Assignment - Ankara (6 page)

“Yes, sir.”

Durell nodded. “All right. Go on.”

“Well, I couldn’t see this plane in the fog; but I kept expectin’ somebody might send somebody over from our side, too.” Sergeant Isaks’ tough mien suddenly crumpled in grief, and his harsh voice sagged to a horrified whisper. “Nobody had a chance here, Mr. Durell; it come so quick.

Some of the fellows were at mess, and the building collapsed on them—it was awful, the screaming—the son-of-a-bitchin’ quake brought the tower down on a couple of other guys, cut Hughie Lashon right in two—and part of this field was just sliced away and went down the mountain with a roar like—like—”

‘Take it easy, Sergeant,” Durell said gently.

The burly man pulled himself together with a visible effort. “Yes, sir. I'll take you to Colonel Wickham now, sir.”

They had to pick their way through the debris that littered the field, working toward one shack that still stood intact, a little to the south of the huge mass of crumpled steel that had been the radar tower facing the Soviet border. The shredded clouds had thinned a little, and moonlight brightened their way. A row of bodies lay under canvas nearby, mute evidence of the sergeant’s grim tasks that day. Lieutenant Kappic muttered angrily to himself as they followed Isaks to the shack.

A battery electric lantern lit up the interior. It had been an office of some sort, with filing cabinets ranked against one wall, a green issue desk, a swivel chair, and a field cot against another wall.

Colonel Packard Wickham was sprawled on the cot. He was not alone. He had three empty bottles for company and consolation.

Durell saw at once that here was a man pushed close to destruction, demoralized by fear. Wickham was flushed a dangerous red, contrasting with the thick white brush of his hair. He was stout, a desk soldier, and perhaps a fine administrator back in the Pentagon. But he did not belong here. And being here, caught by the accident of natural cataclysm, he was close to disintegration.

The room reeked from the whisky he had drunk, and from a sour sort of illness. His eyes were dull and bloodshot, his mouth loose and disorganized as he turned his head to stare at Durell and Kappic.

“Who’re you?” he muttered. “This’s restricted area—no visitors authorized—”

“Get on your feet, Colonel,” Durell said. He reached across the fat man and plucked a half-empty bottle of Canadian from his clutching fingers. “We’ve come to help you get out of here.”

“Help? Ain’t any help, m’boy. All alone here. Nobody to obey orders.” He looked in sudden, flushing anger at Isaks. “This son of a bitch here refuses t’obey anything I say—” “Colonel, that’s not so,” Isaks protested. “I only told you—” “That’s all right, Sergeant,” Durell said. “Get up now, Colonel Wickham.”

“You an Army man?” Wickham muttered. He grunted and pushed himself to his feet and stood swaying unsteadily, eyes fixed on the bottle in Durell’s hand. He licked his lips. “Guess everybody else is dead, huh? Shouldn’t have come here in first place. Stupid inspection tour. Free junket. See the world on expense chits, hey? Wife told me t’get the hell out, anyway. What better way’n a free trip abroad, pal? Who figured an earthquake? Everybody’s dead now, dead, dead—” Durell slapped him hard, to check the rising whine of panic-hysteria. Wickham flopped heavily back on the cot. For a moment his pale eyes sharpened with malevolence, and Durell had the momentary thought that he wouldn’t envy any of the men who worked under Wickham’s command back home. Wickham muttered something to himself, scrubbed his brush of thick white hair, and looked up at Durell from under lowering white brows.

“All right, ’s all right. Let’s see your credentials, mister.” Durell showed him his I.D. card. Wickham stared hard at it, and Durell got the impression that the man’s eyes were unfocused and he couldn’t see well enough to read at the moment.

He took the card back and said, “I’ve been sent here to escort Dr. Uvaldi back to the States, along with some important scanning tapes he recently made. Is Uvaldi still alive? Or do you have the tapes, Colonel?”

“Me? That’s mighty strange, mister. I think you’re a liar. A courier named Anderson already came for Uvaldi and both of ’em went off the Base together; the lucky bastards.” Sergeant Isaks said quietly, “They went down to the village, sir. Anderson got here yesterday morning after the quakes began. He’s the one who snapped me out of it and got me going again—a hell of a nice guy, Mr. Durell. But nobody’s heard a thing from him or Uvaldi since they left.” “This Anderson,” Durell said, “Did he have proper credentials?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And did he wear a ring made out of a lump of coal?” Isaks grinned. “It was a black stone—it could’ve been coal.”

Durell was satisfied. He turned to Kappic. “Do you think they got out of the village?”

Kappic shrugged, his eyes brooding on Wickham. “Ankara would have heard of it by now, if they had succeeded. They may both be in the village, still. Or they may be dead.” Durell swung back to Wickham. “Did Uvaldi take his tapes with him?”

“Huh?” Wickham stared blankly. “How should I know? None of my business, all that nonsense. Got no use for these head-in-the-clouds scientist fellows. Not efficient at all. Make a mess out of the paper work.”

Sergeant Isaks knew nothing about the tapes, either. He hadn’t shaved for two days, and his face looked gray and sunken. “The records of the radar scanning operations were kept in storage here, usually, in these filing' cabinets,” he said. “Most of it was negative, routine stuff. Mr. Durell, I—I want permission to fix the bulldozer, if I can, so we can clear the road. There are five of us still left who’ve got to get off this mountain, or we’ll go nuts. The colonel won’t say yes or no, so I figure I got to take it on my own responsibility to get the dozer going again.”

“Of course. Go to it. But you’d better get some rest first, Sergeant. Do you have enough food up here?”

“Yes, sir. Plenty.”

Durell looked at Kappic. “There ought to be some way to get some of the provisions into the village. I’m sure it can be used down there.” He spoke to Isaks again. “Get yourself a hot meal first and take care of your other men.” He considered the filing cabinets and frowned. “You say your routine radar tapes are stored here?”

“Yes, sir. They’re all coded, you know. They don’t make any sense at all unless they’re run through a special machine back in Washington.”

“All right. Thank you.”

He began to search, quickly and methodically. Wickham took advantage of the moment to retrieve his bottle and took several long swigs, eyeing Durell’s activity with growing irritation. Kappic muttered and tugged at his huge black moustache and went out after Isaks. The wind made a keening sound around the shack. Durell paid no attention to the red-faced American colonel. He went through the filing cabinets, one after the other, not quite sure he would recognize Uvaldi’s last tapes even if he saw them. Those that he found were small, in reels no larger than a typewriter ribbon. They were dated, fortunately, which helped to discard those he found. None were dated within a week prior to the earthquakes.

Whatever Uvaldi had learned from the radar scanning of Soviet territory, just beyond those rugged mountains to the east and north, was missing from these files.

Uvaldi and the courier, Bert Anderson, must have taken the tapes to the village, when the tremors interrupted their trip.

Durell lit a cigarette, fighting off a sense of disaster and defeat. He could cope with reasonable confidence against the plots of other men and human dangers. But acts of nature like this, which destroyed a countryside and killed innocent men, women and children with a wanton hand, were things no one could anticipate.

He wondered if Uvaldi was still alive. But there was only one way to find out. He had to get back to the village at once.

When he started from the shack, however, Wickham lurched to his feet, breathing gustily.

“Hey, now! You aren’t leaving old Packy here, are you?”

“For a short time only, Colonel.”

“Well, now, look, I’ve got important business back in the States. You’ve got to take me with you, Durell! I insist. I order you to—”

“I’m not obliged to take orders from you,” Durell said calmly. “But if I can get you out of here, Colonel, I will. But not just now.”

He walked out into the night, found Kappic watching Sergeant Isaks bully the shocked, haggard remnants of the radar post company into work on a wrecked bulldozer, and began the walk down the mountainside again in company with the Turk.

THEY came down into Karagh at the opposite end of the village from where he had left Francesca and John and Susan Stuyvers. It was late in the evening, and here and there a fitful light glowed with stubborn tenacity in the stone huts that had survived the cataclysm. The square white command post at one end of the river bridge was bolted and empty, the detachment of guards off on another mission that no one in Karagh knew about, when Kappic questioned the villagers.

Except for the single main street, the other narrow alleys of the frontier town consisted of stone steps or ramps going up or down, so that one house always towered over its neighbor below—except where some had collapsed and crushed the others under tangled heaps of rafters, stone blocks, tiles or sod roofs.

The streets were empty and open to the night wind, soundless under the clearing, starlit sky. Durell’s footsteps rang hollowly on the paving as Lieutenant Kappic indicated a larger building ahead.

“The town hall of Karagh,” Kappic said in a hushed tone. “I remember it as a boy.”

The building had once been an ornate caravansary, and now served as a government-sponsored travelers’ inn. It had survived the quakes better than its neighbors, and now did duty as a combination hospital and communal kitchen for the peasants who had survived the past forty-eight hours of terror.

There was a large courtyard, entered through the tunnellike arcade of intricate Byzantine stone design that still seemed redolent of spices and charcoal fires fed from ancient camel caravans. A number of dull-eyed people were huddled here and there around small fires in the courtyard, using makeshift tents of skin or wool, crowded together with vague, looming shapes of rescued cattle, sheep, or dogs. There was even a bright-eyed, unblinking hunting hawk on a makeshift standard, kept in place by a long golden chain linked to an old man’s wrist. The refugees looked at their approach without interest, however, their faces filled with the listless despair of the homeless the world over.

Kappic asked the bearded old man with the hawk a few questions, speaking in rapid, barking dialect. The hawk’s bright yellow eye watched Durell and the lieutenant with interest, unlike his human neighbors. The old man pointed toward the rear wall of the courtyard, where a heavily arched, Romanesque doorway led into a wide stone hall. Here the injured of the village had been laid out on straw pallets, and an indescribable smell of blood and suffering filled the close, humid air. Kappic halted, a spasm of sympathy crossing his dark face, and then he went on down the aisles in the big stone room toward a small, harried man in a white coat who was bent over an old woman to examine her with a stethoscope. Durell waited. The doctor answered Kappic’s questions with an air of exhausted patience, his attention centering on the old woman’s groaning figure. Kappic barked something again, and the doctor finally straightened up, gestured to the right, and looked down at the woman again. She had died in the brief moment he had turned away from her.

Durell followed the Turk out of the stone hall. Kappic looked puzzled. “You will be glad to know that Dr. Uvaldi is here, quite alive and only slightly injured. He was brought in by a group of peasants who were searching for survivors on the road to the north.”

“The north?”

“Yes,” Kappic said grimly. “Where the Moskofs live.” “That doesn’t make sense,” Durell said. “Why would Uvaldi be heading for the Soviet border?”

The Turk shrugged. “Perhaps he was confused.”

“What about Anderson, the American courier who was supposed to be with him? Hasn’t he been found?”

“Not yet. It will be interesting to see what Uvaldi has to say about it all, eh? He was only bruised and knocked about by some falling rock, but he has been awake for the past two or three hours, the doctor says.”

The Turk led the way up a circular stone stairway with its treads worn smooth and shallow by centuries of use by sandal-footed caravan men. Dim emergency oil lamps lit their way. On the upper floors surrounding the courtyard the rooms were little more than cubicles, monastic in size and sparsely furnished. The dim, vaulted stone arches cast long shadows everywhere. The smells, if anything, were worse up here than below.

“This way,” Kappic said.

They turned a comer of the corridor—and darkness greeted them.

“Hold it,” Durell said.

Their shadows stretched uncertainly before them, cast by the flickering lanterns in wall sconces at their backs. But no lantern shone ahead. The wide corridor ran the length of the ancient caravansary, with narrow slitted windows overlooking the interior courtyard. In the dim glow from the charcoal fires where the refugees huddled outside, Durell saw a wall sconce from which a lamp had been removed. Beyond that, only the darkness brooded.

“Dr. Uvaldi is in there—the third door down, I was told,” Kappic whispered. “Wait here. I will find an extra lamp.”

The door Kappic pointed to was slightly ajar, a line of deeper black against the ancient brooding stone of the corridor. Durell nodded and heard the Turk retreat around the corner. He moved toward the wall, training and instinct lifting clamorous warnings inside him. He didn’t need the Turk to tell him something was wrong. He began to move forward after a moment, close to the wall, approaching the door to Uvaldi’s cell.

No sound came from inside. Light flickered behind him and he turned his head and saw Kappic returning with a lantern. The Turk looked huge and burly in the odd light. The crescent moon insignia on his lambskin military cap winked and glistened in the oil lamplight. Durell nodded to the Turk and drew his gun and, as Kappic held the lantern high, Durell pushed open the door suddenly and went in fast, at a low, hard crouch.