The Red Menace #4 Read online

  Podge was certain that this was what occupied Wainwright’s mind, but at that moment Podge Becket was thinking of only one barbarian face.

  Ugly, pockmarked, with dark sunglasses obscuring a madman’s eyes.

  Muammar Qaddafi had been supreme ruler of Libya since the 1969 revolution four years before, and already he was seeking to expand his influence on the global stage. Two weeks earlier, Podge had come across a sample of the Libyan dictator’s aggression.

  It was a small thing, at least by the level of humiliations the United States allowed itself to endure these days. A cruise ship had been given a special refit in Tripoli and had been used to foment terror on the West Coast of the United States. Qaddafi’s men had not manned the ship. The Libyans were simply work-for-hire, paid for their refit services by another party. Podge and Dr. Wainwright had dealt with those individuals and their ship, but a lesson had to be taught Libya or the U.S. by inaction would allow the perception of weakness to take hold internationally. And the moment the pack of wolves smelled even the faintest whiff of blood, they would attack in force.

  Podge wended the car through streets packed with men and women whose gaze never quite fell upon the sedan that passed through their midst. The citizenry of Libya might have disliked their former king, but Podge was willing to bet that a majority now preferred the devil they had known to the one who now ruled them. Libya had been given a crash course in Third World revolution. The Libyans were a beaten people. He saw it on faces that dared not so much as glance at the black car as it rumbled past.

  The pedestrians wouldn’t have seen anything more than indistinct shadows. On the seat beside Wainwright was a black doctor’s bag. When they had picked up the car at a desert drop site outside the city, the older man had removed an object that resembled a can of black spray paint from the bag. Wainwright had crawled around the seats methodically spraying the inside of the windows. The substance that coated the glass with a near-silent hiss had dried on contact. It permitted Podge and Wainwright to see out, but clouded the view of anyone looking inside the car. Handy at any time for a pair of light-skinned men traveling in North Africa, and even handier a moment later when Podge pulled into an alley and put the car in park. He left the engine idling.

  Podge Becket abandoned Wainwright in the front of the car and climbed over the back of the front seat into the rear. Wainwright heard the hasps of a suitcase click.

  The doctor reached in the breast pocket of his white suit jacket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He tapped one loose and tugged it free between his lips.

  “Are you sure you can trust him?” the doctor asked, flicking a silver lighter.

  “I know Ashami from the old days. Don’t smoke in the car.”

  “That was a long time ago,” Wainwright said, as he stuffed the unused lighter and pack of cigarettes back in his pocket. “Qaddafi now has half the country peeking over the back wall into their neighbor’s camel shed while the other half are employed as executioners to rid Libya of its sudden epidemic of peeping toms. You said the last time you were here was, what, 1957? A lot has changed in the past fifteen years.”

  It was Patrick Becket who had climbed into the back seat, but the figure who slid back behind the steering wheel of the car was unrecognizable from the man who had vacated the same spot in the front seat moments before.

  The simple red cowl was like an executioner’s mask, which would have made him right at home in modern Libya if not for the color. The mask was bright red, as was the matching cloak and gloves. Wainwright knew that the color was only visible close up, and that had the figure been further away than the front seat he would have faded into nothingness until he was swallowed up by the shadows.

  As the inventor of the process that rendered the special garments invisible at a distance, Dr. Wainwright knew better than anyone on earth their unique properties, just as he knew down to the millimeter how unique was the custom designed gun that became visible on the masked man’s belt when the cloak settled to the seat.

  “If things hadn’t changed, we wouldn’t be back in business,” the Red Menace gravely intoned.

  The man in the mask flicked the sedan in reverse and backed from the alley.

  The sun was burning to flame across the Sahara and the baking sand raised the temperature in Libya’s capital like an open cooler filled with ice dropped next to a blast furnace.

  Wainwright noted the murky purple that clung low to the sky over the squat buildings. There was a storm predicted to sweep in from the west. A major one, if the forecasters could be trusted. Visibility would be so bad in a matter of hours that the Red Menace would be lucky to see his glove in front of his face.

  For the time being, the stars were twinkling on one by one when the Menace spied the red handprint on the side of a building. He followed it to another print on a streetlamp that had been installed by the Italians during their stewardship, but had since gone dead. A third print on a corner post and he pulled the sedan into a cul-de-sac.

  There were a few doors on the surrounding buildings. He saw no one in the windows above. The only movement was the lazy twirl of a ceiling fan, which indicated that there was at least one person melting in the heat of one of the ancient apartments.

  Dusk had turned to night, and his headlights illuminated one last red handprint on the wall of an old stone garage at the far end of the road. He cut the lights and drove through the open door into the darkness. The Red Menace cut the engine.

  Both men got out of the car. The ambient light that spilled in from the street illuminated a dirt floor. As Wainwright’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw a long work bench barren of everything but the most basic tools. The garage reeked of gasoline.

  He had not seen the Menace once the masked man had gotten from the car. The space between them was great enough that the color change afforded by distance had turned red to black. He heard the younger man’s footfalls.

  “Mind the fort. Keep your head down. I’ll call if I need you.”

  A flash of bright red as the Red Menace slipped past him, and for an instant Wainwright saw a silhouette of black in the doorway. Then the garage door came down and Dr. Wainwright was alone.

  There were two long gaps in the stone near the roofline, windows without glass panes, which allowed some little light to bravely venture inside the ancient garage.

  Despite the strong gasoline smell, Wainwright pulled out another cigarette. He considered it for a long moment in the weak light, rolling the tube in slender fingers. After a minute, he sighed. “I suppose it’s enough that one of us might be committing suicide tonight.” The doctor returned the cigarette to its pack and slipped the pack in his pocket.

  * * *

  Even though the Red Menace could smell in the air the nearby presence of a large body of water, the dry African heat had wrung all moisture from the breeze.

  The Mediterranean Sea was currently engaged in a silent battle with the massive inland storm. The sandstorm had been news even before he and Wainwright had left Morocco. The leading edge of the front that was pushing in across the Sahara had already arrived. The wind from the west was coming in erratic gusts as he moved along the dark alleys of the city. He held the front of his black cloak together with one tight hand and with every gust he felt the fine grain sand drag across the exposed half of his face. High above the city, the stars that had made a spectacular early evening showing were beginning to wink out one by one.

  Although the Red Menace had been retired for more than a decade, he still had friends from the old days. He was pleased to learn that Ashami Kashtari, the Libyan national in whose garage the Menace had left Wainwright to mind the car, still lived near the water. It took only ten minutes of darting from alley to street, always seeking cover of darkness, for the Red Menace to reach the shore.

  The rocky shoreline of Tripoli extended into a bay that was Libya’s major port. Lights along the shore illuminated whitewashed buildings further inland, while immediately adjacent to the shore were the docks, warehouses and hotels that served both the city’s international trade and its minimal tourism. Since the overthrow and exile of King Idris, tourists visiting the city had dwindled to wealthy visitors from nearer African nations, high-ranking Soviet party leaders, and Westerners whose hatred of their own political and cultural systems back home did not prevent them from lavishing capitalist currency on the latest revolutionary hellhole to emerge from the Marxist Third World swamp.

  Brother Leader Muammar Qaddafi had spent the previous year separating a large chunk of the bay for military use. Buoys and mines steered boats through a narrow passage to the newly built shipbuilding site on the western side of the bay. Bright floodlights pierced the night sky and illuminated empty drydocks.

  Despite a desire to become a naval power in the Mediterranean, not a single vessel had been built at the yard. The Russians were playing their own international game of chess and had effectively kept the Libyan leader off the board. The only work Qaddafi had found for his great new shipyard was the refit of one cruise liner for private use.

  Only two military vessels occupied the nearest of the seven drydocks. One was a Soviet destroyer that the Russians had thrown to Qaddafi as a bone, the other was an old World War Two Italian submarine which was in such rough shape it looked like it had been salvaged from the bottom of the nearby sea.

  The Red Menace studied the movement of men around the shipyard for over half an hour. The storm grew in intensity around him, and the most distant floodlights turned to opaque smears behind a veil of swirling sand.

  He hadn’t been sure exactly how he was going to teach a lesson at Qaddafi’s shipbuilding site, but a very obvious possibility presented itself on a silver platter with the two vessels nestled in adjacent dry docks.


  While the rest of the submarine looked like a beat-up old sneaker, a pristine new 47 caliber deck gun gleamed in the spotlights. Assuming Qaddafi didn’t disappoint and was the paranoiac the Red Menace knew him to be, that wouldn’t be all he’d replaced. He squinted at the front of the sub and saw what appeared to be a fat fire hose connected to a port in the ship’s side and running down into the belly of the drydock.

  The buildings on the road to the shipyard were buttoned up for the storm. The Menace encountered only one military jeep on the path down to the base. The headlights cut down at a sharp angle through wind-tossed sand, and the fine grains swirling in the yellow light looked like dust blown off an old book in a musty library.

  He ducked from the road and into the doorway of a shop with display windows filled with cheap metal trinkets and Oriental rugs.

  Even without the cover of the storm, the two men in the jeep would not have seen the masked man. The top was up and the windshield wipers were scratching across the glass as they sped past. He heard a loud voice inside and another shouting back over the static of a radio. The Menace didn’t speak Arabic, but he assumed the men were returning to wherever they were based. The storm was shutting down most of Tripoli.

  He hurried the rest of the way down the rocky thoroughfare to the high fence that blocked entry to the shipyard.

  Armed Libyans were attempting to stand at attention at a booth next to a sawhorse. The two men were squinting against the sand that was blowing into their faces and one had his left eye closed completely.

  The Red Menace approached stealthily, careful to make not a single scuff that might be heard in the dead air that descended between gusts of wind. When the next burst of Saharan wind tore into the faces of the men guarding the base, the Menace simply raced right along with it. The men were squinting against the gale and failed to see the figure in midnight black cape and mask slip past the sawhorse and guard shack.

  From a distance, the shipbuilding piers had looked big, but on the grounds the area was even more mammoth. The Red Menace was as small as the grains of sand that attacked his body as he ran from one single-story corrugated building to another.

  The men he had seen working around the site while he had been observing from above were no longer anywhere to be seen. All the Libyan workers and soldiers save the two at the gates had disappeared inside to sit out the storm. The Menace had the place to himself, and since no one was around to object he requisitioned a jeep and drove to the last pair of docks along the vast cement pier.

  The Soviet destroyer loomed brutish and deadly as he sped his borrowed jeep along its length to the final dock on the pier.

  The salvaged Italian submarine still looked as if it had spent some time on the floor of the Mediterranean. The Red Menace had assumed he knew why it sank, but he was surprised when he drew up beside it and didn’t see a screen door in the hull.

  The Adua class submarine was suspended in the drydock as if the hand of an ancient Greek god had reached down from the heavens and placed it there. Scaffolding surrounded the sub like an exoskeleton. The hose he had seen from a distance ran from the front of the ship, down into the dry dock and slipped through a gap in the wall and into the dark, choppy Mediterranean. There was a second hose further down the side of the sub that he hadn’t seen from a distance. It too snaked into the water.

  A half-dozen gangplanks extended from the pier to the sub, and the Menace hustled across one to the deck.

  The ladder to the high conning tower was gleaming and looked showroom new. When the Red Menace mounted it, he found looking back over the pier that much of the shipyard had vanished behind a veil of sand. The storm was intensifying.

  He checked the angle off the front of the sub, and judged distance between the two berths. It would be tricky, but it just might work.

  He popped the hatch and hurried down the interior conning tower ladder.

  The Red Menace had spent a little time on submarines on missions back during the 1950s. While he was not claustrophobic, he could not say he enjoyed the low ceiling or closeness of the walls. It was worse in Qaddafi’s prize sub, since every free space seemed to be filled with tools and replacement parts.

  Inside, the ship was in far better shape than its dilapidated exterior suggested. The Menace paused to listen for any sounds from repair crews that might be on duty within the sub, but he heard nothing but the dull roar of the raging wind outside and what sounded like a million angry hornets battering the hull.

  He had taken only two careful steps forward when the voice shouted behind him.

  “Kef!”

  The Red Menace didn’t understand the language, but he knew when someone was ordering him to stop.

  He took a rapid glance around the immediate area as he waited for the Libyan to reply. A toolbox was open on the rusty old control station at his elbow; wrenches, screwdrivers and a hammer laid out around it. The Menace swayed slightly to the left.

  “Kef! Kef!” the unseen Libyan soldier yelled.

  “You should see a doctor about that cough,” the Menace suggested. He did not turn around, did not raise his hands. His arms remained concealed in the folds of his cloak, hidden from the view of the soldier behind him.

  The Red Menace wasn’t surprised that he’d been spotted. It was the close quarters of the sub. With just a little more distance his cloak would have rendered him invisible, but it was almost impossible to achieve the necessary breathing room in such a tight space. He knew that the man behind him was close enough that he was seeing the intruder as a smear of red, possibly somewhat fuzzy at that distance, but visible as a man.

  “American! You American? Don’t not move, American!”

  “See, now that’s a double negative, so it’s like you’re making me do this.”

  The soldier didn’t have time to process the words into his own language before the Red Menace moved. In a wink, the masked man dropped to one knee hard, spun and let fly the hammer he had scooped up from the workstation.

  The Libyan depressed the trigger of his rifle instinctively, but the mesmerizing color of the Menace’s cape still danced across his retinas, and he found himself shooting at a ghostly afterimage. Bullets pinged off the bulkhead, yet his ears scarcely had time to register the metallic ding of the first round before the head of the hammer met the head of the Libyan soldier. In a head-to-head contest, the hammer won.

  The soldier’s eyes rolled back in their sockets and he and his rifle dropped to the floor where both man and weapon fell silent.

  The Red Menace remained on one knee, alert to every sound aboard the submarine. The soldier had only gotten off five rounds, and the storm and the closed hatch would have masked the noise to the men in the buildings across the cement pier. But anyone else aboard the sub would have heard the gunfire and come running.

  He heard no footfalls, and when he strained his hearing he detected no whispering or heavy breathing close by. Only this lone soldier had been left to guard the ship.

  The Menace got back to his feet, holstering his gun which had found its way into his glove on instinct as he dropped to his knee.

  “Don’t get up,” the Red Menace told the unconscious man. “I can find my way.”

  The masked man picked his way over panels, wires and pipes, through several compartments until he reached the torpedo room. He smiled when he entered the room.

  “As raving lunatics go, you don’t disappoint, Muammar,” he announced.

  The shiny new deck gun he had seen above was the perfect marker for what he would find below. Just as the Menace suspected, Qaddafi had seen to it that the pantry down below was stocked with the kind of goodies the Libyan madman loved so well. Modern torpedoes hung in brand new fiberglass slings on both walls. Even the Red Menace was surprised to find that two of the forward torpedo tubes were already loaded.