Hazard

by Gerald A. Browne

  Hazard decided this was his chance. He pulled the limo up so it was in position with the rear of the truck but out of view of the driver. Quickly, Hazard got out, went around and opened the limo’s other front door. He turned and squatted to get his shoulders under Saad. A fireman’s carry. Hazard’s legs nearly buckled when he straightened up with all that extra weight. Four steps to the rear of the truck. The edge was waist high. He dropped Saad in and saw now that this section of the truck was cylindrical, shaped like a huge horizontal drum partially cut away.

  The sour smell of garbage.

  Hazard banged twice on the side of the truck.

  At once the compressing mechanism went into motion with a grinding sound as its line of thick steel teeth came curving over and down to the inside edge, like a monster closing its mouth, scraping its food back into its belly and with a hydraulic hiss digesting it with fifty thousand pounds of pressure per square inch.

  No more Saad.

  Garbage.

  The dull clanging of pails warned Hazard that the two men were coming back from the alley. He got into the limo, drove by and away.

  He left the limo right on Madison Avenue, where it was sure to be towed away. Immunity? No, the limo was anonymous, susceptible after Hazard stripped it of its DPL plates.

  Hazard didn’t tell Keven what he’d done.

  When he arrived home he found her on his bedroom floor, using the door for a headboard. She had ocean breakers on the cartridge player.

  “What are you doing down there?”

  “I wanted to make sure you woke me when you came in.”

  “Were you asleep?”

  “Just half.”

  She tried to kiss him hello and he wanted that very much, but he avoided her and went into the bathroom.

  He took a long shower, lathered thick all over, and rinsed, lathered and rinsed again. While he was drying in front of the mirror he thought he didn’t look the same.

  He brushed his teeth extra hard and used the Water Pic.

  He expected by then that Keven would be trying to sleep, but she was waiting for him on the bed. He detected the fragrance of tangerines in the air. Clean. Welcome. Her arms were extended as though to guide him to her and he went between them to be drawn against her.

  The love they made included something they hadn’t experienced together before—a desperation, a greed, like a verification of life.

  No need to tell her what he’d done, thought Hazard.

  She knew.

  7

  LATE IN the afternoon of that same day Hazard and Keven went up to the installation. They weren’t scheduled. Hazard wanted to see Kersh.

  He got alone with Kersh and told him right out that he now was sure Carl had been murdered, and that one of the men who did it was dead.

  Of all possible questions, Kersh chose to ask, “How do you feel?”

  It made Hazard more certain than ever that his affection for Kersh was not misplaced. “I’m okay.”

  “Try not to let it cut deeper than it already has.”

  It’s already to the bone, Hazard thought.

  “Maybe you need some distraction. Go somewhere for a while, do whatever you like.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “There are three more.” Meaning Badr, Hatum, and Mustafa.

  Kersh wanted to dissuade him, but sensed it would be futile, probably even resented. “How can I help?” he asked.

  “I need an advance.”

  In the past Hazard had frequently asked for and received advances on his weekly five hundred. Sometimes he was as much as two or three weeks behind. At the moment it just happened he was even.

  “And some time on my own.”

  “How much?”

  “Five thousand, and maybe two months.”

  Kersh didn’t agree immediately. Not that he had any thoughts of refusing. A better idea had occurred to him, one that would cover what Hazard wanted and possibly include some extra advantages. What he had in mind was a trans-Atlantic exercise, an ultimate test of telepathic communication. It was well within his power to authorize such an exercise and, if in so doing he was stepping on anyone’s toes, hell, they could scream later. He suggested it to Hazard, pointing out that it would put Hazard over there in more of an official capacity. Also, Hazard would be on expenses and the exercise part of it wouldn’t require much of his time.

  “What about the five-thousand advance?”

  Kersh smiled agreeably and that settled it.

  Except for one final request by Hazard. He asked that Kersh arrange for him to attend an accelerated violence course, what the DIA called an “intensive.” Hazard had previously ridiculed the DIA mandate that all active personnel had to attend its special courses every year. A week a year was minimum. Some agents took more for their own good, but not Hazard. He’d gone for karate instruction twice, and then only after having tried every possible way to get out of it.

  However, now he was asking to go. If there was one thing he’d learned from killing Saad it was that he didn’t know how to kill. He’d really hacked it, been lucky, and knew it.

  Kersh promised to arrange for the intensive immediately. He was especially glad to do it because it indicated Hazard wasn’t being totally impulsive.

  All that was left then was to let Keven know what was planned. She resented not being included in the first place and she said so. As for Hazard going abroad, she didn’t like that at all. She was afraid for him, but rather than add to the anxiety of the moment, she kept that to herself. For everyone’s sake, especially her own, she acted indifferent, almost blasé about it. “Senders get to go places and have all the fun,” she complained.

  Hazard going alone to take intensive training was something else. Keven suggested, then insisted she go along. She demanded her equal rights, contending that an aptitude for violence was by no means exclusively male.

  It was critical to Hazard that he get the most out of the DIA training in the shortest possible time. Keven might be a distraction, he thought. “It’s no place for you,” he told her.

  “I’m as much of a damn agent as you are.”

  “So?”

  “Maybe you’re afraid I’ll learn some dirty tricks …”

  “It’s not that.”

  “… and use them on you.”

  Hazard imagined lethal abilities added to her Irish temper. She had a point.

  “Besides,” she went on, “there’s always the big threat.”

  “Of what?”

  She narrowed her eyes dramatically and extended the initial sound of the word. “Rrrrape.”

  Hazard held back a laugh.

  “There were sixty thousand rapes last year and that’s only counting this country. One every seven seconds. Don’t you want me to be able to take care of myself?”

  “That the only reason you want to go?”

  “What else?”

  She only wanted, of course, to be with Hazard as much as possible before he left. She would have preferred spending the time together some place away and peaceful, but, no matter, she’d take what she could get.

  They sparred on the issue a while longer and then looked to Kersh. He already had his mind made up in case he was asked. He pretended to give it some deliberation, finally shrugged, and said, “If Keven wants to go I can hardly prevent it. After all, it is a requirement.”

  So Hazard and Keven spent the next three weeks in Frederick, Maryland, at what the DIA people called “the farm.” It was a large old house and outbuildings set on extensive grounds walled high all around. Once it had been a horse farm and to keep that appearance, as well as the appropriate aroma to the place, there were still a number of horses around, lazy and fortunate.

  Taking the “intensive” meant fourteen hours of instruction each day, and some days as many as sixteen. They received individual instruction with emphasis on judo and karate, which were prerequisites, but they could choose from a wide range of electives—knife throwing, f
or example, or the relatively benign techniques of poisoning.

  Hazard’s qualms about Keven, that she might consider the entire thing a lark and be a distraction were quickly erased. From the first day she went at it with a seriousness matching Hazard’s own grim attitude. Sooner than anyone expected she was tossing her two-hundred-pound judo instructor around as though he were no more than a despicable loaf of white bread. She seemed to enjoy every hostile minute of it and got so she could execute all the various karate fist and elbow strikes. She became particularly adept at delivering the kingeri, also known as the groin kick.

  Weapons.

  Keven worked out with a nine-millimeter Smith and Wesson double-action automatic, which could put a man down with a hit just about anywhere. The comparatively thin grip of that gun suited her and its shorter trigger reach felt comfortable, allowed her more easily to master the correct squeeze, soft yet deliberate. The gun that was first issued and registered personally to her had been previously used. She politely requested a brand new one and got it. She cared for that S & W lovingly, disassembled and cleaned it even when it didn’t need it. Her baby.

  Hazard, for his primary weapon, first tried a Colt .357 Magnum, perhaps the most powerful handgun in the world. He didn’t like it. Despite its reassuring deadliness, it was too heavy, bulky, and obvious. He settled instead on a 32-caliber Llama automatic, just six and a quarter inches overall length and only twenty ounces. Made in Spain by the Gabilondo firm, it looked like a junior version of the famous .45 Colt service automatic.

  Having sacrificed power for convenience, Hazard had to go for accuracy. The Llama was built for rimfire, giving it a velocity of about two thousand feet per second. That helped, but beyond the range of sixty feet it wasn’t reliable, especially with soft-nosed ammunition—the kind that was slower but would spread on impact and more likely kill than merely penetrate. To fire the Llama with consistent accuracy took a lot of practice and concentration. When Hazard managed seven hits out of a clip of nine on an inch-and-a-half circle at fifty feet, his weapons instructor congratulated him. But Hazard wasn’t satisfied. Not until he was getting nine out of nine, regularly.

  Hazard’s and Keven’s guns were both custom-fitted with a new type of silencer. Compared to the more commonly used and longer type, this silencer was much more discreet. Only about three-quarters of an inch in length and diameter. It screwed on and could be left on.

  How to fight with a knife.

  Considering his adversaries, Hazard believed that was something he’d damn well better learn. He was surprised to find how much dancelike agility it required, and such delicate touch. It wasn’t just a matter of stabbing someone. Rely on the sharpness of the blade, he was told. Hazard finally became quite efficient at it, so good, in fact, that his instructor gave him a special kind of knife. On first examination it appeared to be ordinary, with a snap on its handle that shot its five-inch blade straight out. Its exceptional feature was what happened to the blade when it penetrated; when it went into flesh the pressure of resistance activated a mechanism inside its handle that made the blade revolve at high speed in a coring motion. Gruesome. Hazard accepted it with thanks.

  During those intensive three weeks at the farm (twenty-one consecutive days, with not even a Sunday off) it wasn’t easy for Hazard and Keven to find time and place for being alone. Keven was assigned a room on the top floor of the east wing, rather isolated. Hazard’s room was on the same floor but way over on the other side of the building. Fortunately there was never much traffic in the corridor after midnight and they nearly got caught only twice.

  Hazard found that having to sneak from room to room added a desirable spice to their activities. Keven admitted to that added effect, although sneaking around for such a natural purpose was against her values, made her also feel unduly guilty, she said.

  They compromised. One night he’d sneak; the next night it was her turn.

  Keven also complained about having to be so quiet when they were together. Several times she almost suffocated herself with a pillow.

  8

  ON MAY 18th, shortly before sundown, a clean, white ship entered the harbor of Alexandria, Egypt.

  It was a two-thousand tonner with blue lettering on its hull that identified it as the Sea Finder out of Washington, D.C. From stem to stern just above the waterline it had a painted red stripe, although that graphic attempt to give the ship sleekness was defeated by the upright structure that stood at midship—a 110-foot framework tower that resembled an oil derrick. It made the vessel appear awkward, top-heavy.

  There was no other ship in the world like the Sea Finder. It had been specially planned and built by a large, diversified corporation for an admirable scientific purpose. Underwater search and recovery.

  Even the ship’s propulsion system was designed to better fulfill that purpose. Instead of the usual horizontal churning propellers, it was driven by vertical bladed units that extended down beneath the ship, one forward and another aft. The Sea Finder could, for example, rotate a full three hundred and sixty degrees in place as though revolving on an axis. And it could maintain an exact position, hover over any chosen spot of the ocean’s floor with the precise control of a helicopter, even in heavy seas.

  Neatly stacked and secured on its foredeck were sections of four-and-a-half-inch pipe in sixty-foot lengths. Four hundred of these. Directly below the derrick, a bottom portion of the ship’s hull was omitted to form an open well twelve by thirty-six. Using the derrick, the sections of pipe could be fitted together and lowered down through the well into the sea to a depth of twenty-four thousand feet. Attached to the business end of the pipe, a special assembly of underwater lights, television cameras, and sonar devices could scan the ocean floor along a search path twenty-four hundred feet wide and five hundred feet ahead. The accuracy of this sensor assembly was such that at a distance of a thousand feet it could distinguish between two objects no more than three feet apart.

  Once an objective was located, the huge tongs fixed to the extreme end of the pipe could be put to work. The heavy-duty tines of the tongs would spread apart and then close around the object like a giant claw. Then it would be only a matter of bringing the pipe up in the same section-by-section manner it had been lowered. And, of course, the recovered object would finally come up with it.

  The beauty of it was that all these underwater functions could be controlled with ease from above in the ship’s recovery-operations room. A complex electronic system was involved, but its operation had been reduced to push-button simplicity.

  The Sea Finder was indeed one of a kind. Unfortunately it had not been in service when the submarine Thresher went down in 1963 and when an H-bomb was lost in 1968 off Polomares, Spain. It would have been perfect for those jobs. In any case, until another such emergency occurred, the ship was a marine archeologist’s dream come true.

  It had proved itself on its maiden voyage by recovering from a depth of three thousand feet what remained of a Portuguese galleon that had sunk in 1682 off the coast of Colombia. From that initial effort, the corporation that owned the Sea Finder had already recouped a good share of its seven-million-dollar investment. The galleon gave up seven hundred thousand old pesos, each containing one and a half ounces of pure silver. Other objects recovered, such as weapons, tools, cooking utensils, and porcelain (of mere historic value), were donated to the various institutions represented by the archeologists voluntarily along on that expedition.

  With that profitable first success to its credit, the Sea Finder was ready for the even greater rewards promised by the Mediterranean. It was estimated that for the thousand years before Christ and the thousand years after, more than twenty thousand ships went to the bottom of that sea. The Mediterranean, comparatively deep and cold, was especially conducive to underwater preservation. Also the small amount of sediment there, only about six inches every thousand years, meant it was possible that many ships that went down in ancient times were still intact.

  To the
Sea Finder’s crew of thirty and the twelve marine archeologists and other scientists aboard, it was an inspiring theory, particularly so considering the numerous Roman ships that had sailed from Alexandria and never reached Rome. Many were laden with tributes and taxes, vast amounts of gold.

  So for the Sea Finder, with its advanced recovery system, the Mediterranean would be relatively easy pickings.

  To guide the ship into Alexandria, an Egyptian harbor official had come aboard. Under his direction it made for pier 2, the mooring station nearest the harbor entrance. Pier 2 was remote and isolated from the rest of the busy port. It was a restricted area, where the Sea Finder would attract the least attention. The ship’s captain, a man named Copeland, saw the practical side of that. It made good sense not to flaunt the United States flag in those not particularly amiable waters.

  By the time all the ship’s lines were secure and its engines cut it was dark. In the distance across the way the lights of Alexandria shone and pulsed invitingly, but no one on the Sea Finder would be allowed to go ashore that night. An official order. Everyone, including the captain, was to remain aboard until papers had been inspected. And radio silence was to be maintained. Just a formality, the harbor official said.

  Captain Copeland did not protest but he firmly reminded the harbor official that he and his ship and men were there with the sanction of the Egyptian Government by arrangements made through the Arab Republic’s cultural attaché in Washington. The Ministry of Culture had agreed to allow the American archeologists and oceanographers to examine certain old documents and charts kept in the archives in Alexandria. The harbor official politely assured Captain Copeland that he saw no reason why everything should not be put straight by the next day at the latest. It was only a normal matter of clearance. Meanwhile, would the Captain please cooperate and be sure no one went ashore under any circumstances?

  Captain Copeland gave his word on that.