Maracaibo Mission, page 1
Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
DEDICATION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1965 by Van Wyck Mason.
DEDICATION
To these dear friends and neighbors John and Doris Winterbotham with all affection.
CHAPTER ONE
1
The conchs of Key West might not appreciate the comparison, but their weather resembles Southern California’s in at least one respect. When it’s bad, it’s unusual. Ordinarily in early June the sun blankets Key West with beguiling warmth. The turtles, having laid their eggs, lumber along in satisfaction. The conchs, having stolen and eaten the eggs, also lumber in satisfaction. Hotel owners, filling their rooms with tourists, sigh in contentment. Tourists, filling the rooms with cigarette burns and whiskey stains, are also contented.
Usually in early June everyone is pleased because the weather is so pleasing. The sky is blue, the air dry, the spirit vibrant.
But at ten o’clock on the evening of this particular June 3, Colonel Hugh North, U. S. Army Intelligence, found the weather most unusual for Key West; the island was fairly swimming in rain. The sky was torn by lightning and the ear assaulted by thunder.
“Perfect for this sort of thing!” small, slightly hunched Dr. Maury Plack bellowed through the downpour. “Marvelous place!”
Hugh North, tall and lean, replied with a grunt of disinterest. His strong body leaned easily into the stiff wind, each stride matching two of his companion’s. Water sluiced off their shiny black slickers and bubbled in the soft ground at their feet.
“When these fronts whip through, we get fine cover for our show,” the little man yelled. “Everybody thinks nature is playing.” Dr. Plack seemed oblivious to the intensity of the storm. His eyes glistened with excitement as his pitty-patty steps guided them through the wet darkness. He grabbed North’s arm, pulled him into a concrete blockhouse, and slammed the door against the driving rain.
“Beautiful night,” he enthused. “Just beautiful, my friend. We have an occluded front with high electrostatic activity. Key West is simply grand under these conditions, isn’t it?”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” the G-2 man murmured. “If it doesn’t clear by sunup, there’ll be no tuna run.”
“Tuna run?” The hunched man was momentarily puzzled. “Oh, fishing.” He laughed in a voice North considered a shade too shrill. “You’ll have weather enough for that, all right. This’ll all be over in an hour. But I think our show will put fishing out of your mind for a while, my friend. Indeed it will.”
The Colonel doubted that. He had come to Conchtown for sun, sand, and tuna, not to be dragged into the damp for some unexplained tomfoolery. It wasn’t the weather that bothered him—not after the Far East typhoons he had lived through. It was the haziness of the circumstances under which he had arrived at the blockhouse; North didn’t like mysteries when it was he who was mystified.
As they removed their foul-weather gear, he regarded Plack closely for the first time. The doctor had a thick shock of white-yellowish hair that looked electrified. Below this luxuriant mass sat a face of keen intelligence. Hugh had to admit that. The eyes darted, seeming to look for something new in every glance, and his lips pursed constantly in thought. He was a man who probably addressed everyone as his friend but had time for few.
As the G-2 colonel waited, Dr. Plack switched on a small lamp that gave off a glow and no more. He turned to a large, square metal box with dials across its front surface.
“Mr. North—” He paused. “I suppose the Mister is out of place. I presume you’re some kind of military man. But I won’t ask you that. It’s none of my business, and besides I don’t care.”
In addition to everything else, he had a booming capacity for irritating Hugh North.
“This is all I care about, my friend.” He patted the apparatus as if he were burping a baby. “The people who finance my work told me you’d like to see how it operates, and that’s why you’re here.”
North lit a cigarette and said nothing. His commanding officer would not have approved of his saying what he thought.
“Now I’m not going to explain any of this very deeply,” Dr. Plack said. “I doubt you would understand it anyway. Come over here.” He led North to a slit in the blockhouse wall and touched a switch beside it. Immediately, a clear area about a quarter of a mile ahead of the structure was brilliantly illuminated despite the heavy rain. As Hugh stared out he could see, in the center of the spotlight’s circle, a cross-sparred steel tower about one hundred feet high, broadly based and tapering at the top.
“An oil derrick,” he said. “What’s an oil derrick doing on the Key West Naval Station?”
Dr. Plack gurgled. “I haven’t the slightest idea, my friend. They’re simply put up for me to play with. I don’t care what they put there, so long as they’re useful.”
“What do you mean, they’re put up? There’s only one.”
“But there have been others. They put them up and I knock them down. You must be an important man, Mr. North. I knocked one down only last week, and they erected another over the weekend. Just for you. Why, I really don’t know.”
Click. Pieces fell into place for the G-2 agent. Something big was up, all right. Plack was a scientific man on a strictly need-to-know basis. He had a value and what that value was not even the good doctor knew, of course. Instantly, North dismissed his resentment, and his irritation toward the scientist, too. This was business, and in this business you were neutral toward people, at least until they stopped being neutral toward you.
“O.K.,” he said. “Let’s see your show.”
Dr. Plack snapped off the bright searchlight but through the slit North still saw an after-image of the tower. Then its outline appeared in sharp relief as lightning crackled through the sky. Dr. Plack, at the controls of his apparatus, laughed. “That’s not our product. It’s somebody else’s.” He adjusted his dials, checked some figures in a battered notebook, then made more adjustments. “We’re ready, Mr. North. Watch the horizon to your left.”
North gazed into the murk, picking up the skyline only on lightning streaks. Their flashing was so closely spaced, though, that he had no trouble establishing his target. Suddenly it came—first as a dim glow, then as a sharply shaped ball. Small, then larger as it approached. North felt let down. “Ball lightning,” he said flatly. “I’ve seen it in the Himalayas. Is that your show?”
Dr. Plack chortled. “Very good, my friend. Very good. I usually get complete, utter ignoramuses. What else do you know about ball lightning?”
North reached into the distant corners of his memory and extracted a set of miscellaneous scraps. “The Germans call it the Kugelblitz. It’s been differentiated from St. Elmo’s Fire on the masts of ships at sea. Not the same thing at all. It appears during or just after thunderstorms. It’s not common but not so rare, either. It forms only under certain conditions. That’s all I know.”
“Splendid!” Dr. Plack roared. “That’s all you need to know. Isn’t nature grand?”
North remained silent, watching the ball grow in size and intensity. It had been orange-brown, but now seemed to be blue tinged with white. It dipped and bounced as it moved toward them. He squinted and calculated its diameter as roughly five feet.
“I asked you, Mr. North, isn’t nature grand?”
“Yes, yes,” Hugh replied. “Nature is grand.”
“But so are we,” replied Dr. Plack. “Nature did not make that fireball, my friend. I made it.”
North swung around. Had G-2 been taken in by a man with a loose screw? Was he back in a Saturday matinee watching the nutty scientist chain the beautiful girl to a torture rack? Would the door burst open and the hero charge in now? But no. G-2 was not easily fooled. Plack, for all his fervor, was obviously sane. He was scanning a small, round screen which North recognized as the image carrier of a short-range radar.
“I’m going to take the doubt out of your mind, my friend,” he announced. “Keep your eyes on the Kugelblitz. The instant you call out, I’ll extinguish it. You say when.”
Hugh turned back to the slit and stared out. For no particular reason, he counted to twenty-seven, then snapped, “Now!”
Behind him, Dr. Plack flicked a switch and, before the Colonel’s eyes, the fireball’s glow increased to an almost blinding brightness, then disappeared with a loud crack. “Now back to the horizon!” the scientist shouted. “Watch another one form!” And sure enough, in a few seconds a ball of light appeared and, as before, bobbed and danced toward them.
Without turning, North said quietly, “Don’t bother to prove anything else, Doctor. I’m convinced. Let’s get on with it.”
“We shall, my friend.” With that, the fireball moved steadily toward them until it was close enough to light up the metal tower. Shimmering in the rain, it advanced on the derrick and hovered just above it. He coul
Dr. Plack clucked softly. “They’ll just have to build me another, won’t they? Well, Mr. North, what do you think of Plack’s lightning show? You can’t have as much fun with tuna, can you now, my friend?”
2
Colonel Hugh North was silent and reflective as he sat beside Dr. Plack on the way back from the U. S. Naval Station. Gone was the lackadaisical air with which he had started this day in Key West—gone were the lazy movements of a relaxing vacationer. Still startled by the wizardry he had just witnessed, he was aware that an assignment was only hours, perhaps minutes, away. This show had been no mere benefit performance. And yet, what could he do in the science-magic department? Electronics was not his brew—that was for people like this zany Dr. Plack, who could imitate one of nature’s most powerful forces.
He leaned back and reviewed the events of the past couple of hours. He had been at case in the dining room of the venerable Casa Marina, topping off a magnificent loggerhead turtle steak with a cacao, when the waiter handed him a telegram. Since he recognized it instantly as a coded message, a signal blinked in his mind, a flash of intuition that warned: end of vacation.
It had all been too good to last, he thought, this brief reward for a delicate assignment in Africa, where he had yanked the Central Intelligence Agency’s chestnuts out of a Red political inferno.
Upon being decoded, the telegram contained no specific assignment, no marching orders. “Suggest you take in Plack’s show while you’re down there,” it had said. He’d known nothing of Dr. Plack or his lightning show and would have cared less—except that suggestions signed by “Ronald” were taken as instructions. “Ronald” was none other than Lieutenant General R. D. Armiston, presently Chief of G-2, General Staff Corps.
Moments later in North’s surfside suite, Dr. Maury Plack’s grating voice had announced over the telephone that he would pick up the Colonel within five minutes. North had slipped on a light linen jacket and had glanced wistfully at a copy of Game Fish of the World lying open on his bed, opened to a picture of the blue-finned thunnus thynnus. He had dreamed of himself in the deck chair of the Conch, leisurely working his way through bottles of beer and sardines with French mustard on crackers, while Cap’n Ben maneuvered his sports cruiser along the outer edge of the Gulf Stream. He even had pictured himself feeding a twenty-nine-thread line to those blue torpedoes of the Atlantic and feeling a two-hundred pounder start his sounding run for deep water at the drop-off. Only a tuna, he had mused, or the right woman at the right time could challenge you that way... He caught himself, swallowed his dismay and hurried downstairs.
“Thin stuff started rolling in an hour ago,” the wizened, round-shouldered, stooped Dr. Plack had said in the car. “Plenty of cumulo-nimbus behind it. Wind coming up nicely, too. See those banyan shoots sway? Everything should be dandy by the time we arrive.”
By the time they arrived, it was raining nothing less than pelts and hides.
Although the bosun’s mate at the wheel of a Navy gray-blue Sedan bounced them along with confidence, North could barely make out the commandant’s rambling quarters through the rain as they whipped by. It was the place President Truman had made famous as the “Winter White House” back in the 1940s. They donned slickers in a shed, then walked, or swam, to the blockhouse from which he had witnessed Dr. Plack’s magic show.
Now, two hours later, as the Navy car swept back up the long, coco-palmed drive to the gabled Casa Marina, Dr. Plack broke into the Colonel’s reverie. “My friend,” he said, “I’d like to claim that I made the weather, too, but that was happy coincidence. Covered us nicely. I am a good weather forecaster, though. Take it from me, it’ll stop raining within five minutes.”
Four minutes later, as Hugh strolled along the sand before the Casa Marina, the rain ended abruptly. Steam rose from the beach as heat quickly evaporated the moisture on it. The G-2 operative lit a cigarette and looked up into a star-filled sky.
He felt the expectable tightening of his entire body. No matter how many escapades he undertook, the tautness never failed to appear. It was an involuntary preparation for what inevitably lay ahead. He liked the feeling of slight chill that gradually took up the slack from his toes to his brain. Inhaling deeply, he turned and stared at the pounding ocean, ruminating on the shape he was in after so many grindings.
He had been all but skinned alive in his time, yet somehow he had been spared permanent injury. The paper-thin scar on his cheek was almost obscure even if his torso did resemble the handiwork of a knife thrower gone berserk. He had stopped a few bullets, all of which had been neatly removed. He had been slashed, plenty of times—only to be patched up by experts. He had been slugged unmercifully but nature and time salved such wounds. Altogether, luck had traveled with him, and tip-top health hadn’t hurt the odds. His close-cropped hair was the original brown-black issue except for a scattering of gray above his ears. His chiseled chin had recovered remarkably well first from an encounter with a tire iron and then with a plastic surgeon. His hands were as hard as hickory, even if a few of the knuckles no longer were perfectly shaped.
But if anything about Hugh North particularly had improved with experience, it was his mind. He’d long ago rid himself of romantic notions about G-2. Derring-do made rousing, inaccurate Hollywood scripts but caused quiet funerals for real intelligence agents.
Hugh sighed cheerfully and surveyed the hotel again. He liked the whole deal and he got a lot of satisfaction out of his contribut—
His roving eyes stopped at the corner suite, third floor east. He had switched off the bed lamp, hadn’t he? Definitely he preferred to enter dark rooms.
He kicked white sand over his cigarette butt and vaulted lightly over the low parapet separating the beach from the walk before the hotel. Entering the lobby, he observed no one but a dozing clerk who wouldn’t have noticed Hannibal crossing the lobby with elephants. Hugh confirmed this by moving quietly across to the front desk and slapping the bell violently. The clerk opened one eye, closed it again, and said, “Yes, sir, a room?”
“I have a room. Have you sent anyone up to it?”
The clerk came awake. “Oh, no, sir. We don’t do that sort of thing here. This is a respectable place. No offense, sir.” He stammered. “I m-mean, if you m-mean...”
“Forget it. Any messages for 313?”
There was one. North took the envelope and entered the elevator. “You let anyone into 313?” he asked the operator, who appeared only slightly more alert than the desk clerk.
“No, sir,” he said. “We don’t do that sort of thing—”
“Skip it.” He opened the envelope and scanned the sheet inside, laughed softly, then relaxed. The operator pulled the door open at the third floor, regarded him as someone to warn the management about, then watched the guest’s tall and sinewy figure move off down the corridor.
North turned the key of 313, opened the door and, pausing outside, said pleasantly, “I wouldn’t do anything suddenly, Major. I’m one of Uncle Ronald’s lads.”
Major Grant Gordon, aide to General Ronald D. Armiston, stepped from behind the door, at the same time lowered his gun. “Hello, Colonel. Can’t ever be too sure of who picks up messages.”
“Right. Did you find the scotch?”
“Certainly, Colonel, and much obliged. When do you think hotels will install locks instead of toys on the doors?”
North grinned. “What difference would that make? You, Grant, could go through Fort Knox without a key. Well, what’s it all about?”
The Major checked his watch. “Time, first of all. I’m afraid you’ll have to check out at once, sir. I’ll brief you on the way.” Without comment North opened a closet door and yanked his clothes out. As he snugged Game Fish of the World into a corner of his bag, Major Gordon settled into a deep chair, closed his eyes and immediately went to sleep. Hugh smiled. Like himself, the Major evidently had perfected the knack of snatching repose no matter how brief. Without mastering that trick, an operative would soon collapse in this line of work.
