CHAPTER 13

IM AND I EXCUSED OURSELVES THAT EVENING AND DINED alone. We needed an hour together to bring each other up-to-date on the day's events and we needed another hour together to plan the next forty-eight hours; we needed a couple of hours together just to relax a little. The pace was hard and we were just beginning. It would become even harder. We ~ensed that unless we saved our strength by making the odd moments spent with food as restful as possible we might not be able to sustain it.

Tim said, when we were seated in the dining room: "If these Partisans are typical of their kind I don't wonder that Tito wins battles. They work without pay. Their only reward is to get things done. They get so tired they stagger, but they won't quit. All you have to do is exfose them to work, like setting a match to powder."

The sky had become overcast during the afternoon and as we waited for our dinner the storm struck. A gusty wind, laden with rain, shook the windows and drummed upon the

panes beside us.

"Do you think they'll keep at it, shoveling coal, in this

weather?" I asked.

"They'll be there," Tim said. "This won't stop them. Nothing will."

I was more anxious about Olga's visitor than I had been willing to admit at the pier and questioned Tim about the details of his arrangements with the Security section. He had been very thorough, as usual.

"Port Security took a serious view of the case," he said. "They put a lot of men on it; but our safety depends largely on our own defences, it seems to me. No one can protect us against an assassin hiding in the shadows at the port, or waiting out there in the rain now for us to finish dinner and come through the doorway looking for the car—no one but the intended victim. We'll just have to keep the forty-fives on the half-cock with one in the spout and be ready to go into action fast. . . and walk warily."

We were both armed now, of course, even in the dining room, our pistols slung inside our field jackets under the left arm in the regulation Air Force holster. By drawing the zipper on the front of the jacket only halfway up and leaving the top button undone the gun could be kept ready to hand, and fortunately we were both fairly expert in the use of the weapon, particularly in the dark, commando style.

I told Tim about the conversation with the Admiral in the course of which he had promised to send someone up to see us about the ships. That cheered him up.

"If he should come while I'm away," I told him, "be sure to have everything confirmed in writing. We can't keep on calling Admiral Power every day, so be sure that any arrangements are concluded in such form that they'll stick."

"You bet I will," he answered.

It was eleven o'clock when we left the table and went out in the driving rain to look for Tony, the driver, and his rickety little taxicab. We found him sleeping quietly behind the wheel, cheerful as a sparrow. His overtime was accumulating and no one had ever paid him to snooze before.

"Good weather for your trip—if it holds," Tim grinned.

At the end of the pier we found our bare-footed friends toiling in the darkness and the torrential rain. The coal had arrived at last. Several cars had already been unloaded and Petrinovic was working the men in shifts, resting one weary crew while he used the other. Except for one hurricane lamp in the car the men were unloading there was no violation of blackout.

"How's the rakjia holding out?" Tim joked.

"It's a good thing we had the presence of mind to bring over a small barrel of it," Petrinovic answered. "It's a great help to the men."

When we were below, in the stuffy, dimly-lit cabin of the Bog s Nama, Tim produced two tiny pills from his watch pocket and gave one to Petrinovic. "Take it," he said, "it'll do you good . . ." and he washed his down with a gulp of the fiery white rakjia. Petrinovic grinned and swallowed his without asking any questions. It could have, been cyanide ... or sugar.

"Benzedrine:1" I said to Tim.

"Yeh, we'll need it tonight."

"Are you planning, to stay all night?" I asked.

"Sure. It's the least I can do—spell the old boy off now and then."

I stayed a little while, then returned to the hotel and went to bed. The next day would be a long one, and there would be little or no opportunity to sleep at the end of it as dusk would find us well out to sea on our way to Jugoslavia.

The next day began at seven in the morning when Tim came stumbling in, grey with fatigue, dirty and soaked to the skin. He shivered through a cold bath then went to bed "for half an hour—just to get warm . . ." while Ivo and I were getting dressed.

As we went down to breakfast I warned him: "You mustn't take it too hard. You've got to last until we can get some help here, which probably means until that reconnaissance party arrives from Africa—maybe ten days or more."

"I'll last," he answered, looking as though he would collapse before reaching the dining room. "I'll get some rest tonight."

That day, Tuesday, was much like the one before. There were interminable errands to be run by Tim and me; there was constant pressure on us both—and on everyone else—at the pier. The coal was all stored away a few minutes after eleven o'clock. NOIC, we learned, was duly impressed. I called on the captain of destroyers—Captain Dee—as the Admiral had suggested, but he had little information about the other shore which we could use. His zone of operations lay south of the Neretva River mouth and we were interested in the waters north of that point.

Hurry as we would throughout that day we were always ten minutes late, until three o'clock when Steve and I paused to get some food before going aboard the Gull.

Taylor was worried when we reached his ship, although he said nothing beyond welcoming us aboard and showing us where to stow our guns and musette bags. (Mladineo and I were armed with a Marlin each, in addition to our pistols.) He stamped back and forth along the deck, noting every detail of its disorder with evident bad temper and dissatisfaction. Finally he said: "We're late, waiting for Sparks"—the inevitable name for the radio operator—"who has been ashore for hours trying to get that damned circuit of his set up. I've sent word for him to come down at once."

Just then Radic arrived puffing at the quay. I had promised to see his wife in Vis and he now had a letter for me to take to her—a letter and a bundle. "Dirty clothes," he explained. "She can do them up and send them back to me."

Twenty minutes later Sparks arrived, appearing even more unhappy than his skipper.

"What's the matter?" the latter asked, testily. "You know we were scheduled to leave at 1600 hours."

Sparks had encountered difficulty in erecting a suitable an-ennae only to discover, when he completed the task, that the ne available radio set at Navy House was in need of repairs. Te had worked frantically to get them made in time, but he

ould need at least another half an hour to get the set ticking.

Taylor put the case up to me. "What do you think, Major? Shall we go without radio communication?"

Any delay now would oblige us to enter the port of Vis in broad daylight, which might be very dangerous. Mladineo had explained to me that ships like the Gull are seldom bombed or machine-gunned by German aerial patrols if they lie quietly in port during the daylight hours, but they were almost certain to be shot up and bombed if still at sea when the patrols came over early in the morning.

There was one other angle, too. Mladineo had suggested to me that we approach a lonely house he knew on the south shore of Vis before daybreak and there inquire whether the port, around on the eastern tip of the island, was still in Partisan hands. In this way we would avoid going into a trap from which there would be no escape, if the Germans were now at the town of Vis. We might find Germans at the little house on the south shore too, but they would be few and, armed as we were, we could hope to deal with them; but this plan was without meaning unless we allowed ourselves time to escape back over the horizon before daybreak, should there prove to be Germans there.

"Let's go without it, if you don't mind," I answered. "We won't need it anyway."

Taylor's happy grin was reassuring. He had not been worrying about his radio circuit: his only fear was that we would take an unfriendly view of these troubles at the last minute, consider him a sloppy skipper. . . .

"Right. . . . Cast off!" he shouted, and a few moments later we were moving out through the gate in the boom, headed for the open sea.

The Gull's big engines droned sweetly underfoot and the little ship quartered the long swell with a lazy roll as we set our course one degree west of north. A few white cumulous clouds lay on the horizon before us, but the sky was otherwise clear and bright.

"Looks to me like a clear night with a strong wind out of the northeast," Taylor said, suddenly materializing beside me on the deck. "I never thought we'd conduct our first operation—or any other operation, for that matter—under a full moon."