Operation Fireball

antenna. That means a liaison radio inside.”

It reminded me of something that had been disturbing me. “I asked you this before. What makes you think one of these tank radios can push the signal that far?”

“I’ll change my answer. It may not, but friends of mine will be listening for the signal, too. If it sounds weak, they’ll amplify it so Hazel can’t miss it.”

“Lovely. I suppose your friends are on a battleship a few miles offshore?”

“Not a battleship.”

His coolness riled me. “Why don’t you just have an LST run up on the beach and pick us up?”

“The U.S. Government is not involved in this matter in any way that can be traced, Drake. We’re wasting time here.”

We walked back to the tank storage area. Erikson scanned the interior of the park and the streets on either side. “Go!” he said at last. I crossed the street with a rush, dived between the lowest strands of barbed wire, and rolled beneath the nearest tank treads. I listened for an alarm, but there was nothing.

I had no idea a tank was so big. The treads must have been twelve feet apart. I could see that on the next tank in the lineup the huge metal carcass was at least ten feet tall. Protruding from its front was a barrel-like muzzle brake on a cannon fully fifteen feet long. There wasn’t much headroom underneath. A tank is designed to hug the ground.

There was a thud, and Erikson rolled under the tank with me. “This is an old T-34 Russian model,” he said when he regained his breath. “The radio will be one of three or four types.” He handed me a small wrench. “I won’t need this inside. If you want me to come out in a hurry, tap the bottom of the tank. When I’m ready to come out, I’ll tap. You tap back only if you want me to hold off for any reason. Got it?”

“Got it.”

He wriggled forward on his belly and disappeared. I heard the scrape of leather on metal as he scaled the side of the tank. There was a dull metallic sound that I assumed was Erikson disposing of the hatch cover. After that there was silence.

I had time to think for the first time since the dying Slater’s revelation that Erikson was a government agent. How in the hell had I ever wound up in such a jackpot? Slater had been the perfect bridge, of course. He had wanted out of prison so badly that he agreed to anything Erikson wanted done. Ordinarily I would have firmly resolved to shed Mr. Erikson permanently somewhere along the way, and soon. It hadn’t been a one-way street, though. Twice — first at the time we took over the ambulance and again in the alley behind the brothel — he had saved my life. He had needed me, of course. Still …

Two ringing taps above my head aborted my thinking. The metal-on-metal clangor sounded as though it would carry for three miles. I wormed my way out from beneath the tank as Erikson dropped to the ground. “That should do it,” he said. We covered each other crossing the street on our way back to the truck.

Erikson drove steadily for forty-five minutes. The truck wheezed along at a top of 25 mph. There was an increasing tang of salt in the air. When we neared our remote seashore rendezvous point, we abandoned the truck and walked the final mile through pine trees. Shifting sand underfoot made the walking arduous.

We stopped within sound of the surf while we were still in the pines. We unpacked the clumsy one-man life rafts and spread them out. I saw Erikson take from the haversack the piece of equipment about the size of a cigarette lighter that I had seen him repacking carefully so many times before. “What is that?”

“A frequency probe.” He held it out to me. “Quite a piece of miniaturization. It has a selector switch for various frequencies that can be preset. The small bulb at the bottom lights up whenever a transmitter in the area sends out a signal on the frequency selected. Ours is homed in on the Calpyso’s frequency, of course. This unit has a built-in amplitude sensor so the bulb will glow more brightly when pointed directly at the source of the signal. When we’re in the rafts, it will guide us to the cruiser.”

“And right now?”

“We wait.”

I stretched out at the base of a pine tree and tried to relax. The sudden inactivity reminded me how infrequently I had eaten in the past forty-eight hours. My stomach complained audibly.

My thoughts returned to Karl Erikson, Treasury agent. The snow job to which I succumbed in San Diego had been a monumental performance. Even in hindsight, it was hard to see what I might have done differently to avoid being ensnared in a game in which I couldn’t win unless I disposed of Karl Erikson.

After an hour Erikson made frequent trips from the shelter of the trees to the water’s edge, where he made sweeping left-to-right casts along the horizon with his frequency probe. “If that first mate, Redmond, doesn’t make it soon, we’re going to be caught by daylight,” he said quietly after one of these fruitless trips.

On his next try, though, he called me from the shore. “I’m getting a flicker,” he said when I joined him. “Bring the rafts, but don’t inflate them till I’m sure.”

By the time I had lugged the twenty-pound rafts to the edge of the sand, I could see for myself on the frequency probe that the Calypso was out there. The tiny bulb flickered weakly when held left and right of our position. Slightly left of center, it glowed steadily.

“Inflate,” Erikson said after another pass with the sensor. I walked knee-deep into the low surge and turned the knobs on a CO₂ cylinder on each raft. They inflated rapidly. I wasn’t looking forward to what came next, because when we practiced in Key West, the rafts had proved ungainly. They were primarily survival gear, and the only locomotion was provided by paddles strapped to the forearm by elastic bands.

Erikson joined me in the surf. He fastened the rafts together with a length of nylon line. “So we don’t get separated in the dark,” he said. He placed on his raft the oilskin-wrapped package that had never been separated from him since he had acquired it in the basement of the museum. We waded out waist-deep, pushing the rafts ahead of us, then climbed aboard the precariously balanced affairs. I knelt carefully on the thin fabric bottom and strapped on my paddle.

Erikson was much better at it than I was. He kept the nylon line between the rafts taut most of the time. Paddling and trying to keep the raft from spinning around was exhausting work. Once or twice I caught a glow from the sensor Erikson still carried as he aimed us at the steadiest source of light. It was much darker on the water without the beach sand to reflect the luminescence.

Oddly, I saw the Calypso before Erikson did. I had been staring at a darker bulk low on the water without realizing what it was. It took me another moment to assimilate the half-seen, half-sensed outline. “There it is!” I called at the same moment white water foamed out from behind the Calypso as the previously idling engines speeded up. The pilot had seen us.

Erikson practically towed me the final hundred yards to the cruiser. Even alongside it, the Calypso‘s dark paint made it hard to see. Erikson stood up on his bobbing raft and pitched his oilskin-wrapped package up onto the Calypso‘s deck. Then he swarmed up the side with the aid of a hand extended down to him.

I banged a shoulder against the Calypso‘s side as raft and cruiser came together when I reached up for the helping hand. A strong pull and my own scrambling effort landed me aboard. “Welcome aboard, horseman,” Hazel greeted me. The helping hand had been her hand.

“What the hell—?” I began as the engines roared and the Calypso began a sweeping turn. Erikson was at the wheel.

“Redmond chickened out when word came over the radio from Havana about the firing squad execution of the American spy,” Hazel explained. “He said he wasn’t putting his neck into a noose on a Cuban beach. I had to lay him out to keep him from taking off with the Calypso. Where’s Slater?”

“He didn’t make it.”

She went to Erikson at the wheel. “That’s not the reverse course,” she said after a look at the compass, which was on due north.

“It’s just the right course, that’s all. We’ll make the intercept just outside the twelve-mile limit.”

“Will they escort us or will we go aboard the Navy ship?”

“They’ll escort us.”

It took me a moment to digest it. Then I walked over to them. “We’re meeting a Navy ship and you knew it?” I said to Hazel. “You knew this man was a government agent?”

“Wasn’t it nice of him to guarantee my fifty thousand dollars?” she said with a smile. She put her hand on my arm. “He came to see me at the ranch after Calkins, the deputy sheriff, found you. He explained things to me.”