The Italian Job
Episode 1
Spring, 1935
The Nimitz Sea,
somewhere near the Spontoon Islands
(probably)
The drone of the engine had been the
only sound
in the venerable little seaplane’s cockpit for many hours. The pilot, a
short brindle-furred feline wearing a brightly coloured flying jacket,
looked at his watch and snarled quietly. Less than an hour to sunset.
It
would be getting dark soon; the sky overhead was already slowly turning
a deeper shade of blue. After a quick scan of the instruments he turned
to look at the much taller, exotically beautiful lioness dozing
restlessly
in the co-pilot’s seat alongside. His thick, black-banded tail curled
round
and gently brushed the bare fur of her leg below her wrinkled safari
shorts.
“Andrace? Time to wake up, lassie.”
The lioness sat up with a jerk against her seat harness as her
eyes
snapped open. She purred questioningly, staring out at the setting sun
and the empty sea passing by thousands of feet below. After a few
seconds
she shook herself and slumped back in her seat.
“Namma gani? Uh… the time, what is?” She blinked and
flicked
her ears, her eyes coming back into focus as the last cobwebs cleared
from
her head. “My turn to fly, Sandy?” Her voice was a deep, husky growl,
her
accent partly something Mediterranean, partly something else that
couldn’t
easily be pinned down.
“Ye’ve been asleep near four hours, lass. We should be seein’
Spontoon
within the hour… an’ we’ll be flyin’ on fumes in two.”
Andrace flicked an ear back and grunted. She looked down at
her feet,
then back over her shoulder, where the tiny cabin normally furnished
with
four comfortable seats was piled high with fuel canisters, all of them
now empty. The only fuel they had left was the diminishing amount in
the
plane’s own tanks. A tangle of jury-rigged tubing, connections and
stopcocks
snaked about the floor, then led forward around their feet and behind
the
instrument panel.
“We both did those fuel calculations…” The lioness murmured
hesitantly,
reluctant to remind herself as well as Sandy of what they had finally
agreed
on two days before as they passed by Rain Island. Given good weather
and
calm seas, the cruising speed of their old Junkers seaplane would take
them from Tillamook to the Spontoon Islands in eleven or twelve hours
nonstop
— which was uncomfortably close to the endurance limit of the plane, if
nothing went wrong and they stripped out every piece of heavy equipment
it didn’t actually need to fly. That, a very special but very heavy
cargo,
and most of their bulky luggage, toolkits and spare parts, were sent
ahead
on a commercial flight, replaced weight for weight with as much extra
fuel
as their maximum take-off limit allowed.
Flying on a parallel course to the sparse chain of islands
linking Tillamook
to the Spontoon group, they’d planned two or three stops for brief
rests,
if they could find the tiny islands the charts claimed were there. So
far
their luck — and a dearth of crosswinds to push them off course — had
mostly
held. The “non-stop” part of their flight, though, hadn’t: the engine
had
refused to restart at their last rest stop, and laborious repairs with
their cut-down tool kit had put them hours behind schedule. Their best
guess at fuel consumption, though, still left them with a little leeway
if they had to search for the islands at the end of their
journey.
“Try the radio, lass,” Sandy suggested, “see if we can pick up
yon radio
station yet. I’ll come up another couple o’ thousand feet, see if that
puts us in range o’ their transmitter.”
Andrace nodded as Sandy nudged the throttle lever, then she
turned her
attention to the radio set. It was old and cranky, like the rest of the
plane’s equipment, but they’d made sure it still worked before setting
out on this longest and most risky leg of their flight. While she
waited
for the tubes to warm up she fished around in the top pocket of her
safari
shirt, pulled out a crumpled leaflet they’d picked up in Rain Island,
and
turned the tuning dial to one of the frequencies it advertised for
Spontoon’s
best-known station, Radio LONO. Only static came from the speaker. The
lioness huffed, clamped a set of headphones over her ears and twiddled
the radio knobs, listening intently.
“Nothing yet. I’ll try the other frequencies, then the D/F
loop.”
“Ye sure it hasna’ jammed again? Mind, it’s nae been the same
sin’ we
hit yon seagull ower Lake Constance.”
Andrace shrugged. “The knob turns. I’ll try a full sweep, see
what I
can pick up.” She hunched forward over the radio, eyes narrowed,
whiskers
bristling, tail thumping heavily against the floor of the cockpit.
Several
minutes passed, before the lioness sighed and leaned back in her
seat.
“Something’s there… could be a voice, maybe someone singing,
but it’s
too faint to make out. Turn into it — straight south-west — for ten
minutes,
and we’ll see if the signal gets any better. Maybe we’ll even spot one
of the outlying islands, to starboard if we’re still on course.”
Sandy nodded and banked the seaplane slightly to the right.
They sat
without speaking for a few minutes, then Andrace put on her headphones
again.
“Umetoa! Listen to this!” She grinned and turned on the
loudspeaker.
“— was the famous Euro Ukelele player, George Formless,
with his
newest record, ‘When I’m Falling Out of Windows’. Well, he might be
famous
on Euro stations, but not this one!” The female
voice,
faint and slightly staticky, gave way to a thud that sounded
suspiciously
like a gramophone record being dropped into a waste-paper basket.
“For all you lonely fliers out there heading this-a-way, if
your
watch is broken, it’s nine o’ clock. Beep, beep, beep… uh, how many
bleeps
should I bloop? Ah, never mind! You’re listening to Radio LONO, the
Voice
of the Gods. I’m Spontoon Tilli-li, your hostess for the evening, and
now
let’s hear some real ho’oki’i ho’olele music!” The signal
cleared
up a little as a swing band launched into an enthusiastic rendition of
what might once have been a native dance tune.
Andrace roared exultantly and slapped Sandy between his
shoulders almost
hard enough to catapult him out of his seat. “We did it! Keep on this
heading,
and we’ll be there! And safe at last!”
As if on cue, that was the moment the radio chose to expire
with a brief
pop and a fading burst of static.
Interlude: three weeks before…
Watery late afternoon spring sunshine came through the windows of a
roomy but bare and anonymous office, striking the eyes of a tall,
handsome
grey wolf striding towards the desk in the corner and making him blink.
If either of the room’s occupants had looked outside, they would have
been
rewarded with a clear view looking down onto the Brandenburg Gate.
Traffic
noise came faintly through the thick window glass. As always, Berlin
was
busy. The wolf saluted, in the old style still favoured by naval
officers,
and sat down.
The stout, elderly bear sitting behind the desk returned the
salute
absently, cleared his throat and pushed a thin file folder across the
desktop.
The label on the cover promised the great displeasure of the Führer
upon anyone unauthorised even knowing of its existence. The wolf opened
the folder and leafed through the contents; it took only a few
minutes.
“Your opinion, Kommandeur Bindung?” the bear asked
gruffly.
“In my opinion, Herr, Willi should change the
combination of
his office safe,” the wolf replied blandly, ignoring a stifled outraged
splutter from the other side of the desk. “He may be one of the State’s
favoured aircraft designers, but that is no reason to be careless with
the only complete copy of plans for such a revolutionary new fighter
aircraft.
I was looking forward to giving it a test flight when it was
built.”
The bear sighed heavily. “Nevertheless, the plans were there
last night,
and gone this morning. And that dussel at the local security
office
was so sure he had stumbled on a plot to steal money!”
“What do we know of those behind the theft? The report here —”
the wolf
poked a claw at the folder “— is remarkably reluctant to go into any
detail.”
“Those Italian gangsters, the ones in Sicily; corrupt
businessmen; smugglers…”
the bear shrugged. “The names are all in the file, but the only thing
we
are sure of is that these are all go-betweens. Your mission, Bindung,
is
to discover the instigator of this machination, quietly put a stop to
it,
and recover the plans. We have suspicions, but…”
“…But where a certain threat to the security of the Reich
is
concerned, all bets are off?” the wolf suggested. The bear grunted and
nodded.
The wolf smiled lazily, rose to his feet and half-turned
towards the
door. “As always, Herr Oberbefehlshaber, you may consider the
job
as good as done. I will be in touch, through our office in Genoa.” He
snapped
off a half-salute — Kriegsmarine style again, of course — and
strode
quickly out of the office, his tail wagging jauntily. Before the door
closed
again, the bear heard him talking to the secretary in the outer office.
The old ursine smiled wryly: no matter how many times that puppy Jakob
flirted with her, Feldwebel Geldpfennig flirted right back; the
pretty young marten seemed to be immune to the charms of his best
agent.
Twilight was drawing in over
Spontoon, and
one small bay along Main Island’s north coast was already edging into
the
shadow of the old volcanic crater in the middle of the island. A faint
noise broke the silence; the sound of a single aero engine, coughing
and
spluttering now and again, then picking up for another minute or so. A
keen-eyed observer might have seen a tiny speck appear to the
north-west
far out over the Nimitz Sea, black against the rich blue of the
darkening
sky. The engine noise became clearer, and finally the speck resolved
into
a small single-engined seaplane, apparently only just managing to stay
in the air.
That same observer might soon have recognised the plane as an
old-fashioned
German design, a venerable Junkers F13 that could have been anything up
to fifteen years old. Before long the plane was close enough to see its
much more recent colour scheme. Many of the airlines who’d bought one
of
these old planes generally kept it in the original mostly bare-metal
finish:
this far from shining example of Teutonic engineering was painted in a
rainbow medley of eye-straining colours. The wings bore wide purple and
lime green zigzags. Bright yellow and orange formed the basis of the
fuselage
colour scheme, overlaid with vivid stripes and stippling in every
earthly
hue that almost seemed to crawl over the corrugated aluminium alloy
skin.
Even the floats looked like an explosion in a paint factory.
Fortunately, by the time the plane was close enough for its
anti-camouflage
scheme to inflict serious eye damage, dusk had fallen with tropical
abruptness,
muting the blindingly bright colours. Its engine throttled down to a
mild
grumble, the plane dipped closer to the water and finally made a clean
touchdown less than a quarter mile offshore. It slowed down, the still
spluttering engine barely ticking over, and turned towards the
beach.
A few yards from shore, the engine finally gave up the ghost
with a
loud rattle and a gentle but ominous-sounding clunk. Only the
lapping
of the waves in the surf broke the silence as the plane coasted gently
in and grounded in the soft sand. Nothing moved for a long
moment.
Abruptly the door on the left side of the fuselage swung open
and a
tall figure — barely recognisable in the fading light as a lioness —
half
fell out, slid off the back of the float and splashed into the
hock-deep
water.
“It’s real, Sandy!” she called into the plane. “I’m standing
on solid
land, we made it, we’re here!” The lioness grabbed a rope tossed from
inside
the cabin, tied one end to the mooring ring at the front of one float,
splashed ashore and tied the other end to a large piece of wood
standing
up at least twice her height out of the sand. The plane’s other feline
occupant, much shorter than the first, made a slightly more controlled
exit. He ducked under the wing, trudged ashore and stood beside the
lioness,
one arm curled round her waist.
“Ye’re sure now, lass, this is Spontoon?” Sandy asked
wearily.
His drooping ears and whiskers, and tail dragging in the sand,
displayed
his complete exhaustion. The last hour had been a nightmare of
struggling
with the plane’s instruments and controls as more and more of them
abruptly
broke down, before the overburdened engine seized up completely. Even
with
Andrace’s considerable strength to help wrestle with the yoke, the
ordeal
had been almost too much for him.
“The compass must have drifted a little,” the lioness replied
as she
gazed along the deserted beach, “that’s how we reached Orpington Island
first — at least I think it was. But this has to be the right island —
the right shape, an old volcano in the middle, and that has to be
another
old volcano off to the south beyond the hills. It’s just like the
chart:
this has to be Spontoon.”
Sandy raised one ear, slowly as if the effort was almost
beyond him.
“Is it nae a bit on the quiet side, though? I’ve seen mair life in
Tobermory
on a drookit weet Sunday evenin’. Did ye see ony lights, or hooses, or
onything, afore we landed?”
Andrace flicked her tail in a shrug. “Not a thing. And I still
can’t
smell anything either, before you ask.” As a final insult, the engine
had
ruptured an oil line when it seized, spilling hot fumes into the
cabin’s
ventilation ducts. The stink had numbed both their noses
instantly.
The lioness froze suddenly as her ears flicked backwards,
twitching
slightly. Moving slowly and deliberately, she raised one hand and
tapped
Sandy’s shoulder. “Behind us,” she whispered. “Someone is standing
right
behind us.” Their eyes met for a moment as they turned, first towards
each
other, then back towards the other half of the beach.
A stocky coyote stood there, arms folded over his broad chest,
not quite
looking at either of them. There was no expression on his impassive
face,
not the least twitch of ear or whisker. Just as much a surprise to the
two felines, though, were the coyote’s clothes. Small decorations of
metal
and carved bone hung from his ears and the pair of feathers tied into
his
hair. Wind-ruffled fur, its colour uncertain in the evening gloom,
spilled
out of the open front of a buckskin shirt, embroidered and decorated
with
tasseled fringes along the sleeves; his trousers were of a similar
design,
and Andrace’s eyes narrowed when she noticed a businesslike hatchet
tucked
into the belt. All in all, the coyote was everything a native savage
should
be — if you were expecting to meet a Red Indian instead of a typical
tropical
island native.
Sandy glanced at Andrace for a moment. Andrace blinked, then
turned
to stare at the “piece of wood” she’d moored the plane to. Grotesque
caricatures
of deer, cougar and skunk faces stared back from the small but
unmistakable
totem pole that faced out over the open sea.
Andrace cleared her throat and nudged Sandy with her elbow.
“Was that
a left or right turn at Tillamook, boss?”
To be continued…
© 2002 Bruce Grant
Illustration © 2003 Simon Barber
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