Solo - Jack Higgins [2]
'Good God,' Mikali said.
'The police think it's political, Mr Cohen being such a well-known Zionist. He only escaped death by a miracle last year, from that letter bomb someone sent him.' He shook his head. 'It's a funny kind of world we live in, Mr Mikali. What kind of man would do a thing like that?'
He went out and Mikali turned and looked in the mirror. He smiled slightly and his reflection smiled back.
'Well?' he said.
1
Some forty sea miles south from Athens and less than five from the coast of the Peloponnese, lies the island of Hydra, once one of the most formidable maritime powers in the Mediterranean.
From the middle of the eighteenth century many ships' captains amassed huge fortunes trading as far as America, and Venetian architects were brought in to build large mansions which may still be seen to this day in that most beautiful of all ports.
Later, as Greece suffered under the harsh regime of the Ottoman Empire and the island became a haven for mainland refugees, it was the sailors of Hydra who challenged the might of the Turkish Navy in the War of Independence that finally brought national freedom.
To a Greek, the names of those great Hydriot sea captains, Votzis, Tombazis, Boudouris, have the same magic as John Paul Jones for an American, Raleigh and Drake to the English.
Amongst those names, none had a more honourable place than Mikali. The family had prospered as blockade runners when Nelson commanded in the Eastern Mediterranean, had provided four ships for the allied fleet which had crushed the might of the Turkish Empire once and for all at the Battle of Navarino in 1827.
The fortune that was the result of the piracy and the blockade running of the Turkish wars, shrewdly invested in a number of newly developed shipping lines, meant that by the end of the nineteenth century the Mikalis were one of the wealthiest families in Greece.
And the men were all seafarers by nature, except for Dimitri, born in 1892, who showed an unhealthy interest in books, attended Oxford and the Sorbonne and came home only to take up a post as Lecturer in Moral Philosophy at the University of Athens.
His son, George, soon restored the family honour. He opted to attend the School of Merchant Marine at Hydra, the oldest of its kind in Greece. A brilliant and gifted seaman, he held his first command at the age of twenty-two. In 1938, restless for fresh horizons, he moved to California to take command of a new passenger cargo ship for the Pacific Star line, working the San Francisco - Tokyo run.
Money meant nothing to him. His father had deposited one hundred thousand dollars to his account in a San Francisco bank, a considerable sum in those days. What he did, he did because he wanted to do it. He had his ship, the sea. Only one thing was lacking and he found that in Mary Fuller, the daughter of a high school music teacher, a widow named Agnes Fuller, whom he met at a dance in Oakland in July 1939.
His father came over for the wedding, brought the young couple a house by the sea in Pescadero and returned to a Europe where gunfire already rumbled like thunder on the horizon.
George Mikali was half-way to Japan when the Italians invaded Greece. By the time his ship had made the round trip and docked in San Francisco again, the German Army had taken a hand. By 1 May 1941, Hitler, by intervening to save Mussolini's face, had overrun Yugoslavia and Greece and driven out the British Army, all in twenty-five days and for the loss of fewer than five thousand casualties.
For George Mikali there was no way home and from his father there was only silence and then came that Sunday in December when Nagumo's strike force left Pearl Harbor a smoking ruin.
By February, Mikali was in San Diego taking command of a transport and supply ship not much different from his own. Two weeks later his wife, after three years of ill-health and miscarriages, gave birth to a son.
Mikali could be spared for only three days. In that time he