Operation Breakthrough (7 page)

But by that time I wouldn’t care.

I hoped.

I
KNEW
approximately where the field was because Erikson and I had hitched a ride to town with the same flying club employee who had agreed to close his eyes to our unauthorized use of it. I walked along the edge of the road in the deepening twilight. The stars were out although the western sky was still pale. The first onset of the night breeze blew gently, and a dog barked occasionally. There was enough scrub brush and foliage just off the roadside that I wasn’t concerned about getting myself out of sight in a hurry in case headlights appeared from either direction.

I almost passed Oakes Field without seeing it in the gathering darkness. Only the fact that one asphalt runway extended almost to the road enabled me to spot the darker strip against the green grass. Then I could make out the dim outline of a wire fence. I couldn’t see any sign of an adminstration building.

I tried to estimate the direction of a plane’s approach in the prevailing wind, then moved in from the road along the fence in a direction that would place me near the touchdown point. A hundred yards off the road I saw the deeper shadow of another runway angling off the first one, shattering my hope that I could predict accurately where the plane would land.

I burrowed down into the waist-deep grass alongside the fence at a point near the junction of the runways and prepared to try for a little sleep before sweating out the final hours before dawn. I didn’t get any real sleep, but I dozed off from time to time. Once I woke myself by rolling over in the grass and striking my hand against the chain link fence. I couldn’t see my watch, but there was no feel of dawn in the air.

I tried to shift to a more comfortable position, and the papers inside the canvas sack still suspended from my neck crackled noisily, reminding me why I was there. I thought of Karl Erikson trying to sleep in whatever cell the Bahamas police force had lodged him in.

I became aware that my gaze had fixed itself upon a pair of headlights slowly circling the perimeter road outside the fence bordering the airport. A night watchman? The police? The cruising car didn’t come near enough to where I lay next to the fence for me to make an identification, and I wasn’t about to leave my comparatively safe haven to satisfy my curiosity.

When I saw the headlights a second time twenty minutes later in the same deliberate pattern through the area, I was sure it was the police. If a manhunt were actually underway, it would be poor police tactics if one of the prime escape areas on the island — even if an unlikely one in their estimation — went unpatrolled.

It changed my thinking about my own tactics. I had planned on remaining outside the fence until Erikson’s pickup plane actually arrived. Now I couldn’t afford that luxury if the police remained as active as they gave every indication of being.

During an interval when the cruising headlights were absent, I knelt in the grass and made a shield of my jacket while I risked striking a match to take a quick look at my watch. It was 3:35
A.M
. There was still no light in the sky, but a change in the quality of the darkness promised that the first light streaks of dawn would be evident before too much longer.

I rose to my feet and removed my jacket and the canvas sack from around my neck. I pitched both over the fence, then clawed and toed my way to the top of the swaying, eight-foot barrier, and jumped down. I landed in soft sand next to a palmetto bush. Only the whispering rustle of palm fronds disturbed by the salt breeze intruded upon the silence.

I recovered the jacket and sack and made my way in the loose, clinging sand bordering a runway. I judged the plane would roll to a stop at the end of the strip if the diminishing wind continued to blow from its present direction. Then I stretched out in the sand with the straggling palmetto bushes screening me from the road. The cover wasn’t as good as it had been outside the fence, but my ability to move rapidly had increased vastly.

The patrolling car — if in fact it was the same one — made one more pass along the perimeter road before fingers of light in the eastern sky alerted me to the advent of action. The plane was supposed to land as soon after dawn as the pilot’s judgment permitted.

The air grew cooler as the breeze seemed to fade even more. A faint odor of decaying seaweed was carried on the light eddies of air which now seemed to be on my left cheek instead of fullface as before, although they weren’t strong enough for me to be sure.

I replaced the canvas sack around my neck and re-buttoned my jacket. I would need both hands free to scramble into the escape aircraft with a minimum of delay. The gradual infiltration of light upon the field had grown sufficiently for me to make out the dark bulk of the field’s administration building to one side of the longest runway. I could see no activity there.

The increasing light also disclosed that the asphalt strips branching off from the principal runway formed a pattern shaped like the letter K. I wondered again if I had selected the correct place to position myself. Conceivably, the pickup plane could land on any of the strips, depending upon surface wind direction. There was nothing I could do except wait and see.

The light had increased to a point where I began to think something had thrown off the planned rendezvous. It seemed to me there was more than adequate light for a plane to land. Then from the direction of the water I heard the distant whine of turbine engines.

A plane flashed low overhead, a golden streak in the first rays of the sun. It pitched up into a steep climbing turn, dropping wheels and flaps in an acrobatic, unorthodox maneuver. It was going to be on the ground before anyone realized it was there. I stood up and waited. I still couldn’t tell which landing strip the pilot intended to use. There was practically no wind at all.

Only when the plane leveled out low in its final glide did I see that it was going to end up at the opposite end of the runway where I had stationed myself. I began to run through loose, damp sand that grabbed at my feet and seeped into my low-cut shoes. The crucifix of the plane hurtled past me, and I heard the screech of tortured tires biting into the asphalt. I swerved onto the runway into an invisible cloud of heat and kerosene fumes, but the better footing permitted me to run faster.

I couldn’t understand why the sound of the jet engines seemed to intensify until I realized I was hearing a second plane. I skidded to a stop on the asphalt. My pursuit of the rescuing jet had brought me almost midpoint of the long runway where the auxiliary strips intersected it, and to my left another aircraft, a single-engine piston type was in its final landing pattern and headed almost right for me.

I had to wait until it touched down and rolled rapidly toward the administration building. I could see heads looking out the side windows of the second plane. I began to run again as a door above the wing of the second plane opened and two women and a man clambered out, followed by a second man who stood on the wing and looked long and hard at the squatty jet at the farthest end of the main runway. A Bahamian businessman home from an all-night party at one of the Out Islands, I decided, and wondering what the strange plane was doing at this private field.

My breath was coming harder as I tried to increase my speed. The runway seemed endless. The man jumped down from the wing of the plane and began to walk quickly toward the jet. His course roughly paralleled my own. He began to run, too, trying to cut me off.

The pickup plane loomed close at hand now, though. I could see movement through its oval windows in the side of the smooth, cylindrical fuselage. Then the door which fit so snugly it was barely discernible was drawn inward. There were no markings on the plane at all.

A light-haired man in a brilliant orange flying suit appeared in the opening. A glance to the side revealed that the pilot of the private plane had unaccountably stopped running. He was staring at a corner of the field where a car I hadn’t noticed before was parked against the wire fence. Three dark figures were scrambling over its chain link barrier.

I raced around the rescuing plane’s jutting wingtip and hurled myself through the open door, almost knocking the man in the orange flying suit off his feet. “One pigeon in the roost, Artie,” he yelled up to the pilot, whom I could see with earphones cocked on his head so that one ear was exposed.

“Just — me,” I gasped. “Move — out — here!”

“Pappy said there’d be two of you,” the copilot said in a doubtful tone.

“No!” I got out with as much volume as I could muster. “Get — rolling!”

“Bumblebees outside, Sam,” the pilot drawled from up forward. “Batten hatches.”

I lurched to my feet as the sandyhaired copilot pulled the opened door shut and threw over the locking lever. Through one of the oval windows I could see the three men who had climbed the fence were halfway across the field. Their right arms were extended and dots of winking yellow light appeared at the ends of them.

“Pour it on, skipper!” the copilot shouted. “The uglies have arrived!”

The plane surged forward, and the copilot grabbed at the back of a cushioned seat as the cabin swerved with the unlocking of brakes. “Grab yourself a pad and buckle in,” he called to me over his shoulder as he strained against the increasing acceleration to make his way to the cockpit.

We were really rolling by the time I clamped a seat belt across my middle. I had a quick glimpse of the private pilot flat on the ground, dodging bullets. Just beyond him on the perimeter road a jeep was making the scene.

I was pretty sure police were in the jeep.

Police wouldn’t charge across an airstrip shooting at an unidentified plane.

So Candy had been right in his insistence that syndicate toes had been tramped on.

Our plane banked until its silvered wing glistened in the sunlight. Far below I could see tiny figures in positions which indicated the three assailants had reversed direction and were running toward the fence and their car.

Then we were out over the water, and I couldn’t see Oakes Field at all.

The force of the acceleration as the plane continued to angle upward forced me back into the deep cushioned seat. In the aftermath I felt dead beat but too keyed up to relax. Candy’s sudden change of attitude had been baffling, and I hadn’t really believed his seeming near terror was justified until I saw the assault wave coming at me over the airport fence. I’d always felt that Candy had steel cables for nerves, and his loudly expressed angry fear had seemed a rank overstatement of the seriousness of the situation until the close call a few moments before had proven him right.

Thinking back, I had to wonder if I hadn’t inadvertently blocked all escape routes for Erikson. I hadn’t mentioned his name, but both Chen Yi and Candy knew I had a partner in police hands. Candy knew it had something to do with a bank.

I had spoken too freely in Candy’s apartment when I was thinking only in terms of the police. I was certain that none of the group on Eurydice Street would run to the police with information, but the syndicate was another matter. Hadn’t Candy remarked that Hermione was a gangster’s girl friend? I wished I knew exactly what I’d said during that brandy-filled night when I felt fairly secure.

If Candy or Chen Yi talked under syndicate pressure, I had made Erikson a syndicate target.

It was a thought I didn’t like.

I reached down for the seat lever to incline the seat back. Just as I touched it, an alarm bell sounded in the cockpit, and a red light flashed on above my head. An emergency oxygen mask dropped down and dangled in front of my face. I grabbed for it and then was thrown forward as the pilot suddenly pulled back the throttles and abruptly leveled the plane from what been a steady climb.

The copilot scrambled back into the cabin, a flashlight in his hand. “Don’t crap your pants yet, Mac,” he advised me. “We’ve lost cabin pressure, that’s all. You won’t need that mask unless the skipper decides to go higher to get above a storm ahead of us. Meanwhile I’ll check the door seal and latch.”

I turned to watch him as he brushed past me. I wondered if parachutes were concealed somewhere in the aircraft’s plush interior. The copilot bent close to the fuselage door, then swung open a smaller door at the rear of the cabin. Apparently finding nothing there, he reversed direction and started back up the aisle.

He stopped partway and pushed the flat of his hand against the cream-colored vinyl overhead. Two small perforations marred the smooth interior. He probed with a finger, then inserted it into the break and ripped away the outer fabric. He pulled thick, soundproof padding away until the bare metal skin of the fuselage was exposed. “Damn!” he exclaimed. “We’ve been holed!”

I could see twin punch-outs the size of thimbles about four inches apart. The copilot spun around and stared at the plane’s opposite side. Two ragged slits showed in the vinyl, and when he peeled the soundproofing away, two much larger rents in the metal were exposed, made by tumbling bullets during their exit.

“Is it bad?” I asked. I hoped my voice didn’t reveal the totality of my concern.

My question fell unheeded upon the copilot’s retreating back. Through the open cockpit door I could see him consulting with the pilot, who advanced the throttles again. I noticed, though, that he kept the plane in level flight.

The copilot returned and shoved dangling oxygen masks above each empty passenger seat back into overhead compartments. I fumbled with mine until he took over impatiently. “There’s nothing to worry about,” he said. “This little fat cat will hold together through a lot worse than this, but the bullet holes will keep us from flying above ten thousand feet. Safety regulations prohibit it.”

His tone was accusing, as if I were responsible for the plane damage. And in a way I guess I was. “So we’ll hold at nine thousand, and that means we won’t get you back on schedule,” he continued. “At that altitude we’ll have turbulence and head winds because of the storm I mentioned. We’d planned to top it at thirty-eight thousand feet, but now we can’t. We’ll use twice as much fuel at the lower level, so we’ll radio ahead for a clearance into Patrick Air Force Base for refueling and quick repairs.”