by John Knoerle
“You fled the city! The next day!”
“I had no choice!”
Dragomir showed his palms and lowered his voice. “Princess Stela, I beg of you, stay. Together we can inspire a glorious revolt against the invaders. Some dare call you a fellow traveler but I know you to be a true patriot.”
The Captain turned quickly to me. “When the first German officers arrived in Bucharest the aristocracy feted them with lavish parties, toasting the handsome new conquerors of the world.” Dragomir gestured to PS. “But Princess Stela refused all invitations and stayed at home.”
Nice touch. But I was dead on my feet and not interested in refereeing a ten rounder.
“Here’s how it’s going to be, Captain. If Frank Wisner authorizes a flight to deliver supplies to your airstrip, I intend to be on that plane when it takes off. And I won’t back support for your operation unless you allow the Princess and her son to go with me.”
“Princess Stela can choose to join you of course. But her son’s place is here, with his subjects.”
I expected this answer but I made a show of arguing with him while I shot Stela a quick look.
She understood. She waited for the proper moment to hang her head and say, resignedly, “It is all right, Monsieur Schroeder, we will stay.”
Great, fine, well done and executed.
Now all I had to do was contact Frank Wisner from the middle of nowhere, convince him to mount an expensive, big deal supply operation in enemy territory then find a way to smuggle the Princess and her son aboard a supply plane at a secret, heavily-guarded airstrip.
A ludicrous mission, yet one that had to succeed. That was made clear a short time later when I witnessed the regally cool Stela Varadja, eyes abrim, tenderly stroking the head of her long lost son, Prince Vlad.
Chapter Nineteen
That night one of Dragomir’s men, Lucian, drove me to their secret landing strip in a narrow valley about twenty miles north of Sibiu. Only it wasn’t. It was a plowed-under ag field with a stand of tall trees at the far end.
I asked Lucian to explain.
“I will show to you.”
He drove his small hay truck toward the far end of the field, wallowing through the furrows in low gear. This was a job for the four-wheel GAZ but we’d decided to garage it. Too conspicuous.
The truck got stuck in the furrows so we climbed out onto the half-frozen sod and started to walk. “Lucian, here’s an idea. Why not just tell me what we are going to see?”
Lucian waved me on happily. “Come, come!”
I slogged along behind, grumpy as a socialite at the Loyal Order of the Moose Friday Night Smoker. Lucian led the way with his flashlight as we wandered into the tall trees and down a crude road covered in pine needles. He pointed excitedly to a small clearing, to a massive hulk covered with a tarp. Lucian ran to it and lifted up its skirt, revealing the rusted front drum of a very big and very old steam roller.
So. We didn’t have a landing strip. What we did have, given enough time, good weather and an enormous supply of coal or logs to stoke the boiler, was a potential landing strip.
“Este bun, yes?” beamed Lucian.
“It’s better than bun, Lucian. It’s what we Yanks call tarfu!”
“Tarfu?” said Lucian. “Da!”
Lucian’s smiling face reminded me of those beardless youths at Andrews AFB who wanted me to take a few practice jumps from a C-45 at five hundred feet. I didn’t tell him that tarfu is Army shorthand for ‘things are really fucked up.’
When had all young men the world over become idiots?
I walked the length of the ag field, counting steps, one long stride to a yard. I stopped counting at five hundred figuring that was enough runway to accommodate a twin-engine C-45. I tramped back to the truck, climbed into the truck bed, switched on my J/E transceiver and waited for the tubes to warm.
The beauty of the J/E is that it uses a UHF frequency with limited range. You can talk with an overhead plane without being overheard even twenty miles away. Which meant I didn’t have to transmit in code. By rights I should, but I didn’t have to. Which was good seeing as how I had no verbal code training whatsoever.
The de Havilland Mosquito has a ceiling of thirty-thousand feet. If it was up there I wouldn’t be able to see or hear it. I was a stranded freighter firing distress flares in a heavy fog.
But I kept at it every ten minutes or so, hoping Frank Wisner hadn’t written me off, saying, “This is TIMBER calling STINGRAY, come in STINGRAY.”
Flyboys always get the cool code names.
Lucian busied himself digging the truck tires out of the furrows with a garden trowel, smoothing the dirt into little ramps for our escape. In between transmissions I took time to curse our shoddy tradecraft.
I had met STINGRAY at Andrews AFB. Nice chap. But he wouldn’t be able to positively ID my voice at 30,000 feet.
We should have agreed on a threshold question before the mission. A way to establish I was who I said I was. My knowing the proper code names wouldn’t be enough for Frank Wisner. Could be the bad guys had beat that out of me.
But Wisner would know that I would never conduct a phony broadcast even with a gun to my head. So there would be a threshold question only I could answer.
Finally, in a burst of static, came the response from high above. “Roger, TIMBER, this is STINGRAY, over.”
I keyed the J/E. “Nice to hear a friendly voice.”
“Roger that.”
So much for chitchat. He asked me the threshold question. What was the proper name for ‘Cajun napalm’?
Christ. I remembered stirring the red hot flour and oil mix at Frank Wisner’s Maryland farm but the name of the stuff escaped me.
“Don’t recall, what’s the backup question?”
Frank Wisner was a pro. There would be a backup question.
No response from up top. I tried again. And again. I heard a garbled response. I tried again.
Came the reply, loud and clear. “What local delicacy.…was served at dinner?”
I pictured Wisner hacking up Maryland blue crabs to toss in the pot, but that was too easy. Blue crabs was a guess anyone who knew I’d been to Wisner’s farm could make. Frank was testing me. Saying, in effect, ‘You don’t get this one right you’re not worth retrieving.’
I’d thought of that memorable Saturday any number of times, remembered his boys had been down giggin’ at the crick.
“Frogs’ legs,” I said to the J/E. “But they were served as an appetizer, not dinner.”
No response. Shit, Schroeder, can the wisecracks for once, will ya?
Then, from on high. “Roger.”
Once I passed muster with STINGRAY I told him that a major operation was afoot, pending developments. I relayed Dragomir’s request for infantry anti-tank weapons – bazookas and sticky bombs – and twenty-five thousand dollars in gold.
STINGRAY didn’t laugh out loud that I could hear.
We set a time for a follow-up transmission, 0400 Sunday morning. At that point I would have a better idea if Captain Dragomir’s ambitious plan had legs. I asked for the takeoff and landing requirements of a C-45 on the off chance Dragomir’s pie-sky plan got cleared.
“1400 feet coming in heavy, 1500 going out light.”
It was more than I expected but we still had enough. I made no mention of Princess Stela and her son. The boy king would remain a well-kept secret.
Oh knock it off, Schroeder. Like legal brief and military intelligence, a well-kept secret is a contradiction in terms. It was when, not if, Frank Wisner would learn about his son.
Lucian drove us back to Captain Dragomir’s borrowed pagoda in Sibiu. I assumed it was borrowed because, like the brick house in Secaria, there were no framed photos or memorabilia to indicate it was his. Revolutionaries can’t afford the luxury of a permanent residence. And, yes, I was beginning to believe that spit’n’polish Captain Dragomir of the Romanian Palace Guard was a genuine revolutionary.
&n
bsp; Good for him and Godspeed. I was still on the next flight out of here.
The Captain wanted to read me the latest version of his call-to-action speech which, from the sheaf of papers on his desk, looked to be about two hours long. I wanted to talk about our alleged landing strip.
“How long will it take to hardpan that field and when do you plan to start?”
Dragomir grinned at my petulance. “Two days, and we start tomorrow morning.”
“We’re going to need about four hundred and fifty meters end to end.”
“I understand. We will work around the clock.”
“What if it rains?”
“There is no forecast of rain for the next forty-eight hours.”
Smart aleck had an answer for everything.
“I take it from your question that you were able to establish contact.”
“Loud and clear.” The Captain prompted me with his eyebrows. “Sunday,” I said, “0400 hours.”
He filled in the rest. “At which time you will report your assessment of the success of our operation on Saturday night, a report Frank Wisner will use to determine whether to grant our request for money and munitions.”
“Something like that,” I said to a man who was looking far too pleased with himself. “You know, Captain, I’m thinking that a crowd on the final night of a grape harvest festival might’ve had a glass of wine or two. Or ten.”
I gestured to the sheaf of papers covered with the Captain’s florid scrawl. “They might not be in the proper frame of mind for a long-winded lecture on the glorious history of the Romanian monarchy.”
An accepting shrug from Dragomir. I was beginning to glim the different shadings of the Romanian national gesture. Accepting, dismissive, sore, fatalistic.
“If the natives really are fed up with Soviet tyranny, Captain, you don’t have to build a bonfire. All you have to do is strike a match.”
Captain Dragomir sat at his desk and wrote this down with his fountain pen. “Whom are you quoting?”
I was quoting myself so far as I knew. But citing Harold Schroeder of Youngstown, Ohio was unlikely to stoke the revolutionary fervor of the local populace.
“Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States,.”
Dragomir nodded and made a note.
“Captain, about this Saturday, I’m confused. Why would the authorities award you the prime speaking slot at the close of the festival?”
“The Deputy Mayor is scheduled to close the festival. We will see to it that he is interrupted.”
“Oh.”
Interrupted. Not kept from reaching the podium but interrupted in mid-speech and carried off over the strenuous objections of the local gendarmes. Shit. This was shaping up to be a firefight.
Dragomir’s raised chin challenged me to object to this new development but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. PS and I had agreed to participate. And we both knew these two-bit barn dances never go as planned. I would make sure to keep Stela and her son out of harm’s way.
“I have another quote for you, Captain.”
“But my speech, it is too long!”
I returned his smile. “This one’s short, what you call ‘pithy.’”
Dragomir picked up his pen and searched his hen-scratched page for an empty space.
“The British Special Air Service has a motto that applies to your situation quite nicely. To you yourself as a matter of fact.”
The Captain eyed me from an oblique angle. Was I about to indulge in sticky and unprofessional sentiment?
I told him the SAS motto anyway.
“Who dares, wins.”
Chapter Twenty
Saturday evening was balmy in every sense of the word. Thin clouds veiled the moon, the sky glinted pearl gray. The teeming throng that crowded the cobblestone square in Sibiu’s old town was tipsy, not drunk. Not yet. Princess Stela and I stood behind a crudely constructed wooden stage where three gypsy men played crazy-fast music on violin, drum and guitar. Young couples danced, older folks clapped to keep time.
Stela wore a simple black shirt and a bright lavender blouse with short sleeves. Dracula’s silver cross hung from a chain around her neck. She looked scary pretty and vice versa. Her son was nearby, out of sight, in the care of Captain Dragomir’s pretty young maid.
To our right was a handsome black and gold filigree iron bridge crossing a cobbled street below. It seemed the perfect perch for Captain Dragomir to give his speech. Not so, explained PS. The span had been favored for centuries by politicians for just that purpose and was now known as ‘The Bridge of Lies.’
The crowd got frisky when the buxom young Queen of the Fest ascended the stage and tossed them yellow roses from her bouquet.
The crowd got grumpy when the Deputy Mayor, a small whiskered man wearing a black suit and a scarlet sash, stood to the podium to call an end to the festivities.
And they got uproariously happy when a big man in peasant garb, having sneaked across the back of the platform on hands and knees, stuck his head in between the Deputy Mayor’s legs, stood up and promenaded the flummoxed little man back and forth across the stage.
Captain Dragomir took the Deputy Mayor’s place at the podium to scattered applause. The big man in peasant garb used the moment to drop to one knee at the back of the stage and dump the Deputy Mayor into the waiting arms of two of Dragomir’s men. They bound and gagged him.
The Captain gave a powerful, and relatively brief, speech, his voice filled with fire and brimstone. Stela translated for me. Dragomir celebrated Romania’s ultimate nationalist, Vlad Tepes, the dracul who drove the evil Turks from the homeland.
It gets muzzy after that. I had only a couple glasses of that cat’s piss they called Riesling but it felt like someone had slipped me a mickey because the rest of that night was an out-of-focus Salvador Dali film. I can’t swear that any of it – Dragomir leading the crowd off to storm the Mayor’s office, locals dragging the Deputy Mayor behind by his scarlet sash – really happened.
The only memory I can swear to is Captain Sorin Dragomir holding Prince Vlad aloft and shouting, “Our glorious past lives again. Behold the new King of Romania!”
The boy king didn’t whimper, squirm or bawl. Could be I’m bats but the back of my brain holds a snapshot of the son of Princess Stela Varadja and Frank Wisner waving his pudgy hand to the eager crowd.
The response was volcanic. Bugles blared, the earth shook, the crowd roared itself hoarse. Could be Captain Sorin Dragomir was onto something here.
-----
I came to in the sitting room of Dragomir’s pagoda, in a well-upholstered chair, my stocking feet propped up on an ottoman. I checked my head for wounds. No blood, no squishy tissue. What the hell and then some.
Princess Stela placed the back of her hand to my forehead. “You are still hot.”
“How would you know? Your hand’s cold as ice.”
Not the snappiest comeback of all time but passable for a man who just woke up in a plump chair with his boots gone. “What the hell happened?”
“Your eyes roll up and you fall over.”
“What? Did I hit the deck?”
“No deck, I catch you.”
“You?”
“Yes. I am strong.”
No shit. “Guess I was more tired than I knew, but I feel fine now. How’d I get here?”
“Sorin’s men, they carry you to the truck.”
“They should have splashed water on my face, stood me up.”
“They did so. You could not stand.”
Weird. And a little nerve wracking. I had put my carcass through a lot of abuse in my scant twenty-eight years. Could be my carcass was telling me to knock it off.
Then again, perhaps I was simply undernourished.
“I could do with some cream cheese and caviar on toast about now, a thick T-bone on the side, blood rare, hold the mushrooms.”
“You are funny man,” replied Stela, not smiling.
“Ha ha funny or funny
-in-the-head funny?”
PS smiled just enough to indicate that she understood the question but gave no satisfaction. I settled for a ham sandwich and a beer.
Captain Dragomir breezed in a bit later. I expected to find him flushed with Scotch and victory but he was cool and composed and well turned out in a gray-blue military tunic with a braided collar, brass buttons and epaulettes you could set a drink on. He asked how I was feeling. I assured him I was in fine fettle.
“That is most welcome news because tonight will be critical,” he said, patting one of my woolen socks. “You must accompany us.”
Stela shot me a dark look as only she could.
I had been Nurse Nancy’d by unlikely females before – Lizabeth, The Schooler’s moll comes to mind – but I found it hard to believe the Vampire Princess was suggesting I should recuperate in my comfy chair when my participation in, and consequent approval of, Captain Dragomir’s late night raid on a Romanian Army garrison was her only real hope of a flight to freedom.
Her glittering black eyes continued to bore a hole in my forehead. I will never understand women if I live to be one million years old.
“I plan to accompany you, Captain,” I said, turning away. “But I’m not going into battle unarmed.”
Dragomir’s face lit up and he hurried out of the room, leaving me alone with PS.
I asked why she didn’t want me to march off to battle.
“You are no use to me when dead.”
“Don’t worry. I’m a devout coward.”
She clucked her tongue. “A coward who jumps from aeroplanes.”
“I got talked into that. I said I was a coward, I didn’t say I was smart.”
“You are dumb coward?”
“Sure.”
“Good.”
“Why is that good?”
“Dumb cowards live longer than smart heroes.”
I hoisted my beer.
Captain Dragomir returned with a flat cedar box and a bulky rucksack. He presented the box to me with both hands. A shiny brass plaque read: ‘To Captain Sorin Dragomir, in grateful appreciation. FGW.’
I opened the lid to reveal a long-nosed, pearl-handled .44 caliber Remington six shooter nestled in a bed of crushed velvet.