Operation Fireball (8 page)

Hazel joined me, sat down, and slipped her hand into mine. “D’you think your boy Chico got your message?” I asked her.

“If he didn’t, the next one’ll cost him bridgework,” she promised. Her expression was concerned as she studied my face. “Let me handle him, okay?”

I said nothing as Wilson expertly conned the
Calypso
back into its slip.

• • •

Slater was waiting for us at The Castaways.

The Mexican boy Hazel had left on duty behind the bar leaned across it and said something to Slater as we entered. The burly man left his half-finished glass of beer and approached us. I was savoring the feel of the air conditioning. “The boy says you’re the one to see about gettin’ a room,” Slater said to Hazel.

She waited for a negative reaction from me. “No women above the first floor,” she said when I gave no sign. “That’s ironclad.”

“Suits me,” Slater shrugged. Money was changing hands between them when Erikson came through the front door. He walked directly to the stairway and went upstairs. He didn’t look at Slater, nor Slater at him. I stayed downstairs while Hazel took Slater up to get him settled. I’d have plenty of time to talk to him later. I wondered where Wilson was. Probably out picking up Erikson’s supplies.

Hazel came back downstairs and told the bartender that he could go. “It’s quite a crew you’ve put together,” she said to me quietly when she was sure no one could overhear.

I didn’t feel that I’d put it together, but I let it go. “Did you give friend Chico the same pitch about no women above the first floor when you roomed him?”

“I certainly did.”

“What did he say?”

“You won’t get mad?”

“No madder than I am already.”

She smiled reminiscently. “He said ‘Do you stay above the first floor?’ and when I said yes he said ‘Then I won’t need no other women up there.’ ”

“It sounds like him.”

“He’s funny, if you could only see it that way.” I said nothing, and she put her hand on my arm. “Let me handle him,” she said for the second time.

Erikson came downstairs and sat at the other end of the bar. When Hazel served him, he downed a beer in two gulps, said something to her, and went out the front door. I waited while she swished a bar rag along the mahogany bar top until she was opposite me. “He wants you to go down to the basement and give Wilson a hand unloading supplies from Wilson’s truck,” she murmured.

Rather than use the basement door inside the room in back of the bar, I went outside and walked down the alley. Some of the fishermen-faces in The Castaways were beginning to look familiar to me, and if the reverse were true, I didn’t want to call attention to myself by letting anyone see me make too familiar use of the lower floor.

It was twilight outside. Margaret Street looked deserted as I turned into the alley. Slanting outside doors led down a short flight of steps at the rear of the building into The Castaways’ basement. A mud-covered, rust-spotted pickup was parked there. It didn’t need Wilson’s name on it to proclaim its ownership. It was sister-under-the-skin to the
Calypso
.

Wilson emerged from the basement. “I was beginnin’ to think you was afraid to get your hands dirty,” he started in on me. “Stack this stuff inside.” He climbed into the body of the pickup.

We had a lot of chiefs and damn few Indians on this project, I reflected. I kept my mouth shut, though. I went back and forth to the basement with armloads of blue naval uniforms, khaki uniforms, rubber ponchos, and duffle bags crammed with weighty items. Inside the basement the air was musty and smelled of beer, but it was cooler than outside.

Next came several open boxes of what looked like radio equipment. When there was nothing left in the pickup except two small wooden crates, Wilson jumped down and carried one into the basement. I carried the other. For their size, they were deceptively heavy. Stenciled boldly on all sides of the crates was the single word
CLASSIFIED
. “What’s in these?” I asked Wilson as he closed the outer basement doors.

“You can read, can’t you?” he grunted.

I started to heat up until I realized that he didn’t know, either. He got into the pickup and drove off down the alley. I walked around to the front and went inside. I wanted a shower.

Hazel was busy at the tables. I climbed the stairs to our room. “Hey, Drake!” Slater called to me as I passed his open door. I went into his room. He seemed more tense than he had in San Diego. “Who’s the redhead at the bar?” he wanted to know.

“My girl.”

“Your girl! How’d you round up that bit of catnip?”

I decided that the truth couldn’t hurt anything. “She’s the moneyman.” I unbuttoned my sweat-soaked shirt and slipped out of it.

Slater cocked a heavy eyebrow. “All that and money, too,” he said admiringly. “What did Captain Bligh have to say?”

I knew he meant Erikson. “Nothing. Yet.” And now that I thought of it, it was strange that he hadn’t.

Slater’s gaze was on my chest where some of the scars from the plastic surgery transplants partly showed above my undershirt. “Somebody didn’t like you a whole lot one time, hmm?” he remarked.

I didn’t correct him. If he didn’t make the connection between the multicolored scars and my new face, it was all right with me. “Erikson said there was a load of stuff in the basement we’d move upstairs tonight after closin’ time,” Slater continued. “What d’you think of our boat captain?”

“I’ll let you meet him first.”

“You don’t like him?”

“I don’t have to like him if he gets the job done. On the water he seems capable enough.”

“He’s not gonna be on the water when we jump the fence at Gitmo,” Slater objected.

“Maybe he has hidden talent,” I said, and went into my room for my shower.

• • •

The following night I knocked on Erikson’s door. I could hear the tap-tap-tapping of a typewriter inside. Down the corridor I could hear Slater’s full-throated snores. I had no idea where Wilson was.

Erikson’s door opened silently with the blond man shielded behind it until he saw who it was. He closed the door behind me when I entered. Piled in corners were the articles Wilson and I had unloaded from Wilson’s pickup the previous night.

Erikson went back to the typewriter. A bulldog pipe was in an ashtray on the desk and blue tobacco smoke eddied in the air conditioning. “We have work to do,” Erikson said as he sat down.

“Tonight?”

“Tonight. Are you handy with tools?”

“I’m no master mechanic, but I get by.”

“Good. You can help.” There was a five-second pause. “The deputy from White Pine County mentioned that you were handy with a gun.”

“What brought that up on your radar?”

He swiveled on his chair to look me in the eye. “You and Wilson,” he said bluntly.

“Forget it,” I said. “Hazel will hand him his head.”

“I believe that,” he answered. “I just hope that you do, too. By the way, can she sew?”

“Sew?” Erikson made a series of stitching motions. “Oh. Damned if I know. I’ll ask her. Why?”

He glanced at the piles of clothing and equipment. “There’s sleeve insignia to be sewed onto these uniforms.”

“Okay, I’ll find out. What’s the job tonight?”

“Installing the transceiver in the storeroom behind the bar. We can’t erect the antenna tonight because the lights on the roof would attract too much attention. We’ll put up the antenna at sundown tomorrow when it will look to anyone watching as if we’re adjusting the TV antenna.”

I had moved in behind him until I was looking over his shoulder. A stencil was in the typewriter. In widely spaced letters at the top of the stencil it said
CONFIDENTIAL
. Below that it said
HEADQUARTERS, CINC ATLANTIC FLEET, UNITED STATES NAVY, NEWPORT NEWS, VA
.

The small neat type of Erikson’s typewriter had filled in most of the stencil. Beneath the heading it read:

1. The following named officers and enlisted ranks, organizations indicated, (Expense and Account Code: 4181303), will proceed on or about 1 September from Charleston, West Virginia, to Key West, Florida, and Guantanamo Naval Station on TDY for approximately 25 days to accomplish an administrative mission, and upon completion will return to proper organization and station for duty. Travel by military aircraft and/or surface vessel authorized. Commercial air, rail, and/or bus transportation authorized for that portion of travel from Charleston, West Virginia, to Key West, Florida.

It went on for another half-page, but I stopped reading. “What’s all that?”

“It’s the master stencil of our supposed orders getting us onto the Naval Station here and to Guantanamo by destroyer.” Erikson picked up his pipe and set it down again. “Let’s get that transceiver set up.”

“Right.”

He sorted out a pile of equipment from the array in the corners of the room. “You carry this,” he said, handing me a rectangular, boxy-looking object. It was a double armful. From the looks of the dials, switches, and knobs on the front of the panel, it looked like we were planning to set up communications with the next space flight.

I watched as Erikson filled an empty box with smaller pieces of electronic gear. “Looks like you’ve been spending money as if it came out of the Pentagon budget,” I said.

“If this set doesn’t work properly, money won’t do us much good where we’ll be,” he replied.

There wasn’t any answer to that. Erikson balanced the loaded box on his right shoulder, picked up a gunmetal gray tool kit in his left hand, and led the way out of his room. Downstairs I raised the flap in the bar so he could walk behind it en route to the storeroom. The bar’s night light made it possible to see in the bar proper, but inside the storeroom it was dark except for a square of comparative light from the single window.

“Grab a couple of tablecloths from the linen closet and black out that window,” Erikson told me. He handed me a card of thumbtacks to do the job. He waited until I had the window covered before he removed a mechanic’s light from the toolbox and plugged it in. Then he laid out an array of wrenches, pliers, and screwdrivers like a doctor getting ready to perform an operation.

He turned to the transceiver, which I’d set down upon a counter, and rapidly added several components to it from the box he’d brought downstairs. He took a thick coil of antenna wire and fitted one end of it to the side of the radio, using finger-tightened set screws. His huge hands had a surprising delicacy of touch. He tossed the coil of antenna wire under the counter and began to put his tools back in the kit. “Tomorrow we’ll run this up the back wall onto the roof,” he said. “That’s all we can do tonight.”

We hadn’t been together ten minutes, and I had contributed zilch. “What the hell,” I protested. “You didn’t need me.”

“I had a reason for bringing you down here,” Erikson said. He had turned out his mechanic’s light and I couldn’t see his face.

“What’s the reason?”

“I want to say it again. I want no trouble between you and Wilson.”

“I’m not taking my eye off the target.”

“I can’t expect him to use judgment, so I have to tell you.” He sounded like a schoolteacher with a backward pupil. “It won’t be easy on either of you if the project is jeopardized.” He handed me the box with the diminished load of electronic equipment and started from the storeroom. Outside, he set down his tool kit while he swiftly bolted a hasp-and-hinge arrangement to the storeroom door. He slipped a shiny-looking padlock through it, snapped it shut, and handed me the key. “Give that to Hazel.”

In view of what he’d been saying about possible conflict between Wilson and me, I’d been half-expecting him to tell me to get rid of Hazel. Not that I was about to do it anyway, but now here he was handing me a key to give to her as though her presence were perfectly all right.

I followed him upstairs with no more being said.

FIFTEEN HOURS LATER
I found myself climbing the slippery rungs of an aluminum ladder in Erikson’s wake. We climbed it to the almost flat roof of The Castaways. It was only forty-five minutes to twilight, but the sun’s rays were still so strong I was squinting despite my dark glasses. During the day the roof had absorbed heat until it felt like the bottom of a roasting oven.

Erikson didn’t seem to mind the heat. He set down his toolbox and the coil of antenna wire he’d carried up the ladder, then removed his outer shirt. He set to work rapidly, paying no attention to the discomfort I knew he must be feeling. In seconds the white T-shirt covering his broad back was dark with perspiration.

“This will be a lash-up installation, so don’t judge its effectiveness by how it looks,” he said over his shoulder. “The important thing is to get the antenna oriented so it will pick up our signal strongly. I’ve already cut it to a harmonic of the frequency we’ll use to bring it in with all the zip possible.”

I didn’t bother telling him I didn’t know a harmonic from a hernia. The heat was getting to me. The sweat ran off my chin in rivulets, and I wasn’t doing anything. Erikson moved busily around the roof, checking a hand compass, unreeling and threading wire, then snipping off excess ends. There was nothing I could do except hand him tools, friction tape, and more wire as he called for them.

He stepped back to survey his work. His eyes were narrowed to slits as the low-lying sun reflecting from the burnished copper wire turned it into a thread of flame. “That should do it,” Erikson said. “All we need now is to anchor down the lead-in and we’ll be ready to hook up tonight and test it.”

With deft movements he mated the wire from the end of the wooden spool with the antenna. When it was secure, he stepped to the edge of the roof and tossed the spool of wire to the ground behind the building. He fed the lead wire through an insulator, and with two apparently effortless blows from a mallet-headed hammer, he anchored the wire at the roof’s edge.

He tossed me the hammer in an underhand motion, and I dropped it into the toolbox with the other tools I had collected. Erikson picked up the kit and swung himself onto the ladder, which descended to the alley in the rear of the building. I went over the edge after him. The tall, vertical neon sign spelling out
THE CASTAWAYS
was glowing steadily. I hadn’t noticed it, but it had grown almost dark.

It was cooler behind the building. Erikson secured the lead wire into another insulator, which he placed on the frame of the storeroom window. By the time I removed the ladder and put it in the basement, he had disappeared. I walked around to the front and went inside. The air conditioning hit me like a blow in the chest.

Hazel’s always-smiling Mexican boy was behind the bar. Wilson was installed on the end stool with a runty-looking type I hadn’t seen before. Slater was hunched over a bottle of beer at a table. Even when all five of us were upstairs, Slater and Wilson acted like two strange dogs. I had figured them to hit it off. So far it hadn’t taken.

Hazel was just ready to leave our room when I reached it. She had rented a sewing machine and attached the insignia to the uniforms. A single rainstorm would make hand-sewn insignia look tacky, she’d insisted. “Is that Wilson’s first mate with him at the bar? I hope he’s more capable than he looks,” I said.

“Should I discourage you by saying that he’s even less attractive at close range?”

“All he’s got to do is run the boat,” I said hopefully. “What about Slater? He’s down there with a big thirst.”

“Erikson said for every two beers he orders I should give him one, and no wild moose milk,” she said on her way to the door.

I shed damp clothing en route to the shower, then soaked in hot water and luxuriated in the quick chill of a cold rinse. I wondered what Cuba was going to be like without The Castaways’ soothing showers. I stretched out on the bed and decided to rest my eyes for a moment.

A touch on the shoulder brought me bolt upright in a sitting position in the bed as my right hand darted to the .38 under the pillow. “It’s me.” Hazel’s voice penetrated the mist of sleep. I felt sheepish as I withdrew my hand. “Erikson called and said one of the prongs on a cable connector is pitted and he wants you to bring a spare down to the
Calypso
. He took Wilson and Redmond, the mate, with him when he went. Don’t stay too long. I’m thinking of closing up early tonight.”

When I focused on them, her eyes promised volumes. “If you have any trouble moving the customers out, start pouring the mickeys and I’ll be back to help you stack them in the alley.”

She smiled and went back downstairs. I dressed and crossed the hall to Erikson’s room. I rummaged through boxes until I found one with three coiled-up cables with connectors on each. There were a couple of spare connectors rolling around the bottom of the box, so to be sure I wouldn’t have the trip for nothing I took the whole box with me.

It was a clear night with a three-quarter moon. A five-minute walk took me to the
Calypso’s
anchorage. The salty air was seasoned with the odor of dried seaweed and dead marine life. There was an offshore breeze.

Before I reached the
Calypso’s
berth, I heard the sound of metal on metal. Two dark figures peered down at me from the flybridge atop the deckhouse. “You come down to give us a hand?” Chico Wilson’s voice called to me.

“I have a job helping Erikson,” I lied.

“That goddamn Swede,” Wilson cursed. “Tells me I’ve gotta take down my tuna tower, but he don’t give a shit how much work it takes. Gettin’ those corroded nuts an’ bolts loose is like tearin’ apart a weld. An’ in the dark, too.”

I had no sympathy to spare for Wilson. “Where’s Erikson?”

“Fo’ard at the rope locker.”

I jumped down to the deck and walked forward to the cabin door. There was less of an odor of gasoline aboard the
Calypso
. I turned sideways to go down three narrow steps, then stopped under the open, overhead hatch. Erikson had rigged up an oscillating fan, but it was stifling in the close confines of the small cabin. His bulk was squeezed between the space in the bow where two bunks came to a “V.” He blocked most of the light provided by the extension lamp in front of him.

He turned around when I rattled the contents of the connector box to attract his attention. His blond hair was streaked with perspiration and grease. There was a band of dirt across his forehead where he’d swiped at himself with an unclean hand. He looked as if he had a single heavy, continuous eyebrow.

“Good,” he said when he saw the box. “I’d have sent Wilson after them, but I want that tower down tonight and he’s been dogging it enough. You saw them, didn’t you? Are they working at it?”

“Yes. Not that I mind seeing Wilson do a little work, but why take down the tower? You can’t see those tubular struts far.”

“That much metal perched that high above the water would make a radar echo that could be picked up an extra twenty-mile distance,” Erikson replied. He began attaching the new cable I’d brought as he talked. “I’d tear off the flying bridge, too, except that it would look too suspicious. Radar doesn’t bend over the horizon, so the lower the silhouette, the closer the target has to get before radar will pick it up.”

He glanced down at me standing below him. “It might make for a rough trip, but we should wish for a good sea running. Big waves at the radar horizon will hide the boat intermittently. This little black box here, though, will do more for us than any forces of nature.” He patted the top of a square container into which he was plugging the cable.

He had the box anchored to the shelf wall inside the rope locker, and I could hardly see it around his shoulders. “What is it?”

“Miniaturized electronic equipment.” He took off the cover plate and shined his wire-enclosed work light on the exposed mass of complex-looking components. “About half of this conglomeration of transistors, capacitors, and printed circuits is a scanner. It listens for radar signal transmissions, moving up and down a wide frequency range normally used by radar. When it finds a frequency in use, it ‘locks on.’ It stops at that frequency and automatically tunes this other part, which is a transmitter, to the same frequency. The transmitter sends out a strong signal right on the frequency of the search radar.”

“I thought the idea was to avoid the radar.”

“Yes, up to the point where it’s impossible, and then this takes over.” Erikson snipped off a trailing edge of wire. “The idea is to send back such a strong signal that the whole radar tube at the lookout station is flooded with bright light, concealing any one target echo.”

“And it works?”

“Sure it works. It’s the same principle used in jamming radio signals. If you’ve ever listened to shortwave, every once in a while you run across a singsong noise, which is all you can hear. That’s a jamming signal used to cover the regular transmission.”

“Suppose a radar station has more than one frequency to use for sending out detection beams?”

“That’s the beauty of our little beast. Even while the transmitter is sending out the radar jamming signal, the frequency scanner continues to work. It searches the radar spectrum constantly, and if one signal stops and another starts, it retunes the transmitter and starts blanketing the new signal.”

“Sounds as if it could be a busy piece of equipment.”

“Right.” Erikson snapped the cover back on. “And it’s all automatic.” He picked up a black wire and bounced it in his broad palm. “This leads to a flip switch on the flybridge and there’ll be another by the controls in the deckhouse. When the
Calypso
gets within range, the scanner will be turned on to do its job.” He dropped down to the floor beside me from his cramped position up in the bow.

“Are you going to test it?”

“Not the way you think.” He squeezed past me and went into the deckhouse. The two huge engines rumbled into life. The sound brought Wilson down from the tuna tower on the run.

“What the hell’s going on?” he demanded.

“Keep your shirt on,” Erikson said. “I can’t put our black box on the air, so I’ll have to test it by running complete circuit checks.” He stared pointedly at Wilson. “Is the tower dismantled yet?”

Wilson took the hint and shuffled back to work. “I think I’ll get back to The Castaways,” I said.

“We’ll finish wiring up the transceiver at closing time and then give Hazel a lesson in operating it,” Erikson said.

“Okay.”

I left the boat and climbed up onto the dock. At the top of the stairs leading to the street I turned to look back. Even at that short range the dark bulk of the
Calypso
was difficult to make out.

I felt better about the whole operation than at any time since leaving San Diego.

Erikson, Hazel, and I went down to the darkened bar after closing. Hazel unlocked the padlock on the storeroom door and we went inside. Erikson opened the window wide enough to pull in the wire trailing down the side of the building from the antenna on the roof. He clipped the lead to the proper length and fitted it to the side of the transceiver.

“Now let’s try a bit of eavesdropping,” he said. He flipped an
ON-OFF
switch. Needle-thin pointers sprang off pegs and quivered to a halt at various places on the now-illuminated dials. Erikson read them, then adjusted tuning knobs to bring the pointers to desired levels. The small loudspeaker began to hum. There was background noise, static, and squealing. With a delicate touch belying the strength in his hands, Erikson made corrections and backed off the volume control. The noise from the speaker settled down to a steady hiss, overridden by a series of “dits” and “dahs.”

Erikson frowned. “I might have to add another filter to eliminate that. Although it will be tough to mask it all.”

“Eliminate what?” Hazel asked.

“Those Morse code signals. The transmitters at the naval station here have so damned much power they blanket the whole frequency spectrum when we’re this close to them. If you had the right-sized fillings in your teeth, you’d be pouring drinks to a Morse code rhythm. Maybe the pretuned crystals will stop it.”

His blunt fingertip depressed one of a row of clear plastic buttons running vertically on the panel. The button he pushed remained locked in place, lit from behind to show that it was engaged. The fast-paced code signals faded measurably. I had to strain to hear them. Erikson nodded in satisfaction and pushed another button. A Spanish-speaking voice blotted out the background noise entirely.

“Right on it,” Erikson said with the broadest smile I’d ever seen from him. He worked the buttons from top to bottom, bringing in other Spanish-speaking voices on all but two of the eight frequencies. Those two hummed steadily, indicating that the channels were open.

He returned to one of these, turning up the speaker volume until the power hum was almost painful. He backed off the volume control then and listened to the silence for a good three minutes. “Is anything wrong?” I asked finally.

“We’d be in trouble if that frequency were in use,” he answered. “It’s the one I’ve set up for the rendezvous signal, and we need to have it clear. We’ll monitor it for a few days to make sure it stays open, especially during the hours we’ll want to use it ourselves. We’ll probably transmit the recall signal around two in the morning to give the
Calypso
time to make the run and be laying offshore at the pickup point before dawn.”

He looked at Hazel. “It’s going to be boring for you, listening to silent airwaves each night starting at midnight.”

“I’ll bring a crossword puzzle,” she said.

“This is all you have to do,” he said. Hazel moved up beside him. Erikson demonstrated how to turn on and tune the transceiver. “Try it,” he said.

For ten minutes they went through the routine. I thought Erikson was a little rough with his brusque instructions. Knowing Hazel’s quick temper, I was a little surprised she didn’t sound off at him. “Fine,” he said at last. “One more thing. There’s no point in inviting possible attention to what you’re doing here.”