Crossfire (Kirk McGarvey 3)

by Hagberg, David

  "But we're out of season now?"

  "Pretty much. So I'd be willing to take a look for this meteorite of yours."

  McGarvey exchanged a look with Maria. She'd been inventive.

  "But I won't dive. I told that to the lady up front. I don't know

  many workboat skippers who will." Jones leaned forward and tapped a blunt finger on the table. "There's a damned sight more under the sea than's ever been cataloged. And most all of it is hungry most all of the time."

  "We'll do the diving," Maria assured him. "But you have the tanks and compressor?"

  "Sure thing. And I'll get that other installed yet this afternoon. We can start first thing in the morning if you want."

  "We'll leave tonight," Maria said.

  "Which 'other' is this?" McGarvey asked.

  "The magnetometer. I'm borrowing it from one of the old exploration rigs. It's the only way you're going to find a ferrous mass out there. And even then it's going to be like looking for a needle in the haystack."

  "But we will find it," Maria said.

  Jones shrugged. "It's a lot of water, and at the speeds we'll have to go to cover it all before the marlin begin to run, we could miss it easy unless it's big."

  "It's big," Maria said.

  "I mean really big," Jones said.

  "We won't have to search the entire gulf," McGarvey said. Maria glanced sharply at him.

  "Yeah?" Jones said.

  "I think I might be able to narrow it down a bit."

  "Do you know where she went in?"

  "Maybe," McGarvey said.

  McGarvey had rented only one hotel room. They used it to clean up and change into the clothes he'd bought for them. There were plenty of shops in town, but most of them were empty. He'd had to settle for cheap Mexican corduroys and rough woolen sweaters. It would be cold out on the gulf.

  Jones had agreed to round up his mate and let them aboard at six sharp. They would stay out five days. Based on what they'd found or not found by then, they would reevaluate not only their approach, but their contract as well.

  Maria had gotten a chart from Jones. She spread it out on the bed. It showed the entire gulf and a section of the shoreline.

  "We're here," she said, pointing to their location. "What did you mean when you told Jones you could narrow down the search area? How?"

  McGarvey was looking out the window toward the ocean. At this latitude it wouldn't get dark until after nine in the evening. "If we find your submarine, we're going to dive on it. You want to find Roebling's notebook."

  "That's right."

  "How deep can you safely dive?" he asked. "A hundred feet? Two hundred feet?"

  "I see," she said after a moment, understanding that it would do them no good to search waters too deep for them. "What else?"

  "If they were here to make a rendezvous, it would have been set up for a deserted stretch of coast."

  "Somewhere between San Antonio Oeste in the north, and Puerto Lobos in the south. Eighty miles."

  McGarvey turned around. "So we start in the middle, say a few hundred yards offshore, and work our way north and south."

  "Hell," Maria said half to herself. "Why didn't we think of that?"

  McGarvey didn't answer. The question hadn't been for him.

  an increasing swell had been building from the east for the past two days. As long as they ran with it, the motion aboard the old but well-maintained wooden Chris-Craft wasn't so bad. But each time they turned onto a course parallel with the shore they began to roll and wallow.

  "This is not so good for the lady," Jones said to McGarvey over the chart table below. The navigation station was tucked in the starboard corner in the passageway that led back to the engines. It was hot and stuffy and smelled of diesel fuel, but it was well lit and well equipped with good VHF and single-sideband radio equipment, a direction finder, LORAN, and even an old Magnovox satellite navigation receiver.

  "She'll manage," McGarvey said.

  They had already covered an area more than ten miles north

  and ten miles south of a center line between San Antonio Oeste and Puerto Lobos, and nearly two miles offshore.

  On their first morning out they had spotted two wrecks, neither of which was large enough to be their submarine. But just in case, Maria had donned a wet suit and tank both times and had made the initial dives.

  The first had been the hulk of an old steel fishing boat, and the other had been a railroad locomotive, sitting upright on the sand bottom in about one hundred feet of water. It had been amazingly intact, she'd said, and McGarvey had made a dive down to it with her.

  It had been a waste of time, but Jones and his compact Argentinian mate, who spoke no English and whose only name seemed to be Jorge, needed to do some work on the engines anyway.

  They'd discovered nothing since then.

  The food aboard the thirty-eight-foot boat was surprisingly good. Jorge was an excellent cook, and the provisions Jones had laid in were first class, as was his "wine cellar" in the bilges.

  "The people who hire me won't eat goat and chipas" Jones had explained with a broad grin. "And neither will I. Besides, you're paying for it."

  "What about the weather?" McGarvey asked, looking up from the chart.

  "It will hold for another thirty-six hours, perhaps a little longer, or a little less."

  "And then?"

  "The wind will blow, the seas will build, and life will become uncomfortable."

  "How about your equipment?"

  "The weather won't stop our search, although it will make keeping to the pattern difficult, and the diving perhaps impossible."

  McGarvey studied the chart. He tried to put himself in the submarine captain's place. This was a hostile coast. The war was winding down, perhaps even over by now. After such a long voyage they would be nearly out of provisions and perhaps fuel. There was the RSHA passenger, Major Roebling, to consider as well, along with whatever he'd brought with him. The mission would have been of supreme importance.

  There was no record of the submarine after her departure.

  She'd not returned to Germany, nor had she turned up anywhere else. The Allies had not captured her. And no submarine had been sunk in the Atlantic during that specific period.

  But there was a lot of water between here and Bremen, and the chances were that the boat had never made it this far. There was no reason to think that it had. No evidence that Roebling or the U-boat's crew had shown up in Argentina. Nothing had washed ashore. Even as desolate as the Patagonian coast was, had anything washed ashore in 1945 it would have been found eventually.

  But then Maria had not told him everything. Nor, he was beginning to suspect, had Dr. Hesse. Which led to a number of interesting speculations.

  "We're nearly finished with this pattern," Jones was saying. "Do you want to expand the search to the north and south, or shall we work farther offshore?''

  "North and south," McGarvey said.

  "This meteorite must have hit very close to shore. It must have made quite a splash in its day."

  "Yes," McGarvey said. "It must have."

  "jCapitdn, aqui, aquiV Jorge called down from the bridge.

  The boat came hard to starboard as McGarvey and Jones rushed topside. Maria was braced in the corner in front of the magnetometer. Her eyes were glued to the machine.

  "This could be it," she said excitedly. "I think we found it!"

  Jorge had brought the boat completely around so that they were running along their own wake.

  "It's big, whatever it is," she said, showing them the readings on the strip chart coming out of the magnetometer. A series of very dark lines rose well above the normal background and bottom traces, showing that they had passed over a significant mass of ferrous metal.

  "Here it comes again," she said as the trace suddenly began to bloom.

  "Lento^ Jones told his mate, and Jorge immediately throttled back so that they were nearly dead in the water.

  Jones tossed a mar
ker buoy over the side, the bright orange float spinning around as its small anchor and line automatically paid out.

  When they had drifted completely over the object, Jorge again turned the boat hard to starboard, throttled up a little so that

  they would not be pushed off station by the swell, and ran back slightly west of their buoy.

  This time they were on the object almost immediately, coming off it again within yards.

  Jorge repeated the maneuver, turning outward toward the west each time, until they were no longer detecting anything beneath them.

  "Babor" Jones said calmly, and Jorge immediately turned to port.

  "How deep are we?" McGarvey asked.

  "Seventy-five meters," Jones said. "Two hundred fifty feet. But the bottom slopes toward the west and south."

  They came over the submerged object again, and Jones made several notations on the chart. As soon as they had passed it, Jorge turned again to port.

  On the sixteenth run they had passed over the complete length of the object and Jorge turned back toward their marker buoy, again throttling back so that they were nearly stationary against the swell.

  Jones made a few calculations and when he looked up there was a glint in his eyes. "That's some meteorite down there," he drawled. "I think it must have distorted very badly when it hit."

  "It's big, isn't it?" Maria said.

  Jones nodded. "I'd say about two hundred and thirty feet long, but very narrow. Maybe fifteen or twenty feet on the beam. And she's down toward the southwest." He glanced at the paper strip chart. "She's a ship of some kind, I think."

  "You're not being paid to think, Captain," Maria said menacingly. McGarvey took a step back. Jorge turned around and looked at them. There was no reading his dark, deeply weathered face.

  "Your name is Schimmer," Jones said. "What's down there?"

  "Shut up," Maria said.

  "Is it the U-boat?" Jones asked, ignoring her.

  "What U-boat is that?" McGarvey asked, careful to keep his tone conversational, his manner light. Jorge had released the strap that held his big skinning knife in its sheath at his hip.

  "The one that was here in 1945."

  "What are you talking about?" Maria asked, the words not quite even.

  "One of the old fishermen said he saw the periscope. No one believed him, but he insisted."

  "Where is this fisherman of yours?" McGarvey asked.

  "Dead."

  "What do you suppose a German submarine was doing here at the end of the war?"

  Jones grinned. "You haven't been in Argentina very long, have you?" he said. "There've been two big German immigrations to this country in this century. One in 1918 and 1919, and again in 1944 and 1945."

  "So?"

  "A lot of them didn't come empty-handed. A lot of money changed hands. An Argentinan passport in those days was very expensive."

  "So what we have here is a German submarine filled with the bodies of Nazis trying to escape Nuremberg," McGarvey said.

  Maria was white with anger.

  "And money," Jones said. "Gold, I'd suspect. Maybe diamonds. Artwork. A lot of stuff was never found."

  "But you don't dive," McGarvey said gently.

  Jones shrugged. "Within forty-eight hours, probably less, I could have a topnotch marine salvage team here. And you two would be shit out of luck."

  "But then you wouldn't get as big a share, assuming there is gold down there," McGarvey said. "In fact you might attract enough attention to get the government interested, in which case you might get nothing."

  Jones glanced up at the sky. "Less than an hour's good light yet. You'll have to wait until morning to dive. That is, if you're up for a dive that deep."

  "We are," Maria said, and she turned on her heel and stalked down to her cabin.

  phil carrara came through the glass doors on the seventh floor as Thomas Doyle, deputy director of Intelligence, was coming out of Murphy's office.

  "Hope you're prepared," Doyle said half under his breath in passing. "He's loaded for bear this morning."

  "When isn't he?" Carrara replied, and the DCI's secretary waved him through.

  Lawrence Danielle and the Agency's general counsel, Howard Ryan, were seated across from Murphy. Ryan had a yellow legal pad balanced on his lap.

  Murphy looked up and motioned for Carrara to take the lone vacant chair in front of his desk. "Coffee?"

  "No thanks, General," Carrara said, sitting down.

  It was just nine in the morning, and it had begun to snow

  again a couple of hours ago. The light coming from outside was a flat gray. It matched Carrara's mood.

  "Well, where is he?" Murphy asked, a dangerous edge to his voice. Carrara didn't think what the DCI was about to hear would cheer him up.

  "We have reason to believe that he's in Buenos Aires. At least he was there four days ago."

  Murphy was surprised. He exchanged a look with Danielle. "What the hell's he doing in Argentina?"

  "Apparently he went down there with Maria Schimmer, the woman he dug out of the embassy—"

  "Yes, yes, we know all about that. But what's he up to, and more important, why isn't he in custody by now?"

  "He's a dangerous man," Ryan added. "Surely you must agree with that, Phil."

  Carrara avoided the general counsel's eyes. He had never liked or trusted the man, but Murphy had come to depend upon Ryan's advice more and more over the past year.

  "There have been three additional murders," Carrara said, "with strong circumstantial ties to McGarvey and the woman. But I must stress that the evidence to this point is circumstantial."

  "Since we spoke Saturday evening?" Danielle asked sharply.

  "Our knowledge of them has come since then," Carrara said. "In fact we're only just now unraveling what may have happened in the first instance. And in the second the reports are still uncertain."

  "Let me ask you something before you continue," Murphy interrupted. "Have your people come up with any ties between these killings and Iran? Iranian interests, Iranian citizens?"

  "No," Carrara answered, mystified.

  Murphy was definitely disappointed. "Well, who has he killed now?"

  "We don't know for a fact that he's guilty of killing anyone," Carrara said.

  "We will take note of the 'circumstantial' nature of your evidence, Phil," Ryan said.

  "Interpol out of Bonn are looking for McGarvey and the woman for questioning in connection with the murders of Dr. Heinrich Hesse and his housekeeper sometime Friday evening or early Saturday morning in Freiburg."

  "That's where the Germans keep their naval records from the war, I believe," Ryan said.

  "That's correct," Carrara said. "McGarvey and the Schimmer woman were evidently seen at the professor's house Friday afternoon. But they were not seen after that time."

  "But you have traced them to Buenos Aires," Ryan said. "Which means you know how and when they left Germany."

  "The next morning," Carrara said. "Lufthansa out of Munich."

  "Giving McGarvey and this woman time to sneak back to Freiburg, kill the professor and his housekeeper, and get out."

  "Presumably," Carrara admitted.

  "What did they want with this German professor?" Murphy asked.

  "Unknown," Carrara said.

  Danielle had been deep in thought. He looked up. "Did Dr. Hesse have access to the naval archives in Freiburg?"

  "I don't know. But I presume he would have."

  "What is it?" Murphy asked.

  "We have a report from the SDECE that the woman met with a French intelligence officer, a man from Simon Wiesenthal's office, and Carleton Reid at the Inter-Continental just prior to the explosion. She told them that she was looking for a Nazi submarine but was getting no cooperation in Freiburg."

  "Evidently she convinced McGarvey to help her," Carrara said. "That doesn't mean McGarvey killed the man."

  "Who was the third victim?"

  "Dr. Albert Rothmann, the ass
istant director of the Natural History Museum of Buenos Aires."

  "When?"

  "Sunday evening."

  "Were McGarvey and the woman in Buenos Aires at the time?" Ryan asked.

  Carrara nodded.

  The general counsel turned to Danielle and Murphy. "At least in this, there can be no doubt. For whatever reason, he and Maria Schimmer are on some sort of an operation ... a rampage might be a better description."

  "For what purpose?" Danielle asked.

  "God only knows," Ryan replied. He sat forward to emphasize his point. "But you can be damned sure of one thing," he said.

  "Whatever McGarvey is up to this time, it will ultimately involve some sort of revenge against the Agency."

  "For Chrissake, why?" Carrara asked angrily.

  "Because of John Lyman Trotter, Jr., McGarvey's pal. The man was a traitor and a murderer. He damned near managed to kill McGarvey," Ryan said, turning again back to Murphy. "And in part because of you, Mr. Director. Or at least because of how you treated McGarvey after his involvement with Dr. Abbott a couple of years ago."

  "We treated the man shabbily," Carrara said. "But only a madman, a maniac would blow up an embassy merely out of revenge."

  "I agree," Ryan said with a slight smile.

  There was a tight silence for a few long seconds, Ryan's statement hanging in the air, until Danielle spoke.

  "You say they were in Buenos Aires four days ago. Where are they now, Phil? Any hints, any leads?"

  "No. They simply disappeared."

  "Let me guess," Ryan said. "They dropped out of sight immediately following Rothmann's murder."

  "That's enough, Howard," Murphy said. "Are they still in the country to the best of our knowledge?"

  "As far as we can tell, General."

  "Have we the resources down there to find them?"

  "Probably not," Carrara admitted. "Argentina is a big country. Lots of places to hide if you know what you're doing. Presumably Maria Schimmer does."

  "And McGarvey," Ryan said.

  "How about the Buenos Aires police?" Danielle asked.

  "The federal police are apparently interested, but we don't have much on that. I've told our people to stay at arm's length. It wouldn't help our operations down there to advertise our presence."