Free The Keys of Hell by Jack Higgins Page B

relative out of Czechoslovakia and I gave him a hand. That’s when the Chief pulled me in. At that time he was interested in people who spoke Eastern European languages.”
    “An unusual accomplishment.”
    “Some people can work out cube roots in their heads in seconds, others can never forget anything they ever read. I have the same sort of kink for languages. I soak them up like a sponge—no effort.”
    She lapsed into fluent Albanian. “Isn’t it a little unnerving? Don’t you ever get your wires crossed?”
    “Not that I can recall,” he replied faultlessly in the same language. “I can’t afford that kind of mistake. If it’s any consolation, I still can’t read a Chinese newspaper. On the other hand, I’ve only ever met two Europeans who could.”
    “With that kind of flair plus your academic training, you could pick up a chair in modern languages at almost any university in Britain or the States,” she said. “Doesn’t the thought appeal to you?”
    “Not in the slightest. I got into this sort of work by chance, and by chance I possessed all the virtues needed to make me good at it.”
    “You mean you actually enjoy it?”
    “Something like that. If I’d been born in Germany twenty years earlier, I’d probably have ended up in the Gestapo. If I’d been born an Albanian, I might well have been a most efficient member of the sigurmi. Who knows?”
    She seemed shocked. “I don’t believe you.”
    “Why not? It takes a certain type of man or woman to do our kind of work—a professional. I can recognize the quality, and appreciate it, in my opposite numbers. I don’t see anything wrong in that.”
    There was a strained silence as if in some way he had disappointed her. She reached for the tray. “I’d better take these below. We must be getting close.”
    The door closed behind her and Chavasse opened the window and breathed in the sharp morning air feeling rather sad. So often people like her, the fringe crowd who did the paperwork, manned the radios, decoded the messages, could never really know what it was like in the field. What it took to survive. Well, he, Paul Chavasse, had survived, and not by waving any flags, either.
    Then what in the hell are you doing here? he asked himself, and a rueful smile crossed his face. What was it Orsini had said? The things we do for the ladies . And he was right, this one was something special—something very special.
    The door swung open and Orsini entered, immense in his old reefer coat and peaked cap on the side of his head. “Everything all right, Paul?”
    Chavasse nodded and handed over the wheel. “Couldn’t be better.”
    Orsini lit another of his inevitable cheroots. “Good. Shouldn’t be long now.”
    Dawn seeped into the sky, a gray half-light with a heavy mist rolling across the water. Orsini asked Chavasse to take over again and consulted the charts. He checked the cross-bearing Francesca had given him and traced a possible course in from the sea through the maze of channels marked on the chart.
    “Everything okay?” Chavasse asked.
    Orsini came back to the wheel and shrugged. “I know these charts. Four or five fathoms and a strong tidal current. That means that one day there’s a sandbank, the next, ten fathoms of clear water. Estuary marshes are always the same. We’ll go in through the main outlet of the Buene and turn into the marshes about half a mile inland. Not only safer, but a dammed sight quicker.”
     
    T HE MIST ENFOLDED THEM UNTIL THEY were running through an enclosed world. Orsini reduced speed to ten knots and, a few moments later, Carlo and Francesca came up from below.
    Chavasse went and stood in the prow, hands in pockets, and the marshes drifted out of the mist and their stench filled his nostrils. Wildfowl called overhead on their way in from the sea and Carlo moved beside him and crossed himself.
    “A bad place, this. Always, I am glad to leave.”
    It was a landscape from a nightmare. Long, narrow