Джон Болл - The First Team

Admiral Haymarket pursed his lips and leaned back in his chair to think that one over. The possibility of a bluff was immediately obvious to both men; so also was the fact that Rostovitch would be unlikely to volunteer a statement from which he might have to back down later on. Both men also knew that despite Canada’s official neutrality, the enemy had been conducting intensive search activities by air over much of the northern Arctic under the guise of weather reconnaissance. And there were remarkable detection devices still highly classified in what had been the American arsenal, devices which could well have been independently developed or, more likely, compromised by espionage.

The admiral sent for General Gifford, Colonel Prichard, and Major Pappas.

“We have a new can of worms,” he told them when they had assembled. He painted the picture exactly as Ed Higbee had given it to him. When he had done so, he turned to Pappas first. “When are we due for a communication from Commander Nakamura?” Pappas shook his head. “In order to insure minimum risk, sir, no contacts whatever are scheduled. But we can query.”

The general shook his head at that. “Precisely what they would like to have us do, I suspect,” he said. “That is, if Rostovitch is bluffing.”

The admiral passed a hand across his face, blinked his eyes to dispel his sustained fatigue, “Quote the odds,” he invited.

Pappas, the human calculator, was the one to answer that and he responded. “Sixty per cent bluff, forty per cent truth based on present data.”

“Hank?”

Colonel Prichard was ready. “I’ll concur with that for the time being. It’s close enough to an even split to cause us concern, that’s for sure.”

“Which opens the possibility that Hewlitt was fed the information and then allowed to break loose,” the admiral said. “That would explain his supposedly outmaneuvering Rostovitch. To the best of my knowledge Walt Wagner is the only man who has ever taken his measure before, and it wasn’t easy.”

“Make it sixty-five, thirty-five on the strength of that,” Pappas contributed. “I have one recommendation, sir. Whatever we do, no request for a report from Magsaysay. I’ll give you one hundred per cent that they’ve got every detection and listening device that they have trained continuously, waiting for her to break silence. And they’ll read her out, position and all.”

“Agreed,” the general added.

“Do we gamble?” the admiral asked.

When it was silent for a few moments Ed Higbee realized that the question was mainly for him. He had his answer ready. “If we don’t, we’re dead.”

“What about Counterweight?”

Higbee had to think before he was ready to commit himself on that. It took him a good fifteen seconds. “I think, Barney,” he said at last, “messy as it may be, we’ve got to do it. We’ve just landed a punch; it’s time for another.”

“How soon?”

“Right now. We’re still cocked?”

Admiral Haymarket smiled grimly. “We are. I concur. Pass the word to activate. How long will it take?”

Pappas, as usual, had the answer where scheduling was concerned. “It should be all over in two hours, sir.” The words were plain enough, but there was a grim decisiveness behind them.

The admiral drummed his fingers for two or three seconds on his desk. “Tell Colonel Durham,” he directed. “This is one time I want the chaplain in; we can use all of the help we can get.”

The man who called himself Carlo was blessed with his own form of protective coloration. He was short and dumpy. His face was undistinguished except for his eyes, which were small and hyperactive; he was always looking about him to detect what was going on, like an animal forced to exist in a hostile environment. Constant suspicion was part of his stock in trade; he could trust no one and by keeping that fact constantly in his mind he continued to survive. The only joy he found in life was in his work; he was a professional assassin and he liked to kill.

As he sat in his security office he waited, as he had waited more or less patiently for weeks, for his next assignment. The same lack of normal emotion which made him an efficient death machine kept him from being bored; he did what he was told and collected his pay — if he had any other concerns he kept them to himself. He had managed to make himself comfortable in the United States of America because his needs were few and public approbation was not one of them. He had enough men assigned to him to meet his requirements and, although he did not trust them, he knew that they were competent. He did not practice because his skills had long ago been developed to a very high point and they remained there. He would respond when called upon; until then he was content.

His working room had a simple desk which he did not need, but it was a status symbol and he made use of it in a casual way. He was seated behind it, looking about the room he had carefully inspected thousands of times before, when the door was violently flung open and he found himself looking directly into the barrel of a gun.

Like a cat awakened from sleep, he was transformed into combat tension within the fraction of a second. Then he saw the face of the man who held the gun and he saw death. It was a face that belonged to someone as unyielding and trained as himself — the eyes told him that.

Carlo did not move; it was the first step of his counterattack. If he tried for his own weapon it would trigger the tense man in the doorway, but doing nothing might throw him a hair off-stride. His own eyes were fixed now, for a hair was all that he needed — he had seen the ends of guns before.

The man with the weapon motioned him to rise. Carefully Carlo did so. He knew every angle of the room, the exact position of every object that it contained; his opponent did not. He stood by his desk, deliberately looking helpless, as lethal as a poised cobra.

The man motioned him to come forward. He responded at exactly the right pace, and recalculated when the man with the gun retreated a step or two to keep him at a safe distance. He entered the hallway and turned right as he was silently directed. Then he walked slowly ahead, listening intently to the sounds behind him. There was a corner coming, and that would be his first point of defense.

When he reached it and turned, another man, and another gun confronted him. No one man armed with a single weapon could take him out of a building, but two, one in front and one behind, was another matter. But when they were in a single straight line, neither of the men opposing him could fire without the risk of hitting his partner. Like a computer he continuously remeasured the odds and every step that he took was a conscious decision.

The silent men who had taken possession of him were trained too — highly trained. Carlo obeyed them, second by second, and kept up the appearance of a bewildered, middle-aged man of no athletic capability whatsoever. In the past that deceptive demeanor had cost several other men their lives.

Then he became aware that there were more and he knew that they were a team. They were skilled and they had been sent, as he had been many times sent, and he knew that it was not all for him. His men were together in one room and there was no way that he could warn them — not without paying with his own life, and he had no intention whatever of doing that. His best hope now was that he was wanted for questioning, that they would try and detain him, keeping him alive in the meanwhile. That had been tried before, too, by people who had not known Carlo and by one or two who had, but the result had been the same in every case: they had not been able to hold him and he had left dead behind him when he had made his escape.