Assignment - Ankara (25 page)

“You must be a devil. How did you escape?”

“Never mind. Get to the wheel.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then we all drown, don’t we?”

“Perhaps that would be best,” the captain whispered. “If we lose, let us all lose everything,
nyet
?”

Stuyvers was staring at the polished leather bag sliding about on the deck. The trawler slowly righted, shuddering, and the brief case slid away from him, washing toward he open door of the wheelhouse. Stuyvers yelled and ignored Durell’s order to stand still and jumped to save it.

What followed came quickly, and was beyond recall. The captain was s stubborn and brave man. He seized the moment when Durell was distracted by Stuyvers, however briefly, and went for the gun on the deck. Before Durell could cover him again, the captain had it in his hand and its explosive roar shook the narrow confines of the bridge.

Stuyvers screamed, straightened, and stretched his arms up overhead and stood on tiptoe. A look of astonishment replaced the insane and fanatical determination to save the bag. Then he toppled forward, with the lurching of the trawler, and pitched headlong from the wheelhouse.

The black bag slid out with him.

Durell’s shot came hard on the heels of the captain’s. The bearded man spun, cursing, and grabbed at his shoulder and tried to lift his weapon to aim at Durell. He couldn’t do it. The bone in his upper arm was smashed by Durell’s slug. “All right,” Durell gasped. “That’s enough.”

“Do you think you can commit piracy here?” the man whispered. “You will be hanged for this!”

“Take the wheel and set a course to the south.”

“I cannot do that!”

“Do it, or drown,” Durell said harshly. “Quick!”

For a moment the captain still looked rebellious. The pain of his wound must have been enormous, Durell thought, and yet he stood on his feet, sturdy and defiant, a man of simple thoughts and acts. Sweat stood out on his face in great, glittering beads. The trawler shuddered again as a sea washed over her beam and heeled her far over. Great creaks and groans went snapping through the vessel from stem to stern. The deck tilted precariously and seemed never to right itself.

It was this, more than the threat of Durell’s gun, that made the captain co-operate. He loved his vessel and could not stand by and see it founder. He cursed again and jumped for the spinning wheel, caught it in his free hand, and twisted it hard.

Slowly, groaning, the trawler righted herself and lifted her bow from the troughs of the sea.

Durell picked up the captain’s gun and pocketed it and backed to the wheelhouse door and called for Wickham. The fat colonel appeared behind him in the dark rain of the outer bridge.

“Here I am,” the colonel said. “Did you know that Stuyvers just went overboard?”

“Yes. Take this pistol, Colonel, and hold it on these two. Be careful of them, make them keep a steady course to the south.”

Wickham nodded. “I think I can do that.”

“Make sure you do.”

“Where are you going?”

“After Anderson,” Durell said.

Wickham looked at him strangely. “There’s no need for that, Durell. None at all.”

“Have you seen him?”

“Of course. He’s in the captain’s cabin. You know that crack on the head he took, when he first came aboard from the plane and started yelling orders to the captain, and they slugged him and he hit the deck?”

“I was aware of it, yes,” Durell said.

“Well, it caught up with him. He had a massive concussion, and some internal bleeding. I know a little about these things. It’s a miracle he stayed on his feet the way he did, for this long. Anyway, you don’t have to worry about him now. The ship is all ours—and Anderson is dead.”

FROM a window of the villa off the coastal highway that followed the shores of the Sea of Marmara, below Istanbul, Durell watched the steady stream of international shipping, of tramp Greek freighters from the Aegean to huge whitehulled cruise vessels that circled the Mediterranean on holiday tours. It was a warm day, and the air smelled of spring. There were almond trees on the villa’s terrace, within the high wall that sheltered the house from passersby in this resort community, and the trees were all in pink and white flower. The sun glittered on the sea and made the distant hills and shores hazy with fresh green. There was a beach close at hand near a tourist hotel, and a few hardy people were already gathered there to sun themselves near colorful cabanas and stare at the little ferries and fishing boats that plied back and forth to Buyukada.

Durell had slept the clock around, eaten a solid breakfast of sweet rolls, a huge omelet with tiny, delectable shrimp from the Bosphorus, and then enjoyed that vanishing delicacy, real Turkish coffee, served by a silent-footed, heavyhipped Istanbuli woman who pretended to understand nothing he said to her, and who vanished as quietly and mysteriously as she had first appeared when he woke up.

It had taken a night and a day to reach Istanbul—the night of riding out the storm aboard the trawler, and the fortuitous encounter with the Turkish destroyer with the first faint light of dawn—not precisely fortuitous, though, since a vast air and sea search had been flung outward from the point where a Pan Am airliner spotted the wreckage of the KT-4.

Only Colonel Wickham, Susan, Francesca and himself were taken from the trawler. The amenities had been preserved, and no charges of kidnapping or assault were made on either side. The Crimean trawler was permitted to go on its way with official thanks for the “rescue” work.

In Istanbul there had been reports to prepare, cables to file, arrangements for transport to make. Dinty Simpson had been on hand to meet Durell when they landed, and they went by car through the hilly streets of the ancient Byzantine capital to a quiet house with tiled walls and a peaceful garden court overlooking the Golden Horn and the domes and minarets of the Blue Mosque and St. Sophia. It was early evening, then, and a strange sense of unaccustomed peace filled the lavender sky to the west.

Dinty looked unchanged since the few days past, in Ankara. Still worried, still ruffling his thinning, sandy hair, still owlish in his heavy horn-rimmed glasses, looking much the harried law clerk. He pushed at the glasses with a nervous forefinger and grinned at Durell and seemed unable to stop grinning.

“We found the real Bert Anderson’s body, you know. The Turkish frontier regimental detachment that’s normally on post duty at Musa Karagh returned about an hour after you took off in the KT-4. They’d picked up the body on the way down from the frontier passes. Just luck, that’s all—but that’s the way these things happen sometimes, Cajun. It was too late to stop your going by the KT-4. By that time, I think you’d already crashed, following that false radio beacon, although we knew approximately where you were, of course. We were tailing you by radar all the way, if that’s any satisfaction.”

“Not much, now that it’s over,” Durell said, smiling.

“Sorry you had such a hell of a rough time. Things went into the usual snafu, didn’t they? We knew where you were, but we couldn’t reach you, and we didn’t want to precipitate any great hoohah of an international incident over it, although several naval units were out hunting for you all that night, playing tag with units from the other side. Oh, it was a great night for the gremlins, all right.” Dinty Simpson paused and looked at Durell. “You have the Uvaldi tape, of course.”

“Yes,” Durell said. “I have it.”

Simpson looked ready to collapse with relief. “Then your business is done, Cajun. Colonel Wickham and two guards will go by SAC bomber from here to Washington with it. You can relax, Sam.”

“Did you say you’re sending Colonel Wickham with the tape?”

Dinty Simpson grinned. “Oh, he’ll be all right with it. The two boys with him are tough hombres. Wickham may be a fumbler in the things you’re so proficient in, Cajun—and from what I gather, he pushed the panic button a few times and almost sank you all—”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I know you didn’t, Cajun. If you’re willing to forget that part of it, so am I.”

“Done, then,” Durell said.

He gave Dinty Simpson the little spool of tape, and Dinty got up immediately and left the terrace of the quiet house and was gone for a few minutes while Durell smoked a cigarette and watched the lights go on in the ancient hills of Istanbul and the ferries crawling like fireflies over the channel between Asia and Europe. Dinty came back with two drinks.

“Sour mash bourbon, Cajun. I hear it’s your favorite.”

“Thanks, Dinty.”

“Do you have any idea what you’ve managed to do, bringing out that information for Washington?” Simpson asked. He sighed and added fervently, “It ought to be on all the international press wires by tomorrow—this report of the experiments in personnel nuclear arms at Kapustin Yar. It will serve notice that we know what’s going on and are prepared to take countersteps. We live on the edge of a sharp knife, Cajun—we have to hope for and negotiate for disarmament and peaceful coexistence and at the same time keep our guard up at all times, remaining armed and ready to defend ourselves, as our only means of deterrent. Ambitious men have miscalculated our nation’s intentions before, in times past. But it must not happen this time. This time it would be too late to stop the final cataclysm.”

Dinty Simpson paused and laughed with soft embarrassment. “I didn’t mean to make a speech, Sam.”

“I second everything you’ve said,” Durell told him quietly.

Later that evening Susan was brought to the headquarters house by Dinty, who seemed confused and uncertain as to what to do with her. Durell’s report had been deliberately ambiguous about the part she had played in the events of the past two days.

He was surprised and impressed by the way she looked. From somewhere—perhaps from a consul’s wife—she had found a smart black cocktail dress and a few items of restrained jewelry and high heels. Her blonde hair had been washed and set in a softly shimmering pile of gold atop her finely shaped head. Her body moved in the black silk sheath in curves and hollows, soft and desirable, and her proud walk was the sort that made men turn and stare everywhere in the world.

Durell felt a brief pang of regret as he looked at her.

“Sit down, Susan.” He smiled at her. “Have a drink. I’m glad to see you’ve been taken care of.”

Her pale brown eyes regarded him with that same intensity with which she had stared at him when they had first met on the mountain road to Musa Karagh. “Yes, people have been good to me. I thank you, Sam. I can never stop thanking you, I suppose.” Her voice was husky and she paused and lit a cigarette. Her fingers trembled. “What are you going to do about me now, Sam?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“What did you put in your report about me?”

“Nothing.”

She frowned, very slightly. “I don’t understand.”

“The evidence was destroyed, lost overboard, Susan. You’re free to go, to do anything you like.”

She looked at him for a long, uncertain moment. “I don’t know what to say, Sam. I don’t deserve any kindness, you know.”

“I think you do. You can get a job here in Istanbul—I understand that American entertainers, singers, chanteuses, are in great demand here. Either that, or the Embassy will arrange for your passage back to the States.”

She looked down at her folded hands.

“What are you going to do, Sam?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Rest for a day or two, right here. Wait for orders. I never know where I’m to be sent next.” He thought of home, of America, of the quiet peace of his home with old Jonathan in Bayou Peche Rouge, down in the warm folds of the Mississippi delta country; he thought of Washington, of his apartment there, of General McFee and the K Section offices of the CIA. Wherever he was sent in the world, whatever far corner of the globe he happened to be in, he never felt far from home. He carried it with him, inside him, in quiet, tacit devotion. He did not admit openly to sentiment; but it was bred in him, in his flesh and blood and bone, and he knew that within a matter of hours, or a few days, he would go home again.

Susan spoke quietly, “And after this, you’ll be sent somewhere else, on another job, won’t you?”

“Yes. At any time, Susan,” he said gently. “Do you understand?”

She nodded slowly. She did not look at him. “How can I thank you, then? What can I give you to say ‘thank you’ for another chance? You know what you can have from me—for always, forever. But you won’t take it or stay—”

“No, Susan. I’m sorry. It can’t be that way.”

“But for just a day or two, you and I could—”

“It’s better not to,” he said.

She was silent. A freighter hooted briefly in the darkening ship channel near the Horn. Lights twinkled on both shores of the sprawling, fabulous city.

“I can get a job here, I suppose,” she said. She stood up, grave and proud. Her topaz eyes regarded him levelly for a moment. “Good-by, Sam.”

He did not touch her or kiss her when she turned and walked out. When she was gone, he made a few telephone calls that concerned Francesca Uvaldi and her assignment for the U.N. Narcotics Control Commission and made certain that what he had promised Susan would be granted to her. He spoke to Francesca at the hotel where she had checked in, talking at length and in some detail, and when an understanding had been reached, he borrowed a car from Dinty Simpson and drove to an address among the villas on the shore of the Sea of Marmara.

Francesca had given him the address.

“This place belongs to friends of mine,” Francesca said. “A lovely couple, from Rome, originally; they work at the Italian consulate here. They’ve gone for a holiday at Antalya. They won’t be back for a week.”

“I’ll be here a week,” he said.

“So will I. . .”

Now, in the morning, he sat on the terrace that overlooked the garden wall and the almond trees and watched the spring sunlight on the sea and heard the hum of bees and the more distant hum of motor traffic on the new highway from Istanbul. He smiled, thinking of the night just past, and the rest of the week to follow.

“Sam?”

He turned and saw Francesca step from the villa onto the terrace to join him. In the morning sunlight, her beauty was different from what it had been last night. She wore a light robe of red brocade with gold silk embroidery, and her face looked washed and scrubbed. He noticed that her rich, black hair was no longer done in the severely braided coronet she had worn before, and now it hung in thick, shimmering waves of jet to her shoulders, loose and free to the scented wind that blew from the beach below.