Mind Brothers 1: The Mind Brothers Read online

  Mind Brother #1:

  THE MIND BROTHERS

  Peter Heath

  * * *

  THE MIND BROTHERS

  Copyright © 1967 by Lancer Books, Inc.

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the U.SA.

  PRESTIGE BOOKS INC. • 18 EAST 41ST STREET

  NEW YORK, N.Y. 10017

  * * *

  Chapter †

  ONE

  A BLOOD-RED SUN swam up through the marsh fog until the heat churned it into a vivid crimson soup. The huge disk floated higher and, clearing the last tendrils of mist, it hung on the edge of the world; then it began to climb its arc. Already, its monsoon-making heat was felt in the never-sleeping city. A city where the French had once ruled an empire of rubber, coffee and corruption in their voluble, charming and decadent way. A city where now the Americans sat in sweat-stained fatigues toasting the sunrise with stale warm beer and tried hard not to think about anything.

  No one slept in Saigon . . . unless it was after they had had a girl, or were just plain exhausted. There was too much to do and too much to forget. The great city at the mouth of the sluggish river had once been called the Paris of the East. Now it was an inlet and an outlet for men and the machinery of destruction; a great heart, pumping supplies uphill to the dirty war that raged so closely around it; so closely that at night you could hear the mortar fire in the liquid darkness. So close that planes landing at Saigon International Airport could fly a mission without a scratch and yet land with neat rows of holes stitched across their wings—put there by the Vietcong seamstresses holed up under the approach pattern.

  But the heart continued to pump. In spite of the confusion, bad planning, dirt, heat, danger and death, the twin sun-bleached runways served their current masters faithfully and the morning air was full of the whine of turbines, the cough of cold pistons and the stench of burnt rubber, exhaust and raw gasoline.

  The sun was up now, and no one except the Vietnamese in the control tower even bothered to look at the tiny, single-engined Air Force L-19 as it taxied out of its revetment. It was just another battle-chewed old kite . . . going somewhere and who the hell cared? Probably not even the two dirty and tired men inside.

  The L-19 chugged slowly down a long line of heavily guarded F-105 Thunderchiefs, aswarm with maintenance crews and ordinance teams. Then it bumped past a squadron of Gooney Birds loading a company of South Vietnamese Rangers, little men with huge American packs on their wiry backs. They were being hustled aboard by a Special Forces Sergeant with a silver whistle on a cord around his neck, while the helicopter blades whirled silver against the sun.

  At last the L-19 joined the end of the long waiting line, behind a flight of four F-104 Starfighters. It waited there, its engine already overheated, and the colonel in the observer’s seat and the captain at the controls tried to stay awake under the sweltering plexiglass.

  The fact that the L-19 wasn’t just another puddle-jumper on a Rec and Search mission and the fact that the cargo it carried was worth thousands of man-hours and more than its weight in diamonds might have disturbed the grease monkeys and the technicians who had spent the night tearing the guts out of the number two engine of the C-141 Starlifter parked near the end of the runway. But it was doubtful. They were sound asleep in the shadow cast by one of its immense wings.

  But if they had known what the strong-jawed, gray-eyed young man with the sensitive lips who was riding in the back seat knew, they might have had nightmares instead of fantasies about the women Saigon or their wives, girlfriends and mistresses back in the States.

  The flight of F-104’s moved up to the apron. Nasty silver birds with wings like sawed-off shotguns. Short range, immense speed and with the firepower of a battleship. They were the hunters.

  “The Eagle Scouts are waitin’ fer their li’l ol’ exercise,” the precise southern voice of the commander of the F-104’s drawled through the command channel, jolting both of the half-dozing men in the L-19 back into reality.

  “Roger and count-down your roll from ten seconds . . . Mark,” a voice with an Oriental tinge replied. With its overloaded facilities, Saigon Airport had to time its landings and takeoffs to the split second.

  “We’re rollin’,” the young southerner sang out. Simultaneously, four J-79 jet engines wound up to maximum rpm’s and four after-burners kicked in with great blasts of yellow flame. The 104’s crouched and sprang forward. First slowly, then faster. Suddenly they were a silver blur far down the runway.

  “Our turn coming up, Colonel.” The captain half turned in his seat, and Jason Starr nodded his head.

  “Gears up and climbing,” the lieutenant’s voice came in clearly. It was thirty-five seconds and ten miles away and the F-104’s were shooting straight up at approximately 1,350 miles per hour.

  Now it was the L-19’s turn. The captain gave her the gun. Unbalanced and slightly overloaded with the instrumentation that Starr had sweated and cursed all night long to install, she slithered and mushed along, gaining speed so slowly that Starr’s fists clenched into tight balls and his toes curled up inside the old tennis shoes that he had worn in place of the uncomfortable Air Force version of the jungle boot.

  But the captain knew his business—which was exactly why the AFSWR had yanked him out of the cockpit of an X-15 rocket plane for this mission. After what seemed an interminable period of engine roar and runway jounce, she floated off, her flaps slid into their dirty grease-covered slots, her nose came down, and she banked hard to the left, away from the concrete and away from an incoming Pan American Airlines 707, which had already touched down and was braking to a stop beneath them.

  They throttled back, and Jason Starr, his lanky but muscular body crimped into a knot in the tight cockpit, allowed himself a somewhat boyish grin. Project Hysteria was off the ground and on its way toward a patch of jungle a hundred and twenty miles away—a patch of jungle that might change the history of the world. For the contents of the three black boxes that he had welded to the steel tubing of the airframe, where his sensitive fingers could play over their dial-and-switch-studded faces, were certainly going to change something. It had been worth it, Starr decided—the lack of sleep, the heat, even the absence of women.

  Now, as the L-19 puttered along, its flimsy wings jiggling through the low altitude turbulence, he let his thoughts ride elsewhere.

  He slipped back through the months of high-speed computational engineering in the Air Force Special Weapons Research Center, a bleak place in the high Rockies where no one was invited unless his services were first classified as vital . . . all the way back to the quiet days in his office at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California. To his house in Pacific Palisades, with its view of the ocean, its library and its garage full of high-performance sports cars. And the nights on the patio, with women in his arms, making love, broiling steaks and playing the big-little games of love until the sun came up through the morning’s haze.

  He missed it, but he had left it by choice and without a backward glance. When the man from the Air Force Special Weapons Research Center had walked into his office, lit his pipe and told him to pack his bags, “Colonel Starr” had been born. The rank was a politeness extended by the Department of Defense to the men it requisitioned for its mental stockpile.

  Naturally, Jason’s first reaction had been hostile.

  “Look, whoever you are, I don’t go anywhere for anybody unless they have a pretty good reason . . . a damn good reason,” he said bluntly. “Spent too much time learning how to think for myself to waste it,” he added.

  “It won’t be wasted, Doctor Starr,” the AFSWR man said. “The Special Weapons Research Center isn’t in
the habit of wasting people’s time.”

  “That’s what you say.” Jason rose from his desk and crossed the office to the steel-slatted security window. Through the slits he could see the summer sun whitewashing the street below. “I’m thirty-two years old, I’m engaged in highly classified research for a semi-independent agency of the U.S. Government, I have two Ph.D.’s and a master’s degree . . . and I like it. I like the money, I like the work, and I like being a civilian.”

  “Yes, we know all that, Doctor, and that’s why I’m here. We know how you feel about war and, more specifically, what you’re doing to think of alternative solutions,” said the AFSWR man.

  “Well—?”

  “Just that your services on this particular project could make the difference between—shall we say—survival or extinction of the human race.”

  Jason’s eyebrows raised. “Cleaner H-bombs?” he said. “—sorry.”

  “Hardly, Doctor. I mean saving lives.”

  “Project what?” Jason was half-hooked by then and he knew it.

  “Project Hysteria.” The AFSWR man’s face was shadowed, gloomy, cold. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in a month or two.

  “Until you say yes or no, I can’t be too specific, Doctor. For several years the Department of Defense has been developing a device which has involved the best scientific minds in the country. Progress has been made. Now we need a computer specialist to clear the last hurdle . . . a computer specialist of the highest order. That’s you, Doctor Starr.”

  “What if I say yes?” said Jason softly.

  “You’ll work completely alone. The others never knew the full implications of what they were doing, but you will—and you’ll be responsible for testing the equipment.”

  “And just what is Project Hysteria?” asked Jason.

  The room was absolutely quiet. The air conditioning hummed tunelessly. Jason’s eyes were fixed on the AFSWR man’s tired-out face.

  “Thought control, Doctor,” he replied.

  A thermal updraft hit the L-19 in the belly. It shied sideways like a frightened colt and the engine screamed in protest. Jason looked down. Now they were skimming over a solid green carpet, the jungle boudoir of the Vietcong. Even at 130 miles per hour the smell of rotting vegetation and stagnant water filtered into the sweltering cockpit. The captain cursed sourly while he tried to keep the plane level and read his maps at the same time.

  “We’ll be over the target grid in zero eight minutes,” he announced.

  Jason gave him thumbs-up. It was easier than trying to shout over the wind and engine noise. He checked out the systems, flicking switches, adjusting voltages, checking and rechecking circuits until there was only one more switch to throw—a black toggle protected by a red safety guard. The words: TRIGGER, DANGEROUS WHEN ACTIVATED were stenciled neatly underneath.

  Jason grinned at that. No one knew whether it was dangerous or not. The closest the Air Force had gotten to it was to stick on the label. It was a collection of instruments designed by a high-speed computer which analyzed the information that Jason laboriously fed into it and came up with an answer. An answer that not even he, with fifteen years of theoretical mathematics, could completely understand.

  The coming test would prove whether or not a combination of transistors, wires and dish antennas could broadcast the emotions of fear, confusion and frustration to a selected group of human minds. It was a test being carried out in such complete secrecy that not even the CIA or Air Force Intelligence had been informed.

  If the thing worked he would know soon enough. Just as he had made rats, birds and monkeys go berserk under controlled laboratory conditions, he expected to make people—normal human beings—respond in the same way. Seen in physical terms, the brain is nothing more nor less than a computer made out of living tissue—brain cells. And, like man-made computers, the brain uses electrical energy to function. The equipment that Jason had designed duplicated and amplified brain waves and broadcast them on the same frequencies that living brains used during the thinking process. Theoretically, the equipment could broadcast any pattern of waves in any combination. However, Jason had worked against the deadline imposed by the Air Force and he had confined his experiments to the instantaneous conditioning of animals. In its current state of development the machine was limited to one major “program.” It transmitted fear. The kind of primitive fear that was beyond the level of the conscious mind. The kind of fear that would make men forget their pride, their duty and their identities. The kind of fear that would make them utterly useless as soldiers. If it worked, war, as a way of solving humanity’s quarrels, was finished for good.

  He had arrived in Saigon alone with a couple of crates and some orders assigning him the L-19 and its pilot. The captain up front was in the dark as far as the nature of the equipment was concerned. His job was to get the puddle-jumper over the target. And Jason’s job was to push the buttons in the right ways and get himself back to Saigon . . . to wait for the results. The results would be investigated by the Special Forces team he had requisitioned from the Special Warfare Center in Saigon. They were now hovering ten miles away in a fleet of whirlybirds, waiting to move in at his radio command.

  In the laboratory the effects had been temporary. Jason hoped the same was true in the field. At best it was a grim business, and he was happy to be on the shielded side of the directional antennas installed under the tail of the L-19.

  “Pow! . . . as they say on Batman,” the captain shouted over his shoulder. “We’re coming up on target, sir.”

  The green velvet jungle looked the same. But a mile ahead Starr caught a swift glimpse of a river running silver through the tropical forest. There was a patch of brown bordering it—the clearing and huts of a small Vietcong unit—the perfect target for Project Hysteria’s test.

  The L-19 banked ninety degrees to the left, lining up on the treetops that fringed the edge of the river. Jason bounced his head against the canopy as the little craft leveled off and then went into a short, steep climb to lose airspeed. The nose swung down again, the engine backfired once as it was throttled back, and they were mushing in over the river . . . so low that Jason could see a school of minnows scampering away from their moving shadow.

  His hand found the trigger guard and flipped it up. The clearing was around a sharp bend a half-mile ahead. The plane purred toward its rendezvous, threading the needle-path between the high jungle trees that closed off escape from both sides. Jason knew, then, what a bombardier felt in his guts: a savage state of calm excitement. His finger crooked around the toggle. The L-19 swept into its turn, one wingtip brushing a few inches above the water. Now he could see the clearing just ahead—calm and empty under the afternoon sun. His finger began to pull the switch. It never finished the task.

  They had waited for three hours. The two U.S. Army .50-caliber machine guns—captured months ago from an ambushed truck convoy—were set up on opposite banks of the river, their fields of fire crossing in the center. They had posted observers with walkie-talkies far up the river. They had known well in advance what to look for and when to be ready.

  The men looked like regular North Vietnamese; the village gave the impression it was intended to give; and Colonel Po had organized and executed his mission along classic guerilla lines. His men had been infiltrated with regular units and he had walked the Ho Chi Minh trail with three other colonels, bound for new assignments with tactical regiments. It had taken them two months to assemble, to build the small village, and to wait.

  And now the purpose of their operation approached.

  As the L-19 skidded out of its turn, Po’s arm came up. He grinned wolfishly.

  “Aim carefully, comrades,” he shouted in Chinese. His arm snapped down.

  Two streams of tracers converged into a single point fifty feet ahead of the plane. At seventy miles an hour, even an L-19 is barely flying. But it is moving too fast for a human to react instantaneously. The captain saw the white puffs and identified them.
In a movement too swift to follow, he hit the throttle and pulled back on the stick. Only three-quarters of a second had elapsed, but the captain was too late.

  The L-19 flew through a hail of lead and things happened even more swiftly. The plane was rising when the first bullets tore through its flimsy fuselage. Instead of ripping the engine to shreds and shattering the windscreen, they splattered into the belly with a series of vibrating explosions under the floorboards that sounded like hail. The L-19’s control cables were sheared, locking the horizontal and vertical stabilizers into the position the captain had instinctively chosen—a steep climb.

  It happened so quickly that Jason was still reacting to the captain’s first curse when the L-19 entered the swarm of bullets. Then something smashed him in the thigh with the power of a mule’s kick and his mind grew hazy. The engine was roaring wide open and they seemed to be climbing steeply. He was aware of something sticky and warm on the numbness of his right leg. His hand was still on the toggle. He looked at it. It all seemed part of a dream, and he continued to watch it unfold with strange amusement.

  With its engine wide open, the L-19 nosed up into the sky. It rose quickly away from the river and the running men on the ground. Swiftly, the men receded until they were no longer men but tiny toys, waving their arms ridiculously and looking upward. Jason laughed. It seemed very funny. He wondered if the captain up front appreciated the humor. He decided to ask him.

  But the captain seemed very busy. He was hunched over the controls keeping the nose pointed toward the great silver sun that had appeared in front of Jason’s eyes. I must ask him, he thought. He leaned forward and tapped the captain’s shoulder. Then he tugged. Then he pulled. Finally the captain leaned back and Jason could see the gaping, Y-shaped hole where the captain’s forehead had been.

  Jason wanted to say something. A word of comfort to make the captain feel better. But he couldn’t stop laughing.