The Big Lifters Read online

  Charlie Rourke, who represented most of Massachusetts, bulked like a smaller version of the barrel-chested Weatherby. Now he spoke up. “If it wasn’t Peel Transit, it’d be those other manufacturers.”

  “The hell it would,” Weatherby shot back. “A bunch of me-too marketers. John Wesley Peel is beholden to nobody, and he keeps plowing profits back into new ways to take away our piece of the action. All his high tech shit keeps him a year ahead of the others, finding more ways to undercut highway freight. It’s not just a coincidence, gentlemen. Peel Transit is putting our big highway rigs out of business.”

  Ciano, softly, “You’re talkin’ vendetta, Joey.”

  Weatherby’s thick expressive brows raised, his eyes widening as he nodded. The effect was as if he were hearing a brilliant response from a dull student. “Yeah, I am. I can even tell you why.

  “First time I ever saw Wes Peel, I was fresh out of Pitt, covering an insurance case for New Empress Freight. Peel’s old man drove a double-tandem semi rig out of Albuquerque, back in the days before wives rode in long-haulers. But Peel’s wife rode with him. She was in the cab in, uh, ’fifty-nine it was, when his brakes failed on the old Grapevine grade south of Bakersfield.”

  “Whoaaa,” said the West Coast man, Frank Lecano, who had spent twenty years at the wheel of the biggest rigs and now, at the top of the heap, was near retirement. “The old Grapevine had bad turnouts and sand pits, no nothin’. Blood alley,” he said, and with the curiosity of an old pro, asked, “What was he haulin’?”

  “Mixed load; heavy gypsum board and fertilizer. The bill of lading was doctored so it didn’t say ammonium nitrate, and the driver didn’t know his fertilizer was ten tons of high explosive. Hard to tell what set it off.”

  Lecano’s “Ohhh, yeah,” interrupted the chairman. “I remember. We had to route around the crater for weeks. Well, these things happen.” His shrug suggested that these things had always happened and, immutable as acts of God, would always happen. In a way it was true; they would always happen as long as multiton loads of lethal cargoes jousted with ordinary traffic.

  Weatherby continued, “Wes Peel was a kid then, testifying because of a long-distance phone call back to Albuquerque. His old man had mentioned to the boy that it was a no-sweat run with a load of gypsum and cowshit, and the defense couldn’t shake the kid. Peel knew all the buzzwords already; he intended to be a trucker like his dad. The settlement was a whopper; punitive damages. Shit, some of that money set John Wesley Peel up in business!”

  “Don’t sound like a vendetta to me,” said Rourke. “He wanted to be a trucker. He ’ s building trucks. ’ ’ Outspread hands implied that Rourke’s case was cut and dried.

  “Wait,” Weatherby cautioned, with one palm out, and softened it with a faint smile. “I spent good NTC money getting dope on Peel, so let me get to the payoff. Turns out that he was injured later in another accident with a rig, and still wears metal pins in his butt. His grandparents raised him after the Grapevine thing; hard-shell Christian fundamentalists, very strict. When Peel was seventeen, he was riding with his grandmother in a litde van when a rig carrying oil well line pipe overtook ’em. Driver was prob’ly doing eighty or so to get his bonus pay. You know how they run flat-out on those open New Mexico stretches.

  “Seems that a deer ran onto the highway, and the rig driver locked everything up and jackknifed. The line pipe mashed that little van pretty much flat. Young Peel came out of it with a broken hip, but he was pinned in the van for a half hour with his face six inches from what was left of his grandmother’s head.” A long pause, then, “I suspect Wes Peel did a lot of thinking in that half hour.”

  Lecano: “What happened to the rig driver?”

  Weatherby: “Shook up a little. But that’s not the point.” Rourke: “He was one of ours, Joey. That’s always the point.”

  Weatherby, with a show of restraint, “The point I’m getting at, is that Peel started out as one of ours, and a turncoat who knows the ropes can be the worst kind of enemy. When he went into business, it was with off-road heavy equipment in Colorado. By the time he built his Hayward plant, Peel had a personal hard-on against what we do for a living. I can’t prove it, but I can smell it. Ciano, you said ‘vendetta.’ I say we take it seriously.”

  Ari Pappas, whose interests spanned the Gulf Coast states, was first to raise his voice above a mutter of other responses.

  “Gentlemen, this industry has a history of ignoring smoke when its pants are on fire. Our chairman may be right about Peel; I’ve met the man, he’s a two-bottle Holy Joe, and you couldn’t scare him with a SWAT team. But let’s keep our hands clean, okay?”

  “Spit it out, Ari,” Ciano sneered. “You don’t want him keepin’ house in a waste drum on the Jersey flats.”

  Snickers, and a quick rejoinder from Weatherby, “I don’t either.”

  Ciano: “So whose side you on, Mr. Chairman?”

  “This country’s side,” Weatherby said. “We stay clean as we can, and we keep the nation’s highway freight running in a way that doesn’t get feds sniffing at our heels.”

  “Motion seconded,” said Lecano, his eyes on Ciano’s face. “You can’t get at Peel through stock holdings or a board of directors; he hasn’t got any,” Pappas admitted. “Maybe we could lobby for some laws that just happen to hit Peel’s business harder than anybody else’s.”

  “I think we could vote some NTC funds for that,” Weatherby nodded. “And meanwhile, put out the word that the NTC is worried about Peel’s rigs. Safety, reliability, all that crap. If a trucker thinks a Peel local rig might be outlawed next year, he sure as hell won’t wanta buy one this year. The less profit Peel makes, the less he plows back into new ways to zing us.”

  “You want a few little accidents? Why didn’t you say so,” asked Ciano. “I got a man works on Peel stuff all the time.” “Keep your soldiers on leave,” Weatherby said.

  “Naw, not that kind of mechanic, a mechanic mechanic. Ramirez owes me,” Ciano said, explaining much with tremendous economy.

  “Fine, just don’t graunch anybody, and I don’t want to know any more about it,” Weatherby cautioned. Ciano shrugged and looked out the window.

  During the next hour or so, the minds of Pappas and Weath-erby complemented one another, as usual: Pappas quick, Weatherby inexorably logical. Both were family men who took their religions - Greek Orthodox and Catholic - seriously. Where others might decide to break heads, these two preferred to break leases. In earlier days restraint would have been a weakness, but federal task forces against organized crime had turned this restraint into a strength. The National Transport Coalition, under Joey Weatherby’s guidance, had turned legalized bullying into a fine art.

  Some of the members were chafing, and the big window was splashing a golden gleam of late sunlight off the river, before Weatherby committed their voice vote results to a recorder. NTC lobbyists on Capitol Hill, and the wordsmiths who drafted proposals for trucking legislation, would briefly earn the astonishing salaries they enjoyed. No paper or computer record would be sullied with the name of John Wesley Peel, but the man’s freight brokerage and his trucking equipment would soon begin to feel the pressure of a hostile NTC.

  Ari Pappas lingered at his place, rummaging in his briefcase, as the others hurried out of the boardroom. Joey Weatherby noticed, and did the same.

  When the two men were alone, Joey pulled a cigar humidor from a special breast pocket; chose one Haitian Crook; offered another to Pappas. They performed rituals of clipping and lighting up in silence. TTien Pappas, watching his own thick blue exhalation, said, “There’s got to be a hidden agenda on . this Peel business, Joey. What’s the guy done to you?”

  Startled, Joey coughed and then grinned. “Swear to God, Ari, it’s nothing personal. I laid it on straight. I should’a said something about Peel in ’ninety-one when I first realized how his intermodal stuff was gonna affect long-haulers. I mean, hell, that freight brokerage business of his was busting its nuts to a
void the highways.”

  “But you waited until now? Yeah,” Pappas said, putting his head to one side, “you would. No complaints; some of

  these guys would’ve taken, uh, what my lawyers call ‘precipitate action.’ Lecano and Rourke are up to date, but you want to keep a friendly eye on Ciano. The day he reverts to an old mustache Pete, NTC’s looking for indictments.”

  “Tell me about it,” Weatherby grumped. “But whattaya want from me, Tony’s drivers put him here. Same as you and me.” He snapped his briefcase shut and waved the boardroom lights off.

  En route to the door, padding on carpet that shined the tips of their shoes, Pappas remained silent. Then, his face bathed in a dying golden light from the window, “Joey, if Peel is after our hides . .

  “I never said that. I think he’s after our business. It just happens to come wrapped in our hides.”

  “Whatever. But why didn’t you ask for some resumes during the meeting? I have a couple of people in Atlanta who could charm a mongoose. If I said the word, they’d be happy to get jobs with Peel. Never hurts to have somebody in the other camp, drawing two salaries.”

  Joey Weatherby put his big meaty hand on the door and beamed. “Now, why didn’t I think of that myself,” he said with dry sarcasm.

  Pappas, grinning back, nodded. “One day I’ll learn not to underestimate you, Joey. So you know Peel’s intentions for certain.”

  “Oh, yeah. And not just from Peel’s camp,” he went on, watching the door slide shut. “From inside his fuckin’ tent.” If he thought about it at all, Weatherby assumed that old Ciano’s accident-prone mechanic worked out of Jersey. But Joey Weatherby was not the only NTC leader with a link to the camp of John Wesley Peel.

  TWO

  Few of Winthorp’s students during the Spring Term of 1995 recognized him as a homicidal maniac, which proves only that some maniacs are more subtle than others. With thinning dark hair carefully arranged across his scalp, small well-groomed hands, and his mother’s luminous gaze, Winthorp seemed anything but a radical professor. He was fond of his splendid British diction, his three-piece suits, his campus strolls, and his glances toward the dark secret places between the knees of young women in the lecture halls of midwest Grayson University. Kosrow Nurbashi, his gaunt companion on this particular stroll, was not fond of Winthorp’s dialect when speaking Persian, as both were doing now, more literary than the southern Farsi dialect. Yet it would never do to tell Professor Bruce Hassan Winthorp that he spoke the argot of a Tabriz whore. Winthorp had learned Persian from his mother.

  “Your martyr was not wasted in the Elliott necessity,” Winthorp told the Iranian. Another man might have said, “the Elliott assassination.” Like many economists, Winthorp coined his own expressions even when - sometimes precisely because - older phrases were better understood. “Trust me in this,” Winthorp added.

  “Allah’s warriors are too few to waste,” said Kosrow Nurbashi, biting back a more caustic reply. A mullah of Nurbashi’s sort, running a team of suicidal zealots in a foreign country, demanded trust utterly and at last fatally; but he did not return it. Therefore he did not entirely trust this tweedy half-English intellectual, not even after the reports from Tehran which told Nurbashi more about Winthorp than Winthorp himself might know.

  Possibly Winthorp knew his real father had been a Ukrainian geologist probing for Iran’s oil in 1942, not the staunch British sergeant who took Sultana’s babe for his own and brought mother and child back to England. Perhaps he knew why Sergeant Winthorp had taken to drink, and to beating his round-heeled wife, in 1946 after discovering how she added to her income as an exotic entertainer. Perhaps, too, the son had taken refuge in books to gain more distance from a past that one might expect of a divorced belly dancer’s brat.

  Sultana’s later fame in English cinema had paid young Bruce’s way through the Victoria University of Manchester. Secretly, she taught him the Shia way. By observing her with men, the boy learned how subtly one can take revenge on a strong but unwary opponent. His own brains brought him some fame in national economic planning, and tenure in an American university, and gradually Winthorp realized his very special position. Wary of Soviets, he never contacted them; those who scampered between superpowers tended to become very small animals maimed between very large gears. Eventually, at Grayson U., he dropped hints to certain foreign students of the Shiite persuasion. In due course Nurbashi contacted him.

  Kosrow Nurbashi knew the considerable strengths, and the human weaknesses, of this middle-aged fanatic. He knew that he could not hope to find a man better trained than Winthorp to decapitate America by pinpointing Americans who most needed killing. Despite all this, Nurbashi would never completely trust a man with such a villainous accent. Raised in a culture whose every children’s tale featured revenge, whose most revered figure was Ruhollah Khomeini, the mullah withheld trust as a child hoards sweetmeats. “The media say that Senator Elliott could never have become President,” Nurbashi pointed out.

  A snort. “Certainly not; never tractable enough for his party,” Winthorp agreed. “But Adam Elliott was an astronaut before he was a politician. After the failure of the second space shuttle, he became a dervish in Congress seeking funds for orbital lifters of better design. He had charisma. He had powerful backers. He was driven by the idea that cheap cargo to orbit was the key to American wealth in the coming years.” Unconsciously, the little man slowed his words as he sprinkled Americanisms, speaking with the assurance of one who was safe behind a lectern.

  But Nurbashi had been harangued by coal-eyed experts before. “And to counter this mere idea, Islam sacrificed a youth?” Dependable martyrs were getting harder to find. Nurbashi’s most galling secret was that he had only a few more of them to expend, and two of those needed further injections of fervor. It was not a secret to be shared with Winthorp.

  “Elliott was not so mere,” Winthorp objected. “People like myself have ideas in abundance. Elliott was a man like your own martyrs, a man of action. He might have put his particular idea into practice,” said Winthorp.

  Nurbashi made a Middle-East gesture of uncertainty with his hands. “I cannot see how that made him worth a Far da martyr,” he grumbled.

  “That is why you need me,” said Winthorp. “I remember yesterday and I study the present, but I live for tomorrow. The Great Satan would plan for its tomorrows, and Allah’s Far da servant must not do less.” Winthorp’s nod might have been the faintest of bows, and lessened the arrogance of his boast.

  In addition, he had made a sort of pun on Farda. The word could mean “tomorrow,” or “sometime in the future”; but it was also the name of Nurbashi’s vengeance group, which took the decrees of Khomeini at face value.

  The Ayatollah had called openly for the death of Saudi princes and of his “Great Satan,” America itself, during his lifetime, even after the arms-for-hostages trades that shook one

  American administration to its roots. After Khomeini’s death, uprisings by Arabian Shiites had sparked a bloodbath of hundreds of Saudi royalty. Now, Shiites controlled Arabia’s enormous oil production - fully half of the world’s available supply. Now the price of Arabian crude was in line with Iran’s wishes, and after a brief return to cheaper fuel, Americans were again paying dearly for gasoline. Iraq’s Hussein and the Saudis had paid Khomeini’s price but finally, in 1995, the Great Satan America was using its technology to recover from the blow of expensive fuel. America lived today; but with her best people erased, she might die piecemeal tomorrow - Farda.

  They passed a bevy of American beauties on the broad stone walk before Nurbashi replied. “I accept your motive. Farda could work more speedily if we could research several of our . . . necessities ... at once.”

  “Harold E. Kroner,” murmured Winthorp instantly. Hissing, insistent, “And, and, and?”

  ‘ ‘Please try to be content with one name. These things take time. Would you force me to a hasty decision? It was you who said the necessity must be worth your mart
yrs. Of Kroner, I am now certain.”

  Nurbashi withdrew a small pad and pencil from his workman’s jacket where an American would have produced a mem-ocomp. “As a judge in Allah’s service, I demand to know how this child of Allah commits war against Allah,” he said formally. In his way, Kosrow Nurbashi maintained the ancient tradition: A public figure who questioned ordained punishment must be judged for warring against God, before his execution. Of course, Nurbashi’s judgments tended to be very, very summary. The assassins, convinced that they were Allah’s warriors in a jehad, a holy war, hoped to die so that paradise would be theirs. It all worked out neatly so long as a few barmy recruits were available and suitably worried about their chances for paradise.

  Winthorp stole a glance at his watch. In ten minutes he had an office appointment with a graduate student who was researching the swift changes in America’s interstate commerce. More than enough time for Nurbashi to try, convict, and sentence a man. “Hal Kroner directs motion pictures,” Winthorp said, “each of which draws huge audiences. That would be of no importance if Kroner’s ideas were harmless.

  “But his Valley Forge thrilled Americans by showing that ordinary people, with determined action, can move the world. Youth Corps volunteers tripled within the year. Kroner’s Catch A Rising Star was picketed by minority groups, but it seems to have changed the awareness of many blacks. Their new civic pride is alarming; their neighborhood projects are sometimes called Rising Stars. You can see where this might lead.” Nurbashi made a note. “It would not offend Allah,” he said, playing Heaven’s advocate.