Operation Flashpoint Read online

  “We’ll take care of the getaway.” Both his eyes and voice were chilly. “You take care of getting into the truck.”

  “Forget it!” I said angrily. “It may be amateur night for you, but not for me. I’m not going to jail for your mistakes.”

  “Nobody is going to jail.” Hassan drew lengthily on his fresh cigar and examined me through the wreath of blue smoke he slowly exhaled. “This is a military operation, Drake. We take the objective; then we worry about the getaway.”

  I started to say something but he kept right on talking. “Iskir thinks you may have something going for yourself on this. I’ll tell you now that it will be your last mistake if you try anything. I argued with Iskir about including you, but he insisted that instead of stopping the truck and shooting it out you could finesse us inside it less noticeably.”

  “But we’ll still have to have a plan for—”

  “The only plan we need is for stopping the truck. We’re wasting time. Either you lay out the job and come with us and direct it, or we leave your body here and do it our way.”

  I wasn’t going to win any arguments with this fanatic. “Have you seen the actual location?”

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “Is there a traffic light?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there a curve on Road A, the road along which the truck will be approaching, either just before or just after the light?”

  He squinted while endeavoring to remember. “There is a curve perhaps one hundred to one hundred and twenty meters beyond the light.”

  “How much is a meter?”

  “Approximately three and a quarter feet.”

  I did a little mental arithmetic. “So there’s a curve three hundred and fifty to four hundred feet beyond the light. Where’s the equipment?”

  He gestured toward the corner of the warehouse. “In the truck.”

  “Break it out.”

  He snapped his fingers and issued a command. Two men went to the truck and began unloading automatic weapons and sawhorses with yellow-and-black signs saying CONSTRUCTION on them. I used the time to transfer to the sheet of paper on the card table the rectangles and circles indicating relative positions of the target truck, the men, and the getaway cars.

  “They speak English?” I asked when everyone was around the table again.

  “Enough to understand,” Hassan replied.

  “How do we recognize the truck?”

  “Show him the picture,” Hassan said to the driver of the car that had brought me to the warehouse. The man produced a colored snapshot of a big jimmy-diesel with R & M Transportation Company prominently lettered on its front and the side that could be seen in the picture.

  “We’ll set up on the curve,” I said, positioning sawhorses diagonally on the warehouse floor, simulating a gradual closure of the outer lane of traffic on a highway. “That way when we block traffic from the rear, we can stop it far enough around the curve so drivers can’t see what’s happening to the truck.”

  I pointed to the sawhorses. “We force the traffic to move over to the inner edge of the road,” I said. “Everything must go past us in one lane, and slowly.”

  One of the men nodded. “You four will be waiting here,” I continued, pointing to each of the four men in turn except Hassan, and then placing my finger on the first set of circles I’d drawn on the map. “Two on each side of the road. When the truck appears, one of each pair will swing up onto the jump-seat step on each side of the truck cab and hold a gun on the driver.”

  There were several nods. “When the truck stops, it will be the responsibility of the second man on the driver’s side of the truck to keep the traffic on the opposite side of the road moving. Don’t let anyone stop to see what’s going on. Do it by arm signals if possible, but keep that traffic flowing.”

  I pointed to the second set of circles I’d drawn on the map. “The positions will then be as follows, except for the second man on the inner edge of the road. He will run back up the road around the curve, carrying a sawhorse and will place it across the single lane of traffic so that cars must stop. Some won’t want to stop, but they must not be allowed to continue around the curve.”

  I looked at Hassan. “You and I will then have four or five minutes to unbutton the truck and get the package.” This man would give the order for my erasure when I was considered expendable. I intended to stay close enough to him to make sure the order was never given. “We can’t reasonably expect to freeze traffic any longer than that.”

  “It is a competent plan,” he admitted grudgingly after studying the map and considering my lined-up sawhorses. “What about getting into the truck?”

  “If it’s just an ordinary lock on the back doors, a revolver bullet should do it. If it’s anything more complicated, we’ll need the torch or the plastic. The torch would take about three minutes, the explosive one minute.”

  “Then we are ready to proceed,” Hassan announced. “Reload the truck, Ahmed. Then blindfold this one.”

  “Now wait a minute—” I began.

  “Blindfold him,” Hassan repeated. “He has no need to see until we reach the scene.”

  Ahmed supervised the reloading of the green panel truck, then approached me with a grimy handkerchief which he folded deftly. He placed it over my eyes and knotted it at the back of my head, then took my arm and steered me to the front seat of a car. I was relieved to find it was the car I’d come in, the one with the beeper transmission unit. Hassan settled down beside me at the wheel. I knew it was him because of the odor from his cigar.

  If Erikson hadn’t received word from Washington about where to intercept the truck, we were in for a bad time. Even if he made the scene while the hijack was going on with another carful of agents as he promised, we were going to be outmanned and outgunned. I’d seen enough automatic weapons aboard the green panel truck for a small-scale war. And because Bayak’s suspicion of me had been passed on to Hassan, that hawk-eyed worthy was sure to attempt to punch my clock permanently the moment the shooting broke out.

  I heard the rumbling sound as the warehouse door lifted again. The car backed up, swung around, and rolled forward. ‘I heard a second car, and then a heavier engine that could only be the panel truck.

  “A diesel truck on the highway isn’t like a train on a track which runs on a schedule,” I said to Hassan. “If there’s a long wait, we’re bound to look conspicuous waiting alongside the road.”

  “The truck won’t be late,” Hassan replied. “It checks in periodically on its trip across the country. It cost Iskir a lot of money to acquire the check-in information, but we know the time of the truck’s arrival at the intersection, give or take five minutes. The next-to-last check-in was made twenty-five minutes ago.”

  “How about recognition?” I asked. “Even forcing the traffic to slow down in a single lane, a diesel rolls up on you fast.”

  “That is provided for,” Hassan answered. “A man with a field telephone in his car is stationed at the brightly lighted intersection. When the truck appears, the man will call the green panel truck. We will have a minimum of thirty seconds warning, more if the traffic light at the intersection detains the truck. But even thirty seconds will be sufficient.”

  I’d made a mistake in thinking of these men as amateurs. With the fire power they possessed, a pocket battleship wouldn’t have been too much of a problem for them, let alone an unarmored truck. They really didn’t need me to get into it for them, either, now that I thought about it. I wondered if the shrewd Bayak’s real reason for including me had been simply to supply a dead criminal body to divert the police after the hijack.

  Our car stopped. I thought it was for a traffic light, but then I heard Hassan open the door on his side. “We’re here,” he stated. There was no emotion in his voice.

  “Already?” I responded, startled. Everything had been on paper to this point. Now for the first time I had the feeling we were really going into action.

  The door on my
side opened, and someone leaned in. “Remove the blindfold,” Hassan’s voice ordered. It was ripped ungently from my eyes. When my vision adjusted, I saw a four-lane highway divided by a median. The night air felt damp. Running figures were unloading sawhorses from the panel truck across the road and setting them up on the highway on our side of the road in the pattern I’d indicated at the warehouse. Other figures were carrying weapons from the panel truck. A man handed a Sten gun to Hassan. I reached across my chest and touched the butt of my holstered Smith & Wesson to reassure myself somewhat.

  Across the median the lights of the parked panel truck flipped on and off three times. “Get out,” Hassan said. He still had his half-smoked cigar between his teeth. “It’s coming.”

  I picked up the sack containing the torch and the plastic which had been in the seat between us, then stepped out onto the shoulder of the road. A car passed us, and then another, slowly, herded over to the edge of the road by the sawhorses. Another set of headlights, wider spaced, appeared on the upper perimeter of the curve. Hassan grunted and walked rapidly toward them.

  A man ran out and placed a sawhorse across the single lane of traffic, sealing it off. There was an immediate shriek of hastily applied brakes as the truck loomed up alongside us. A khaki-clad figure bounded up onto the jump step as the truck came to a stop. The butt of his automatic rifle smashed through the cab window, and the man reversed his gun and leaned inside the cab. The plan called for another man to be holding a gun on the driver from the jump step on the other side, and I was sure that he was there although I couldn’t see him.

  Hassan strode to the rear of the truck. Both his hands were free as the sten gun was suspended from a shoulder sling. I followed right behind him. From now on I was determined that the stocky Hassan would never get behind me. Just one more straw in the wind as to my future with this group was the fact that Hassan had made no offer of the locker key to where my money presumably awaited me upon the completion of the hijack.

  Hassan reached the rear of the truck while the sounds of tinkling glass from the truck’s smashed cab windows still echoed in the night air. Across the road a man with a red lantern was busily waving-through traffic going in the opposite direction.

  I had expected to be the one to force the door lock, and I would have taken as long as I dared to give Erikson more time to catch up to us by tracing the beeper transmission signal. Instead, Hassan unslung the sten gun and fired a long burst into the lock. It was wasteful but effective. The lock shattered, and we stood there for an instant while spent shells pattered to the roadway like falling rain.

  Hassan flung open the doors and scrambled up into the truck. I turned and looked up the road. No headlights were advancing toward us. Around the curve the road had been sealed off according to the plan. I climbed up into the back of the truck and immediately drew my.38. Whatever was going to happen now was going to happen fast.

  Hassan was prowling the truck’s interior with a three-cell flashlight in his left hand. His right hand cradled the barrel of the sten gun still slung on his shoulder. According to the division of responsibilities outlined by the Turk, Hassan shouldn’t have known what he was looking for, but he obviously did. Another indication that I was to be left on the scene as a very dead red herring.

  Hassan’s flashlight beam moved on past a stack of crates and lingered on a gray package, its shape almost like a miniature coffin. I couldn’t see the AEC #3?45D, Hanford, Washington identifying marking, but I didn’t need to see it. Hassan’s pleased exclamation was identification enough. He started to bend down to pick it up, and then the night outside the truck was pierced by a rattle of machine-gun fire, followed at once by another burst, much closer.

  Hassan froze in his semi-crouched position. His flashlight went out, but not before I saw the barrel of the sten gun start to swing in my direction. I fired the Smith & Wesson three times. The range was six feet. By the gun’s flash I saw Hassan’s cigar fall to the truck floor from his slack mouth an instant before his body fell. There wasn’t much left of his head.

  The machine-gun exchange continued noisily outside. Erikson had arrived, and apparently in force. Right now I was intent upon survival. This was a dedicated group, and I was sure that someone else would be after the AEC package when Hassan didn’t appear.

  I dragged his body to the rear doors and flattened myself on the truck floor behind it. A voice snapped an impatient question in a foreign language. I waited,.38 at the ready. A man started to scramble up into the truck. He paused when confronted by the barrier of Hassan’s body, then went backward over the tail gate when I put a bullet into his chest.

  A machine gun went off so close to me I could almost feel the heat. Hassan’s body jumped and quivered as the slugs ripped into it. Then a waist-high spray of bullets hosed down the truck’s interior. I stretched out my arm as I tried to line up on the unseen machine gunner.

  The machine gun suddenly became silent. It took me only a second to see why. Through the open truck doors I saw a brilliant pair of headlights rounding the curve as a big car rocketed down the closed-off, outside lane, bouncing sawhorses to one side or grinding them beneath the wheels. The limousine-type car slid to a halt to the rear of the truck. Two men rushed out; one raised his arm, and lobbed a pineapple-shaped object toward the truck. It landed short, in the roadway, and rolled beneath the truck, out of my line of vision.

  I knew what it was, but I couldn’t do anything about it.

  There was a brilliant flare of light as the grenade went off, and a giant hand slammed the truck body upward into my stomach.

  My ears rang and my sight dimmed.

  I could feel the truck disintegrating around me.

  Then blackness descended.

  I came to with hands patting my body. “He’s breathing, and I can’t find any wounds,” I heard Erikson’s voice. “It might be just concussion. How’s your leg, Jock?”

  “The bullet must have hit a nerve,” McLaren’s voice answered. “I can’t feel anything below the knee.”

  “I’m afraid Bill and Eddie are in worse shape,” Erikson said soberly. I rolled over and sat up. “Well, back in the land of the living.”

  My throat was dry and there was something the matter with my ears. “Glad to see the U.S. Cavalry made it on time,” I croaked.

  “On time, hell,” McLaren snorted. He was sitting with one leg stretched out straight in front of him. Erikson had moved to him and was probing at the leg. “Bayak was in that limousine,” McLaren continued, wincing. “And whoever was with him recovered the AEC package while you were knocked out. The only break we got was that the grenade explosion blew the truck’s gas tank right into the limousine and set it afire.”

  I looked outside. I was surprised to find that the twisted truck body was level with the roadway. Up the road I could see the big car burning fiercely.

  “We nailed the man who threw the grenade,” Erikson added, “but not before he got the AEC package to Bayak. And Bayak just got away in the car that brought you here. Can you walk?”

  I struggled to my feet and tried it. “Sure.”

  “Then let’s go. Jock, hold the lid on things here.”

  I looked around for my.38 and found it. Erikson took my arm and hustled me to a car parked in front of the truck. Across the road the green panel truck was also burning. Cars were backed up behind the burning truck, not moving. There was no traffic on our side of the road, either. It would have taken a stupid motorist indeed to encroach on the war zone. A body in olive-drab was crumpled across the median. Another lay in the middle of the road with a submachine gun still grasped in its stilled hands.

  Erikson slid under the wheel, started the engine, and slammed the car down the highway. Beside him, I still felt partly numb and I was having difficulty swallowing. “That car that Bayak’s in still has the bumper beeper on it,” I reminded Erikson.

  He grunted acknowledgment, took one hand from the steering wheel, and fiddled with a switch on the dashboard. A faint b
eeping tone sounded. “There he is,” Erikson said. “But damn near the outer limit of pickup range.” He sounded worried. “If we were in our communications car, I could call ahead and arrange a roadblock, but the comcar was shot to pieces by those bastards. And if we stop to call we’ll lose Bayak.”

  Under the impetus of Erikson’s heavy-footed driving the car was doing eighty. The continuous beeping tone became louder. “We’re gaining,” Erikson said hopefully. “He’ll be driving like a law-abiding citizen in order not to attract attention to himself. But with the start he has—”

  “There’s only one place he can be headed,” I said. “Kennedy International Airport.”

  “The direction is right,” Erikson said after glancing at a dashboard compass. “But we can’t be sure.”

  “The hell we can’t. We know his next stop is Damascus. You got any.38 ammunition in this ark?”

  “Try the glove compartment.”

  I found a box of.45 bullets and a box of.38’s. I reloaded the Smith & Wesson, ignoring the swaying motion of the car as Erikson really pushed it. The speedometer needle flickered near ninety, and the beeping tone increased steadily in volume. “He can’t be more than a mile ahead of us now,” Erikson said. We had picked up some traffic, and he wheeled the car in, around, and through it with no thought for the brake.

  “I saw the AEC package,” I said. I made a shape in the air with my hands. “It looks like a gray miniature casket, about this big.”

  “That gets priority,” Erikson stated. “Above everything.” He hit the horn in a long blast, and cars ahead of us swerved out of the way. I caught a glimpse of drivers’ startled faces as we whizzed past them. “If we catch him, Bayak can claim diplomatic immunity, but at least we’ll recover the package from him.” The beeping sound suddenly filled the car’s interior, assaulting the ears almost painfully. “He must be held up at the toll bridge, by God! We’re going to get him yet!”

  Erikson rolled down the car window on his side and removed a gold badge from an inner pocket. In three minutes we rolled up on the lights-ablaze toll station with the car’s horn blaring steadily. Automobiles scuttled to one side. Erikson picked an empty lane, slowed to sixty, and threw his badge into the collection box as we burst on through. “That’ll bring reinforcements,” he said when he straightened the car out again after almost driving off the road where it narrowed beyond the toll station.