by John Knoerle
Amateurs. A mail plane would have been a more effective disguise. Black screamed cloak and dagger.
I ran up to greet the crew and gave them the all clear. They opened the cargo bay. The truck rumbled up to offload the supplies.
I was supposed to give Stela a flashlight signal when the offloading was complete, her cue to come forward.
But when the loading was done and the truck eased away from the plane all hell broke loose.
Half a dozen jeeps roared out of the stand of trees behind the strip, lights blaring, mounted machine guns firing.
I raced for a clump of bushes by the road, figuring the C-45 would be a target.
But there was no gunfire toward the plane and no gunfire from the plane.
I hit the dirt and crawled behind the clump of bushes.
Captain Dragomir had two men flanking the truck, one on each side, and another bringing up the rear. They carried automatic rifles captured at the garrison. They would have been better off with their Lee-Enfields. They struggled to operate their new weapons and were quickly cut down.
I felt that familiar wall come down. The one that protected me from the shock of combat. The eerie calm that said this is something you can worry about later. Now is not the time.
The kill squad shot up the truck’s tires instead of concentrating their firepower on Dragomir and his companion in the cab, who was squeezing off a few piddling pistol rounds. The other two men were in the tarp-covered bed of the truck, cowering or dead.
The kill squad wasn’t in uniform. They were driving GAZ-67s. They wanted to take Sorin Dragomir alive.
They were NKVD. Beria wouldn’t trust the Securitate with a job this big.
A deep voice spoke over a bullhorn. I recognized the language as Romanian. I surmised the content as ‘Come out with your hands up.’
Captain Dragomir did just that, to my shock and dismay. He marched resolutely toward the man with the bullhorn, his hands held high.
I noticed something odd about his attire. He had doffed his jacket and gloves before he climbed out of the truck. Shame on me for doubting him.
Two men jumped out of the lead jeep to grab him as he approached.
Dragomir reached behind his back and whipped out the handgun he had wedged in his belt and fired four rounds at the man with the bullhorn before the machine gunners cut him to ribbons.
The head man clutched his throat with one hand and reflexively squeezed the bullhorn trigger with his other so that his death gurgle was broadcast out across the runway.
The Blue Caps were shocked to silence as their commander toppled from the jeep.
Then the second-in-command seized the bullhorn and started barking commands.
I suppose a true hero would have unholstered his six shooter, raced into battle to avenge his leader and gone out in a blaze of glory.
But the thought never occurred to me. If Dragomir’s remaining men didn’t get killed here they would be captured, interrogated and killed later. I was the only one left who could tell his story. How Captain Sorin Dragomir, loyal monarchist and fierce anti-Communist crusader, had martyred himself for the cause.
That’s what I told myself anyway.
Dragomir’s companion in the cab hit the dirt as instructed and was cuffed and carted off. The Blue Cap with the bullhorn addressed himself to the back of the truck as the GAZ-67 machine gunners trained their weapons in that direction.
I would like to report that these last core members of the Captain’s cadre followed his example. I would especially like to report that they broke open the crates containing the anti-tank bazookas and went to town on those GAZ-67s. But they did not. They surrendered meekly.
I have always had a healthy skepticism of leaders. Big egos and wisdom don’t often come in the same package. But leaders do come in handy once the shit hits the fan. Dragomir’s men knew their leader was dead and that took all the starch out of them.
I looked to the sky. Thick clouds blacked out the moon and stars. I inched forward on my belly and felt the dirt runway. The pinprick rain hadn’t done much damage, it was still hard packed.
Then I looked up from the dirt. I looked up to see two small figures duck under the belly of the plane and approach the light from the cargo bay. Princess Stela and her son.
What was she doing? The chaos of the last few minutes had been the perfect opportunity for her to clamber up the rope ladder on the far side of the plane and into the cockpit.
The Blue Caps, the two who had jumped down from their jeeps to grab Dragomir, rushed over to intercept Stela and the boy. They wore black leather coats and held Makarov pistols. The bigger one rattled off an angry stream of Romanian.
PS calmly ushered her son behind her and replied in a different language. Russian. The men lowered their weapons. A heated argument ensued. Commissar Second-in-Command stalked over to join the fray. The boy king began to whimper.
Stela set down her suitcase, picked him up and held him to her chest with both arms, her voice lower now, but firm, not pleading.
If she was the one who had blown the whistle on our covert operation why would the NKVD be giving her the third degree?
But if she hadn’t, why would they abruptly turn away and allow her to climb up the step stair into the cargo bay. Which is what they did.
I was feeling a little left out, lying on my belly in the dirt while the cargo door got shut and sealed. At least they didn’t fire up the propellers.
We might wait it out, the C-45 crew and me. They knew I was nearby. The Reds had gotten what they came for. They showed no interest in attacking the plane. They might disappear into the night and leave us sadass Yanks to lick our wounds.
Unfortunately the rain went from a gentle brush stroke to a Gene Krupa tom tom solo about then. I dug out my J/E, put on the phones and made a quiet call to COYOTE.
He answered instantly. I told him I was going to attempt to run across the landing strip.
“Deploy the rope ladder from right cockpit window. If I’m hit make no attempt at rescue. Take off as conditions dictate.”
“Roger, TIMBER. Best o’ luck.”
I got my gun in hand and waited till the three Blue Caps disappeared into the troop truck, then put my head down and darted across the runway.
I could have dispensed with the darting. In fact I could’ve done a buck and wing while accompanying myself on accordion and the kill squad wouldn’t have noticed. They were busy as ants on an all-day sucker, swarming the troop truck, exclaiming and shouting. If you can whoop in Russian they were doing that. They had, apparently, found the crate of gold sovereigns.
Co-pilot COYOTE, a blue-eyed scamp with sandy hair, sought to keep things light after he hauled me in through the open window. He pressed his finger to my lips, looked over to the pilot and whispered what co-pilots are supposed to announce in a loud voice.
“Clear.”
They fired up the props. I staggered back to the cargo hold, took a jump seat and looked out a porthole window.
We throttled down the hardpan runway. It held up well despite the downpour, even the smudge pots stayed lit. Sorin Dragomir had done everything right.
I did not return Stela’s happy smile as we torqued into the black sky for a long flight to an unknown destination. The Princess had a lot of questions to answer.
Boy, did she.
Chapter Twenty-four
We flew all night save for a quick refueling stop in northern Greece. We shared flyboy fare – salami on a hard roll and a coke.
The drone of the engines put little Vlad to sleep soon after takeoff. Stela held him on her lap. He was a handsome lad with light brown hair and rosy cheeks. He looked more like his dad than his mom.
I wanted to have a little chat with the Princess so I asked the loadmaster sergeant to go chat up the pilots for five or so. He nodded and climbed into the cramped cockpit. I looked over at Stela in the jump seat across from me. She met my stare defiantly.
“They knew me,” she said.
“Da. They were knowing all about Sibiu.”
“Then why the hell did they let you board? You took part in the uprising!”
She winced and held up her hand at my raised voice, as if I was some loudmouth drunk. Pissed me off.
I leaned over and growled, “Answer the damn question Stela.”
“I explain it to them. If I am arrested I am, I become a…how do you say? A saint who is killed?”
“A martyr.”
“Just so. A martyr to the people. But if I am to go on areoplane I become a…how do you say?”
“You know how you say.”
“A traitor?”
“Yeah,” I snorted, “just so.”
I leaned in some more. “Why did you duck under the plane? Why didn’t you climb up the rope ladder on the other side?”
“I did not have this ladder. When came all of the gun shootings your brave pilots hid away.”
Hate to say it but that sounded believable. Flyboys were notorious for feet of clay on terra firma. I would have to give COYOTE an enormous ration of shit.
The Princess had all the right answers but my fevered brain kept replaying the same scene. Captain Dragomir being torn to pieces by machine guns as he fired his service weapon at the enemy.
The enemy. A slippery concept on this occasion. Sorin Dragomir’s enemy was Soviet Communism. In the abstract. In the particular it was Princess Stela Varadja. He had kidnapped her son. So I kept pressing, asking her who she had recruited to help her and her son slip out the window and down the long road to the airstrip.
“Lucian, he was from Palace Guard, like Sorin. He fears the Blue Caps, wants to go away, go away to America.”
“And you promised him a flight out?”
“Da.”
“And what happened to him? Where did he go?”
“When the shootings started he ran away.”
“And if he hadn’t fled, how did you intend to get him onboard the plane?”
Stela shrugged.
I had no way to confirm this story but Lucian, who had driven me in his hay truck to the unfinished airstrip, did seem a bit of a nail-biter. He’d spent so much time checking the mirror for a tail that I twice had to grab the wheel to keep us from veering off the road. That Stela didn’t make any excuse for her callous behavior inclined me to believe her.
I didn’t ask her any more questions that night. I wrapped myself in a blanket against the cold, stretched out my legs and nodded off.
-----
We landed at a military airbase just before dawn and were immediately bundled into a large van with a tall bespectacled man who introduced himself as Stanley. I didn’t know if he was CIA or OPC or State Department and I didn’t ask. No point. I was just along for the ride.
We were seated with our backs to the driver. There were no windows. It was a polite way of being blindfolded.
Stanley sat across from us in the back of the van. He seemed a bit puzzled at my traveling companions, a woman and a small child. All I had told STINGRAY was that I was bringing along two high value assets. When I introduced Stanley to the fetching Princess Stela Varadja he slid me a glance.
I replied with a weary head shake. This is not what you think it is.
He made polite inquiries about our flight, not wanting to debrief me in the presence of the mystery woman. I figured that would take place at the CIA station in… “Where the hell are we anyway?”
A mischievous grin from Stanley. “You’ll see.”
We drove about ninety minutes, the last thirty minutes or so filled with stops and starts and honking horns. Little Vlad got cranky despite Stela’s attempts to soothe him. She looked beat.
“I’ll take him,” I said. She handed him over gladly.
The kid couldn’t have been over fifty pounds but he weighed a ton. He writhed in my grasp. I had to hold him at arm’s length to keep him from clawing my face. I hoisted him high above my head and smiled up at him as he bawled.
“Hey there, big stuff, I hear ya. You’ve been bounced around from pillar to post.”
I tossed him up a few inches and caught him. He stopped bawling. I did it again, higher this time. He smiled.
I waited until we were stopped at another intersection. The van had a high ceiling, high enough for me to stand up. So I tossed the boy king up high, jumped to my feet – Stela’s look was sheer horror – and caught him at waist level as he plummeted downward.
Young Vlad looked glassy-eyed for a moment. Then he giggled.
“Ya see,” I said, “you get to like it.”
The van parked a few minutes later. Our driver opened the side door and we crawled out. My legs felt wobbly when they hit the pavement. We were in a narrow back alley behind a four-story, polished stone building of classic Renaissance architecture. A stunner.
The driver handed me Stela’s suitcase and got back in the van. There didn’t look to be an entrance on this side of the building but Stanley led us to a rust colored steel door cut into the stone. He used two keys on two locks. We entered a small chamber where we faced another steel door. Stanley inserted a pin key into a metal pad next to the door.
We waited. Stela with her sleeping son on her shoulder. Me flexing my neck and shoulders, trying to shake off the long trip. The steel door opened. Damned if it wasn’t an elevator.
We crowded in. Stanley pushed a button – there was only one – and up we went. When the door opened we entered a wide, plushly carpeted corridor.
This weren’t no CIA station. I saw only two doors in the long hallway. One close, on the right. One far, on the left.
Stanley led us to the close one, its hinges on the outside, no handle, no keyhole. It popped open when he stuck a plastic card into a slot.
We walked into a foyer with a kitchen behind it. A kitchen containing more marble and granite than Westminster Abbey. To the left was a living room with red leather chairs, white linen sofas lined with gold braid, and a crystal chandelier for Chrissakes. The bay windows were covered with flouncy lace.
I marched over to the first window and threw open the drapes. Pink dawn bathed the basilica of St. Peter’s Cathedral.
Holy shit. Rome!
Stanley smiled at my goofy grin. “They say this was Mussolini’s bachelor pad, his imbottitura di scapolo.”
“Really?”
“That’s what they say,” said Mr. Stanley. His thick black frame glasses made his eyeballs look like fat goldfish in a bowl.
“And what do you say?”
“Our Italian friends have a stormy relationship with the truth.”
We were warmly welcomed by a tiny middle-aged housekeeper a moment later. She shook our hands vigorously and cooed over little Vlad.
I expected Stanley to take this opportunity to escort me to a back room and ask endless questions while he took copious notes. But he asked only one question as he pulled me along on his way out the door.
“What is the condition of our friend?”
Amateurs. Me included. This operation had been such a yank job that no one had taken two seconds to give Dragomir a code name.
“Our friend, if you’re referring to Captain Sorin Dragomir, is dead.”
Stanley nodded cheerily and said, “Duly noted.”
It was all I could do not to slug him.
“Take a day to recuperate,” said Stanley, patting me on the back in fatherly fashion. “Maria will take good care of you.”
He didn’t tell me not to leave the apartment as he let himself out the vacuum-locked door with his plastic card. No need. Place was a cell with lace curtains.
Chapter Twenty-five
Maria cooked up scrambled eggs and something that looked like bacon but wasn’t and something that looked like toast but was smaller and crunchier. Whatever it was it hit the spot.
After breakfast she showed us to our separate quarters, each with its own bathroom. I let Stela have the larger room, Benito’s boudoir as it were.
M
aria told us to pile our dirty clothes outside our doors, then she retired to her room further down the hall. I gave PS and her son first crack at the hot water and wandered off to case the joint.
The windows in the living room opened out. The pantry was well stocked. So was the liquor cabinet. The keyless door was beyond my ken.
Five years ago I would’ve knotted bed sheets and rappelled down the side of the building to show my independence. But we had plenty of food and booze and a good cook. Yeah, it was involuntary confinement, but it beat a Romanian barn stall all to hell.
I took a hot soak in a Roman tub. The coating of grime on my body turned the water brown so I drained the tub and took a scalding shower. I dried off with fluffy towels and donned a monogrammed robe. Somebody had a sense of humor. The monogram read .
I studied my face in the mirror. The swelling was down, the bruises now more gray and yellow than black and blue. Finding the bathroom fully stocked, I shaved off my scraggly beard – which took forever – brushed my teeth and combed my hair with something that was either hair tonic or aftershave. A new man!
I dropped my stinking heap of clothes in the hall and eyed the king size bed. It called to me, murmured sweet nothings in my ear. But something was wrong, something was missing.
My little arsenal sat atop the mahogany bureau. What else, what else?
Dragomir’s pocket watch, that’s what. I had stuck it in my pants pocket for safekeeping. It would not do to have Maria run it through the wash cycle. I went back to the stinking pile and retrieved it, put it on the nightstand next to me and sacked out at precisely 8:39 a.m. Romanian time.
-----
My eyes popped open three hours later. I went to the bathroom and splashed myself awake. Maria had deposited my freshly laundered clothes on the bureau next to my little arsenal.
I should have shoved all that stuff in a drawer but I’d been too tired to think straight. I could only imagine what Maria thought. What kind of nut travels with a steak knife, a sap and a century-old six gun in a cowboy holster?
And I could only imagine what Frank Wisner would think of me when I greeted him in a flannel shirt and moleskin pants suitable for duck hunting. An outfit he himself might have left behind at the stone cottage.