Operation Fireball

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