The Proxy Assassin

by John Knoerle

  “It’s a cavalry officer’s service weapon from the Civil War, given to me by Frank Wisner on the day he departed Bucharest.”

  “Wow.”

  I couldn’t very well refuse this five-pound hand cannon, all I was packing was a steak knife. But how in the hell was I supposed to carry it?

  That’s what the rucksack was for. Dragomir removed a leather belt holster complete with a strip of rawhide meant to cinch the holster around your thigh. I thanked the Captain for his generosity. All I needed now were spurs and a ten-gallon hat.

  Dragomir’s men began to arrive, in civvies. They didn’t change into uniform. A couple carried their spiffy Lee-Enfields but more had shotguns or hunting rifles slung over their shoulders.

  “We are guerilla fighters tonight,” said Dragomir to my puzzled look.

  The Captain herded his men into the pagoda’s small backyard. I laced up my boots and followed them out. It was ten p.m. or so and the night had cooled. We stood around on the spongy grass and listened to our fearless leader say his piece. He wasn’t a fire and brimstone Baptist this time, more like an Episcopalian.

  I didn’t understand a word he said but I knew it wasn’t going over well. Something bloody and gruesome had occurred in the storming of the Mayor’s office. I could smell it on the men. They were fired up and ready to wage war.

  The discussion grew heated, one of the men shouting acum, acum, acum! The Captain kept his cool, explaining himself in a way that settled them down. When he was done he hooked my elbow and hauled me back inside for a glass of peat moss.

  “They want to march now, acum, before the army garrison hears about our uprising and mans the parapets.”

  “Makes sense.”

  Dragomir poured us each a slug of Scotch. I took the glass he offered and drained it. It tasted bad but it felt good.

  “But I do not want to march as yet,” he said. “I want them to learn what has happened, to talk about it amongst themselves, to decide which side they want to be on. Now that the revolution has begun.”

  “Sounds good, Captain, just one question. Who is them?”

  Dragomir eyed me as if I were daft. “The soldiers in the garrison.”

  “Of course.”

  History is up to its eyebrows in rabble-rousing strongmen who are good at only one thing – whipping their followers into a frenzy and marching them off a cliff. But the Captain had the smarts to hang back for a minute or two, to delay his attack for strategic advantage. He was an impressive leader, this Dragomir.

  It looked like Frank Wisner’s hoped-for indigenous anti-Communist resistance movement was underway, unbeknownst to Frank, the CIA and the President of the United States of America.

  I would have to find a minute to let them know.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  We marched the two miles to the Romanian Army garrison though our dozen fighters could have squeezed into the beds of two pickup trucks. We carried burning torches made from tightly-wrapped rags soaked in pitch. I wore the Remington six shooter in my new belt holster.

  The torches were a big hit. We marched out of Dragomir’s pagoda about eleven-thirty that Saturday night and proceeded down the narrow cobbled street beneath the Bridge of Lies. The old folks had gone to bed but young men were still winding down the festival on street corners, smoking, passing bottles back and forth.

  I understood why the Captain didn’t want his men in uniform. Or in trucks. We weren’t an anonymous militia racing through town, we were the home team. Men joined us at every intersection. None asked who we were, none asked where we were headed. We were the home team with burning torches.

  Every few blocks a partisan would present the swelling crowd a basket of rods or sticks or rusty old scythes which our recruits stumbled and scrambled to grab hold of. We marched on at a good clip.

  This shindig was probably a bit more inebriated than Frank Wisner had in mind but it wasn’t bad.

  We strode past ancient three-story homes with peaked tile roofs. When the street widened half a mile later we passed newer, smaller homes with flower boxes and postage stamp yards. Few late night revelers were out and about in this neighborhood and some of our recruits were sucking wind and falling behind.

  We were running out of steam as we approached a major thoroughfare half a mile later. Dragomir, who had not acted as Grand Marshall so far, pulled out a parade whistle and gave it three blasts. The recruits weren’t sure what this meant but it perked them right up.

  The Captain shouted “Companie, opri!” which I translated as ‘Company, halt’ because that was what we did.

  Dragomir waded out onto the boulevard and whistled oncoming traffic to a halt. He waved us through, we turned left. The four-lane street was crowded on both sides with tall apartment buildings. Some had balconies. Balconies full to bursting with lustily cheering partisans. To this day I don’t know how the Captain pulled that off.

  We marched west, new spring in our step. Our ranks swelled. The garrison was some eight blocks further on. We arrived with a whooping, chanting drunken throng of over a hundred men. Maybe two hundred.

  The garrison took no notice of us, remaining dimly lit behind twenty-foot walls. Looked like they knew we were coming though. The sentry box in front of the main gate was lit, empty, door ajar.

  I gave the joint the once over. It was big, with a couple three-story steel and concrete office buildings inside the walls, likely used by Romanian officers and their Soviet minders. The windows were dark on this Saturday night I was happy to see, the brass weren’t up late frantically cabling Moscow. But the garrison wasn’t the collection of ramshackle barracks I had expected to find. It was formidable.

  Captain Dragomir had said he had men inside. Now, it seemed to me, would be a good time for them to get busy.

  We stood there stupidly, our torches guttering low, some of the men gently swaying as if on the deck of a ship at sea. I caught Dragomir’s eye. He smiled, and lipped his whistle.

  He sounded two blasts, one long, one short. The motorized gate winged open a moment later. No hostiles opened fire. We followed our fearless leader inside the compound.

  A small group of soldiers rushed up to greet the Captain and tell him stuff and gesticulate wildly in the Romanian manner. Dragomir listened, asked several questions and listened some more. His slow motion style of command was making me nervous. We had penetrated an enemy encampment. We should be wreaking havoc by now.

  But the behavior of the soldiers seemed to indicate that havoc had already been wreaked. They gave each other quick sideways looks, took a step back and saluted Captain Dragomir as one.

  He accepted their tribute humbly, then gave the Romanian command for ‘As you were.’

  We followed the soldiers deeper into the compound. There were barracks further on, low-slung wooden buildings that formed a quadrangle with a grassy square in the middle for mustering troops.

  And troops there were this Saturday evening, fifty or so. They barely noticed the arrival of us torch-bearing revolutionaries, however. They were too busy getting their pictures took.

  Our eager insurgents slowed to a crawl at the eerie scene taking place in the quadrangle. A photographer was posing soldiers for keepsake photos.

  Two tall pole lamps provided the only light so it was quite a shock to see what the photographer’s flash captured, like a bolt of lightning on a black night.

  Two young soldiers, one on either side, were mugging at the lens. In between them was a dead Romanian officer, impaled from behind, on a wooden stake. As more flash photos were taken it became clear that there were three such officers from which the enlisted men could chose.

  The lower legs of the victims, I noticed as I got closer, had been bent back at the knee and bound to their thighs. The victims had been hobbled in this way so that gravity and the impaling stake could do their grisly work without resistance.

  God.

  That wasn’t the worst of it. The victims were arranged in a V with the commanding officer plan
ted at the tip. He was the most popular photographic subject. He was also, I noticed from his blinking lids and twitching lips, still alive.

  Not right. Not even close.

  I shoved my way to the head of the line, pointed the barrel of the Remington at the man’s heart and put the poor bastard out of his misery.

  The shot rang out like a cannon round. Blood gushed from the commanding officer’s nostrils and his carcass sank several inches down the stake.

  I turned around, my five-pound six shooter firmly in hand in case anyone cared to object to my course of action.

  Our anti-Communist insurgents and the Romanian Army conscripts took a moment to look around and ponder this new development, then erupted into deafening cheers.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Four a.m. is a wonderful time of day, still and calm as a glacial lake. Lucian had driven me to our improvised landing strip so that I could radio STINGRAY at the appointed hour.

  I inspected the strip as I donned my phones and fired up the J/E. It looked like the steam roller had mashed the ag field into decent shape. There was no give in the dirt when I stepped on it and Lucian’s truck hadn’t left any ruts.

  I checked the pocket watch Captain Dragomir had loaned me and keyed the mike at the tick of four.

  “This is TIMBER calling STINGRAY. Come in STINGRAY.”

  I got a reply on my third try. “This is STRINGRAY, over.”

  Now that I had the floor I got tongue-tied. My words were being recorded or transcribed verbatim and would be replayed or repeated at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

  The charter of the OPC awarded Director Frank Wisner ironclad confidentiality. But STINGRAY worked for the USAF, which reported to the Joint Chiefs, who reported to the Commander in Chief.

  Think, genius!

  “Operation proceeding…”

  No, more positive.

  “Operation successful.”

  Now what?

  “Await further instruction…”

  No, numbskull, no time to waste.

  “Strongly recommend ongoing support for…further undertakings.”

  Weak!

  “Future operations. Strongly recommend ongoing support for future operations.”

  STINGRAY took a beat to set up his droll reply.

  “Copy.”

  We hadn’t pre-arranged the next dance step. I hadn’t told STINGRAY to tell Wisner that I needed a quick answer on Captain Dragomir’s request for anti-tank weapons and a pot of gold because that had seemed an outrageous demand on top of an outrageous demand. I’d been thinking like an enlisted man, not the officer in charge.

  Dragomir had said the nearest Red Army base was three days distant. He’d have to take delivery of the money and munitions by tomorrow night in order to have enough time to truck his regulars and new recruits to his designated ambush spot in the mountain gorge. The ambush spot where Vlad Tepes Draculea had massacred the invading Turks centuries before the United States of America was even a twinkle in George Washington’s eye.

  I was disappointed in myself. I felt like a frayed wire connecting a powerful generator, Sorin Dragomir, to a large capacitor, Frank Wisner. With any luck Dragomir’s surging current would complete the voltaic arc.

  Which is a tortured way of saying I hoped Frank Wisner would divine the Captain’s clock-is-ticking message despite my failure to transmit same.

  Frank Wisner had. STINGRAY confirmed that our ‘request for provisions’ had already been approved.

  Whew.

  And wow. Who’d have thunk it?

  I told STINGRAY that the landing strip exceeded the required length and that it needed to be approached from the west because of tall trees at the eastern end.

  “And it’s hard dirt, not asphalt.”

  Long pause from on high. “Roger.”

  I waited for instructions, conscious of how profoundly absurd it was to be listening for important words to appear from 30,000 feet while perched on the front bumper of a hay truck parked in an ag field in a valley in rural Transylvania.

  I was happy to be here though, happy to be far away from the army garrison and that grotesque tribute to Vlad the Impaler. I told myself at the time that I had seen worse during my behind-the-lines service in World War Two. But that wasn’t strictly true.

  “Tomorrow, 2200 hours” came the reply. “Co-pilot COYOTE will make contact five minutes prior, weather permitting. Fuel dictates a ten minute window.”

  “Copy.”

  “Command requests security assurance.”

  “Security in place.”

  “How will runway be lit?”

  He would ask that. I told him torches, what else could it be? Then added the kicker.

  “Will need to smuggle two high value assets on board.”

  It took a static-choked ten minutes to work out the details but I signed off feeling that STINGRAY and I had hammered out a winning plan.

  Weather permitting.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Princess Stela bid us goodnight at about half past seven the following evening.

  I was sitting in the parlor with Captain Dragomir, going over his last minute tick list. Stela entered with Cosmina, Dragomir’s young maid and the boy king’s nanny. The pint-sized monarch was snoozing on her shoulder.

  Stela wished Dragomir good luck. He nodded.

  I knew the Captain had instructed two of his men to remain behind and look after Princess Stela. He knew she would kill to be on that supply plane with her son when it took off in a few hours time.

  Turned out he was right.

  “And now we must put young Vlad to bed,” said Stela and whispered off on slippered feet, Cosmina scurrying behind.

  Stela had assured me she had an escape plan in place. I didn’t press, figured she’d seduced some young fool into helping her to sneak out the window and roll on down the road.

  I was clear with her about one thing. We had a short runway, no additional passengers would be permitted. Not even the boy king’s adored nanny.

  Princess Stela assured me this would not be a problem.

  I had given her a hand-drawn map detailing her hiding place on the thickly wooded far side of the landing strip, the side opposite the road.

  The C-45 would taxi to the end of the runway and turn around. She and the boy were to scramble up a rope ladder tossed from the cockpit after Dragomir and his men offloaded the cargo on the opposite side of the plane.

  It was high risk. Anyone looking under the plane’s fuselage would spot their approach even in the dim torch light. I was counting on the Captain’s men being preoccupied by two things that delight men everywhere.

  Guns and loot.

  I had a date with COYOTE for 2200 hours. At 2000 hours Dragomir herded six of his men into the back of a troop truck they had commandeered from the army garrison. It was a small number for a big mission. Maybe the other core members of his cadre were done in by the exertion of the previous night’s activities.

  Sure, Schroeder. More likely Sorin Dragomir only had six men he could trust to handle a fortune in gold.

  We began the twenty-mile trip to our improvised landing field, the Captain, wearing knitted leather driving gloves, at the wheel. I rode shotgun.

  I assumed, that is to say hoped, that Stela and her son had enough of a head start so that we wouldn’t overtake them on the road. They’d have a hell of a time getting to their hiding place with Dragomir’s men prowling the perimeter.

  The Captain was in a cheery mood, singing snatches of patriotic songs and one burst of “God Bless America, land that I love!”

  Why not? He was about to assume an important role. He was about to become the spear point of Western Civilization’s attempt to pierce the Iron Curtain. By his own account his success might lead to anti-Communist insurrections in a number of Balkan countries.

  Little wonder Frank Wisner had signed off on Dragomir’s request for twenty-five thousand dollars in gold. Frank Wisner wouldn’t have blinked a
t five times that amount.

  -----

  We arrived at the landing strip forty-eight minutes early. I was still carrying Captain Dragomir’s pocket watch which I intended to give back to him before I boarded the plane.

  I looked across the runway to Stela’s designated hiding place, hoping she was hunkered down with the boy king. Shit, the kid was only three. What if he started bawling?

  Don’t sweat it, Schroeder. PS will stuff a rag in his mouth if she has to.

  Dragomir’s men set about lighting the landing strip’s perimeter, using plump little smudge pots filled with kerosene instead of torches.

  After that we spent fifty long minutes listening to crickets chirp. I radioed COYOTE at 2210 even though he was the one who was supposed to initiate contact. No reply.

  Dragomir’s men muttered darkly and shot me looks. It was all I could do not to shrug. The Captain remained silent.

  A light rain started to fall and I felt something I didn’t expect to feel. Relief. This operation always had a creepy funhouse feel to it. I still wanted out of here and I still wanted Captain Dragomir to succeed. Yet I felt relieved as the rain fell.

  And then the J/E lit up.

  COYOTE wanted to know if they could land. I told the Captain to drive the troop truck onto the landing strip, speed up, then hit the brakes.

  He did that. The truck tires didn’t sink down but about a quarter inch.

  I passed this information along to COYOTE. He had twang, this flyboy.

  “Roger that, TIMBER. We din’t just buck through a hunnert miles o’ thunderheads to bang a U’ey. Clear the decks, we’re rollin’ in.”

  “Roger dodger, you old codger.”

  Always wanted to say that on the radio. It looked like we were going to do this thing after all.

  The C-45 roared in and touched down without much difficulty. It taxied to the end of the runway and turned around at the stand of trees.

  I was surprised to see that it had been painted black and bore no markings of any sort. They didn’t want to display the USAF roundel on a secret mission of course, but Beech made a civilian version of the C-45 that was used by mail haulers and such.