Hostage Tower (2 page)

Yet the hands of Mister Smith were among the dirtiest in creation.

And the instrument of his criminal ambition was at that moment speeding down an autobahn in a hired car to keep an appointment with the four deadliest ‘babies' of all time.

‘AUSGANG-STUTTGART' the road sign read, and Michael Graham obediently urged the BMW into the stream that peeled off the motorway.

When the price was right, Graham was invariably obedient. Van Beck's price had been not only
right, but generous. The unknown client, the German explained, was prepared to pay for excellence. And Mike Graham, van Beck had known, was awesome in his field of weapons and weapon systems. He had received the kind of training that only the US Army could supply, and had used a privileged position to enlarge his knowledge and raise his performance to a peak of unparalleled capability.

Smith had provided the means, through van Beck, to steal the Lap-Lasers, but the plan was Mike Graham's, and he turned it over in his mind for the thousandth time.

Using a laser-guided, tripod-mounted electronic surveillance device over a range of more than half a mile, Graham had bugged the US Army base guardroom to obtain the weekly series of passwords that would gain him admittance to the off-limits compound at the right time … when the helicopter touched down on its run back from the firing range.

Graham had also sounded out the other parts of the base's territory which interested him: the officers' club, and the living quarters for visiting top brass, whose faces would not be known to the guards. He had selected and marked his target officer, and now had a complete set of forged papers in his new identity. He drove carefully along the public road through the base, away from the off-limits section, and pulled into a cul-de-sac not far from the officers' quarters, located in a mini-apartment block.

Ten minutes later, a figure in the uniform of a General of the United States Army strode the short distance from the living quarters to the officers' club. He had a bundle under his arm. He checked his wrist-watch, peered up at the sky, and made his way to a jeep parked at the rear of the club.

The guard corporal dropped his girlie magazine and jumped to his feet as the jeep screeched to a halt outside the guardroom. He joined another soldier at the door, and they peered out into the near-darkness. The harsh whirr of the descending helicopter's engine sounded loudly in their ears.

A man leapt lithely from the jeep, and the guardroom lights winked on his General's stars. The corporal tightened his grip on his M–1 carbine.

‘Halt,' he commanded. Graham did. ‘It's an emergency, for Christ's sake, Corporal,' he shouted. ‘I'm in one hell of a hurry.'

‘Advance and be recognized.' Snorting with impatience. Graham advanced. The GIs saw a man they did not know, tall and bronzed, with brown hair and moustache, broad-shouldered and thin-faced, looking at them from soft, quick, intelligent eyes. He had a commanding, arrogant manner. But then, the soldiers reasoned, Generals usually did.

‘Hurry it up,' Graham ordered. The banshee wail of the chopper told him it would soon be settling on the launch-pad in the compound beyond the guard block.

‘Password,' the corporal rapped.

‘Don't play games with me,' Graham snapped. ‘You first – that's the drill.'

‘Sleepy dog,' the guard rejoined.

‘Angle-iron,' said Graham, handing over his papers.

The corporal recollected the name. ‘General Otis T. Brick.' Visiting brass. Weapons expert. He snapped up a salute. ‘Yes
sir
General,' he bellowed, while his subordinate pressed the button to raise the barrier to the compound.

Graham vaulted back into the jeep, gunned the motor to speed into the compound and slew to a halt in a spray of gravel near the launch-pad. Three startled soldiers, waiting for the helicopter to come back from the range with the four crated laser-guns on board, jumped like scalded tomcats when Graham screamed, ‘Get away from there – now!'

‘Ten-shun!' barked the corporal in charge, and all three snapped into rigidity.

Graham saluted, and said, ‘Get your men away from this area. There's a leak in the nuclear generator shielding out at the range. The radioactivity could have spread to the guns, or even the helicopter. My orders are to take the chopper away.'

‘Who – who are you, s-sir,' the corporal stammered. Graham had already raced back to the jeep and extricated the anti-radiation suit he had brought with him. Climbing into it, he shouted
above the roar of the settling helicopter, ‘General Brick, Third Army Special Weapons Division. Now move it, soldier – move it!'

Graham reached back into the jeep and pulled out a geiger counter, and what looked like a steel brief-case. The helicopter's rotors were beating the air, and the pilot looked anxiously out at the charade on the tarmac. Graham ducked under the sweeping blades, and wrenched open the door.

‘Out!' he ordered the pilot. ‘Radiation scare. You could have got a dose. The Emergency Med. Unit'll be here soon to check you over. I'll take the chopper away. Don't switch the motor off.'

The pilot needed no second bidding. He scrambled out of the seat and dropped to the ground, almost colliding with Graham.

‘Will you be all right, sir?' he screamed.

‘The suit will protect me,' Graham shouted. ‘I'll fly the chopper to the far end of the range and quarantine it. Look after your
self
, man.'

The blare of a motor-horn from the direction of the guardroom drew the eyes of all four men on the ground away from the helicopter, where Graham was already revving the engine.

Two jeeps packed with men hurtled towards the launch-pad. A burst of machine-gun fire came from the leading vehicle. The three soldiers and the pilot scattered to hit the deck, and the jeeps pulled up short of a stack of gasolene cans a hundred yards from the chopper. Graham throttled
viciously, and another spurt of tracer fire arced towards him.

Bullets pinged off the shell of the helicopter, and one tore a track across the shoulder of his anti-radiation suit, but he felt no pain. A third salvo stuttered out, and Graham, who had been about to take off, swore brutally. He snapped open the clasp of his brief-case and drew out a heavy, ugly Schmeisser machine pistol.

He could barely see the two vehicles in the pool of blinding light, so he hit the easier target.

A vast swell of sound erupted as the gasolene cans exploded. The GIs were safe behind their jeeps, but there was now no possibility of stopping Graham.

Behind a concealing wall of smoke and flame, the helicopter rose into the air, taking the false General, and four crated but fully operative Lap-Laser-guns, away to do the bidding of Mister Smith.

The troops on the ground fired madly at the departing plane to ease their frustration, until the officer in charge resignedly flapped his hand in a gesture of dismissal.

‘Who the hell was he, sir?' asked his sergeant.

‘Christ knows,' the captain returned wearily, ‘but he sure wasn't General Brick, because I've just been talking to General Brick in the officers' club. Somebody walked off with his dress uniform, and it wasn't his batman, so it must've been that sonofabitch up there.'

He tipped his peaked cap back on his head, put
his hands on his hips, and whistled out a tight-lipped sigh. ‘Can you imagine the crap that's going to be flying around when the brass find out we've lost not just one of their favourite toys, but all four? Jeeze.' He shook his head, almost admiringly. ‘You gotta hand it to that guy. He sure pulled a neat trick, whoever he is.'

But the Army never did learn Graham's identity. The BMW was untraceable, and Graham had made no fingerprints. His abandoned clothing was unmarked, and in any case had been bought from a chain store. He might as well have been a ghost for all the clues he left. Or a spook.

He flew the helicopter eastwards for perhaps fifteen minutes on a pre-arranged flight path. Then he brought her in low and skimmed the tree-tops, his eyes combing the ground.

There it was. A winking light in a pool of blackness. He flashed his own landing lights, and three pairs of vehicle headlamps came on in answer.

Mike set the plane down quickly and expertly, forming a square in the deserted field with the big, dark Citröen, the Volkswagen, and the tough little pick-up truck that waited to greet him.

He ran to the larger car, and the driver's window slid noiselessly down. ‘You have them?' asked a man in the uniform as a chauffeur.

Mike said, ‘Yep.'

‘Excellent,' the chauffeur returned briefly. He spoke guttural German. He reached over to the front
passenger seat and handed Graham a loosely wrapped parcel and a brief-case of soft matt leather.

‘Clothing, your size,' he grunted. ‘In the valise – money, and the keys to the Volkswagen. Don't worry about the lasers. We'll load them into the truck. You'll be contacted for Phase Two. For now, disappear.'

Graham opened the brief-case, and raised his eyebrows as he saw the fat bundles of small denomination US dollars. ‘Wow,' he said. ‘Thanks.' The chauffeur nodded.

Mike tried to peer beyond him to the man whom he could dimly see in the rear offside passenger seat, but a panel of tinted glass blocked his view. The windows were tinted, too. The man had not spoken a word, and sat hunched inside an enveloping overcoat, with a black Homburg pulled down over his brow.

‘Thank you, too,' Graham said, cheerily. The mystery man stayed silent and unmoving. Mike gave up the struggle and walked away, whistling.

The chauffeur turned and slid back the glass panel. ‘I'll transfer the guns and take the pick-up to the warehouse, sir,' he said, respectfully.

‘Do that,' Smith grunted. ‘I'll drive the Citröen and see you at the hotel. Don't make any mistakes. Graham didn't. He's good.'

The chauffeur nodded. ‘And the helicopter?'

‘Kill it,' Smith ordered. ‘With Graham's uniform and anti-radiation suit in it.'

Mike was a mile away when he heard the ‘crump'
of the explosion, and saw in his rear-view mirror the funeral pyre of the helicopter.

‘You gotta hand it to that guy,' he murmured, patting the brief-case on the seat beside him. ‘He sure pulls neat tricks, whoever he is.'

Weesperplein is not one of the great public squares of Amsterdam, like Sophiaplein, Rembrandtplein or Dam Square itself, but its commercial importance is undeniable. That Friday evening, Weesperplein hummed with important traffic and prosperous, stolid people, as the armoured secur ity van nosed its way patiently along to come to a halt outside Number Four.

The uniformed, armed and helmeted driver of the vehicle got out, and slammed the self-locking door. He walked around to the rear of the van, and tapped with his truncheon on the panel. Two men, also in uniform and wearing guns, alighted to stand by him.

The driver glanced at the clock above the heavy double-fronted entrance to Number Four, Weesperplein. The finely wrought gilt hands stood at four minutes to six. ‘Just in time,' he remarked.

While the driver rang the bell, his colleagues
manhandled a wooden crate on to the sidewalk by its carrying handles. The summons was answered by a man of medium height, balding, with mild grey eyes and a nervous manner. He nodded to the driver, who turned to his companions and sang out, ‘OK.'

They heaved the create up between them, and carried it inside. Then they returned and fetched from the van a precisely similar crate, and took that in, too. Both crates were heavy, and sealed.

When all three security men came out, the nervous man stood in the doorway, watching them depart. He shut the front door behind them, and checked that it was fully locked.

The driver glanced up again at the big clock. It gave the time as three minutes after six. ‘Home then,' he said.

Number Four, Weesperplein, was an impressive, even beautiful, building, and the Gothic-script ornamental letters forming the frieze around the clock described in two succinct words what went on behind the imposing facade. The legend was ‘AMSTERDAM DIAMANTBEUR'.

A brass plate on the wall carried a translation for the benefit of foreigners: ‘AMSTERDAM DIAMOND EXCHANGE'.

Sabrina Carver made her first steal when she was seven.

She lived then – and for the next ten years – in her native town of Fort Dodge, Iowa, county
seat of Webster County, as Sabrina learned at an early age, and immediately forgot.

It was also patiently explained to her that Fort Dodge had started life in 1850 as Fort Clarke, but the following year a pressing need arose to honour a certain Colonel Henry Dodge, and the name was changed. The fort was abandoned in 1853, so the tiny settlement, struggling to make ends meet in its uncompromising bed of river clay and gypsum, assumed the name.

‘Good for Colonel Dodge,' thought Sabrina, and immediately forgot him, too.

The Des Moines River, on which Fort Dodge stands, is still picturesque at that point, though it no longer rings to the cries of marauding Indians and defending settlers. It figured prominently in Sabrina Carver's young life, though, since it was the scene of that very first theft.

She was on a river trip with family and friends, and she calmly picked a tiny, silvery brooch off the coat of the lady who was sitting next to her, talking animatedly to Sabrina's own mother. The larceny passed unnoticed for half an hour, until Sabrina's mother spotted the brooch on her daughter's dress.

Though she was straightway forgiven by the gushing owner – ‘The poor, innocent little darling doesn't know, does she' – Sabrina made no fuss about giving the brooch back.

For this act of mature contrition, she received a quarter from the gushing lady, who petted her
like a doll, for Sabrina had appealing dark eyes, long red-blonde hair and a serious, saintly little face. As they were parting from her new-found friend, Sabrina stole the brooch again, and this time made sure her mother didn't see it.