The Liquidator

Five

Contact was simple; a message for Daniel McKee at the Tampa airport, informing me that reservations had been made in my name at a motel close by. I checked in and had just finished a quick shave — no chance before I left Nathaniel’s house — when there was a light tapping at the door.

I hesitated, looked at my suitcase where Wilhelmina lay in her special compartment. But I didn’t think I’d need the stripped-down Luger, not now. As far as I knew there was no reason for anyone to be looking for me who wasn’t likely to be friendly. Not at this point. Still, I opened the door with caution, and when I saw Hawk standing there I felt an odd kind of relief.

He came in without so much as a word of greeting, sat down on one of the pair of oversized beds and looked up at me. I swiped at a stray dab of lather, turned around the chair in front of the plastic-imitation-wood desk and planted myself in it facing him.

“This room has been thoroughly checked out,” Hawk said. “One of our electronics men spent last night here, and it’s been under surveillance ever since.”

I glanced automatically at the wall behind him; most motels seem to be built out of cheesecloth these days, and even a senior citizen without his hearing aid can hear everything that goes on in the next unit.

“Don’t worry,” the old man said. “We’ve booked the rooms on either side; no one will overhear what we say.”

That satisfied me; I never doubted the Chief’s ability to think of every detail.

“Zenopolis is doing it our way,” he said without further preliminaries. “The precise date hasn’t been set yet, but it will be within a week. He will cross the Albanian border and make his way to Korfu. Time and place of rendezvous to be established at that time.”

I nodded, then frowned. “How am I to be in contact with him?”

“Through his sister.”

Hawk said it so matter-of-factly it didn’t register at first. “How was that again?”

“His sister. Her name is Christina, and she is his only living relative. At present she is a student nurse in Athens, but she is taking a vacation on the western coast. You will pick her up, and... I don’t have to go into details.”

But he did anyway. Christina, it developed, was twenty-two, hadn’t seen Alex since he defected fifteen years earlier. But Alex, according to Hawk, wanted his sister to be present when we met; he had a bad case of suspicions, and after the preliminary negotiations with our people had insisted on bringing Christina into the deal. The only one he could trust, he said, and also, Hawk and I agreed, he was using her as a buffer between himself and possible betrayal to the Greek government.

“I won’t pretend to understand exactly what he’s doing,” Hawk admitted, “but it seems worth our while to go along with him as far as seems feasible.”

My assignment seemed relatively simple: I was to fly to Athens, hire a car and spend a few days nosing around boat yards along the coast. At Pirgos I would pick up the girl (“quite attractive, I’m told,” Hawk assured me), then rent a sail boat for a short cruise up to Korfu. There, on that island which lies more off Albania than Greece, the two of us would contact Alex Zenopolis.

“We’ve had several communications with him since you and I last spoke,” Hawk explained. “It’s none of our concern how he gets there, but now he indicates that he has information of critical importance to give us. Possibly, possibly not, but you’ll have to make every effort to get him away as planned; we have to assume he’s telling the truth until we learn otherwise.”

“I still say why not take him over to Taranto in a fast boat? This sailing business could take a couple of days.”

The old man shook his head. “It’s vital that you in no way allow attention to be drawn to you or to Zenopolis. He assures us that his breakout will go undetected for at least a few days, but he insists that our efforts on his behalf must be totally inconspicuous. There’s a time element involved, which he hasn’t explained fully; at any rate we have to respect his advice for now. No, Nick, you will take your rented sailboat to Taranto with a secret stowaway. You will not do anything to attract the attention of the authorities in Greece or any other country until Zenopolis is safely in our custody. At any rate,” he added with a tiny smile, “if it came to a chase across the water, no power boat you could obtain would be able to outrun the ships and planes the various governments would send after you.”

Either way, he had me. I thought that was all, but Hawk had another little surprise for me.

“By the way,” he said, glancing toward my open suitcase on a rack against the wall. “On this assignment you will carry no firearms. Or anything else that might be incriminating should you be caught and interrogated.”

“Nothing?” I demanded.

“You may carry your knife, I suppose, but not in that forearm sheath you use. As a yachtsman, you’d be expected to have a blade of some sort, though yours is hardly the sort of tool found aboard most boats. In the end, however, you may need it.”

“You think so?”

“Yes. You see, Nick, we have to consider the possibility that this whole operation is a trap of some sort set up by the other side. As you know, we’re in a period of extraordinarily delicate negotiations with the Russians and Chinese. There is, in fact, a sort of tacit moratorium on our operations against those countries and their satellites. Should you decide, during your crossing from Korfu to Taranto, that Zenopolis is working for their purposes, to throw us into a bad light, let’s say, then you will see to it that he is... lost at sea.”

That didn’t faze me; I wasn’t given the rating of “Killmaster” because I flinched at the idea of sticking a knife into an enemy agent, even if he was a man who used to be a friend.

“Okay,” I said, getting up to walk over to my bag. I took out the Luger and handed it to Hawk. “Take good care of her; she’s treated me well.”

“It will be ready when you return,” he said, tucking the weapon into his briefcase.

I sat down again. “One more thing.”

Hawk quirked a shaggy eyebrow at me.

“What the hell am I doing in Tampa?”

“Of course. I was about to explain that. You will stay here for two days and familiarize yourself with the various marinas and yacht brokers.” He took a small envelope from his briefcase and put it on the bed beside him. “This is a list of brokers who have recently gone out of business; you have worked for all three of them and are now taking some time off while attempting to set up your own business. Perhaps we’re being overcautious, but if someone asks you who you worked for, you can give information that can’t be readily checked. It shouldn’t be necessary, actually; this operation will only take a few days. But it would be silly to have it blown through some chance encounter.”

“Boating people are pretty close all over the world,” I agreed. Nathaniel Frederick had convinced me of that.

“Precisely. In your travels along the coast of Greece you will possibly encounter other Americans who know this area. Better to be glib than to stammer and hedge, eh?”

So I did as Hawk told me, spending every daylight hour, and not a few after nightfall, prowling around marinas, salesrooms and boatyards like an out-of-work yacht broker. In my travels I picked up names of managers and salesmen, harbor-masters and the kids who manned the gas pumps at various docks. Maybe all of the detail would never be needed, but if some American at, say, Piraeus should start reminiscing with me about the nutty old character who worked at that boatyard outside Clearwater, I’d be ready with my own story about him.

At the end of the second day I drove across the Florida peninsula to Miami, where I took a plane that put me in Madrid early the next morning. There I got a connecting flight to Athens, and it was just coming up dark when I finished clearing customs — they weren’t at all excited about the double-edged knife I carried in my luggage when they learned my supposed business — and went out to find a taxi. The night had that peculiar clarity that you find, I think, only in Greece and the Levant; it’s as though the sky traps and distills all the exotic scents, those of olive and fig trees mixed with burning charcoal and roasting lamb, then chills them all just a little so they don’t become cloying. It’s a sort of elusive perfume that no woman could wear, but Athens does it with style and grace.

And then I checked in at the Hilton, losing it all in the anywhere-in-the-world blandness of American air conditioning. As a matter of fact, when I turned on the television set in my room, I got Gunsmoke. So much for the Cradle of Western Civilization.

I indulged myself the next morning with a quick tour of the city. It’s a terrible thing to say, but I’ve traveled so much that the cities of the world have begun to have a disappointing similarity to me. No matter where you go, it seems, there’s an American overlay on everything; the fawning rug merchant speaks English and makes sure you know about his brother in Akron, and though you may not actually see a Coca-Cola sign on any given street, there’s always the feeling that one is just around the corner.

So I’m cynical. I was also edgy. This assignment seemed almost too simple, and I had to psyche myself up, like the Super Bowl champion getting ready to take on the College All-Stars. The game should always be a cinch for the pros, which means they have to be especially careful not to consider it a walkover. My problem wasn’t exactly the same, but the casual life I was expected to live for the next few days, spiced with an encounter with a, hopefully, attractive girl, could easily make me lazy in the head if I wasn’t careful.

Besides, I missed Wilhelmina. At the time, I didn’t know how much; in a short time I was to find out.

I rented a Volkswagen from the local Hertz agency and started my yacht-broker’s tour. Piraeus was my logical first stop, and I spent an afternoon wandering around the docks of that busy port city. Playing the businessman-tourist, I asked questions, made a show of examining designs and rigging with an expertise I’m sure Nathaniel would have applauded. No one I encountered seemed to question my cover; I was Daniel McKee, on a busman’s holiday in the part of the world some people call a sailor’s paradise. Funny thing was, I’d only been in that part of the world once before, and it was a sailor’s paradise, but not the way they mean it now. To explain what I was doing in the US Army fifteen years earlier would be much too complicated. Just say it was a part of my advanced training with AXE, and even the Army can bend some rules when it seems advisable. The only time I wore a uniform during that stint was while I was going through Counterintelligence Corps School at Fort Holabird in Baltimore. That was mostly for show, the first thing they taught us was how to type, because of all the reports an agent had to fill out, and I wore the innocuous bars of a second lieutenant. Afterward, when I was assigned to a post in West Germany, any top brass who demanded to know what my rank was got the word that I was a major. That’s the way the CIC worked then, and I knew one or two corporals, operating in plainclothes, who also had the “rank” of major if anyone asked.

But rank had nothing to do with the way I met Alex Zenopolis and the operation we pulled off together. Briefly, our Army was being plagued by a heroin ring that was bringing the stuff into Germany and selling it to our troops. Nothing like the way it’s been in Vietnam in recent years, but still serious then. It was discovered that a handful of GIs were the suppliers, and they were getting the horse from a couple of Greek sailors who had connections in Turkey. The point of exchange was Naxos, the largest island in the Cyclades.

One of the GIs, a young sergeant, had picked up one of those cushy jobs every soldier dreams of; he piloted a small twin-engined plane that carried VIPs, brass and civilians, to sunny spots in places like the Greek islands and Lebanon. It was a cinch, returning empty to Munich, to set down at a small airfield on Naxos and take on a load of the white stuff. He didn’t have any customs to clear, and a couple of mechanics at his home base were in on the deal; they took the dope away and moved it out among the small-time pushers.

I wasn’t in on the preliminaries; it was mostly a job for the CIC people of the MPs, but when it became clear there were Greek military personnel involved it got a little touchy for the military cops. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a CIC job either; the mission of the Corps is basically to stop any clandestine threat to the Army, but that’s pretty broadly interpreted. Either way, I was tapped for the job of putting the dope smugglers out of commission, and to make sure nobody in any of the governments involved made a big stink about it. Or heard about it, if I could help it.

It was a killing job; I knew it as soon as my briefing was over. And when I met Alex Zenopolis in Beirut, all I had to do was look at him to know he was a good man to have working with me. Alex was a bull of a man, a little taller than my own six feet-one and just about as wide. He was with his country’s Naval Intelligence then, but in a dark civilian suit he looked like a character out of a Humphrey Bogart movie, black hair and mustache, fierce eyes that looked as though they could pin you to the wall and leave you dangling there until he decided to let you go.

“You are Carter,” he said when we met at a noisy cafe. A Sinatra record was playing on a jukebox while an overfed belly dancer tried to compete with the music.

I admitted I was; I could still use my own name in those days.

“Very simple.” His English was good, but he didn’t waste words. “Two of our people meet two Americans at airfield. You and I, we eliminate them.”

“How do we know when the American plane will arrive?”

“There’s a place overlooking the landing site. Set up by us, a goatherder’s shack; he has gone to hospital, poor fellow.” Alex laughed, showing a large gap between his front teeth. “Little stomach problem, something in his drinking water. He is old man, but he will recover.”

“And how long do we wait?”

Alex shrugged massive shoulders. “Until they come. Are you in a hurry?”

We took a clackety old boat that seemed to stop at every island in the Cyclades, not to mention Crete, before we arrived at Naxos. Tourists we were supposed to be, and we didn’t speak to each other after we disembarked. I checked in at what passed for a hotel in the port city, then played the eccentric American who wanted to go off on a hiking trip up into the hills, a forerunner, I guess, of the present-day hippies who swarm all over the world with their knapsacks.

I found Alex at the goatherder’s cottage overlooking the landing strip. Fortunately he had a pack of worn but serviceable playing cards, and somehow had managed to lay in a tremendous store of ouzo along with the weapons we would need. The waiting, it was more than two days, wasn’t bad, but if we’d been playing pinochle for real money I would still owe Alex Zenopolis just about everything I’ve earned since then.

The field was in a long, narrow valley below us; it had been built by the Germans during the War and kept in more or less serviceable condition by the cropping of sheep and goats. At the far end from us was a steep drop-off; close to the edge was a large natural cave whose entrance we could see plainly.

“The sailors go in there,” Alex explained. “Our people, the defenders of our shores.” He spat on the dirt floor of the hut. “We Greeks have so many shores to defend; look at any map, Nick. And to think that scum like those defile their profession...” He spat again.

Alex, I realized, was an idealist. That worried me; even then I preferred to work with cynics, because they’re much more reliable.

The nights were the hardest, because we couldn’t use any lights. Alex didn’t talk much and neither did I. Occasionally I’d wander outside to marvel at the pale brightness of the ground under a dazzling moon. And it was on the third of those nights I saw figures moving at the end of the airstrip, hauling themselves up over the lip of the drop like mountain climbers reaching the peak of Mount Everest.

I ran back inside the hut and shook Alex awake. “They’re here,” I whispered. “Your boys, I’m pretty sure.”

Alex waved a hand and rolled over inside his blanket. “Okay, okay, young fellow.” He was maybe ten years older than I was. “They wait, like us. American plane don’t show up till daylight. Can’t land here at night.”

I wouldn’t swear to it, but it seemed to me that Alex was snoring as soon as he said his last word.

Maybe I got a total of half an hour’s sleep the rest of that night; I know I was awake and moving around the hut before dawn, waiting impatiently for the sun to start giving us some light. The moon was long gone, and I could barely see to the valley floor.

“We start now.” Alex’s calm voice in the silent hut was so startling I nearly jumped out of my skin. “Half hour to daylight.” He was on his feet, shrugging into a heavy, black leather jacket whose pockets were stuffed with ammunition. Under it he carried a Colt .45 automatic, but the weapon he relied most on was the M-1 rifle he had slung over one shoulder.

I had one too. I also had Wilhelmina, the Luger I’d recently acquired in Germany and which, in a sense, was becoming an intimate part of my family.

We moved cautiously along the near rim of the Valley, circling toward the heights above the cave entrance. We stayed far enough back from the edge so no one below could see us even if there had been light, and it was purely Alex’s judgment and instinct that told us where to stop.

“There,” he whispered, pointing toward the rim.

We crept over the rough ground, as much rock as foliage, until we could see the field below. We were maybe sixty feet above it, and from what I could see there was no way down.

“How do we...?” I began, but Alex put a finger to his lips, and teeth gleamed in the darkness.

From one of his many pockets he pulled out a thin length of nylon rope. Attached to one end was a grenade, and he placed a couple of others on the ground beside him.

“The airplane comes from there,” he said, pointing off to our right into the black void beyond the edge of the field. “Only way. When it touches down it must taxi to the far end and turn, yes? So at touchdown... no, they cannot get away.”

He began letting the slender line down the rocky cliff face, very slowly, until the end with the grenade attached was just above the top of the cave entrance. Then he paused, wiggling sausage fingers while he did some mental calculations, and drew the line up again. He made a mark on the nylon and slashed it with a knife. “Just right,” he announced, and took the rest of the line to secure it to a little bush a few feet back from the rim.

“Now what?” I asked. Nobody had told us who was to be in charge on this operation, but Alex seemed to know what he was doing, and I was willing to learn.

“This bad stuff for rock work, but I can rappel down.” He pulled on thick gloves, wrapped a length of the secured line around a thigh and looped it over his shoulder. “Now you go back to far end of field. Little path, used by goats, takes you down. When you hear grenade go off in the cave, you go down and persuade those fellows in the airplane that they got no place to go. See?”

I thought so. Obediently I trotted back in the direction we had come. It wasn’t hard to find the path Alex had mentioned, though as I looked down it in the gray light of false dawn I wished I was a goat. Unslinging my M-l, I lay on the rim of the cliff and waited.

At first it seemed like the persistent buzzing of a fly, and I was fighting off the temptation to swat at it when I realized I had dozed off. My eyes snapped open and I was looking into a piece of burning orange sun rising out of the distant sea. In the middle of the half-disc was a dark speck that kept growing larger as it headed straight for where I lay. I felt a quick clutch at my belly, forced myself to stay where I was as the twin-engined plane came into clear view, heading for a landing at the far end of the field.

I looked along the rim of the cliff toward the place where I’d left Alex. There was no sign of him at all until the plane’s wheels touched the grass, but then I saw a bulky figure rise and fling out a long, thin line of white. It snaked through the air, dropped quickly under the sputtering weight attached to its end, and finally whipped into the cave opening.

There was a long pause, too long, and I was beginning to think. Four seconds doesn’t seem like much time, but once I had an instructor pull the pin on a grenade and then toss it to me casually. I fielded it cleanly, and fired it over the concrete parapet into the practice pit as though I were the middle man on a double play. My elbow ached for days afterward — grenades are heavy, don’t forget — but I was mostly concerned about the cackling son of a bitch who had started the whole thing and figuring what was the best way to kill the bastard. Fortunately for him, and probably for me, I never laid eyes on him again after that day.

The cave mouth erupted in a shockingly loud blast, great streams of smoke and showers of fragmented rock bursting out on to the green field. Before I could move I saw Alex hurl himself over the cliff edge, banging against the rock outcroppings as he rappelled swiftly down to the ground.

I scrambled down the steep path, clinging to scrubby bushes as I went, and hit the valley floor at a run. The twin-engined American aircraft was taxiing toward me, engines roaring, but for the moment I wasn’t worried about being spotted; that explosion behind them had to be occupying all their attention.

As the plane slowed, I flattened myself inside a little cleft in the wall of the cliff, waited for the turn to begin, then stepped out and fired a couple of quick shots close to the plane’s nose. I saw a startled, pale face through the windshield, then a scurry of movement. A side door began to open as the pilot continued his turn, already revving up his motors for a takeoff.

The orders were not to shoot up the plane if we could help it; after all, it was US Government property. So I stepped behind its tail, out of range of the probable gunman at the side door. A sudden blast from the twin props nearly knocked me down, kicking up dust and blinding me for a moment. When I could see again, the aircraft was moving rapidly away from me; I had the M-1 at my shoulder, ready to shoot as a last resort, when Alex bolted from the ruined cave right into the path of the speeding plane.

In the early light he looked like a small mountain, all in black with his arms upraised like some ancient warrior trying to stay the fury of the gods. As the plane sped toward him it looked as though a collision was inevitable, but at the last instant it swerved aside, cutting engines and jamming on the brakes. Alex dove under a spinning prop, rolling away from the wheels.

I was running down the field toward the big Greek and the plane, and I saw the gun poke out of the side door before Alex did. I stopped, knelt and raised my M-l as the aircraft came to a bumpy halt close to the edge of the drop-off. A man stuck his head out, pistol aimed at my partner.

It wasn’t much of a target, and the plane was still rocking from its violent turn and abrupt stop, but there was no time to take careful aim. I squeezed off a shot, then another. The man in the doorway looked at me, and even at that distance I could see the look of blank surprise on his face as the blood began to spout from his neck. He started to swing the pistol in my direction, but suddenly it must have become as heavy as an anvil. His arm dropped, the gun fell from his hand and he slowly toppled out of the door to the ground.

Alex stepped on the man as he jumped up and into the cabin. There was a high, muffled cry, then a guttural laugh; a few seconds later another man came flying out to land face down on the rocky ground. Alex stood behind him in the doorway, holding his nine-pound M-l as easily as a policeman’s nightstick. Then he beckoned to me, but I was already up and moving toward the plane.

“That good shooting,” he said. “You damned near got the pilot, too.”

“How do you mean?” We were both watching the man writhing on the ground; the one I’d shot wasn’t moving.

“Hah! Your bullet goes through his neck and into plane, nicks this pilot fellow’s ear and smashes the window up front. Too bad.”

“Yeah. Any other damage?”

“None I could see. I guess your other shot got him in chest. Didn’t go through, anyway.”

“Or maybe I missed completely.”

Alex shook his head. “No, you don’t miss, Nick Carter. And I never forget that, you know?” He looked down at the pilot, who was trying to sit up. “You want this fellow alive?”

“As long as he’s not badly hurt, I guess we can use him back at headquarters.” I bent over, grabbed the man. He wore an Army uniform with sergeant’s stripes, and I knew his face as well as my own after studying his file. “Ragan,” I growled. “You want to live or die right here? It’s your choice.”

“Cheesus, yes!” He wasn’t much more than a kid, I recalled, and he looked younger than his picture. He stared up at Alex and shook his head wonderingly. “Crazy!” he murmured. “This guy is crazy.”

Alex laughed and knelt beside him, the barrel of his rifle touching the side of the young sergeant’s face. “You smart boy,” he said. “You know if you hit me, your plane get busted up same as me. And down you go.” He made an eloquent gesture with his hand, looking over his shoulder toward the lip of the drop-off. “So you stay alive, eh? Good boy.” He clapped him on the back, not gently, then grabbed a shoulder and hauled the sergeant to his feet.

“What about the cave?” I asked.

“All dead.” He patted the rifle butt. “After you go I will use other grenades to seal up cave. Make nice tomb. How about this one?” He nudged the dead man with his toe.

“No. I’d better take him with me. But how are you going to get away from here?”

“This is part of my country, Nick Carter. You don’t worry about me, eh? Now I help you tie up this boy so he don’t give you no trouble during flight.”

We decided to leave the thoroughly trussed Ragan just behind the pilot’s seat, where I could keep an eye on him. The body of the other man Alex slung in the back, like so much cargo. Before I got in, he fished in his pockets and brought out a couple of smallish packages.

“You take both; you Americans, you need the evidence. Us, we don’t know nothing about dope smuggling, eh?” He clapped me on the back. “Have a good trip, Nick Carter. If you as good a pilot as you shoot, you will have no problems, eh?”

The last I saw of him, he was trudging back toward the cave, the rifle carried carelessly over his shoulder; he looked like a hunter heading home after a successful day. He didn’t even turn to wave as I made my take-off run.