Fertile Soil
A Seminary novella by Tom Mecredy
BARI, ITALY, SEPTEMBER 1959
The agreed sign was a diagonal blue chalk line drawn on a post box at the intersection of the Via Napoli and the Via Trevisani. It was an innocuous enough marking. One that wouldn’t stand out against the backdrop of graffiti and peeling posters that turned Bari’s streets into a political battleground.
Its appearance was the first contact Sean Mould had had from his handler in six weeks. That didn’t bother him, as he preferred to be left to work in his own way, without the stifling oversight and constant paperwork that a traditional posting back at the Seminary’s London headquarters would entail.
He picked up his pace, rubber-soled gym shoes slapping on the stone pavement. He was dressed for his morning run in a pair of blue shorts and a white vest that was already soaked with sweat. It was sweltering in Bari’s claustrophobic streets despite the early hour, the first rays of sunlight turning the old town into a lit brick oven.
Panting like a blown horse at the end of a close-fought derby, he cantered across the leafy Piazza G. Garibaldi, pausing at a public fountain to splash water on his face. The piazza was mostly empty apart from an old woman carrying a string bag of fruit and vegetables and a drunk curled up in a tree’s leafy shade, using a copy of the communist newspaper l’Unitá as a blanket.
Mould drank deeply from the fountain’s verdigrised copper spout, angling his head from side to side in an apparent effort to get more water into his mouth, examining both entrances and exits to see if he was being followed.
He sauntered over to a green-painted iron bench crudely daubed swastikas and sat down, the metal hot against the bare skin of his thick legs.
He made a show of tying his shoe laces with one hand while rooting around under the bench with the other. The dead drop container was an old film canister with a strong magnet glued to one side, allowing it to be discretely affixed to the underside of the bench’s curved seat. Mould retrieved the canister and emptied it into his palm, before quickly replacing it and busying himself with retying his shoes.
Inside was a small metal key attached to a plastic keyring with the number 205 on one face and the red and blue Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane logo on the other. He slipped the key into the pocket of his shorts and hauled himself to his feet, overworked muscles protesting at the effort.
He left the piazza by the opposite gate to the one he’d entered, leaving his own chalk mark on a lamppost at the head of the Corso Vittorio Emanuelle II as he jogged past. As he ran on, he wondered what cover his handler had to sporadically visit Bari. He was probably posing as a trade envoy, and would spend most of his days in interminable meetings about coffee beans, olive oil or fish byproducts before checking on the dead drop. At least he’d be grateful to get away from Rome’s stifling heat and the crowds of gawping tourists, even if it meant ten hours on an Italian train and a couple of days of pointless meetings.
The streets of run-down interwar apartment buildings eventually gave way to the labyrinthine tangle of medieval streets that made up Bari’s old town. He dodged a delivery driver on a sputtering scooter outside the Cathedral of Saint Sabine, nearly colliding with a gaggle of chattering nuns. Leaving them clucking like black-clad hens in his wake, he continued to wind his way through the narrow streets. The city was waking up, and the streets were soon clogged with shoppers, workers and schoolchildren, their babble echoing off the stone buildings like cascading fountains.
Bari’s port felt like an entirely different world. A snaking queue of cars and trucks choked the new metalled road, clouds of noxious exhaust smoke hanging over the whole procession. Honking horns and bitter arguments drowned out the sounds of grumbling engines. Morning sunlight knifed through the pollution, raising a hazy mirage from the road surface.
Mould crossed the road, weaving between the close-packed vehicles, eventually emerging onto the roughly L-shaped mole that jutted out into the Adriatic’s azure waters. He weaved around badly parked cars, scooters and bicycles, all belonging to the fishermen that plied their trade up and down the coast, before stepping onto a rickety gangway that connected the mole to a haphazard tangle of quays and jetties.
He’d bought the motor yacht for a song from a corrupt police officer in the Corpo delle Guardie di Pubblica Sicurezza who’d confiscated it from a gang of Albanian smugglers running cigarettes out of the port of Pescara. It was fifty-five feet from stem to stern, built from a mixture of pine, oak, teak and mahogany, with two masts and a single diesel engine. As well as being his home, it also formed a key part of his cover, allowing him to move freely up and down the coast under the guise of shuttling tourists between various picturesque ports.
The extensive deck space and spacious double cabins made it a very attractive proposition to adventurous tourists, especially at the cut prices he offered. This provided a plausible explanation if anyone asked about the large quantities of cash he found himself with, which he used for day-to-day expenses as well as payments to his agents and bribes to the local authorities.
Zlatko, a former Serbian soldier turned smuggler who’d fled one of Tito’s purges and now acted as Mould’s first mate, was lounging on the foredeck with a dirty magazine and a hand-rolled cigarette dangly limply from under his bristling moustache.
“Anyone come by while I was out?” Mould asked in the fluent if heavily accented Italian that he’d first learned running wild on Sheffield’s smog-choked streets.
“Nah.” Zlatko replied, batting a fly away from his face and adjusting the counterfeit aviator sunglasses that made him look like a down-on-his-luck pornstar. “It’s been pretty dead. I sent Ettore and Nico to get us some breakfast, they should be back soon.”
Ettore and Nicomede were the other two members of Mould’s makeshift crew, teenage runaways Zlatko had caught trying to break into the boat. They had both been malnourished and filthy, trying to eke out an existence by thieving and begging around the old city. Rather than turn them over to the police, the soft old Serb had offered them jobs, and they’d proved to be hard workers that didn’t ask too many questions.
“Alright. I’ve got something to sort out in town. Don’t go anywhere until I get back.” Mould grunted, walking down the gangplank and onto the teak deck.
He meandered through the pilot house and down a ladder into the crew quarters, past two guest cabins, ducking under the lintel into the cramped engine room and then finally into his own double cabin at the stern. The morning sun streamed into the cabin through four portholes, illuminating the small, roughly rectangular space. A laminate accordion door hid a triangular toilet and sink squeezed up against the bulkhead. Clothing and other possessions were strewn across every flat surface, spilling out of the three drawers under the double bed and covering the carpeted deck.
He’d abandoned the institutional tidiness beaten into him by army drill sergeants during the war, preferring a system of barely-organised chaos that also served as an anti-surveillance tool. An incautious searcher might assume there was no logic to the mess and not bother to exactly replace disturbed items exactly, providing an immediate tell that someone had rummaged through his belongings.
He stripped off his running clothes and washed in the sink, splashing himself with freezing water from the constantly-dripping tap. Dressing in a short-sleeved collared shirt that hung badly on his oversized frame, he pulled on a pair of fraying workman’s trousers and olive-drab canvas Patauga jungle boots - an Italian copy of a famous French design he’d acquired from a cash-strapped supply sergeant in the Naval Infantry.
He dug through a pile of soiled clothing in one of the drawers and extracted a well-oiled Colt automatic pistol from a compartment cleverly concealed in a sliding compartment built into the bottom of the drawer. He racked the slide and checked the chamber before sticking the gun into the front of his waistband. A spare magazine of fat .45-calibre slugs went into the hip pocket of his trousers, along with the dead drop key, his German-made gravity knife and a leather wallet bulging with notes.
By the time he emerged onto the foredeck, Zlatko, Ettore and Nicomede were drinking coffee and playing cards in the saloon, while a pan of thick sausages spat and sizzled to itself on the small stove. A sizable pile of silver coins had amassed in the centre of the table, most of which seemed to belong to Zlatko, judging by his pained expression.
“Don’t lose your shirt.” Mould joked, pouring himself a cup of sludgy black coffee, which he saw off in a single gulp.
“Oh, Nico would love that.” Ettore replied, leaning over to kiss his lithe, sun-browned companion on the cheek.
Zlatko reddened and grimaced, staring fixedly at his cards like he could change their value if he just looked down long enough.
Mould left them to it, ducking through the narrow door onto the foredeck. He clattered across the gangplank onto the mole. A fisherman was bringing in his catch, a net full of silver-scaled fish that flashed iridescent in the late summer sunlight. He nodded to Mould, who flashed him a smile in return.
He was making slow but steady progress worming his way into the insular fraternity of fishermen and sailors that used the port, after overcoming their initial mistrust of a giant, sunburnt foreigner with seemingly more cash than sense. Many of them were smugglers on the side, running arms, cigarettes and other commodities in and out of Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia, the kinds of contacts that had already proven invaluable for his nascent network in the Adriatic.
Once he was beyond the boundaries of the medieval city, it was a straight walk to Bari’s central station, past the soaring Art Nouveau buildings of the Aldo Moro University, already swarming with sharply-dressed students bent double under the weight of their books and papers.
The station itself was a haphazard mix of architectural styles, a functional 19th century structure buried beneath an avalanche of Art Nouveau and neoclassical additions. Hawkers and pickpockets infested the forecourt, preying on the mass of early morning commuters and tourists.
Passing through a striking Doric colonnade, Mould entered the main concourse and began looking around for the luggage lockers. He allowed the crowds to swallow him up and carry him along into the main body of the station, trailing behind a group of Americans in garishly-patterned Hawaiian shirts, straw hats and sunglasses, listening to one of their comrades regale them with tales of his Army service in Korea.
Extricating himself from the press, Mould drifted over to the luggage lockers, making a show of carefully reading all the door numbers while he checked for a tail, before carefully positioning his bulk in front of number 205, screening the contents from any prying eyes.
The lock stuck twice before the door swung open, revealing a nondescript brown leather briefcase covered in innumerable scuffs from years of hard use. Mould scooped it out of the locker by the curved handle, shutting the door in the same swift motion.
With the case hanging at his side, he rejoined the crowd and allowed it to carry him through the marble-floored concourse and back out into the stifling heat via one of the station’s side exits.
He immediately disappeared into the maze of residential streets surrounding the station, changing direction at random, using reflections in the windows of shops and parked cars to watch for anyone tailing him. Satisfied that he wasn’t being surveilled, he headed back to the marina.
Mould arrived at the boat to find Zlatko holding forth to a crowd of Dutch tourists, barking his sales pitch with the exuberance of a Cockney market trader. The tourists were muttering amongst themselves, glancing back and forth between the luscious shine of the teak deck and the unprepossessing figure of its disheveled and sweat-stained first mate.
Mould pushed through the crowd and stomped across the gangplank, pulling the Serb to one side with a massive paw on the man’s shoulder.
“Doubt we’ll be going anywhere.” He grunted into a hairy ear, jerking his head at the briefcase in his other hand. “Get rid of them. I’ve got business to sort out.”
He left Zlatko to disperse the crowd and took the ladder down into the bowels of the boat. He expected to find Ettore and Nico lounging in the crew quarters, and was just about to shout for them when he heard grunts and moans coming from one of the occupied cabins, accompanied by the rhythmic squeaking of furniture. Pretending he hadn’t heard anything, he quietly sidled down the gangway and into his cabin, tossing the briefcase onto the desk as he closed and locked the door behind him.
His first attempt to open it using the twin brass clasps failed, forcing him to prize it open with the point of his knife. The triangular steel blade made short work of the cheap metal locks, popping each with a metallic rattle of sheared parts.
Inside, Mould found several bundles of 50,000 lira notes and a single sheet of close-typed paper. He stacked the money beside the case and turned his attention to the sheet of paper.
33T XF 006 262
MASSERIA BONACCORSO
RENDER ALL POSSIBLE ASSISTANCE BY 23:00 19.09.59
COUNTERSIGN WEDNESDAYS / OWLS
Putting the sheet of paper back onto the case’s threadbare lining, Mould extracted a thick sheaf of papers from the hidden compartment under the bed.
He sifted through the reams of notes on local politicians, policemen and agitators until he found a set of military maps covering much of central and southern Italy in a myriad of different scales, rapidly locating the sheet indicated by the alphanumeric reference at the top of his terse orders.
It showed a hilly stretch of sparsely populated countryside along the border between Bari’s home province of Apulia and the neighbouring Basilicata. Further consultation of various grid references narrowed the location down to a collection of buildings near the tiny hamlet of Il Cardinale. Given the state of rural Italian roads, Mould guessed it was at least a couple of hours’ drive to the location.
Carefully folding the pertinent map sheets, he dropped them into a canvas duffle bag along with a change of clothes and a fat bundle of lira notes.
Before leaving, he gathered up the remaining banknotes and stepped into the tiny bathroom. Using the point of his knife, he removed a section of wooden panelling, revealing the toilet’s small cistern. Inside the cistern was a tight plastic bundle of multiple bags, which he unwrapped to reveal several million lira in mixed bills, over a hundred thousand pounds in various other currencies, and a Smith & Wesson .45-calibre revolver swaddled in a greasy rag to keep the damp away.
He added the money from the case to the stash before wrapping and replacing it in its hiding place. Grabbing his duffle bag, he headed for the door. With the bag slung over one shoulder, he returned to the deck to find Zlatko leaning on the rail, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and glowering at the fish writhing below the surface of the crystal-clear water.
“We lost a lot of money.” The Serb grunted over the side, not bothering to face his employer. “They would have paid us to take them all the way to Taranto and back.”
“You’re not hard up for cash, are you?” Mould replied, settling at the rail beside his first mate, fishing a thin Alfa cigarette from his breast pocket and lighting it from Zlatko’s.
“I’ve never said no to more.” Zlatko said, turning his head to blow a smoke ring out over the water.
“Well then, I’ve got a proper job for you.” Mould grinned wolfishly. “Two weeks pay for a quick jaunt in the countryside.”
“A… jaunt?” Zlatko said, his gravelly voice laden with skepticism.
“Aye, I need someone to watch my back. It’s a couple hours drive inland. Shouldn’t be any drama.” Mould continued blithely, before taking a long drag on his cigarette.
“What were you planning to drive? Don’t think you’ll get this old tub up those hills.” The Serb grunted, flicking ash into the water.
“Well, I’d hoped you’d help out with that. Steal us something that’s fast and reliable but won’t attract too much attention.”
An awkward silence descended over the pair, punctuated only by raspy exhalations of smoke from Zlatko before he flicked the smouldering cigarette butt into the water.
“I want half a million lira extra.” Came his eventual reply. “Half now, half when the job’s done.”
“You’re on.” Mould said, perhaps a bit too eagerly. He rolled the duffle bag off his shoulder and counted out five notes from the bundle inside, and handed them over. “Take Ettore and Nico with you, time they learned a trade.”
“If you insist.” The old Serb grumbled, turning away from the rail and disappearing into the pilot house, interspersing his yells for the two Italians with a string of anatomically-improbable Serbian curses.
Mould settled himself behind the galley’s cramped table with another cup of coffee, extracting the .45 automatic from his waistband and placing it carefully in front of him. Armed with an oily rag taken from a haphazardly-discarded toolbox, he began the painstaking process of disassembling the pistol into its constituent components.
The clink of metallic parts and the smell of gun oil sent him into a trance-like state as he broke the weapon down with practiced ease, oblivious to the stream of curses issuing up from below decks. He’d carried a similar weapon the last time he’d been in Italy with the British army.
He had acquired it from an American supply depot and kept it tucked into his webbing as a last-ditch defensive weapon. Mould much preferred the pistol’s familiar heft to the Belgian-made Brownings currently issued to Seminary field officers.
He’d just removed the slide assembly and was using the folding awl on his gravity knife to dislodge some particularly stubborn carbon buildup as the flushed and dishevelled Ettore and Nico emerged through the hatch, chivvied on with a mixture of Serbian and Italian curses by Zlatko.
“Leave the car off the Pescara road and get back here as soon as you can.” Mould said absent-mindedly as he arranged a selection of small pins and springs on the tabletop, gingerly aligning each one with a square fingertip.
“I’m not fucking walking all the way back.” The Serb cursed, keeping his young charges moving with a not-so-gentle application of a booted foot.
“Christ, I’m not explaining basic tradecraft to you again. Do you want the Carabinieri crawling up our arses? They’re watching the port like hawks, if you lot park a stolen car out there they’ll be swarming all over us in minutes.”
“These two wouldn’t mind them having a look up their arses.” Zlatko replied darkly, cuffing Nico around the head for malingering in the doorway.
“Just get it done, for fuck’s sake.” Mould said, now preoccupied with prising the pistol’s chequered wood grip scales off to access the springs and mechanisms beneath. The swearing, stamping of feet and bickering drifted away as he settled back into the rhythm of maintenance.
His coffee had cooled to an almost undrinkable temperature by the time he had finished cleaning the gun with a combination of wire brush, the awl on his knife and a bottle of sweet-smelling mineral oil. He quickly reassembled it, inserted the magazine and racked the slide to chamber a round.
He stuck the weapon back into his waistband, pocketed the knife and shuffled out onto the deck to sip the tar-like coffee in a deck chair, screened from the sun by the pilot house’s generous overhang.
Despite the strength of Zlatko’s awful excuse for coffee, the gentle rocking of the boat and oven-like Adriatic heat saw him drift into a doze.
A peal of throaty laughter followed by a smoker’s hacking cough jerked him awake. He made to grab for the pistol, but stopped short when he saw a diminutive grey-haired figure propping herself up on the gangway’s wooden railing with a claw-like hand.
“You snore like a bear!” She spat in accented Italian between phlegmy coughs. “My dad, God rest his soul, kept half the apartment building awake all night and he wasn’t nearly as bad as you.”
“Maria-Vittoria.” Mould exhaled, collapsing back into the deck chair with an alarming creak. “I thought you were in Sarajevo with your boys.”
“I never miss Liberation Day.” The old woman grinned, climbing aboard with the goat-like ease. “Besides, my grandson Cosma is carrying a banner for the P.C.I, and I’ll probably get to spit on a Fascist or two.”
She hawked a practice gobbet of spittle over the side before continuing. “I didn’t expect to find you here, thought you’d be out helping more beautiful Americans with their tans.”
“Not today, grandma.” Mould said, splaying out in the deck chair. “I’ve got a job inland. Probably won’t be able to take her out for the rest of the week.”
“What a shame!” Maria’s brown weatherbeaten face crinkled into a broad, motherly smile. “I’d have brought you something nice to eat if I had known.”
“Your gifts tend to come with nasty surprises attached.” Mould smiled back. “Remember the time you dumped those cigarettes on me and I had to spend three weeks hiding out on Capri to avoid the Cosa Nostra boys you pinched them from?”
“Oh boo hoo, I had to spend three weeks on Italy’s most beautiful island surrounded by rich tourists who spent hundreds of thousands of lira on boat trips.” Maria mimed a child weeping with practiced ease. “I did you a favour, you big English oaf.”
“This time I’ll just take any news from across the water.” Mould replied with mock annoyance, smiling at the irrepressible old lady. “It’s better for my health.”
“Another couple of generals have been sent down. Tito’s still purging the army of Stalinist pigs.” Maria spat over the side again. “That Serb of yours was lucky to get out before they put him up against a wall. One of my regulars is a major in the UDBA, he’s been kicking in doors for the last couple of weeks.”
“He bent?” Mould replied quickly, the chair groaning in protest as he leant forward, his interest piqued by the elderly smuggler.
“He doesn’t know which fish to catch.” Maria said as she slid out of her thick wool sweater, revealing her wiry, liver-spotted shoulders and a livid network of scars that crisscrossed her right hand and forearm. “He fled when the Nazis and spent most of the war in London, fell in love with jazz and whiskey and American films, but now he’s stuck as a cat’s paw for the marshal in Belgrade, but with much fewer perks. Wants his daughters to be movie stars, you know?”
“Would he sit down with me?” Mould asked incautiously. “I think I could help him out.”
“What’s in it for you, huh?” The old woman’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Why’d you want to help a washed-up old Slav?”
“Bet he’d pay big to get his daughters out.” Mould replied blithely, leaving out the fact that it would give him permanent leverage over a Yugoslavian military officer, one that could provide a steady source of product for his nascent intelligence network.
“I’m sure he would…” Maria said, almost to herself. “Look, I’ll talk it over with my boys and let you know. I’ve got to get back to my girl anyway, they’re rebalancing the hold and they’ll sink her if I’m not there to keep an eye on them.”
With that, she spun on a booted heel, hitched up her long homespun dress and disappeared like some wizened sea witch, leaving Mould alone on deck once more.
Maria-Vittoria was the self-crowned queen of Bari’s smugglers, the half-Croatian scion of a Cosa Nostra clan who’d spent the war years dodging the fascist Port Militia as a black marketeer, and now used her small freighter the Dea del Mare to run cargos of contraband into Dubrovnik and beyond, returning with a hold full of arms and cheap Bosnian cigarettes.
She’d taken to Mould as he reminded her of a long-dead son, long buried on a Libyan battlefield and had eased his entry into the insular fraternity of Bari’s port. He’d been gently working her on the situation in Yugoslavia for several months, and she had proven to be a reliable if somewhat erratic source. He headed into the pilot house and found a sheet of lined paper, jotting down a contact report in cramped, clumsy handwriting. Briefly outlining the intelligence value of the new source and Maria-Vittoria’s reliability, Mould wrote that he’d need access to more funds if he was to go ahead with extracting the officer’s daughters from Yugoslavia. With that done, he returned to his cabin for a second sheet of paper and his one-time pad.
He spent the next couple of hours carefully enciphering his report, before folding it several times and tucking it into his wallet. He’d leave the message in the dead drop the next time he went for a run. The original clear text and his orders from the suitcase were burning merrily in the galley’s sink when he heard his motley crew stamping down the jetty. Glancing through one of the salt-streaked windows, he saw Zlatko leading the pack, with Ettore bringing up the rear, strips torn from his shirt packed tightly against an oozing gash on his temple.
“What the fuck happened?” Mould scolded, stepping out onto the deck with his arms folded across his chest like a mother greeting her delinquent children.
“Someone saw us taking the car.” Zlatko replied angrily, shooting daggers at the two teenagers. “Threw a brick from their balcony, this prick was too slow getting in the back and learned a valuable lesson.”
“For fuck’s sake!” Mould cursed. “You were seen? The police could be here any minute.”
“Ahhh it’ll be alright boss.” Ettore chimed in happily. “People steal cars in the Old Town all the time. Plus we stashed it real good, we found a bombed-out building with a bunch of wrecks in the carpark.”
“It’s just a scratch anyway.” The other teen piped up, pulling the makeshift bandage away from his head to reveal a trickle of blood oozing slowly from a scabby gash above his left eye.
Mould ignored both of them, fixing his angry glare on the Serb. “We’ll have to move the fucking boat now. Good thing we’re paid up for the week so we don’t have to drag the harbour master into this disaster. I thought you used to do this shit for a living.”
“It’s not my job to babysit a couple of useless nancies!” Zlatko shouted back.
“Hey, watch your mouth old man!” Ettore yelled, one hand diving for the ivory-handled folding knife he kept in his trouser pocket.
“Shut the fuck up, all of you.” Mould thundered, interposing himself between Zlatko and Ettore.
“You.” He jabbed a finger into the Serb’s narrow chest. “Grab your shit, we’re moving out.”
He rounded on the Italians next, barking orders in his best colour sergeant’s bellow. “Take the boat up the coast to Manfredonia and find Maria-Vittoria’s people. They’ll help you get squared away until we meet you tomorrow morning.”
“Us, sail the boat?!” Nico said incredulously, slumped against the rail while nursing his head wound.
“We won’t let you down, boss.” Ettore chipped in enthusiastically, puffing out his slender chest like a fresh-faced squaddie on Sunday parade.
“If anything happens to my ship, I’ll skin you both alive.” Mould concluded with an air of menace, slinging the duffle over his shoulder as Zlatko emerged from below decks with an army-issue pack on his back, the wooden grips of a Second World War-vintage Beretta automatic sticking out of the front of his trousers.
“Put that shit away, for fuck’s sake.” Mould cursed at him, gesturing at the pistol as he stomped down the gangplank with a last glare at the two teenagers. They were too busy excitedly fussing over charts in the pilot house to notice.
The pair tramped out to Bari’s outskirts using side streets and back roads, a stony silence lingering between them. Mould let Zlatko lead, staring angrily at the back of the Serb’s balding head.
After hopping rusting chain link fences, crossing a railway line and following a heavily overgrown drainage ditch, they found themselves in Bari’s decaying outskirts.
Even though more than a decade had passed since the war’s end, Italian reconstruction hadn’t reached the city’s shattered industrial belt. Ruined factories and expanses of rubble were interspersed with building sites, punctuated by expanses of cleared ground ready for new apartment blocks that would eventually house thousands of the city’s workers.
Zlatko had hidden the car on a stretch of waste ground dotted with burnt-out wrecks like a child’s discarded toys, presumably the local Cosa Nostra’s handiwork. He’d pulled a dirty tarp over it and weighed it down with bricks, which he pulled back with a magician’s flourish to reveal an aging Alfa Romeo 1900 saloon with flaking umber paint and yellowing foam pushing through cracks in the leather upholstery.
“I snagged these on the way.” The Serb grinned, opening the boot to reveal a set of number plates, liberated from a parked car somewhere in Bari.
“Good work.” Mould admitted grudgingly, tossing his bag into the passenger footwell as Zlatko busied himself swapping the plates with his pocket knife.
He was consulting his sheaf of military maps when the Serb slipped into the driver’s seat.
“Where are we going then?” The former soldier asked, settling himself behind the wheel.
“Follow the ninety six until Altamura and then we’ll turn off onto the fifty two towards Scarpara. We’re looking for a village called Il Cardinale and then we’ve got to find the Masseria Bonaccorso.”
“Masseria?” Zlatko questioned. “One of those old fortified farms?”
“Yeah, I suppose so.” Mould said, quietly cursing the sparseness of his instructions from London. They could have given him a bit more to go on than just the name of some abandoned farm buildings.
“How far is it?” Zlatko replied dubiously, craning his neck to look at the map, dimly illuminated by the Alfa Romeo’s reading light.
“Eighty, ninety kilometres I reckon.” Mould said, squinting at the badly-printed scale bar and the faint grid traced across the jumble of coloured topography. “Maybe a couple hours drive if we’re careful.”
He passed an unfolded sheet over to Zlatko and sifted through the rest for a larger scale sheet covering the same area of the Puglia-Basillicata border.
The Serb grunted unhappily as he consulted the map, leaving it unfolded on the dash in front of him. “Probably more like three hours. The roads will be horrible once we get off the motorways.”
“We’ve got to find this farm as well.” Mould had located the clutch of buildings and indicated them with a grubby finger. “There’s a track marked but I don’t know what state it’ll be in, or how easy it’ll be to find it.”
Zlatko glanced at his battered Soviet watch. “It’ll be past six o’clock by the time we get there. Is anyone expecting us?”
“Supposedly.” Mould replied uncertainly. “Let’s get a move on, we don’t have time for faffing about.”
The Serb started the car using the exposed wires dangling beneath the steering column before easing it into gear with a crunch of meshing cogs, accelerating towards the distant motorway in a cloud of black smoke.
It was early evening by the time they passed through the sleepy town of Altamura with the twin spires of its Romanesque cathedral protruding above a sea of red-roofed buildings like a broken tooth in sunbleached gums.
They turned off the motorway onto a poorly surfaced provincial road, the Alfa Romeo’s suspension rattling alarmingly at every bump.
The road climbed gently towards the Basilicatan border, through lush green fields that gave way to rolling hills covered in a threadbare carpet of sunbleached vegetation. Dusty labourers drifted by on either side of the road, clearly struggling to lift their work-stiffened limbs after a day spent toiling in the fields.
Zlatko slowed the car and wound down his window with a squeaking crank handle.
“Il Cardinale?” He shouted in thickly-accented Italian.
One of the workers jerked an arm to indicate a side road, and the Serb nodded his thanks before moving off in a cloud of coruscating dust.
The road snaked through the hills, taking them past a battered metal road sign indicating the boundary of the village. Mould had Zlatko pull off the road while he squinted at the map until he found their approximate position. He traced a grubby finger along the spider web of tracks, identifying the route they’d take up into the hills.
They carried on until they reached a fork in the road, where a rutted track lanced straight up towards a nearby summit, undulations in the terrain screening the crest from view.
“Leave the car here.” He told Zlatko, pushing open his creaking door and stepping out into the sunbaked countryside.
“No sense giving away how we got up there.” He added as he folded his map and stuffed it into the back pocket of his trousers, checking that his pistol was secure and hidden under the hem of his shirt.
The pair set off up the dusty track, pausing briefly to admire the glimmer of a distant lake as they ascended. The heat was still stifling, and Mould had to pause a couple of times to let the Serb catch his breath.
A high-pitched shout rang out from a heap of boulders halfway up the slope, about thirty yards from the road.
They were confronted by a slight figure tightly clutching a double-barrelled shotgun in its slender hands.
“Halt! Identify yourselves!” The figure hiccoughed, his voice cracking.
“No Italian, alright?” Mould muttered to Zlatko in English, hoping the sentry was too far off to hear. “Better they think we’re thick as pigshit.”
“Uh… Wednesdays!” He shouted back up the hillside, slipping effortlessly into the heavily accented English of his native Yorkshire.
There was a brief pause, the sentry’s face screwing up as he tried to remember the correct counter-sign.
“Gufi… no… owls! Owls!” Came the eventual reply as the teen struggled with the unfamiliar English he’d only heard once or twice.
“You… follow me? We go up!” He jerked the shotgun towards the crest, where Mould could just about make out the top of a high defensive wall and the tiled roofs of several buildings.
The sentry scrambled down from his makeshift observation post, kicking up a cloud of dust and tumbling gravel in his wake. As he got closer, Mould saw that he couldn’t be much older than sixteen or seventeen, his face covered in acne and a light dusting of blonde fuzz to match the ratty undercut covering his sunburnt scalp.
“I am called Camillo.” The boy stuttered, slinging the shotgun onto one narrow shoulder. “I take you to my father. He is called Felice.”
“Alright, lead on, Macduff!” Mould replied brightly, giving the teenager an oafish grin.
Camillo shrugged nervously and started off towards the nearby, clearly not understanding Mould’s impenetrable accent or the unfamiliar English idiom. Mould and Zlatko trailed behind, warily scanning the hillside for other ambush positions and likely escape routes. The rocky slopes were covered in serried ranks of skeletal grape vines that crawled up sagging wooden posts.
“You American?” The teenager asked. “My father, he says the Americans help us kill the reds, yes?”
“Not American. English and Polish.” Mould replied slowly, jerking his head at his Serbian companion.
“Oh…” Camillo stopped abruptly and turned to look at Mould, his face dropping. “My father hates English. They… uh… you will see.”
“What about Poles?” Zlatko asked, a smile crinkling his weatherbeaten face.
“Poles are all gypsies and jews, no?” The teen replied guilelessly. “Hitler should have killed them all. Bang bang.”
He mimed shooting an imaginary prisoner, before turning back up the hill. Mould caught Zlatko’s eye, sharing a worried expression with the Serb as they continued the climb.
Another ten minutes passed before they found themselves in front of the farm’s sunbleached double gates, wood planked affairs set in a tall stone archway with a crumbling crest at its apex. Eroding sculptures of grapes and vines flanked the crest, stone vegetation curling down towards the supporting pillars. A ten-foot high stone wall ringed the entire complex, chunks of cracked render decorating the base and exposing the crumbling stonework beneath. A triangular breach in the western side had been poorly filled with a heap of rubble and other detritus.
Camillo rapped on the gate and it opened immediately, revealing a florid, sunburnt man dressed in a hodgepodge mix of military fatigues with a peaked cap pulled down over his pudgy, moustachioed face and a rusty American M1 carbine slung across his chest.
“Who are they?” The man asked cautiously, resting one hand on the stock of his carbine, eyeing Mould and Zlatko with suspicion.
“It’s the Owl men, Renato. Father said the Americans would send someone to help us, and here they are!” The teenager replied in rapid-fire Italian, gesturing enthusiastically towards the two men standing behind him.
“They knew the proper sign?” Renato replied warily, edging out from behind the gate to get a better look at the two men, his carbine tucked under his armpit.
“Yes, yes of course! I’d have gunned them down otherwise!” The teenager babbled excitedly, brandishing finger guns and miming firing down the hill. “Come on, let us in. I need to piss.”
“I’ll take them to Felice. Don’t take too long, we need someone watching the road.” The fat man replied, pulling the large gate open with a creak of rusting iron hinges, and gesturing for the group to enter.
The flagstoned courtyard was dominated by a two-storey stone blockhouse with ornamental crenellations clinging to the lip of the flat roof. It reminded Mould of the granite bastle houses along the Scottish border, a similar response to banditry and internal strife. A dilapidated first-floor extension slumped to the left of the main building, a crumbling staircase providing access to the collapsing roof.
A huge stone barn sat off to one side, standing almost as tall as the fortified farmhouse, facing a low stable block across the courtyard. The buildings were all in a shocking state of repair, their outer walls colonised by swarming tendrils of vegetation that were worming their way through the cracks in the crumbling mortar.
Renato led them across the courtyard, past a covered stone well with a sagging tiled roof, and knocked on the main building’s red-painted front door with the muzzle of his carbine.
“Renato?” A gravelly voice answered, muffled by the heavy wooden door.
“Scevola, it’s me. Open up! The Americans are here.” The fat man replied, stepping back and ushering Mould and Zlatko forward with his carbine.
The door was opened by a skinny figure in a grey field jacket carrying the insignia of the Italian State Forestry Corps, a parkerised Beretta M12 submachine gun hanging against his hip. He moved to one side and ushered the group in with a gnarled, arthritic nine-fingered hand before returning to a three-legged stool set beside the doorway.
They entered the gloomy interior of the house with Renato bringing up the rear, intentionally or unintentionally slipping into Mould’s blind spot, immediately putting him on edge.
A hallway ran two thirds of the way down the building, ending in a staircase which hooked along the back wall and provided access to the second floor. They passed a huge kitchen, the long range covered in dust, wooden countertops covered with mysterious dark stains, tarnished pans and cooking implements dangling from a rusting iron rack hanging from a blackened ceiling joist.
“In here.” Renato grunted as they approached another doorway, following them into what must have been a living or dining room. Shafts of light knifed through gaps in the boarded windows, illuminating a long dining table groaning under the weight of military paraphernalia piled on top of it.
Ammunition boxes spilled brass-cased .30-calibre and nine millimetre cartridges, along with a variety of spare magazines for different weapons, knives, entrenching tools and ancient-looking military radio in its olive-drab metal case. A stack of dinner-plate sized wooden crates stencilled with German lettering and markings sat at the far end.
A one-armed man in a black wool shirt, grey trousers and a black leather Sam Browne gun belt was hunched over the crates, chiselling away at the nails holding the lids shut with the point of a large hunting knife.He looked up as the trio entered, showing a bearded face that was partially disfigured by horrific burn scars, melted flesh running like candlewax down to one side, obscuring his left eye almost completely and twisting his mouth up into a permanent rictus grin.
“Thank you, Renato. You can leave us.” The man rasped, almost-invisible lips working in the ruin of the scarred face.
Renato clicked his heels and closed the door behind him, leaving Mould and Zlatko alone with the maimed man.
“I am Felice.” The man said, moving to stand in front of a huge, crudely embroidered flag that dominated one of the room’s cracked plaster walls.
It displayed a double-bitted battle axe emblazoned on a white circle and a red field, which Mould immediately recognised as the symbol of the Ordine Nuovo, Italy’s newest and now largest far-right paramilitary organisation.
“Do you speak Italian?” Felice continued in thickly-accented English.
“No, we don’t.” Mould replied bluntly, squaring his shoulders and straightening up to tower over the smaller man, an unconscious reaction to the unease slowly permeating his massive frame.
“They said you would speak Italian.” Felice barked, picking up a piece of paper covered in code, that had been crudely deciphered in pencil. “An Italian-speaking explosives specialist, they said.”
“We were available at short notice. Take it or leave it.” Mould replied, slowly approaching the table, one hand close to the pistol hidden at his waist.
“You don’t sound American.” The one-armed man continued, glaring through his one good eye.
“I’m English. He’s Polish.” Mould said curtly, gesturing at Zlatko who had sidled into one corner of the room to cover the door. The Serb had folded his hands in front of him, conveniently close to his own pistol.
“Fucking English.” Felice spat on the cracked flagstones, setting down his knife and squaring up to Mould over the table. “One of your bombs took off my arm and ruined my face while I slept. I hate the English.”
“Are we going to bicker about ancient history or do you want our help?” Zlatko piped up before Mould could interject, preempting his employer’s rising temper.
“At least you hate the reds too, English?” Felice snarled. “Kill them in Egypt, in Malaya, in Cyprus, no?”
“I spent most of my career cutting fascist throats.” Mould growled, every syllable laden with the threat of immediate and brutal violence. “Italian fascist throats.”
“All in the past now, eh?” Zlatko interjected quickly, thumb hooked into his waistband, beneath his shirt to allow for a faster draw.
“As you say… Ancient history.” Felice replied, clearly sizing up Mould with one hand resting on the flap of his leather holster.
“I accept your help, English.” He gestured to the panoply of weaponry and equipment laid out before him. “We want to kill many Communists, but we don’t have the expertise to carry out a big attack. Guns and grenades kill some, a bomb would kill a lot more.”
“We have an old truck, a… uh, a tonne and a half of fertiliser and some barrels of diesel. This is enough, yes?” Felice continued.
“Any proper explosives and detonators?” Mould asked, delving back into the demolitions training he’d received back at Airisaig during his induction into the Seminary’s ranks half a decade earlier. “You’ll need something to set off the bomb.”
“Ah, yes. We are well equipped.” The one-armed fascist gave an evil grin, pointing at the stack of flat wooden crates beside him. “Anti-tank mines left behind by the Germans.”
“No, no. Ex-plo-sives.” Mould said slowly, as if instructing a particularly slow child, miming a big blast with both his hands. “Plastico.”
“We have nothing like that.” Felice grunted. “There must be something we can do.”
Reluctantly warming to the task of bombmaking, a subject he had proved particularly good at, Mould gave the problem some thought, occasionally glancing at Zlatko who was shifting uncomfortably in the corner of the room.
“You have to get the explosive out of those mines.” He crossed to the stack of crates and effortlessly levered off the lid with a nearby screwdriver, revealing the grey-green domed shape of the mine beneath.
He grabbed it with both hands and lifted it out gingerly, before twisting off the flat steel cover to reveal an angular doughnut of yellow-brown high explosive inside.
He set the cover with its recessed fuse well to one side and set the mine in front of Felice as if he was serving him dinner.
“Put the mines in boiling water to soften it, then scrape it out.” He paused for a second before exclaiming; “Like pasta!”
Felice spat on the ground and scowled at him, clearly unimpressed by the comparison.
“Once it’s scraped out, make it into balls.” Mould mimed moulding something soft into a sphere. “Then put your detonator in and put it on top of the fertiliser.”
“Detonators?” The fascist replied, picking up a black-painted tin with white lines painted across it. He opened the lid to reveal slender brass cylinders arranged like a packet of cigarettes inside. “These came in the… uh, dead drop. Crush one end and bang, no?”
Mould immediately recognised the British-designed time pencils, developed by the Directorate for use by saboteurs in the field. Pretty foolproof in operation, but somewhat unreliable.
“Stick them in the balls of explosive.” He used his thick fingers to demonstrate jabbing the time pencils into the high explosive. “At least two per ball. THis will make sure it definitely goes off.”
“And the size? We will make a big bomb. These will set it off?” The fascist made an expansive gesture to properly convey the size of his ambitions.
“Have you got oil drums?” Mould asked, trying to understand the man’s intentions. “Fill each one with fertilizer and diesel, then add the explosive and detonators on top. That way at least one will go off and take the whole lot with it.”
“You help us with this, yes?” Felice said, mollified by Mould’s willingness to share information. “Together we give the reds a Liberation Day to remember!”
“I can’t.” Mould replied brusquely. “I have other assignments.”
“I understand.” The fascist replied. “We are just one weapon in a large arsenal.”
“Something like that.” Mould grunted in response, turning towards the door. Felice came close behind him, with Zlatko bringing up the rear, one hand hovering close to his concealed weapon.
They added the nine-fingered Ercole to the group as they left the farmhouse, with Felice’s bellowing summoning the portly Renato and a fifth member of the cell from his vantage point somewhere on the second floor.
Barking orders like a drill sergeant, Felice began relating Mould’s instructions to his motley band in rapid-fire Italian. One was sent off to build a big fire and grab a cauldron from the kitchen, while the others were sent off to get the oil drums from the barn. With his instructions given, he turned back to Mould.
“How do I reach you if we need help?” He asked, breathless after his deluge of orders.
“You don’t.” Was Mould’s blunt reply. “Send up your emergency signal, they’ll send someone. Might be me, might not be.”
“Well, I thank you, English.” The fascist stuck out his hand. “We must put aside old wounds to fight new enemies, yes?”
Mould took the man’s hand, feeling the iron strength in the fascist’s grip.
“Agreed. Good luck.” He couldn’t bring himself to sound happy about the situation, but managed a strained smile.
He and Zlatko slipped out via the mouldering double gates, back onto the rutted gravel track down towards Il Cardinale. They walked in silence for ten minutes, both casting wary glances back over their shoulders, halfheartedly waving at Camillo as he broke cover to excitedly send them off.
Once a fold in the ground screened them from view of both the farm and the young sentry, Zlatko stopped abruptly, fixing Mould with a hard stare.
“Why would you help those cunts?” He grumbled. “How long did you spend fucking fighting them only to cosy up to them now they’ve promised to kill communists instead of jews?”
“Trust me, I’d rather do anything else, but I have my orders.” Mould replied halfheartedly, not really believing it himself.
At fifteen he had tried to join the International Brigades and fight in Spain, inspired by stories of General Franco’s reign of terror. Wintringham hadn’t believed that he was old enough, that night at Cutler’s Hall, and it had been three frustrated years until the British Army had taken him on.
Deep in his bones he despised authoritarianism, whether it was the heavy-handed British response to the Irish question, Stalin’s repressive purges or Hitler’s massacre of Jews. His moral code had slowly been eroded by a decade of fighting the shadow war against the Soviet Union, but it felt like he was crossing a line in the sand he’d drawn long, long ago.
“How many innocents are they going to kill with that bomb of theirs?” Zlatko’s continued grumbling snapped Mould out of his reverie.
“Fuck.” He muttered, half in response to the Serb and half to himself. “The Liberation Day parade…”
That settled it. A targeted, surgical killing was one thing, something he’d done a dozen or more times. Setting off a bomb in the heart of Bari was another.
“Go back to the car and wait for me.” His mind was racing as he replayed the brief look they’d got at the compound, the various members of the cell and their armaments.
“What are you going to do?” Zlatko replied sullenly.
“What we should have done in the fucking first place.” Mould grunted.
“Kick up more dust on your way down, make it look like there’s two of us.” He continued, turning abruptly on his heel and starting back up the hill.
After a few minutes, he dropped into the drainage ditch that ran parallel to the track, slithering through the shadows of early evening in the exaggerated low crawl of a veteran scout.
His attention was fixed on the ground in front, scanning for loose stones, dead branches and other detritus that, if disturbed even slightly, could give away his presence.
He was moving in a rough arc uphill away from the rutted track in an attempt to come up on the teenage sentry’s position from the rear. As he picked his way down the ditch, he strained his ears for the slightest sound, filtering out the dull rumble of traffic on the distant motorways.
Ten minutes passed before Mould heard a tuneless whistling echoing across the bare hillside, strangled bars from Giovinezza, Fascist Italy’s national anthem.
The sound stopped Mould in his tracks, and he stuck his head up above the bank of the ditch, moving his head back and forth like a ship’s revolving radar dish to get a more precise bearing on the sound.
He slowed his pace even further, flattening himself to the chalky earth and inching forward on his belly, pushing through the parched scrub towards the source of the sound.
The light was fading fast, and soon the glow of the boy’s cigarette betrayed the exact position of his hiding place, tucked into a fold in the ground amongst a clutch of boulders, with an unobstructed line of sight to the track.
Mould circled around towards the ruined farm, finding the rough path cut in the hillside by the Fascists to access the sentry post.
He followed its course, hoping the inattentive sentry would attribute any accidental noise to one of his comrades coming to relieve him.
The boy’s gangly frame appeared in the gloom, backlit by the last golden rays of summer sunshine. He was squatting with his back to Mould, the shotgun and its bandolier of red and green shells slung across his narrow chest and shoulders.
Mould could smell the acrid smoke of the boy’s cigarette, held loosely in his right hand, his head tilted back to watch the sun set over the wrinkled carpet of the Puglian countryside.
He was blowing smoke rings out over the landscape, clearly oblivious of his surroundings. A tank could have driven by at full speed and he might still have missed it.
Mould slipped the gravity knife from his pocket and depressed the latch, flicking his wrist gently to deploy the four-inch spearpoint blade.
It took several heart-pounding minutes for Mould to get within arms reach.
With his knife gripped between thumb and forefinger, the swell of the grip loosely resting in his palm, he coiled his weight under him like a big cat preparing to pounce.
He hurled himself forward, snaking his left arm out to encircle the boy’s head with his massive forearm and bicep.
Reeling the squatting teenager in by curling his arm, Mould drove the knife forward and up, angling to strike the thin piece of bone at the base of the skull. The blade made a dull, wet crunch as it hit home, spearing into the boy’s brain stem and cutting off all motor function almost instantaneously. He shuddered, his last breath smothered completely by the huge arm wrapped around his face and neck.
Mould lowered the body gingerly to the floor, letting the shotgun slide off the boy’s shoulder. He unbuckled the bandolier of shells and cinched it around his waist before retrieving the weapon and checking that both of the slightly rusted barrels were loaded.
He eased off the cocked hammers and propped the weapon against one of the boulders before turning his attention to the stiffening corpse at his feet. Using the toe of his boot, he rolled it into the shadow of the boulders, using the boy’s discarded camouflage smock as a makeshift shroud.
He followed the track towards the crest of the hill at a low crouch, gingerly lowering himself back onto his belly to crawl over the summit. It took him over an hour to cover the half mile between the sentry’s makeshift observation post and the farm. By the time he reached the ruins it was almost pitch black, a crescent moon scudding gracefully across the cloudless sky.
He edged around the crumbling perimeter wall to find the huge breach he’d spotted earlier, finding electric light spilled out of the barn’s open double doors, illuminating the whole courtyard.
An aging Fiat army truck had been backed out onto the packed earth, its canvas cover pulled back to reveal the empty load bed, its original camouflage livery showing through under several patchy coats of royal blue. Eight empty oil drums were racked up by the open tailgate, bearing the colourful liveries of several different oil companies, the paint flaking from the corroding barrels.
Renato and the sentry from the rooftop, stripped to their sweat-stained undershirts with rags tied around their faces, were manhandling a huge sack of fertiliser past the rusting truck and out into the farmyard, before emptying it into one of the empty drums. When they’d emptied a sack, one of them decanted a small amount of oil from a jerry can and poured it in, stirring the noxious mixture with a length of scrap wood.
The group had built a fire in the centre of the courtyard, tended by the one-armed Felice. An iron kettle of water was suspended on a makeshift frame, presumably containing the old German anti-tank mines, judging by the shattered remnants of wooden packing crates piled up ready to be fed into the flames.
Mould settled onto his haunches with the shotgun’s barrels resting on the wall’s exposed brickwork, trying not to stare directly at the light and preserve his precious night vision.
The only member of the cell missing was the nine-fingered Scevola, but he could see more lights blazing behind the farmhouse’s boarded-up ground floor windows, along with a thick plume of smoke issuing from the lopsided chimney.
Isolated as they were, the cell had absolutely no noise discipline, the labourers grunting and bitching about the weight of the sacks and the pungent odour of diesel, harangued by their boss as he prodded the contents of the kettle with a rusty poker.
The two with the sacks appeared to be unarmed, but Felice was still wearing his polished Sam Browne holster belt with the black bakelite grips of a Walther P38 poking out of the open flap, and one of the group’s battered M1 carbines at his feet.
As he posed an immediate threat, he became Mould’s priority target.
Moving with extreme caution, Mould gently cracked the shotgun and extracted the shells, swapping the red-hulled buckshot for green-hulled slugs.
The thumb-sized lead projectiles nestled inside the hulls had angled grooves that gripped the barrel and set them spinning, giving them better accuracy over distance compared to a relatively random pattern of buckshot.
Nestling the wooden stock into his shoulder, he aligned the brass bead sight on the man’s upper torso, thumbed back both chequered hammers and squeezed the pair of triggers.
The gun discharged with a deafening crash and a foot-long tongue of flame, the blast kicking up a huge cloud of brick dust and dirt. It kicked hard against his massive shoulder, shoving him back as the two slugs spun off towards their intended target.
A heartbeat later they struck, with a sound like a butcher’s cleaver hitting the block, pitching the one-armed man over onto his back in a great spray of blood and bone fragments.
Mould was already moving, tossing the smoking shotgun to the ground and drawing the Colt automatic from his waistband as he vaulted through the triangular breach in the wall.
He shot Renato in the back three times, drilling fat .45-calibre holes in the portly man, covering his comrade and the sack carried between them with bright red oxygen-rich arterial blood. The man pitched over onto one side, mewling as blood bubbled from exit wounds in his sternum.
The other man shrieked in panic, letting the heavy sack fall to the ground, spilling an avalanche of ammonia pellets over the packed earth. He scrabbled at his waist for a knife, but never got the chance to draw it as Mould emptied the rest of his magazine into him. He was struck three times in the chest and once in the head, completely pollaxing him. The lifeless corpse tumbled to the ground like a puppet with cut strings.
Scevola burst out of the farmhouse’s main door into the courtyard, a blood-spattered apron over threadbare overalls, M1 carbine pulled tight into one shoulder, the green canvas sling flapping as he charged forward.
Mould had already relocated, crabbing sideways past the dilapidated wooden gates to put the crumbling bulk of the stone well between him and the door. He reloaded as he ran, dropping the empty magazine into one of his pockets.
The charging fascist opened up, spraying the wall behind Mould with bullets, leaving neat lines of craters as if stitched by a sewing machine. Firelight robbed him of any night vision, plunging everything outside of its incandescent glow into a shadowy murk and giving Mould excellent concealment.
Rounds ricocheted off the well and slashed through the air around him, but he remained unperturbed, carefully setting his sights on the man’s torso and dropping him with a precise double-tap. Plumes of dust kicked up by charging feet and foul-smelling smoke drifted over the courtyard, now a charnel house that stunk of spilled blood and cordite.
Renato was still moving, the slick of blood around him seeping into the ammonium nitrate. His voice had shrunk to a frightened whimper, praying for salvation as the last of his life ebbed away.
Mould left him to bleed out, pulling open one of the gates and setting off back down the hill.
It took significantly less time to reach his rendezvous with Zlatko and the stolen Alfa Romeo saloon. The Croat was perched on the bonnet like a wizened bird of prey, wrapped in a moth-eaten military greatcoat with his Beretta drawn.
He jerked around sharply as a twig cracked under Mould’s foot, thrusting the pistol forward into the aim.
“Woah, easy.” Mould said, spreading his arms and raising both hands. “It’s only me.”
“I heard shooting.” The old smuggler muttered flatly. “Glad to see you’re still standing.”
“Aye, well those cunts couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery.” Mould replied, grinning broadly as the last dregs of adrenaline ebbed away. “They weren’t exactly crack stormtroopers, eh?”
Zlatko shrugged, stowing his pistol and stretching as he unfolded limbs stiffened by inaction.
“All it takes is one shot to put someone in the ground, even a big ox like you.” He replied eventually, opening the car door with a shriek. “You’re lucky you weren’t killed.”
“Guess I’m lucky then.” Mould said as he hauled his bulk into the passenger seat. “Any drama up here?”
“Some police come by.” Zlatko replied. “I told them I had a flat tire and they drove on, but the shooting will bring them back.”
“Then the quicker we’re done here the better then! Get us back up the hill, I’ve got to cover our tracks” Mould said, slapping the dashboard impatiently.
“We should leave!” Zlatko argued. “We don’t have time.”
“And if I don’t clean things up, I’ll be for the high jump!” Mould continued loudly. “Them needing killing won’t hold water with London. I need to make it look like they botched things and blew themselves up.”
A pregnant pause filled the car. Zlatko’s hands clenched on the wheel, scarred knuckles white, before he turned the key and coaxed the car into spluttering wakefulness.
It didn’t take long for them to reach the slaughteryard Mould had left in his wake. Sprawled bodies were illuminated by guttering flames as the fire under the kettle died away, clouds of steam rising from the evaporating water.
“What are you going to do?” Zlatko as he got out of the car, warily eyeing the carnage.
“Like I said, I’m going to make it look like they fucked it up.” Mould replied as he stalked away from the car and grabbed Felice’s body by the lapels of his jacket.
The slugs had blown two fist-sized holes in the man’s back, exposing shattered ribs and pulped organs. Mould dragged the body away from the fire and over to the rusted barrels, leaving a trail of bloody drag marks in the packed earth.
“Grab the other one then.” He snapped at his companion, jerking his head at the body in the farmhouse doorway. “We haven’t got time to piss about.”
He heard the smuggler cursing the wild English under his breath as he inspected the drums. Two of the six were filled with the sticky mixture of fertilizer and fuel oil, a heady chemical stink swimming in the air above them. Mould replaced the lid and crossed to the fire, leaning over the bubbling kettle.
Three of the ochre-painted mines were immersed in the water, a stew of paint flakes and rust roiling around them. Using the discarded poker as a makeshift hook, he snagged the folding carry handle and gingerly pulled one out of the water and set it on the ground.
Leaving the metal casing to cool, he found a discarded shirt in the barn and tore it into strips, two for his hands and one to cover his nose and mouth. He emerged to find Zlatko staring at him quizzically.
“Auditioning for a western now are we?” The smuggler joked, wiping blood off his hands on Felice’s jacket.
“Very funny.” Mould replied. “Make yourself useful and see if you can find those time pencils in the house.”
“Yes sir.” Zlatko threw him a mocking salute and sauntered inside, as Mould returned to the mine he’d pulled from the pot.
It took him several precious minutes to unscrew the smooth upper surface and the corrugated pressure plate, revealing the twelve pounds of yellow-brown high explosive inside. It had softened in the hot water, taking on the consistency of plasticene. Scooping it out with his cloth-wrapped hands, while trying not to breathe in the bitter almond smell, he moulded it into two rough balls.
By the time he had finished, Zlatko had emerged from the house with two black-painted tins, one with a red band, the other with a white band.
“Are these what you wanted?” He asked. “Are we leaving all that artillery behind? It’d be worth a fucking fortune on the black market.”
“We haven’t got fucking time.” Mould snapped, the fumes from the explosives having seeped through his mask and given him a blinding headache. “Bring those here.”
He used the lid of one of the empty barrels as a makeshift work bench, placing his two balls of high explosive on top of them. Extracting four of the long copper cylinders from the red-banded tin, he crushed one end under his bootheel, smashing the glass vial of acid inside. The acid would eat through a short length of lead wire, releasing a spring-loaded striker which would then detonate a percussion cap, initiating any explosive the cylinder was inserted into.
With the clock definitely ticking, Mould stuck two pencils into each ball, dropping one into each filled drum and replacing the lid.
“Get in the fucking car!” He shouted at Zlatko, who had liberated a packet of cigarettes from one of the bodies and was trying to strike a match on his boot heel. “We’ve got half an hour to get as far away from here as possible before this lot goes up and blows everything to hell and back.”
“Blows up?” Zlatko replied incredulously as he abandoned his smoke and ran towards the car. “You’re going to set it all off?”
“What did you think I was doing? Setting out a fucking kid’s tea party?” Mould yelled as he ran across the courtyard and hurled himself into the driver’s seat, turning the ignition before he was even fully in the seat.
The old Alfa Romeo’s engine turned over a few times before grumbling back into life, urged on by thumps and kicks from Mould’s huge hands and feet. Zlatko had barely closed the passenger door before he gunned the engine sending the car bounding down the track, its axles rattling alarmingly as they struck a succession of bumps and potholes.
Racing back onto the main road, the car’s engine protested loudly as Mould buried his foot into the floor, the gearbox crunching as he forced his way through the gears, pushing the stolen car to its absolute limits. They were ten miles away from the farm when his improvised bomb blew, creating a shockwave that echoed off the surrounding hillsides like a giant thunderclap.
A huge mushroom cloud of red-brown dust spewed into the air, scattering clods of earth and brick fragments over half a mile of rolling countryside. The moon was veiled by the dirty orange cloud as they skirted around the tightly-clustered houses of Il Cardinale, before rejoining the road outside Monte Poto.
Now they were out of immediate danger, Mould reduced his speed and crawled along at a modest pace, doing his best to look like a lost tourist or a bored local out for an evening drive.
A column of cars and vans in the khaki livery of the Corpo delle Guardie di Pubblica Sicurezza raced past them outside of Calendano, causing the Serb smuggler to duck his head before Mould cuffed him and ordered him to act normally.
With their sirens screaming and uniformed drivers hunched intently over the wheel, the police passed without giving them a second glance, followed closely by several red fire engines, crammed with volunteer firefighters.
The sky behind them glowed ominously, and Mould could see billowing clouds of black smoke rising over the hills in the Alfa’s cracked rear-view mirror. Baked by the scorching sun, the countryside had become a tinderbox, set ablaze by scattered globs of burning diesel and cooked-off small arms ammunition.
Not wishing for any further encounters with police, they headed to Manfredonia using back roads, stopping a handful of times so Mould could consult his sheaf of military maps and keep them moving in the right direction.
They reached the town’s outskirts in the small hours of the morning with only the barking of wild dogs and the hum of cicadas for company. They abandoned the Alfa Romeo in a layby just off the motorway.
Zlatko stuffed a petrol-soaked rag into the fuel tank and set it smouldering with his lighter, the blazing vehicle warming their backs as they disappeared into the night.
Picking their way along the grid of 19th-century streets towards the harbour, with its stone drum of a Norman fortress glowering out at the Adriatic.
Mould roused one of the harbourmaster’s attendants, asleep in his prefabricated office and got directions to the yacht’s berth.
Ettore was on deck with a pile of cigarette butts and empty beer bottles around his feet when they eventually reached the boat, a book of lewd poems open on his lap.
“Have a nice drive?” He said, winking lasciviously at Mould before catching sight of Zlatko’s thunderous expression.
“Shut up, faggot.” The Serbian spat acidly, making an obscene gesture with a hand covered in flecks of dried blood, before stomping angrily down into the crew quarters.
“What happened? What’s crawled up your arse?” The young man asked, face reddening at the insult.
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to. Well done on getting here in one piece” Mould said begrudgingly, pulling the pilot house door shut behind him.
He did his best to avoid the Serb as he squeezed through the narrow passageways to his cabin. He closed the door and collapsed on the bed, and was asleep before he had a chance to take his boots off.
He woke absolutely stinking of sweat, dust and grime clinging to him like a second skin. He splashed water on his face and changed into a set of serge overalls, returning his automatic to its hiding place under the bed and filling his pockets with the gravity knife and his wallet.
The saloon smelled like grease and overcooked meat, the remnants of a meal scattered across the stovetop, counters and the central table.
Mould ignored the chaos and stepped out onto the foredeck, finding that similarly deserted, apart from scattered litter.
He locked the doors behind him and picked his way along the gangway and onto the pier. There was a grimy, metal-cased payphone at the start of the mole, covered in graffiti and decorated with obscene postcards advertising the services of various prostitutes that hung around the marina.
He lifted the handset, uncomfortably warm in the morning sun, and entered the number for the embassy’s reception using the stiff, dirt-encrusted dial.
The phone rang twice before an enthusiastic secretary answered in Italian. “This is the British embassy, how may I direct your call?”
“Buongiorno.” Mould replied in his flawless Italian. “My name is Cesare Provenzano and I need to speak to Signore Schofield from the Board of Trade. It’s urgent. Have him call me back on this number as soon as possible.”
He hung up before the receptionist had a chance to reply, and sauntered over to a patch of shade in sight of the payphone and lit a cigarette. He imagined the flustered receptionist consulting her directory, looking up at her boss with puzzlement as she found that there was no Signore Schofield working at the embassy.
Her boss would know all the emergency signals by heart and would tell the woman that the caller must have made a mistake, before memorising the number and disappearing into the bowels of the building, making his way up to the stuffy little office shared by three Seminary officers and a lone secretary.
It would be like an oven by this time of the morning, filled with a noxious fug of sweat and cigarette smoke. Dog-eared photographs of mafia dons, communist agitators and corrupt politicians decorated the walls, while fat files of questionable intelligence spilled out over the peeling laminate desks.
The head receptionist would inform the section chief that someone had sent up an emergency signal, recite the number and then return to his duties. Meanwhile, the section chief would pull on his jacket, fill his pipe with tobacco and stomp down the embassy’s grand staircases in search of a payphone of his own.
Mould was shaken from his reverie by the jangling of the phone. Crushing his half-smoked cigarette under his bootheel, he crossed the street and picked up the receiver.
“Aquinas.” A gruff voice barked.
“Albert Magnus.” Mould replied, dredging up the correct response from the list of medieval theologians devised by the Seminary’s security people and implemented primarily to torture field agents with shitty memories.
“Is that Mould? I’m fucking furious with you! Do you know what you’ve done?” The voice continued, its nauseating public school tone sounding more irate by the second.
“Yes sir, it’s Mould.” Mould replied, adopting the deferential yet indifferent tone that had averted the wrath of many a senior officer during his time in the Army.
“Your handiwork is all over the fucking papers, you fucking useless cunt.” The section chief hissed evilly.
“Front page, the Corriere della Sera. Explosion at Bari farm linked to the Ordine Nuovo. The crackdown will force everyone underground and we won’t hear a peep out of anyone for months.”
“Our efforts, sir?” Mould asked.
“Don’t play coy with me, Mould.” The section head spat. “You know full well that we’re playing in the American’s sandpit out here. You’ve set their operations back by fucking years! The head of station is absolutely furious with us, as is half of bloody Whitehall.”
“What did the Americans want with a useless bunch of fascists?” Mould replied, playing dumb.
“Not that I need to explain myself to the bloody infantry;” The section head said, finally getting his temper under control. “But the CIA have been running an op codenamed Spatha, involving various Italian political movements to stop the reds seizing power, and to slow the Russkies down if they decide to invade. Many of these groups happen to be fascists, on account of their training, access to arms and connections with the Italian political establishment, unlike that unwashed lot you’ve been peddling product from.”
“You were going to let some Yank burn my network with some half-cocked scheme cooked up in Washington?” Mould asked indignantly, struggling to keep a lid on his temper.
“Your ‘network’ was a bunch of mafia con artists and illiterate dockers.” The section chief replied crossly. “You’ve produced nothing of value in six months, so London decided it was worth trading for some good will with the Americans.”
“I’m not going to debate this with you, Mould.” He continued flatly. “You’re being recalled. I want you on the next train to Rome or I’ll declare you out of bounds and have the Confessors bring you back folded up in a suitcase.”
Mould knew he wasn’t bluffing. The Confessors were all moonlighters from British special operations and spent most of their time doing horrific shit on the Seminary’s behalf. They’d be on him like a pack of dogs.
Mould looked back along the mole at the forest of masts. He’d miss the boat more than anything else. While it wasn’t much bigger than his mouldering flat off the Old Kent Road, the views were considerably better.
“Well?” The section head asked irately. “Are you coming, or shall I call the minister?”
“I’ll be on the next train back.” Mould said quietly. “Send a car to pick me up at the station.”
Replacing the receiver before the section head could respond, he shambled back towards the boat, smoking another cigarette as he went.
Once inside his cabin again, he began the tedious business of removing any trace of his presence from the vessel.
He began sifting through the reams of paper spilling out of the hidden compartment under the bed. Most of it went straight into a wire wastepaper bin he’d snagged from one of the cabins.
He kept the boat’s bill of sale and other registration documents, which he placed in the empty leather briefcase still sitting open on the built-in desk.
To that he added several months wages in various currencies from his stash behind the toilet cistern, stuffing the rest into his duffle bag along with a change of clothes from the piles scattered across the floor.
Stuffing both the Colt automatic and the Smith & Wesson revolver into the bulging wastepaper basket, he carried it up onto the deck with his duffle bag over one shoulder and the leather briefcase in his other hand.
He left the basket in the galley sink while he tossed both pistols over the side along with his spare magazines and a half-full box of .45 shells, before returning to douse the contents in lighter fluid and set the whole lot ablaze.
With the fire crackling merrily behind him, he tore a page out of his notebook and jotted down a quick note.
He left the briefcase on the galley table, adding his ring of keys to the slim sheaf of papers, before closing the briefcase as best he could.
With that done, he stamped down the gangplank for the last time and disappeared into Manfredonia’s tangled streets. Hunched under the weight of his duffle, he tramped dejectedly in the direction of the tiny train station.
Rome, and everything that came with it, awaited.