The Balkan Assignment

by Joe Poyer

  In all, three hours of precious darkness were wasted in bringing the cable back to the surface and bending it again to the winch drum. After that, it was relatively easy to dive again, fasten the first of the ammunition crates to the cable and haul it to the surface. By this time, I was running short of air . . . in fact I was down to the last of the three forty-five-minute tanks by the time I surfaced with the first crate. There were three more to go and I had no intention of diving without a tank into that cistern under any circumstances.

  Klaus and Mikhail worked the winch and cable more tenderly than they might have handled their infant grandsons. I sat on the far edge of the cistern and watched them hook the cable and gradually wind it in, then ease the brake and let the cable run out while the other pulled until the crate was resting securely on the rubber-tired dolly. Both men grinned at each other and then at me. I was too tired to smile back. Mikhail picked up a crowbar and snapped the rusted padlock, then pried the lid up carefully. Twenty-five years of rust resisted at first. Mikhail swore, settled his feet, dug the point in for a better purchase and hunched the muscles in his shoulders and heaved upward convulsively. The lid groaned and flew open.

  A mass of dirty water and rotting canvas poured out. Klaus used his knife to dig away the remains of the canvas

  cover. The first strip that pulled away revealed two evenly matched bars of gold; frantically, Klaus raked away the rest of the canvas and the gold flamed in the light of the gasoline lantern.

  After a minute of stunned silence, Mikhail used his knife to pry up one of the bars. I reached over and pulled its surprisingly heavy bulk out of the chest and held it up. The bar was twelve inches long by four wide and four thick. The two and one-half decades in the water had done nothing to diminish either its luster or smoothness. I turned it over in my hand and on the end found a strange seal and slavic script.

  "Royal Treasury of Bulgaria," Mikhail translated and then began to laugh. In a few moments, Klaus joined him and the two of them laughed like fools at this masterful joke on the now defunct Royal Treasury of Bulgaria. I watched them for several moments, wondering seriously at the margin of sanity left to either and touched the comforting bulk of the plastic-wrapped Walther P-38 inside my wet suit.

  By four a.m., all of the crates were out of the cistern. We had been at work for eight straight hours. I was not able to speak for either Klaus or Mikhail, but I was ready to collapse. They were probably in worse shape, since I had had eight solid hours of sleep during the day. In my ' estimation, neither Klaus nor Mikhail were stable enough to take the kind of pressures that a combination of fatigue and fear brings; something would have to give . . . and it did, and it was strictly a panic reaction.

  "Come and help me with the cable," Klaus called urgently as I shucked the diving gear.

  I hurried over to help him. The cable was not feeding evenly onto the drum and for the moment I was too busy to ask what had happened to Mikhail. I pulled on the heavy canvas gloves and began tugging on the heavy cable to guide it back onto the drum properly. The crate came into view and between the two of us, we got it over the cart and let it settle with a thud. Klaus came over to the cart, both of us silent; the last of four crates . . . one million dollars in gold in those rusting metal boxes. One million dollars of the hardest, firmest, most negotiable currency in all the world and it was ours. All we had to do now was load it aboard the PBY and be gone from Yugoslavian air space before dawn. Curiously enough, I

  felt no surge of pride, pleasure or greed. I kept picturing five bodies lying at the bottom of the cistern, covered by mud and silt and forever forgotten.

  Two gunshots smashed through the tunnel. We both stared at each other for the briefest of seconds and broke' into a run. As we pounded up the tunnel, I unzipped my wet suit, yanked the pistol loose and ripped off the plastic waterproof covering.

  At the second rockfall, Mikhail stood over a body. He was leaning forward very slightly, head down peering intently at the man flung back on the stone floor. It was obvious that Mikhail had caught the other unaware and shot him with no warning. Very deliberately, Mikhail aimed the pistol at the victim's head.

  "Mikhail, stop!" Klaus shouted.

  Mikhail turned, glanced casually at us and raised the pistol again. I slid to a halt, steadied the pistol over my left arm and fired two shots past his head, not really caring whether I hit him or not.

  "Damn it," I yelled at him, "stop, now or I'll put a bullet between your eyes!"

  Mikhail shook his head as if in a daze and Klaus raced up and wrenched the pistol out of his hand. He offered no resistance; just stood and smiled down at the body.

  "He is dead, do you realize? I told you several days ago that one of us would have to die, but you did not believe me."

  "Vishailly," Klaus whispered.

  "Good Lord," I muttered. "Vishailly." I sat down heavily. "For God's sake Mikhail, don't you ever think! He probably brought half the police in Yugoslavia with him."

  Mikhail only laughed at that. "Police . . . what do I care for the police?''

  "You'll care plenty when they put the rope around your neck to hang you."

  Mikhail chuckled slowly now, his laughter ponderous. "I am becoming an old man. What do I care if they kill me? My whole life I have given to my country, to my beliefs. They will not kill me with a rope."

  "I wouldn't count on it." I took a deep breath. In the past few days, there were two or three times when things had looked pretty bleak. But right at that moment, if somebody had offered million-to-one odds that we would

  not get out of Yugoslavia, I would not have thought them too high. Vishailly had not come alone . . . no one would have been that stupid.

  I got up slowly, feeling like half the world was on my shoulders.

  "Klaus, take this damned idiot back down to the cistern and bring up that last box of gold. Leave the equipment behind, we won't need it anymore. I'm going up to see how many troops Vishailly brought with him. Maybe we can negotiate some kind of surrender."

  "Surrender?" Klaus almost screamed. "We will never be able to surrender. If we try, they will kill us . . ."

  I didn't waste time arguing, but grabbed the flashlight from his hand and raced up the tunnel. With every minute that passed, I became more and more apprehensive. Why hadn't anyone come to investigate the gunshots that had killed Vishailly? Vishailly, damn him. I cursed his soul all the way up the tunnel. What had possessed him to grandstand like that? By coming into the tunnel alone, he had signed his own death warrant as surely as if he had jumped in front of a speeding truck.

  A small patch of gray-black marked the mouth of the tunnel. I turned off the flashlight and glanced at my watch: 4:32 a.m. Cautiously, I edged up to the tunnel mouth and lay down flat on the cold stone. After a few moments, I could make out the tiny pinpoints of stars across the cove, above the fog that was beginning to flow in from the bay.

  Carefully hidden in the shadows, I searched the narrow beach below the tunnel entrance.

  The PBY still rode at anchor in the cove, rocking gently in the lapping waves. The calque was beached in the exact same spot where I had seen it earlier in the evening. In the waning moonlight, it took several minutes to spot the small powerboat that was drawn up on the far side of the tiny beach.

  I watched the cove for more than ten minutes. In all that time there was not a whisper of sound or movement. At least fifteen minutes had now passed since the pistol shots that had killed Vishailly had been fired. In all that time, neither sound nor movement had betrayed anyone who might have accompanied Vishailly. Either they had extra-human powers of self-control, or they didn't exist. The latter I hoped, and crept slowly down to the beach to examine the powerboat.

  It was a small, fibreglass outboard boat, relatively harmless in itself, but the two-way radio mounted under the dash chilled me to the bone. The radio was still on and tuned to a police band.

  He may have come alone, but he had not come without signing the warrant that was going to take
one and probably all three of us to the gallows. With Vishailly dead, there would be no one but Ley to describe the course of my involvement . . . and the chances of Ley being believed were next to nil. Both policemen who had been involved with him as well as his own superior had been killed. You might describe it as leaving a trail of bodies across the countryside. Ley would be lucky enough to get himself out of the country in one piece.

  If the police were following by boat, I forced myself to reason calmly, it would be at least an hour before they arrived. They couldn't come overland since there were no roads.

  If they were coming by air, the helicopter would have landed ten to fifteen minutes ago.

  Ergo, they were coming by boat and we had thirty to forty-five minutes left . . . if Vishailly had not waited long before starting off on his own. I beat it back into the cave to find Mikhail and Klaus shouting at each other like two fishwives halfway down the tunnel. I didn't wait to find out what the argument was about. I grabbed Mikhail by the shoulder, spun him around and pushed him down the tunnel. Klaus subsided immediately, apprehension glazing his face. Roaring like a madman, I chased both of them back to the cistern. I didn't give either a chance to recover, but ran through the time line I had worked out on the beach

  .. at the top of my voice. The situation analysis sobered them both quickly and they fell to without another word.

  It took twenty minutes to get that last cart up the tunnel, down onto the beach and loaded into the calque. While the two of them sweated and swore over the loading, I took the small dinghy and rowed to the PBY to warm up the engines. The port engine kicked over slowly; the batteries were running low and I held my breath until it started with a bang and a plume of dirty smoke. The starboard engine, now running off the generator, turned over immediately and ran up with a powerful surge. While the engines warmed up, I ducked back into the fuselage and shoved open the starboard hatch. Back in the cockpit, I swung the PBY around until the nose was pointing at

  the beach and edged in carefully to meet the calque. As it slid under the wing tip,! I idled the port engine down and let the starboard engine swing the ponderous bulk of the aircraft around again until we were heading out to the open bay. As we came around, a flare burst just over the low headland separating the cove from the bay. One police boat signaling to another? I had never been surer of anything in my life. I slammed back the window vent and shouted down to Klaus and Mikhail. My words were torn away in the engine noise, but my meaning was unmistakable. Klaus vaulted across the hatch sill as soon as the calque was close enough to do so. I left the cockpit and ducked back to the cargo blister. Mikhail edged the calque in as close as he could and Klaus smashed away the railing with an axe. Together the three of us pushed and pulled those four, fivehundred-pound boxes into the PBY, letting them fall to the deck with enough force to shake the airplane. It took less than five minutes and left all three of us shaking with the exertion. While I staggered back to the cockpit, Mikhail jumped for the tiny wheelhouse and spun the rudder flat over and yanked the throttle wide open at the same time. In the next instant he was out and across the deck and in a long leap clawed himself into the cargo hatch. The calque heeled away from the PBY, the ancient engine sputtering toward the beach. I didn't wait to see anymore, but threw myself into the pilot's seat and pulled the throttles open. The PBY leapt forward.

  The hell with the prevailing winds, I thought as we dug out of the cove. We were just going to have to depend on those two twenty-six-year-old engines so far over their scheduled overhaul that the pistons dragged a pound of carbon up and down with each stroke.

  As we cleared the mouth-of the cove, the searchlight on the leading police boat flashed past, checked and swung back to hold on us. Automatic carbine fire from two boat loads of Yugoslav police opened up. The distance was not point blank, but then at one hundred yards, even in a fog, anything as big as a PBY is not the hardest thing in the world to hit.

  And hit us they did. I dug down in the seat and hung onto that wheel literally for my life.

  I have been through massed corridors of .51 calibre antiaircraft fire in Vietnam, but for some reason it did not seem to compare with the firepower that those cops turned on us.

  I counted fourteen bullet holes in the side and front windshields alone the next morning.

  The fuselage was so full of holes that it looked like a sieve. So did the starboard engine.

  And, it ran like one as well. How we ever got off the water, I'll never know. But those two faithful R-1-630s poured their hearts into that thousand yards to gain speed and to take us out of range and off the water.

  Once up, I didn't bother with the niceties. The quickest way out of this mess was west; due west out of Yugoslav air space as fast as the engines could take us. We would have made it too; if five minutes later, the starboard engine hadn't quit cold.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Klaus stumbled through the compartment door and almost fell into the copilot's seat, cursing in a monotone trying at the same time to stem a flow of blood from his forearm.

  I've heard men swear in a dozen different languages, but I have to admit that to a connoisseur of profanity, no language but German will ever again suffice.

  "Now what are you going to do?" he roared accusingly and pointed to the starboard propeller windmilling to a stop.

  "What the hell do you mean, what am I going to do, you damned jackass. What do you think, it's my fault because the Yugoslav fuzz shot up my aircraft and knocked out an engine?"

  I added a few swear words of my own, but the effort seemed half-hearted at best compared to Klaus's. "Is there any other damage back there?"

  "Only if you count Korstlov's split skull. He fell against one of the crates, but he is only unconscious. He will suffer a small concussion at worst."

  "Too bad," I muttered under my breath.

  "What?" Klaus demanded.

  "Nothing, nothing," I muttered again trying to conceal my disgust. "I've got to find someplace to put this crate down before that other engine gives out and drops us like a rock."

  I brought the PBY around in a gentle turn and headed

  back to the Yugoslav coast. As expected, it brought a reaction from Klaus.

  "Are you crazy?" he bellowed in confusion and anger. "Why do you want to take us back .. ."

  "Use your head," I roared in return. "If I don't put this crate down and fast, it'll go down by itself and the landing will spread us all over the Adriatic. If we land on the water, outside the three mile limit, where will we be then? The Yugoslays will just send a patrol boat to pick us up. They saw which direction we were heading and it won't take them long to figure that we didn't go anywhere but down. We haven't gotten high enough to attract the attention of their radar operators, and we can find someplace along the coast to hide. Then, I can try to fix the engine. They saw us fly west, the last thing in the. world they would expect, under any circumstances, for us to do would be to turn back for the mainland."

  I did not waste a second while explaining, but steadied the shaking aircraft around onto a heading that would take us east and north some twenty miles to a marshy area on the coast where I expected we could find a creek mouth or cove in which to hole up. The starboard engine was completely gone and the port engine was in a bad way, overheating furiously under the load. I figured that she had at best, ten to fifteen minutes flying time left. We lost altitude more rapidly than I would have liked, lower and lower until we were only some twenty feet off the waves. I watched them race past thinking that if the port engine gave out now, we wouldn't fall far, but the shock and the unsecured weight of the gold would snap us in half. We would go down like a rock.

  The moon was beginning to set. Its light, meager at best against the dark water, was waning fast. Dawn was still an hour away and the sky to the east had not yet even the first faint flush of dawn.

  We passed over a peninsula jutting a mile into the Adriatic. A thick belt of land, it curved sharply northward, forming a scimitar. I could just
make out the faint gleam of a small creek winding down through the center of the peninsula from the hills several miles away to empty into the sea.

  We had little choice. The temperature gauge was now over into the red and the port engine beginning to miss badly. The PBY limped around and I knew that this would have to be the final pass. I eased her down as if she were carrying a cargo of nitroglycerin. Flat water stretched away in front of the nose, shining black in the last bit of moonlight. Ahead, I could barely make out the hook of land lying low in the water.

  The altimeter showed zero and seconds later, the first bump as we touched a wave; then a second and a third, mild all of them and we were down.

  I eased the throttle forward and wiped a hand across my forehead. The ragged engine carried us into the cover of the peninsula and there I turned to run in alongside the shoreline, but keeping a good distance to avoid submerged sand bars.

  Klaus straightened himself in the seat, turned to say something to me, then apparently thought better of it. The darkness on the surface was almost complete. A heavy surface mist ten or so feet deep was forming in the darkness that lay over the coast. There weren'

  t even stars visible to provide relief from the suffocating pall.

  I taxied as far in as I dared before turning on the landing lights. The two powerful beams sprang out to smash aside the tendrils of fog and cautiously we moved forward again, seeking the beach. I could tell from his sharpened breathing that Klaus didn't like the idea of the lights any better than I did, but it was either the lights or we would wind up on a sand bar in full view of the patrol aircraft that certainly would be out looking for us at dawn.

  The cove formed by the peninsula was larger than it appeared from the air and it took ten minutes to locate the mouth of the creek that I had spotted so easily from the air. I ordered Klaus out onto the nose to act as "pilot" to warn of sand bars or other obstructions.