McGarvey and the woman had come to Buenos Aires, according to Dr. Hesse. And Kurshin figured that sooner or later the CIA would come looking for them. By now they would have discovered the evidence he'd planted not only at the Paris embassy, but in McGarvey's apartment as well. At the very least they would want to bring the man in for questioning. The Company had the organization and the manpower to do in a few days something that might take him months to accomplish if he had to work alone.
His planning and patience had finally paid off.
CIA interests in Argentina were not conducted out of the embassy as they were in many other countries. Here the Company operated out of Mercator Air Freight, Ltd., at Ezezia Airport, and to a more limited extent out of the Tomas Vestry Import/Export Co., GmbH, ostensibly a German firm here at Puerto Nuevo.
With everything that had been going on in Latin America in recent years, the CIA would be taking care not to advertise its presence here.
Kurshin had reasoned that the preliminary- search for McGarvey and the woman might be carried out by local operatives, but that any real search would of necessity involve imported talent. Talent that would arrive in Argentina aboard a Mercator Air Freight flight.
He'd finally gotten lucky this morning. The two men were obviously American by the cut of their clothes and their looks. They'd brought with them a dozen large aluminum cases that had been passed through Argentinian customs without question before being trucked into the city to the Vestry Company docks.
They were here to find McGarvey, and apparently the Nazi submarine he and the woman were seeking.
The only question that remained was exactly where they intended to begin their search. A question Kurshin intended asking one of them at the earliest possible moment.
the weather had deteriorated drastically during the past forty minutes. When McGarvey surfaced just behind Maria he was propelled violently upward and to the west on the crest of a fifteen-foot wave.
For one moment Maria was rising above him on another wave, and in the next she had disappeared in a trough.
He'd caught a brief glimpse of the Chris-Craft about fifty yards downwind, hobby-horsing wildly in the rough seas. The deep low-pressure system had developed much faster than Jones had predicted.
Rising on the next crest, McGarvey caught sight of Maria again, well downwind from him. She seemed to be struggling with her mouthpiece and face mask. She was in trouble, and as he watched helplessly, a breaking wave buried her.
Immediately McGarvey released a little air from his buoyancy vest and dived beneath the surface as he took a snap compass course on where he'd last seen her.
Thrusting powerfully with his fins, and no longer impeded by the conditions on the surface, he managed to cover the distance between them in a couple of minutes, coming up once when he was within ten yards to make sure she had surfaced, and then diving again.
He surfaced within reaching distance of her and grabbed her tank harness, pulling her to him.
She struggled wildly until she realized what was happening. Her mask was half off her face, and she had spit out her mouthpiece. Her lips were blue, and spittle and mucus ran freely from her mouth and nose. She was in panic and on the verge of drowning.
McGarvey tried to shove the mouthpiece back into her mouth, but she pushed it away.
"No ... no ..." she cried, gagging and sputtering as she swallowed water. "Air ... no air ... tanks empty ..."
McGarvey took a deep breath, spit out his mouthpiece, and, holding Maria close put it in her mouth.
She nearly vomited, but almost immediately she forced herself to calm down. She drew in three measured breaths while looking directly and resentfully into his eyes.
McGarvey took the mouthpiece back, breathed deeply a couple of times, and returned it to her.
The wind was so strong that the division between water and air was almost nonexistent. Breathing was next to impossible.
They had drifted nearly down to the Chris-Craft, which was now barely fifteen yards away. The boat's stern landing platform rose and fell so violently that there was no way to approach it, let alone clamber aboard. McGarvey could see Jorge on the bridge, and he tried to signal, but the Argentinian was intent on keeping the boat at an angle into the wind. He did not see them as they bobbed in the huge waves.
There was a real danger, McGarvey decided, that they would drift past the boat and be impossible to find. Their wet suits were black and their faces white, the same colors as the dark water and cresting waves.
Jones appeared at the rail and spotted them. He shouted some-
thing to Jorge, who turned and saw them. Almost instantly the boat began to angle slowly toward them.
Jones pointed toward the landing platform at the stern, shook his head, and crossed his arms making the figure X, all of his movements and gestures exaggerated so that they could be clearly understood. Boarding by the swim platform was out. McGarvey waved his understanding and took another couple of deep breaths from his mouthpiece, handing it back to Maria.
McGarvey could not see how Jones was going to get them aboard under these conditions, but he had underestimated the man. The stern of the boat had been modified so that it looked almost like the aft section of a trawler, with a narrow deck above which rose a mast and sturdy boom.
Jones swung the boom out over the port side of the boat, then tossed a bright orange life jacket out over their heads, upwind of them. The jacket was attached by a nylon line to the boom.
As it drifted down on them, McGarvey snagged it and hurriedly tied a loop around Maria's waist, and another around her legs, making a crude sling for her to sit in.
She took a deep breath from his mouthpiece and handed it back.
There was enough slack in the line so that the boat's motion was not pulling at her yet. But as soon as McGarvey signaled, Jones took up the slack on the boom winch. Maria was violently yanked out of the water, swinging toward the wildly gyrating boat. She would have smashed into the hull, except that Jones had figured the length of line and the period of the waves just right, so that at the last moment she was dunked half into the water, coming up short.
Moments later the boat rose on the next wave at the same instant Jones hauled in on the boom line and Maria was yanked out of the water and dumped on the deck. It was like fishing.
In the precious seconds it took Jones to free Maria from the line, McGarvey had already drifted well behind the boat, and Jorge had to bring it around downwind of him. For ten or fifteen seconds he was out of sight of anyone aboard the Chris-Craft. Hurriedly, he pulled the gold bar from the mesh bag at his side, unzipped the front of his wet suit, stuffed the gold bar inside, under his left arm, and zipped up his suit.
This time it took two tries before Jones could get the life vest and line near enough for McGarvey to grab. But the boarding went as smoothly as it had for Maria, though McGarvey felt as if every muscle in his body had been yanked from his bones.
"Welcome aboard," Jones said.
"What the hell's wrong with her tanks?" McGarvey shouted. "She ran out of air."
"She has plenty of air. Her regulator just hung up, that's all," Jones said. "Did you find what you were looking for?"
McGarvey looked over at Maria, who was lying on the deck, still gasping for air. "It's down there."
"The German U-boat?"
"Yes."
"Jesus," Jones said softly. He looked out at the sea and shook his head. "We'll be back," he said. He looked at Maria. "We'll be back," he repeated.
"It's the second time you've saved my life," Maria said.
It was early afternoon, but already the day had turned very dark. Motion aboard the boat was so violent that almost everything had become impossible; cooking, eating, bathing, even moving from one part of the boat to the other entailed great risk. Jorge and Jones remained on the bridge. They were making for Puerto Lobos to the southwest, but the going was very slow.
Somehow Maria had managed to clean up and comb her hair, but
she still looked battered and tense, braced in the doorway to McGarvey's aft cabin.
"It's getting to be a habit," he said, looking up. He had wedged himself in his bunk with a bottle of brandy.
"Thank you," she said. "But I'm going to need your help again. Now more than ever before."
"Sorry," McGarvey said, "but you're on your own. You've found what you're looking for. I'll leave it to you to work out the details between Jones and your Captain Esformes, and whatever assorted Nazis are still running around Argentina looking for their property."
Her eyes narrowed. "What are you talking about?"
"I found what you've been looking for all this time. What you were really looking for."
"I don't understand—" she said, stopping in midsentence.
McGarvey had wrapped the gold bar in a towel. He pulled
himself up and got it from the shelf beside his bunk, then unwrapped it and laid it on the blanket.
There was an explosion aboard," McGarvey said. "Aft. Probably in the engine room. There's more of this down there on the oeean floor, and presumably even more inside the boat."
The gold bar was stamped with the swastika.
Maria stared at it, an unreadable expression clouding her features.
"I'd suspect this is the recast dental work from the Jews they killed. A little nest egg for your friends here in Argentina. But you're going to have to fight a lot of people for it."
Maria shook her head. "It's not what you think," she said thickly.
"No? Are you denying that this is what you came looking for?"
"I'm not denying anything, Kirk. All I'm trying to tell you is that what you think you see isn't necessarily so."
"Look, I don't care any longer. I shouldn't be here. I belong back in Europe, where I left a very large mess that needs to be straightened out. At first I thought you were somehow involved with it, but now I know better. As soon as we reach Puerto Lobos I'll leave you to it." He nodded toward the gold. "Now, if you'll get that out of here, perhaps I can get a little rest."
"Don't be stupid," Maria snarled. "I'm trying to tell you something." She flipped her hair back. "Now that you've found this, you can know the rest."
"Let me guess," McGarvey said dryly. "You're an Israeli in search of Nazi gold."
Maria's eyes flashed, a little color coming to her cheeks. "I'm an Argentinian of German descent, and my grandfather was the skipper of that submarine down there."
"But?"
"My father killed Jews for the Odessa—"
"The organization of former SS officers."
'Tes," she said. "Which was somehow gruesomely funny because he was part Jew himself."
She had lied to him from the beginning, but this now was the most fantastic. "Your father killed Jews, even though he himself was a Jew, and your grandfather, also presumably a Jew, commanded a Nazi submarine. And they were related to Hitler, who was probably a Jew, right?"
"I'm telling you the truth. My grandfather's mother was a Jew,
but she married a Gentile and converted to Christianity, and later the records were lost."
"Then how did you come to find out about your heritage?"
"Because my great-grandfather told his son, and my grandmother told my father, who told me."
"But your father killed Jews."
Maria nodded. "By the time he'd been told, he was too old to accept it, or he didn't care. I don't know. But he was a Nazi and he simply could not be Jewish, so he lashed out. He killed Jews to prove he wasn't Jewish. He told me that he had no feelings about it, and that I shouldn't, either."
"I see," McGarvey said after a pause, not certain if he believed her, though in this story she seemed sincere. "So now, in an effort to clear your family's name, you want to find this gold which you will turn over to the government of Israel for humanitarian purposes. You want to wash your own hands as well. Cleanse your soul."
"Yes," Maria said defiantly, her nostrils flared. "But not with that." She pointed at the gold bar. She pulled out a narrow-bladed dagger from the waistband of her trousers and lurched forward, falling against the bunk.
For a second McGarvey thought she was attacking him, and he raised up to defend himself. Instead she used the knife to score a line on the bottom of the gold bar.
"There's your gold," she said.
McGarvey cautiously sat forward and examined what she had done. The bar he'd brought up from the bottom was lead, as far as he could tell. It had been covered with a thin layer of gold.
"That's what my grandfather brought over from Germany," she said. "He and Roebling were to be used as decoys while the real gold, much more than could have been hauled by a dozen submarines, was hidden somewhere else."
"How do you know this?" McGarvey asked. She had his interest now.
She sheathed her knife. "Because Major Roebling escaped from the submarine after setting the explosives that sank her. He'd fixed the watertight doors so that they were jammed open, and he even fixed the escape trunk hatch, making it tamperproof. He was the only one to escape. Everyone else aboard, including my grandfather, drowned."
"Why did he do it? He thought he was bringing over a fortune. Why sink it?"
"Somehow he found out about the ruse, and he knew that they had been betrayed."
"Did he know by whom?"
'Tes," Maria said. "He was a brilliant man, but he was very greedy and ruthless. If the gold wasn't to be used to establish the Fourth Reich, then he wanted it for himself. He made his way up to Buenos Aires, where he began killing everyone he figured knew about the switch."
"Then he must have also known where the real gold was stashed," McGarvey said.
"He said he did."
"What happened to him?"
"He was killed in a shoot-out in the city," Maria said.
"What happened to the gold?"
"It was never found."
"But you know where it is," McGarvey said. "You found something in the submarine."
"In the escape trunk," Maria said, her eyes bright. "Major Roebling's bag snagged on something in those last dark, frantic moments. He had to leave the boat without it in order to save his own life. And I found it."
McGarvey sat back. He lit a cigarette in order to give himself time to think. It was an extraordinary story she was telling him, true or not. Yet it was nothing more than a treasure hunt.
"Contact the Mossad. They'll help you," he said.
She laughed disparagingly. "What, help the daughter of a Jew killer?"
"Then retrieve the gold yourself. You said you've found Roebling's bag, presumably containing the ... treasure map. That's what you found, wasn't it?"
"No," Maria said, looking away for a moment. "The man had been lying. He didn't know where the gold was hidden."
"Then, what?"
"But he knew the men who'd hidden it."
"So what?" McGarvey said. "The gold is gone, then. Spent. Invested."
"That much gold? We would have heard about it. There was simply too much of it."
"We?" McGarvey asked.
"The world. People. The Allies after the war. The Israelis. Hell, even the Russians."
"But the men who Roebling suspected knew its whereabouts must be dead by now."
"Maybe not, Kirk. It's what I'm asking you to help me with. The group was called Der Amt Sechster Anbau—the Office of the Sixth Annex."
"Based where? Berlin?"
"Lisbon," Maria said. "Admiral Canaris had set up the network during the first war under the Office of Special Submarine Intelligence Operations. He knew the Spanish and Portuguese coasts like the back of his hand. His knowledge was no doubt passed along to Walther Schellenberg, who took over from him near the end of the second war. Kirk, there are millions of places along those coasts for the gold to have been hidden."
"The chances are a million to one that it was ever there, or is still there, or that there are any members of the Amt Sechster Anbau still alive who would know about it."
"Mayb
e a million-to-one chance, but this is billions of dollars in gold. Tens of billions."
"I'm not a treasure hunter."
"You must help me."
"No," McGarvey said. "Not this time."
A storm had developed from the southeast during the late morning and early afternoon, so that by four o'clock the sky was deeply overcast, and cars in Buenos Aires had to run with parking lights. Kurshin noticed that no one in the city ever used headlights.
Work on the docks began to slow down, and a group of men gathered in the foreman's shack at the end of the quay, the light from within dim and yellow.
At six, the shorter of the two Americans came off the ship, walked down the quay to an old Chevrolet, got behind the wheel, and took off.
Kurshin followed him in his rented Taurus, careful not to lose him in the dense traffic downtown, until it became clear that he was heading to the U.S. embassy. The man was taking his time, either because he was in no hurry, or more likely because he was uncertain of the traffic in a strange city.
On the broad avenida Santa Fe, Kurshin was able to speed up
and get a half block ahead of the American, pulling over sharply and parking in the first available spot.
He yanked his pistol out of its holster and stuffed it in his jacket pocket, jumped out of his car, and, as the Chevy approached, stepped out in front of it.
The American slammed on his brakes, coming to a complete halt as he laid on his horn.
Kurshin pulled the gun from his pocket and darted around to the passenger side. He yanked the door open and slipped inside before the American had a chance to react.
"Drive," Kurshin ordered, showing the American the gun.
"What the hell is this ..." the CIA agent sputtered. He looked military: short-cropped hair, closely shaved face, khaki trousers and shirt.
Crossfire (Kirk McGarvey 3) Page 17
