The Proxy Assassin (4 page)

Princess Stela had taken pains to portray Frank Wisner as a lonesome hero fighting to save the
Volksdeutche
in 1945. I didn't doubt it, though the story of the Russians rounding up ethnic Germans was new to me. What got me to wondering was how Princess Stela knew I was important enough to
Wisner to make that effort. She was a surprise guest, she and Wisner didn't have a moment alone.

Step back, Schroeder. Stop speculating. They teach you at spy school that speculation is akin to masturbation. You get where you want to go far too quickly. I wasn't the person Princess Stela was trying to reach with her adoring tale of Frank Wisner's heroism.

Princess Stela was addressing herself to Frank Wisner.

The
troops filtered back to the little fort after dark, wearing civvies. They changed into their olive drab in a low-roofed outbuilding, an old hog pen or hay shed.

The Captain made them stand to attention on the grass in front of the little fort at 2300 hours. Dragomir had equipped them well. They held recent vintage Lee-Enfield repeating rifles at present arms. He walked the line, inspecting them as if they were Beefeaters guarding Buckingham Palace.

When the inspection was complete the Captain told the men to stand down and addressed them in their native language. The part of his speech where he said they would not be permitted to carry their rifles was evident from their furrowed brows.

I'd told Frank Wisner I had doubts about his well-intentioned campaign to support indigenous anti-Communist elements in Eastern Europe – good intentions being the paver stones of the road to hell. This was a good example. OPC wanted to avoid a bloody international incident so they gave me strict instructions. ‘No heavy or long range weaponry permitted on the reconnaissance probe. Self-defense weapons only.'

The OPC meant sidearms. But none of the Dragomir's poor peasants owned anything as exotic as a Mauser or a.38 Special. A self-defense weapon to them was a knife. Or rock.

We would be marching into what I had recently learned was hostile territory with what I had even-more-recently learned would be soldiers carrying no weapons of any kind.

We had half an hour to kill so Captain Dragomir invited me inside for a libation. The elderly valet must have seen the empty bottle I'd left outside because I wasn't offered peat moss or gasoline. He poured me a cold Ursus beer with a wry smile.

I
drank thirstily, waiting for the Captain to finally unveil his master plan to overthrow the puppet regime in Bucharest. But he remained silent as he used a bootjack to pull off his tasseled hessians, then stepped into a pair of lower-cut boots more suitable for a long march.

He was worried about his men, what else? He hadn't refused Wisner's no-rifles' decree but it had to piss him off.

I felt a pang of sympathy for the man. It had to do with his socks. He had been doing his best to maintain his appearance as a well-appointed potentate, field marshal, kingfish and all around Big Chief Itch and Rub. But his socks told a different story. They had been darned so often it was hard to tell if their original color was brown or green.

My money was on brown. The toes and heels were mostly green.

-----

There might be safety in numbers in combat but not in espionage. The only reason I survived behind German lines in World War II was that I operated solo. And I had a trick. I would dig a three-foot hidey hole not 100 feet from my recon post. If spotted I could be in that hole in five seconds flat with a neatly trimmed cover of peat pulled over, the cover sprayed with a canister the OSS gave me to put off the German Shepherds. I'm not sure what was in it but you'll never hear me speak ill of skunks.

But Frank Wisner wanted the Captain's men put through their paces. So we would skip down the road together, hand in hand.

We set out promptly at zero hundred hours. The men were skilled, they knew to march in twos, widely spaced. And to keep their yaps shut.

The night was fine, cool and starwashed. The road twisted up the mountainside, perpendicular to the main road I had
visited earlier. It was gravel at first, then packed dirt as we climbed higher.

The foliage crowded in as the road narrowed. It grew cold. Animals scurried in the brush as we passed. Captain Dragomir led the procession, I brought up the rear.

We kept up a good pace until a single rifle report rang out. A nearby tree trunk took the hit.

Dragomir and his men hit the dirt as one. I took a knee and listened.

Don't prone yourself out in a combat zone, if you want my advice. It limits your mobility, and sightlines. I learned this important lesson from observing a young woman in the farm country outside Karlsruhe.

She was herding a few scrawny goats down the road when she heard the scream of a P-51 Mustang swooping down for the kill. She bit the dust. The P-51 flew past.

Well done and executed. Except the young goatherd kept flat a moment too long. Two five-ton German half-tracks, the Mustang's intended prey, roared out of a stand of trees they'd been hiding in and ground the poor girl to grist under their caterpillar tracks.

Combat is fight or flight. I'm partial to flight myself but it's hard to do either when your nose is in the dirt. Keep a knee up, keep your head up. We'll all be prone soon enough.

No
more rifle fire commenced. I got my trusty Walther P-38 in hand and listened hard.

No sounds of motion, whoever took a potshot at us remained in place. I fired twice in the general direction of the rifle round. Someone took off through the underbrush.

We had crossed some perimeter most likely and a lone sentry had cranked a round at the sound of marching feet. A polite warning as these things go. But we had been found out, the road was not our friend.

I had followed my OPC instructions to the letter so far but I wasn't going to march Captain Dragomir's men into an ambush just to prove they could follow orders. I would do it my way from here on.

Dragomir climbed to his feet. His men followed suit a moment later. He dusted himself off furiously, his dignity offended.

I told him in a whisper that he was to take his men back to the little fort, that I would slog through the underbrush to the Romanian Army encampment with a guide of his choosing.

The Captain responded with something no red-blooded American wants to hear. “Let's wait, be patient. We will try again in a day or two.”

I knew something about making my way through heavy brush so I pulled rank and insisted. Dragomir shrugged, and assigned me two guides. “My most trusted men.”

“Why two?”

Dragomir didn't mince words. “One is your guide, one is my spy, who will follow at a distance. If you and Spiru are killed or captured my spy will report back.”

“It wouldn't hurt, Captain, if your men made a little noise on the march back.”

I was
about to explain that this would telegraph to any sentries that the troops were now in retreat, but he cut me short with a brisk, “Of course.”

Smart fellow, this Dragomir.

He issued instructions to Spiru, an elfin little guy with big ears.

I followed Spiru into the woods. Man, it was thick. What wasn't trees was bushes. Spiru had a little flashlight that helped us scratch our way through the thicket at a snail's pace.

My best guess is that we were still a couple miles from the army camp. It would be broad daylight before we got there at this rate.

I tapped Spiru's shoulder. We stopped and listened. Dead quiet. If Dragomir's spy was tailing us he was doing it on the road.

Could be it was time to rethink this fighting-our-way-through-brambles-with-a-flashlight idea. The night was still moonless, we were only two. We would walk down the road, not march. Flatfooted. No one would know we were there.

But someone did know.

When Spiru and I climbed out of the brush and started down the road another shot rang out. A pistol round, small caliber, close by.

Then three more in quick succession.

Spiru pitched forward, fell on his face and stayed there.

I was twisting around to confront our attacker when the lights went out.

-----

I woke up with a thudding headache and a mouthful of mud, which I took to mean that someone had turned my head to the side so I didn't drown in the shallow puddle I had fallen into.

I spat
out the mud and looked around best I could. My hands were tightly bound behind my back. Ankles too. An apple in my mouth was all I needed.

Poor little Spiru was not where he had fallen. A bloody trail in the dirt road indicated that his body had been dragged into the woods to be disposed of by bear, wolf and fox. I would say a prayer for him when I could but I had by more immediate concerns.

My captors were standing above me speaking a language that wasn't Romanian. It sounded odd, woozy-making, like English played backwards on a tape recorder.

Hungarian, what else? These were Magyars, half a dozen or so.

I heard the wheeze of a rattletrap car or truck behind me. How the hell had they gotten the drop on us so quick, just as we stepped out of the woods?

I had my answer a short minute later when two men hauled me up at knees and shoulders and dumped me into the back of a flatbed truck that reeked of pig manure. The men climbed in on either side of me. They didn't wear uniforms like Dragomir's boys but they looked much the same. Short, dark, taut. They had sidearms holstered to their belts, some Great War relics I didn't recognize. But these weren't the men who ambushed Spiru and me.

No, that would be the surviving member of Captain Dragomir's ‘most trusted men,' the one who was supposed to be his spy.

The moon had put in a late night appearance. I could see him trudging along behind the sputtering truck, avoiding eye contact with the prize porker in the flatbed.

An enterprising young man. He must have been highly motivated to sneak a concealed weapon past Dragomir, kill his comrade in arms with four quick rounds from a snub nose and then conk me out with the butt of same.

If he was
one of the Captain's most trusted men it didn't speak too well for the rest of his crew.

We turned left off the main road and climbed a serpentine trail that wasn't much more than a cow path with tire ruts. My guards had to jump out and help push the truck uphill when we hit a muddy patch.

We weren't headed to a Romanian Army camp, that was sure. While I had not been looking forward to interrogation by some self-important base commander with a swagger stick, we would at least speak the common language of military protocol and strategic interests.

He'd know he'd bagged a valuable asset in other words.

It was doubtful that my strategic import would impress whatever tribal chieftain I was being carried off to. Hal Schroeder wouldn't be a captured knight on the Cold War chessboard to him. Hal Schroeder would be a foreign interloper sent to help a hated rival.

Fun.

We reached our destination before dawn. A few moth-eaten pup tents clustered around a fire pit, an open air latrine stinking to high heaven and a listing-to-port hunter's shack with papered-over windows that stood above the perimeter, twenty yards uphill. The imperial palace of the King of the Magyars.

-----

“What is your name American?”

“Puddintane. Ask me again and I'll tell you the same.”

It looked like Captain Dragomir had himself a formidable opponent. A gargoyle head on a fireplug body, a brawler. A brawler with a steady pilot light burning behind pale gray eyeballs.

I had been untied and stood on my hind legs to greet the boss man, my guards bending my arms behind me. The boss man didn't bust my lip for mouthing off for some reason.

Apparently
Captain Dragomir's most trusted weasel had already sent word that an American had dropped in to see the Captain, and that the troops had been called to assemble late at night. The weasel would not have had time to relay our exact plans since Dragomir didn't reveal them till the last minute. But the boss man knew we'd be on the move.

It would never have occurred to him that the head of a U.S. covert operations agency would send an agent halfway around the world to conduct a training exercise. That Captain Dragomir had called off the march or attack or whatever it was after one warning shot had to puzzle the crap out of him. That I had continued on almost alone made no sense either.

So the boss man hadn't slugged me because he wasn't sure who I was or what I was up to. But he was chewing on it.

He barked an order. My guards sweep kicked my legs out from under me and dumped me on my back. The knot on the back of my head sent thunderbolts down my spine.

The boss man bent to one knee and patted me down, intimately. He looked in my mouth with a flashlight and ran his finger around my teeth. He pulled off my boots and socks and searched inside. No joy. He was looking for a hidden cyanide pill that would positively identify me as a spy.

But why did he give a shit? Unless he was working for the Romanian Army. Or, more likely and far worse, the sadistic little brother of the Soviet Secret Police, the Romanian
Securitate
.

I held my breath as he examined my boots with care. Leonid Vitinov, my archrival in Berlin, had a rule. ‘Do not use gadgets – dart guns, mini-cameras and the like. If you are captured with them they cannot be explained.'

L-pills deserved a mention.

The boss man drew his knife and jabbed and pried at the heel of my right boot. The spring-loaded cavity popped open. He removed the little blue pill and held it up for me to see.

I was fresh out of wisecracks.

The
boss man stood up and gestured for Dragomir's traitor to step forward. He counted out a small stack of local currency and handed it to him.

That was it? The traitor shot his comrade in the back and betrayed his tribe for beer money?

My opinion of Benedict Arnold improved a moment later when a woman of middle years emerged from the hunting shack leading a frightened little girl. They made their way across the moonlit compound gingerly.