Lassiter had the crew fully armed at this point. Somehow, Cobb noted, they had come up with some pretty fair armaments, considering the nature of the operation — old fashioned bazookas, modern antitank weapons, some wire-guided rockets, and an assortment of grenade launchers and mortars. Lassiter did not trust a soul. That was why he, like Cobb, was a survivor.
They sped down the Bosporus, weaving constantly. This satisfied Cobb, who did not take the idea of being a target lightly. He operated furtively. This open-air approach was not to his liking. At every bend, he expected a surge of weapons fire to sweep the deck. But the passage was a safe one.
Within half an hour, the distant hills of Istanbul rose through the morning haze. As they came closer, the farms on the shore gave way to small factories, then to smokestacks, then to a combination of new construction interspersed with dwellings put up before the United States became a nation.
Istanbul is called the City of Seven Hills, once surrounded by nearly impregnable walls built down to the water. It’s Old City surrounded on three sides by water and thus well fortified, stands on the Golden Horn. The New City, to the northeast and across the Galata Bridge, is not nearly so fascinating.
Their boat slowed to a crawl to navigate through the heavy commercial traffic of this major seaport. Slender, graceful minarets towered above the mosques of the Moslem city. They were to fuel at the Sirkeci Ferry Pier. It was directly ahead as they exited the Bosporus into the widening Sea of Marmara.
Lassiter was the tour guide. He pointed out the first hill atop the Golden Horn, which ended in Seraglio Point. The Ataturk Monument and the Topkapi Palace were to their left. The waterways of the ancient city bustled as if there were nothing of concern, no recent war with Greece, no Soviet planes gradually encroaching on their airspace, no fear of the Russian warships that continually passed on their way to the Mediterranean. The small Russian boat flying the American flag was a fearful-looking craft with her assortment of weapons displayed on deck. She was given a wide berth as she stood half a mile off the pier. Lassiter intended to drift and watch for a while.
Verra, her eyes continually wandering back to Keradin, remained close to Cobb. “It’s beautiful,” she murmured sleepily. “I’ve never seen anything like this, never traveled before.”
Cobb smiled. Now that he had a few moments with nothing to concern him other than eventually getting back to Saratoga, he studied her more closely. She was young — young enough to be his daughter — but so grown up after being at Keradin’s vineyards. And she was tough too. She had to be to come out of that experience the way she had. Verra was relaxed. Her face had softened considerably from the vixen who had wanted to emasculate Keradin on the spot. She would have too, Cobb acknowledged, smiling. He felt an affection for her, much different than he imagined a man would have for a daughter. It was something he had not felt for a long time, something he had long ago told himself he should avoid.
He pondered the idea for a second, imagining a life he knew he wasn’t cut out for, studying the wisps of hair that blew over her face as she stared, fascinated, at the ancient city. Cobb, he reminded himself, you’re getting too old, too old to handle sleepless nights because you’re letting a kid, a female kid, turn your head. There’s work to do, my friend, much work before you can think about such things.
His mind drifted back to other operations — steamy jungles in Vietnam, midnight landings in rubber rafts in the Caribbean, one in South Africa, another in Libya, and then the drinking afterward, disdaining sleep in the heady excitement of close-in fighting, and finally coming out of it all alive! There were moments now when he knew he wasn’t functioning on that level. This time he wanted to get it over with, get it done, and get the hell out with his skin intact. And a kid, a female — no, a woman in every sense of the word — was occupying his mind.
“Why are we waiting out here?” she inquired.
Cobb pointed at Lassiter, who was still surveying the docks through his binoculars. “After you’ve been in this business long enough, you tend not to trust anyone or anything but yourself. That’s where we’re supposed to fuel.” He pointed straight ahead to the pier, easily identified by the Sirkeci railroad station looming over it. “The Turks expect us. Our own people spent hours explaining how we’d be in a Soviet boat with an American flag. But anything can happen. An old philosopher friend of ours, Bernie Ryng, once said, ‘Never trust a soul and you’ll live to tell someone else the same thing.’”
“Do you believe that?” Verra asked.
“Absolutely.” He did not mention that Ryng, the perennial bachelor, had also said that there was no place for women in their business, that you saved them only for when you needed them.
“Do you trust me?” she asked him.
Cobb looked down. She waited calmly for his answer, her eyes never leaving his. Even Ryng would allow him an occasional lapse. “Yes. I trust you, but I also had an alternate plan if you turned on me.” He shrugged. “We’ll never know if it would have worked, will we?”
“I don’t know you, but I trusted you,” she whispered. “And you brought me out of there.”
Cobb smiled. “That statement from the great Ryng did not include every single person on the face of this earth. You may always trust me. If you ever meet the great Ryng, please trust him too. And,” he gestured toward Lassiter, “that is a man I trust, so you can stick with him also.”
“Just the three of you?” She smiled. “Only three men in the whole wide world?”
“There are others, some old friends of mine.”
“Will I get to meet them?”
“I don’t know if I want to share the likes of them with you.” Now what the hell did he mean by that? She didn’t belong to him, and he didn’t belong to her. “Yes. I hope you will,” he concluded.
The boat rocked in the gentle wavelets created by the heavy flow of traffic off the Golden Horn. Wafting across the harbor were a variety of aromas similar to those that had fascinated Cobb in so many other seaports. Each one was different, each had its own special appeal.
Lassiter dropped his binoculars and gestured for Cobb to come up with him. “Here, sweep those docks starting about a hundred yards to the left of our pier. Then go to the right, up to about the Galata Bridge.”
Cobb closed his eyes. He squeezed them tight, then opened them, pressed against the lenses. They adjusted quickly. He first saw what he expected, a variety of craft tied to various piers, trucks outside warehouses, stacks of goods on pallets. Wait a second — fire trucks, wisps of smoke here and there, uniforms. Must be military. Not a lot of smoke, not enough to cause concern, but nevertheless, he could locate at least three distinct spots where light smoke was driven to the north before it rose far into the sky.
“What do you make of it?” Lassiter asked.
“If there was much of a fire in any of those locations, they’re pretty much out now or they never amounted to much to begin with. Looks safe enough to me now.”
“Yeah. It does to me too. But how often do you have that many fires all near the same spot, namely the one we want to refuel at?”