Flicker of Doom Read online

  He was deep into his own rideout now. It had made him incautious. He thrust against her repeatedly, trying to bury all of himself in that warm, moist primeval cave. It took all the strength of her right arm to keep them intertwined and upright.

  That molten bubble inside her broke the surface, still too heavy and dense to burst. Its glowing surface trembled. There was a sweet, unbearable torment, waiting for it to make up its mind. She palpitated in a suspended rapture for an eternity.

  Then, with a hoarse cry, she hugged his lower body to hers, squeezing his buttocks with her forearm, tearing at his hip with her fingernails. The bubble burst, and there was an explosion of blind ecstasy. She kept him pressed against her, the long male pole pushed inside her as far as she could get it, while she came again and again.

  Morgan was making it, too. She could tell, as soon as her own convulsions began to subside. A whoosh of bourbon-scented wind came from his open mouth, and there was a long, drawn-out "Ooohh," and a great, shuddering spasm.

  She let go of him, and he toppled over. Something warm and sticky was dribbling down — no, up — her belly. She gave a laugh of sheer delight and tumbled like an acrobat, her bare soles hitting the mattress. She rolled over and propped herself up on one elbow.

  "Well?" she said.

  Morgan looked dazed. "I'll let you know as soon as my head clears," he said.

  The blood was rushing from her own head. The room was a blur. After a while, small objects began to swim back into focus. She found her eyes resting on something that flickered. It was the television set. They'd neglected to turn it off.

  "Je suis le roi!" the television set buzzed.

  Something extraordinary was happening on the screen. Morgan saw Penelope's sudden alertness and dragged his unwilling gaze to the set.

  Leclerc was trying to strangle a fat little man with a mustache. He was screaming in an unintelligible rage. The words that you could make out were obscene.

  It was insane.

  "Good God!" Morgan breathed. "What's happening?"

  Two burly looking men who looked like Leclerc's hired thugs were trying to hold him down. He tossed them both aside. One of them got up and tried to grab Leclerc again. Leclerc made a blind swipe at him, and the man tumbled over backward.

  Leclerc was on the floor of the wooden platform now, out from behind the bulletproof lectern. He was writhing, jerking his limbs uncontrollably. He was frothing at the mouth.

  "He's having some kind of psychomotor attack," Morgan said.

  Leclerc's entire body arched like a bow. They could hear his spine snap like a dry stick, even on TV. Leclerc collapsed into a baggy heap of clothing with nothing important inside it. The would-be savior of France was as dead as you could get.

  The Baroness turned to Morgan.

  "The bulletproof shield didn't do him much good, did it?" she said.

  "Is he dead?" Sancho said.

  Esteban frowned and pulled the door shut behind him before answering. "Si," he said. "Exactly as Don Alejandro described."

  Sancho shook his head in wonderment. "To kill a man by taking a picture of him! I don't understand it!"

  "Don't bother your head about it, niño." He clapped Sancho on the shoulder. Sancho was as strong as an ox, and very willing, but he wasn't very much in the brains department.

  "But, Esteban, if you killed him with the camera, then how did you get blood on yourself?"

  Esteban glanced down at the red splotches on his sleeve. He laughed. "That's from an American television cameraman. One of Leclerc's bodyguards punched him in the nose when he wouldn't stop filming. He bled like a pig all over me."

  There was a muffled groan from the fishing shack's only other room, and Esteban looked up sharply.

  "Did the Italians behave?" he said.

  "Si," Sancho told him. "I had to give them a little tap or two, but I left no marks, as Doctor Funke told me."

  Esteban nodded. "Good."

  Sancho's low shelf of a brow wrinkled. "But, Esteban, you are wearing the clothes of one of the Italians. There will be blood…"

  Esteban flashed a white smile. "It won't matter when they find him."

  The outside door opened, and an extraordinary figure entered the shack. He was short — no taller than a child — but tremendously broad-shouldered, with arms like a chimpanzee. The simian impression was reinforced by his short, bandy legs and the wide, squarish torso, despite his sharply pressed gray suit and expensive cravat and the flower in his lapel. He had a gleaming bald dome of a head, with a bull neck and bulging jowls. There was a little Prussian face in the middle of the expanse of forehead and jowls, with a monocle screwed into one eye.

  Over his shoulder, with no more apparent effort than if it had been made of cardboard, he carried a bulky television camera that had Televisione Italia white-painted on its side.

  He unslung the camera and swung it easily down to a low workbench. There was an array of electronic components and lenses on the bench.

  "Sancho," he said in a harsh German accent, "bring the computer in from the van."

  "Immediatamente, Doctor Funke."

  Sancho left the shack and came back a few minutes later, wheeling in a metal cube the size of a small filing cabinet. It was festooned with wires and disconnected jacks. He rolled it into a corner with the rest of the gear and stood waiting, patient as an ox.

  Doctor Funke finished replacing the original innards of the television camera, and screwed the casing shut again. He handed Esteban the component he had removed. It resembled an oversize flashlight with a gun-metal box at one end and an assembly of camera-type lenses and shutters at the other.

  "Pack it carefully, and put it in the boat with the computer," he said.

  "Sí, Doctor Funke."

  "The Italians will have an accident somewhere between here and Marseilles. The television van will be wrecked. You and Sancho will be back here before dark."

  "As you say, Doctor Funke."

  The little man hopped off his stool and waddled on his bow legs toward the back room.

  "I trust you kept them quiet, Sancho," he said severely.

  "Sí, Doctor. They didn't make a peep."

  There were two men in their underwear tied up on the floor of the next room. Their mouths were stuffed with rags and covered with surgical tape. They turned to look, as the monkeylike figure and the two Spaniards entered.

  One of them tried to talk. The sounds were muffled, but he sounded outraged. He was a dark, good-looking young man with long sideburns.

  Doctor Funke ignored the sounds. He seemed to have no more interest in the two bound men than if they had been pieces of furniture. He turned to Sancho.

  "This one is the driver. He will be behind the wheel. His neck will be broken. Comprende?"

  "Si," Sancho said.

  Esteban took off the bloodstained jacket. He unzipped his trousers and stepped out of them.

  "Thanks for the use of your clothes, hombre," he said with a ferret grin. "Sorry about the blood stains."

  The young Italian made a furious sound behind his gag.

  Doctor Funke said, "Don't forget to return the passport and identification."

  Sancho squatted in front of the Italian and hauled him to a sitting position. The muffled noises grew angrier. He put a big hand, with fingers like bananas, on the Italian's collarbone. With the other hand, he chucked the Italian under the chin, raising his head. The gesture looked almost tender.

  The Italian spluttered indignantly behind his gag.

  Sancho pushed under the chin with the heel of his hand. The Italian's head was forced all the way back. There was a snapping sound, and the Italian was suddenly dead.

  The other prisoner stared in horror, his eyes wide. He was a middle-aged man with a pot belly. He began making sounds, too. It sounded as if he were pleading.

  "When you put the body behind the wheel, Sancho, give it a good hard push forward," Doctor Funke said. He sounded as if he were speaking to a child. "I want you to
make sure that the ribs are crushed. Comprende?"

  Sancho nodded.

  "I will see that it is done," Esteban said.

  Doctor Funke turned to the other Italian and studied him. His huge bald dome wrinkled with concentration. The man stared back at him, pop-eyed and terrified.

  Esteban already was dressing the body of the dead man in the trousers and bloodied jacket. He snapped his fingers.

  "Chiquillo, the ether!" he said.

  Wordlessly, Sancho handed over a stoppered bottle. Esteban swabbed the dead man's mouth with a cotton wad soaked in ether, wiping away the traces of adhesive tape.

  Doctor Funke had made up his mind.

  "This one was flung face forward into the windshield. His skull was fractured. The direction of impact was frontal."

  Sancho looked puzzled.

  Esteban paused in his clean-up job. "From the front, muchacho," he said.

  Sancho nodded. He walked over to the middle-aged Italian and grabbed him by the hair. The Italian made a gobbling sound.

  "Before you wreck the van," Doctor Funke said, "push his face all the way through the glass. I want little fragments of safety glass embedded in his face."

  "Is too much for him to remember," Esteban said. "I will see to it."

  Sancho had the Italian's head between his two enormous paws. One hand was over the face, the other cradling the back of the skull. The Italian was thrashing about, trying to get away.

  He gave one quick push, like a man popping a party balloon. The Italian's head squashed like a rotten melon. The legs kicked once. Brain tissue and bloody fragments of bone oozed from between Sancho's banana-like fingers.

  Doctor Funke looked at him with distaste. "Go wash your hands, Sancho," he said.

  Sancho got to his feet, looking guilty. He went outside and made splashing sounds. After a moment he came back, holding his hands out proudly for inspection.

  "That's fine," Esteban told him.

  They rolled the two bodies into tarpaulins and carried them out to the television van. Esteban got behind the wheel and started the motor.

  Doctor Funke walked over to the driver's side. He stood on his tiptoes, but his bald head still didn't reach the window. Esteban leaned out the window and waited politely.

  The little man squared his gorilla shoulders and looked sternly up into Esteban's face.

  "Hurry back," he said. "I want to be fifty miles off the coast by sunset. Don Alejandro is waiting."

  2

  The two sentries were tired and bored.

  They were tired because it was 4:30 in the morning, and they'd been tapped for duty by their respective commands without having a chance to catch up on their sleep. They were bored because they couldn't talk to one another, except in the most basic way, in pidgin English and fractured French and hand gestures. Even at that, the Belgian was a Fleming, whose French was almost as bad as the American's.

  It was boring, anyway, in this dreary country town, thirty miles from Brussels, where SHAPE had decided to put the arsenal. NATO needed depots for its guns and tanks and rockets, but the Belgians had banished the military hardware to the sticks.

  The Belgian sentry covered up a yawn. His thoughts strayed to the local farm girl he'd talked into a date. He'd be off duty by noon. If he could manage to stay awake, he'd tank her up with beer — she liked the awful cherry-flavored brew called Kriek — persuade her to go for a walk and screw her in the hayfield that served as the local lovers' lane.

  The American lit a cigarette, strictly against regulations. But the two sentries at the inner gate wouldn't squeal, even if they saw the glow. One of them was a big, easy-going Canadian and the other was a Turk who liked to sneak a smoke himself.

  "Headlights," the American said. He was a lanky black man from a place with a French-sounding name — New Orleans. He struggled for the French word. "Le phare," he said, pronouncing it "lee fair." The Belgian smiled tolerantly. It was easier to understand the English.

  "I'll go," the Belgian said.

  He stepped outside the gate, closing it behind him but leaving it unlocked. The American was covering him with a machine gun. It was all nonsense, anyway. Nobody was going to break into a NATO arms depot — not when it was manned by two platoons of armed soldiers drawn from fifteen nations.

  He squinted at the headlights. Why didn't the fool turn them off?

  He could make out the shape of a truck with a humpbacked canvas top. One of the units stationed nearby, having come to requisition supplies. Probably the West Germans. They got up early.

  "Folgen sie mir," he called out in German. "Turn off your lights."

  The headlights blinked. The driver stayed where he was. They hadn't understood him.

  He tried it in French. "Fermez les phares."

  The headlights blinked again. He rubbed his eyes. He suddenly felt very odd. Dizzy. The lack of sleep, probably.

  That was strange. He thought the headlights had been yellowish. Now they looked pink to him.

  He started toward the truck. The driver made no move to get out. He'd have to put the fellow right. He unslung his automatic rifle, more for effect than anything else.

  "Let's see your pass," he said, walking up to the truck. The pink headlights were blinking again. On and off. Faster and faster. It became a flicker. A pink flicker that made him feel warm all over. The flicker blended into a steady fight. He screwed his eyelids shut, but somehow the light managed to get through.

  "Turn out your lights," he said. But he couldn't hear his own voice. He couldn't hear anything. He was floating in a warm pink space. A great truth was taking shape in his brain. He struggled to comprehend it.

  And then there was something like sexual ecstasy, only a thousand times more intense, and a flash of great pain, and the pink ball of his consciousness shrank like a pricked balloon, to the size of a pea, a pinpoint, nothing.

  The driver got out of the truck to inspect the body. He was a young Arab dressed in olive fatigues that could have belonged to the army of any nation.

  "He's dead," he said. "Just as the Spaniard said."

  The sentry was sprawled grotesquely, his arms and legs at impossible angles. His tongue, thick and swollen, protruded horribly. There was a wet stain at the front of his trousers.

  The Arab dragged the body out of the way and opened the gate. He got back in and drove the truck through. The other sentry, the American, was lying just inside. His body had the same contorted look. The Arab didn't bother to get out to check. At the inner gate, another sentry challenged him. He sounded like a Turk.

  The Turk was more alert than the Belgian had been.

  "Hold it right there," he said. He called to his partner, and a big redheaded fellow came out of the sentry station, his gun ready.

  "What's wrong, Ismail?" he said.

  "There's something fishy…" the Turk began, and then the headlights began to flicker.

  The Arab driver watched through the polarized windshield as the two sentries began to jerk and twitch. They fell to the ground, their bodies contorted.

  "I think the big one's still alive," Abdul said in the seat next to him.

  "It doesn't matter," he said.

  He drove across the compound toward the row of low warehouse buildings at the far end. There was a line of parked tanks, and some tracked amphibious vehicles, and self-propelled rocket launchers. Several trucks were parked in front of the loading platform, piles of crates beside them, waiting for the morning shift.

  He backed the big truck into the loading platform, with the headlights pointing out across the expanse of parade ground. He shut them off; no use attracting attention.

  Abdul said, "I'll keep watch."

  The computer terminal was on the seat beside him — an amazingly compact device that looked like a cross between a pushbutton telephone and a portable electric typewriter. There was a tiny CRT display screen, no larger than a pocket slide viewer. A parade of glowing green dots bounced across the tube like Ping-Pong balls. The compute
r itself, about the size of a theatrical trunk, was in back.

  The men climbed out — sixteen of them — and fanned out. They were all young Arabs, dressed in olive drab uniforms.

  They crossed ignition wires on a dozen of the parked trucks and got the engines idling. Then they started loading the trucks with the choicer crates.

  "Don't bother with the SAFN rifles," the driver ordered. "We want the NATO Light Automatic rifles and those cases of 7.62mm cartridges. And the American shoulder-fired missile launchers."

  Working swiftly, silently, they filled the twelve trucks with crated weapons.

  One of the men approached the driver. He was a young Palestinian named Hakim.

  "There's something in the further warehouse that you ought to see," he said.

  The driver gestured impatiently. "No time. We're almost loaded. Get over there and help the others."

  Hakim stood his ground stubbornly. "It's important."

  The driver sighed and went with him. The warehouse was a low structure of corrugated iron, set aside from the others. There was a seal on the door that Hakim had broken.

  "Through there."

  It was a boxy, six-wheeled army truck with a missile rack mounted on its rear. The rocket was about fifteen feet long, with stubby fins and a bulbous warhead. It was covered with cobwebs.

  The driver blew dust away from a stenciled identification. There were some words in English and a number.

  "Honest John," the driver read with difficulty. "What is this 'Honest John'?"

  Hakim was almost dancing with excitement. "An atomic bomb. One of the Americans' tactical nuclear weapons."

  "Impossible!"

  "Look, here's the warning sign for radiation."

  He pointed to the stylized symbol for an atom, and a skull and crossbones.

  The driver stepped back hastily.

  "The Honest Johns were supposed to be phased out," Hakim said smugly. "The Americans must have forgotten this one."