Operation Fireball

CHAPTER EIGHT

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.”

He pulled a box from under a bench, ripped it open, and took out a headset with large, foam-rubber-cushioned cups covering the earphones. He plugged the jack into a receptacle on the receiver panel and moved a two-way switch next to it from speaker to phone position. The room became quiet.

Hazel put on the headset, adjusted the earphones for comfort, and depressed a channel button. She tilted her head slightly, then reached forward and turned a control knob. She took off the headset and handed it to me. When I held it to one ear, liquid-sounding Spanish syllables crackled clearly.

“Fine,” Erikson repeated after he had also listened for a moment. “That’s all for tonight,” he added to Hazel. “We’ll be upstairs in a little bit.”

In the instant Erikson leaned forward to turn off the radio, Hazel made a face to me to indicate her opinion of her abrupt dismissal, but she left the storeroom. “We’ll all go out on the Calypso in the morning, except Hazel. Wilson will take us to a quiet area where we can practice boarding from rubber life rafts. Now let’s go up to. my room. I want to give you all copies of a Navy Training Pamphlet called “The Bluejacket’s Manual.” And I want you all to study it. You’ll have to act like white hats aboard the destroyer that takes us to Guantanamo. I also want to show you a detailed map of Cuba and mark a point where I feel—”

There was a loud thump above our heads, followed by scuffling noises. Another thump sounded. Erikson and I jammed together in the storeroom doorway trying to get through it at the same time. We wriggled free, ran for the stairs, and sprinted up them. Erikson beat me to the door of Hazel’s and my room. He stopped inside it, his bulk blocking my vision partly, but I could see the essentials.

Chico Wilson had returned from the Calypso. He was struggling to get to his feet, a look of incredulous disbelief on his handsome features. Hazel stood to one side. The print of her knuckles stood out starkly on Wilson’s tanned jawline. “You bitch!” he rasped as he bounded to his feet. He started toward her. Erikson moved forward like a big cat, but Hazel was quicker. She took two steps and then planted the toe of her cowboy boot squarely in Wilson’s shin like Jan Stenerud kicking a fifty-yard field goal. Wilson’s head flew back until he was staring at the ceiling, his face screwed up in pain. He collapsed slowly upon himself until he ended up sitting on the floor with both hands clasping the wounded shin.

“Wassamatter?” a husky voice said from behind me. I turned. Slater was standing there in his underwear, glassy-eyed. In his right hand he held the biggest pistol I’d ever seen. Both hand and pistol were shaking. “Cops?” he demanded.

Inside the room, Erikson leaned down and took hold of Wilson by one arm. He jerked him to his feet and thrust him at the door. Slater and I barely cleared the entrance in time for Wilson to be propelled through it. He didn’t even look around. He kept right on going to his own room.

“Oh, it’s jus’ lover boy,” Slater said. He attempted to put the pistol into his belt, realized he had no belt, stared at the pistol for a moment, and then clamped it under his armpit. His hand continued to shake. “ ‘Night,” he said with an attempt at jauntiness, and went down the corridor.

I was looking at Wilson’s door when Erikson came out into the hall. “Stay away from him,” Erikson ordered.

Some of my inarticulate rage transferred itself to the big blond man. Who the hell did he think he was? “Don’t try to tell—”

“Simmer down,” his hard voice overrode mine. “There’s too much at stake.”

When I could think, I couldn’t argue with the statement.

Neither Hazel nor I referred to the incident while we undressed and went to bed. While I waited for her to fall asleep, I remade a resolution I had made previously and done nothing about. When everything was quiet, I eased out of bed and went over to the bureau. I laid out my loosest-fitting sport shirt for the morning, and under it I placed my shoulder holster and.38.

The next time Chico Wilson got that far out of line around me, I intended to be in a position to do something about it.

It was a silent crew that boarded the Calypso in the morning. As usual, we went aboard at intervals. Wilson took the Calypso to a deserted spit of land and anchored. For two hours in the broiling sun we practiced boarding the cruiser from collapsible rubber life rafts. It was hot, tedious, exhausting work. Everyone had the disposition of a snapping turtle by the time we began the run back to Key West.

Erikson took the wheel. Wilson slumped down upon a coil of rope. Slater brushed against me as he attempted to move past. He turned his head, and I knew he had felt the outline of the holster and.38 under my sport shirt. He went to an iced-down chest, opened it, and took out a can of beer.

He drained the can in one long swallow, held out the empty can in my direction, and looked at me quizzically. “Come on, Wild Bill,” he said. “Show us how you used to do it when the buffalo was a-stampedin’ across the plains.” He lobbed the empty beer can over the side in a long, lazy arc. “What’s the matter?” he said when I made no move. “Savin’ ammunition?”

He took out another can of beer. It took him two swallows for that one. He held it out toward me wordlessly, then feinted throwing it. The ocean was flat calm and there wasn’t another boat in sight. I moved up to the rail, unbuttoned the top two buttons on my shirt, and drew the.38.

Slater grinned. He threw the can in the same rainbow trajectory. The third slug from the.38 bounced the can skyward. Slater threw a full can. That one almost reached the water before my last bullet drove it downward into the top of a wave. I reloaded while Slater picked up another can. When he threw it, the first bullet jerked the can sideways while it was still on its way up.

I reholstered the Smith & Wesson and stepped back from the rail. Chico Wilson was staring at the stretch of ocean where the beer cans had disappeared. At the wheel Erikson displayed no emotion on his rugged features. Slater chuckled aloud as he opened another can of beer. “Ol’ Wild Bill has still got it,” he pronounced, and held the beer can aloft in a salute.

The Calypso knifed steadily through the blue-green water.

Showboating isn’t my style, but I had a feeling that Hazel wouldn’t have as much trouble with Wilson again.