The Mediterranean Caper

  PROLOGUE

  It was oven hot, and it was Sunday. In the air traffic tower, the control operator at Brady Air Force Base lit a cigarette from a still glowing butt, propped his stocking feet on top of a portable air conditioner and waited for something to happen.

  He was totally bored, and for good reason. Air traffic was slow on Sundays. In fact, it was nearly nonexistent Military pilots and their aircraft rarely flew on that day in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations, particularly since no international political trouble was brewing at the moment. Occasionally a plane might set down or take off, but it was usually just a quick refueling stop for some VIP who was in a hurry to get to a conference somewhere in Europe or Africa.

  The control operator scanned the large flight schedule blackboard for the tenth time since he came on duty. There were no departures, and the only estimated time of arrival was at 1630, almost five hours away.

  He was young—in his early twenties—and strikingly refuted the myth that fair-haired people cannot tan well; wherever skin showed, it looked like dark walnut laced with strands of platinum blond hair. The four stripes on his sleeve denoted the rank of a Staff Sergeant, and although the temperature was touching ninety-eight degrees, the armpits of his khaki uniform displayed no damp sweat stains. The collar on his shirt was open and missing a tie; a custom normally allowed at Air Force facilities located in warm atmospheres.

  He Leaned forward and adjusted the louvers on the air conditioner so that the cool air ran up his legs. The new position seemed to satisfy him. and he smiled at the refreshing tingle. Then, clasping his hands behind his head, he relaxed backward, staring at the metal ceiling.

  The ever-present thought of Minneapolis and the girls parading Nicollet Avenue crossed his mind. He counted again the fifty-four days left to endure before he was rotated back to the States. When each day came it was ceremoniously marked off in a small black notebook he carried in his breast pocket.

  Yawning for perhaps the twentieth time, he picked up a pair of binoculars that were sitting on the window ledge, and surveyed the parked aircraft that rested on the dark asphalt runway stretching beneath the elevated control tower.

  The runway lay on the island of Thasos in the northern part of the Aegean Sea. The island was separated from the Greek Macedonia mainland by sixteen miles of water. appropriately called the Thasos Strait The Thasos land mass consisted of one hundred and seventy square miles of rock, timber and remnants from classical history dating back to One Thousand B.C.

  Brady Field, as generally termed by the base personnel, was constructed under a treaty between the United States and the Greek government in the late nineteen sixties. Except for ten F-105 Starfire Jets, the only other permanently based aircraft were two monstrous C-133 Cargomaster transports that sat like a pair of fat silver whales, glistening in the blazing Aegean sun.

  The sergeant pointed the binoculars at the dormant aircraft and searched for signs of life. The field was empty. Most of the men were either in the nearby town of Panaghia drinking beer, sunbathing on the beach or napping in the air-Cooled barracks. Only a solitary MP guarding the main gate, and the constant rotation of the radar antennae atop its cement bunker offered any form of human presence. He slowly raised the lenses and peered over the azure sea. It was a bright, cloudless day, and he could easily recognize details on the distant Greek mainland. The glasses swung east and gathered in the horizon line where deep blue water met light blue sky. Through the shimmering haze of heat waves the white speck of a ship resting at anchor came into view. He squinted and adjusted the focus knob to clarify the ship’s name on the bow. He could just barely make out the tiny black words: First Attempt.

  That's a dumb name. he thought. The significance escaped him. Other markings also darkened the ship’s hull. In long, heavy, black lines across the center of the bull were the vertical letters NUMA which he knew stood for the National Underwater Marine Agency.

  A huge crooked crane stood on the stern of the ship and hung over the water, lifting a round ball-like object from the depths. The sergeant could see men laboring about the crane, and he felt inwardly glad that civilians had to work on a Sunday too. Suddenly his visual exploration was cut short by a robot-like voice over the intercom.

  “Hello, Control Tower, this is Radar. . . Over!”

  The sergeant laid down the binoculars and flicked a microphone switch. “This is the Control Tower, Radar. What’s up?”

  “I’ve got a contact about ten miles to the west.”

  “Ten miles west?” boomed the sergeant. “That’s inland over the island. Your contact is practically on top of us.” He turned and looked again at the big lettered blackboard, reassuring himself that no scheduled flights were due. “Next time, let me know sooner?”

  “Beats me where it came from,” droned the voice from the radar bunker. “Nothing has shown on the scope in any direction under one hundred miles in the last six hours.”

  “Well either stay awake down there or get your-damn equipment checked,” snapped the sergeant. He released the mike button and grabbed the binoculars.

  Then he stood up and peered to the west.

  It was there. . . a tiny dark dot, flying low over the hills at tree top level. It came slow; no more than ninety miles an hour. For a few moments it seemed to hang suspended over the ground, and then, almost all at once, It began to take on shape. The outlines of the wings and fuselage drew into sharp focus through the binoculars. It was so dear as to be unmistakable. The sergeant gaped in astonishment as the rattley-bang engine sound of an old single seat, biwing airplane complete with rigid, spoked wheel landing gear, tore the arid island air. Except for the protruding in-line cylinder head, the fuselage followed a streamlined shape that tapered to straight skies at the open cockpit The great wooden propeller beat the air like an old windmill, pulling the ancient craft over the landscape at a tortoise-like air speed. The fabric covered wings wavered in the wind and showed the early characteristic scalloped trailing edge. From the spinner enclosing the propeller hub to the rear tips of the elevators, the entire machine was painted a bright and flamboyant yellow. The sergeant lowered the glasses just as the plane displaying the familiar black Maltese Cross markings of World War I Germany, flashed by the control tower.

  In another circumstance the sergeant would have probably dropped to the floor if an airplane buzzed the control tower at no more than five feet. But his amazement at seeing a very real ghost from the dim skies of the Western Front was too much for his senses to grasp, and he stood stock still. As the plane passed, the pilot brazenly waved from his cockpit. He was so close that the sergeant could see the features of his face under the faded leather helmet and goggles. The spectre from the past was grinning and patting the butts of the twin machine guns, mounted on the cowling.

  Was this some sort of colossal joke? Is the pilot a nutty Greek with a circus? Where did he come from? The sergeant’s brain spun with questions but no answers. Suddenly he became aware of twin, blinking spots of light, emitting behind the propeller of the plane. Then the glass of the control tower windows shattered and disappeared around him.

  A moment in time stopped and war came to Brady Field. The pilot of the World War I fighter dipped around the control tower and strafed the sleek modern jets parked lazily on the runway. One by one the F-105 Starfires were raked and slashed by ancient eight millimeter bullets that tore into their thin aluminum skin. Three of them burst into flames as their full tanks of jet fuel ignited. They burned fiercely, melting the soft asphalt into smoking puddles of tar. Again and again, the bright yellow flying antique soared over the field, spitting a leaden stream of destruction. One of the C-133 Cargomasters went next. It erupted in a gigantic roar of flames that rose hund
reds of feet into the air.

  In the tower the sergeant lay on the floor, looking dazedly at a red trail of blood that oozed from his chest. He gently pulled the black notebook from his breast pocket and stared in fascinated surprise at a small. neat hole in the middle of the cover. A dark veil began to circle his eyes and he shook it off. Then he struggled to his knees and looked around the room.

  Glittering fragments of broken glass blanketed the floor, the radio equipment, the furniture. In the center of the room, the air conditioner lay upside down’ like a dead mechanical animal: its legs thrown stiffly in the air and its coolant trickling onto the floor from several round punctures. The sergeant dull peered up at the radio. Miraculously It was untouched. Painfully, he crawled across the floor slicing his knees and hands on the crystal slivers. He reached the microphone and grasped it tightly, bloodying the black plastic handle.

  Darkness crowded the sergeant’s thoughts. What is the proper procedure, he wondered? What does one say at a time like this? Say something his mind shouted, say anything!

  “To all who can hear my voice. MAY DAY! MAY DAY! This is Brady Field. We are under attack by an unidentified aircraft. This is not a drill, I repeat, Brady Field is under attack...”

  1

  Major Dirk Pitt adjusted the headset on his thick black hair and slowly turned the channel crank on the radio, trying to fine-tune the reception. He listened intently for a few moments, his dark, sea-green eyes reflecting a trace of bewilderment A frown cut his forehead in a series of grooves and hung there in the tanned leathery skin.

  It wasn’t that the words crackling over the receiver weren’t understandable. They were. He just didn’t believe them. He listened again, and listened hard over the droning roar of the PBY Catalina’s twin engines. The voice he heard was fading, when it should have been getting stronger. The volume control was turned to full on, and, Brady Field was only thirty miles away. Under those conditions, the air traffic operator’s voice should have blasted Pitt’s eardrums out. The operator is either losing power or he’s seriously injured, thought Pitt He pondered a minute and then reached over to his right and shook the sleeping figure in the co-pilot’s seat.

  “Come out of it, sleeping beauty.” He spoke in a tone that was soft and effortless, yet had a way of making itself heard in a throbbing airplane or a crowded room.

  Captain Al Giordino wearily raised his head and yawned loudly. The fatigue of sitting in an old vibrating PBY flying boat for thirteen hours straight was evident in his dark, bloodshot eyes. He flung his arms upward, puffed out his barrel chest and stretched. Then he came erect and leaned forward, peering out in the distance beyond the cockpit windows.

  “Are we over the First Attempt yet?” Giordino mumbled through another yawn.

  “Almost,” replied Pitt. “There’s Thasos dead ahead.”

  “Oh hell,” Giordino grunted; then grinned. “I could have slept another ten minutes. Why’d you wake me?”

  “I intercepted a message from Brady Control that said the field was under attack by an unidentified aircraft”

  “You can’t be serious,” Giordino said incredulously. “It must be some kind of a joke.”

  “No, I don’t think so. The control operator’s voice didn’t sound like it was faking.’ Pitt hesitated and kept an eye on the water only fifty feet away as it flashed under the PBY’s hull. Just for practice he had wave-hopped the last two hundred miles; a means of keeping his reflexes honed and sharp.

  “It might be that Brady Control was telling the truth,” said Giordino, peering through the cockpit windshield. “Look over there toward the eastern part of the island.”

  Both men stared at the approaching mound rising out of the sea. The beaches bordering the surf were yellow and barren, but the round sloping hills were green with trees. The colors danced in the heat waves and vividly contrasted against the encircling blue of the Aegean. On the eastern side of Thasos a large pillar of smoke rose into the windless sky and fanned a giant, spiral-shaped, black cloud. The PBY's bow soared closer to the island, and soon they could distinguish the orange movement of flames at the base of the smoke.

  Pitt grabbed the mike and pressed the button on the side of the handgrip. “Brady Control, Brady Control, this is PBY-086, over.” There was no response.

  Pitt repeated the call twice more.

  “No answer?” queried Giordino.

  “Nothing,” returned Pitt.

  “You said an unidentified aircraft. I take it, that means one?”

  “That’s precisely what Brady Control said before they went off the air.”

  “It doesn’t make sense. Why would one plane attack a United States Air Force Base?”

  “Who knows,” Pitt said, easing the control column back slightly. “Maybe it’s an irate Greek farmer who’s tired of our jets scaring his goals. Anyway. it can’t be a full-scale attack, or Washington would have notified us by now. We’ll have to wait and see” He rubbed his eyes and blinked away the drowsiness. “Get ready, I’m going to take her up, circle in over those hills and come down out of the sun for a closer look.”

  “Take it nice and easy.” Giordino’s eyebrows came together and he grinned a serious grin. “This old bus is way overmatched if that’s a rocket firing jet down there.”

  “Don’t worry,” Pitt laughed. “My main goal in life is to stay healthy as long as possible.” He pushed the throttles forward, and the two Pratt & Whitney Wasp engines increased their beat. His large, brown hands moved efficiently, pulling back on the control column, and the plane aimed its flat snout at the sun. The big Catalina rose steadily, gaining altitude by the second, and circled above the Thasos mountains in the direction of the growing smoke cloud.

  Suddenly, a voice broke in over Pitt’s headset. The unexpected sound nearly deafened his ears before he could lower the volume—the same voice be heard before, but stronger this time.

  “This is Brady Control calling. We are under attack! I repeat, we are under attack! Come in anybody, please reply!” The voice was near hysteria.

  Pitt replied, “Brady Control, this is PBY-086. Over.”

  “Thank God, someone answered,” the voice gasped.

  “I tried to raise you before, Brady Control, but you faded and went off the air.”

  “I was hit in the first attack, I.. . I must have passed out I’m all right now.” The words sounded broken, but coherent

  “We’re approximately ten miles west of you at six thousand feet.” Pitt spoke slowly and did not repeat his position. “What is your situation?”

  “We have no defense. All our aircraft were destroyed on the ground. The nearest interceptor squadron is seven hundred miles away. They’ll never get here in time. Can you assist?”

  Pitt shook his head from side to side from habit. “Negative Brady Control. My top speed is under one hundred ninety knots and I only have a couple of rifles on board. We’d be wasting our time engaging a jet.”

  “Please assist,” the voice pleaded. "Our attacker is not a jet bomber but a World War I biplane. I repeat, our attacker is a World War I biplane. Please assist.”

  Pitt and Giordino merely looked at each other, dumbfounded. It was a full ten seconds before Pitt could pull his senses back into reign.

  “Okay, Brady Control, we’re coming in. But you’d better know your aircraft identification or you’re going to make a pair of little old silver-haired mother damn sad if my co-pilot and I buy the farm. Over and out.” Pitt turned to Giordino and spoke quickly without facial expression his tone confident and calculating. “Go aft and throw open the side hatches. Use one of the carbines and make like a sharpshooter.”

  “I can’t believe what I'm hearing,” Giordino said stunned.

  Pitt shook his head. “I can’t quite accept it either, but we’ve got to give those guys down there on the ground a helping hand. Now hurry it up.”

  “I’ll do it,” Giordino muttered. “But I still don’t believe it.”

  “Yours is not to reason w
hy, my friend,” Pitt lightly punched Giordino on the arm and smiled briefly.

  “Good luck.”

  “Save it for yourself, you bleed just as easily as I do,” Giordino said soberly. Then, muttering quietly under his breath, he rose from the co-pilot’s seat and made his way to the ship’s waist. Once there he pulled the thirty caliber carbine from an upright cabinet and shoved a fifteen shot clip into the receiver. A blast of warm air struck his face, filling the compartment when he opened the waist batches. He checked the gun once more and sat down to wait; his thoughts drifting to the big man who was piloting the plane. Giordino had known Pitt for a long time. They’d played together as boys, ran on the same high school track team and dated the same girls. He knew Pitt better than any man alive; any woman too, for that matter.

  Pitt was, in a sense, two men, neither of them directly related to the other. There was the coldly efficient Dirk Pitt who rarely made a mistake, and yet was humorous, unpretentious and easily made friends with everyone who came in contact with him; a rare combination.

  Then there was the other Pitt, the moody one the one who often withdrew to himself for hours at a time and became remote and aloof, as though his mind were constantly churning over some distant dream. There had to be a key that unlocked and opened the door between the two Pitts, but Giordino had never found it. He did know, however, that the transition from one Dirk Pitt to the other took place more frequently in the past year— since Pitt lost a woman in the sea near Hawaii; a woman he had loved deeply.

  Giordino remembered noticing Pitt’s eyes before coming back to the main cabin; how the deep green had transformed to a glinting brightness at the call of danger. Giordino had never seen eyes quite like them. except once. and he shuddered slightly at the recollection as he glanced at the missing finger on his right hand. He jerked his thoughts back to the reality of the present and slid off the safety catch on the carbine. Then, strangely. he felt secure.

  Back in the cockpit, Pitt’s tanned face was a study in masculinity. He was not handsome in the movie star sense: far from it Women rarely, if ever, threw themselves at him. They were usually a little awed and uncomfortable in his presence. They somehow sensed that he was not a man who catered to feminine wiles or silly coquettish games. He loved women’s company and the feel of their soft bodies, but he disliked the subterfuge, the lies, and all the other ridiculous little ploys it took to seduce the average female. Not that he lacked cleverness at getting a woman between the sheets; be was an expert. But he had to force himself to play the game. He preferred straightforward and honest women, but there were far too few to be found. Pitt eased the control column forward, and the PBY nosed over in a shallow dive toward the inferno at Brady Field. The white altimeter needles slowly swung backward around the black dial, registering the descent. He steepened the angle, and the twenty-five year old aircraft began to vibrate. It was not built for high speed. It was designed for low speed reconnaissance, dependability and long range, but that was about all.