The Balkan Assignment (23 page)

"That's his problem," I snorted. "There was no honor in the way he settled it. Mikhail shot him point blank without giving him a chance. What the Yugoslav police do with him is not my worry. I just want to make sure you're not planning to leave him in the desert with a bullet in his head.

"And of course," I continued, "you have figured a way around the fact that as soon as the Yugoslav police pick him up, he'll blab everything he knows about our operation in Kornat?" •

Klaus threw back his head and laughed deeply, happily. "But that is the beauty of it all. It is our word, two respectable businessmen against his, a suspected murderer; one who was not even welcome in his own country, who is known to be not only violent but exceedingly dangerous. Also, who will believe a wild tale of a hidden fortune in gold?

One, finally, who had every reason to kill Vishailly. Who would you believe?" Klaus did have a point. In fact, he had the whole thing sewed up very neatly. Every angle seemed covered. Mikhail would take the rap . . . one he richly deserved in any case. The two of us would be left in the clear. And, without firm evidence to the contrary, as long as we stayed away from Yugoslavia there really was not a whole lot they could do to us.

"Okay," I nodded, "I'm in."

"Fine," Klaus said. "Fine." He stood up rubbing his hands. "Now, we must have some dinner and then more sleep. By tomorrow at dawn, we will be on our way." If only Klaus was telling the truth, I thought . . . but of course he wasn't. I may not have known specifically where the lies were, but I knew that there were lies. We left the hut and crossed the quadrangle scratched out of the desert by caterpillar tractors and bounded by scattered tents and loose piles of equipment.

Night falls swiftly in the desert; one minute pale twilight, the next darkness sweeps over the desert. Sitting on the top step of the hut, I had gained a perspective of three, feet and I could watch the line of darkness racing across the incredibly flat sand and gravel plain to the west. I finished my cigarette and went across the informal square to the hut where Mikhail, a wet towel wrapped around his swollen head, was squatting on his heels lighting a cigar.

I dropped down beside him and rested my back against the canvas siding and enjoyed the lingering warmth of the sand and the quiet of early evening.

"How's your head?" I asked.

Mikhail squinted into the darkness for a long while before answering. "It is all right now." He fell silent again, gazing slowly around the scattered huts and the stars beginning to show clearly in the blackening sky. The last vestiges of sunset had disappeared and full night had fallen. The desert was terribly dark in the absence of the comforting artificial light beyond the pale circle of the encampment and the Christmas tree-like beads on the two drilling platforms. The muted bump and clank of the drilling rigs carried clearly over the half mile intervening distance. To the east, a milky haze suggested the moon lurking below the horizon.

"What is going on here?"

I shrugged in the darkness, but even so, Mikhail must have caught the gesture. Angrily, he muttered, "Why shouldn't you know? You have sold out to that Nazi and his friends.-Who are they and what do they want?"

"Cut it, Mikhail, I don't know anything about what's going on . . . no more than you do. All I know is that we got off the plane this morning, and there they were waiting for us. Automatic carbines don't leave much room for argument." Mikhail turned on me, his voice lashing. "You are lying. You have made a deal with that pig, Maher. Who are these people? Police, or friends of yours . . ." The guard standing a little way off with a carbine resting on his hip, shifted restlessly and stepped closer to us. Mikhail ignored him and bored on. "Perhaps you have decided that you will kill Mikhail and make bigger shares for you. Maybe these friends of yours do not know that you have an aircraft full of gold and maybe if they did, they would not be so co-operative and . . ."

"Knock it off," I interrupted furiously. "You overgrown windbag. Shut your mouth and try and use your head for something besides an obstacle course for a change. If they were going to kill either one of us, they would have done so immediately. I don't know who these people are, but I do know that they know about the gold, and unless we are very damned careful all we'll get will be bullets in the back of the neck. I know they do need a pilot and I'm it. Why they want you around, I have no idea. Talk to Klaus and straighten out your own messes. I'm not your bodyguard or your nursemaid and I don't intend to start now . . . and whoever they are, they are not police. Now, do what the hell you want .

.." I got up and walked away.

I didn't look back, but I could picture Mikhail squatting on the sand, the cigar dangling from his fingers as he squinted after me. I knew that if he had a pistol or a knife, I would have been dead within ten paces. Obviously the guard knew it, too, because he shifted his carbine into both hands and I could see him bring the muzzle around casually to bear on Mikhail.

The hell with him, I thought. I had considered the possibility of letting him know my reason for sticking with Klaus. But that had been discarded as soon as he began raving. Even assuming that he agreed to help, he was too damned unstable to be of any use. Give him a pistol and he was likely to start shooting up the camp . . . just to defend his damned honor. I snorted and continued on. Honor and religion; two chief causes of more deaths than all other excuses in human history combined.

The first thing I had to do was to contact Ley. Accordingly, about midnight, I sneaked away from the hut by working the canvas wall loose from the floor. A guard had come to sit in the middle of the square; probably to watch the camp in general. But as I watched him, it seemed to me that he was keeping a closer eye on my hut than anywhere else. At the same time, I could see the guard outside Mikhail's hut pacing back and forth in a valiant effort to stay awake. The night was silent except for the muffled banging of the drilling rigs and the whispering of wind over the sand . . . and cold as only a desert night can be after the sand has given up all of the day's stored heat. My light windbreaker was no match for the chill or for the bite of the sand. The sky was brilliantly clear; the moon, barely past full, blazed down from near zenith. In spite of the cold, I hugged the sand and worked my way east away from the line of huts deeper into the darkness and the low sand dunes. Both guards were still busily guarding in the middle of the square. So far so good. From here on it was going to be tougher. I would have felt better with the .38 in my pocket, but perhaps it was just as well that it was still in the DC-3. I had nowhere to go if they spotted me. Without a gun I was downright scared to death and was likely to be a hell of a lot more careful than if supported by the Dutch courage that comes with carrying a pistol.

It took me almost half an hour to work my way around the line of huts to the radio shack and up to the small window set into the back wall. The hut was lit by an oil lantern turned low, and deserted; a surprise until I saw the bell alarm rigged to the radio receiver. I spent another ten minutes minutely exploring the immediate area. The operator was asleep in the next hut; dead asleep. There was an empty whiskey bottle on the floor beside him and the breeze had not yet dispersed the alcoholic cloud. The graveyard shift on the drilling rigs had settled into the routine, and the swing-shift crew had finished dinner and were soundly asleep by now . . . I devoutly hoped. I took my life in my hands and snuck into the shack.

The smell of alcohol was still quite strong inside; although not as bad as the hut next door. The operator must have been a real boozer . . . as well as having the most erotic taste in literature that I had ever encountered,

judging by the reading matter piled on every available surface. First, I unhooked the alarm. All I needed was to have that damned bell ring while I was inside . . . even though the chances were against even a truck horn awakening the operator tonight.

The transceiver, a Hallicrafters Model S-40B was a lot more modern than I expected. The Model S-40B is a civilian version of the latest military single side-bank setup. It can punch a signal farther and through more interference than just about any other rig that I know of. These guys were loaded for bear. With the proper relays, or through one of the commercial relay satellites, they could go just about anywhere in the world. With one eye on the door, I hunched down in front of the set to study the control panel. Even though the military makes it pretty easy for you . . . turn green knob on right-hand side of set to "on" position . . . I did know the basic principles and could recognize the band selector and the on-off switch given enough time.

Ley had said that they would keep a twenty-four hour watch on the 127.6 kc band. I tuned down to the exact location, flipped the switch and thumbed the microphone button to transmit, muttered my name twice and flipped the switch to receive and there they were.

"Chris, this is Ley. Do you read me? You are coming through clearly, over." I chuckled with relief. Just hearing a friendly voice, even though it was at least a thousand miles away was comfort enough.

"Yes, you are coming through clearly. Where are you?" "Never mind that. Where are you?"

"The El Wahat el Dakhla, an oil-drilling camp run by a German firm . . . I can't remember the name. I don't know where we go from here. Maher is too suspicious of me. I only know that we will leave at dawn and, I suspect, fly east." I gave Ley the co-ordinates of the oil camp as best I could remember.

"All right, you say you are leaving at dawn. We will be watching and I don't think we will lose you again."

"That's good to hear. It was getting to be a bit lonely running with a couple of loonies. Now, I've got a whole

camp full. Have you any repercussions from the Yugoslav authorities?"

"Yes. If I ever go back, I'll be arrested on sight. They did trace us to the hotel room in Tobruz. They don't like finding dead bodies, especially dead bodies belonging to policemen. Very strange people. That must be what the socialist system does to you. Takes all the fun out of work; turns it into a bureaucracy." Ley's mention of Tobruz jolted me. It seemed like a memory from another era and another world; so much had happened in the past few days.

I questioned Ley on how they were going to keep up with me without giving _themselves away and he told me to watch my radar vector indicator light. They would stay on the trailing edge of my radar coverage. The vector indicator would tell me that he was around. As satisfied as I could be in the situation, I signed off, re-hooked the alarm bell and thirty minutes later was back in my hut and asleep.

Klaus stomped into the hut at dawn, bringing a stiff cup of Turkish coffee with him. It seemed as though I had been asleep for minutes rather than hours. I struggled into a sitting position and gratefully accepted the coffee. Klaus hunkered down by the doorway and watched me torture myself awake with a large gulp of the steaming liquid. I finished the rest of the cup slowly and watched the desert brighten as the sun inched above the horizon to begin another day. As it climbed higher, the fantastic play of light and shadow and color began to bleach from the desert under the intense hammering of the sun. It is only possible to see the desert in full glory at sunrise or sunset. Finally, Klaus cleared his throat. "I hope you are well rested because today we begin the final stage of the trip. We have a long flight ahead of us, but we will break it into three smaller stages."

Three, I thought. He's overestimating the range of the DC-3 if he thinks he can get to Hong Kong in three hops. Klaus pulled a map out from his pocket and spread it on the floor next to my sleeping bag. A red circle marked the location of the camp. A dotted red line, drawn with a marking pen ran toward the end of Lake Nasser some two hundred miles east, crossed the coastal ranges and the Red Sea, ran on across central Saudi Arabia, and turned north at Masturah. One stop was marked for refueling at Jebel Danah, then continued on across the Persian Gulf, into the Indian Ocean, crossed the coast east of Gwadar into Pakistan where it turned sharply north and continued up the spine of the southern extremity of the Hindu Kush to a small mark on the map in central Pakistan. I bent closer to read the description of the landing site printed in very small letters. The landing site was an abandoned airstrip at Sibi deep in the foothills of the Hindu Kush.

"For God's sake," I exploded. "An abandoned airstrip. After flying nearly two thousand miles, you expect me to land on an airstrip that hasn't been used since World War II?

You must be crazy."

"The airstrip," Klaus replied patiently, "has been cleared and a crew is standing by to refuel us when we land tonight. We will sleep there, aboard the aircraft, and leave tomorrow morning. This site has been chosen as we have no effective contacts in Pakistan to arrange flight plans and customs clearances."

"Where do we go from there?" I asked, not at all Satisfied but knowing there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

Klaus folded up the map and shoved it into his jacket pocket. "We go east to a certain location which you will be told about later, and then we go back to Brindisi."

"Brindisi? Maybe you have forgotten," I pointed out, "that a certain ex-friend of mine, whose aircraft we stole, will probably be waiting for us. He may not call in the cops, but he will personally beat our heads to bloody pulps . . ." I knew this was not true, but Klaus did not.

Klaus looked flustered for a moment, then said soberly, "An associate of mine called on your friend last night to make sure your friend understood the arrangements and the necessity for you to use his aircraft. He found your friend dead." I went cold all over.

"Apparently, your friend was returning from another town in his automobile. He was traveling at a high rate

of speed and in the darkness and rain he missed a turn. He was killed instantly." The sun was well up over the horizon now, nudging the temperature to scorching again, yet I was so cold that I was shivering. I had no illusions this time that Klaus was telling me the truth. Pete was too good a driver for that ever to have happened to him. Mentally I catalogued the names . . . Mistako, Bowen, two unknown assassins. Vishailly and now Pete. How many more? I shook my head and turned away from Klaus, shaking with rage and frustration. I knew damned well that Pete had been murdered on orders. I would never be able to prove it to anyone else, but I knew and that was enough. I walked away from Klaus. A few seconds more and I would have lost all control; would have killed him with my bare hands, all compunctions to the contrary, lost in the savagery that gripped me. Before this was finished, I vowed that Klaus would pay dearly for Pete's death.