Operation Moon Rocket Read online

  Her name was Cynthia something and she was a native Floridian, the girl in all the travelogues. Nick called her Cindy, and she knew Nick as "Sam Harmon," an admiralty lawyer from Chevy Chase, Maryland. Whenever "Sam" was on vacation down Miami Beach way, they made a point of getting together.

  There was a dew of sweat from the hot sun beneath her closed eyes and at her temples. She sensed him looking at her and the wet eyelashes parted; the tawny eyes, big and far-away, looked up with remote curiosity into his.

  "What do you say we flee this vulgar display of half-cooked flesh?" he grinned, showing enviably white teeth.

  "What do you have in mind?" she countered. A faint smile lurked in the corners of her mouth.

  "The two of us, alone, back in suite twelve-eight."

  Excitement began to grow in her eyes. "Again?" she murmured. Her eyes trailed warmly over his brown, muscular body. "All right, yes, that is a nice idea..."

  A shadow suddenly fell across them. A voice said, "Mr. Harmon?"

  Nick swung onto his back. A funereal man in black, in silhouette, bent over him, blotting out part of the sky. "You are wanted on the telephone, sir. By the blue entrance, phone number six."

  Nick nodded and the assistant bell captain went away, treading slowly, cautiously through the sand to preserve the shine on his black oxfords, looking like a dark omen of death amid the riot of colors on the beach. Nick climbed to his feet. "I'll only be a minute," he said, but he didn't believe it.

  "Sam Harmon" had no friends, no relations, no life of his own. Only one man knew of his existence, knew that he was in Miami Beach at this moment, at this particular hotel, on the second week of his first vacation in over two years. A tough old man in Washington.

  Nick walked through the sand toward the Surfway Hotel's entrance. He was a big man, slim-hipped and wide at the shoulders, with the calm eyes of a top athlete who has dedicated his life to challenge. Feminine eyes swiveled behind sunglasses, taking stock. Thick, slightly unruly dark hair. An almost perfect profile. Laugh lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth. Feminine eyes liked what they saw and followed him, openly interested. There was a promise of excitement in the sinewy, tapering body, and of danger, too.

  "Sam Harmon" fell away from Nick with every step he took. Eight days of love, laughter and idleness vanished stride by stride, and by the time he reached the hotel's cool, dark interior he was his usual working self — special agent Nick Carter, top operative of AXE, America's super-secret counterintelligence agency.

  The telephones were to the left of the blue entrance, a row of ten mounted on the wall, with soundproof barriers between them. Nick went to number six and picked up the receiver. "Harmon here."

  "Hello, my boy, just passing through. Thought I'd see how you were getting on."

  Nick's dark eyebrows rose. Hawk — on an open line. Surprise number one. Here in Florida. Surprise number two. "Everything's fine, sir. First vacation I've had in some time," he added pointedly.

  "Splendid, splendid." The head of AXE said it with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. "Are you free for dinner?" Nick glanced at his watch. At 4:00 p.m.? The tough old bird seemed to read his thoughts. "It will be the dinner hour by the time you reach Palm Beach," he added. "The Bali Hai, Worth Avenue. The cuisine is Polynesian-Chinese, the maitre d's name is Don Lee. Just tell him you're dining with Mr. Byrd. Fivish is fine. We'll have time for a drink."

  Surprise number three. Hawk was strictly a steak and potatoes man. He hated Oriental food. "Fine," said Nick. "But I'll need time to get organized. Your call was rather... unexpected."

  "The young lady's already been notified." Hawk's voice was suddenly crisp and businesslike. "She was told that you were called away on business unexpectedly. Your suitcase is packed and in the car, your street clothes are on the front seat. You've already checked out at the desk."

  Nick fumed at the highhandedness of it all. "I left my cigarettes and sunglasses out on the beach," he snapped. "Mind if I get them?"

  "You'll find them in the glove compartment. I take it you haven't been reading the papers?"

  "No." Nick let it go at that. His idea of a vacation was to sweat the poisons of everyday life out of his system. Those poisons included newspapers, radios, TV, anything that carried news of the outside world.

  "Then I suggest you switch the car radio on," said Hawk, and N3 knew from his voice that something big was up.

  * * *

  He moved the Lamborghini 350 GT through the gearbox. The heavy traffic was pointed toward Miami and he had his half of U.S. 1 largely to himself. North through Surfside, Hollywood and Boca Raton he sped, past the endless procession of motels, gas stations and fruit juice stands.

  There was nothing else on the radio. It was as if war had been declared, as if the President had died. All regular programs had been canceled as the nation honored its fallen astronauts.

  Nick swung onto the Kennedy Causeway in West Palm Beach, made a left into Ocean Boulevard and headed north toward Worth Avenue, main drag of the town society columnists called the "platinum watering hole."

  He couldn't figure it out. Why had the head of AXE chosen Palm Beach for their meeting? And why the Bali Hai? Nick reviewed what he knew about the place. It was said to be the most exclusive restaurant in the United States. If your name wasn't in the Social Register, or if you weren't fabulously rich, a foreign dignitary, a senator or a high State Department official, you could forget about it. You wouldn't get in,

  Nick made a right into the street of expensive dreams, swinging past the local branches of Carder's and Van Cleef & Arpels with their small vitrines displaying rocks the size of the Kohinoor Diamond. The Bali Hai was situated between the elegant old Colony Hotel and the ocean front, and was painted to look like a pineapple rind.

  An attendant swept his car away and the maitre d' bowed obsequiously at the mention of "Mr. Byrd." "Ah yes, Mr. Harmon, you were expected," he murmured. "If you will follow me, please."

  He was led along a leopard-striped banquette to where the leathery old man with the rustic appearance and gimlet eyes sat at a table. Hawk rose as Nick approached, holding out his hand. "My boy, glad you could make it" He seemed rather unsteady. "Sit down, sit down." The captain pulled the table out and Nick did. "A vodka martini?" said Hawk. "Our friend here, Don Lee, makes the very best." He patted the maitre d's arm.

  Lee beamed. "Always a pleasure to serve you, Mr. Byrd." He was a young, dimpled Hawaiian Chinese, wearing a tuxedo with a colorful lei draped around his neck. He chuckled, adding, "But General Sweet accused me last week of being an agent of the Vermouth industry."

  Hawk chuckled. "Dick's always been a grouser."

  "I'll have a straight scotch," said Nick. "On the rocks." He glanced around the restaurant. It was paneled in bamboo to table level, with wall-to-wall mirroring above that and wrought-iron pineapples on each table. A horseshoe-shaped bar was at one end and beyond it, enclosed in glass, the discotheque — at present the "in" spot for the Golden Youth of the Rolls-Royce set. Elaborately jeweled women and men with smooth, well-fed faces sat at tables here and there, picking at their food in the vague half-light.

  A waiter arrived with their drinks. He wore a colorful aloha shirt over black trousers. His flat Oriental features were expressionless as Hawk upset the martini that had just been placed in front of him. "I take it you've caught up with the news," said Hawk, watching the liquid disappear into the damp tablecloth. "A national tragedy of the gravest dimensions," he added, pulling the toothpick out of the olive that had spilled from the drink and beginning to jab at it absent-mindedly. "It will delay the moon program at least two years. Perhaps longer, considering the mood the public is in at present. And their representatives have caught the mood." He glanced up. "That Senator what's-his-name, the chairman of the subcommittee on space," he said. "He wants the program delayed at least five years to make certain no more lives are lost."

  The waiter returned with a fresh tablecloth and Hawk abruptly changed the subject. "Of course
I don't get down too often," he said, popping the remains of the olive into his mouth. "Once a year the Belle Glade Club has a pre-duck-hunting banquet here. I try always to make that."

  Still another surprise. The Belle Glade Club, Palm Beach's most exclusive. Money wouldn't get you in; and if you were in, you might suddenly find yourself out for some obscure reason. Nick peered at the man who sat across from him. Hawk looked like a farmer or perhaps the editor of a small-town newspaper. Nick had known him a long time. Intimately, he'd thought. Their relationship had been very near to that of father and son. Yet this was the first inkling he'd had that Hawk's background was a social one.

  Don Lee arrived with a fresh martini. "Would you like to order now?"

  "Perhaps my young friend would," said Hawk, speaking with exaggerated care. "I'm fine." He glanced at the menu that Lee held in front of him. "It's all glorified chop suey to me, Lee. You know that."

  "I can have a steak ready for you in five minutes, Mr. Byrd."

  "That sounds good to me," said Nick. "Make it rare."

  "All right, two," Hawk snapped testily. When Lee had gone, he asked suddenly, "Of what earthly use is the moon?" Nick noticed that his S's were beginning to slur. Hawk drunk? Unheard of — yet he gave every indication. Martinis weren't his drink. One scotch and water before dinner was his usual fare. Had the deaths of the three astronauts somehow gotten under that grizzled old skin?

  "The Russians know," Hawk said, without waiting for an answer. "They know minerals will be found there unknown to students of this planet's rocks. They know that if nuclear war destroys our technology, it will never recover because the raw materials that would enable a new civilization to evolve have been exhausted. But the moon — its a great floating ball of raw, unknown resources. And mark my words," space treaty or no, the first power to land there will eventually control all of it!"

  Nick sipped his drink. Had he been dragged away from his vacation to attend a lecture on the importance of the moon program? When Hawk finally paused, Nick said quickly, "Where do we fit into all of this?"

  Hawk glanced up, surprised. Then he said, "You've been on vacation. I forgot. When was your last briefing?"

  "Eight days ago."

  "Then you haven't heard that the Cape Kennedy fire was sabotage?"

  "No, the radio reports didn't mention that."

  Hawk shook his head. "The public doesn't know yet Perhaps they never will. There's been no final decision on that as yet."

  "Any idea who did it?"

  "It's quite definite. Man named Patrick Hammer. He was the gantry-crew chief..."

  Nick's eyebrows rose. "The news reports are still touting him as the hero of the whole affair."

  Hawk nodded. "The investigators narrowed it down to him in a matter of hours. He asked for police protection. But before they could get to his house he killed his wife and three children and put his head in the oven." Hawk took a long swig of his martini. "Very messy," he muttered. "He slit their throats, then wrote a confession on the wall with their blood. Said he'd planned the whole thing so he could be a hero, but that he couldn't live with himself and didn't want his family to live with the shame of it, either."

  "Very thoughtful of him," said Nick dryly.

  They were silent while the waiter served their steaks. When he had gone away Nick said, "I still don't see where we enter the picture. Or is there more?"

  "There is," said Hawk. "There's the airplane crash that killed the Gemini 9 crew a few years ago, the first Apollo disaster, the loss of the SV-5D re-entry vehicle from Vandenberg Air Force Base last June. There's the explosion of the J2A rocket test facility in the Air Force's Arnold Engineering Development Center in Tennessee in February, and there are the dozens of other accidents that have been logged in since the project began. The FBI, NASA Security, and now even the CIA, have been investigating each of them and they've reached the conclusion that most, perhaps all, are the result of sabotage."

  Nick picked silently at his steak, mulling it over. "Hammer couldn't have been in all those places at once," he said finally.

  "Exactly. And that last message he scrawled — strictly a red herring. Hammer used the hurricane shelter of his bungalow as a workshop. Before killing himself, he soaked the place in gasoline. He apparently hoped a spark from the doorbell would ignite the escaping gas and blow the whole house up. It didn't, though, and certain incriminating evidence has been found. Microdots with instructions from someone using the code name Sol, photographs, scale models of the capsule's life-support system with the pipe he was to cut painted in red. And — interestingly enough — a card from this restaurant with a notation on the back that read: Sol, midnight, 3/21."

  Nick glanced up, surprised. In that case, what in hell were they doing here, dining so placidly, talking so openly? He had assumed they were in a "safe house" or, at the very least, in a carefully "neutralized" zone.

  Hawk watched him impassively. "The Bali Hai's cards are not given out lightly," he said. "You have to ask for one, and if you're someone of little importance, chances are you won't get it. So how did a $15,000-a-year space technician end up with one?"

  Nick looked past him, seeing the restaurant through new eyes. Alert, professional eyes that missed nothing, that probed for the elusive element in the pattern round him, something disturbing, not quite within reach. He had noticed it earlier but thinking they were in a safe house, he had dismissed it from his mind.

  Hawk signaled the waiter. "Have the maitre d' step over here a minute, please," he said. He took a photograph from his pocket and showed it to Nick. "This is our friend Pat Hammer," he said. Don Lee appeared and Hawk handed the photo to him. "Recognize this man?" he asked.

  Lee studied it a moment. "Sure, Mr. Byrd, I remember him. He was in here about a month ago. With a gorgeous Chinese chick." He winked broadly. "That's how I remember him."

  "I take it he got in with no difficulty. Is that because he had a card?"

  "No. Because of the girl," said Lee. "Joy Sun. She's been here before. She's an old friend, as a matter of fact. She's some kind of scientist up at Cape Kennedy."

  "Thanks, Lee. I won't detain you."

  Nick stared at Hawk in amazement. The controlling hand of AXE, troubleshooting arm of the American security forces — a man responsible only to the National Security Council, the Secretary of Defense and the President of the United States — had just conducted that interrogation with all the subtlety of a third-rate divorce detective!

  Had Hawk turned into a security risk? Nick's mind suddenly tensed with alarm — was the man opposite him actually Hawk? When the waiter brought them their coffee, Nick said casually, "Could we have more light here?" The waiter nodded, pressing a hidden button on the wall. Soft light fell across them. Nick glanced at his superior. "They ought to give out miners' lamps when you come in," he smiled.

  The leathery old man chuckled. A match flickered, casting a brief glow across his face. It was Hawk, all right. The pungent smoke from the malodorous cigar settled that with finality. "Dr. Sun is already a prime suspect," Hawk said, blowing out the match. "You'll be filled in on her background by the CIA investigator with whom you'll be working..."

  Nick wasn't listening. A tiny glow had gone out with the match. A glow that hadn't been there earlier. He glanced down, to his left. It was faintly visible now that they had extra light — a spider-thin wire running along the edge of the banquette. Nick's eye quickly followed it, searching for the obvious outlet. The wrought-iron pineapple. He tugged at it. It wouldn't give. It was bolted to the center of the table. He dipped his right index finger into the bottom half, felt the cold metal grating under the fake candle wax. A remote pickup mike.

  He scribbled two words — We're bugged— on the inside cover of his matches and pushed them across the table. Hawk read the message and nodded blandly. "Now the thing is," he said, "we absolutely have to get one of our people into the moon program. So far we've been unsuccessful. But I have an idea..."

  Nick stared at hi
m. He was still staring in disbelief ten minutes later when Hawk glanced at his watch and said, "Well, that about covers it I've got to be going. Why don't you stay awhile and enjoy yourself? You're going to be pretty busy for the next few days." He stood up and nodded in the direction of the discotheque. "Things are beginning to warm up in there. Looks rather interesting — if I were a younger man, of course."

  Nick felt something slide under his fingertips. It was a card. He glanced up. Hawk had turned away and was moving toward the entrance, waving goodbye to Don Lee. "More coffee, sir?" asked the waiter.

  "No, I think I'll have a drink at the bar." Nick lifted the edge of his hand slightly as the waiter retreated. The message was in Hawk's handwriting. CIA operative will contact you here, it read. Recogphrase: ''What are you doing here in May? The season's over." Reply: "Social, maybe. Not hunting." Counter-reply: "Mind if I join you — for the hunting, that is?" Beneath this, Hawk had written: Card water-soluble. Make contact with Wash. h.q. no later than midnight tonight.

  Nick slipped the card into his water glass, watched it dissolve, then got up and sauntered into the bar area. He ordered a double scotch. Through the glass partition he could see the cream of Palm Beach's youth writhing spasmodically to the distant roar of drums, electric bass and guitar.

  Suddenly the music grew louder. A girl had just come though the glass door from the discotheque. She was a blonde — pretty, fresh-looking, slightly out of breath from dancing. She had that special look about her that spelled money and breeding. She wore olive-green hip-huggers, a midriff blouse and sandals, and she had a glass in her hand.

  "I just know you're going to forget Daddy's orders and slip some real rum into my cola this time," she said to the bartender. Then she noticed Nick at the end of the bar and did an elaborate double-take. "Why, hello there!" she smiled brightly. "I didn't recognize you at first. What are you doing here in May? The season's practically over..."