“You didn’t get a bridge game in Brazil?”
“The only bridge I ever saw was one we kept building and somebody kept blowing up. I wore out a deck of cards playing solitaire, but that was about the extent of it.”
“It would all come back to you.”
“I suppose so.”
“But you weren’t at your room, so the point never came up. What did you do, have yourself a sightseeing tour of beautiful South Dakota?”
“Something like that.” I wondered if this was maybe a little too casual to be true. “Practiced my snow driving,” I said.
“Oh?”
Far too casual. “And did a little homework in the process,” I admitted. “I thought it might not be a bad idea to check the roads south of here. I still don’t know how I fit into the picture on this operation, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to get some idea of the terrain. Just in case the office decides to put me on active duty.”
His face changed ever so slightly, just enough to tell me I’d made the right answer. Then he started to tell me something about Carr and his crazy wife, and told me just enough so that I had the feeling it was Col. Carr’s wife who had helped me break Rule #4. That was fine, it would give me an excuse to avoid future bridge games.
“A really strange gal,” he was saying. “I got the impression …” But I didn’t find out what impression he had gotten, because then the door opened and Bourke came in. He looked at O’Gara, and O’Gara nodded, and Bourke closed the door and found his way into a chair. The three of us talked about how cold it was, and they did a routine on the practice of locating army posts in uninhabitable areas. Their timing was good enough for me to suspect this was a bit they had refined over the years.
“All loaded,” Bourke said eventually. “Larry tell you about it, Dick?”
“Just that the bucks will stay there until they’re ready to roll them.”
“Uh-huh. Your truck is number two, incidentally.”
“I already told him,” Larry said.
“Told me what?”
“That the Texas truck is second. Come off it. Don’t be cute, or haven’t they told you? My spies say you got a telegram today.”
“I did, but this is the first I’ve heard of Texas.”
He looked at me appraisingly. “What are your orders, exactly?”
“Hardly anything specific so far. Just stay on the scene and keep an eye on the departure of the shipment.”
“You weren’t told to take an interest in any particular truck?”
“No. Not yet, at least. Why?”
They looked at each other. Then Larry said, “I don’t see why you’d be cagy, so all I can guess is that our team’s a day ahead of you on this one. It’s about time. I think I’ll declare a military victory.”
“I don’t—”
“On the other hand, maybe they don’t want to tell you until the last minute, or you’ll be mad at getting sent here.”
“I’m that already. They say you get used to the cold, but they say that about hanging, too. What the hell are you talking about, Larry?”
He lit another cigarette. “There’s supposed to be a play made for one of the trucks,” he said finally. “The usual sort of scuttlebutt. According to what we’ve got, a group of super-patriots want to take possession of the armaments so that they’ll be able to prevent the Russians from sending a gunboat up the Rio Grande. You know the drift. Some of those Texas left-wingers—”
“Right-wingers,” Bourke said.
“Did I say left? I meant right. The Sons of ’76 or ’69 or some such number. A paramilitary group. Listen, you can save me a lot of excess words if you already know all this.”
“I’ve heard of the group but I don’t know anything about them fitting into this operation.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Good enough. The word is that they’re based in Texas, and they plan to make an ambush attempt on the truck heading for Amarillo. You know one of the trucks is going to Amarillo?”
“To be honest, all I knew was Texas.”
“Well, the precise destination is Amarillo. These jokers are supposed to have an intercept scheduled somewhere between the moment we ship the goods and the moment they arrive there. Which means, of course, that they’ll hit it somewhere in Texas. Amarillo’s less than a hundred miles from the Oklahoma line, so they won’t have much room to work in.”
“Unless they hit it in Oklahoma,” Bourke said.
“Which wouldn’t make sense. They don’t want to cross a state line.”
“If they’re crazy enough to do it, what difference does a state line make?” O’Gara laughed. “Either way it sounds like a load of shit, but nowadays any load of shit with Texas in it seems to inspire belief. Anyway, Dick, that’s where you come into the picture.”
“In Texas?” I didn’t honestly have to pretend to be confused. I
was
confused.
“Texas is where the rest of your buddies are. You, lucky man, got sent here to guard the North Pole.”
“What Larry’s getting at,” Phil said, “is that evidently the Sons of ’69—”
“I think it’s ’76, actually—”
“Whatever they are, these Sons of Something must be one of the groups of clowns on your list. Though usually the Bureau gets them, don’t they?”
It seemed time for me to say something. “We keep an eye on certain crackpot groups,” I said. “Insofar as they have foreign contacts or impinge on foreign policy—”
“Uh-huh. Well, that’s the drift, then. Getting the goods to Amarillo is a military job, and we’re handling it. But making sure that the Sons don’t get their hands on them is evidently an Agency job as well, and a team of your gang is supposed to be on the spot in Texas already. We’re arranging the route to minimize the danger of an ambush once the Texas border is crossed. And you’re here to keep your eyes open and freeze your balls off, and if we weren’t stuck here too, Dick, I might go so far as to feel sorry for you.”
It wasn’t hard to give them the right reaction. By the time he finished his speech, I was really angry. I must have gotten a wire crossed mentally, to the point where I believed for a moment or two that we were really going to ambush the truck in Texas, and that George had shafted me by sending me to Sprayhorn. That’s a recognized hazard in any sort of role-playing. Anyone good enough to operate under cover has a certain amount of trouble keeping the cover separated from the reality in his own mind. In this case it worked out for the better. I showed the right degree of annoyance at the way I was being called upon to waste my time and comfort, and Bourke and O’Gara had a laugh at my expense, and I joined in.
“If they were shipping sheep shit from Texas to South Dakota,” I said, “then guess who’d be on the receiving end that time.”
“They’ll never do it. This place has all the sheep shit it needs.”
“The Army wouldn’t care.”
There was a knock at the door, and a non-com came in with a telegram for me. “Now’s when they tell you about it,” O’Gara said. I agreed, and put the telegram in my pocket without opening it.
“Come on,” Bourke said, “we’ll take a look at the trucks. Now that you know how important they are, you might want to see how we’re setting it up.”
It was cold on the way over and just as cold inside the storage depot. The building wasn’t heated. All four trucks stood in line at the far end of the building, away from the big doorway. We walked over to them, and Bourke pointed out the one destined for Amarillo. He called a soldier over and ordered him to unlock the back.
“Our idea,” he explained. “We shifted the load, apportioned a few cases among the three other trucks.”
“Won’t that screw things up?”
O’Gara shook his head. “We shifted goods the truck was heavy on,” he said. “Some chemical stuff that’ll never see use anywhere, and some of the gas grenades. We’ve corrected the invoices accordingly, so that no one in Amarillo will start raising hell. They can always adjust quantities later on, ship stuff from other bases to Amarillo, but I don’t really think they’ll bother.”
“Probably not,” Bourke agreed. “The important thing is that we’ve made room in this truck for four men armed with M-14s. That’s plenty of insurance, don’t you think?”
“Uh-huh. They ride in back?”
“Right. They’ll get bumped around, but that’s army life for you. If any crackpot patriots open this rig before the truck gets to Amarillo, they won’t even know what hit them.”
“Beautiful.”
“Of course there’ll be an armed man sitting next to the driver all the way,” O’Gara said. “The same as the other three.”
“And we’ll follow this one down.”
“In a car?”
He nodded. “We’ll keep all four trucks together as far as Omaha. At that point number one heads due east, number three swings southeast, and number four goes west to California. Our baby keeps on going south and we ride her tail all the way home.” He grinned at me. “We’ve got a sheaf of maps where we’re bedded down. If you want to come along, we’ll give you a quick briefing on the route.”
We took their car, and it wasn’t hard to spot it as government issue; it was the current year’s Ford, the bottom of the line, with absolutely no extras. Not even an ashtray. Their quarters were on the base, a single squat concrete block cube designed by the same imaginative genius who had created the rest of the base.
We spread maps on O’Gara’s bed and the two of them took turns explaining the proposed route to me. I had to pay closest attention to the part that interested me least, the route of the Texas-bound truck after the convoy broke up in Omaha. The part I cared about they covered in a few words, and it was as I had figured; the four trucks would move together along the fifteen-mile stretch. After that it all became academic as far as I was concerned.
But I had to pretend to pay attention. “Now here’s where we go a few extra miles,” Phil Bourke showed me. “From Omaha, the most natural route would take us almost due southwest toward Amarillo. But instead we’re routing the truck along the Missouri as far as Kansas City, Kansas. Then we head straight down to Tulsa, then over to Oklahoma City. Get the point? The roads are bigger and better, and they have more traffic. I don’t think they’d be fool enough to try anything north of the Texas line, but this makes it just that much safer.”
I agreed that this made a lot of sense.
“There are two ways to bring the goods through to Amarillo. We can come due south through Stratford and Moore or cut in from the east through Canadian, Pampa and White Deer. That way’s a little longer, but again we take advantage of better roads. Also, we’ll be picking up two escort jeeps in Fort Jeffrey Hillary just east of the border, see? And by the time—”
I let them give me the full rundown, and I asked most of the right questions. They weren’t making provision for air cover, that would be handled by the receiving unit out of Amarillo. All four trucks would receive air spotting throughout the trip once they separated in Omaha.
Finally they finished and asked me how it looked, and I said it looked airtight to me. No questions? Just one, I said, and they couldn’t answer it—where did I fit in?
“The answer’s probably in your pocket, Dick.”
“How’s that?”
“Your telegram. You figure they’ll send you along?”
“Damned if I know. I can’t see the point myself.”
“It’s a long trip, if they make you take your own car. At least the boys in the trucks will be splitting the driving, and so will Phil and I in our car. Maybe they’ll let you ride with us.”
We all laughed at that. They drove me back to my office, and on the way I asked the question that had been on my mind for most of the past hour. “Not that I’m complaining,” I said, “but how come you brought me in on all this?”
They glanced quickly at each other, then at me. “No reason not to,” Larry said. “We aren’t telling you anything you won’t know anyway.”
“True, but—”
“And inter-service rivalry doesn’t quite enter the picture this time, does it? We’re no saints, we hate to see you boys grab all the glory, but there’s not going to be any glory in this one, not up here in South Dakota. The trucks leave here on schedule. If the Texas truck arrives on time, that’s routine. If somebody makes a play for it, then whoever’s on the spot can be glorious. And if a long shot comes through and the crackpots pull it off, they won’t be passing out glory. They’ll be pouring out shit with a ladle.”
“Oh,” I said.
Larry O’Gara grinned. “So naturally we want you in on the planning,” he said. “You’ll be one more person for them to pour the shit on.”
I went to my office and closed the door. I opened the telegram. For the first time it wasn’t even coded. It said SCRATCH UNDERDOG SIT TIGHT.
I still had the telegram in my hand when the door opened. It was O’Gara. “We just got one of those ourselves,” he said. “I hope to Christ I never become a general. I’d hate to spend my declining years acting like an idiot. Did you get the same news we got?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I decided the hell with it and handed him the wire. “You tell me,” I said.
He read it. “Uh-huh. Well, that’s half of it.
Underdog
meant the original shipping date, right?”
It didn’t, but I nodded.
“You’ll probably get the rest in a few minutes, unless your people don’t have it yet. You knew of course that shipping date was Thursday.”
“I don’t recall anybody mentioning it.”
“No, we didn’t tell you and you didn’t tell us. Actually we took it for granted that you knew, and you realize how secrecy becomes a habit in this game. Well, they moved it up.”
“Wednesday?”
He shook his head. “Tomorrow morning. Six hundred thirty hours.” He heaved a sigh. “Phil’s on the line now trying to change their minds for them. We haven’t even lined up our drivers yet, let alone the four clowns who’ll sit in back with the M-14s. I told Phil he was wasting his time.”
“Six-thirty,” I said.
“That’s the word. That’s what? Twenty hours from now? Not even that. “He shook his head. “Got to go. Let me know when you get the word. If they tell you a different time, for God’s sake let me hear about it.”
He left, drawing the door shut after him. I burned the telegram and dropped the ashes in the wastebasket.
Scratch underdog sit tight.
The score was less than twenty hours away and Dattner’s arrival was scrambled, and I was supposed to sit tight.