The German's voice was faint, but reception was reasonably clear. "Carlo?"

"Yes. Kurt?"

"I'm in Genoa."

"I know. What news?"

"I have it. This tune I am sure. She is just what you wanted. But there is someone else would like to buy her also. We may have to outbid them if we want the boat. But she is good. For us, very good. Can you come out and see her?"

"You're quite sure, Kurt?"

"Yes. Quite sure. Registered freighter, property of a Genoa-based shipping company. Made to order."

Shannon considered. "I'll come tomorrow. What hotel are you staying at?"

Semmler told him.

"I'll be there on the first available plane. I don't know when that will be. Stay at the hotel in the afternoon, and I'll contact you when I get there. Book me a room."

A few minutes later he was booked on the Alitalia flight to Milan at 0905 the following morning, to make a connection from Milan to Genoa and arrive at the port just after one in the afternoon.

He was grinning when Julie returned with the coffee. If the ship was the right one, he could conclude the deal over the next twelve days and be in Paris on the fifteenth for his rendezvous with Langarotti, secure in the knowledge that Semmler would have the ship ready for sea, with a good crew and fully fueled and supplied, by June 1.

"Who was that?" asked the girl.

"A friend."

"Which friend?"

"A business friend."

"What did he want?"

"I have to go and see him."

"When?"

"Tomorrow morning. In Italy."

"How long will you be gone?"

"I don't know. Two weeks. Maybe more."

She pouted over her coffee cup. "So what am I supposed to do all that time?" she asked.

Shannon grinned. "You'll find something. There's a lot of it about."

"You're a s.h.i.t," she said conversationally. "But if you have to go, I suppose you must. It only leaves us till tomorrow morning, so I, my dear Tomcat, am going to make the best of it."

As his coffee was spilled over the pillow, Shannon reflected that the fight for Kimba's palace was going to be a holiday compared with trying to satisfy Sir James Manson's sweet little daughter.

16.

The port of Genoa was bathed in late-afternoon sunshine when Cat Shannon and Kurt Semmler paid off their taxi and the German led his employer along the quays to where the motor vessel Toscana was moored. The old coaster was dwarfed by the two 3000-ton freighters that lay on either side of her, but that was no problem. To Shannon's eye she was big enough for her purposes.

- There was a tiny forepeak and a four-foot drop to the main deck, in the center of which was the large square hatch to the only cargo hold set amidships. Aft was the tiny bridge, and below it evidently were the crew quarters and captain's cabin. She had a short, stubby mast, to which a single loading derrick was attached, rigged almost vertical. Right aft, above the stern, the ship's single lifeboat was slung.

She was rusty, her paint blistered by the sun in many places, flayed off by salt spray in others. Small and old and dowdy, she had the quality Shannon looked for-she was anonymous. There are thousands of such small freighters plying the coastal insh.o.r.e trade from Haifa to Gibraltar, Tangier to Dakar, Monrovia to Simonstown. They all look much the same, attract no attention, and are seldom suspected of being up to anything beyond carrying small cargoes from port to port.

Semmler took Shannon on board. They found their way aft to where a companionway led down into the darkness of the crew quarters, and Semmler called. Then they went on down. They were met at the bottom by a muscular, hard-faced man in his mid-forties who nodded at Semmler and stared at Shannon.

Semmler shook hands with him and introduced him to Shannon. "Carl Waldenberg, the first mate."

Waldenberg nodded abruptly and shook hands. "You have come to look her over, our old Toscana?" he asked.

Shannon was pleased to note he spoke good, if accented, English and looked as if he might be prepared to run a cargo that did not appear on the manifest, if the price was right. He could understand the German seaman's interest in him. Semmler had already briefed him on the background, and he had told the crew his employer would be coming to look the ship over, with a view to buying. For the first mate, the new owner was an interesting person. Apart from anything else, Waldenberg had to be concerned about his own future.

The Yugoslav engineer was ash.o.r.e somewhere, but they met the deckhand, a teenage Italian boy reading a girlie magazine on his bunk. Without waiting for the Italian captain's return, the first mate showed them both Over the Toscana.

Shannon was interested in three things: the ability of the boat to accommodate another twelve men somewhere, even if they had to sleep out on deck in the open; the main hold and the possibility of secreting a few crates below the flooring down in the bilges; and the trustworthiness of the engines to get them as far as, say, South Africa.

Waldenberg's eyes narrowed slightly as Shannon asked his questions, but he answered them civilly. He could work out for himself that no fare-paying pa.s.sengers were coming on board the Toscana for the privilege of sleeping wrapped in blankets on the hold-cover under the summer stars; nor was the Toscana going to pick up much freight for a run to the other end of Africa. Cargo sent that distance will be shipped in a bigger vessel. The advantage of a small coaster is that she can often load a cargo at very short notice and deliver it two days later a couple of hundred miles away. Big ships spend longer in port while turning around. But on a long run like that from the Mediterranean to South Africa, a bigger ship makes up in extra speed what she spent in port before setting out. For the exporter, the Toscanas of the sea have little attraction for trips of more than 500 miles.

After seeing the boat they went topside, and Wal denberg offered them bottles of beer, which they drank in the shade of the canvas awning set up behind the bridge. That was when the negotiations really started. The two Germans rattled away in their own language, the seaman evidently putting the questions and Semmler answering.

At last Waldenberg looked keenly at Shannon, looked back at Semmler, and nodded slowly. "Possibly," he said in English.

Semmler turned to Shannon and explained. "Waldenberg is interested why a man like yourself, who evidently does not know the charter cargo business, wants to buy a freighter for general cargo. I said you were a businessman and not a seaman. He feels the general cargo business is too risky for a rich man to want to hazard money on it, unless he has something specific in mind."

Shannon nodded. "Fair enough. Kurt, I want a word with you alone."

They went aft and leaned over the rail while Waldenberg drank his beer.

"How do you reckon this guy?" muttered Shannon.

"He's good," said Semmler without hesitation. "The captain is the owner also, and he is an old man and wants to retire. For this he has to sell the boat and retire on the money. That leaves a place vacant as captain.

I think Waldenberg would like it, and I agree with that. He has his master's license, and he knows this boat inside out. He also knows the sea. That leaves the question of whether he would run a cargo with a risk attached. I think he would, if the price is right."

"He suspects something already?" asked Shannon.

"Sure. Actually he thinks you are in the business of running illegal immigrants into Britain. He would not want to get arrested, but if the price is right, I think he would take the risk."

"Surely the first thing is to buy the ship. He can decide whether to stay on later. If he wants to quit, we can find another captain."

Semmler shook his head. "No. For one thing, we would have to tell him enough beforehand for him to know roughly what the job was. If he quit then, it would be a breach of security."

"If he learns what the job is and then quits, he only goes out one way," said Shannon and pointed his forefinger down at the oil-slicked water beneath the stern.

"There's one other point, Cat. It would be an advantage to have him on our side. He knows the ship, and if he decides to stay on he will try to persuade the captain to let us have the Toscana, rather than the local shipping company that is sniffing around. His opinion counts with the captain, because the old boy wants the Toscana to be in good hands, and he trusts Waldenberg."

Shannon considered the logic. It appealed to him. Time was running short, and he wanted the Toscana. The first mate might help him get it and could certainly run it. He could also recruit his own first mate and make sure he was a kindred spirit. Apart from that, there is one useful precept about bribing people: Never try to bribe them all; just buy the man who controls his own subordinates, and let him keep the rest in line. Shannon decided to make an ally of Waldenberg if he could. They strolled back to the awning.

"I'll be straight with you, mister," he told the German. "It's true if I bought the Toscana she would not be used for carrying peanuts. It's also true that there would be a slight element of risk as the cargo went on board. There would be no risk as the cargo went ash.o.r.e, because the ship would be outside territorial waters. I need a good skipper, and Kurt Semmler tells me you're good. So let's get down to basics. If I get the Toscana I'll offer you the post of captain. You get a six-month guaranteed salary double your present one, plus a five-thousand-dollar bonus for the first shipment, which is due ten weeks from now."

Waldenberg listened without saying a word. Then he grinned and uncoiled himself from where he sat. He held out his hand. "Mister, you just got yourself a captain."

"Fine," said Shannon. "Except the first thing is to buy the boat."

"No problem," said Waldenberg. "How much would you spend for her?"

"What's she worth?" countered Shannon.

"What the market will take," answered Waldenberg. "The opposition has fixed its own ceiling at twenty-five thousand pounds and not a penny more."

"I'll go to twenty-six," said Shannon. "Will the captain take that?"

"Sure. Do you speak Italian?"

"No."

"Spinetti speaks no English. So let me interpret for you. I'll fix it with the old man. With that price, and me as captain, he'll let you have her. When can you meet him?"

"Tomorrow morning?" asked Shannon.

"Right. Tomorrow at ten, here on board."

They shook hands again, and the two mercenaries left.

Tiny Marc Vlaminck was contentedly at work in the garage he had rented, while the locked truck stood outside the door in the alley. Marc had closed and locked the garage door also, so he would not be disturbed while he worked. It was his second afternoon alone in the garage, and he had almost finished the first part of the job.

Along the rear wall of the garage he had erected a workbench of solid timber balks and equipped it with what he needed, the tools bought with Shannon's 500, as the truck and the rest of the necessary items had also been. Along one wall stood five large drums. They were bright green and bore the trading mark of the Castrol oil company. They were empty, which was the way Marc had bought them, quite cheap, from one of the big shipping firms in the port, and they had once contained heavy lubricating oil, as was plainly marked on each barrel.

From the first in the line, Marc had cut a circular disk out of the bottom, and the barrel stood up-ended, with the gaping hole showing upward and the screw cap at the top of the barrel on the floor. Around the hole was a 1-inch f.l.a.n.g.e, all that was left of the original base of the drum.

From the truck Marc had taken two crates of Schmeissers, and the twenty machine pistols were almost ready to enter their new hiding place. Each gun had been carefully mummified from end to end in sticky masking tape, and each had five magazines taped to the weapon itself. Following the wrapping process, each machine pistol had been slipped into a stout polyethylene envelope, which Marc had then sucked empty of air and tied securely at the neck with twine. After that, each had gone into a second, outer envelope of polyethylene, which was again tied at the neck. Such wrapping, he reckoned, should keep each weapon dry until it was next brought out into the air.

He took the twenty stubby packages and with two stout webbing straps rolled them all into one large bundle. This he inserted into the hole at the top of the drum and lowered it to the bottom. The drums were the usual 44-gallon or 200-liter type, and there was enough room in each for twenty Schmeissers and their accompanying magazines, with a little room to spare around the walls.

When the first bundle was secreted, Marc began the process of resealing the barrel. He had had fresh tin-plate disks cut at a machine-shop in the port, and the first of these he fitted onto the top of the opened drum. It took half an hour of filing and rasping before the disk finally settled tight and neatly onto the drumhead, running right up to the rim in all places and nicely covering the 1-inch overlap that remained of the previous end of the drum. Turning on his steam jet, powered by a gas bottle and burner, and taking a stick of soft solder, he began to "sweat" the tinplate to tinplate.

Metal can be welded to metal and, to get the hardest join, it usually is. But a barrel that has once contained oil or ignitable fuel always retains a residue of film on the inner surface of the metal. When heated, as it must be by welding, the film turns to fumes and can easily explode very dangerously. "Sweating" a piece of tinplate onto another piece does not give the same strength of join but can be done with steam heat at a lower temperature. Provided the drums were not laid on their sides and juggled about, which would produce a powerful surge inside, they would hold together against a fair amount of handling.

When he had finished, Marc packed any remaining crevices with solder and, when all was cool, spray-painted the whole area with a color the exact replica of the color of Castrol oil drums the whole world over. After leaving the paint to dry, he eased the drum gently onto its new base, removed the screw cap at the top, took one of several large jerrycans standing ready, and began to pour in the lubricating oil.

The emerald-green liquid, thick, sticky, viscous, flowed into the open aperture and gurgled its way to the bottom of the drum. Slowly it filled up the air s.p.a.ces between the sides of the drum and the bundle of machine pistols inside, slid noiselessly into every nook and cranny between the individual weapons, and impregnated the webbing and twine. Despite Marc's sucking before twisting the ends of each polyethylene bag tight shut, there were still bubbles of air inside the bags, trapped in magazines, barrels, and breeches. These offset the weight of the metal so that, as the barrel filled, the c.u.mbersome bundle of guns became almost weightless, bobbing in the heavy oil like a body on the tide, and finally sinking slowly below the surface.

The Belgian used two jerrycans, and when the drum was full to the brim he estimated seven-tenths of the interior was taken up by the bundle, three-tenths by oil. He had poured 60 liters into the 200-liter drum. Finally he took a pencil flashlight and scanned the surface of the liquid. It gleamed back at him in the light, slick and green, with hints of gold. Of what lay at the bottom of the drum there was not a sign. He waited another hour before he checked around the base. Nothing had leaked; the new base of the barrel was sealed tight.

There was a jauntiness to him as he rolled open the garage doors and ran the truck back inside. He still had the wood of two flat crates with German markings to destroy, and a disk of now useless tinplate to throw away. The latter would go into the harbor, the former onto a bonfire. He knew now that the system worked and that he could convert one barrel every two days. He would be ready for Shannon by May 15, as promised. It was good to be back at work.

Dr. Ivanov was incensed, not for the first time and doubtless not for the last.

"The bureaucracy," he snapped at his wife across the breakfast table, "the sheer, incompetent, stultifying bureaucracy in this country is b.l.o.o.d.y unbelievable."

"I'm sure you're right, Mikhail Mikhailovich," his wife said soothingly as she poured two more cups of tea, strong, dark, and bitter as she knew her husband liked it. A placid and contented woman, she wished her volatile scientist husband would be careful with his outbursts, or at least confine them to the house.

"If the capitalist world knew how long it takes to get a couple of nuts and bolts in this country, they'd die laughing."

"Shush, dear," she told him, stirring in the sugar for herself. "You must be patient."

It had been weeks since the director had summoned him to the pine-paneled office in the heart of the vast complex of laboratories and living quarters that made up the inst.i.tute in the heart of the Siberian New Lands, to inform him that he would be in charge of a survey team being sent to West Africa and that he should take charge of the details himself.

It had meant forsaking a project that interested him deeply, and asking two of his junior colleagues to do the same. He had put in for the necessary equipment for an African climate, sending off his requirements to the half-dozen different supply directorates concerned, answering the petty queries as politely as he could, and waiting, always waiting, for the equipment to arrive and be crated. He knew from having been on a survey team in Ghana what working in the deep bush could entail.

"Give me the snow any time," he had told his team leader at the time. "I'm a cold-weather man."

But he had done it, on orders and on time. His team was ready, his equipment prepared and crated, down to the last water-purification tablet and camp bed. With luck, he had thought, he could be there, do the survey, and be back with his rock samples before the brief and glorious days of the Siberian summer had been eaten by the bitter autumn. The letter in his hand told him it was not to be.

It came from his director personally, and he bore the man no animosity, for he knew he was only pa.s.sing on instructions from Moscow. Unfortunately the Transport Directorate there had ruled that the confidential nature of the survey forbade the use of public transport, but the Foreign Ministry did not feel able to instinct Aeroflot to put an airliner at the team's disposal. In view of continuing Middle East developments, neither would it be possible to use one of the military's Antonov freighters.

In consequence, ran the instructions from Moscow, it had been felt advisable, in view of the volume of equipment necessary for the survey, and the even greater volumes of samples that would have to be brought back from West Africa, to use maritime transport. It was decided that the team could be best transported by a Soviet freighter heading past the coast of West Africa toward the Far East. On its return, it would simply notify Amba.s.sador Dobrovolsky that it had completed the survey, and, on instructions from him, a freighter heading back toward home would divert to take the three-man team and its crates of samples on board. Notification would be made in due course of the date and port of departure, and vouchers authorizing the use of state transport to the port of embarkation would be provided.

"The whole summer," shouted Ivanov as his wife helped him into his fur-collared coat and fur hat. "I'm going to miss the whole d.a.m.ned summer. And it'll be the rainy season down there."

Cat Shannon and Kurt Semmler were at the ship again the following morning and met Captain Ales sandro Spinetti for the first time. He was a gnarled old man with a face like a walnut, a T-shirt over what was still a barrel of a chest, and a white-topped peaked cap aslant on his head.

The negotiating started then and there, before they adjourned to the office of the captain's lawyer, a certain Giulio Ponti, who ran his practice from one of the narrow side streets that lead backward and upward from the brawling, riotous Via Gramschi. To be fair to the signer, he was at least at the better end of the Via Gramschi, and the prost.i.tutes in the bars they pa.s.sed became progressively more presentable and expensive as they neared the lawyer's office.

Nothing to do with the business of the law moves faster than a snail's pace in Italy-and usually the pace of an arthritic snail.

The terms had been agreed on already. With Carl Waldenberg translating, Captain Spinetti had accepted the package deal Shannon offered: 26,000 cash for the ship, to be paid in any currency or country the captain cared to name; his own first mate to be offered a minimum six-month contract as the new skipper, at a salary double that he had received as first mate; the chance for the other two men, the engineer and the deckhand, to stay on for six months at existing salary, or part company with severance pay of 500 for the deckhand and 1000 for the engineer.

Privately Shannon had already decided to persuade the deckhand to leave but to do all he could to keep the engineer, a surly Serbian who Waldenberg said could coax those engines to h.e.l.l and back, who said nothing and asked less, and, best of all, whose papers were probably not in order and who therefore needed the job.

For tax reasons, the captain had long ago invested 100 in forming a small private company, Spinetti Maritime Shipping Company. It had one hundred ordinary shares, of which he held ninety-nine and his lawyer, Signor Ponti, held one plus the position of company secretary. The sale of the MV Toscana, the company's only a.s.set, was therefore linked to the sale of the shipping company, Spinetti Maritimo, which suited Shannon perfectly.

What did not suit him so well was that it took five days of meetings with the lawyer before the details were in order. And that was only for the first stage.

It was a week into May, and Day Thirty-One of Shannon's private calendar of a hundred days, before Ponti could start drawing up the contracts. As the deal was going through in Italy, and the Toscana was an Italian-registered and -resident vessel, the contract had to comply with Italian law, which is complicated. There were three contracts, that for the sale of Spinetti Maritimo and all her a.s.sets to Tyrone Holdings of Luxembourg, that which contracted Tyrone Holdings to offer Carl Waldenberg the job of captain for six months at the agreed salary, and the third guaranteeing the two other crewmen their existing salaries or severance pay. This process took four days, and Ponti's att.i.tude was evidently that he was breaking all speed records, although all partic.i.p.ant parties were anxious to complete the sale as soon as possible.

Big Janni Dupree was content with life that bright May morning when he emerged from the camping-goods store, having placed the last of his orders. He had put down a deposit for the required number of haversacks and sleeping bags. Delivery had been promised for the next day, and that same afternoon he intended to pick up two large cardboard boxes full of military-style knapsacks and berets from a warehouse in East London.

Three bulky consignments of miscellaneous equipment were already on their way to Toulon. The first should have arrived, he estimated, and the other two should be in transit. The fourth would be crated and put in the hands of the shipping agent the following afternoon, which left him a week ahead of time. The day before, he had received a letter from Shannon, telling him to vacate his London flatlet and fly to Ma.r.s.eilles on May 15. He was to check into a given hotel in the French port and wait there to be contacted. He liked precise instructions; they left little room for errors, and if anything did go wrong, it could not be his fault. He had bought his ticket and was eager for the remaining week to pa.s.s so that he could be off. It was good to be going into action again.