Operation Breakthrough (8 page)

“Can the condition get any worse?”

“Only if one of our wingtip fuel tanks was holed, and there hasn’t been any indication of it on the fuel gauges. All it would mean anyway is that Patrick would be the end of the line for you on this flying carpet. You’d have to contact your office and make other travel arrangements.” He returned to the cockpit.

I had a mental picture of myself trying to call my office and make other travel arrangements. I knew no office to call. Erikson had always handled all that. These jet jockeys might not know it, but they had a passenger until they landed me at Andrews, no matter how long it took.

But I could see another problem on the horizon. A slow flight and a stop at Patrick AFB meant I was going to be late for the 8:00
A.M
. rendezvous with Erikson’s man Baker who was to be at Andrews only for ten minute intervals each twenty-four hours. What was I going to do with myself for twenty-four hours while I waited for the next rendezvous interval?

I put it out of my mind. Moments later I fell asleep. Or rather I dozed. I kept being wakened by the pitching of the plane. Over the steady hum of the engines I could hear a new, drumming sound. When I looked out the window, I could see heavy rain blasting against the fuselage. Driblets of water came through the bullet holes overhead. Once a lightning flash so bright it pierced my closed eyelids brought me to full consciousness with a start, but soon I went back to sleep again.

I was awakened fully by the thump of our landing. In contrast to the brilliant sunrise of our takeoff it was a dark gray morning. The plane rolled along a rain-slicked runway and turned off at its end. We bobbed and lurched along for a short distance, then swung onto a hardstand shielded on three sides by high earthern embankments. The plane spun around and stopped. A fuel truck halted alongside with a hiss of air brakes. “This shouldn’t take long,” the pilot said to me as he left the cockpit.

A sunburned mechanic entered the plane when the door was opened. He carried a tool box. He and a companion began hammering and pounding inside the plane and out, creating an unholy, ear splitting racket as they anchored temporary metal patches to the bullet-torn fuselage. It didn’t take them long, and I looked out to see the fuel hose being snaked back aboard the truck. Everyone worked with the speed and precision of a Daytona Speedway pit crew. Not that it made that much difference, since the time we’d lost flying at low altitude and bucking the storm had already made me miss the Andrews Field rendezvous for that morning.

Within minutes we were back in the air, climbing rapidly as we paralleled the east coast of Florida. The sky lightened as we gained altitude. I became conscious of a tugging at my sleeve; I had fallen asleep again. I couldn’t seem to get rested.

The copilot was placing a briefcase in my lap. “We’ll be letting down shortly,” he said. “My instructions were to give you these.” He flicked a hand at the briefcase — an attaché case type — and then handed me two keys. He hesitated a moment before continuing. “Sorry about your buddy,” he said awkwardly. “I wouldn’t have your job for four times the pay.” He went back to the cockpit.

I found that each briefcase latch had its own lock, which accounted for the two keys. After some fumbling I discovered that a half-turn of one key in the left-hand lock released a pin that permitted the right-hand lock to be opened with the other key. Only after that could the left-hand lock be sprung. Erikson had evidently planned for each of us to have a key to this briefcase, which afforded security by ordinarily requiring two individuals to open it.

I propped up the attaché case lid and looked inside. The case held nothing but two plastic cards which were strung individually on metal bead chains. The faces of the cards appeared blank except for an intricate network of threadlike wires imbedded under the slick coating. The letter
Q
was imprinted on the back of each card and beneath that a nine-digit identification number. The beaded chains were to permit the cards to be worn around the neck. There had evidently been one for Erikson and one for me. Where and when I would use mine was still a mystery.

The briefcase itself had obviously been provided as a receptacle for the material we had obtained from the bank. I transferred the contents of the canvas sack to the briefcase and for the first time had a look at the material the sack had contained. Most of it was loose papers, some so old they had become discolored with age.

There was a half-inch-thick pack of ledger sheets, but the only entries I could understand were the figures. It wasn’t English. I guessed it was either Spanish or Italian. And the figures were written with a European slant including the characteristic short bar drawn through the upright stroke of the 7s.

One thing I couldn’t overlook was the amount column at the right-hand side of the ledger sheets. Few had less than eight digits. Even if the figures represented lira or Swiss or French francs, it was a cinch the carefully preserved records represented some kind of financial dealings in the millions of dollars.

I looked at the rest of the material quickly. Flat cardboard boxes contained reels of film. A few single negatives I held up to the light disclosed groups of men. And there were half a dozen slim, leather-bound, diary-type books in which the writing again was not in English.

I found pages of Italian names while leafing through one of these. In parentheses behind the names were listings such as Banc de Suisse, Banque du Martinique, and Banca la Roma. Letters and numbers following the listings evidently represented some sort of identification, and these in turn were followed by more of the eight and nine digit numbers I’d seen before. It didn’t take a giant intellect to perceive that I was looking at a record of secret bank accounts.

Ever since the semicommando assault wave at Oakes Field, I’d had a growing suspicion what Erikson had been after inside the safe deposit boxes we’d rifled. Now I knew for sure. I closed and carefully locked the briefcase with its incriminating material. The innocent-looking briefcase contained a time bomb for someone or a lot of someones. All I wanted to do was get rid of the thing.

I should have paid more attention to Candy. He was on his home turf and certainly should have known the score, but it just hadn’t sounded reasonable. Unknowingly, I might have put Candy on a tough spot. The syndicate had a long arm, and if they backtracked to Candy, they might backtrack to Erikson. I didn’t like what I was thinking. I wanted to tell my story to someone who could set the wheels in motion to jerk Karl Erikson the hell out of Nassau.

We had been flying in bright sunshine which reflected dazzlingly at times from the wing outside my window. Then the light was obscured as the plane entered a thick cloud bank. It took me a second to realize that we had started descending. A series of squeaks, squeals, and whistles filled the cabin, and the light outside grew more dim.

A gray strip of concrete appeared below us, and the plane eased down upon it so smoothly I didn’t know when the wheels made contact. A low layer of fog capped the field, explaining the semidarkness of the descent. A blur of unfamiliar buildings flowed by my window. These were abruptly blocked out by lines of aircraft all bearing USAF insignia. Then in an open space between the planes there appeared a low, squat building with a sign that said Andrews Air Force Base Operations.

I’d landed at the huge military airfield near Washington, D.C., once before on a job with Erikson. Our plane turned onto a taxi strip that led away from the populated area. It rumbled and rolled along for what seemed miles and eventually turned off onto a concrete road that cut between a screen of tall pine trees.

Still the plane kept taxiing. A quarter mile farther on we entered a vast concrete-ramp area in front of four tremendous hangars. All around the parking area was a collection of strange-looking aircraft. I recognized U-2 spy planes wearing dull black paint, their long, narrow, drooping wings held up from the ground by outrigger wheels at their wingtips.

Some planes I didn’t recognize. There was a four-engine turboprop transport painted a pale sky blue. A low, squatty, single-seat fighter plane was tucked under one wing of the transport. The fighter had splashes of green, brown, and yellow paint intermixed in such a way its outline could barely be distinguished against the verdant pine tree background. Like the jet that had brought me here none of the aircraft bore identifying marks of any kind.

Helicopters and reconnaissance planes were jammed together nearby. In front of each plane was stationed an armed guard. Everything in sight looked perfectly capable of taking part in a Skunk Works’ Department of Dirty Tricks operation. I had never know about this area at Andrews before, and I wondered how many people actually did know about this separate installation at one of the country’s busiest military airfields.

A canopied, flatbed trailer towed by a slow-moving tractor approached us. Mechanics wearing white coveralls devoid of any indication of service or rank dropped off the trailer. One herded our plane into a vacant spot with hand signals. When the engines whined to a stop, the two pilots stepped aside to let me precede them out the opened door. I noticed that around their necks they were wearing plastic cards on beaded chains similar to the ones I’d found in the briefcase, and I put one on, too.

I ducked under the plane’s wing short of the streamlined fuel pod at its tip to avoid being run over by the inevitable fuel bowser pulling into position alongside. The pilots followed, one carrying a bulging navigation kit. They seemed ready to walk off and forget me. “What do I do now?” I asked.

Both men looked at me in surprise, then the pilot spoke with seeming understanding. “We got you in here late, you know. Your contact probably figured you weren’t going to make it today and left. You’ll have to call your office. Our job is finished, and we’ve got to check in. It’s been a long day.”

“Night,” the copilot corrected him.

“I’ll go with you,” I suggested.

The pilot tapped the red
Q
on the plastic card on my chest, then pointed to his own which had a green Omega symbol. “You couldn’t get within twenty yards of the Omega compound with that badge,” he said. He sounded suspicious, as though I were trying to put something over on him. “The only thing a Q card will get you around here is a one-way trip out the gate.”

Pilot and copilot walked away from me. As I stared after them, I was asked to move by a mechanic trailing a fuel hose. After the pilots’ warning I didn’t attempt to follow them. Confronting me in the opposite direction was a regular obstacle course of sober-faced guards.

I cruised through the area letting the position of the guards plot my course. I ended up going down a sidewalk to the right of the hangar line. At its end stood a gatehouse hemmed in on either side by double chain link fences with an electronic alarm system located in the eight-foot dead-man’s area between the fences.

Outside the gatehouse I could see a street and a large parking lot beyond it. I slowed down and watched the procedure followed by men coming from the parking lot into the area where I was. Each one as he approached the gate took the plastic card looped on the chain around his neck and lifted it chin-high to insert it into a slot anchored to a six-foot-high, steel-barred turnstile.

The men who carried lunch pails placed them in an open-end box imbedded in the gate house wall and left them there until a light above the inspection box turned green. Only after having passed both lunch inspection and establishment of his bona fides with his coded card did the turnstile click open and permit the man to enter.

Once clued, I could see that an identical arrangement was set up for the exit side. I walked to the turnstile, stuck my plastic card into the slot, and laid the briefcase in the inspection compartment. The light turned green, but the turnstile remained locked. I pushed on the horizontal bars, but they wouldn’t yield.

In the midst of my struggle with the turnstile I became aware that a guard was watching me. He strolled toward me when he saw I couldn’t open the gate. “Leave the card in the slot and step back,” he ordered crisply.

I ducked my head out from under the beaded chain and took three paces to the rear. When the guard saw I was clear of the gate, he pulled my card out of the slot, looked at it, turned it over, and reinserted it. The turnstile latch clicked. The guard looked at me pityingly as he would at an idiot child. “Okay,” he said gruffly.

I reached for the edge of the card that projected from the slot as I approached the turnstile again. My hand closed upon it but the card stuck fast. I pulled harder. My fingers slipped from its slick surface.

The guard was frowning. “It won’t release until you’ve passed through,” he said. “It’s a one-way pass. Exit only. It’s designed so we can’t fail to pick them up. The gate will release it after you pass through the turnstile, and I’ll send it on to your security section.”

I stopped with a hand on the turnstile. A one-way pass? That’s what the pilot had said, too. “Listen, I’ve got to get back in here,” I said.

“Not with that badge, man,” the guard said emphatically. “That’s a passout only.”

I began to sweat. Once through the gate how was I going to get back inside to keep the rendezvous with Erikson’s man, Baker? From the looks of this place they weren’t about to let me hang around inside the place either. For a second I thought I had an out: I had Erikson’s badge in the briefcase, but then that faint hope faded when I remembered that his badge was identical to mine and was one-way, too. If he had been with me, there’d have been no problem, but now I didn’t know what to do.

The guard was looking me over closely. “Buddy, get moving, or I’ll enforce section twelve of the new regs and detain you as a suspicious character. What are you trying to pull on me? Are you one of these security guys with your pretend-you-don’t-know-the-procedures gimmick? Go on, get lost. Maybe I ought to run you in anyway. I could use a commendation in my file.”

I could let him run me in, but what then? Nobody knew Erikson’s business except Erikson’s bosses, and how was I supposed to get in touch with them? And if I let anyone not in the know separate me from the briefcase and its contents, how was I going to interest anyone in Karl Erikson’s plight?