“Tina! Muriel was not feeling well this afternoon. She is in her cabin. Make sure the doctor is keeping an eye on her.” She crossed over to her husband as he spoke, her hands with ten perfect ovals of rose-painted fingernails resting gently on his shoulders.
“Of course, Tommie. Poor Muriel, my co–wife. I don’t think the canapés and catamarans agree with her. I’ll have one of the stewards look in on her right now—and, really,—we all should have something to eat.” She continued her careful stroll around the outside of the circle, gave her instructions, and took her chair again.
“What I find so astounding”—Starring picked up the earlier thread—“is that the last war was merely a footnote to the greater sieges centuries before.”
“I must agree,” Ghadira said. “The weapons may have been more modern, the statistics greater in terms of tons of explosives, but the tactics, the intensity of struggle, the barbarism, the cause were far more dramatic in the sixteenth century.”
“The Turk, Suleiman, wasn’t he? Suleiman of the Ottomans, Suleiman the Magnificent.” Starring moved to the rail on the flight deck’s starboard side. The Towerpoint Octagon had swung on her mooring with the gentle northerly breeze. The others followed, looked out toward the mouth of the harbor across the dark, rippling water reflecting the lights of the city.
“My favorite of his titles, he must have had twenty,” Ghadira said, “was Possessor of Men’s Necks. . . .”
“When did the siege actually begin?” Starring asked.”
“In 1564.” Leslie’s voice brought a quick turn their heads.
“A student of the siege, too, Princess?” Tooms added to his file.
“When you live here”—her eyes stayed on the water—“it becomes part of you. It is living history despite the passage of the years, the repeated devastations.”
“‘Living,’ that’s excellent, very apt.” Starring resumed, one foot on the bottom rung of the raised safety railing. “Suleiman was in his seventies, wasn’t he? He had driven the Knights from Rhodes forty years before, The Emperor of Spain had given them Malta as a place of refuge.”
“Charles the Fifth,” Dr. Ghadira confirmed.
“It was the Knights of St. John, I learned earlier this evening, who gave the islands their cross, each of the arms a virtue, each point on each arm a beatitude. Suleiman was obsessed with ridding the world of them, launched his forces from Constantinople in two hundred galleys and sailing ships. What were the Knights’ defenses?”
“De la Valette had two fortifications, Tommie, a small fort, St. Elmo, off to the left at the outer reaches of the harbor, and the main point of defense, Fort St. Angelo.”
“And, the Turk’s plan was to sweep quickly across St. Elmo and then move in for the kill on St. Angelo—”
“Tommie, dear guests, the buffet is set.”
“Not yet, not yet.” Starring brushed her away.
“Tina, you’re the most delectable morsel afloat. No need to bother with more food,” Tooms called. “Tell me about this well-earned vacation of yours.”
“Jaruka, thumma, jaruka, thumma jaruka.” She kissed him, a warm, lingering kiss on the cheek.
“I know,” Tooms answered, “felt the same myself countless times. What brought that to mind?”
“Arabic, Oats, my darling scholar. Don’t your fish know the tongue of the desert? ‘Your neighbor, then your neighbor, then your neighbo,—very philosophical, don’t you think?”
“Good for apartment living.”
“I am reading, reading a great deal about the Arabs, slowly transforming myself into a desert almanac. A camel, dear Oats, does four miles an hour at a walk, eight if he holds to a steady trot, and thirteen running as fast as his little feet will carry him. There is a new play—too soon, but it is there, with a benefit in less than a month. It is speckled with Arabia, and so will I be.” She glided away. Tooms gave her a bon voyage wave without moving from the rail. Ghadira had carried the Grand Siege to the fall of St. Elmo.
“Correct me, my friend”—Starring grasped the professor’s wrist—“the Turks were so bitter when they finally took St. Elmo that they mutilated the bodies of the few Knights they found, sliced out their hearts, hacked off their heads, nailed them to crosses, and floated them over to St. Angelo?”
Ghadira nodded, “The most brutal episode of the entire siege. De la Valette took one look, immediately executed the Turkish prisoners held within his walls, loaded their heads into cannons, and fired them back into the Turkish lines.” Starring pounded his fist on the rail in excitement.
They moved back into the ring of light and chairs, pausing to be served from a table richly spread with salads, smoked trout, whitefish, salmon, lobster, hot breads, and pastries. Tina returned to her chair with a champagne in each hand. “A new diet, Gus, darling. Do have some more and do give me a cigarette.” She reeled back from the flame of his lighter. “A light, darling, not a sun tan.” Her voice was louder. “I have a very fair skin, and I am very envious of Miss Renfro’s glorious color. Do you have regular sessions at the beach, darling?”
Leslie Renfro had mapped her strategy for the evening before setting foot on Starring’s ship. She ignored the baiting, passed her plate to a steward with the meal untouched.
“Delicious, delicious.” Starring had already finished and punctuated his verdict with a flourish of his napkin. The Maltese professor had resumed his history. When he finished, the islands still safe in the hands of the Knights, Starring rose.
“Brilliantly told, my friend; a splendid tale of a proud people.” He proposed a toast to Ghadira and to the success of the Oceanic University of the World Conferences.
“Tommie”—Ghadira’s glass was raised in response—“as our president said this evening on this very deck, none of this would have been possible without you. Your announcement this evening of the new pier and laboratory was colossal, absolutely colossal, banner headlines fully deserved tomorrow.”
“Oats sketched out this project for me two years ago. He deserves the credit.”
The chief scientist beckoned to one of the white jackets. “One more of Kentucky’s finest; the praise has made me dry.”
Starring continued. “The Towerpoint fleet plies the Mediterranean—plies every ocean, my friends. This is only the first. Malta will be the model. We’ll work together, Dr. Ghadira, Towerpoint and Malta. We’ll put the knowledge of your graduates to work, no lacking attention . . .” He again had looked toward Tooms’s guest as he had addressed the words.
She leaned forward, hands clasped tightly across her knees. “I do not expect to alter your idea of what is right and what is wrong, not this evening. You are wrong. People will . . .” She broke off. Her words had flowed quickly, with rising emotion. Tooms heaved himself upright in his seat.
Starring had moved a step closer. “Mistaken idea? Hardly, Miss Renfro, and a perception on your part, my friend, I attach importance to correcting.”
“Our mermaid is setting off on her own expedition, Tommie. She’ll be back, my personal crusade, for the complete two-dollar tour of this tub.”
“Excellent, Miss Renfro. Towerpoint is about to embark on one of the most dramatic research projects ever conceived. If you are a scientist it might be of interest to you—”
Tina’s champagne glass fell to the rug unbroken, swinging in a half-circle around its base before rolling to a stop at Anderson’s feet. He scooped under the stem and placed it on a waiting tray.
“Tina has given the signal. Ladies get their wraps; gents their canes and hats.” Tooms pushed himself to his feet. The others rose, except for Starring’s wife. As the candlelight played on her face and hair, she was so lovely, so composed, it was barely apparent she was asleep.
“Oats, are you seeing Miss Renfro ashore?”
“Taxi’s just around the corner, Tommie.”
“Ahhhhh!” The entire party exclaimed, as the sky over the city exploded with brilliant bursts of fireworks: pinks, whites, golds, and green blossomi
ng from thundering puffs into expanding, rolling, shimmering globes.
“Night flares,” Anderson laughed. “Junkers on the way. Come on, Joe, got to get out to Luqa, get the Hurricane up to meet them.” Starring laughed with them.
“Church festival,” Ghadira said. “A true friend of Malta must love fireworks, Malta’s soul and passion.”
“The sky flashed again, flowering, banging bursts of red and white which opened, separating into petals before falling and fading into the night. Ship’s lights, playing on the submersible, spotlighted the Towerpoint Octagon’s presence in the harbor as the party made its way to the ladder on the main deck.
Tooms hesitated at the head of the ladder, shielded his eyes. “There he is, faithful skipper, Princess, lying off about twenty yards. He hailed the dghajsa, boarded with Leslie. The taxiboat sculled silently back across the harbor to the customs wharf, its way lit at intervals by the bursts of festival rockets.
Chapter 5
At the moment Ambassador Burdette had slumped dead in the smoke, blood, and shattered glass of her limousine in Geneva, the young lieutenant navigator of the Soviet cruise ship Omsk was bent over a chart penciling in his ship’s position north of Cape Hatteras.
He checked his sun-line computations against the loran bearings and marked a circled X. This done, he slid the parallel rule across the chart, drawing a line from the ship’s location to the Chesapeake Light, then walked the rule to the nearest compass rose, took the reading, and jotted down the course heading.
His mind ticked off the coming sequence of events. The pilot would swing aboard at the Light, take them through the bridge-tunnel channel cleaving Cape Henry and Cape Charles, and up the bay. He placed the points of his dividers on the breadth of the channel, too narrow, dangerous, the great engineering Americans.
Emerging from the chart house, the navigator walked the twenty paces to his captain who was on the starboard wing of the bridge, legs set apart, binoculars to his eyes, studying a faint hull shape on the horizon. “One of their new cruisers, that pyramidal shape forward. What dreamers!” The young officer saluted, reported the Omsk’s position and recommended new heading. The captain acknowledged the report, stepped into the bridge house, ordered left rudder, waited until the ship steadied on her new heading, then returned to the wing.
“They are a strange nation, Mr. Navigator. That unit is standing out for their Sixth Fleet where he will join the rest of their fish in the Mediterranean barrel. Meanwhile, Mr. Navigator, do you not find it strange the Omsk is permitted to proceed along their coast without so much as a patrol plane? Can you imagine an American ship steaming off the Soviet Union unsurveilled? Quite remarkable, isn’t it?
“Irresponsible, Captain.”
“Yes. They place their faith and their defense in God. They believe that coastal defenses are a strategy of the past—no more ships, no more planes, no more troops. They build their automated lighthouses, fit them with modern navigational aids free to all, and God will provide. Remarkable isn’t it? He does provide—illegals, undesirables swarming ashore stealing, robbing the American worker of his job, parasites infesting their nation. He provides narcotics by the ton, heroin, cocaine, and the rest poisoning their sick society. Quite remarkable.” He stepped back inside the bridge house, placed his binoculars in the rack beside his chair, left instructions with the watch, brushed his uniform, and departed on a stroll of the passenger decks.
Hundreds of miles to the north, well above the entrance to the bay, Memorial Day traffic moved smoothly over the twin spans of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, despite construction on the westbound span which had reduced the flow from three lanes to two. Orange fluorescent cones and an arrow of blinking yellow lights diverted the traffic from the left lane just beyond the first tower of the bridge’s suspension span. At the highest point, 187 feet above the 1,500 foot main channel, three white aluminum trailers and an electrical generator unit were parked at intervals behind the cones. The generator’s engine periodically coughed into life, its electricity flowing to the trailers in cables laid along the bridge curbing. Five gallon cans of red lead and aluminum paint were stacked in two piles. Air compressors and coils of line added to the maintenance clutter.
Funnels of yellow plastic fitted to the open doors of each trailer on the side facing the bridge rail ran over the rail, down to the span’s catwalk beneath the roadway. Additional yellow sheltering material had been rigged to provide a roof connecting the three funnels.
Four men sat beneath this roof waiting. Their leader, Hanspeter Sweetman, shifted uncomfortably on the aluminum case he was using for a seat. Tall, in his early thirties, bald with a monk’s fringe of black hair, he looked down through the gray rails of the catwalk at the weekend yachts cutting along the bay. Sweetman had a delicate, almost boyish face for so big a man, a high Irish tenor voice, thin nose, fine lips and white, freckled skin, all of which were very deceptive given his great strength and his profession.
A breeze ruffled his fringe of hair. Oblivious to the hum of traffic above, he shifted his gaze to the bridge’s second span, and beyond, farther to the south, to the hazy hulls of the ocean traffic anchored in the Annapolis roadstead, ore carriers, coal carriers, container ships, a few earlier generation cargo ships studded with masts and king posts. They were riding out the weekend, many prepared to remain at anchor for weeks to come, awaiting pier assignments before proceeding to the sprawling port of Baltimore.
Sweetman yawned. He continued to give his watch an occasional glance as the digital seconds flicked past. “Coming up on 1600.” He spoke loudly enough for each man to hear. The words were directed to the team communicator. The four wore painters coveralls, splattered with impressionistic orange and grays. “Radio check, all stations; confirm twelve hours.” Sweetman leaned back, enjoying the bay air, eyes closed, hands behind his head, listening to the clipped professional exchange.
“Revere One, Revere One, Church Tower, radio check.”
“Church Tower, this is Revere One, out.” The patrol plane communicator’s voice responded almost instantly from the aircraft far to the south over the Atlantic.
“Revere Two, Revere Two, Church Tower, radio check.”
“Church Tower, Revere Two, out.”
“Revere Three, Revere Three, Church Tower, radio check.”
“Church Tower, Revere Three, out.” Two more radio responses, the first from a cabin cruiser anchored on fishing grounds off Thomas Point Light eight miles to the south; the second, a few hundred yards away, from a catwalk on the eastbound span.
“Revere Four, Revere Four, Church Tower, radio check.”
“Church Tower, Revere Four, out.” The response, instantaneous, came from the cockpit of a low-slung twin-V-8 black speedboat rocking gently on her mooring lines in a boathouse on the Western Shore of the upper bay.
“Confirm twelve hours.” The communicator again ran the circuit. “Twelve hours confirmed.” Others were making the calculations.
At three A.M. the following morning, the operation entered its decisive moment. It was Sweetman’s operation, shaped from his decade and more as a frogman, a SEAL in Southeast Asia, and from the years of the second career, counterespionage with the Central Intelligence Agency. His hearing was dead in one ear, blown away in special operations off the Chinese mainland. The wash of the night rescue helo’s rotors had fanned him back to consciousness that night deep in the Gulf of Tonkin. The screaming pain; he hadn’t dared touch his head. It felt as if half had been destroyed. Then, the needle and sleep so deep on the hospital ship that even the vision of the wounded and dying being raced on the corpsmens’ stretchers to the operating rooms had been blanketed in a total void.
Like an athlete no longer in the game, Sweetman missed those diving years. The white hull with its red crosses flashed through his thoughts as he readied for this new mission.
Bridge traffic was light, barely audible from inside the central trailer. Sweetman’s face was smeared with black grease, blending into th
e hood of the wetsuit encasing him. He pulled black pads of protective fiberglass over each elbow, each knee. His hands worked quickly lacing the calf-high black nylon boots, rubber-soled with fiberglass stays reinforcing each ankle. It was hot in the wet suit; he wanted to get outside again.
The communicator was at his post on the catwalk. The other team-members helped him strap on equipment: two waterproof infrared cameras attached by separate lanyards to a zippered kangaroo pouch on his stomach, a blackjack banded and clipped to his left wrist, luminous-dial wristwatch and compass, radio beacon, infrared beacon light and inflatable waist vest.
He extended his arms to receive the nylon chest harness, which buckled into place supporting a dull black metal breastplate with two heavy-gauged slide grooves running in a vee from the base to the upper corners of the plate. An eight-inch knife fitted in a friction sheath at the base of the plate. Beneath the sheath, a snap-pouch held a coiled ten-foot line permanently tethered to the plate.
The first indication of the Soviets’ operation had come from a KGB officer recruited by the Agency as a double agent in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He had just finished a five-year assignment with the Soviet Trade Mission in New York. He had become disillusioned in the new, primitive surroundings, the sickening heat, the absence of the good life. He missed the States. In the course of the first year, he found one buddy, his American case officer, and over the nights of drink he became steadily more expansive about Soviet operations in the United States . . . until, in the early hours of a drink-sodden morning: “Pioneer Point, cher colleague!” He had giggled, rubbed his face with his hands. “You study us like microbes . . . San Francisco, Dulles, JFK; the airports . . . tight! The seaports, tight! Tight as a tick!” He had bent over in merriment, the giggle louder, lost in the dawn of the Indian Ocean. “Yet, cher colleague, you give us total laissez-faire at the dacha. Check on it—but only after we endure the misery of this wretched dawn—really, quite scandalous.” The two had clinked glasses, laughed together.
A Death in Geneva Page 6