The Ill Wind Contract [Joe Gall 10]

  Philip Atlee

  The Ill Wind Contract

  ***

  When the job is tough enough, they come to him. Joe Gall is a master of the cold-blooded game of espionage. He knows that only one of the players is going to walk away with the marbles, and as far as he is concerned the only rule that means anything is to forget about rules.

  JOE GALL is in Indonesia, where the military and the Communists have brought the country to bloody civil war. Joe is caught between a swinging Swedish jet setter with a gift for double-dealing and ruthless killers who have just murdered six generals.

  THE CONTRACT is to grab and deliver five tons of gold and silver bullion stashed in the heart of the enemy camp.

  ***

  Scanning by unknown hero.

  OCR, formatting & proofing by P.

  ***

  ONE

  THERE WAS A HINT OF SNOW IN THE AIR as I drove back into the Ozark Mountains, headed for my remote eyrie. A leaden overcast obscured all but a few sunset shafts, and they arrowed across the cathedral pine stands. The twilight air was sharpening. By the time I had turned off the highway and gone winding upward on the graded dirt road to my private mountain, the cold wind was freshening through the tail trees, lashing their tops around. I drove into my hillside garage and got out of the car, carrying my mail.

  I must be the only man in the United States who drives two hundred miles every week, out of state, to pick up his mail. What would render the trips even more interesting to a casual observer is that, although I collect a large armload from the postal box. not one of the items's addressed to me. I never appear personally to pay the rental on the box, do not know who does, and the formidable stream of foreign newspapers and magazines is subscribed to by a distinguished but deceased professor. (Who is probably chortling with glee at being released from studying such unending tales of calamity and woe).

  While I was locking the garage doors Hank Roach, the sheriff, drove up the narrow road and got out of his official car. He handed me the weekly half gallon of moon but seemed reluctant to leave. Took off his slouch hat and scratched at the part in his thinning hair with a thumb.

  "What is it, Hank?" I asked. It was getting dark fast.

  "Fact of the matter, Major," he said slowly, "I've had a complaint about you." That startled me; to the sheriff and the other inhabitants of the village several miles away I was presumably only a retired Marine officer.

  "What about?"

  "Bunch of rock hunters were working south of your place yesterday before the weather turned off bad. They came to my office and swore you had a tiger on your property. Didn't claim actual eyeball witness but say they heard a tiger growlin' and fightin' something just inside your south fence."

  "If you've got a few minutes, Hank," I said, "you'd better come up to the house with me. You see, I've got three tigers here. A male and two females."

  Roach looked pained. "You have?" he asked. As if I had betrayed him in some way.

  "That's right. Very rare animals, too. White tigers with blue eyes. Come on up and I'll tell you about them."

  You could not see the house from, the front gate. I used my key to unlock it and we went up the path toward the pines. The electrified gate also operated on the sound of my voice, but I thought it just as well that Roach not hear the code words. The pines were shedding slush ice as we walked through them and onto the veranda of the dark house.

  Inside, I started flipping switches and motioned Roach into the living room. It was the first time he had been inside the house and while he cased the high ceilings I touched off the kerosined shavings under the logs in the walk-in fireplace. The shavings went with a whooshing roar and flames began to curl around the logs.

  When Roach was settled in one of the big leather chairs, with ice, glasses, spring water, and a fifth of Cutty Sark at his elbow, I went into the study and got the tiger papers. Had a dollop of moon and went back to sit across from him before the fire. Then, while offering one letter, license, and sheet of certification after another, I told him the story.

  Three years ago, I said, I had thought about putting some kind of mystery into my ninety-five remote acres. I had never cultivated anything on the place and it had remained in a wild state except for the immediate surroundings of the house: garden, terrace, and the hilltop pasture to the east of the house. Which I kept mowed and intended to turn into a light-plane strip someday.

  Having seen one of the rare white tigers in the Washington, D.C., Zoo, I began wondering if they could become acclimated to my place. It was, after all, far south of Washington and the weather was no more severe than that of the hill stations in India, I had written to the Maharaja of Rewa about the possibility, describing my altitude, vegetation, water supplies, and space available on the Ozark Mountain. (The maharaja had been responsible for developing the white tigers with the ice-blue eyes, after nearly twenty years of selective breeding.)

  He had answered promptly, saying that he saw no reason why the animals would not do well in the surroundings I had described. That if I could provide the necessary bona fides and secure the proper licenses and clearances from the U.S. and Indian governments, he would sell me either a pair or three white tigers. Young animals of breeding age. He further stipulated that the animals must be accompanied to their final destination by one of his shikaris.

  All this seemed eminently sensible, but the maharaja made a suggestion that was even more to the point. Since I wished to keep the tigers as nearly as possible in their wild state and not for exhibition, why did I not first spend a couple of years improving the whole ecology of my acreage, as a tiger preserve, and incorporate as a nonprofit, private zoo?

  That same week I went to St. Louis and talked to Marlin Perkins and his big-cat man. They helped me decide which animals native to the Ozark area would provide the best game for tigers and directed me to the experts who could advise me on what extra planting to do. Further, the St. Louis officials agreed to lend me, on a temporary basis, a man from their big-cat staff whenever I had to be out of the country. I would have to assume his salary and expenses, of course.

  When they intimated that they would, in turn, appreciate first option on any litters that might result, I clinched their cooperation by offering to donate any such litters to the Forest Park Zoo.

  For the next two and a half years, I told Sheriff Roach, I had stocked the estate with Malayan pig and tiny Indian sambur deer. In addition, I had put in West Texas jackrabbits. All of these species seemed to have caught on, the rabbits perhaps too much so, and seven months ago I had gone to New Orleans to meet the white tigers on the dock. Had ridden back home on the truck that held the animals and their shikari.

  Since then the tigers had been roaming my acreage without hindrance or extra feeding. Several caves on the far side of the mountain were kept electrically heated whenever the weather grew cold, and the tigers had apparently laired in them. I had glimpsed them only a few times because they made good use of the high cane grasses I had planted around the springs and rivulets.

  I stressed all these facts to Roach because J didn't want the peckerwoods down in the valley hamlet to get overheated about "man-eating" tigers roaming at large. He examined my license to operate a private zoo, issued by the State Game & Fish Commission, my correspondence with the Maharaja and Perkins, and the various export-import licenses. When he was satisfied, he got up and sighed.

  "You've gone to a lot of expense, Major," he said mildly. "Ain't you even gonna let people come in and see them? Be quite a tourist attraction."

  "No, Hank, I'm not. If any tourists or local people crowd my fences, they'll get their asses shocked off. And if any of the silly bastards get inside, I'
ll put them in cages and let the tigers examine them from the outside.

  The sheriff laughed. "Okay. Thanks for the explanation and the hospitality." He started for the front door and I said I would appreciate it if he'd keep the complaint quiet as long as he could.

  Roach nodded, settling his hat into place. "Do my best. But we ain't had tigers around here for a long time. They make a lot of noise and sooner or later people will start talking about them. Good night."

  He walked off the wide veranda, down the steps, and through the grove of spotlighted pines. I closed the door and waited until the gate clicked behind him; the red light on my pantry panel went out. I was stretching before the roaring logs when the front gate buzzer sounded again.

  The sheriff returns, I thought wearily. Wants another belt of Scotch, has thought of another question, in the public interest…

  I went into the pantry, flipped a switch, and said, "Yes?"

  "Official business," announced a voice I did not recognize.

  I flipped another switch that floodlighted the front gate for twenty seconds. "Come in, latch the gate behind you. and follow the lighted path through the trees. Understand?"

  "Right" answered the voice, and in a few minutes the front door chimes sounded. The visitor was not a courier, however; he was a tall, lean man who looked like an aging golf professional. His name was Burt Holroyd and he was Tokyo station chief for the agency. A long time ago we had both flown the Himalayan route during World War II.

  We shook hands and I told him it was a treat, because it was. Holroyd was one of the few really good pilots I ever knew who went on to an important administrative job. He had two fair things going for him-dignity and integrity. When he was settled in a leather chair beside the fireplace, I hustled up a tray with potables, ice, and chasers and we skoaled each other.

  Then we had another drink and surveyed each other in reflective silence. Marking what the years had done and remembering those incredible days when the wind whipped snow-plumes off the high peaks… Holroyd didn't ask to see the house or garden, and if he cared about my health, he kept it to himself. I can stand a lot of that. "

  When I asked if he could spend the night, Burt said no. He had a rented car down at my gate and after we got through our business, he was driving on to catch a coast flight in Tulsa. He had been on a ten-day emergency leave in Washington to get an impacted wisdom tooth yanked out by the ankles, and would fly straight on through to Japan after we had talked.

  "Dinner, though?"

  "That I'd like," he said, and I left him to commune with the Black Daniels and the flickering log while I went to the kitchen and got two Chateaubriand prime steaks ready for the broiler. Then I returned to the living room, had another shot neat, and asked if he wanted to start or should I?

  "Guess I should, since I brought you into it." Holroyd was staring at the beamed ceilings, fourteen feet high. "Nice little lean-to you got here. Have you turned all the way queer or just animist?"

  Laughing, I choked on my chaser and had a coughing fit.

  "Don't misunderstand." Holroyd said with great sincerity'. ''It's just that I keep waiting for Mussolini to walk in."

  "You miserable sod. the last time I saw Mussolini was when you were wearing that solar topi at midnight in the Calcutta whorehouse. Giving away buckets of hard-boiled eggs, hollering that they were reverse lend-lease."

  "As. indeed, they were," said Holroyd. "I had paid American cash for the goddamned things…

  After our remembrance of those bawdy times had gone up the wide chimney like dying sparks, he told me about his end of the curious assignment I had been considering for nearly a week.

  Slouching back in the big leather chair, long fingers steepled at his chin. Holroyd said that his Tokyo headquarters office had begun getting feelers eight months ago. All indirect. Some through the Japanese seaports, the underworld, and even one through the German Embassy. An American bully-boy was wanted in Djakarta. Somebody willing to take a big chance for the right price.

  Burt added that his office got such second-hand feelers all the time. They were processed routinely, if perfunctorily, to see if they might be linked to something important. This particular attempt at recruitment was interesting only because an American had been specified. Indirectly, his office had put up a barfly Yankee scrounger who was about to be deported from Japan anyway, and this candidate made the necessary contact in Kobe and promptly vanished. Period. Had not been heard of since.

  In three weeks, however, the recruiting effort was on again. This time, however, the price was up to $50,000, and the shadowy recruiters had gone to the center of the Tokyo underground, to the vice lords and pachinko kings.

  "It still had to be a glorified smash-and-grab deal," said Holroyd, leaning forward to pour a drink. "A smuggling effort. But we couldn't just ignore it. not when we didn't know what had happened to the first candidate. So we save them Lad MacBride. Remember him?"

  I did. Lad had been a general's aide during the Korean War, more truculent than talented, and afterward had hung around Hong Kong too long. He never understood. even after the transition was obvious, that a white man was no longer important in the Orient just by standing there and showing off his Caucasian characteristics. MacBride had kept sinking in the scale, taking one off-color job after the other, and the last I had heard of him he was doing a six-year jolt on Formosa for smuggling narcotics.

  Holroyd said he had put MacBride in the line of inquiry, and Lad had grabbed at a fee that size. They must have paid him a sizable advance because he moved out of his Hong Kong burrow into a suite in the Peninsula Hotel and, after a series of roaring parties, flew to Djakarta.

  He didn't last for the handshake. Three days after arriving in Indonesia he had been gunned down on the busy street running in front of the USIA Library building in Djakarta. From a truck. No truck can race away very fast in the traffic along that street, but this one had not been apprehended.

  Holroyd shook his head, thin mouth working with distaste. "The dumb bastard was wearing his expensive custom-tailored sharkskin silk shorts and jacket, as usual. I know, because I flew over to have a look at him in the morgue. Still had that supercilious smile, too… you remember? Like he couldn't stop to talk to you because he had a tea-date, right now, with Jesus Christ Almighty."

  I nodded.

  "Besides his wounds, which were numerous, all he had on him were a wallet with nearly $12,000 in assorted currencies and one of those squeeze-bottle sinus remedies. We put everything through the lab. Turned out to be not quite routine. The three-odd ounces of fluid left in the squeeze-bottle weren't put in it by the manufacturer; they tested out as puromycin, an experimental antibiotic."

  Holroyd had immediately sent everything, all of Lad MacBride's remains and artifacts, to the Washington laboratory of the agency. And forgotten the affair.

  Until, three months later, like an exposed nerve end that would not stop twitching, the attempts at recruitment began again. This time at even higher levels, with the price raised again. This time it was up to $80,000, one half promised in advance. That bothered Holroyd. A delegation from the World Bank was expected to visit Djakarta soon.

  He cabled Washington that it might be a good idea to check this persistent effort out, and recommended that a professional contract agent be put on the job. He suggested that I was the logical man because I had worked in the area before, etc. End of the first part of the story. Later, when his aching jaw had driven him to Washington for relief, Neal Pearsall had told him that I was partially briefed, and would he fly to St. Louis and then drive down to contact me before returning to Tokyo?

  Neal Pearsall was the director of the agency's action division, so when he suggested something, we did it as a matter of course. We didn't have to, of course, because we were all free men, working for a democratic, if subterranean, organization. Those who didn't follow Neal's suggestions soon found themselves still free men but unattached to that particular part of our democracy.

 
TWO

  IT WAS MY TURN. I SAID THAT MOST OF what Holroyd had told me had been forwarded by courier, together with several ounces of the puromycin and some blurred but legible photocopied notes recovered from Lad MacBride's room in the Hotel Indonesia. (Burt's men, in theory, should have been working closely enough with the Djakarta station chief to have known about these notes, but I did not linger on that angle.)

  The notes had obviously been part of a laboratory evaluation on widespread human tests in Japanese prisons, using puromycin. They were startling and, when coupled with the notes on American laboratory findings, astonishing. Pearsall had sent me these American notes after having his own central lab reidentify the substance and checking it out with Dr. Carlo Ravich in Berkeley. Dr. Ravich was the agency's principal consultant in this field.

  He, in turn, had referred Neal to the leading American investigators of puromycin, Drs. Samuel Barondes and Harry Cohen. Both these researchers worked in the MacLean Hospital Laboratory, Belmont, Massachusetts, and were affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School. Explaining to Holroyd that their notes were mostly too deep for me but that I had tried to capsule them to the layman's level, I went to the desk and got my cards.

  "Male Swiss albino mice (thirty to forty grams, Charles River Breeding Company) were used. Both puromycin and cyclohexamide are inhibitors of protein synthesis. However cvclohexamide-injected mice gave hippocampal region recordings of electrical activity not distinguishable from mice injected with saline solution alone. The puromycin-injected subjects gave strikingly abnormal recordings.

  "Mice injected with puromycin five hours before training learned to escape, or avoid, shock. Injections of puromycin into both temporal regions of the brain inhibited more than eighty percent of protein synthesis, for from several hours to more than half a day after medication.