Operation Moon Rocket

Chapter 10

The early morning fog had begun to burn off. Ragged blue holes opened and closed in the grayness. Through them Nick caught brief glimpses of orange grove plantings swinging past like the spokes in a wheel.

Candy was driving. She had insisted that they take her car — a sporty GT model Giulia. She had also insisted that he wait and actually see her discovery. She couldn't — she said — tell him about it.

Still playing it like a little girl, he decided sourly. He glanced over at her. The hip-huggers had been replaced by a white miniskirt which, together with her midriff blouse and white tennis shoes and her fresh-scrubbed blonde prettiness, gave her the look of a high school cheerleader.

She felt him watching her and turned. "Not much farther," she smiled. "It's just north of the Dummitt Grove."

The Space Center's moon port occupied only a small part of Merritt Island. More than seventy thousand acres had been leased back to the farmers who had originally owned the orange groves. The road north from the Bennett Causeway ran through a wilderness of swamp and scrub woods broken up by the Indian River, Seedless Enterprise and Dummitt Groves, all of them dating back to the 1830's.

The road curved now around a small inlet and they passed a bunch of tumbledown shacks on stilts at the water's edge, a combination gas station-grocery store, and a small boatyard with a fishing dock lined with shrimp trawlers. "Enterprise," she said. "It's directly across from Port Canaveral. We're almost there."

They went another quarter of a mile and Candy put on the right-turn indicator and began to slow up. She pulled the car off onto the shoulder of the road and came to a stop. She turned to look at him. "We're here." She picked up her purse and opened the door on her side,

Nick got out on his and stood there, looking around. They were in the middle of an open, desolate area. A wide vista of salt-water fiats stretched away to the Banana River on their right. Northward the flats turned to swamp. The thickly matted growth crowded right to the water's edge. Three hundred yards to their left, the electrified fence of MILA (the moon port's Merritt Island Launching Area) began. Through the scrub woods he could make out the Phoenix One's concrete launching pad atop a gentle slope and, four miles beyond it, the bright orange girders and open-work platforms of the 56-story Vehicular Assembly Building.

A distant helicopter droned somewhere behind them. Nick turned, shading his eyes. He saw the flash-flash-flash of its rotor in the morning sun over Port Canaveral.

"This way," said Candy. She crossed the highway and headed into the brush. Nick followed. The heat inside the canebrake was suffocating. Mosquitoes rose in swarms, tormenting them. The girl ignored them. Her tough, stubborn side was showing once again. They came to a drainage ditch that debouched into a wide channel which had apparently been used at one time as a canal. The ditch was choked with weeds and underwater grasses and it narrowed where the embankment had washed into the water.

She dropped her purse and kicked off her tennis shoes. "I'm going to need both hands," she said and clambered down the slope into the knee-deep muck. She moved forward now, bent over, her hands searching for something in the muddy water.

Nick watched her from the top of the embankment. He shook his head. "What in hell are you looking for?" he grinned. The helicopter's clatter had gotten louder. He stopped and glanced over his shoulder. It was headed in their direction, some three hundred feet above the ground, the light glinting on its whirling rotor blades.

"I've found it!" Candy shouted. He turned. She had moved about a hundred feet along the drainage ditch and was bent over, tugging at an object in the mud. He started toward her. The chopper sounded as if it was almost directly overhead now. He glanced up. The rotor blades had tilted, increasing its rate of descent. He could make out the white lettering on its red underside — SHARP'S FLYING SERVICE. It was one of the six helicopters that flew on half-hour schedules from the Cocoa Beach Amusement Pier to Port Canaveral, then followed the perimeter of the MILA fence, allowing tourists to snap photographs of the VAB building and launching platforms.

Whatever Candy had found, she now had it half out of the mud. "Get my purse, will you?" she called out. "I left it back there a little way. I need something in it."

The helicopter had banked away sharply. It now came circling back, no more than a hundred feet above the ground, the wind from its whirling blades flattening the scrubby bushes along the embankment. Nick found the purse. He leaned over, picked it up. The sudden silence brought his head up with a jerk. The chopper's motor had switched off. It came gliding in over the tops of the cane stalks, heading directly toward him!

He spun to his left and dived head first into the ditch. There was a gigantic, rumbling roar behind him. Heat rippled the air like watered silk. A jagged ball of flame billowed upwards, followed immediately by clouds of blackish, carbon-laden smoke that blotted out the sun.

Nick clambered back up the embankment and ran toward the wreckage. He could see the figure of a man inside the flaming Perspex canopy. His head was wrenched around, facing him. As Nick approached, he could make out his features. He was Chinese and the expression on his face was something out of a nightmare. There was a smell of roasting flesh and Nick saw that the lower half of his body was already in flames. He saw, also, why the man wasn't trying to get out. He was bound hand and foot to the seat with wires.

"Help me!" the man screamed. "Get me out of here!"

Nick's skin momentarily crawled. The voice belonged to Major Sollitz!

There was a second explosion. Nick was sent tumbling backwards by the heat. He hoped the alternate gas tank had killed Sollitz when it blew. He believed that it had. The helicopter burned to a shell, the glass fiber buckling and splitting in a machine-gun rattle of hot, exploding rivets. The flames melted the Lastotex mask and the Chinese face sagged, then began to run, revealing Major Sollitz's own features for a brief second before they, too, melted away and were replaced by a charred skull.

Candy stood a few feet away, the back of her hand pressed against her mouth, her eyes wide with horror. "What happened?" she said, her voice shaking. "It looked like he aimed directly at you."

Nick shook his head. "On automatic pilot," he said. "He was just in there as a sacrificial offering." And the Chinese mask, he thought to himself — still another false clue in case Nick survived. He turned to her. "Let's take a look at what you found."

Wordlessly she led him along the embankment to where an oilcloth package lay. "You'll need a knife," she said. She glanced back at the burning wreckage and he saw a shadow of fear in her wide-set blue eyes. "There's one in my purse."

"Won't need it." He grasped the oilcloth in both hands and pulled. It parted like wet paper in his grip. He had a knife with him, a stiletto named Hugo, but it remained sheathed inches above his right wrist, awaiting more important tasks. "How'd you happen to come across this?" he asked.

The package contained a short-range AN/PRC-6 two-way radio set and a pair of powerful field glasses — 8 × 60 AO Jupiters. "It was sticking half out of the water the other day," she said. "Look." She took the field glasses and focused them on the launching platform, which was barely visible to him. He looked through them. The powerful lenses brought the gantry so close he could see the lips of the pad crew moving as they talked to each other over their headsets. "The radio has fifty channels," she said, "and a range of about one mile. So whoever was here had confederates nearby. I think that…"

But he was no longer listening. Confederates… radio. Why hadn't he thought of that sooner? The automatic pilot by itself couldn't have brought the chopper so unerringly toward its target. It had to operate like a drone plane. Which meant it had to be directed electronically, attracted by something they were wearing. Or carrying… "Your purse!" he said, suddenly. "Come on!"

The copter's motor had shut off as he'd lifted the purse. It had still been in his hand when he'd dived into the drainage ditch. He scrambled down the embankment and felt around in the muddy water for it. It took him about a minute to locate it. He brought the purse up dripping and opened it. There, beneath lipstick, tissues, a pair of dark glasses, a package of chewing gum and a penknife, he found a twenty-ounce Talar transmitter.

It was the type used to land small planes and helicopters in zero visibility. The transmitter sent a rotating microwave beam that was registered on panel instruments connected to the automatic pilot. In this case, the landing point happened to be on top of Nick Carter. Candy stared at the tiny device in his palm. "But… what is it?" she said. "How did it get in there?"

"You tell me. Has the purse been out of your sight today?"

"No," she said. "At least I… Wait a minute, yes!" she suddenly exclaimed. "When I phoned you this morning… it was from a booth, in Enterprise. That grocery store we passed on the way out here. I left the purse on the counter there. When I came out of the booth, I noticed it had been moved to one side by the clerk. I didn't think anything about it at the time…"

"Come on."

This time he drove. "The pilot was tied hand and foot," he said as he sent the Giulia hurtling along the highway. "So someone else had to get that chopper off the ground. That means there was a third transmitter setup. Probably in Enterprise. Let's hope we get there before they disassemble it. My friend Hugo has questions he wants to ask."

Peterson had brought N3's protective devices with him from Washington. They'd been waiting for Nick in a false-bottom suitcase at the Gemini Inn. Hugo, the stiletto, was now up his sleeve. Wilhelmina, the stripped-down Luger, hung in a snug holster at his waist, and Pierre, the lethal gas pellet, nestled with several of his nearest relatives in a waistband pocket. AXE's top operative was dressed to kill.

The gas station-grocery store was closed. There was no sign of life inside. Nor anywhere else in Enterprise, for that matter. Nick glanced at his watch. It was only ten o'clock. "Not very enterprising," he said.

Candy shrugged. "I don't get it. They were open when I was here at eight." Nick walked around to the side of the building, feeling the weight of the sun on him, sweating. He sauntered past a fruit processing shed and some oil storage tanks. Upturned boats and drying nets lay along the edge of the dirt road. The ramshackle waterfront was quiet, stifled under the pall of humid heat.

Suddenly he stopped, listened, then moved quickly into the shadowed overhang of an upturned hull, Wilhelmina in hand. The footsteps were approaching at a right angle. They reached their loudest point, then began to recede. Nick peered out. Two men were moving between the boats, carrying a heavy piece of electronic equipment. They moved out of his field of vision and a moment later he heard a car door open, then slam shut. He started out from under the boat, then froze…

They were returning. Nick melted back into the shadows. This time he got a good look at them. The one in the lead was short, thin, with a hollow, hard-eyed face that spelled hood. The shambling giant behind him had gray hair cropped short to the shape of his bullet head and a sunburned face dusted over with pale freckles.

Dexter. Pat Hammer's next-door neighbor — who'd said he worked for the Electronic Guidance Division of Connelly Aviation.

Electronic Guidance. The drone-like helicopter. The piece of equipment the two of them had just delivered to the car. It added up.

N3 gave them a good head start, then followed, careful to keep objects between them. The two men went down a flight of steps and out along a small weatherbeaten wooden jetty that reached some twenty yards on barnacled piles into the bay. A single boat was moored to the end of it. A wide-beamed, diesel-powered shrimp trawler. Cracker Boy, Enterprise, Fla., the black lettering on its stern proclaimed. The two men climbed aboard, opened a hatch and disappeared below deck.

Nick turned. Candy was a few yards behind him. "Better wait here," he warned her. "There may be fireworks."

He raced out along the jetty, hoping to reach the wheelhouse before they came back on deck. But this time his luck wasn't running. As he swung over the taffrail, Dexter's bulky shape filled the hatchway. The big man stopped in his tracks. He had a complicated electronic component in his hands. His mouth dropped open. "Hey, I know you…" He glanced over his shoulder, then started toward Nick. "Listen, buddy, they made me do it," he rasped hoarsely. "They got my wife and kids…"

Something roared, driving into Dexter with pile-driver force, spinning him completely around and throwing him halfway across the deck. He finished on his knees, the component crashing off to one side, his eyes all whites, his hands clasping his guts, trying to keep them from spilling out on the deck. Blood welled through his fingers. He folded slowly forward with a sigh.

There was another burst of orange from inside the hatchway, a chopping noise and the hollow-faced man came charging up the steps, slugs spurting wildly in all directions from the machine pistol in his hand. Wilhelmina was already out and Killmaster pumped two carefully placed bullets at him with an action so swift that the double crash sounded like a single prolonged roar. For a moment, Hollow Face stood upright, then, like a straw man, he crumpled and fell awkwardly, his legs turning to rubber beneath him.

N3 kicked the machine pistol away from his hand and knelt beside Dexter. Blood was flowing out of the big man's mouth. It was light pink and very frothy. His lips worked frantically, trying to form words."…Miami… goin' to blow it up…" he gurgled indistinctly."…kill everybody… I know… I worked on it… stop them… before… too late…" The eyes rolled back to their more important work. The face went slack.

Nick straightened up. "Okay, let's talk about that," he said to Hollow Face. His voice was calm, amiable, but the gray eyes were green, a deep sea green, and for a moment a shark swirled in their depths. Hugo came out of its hiding place. Its vicious, ice-pick blade clicked open.

Killmaster turned the gunman over with his foot, then squatted beside him. Hugo slashed down the front of his shirt, not being too careful about the bony, sallow flesh beneath. Hollow Face flinched. His eyes went wet with pain. Hugo found a place at the base of the man's bare neck and stroked it lightly. "Now," Nick smiled. "Name, please."

The man pressed his lips together. His eyes closed. Hugo bit into the knotted neck. "Aggh!" The sound forced itself out of his throat and his shoulders bunched. "Eddie Byloff," he croaked.

"Where are you from, Eddie?"

"Vegas."

"I thought you looked familiar. You're one of the Sierra Inn boys, aren't you?" Byloff closed his eyes again. Hugo cut a slow, neat zigzag down his belly. The tiny slits and pinpricks started to ooze blood. Byloff made noises that weren't quite human. "Aren't you, Eddie?" His head jerked up and down spasmodically. "Tell me, Eddie, what are you doing here in Florida? And what did Dexter mean about blowing up Miami? Talk, Eddie — or die slowly." Hugo edged its way beneath a skin flap and started exploring.

Byloff's tortured body writhed. Blood bubbled up, mixing with the sweat that sprang from every pore. His eyes burst open. "Ask her," he gasped, staring past Nick. "She's the one that set it up…"

Nick turned. Candy stood just behind him, smiling. Smoothly, gracefully, she raised her white miniskirt. She was naked underneath it except for the wafer-flat .22 that was holstered to the inside of her thigh.

"Sorry about this, chief," she smiled. The gun was in her hand now and pointed at him. Slowly her finger tightened around the trigger…