Crossfire Page 15

  “If it’s there we’ll find it,” Maria said with conviction. She had perked up since they’d gotten airborne. They’d spent the night in the commercial pilots’ ready room at the airport, and neither of them had gotten much rest. McGarvey’s mouth was foul from too much strong Argentinian coffee and too many cigarettes. Maria’s complexion seemed sallow beneath her normal olive coloring.

  “If it’s not?”

  “Then we’ll go farther south to delta and epsilon. Sooner or later we’ll find it, now that we know where to look.”

  “What if it never made it this far?” McGarvey asked, playing devil’s advocate to her certainty. “It might never have got out of the North Atlantic.”

  “It did, Kirk,” Maria said, glancing at him. “It must have.”

  “In the meantime you’re a fugitive.”

  She nodded. In the distance they could see the town of Viedma on the Rio Negro. A couple of miles south of the city was the only airport on the gulf.

  “What about your friends? You said there were others besides Rothmann.”

  “We have to stay away from them now. You can’t believe how many bodies are buried in the hills around Buenos Aires and out on the pampas and in the jungles. It never stops. Now Esformes and his gang will be watching very closely.”

  “They killed Rothmann without hesitation,” McGarvey said. “What’s stopping them from killing the others? Or you and me, if they catch up with us?”

  She said nothing, concentrating on her flying for the moment. She’d reduced their speed, and they began a slow descent toward the airport still twenty miles away.

  “We could stay and fight them,” McGarvey said. “I have friends who might be able to help.”

  She remained silent for a little while, but then she turned and looked into his eyes. “I still don’t know what you’re doing here, or why you decided to help me in the first place. But now I need you. I don’t think I can do this alone. Albert would have come with me … but …”

  “We’ve already covered that ground,” McGarvey said, looking out the window toward the gulf. The white-capped waves looked like ripples on a tiny pond. Harmless at this distance.

  “If it gets too bad, and you want to leave, I’ll understand.”

  “We’ll find your submarine,” McGarvey said. “And we’ll find whatever it was that Major Roebling brought with him.”

  This part of Argentina was Patagonia, desolate, windswept, and cold year-round. Steep cliffs plunged into the sea from a landscape that was nearly desert until the thick forests began some distance inland, beyond which were the Andes, South America’s spine.

  Twenty-five years ago Viedma had been a cowtown struggling for its existence in the bleak region. But when the former president of Argentina, Raul Alfonsin, had suggested that the federal capital be moved there because of what were believed to be untapped mineral and oil deposits in the region, the town had begun to grow.

  Now, with a population of nearly fifty thousand, Viedma was in stasis. No minerals or oil had been found yet.

  A clerk at the airport told them, “We are a city waiting to become a capital. We have the libraries, the office buildings, the shopping centers, the hospitals, and the cultural facilities. All we need is the government.”

  They’d arranged to store the plane and McGarvey had rented a Ford export-model Escort with yellow headlights and a loud muffler.

  “We’ll need a boat and equipment,” McGarvey said on the way into the city.

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Maria said. “There’s no real harbor here at Viedma. Most of the fleet that operates within the gulf is based in Puerto Madryn behind the Valdes Peninsula.”

  “The navy is still there, isn’t it?” McGarvey asked. He thought he remembered that from some CIA briefing years ago.

  “Yes, it is,” she said, looking at him. “Which is one of the reasons I picked Viedma. There are some boats to be had here. But what’s more important, there are Europeans who will have access to the equipment we’re going to need, as well as the skill to use it and the good sense to keep their mouths shut.”

  “What about money?”

  “I have plenty,” she said.

  “Are these ‘Europeans’ expatriates or Argentinians?”

  “Expatriates, a lot of them. Waiting for the big boom.”

  “In the meantime?” McGarvey asked.

  Maria shrugged. “I don’t know much about this place. I’ve heard it described as a pocket of poverty in the middle of an oasis. A few tourists come here from time to time, I suppose to gawk at Argentina’s answer to Brasilia.”

  “That never quite was.”

  “No one will bother us here, I think.”

  “Esformes will find us.”

  “Perhaps,” Maria said. They had come to a small boat basin just upriver from the sea. The docks were on floats because of the huge tidal range, and the tidal flats stretched nearly a mile on either side of the river before they were contained by levees.

  The marina had the scruffy, down-at-the-heels look of workboat harbors the world over. Almost all the boats here were utilitarian. Not many pleasure cruisers.

  Even the shabbiest boats, however, were equipped with radar. It was a good sign.

  “We’ll get our boat here,” Maria said. “Pull in.”

  McGarvey turned off the main highway, went through an open gate hanging on one hinge, and bumped across a broad field down a rutted dirt track to the marina office. A dog was sleeping in the sun, and a hundred or more sea gulls were perched on the ends of the docks. There seemed to be no other life.

  “These are my kind of people, Kirk,” Maria said when they pulled up. “Unless you’ve had experience dealing with them, let me do it.”

  “It’s your country,” McGarvey said, watching her eyes. There was no reaction he could see.

  “Get us rooms at the Hotel Matías. Downtown. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.”

  There was much about her that was extraordinary. McGarvey was struck with the notion that she was not South American, though her Spanish seemed authentic. Perhaps it was her English. The accent was wrong, somehow.

  “We’re going to need clothing,” McGarvey said. He looked up at the perfectly clear blue sky. There was a metallic tang to the air, and it was windy by the water. “Unless I miss my guess, it’s going to be cold out on the gulf.”

  “I’m a thirty-eight tall,” she said. “Forty shoe or boot. But don’t go overboard. Don’t get conspicuous.”

  He just looked at her.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m very nervous now that we’re this close.”

  “We may not be.”

  She looked out the window. “We are,” she said. “I can smell it.”

  “It’s your show,” McGarvey said.

  “Yes, it is.” She got out of the car and headed down to the docks.

  “He’s a fellow North American,” Maria said, introducing the blond-haired, husky man she’d brought with her. It was nearly three in the afternoon. They were in the hotel’s pleasant coffee shop. “Captain Steven Jones, Kirk McGarvey.”

  They shook hands. Jones’s grip was iron hard, his hand roughly calloused. McGarvey figured him to be in his mid-to late thirties, with the too-early-to-be-burned-out look of the roustabout and professional adventurer.

  “I’m an oil engineer by trade,” he explained in a Texas drawl. “Leastways I used to be. Came down to work the Tierra del Fuego fields on the big island.”

  “What happened?” McGarvey asked.

  “It got a little rough for my blood, what with the fight going over Chile’s claim. And the goddamned weather—” He glanced at Maria. “Sorry, ma’am,” he apologized. He was like an overgrown puppy. “The weather started to get to me, so I cashed in, bought a boat, and set up shop here in the gulf.”

  “Doing what?” McGarvey asked, amazed that he was believing what he was hearing.

  Jones smiled broadly. “Well, now, the marlin fishing ain’t so bad in
the right season, if you know what you’re doing. And I do. And if you got the connections with the fat cats up in Dallas and Houston who like that sort of thing. And I do. Then you can make a respectable living.”

  “But we’re out of season now?”

  “Pretty much. So I’d be willing to take a look for this meteorite of yours.”

  McGarvey exchanged a look with Maria. She’d been inventive.

  “But I won’t dive. I told that to the lady up front. I don’t know many workboat skippers who will.” Jones leaned forward and tapped a blunt finger on the table. “There’s a damned sight more under the sea than’s ever been cataloged. And most all of it is hungry most all of the time.”

  “We’ll do the diving,” Maria assured him. “But you have the tanks and compressor?”

  “Sure thing. And I’ll get that other installed yet this afternoon. We can start first thing in the morning if you want.”

  “We’ll leave tonight,” Maria said.

  “Which ‘other’ is this?” McGarvey asked.

  “The magnetometer. I’m borrowing it from one of the old exploration rigs. It’s the only way you’re going to find a ferrous mass out there. And even then it’s going to be like looking for a needle in the haystack.”

  “But we will find it,” Maria said.

  Jones shrugged. “It’s a lot of water, and at the speeds we’ll have to go to cover it all before the marlin begin to run, we could miss it easy unless it’s big.”

  “It’s big,” Maria said.

  “I mean really big,” Jones said.

  “We won’t have to search the entire gulf,” McGarvey said. Maria glanced sharply at him.

  “Yeah?” Jones said.

  “I think I might be able to narrow it down a bit.”

  “Do you know where she went in?”

  “Maybe,” McGarvey said.

  McGarvey had rented only one hotel room. They used it to clean up and change into the clothes he’d bought for them. There were plenty of shops in town, but most of them were empty. He’d had to settle for cheap Mexican corduroys and rough woolen sweaters. It would be cold out on the gulf.

  Jones had agreed to round up his mate and let them aboard at six sharp. They would stay out five days. Based on what they’d found or not found by then, they would reevaluate not only their approach, but their contract as well.

  Maria had gotten a chart from Jones. She spread it out on the bed. It showed the entire gulf and a section of the shoreline.

  “We’re here,” she said, pointing to their location. “What did you mean when you told Jones you could narrow down the search area? How?”

  McGarvey was looking out the window toward the ocean. At this latitude it wouldn’t get dark until after nine in the evening. “If we find your submarine, we’re going to dive on it. You want to find Roebling’s notebook.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How deep can you safely dive?” he asked. “A hundred feet? Two hundred feet?”

  “I see,” she said after a moment, understanding that it would do them no good to search waters too deep for them. “What else?”

  “If they were here to make a rendezvous, it would have been set up for a deserted stretch of coast.”

  “Somewhere between San Antonio Oeste in the north, and Puerto Lobos in the south. Eighty miles.”

  McGarvey turned around. “So we start in the middle, say a few hundred yards offshore, and work our way north and south.”

  “Hell,” Maria said half to herself. “Why didn’t we think of that?”

  McGarvey didn’t answer. The question hadn’t been for him.

  22

  AN INCREASING SWELL HAD been building from the east for the past two days. As long as they ran with it, the motion aboard the old but well-maintained wooden Chris-Craft wasn’t so bad. But each time they turned onto a course parallel with the shore they began to roll and wallow.

  “This is not so good for the lady,” Jones said to McGarvey over the chart table below. The navigation station was tucked in the starboard corner in the passageway that led back to the engines. It was hot and stuffy and smelled of diesel fuel, but it was well lit and well equipped with good VHF and single-side-band radio equipment, a direction finder, LORAN, and even an old Magnovox satellite navigation receiver.

  “She’ll manage,” McGarvey said.

  They had already covered an area more than ten miles north and ten miles south of a center line between San Antonio Oeste and Puerto Lobos, and nearly two miles offshore.

  On their first morning out they had spotted two wrecks, neither of which was large enough to be their submarine. But just in case, Maria had donned a wet suit and tank both times and had made the initial dives.

  The first had been the hulk of an old steel fishing boat, and the other had been a railroad locomotive, sitting upright on the sand bottom in about one hundred feet of water. It had been amazingly intact, she’d said, and McGarvey had made a dive down to it with her.

  It had been a waste of time, but Jones and his compact Argentinian mate, who spoke no English and whose only name seemed to be Jorge, needed to do some work on the engines anyway.

  They’d discovered nothing since then.

  The food aboard the thirty-eight-foot boat was surprisingly good. Jorge was an excellent cook, and the provisions Jones had laid in were first class, as was his “wine cellar” in the bilges.

  “The people who hire me won’t eat goat and chipas,” Jones had explained with a broad grin. “And neither will I. Besides, you’re paying for it.”

  “What about the weather?” McGarvey asked, looking up from the chart.

  “It will hold for another thirty-six hours, perhaps a little longer, or a little less.”

  “And then?”

  “The wind will blow, the seas will build, and life will become uncomfortable.”

  “How about your equipment?”

  “The weather won’t stop our search, although it will make keeping to the pattern difficult, and the diving perhaps impossible.”

  McGarvey studied the chart. He tried to put himself in the submarine captain’s place. This was a hostile coast. The war was winding down, perhaps even over by now. After such a long voyage they would be nearly out of provisions and perhaps fuel. There was the RSHA passenger, Major Roebling, to consider as well, along with whatever he’d brought with him. The mission would have been of supreme importance.

  There was no record of the submarine after her departure. She’d not returned to Germany, nor had she turned up anywhere else. The Allies had not captured her. And no submarine had been sunk in the Atlantic during that specific period.

  But there was a lot of water between here and Bremen, and the chances were that the boat had never made it this far. There was no reason to think that it had. No evidence that Roebling or the U-boat’s crew had shown up in Argentina. Nothing had washed ashore. Even as desolate as the Patagonian coast was, had anything washed ashore in 1945 it would have been found eventually.

  But then Maria had not told him everything. Nor, he was beginning to suspect, had Dr. Hesse. Which led to a number of interesting speculations.

  “We’re nearly finished with this pattern,” Jones was saying. “Do you want to expand the search to the north and south, or shall we work farther offshore?”

  “North and south,” McGarvey said.

  “This meteorite must have hit very close to shore. It must have made quite a splash in its day.”

  “Yes,” McGarvey said. “It must have.”

  “¡Capitán, aquí, aquí!” Jorge called down from the bridge.

  The boat came hard to starboard as McGarvey and Jones rushed topside. Maria was braced in the corner in front of the magnetometer. Her eyes were glued to the machine.

  “This could be it,” she said excitedly. “I think we found it!”

  Jorge had brought the boat completely around so that they were running along their own wake.

  “It’s big, whatever it is,” she said
, showing them the readings on the strip chart coming out of the magnetometer. A series of very dark lines rose well above the normal background and bottom traces, showing that they had passed over a significant mass of ferrous metal.

  “Here it comes again,” she said as the trace suddenly began to bloom.

  “Lento,” Jones told his mate, and Jorge immediately throttled back so that they were nearly dead in the water.

  Jones tossed a marker buoy over the side, the bright orange float spinning around as its small anchor and line automatically paid out.

  When they had drifted completely over the object, Jorge again turned the boat hard to starboard, throttled up a little so that they would not be pushed off station by the swell, and ran back slightly west of their buoy.

  This time they were on the object almost immediately, coming off it again within yards.

  Jorge repeated the maneuver, turning outward toward the west each time, until they were no longer detecting anything beneath them.

  “Babor,” Jones said calmly, and Jorge immediately turned to port.

  “How deep are we?” McGarvey asked.

  “Seventy-five meters,” Jones said. “Two hundred fifty feet. But the bottom slopes toward the west and south.”

  They came over the submerged object again, and Jones made several notations on the chart. As soon as they had passed it, Jorge turned again to port.

  On the sixteenth run they had passed over the complete length of the object and Jorge turned back toward their marker buoy, again throttling back so that they were nearly stationary against the swell.

  Jones made a few calculations and when he looked up there was a glint in his eyes. “That’s some meteorite down there,” he drawled. “I think it must have distorted very badly when it hit.”

  “It’s big, isn’t it?” Maria said.

  Jones nodded. “I’d say about two hundred and thirty feet long, but very narrow. Maybe fifteen or twenty feet on the beam. And she’s down toward the southwest.” He glanced at the paper strip chart. “She’s a ship of some kind, I think.”

  “You’re not being paid to think, Captain,” Maria said menacingly. McGarvey took a step back. Jorge turned around and looked at them. There was no reading his dark, deeply weathered face.