Twilight's Last Gleaming Page 3

  The Air Policeman froze.

  “I’ll splash your brains all over the walls,” Dell promised.

  The patriotic guard was willing to die to protect Viper Three from enemy saboteurs, but Dell—and the others whose escape the radio had reported—were common criminals and not Red raiders. They didn’t—couldn’t—threaten either “the Hole” or the United States. Still Dell was alone and the AP was beginning to calculate the odds when two more armed men entered. There was a beefy captain with a gunnysack in one hand and a regulation Air Force revolver in the other, and behind him a husky black sergeant who cradled a submachine gun in a manner that reflected considerable experience.

  “Cover him! It’s Dell!” the AP called out exultantly to the missile crew.

  The African American swung his machine gun, aimed it at the guard’s stomach.

  The guard gaped.

  “Meet Sergeant Willieboy Powell,” Dell invited. “Willieboy knows all about automatic weapons. I hear he was a fine Marine, decorated in Vietnam.”

  “A damn fine Marine,” Powell remembered aloud.

  It was difficult to tell whether the man with the machine gun was being proud or simply truthful. His voice was flat, controlled.

  One thing was clear, however. Dell was in command, and there was no glimmer of indecision in his large gray eyes. When the ex-SAC intelligence officer waved his .38, the muzzle moved only an inch—but the guard got the message. Move. The helpless Air Policeman stood up slowly, raised his hands and began to step away from the desk.

  Then he suddenly got his chance.

  Across the overheated room, the door to the adjacent kitchen opened to admit a cook carrying a metal pitcher of steaming coffee. The glances of the three convicts turned slightly with their weapons, and the alert, conscientious Air Policeman made a frantic grab for the carbine on the desk. He succeeded, just the way they do in the movies. He seized the gun, spun to fire—and then something went wrong with the script. He died.

  The window behind him disappeared as Falco’s machine gun erupted in one short terrible burst. The big .45-caliber slugs threw the corpse across the floor with the impact of a high-pressure steam hose. So awfully real and final that it was almost unreal, it was very ugly and very frightening. The cook with the aluminum pitcher stood rigid, his throat knotted and his eyes wide as he tried to cope with the coppery taste of terror in his mouth and the incredible shock. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. The training had made it clear that the attack would come in a salvo of ICBMs over the Arctic, and the multibillion-dollar Ballistic Missile Early Warning System would detect these rockets by excellent long-range radar and flash a warning to the SAC command post buried in that bunker near Omaha. Then the command post would alert Viper Three and all the other launch sites—at least twelve, perhaps fourteen minutes before the enemy assault hit the United States.

  It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.

  The cook stood there with the coffee vapors rising before his eyes, wholly uncertain of what was happening or what to do. He was only a twenty-year-old cook. This stunning savagery was beyond both his training and his experience, so he clutched the pitcher as if it were a cross or some other magic talisman and he hoped that he wouldn’t be killed too. He was still hoping a few seconds later when the other cook ran into the guard room, took in the situation in one look and raised his hands immediately.

  He was a born survivor.

  “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, Major!” he blurted.

  Dell considered, nodded, smiled.

  “See that? I’m still an officer to my old buddies in the 168th,” he mocked in oddly muted tones. “Still Major Dell—despite my domestic and legal problems.”

  The black man in the sergeant’s coveralls shrugged.

  “Do we really have time for that kind of creative dialogue?” Powell asked.

  Practical and intelligent as well as brave and tough, he had been a damn fine Marine all right.

  Dell smiled again, shook that perfect profile.

  “No, we don’t. You’re right, Willieboy,” he admitted calmly. “I’d rather hoped that a little wife-killing conviction wouldn’t affect the 168th’s loyalty to me,” he continued sardonically, “but we can go into that after we’ve completed Phase Three.”

  Phase One had been to penetrate the compound.

  Phase Two had been to capture the surface guardhouse.

  Phase Three of the Plan called for the seizure of the subterranean command capsule, “the Hole” and its instruments which lay behind a door that was four feet thick. There were elaborate alarm devices and an armed SAC Missile Combat Crew within Viper Three’s command capsule, and these wary, disciplined men operated under complex security procedures that had been developed and perfected during more than a decade of Cold War.

  Phase Three was, of course, impossible.

  4

  First things first.

  First, Harvey Schonbacher opened his sack, took out three sets of handcuffs stolen from the police station, turned the two cooks back to back and manacled their wrists together. He chained the right wrist of one to the left of the other, then reversed the process. After that, he removed their belts and lashed their ankles together in accord with Dell’s instructions. As the fat man was completing this, Hoxey and Falco entered the guardhouse—drenched, barefoot, beaming.

  “Beautiful, just beautiful,” the assassin said while he mopped his wet face with his left hand. His right still held the machine gun.

  Hoxey said nothing, nothing clearly audible. His lips were moving animatedly, however, and Dell was reasonably confident that he was intoning a prayer for the dead Air Policeman’s soul. For a moment, the former Deputy Intelligence Officer of the 168th was tempted to add a solemn “amen” to the lunatic’s litany but then decided that Hoxey was too unpredictable to risk it.

  “Nice shooting, Stud,” he said to Falco instead.

  The underworld professional flashed his broad Mediterranean grin, lots of good teeth, male pride and earthy peasant charm.

  “I sure saved your ass,” he agreed as he noticed the box of Kleenex on the desk. “That kid had plenty of guts and the way he dived for the carbine—well, he was going for the long ball. He’d have taken at least one of you with him,” Falco estimated.

  He pulled out fistful of the paper tissues—ten or twelve—and dried off most of his face. “Yeah, I saved your ass—your asses—all right,” he repeated in tones edged with good-humored complacency.

  “Done,” Schonbacher announced from across the room.

  He was breathing hard from the relatively modest exertion that had been required to bind two unarmed and unresisting cooks, Powell noticed. The pudgy rapist was in poor condition physically, Powell judged, and when he glanced across at Dell he saw that the ex-SAC officer had reached the same conclusion.

  “Not quite done, Harvey,” Dell responded, “but almost. We’ve got to gag them and put them out of sight—that closet over there would do—just in case someone might come by. A very remote possibility, I admit, but let’s not risk it. Let’s do a clean job.”

  “Cleanliness is next to Godliness, my Uncle Tom used to say,” announced the black man.

  Falco smiled, Dell nodded affably and “Deacon” Hoxey looked up in puzzled surprise. Hoxey didn’t have a very high opinion of black people, and this apparent show of piety on the part of Willieboy Powell came as an unexpected delight to the religious fanatic.

  Harvey Schonbacher was less impressed. “Your uncle was a preacher?” he challenged irritably.

  “No, a street cleaner.”

  Dell and Falco both chuckled, but Hoxey still wore that earnest, puzzled face. Harvey Schonbacher gagged the two prisoners with strips of cloth ripped from white kitchen aprons, opened the closet door and glared at Powell. The former Marine understood, helped bundle the cooks into the broom closet.

  “Good,” Dell rated their effort. “Now, Willieboy, would you please drive the wagon inside the fence? It could attract attention out there.”

  “Lock the gate too?”

  The man with the film star’s face—the man whom Montana newspapers and broadcasters had been describing as “the handsomest murderer ever imprisoned in the State Penitentiary Death House”—nodded. Powell thought ahead regularly and neatly, neatly and coolly and purposefully. He and Falco were the best—by far—Lawrence Dell computed, and he was counting on them.

  “Switch built into the gatepost—left gatepost—locks it electrically,” Dell explained.

  There was nothing remarkable about the fact that he knew such details, that he knew it all. As Deputy Intelligence Officer, he’d been in charge of launch-site security for the 168th and it had been his job to know it all. It was easy for him to learn, for he was a good student with an exceptional memory and a passion to know it all—all that counted anyway. Dell had all the poise and the brains and the nerve—the cool, the courage and the cunning—to win a general’s star eventually, the black man reflected as he walked out into the fog. A handsome, careful, clever WASP like Major Lawrence Dell could have gone all the way, Powell thought with only a trace of bitterness. Then the ex-Marine slid into the stolen wagon, drove the dark-blue Ford inside the electrified fence, closed the gate switch and re-entered the guardhouse with a pair of shoes in each hand.

  “You fellows might need these,” he said curtly.

  Falco and Hoxey thanked him for his consideration, but Dell merely smiled. Dell was the only one who realized that Willieboy Powell has spoken the literal truth. He hadn’t meant to be considerate or helpful at all—simply practical. He ran nobody’s errands, for he was nobody’s servant. Powell had thought—rationally—that these two men who were now and temporarily his allies might need their shoes, might do their share of the
work better if shod. If they did their best, his life and his future might be saved and that was all he cared about—all he had cared about for a long time.

  Dell could have told the others this, but that wouldn’t have been wise, for it might anger Powell. Instead, he said something else that was much safer.

  “Let’s eat,” he advised.

  A few minutes later, the five fugitives from the Death House sat munching thick ham-and-rye-bread sandwiches and drinking coffee. Hoxey was chewing abstractedly, faintly humming some almost tuneless hymn and nodding to the rhythm that sounded only in the private labyrinth of his mind. It was a psalm to God who had sent him into this strange place with these strange companions. Powell consumed his sandwich slowly and systematically, his eyes wandering to the windows every twenty seconds on “routine patrol.” Dell’s attention was focussed on his allies, for he knew how remote was the chance of anyone else visiting Viper Three on a morning such as this, and he found himself studying the gross way that fat Harvey Schonbacher was gorging himself. It seemed appropriate that the sex murderer should eat like some large swinish animal, for the homicidal pharmacist was a vicious hypocrite and sly sadist who represented most of what Dell detested. Back in the Death House. Dell had described his project—this project—as “the greatest crime in history,” and now it seemed unfortunate that anyone as gross, shifty and contemptible as Schonbacher should participate.

  Well, flabby Harvey Schonbacher didn’t matter that much.

  It was the mission that counted, Dell reminded himself. They had trained him to think that way, and now all those years of training were going to pay off in the next sixty minutes. This was going to be bigger than the Brink payroll theft or the British mail-train robbery or anything. Within the next hour, the five fugitives were going to do something that would make them internationally famous.

  Or dead.

  “Now pay attention,” Dell announced in that crisp clear voice he’d used at so many briefings, “because this is the last time I’m going over it. We’ve talked this operation backwards and forwards a hundred times, but now it’s for real. If you do exactly what I’ve told you—exactly—we can make it. On paper, this is a suicide mission. I say it isn’t—not for us. I say we can make it.”

  Falco nodded. He’d been on tricky jobs before, like that “hit” in Vegas or the time he’d gunned the government witness right on the steps of the U.S. Court House in Manhattan’s Foley Square. Willieboy Powell’s eyes narrowed, but he kept on eating.

  “Maybe nobody else in the world could make it,” Dell admitted. “Maybe the best Red Chinese commando team or the toughest Russian paratroop company couldn’t, but we can make it—and alive. Okay, take a look at this squawk box on the guard’s desk. First, Deacon will talk to the missile crew down in the capsule on this squawk box and he’ll tell them the new shift is here. He’ll give the names and the ranks they expect. Second, I’ll step up to the box and recite the code phrases we squeezed out of the replacement crew when we ambushed their station wagon.”

  “Why should Deacon talk to the capsule?” challenged Schonbacher.

  “Because he’s the only one of us who speaks with a Southern accent like that sergeant I choked outside,” Powell explained coolly.

  Falco nodded again. It made sense.

  “Willie’s right,” confirmed the former intelligence officer, “so let’s give it another run-through.”

  They rehearsed the routine four times before Dell was satisfied that Hoxey was letter perfect. The fact that the religious fanatic was a lunatic didn’t appear to interfere with his “country boy” cunning; in fact, he appeared to enjoy the role and was an impressively quick study. He had it all right the second time, didn’t waver when he was asked to repeat the lines twice more. Even Falco, who regarded Hoxey as a “Hick creep,” was impressed.

  “Good. Okay, here we go,” ordered Dell.

  Hoxey sat at the chair behind the dead guard’s desk, took the clipboard and watched Dell press down the switch on the intercom.

  “Attention, the Hole; attention, the Hole,” Marvin Hoxey repeated as he’d been drilled. “This is the guardroom. Security detail now processing replacement Missile Combat Crew 962-B reporting for duty. Names and ranks: Kincaid, Roger F., Captain and Crew Commander, and Witkin, Harry O., First Lieutenant.”

  The reply was almost instantaneous.

  “Affirmative, affirmative. Names and ranks check properly with those on our list. Please put Captain Kincaid on the box for the challenge,” the metallic voice of the capsule commander directed.

  As Lawrence Dell leaned forward, he wondered—for one moment—whether the genuine SAC crew had supplied the correct passwords when the convicts had hurt them so badly. Some dedicated men might be tricky despite the pain, but other very brave men might crack under the brutal beating and shock. Dell had to say the right things—all the right things and in the correct sequence—or the massive door to the capsule would remain closed and the commander of the Missile Combat Crew inside would sound the alarm. Red Indian. Red Indian was the SAC code phrase for an attempt to sabotage or seize a nuclear-weapons base, and that was what the commander would shout into the microphone as he punched the alarm button.

  Red Indian.

  That would do it all right.

  That would kill them all.

  At this moment—at every moment—there were two “alert platoons” of Air Police standing by in a “ready room” at Malmstrom Air Force Base. Malmstrom was the headquarters for the 168th, and it was precisely nineteen point seven miles from Viper Three. That was the distance from outer fence to outer fence. It was actually a bit more than twenty-two miles from the helicopter pad near the “ready room” to the front door of the guardhouse at Viper Three. They would come by helicopter, eager young men with automatic weapons and enormous motivation. Motivation—that was the armed forces’ synonym for a willingness to die so long as it was done purposefully and stylishly. The three twin-rotor helicopters that were always on the pad could be loaded and airborne in no more than four minutes, and in another thirteen the keen APs—all qualified as sharpshooters on the range each month—would be ringing the launch site and firing.

  Dell didn’t think about any of this.

  He didn’t have to.

  He knew it.

  He also knew that he couldn’t hesitate any longer now, and he couldn’t turn back either. This plan and this hole added up to their only chance.

  “Captain Kincaid here, requesting permission to come down,” he lied evenly.

  He didn’t smile meaningfully. A lot of vulgar people might have done that in this situation, but Dell, a worldly connoisseur of Marcello Mastroianni and Steve McQueen films, didn’t. He was much too tense.

  “Captain Kincaid, would you please present the security password?” the squawk box rumbled.

  “Bunker Hill.”

  “And?”

  “Yorktown,” Dell added.

  “Now the third part, please.”

  Fear.

  Terror.

  Harry Schonbacher was so frightened that he might vomit. Lawrence Dell could see it in his face, and he didn’t have to ask why. The missile crew they’d captured and beaten so brutally—no, tortured was a less mealymouthed description—hadn’t yielded up three parts to the security password. They’d given only two, Bunker Hill and Yorktown, and there was no way that anyone—not even a man as intelligent and cunning as Dell—could possibly guess the third.

  Powell and Falco exchanged glances, saying nothing to avoid distracting the man who’d masterminded the prison break and brought them this far. It was up to him, completely up to him. Their strength and weapons couldn’t help him now. They watched, saw his eyes swing to the United Air Lines calendar on the wall.

  “There is no third part,” the ex-major said firmly.

  “I’m sorry,” responded the crew commander in the capsule, “but I must insist on the third part.”

  Now Dell grinned.

  “There is no third part. I challenge you,” he said into the squawk box.

  There was a moment of silence.

  “All correct. You are correct,” announced the man some twenty yards below their feet. “We’ll be ready to switch the keys at oh-eight-twenty. Okay, Kincaid, you can come on down.”