Operation Flashpoint Read online

  Like I was expendable. “What happens to the ‘item’ when we get it?”

  “That is not your department,” he retorted, unruffled. He rose to his feet again. “How much money do you require for the purchases you mentioned?”

  “Three thousand.” Actually it wouldn’t take a sixth of that unless the torch and the explosive came encrusted with diamonds, but I was testing. Bayak made no protest.

  My back was to the wall safe as he waddled toward it. “Do not turn around,” he said over his shoulder. I knew he couldn’t open the safe and watch me, too, so someone else was watching me. I shifted position slightly until I could see his obese figure in the same polished lamp base as before.

  “Something I forgot,” I said as I saw in the lamp base the same up-and-down movement twice of the concealing picture next to the liquor storage closet before the safe dial appeared. “How much does the ‘item’ weigh? Will there be any difficulty in moving it?”

  “There will be no difficulty.” Bayak’s voice was muffled as his face pressed close to the safe’s opened door. “It weighs twelve pounds.”

  Twelve pounds of heroin wasn’t a small amount, but it hardly seemed like enough to warrant the elaborate preparation and the money Bayak was throwing around. For the first time I began to feel that Erikson could be right in his insistence that dope wasn’t the target. But what else could be valuable enough to warrant such a violent laying on of hands?

  Bayak turned away from the safe with money in his hand. “Do not return here again,” he said brusquely as he confronted me and thrust the money at me. “There is a cocktail lounge on Lexington Avenue near Forty-sixth Street, called the Alhambra. Be there in four hours. Call me here—I will be able to verify from where you are calling—and you will be told where to go to meet the individual who will take you to the hijack spot.”

  I really had to admire the bastard.

  Whatever else happened, Iskir Bayak’s coattails were going to remain out of the grease pit.

  He would have a contact at the Alhambra to note and report to him anything unusual, either in my conduct or my companionship.

  Iskir Bayak was protecting himself right down to the fifth decimal place.

  “We haven’t talked about how I’m to be paid off,” I suggested. I knew he would expect it, and be ready for it.

  Nor was I mistaken. “When you leave the Alhambra, you will be taken to Grand Central Station by a man who in your presence will deposit forty thousand dollars in U.S. currency in a locker,” Bayak said smoothly. “At the hijack location, when you are committed, you will be given the only key, and upon the completion of the job you will return and recover the money.”

  Beautiful.

  Except that I knew it was this fat slug’s intention that I never return from the hijack. One of the hijack crew would have orders to finish me off with a bullet in the back of the head. I’d gone this far thinking I had only to learn the location and let Erikson know and have his people take over. Now I was being firmly locked into the operation with no possibility of finding out the essential factor: where the hijack was to take place.

  It was in a thoughtful mood that I left the penthouse apartment.

  I had to get to a phone and call Erikson at the Queens number he’d given me.

  10

  IT took me ten minutes to lose the tail who picked me up on the street in front of Bayak’s apartment building.

  I led him to a busy intersection where I hailed a cab in a bumper-to-bumper and curb-to-curb mass of cars. I watched while the tail scrambled frantically for another cab, and the instant he opened the door, I leaned forward and dropped a bill on the front seat of my cab. “Changed my mind,” I told the cabbie as I went out the opposite door I’d entered. I inched my way through jammed cars to the sidewalk.

  When the light changed, the traffic surged forward. I watched the cab with the tail in it follow the cab I’d been in across the intersection, and I wondered how long it would be before the tail realized he’d been had.

  I found a street pay phone and called Erikson at the Queens phone number. “You mean you still don’t know where the hijack is going to take place?” he demanded after I brought him up to date.

  “That’s right. The Turk is too cute to tip his hand even five minutes in advance of the action.”

  “And we have five and a half hours?”

  “Less thirty minutes,” I said after checking my watch. “How did you make out with Talia?”

  “She’s four doors down the hall. Doc Walsh thinks she was waiting to load up again just before she boarded the plane, so she was on a down cycle when we brought her out here. He says she’s in the first stages of actual withdrawal, but he won’t guess how soon she’ll be willing to talk.”

  And if she didn’t talk—or didn’t know anything useful when she did talk—I was right up to the gate of the Turk’s project with no way out.

  Unless I pulled out.

  Erikson must have read my mind. “Take a cab up here and we’ll talk this over,” he said. “There’s got to be some way we can set this thing up so we can give you an umbrella.” The phone clicked in my ear.

  I went over it all again during the long cab ride, and I could find no better answers than I had in Bayak’s apartment. The Turk had covered himself well at every turn. A man had to be crazy to go into a midnight-black cave without a flashlight, and I was going to tell Erikson so.

  The cab pulled up at the emergency entrance of a small clinic, the main building of which was hidden from the road behind stone walls and high hedges. Erikson came down a white-walled corridor to rescue me from the questions of the nurse at the admissions desk. “She’s cracking up,” he said quietly after drawing me to one side. “Doc thinks she might spit it out anytime. Brace yourself. It isn’t pretty.”

  I followed him down the hall. We went into an antiseptic-looking room with a hospital bed and a single chair. I heard the click of a solid lock as Erikson closed the door. A gray-haired, white-coated man with a stethoscope stood beside the bed which had high metal bars raised on either side of it.

  Erikson’s warning still hadn’t prepared me for my first glimpse of Talia. She was a twitching mass of flesh in a short hospital gown, restrained in the bed by leather straps across chest and ankles. Ravaging lines around eyes and mouth made her look ten years older. Her features glistened damply, and wet blotches on the hospital gown indicated profuse body perspiration.

  “Can she talk?” Erikson asked.

  The doctor shrugged. “If she will.”

  “See if she knows you,” Erikson asked me.

  I moved in beside the barrier of the raised metal bars. Talia’s glossy black hair streamed soddenly over the pillow. Her constantly tossing head gave her eyes little opportunity to focus, but I leaned down until I thought she could see my face. She knew someone was there, all right, but I couldn’t tell if she knew it was me. She muttered something in a foreign tongue, then repeated it with great urgency. “F-fix!” she whispered hoarsely. “Need—f-fix!”

  I leaned still closer. Her constant struggle against the restraints was causing her body to give off an almost animal heat. “Where is Bayak’s truck hijack going to take place, Talia?” I said slowly and distinctly.

  “Don’t—know,” she got out breathlessly. Saliva flew at each consonant. More spittle formed at the corners of her mouth and ran down onto her chin. “Can’t—tell you. Never told me—anything.”

  Erikson leaned down over the side of the bed. “Bayak smuggles dope?” he asked, spacing each word.

  “Yessssss.” It came out as one long hissing sibilant. “In diplo—” Talia swallowed hard and began over again. “In diplomatic pou—ches.” Her throat worked convulsively. “Gets—from Arabs to—finance commando—activities.” Her knees jerked wildly and her hands clenched and unclenched.

  “And Bayak takes a cut?”

  “Yessssss.”

  “What about the truck hijack?”

  “Not—heroin. Way he act
s—more valuable.”

  “What were you supposed to do in Damascus?”

  “Tell Shariyk—missing element—be in hands—twenty-four hours.”

  Erikson’s eyes met mine across the bed. “The lost-strayed-or-stolen atomic scientist,” he said. He returned his attention to Talia. “Where will the truck hijack take place?”

  Her black hair whipped from side to side as she shook her head in a violent negative movement. “Don’t—know!” It was almost a scream. “Only place possibly—find out—his safe!”

  Erikson straightened up. “I’ve got to make a phone call,” he said curtly, and strode to the door.

  I tried a few more questions, but with less and less response. In all honesty it didn’t make sense that the cautious Bayak would have confided details of his plan to Talia. I stared down at the writhing girl on the bed. “Give her a shot, Doc,” I said.

  “She’s going to have to go through this sooner or later, you know,” he objected.

  “Later, then.”

  “I’ve no authority—”

  “Don’t give me a hard time, Doc. Give her a shot.”

  He opened a little black bag at the foot of the bed and removed a hypodermic syringe. “These types usually aren’t salvageable, anyway,” he said while he wound a rubber cord under Talia’s upper arm and searched with his fingertips for unpitted flesh. “Mainlining it into the vein doesn’t make for a long life, but it’s the only thing that can reach her now.” Dextrously he plunged the needle into the black-and-blue arm.

  Talia’s shivering and shaking died away. Her knees went slack as I watched the familiar hard shine take over her dark eyes. “Bet—ter,” she whispered. “Stomach—hurts. H-hurts.”

  Erikson thrust his head into the room. “Come on,” he said to me.

  I went down the hallway with him to a small conference room. In front of a picture window overlooking the clinic parking lot was a library table with a telephone and a scattering of medical journals. “You’ve got to call Bayak and explain your disappearance,” Erikson said. “And try again to get him to tell you where the hijack location is.”

  “I’ve got a good out on the disappearance,” I said. I looked up Bayak’s number in the directory and dialed. Abdel’s heavy voice answered the very first ring. Bayak came on the line immediately. “Where are you?” the fat Turk demanded angrily.

  “I’m doing a little shopping, remember?” There was a note pad beside the phone. I scribbled the words “hand-held acetylene torch” and “plastic explosive” on it and shoved the pad toward Erikson. He nodded.

  “It’s almost time for you to be at the Alhambra!” Bayak sounded more nearly out of control than I had ever heard him.

  “I had to break loose from a tail after I left your place. It could’ve been the precinct detectives keeping tab on me, like they said they would when Talia sprung me, or maybe the fuzz is getting close to your operation. In which case you’d better get yourself another boy.”

  “It was my man, not the police!” Bayak exploded. “Naturally I had to make sure you weren’t being followed!”

  Naturally you’re a pluperfect liar, I thought. You intended having me followed for your own good reason. “If you weren’t so damned secretive about these things, we wouldn’t be wasting so much time,” I complained. “Now cut out the foolishness. Where’s the hijack location?”

  Immediately he was in control again. “You don’t need to know that yet.” I tried to say something, but he kept right on talking. “Listen closely, now. Forget the Alhambra. There isn’t time. Instead, go to the waterfront in Bayonne, New Jersey and station yourself at the northeast corner of the abandoned gate-house leading to Pier Twenty-six. You will be contacted—” There was a pause as if he was consulting his watch “—in two hours and thirty-four minutes. Do you understand?”

  “Hold it while I write that down,” I said. I covered the mouthpiece while I wrote it on the pad and showed it to Erikson.

  “I know the area,” he whispered, frowning. “It’s open and exposed. There’s no way we can give you back-up cover there. But we’ll work out something.” He nodded at the phone. “Don’t keep him waiting.”

  I was staring out the conference-room picture window at the parking lot. Two guards were shooing off-duty nurses and white-jacketed orderlies from the center of the area. All heads were turned upwards. A gray-painted helicopter wearing bands of iridescent yellow paint around its thin boom settled slowly in the middle of the area. Its rotating blades whirled with decreasing speed, then came to a stop. The plexiglass door, which formed one side of the passenger bubble, opened and a uniformed man climbed out.

  Erikson nudged me, and I uncovered the mouthpiece. “I’ve got that down,” I said. “Will you be there?”

  “I’ve already said that we will have no further contact,” Bayak said sharply.

  “I don’t like working in the dark,” I sought to prolong the conversation while I tried to think of another angle to bring pressure to bear on Bayak. “We should really have a dry run or two on the hijack to iron out any possible problem.”

  “There will be no problem unless you become one,” Bayak replied. His tone was pregnant with warning. “The timetable provides sufficient latitude for you to conduct what you Americans call a ‘skull session’ with the men who will assist you. They know their jobs.”

  “But how will I know now that my money is in the Grand Central locker like you promised?”

  “It’s entirely your fault that you weren’t in a position to verify it for yourself,” the Turk said coldly. “Once the business is finished, you will be given the locker key and dropped off at a convenient point.”

  Dropped off at convenient point from a convenient bridge into a convenient river. “It’s too complicated,” I said.

  Bayak’s voice rose again. “It’s hardly necessary to practice something that must be done perfectly the first time. Like a parachute jump, for instance. Are you going ahead with the plan?”

  “Sure I’m going ahead with it,” I said. “But I’ve got to know—”

  “I must leave now,” Bayak said. He hung up on me.

  “I ought to cut out of this damned business right now,” I told Erikson while I replaced the phone receiver. “You can’t cover me, and if this hijack comes off, you’ll arrive on the scene in time to deliver flowers.”

  “I can’t order you to do it,” Erikson said. “But I laid on the helicopter to save time in case you decided to follow through.”

  I thought again of the way Chryssie had died, and the care the Turk had shown in protecting his own gross obesity. “I’d love to put a spoke in that bastard Bayak’s wheel for sure,” I admitted. “You figure the hijack is going to take place right there on the Bayonne docks?”

  “That would be too simple, the way the rest of the operation is shaping up. You’ll probably be meeting a contact man who’ll take you to the hijack spot.”

  “These guys have got to slip somewhere,” I argued to myself. “And when they do—” I didn’t finish it, but I had Iskir Bayak’s left ventricle lined up in a mental gunsight. “Let’s try for another first down. I’ll let you know about the touchdown later.”

  Erikson led the way outside to the helicopter. The pilot looked like a kid. Erikson brushed aside the boy’s snappy salute. “Next stop Bayonne?” I said as we settled down inside the bubble.

  “Downtown New York,” Erikson replied. “The girl convinced me that our only chance to nail down the hijack location is to get into Bayak’s safe.”

  “And how do you think you’re going to do that?” I asked as the engine of the helicopter caught hold and the drooping blades began windmilling again.

  “You’re going to do it,” Erikson informed me, raising his voice against the engine noise. “Or have I been misjudging you all the time I’ve known you?”

  I didn’t say anything. “Where to, sir?” the helicopter pilot inquired as we rose from the ground.

  “The heliport on top of the Pan Amer
ican Building!” Erikson shouted.

  The pilot jerked his head around. “I can’t do it, sir. It’s off limits. The FAA closed it down.”

  “Just follow orders, Ensign. I’ll clean up the paperwork later.”

  “There goes my Navy career,” the boy muttered in an aside. “Boy, my tail will really be in the grease.”

  Erikson handed me a microphone after speaking into it briefly. “This is a ‘ham’ phone patch linking radio transmission to ground telephone lines. McLaren’s on there. Tell him what you need in the way of a torch and plastic explosives. Have him bring them to the Turk’s with two cars and four agents.”

  I transmitted the information as the ‘copter’s wide-ranging arc in the sky disclosed the blue waters of Long Island Sound in the distance. “And McLaren?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll need a detailed map of the area around Pier Twenty-six in Bayonne, New Jersey. Plus the tool kit.”

  “Check. Sounds as though business is picking up.”

  I handed the microphone back to Erikson.

  We approached Manhattan’s tall buildings, heading into a lowering sun which turned the haze over the city into an orange mist. We crossed the East River paralleling the Queensborough Bridge. To our left, the rays of the setting sun reflected from the glass windows of the UN Secretariat Building, making its western side look like a sheet of flame.

  We weren’t more than a couple of hundred feet above the tallest buildings, and air turbulence made the helicopter bounce and rock. “You can see now why the heliport’s closed, sir,” the pilot shouted, fighting the controls. “But there it is.”

  “It” was the flat top of the Pan Am building a few blocks away. From where we were yo-yoing in the air, the landing area looked like a postage stamp. And when the pilot plunked us down with a shuddering thud within the yellow landing circle, it still didn’t look a hell of a lot larger.