“Expecting trouble?”
“Not that I know of.” I looked at him, then turned to study Bourke. “Why? Something in the air?”
“We wouldn’t know. If they had to send us here, why couldn’t they wait until maybe August? A week in this town, I don’t know. What do you do for kicks?”
We did fifteen minutes on various ways of amusing oneself in Sprayhorn. I was waiting for the pitch, and I wasn’t surprised when they made it casual. Bourke said something about the general having simplified things, and that it was just as well our identities were out in the open. We might help each other, we could give each other company, and otherwise we’d have spent all our time running checks on each other.
“Amen to that,” O’Gara said. “And just for the record, Comrade Richard, here’s my Red Party Card.”
He gave me a leatherette case about the size of a passport. It had his picture — I think it was his picture, but it didn’t come all that close — and a thumbprint and description. I made a show of giving it a careful look-see while pretending to pass it with a glance. Then Bourke produced his ID and I had to glance examine it, too.
“And now, friends, we make the party complete.” The first thing I handed them was the Maj. John Walker paraphernalia. Bourke said it wasn’t bad work, but O’Gara didn’t think it would fool anyone who looked hard at it. Then I gave them the Agency ticket in the Lynch name. O’Gara hardly looked at it before passing it on to Bourke, who took a quick glance and flipped it back to me. There was just the quietest click when O’Gara photographed it. They were pretty smooth.
“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.
Ten
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.