Year of the Golden Ape Read Online Free PDF Page A

trawler?' LeCat had been staggered as they drank wine in a bar overlooking Tangier harbour. 'This is crazy - a trawler has no speed. Anyone can catch you.'
    'If they are looking for you ...'
    Winter worked it out for LeCat inside ten minutes, the new twist to cigarette smuggling which proved so profitable. The Italian police and security services knew exactly what type of vessel to look for - as LeCat had said, you used a power-boat or ,a fast yacht. Winter proposed obtaining a 1,000-ton trawler, a vessel where a large consignment of cigarettes, say as much as one hundred tons, could easily be hidden under eight hundred tons of fish.
    No attempt would be made to get the consignment ashore in the dark from small boats, the normal technique - instead they would sail into Naples in broad daylight as a bona-fide fishing vessel. Who would suspect a trawler? As everyone knew, for smuggling you needed a fast boat . . .
    When Winter raised the question of finance, LeCat admitted he was an agent for the French Syndicate, a group of Marseilles businessmen who were not always over-concerned with legality. In a very short time LeCat purchased a 1,000-ton trawler, Pêcheur, with funds provided by the French Syndicate, and the crew of so-called fishermen were largely made up of LeCat's ex-OAS terrorist friends. The smuggling operation proved highly profitable - until the Italian Syndicate began making menacing noises.
    'One night these people will meet us off the Naples coast,' LeCat warned. 'They think we are poaching on their preserve. And their method of discouraging opposition is likely to be swift and permanent ...'
    Again Winter worked out a plan while they sat at a table in the bar overlooking Tangier harbour. The idea was submitted to the French Syndicate whose top men were impressed once more by Winter's plan, a little too impressed for LeCat's liking. By this time the Englishman had organised the smuggling out of Italy on the return trips to Tangier, valuable works of art stolen from Italy. These paintings fetched high prices from certain American and Japanese millionaires.
    Winter had the foremast removed from the trawler and a platform built over one of the three fish-holds. On this platform an Alouette helicopter could land and take off with ease. LeCat grumbled about the expense, but the French Syndicate chiefs over-ruled him, which did not increase his affection for Winter.
    The Pêcheur made further trips to Naples without incident. No one was worried about the presence of the helicopter on the main deck after Winter had casually mentioned to an Italian Customs man that this was the new fishing technique - the helicopter was used to seek out fish shoals from the air. Then the rival smuggling organisation, the Italian Syndicate, struck.
    The Pêcheur was within twenty miles of the Italian coastline when Winter saw through field-glasses a powerful motor vessel approaching at speed. It was full of armed men and made no reply to Pêcheur's wireless signals. Winter, a skilled pilot - no one ever knew where he acquired the skill - took off in the machine with the most resourceful of LeCat's ex-OAS associates, Andre Dupont. Flying over the Italian Syndicate vessel the first time, Dupont dropped smoke bombs on its deck. On the second run, while Winter held the machine in a steady hover barely fifty feet above the smoke-obscured deck, Dupont dropped two thermite bombs. The vessel was ablaze within seconds; within minutes the armed smugglers had taken to their small boats. When Winter landed again on the Pêcheur he had to exert the whole force of his personality to stop LeCat ramming the helpless boatloads of men. The Frenchman was giving the order to the Pêcheur's captain as Winter came back on to the bridge.
    'Change course! Head straight for them! Ram them!' 'Maintain previous course,' Winter told the captain quietly. 'The object of the exercise,' he informed LeCat, 'is to let them see it is unprofitable to tangle with us. Those