Such a letter was what Shannon wrote and dispatched from Hamburg. It was to Signor Kurt Semmler, MV Toscana, c/o the Port Office, Brindisi, Italy.

In it he told Semmler that from Brindisi he should proceed to Ploce on the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia, and that if he had no charts to negotiate the tricky straits north of Korcula Island, he should get them locally. He had to get the Toscana there on the evening of June 10, and his berth would be reserved. There was no need to inform the agents in Genoa of the extra leg from Brindisi to Ploce.

His last instruction to Semmler was important. He told the German ex-smuggler he wanted him to acquire a merchant seaman’s card for a deckhand called Keith Brown, stamped and up to date, and issued by the Italian authorities. The second thing the ship would need was a cargo manifest showing the Toscana had proceeded straight from Brindisi to Valencia without a halt, and would be heading from Valencia to Latakia, Syria, after taking cargo aboard in Valencia. Semmler would have to use his old Brindisi contacts to obtain these documents.

Before he left Hamburg for Yugoslavia, Shannon’s last letter was to Simon Endean in London. It required Endean to meet Shannon at a rendezvous in Rome on June 16, and to bring certain maritime charts with him.

About the same time, the MV Toscana was chugging steadily through the Bight of Bonifacio, the narrow channel of limpid blue water that separates the southern tip of Corsica from the northern end of Sardinia. The sun was blistering, but mellowed by a light wind. Marc Vlaminck was stretched out, stripped to the waist, on the hatch cover of the main hold, a wet towel beneath him, his torso like a pink hippopotamus covered in suntan oil. Janni Dupree, who always turned brick red in the sun, was propped up against the wall of the after structure, under the awning, swigging from his tenth bottle of beer of the morning. Cipriani, the deckhand, was painting part of the rail around the forepeak white, and the first mate, Norbiatto, was snoozing on his bunk below after taking the night watch.

Also down below, in the stinking heat of the engine room, was the engineer, Grubic, oiling some piece of machinery that only he could understand but which no doubt was vital to keep the Toscana steady on her eight knots through the Mediterranean. In the wheel-house Kurt Semmler and Carl Waldenberg were sipping cold beer and exchanging reminiscences of their respective careers.

Jean-Baptiste Langarotti would have liked to be there. From the port rail he could have watched the gray-white sunbleached coast of his homeland slipping past barely four miles across the water. But he was many miles away, in West Africa, where the rainy season had already begun and where, despite the fever heat, the clouds were leaden gray.

Alan Baker came into Shannon’s hotel in Dubrovnik just as the mercenary was returning from the beach on the evening of June 8. He looked tired and dusty.

Cat Shannon, by contrast, was looking and feeling better. He had spent his week in the Yugoslav holiday resort behaving like any other tourist, sunbathing and swimming several miles each day. He looked thinner, but fit and tanned. He was also optimistic.

After settling into his hotel, he had sent Semmler a cable at Brindisi requesting confirmation of the arrival of the vessel and receipt of the waiting letter mailed from Hamburg. That morning he had got Semmler’s telegraphed reply. The Toscana had arrived safely in Brindisi, the letter had been received and acted on, and they would depart on the morning of June 9 to make destination by midnight of the tenth.

Over drinks on the terrace of their hotel, where Shannon had reserved Baker a room for the night, he told the dealer from Hamburg the news.

Baker nodded and smiled. “Fine. I got a cable forty-eight hours ago from Ziljak in Belgrade. The crates have arrived in Ploce and are in the government warehouse near the quay, under guard.”

They spent the night in Dubrovnik and the following morning hired a taxi to take them the hundred kilometers up the coast to Ploce. It was a boneshaker of a car that appeared to have square wheels and cast-iron suspension, but the drive along the coast road was agreeable, mile upon mile of unspoiled coastline, with the small town of Slano at the halfway mark, where they stopped for a cup of coffee and to stretch their limbs.

They were established in a Ploce hotel by lunchtime and waited in the shade of the terrace until the port office opened again at four in the afternoon.

The port was set on a broad sweep of deep blue water, shielded to its seaward side by a long peninsula of land called Peliesac, which curved out of the mam coast to the south of Ploce and ran northward parallel to the coast. Up to the north the gap between the tip of the peninsula and the coast was almost blocked by the rocky island of Hvar, and only a narrow gap gave access to the sea lagoon on which Ploce stood. This lagoon, nearly thirty miles long, surrounded on nineteenths of its perimeter by land, was a paradise for swimming, fishing, and sailing.

As they approached the port office, a small and battered Volkswagen squealed to a halt a few yards away and hooted noisily. Shannon froze. His first instinct said trouble, something he had been fearing all along, some slip-up in the paperwork, a sudden block put on the whole deal by the authorities, and an extended stay under questioning in the local police station.

The man who climbed out of the small car and waved cheerily might have been a policeman, except that police in most totalitarian states of East or West seemed to be banned from smiling by standing orders. Shannon glanced at Baker and saw his shoulders sag in relief.

“Ziljak,” Baker muttered through closed mouth and went to meet the Yugoslav. The latter was a big shaggy man, like an amiable black-haired bear, and he embraced Baker with both arms. When he was introduced, his first name turned out to be Kemal, and Shannon supposed there was more than a touch of Turk in the man. That suited Shannon fine; he liked the type, normally good fighters and comrades with a healthy dislike of bureaucracy.

“My assistant,” said Baker, and Ziljak shook hands and muttered something in what Shannon assumed to be Serbo-Croat. Baker and Ziljak communicated in German, which many Yugoslavians speak a little. He spoke no English.

With Ziljak’s assistance, they roused the head of the customs office and were taken off to inspect the warehouse. The customs man jabbered a few words at the guard on the door, and in the corner of the building they found the crates. There were thirteen of them; one apparently contained the two bazookas, and each of two others contained one mortar, including the baseplates and sighting mechanisms in each. The rest were of ammunition, four of them with ten bazooka rockets in each, and the other six containing the ordered three hundred mortar bombs. The crates were in new timber, unmarked with any description of contents, but stenciled with serial numbers and the word Toscana.

Ziljak and the customs chief babbled away in their own dialect—and it appeared they were using the same one, which was helpful, because there are dozens in Yugoslavia, including seven major languages, and difficulties have been known to occur.

Eventually Ziljak turned to Baker and said several sentences in his halting German. Baker replied, and Ziljak translated for the customs man. He smiled, and they all shook hands and parted. Outside, the sunshine struck like a sledgehammer.

“What was all that about?” asked Shannon.

“Kemal was asked by the customs man if there was a little present in it for him,” explained Baker. “Kemal told him there would be a nice one if the paperwork could be kept trouble-free and the ship was loaded on time tomorrow morning.”

Shannon had already given Baker the first half of Ziljak’s £1000 bonus for helping the deal go through, and Baker drew the Yugoslav to one side to slip it to him. The man’s all-embracing bonhomie became even more embracing for both of them, and they adjourned to the hotel to celebrate with a little slivovitz. A little was the word Baker used. Ziljak may have used the same word. He did not mean it. Happy Yugoslavs never drink a little slivovitz. With £500 under his belt, Ziljak ordered a bottle of the fiery plum liquor and bowl after bowl of almonds and olives. As the sun went down and the Adriatic evening slipped through the streets, he relived again his years in the war, hunting and hiding in the Bosnian hills to the north with Tito’s partisans.