Dirty Harry 10 - The Blood of Strangers (19 page)

“Have the terrorists made any demands yet?”

“Nothing, not a word from them. Nor does anyone answer the telephones, and we’ve got people calling them every couple of minutes. But there is one thing that might give us a lead.”

“And what’s that?”

“The station manager I mentioned to you says that at six o’clock this evening there was going to be a special news report on terrorism. It was listed in the program announcements in the papers and the
Chronicle
ran a story about it so that it was public knowledge. He feels the terrorist action might be related to the airing of the story.”

Suddenly, Harry was overcome by fear. “Who’s supposed to be doing the story tonight, do you know?”

Avery was puzzled by the change that had come over him, the urgency in his voice. “No, let me get you the station manager, he’ll probably know.”

The station manager turned out to be a short balding man with the air of someone whose nerves have been long since shot. Obviously, the forcible takeover of his station was not making his condition any better. He kept plugging cigarettes into his mouth and lighting them, often ignoring the fact that he’d already one going in the ashtray.

“Who’s doing the six o’clock news?” Harry demanded. There was no time for the ordinary courtesies.

“This is Inspector Callahan,” said Avery, figuring an introduction might be necessary. “And this is Joe Lewiston.”

Lewiston shook his head. “Let’s see if I remember. I’m on at night so I can’t be absolutely sure.” He proceeded to rattle off some names, none of which Harry recognized.

“What about Ellie Winston?”

“Oh yes, of course, she’s the person responsible for the story. She’s the one who gathered all the data, you know.”

“I know very well.”

“So she would be there.”

“Would she be in the building now at two o’clock?”

Actually, Harry was astonished to learn that she was even in the city, much less the building, which was why he hadn’t been as alarmed when the radio call had gone out; he’d assumed that she was still in Miami with her family. He’d expected to hear from her when she got back. Well, the fact of the matter was that there hadn’t been any call, and she was back. Maybe she’d become so involved with her work that she hadn’t found time. But none of that was important now.

“Yes, I would think that she’d have some last minute editing to do so it’s pretty certain she’d be there at this hour of the afternoon. With a major story like she’s got, she’d be editing right up until the time she went on the air.”

He was about to explain further, but Harry had learned all that he needed from the man.

Outside of the phone company’s van, Harry spied Bressler. As always, he looked harassed, especially by members of the press who for weeks had been stalking him in hope of a new disclosure.

In his hands, he held a blueprint of the station. Several high ranking officers were clustered about him. One of them, Harry noted, was Connelly.

“You spoke too soon,” Harry told Connelly. “Whatever dent you made in Alpha wasn’t enough.”

Connelly nodded miserably, but said nothing.

Turning his attention to the blueprint, Harry listened as Bressler indicated all the points of ingress and egress in the building. He concluded a minimum of four men could adequately close off the top two floors and hold them so long as their ammunition lasted. “And of course,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “there are a great number of hostages whose lives would be jeopardized should we make any attempt to storm the area.”

He looked to Connelly for moral support. Connelly shrugged, saying, “The only thing we can do now is wait on the assumption that sooner or later they will make their demands known. Once they’ve done that, we can open negotiations for the release of the hostages. Until then . . .” He left the sentence hanging.

Choppers meantime were hovering over the ten-story building while police snipers took up positions on neighboring rooftops. There was an air of great expectancy throughout the sweltering summer afternoon, but to the frustration of all those waiting outside, nothing happened. On the T.V. monitors, the screen was still proclaiming the same monotonous message: Technical Difficulties/Please Stand By.

Towards five-thirty the picture changed. A man in a ski mask appeared on the screen sitting at the news desk. He appeared nervous, and his eyes kept wandering as though he wasn’t exactly sure where the cameras were. Then he faced forward and addressed his unseen audience: “We members of the Alpha Group, have expropriated Station KCVO to make an important announcement to the people of San Francisco and all the USA. But as we lack experience in broadcasting, the six o’clock news will go on as usual. Only we shall be the authors of the news tonight. Please stay tuned.”

Although the camera remained focused on the news desk, the man in the ski mask faded from sight.

It was then that Harry had an inspiration. He went back to the blueprints and studied them on his own. But they didn’t tell him what he wanted to know: where the power hookup was located.

He got on the phone and, acting on his own authority, contacted an executive on duty with Pacific Gas & Electric. The executive was aware of the situation and was agreeable to helping out in any way he could. He would have to know precisely where the cables and circuitry were situated, naturally, but he believed that it was possible to cut the power without going inside the building itself.

“You see if you can get on it immediately, will you?”

The executive assured him that he would. And true to his promise, a utility van appeared within fifteen minutes.

There was one other thing to check out. He returned to Joe Lewiston who was trying to suppress a hacking cough which he was exacerbating with his cigarettes. “Is there any emergency generator on the premises that you know of?”

The station manager said that while one had been planned, none had yet been installed because of budgetary cutbacks. Which was all that Harry wanted to hear.

The blueprints clearly showed that there was an entrance through the rooftop down into the station’s executive suite. Three floors further down, one would come to the newsroom. Harry believed that if it was done right, the police could storm the occupied station at the exact same moment the electricity was cut off. In the confusion, the terrorists would lose control over the situation and, maybe, be overwhelmed, without loss of innocent lives.

Of couse, Harry wasn’t thinking so much of the twenty-five innocent lives which were at stake, although he did not dismiss their importance. In truth, his mind was on only one innocent life, Ellie Winston’s.

Bressler and Connelly were dubious about his scheme. While they didn’t object to electricians going down into manholes to determine how the electricity was being delivered to KCVO, they were not convinced that severing the power would give the police the advantage they were seeking.

Harry reminded them that the people who held KCVO and its staff had not hesitated to fire on patrolmen without provocation nor to demolish an airport terminal when it was crowded with mid-morning travellers. There was no reason to believe that they would spare their hostages now, even if all their demands were met.

“Look,” he said desperately, “let me go up there. I’ll have a two-way radio with me. If I can get in, and it seems possible, I’ll let you know. If it doesn’t seem possible, or I get killed, which amounts to the same thing, you’ll know about that too. And if it’s a go we’ll coordinate it with the electricians and you can have your men ready just as soon as the power’s cut.”

Connelly grudgingly conceded that there was some possibility of success. Not much, but some.

Bressler obviously would rather not have this responsibility thrust on him. He checked with the Commissioner who, however, was unavailable, having left that morning for a vacation in Hawaii. Evidently, the absence of terrorist incidents during the past couple of weeks had convinced him that he could afford to take some time off without fear of missing another crisis.

Well, he was missing another crisis.

“Why wasn’t I told he was going on vacation, the son of a bitch,” Bressler said dolefully. Then he regarded Connelly. “You think it’s worth a try?”

“It’s your show, but it could be my ass. Yeah, I think it’s worth a try.”

“All right. Check with the electricians, find out the soonest they can shut off the juice,” he instructed one of his men. Then to Harry he said, “You don’t get air sick, do you?”

“Not that I know of.”

“OK, I’ll radio one of the choppers to come down and pick you up. We should have you up on the roof by the time they go on the air. Then it’ll be up to you.”

C H A P T E R
F i f t e e n

T
he Small Man stood over her, casually pointing a Mark 1 handfiring device, a terrifying-looking instrument with its long smooth barrel and noise suppressor attachment. Having removed his mask because he found it too hot and uncomfortable, the Small Man seemed to be an oddly vulnerable and earnest young man of the sort that Ellie would have been attracted to when she was a student at Berkeley. He had a vaguely exotic appearance that promised evenings of romantic stories and passionate lovemaking. She wondered how he had turned into a terrorist who was prepared to kill without thinking twice. His voice was familiar to her and she was almost sure she had heard him over the phone: one of the voices claiming responsibility for blowing up the terminal at San Francisco Airport. And his face, too, was familiar. She had the feeling she had seen him somewhere before—but where?

The document that the Small Man had given her to read was loony and impossible. She was to go on the air in ten minutes’ time and deliver this manifesto, or whatever it was, word for word to the city and probably the country since this dramatic event was likely to be picked up by all three networks and public broadcasting. If she survived this she might be so well-known that she could walk into NBC or CBS Monday morning and have her choice of jobs.

But the contents of this manifesto did not give her much hope of surviving. The Alpha Group was demanding a total of five million dollars in order “to carry on the liberation effort on a global basis.” Of this money, more than two-thirds was to be provided to “oppressed peoples and freedom-fighting movements,” which would, of course, be chosen by the directors of Alpha. Predictably, it also called for the U.S. Government to free certain so-called political prisoners from prisons around the country and to guarantee safe passage for the terrorists to a “socialist republic to be designated upon the completion of negotiations.” Hostages would be released at various stages of these negotiations, concluded the document, “or else executed as an example.” It did not say as an example of what, but Ellie got the idea. She did not know whether she could summon the courage to go through with this, pronouncing what might be her own death sentence.

Yet what choice did she have? Moreover, the lives of her friends and colleagues, nearly thirty of them in all, depended on her.

As far as she could judge, there were six men and one woman involved in the takeover: most of them had taken up positions at the exits and stairwells, one held the hostages at bay with two automatics—evidently he was ambidexterous—while the Small Man concentrated on rehearsing her for the upcoming news broadcast. Although the staff members of the station way outnumbered the terrorists, resistance would have been foolhardy. These were newspeople, editors, secretaries, cameramen, and soundmen, not trained urban guerrillas. And here she had thought after her adventures in Beirut and El Salvador that once back in San Francisco at her news desk she would finally be safe. At that moment, she remembered Harry. What, she wondered, was he doing now?

Harry was making his way torturously down a cable dangling over the roof of the KCVO building. The chopper hovered right overhead, making a tremendous dip and causing the air to churn about its bulbous body.

The cable didn’t extend all the way down to the surface of the roof, obliging Harry to jump. It wasn’t much of a drop but he landed clumsily. For several moments, he lay on the asphalt, until he ascertained that his limbs were all in working order.

By the monstrous air conditioning unit and water cooler that rose on stilts from the roof, Harry located the trapdoor that would lead him down into the building’s interior. It was right where it was supposed to be. And it was locked.

Prepared for this eventuality, Harry attached a small timing device to it and waited until the second hand on his watch had completed two revolutions. The detonation was muffled. Unless one were a few feet away from it, one would have heard nothing.

The trap door opened with no problem. Harry signaled to the command post on Kearny that he was about to go in. The radio he gripped in his hand diminished Bressler’s voice, and made it sound tinny and unreal.

“Harry, the electricians have everything set up. Our men are in position. So we’re ready to go when you are. They should be on the air in three minutes.”

“OK, going in now.”

Lifting the trapdoor, he peered into the gloom. The entire building had been evacuated after the takeover. Those fortunate enough to escape had had no wish to linger about for the excitement.

An aluminum ladder brought him down into a corridor. At the far end a flourescent light had been left on. In its buzzing glare Harry could see a succession of offices, all with their doors closed.

Because there were lights over the elevators indicating at which floor the elevator currently was, Harry was compelled to use the stairwell to move from floor to floor. Otherwise, he was sure to alert the terrorists to his presence.

It all depended on how many terrorists there were. If they were limited to about six, as was thought, then there was no way they could keep an eye on the hostages and cover all the exits and the stairwells too. Harry just hoped that the reports were correct; should any fighting break out before he reached the sixth floor and the newsroom, his plan would be ruined.