The port of Castellón lies three miles from the main town, down a narrow, arrow-straight road that leads from the city to the sea. At the end of the road it is impossible to miss the port and harbor, for there is nothing else there.
As usual with Mediterranean ports, there are three separate harbors: one for freighters, one for yachts and pleasure craft, and one for fishing vessels. In Castellón the commercial port lies to the left as one faces the sea, and like all Spanish ports is ringed by a fence, and the gates are manned day and night by armed Guardia Civil. In the center lies the harbormaster’s office, and beside it the splendid yacht club, with a dining room looking out over the commercial port on one side and the yacht basin and fishing harbor on the other. Landward of the harbor office is a row of warehouses.
Shannon turned to the left and parked the car by the roadside, climbed out, and started walking. Halfway around the perimeter fence of the port area he found the main gate, with a sentry dozing in a box beside it. The gate was locked. Farther on, he peered through the chain-links and with a surge of relief spotted the Toscana berthed against the far side of the basin. He settled to wait till six o’clock.
He was at the main gate at quarter to six, smiled and nodded at the Guardia Civil sentry, who stared coldly back. In the rising sunlight he could see the army staff car, truck, and jeep, with seven or eight soldiers milling around them, parked a hundred yards away. A
t 6:10 a civilian car arrived, parked next to the gate, and sounded its horn. A small, dapper Spaniard climbed out. Shannon approached him.
“Señor Moscar?”
“Sí.”
“My name’s Brown. I’m the seaman who’s got to join his ship here.”
The Spaniard puckered his brows. “Por favor? Qué?”
“Brown,” insisted Shannon. “Toscana.”
The Spaniard’s face lightened. “Ah, sí. El marinero. Come, please.”
The gate had been opened, and Moscar showed his pass. He babbled for several seconds at the guard and the customs man who had opened the gate, and pointed at Shannon. Cat caught the word “marinero” several times, and his passport and merchant seaman’s card were examined. Then he followed Moscar to the customs office. An hour later he was on board the Toscana.
The search started at nine. There was no warning. The captain’s manifest had been presented and checked out. It was perfectly in order. Down on the quay the truck from Madrid was parked, along with the car and the jeep. The army escort captain, a thin, sallow man with a face like a Moor’s and a lipless mouth, consulted with two customs officers. Then the latter came aboard. Moscar followed. They checked the cargo to make sure it was what the manifest said and no more. They peered into nooks and crannies, but not under the floorboards of the main hold. They looked in the stores locker, gazed at the tangle of chains, oil drums, and paint cans, and closed the door. It took an hour. The main thing that interested them was why Captain Waldenberg needed seven men on such a small ship. It was explained that Dupree and Vlaminck were company employees who had missed their ship in Brindisi and were being dropped off at Malta on the way to Latakia. They had no seamen’s cards with them because they had left their gear on board their own ship. Asked for a name, Waldenberg gave them the name of a ship he had seen in Brindisi harbor. There was silence from the Spaniards, who looked at their chief for advice. He glanced down at the army captain, shrugged, and left the ship. Twenty minutes later, loading began.
At half past noon the Toscana slipped out of Castellón harbor and turned her helm south to Cape San Antonio. Cat Shannon, feeling sick now that it was all over, knowing that from then on he was virtually unstoppable, was leaning against the after rail, watching the flat green orange groves south of Castellón slip away as they headed for the sea.
Carl Waldenberg came up behind him. “That’s the last stop?” he asked.
“The last where we have to open our hatches,” said Shannon. “We have to pick up some men on the coast of Africa, but we’ll moor in the roads. The men will come out by launch. Deck cargo native workers. At least, that’s what they’ll be shipped as.”
“I’ve only got charts as far as the Strait of Gibraltar,” objected Waldenberg.
Shannon reached into his zip-up Windbreaker and pulled out a sheaf of charts, half of the number Endean had handed him in Rome. “These,” he said, handing them to the skipper, “will get you as far as Freetown, Sierra Leone. That’s where we anchor and pick up the men. Please give me an arrival time at noon on July second. That is the rendezvous.”
As the captain left to return to his cabin and start to plot his course and speed, Shannon was left alone at the rail. Seagulls wheeled around the stern, seeking morsels dropped from the galley, where Cipriani was preparing lunch, squealing and cawing as they dipped toward the foaming wake to snatch up a scrap of bread or vegetable.
Anyone listening would have heard another sound amid their screaming, the sound of a man whistling “Spanish Harlem.”
Far away to the north, another ship slipped her moorings and under the guidance of a port pilot eased her way out of the harbor of Archangel. The motor vessel Komarov was only ten years old and something over five thousand tons.
Inside her bridge, the atmosphere was warm and cozy. The captain and the pilot stood side by side, staring forward as the quays and warehouses slipped past to her port side, and watching the channel ahead to the open sea. Each man held a cup of steaming coffee. The helmsman kept the vessel on the heading given him by the pilot, and to his left the radar screen gleamed and died endlessly, its iridescent sweep arm picking up on each turn the dotted ocean ahead and beyond it the fringe of the ice that would never melt, even in high summer.
In the stern two men leaned over the rail beneath the flag with the hammer-and-sickle emblem and watched the Russian Arctic port slip past. Dr. Ivanov clipped the crushed cardboard filter of his black cigarette between his teeth and sniffed the crisp, salt-caked air. Both men were wrapped against the cold, for even in June the wind off the White Sea is no invitation to shirtsleeves. By his side, one of his technicians, younger, eager for his first trip abroad, turned to him.
“Comrade Doctor,” he began.
Ivanov took the stump of the Papiross from his teeth and flicked it into the foaming wake. “My friend,” he said, “I think, as we are now aboard, you can call me Mikhail Mikhailovich.”
“But at the institute—”
“We are not at the institute. We are on board a ship. And we will be in fairly close confinement either here or in the jungle for months to come.”
“I see,” said the younger man, but he was not to be repressed. “Have you ever been to Zangaro before?”
“No,” said his superior.
“But to Africa,” insisted the younger man.