Hostage Tower (11 page)

‘A month ago, the General Electric Corporation of Buffalo, New York State, shipped twelve prototype Lap-Lasers to selected US Army test sites, including one in Europe. The four which were being tested at a secret range near the base at Stuttgart were, unfortunately, stolen. The Army have kept the lid on the theft, and their investigation has been highly confidential, you could say.

‘Luckily for us, they were stolen by me. I would imagine they are now here.' He looked questioningly at Smith, who nodded. ‘Great,' said Mike. ‘In that case, whatever our target, however difficult the going is made for us, we have a fantastic edge on anyone trying to stop us. These guns are really something else. They draw enough power to run a small city, and they are so phenomenally destructive that they make the average rocket gun
seem like a pea-shooter. With four of them, we could take on an army.'

Smith chuckled. ‘Funny you should say that,' he mused. ‘Because we may have to.'

Sabrina and C.W. looked startled. The ponderous Tote cracked his knuckles and beamed.

Despite his promise, Smith decided not to reveal the details of his operation until they had finished what he termed ‘a short period of training and relocation'. Sabrina and C.W. were not too downhearted; there was no possibility, in any case, of getting the information out to Philpott. It troubled them that he almost certainly didn't know where they were, but there was nothing they could do about that, either.

In fact, they were wrong. Philpott knew exactly where they were. Using an Air Force ‘Blackbird' Mach III spy plane, he had tracked the chopper to the château. Now he was even able to recognize their faces, and photograph them, and Smith and his cohorts. He had seen more of the weaponry at Château Clérignault than C.W. and Sabrina had, and he hadn't liked what he saw. What he didn't know was the final plan and venue. And he could think of no way of obtaining that intelligence. He and Sonya Kolchinsky waited – in some comfort – at the Ritz, for Smith to make his move. They dared not risk French or American troops against the laser-gun in an assault on the château. They had no option but to play the waiting – and watching – game.

The time passed swiftly enough for Smith's team. The following night, after a tour of the vast estate, Smith assembled them once more in the enclosed stable yard. Claude was relieved to see that the big stallion had slaked his lust and gone to bed.

The evening had been soft and balmy, and all round them was silence. Smith soon stopped that. He gave an airy wave of his hand, the stable doors opened, and the night was filled with deafening noise. The scene was bathed in light from arc-lamps on the roofs, and strung to poles overlooking the yard. Smith gestured towards the interior of the stables.

Three monster generator trucks were lined up side by side, under constant cover from ground or aerial surveillance, thick wedges of cable looping from vehicle to vehicle. Further along, banks of turbine generators hummed and flickered with suppressed power. From the last truck, a bunch of cables ran to a wooden platform which had been put up in the yard. The words ‘RESTAURANT LAROUSSE' were stencilled on the sides of all three trucks.

Smith had assembled practically a hundred other trainees dressed, like his top team, in jump suits, to watch the operation. He waved both arms energetically at the truck drivers, and they cut their engines. ‘This is a fairly simple but, I feel, impressive demonstration. It is not designed to demonstrate the destructive power of the Lap-Laser-guns. If I did
that, my beautiful castle would almost certainly be razed to the ground.' There was a titter of appreciation, or sympathy, or whatever.

‘No. I merely want to show you how the Lap-Laser can combine speed with accuracy and total efficiency. Proceed.'

On came the engines again. On the wooden platform, Graham stood at a control panel, all flashing lights and important-looking levers. Three feet away from him, resting on its mounting, black-snouted and menacing, with its mouse-ear detectors ranging edgily, was a Lap-Laser-gun. All eyes were fixed on it. Behind Mike, Pei and C.W. worked at a computer console, monitoring the hit. Tote and Sabrina stood by, engrossed in what they saw.

Graham stood back, patted the Lap-Laser on its stock, and gave a thumbs up sign to Smith. Smith nodded at Claude, and Claude pressed a remote-control switch activating a signal-bulb at the far end of the yard. There, behind a shield of impenetrable lead, four men lifted Russian Kalashnikov AK 47 rifles, and fired automatic tracers at orthodox targets in the same area of range that was used the day before.

Simultaneously, Graham flicked a set of switches on the panel and a light-beam shot out from the Lap-Lasers. The tracer rounds screamed across the yard in front of the laser-gun – and disappeared. Working at unbelievable speed, the Lap-Laser made minute course and trajectory adjustments,
and each time it blinked – to swiftly that the human eye could not detect any break in the ray – it selected and destroyed an individual bullet.

It was a dazzling display of pyrotechnics, and a shattering experience for the spectators. Smith called for quiet again, and strolled unconcernedly over to the targets. This time he held a little hand microphone with a trailing lead.

‘Not a single round found its mark,' he announced in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘The Lap-Laser destroyed every one of them. With four of these to protect us, and to mount assaults on selected targets, we shall be invulnerable.'

Graham manipulated the controls, and the Lap-Laser subsided. The air was thick with gun-smoke; Mike was pleased with the outcome of the test. Smith walked across to the platform and said, ‘Well done, and thank you.'

‘Nothing to it,' said Graham. Smith asked C.W., ‘Have you worked out the safety coding yet?' C.W. replied, ‘I think so.' He glanced at Sabrina, who had joined Pei and himself at the computer. Sabrina said, ‘We think it's tuned to this at the moment.' She indicated a metal tag that C.W. held in his hand. Graham regarded it curiously.

‘Presumably,' C.W. said, ‘it can be set to any metal alloy for protection, just as it can sniff out and destroy any predetermined target. But if you don't want it to harm something, you merely feed into the computer a description and formula of the particular element or alloy to be avoided.
The object – or person – to be protected then wears a specimen of the embargoed metal, and the Lap-Laser doesn't function. It will simply miss out that part of the target altogether.'

‘Are you sure of this?' Smith enquired.

C.W. nodded, emphatically. ‘I'd bet my life on it.'

‘Then why don't you?' drawled Mike Graham.

C. W. smiled, slowly. For a while he made no reply. Then he said, ‘Do I hear you right, man?' His voice was dangerously low and silky.

‘If you didn't,' Mike pronounced deliberately, ‘what I said was: why don't you bet your life on that metal tag?'

C.W. bounced the shiny strip of alloy thoughtfully around his hand. ‘Why don't I?' he murmured. Then to Graham, ‘Let's go – fella.'

Smith signalled to the truck drivers, and they restarted their engines. Graham manned the control panel, Pei monitored the computer alone. C.W. clipped the metal tag to his breast pocket, and walked the length of the yard to the screen of lead. He waited there, head bowed, until the light blinked fussily above his head.

His step never faltered, but his blood ran ice-cold as he saw Graham trip the Lap-Laser switches. C.W. walked closer, and closer, to the target area. He felt the hairs of his neck grow individually erect when the barrel of the laser-gun turned in his direction. The mouse-ears twitched, picked him up, and locked on to him.

Even above the noise, Sabrina, standing right by the Lap-Laser, heard a dull click as the gun's firing mechanism operated. But there was no fierce glow at the mouth of the tube. No death ray leapt out to reduce the black man to ashes.

‘A malfunction?' Smith suggested.

Mike grinned sardonically. He pressed another lever on the panel, and a target silhouette trundled out on the electric pulley until it was bearing down on the area swept by the Lap-Laser. C.W. stopped, looked back and watched.

The Lap-Laser tracked its new target, discovered no inhibition to firing, and carried out its allotted task. The tube-end glowed, the beam flashed once, and the silhouette disintegrated. The trucks were silenced. C.W. turned, and continued his steady march to the platform. He stopped beneath the laser-gun, and tossed the safety tag at Graham's feet.

‘Don't ever,' he hissed, ‘don't you ever put me on again, boy.' He glared at Graham through slit eyes, and Graham looked contemptuously back. C.W.'s fists balled, and his eyes opened wide, flaring. He stepped aside and commanded, ‘You! Down here!'

Mike made to move, but Smith's voice cut through their anger. ‘Stop! Now!' There could be no argument; they backed off, glowering. ‘I have watched your childish exhibition with some interest, not because I particularly care what happens to either of you, but because it did serve the purpose of
illustrating something else which it is just as well you should all know.

‘You have now had it amply proven that while the Lap-Laser will destroy indiscriminately what you wish it to destroy, it will miss any target protected by a safety device fed into the computer … in this case, a metal tag.' He picked the tag up from the platform, and stowed it in his pocket.

‘I have a supply of these tags,' Smith continued, ‘under lock and key. They will remain there. I have also mounted a Lap-Laser on the roof of this castle. The way I see it now is – no unauthorized person can get into the château. And by the same token, no one can leave. Good night to you.'

The following morning, trucks took the main team and a company of other ranks to a secluded area in the castle park. They lined up in military formation by a lily pond. Rising thirty feet above the pond was a tower constructed mostly of wooden scaffolding poles.

Claude blew a whistle, and the trainees swarmed like monkeys over the tower; on the bars, through them, inside and out, some acrobats clinging to the cross-beams by hands and feet, inching their way along like giant sloths. Others tight-rope walked on connected pipes, or moved hand over hand from one side to the other. It looked like a giant jungle-gymnasium for adults, which was precisely what it was.

Smith appeared, and motioned to C.W. and
Graham. He held a stop-watch in his hand, and he thumbed it dramatically. At the top of the tower the beams were of metal, and Sabrina and Tote sat astride a cross-pole, welding mounts to the iron.

A rope snaked down to drop its end at C.W.'s feet. He shinned up it and joined Sabrina on the beam. Below, Graham fastened the end of the rope to a Lap-Laser. Tote and C.W. hoisted the gun up the tower, and mounted it on the cross-beam. Then they repeated the operation with a second Lap-Laser, which Graham followed until all four trainees were perched on the tower with the two guns. Smith pressed the stop-watch again.

He walked to the foot of the tower and shouted, ‘Bravo. The best yet. You're improving. It must be the food.'

That night in the stable yard, Pei and two other recruits worked under floodlights at the thick bundles of cable. Pei and one of the men wore electricity linemen's heavy duty gloves. The generators boomed out, and they worked with exaggerated care. Each of the cables bore a lightning bolt label, and the simple warning, ‘2000 volts'.

The gloved trainee, under Pei's watchful gaze, made a long cut in the insulation of the cable. He prised the incision apart with insulated shears, and exposed a section of gleaming copper wire. The second man, who had discarded his gloves, leaned in, and opened a huge clamp. It, too, had insulation over its handle and operating nut.

The trainee slid the clamp over the ruptured
cable. He was trembling, and his face ran with sweat. Inevitably, his hand slipped, and touched the metal of the clamp, which dropped on the exposed cable. A violent blue arc of electricity streaked from the copper wire into the clamp and passed into the body of the unlucky ex-recruit. Pei watched impassively. Then he turned to the other man, and said, ‘Keep your gloves on. Switch off the current, and get rid of him. And in future, remember: when I say take care, I mean take care.'

When the corpse had been removed, and the stench of burning flesh had abated, Pei repeated the manoeuvre with the clamp – but he made no mistake. He lowered the tool until it barely rested on the copper strands. There was a tiny crackle of current. Nothing more.

So another week of training passed, an endless procession of exercises, weapons practice, written and oral examinations, foot-slogging, fighting; until, bone-weary, the team came to what they had been told would be the final day.

They gathered at the lily-pond tower. Graham alone, and again under the tyranny of the stopwatch, approached the scaffolding. Swiftly, he set lumps of plastique and detonators at all four corner supports. He ran back, and peered over Smith's shoulder at the stop-watch. The hand moved to zero. The four small explosions flared up, and the tower collapsed, crashing to the ground in an unruly tangle of bent piping and broken wooden beams.

Smith was delighted, but didn't explain why.

That night, after dinner in the Great Hall under a glowing crystal chandelier, and eating off silver plates, waited on like maharajahs, the five newest recruits in Mister Smith's organization saw him rise to his feet and clap for silence.

‘You have done a fine job during your ten days here,' he said, ‘and I am proud of you. You have mastered every technique necessary for our operation, and you are now at your peak. It would be pointlessly cruel to keep from you any longer the details of the project I wish you to undertake, and which I am confident you will discharge with every success.'

So Smith unveiled the master plan. Every detail of it; coldly, logically, and with great clarity. They listened in absolute silence as he opened his warped brain to them, and the appalling lunacies came tumbling out.