by Nick Elliott
Chapter 24
Belgrade
16 June 1999
It was pitch-black down here. Aleksandar had a pocket torch, but it provided only a faint and narrow beam to guide us through the puddles and potholes. The concrete floor had rotted over the years since the Germans had restored this medieval network of tunnels beneath the ancient Kalemegdan Fortress. The stronghold had been used by the city’s various rulers: Celts, Romans, then Huns, Slavic tribes, Byzantines, Hungarians, Ottoman Turks, Austrians and more recently, Germans, as they all sought to control the meeting point of the Sava and Danube rivers, and so hold the gateway to Europe. And over those centuries, a maze of underground passages, fortifications, bunkers and command posts had been carved.
‘In 1944 German troops were trying to break the contact between the partisans and the Red Army which was moving towards the city,’ Aleksandar told me, his voice low. ‘No one’s sure how long they were down here for or how many escaped. The city was liberated and the Germans vanished into the building where we just came in, on the corner of Nemanjina Street. But for days afterwards the odd German soldier would appear from the tunnels and fire a few rounds or toss a hand grenade then vanish again. They were persistent.’
It was on Nemanjina Street that we’d located the Zastava truck parked outside an old building – the one used by the Germans and through which we’d found our way down here. Aleksandar’s informer had guided us there based on a reliable source who was certain it was used by the Black Hand to access the tunnels. The building itself was deserted but we’d discovered the entrance to the tunnel through a door in the basement. It was the smell of sweat mingled with the faintest scent of a woman’s perfume that had persuaded us that Iveta had been brought this way. I thought I was imagining it until Aleksandar said he could detect the scent too. Now we were feeling our way along a warren of underground tunnels, dugouts and chambers, never sure whether we were heading in the right direction. I was beginning to worry that we weren’t when Aleksandar stopped abruptly and held up his hand. I could hear it too now: away from the dripping water and the occasional scurrying of rats, was the sound of voices. We moved even more cautiously now. Towards the raised voices of two men speaking loudly.
‘Wait here,’ I whispered.
‘No, you will need me.’
I held his arm. ‘Wait here and follow me after I’ve seen what’s going on in there.’
‘No. Let me speak to them first. Then you can intervene.’
I hesitated. ‘Okay,’ I said, compromising, ‘we’ll go in together.’ There was no point in standing there arguing, but I could see that Aleksandar was almost dropping with exhaustion. I wasn’t far off myself.
The room was big, the air fetid and damp. A single light bulb hung from the ceiling illuminating walls covered in a wet, greenish mould. I learned later that German troops had used it as a dormitory and I could imagine it would have been able to accommodate twenty or more beds. It reminded me of White Swan. Now its only occupants were two men and a woman. The Surgeon was standing arguing with another man who was dressed in camouflage fatigues. Whatever they were talking about, the discussion was heated. The woman – I could see it was Iveta – was lying on the floor against a wall, hands secured behind her back, her ankles shackled by heavy irons and thick grey tape covering her mouth. Her jeans were filthy from the mud on the mountain. The sweater she’d been wearing was gone and her thin top had been ripped open. An image flashed through my mind of her in a black evening gown on the night of the recital. She had banished her nerves, performed faultlessly and afterwards, for a few brief minutes, enjoyed the praise of an admiring audience. Then her world turned upside down. Now, although she didn’t know it, her father was dead. And she had no mother or siblings to go back to either.
I’d rehearsed a line: ‘Hands above your head,’ I would shout, the old SKS raised to my shoulder. But the Surgeon’s accomplice thought he’d beat me to it. As we entered he reached inside his jacket. I didn’t wait to see what it was - cigarettes maybe, or a wallet? I doubted that so I fired intuitively, holding the rifle butt against my hip. It was a wild shot, the carbine awkward to handle in such a confined space. But it hit him and he went sprawling as the force of the round knocked him off balance. The Surgeon froze. Aleksandar shouted at him and very slowly he raised his arms. I kept the carbine on him as Aleksandar moved over to where Iveta lay. She was struggling, nodding her head frantically. He ripped the tape from her mouth. She took a desperate gulp of air and, between coughing spasms, gasped: ‘He’s got the keys, the one you shot.’ Aleksandar crossed the room to get the keys and in doing so cut across the line of fire I had on the Surgeon. He saw his chance and bolted, heading for the door in the far corner of the room. I took a shot at him and missed, the bullet making a high-pitched whine as it ricocheted of the wall. I followed him, realising too late that his accomplice was down but not out. He’d drawn a gun and was aiming it at me. Aleksandar, himself unarmed, ran to disarm him. Anticipating it, the man changed the direction of his aim. I swung round and fired twice as he lay on the floor, but I was too late. He’d loosed off a quick, hit-or-miss round as he lay dying, but it was enough to bring Aleksandar down.
I went back and bent over him. The shot had caught him in his right side. Now he lay doubled-up, hugging himself tightly as if to make the pain go away. I looked around, hoping to find anything that might help him. Iveta was shouting. I turned back to the man who lay still now, dark blood spreading out around him onto the rough stone floor. Yet another bloody corpse in a growing count. I found a bunch of keys in the man’s pocket, ran back to Iveta and fumbled with them until I’d unbound her wrists and unlocked the leg irons.
‘Is there anything here? A medicine cabinet? Painkillers?’
‘Just that rucksack. Over there,’ she said pointing over at the door. I helped her to her feet, not sure whether to attend to her, to Aleksandar or go after the Surgeon.
From across the room Aleksandar was rasping something. We went over to where he lay and between us eased open his jacket and shirt to see the wound. The bullet had torn through his side between the bottom of his ribcage and around where I guessed his right kidney would be. It could have punctured a lung, a kidney or some other organ, or if he was lucky, just passed through skin and muscle. There wasn’t much blood and his breathing and pulse were steady. But having seen how Valdis had succumbed, and given that Aleksandar was a similar age, I worried now that shock might set in.
‘Don’t concern yourself,’ he whispered. ‘It really is not a serious wound, I can tell.’ How could he possibly know how serious it was?
‘Angus, go after him,’ he whispered urgently. ‘Now. He will make for the river, I am sure. I believe there’s a central culvert into which other streams run. Follow the water down the incline and you may find him. Iveta will look after me, but you must not let him get away or he will continue with his insane plan. And Angus, don’t worry, I will tell her.’
At that moment Iveta brought over the rucksack. Now she pulled it open and spread the contents onto the floor, producing two plastic bottles of water, a can of beer and a small steel hip flask. I unscrewed the cap and sniffed it: slivovitz. There were also some magazines, a grubby-looking hand towel and a black flag with a crude rendering of the Black Hand’s Union or Death insignia set around the skull and crossbones.
‘Give him water and some of the spirit to drink, and to clean the wound. And use this as a bandage,’ I added ripping the flag into strips.
‘Don’t worry,’ she reassured me. ‘I will bandage the wound and make him comfortable. Go now.’
I looked at her. I had no idea what had happened from the time she was dragged away from the fire on the mountain; what she’d had to endure. I went over and removed the gun from the dead man’s hand.
‘I’ll be back. Look after him.’
‘Of course she will,’ Aleksandar muttered. I didn’t envy him having to tell her of her father’s death.
The tunnel int
o which the Surgeon had escaped was no more than five feet high by three feet wide. Its stone floor was smooth, wet and slippery. Stooping, and with the torch’s weak beam to guide me, I moved down the incline. He was at least five minutes ahead of me, and he would guess that he’d be followed. After a hundred yards the tunnel opened out at a junction with two others. I took the wider of the two. This tunnel was a culvert: wider and higher, but with water running down it a foot deep. And the further down I went, the steeper the slope became. Several times I slipped. The first time this happened I lost the torch, but as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness I detected a faint light far ahead. I had the dead man’s gun and drew it now, stopping to familiarise myself with it. It still had thirteen 9mm rounds left in the magazine. I continued edging my way down the tunnel.
The noise of rushing water made it impossible to listen for any other sound so I had no warning when he sprang out from a recess in the tunnel wall. We tumbled to the floor, each grappling to get a hold of the other but slithering down the progressively steeper incline in fast-flowing water, our rate of descent increasing as we slid further down. Then ahead and to my right I caught a glimpse of a ladder attached to the wall. Releasing the gun I made a grab for it, managing to hold onto one of the rungs while still struggling to get free of him. But he wasn’t letting go. Instead, using me as a support, he scrambled to his feet.
‘Who are you?’ he panted, standing over me. ‘Who are you to interfere in our affairs, the affairs of our nation?’ He’d drawn a gun now and was staring down at me as I lay in the water, still clinging onto the foot of the ladder with one hand. It was a rhetorical question so I didn’t bother explaining who I was, never mind why I was interfering in his mad schemes. He was standing close, leaning forward against the incline and the flow of the stream, his gun raised.
‘He’s dead,’ I said. ‘The code died with him. It’s lost.’
Before he could respond I kicked out hard with my left foot, making contact with his knee. He had nothing to hold onto and staggered backwards, keeping his balance but only by wildly flailing his arms round. I got to my knees and with my full weight thrust forwards. Again we were tumbling, the gradient even steeper now, the water flowing fast, each of us trying to slow our descent, the enemy no longer each other, but the cascading waterfall. We were in a free fall, heading towards the light with no way to stop. We went over the edge of the culvert and plunged down into the river, each instinctively struggling to free himself from the other.
The first thing I saw when I came to the surface was a white-hulled river barge of the kind adapted for the tourist trade. It was no more than thirty feet away and beginning a turn from the Sava into the Danube at the confluence of the two rivers. I headed for the bank to get away from it, the throb of its engines and the churning of its propellers in the silty waters frighteningly close. I was getting pulled by the current, but falling behind the barge now, when I heard above it all a thin, high-pitched scream. I turned and looked back as he was swept into the slipstream and from there, as the scream stopped abruptly, into the propeller’s suction. I could see passengers leaning over the stern rail. For a few seconds the barge’s wake turned red, then back to the muddy brown it had been before. Yet spattered across the stern around the vessel’s name, Ruby Dawn, were bright red streaks. They’d soon get washed away, I thought as I struck out for the river bank.
Chapter 25
Piraeus, Greece
June–December 1999
In the months that followed, my life changed. I’d been at sea for nine years. Now I had to decide whether to make a proper career of it by qualifying as a deck officer, or to look for work ashore. I spent some time consciously reflecting on those years, looking back and remembering the best and worst of times to help me take a rational decision. But my mind was made up by an offer I couldn’t refuse, and for which I had the Admiral, in part at least, to thank.
The Admiral took a keen interest in the affairs of the commercial shipping world, specifically when it came to maritime crime. While I had little knowledge of the inner workings of protection and indemnity insurance that shipowners took out to guard against calamity, I’d seen plenty of evidence of fraud, a number of serious and not so serious casualties, including those created purely to benefit from an insurance claim, and on one occasion, involvement in an attempted piracy attack, all of which had given me an insight into the risks involved in operating a fleet of merchant ships. Damage to cargo, engineroom fires and explosions or injury to crew and stevedores were worryingly commonplace too and from time to time, as a witness to such occurrences, I’d been called to give evidence along with ships’ officers whose version of events often differed from my own. So in many ways the Admiral and I were on common ground.
When I finally returned to Piraeus, Christos Mavritis, who had generously recompensed me with full chief officer’s wages and overtime allowance for the time I’d been away, took me to lunch at his favourite taverna.
‘Maybe I can help you make your mind up. If you don’t want to go back to sea, I can give you work here. Not full time, but enough to get you started. You know the business and I’ve seen you get involved in investigations and produce good reports. Your Admiral friend got in touch with me recently. He suggested I should talk to you about it. What do you think?’
I hadn’t been expecting this. The prospect of another nine months on one of Christos’s old bangers had little appeal. So without too much forethought I jumped at his offer. By the end of the year I had my own office in Notara Street, parallel to the vaunted shipowners’ row, Akti Miaouli, and a short walk from the Mavritis offices. And I’d handled a variety of cases across the region: a cargo of Greek oranges that had gone rotten as the ship lay helplessly at anchor outside the frozen Sea of Azov; a fraught negotiation with a Croatian port manager who believed minor damage to one of his rusting old shore cranes was worth a million-dollar letter of guarantee with a substantial down payment because the ship, that he’d had arrested, had nudged the crane off its rails while berthing in high winds; and other incidents besides for Mavritis himself.
Very often these accidents and incidents were followed by a process of inquiry that could last for months or years. Surveyors and assessors from all the concerned parties would clamber over the ship inspecting damage, interviewing crew, port officials and stevedores, writing their reports and discussing the handling of the claim with the lawyers. I was now part of this circus and to my surprise, liking it. Such cases became my bread and butter, earning me considerably more than I’d have made at sea. And my fees were paid into an offshore dollar account in Cyprus.
But of more lasting importance was a meeting I’d had in the Edinburgh port of Leith with a protection and indemnity ‘Club’, the Caledonian Marine Mutual P&I Association. This venerable organisation insured the Mavritis fleet, and many others, against an assortment of risks. While they employed an array of agile-minded but office-based lawyers in Leith, they also relied on a network of freelance investigators and surveyors located in ports around the world.
Before I left their grand old building on Leith Links, I’d been signed up as one of their accredited correspondents, meaning I’d be handling cases involving Greek-owned ships entered in the Club as well as those involving their non-Greek tonnage, if and when they were involved in mishaps around the eastern Med.
Their American boss had been talking to the Admiral, who it seemed he’d known for many years, and having done the rounds in the office, I met him in the boardroom on the top floor where portraits of shipowners from the glory days of Scottish shipping and maritime enterprise graced the oak-panelled walls. Grant Douglas was an affable and expansive New Englander with a strong penchant for anything and everything Scottish, including his own Scots ancestry, which he explained to me in depth as we sat opposite each other across the oak boardroom table, that in itself must have weighed the best part of half a ton.
‘You’ll have gotten a pretty good idea of how we operate here so I wo
n’t go over it all again. I’d just like to give you a gentle warning. And it’s something I explain to the folk here when they join, and remind them of on a regular basis. In the world of international shipping the rules are often blurred, so the oceans are pretty much lawless. And because of this, those who play for the highest stakes, be they owners, charterers, financiers or others, often do so with a sense of impunity. To them it’s a sea of gold out there waiting to be mined. Keep it in mind, Angus. Because you’ll meet them, and sooner or later, you’ll come up against them.’
By early October I was feeling confident that the decision to set up my own business had been the right one. It was hard work and the flow of cases was uneven, at least in the early stages, but with my overheads under tight control and a generous payment from the Admiral for services rendered, I knew I’d survive.
I was standing on my balcony overlooking the Bay of Zea, or Pasa Limani as it was known in Ottoman days, reflecting on all this with the help of a whisky and as the sun set over Piraeus, when something on the TV news in the living room behind me caught my attention. I moved inside to watch the CNN report. It was showing two warships cutting through a choppy blue sea. The picture switched to a talking head reporting live from Beirut.
‘Breaking news as a team of British Royal Navy Marines are reported to have boarded a merchant vessel some distance north of here as it was on its way to Beirut’s port. A security blanket has been drawn over exactly what happened, but local sources have told CNN that the ship was believed to be carrying nothing less than a weapon of mass destruction, possibly a nuclear missile destined for an unnamed Islamic fundamentalist group. More reports as they come in …’
I phoned the Admiral to see if he knew anything about it. I hadn’t heard from him since Belgrade, when he had reappeared and, along with Kirstin, taken care of Iveta. I had returned to Aleksandar’s house in Zemun for a day or two while he was recovering, and from there flown to Athens.