Operation Stranglehold Read Online Free

couldn’t tell if it was the strength of the sudden storm or Hazel’s hasty, jockeying reactions that tossed our bouncing Cessna around. I couldn’t see much outside. It looked as if we were flying through a waterfall. Raindrops thick as gelatin covered the windows. “Full flaps!” Hazel bugled at me. She was handling the control wheel like a kid steering a dodge-em car at a carnival.
    “Full flaps!” I reported. I barely had the words out of my mouth when I felt a sickening feeling as the plane’s seat dropped out from under me. The next second my spine buckled from a sudden impact below.
    “Damn!” Hazel exploded. “Ran out of air six feet too high!”
    But we were on the ground, in one piece although shaken up.
    I started to say something expressing my relief, but Hazel’s uplifted palm cut me off. She was listening to the control tower’s taxiing instructions. She guided the plane to the end of the rain-glistening runway and pulled off to one side. Blinking red lights approached us through the increasing murk. Behind the lights was the long, sleek body of a white ambulance.
    Two white-jacketed attendants who looked like overweight members of the Kansas City Chiefs’ taxi squad sprang from the ambulance and boarded the Cessna as I swung open the door on my side. There was no conversation. The attendants took charge of Bruno and Smitty. That pair of worthies looked almost relieved at our parting, though they flinched from the hypodermic shots expertly administered to them.
    Hazel gave orders to service the plane.
    Thirty minutes later, with the Cessna safely refueled and hangared, Hazel and I were in a hotel room—with our damp, wrinkled clothes and a five-dollar bill in the hands of the hotel’s valet.
    It hadn’t been the least eventful day of my life.

CHAPTER II
    We ate dinner in the hotel dining room. Hazel seemed preoccupied all during the meal. “I keep wondering what you feel you’ve accomplished by having those men held,” she said at last.
    “Two things, maybe three,” I answered. “First, there’s going to be no million dollar lawsuit à la Bruno while they’re on ice. Second, it’s going to slow down any follow up by their boss while he tries to figure out what happened to his lovebirds. And third, if it comes to a crunch, they’ll make trading material.”
    She quirked an eyebrow. “Trading material?”
    “Sure. I turn them loose for a guarantee of immunity.”
    She shook her head slowly. “From what I’ve read about him, Senator ‘Cotton’ Ed Winters isn’t noted for his largesse with guarantees of immunity.”
    “Then he must not care very much what happens to his men.”
    That kept her quiet through the dessert course. She refused a brandy afterward. I had an Armagnac, then stopped at the cigar stand in the lobby and picked up three A&C Grenadiers. “Let me see the note those men brought,” Hazel said without further preliminary when we were back in our room.
    I lit a cigar before I handed it over.
    I was almost sure what was coming.
    “I don’t like it,” she pronounced following a two-minute brooding silence. “ ‘Badly injured’ … I don’t like it.”
    “It might not even be true,” I tried to soothe her. “Every time I’ve heard from Washington before, it’s been from Erikson himself.”
    “Then how did those—those roughnecks of Winters’ know how to find us?”
    “I’d really like to know the answer to that,” I admitted.
    “You could call Senator Winters and find out.”
    That’s my redheaded girl friend; always in favor of direct action.
    “What do I tell the senator about wing-shooting his man?”
    She bit her lip. “You could kind of gloss it over.”
    “Baby, that’s a hogshead of gloss.”
    But she had already charged on. “No, tell him Bruno deserved shooting.” Some of her former indignation had returned to her voice. “Which he did. I’ve never
seen
anyone so—so callously rude.”
    I didn’t say anything.
    The last time I