The Balkan Assignment (11 page)

I nodded. "I stand corrected. Your point is well taken. You have first-hand experience with them, but to me they represent the Viet Cong mentality with whom I also have had first-hand experience. The Viet Cong were and still are terrorists and murderers in the same vein as the Nazis. Everything they started out to do has to be set against the murder and torture they employed for over twenty years. I've seen what that has done. You have seen what nazism had done. I doubt if there is that much difference in the end result."

Vishailly was silent a moment, then he said: "This is neither the time nor place to argue the merits of the war in Vietnam. Our problem is with this type of mentality that you claim to detest so much. If you do, why have you refused to aid Captain Ley?" Now he had me. I had been asking myself exactly that same question. Part of the answer was that I had not really been able to believe the fantastic web Ley spun for me. Of course, it was extremely possible that some of the loot cached by the retreating SS

throughout Europe might now be finding its way back into the revived party coffers. And, too, it was partly that I didn't really believe that Klaus could become mixed up in anything like this. And finally, it was partly that I was just as greedy as the next person. The thought of a nice tax-free third of a million dollars . . . you can buy a lot of escape with that kind of money.

"I honestly can't give you one single reason why," I said finally. "I'm not sure myself."

"Do you still not believe that what he is telling is the truth?"

"No, I guess I don't. The Yugoslav police certainly have ways and means of checking on him that I don't. So, I guess that if you're satisfied, I am, too."

"We are satisfied that he is who he is," Vishailly replied gravely.

"All right," I said at last. "What can I do to help?" Vishailly glanced around the quay then turned to survey the road leading along the ridge to the cluster of tiny houses and shops of the village.

"I hope that my assistant is keeping watch as I told him to. He is a good man but grown lazy in such an easy post. It is time to transfer him back to the mainland, I suppose," he said with a sigh.

Having politely warned me that I was under constant surveillance, he was all business again; he turned back to me. "Ley reports that his field operatives have located the first of the reception points for this gold."

"Now, let me guess just where it might be," I grinned at him. "It's not Turkey for which we have filed a flight

plan. So, it's either Berlin or Hong Kong or maybe someplace in India."

"No. You are not even close. It is Egypt."

"Egypt?" I repeated astounded. "Why in hell Egypt? You'd have a hard time scraping up someone outside the government who had a million bucks. And with Soviet carte blanche support, they don't have to pay premium prices for gold."

"Precisely the question as I asked it. Ley tells me that his operatives are sure this is only the first stop in a pipeline that might ultimately lead to Hong Kong. And this is what he must know. Where does this pipeline lead and what does it consist of?"

"And he wants me to find out, right?"

"Ah," Vishailly murmured. "Good. I am happy that you have agreed to assist us. Now, since your friends do not intend to recover the gold through the main cavern, I need to know how they expect to get in and where it is located. How are they entering the cavern?"

I held up a hand. "Not so fast. Just in case anything goes wrong, that's going to be my insurance policy. If you don't know where the entrance is, you have only to search the line of the entire bay; maybe some fifty miles? But look carefully because the other entrance is well hidden."

Vishailly started to retort angrily, then thought better of it.

"All right, I will not press you."

He looked anxious and worried for the briefest moment.

"Don't worry," I said softly, "I won't double-cross you. Remember what I said about the Viet Cong. I feel the same way you do."

Vishailly nodded. "Well," he said briskly, "you are to co-operate fully with everything that Maher wishes you to do. When you leave, you will of course fly out in your own aircraft. We will be watching on radar. To identify you, we wish you to climb directly to twelve thousand feet, descend immediately to eight thousand and reclimb to twelve thousand. At that point, we will have singled your aircraft out of the others that will be expected in the area. Your radio transmits on the commercial bands only. You will find that while you were in Belgrade, we added an extra channel. The channel selector switch will click one stop more than is indicated. If you are in difficulty, you have that frequency and we will attempt to get aid to you.

It can also be used for whatever reports you would like to make. It will be monitored at all hours of the day in the vicinity of your aircraft. The band is 127.6 kilocycles." Maher had been right, I thought. Someone had been aboard the aircraft. I had to admit that whatever else, Ley ran a tight organization.

I nodded. "So all I have to do is to play along with Maher no matter what he says and try and get as far down the pipeline as possible. What happens after we reach Egypt if he decides that he no longer needs a pilot. What do I do then?"

"There is that possibility," Vishailly admitted, "but Ley thinks it is remote. He is of the opinion that Maher cannot trust those with whom he works. He suspects that you and Mikhail were taken along as much for his protection as for your help." •

"Well, you can tell Herr Ley that I sincerely hope he is right—righter than he was about Mistako or Bowen."

With sunset the wind increased both in velocity and ferocity. I returned to the PBY after Vishailly had left and there spent the better part of an hour slumped in the pilot's seat reviewing the events, and my part in them, of the past few days. In that hour, I discovered facets of myself that I was not particularly pleased with, beginning with my reasons for coming to Italy and to this ridiculous excuse for an island. The January sky was pitch-black and studded with scudding clouds driven to madness by the wind. The wind itself had settled into the bay, its fury driving whitecapped waves into a frenzy of lashing crosscurrents. The winds were strong enough to question the advisability of driving the PBY the five miles or more to the cove. Even hugging the coastline, I could expect little mitigation of the wind since it funneled in through the narrow entrance and poured over the flanks of St. Peter's in a bevy of crosscurrents impossible to read. But, I knew that if I waited any longer, there would be little chance of the wind

slackening for hours, if not for days. The bora starts out strong and gets stronger. I hunkered back into the fuselage to check the few pieces of cargo still remaining . . . mostly the heavy SCUBA gear that Mikhail had left behind for me to bring along, since I was to do all the diving. Everything was still secured properly and I noticed that the belts and straps that Mikhail had loosened as he removed other pieces of equipment to load into the calque had been neatly stowed or coiled away. Everything seemed to be in order, but before climbing out onto the nose to cast off the bow and stern lines, I dug under the seat and pulled out the Smith & Wesson .38. Carrying a loaded revolver was a habit that I had gotten into in South Vietnam and one I found hard to break. I checked the safety, wriggling it back and forth, then replaced it. The Walther P-38 was still tucked into the inside pocket of my jacket and there

intended to keep it for a while. I still wasn't sure that Interpol and the Yugoslav police, in the respective guises of Ley and Vishailly, were telling me the truth, and it wouldn't do any harm to take a few precautions.

" After that, there was nothing to do but get started. Since the high quay and the cliffs above protected the mooring area from the full force of the wind blowing in through the entrance to the bay, I had no way of judging accurately the conditions out on the water. I had planned to taxi diagonally out into the bay as if making a test run. Then, instead of actually lifting into the air, I had planned on continuing around to run straight west, around the headland and finally to the cove. From either the quay or the village darkness would prevent watchers from knowing that I hadn't taken off. I abandoned that plan almost immediately. Once away from the quay, I found that both engines at half power were needed just to maintain headway. The wind quartered constantly, first rushing in on the portside, then seconds later, slamming around to smash into the starboard quarter. The waves were just as bad. Three and four feet high at times, they marched and counter-marched in welters of flying foam, smashing over the cockpit and reaching up to snatch a wing tip. There was no chance of pretending that I was trying to take off . . . in fact, anyone watching would have been sure I was crazy to try. What Vishailly was thinking as he watched through high-powered glasses from atop the cliff, I didn't know or care. The only thing of which I was sure was that he was watching and that it would probably do him no good at all as my luck had finally run out.

I knew I would never make it to the cove. And, there wasn't a chance in the world that I could turn the aircraft back to the quay without the wind lifting a wing and flipping her over on her back. It was equally certain that I wasn't going much further before that happened anyway.

I had misjudged the strength of the bora. A PBY is a stable craft in a rough sea, but this was way beyond what she had been designed to handle. She was an aircraft, not a ship; and in short order, it looked as if she might become a submarine. Spray became an incessant hail of water smashing back at the windshield, a deluge, a torrent that shut out all but the sound of the wind and the chatter of water lacing the fuselage and wings. I had only the compass to steer by, and the shuddering rack of the fuselage, as she smothered down into the troughs between wave crests, kept that in perpetual flux.

As the minutes passed, it seemed more and more impossible that the PBY could continue to maintain headway. Both engines were now straining at full power. I guessed that we were making less than ten knots in the bellowing seas. The aircraft plunged and rolled with all the abandon of a Gloucester schooner in a gale, but somehow, she came up from each trough with spray flying from her bow; the huge tail section digging into the wind for purchase. Perhaps it was the tail section that saved me; that and the tremendous suction created by the stepped pontoon fuselage providing the stability so desperately needed.

The bora, like all compression winds is given to sudden starts and subsidences. A given volume of air must pour into the far end of mountain valleys and canyons, which tend to act like venturi tubes to compress and often heat the air. This same volume must pass out the other end of the tube . . . and it does; moving several times as fast. Any change in the inflow can cause the winds to falter and slacken for several minutes, or even hours at a time. Fortunately, it happened exactly like that.

The rolling and pitching eased and the overloaded wipers began to keep pace. Through the rack of scudding

cloud I saw a fantastically bright and full moon edging up over the rim of the island. Within five minutes more, the winds slacked to a dead calm: twenty knots worth of calm. The moon had cleared the eastern ridge of the island and I was able to take a bearing on the black bulk of St. Peter's. I was not as far off course as I had expected to be and shortly sighted the headland shielding the cove from the main portion of the bay. The wind was beginning to blow harder again when I rounded the headland and taxied slowly into the cove where a dim lantern marked the shore line. Klaus had warned about the steeply shelving beach that would make it impossible to taxi ashore, and so, by the time I had swung the aircraft around and was ready to tie up to the two buoys anchored earlier, Mikhail, alerted by the sound of the engines, had pushed a dinghy off the beach and was rowing out. He waved as he came alongside, took the lines and moved away easily to the buoys.

"The wind . . . is it bad out there?" he shouted up as he rowed back again. I nodded. "Really bad," and clambered down off the nose into the rubber boat, landing heavily as it shifted in the choppy waves.

Mikhail sculled the dinghy expertly back to the shore. The sides of the cove were steep and high, reaching some two hundred feet up the flanks of the mountain rearing directly above our heads. The entrance to the cove was from the southwest, well away from the path of the bora. It would be gusty, but nothing like the high and steady winds that I had encountered on the bay, and I was confident that the PBY would not drag her buoys. We beached the dinghy and climbed up the beach to the air shaft opening. I tried to question Mikhail about the progress they had made in the tunnel that day, but he was even more uncommunicative than usual. A series of grunts and shrugs was all that I was able to get out of him, and by the time we had reached the shaft I had given up. He seemed just as happy.

The air shaft entrance or exit, depending on its function at any moment, was well concealed. Without a guide, I doubt if I could have found it easily, even though the moon was just past full and high enough to cast light into the cove. The back of the cove was layered with a fall

of rock washed down by water and gravity over the centuries; near the base of the cove, just above the beach, were several boulders that could easily have tipped the scales at several hundred tons. One was almost as big at a railway car. Mikhail led me up the rockfall to the base of another even larger boulder lodged securely against the ridge wall. Beneath the boulder was the tunnel mouth. I had to stoop to enter, but once inside, was able to straighten to full height. It obviously had been dug as much for an emergency escape route as for an air shaft. We plodded down the steep corridor, and I noted in the light of Mikhail's flashlight that the walls and floor were dry and smooth; the unfinished floor should pose no problem in bringing up the heavy crates of gold, in spite of the incline. Klaus, who in his good German thoroughness had thought of everything, had included a small winch and a soft-tired cart for hauling the gold. We reached the site of the cave-in three hundred yards deep into the tunnel. The tunnel curved rather sharply as it burrowed into the bowels of the mountain; the entrance was no longer visible, and the darkness was almost total except where Mikhail's flash cast a small oblong of brightness on the undressed rock floor.