Balkan Adventures One
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Alex whistled. "I wonder what this is doing here, out in the open." She added emphatically, "I wonder what in the hell this is doing here. This is really strange." An animal-like moan came from the other side of the stacked boxes. Clasping his climbing hammer, Alex edged toward the corner of the pile and peered around. "Monica! Come here. There's a man. Looks like he's been hurt!" As he approached, his trained medical eye and his experience in Viet Nam as a medic indicated that the man was in serious condition. Blood stained his clothing in numerous places. Alex kneeled and carefully started to probe about the man's extremities. "It feels like every bone in his body has been fractured, skull has a nasty fracture, multiple lacerations. He's still alive, barely, but unconscious. Damn. Here I am with an extreme emergency, and I don't even have a bandaid with me." He carefully eased the man onto his back. The man wakened and uttered something in halting, gasping words. Alex looked at Monica. "What'd he say?" "I don't know. It certainly doesn't sound like any Slavic language." She addressed the man in Balkanian, "What happened?" Alex took a bottle of water from the lunch packet and poured a little into the man's mouth. It rallied him momentarily. He began to speak in Balkanian with numerous gasps and coughs. Alex whispered to Monica, "I don't like the sound of his cough and breathing. He undoubtedly has fluid in his lungs and may not live more than a few minutes." As predicted, the man stopped talking after a few minutes. Alex felt his pulse. "It's probably a blessing; if he did recover it would have been slow, and he would have been a pitiful cripple." He opened the man's sleeve with his knife. "See here and here, this arm is not simply fractured, but the bones are crushed in several places. They're beyond any hope of setting. Whoever did this used a hammer or some other blunt instrument like a tire iron, and he was not just bent on killing, but he must have taken sadistic pleasure in mutilating this man. I've never seen anything like it, not even in the Viet Nam War." Alex paused. "What was the talk he was giving you, could you understand it?" "Quite a bit. First of all he said he was a Turk, from Turkey, a schoolteacher. He had come here because a century ago his grandfather had been in the Turkish army when it occupied this area, and he was commander. He had told his family that he had hidden in the fortress some gold and all they had to do was go and get it. He said the family only half believed the story, but that he had studied the Balkanian language and finally this summer he was going to find out the truth. He knew he was not going to live and told us to take the treasure and to give some to his mother. He started to explain where it was hidden, and as he began to say 'you have to go into the'---- he choked and said 'water, water,' several times and then nothing." Alex mused, "Whoever beat the daylights out of this man must have had reasons that had nothing to do with sharing a little Food for Peace with a visitor from Turkey. Let's get a look into one of those boxes." He inserted the back of his climbing hammer into the edge of a box and pried open the lid. "Looks like a stainless steel jug with the symbol for danger - skull and crossbones and some lettering - in Cyrillic. I don't think anybody ships food around in this kind of container. Do you have any idea what these letters mean?" He started copying down the Cyrillic letters on the back of a card from his wallet. Monica leaned over and studied the Cyrillic. "This heavy lettering I think is Russian and says, 'Danger, Highly Toxic, Handle with care.' The other lettering translated to the Roman alphabet is a chemical word of some kind - 'Fluorophosphine - 7.'" "Do you have any idea what the chemical is? Looks to be some kind of poison." She shook her head. "I have no idea." Alex looked through the dead man's clothing. "Nothing. His assassin must have removed all identification and anything of value." He glanced around the porch. "He must have had some climbing gear. But that's gone too. "I think we had better scram out of here. If whoever bludgeoned this poor Turk comes back, we might suffer the same fate." "That's just what I was thinking," agreed Monica.
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About the Book
Weeks after a recent war in the Balkans an American, Dr. Alexander Marks, visits the Balkans on holiday to visit a village from which his ancestors emigrated. While being given a tour of caves in the nearby countryside by a young woman university professor of geology, they unexpectedly stumble on a cache of poison chemicals together with the body of a near dead man who tells them that he had come to recover a treasure of gold coins from the cave and he was attacked by two men; he expires before he can tell them more. They are seen by the terrorists and pursued. They manage to elude them initially, but they find themselves in the midst a terrorist plot to poison the water supply of a nearby town. While assisting authorities to avoid a catastrophe they also explore the truth of the dying man about the hidden gold.
About the Author
For many years the author was an international banker with extensive travel in over 60 countries. He has lectured and published numerous articles on banking and published two books on International Banking and Foreign Exchange Trading Techniques and Controls. He also translated and published a ten-volume work from the Tsarist era on Russian Heraldry and Nobility. He now lives in Florida and his current project is writing novels where the events take place in the various countries he has visited. He recently completed two novels Attack Satellite and The American Laird; both are available from 1stBooks Library.