by John Denis
Myshkin looked sharply at him. ‘What makes you say that?’ he inquired brusquely. Philpott explained the terms of Smith’s ransom demand and the threat that accompanied it.
‘It looks very much as though America, at the moment anyway, is bearing the brunt of international excoriation,’ the Russian observed.
‘But that,’ Philpott replied earnestly, ‘will last only as long as the world doesn’t know the identity of the nation which helped Smith to set up this hijacking. And once it is established that Smith has received active encouragement and assistance, even down to providing men and armaments for him and smoothing his passage in a hostile environment, the contempt of the injured nations will, without a shadow of doubt, be turned on the country which has made all this possible.’
The Russian grinned, almost admiringly. ‘Your diet must be exclusively founded on carrots and fish, Mr Philpott,’ he said drily. ‘You are consummately adept at shooting in the dark.’
Philpott called the waiter over and paid the bill with a five thousand lire note, neither expecting nor receiving the change due to him. He laid a copy of the newspaper Il Messaggero carefully on the table between himself and the Russian.
‘I know your countrymen pride themselves in keeping up to date with political thought in Italy,’ he said. ‘Tucked into the leader page is the text of a message which will be broadcast on the American Forces’ Network in roughly three minutes from now. It will be repeated at 1000 hours. It is not the news Smith was expecting.
‘It asks for a two-hour delay. As Director of UNACO I shall appreciate it, indeed I would consider it a favour, if some pressure can be brought upon Smith to accede to this request. Obviously, should any harm befall a minister, Smith will be hunted to the ends of the earth. Perhaps you would care to ponder, my dear Myshkin, as to how best this information can be passed to Mister Smith.’
Myshkin looked up at him benignly. ‘I, Mr Philpott? What could conceivably persuade you that I might have some channel of contact with this monster?’
Philpott bowed his head. ‘If I have conveyed that impression to you, General, you have my deepest apologies. No doubt we shall meet again soon.’
He stepped out into the Piazza Barberini, and a long, dark blue NATO staff-car, a flag fluttering from the apex of its bonnet, drew up alongside him. Philpott got in, and the car pulled away.
Myshkin took another careful pull at the Cuban cigar, deprived it of its nose-cone of ash, then dropped the still-light butt to the ground, and stepped on it as he walked out into the square. A black Zil limousine, Soviet flag fluttering at the apex of its bonnet, purred at his heels. He turned, and the door swung open …
At five minutes after ten, the telephone rang in the NATO Ops room, and Smith said, ‘Two hours, Mr Philpott, not a second more.’
‘You have my word,’ Philpott replied, careful not to identify the caller with Tomlin at his shoulder. ‘It merely allows for certain formalities to be completed.’
‘No tricks, Philpott,’ Smith warned. ‘Not only the Americans and Arabs, but your estimable Sabrina Carver, are at my mercy, remember.’
‘True,’ Philpott conceded, ‘though I am confident you will not harm them. You must know by now – from Dunkels, I imagine – that my friend the erstwhile security chief of Air Force One has escaped from custody in Bahrain. He was the only card in your hand in which the Russians could be remotely interested. They will not, I know, look with any enthusiasm on your failure to hold him for their interrogators. No doubt you have concocted some story to mollify them in the meantime, but they would believe me if I told them he had escaped, Smith. I don’t think you would wish them to know that.’
‘Hence my agreement to your request for a delay,’ Smith answered. ‘Use the time wisely, Mr Director.’
‘I intend to,’ Philpott said, glancing up at Tomlin.
TWELVE
As far as McCafferty could judge, the Kamov pilot must be following orders in flying low to escape radar detection. Mac throttled back so he could more sensibly use his high vantage-point to monitor Dunkels’ progress. Clearly, the helicopter was also intent on avoiding even the smallest village, let alone any larger centre of human habitation.
The American decided that, given all the precautions the Kamov pilot was taking, he would also be aware that the only source of danger to him must come from above, and would be keeping his eyes peeled. The place for anyone intent on secret pursuit was behind and below the helicopter, Mac thought.
Chopping the power in his own machine, Mac put on a bootful of rudder, pulled the stick over, and side-slipped towards the ground. He took up straight and level flight again at about fifty feet, and some quarter of a mile behind the little Kamov, which was literally skimming the treetops.
For the next hundred miles or so, McCafferty effectively saw nothing save the series of greens and browns which flashed across the periphery of his vision. He was concentrating on the steel-grey body of the Kamov as it flew up shallow valleys, danced over hilltops, flirted with the crests of tall forest trees, and buzzed the surfaces of a dozen sapphire-blue lakes.
An hour and a half went by with McCafferty fighting to balance elevator, rudder and aileron, opening and closing the throttle a thousand times in an effort to stay hidden while keeping contact with a target whose speed fluctuated between ninety miles per hour (which was easy for Mac to parallel) right down to under fifty miles per hour. This was a trickier proposition, for it brought the UTVA to the point of stall, where she wallowed with slack controls and insufficient height to recover from the effect of even a slight mistake by her pilot. The sweat coursed down his face, and his language matched the blue of the sky and waters.
Suddenly the ground started to rise steeply. Mac’s altimeter showed twelve hundred feet more than the zero which he had set before his departure from the low-lying airfield near Gora. He looked anxiously ahead. Still in front of him were mountain peaks that seemed fifteen or sixteen hundred feet higher. He snatched a quick peep at the map crumpled over in front of him and identified the Dinaric Alps.
When he looked back the Kamov had vanished.
McCafferty fought his momentary panic and quelled it. The helicopter, he reasoned, couldn’t simply have disappeared from view, or sunk out of sight into the ground. His first instinct was to slam the throttle open and surge forward as fast as possible, but instinct and caution held him back. The Kamov was still there somewhere, he told himself; Mac’s problem was that he couldn’t see it.
He wound the UTVA into a steep, spiralling climb to overfly the ground before him without attracting attention. Four thousand feet of extra height registered on the dial in a little over three minutes, and then Mac resumed his original course. He peered to starboard, his eyes exploring the rocky terrain. Then he grinned and said, ‘Hot diggety.’
The mystery was solved. The helicopter had vaulted the edge of a natural glacier-formation and slipped into the steep valley below it. The valley was a thumbprint amid the sharp, pointed mountains, and there was a grassy tree-fringed platform set into the hillside at the top of a winding road.
Facing this natural ledge, which started off as barely a smudge but grew to respectable proportions in Mac’s view, was a castle, perched precariously against a dent in the mountain.
At a slightly lower level, a flat area had been gouged out of the rock and smoothed over. The Kamov rested on it, the rotor blades turning at no more than walking pace.
Siegfried Dunkels had arrived at his destination …
An aide bustled into the NATO computer complex and asked for Philpott. Directed with an irritable wave by a red-haired American major, the courier whispered to the UNACO chief that transport was waiting to take him to Leonardo da Vinci for the Zagreb flight. Philpott was busy receiving Sonya’s assurances that the diamonds were being assembled and dispatched in the care of a leading member of the Amsterdam Diamond Exchange, and at the same time coping with Tomlin’s obvious keenness to impress UNACO with his obvious keenness.
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br /> ‘I’ve also scrambled a squadron of P-90s to square-search beaches, salt flats – any open ground that could take a 707,’ the Brigadier expatiated.
‘Yugoslavian beaches?’ Philpott asked in astonishment. ‘She’s not a member of NATO, you know, Brigadier.’
Tomlin glared like a cornered schoolboy coming out of a strip club. ‘I am aware of that, sir,’ he snapped, ‘and although we appear merely to be including Yugoslavia in the search area on a casual basis – taking it in along with Italy, Sicily, Greece and the islands, Corfu and the Albanian coast – I have at least established contact with the Yugoslav authorities and explained the problem, of which, naturally, they are aware since the news broke in their own country. They also suspect that Air Force One and its captives are in Yugoslavia, and—’
‘And so they think you’re just wasting aviation fuel looking anywhere else, but at the same time they’re not inviting you in. That it, Brigadier?’
‘Something like that, sir,’ Tomlin mumbled.
‘So that’s why I’m going to Zagreb,’ Philpott supplied, ‘because whereas they don’t want NATO trampling all over their beautiful country, they’ll accept – they’re bound to, by their membership – a small UNACO contingent.’
Tomlin then confessed, with a sheepish grin, that his pilots had been instructed not to be over-conscientious in their search of areas outside Yugoslav air-space. ‘We shan’t be wasting too much fuel, sir,’ he added, ‘if only because we’ve no real idea where you could hide an aircraft that big.’
Philpott stopped putting papers into a brief-case and favoured the soldier with a sympathetic but knowing look. ‘You won’t find it, Brigadier. It can’t be camouflaged, so Smith will have hidden it, and removed any possibility of tracing it with heat sensors by cooling it down, or something like that. If I know him, the plane’ll be under cover and wrapped in tarpaulins by now.’
Tomlin nodded. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ he sighed. ‘I’ll call off the hounds. Incidentally,’ he added, ‘there’s something else that’s been bothering me.’ He waited for an encouraging inclination of the head from the UNACO man, then said, ‘It’s just that Trieste is well outside our radius. Why do you suppose Smith sent the ransom demand there?’
Philpott considered the question. ‘You have a point there, Brigadier; a good point.’ Tomlin flushed with gratification. ‘I can only assume,’ Philpott went on, ‘that it was intended to throw us off the scent. Now that you mention it, I’m inclined more and more to the opinion that Dubrovnik is nearer to our presumed centre of activity, so Zagreb will be a good place to start from. Keep thinking. You’re actually very good at it, Brigadier.’
With that, Philpott leaned over to kiss Sonya, causing Tomlin’s blush to deepen, and left the room trailing a covey of uniformed acolytes.
Three minutes after his flight was airborne, the telephone rang on Sonya Kolchinsky’s desk, and a breathless voice said, ‘Is the Chief there, Sonya? I’ve got to speak to him. It’s Joe McCafferty. I’ve found Smith.’
Sonya crooked her finger at the red-haired major, who bounced over and skidded to a halt in front of her chair. ‘I don’t care what it costs or how difficult it is,’ she said, ‘but I want the call on this line –’ she pointed at the receiver in her hand ‘– patched through to Mr Philpott’s plane. And I want it done now.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ the major replied, ‘oh yes, ma’am.’ He shot off to the communications room as though preventing World War Three depended on it …
Sabrina and Feisal had refused breakfast, but Feisal had to have food at stated times, so they started toying with a mid-morning snack that Smith sent up to the attic room. It was a gruel of some kind, larded with greasy croutons, and they quickly found it unpalatable. ‘I had no idea Yugoslav food was so bad,’ Sabrina began, regretting it when Feisal launched into a dissertation on Central European culinary traditions.
Feisal dropped the subject when she raised her eyes to heaven in mock horror; and he followed her gaze when it stayed up, instead of coming back down. She had spotted something they had not noticed before – a small opening in the ceiling where it joined the bare rock of the mountain wall. Sabrina crossed to the corner and squinted into the hole. ‘Hey,’ she exclaimed, ‘I can see daylight, Feisal.’
The Arab boy joined her and they ran their fingers over the rock wall. The junction was in fact a shallow fissure, going beyond the ceiling and showing, as Sabrina had remarked, a small chink of light at its very top.
‘I don’t think it’s wide enough for me,’ Sabrina said doubtfully, measuring the fissure against her body.
‘All right for me, though,’ Feisal insisted. ‘We Arabs look after our bodies. It’s our diet, you see.’
‘Yeah, I get it,’ Sabrina said hurriedly. ‘Look, I know you mean well, Feisal, but I’m not sure I ought to let you take risks like going up that hole. Your grandfather would be furious with me if—’
‘And he would be furious with me if I did not go,’ Feisal bristled, ‘so that is settled. Now, if you would be so kind as to hoist me up there …’
As Sabrina stooped for him to climb on her back, they heard the scrape of the iron key in the lock. They were seated at the table when the door was flung open and Bert Cooligan stumbled into the room.
‘He was foolish enough to make a run for it,’ Achmed Fayeed, who appeared behind the agent, said. ‘As you must all be aware, escape from the castle of Windischgraetz is not possible. For his pains, Mr Cooligan will join you up here.’
Cooligan sat on the bed and rubbed his bruised limbs. He had slipped his guard on a toilet visit, he told them, and managed to get as far as the courtyard, but Fayeed had raised the drawbridge in his face.
‘It was brave of you, Bert,’ Sabrina consoled him, ‘but I think it really is useless, like that man said.’
Cooligan looked at them slyly. ‘Don’t you believe it, honey,’ he whispered. ‘Having tried to escape once and been recaptured, I’m the last guy they’d expect to try again. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do: try again.’
‘Well done,’ Feisal commended him, ‘be assured that I shall offer you every assistance.’
Cooligan goggled at the boy and gasped, ‘You don’t say.’
Sabrina grinned. ‘He does say, I’m afraid,’ she remarked, ‘over and over again, all the time. But he has a point.’ And she indicated the gap in the corner of the room.
The agent joined them, nodding approvingly and picking up Feisal all in one movement. At the full extent of his reach, he pushed the boy up into the hole. ‘Room enough?’ he called out.
‘More than sufficient,’ Feisal called back, and squirmed up the fissure until he blotted out the tiny patch of light …
Mac sheered off and gave the castle a wide berth. He flew on down the valley, noting the rough, unmade track which served as a road. There didn’t seem to be any other inhabited area, as the valley, deceptively small from the air, wound through a gorge and meandered out into a flat plain. From his new high altitude, the American could see as far as the Adriatic, with its shoals of tiny islands swimming off the coast.
His plan of action was comfortably clear: he must land the aircraft and make contact with Philpott, for he had no doubt whatsoever that he had located Smith’s headquarters and the hostages’ prison. The frying-pan-shaped area, Mac realised, was the valley’s mouth, and he spotted just the sort of situation he had been seeking: a ruined house, the traces of its once fine and spacious formal gardens still visible from the air. Sheep and goats grazed where the great lawn had been, but it would suit his purpose, for it looked reasonably flat and smooth, and was all of three hundred yards long.
Mac completed his descent and made one quick pass at low level to check the surface and frighten the animals up to one end of the pasture. Then he turned tightly and prepared to land. The UTVA slipped over the crumbling stone boundary-wall at exactly forty-five knots, and the pilot made a perfect three-point touch-down, braking gently to a halt after using
only two-thirds of the available space.
Seeing a large open barn next to a clump of tall trees near the ruin of the house, the American opened his throttle again and taxied towards it. The barn, though it looked dilapidated and sported a few holes in its roof, swallowed the little aeroplane without difficulty.
Moments later McCafferty, who had seen a village which, from the air, looked to be not too far away, was strolling along the rudimentary path, looking like a purposeful tourist off the beaten track. He wore the back-pack, his anorak was slung over his shoulder and he whistled, rather selfconsciously, The Happy Wanderer.
He traded dollars for dinars from Mackie-Belton’s pile at a huge loss, tossed back a couple of beers at a café, and bribed his way into the village post office which, as far as he could ascertain, housed the only telephone for miles around.
A fairly agonising twenty minutes later, using the postman’s sixteen-year-old daughter as an interpreter, Mac found himself magically connected with Philpott, cruising five miles overhead.
He gave the UNACO director the location of the castle – which he had learned from his new friends was called Castle Windischgraetz – and supplied directions to his village of Luka. Philpott set the time for their rendezvous in the early evening.
‘I’ll probably come alone,’ Philpott warned him. ‘I still have to case the scene in Yugoslavia. I’ve no idea what help or co-operation I’ll get from the authorities, so I’d better not promise you an army of deliverance. The chances are it’ll be just you and me, Joe.’
‘You’d better be in good form, then,’ Mac returned cheerfully, though he felt far from confident at the prospect ahead of them.
Philpott signed off, and while McCafferty set out by donkey and on foot to reconnoitre the castle of Windischgraetz, the UNACO director’s plane commenced its descent to Zagreb …