The Balkan Assignment

by Joe Poyer

  Vishailly looked at me sharply. "Why would we do that?"

  "To make damned sure that one million dollars worth of gold stays in Yugoslavia. That's why. You know that Interpol is more interested in tracing the pipeline than in retrieving the gold. You know as well as I do that if they have to, they will sacrifice the gold for the pipeline and consider the money well spent. But Yugoslavia can't be that carefree with monetary windfalls. Maybe another country without your chronic shortage of foreign exchange could, but not Yugoslavia. Your superiors suspect that if the gold leaves Yugoslavia, it will be divided by Interpol among the countries it came from, or else turned over to some international organization to distribute. Either way, your government stands to lose a good part of a million dollars."

  "Perhaps you are right," Vishailly answered seriously, his face troubled. "I hope not. I would hate to think that my country is so small-minded that it would forfeit the chance to wipe out the Nazi menace once and for all for mere money."

  "I hope so, too," I muttered. "But then, it's not your country making the choice, it's your government and there's a hell of a big difference between the two. Govern- ments detest two things; poverty and challenges to their authority."

  "Perhaps you are right. But then, it really should make no difference to you how the problem is resolved."

  "Except," I pointed out, "that with the backing of Interpol I don't wind up in jail for twenty years. If the Yugoslav Government moves in without Interpol, I'm liable to get swept up into the net. And, if something happens to you, who would testify to my good intentions at the trial?"

  "I think I can assure you that my government has no intention of acting on its own in this matter. They are very anxious to co-operate in tracking down this 'pipeline' as Herr Ley insists on calling it. I have been given orders to co-operate in every regard."

  Vishailly left right after that, refusing a cup of coffee. For the next two hours, I puttered around inside the PBY, securing what little cargo remained. I wondered idly how the two of them were making out, cooped up inside the tunnel by themselves. If they hadn't killed each other by now, maybe there was hope after all.

  By seven o'clock, it was pitch dark and only a few scattered lights remained along the top of the cliff marking the location of the village. The quay was completely deserted. This night was as different from the previous night as it could be. Where the other had included sixty-mile per hour winds and a sky so clear it could scratch like diamonds; tonight was still and somber, beginning to wrap itself in a soft shroud of fog. The air was cold and the warm waters of the Adriatic were shedding strands of mist and threatening fog by morning. Well and good, I decided. If we got away before dawn the fog would muffle our passage. I had no idea then just how welcome that fog was going to be.

  The trip back to the cove took less than fifteen minutes . . . in contrast to the hour of the night before. I taxied the PBY out and in one fast run toward the headlands was airborne.

  Heading toward the mainland, I flew on until I had covered half the distance and then made a long sweeping turn to the north and west that brought me back to the head of the deep cove across the barren and deserted northern hills of the island.

  I found Klaus and Mikhail lugging the last of the equipment down the tunnel to the cistern. Obviously, they had worked steadily through the day as both rockfalls had been cleared sufficiently to allow easy passage. The blasting powder had done its work well enough. Several large boulders were still scattered in the passageway, their sides blackened and freshly fractured.

  The cistern formed a black hole in the middle of a small chamber,, perfectly round with mortared stone edging. The surface of the pool was still and cold. The chamber roof was a vault some twenty feet above our heads, its sloping sides were of rough-hewn stone. A narrow walkway encircled the cistern and proved wide enough to provide a purchase for the tripod we had brought along.

  Klaus had described the cistern quite accurately, even to the intense cold of the water. He had estimated that the pool itself was some thirty feet deep in the center with sharply sloping sides that led down to the source, a small

  spring that had been widened by German engineers. Because of the sloping sides, he was certain that the ammunition crates would be comparatively easy to find since the gravity would have worked them downhill by now to the cistern bottom. The water looked clear enough. I was counting on the fact that most springs were crystal clear due to the inflow of a constant volume of water that kept silt out of suspension. Also, as the cistern was well closed-off from the rest of the cavern, there wasn't much chance that food plants would have taken root to provide food for marine life.

  Even so, I did not relish the idea of having to dive into that Stygian pool. Having done some amateur diving while in the service, I was elected to do the diving by the unanimous approbation of Klaus and Mikhail. Neither of them had ever worn a diving rig, let alone a wet suit, in their lives, and Klaus had stated very firmly that at fifty plus he did not intend to start. Mikhail had seconded him; possibly the only thing that those two had ever or were ever to agree upon.

  I left Klaus and Mikhail rigging the tripod and winch while I went out to gather up my diving gear. The tripod was just that; three sturdy steel legs to straddle the pool and a hook at the center point from which to hang a block and tackle arrangement. A hand winch was attached to the other end of the steel cable running through the pulleys; five hundred pound ammunition crates of gold are not brought up with hand lines under any circumstances.

  Lugging the diving gear through the deepening fog and up into the strangely echoing tunnel, I wondered what in hell I was really doing on this Godforsaken island off the coast of Yugoslavia. Surely there were more pleasant places to die than thirty feet down in a dead pool in the bowels of a barren mountain ... a mountain that had already tried to kill me. Put it down to the weirdness of the place and the hour and the fog and the company. Put it down to whatever you like. I was damned scared and I don't care now who knows it. Two half-maniacs were waiting for me to come and dredge up one million dollars in stolen gold. Who knows how many people had died for that gold . . . from the bank guards to soldiers to the SS troopers who were massacred by the partisans to the sailors and soldiers and partisans trapped inside the underground submarine base when the roof was blown down. And don't, above all, forget

  the five slave laborers and, for that matter, the tourists who came after the war and died in the mudsinks and cave-ins.

  But of course I now had a higher calling than mere greed . . . I was here to follow the gold, to put an end to one of the most cursed, most evil of modem political philosophies

  . . . nazism. So they told me.

  But it was me that was going down into that pool while those two washed-up professional killers waited for me to come back up with that last load. Maybe Klaus knew how to fly after all; maybe Mikhail did; maybe they had another pilot waiting until the last crate was up. Maybe just one of them did. If so, I would surface, pull off my mask and one of them would put a pistol bullet in my head.

  I walked down that tunnel just as slowly as any condemned man walking that last mile.

  Most of what passed through my mind during those moments, I cannot recall . . . which is probably just as well. I still wake up in a cold sweat on bad nights dreaming about the weird tableau that met me as I came down the tunnel to the cistern; Mikhail had stripped off his shirt in spite of the clammy chill, his face hideous and bright red with exertion, the crushed shapeless cap on his head rearing up at the corners in imitation of horns, exaggerated in the black shadow swelling on the far wall. Maher standing expectantly against the wall, waiting, face set and eyes locked queerly on the cistern. The pale hiss and whitish glare from the Coleman lantern cast flickering shadows that seemed to move of their own volition. The entire scene was a sojourn in hell.

  As I moved into the light, both men turned slowly to examine me, both sets of eyes, I noticed, moving carefully to my equipment. Then Maher burst into a d
eep laugh that ended in a series of dry chuckles. Even Mikhail had a chilly smile on his face.

  "After all these years," Maher breathed softly. "After all these years."

  Mikhail glanced sharply at him and then at me. I was wearing my wet suit, having changed in the aircraft and I was damned glad now that I had shoved the short-barreled Walther into the inside pocket of the suit. Not for anything in the world would I have parted with it at that moment.

  Klaus, still smiling strangely, walked carefully around the edge of the pool and clapped me on the shoulder.

  "This is it, my friend. This is what I have been waiting for for over twenty-five years. In a little while we will be looking at one million dollars in gold. One million dollars, imagine!"

  I forced a grin back at him. Mikhail joined me, his very stance recalling our bargain: the two of us allied against Klaus at any price. Fortunately, Klaus was too excited to notice.

  He even smacked Mikhail affectionately on the arm before pushing me toward the edge of the pool.

  "Is your equipment ready?" he asked impatiently.

  I twisted the valve on the air tank and listened to the steady hiss of air pouring out. The pressure was holding on 2200 PSI and the needle shuddered delicately as the air rushed out.

  I nodded at him and dipped my mask into the water of the cistern and sniffed at it. It smelled of the normal, flat smell of pure water; I had been concerned about seepage from accidental reservoirs of gasoline or acid left in the bowels of the destroyed submarine base. If any had leaked into the fresh-water cistern, I wanted to know about it, even though no matter how slowly the water in the cistern, was renewed, after twenty-five years any lingering traces should be gone. It was better to be safe than sorry.

  I rinsed the mask and slipped it on, adjusted the strap and sat down on the edge of the cistern. I shrugged into the web straps of the tank and buckled the weight belt on. I had not bothered with flippers since in the confined space of the cistern, I did not expect to do much swimming. Mikhail handed me the powerful underwater torch that I had bought in Brindisi the week before, and I slipped down into the cold water.

  The first shock of water against your skin is always terrible. The coldness literally swims in between the foam rubber layer and your skin; it's as if someone had wrapped you in an icy blanket in a single instant. Then body heat quickly warms the water trapped between rubber and skin and from then on you are aware only of the frictionless sliding of wet rubber.

  The heavy lead belt took me down quickly and the inside of the cistern became a quicksilver pool when I flicked on the torch. A moment later my head broke water and I hooked a hand over the edge of the cistern. Through the watery lens of the mask I saw blurry shapes of Klaus and Mikhail.

  "What's wrong?" Klaus demanded sharply.

  "Nothing, damn it," I said spitting out the mouthpiece. "Just getting my bearings. It's blacker than the inside of hell down there."

  Just as I started to pull the mask down again, I caught sight of something that chilled me even more than the water had.

  Lying just beside my hand was the tarnished glint of a brass cartridge case; a stubby, fat cartridge case. Instantly I knew that it was from one of the bullets that had been fired that day at the cistern to murder five slave workers.

  I am usually not squeamish, but the moment I realized that I could encounter five dead bodies at the bottom of the cistern, I can only say that the hairs on the back of my neck actually lifted of their own accord and the nerve shock that scored down my spine left me shaking.

  "What is wrong?" Klaus demanded again.

  I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak. I wondered if he had seen the cartridge case and if he had . . . I bit hard on the mouthpiece and dragged the mask down over my face and let go of the side. As the lead belt dragged me down into the black depths of the pool, the cartridge case danced in front of my eyes like a burned-in retinal image.

  My feet touched bottom shortly, and I sank in up to my ankles in the soft muck. I had come almost straight down along the cistern wall, my hand trailing down the rough rock where the German engineers had long ago hollowed out the shaft to increase the flow of the natural spring to supply the submarine base with a constant source of fresh water.

  When I turned the torch onto the wall, the scrapes and grooves left by their power machines were still visible. The cistern was not quite sterile; a thick lichenlike growth covered most of the wall, pale greenish in the torchlight. The bottom of the pool was covered with a ' brownish silt to a foot in depth. With every step I took, long strands of mud wafted up into the current, and I knew that soon the water would be full of silt.

  Klaus had described the ammunition boxes as being standard German Army issue .88

  millimeter steel artillery ammunition crates measuring thirty-three centimeters wide by forty-four long by thirty deep. They were painted green and had been sealed with pitch.

  Since the bottom of the shaft had been hollowed into a shallow bowl to allow the water to continuously wash the silt away from the spring, the silt should have been deeper near the walls where I was standing than toward the spring itself. Given this con-figuration, then, the ammunition boxes should have congregated near the source after twenty-five years, pulled downward by gravity against the mild current.

  A very good theory, but that's all it turned out to be. The upwelling of fresh water through the spring was at a slow enough speed and volume that it carried silt up nicely for a distance of a few feet and deposited it in an ever-growing mound around the source.

  As I moved down the slope, the silt became deeper and deeper until I was sinking in up to my knees.

  One tentative step more and my foot slid forward in slow motion, throwing me off balance and wrenching my leg into the source itself. I floundered helplessly for a minute and the torch slipped out of my hand and buried itself in the loose silt, leaving me in darkness.

  Cursing, I regained my balance and pulled my foot out and went down on hands and knees to dig around in the area where the last flicker of light disappeared. The torch was a heavy, rubber encased affair and it had sunk deeply. I wasted almost five minutes before my fingers made contact with it and at almost the same time with the hard edge of something that felt like a metal box. Retrieving the torch, I dug carefully down through the silt again to uncover the metal. The mud was like loose sand, it flowed back into the hole almost as fast as I scooped it away. After a few minutes, I quit trying to dig away the silt and concentrated instead on feeling out the dimensions of the box. I could make out the flat metal top and along the front, the protrusions that were the snap fasteners. I was able to get my fingers under the box and found it far too heavy to move.

  If Klaus's memories were correct, there would be four rings, one at each corner. There were and with difficulty, I worked a strand of nylon rope through one ring and secured it tightly and attached a plastic bottle filled with air to the other end. The drill was that when I was ready for the cable to be passed down, I would send up the nylon rope using the bottle as a buoy. Mikhail would attach the cable end. Using the line, I could control the rate of descent of the heavy steel cable. It was a hell of a lot better than getting smashed with three hundred

  pounds of steel dropping down through the water ... which is exactly what happened.

  The buoy hadn't been gone more than thirty seconds before I spotted a dark shadow above me. I'm not sure what exactly warned me, but I twisted sideways desperately and saved my life. The entire reel of steel cable plummeted down; a single loose strand slapped me across the back like a terrible whip. I lost the mouthpiece as I screamed in agony, and instantly my mouth was full of water and I was drowning. My hand hit the quick release of the weight belt and I kicked upward desperately. You can pack a lifetime of terror into a twenty-second swim for air. I know.

  My mouth and nose were full of water; water that was trying its best to work its way down my throat and into my lungs. At the same time, the muscles in my windpipe were constricti
ng in agonizing coughs to clear away the water, but to open my mouth to do so would have been to drown. My head broke the surface and Klaus and Mikhail dragged me out of the cistern and up onto the paved walkway to gag and choke the water from my lungs.

  The only thing that saved both of those idiots from being beaten to death was the half drowning and the coughing spasm that followed. By the time I was able to get shakily to my feet, I had regained a measure of control. Both Klaus and Mikhail watched apprehensively as I stumbled around. Then Klaus stepped forward hastily and took my arm when I tottered over to the brink of the cistern to stare at the broken hook dangling from the apex of the tripod. It had broken all right. The steel shank of the hook had snapped at the bend. The characteristic jagged fracture of stressed steel showed plainly enough. Twice now, I thought.

  "Do we have a spare?" I croaked.

  Mikhail nodded. "Yes. There is another in the tool kit."

  "Then get it hooked up, damn it. And make sure it's done right. I don't want any more foul-ups in this operation."

  Both men nodded quickly. I could see the beginning of hostility in Mikhail's eyes again, but I was beyond caring now. My back, where the cable end had whipped across, burned like fire. I could feel a gash through the tough butyl rubber and foam and I was damned glad I had been

  wearing the wet suit. I hated to think what the cable would have done to my bare back.

  Klaus and Mikhail attached the new hook to the tripod and reassembled the block and tackle. It took them nearly a half hour, but by the end of that time, the ache was gone and the pain in my back was beginning to subside.

  "It's ready now," Klaus muttered, wiping grease from his hands on an old handkerchief.

  "All right." I refrained from saying anything further. Tensions were high enough as it was.

  I pulled the tanks on to my back grimacing at the -pain where the straps rubbed, settled the harness as comfortably as possible and slid back into the water. While I readjusted the mask, I watched Klaus and Mikhail, still working industriously; Klaus on the winch, readying it to take the nylon rope I was taking down with me to fasten to the cable and Mikhail, carefully paying out the coiled line.