The Striker Portfolio q-3 Read online

  That was silly of me.'

  'Yes.'

  They'd seen people flashing me. I'd been hoping a patrol-car would decide to pull me up about it and ask to see my papers.

  'Make for Sudstadt now.'

  The only other chance before we got there was when we were held up at some lights at the Stadtbibliothek. A policeman was hanging around. The exercise was easy enough: clip the wing of the car alongside and cause a jam and bring him across to deal with me. But I didn't trust them: they were pure German and therefore law-respecting but they or their group had finished Lovett and they might finish me with one in the spine and get out and run clear before a policeman could reach his holster. They might even chance a running duel in the street: the police sometimes open fire on running men and the papers usually call them 'gangsters' but now and then they're not gangsters at all; they're men caught in a bad spot somewhere between a high-level attempt to sabotage a summit meeting and the mechanics of the opposition lined-up against the idea. Men like these.

  Turn right in the square.'

  We began heading for one of the main industrial sections. There were some lights on in the Sprengel chocolate factory and the three-quarter moon silvered the parapets and sparked on the glass.

  One of them spoke quietly and the wet guttural laugh came again.

  'Through the gates just here.'

  I had to put the heads on. There were no lamps anywhere and the shadows flickered across the piled wreckage as we turned. They were stacked six-high: Volkswagen, Mercedes, Opel, Taunus, patches of rust-red and smoke-black, smashed glass and twisted axles and burst panelling. They'd been craned into orderly blocks with alleys between them.

  'Stop.'

  I put out the lights as if by habit because if there was anything to be done I wanted to start accommodating visually as soon as I could.

  'Stay where you are.'

  They got out and I sat waiting. I hadn't been brought here to talk, to be made to talk. It wasn't a rendezvous with anyone else. They must have meant what they said: I was to be beaten up and left incapacitated. In the flat light of the moon the wreckage looked like blocks of sculpting, monuments to the dead and the injured. The glass of a headlamp caught the light, an ever-burning flame. Did they assume I didn't know anything worth talking about, worth being made to talk about? They were right. The mission was in its first stage and all I knew so far was that it was a long drop from the fourth floor of the Carlsberg and that there was a girl in Hanover with too much pride to drink any vodka. The alleys between the blocks of wreckage were quite wide, the width of a mobile crane, and a running man would have to zig-zag like a forest hare: it wasn't much better than open ground. Whereas Lovett had known a lot: he'd even known there was one due to come down in the Westheim-Pfelberg-Nohlmundt area and they'd had to make him forget.

  The shadow of a hat was across the windscreen, a respectable trilby. They were standing still and listening to make sure no one would hear anything when they did it.

  The shadow moved, sliding across the glass.

  'You can get out of the car now.'

  A little ball of silver paper flashed away and bounced.

  He had a black rubber cosh in his hand, which I was expecting because it is the perfect instrument for paralysing the main joints with very little effort. The. other one was standing back with the Walther P38 trained on the driving-door. It was a cold night and we'd been travelling with the windows shut and the smell of almonds inside the car was sickly.

  'Come along, now. Get out.'

  Apart from the special tactics they show you at the Box of Squibs in Norfolk there are the routine exercises that most people know. The handbook is written in Basic Civil-Service and this chapter is headed: Taking Leave of a Stationary Vehicle While Under Menace of Fire-Arms. But the actual idea is sensible and can work if you're very quick so I leaned over and hit the handles of both doors at the same time and jack-knifed with my feet against the driving-door and kicked so hard that the door's inertia helped to send me backwards and out through the other side before it swung against them explosively and put them off their guard for several fractions of a second. Some people say you should leave the door shut while you go pitching out of the other one so that it makes a bullet-shield and there's a lot of point in that but for one thing they can shoo i through the window and for another thing the Norfolk Instructions are based on psychological rather than physical factors and the chief of these is the use of surprise.

  They'd expected me to emerge past a slowly opened door and in fact I was moving hard in the opposite direction and the door was bursting open against the hinge-stop with a lot of noise and up to a point it worked because the first two shots went into the seats and the third rang somewhere among the wreckage in front of me as I hunched over and started the zig-zag with my hands hitting out at the stuff on each side of the alley to help the momentum while the fourth hooked at my coat and the fifth smashed some glass near my head. He was playing it the best way, keeping still and taking steady aim instead of coming after me and firing wild. Another thing that worried me was that they had a gun each and it was no good counting on the basic limitations of the P38: it's a 9-mm Luger with eight shots and so far he'd only used five but there was a near-synchronized double report now as the other one started up.

  They were anxious by this time because I could hear them following but the moonlight was a help to me and a hazard to them: I wasn't doing anything that called for precision. All they'd done so far was to put one into the flesh, upper forearm. My left hand was sticky but only through hitting at the wreckage which had a lot of torn metal among it. I saw a blob on the ground and scooped it backwards and heard it smash against metal — it was a headlamp from one of the wrecks and it hadn't caught anyone in the face but it might have and you've got to try everything because people who get into a mortal situation and don't try everything are selling themselves short and that's what a lot of them die of.

  One was closer to me than the other. It would be the one with fan-teeth. He was thinner. He was running faster. Barbed wire, a sweep of headlights somewhere on the other side, a lamp as high as the moon: they were all I knew. And his pelting footsteps behind. I span at right-angles along the edge of the dump, along the barbed wire, trapped in the hare-track of the dump and the wire, my shadow flickering beside me, thrown by the tall lamp, beside me and slightly ahead of me across the sculpted facade of the wrecks, then he fired again and the bullet struck and droned on, deflected and struck again and rattled among the black metal carcasses-where I ran.

  An irrelevant consideration (human pride) was trying to get my attention, make me stop and swing round and go at them, but it was dangerous and the instincts knew it and went on pushing me forward. You don't need Norfolk Instructions to tell you: never run into a gun.

  Only one of them now. The thin one. His friend had stopped. He would be waiting somewhere at the other side of the dump to pick me off with a close calculated shot as soon as I came into range. It was no good going down there. The tall lamp swung as I turned again, then the instincts took over completely.

  Their reasoning was sound: it was a geometrical certainty that if I stayed in the maze of the wrecks I would catch a bullet in the spine or the face sooner or later, a second from now or a minute from now. The thin one wasn't firing as often as he should be: he had become a beater and he was trying to flush me straight into the other one's gun. He would do that, would be bound to do it, as long as I went on running.

  Headlights swept the wire again and I saw that it was close-rigged: four or five strands with six-inch gaps. The posts were angle-iron cut sharp at the top so I put one hand on the wire itself as near as I could to a post and went over the top with a shoe fouling and the wire dipping till I let go and dropped and tried to run and couldn't; my coat was caught by more than one barb and wrenching was no good and somewhere on the edge of the vision-field I noticed the flash as he fired again and came running on but you can get a coat off quickly if a l
ot depends on it and I was running again, running hard, my feet on the flat surface of tarmac.

  The headlights were Blinding but not too close. It was a vacuum horn, the kind that big trucks have. The tyres began dragging.

  Perhaps the thin one followed because he had only two shots left in the magazine or because my coat across the wire made it easy for him. But he must have been frightened, to take no heed at all. The orders were to beat me up, to kill me only if I gave trouble. There would be nothing in the orders to countenance my getting free. So he must have been frightened of them, the controllers, to do so desperate a thing.

  Or it was simple misjudgement. I knew there was time and I was clear across the road and lurching among frosted mole-hills when the big horn boomed again. Then there was the other sound, of something soft being hit, and I slowed my run, relaxing.

  Chapter Five — THE WIDOWMAKER

  It looked ugly on the ground.

  Ferris had called it adaptable, versatile, flexible, sophisticated. On the ground it looked humped, bow-legged, sinister, obscene. Sexual.

  Down here at Linsdorf they called it the Widowmaker.

  I had telephoned Ferris.

  The sun was directly behind it, a flat orange disc two diameters high in the mist It squatted there, black. Why sexual? I had to think about it.

  Ferris had ordered me down here to Linsdorf. Herr W. Martin Aviation psychologist attached to the Ministry's Accidents Investigation Branch. Walter: another name that could be English or German, whichever was the more convenient at any given time.

  Because the wings drooped. They were held spread open and drooped like the wings of a crow in the act of copulation. That was why.

  They were running the engine up. The kerosene haze darkened the sun, dirtied it.

  The pilot was walking across from the crew's quarters, clumsy in his boots and anti-g suit, his oxygen helmet dangling.

  Ferris had ordered me to Linsdorf for his own reasons. I didn't ask what they were. He was my director in the field.

  'I told you you should have picked something up in Firearms.'

  'I didn't need anything.'

  'What happened?'

  'We finished up playing "Last Across" and he cut it too fine.'

  'You could have avoided a situation like that if you'd had a — '

  'Oh for God's sake what do I want to shoot at them for? We want to send them to Parkis alive, don't we, so he can watch them do what Lazlo did after he'd bled them. Don't we?'

  The black haze smothered the sun's disc, fouling it. There wasn't much sound: the acoustic irradiation was spreading away from where I stood. Only half-visible, only half-audible, the plane existed and didn't exist. You could believe you imagined it, that it was something out of a hangover, a black tumour on the sun.

  'You don't have to be upset,' Ferris bad said.

  That's good.'

  I'd started out on a routine flush-and-follow exercise. Objective: find where they were based or who their contacts were and then signal Ferris like a good boy. I'd finished up without an overcoat and out of breath like a bloody fool. Of course there was no need to be upset.

  He wasn't too jolly himself. If I'd stopped one in the lung all he could have done was signal London and try to wipe up the mess.

  'You'd better get down to Linsdorf.'

  I asked him to tell the car-hire people to keep their shirt on till the police found an abandoned 250 SE. That was what he was for, that kind of thing.

  The pilot stood watching the plane, then suddenly turned round and trotted back to the crews' quarters and I thought: Surely he's not got the wind up already.

  After I'd talked to Ferris I went round to Avis and picked up another one for the drive down to Linsdorf: a good-looking N.S.U. RO-80, the one with the rotary engine. I couldn't resist it because it was an engine I'd never tried. London Accounts would put up a bleat: The type of motor-vehicle selected for routine transport in Hanover, West Germany, 1 November, appears excessively expensive in view of the fact that no Special-Uses form was filed in retrospect.

  The half-noise of the half-thing that stood there against the sun was dying away and I saw the silhouetted head of the flight mechanic prodding out of the cockpit looking for the pilot.

  Signal to London Accounts: Reference your observation concerning the hire of I N.S.U. RO-SO in Hanover. I would respectfully suggest you go and stuff your cucumber up the Old Kent Road, Then the pilot came trotting across from the crews' quarters again, calling something to one of the ground staff. The flight mechanic climbed down from the plane and the pilot checked his report sheet and nodded and swung up and the mechanic passed him his helmet. The sun was clear now and beginning to dazzle.

  Of course you can pick up a 260 k.p.h. Lamborghini and file a Special-Uses application in retrospect on the grounds that you'd had to chase someone in a Concorde before it got airborne. They'll believe anything: all they understand are the mechanics of parsimony.

  The chocks were away and the thing was turning. It looked even worse broadside on with the wings flexing to every bump in the ground. I'd only seen them in the air before, once through the binoculars over Westheim and once at Farnborough Air Show eleven months ago: there'd been three of them and they'd looked pretty enough with the R.A.F. roundels and polished-metal finish and everyone cheering like mad. That was before they'd started dropping out of the sky all over Germany.

  The N.S.U. wasn't the only thing. I couldn't go back for my stuff at the Carlsberg or they'd have made sure of me with a distance-shot so I'd bought the bare necessities at a supermarket on the edge of Am Kropcke — toothbrush, shaving-gear, so forth — but I'd gone to town on the overcoat: it was a sheepskin job and a perfect fit except where the bandage was, right upper fore-arm. High collar and full lapels and extra length, right down over the bum and beautifully warm. It was a pleasure to stand here inside it watching that bloody aeroplane. The type of overcoat selected for winter wear in Hanover, West Germany… Cucumbers.

  He was rolling faster and turning towards the end of the runway with the wings rising and falling and the recognition lamps winking, easier to see now because the sun wasn't behind him any more, then he was gunning up on tower permission and rolling again with the wings lifting and holding and the power piling on and the wake of dark gas streaming behind and then he was airborne so fast that the legs were folding before he came abreast of where I stood on the perimeter road already craning my neck. The sound hit me with a kind of protracted slam and indicated better than anything else that a mass of ten tons was being pulled upwards at forty-five degrees through an element that wouldn't support a feather.

  He made one circuit and was lost within nine seconds. The airbase couldn't have been in his track because there was no sonic boom as I walked round the perimeter to the main buildings. The sky was totally silent.

  They were stowing the chocks in the bay.

  'Why did the pilot run back?'

  'Who are you?'

  'Martin, British A.I.B. group.'

  'Have you shown your papers to Security?'

  'I couldn't be here if I hadn't.' '

  'You must ask the Herr-Direktor of Operations.'

  I went on towards the hangars. There was a pilot pumping up his bicycle outside the crews' quarters.

  'It was a nice take-off.'

  'What?'

  'I was watching his take-off. Very neat.' I didn't know their slang: it wouldn't be in any dictionary. The correct use of slang is like an accepted accent and can open doors that are shut to printed credentials.

  He laughed briefly, undoing the pump and stowing the extension. 'Oh, they go up all right.' He was older than a boy and younger than a man, notably handsome, careful in his movements and speech.. The strain marking this face would show on all of them: it was part of their identity.

  'Did he forget something?'

  'Who?'

  The chap who's just taken off.'

  He clipped the pump back and looked at me uncertainly. 'What
like? I'm sorry — I don't seem to be quite with you.'

  The pilot ran back for something. I was worried.'

  He laughed again. 'We're all worried. No, he'd only forgotten his sea-horse. He often does that.'

  The Striker was in the circuit again, much higher, much wider. We heard it faintly.

  'I suppose he won't fly without it.'

  'Never.'

  He was wondering who I was. I asked him:

  'What do you use, yourself?'

  'Women.' The laugh was the same: part-nervous, part-cynical. 'I don't take them up with me but they're quite a tranquillizer.'

  What would they dig out of the mess of alloy and blood and fibreglass and bone in the crater at Westheim: St Christopher, a rabbit's foot?

  'My name's Martin.'

  'Rohmhild.' His feet came together. 'Are you English?'

  'Yes. Aviation psychologist.'

  'Another one?' He corrected himself quickly. 'Maybe you're the one we've been waiting for.'

  It looked as if a ton of grey lump-sugar had been tipped across the hangar floor in the chance shape of an aeroplane.

  There were only six people working on it. The place was enormous, a tin cathedral, and cold. The heaters were on and it was less cold than outside by a few degrees. The cost of the heaters would probably have kept the whole squadron airborne for a week. The winter sun was up but it was brighter inside the hangar: lamps hung in focussed clusters from the gantries, their glare emphasizing the silence. Despite the movement of six men there was a mortuary stillness here.

  'You know anything about orchids?'

  One of the small doors at the side of the hangar came open and I looked across to see who it was. The survivor, the one with the wet guttural laugh, might be sent down here to look for me. I'd come to Hanover to see Lovett and Lovett had known when the next one would crash so they might think it natural for me to move out to Linsdorf and take it from there. So I wanted to know who people were when they came towards me.

  'Not much,' I said.

  This was Philpott, leading the A.I.B. group. I'd been here for an hour and all he liked talking about was orchids.