Hostage Tower Read online

  JOHN DENIS

  Alistair MacLean’s UNACO

  Hostage Tower

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  EPILOGUE

  By Alistair MacLean

  ALISTAIR MACLEAN’S HOSTAGE TOWER

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  Lorenz van Beck had three hours to kill. For a man to whom killing came easily, it was time enough. But on that fine, pastel-golden Paris day, van Beck had nothing to kill but time.

  Van Beck wandered through the leafy shades of the Ile Saint-Louis and basked in the dappled darts of sunlight that sought out his square, unsmiling face beneath its cap of spiked grey hair. He was hatless, and dressed in a dark suit of heavy broadcloth, his waistcoat buttoning high to bunch up the small-knotted, unimpressive tie. He looked, unsurprisingly, like a businessman.

  With a muttered sigh, van Beck turned to business, choosing the Musée Rodin and the Musée de Cluny for modern art, porcelain and glass. He noted recent additions, their placings and lighting, their security surveillance. He made jottings in a notebook: enter by this or that window; copy key to door 2, 9, 15; how big, how small, how friendly, the curator’s guards; proximity to sewers, access roads; MO – bombs? Gas?

  Occasionally he wrote down a name, one of a thousand – ten thousand – thieves, killers, weapons men, explosives men, biologists, hit-men, stunt-men, drivers, pimps … the freelance employees of Lorenz van Beck, international fence extraordinary. Against a particularly splendid loan collection of Venetian glass he set another name – a well-known name, titled, respected – a lady, you could say, of some quality. Not an employee, but a client.

  Van Beck flipped back through the pages of the notebook to the diary section, and checked the client appointment he had fixed that day. He cast an eye at the gold watch chained to his waistcoat, sniffed the expensively musty air of the museum once again – what delicious odours wealth created! – and strolled to the car he had rented under a false name and driving licence at the Gare d’Austerlitz. He retrieved a shabby leather case with an obstinate clasp from the front seat, locked the car, and abandoned it. It would later, he knew, be reported missing, but the matter did not greatly concern van Beck.

  He made his way by taxi to another car rental office in the Boulevard Haussmann, where the pretty secretary recognized him as Marcel Louvain, and drove to Rambouillet by way of Versailles, stopping at the palace to sit in the lengthening garden shadows and eat warm bread and rough Ardennes pâté. The Rambouillet bell-tower boomed the first chime of six o’clock as Lorenz van Beck pushed open a creaking internal door and clumped into the darker silence of the church …

  The bell notes reverberated through the empty nave. Van Beck peered into the gloom, grunted, and plodded to the second in a group of confessional boxes set in the furthest shadowy corner. He pushed through the dingy red curtain, lowered his bulk on to the chair, cleared his throat, and sniffed in the direction of the confessional grille. A polite cough came from the scarcely discernible figure on the other side.

  ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,’ van Beck mumbled.

  ‘In nomine Patris, Filii et Spiritus Sanc –’ the priest began, and was rudely interrupted by van Beck’s derisive chuckle.

  ‘This was your idea, Smith,’ he said, ‘but I’m a sensitive man, and play-acting becomes neither of us. Say what you have to say, and let me go.’

  ‘I rely, as always, van Beck,’ Smith returned in his dry, precise voice, ‘on your absolute discretion.’

  ‘And I on your consuming lust for making money illegally.’

  The vaguely outlined head nodded agreement. ‘Though you do me a small injustice,’ Smith said. ‘I am fascinated more by crime than by money, as you well know. For me, stealing ten dollars from the coffee fund in the desk of the secretary to the Director of Fort Knox is worth all the jackpots in Las Vegas … in the world.

  ‘I have made crime my life’s study, my life’s work. It is the ultimate excitement, van Beck. No other physical experience can match it.’

  ‘Ja, ja,’ the Bavarian sighed, ‘so you have said, so you have said, Mister Smith. So you’re different from me … huh? I can fence anything from the Mona Lisa to a uranium mine. I could find customers for the Taj Mahal or Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony. I’ve even sold his own gold back to the Director of Fort Knox. But I’m a peasant. You’re an artist. What do you want?’

  ‘A team.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘You know better than that, van Beck,’ Smith rapped.

  ‘OK, OK.’ Van Beck was silent. ‘How many?’

  ‘Three,’ Smith replied.

  Van Beck wrote the figure in his dog-eared notebook. ‘Any preferences?’ he enquired.

  ‘None.’

  ‘So tell me.’

  Smith’s urbane voice dropped to a sibilant hiss. ‘One – a weapons expert. The best. Tough … resourceful … professional.’ Van Beck’s blunting pencil stump dug into the cheap paper.

  ‘Two – a thief. Again, the best. I have to steal two and a half million rivets and somebody’s mother.’ Smith giggled. ‘The best thief you know, van Beck. Daring, totally unafraid.’

  ‘What’s the going rate for scrap iron and old ladies?’ van Beck enquired.

  ‘For this collection?’ Smith said. ‘Could be thirty million.’

  ‘Rivets?’

  ‘Dollars.’

  Van Beck whistled low, unmelodiously. ‘I can get a good team for a slice of that.’

  ‘Then do it,’ Smith whispered. ‘Do it.’

  ‘The third one?’

  Smith hesitated. ‘Someone … inventive. Incredibly ingenious. Strong, and – again – afraid of nothing. Especially heights.’

  Van Beck was thoughtful, rubbing his fleshy, prickly chin.

  ‘That apply to the other two as well?’ he queried, blandly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The heights,’ the German replied, trying to fit rivets in the sky into a recognizable pattern.

  Smith was quiet, dangerously quiet. At length he said. ‘Don’t push me, van Beck. Do what you have to do, but don’t try your luck too hard. It may not last.’

  Van Beck swallowed, and shuffled uncomfortably. ‘It will be as you say.’ He made to get up, but Smith’s rasping command froze him.

  ‘One more thing. There is a new gun, a laser-gun, the Lap-Laser. The Americans have it for their army. I want some. The weapons man must get them. Agreed?’

  ‘It’ll cost.’

  ‘I’ll pay.’

  ‘Sure,’ van Beck grunted. ‘You pay, I’ll supply. That’s business.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Smith relaxed back in his seat. ‘You may go. Contact me in the usual way. You have a month.’

  Van Beck nodded, making no reply. None was needed. He threw aside the curtain on its jangling brass rings, and strode out into the mellow light of evening. He drank white wine, marginally chilled, and cognac at the pavement table of a café, then rejoined his car and took the road to Chartres.

  From the church porch, piercing eyes in a hooded face watched him.

  Then the heavy door swung open once again, and a bent, shabby little priest joined the home-goers and the evening walkers. He smiled benignly at an old woman dressed, like himself, in rusty black. He reached to pat the head of a passing boy, but missed.

  ONE

  It was a sheltered place, twenty-eight miles west of Stuttgart: a plateau
in wooded country screened from the road by trees, and hardly ever overflown. It made an ideal secret firing range. The US Army used the unfenced fields to test their newest toy, the General Electric Lap-Laser-gun.

  The US Army had four Lap-Lasers at Stuttgart. Not very many, they conceded, but still one-third of those known to exist. For the manufacturers had made only twelve so far, and they were as yet in the experimental stage. Since the Army chiefs were confident that neither General Electric’s security nor their own had been breached, they took their time about putting the Lap-Laser through its paces. No one, after all, they reasoned, was going to steal it …

  On the day appointed by Smith for the theft of all four guns, a fine but drenching rain speckled the goggles of the Army’s chief weapons instructor as he strained his eyes skywards to pick up the incoming helicopter. The fretful buzz of its motor sounded intermittently out of the heavy clouds. He chewed his gum viciously and spat, a not un-accomplished combined operation.

  The helicopter was part of the daily Lap-Laser routine, bringing the precious guns from the big, closely guarded Stuttgart base to the range each morning, and taking them back again in the evening for safe keeping. The guns could not be tested at the base: they were too powerful, too unpredictable.

  Apart from that, they needed an enormous power source, and rather than transport huge and unwieldy banks of generators from place to place, the Army preferred the option of an isolated testing ground where they could install a small nuclear power plant.

  The colonel glanced back over his shoulder at his sleekly sinister ‘babies’, all four stripped and stacked away, ready to leave on the return trip to the base. He grinned and winked at his second-in-command at his side.

  ‘They’re really somethin’ aren’t they.’ It was a statement, not a question.

  ‘Yeah,’ acknowledged the major, through a stubby cigar that rarely left his stained lips.

  There were US Army Generals, plenty of them, who would greet with genuinely blank astonishment any leading question about a laser-gun, and the chief weapons instructor and his 2–IC basked in the realization that they were part of an impressively small band of experts. For example, if put to the trouble, which they rarely were, they would be able to explain that the Lap-Laser was made possible by advances not in ballistics or aero-dynamics, but in the field of optics. That statement in itself was enough to confound most questioners.

  The colonel grinned appreciatively at the final touch the laser-gunners had insisted on adding to the already successful day’s tests: at a range of a thousand metres they had drilled ‘USAAF’ through a four-inch plate of sheet steel as cleanly as if it had been stencilled on cartridge-paper.

  The Lap-Laser’s guidance system was similar to that of a conventional radar device, except that instead of using radio beams, it reflected beams of light when seeking its target. It could be sensitized to any target within its range, or any kind of target, because the mouse-ear detectors of the Lap-Laser, on either side of its firing mechanism, were tuned to distinguish the properties of a variety of different materials. They could run from a dozen different sorts of metal, to wood, brick, or the human body.

  Once the target was located, the Lap-Laser sent out a concentrated ray of appallingly destructive force, which annihilated anything in its direct path.

  Its other great advantage was speed. It is the practice in orthodox electronics to work down to a nano-second – one thousandth of a millionth of a second. If even greater speed is required, the only alternative carrier is light, which can be con trolled to a pico-second, or micromicro-second – a millionth of a millionth fraction of time, of such minute duration as to be incomprehensible in human terms.

  The Lap-Laser worked to pico-second tolerances, using a processor which General Electric built into the controlling computer specially for the job. To give the optical system the necessary speed to match the sophisticated laser-gun, the processor employed mini-lasers no larger than a grain of salt.

  Allied to a power source of massive concentration and force, the lasers combined to produce a weapon that was like a glimpse into a fearful future. Everything ultimately depended on the uses to which the Lap-Laser was put, and on the inviolable guarantee that it could never fall into the wrong hands.

  Yet the hands of Mister Smith were among the dirtiest in creation.

  And the instrument of his criminal ambition was at that moment speeding down an autobahn in a hired car to keep an appointment with the four deadliest ‘babies’ of all time.

  ‘AUSGANG-STUTTGART’ the road sign read, and Michael Graham obediently urged the BMW into the stream that peeled off the motorway.

  When the price was right, Graham was invariably obedient. Van Beck’s price had been not only right, but generous. The unknown client, the German explained, was prepared to pay for excellence. And Mike Graham, van Beck had known, was awesome in his field of weapons and weapon systems. He had received the kind of training that only the US Army could supply, and had used a privileged position to enlarge his knowledge and raise his performance to a peak of unparalleled capability.

  Smith had provided the means, through van Beck, to steal the Lap-Lasers, but the plan was Mike Graham’s, and he turned it over in his mind for the thousandth time.

  Using a laser-guided, tripod-mounted electronic surveillance device over a range of more than half a mile, Graham had bugged the US Army base guardroom to obtain the weekly series of passwords that would gain him admittance to the off-limits compound at the right time … when the helicopter touched down on its run back from the firing range.

  Graham had also sounded out the other parts of the base’s territory which interested him: the officers’ club, and the living quarters for visiting top brass, whose faces would not be known to the guards. He had selected and marked his target officer, and now had a complete set of forged papers in his new identity. He drove carefully along the public road through the base, away from the off-limits section, and pulled into a cul-de-sac not far from the officers’ quarters, located in a mini-apartment block.

  Ten minutes later, a figure in the uniform of a General of the United States Army strode the short distance from the living quarters to the officers’ club. He had a bundle under his arm. He checked his wrist-watch, peered up at the sky, and made his way to a jeep parked at the rear of the club.

  The guard corporal dropped his girlie magazine and jumped to his feet as the jeep screeched to a halt outside the guardroom. He joined another soldier at the door, and they peered out into the near-darkness. The harsh whirr of the descending helicopter’s engine sounded loudly in their ears.

  A man leapt lithely from the jeep, and the guardroom lights winked on his General’s stars. The corporal tightened his grip on his M–1 carbine.

  ‘Halt,’ he commanded. Graham did. ‘It’s an emergency, for Christ’s sake, Corporal,’ he shouted. ‘I’m in one hell of a hurry.’

  ‘Advance and be recognized.’ Snorting with impatience. Graham advanced. The GIs saw a man they did not know, tall and bronzed, with brown hair and moustache, broad-shouldered and thin-faced, looking at them from soft, quick, intelligent eyes. He had a commanding, arrogant manner. But then, the soldiers reasoned, Generals usually did.

  ‘Hurry it up,’ Graham ordered. The banshee wail of the chopper told him it would soon be settling on the launch-pad in the compound beyond the guard block.

  ‘Password,’ the corporal rapped.

  ‘Don’t play games with me,’ Graham snapped. ‘You first – that’s the drill.’

  ‘Sleepy dog,’ the guard rejoined.

  ‘Angle-iron,’ said Graham, handing over his papers.

  The corporal recollected the name. ‘General Otis T. Brick.’ Visiting brass. Weapons expert. He snapped up a salute. ‘Yessir General,’ he bellowed, while his subordinate pressed the button to raise the barrier to the compound.

  Graham vaulted back into the jeep, gunned the motor to speed into the compound and slew to a halt in a spray of grave
l near the launch-pad. Three startled soldiers, waiting for the helicopter to come back from the range with the four crated laser-guns on board, jumped like scalded tomcats when Graham screamed, ‘Get away from there – now!’

  ‘Ten-shun!’ barked the corporal in charge, and all three snapped into rigidity.

  Graham saluted, and said, ‘Get your men away from this area. There’s a leak in the nuclear generator shielding out at the range. The radioactivity could have spread to the guns, or even the helicopter. My orders are to take the chopper away.’

  ‘Who – who are you, s-sir,’ the corporal stammered. Graham had already raced back to the jeep and extricated the anti-radiation suit he had brought with him. Climbing into it, he shouted above the roar of the settling helicopter, ‘General Brick, Third Army Special Weapons Division. Now move it, soldier – move it!’

  Graham reached back into the jeep and pulled out a geiger counter, and what looked like a steel brief-case. The helicopter’s rotors were beating the air, and the pilot looked anxiously out at the charade on the tarmac. Graham ducked under the sweeping blades, and wrenched open the door.

  ‘Out!’ he ordered the pilot. ‘Radiation scare. You could have got a dose. The Emergency Med. Unit’ll be here soon to check you over. I’ll take the chopper away. Don’t switch the motor off.’

  The pilot needed no second bidding. He scrambled out of the seat and dropped to the ground, almost colliding with Graham.

  ‘Will you be all right, sir?’ he screamed.

  ‘The suit will protect me,’ Graham shouted. ‘I’ll fly the chopper to the far end of the range and quarantine it. Look after yourself, man.’

  The blare of a motor-horn from the direction of the guardroom drew the eyes of all four men on the ground away from the helicopter, where Graham was already revving the engine.

  Two jeeps packed with men hurtled towards the launch-pad. A burst of machine-gun fire came from the leading vehicle. The three soldiers and the pilot scattered to hit the deck, and the jeeps pulled up short of a stack of gasolene cans a hundred yards from the chopper. Graham throttled viciously, and another spurt of tracer fire arced towards him.