The Balkan Assignment (6 page)

march of his headquarters; two Luftwaffe airdromes near Mostar from which FockeWulfs and Me-109s rose, to challenge escorting P-47s on Allied bombing runs to the oil fields of Rumania, a large Nazi garrison at Mostar and several army strongholds along the coast. And the miniature submarine base on Kornat Island. In early December 1944 Mikhail received orders to intercept and capture at all costs the armored train loading in Mostar. He was not told why this particular train was so valuable, only that he was to obtain the sealed ammunition boxes at all costs. Within hours, the order was amended. The ammunition boxes, he was now told, were being sent to Kornat Island by the Nazis and from there would be transhipped by sea to Trieste.

No matter what the cost, he was told, he was to take those ammunition boxes. Not once did he question those orders or the value in capturing a trainload of artillery ammunition; even though it could very well mean the total destruction of his unit. The only direct route was into the stronghold itself through the heavily guarded harbor entrance. An indirect overland route crept down the length of the island from the steep rocky beaches of the northern end. But Mikhail knew that he could never hope to take so large a force the fifteen tortuous miles over the chaparral-covered ridges without being detected. The western and eastern sides were impassably high cliffs. The direct approach through the southern end was completely out of the question as the Nazis held the two small islands that served as wardens to the harbor. To be successful, the attack had to be mounted in complete surprise.

Mikhail decided to go in over the western cliffs from the seaward side in spite of the danger . . . a possibility which the garrison commander should have guarded against but did not.

Mikhail assembled his small invasion force of fifty men in a tiny cove thirty miles or so north of Mostar and loaded them into three fishing calques and put to sea, counting on the winter rains to conceal their movements from German coastal patrols. For two days they fought to the westward directly into the teeth of a gale-force wind until on the third day, they rounded to and drove in on the high western coastline or Kornat. That two-day delay was to prove extremely critical for every man connected with the contents of those ammunition boxes.

They reached the cliffs at sunset. In spite of the almost impossible climb, by midnight the partisans were up, equipment distributed, and ready to march. Mikhail briefed his men for a final time, and they separated into two groups. Mikhail leading the main party, crossed the narrow island, climbed the 'thousand-foot ridges in the dark and traveled down the eastern flank where they holed

up just before dawn in a brush-grown canyon less than three miles below the northern flanks of St. Peter's Mountain. That midnight, they reached the entrance and slipped into the base. Their immediate targets: the five submarines moored to the underground quay. Two men were sent to silence the lone sentry standing watch at the near end of the quay. These were followed by two more partisans carrying crude dynamite bombs that they attached to the hull of the nearest sub. Unknown to them, the Nazis had unloaded the two torpedos that each submarine normally carried to make room for the crates of gold. Ten torpedos were stacked neatly on the quay waiting to be moved to the ammunition bunker.

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Two minutes after the timers were set, the dynamite charges went off and in one roaring, sympathetic explosion, the torpedos detonated as well. The concussion reverberated through the main chamber, smashing tons of rock down on the submarines, part of the quay and thestacks of ammunition crates containing the gold. When the first series of explosions blasted through the cavern, Maher was in the briefing room deep inside the base. As a submarine commander, Klaus had no regularly assigned combat station and the forward tunnels leading to the main cavern were completely blocked. Klaus wasted little time on a hopeless cause. He may not have known how large the invading force was, but it required little intelligence to decide that with the amount of damage caused by the detonating torpedos, the rattle of gunfire and the number of casualties already sustained, that resistance was only delaying the inevitable. With his executive officer, a twenty-two year old Bavarian named Helmuth, they proceeded to carry out a plan formulated days before. Only now, the danger of detection by the SS was no longer a factor. All were busy fighting for their lives. Klaus and Helmuth managed to work out of the press of panicky men and make their way to the barracks area where the slave laborers were quartered. They overpowered the guard and recruited at gunpoint the five strongest; a mixed bag of two Russians, two Yugoslav Jews and a Greek.

It took three hours to load the ton of gold bars onto hand carts, drag them back through the narrow tunnels to the cistern and dump them in; three hours during which the sound of gunfire echoing through the rock chambers gained in intensity, then melted away. The final shots inside the cavern were those fired by Helmuth as he killed the five slave laborers.

After the war? Mikhail became an officer in the newly organized Federal Army. But the combination of strict discipline and the break with the Soviet Union instigated by Tito was for him, as for many other old-time party members, too much. Used to the independence of the guerrilla leader, he was finally cashiered from the army, thrown out of the Communist party.

Klaus had managed to locate Mikhail in a small mountain village in Herzceovina, working as a forester and deeply embittered. Klaus felt that Mikhail was the key to the entire operation since he had organized the raid and afterward completed the demolition of the base to prevent the Nazis from reopening it. Following the war, Mikhail had served on the several advisory committees to both the Allied and Yugolsav investigating boards charged with trying to find ways to recover the gold. If anyone knew the cavern and its intricacies, it was Mikhail.

Maher and Helmuth were two of the few German survivors of the Kornat invasion who managed to escape through an airshaft. Helmuth was later killed by the partisans . . . or so Klaus said. Klaus was later posted to Norway, where he stayed until the end of the war. After his release from a Norwegian prisoner-of-war camp in 1946 he returned -to Germany, where he worked as a translator for one of the British intelligence services and finally wound up in Italy in 1956, running his own import-export company, a solid and respected businessman.

And that's how I became involved. I had been in the air force since college, and after a divorce and two tours in Vietnam I had about had it. I found myself in the same quandary that others of my age group were suffering through . . . not quite young enough to know everything, not quite old enough to be perfectly satisfied with things the way they were and with damn little hope that I could straighten anything out, myself included. Two years ago then, I resigned my commission and with a buddy, Pete Schenk blew my savings on an old PBY aircraft and buried myself in the Med. ,A two-man airfreight line is no way to get rich quick, but at least you eat fairly steadily. And in the course of two years, we had managed to add an old DC-3 and expand our business somewhat. Maher was one of the few steady customers we had and the only one who paid his bills on time. The Mediterranean, mildly described, is a hotbed of smuggling . . . everything from girls to opium. Don't trust your customer is the rule of thumb, and because at least twelve different nations' police and customs officials watched us, we watched with whom we did business. Maher had wanted to contract for several pretty hefty shipments and before signing the papers, we had run a check on him through the Italian commerce department. They gave him a clean bill.

During that first year then, we had become .. . not friends exactly . . . but two expatriates drawn together for mutual company and liking the alien tang, you might say, of our dissimilar backgrounds and ages. Maher and his wife, a small, pretty but rather vacant blonde from Germany, had invited me to dinner at their villa or their club for tennis a few times. His wife was an excellent cook, and I was more than happy to abandon the one-burner gas stove in my apartment. It might never have gone beyond that if he hadn't ridden along on that particular trip to Istanbul. On the flight back, Maher had turned to me and with some hesitation related the story of his last months on Kornat Island. The story he told of those last hours was so at odds with the Klaus Maher I knew, that I didn't know whether to be shocked, horrified, sad, or all three at once. What rocked me was the horror of the tale unfolding to encompass the deaths of the five slave laborers. Maher claimed that he was not directly responsible for their deaths, but, as he admitted, had done nothing to stop Helmuth from executing . . . murdering . . . the prisoners. Killing by remote control, I was good at that and God only knew how many human beings I had killed with just a touch of my thumb from a six-hundred-mile-an-hour fighter-bomber. But close-up killing, killing with a machine gun of five helpless human beings, five men so starved, so exhausted they could not have resisted had there been opportunity for them to do so; no, that sickened me. But the abhorrence I should have felt was quickly submerged by the thought of that million dollars buried in the cistern of some long-forgotten naval base. I was not ashamed then, nor was I until after the true ambivalence of my own

character was brought so forcibly before me that I could no longer ignore it. The rest of the flight was silent; neither of us knowing what more to say to the other, how to react to the other's silence or how to break the emotional impasse. It wasn't until we had landed and were turning off the taxiway onto the apron in front of the customs shed, that he said quietly without looking at me: "Chris, I need a partner to help me get that gold out."

He said it simply and matter-of-factly, as if he had no doubts that I was going to be that partner. A good many men would tell you a story such as he had and then let the subject drop, a confession of sorts to a person they could trust, sort of third-party purging. But from the way he spoke, I knew. Klaus was serious about going after the gold and was equally serious about having me in.

"I need you. I need someone I can trust, someone who knows the Mediterranean and can fly an amphibious aircraft. I can always find the aircraft, but I can't find a man I can trust down every side street."

He left it hanging in the air between us and I nodded slowly. That was us then; three used-up soldiers, done in by wars that, in this supposed age of enlightenment, had managed to kill more people than all of the wars in man's previous history rolled into one. Klaus Maher knew exactly where the gold was hidden and he had the connections to dispose of it at the best price, with no questions asked. Mikhail Korstlov knew how to get into the cavern because he had carried out the final demolition.

Me, I had the aircraft.

We passed over the narrow bulk of the island at four thousand feet and turned into a short spiral down between the two long ridges on either side of the bay. Traces of white waves marched across the Adriatic to shatter vainly against the rocky bulk of the island. But the sheltered bay from this altitude, was as calm as a lake. Maher pointed out the abandoned monastery—looking more like a crusader's castle than an Orthodox church

surmounting the top of St. Peter's Mountain. The mountain itself was a long, humped pile of rock resembling a sleeping bear. The northeastern flanks began in a series of hills and ridges and climbed slowly to the rounded peak on which the monastery clung. The southern side, however, rose almost sheer from the Adriatic; as if some long-ago giant had stepped across the channel and with a sword, hacked away a side, leaving a perpendicular drop of nearly a thousand feet to the bay.

On the final approach, the starboard engine quit altogether. The old PBY swayed down onto the port wing and I swear the wingtip cut through the tops of the swells before I could steady her out. We hit hard, harder than I intended and bounced, causing a tremendous bow wave over the nose that almost washed out the port engine. Our entrance to Kornat was neither prestigious nor auspicious. Fortunately, the waterfront was all but deserted and only Mikhail was waiting on the quay to meet us. As I swung into the dock, Maher slipped down into the nose and shoved the hatch back and climbed through. He tossed the mooring line to Mikhail, jumped for the quay, and together they warped the PBY alongside the dock and snugged down. I shut off the engine and sat for a moment, relishing the silence and the soft lift of the aircraft in the tiny waves. We might sink; but we couldn't fall any further. Mikhail's face appeared in the hatch, grinning sourly.

"Trouble, heh?"

"Yeah, fuel pump gone on the starboard engine." Mikhail nodded as if this were an every-day occurrence. "Can you fix it?"

I shrugged. "Depends. I don't have a spare, and I doubt if they have one lying around up at the monastery." "You are sure it is the fuel pump?"

"Let's say I hope to God it is. Fuel pumps are easier to come by than Pratt & Whitney R1630 engines." I unbuckled my seat belt and pulled myself up through the hatch and clambered back onto the cockpit. Rearing directly above us like a thunderhead was the precipitous southern face of the mountain, crowned with the jumbled child's blocks of the monastery. A stiff wind was beginning to leak in through the harbor mouth ruffling the waters of the bay as it came. There was something heavy and oppressive about the scene, something beyond the pressure of the wind.

Mikhail climbed off the aircraft to the dock to talk with Maher. I couldn't hear what they were saying, and for the moment I was content to sit on the canopy feeling the sharp wind against my face. Sitting up there, I felt, looking down on the two of them, as if I had no part in this entire affair. They were just two Europeans whom I had only met casually and contracted to fly into this Godforsaken island. But, my moment of peace couldn't last forever. Maher called up for me to join them on the quay and I reluctantly left my perch and climbed down.

"Mikhail says he has located the access tunnel to the cistern," Maher announced without preamble. "He's followed it back three hundred meters. There's a cave-in at that point, but he thinks we should be able to clear it without much trouble. If everything is all right on the far side, there should be only another few hundred meters to the cistern." I nodded. "How long to clear the cave-in?"