“Okay, Plocˇe. On June eleventh,” said Shannon.
Baker noted the date. “The Toscana is okay?” he asked. He decided to bear the Toscana in mind for later use. Shannon, he was sure, would have little use for her after whatever operation he was mounting was finished, and Baker was always on the lookout for a good boat for running his cargoes into deserted coves.
“She’s fine,” said Shannon. “She’s running for an Italian port now, where I have to let her know by telex or letter where to head for. Any problems at your end?”
Baker shifted slightly. “One,” he said. “The price.”
“What about it?”
“I know I quoted you fixed prices, totaling fourteen thousand, four hundred dollars. But the system inside Yugoslavia has changed over the past six months. To get the paperwork through on time, I had to engage a Yugoslav partner. At least, that’s what he is called, though in fact he’s another middleman.”
“So?” asked Shannon.
“So he has to get a fee or salary for getting the paperwork through the Belgrade office. On balance, I supposed it was worth it to you to have the shipment ready on time and no bureaucratic hang-ups. So I agreed to engage him. He’s the brother-in-law of the official in the Trade Ministry. It’s another way of taking a kickback. But what can you expect these days? The Balkans are still the Balkans, and they’ve got wised up.”
“How much extra will he cost?”
“A thousand pounds sterling.”
“In dinars or dollars?”
“In dollars.”
Shannon thought it over. It might be the truth, or it might be that Baker was trying to squeeze a bit more out of him. If it was the truth, refusing to pay would simply force Baker to pay the Yugoslav out of his own cut. That would reduce Baker’s margin to such a small amount he might lose interest in the deal, not caring whether it went through or not. And he still needed Baker, and would need him until he saw the white wake of the Toscana heading out of Plocˇe harbor on her way to Spain.
“All right,” he said. “Who is this partner?”
“Fellow called Ziljak. He’s out there now, taking care of the shipment right up to Plocˇe and into the warehouse there. When the ship comes in, he’ll get the stuff from the warehouse through customs and onto the boat.”
“I thought that was your job.”
“It is, but now I have to engage a Yugoslav as partner. Honestly, Cat, they left me no alternative.”
“Then I’ll pay him personally, in travelers’ checks.”
“I wouldn’t,” said Baker.
“Why not?”
“The buyers of this shipment are supposed to be the government of Togo, right? Black men. Another white turns up, obviously the paymaster, and they might begin to smell a rat. We can go to Plocˇe, if you like, or I can go alone. But if you want to come with me, you’ll have to come ostensibly as my assistant. Besides, travelers’ checks have to be cashed at a bank, and in Yugoslavia that means they take the man’s name and identity-card number. If someone cashing them is a Yugoslav, there are questions asked. It would be better if Ziljak got cash, as he has asked.”
“All right, I’ll cash some checks here in Hamburg, and I’ll pay him in dollar bills,” said Shannon. “But you get yours in checks. I’m not carrying vast sums of dollars in cash around. Not to Yugoslavia. They get sensitive about that sort of thing. Security gets interested. They think you’re funding a spy operation. So we go as tourists with travelers’ checks.”
“Fine by me,” said Baker. “When do you want to go?”
Shannon glanced at his watch. The next day would be June 1.
“Day after tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll fly to Dubrovnik and have a week in the sun. I could do with a rest anyway. Or you can join me on the eighth or ninth, but not a day later. I’ll hire a car, and we can drive up the coast to Plocˇe on the tenth. I’ll have the Toscana come in that night or early on the morning of the eleventh.”
“You go on alone,” said Baker. “I have work to do in Hamburg. I’ll join you on the eighth.”
“Without fail,” said Shannon. “If you don’t turn up, I’ll come looking. And I’ll be hopping mad.”
“I’ll come,” said Baker. “I still want the balance of my money, don’t forget. So far, I’m out of pocket on this deal. I want it to go through just as much as you.”
That was the way Shannon wanted him to feel.
“You do have the money, I suppose?” asked Baker, fingering a lump of sugar.
Shannon flicked through a booklet of large-denomination dollar checks under Baker’s nose. The arms dealer smiled.
They left the table and on the way out used the restaurant telephone to call a Hamburg charter company specializing in package tours for the thousands of Germans who vacation along the Adriatic coast. From this company they learned the names of the three best hotels in the Yugoslav resort. Baker was told he would find Shannon in one of them under the name of Keith Brown.
Johann Schlinker was as confident as Baker that he could fulfill his arms deal, though he had no idea that Baker was also doing business with Shannon. No doubt the men knew of each other, might even be acquainted, but there would not be a question of discussing each other’s business together.
“The port should be Valencia, though this has yet to be fixed and is in any case the choice of the Spanish authorities,” he told Shannon. “Madrid tells me the dates have to be between the sixteenth and twentieth of June.”
“I’d prefer the twentieth for loading,” said Shannon. “The Toscana should be permitted to berth on or during the night of the nineteenth and load in the morning.”
“Good,” said Schlinker. “I’ll inform my Madrid partner. He habitually handles the transporting and loading side of things, and employs a first-class freight agent in Valencia who knows all the customs personnel very well. There should be no problem.”
“There must be no problems,” growled Shannon. “The ship has been delayed already once, and by loading on the twentieth I have enough sailing time but no margin to fulfill my own contract.”
It was not true, but he saw no reason why Schlinker should not believe it was true.
“I shall want to watch the loading also,” he told the arms dealer.
Schlinker pursed his lips. “You may watch it from afar, of course,” he said. “I cannot stop you. But as the customers are supposed to be an Arab government, you cannot propose yourself as the buyer of the merchandise.”
“I also want to board the ship at Valencia,” said Shannon.
“That will be even harder. The whole port is sealed off inside a chain-link fence. Entry is by authority only. To board the ship you would have to go through passport control. Also, as she will be carrying ammunition, there will be a Guardia Civil at the bottom of the gangplank.”
“Supposing the captain needed another crewman. Could he engage a seaman locally?”
Schlinker thought it over. “I suppose so. Are you connected with the company owning the vessel?”
“Not on paper,” said Shannon.
“If the captain informed the agent on arrival that he had permitted one of his crewmen to leave the vessel at its last port of call to fly home and attend his mother’s funeral, and that the crewman would be rejoining the vessel at Valencia, I suppose there would be no objection. But you would need a merchant seaman’s card to prove you were a seaman. And in the same name as yourself, Mr. Brown.”
Shannon thought for a few minutes. “Okay. I’ll fix it.”
Schlinker consulted his diary. “As it happens, I shall be in Madrid on the nineteenth and twentieth,” he said. “I have another business deal to attend to. I shall be at the Mindanao Hotel. If you want to contact me, you can find me there. If loading is for the twentieth, the chances are the convoy and escort from the Spanish army will run the shipment down to the coast during the night of the nineteenth to arrive at crack of dawn. If you are going to board the ship at all, I think you should do so before the military co
nvoy arrives at the docks.”
“I could be in Madrid on the nineteenth,” said Shannon. “Then I could check with you that the convoy had indeed left on time. By driving fast to Valencia, I could be there ahead of it, and board the Toscana as the rejoining seaman before the convoy arrives.”
“That is entirely up to you,” said Schlinker. “For my part, I will have my agents arrange the freighting, transportation, and loading, according to all the normal procedures, for dawn of the twentieth. That is what I contracted to do. If there is any risk attached to your boarding the vessel in harbor, that must be your affair. I cannot take the responsibility for that. I can only point out that ships carrying arms out of Spain are subjected to scrutiny by the army and customs authorities. If anything goes wrong with the loading and clearance of the ship to sail, because of you, that is not my responsibility. One other thing. After loading arms a ship must leave a Spanish port within six hours, and may not reenter Spanish waters until the cargo has been off-loaded. Also, the manifest must be in perfect order.”
“It will be,” said Shannon. “I’ll be with you in Madrid on the morning of the nineteenth.”
Before leaving Toulon, Kurt Semmler had given Shannon a letter to mail. It was from Semmler to the Toscana’s shipping agents in Genoa. It informed them there had been a slight change of plan, and that the Toscana would be proceeding from Toulon not directly to Morocco but first to Brindisi to pick up further cargo. The order, Semmler informed the agents, had been secured locally by him in Toulon and was lucrative, since it was a rush order, whereas the consignment of mixed cargo from Toulon to Morocco was in no hurry. Because he was the managing director of Spinetti Maritimo, Semmler’s instructions were those of the boss. He required the Genoa agents to cable Brindisi reserving a berth for June 7 and 8, and to instruct the port office to hold any mail addressed to the Toscana for collection when she berthed.
Such a letter was what Shannon wrote and dispatched from Hamburg. It was to Signor Kurt Semmler, MV Toscana, c/o the Port Office, Brindisi, Italy.
In it he told Semmler that from Brindisi he should proceed to Plocˇe on the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia, and that if he had no charts to negotiate the tricky straits north of Korcula Island, he should get them locally. He had to get the Toscana there on the evening of June 10, and his berth would be reserved. There was no need to inform the agents in Genoa of the extra leg from Brindisi to Plocˇe.
His last instruction to Semmler was important. He told the German ex-smuggler he wanted him to acquire a merchant seaman’s card for a deckhand called Keith Brown, stamped and up-to-date, and issued by the Italian authorities. The second thing the ship would need was a cargo manifest showing the Toscana had proceeded straight from Brindisi to Valencia without a halt, and would be heading from Valencia to Latakia, Syria, after taking cargo aboard in Valencia. Semmler would have to use his old Brindisi contacts to obtain these documents.
Before he left Hamburg for Yugoslavia, Shannon’s last letter was to Simon Endean in London. It required Endean to meet Shannon at a rendezvous in Rome on June 16, and to bring certain maritime charts with him.
About the same time, the MV Toscana was chugging steadily through the Bight of Bonifacio, the narrow channel of limpid blue water that separates the southern tip of Corsica from the northern end of Sardinia. The sun was blistering, but mellowed by a light wind. Marc Vlaminck was stretched out, stripped to the waist, on the hatch cover of the main hold, a wet towel beneath him, his torso like a pink hippopotamus covered in suntan oil. Janni Dupree, who always turned brick red in the sun, was propped up against the wall of the after structure, under the awning, swigging from his tenth bottle of beer of the morning. Cipriani, the deckhand, was painting part of the rail around the forepeak white, and the first mate, Norbiatto, was snoozing on his bunk below after taking the night watch.
Also down below, in the stinking heat of the engine room, was the engineer, Grubic, oiling some piece of machinery that only he could understand but which no doubt was vital to keep the Toscana steady on her eight knots through the Mediterranean. In the wheelhouse Kurt Semmler and Carl Waldenberg were sipping cold beer and exchanging reminiscences of their respective careers.
Jean-Baptiste Langarotti would have liked to be there. From the port rail he could have watched the gray-white sun-bleached coast of his homeland slipping past barely four miles across the water. But he was many miles away, in West Africa, where the rainy season had already begun and where, despite the fever heat, the clouds were leaden gray.
Alan Baker came into Shannon’s hotel in Dubrovnik just as the mercenary was returning from the beach on the evening of June 8. He looked tired and dusty.
Cat Shannon, by contrast, was looking and feeling better. He had spent his week in the Yugoslav holiday resort behaving like any other tourist, sunbathing and swimming several miles each day. He looked thinner, but fit and tanned. He was also optimistic.
After settling into his hotel, he had sent Semmler a cable at Brindisi requesting confirmation of the arrival of the vessel and receipt of the waiting letter mailed from Hamburg. That morning he had got Semmler’s telegraphed reply. The Toscana had arrived safely in Brindisi, the letter had been received and acted on, and they would depart on the morning of June 9 to make destination by midnight of the tenth.
Over drinks on the terrace of their hotel, where Shannon had reserved Baker a room for the night, he told the dealer from Hamburg the news.
Baker nodded and smiled. “Fine. I got a cable forty-eight hours ago from Ziljak in Belgrade. The crates have arrived in Plocˇe and are in the government warehouse near the quay, under guard.”
They spent the night in Dubrovnik and the following morning hired a taxi to take them the hundred kilometers up the coast to Plocˇe. It was a bone shaker of a car that appeared to have square wheels and cast-iron suspension, but the drive along the coast road was agreeable, mile upon mile of unspoiled coastline, with the small town of Slano at the halfway mark, where they stopped for a cup of coffee and to stretch their limbs.
They were established in a Plocˇe hotel by lunchtime and waited in the shade of the terrace until the port office opened again at four in the afternoon.
The port was set on a broad sweep of deep blue water, shielded to its seaward side by a long peninsula of land called Peljesac, which curved out of the main coast to the south of Plocˇe and ran northward parallel to the coast. Up to the north the gap between the tip of the peninsula and the coast was almost blocked by the rocky island of Hvar, and only a narrow gap gave access to the sea lagoon on which Plocˇe stood. This lagoon, nearly thirty miles long, surrounded on nine-tenths of its perimeter by land, was a paradise for swimming, fishing, and sailing.
As they approached the port office, a small and battered Volkswagen squealed to a halt a few yards away and hooted noisily. Shannon froze. His first instinct said trouble, something he had been fearing all along, some slipup in the paperwork, a sudden block put on the whole deal by the authorities, and an extended stay under questioning in the local police station.
The man who climbed out of the small car and waved cheerily might have been a policeman, except that police in most totalitarian states of East or West seemed to be banned from smiling by standing orders. Shannon glanced at Baker and saw his shoulders sag in relief.
“Ziljak,” Baker muttered through closed mouth and went to meet the Yugoslav. The latter was a big shaggy man, like an amiable black-haired bear, and he embraced Baker with both arms. When he was introduced, his first name turned out to be Kemal, and Shannon supposed there was more than a touch of Turk in the man. That suited Shannon fine; he liked the type, normally good fighters and comrades with a healthy dislike of bureaucracy.
“My assistant,” said Baker, and Ziljak shook hands and muttered something in what Shannon assumed to be Serbo-Croat. Baker and Ziljak communicated in German, which many Yugoslavians speak a little. He spoke no English.
With Ziljak’s assistance, they roused the head of the cu
stoms office and were taken off to inspect the warehouse. The customs man jabbered a few words at the guard on the door, and in the corner of the building they found the crates. There were thirteen of them; one apparently contained the two bazookas, and each of two others contained one mortar, including the baseplates and sighting mechanisms in each. The rest were of ammunition, four of them with ten bazooka rockets in each, and the other six containing the ordered three hundred mortar bombs. The crates were in new timber, unmarked with any description of contents, but stenciled with serial numbers and the word “Toscana.”
Ziljak and the customs chief babbled away in their own dialect—and it appeared they were using the same one, which was helpful, because there are dozens in Yugoslavia, including seven major languages, and difficulties have been known to occur.
Eventually Ziljak turned to Baker and said several sentences in his halting German. Baker replied, and Ziljak translated for the customs man. He smiled, and they all shook hands and parted. Outside, the sunshine struck like a sledgehammer.
“What was all that about?” asked Shannon.
“Kemal was asked by the customs man if there was a little present in it for him,” explained Baker. “Kemal told him there would be a nice one if the paperwork could be kept trouble-free and the ship was loaded on time tomorrow morning.”
Shannon had already given Baker the first half of Ziljak’s £1000 bonus for helping the deal go through, and Baker drew the Yugoslav to one side to slip it to him. The man’s all-embracing bonhomie became even more embracing for both of them, and they adjourned to the hotel to celebrate with a little slivovitz. A “little” was the word Baker used. Ziljak may have used the same word. He did not mean it. Happy Yugoslavs never drink a little slivovitz. With £500 under his belt, Ziljak ordered a bottle of the fiery plum liquor and bowl after bowl of almonds and olives. As the sun went down and the Adriatic evening slipped through the streets, he relived again his years in the war, hunting and hiding in the Bosnian hills to the north with Tito’s partisans.
The Dogs of War Page 36