Operation Flashpoint Read online

  Duke strolled back to the watching gamblers. “Nothin’ to it now,” he said comfortably.

  “I’m glad you think so,” I told him. “When that first deputy finds what’s left at the plane—”

  “Nothin’ to it,” Duke repeated. The jeep driver waved to him to indicate that the message had been sent. Duke waved back in acknowledgment. “Might as well get as comfortable as we can, boys,” he said to the others. “There’s buses on the way to pick us up.”

  “What about that deputy?” Sal wanted to know.

  “I just pulled his teeth.”

  “I hope he knows it,” Sal grunted.

  The gamblers seated themselves awkwardly on the ground. The twilight shadows were lengthening but the earth was still warm to the touch. The occupants of the jeep got out and sat with their backs braced against the jeep’s wheels while they chain-smoked hand-rolled cigarettes. There was no fraternizing between the two groups.

  Thirty minutes passed. There was a preliminary squawk and then a voice from the jeep’s dashboard speaker. “KN-five-five-eight Mobile Unit Two to KN-five-five-eight Mobile Unit Four,” it said. “Come in, Mobile Unit Four.”

  The driver rose to his feet and picked up his microphone. “Go ahead, Two.”

  “Call Williamson an’ get the coroner an’ two ambulances out here pronto.” The jeep driver looked at his companions and then at the gamblers. “You got that, Four?”

  “I got it.”

  “You guys never saw nothin’ like what we got here. KN-five-five-eight Mobile Unit Two out.”

  “KN-five-five-eight Mobile Unit Four out,” the driver echoed. He depressed the microphone switch again. “KN-five-five-eight, this is Mobile Unit Four,” he began.

  “Look there,” a man near me said softly.

  I looked in the direction he was pointing.

  Three dust devils were advancing toward us along the same route the jeeps had taken previously. The clouds of dust materialized into two huge yellow buses led by a black limousine. When the limousine drew up near us and the rear door opened and two men in dark business suits stepped out, the jeep’s occupants rose and stood stiffly, almost at attention.

  The two men were followed by a chubby man in the same uniform as Morgan, the deputy who had gone to inspect the plane, but this one had scrambled eggs on his campaign hat. The first man out of the limousine was tall and aristocratic-looking with wavy gray hair. “Where’s Duke Conboy?” he asked.

  “Here I am, Tom,” Duke announced.

  The tall man strode to where we were standing. “What’ve we got, Duke?” His tone was pleasant but carried a note of authority.

  “A bad one,” Duke replied. “The plane crew’s dead plus two hijackers.”

  Weston frowned. “Aren’t you the little ray of sunshine, though?” he said as we were joined by the other civilian and the man in uniform. “Gentlemen, this is Neal Harris, liaison with the governor’s office,” he continued. “He happened to be with me and I’m glad I played a hunch and brought him along. And this is Sheriff Courtney.” Nods were exchanged all around. “These men were on one of our special flights, Neal, and Duke just told me that the plane crew is dead along with two hijackers.”

  Neal Harris’ easy-going manner changed. “Where is the plane?” he wanted to know.

  “Back a couple of miles,” Duke answered.

  “Probably at the abandoned silver mine’s airstrip,” Sheriff Courtney said.

  Harris looked at the sheriff. “Someone is investigating the—ah—situation at the airstrip?”

  The sheriff nodded. “Morgan, one of my deputies.”

  “To this point no one else is involved except your department?” Harris’ voice was crisp. “No other investigatory agency, I mean?”

  “No, sir. Not yet.”

  “Here comes Morgan,” someone said from behind me. A long, trailing funnel of dust from the direction in which we’d come heralded the return of the first jeep.

  “I’ll do the talking,” Harris said, and said nothing more until the jeep arrived. Deputy Morgan stared from the buses to the limousine to our little group, then swung down from the jeep and walked over to us.

  “This is Neal Harris, Deputy Morgan,” Tom Weston said.

  “I know Mr. Harris,” Morgan replied. Respect dripped from each syllable.

  “What did you find?” Harris demanded.

  Morgan drew a deep breath and flung his hands wide. “Bodies till hell wouldn’t have it,” he declared. “The plane crew includin’ the stewardess with their throats cut, plus two foreign-lookin’ guys on the ground outside, one of ‘em sliced up like you wouldn’t believe. I never saw—”

  “I’m correct in assuming that the basic situation is that the plane was hijacked and the passengers—ah—retaliated?” Harris interrupted him.

  “They sure as hell did,” Morgan said grimly. “I been in the department a long time but I never—”

  “It’s not the image we wish to promote of the state of Nevada,” Harris cut him off again. “So there will be no report of a hijack.”

  Morgan’s eyes swiveled to the sheriff, who nodded. “Yes, sir,” Morgan said.

  “Send the airline people to me, Sheriff Courtney,” Harris continued smoothly. “For once our concern about poor publicity should coincide. I’ll depend upon you to arrange for inconspicuous disposal of the bodies other than those of the plane crew. Have I made myself clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” the sheriff replied.

  “I’ll expect you to impress the need for silence upon deputies and other personnel on the scene here, Sheriff.”

  “Take care of that, Morgan,” the sheriff said. Morgan strode to the jeeps. The sheriff’s gaze swept the gamblers, lingering upon Candy Kane’s lime-green-and-shocking-pink ensemble. “Of course you realize I don’t have any control over these people, sir.”

  “I’m about to give you control, Sheriff. You have two buses here. I want this group split between the buses with deputies aboard each. I want one bus driven to Reno and the other to Salt Lake City. I’ll arrange to have a charter flight at each municipal airport to take these men back to New York. These men are to communicate with no one before they leave, and there are to be no exceptions to the fact that they do leave. I’ll hold you personally responsible. I intend that any stories floating back to Nevada in connection with this—ah—episode will be strictly in the nature of rumors.”

  “Yes, sir,” the sheriff said again.

  “These men lost a hell of a lot of cash, Mr. Harris,” Duke Conboy spoke up. “What about that?”

  Harris’ flat gaze examined him coolly. “You’ve all had a bad day at the tables, sir. Better luck next time.”

  “You mean you’re not going to—”

  “I mean I’ve already pushed myself dangerously close to the limit of my authority. Please get your men aboard the buses.” He walked toward the black limousine.

  “Maybe we can get a line on something, Duke,” Tom Weston muttered. “I’ll call you in New York.” He hurried after Neal Harris.

  “I wonder if the Lord realizes he’s been outflanked in this area of the world?” Duke said in a reflective tone as we watched the limousine make a sweeping turn in the sand and move away.

  It so nearly reflected my own sentiment that I found it unnecessary to comment.

  “You mean you were within two hundred miles when you were on the ground but you had to make another five-thousand-mile round trip to New York to get back here to the ranch?” Hazel demanded.

  “That’s what I mean.” We were sitting in the kitchen of the Rancho Dolorosa, Hazel’s spread twenty miles north of Ely, Nevada. I had just finished tucking in a meal of scrambled eggs and ham. “I got on the Salt Lake City bus because I knew it would pass within fifty miles of here,” I went on. “I thought I could talk the deputy into letting me off, but I couldn’t make a dent in him. That man Harris must really stamp his hoofprints all over anyone who doesn’t do exactly as he says. I had to go to New York and take
a commercial flight back.”

  Hazel started to laugh. She went to the stove and poured me another cup of steaming coffee from the big aluminum coffeepot. Her six-foot figure was clad as usual on the ranch in skin-tight Levis and a sleeveless buckskin vest that snugly encased her big breasts and left bare the smooth skin of her upper arms. Flaming red hair and cowboy boots studded with silver conches topped her off at either end. “I’d like to have seen your face when you realized you had to make another round trip to New York,” she said.

  “What’s so damn funny?” I groused when she laughed again. “I lost your seventy-five thousand, didn’t I?” And the remains of my own skinny bankroll, I could have added, but didn’t. I’d had to borrow plane fare back to Nevada from Duke Conboy.

  “It might have been worse,” Hazel said. “Suppose they’d held you all for investigation? If they took the trouble to trace you before your arrival in Ely, you wouldn’t be sitting here now.”

  “I thought of that when we were walking away from the airplane at that abandoned airstrip,” I admitted.

  “Who do you think the hijackers were?”

  “They weren’t syndicate types or anything like that. It came off more like a planned military operation. And then all the business about Jews—” I didn’t complete it. “NR eight-one-three-three-two. How’s your contact in the White Pine County sheriff’s department these days?”

  “We’re speaking again. Why?” Hazel’s shrewd eyes probed me. “And what’s NR eight-one-three-three-two?”

  “It’s the registration number on the private plane that magic-carpeted the machine gunner away from the hijack. How about calling your man at the sheriff’s office and asking him to trace the registration?”

  “No, thank you,” Hazel said firmly. “I’m not going to open up a can of worms that might force you to leave here if there’s additional investigation. I’m just getting used to having you around again.”

  “There shouldn’t be any problem,” I argued. “The plane was probably hired, which would be a dead end, but if it wasn’t, it might be possible to shake our money out of the tree just by knocking on someone’s door.”

  “What do you mean our money?” Hazel asked alertly. “Did you tap out on this thing?”

  “It probably didn’t cost me any more than if I’d stayed with the action in Vegas.”

  “But you wouldn’t have stayed!” she protested. “You know you’re not that kind of gambler. Now you’ve got me feeling badly about this. I don’t like to see you broke. You won’t use my money, and now you’ll probably get into trouble trying for a stake.” She surveyed me gloomily across the table.

  “You’re not feeling badly about the seventy-five thousand?”

  “No, I’m not. There were sixty witnesses on that plane that Tippy Larkin’s money was sent to him. And if he’d been in New York like he was supposed to be and you paid him, and he was on the plane afterward, he’d have lost it anyway, wouldn’t he?”

  “Feminine logic,” I said admiringly. “It’s just great.”

  “Never mind my feminine logic How much did you lose?”

  “A couple weeks’ rent. If you’re so cut up about my losing my roll, why don’t you make that telephone call and give me a shot at getting it back?”

  “Because you’d get into trouble.

  “If I ever find the guy, he’s the one in trouble.”

  “I suppose you won’t give me any peace until I do,” Hazel sighed. She went into the next room to the telephone. “The sheriff’s not there, but I left a message for him to call,” she reported when she returned. “Another cup of coffee?”

  “No, thanks. I’m awash now.” I pushed back my chair. “I’m going upstairs for some sack time. I feel as thought I’ve been on airplanes for a week.”

  I climbed the stairs to the north bedroom.

  I’d met Hazel four years before when I was in South Florida, trying to find out what happened to my partner and the swag from a Phoenix bank job. Both had disappeared. Hazel was a twice-widowed lusty female running a tavern in the area where I was doing my looking. We found we had a common racetrack background, and we’d hit it off in other ways. It had been a good time.

  Then I tangled with a police roadblock while I was making my move to avenge my partner and recover the loot. In the shoot-out a car’s gasoline tank exploded in my face. I was in a prison hospital for eighteen months before I promoted a little Pakistani plastic surgeon into making me a new face. I’d refused permission for Hazel to visit me because she didn’t deserve to be involved in my problems. She gave up trying eventually and came back to her homeplace, the ranch in Ely.

  When the time was ripe, I crushed out of the prison hospital without benefit of clergy and drifted to the west coast after a couple of eastern bank jobs that went wrong. I hadn’t seen Hazel for two years when I finally decided that things had cooled down enough for it to be safe for her if I looked her up. When I reached Ely I was surprised to find that Hazel had a sixteen-hundred-acre spread there plus stocks, bonds, and cash left her by her husbands. We picked up where we left off, and except for a side excursion to Cuba, which turned out to be a really wild affair, we’d been together ever since.

  I shed my clothes, took a shower, and turned down the bed. For forty-eight hours all my sleeping had been done sitting up. I had just crawled between the sheets when I heard Hazel’s step on the stairs, and I knew what was going to happen. She walked into the bedroom, and it was just as natural as any ace-six that ever rolled out onto a table.

  She sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled off her boots, then rose and peeled clothing from herself in a rainbow-hued shower. The big, warm, naked female body slid into the bed and snuggled up to me. I stroked her lazily, then not so lazily. We filled our roving hands with flesh until by mutual consent we threw the top sheet aside. I was so tired that it was a long, leisurely, and delicious ride before my boiler finally flared up and we sprinted down the homestretch together.

  I fell asleep afterward as though I’d been clubbed.

  When I awoke my watch had stopped. Hazel had drawn the shades before she left the bedroom, and I couldn’t tell if it was daylight or dark outside. I stretched luxuriously, slid out of bed, and took another shower. Hazel heard the water running, and when I came out of the bathroom she was seated on the edge of the bed again, smoking a cigarette.

  “The sheriff’s office called just after I boosted myself out from under your dead weight and went downstairs,” she announced. “I gave him the registration number of the plane, and he called back twenty minutes later.” She consulted a slip of paper she had removed from her Levis. “The plane is registered in the name of Frank Dalrymple who operates the Colonial Airport, a small private field near Tucson.”

  “Dalrymple,” I repeated. “A hired plane, for sure, but maybe this Dalrymple could tell me who hired him.”

  “There’s really no need for you to involve yourself,” Hazel pointed out. “You were my agent on the trip to New York with Larkin’s money, and I feel responsible for any loss you had.”

  I didn’t even bother to answer that one. The whole crazy expedition to Cuba had come about because I wasn’t about to use Hazel’s money. “How long was I asleep?”

  “Twelve hours.”

  “Damned if I don’t feel I could do it all over again.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “Including the preliminaries?”

  “Given similar provocation,” I agreed. “But first I could stand a shot of bourbon and some food.”

  I put on a robe and we went downstairs. Hazel fed me a steak, and then I watched the last half of a ball game on television. Hazel had a tower stretching up into the cobalt blue of the Nevada sky that was higher than some cable-company antennas I’d seen. It pulled in a signal from everything this side of the Continental Divide.

  We went back upstairs and sacked in again. I’d been a little doubtful about performance, but when I turned my palomino loose at the watering hole it was hip, hip, and hooray. W
e reached the quarter pole in.24, breezing, and worked out the mile in 35 and change.

  “How’d you like to take a ride down to Tucson tomorrow?” I asked Hazel when she came out of the shower.

  “Oh, man, have you ever got a one-track mind. Why don’t you just forget the whole thing?”

  I thought of a bronzed, high-cheekboned, eagle-beaked face peering at me along the barrel of a machine gun while I crouched on the wing of the 727. “I’d like to meet up with the one who got away, that’s all. One more time.”

  “Why hasn’t there been anything about it in the papers?”

  “Because a man named Neal Harris decided there wasn’t going to be anything about it in the papers.”

  “I still don’t see why you feel—”

  “Quit stalling. You want to go to Tucson?”

  “Oh, all right, all right!”

  So the next morning I was gassing Hazel’s Corvette at the pump in front of the barn when she hailed me from the kitchen doorway. “Someone’s driving in from the highway, Earl!” she called.

  I stared in the direction of the dust devils swirling above the dirt road that led from the highway to the ranch property. I started for my own car instinctively before I remembered that my.38 wasn’t in the glove compartment but buried in the sand near the abandoned airstrip where the hijacked plane had been forced down. There was no real reason I should need it, anyway. There was an umbrella now over my presence at Hazel’s place, a by-product of the Cuban expedition.

  The incoming car was only a hundred yards away when I recognized the driver. Hazel recognized him, too. “Earl, it’s Karl Erikson!” she said. She sounded pleased.

  I wasn’t nearly so pleased myself.

  Erikson was a government man who had suckered me into the Cuban caper I mentioned. I had no idea he was a government man at the time I was recruited, although in hindsight I should probably have realized it from his authoritative manner and take-charge personality.

  So instead of a big bundle of cash I thought I was shooting for in Havana, it turned out I was working on a piddling per diem basis for the government. Wholly involuntarily, I might add. And once I found out, I had to go through with it in order to get out of Cuba with my neck intact. And this damn Erikson had backdoored me with Hazel who had aided and abetted the entire deception. “You said you were sick and tired of sitting around listening to the rust harden on yourself,” she defended herself afterwards. “And I was afraid you’d take off on a bank job or something and get caught. This way I figured you were safe.”