He broke through at the side of the dinghy and Orsini pulled him over. There was a muffled roar and the dinghy rocked in the turbulence. The surface of the water boiled and wreckage bobbed up, sand and mud spreading in a great stain toward the reeds.
They waited for fifteen minutes, and gradually the water cleared again and the hull of the launch became visible. Orsini nodded and Chavasse went over the side.
There was still a lot of sand and mud hanging in suspension like a great curtain, obscuring his vision, but not seriously, and he went down toward the Teresa.
The explosion had even disturbed the entrance to the companionway, the turbulence blowing the wreckage back out onto the deck, and he passed through the salon himself with no trouble.
Where the door to the cabin had been, there was now only a gaping hole, and he swam forward, paused for a moment and then moved inside.
The tiered bunks were still intact but bedding floated against the bulkhead, moving languorously in the water like some living thing. He pushed his way through their pale fronds and looked for the Madonna. It became immediately obvious that he was wasting his time. There was no five-foot bundle wrapped in oilskins as Francesca had described.
The Madonna was carved out of ebony, a heavy wood, but one that would float, and he drifted up through the waving blankets, pulling them to one side, searching desperately, but he was wasting his time.
Back outside, he grabbed for the stern rail and floated there like some strange sea creature, his webbed feet hanging down. Perhaps Francesca had been wrong. Maybe her brother had moved it to some other place in the launch. And there was always the chance that it had been blown clear in the explosion.
He decided to start again, working his way from one end of the launch to the other. But first he had to let Orsini know what had happened.
He surfaced a few feet away from the dinghy and went under again in the same moment. Orsini was standing with his back to him, hands above his head. On the far side of the dinghy was a flat-bottomed marsh punt, an outboard motor at its stern. Its occupants were three Albanians in drab and dirty uniforms, on their peaked caps the red star of the Army of the Republic. Two of them menaced Orsini and Francesca with submachine guns while the third was in the act of stepping across.
Chavasse went under the dinghy in a shallow dive as submachine-gun fire churned the water where he had surfaced. His Aqua-lung scraped the bottom of the punt and he reached up, grabbed the thwart and pulled the frail craft completely over.
One of the soldiers sprawled against him, legs thrashing in a panic, and Chavasse slipped an arm around his neck and took him into deep water. His legs scraped painfully against the stern rail of the Teresa and he hung on with one hand, tightening his grip.
The soldier’s face twisted to one side, hands clawing back, wrenching the breathing tube from his assailant’s mouth. Chavasse tightened his lips and hung on. The man’s limbs moved in slow motion, weakening perceptibly, until suddenly he stopped struggling altogether. Chavasse released his grip and the body spun away from him.
The sand at the bottom of the lagoon had churned into a great cloud and he clamped the mouthpiece of his breathing tube between his teeth and struck out for the surface. Above him there was a tremendous disturbance, limbs thrashing together in a violent struggle.
He came up into the center of it, pulling his knife from his sheath, and struck out at a dim, khaki-clad shape. The soldier bucked agonizingly, shoving Chavasse away so that he broke through to the surface.
A couple of yards away from him, a fifteen-foot motor boat bumped against the dinghy. He was aware of Francesca struggling in the grip of two soldiers, of Orsini floating against the hull, blood on his face.
A soldier rushed to the rail, machine gun leveled, and a man in a dark leather coat with a high fur collar ran forward and knocked the barrel to one side, the bullets discharging themselves harmlessly in the sky.
“Alive! I want him alive!”
For one brief moment Chavasse looked up into Adem Kapo’s excited face, then he jackknifed and went down through the water, his webbed feet driving him toward the edge of the lagoon. He swam into the reeds, forcing his way through desperately. A few moments later he surfaced. Behind him he could hear voices calling excitedly, and then the engine of the motor boat coughed into life.
He broke through into the main channel, moved straight across it into a narrow tributary and started to swim for his life.
TEN
THE MOTOR BOAT TURNED OUT OF A side channel into the main stream of the Buene River, the dinghy trailing behind on a line. In the stern, four soldiers huddled together, smoking cigarettes and talking in low tones. The bodies of their two comrades, killed in the lagoon by Chavasse, lay under a tarpaulin beside them.
Orsini was handcuffed to the rail and seemed half unconscious, his head roughly bandaged where a rifle butt had struck him a glancing blow. There was no sign of Francesca Minetti, but Adem Kapo paced the foredeck, impatiently smoking a cigarette, the fur collar of his hunting jacket turned up.
Orsini watched him, eyes half closed, and after a while, another man appeared from the companionway. He was as big as Orsini with a scarred, brutal face and wore the uniform of a colonel in the Army of the Albanian Republic with the green insignia of the Intelligence Corps on his collar.
Kapo turned on him, eyes like black holes in his small face. “Well?”
The colonel shrugged. “She isn’t being very helpful.”
The anger blazed out of the little man like a searing flame. “You said it would work, damn you. That all we had to do was wait and they’d walk right into the net. What in the hell am I supposed to tell them in Tirana?”
“What do you think he’s going to do, swim out of here?” The big man laughed coldly. “We’ll run him down, never fear. A night out on his own in a place like this will shrink him down to size.”
“Let’s hope you’re right.”
Kapo walked across to Orsini, looked down at him for a moment, then kicked him in the side. Orsini continued to feign unconsciousness. Kapo turned away and resumed his pacing.
AS THE MOTOR BOAT ROUNDED A POINT OF land jutting from the mist into the river, Chavasse parted the reeds carefully. He stood up to his chest in water no more than fifteen yards away as it passed and his trained eyes took in everything – Orsini and the soldiers, Kapo standing in the prow, the cigarette holder jutting from a corner of his mouth.
The most interesting thing was the presence of Tashko. When Chavasse had last encountered him, he had been dressed like any seaman off the Taranto waterfront; now he wore the uniform of a colonel in the Albanian Intelligence Corps, which explained a lot. Beyond him, through the deckhouse window, Chavasse could just see the head and shoulders of Haji, the knife man, standing at the wheel.
The motor boat passed into the mist and he waded onto a piece of comparatively dry land to take stock of the situation. The stench of the marsh filled his nostrils and the bitter cold ate into his bones.
There was a hell of a lot about the whole affair that didn’t make any kind of sense, but the basic situation was obvious enough. Adem Kapo was no ordinary agent, but someone a lot more important than that. Probably a high-ranking sigurmi officer. He’d have to be to have a colonel of Intelligence taking orders from him.
In any event he was a man who knew what he was doing. He’d obviously sailed straight for the Buene from Matano and his twenty-four-hour start had given him the time he’d needed to reach Tama and organize a suitable reception.