The Devil's Dozen

Two

It was two months later. Hawk had stuck me with some long-range-analysis papers, which is work I hate, but the Commander forcefeeds it to me because when he dies, naturally or unnaturally, I’m next in command. There is no N2 in AXE; he died a long time ago. So every once in a great while just to make Hawk happy, Nick Carter, Killmaster, sits behind a desk and plays administrator. At least it gives me a chance to see what new talent has turned up in the secretarial pool-

I was making a paper airplane out of the CIA’s latest proposal when Hawk called me into his office. There’s usually an undertone of sardonic humor in his voice. There wasn’t this time, and I crumpled the plane into a ball.

“Come in, Nick.” Hawk gestured to a chair.

He wasn’t angry or depressed because a man who gives out dangerous assignments can’t afford to be angry or depressed — it affects his efficiency. And he can’t take a drink under pressure because that turns into a habit, and he can’t use amphetamines because that would make him unreliable. But when an AXE agent is killed on the job, I can tell, because Hawk seems a little more weary than usual.

He slumped in the wrinkles of his suit, sitting behind a desk so scarred by cigar burns that it looked like the bridge of a battleship. We were surrounded by filing cabinets painted the usual government-issue Navy gray. The cabinets were too stuffed with For-The-President’s-Eyes-Only reports for many of the drawers to shut. Hawk’s genius incubates in such a mess that the security seems loose, but if an enemy agency ever tried to penetrate AXE headquarters, they’d have to use an armored brigade to get to his files.

“Remember the training exercise we tried out in Mexico, Nick?”

“Yes. I understand we’re getting part of the White Sands Testing Range for the other men to practice on.”

“And just what do you think we’ll learn from the exercise?”

“Fitness, for one thing. Character is what it should really test, though. Set a man running over dunes for days being chased by a dune-buggy-mounted machine gun. The first day is just hard work and a little perverse fun. The second day he’s dehydrated, and his legs are so oxygen-starved and stiff he has to keep running from sheer will. The third day he’s hallucinating. The men in the jeep shooting at him are no longer training instructors playing a game. They’re just black silhouettes out to kill or capture him. If our trainee still doesn’t give up, we’ve got a good man. If he makes an intelligent attempt to kill his pursuers, then we’ve got a very good man.”

“And if he does stop running or gives himself up?”

“Then he’s a fine, sane individual but unfit for AXE. We apologize and give him a wonderful recommendation as a civil servant somewhere else.”

Hawk picked a flake of tobacco from his thin upper lip.

“That boy who went to Mexico with us, Jaime Montenegro. Do you think he would have passed the test, Nick?”

I took a second to think. Hawk seems like a sloppy man, but he has no time for vague answers, and he loathes lies. I recalled how Jaime had spoken up to me on the mountain.

“Yes.”

Hawk rooted in his desk for a cigar. I won’t say a fresh or a new cigar, because that was not the description for his ugly cheroots.

“Well,” he lit up, “I’m glad you said that, Nick. Jaime was quite an admirer of yours. You’ll notice I said was. He turned up this morning, washed up from the Bay of Tehuantepec. He was tortured to death. You know, hold a man under water until he talks. The local police thought it was a simple case of drowning, but our autopsy was a little more complete. It showed, among other things, that there was salt water in his stomach, as well as in his lungs.”

“He committed suicide rather than talk,” I finished the thought for the Commander. Deliberately opening the esophagus while underwater took an enormous amount of muscular control, not to mention a degree of heroism that staggered my mind. “What was his assignment?”

“Narcotics. The drug route from Panama to Tucson. He was on loan to the Federal Narcotics Task Force.”

I tried not to show my surprise. Hawk didn’t lend his men out to anyone. He raised his eyes and caught my stoney face.

“A direct personal order from the White House made me share Jaime,” Hawk stated. “I told Jaime to move slowly until one of our more experienced men was free. He was a lot like you in some ways. He hated to follow orders.”

“I was free,” I reminded Hawk.

“You are not just an experienced man, N3. You’re too important to ship out every time the President picks up the phone.” He winced. “And, damn it, so was Jaime.”

There was no point in my adding to the regret he felt. But if this was the hell of being an administrator, I never wanted to be one.

“What do we have to go on?” I asked.

“Just about nothing,” Hawk’s lips thinned bitterly. “No particular clues about the body. We have no idea where Jaime was last seen, although he was headed for Puerto Vallarta.

“This afternoon we found his radio set in Panama City. The pad next to it had no words, but it bore the impression from the writing on the last page tom out. One word: ‘Snowman.’”

Hawk spread his hands. I shook my head.

“It doesn’t mean anything to me,” I admitted. “Cocaine and heroin are both called snow, so it could be someone high up in either business. You ran down all the possibilities?”

“Every file. Also names of registered yachts and fishing boats and ships of all flags. Jaime may have just been doodling or may have made up the nickname for someone he was suspicious of.”

“Jaime spoke English but he thought in Spanish,” I pointed out. “He wouldn’t be likely to choose an English nickname. I think Snowman is a real person or a real thing. So when do I go to find out?”

“Forget about it, Nick. Forget I ever mentioned this Snowman.” Hawk had his hand up before I was even out of my chair. “Just wait a second. Say you do go to Panama, and there, or in Puerto Vallarta, you find some assassin called Snowman and kill him. That’s revenge, but that’s all it is. The Feds have been arresting small-time Mafia hitmen for years, and has that stopped the drug traffic? Not a chance. Why should we start copying them? I want a pure AXE operation — one Killmaster going right to the top of the Mafia drug dealers, not playing cops and robbers with Mafia messenger boys. We’ll hit back, but we’ll do it our way.”

We left his office and went down the hall to the projection room. The room would have impressed a casual visitor as a night-school lecture hall, which is to say, it wouldn’t have impressed a casual visitor at all. A professional might have noticed the identity scanners taking in the weight, height, physical characteristics, and weapons systems of each person entering the small auditorium. Dr. Thompson from Special Effects was already seated. Hawk’s secretary waited by the projector.

The doctor and I shook hands. The lights went out.

On the screen was a map of North and South America. Red arrows from Canada, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, and Brazil all pointed to the United States.

“The drug traffic of the Western Hemisphere,” Hawk announced. “Over the U.S. — Canadian line because customs is looser there. Through Panama because of the shipping trade. That’s where Jaime was. But this is just a small part of the picture.”

The slide projector clicked, and a map of the world flashed on the screen. Now there were lines from the Americas, from Europe, Hong Kong, Guam, and Saigon.

“This is what we’re up against. Dozens of different routes. And the Panama line is one of the least important. The same with Southeast Asia. Here’s the real pipeline.”

Another click and we were looking at a map of Europe. Across it were routes that had nothing to do with trains or planes. These arrows were the underground highways of opium from the Near East with stops on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

“Palermo, Naples, Athens, Belgrade, Barcelona, Marseilles, and Munich,” Hawk rattled off. “But the real capitals are the last two, Marseilles and Munich. Eighty percent of the heroin in the United States comes from opium processed in those two cities.”

Next came a slide of the port city of Marseilles, an industrial sprawl on the Mediterranean.

“This is the old center of heroin processing. I don’t have to tell you, Nick, how the Corsicans of Marseilles monopolize the city and the drug trade there. Lately, the French have started having a drug problem of their own, though. The Corsicans have not been stopped, but the atmosphere in Marseilles is not as comfortable for them as it used to be.

“Which is why a lot of the trade has moved here.” The slide of Marseilles was replaced by one of Munich, the German-Bavarian capital of beer-flowing gemutlichkeit.

“Munich has thousands of Turkish factory workers, laborers who smuggle in Turkish opium. The operations have been successful so far because Germany has a constitutionally decentralized police system. But the Germans are organizing narcotics strike forces, too, which brings us to a very interesting situation. For the first time in years the pattern of heroin traffic is in flux. The Mafia can’t rely on their old contacts the way they used to. They’re considering new routes built by new contacts. And this is our opportunity.”

“I think I can guess what you’re getting to,” I interrupted. “Instead of approaching the problem from the outside, I should present myself to the Mafia as a European dealer with a safe drug route.”

“And be invited into the Mafia as a partner, a welcome guest, instead of an intruder. That’s right”

“Fine,” I agreed, “except for one thing. The European routes are run by families that are even tighter than the American Mafia. Let’s be realistic. If I show up as a Corsican, the Mafia can fly in ten of my alleged uncles to check my story.”

In the dark I could still make out Hawk nodding and smiling.

“Correct, Nick. But you won’t be a Corsican.”

The projector clicked for the last time, filling the screen with bright color, a rolling blanket of poppies in red blossom and with a stark range of mountains that I recognized as Anatolia.

“You’ll be a Turk, Nick. We’re going right to the source of the opium in Turkey. That’s where the Corsicans get their raw material and for a very good reason. Turkish opium is the highest grade. With its enormous morphine ratio it can be cut down more than other opiums.”

“The economics are fantastic,” Dr. Thompson spoke up for the first time. “A farmer in Turkey grows ten kilos, or twenty-two pounds, of opium for 330 Turkish lira. That’s the equivalent of $22. Once that opium has been processed into heroin and adulterated for sale on American streets, its value has increased to $1,936,000.”

“The Mafia will listen to any Turk who can come to them with a deal,” Hawk concluded. “And farmers all over Turkey grow opium poppies. You don’t have to be involved with the current suppliers at all.”

“A Turk,” I rubbed my hand over my face. It wasn’t the handsomest face in the world, but it wasn’t the ugliest either. I turned to Thompson. As head of Special Effects he takes a particular delight in rearranging my features to fit drops into China. A silicone bruise can last for months. On the other hand, he designs lovely little tools, like finger rings that turn into 36 inches of garroting wire. I regard him as being somewhere between a dentist and a wizard. “How much make up will that take?”

“Not much. Well make the port town of Izmir your home, and Izmir has enough nationalities so you could be blonde without being suspicious. As it is, you’re dark and menacing enough, if a little tall for a Turk,” Thompson paused. “The main problem is making you look a little less like Nick Carter.”

“You aren’t entirely unknown to the Mafia,” Hawk reminded me.

“We’ll build up the bridge of your nose a bit, emphasize the lines around your mouth, and reshape your hair,” the scientist said airily.

“A touch here and a touch there? No dueling scar?” I asked just to see Thompson wince. “All right, I assume we have tapes of the Izmir dialect and idioms.”

“All taken care of. But there is one other small matter,” Hawk remarked mildly.

The lights went on, washing out the poppies on the screen and revealing Hawk’s grin as he lit another of his evil cheroots.

“You see, Nick, it’s no problem for us to supply you with any amount of opium you need to impress the Mafia that you are a desirable partner. However, you have to have more than opium. All the suppliers have that.

“You have to prove to the Mafia that you have a foolproof system of moving your opium from Turkey to New York. And I mean foolproof. If customs catches you, you go to jail. If the Mafia so much as suspects that this is a set up, that customs is not doing its best to stop your shipment, then you may wind up dead. Either way, our whole operation collapses.”

“I’m glad you pointed that out,” I frowned. “The Corsicans have tried everything from coffins to cars to send their heroin through. You mean you’ve actually thought of something they haven’t?”

“Actually, no,” Hawk blew a puff to the ceiling. “We’ve left that for you. You have a week to figure it out.”

“A week!”

Hawk stood up. Suddenly, he was in a hurry to go someplace.

“You’ll think of something, Nick,” he patted my shoulder. “You always do.”

I was still thinking up Turkish curses for our beloved Commander when Dr. Thompson and I entered one of Special Effects’ lower-level laboratories. Usually, the lab is full of weapons under research. Now it was littered with dismantled cars, all sorts of luggage, and even part of an airliner fuselage.

“It’s very frustrating,” Thompson confessed. “To impress your future partners you would have to bring in a substantial shipment. Everything my men and I develop seems to have been tried already or thought of by customs. Car engines, false panels, even Japanese radios. Either trained dogs can sniff the heroin out or customs X-rays see it. Some Mexicans have sewn heroin into the second stomach of cattle and then driven the cattle over the border, but customs is on to that now. You can’t bring fruit into the country. If you bring in canned goods, they have to be inspected. With all the hijacking that’s going on, handcarried luggage gets a much more thorough going over.”

“How about stuffing the heroin in my stomach?” I growled.

Thompson began considering the possibility, so I left him with a sigh of disgust and went over to the plane fuselage. It was of a first class section, and I found one of the wide seats had a hollow bottom.

“This would involve the cooperation of an airline sanitation worker, someone who would clean the plane after you left and deposit the shipment in his industrial vacuum cleaner,” Thompson explained.

“Not a bad idea,” I said hopefully.

“But it happens that it was tried last week at Kennedy Airport. You see, the suppliers in Marseilles and Munich have laboratories just like this, and they’ve been spending years working on new systems. They have a headstart.”

He was still muttering about his problems when I left him.

For the next five days, I rehearsed my Turkish background and tried to think of a way to ship 200 pounds of heroin into the United States. In the first endeavor I was successful, and in the second I was a bust. Special Effects kept calling me down to see how they were getting along but they didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Heroin secreted in the mile of wiring of a Rolls Royce may seem clever to a researcher, but it wasn’t the sort of plan I wanted to stake my life on, not if a customs inspector tried to start the engine. Besides, I was faced with the task of bringing in a big shipment, not a token sample.

“Could you get me some aspirin and a bottle of Johnny Walker from the commissary?” I asked my new secretary when I made my way back to my office.

“You have a headache?” she inquired sympathetically.

“No, but I will have when I get to the bottom of the bottle.”

She was a buxom blonde with tight leather pants and a beauty spot next to her mouth. Her mouth was in perpetual motion, sucking the candies she constantly fed herself. She wrinkled her nose cutely now as she toddled off for the scotch and pills. From the start I’d labeled her as overly willing, and I hadn’t approached her except with some papers to type. In my depression I was starting to see her charms.

On my desk was the huge government ledger I’d been studying for days, the survey of all foreign imports from Afghanistan to Zaire and from anchovies to zircons.

“My, that’s a big book,” my secretary thrust out her chest as she came back.

“Yes, and the pages are heavy, too. Maybe you’d like to help me turn the pages sometime.”

“Any time.”

I noticed that there were two paper cups with the bottle. Somehow I got a grip on myself.

“Later, Miss Van Hazinga. Later.”

I went through the book for the tenth time. I kept letting myself be distracted, though, by the rattle of my secretary’s typing. My eyes wandered of their own accord to her long leather-clad thighs. Her waist was narrow, and I couldn’t help noticing that each time a finger hit a key, her generous breasts moved hypnotically. I wondered idly if it was worth encouraging her. Clearly, she’d be a more than sympathetic companion. Hell, in the right situation she might even be a witty conversationalist too.

Then her fingers flipped another gumball between her red lips, and I stopped thinking about idyllic affairs with Miss Van Hazinga.

At the end of the day, Hawk asked me into his office.

“Well, Nick, you ship out in forty hours. Have you and Special Effects come up with the system yet?”

“I have.” I placed a list on his desk. “This is what I need.”

His eyes scanned the paper in a second, and then he went over it twice more.

“I don’t believe it. An order with a Portuguese exporter, a railway-car lease, and ownership of this German firm. It’s so easy.”

“Special Effects wanted to hide the snow,” I explained. “That’s the wrong approach.”

“I can see that. Yet this is foolproof, so foolproof it’s a joke. You’ve done it again, Nick. Congratulations.”

“Oh, I don’t deserve the credit, sir. Miss Van Hazinga was my inspiration.”

Hawk narrowed his eyes.

It’s always amazed me how a man of Hawk’s genius can have such a dirty mind.