Brett Halliday - At the Point of a. 38

Now came the difficult job of loading them one by one into the hearse. The Arabs stationed themselves at intervals. They could be seen from the beach, and it was important to hurry. One of their prisoners collapsed, and had to be lifted. Rashid saved Weinberger for last, and used two men to drive him. An absurd but somehow threatening figure in his flowered beach clothes, Weinberger looked at the guns, at the bathers throwing Frisbees on the sand, and climbed in without help.

“Shoot that one first if there’s trouble,” Rashid told a guard.

The two vehicles kept close together through the Collins Avenue traffic, and presently were crossing the causeway to Miami. It was 11:28. A textbook operation, swift and efficient.

They put on speed after reaching the expressway, but kept in the right-hand lane. They passed the international airport, a large graveyard and crematorium.

“They’re fools,” Fuad said suddenly. “And these people are millionaires? I didn’t expect them to disgust me so much. If you want to know my opinion, I wish it had been less simple.”

“There is more to come.”

“Who would suspect we are about to steal an airplane of the mighty United States Air Force? I predict it will go on being simple, easy and simple. And when we get back we will have difficulty persuading the women that we were ever in danger.”

And that, of course, called down the lightning.

The limousine blew up. Rashid’s first improbable thought was that it had run over a mine. The front end rose from the pavement, the trunk sprang open. They were travelling at eighty kilometers an hour. One wheel blew off, and rolled away into a tomato field, bowling down staked plants. Fuad, in the hearse, was riding his brake. The crippled limousine swerved, crossing in front of another rapidly moving car. Horn blaring, that car managed to squeeze through the gap between limousine and hearse. The limousine struck the divider and lost a second wheel. The long, shiny, ostentatious car bumped down and turned over, sliding on its side, rotating, for another fifty feet before it came to rest, on fire.

Rashid hadn’t been using his belt, and he was thrown forward against the unpadded dashboard. He was yelling. The brakes grabbed unevenly, taking the hearse onto the rough shoulder. For an instant, unaccustomed to the behavior of big cars under stress, Fuad lost command and nearly piled them up among the tomatoes. The hearse rocked and shook and came back, missing the wreck by millimeters.

“Gold did this!” Rashid yelled. “A bomb-”

He spun out of the hearse before it was completely at rest, yelling at Fuad to pull the hood-latch. The hearse had come about broadside to the traffic, blocking both lanes. Fuad was unable to understand. In mild shock, he stared ahead, gripping the wheel. Rashid hammered on the hood, then came back and punched him in the face through the open window.

Still Fuad couldn’t make himself understand what the leader wanted. Rashid pulled the door open and hunted for the inside latch. He yanked it. Running back, he found the outside release, and the hood snapped up, like an animal opening its jaws.

He was fighting panic. The immense engine was steaming and clicking. He had no time, absolutely no time at all. There were hundreds of tubes, wires, connections, coiling and doubling back. Then he saw a black cancerous growth taped to the fuel line as it came into the fuel pump from beneath. It was ticking faintly.

He scratched frantically at the tape with his fingernail, without finding the juncture. He tried to pull it loose, but merely endangered the fuel-line connection. Inside the lump, nearly concealed by the tape, he caught a glint of white plastic: some kind of small ball.

Fuad had finally released the steering wheel and come out of the hearse. He saw Rashid under the hood, struggling. His brain unfroze. An open knife jumped into his hand.

“Here.”

Rashid snatched it away and sawed through the tape. The device came free in his hand. Whirling in one quick motion, he flicked it away. If he had taken time to cock his arm, they would have been blown apart. He threw it like the plateshaped objects the Americans played with on the beach, and it went off in the air above the tomatoes. A cone of liquid flame poured to the ground.

The force of the blast tore the buttons off Rashid’s shirt and tumbled him into Fuad’s arms. One of the armed Arabs had jumped down from the rear of the hearse. Rashid shouted at him to stay where he was, and ran toward the wreck.

Two of the three Arabs had been thrown clear. Sayyid, the young student, lay huddled at the edge of the road, his clothing torn, without his gun, mumbling to himself in Arabic. The driver, nearby, was burning. Rashid tore off his own coat and beat out the flames. The third Arab was still in the limousine.

Rashid called for Solomon, the Jewish doctor, to look at the burned man. One look was enough.

“If you can get him to a hospital in five minutes, maybe,” Solomon said. “There’s one in Coral Gables. Otherwise no.”

“A hospital? Obviously not,” Rashid said. “Leave him.”

Michael Shayne was twelve minutes from Homestead Air Base.

Coddington drove, having the use of both arms. Shayne opened the phone and his operator tried once more to get into the police switchboards. They were still blocked. But she found Tim Rourke, still in the News city room. It was one minute before twelve, nearly an hour since the beginning of the Arab action.

“Have you heard anything out of the ordinary from the St. Albans?” Shayne said.

“You mean the call-girl killing?”

Blinking his lights, Coddington roared past a slow-moving pickup. Shayne talked for a moment, omitting Murray Gold and condensing the remainder of the story to a series of quick headlines.

“Mike, is this all true?”

“Yeah, believe me. I can’t get through to the cops. I think the Arabs are heading for Homestead, and I may be ahead of them. But not by much. I can’t take time to do any more phoning. You do it from Miami.”

“You want me to call the base and tell them Arab hijackers are heading their way? Who’s going to believe me? I don’t believe it myself yet.”

“Was that woman in the St. A. shot with a tommy gun?”

“That’s what they say, but Mike-”

“Hotel thieves don’t use tommy guns. You have to be very, very careful. You don’t have more than ten or eleven minutes. If the sirens all go off at once, those hostages are going to be murdered. That may happen anyway, but let’s see if we can avoid it.”

“Don’t worry about sirens. Remember Pearl Harbor, man. They didn’t believe anything was happening that day until it was all over.”

“I don’t know about the command structure. But get the commanding officer and don’t talk to anybody else.”

“It’s going to sound like a crank call. You don’t want the sirens. What do you want, sharpshooters?”

“To be ready, in case. It won’t be a frontal attack on the main gate. They’ve bought their way in. Somewhere, in one of the hangars, there’s a plane that’s fueled up and ready to fly. I’ll look for it. I want to be left absolutely alone.”

“Mike, this may not be the time for one-man heroics. You’ve got a broken arm.”

“I’ve got a helper, and I’m about to offer him combat pay. I’ll say this again. Don’t pass on the message unless you’re sure of your man. If they move too soon, the wrong people will die, and I could be included. If one of the hangars opens and a plane rolls out, I don’t want it to get off the ground. If it gets off the ground, I want them to be ready to shoot it down.”

“I’ll try,” Rourke said, still doubtful. “But in my experience with the air force, these things take more than ten minutes. Anything else?”