The Istanbul Decision

by Nick Carter

  That's not to say you're not pretty," he went on, "or that I might not enjoy it another time, but not today."

  If this were an attempt to smooth things over, it failed miserably. A mixture of surprise and anger continued to mount in the girl's face until it seemed as if she'd lost the ability to talk. "W-What? W-What it'?" she stuttered.

  Carter didn't bother to reply. He turned his back to her, crossed the cafe, paid his bill at the bar, then left the hotel by the front door.

  He went straight to Schwetzler's apartment. Schwetzler was sitting in an armchair, gun oil, rags, and pieces of revolver laid out on the table beside him.

  "Fog tonight," he said, greeting Carter cheerfully. He sighted up the barrel to see if it was clean. "That's how it is. During the day sun. Then at night the air cools and fog. A climate suitable for smugglers, yes? And the air is damp today. Should be a thick one."

  Carter went to the window and pulled back the drape. Down in the street on the opposite corner the girl strained to look first in one direction, then in the other. Apparently she'd lost him when he turned in from the main street.

  "Friedrich," he said, calling him over. "Know her?"

  Schwetzler looked down over Carter's shoulder. "No," he said after a moment's study. "But I'd like to, even at my age. Is she an agent?"

  "I don't know."

  They watched as the girl shrugged and retraced her steps up the side street. "If she isn't," Carter said, "I just blew one of the better opportunities of my life."

  The fog was everything Schwetzler had promised. It hung in the air like a curtain, impeding pedestrians and slowing automobile traffic to a crawl. They drove out the lake road until it became little more than a cart path, and they lost sight of it even in the high beams. Schwetzler parked, and they went the rest of the distance on foot.

  The skiff was moored to a single piling in a sea of reeds that obscured it completely from view. Carter was amazed his companion was able to find it.

  "We do this two, sometimes three nights a week in heavier fog than this," he explained. Tonight is easy. Usually I have heavy boxes to carry."

  They got into the boat, and Schwetzler began rowing. In the fog the night seemed to close around them with only the occasional bleat of a foghorn to the northwest to orient them.

  "How do you find the shack in all this?" Carter asked.

  "I hear it. The waves play a tune on the pilings. Listen!" He held up a finger for quiet. There it is!" He turned several degrees starboard and continued to row.

  Even with Schwetzler's sonar guidance, it took them half an hour to reach the shack. Once there, they waited another hour and a half before they heard the first slow chug-chug of a diesel engine growing steadily closer.

  "Hallo! Wer ist da?" called a voice.

  "Why is he speaking German?" Carter asked suspiciously, grabbing Schwetzler's arm.

  "What would you have him speak in these waters? Hungarian? Hier!" Schwetzler called back.

  The lumbering hull of a fishing boat appeared out of the mist and nuzzled itself against the pier. Her sole occupant, a young man in a black sweater and sailor's watch cap, threw over a line and Schwetzler secured it.

  "Nicholas, this is my son-in-law, Emo Vadas," Schwetzler said as the young man stepped onto the pier.

  "Emo, this is Nicholas Carter. He is…"

  "Ein Amerikaner," finished Vadas, shaking Carter's hand.

  "Is it so obvious?"

  "No, but every frontier guard from Bratislava to Szombathely is looking for you. They have orders to shoot to kill."

  "Where did you hear this?" demanded Schwetzler.

  "They are talking about it as far east as Györ."

  "Kobelev," said Carter, turning to Schwetzler.

  "But I don't understand. Why would he want you dead when he has still to negotiate for his daughter?"

  "His daughter escaped. She's probably on her way to him right now."

  "Then your position is very grave," said Schwetzler, shaking his head.

  "Not as grave as the girl's he's holding captive."

  "Do you think she is still alive?"

  "Maybe. Kobelev isn't on the best of terms with his home base. It's possible he hasn't been told yet. Maybe he figures that now that I've had a chance to relay his demands to my superiors, I'm expendable. He's wanted me dead for a long time."

  "Then I pity you, my friend. You are a hunted man. As a man who has also been hunted in his time, I know how it feels."

  "This is idle talk," Vadas put in impatiently. "And it is not getting us any closer to Hungary. We must move now. The guard boats are double tonight."

  The three men quickly set to work emptying the shack of its contents: cases of French wines, bolts of brightly colored cloth, boxes of perfume and other luxury items, and stacks of Western clothing, including denim jackets and blue jeans. They stashed the contraband belowdecks, men Schwetzler gave Carter's hand a solemn, knowing shake, and stepped from the gunwale onto the pier. The diesel sputtered into life, and Schwetzler threw the mooring line onto the deck. Carter watched from the bridge as Schwetzler waved once; as the boat moved away, he was quickly swallowed by the fog.

  The young captain spun the helm to port and headed for open water. "This boat isn't built for speed, so I take it you use the fog as a screen rather than trying to outrun them, is that it?" Carter shouted over the engine.

  Vadas nodded, keeping his eyes riveted on the windshield. Carter stared uneasily at the seemingly impenetrable barrier of gray-white mist.

  "The question is, how do you navigate in this pea soup? How do you keep from running aground?"

  Vadas suddenly cut the engine and held up a finger. Across the water came the faint bong of a buoy bell. "They are placed wherever there is danger," Vadas said. "All of them sound slightly different. If one knows them well, they will lead one directly down the lake."

  It was a good thing they were a musical family, Carter thought, or he'd have been reduced to trying to row across this lake in a skiff. He turned and went belowdecks. There he found a narrow bench and sat down, picking up an East German fishing catalogue from the map table, but he didn't read any of it. He just held it open on his lap and stared into space, wondering how Cynthia was doing and if she'd regained consciousness, and thinking perhaps it would be better if she hadn't.

  The engine ceased while Vadas listened for a buoy. Carter listened along with him. Vadas started the engine again and veered starboard for several minutes, then pulled around to the left. At this rate their progress was erratic. Carter thought with some satisfaction, so even if the frontier guard was outfitted with sonar detection equipment, the old trawler would still be tough to intercept.

  The gentle motion of the boat made him drowsy. He laid his head back against the bulwark and closed his eyes. Another stop, another moment of listening, then start again. The galley and his surroundings began to move into the unconscious part of his mind, mixing with other images, when the engine stopped once more, and this time no bell sounded. Instead, the drone of another, much more powerful engine reverberated through the fog, growing steadily louder.

  Carter jerked awake and hurried up to the bridge. Vadas turned from the helm as Carter rushed into the cabin. Two hundred yards and closing. Vadas cut the power, plunging the cabin into darkness except for a shaft of light streaming out of the gangway from below. Carter dashed down the stairs and pawed until he hit the switch. It was pitch black only for a second when a bright light beamed in through the porthole. The noise of the approaching engine whined to a peak, and the old trawler began to rock violently. Carter estimated the distance at twenty-five yards.

  The lights disappeared quickly, then the engine noise diminished as it steamed into the distance. Carter came slowly up the stairs. "I can't believe they didn't see us," he said.

  "The fog," said Vadas. "Be prepared. There'll be others."

  They moved slowly ahead in complete darkness for the next quarter of an hour, then stopped again and listened. In
the silence the night pulled itself around them, black and damp. The very atmosphere of the cabin had turned to fog. It had penetrated Carter's clothes, and its dampness filled his nostrils. In the distance a buoy tolled like a death knell.

  "Funny," said Vadas. "I would have sworn that should have been on the starboard side, not the port." He hastily swung the wheel to starboard when it suddenly dawned on Carter that this was the direction from which the guard boat had been coming.

  "Hey!" he shouted. "Maybe they changed the…"

  He never completed the sentence. A deafening screech, like a million gulls all diving at once, tore through the cabin, and the deck pitched crazily, tossing Vadas off-balance and ramming his head into the control panel. He rolled against the bulwark, then onto the window, which broke. He hung for a moment by the window frame, black water surging up beneath him, then he slipped through and disappeared.

  Carter had caught hold of the pilot's chair, and he clung to it, trying to keep from sliding down the floor and following Vadas. He hung by his hands for what seemed many minutes, although in reality it couldn't have been more than one or two, then managed to wedge a foot against the bulkhead alongside the gangway and swung over. Below him waves of black water lapped the cabin windows, gushing in the hole through which Vadas had vanished.

  He crawled down the wall of the gangway, which now had become its floor, and found belowdecks to be in worse shape than the cabin. A fist of wet rock had pierced the hull, and water was steadily running in.

  They'd run aground, although whether near shore or on some outcropping of rock in the middle of the lake was impossible to tell.

  The boat creaked suddenly like a door being swung open on rusty hinges, and his perch in the gangway shifted another ten degrees from vertical. She was on the verge of rolling out. If he were caught in here, he'd drown.

  He scurried back to the cabin and let himself down cautiously on the ladderlike structure of the window frame, being careful to step only where the crosspieces were welded to the top and bottom. Then, using the heel of his shoe, he kicked out the glass all the way to the edges.

  He glanced briefly around the cabin, wondering if there were anything useful he might take. But there was no time, and at this crazy angle in the dark, rifling through the lockers would be next to impossible.

  He raised his hands over his head and jumped. The cold water covered him, the logical extension of the fog. He began swimming even before he reached the surface, pulling himself forward, heedless of where he was going, until the wave the trawler made as it slid off the rocks washed over him.

  Then he treaded water for what seemed an eternity, one more piece of flotsam amid a growing population of debris, until finally a chunk of hull large enough to support him floated by, and he pulled himself onto it.

  * * *

  Daylight found Carter huddled on his makeshift lifeboat, his knees tucked glumly under his chin. During the night the fog had lifted, and although he could now see where the boat had impaled itself — a rocky mass of land that he felt had no business being in the middle of the lake — he had drifted too far to swim to it. He sat, bobbing and shivering, sullenly staring at the waves peak and flatten on the vast, empty expanse of water.

  The thought of Cynthia ran continually through his mind. She was coming to mean more to him than just a fellow agent in trouble, or even a woman he had once loved who was in danger and needed him, although either one of these would have been enough to make him brave the fires of hell to reach her. She was beginning to personify the entire debt Kobelev owed him, and the more he thought about it, the larger it seemed.

  Vadas was dead. He had never surfaced after falling out of the boat. At one point during the night Carter had found what looked to be a wad of clothing floating with some boards on the water. He speared it with a piece of broken handrail and rolled it over. It was Vadas, his blank eyes staring out of white sockets, a pink gash dividing his forehead where he'd smashed it against the boat's control panel. This brought to ten the number of deaths since the operation against Kobelev had begun.

  It was more than just the innocent lives that had been forfeited, or even the political ramifications of a man like Kobelev attaining power among America's enemies. It was more than the foiled assignment in Russia. His wanting Kobelev dead extended to his entire career as an agent. The man epitomized everything Carter had fought against; he negated everything Carter had risked his life time after time to preserve. If he failed again and Kobelev lived, he would tender his resignation, no matter what Hawk said. Success meant that much to him, and yet, as he sat watching the waves lap over the edges of his tiny raft, he never felt so far from accomplishing his goal.

  He pulled a wood chip from the ragged comer of his little boat and absently tossed it into the water. It landed a few feet away and bobbed stubbornly. He watched it for a while, then noticed another object on the horizon, about the same apparent size as the wood chip but moving and growing steadily larger. Within a few minutes the faint roar of an outboard motor rose to accompany it.

  It was an open boat with a woman in the back, steering. She was bearing directly for him. In a minute or two he recognized her as the girl from the cafe, whose advances he'd rebuffed the day before.

  "I'll be damned…" he said half-aloud.

  She cut the motor a few yards from him, and the boat drifted to a standstill inches from his feet. "Get in," she said brusquely in pure American English.

  "What in hell…?"

  "Just get in. We haven't much time."

  Carter swung a leg over and had no more than shifted his weight from the section of hull to the boat when she gunned the motor, spilling him into the bottom. He was up in time to see his tiny island of salvation slipping into the distance.

  "Who the hell are you?" he asked.

  "Name's Stewart. Roberta. Lieutenant Commander, junior grade. Naval Intelligence."

  "You?"

  "Right."

  "I assumed you were a…"

  "A man. I know. Everyone thinks that. Well. I'm not."

  "No," he said a little weakly, "I guess not. But how did you know I'd be out here?"

  "I followed you after that little meeting we had at the hotel cafe yesterday. You came to within a block of Friedrich Schwetzler's apartment, the local smuggler. His operation is something of a joke around here. The frontier guards tolerate it because they feel sorry for him, but I know one of the guardsmen, a buffoon named Franco. He told me if Schwetzler ever got ambitious, they would have to sink his boat. Then word came through about you, and they closed the border. I guess that meant Schwetzler, too. I was talking to Franco in the cafe last night, and he told me he was on a detail mat moved one of the signal buoys out here in the shallows. When he thought of what that would do to Schwetzler, he laughed so hard he almost choked on his wine. Everyone knows how Schwetzler finds his way down the lake. At any rate, when Schwetzler's man didn't show up in the cafe at the usual time, I figured he'd gotten hung up out here. You with him."

  "He got hung up, all right," said Carter solemnly. "Permanently."

  "I know his wife. Poor Mardya."

  After a moment's silence while they contemplated the widow's sorrow, it occurred to Carter that he should make some apology for the things he'd said to Roberta the day before. But the thought passed. "How do you know so much about what goes on around here?" he said instead.

  "I teach English and Hungarian to the children of the Soviet diplomatic mission in Budapest… and play cat-and-mouse with the local KGB."

  "Oh?" he said, taking interest. "I suppose they know about Tatiana Kobelev's escape."

  "Tatiana the Brave?" The girl laughed. "The children are making a heroine of her. They compare her to Eliza running from the hounds."

  Carter looked at her, trying to make the political and literary connection.

  "Didn't you know that Uncle Tom's Cabin is required reading for well-bred Soviet children? Simon Legree is the prototype capitalist pig."

  "Th
at's an interesting interpretation," he said with a sigh.

  "Yesterday they invented a new game," she went on. "One of them is Tatiana, and the other children play the American soldiers. They chase each other all over the schoolyard."

  "So the word's out," Carter said. "But does he know?"

  "Kobelev? Absolutely not. Word has it that Tatiana has expressly forbidden anyone to contact the train with the news she is free. Something about wanting to see the look of shock on a man's face when she finally shows up. We don't know who she intends to surprise."

  "Me," said Carter. "That buys us a little time anyway. Where's the train now?"

  "Sidetracked in Györ."

  "Györ? It was due in Budapest."

  "For some reason he had it pulled off the main line in Györ. He must have something in mind. He's invited the Hungarian circus to come in and entertain during the delay."

  "Györ," Carter said. It seemed to suggest something just out of reach. Then suddenly he realized what it was. "We must get to Györ immediately."

  Roberta shoved the accelerator as far forward as it would go, and the little boat skimmed across the water at a respectable speed. Within twenty minutes they had reached the Hungarian shore, picked up Stewart's car, a battered Fiat modest enough by Western standards but impossible for a schoolteacher in Hungary if it weren't for the fact that she worked for the Soviets, and were speeding down the main trunk road into Budapest by way of Györ. She drove while Carter talked.

  "The entire U.S. intelligence community has been studying Kobelev ever since he started to emerge from the ranks of the KGB. His methodology, his networks, his plans — even his most intimate personal habits — are collated, analyzed, then rotated into the information pool that all services have access to." Roberta glanced at Carter. "I've made it a hobby," he said. "I've spent hours poring over the stuff. I know every flyspeck on every page. Kobelev's maternal grandmother was Hungarian. Her last known whereabouts is a state housing project in Györ."

  "Wait a minute," said Roberta, tearing her eyes from the road for a brief second. "You don't really think Kobelev is going to interrupt his dash home just to pay his respects to his grandmother, do you?"