The Game of X: A Novel of Upmanship Espionage (10 page)

The bullet missed me by inches. Karinovsky was swimming hard, and I gritted my teeth and kicked, trying to shake off that clinging yellow light.

Then I saw what Karinovsky had spotted: a huge rectangular darkness beneath the Terra Prima bridge. We reached it and found a flat-bottomed work barge, moored for the night. There was barely two feet of room for us between its barnacled keel and the glutinous mud bottom.

The gondola swept past, then came to a stop. The searchlight poked and probed, and the gondola inched backward. There was a crisp rasping of wood as they came alongside the barge; a sleepy, outraged voice asked them what in hell they were doing.

At the height of the argument we sneaked out from under the barge and continued up the Rio di San Baldo. We were gaining valuable yards while an argument raged between bargemen and gondolier. Then it was broken off abruptly, and the gondola’s oar splashed and gained a purchase on the water. Again, our air bubbles must have given us away.

We were in a wide stretch of the canal, and the gondola was coming up fast. Karinovsky turned hard to his right, continued for a dozen yards, and turned right again, as if to enter the Rio Maceningo. But he straightened out and continued to the Rio della Pergola. The gondola hesitated at the entrance to Maceningo, losing time in tracing the path of our bubbles.

We went by the heavy wooden piles of Santa Maria Mater Domini, and turned left, into a waterway about five feet wide. I thought we must have lost the gondola; but when I looked back, I saw the marching yellow point of its searchlight about thirty feet behind.

It came straight into our narrow waterway, filling it and scraping the embankment on either side, but still gaining on us. A man in the bow was shouting encouragement to the gondolier, and the barracuda shape crept up behind me. I wanted to tell Karinovsky that we were trapped, that we had better make an attempt to turn back under the boat. I tugged at his leg. He turned and grinned, patted the top of his head and swam on.

I couldn’t understand what he meant. The searchlight was on us again, and they had begun firing. Then Karinovsky disappeared.

Immediately after that, I disappeared.

I was in complete darkness. Stone scraped my left arm. I straightened out and hit my head against the right wall. I thought I could hear triumphant voices behind me, and I scraped again on the left. The passage couldn’t have been more than three feet wide. Then I was out of it, swimming through the lighter gloom of a canal.

We surfaced. The spires of the Mater Domini filled the night sky behind us. We had followed a canal that ran beneath the church. It might have been passable for gondolas at low tide, but at high tide it was completely flooded.

Karinovsky said, “We’ll have to keep on going. They can back out and come around by way of the Maceningo Canal in five minutes.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

Karinovsky gestured boldly. “Like Lord Byron, we are going to swim across the Grand Canal. After that our quickest way would be straight up the Canale della Misericordia and into the Lagoon. But we can’t risk so obvious a route. For safety’s sake we shall do a little extra swimming through the Quartiere Grimani. I will take you by the scenic route, of course.”

“Thanks. Will our air tanks hold out?”

“I hope so.”

“You don’t think we can try it on foot now?”

“No. Forster may have a dozen men on foot, but surely no more than a few in boats. The odds favor us in the water.”

I was about to ask what we would do when we reached the Lagoon. But then I noticed the harsh lines of strain on Karinovsky’s face.

“How is your arm?”

“Proving more of a nuisance than I had expected. But not enough to impede us, I think. Now we had better—”

Someone shouted at us from the embankment: “Hey, what in hell is going on out there?”

We submerged, moved quickly past San Stae, and into the Grand Canal. Halfway across, Karinovsky came to the surface, lined up the Palazzo Erizzo and the Maddalena Church, and submerged again. It seemed to me that he was swimming more slowly, and at a greater expenditure of energy.

A vaporetto churned past us, and then a work barge. Twenty minutes later we had crossed the seventy-odd yards of the Canal, and were entering the dog-leg Rio della Maddalena.

It seemed safe enough here. We swam undisturbed into the Rio dei Servi, and followed its winding course into the Rio di San Girolamo. After passing the Ghetto Nuovo, Karinovsky led us by a connecting channel into the Rio della Sansa. A gondola passed over us, but no searchlight reached into the water, and no voice shouted an alarm. Instead, a cracked tenor sang a Neapolitan love song, and a girl giggled.

The canal turned right, and we lost contact with the retaining wall. When we surfaced, I saw that we were in the Venetian Lagoon. The city lay just behind us, its glistening spires and tilted domes rising from the water like a romantic sketch of Atlantis. A mile or so ahead of us was the marshy Veneto coast; to our right was the island of Murano, and very close on our left was Venice’s causeway to Mestre.

“Do we swim across the Lagoon?” I asked.

“No,” Karinovsky said, “We are spared that. We merely follow the shoreline around the Sacca di San Girolamo, to a position near the Ricovero Penitenti. Once there, our troubles should be ended.”

He was floating with difficulty, his head thrown back and the breath rasping in his throat. He turned over and began to swim, slowly and doggedly, following the contour of the land to the west. In ten minutes we reached a low, flat, deserted piece of land near the entrance to the Cannareggio Canal, almost opposite the slaughterhouse. The Ricovero was fifty yards away, half-hidden behind its stone walls.

“Behold!” Karinovsky said proudly.

I saw the boat, dark and sleek, moored to the seawall. Something about its long low hull disturbed me, touching a memory just beyond recall. Suddenly I wanted nothing to do with that boat. But my feeling was illogical and absurd, so I ignored it and followed Karinovsky to the boat, which we boarded by means of a ladder.

17

No one was aboard. We got rid of the air cylinders and crept down the narrow deck into the cockpit. We sat for a while and caught our breath, then changed into dry clothes that had been stored for us under the seat. I was very tired from the long swim, and Karinovsky looked close to exhaustion. But we couldn’t afford to rest now: We had shaken off our pursuers, at least for the moment; but we had to use our advantage before they had a chance to find us again.

Karinovsky opened the dashboard compartment and took out a map and a small flashlight. The map showed the northern part of the Laguna Veneta, from the Causeway to Torcello.

“This is our position,” Karinovsky told me. “The causeway is on our left, San Michele and Murano on our right, the mainland straight ahead to the north. We follow the main channel, marked here in red, past Isola Tessera, to the vicinity of Marco Polo Airport. But we do not go to the airport wharf.”

“Of course not,” I said. “That would be too easy.”

“Too dangerous,” Karinovsky amended. “We turn eastward before reaching the wharf, take the channel past San Giacomo in Palude, and continue nearly as far as Mazzorbo. Do you see Mazzorbo circled there?”

“I thought it was a flyspeck. What kind of chart is this?”

“Albanian. It is a copy of a Yugoslav naval chart.”

“Couldn’t Guesci have gotten us an Italian chart?”

“The Government Printing Office was out of stock. The Lagoon is being resurveyed.”

“A British Admiralty chart would have been best of all.”

“Guesci couldn’t very well write to London for one, could he?”

“I suppose not.”

“In any event, he assured me that a child could navigate by this. Look, the main islands and channels are clearly marked. All you have to do is steer for the airport, then turn right at the next-to-last marker and continue toward Mazzorbo, then turn left at number 5 marker and follow the channel into Palude del Monte.”

Karinovsky spread his hands to show how easy it would be. I was not so sure. I had done some day-sailing on Long Island Sound, enough to know how tricky it could get trying to follow a nautical chart at night across an unfamiliar body of water.

I examined the chart. Its markings were conventional. Channels were shown in a series of bold dashes. Navigational aids were white or red dots. Marsh or sandy areas were shaded with little blue crosses; there were plenty of them. Depths in the Lagoon reached a low tide maximum of six feet, but the average was more like three. There were entirely too many places to run aground, and to do so now, on a falling tide, could be disastrous.

Karinovsky was beginning to fidget, but I took a moment to examine the boat. She was a flat, unlovely, shark-headed old beast, paint-sick and scarred, with a fin in the rear and a massive ten feet of engine cowling in the bow. That cowling looked big enough to house a truck engine. The dashboard had the usual array of controls; nothing very much out of the ordinary except for something called a “trim-tab.” I didn’t know what it was, so I decided to leave it alone. There were two tachometers, one for the engine and one for the supercharger. There was a bronze plaque in the center that gave the boat’s vital statistics: 28 feet 6 inches long, 11 feet 6 inches wide, gross weight of 5,200 lbs. Engine: Rolls Royce Merlin. Horsepower: 2,000.

Horsepower two thousand? I stopped and reread the plaque. Yes, Virginia, there is a horsepower two thousand. All of that horsepower is contained within your lively Rolls Royce Merlin engine. It is the very same engine, you may remember, that was used during World War II to power the Mosquito fighter-bomber. …

“What homicidal maniac,” I asked, keeping my voice low and level, “procured this bomb for us?”

“You are speaking about the boat? Guesci found it, of course.”

“Then let Guesci drive it.”

“A boat is a boat,” Karinovsky said sharply.

“The hell it is,” I told him. “This is no boat. This is an unlimited hydroplane. Do you know what that means?”

“I suppose it means that she is very fast.”

“She’s fast, all right. She’s fast enough to kill us and save Forster the trouble.”

Karinovsky looked interested. “What speed will she attain?”

“She might have done 170 or 180 when she was new. But in her present beat-up condition, I doubt if she’ll do much better than 130 or so.”

“Kilometers or miles?”

“Miles per hour. In the dead of night with an Albanian chart across a bathtub-sized lagoon with more sandbars than water.”

“I know nothing about boats,” Karinovsky announced airily. “Besides—do we have any choice?”

We didn’t, of course. Not really. Karinovsky was in no shape to swim across the Lagoon. There was no time to find another boat, and land transport was out. We were stuck with this shark-headed beast of a hydroplane. I would just have to take it slow and easy, and hope that I could manage without blowing it up or flipping it over, or grounding in the middle of the lagoon.

“All right,” I said. “Cast off the line.”

Karinovsky untied the boat and pushed it away from the dock. I turned on the ignition switch and kicked the starter.

The engine whined, then caught. The twelve pistons of the modified Merlin rumbled like an avalanche, and the exhaust sounded like a runaway machine gun.

“Can’t you make it any quieter?” Karinovsky shouted. “We’ll wake up the whole damned city.”

“She’s just idling now,” I shouted back. “Hang on!”

And so it was that Agent X—demon driver of the world’s fastest machines—settled back firmly against the headrest. There was a hard tight smile on his tanned hawk features, and his blunt skillful powerful hands rested lightly on the controls. With the delicacy of a surgeon he engaged the clutch and applied a touch of throttle.

The hydroplane responded with a roar that could probably be heard in Switzerland. The rpm indicator jumped to three thousand. The hydroplane shot forward like a shell from a cannon, and Agent X held on for dear life.

18

Several things were going wrong simultaneously. The hydroplane was traveling much too fast, and her bow was swinging hard to the left. I turned the steering wheel and the boat swung instantly to the right. Her starboard rail dipped, and the bow tried to dig itself into the water.

“Slow down!” Karinovsky screamed at me.

That was just what I was trying to do. I had taken my foot off the throttle, but it seemed to be jammed, we were still gaining speed. The tachometer had gone to 3,700. The boat, swinging again to the left, apparently was trying to run itself up on the causeway.

Again I turned the wheel to the right. Again the bow dug in, and the stern began to lift. It kept on lifting, and I threw in the clutch. The engine, spinning without any load, sounded as if it were flying apart. Then the throttle popped up, and the engine quieted down to an ear-shattering rumble. The boat settled down and grudgingly began to lose speed.