Operation Flashpoint Read online

  Which was a hell of an argument when you consider that four of us went down into Cuba and only Karl Erikson and I made it back. And that the last time I’d seen him he’d been flat on his back in Bethesda Naval Hospital with machine-gun holes and wooden splinters as big as failroad spikes in him from the boat that had been shot out from under us by Cuban Migs.

  I walked across the yard to Erikson’s car as he got out from under the wheel. He’s a big, blond, rough-hewn type, possibly the strongest man I’d ever known. His movements were stiff, and I realized he hadn’t fully recovered from his recent hospitalization. “I’m so glad you could come, Karl,” Hazel greeted him warmly as she joined us. Erikson and I shook hands. “I hoped you’d accept my invitation to visit us here, but I really didn’t expect you’d be able to manage it this soon.”

  “Didn’t I tell you I’d come?” Erikson said easily. He eyed me up and down, the familiar cynical expression on his hard-bitten features. “How’s the Shoot-’Em-Up Kid?”

  “Great. Did they get all the lead out of your ugly carcass?”

  “Enough to get me perpendicular again.”

  “Let’s go inside and have coffee,” Hazel urged.

  We trooped into the ranch house. “I’m just leaving for Tucson,” I told Erikson as he settled himself carefully at the kitchen table. “But I’ll be back in a couple of days, and Hazel will make you comfortable here in the meantime.”

  “I’m just on my way down to Tucson, too,” Erikson said. He accepted a cup of steaming black coffee from Hazel and regarded me over its rim as he sipped. “To the Colonial Airport. Why don’t we ride down together?”

  I tried to hold my face together since he was obviously enjoying my surprise. “The Colonial Airport,” I repeated while I tried to get my brain in gear. How in hell could this big moose know about the Colonial Airport?

  “I hope you can spend some time with us, Karl,” Hazel said. I knew she was attempting a diversion while I pulled myself together. “You’re not fit to be working again so soon.”

  “Something came up that my boss decided needed my delicate touch,” Erikson said.

  “You’re about as delicate as a man lighting a cigarette with a blow torch,” I snorted. “Now what’s this about a Colonial Airport?”

  His eyes were riveted on mine. “You’re onto something that fits into my assignment. I want to know what it is.”

  “D’you mind starting at the beginning?” I inquired.

  He glanced at Hazel as if about to ask her to leave the room, then changed his mind. Karl Erikson knew where he stood with Hazel Andrews. Did I say that Hazel piloted the boat to Cuba that picked us up, and was in the drink with us when the Mig-jockeys were circling our blazing cruiser?

  “I’ll keep it brief,” Erikson said. “I’m on temporary loan to two government agencies who have overlapping intelligence interests. The names don’t matter. I’m supposed to act as liaison between them and a special group of Israeli intelligence people who have been warning the State Department about Arab fedayeen operations in this country, operations aimed at pulling coups to raise money in the U.S. to finance their guerilla activities in the Middle East. Up to now, I’m afraid, no one took their warnings seriously enough.”

  He sipped at his coffee again. “We have feelers out all over the country, of course, and when we heard a rumor about a supposed hijack of an airliner near Las Vegas, I started to check into it. I found that powerful influences in the state had clamped such a tight lid on the affair that no one could produce a proper list of the plane passengers for me to follow up on.”

  He accepted Hazel’s offer of a cigarette. “It looked like a dead end, but we always have ways and means to widen a crack. We came up with a tip finally that the hijackers used a private plane to make their getaway, so we took a look at all FAA flight-plan records for that particular day, looking for nonscheduled flights within a thousand miles of the scene. And we found that all flight plans had been closed out except one from the Colonial Airport near Tucson.”

  Erikson set down his coffee cup. “That was enough to bring me out here yesterday morning. Last night I learned that the missing private plane had been found with the pilot alone in it. He’d been shot in the back of the head. Then I learned that an inquiry had been made of the White Pine County’s law enforcement office about a plane with the registration number NR eight-one-three-three-two, the number of the dead pilot’s plane. Imagine my surprise when I found that the inquiry had been initiated from the Rancho Dolorosa in Ely, Nevada. Naturally I thought of my old friend, the Shoot-’Em-Up Kid.” Erikson’s rocklike features were creased in the closest they ever came to a smile.

  “Naturally.” There was going to be no talking my way out of this one.

  “You were on the hijacked plane?”

  “Yes.”

  “You may not be accident-prone, but you sure as hell are incident-prone,” Erikson observed. “What happened?”

  I told him.

  “And you said you got a good look at the one who got away,” Hazel reminded me when I finished.

  I’d left that out deliberately because I could see complications ahead. Hazel kept on talking, explaining to Erikson about Tippy Larkin’s money and how I happened to be on the gamblers’ chartered flight. Erikson kept nodding, but his eyes were still on mine. “You’d recognize the man?” he asked me when Hazel stopped.

  “I might.”

  “Good,” he said briskly. “You’ll have a chance to recognize him if we get a break in Tucson.”

  “Now wait a minute. I’m not volunteering for your campaign. I’m not—”

  “You’d like to get Hazel’s money back, wouldn’t you?” he interrupted me.

  “Well, sure, but I don’t need you hanging around my neck to get it back. If I can find out who hired that plane—”

  “Do I need to remind you that you’ll get a lot more information if I’m with you?” Erikson said it confidently as he rose to his feet. “Let’s get going. My bullet holes won’t stand the long drive down there, so we’ll go to the airport in Ely and charter a flight.”

  I looked at Hazel.

  “You bring him back here with you afterward,” she told me.

  It seemed that I was a minority of one in regard to a chaperoned trip to the Colonial Airport in Tucson.

  3

  THERE were two reasons why I eventually agreed to fly to Tucson with Karl Erikson.

  One was forthright: I wanted a shot at recovering Hazel’s money. And my own. I wasn’t about to overlook the possibility of a bit of interest, either.

  The second reason was more subtle.

  When I first visited Hazel at her ranch after I escaped from the prison hospital, I was on the run from the law as I had been all my adult life. It didn’t make any difference to Hazel, who hadn’t been brought up in a vacuum, but I didn’t want to bring her any trouble. Then her stepfather, a nice old guy who wouldn’t act his age, was killed on the ranch by a bunch of vicious kids who went further than they intended in trying to scare him.

  I got into the tail end of the act, and I sickened the kids of the idea that they were running things in that part of the county. Afterward, though, I had to leave the ranch in a hurry because I couldn’t afford to hang around and answer lawmen’s questions about what had happened. Or about my background.

  Erikson knew about the background when he recruited me for Cuba, but he needed me for what I could do for the operation. When he finally got back to Florida with the bundle that turned out to belong to the State Department and wasn’t partly mine as I’d expected, in partial recompense Erikson gave me his word that no law-enforcement agency would bother me at the ranch.

  I could have kicked myself that I hadn’t inserted a stipulation that Karl Erikson couldn’t bother me, either. Not that it would really have done any good. There weren’t three other men in the world I’d rather have watching my back in a tight spot; but Erikson was a dedicated, hard-nosed government agent who let nothing and nobody st
and in the way of getting his job done. I didn’t want him twisting my arm in front of Hazel, threatening the removal of my umbrella. I didn’t want her upset, but she’d let the cat out of the bag about me getting a good look at the escaped hijacker, and as far as Erikson was concerned, this made me essential to his trip to Tucson.

  I’d much rather have gone alone. Erikson was an ex-Navy commander, a specialist in communications. He was also used to giving orders. I wasn’t used to taking them. We’d hung up several times on the Cuban caper—long before I had any idea who he really was—because of his insistence upon doing things his way. He was an odd mixture of practicality and chivalry. I had to keep pointing out to him in Cuba that we weren’t in a chivalrous part of the world.

  So we landed at the Tucson Municipal Airport and Erikson hired a car. He drove north, after asking directions, clear across town, out past the Rillito Racetrack. He had to ask directions twice more before we found the Colonial Airport tucked away a mile down a dirt road leading off U.S. Highway 80-89.

  The field had a single, hard-packed, dirt landing strip, two slant-roofed sheds open to the elements on either end under which three small planes were staked down, and a rickety-looking administration building too small for a game of Ping-Pong. From under one of the sheds came the ringing sound of metal on metal as Erikson cut the engine and we sat there watching heat waves shimmering.

  “No rush to welcome visitors,” I said. Erikson grunted. “If the hijackers were members of an Arab fedayeen group, that could be why they were so rough on the Jewish plane crew,” I voiced a thought that had occurred to me previously.

  “And if they weren’t, they just might have wanted to give that impression,” Erikson said.

  “You have a devious mind,” I complained. “Who are we going to talk to here?”

  “Anyone.”

  He opened the car door and led the way across the sun-seared parking lot. The clang of metal on metal ceased, and a stocky figure in oil-stained work pants appeared from under one of the planes. His features were so dark I took a second look at him, but his was a young, frank, open face in contrast to the strong-featured mask of violence I had seen behind the machine gun.

  “I hope you don’t want to fly, gents, because we don’t have a pilot,” the boy said as he walked toward us. I could see that he had Mexican blood in him. There was grease halfway up his powerful forearms.

  “What about Frank Dalrymple?” Erikson asked.

  “If you know Frank, brace yourself. He’s dead.”

  “That’s what I’m here about.”

  “Oh, you’re one of those.” The boy removed a rag from a hip pocket and wiped off his hands, wrists, and forearms. “Well, what about it?”

  “That charter flight,” Erikson said. “How did Dalrymple happen to take it on?”

  “Five reasons.” The Mexicon boy swept an arm at the desolation around us. “Spelled M-O-N-E-Y. He needed it.”

  “Badly enough to let a man carrying a machine gun aboard his plane?”

  “Who says he did?” The boy said it angrily. “Listen, Frank was no stupe. I wasn’t here when they took off, but you can bet if there was a machine gun the guy didn’t walk aboard with it on his shoulder. Who the hell are you, anyway?”

  Erikson ignored the question. “The man came here and arranged the charter?”

  “No. He made the arrangement by phone a week before.”

  “I’d like to hear about it,” Erikson said when the boy showed no sign of continuing.

  “How come you’re coming at me in relays today?” the boy asked. “Don’t you believe what I’m telling you?”

  “Relays?” Erikson said, picking out the operative word. “Someone else has been here talking to you about this?”

  “As if you didn’t know,” the boy said scornfully. “Listen, if I knew anything that would help catch Frank’s killer, you wouldn’t have to ask me about it. I told your partners that. Frank gave me a job when no one else would.”

  “Oh, you must mean Carmody and Stevens,” Erikson said. “A skinny redhead and a heavy-set blond?”

  The boy shook his head. “Don’t you people talk to each other? It was two dark-looking men, and one of them had no earlobe on his left ear.”

  Erikson nodded. “And the other one was taller and stood like this?” He went into a military brace with his gut sucked in and his shoulders braced.

  “Yeah, that’s it,” the boy said.

  Erikson didn’t pursue the subject. “Now tell me—”

  “What’s your story about who you’re from?” the boy interrupted him.

  I could see Erikson starting to boil at the all-but-outright insolence in the boy’s tone. I had wondered at the kid’s attitude almost from his first words. “You don’t sound to me like someone interested in finding Frank’s killer,” I put in before Erikson could say anything.

  The effect was startling. The Mexican boy’s features crumpled like wet cardboard. Tears spurted from beneath his eyelids and ran down his brown cheeks. “What the h-hell do you know about it?” he blubbered. He swiped at his eyes with the back of a still-greasy hand. “Wh-what the h-hell—”

  He swung aroung and stumbled inside the mangy-looking office, slamming the squeaky-hinged door behind him. Erikson and I stood in the bright sunlight looking at each other. Erikson shrugged finally and followed the boy inside. I was right behind him.

  The temperature inside the shack must have been a hundred and twenty degrees. The boy stood with his back to us, facing the single window which was unopened. “How old are you, son?” I asked.

  “Si-sixteen.” The tone was muffled. “And you g-guys will never know about F-Frank. You j-just come in h-here and ask about the plane. And now Frank’s gone and my job’s g-gone and the desert will have the f-field back in six months and I don’t know h-how I’ll s-support my mother—”

  “A good mechanic can get a job anywhere,” I said when the shaky voice trailed off. “And you’re a good mechanic or Frank wouldn’t have hired you.”

  “Even when you’re good, they don’t h-hire you if you’re a Mex,” the boy said in a hopeless tone. “I tried before.”

  “What about the telephone call that set up the charter?” Erikson asked impatiently.

  “Go ask Elaine!” the boy snarled. He swung around and faced us defiantly. “She was the one in the office when the call came.”

  “Elaine?”

  “Frank’s wife.” The boy’s lower lip curled.

  I picked up a tattered telephone directory from a splintery board counter. I found Dalrymple, Frank with the address 224 Oliveras Street. I showed it to Erikson. “We’d better talk to her in person,” he said, and went out the door of the shack.

  I stayed behind. “Who was at the field when the man showed up for the chartered flight?”

  “Frank.”

  “How was Frank supposed to know him?”

  The boy shrugged. “He must have used the s-same name he gave Elaine on the phone. Hawk.”

  “Hawk? Mr. Hawk, or was it a nickname?”

  “I don’t know.” The boy had turned sullen again. “I won’t even get paid what Frank owes me now. Elaine h-hates everything connected with the field. She was always trying to get Frank to give it up and get a job.”

  “Did you tell the other men who came about Elaine?”

  “They didn’t ask me.”

  I followed Erikson out to the car. He rammed it back out to the highway at a fast clip. He had already forgotten the Mexican boy.

  I hadn’t.

  When a kid like that gets the ground cut from under his feet suddenly, ground he’s been depending upon, it takes only a light shove to start him in a direction he’d never have considered previously.

  I know because it happened to me.

  The homes on Oliveras Street were not mansions. Number 224 was a two-family dwelling with tired-looking grass in the tiny front yard. Erikson pressed the 224-A button after leaning down to check the nameplates. The door opened three
inches and a thin-faced, brassy blonde stared out at us. She had on slacks and a bra. No blouse. Her feet were bare. “I want to talk to you about Frank Dalrymple’s last chartered flight,” Erikson said gruffly.

  “I got nothing to say to you!” the blonde retorted. She tried to slam the door but Erikson had a shoe wedged inside. He shouldered the door open, and we walked into a midget-sized hallway. “You get out of here!” the blonde shrilled. She had a voice like the sound of a rat tail file on rusty metal.

  “You can get us out of here by answering a few questions,” Erikson told her. “Or maybe you’d rather answer them downtown?”

  “You’re not local,” the woman informed him. “And if you’re not, you don’t have any jurisdiction here.” She looked as though she weighed only ninety-eight pounds, but she also looked competent. I had a feeling that this one was a survivor.

  “Call your lawyer,” Erikson suggested.

  She made no move toward the phone on the table.

  “What about that charter flight?”

  “The phone call was from New York,” she said reluctantly.

  “Why was your husband selected to make the flight?”

  “If he knew, he never told me. Not that I’d have tried to stop him. We needed the cash. With him wasting his time out at that piece of desert acreage instead of supporting—”

  “What about the call?”

  “Well, I took the message. Frank was away, and he called New York when he came back. The charter customer—”

  “Frank called New York? You had a number for him to call? Where is it?” Erikson rapped at her in one breath.

  “It’s probably still in my handbag. Wait a minute.” Her bare feet slap-slapped into the next room and back again. “Here.”