Lone Wolf #2: Bay Prowler (12 page)

It appeared empty. Garbage flew in the brisk wind. Windows up and down the street were open or opening but even as Wulff checked them out, heads vanished, the windows slammed closed. This seemed to be a more public-spirited block, however. Even as he stood there, he heard the sirens. Someone had called the police.

Shit,
Wulff said, putting the gun away, and measuring the situation. They were absolutely unreasonable. These people would not let him live.

He decided that this was amusing although he had not intended it quite that way.

Two bodies on the street, an idling Thunderbird. If he only had the time he would transfer the stuff from the trunk of the Continental to the Thunderbird; it would be a better car in a crisis situation. Hell, if anyone tried to take him off the road in this Continental he was done for. A bicycle could finish him off. But there was no time at all. The sirens were much closer.

For just an instant, Wulff found himself tempted. It was an unreasonable temptation but it was real. He found himself tempted to stay on the site and let the police take him. What, after all, could they do? There were witnesses around to this shooting who maybe would talk and exonerate Wulff, and in any event, once they got back to New York and got the full details on him, he would be clear. The San Francisco police might even wish him well. He had done more in a day to undercut their criminal element than these same police had done for years.

Oh yes, as the sirens came closer, it was very tempting. For just a moment he could see it all laid out before him. He had a wonderful future. The San Francisco police, would turn him loose eventually and he could go back to New York. Informers on the San Francisco department would tell the New York contacts his every move. He could do the furnished room bit in Manhattan again and he guessed that this time he might last all of three hours. There would be at least ten thousand men with his description and photograph in their wallets and all of them looking for him.

He could try to duck underground all together, of course. In Fargo, North Dakota or Poughkeepsie, New York he might last a week, slowness of communications being what they were.

He could not do it. The temptation was not even real. He was doomed. He was a doomed man. He could not go to the police, he could not go to the criminals, he could not even go underground anymore. There was no underground.
He
was his underground. For the rest of his life, however long it might be, he would have to live exactly this way, catching sleep on the rebound, catching small pockets of escape which could not possibly last, being driven, driven, driven, until his hopeless war either battered itself out or set the whole world aflame.

He was on his own. No one was going to help him, no one could even if they wanted to. The only man he could trust was three thousand miles away and there was nothing this man could do either. There was a girl some miles from here but she not only could not help him, any kind of involvement was going to get her killed. He had not thought of Tamara since she got into the taxi. He felt a brush of pain and realized, almost with futility, that the girl had reached him. He cared. He cared for her. The ascension to feeling was almost more than he could bear.

Sirens closer and closer, only a block away. In a moment a car would turn the corner, tires screaming, and police would bolt from it. He had to move now or be taken. He could not afford to be taken. He was the Wolf. He had a rendezvous to make.

Wulff got back into the Continental, kicked the corpses away, started and floored it. He turned the corner just as the police car came around it wailing, almost swerving the damned junker into it. The shotgun in the police car looked at him with amazement and shook his fist. But one call could not be exchanged for another. Police procedure. They would take the plates, maybe issue a call, but not follow.

Wulff, bad suspension and all, wheeled the worthless Continental down the ave at fifty-five perilous miles an hour, heading for the Golden Gate Bridge.

The ship had come a long way and now it yawed at rest. A thick pool of oil like blood oozed from underneath its edges and puddled in the grey waters of the Bay. From a distance the ship seemed indistinguishable from the commercial freighters at anchor around it, or making their way to and from the ocean but the two men who stood on the foredeck had an inexplicable nervousness which a telescopic sight might have detected. No one, however, had a telescopic sight on the boat. The two men were counting on it.

“How long?” one of them said.

The other, an oriental, looked at his watch and said, “I don’t know how long. I do know that it’s six o’clock. How long it might be through is out of our hands. We—”

“That means three hours,” the other man said. He had a beard and curiously dull eyes, ran his hand over a pistol in a pants pocket. “Three hours if everything’s on schedule.”

“We must assume that everything’s on schedule.”

“I don’t know if I can hold out,” the bearded man said.

The oriental raised his eyebrows. “I don’t think that you have any choice,” he said. He seemed to be a man who was accustomed to and functioned within larger circles of time than the other. There was, in fact, a hint of amusement in his carefully shaded eyes.

“I just don’t like it. I don’t like anything about it.”

“What is there to like? It is not a question of
like, my
friend.”

“I don’t trust any of them. Godammit it, Lee, I’ve worked too hard—”

“Ah,” the oriental said and walked to the rail, peered out through the mist to the Bay, “everyone in America works too hard. It is a fact of life. You should cultivate what we like to think of as a certain sense of resignation.”

“That’s easy to say,” the bearded man said bitterly. “All of this philosophy sounds so good.”

The oriental turned back to him. “You don’t think I’ve worked hard? You don’t think that this means as much or more to me than it does to you? Then you misunderstand everything, my friend.”

“All right,” the bearded man said, “all right, you’ve worked hard.”

“But there is nothing to be done. In a way, the matter now is out of our hands.”

“That’s what I can’t stand,” the bearded man said, and turned abruptly from the rail, took a napkin from his pocket and began to tear and fling it, bit by bit, into the sea, “the waiting and the knowing that it’s out of our hands.”

“Hazards of duty, my friend.”

“We bring it here and then we wait. We’re at their mercy.”

The oriental shrugged. “And they at ours. It is what you call reciprocal.”

“They call the shots. They give the where or when. And we take the risks.”

Lee said, “There are a lot of people taking risks. Their risks are great too.”

“I have a feeling,” the bearded man said abruptly, tossing out the last piece of napkin, “I just have a feeling that something is going to go wrong.”

Lee risked a little smile. “With half a million dollars involved, there’s a great deal to go wrong.”

“They called it off once before. And they seem nervous about tonight.”

The oriental said nothing. He seemed to be waiting for the other to go on.

“In fact,” the bearded man said as if passing on a confidence, “I think that they wanted to call it off. To postpone it one day.”

“That would be irretrievably disastrous.”

“And that’s what I told them. I told them we’re sitting out in San Francisco Bay already too long for this stuff, and it’s got to go tonight. How long can this go on? How long could we push our luck like this?”

“And what did they say?”

“You know what they said,” the bearded man said and looked out the long frame at the Bay, ships scuttling like rats on the oily surfaces of the water, “they said okay. We’re going ahead with it.”

“Maybe we could have given them their day.”

“And stay at anchor with this stuff? Don’t be foolish, Lee. I told you, we’re pressing our luck.”

The oriental looked at his fingernails. “One day more or less might not have mattered,” he said, “not in terms of the risks already involved.”

“We don’t know that.”

“You people are too impatient. Impatience is built deeply into your culture. You should cultivate that sense of resignation I mentioned. In the long run even ten thousand years is as nothing. The sparrow’s wing in the heart of flight.”

The bearded man twitched nervously. “Don’t give me that confucian shit.”

“It has nothing to do with confucianism.”

“I don’t want to hear it. I just don’t want to hear it anymore.”

“All right.”

“You work for
me,
do you hear that? On this ship
I’m
calling the shots.”

“I think we shall terminate this discussion,” the oriental said. He turned, walked briskly past the bearded man and toward the ramp leading below deck. “I will forgive that outburst because you are very nervous. Perhaps even understandably nervous although I am not sure.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“But,” the oriental said, his eyes becoming cold and white, “I will not tolerate many more outbursts of this sort and I wish to remind you that the risks, equally great, are equally apportioned. I stand to lose as much or more than you do.”

“I know that.”

“Remember it,” the oriental said in a level voice and went down the ramp.

Shading his eyes, the bearded man looked again out over the Bay. Now, from a great distance, he could see another ship heading dead on course toward them and with instincts he had long since learned to trust he knew that the ship was a tow and that it was directly involved with them.

The sons of bitches were going to bring them right up to port.

With a gesture of disgust, the bearded man left the deck to head toward the radio shack and pick up contact with this tow. Going into port was in a way crazy but on the other hand, as Lee had said, the matter was out of their hands. They had to go along. They had to presume that what the contact-point wanted was best.

At least, he thought, it would be over soon now.

Wulff got down to the bay long before sundown. The sun was still hanging high above the water, sneaking uneven rays through the fine mist; it looked clearer and brighter than it had all day. San Francisco in certain ways looked like the end of the world; as the sun got nearer to expiration it forced last little slivers of energy through the pollution and fog.

He got the Continental a distance away with a clear sighting of the wharf and there he could see it, his quarry, bobbing unevenly in the waters, at dock. As Severo had promised, they were bringing the ship all the way in, not risking the dangers of a transfer at sea. Then again there were concurrent dangers in bringing the ship all the way in, but he supposed that they did not have to worry about police interference, not with the kind of security they had, not with the preparations that had been made for the transfer. Besides, these things were generally taken care of in the overhead long before they got down to business.

Security they had. Wulff could see the little groups of men gathered in front of the wharf, all up and down the line there were singles who might have been longshoremen or sailors but were not, strolling with a kind of casual attention. He would not be surprised if they had a hundred men covering this operation and he had a feeling that at least fifty of them, seventy five perhaps, were there because of Wulff. Ordinarily twenty-five would have been all the lookout and security that one would need but Wulff had the strong suspicion that they were aware of his knowledge of the transfer and were waiting for him to come on in. Severo was a weak man. He could perceive the weakness. If he had squeezed information so easily out of him then people on the other side might have done the same.

They would be waiting for him.

For just a moment that strange disinclination he had felt when the police sirens were bearing down on him hit again and he had to get through it with a sheer effort of will. It was going to be difficult and the plan he had set for himself involved the most complex of all the actions he had taken. He had no doubt that with what he had in the trunk he could demolish the ship, take out the security, make the delivery impossible. He even had a small chance, tackling it that way, of getting out in one piece if he was lucky, had set the thing up right, and could take advantage of the surprise and panic that would surely come on the heels of that surprise no matter how professional this operation might be.

But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to sink the ship, rip off the delivery. He would like, if possible, to get his own hands on that shipment and there were some people he would very much like to take out of this scene alive. He wanted to talk to them.

He sat there for a moment, motor idling. He was a good distance back and there was a lot of traffic around the pier; they weren’t going to notice him for a while. And the Continental was innocuous enough, it blended into the mist harmlessly. Sooner or later someone was going to get curious and wander out to take a look but he guessed that he could buy a little time.

He considered the situation. There was no time to attempt the kind of job he had perpetrated on Peter Vincent’s New York townhouse; he had neither the cover nor the equipment, much less the secrecy to run lines down toward the pier. Rather he would have to come in there with full arsenal from the start; use the grenades to scatter and then hit with the heavy stuff, all of it launched by hand. The ship would break open if his aim were good and it would go down, but if he knew what he was doing he would have enough time in between the first hit and the sinking to get in there and do what he had to do. About four minutes, he calculated.

Against almost a hundred men.

Oh well, Wulff thought, it didn’t matter. At least as between fifty and a hundred, a hundred and a thousand—it simply made no difference. The enemy did not understand that in terms of security, twenty-five men would have been as good as a hundred. On any reasonable basis, anything over a ten-man force really was overkill. But the enemy had not thought that way. They had, in fact, panicked. He allowed himself a distant smile at that. Panic could only work to his advantage.

Two men who were near the dock strolled out some yards and looked uprange. They seemed to have noticed the Continental. Even as he watched, one of them produced a pair of binoculars and focused on the car.

Under observation, behind the windshield, Wulff smiled. Posing for the pretty picture, looking nice. Underneath the dash his hands clenched and unclenched rhythmically as he allowed the tension to ease itself out along with the fear.

Then, very slowly and precisely, calculating his movements but using the slowness to waste not a motion, he got out of the car and went to the trunk.

He had clearance of a minute or so. That was all. He trusted that it would be enough.

In for a dime, in for a dollar.

It began.