Paul Kavanagh - Such Men Are Dangerous

“Major Walker himself,” O’Gara said. “John Walker.”

“None other.”

“I used to know a bottle by that name. Do they call you Red Label, by any chance?”

“Sounds subversive. Now Black Label, that’s something else again. If you old soldiers would care to pursue the matter, there’s a research center just this side of town that I could recommend—”

We went to a roadhouse together and did some fairly serious drinking. When I came back from the John one time my glass was a little sticky in spots with what I guessed was scotch tape residue; now they would have some prints to compare with their photograph of my ID. According to George, it wouldn’t matter if they sent the prints to Washington. I hoped they wouldn’t bother.

With that out of the way, we all three relaxed and made a day out of it. We went to another place for a late lunch and then returned to the first roadhouse and sat drinking until the crowd from the base arrived around the dinner hour. I got the impression that they didn’t have anything resembling final orders yet, so I didn’t bother pumping them very hard. They seemed interested in learning the final destination of the weapons, but I was vague on that score, so they gathered either that I didn’t know or that I wouldn’t tell, whereupon they let go of it. They were pretty decent types, especially O’Gara, who had an unusually dry sense of humor for a career officer. Bourke ran a little closer to type, but was still good company.

I had to drink a little heavier than I wanted to, but I stayed on top of the liquor. I left them around six-thirty, stopped in town to send George a prearranged telegram, then went back to the motel.

Something woke me before sunrise Sunday, a backfiring track or a bad dream. I got dressed and went out. The snow that had held off for a few days was coming down again, and according to the car radio it would do so for a long while. I ate breakfast and drank a lot of coffee, then went back to the motel. I didn’t stay there long, though, because I had the feeling that Bourke and O’Gara might pay a call, and I didn’t want to see them now. I got back in the car and went out to look things over.

I drove to the base, then went on past it, tracing the route the four tracks would take from Fort Tree south. It was only a fifteen-mile stretch, but with the snow coming down hard it took me the better part of two hours to ran the length of it and back. In all that time, I only saw two other cars, both of them civilian. The day and hour may have had something to do with it, of course. We couldn’t count on the traffic being that light during the week.

The countryside itself was flat and barren in all directions, large farms and open fields. The view would probably have been monotonous enough under any circumstances, but with snow everywhere there was really nothing at all to look at. Now and then a farmhouse or barn broke the barren whiteness of the view.

I drove to the end and back, stopping periodically to check my mileage and make notes of likely spots. If we were going to take the tracks, we had to pick our spot carefully. We needed a stretch of several hundred yards away from houses and side roads, a spot where we could make the touch without being seen, a spot we could seal to traffic easily and effectively. I found three possibilities on the way out and eliminated one of them on the way back.

That left two, and either one was better than I’d expected and a little less than I’d hoped for. They were 4.3 and 11.2 miles from the base, which meant that one was too close to the beginning of the run and the other too close to the end. My third choice had been ideal in that respect, right smack in the middle, but on the way back I had noticed a secondary road that fed right into it at its midpoint, and that seemed enough to rule it out.

In the motel room, I used my notes and my memory to rough out a map of the fifteen-mile route. I drew it to scale and noted all the landmarks I could remember in the areas of the two ambush sites. I played with the map for an hour or so. When it stopped snowing I went out in the car again and had another look at the route. This time I stopped at every access road and filled it in on the map. I also added as many of the houses and barns as possible, redrafted to show bends and curves in the road, and made other notations for contour. This last was hardly worth the trouble. The ground was so flat that dips in the road hardly entered into things at all. To the west, on the other side of the Missouri, were the Black Hills and the Badlands and all of that. But here everything was flat.

I went to a bar that night but couldn’t relax at all. My mind was on the two ambush sites and I couldn’t turn it off. I went back to the motel and dragged out the map again, bouncing a variety of plan elements off it, seeing what would work and what wouldn’t, trying to guess in advance the elements we hadn’t allowed for.

It was a waste of time, but there was time to waste and my mind wouldn’t stay focused on anything else. When I managed to turn it aside I found myself thinking about other things, more troublesome things. George was arriving the following night, and from that time on it would be pressure all the way; in the meanwhile it wouldn’t do to get hung up on uncomfortable thoughts. I put the map in my money belt before I went to sleep, and slept with it fastened tightly about my middle.

on Monday morning they started loading the trucks.

There was no memo to that effect on my desk. The only thing on my desk when I got there was a coded wire from George, and all it said once I unscrambled it was UNDERDOG, which meant he’d be in Aberdeen that night. For all that, it hardly had to be in code. You can take the man out of the Agency but you can’t take the Agency out of the man. George was incurable.

The decoding process, as it happened, almost kept me from discovering about the loading operation. I finished destroying the wire and my work sheets and went outside just in time to see one of the four armored cars disappearing into a building, the very building in which the shipment was presently stored. I waited, but no other trucks showed up, and I wondered if they were going to load and ship them one by one. If that was the case, we were in all kinds of trouble.

I headed for the warehouse and was halfway there when Larry O’Gara emerged from it and waved at me. He trotted over to me. “Nothing to see,” he told me. “Phil’s inside watching them load. They’re on truck number three, and when you’ve seen one, etc. Christ, it’s cold. Is it like this all winter long?”

“I’m a stranger here myself.”

“A few more days and we can all add this to our list of happy memories. Let’s get inside.”

We went to my office. It was still smoky from the telegram I had incinerated, but if O’Gara noticed he kept it to himself. “They’ll keep the loaded trucks inside until they take off,” he said. “We’ll go over later and have a look.”

“Fine with me.”

He lit a cigarette, then leaned back and put his feet on my desk. “We got some messages from home this morning,” he said.

“Word from on high?”

“Uh-huh. Phil will brief you when he gets here. Right now he’s making himself dispensable. The right crates have to go on the right trucks, and the labels with “This Side Up’ have to face up, and he seems to think none of this will come about unless he hangs in there. Funny guy—”

“With Baldy in command, I can understand his logic.”

“Oh, I don’t know. The apes who haul things around seem competent, no matter who’s in command.” He flicked ashes on my floor. “The Texas truck was loaded first, and that was the important one, so I don’t see why he’s still there. He’ll be along any minute. Looked for you yesterday, incidentally.”