Tower of Terror

2

Through the Starlite scope, its electronics turning the moonless night into day, Lyons watched them unload explosives.

Two men standing in the motor launch lifted each case by its rope handles, swung it onto the floating dock. The cases were wide and flat, too heavy for the man on the dock to carry. He dragged the cases one after another into the boathouse, then ran back for the next one. At the far end of the boathouse, a fourth man crouched against the wall, his M-16 pointed at the silent fields and marshes of the North Carolina coast. In the distance, more than a mile from the stagnant inlet, were brush-covered foothills, then forest. There were no lights, no highways, only the dirt road cutting through the salt marshes.

Lyons checked the safety on his rifle. He wanted no accident. This was not an ambush. If it had been, the four men would have been dead the moment the boat touched the dock. Quick as counting one, two, three, four. But Lyons was well aware that killing these four would not stop the terrorists in New York City.

He took his eye from the eyepiece, half turned to glance behind him. No headlights approaching. At some time during the night, however, a truck would come for those crates.

On the launch, the men stopped. Lyons watched one of them light a cigarette. Through the scope, the match flare looked like a spotlight on the man's face. The muffled engine started, and the launch chugged away. Only the man on the dock and the guard with the M-16 remained.

His radio hand-set clicked twice. Lyons acknowledged Blancanales' signal with a single click. He couldn't chance any words. Blancanales hid somewhere near the dock, his night-suited and black-faced form invisible in the tall weeds. The clicks to Lyons meant he was ready and waiting. And with luck...

Forget luck, Lyons told himself. Organization, discipline and patience: Lyons repeated the words as he searched the night for headlights. It wasn't luck that got us to this boathouse.

Back in Miami, Hector and his son Alfonso had confessed in the aftermath of the firefight that they had sold a rusting freighter to a smuggler running dope from the Caribbean to the United States. But the smuggler was unknown to the international drug gangs. Until the deal blew up in his face, Hector had thought the operation was a Federal scam to trap big-time dealers. Alfonso told him he had overheard a crewman say "Carolina."

This information had prompted Gadgets to focus his wizardry on the part of the Carolina coast where they were now encamped. He had electronically located a high-powered transmitter in this area, which was in communication with both New York City and a freighter off the coast, presumably the smugglers'.

In pinpointing the location of the transmitter, he had intercepted a coded message from the freighter to the boathouse. Though they couldn't break the code, the Able Team hoped it meant a delivery.

Lyons and Blancanales had waited near the coastline until dark, then hiked two miles through the marshes and fields, crawling the last few hundred yards. Gadgets stayed at the motel command' center to monitor the frequencies for any communications.

In the field, Lyons took a position on a sandbank where he could watch both the boathouse and the road. Blancanales took a forward position where he would have cover from gunfire, but still be within a few steps of the dock. When the truck came to carry those crates of explosives to New York City, they would try to take the terrorists alive for interrogation. At least one of them.

Assuming the men in the boathousewere members of the terrorist group, Lyons thought. Assuming therewas plastic explosive in the crates. If we've gone to all this trouble just to grab some dopers...

The blast stunned him like a hammer-blow to his head. Lyons instinctively covered himself as the rising fireball spewed bits and pieces of debris into the sky. It took him only a second to realize that the boathouse was gone.

"Rosario!" Lyons shouted. He ran to where the boathouse had been, thrashed through the tall weeds. "Rosario! You still here? You alive?"

The weeds burned in a dozen places, smoke swirling around Lyons as he searched for his friend. He found Blancanales sprawled behind a low mound near the water's edge. He was only semi-conscious, bleeding from a scalp wound.

Lyons dragged him a hundred yards along the edge of the inlet. It had been a big explosion, maybe a hundred pounds of C-4, but that accounted for only one of the crates the men had unloaded. He found an embankment that would protect them if any more of the explosives went off. He gently put Blancanales down.

"Hey, Rosario. Can you hear me?"

Blancanales looked at him, grinned. He ran his hand across his forehead, gauging the amount of blood, and said nothing.

"Don't sweat it, Politician. Your brains are still in your head. Can you hear?"

"Sort of." Blancanales tried to sit up, groaned, lay back. "Ohhhh, do I hurt." He closed his eyes, then very slowly sat up. "Something went wrong, didn't it?"

Flames lit the sky. "Yeah, and now we know what they had in those boxes, don't we?" smiled Lyons. "I've heard of high-powered dope, but this is ridiculous."

Blancanales glanced over the top of the embankment and surveyed the scene. "We get one good break, and now it's back to zero."

"Don't knock our luck, Rosario. At least you're alive."

An FBI helicopter shuttled them back to the ocean-front motel on the outskirts of a small town, hovering for a moment while Lyons and Blancanales carefully jumped the few feet to the sand on the dark beach. Then the chopper roared up and away, returning to the scene of the blast where teams of Federal agents searched the ashes.

They crossed the deserted beach to Mitch Anders' improvised office. His Emergency Task Force had commandeered the motel's twenty rooms.

"What happened out there?" Anders asked sternly. At two-thirty in the morning, he was freshly shaved and cologned and wore a three-piece suit.

Mud from the inlet's banks caked both Lyons and Blancanales. The blood from Blancanales' forehead ran down his face, mixing with the mud. They didn't answer immediately. Lyons eased himself into the cushions of the motel-modern chair, closed his eyes. He hadn't slept in three days.

"Well, I don't really know," Lyons said. "One second these four men were there, and the next, they weren't."

Anders looked to Blancanales. "What's the truth?"

"That was it. One of them was in the boathouse. He called the other one in. Then it was all over." Blancanales went to the room's sink and put his head under the faucet.

"You need a doctor?" Anders dialed a telephone number.

"Forget the doctor," Blancanales told him. "It's nothing."

Anders slammed down the phone. "So there was no shooting? What was it, a double suicide?"

Lyons laughed. "Must've been."

Anders ignored Lyons. "How'd you get that wound, Blancanales? Couldn't you cowboys hold off? You had to take them? "

"Anders," Lyons protested, "don't give us the third degree."

"Don't give me your crap!"

"We weren't even there. How's that for a report? Does that answer your questions?"

"You have seriously jeopardized the progress of this investigation with your actions. It was over my objections that Commander Brognola assigned your team to this investigation. I will immediately..."

"This is the fact," Lyons interrupted. "We do not know what happened. We were in our positions, waiting for the truck. El Politico there is one very lucky man. If he'd just happened to have his head up at that moment, he would've lost it. You think we'd have made any kind of stupid move? He's lying there, maybe thirty-five, forty feet from a thousand pounds of plastic explosive. By some miracle, only about a hundred pounds went off..."

"All right!" Anders cut him off. "Thank you. I just wanted a report. You must understand my concern. Your team has methods that are quite different than those the Bureau would employ..."

"And the Bureau didn't come up with much, did they?" Lyons said. "A week and a half you're on it, and we're the ones who..."

"Gentlemen," Blancanales interrupted, "we're still on the same side. This is a team effort."

"Okay," Lyons agreed. "Us against them. Sorry I shot my mouth off, Anders."

"I hoped tonight would be the turning point."

Anders sighed. "Well, I'm waiting on a call from the Coast Guard. They're taking the freighter, maybe they'll get someone for us."

There was a quick knock at the door. Gadgets Schwarz came in. "The shouting over?"

"Oh, yeah." Lyons stood. "We're just leaving. You get anything interesting, Gadgets?"

"Man, you cannot believe how interesting."

"On the accident?"

"Guess again, Lyons," Gadgets told him. "That big boom was no accident."

They crowded into Gadgets' motel room. Electronic gear — consoles, modules, racks of circuitry interlocked with receivers and tape machines — left space only for Gadgets' chair. Tools and cables and components covered the bed. A bundle of thick wires ran out the window to the temporary antennas hanging in the trees. Lyons pushed the cables aside, sat on the windowsill.

"I got it all. Listen." Gadgets ran tapes as he briefed them. "Here's the static of the launch engine, then your hand-sets clicking back and forth..."

"Could they have picked up the walkie-talkies?" Anders asked. "When Lyons and Blancanales..."

"Take it easy," Gadgets grinned. "Don't get paranoid. Just because I can, doesn't mean they can. Listen." Gadgets accelerated the tape, slowed it. "Here's the coded message, probably to New York. They had to send it twice before they got their confirmation. Hear it?"

A series of pulses came from the monitor speakers.

There was a pause, then the pulses repeated. Then a return pulse answered the code.

"That's their confirmation. Now a minute or two later, this voice comes on in the clear. It breaks in on their frequency. No code, no double talk, no scrambler."

It was in Castilian Spanish: "Please call in your comrade. It is imperative I immediately issue instructions to both of you."

"My Spanish isn't so good," Gadgets said. "So I had one of your Feds check it, Anders. It was just straight talk."

"Make a copy of that," Anders told him. "We'll want a voice graph."

"You got it already." Gadgets found a cassette in the clutter, tossed it to Anders.

"Play that voice again," Blancanales said. "Normal speed."

Gadgets backed up the tape, replayed it. Blancanales listened intently.

"That's correct Spanish," he commented. "Formal Spanish, like at a university."

Anders made a note on the cassette's label. "I'll have the linguists listen to it."

"Now listen to this." Gadgets slowed the playback of another part of the tape to half speed. Unnaturally slow voices slurred from the speakers. Then there was a jolt of electronic noise.

"That's when they died." Gadgets backed up the tape, played the single sound again. "That was a signal to a radio-command detonator. He blew away his own people."

"Are you absolutely certain?" Anders asked.

"Ab-so-loot-ly! I've made those things. The straight talk that breaks in is to make sure that they're using the frequency, so they'll be open to the detonating signal."

Anders turned to Lyons. "What do you think about this? How does it relate to their operation in New York?"

Lyons stood, stretched, headed for the door. "I think we're up against crazies like we never saw before. I think they'll have some more surprises for us."

With a quick salute, he said good-night. As he walked to his own motel room, he was deep in thought. Organization, discipline, patience. Sometimes they weren't enough. The Able Team needed some luck, and fast.