Hostage Tower u-1 Page 12

  ‘I would advise the people gathered here, and the police, and the French Army, not to attempt to challenge these weapons, which are operating now on the face of the tower. That is all I have to say for the moment. I shall broadcast again in one hour. Au revoir.’

  The screen blanked out, and in Government offices, in bars, homes and shops throughout Paris, the reaction was one of numbed, fearful, enormous shock.

  In Washington and London, Moscow and Peking. Cairo and Brussels. Presidents and pressmen scanned incoming telexes and panic-stricken diplomatic cables with mounting incredulity.

  Philpott raced to the ’phone. ‘Roger,’ he rapped, ‘did you see it? All of it? Good. Now what I want you to do is this: I know Smith — his methods, his persona. I’ve studied him. Also I know a lot about these Lap-Lasers — because they’re the really import ant factor, you realize? Without the lasers there, we might have a chance, although obviously we couldn’t risk Adela’s life. But with Smith in possession of the lasers, the authorities are — completely — totally — powerless. Clear?

  ‘OK. Well, it’s just possible I and my people may be able to tip the balance. Strictly for your ears alone — and I mean this, Roger … it must go no further. Your word? Done. Well … I have two operatives on the inside — in the tower. Now I want you to fix it with the French Government — and you must know by now that I have Giscard’s Red priority, anyway — fix it for Sonya and me and UNACO to get in on the act. Like now. OK? Good. ’Phone me back.’ He slammed the receiver down, and said to Sonya. ‘We wait.’

  Less than a minute later, the telephone sounded again. Philpott snatched it up and said, ‘Roger? Who? Oh … oh, I see. No, of course. I’ll hold.’ He looked at Sonya and shook his head, slowly, but not in defeat; in sympathy.

  Then he put the receiver to his ear once more. ‘Yes, Mr President,’ he said. ‘It’s Malcolm. I know, sir, I know … I hope to give us an edge. Of course, of course — anything that could possibly cause even a hint of danger to Mrs Wheeler is clearly out of the question.

  ‘No, sir, no,’ he went on, ‘you have my absolute promise on that. Sure, I’ll calm things down, and I’ll be honoured to act as your personal re presentative, interpreting your wishes. Please don’t worry about that, Mr President. And — Warren. Have faith. OK, I’ll keep in touch.’ He cradled the machine, and it rang again almost at once.

  It was the American Ambassador. UNACO were more than acceptable to the incident team Ravensberg said. In fact — Philpott could consider himself as being virtually in charge of the operation. ‘And Malcolm — make sure the right side wins. The world is watching us — and the President considers Smith to be an appalling threat to international security.’

  At last Philpott smiled, albeit ruefully. Then he snapped into action. ‘Come on,’ he said to Sonya. ‘First stop, the French Ministry of the Interior. We have a hell of a lot to do. Pray God we’re in time.’

  * * *

  Whatever the spectacle, people have the sometimes dangerous habit of pushing small children to the front of a crowd, so that they can get a full view of the proceedings. The Eiffel Tower crowd was no exception.

  A little girl of perhaps seven, blonde hair caught up in bunches and held with ribbon, stood between two policemen, open-mouthed, clutching a large chequered ball.

  Her mother held her by the shoulder, but her own attention was fixed unswervingly on the tower, although she could see nothing that mattered. The child, from sudden, frustrated boredom, bounced the chequered ball and failed to catch it. Worse, in her attempt to hold on to it, she hit it with her knee, and it rolled out across the road … and trickled towards the chalk-marked perimeter area of the tower.

  With an annoyed squeal, the girl broke from her mother’s grasp and ran for the ball.

  Her mother screamed, and started after the child, but the police cordon held her in check. Some twenty feet along the fringe of the straining mass of people, a burly young man swept a policeman aside and streaked frantically in the wake of the little girl.

  On the tower, a Lap-Laser moved fractionally to the left. The mouse-ear antennae pricked up, then started tracking the running figures. The computer picked the smaller target first, and the generator trucks beneath the tower sent power surging into the gun.

  The running man dived just as the child reached her obstinately trickling toy. He scooped her up inches short of the chalk line, whose delineation had been dictated by Smith.

  The ball rolled over the line. The laser-gun moved at lightning speed. Its tube gleamed brilliant white. The outline of the ball glowed incandescently … And there was nothing. The ball simply disappeared. All that was left to show where it had been was a puff of smoke curling up from the tarmac.

  The little girl’s mother clutched her fiercely to her body, sobbing and rocking the child. There was total silence in the crowd around her. They stared at the smoke whiff in stunned, unbelieving horror.

  * * *

  Their limousine pulled up at the French Interior Ministry, and Philpott and Sonya got out and ran inside. Still the most notable feature of the skyline was the implacable giraffe of the Eiffel Tower.

  Without ceremony, they were taken straight to the lofty conference room, where Guillaume Ducret, the Minister, was meeting representatives of the police, Army and Civil Defence forces. Ducret held out his hand in manifest relief and said, ‘Mr Philpott. I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you.’ He introduced them all round.

  Ducret, a handsome and aristocratic French politician of the Giscard-Malraux school, started to quiz Philpott when the door burst open again, and Police Commissioner August Poupon threw himself through it. He was all nervous energy, Poupon, but effective in a crisis. He was followed in quick order by Roger Ravensberg, trailing a brace of four-star US Army generals — Holmwood and Hornbecker — plus aides, and then by French military and industrial chiefs.

  General Hornbecker and General Jaubert fell to discussing who could cause the most earth-shattering cataclysm in the shortest time. Jaubert declared, ‘I have a squadron of Mirage bombers in the air right now. They could be on the way in seconds.’

  Hornbecker replied, scornfully, ‘The Lap-Lasers will take them out in seconds! Now we could pick the lasers off with some very special missiles we have …’

  ‘Which would blow the Eiffel Tower, and Mrs Wheeler, and half of Paris sky-high,’ Philpott put in cuttingly. ‘No, gentlemen. Monsieur Ducret and I have been placed in command of this operation. If we need your assistance, we will call on it; and we probably shall — but on our terms. Until we do, I shall be obliged if, unless you have anything truly helpful to contribute, you remain silent.’ It was rough, but effective: in the last analysis, the only way to treat generals.

  Ducret coughed, and broke the embarrassed silence. Jaubert and Hornbecker, united at last, glared their collective loathing at Philpott. Ducret said, ‘May I suggest that our priority should be to learn all we can about the man who has committed this monstrous crime — the criminal who calls himself Mister Smith. Mr Philpott? You can help us there, I believe.’

  Philpott cleared his throat and frowned. ‘Smith is one of the world’s most extraordinary criminals, that’s true, Minister,’ he said. ‘He’s fantastically rich, but he has this dreadful urge … compulsion, to commit outlandish crimes. Freudian, possibly, but I believe he gets his kicks that way. No interest in politics or people; only crime … exalts him. So every year or so, he organizes a complex, brilliant, and normally successful criminal operation. He seems to be invulnerable. He thinks he is, anyway, which could be even more dangerous.’

  Ducret inquired, ‘Do we know anything that we are sure he’s been responsible for?’

  Philpott turned to Sonya. ‘Mrs Kolchinsky? She — she will tell you, gentlemen. She has the facts.’

  Sonya itemized Smith’s catalogue of atrocity. ‘It was he,’ she said, ‘who stole sixty kilos of fission-grade Uranium U-235 from the Nuclear Fuel Fabrication plant at Blythe, Wyoming, in 1963. You rem
ember? He held San Diego successfully to ransom for ten million dollars? Twenty dead in the panic.

  ‘Two. In 1976, he sold a load of stolen Russian hand weapons — super-advanced equipment from their experimental test ground in Nevyansk — to terrorists in Libya. They turned up all over the place. A hundred and fifty dead in Manchester, England; two hundred in Tokyo; that air liner over Haifa; the Darmstadt massacre. Not Smith, I grant you — but Smith was the catalyst.’

  Sonya looked from face to face. ‘Do you want me to go on? The Channel Islands bank heist? Remember? Hell, he practically hi-jacked Jersey; commandos all over the island.’ She started to tick off another, but Ducret intervened. ‘No, Mrs Kolchinsky, that will be enough, thank you. But why have I, any of us, never heard of a man like this? A man who actually lives in a Loire château, and apparently spends enormous sums of money here in my country.’

  Philpott explained. ‘He always disguises his identity. I hate to use the phrase, but he is a master of disguise. He can change his appearance so completely that his closest associates will fail to recognize him. Five years ago in Tokyo he appeared as a German: he speaks God knows how many languages. He was a Spaniard in Johannesburg two years back. But the main point about him, which I feel you have yet failed to appreciate, is that: whatever identity he assumes, when Smith issues a demand, it is axiomatic that he will make it as difficult as possible to avoid compliance.’

  ‘You’re saying he will give us no room to manoeuvre,’ Ravensberg put in.

  ‘Exactly,’ Philpott replied. ‘Absolutely none. However, we’ve managed to make some room for ourselves. Gentlemen,’ Philpott sighed heavily, ‘there is no time for me to extract promises from you not to broadcast around what I’m going to tell you, so I’ll take it on trust that you won’t. My organization, UNACO, has planted two agents in Smith’s team on the Eiffel Tower.’

  The response was gratifying, although muted by the realization that, as Philpott said, ‘Whatever advantage it gives us, we can’t capitalize on it for the moment, because we’re out of touch with our people. So, not to gloss over the matter, we still know damn-all about what’s going on up there.’ He pointed out of the window at the tower.

  * * *

  Mike Graham looked keenly at the group gathered around him in the kitchen. Sabrina’s special talent made her the leader; the other three commandos were make-weight, but would obey orders. A plan of the tower lay before them on the table, held down incongruously by four bulky explosive charges.

  Graham’s finger jabbed at the plan. ‘Here, here, here and here — the stress points. That’s where I calculate the tower is at its weakest — the fulcrums, so to speak. Hit them — and whoompf.’ He spread his hands wide, palm downwards. ‘No more Eiffel Tower.’

  ‘At each point?’ Sabrina asked. ‘A full charge?’

  Mike nodded. ‘Uh-huh. A twenty-five pounder.’ He picked up a detonator from a steel box. ‘And one of these. This is a radioactivated detonator. It’s completely safe until activated by a radio signal. But once the command to arm has been delivered, it cannot be countermanded. However long the fuse duration is — that’s the time you’ve got to get clear. If you can.’

  As it happened two of the commandos weren’t even good ballast; they were scared stiff of heights. Tote contemptuously elbowed one out of the way and roughly hauled the other from the harness perched on the gallery rail. He took the quaking man’s place, jumped down the side of the tower, and fitted two charges of moulded explosive. Sabrina and the third commando did the others. Like Tote, she scorned the use of the restraining harness.

  She worked, as always, quickly and with a seemingly inborn skill, swinging surely out on the angled iron struts, taping the rolls of pliable greyish-pink plastique into the girder-beds, and pressing home the detonators. At the end of it, the bombs, mocking the innocence of their classroom plasticine substance, sat snugly like sinister bird’s nests in the branches of the tower.

  Sabrina flashed the uneasy commando above her a grateful smile. He may be scared, she thought, but at least he’s competent. The commando offered her a hand to help her up, but she waved it impatiently away. ‘Look after yourself,’ she instructed, ‘you’re in more danger than I am.’

  The man shrugged, and balanced nonchalantly astride a cross-beam intended to take him to the safety of the spiral staircase. He lunged for the guard rail — and missed. His scream rang out on the air as he swivelled on the beam and tried to hook his legs around it.

  The iron cut into the backs of his knees, and the pain reflexes straightened his legs. With a second wild, throaty cry, he fell from the beam. His body cannoned off an angle strut, and passed Sabrina close enough for her to feel the wind of its passage and the agony of his despair.

  She anchored herself securely to an upright, and shot out a rigid arm and hand to grasp his own flailing fingers. It fastened on his hand, nails digging into the flesh, the grip moving to enclose his wrist like an iron band. The wrench on her corded muscles as she took the full strain of his body almost dislocated her shoulder, but she gasped with the numbing pain and gritted her teeth, trying to control the ugly rasp of the breath forced from her heaving chest.

  Tote, from the opposite side of the tower, shouted, ‘Hang on! Hold him!’ What, Sabrina thought wildly, does he think I’m trying to do?

  ‘Get your feet on a girder!’ she screamed, as the squirming man on the end of her arm kicked aimlessly out into space. Even Sabrina’s strength was fast giving out, and she knew it would be a matter only of seconds before she must release him or join him in his death fall.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, I can’t hold you!’ she yelled. The girder she was clinging to bit into her muscles and sent waves of pain coursing through her body. Her fingers started to slip from the ironwork, her toes curled to ease the intolerable pressure, and she felt herself bowing and slumping down the beam. A sobbing moan of terror and frustration escaped from her clenched teeth.

  Then it was over. The tension relaxed so suddenly as Tote, from below, swung across to catch the commando in a crushing hug, that Sabrina almost let go of the upright. She caught herself in time, and her body snapped back to embrace the girder, spacing her legs and arms away from the metal edges that were denting and ridging her flesh.

  She heaved herself gratefully up to the gallery, and lay on the floor, blinking back tears of relief, and at last breathing deeply and evenly. Tote dumped the commando unceremoniously next to her. She turned to the man. ‘You all right?’ she whispered. Dumbly, he nodded. ‘Yeah, thanks,’ he replied. Then he gasped and retched as Tote’s booted foot caught him in the side.

  ‘I’ll say you’re all right,’ the Finn growled. ‘You one lucky sonofabitch, your hear me, man? Me, I’d have dropped you. You hear that?’ He kicked the commando again. The man grunted and coughed a spray of blood.

  ‘Worse t’ing you do,’ Tote continued remorselessly, ‘is you nearly kill her. You, we can do without. She’s worth ten of you — a hundred. You hear? I ever see you again, I kick you off the — tower myself.’

  Beneath the tower, the area was all bustle and activity. The Larousse trucks formed a circle like settler’s wagons against marauding Indians. Inside the enclosure, Claude and C.W. led a team unspooling massive lengths of cable from a truck, and transporting them to an underground chamber.

  They clamped the cables on to the tower’s main power line. Other members of the crew brought in several small cartons, which they stacked against the wall as company for a couple of beer tanks.

  As before, the cable-linking was a nerve-racking job, and when it was done, C.W. stepped back from the bench and mopped the sweat from his brow. He looked for a freshener, and his eye fell on the beer tanks. He loped over to them, hunkered down, put his mouth under the spigot, and turned the valve.

  Nothing came from the nozzle but the hiss of compressed air. ‘Jeeze,’ C.W. complained, ‘there’s an awful lot of bubbles in your beer, Claude.’ Claude whipped round and barked, ‘Don’t touch tha
t. If you want a drink, wait until you get upstairs.’

  C.W. rose to his feet and shrugged. The drink he could do without … but the knowledge that at least some of Smith’s beer tanks were filled with oxygen might come in handy.

  Not for the first time, the black man cudgelled his agile brain for some way of getting the priceless information he had off the tower and into Philpott’s hands. Here, in the basement, on the ground, he was so close to safety. All he had to do was cut and run. Except, he thought ruefully, that Claude would blast his head off before he’d taken half a dozen steps …

  * * *

  The activity at the Interior Ministry was more controlled now. Philpott and Ducret kept useless talk down to the minimum, and concentrated on getting the best scientific and military advice on how to deal with the lasers.

  At one stage it seemed as if they might have achieved a break-through, when a tall, gangling, humourless French boffin came up with a startingly obvious solution.

  ‘The guns operate on light-beams,’ he explained earnestly, ‘so all you have to do is reflect the — how you say? — death ray back at the Lap-Laser.’

  Philpott leapt to his feet. ‘Mirrors, by God!’ he exploded. ‘That’s it! Big mirrors! Catch the beam, and bend it back. Why didn’t we think of that before?’

  He set the scientific team to work, but they mournfully reported half an hour later that if the angle of refraction wasn’t absolutely correct, the bouncing beam could shear off large sections of the Eiffel Tower and miss the lasers altogether.

  ‘Can’t you fix the angle of refraction and keep it fixed?’ Philpott pleaded, desperately. ‘When you’re running with a damned great looking-glass?’ the tall boffin moaned. ‘Or when all they have to do is alter the angle of the laser anyway, and you’re in even deeper trouble than before?’