He slumped in the wrinkles of his suit, sitting behind a desk so scarred by cigar burns that it looked like the bridge of a battleship. We were surrounded by filing cabinets painted the usual government-issue Navy gray. The cabinets were too stuffed with For-The-President’s-Eyes-Only reports for many of the drawers to shut. Hawk’s genius incubates in such a mess that the security seems loose, but if an enemy agency ever tried to penetrate AXE headquarters, they’d have to use an armored brigade to get to his files.
“Remember the training exercise we tried out in Mexico, Nick?”
“Yes. I understand we’re getting part of the White Sands Testing Range for the other men to practice on.”
“And just what do you think we’ll learn from the exercise?”
“Fitness, for one thing. Character is what it should really test, though. Set a man running over dunes for days being chased by a dune-buggy-mounted machine gun. The first day is just hard work and a little perverse fun. The second day he’s dehydrated, and his legs are so oxygen-starved and stiff he has to keep running from sheer will. The third day he’s hallucinating. The men in the jeep shooting at him are no longer training instructors playing a game. They’re just black silhouettes out to kill or capture him. If our trainee still doesn’t give up, we’ve got a good man. If he makes an intelligent attempt to kill his pursuers, then we’ve got a very good man.”
“And if he does stop running or gives himself up?”
“Then he’s a fine, sane individual but unfit for AXE. We apologize and give him a wonderful recommendation as a civil servant somewhere else.”
Hawk picked a flake of tobacco from his thin upper lip.
“That boy who went to Mexico with us, Jaime Montenegro. Do you think he would have passed the test, Nick?”
I took a second to think. Hawk seems like a sloppy man, but he has no time for vague answers, and he loathes lies. I recalled how Jaime had spoken up to me on the mountain.
“Yes.”
Hawk rooted in his desk for a cigar. I won’t say a fresh or a new cigar, because that was not the description for his ugly cheroots.
“Well,” he lit up, “I’m glad you said that, Nick. Jaime was quite an admirer of yours. You’ll notice I said was. He turned up this morning, washed up from the Bay of Tehuantepec. He was tortured to death. You know, hold a man under water until he talks. The local police thought it was a simple case of drowning, but our autopsy was a little more complete. It showed, among other things, that there was salt water in his stomach, as well as in his lungs.”
“He committed suicide rather than talk,” I finished the thought for the Commander. Deliberately opening the esophagus while underwater took an enormous amount of muscular control, not to mention a degree of heroism that staggered my mind. “What was his assignment?”
“Narcotics. The drug route from Panama to Tucson. He was on loan to the Federal Narcotics Task Force.”
I tried not to show my surprise. Hawk didn’t lend his men out to anyone. He raised his eyes and caught my stoney face.
“A direct personal order from the White House made me share Jaime,” Hawk stated. “I told Jaime to move slowly until one of our more experienced men was free. He was a lot like you in some ways. He hated to follow orders.”
“I was free,” I reminded Hawk.
“You are not just an experienced man, N3. You’re too important to ship out every time the President picks up the phone.” He winced. “And, damn it, so was Jaime.”
There was no point in my adding to the regret he felt. But if this was the hell of being an administrator, I never wanted to be one.
“What do we have to go on?” I asked.
“Just about nothing,” Hawk’s lips thinned bitterly. “No particular clues about the body. We have no idea where Jaime was last seen, although he was headed for Puerto Vallarta.
“This afternoon we found his radio set in Panama City. The pad next to it had no words, but it bore the impression from the writing on the last page tom out. One word: ‘Snowman.’”
Hawk spread his hands. I shook my head.
“It doesn’t mean anything to me,” I admitted. “Cocaine and heroin are both called snow, so it could be someone high up in either business. You ran down all the possibilities?”
“Every file. Also names of registered yachts and fishing boats and ships of all flags. Jaime may have just been doodling or may have made up the nickname for someone he was suspicious of.”
“Jaime spoke English but he thought in Spanish,” I pointed out. “He wouldn’t be likely to choose an English nickname. I think Snowman is a real person or a real thing. So when do I go to find out?”
“Forget about it, Nick. Forget I ever mentioned this Snowman.” Hawk had his hand up before I was even out of my chair. “Just wait a second. Say you do go to Panama, and there, or in Puerto Vallarta, you find some assassin called Snowman and kill him. That’s revenge, but that’s all it is. The Feds have been arresting small-time Mafia hitmen for years, and has that stopped the drug traffic? Not a chance. Why should we start copying them? I want a pure AXE operation — one Killmaster going right to the top of the Mafia drug dealers, not playing cops and robbers with Mafia messenger boys. We’ll hit back, but we’ll do it our way.”
We left his office and went down the hall to the projection room. The room would have impressed a casual visitor as a night-school lecture hall, which is to say, it wouldn’t have impressed a casual visitor at all. A professional might have noticed the identity scanners taking in the weight, height, physical characteristics, and weapons systems of each person entering the small auditorium. Dr. Thompson from Special Effects was already seated. Hawk’s secretary waited by the projector.
The doctor and I shook hands. The lights went out.
On the screen was a map of North and South America. Red arrows from Canada, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, and Brazil all pointed to the United States.
“The drug traffic of the Western Hemisphere,” Hawk announced. “Over the U.S. — Canadian line because customs is looser there. Through Panama because of the shipping trade. That’s where Jaime was. But this is just a small part of the picture.”
The slide projector clicked, and a map of the world flashed on the screen. Now there were lines from the Americas, from Europe, Hong Kong, Guam, and Saigon.
“This is what we’re up against. Dozens of different routes. And the Panama line is one of the least important. The same with Southeast Asia. Here’s the real pipeline.”
Another click and we were looking at a map of Europe. Across it were routes that had nothing to do with trains or planes. These arrows were the underground highways of opium from the Near East with stops on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
“Palermo, Naples, Athens, Belgrade, Barcelona, Marseilles, and Munich,” Hawk rattled off. “But the real capitals are the last two, Marseilles and Munich. Eighty percent of the heroin in the United States comes from opium processed in those two cities.”
Next came a slide of the port city of Marseilles, an industrial sprawl on the Mediterranean.
“This is the old center of heroin processing. I don’t have to tell you, Nick, how the Corsicans of Marseilles monopolize the city and the drug trade there. Lately, the French have started having a drug problem of their own, though. The Corsicans have not been stopped, but the atmosphere in Marseilles is not as comfortable for them as it used to be.
“Which is why a lot of the trade has moved here.” The slide of Marseilles was replaced by one of Munich, the German-Bavarian capital of beer-flowing gemutlichkeit.
“Munich has thousands of Turkish factory workers, laborers who smuggle in Turkish opium. The operations have been successful so far because Germany has a constitutionally decentralized police system. But the Germans are organizing narcotics strike forces, too, which brings us to a very interesting situation. For the first time in years the pattern of heroin traffic is in flux. The Mafia can’t rely on their old contacts the way they used to. They’re considering new routes built by new contacts. And this is our opportunity.”