The Terminators (2 page)

I looked up to see the waitress standing over me expectantly. I made an apologetic noise, put the letter away, picked up the menu, frowned at it, and shook my head.

"Sorry, I don't dig that 
Norska
 stuff," I said. "Haven't you got one in English? 
Engelska?
 No? Well, just bring me something with meat in it, okay? Meat. Beef. 
Boeuf?
 No, that's French, dammit. . . ."

"Can I be of help, sir?"

It was the male half of the couple at the next table, a husky, weathered character in his sixties with cropped gray hair, wearing tweeds and a strong British accent. His companion was younger, a slim, pale girl in gray slacks and sweater. I'd noticed them when they came in, a few minutes after me—as a matter of fact, I'd recognized the man and been surprised to see him, since he wasn't the kind of errand-boy I'd expected to meet—but I had not, of course, paid any attention to them since.

I said, "Well, if you don't mind. ... I'd kind of like a steak or something. I've been eating fish ever since I got here. What's Norwegian for beef?"

The man said, "The word is 
ox k0tt
 —ox meat. They don't have steaks here, but the first meat dish on the menu is rather good, don't you know? Would you like me to tell her?"

"I'd sure appreciate it," I said. "Ox meat, for God's sake! Thanks a lot."

"It's perfectly all right, old chap. Happy to be of service."

His British was a little overdone, perhaps; but then, so was my American. He spoke to the waitress in reasonably fluent Norwegian. After being thanked once more, he turned back to his companion, who gave me a brief, polite, restrained little smile before picking up the conversation that had been interrupted by my gastronomic and linguistic emergency. An hour later, well fed and beered, I emerged on the street that ran along the misty harbor. There had been a man lounging in the shadows near the corner of the restaurant, but nobody'd jumped me or shot at me as I made my way out of the Hansa merchants' ancient dark lanes, although it was an ideal place for an ambush.

I was a little disappointed. I'd kind of hoped for some kind of action to give me a hint of what I was going to be up against. Well, whoever we were dealing with, they'd missed their boat. I'd been walking around practically naked for a couple of days. All these current anti-hijacking procedures make it tough for an honest agent to earn an honest buck, or even stay alive; but now I had my gun and knife back, slipped to me under the table, after being transported across the Atlantic by a different route, by the tweedy pseudo-British chappie who was actually a very solid American citizen, an ex-congressman m fact, named Captain Henry Priest, USN, Ret. Obviously, he was having himself a lot of fun playing secret agent, phony accent and all.

His presence changed the picture rather drastically. I'd been thinking of this friendship deal in rather vague and general terms; but Hank Priest was a real friend of Mac's, with a real claim on the organization for services rendered not long ago, when we'd needed his help badly. If, after losing his bid for reelection, and later losing his wife in a boating accident—I'd read about it in the newspapers— Captain Priest had consoled himself by becoming involved in some kind of hush-hush government project that required a little assistance of the kind that only we could give, he'd know where to go; and if his request was at all reasonable and legitimate Mac would undoubtedly grant it, maybe even straining the rules a bit, since we did owe the guy a favor. The only question was: why hadn't Mac simply told me I'd be working with Hank Priest once more, instead of handing me the old need-to-know routine?

Well, my superior does like to be mysterious, sometimes unnecessarily so; but in our business it doesn't pay to take anything for granted. I had to go back to the hotel anyway, to check out and pick up my suitcase—it hadn't seemed advisable to explore the wilds of Bergen burdened with forty pounds of luggage. Back in my room, I placed a call to a number in Oslo, the national capital, a couple of hundred miles to the east across a lot of rugged mountains. After half a dozen rings, a male voice answered.

I said, "Okay Priest."

The voice said, "Priest okay."

I hung up, making a sour face at the phone. Hank Priest might be okay as far as security was concerned; he had been reliable the last time we met and apparently he still was. He might be a pretty good congressman, when the voters allowed him to work at it. He might even, before retirement, have been a fine seaman and naval officer. I had no reason to think otherwise. But just what the hell was the picturesque old seadog doing here with his lousy old tweeds and his pale young brunette?

Well, whatever it was, it was bound to be a high school production and I wanted no part of it—which didn't alter the fact that I obviously had a large part of it whether I wanted it or not.

I picked up my suitcase and went downstairs to check out and take a taxi back to the harbor, past the Hansa section where I'd had dinner, to Festnungskaien, which I managed to translate loosely as the Fortress Dock, presumably named for an ancient stone structure on one of the hills nearby.

II.

THE ship looked black and enormous, lying at the dock in the misty darkness. I guess I was judging her by the pleasure boats I'd been playing around with recently in more tropical waters—a ton-and-a-half outboard is quite a husky runabout, and a ten-ton sportfisherman isn't something you want to start dreaming about unless you can shell out half a hundred grand without hurting. This was actually a fairly small steamer; but she'd still weigh in at well over two thousand tons.

Although far from new, she was clean and freshly painted; but I quickly learned that she was no luxury cruise-ship with service to match. The uniformed gent at the gangplank just took my ticket, told me that my cabin was one deck down on the starboard side, and let me find it for myself, carrying my own damned bag.

The Norwegians call it their National Highway Number One: the regular daily ship service up the coast. It's also known as Hurtigruten, which translates loosely as "the speedy route." I guess it does beat walking, at that, and maybe even driving, since the roads along that rugged, mountainous, fjord-slashed shoreline mostly have to go the long way around, where they exist at all.

If you've got an active imagination, you can visualize the main Scandinavian peninsula as a large dog standing on its forepaws (don't ask me why) near a fire hydrant called Denmark. The belly, washed by the Baltic and the Gulf of Bothnia, is Sweden, which also includes the forelegs. The back, exposed to the North Atlantic, is Norway, which also includes the head. Oslo is tucked away well up under the chin. Bergen is out on the face, halfway between the nose and the ears. The ship route runs from there up the mutt's back, clear around the rump—the North Cape, well above the Arctic Circle—and down to Kirkenes on the Russian border; the ice-cold ass-hole, if you insist on completing the picture. A round trip takes some eleven days and is popular in midsummer with sun-worshippers, who get a thrill out of experiencing twenty-four continuous hours of daylight on the roof of the world. In midwinter, it works the other way, of course; but I'm told that few people seem to be interested in seeing that much darkness.

The ticket I'd received wouldn't take me that far. It was a one-way job entitling me only to a four-day voyage as far as Svolvaer, in the Lofoten Islands just off the coast, opposite Narvik on the mainland. Having been there once, I knew that Narvik is the ice-free Norwegian port that handles the ore from the great Swedish iron mines across the mountains in Kirunaat least the ore comes out that way in winter when the Gulf of Bothnia freezes over. It's the sort of detail you notice when you don't know what the hell's going on. Whether it was actually significant as far as the present operation was concerned, I had no idea. What would happen after Svolvaer, if we got that far—destinations marked on tickets mean very little in this racket—was up to the gods, or a girl called Madeleine.

I'd checked both cabins, as well as I could, for electronics; and I was examining my stateroom when she arrived. I was standing there wondering how a race of reasonably husky people like the Norwegians manage to do their sleeping m the narrowest, shortest beds on earth. My fairly expensive Bergen hotel room had boasted, if that is the correct term, a pair of diminutive cots I wouldn't have wished off on a couple of stunted kids. This tiny cabin was equipped with sleeping-shelves—you couldn't conscientiously call them berths—one on each side, that were not only ridiculously inadequate in the transverse direction, but weren't significantly over six feet long, leaving me with several extra inches to dispose of somehow. It occurred to me that my prospective partner's elaborate efforts to preserve her virtue had been quite unnecessary. We might as well have saved public money by sharing one cabin. Only a pair of oversexed midgets could have managed successful passion in the cramped space provided. . . . "Matt, darling!"

She was standing in the doorway. It was no time for taking inventory. After all, we were supposed to be, at least, very good friends. She was stepping forward, arms outstretched; and I took the cue and embraced her heartily and kissed her on the lips—cool and damp from the rainy night outside—without having had much of a chance to determine what I was greeting so affectionately. I only knew that it smelled nice and felt feminine in spite of being snugly wrapped in a tailored pantsuit of brownish tweed rough enough to earn the approval of Hank Priest in his British incarnation.

I felt her stiffen in my arms when I carried the exploration a little too far. Apparently I'd read her written message correctly: no funny business. I withdrew my scouts from the forbidden territory; and we clung together a moment longer and parted with reasonably convincing reluctance—all this, presumably, for the benefit of a husky, red-faced, fairhaired sailor in dungarees and a navy-blue turtle-neck, who was standing out in the passage with a white suitcase in each hand. It seemed that there were ways of getting porter service on board, after all, if you knew how and were properly constructed.

"Darling!" said my colleague-to-be. "Oh, darting!" Her eyes were angry. Even play-acting, apparently, before an interested audience, I was supposed to keep my cotton-picking hands from wandering.

"It's been a long time, Madeleine," I said soulfully.

"Too long, dear. Much too long!"

She was properly constructed. She was, as a matter of fact, much better than I'd expected. As a rule, the ones who are afraid of it are the ones to whom it will never happen; but this one wasn't going to wither on the vine unpicked unless she worked at it hard. She was a fairly fragile-looking girl in spite of her tweedy, trousered outfit; a slight figure with dark, carefully arranged hair, and delicate, accurate features in a small, heart-shaped face. She was carrying a purse, a raincoat, and what T at first took to be a cased camera, and then realized was a pair of small binoculars. I wondered if it was part of her tourist camouflage, or if she was actually expecting to have to spot a distant object invisible to the naked eye, and if so, what

"Give me a moment to clean up, darling," she said. "I just stepped off the plane and into a cab. It's wonderful to see you. Matt, it really is!"

Our greeting dialogue wasn't the greatest, I reflected; but then we weren't really trying to fool anybody, just to make them think we were trying to fool them, if I had the game figured correctly. Even that, as far as I could see, wasn't absolutely essential. After all, judging by what Mac had said, I'd been hired as a menace, not as an actor. That meant the people I was supposed to be menacing were supposed to know it, or what was the point? And if the folks who were supposed to be scared knew enough about me to know what a scary fellow I was, they'd also know, most likely, that I'd never seen this very attractive, very proper lady before in my life.

"I won't be a minute," she said.

I made a burlesque thing of checking the time. "I'll hold you to that, doll," I said. "One minute. Sixty seconds. No more."

She laughed; but her eyes had narrowed slightly. I'd gone and done it again; the crude gent with the wandering hands and the big mouth. Calling her "doll" was, apparently, not showing proper respect, or something. I watched her turn away and I sighed, reflecting grimly that it was going to be a great four-day boat ride, relaxed and informal and friendly, just fun, fun, fun all the way. Well, hell. Maybe I should look upon it as a challenge to my machismo, as the Mexicans call it and make a real project of finding out what kind of a girl or woman was hiding behind the frigid, protective shell. But my experience has been that kissing Sleeping Beauties awake isn't all it's cracked up to be. It's more fun when they already know where the noses go.

I shook my head ruefully, and busied myself unpacking my suitcase while I waited. I'd laid out my pajamas and toilet kit; and I was tucking the bag into the wardrobe, out of the way, when it occurred to me to glance at my watch again, a bit uneasily. Six minutes.

Of course, the lady probably hadn't taken the time limit I'd set her very seriously. She could even be putting me in my place deliberately. Nevertheless, the old hunter-hunted instinct was stirring in its primitive way. It had been a hell of a quiet evening so far. It didn't feel right. Somebody'd had me brought a long way because I was supposed to be familiar with violence; yet no violence had occurred. Or had it?

I stepped quickly out into the passage and knocked on the door of the next stateroom. There was no answer. I checked the door cautiously. It wasn't locked. Well, it wouldn't be. The general passenger instructions issued with my ticket had informed me that for safety reasons—I suppose so you could get out in a hurry if the ship started to bum or sink—the staterooms were not supplied with keys. If you wanted to protect your belongings while you stepped ashore at a port along the way, you were supposed to see the purser, and he'd do the honors.

I worked the handle, gave a little push, and watched the door swing back into the cabin. There was nobody to be seen inside and there was only one place for anybody to hide. With my hand on the gun in my jacket pocket, I sidled into the stateroom, kicked the door shut, and yanked open the wardrobe. It was empty.