The Balkan Assignment (17 page)

"Stand by," the voice said and a moment later, Ley's voice was coming through loud and clear.

"Chris, do not transmit, just listen to me. The Yugoslav police have apparently decided to move in without waiting for Interpol . . . and without telling us. If they have not already shown up, be warned they are on the way. Do not attempt to resist. We are trying to reach the Minister for Internal Security, but so far have had no success. Now transmit, but be quick. I am sure that we are being monitored and I do not want you located." Quickly I switched on the microphone and said hurriedly; "Too late. Mikhail killed Vishailly. We got away. Won't say more. Over."

Ley was back on immediately. "Damn, I was afraid something like that would happen. Do not even hint where you are. We now know that somewhere in Egypt is the first transient base. We suspect Hong Kong or Macao as the final destination. I am only afraid that the Yugoslays have done us a good bit of damage. Over."

"Must abandon aircraft. How do I keep in touch, over."

"Transmit on same 127.6 Kc frequency. My call letters, KXY-23. We will keep as close watch on you as possible. Is there anything else I can do? Make this your last transmission."

"Yes," I said. "Get the Yugoslays off my back. Out." I shut off the radio and sat staring through the windshield while I finished the cigarette. The lowering gray sky only deepened my melancholy. We stood about as much chance of getting out of this fix as I had of jumping

over the moon from a standing start. Finally, I stubbed out the cigarette and cut the port engine. The sound as it wound down to a standstill almost broke my heart. I took only the .38 revolver with me and waded back into the fuselage to the portside blister, swung it open and pulled the raft up. Then I went across the fuselage and opened the starboard blister. I had decided that sinking her was the only way of doing it gracefully and with finality. Maybe, if things turned out all right, I could persuade Interpol that they owed me a salvage job .. . at the very least. I spent a further fifteen exhausting minutes cranking open the landing gear doors by hand. On the trip out, the aircraft had partly filled as water seeped in through the numerous bullet holes. Now, with the gear doors open, the water became a torrent. I took a last sentimental look around and climbed out into the raft, from where I could watch her as she settled beneath the surface. Five minutes later, she stopped sinking as the starboard wing listed over and dipped beneath the water. Slowly rowing around to the front of the PBY, I could see that the top of the fuselage was almost awash but her gasoline tanks were still three quarters full. That, combined with the broad wing expanse, would keep her afloat for hours, perhaps days.

So much for any possible salvage, I thought and rowed under the wings to open the pet cocks on the gasoline tanks. After a few moments, two good-sized pools of gasoline accumulated on the still surface. Sadly, I rowed off fifty yards, took a last long look and fired the raft's flare gun into the gasoline under the port wing. The gasoline exploded into twin pillars of flame that shot skyward, melting the fog into clear air. So intense was the burning high-octane fuel that the flame was almost colorless. Seconds later the tanks in the starboard side erupted, adding their ferocity to the blaze. I had begun to row steadily shoreward as soon as the first tank had gone up. Now at a safe distance, I watched the aircraft bum to death; first the wings blazing up and then crumpling under the intense heat. As each dropped into the water it spilled a stream of liquid fire. Within minutes, the entire aircraft was enveloped in flame.

I watched the whole time until, at last, the skeleton buckled and slipped beneath the waves and the fog crept

back, sealing the crypt. Then I turned the raft and began the long row to the shore.

The fog never did properly clear off that day, and I spent most of the remaining afternoon reconnoitering the area. It was pretty much as shown on the map; empty swamp land lying between the foothills of the Dinaric escarpment and the coast proper. Immediately in back of my camp, the ground began to rise steadily until it leveled off to form a small plateau, heavily overgrown with pines, that connected to the mainland. I struck out through the trees and shortly, was climbing uphill again. It took nearly an hour, but finally I broke out of the forest onto a ridge overlooking a shallow valley through the middle of which ran a narrow, unpaved road. I found a comfortable spot to sit in the hazy sun and watched the road for half an hour. In all that time, not even a stray dog passed by.

It was close to dark by the time I made it back to camp, ravenously hungry. Lunch had been forgotten and the heavy exercise of the day had exhausted me. I ate a hurried dinner, laid out the sleeping bag and settled down with a last cigarette. My mind wandered briefly to Klaus and Mikhail and finally to Ley.

Obviously, the Yugoslav authorities, with their hasty action, had taken him by surprise. Vishailly would have notified his superiors as to which radio wavelengths to watch, but brief as our conversation had been, I seriously doubted that they had obtained an accurate fix. Without radio direction-finding equipment in the immediate area watching the exact wavelength, it was unlikely that they could have narrowed the search any closer than the general area. They would have learned nothing more than they already knew. Too tired to think about it any longer I stubbed out the cigarette and was asleep in seconds .. . in spite of the hard ground and the unfamiliar surroundings. Dawn of the sixth day in Yugoslavia. Dull, dreary, foggy. Not expecting Klaus and Mikhail to return for some time yet, I ate a leisurely breakfast and took a long, cold swim to work out some of the kinks. After that, I lazed around the camp for several hours, ate and finally fell asleep again in the early afternoon. A dream I had not had for several months was waiting for me. I was playing Forward Air Controller for a South Vietnamese' Ranger unit up near the DMZ. Monsoon rains were drizzling and the air held the soft heat of the wet jungle. The unit had been moving on a suspected VC rendezvous camp, and I had left them several hundred feet behind while I pushed up through the undergrowth with a radioman. Overhead, I could hear the dull drone of a circling Phantom waiting for my co-ordinates to begin his bombing run. I had just radioed the exact location of the camp and could hear the Phantom swing off to the north to begin its approach. At that moment, we were suddenly under heavy fire. The radioman yelled at me, and a moment later knocked me to the ground before collapsing limply on top of me. The whine of the approaching jet, the corporal's screams and the constant sharp cracking of the small-arms fire tangled impressions and I panicked. That damned Phantom was coming in with napalm and we were smack in the middle of his drop zone. The radio had been knocked from my hand by the fall and the corporal's heavy body and the tangle of brush put it beyond my reach.

The dream always reached this point clearly, concisely; as if I were watching an exceptionally well-done movie. But as soon as I lunged for the radio phone, the film spurted forward into a dreamy surrealism. The rain drops grew in size and fell slowly and merged with the shape of the gray egg descending from the Phantom, tumbling end for end. The dead or dying radioman disappeared and the trees and the brush thrashed violently in the wind storm that was somehow created by the gunfire. And the bomb floated closer. I was standing now, the better to watch it. Then, I began to run through the jungle, fighting the vegetation and the sucking mud and when I looked behind me, the bomb had changed course to follow me until it came to rest less than a foot from the top of my head. A tiny crack appeared in the casing and grew and grew until the burning napalm came boiling out.

A loud halloo woke me; shocked me awake is perhaps more accurate. The intense reality of the nightmare always

left me shaken and disoriented. I had lived a part of that dream once . . . up to the exploding napalm. A bullet in my leg, disoriented, scared as hell and almost paralyzed knowing that there was nowhere to go until Pete Schenk sprinted through the gouts of flame to pull me out.

I came out from under the shelter halves with the pistol in my hand to see Klaus and Mikhail grinning at me from the beach.

"How the hell . . ." I began.

Mikhail laughed and with a sweeping gesture pointed to an old fishing boat riding at anchor in the river. I stumbled down to the beach and stared at it.

"Where in the world did you steal that thing?"

Klaus grinned even wider. "Mikhail found it in the village that we passed through yesterday afternoon. We had gone in to buy food, and we came across a funeral procession. One of the bystanders told Mikhail that the funeral was for a fisherman who had died of pneumonia the day before. He was an old man and had left his wife, after a lifetime's hard work, an old house and fishing boat. This gave us the idea. That evening we went round to her house, bought the boat from her and swore her to secrecy for at least three days. Then we sailed the boat south this morning. Mikhail says she handles well enough to get us to Italy."

"Italy?" I asked in surprise. "Why the devil do you want to go to Italy?" Klaus snorted. "Don't be ridiculous. Where else do we go? First we must get out of Yugoslavia. The police are looking for us all along the coast. The old woman said that soldiers were in the village looking for several men. She did not know who or why."

"The second reason," Mikhail interrupted, nettled obviously at having the spotlight stolen, "is that the two of you have valid Italian passports and residences in that country. Therefore, you can fly your other airplane out of the country with little difficulty."

"Ha, what the hell makes you think the Yugoslav Coast Guard is going to let us sail right on across the Adriatic?"

"The weather," Mikhail replied smugly. "The reports say fog and rain will continue for several days. If we leave now while the fog is still heavy, we can be off the Italian coast by daybreak. I spent many years dodging Nazi coastal patrols," he said this last with a slight sneer

that twisted his lip in Maher's direction, "and I do not think I have forgotten how." Much of what Mikhail said was true. If there was anybody qualified by experience to run a blockade of coastal patrols, he was certainly it. If the police were already in the villages looking for us, it would not be long before they started scouring the country and coast between.

"Okay," I agreed. "We probably stand a better chance of getting across to Italy than trying to find another aircraft here."

We cleaned up the campsite immediately, covering any trace that might have betrayed us. Always we worked with one ear cocked for the slightest sound of an aircraft engine or worse, a patrol boat. I told them what had happened to the PBY. Klaus said nothing, but Mikhail was surprisingly unhappy that I had destroyed the aircraft. An amazing wreck of a man I thought. Every hour revealed another unsuspected facet of his character.

By late afternoon, we had the gold stowed aboard the boat in the forward hold under a molding pile of old fishing nets. Other than that, we took no further precautions. If we were stopped and searched, there was no way we could have hidden four rusty ammunition boxes aboard such a small boat.

The boat itself was a slightly more modern version of the Balkan calque we had used on the island; it looked more like one of the San Pedro fishing boats that still operate off the west coast of the United States. The hull was broad-beamed with a high bow, the stern squared off and supporting a small deck-house just aft of amidships. A small, fiftyhorsepower diesel engine in surprisingly good condition pushed her along smartly at twelve knots flat out or eight knots cruising. Unlike its American contemporaries, this craft carried no radar and only a small receiver permanently tuned to the marine weather band. I would have liked a police band to keep tabs on what was being said about us, but on a fishing boat there would, of course, be no time or need for such luxuries. Mikhail assured us that the engine was in good enough repair to attempt the crossing and that the tanks were full of diesel oil. What more could we ask? Maybe a full pardon, I thought, but I kept it to myself.

A light drizzle had started earlier, and now as we crept

out of the river channel in the heavy dusk it increased to a steady downpour. If nothing else, the elements seemed to be on our side. Mikhail crouched his six-foot two-inch bulk into the tiny wheelhouse and peered out through the driving rain. With the three of us, the cabin was jammed, and when I couldn't stand the cramped cubicle any longer I slipped on one of the old rain slickers hanging by the screen door and went out onto the narrow, slippery deck and made my way to what I suppose you would call a forepeak. The steady downpour mixed grandly with the fog to hide all beyond fifty yards. Mikhail had set a course in a southwesterly direction to take us through the outlying islands and out of Yugoslav waters as fast as possible. Yugoslavia subscribed to the Hague Convention that had set three miles as a territorial limit, but like most nations bordering the sea, continued to exercise informal control to a twelve-mile limit. Thus, with the offshore islands thrown in, we had nearly forty miles of heavily patrolled waters to traverse before we could begin to relax, and even then, if they decided to stop us on the high seas, there would be no one to deny them that right; certainly not us. We had four pistols between us. I knew that Mikhail had one, I had two . . . the Smith & Wesson .38

carefully wrapped away in my sleeping bag and the Walther beneath my shirt. And I was certain that Klaus had a pistol concealed somewhere. We were a dangerous band of desperados, yes we were.

It sounds childish in the retelling, but believe me, at the time it was mighty comforting to feel that cold bulk of the Walther pressing against my skin. The memory of Mikhail's attack on me after the rockslide was still very fresh in my mind. So was the incident with the coil of steel cable.

For an hour, we continued to push through the dark silent seas. There were no waves to speak of; the surface was like a lake in the early morning, only the barest of ripples spattered with raindrops. I was worried most about Yugoslav coastal patrol boats equipped with radar. Smuggling is the bane of all eastern-bloc countries . . . especially those with a coastline. Western luxury goods command a high price and import quotas are usually low. The Yugo-slays would be well versed in anti-smuggling tactics, which they would certainly put to good use while searching for