guy with the silver hair had asked questions about the unmasking of a "ring." The term «tip-off» had been mentioned, and both Sally Ann and the East German police boss had implied some kind of action that bypassed the Fourth Department.

  Bolan read it this way. The KGB, with a vested interest in keeping East-West relations at cold-war level, was dissatisfied with the current glasnost climate and particularly with the probable success of the Berlin disarmament talks. Certain top-echelon types of the organization had therefore decided to torpedo the second round of those talks with a disinformation campaign activated through part of the East German intelligence network. The campaign was secret, inasmuch as it was mounted without knowledge or approval of the Politburo and bypassed the First Chief Directorate's special West German section.

  The operation involved the use of the smuggled drugs ordered through Arvell Asticot. But the cocaine and heroin wasn't, as Bolan had first thought, to be used by Benckendorff to make money through a newly organized ring in the East. The ring was to be set up, sure. But the members, whose dossiers the Executioner had under his hand at this moment, subverted or with the stuff simply planted on them, were all patsies. The ring was being created with one purpose: to be blown.

  Foreign students, typical of their decadent imperialist society, were being used in an integrated attempt to destabilize Communist youth, the Eastern-bloc papers would cry. Suspicion would be provoked. The next round of the talks would be compromised. Would you buy a used disarmament treaty from these people, and similar questions.

  Small wonder that the KGB wished to funnel an operation through a third party that ran directly counter to Gorbachev's thinking; no surprise if Benckendorff, the man charged with planning the conspiracy, was adamant that his unit was in no way connected with the exposure of the " Western ring."

  But there was an additional factor, something that Bolan suspected but could in no way prove. Benckendorff, he believed, was using the fact that he had been chosen to mastermind this disinformation campaign to set up quite a different operation.

  This would involve the creation of a permanent spy ring in the Hamburg area, with a mandate to report not to the KGB but to Benckendorff himself in East Germany. He could lay the groundwork while he was officially here on other business. And the secrets the ring would relay would filter through two main sources: the honey trap provided by the girls working this particular house, and the network of protection contacts set up by Ferucco Lattuada and Zuta Krohn. Through these contacts, Benckendorff s agents would be able to put the bite on Western diplomats and industrialists, most of whom would be members of the Coliseum.

  It was all, Bolan thought, very neat and very predictable — once you knew the key factors on which the deal was based. And he himself, he was forced to admit, must have been one of the factors taken into account at some late stage in the planning — the joker dealt suddenly who could be different things to different players in the game.

  The East German, like Kraul in his turn, was using the Executioner as a weapon to destroy Lattuada and the Team so that their carefully engineered racket could be modified and turned around to serve quite a different purpose. And the warrior was caught by the short hairs, because if he failed to assist Benckendorff in this way he would automatically abort his own priority mission…

  He sighed, putting the Beretta down on the desk as he replaced the sheets of paper exactly as they had been before in the buff folder.

  "This is only.22 caliber," Sally Ann said, "but it can kill you as efficiently as a.45 if the person firing it knows exactly where to place the shots."

  Bolan whirled. She was standing on the spiral stairs, her elbows resting on the edge of the circular hole cut in the floor, the nickeled automatic she held in her two hands trained on his chest.

  "And I do know exactly where to place the shots,
" Sally Ann said, "so I think you better raise your hands."

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The light was very faint, filtering through a barred grating high up in the cellar wall from some uncurtained window in the facade of the house above. Bolan was shivering with cold. He lay on his back on the damp concrete floor with his feet raised high in the air. The rope that bound his ankles was attached to one of the grating bars; his wrists and elbows were lashed together behind his back.

  It was a simple and ingenious way of immobilizing a captive. Tied to a chair, a prisoner could use his feet to lever or shuffle himself into a different position; even if the legs were drawn up and bound so that the feet didn't touch the floor, the chair could be rocked. Roped hand and foot and lying on the ground, a man could roll. But with the feet way up off the ground and the weight of the body increasingly blocking the circulation in the arms, it was strictly a no-go situation.

  There wasn't even anything the Executioner could try: the floor of the cellar was bare, nothing stood against the walls, the rope was drawn tight enough to kill any lateral movement however much he thrashed from side to side.

  There were no options here. The only thing he could do was wait, and hope there would be an opportunity for some kind of break when they came to fetch him back upstairs. They would do that, he reckoned. If they aimed to shoot him like a dog here in the cellar, they would have done it as soon as they had brought him down rather than waste time with the rope number.

  In any case, there would be an interrogation. That was for sure. He imagined they simply wanted him out of the way while Hansie Schiller played his tune. We'll have to knock around the character at the cathouse a sight more, the big thug had told Lattuada when he'd announced that he was going to visit the two Aumuhle prospects that afternoon. Squeeze the bastard dry, because, shit, with all those broads… Fuck him over until he… And Lattuada had agreed to that. Yeah, they had to act tough and be tough if the owner of the place, presumably the silver-haired man, was to come across.

  Benckendorff wouldn't want the Team's top man to know that he had stumbled on the opposition headquarters in his search for fresh victims. With Bolan out of the way he would allow Schiller to make his play cold, and then what? Make like he was scared, beginning to crumble and stall until the goatskin operation was through? Eliminate Hansie and risk having the Team descend on the property in force, which could definitely compromise the disinformation campaign if it brought the police in?

  Whichever, one thing was certain: if Schiller did tumble to the place's connection with the smuggled narcotics, his expectation of life would be even shorter than Bolan's own.

  And Bolan's expectation? Well, all he knew was that it would be tough taking advantage of a break, if there was one. The faces of the three storm troopers Benckendorff had called in to escort the warrior to the cellar had been stony enough to make Hansie look like Little Lord Fauntleroy. And all 240 pounds of each man had been hard muscle.

  "I warned you, Herr Belasko," Benckendorff had said. "We could still, perhaps, have made use of you, with or without your knowledge, if you hadn't persisted in your meddling. But I won't tolerate people spying on my private business. That's totally unacceptable."

  "The towns ringed on your map," Bolan had said, "Magdeburg, Dresden, Leipzig, Karl-Marx-Stadt, Rostock and, of course, Berlin, are these the places where your dupes, those poor kids you aim to set up, will have the stuff unloaded on them?"

  The East German's lips had tightened. "Belasko," he'd said, "you just signed your own death warrant." And then, with a wintry smile, he added, "St. Pauli Blonde Killer Executed by Vigilantes — that would make a nice headline for the capitalist rag you claim to work for, wouldn't it?"

  It was then, before Bolan could reply, that they'd heard the scrape of heavy tires on gravel; then, that the white Cadillac had passed through the band of light streaming through the library window; then, that the silver-haired man had said, "Sally Ann, my dear, if you would keep that weapon trained on our… guest, I'll summon the staff to help him to his quarters."

  Now the quarters grew colder every minute. Bolan's teeth chattered. He rolled his shoulders, jerking with his legs at the rope in an attempt to keep his circulation pulsing so that he would be in shape when an opportunity came to make his play. The cords were already cutting into his flesh so much that his limbs were numb.

  And those teeth! There was now an almost metallic sound…

  Hold it!

  The noise, the extra noise that wasn't there before, came from somewhere beyond his feet. He writhed left and right, grimacing with pain as the movement ground his near-paralyzed arms into the concrete floor, and then arched his back and twisted his head so that he could look up past his knees.

  There was a shadow outside the grating, something that moved beyond the bars. A gloved hand came through — an arm. An indistinct, nebulous shape hung heavily from the iron grille. A small metallic object clattered to the floor. The shadow withdrew and the light behind the bars brightened again.

  Bolan gritted his teeth. Snakelike, he twisted the upper half of his body this way and that until his fingers could touch whatever it was that had been thrown down. They closed around it and he felt a familiar shape — the flat-bladed throwing knife taken off him while Sally Ann had held him at gunpoint.

  He didn't trouble asking himself who, or why, or how. He gripped the haft and rolled himself as far as he could over onto his left side. Maneuvering the knife so that the blade was against the cords lashing his wrists together — and would stay that way — was one of the most infuriating physical tests he had ever come up against. With his legs up in the air, the movement of the rest of him was severely restricted. And there was very little chance of sawing the cords against the razor-sharp edge unless the knife itself was firmly anchored somehow.

  If he lay on the knife, there was no room for one hand between the blade and the floor. There wasn't enough freedom of movement for him to hold the knife and jockey the tip between his wrists. The only workable system was for him to turn the knife on its side, wedge the hilt beneath his hip so that the blade was canted slightly upward and squirm his bound arms around until his wrists were over the blade.

  But he had no purchase and no leverage. The blade only slanted upward if the knife's hand guard was between it and the floor, and the very weight of his body tended to shift it with the slightest motion of his arms or torso. Even if he could roll far enough over for the guard to be free of his weight, he was so precariously balanced that the haft kept slipping from under his hipbone.

  The blood was flowing hotly from his lacerated wrists within minutes, and it was a full half hour before the last strand of the rope binding him parted. Even then his upper arms had to be freed before he could jackknife forward and slice through the rope attaching his feet to the grating.

  Fortunately the strands restraining elbow movement passed around his chest, and once his hands were free he could bring them around to the front of his body and work the bonds up and over his shoulders so that they could simply be lifted off above his head. If the hoods had thought to lash his arms together at biceps level, he would never have been able to reach the cords binding his feet.

  Once he was free he stamped up and down the empty cellar to warm himself and restore the circulation, wincing at the agonizing nerve reaction as the blood flowed back into the numbed arteries and veins. It was another ten minutes before his wrists stopped bleeding. He occupied the time taking stock of his prison.

  The cellar was about fifteen-by-twenty-five feet. Opposite the grating three steps led up to the only door. It was closed with an ordinary farmhouse latch. Cautiously he pressed the tongue. The latch lifted, but the door moved only a half inch. There was a metallic rattle from the far side. Probably a hasp and padlock. He crossed the floor to the wall with the grating, reaching his hand up to check out the indistinct shape hanging from it. As soon as his outstretched hand touched it, he had to repress an exclamation of surprise… and
pleasure. Draped over the iron bars was his quickdraw shoulder rig, with the Beretta in its holster! He eased it down very carefully, strapped on the rig and checked over the autoloader. The full magazine was still in place.

  Who was the unseen rescuer? Sally Ann? He didn't think so. She could easily have wavered, could even have allowed him the opportunity to make a break before she shepherded him back to the library if she'd wanted to help. But she had kept a steely grip on the situation, the little.22 rock-steady in her hand right up until the moment he was hustled away by the storm troopers.

  Who then? Clearly neither Benckendorff nor the silver-haired owner of the club. And certainly not Hansie. Bolan refused to waste time speculating. He had no idea how they proposed to deal with Schiller; the hoods could be sent to fetch him back at any minute.

  There was no way of getting to the grating, even if it could be moved. So it had to be the door. As a last resort he could shoot off the padlock hasp, but it would take several rounds since he couldn't see precisely where the anchorage was. Plus he had no notion of the layout on the far side; he could easily be caught like a rat in a trap if the sound of the shots brought the hoods quickly enough. He took the knife and started working on the edge of the door at the height he figured the padlock to be.

  The old wood was dry and it split away fairly easily at first. Within a few minutes he had carved away a crescent-shaped notch. Sixty seconds later the tip of the blade struck against the iron hasp. He pried away more wood until he could poke a forefinger through and touch the metal. Moving it slightly, he found that the hasp was screwed to and hinged from the door; the iron loop over which it fitted, to be secured with the padlock, was set in the jamb.