Алистер Маклин: Red Alert

‘A patrol boat has already intercepted him near Lummus Island.’ The lieutenant stared at her, then shook his head slowly to himself. ‘You’ve been watching too much Miami Vice, sweetheart.’

‘I’m not your sweetheart,’ she snapped back.

‘A New Yorker; I should have guessed,’ he muttered and reached for her baseball cap.

‘You touch that and you’ll be in the water quicker than you can draw breath,’ she said icily.

‘I’d watch my tongue if I were you,’ he shot back, pointing a finger of warning at her. ‘What the hell were you doing? You could have got somebody killed at the Miamarina.’

‘I didn’t know they were armed,’ she replied defensively. ‘The yacht belongs to a friend of mine who happens to be out of town at the moment. What was I supposed to do? Ignore the fact that two men were acting suspiciously on board?’

‘You were supposed to call the police and let them handle it.’

‘I’ll bear it in mind next time, if I can find a policeman to call.’

‘I’ve got a good mind to book you.’

‘For what?’ she replied in amazement.

‘Making a citizen’s arrest? You guys must really be having trouble reaching your quota of collars for the month.’

Her bleeper sounded. She undipped it from the bottom half of her bikini and switched it off.

‘I need to call New York urgently.’

‘Don’t tell me, your boyfriend’s missing you,’ the lieutenant said sarcastically.

There was a ripple of laughter from the men around them. She bit back her anger.

‘If it’ll put your mind at rest, have one of your men radio through to police headquarters and check on the speedboat. The Port of Call . You’ll find it’s registered to George Carver, the former Democratic Congressman and Ambassador to Canada and the United Kingdom. He’s my father.’

The lieutenant gestured to the door behind her. ‘Make your call, but you’re going to have a lot of explaining to do before we’re through here.’

She let him lead the way to his cabin.

‘I’ll be waiting outside the door,’ he told her gruffly.

She closed the door behind her and crossed to the telephone on the desk. She dialled an unlisted number.

‘Llewelyn and Lee, good morning,’ a female voice answered politely after the first ring.

‘Sabrina Carver, 101730630,’ she said, quoting the number on her personnel dossier in Philpott’s office.

‘Hello, Sabrina, the Colonel wants to speak to you urgently. I’ll put you through.’

‘Thanks, Sarah.’

There was a click on the other end of the line.

‘Sabrina?’

‘Yes, sir,’ she replied, immediately recognizing Philpott’s crisp Celtic accent.

‘You’re on an immediate Code Red standby. There’s a ticket waiting for you at the Continental check-in counter. Your flight leaves in three hours. Briefing is scheduled for three-thirty this afternoon.’

She swore inwardly.

‘There’s a slight problem, sir,’ she said, and went on to tell him what had happened.

‘I’ll call Miami’s Chief of Police and have him clear things with this lieutenant. You say his name’s Grady?’

‘That’s what it says here,’ she replied, touching the nameplates on the desk.

‘Fine. See you later.’

The line went dead. She replaced the receiver and found Grady waiting in the corridor.

‘The Chief of Police?’ he said in amazement, when she had told him to expect the call.

‘Who are you?’

‘Just another New Yorker,’ she replied, touching her cap.

‘See you on deck.’

When he reemerged fifteen minutes later she was busy talking to a couple of the men about the intruder, who had already confessed to attempted theft. They saw it as an open and shut case.

‘You’re free to go,’ Grady told her, barely able to keep the contempt from his voice. ‘You’ll still need to testify in court.’

‘You know where to get hold of me, Lieutenant.’

Sabrina climbed back into the speedboat, untied the rope, then turned the boat around and headed back towards the Miamarina.

‘What I’d give for one date with her,’ one of the men muttered wistfully.

‘I know what your wife would give you,’ a voice piped up behind him.

The others laughed.

‘Okay, the fun’s over,’ Grady snapped.

‘Let’s get that damn jet ski out of the water before it drifts any further out to sea.’

Mike Graham’s first thought on hearing the gunshots had been for the safety of the small herd of white-tailed deer that lived in the forest near his log cabin on the banks of Lake Champlain in southern Vermont. He had spent his vacations watching them since moving from New York two years earlier and the idea of them being harmed both angered and horrified him. Arming himself with an M21 rifle and a powerful pair of Zeiss binoculars, he had set off in the direction from which the gunshots had originated. Not that he had needed to draw on any of his tracking experience to find the culprits. A ten-year-old could have followed the trail of empty beer cans. The two men were sitting against the side of a white jeep in a clearing by the lake, each with a beer in his hand. They were cooking a rabbit over a crudely constructed fire, occasionally turning it on a makeshift spit. He could smell the meat from where he lay. He could also smell the joint they were sharing.

Graham was a youthfully handsome 37-year-old with tousled collar-length auburn hair and penetrating pale blue eyes who kept himself in shape with a daily pre-dawn run followed by a gruelling workout in the converted mini-gym behind the cabin. His obsession with fitness dated back to his childhood in the Bronx when his only ambition was to wear the famous blue and white uniform of the New York Giants . His ambition was realized when he was signed up as a rookie quarterback after he graduated from CLA with a degree in Political Science. A month later he was drafted into Vietnam where a shoulder injury cut short his promising football career. He joined the CIA to help train Meo tribesmen in Thailand and on his return to the United States he was accepted by the elite anti-terrorist squad, Delta. He was promoted to leader of Squadron-B eleven years later and his first mission was to take a five-man team into Libya to destroy a known terrorist base on the outskirts of Benghazi. He was about to give the order to close in on the base when news reached him that his wife, Carrie, and son, Mike Jr, had been abducted outside their New York apartment by Arab-speaking gunmen. He refused to abort the mission and the base was destroyed. The FBI launched an intensive nationwide search but Carrie and Mike Jr were never found. He was retired from Delta at his own request three months later but was initially turned down for UNACO by the Secretary-General on the basis of his psychiatric report. Philpott personally overruled the Secretary-General’s decision and Graham was accepted as a UNACO field operative, subject to periodic reevaluation tests every year.

The older of the two men, who was wearing a peaked cap over his grey hair, tossed the joint into the fire then got to his feet and helped himself to another beer from the cooler on the passenger seat. He was about to sit down again when a movement caught his eye in the scrub behind the jeep. He tapped his blond-haired companion on the shoulder, gestured for him to be quiet, and pointed towards the scrub. The blond-haired man took a .300 Parker Hale from the back of the jeep, raised it to his shoulder and fired. He shouted in triumph and slapped his friend on the back.

‘You only hit it in the leg, Ray,’ the grey-haired man chided, then took another mouthful of beer.

‘Hell, that deer’s big enough to keep us in jerkey for the next year.’