The weapon rode up in his grasp and in that broken instant of time I wondered if I’d guessed wrong. But it didn’t matter now. I didn’t bother to try to lift my carbine; it would have been a useless gesture. I saw the grim stubborn satisfaction in his eyes; a trace of puzzlement flicked across him but he was already committed: he pulled the trigger.
* * *
THE EXPLOSION rang in my ears. Pieces of heavy steel whacked into the walls of the trench. The Mongol wheeled back with a wail, blood streaming from his right hand in a gout. He sank to his knees and folded himself protectively over the shattered hand, grunting his agony.
I found the first-aid kit in my pack and tossed it to him. “Here. Bind it. We’ve got a long hike ahead of us.”
And hike we did. He was docile enough now; the injury had blown the fight out of him.
The chopper collected us at noon on Massacre Beach.
* * *
THE BASE COMMANDER drove me to the plane. When I got out of the car we shook hands. He said, “Thanks for bringing him in alive. We’ll milk him for every drop. But I still don’t understand how you brought it off.”
“I guess I didn’t play fair with him. I could have told him not to try to shoot that machine pistol. You can’t fire a weapon that’s got mud jammed up its muzzle. It won’t shoot — it’ll only explode.”
* * *
Charlie’s
Dodge
STREAKS OF FALLING GREY RAIN slanted across the silhouette of Sydney Harbor Bridge and when the taxi decanted me under the shelter of the porte-cochere canopy my poplin suit was still steamy from the dash at the airport. I carried my traveling bag inside the high-rise, found my way to the lifts and rode it up to the ninth floor.
The door had frosted glass and a legend: Australamerica Travel & Shipping Agency Ltd.—New York, Los Angeles, Sydney.
The girl at the reception desk sent me down a sterile hall. I could hear typewriters and Telexes in the warren of partitioned cubicles.
The conference room had wraparound plate glass; it was a corner suite. The view of the stormy city was striking.
Two men awaited me. The ash tray was a litter of butts and the styrofoam coffee cups had nothing left in them but smeared brown stains. Young Leonard Ross hurried like an officious bellboy to relieve me of the B-4 bag. “I hope you’ve got a spare suit in here. You’re drenched. How was the flight? Bill, I guess you know Charlie Dark?”
“Only by reputation.” The tall man came sinuously to shake my hand. “Good to meet you, Charlie. I’m Bill Jaeger, chief-of-station down here.”
When the amenities were out of the way and we’d sent out for sandwiches I settled my amplitude into a wooden armchair at the table. It was a bit of a squeeze. “Now what’s the flap?”
Ross said, “Didn’t Myerson brief you?”
“No.”
“That figures,” Jaeger said. “I may be stepping out of line but it baffles me how Myerson keeps his job.”
I let it lie. It wouldn’t have been useful to explain to Jaeger that Myerson keeps his job only because of me. Either Jaeger would refuse to believe it or he’d resent my conceit.
“The flap,” Ross said, “goes by the names of Myra Hilley and Iwan Stenback. They purport to be journalists.”
Jaeger made a face. “Underground press. They’re tearing our station to pieces.”
“Systematically,” Ross said. “Causing a great deal of embarrassment for both the Australians and us.” Then a wan smile: “You and I were sent in to get rid of them for Bill. Actually that’s not quite accurate. You were sent to get rid of them. I was sent to hold your coat.” With his collegiate good looks Ross was the picture of earnest innocence but I’d known him a while — sometimes he was astonishingly naïve but he was brighter than he seemed: a quick study. One day he’d be in charge of a department.
A girl brought us a tray of sandwiches and rattled something at Jaeger in ’Stryne — I didn’t get but one word in four; the accent was more impenetrable than Cockney. Jaeger said, “I’ll have to call them back later.” The girl smiled, nodded, departed, legs swishing; Ross’s eyes followed her until she was gone.
Jaeger was one of those lanky Gary Cooperish people who seem to have flexible bones rather than joints. I knew him as he knew me: by reputation. Easygoing but efficient — a good station chief, reliable, but not the sort you’d want running a vital station in a danger zone. He was a good diplomat and knew how to avoid ruffling feathers; he was the kind of executive you assigned to a friendly country rather than a potential enemy.
He said, “Iwan Stenback publishes a weekly rag called Sydney Exposed. Part soft-core porn, part yellow gossip and cheap scandal, part health food recipes and diagrams for Yoga positions, part radical-left editorializing. Until recently it didn’t have much of a circulation — mostly just freaks. Very youth-oriented. Always just skirting the libel and obscenity laws. Then a couple of months ago Stenback hired a hot new reporter by the name of Myra Hilley. Since then the circulation’s shot up like a Titan missile because the rag announced in a page-one box under Hilley’s by-line that they were going to start naming and identifying American CIA spies who were working undercover in Australia.”
Ross said, “It’s happened before, of course. In Greece that time, and —”
I cut him off. “Have they made good on the threat?”
Jaeger said in his dry way, “So far they’ve named seven of our people.”
“Accurately?”
“Yes.”
I decided I liked him. He didn’t make apologies; he didn’t waffle. He looked like a cowboy and talked with a prairie twang but I suspected there was nothing wrong with his brain.
I said, “Where’s they get the names?”
“We think one or two of our people may have been indiscreet. They aren’t all paragons, the people we buy information from. And in a country like this they’re not scared into secrecy — they don’t need to worry about jackboots in the hall at midnight, do they. In some ways it’s harder to run a secure intelligence network in a free country that it is in a dictatorship.”
“You’ve made efforts to plug the leaks?”
“Yes, sure. I think I know how it may have happened. I’m told Myra Hilley’s attractive — seductive as hell.”
“You’ve never seen her?”
“No. Not many people have, evidently. I’m sure she goes under a variety of cover identities. After all, if her face were known people wouldn’t talk to her.”
“Is ‘Myra Hilley’ a pen name?”
“No.” Jaeger deferred to Ross.
“Born in Australia but schooled in England and Switzerland .” Ross was reading from his notebook. “Myra Elizabeth Hilley’s her real name. She’s twenty-seven. The Berne file suggests she may have had contact with members of the Baader-Meinhof gang. In any case she returned to Australia a year ago with a head full of radical revolutionary anti-capitalist theory.”
Jaeger said, “Typical immature anti-establishment anti-American notions. Australia already has a socialist government but that doesn’t seem to satisfy these idiots. They want blood. Preferably blue. It doesn’t seem to penetrate their thick heads that this capitalist free enterprise system they hate so much has graduated more people out of poverty than any other system in history.”
“Still,” I said, wanting to get him off his political stump, “for an idiot she seems to have done a capable professional espionage job against us.”
“Every week,” Ross said, “the name of another of our agents appears in Sydney Exposed. They promise to keep doing it until they’ve named every last American spy in Australia, New Zealand and New Guinea.”