The Vulcan Disaster

Chapter Thirteen

We had ourselves a nightcap for good luck, and then Tatiana fixed me up a Japanese-style bed on the mats before the galley and kissed me good-night and went off to her own little cabin next to Will’s. After an hour or so had passed, in she padded, all warm and soft and naked and tousle-haired, and tucked herself in with me, and things got all chummy again. It’d been many lonely months since her last man and-she needed some reassuring the way women do. And of course I didn’t need much persuading. Bum ribs or no.

But then, after she’d slipped off into a tranquil sleep beside me, I found myself still too wound up, tired as I was, to get to sleep easily. I would have loved a smoke. I settled for lying back and letting the boat rock gently under me and for thinking about a lot of the events of the past two impossibly crowded days, and about a few questions I’d managed neither to answer nor to ignore.

For instance:

Three contenders for that shipment? Who were they all? I didn’t even know who the two Israelis were, except that they were a couple of cold, bloodthirsty bastards. But what were they up to? Were they renegades, perhaps, working for the OPEC people or one of the Arab Bloc nations? Free agents of some kind? I thought I knew better than to take them for official Israeli undercover types; I’d worked with some of them before, and this didn’t seem anything like their style, but I wasn’t sure.

Mercenaries? Not likely. Wild cards, emissaries of some foreign power we weren’t on to yet? Possibly. But without closing my mind on the matter, I was willing to guess that what we had here was the dedicated terrorist type, working for God alone knew who — but in it as much for the thrill of it all as anything. They seemed like paid professionals, after all... but then there was that strange business about the decoration of Meyer’s corpse.

But now: who were the other two contenders? I’d have to remember to pump Will in the morning. He’d mentioned the mysterious Mr. Komaroff, and it’d rung a bell with him. Who could that be? Someone attached quite recently to the local KGB unit — too recently to be on the lists posted in D.C.? I wouldn’t have put it past Will to be one up on David Hawk on nuts-and-bolts intelligence matters here, especially if Hawk got his information in large part from people like Basil Morse. I promised myself a snoop through Will’s mental dossier on the Russian gentleman in the morning.

Then, too, there was that “third party” of Will’s. Neither of us knew anything about that one. I had only Will’s hunch to go on in believing it existed, and all his hunch said was that the present facts didn’t work if there were only two parties. I fell asleep promising myself a long chat with Will about that the next morning, too...

But it didn’t work out that way.

When I woke up, both of them were gone. On the bulletin board next to the galley, next to Tatiana’s shopping list, a pair of notes were pinned to the wall. I took them down and read them.

I knew what he meant; I was almost beginning to enjoy this confusing trip for the first time, with a couple of leads at last and a bare outside chance to get somewhere during the next few hours. I read the note again. Yes, they’d either drop the load and junk the boat or they’d put back out to sea and change the flag and registry and name again, depending on whether the General’s confederates had made the transfer yet. If they hadn’t, they’d be playing it smart to hightail it.

And what was this business of the G and K files? “K” could be “Komaroff,” but what about the “G”?

Tatiana’s note was briefer:

I looked around. No phone on the boat. She’d have had to go ashore to make her phone calls. I had a sudden thought, and stuck my head out on deck, wondering what that left me to get ashore with, but there was a flat-bottomed rowboat tied up alongside the junk. I dressed, had coffee, and went outside to get things started for the day.

It was a beautiful, clear morning — the kind you always hope you’re going to have when you come steaming into a place like Hong Kong, with its steep mountains plunging into the rich blue of the sea. If there were any problems in the Crown Colony — poverty, crime, the threat of Red China hovering overhead — you didn’t want to know about them as you drank in the sheer beauty of the place.

Sculling slowly through the nest of docks and slips, I had time to look around me and to savor some of the strange and intriguing sights and sounds of the waterfront community and to feel a little sorry that I hadn’t made it with Tatiana beside me, telling me all about it, or with Will spinning rich sailor yams about the Islands and Fiddler’s Green. As it was, it was a fine ambience on a clear morning, and it got me, little by little, into a fine mood well before I docked the little boat and went ashore.

There is, however, one all-purpose rule of thumb in any kind of warfare, be it cold or hot, overt or covert, and it goes like this: keep your ass down.

So as my cab putt-putted through the dense morning traffic on its way to 68–72 Nathan Road, I hauled out Wilhelmina and busted her down and checked her out. She was full of goop where some fool had dropped her and then not cleaned her, and I promised to give her a real Number One scrub-down and oiling, first chance I got. Meanwhile, I scraped her down with the old pocket knife — it would have been a waste of Hugo’s delicate blade to use him — and, by the time I was ready to tuck the old girl away in her holster, she was at least in serviceable condition. She’d shoot. She’d shoot better clean; but now I knew exactly how far I could trust her, and I felt a lot better about that.

This didn’t sit well with the driver at all. The first time he looked back and saw me oiling a 9mm Luger, smiling and whistling, he came unstuck a little. We almost hit a cop, but we finally rounded the corner and shot down Nathan Road, past the Fortuna Hotel, into Tsim Sha Tsui.

I’d cracked that front door once before; I could do it in my sleep. In spite of all the to-and-fro traffic on old Meyer’s floor, I decided just to walk up and let myself in as though I were one of the family. I walked confidently up to the door; I fumbled in my pocket as a secretary from an adjoining office walked past; and, when she’d gone, I shoved that credit card home again, forced the bolt upward, and stepped into the room.

Sometimes you’re not sensitive to vibes, sometimes you are. That day I know I was. The minute I stepped inside I could feel something wrong. Don’t ask me what it was. There was just a tension in that room you could cut with a knife.

There was a noise in the rear, out the window.

I ran to the window and looked out, Wilhelmina held at the ready in my hand.

Down in the alley the big Israeli — Zvy — was racing around the corner. I heard the Jag’s motor fire up, race; Shimon would be driving this time. Why the hell hadn’t I spotted him in the street?

There was a noise down by my feet.

I looked down. There was a man there. His hands were pressed to his throat, but they wouldn’t do much good. As I watched, a gout of blood spurted forth from the gaping wound where somebody had taken a razor-sharp knife to his throat.

He couldn’t talk. The vocal cords had been cut.

He was dying, horribly, in a pool of dark blood. I noticed that his belt and fly were undone — and bloody. His killers had left their mark: a star in deep, red welts.

I knew him.

I bent over him, trying to listen, trying to catch that last desperate message he wanted to give me. My head was reeling. My heart was beating fast. My hand squeezed Wilhelmina’s scored grip as if my object were to tear the dark gun in half.

He couldn’t talk. His hands trembled in panic. He knew he was dying. The panic grew. One hand held his throat, hard. The other traced a single letter in the air, boldly, as if it meant to continue.

Then it fell.

I leaned back and slowly sat down on the stained rug, not really looking at anything. My eye kept lighting on little things. A spot of blood on my pants, from last night. The dead man’s gun, across the room on the floor. His sightless eyes. The gore at his throat. The gore at his crotch... I looked away.

Finally my eyes came back into focus again, and I got up wearily. My ribs ached, and I felt like an old man, beaten and defeated. I leaned against the filing cabinet, trying to get it all together; but I hadn’t got anything together at all when I tried to talk to the dead man. My voice came out a quavery old man’s croak.

“Fred,” I said, “this is going to cost somebody something. I promise you, so help me God I do. Somebody is not only going to get it, and painfully, but he’s going to have to beg me not to do it. And when he’s done with begging, I’m going to give it to him anyway. Just you watch, buddy.”

Fred, Goddamit...

Fred, why did you have to get in on this one? Why didn’t you just send some tyro to do it, the way Basil Morse would? Why did you always have to tackle the tough ones yourself, you crazy bastard? Why couldn’t you be cautious, like your boss? Why couldn’t you be yellow...

After a while I went to work. The filing cabinet, however, had been rifled — and the things that were missing were precisely the things Will had asked me to look for. I did a bit of useless cursing about that, and then I settled down to looking over whatever might remain. I didn’t know for sure what I’d be looking for, besides the obvious.

After a while I closed the file cabinet and went over and sat down and looked out the window.

A “G.” That was all I knew. Beyond that, and the fact that “G” was the other file letter Will had asked me to look up in Meyer’s files, I knew nothing at all of the one last despairing message Fredericks had tried to give me.

Except it had been a cursive “G” and it had been definitely leading into something: an ascending stroke. “G-I,” perhaps? “G-L”? I was wondering if Will would know — Will, who seemed to have a handle on almost everything that happened here in Hong Kong — when the phone rang.

I froze.

I looked down at my watch. Eleven-thirty, give or take a few minutes.

I picked it up. “Hello?” I said.

“Nick? Will here.”

“Will! What are you...”

“Not much time here to talk, Nick. Tatiana’s with me. We seem to have landed in the shit, old boy.”

“Where are you?”

He gave me an address in Wanchai, across the Strait. Of course, of course: that number he’d asked me to call at noon had had a Hong Kong Island prefix. “And look, Nick. Your deadly little friends are here, and...”

“Who?”

“The Israelis. They...”

“But that’s impossible. I... they just killed Fredericks. Right here. I just missed them. I saw the bigger one as he was getting away. They couldn’t have had time to get across the Strait and get to where you are. Not on the Ferry, not on a ’copter, not any way.”

“Well, whoever they are, they’ve got us boxed in. We’re in an office in the warehouse, Nick. The one the shipment was to have gone to. I’ve got the place barricaded, but they’ll be busting through in a few minutes, I think. Looks like I was right, there’s three groups. If only...”

“Will,” I said. “You said was to have gone to. It’s not here, then?”

“No. It was intercepted — hijacked out at sea, as far as I know, destination unknown. But I think Europe, Nick. Europe or the Middle East. Perhaps somewhere in the Mediterranean. I... no, Tatiana! Back from the door! No, my dear... Nick, where was I? Oh, yes... ah... well, I think it won’t be much longer. Nick, for the love of heaven, get through to David. Follow this up, all the way. This is something big, I’m sure of it — bigger than any damned single arms shipment. There’s a new factor in... in... N-no...”

“Will!” I said. “Will, hang on!”

“Oh, God... oh, God, my head... oh, God, not now... not n-n-n...” The rational voice became a low keening. There was a loud report in my ear; another. There was a woman’s shrill scream. More shots. Six, eight; I’m not sure how many. After a while somebody put the phone back on the hook.

After a while I put my own receiver down, too.