CHAPTER 11

We were all at the dock again before six o'clock on that Monday morning. The four-hundred-ton motor vessel Mira had been brought alongside and was waiting to take aboard the coal that would be left when our two little steamers were bunkered. The men—our improvised stevedores—were there, waiting with sacks and shovels.

So NOIC thought he was going to put one over by dumping the whole lot on us at once. We'd show him!

But no coal arrived. By seven o'clock there was no coal, and at eight o'clock there was still no coal. At ten o'clock, Tim went off to Navy House to inquire and was told it was on the way, to stand by and be ready to whisk it off.

At ten-thirty Admiral Power's gift of supplies arrived. There were twenty-two cars—two hundred and twenty tons— in the train that backed slowly out on our pier and we went to work at once, off-loading. That was our first stevedoring job and it taxed Partisan ingenuity to the limit as some of the pieces were heavy and there were no mechanical aids for swinging them aboard. Even so, we made good progress and quickly loaded the little Bog s Nama to the Plimsoll mark; cases of biscuit, chocolate, cigarettes, medical supplies, and other such treasures were stacked in all available cabin space when the holds were full. By one o'clock even the well decks were piled deep and Tim was obliged to put what still remained—about half of the consignment—on one of the other ships for temporary storage.

As the coal was still expected from one moment to the next we worked at a furious pace to clear the tracks. Early in the afternoon the job was finished. The little train crept off the pier, back into the marshalling yards, but there was still no coal. Not until nine o'clock at night did those forty carloads arrive.

Tim was in charge on the pier that day. I was busy with other things. We needed, in addition to what the Admiral had sent, certain specific items for our first cargo, and these had to be obtained in Bari and hauled down to the pier in trucks at once. We needed boiler plates, lubricating oil, gasoline, heavy grease, diesel oil, kerosene. The mechanics working on the boilers needed an acetylene welding outfit. And above all we needed a ship to take us across to the other shore that very night, if possible. No two of these items appeared to be controlled by the same authority and once the items themselves had been obtained there was always the difficult matter of finding trucks to bring them to the pier; nevertheless we kept going and every hour brought fresh truckloads of supplies to our berth- Tim and Radic and their weary stevedores were a miracle of efficiency and kept the quayside clear, no matter how fast the goods arrived. By three o'clock in the afternoon everything appeared under control and I set out to find a ship for our first Dalmatian cruise.

There seemed no better way of proceeding than to walk

about in the harbor in search of a suitable vessel. I wanted

something small, well armed and fairly fast, if possible, and

presently I found a ship that appeared to answer this description. She was an American sub-chaser that had come in with a convoy during the morning. The next step was to go aboard, hail the skipper, find out to what duty he was assigned and whether he could be pried away from it for a day or two and would consent to ferry us across.

The "Captain" was a rangy, fair-haired Lieutenant, Junior Grade, from Chicago. He received me gallantly and introduced his second-in-command, another blond amiable young giant from the same part of the world. They were a couple of wonderful lads whose only complaint was that convoy duty had grown dull of late. After a little while I learned that they expected to lay over in Bari for several days and that they were thinking of having some work done on their engines . . . then I asked whether they would consent to take me across, if permission could be obtained for them to go.

Their response was overwhelming. They were madly eager to make the trip and insisted upon showing me over the little ship from the engine-room to the guns on the deck—an all-out effort to prove that her builders had created her specially for this mission. I promised to get in touch with the Admiral if orders for them to go could not be obtained through NOIC, but in their enthusiasm they followed me all the way to Navy House priming me with arguments which, they hoped, might soften the Admiral's heart if, at first, he took a poor view of the request.

NOIC could do nothing. The ship was not under his orders. There was no alternative but to go through to the Admiral's headquarters in Taranto and see whether anything could be done there. In due course the circuit was set up and once more the Admiral's hearty voice came booming down the line:

"Hello, Huot. What do you want today?" was his characteristic greeting. He was always wonderfully—almost alarmingly—direct. I never completed a conversation with him without thanking my stars that I was bom without a stutter.

"I'll see what I can do," he said, when I had stated the problem. "That ship probably has her orders right now, but if she can't go I'll try to find you another. How are you getting on up there? Have the supplies arrived?"

"Everything is going fine, thank you, sir; and the supplies are here. We already have them stowed."

"I'll send a man up to see you about that shipping line of yours in a few days, and he'll have an Italian naval officer along to help you seize the vessels that are still under the Italian flag."

"That's wonderful, sir. Will they be officially made over to the Partisans?"

"I don't know. He'll fix you up, I think. I don't know how he'll do it."

"Well, a thousand thanks to you, sir. We are greatly indebted. .. ."

"That's all right, Huot. Glad to help you. Good-bye."

An hour later my Chicago friends called at the Bog s Noma with long faces. I knew they had their orders—and not the orders they wanted—before they found their way aboard from watching them walk down the pier.

"We're taking a convoy out of here," the Lieutenant said. "Ain't it hell?"

It was disappointing. The idea of going across with them had been most attractive. The sub-chaser was not ideal, her speed being considerably reduced by the engine trouble they had hoped to deal with while laying over at Bari. In spite of their valiant efforts to persuade me that she was the best craft in the harbor for the mission I had been left with some misgivings; but they were ideal; there could be no misgivings about that. While we were commiserating with one another a messenger arrived from Navy House to say I was expected there at six o'clock for a conference; and would I bring the head of the Jugoslav group with me.

"The old boy has found someone else to take you over," the Lieutenant said, "God-damn it. We haven't fired a round except to check the guns in two months."

One ugly incident marked that otherwise felicitous day and forced us to pause and consider a new complication in our work.

In spite of her look of radiant vitality Olga was not too strong. Undernourishment during her adolescence, when she bloomed into her present rich womanliness, had left her with a cough that sometimes sounded suspiciously like tuberculosis. Tim and I knew nothing of it then, but Steve told us later, after we had noticed his anxiety and pressed him with questions. She needed lots of sleep and often went without it, but on this occasion, having been up at half past four to see that our stevedores were fed, nature asserted itself. During the morning she was taken ill and feeling faint went to bed.

Tim, realizing that she would not rest well aboard the noisy Bog s Nama where so much was happening, any more than an American housewife could rest in her own home during spring cleaning, had chivalrously run off to the Majestic Hotel and bullied the management into giving us the second room to which our requisition from the Town Mayor's office entitled us. It was a pleasant double room like ours, with bath, and Steve had taken Olga there at once and put her to bed.

As soon as she was comfortably installed, at about one o'clock, Steve had returned to the dock, and two hours later her unlocked door had been thrust open by an armed man who stayed a long time at the foot of her bed, keeping his pistol pointed at her head and delivering a most extraordinary ultimatum.

On entering the room he told her not to move her hands, which were holding a book, then he introduced himself, without giving his name, as an officer—a captain—in the Jugoslav army. He acknowledged, as his chief, Draja Mihailovic but he laid no claim to be acting under his orders.

"There are a good many of us here in Bari," he told her, "and we know what you and your American gangster friends are doing. There is no room in Jugoslavia for Communists and in our eyes those who refer to themselves as Partisans instead of by their right name are the worst of the lot. Those of us who are here are sworn to kill the lot of you unless you desist at once from this work you are doing in the port. Persuade your husband to go back where he came from with you and all your friends or take the consequences. You and your husband will die first, together with your American friends, then we'll pick the rest of you off one by one. We will not tolerate the movement of supplies from here to Tito's bandits on the coast."

Olga answered tactfully that she would probably not be able to do what he asked, no matter how hard she tried. She was sizing him up. He was calm and collected and had none of the assassin's fanaticism in his manner. She told him that she and her husband were both Catholics and asked him whether he really believed that one could be.a good Catholic and a Communist at the same time. Artfully, she drew him out, studying him closely, noting every detail of his apparel, his mannerisms, his features. . . .

For his effrontery he would die . . . she had already condemned him to death . . . the important thing was to have a perfect case, a perfect record of his appearance that would allow her people to hunt him down . . . and there was always the faint hope that one of them might walk in and kill him where he stood.

In this way she kept him talking for a litde more than half an hour. Before leaving he pleaded, trying to convert her, trying to show that her duty lay in repudiating the Partisans and "being true to the traditions of the educated class" to which she and her husband belonged in Jugoslavia. She made no effort to convert him. The only conversion she had in mind was that which would make a corpse of the officer that kept her looking into the barrel of his Browning automatic—"a pistol just like mine," she later explained.

Finally, he left, backing out of the door after reiterating his threats and giving her forty-eight hours to get her husband and his fellows out of the port with no supplies aboard the ship on which they sailed.

"Why are you prepared to let us go when you know that once we get back to Jugoslavia we will all be fighting for the Partisan movement?" she had asked him.

"General Mihailovic will deal with you over there," he answered her. "That is as it should be. We don't want to fight our battles on soil held by our allies for fear of embarrassing them. That's all. Just get out—but take no supplies beyond what you need in the way of food! We will know what you keep aboard the Bog s Nama. Take her and clear out without fuss or commotion. You have only two days in which to get out. After that you can take the consequences—and you'll be the first to take them."

Then he backed out.

As soon as the latch clicked behind him Olga was on her feet and across the room to the cupboard where her pistol lay in its polished brown holster on the Sam Browne belt, then, like a flash, she was back at the door, had thrown it wide and was peering into the hall; but her guest had vanished into the stairway and dressed as she was in what Tim would have called her "pin-up-giri outfit"—or less—she was unable to

follow him.

"Can you imagine," she said, "for once I go to bed without putting my pistol under the pillow, and that's what happens!" It was late in the afternoon before Steve, to whom her message was addressed, received it and hurried over to learn what had happened. He had just returned to the dock when the messenger from Navy House arrived.

Tim and Ivo Radic and I heard his story in the captain's cabin on the Bog s Nama. The "American gangsters" looked at one another without surprise, but meaningfully. So it had come to that! From now on we would be careful to go suitably armed in the port of Bari. Both of us had thought it odd the night before that Steve and Olga had worn their belts and pistols to dinner. Now we knew better.

We were learning about Jugoslavia. Our current business was with a determined race of men—and women.

"You take the matter up with Port Security," I told Tim. (The British secret police.) "I've got to get over to that meeting at Navy House and Steve has to come with me."

"I'll send the best man we have to the Majestic to sit with Olga until we can get back," Steve said. "She has her pistol in her right hand under the covers now. God help the next man that walks in there without knocking; but I'll be more comfortable if she has some friend with her. She won't get much rest as long as she's alone."

"Was she very frightened?" Ivo asked.

"No. She was mad," Steve grinned. "Missed the best shot of the season. But she needs some rest."

About that we were all agreed, then Tim went off to "raise" Security. Dusan sent the skipper of the Mira—a famous marksman—to sit with Olga until the police should arrive, then he and I set out for Navy House to attend the conference, leaving Ivo to help Petrinovic on the dock.