Crossfire Read online

  McGarvey smiled reassuringly and took another step closer. The boat was rising and falling by the bow now. It felt as if they had nearly stopped and were maintaining their position somewhere off the breakwater.

  “If you want to share it with him and his pals, that’s up to you. But we just want to make it to shore.”

  “It’s not my business,” Jorge said.

  McGarvey took another step closer, and stumbled, dropping the gold bar.

  Jorge instinctively moved forward in an effort to grab the gold bar. At that moment he was open and vulnerable. McGarvey shifted his weight to his left foot and kicked out with his right, catching the Argentinian’s gun hand.

  The pistol discharged, the noise deafening in the narrow confines of the saloon. McGarvey was on top of the man in the next instant, driving him against the companionway stairs.

  Though short, Jorge was extremely strong. Almost immediately he had the advantage, bodily forcing McGarvey back, turning the gun inward.

  “Kirk!” Maria cried.

  The boat dropped into a trough with a tremendous lurch, and McGarvey let himself go limp, falling back under Jorge’s attack.

  The Argentinian was suddenly propelled forward by his own strength, and before he realized what was happening to him, he went completely over McGarvey, the wrist of his gun hand snapping with a loud pop.

  Jorge bellowed in pain and rage, scrambling to his feet as he pulled out his skinning knife.

  McGarvey snatched up the gun. “I don’t want to kill you,” he shouted.

  Jorge stopped short, fury in his face.

  Maria rushed across the saloon. “¡Bastardo!” she screamed, and before Jorge could react, she plunged her dagger to the hilt in his back.

  The Argentinian cried out, stumbled forward, and then went down.

  Kurshin got lucky. An Austral flight to Viedma put him in the Patagonian city a little after nine in the evening. He was able to rent a car at the airport, and in the city it took him only five telephone calls before he’d found that McGarvey and the woman had stayed briefly at the Hotel Matías, but were gone.

  It was what he’d expected. They would be out on the water searching for the submarine. Or at least they had been out there. He didn’t think they’d be out on a night like this, however. The weather here was even worse than it had been in Buenos Aires. The flight down had been rough.

  He reasoned that they would have had to hire a workboat to take them out. They’d need the equipment and the crew to operate it if they expected any chance of success.

  Such a boat and crew, he was told, could be hired at only one marina in the city.

  It was ten-thirty by the time he got there, and except for a dim light or two on a couple of the boats, the place seemed deserted.

  He drove down the long dirt track and pulled up in front of the ramshackle marina office. Shutting off his lights, but leaving the engine running, he got out of the car.

  The air smelled of the sea, of creosote, and of diesel fuel. Nothing moved in the night wind except for tree branches and boats’ rigging. Someone aboard one of the boats laughed and shouted something, and then was quiet again.

  It was possible that McGarvey and the woman had come back here, and were at this moment aboard one of the boats. But somehow he didn’t think that was the case.

  He was reaching inside the car to turn off the engine when someone came up out of the darkness behind him.

  “¿Que pasa, señor?”

  Kurshin spun around, reaching for his pistol. But it was just an old man with dark, leathery skin and whispy white hair.

  “I’m looking for my friends. I was told they might be here,” he replied in Spanish.

  “Are they fishermen, these friends of yours?” the old man asked pleasantly.

  “No. The man is American and the woman is an Argentinian.”

  “Oh, yes, they are with Captain Jones aboard the Yankee Girl. But they are not here. They have been gone for three days now.”

  “Where?”

  The old man shrugged, and glanced toward the docks and the river. “On the gulf.”

  “But not tonight,” Kurshin suggested.

  “No, of course not.”

  “Did they head north?”

  “No, it was south.”

  “But they are not here?”

  “No,” the old man said.

  “Where, then?”

  “Perhaps not so far south as Golfo Nuevo.”

  “No?”

  The old man shrugged. “They have no doubt gone to safety at Puerto Lobos. It is the only sensible thing to do. And Captain Jones is a sensible man.”

  “How far is this city to the south?”

  “By water or by highway?”

  “By highway.”

  Again the old man shrugged. “Two hundred, perhaps three hundred kilometers. But the road is good.”

  “Gracias,” Kurshin said.

  The old man nodded, and stepped back as Kurshin climbed into his car, flipped on the headlights, and headed back to the highway. If he pushed it, he figured he could make Puerto Lobos in less than three hours. The timing would be perfect.

  There was a lot of surge in the small harbor. They had to put out automobile tires to save the boat from beating herself to death against the docks.

  Jones had been extremely wary ever since McGarvey, and not Jorge, had come topside to help bring the boat through the breakwater. But he’d said nothing, and McGarvey had maintained the silence until they were safely docked. It was nearly one in the morning. Nothing moved on the streets of the small port town, although a couple of the waterfront bars were open and seemed to be doing a lively business.

  “Your mate is dead,” McGarvey said.

  “I see,” the man said expressionlessly.

  “You wanted the gold for yourselves,” McGarvey said softly. “But there is none down there.”

  Jones said nothing.

  “What I brought up was a solid lead bar, with a coating of gold to make it look authentic. Somebody was playing a trick.”

  Jones’s eyes narrowed. “You won’t get out of Argentina alive,” he said.

  “I think you are in more trouble here than you realize, Captain,” McGarvey continued. “This is your boat, and he was your mate. You’ll have to do something with the body.”

  “The police—”

  “Will do nothing. In Buenos Aires there are people who would be upset to learn that you have been dredging up old Nazi secrets. Powerful people who have influence with the police.”

  “Then I will kill you myself.”

  “You might try,” McGarvey said. “But I have a better solution for you.”

  Jones said nothing. Finally he inclined his head slightly.

  “There are a lot of lead bars down there to be salvaged.”

  “Lead is not worth the effort.”

  “But each bar is covered in gold. Maybe a few ounces each. Maybe eight hundred to a thousand dollars apiece. Not a fortune, but worth the effort.”

  “What about Jorge?” Jones asked.

  “The submarine holds many secrets,” McGarvey said. “One more will make no difference. Does he have family?”

  Jones shook his head. “How do I know if you’re telling the truth?”

  “The lead bar I brought from the bottom is in the saloon.”

  “I mean about what’s left on the bottom.”

  “Go see for yourself.”

  “I don’t dive …”

  “I think you do if the rewards are there.”

  Jones remained silent for a moment or two. He glanced at the companionway hatch. “What about you and the woman?”

  “We’ll leave tonight. Immediately.”

  “What’s to prevent you from turning this over to the police —or to your friends in Buenos Aires?”

  “For what reason?” McGarvey said. “We came looking for gold, and we did not find it.”

  “But you found something,” Jones said. “Something worth more than a
submarine filled with gold.”

  “Don’t press your luck,” McGarvey warned. “I’m offering you an easy way out. Take it.”

  “If I don’t?”

  “You won’t like the consequences. Believe me.”

  For a long time Jones just stared at McGarvey. Then he moved away from the companionway hatch. “I don’t want trouble.”

  McGarvey nodded. “Maria,” he called.

  She appeared at the hatch with their things. But she hesitated, not quite certain of the situation.

  “Go,” Jones said.

  McGarvey motioned for Maria to get off the boat. Quickly she crossed the deck and, timing her move to coincide with the boat’s motion in the surge, scrambled over the rail and onto the dock.

  “I heard the shot,” Jones said. “Did you kill him with his own gun?”

  “No,” McGarvey said at the rail. “Maria killed him.”

  “He was a friend,” Jones said, but McGarvey had clambered over the rail, and he and Maria were hurrying off the long dock into the town.

  27

  KURSHIN STOOD IN THE shadows at the end of the Puerto Lobos dock. A couple of the portholes were lit aboard the Yankee Girl. Other than that the rest of the tiny harbor was in darkness, except for the four-and-a-half-second flashing green light at the end of the breakwater.

  The wind was very strong. Even inside the harbor waves rose to three and four feet.

  He checked his watch. It was a few minutes after one-thirty. He’d stood in the darkness for a full five minutes to make certain no one was hidden either on the deck of the thirty-eight-foot converted pleasure craft or on the dock somewhere.

  Satisfied that there was no one, Kurshin took out his pistol and started for the boat.

  In his mind was a jumble of confused thoughts and images and emotions with McGarvey at the dark center of each.

  All of his failures—his disfavor with Baranov while the former KGB chief was still alive, and his own near death—could be attributed to McGarvey. But not to the American alone. In Kurshin’s mind, McGarvey always had an army of backers behind him. Soldiers. Highly trained CIA operatives. Fieldmen. Shooters. Technicians. He had the cooperation of all the Western intelligence services. He knew the federal police forces in every Western nation. And most galling of all, the man had been incredibly lucky.

  All of that had changed. Now the CIA was not his ally, nor were the police here in Argentina, or in France or in Germany. They all were looking for him.

  He had the girl, but as far as Kurshin knew she was no professional. Which left only the captain and crew of the small boat he’d hired. They’d have only as much loyalty as a few dollars would buy. They would not have the stomach for an all-out fight when the time came.

  Which left only McGarvey. This time it would be just the two of them. Head to head.

  The boats and the floating dock were heaving on the waves, sometimes violently. Kurshin had to time his move as he scrambled aboard, and as it was he lost his footing and fell heavily to the deck, banging his right elbow.

  He shifted the pistol to his left hand as the companionway hatch slid open and a heavyset man with pale hair looked out.

  “What the fuck … !”

  Kurshin was on Jones in an instant, jamming the barrel of the big pistol into his face. “Where is he?”

  “What are you talking about?” Jones rasped, but Kurshin could see in the man’s blue eyes that he was hiding something.

  Kurshin cocked the hammer. “I want McGarvey. Where is he?”

  “Gone. I swear it. Mother of God, the son of a bitch is gone.” A sharp stab of disappointment hit Kurshin’s chest. “Gone? Where? Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. He and his woman just left. I swear to God. What are you, the police? They killed my mate. Stabbed him in the back.”

  This was impossible. He had come halfway around the world, betraying Didenko and even killing the general’s soldiers in the process. He had come so fucking close. He tried to think it out. He’d passed no one heading north. The highway had been totally deserted.

  Unless they had seen his headlights first, and had shut theirs off before he spotted them. They could have pulled over to the side of the road and he might have missed them.

  But that was paranoia. They were still here. They had to be!

  “How long ago did they leave?”

  “A half hour. Maybe less. I swear to God, there’s no one here except me. Jorge is dead.”

  It had been more than two days since Kurshin had last slept, and he was having trouble keeping his thoughts straight.

  He could almost hear McGarvey’s laughter. The thought of it, the sound of it in his head nearly drove him crazy.

  “Jesus Christ, man, what’s the matter with you?” Jones said.

  Kurshin shot him in the head, driving him backward down the ladder into the saloon with a tremendous crash.

  For a full minute Kurshin remained at the companionway hatch, listening for a sound from below. Any sound. But there was nothing other than the wind howling in the rigging, and the boat’s hull banging against the rubber tires and the dock.

  Cautiously Kurshin went below, swinging his pistol left to right, sparks jumping in front of his eyes as he came from darkness into light.

  Jones lay on his back in a puddle of blood, his left eye destroyed. He was dead; there was absolutely no doubt about it. But there was a lot of blood. Too much blood, some of which led forward through an open door.

  Kurshin hesitated a moment. The man had told him that his mate was dead. Stabbed in the back. His body could have been dragged forward.

  Stepping carefully over Jones’s body, and around the blood, Kurshin looked in the forepeak. A short, swarthy man, dressed in dungarees and a yellow slicker, lay facedown in the lower bunk. The back of his jacket was covered with blood. He had been dead for some time.

  But why? Kurshin stepped back into the main saloon. What had happened here to cause McGarvey to kill one man, leave the other alive, and simply walk off with the woman? It didn’t make sense.

  Suddenly his eyes fell on something swaddled in a towel on the galley floor. He went over to it, bracing himself against the counter, and flipped aside a corner of the towel. It was a gold bar, a swastika and serial number stamped into the surface.

  They’d found the submarine and the gold. They’d apparently dived down to it and retrieved … what? He looked up. This gold bar at least. Others, perhaps? A lot more gold?

  Working quickly, it took Kurshin less than ten minutes to search the entire boat from the forepeak to the aft cabins, and from the bridge to the bilges. But there was no more gold, although he found the scuba gear, a couple of .223-caliber automatic rifles, the magnetometer equipment, and below, at the chart table, Jones’s calculations and sketches on the magnetometer readout strips. The navigational chart of the gulf showed not only their search pattern over the past three days, but the spot where they’d discovered the U-boat.

  He still wanted McGarvey, but this now offered another possibility.

  After memorizing the exact latitude and longitude of their find, he found a large plastic bag into which he stuffed the gold bar, still wrapped in the towel, the magnetometer strip graphs, and the gulf chart. Sealing the package with tape, he brought it topside, and making certain that no one was watching, he tossed it overboard.

  Kurshin was not particularly interested in wealth; he’d never been interested in having more than he needed for survival and a modicum of comfort. But there were others who thought differently. Once McGarvey and the woman were dead, presumably no one else would know about the treasure. It could be a powerful bargaining chip. Very soon he was going to have to face General Didenko.

  McGarvey would be dead, but the gold would be an offering. The KGB, especially in these times, was desperate for hard Western currencies to fund its foreign operations.

  Didenko would be interested. And the general had what Kurshin needed for survival: assignments, targets, kills.
>
  28

  THE STORM INTENSIFIED THROUGH the night, blowing sheets of rain against the windows of the Victory Hotel in Puerto Lobos. Even the bars along the waterfront had closed, and there was no traffic below on the street.

  McGarvey and Maria had gotten separate rooms for the night. In the morning they would rent a car and drive back to Viedma, where they would retrieve the airplane for the flight back to Buenos Aires. They would have to keep out of Esformes’s way until they could get a flight out of the country, but McGarvey foresaw no trouble from the federales. Nor did he expect Jones to try anything. The man had been sufficiently intimidated to keep his mouth shut. And he had the prospect of making a fair sum of money from the fake gold bars from the submarine.

  McGarvey had not been able to sleep. He stood in the darkness by the window, looking down on the deserted street as he smoked a cigarette.

  He had not bothered to ask Maria what her plans were. He figured she had only two options: remain in Buenos Aires to straighten out the mess with the federal police over Rothmann’s death, or pursue her search for the gold. He expected she would do the latter, and would fly to Lisbon at the first opportunity.

  A dark blue Chevrolet came down the street from the general direction of the waterfront, made a U-turn in front of the hotel, and parked at the end of the next block.

  It was nearly impossible to pick out details in the blowing rain, but after a moment the car’s lights went off and a lone figure got out.

  There was something faintly familiar about the person, and McGarvey’s stomach began to knot.

  He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and watched as the figure walked back toward the hotel.

  There was something … . But it was impossible, he told himself. It could not be.

  He reached for the telephone and dialed Maria’s room number, keeping his eyes on the approaching figure.

  And in the end the legions from your past shall arise to strike you down. The agent come out of the field will spend his final days looking over his shoulder. It is axiomatic.

  The figure stopped below and looked up. McGarvey pulled away from the window, his heart hammering. Christ!