by Joe Poyer
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.
CHAPTER NINE
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, fifty-horsepower diesel engine in surprisingly good condition pushed her along smartly at twelve knots flat out or e
ight 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
us. Our only hope was in relying on the darkness and Mikhail's extensive experience running Nazi wartime blockades.
When the rain began to seep through and around the slicker I went back to the deckhouse. Mikhail acknowledged my company with a nod and mentioned that Klaus had gone below to the small cabin to sleep.
We stood in companionable silence for a while. I asked if he would like me to take the wheel, but he shook his head and continued to stare fixedly through the forward windows. The compass was bearing steadily on the course he had set, 272° WSW. In the light reflecting from the red dash lamps, I studied the big man's face. Lit from beneath, the coarseness was gone from his features. The red light obscured the folds and wrinkles, smoothing the skin and making him look younger. He must have been a great one with women in his younger days, I thought. His face was all angled planes; no' round weaknesses at all. The strange light made it crystal clear that he had grown older refusing to accept changing ways, and this obstinacy had begun to show in his face. Now in his fifties, he had the appearance sometimes of a punch-drunk fighter. Apparently the pitiless glare of change had also affected him mentally. I could not picture the childish man I knew as Mikhail Korstlov ever surviving the rigors of a guerilla existence against an enemy as cunning as the Nazis. Yet that night in the deckhouse of a tiny fishing boat, fleeing from the Yugoslav authorities with a cargo of contraband, I found I was not only seeing Mikhail in his natural environment, but also as he had been thirty years earlier.
Physically, he may still have been as powerful as in his youth, but only his strength had survived the years. I could feel a great pity for this man; no affection, only a pity for the wreck who stood before me grasping the spokes of the wheel with competent hands. He was a man from another age, an age when war was still conducted on a man-to-man basis. He had not been suited to the peculiar rigors and demands of the cold war nor to peace time nor to the strange non-wars with which we now occupy ourselves. He had become an outlaw, an outcast, a restless spirit of a kind doomed in a technological world.
As I stood watching him, I honestly could not decide if the world would be better off when his kind were gone completely. Maybe we would; but a certain vitality of spirit and purpose would also disappear with him. The effects were already to be seen among the young all over the planet as mankind fought desperately to adapt himself to an alien way of life, a way that could only inevitably treat him as an inconvenience not properly programmable on a computer punch card. We adaptable ones would probably make it, but never men like Mikhail. This was probably his last great adventure, the last opportunity to "accomplish". I knew that if we survived this crazy quilt of cross-purposes and managed to get cleanly away with the gold, Mikhail would not live beyond another year. It would ruin him. I wondered if he realized that?
They were not happy thoughts that strange night, but they clarified much for me. I had finally come to see that Mikhail resented Klaus for the authority that he somehow represented rather than for any past political ideology which he had fought against for nine continuous years from Spain to Dalmatia. Mikhail was an anarchist, not a Communist; simply an anarchist. I was fully aware that Klaus was the authority figure and it rankled; but nowhere near to the same extent that it rankled Mikhail. I was of a different generation and background; one taught to respect authority . . . perhaps unfortunately for my generation, taught too well. But in any event, since I had decided to co-operate fully with Interpol, Mikhail, the anarchist, and I, the fool, were forced to become allies against the Nazi. We had reached a working agreement that morning on the beach, and I felt that that was about as far as I dared go.
Presently, the gentle swaying of the boat and the closeness of the cabin made me desperately sleepy and rather than go below, I spread a couple of blankets on the deckhouse floor and fell asleep.
The explosion occurred so close that it lifted the old boat and slammed it sideways in the water. I was thrown solidly against the flimsy bulkhead and shocked out of a drugged sleep into a fierce disorientation that lasted several seconds until a second explosion cast a vivid white light, bright as lightning through the windows of the fishing boat etching Mikhail boldly against the glare as he struggled with the wheel. He wrenched the wheel sending the boat away in a spinning circle to heel dangerously to starboard. I staggered to my feet and propped
my back against the bulkhead, bracing a hand on the railing in front of me. A third vicious crack followed and a spear of lightning lanced down from the tortured clouds and I laughed insanely.
Mikhail whipped his head around, lips drawn back in a grimace of exertion and surprise.
He obviously thought I had gone mad. I laughed again and pointed through the windows at the storm raging outside, throwing up mountains of water around the little boat; waves that lost their crests to the wind slashing the angry seas.
"A storm!" I shouted at him. "I thought we were being attacked!"
"We are, damn you!" he shouted and as if to lend confirmation, another roar and a strip of railing exploded and vanished into the waves.
By God, I thought insanely, he's right.
"A patrol boat," Mikhail panted. "They fired across our bow. I do not know where they are. Then they fired again, closer and then right at us."
He spun the wheel frantically, letting the bow fall away into the wind. The old boat shuddered as the wind clawed her broadside and she slewed sharply, almost corkscrewing, across a wave crest and then slipped sideways down into a trough. The port rail dipped under the greenish black water and the deck foamed upward, the railing torn away from bow to amidships. Mikhail spun the wheel again and she staggered and then steadied, driving up a towering wave rearing in front of us. Another shot whistled overhead, clearly heard in spite of the storm's fury. But this one was wide and all we saw was the lightninglike glow of its explosion far to starboard.
"We're losing them," I yelped. Mikhail snorted and muttered about radar. We had not lost them I realized. Their gunfire was wild in the heavy seas. The hatch banged open and Klaus squirmed through. Mikhail roared at him to stay out of the way and he sidled over to brace himself beside me.
"What in hell is happening?" he shouted into my ear.
"Must be the Yugoslav Coastal Patrol," I shouted back. I pointed out the missing rail and the smashed deck barely visible in the strobelike effect of the rapidly flickering lightning.
Another shell screamed at us and exploded; nearer this time. Then another followed, falling short on the port side.
"Bracketed, by God!" Mikhail chortled.
A sixth shot smashed into the waves behind us and exploded in a geyser of water that reached the boat, for a moment doubling the intensity of the water pouring down on us.
"Only a few more shots and they will have sunk us," Mikhail boomed, his voice full of admiration. He rammed the engine throttle forward and spun the wheel, heeling the boat to starboard again. As he did so, the seventh shot smashed into the water just beyond the bow deluging the boat with the geyser of its explosion. I thought I had lost my eardrums; I could see Mikhail's mouth working, but could hear no sound for several seconds.
. . using . . . three-inch deck gun. Must be impossible . . . aim properly . . . these seas . . .
