The Asian Mantrap

Nineteen

My watch said ten minutes past midnight when we started up the rust-encrusted fire escape at the rear of the department store next to the government building. I could feel the perspiration breaking out on the back of my neck in the humidity of the warm night as we lugged our equipment up to the roof. With anyone less strong than Keith Martin for a pack-horse partner it would have taken more than one trip.

I paused for a breather on the roof. At that height a slight breeze was both noticeable and welcome. When I perspire, I have a tendency to itch. During the next few hours I expected to itch a good deal, and I didn’t mind postponing it momentarily.

Willow’s last check-in call to the French Embassy brought a rare, clear-text message from Hawk. It mentioned an upcoming rice crop failure. That indicated that something had gone off the rails. His guarded conversation translated into the fact that we had to undertake the effort without delay because what we were after inside the vault might not be there the next day.

It put a definite squeeze on a carefully timed plan. For one thing, we wouldn’t be able to get clear of the country immediately after we completed the job. The getaway arrangements set up by Hawk involved a lot of governmental red tape, and the system was too rigid to react to sudden changes. So now we were committed to play cat-and-mouse with Vietnamese police and alerted military forces for a day and a night until the prearranged transportation showed up. I didn’t like it, but there was nothing I could do about it.

The department store roof was high enough so I could see, against the blackness of the night, the carpet of glittering lights that defined the city. The air around us was heavy and the lights were screened by a thin layer of smog.

“What’s the hangup, Nick?” Martin demanded impatiently. He kept his voice down. Sounds travel well in the hushed tropical night.

“Nothing,” I said. “Let’s move over to the other roof.”

Martin scooped up the heavier of the two canvas bags and walked to the roof edge I had marked on our diagram. He made it look easy as he leaped across the intervening space to the next building. I picked up the other sack and set my teeth as I confronted the eight-foot gap with a litter-filled alley below. Heights don’t bother me, but with more than my own weight to take across the chasm, the distance I had to jump was a challenge. I backed off, took a run at it, and jumped without giving myself time to think.

I landed off balance, stumbled, then righted myself. The staff of the building left at eight o’clock each evening, leaving it vacant. Street and exterior guards patrolled the area, but none were stationed inside. There were several alarm systems scattered throughout the building, all of them sophisticated enough to insure that even a good technician would be almost sure to trigger an alarm at some point during his trespassing. The inside security measures were so sensitive and extensive that no personnel could be placed within the building during its closure.

When I first studied the wiring diagrams webbing the building, I thought we might have to import an expert to knock out the electronic devices. I also knew, with the uproar we had caused, such an attempt would be impossible. Even Hawk couldn’t get a gnat through the defenses that had been erected to search us out. When I examined the schematic further, I realized we could do without special help. The alarms were a handicap only if they kept us from getting into the vault and escaping afterward. The more I studied the circuits, the more sure I became that it was going to take more than flashing lights, TV cameras, or ringing bells to stop us.

The wiring diagrams of the security headquarters had been obtained only through the intervention and pressure by Hawk on some dirty tricks group back home who had obtained access to some contractor’s blueprint room. My guess was that the plans were drawn up either in Moscow or Peking. The burglarized sheets had been photofaxed over a scrambler line between Washington and the French Embassy here in Hanoi. It was these that I held. I hardly needed them for reference. I had them memorized down to the dimensions in the area we intended to infiltrate.

A door led down from the roof into the interior of the building. I checked it automatically, but it was locked as I expected. Close inspection disclosed tiny, silver wires of an alarm system. I turned to the small adjoining structure housing the mechanism for the building’s elevators. The blueprints indicated that it was neither locked nor bugged, and it represented the single major weakness I had found in the entire building’s security system.

Keith Martin crowded in behind me when I pried open the door gently and entered the small, shedlike structure. I turned to him. “Go back and get Willow. Now is when we’ll need her to protect our backs. We’ll post her right here as a lookout.”

While Martin was gone, I worked at the four screws holding down a plate fastened over the elevator shaft’s metal roof. The four rusty screws holding down the access panel finally yielded to the force of the long-shanked screwdriver I used. When Martin returned with Willow in tow, I had the inspection plate set aside. I flashed my penlight downward until its beam found the metal ladder leading into the shaft exactly where it was on the blueprint.

Three elevators rode side by side in the seven story shaft. All three were now parked at basement level. Examination of the wiring diagram had shown me that if any one of them were moved, an alarm would be set off. Similarly, if any of the elevator doors on each floor leading to the shaft were opened, the result would be the same. To avoid setting off an alarm, we had to confine our activities to the shaft itself.

This presented no obstacle. The construction plans revealed that the back wall of the elevator shaft at the reinforced basement level was also the rear wall of the documents vault. It could never happen in the U.S., but evidently the Vietnamese were more casual about that sort of thing. It meant we wouldn’t have to leave the elevator shaft until we were ready to enter the vault.

I hadn’t explained any of this to Martin. Sometimes a deviation from set plans is required in an emergency, and if a participant recognizes the deviation but not the emergency, nervousness results. Despite Keith Martin’s reputation for cool-headedness in tight situations, I hadn’t seen enough of it demonstrated to trust him completely. Which is why I insisted that I be in charge. Martin didn’t like a subordinate role; it was against his nature. But he had the sense to agree.

The task of moving all of our equipment down the long shaft and depositing it on top of the center elevator cab was a lot more work than just getting it on the roof. Martin served as chief loadbearer again. I followed him down the narrow steel ladder after giving Willow some final instructions and then replacing the removed inspection panel back above my head. Standing on the ladder, I fastened it from below with a single metal screw.

We were sealed inside the elevator shaft now until the job was done. Or until something went wrong.

Martin stared at me expectantly when we were standing together on the top of the elevator that operated adjacent to the back wall of the vault. “What happens now?” he wanted to know. His voice echoed hollowly in the shaft.

“We go to work,” I informed him.

Elevators always have an emergency door in their roofs. I raised the door, wriggled through the opening, and dropped down inside. Using the penlight again, I found the car’s control panel and turned on the overhead light. Martin handed our two equipment bags down to me then dropped himself by my side. “Shall I close the door in the top of the elevator?” he asked in a half-whisper.

“No,” I replied in a normal tone. “We’ll need the ventilation.” Martin was going to stand a lot more noise before he heard less.

I unloaded our canvas sacks and spread their contents in a semicircle on the floor of the cab. I picked up a magnetized screwdriver and removed the screws from one of the three-by-seven-foot metal panels making up the back of the car. I lifted it out of the way, thereby exposing the reinforced concrete wall of the vault just a foot away. It was a thick wall, also serving as a part of the building foundation.

Next I cut the heads from the screws I’d taken from the panel and glued them back in place on the face of the panel with quick-drying epoxy cement. Martin watched me with a puzzled look.

I reached up and removed the light bulb in the roof of the car. Martin held my penlight so I could see what I was doing while I installed a two-socket fixture. I returned the bulb to one socket and placed a female plug in the other. Now that I had both light and a power source, I plugged in the masonry drill and attacked the wall of the vault.

The concrete was fourteen inches thick, but the drill chewed through it like a run in a cheap pair of pantyhose. I soon had the walk honeycombed with holes. Martin watched intently. “It can’t be this easy,” he observed.

“It’s not,” I told him. “There’s quarter-inch steel plate behind that concrete.”

From the floor of the cab I picked up three lengths of steel pipe which I screwed together to make a handle. To this I attached a solid, fourteen pound weight to complete the fabrication of a heavy striking implement. I handed the sledge to Martin. “Go ahead,” I invited him. “Bust up that concrete.”

“What about the noise?”

“The drilling I did wasn’t heard, except maybe by Willow. No one is going to hear the thud of that hammer unless they have an ear pressed against the building. And then they couldn’t easily locate where the noise was coming from. Have at it.”

Martin did, with long-armed swings of the sledge that soon had the air laden with a powdery dust. Even before I removed the panel, there was a one-foot space between the vault wall and the back of the elevator cab. Most of the concrete chunks and chips from Martin’s pounding fell into this gap and ended up at the bottom of the shaft, some four feet beneath the floor of the elevator.

Martin worked so rapidly and to such good effect that he soon exposed the latticework of reinforcing rods, which was all that separated us from the steel vault liner. I stopped him while I disconnected the masonry drill we wouldn’t need again. Next I used the whiskbroom to clean up the mess we’d made in the cab.

Anything too large to be brushed away we kicked over the edge into the bottom of the shaft. We also removed the clinging dust on our clothing, paying special attention to the welts of our shoes. When we finished, the floor of the elevator cab was cleaner than when we had entered.

I picked up the miniature acetylene outfit. It was according to my specifications, both light and compact. The hose was cut down to only five feet, the acetylene carried in a small propane tank, and the oxygen contained in a single skin-diving tank. The outfit was just big enough to do the required job with very little margin for error.

I donned a knitted ski mask and dark-lensed goggles. The torch I lighted had a hot, violet flame that took only seconds to turn the reinforcing rods to water. When I heated them up and then increased the oxygen, the metal grew red, then yellow, then ruptured, and ran before the invisible jet of oxygen.

The barrier of rods separating us from the vault liner soon was just short lengths of scrap metal at the bottom of the elevator shaft. I inspected the final obstruction, the steel liner. From outside it looked like any other piece of sheet plate, but from the blueprints I knew there was no way of cutting through it without triggering an alarm.

“When I burn this and climb inside there,” I told Martin, “clean up everything in the cab again after you pass the bagged equipment inside to me. The cab has to look as though it hasn’t been used for anything. Get set to go. When we move now, we move fast.”

Martin got the equipment to one side of the removed cab panel. I relit the torch, took a deep breath, and sliced through the steel vault liner plate in one long cut, following the edges of the sledged-away concrete.

When the outline was completed, I kicked hard at the center portion of the vault liner. The torched section fell inside the vault with a loud noise. “Quick now!” I called to Martin. Bells were ringing all over the city. I didn’t know how many minutes we had before security forces, police and truckloads of combat troops would be surrounding and crawling all over the building.

Martin had the whiskbroom going again feverishly while I sprayed with a can of air freshener. I closed the emergency exit in the cab’s roof and kept using the aerosol bomb before dropping the can into the pit and jumping through the hole we’d made into the vault’s interior. The aerosol spray would remove the last traces of torch heat and cement dust from the elevator.

Martin threw the equipment bags and their contents in to me over the hot edge of the gaping hole in the vault liner. When I had everything, he scrambled down into the vault. I sent him back to turn off the switch controlling the cab’s roof light, then guided him back with the thin beam of the penlight.

Martin held the light for me while I reached back and fitted the previously unscrewed back panel from the cab into place again, working from inside the vault and outside the elevator. I fastened the panel into place firmly using a dozen powerful alnico magnets. From inside the cab there was nothing to show the panel had ever been removed, since I’d glued the cut-off screw heads back in place, and the panel was almost as securely attached from the heat by the magnets as it would have been by the original screws.

“Now what?” Martin asked tensely, looking at the big hole we’d made. We could hear the sound of running feet outside the vault door. I could picture some guard, perplexed at the sudden explosion of alarm sounds, checking to make sure it was unopened. And relieved to find the status quo.

“We wait,” I told Martin.

“Like fat lambs in a slaughter pen?” he demanded. He sounded as though he didn’t care for the idea.

“Like beaver in an aspen forest,” I tried to sooth him. “Until they search the building and satisfy themselves there’s nothing wrong. There never was an alarm system in the world that didn’t kick itself off accidentally at some time or other, and eventually the security guards and the police will conclude that’s what happened now.”

Martin shook his head dubiously. More voices could be heard outside the vault. They seemed to be shouting at each other. Some were close to the vault door, and some sounded as though they were reaching us through the hole in the wall of the elevator shaft. This was confirmed when the elevator started upward suddenly with a grinding noise.

When it was a floor above us, I leaned out through the hole in the vault’s steel liner and aimed my light downward into the shaft. The debris at the bottom didn’t appear at all unusual. There’s often a lot of construction rubble at the base of such shafts, and this one had obviously had quite a bit before we added our contribution. Bricks, boards, mortar, and miscellaneous waste surrounded the large shock absorber in the pit.

Excited voices aboard the elevator harangued each other in biting tones. “They’re going to search every floor,” Martin translated for me. The elevator rose still higher, and we could hear a jumble of voices rising and falling as the order was carried out.

Martin was listening intently as the voices from the shaft called back and forth to each other. “How long is this damned commotion going to last?” he asked irritably.

“Not much longer,” I said confidently. “They’ll get tired of playing hide-and-seek. We’ll have plenty of time before the regular staff turns up for duty in the morning.” I beamed my light around the corners of the vault until I located a steel-strapped box that looked like a money chest. I sat down on it and rested my back gratefully against a wall patterned with wooden as well as metal four-drawer files. The contents of each drawer was identified by a tab on its front.

Time has no measurement in total darkness. I don’t know how long we waited in silence before the sound of voices diminished outside the vault. It didn’t matter; we weren’t going anywhere until they were gone. Martin’s groping hand found my knee in the dark. “I’m curious,” he said softly. “What alternate plan do you have if something goes wrong and we don’t get out of this vault before the building opens in the morning and the elevators start running, pinning us in here?”

“Simple,” I assured him. “I’ll jam the vault’s timing mechanism from inside here. I’ll jimmy it so badly that it’ll take technicians a couple of days to open that ten-ton door. If the door can’t be opened, no one will know we’re here. If it comes to that, we’ll go out over the roof again after the building closes tonight, even if someone is working on the other side of the door. Our transportation will be standing by at the rendezvous point once every twenty-four hours of the next two days. It’s supposed to hold in place for a maximum of two hours each time. We’ll just have to hustle a bit more to meet that schedule if we get tied up an extra day.”

“My God,” gasped Martin. “I forgot. Willow—?”

“Don’t worry. She was off the roof and away at the sound of the very first alarm. She won’t be back until all these snoopers have gone. We’re depending on her giving us the ‘all clear’ to come back up to the roof when we’re ready to go.”

Martin rapped my leg. “Sounds pretty quiet now.”

I agreed. I knew the active search was over when the three elevators were returned to the basement level so that part of the alarm system triggered by their movement could be reset. That had occurred some time ago.

I turned on the penlight and stood up. With Martin looking over my shoulder, I examined the file drawer labels. The contents’ description was written in both Vietnamese and French.

I wished we had brought a truck. The drawers were loaded with classified intelligence data. Finding the American POW list was almost anticlimactic for me; it was a highly emotional experience for Martin. His visibly trembling fingers held it like it was the original Holy Grail. The file folder contained 20 pages listing nearly 800 names of MIAs. The closely typed lines bearing U.S. servicemen’s identity and disposition were held in reverence by the wet-eyed, tight-lipped general. “Let’s go,” he said softly.

“Not yet,” I countermanded. I reached into the satchel for a waterproof plastic bag and began stuffing it with hastily extracted documents from the file drawers. I had to be selective, taking only what I recognized as extremely unique material. The CIA couldn’t reap this kind of intelligence harvest in Hanoi with a hundred trained agents working at it all year. When I had packed as much as could safely be carried and concealed, I handed the bag to Martin.

I then returned to the entrance hole we had made in the back of the vault carrying a heavy twelve-inch screwdriver taken from the remaining tool bag. The magnets holding the elevator’s loosened back wall panel were too strong for me to pull away with my hands. I pried them free with the long screwdriver, shoving the panel out of the way.

I stepped into the cab. Martin followed right behind. I pushed open the emergency door in the cab’s roof and pulled myself up through the opening with Martin assisting me from below. I helped him up in turn by first relieving him of the document-filled sack, then giving him a hand so he could join me on the elevator roof.

The long climb up the steel ladder to the top of the shaft was like scaling Mount Everest. When I reached the top, I tapped lightly on the removable metal panel and waited for a response.

None came. I rapped again, a bit harder. Still no reply from Willow.

Using the long screwdriver, I eased out the single screw I’d left to hold the loosened inspection panel in place, then pushed aside the square of metal. I stuck the upper part of my body through the opening with my feet still on the ladder rungs. No sight of Willow. I leaned forward and gently cracked open the outer door of the small structure housing the elevator mechanism.

It was still dark outside, but not the total blackness of several hours ago. A tinge of gray in the eastern sky marked the coming dawn. Everything seemed quiet on the rooftop. I took a relieved breath and raised a foot to the next ladder rung.

And then through the crack I saw a dim figure at the farthest perimeter of the roof.

It wasn’t Willow.

The heavy, dark face of an armed soldier in uniform appeared in the quick glow of a lighted cigarette being inhaled while held in a cupped hand.