Assignment - Ankara (2 page)

“Your name is Francesca Uvaldi?”

“Of course. My father is Dr. Roberto Uvaldi—he’s the chief at the American radar base in Musa Karagh—Base Four, I think it’s called.”

EVEN disheveled as she was, Francesca Uvaldi was one of the loveliest women Durell had ever met. She had the black hair and deep gray eyes of North Italy, and under her wet, clinging woolen suit, her body left nothing to be desired— long-limbed, high-waisted, full-breasted and lithe. Her voice was throaty, her accent American. Her mouth had a seductive, full tremulousness that was inviting. Durell put his wet coat around her to shield her from the bite of the misty wind. He heard the jeep sputtering as Lieutenant Mustapha Kappic pushed it across the ford upstream. He didn’t worry about Kappic. He kept his attention on the girl.

“Have you any identification?”

She shrugged ruefully. “Just my sketch box. I lost my handbag, everything, in the darned river—even my sable neckpiece.”

“May I see your sketches?”

She stared in resentment. “Don’t you believe me?”

“Please open the case,” he said quietly.

The girl sighed with relief when the unwieldy box proved to have been water-tight. Durell fingered through the sketch pads, the boxes of pastel chalk, the rolls of finished sketches. They were all of women, fashion designs of dress and design motifs, and on each sheet of paper was printed: Mini—Roma. He knew of the famous fashion house, of course, that competed with the best of the Paris coutouriers.

“I was hoping to get some more primitive, basic designs here in the mountains,” the girl offered. “Are you satisfied?” There was nothing else in the case, and Durell closed it and returned to her. Francesca said coolly, “You’re an American, too, aren’t you? Who’s the fierce-looking Turk in the jeep? He looks like a Caucasian mountain bear.”

“Kappic is an infantry officer. You’re familiar with uniforms, it seems.”

“I’ve seen a few.” She grinned now. “Are you on your way to Base Four, too? You can take me with you, if you are. I’m worried about my father—nobody’s heard a word out of Musa Karagh for days, you know. Unless you’ve got some news—” She paused hopefully.

Durell nodded. “Before we go, however, I’ll have to take your gun.”

Her eyes widened, slanted up. “My gun?”

“Your skirt is wet. I can see it strapped to your leg.”

“Oh.” She looked uncomfortable for a moment, then smiled brilliantly. Her laughter was brief but convincing. “A girl has to be careful in these mountains, after all. One never knows. And I was traveling alone—”

“I understand,” Durell said. “But I must have your gun.” She frowned. “But how do I know I can trust you?” “You don’t. No more than I can trust you,” he countered. She shivered in the cold wind, and pushed aside a thick tendril of dark hair blowing across her cheek. “Are you actually afraid of me?”

“Perhaps,” he said. “But let’s not argue the point now.” “All right. Turn around.”

He shook his head. “Not while you handle the gun.”

She stared. “You are strange! One moment you risk your life to rescue me, and the next you won’t trust me to—” She shrugged. “Oh, all right, if that’s what you want.”

Her leg was long and firm. Her gun was a pearl-handled .22 caliber Italian revolver, ornately etched along the barrel. She held it delicately by the muzzle and he took it and dropped it into his wet pocket as the jeep drew up, bouncing on the rocks.

“We have some blankets and food,” he said. “Better strip out of those wet clothes and get dry.”

“But I can’t travel around in just a blanket.”

“Until your dress dries—unless you care to take your chances with pneumonia.”

Her gray eyes flashed angrily, but she made no reply. From the chest strapped to the back of the jeep, Kappic took two rough, gray blankets, and both the Turk and Durell turned and waited while Francesca Uvaldi stripped out of her wet traveling suit, scrubbed her hair, bound a towel around it, and wrapped herself in the two woolen sheets. The wind was cold and raw, biting into Durell’s wet clothing, but there was only a spare shirt to change into and a sheepskin overcoat, among the items hurriedly thrown onto the jeep to help such refugees from the quakes as they might encounter. He changed into the rough woolen shirt, threw away his topcoat and put on the sheepskin, wearing it as the local inhabitants did, with the hide out.

He could not decide what to think about Francesca Uvaldi. Without her identification papers, he had to accept her word for what she was. Yet he could think of no reason why she should pick Dr. Roberto Uvaldi’s name out of a hat and use it—unless, somehow, she had been waiting for him at this place, hoping he would come along exactly like this.

It was possible. If his errand to Uvaldi was as important as had been indicated, he could take chances on no one— especially a girl as lovely and distracting as Francesca. She was angry with him for his attitude about the gun, but he couldn’t help that. In any case, when they got through to Base Four and found Uvaldi, he would know all about her then.

Durell had been briefed only sketchily by the K Section man in Ankara. A certain amount of the usual security provisions had been dispensed with at the meeting, and Durell hadn’t liked it. He had been trained in caution, working for the Central Intelligence Agency, and before that he’d put in a term with the old OSS, long ago, in Europe. He knew that to be careless in details could jeopardize your survival factor. In Durell's business, you never opened a door without considering what might wait for you behind it; you never entered a room without being ready for a surprise; and you never turned a comer in a hurry, or turned your back on anyone.

His business was the dark, silent war that blew hot or cold as the world powers happened to dictate it. In this business you could die quickly and anonymously, in strange and forgotten comers of the world. He had survived this far by taking a professional attitude toward his work and toward the men he was engaged with. He never underestimated his opponents. They were men like himself in many ways, as fanatically dedicated to their goals as he was dedicated, without fanfare, to defending what was important to him.

Durell took his risks with the objectivity of a gambler, holding to the teachings of his grandfather, old Jonathan, down in Bayou Peche Rouge in the Mississippi delta country. The old man was one of the last of the riverboat gamblers, and he had trained Durell as a boy and a young man in all the treacheries as well as the rewards that greeted the hunter and the hunted.

Dinty Simpson, the K Section man in Ankara, tried to be brief and crisp when he talked to Durell in the plush lobby of the hotel there, but Dinty could not hide his nervousness.

“I’m sorry to pull you out of Paris on such short notice, Sam, but we don’t know what’s happening over by the frontier or in the Caucasus Mountains right now—the section the Turks call the Kavkas. Our radio isn’t being answered, and the courier who was to accompany Dr. Uvaldi back home may be dead. For that matter, Uvaldi may be dead, too. We just haven’t heard anything and we just don’t know, thanks to the earthquakes. We’ve tried through the NATO bunch here to contact a Turkish frontier regimental headquarters near Musa Karagh, but we’ve only gotten garbled responses—they’re desperately involved in rescue and relief work in the valley towns, and in trying to hang on to their guard posts at the same time. Then, the nearest Turkish divisional HQ is twenty-two miles to the south of Base Four, and the roads are impassable—they were never much, anyway, even without the recent landslides to block the way. The infantry on the frontier has to guard such bridges and open paths—cattle paths, really—as still exist. So we have to reach Base Four ourselves. Somebody has to go into that country and get Dr. Uvaldi’s radar tapes.”

“I don’t know much about Base Four,” Durell said.

“Well, it’s the new radar scanning station on Musa Karagh, a mountaintop near the Georgian frontier, and it’s loaded with some extraordinary new electronic gadgets to check on the two launching sites at Kapustin Yar, near Stalingrad, and at Tyratum, by the Aral Sea. These two locations have been positively identified for some time, but what’s been going on there lately has been anybody’s guess.”

Dinty Simpson was a sandy-haired man in his middle thirties, and he looked like a junior attorney in some vast law firm on Wall Street. His horn-rimmed glasses gave him an owlish look, and he had a bad case of nerves, Durell saw, watching him pace the carpeted floor of the Ankara hotel lobby. It was raining in Ankara that day, discouraging the pigeons who roosted on the statues of Kemal Ataturk in his dinner jacket costume, the symbol of Turkish reform. The local newspapers were full of the cataclysm that had taken place in the rugged mountains of the eastern frontier.

Dinty made a soft sound of discouragement. “We sent a courier out of the Embassy, a very competent chap named Bert Anderson, to pick up Dr. Uvaldi and escort him and the tapes back to Washington. Know him, Cajun?”

“No,” Durell said.

“Well, no matter. Bert is tough and absolutely dependable —comes from the hills around Nashville, Tennessee, talks with a hillbilly drawl. But don’t let his slow manner fool you; he can be quick as a cat and twice as smart. You can trust him at your back all the way; I guarantee it. The trouble is, the Base may be a mess, wrecked by the quake and full of casualties. Bert Anderson may be hurt, too, but we just don’t know. Or maybe it’s something just as simple as being detained by an isolated frontier guard. Anyway, we can’t wait. So you’re going in to help Anderson and Uvaldi out— or take Andy’s place, if something happened to him, which seems inconceivable, knowing him as I do. The main thing is to bring out Uvaldi and the tapes—if they can be found,” Simpson said grimly. “And you’ve got to find them, Cajun. Don’t let anything stop you. The Turkish government will help; they’re giving you an infantry lieutenant who was bom in the Kavkas area and he’ll guide you and smooth the way if you run into any military blocks on the road. But even if there are any delays, you’ll have to cut corners any way you see fit.”

“I understand.”

“I’ve sent for Bert Anderson’s dossier as well as Dr. Uvaldi’s, but they haven’t come in yet—transportation has been confused these past forty-eight hours—and there’s no more time to lose. Andy will have identification, of course, and he wears a gold ring with a small, polished piece of anthracite in it—looks like an onyx, but it’s coal. As a kid he was caught in a mine disaster, and wears the chunk of coal as a good-luck charm.”

“He sounds good to me,” Durell said.

“The main thing is that Dr. Uvaldi’s tapes have to get to Washington as soon as possible.”

“May I ask what Uvaldi found on his radar scannings?” Dinty Simpson shrugged and poked at his horn-rimmed glasses. “It’s classified, but there’s been enough talk about it back home in the press to tell you this much: it deals with this radically new type of nuclear weapon we’ve been working on—the one that may be the key to our survival. Quite different from the H-bomb, being primarily an antipersonnel weapon that discharges deadly neutrons without the blast, heat and fall-out of the big bombs.”

“I’ve heard of it,” Durell said. “But it’s only in the conceptual stage, back home.”

“Right. And our friends across the border may already have it. At least, Uvaldi’s scannings have shown some activity on it up toward Kapustin Yar—especially threatening if it’s sprung on us as a surprise. My guesses may be all wrong, but Washington wants to announce we know about it before somebody pulls the trigger. Publicity might inhibit a surprise offensive, on the theory of announcing all deterrent knowledge at once. Uvaldi’s discoveries are all on his coded tapes from the radar equipment at Karagh. Andy was supposed to fly him out yesterday, but the ’copter we sent couldn’t land in the fog and wind. Couldn’t see a damned thing, as a matter of fact, except hints of a lot of wreckage on the mountaintop. It won’t be easy to get in there, Cajun— and your troubles may not come just from the general confusion in the disaster area.”

“I understand,” Durell said.

“Well, be careful, for God’s sake,” Simpson said urgently. “If Uvaldi is dead—well, get his tapes, any way you can. Anderson will be a big help, too—as I said, he’s a tough ex-mountaineer, absolutely secure. That is, he’ll help if he’s still alive.”

“We’ll see,” Durell said.

He was thinking of Dinty Simpson, and the remote, modem world of Ankara he had left that morning, when he climbed back into Lieutenant Kappic’s jeep with Francesca Uvaldi and started on his way again. The road climbed steeply into the rugged mountains, twisting into the heart of the earthquake area. The road was more primitive, strewn with rocks that had crashed down the mountainside. Twice they had to halt and remove fallen trees in their way. The day grew colder and darker, and even Kappic slowed down as a concession to the thickening mist, which could easily hide a crevass or obstacle that might wreck them in this desolate place.

Durell gave the girl a chocolate bar from their relief supplies strapped to the back of the jeep and questioned her casually. She spoke freely from her huddle of blankets beside him.

“I must admit I haven’t seen my father in two years—he’s so absorbed in his work at the base here. There are just the two of us, anyway, and I’ve always been more or less on my own.” She looked at him with careful gray eyes. “I didn’t know you were associated with Dad’s work.”

“I didn’t say I was,” Durell remarked.

Her lashes made small, dark fans against the impeccable creaminess of her cheeks. “You’re as bad as Roberto, when it comes to security. Everything so ridiculously hush-hush— when the other side probably knows all about it anyway, and the only people kept in ignorance are our own! I resent it, sometimes, but—well, I’m sorry I was so suspicious when you wanted my gun, back there.” She paused. “Was it be-casue I spoke first in French? I speak French, Italian, and a little Portuguese. And even Russian. Took it up as a hobby in a spirit of patriotic preparedness, or something, last year. But my work demands a working knowledge of these languages, you see.” She patted her sketch case. “Mini of Roma has the bright idea of making Byzantine design all the rage next season, so here I am in Turkey making authentic, derivative designs for the silk-screen people. It will cost you a fortune for a veil and a wisp of the usual diaphanous stuff when I’m through. Doesn’t leave the poor husbands much for the traditional loaf of bread or jug of wine. Anyway, last Thursday I found some free time and got to Ankara, but the red tape held me up and then the earthquakes began—” She paused and shivered. “Do you suppose everything is all right up ahead?” she asked, nodding toward the tumbled dark mountaintops.