Crossfire

by David Hagberg

  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 ocean 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.”

  “Yes,” 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?”

  “Yes,” 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.”

  “Maybe 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.

  “Drive, or I will kill you here and now,” Kurshin said.

  Traffic was piling up behind them, and other drivers were honking their horns.

  “If a cop shows up, I will shoot you,” Kurshin warned.

  The American took off. At the next intersection Kurshin instructed him to turn left, away from the river and the embassy.

  “If this is some kind of a stickup, I don’t have very much on me, and besides, you’d be making a big fucking mistake.”

  “On the contrary, it is you who have made the mistake, coming here to look for McGarvey and his woman,” Kurshin said in a reasonable tone.

  The CIA officer nearly lost control of the car. When he recovered, he said, “What the hell is this? What do you want? Who the hell are you?” He was tan, but his complexion had begun to pale.

  “A friend. I want to know where McGarvey is keeping himself these days. I want to have a word with him.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. McGarvey who?”

  “You do know, and you’ll tell me, either the easy way or the hard way. Personally, I don’t care which.”

  After a half-dozen blocks they had come to one of the many slums called villas miserias. It was a densely packed area lined with tin and cardboard shacks, with open sewers along the sides of the narrow, filthy streets. The slum was crisscrossed with dark alleys and dead-end streets.

  Kurshin had the American pull over, shut off the engine, and kill the lights.

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. I swear to Christ.”

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Kurshin said, motioning with his gun for the agent to get out of the car.

  “Christ … Christ, don’t do this. What do you want? Just tell me. Money? Whatever.”

  “You and your partner showed up at Mercator with a dozen aluminum cases, which you trucked to that ship at the Vestry docks. Mercator and Vestry are both fronts for Central Intelligence Agency activities in Argentina. You are here to find Kirk McGarvey, whom you suspect was involved with the attack on your Paris embassy. You believe he is currently somewhere along the coast searching for a Nazi submarine that may have been sunk at the end of the war.”

  The American was breathing rapidly through his mouth. He was impressed.

  “All I need to know is, where will you begin your search? Where do you believe McGarvey and the woman are at this moment?”

  The American was shaking his head. “If you know that much, then you know that I can’t tell you anything. You’re the opposition. Okay, pal, you’ve got me. But the goddamned cold war is over. Let us clean up our own house.”

  “Get out of the car,” Kurshin said.

  “Bullshit.”

  Kurshin cocked the pistol’s hammer.

  The American hurriedly opened the door and slid out, Kurshin right behind him.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re going to do?”

  Kurshin lowered his aim and fired, the bullet catching the American in the left kneecap. The man screamed in pain as he collapsed in the filthy street.

  No one came running; no one sounded the alarm. No one would, in this section of the city.

  Kurshin hunched down beside the American and jammed the barrel of the pistol into the man’s scrotum. “Where do you believe McGarvey has gotten himself to?”

  The American was sobbing in pain and fear. “Christ, Christ …”

  “Where?” Kurshin asked softly.

  The American looked up, pleading. “Viedma. The Gulf of San Matías.”

  “I hope you’re not lying.”

  “No, no, I swear to God. We’re leaving in a few hours. We’re supposed to be there sometime tomorrow. God, I swear it.”

  “I believe you,” Kurshin said, and he stood up and shot the man in the head at point-blank range.

  26

  IT HAD TAKEN THEM nearly ten hours in the steadily rising wind and seas to make the forty-five nautical miles southwest to the breakwater off the town of Puerto Lobos.

  They’d had nothing to eat during the long day. Except for the one visit, Maria had kept to her cabin forward of the saloon. As far as McGarvey knew, Jones and his mate had remained topside on the bridge, trying to bring them in to safety.

  McGarvey had actually managed to get a few hours of sleep, despite the extreme motion and uncertainty about their chances. But he had pushed himself dangerously close to collapse on the dive. At forty-six he was no longer a kid, and despite his good physical condition, his age was beginning to catch up with him.

  His dreams were jumbled and confused, and involved erotic pictures of Maria, naked on a huge pile of gold bars, all stamped with the swastika. She was beckoning to him, but someone else out of the range of his vision was calling to him, trying to tell him something. He could hear the desperation in the person’s voice, but he could not tell who was calling, nor even the speaker’s gender, which left him frustrated and disturbed.

  When he woke it was pitch-dark in his cabin. If anything, the motion of the sea had gotten worse, and for several seconds, disoriented, he was on the verge of becoming seasick.

  He pulled himself out of his bunk and, bracing himself against the bulkhead, cupped his hands around the small porthole and looked out into the night. He glanced at his watch; it was nearly ten.

  At first he could see nothing, but then he thought he spotted lights ahead to the south, and a second later he caught the flash of the navigational beacon on the end of the Puerto Lobos breakwater. They had arrived, but this close to shore the waves were tremendous and extremely dangerous.

  Pulling on his foul-weather jacket, McGarvey lurched out of his cabin into the empty main saloon, which smelled strongly of diesel fuel, sloshing bilges, and the heads. Dim red and amber lights on the navigation equipment above the chart table aft, and a thin line of white light from beneath Maria’s door forward, provided the only illumination. The companionway hatch leading topside was partly open, but the night above it was utterly dark.

  He hesitated for a minute. Perhaps he should speak to Maria again, try to explain to her why he was leaving. But then he decided that he owed her no explanation. In fact, it was she who owed him the truth.

  He had started for the companionway when Jorge suddenly appeared at the hatch and came down the ladder, a broad grin on his dark face.

  “Where is the woman?” the Argentinian demanded in clear English.
r />   “So, he does speak after all,” McGarvey replied carefully. This was trouble. His gun was holstered at the small of his back beneath his foul-weather gear.

  Jorge glanced at her door. “Get her. The captain wants both of you topside immediately.”

  “What does he want?”

  “Get the woman,” Jorge repeated. “Immediately. There is no time.”

  “Time for what?” McGarvey asked.

  Jorge pulled out a big gun, cocked the hammer, and pointed it at the center of McGarvey’s chest. It was a .357 magnum, and the Argentinian’s hand was steady. “Hurry.”

  “Maria,” McGarvey shouted without taking his eyes off Jorge. “Maria. Come out here,” he called. “And bring the … gold with you.”

  “That is not necessary—” Jorge began, but abruptly stopped.

  “You know,” McGarvey said to him. “Maria!” he shouted. He turned and lurched across the saloon, bracing himself against the dining table as the boat swung around broadside to the waves for a moment before coming dead into the wind. They were heading back out to sea.

  The door to Maria’s cabin opened and she came out. “Are we almost there?” she asked, and then she spotted Jorge beyond McGarvey. “Oh,” she said, reaching for the doorframe for support.

  “They want the gold,” McGarvey said, looking into her eyes.

  “No!” Jorge shouted from behind him.

  “We’re going to give it to them. Now,” McGarvey said.

  “All right,” Maria said, and before Jorge could do anything she turned and went back into her cabin.

  “Get away from that door,” the Argentinian yelled. He was suddenly very agitated.

  Maria was back a second later. She handed the heavy gold bar to McGarvey, who turned and held it up.

  “This is what you want, isn’t it?”

  Jorge’s black eyes grew large, his greed obvious on his lined face. It was a universal look, unmistakable. His gun hand wavered.

  “We don’t want any trouble,” McGarvey said, taking a step closer.

  Jorge’s aim steadied.

  “You can have this, and the rest aboard the sub. Just put us ashore.”

  “That’s up to the captain.”