Seawitch (6 page)

Palermo and his men, with the exception of Watkins, boarded the other helicopter and sat back to await promised reinforcements. The pilot of this helicopter had already, as was customary, radio-filed his flight plan to the nearest airport, accurately giving his destination as the Seawitch. To have done otherwise would have been foolish indeed. The radar tracking systems along the Gulf states are as efficient as any in the world, and any course deviation from a falsely declared destination would have meant that, in very short order, two highly suspicious pilots in supersonic jets would be flying alongside and asking some very unpleasant questions.

Watkins drove the truck back to the garage,

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Jewired the ignition, locked the door, retrieved the minibus and left. Before dawn, all his friends* clothes would have been returned to their apartments, and the minibus, which had of course been stolen, to its parking lot.

Roomer was getting bored and his elbows were becoming sore. Since the minibus had driven away some half hour ago he had remained in the same prone position, his night glasses seldom far from his eyes. His sandwiches were gone, as was all his coffee, and he would have given much for a cigarette but decided it would be unwise. Clearly those aboard the helicopters were waiting for something, and that something could only be the arrival of Lord Worth.

He heard the sound of an approaching engine and saw another vehicle, with only sidelights on, turn through the gateway. It was another minibus. Whoever was inside was not the man he was waiting for, he knew: Lord Worth was not much given to traveling in minibuses. The vehicle drew up alongside the passenger helicopter and its passengers disembarked and climbed aboard the helicooter. Roomer counted twelve in all.

The last was just disappearing inside the helicopter when another vehicle arrived. This one didn't pass through the gateway; it swept through it, with only parking lights on. A Rolls Royce. Lord Worth, for a certainty. As if to redouble his certainty, there caine to his ears the soft

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swish of tires on the grass. He twisted round to see a car, both lights and engine off, coasting to a soundless stop beside his own.

"Over here," Roomer called softly. Mitchell joined him, and together they watched the white-clad figure of Lord Worth leave the Rolls and mount the steps to the helicopter. "I guess that completes the payload for the night."

"The payload being?"

"There are twenty-one other passengers aboard that machine. I can't swear to it, but instinct tells me they are not honest, upright citizens. They say that every multimillionaire has his own private army. I think I've just seen one of Lord Worth's platoons filing by."

"The second chopper's not involved?"

"It sure is. It's the star of the show—loaded to the gunwales with armament."

"That*s not a crime in itself. Could be part of Lord Worth's private collection. He's got one of the biggest in the country."

"Private citizens aren't allowed to have bazookas, machine guns and high explosives in their collections."

"He borrowed them, you think?"

"Yeah. Without payment or receipt."

"The nearest government arsenal?"

"I'd say so."

"They're still sitting there. Maybe they're waiting a preset time before takeoff. Might be some

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time. Let's go to one of the cars and radio the law."

"The nearest army command post is seven miles from here."

"Right."

The two men were on their feet and had taken only two steps toward the cars when, almost simultaneously, the engines of both helicopters started up with their usual clattering roar. Seconds later both machines lifted off.

Mitchell said: "Well, it was a thought."

" 'Was' is right. Look at 'em go: honest Godfearing citizens with all their navigational lights on."

"That's in case someone bumps into them," Mitchell said. "We could call up the nearest air force base and have them forced down."

"On what grounds?"

"Stolen government property."

"No evidence. Just our say-so. They'll find out Lord Worth is aboard. Who's going to take the word of a couple of busted cops against his?"

"No one. A sobering thought. Ever felt like a pariah?"

"Like now. I feel goddamned helpless. Well, let's go and find some evidence. Where's the nearest arsenal from here?"

"About a mile from the command post. I know where."

"Why don't they keep their damned arsenals inside the command posts?"

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"Because ammunition can and does blow up. How would you like to be sitting in a crowded barracks when an ammo dump blew up next door?"

Roomer straightened from the keyhole of the main door of the arms depot and reluctantly pocketed the very large set of keys which any ill-disposed law officer could have jailed him for carrying.

"I thought I could open any door with this bunch. But not this one. Give you one guess where the keys are now."

"Probably sailing down from a chopper into the Gulf."

"Right. Those loading doors have the same lock. Besides that, nothing but barred windows. You don't have a hacksaw on you, do you, Mike?"

"I will next time." He shone his flashlight through one of the barred windows. All he could see was his own reflection. He took out his pistol and, holding it by the barrel, struck the heavy butt several times against the glass, without any noticeable effect—hardly surprising, considering that the window lay several inches beyond the bars and the force of the blows was minimal.

Roomer said: "What are you trying to do?"

Mitchell was patient. "Break the glass."

"Breaking the glass won't help you get inside."

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"It'll help me see and maybe hear. I wonder if that's just plate glass or armored stuff.** "How should I know?"

"Well, we'll find out. If it's armored, the bullet will ricochet. Get down." Both men crouched and Mitchell fired one shot at an upward angle. The bullet did not ricochet. It passed through, leaving a jagged hole with radiating cracks. Mitchell began chipping away round the hole but desisted when Roomer appeared with a heavy car j ack-handle: a few powerful blows and Roomer had a hole almost a foot in diameter. Mitchell shone his flash through this: an office lined with filing cabinets and an open door beyond. He put his ear as close to the hole as possible and he heard it at once, the faint but unmistakable sound of metal clanging against metal and the shouting of unmistakably hoarse voices. Mitchell withdrew his head and nodded to Roomer, who leaned forward and listened in turn.

Roomer straightened and said: "There are a lot of frustrated people in there."

About a mile beyond the entrance to the army command post they stopped by a roadside telephone booth. Mitchell telephoned the army post, told them the state of defenses at their arsenal building would bear investigation and that it would be advisable for them to bring along a duplicate set of keys for the main door. When asked who was speaking he hung up and returned to Roomer's car.

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'Too late to call in the Air Force now, I suppose?"

"Too late. They'll be well out over extraterritorial waters by now. There's no state of war. Not yet." He sighed. "Why, oh why, didn't I have an infrared movie camera tonight?"

Over in Mississippi Conde's task of breaking into the naval depot there turned out to be ridiculously easy. He had with him only six men, although he had sixteen more waiting in reserve aboard the 120-foot vessel Roomer, which was tied up dockside less than thirty feet from the arsenal. Those men had already effectively neutralized the three armed guards who patrolled the dock area at night.

The arsenal was guarded by only two retired naval petty officers, who regarded their job not only as a sinecure but downright nonsense, for who in his right mind would want to steal depth charges and naval guns? It was their invariable custom to prepare themselves for sleep immediately upon arrival, and asleep they soundly were when Conde and his men entered through the door they hadn't even bothered to lock.

They used two forklift trucks to trundle depth charges, light, dual-purpose antiaircraft guns, and a sufficiency of shells down to the dockside, then used one of the scores of cranes that lined the dockside to lower the stolen equipment into the hold of the Roamer, which was then battened down. Clearing customs was the merest formal-

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ity. The customs official had seen the Roamer come and go so many times that they had long ago lost count. Besides, no one was going to have the temerity to inspect the oceangoing property of one of the very richest men in the world: the Roamer was Lord Worth's seismo-logical survey vessel.

At its base not far from Havana, a small, conventionally powered and Russian-built submarine slipped its moorings and quietly put out to sea. The hastily assembled but nonetheless hand-picked crew was informed that they were on a training cruise designed to test the seagoing readiness of Castro's tiny fleet. Not a man aboard believed a word of this.

Meanwhile Cronkite had not been idle. Unlike the others, he had no need to break into any place to obtain explosives. He had merely to use his own key. As the world's top expert in capping blazing gushers he had access to an unlimited number and great variety of explosives. He made a selection of those and had them trucked down to Galveston from Houston, where he lived; apart from the fact that Houston was the oil-rig center of the South, the nature of Cronkite's business made it essential for him to live within easy reach of an airport with international connections.

As the truck was on its way, another seismo-

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logical vessel, a converted coast guard cutter, was also closing in on Galveston. Without explaining his reasons for needing the vessel, Cronkite had obtained it through the good offices of Durant, who had represented the Galveston-area companies at the meeting of the ten at Lake Tahoe. The cutter, which went by the name of Tiburon, was normally based at Freeport, and Cronkite could quite easily have taken the shipment there, but this would not have suited his purpose. The tanker Crusader was unloading at Galveston, and the Crusader was one of the three tankers that plied regularly between the Seawitch and the Gulf ports.

The Tiburon and Cronkite arrived almost simultaneously sometime after midnight. Mul-hooney, the Tiburorfs skipper, eased his ship into a berth conveniently close to the Crusader. Mulhooney was not the regular captain of the Tiburon. That gentleman had been so overcome by the sight of two thousand dollars in cash that he had fallen ill, and would remain so for a few days. Cronkite had recommended his friend Mulhooney. Cronkite didn't immediately go aboard the Tiburon. Instead he chatted with a night-duty dock inspector, who watched with an idle eye as what were obviously explosives were transferred to the Tiburon. The two men had known each other for years. Apart from observing that someone out in the Gulf must have been careless with matches again, the port official had

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no further pertinent comment to make. In response to idle questioning, Cronkite learned that the Crusader had finished off-loading its cargo and would be sailing in approximately one hour.

He boarded the Tiburon, greeted Mulhooney and went straight to the crew's mess. Seated among the others at this early hour were three divers already fully clad in wetsuits. He gave brief instructions and the three men went on deck. Under cover of the superstructure and on the side of the ship remote from the dock the three men donned scuba gear, went down a rope ladder and slid quietly into the water. Six objects — radio-detonated magnetic mines equipped with metallic clamps — were lowered to them. They were so constructed as to have a very slight negative buoyancy, which made them easy to tow under water.

In the predawn darkness the hulls of the vessels cast so heavy a shadow from the powerful shorelights that the men could have swum unobserved on the surface. But Cronkite was not much given to taking chances. The mines were attached along the stern half of the Crusader's hull, thirty feet apart and at a depth of about ten feet. Five minutes after their departure the scuba divers were back. After a further five minutes the Tiburon put out to sea.

Despite his near-legendary reputation for ruth-lessness, Cronkite had not lost touch with humanity: to say that he was possessed of an innate

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kindliness would have been a distortion of the truth, for he was above all an uncompromising and single-minded realist, but one with no innate killer instinct. Nonetheless, there were two things that would at that moment have given him considerable satisfaction.

The first of those was that he would have preferred to have the Crusader at sea before pressing the sheathed button before him on the bridge. He had no wish that innocent lives should be lost in Galveston, but it was a chance that he had to take. Limpet mines, as the Italian divers had proved at Alexandria in World War II—and this to the great distress of the Royal Navy— could be devastating^ effective against moored vessels. But what might happen to high-buoyancy limpets when a ship got under way and worked up to maximum speed was impossible to forecast, as there was no known case of a vessel under way having been destroyed by limpet mines. It was at least possible that water pressure on a ship under way might well overcome the tenuous magnetic hold of the limpets and tear them free.

The second temptation was to board the helicopter on the Tiburorfs after helipad—many such vessels carried helicopters for the purpose of having them drop patterned explosives on the seabed to register on the seismological computer—and have a close look at what would be the ensuing havoc, a temptation he immediately regarded as pure self-indulgence.

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He put both thoughts from his mind. Eight miles out from Galveston he unscrewed the covered switch and leaned firmly on the button beneath. The immediate results were wholly unspectacular, and Cronkite feared that they might be out of radio range. But in the port area in Galveston the results were highly spectacular. Six shattering explosions occurred almost simultaneously, and within twenty seconds the Crusader, her stern section torn in half, developed a marked list to starboard as thousands of tons of water poured through the ruptured side. Another twenty seconds later the distant rumble of the explosions reached the ears of listeners on the Tiburon. Cronkite and Mulhooney, alone on the bridge—the ship was on automatic pilot— looked at each other with grim satisfaction. Mulhooney, an Irishman with a true Irishman's sense of occasion, produced an opened bottle of champagne and poured two brimming glassfuls. Cronkite, who normally detested the stuff, consumed his drink with considerable relish and set his glass down. It was then that the Crusader caught fire.