Mack Maloney - Wingman 08, page 18
“So talk …” Zim said, a thin, shiny grin returning.
Elvis pulled his chair closer to the table.
“You’ve got something that I want,” he said. “I’ve been in town for weeks just to tell you I’m here to buy it.”
Zim laughed and took a long swig from the liquor bottle.
“Obviously you have never heard of the Oriental art of business negotiation,”
he told Elvis. “The object desired is never discussed at the first meeting.”
Elvis slammed his fist down on the table, the tremor causing the ring of bodyguards to close in even tighter.
“I don’t have any more time for your goo gai pan bullshit,” he said in his thick southern accent. “Tell me the price and let’s get on with it!”
Zim smacked his lips and took another drag of his cigarette.
“Typical American,” he said. “No patience. No time 201
to talk. No time to appreciate things…”
“As far as I’m concerned,” Elvis countered, “we ain’t got much to talk about besides what I’m here for.”
Zim shook his head slowly, letting a long plume of smoke escape from his nostrils,
“Don’t be so sure about that,” he told Elvis, his tone turning ominously serious. “I might have something even more valuable to you. But, nevertheless, I can see you are in a hurry, my impatient friend. So go ahead.”
Elvis took a deep breath and drew in even closer to the man.
“Let’s make it simple,” he said. “You have the merchandise, yes or no?”
“Yes,” Zim answered.
“And it is for sale?”
“Yes-for the equivalent of one million dollars. Nothing less.”
“Gold or silver?”
“Gold. Bars not chips…”
Elvis sat back and stared hard at the man. “That sounds too cheap,” he said.
“What condition is it in?”
“Good condition,” Zim replied, sounding like he was offended by the question.
“It’s all packed in crates, of course. Twenty-three in all, I believe. Every part marked and listed.”
Zim took a quick swig of his bottle and an even shorter drag of his cigarette.
“As for the price …” he said. “I’m a businessman. I know that sometimes it is best to move merchandise quickly. Besides, I am leaving the islands soon and therefore I must liquidate all my commodities.”
Elvis bit his lip; the next question was probably the most important of all.
“Just how did you happen to get it?” he asked the man deliberately.
Zim was caught off guard by the question, a slight 202
amount of color draining from his face.
“Why should that be of any importance to you?” he stammered.
“‘I’ll give you half again the price if you tell me how you came by it,” Elvis said, staring the man right in the eyes.
What was left of the man’s cool facade was now crumbling by the second.
“I cannot tell,” Zim said nervously. “I would be a marked man if the wrong people learned that I was selling it to you.”
“I’ll give you twice the price,” Elvis said.
“No,” Zim replied defiantly. “You want it, you can have it for the million in gold. But that is all.”
That was enough. Elvis knew he couldn’t push his luck. Not in this situation.
Not in this tune or place. The man was getting very jumpy and that was making his goons nervous.
“All right,” Elvis told him. “One million in gold bars. We can load it tomorrow morning at ‘Lulu Airport and you can get paid then.”
“No!” Zim half shouted. “You take delivery within two hours or the deal is off.”
Once again, Elvis knew it was not a time to quibble. Still, he had to wonder why someone like Zim-well known in these parts as an ice-water-in-the-veins operator-was so jumpy.
“OK,” he told him. “At the airport in two hours…”
“Agreed,” the man said, his voice returning somewhat to its normally snide timbre.
With that, he stood up, and gathering his bodyguards in tow, quickly marched out of the barroom.
Elvis instinctively checked his watch again. The negotiations had taken hardly any time at all. Not only had the man sold quickly-too quickly-he also seemed to be in an awful rush to free himself of the merchandise.
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The question was: why?
But first things came first. Elvis had to make a radio call to Maui, the next island over and get a cargo plane waiting there under heavy guard into the air. Then he had to retrieve his jet before it was reduced to the hubcaps.
But he did take a second to finish his beer and contemplate what he had just done. He had the feeling that somehow, somewhere, Hawk Hunter knew that his beloved F-16XL was soon to be in friendly hands once again.
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Chapter Thirty-four
Two hours later
The huge C-5 Galaxy circled the former Honolulu International Airport once before coming in for a perfect landing.
Waiting at the end of the otherwise deserted runway, Elvis followed the gigantic plane’s progress as it taxied toward him.
If we can get this show on the road within an hour, he thought, we’ll be in LA by midnight.
It took several minutes for the big cargo plane to reach the prescribed spot and another couple for its pilots to shut down its engines and various flight systems. Already two squads of United American Rangers were disembarking from the rear cargo door, smartly forming a tight defense perimeter around the big airplane. Finally, the front cargo hatch lifted open, giving the big plane the appearance of a huge fish ready to swallow anything in sight.
The first person down the runway was Elvis’s partner, the famous Captain
“Crunch” O’Malley of the Ace Wrecking Crew.
“Everything still peachy?” he asked Elvis with a sly wink.
“Ask them,” Elvis replied, pointing to the small army of Hawaiian gunmen that surrounded the pair of battered tractor trailer trucks parked nearby.
Crunch gave the men a quick lookover and then sig-205
naled two UA troopers who were still waiting inside the C-5. The soldiers signaled back and soon were carefully carrying a large steel case down the C-5’s ramp.
“One million is all he wanted, eh?” Crunch asked Elvis as the two soldiers laid the cash box at their feet.
“I offered him two if he told us where he got the jet,” Elvis replied. “But he wanted no part of it.”
“Weird,” Crunch said.
Elvis put his fingers to his mouth and let out a long whistle. With that, Zim emerged from the cab of one of the trailer trucks and walked forward, his entourage of goons following behind like baby ducks.
Crunch instinctively pushed the safety off his sidearm. “Let’s just hope these guys don’t suspect we’ve got five million more sitting back in the plane,” he said.
“Don’t worry,” Elvis told him. “Mister Zim isn’t concerned about money right now. Something else is on his mind.”
The businessman walked up and without a word pointed to the cash box.
Immediately, two of his bodyguards opened the box and started counting out the gold bars inside.
Two minutes and two grunts later, Zim nodded and slammed the box shut with his foot.
“I’m happy to see that you pay your debts in full and on time,” he said to Crunch and Elvis.
“Yeah, big deal,” Elvis told him. “Now just get your guys cracking and do your part…”
Zim snapped his fingers and was holding a lit cigarette a mere five seconds later.
‘There has been one alteration to our deal,” he said sinisterly.
Crunch immediately laid his hand on his enormous .357 Magnum sidearm, at the same time nodding to the officer in charge of the UA troopers guarding the air-206
plane.
“What the hell do you mean?” Elvis challenged the man. “You can’t go changing the deal now …”
Zim flicked away his barely smoked cigarette and then closed his eyes for a moment.
“It is a simple request,” he said in a low voice. “I want no more money, or anything of yours that is valuable. All I ask is that you take me and six of my men back to the mainland with you.”
The request stunned both Crunch and Elvis.
It was Crunch who started shaking his head first.
“No way, pal,” he said. “We ain’t no taxi service and that’s not part of the deal. Besides, you don’t want to go there. There’s big trouble back on the mainland. Very big trouble on the East Coast. In fact, we wouldn’t even be out here screwing around with you at all except our boss told us to.”
Zim was becoming very nervous now. Years spent cultivating an image of cool and cunning was lost in a few seconds’ time. It was apparent that he wanted nothing better but to get the hell out of Hawaii, and quick.
“I’ll cut the price of the airplane,” he said suddenly, his gold teeth somehow losing some of the gleam. “You can have it for a half million if you take us.”
Crunch had never stopped shaking his head.
“A quarter of a million,” Zim said desperately.
Elvis held his hand up at this point. “Hold it,” he said. “What the hell is going on? Why do you want to get out of here so damn quick? You just about own Honolulu …”
Zim shook his head sadly. “I will have nothing in a very short time,” he said.
“Nothing will be left…”
Crunch and Elvis just looked at each other.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Elvis asked the man.
It took the frightened businessman five minutes to 207
explain it all, Crunch and Elvis listening with a mixture of astonishment and outright disbelief.
Less than a half hour later, the huge airplane was lifting off from the airport’s longest runway, the twenty-three crates containing the disassembled F-16 safely packed inside along with Zim and his six bodyguards.
Elvis’s F-4X Phantom took off shortly afterward.
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Chapter Thirty-five
The sunlight was fading fast as Elvis flew the powerful F-4X up to twenty-five thousand feet.
Leveling off, he looked to the east and saw the glint of silver that was the huge C-5, heading at full throttle back toward the mainland. He knew that a squadron of F-5’s from the Republic of California Air Force would meet the C-5
at about the halfway point and escort them the rest of the way from there. It was the best that could be done under the circumstances.
He, too, would have liked nothing better but to trail the Galaxy back to LA, but he had another mission to perform, one that was as critical as it was last minute.
He shook his head and took a long, deep breath of oxygen.
The last five weeks had been among the strangest of his life. One moment he was training a new crop of United American fighter pilots up in Boston, and the next heading to Hawaii, a satchel of classified papers under his arm and a book of codes in his pocket.
Thus began the mission to recover Hunter’s F-16.
Jones’s intelligence operatives had been searching for the missing jet ever since the battle up in the Canadian Rockies. A special squad of the Guardians was spotted carting the aircraft away during the early rounds of fighting, escaping amid the natural confusion of warfare. Jones’s spies were on the trail of these people forty-eight hours later.
The unlikely group carried the aircraft on a specially 209
made tractor trailer truck that was adapted to off-road driving. Moving only at night, they made it to Vancouver, Jones’s agents just an hour behind.
That’s when the airplane and the Guardians simply disappeared.
Jones’s men spent the next month combing Vancouver for clues, and their hard work paid qff when they questioned a man who built packing boxes down on the city’s docks. He had been paid an exorbitant amount of money to construct a total of twenty-three wooden boxes of various sizes and shapes. When the agents saw the crude pencil drawings the man had made by hand, they added up the boxes’ total displacement and estimated weight capacity. The total equaled 13,959 pounds, the exact weight of an empty F-16.
Using this tip, the agents then tracked the twenty-three crates to Juneau, where they were bought by a local hoodlum, who once again seemed to have become very wealthy very quickly. Gambling with some heavy rollers one night, this man offered the twenty-three crates as collateral on a big bet. He lost, and the cargo became the property of a Japanese gangster who had slipped an ace into his hand and won the pot with a royal flush.
The Japanese gangster eventually moved on to Honolulu, where he in turn lost the crates to the Hawaiian military officer who was better at cheating at poker than he.
At this point, General Jones called Elvis in and gave him the assignment to go to Hawaii and try to locate the disassembled plane. By the time Elvis made it to Honolulu, the crates had become the possession of a well-known Hawaiian crime boss, who, it was said, planned to sell it in pieces. This gangster was later found floating near the Pearl Harbor monument, the apparent loser in an argument over drugs.
The trail suddenly gone cold, Elvis contacted Jones 210
and asked what to do. By this time the crisis on the East Coast was getting worse by the day, and experienced pilots like Elvis were soon going to be very much in need. However, Jones told him to stay in Hawaii and try to pick up the scent again.
These orders underscored the importance of the airplane to the country’s postwar national heritage. The F-16 was as well known now as Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis and the Enola Gay. But Elvis also knew that Jones’s reasons were more personal than that.
The Commander-In-Chief of the United American Armed Forces rightly figured that because the airplane had been stolen from Hunter while he was fighting with the UAAF against the white supremacist armies of the American Southwest, then it was only right that the UAAF do everything in its power to retrieve it. Besides the obvious moral victory in recovering the airplane, the sly Jones knew the gesture would certainly not be lost on a loyal soldier like Hunter.
So Jones had told Elvis to stay in ‘Lulu and ask questions and Elvis did just that for two weeks before finding out that the famous airplane had been won in yet another poker game by an individual who turned out to be Zim, the businessman.
Just as quickly, the word on the streets was that the airplane-all twenty-three crates of it-would be sold to the highest bidder.
Elvis immediately radioed Jones, and soon Crunch was driving the big C-5 to Honolulu to deliver whatever money Elvis might need and hopefully carry the airplane back to the mainland.
So now this piece of business was done. The nervous businessman had gotten his one million dollars hi gold and his free ride out of the Islands….
But not before he had told Elvis and Crunch an incredible story, so incredible that at the beginning they suspected Zim was actually planning an elaborate hoax.
Then they thought he was just plain crazy. Finally he had convinced them not only that he was dead serious but that his tale carried with it such a dire threat to continental America that both Elvis and Crunch knew that they couldn’t take any chances. So they agreed to carry him away from Hawaii, knowing that if his story proved true, then he would be just the first of thousands of people who would soon attempt to flee the islands.
Elvis checked his position and fuel load and then turned the F-4X due west, right into the bath of red that was the setting sun. Besides carrying extra-large external fuel tanks, the long-range Phantom was also equipped with several recon cameras. It was only through experience and foresight that Elvis had arranged to have these devices loaded on before he left California for the trip to Hawaii.
Now, as he gazed into the setting sun through his heavily tinted helmet visor, he wondered if the impending disaster that Zim warned about actually lay out beyond the horizon. Or was he just carrying out some enormous joke.
Only time and a lot of miles would tell.
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Chapter Thirty-six
Aboard the USS New Jersey
Hunter took another sip from the leather-covered goblet and winced slightly as the bitter lager made its way down his throat.
The barely picked-over remains of the meal in front of him made him long for Dominique’s cooking-or even his own. Never had he tasted food so bland, so poorly cooked, or so frigging salty.
Still, he had eaten it-or, more accurately, he had moved the bits of potatoes, cabbage, and practically raw fish back and forth from one side of his plate to the other, while taking only the smallest judicious bites and thus giving the appearance of enjoying the meal.
It was necessary to be polite-of this he was sure. The other men around the table had attacked their chow with unmannered ferociousness, which led Hunter to suspect that this was, in fact, a special occasion, that possibly by his presence a more sumptuous repast had been laid on and the men were taking full advantage of it.
Or maybe they just didn’t mind eating slop. But if this was the case, it would still be one of the least unusual things about them.
The first few minutes after landing on the battleship had been riveting and uneasy. After all, the ship had just fired on him, and he had come quite close to launching an antiship missile into its bridge. The fact that the captain-the man everyone simply called Wolf-wore a matinee-213
idol mask only added to the strangeness of the moment.
Still, Wolf immediately requested that he joki him and his officers for his noon meal, and this before Hunter could even fully explain how he had come to discover the battleship by following the RPV.
But by that time, it almost seemed not to matter. Despite the man’s disguise, Hunter could almost see a definable psychic aura surrounding the mysterious Wolf. His own strong power of the sixth sense was telling him that this man also possessed intuitive powers. So it was almost as if the ship’s captain already knew why Hunter had come.
He was led to the huge dining room that served as the officers’ mess. Already there was Wolfs staff of fifteen officers, each one of them wearing a strange, almost comic-book-style navy uniform. After a few goblets full of the bitter ale were dispensed with, the lousy food had been laid on. Through it all Hunter searched in vain for a way to politely question Wolf and his men about what they were doing sailing around in a US Navy battleship, about their connection with the men controlling the RPV, and, most of all, what the hell was the story with Wolfs mask.
