Schlinker smiled broadly. “I own it,” he said. “It is what I am best known for to the general public.”

And a damn good cover for holding a warehouse full of crates labeled “Danger of Explosion,” thought Shannon. But he was interested. Quickly he wrote out a list of items and showed them to Schlinker. “Could you fulfill this order, for export, out of your stocks?” he asked.

Schlinker glanced at the list. It included two rocket-launching tubes of the type used by coast guards to send up distress flares, ten rockets containing magnesium flares of maximum intensity and duration attached to parachutes, two penetrating foghorns powered by compressed-gas canisters, four sets of night binoculars, three fixed-crystal walkie-talkie sets with a range of not less than five miles, and five wrist compasses.

“Certainly,” he said. “I stock all these things.”

“I’d like to place an order for the list. As they are off the classification of arms, I assume there would be no problems with exporting them?”

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“None at all. I can send them anywhere I want, particularly to a ship.”

“Good,” said Shannon. “How much would that lot cost, with freight in bond to an exporting agent in Marseilles?”

Schlinker went through his catalogue and priced the list, adding on 10 percent for freight. “Four thousand, eight hundred dollars,” he said.

“I’ll be in touch with you in twelve days,” said Shannon. “Please have the whole lot ready-crated for freighting. I will give you the name of the exporting agent in Marseilles, and mail you a banker’s check in your favor for forty-eight hundred dollars. Within thirty days I expect to be able to give you the remaining twenty-six thousand dollars for the ammunition deal, and the name of the ship.”

He met his second contact for dinner that night at the Atlantic. Alan Baker was an expatriate, a Canadian who had settled in Germany after the war and married a German girl. A former Royal Engineer during the war, he had got himself involved during the early postwar years in a series of border-crossing operations into and out of the Soviet Zone, running nylons, watches, and refugees. From there, he had drifted into arms-running to the scores of tiny nationalist or anti-Communist bands of maquis who, left over from the war, still ran their resistance movements in Central and Eastern Europe—with the sole difference that during the war they had been resisting the Germans, while after it they were resisting the Communists.

Most of them had been paid for by the Americans, but Baker was content to use his knowledge of German and commando tactics to slip quantities of arms to them and take a hefty salary check from the Americans for doing so. When these groups finally petered out, he found himself in Tangier in the early 1950s, using the smuggling talents he had learned in the war and after it to bring cargoes of perfume and cigarettes into Italy and Spain from the then international and free port on the north coast of Morocco. Finally put out of business by the bombing and sinking of his ship in a gangland feud, he had returned to Germany and gone into the business of wheeler-dealing in any commodity that had a buyer and a supplier. His most recent feat had been to negotiate a deal in Yugoslav arms on behalf of the Basques in northern Spain.

He and Shannon had met when Baker was running guns into Ethiopia and Shannon had been at a loose end after returning from Bukavu in April 1968. Baker knew Shannon under his real name.

The short, wiry man listened quietly while Shannon explained what he wanted, his eyes flickering from his food to the other mercenary.

“Yes, it can be done,” he said when Shannon had finished. “The Yugoslavs would accept the idea that a new customer wanted a sample set of two mortars and two bazookas for test purposes before placing a larger order if he was satisfied. It’s plausible. There’s no problem from my side in getting the stuff from them. My relations with the men in Belgrade are excellent. And they are quick. Just at the moment I have to admit I have one other problem, though.”

“What’s that?”

“End User Certificate,” said Baker. “I used to have a man in Bonn, diplomat for a certain East African country, who would sign anything for a price and a few nice, big German girls laid on at a party, the sort he liked. He was transferred back to his own country two weeks ago. I’m a bit stuck for a replacement at the moment.”

“Are the Yugoslavs particular about End Users?”

Baker shook his head. “Nope. So long as the documentation is in order, they don’t check further. But there has to be a certificate, and it must have the right governmental stamp on it. They can’t afford to be too slack, after all.”

Shannon thought for a moment. He knew of a man in Paris who had once boasted he had a contact in an embassy there who could make out End User Certificates.

“If I could get you one, a good one, from an African country? Would that work?” he asked.

Baker inhaled on his cigar. “No problem at all,” he said. “As for the price, a sixty-mm. mortar tube would run you eleven hundred dollars each. Say, twenty-two hundred for the pair. The bombs are twenty-four dollars each. The only problem with your order is that the sums are really too small. Couldn’t you up the number of mortar bombs from a hundred to three hundred? It would make things much easier. No one throws off just a hundred bombs, not even for test purposes.”

“All right,” said Shannon, “I’ll take three hundred, but no more. Otherwise I’ll go over budget, and that comes off my cut.”

It did not come off his cut, for he had allowed a margin for overexpenditure, and his own salary was secure. But he knew Baker would accept the argument as final.

“Good,” said Baker. “So that’s seventy-two hundred dollars for the bombs. The bazookas cost a thousand dollars each, two thousand for the pair. The rockets are forty-two dollars and fifty cents each. The forty you want come out at…Let’s see…”

“Seventeen hundred dollars,” said Shannon. “The whole packet comes out at thirteen thousand, one hundred dollars.”

“Plus ten percent for getting the stuff free on board your ship, Cat. Without the End User Certificate. If I could have got one for you, it would have been twenty percent. Let’s face it. It’s a tiny order, but the traveling and out-of-pocket expenses for me are constants. I ought to charge you fifteen percent for such a small order. So the total is fourteen thousand, four hundred dollars. Let’s say fourteen and a half, eh?”

“We’ll say fourteen four,” said Shannon. “I’ll get the certificate and mail it to you, along with a fifty percent deposit. I’ll pay another twenty-five percent when I see the stuff in Yugoslavia crated and ready to go, and twenty-five percent as the ship leaves the quay. Travelers’ checks in dollars, okay?”

Baker would have liked it all in advance, but, not being a licensed dealer, he had no offices, warehouses, or business address as Schlinker had. He would act as broker, using another dealer he knew to make the actual purchase on his behalf. As a black-market man, he had to accept these terms, the lower cut, and less in advance.

One of the oldest tricks in the book is to promise to fulfill an arms order, show plenty of confidence, assure the customer of the broker’s absolute integrity, take the maximum in advance, and disappear. Many a black and brown seeker after arms in Europe has had that trick played on him. Baker knew Shannon would never fall for it; besides, 50 percent of $14,400 was too small a sum to disappear for.

Tags: Frederick Forsyth Thriller
Source: readsnovelonline.net