MURDER BY QRM
By Walker A. Tompkins
No. 6 (and last) in the Tommy Rockford series.

The Tommy Rockford adventures by Walker A. Tompkins:
SOS at Midnight (1957)
CO Ghost Ship (1960)
DX Brings Danger (1962)
Death Valley QTH (1971)
Grand Canyon QSD (1987)
Murder by QRM (1988)

Published by the American Radio Relay League Newington, CT USA 06111

The geographical locations appearing in this adventure novel actually exist in Santa Barbara County, California, but fictitious names have been given to Vanderhoff AFB, Thundergust Peak, Jawbone Springs, Box Canyon and Rough Riders Potrero.
Cover Design: Alison Halapin and Meg Wise. (Shuttle photo courtesy NASA.)
Copyright © 1988 by Walker A. Tompkins
Copyright secured under the Pan-American Convention International Copyright secured
This work is Publication No. 100 of the Radio Amateur's Library, published by the League. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form except by written permission of the publisher. All rights of translation are reserved.
Printed in USA
Quedan reservados todos los derechos
ISBN: 0-87259-506-4

The Amateur Radio stations appearing in this book actually exist, and are used by permission of the licensees and the Federal Communications Commission, whose cooperation is gratefully acknowledged by the author. Any resemblance of characters herein to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Contents
1. Summons from NASA
2. Hit-Run Attacker
3. Gaviota Pass Shootout
4. Secret Beach Rendezvous
5. Logan's Defense Strategy
6. Ham Radio T-Hunt
7. Operation Hang Glider
8. "K6ATX Call Coroner!"
9. Blood in the Moonlight
10. Trapper Joe Loustalot
11. Bullets in a Stump
12. Buried in the Barn
13. On Thundergust Peak
14. Targets of a Sniper
15. Lair of the Condor
16. Ghosts of an Old War
17. Tools of Terrorism
18. Hunted by Helicopter
19. Secret of the Cellar
20. The Last Long Night
21. Passports to Eternity
22. Countdown to Zero
About the Author

For my computer-crazy grandsons Ryan and Jeff from Grandpa Tommy

CHAPTER 1
A Summons from NASA

The sound of screeching brakes sent Tommy Rockford rushing to the window of his radio hamshack over the garage. Had it been a violent crash, he could not have been more startled. But the car turned out to be an ordinary blue-and-white side-door van, being backed into a parking space across the street on Mission View Road-presumably a salesman making a routine neighborhood delivery.
Even if Tommy could have foreseen the horror and danger that that vehicle would bring into his life before the hour was out, he could not have had a more nervous reaction to the interruption.
Tommy, better known in the world of ham radio by his call sign, K6ATX, was tingling with excitement and suspense for two reasons. Yesterday he had learned that an official of NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, had requested a personal interview with him to discuss "a matter of high security"!
For an ambitious nineteen-year-old Caltech freshman who wanted to become a career astronaut, such a summons from on high was--well, unbelievable.
He had been waiting anxiously to be picked up at any moment by his long-time buddy Sheriff Ross Jackson to drive him thirty miles up the coast to Gaviota Beach Park. There he would be met by the mysterious NASA official--stationed at nearby Vanderhoff Air Force Base--for a meeting that Sheriff Jackson said was too hush-hush to discuss over the telephone.
Tommy was also excited because the Los Angeles editor of the New York weekly magazine Headline News was in the ham shack with him. The man was in Santa Bonita this morning to put together a story on K6ATX's recent adventure shooting the rapids in the Grand Canyon. But this dramatic exploit had included far more than a thrilling river ride--it had involved a cache of Aztec gold that had lain hidden in the gorge for more than four hundred years. Tommy's hobby of Amateur Radio had played a central part in its discovery.
Disappointment stamped across his face, K6ATX turned back from the window to face his gung-ho yuppie magazine interviewer, whose name had already slipped his mind.
"Sorry to interrupt you like that, sir," Tommy apologized. "I-I am expecting to be picked up for something important, and it's got me jittery."
The magazine writer switched off his tape recorder.
"No pain, no strain, Tommy! I think we've pretty well wrapped up your Grand Canyon experience. Interesting the way it relates to ham radio's role in probably the most important art discovery since King Tut's tomb. It'll make great reading, too. All the ingredients of a Hollywood thriller. Recovering a real prehistoric find from places called 'Quicksand Gulch' and a 'Cave of Skeletons'-wow! Armor-clad Spanish corpses, dead 400 years, guarding buried treasure! Enter K6ATX, our ail-American hero from Southern California, who uses ham radio to rescue the treasure hunters from being ambushed by an international art thief.* It's all there. I should sell the plot to Hollywood."
 (* See GRAND CANYON QSO, published 1987 by ARRL.)
K6ATX's cheeks reddened with embarrassment. "Don't pour it on too thick, please. I'm no hero--but I do want to see ham radio get all due credit. Because it's a lot more than just a fascinating hobby--it's really a national resource, especially in wartime or emergencies. I hope you'll emphasize that angle in your article."
The brash reporter slapped Tommy hard on the back.
"Hey, young fella, no problem, no problem! I'm going all out on this piece. Trust me! I expect to win a journalism award for it, maybe the Pulitzer! And you can expect to get an avalanche of fan mail when the magazine hits the stands coast to coast. Now, if you'd pose for a few color pix to go with the story--"
K6ATX seated himself at the operating bench before his main all-band transceiver, a home-assembled Heathkit HW-5400. He pulled the microphone into position as if he were engaging in a QSO, or two-way radio contact, with a fellow ham thousands of miles away.
"I hope you'll make Dr. Antonio Bonilla, EA7WK, the main character in your article, sir," Tommy said earnestly. "He's the expedition leader from Spain who will actually be returning the stolen Aztec treasure to Mexico this week. I was just excess baggage, in the party as his communications assistant. Shooting the rapids of the Colorado River was a big thrill though, even without the buried treasure and skeletons in armor. I wouldn't have missed it for anything."
This was the first time K6ATX had ever been interviewed by a big-league national publication. Still in his teens, he felt self-conscious posing for a picture he knew would be seen by millions of readers. The reporter, darting about the ham shack shooting color photos from a dozen angles with his Hasselblad camera, could not have chosen a more masculine model-a husky six-footer with medium-cropped blond hair, skin tanned to the sheen of saddle leather, dressed in a blue Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cap, a Caltech T-shirt, faded jeans and Nike shoes.
"I've been noticing all those post cards on the wall above your ham station-they represent contacts you've made?" the reporter asked between shutter clicks. "QSL cards, I think you said the hams call them? Any stories there?"
Tommy grinned. "About 200 cards I picked out of thousands of QSOs I've logged in the ten years since I was nine and got my Novice license. Each one has a story."
The reporter whistled with amazement. "Nine years old! That's pretty young to be a licensed radio operator!"
"Not really. See that card from WD0DVX? It's from a five-year old Iowa kid, Guy Mitchell. He got his FCC license before he started kindergarten! He's probably the youngest licensed radio operator in the world."
Tommy was finding it almost impossible to concentrate on anything but the sheriff coming this morning to transport him to that super-secret meeting with a NASA official. What could it possibly mean? Had he been chosen for hands-on astronaut training, an electronics major at Caltech approaching his sophomore year? No, impossible...you had to have an engineering degree to qualify for the astronaut program. Yet--
The reporter broke into his thoughts with another question:
"Any QSL cards from celebrities? I see you've got the K7UGA one behind glass. How come the special treatment? It might give me a sidebar item for the magazine."
Tommy stifled a yawn, wishing the interview was over.
"All the cards deserve framing," K6ATX answered. "I was only twelve when I worked K7UGA on 40-meter CW. K7UGA was U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater, QTH Phoenix. He spent 20 minutes explaining to me why he lost the presidential election in 1964 against Lyndon B. Johnson. That was pretty big stuff for a kid in eighth grade."
The sophisticated I. A. journalist was obviously impressed.
"I guess Senator Goldwater would have to be the most unforgettable contact you ever had?"
To the reporter's surprise, K6ATX shook his head.
"No. It's strange, but I've never received a QSL card from the most interesting personality I ever met on the air."
The reporter, sensing another dramatic story, punched the "record" tab to start his tape machine again.
"His QTH--that's the International Q-signal for location--is right here in Santa Barbara County," Rockford continued. "A real mystery man. He's a recluse. Spends his days wandering around the mountains in the Back Country--that's the wilderness of the Los Padres National Forest north of here. His father was a World War II Marine pilot whose C-47 plane, the Lucky Lady, crashed on a training flight somewhere in those mountains in 1943. They never found the wreckage. The son swore he was going to find his father's remains after the war and give them a decent burial. He's a legend around here."
"And did he? Find the crashed plane, I mean?"
"Who knows? On the air he calls himself the Condor. You know, that's a nearly extinct scavenger bird. It used to be native to our Back Country. The Callbook lists him as Austin Rudniki, K6IA, phonetic call of 'Itchy Alligator.' I've had several QSOs with him on CW, my favorite mode of hamming-CW meaning continuous wave, or Morse code."
"Could I borrow a picture of this weirdo--if you have one?"
"No one I know has ever seen the Condor or heard his voice--he operates only on CW, and never slower than 50 words a minute, which most hams can't copy these days. The scuttlebutt is that the poor guy lost his sanity, combing those mountains looking for his father's plane and that he's still out there hunting for it. Anyway, the Condor is by far the most educated and fascinating character I've ever met on the air. And I've worked lots of amazing people via ham radio-a royal prince in Saudi Arabia, a descendant of a Bounty mutineer who operates out of Pitcairn Island, an Eskimo near the North Pole who said he was 100 years old, even an astronaut ham aboard the space shuttle Challenger on its next-to-last flight--"
The Headline News writer switched off his tape recorder and heaved a sigh of pure envy. "What a terrific hobby. I always wanted to join you ham radio guys, even enrolled in an Adult Ed course to bone up for the FCC exam, but the prospect of having to learn the Morse code for my Novice test scared me out. Dots and dashes belong to the horse-and-buggy days. Why can't they just let you pick up a microphone and talk?"
Tommy's mind had wandered again. A manned shuttle launch, the first since the Challenger disaster put the West Coast shuttle program on indefinite hold, was scheduled to take place from Vanderhoff AFB this coming week. Could it be possible that NASA wanted to send another licensed radio ham aloft on the next space shuttle--and that he had been chosen for the honor?
The reporter's voice intruded into his fantasy, "Tommy? Hey! Are you still with me?"
K6ATX came to with a start. "I'm sorry, sir--I guess I haven't recuperated yet from the sleep I lost on the Grand Canyon trip," he apologized. "You asked why Novices aren't allowed on phone--they are!"
At that moment an automobile horn honked from out front, the familiar mating call of radio hams--beep-beep-beep-beep...beep-beep-- which translated "HI" in Morse code. The signal returned K6ATX to the window in one bound. This time he was rewarded. Turning into the entrance of the Rockford driveway was his eagerly awaited pal, Sheriff Ross Jackson, driving an unmarked black police cruiser without identifying roof flashers or Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department insignia on its side panels.
"There's the guy who's picking me up!" Tommy exclaimed, trying to keep his voice from cracking with boyish excitement. "I hope you have all you need for your story, because I have to split now--"
The magazine reporter slung his camera and tape recorder straps over his shoulder and reached out to pump Tommy's hand.
"When this story breaks next week," he laughed, "K6ATX will be the best-known radio ham in the world... Thanks for everything, Tommy, letting me monopolize your time just two days after you got back from your Grand Canyon caper. But this is an important event in the art world and you've helped us scoop Time and Newsweek and the wire services. I owe you one, pal."
* * *
In Sheriff Jackson's car minutes later, over an eager handshake between old friends, Tommy demanded "Clue me in, Ross! What's cooking with this Captain Logan guy from NASA? And why the secrecy?"
Jackson, a veteran peace officer who had been a combat pilot in Vietnam and whose friendly relationship with Tommy dated back a dozen years, laughed mysteriously. "Let's not open that can of worms until we're out on the freeway, eh? We're already late for your appointment at Gaviota."
As Sheriff Jackson was backing his unmarked black cruiser out of Tommy's driveway onto the street, K6ATX noticed subconsciously that the blue-and-white van he had seen earlier was just pulling away from the curb.
Two miles and ten minutes later, with Tommy answering the sheriff's eager questions about last week's Grand Canyon adventure, they were rolling up the Mission Street on-ramp onto the 101 freeway headed north with the same van still close behind, blending into the flow of traffic in the fast lane. A vagrant thought crossed Tommy's mind--were they being followed?
The fact that his friend Jackson had received several death threats in the past week, presumably from friends of gangsters he had rounded up in a massive cocaine bust recently, gave Tommy cause to wonder if in fact that blue-and-white van had been deliberately waiting in front of the Rockford home for Jackson to show up.
Or, it occurred to Tommy with a sudden shock of anxiety, was the driver of the following van tailing him, rather than the sheriff? It could be, considering the mysterious, hush-hush nature of this summons from NASA.
Tommy decided not to mention the trailing van just yet. He would wait to see if it would pass them farther up the open highway, or turn off in Goleta, west of town. Otherwise Jackson would think he was a worrywart. Still, K6ATX could not shake off a nagging premonition that menace had somehow entered his day.

CHAPTER 2
Hit-Run Attacker

Traffic began to thin out after they passed the suburbs. Unable to contain his gnawing curiosity another moment, and knowing that Sheriff Jackson was playing games with him, Tommy burst out:
"Ross, for a week now I have suspected that something fishy was going on. I saw Dad slip you a long envelope sort of on the sly, as if he didn't want me to know. And yesterday when you came by Val's radio store and had a long confab with my boss, he wouldn't tell me why you wanted me to take time off today, and might even be asking for a two-week leave of absence from my job. We're out of traffic now, so let's have some explanations, huh? My poor nerves can only take so much stress and strain."
The sheriff grinned. "I didn't give your boss any details. That's why he couldn't answer your questions. And your parents are sworn to secrecy-for reasons you'll find out soon enough."
Tommy restrained himself for a few miles, until Jackson had driven through the industrial section beyond Goleta. Then he asked, "Is it my imagination working overtime, Ross? Dad and I have never had secrets from each other, but he wouldn't talk about this. And if I'm going to supplement my scholarship for my tuition at Caltech this fall, I can't afford any more unpaid vacations. Or did that envelope have anything to do with me and this run up to Gaviota to meet this guy?"
The sheriff of Santa Barbara County bent an affectionate sideways glance at his blond-headed young friend. Something akin to a fraternal relationship had built up between K6ATX and the sheriff over the years, dating back to Tommy's Cub Scouting and Little League baseball days.
Ross Jackson was widely known in California as an innovator in the field of high-tech electronics as they applied to law enforcement. He had taught eight-year-old Tommy the Morse code and had coached him in basic radio theory so that he could pass the FCC exam that granted him his Novice license to get on the air as K6ATX. In turn the license enabled him to win a coveted Boy Scout radio merit badge. It all led to Tommy's current major in aerospace electronics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, in preparation for a career as a space scientist.
"I don't have much to tell you, Tommy, but here's what little I do know," the sheriff said. "This top-secret interview you're having with Captain Jerry Logan today has something to do with NASA's big space shuttle launch coming up next week at Vanderhoff Space Center, the first West Coast polar-orbit launch ever.
"The purpose of the mission is classified, for national security reasons," Jackson continued, "so it must be carrying a payload of classified military satellites. Captain Logan has reason to believe an attempt may be made by enemy terrorists to sabotage the launch. A few months ago a Delta missile and an MX loaded with dummy warheads blew up mysteriously upon launching. And only last week, while you were away in Grand Canyon, a Minuteman Two missile exploded in its silo."
"They think sabotage was behind the explosions?"
"The press blames it on a malfunction of the self-destruct mechanism carried by the rocket for use in aborting a flight in case of emergency. But who knows who or what triggered the abort mechanisms? NASA engineers at Vanderhoff--a technical malfunction-or an enemy saboteur, location unknown? The top brass laugh when Logan poses that question. But Logan has a theory--and I think he believes you can help him prove it. With this historic polar orbit launch coming up in a few days, Captain Logan was dismayed when he learned you were incommunicado for a week on your Grand Canyon expedition. He could hardly wait for you to get back for today's briefing."
Now K6ATX's rash of curiosity was really itching. "But why would Captain Logan want to see me--a green college freshman--about anything as serious as national security, Ross?"
The sheriff shrugged. "Don't underestimate yourself, Tommy. This much I do know: Captain Logan has been running security checks on you, because I was one of the officials he asked for character references. Logan hinted that he felt you were eminently qualified for some kind of important secret mission on behalf of the government. I know he also had the FBI investigating you, and you check out 100 percent OK. Whatever his mission may be, Logan wanted to get parental consent for you to participate. That's what your Dad gave me in writing. And it may require a week off from your job at Val's Radio-TV Supply, which was what Mr. Shannon and I were discussing yesterday. You'll get overtime pay for any days lost from work."
The two were silent while they sped past the Sandpiper Golf Course along the ocean front, scene of an historic Japanese submarine bombing attack on an oil field back in World War II. Most of the traffic had turned off at Goleta, giving them the freeway practically to themselves. Tommy noted uneasily that the big blue-and-white delivery van was still keeping pace a hundred yards to the rear.
"What does Captain Logan do for NASA?" Tommy asked. "Public relations or something?"
"No, he's an aerospace engineer, but not too high up in NASA's pecking order, I take it. Logan came to see me a month ago to get that character reference about you. Young, 30 or so, lots of enthusiasm, still sort of wet behind the ears. Chafing under the leash of all the Pentagon majors, chicken colonels and brigadier generals who automatically veto his ideas. A small cog in a mighty big wheel, but conscientious and dedicated. I think you'll like Logan."
Tommy twisted around for another look behind them. The blue-and-white van was gaining rapidly on them now.
"Does Captain Logan know I'm preparing to make my career in aerospace engineering also--hopefully as an astronaut?"
Ross Jackson shrugged. "He no doubt does. He knew you were enrolled at Caltech, and he asked your dean for a character reference. Even your minister at the Presbyterian Church. Here's all he would tell me, Tommy--that some serious crisis has come up that could jeopardize the very future of America's space program. That sounds pretty extreme, but I got the impression that Captain Logan tends to overexaggerate a bit. Bear that in mind today."
K6ATX's heart started pounding with a new excitement. "Wow, do you suppose--maybe they want a radio ham aboard the Conquistador! That's it! I'll bet they're considering ol’ K6ATX for the honor! Gosh, Ross, that would be super! Wait till the Caltech ham club guys hear that! My girlfriend won't believe it!"
Sheriff Jackson eased over into the fast lane and picked up speed, his eyes fixed on the unwinding ribbon of freeway heading up the rural area of the coastal plain between the looming Santa Ynez Mountain Range on the right and the shimmering blue-green waters of the Pacific Ocean on the left.
The big blue-and-white van also made the lane change and was now tailgating Jackson's unmarked cruiser. The driver was a gaunt-faced young man wearing a Cincinnati Reds baseball cap and a skimpy white mustache like he had been drinking milk from a mug.
It was on this very same stretch of coastal highway, Tommy recalled with a shudder, that he and his buddy Doc Baldwin, K6CRJ, had engaged in a high-speed chase of two gangsters from the Purple Shirt dope-smuggling ring a couple of years back, which had narrowly missed costing them their lives.*
 (* See SOS AT MIDNIGHT, published 1985 by ARRL)
"Don't jump to conclusions about going for a ride in space," Jackson said, snapping Tommy back from his daydream. "I've told you everything I know. Only that Captain Jerry Logan asked me to bring you to a rendezvous that is so classified you have to meet on the fishing pier at Gaviota Beach State Park to discuss some kind of an assignment. Nothing was said about you boarding the Conquistador. Not that it wouldn't be wonderful if NASA chose you to be the first radio ham in space. You're certainly qualified technically, and you deserve it."
Barely able to contain his excitement, Tommy Rockford said "I wouldn't be the/f>sr ham in space, Ross. W5LFL and W0ORE beat me to that honor. But-"
"Just don't get your hopes up, Tommy, that's all."
They had put twenty miles behind them and were on the straightaway west of Refugio Bay when the Sheriff swung his car into the right-hand lane and slowed until the speedometer needle hovered at a legal 55.
"I've got a van tailgating me," Jackson grumbled, a frown carving its notch between his brows. "I'm not hankering for a whiplash injury in case he should skid into my rear bumper. Blast him, if we weren't running late I would ticket that jerk for following too close."
Tommy had his opening and took it. "I don't know if you're aware of it, Ross, but that very same van was waiting on Mission View Road across the street from my place, just before you came to pick up me. It moved out when we left, followed us past the Old Mission and down to the Mission Street on-ramp onto the freeway. I definitely think the driver is shadowing us for some reason. But what doesn't make sense is, how he would know you were coming to pick me up at 2910 Mission View Road this morning, so he could wait for you?"
Jackson scowled. "You should have mentioned this before, son. I don't like the sound of it."
"And have you think I was neurotic or something? Why should I be worried just because some van was heading for the freeway?"
Jackson frowned thoughtfully. Then he said, "Without being too obvious about it, Tommy, try to get the bozo's license number. If he passes us I'll radio ahead for the California Highway Patrol to cite him for speeding."
K6ATX twisted around, pretending to adjust his safety belt. In doing so, he made a mental note of the van's California license plate. The van was even now preparing to make a fast pass of Jackson's unmarked sedan.
"Got it!" Tommy said, jotting down the number on the end of a print-out slip protruding from the sheriff's dashboard computer. "Hey, he's starting to pass us, I think."
A moment later the two vehicles were abreast of each other, heading neck and neck onto the long earthen fill that spanned the thousand-yard-long expanse of Hondo Arroyo. At the moment no traffic was in sight in either direction.
To their left, flanking the ocean, was the abandoned multi-arched two-lane concrete bridge that once carried the entire traffic burden of the Coast Highway in the 1920s. Paralleling the highway bridge was the high steel trestle of the Southern Pacific Railroad's coast line to San Francisco.
"He's crowding us awful close!" K6ATX yelled in alarm, as he saw the van drift to within inches of the sheriff's car. Such crowding was in no way necessary, for this was a wide two-lane, one-way freeway. "Is he trying to ram us?"
Tommy was aware of Ross Jackson edging as close as possible to the concrete apron of his lane. The van, altering its speed to match Jackson's, veered inches closer. Jackson gave an angry shout and was reaching for his siren button when there sounded a sickening screech of metal ripping metal as the Sheriff's outside fenders sideswiped the rugged corrugated steel guard rails designed to protect vehicles from plunging over the brink into the 200-foot abyss below.
Tommy felt Jackson's car careen violently as the van rammed into them broadside. Jackson's right front wheel was forced up and over the rounded concrete berm at the edge of the shoulder.
The heavy van's violent sideways shove sent the lighter sedan into a sixty-mile-per-hour roll-over, causing it to vault the guardrail and become airborne.
An instant later they were catapulting out into a terrifying void of empty space.

CHAPTER 3
Gaviota Pass Shoot-Out

Through the side windows K6ATX had a pinched-off glimpse of the van disappearing, the driver of the hit-run vehicle gunning his engine to speed off up the highway.
For endless seconds they seemed airborne. Then came the horrendous crunching jolt of the hurtling machine as it glanced off a rocky ledge midway down the forty-degree earthen slope.
Thick brush, intended to retard rain erosion, cushioned their first impact. Massive roll bars, not standard equipment on ordinary civilian sedans, prevented the roof from caving in to crush them. The car bounced free, their bodies thrashing violently against shoulder and waist belts that restrained them from being ejected from the pinwheeling vehicle.
Jackson's stubby-barreled shotgun came loose from its bracket, its walnut stock clapping the Sheriff across the skull with a crack of sound like a mallet hitting a croquet ball. Knocked cold, the sheriff wilted rag-limp in his harness.
For split seconds sky and earth were a sickening blur in Tommy's vision. Then the bone-wrenching tumble found Sheriff Jackson's vehicle landing in the heavy growth of ancient sycamore and live oak trees that carpeted the pit of the arroyo.
K6ATX's ears registered the chiming tinkle of breaking glass, the scream of ripping metal, the splintering of tree limbs. The door panel alongside the radio ham's seat seemed to cave in like a squashed beer can, shoving Tommy violently against the unconscious sheriff. Jackson was still clinging to the wheel, his right foot instinctively jamming the brake pedal to the floorboards, the loose shotgun coming to rest harmlessly in the back seat.
The nightmarish tumble ended with the car suspended by huge tree limbs, bottom side up a few feet above the ground, its two passengers dangling head-down in their safety belts, the battered roof of the car shielding them from the splintered trees that had absorbed the shock of their landing.
The whole nightmare could be measured in seconds.
Dazed and bloody, K6ATX clawed at the buckle of his seat belt, releasing his body so that he could pull himself upright, kneeling on a floor which was actually the vinyl header or ceiling. He smelled leaking gasoline and his first instinct was to reach for the ignition switch and turn off the engine to avoid a holocaust.
"Ross--Ross!" K6ATX yelled frantically. "Are you OK?"
The sheriff did not respond. He hung suspended above the steering wheel, a dribble of crimson leaking from a gash where the shotgun stock had cut his scalp. Jackson's eyes were glazed, lids half open, but a strong pulse ticked on his throat.
The raw odor of gasoline was suffocating. Tommy was thankful the car had landed upside down; at least that kept the high-octane fuel from the ruptured gas tank from leaking onto the hot exhaust pipe and igniting, otherwise both would have been incinerated to a crisp by now.
Bracing both knees on the roll bar, K6ATX groped for the microphone of the Sheriff's shortwave radio transceiver, swinging from its twisted cord. Through the shattered back window, against a background of jagged tree branches, K6ATX saw the chromium glint of the radio's center-loaded whip antenna, bolted to the rear bumper but still in place. If it could still radiate an RF signal...
With trembling fingers K6ATX moved the band switch knob until the digital read-out gave him the emergency frequency monitored by the Highway Patrol. Struggling to control his voice, K6ATX gasped out, "Mayday, Mayday! This is Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Car Number One--our vehicle was rammed off the freeway at Arroyo Hondo by a blue-and-white side-door van, California plates..." Tommy found that he was still holding the slip of computer paper on which he had jotted the license number.
He read off the number three times, then concluded with an unnecessary instruction: "Request CHP intercept the van, northbound on 101, take the driver into custody, and send paramedics soonest. Sheriff Jackson has been injured, repeat injured, and is unconscious.
Sheriff's Car Number One standing by."
With the radio back in receiving mode, Tommy was relieved to hear a Highway Patrol officer returning: "Roger, Sheriff’s Car One. Am dispatching ambulance immediately. Roadblocks will seal off the hit-run vehicle at Las Cruces and Highway One. Also the southbound lanes if he makes a U-turn over the center divider."
The CHP officer repeated the hit-run van's license number and acknowledged Tommy's verification. That done, K6ATX turned to Ross Jackson. Unbuckling the safety harness, Tommy lowered the unconscious officer as gently as possible to a prone position on the battered underside of the car top. He located the first aid kit under the dash and obtained alcohol swabs for cleansing the bleeding cut on the sheriff's scalp, applied antibiotic ointment from a tube and taped on two gauze pads to staunch further bleeding. He was relieved to see that Jackson was showing signs of coming around.
They had had a near-miraculous escape from death. The extra steel framework that the county had installed on the stock car by order of the Sheriff's Department, plus the use of heavy-duty safety harnesses, added to the lucky fact that they had not landed on bedrock, accounted for their survival. But Ross Jackson's left shoulder had an unnatural look to it, and his left forearm, Tommy feared, had suffered a fracture of the ulna or radius, or both.
All four car doors were jammed, and if they were to be opened they would require the use of the powerful prying tool known as the "Jaws of Life." In all probability the injured man could be removed through the windshield opening. Tommy kicked out the crumblike remnants of glass and peered through the opening, determining that the car was suspended six feet above solid ground.
Tommy felt sick, dizzy, and ached 'all over. Not until then did K6ATX think to examine himself to determine the extent of his own injuries, if any. His Caltech T-shirt, bearing the W6UE call sign of the college's Amateur Radio Club, had been ripped during their popcorn-machine plunge down the slope. There were superficial lacerations across his ribs, and both legs of his blue jeans were frayed open to reveal skinned kneecaps where he had been slammed against the instrument panel. So far as he could tell, however, he had suffered no internal injuries.
Peering around dazedly, K6ATX recognized familiar landmarks.
Arroyo Hondo twisted off into green foothills sloping up to meet the rocky crags and chaparral-furred mountain range, blue-hazed and shimmering behind the July heat waves.
The skyline above him to the south bristled with the silhouetted figures of motorists assembling to stare down at them from the roadside above. Perhaps among them were witnesses who could confirm that the sheriff's car had been sideswiped into the abyss by the driver of a speeding van who had not stopped to render assistance. Somewhere in the distance, a siren was wailing. A CHP squad car, maybe, or possibly a paramedic rescue team...
K6ATX wiped a trickle of blood from his cheek. He hurt all over. But his physical pain was as nothing compared to the mental torture he felt as he muttered to himself, "This was no accident. That driver butted us over the edge on purpose. But why? Was it some criminal Ross had put behind bars in the past, trying to kill the sheriff for revenge?"
Tommy could not give voice to the other grim possibility that had come back to haunt him again. Was it he, not Sheriff Ross, who had been the primary intended victim of this traffic accident? Could someone be that desperate to prevent his keeping a rendezvous today with Captain Jerry Logan of the Vanderhoff Space Center?
* * *
The Search-and-Rescue program that Ross Jackson had developed inside the framework of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department during recent years had set the standard for law-enforcement people throughout California.
State-of-the-art equipment for communication and transportation accounted for the S & R teams' amazing speed in reaching the scene of emergencies, which ranged from boating mishaps out on the Pacific to backpacking accidents on the lonely wilderness trails of the mountainous Back Country to the north.
The sheriff's rescue team could be expected to set new records for promptness when their own boss' life might be at stake. Tommy Rockford's radio message from the wreck site to cruising California Highway Patrol units was also picked up by the emergency scanner at Ross Jackson's heliport near the county jail facility on the western outskirts of Santa Bonita. Before the message could be relayed by the CHP dispatcher 90 seconds later, the Search-and-Rescue team's big Bell 204 helicopter had already been rolled out of its hangar and was warming up for take-off.
* * *
Sheriff Jackson was just stirring back to consciousness inside the smashed squad car when Tommy Rockford heard the roar of the helicopter's engine and the thump-thump of its rotor blades as the big whirlybird began its vertical descent into the canyon. Within moments of a feather-light landing, the county's S & R team was racing toward the sheriff's vehicle, bringing a slotted body board and a wire mesh stretcher with them.
Tommy Rockford crawled out onto the chassis of the wrecked car, waving a greeting down to the chief paramedic. "Ross is coming around. What took you so long? I put my mayday on the air five seconds ago."
Ignoring Tommy's complimentary wisecrack, the S & R team climbed up into the wrecked vehicle and went to work with consummate skill. Using infinite caution in case the semiconscious sheriff had suffered a spinal cord injury, the highly-trained paramedics got the injured lawman strapped securely to the body board and eased him out of the wrecked sedan by way of the windshield opening, thus bypassing the time-consuming task of prying open the jammed doors.
While two paramedics were strapping Jackson onto the basket litter for loading aboard the chopper, a third checked over Tommy Rockford's numerous bruises, scratches and contusions, attending to his hurts, applying gauze or surgical tape where needed, and pronouncing him lucky to be alive.
"We'll head for the Goleta Valley Community Hospital," the chief paramedic instructed the pilot. "It's the only hospital in the county with a helipad, and it's just minutes-away."
As the paramedics were loading Jackson's stretcher aboard the chopper, a white envelope fell from the Sheriff's jacket pocket. Tommy picked it up, noting that it bore the logo of his parents' Channel City Travel Agency. It carried a line of printing in his father's hand, PERSONAL FOR CAPTAIN J. LOGAN'S EYES ONLY!!
This was the message Ross Jackson had intended to turn over to the NASA officer at Gaviota, obviously. Unnoticed by the busy paramedics, Tommy stuffed the envelope into his pocket. He guessed that the sealed message was his parents' permission for him to consider whatever proposition Captain Logan was going to make.
As he followed the others aboard the chopper, K6ATX spoke to the pilot seated at the controls, "Can you let me off up at the road? I've got to deliver an important message for Jackson to some people waiting at Gaviota Beach Park."
The pilot closed and latched the cockpit door, made the A-OK sign with thumb and forefinger and said, "No problem, son--I'll set you down topside. You're sure you're OK?"
Within a matter of moments the helicopter was in vertical liftoff. Almost before Tommy Rockford had settled into a bucket seat behind the pilot, the chopper touched down on the paved freeway, rotor blades well clear of the jam of cars now clotting around the accident scene. The door slid open and K6ATX leaped to the ground, shouting his thanks to the cooperative pilot.
"Hey!" protested the chief paramedic attending Jackson at the rear of the cabin. "You, Rockford! Get back aboard! You've got to come with us to the hospital for X-rays and a check-up! You may have internal injuries you don't know about! Come back here-"
Pretending he hadn't heard above the engine and rotor noise, K6ATX crouched low to avoid the spinning blades and raced over to the nearest in a line-up of CHP vehicles. He recognized the driver as an old acquaintance, Officer Bill Everett.
"I have an important message to deliver for the Sheriff to an Air Force honcho who's waiting at Gaviota Pier, Bill!" Tommy panted. "Any chance of a lift? Five miles is too far to hitchhike."
The CHP officer nodded, remembering a certain Christmas Eve several years back when K6ATX had phone-patched him and his wife through to their airman son stationed at Hahn Air Base near Frankfurt, West Germany. It was part of an ongoing Santa Bonita Amateur Radio Club public service project for the benefit of families of U.S. servicemen stationed overseas.
"For you, Tommy, I'd taxi you to the moon. Climb aboard."
Assisted by flashing red lights and a siren, Everett wormed his CHP cruiser through the traffic pile-up and they were on their way. Twisting around to look through the rear window, K6ATX saw Ross Jackson's helicopter soaring off and away eastward toward the Goleta hospital.
As if by way of starting a casual conversation, the CHP man said, "What's with the hit-run accident, Tommy? Did you--"
Everett was interrupted by a sharp voice crackling from the radio, professionally controlled, yet urgent: "Calling all cars! Code Three, Ten Thirty-Five! This is Unit 2940, Gaviota Pass!"
Both men felt their spines stiffen. As an Explorer Scout in high school, Tommy Rockford had accompanied Santa Bonita law enforcement men on their rounds enough to know that "1035" was CHP code for an emergency requesting back-up assistance, usually where an officer's life was in peril.
Captain Everett reached automatically for his dashboard mike, thumbed the transmit button and barked "Unit 2930, northbound from Arroyo Hondo, be there in four minutes."
The officer calling from Gaviota Pass reported tersely, "Blue-and-white van believed involved in Sheriff Jackson's hit-run has just pulled in at northbound roadside public rest facility. Driver believed to be armed and dangerous. This unit is blocking Gaviota tunnel. Hey, guys, better consider this an 1199!"
The adrenalin was really pumping in Tommy's veins now. Eleven ninety-nine: urgent emergency involving possible gunplay...
K6ATX felt the seat cushions thrusting against his shoulder blades as the cruiser responded to the sudden surge of speed with Everett jamming the accelerator to the floorboard. In the time it took Tommy to settle forward against the shoulder harness, the cruiser's speedometer needle had passed the hundred-mile-per-hour mark.
Siren screaming, rooftop reds flashing, the CHP car threaded through traffic, making a blur out of passing landmarks--the former Vista del Mar country schoolhouse, the century-old Gaviota Store, the oil tank farm at Alcatraz Landing.
Rubber screeched as Everett skidded into the right-angle curve leading to the mouth of Gaviota Pass, the only mountain pass in the world with an exit at sea level. The flat sandy delta below them to the left was where Gaviota Creek emptied into the sea. Tommy got a glimpse of the paved parking area under the railroad viaduct, crowded with parked campers, ORVs and private automobiles. The sandy beach was jammed with the usual summertime crowd of sunbathers and surfers. Jutting seaward was the long steel pleasure pier where Tommy was scheduled to have his secret meeting with Air Force Captain Jerry Logan. As always, fishermen angling for sea bass and flounders lined the pier.
Officer Everett's radio was crackling with signals as the black-and-white fleet of the California Highway Patrol responded to the central dispatcher's terse orders to converge on the Caltrans landscaped roadside rest stop at the entrance to Gaviota Pass.
Officer Everett had seemingly forgotten Tommy's presence. Another CHP unit was parked broadside to stop incoming traffic at the rest facility's northbound turn-off. Everett slid his locked wheels to a smoking halt alongside, noting that his fellow Highway Patrolman was crouching behind his cruiser, shotgun at the ready.
"What's the scoop, Andy?" Everett inquired brusquely.
"We think that's the van that rammed Jackson off the road, just beyond the information booth yonder. The driver got out, started to get into that red Corvette parked alongside, then must have spotted Sergeant Cotton's black and white. He drew a hand gun and ducked back into the van, like as if he's inviting us to come and get him. Are you wearing your flak jacket, Bill?"
As he reached into the car to get his bulletproof vest, Everett suddenly realized he had a civilian passenger with him.
"Tommy," Everett said urgently, "this is a combat zone where slugs may start flying any minute. You duck into that restroom over there and lie low till you hear the all clear, understand? I don't want any heroics out of you. You won't give me a bad time, now?"
K6ATX nodded somberly. "Of course not, Bill. Good luck to you. I can verify the identification of that van, even without the scrape marks on the far side where he rammed the sheriff's cruiser. That guy inside may have been trying to trash me too, remember."
Tommy waited in the squad car until Everett and his fellow officer, both toting shotguns and with their sidearm holsters unsnapped and ready for action, started in the direction of the blue-and-white delivery van.
Officer Andy had a handie-talkie pushed against his lips, conversing on 42.56 MHz, the CHP frequency. Tommy was tempted to remain in the car and listen in on the radio chatter as the dragnet closed around the man in the blue-and-white van, but he had promised Everett to take cover inside the cinder-block restroom a few yards away, in case bullets started spraying the landscape. If the van driver had any brains at all he would surrender in the face of such overwhelming fire power.
By the time Tommy reached the restroom, a sheriff's deputy with an electric bullhorn was thundering an order to the trapped man. Peering out a slotlike window toward the target vehicle, Tommy heard the amplified bellow: "We know you're in there, man. Toss out your piece and come out with both hands on top of your head. Then turn and spread-eagle against the side of the van. Obey orders and nothing will happen to you. Otherwise you're in deep trouble."
The dozen or so tourists making a rest stop at the Gaviota park were scurrying for cover as they saw CHP and sheriff's vehicles closing in from north and south. Above the pounding of his pulse in his eardrums K6ATX heard a muffled voice issue from the blue-and-white van, malignant as a cobra's hiss:
"Hold your fire, coppers! I'm coming out. Hold your fire--"
What happened next was over in a couple of heart ticks, but to Tommy and the other tourists crowded inside the shelter of the public restroom, the whole scene was like a TV instant replay in slow-mo.
The side door of the van, showing the dents and scars of its sideswiping of Sheriff Jackson's vehicle, jerked open from within, inch by inch. The stooped figure of a man wearing blue sweats stood framed in the half-open door of the vehicle. Milk-pale eyes--blinking as he tore off dark glasses--brush-cut hair gleaming like bleached straw from under a pushed-back red baseball cap. Head jerking left and right, searching out the projected shadows of lawmen crouched behind cars and trash barrels ringing him in.
Then panic seemed to seize the fugitive. Sunlight glittered on the blued steel of a 9-mm Berreta handgun as he leaped from the shadowy interior to the pavement and fell into a squatting crouch, a cornered rat crazed by fear, teeth bared, screeching his hate in a torrent of defiant obscenities.
Then, facing suicidal odds, the fugitive started shooting.

CHAPTER 4
Beach Blanket Rendezvous

Tommy Rockford's mouth went cotton-dry with horror as he heard the lawmen's blast of return fire from a dozen angles. He saw the fugitive's body jerk and spin to the impact of drilling slugs, saw the knees buckle to drop him face down on the pavement, the high-pitched screams continuing to retch from his lips. Then the fallen man's legs twitched in final spasm and he was still...
The crackle of gunfire echoed off the cliffs of the Pass, the sound retreating eerily into the distance before dying into silence. Then, somewhere across the parking lot, a woman began screaming out of control as uniformed officers cautiously started leaving their cover, crouched low, weapons poised in case their target made a hostile move...
...K6ATX was waiting in Bill Everett's cruiser, monitoring the radio messages that jammed the frequency from the dashboard speaker, as the CHP dispatcher in Buellton summoned a coroner's ambulance from Santa Bonita, adding ominously that "no paramedical assistance needed for driver of hit-run vehicle--all he'll need is an embalmer--"
When Officer Everett returned to his car he said to Tommy apologetically, "Just remembered I'm supposed to drop you off back down at Gaviota Pier. I can do that and be up here again before the coroner's cold meat wagon comes. By the way, the sheriff just went into surgery at Goleta Hospital, and before they put him under he was asking about you, seemed to be uppermost in his mind."
As they were making a U-turn to reach the southbound lanes of U.S. 101, Tommy asked, "Any ID on the dead guy yet?"
"We'll have to wait for the Medical Examiner for that one."
K6ATX did not break the silence again until they were pulling into the off-ramp leading down to Gaviota State Beach Park.
"Let me off now, Bill. I don't know exactly what the score is here, but it might be best if I wasn't seen arriving in one of Smokey Bear's black-and-whites. Thanks a million for the lift."
As he alighted from the cruiser, Tommy turned to his friend and said, "Would you mind dropping by the pier and giving me the identity of the van driver as soon as convenient, Bill? I have a hunch that information might be important to the NASA brass I'm supposed to meet."
Everett, leaned over to shake Tommy's hand. "Sure thing, son--if I can pick you out of that mob of sun-tanned beach boys."
Tommy Rockford's knees felt rubbery as he walked across the crowded parking lot toward the pier, a delayed reaction to the bloody violence he had just witnessed--violence he feared might have some connection with his own fate. There was the added tension of this top-secret meeting and the knowledge that he would soon learn what lay ahead for him.
He walked past the concession stand and bait shop toward the beach. Gaviota, he had read somewhere, meant "seagull" in Spanish; more than 200 years ago, back in the summer of 1769, when the explorers of the Portola Expedition had camped overnight at this spot, one of the Spanish musketeers had shot a gaviota on the wing, thereby creating the place name it had borne ever since.
The squatty steel pleasure pier was jammed with fishermen leaning along its railings, casting lines into the green swells outside the foaming breakers that curled up and flattened out on the beach like the pages of a discarded book fluttering in the sea breeze. Which one of those fishermen would be Captain Jerry Logan of the Vanderhoff Air Force Base Space Shuttle Command?
Logan was to identify Tommy by his Caltech T-shirt and blue Dodger baseball cap. Captain Logan would be wearing a California Angels baseball cap-although during his walk along the pier, K6ATX saw no less than seven people wearing the Angels cap of their favorite American League baseball team.
Strolling casually out on the pier, Tommy reached dead end without having been approached. He leaned his elbows on the rusty steel railing of the pierhead, removed his cap, and let the brisk salt-laden ocean breeze ruffle his medium-cropped blond hair.
All he could do now was wait for Captain Logan to reveal himself. Other than knowing that the Air Force officer was youngish, in his thirties, with a crew cut, Tommy had no idea what the man would look like, except that he probably wouldn't be in uniform.
K6ATX was watching a Japanese freighter bucking the tide down Santa Barbara Channel past the ugly oil-drilling platforms between the coast and Santa Rosa Island when a man wearing a polo shirt and Bermuda shorts, too young to be Captain Logan, elbowed into a vacant space at his elbow. His face, freckled as a bird's egg, and his curly cap of cinnamon-red hair struck Tommy Rockford as vaguely familiar. Had they crossed trails before?
The stranger's gray eyes met Tommy's. "King Six Alpha Tango X-ray?" came the tight-lipped mutter.
Receiving Tommy's confirming nod, he continued: "Sergeant Beau Humphries. I'm on Captain Logan's staff at Vanderhoff. I'm your contact. Happy to meet you, Tommy.
Over a vigorous handshake, K6ATX said, "It's mutual, Sarge. Can you clue me in on what this is all about?"
Humphries glanced over this shoulder. "Too many potential eavesdroppers here on the wharf, so Captain Logan chose a spot down on the sand where we can yak in total privacy, making like four tourists getting a tan between swims." Humphries grinned sheepishly and added, "Meeting this way probably strikes you as kid stuff, but that's how Captain Logan operates. Like he's playing the lead in a Grade-B spy movie."
"Four guys, you say? Captain Logan, you, me--and who else?" The young airman pointed toward the seacliffs at the western edge of the beach park. "See the Navajo beach blanket with the three guys on it? Captain Logan's the one wearing the swim trunks. The tall bearded man with him is Merlin Kendall. He's the top trouble-shooting engineer for Aerospace Computer Corporation over in Utah."
"The name is familiar. Caltech uses A.C.C. software."
"Kendall has the contract to build the booster rockets for the space shuttle program. You'll understand why he rushed out to Vanderhoff to join us, after the Captain briefs you on what's cookin'. I'm not authorized to talk. The other guy, the hairy one who looks like a no-neck gorilla, is called Crusher. Used to be a professional wrestler. Mr. Kendall's bodyguard, chauffeur and pilot of the executive jet he uses when he flies over from Utah. Crusher doesn't count. He won't be in on the briefing. Let's take a stroll over and join 'em, huh? Just act casual."
Falling in step with the young Air Force sergeant, K6ATX said ruefully, "All this cloak-and-dagger stuff sure bugs me, Sarge."
Humphries answered in a low monotone, "Take my word for it, you'll be asked to help out in a very urgent mission. By the way, how well do you hang glide, Tommy?" Tommy assumed the abrupt change of subject was for the benefit of anyone who heard them talking as they walked down the pier.
"Hang-gliding? So-so. I did it for a while a couple of years back. Couldn't afford eight-hundred bucks for my own kite--what spare cash I have has always gone into ham gear or keeping my car running. But I have made enough medium-distance flights with borrowed Glider Club equipment to qualify as an intermediate grade pilot, I would say. No time for the sport since I entered college last year, though. Why do you ask?"
Sergeant Humphries repeated, "Captain Logan will field all the questions, Tommy. Afraid I've already babbled too much."
"Before I meet him, Sarge--what sort of guy is this Captain of yours? Except for high school ROTC I've never served in the military, but I'm leery of brass. Saluting, all that jazz."
The airman shrugged. "Nice fella. Acts younger than his age, but he's no nerd. Doesn't have a Rodney Dangerfield complex, either, although he doesn't get the respect he deserves from the higher echelons at NASA. I think you'll like him. Just bear in mind, he may sound immature, and some of his ideas seem pretty far out and wimpy, but Jerry Logan is one of the top radio engineers on the post, bar none, and more than that, a dedicated patriot."
Leaving the pier, they trudged through the sand toward the chalky sea cliffs that formed the coast line. As they drew closer to the men on the beach blanket, Tommy saw Crusher, the huge musclebound chauffeur, get up and gallop across the beach to plunge into the cold surf.
"Gentlemen," Humphries called out, "meet Tommy Rockford. Tommy, Captain Logan and Mr. Merlin Kendall, both aerospace engineers, one NASA, one private sector."
A shiver of excitement went down Tommy's spine as the two men stood up to shake his hand. Both were wearing dark glasses, their noses painted white with zinc oxide sunburn cream, giving them a masklike surreal appearance.
The computer engineer's swarthy face was taut and anxious. At closer range, Tommy Rockford saw that Kendall's beard, black from sideburns to the angle of his jaws, was frosting white at the chin. Captain Logan, by contrast, appeared juvenile, his peach-fuzzed cheeks looking as if they were not yet ready for a razor blade, his brown eyes wide and innocent and trusting as a child's.
Captain Logan said in reference to his taller companion, "Mr. Kendall and I have equal concerns about the space shuttle program, but from different motivations. He designed the self-destruct circuitry NASA uses on our rocket boosters and smaller ICBMs, Tommy. Naturally he hopes they'll never have to be used to abort a flight for safety reasons. I hope the same--for military reasons."
Merlin Kendall's A.C. Corporation manufactured most of the more sophisticated computer equipment software used in America's engineering schools, including Caltech. It was mind-boggling to K6ATX that the senior engineer for one of America's leading defense contractors would be waiting for him to join this mysterious beach blanket rendezvous with Logan and Humphries. Something of superlative importance must be in the air.
Kendall commented, "The Captain and I had about decided you were a no-show, Tommy. Not that I would have blamed you for rejecting a pig in a poke... What's with all the scratches and bruises? You look like you've been through a sausage grinder."
"I am lucky to have made it at all," K6ATX answered somberly. "Sheriff Jackson was driving me up from Santa Bonita when a van rammed us off the big earthfill at Arroyo Hondo. We took a 200-foot free fall. Search and Rescue air-lifted the sheriff by helicopter to the hospital in Goleta. He has a broken arm, cuts, broken teeth. Possibly internal injuries."
Logan and Kendall exchanged shocked looks. "That's terrible!" the young NASA officer cried. "What caused the accident?"
"It was no accident, sir. The driver wanted either the sheriff or me dead. For what reason, I can't say. I was wondering if it might be connected with this rendezvous of ours."
Logan and Kendall seemed so agitated by Tommy's startling news that K6ATX decided to postpone mentioning the fatal shootout that was a sequel to the incident. He added hastily, "But I'm OK. Nothing wrong with me except being half-devoured by curiosity over why you gentlemen want to see me. I--I've been fantasizing that maybe Conquistador needs a civilian radio ham to go into orbit next week. If so, I'm your man, ready and rarin' to go!"
Captain Logan shook his head. "Sorry to disappoint you regarding a freebie space flight, Tommy, but the orbiter may not even fly unless you can help us. That's the bottom line--it's why we're here today. Conquistador may be in mortal danger of aborting."
The four men sat down cross-legged on the blanket like Indians at a war council. Captain Logan was appraising the teenage radio ham with obvious approval of his muscular fitness, keenly intelligent blue eyes and the good humor tugging at the corners of his mouth.
"By the way," Tommy said, drawing his father's envelope out of his hip pocket, "the Sheriff asked me to give this to you. It's my parents' permission for you to feed me to the lions, I think."
The glances that Captain Logan and Merlin Kendall exchanged were somber. Logan said gravely, "We are deeply concerned by your hit-run freeway accident, Tommy. I can't be sure, but yes, it may be related to this top-secret mission I'm asking you to join. It may be a coincidence of timing, or your hunch may be right--that someone was trying to prevent your joining us this morning."
"What mission, sir? Nobody's clued me in on a thing so far."
Captain Logan was momentarily preoccupied with reading the release form that Tommy's folks had prepared. He read aloud for Kendall's benefit, "Mr. Rockford's note ends with this paragraph: 'The ultimate decision to participate in your project must be Tommy 's alone. We have raised our son to take care of himself in all situations. At the risk of sounding like boastful parents, we can assure you that his judgement is mature for his years. He can be trusted absolutely.' You must have wonderful parents, Tommy."
"I do, Captain. But will you please tell me what's what?"
Captain Logan sucked in a deep breath. "What I am going to say must be considered top secret, Tommy...But first, to test your basic technical knowledge--you are aware that rockets and missiles are equipped with self-destruct mechanisms, activated by Morse code radio signals from ground control, in case they stray off course and become a threat to inhabited areas?"
"Yes," Tommy replied. "I know it is sometimes necessary to abort a flight in progress. That is general public knowledge."
"Well, I have reason to believe," Logan said, "that our space shuttle launch a week from today may be the target of an attack by international saboteurs, using land-based radio. We fear that the rocket boosters' digitized command code self-destruct system may be triggered by a spurious interfering signal. The International Q-signal that you hams use identifies such a signal as 'QRM.' It would cause an explosion either at lift-off or shortly afterward. Mr. Kendall here was concerned enough to fly out from Utah to share his expertise with me. He agrees the risk is very real. In addition, in his case, his company's government contracts and his own professional career are threatened."
Kendall reluctantly admitted, "As the inventor and manufacturer of the self-destruct equipment used by NASA, Aerospace Computer Corporation is forced to agree with Captain Logan that a determined saboteur might conceivably be able to trigger such an explosion, as well as could the operators at mission control. It is a frightening concept, a grave threat to national security."
Tommy gave a low whistle. "Wow! Blowing up ordinary missiles is bad enough, but a space shuttle--it carries seven human lives! Which puts the sabotage into the category of murder--murder by QRM. But how can you possibly meet the threat?"
"A tough problem," Kendall conceded. "But the threat has to be eliminated at all costs. This forthcoming launch is too important to mankind, to the space program. Nothing must stand in the way of Conquistador accomplishing its mission, or even delaying it. We must seek out and destroy the saboteurs..."
Captain Logan went on, "Congress would scrub the National Aeronautical and Space Administration's entire shuttle program in a minute if we had another disaster such as the one that blew up Challenger in Florida in January of '86."
K6ATX blinked with surprise. "You mean to say the Challenger was blown up by terrorists?"
"No, no, Tommy. It has been determined that defective O-ring seals in Challenger's starboard booster rocket leaked fire to touch off the explosion in the main fuel tank, some nine miles off the ground. But I have reason to believe that Conquistador may be destroyed by enemy signals, not a mechanical defect in the booster system."
"Definitely not a manufacturing defect!" Kendall snapped.
Captain Logan continued, "I consider it my duty as a career Air Force engineer to locate the terrorists' secret transmitter and put it out ot commission before our shuttle launch takes place. But time is desperately short, as you know. Only a week. My superiors refuse to listen to me; in fact, they ridicule the concept that an interfering signal could destroy the Conquistador in flight. When I ask for a launch delay they tell me I have been reading too many comic books. That is where you enter the picture, Tommy. You might prove to be the key figure in our counterattack plans."
Tommy was speechless for a moment. "Me? How could I possibly--"
Captain Logan said ruefully, "As the matter now stands, my superiors at the Pentagon level won't even agree to postponing the launch to give us extra time to check out my theory about an enemy jamming transmitter. We are positive it exists. We even believe we know who the operator is! But we don't know where his transmitter is hidden. Finding that operator and his transmitter may depend on you, Tommy Rockford. Now you have the picture."
K6ATX said thoughtfully, "This makes my hit-run incident seem more and more like part of a plot, doesn't it? But there has to be a leak of classified information somewhere along the chain of command. How many people knew 1 was going to meet you here at Gaviota today, sir? Besides my folks and Sheriff Jackson?"
Logan and Sergeant Humphries stared at each other. "Only one other person knew besides the four of us here," the Captain answered. "Mr. Kendall himself composes the secret code and passes it along to us. The code changes frequently. It is filed in a vault by my confidential clerk at headquarters--the military equivalent of my private secretary, who keeps all my classified records."
"Who is this clerk? He could be your leak."
Logan shook his head. "No. My clerk is beyond suspicion. Corporal Konrad Kohl. He has clearance to handle top secret documents. I trust him absolutely, without reservation."
"Just the same," Merlin Kendall interjected surlily, "your Corporal Kohl, as part of his job, is privy to the high command's top-secret codes and transmitting frequencies used to abort a mission if it's necessary. That has always bothered me."
K6ATX rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "I'm just a layman," h said, "but it makes sense to me that an enemy agent could make a rocket self-destruct as well as anyone in the control center, using QRM signals. Providing, of course, he knew the code. I share Mr. Kendall's doubts about this Corporal Kohl of yours."
Captain Jerry Logan's shoulders lifted and fell with a deep inhalation of breath.
"To get to the point of your being called here today, Tommy. You may be aware that within the past six months we have had three missiles explode mysteriously at Vanderhoff?"
K6ATX nodded. "Yes sir, it was in all the papers. I understand NASA blames defects in manufacture of the self-destruct devices, not operational errors."
"A slur at my company's quality control," Merlin Kendall flared up angrily, his face reddening. "A charge that I, as the designer and installer of such equipment, vigorously deny."
"What makes you think those other explosions were the result of terrorist sabotage, Captain?"
Merlin Kendall answered for Logan. "We believe that Sergeant Humphries here has uncovered direct proof that this is so. Let me explain." As he spoke, the defense contractor's troubleshooter unsnapped an attache case and drew out what appeared to be a large scroll. When he had unrolled it and spread it out on the beach blanket, K6ATX recognized it as a U.S. Geodetic Survey topographic chart covering Santa Barbara County, comprising a land area as large as the state of Rhode Island.
"As you well know, Tommy," Logan put in, "the eastern half of Santa Barbara County is primitive wilderness, extremely mountainous, mostly lying inside Los Padres National Forest. To the west, extending for twenty-five miles of ocean frontage and in visual line of sight of those mountains, lies Vanderhoff Air Force Base with its missile-launching gantries and silos dispersed along the coast. It is my understanding that you are familiar with that primitive mountain area, Tommy? Especially in the vicinity of a landmark called Thundergust Peak?
Tommy nodded. "Almost every inch of it. My Dad and I have backpacked over those mountains since I was a kid. an area with several peaks ranging over 6,000 feet. Much of it closed to entry, including Thundergust Peak, which is inside a restricted federal wildlife refuge."
"Do you know of anyone living in that area?" Logan asked.
Tommy replied, "Except for an old Basque named Trapper Joe Loustalot, who lives on a homestead outside the National Forest, the Back Country is totally uninhabited. It would be an ideal place for enemy agents to hide an illicit radio transmitter."
Captain Logan exhaled a pent-up breath as if in relief. "The fact that you've hiked that wilderness country is one reason why I summoned you here, Tommy. To summarize, I have reason to believe that a terrorist agent, representing an unknown foreign power or an internal subversive group, is bent on crippling or destroying America's space program by operating an illicit radio station from somewhere inside our Los Padres National Forest wilderness area. A terrorist who has somehow gained access to our secret digital codes, launching schedules and classified radio frequencies required to cause our birds to self-destruct, during or after launch."
"What enemy do we suspect?" Tommy asked.
Logan shrugged. "Who knows? Russia? Iran? Libya? Syria? Cuba? The PLO? Any attempt to accuse a specific country or subversive organization would be libelous speculation. I feel that the recent missile explosions were mere tests of equipment, dry runs in preparation for Conquistador's launch next week.
"What reason do you have," Tommy asked, "to believe there is such an illicit radio station back in the mountains, sir? Why not from a passing airplane? Or even a submarine at sea? Or a mobile station operating from a truck on the freeway?"
Captain Logan gestured toward Beau Humphries. "The Sergeant here routinely scans the radio spectrum a hundred kilohertz above and below the frequencies that operate Mr. Kendall's self-destruct mechanism on the rockets, using a radar-type rotating antenna. He has monitored strong unidentified radio signals emanating from the east, in the direction of your Back Country, immediately before each missile explosion--but from a slightly different bearing each time, indicating a portable transmitter. Mr. Kendall and I have listened to the tapes Sergeant Humphries made of those spurious emissions. They contain our digitized command code signals! What more proof do we need?"
The red-headed sergeant said, "Obviously the antenna transmitting the mystery signals was being moved from place to place for each transmission, but always from the direction of the Back Country--specifically, in the Thundergust Peak area."
K6ATX tugged thoughtfully at his lower lip. "You may be on to something pretty frightening here. Seems no doubt about it that you have a strong case, Captain. Also it seems obvious that someone close to you is leaking the secret codes. If Corporal Kohl is as clean as you say, then who else..."
Merlin Kendall was about to speak when the four men hunkered around the beach blanket and its spread-out map heard a voice shouting "Tommy Rockford! Can I see you, Tommy?"
K6ATX snapped back to reality. Twisting his head around, he saw Highway Patrolman Bill Everett beckoning to him from a discreet distance, on the beach between them and the parking lot.
"Excuse me a moment," Tommy said, getting to his feet. "I think that CHP officer may have a message for us. Be right back."
K6ATX trotted across the sand to join Everett, who was extracting a white ribbon of paper from a breast pocket.
"Didn't want to get too close to your meeting," Everett apologized half facetiously, "for fear I might overhear state secrets....! have some data for you, Tommy." He consulted the dot matrix print-out from his cruiser's dashboard computer. "Sacramento ran a DMV check on the blue-and-white van for us. It was taken out of a rental agency in Solvang at 0830 hours this morning. The Coroner found a wallet with some IDs on the driver's body. According to his driver's license, his name is Glenn Fricke of Niota, Tennessee. However, the computer identifies Fricke as a tourist who reported his wallet stolen from a Lompoc motel a month ago, containing his operator's license. But inside the dead man's undershirt, hanging from a neck chain, we found these."
Everett lifted from his pants pocket what appeared to be a matching pair of small brass plates looped through a thin gold chain.
"GI dog tags," the CHP man said laconically. "U.S. Air Force. We checked the airman's ID number by radio with the personnel officer at Vanderhoff, and hit paydirt. The physical description of the deceased fits one of their non-commissioned officers exactly--as the fingerprints will probably confirm. Seems the airman who owns these ID tags is on a four-day pass from the base. He was the registered owner of the red Corvette we saw parked at the Gaviota rest stop-apparently he left it there this morning while an accomplice drove him over to Solvang to rent the van. We figure he drove to Santa Bonita and parked in front of your home, waiting for the sheriff to show up, with the hit-run attack in mind. The Corvette is registered to the airman, not to Glenn Fricke, by the way."
Tommy said, "What name is on the dog tags?"
"A Vanderhoff corporal named Kohl. Konrad Kohl, K-o-h-l.”

CHAPTER FIVE
Logan's Defense Strategy

A visibly shaken Tommy Rockford returned to Captain Logan's trio with the startling news that Corporal Kohl had been identified as the driver of the hit-run truck, and that he had been killed in a confrontation with law enforcement officers. It was almost as if K6ATX had tossed a live grenade on the beach blanket.
Logan and Humphries seemed too stunned to speak. Kendall, obviously seeing the potential loss of multi-million-dollar defense contracts for his firm, was the first to come out of shock and voice the truth: "Corporal Kohl--your squeaky-clean top-clearance company clerk! There's your answer, Logan! A two-bit non-com! He's been leaking classified information to the saboteur! You've been harboring a terrorist spy in your own office! Another example of government bureaucratic incompetence."
As for Tommy Rockford, he now had proof for what he had only guessed at before. Corporal Kohl, fearing K6ATX's role in destroying the terrorist's sabotage plans, had set out to make sure Tommy wouldn't survive to help in Captain Logan's investigation. Logan had sunk to his knees as if he had been kicked in the solar plexus. "Corporal Kohl an enemy mole? It isn't possible. I can't believe it! I would have trusted him with my life--"
Sergeant Humphries cleared his throat. He knelt down and laid a hand on the shoulder of his badly shaken superior. "We've got to face up to the truth of what Mr. Kendall just said, Captain. We've suspected for a long time that the enemy terrorist we're after has been working with a spy on our staff. Now we know who that spy was."
Logan shook his head numbly. "But Kohl would never betray his country! Because of his Teutonic name, we ran extra loyalty checks on him, just in case he might be a Commie or a neo-Nazi sympathizer or something subversive like that. We investigated his background for two generations. Spotless! Why, his grandmother died in one of Hitler's concentration camps. His father is a high-ranking official in the CIA stationed somewhere overseas. The Pentagon gives him top security clearance. Kohl's record is impeccable, his loyalty unimpeachable. That's why he was assigned to a sensitive area."
Kendall grunted skeptically. "Spies have been known to work from inside U.S. embassies abroad, from the Pentagon itself... I would say, Captain Logan, that what Rockford just learned is the best proof we have yet. We better stop wasting time with these stupid secret meetings and start our transmitter hunt in the Back Country!"
Tommy Rockford cut in, "Wait a minute, guys. With Kohl out of the picture, what's to prevent Mr. Kendall installing a new self-destruct code in the shuttle? Isn't it just like changing the combination on a safe? That way, only Mr. Kendall would know the code and the chances of the saboteurs hitting on the right numbers would be one in a trillion trillion!"
Kendall shook his head despondently. "It's not that simple, Rockford. It would require more time than we have at our disposal--even if NASA would permit a delay to work on it. Their minds are sealed in concrete."
Captain Logan seemed to shake himself out of the throes of a nightmare. He turned anguished eyes toward Tommy Rockford.
"Mr. Kendall is right. Today is Thursday, July 16. The launch is scheduled for 0800 hours a week from today, July 23. That doesn't give us much time to put our counter plan into operation."
K6ATX said with a trace of irritation, "What is your plan, sir? And where do I fit in? I still haven't the foggiest notion why you pulled my name out of the hat and called me in today."
Logan took in a deep breath. "Tommy, you might say you were selected by computer. If we were going to locate a saboteur's radio installation, we had to have the help of, first, a person with intimate knowledge of the Back Country wilderness; second, someone with a technical understanding of radio and electronics; third, someone who could help conduct a low-level aerial surveillance of the Back Country, not by airplane, but by hang glider. Of all our available candidates, Tommy, the computer picked you as the only man who met all three criteria. You have backpacked into that country, you are a veteran radio ham and a star electronics student at Caltech engineering college, and you have had some hang gliding experience. Plus impeccable character references."
Tommy was baffled. "How does hang gliding enter this picture?"
Sergeant Humphries explained, "The only way we can scout hundreds of square miles of rough terrain searching for signs of a terrorist radio installation is by air. At slow speeds and almost at ground level. Hot air balloons would be ideal, but they can't be steered. Blimps are too conspicuous. A hang glider is the only answer."
K6ATX shook his head. "I can tell you this, Beau, the last place in the world a hang glider could operate safely would be in the turbulent air over those Back Country ridges and canyons in mid-summer. It would be suicidal to attempt to fly at the mercy of those thermals and down-drafts--"
"You don't understand, Tommy," Humphries broke in. "We'd make our surveillance flights with motorized hang gliders, two gliders in parallel flights four hundred yards apart. That way we could cover the entire wilderness area inside of two days. I'd be your flying partner. You're familiar with the terrain, so you'd be the navigator. I'd be responsible for knocking out the terrorist station when and if we succeed in finding it."
Tommy Rockford replied glumly, "I hate to tell you this, but I've never flown a powered glider, Sergeant. Always thought it was an insult to the hobby of free flight, tacking a noisy propeller and a foul-smelling lawn mower engine to a kite."
Captain Logan gestured toward his sergeant. "Beau here is a qualified motorized hang gliding instructor. He has trained dozens of pilots, right on our base. Our hang glider program is classified--the public is not aware of it, but the military makes considerable use of it for low-level reconnaissance. Sergeant Humphries can give you a concentrated two-day cram course in motorized gliding, Tommy. Then we'll fly you both to the Back Country Saturday evening--with four full days left before launch."
K6ATX waggled his head dubiously.
"It would be like looking for a certain grain of sand on the beach here," he protested. "You'd be watching for an antenna system of some kind, obviously. A Yagi array, or a microwave dish on a high point that had a line-of-sight shot at the launch complex, right? But it just doesn't make sense. We could scout those Back Country ridges for weeks and not cover all the possible sites. I can't see trying to tackle the impossible."
Merlin Kendall entered the discussion. "It wouldn't be quite that impossible a search," the contractor said. "Our fly-boy friends here think they have zeroed in on the suspected radioman, and even the approximate location of his transmitter. Tell him, Captain. Give him all the facts. Stop wasting time."
Logan flushed with embarrassment. "I--I have put off having to tell you this, Tommy, knowing your great passion for Amateur Radio. But I must confess that our prime terrorist suspect--our only suspect, actually--is a fellow licensed radio ham who, all the evidence would suggest, is also a potential traitor to his country."
K6ATX stiffened indignantly.
"A radio ham terrorist? What do you mean?"
Captain Logan could not meet the angry flash in Tommy's eyes.
"Tommy, a few years ago, before I was assigned to Vanderhoff Space Center to work on the polar orbit shuttle program, a brilliant young electronics engineer was sent out from Kennedy Space Center to join our staff. Ham radio was his hobby. He organized the Vanderhoff Amateur Radio Club. Then his health broke down--tuberculosis--causing him to resign his commission in the Air Force and leave the service."
K6ATX frowned uncertainly. "I don't get the connection with ham radio and terrorism--"
"Hear me out, Tommy! Do you know what this engineer did to recover his health? He disappeared into the far reaches of your Back Country seven years ago--and reportedly he's still there. Since then he has lived the life of a hermit, you might say. His only contact with the outside world has been by ham radio--even then he surfaces only every few months. No one has seen him, or ever been able to find his location, or find out who keeps him supplied with food and equipment."
K6ATX thought anxiously, "He could almost be talking about the Condor--"
Logan went on, "That is the enemy we face, Tommy! A NASA-trained engineer possessing intimate technical knowledge about the way our missile program operates. The evidence is overwhelming that he is the instigator of the mysterious signals that Sergeant Humphries intercepted with Hs scanning devices, signals coming from the east--your Back Country. This mountain hermit--you may have heard of him, Tommy. His nickname on the air is "The Condor."
Tommy Rockford's eyes rounded with shock.
"The Condor!" he gasped. "Why, I've known him for years! I consider him a good friend! I can reassure you right now--he couldn't possibly be a terrorist plotter! Your profile of him just doesn't fit the kind of man I know the Condor to be. I've spent too many hours on the air with him, discussing things like his philosophies, his religious beliefs, his personal loyalties--"
Kendall's eyes flashed with eager excitement. "You mean you know where the Condor's station is? You've met him personally?"
"Negative to both questions, sir. His QTH is like an unlisted phone number--no one knows its whereabouts that I'm aware of."
Captain Logan reached out to touch Tommy's arm. "I implore you, Tommy, put aside your bias in favor of the Condor and at least help us locate him and his radio station. For the sake of those seven human beings who will be aboard the Conquistador next week, I beg you to assist us."
K6ATX took in a long breath, eyes squeezed shut in concentration. Then, as if he had come to a monumental decision, he blurted out, "OK, count me in. I'm not going into this entirely blind. I happen to know Trapper Joe Loustalot--for years he's lived on a homestead near Thundergust Peak. Maybe, during all the time he's been trapping in the area, Trapper Joe's run across that illegal radio station you're after. If he hasn't, I doubt if our hang glider surveillance will come up with anything before next Thursday's shuttle launch anyway... When do we start?"
Logan and Humphries exchanged whoops of delight.
"Tomorrow morning!" the Air Force officer said. "I'll send transportation to your home in Santa Bonita to run you out to Point Sal. That's where Beau conducts his hang-gliding classes."
"Great!" K6ATX said. "I'll look forward to that, Sergeant."
"Tomorrow night," Captain Logan continued, "you'll stay at my home at Vanderhoff Village, off the post. Saturday night, July 18, we will air-lift the two of you to any landing place you designate in the wilderness, Tommy, along with your hang gliders, fuel for your engines, camping equipment and a week's supply of provisions. Sunday morning at dawn, Operation Hang Glider will begin! Gentlemen, our conference is concluded."
As if vastly relieved to finish the whole cloak-and-dagger business, the men began making preparations to leave. Kendall stowed his map in his attaché case, Sergeant Humphries started folding the sandy beach blanket.
Captain Logan said wearily, "Tommy, I'll hitch a ride back to the base with Mr. Kendall. Beau will drive you home in my vehicle. I'll see you tomorrow. And I can never thank you enough for agreeing to help. You--you cannot possibly appreciate what responsibility rests on your shoulders."
Merlin Kendall took K6ATX by the arm and led him to one side. "Tommy," he said in a low voice, "I have seen the papers that Caltech sent Captain Logan concerning you. I get the impression that you may be facing a struggle meeting your college tuition."
K6ATX grinned ruefully. "My parents can't afford Caltech tuition for all four years," he admitted. "I plan to take a semester off now and then to earn money."
Kendall shook his head. "That won't be necessary, son, for a student as highly qualified as you. As soon as I get back to Utah, I will arrange for Aerospace Computer Corporation to underwrite your education, including living expenses on campus. Corporate scholarships for deserving students is the industry's way of preserving America's leadership in space research."
K6ATX felt his heart pounding with excitement. Then he remembered something: scholarships invariably carried a price. Usually a student accepting financial assistance had to agree to go to work for the donor corporation. In Tommy's case, that would delay or prevent his achieving his dream of becoming a NASA astronaut.
"Mr. Kendall," he asked candidly, "what strings are attached to your wonderful offer? I've been taught that there is no such thing in this life as a free lunch."
Kendall's mouth twisted in a cynical grin.
"If you succeed in locating a saboteurs' radio station in the Back Country, thereby saving Conquistador's launch, to say nothing of Aerospace Computer's and my future career--then your Caltech education is guaranteed, and with no strings attached whatsoever. If Conquistador is shot down--no deal. Fair enough, Tommy?"
The excitement died slowly from K6ATX's blue gaze. It was becoming obvious that this man's interest in averting a disaster to Conquistador was selfishly motivated. Kendall was more concerned with preserving defense contracts and his own career than he was in the human lives involved.
After a long pause, K6ATX said heavily, "I am not in this deal for a reward, Mr. Kendall."
"You mean--you are rejecting my offer?"
"I am saying that if we do locate a saboteur's radio station in the Back Country and eliminate it in time to save Conquistador, your corporation owes me nothing. I will have only done my duty as an American citizen..."
Kendall turned away with a snort of disgust. "I'm sorry I didn't bring along a flag for you to wave." He sneered. "Tommy Rockford, you're a stupid, naive fool."

CHAPTER SIX
Ham Radio T-Hunt

Purple dusk was pooling over the California coastline when Sergeant Humphries, driving Captain Logan's Air Force sedan from the Vanderhoff motor pool, dropped K6ATX off at the Goleta Valley Community Hospital. There, where Sheriff Ross Jackson was being held for treatment and observation, Tommy found his lawman friend, slightly groggy following minor surgery to repair a shoulder separation. Jackson was propped up in bed chatting with his teary-eyed wife, Judy, who had been Tommy's den mother back in his Cub Scout days.
The sheriff's chart showed that in addition to the shoulder problem, he had suffered a broken arm, a mild concussion and numerous cuts and bruises, but X-rays confirmed that there were no internal injuries, so he would be hospitalized only a few days.
After K6ATX had made his own capsulized report concerning his rendezvous at Gaviota Beach, Sheriff Jackson asked his wife for a computer print-out from his bedside stand.
"I have an update to the Motor Vehicles report that Officer Everett read to you," Jackson said. "It would seem that the late Corporal Kohl was an extraordinarily stupid character to be engaged in international terrorism. Apparently before renting the van in Solvang, he had left his own getaway car in the parking lot at the Gaviota rest stop, a red Corvette. It checked out as Corporal Kohl's private vehicle, complete to Vanderhoff parking permits on the bumpei. The serial number had been filed off the Beretta pistol Kohl was carrying, so it can't be traced through regular channels, but it was not a government-issue weapon."
The sheriff turned to his wife and mumbled, "Judy, I'm running out of gas and could use some sack time. You drive Tommy home, will you? Our ham radio buddy has had a busy day. And he's got a lot more of the same ahead of him, I'm afraid. I hope you realize, Tommy, that your knowledge of the Back Country is the deciding factor in whether Captain Logan locates his saboteur. I'm glad you agreed to join him. In the little time they've got until the shuttle launch, low-level hang gliding is the only way Logan could ever reconnoiter that rough country and have any chance of locating a saboteur's installation."
Tommy Rockford couldn't remember when he had ever been so happy to get back to the security of his own QTH, nor could he remember a day that had packed so much excitement and violence into so few hours.
During supper he managed to reassure his parents, especially his worry-wart mother, that the hush-hush meeting with Captain Logan merely involved a scouting trip into the Back Country mountains on "classified government business."
They did not press him for details, proud in the knowledge that their son had been called to assist on an important mission for the Air Force.
Back in the snug refuge of his combination ham shack-bedroom upstairs over the family's attached garage, Tommy was reminded that this was a Thursday night. The far-flung network of the Brass Pounders' Bunch would be firing up on 40 meters at 2200 hours Pacific Daylight Savings Time for their weekly high-speed code competition and rag chew.
Tommy's favorite brasspounder, the Condor, checked in at irregular intervals, sometimes a month or two between transmissions, but hadn't missed a session in recent weeks. If he was on the air tonight it would give K6ATX a chance to zero in with his rotating beam to get a bearing on K6AI's QTH.
In the magic world of Amateur Radio, T-hunts, as transmitter hunts were called, had long been a popular sport. It was similar to a child's game of hide and seek. A ham was chosen to be "it." Using portable gear, at the time designated for the T-hunt he would hide himself as cleverly as possible, whether his QTH was in a crowded city or in the open countryside, up a tree or down in an irrigation ditch, and start transmitting "clues."
The ham operators designated as the hunters, using RDFs or radio direction finders--usually loop antennas atop their cars--would start reading signal strengths on their S-meters, thereby eventually tracking the hidden transmitter's direction from their receiver.
It was significant that the Condor had never been "it" in a transmitter hunt in the Santa Barbara County area, for the simple reason that K6IA operated portable, rarely from the same location, and was too far removed from civilization to enable his fellow hams to organize a T-hunt for him.
K6ATX had not had time to check into the Brasspounders' net for almost a year, but earlier this summer he had "read the mail" just to see if he had retained his ability to copy high-speed CW, regrettably a fast-vanishing art among hams who preferred phone QSOs. Most of the Brasspounders, using electronic keyers, rattled along at 45 words per minute.
K6ATX, if asked to name the best CW "fist" he had ever copied, would have chosen the Condor. For purity of tone, perfection of rhythm and ease of reading, the dits and dahs from K6IA's old-fashioned J-36 semiautomatic "bug" were in a class by themselves--as all members of the Brasspounders' Bunch agreed. He was the champ...
A land line call to his buddy Roy, W6AMD, brought the disturbing news that last Thursday night, at a time when K6ATX was rafting down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, the Condor had responded to net control's check-in roll call with his same sweet-toned signal--but with a faultiness of keymanship that bore scant resemblance to his skilled brasspounding of former years.
The Condor had a reasonable explanation for his stuttering fist, however. He had injured his right wrist in a fall. As a result of the accident, he would have to give up CW for a few weeks until his hand healed. Temporarily, at least, he would not be checking in with the weekly rag chews of the Brasspounders.
Two minutes after hanging up, Tommy heard W6WYN, the net control station in Los Angeles, start taking roll call via electronic key, running down the list of the twenty-odd Brasspounders whose skill at CW qualified them for membership in one of ham radio's most exclusive talk nets.
The Brasspounders were scattered throughout the eleven Western states and British Columbia, and were called alphabetically. K6IA, the Condor, was near the beginning of the roll call--and to Tommy's infinite disappointment, dead air filled the Condor's time slot when his name was called.
Hams knew in a general way that the Condor's base station was somewhere around Thundergust Peak. The mountain was located between the San Rafael and Sierra Madre ranges, which formed parallel spines through the heart of the wilderness portion of Los Padres National Forest. Actually, it was a forest in name only, at least in Santa Barbara County, where brush and rocks were more common than tall timber, except on the highest elevations.
Thundergust Peak was inside one of two designated sanctuaries the federal government had set aside in perpetuity as a wildlife preserve. That meant K6IA was situated in an area where hunting, trapping and backpacking were prohibited-a perfect refuge for a hermit to hide in. Or a spy operating an illicit radio station, as Captain Logan believed?
How the Condor managed to live inside the sanctuary was a mystery. It was generally assumed that he had made some kind of arrangement with the Wild Life Service or the U.S. Forestry people.
Thundergust Peak was about 26 airline miles almost due north of Santa Bonita, and 21 airline miles east-northeast of "Slick Six," as NASA's Shuttle Launch Complex No. Six at Vanderhoff AFB was called-the launching pad where even now the space shuttle Conquistador was being groomed for its historic lift-off.
According to what Tommy could recall about Thundergust Peak, it was in direct line of sight of Slick Six. Whereas NASA's target site was stationary, the outlaw station might be on Thundergust tonight, but where might it be on the day of the shuttle launch? A terrorist would certainly move his QTH around constantly to avoid detection. Sergeant Humphries' intercepted, but unidentified, signals had always come from different beam headings...
Preparing for bed, K6ATX comforted himself with the fact that at least he knew the general area in which the Condor's station was located. To his knowledge, no radio hams had ever had a reason to conduct a transmitter hunt in the Back Country.
Except for Tommy and a few others, radio hams were usually not also dedicated backpackers with the physical endurance to survive in rugged wilderness terrain. But he still refused to believe that the mysterious hermit who called himself the Condor was capable of planning as monstrous an act of sabotage and murder as Captain Logan suspected.
Why am I going on this hang-gliding search, then? Tommy asked himself that question just as he was drifting off to sleep. There is a good chance I'll wind up the target of a saboteur's gun--
That grim possibility gave an altered meaning and new menace to the hang-glider mission he would start training for tomorrow.

CHAPTER SEVEN
Operation Hang Glider

K6ATX spent Friday and Saturday undergoing intensive motorized hang-glider instruction from Sergeant Humphries. He learned more fundamentals in 20 hours than he could have picked up in two months at a commercial gliding school. The sergeant, however, attributed Tommy's rapid progress to his previous limited experience flying standard Rogallo Delta flex-wing gliders.
The restricted training area was at wind-swept Point Sal at the northeastern corner of the sprawling 100,000-acre Vanderhoff Air Force Base, off limits to civilian personnel. It provided a variety of flying hazards such as air turbulence over heated ground and treacherous down-drafts at the seacliffs, duplicating conditions they could expect to encounter over the wilderness of the mountainous Back Country.
The Air Force gliders, developed for low-level surveillance to escape radar detection, were equipped with ultra-light, two-stroke engines that drove 54-inch pusher propellers. Each glider carried a five-gallon fuel tank, which would transport a 170-pound man a hundred miles under normal weather conditions. Extreme headwind factors were not anticipated inland in late July.
"This equipment is just under the legal limit, or it would be classified as an airplane subject to the usual regulations for heavier-than-air craft," Humphries explained as the two were dismantling and packing their gliders for the last time. "The FAA doesn't require pilots to be licensed for these low-power, single-passenger gliders--but we're restricted to daytime use only."
The 15-horsepower engines were similar to those on snowmobiles, a common enough mode of winter transportation in Sergeant Humphries' native Minnesota, but foreign to Southern California where Tommy grew up.
"When we start our reconnaissance sweeps over the mountains," his flight instructor emphasized soberly, "we do run some risk of being shot at, Tommy. We may as well admit that to ourselves. Especially by trigger-happy marijuana farmers. But motorized hang gliding is becoming more and more common over the Back Country, mostly gliding clubs on routine cross-country flights between Ventura and Santa Maria. So we won't raise too much suspicion if the Condor should see us soaring around overhead. Captain Logan wouldn't have enlisted you for this mission if there had been severe risk."
Tommy grimaced. "I wish," he grinned, "you would stop referring to my friend the Condor as the villain who wants to blow up Conquistador. He's innocent until proved guilty, OK?"
* * *
At six o'clock Saturday afternoon, Sergeant Humphries pronounced K6ATX ready, after 20 hours of intensive practice. Following a leisurely dinner at Captain Logan's home in Vanderhoff Village, the three of them boarded a jeep and drove to a helipad near the main gate of the base.
There, Captain Logan had arranged for a VAFB chopper to transport them 50 miles to the east. Already loaded aboard were their two dismantled motorized gliders, ten jerry cans filled with oil and gasoline fuel mix, sleeping bags and nylon tents, food and water for five days, and hand-held radio gear for communication with Captain Logan back at the base.
In addition, while in flight both men would be carrying lightweight 8X binoculars and tiny Nikon L35AF auto-focus cameras. Tommy was taking along his own 2-ATS ham transceiver for 2-meter work, capable of tying in with local repeaters.
Twenty minutes after their take-off, a dollar-round moon peeped over the jagged eastern horizon, throwing the low hills encircling the Los Alamos and Santa Ynez Valleys into stark relief.
Tommy, drawing on years of boyhood memories of backpacking trips through the Back Country with his father, had selected the Roughriders' Potrero as their landing place and field headquarters, mostly because it was near the home of the Basque homesteader, Trapper Joe Loustalot, the only inhabitant along the edge of the National
Forest. Their daily reconnaissance flights would begin and end there. Tommy was counting heavily on information he might be able to pick up from Trapper Joe.
Ten miles north loomed Thundergust Peak, the six-thousand-foot mountain that Tommy believed hid the QTH of the Condor.
The chopper flight had an eerie, ethereal quality, the moonlit earth below taking on the image of a lunar landscape as they flew over the brush-mottled Solomon and Purisima Hills, climbing steadily to meet the rocky spines of the San Rafael Range above 4,000 feet.
Tommy easily recognized familiar landmarks. Off to the south the moon's orb painted a shimmering silver streak across Cachuma Lake, the man-made reservoir on the Santa Ynez River that was the main source of Santa Bonita's water supply.
Beyond the black ridge of the Santa Ynez Mountains a similar moonglade twinkled on distant waters--the Pacific Ocean. Clustered lights dotted along the southern horizon marked the ocean front locations of Santa Bonita and Ventura, and far to the southeast, the glow of the Los Angeles Basin megalopolis dimmed by a ground-hugging mantle of smog.
"We'll be landing in restricted country where there aren't any trails," K6ATX shouted in Captain Logan's ear. "It isn't likely that our saboteur's radio station will be close to traveled routes anyway. In fact, Thundergust Peak is inside the federal Wildlife Sanctuary, which is off limits to everyone."
Tommy knew from the growing size of Back Country landmarks exactly where the helicopter was. Wind-swept Hurricane Deck, Mal-dulce Peak and Big Pine Mountain--Santa Barbara County's highest at 6,828 feet-all lay eastward in vivid relief.
At 2215 hours the high plateau known as Roughriders' Potrero or mountain meadow was drawing near, named in honor of President Theodore Roosevelt's Spanish-American War cavalry regiment. "Teddy" had been the environmentally minded President who had set aside a national forest in this area in 1903.
Guided by Tommy Rockford's hand signals, the Air Force chopper began its descent toward an open arena hemmed in by manzanita thickets that would offer good concealment for their refueling and base camp. Fifty yards west of the landing site was the rimrock where the plateau broke away vertically for a thousand-foot drop into the vast San Rafael Game Refuge and Jawbone Springs Canyon.
The jumbo helicopter touched ground as lightly as a hummingbird kissing a flower. The three crewmen made quick work of unloading their cargo. The rotor blades remained idling. The whole moonlit scene--the resinous fragrance of the nearby pines, the endless ridges dropping away forever toward remote skylines, all took on an air of non-reality for Tommy and Sergeant Humphries.
Within less than 10 minutes, Captain Logan was giving his two men their final instructions. "You have fuel sufficient to make five hundred-mile sweeps each, enough to carry out a low-level survey of hundreds of square miles of incredibly rugged country," Logan said. "You'll be paying special attention to the west-facing slopes and higher ridges, especially those with visual sightings of Vanderhoff's launching pads, where the Condor would be most likely to install his directional antennas. Watch especially for portable microwave dishes that may be concealed under brush cover, to be moved into the open shortly before zero hour for launching Conquistador.
Logan handed each of them a small code book so they could communicate essential information by radio, a code Logan had created exclusively for Operation Hang Glider during the week, therefore impossible for hostile parties to translate off the air. Over a hearty double handshake, Logan said, "Keep in mind that whether the space shuttle makes it into orbit depends on you two locating the Condor's transmitter in time."
Tommy resisted the impulse to remind the captain again that the Condor was his friend and that he couldn't think of the man as an enemy.
"Radio me," Logan continued, "when you think you've found the transmitter, and I'll have heavily-armed SWAT teams on the way within moments. Your back up is fantastic. Tommy, in case of any decision making on this mission, remember that Sergeant Humphries here is in command. So long, fellows, take care and God bless you." Tears glistened in the boyish young officer's eyes as he turned and vaulted back aboard his chopper.
Moments later the USAF helicopter was lifting vertically and banking off and away to disappear into a fluff of cottony cloud drifting in from the sea. The thumping roar of rotor blades and engine faded on the night breeze. A ghostly silence filled the night. The two hang-glider pilots were alone.
Tommy walked over to the brink of the rimrock and looked down into Jawbone Springs Canyon. As Humphries joined him, K6ATX pointed out a pinpoint of amber lamplight in the awesome darkness far below. An alien odor of woodsmoke was pungent in their nostrils.
"That light's coming from the cabin where the old Basque trapper lives--Joe Loustalot," Tommy said. "I'm wondering if it might save some time if I hiked down there in the morning and asked Joe a few questions, Sarge? He knows this country better than any man living, because every fall and winter he's setting his trap lines. He may have even run across the Condor. He would be the logical one to ask if he had run across any funny-looking dish antennas or Yagi arrays hidden in the brush hereabouts. I could make it down there first thing and be back here by nine o'clock."
Sergeant Beau Humphries, by virtue of his USAF status, was Tommy's superior on this mission, as Logan had been careful to point out. He made his power felt now by vetoing Tommy's suggestion.
"Captain Logan issued strict orders not to share our mission with anyone, also to begin our hundred-mile round trip aerial sweeps at dawn tomorrow, Tommy. If we come up empty-handed after two days, we can contact Captain Logan by radio and get clearance to see if your Basque friend can help us. Otherwise it's low-level hang-glider reconnaissance for us."
* * *
The two breakfasted in the pre-dawn darkness on a Sunday morning that was the most indescribably beautiful Tommy could ever remember. They heated their coffee over a portable campstove; camp-fires were out during this fire-closure season. Besides, they would give off tell-tale smoke.
Within an hour the temperature had climbed into the eighties, promising a July scorcher ahead of them. During the 50 minutes it took them to assemble and make detailed preflight safety checks of their hang gliders, both men were panting with exertion.
Early morning and evening hours were the best parts of the day for basic hang gliding, when the air was still. Rising temperatures promised thermals of lifting warm air on which gliders could soar like eagles, but over terrain as up-and-down as this, summer heat also promised a choppy ride. This was not, however, as important a factor when they were motorized.
The fifteen-horsepower engines came alive with unmuffled, high-pitched snarls. Tommy's limited experience in hang gliding had been in a suspension harness supporting his body in a reclining, face-down position, but in a motor-driven glider, the pilot sat upright on a trapeze similar to a child's playground swing.
The time to take off had come. The two exchanged high fives, each recognizing the solemnity of the moment. Each was aware of the risks they faced. Both tried not to let their thoughts drift to premonitions of trouble.
"OK, pal, here goes!" shouted Sergeant Humphries, his customarily ruddy face paled by exertion and suspense. "Remember, we fly abreast of each other, couple hundred yards apart. Maintain radio silence except for emergency. We turn back when the fuel gauge shows three gallons in the tank. OK?"
K6ATX, busy adjusting the chin strap of his fiberglass helmet, waved a hand with thumb and forefinger forming the classic A-OK symbol that combat pilots always flourished in the movies.
"Ready whenever you are, Sarge."
Humphries jogged a dozen yards before reaching the rimrock and stepped off into empty space. K6ATX knew by the sudden buoyant lift which ballooned his own glider's wings that a strong thermal was already flowing up the cliff to add support once he hopped over the edge into the chasm below.
Gripping the triangular aluminum control bar with white-knuckled fists, Tommy Rockford began his take-off trot, his forward speed aided by the idling thrust of the small propeller above and behind him. His heart was in his throat as his Nike-clad feet kicked off from the brink of the cliff and he found himself sailing into a void with a thousand feet of nothing between his shoe soles and the rocky floor of Trapper Joe's homestead below.
Unknown to the average earth-bound creature, air is as tangible a medium as water, and Tommy's pair of Dacron sailcloth wings, extending 26 feet from tip to tip, caught the warm current of air flowing up the face of the rock wall and was lifted as buoyantly as a boat on an ocean swell.
K6ATX swung the weight of his body to put the glider into a right-angled bank to the north, following Sergeant Humphries on their first 50-mile due-north sweep, which would include a fly-by of Thundergust Peak.
An almost narcotic "high" filled Tommy, a thrill unmatched by any other sport. He was literally soaring like a bird, fulfilling the most ancient of man's dreams.
Following the sergeant's example, K6ATX switched off his noisy engine. As long as they had a following wind and thermal up-drafts to offset the drag of gravity, there was no need to expend precious fuel. They were lone travelers in a silent, undefiled world, with the musical whistle of the wind through the cables, bolts and turnbuckles attached to the top-mounted kingpost. Alien sounds from the earth below, if any, were muffled because Tommy was wearing a crash helmet at the explicit orders of Captain Logan.
Slightly higher and off to the west by the length of a football field, Sergeant Humphries resembled a man caught in the talons of some prehistoric flying reptile. Tommy felt exhilarated, as if he were really a part of America's space program today. He was reminded that someone had said "In one generation man has leaped from a horse through the sonic wall, from Carolina sand to the dust of the moon."
But there was no time for rhapsodizing over the joys of free flight. He adjusted the neck strap of the autofocus Nikon stuffed under his nylon jacket, making sure he was ready to photograph anything of significance, again in keeping with explicit orders from Captain Logan.
Tommy let the air currents drift him westward, paralleling his flying partner's line of flight. Below and behind him he could see the receding green oasis of cottonwoods marking Jawbone Springs, and the toylike homestead cabin where Trapper Joe Loustalot lived.
The two gliders were now soaring along opposite sides of Hogback Ridge, the naked rocky crest that divided Jawbone Springs Canyon on the east from Box Canyon on the west.
Both hang gliders began to lose altitude. Tommy switched on his motor to gain lift and was surprised to see that Sergeant Humphries, by far the more experienced of the two, had not done likewise. Humphries' glider was being dragged down into Box Canyon by gravity, rather than riding a buffer of warm air, over there on the west side of Hogback. Even as Tommy watched, Humphries sank out of view below the ridge, like a dragonlike pterodactyl coasting toward a landing in some primordial jungle. Had Humphries already spotted something suspicious and was going down for a closer look?
Feeling a sudden vague alarm, K6ATX revved up his engine and shifted his weight in the swing seat to put his glider into a climb, so that the rock-toothed horizon of the Hogback would no longer block his view of his flying companion.
Tommy felt no concern for his own safety; he had 224 square feet of non-stretchable, non-porous Dacron supporting him. But why hadn't the Sergeant cut in his motor by now?
When Humphries came into view again, Tommy was alarmed to see that the airman was still in a five-degree descending glide, hurtling straight-on at ever-increasing speed toward the vertical cliffs that formed the north end of Box Canyon. Humphries was on a collision course with death if he didn't pull out of it within the next few seconds!
With an involuntary shout of alarm, Tommy Rockford gunned his motor full throttle for top speed and veered to the left to get a closer look at Beau Humphries. Something was wrong. His red-headed flying buddy was slumped forward, armpits hooked over the control bar, hands dangling from arms as limp as ropes, his head hanging floppy-necked as a rag doll's.
With a solid wall of stone not 50 yards ahead, Humphries was approaching his doom at a speed in excess of 30 miles an hour, his engine still inoperative. Sergeant Humphries had apparently passed out in his glider harness, no longer in control.
"Sarge! Wake up! For God's sake, pull out of it!"
Tommy's scream of warning was unraveled by the whip of the wind even as it left his lips, but it was too late to be of any avail now, even if Sergeant Humphries was conscious.
K6ATX could only watch in sick horror as he saw the sergeant's glider dip into a steeper, swifter glide angle.
Kite and man slammed into the beetling stone face of the cliff with a sodden pulpy sound loud enough to penetrate Tommy's helmet.
Glider parts flew, torn metal winking in the sun.
Human flesh spattered against stone like an insect crushed into a pasty mass under a flyswatter...

CHAPTER EIGHT
K6ATX Call Coroner

Frozen in a paralysis of pure horror, Tommy Rockford watched the crumpled form of his Air Force friend tumbling earthward as if in slow-motion, chasing his shadow down the rocky face of the cliff, entangled in the draping folds of a hang glider that resembled a crippled butterfly more than a shroud.
Tommy's own glider sailed past the dead end of Box Canyon in time to spare him the agony of seeing Sergeant Humphries' lifeless form bounce into the talus boulders far below.
With a moan of pure desperation, K6ATX put his power glider into a steep climbing bank to head back into the prevailing wind. Controlling his wings came instinctively now as he picked out a level landing spot on Hogback Ridge, switched off his engine and went into a stall to reduce landing speed.
His landing wasn't as textbook-perfect as he had demonstrated many times yesterday over at Vanderhoff. His ground approach angle was too steep. Too late, he tried to nose the kite up to spill air and brake his speed.
As the stony surface of Hogback Ridge zoomed up to meet him, the nose of the kite was snagged by a stub of dead manzanita and he lost all flight control. His windmilling feet stumbled when they hit earth. Moments later he was skidding along the stony ground to an ignominious collision with a hedge of ceanothus, ripping the Dacron sailcloth wings to shreds. As a motorized glider, he had washed out on his maiden flight.
Dazed and beaten, K6ATX untangled himself from his buckled control bar and safety harness and unbuckled his crash helmet. He unfastened and discarded his bulky parachute and climbed shakily to his feet, taking comfort in the old aviator's adage that "any landing you can walk away from is a good landing."
Tommy's clothing was torn, but he had sustained no serious physical injury. He couldn't say the same for his flying machine, which would never be airborne again. The aluminum propeller had a badly bent blade and a warped shaft. In the short skid across the ground a protruding rock had ruptured the fuel tank, filling the air with the pungent, alien stench of gasoline and lubricating oil. A spark caused by metal rubbing against stone could have trapped him in a fireball and fried him to a cinder within seconds.
Tommy lurched into a trot, heading for the brink of Box Canyon, a dozen yards short of the dead end where Sergeant Humphries, for some inexplicable reason, had crashed to his doom. It was in that moment that the tail of his eye caught a movement, either real or imagined, which seized his total attention.
Across the yawning gulf of Box Canyon, on the skyline of the opposite rim, he saw--or imagined he saw--a human figure mounted on a red and chrome vehicle, probably a three-wheel all-terrain bike, glimpsed in the split-second action of climbing the ridge.
Working on reflexes alone, K6ATX whipped up his autofocus camera and snapped one shot just as the rider topped the skyline and vanished on the far side, the noise of his engine dying away.
It had happened so quickly that K6ATX was not honestly sure he had seen anything. If the disappearing biker was a figment of his imagination, an image that had faded on his retinas in the space between heartbeats, it would not appear on his film.
But if it was real and he had a photo to prove it-what did it mean? It meant that someone--perhaps Trapper Joe, assuming that the old Basque had graduated from his aging saddle mare to a three-wheel vehicle to run his trap lines-could have been an eye witness to Beau Humphries' tragic end. More than ever, K6ATX knew he had to make contact with Joe Loustalot.
Sinking to his knees as if in prayer at the edge of the rimrock, Tommy lifted his lightweight binoculars and focused them on the jagged rocks at the base of the cliff far below.
Vertigo set his brain swimming and nausea clawed at his stomach as he located a shiny three-cornered metal device amid the brush and rocks, metal which had been the control bar of Humphries' ill-fated glider.
The dead Sergeant's shoulders and helmeted head were still enclosed by the twisted aluminum triangle. The rest of the corpse was mercifully concealed from Tommy's view by the tattered left wing of the broken glider.
How could this sickening accident have happened? If black belts or gold medals had been awarded for superior hang-gliding prowess, Beau Humphries would have certainly qualified as a champion. A death wish? No way. Deliberate suicide? Tommy had only known the airman a few days, but intentional self-destruction could not have been the answer for Humphries' fatal dive, nor had there been any sign of structural failure on the part of his glider.
There was no sense in K6ATX risking his own life and limb climbing down into Box Canyon to determine whether the Sergeant was alive or dead. No living thing could have survived the crash or the subsequent plunge into the jagged talus slope below.
K6ATX fumbled at the leather case that holstered his short-wave USAF transceiver, pretuned to an Air Force frequency that Captain Logan or one of his staff were monitoring around the clock back at the base.
Stowed in an inside pocket of the radio case was the special code book that Logan had composed for his and Sergeant Humphries' exclusive use during Operation Hang Glider-an operation that had come to a premature and catastrophic end before it had hardly begun. No one other than Captain Logan would be able to decipher the cryptography he was about to put on the air.
Logan's code was a simple one, created from words borrowed from a mutual hobby, the world of baseball. The words could be fitted together to describe in fair detail almost any contingency. K6ATX scribbled out the message that he knew would bring consternation and grief to Captain Logan when it was decoded:
DODGERS (Major Emergency Here). SLIDER (Help urgently needed). EXPOS (Hang Glider Problem). ONE CUB (One Fatality). PADRES (Rush evac helicopter). NEGATIVE YANKEES (No paramedics needed). PIRATES (can make visual contact when you arrive).
Next came the symbol QTH, International Q-Signal ham jargon for "location." Nothing in the code could cover that necessary detail. Tommy reached into an inner pocket of his flight jacket and drew out a folded Forest Service topo map of the Back Country quadrant, crosshatched with one-mile squares, the rows identified vertically by letters of the alphabet, horizontally by numerals.
By a stroke of luck, the coordinates FF and 136 crossed nearest the dead end of Box Canyon where the tragedy had occurred. To prevent hostile eavesdroppers from using the same government map coordinates, Captain Logan had arbitrarily inked in new ID numerals and letters around the borders of the map, so that FF-136 became JK-P5X.
The code book had given Tommy enough symbols to bring a rescue chopper to the exact scene of Humphries' death. When the helicopter arrived, Tommy Rockford could either use arm signals to direct them down to evacuate the dead man from his crumpled hang glider, or resort to plain English radio communication if necessary.
A hot breeze was flowing out of Box Canyon and across the brushy backbone of the ridge, but icy sweat was leaking from Tommy's pores as he switched on his transceiver and put a mayday call through on the emergency frequency to Vanderhoff Air Force Base. "Mouse calling Cat," translating to "Rockford calling Logan."
Back in receiving mode, the radio responded instantly in a voice Tommy recognized as coming from Captain Logan himself:
"Roger, Cat to Mouse."
Sucking in a deep breath to help stifle the tremor in his voice, K6ATX spoke the code words into his mike: “Cat-Dodgers-Slider-Expos-One Cub-Padres-Negative Yankees-Pirates-QTH JK-P5X-Mouse."
Tommy repeated the coded message twice before signing clear. The returning acknowledgment consisted of "Roger"--message received--and a scrambled message that sent K6ATX back for a quick reference to Logan's code book, ASTROS-UMPIRE?
"ASTROS," Tommy was relieved to discover, meant "Leaving for your QTH immediately." UMPIRE? required an answer: "Have you sighted enemy?" K6ATX answered, "Negative UMPIRE QRX," indicating that he had not sighted any enemy-the saboteur station they were hunting--but would be standing by until help arrived. Captain Logan signed off with HOME RUN, another baseball-oriented code word that the book translated as "We will be monitoring this frequency en route to your QTH if needed."
* * *
The initial shock of the tragedy was fading. Tommy Rockford made his way back to the wreckage of his own hang glider and crawled into the shade of one crumpled Dacron wing to escape the punishing July sun. Captain Logan, he mused, must be beside himself about now, knowing that his Operation Hang Glider was a failure only minutes after it got off the ground.
The young Air Force officer would have myriad questions for him to answer when he arrived in the VAFB helicopter, Tommy knew. He could predict in advance that he wouldn't be able to supply the answers to most of those questions, if any of them.
Searching his memory, it seemed to him that Sergeant Humphries was either asleep or unconscious before his glider went into its final flight toward the cliff. Tommy would be willing to swear that his flying companion had not crashed due to "choking" at the controls, or any other type of pilot error. Air turbulence had not been a factor. Wind shear, possibly. He had seen no sign of mechanical failure of any kind.
But why would Humphries have lost consciousness in mid-air? He was too experienced a pilot to have fainted from fright. He was too young for a heart attack or stroke to be a logical cause, as an Air Force medical officer would no doubt confirm at an autopsy. Drugs or alcohol were not factors. Yet the accident had happened, in front of Rockford's eyes, and it had to have a logical cause.
The mystery bike rider who may have seen the fatal accident crossed K6ATX's mind momentarily and was then dismissed. He was getting more and more uncertain he had actually seen such a man.
Even though Operation Hang Glider had accomplished nothing in the way of uncovering any hostile radio installation, Tommy Rockford was now convinced that Captain Logan was correct in his theory about the Back Country wilderness concealing an enemy radio station of some kind. The attempt on his or Sheriff Jackson's life by Corporal Kohl added powerful support to Captain Logan's espionage theory, which had drawn only derision from his superiors.
Despair laid its cutting edge against Tommy's spirit. The space shuttle launch was only five short days away. What would they be able to do next, with Sergeant Humphries gone?
* * *
Captain Logan's Bell 204 helicopter was a mosquito-size dot emerging from the brown smog blanket that befouled the western skyline when Tommy Rockford picked it up in the binocs. The image in his lenses grew and grew, making a beeline toward the dead end of Box Canyon, proof that Logan had a skilled navigator aboard.
When the Air Force chopper had closed to within eight hundred yards of Box Canyon, Tommy left his shelter under the crippled hang glider and walked over to the yawning brink of the abyss, waving both arms to attract the pilot's attention.
His transceiver came alive: "Cat calling Mouse. We have visual contact. Do we land beside you or where?"
Tommy removed his blue Dodgers cap and made long sweeping waves into the canyon. Responding instantly, the chopper came to a hovering halt five hundred feet overhead. Tommy broke his radio silence to say, "Body at base of cliff. Read me?"
"Affirmative," Captain Logan's voice came from the tiny speaker. "Wreckage sighted. Standby, Mouse."
"The helicopter began settling in a vertical descent, close enough for Tommy to feel the passing air wash of the rotor blades. He recognized the pilot as Pete Langlo, the USAF lieutenant who had flown them over from Vanderhoff last night. Sharing the cabin were Captain Logan and two solemn-faced airmen in fatigues whom Tommy assumed were medics, although they would not be needed.
Eight hundred feet below the rim, with the sound of the thumping rotor blades megaphoning up out of the rock-ribbed defile in waves of echo, Logan's helicopter settled its landing skis onto a clearing amid the scrub oaks at the foot of the sprawling talus, a hundred yards from Sergeant Humphries' broken body.
Using his autofocus Nikon, Tommy Rockford took a series of photographs of the chopper's descent, of the men alighting from the Bell 204's roomy cabin, and then of their carrying a black rubber body bag and a wire mesh stretcher as they began picking their way up the talus slope.
He left the close-up photography to Captain Logan, pitying the mental torture the officer must be going through. In Beau Humphries' tragic end, Logan had lost a man he loved like his own brother. Humphries had also been an essential part of Logan's plan to save the shuttle Conquistador from being destroyed at lift-off.
It took the better part of an hour for the rescue crew to transport Humphries' broken body and certain parts of the hang glider back to the chopper, but only seconds for the whirlybird to ascend to rimrock level and make a landing not 50 feet from where Tommy Rockford stood beside his own damaged kite.
Captain Logan was the only one to alight from the helicopter. Tears were streaming down his cheeks as he strode over to K6ATX and pulled the young radio ham into an anguished embrace.
"What happened, Tommy?" the Air Force officer finally choked out. "I can't conceive of Beau dying in a hang glider accident..."
As briefly as possible, K6ATX recounted Beau Humphries' last moments of life, saying that the sergeant had seemingly lost consciousness just before the crash sent him into a fatal downward glide. He forgot--an honest omission--to mention the rider on the three wheel all-terrain bike, be he real or illusory.
"Captain, I want to carry on," Tommy Rockford said urgently, his voice barely audible above the roar of the helicopter engine. "My glider is kaput, but I can reach Thundergust Peak and locate the Condor on foot, I know I can."
Captain Logan shook his head.
"I'm putting Project Condor on hold, for the time being," he said. "Since my sergeant died outside the military reservation, we'll take Beau's remains back to the civilian coroner in Santa Bonita to determine the cause of death. Then tomorrow perhaps you and I can return here and resume our Condor hunt. We'll see."
Tommy choked on the words, "I know the sergeant would want us to carry on, captain. He believed in your theory."
Side by side, stunned into silence by their mutual grief, the two walked over to board the waiting chopper. After a moment's discussion with pilot Langlo, the lieutenant rummaged in a tool box and brought out a piece of electronic gear that Tommy recognized as a transponder, a radio transmitter that would emit a signal to guide a rescue aircraft to any point where it might crash land.
"We'll plant this beeper at the base camp where you left your supplies last night," Captain Logan explained. "I'll send a chopper back tomorrow night to home in on the transponder and pick up your gear. Especially those cans of gasoline--the Forest Service would have a fit if they knew all this inflammable stuff was out here during the forest fire season. The heat of the sun might touch it off and start a major conflagration."
The chopper took mere minutes to hedgehop over to Tommy's base camp. When the transponder had been set in place, its antenna extended and the power switched on, Captain Logan returned to the chopper and ordered pilot Langlo to head for Santa Bonita. Ten minutes into their short flight back to town, Captain Logan removed from a hip pocket a pliofilm bag that contained some sort of green vegetable material. From the bag, the officer took out a freshly picked leafy plant with sharply serrated edges.
"Recognize this weed?" he asked Tommy.
K6ATX stared at the spike-leafed plant for a moment and replied, "That's marijuana, isn't it?"
Captain Logan said, "Correct. Not your common garden variety pot, either. This is sensimilla, worth fifty times its weight in gold on the street. Box Canyon is full of it, acres of it! Planted under the oak trees where it can't be spotted by narcotics officers on air patrol. The authorities will like to know that Box Canyon is a young Mary Jane farm about ready for harvesting."
Tommy stared at the green leaves, his cheeks going pale.
"This means Beau crashed into a marijuana plantation."
"Correct. Must have been five million dollars' worth of sensimilla down in Box Canyon, waiting to be cut and shipped."
Tommy Rockford felt a sickish sensation go through him. His friend Trapper Joe Loustalot lived just over the ridge from Box Canyon--could it be that the old Basque had become a pot grower, posing as a homestead farmer and wild game trapper? Out of loyalty to an old friend, Tommy did not mention him to Captain Logan now.
It was public knowledge that illegal pot farms, hidden in remote mountain areas, especially in Northern California, yielded more than two-and-a-half billion dollars' worth of illicit marijuana annually, in fact making it the state's leading agricultural crop, exceeding the combined revenues of cotton, grapes, and or vegetables.
Santa Barbara County's illicit marijuana plantations contributed to that staggering total, as Sheriff Ross Jackson was well aware, although his narc detail had uprooted and burned many tons of the weed over the years. Marijuana culture was a social and moral disgrace that California was struggling to eradicate, hampered by insufficient funds for proper enforcement.
The oozing resin from the sinsimilla bud in Captain Logan's hand was a narcotic that could be sold wholesale to drug merchants for $2,000 a pound. Marijuana addicts paid many times that price to pushers on the street for the pleasure of doing permanent damage to brain tissue and other vital organs over the long run. But right now, staring at the black plastic body bag in the rear of the fuselage that contained the mortal remains of their red-headed friend, Tommy didn't want to clutter his mind with the marijuana problems facing Santa Barbara County...
* * *
Back in Santa Bonita that evening, K6ATX and Captain Logan were sitting in glum silence in Tommy's cozy ham shack over the garage, waiting for Mrs. Rockford to summon them to dinner. Their helicopter had unloaded its gruesome cargo at the county sheriff's headquarters on the outskirts of the city, while one of Ross Jackson's squad cars transported Logan and Tommy to the Rockford home in town. Jackson was keeping in touch from the hospital.
A despairing Logan had telephoned Vanderhoff headquarters and arranged for the base motor pool to dispatch a vehicle to pick him up at the Rockford residence and return him to his home. He also arranged for a Forest Service helicopter to pick up the hang glider's cache of cans of gasoline, making the pickup at 12 midnight tomorrow, hopefully at a time that would not reach enemy ears.
Suddenly his father's voice issued from the intercom speaker: "Telephone, son. Operator says K6ATX call coroner!"
Tommy reached for the telephone. The voice of his buddy Ross Jackson, who wore the hat of county coroner as well as sheriff, greeted him anxiously from his hospital bed out in Goleta:
"Tommy, brace yourself."
"Roger. I'm prepared for anything, Ross. What is it?"
Captain Logan's cheeks stiffened with suspense as he stared at Tommy, sensing bad news. The radio ham's face went ashen as he hung up the phone and turned to the Air Force officer.
"Captain," Tommy said, "Sarge was dead before his glider hit the cliff. The autopsy surgeon's report is that X-rays of Sergeant Humphries' skull show a copper-jacketed .30-caliber rifle bullet imbedded in the left frontal lobe of his brain. Somebody shot Beau as he was flying over Box Canyon."
K6ATX had his answer to the reality of the figure he had seen escaping the Box Canyon skyline aboard an off-road vehicle. It could have been a sniper protecting the marijuana farm in Box Canyon, mistaking the hang-glider pilot for a narc-squad spy.

CHAPTER NINE
Blood In The Moonlight

Captain Logan stared at K6ATX like a man in a trance. Finally he husked out in a broken whisper, "I'm scrubbing Operation Hang Glider. The Condor must have seen our helicopter land last night and was lying in wait for you to take off this morning."
"It was a night landing, sir. Even by moonlight, I doubt if--"
"By killing Beau Humphries," Logan went on as if he hadn't heard Tommy, "the Condor's sending us a message. Stay out of the Back Country! This proves more than ever that our shuttle launch is in jeopardy. And I'm totally helpless to do anything--"
A sickening possibility had occurred to Tommy Rockford: The only Back Country sharpshooter he knew of was Trapper Joe. Once on a Sierra Club backpacking trip he had spent a night at Trapper Joe's cabin at Jawbone Springs. He had seen the old Basque drop a running deer at a thousand yards' range. A slow-soaring hang glider would be as easy a target as a sitting duck in a pond. And the murder had happened in Joe's back yard...
Ominous questions nagged unbidden in Tommy's brain. Trapper Joe might well be raising marijuana on the side. What if he had been irrigating his plants in Box Canyon when he spotted Sergeant Humphries flying overhead? Would Trapper Joe have panicked enough to fire a warning shot at a hang glider he suspected carried a narc officer on patrol and his bullet accidentally struck Humphries? But that didn't explain the man on the three-wheel bike, up on the rim.
Somehow, K6ATX couldn't bring himself to believe the grizzled old Basque would deliberately kill a man. But he wasn't so sure that Trapper Joe might not succumb to the temptation of becoming an overnight millionaire by going into the marijuana business in such an ideal location.
"That .30-30 slug brought down more than my Sergeant," Captain Logan's distressed voice broke into Tommy's thoughts. "Four days from now it will also bring down the Conquistador. There just isn't time enough left for me to ferret out that enemy transmitter on my own. And I'll never be able to persuade NASA to cancel or even to postpone the shuttle launch, not even when I tell them what happened to Sergeant Humphries. In fact, I may face a court martial for sending Beau on a hazardous mission without clearing it with the high command. Beau was officially on furlough. This whole investigation of mine was illegal. It has turned into a fiasco."
Tommy reached over to grip Logan's hand. It felt clammy cold.
"Captain, I'm still here! We've still got three days left. I can at least lead you to the Condor, I'm pretty sure. I don't think he's your enemy operator, but he might be able to tell us of any suspicious radio installation in the area."
Logan, elbows on knees, buried his face in his hands. His shoulders shook as if he were sobbing, but no sound came.
"No, Tommy. I'm aborting this project, as of now. Two lives have already beer sacrificed to this childish brainstorm of mine. Corporal Kohl, and now Beau Humphries. If your parents were aware that Beau's glider crash wasn't an accident-that he was ambushed by someone from the ground-they would never permit you to carry on with this risky business. But you have my eternal gratitude for volunteering."
Not until this moment did Tommy Rockford realize how deep was his own emotional involvement in Logan's efforts to forestall a possible plot to destroy the Conquistador. A plot he had to admit was little more than an unproved theory incubated inside Captain Logan's paranoid imagination, plus some intercepted CW signals originating northeast of the launch pad.
But the presence of an enemy transmitter in the Back Country capable of sending a shuttle-destroying QRM signal had suddenly become very logical to K6ATX. Logan's abrupt termination of the project came as a stinging disappointment.
At that moment the intercom clicked to life again. His mother called cheerily from the kitchen: "Soup's on, guys!" As they were starting downstairs, Tommy Rockford whispered earnestly, "Please don't tell my folks what the coroner's message was, Captain. They'll think it was a personal message from my best friend, the Sheriff, who is also the county coroner. If my mother knew it was murder instead of an accident, she wouldn't sleep for weeks, knowing that if I had been flying the Box Canyon side of Hogback Ridge instead of the Jawbone this morning, it could have been me coming home in a body bag."
* * *
Supper was a gloomy affair. Mr. and Mrs. Rockford accepted Captain Logan's silence and were too tactful to press for information, knowing the whole matter was classified.
At the conclusion of the meal Tommy and Captain Logan retired to the living room to catch the nightly telecast of local news from KEYT Channel 3. No mention was made on the air of a coroner's report that a non-commissioned officer from Vanderhoff Air Force Base had died in a hang-gliding accident out in the Back Country this morning. Either the TV reporter had not checked for news with the Sheriff, or the autopsy surgeon had imposed a news blackout.
At eight o'clock Tommy's parents left to join a bridge tournament at La Cumbre Country Club. Shortly afterwards an auto horn sounded out in the driveway. Captain Logan responded, Tommy being on the phone at the moment copying a long-distance business message from a client of his father's travel agency.
Shouts were exchanged between Logan and the vehicle driver. A few moments later Captain Logan returned, shrugging into his Air Force fatigue jacket.
"My transportation back to the base has arrived," he said, as Tommy asked the telephoning party to hold for a moment. "Give your mother my compliments on a very fine dinner. So long."
"I sure will, Captain. Take care of yourself. I'm sorry about the way things turned out. I'll be in touch."
A moment later the NASA engineer was gone, and Tommy returned to copy the remainder of the telephone message.
K6ATX was tidying up the kitchen for his mother half an hour later when the front door chimes sounded. This time, the visitor was a young Air Force Corporal about Tommy's age whose shoulder patch identified him as being attached to the 394th Maintenance Squadron, the unit in charge of the Peacemaker silos at Vanderhoff.
"Good evening, sir. I'm Corporal John Campbell, Vanderhoff Air Force Base. I'm here to pick up Captain Gerald Logan."
K6ATX felt the hairs at his neck nape prickle with some strange premonition of alarm. "Somebody has already picked up Captain Logan, Corporal. You probably passed him on 101 on your way to Santa Bonita."
Corporal Campbell groaned with disgust. "Another dispatching snafu at the motor pool, I guess. Well, it looks like I've had a 140-mile round trip for nothing. Good-bye."
Since his folks were out for the evening, Tommy went on up to his hamshack and tried to get his mind off his troubles by working a few DX contacts on 10 meters. The band was wide open. Before pulling the big switch at 11 o'clock, his fishing had netted him solid QSOs with a CT1 in Portugal, an HL2 in Korea, two EK8s in Soviet Russia and three JAs in Japan, all solid 599 copy, and a phone QSO with a brand-new Novice on 10 meters.
There was a time not too far back when so much DX in one evening would have exalted Tommy's spirits for a week. But he had already been awarded his DX Century Club certificate-proof that he had worked a hundred different countries. All of tonight's four countries were already represented in the QSL cards mounted on the walls of his hamshack. Nowadays the big thrills came from EME contacts- bouncing signals off the moon, or ham radio's OSCAR satellites-- OSCAR being an acronym for "Orbiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio." Only a lack of funds had kept K6ATX from adding his own slow-scan television station to his shack.
Spiffy, his snow-white Samoyed, was whimpering to be taken for his usual evening walk, prompting Tommy to shut down for the night even though he heard an FDZ operating out of France frantically calling CQ K6ATX USA, CQ K6ATX USA!
Heading for the street with Spiffy gamboling far ahead of him, Tommy found it hard to realize that the near-full moon coasting overhead was the same satellite that had painted the Back Country peaks and canyons with ebony and silver 24 hours ago.
Leaving his driveway and walking out onto Mission View Road, Tommy turned right, skirting their neighbor's Eugenia hedge. Suddenly his eye was caught by a glint of moonlight reflecting from a silvery object that appeared to be caught in the foliage a foot above the sidewalk.
Out of idle curiosity, Tommy stooped to examine the object. It was the twin silver bars of a captain, affixed to the blue service cap used by the U.S. Air Force! It had taken a considerable thrust to wedge the cap into the hedge.
Tommy pulled the cap out of the hedge and turned it over. The interior silken lining was sodden with some pungent sticky substance that looked like black ink in the moonlight. K6ATX knew the color was red.
Spiffy followed him, trying to jump up and snatch the cap out of his grasp as Tommy hurried back to his front door. By the glare of the porch light he confirmed that the stain was a deep crimson, turning brown at the edges.
Blood. Clotting blood. And then he saw something else. Visible on the leather sweatband were the perforated initials G.L., followed by a string of numerals. G.L.--Gerald Logan? Jerry Logan! And the figures would be his USAF serial number!
Tommy felt a lump in his throat as he hurried out to the street again to explore the area where he had found Captain Logan's bloodstained cap. Plainly visible now were two details he had missed a moment ago. Smeared spatters of fresh blood stippled the sidewalk. And deep footprints had gouged the green turf of the parking strip between the sidewalk and the gutter curbing.
A struggle had occurred here. Had Captain Logan's vehicle been attacked? When a search of the area yielded no further clues, Tommy Rockford raced back into the house and telephoned the watch commander at the Figueroa Street Police Station. Assured that a prowl car would be dispatched to the scene immediately, Tommy next dialed the security police at Vanderhoff Air Force Base and asked to be connected with Captain Jerry Logan.
A bored desk Sergeant replied languidly, "Captain Logan should be at home this time of night, only he's a no-show. His wife has been calling every ten minutes this past hour, seems like. Says he was in Santa Bonita, is long overdue back, so she's scared out of her gourd. I told her he had probably dropped in at a Lompoc pub for a couple of beers with the boys. What's happenin’"?
"Could you transfer me to Main Gate Security, please?
"With regard to what? I have to log who's speaking."
"I am Tommy Rockford. 2910 Mission View Road in Santa Bonita. Telephone 682-5919. Captain Logan had chow with us tonight. Around 2015 hours he was picked up by someone to return to Vanderhoff. Around 2100 hours an Air Force Corporal named Campbell arrived in an Air Force vehicle, John Campbell, saying he had orders to pick up the Captain. I--I have reason to believe that--that Captain Logan might have been a victim of foul play."
After a moment's pause the security guard replied, "I have a computer read-out of the traffic roster here. Corporal John Campbell signed out a four-door from our motor pool at 1900 hours... destination your home address in Santa Bee... orders to return Captain Logan to his home in the Village. Corporal Campbell checked back in at the motor pool at 2230 hours... said someone had already picked up Captain Logan. But we have no record of anyone checking out a vehicle at the base motor pool for a trip to Santa Bonita to pick up said Captain Logan. Too many loose ends."
K6ATX said heavily, "Thanks for the info. Maybe you'd better refer this to your commanding officer. The CD will be hearing from the Santa Bonita PD on this matter tonight, I'm sure. Thanks again."
A SBPD squad car arrived and two detectives checked out the sidewalk stains and the bruised grass on the parking strip.
"What happened here as I see it," one policeman confirmed Tommy's own speculation, "is that your Captain Logan either fell out of a car, or was pushed out, or pulled out. Anyway, he got into a tussle with somebody, which accounts for the gouged-up grass. The Captain got slugged over the head. He fell headfirst into this hedge, hard enough for his cap to pull off and become wedged in the bushes. Whoever slugged him must have loaded him into a vehicle and carried him off. Any idea why? Headquarters will be wanting to question you later, so think up some answers."
K6ATX surrendered Logan's blood-stained cap. The officer stuffed it into a pliofilm bag to hold as evidence and departed, just moments before Tommy's parents returned home from their bridge party. He hoped against hope they wouldn't hear about the mystery of the bloody cap. At all costs he wanted to avoid having his folks put in a position where they could not conscientiously give their official consent to his continued search for the Condor, because Tommy Rockford felt a moral commitment to carry on Logan's crusade.
Sergeant Humphries was dead. Logan himself had either been kidnapped or--Tommy tried to keep the thought out of his mind--was also the victim of a homicide. That left Tommy Rockford as the sole person with an interest in finding out whether a radio station was transmitting from some secret Back Country QTH, its target the space shuttle Conquistador. K6ATX knew he would carry on. He had to, if he wanted to live with himself. The certainty that he would be working at desperate risk to his own life did not enter his head.

CHAPTER TEN
Trapper Joe Loustalot

K6ATX overslept next morning. When he appeared for breakfast his father and mother, totally unaware of the violent drama that had taken place in front of their home the night before, had already left for work at their downtown travel agency.
Tommy was just finishing breakfast when his pal Sheriff Ross Jackson telephoned--still doing business from his hospital bed. Ross was summoning him to testify as a witness at the official coroner's inquest into yesterday's unexplained death of Air Force Sergeant Beau Humphries.
Almost wishing he didn't have to ask, K6ATX said, "Have the city police contacted you concerning Captain Logan today, Ross?"
"They have. He's still missing. Logan hadn't checked in at either his home or his office on the base as of half an hour ago."
An involuntary shudder rippled down Tommy's spine.
"Ross, I can't shake off the feeling that Logan's disappearance is connected to his hunt for a space shuttle saboteur."
"I'll buy that, Tommy. But there have been developments. A blood-soaked automobile seat cover was spotted beside the taxiway out at the Municipal Airport by a private plane pilot coming in for a landing this morning. The blood type was A-negative, matching the stains you found on the Captain's hat last night, according to the police pathologist. Which might not mean a thing, were it not for the comparative rarity of the blood type, and where that seat cover was found."
"And why is that important? I don't follow you, Ross."
"You will when I tell you the flight controller in the tower logged an unauthorized landing and take-off by an unidentified Huey helicopter at 2358 hours last night. At first the controller figured the chopper belonged to an oil company servicing one of its off-shore drilling platforms in the Channel--they sometimes ignore FAA procedures, especially at night. But instead of flying out to sea, the aircraft flew inland, northeast."
"Toward the Back Country."
"Right on! It disappeared from the radar screen when it crossed the Santa Ynez Mountains above La Cumbre Peak at 5,000 feet, around ten after midnight. We think the chopper pilot had rendezvoused with someone who had walked over from the highway with a body wrapped in the seat cover, loaded it into the waiting helicopter, discarded the soiled seat cover, and drove off in his car.
Tommy said in a sick whisper, "At least that leaves us with a a slim reason to hope that Captain Logan is still alive. His abductor could as easily have dumped his dead body along the road."
"Dead or alive, Logan could have been transported from your place in town to the far corner of the airport and transferred to a waiting chopper with little or no difficulty. This development certainly lends credence to Logan's theory that persons unknown may be planning to blow up the shuttle during launch."
Tommy bit into his lower lip until he could taste the blood. "Those NASA guys at the control center will surely cancel the shuttle launch now, in view of what happened to Logan."
Sheriff Jackson laughed bitterly. "Not a chance. Anything connected with Gerald Logan is treated as a joke out at the base. I talked to his CO this morning. They think Logan has gone AWOL, out gallivanting in the hills trying to prove his crazy saboteur theory."
Tommy pulled in a long sigh of frustration. "OK, Ross, I'm on my way. And I'll be asking a whale of a favor when I come out to the hospital to see you, old buddy. Things I don't want to send over the talking wires. Abyssinia."
* * *
The coroner's inquest into the death of Sergeant Beauregard F. Humphries, with three owlish-faced medics from the Vanderhoff post hospital sitting in as observers, was chaired by Ross Jackson's assistant county coroner.
The proceedings consisted mainly of questions posed by the County Medical Examiner to Tommy Rockford, for whom it was a short but excruciatingly painful ordeal. It was hard not to let his eyes stray to a grisly exhibit on a nearby desk--the Sergeant's blood-stained crash helmet lying on the surgeon's desk, badly flattened from the impact of hitting the cliff. Worse yet was the bullet hole plainly visible near the left ear guard.
"No, gliding along, I didn't hear any gunshot," K6ATX testified into a tape recorder. "But we were wearing helmets, and they muffle sound; in fact they create a whistling noise. When I saw Beau's glider dip beneath Hogback Ridge out of my range of vision, I started my engine and climbed to where I could see him, over Box Canyon. He was in a five-degree descent pattern, engine off, but gaining speed. I noticed his head and shoulders were pitched forward, resting on the control bar, his arms hanging limp. I thought he had passed out or something....No sir, I didn't see anyone down in the canyon who could have been the sniper. I wasn't looking for anyone, though. The thought never occurred to me that Beau had been shot."
The only new information K6ATX had to offer was mention of the fact that he believed he had seen a man on a three-wheel bike leaving the west rim of Box Canyon shortly after Beau's crash.
For some reason he could not account for, Tommy avoided mentioning that he knew one person who lived within a mile of the spot where Humphries had met his death. Trapper Joe Loustalot... The fact that Humphries had been shot while sailing over a marijuana farm concealed under the oak trees on the floor of Box Canyon did not come up in testimony and Tommy didn't volunteer it.
When the inquest was over, Tommy drove out to the Goleta Valley Hospital and Ross Jackson's private room. His old friend's shoulder was still heavily bandaged and his broken arm rested in a sling, the cast scrawled with the signatures of numerous nurses, orderlies and hospital visitors.
"On your way home, Tommy," the Sheriff said, "the Homicide Bureau at Police Headquarters wants to question you about events leading up to Captain Logan's disappearance last night. There's no need to bring up the space shuttle sabotage business. The fewer people who know about that the better. Especially the media."
"OK, Ross, I concur with that a thousand percent."
The sheriff gave his young radio ham friend a long and penetrating look. "I believe you said on the phone you wanted a favor from me? \ have a hunch I'm not going to like it."
K6ATX looked up imploringly. "A simple favor, easily granted. I want to requisition a county chopper to fly me over to Roughriders' potrero south of Thundergust Peak. That's all. There's ample space for even a big helicopter to land. We did it in a big Air Force 204 night before last. A Forest Service chopper will be doing it again at midnight, to pick up the gasoline cans and camping supplies we left behind."
Jackson frowned dubiously. "Let me get this straight. You want to carry on Captain Logan's search--on your own?"
"I've got to, Ross! Can't you understand that?"
"I understand, but I don't approve. That's a suicidal idea, Tommy. No, I won't even consider it. You're looking for a phantom radio installation, hidden somewhere inside hundreds of square miles of some of the roughest wilderness terrain in the United States. Talk about your needle in a haystack!"
Tommy said desperately, "Look, Ross, I'm not going at this search entirely blind. Captain Logan thinks the radio ham we call the Condor is the bad guy we're after. Local hams, including myself, already have zeroed in on the Condor's approximate QTH--it's somewhere around Thundergust Peak. That narrows the search. Besides that, I am pretty well acquainted with old Trapper Joe Loustalot--he lives near where Humphries was shot down."
Sheriff Jackson grimaced, trying to dig a finger under his cast to scratch an itch. "I've known Trapper Joe for years, yes. Our marijuana squad has used Joe as an informant. A reliable man."
Tommy went on, "Joe's tin-can shack is in Jawbone Springs Canyon--just over the ridge from where Beau was killed. Joe knows the Back Country like the palm of his hand. If he ever stumbled across some suspicious-looking radio installation while he was checking his trap lines, he could pinpoint it for me, even guide me to it. He may be able to tell me where the Condor holes up."
Jackson shook his head. "My office is working on the assumption that the sergeant was shot because he accidentally ventured too close to a marijuana patch, Tommy. More than one pot grower has fired on an uninvited visitor in this county. Your buddy Trapper Joe might even be the sniper, who knows? He could make a lot more growing pot than he could trapping varmints."
K6ATX said in a pleading tone, "Ross, Beau Humphries for sure, and probably Captain Logan, have sacrificed their lives trying to find the bootleg operator they figured is waiting to blow up that space shuttle three days from now. They will have died for nothing if I can't carry on and try to stop that QRM signal while there's still time. I beg you, Ross...give me an air lift. It would take me two days hard backpacking to get there from Nira Camp or any other trailhead I could reach by car. And time's getting desperately short."
Ross Jackson scowled, wracked by indecision. "I'm not saying I will, but if I could form a sort of commando squad to go with you..."
"No, Ross. You know the old saying, he travels fastest who travels alone. A crowd of backpackers would be too conspicuous in fire season. I'm an experienced hiker. I'm reasonably familiar with the terrain. But most important of all-I'm motivated."
The Sheriff's eyes went moist. "You sure are that, Tommy! But if something happened to you, I would carry a load of guilt to the end of my days."
"And if I don't try to stop the sabotage of the Conquistador--if Captain Logan's theory proves correct--it would not only mean a loss of seven astronauts' lives, it could jeopardize America's future space program--to say nothing of Merlin Kendall's defense contracts, which I admit are my lowest priority."
"You're asking too much of me, Tommy--"
"I don't mean to sound like a flag-waving fanatic, Ross, but in view of all the violent happenings of the past three days, I don't see how we can dismiss Captain Logan's ideas as paranoia, like his superior officers at Vanderhoff are doing."
Ross Jackson reached across the bed to grip Tommy's hand.
"I am an irresponsible fool," he said resignedly, "but I've known you since you were knee-high to a pup, and I understand the depth of your dedication and the sincerity of your motives. What's more important I also know you can take care of yourself... Tommy, I'll authorize the chopper flight to wherever it is you want to go. One of our fast little Hueys. When do you want to leave?"
K6ATX gave a whoop of joy. "Soonest! I'll drive home, pick up my 2-meter hand-held rig and my autofocus camera, leave a note for my folks, and be at your Aerial Squadron helipad within an hour. You'll never regret this, Ross. Never."
* * *
At the spot where K6ATX and Sergeant Humphries had camped, the mid-afternoon sun was casting long indigo shadows through the manzanita scrub atop Roughriders' Potrero. An overnight wind had erased the tracks in the dust where the two of them had unpacked and assembled their hang gliders, prior to leaping into the abyss of Jawbone Springs Canyon on what, for the sergeant, had proved to be a one-way flight to eternity by way of Box Canyon. The jerry cans of gasoline and their camping gear were scheduled to be picked up by a Forest Service helicopter at midnight sharp. Captain Logan would have to answer later to a very angry Forest Service for having unloaded inflammable material inside a national forest at the height of the fire season.
Tommy packed a grubsack with enough rations for three days. This was Monday. If he didn't accomplish his mission by Wednesday, launch day minus one, it would be too late to save the space shuttle anyway.
He lashed the sack to the aluminum frame of his Kelty backpack, along with his tightly-rolled sleeping bag and inflatable air mattress. In one of the zippered side pockets of the canvas backpack he stored his little Nikon autofocus camera with extra rolls of film packed in loops on the web carrying strap. He intended to photograph any evidence he found that would help establish the Condor's innocence- or guilt-to say nothing of any illicit radio installations he might discover.
Clipped to his belt was his ICOM 2-AT 2-meter ham transceiver, fitted with a telescoping Vikom antenna to boost the range, and a reserve battery pack. Before leaving Santa Bonita he had Ross Jackson's assurance that the 144.8 MHz frequency would be scanned continuously around the clock for any emergency message he might make; otherwise, for his own protection he would be maintaining strict radio silence while stalking the Condor's lair.
The little hand-held rig had a variable power output from one-half to three watts, more than ample to break local repeaters. The sheriff's communications operations had been given a Xerox copy of Captain Logan's "baseball code" to use, should a dire emergency arise requiring a scrambled transmission.
Hanging a plastic quart bottle of water on his belt, Tommy shrugged into the shoulder straps of his backpack and headed for the brink of the cliff from which he and Sergeant Humphries had launched their hang gliders yesterday.
Two hundred yards to the south he could see the break in the rimrock that marked the head of a torturous switchback trail slanting down to Jawbone Springs and the long-time residence of Trapper Joe Loustalot. It had been more than two years since he had visited the eccentric old Basque. He hoped the trapper would recognize him and not open fire from ambush-just in case he was engaged in illegal marijuana growing, over the ridge in Box Canyon.
The sun westering across a brassy sky had pushed the mercury well over 110 degrees. There was no breeze to temper the punishing heat; winds started after dusk. K6ATX was glad he wasn't climbing the mile of zigzag trail needed to descend the seven hundred feet from the potrero rim to the oasis of cottonwoods and sycamores marking Jawbone Springs.
Before he was half-way down the face of the scarp he caught the acrid scent of wood smoke in the stagnant air, which told him Trapper Joe Loustalot was in residence. This being the off season for trapping animals, old Joe sometimes left the wilderness for jaunts as far away as his native Pyrenees. Some rumors had it that Joe had fled to America 30 years ago after killing a man. Another version was that he had emigrated to rest his ears from the sharp tongue of his shrewish wife. Tommy was panting heavily by the time he had skidded down the last rocky ramp to reach the canyon floor. His 30-pound pack felt more like a ton. He was glad he hadn't taken on the added weight of a firearm. As Ross Jackson had advised him, if he got into a jam where it would be necessary to shoot it out to save his own life, having a gun would only double the chances of becoming a target himself. As it was, he could pose as an innocent backpacker.
Off through the cottonwoods he caught sight of Trapper Joe's cabin. On Forest Service topo maps, it was called the "Tin Can Shack." It had been built in the 1870s by a mountain man named Davey Black, a mysterious figure reputed to have been in the slave trade in his youth.
He had been wanted in Louisiana for murder and had hidden out in Jawbone Springs Canyon until his death in 1898 at age 98. The legendary Davey had used flattened five-gallon kerosene cans for shingles and siding. Brown with the rust of more than a century's weathering, the small cabin was hard to see in the mottled shade of the surrounding oak grove.
Tommy was remembering the instructions Ross Jackson had telephoned him just before the county helicopter took off from its pad on the outskirts of Santa Bonita two hours ago: "No matter how much you may like Trapper Joe, and I know he is a charismatic old gaffer, assume he's the marijuana farmer who murdered Sergeant Humphries. Tell him the reason you're hoping to look up your old radio ham friend, the Condor, is because you've heard he's in bad health and might need help. Joe probably knows the Condor. That way, you can get around to asking critical questions about secret radio installations without rousing his suspicions. Always assume Joe's one of the bad guys."
A dog set up a deafening clamor as Tommy Rockford plodded wearily toward the edge of the cottonwood oasis. A skinny-ribbed black-and-brown hound came loping out of the shadows to meet him. Tommy let out a glad cry. It was Roxie, Joe Loustalot's inseparable canine companion on his trap line rounds. Roxie remembered Tommy, and she made that evident now, leaping shoulder high to lick his face and dancing around him with tail whipping madly.
"Hey yah, who goes thar?" Trapper Joe's shout set echoes chasing up Jawbone Springs Canyon as the brindle-bearded trapper emerged from the shade of his tin-can shanty, carrying an oily gunnysack in one hand and a string of traps in the other.
"Joe, you old son of a gun!" Tommy Rockford called out, trying to fend off Roxie's soggy kisses and flogging tail as he knelt down to fondle the hound. "If I'd had any idea I'd find you home this time of year, I would have brought you a jug of vino and a pizza."
Over a vigorous handshake, the two friends sized each other up for the first time in two years. Tommy had grown to six feet in the interim and had filled out with solid muscle. The trapper, by comparison, had seemingly shriveled a bit inside his red and black checkered hunting shirt, bib overalls and laced knee boots.
Joe's wispy gray hair was still tied in a hippie's braided pony tail between his shoulder blades. Like his mountaineer ancestors in the Pyrenees, the old Basque was neither French nor Spanish, but a separate ethnic breed, its racial origins lost in antiquity. "Last I heard o' you, Tommy, was on the radio news. About you gettin' kidnapped by a pair o' hoodlums who'd held up a casino over in Las Vegas. Never heard how you made out. Did you get kilt?" *
(* See DEATH VALLEY QTH, published 1985 by ARRL.)
"Yep. I'm Tommy's ghost. Roxie, lay off your drooling, OK? It's too hot a day for you to get dehydrated.
The grizzled old trapper combed his beard with knobbly fingers, cocking his head to eye K6ATX with a growing curiosity, if not actual suspicion.
"How come you're out hikin' durin' fire closure season, kid? Forest Rangers catch you, they'll throw you in the slammer."
A chill of apprehension touched Rockford. Did he imagine that Joe was suddenly on guard, grilling him for information?
"This is the only time of year I'm free to do any backpacking, Joe. I'm going to college in Pasadena now. No, I'm OK with the law. The Forest Service issued me a temporary camping permit. The Rangers said they owed me one for all the emergency help we ham club ARES members gave 'em during the big Juncal forest fire."
"Who's them?"
"ARES. Amateur Radio Emergency Service. After the Forest Service lost their transmitter in the Wellman Fire, ham radio was their only communication, I guess you remember that. Rangers told me at the time they were afraid you might have been running your trap lines on the Juncal watershed and were caught inside the fire zone. So I'm doubly happy to see you, Joe. Looks like you came out with your whiskers unsinged."
Joe led the way back to a bench in the cool shade of the tin can shack. He tossed his traps onto a pile near the sandstone doorstep and picked up a corncob pipe he had left on the sill, packed it with some malodorous substance that Tommy had once accused him of sweeping off the floor of his stable, and lit up.
"Let me warn you of one place not to hike, amigo," Joe Loustalot said, offering his guest a tin dipper of cold spring water after Tommy had shed his backback and seated himself on the bench. Loustalot gestured up the canyon with his pipestem. "Over on t'other side of Hogback Ridge is Box Canyon. A Mafia-type hombre who runs a tavern down in Oxnard has got himself a couple acres of prime marijuana growin' there, hidden under the oaks so the feds can't spot 'em from an airyplane. Grass worth millions, he claims. He's very jumpy about anybody findin' it, especially when he's up here waterin' an' weedin' his plants. He'd as soon shoot you as look at you, if he caught you trespassin."
Trapper Joe Loustalot leaned back against the rusty tin wall and exploded twin forks of smoke through his nose, the air pollution forcing K6ATX to withdraw to the end of the bench.
The sheriff had the right hunch, K6ATX said to himself. Sergeant Humphries' death could be marijuana-related. Tommy was trying to make himself believe Beau's death had nothing to do with the Condor and the space shuttle sabotage plot...
Then he remembered Ross Jackson's parting advice about not trusting Joe Loustalot too far. What if the "Mafia hood from Oxnard" was just an invention of Trapper Joe's to divert suspicion away from himself?
Tommy found his attention drawn to a hunting rifle Joe had propped against the wall near the door.
Supposing--just supposing--that rifle was the weapon that had brought Beau Humphries crashing to his doom?
On the heels of that disturbing thought, another idea came to K6ATX. At least he knew a way to prove once and for all whether old Loustalot's rifle had been the murder weapon, without Trapper Joe knowing he was being investigated.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Bullets In A Stump

Sipping cold water from the dipper, K6ATX watched Trapper Joe Loustalot spraying WD-40 on his steel traps, protecting them from rust until time for the next fur-trapping season, October through February, when animal pelts would be at their prime.
The whole point of devoting what was left of this day to the old Basque mountaineer was to query him regarding radio antennas or other electronic equipment he might have stumbled across while making the rounds of his trap lines. Tommy now faced the ticklish challenge of putting Trapper Joe off guard so that radio-related questions would seem casual.
The best approach, he decided, was to get Trapper Joe talking about himself. He had been a government-licensed trapper in Los Padres National Forest for over 20 years, and he knew the wilderness better than any ranger.
"You know, Joe," Tommy spoke up following a lengthy workout rubbing Roxie's ears, "in all the backpacking I've done around here, I have never once run across one of your traps. How come?"
Loustalot chuckled. "That's because I cammyflage 'em, son. I set 'em off the trails, o' course, so stupid city dudes like you won't step on 'em accidental and wind up with a busted ankle. Forest Service is techy about trappin' accidents inside national forests. And I always tag my traps with a scent stick--not to warn hikers to avoid the spot, but to attract game."
"Come again? What kind of stick?"
"Scent stick. Any time you see a twig stuck in the ground with a bright-red scrap of flannel tied to it, you'll also see an iron stake nearby anchorin' a chain leading to one of my buried traps."
"Scent stick? I still don't follow, Joe."
Loustalot reached into a box beside the bench and drew out a handful of foot-long, sharp-pointed stakes made from manzanita twigs, each festooned with identifying bright red strips of flannel. Also from the box Trapper Joe produced a small brown bottle, which he uncorked. Dipping a stick into whatever liquid substance the bottle contained, the trapper wafted it under Tommy's nose. K6ATX recoiled, his sense of smell revolted by the foul stench.
"Phew!" the radio ham gasped in disgust. "Is that skunk oil?"
"Maybe it stinks to you, but it's Corral Number Five to male animals! Critters can't resist it. The gunk is from the musk glands of females of the species. I set a trap in a shallow hole, see? Cover it over with loose leaves and twigs, and drive this scent stick alongside. Ol' Mr. Bobcat, or skunk, or fox, or coyote, he sniffs the musk downwind from maybe miles off, and makes a beeline for my scent stick. Starts pawin' around, and bingo! He finds one or both front paws caught in a steel trap."
K6ATX grimaced. "You're in a cruel business, Joe."
As if he hadn't heard K6ATX's comment, Loustalot continued, "Another place I like to hide traps is in the ashes of campfires, inside abandoned barns and farmhouses, or any kitchen garbage dump after people leave a camp. Animals like to dig where marrow bones or food scraps have been buried."
Tommy Rockford scowled with disapproval. "I know you make your living selling pelts, Joe, but if I came across an animal with a paw caught in one of your traps, I would set him free. I imagine lots of your catches starve to death before you get back to 'em. Or gnaw off their own paws to escape."
Trapper Joe snapped waspishly, "Don't let the ranchers who run cattle in the foothills or on the high meadows hear you talkin' such nonsense, son! The varmints I trap are the ones who are forced down to the flatlands to prey on calves and poultry when game gets scarce in the high country. In fact, the ranchers pay me what they call a retainer just to keep me from retirin' from the business, which I've been threatenin' to do now for the past several winters. I'm seventy-eight, you know. Figger to make my pile and head back to the old country. Marry me a Basque gal and settle down. But I'm tellin' you, Tomas, I won't take any bleedin'-heart guff from you about my trappin'."
The conversation was turning abrasive, and Tommy couldn't afford to alienate Loustalot. He was still trying to think of a way to bring up the subject of the Condor and his Back Country radio activities when the old Basque gave him an opening.
Eyes suddenly turning flint-cold with suspicion, Joe asked "You ain't told me how come you're doin' your hikin' in this part of the Back Country, Tomas? Like I said before--and you dang well know it--it's the off-limits season to the public. No maintained trails, no camps with fancy stoves and barbecue pits and outhouses."
The narrowed eyes turned colder. "Are you huntin' for somethin' or somebody in particular? Marijuana bushes, maybe? Injun relics? Painted caves nobody else has seen? Abandoned homesteader cabins, like mine used to be? What brings you here to the roughest part of the wilderness in the hottest time of the year? I hardly ever see the Wilderness Patrol policin' this area. Yep, you gotta be lookin' for somethin' or somebody. Pot farmers? Are you a bounty hunter? The narcs pay big money for tips on Mary Jane farmers."
Trapper Joe's barrage of questions left K6ATX off balance. The old Basque was obviously suspicious of his motives and was getting testy, if not hostile. Tommy Rockford decided that honesty was the best policy to defuse this possibly dangerous situation. He would tell Trapper Joe at least part of the reason why he had come visiting this almost inaccessible region at such a dangerous season of the year, leaving Captain Logan's investigation out of it.
"Joe, you know I'm a radio ham? Remember the time I let you talk to that Basque sheepherder back in Texas--with this little gadget I'm carrying on my belt now?"
Trapper Joe relaxed with a snag-toothed grin. "Ain't never going to forgit that, Tomas! He sounded like he was right in the shack talkin' to me. And in my language!"
"That was what hams call working crossband DX, Joe. We were talking on 2 meters to a machine on Santa Ynez Peak, which relayed your voice on 10 meters to the guy in Texas. Well, I'm hunting for a radio ham who lives here in the Back Country, Joe. A ham I'm afraid may be having health problems and needing help."
Joe Loustalot fingered his badger-gray beard thoughtfully.
"This radio ham is a backpacker, maybe, who got lost? Had no business campin' up here alone in the first place."
"No," K6ATX said, "he's a permanent mountaineer, you might say. Lives up here, somewhere around Thundergust Peak, the year 'round. I've talked to him by Morse code many times. The ham club in town is concerned about why--why he suddenly left the air. He claims he hurt his hand, can't transmit. We think he might be hurt worse than that--and doesn't want to put anybody to the trouble of coming clear out here--and maybe taking him to a hospital or something. Since I've got all this backpacking experience, they elected me to try and find him. We call him the Condor."
Trapper Joe's eyes narrowed into slits for a part of a second, telling K6ATX that he had struck paydirt. The Condor, at least by name, was no stranger to Trapper Joe. The old man waggled his head slowly from side to side.
"Only condors I've ever seen in these parts have got ten-foot wing spreads an' soar around without flappin' their wings, lookin' for dead meat. Twenty years ago there was maybe 30 pair of 'em. Now I hear maybe they're extinct, except for in zoos. I ain't spotted a condor in two, three year."
Tommy was getting down to the nitty-gritty now. "Joe," he said earnestly, "during your roaming around, setting your trap lines, have you ever seen anything that looked like a radio antenna? Or one of those fancy saucers that pull in television programs from satellites out in space--I know you've seen them down at Los Olivos or on those horse-breeding ranches in the foothills. Anything at all that might have some connection to a radio or TV set?"
Loustalot reloaded and relighted his foul-smelling pipe, his thorny brows furrowed with concentration, his temper cooling.
"Well, now, come to think of it, there's that Injun cave on the west shoulder o' Thundergust Peak. Just above timberline, maybe ten mile from here. Injun paintings on the ceiling, and old campfire ashes where I was tempted to bury traps, until I figured there hadn't been any marrow bones or garbage left there in a thousand year. Besides, the mare an' me don't cotton to mountain climbin' any more, an' Thundergust is steep. Something else, Tomas. Thundergust Peak is inside the federal game reserve. You'd go to jail if you were caught hikin' around up there. Besides which-it ain't safe to go prowlin' around Thundergust. Don't you go nowheres close to that mountain, Tomas, understand? You might get shot at."
Trapper Joe's voice trailed off on that ominous note, telling K6ATX nothing, but hinting of other sinister angles.
"What do you mean, I might get shot at?"
The old Basque shrugged. "Somebody lives up on Thundergust who is a dead-eye shot with a deer rifle, Tomas. One reason why I quit trappin' up there." Loustalot pulled up a shirt sleeve to reveal a livid, puckered scar running from shoulder to elbow. "A rifle slug plowed that furrow through my hide, a year ago this spring," Loustalot said. "Who knows? It might be your radio ham friend. I took the hint. I was trespassin' on another man's territory, so I ain't been back. I'm advisin' you to stay away from Thundergust Peak too."
Confused thoughts stormed through K6ATX's brain. Was the old Basque trying to protect him from danger? Or was he making sure Tommy would not go snooping around the ambusher's domain?
After a long run of silence, Tommy said, "Joe, I have a special permit to enter the Thundergust restricted zone. I'm not interested in publicizing prehistoric Indian art or homesteaders' cabins. In fact, whenever I come across any pictographs, I don't spread the word because that would bring in the vandals."
"Then what are you snoopin' around for?"
"I told you, Joe. It's radio gear I'm looking for. This ham, the Condor, would have to have an antenna, and antennas are kind of hard to conceal, especially from hikers and trappers on the ground. Maybe you've seen a vertical antenna hidden among the trees? Looking like an aluminum flagpole, maybe? Think hard. It's very important to me and all of the Condor's ham friends."
The grizzled old trapper drawled musingly, "I was jest startin' to say, I seen somethin' strange in this Injun cave over on Thundergust Peak. What led me to it was some tire tracks. Made by rubber tires on a three-wheeler of some kind, two wheels side by side, not motorsickles, and one wheel in the middle. Tracks I've never seen in the wilderness, especially this high up."
K6ATX felt his pulses speeding up. "Double tire tracks? That sounds like one of those three-wheel Japanese-made all-terrain bikes." It also brought flooding back to Tommy's mind the lingering belief that Beau Humphries' sniper had escaped on a three-wheeler.
Loustalot went on, "Like I say, I follered those two main tire tracks around up the shoulder o' Thundergust Peak, then lost 'em on the slick rock above timberline. But I found the vehicle them tires was on, all right, hidden in that Injun cave. It wasn't a three-wheel road bike. It was a sort of lightweight cart that a man could trundle along by hand, like one of them golf carts. And mounted on that cart was one o' them big wire screen platters for TV, like you see on the rich peoples' ranches around Los Alamos an' Los Olivos."
Tommy Rockford's eyes flashed with excitement. For the first time since he had had his rendezvous with Captain Logan, Merlin Kendall and Beau Humphries at Gaviota Beach Park, K6ATX believed he was onto something big. And dangerous.
Loustalot had described a portable microwave dish mounted on wheels. What made Loustalot's disclosure especially exciting was that the dish was in a cave on Thundergust Peak-the mountain that his ham radio friends, using direction-finders, had pinpointed as the source of the Condor's signals during many of the Brasspounders' Bunch's weekly check-ins in the past. The dish Loustalot had stumbled across might well have been a directional parabolic transmitting dish the Condor was using, although most hams used rotating Yagis atop high masts.
"How big was this wire screen platter, Joe?"
"Oh, I would guess eight, ten foot acrost. Silver colored."
"Do you remember what direction it was aimed? Was it facing southeast, maybe, toward Ventura or L.A.?"
The old Basque paused to consider. "Southeast? Naw, that would be pointin' back into the cave. The mouth of the cave opens southwest, toward Lompoc and the ocean. Dish was pointin' out."
Toward Lompoc and the ocean...that would be in the direction of NASA's shuttle-launching complex at Vanderhoff Space Center!
Tommy came out of his trance to hear Loustalot saying, "I'd been in that cave a few weeks before, you understand, but there wasn't any radio stuff in it then. Just ashes of old campfires, stuff like that. Fact is, three winters ago, I camped fer a week in that cave, waitin' out' a big blizzard. Saved my life."
"When was it you found the tire tracks leading to the cave?"
"Six, eight weeks ago. I was doin' some off-season deer huntin'. Like I said, I don't run trap lines on Thundergust Peak since I got shot at. Too dangerous. Territory too steep and rough, anyway. I stick to Roughriders' Potrero, and as far northwest as the old Blakeley homestead down on Mormon Flat, which is at the front foot of Thundergust."
"Did you see any wires or cables leading away from the dish?"
"Not as I recollect, Tomas. I wasn't payin' much attention. Figured it was some kind of U.S. Forest Service contraption."
Thoughts were milling wildly in K6ATX's head. He was definitely onto something exciting here, something he would check out tomorrow, in defiance of Trapper Joe's warning. The fact that the parabolic dish antenna was mounted on wheels with pneumatic tires indicated a mobile apparatus, easily moved from place to place. He was recalling what Captain Logan had told him about the radio jamming transmissions he suspected had been responsible for the self-destruction of the Vanderhoff missiles. Each transmission had come from a slightly different location east of the launch sites, Logan had said, making them impossible to pinpoint with radio direction finders.
Tommy said, "What you've described could be part of the Condor's radio lash-up, Joe. You've never seen evidence of anyone living in the vicinity of Thundergust Peak? Campfire smoke? Fresh footprints? Discarded litter, like beer cans or cigarette butts?"
"Nary a sign. Even the hunters and cross-country skiers avoid Thundergust and Mormon Flat. Nearest habitation is Jim Blakeley's old rock cabin on the Flat, but it's been abandoned since the 1880s. House wouldn't be there now if it wasn't made o' stone. I've used it for campin' out in bad weather, many's the time."
Tommy asked, "In any of your ramblings have you ever seen tire tracks in other locations?"
"Oh, you referrin' to them night-landin' helio-coppers? But they have landing gear that looks like skis, not wheels."
"What helicopters are you talking about, Joe?" Tommy's mind had leaped instantly to the north-bound helicopter that Sheriff Jackson believed had taken Captain Logan's body inland.
"The ones I've heard landin' on a ledge halfway up Thundergust Peak. Always at night. Once a month regular, I hear one go over. Lately, sometimes two or three times a week. They land without any lights, always on moonlit nights, an' take off quick, sometimes without stoppin' their engines. I never investigate. I don't aim to risk suicide if I can help it. Not since I got my arm nicked."
Tommy Rockford got to his feet, pretending to be romping with Roxie. The old hound gave him an excuse to work off his growing nervous excitement without letting Loustalot notice his tension.
"What do you mean, risk suicide? Aren't those helicopters on Forest Service fire patrol?"
"Those helio-coppers wouldn't come an' go so secret-like if they were operatin' legal, Tomas. You know what I think? I think those choppers are used to smuggle away the marijuana crops they harvest around these hills. Like my Mafioso neighbor over in Box Canyon. This little bullet burn on my arm, it was a warnin'. I don't figger I'd get a second chance."
After a run of silence, Tommy asked off-handedly, "Those tire tracks that led you to the Indian cave on Thundergust--have you ever seen tire tracks in any other places? Think hard."
Loustalot dug his fingertips into his unkempt beard, a mannerism that seemed to indicate stimulated mental activity.
"We-el, now that I come to think of it, I did see some tire tracks in the snow. In March, on Mormon Flat. I'd gone over to pick up some traps I'd cached there last fall. Found fresh tire tracks leadin' up to the door of Blakeley's rock house, what they call Casa Piedra on the maps. I'd plumb fergotten about them tracks. Puzzled me at the time. Especially the door bein' locked. Didn't make sense. Kept me from gettin' my reserve traps, which I didn't want to get stole. Figgered the Forest Service must of done it to keep deerhunters from usin' the cabin to camp in. I could of dumb over the wall and got inside through a hole in the roof, but the traps weren't worth it. They'll be there when I show up next fall. By then maybe the fool padlock will be gone."
"Padlock? What do you mean?"
"A shiny new padlock was on the door of Blakeley's cabin. Why lock up a cabin that don't have a roof, don't give no shelter from the elements? Many's the time I've camped there, 'cause the rock walls protect you from the gales that's always howlin' acrost Mormon Flat, worse even than them Hurricane Deck storms you hear about. I set a few traps inside and around Blakeley's cabin every year because coyotes like to den inside of shelters. But as for shelter from rain or snow, you might as well be sleepin' out in the open. Roof's mostly gone, blowed away."
"I'd guess somebody was using an illegal trail bike, probably, and locked the door because they had parked the bike inside--"
"No," Loustalot said. "It was another cart you'd push, with the wheels wide apart, like the one I seen in that Injun cave on the Peak."
Tommy said, "Is the padlock still on the door of the Blakeley cabin, Joe? I am wondering if maybe my ham radio friend the Condor might be living there during the summertime."
"I haven't been back since, so I don't rightly know. But I don't think anybody would live there, summer or winter. The spring's dried up, which is why Blakeley quit his homestead claim in the first place, hunderd years ago. Nearest water is a mile away, in Asphalta Crick. Man can't live where there's no water, that's why I'm down here at Jawbone Springs. At Blakeley's place, winds have blown the top soil away to the bedrock, so there's no farmin' possible. I'm telling you, man, Casa Piedra is desolate."
The sun had set, filling Jawbone Springs Canyon with smoky shadow and bringing a twilight chill to temper the stored-up heat of the long July day.
"You rest your feet while I rustle up some chow," Trapper Joe suggested. "You can stay overnight, can't you? Good Dodger baseball on the radio tonight."
"If you've got room for me, Joe. I remember you've only got one bunk. Last time, I spread my bedroll out in Esprit's stable."
"If you don't mind sleepin' with ol’ Esprit, yo're welcome to stay over. Don't get much company, 'specially in summertime. Couple o' times a summer, maybe, a Wilderness Patrolman from the Forest Service goes through on horseback, scoutin' for illegal campers. They'd like to outlaw trappers like me inside the National Forest, I reckon. Make yourself to home, Tomas, while I go out an' fork down some feed for the mare. You'd think Esprit was in foal, the way that critter eats."
As he left for the stable shed, Trapper Joe switched on his battery-powered AM radio for Tommy's benefit. That was one amenity of civilization Trapper Joe couldn't do without, at least during baseball season. Even down in this cliff-girt QTH, strong signals from AM stereo station KIST in Santa Bonita brought them the evening news summary of what had gone on in the outside world that day, while KVEN in Ventura brought in the Dodger ball games. The Back Country always made K6ATX feel that the civilized world of Santa Bonita was light years removed; no TV or radio were among its many blessings.
The state and national news was followed by a local bulletin emanating from the office of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff:

Captain Gerald Logan USAF, an officer attached to NASA at Vanderhoff Space Center, has been declared a missing person by Sheriff Ross Jackson, following his disappearance yesterday after dining Sunday evening with Santa Bonita friends. He is believed to have been a victim of foul play. For developments as they occur, stay tuned to KIST, 1340 on your AM dial. We now switch you remote to Vanderhoff Air Force Base, where final preparations are under way for the launching of the space shuttle Conquistador early Thursday. Thousands of sightseers have already started converging on the Lompoc Valley to witness the launch of NASA's first manned polar orbiting of the earth, one of the most spectacular events in Santa Barbara County's 400-year history.

Tommy remembered Trapper Joe Loustalot as a super chef. The feast the old Basque prepared and served by flickering lanternlight did not disappoint him tonight.
Joe's menu led off with vegetable soup, the stock coming from his own garden. A thick and juicy beefsteak, the origin of which K6ATX was too discreet to ask, although it was possible Joe ran his own cattle in Jawbone Springs Canyon. Half an avocado, home grown, nesting in succulent lettuce. Crisp fried potatoes, sourdough biscuits to go with a honeycomb procured from a nearby hollow bee tree. Coffee from used-over grounds, bitter as gall, which could melt a tooth filling. Dessert was a spicy apple pie, the fruit also coming from a tree old Davey Black had planted in another century.
A twinge of guilt touched K6ATX after supper, for thinking that Trapper Joe might have been implicated in such a criminal activity as raising marijuana. But there was something he had to find out about Trapper Joe's possible connection to Sergeant Humphries' murder, and there was only one way he could figure out how to go about it without letting Loustalot know he was being tested.
"Are you a betting man, Joe?" Tommy inquired off-handedly.
The old trapper's eyes danced in the lamplight. "A baseball bet, or what? Poker? A mite of gambling would be welcome to break the monotonous life I lead. You name it, I'll cover it. Depends on who's pitchin' for the Dodgers, though. I'll give you odds--"
"How many hunting rifles do you own, Joe?"
"Just the one. Had it over fifty years, a beauty. Why?"
"I'll bet you five bucks I can beat you whiffing out a candle flame at fifty yards from a standing stance, three rounds limit."
Loustalot snorted with disdain.
"You're a fool to challenge me, Tomas, but it was your idea. You go set up the targets while I'm rustling up some ammo. I'll even give you a five-yard handicap, on account of you'll be usin' a strange carbine. I'll hate takin' money from a kid."
Loustalot found a couple of tallow candles and handed them to Tommy. Lighting a spare lantern, K6ATX headed out under the trees, pacing off fifty yards in the direction of the cold-water spring. Finding a wide-boled sycamore stump to use as a backstop, he dragged up a log and placed it in front of the stump. On top of the log he placed two candles a foot apart, anchoring them in their own wax drippings. Any bullet aimed at the candle flames would lodge undamaged in the pulpwood backstop of the rotten stump. That was the point of K6ATX's scheme to obtain coroner's evidence.
Back at the cabin, he found Joe Loustalot fitting an 8X 'scope to the barrel of his lever-action .30-30 Winchester. Fifty yards away, the twin candles gleamed in the darkness like the yellow eyes of a wild animal, hardly a breath of air wavering the flames.
"OK," chortled the old Basque. "I won't use the 'scope-eyes won't focus right, after dark. But you're welcome to. That'll make up for my bein' more familiar with the carbine."
Tommy won the toss to determine who would shoot first. He selected the right-hand candle as his target. Joe agreed to a standing stance, as opposed to the more stable kneeling stance. Tommy lined up the cross-hairs in the telescopic sight on the magnified image of the candle flame, made his allowances for windage and trajectory, and squeezed off his first shot.
The candle flame jumped, indicating a near miss. On the second shot, Tommy deliberately put his bullet higher up the rotten stump, taking care to memorize where the bullet entered it. On his third and final try, the candle flame retained its full brilliance, indicating a wide miss.
"I think my fiver is still safe," K6ATX jibed his host, handing over the rifle. "Can you do any better? Remember, you've got to hit the candlewick. No fair hitting the candle itself. Any duffer could do that."
Loustalot's first shot snuffed out the left-hand candle. He drawled, "No use walkin' out to douse the other candle," and calmly proceeded to extinguish Tommy's candle with his next bullet.
The contest was over, except for the transfer of a five-dollar bill to the winner. Tommy pretended to be embarrassed, but he wasn't. He had performed an unpleasant but necessary duty.
Sergeant Beau Humphries had been shot while flying over what Trapper Joe might have figured to be his private air space. If it should ever become necessary for Sheriff Jackson to determine whether the bullet found in the Sergeant's skull had come from Joe Loustalot's rifle, all his experts had to do was dig the slugs out of the rotten sycamore stump and compare the rifling grooves with those on the bullet removed from Humphries' brain, using a ballistics comparison microscope. If they matched, they had found the murder weapon. It would be up to the sheriff to take it from there and determine who pulled the trigger that killed Beau.

CHAPTER TWELVE
Buried In The Barn

Nine o'clock found Tommy and his host absorbed in listening to the ninth inning of a baseball game from Dodger Stadium in L.A with the score tied. Although K6ATX was as ardent a baseball fan as Trapper Joe, he was too much in need of rest to face the prospect of a prolonged extra-inning game. It could easily go on past midnight, and tomorrow he faced a difficult and possibly hazardous day of hiking on the rocky slopes of Thundergust Peak.
"I'm hitting the sack, Joe," K6ATX yawned, lighting the spare lantern during the between-innings commercial. "See you manana."
Joe Loustalot, his total attention riveted to a pitchers' duel, grunted a good-night as K6ATX shouldered his backpack and headed for the stable haymow, followed by the worshipful Roxie, whose muzzle had slobbered on Tommy's knee all evening.
Loustalot's geriatric saddle mare, Esprit, whickered a greeting from her stall as Tommy entered the barn. He hung the lantern on a wall peg and spread his mummiform sleeping bag on a mattress of hay. Roxie, after apparently preparing herself a bed alongside him, suddenly began a frenzied digging in the straw in one corner of the barn. As loose chaff began flying in all directions from the dog's paws, Tommy realized she was busily trying to uncover some buried object.
"Roxie," Tommy said in an exasperated voice, "quit stirring up that dust, or I won't let you spend the night out here. Cool it!"
The hound began whining and redoubled her digging activity. A moment later she exhumed something from the hay. At first glance Tommy mistook it for an old sack, or fragment of tarpaulin. Then he saw a glint of bright metal refracting the lantern's rays, as Roxie tossed the object at his feet, whimpering in excited triumph and obviously begging for praise at her accomplishment.
"What have you retrieved for me, girl? An old horse blanket?"
Tommy felt a moment's puzzlement, followed by a rush of shock. The silvery glint came from a pair of captain's bars pinned to the lapel of an Air Force officer's much-laundered fatigue jacket.
But what struck horror in Tommy's heart was the rectangle of black plastic pinned above the right-hand breast pocket flap. A plastic ID badge, engraved with the jacket owner's name: LOGAN.
In a moment of stunned realization, K6ATX stooped to pick up the garment Roxie had unearthed from the floor of Joe Loustalot's barn. The back of the jacket was caked with what appeared to be half-dried brown paint. Dried blood.
Roxie almost knocked Tommy off his feet, leaping up in an attempt to recover her trophy and rebury it. The strong scent of human blood, no doubt, had prompted the hound to dig the jacket out of the hay.
Tommy's skin beaded with cold sweat. The implications of this discovery were mind-boggling. Brushing Roxie aside, he carried the telltale jacket over to the mare's stall and hung it on a high harness peg to keep it away from the dog. Not until he had blown out the lantern and was sitting on his sleeping bag in the Stygian darkness did K6ATX attempt to muster his thoughts in an effort to make some kind of sense out of this macabre development.
Everything seemed to point to a murder committed by Trapper Joe. Otherwise, how could Captain Logan's blood-stained jacket have possibly wound up in such a remote, unlikely place as Trapper Joe's barn? Had Joe sought to conceal the evidence of his crime after possibly burying Logan's corpse somewhere in this remote canyon-or-the thought gave Tommy goose bumps-perhaps in the earthen floor under his feet?
K6ATX tried to put events together as he knew them. The police believed that Jerry Logan, after being abducted by an unknown kidnapper in the act of leaving the Rockford home in Santa Bonita, apparently had been driven out to the Goleta airport and whisked away aboard an unidentified chopper piloted by the abductor's accomplice. A chopper last seen headed over the mountains in the direction of Thundergust Peak. A chopper that may well have landed secretly in Joe Loustalot's secluded canyon.
It followed that Captain Logan, either dead or alive, could then have been removed from the helicopter and buried. If K6ATX accepted the obvious explanation, it would lead him to only one logical conclusion: Trapper Joe Loustalot was a confederate of whatever evil forces were masterminding a plot to blow up the Conquistador with illegal Morse code QRM.
As much as K6ATX liked the old trapper from past acquaintance, it was not out of the realm of possibility that Joe Loustalot could have sold out to an international sabotage gang. After all, Trapper Joe's own past was cloaked in mystery, even to having committed a homicide in the old country. And there was always the chance that Trapper Joe had turned to illicit marijuana farming, which would make him a prime suspect in the murder of Beau Humphries...
Shivering in spite of the night's stored-up heat, Tommy walked over to the door and peered cautiously out into the darkness. Through the lamplighted window of the tin-can shack 50 feet away he could see Trapper Joe sipping his beer and listening to the network announcer describing the third out of the Dodgers' half of the tenth inning, the score still tied. A Ventura announcer identified the station as KVEN, and read a Unical commercial. It seemed unreal that tonight, in the outside world, life was going on as usual...
If Captain Logan had been alive when he was transported over the mountain in his abductor's helicopter, he could have been murdered under the roof of this very barn! When that grisly possibility presented itself, Tommy's over-wrought imagination really blasted into afterburner mode. What if his host planned to make him a second victim following the ball game?
The radio ham licked dry lips. He had come to a decision. He dared not risk sleeping in this stable tonight. For all he knew, Loustalot might come calling later with gun or knife, intending to murder him in his sleep.
"I've got to get out of here," K6ATX panted in a whisper, mopping the perspiration from his cheeks with a sleeve. "My best chance is while Joe is awake and totally absorbed in his ball game. If I left later, Roxie would bark and give me away--"
Tommy rolled up his sleeping bag, the cozy hospitality of these rustic surroundings suddenly becoming supercharged with peril. He took Captain Logan's gore-stained fatigue jacket off the stable peg, rolled it up tightly and stowed it in his backpack. As he peered out the stable door into the darkness he heard the tinny, muffled voice from Loustalot's loudspeaker: "...So here we are, fans, going into the eleventh inning with the score knotted five-all. Let's have a look at the scores of today's other games."
Roxie was licking Tommy's hand, her wagging tail whipping his thighs. It was in his favor that the dog was with him; she wouldn't start barking when he left. He still had seven hours before daylight. By then he intended to be safely up on the rimrock above Jawbone Springs Canyon, well on his way to Thundergust Peak, hopefully before Trapper Joe discovered his absence.
Before leaving Jawbone Canyon Tommy had an errand to do.
The moon had long since set and the canyon lay in darkness so blindingly total it seemed to press like black fingers against his eyelids. Tommy ripped a sheet out of his pocket notebook and scrawled: JOE: STARTING HOME EARLY TO BEAT THE HEAT. THANX FOR YOUR HOSPITALITY. HOPE DODGERS WON. TOMMY. He stuck the message on a nail near Esprit's stall where Trapper Joe would be sure to see it. Then he stepped out of the inky gloom of the stable, Roxie at his heels. He groped his way through the cotton wood bosque to fill his plastic water bottle at Jawbone Springs.
K6ATX knew exactly what he had to do in the darkness. He headed for the tree stump that had provided a backstop to trap the bullets he had fired from Trapper Joe's hunting rifle early in the evening. Reaching the stump, his probing fingers quickly located the bullet holes left when he had deliberately fired at the one o'clock angle above and to the right of the flickering candle, ostensibly his target.
Using one of the blades of the red-handled Swiss army knife he always carried on backpacking trips, Tommy picked away at the decayed wood until he located two of the copper-jacketed slugs that could be traced as coming from the bore of Trapper Joe's Winchester .30-30. He wrapped the two bullets in a Kleenex tissue and stowed them carefully in his wallet, his job accomplished.
Thanks to being endowed with keen night vision, K6ATX was able to wind his way from the tree stump target backstop to the foot of the switchback trail that zigzagged up the cliff face to the rim of the potrero. He was aware that Roxie was foraging off ahead in the darkness, but he could send the hound back home after they were well out of earshot of the trapper's shack.
It took almost two hours for Tommy to scale the lofty scarp trail in the dark, hugging the rock wall, knowing a single misstep could plunge him to certain death. He was near exhaustion by the time he reached the flat top of the potrero, burrowed back into a dense thicket of undergrowth and spread out his sleeping bag, urgently in need of sleep.
A shift of the night breeze brought to K6ATX's ears the unmistakable rhythmic thumping of a helicopter. The sound grew in volume, until it seemed to come from directly overhead. Suddenly the brush around him began whipping madly and clouds of dust arose in response to the air turbulence created by a chopper's rotor blades. And then, through a patch of overcast, Tommy Rockford saw the aircraft, so distinct in the moonlight that he recognized the insignia of the US Forest Service on its underbelly.
K6ATX consulted his watch. The hands stood straight up midnight.
Of course! This was the chopper dispatched to pick up the nine jerry cans containing 45 gallons of gasoline that he and Beau Humphries had intended to use to fuel their glider motors for their ill-fated reconnaissance flights.
The big Bell helicopter settled to earth not 50 feet away. The pilot cut his engine and the rotors began slowing down and finally came to a jerky halt. The three-man crew waited until the dust cloud had dissipated before alighting from the chopper.
Tommy Rockford, half in his sleeping bag, took a flashlight from his backpack. Knowing the USFS men could be dangerous if startled, Tommy switched on the flashlight and sent its beam over to the right of the helicopter, illuminating the red jerry cans stored there. The three men instantly dropped to the ground and Tommy saw the blue glint of moonlight shining off at least two hand guns.
"Hold your fire, men!" Tommy shouted. "Tommy Rockford here. I've been expecting you. You're exactly on schedule."
After a moment's silence, one of the men called out, "Show yourself, Rockford. Keep the flashlight on yourself. Move it!"
Obeying orders, K6ATX crawled out of his sleeping bag, careful to keep the flashlight beam on his face, and started walking toward the helicopter. Moments later he was shaking hands with the trio, two of whom were acquaintances.
"Tommy," panted one of them, "you really had us spooked."
"I've got something I want you to leave with the county coroner's ballistics expert," Tommy said, handing over the tissue-wrapped bullets from Trapper Joe's rifle. "The guilt or innocence of a man involved in a murder case could depend on identifying these slugs, so handle with care, OK?"
While the men were busy loading jerry cans into the chopper, K6ATX removed Captain Logan's blood-stained fatigue jacket from his backpack and turned it over to the chopper pilot with instructions to also deliver it to the coroner's office. "I'll make a report later by radio concerning this jacket," he said. "Just tell them it belongs to Captain Jerry Logan of the Air Force."
Twenty minutes later the USFS chopper took off with its highly inflammable cargo. Tommy was snoring in his sleeping bag before the sound of the rotor blades died in the night air, headed for Santa Bonita.
The dawning sun awakened K6ATX. Trapper Joe's hound dog lay sprawled beside the sleeping bag, tongue lolling from her chops like a wet pink ribbon, tail pounding the ground as Tommy broke out his ration sack and breakfasted on trailmix, cheese and raisins, washed down with refreshing spring water that he shared with the hound.
Another hot day was a fiery pink promise on the uneven eastern horizon. Tuesday, July 21. Launch Day minus two. The fateful dates and figures were branded on Tommy Rockford's brain cells as if seared there by a hot iron.
The scarlet sunrise was spectacular enough to bring a gasp to the lips of the most jaded hiker. The ridges of the Back Country led away in all directions, the San Rafaels to the west, the Sierra Madres to the east, crimson-edged silhouettes cut from black paper, the valleys holding light mists that would soon dissipate under the heat of a rising sun. The mercury would likely soar sixty degrees within the next two hours.
As daylight increased, landmarks stood out in bolder definition. The conical pile of his destination, Thundergust Peak, ten miles away, seemingly close enough to touch in the crystalline air, was the dominant feature on the northern horizon, its pyramidal crest bathed in coral pink alpenglow.
Somewhere on the pine-mottled, gully-scarred western face of that mountain, K6ATX believed he would find the mysterious Condor's aerie. Perhaps he would also be at the source of the saboteur's illicit signals.
Peering over the edge of the precipice he had just scaled, K6ATX could now make out the trees surrounding Jawbone Springs and Trapper Joe's cabin. Even as he looked, smoke from the old man's breakfast fire fumed in a blue-white tendril from the chimney. The old man was up and about. What would he think when he found his guest had flown the coop?
In gathering daylight, Tommy felt a little sheepish about the fear he had experienced at finding Captain Logan's bloody jacket in the trapper's stable. If Trapper Joe was in league with whoever had kidnapped the NASA official, why would he have thrown straw over a garment that could so obviously be linked to the missing man? He would have burned it, or buried it with its owner.
Well, it didn't matter now. What counted was that he was off to an early start on the Tuesday morning before the Thursday launch date of the Conquistador. If Captain Logan's theories about a saboteur's illicit radio station in the Back Country wilderness were correct, he, K6ATX, was the only shield that stood between defusing the fatal Morse code transmission and a tragedy at Vanderhoff Air Force Base that would be making headlines around the world two days from now...
Roxie, after taking a couple of good swats from a juniper twig, got Tommy's message that her company was no longer welcome. Tail tucked between her legs, disappointment shining in her amber eyes, Roxie vanished over the rim of the potrero, loping down the switchback trail that would return her to her master's house.
Sufficiently rested by his few hours' sleep after his exhausting climb out of the canyon, Tommy Rockford buckled on his pack and began his 10-mile trek across upward-sloping terrain toward the base of Thundergust, threading through the stunted juniper growth without benefit of any trail.
He paused from time to time to break out his binoculars and study the landscape. This was restricted country few hikers ever penetrated, but from open spots he had a 180-degree view of the western horizon, the Pacific Ocean dominating the vista as a thin gunmetal blue line that would soon dissolve into the haze and, later in the morning, disappear behind the inevitable dun-colored, earth-hugging, man-made smog.
Off to the southwest he could barely make out, even with the help of the powerful glasses, the low-lying blob on the skyline that marked the outermost of the Channel Islands, San Miguel, reviving memories of the time that he had narrowly escaped death after scuba diving in search of a treasure-laden Spanish galleon believed wrecked there four centuries ago.*
 (*See DX BRINGS DANGER, published 1985 by ARRL.)
Sixty miles away, the coastline from Mount Tranquillon to the southwest to the mouth of the Santa Maria Valley to the northwest comprised for the most part the vast length of Vanderhoff Air Force Base. Visible, if you knew what to look for, were the gantries and silos where Peacemakers, formerly known as MX missiles, began their fiery test flights to targets on Kwajalein Atoll, 4,500 miles across the Pacific. Tommy had not yet gained enough elevation to be able to see over intervening hills to the 350-foot concrete tower that marked Slick Six, the space shuttle's launching pad north of Point Arguello.
From what he was now seeing, K6ATX had proof of the vulnerability of the ICBM facility, exposed to line-of-sight radio QRM originating here in the lofty Back Country.
Two hours and five miles later, Tommy shed his pack and seated himself on a sandstone boulder in the shade of a government signboard, to catch his breath and partake of water and a mid-morning snack. The sign, black lettering on white enamel, read:

Warning! Closed to Entry!
FEDERAL WILDLIFE SANCTUARY
Trespass punishable under wildlife protection laws
U.S. DEPT. OF INTERIOR

Tommy's view of Vanderhoff Space Center was now hidden under malignant layers of the promised brown smog, which only an off-shore wind could dissipate. A careful binoculars-assisted scan of the looming slope of Thundergust Peak told him what a discouraging, if not impossible, task he was facing; the peak, smooth as a wolf's fang when seen from a distance, was on closer view gashed with a thousand eroded gullies, ribbed with rock-studded ridges, naked rock shimmering in the heat waves above timber line.
Before casing his binoculars, Tommy swung them in a 360-degree sweep of the horizon, pausing to admire familiar landmarks of past hikes-soaring peaks named Tepusquet, Manzanita, San Rafael, Little and Big Pine, Madulce, along with the major upthrusts of the Hurricane Deck ridge and the Sierra Madre and San Rafael ranges.
A blur of movement attracted Tommy Rockford's eye as his magnified field of vision was swinging down on the long reach of Rough-riders' Potrero, with the parallel shadow-filled fissures of Jawbone Springs and Box Canyons off to his right, reminding him poignantly of Sergeant Humphries' tragic end.
He caught the movement again, and drew into focus the image of a man on horseback, riding at a lope in spite of the punishing heat. The shiny walnut stock of a lever-action hunting rifle protruded from a bullhide saddle scabbard under the rider's knee. Head down under a broad-brimmed sombrero, the horseman seemed to be following the same route Tommy Rockford had covered, although no trail existed and the slickrock terrain would not show his tracks.
Then Tommy saw that the rider was following a dog. The animal was sniffing the ground as it cruised along seeking spoor. A black and brown hound. Roxie! K6ATX was being trailed by the man who had ordered him not to invade the wildlife sanctuary--Joe Loustalot!
The Basque's character was still an unknown quantity; but he very well might be the man who had shot Sergeant Humphries and who had some connection with the kidnapping of Captain Logan. If so, the odds were stacked in his favor that Tommy Rockford would be his third victim.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
On Thundergust Peak

The taste of fear burned like raw acid in K6ATX's throat. Trapper Joe Loustalot, on horseback, could easily overtake him before the hour was out.
Was the old Basque trying to protect a visitor from being fired upon by some criminal hiding out on the peak--or was he intent on keeping Tommy from snooping around? Was there a secret Loustalot wanted to keep him from discovering? Something to do with a marijuana plantation, perhaps, or a buried jacket belonging to a missing Air Force officer?
K6ATX could only guess at Trapper Joe's motives. The one thing he knew for certain was that Loustalot had once boasted of having dropped an eagle on the wing. It would be useless to attempt to hide in some thicket or gully; Roxie's talented nose would unerringly lead Trapper Joe to his quarry.
Tommy Rockford forced himself to relax and think it out. He had two things going for him. Approaching Thundergust Peak from the south, he knew he would have to cross the cold stream known as Asphalta Creek, which sluiced down one of those defiles ahead of him to its confluence with the Sisquoc River, flowing toward the distant sea.
He wouldn't cross Asphalta Creek when he reached it; he would wade upstream. That ploy would foil old Roxie's educated nose! Even the best of bloodhounds would lose a scent if it disappeared into moving water. The other advantage he enjoyed over the rider trailing him was that his heavy-soled hiking boots could scramble like a mountain goat's hooves up steep slickrock slopes that Joe's saddle mare would have difficulty negotiating on her iron shoes.
Objective numero uno, then, was to reach Asphalta Creek with all possible haste, choosing steep slopes to slow down Loustalot's pursuit. And above all, keep out of his stalker's sight; if he could see Trapper Joe, the reverse was true.
Hitching his backpack to a more comfortable position high on his shoulders, Tommy struck out for higher ground, moving fast even though his heart was threatening to jump out of his chest. The presence of green brush and dwarf trees lining one of the defiles at the foot of Thundergust told him he was nearing a running stream.
A quarter of a mile and two hundred feet higher than the spot where he had first discovered that Loustalot was trailing him brought K6ATX to the south rim of a narrow gulch, from which came the melodic sound of water running over stones.
"I'm in the Condor's territory now--"
Goose flesh lifted the fine hairs of Tommy's forearms as he realized that this stream was probably the source of the Condor's water supply, the reason why K6 Itchy Alligator could sustain himself at any season in the semi-arid Back Country.
Breathing heavily, ever more aware of the knock-knock-knock of overtaxed heartbeats in his eardrums, Tommy Rockford located a fissure in the rimrock that lowered him down to the pit of the gulch 50 feet below. He clawed his way through a bosque of cottonwoods and bay trees until he came to the running water, foaming milkily over a pebbled bottom--Asphalta Creek. The name came from the fact that the creek ran across an expanse of surface oil sands, giving the soil the color and odor of asphaltum.
K6ATX shucked his Kelty pack and squatted down to rest. Trapper Joe and his hunting dog would have slow going up this rocky grade; he would certainly have to dismount and lead his saddle mare.
Down here in the gully it was cooler by ten degrees than out in the boiling sunlight. That made for more comfortable mountain climbing, but was costing precious time. He could imagine the bustle of activity out at Slick Six launch pad at this moment, where teams of NASA technical inspectors would be swarming over space shuttle Conquistador, loading its mammoth fuel tank and dual booster rockets, making positive everything humanly possible had been done to secure the safety of Thursday morning's launch.
One of those inspecting engineers even had a face that K6ATX could visualize: bearded Merlin Kendall, checking and rechecking the electronic self-destruct mechanisms his computer company had installed on the twin solid-fuel rocket boosters so as to abort them in case of emergency.
When his heart had stopped hammering painfully under his ribs, Tommy picked up his Kelty pack once more and, stepping out into the ankle-deep stream, began sloshing his way laboriously up the long incline of tumbling water.
Roxie would lose the spoor at his point of entry on the right bank. Tommy knew what problem Trapper Joe would then face: which side of the creek should he scout, upstream or down, seeking the point where his quarry had left the creek? Whichever way Loustalot guessed, it would cost him precious time and add substantially to the radio ham's lead.
An hour of clambering upstream, Tommy found the gully walls reduced in height to where he could see over them. He scrambled out of the bone-numbing water and stood up, cautiously surveying the slope below. He saw no sign of his pursuer on horseback or afoot. This could mean that Trapper Joe was still exploring the edges of Asphalta Creek in hopes of picking up Rockford's trail. Or it could mean that the old Basque had abandoned the chase as hopeless and had returned to his homestead in Jawbone Spring Canyon.
The odor of raw petroleum was strong here, baked out of the oil sands by the summer sun. Major oil companies and wildcatters alike had coveted this ground for generations; only the fact that Thundergust Peak lay inside the restricted Wildlife Sanctuary had kept them from erecting derricks and drilling for oil long ago.
K6ATX followed up his naked-eye surveillance with the assistance of his prism binoculars. The highly-magnified field of vision was blurred as if through wavy glass by the dancing heatwaves radiating off the rocky crust of the mountain slope. He could trace Asphalta Creek's gulch across the flank of Thundergust Peak onto the barren plateau of Mormon Flat, where the creek spilled like quicksilver into the lower foothills.
No evidence of pursuit--but he was well aware that the eagle-eyed trapper could be keeping a vigilant watch on the higher reaches of this landscape as well, waiting for Tommy to show himself.
Before leaving the cool shade of the shallow gully, K6ATX broke out his grubsack and feasted on raisins and cheese, a Granola bar and a dried apricot, washed down with mountain spring water.
It was two-thirty when he climbed up out of the gully into the searing strike of the westered sun. By now, he noted, the coastline marking Vanderhoff Air Force Base was lost under its usual afternoon layers of obscene purplish-brown vapor, with only the tips of Tranquillon Peak and Mount Solomon lifting above the man-made murk.
He picked up what appeared to be a foot path leading northward around Thundergust. Whether it belonged to animals or man, he did not know, but it was significant that to the left, or lower side, of the path was scrubby pinon and manzanita growth, while on the right, or uphill, side was barren rock, part of the final thousand feet of Thundergust Peak's fanglike uplift. Timberline...
Timberline! Trapper Joe had used that word last night, in describing a cave covered with prehistoric Indian paintings, on the southwest shoulder of Thundergust. Perhaps this was an ancient Chumash Indian trace leading to a painted cave that might have served long-extinct tribes as a holy place.
Pulse racing with a new excitement, Tommy Rockford set off along the slightly-climbing path, believing more and more that it could indeed have been worn by the moccasins of Chumash tribesmen ten thousand years ago, after this Back Country had emerged from the primordial ooze at the dawn of time.
The fact that this rugged wilderness a mile above sea level had at one time been the bottom of the sea accounted for the fossilized oyster and clam shells cemented into the sandstone conglomerate under foot, marine life that had lain embedded in a matrix of beach sand, slowly petrifying into stone.
Indenting the roof-steep skyline a quarter-mile ahead was a black crescent. A cave's entrance! This path was veering toward it, as if the Indians who had left their artwork on the walls and ceiling of a mountain grotto had used this trail to get down to the headwaters of Asphalta Creek.
It gave K6ATX a sense of linkage with the prehistoric past, his awareness tempered by the fact that he might conceivably be in the cross-hairs of Trapper Joe's telescopic gunsight at this moment, exposed as he was on a naked slope of rock. He had experienced this same odd sense of time warp two weeks ago, deep in the depths of Arizona's Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, when he had found himself trapped with scant hope of escaping death...
Fighting the heat, muscles cramping his overtaxed legs, the harsh pull of gravity dragging on his backpack, Tommy Rockford scrambled ever closer to the welcome shade of the yawning half-oval mouth of the cavern ahead. It was a blessed relief to finally shed his pack and sink to his knees on the cool sandy floor of the cave, the overhanging ceiling protecting him from the blowtorch glare of the July sun.
As his eyes accustomed themselves to the half-light beyond the blinding glare outside, he beheld a sight, similar to others he had seen in this Back Country wilderness, one which never failed to thrill him to the core of his being.
This was Trapper Joe's "Indian cave."
Tommy's wondering eyes made out a veritable art gallery of Indian pictographs on the walls and ceiling of this grotto, eerily visible in the reflected light of the cave's interior-mysterious symbols left behind by a vanished people, geometric designs mixed with crude depictions of antlered deer and huntsmen with bows and arrows, painted with colored pigments in hues of ochre yellow and charcoal black, lime white and cinnebar red, the meaning of which remained unsolved by generations of anthropologists.
The grit-laden winds of a thousand winters, scouring the eroded stone of the lower badlands, had carpeted the floor of this wide, shallow cave with talcum-fine sand. And stamped into that sifting of powdered rock were a series of tracks that set the adrenalin pumping through K6ATX's veins.
He first noticed the distinct tread marks of two rubber-tired wheels spaced four feet apart, the tire design sharply etched in highlight and shadow. Recent tracks, which curved toward the spot where Tommy Rockford knelt at the edge of the sunlight, disappearing when they reached the naked rock outside.
There were also fresh dog or coyote paw prints, and between the tire marks, as out of place in this mile-high cavern near the crest of Thundergust Peak as a pile of beer cans on the moon, was a double set of fresh footprints: the soles of a man's hiking boots, deep-cleated, as large as his own, both entering and leaving the cave. Boot marks left by whoever had trundled a two-wheeled portable microwave dish out of this improbable setting. The deepest prints of all had been stamped in the sand by a horse's hooves--
An alien odor reached Tommy's nostrils in that instant of awareness: the bittersweet aroma of rum-scented tobacco smoke. And with it came another sound from the depths of the cave: the whicker of a horse blowing trail dust from its nostrils, somewhere back in the shadows.
Even as K6ATX came to his feet, a deep bass voice rumbled from the interior of the grotto: "Hold it where you are, Tomas. You have played the fool long enough, don't try anything rash now."
"Trapper Joe!"
Tommy's involuntary cry was flung back to him in echo by the sounding board effect of the shallow cavern walls. He saw the grizzled old Basque emerge from the half-light into the reflected glare of sunlight, fuming pipe caught between his teeth, holding in his arms the struggling black-and-brown form of his hound dog Roxie, with Trapper's Joe's big hand muzzling her attempt to bark a greeting to the radio ham she regarded as her friend.
In the background, Tommy's eyes picked out the familiar shape of Loustalot's saddle mare, reins hitched to the horn of the saddle that had been placed on the floor of the cave. Tommy also noted, with infinite relief, that Loustalot's .30-30 rifle was stowed snuggly in its saddle scabbard.
"You--you got here ahead of me!" Tommy cried. "You couldn't have known I was headed here--I didn't know myself!"
Trapper Joe Loustalot let the squirming Roxie loose, and in a couple of bounds the dog had leaped up to put a paw on either of Tommy's shoulders, laving the teenager's cheeks with an affectionate and watery tongue that could not be denied.
"Pretty well figgered you'd spotted me an' would take to the crick to keep Roxie from trailin' you," the old trapper chuckled. "Knew you'd have to climb out of that gully sooner or later. Too hot to wait out in the sun like a mad dog, so I beelined for this painted cave, figgerin' you'd show up sooner or later. Always cool in here. You're lucky the Condor wasn't roamin' around and spotted you or I'd have the job of buryin' your carcass."
K6ATX could only stare at the old mountain man. The youth's head was storming with unanswered questions. Trapper Joe's grin seemed too friendly to go with anyone who was an accomplice of the Condor's--or rather, the unknown saboteur he was hunting.
The Basque trapper continued, "This is where I saw the big platter on wheels I told you about, Tomas. I'd say, judgin' from how sharp and undisturbed them tire tracks is, that gadget was wheeled out of here as recent as sometime yesterday or last night."
"Joe--I don't understand...Why did you trail me this morning?"
Loustalot hunkered down in front of Tommy, fanning his heat-reddened face with his sweat-stained Mexican sombrero.
"I didn't want you venturin' into range of the Condor, that's why. That hombre is bad medicine, and I got a bullet scar to prove it. He'd as soon shoot you as look at you, if you came prowlin' into the territory he's staked out for himself. You're inside his range the minute you cross Asphalta Crick. 'Condor country' in more ways than one, and don't you ever forgit it. Come dark, we're getting out of here, if we're lucky."
Tommy thought that over. Trapper Joe had tried to warn him away from this last night before the ball game, for reasons best known to himself. But there was another question Tommy had to have answered.
"Joe, a question has been nagging at me ever since I went out to the barn to hit the sack last night," Tommy said. "I--"
"How the baseball game turned out? Dodgers lost, 8 to 7, in 14 innings. Bullpen let us down again, plus infield errors. The Giants reliever who got the win was-
"No, no--forget the ball game!" Tommy cried in exasperation. "I meant that Air Force officer's fatigue jacket--"
Trapper Joe's eyes narrowed. "You found it, eh? Where was it?"
"I found it where you buried it under the hay in the stable," Tommy retorted. "Roxie dug it up. She smelled the bloodstains on the back, most likely. You didn't bury it deep enough, Joe. And I can't help wondering if I would have slept last night with a dead man buried on the premises--"
Joe Loustalot tamped fresh tobacco into his briar pipe with a calloused thumb, found a match in his jeans, snapped it aflame with a thumbnail, and lighted up, rheumy eyes masking his secret thoughts.
"Logan's coat...that's the dangdest puzzle you ever heard, Tomas. Around 1 am, night before last, whilst I was listenin' to a night owl talk show on the radio, I heard this helio-copper flyin' over, real low. Figgered it was my neighbor, the marijuana farmer from Oxnard, droppin' off a harvest crew. Roxie started barkin' like crazy, and ran out into the dark. She stayed out all night, blast her ornery hide. Just after daylight, Roxie came lopin' in, draggin' that coat from wherever she'd found it. Only thing I can figger out is, somebody on that helio-copper must have lost it overboard, which don't make much sense, does it?"
Tommy was thinking--it made sense to him. Captain Logan must have seen Joe's lighted window and tossed out his fatigue jacket, hoping somebody would find it and report it...
Trapper Joe was saying, "When I tried to take it away from Roxie, she thought I was playin' games. She never could retrieve worth a darn. OK at fetchin', but won't surrender a bird or a rabbit, let alone a bloody coat. Anyway, Rox went scamperin' off, an' I never seen the coat again. You've explained it. Roxie must of drug it into the barn an' buried it under the hay. Sure! That's where she buries most of the marrow bones I give her, come to think of it. I might have knowed. Roxie, you no-account rapscallion!"
K6ATX shook his head, half angry, half puzzled.
"Trapper, you are the most outrageous yarn-spinner in these mountains. Many's the tall tale you've fed me for gospel truth. But that Air Force fatigue jacket belonged to a friend of mine--a friend I'm afraid was murdered."
Tommy Rockford disengaged himself from Roxie's loving embrace and drooling chops and stood there, lost in thought. Trapper Joe's far-fetched story somehow made sense; it carried a ring of truth. And it jibed with known facts; Jerry Logan had probably been transported over the mountains by helicopter.
Trapper Joe got to his feet and stretched mightily. "You and me are headin' back to my cabin, Tommy," the old Basque said. "We can make it back before moonset if we leave now. Ol' Esprit can tote double, once we're onto level country."
Tommy protested "I came out here to find the Condor and I'm--"
"No way, son! I've told you, Thundergust Peak is inside the wildlife sanctuary, off limits to everybody. I ain't standin' by an' lettin' you do anything to get you in trouble with the authorities. I don't know exactly where this loco Condor hombre makes his nest, but it must be in this general neighborhood, an' that's too close for comfort."
At that moment a strange thing happened. Roxie bounded to her feet, the hackles on her neck bristling, a savage growl swelling deep in her throat. Then, as if she had spotted a jackrabbit or a bird, the hound raced out of the cave and disappeared down the lope outside, baying at full throat.
There followed a sudden crack of sound in the distance, like the snapping of a twig-and Roxie's frenzied barking ceased.
Tommy and Trapper Joe exchanged puzzled glances.
"What in blazes got into ol' Roxie?" the Basque demanded. "What is goin' on down there? Sounded like a gunshot."
Trapper Joe stepped out into the sunlight, pulling his hat brim down to shield his slitted eyes as he studied the heat-dancing vista below the cave. He was standing like that, his back to Tommy Rockford, when the bullet caught him in the breastbone.
Not until the distant report of a rifle shot reached Tommy's ears did he see his old friend's knees unhinge. Loustalot fell backwards, slowly at first, half twisting as a tree falls in a forest before a lumberjack's chain saw, fine dust puffing out from under his shoulder blades as he jolted hard to the ground, arms outflung, sombrero rolling away.
"Come dark...run...for the crick..." Trapper Joe's voice gargled from a throat convulsed in a death rattle. "Condor...may not know...you're in here... with me... Take...carbine with you...use it...Condor kilt...ol’ Roxie..."
Even as K6ATX knelt by his friend's side, he saw the intelligence fade from the old Basque's pleading gaze, turning the bright vitality of his eyes into the sterility of dull pebbles. He pressed his knuckle against Trapper Joe's carotid artery in time to feel his old friend's last heartbeat this side of eternity.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Target For A Sniper

For a stunned moment Tommy Rockford could not believe what he had witnessed. This had to be some terrible hallucination, induced by too much exposure to a scorching sun.
The fading echoes of the rifle shot told him differently. Joe Loustalot was dead, his life sacrificed because he had tried to prevent "Tomas" from entering a place of danger.
Tommy suddenly realized his own safety was now in jeopardy. His life might be measured in minutes or hours. He was trapped inside this shallow defile in the face of the mountainside, pinned down by a homicidal maniac with a high-powered rifle, concealed somewhere on the slope below.
K6ATX made a quick assessment of his situation and found it not entirely hopeless. Trapper Joe's .30-30, which Tommy had fired in target practice only last night, lay handy in the scabbard lashed to Esprit's saddle, back in the shadows. Not that he relished the prospect of a gun duel, but possession of the Winchester was a comforting factor in this desperate situation. Tommy had never gone in for game hunting, for the simple reason that he hated to kill animals. But this would be self-defense...
Drawing the Winchester from its leather boot, Tommy levered a shell into the breech and then, flat on his stomach, began crawling with his elbows until he was able to peer down the slope of Thundergust Peak toward Mormon Flats. Any one of those boulders or clumps of pine or juniper at the upper edge of timberline could conceal Trapper Joe's killer. He was probably scanning the mouth of the cave through a telescopic sight at this very moment.
To his surprise, Tommy saw nothing hostile through the filter of shimmering heat-waves. A turkey buzzard's shadow flitted across the barren rock slope as the giant scavenger bird soared on motionless wings somewhere overhead; a squirrel poked its head out of a burrow off to the left and ducked back under cover an instant later. A cicada, its song cut off by the gunshot, resumed trilling in a thicket somewhere down the slope. That activity reassured Tommy that the sniper was not on the move.
And then Tommy saw the significance in the turkey buzzard's downward spiraling. A brownish object on the naked bedrock at the edge of Timberline seemed out of place. Even before he unslung his binoculars for a look at the object, he knew what it was.
Trapper Joe's faithful hound, Roxie. The dog had scented the approach of the enemy and had charged down the mountainside to protect her master--and a rifle bullet had dropped her in her tracks. The knowledge that the loveable old hound lay down there under the punishing sunrays brought a choking sob to Tommy's throat.
K6ATX set the rifle aside and, propelling himself with knees and elbows like a swimmer doing the breast stroke, crawled over to where he had left his pack, knowing that if he stood up he would probably draw an instant bullet. From the pack he extracted his ICOM 2-AT two-meter ham rig. The time had certainly come to enlist the aid of ham radio.
Crawling back to his lookout point, Tommy extended the tubular shades to hood both lenses of his binocs, knowing that a flash of sunlight on polished optical glass would instantly betray his location to the Condor.
The Condor?
He had used the name without meaning to. Why should he have unconsciously jumped to the conclusion that his old ham radio friend had fired the shots that had dropped Roxie and Trapper Joe? Just because the old Basque had named the Condor as the rifleman, literally with his dying breath? Old Joe couldn't know for sure!
The magnified vision afforded by the binoculars actually hindered, rather than helped, K6ATX in scanning the mountain slope below for some glimpse of the sniper. Nothing moved, not even the leaves of the chaparral; the air was stagnant. But there were many shallow gullies fluting the slickrock slope, deep enough to hide the creeping body of a killer stalking closer to the cavern.
Tommy laid the glasses alongside the rifle and took his 2-meter hand-held transceiver out of its leather case. Wriggling back out of view, he extended the telescoping sections of the quarter-wave Vicorn antenna on the rig to get maximum signal gain.
Some 25 miles almost due south of Thundergust Peak, within easy 2-meter range of this Indian cave, K6ATX could make out the shimmering lavender undulations of the Santa Ynez Mountains flanking the coast, one of only two mountain ranges in North or South America with an east-west traverse.
The highest point on that purple-magenta skyline was Santa Ynez Peak, surmounted by a glass-enclosed, steel-towered Forest Service fire lookout. A mile to the left loomed the lower crown called Broadcast Peak, bristling with antennas and microwave dishes that provided outlets for television stations, fire and law enforcement transmitters, taxi companies, commercial FM radio and-riding piggyback on the antenna of Channel Three's KEY-TV--one of the Santa Bonita area's ham radio repeaters using the call sign N6ZF.
In this moment of extreme danger it was reassuring for Tommy Rockford to know that the single-watt signal from his hand-held rig could activate the Zebra Foxtrot repeater, enabling his relayed transmission to be boosted to a hefty 100 watts.
It was even more comforting to know that right this minute, down in Sheriff Ross Jackson's communications headquarters near Santa Bonita, the deputy monitoring the many available signal scanners would spot the blinking red light indicating that a ham had keyed up the N6ZF ham repeater and could be received on 147 MHz. The communications man on duty had been specially briefed to be on the alert for any signal coming from K6ATX out in the Back Country, knowing that the teenager would not break radio silence except in cases of extreme emergency.
Well, the emergency couldn't get much worse--although K6ATX had hoped that his first outgoing signal would be to summon a helicopter and a SWAT team to come and take the would-be space shuttle saboteur into custody, verifying Captain Logan's theories.
Sweating profusely, more from stress than the July heat--for it was actually a comfortable sixty degrees in the shade of the cavern mouth--K6ATX switched on his 2-meter rig and checked the thumbwheel dial to make certain it was set on the repeater's input frequency of 147.600 MHz. The rig's microcircuitry would automatically be receiving the repeater's transmissions on its output frequency of 147 MHz.
The necessary tuning adjustments made, Tommy Rockford pressed the transmit switch with his thumb, then released it, sending a laser-straight impulse of radio frequency toward the repeater. ln a matter of a second or two he should hear the thunk! sound telling him he had keyed up N6ZF and could send his Mayday message.
But an instant before the thunk! could come, K6ATX switched off his 2-meter rig. What was he thinking of? To break radio silence, now of all times, might be suicidal! If the rifleman was the Condor--and Tommy could not afford to reject any possibilities--he might be carrying a battery-powered scanner, enabling him to investigate any signal that appeared on the band.
It would be foolhardy for K6ATX to communicate with Santa Bonita on the easily-monitored 2-meter channels to which his unknown enemy might be listening.
A sudden faint noise reached his ears. It sounded like the buzz of a small motorcycle engine in the distance. Holstering his useless transceiver, Tommy returned to his lookout point and made another binocular scan of the brushy slope below timberline.
This time, a glint of sun on moving metal drew his attention to the northwest. He thumbed the glasses into focus just in time to catch sight of a man in a wide-brimmed straw hat, mounted on a three-wheeled Honda trail bike, threading his way out of sight downhill behind a hedge of ground-hugging juniper far below. The flash of light that had drawn Tommy's attention had come from the barrel of a rifle slung across the bike rider's shoulder--the rifle that had taken Roxie's and Joe Loustalot's lives.
The trail bike's engine noise faded on the sweltering air. The figure did not reappear during the ten minutes Tommy kept the juniper hedge under surveillance. His retinas retained a fleeting memory of the man's broad-brimmed straw hat, a dot of red around the neck area which was probably a bandanna--and the cheering fact that the rifleman was headed downhill and away, not toward, his potential target in the Indian cave. That hinted at something--
"Could it be possible," Tommy Rockford asked himself, "that he saw Trapper Joe leading his horse up to this cave--but didn't know I had arrived later? Could it be possible that the Cond--that the killer is withdrawing without knowing I'm up here?"
The sun was like a swollen drop of blood just entering the thousand-foot smog layer that overhung Vanderhoff Air Force Base and the coastline. It would soon be dusk, under the cover of which Tommy Rockford intended to work his way around to the western face of Thundergust Peak, so that he could resume his hunt for a hidden radio station with tomorrow's first light.
Tomorrow was the last day available to accomplish his mission. Day after tomorrow would be forever too late. A multi-million-dollar space shuttle, with its unknown payload of vast importance to the country's welfare, to say nothing of the seven precious lives of the crew aboard Thursday's launch, now hung in the balance.
Remembering Sheriff Jackson's orders, K6ATX got his autofocus Nikon out of his pack and began taking flash shots that might be used in evidence against a cold-blood killer later on: several different angle shots of the dead trapper lying sprawled on the sandy floor of the cave, a long shot showing the scene outside the cave that Trapper Joe had been looking at just before the sniper's bullet knocked him down, with Roxie's limp carcass a barely distinguishable dot on the photo negative.
K6ATX also photographed close-ups of the mysterious tire tracks in the sand. In an investigation into the existence of a terrorist radio transmitter here in the high Back Country of Santa Barbara County, those tracks might prove to be of vital importance.
His photography concluded, Tommy slung the camera's carrying strap around his neck and walked over to where the old Basque's mare was standing patiently in the shadows, ground-hitched to a stone. Esprit whickered a plaintive greeting, as if aware that she had lost her canine companion and her master of many years.
"I'm going to turn you loose, old girl," Tommy whispered. "I know you can find your way back to Jawbone Springs and your home stable. In case I don't get off this mountain alive, I'm hoping that some ranger will drop by the tin-can shack and find you--along with the message I'm going to tie to your bridle..."
Tommy led the mare over to stand beside her master's body.
The faithful old horse nuzzled the dead man's bearded face as Tommy went through the pockets of his friend's shirt and Levis. He found only tobacco, a jackknife and a bandanna, but no wallet or identification papers of any kind. A matchbook in a shirt pocket provided Tommy with something to scribble a message on, using his own ball-point pen:
THIS MARE BELONGS TO TRAPPER JOE LOUSTALOT OF JAWBONE SPRINGS. MURDERED TUES JULY 21. BODY IN CAVE ABOVE TIMBERLINE S.E. FACE THUNDERGUST PEAK QUARTER MILE NORTH OF ASPHALTA CREEK.--T. ROCKFORD, RADIO K6ATX.
Tommy secured the matchbook cover tightly to Esprit's bridle, tying it in place with a buckskin thong he cut from a rosette on the leather skirting of Trapper Joe's saddle. He would leave the saddle in the cave. He had no concern over Esprit's ability to take care of herself, but whether human eyes would ever find his message Tommy had no way of knowing.
Tommy swatted Esprit's rump with his Dodger cap and saw the wise old mare trot out into the open. The mare turned, lowering her head to sniff the dead body of her murdered owner for a few moments. Then she moved away, sized up the landscape as if to get her bearings, and cantered off downhill toward the southwest, doubtlessly retracing the route Trapper Joe had taken in coming up here to the cave.
By moonrise, Esprit should be back in her home stall at Jawbone Springs; horses had an unerring homing instinct. She could survive indefinitely on the supply of hay in the barn, with a spring nearby.
Staring down at Trapper Joe's corpse, K6ATX choked out, "Old friend, I've got to leave here as soon as it gets dark. I've got to protect you from...animals and things. And in a day or two, I'll be back to get you, that's a promise. I'll see that you get a Christian burial in some Catholic cemetery..."
Digging a grave in the rock floor of the cave would be impossible, even if he had a pick and shovel. But by using the crown of Trapper Joe's Mexican sombrero for a scoop, he could carry the fine blowsand that carpeted the floor of the cavern, enough to heap a mound of earth over Joe's corpse. This, he figured, could be covered with rocks to discourage any scavenging animals.
Plenty of rocks were available without going outside. Within two days, he hoped to come back and load Trapper Joe's remains onto a coroner's helicopter. He wondered if the old man had any living relatives back in the old country who should be notified...
It took Tommy Rockford the better part of an hour to cover Loustalot's still form with a plastic ground sheet from his bedroll, then carry hatload after hatload of sand to protect the body. While scooping up sand, Tommy saw several evidences that an electronics technician had been to this cave ahead of him. Scraps of coaxial cable, such as would feed a microwave dish. Bits of black rubber tape for splicing cable. A Philips screwdriver, carelessly dropped from a tool kit and covered with sand. Insulation stripped from copper wires...
Why would anyone set up a satellite dish under the ceiling of a cavern in a mountainside, with no view of the sky? But as Trapper Joe had described it, the dish was aimed in a nearly level southwesterly direction, pointed outside the mouth of the cave. And southwesterly from Thundergust Peak lay the lower end of Vanderhoff Air Force Base-and Slick Six, the launch complex, where less than 48 hours from now the shuttle Conquistador was scheduled for lift-off. The realization that time was fast running out on him was beginning to burden K6ATX's spirit like a tangible weight.
Every few minutes Tommy scanned the lower slopes of Thundergust Peak, taking no chances of having Trapper Joe's killer creep up on him by surprise. A glint of sunset light on the landscape below proved to be the window of a stone-walled homestead cabin several miles away on Mormon Flat, the mesa extending westward from the foot of the peak.
That would be Casa Piedra on the old Blakeley homestead. Some four months ago Trapper Joe had been puzzled to find a shiny new padlock on the cabin door. Why was it there? The door opened onto an abandoned roofless room, used only by hunters for overnight camps to get out of the wind.
Before tomorrow's sundown, Tommy hoped to be checking out Casa Piedra for himself. The transmitting antenna that Trapper Joe had seen inside this Indian cave could easily have been towed by motor scooter down to Mormon Flat-in fact, Loustalot had reported seeing tire tracks at Casa Piedra similar to those here in the cavern, imprinted in a light crust of snow.
Casa Piedra certainly had a better line of sight to Vanderhoff Air Force Base than did Thundergust Peak, assuming the dish was intended as a key component in a plot to destroy Conquistador.
Night was closing in like a blue-black veil before Tommy Rockford finished covering Trapper Joe's bier with a layer of loose stones. It was time to leave this cave.
K6ATX took a final flash photo of the macabre scene. Then he buckled on his pack, picked up Joe's rifle, and stepped out under the stars, heading northward around the curve of the peak. He would pick out tonight's camp by starlight, well away from this grotto of death. The cool night breeze, bearing the salty tang of the distant ocean to his nostrils, felt like soothing strokes on his fevered cheek.
K6ATX had never seen so many stars. One, moving too slowly to be a meteor and too fast to be a jet liner, traced the passage of a man-made satellite across the froth clouds of the Milky Way, from skyline to skyline. Who knows? Tommy Rockford wondered. Maybe it was one of ham radio's OSCAR satellites...
He took his eyes off the heavens, knowing from now on he had to pay strict attention to where he was walking. To stumble into a fissure in this mountain wall could mean plunging to a grisly death in a grave too deep and remote for any man to ever find...

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Lair of the Condor

The following dawn, Tommy Rockford crawled stiffly from his sleeping bag just as the rising sun kindled the stony crest of Thundergust Peak aflame with golden light, the western half of the mountain remaining in blue-black silhouette.
He had camped in a sheltered thicket just below the timberline, so as to be protected from discovery as well as from exposure to the savage winds that punished Thundergust Peak during the night.
K6ATX awoke to the sickening realization that time had about run out on him. This was 0600 hours, Wednesday, July 22. Launch day minus one. Only 26 short hours before the Conquistador was scheduled to lift off from Vanderhoff's Slick Six launching pad, 26 hours in which to locate a saboteur's radio station and put it and its operator out of commission in time to save the shuttle from destruction.
How could he possibly accomplish such an overwhelming assignment in the 14 daylight hours remaining at his disposal today? What was he doing, mired in this impossible mess? Why had he volunteered for this mad quest to begin with?
He knew the answers, of course. Patriotic considerations aside, he felt an obligation to clear the Condor's name, a sense of loyalty to a brother radio ham. But was the loyalty misplaced? Was the Condor also an enemy agent? There were other reasons. The need to carry on for the martyred Captain Jerry Logan and Sergeant Humphries; otherwise, they had died in vain. And now he could add Trapper Joe Loustalot to that list of victims.
Thinking of Trapper Joe reminded him that he had a radio call to make to Ross Jackson's office. His call on two meters was answered instantly by a deputy sheriff in the radio room in Santa Bonita.
K6ATX asked, "Mouse requesting ballistics report on bullet sent by chopper yesterday."
"Results negative. Bullet not fired from same weapon that killed hang-glider pilot."
A vast sense of relief flooded through Tommy Rockford as he answered, "Keep monitoring the freq during the day. Over and out."
"Roger, Cat standing by, Ross sends his 73. He went home today. By home, I mean he's back at his office."
K6ATX felt like shouting for joy. The ballistics test made on the .30-30 slug Tommy had pried out of the rotten stump down in Jawbone Canyon the other night was positive proof that Trapper Joe's rifle had not been used to shoot Beau Humphries out of the sky. That vindicated the faith Tommy had always had in the old Basque sheepherder's integrity. Now, if he could do as much to clear the Condor's good name...
At Gaviota Beach a week ago, K6ATX at first had been inclined to agree with Logan's superiors that the idea of a terrorist radio signal being responsible for the unexplained destruction of four Vanderhoff missiles inside of six months was at best a far-fetched one. But subsequent events had put him on Logan's side, otherwise he would not find himself preparing breakfast in this desolate spot inside a federally restricted zone. It was also significant that Logan's views had won the belief and concern of Merlin Kendall, whose engineering career would be destroyed along with the shuttle...
Too many signs supported Logan's sabotage theory. Tommy ticked them off in his head:
If Logan had not been on the track of something sinister, why had Corporal Kohl attempted to murder K6ATX by ramming the sheriff's car off the highway a week ago? Was it to keep Tommy from helping with the Back Country hang-glider reconnaissance?
Why had Captain Logan been abducted from in front of Tommy's home and in all probability taken away by an unidentified chopper? Was it because the saboteurs believed Logan was getting too close to exposing their terrorist plot?
Why had Sergeant Beau Humphries been murdered at the outset of their hang-glider search of the Thundergust Peak area? Was the fact that Humphries had met his doom in the sky over a marijuana patch merely a macabre coincidence, or was it to keep the hang-glider team from finding what they were looking for?
And why had Trapper Joe Loustalot been so adamant in ordering K6ATX to steer clear of Thundergust Peak? What secret, guilty or otherwise, had Loustalot concealed? If Joe had been an accomplice of the terrorist enemy, what reason did an unidentified assassin have to shoot the trapper as he emerged from the Indian cave?
All these violent happenings seemed to have a common denominator: an effort to keep Tommy Rockford from making any search for an unauthorized radio transmitter somewhere around the Thundergust Peak wildlife sanctuary.
Captain Logan's theory, far-fetched though it had seemed at first, was the only one that held water in light of the past week's tragic events.
K6ATX heated some of his dwindling supply of water over his tiny camp stove to make an invigorating cup of tea. The altitude slowed down the boiling process, prompting Tommy to get his 2-meter rig out of his pack. He wanted to monitor his emergency frequency to see if the ham radio repeater on Broadcast Peak was functioning-it had been down for repairs recently. If so, it would transmit its call sign in Morse code at eight-minute intervals.
Tommy had been listening three and a half minutes when he heard the familiar ID signal from N6ZF on 147 MHz. He was startled to find that he himself was the topic of conversation between the driver of an oil tanker truck northbound near Orcutt on U.S. 101 and a bedridden invalid in Carpinteria.
"You seen K6ATX's picture on the front cover of Headline News this week? Sittin' in front of his rig, grinnin' ear to ear. Some story about him helpin' find some Aztec treasure in Arizona."
"Old Tommy Rockford made a magazine cover? Hooray for him!"
The two hams went into a technical discussion concerning the digitization of analog signals, which ordinarily K6ATX would have found fascinating, but he felt obliged to switch off the ICOM 2-AT to save the batteries.
Back in the Indian cave yesterday, K6ATX would have given everything he possessed to have been able to put a Mayday call out on two meters and summon one of Ross Jackson's helicopters to his aid. Again this morning, he dared not break radio silence. That would call attention to his exposed location. There was no way of knowing what other ears might be monitoring the band to intercept just such a signal.
The hot tea, raisins, his last sandwich, and a granola bar made up his nutritious, high-energy breakfast. Tommy had no idea how many miles he might have to travel during this final day of search, or what unknown perils he faced.
Now, breakfast finished and bedroll packed, K6ATX crawled out of the thicket to reconnoiter before continuing his exploratory trek around the western face of the mountain.
He belatedly remembered Trapper Joe's hunting rifle and burrowed back to his campsite to retrieve it. He deplored having to carry so much extra weight, but somewhere out there was a sniper on a road bike, and it would be suicidal to be caught unarmed.
Emerging from a wind-ravaged stand of rare bristlecone pines, Tommy had a view of another breathtaking sunrise tinting the mountains and the western half of Santa Barbara County with a golden, wine-red light. The vista stretched off to the coastline, where the blue-green sheen of the Pacific Ocean marked the jumping-off place of the world.
It was hard to convince himself that such unearthly beauty was cloaking a threat of evil...
Tommy resumed his northward-bearing hike. The tawny bald hills beyond the valley of the Santa Maria River, over in San Luis Obispo County, lay like whales along the horizon 40 miles to the north. He wondered what would happen if he didn't find anything here on Thundergust? Where to next? This is why, he realized, we needed a motorized hang glider, so we could cover more miles of rugged terrain in an hour than I can handle in a week on foot.
Except that he didn't have a week. He now had exactly 25 hours before the shuttle launch countdown hit zero.
Tommy was working out of a tumble of sandstone boulders when some alien object caught his eye, dead ahead at the edge of another clump of timber across an expanse of naked rock.
Almost hidden inside screening trees not 50 yards away stood a shortwave radio antenna tower, aluminum girders painted green to conceal it from passing aircraft. A telescoping-type tower in common use among radio amateurs world-wide. It supported a heavy-duty rotator and a six-element, horizontally-polarized triband antenna cut for 15, 20, and 40 meters.
Higher up was a complicated Yagi antenna array for two meters, vertically polarized and capable of being oriented for work in conjunction with moonbounce or OSCAR satellites. It could yield fantastic DX with low power.
In the excitement of his discovery, K6ATX forgot caution and raced out into the open, halting only to shoot several 35mm pictures with the Nikon before reaching the base of the tower. The hams back home would be interested in those pictures! Tommy knew instinctively that this had to be the skyhook of K6IA, the elusive hermit ham, Austin Rudniki, alias the Condor.
K6ATX guessed the tower height at 40 feet; the heavy guy cables were obviously to protect it from the mountain gales that scoured the Back Country at all times of year. The guys also showed this to be a permanent installation, not a tower to be cranked down in daytime, as was often done in urban locations to placate cranky neighbors who considered antenna towers to be eyesores.
With the educated eye of the holder of an Amateur Extra Class license, Tommy Rockford scanned the roundabout area, knowing that any antenna system had to be linked to its transmitting-receiving station by some sort of communication line, either above or below ground; either open wire or coax cable.
At the base of this radio tower, heavy coax cable coming out of the ground indicated the type of transmission line used to feed the RF into the radiators high overhead. There were no signs or plaques to indicate that this installation was maintained by the federal government or any county police or fire agency, nor was it fenced off to keep vandals away.
Kneeling at the base of the tower, Tommy scraped away soil where the coax cable emerged from underground, exposing enough cable to determine that it led off at a downhill northwesterly angle from the tower. How far it continued in that direction he would have no way of knowing short of digging up the cable, and he had no time for that chore. But a radio station had to be somewhere fairly close by...
Tommy headed down the slope to the northwest, into the trees, searching with a Boy Scout's zeal for some trace of a path. He reached a ledge with a 20-foot drop-off that forced him to detour to his right.
He had not followed the rim 50 yards when he came to the beetling overhang of a canyon that gashed the flank of Thundergust Peak as if it had been scratched out of the rock by some giant bear's claw, one of scores of eroded canyons that fluted the west face of the peak. He saw no sign of coaxial cable threading down the rocky slope below.
The canyon was perhaps 50 feet deep, oriented due west to east, the level bottom matted with cotton wood and laurel, indicating a water course during rainy season. It was shadowy down there, the sun's rays having not yet penetrated the gloomy depths.
As his eyes became accustomed to the dim light, Tommy Rockford suddenly detected an alien shape. A longish silver-colored object that resembled a giant sword blade, giving off a corroded metallic gleam as it seemed to lie across the treetops below. Then he recognized that bladelike object.
It was the sheared-off starboard wing of a wrecked aircraft! K6ATX felt his heart pick up tempo. Near the tip of the wing, beyond the missing aileron on the trailing edge of the airfoil, was the half-century-old insignia of the Army Air Corps, predecessor in World War Two to the modern Air Force, a red disk inside a five-pointed white star inside a blue circle. He took a picture of the wreckage to show to the proper aviation authorities when he got back to Santa Bonita, in case they were unaware of this wreckage.
This was not the first airplane debris Tommy had stumbled across during his past explorations of the rugged Back Country. During the World War II years when the U.S. Marine Corps had operated a Naval Air Training Station at Goleta, many a rookie pilot had crashed his trainer in these hills. Not all of them had parachuted to safety to hike out and fly another day.
Across the canyon from the shattered wing, deeper in the foliage of the cottonwoods lining some dry creekbed, K6ATX dimly made out a twin long tapering knife-blade shape tilted toward the sky. The matching portside wing. This one had the engine still on its mount, with three bent and twisted propeller blades projecting from the hub. The motor and prop had been torn off the wing directly below Tommy's location on the rim.
Sizing up the relative locations of the two matching aircraft wings, Tommy Rockford suddenly comprehended what had happened. A twin-engine aircraft--too large to be a trainer--had made a forced landing inside this canyon sometime in decades past, either because the pilot was flying blind in bad weather, or had run out of fuel, or perhaps windshear had knocked it out of the sky. Falling into this narrow fissure in the mountainside, the wreckage was soon covered over and hidden by screening foliage, going undiscovered by subsequent search parties.
Tommy turned his thoughts back in time to the early 1940s and tried to picture himself in the pilot's place, faced with an emergency landing in some of the roughest terrain in California. Rather than crash head-on into a forty-degree mountainside, he had taken the thousand-to-one risk of bellylanding in a soft cushion of undergrowth at the bottom of this canyon. But as the cliff walls narrowed, the wings of the ship had been sheared off.
Hey--if the wings are here, the fuselage has got to be a little farther along...
He broke into a trot, scrambling up the slope to follow the south rim of the shallow canyon. He had not gone a hundred feet before he caught sight of the battered but virtually intact body of the airplane that belonged to the two shattered wings.
Tommy recognized it instantly as a two-engined transport built by Douglas in the early 1940s, known as a C-47 in the Army, or as a DC-3 to civilians. The Model T of airliners, it was the predecessor of the 707s and 747s and DC-lOs and L-101 Is, the whole line of jumbo jets leading up to the supersonic Concorde.
The grand old DC-3, workhorse of the military in a long-gone war, was still making commercial flights in remote parts of the world.
"This plane," K6ATX whispered, "must be the one flown by the Condor's father..."
Tommy stumbled forward, moving parallel to the wreckage, taking Kodachrome shots as he went. The aluminum skin of the fuselage still retained some of its silvery metallic luster. Despite all the decades of exposure to sun, wind, snow and rain, the vertical rudder and stabilizer were still intact below the treetops level, although the rest of the tail assembly had been shorn off in the emergency landing.
Tommy was amazed to see how little damage the long, cigar-shaped cabin of the downed plane had suffered. Even the glass in the rows of portholes was intact. The forward emergency door still hung open, as if the crew had exited the plane within minutes of its landing. The fuselage lay in an almost level position.
Tommy knew that Ross Jackson had a detailed map in his office, with glass-headed thumbtacks showing the location of scores of wartime military plane wrecks in Santa Barbara County. The map came in handy whenever the wreckage of one of them was rediscovered and reported as a "new" wreck to the Civil Air Patrol.
All the known wrecks had been left where they were, but had been painted with yellow Xs so that duplicate search-and-rescue operations could be avoided. This DC-3, Tommy noted, had not been branded with a yellow X, which meant it had not yet been discovered, reported and logged.
Working his way toward the front of the wreckage, Tommy saw that the sheer cliff forming the box end of the canyon had halted the emergency landing. It was obvious the crew had not survived what otherwise must have been a fantastically skillful landing in such a narrow fissure. The cockpit was an accordian-pleated, crumpled mass of twisted metal jammed against and into the sheer dead end of the canyon. The impact had buckled the spine of the fuselage slightly amidships, but the general structure of the aircraft was remarkably free of damage.
The sun had climbed to where a shaft of light speared over the rimrock, and its reflected glare enabled Tommy Rockford to see the dim outlines of an Esquire Magazine "Petty Girl" cartoon of a movie starlet in a bikini that had been painted on the fuselage just aft of the crushed cockpit, the green swimsuit and pink flesh tones faded and scaling. In heavy black and gold letters above the cartoon were the words LUCKY LADY.
This confirmed his hunch that the plane had been the one piloted in 1943 by the Condor's young Marine aviator father! Long decades after the war, this wreckage had been the goal of his son's search. The son who had the ham radio call sign K6IA, the devoted son who had hunted for his father's plane out here in the trackless badlands and, having found it, had chosen to live out his life in these lonely surroundings, rather than return to his professional job with NASA.
The aircraft, Tommy knew, had to be the lair of the Condor! But whether the Condor was a ham radio friend or a dangerous foe was a question K6ATX could not honestly answer this morning--even though his life might depend on it.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Ghosts of an Old War

The only sounds to break the summer silence were a faint chuckle of water gurgling over a pebbly bed below the belly of the wrecked DC-3, and the trill of a tree frog somewhere down-canyon. K6ATX hunkered down on the rimrock to size up the situation and decide what to do next. Was the Condor waiting for him to descend into the canyon? Was Lucky Lady a death trap?
Tommy freed himself of the encumbering backpack and rifle, ears straining to pick up any alien noise that would indicate that the Condor was moving around the interior of the wrecked plane. So far, he was gambling his own safety, not sure whether the Condor was a ham friend--whose voice he had never heard or whose face he had never seen--or a man whom Trapper Joe had branded as a killer with his last breath.
Seeing no path or ladder by which to descend to the Lucky Lady, Tommy rummaged in his pack for the coil of light nylon rope he always carried when he explored the Back Country. It would be an easy matter for someone with his hardrock climbing experience to rappel himself down the face of the cliff, but during his descent he would be without defenses, extremely vulnerable to attack from any quarter.
The total silence surrounding the wrecked plane was no guarantee that the Condor was not waiting like a spider in its web. That the Condor's mysterious ham station was located inside the plane was no longer a matter of speculation now; Tommy's searching eyes soon caught sight of the double black line of coaxial cables corning to the surface a few feet to his left, umbilical cords leading to feed-through connectors mounted on the curved top of the fuselage toward the tail section, transmission lines that led to the 2-meter and 15-20-40-meter antennas mounted on the 40-foot aluminum tower close by on the forested mountainside.
An even more significant item of electronic gear was a microwave dish mounted on the crumpled nose of the Lucky Lady--a parabolic dish oriented southwest ward. In that direction lay the launch pad where Conquistador was poised for take-off...
The all-pervading sense that he had to make every minute count on this last day of grace prompted Tommy's decision to enter the canyon at once, gambling that it was deserted. The sniper who had shot down Trapper Joe at long range yesterday had last been seen heading down Thundergust Peak on a trail bike, in a westerly direction rather than northerly toward the Lucky Lady's canyon.
Secreting his backpack and bedroll in the underbrush, Tommy strapped Loustalot's Winchester rifle over his back by means of its leather sling, balancing its weight as carefully as he could so as not to impede his descent into the canyon. He secured the nylon rope to a tree trunk near the rim and tossed the coil over the edge, noting that the 50-foot rope gave him plenty to spare.
After a final five minutes of straining his eyes and ears for any sign that a human lurked below, K6ATX adjusted the rope around his body and left leg, eased himself with his elbows over the brink of the cliff, and began rappeling down the vertical face, bouncing his boot toes off the rock wall as he slid down the rope.
Within moments he had reached the bottom of the cliff safely and was picking his way through a jungle of fernbrake in the direction of the open door of the wrecked plane.
On closer inspection he determined that the aircraft was resting on the ground for the forward half of its length, the running gear collapsed under it; while the tail section and rear third of the fuselage were supported off the ground by broken tree limbs, resulting in the floor of the plane being roughly level.
Pulse racing with suspense, K6ATX worked his way through the ferns with infinite care so as not to make a sound. When he reached a cleared space running alongside the wreckage-obviously a pathway made by human hands and recently used-he was arrested by the discovery of three white-painted wooden crosses under the belly of the plane amidships.
Drawing nearer, K6ATX saw where names and dates had been carved into the crosspieces of the grave markers. Epitaphs identifying the last resting places of the pilot and two crew members who had flown the misnamed Lucky Lady to her doom over 40 years ago:

MAJ AUSTIN RUDNIKI SR. USMC--PILOT
Born Prosser Wash 1909

LT ROBERT DAVID SAFFOLD USMC--CO-PILOT
Born Ross Calif 1913
M/SGT SASHA IRVINE--NAVIGATOR
Born Casper Wyo 1922
LOYAL CREW OF THE "LUCKY LADY"
Died Here April 19 1943
In the Service of Their Country

Tears misted K6ATX's eyes as he visualized what had gone into creating these three graves with their primitive markers. After years of loving search, the orphaned son who later became known in ham radio as the Condor had finally located the wreckage of his father's plane. The crumpled nose of the DC-3 told Tommy that the Condor had found only the shattered skeletons of his father, co-pilot and flight engineer inside that crushed cockpit. He had dug three graves alongside the Lucky Lady and had given the three skeletons a dignified burial...and had chosen to spend the rest of his life with three ghosts of an old war who had met their untimely end at this very spot.
At least the three Marine aviators had been spared cremation; the fact that the wings containing the fuel tanks had sheared off a hundred yards behind the spot where the plane had skidded to rest against the dead end cliff explained the lack of an explosion at the end. It also pointed to the possibility that the Lucky Lady may have had empty fuel tanks when she crash-landed.
Tommy photographed the three graves, using fill-in flash. Some day the War Department might be able to forward prints to the next of kin of the deceased, giving them some measure of comfort in knowing their loved ones were not listed forever as missing and had been given decent Christian burials.
Unslinging the hunting rifle and making sure a shell was enchambered in the breech, K6ATX crept stealthily along the path beside the DC-3 to the foot of a ramp leading to the threshold of the open door. The sandy path showed footprints that could have been made within the hour. Tracks of the Condor himself...
Tommy climbed the cleated ramp as quietly as possible and stepped inside the cabin-and stopped in amazement.
The Condor had converted the wrecked DC-3 into a residence. To the right was the galley. A skillet and a coffee pot were on the burners of a propane-fueled range. How, Tommy wondered, did the Condor recharge his propane tank? Or, for that matter, where did he get the food it would take to sustain life during the years he had lived in seclusion here on Thundergust Peak?
Forward of the galley was the twisted bulkhead, beyond which was the crumpled-flat cockpit where the three-man crew had died.
Turning left, Tommy was looking down the aisle of what would be the passenger cabin of a commercial air liner. There the resemblance ended. The seats had probably been removed during wartime, since the Lucky Lady had often been used to transport freight as well as troops. The luggage racks had been converted to bookcases; remembering past QSOs with the Condor, who seemed to have a limitless supply of knowledge on an infinite variety of subjects, K6ATX was not surprised to see that his ham radio friend had a large library.
The next thing to meet Tommy's eye was an Army cot on which rested an eiderdown sleeping bag, pulled inside out to air. Across the hull from the bed was a low table made of scrap metal, on which rested a color television with a 12-inch screen. Another question: where did the Condor get the electric power to run his boob tube, to say nothing of his thousand-watt amateur radio station?
An RG-8 coaxial cable led from the TV to a hole in the roof. Somewhere topside, perhaps even on the antenna tower Tommy had discovered earlier, would be a TV antenna with a rotator so the Yagi elements could be oriented toward KEY-TV, the Channel 3 transmitter on Broadcast Peak near Santa Bonita, or possibly KCOY, the Channel 12 station out of Santa Maria, its transmitter located line-of-sight on Tepesquet Peak some 15 miles from Thundergust.
Tommy grinned to himself. At least the Condor's isolated hermitage was not without such perks of modern civilization as soap operas, Super Bowls, talk shows, political speeches and prime time sitcoms. Whether blessing or curse depended on individual tastes. Tommy would bet that the Condor preferred PBS programming.
Tommy Rockford took more pictures of this remarkable scene, not without a twinge of guilt that he was invading another man's privacy, trespassing where he had no business. But until he had positive proof that his ham radio friend was not involved in a terrorist sabotage plot against NASA, Tommy would classify his trespassing as justifiable investigation.
Beyond the living quarters section of the passenger cabin was a bulkhead that the Condor had apparently constructed out of sheet aluminum cannibalized from other parts of the plane, dividing the fuselage into two compartments. A narrow door led to the after section. Impelled by a curiosity he could not control, Tommy Rockford approached the door, tested the knob, found it unlocked, and opened it.
The rear half of the fuselage was in semi-darkness; blackout curtains had been pulled over the cabin windows on either side. Ducking low so as to get his six-foot height under the lintel, K6ATX entered the rear compartment, letting his eyes adjust to the dim light.
Curiosity got the better of him and he took out his pocket flashlight. The instant he thumbed it on and sent the beam scanning the room, a gasp of awed excitement escaped his lips.
This was an elaborate radio station, the equal of which he had never seen outside the advanced electronics laboratories at Caltech. Racks of equipment stood to left and right, bristling with more knobs and switches and meters than the instrument panel of a Boeing 747.
K6ATX's educated glance took a quick inventory. A slow-scan television monitor, a late-model Apple computer, hooked up to state-of-the-art RTTY, or radioteletype, equipment. Antenna tuners, antenna rotator controls, power supplies for various installations, VHP and UHF scanners, the semiautomatic "bug"and, strangely enough, an electronic keyer. The ham gear seemed endless.
The Condor had separate transmitters and receivers for 10, 15, 20, 40, 80, and 160 meters. Gadgets to measure the standing wave ratios of his skyhooks; oscilloscopes for running myriads of tests; panels full of instrumentation Tommy couldn't even identify, some commercially bought, others obviously homebrew.
Tens of thousands of dollars worth of the latest in ham gear, hidden away in the tail section of a wrecked airplane of World War II vintage, deep in the throat of an unnamed canyon on the side of a mountain peak that was located in a wilderness area where such an installation had to be illegal! How incredible could you get?
Tommy groped past the banks of radio equipment to a rear exit. He noticed power cables leading through the bulkhead that screened off what would have been the restrooms of a modern commercial air liner. But this door opened on the rear emergency hatch of the DC-3. Unlatching it, Tommy saw where the power cables led from Station K6IA to a piece of machinery half-hidden in the deep shadows of the plane. His flashlight beam gave him a quick explanation of where the Condor got his electrical power: a heavy-duty generator run by a gasoline engine, mounted on a rubber-tired vehicle of some sort for portability.
This brought up still another puzzling question. It took electricity to power a ham station or a refrigerator or energize a TV set, power which this generator provided. But it took gasoline to operate the generator. How could the Condor transport gasoline to this remote spot on Thundergust Peak? No one knew better than Tommy how difficult it was to access this federal Wildlife Sanctuary.
Tommy closed and latched the emergency exit door and reentered the Condor's radio room, taking flash shots until his roll of film was within two frames of full exposure. Some day, he hoped he could sit at the operating bench of this incredible ham station with the Condor and get a first-hand demonstration of K6IA's incomparable Morse code fist. Or had injury or disease forever silenced the Condor's CW key, as he had hinted to the Brasspounder's Bunch?
K6ATX left the hamshack and headed toward the tail section of the plane. The Condor used this space for storage. On either side of a narrow aisle were countless boxes stacked in neat array. Canned goods of all kinds, he noticed, and two large freezers that he found stocked with beef, frozen eggs, and other perishables, food enough to keep a man feasting through a long snowbound winter.
He could not tarry here, fascinating though it was to explore the infinite wonders that the Lucky Lady contained. Except for the parabolic dish mounted on the roof of the plane, he had seen nothing that tied in with equipment designed to beam radio QRM to detonate a self-destruct mechanism on a space shuttle rocket.
There was no way of knowing why the Condor was absent. He could well be on a shopping trek to Los Olivos, in which case he would be away for two or three days. Meanwhile, the precious hours of this final day were ticking away rapidly. Tommy consulted his watch and saw that his 26 precious hours had already dwindled to 21, and he was no closer to locating the QTH of Captain Logan's suspected saboteur than he had ever been.
Tommy had returned to the passenger compartment aisle when he felt a strange sensation transmitted through his boot soles. Had he imagined it, or had the aluminum-framed fuselage tilted ever so slightly, as might happen with the weight of someone entering the emergency door in the tail section behind him? You could feel that shift of weight in a small boat at sea, why not an aircraft?
Tommy Rockford, covered with sweat, unslung the rifle from his shoulder, thumb earing the knurled hammer back to full cock, forefinger sliding through the trigger guard. He froze in a half-crouched position, unable to account for the slight rocking motion in the metal floor plates underfoot.
He crept back toward the bulkhead dividing the ham station from the passenger compartment. When he was within arm's length of the closed door, something stopped him in his tracks. The brass handle of the door was turning ever so slowly! Someone was twisting the knob from the inside! That could not be his imagination!
A quick step forward and to the left, and K6ATX was behind the hamshack door when, inch by inch, it swung slowly open. Tommy knew he was invisible to anyone standing inside. He could sense a presence; he thought he heard an intake of breath.
Then K6ATX started violently as a low-pitched voice snarled hoarsely from the inky blackness beyond the open doorway:
"Who's out there? What are you after?"
Tommy froze, his tongue and the roof of his mouth as dry as cotton. His vocal chords seemed paralyzed.
The voice sounded vaguely familiar, but could it be his old friend the Condor? He had never heard the Condor speak over the air; they had communicated only in Morse code.
"Speak up!" came the voice, sharpened with anger now. "I know you're in there, I watched you slide down the cliff and sneak in, and I waited to see what you were up to. Who are you and why are you trespassing in my home?"
His "home"! This, then, was the voice of the elusive Condor.
K6ATX crowded his body closer to the bulkhead, knuckles whitening as he gripped the Winchester. In this cramped position he couldn't have used the rifle if he had wanted to.
"I--I'm Tommy Rockford!" the teenager called out. "King Six Alpha Tango X-ray. Are you--K6 Itchy Alligator? The Condor?"
There was a pause. "Who else did you think you would find here? If you are really Tommy Rockford, you know me as the Condor, yes. If we are supposed to be buddy-buddy in radio, why are you carrying that rifle?"
K6ATX gave out with a burst of hollow-sounding nervous laughter.
"Condor, old friend, the ham club in Santa Bonita was getting worried about you, after you dropped out of the Brasspounder's Bunch. They sent me over to find out how bad you were injured."
From the darkness of the hamshack came a snort of disgust. "How very charitable of you--especially when you knew I did not welcome visitors, whatever the pretext!...How do I know you are K6ATX? You could be one of those marijuana farmers, coming here to kill me--"
K6ATX tried to come up with another laugh. "Cool it, Condor, old buddy! You know I'm on your side! Wait a minute, I have my ham ticket in my wallet proving I'm K6ATX--I'll toss it in to you--"
"Don't move--hold it as you are!" came the muffled order from the darkness. "Tommy, I know exactly where you are crouching, behind this door. A door that is not made of armor plate, but of flimsy sheet metal. At this moment I have a .44 Magnum pointed squarely at your midsection. I would advise you to toss that rifle of yours out onto the aisle where I can see it, or I will blow you away at the count of five. One...two..."
K6ATX found his voice with difficulty. "OK, Condor, relax. Hold your fire. Here--here comes the rifle."
As he spoke, Tommy rested the butt plate of the Winchester stock on the floor and carefully slid the weapon across the metal aisle to where it could be seen from inside the hamshack.
"All right," the voice continued. "I hope you are carrying proof that you are indeed K6ATX. Who else is with you? And where are they?"
"I'm alone, Condor. I almost always hike solo."
A slight pause, then: "OK, now put your hands on top of your head. Back out away from that door where I can get a good look at you. So far, I give you the status of a burglar."
Tommy laced his hands together and placed his palms over his Dodger cap. Stepping out into the aisle of the passenger cab, for the first time he had a shadowy view of the man behind the voice.
He was surprised that the Condor was so tall, too tall to get through the door without bending over. He was dressed for hot weather, in a beige golf shirt and khaki shorts. He stood in a half-crouch, elbows hugged to his ribcage to help steady the heavy-barreled revolver he was clutching in both hands, police academy style, aimed at Tommy's midriff. His head and shoulders were out of Tommy's view beyond the low doorway.
"So you are the Condor!" K6ATX said hollowly. "You have no idea how many hams would like to meet you in person. You have the best fist of anybody on the air, in my opin--"
Tommy broke off, his cheeks blanching as the man stooped to clear the door lintel and stepped forward into view.
If he was the Condor, he was also Merlin Kendall.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Tools of Terrorism

Kendall--leading a double life as the Condor? Was this the man K6ATX had first met a week ago at Gaviota Beach? He had claimed to be a trouble-shooting radio engineer working on a government defense contract for Aerospace Computer Corporation of Utah.
Merlin Kendall stepped forward to halt in front of Tommy. He held a big-bore Magnum handgun at belt level.
"Turn your back," he ordered brusquely.
K6ATX did so. He was still in a state of profound shock at the revelation of his captor's identity. He felt Kendall's hands giving him a quick pat-down, with the practiced skill of a police officer frisking a suspect for a knife or pistol.
Tommy's heart sank as he felt Kendall unclip the 2-meter radio transceiver from his belt. That meant Tommy no longer had a lifeline to the outside world. He felt the dismay of an aviator without a parachute, a swimmer in mid-ocean without a life preserver. He felt an even deeper despair when Kendall dropped the ICOM rig on the floor and stamped it under his heel several times, rendering it into a flattened pile of wires and shattered plastic.
Next thing to be confiscated was the little L35AF camera under Tommy's shirt. Kendall unlooped the carrying strap from around Tommy's neck and set the camera aside on top of one of the food freezers while he continued his frisking operation. The Swiss army knife, wallet and loose change joined the camera on the freezer.
"Now you're clean," Kendall said, his voice registering relief and satisfaction. "Walk straight ahead to the galley. You and I have a lot of things to discuss, Tommy, before I--dispose of you."
The sinister implications of Kendall's last words made Tommy's stomach constrict with pure unalloyed terror. Helpless with a gun prodding his back, he headed up the long aisle to where bright daylight was pouring in through the side doorway.
"Slide into that seat," Kendall ordered, motioning to a bench behind a little fold-down table, "so I can keep an eye on you while you explain why you are trespassing--in what I call my home away from home."
Resentment of Kendall's cat-and-mouse manner replaced some of the terror that was clawing at K6ATX's nerves. "You know very well why I'm here, Kendall! I'm trying to check out Captain Logan's theory that the Condor was the saboteur who was planning to destroy the shuttle. I don't see how you could be the Condor. From what I know about him from on-the-air contacts, he isn't capable of such treason as you plan to commit. The son of a patriot, a decorated war veteran in his own right, a former NASA engineer--the Condor I knew on the air was no criminal."
A cynical smile twisted Kendall's lips. He stowed the .44 Magnum under the waistband of his slacks, moved over into the galley compartment across the aisle and seated himself on a stool.
"For a kid who is smart enough to handle the tough engineering curriculum at Caltech," Kendall said, "you strike me as incredibly naive, Tommy. You can't see how I could lead a double life as Merlin Kendall and the Condor? Working for Aerospace Computer in Utah, and at the same time a practitioner of Amateur Radio, living like a hermit here on Thundergust Peak?"
"You're stretching my credulity, yes."
"How so? This is the jet age, Tommy. My executive jet can shuttle me to and from Utah in less than three hours. And wasn't my ham radio activity intermittent, non-existent for weeks? You hams took it for granted I lived up here all the time. Not so! Mostly I was flying all over the country for Aerospace Computers Corp."
"But Captain Logan knew Austin Rudniki when he worked at Vanderhoff Space Center--before he became the Condor--"
"Captain Logan is a dunce. He jumped to conclusions that Rudniki and the Condor were one and the same. He couldn't believe it when he found I was the one who would be blowing up his precious shuttle tomorrow morning. That it was I, with the assistance of Corporal Kohl, who blew up three Vanderhoff test missiles."
K6ATX could only stare, his mouth gaping incredulously.
Kendall went on, "Your reaction is as shocked and unbelieving as was poor Jerry Logan's the other night when the Crusher and I abducted him as he was leaving your house. Logan had been harboring his mad bomber right under his nose all along--and was too stupid to figure out that the Condor and I were one and the same person!"
Goose bumps tickled along Tommy Rockford's arms. He heard himself protesting "But you of all people! Your company stands to lose millions in high tech defense contracts if the Conquistador blows up tomorrow! You'll destroy your own career--"
Kendall shook his head pityingly.
"Tommy, I am but a small, underpaid cog in my corporate wheel over in Utah. But where tomorrow's sabotage is concerned, I'm the big honcho, what the media would call terrorist numero uno, and I am being compensated accordingly. With a potentate's ransom."
A faint glimmer of the truth began to form in K6ATX's mind. In some fashion he could not understand as yet, Merlin Kendall was going to profit, not lose, when Conquistador blew up tomorrow.
Kendall went on, "I guess I'll have to draw you a picture, Tommy. Tomorrow's shuttle is loaded with classified military cargo. Mostly spy satellites, capable of sending back high-resolution, infra-red day or night photographs of certain countries the United States considers a threat to our national security. Russia, Iran, Libya, Syria, China--any country in the world, you name it, Uncle Sam's all-seeing electronic eyes in the sky will be keeping an eye on them 24 hours a day, while our scientists back home try to figure out ways to defend ourselves from nuclear attack. Call it "Star Wars" or whatever. When tomorrow's shuttle launch fails--and I'll make sure it will--American defenses will be crippled for years to come, perhaps forever. Are you beginning to comprehend why very powerful forces would pay any price to someone who could prevent those satellites from being put in orbit over their air space tomorrow? Well, that 'someone' happens to be me! Thanks to my meeting a certain turncoat corporal at Vanderhoff named Konrad Kohl. You remember Kohl."
Tommy shook his head in utter confusion. "I know Corporal Kohl tried to kill me last week to keep me from helping Captain Logan. I'm just beginning to see why."
Kendall, obviously enjoying the game he was playing with
K6ATX, went on in a conversational tone, "Years ago--when Kohl was first assigned to classified work at Vanderhoff Space Center--an agent for a foreign power approached him and offered a large sum of money, a red Corvette and other goodies in return for delivering secret documents--blueprints concerning the self-destruct mechanisms incorporated into our space shuttle solid-fuel booster rockets.
"Kohl lost access to those secret files. He couldn't deliver. But he knew I was in a position to, so two years ago when I was visiting the base on a routine inspection tour, Kohl made me a proposition. I would do the complete job for the enemy agent in return for a very high fee, of which Kohl would receive a twenty percent commission for getting agent and saboteur together. When plans for the Conquistador polar launch on the west coast were first announced, I agreed to meet the agent at a hotel in Salt Lake City. And I received an offer only a fool would have rejected. Ten million American dollars, Tommy, deposited in a numbered secret bank account in Zurich. Five mil in advance, five mil on the agent's receipt of news that Conquistador exploded before clearing the Vanderhoff launch pad. Even a nerd like yourself would have yielded to temptation and accepted."
Tommy's blue eyes went hot with outrage. "You believe I would sell out my country to an enemy bent on destroying us? By the way, what country is paying you all this blood money?"
Kendall shrugged, momentarily preoccupied with preparing a pot of instant coffee on the galley stove.
"The agent who contacted me did not mention what country he represented, nor did I ask him. I couldn't care less. In fact, I would rather not know who I am working for. What difference does the country make? Tomorrow morning I will trigger the digitalized code command signal. It will activate the self-destruct mechanism I installed on the rocket boosters myself, blasting the Conquistador to smithereens and taking the launch facilities with it. In that moment I become a multimillionaire for life. And who's ever to know Aerospace Computers' Merlin Kendall was involved? I'll never return to Utah. The world will assume that Merlin Kendall was one of the victims who was vaporized in the explosion of Conquistador. Merlin Kendall will disappear from the scene-and so will the Condor. Someday the Lucky Lady will be discovered. The radio equipment will be found, and the FBI, CIA and future Air Force historians will have a riddle on their hands. They will never connect the Lucky Lady's radio equipment with the destruction of Conquistador. It will be the perfect crime."
K6ATX settled back on his bench, reaching automatically for the cup of steaming coffee Kendall placed before him. He took a gulp of the hot liquid to help restore his shattered nerves. His brain was still reeling with the enormity of Merlin Kendall's confession.
"Would you answer a few minor questions that have been nagging me, Kendall? You've admitted you kidnapped Captain Logan--"
Kendall shrugged. "Well, not me, actually. I do not stoop to perform such gross errands. The job was accomplished by my bodyguard. You saw him at Gaviota? The big hulk we call Crusher? Crusher, you remember, is a Vietnam vet who happens to double as the pilot of the company's executive jet that flies me to and from Utah and California. Crusher also pilots the rented helicopter we are using on this shuttle-bombing project, ferrying supplies and materiel to Thundergust Peak as needed. Next question?"
"The obvious one--what did Crusher do to Captain Logan after kidnapping him? I know about the chopper waiting at the airport."
Kendall stared mockingly across the rim of his coffee cup as he said, "Crusher transported the good captain back to this wilderness under cover of darkness. But Captain Logan was excess baggage. Crusher jettisoned him en route. A pity. Jerry Logan was a harmless young zealot. Unfortunately, he and Sergeant Humphries stumbled onto my basic plan to blast the space shuttle out of the sky via Morse code QRM. Logan had become more than an embarrassing nuisance to me. He had to go. If he had continued to live he might have aborted my whole effort, and ten million big ones would have gone down the drain. Unthinkable!"
Tommy pondered that grisly information, visualizing how Roxie the hound must have pulled the Air Force jacket off the mangled body of its owner who had been tossed out of a helicopter, probably while flying over Jawbone Springs Canyon the other night.
"The other person at our rendezvous at Gaviota last week, Sergeant Humphries. Did you have anything to do with his--"
"His untimely end? Yes, I did, very directly. You see, I knew where Logan had landed you and Sergeant Humphries on Saturday night. I knew you would start your motorized hang-glider sweeps from that place the following dawn. I wasn't too concerned about you, but I knew I had to get Humphries out of the way before he found out too much about my operations on Thundergust Peak. So that Sunday morning, I was waiting on the rimrock of Box Canyon, knowing he would be flying by within range of my rifle. Potting him was no great feat of marksmanship, I assure you. I would have dropped you as well, but your glider had dipped out of sight beyond the ridge."
K6ATX smiled. "You won't believe this, but I saw you making your getaway from Box Canyon after you shot Beau Humphries. You were riding the same three-wheel bike you were riding when you shot Joe Loustalot. And to think I had suspected poor old Trapper Joe might have shot Humphries--"
Kendall laughed. "Ah, yes, Trapper Joe. He was a fly in my soup for sure. I decided Trapper was beginning to be a hazard to the health of my sabotage project. A few months ago the old snoop blundered into the Indian cave farther up the peak from here. I had spent weeks carefully installing, calibrating and orienting the satellite-type microwave dish up there-the one that had transmitted the Morse code signals that blew up the other missiles at Vanderhoff, dry runs to practice for the big event tomorrow. Loustalot's making that discovery--he betrayed his visit to the cave by setting traps all over the place--forced me to change my game plan drastically and move the dish elsewhere--down to a homesteader's cabin on Mormon Flat. I finally decided Joe might know too much. This close to launch day, I couldn't afford the risk of his going to the authorities and saying that there was something fishy happening over at Thundergust Peak."
"So you shot him down in cold blood yesterday. I was hiding in the cave when it happened."
Kendall shrugged and spread his hands. "But what else could I do? My lookout, Crusher, caught sight of Joe riding his horse up the mountain and into the Indian cave. Joe frequently rested there in hot weather. But this time he would find that the electronic equipment was no longer there, and might possibly report that to somebody, like the Forest Service. I was down here making final equipment checks when Crusher alerted me on the walkie-talkie. So I cranked up my trail bike and drove up to where I could stake out the cave. I waited for Joe to come out in the cool of the evening. The next thing I knew, Trapper Joe's hunting dog was charging down the hill at me. A dangerous animal. I had to shoot the hound, even though the gunshot tipped off Trapper Joe that I was stalking the cave. I confess I didn't know you were up there with Joe."
Kendall got to his feet, set aside his coffee cup, wiped his beard carefully and said, "I think we've about covered all the bases, Tommy. As a special favor to you, considering the fact that I face the unhappy necessity of terminating your budding career in space electronics, I am going to show you exactly how I will destroy the shuttle tomorrow. Would you like to see the equipment?"
"Yes--I confess I would."
K6ATX followed Kendall to his feet. Obeying a gesture of Kendall's arm, he started back down the fuselage aisle toward the ham-shack just forward of the tail section. Midway along the passengers' cabin Kendall remembered that Tommy s .30-30 rifle was still lying on the floor in front of the hamshack door where Tommy had surrendered it.
"Hold up a second!" Kendall ordered. "Let me get that weapon."
Tommy stood aside as Kendall passed him. Beside him was the meat locker on which Kendall had placed his camera, knife, and other pocket belongings during the body search.
Acting purely on impulse, as Kendall's attention was momentarily distracted by stooping down to recover the hunting rifle, Tommy snatched up the camera and stowed it under the waistband of his Le-vis, covering the bulge with the tail of his T-shirt. The germ of an idea had occurred to him. That camera might come in handy in the next few moments. Almost immediately, he was preceding Kendall into the semi-darkness of the radio room.
"I'll have to go out and start the generator," Kendall explained. "I use a little Honda portable generator to run the radio gear, and a larger one for the lights, freezers, air conditioner, and so on."
"Speaking of the Condor," Tommy said, "you still don't think you've conned me into believing you and the Condor are the same, do you? If so, there's an easy way to prove it. Go to that radio key, fire up an oscillator and rattle off a few dits and dahs for me! The Condor had the best CW fist I ever copied--and 60 words per minute was just coasting for him."
Something like amusement kindled in Merlin Kendall's reptilian eyes. "You heard my hand on the key," he said, "the last time the Condor checked in with the Brasspounder's Bunch. That was my top speed. What was it--20 words a minute? You win, Tommy. I'm not leading a double life. I'm not the Condor."
Somehow, Kendall's admission lifted a great load off Tommy's shoulders. His faith in the Condor's character was still alive.
K6ATX nodded his understanding. "You said you had injured your wrist and couldn't check in with the Brasspounders. We bought it, hook, line, sinker, and rowboat. Pretty clever."
The defense contractor's shoulders lifted and fell. "Over five years ago," he said, "when NASA was making its first plans for a west coast polar orbit shuttle launch, I started looking for a well-concealed site for a radio installation to zap it at launch. The Crusher and I cruised over this Back Country by chopper and quite by accident, sunlight shining on metal, I stumbled across the Lucky Lady's wreckage- and saw the Condor's ham station. I met the Condor. Knowing he was an ex-NASA engineer, I had no trouble getting his cooperation in setting up what he thought was a radio station that would be used in tracking Conquistador. He swore an oath of secrecy and seemed to be delighted to be back on the NASA team again. When the test missiles blew up in recent months down at the base, he didn't seem to realize that I was always up here manning the radio equipment when the mysterious explosions occurred. Not until recently, when I was busy lining up microwave dishes aimed at Conquistador's launch pad, did he begin to suspect something. That forced me to--liquidate him."
Tommy felt a sickish sensation in the pit of his stomach.
"So you killed the Condor! And because people on the outside would wonder why he suddenly quit hamming with the CW net, you took over the key and pretended you had injured your wrist."
Kendall responded enigmatically, "The Condor is no longer a viable component of our equation. A real weirdo personality, that one, but a genius when it came to electronic engineering. I am truly sorry he became a threat to my personal security-and the success of my sabotage mission...Well, I'll go fire up the generator. You stand put. Don't get any wild ideas about escape."
Tommy momentarily found himself alone in the hamshack, as Kendall stepped out the rear exit. K6ATX was tempted to bolt for the main exit at the front end of the plane, but discarded the idea as suicidal, seeing as how Kendall was carrying a rifle at the moment--and had a sharpshooter's skill to go with it.
He heard Kendall yanking at the pull cord of the generator. The gas engine, equipped with a special muffler, hummed into action. Simultaneously, a 200-watt bulb in the ceiling of the radio room bloomed into light so bright it made Tommy squint.
Rejoining Tommy, Kendall laid the bulky Winchester under the operating bench and turned to face his guest.
"The space shuttle is due to lift off at precisely 0800 hours tomorrow," Kendall explained. "The base transmitter here--" Kendall laid a hand on a piece of equipment that K6ATX had not been able to identify earlier--"will be activated by this master control that I call the red button. Starting at 0750 hours, 10 minutes in advance of zero hour, the gear will turn itself on and flash a signal to activate a transmitting antenna at the homesteader's cabin down on Mormon Flat, the same portable dish that Joe Loustalot accidentally discovered up at the Indian cave a few months back.
"Where will I be at 0800 hours when our shuttle is scheduled to blast into orbit? I am scheduled to be seated in a concrete blockhouse near the Slick Six launch pad at Vanderhoff Air Force Base, watching the launch proceedings on a battery of television monitors with a lot of nervous NASA brass and VIP scientist types, whose careers could be adversely affected if anything should go wrong with this launch."
"Including yourself."
"Including myself. As the rep for the Aerospace Computer Corporation who installed the self-destruct apparatus in all the rocket boosters, I naturally rate a front-row seat--but I will be a no-show! Precisely at 0801 hours, just as the Conquistador is clearing the launch complex, I will be ordering Crusher to push this red button here, which will transmit the secret frequency of the self-destruct device. Blooie! Another unexplained explosion. But this one is timed to totally wreck Shuttle Launch Complex Number Six, setting the space program at Vanderhoff back by many years, and snuffing out the lives of at least seven of the country's top astronauts and space scientists. 'Murder by QRM,' I believe you called it at Gaviota? Well, tomorrow you and I will see it happen--on a television screen, of course. Consider yourself privileged. It will be the greatest TV show in history."
Tommy suppressed the feelings of revulsion that surged through him. Kendall, taking no chances of Tommy attempting a surprise assault, was standing well away from his ham radio guest, right thumb hooked over the butt of his heavy-calibered revolver.
"Your gear may be automated," Tommy said, "but what happens if a glitch occurs and the computers put the launch on hold at the last moment? Won't that deactivate the destruct apparatus?"
Admiration flickered across Kendall's bearded face.
"Smart boy, Tommy. No problem. That's why Crusher will actually push the red button. I'll be in touch by radio, and he will also be watching the public TV coverage of the launch on a portable television, here in the Lucky Lady. Which reminds me--I'd better alert Crusher to pick us up in a few minutes at the helipad for a little joy ride."
"We're flying somewhere?" Tommy asked apprehensively, wondering if Kendall was planning the same fate for him that Crusher had meted out to Captain Logan.
"We'll airlift you down to the master antenna, the one the red button activates from this remote base station tomorrow."
Kendall pulled open a drawer and took out a CB walkie-talkie with a rubber-ducky flexible antenna. He pushed the talk button and spoke into the mike, "Boss calling Helper, over."
The transceiver responded in receiving mode with the sore-throat voice that Tommy deduced must be that of Kendall's chauffeur: "Helper to Boss, go ahead."
"Arriving in ten minutes with extra passenger."
"Repeat?"
"I have a passenger."
This was the moment K6ATX had been waiting for, maybe the only opportunity for a surprise strike he would ever have, while his captor was concentrating on his radio contact.
With his left hand, K6ATX extracted the automatic-focus camera he had hidden under his shirt, thumb-snapping the power switch to "on." The strobe unit in the miniature camera popped out of the camera case with a faint click as the neon indicator emitted its pink glow, showing that the flash unit was charged and ready.
"You copy that, Helper?" Kendall was saying. "Over."
"Roger. Where'd this passenger come from?"
In that instant Tommy Rockford thrust the camera toward Kendall's face and fired the flash an inch from his eyes. For a hundredth part of a second the hamshack was limned in dazzling white light, leaving Kendall with an illusion of abnormal blackness as his retinas reacted to the high-intensity light.
Momentarily blinded, Kendall reacted with a shout of dismay. Springing back, Tommy fired a second flash shot, which caught Kendall in the act of digging the .44 Magnum from his waistband. There went the automatic rewind. It was the last of the film. Kendall spun to his right, blasting two quick shots through the forward doorway on the assumption that Tommy Rockford was fleeing the radio room in that direction.
Instead, K6ATX had flung himself through the rear exit door and out the emergency hatch, diving over the humming generator.
In the time it would take Kendall to recover his full vision, Tommy Rockford knew he had to cover a lot of ground if he were to make good his escape from this death trap, but he believed he could do what had seemed impossible only moments before.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Hunted by Helicopter

Sprinting for his life, making the most of his precious moment of advantage while Kendall was temporarily blinded, Tommy Rockford followed the beaten path under the tail assembly on the port side of the Lucky Lady.
As he burrowed into the jungle-thick undergrowth below trees that had been broken or uprooted decades ago during the crash landing, he could hear Kendall screaming orders into his radio for Crusher to come to his aid.
The Condor's well-defined footpath led down-canyon past the severed wings of the Lucky Lady. K6ATX paused, momentarily debating his chances of scaling his nylon rope as the shortest route out of this defile. While he knew Kendall's vision would be out of commission for a few moments, he decided not to risk the slow hand-over-hand ascent of the rope; Crusher might catch him climbing.
His only alternative was the Condor's exit path. Tommy knew he faced the risk of running head-on into Kendall's chauffeur-pilot, but he had no options here. He recalled Kendall telling Crusher that they would be at the helipad "in 10 minutes." That indicated a climb out of the canyon, probably followed by a short walk; a chopper's blades wouldn't have room to rotate between the confines of these sandstone scarps.
Racing at top speed, K6ATX saw the path ahead emerge from the broken swath of trees and dip down to ford a shallow trickle of water--the stream he had heard gurgling over the stony bed somewhere under the wrecked plane.
The canyon rimrocks were lowering and spreading like a funnel before him; he already had a view to the west of the sun-drenched foot of Thundergust Peak sloping down to the shelf of Mormon Flat. On the other side of the creek, Tommy almost ran into a red-and-white painted machine parked half-hidden in the brush. It was a three-wheel motor bike with heavy-duty tires, designed for rugged off-trail use--a type of vehicle that all nature-loving environmentalists deplored for the way they tore up foot trails, befouled the air with gasoline fumes, and created ruts that caused serious erosion during rainy season.
This had to be the same motorized vehicle he had seen Kendall using yesterday following the ambush murder of Joe Loustalot--and probably following the hang-glider death of Beau Humphries.
Miracle of miracles, the starter key was still in the ignition! It was a sign of Kendall's obvious self-assurance, or maybe his plan for an emergency getaway. Whatever the reason, that carelessness could well mean the difference between Tommy's survival and his being gunned down by Kendall or Crusher.
K6ATX vaulted into the saddle of the trail bike, switched on the ignition, and was rewarded by the muffled roar of the motor. His experience with such machines was limited, but he shifted into gear, gunned the throttle, and roared off down the path leading out of the widening mouth of the canyon that had concealed the wreckage of the Lucky Lady for nearly half a century.
The path emerged from the defile to blend onto naked slickrock that radiated the sun's heat like the grates of a steam boiler. Bent down over the handlebars, K6ATX swung the bike to the left, southward, his first instinct being to speed back to Joe Loustalot's homestead in Jawbone Canyon and ride Esprit out to Los Olivos and the nearest telephone. Then he remembered an obstacle in the way: the deep meandering gully carved out by Asphalta Creek. He could never cross that barrier on a low-slung motor bike.
The problem was taken out of his control moments later when the engine coughed, choked, sputtered and died. Hands shaking with tension, Tommy unscrewed the cap of the fuel tank and confirmed his worst fears: the three-wheeler was out of fuel. If he escaped it had to be on foot. Again, Kendall--perhaps growing increasingly taut--had been either too confident or too careless.
Shifting the now-useless machine into neutral, Tommy leaped off and trundled the bike over to a clump of dwarf juniper, concealing it as best he could. It would not be long, he knew, before Kendall and Crusher would be air-borne, searching for him with their helicopter; if they spotted the bright-red abandoned trail bike they would know the direction his flight had taken.
Caught on the exposed slope of Thundergust Peak, K6ATX knew he would be an easy target for Kendall's rifle. It would be physically punishing work, running in this heat, with the ground temperature burning through his shoe soles, reminding him of his recent Death Valley and Grand Canyon experiences. He was thankful that Asphalta Creek and its promise of running water was near.
Then his ears caught the ominous thump-thump-thump of a helicopter's rotor blades biting into the superheated air to gain altitude. Burrowing into the concealment of the nearest clump of chaparral and black oak, K6ATX saw Kendall's chopper lifting from a flat out-thrust of rock to the north, just beyond the canyon that concealed the Condor's QTH.
Droning like some malignant insect with a transparent Plexiglas globe for an abdomen, the chopper lifted vertically for 200 feet from the mountain slope and hovered, giving its two occupants the advantage of a fixed high-elevation observation point covering all the terrain within a five-mile radius.
Tommy Rockford tucked his legs under his chin in a fetal position to take up as little space as possible under the ceonothus scrub. When he saw the helicopter begin a half-mile-wide circle, starting out in a direction opposite from his location, he breathed a little easier.
He could use the rest. Had he not been revived by the cup of coffee Kendall gave him back at the galley of the Lucky Lady, K6ATX knew he would be fainting from heat and thirst by now. But there was no time to rest.
The helicopter suddenly went into a steep bank and headed back toward him. Had he been spotted? Kendall was probably up there with a pair of powerful binoculars, scanning every inch of ground for the radio ham whose escape now put the sabotage project at risk.
The chopper screamed past a hundred yards to the east.
Peering through the screening foliage of the tangled ceonothus bush, Tommy fixed his gaze on the dark half-oval marking the Indian cave where Trapper Joe's body lay under its protecting mound of sand and rocks.
If only Kendall had not smashed his 2-meter rig! Right now he could be sending a Mayday call to the repeater at Broadcast Peak for relay down to Sheriff Jackson's office. A call that would bring immediate rescue choppers. If nothing else, the approaching sound would send Kendall and Crusher high-tailing it out of the Back Country in their own whirlybird. But there was no point in bemoaning his lack of a radio. He would have to make do with what he had.
All was far from lost. Kendall had said he was not returning to Vanderhoff AFB to witness tomorrow morning's launch; he would be at a "stone house" where his master antenna was hidden. The only stone house in the area was Casa Piedra on the old Blakeley homestead down on Mormon Flat. That would give Tommy all night to return to the Condor's radio room in the Lucky Lady. It made his spine tingle, just thinking how he would wreck the radio gear that Kendall had assembled to destroy America's first polar-orbit space shuttle. It would get the same treatment Kendall had given his 2-meter rig, a total flattening.
Tommy found, however, that it was hard to accept the bitter reality of no radio, no available telephone, no means of communicating his predicament to the outside world short of walking out, and that would take a full day of hard hiking.
If Kendall's sabotage scheme was to be thwarted in time, it was up to him to accomplish that impossible objective on his own. Kendall was stationing himself at Casa Piedra for the final countdown to zero tomorrow, but Crusher would be guarding the Lucky Lady's radio equipment, ready to push the red button just as the space shuttle was clearing its launching gantry.
The roar of the helicopter engine was swelling again as Kendall's chopper sped straight back toward Tommy's hiding place at an elevation of fifty feet. For a sickening moment Tommy thought the two saboteurs had found him on their first pass, but the helicopter thundered overhead so close that the airwhip of the rotors flattened his brushy cover and filled the air with gritty dust.
Tommy could distinctly see Crusher bending over his controls, with Kendall, rifle at the ready, peering out the open starboard window of the Plexiglas cabin.
Suddenly the helicopter banked sharply southward in the direction of the gully of Asphalta Creek, the angry roar of its engine and the pounding of its rotors in the superheated air fading away in a weird Doppler effect, sending a brush rabbit scurrying for cover.
Too bad the Nikon had reached the end of the roll of film with his last flash shot, but a new thought came soaring into Tommy Rockford's consciousness: the photographic evidence that roll of film contained would be enough in any court of law to convict Merlin Kendall of high treason and worse. It would be Tommy's responsibility to get that damning roll of film into the hands of the law.
Trembling with suspense, K6ATX unloaded the camera, tucking the all-important cassette of exposed film deep into the pocket of his Levis. God willing, he would be handing that film over to Sheriff Ross Jackson, who in turn would see that it reached the FBI. Unfortunately, he was now out of film.
The two airborne manhunters swung their roaring helicopter westward, apparently aware that, in the time that had elapsed, their escaped victim could not have gotten any farther than the creek. K6ATX directed his eye downhill toward the level, sagebrush-carpeted expanse of Mormon Flat-and to a black speck on the landscape that he recognized as Casa Piedra, the landmark stone house of Blakeley, the pioneer homesteader, who had failed trying to run cattle on the barren windswept plateau back in the 1870s.
K6ATX muttered aloud, "The stone house! That's where Kendall told Crusher he was going to take me--to see the master dish aimed at Vanderhoff Space Center and the shuttle! There's my answer!"
He watched the black whirlybird make its wide swoop, skimming just above the lower slope of Thundergust Peak, arcing northward to begin another low-level fly-by across the territory where Kendall knew his radio ham enemy had to be hiding.
This manhunt, Tommy realized, could keep up as long as daylight lasted. The perpetrator of tomorrow's terrorist plot would be desperate to make a capture before night set in, if for no other reason than to recover the camera and roll of film.
The mere fact that Kendall was exposing his helicopter in daylight flight was proof of his mounting fear that K6ATX might succeed in making his getaway, something Kendall had to prevent at all costs, not only to guarantee the success of his sabotage mission, but to save himself from the executioner.
Kendall was aware of the two flash shots Tommy had taken inside the Lucky Lady's radio shack, which should clearly identify Merlin Kendall's face as the man who had planned to murder him. Those pictures would nullify any attempts of Kendall to establish an alibi or any claim that he had no connection with the international terrorist plot to destroy the Conquistador.
A vast euphoria swept through Tommy as he lay resting in his brushy concealment. It was 4:15 now. Another four hours before the sun would set out there over the Pacific horizon. That left him another 16 hours before the shuttle's countdown was reduced to zero, time to work his way over to Casa Piedra where the death-dealing transmitting dish was located. He relished what he would do to that apparatus when he reached the homesteader's cabin!
"Once that dish is smashed out of commission, Conquistador is home free. I think I've got it made!"
Then a sobering thought cooled off Tommy's self-congratulation. Kendall knew that knocking out his terrorist station was K6ATX's reason for coming to the Back Country in the first place, working to prove Captain Logan's theory correct. The death-dealing radio apparatus was geographically vulnerable in two widely separated places--the base station inside the fuselage of the Lucky Lady and its transmitting satellite-type parabolic antenna down at the Casa Piedra. Cripple either one of those installations, and Kendall could kiss his 10-million-dollar traitor's payoff goodbye. The space shuttle would be free to soar into the skies tomorrow without NASA ever knowing the launch had been in jeopardy from an unidentified enemy power...
Kendall's helicopter went into a hovering mode, two hundred feet above the canyon where the Lucky Lady was concealed. From that distance, Tommy doubted if he could be seen now.
Emerging from his hiding place, Tommy kept down on his stomach, wriggling lizard-like across open areas, running at a stooped posture only when there was chaparral to screen him. A visible moving object could attract Kendall's attention up there in that black chopper and bring doom on the double.
Having figured out the odds against him, Tommy made his own plans. While the helicopter was searching for him, he would risk crossing the open rock formations of Thundergust Peak to reach Asphalta Creek. As soon as he got to that sheltering arroyo he not only could escape detection from the air, but he would have a direct route leading down to Mormon Flat and the Casa Piedra. Once at the stone house he could make short work of Kendall's radio equipment and be long gone before Kendall arrived there to await the NASA countdown.
Bent almost double, K6ATX continued running toward the blue-black line indicating Asphalta Creek's arroyo. He had covered half the distance when he saw Kendall's helicopter start another circular sweep of the mountain slope, forcing him to seek cover from time to time.
The sun was westering toward the hazy horizon at five o'clock when K6ATX finally gained the north rim of Asphalta Creek's low-walled canyon. He found an area of broken scab rock slanting down to a talus pile and was able to reach the level of the rushing creek without difficulty.
His greatest danger now would be in not hearing the helicopter if it approached until it would be too late to seek cover. It was a chance he had to take; it would be too dangerous to attempt the passage of this watercourse after dark. By the same token, Kendall's manhunt would end when darkness came.
Now all he had to do was let the creek lead him to the place where the canyon met the mesa of Mormon Flat. The creek would carry on to its drop-off into the lowlands this side of the San Rafael range; Tommy would take a 90-degree turn to the north, with Casa Piedra less than a mile away across the level flats.
It was rough scrambling over the rocks to reach the point where the cascading water leveled out for its run across the Flat, taking him an hour to cover a mile and a quarter. His wristwatch showed straight-up 1800 hours when he crawled on his belly out of the streambed for his first look behind him at the awesome loom of Thundergust Peak.
He sighted Kendall's helicopter. It had descended to treetop level and was still patrolling the terrain at the base of Thundergust Peak like an angry hornet. At this hour, with the sun at a low angle and in Kendall's eyes, Tommy Rockford believed he could risk crossing the open sage flats to the Stone House without detection.
Twenty minutes later, he watched Kendall's helicopter move over to the entrance of the dark crease in the mountain wall and settle to its landing pad near the hidden Lucky Lady.
Was Kendall giving up the hunt, even though daylight still held? Or was it because he was afraid to leave the Condor's vital base station unguarded in the event K6ATX circled back and wrecked the place?
"Time to go," K6ATX told himself. "Even if one of them comes back to guard the stone house overnight, I'll be long gone when they get there. And I can inflict more damage to their terrorist gear in ten minutes than they could possibly repair by lift-off time tomorrow!" K6ATX emerged onto the open ground of Mormon Flats and started loping in a beeline for the ruins of Casa Piedra.

CHAPTER NINETEEN
Surprise at Casa Piedra

By the time Tommy Rockford had covered half the distance over the sage flats to Casa Piedra, a stiff westerly wind had risen, generating clouds of choking dust.
The sandstorm had its advantages. It would screen him from any possibility of Kendall seeing him cross Mormon Flat. It would also prevent Kendall from flying over to Casa Piedra in his fragile Huey helicopter, which did not handle well in high gusty winds.
Such winds were a common phenomenon in Santa Barbara County in summertime, because cool air masses above the ocean were sucked inland by the sun-baked earth, sometimes creating gusts of gale force that usually subsided when air and ground temperatures balanced out at day's end.
When he was within 50 yards of the roofless, rock-walled Casa Piedra, dominated by its massive fieldstone fireplace and chimney centered in the west end of the cabin, Tommy's heart quickened in response to a detail that was oddly out of place in a house reared stone by stone in 1872.
Clearly visible alongside the rock chimney inside the western gable to the right of the fireplace was the umbrella-like shape of a microwave parabolic disk slung from the rafters and oriented southwest.
This was his target: Merlin Kendall's death-emitting dish antenna, probably the same one Trapper Joe had seen up in the Indian cave. A receiving dish would feed the fatal Morse code signal. Tommy could see the second dish now, mounted in the opposite gable of the cabin nearest to Thundergust Peak--it was intended to transmit the signal originating from the powerful transmitter in the radio room of the
Condor's wrecked airplane, just below timberline and two airline miles distant.
Homesteader Blakeley had oriented his frontier home east and west to take advantage of maximum sun year-round, the west gable end serving as a shield to absorb the brunt of prevailing winds. The main doorway of Casa Piedra was centered on the south wall facing Tommy Rockford as he approached.
The cabin's "front yard" had been covered with a crust of snow when Trapper Joe Loustalot had last come here in March on a hunting trip. At the time, Tommy recalled, the old Basque had puzzled over the mysterious tracks of a rubber-tired vehicle crossing Mormon Flat and ending at the threshold of Blakeley's abandoned cabin. Trapper Joe had told him that he had been baffled to find the door sealed by a brand-new padlock.
Moments later, K6ATX was examining that laminated steel padlock and its heavy-duty hasp, and was surprised to find it now hung open.
A vast sigh of relief swelled K6ATX's cheeks. The unlocked door meant that his task was nearly over. All that remained for him to do was to enter the cabin and, as quickly as possible, smash both of Kendall's dish antennas beyond any possible chance of repair. Then he'd scram out of there before Kendall flew down to Casa Piedra in his chopper, probably as soon as the windstorm died down.
Once he had accomplished his acts of countersabotage, K6ATX would have set in action a domino-progression of events--the unhampered launch of America's first polar-orbit shuttle tomorrow morning, Conquistador's deployment of an unknown number of high-altitude spy satellites to scan enemy territory in the interests of ensuring world peace, and, of special concern to Tommy personally, the assured continuance of NASA's space program, which K6ATX aspired to make his life's work.
"Well," he let out a sigh of anticipation, "what are we waiting for?"
Rusty hinges squealed in protest as Tommy Rockford thrust the door open and stepped inside Casa Piedra for the first time.
The rectangular interior of the single-room cabin was 16 by 20 feet in size. The earthen floor had clumps of grass and weeds tufting it here and there.
The wind shrieked impotently through the open rafters overhead, wailed in the fireplace chimney, and vented its fury against the thick stone walls, offering a snug haven that generations of deer hunters had taken advantage of for overnight camping. Old Blakeley had built his frontier home to last a thousand years.
Still, it was a spooky place, especially with daylight ebbing. It was easy to imagine that Casa Piedra was haunted by the ghosts of the pioneer family that had been forced to abandon this hostile environment more than a century ago.
K6ATX looked around, sizing up how best to destroy Kendall's electronic gear. In the northeast corner to his left was a partitioned-off kitchen, its door hanging ajar. Tommy could see the rusty remains of a cookstove that had been transported to this desolate place by pack-mule; the dented tin stovepipes lay scattered about the floor, long since knocked down by the wind. Dishes and tin cans littered a wall shelf. Field rats had built a nest in the oven. He could see the recent track of a rattlesnake in the blowsand that had accumulated under the stove, a reptile in search of mice.
In the center of the main room stood a rough pine table bearing a coal-oil lamp with a cracked and blackened chimney. Four chairs made of manzanita wood had seats of laced rawhide thongs. A short flight of stone steps led down to some kind of cellar, no doubt where the homesteader's wife kept her milk and vegetables and other perishables in the cool darkness, to protect them from the heat of the summer months. Every pioneer home had its root cellar.
The Blakeley family's first home had probably been in that cellar, building the stone house around it later. The big open fireplace was filled with beer cans, decayed garbage and other litter tossed into it by hikers who had camped here overnight in years past.
Hanging from a row of pegs between the two planked-over window openings of the south wall were a greasy horse blanket, a bridle, and a half dozen rusty objects that Tommy recognized as duplicates of the animal traps he had watched Joe Loustalot oiling at Jawbone Springs an eternity ago-was it only day before yesterday?
It was not until he had turned his gaze in the direction of the west end of the house, alongside the fireplace, that Tommy felt he had stumbled into some kind of time warp.
Standing on a wooden crate to the left of the huge stone fireplace was a television set, complete with rabbit-ear antennas and a 19-inch screen! On top of the TV was a late-model VHS videocasette
recorder. A portable gasoline-powered electric generator on the raised hearth revealed the power source for the television equipment.
Equally incongruous in this primitive rock-walled setting was another scientific gadget that Merlin Kendall had brought to Casa Piedra--a reflecting 60X telescope, mounted on a massive tripod that had been weighted down for stability against vibration by a suspended gunny sack filled with rocks. The tripod stood spraddle-legged in front of the boarded-over window to the right of the fireplace. Kendall had knocked loose a board so as to aim the telescope in a southwesterly direction. The telescope's eight-inch mirror was shielded against damage from flying grit by a plastic cover.
But K6ATX was not interested in TVs or VCRs or terrestrial telescopes. That dish antenna suspended from the ridge-pole in the gable overhead was what had brought him to Casa Piedra. The aluminum-mesh umbrella, after being hoisted into place, had been swung into precise orientation with Vanderhoff AFB by smaller guy ropes lashed to the chimney and two opposite rafters, anchoring it so securely that it did not even vibrate in the wind gusts which smote the cabin now.
A sense of exhilaration swept through K6ATX. It would not be necessary to climb up to the dish to destroy it. Sever the main support rope, and the dish would come crashing down, throwing it hopelessly out of calibration with its target, the shuttle launch complex 60-odd miles away on the coast. He would complete his trashing job after the dish landed on the cabin floor.
The main rope holding the parabolic disk under the ridgepole was looped through a steel hook in the concrete fireplace mantel, a hook originally intended to suspend cooking pots over the hearth. From the hook the rope doubled back to the ridgepole where it had been knotted securely, far out of Tommy's reach.
The immediate problem facing him was how to sever the rope. It was of tough nylon, virtually as strong as a wire cable. He reached in his pocket for his Swiss army knife, then remembered that Kendall had confiscated it back at the Lucky Lady.
It was imperative that he find a cutting device of some kind. Fireplace tools protruded from a woodbox alongside the telescope. He hoped to find an ax for chopping firewood, but he wasn't that lucky; the box contained only a pair of rusty iron tongs and an iron poker.
Tommy headed back toward the kitchen, trying to find an ax or a wood saw or some other cutting tool from another woodbox near the cookstove. As he was passing the heavy wooden table that stood in front of the stairs going down to the cellar, he paused in his tracks, staring down the stone steps toward the plank door of the root cellar.
That was where he would be more likely to find shovels and hoes and rakes and axes and other farming tools a homesteader might have left behind.
In the half-light of dusk, which poured eerily through the open roof, Tommy Rockford picked his way down the litter-strewn sandstone steps and reached for the strap hanging from the cellar door. The door was secured by a heavy wooden bar. Tommy lifted the bar from its hardwood brackets and pulled the massive door open on its bullhide hinges to admit daylight to the Blakeleys' root cellar-a ten-foot square room with walls and ceiling formed of rough-hewn pine logs, several moldy cowhides serving as floor covering. His nostrils were revolted by a fusty outrush of stale, dank air.
The log walls on three sides of the cellar were fitted with sagging wooden shelves where the family had stored its preserved fruits and other food supplies.
"Tommy! Thank God-never expected...ever see you..."
K6ATX gave an involuntary cry and sprang back in alarm, so violently was he startled by the hoarse human voice issuing out of the cellar's gloom.
Then, as his pupils adjusted to the low light, K6ATX made out the dim outlines of two men, seated facing him on empty boxes in the center of the underground room. Their arms were trussed behind their backs, their faces pale as skulls in the murk, eyes squinting piteously against the unaccustomed daylight.
The man who had spoken was wearing a U.S. Air Force fatigue shirt and pants. Tommy could see the glint of captain's bars on his collar. His companion was an older man, wearing a faded denim jumpsuit, his pink cheeks and watery blue eyes and thicket of cottony whiskers making him look as if he was in a Santa Claus mask--a very emaciated Santa Claus.
"Tommy! Don't you know me?" the younger man asked. Rockford ducked under the low lintel of the cellar doorway and took a hesitant step toward the apparitions who now were getting laboriously to their feet. Then recognition flooded through K6ATX, recognition that his reason had rejected as a figment from an incredible nightmare.
"Captain Loganl Is that you?"
Leaping forward, Tommy Rockford peered closely into the gaunt-cheeked countenance of the NASA engineer whom he had believed hurtled to his death in Jawbone Creek Canyon three nights ago, dumped from Kendall's low-flying helicopter. The smooth-shaven, boyish face Tommy remembered was furred with several days' growth of dark stubble now, the eyes were sunk back in their sockets.
"I'm afraid it is me, Tommy. Merlin Kendall--remember him?--brought me here the night Crusher kidnapped me leaving your house. I can't even tell you how long that has been. Seems like years. I haven't seen a glimmer of daylight since-"
Tommy Rockford was still stunned with surprise and bewilderment. He turned to Logan's white-bearded companion, who said in a whisper hoarse as rustling paper, "So you are King Six Always Take X-Lax! Our first eyeball QSO."
Ham talk from a living ghost!
"Then you--you have to be--" Tommy turned back to Captain Logan as if for confirmation of the impossible. The NASA engineer nodded, managing to purse his brittle lips into a grin.
"Yes--this is the Condor. In person. Pardon me for not introducing you," Logan said. "This is the radio ham I accused of being the saboteur we were hunting for. The Condor was a prisoner here before I arrived. But how could I have ever guessed the saboteur was Merlin Kendall? He was the man who stood to lose the most if Conquistador was blown up."
Tommy stepped back a pace and laughed sardonically. "You think you were surprised--wait till you hear my story. But we don't have time for talk, fellas. Turn around, both of you, and let me untie your wrists...We've got to get out of here as soon as I smash that microwave gear of Kendall's, because the minute this windstorm subsides he'll be helicoptering down here to guard his equipment, you can bet on that. I'll explain everything later--"
With trembling fingers, Tommy Rockford untied the knotted leather thongs that bound Logan's wrists behind his back. The flesh of the officer's hands felt cold and dead from loss of circulation over the past three days and nights of his imprisonment.
Leaving Captain Logan to attempt to massage some feeling back into his paralyzed wrists, K6ATX went to work on the Condor's bonds.
"Itchy Alligator!" he told the radio ham recluse of Thundergust Peak, "the happiest thing that has come out of this whole miserable nightmare is that I came out here to the wildlife sanctuary with the idea of finding your QTH and proving that no licensed radio ham would sell out his country the way Kendall has. And my faith that radio hams are good guys was justified. You have no idea how good that makes me feel inside!"
When the Condor had been released, Tommy realized that both men were in such a severely emaciated condition it was difficult for them to stand erect. Yet, just as soon as he had put the saboteur's microwave gear permanently out of commission, he would have to force them into taking flight across the windswept sage flats.
"Follow me," Tommy ordered, turning toward the cellar exit. "We've got to move fast. You can loosen up your muscles while I--"
Tommy broke off, staring up the short flight of steps to see his way blocked by the silhouetted figure of a man standing spread-legged on the top step. The dying rays of sunset light, filtering through the dust storm outside, glinted off the barrel of a heavy-caliber revolver aimed at Rockford's chest.
Then a white spot of light snapped on, an electric lantern held in the gunman's other hand, the dazzling white beam aimed squarely into Tommy's eyes, blinding him.
"Just freeze where you are, boys. You aren't going anywhere."
The voice was Merlin Kendall's.

CHAPTER TWENTY
The Last Long Night

Tommy Rockford's mind reeled under a hammer blow of surprise and a feeling of total hopelessness at this abrupt reversal of fortune.
Then his momentary despair turned into a seething contempt for his own stupid bungling. Why had he assumed that just because Kendall's helicopter was up at the Lucky Lady's landing pad, Kendall was there also? Obviously Kendall had had Crusher drop him off at Casa Piedra while K6ATX was still out of sight in the Asphaltum Creek arroyo. No wonder the door was unlocked. Kendall had been here since before the windstorm started.
He was vaguely aware of Kendall addressing him in his usual suave, sarcastic tone: "I do believe I have caught you three ungrateful gentleman in the act of rejecting my hospitality. I can hardly blame you. I have not provided the most luxurious of mausoleums for the three of you to wait out eternity in, have I?
"Our first order of business," Kendall went on, "is for you to hand over your camera, Tommy. You took pictures of me that could have destroyed me had you delivered them to NASA, say, or even that hick-town sheriff friend of yours."
With a shrug of resignation, Tommy unslung the now-empty Nikon from his shoulder and tossed it up to his grinning captor. It was comforting to know that the exposed film with the frames placing Kendall in the Lucky Lady radio room still reposed in his pocket. He might yet have an opportunity to hide the cassette from Kendall.
Merlin Kendall slung the camera strap over his own shoulder, then seated himself on the top step of the cellar stairs, setting his electric lantern on the floor beside him.
His three prisoners, still paralyzed by the shock of this nightmare, saw that Kendall was carrying his .44 Magnum revolver in a holster on his right hip. On the opposite side of the gun belt was another black leather case, from which Kendall extracted the Citizens' Band handheld transceiver he used in communicating with his chopper pilot.
Lifting the radio to his lips, Kendall said "Come in Helper."
Crusher's voice issued from the speaker of the walkie-talkie, "Roger, Boss?"
Kendall returned, "Surprise! Guess who just showed up here--the ham operator!"
'Wo kiddin'?... Want me to come back?"
"No, still too windy to risk landing the chopper here. Tie down at the pad. I'll see you as soon as the show is over tomorrow morning. Maintain radio silence until then, but monitor frequency as usual in case of emergency. Over and out."
"Roger! Over and out."
Kendall restored the CB radio to its belt case and then shifted the electric lantern's beam to cover the doorway to the cellar. Tommy Rockford remained poised like a freeze-frame video picture, in the attitude he had been in when Kendall switched on the light.
Behind K6ATX, Captain Logan and the Condor, like two men resurrected from the dead, waited in slump-shouldered dejection, stunned by knowing how tantalizingly close the three of them had been to regaining their freedom. Kendall had made it clear by referring to their prison as a "mausoleum" that this was where, at some unknown date in the future, searchers would find their skeletons.
"Logan and the Condor have probably told you," Kendall said to Tommy Rockford, "about the special grandstand seats I have arranged for them tomorrow morning when the shuttle countdown reaches zero?"
"We haven't had time for much discussion, Kendall. Tell me--where were you when I came into the cabin?"
"In the kitchen, checking on the guy wires holding my receiving dish in place...I took the liberty of bringing one of the Condor's excellent television sets down here from the Lucky Lady. Fortunately we have a line-of-sight shot at Tepesquet Peak and the Santa Maria station's transmitter, which will be telecasting network coverage of the Conquistador's lift-off--and destruction. It will go down in the annals of TV journalism as a serendipitous bit of on-the-spot news coverage, surpassing even the newsreels of the Hindenburg Zeppelin explosion in 1937 or the Challenger disaster of '86. As is a director's privilege, I intend to videotape the spectacular ending of my Conquistador saga."
K6ATX shook his head slowly from side to side. "It baffles me," he said, "that you could wipe out the lives of seven astronauts and scientists, not to say how many ground crewmen and observers, and all you think about is taping the event."
Getting no reaction from Kendall, K6ATX had his answer. He was not dealing with a normal human being here. Merlin Kendall had to be psychotic--a madman, irresponsible for his actions.
Kendall got up and reached for his lantern. "Inasmuch as I will be standing guard overnight," he said, coming down the steps, "I will forego binding your arms behind your backs, as I was forced to do to Logan and the Condor when I was absent from the premises yesterday. However, to sustain you so that you will be able to enjoy tomorrow's television extravaganza to the fullest, I will return shortly with energy-restoring food and drink. Will you please move back now and seat yourselves?"
Tommy turned to join his two companions as they shuffled like robots back to the wooden crates where they had been sitting when K6ATX discovered them. As Kendall closed the door and lowered the heavy wooden bar into its brackets to lock them in, the white glare of the electric lantern was reduced to a single needle-thin beam slanting through a knothole in one of the door's plankings.
The light disappeared from the knothole as Kendall made his way back up into the rock cabin.
Tommy, knowing that to retain their sanity the three would have to keep conversing with each other, spoke to Jerry Logan in the darkness. "Your bloody jacket showed up at Trapper Joe's Monday night, Captain. I didn't know what to make of that. What's the story?"
Logan cleared his throat. "I intended that jacket as a clue to what had happened to me, Tommy, seeing as how I must have seemed to have vanished like a puff of smoke after leaving your house. I tossed the coat out the helicopter window when they thought I was unconscious, after I looked out and saw lighted windows down below.
I deduced that it was your friend the Basque trapper's home--no one else lives in the Back Country that I know of."
"But why," Tommy asked, "were you kidnapped at all?"
"Two reasons," the NASA engineer explained. "Kendall realized that by stumbling across his sabotage plot and sending you and Sergeant Humphries out on a hang-glider reconnaissance in the Thundergust Peak area, the time had come to muzzle me permanently. The second reason is that Kendall has revealed himself to be a totally committed sadist, Tommy. We are dealing with a mentally deranged individual. Kendall wants to punish me for what I did to jeopardize his sabotage scheme. He wants to sit and gloat tomorrow during the final count-down. And when the explosion occurs at 0800 hours, he'll derive a psychopathic pleasure out of forcing us to watch the disaster on television. He has already shown Condor and me some video tapes that Corporal Kohl took of their successful destruction of the Delta and MX missiles during recent months. If my superiors at Vanderhoff could see those tapes they would realize I was right all along. But it's too late now…"
The narrow beam of yellow light lanced through the knothole again, wig-wagging as Merlin Kendall descended the steps. They heard him pause at the foot of the stairs, grunting with effort as he unbarred the door.
"Stand back, in case you have any ideas of jumping me!" came Kendall's warning. "I'm opening this door, and I'll shoot any one of you I find not sitting back on those boxes!"
The door kicked open to frame Kendall's silhouetted figure, revolver in his right hand, a cardboard carton clutched under the other elbow. Seeing that his three prisoners were seated well back from the opening, their captor thrust the carton into Captain Logan's hands.
"The makings of your last supper, gentleman," Kendall said mockingly. "Bon apetit, and sleep well! I want you all to enjoy the fireworks show at Slick Six launch complex tomorrow. Do not worry about oversleeping. I will awaken you at zero minus 90 minutes so you can share the dramatic countdown with the rest of America."
The door thudded shut. The locking bar wedged into place. Then Kendall's boots thudded back up the stairs, the waggling knothole beam of light disappearing with him. A moment later the three men heard him switch on the TV to catch the evening network news.
The carton of food contained six tin cans and a can opener. Three of the cans proved to contain Campbell's pork and beans; three pop-top cans held diet colas. Under the circumstances, it was a gourmet banquet.
No words were spoken as the three men wolfed down what Kendall had called their "last supper." The Condor and Captain Logan sucked and chewed at the pork and beans, giving off animalistic noises, washing the cold but appetizing food down their throats with copious swigs of cola. Tommy could visualize his companions in the darkness, swabbing out the last drippings of food from the inside of the cans and licking it off their fingers. Obviously, Tommy's two companions had been ravenously hungry. As a matter of fact, they had not eaten since yesterday.
"Condor," Tommy broke the silence which he knew to be deadly to their sanity, "I guess, under the circumstances, maybe you can tell me what all radio hams have long wanted to know--the story of how and why you came to Thundergust Peak to live like a hermit."
Austin Rudniki wiped his greasy fingers on his pantlegs and said in his hoarse voice, "First, ATX, let me talk Condor-style. I will use the top of this soft drink can for a telegraph sounder--"
The Condor's words were followed by a rapid burst of Morse Code, sounding more like the clatter of an old-time telegraph sounder than the musical whistle of radio's CW. With thumb and middle finger giving off different sounds to represent dots and dashes, the Condor rattled off:
I DEVELOPED T.B. WHILE WORKING ON MISSILE PROGRAM AT VANDERHOFF AND WAS GIVEN SIX MONTHS TO LIVE.
"Rodger-dodger!" Tommy responded excitedly. "Copy you solid, old man. No other ham operator I know has a fist that smooth. And you were supposed to have told the Brasspounders' Bunch your hand was crippled--"
The Condor continued his rapid-fire two-fingered drumroll on the top of the cola can: THAT WAS WHEN KENDALL MOVED IN THIS SPRING AND TOOK OVER LUCKY LADY AND MY HAM STATION. MY LAST TRANSMISSION ON BRASSPOUNDERS' NET ROLL CALL SOUNDED LIKE I WAS SENDING WITH MY LEFT FOOT, DIDN'T IT? THAT'S BECAUSE KENDALL WAS WORKING THE KEY--
"Hey, hold it, you guys!" complained Jerry Logan. "I can read Morse at fifteen or so, Condor, but not when you're outrunning a machine gun!"
The Condor laughed. "OK, Captain, we'll modulate from here on. You already know my story, so this is for Tommy's benefit... My father was a Marine Corps flying instructor at the Goleta training base during World War II. He was flying the Lucky Lady over to Bakersfield for supplies when his DC-3 got caught in a violent electrical storm, and he disappeared somewhere in the Back Country. He, his two crew members, and the plane were never found. Mostly because fly-overs aren't allowed in the sanctuary."
"And you were determined to find the Lucky Lady and your father's remains, even after 40 years had elapsed?" Tommy prompted the old radio ham when his voice trailed off in revery.
"Yes. With only six months to live, how else to pass the time? I packed into the Back Country from Santa Bonita and for the next two years I fine-toothed-combed every canyon and high potrero and gopher hole and anthill in the wilderness area. You'd be amazed how many marijuana farms I found! All that clean air and exercise cured my lung trouble, though, so that I was in good physical shape when I finally entered the restricted wildlife sanctuary and in due time, exploring each canyon and cave and crany, I came across where my dad had crash-landed his aircraft. I--I found Dad and his co-pilot and his flight engineer... in the wreckage of the cockpit. I gave their bones a decent Christian burial..."
The Condor choked off, memories overcoming him. Finally he went on in a hoarse whisper, "I had accomplished what I had set out to do, but I decided I didn't want to leave the wilderness! I had no one on the outside to return to--my wife and infant son had died in a traffic accident..." he paused, then mumbled "...some young punk driver under the influence of marijuana."
Another pause, and then he continued, "It was an ideal place for me to do my writing, and as you know, Tommy, I had ham radio as a pastime. The fuselage of the Lucky Lady was a made-to-order shelter. And then, five years ago, a U.S. Forest Service Ranger discovered me. I assumed I faced eviction from the wilderness-even imprisonment. Instead, it was the door opening on the greatest opportunity of my life. A job with the federal government!"
Following a long silence, Tommy Rockford prompted his friend: "I'm afraid I don't follow you--"
"Tommy, you are aware that marijuana is now California's biggest agricultural crop?"
"I'm well aware of that, yes. There are hundreds of acres of pot being grown within miles of where we're sitting."
K6ATX heard the Condor suck in and release a deep breath.
"The bottom line, Tommy, is that the government enlisted my help in its war on dope. I was hired as a federal narcotics agent. The illicit pot farms are concealed in remote mountain areas. Manpower is needed to ferret them out so the narc police can raid them, jail the pot farmers, destroy their crops."
"I would say," K6ATX commented, "you were the perfect man for the job."
Captain Logan spoke softly from the darkness, "Can you imagine a better setup for a man who wants to spend his life roaming these mountains--a man motivated by having lost his family to a driver dulled by pot? And getting paid by the government for his services?"
Tommy reached over to pat the Condor on the shoulder. Then the ham's next words jolted them back to the present: "I was all set to live happily ever after...Once a month, under cover of darkness, a bonded helicopter service would fly over from Burbank, bringing me food, radio gear, supplies of all kinds, whatever I ordered by radio or mail. I maintain a post office box in Los Olivos, you know, but I only call for my mail after office hours, every six weeks or so. The public assumes I am just another hiker, in town to buy a bar of soap or some candy and to pick up my mail."
Captain Logan said, "I hope you can forgive me for being suspicious that you were behind this Conquistador plot--a suspicion for which I now abjectly apologize, good friend."
"Forgiven. I am deeply religious, trusting in God to protect me. What more can a man ask of life? If this is to be my last night on earth, I accept that as God's will. To me, death is the act of passing through a golden door, leaving one room to enter another room. I am infinitely curious to know what lies beyond that door we all must pass through someday--fortunately it never happens until the end of our lives." Tommy heard the hint of a smile in the man's voice.
"To me," the Condor went on, "death is the ultimate adventure, the crowning glory of this earthly existence. I devoutly hope both of you can experience the same tranquility I will tomorrow as we go through that golden door together to face whatever eternity holds in store for us. I do not agree with the atheists' theory that when we die, we become nothing."
The Condor's philosophy caused K6ATX to shiver. He shared a deep faith in the hereafter. His religious feelings were never stronger than when he was hiking in the cathedral of the great outdoors. But he also loved life too much at 19 to want to leave it now, especially at the hands of an enemy agent. That was what made this totally hopeless situation so unbearable.
"How did you happen to fall into Kendall's clutches?" Tommy asked. "Did he home in on one of your QSOs?"
Tommy heard Condor grunt contemptuously.
"Kendall read my high-speed Morse code? No way! No, he showed up just after New Year's. Crusher landed his private helicopter at the pad I had cleared out for my supply chopper, near the Lucky Lady's canyon. I was not alarmed, just annoyed that an outsider had blown my cover. Kendall claimed he was on a top-secret mission for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Came loaded with bona fide credentials from Kennedy Space Center, the Marshall Center at Huntsville, Cape Canaveral and Vanderhoff Center, identifying him as a civilian expert from Aerospace Computers, Inc., based in Utah. His top-security clearances were genuine. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I took Kendall's line at face value."
"As did I," groaned Logan. "I worked with him for months. And I shared all my secrets with him--he was cleared...so of course I...well, I was just a naive fool. Which was my superior officers' assessment of me, come to think of it."
"Remember," the Condor sympathized, "I fell for it, too. Kendall told me that the government was embarked on a plan to organize secret back-up control centers for its space and missile programs, in case our existing command posts were knocked out by a surprise nuclear strike.
"Where Vanderhoff's missile complexes were concerned, the nearest mountain wilderness country seemed the obvious place to hide such an auxiliary command post. Kendall said he was aware of my NASA background and my electronic expertise, and asked me to assist him, as a patriotic gesture to my country. I almost bowled him over in my eagerness to cooperate."
The Condor went on with a heavy groan of anguish. "To make a long story short, I agreed to QRT my weekly Amateur Radio operations for a few months while I helped Kendall set up high-tech microwave units that could beam radio commands to any missile-launching complex on Vanderhoff. Kendall is a top-ranked engineer and radio technician in his own right, but I made it easier for him by finding the right locations for transmitting antennas. I'm the one who recommended Casa Piedra after Trapper Joe stumbled onto our setup in the Indian cave. Through my efforts, Kendall saved all kinds of time in meeting tomorrow's deadline for the Conquistador launch--which of course was his original objective from the start. I understand some foreign government is paying him ten million U.S. dollars for destroying our polar orbiter tomorrow. And nothing can be done to stop him from collecting his Judas money. What greed does to a man!"
"When did you discover Kendall was actually a foreign agent?" K6ATX asked.
"Not until Friday of last week--when he and Crusher flew me down here to Mormon Flat on a pretext of giving our transmitting dish a final testing. Instead he called me a sucker for a con job and threw me into this cellar to wait for Conquistador's countdown. Captain Logan joined me Monday morning. I wouldn't trust him, because I thought he was a spy too. I'm sorry, Captain."
Logan said to Tommy, "Condor was as flabbergasted to learn Kendall's true colors as I was. The moment Kendall's gorilla of a bodyguard called at your home to drive me back to the base Sunday night--instead of the non-com I was expecting--I knew something was wrong, but it was too late. I tried to jump out of his vehicle--we had a one-sided battle until he slugged me with a wrench. I didn't come to until I was on the helicopter that was flying me over to this cellar."
Outside Casa Piedra, the windstorm was letting up. In the locked cellar, the three prisoners' conversation tapered off, each man lost in the turmoil of his own private hell.
"We have to sleep on the cowhides on the dirt floor," Captain Logan told Tommy. "Thank God this is our last long night."
Over in a corner, the Condor stretched himself out in the darkness and soon his gentle snoring told his companions that Austin Rudniki was sleeping the sound slumber of a man who was at peace with himself and with his maker.
K6ATX groped around for a cowhide, placed it on the dank earth, lay down and closed his eyes. A lump in his pocket reminded him of the roll of 35 millimeter film that could reveal Merlin Kendall for the traitor he was.
Tommy's last conscious act was to dig a tiny hole in the dirt floor and bury the film canister, safe from discovery by Kendall. It would probably never be seen by human eyes again.
He fell asleep without knowing it, his dreams as vivid as they were disconnected. One moment he was enjoying a hike in the foothills above Pasadena with his girlfriend, Trudy, K6ZNT. The next he was reliving the hit-run crash at Honda Arroyo with Ross Jackson.
That terror-packed scene dissolved and Tommy found himself scooping hatfuls of sand to cover the corpse of Joe Loustalot. Time out for a ghoulish replay of hang-gliding Beau Humphries' head-on crash into the cliff at Box Canyon; then the languid comfort of a game of Trivial Pursuit with his folks back home in Santa Bonita.
The torment ended abruptly with the opening of the cellar door to admit a wash of dawn light into their prison, and Merlin Kendall's sadistic voice welcoming them to their last day on earth:
"Rise and shine, gentlemen! It is 0720 hours, zero plus forty minutes at the launch pad and counting-thirty-nine, thirty-eight, thirty-seven--. I overslept myself. The television coverage has already begun."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Passports to Eternity

Squinting against the blinding glare of daylight pouring through the open rafters from an enamel-blue sky, the three bone-weary prisoners stumbled their way up the cellar steps like zombies. Obeying Kendall's gestured command with the barrel of the .44 Magnum, they slumped into the three manzanita chairs placed behind the oilcloth-covered table at the head of the stairs.
"One minor task to attend to," Kendall said, "and then we will be ready to relax and enjoy today's big television spectacle."
As he spoke, Kendall picked up three pieces of nylon cord, which he had obviously prepared in advance for his prisoners. Ordering the three to stand up, Kendall proceeded to secure their wrists, then gestured for them to be seated, hands in their laps.
"I will be concentrating on the shuttle launch when the exact moment comes for Crusher to push the red button," Kendall explained with a feigned note of apology in his voice. "You might be tempted to rush me en masse. I can relax better if your arms are immobilized."
Tommy was beginning to weary of Kendall's incessant talking. At 19 he was the youngest of the group, enjoying the peak of muscular fitness, but he ached to the marrow of his bones, sore in every muscle of his body from the long night spent sleeping on cold earth. He could imagine the even greater physical discomfort being suffered by his two older companions for whom it had been one of several nights.
Getting his first look in daylight at Captain Logan, K6ATX was shocked by the toll that a mere four days' captivity had taken on the young NASA engineer. The officer's cheeks were sunken under his cheekbones, mottled with a Velcro-like stubble, blue-black pockets sagging under bloodshot eyes, hands showing a visible tremor.
The bewhiskered radio ham Tommy knew as the Condor, on the other hand, seemed spry and alert, eyes twinkling with tranquility.
Kendall had apparently rested comfortably, and showed it. His Army cot alongside the south wall was equipped with an air mattress and a down sleeping bag.
The television set was on, its audio loud enough to blank out the background hum of the portable generator. The color screen framed a network news helicopter shot of tawny rolling hills with a paved, two-lane highway winding in serpentine curves up a narrow valley. The Highway Patrol had designated both lanes for westbound traffic--but they were now totally gridlocked. It took K6ATX a moment to orient the pastoral scene: State Highway 1, one of Vanderhoff Space Center's principal surface arteries for bringing in missile fuel, rockets or supplies by 18-wheel trucks. The highway snaked through Santa Barbara County's Spanish-era San Julian land grant, linking the Space Center to U.S. Highway 101 north of Gaviota Pass, near the rest stop where Corporal Kohl's Shootout had occurred.
The TV commentator was explaining the traffic jam: "..With less than a half hour remaining before the historic polar-orbit launch of the space shuttle Conquistador, thousands of motorists from the Southland area will be disappointed. Due to this monumental bumper-to-bumper traffic jam, they will be stranded on the highway--unable to witness NASA's grand spectacle. The arbiter will be half a mile Into the sky before it becomes visible over these hills--"
Kendall sat down opposite them and rested his revolver on the table. Then he laced his fingers together, thumbs rotating, and leveled a mocking stare at Tommy Rockford.
"It was ingenious of you, using the flash gun of your camera to leave me helpless while you made your getaway yesterday," Kendall conceded. "I confess that your escape gave me plenty of reason for concern, knowing you had taken incriminating photographs of me. At least I had rendered you incommunicado by confiscating your shortwave radio. I have 10 million dollars riding on the success of that project, so you can appreciate my concern."
Tommy snapped waspishly, "You sound like a broken record, Kendall. How many times have you given me the ten-million-dollar bit? You sold out your country. Stop rubbing our noses in it."
Logan and the Condor tensed involuntarily as Kendall picked up his Magnum revolver. But he merely jacked open the cylinder and proceeded to shake into the palm of his hand three of the five cartridges contained in the chambers, one being left empty under the firing pin for safety reasons. Kendall arranged the three shiny brass and copper cartridges in a precise row before him.
"You gentlemen have no doubt discussed among yourselves the possibility that as soon as I blow up the Conquistador, I might abandon the three of you to a slow death by starvation down in the cellar," Kendall speculated. "Perish the thought! I am a compassionate man. I plan a swift and mercifully painless execution for each of you. Less than an hour from now, you three will not have a care in the world! Nor will I."
Laughing, Kendall nudged the three cartridges into a neat line with a fingertip, as if they were pieces on a chessboard.
"What you see here," he continued, "are your passports to eternity. This left-hand bullet, friend Condor, will dispatch you first. After all, I could hardly allow you to live to bear witness against me, could I? The middle bullet has 'Tommy Rockford' written on it, his punishment for so nearly wrecking my sabotage plans on which--excuse the repetition--my 10-million-dollar stipend depends. And the third bullet, dear Captain Logan, is your reward for snooping around and instituting your own private investigation into my project--failing to realize that I was the very saboteur you were after. Ironic, isn't it, that you were the one who called me in to help confirm your sabotage theory in the first place? This alerted me. You had found out about my remote-control QRM signals coming from the Back Country--thanks to Beau Humphries, who accidentally intercepted one of my transmissions. I have to respect you for your detective work."
The three prisoners remained silent. Their attention was riveted to the television screen, which now showed a view of the mammoth space shuttle perched on its tail alongside the launching gantry at Shuttle Launch Complex Six, with the blue Pacific sparkling in the background.
The TV newscaster, his voice vibrant with excitement, aware that millions of Americans were watching and listening, was busy educating
the viewing public about what they were seeing:
"Try to conceive of the gigantic size of that external fuel tank! A hundred and forty thousand gallons of liquid oxygen in its forward bay, three hundred and eighty thousand gallons of liquid hydrogen in its aft bay. Imagine this: the shuttle configuration itself is higher than an eighteen-story building-"
Kendall carefully reloaded the Magnum and restored it to his belt hoister. He stood up and beckoned K6ATX to follow him.
"I have already shown the captain and the Condor--that would make a catchy title for a situation comedy, wouldn't it?--the view my telescope is covering. It shows you the target of the radio beam, which the microwave dish over your head will be directing at the self-destruct units I installed in the solid-fuel rocket boosters. Crusher will push the red button just as Conquistador is about to clear the launch tower. A blast at that low level is calculated to destroy the entire launch facility, including the control crew standing by in the blockhouse. Come over to the telescope, Tommy, if you will, for a preview."
As Tommy walked across the hearth, he noticed his camera lying on the mantlepiece and was thankful he had rescued the film. He felt a sudden rise of nausea-not only with his own plight, but with the loss of life this man was plotting. He joined Kendall behind the tripod-mounted telescope.
Squinting through the eyepiece, K6ATX got a 60X magnified live image of a scene transpiring sixty-odd miles to the southwest-a view of Conquistador from another angle, poised on its launch pad at Slick Six.
Visibility was crystal perfect this morning as zero hour approached. Last night's wind had purged the air of smog pollution, and the coastal fog banks so common to Southern California at this season were stalled in a wooly blanket 20 miles off shore.
Except for jets of steam writhing from the launch complex, the scene resembled a still photograph, pulsating slightly as the earth began to radiate heat waves from the morning sun.
"When Crusher pushes the red button, I will be monitoring the destruction of the shuttle through this 'scope," Kendall explained. "I prefer seeing it live to an electronic clone scanned by a cathode ray tube. But I assure you, the three of you will witness a television spectacular."
Tommy's tightly knotted wrists were beginning to throb from lack of circulation, but he knew it would be useless to ask Kendall to loosen his bonds. He returned listlessly to his chair behind the table where his two doomed companions sat numb as dope addicts, staring mindlessly at the television. A Vanderhoff AFB colonel was citing the awesome statistics about the space shuttle itself:
"What you see here, fellow Americans, is a display of harnessed power beyond human comprehension. Note the smaller engines under the arbiter itself--they are only five feet tall minus their nozzles, weigh only three and a half tons each, yet they will release the energy of 23 Hoover Dam powerhouses!
"Now turn your attention to the two white solid-fuel rockets that bracket the shuttle. During the two minutes they are operational before they are ejected into the ocean off Mexico for recovery later, those rockets will provide five-and-a-third million pounds of thrust to overcome the earth's pull of gravity. That's enough power to get 25 fully loaded 747 jumbo jets airborne! A few moments before reaching orbit, the main external tank will be jettisoned, to be incinerated in space. By then, Conquistador will be safely in polar orbit around the world, a history-making first."
After giving the television audience a few moments to absorb his words, the officer went on: " We are now only 10 minutes away from blast-off. NASA's digital count-down has begun, you can see it on the lower-right corner of your screen.
"For those of you who would like to brush up on your geography, here's the route this shuttle will take around the globe-following the 120th meridian of longitude:
"After blasting off from Vanderhoff and shedding its rockets, Conquistador will be coasting through the total blackness of outer space at an incredible 17,500 miles per hour. Spanning the South Pacific Ocean, it will cross over Antarctica and the South Pole, thence up the other side of the earth, across the Indian Ocean to pass over land again at India, Soviet Russia, the North Pole, then down across Canada, Washington, Oregon, over Vanderhoff, and so on into Orbit Number Two--"
Kendall went over to the mantel and grabbed a rectangular black object that was laying next to Tommy's camera. As he headed toward the television set, K6ATX recognized it as a VHS videocassette.
"I have here a tape, filmed by my accomplice Corporal Kohl a few months ago," Kendall explained, inserting the cassette into a slot in the VCR. "It is our personal record of the preliminary tests we made. We wanted to see whether we could detonate the self-destruct devices I installed on various missiles at Vanderhoff. NASA believes they are tamper-proof--after all, with a Morse code consisting of ten randomly intermixed letters and numerals, how could any saboteur decode the exact signals needed to detonate the devices? Obviously, that information was known to the engineer who programmed the self-destruct codes-in this case, myself. I'm surprised you never caught on, Captain Logan."
The television picture of the Slick Six scene was replaced by a grainy, opaque leader from the VCR tape. Then appeared the grinning face of the mole Kendall had planted on the NASA high-security staff--the late unlamented Air Force Corporal Konrad Kohl. Tommy Rockford was reminded that only a scant week ago he had seen the owner of that face crumple before a hail of police bullets at the Gaviota Pass rest stop.
Kohl's face was replaced by a view of an enormous Delta intercontinental missile lifting from its gantry at Vanderhoff AFB. Moments after lift-off, the Delta disintegrated in a cataclysmic flash, followed by a vast cloud of orange-tinted toxic smoke. All the newspapers had carried prints of that explosion.
"Our friend the Condor, all unknowing, was with me in the radio control room at the Lucky Lady when I pushed the red button to cause that explosion," Kendall boasted smugly. "The transmitting dish was the one you see over your heads, but it was then located in the so-called Indian cave higher up on Thundergust Peak. Trapper Joe's accidental discovery of our setup forced us to move it here."
The videotape, minus its audio, now showed a silo containing an MX missile, one of the mainstays of NASA's West Coast operation. Kohl had photographed it with a zoom lens from the safety of a concrete block house on the base. This time, the explosion erupted from the underground silo. The disaster had confounded NASA engineers and had led to considerable news media speculation. The emergency self-destruct systems Kendall's Aerospace Computers Corporation had installed in the missiles were suspected of being defective.
"Time's getting short," Kendall said, "so I won't run the rest of Kohl's tape. I am going to record today's shuttle disaster, of course. It will be a treasured personal memento for me to enjoy a few weeks from now when I am relaxing on the French Riviera, under an assumed name and with this beautiful beard shaved off. I hope my multi-million-dollar fee will be enough to support the lifestyle I envision for my future. Toys like yachts, villas, private jets, you name it; I intend to have them."
Kendall replaced Kohl's cassette with a blank tape of his own and made the necessary adjustments to record what they were again seeing on the screen. A digital clock had been supered over the picture to give the countdown to zero, in increments of a tenth of a second. At this moment the read-out stood at six minutes, forty-seven seconds to zero hour. Suspense crackled like static electricity in the air as the four of them waited.
Tommy Rockford sat numbly, trussed hands clasped at his belt buckle, his glazed-over eyes staring blankly toward the fireplace.
His mind drifted. So near and yet so far. Here I sit, 20 feet away from that transmitter dish. All it would take to rescue those astronauts now, to save Conquistador, would be to jostle that microwave dish a few centimeters out of line to send the signals off target. But I'm totally helpless. I might as well be dead...
Kendall removed a hand-held CB transceiver from his belt and growled into the mike, "Everything OK up there, Crusher? Your TV monitor is functioning OK, so I won't have to send a vocal order?"
From the transceiver came the gravelly monotone of the man standing by in the Lucky Lady's radio room: "Yeah. I push the red button the exact instant I see the orbiter clearing the tower. Just like we've rehearsed it a hundred times. Right?"
"Roger. How long will it take to bring the chopper down here and pick me up after blast-off?"
"Four, five minutes at the outside. I've got the engine idling, just like you said."
Kendall muttered, "Roger. Observe radio silence from now on."
K6ATX knew he couldn't bear to watch the cataclysm about to unfold on the TV screen. As Kendall walked over to take his position at the telescope, Tommy's glance shifted to his camera lying on the mantel, then to a bright colored object that had aroused his curiosity inside the hearth. Suddenly he sat bolt upright, excitement kindling a spark in his blue eyes. His heart felt as if it would burst out of his rib cage.
In that instant, K6ATX knew their case was not hopeless.
Raising his voice, Tommy Rockford shouted across the room above the TV announcer chanting the countdown, "Kendall, I think I can make you a proposition that will persuade you to turn the three of us free! Want to hear it and decide for yourself?"
The countdown was now under four minutes. Kendall turned from fine-tuning the focus on his telescope, his satanic face flushed with the mounting suspense all of them were feeling. A sadistic grin curled his upper lip as he jeered, "What bargaining power could you possibly have over me, idiot? Two minutes after the Conquistador show is over, the three of you will be cold meat, your brains blown out-and you have the unmitigated optimism to try to proposition me into turning you loose? You've got to be out of your mind, sonny boy."
It was obvious from the way Captain Logan and the Condor were staring at Tommy that they agreed with Kendall.
K6ATX returned the torrent of ridicule with a bland smile.
"Open my camera, Kendall! You'll find something that may change your mind about sparing our lives! Go ahead--open my camera--and be prepared for the shock of your life!"
Captain Logan and the Condor, seated on either side of K6ATX, stared curiously at their young friend as if they thought his sanity had snapped under the pressure. But his words caused a reaction in Kendall. He hesitated, scowled, then walked over and gingerly took Tommy's mini-size Nikon off the mantel.
"Go ahead--open it!" Tommy urged. "It isn't booby-trapped--I was fresh out of the ingredients for a plastic bomb."
Kendall stared at the camera for a moment, then snapped open the rear lid of the Nikon and peered down inside the camera box. Staring at the empty well where the take-up spool should have been, he looked up to stare at Tommy, his eyes mirroring sudden fear.
"The camera's empty! The film is gone!"
K6ATX's brows lifted, feigning surprise. "Why, so it is! I've been too busy to reload. But I was careful to hide the film that proves you are a traitor and a saboteur, Kendall! Only one other person in the world besides me knows where I hid it. That person is Sheriff Ross Jackson\ We arranged it Monday, before I was flown over to the Back Country. Just as back-up protection, in case I mysteriously disappeared--like Captain Logan did."
The flush left Kendall's cheeks, his flesh going the color of stale paste as Tommy drove his point home: "Would you like to know what is on that film, Kendall? For openers, a gruesome shot of Sergeant Humphries' dead body lying in the wreckage of his hang glider, taken by me from the rimrock above Box Canyon. And on the rim above, but plainly visible, Humphries' sniper with a rifle, making his getaway on a three-wheel trail bike. An enlargement of that 35 millimeter frame will identify that man for the sheriff, even if the three of us here are dead and gone. Your only way of retrieving that film is to let the three of us go free. Unless you accept my offer, Kendall, you've lost the ball game! Think it over. You have no choice but to release us--or be a hunted criminal the rest of your days."
The camera dropped from Kendall's trembling fingers. His mouth worked, but no sound came out. Tommy droned on relentlessly, "That film also contains several close-ups of Trapper Joe's corpse lying up in the Indian cave where I buried him. I was in the cave with him when you shot him, Kendall. And another frame will show you bouncing off down the mountainside aboard your three-wheel motor bike after that murder."
Panic was showing in Kendall's eyes now, flaring his nostrils, making his lower lip tremble.
All four men in the room were oblivious to the TV reporter's chant in the background: "We are now at exactly two minutes before launch and counting-"
Tommy Rockford went on relentlessly, "The worst two pictures from your point of view are the close-up shots I took of you in the radio room of Lucky Lady."
There was a moment's silence, broken only by the metronomic countdown issuing from the television speaker: "One minute fifteen seconds to launch--no hitches or glitches--all signs are go--"
Then Jerry Logan made his choked protest: "Don't be a fool, Tommy! The instant Kendall lays hands on your film he'll double cross the three of us, can't you see that?"
Kendall shook himself out of his trance. A rime of icy sweat pearled on his forehead, glistening obscenely. The saboteur licked his dry lips and finally cawed out in a spectral voice, "OK, kid, I admit your film could ruin me. So let's hear your proposition."
Tommy said, "I give you the roll of film--in return for your solemn oath to let Logan and the Condor and me walk out that door on our way to freedom. With our promise not to squeal on you. Plus you radio an order to Crusher not to push that red button! Otherwise, Kendall, when I fail to keep my radio sked on 2 meters today--if the Conquistador flight is sabotaged--Sheriff Jackson will fly over here and pick up that film from the hiding place we agreed on before I left. His lab will develop it and--the FBI and Interpol will take it from there. The ball is in your court, Kendall, and you've only got seconds to make up your mind."
Kendall squared his shoulders in a show of confidence. He said contemptuously, "Your secret wouldn't last long if I work you over with a red-hot iron, Tommy. Worse yet, turned you over to Crusher to break a few bones, gouge out your eyeballs--"
Gambling that Kendall was bluffing, K6ATX said with a bluster of courage he was far from feeling at the moment,"So even if you try torture, how will you know that I'm telling you where the film actually is hidden? By the time you get to the designated spot you might find the sheriff and his men waiting for you. Think about it. All I need is your word of honor to spare us--and the shuttle--and the film is yours. It can be in your hands within one minute."
Kendall exhaled a long sigh and muttered something that sounded like "How could any moron possibly be stupid enough to trust me in this situation?"
Then he spoke: "OK, you win. It's a deal... Where's the film?"

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Countdown to Zero

Tommy Rockford pointed to the fireplace behind Kendall. "Buried in the hearth ashes. Remember when I went past the hearth on my way to the telescope? Your back was turned. Even after you tied my wrists together, it was easy enough to fish the film cassette out of my shirt pocket. It was no big deal to squat down and stuff the film into the sand and ashes. It can't be buried deeper than four or five inches."
"Forty-five seconds to blast off! Forty-four seconds--"
Kendall turned on his heels and knelt in front of the cabin's trash-littered fireplace. Golden sunlight streaming through the rafters cast the meshed shadow of the overhead microwave dish across the saboteur's figure, highlighted the metal backstrap of the holstered Magnum pistol on his right hip.
Kendall looked over his shoulder and rasped through gritting teeth, "I warn you, Rockford, if I don't find that film here, you'll wish you'd never been born! One way or another, I'll get that film."
Kendall paused, as if assessing the situation. Then he bent forward and thrust both hands tentatively into the loose sand and powdery ashes, pawing deeper, deeper--
It came without warning.
The fireplace seemed to explode in a geyser of dirt and cinders. The three prisoners saw Merlin Kendall's torso rear back. He gave a scream of agony and attempted to jump up, only to be jerked violently off his feet by a steel chain that appeared from nowhere to shackle Kendall's hands to an iron stake driven deep in the rear of the litter-filled hearth.
Locked over Kendall's knuckles were the steel teeth of one of Joe Loustalot's Number Triple-Z big game traps, capable of holding a grizzly bear helpless in its iron grip..
Logan and the Condor remained gripped in stunned paralysis as they saw K6ATX bolt from his chair, diving toward the fireplace simultaneously with the springing of the trap. Three reaching strides took him to where Kendall was writhing in agony in front of the open fireplace. Tommy Rockford, his two hands spread open like the mouth of an alligator, had no problem in yanking the Magnum .44 out of Kendall's holster.
"Three...two...one…zero!" screamed the television newscaster. "WE HAVE IGNITION!"
Through the tail of his eye K6ATX saw the TV view of the belch of white steam and red-yellow flame bursting from the space shuttle as Conquistador strained to free itself of the tug of gravity, its mighty engines fighting to lift away from the launch pad. Tommy had not more than two seconds before Crusher would be pressing the fatal red button up at the Lucky Lady control room.
In the same smooth, uninterrupted movement that jerked Kendall's pistol from its holster, Tommy Rockford raised the gun to the iron hook imbedded in the fireplace arch, to which the microwave dish's support rope was anchored. He thrust the big-bored muzzle of the revolver against the taut nylon rope and pulled the trigger.
With a deafening crack of sound the heavy-caliber weapon bucked in recoil against the crotch of his thumb. The leaden slug tunneled through the rope to leave only a wisp of twisted nylon fibers holding it together, strands that began unraveling to the pull of the microwave dish's weight.
A metallic crash followed as the parabolic dish plummeted to the earthen floor alongside the TV set, its lethal capability nullified forever. Tommy Rockford knew that at that precise moment, Crusher had pushed the Red Button--but the death-dealing ray of R.F. power he released was being pumped harmlessly into the earthen floor of Casa Piedra.
A trail of acrid powdersmoke followed Tommy Rockford as he leaped over Kendall and crouched to peer through the telescope lens. He was in time to see great eruptions of red and white smoke spewing from the Conquistador's engine nozzles to envelop the whole launch site.
Then the fiery tail of the orbiter reappeared in slow motion near the top of the gantry, thrusting upward out of the smoke clouds in synchronization with the announcer's frenzied patter to the TV audience: "...We have LIFT-OFF!.. Conquistador /s clearing the launch tower!.. The shuttle is ON ITS WA Y...Man is again headed for the stars--this time by way of the poles!"
Up at the Lucky Lady, Crusher was viewing the same scene on his television monitor, hearing the announcer's same triumphant words. He would know that something, somehow, had gone wrong with Merlin Kendall's carefully laid plans to commit murder by QRM.
As if mesmerized, K6ATX kept his eye glued to the telescope until Conquistador rode its nozzling red torch skyward and out of the 'scope's limited field of vision.
Milky layers of gunsmoke eddied in the dead air of Casa Piedra as Tommy Rockford finally turned his attention to the injured Merlin Kendall. Recovered from his momentary shock, Kendall was now screaming with rage and despair, staring down at the steel trap that had nearly amputated three fingers of his left hand, while the right hand was caught just behind the knuckles in the bone-fracturing bite of steel jaws more powerful than the teeth of a killer shark.
"Leave the trap on!" shouted Logan. "Let the animal suffer!"
Resting one foot on the trigger pan of the trap, K6ATX bent his full weight to the merciful task of releasing Kendall. Not until the man's arms fell free of the opening iron jaws was Tommy aware that Captain Logan and the Condor had crossed the room to reach his side. In quick succession, Tommy loosened their bonds. When that was done, the Condor freed Tommy's wrists.
Logan was babbling like a crazy man: "You did it, Tommy! You did it! You saved us from that monster--I'll never know how, but you did it! We owe you our lives, Tommy! So do the poor doomed souls aboard the Conquistadorl Little did they dream they were within microseconds of a fiery death--"
Merlin Kendall struggled to his knees, hugging his ruined hands against his shirt, tears of agony slipping into his beard. Bloodshot eyes staring up at Tommy Rockford, he found the strength to whisper one agonized syllable that summed up his mingled fear and shattered dreams. Dreams that no longer had room for Swiss bank accounts and yachts and white beaches and Mercedes convertibles and Riviera sunshine. One word that said it all:
"How?"
Tommy sighed. "Give old Trapper Joe the credit. It wasn't part of any plan. Not until a minute ago, anyway--when I found myself staring at something in the back of the fireplace that I hadn't noticed before. Then I caught on to what it was, and I had my answer. One of Trapper Joe's red-flagged scent sticks."
"A red-flagged what stick?" Captain Logan sputtered.
Tommy leaned past Kendall's writhing figure and reached into the fireplace to pull out a twig of manzanita that Trapper Joe had stuck into the soft ashes and litter of the hearth. Tied to the twig was a strip of bright-red flannel.
"Scent stick," Tommy repeated. "Trappers dip them in musk and use them to lure wild animals to a buried trap. This fireplace has been used as a garbage dump for years, so it was an obvious place for Joe to plant a trap. But as it turned out, animals couldn't get in to dig around this scent stick, because Kendall had padlocked the door to keep anyone from discovering his radio equipment."
Captain Logan said, "The camera film--did you actually hide it where the sheriff could find it if anything happened to you?"
Kendall stopped his agonized wailing to listen.
"No, that story was spur-of-the-moment--I had to bait the hook for Kendall's benefit. Most of it was true, some of it was made up. But the closeup flash shot of Kendall in the Condor's hamshack--that alone will send him to the gas chamber."
"What about the film?"
"I buried it in the dirt floor of the cellar last night. It'll be ready as evidence in any court of law when Kendall comes to trial."
As if this news put him past the breaking point, Kendall wilted into a dead faint, collapsing into a fetal position on the hearth stones.
Taking command of the situation, K6ATX said briskly, "Condor, radio the sheriff's office in town on Kendall's CB rig. Tell them to send a big chopper soonest... Include two body bags, one for Trapper Joe, one for Roxie. And we'll need a paramedic with first-aid equipment to patch up Kendall. They know where Casa Piedra is."
The old radio ham nodded obediently, taking for granted that Tommy was in complete charge. Before the Condor could answer, the air was filled with the sudden thump-thump-thump of a helicopter swooping down on them from the direction of Thundergust Peak. It seemed to be hovering directly over the roof. From the zenith came the stentorian voice of the Crusher, amplified through a bull horn:
"Somethin' went wrong, Boss! I pushed your red button, but the shuttle took off! Get out there so we can get goin' to LAX--"
"Holy Moses!" Captain Logan shouted. "Crusher will be coming in to pick up Kendall! Leave that overgrown ape to me--"
Trapper Joe's .30-30 hunting rifle was leaning against the wall alongside the open door. Before Tommy could shout a warning, the wild-eyed young NASA officer seized the Winchester and raced outdoors, gaunt face a mask of hate and rage, just as the Kendall's pilot was sending his helicopter into a looping spiral for a landing alongside the cabin.
"Logan!" K6ATX shouted in desperation. "Get back out of sight--if Crusher sees you're on the loose he'll take off--"
K6ATX's warning came too late. From the plexiglass bubble of the chopper, Crusher looked down to see Kendall's prisoner bolting out of the cabin, then dropping to one knee and lifting a hunting rifle to take point-blank aim at the chopper.
Tommy Rockford never knew exactly what happened in the next split seconds. He heard the crack of the .30-30, and reached the threshold in time to see Crusher's helicopter heel over and plunge vertically to earth from a hundred feet.
With an ear-riving crash of thunder, aircraft and pilot vanished in a fireball that was converted instantly into a mushroom of black smoke. The entire cabin trembled with the impact of the chopper's dive to earth only fifty yards away. Then it was over.
Tommy was standing guard over Kendall's unconscious body when an ashen-faced Captain Logan reentered, the smoking rifle still in his hands.
"I--I didn't mean--my bullet to hit the Crusher," Logan was sobbing. "I hope--he put the chopper into too steep an angle--lost control--and nose-dived. I didn't want to kill--"
"But he deserved to die," grunted the Condor. "He was going to destroy the shuttle. You have no cause for guilt, Cap'n."
K6ATX and the Condor exchanged compassionate glances.
"I predict that NASA will make you a brigadier for what you accomplished in saving Conquistador today, Captain." Tommy grinned. "If it hadn't been for all your months of investigation..."
Logan smiled in modest agreement. "Well, let's say next time I talk, the Pentagon bigwigs may listen-and respect what I have to tell them. And will they be astonished when I explain who really saved the Conquistadorl...along with countless human lives and maybe the future of the whole U.S. space program...a young ham operator named Tommy Rockford of Santa Bonita, California--great astronaut material! You're the one who's liable to have a general's stars in your future, Tommy."
Logan returned to the television set, utterly engrossed in the wrap-up show attending the successful launch of his precious polar shuttle.
K6ATX removed Kendall's hand gun from the waistband of his Levis and handed it to the Condor. "When Kendall comes around he may get violent. If you're forced to use this Magnum, I hope it's as a club. I don't want to turn a dead man over to the law."
The Condor hefted the big revolver and said, "It would be a pleasure to exterminate that monster--but I understand."
The Condor picked up Kendall's CB rig to initiate the call to the sheriff's office that would bring a helicopter to pick them up. As Tommy was heading out the door to get some fresh air, he heard the Condor start his QSO with "mission completed."
Mission completed...
Outside the stone house, K6ATX cupped hands around his eyes to shield them from the glare of the morning sun until he located Conquistador's ragged white vapor trail climbing the southwestern sky, like a frayed kite string anchored to the site of the launch pad, a contrail visible from San Francisco to Las Vegas.
K6ATX knew he should be half-dead from exhaustion, but instead he felt the euphoria shared by the seven astronauts and space scientists who by now were watching the marbled turquoise-and-white ball of Mother Earth floating in slow motion a hundred miles below them, the icecap of Antarctica and the South Pole already coming within visual range.
The contrail was breaking up and smudging the sky where it had passed through a strata of stratospheric winds before Conquistador vanished into the lonely blackness of outer space.
Conquistador. The Conquerer. What a perfect name!
The Condor stepped out to stand beside Tommy, tears in his eyes, gripped by emotion too deep to hold in.
"Sheriff's chopper will be here in 30 minutes, Tommy."
K6ATX murmured, "Thanks...You'll be flying back to town with us, Condor? You need a rest."
The old ham shook his head. "I'm needed out here, Tommy. Marijuana crop's about to reach the harvesting stage. That's when I earn my salary. I've got to be around to call in the narc squads so they can pick up the illegal aliens who fly in to harvest the sensimilla. We'll make a good haul this year...But I'll be checking in with the Brasspounders' Bunch every Thursday night from now on."
Tommy nodded his understanding. Then, eyes riveted to the dissolving white track in the sky, K6ATX whispered to his fellow radio ham: "What was it our President said when he was eulogizing the Challenger victims?...Something about men striving to shake off the bonds of Earth, climb to the stars, and touch the face of God?"

THE END
MURDER BY QRM
By Walker A. Tompkins
No. 6 (and last) in the Tommy Rockford series.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Murder by QRM is the sixth [and final] in the series of Tommy Rockford K6ATX ham radio adventures by Walker A. Tompkins (previous titles include SOS at Midnight, CQ Ghost Ship!, DX Brings Danger, Death Valley QTH and Grand Canyon QSO).
Because the books follow K6ATX's progress from radio ham toward a future career as a NASA astronaut, Tompkins carried out his technical research for Murder by QRM with in-person visits to Cape Canaveral, Florida; the Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas; and Vandenberg Air Force Base near Santa Barbara (to which he gives the fictionalized name of "Vanderhoff AFB" in this novel.)
"A strange thing happened to Murder by QRM on the way to the editors at ARRL," Tompkins told the editor. "Current events caught up with my fictional story and I had to rewrite the book! The original plot called for enemy saboteurs to blow up one of our NASA space shuttles at launch. Hardly had I completed the book than a 'major malfunction' caused the real-life space shuttle Challenger to explode nine miles in the air over Cape Canaveral, Florida. So I had to make some major changes in my plot."
Walker A. Tompkins' interest in Amateur Radio began in the early 1920s when hams wound their own tuning coils and receivers used galena-crystal catwhisker detectors.
In 1952, at age 43, Tompkins brushed up on his code and theory, drove from his home in Santa Barbara to the FCC office in Los Angeles to take his Novice examination, and was assigned the call K6ATX, which his fictional alter ego has since made famous.
Three years later Tompkins was elected president of the Santa Barbara Amateur Radio Club, where he originated the monthly news magazine Key-Klix, now in its 32nd year of publication. Tompkins also wrote articles about Amateur Radio for such magazines as Parents, Popular Mechanics, QST, National Geographic and CQ.
During a writing career that began in 1931 and included 59 published books of fiction, history and biography, TV and movie scripts and countless magazine stories, Tompkins traveled extensively in all parts of the world. During World War II he served three years in the European Theater of Operations as an army correspondent.
Tompkins made his home in Santa Barbara (Tommy Rockford's Santa Bonita). He became a Silent Key on November 24, 1988.

Version 1,0. Scanned and proofed in November 2002.  If you do an additional scan for typos, please have the courtesy to the person who spent the time to scan and proof, and leave in such things as the book summary at the beginning, the version history, and “The End” even if you personally don’t care about them.  Some of us readers want to have a dust-jacket view of what the book is about, and we want to easily know we received the complete file and the book really is at an end just as in the dead-tree version. (Some endings are more abrupt or ambiguous than others.)