The Balkan Assignment

by Joe Poyer

  Now, in the dreary light of morning, I could make out the faint Italian coastline off our starboard beam. I had the idea that we had made landfall somewhere north of the port city of Pescara. I had decided in the long hours to dawn that the best approach to the port was bold-as-you-please and straight in. Since Pescara was also home port for a large Adriatic fishing fleet, we might, by sailing boldly in, fool the customs officials into thinking that we were part of that fleet long enough to unload an, disappear.

  The closer we came to the coast, the thicker became the fog and rain until it was heavier now than it had been farther out to sea. Mikhail had come up a few minutes before, wakened Klaus and was using the binoculars to examine the coastline. Just as Klaus had gone below to brew a pot of coffee, Mikhail grunted and passed the glasses to me, pointing across the starboard quarter to the low headlands and the breakwater indicating the port of Pescara. We were right on . . . not bad navigating. I nodded back at him, my grin matching his.

  Very slowly, sticking to the channel edges, we ran in to find the harbor docks deserted in the lashing rain. The lack of activity puzzled me until I realized that it was Sunday . . . in Italy, on Sunday mornings, nothing stirs except the churches and cafés.

  We tied up at the far end of a remote pier, in the shadow of an oil tanker that had come up the Adriatic from the new pipeline terminal at Haifa. The tanker's bulk would serve to hide our battered, gunshot ripped boat from the casual eye . . . particularly one belonging to a wandering customs official. As the morning grew older, rain or no rain, they would be venturing out for their daily inspection tours.

  We wasted no time. While Mikhail and Klaus wrestled the ammunition crates up onto the deck, I left hurriedly for the taxi stand at the end of the dock. I had managed to hang onto all of my papers throughout the uproar of the past few days, and twenty minutes later, in spite of my half-drowned appearance, I was leaving the nearest car rental agency with a Ford van.

  We loaded the ammunition crates into the van, ignoring the dangerous way it sagged onto its springs, and drove slowly off the dock and into the new city. An hour later, not even stopping for breakfast, we were solidly onto the four-lane highway leading down the coast to Bari two hundred miles south and from there another seventy-five miles to Brindisi. The drive south, in contrast to the activities of previous days, was completely uneventful. Mikhail and Klaus both slept the deep sleep of exhaustion and semi-security.

  In spite of a dragging weariness, I was wide awake and too keyed up to be sleepy. The highway was slippery in the winter rain and driving the overloaded van required enough concentration to prevent road hypnosis.

  As long as I obeyed the traffic rules, we were not likely to be stopped. It would probably be hours before the fishing boat was found, let alone traced to us . . . if ever. By early afternoon, the rain had all but stopped and the skies were beginning to show rare patches of. blue.

  We stopped at a roadside restaurant an hour or so north of Brindisi. Sunday afternoons in Italy are full of quiet relaxing family visits, or with the new affluence, family dinners at favorite restaurants. And when I say family, I mean family . . . grandfather to youngest child and all dressed to the ears. Needless to say, our sea-stained and rumpled clothing and unshaven faces received a few stares and snide Italian comments.

  Less than an hour later, we were back on the road, Klaus driving now while I caught some sleep in the back. There was not even a guard on the airfield entrance, although the gate gaped wide when Klaus drove through two hours later. Coming back to the old house that served Pete and me as a combination office and living quarters was a little like coming home after a long absence. It was hard to realize that I had been gone less than a week. Everything was so familiar and sharp that it almost hurt.

  On the drive south, we had decided to leave Italy that evening if at all possible. After the incident with the Coastal Patrol boat the three of us wanted to take every precaution possible. When Klaus proposed to fly out of Italy that night, neither Mikhail nor I argued, tired as we were.

  As evening settled in, the patchy sky fused into a solid mass of gray cotton and by six p.

  m. rain was again falling heavily. I stood by the large bay window watching it splatter on the pavement where it refracted the airfield lights into multicolored crystals. For minutes at a time, it would pour down in a veritable deluge, then as if some giant hand were working a bellows, it would slacken to a steady drizzle of several minutes duration before building up in force once again. The rhythm held me in fascination. Across the apron, the long row of hangars was dark, deserted this Sunday evening except for the lights of the small café. Suddenly, I had the longing for company other than these two madmen . . . sane company . . . I pulled

  my raincoat out of the cupboard, the beginning of an idea forming.

  "Where are you going," Mikhail asked suspiciously. He crossed the small room to stand by the desk watching me. Klaus turned silently from the window to watch me shrug into the coat and do up the buttons.

  "Out," I said briefly and offered no more in the way of explanation.

  "We will come with you," Klaus stated promptly.

  I shook my head. "No. You'd only be in the way and people would ask too many questions. Both of you wait here until I come back."

  I opened the door and pushed out into the slanting rain, hearing a muffled curse as the door swung shut and, not really caring, ran across the tarmac to the coffee shop.

  Several people greeted me as I came in and I stopped by the pool table to trade a couple of insults with acquaintances. By the time I reached the coffee bar, the whole place knew I was back. I was also quite certain that the police had not been around looking for me.

  Someone would have told me so if they had.

  As I settled down at the counter, the noise in the place settled back to its usual dull roar including the click of billiard balls and the staccato conversations in Italian.

  Silvannia was working the counter as I thought she would be. A lush, long-legged blonde, from the Italian section of Switzerland. Over the past couple of years we had become quite close friends. Nothing serious, we just seemed to understand one another without the need to make further demands. She greeted me with a smile.

  "I thought you were on a charter still?"

  "I finished yesterday. Just got back a few minutes ago."

  Silvannia bent across the counter to peer out the window for the PBY. As she did, her shirtwaist casually fell away and the view to which I was intentionally treated brought back memories of many comfortable nights.

  "I do not see the Catalina. I thought I did not hear you come in."

  "Engine trouble again," I half lied. "Left her in Turkey until I can get back over." That much was true . . . barely.

  She nodded sympathetically, knowing that I lived a hand-to-mouth existence with that Catalina and that I

  took my life in my hands every time I went up; but she knew that I knew and that's the way we left it.

  "Is Pete around?" I asked innocently. I really wanted to know where the DC-3 was.

  Pete was a hellion. He learned to fly in the service as I had done. Some fifteen years or so older than I was, he made me feel like an octagenarian at times.

  "No, he 'has gone to Tintino for the weekend . . . or week, I don't think he was sure which."

  "With Tina . . . ?"

  Silvannia nodded, grinning.

  "Then it's for the week. By the time she gets through with him, he may have to take a rest cure."

  She laughed at that and I grinned, more in appreciation of the fine breasts rising and falling unhindered beneath the shirtwaist than the lousy joke.

  I stayed for another ten minutes drinking coffee, then slid some coins on the counter and stood up.

  "Are you leaving, Chris?"

  I nodded and shrugged into my coat. "I haven't checked in with Customs yet and old Scarbrezzi's going to be mad as a wet hen if I don't. Maybe I'll see you later?"

  She smiled a careful
smile that I knew meant much more than it appeared to promise.

  She leaned forward and brushed my cheek with a kiss.

  "At ten . . . ?"

  "At ten," I lied, felt like hell and left. But at least for the next few hours, I would have an alibi in Silvannia. Anyone asking about me would know that I had come into the coffee shop and made a date with her for later that evening.

  The rain was coming down harder now and I wished I had thought to bring along an umbrella. Water cascaded down my sopping trouser legs and into my shoes as I splashed across the apron in the direction of the Customs office where old Scarbrezzi was probably sitting comfortably by his oil-fired stove, a glass of wine in one hand, a Balkan cigar clenched in his teeth and a pornographic novel in the other. The plate-glass window verified the scene. He had his belt and shoes off and his feet propped on the stove, and the paperback in turn propped on his huge belly. Grinning, I kept on, heading for the tumbledown hangar, a relic of World War II, on the far side

  of the field. If you looked closely enough at the roof you could see where it had been incompetently patched after an allied bomb had rocketed through and exploded, splattering the girders and walls with shrapnel.

  A wind had begun to blow and as I rounded and crossed the open area to the hangar, I could see the orange wind indicator stretched rigidly to the southeast. Obviously, the storm had retained more of its punch than I had expected. But at least it was serving to keep everyone inside and under cover. The dark sky, a mass of heavy black clouds mounted tier upon tier, poured rain down onto the already sodden earth. The center grassy strip of the airfield looked like a rice paddy; a sheet of water with tiny green stalks delicately spearing the surface. The wind blew rippling sheets of rain water down the runway.

  I let myself into the old hangar through the office door. The place was so old and uncared for that the bomb that twenty-five years ago had peppered the ceiling with shrapnel had also blown the door out of alignment. It had never been fixed and to get in you only had to smack it hard with your shoulder. But then neither of us worried much about anyone breaking in. There was little to steal.

  I didn't dare turn on any lights. Everybody knew about Pete's romance with Tina Luchechissi, the local grande dame. Not only was she rich, but she was also relatively well preserved with a typical Italian figure. Remarkably, that figure should belong to a girl of twenty, not a widow of forty-eight. Needless to say she also had a very passionate nature, and by the time Pete returned to Brindisi he would have deep, black circles of exhaustion under his eyes. Everybody thought he was damned lucky because Tina would probably marry him. Pete did not consider that luck. He had once complained that she would probably kill him in less than a month. I honestly think only that possibility, remote as it was, held him back. Certainly Tina was more than willing.

  In any event, if anyone saw a light in the hangar they would immediately have to drive out, rain or no rain, to hear the latest chapter of Pete's amorous adventures with the merry widow; and they would find me stealing his DC-3.

  Pete was a good pilot and better mechanic. In spite of

  the appearance of the hangar and our working quarters, that old DC-3 was spotless. The two Wright Cyclone engines were in such good repair that the local Curtiss Wright service representative joked about bringing his maintenance crew around periodically for refresher courses. The aircraft was painted the same blue and white and carried the same sober, dignified logotype reading Brindisi Airways, Ltd., in Life magazine display type as the poor old Catalina.

  I wasted no time. There was always the chance that the watchman would come by or that Pete would stagger home. I wrote him a note explaining why I was taking the DC-3, explained that the Catalina had. burned off the Yugoslavian coast and that I was a fugitive from justice with just about every European police organization except Interpol—I hoped—out looking for me. This kind of truth Pete would believe since he had always loudly proclaimed that both of us would wind up in a jail cell for life somewhere. But, he would know enough to read between the lines and know me well enough to realize that whatever I had done, it had been necessary. He, too, was a born anarchist.

  I spent the next half hour pumping gasoline into the tanks to top them off and hooked up the booster batteries to the portside engine. I dragged the main door open and decided, since it was raining even harder now, that it made no sense to tow the DC-3 outside. The rain would probably short out the batteries.

  I tucked the .38 safely beneath the pilot's seat and called Mikhail and Klaus on the phone and told them to drive off the airfield, take the main highway south and re-enter through the main gate. I gave them instructions on how to drive past the parking lot and main hangar, skirt the Customs shed from the back and drive directly across the field and into the last hangar at the far end of the runway.

  Twenty minutes later, the' Ford van nosed into the hangar bay and Mikhail and Klaus jumped out. Both grinned from ear to ear and hurried across the hangar. Mikhail clapped me on the shoulder so hard that he nearly knocked me down. Klaus, chuckling to himself, walked around the DC-3 pausing now and then to run

  his hands along a wheel strut or the elevator surface as if the airplane were a thoroughbred horse.

  Finally he nodded. "Yes, she will do."

  "Great," I muttered. "That's fine since it's the only one I can find. Now, let's get busy with that gold."

  It took us another twenty minutes to get the four ammunition crates of gold into the aircraft. You could almost hear the van sigh with relief as we took the fivehundred-pound boxes out one by one. Mikhail then drove the van around to the back of the hangar where it would be out of sight. I unshackled the one crate that we had opened at the cistern, it seemed eons ago, and removed a single bar of gold as Mikhail climbed aboard.

  "What are you going to do with that?" suspicion ill-concealed in his voice. At that moment, Klaus was coming aft from the cockpit. He heard the tail end of Mikhail's question and came hurrying back to find out what was going on. I carefully put the gold bar on top of the crate and stood up and backed away a step or so. My hand was inside my raincoat pocket and the butt of the Walther felt solid and comforting. I slid the safety catch to off with my thumb and waited.

  "What are you going to do with the gold?" Klaus repeated Mikhail's question.

  I waved my free hand around the cabin and tried to keep my voice casual and under control. "Pretty expensive piece of machinery. It belongs to my partner as much as it belongs to me. If we make it out of here, I may never be able to come back. If we take this plane, he'll be fiat broke."

  "So you are going to pay him with that," Mikhail rasped pointing at the bar.

  "Why you selfish sons of bitches!" I roared. Mikhail was so startled at the yell that he straightened and took one involuntary step backward and almost fell through the hatch.

  "You asinine morons, you silly sons of . . ." I was practically screaming by now. "You are damned right I'm using your gold to pay for the aircraft . . . what the hell do you think

  . . . maybe you get a free ride? I say that this bar gets left for Pete." I paused breathing heavily and shaking with anger.

  Each bar of gold weighed fifty pounds . . . $28,000 at United States free-market prices.

  That would barely get

  Pete out from under the mortgage on the DC-3 and get him set up with a new aircraft.

  "I've had all the nonsense I'm going to take from both of you bastards," I snarled. "One of these bars of gold stays behind to pay for this aircraft since Pete is never going to get it back. Even if we get away from here scot free, this bucket of bolts will have to go down at sea somewhere or the police will always be able to trace us through it."

  Mikhail nodded his head, slowly, in resignation more than agreement. Klaus said nothing. I swore at both of them again and jumped down from the cargo door and pulled the gold bar out after me. It didn't take long to hide the gold bar and my explanatory note in a spot where Pete would be sure to find it.

  Sat
isfied, I beat it back to the DC-3, still loaded for bear as far as Mikhail and Klaus were concerned. Mikhail glared at me as I came aboard, but said nothing more. I jerked my thumb out the cargo door.

  "You close the hangar door when I taxi outside."

  Mikhail bristled at the order and glanced at Klaus. Klaus nodded, and scowling, Mikhail jumped down to the floor.

  "And stand by with that fire extinguisher when I start the engines," I yelled after him.

  I settled into the pilot's seat and studied the instrument panel. Klaus hesitantly took the right-hand seat and when I didn't say anything, buckled in. The port engine kicked over easily and the starboard engine followed suit. The hangar filled immediately with blue exhaust smoke and vibrated to the roar of the engines until they settled into the familiar throaty roar. I had to ride the brakes to keep her steady. After a few moments, both engine temperature needles began to move slowly toward the normal zone and I eased up on the brakes and taxied her out. Rain spattered the windshield and I swung her around to nose down the runway, the engines still running at almost full RPM. In this kind of weather and wind I wanted good hot engines that wouldn't falter on take-off.

  I saw Mikhail run out into the downpour, drag the hangar door shut and race for the DC-3. Klaus ducked back into the cargo bay to give him a hand and a few minutes later, slid back into the copilot's seat and nodded.

  "He's aboard and the door is closed and latched."

  I nodded and headed out onto the far runway, away from the main buildings, particularly the customs shed. Fortunately, this was a small airfield, more of an auxiliary field than anything else, and there was no radar, GCA or fog-dispersal equipment. If it snowed, everything came to a halt until it melted or was scraped away by a lone, jury-rigged farm tractor. Accordingly, I blasted the DC-3 straight down the runway and into the air. The radio remained blessedly free of identification requests. Airborne, I swung sharply around and headed out to sea, staying low to avoid the coastal radar net. I thought sorrowfully of Silvannia and the evening that would never happen.