The Assignment (5 page)

The car had stopped, and although the distance to the entrance was no more than three yards, the arrangement with the guards was repeated before the Resident and his secretary were allowed to enter the foyer. This room was ostentatiously equipped with luxurious furniture and colorful wall decorations. A policeman opened a door in the far wall and at the same time made a sign to the woman to stay where she was.

Manuel Ortega went into a small room containing low tables and leather armchairs. Two men were already in there, one whom he had only heard of and seen in pictures and one whom he knew of old. The former was Jacinto Zaforteza, Minister of the Interior in the federal government, the other Miguel Uribarri, Chief Inspector of the C.I.D.

Manuel shook hands with Zaforteza and embraced his brother-in-law.

The Minister of the Interior was a large, coarse man with a bull neck and short gray hair. Several heads of government had considered him invaluable, but no one really knew why. He was a skilled orator and his powerful blustering voice had over the years become almost physically penetrating.

He began to speak at once.

“The only thing I can do for you at the moment is to welcome you most warmly and give you a word or two on your way. Your task is an extremely delicate one and perhaps it will land you in some awkward situations. Don’t expect swift or grandiose results—the situation is much too complicated for that. We expect nothing of that sort from you anyhow. What we do expect, on the other hand, is uncompromising loyalty and complete cooperation. Two things must be avoided at all costs: open military activity and incidents of a kind that arouse international attention. Otherwise you have a free hand. It is important that you get to your destination as quickly as possible. So an air force helicopter is coming to pick you up in twenty minutes. You should be able to get down there in less than five hours.”

Zaforteza glanced at his watch, embraced him, heavily and powerfully, and then dashed out of the room.

Manuel Ortega stared in astonishment at the closed door. He had in fact not had the chance to say a single word.

“Yes, you can see how much help you can expect from that quarter,” said Uribarri.

He was a small, neat man with a thin face and a narrow black mustache. Although he was wearing civilian clothes, his bearing bore traces of many and long years in various uniforms. He strode impatiently up and down the room.

“Manuel, what in the hell have you done?”

He said it suddenly and with unexpected violence.

“You’ve made a terrible mistake. The situation down there is horrible. They’re all mad.”

“I’m certain the problem can be solved.”

“To hell with the problem. It’s possible that you might get them to agree, but I don’t care about that. What I’m thinking of is your personal safety.”

“But the Federal Police …”

“The Federal Police are a collection of idiots—at their best. You saw the circus out there for yourself? Huge escorts with sirens to move one man three hundred yards on an empty airfield. The most logical thing would have been to let you come in as unobtrusively as possible.”

“Well, anyhow, it’s too late now.”

“Yes—it’s too late to withdraw—but not to save your life. Listen now. I’ve sent four men down there. They’ll meet your helicopter. They’re my men, the best I can find. Their only job is to look after you, and I promise you they know their job. Remember one thing: of all the people you’ll meet, these four are the only ones you
know
you can trust. Don’t trust anyone else, not the army, nor the police, nor anyone else.”

Uribarri walked over to the window and peered out between the slats of the blind.

“Who’s that woman?”

“My secretary.”

“Where’s she from?”

“The embassy in Copenhagen.”

“Name?”

“Danica Rodríguez.”

He pondered the name for a moment.

“Doesn’t mean anything to me,” he said finally.

Manuel Ortega smiled and looked at the clock.

“I must be going now, I suppose, Miguel. I can hear the helicopter.”

“Are you armed?”

“Yes.”

“What with?”

“An army revolver.”

“Where is it?”

“In my case.”

“Wrong place, Manuel, wrong place. Here! Here!”

He slapped the left side of his chest with the flat of his hand.

“You’ve always been so dramatic, Miguel. Are you quite certain that you’re not exaggerating the risks?”

“No! No! I know I’m not exaggerating. They’re mad. They’re out of their minds. They’ll try to kill you, if only for fun, or to be able to say someone else did it.”

“Who?”

“Everyone. Anyone. Although no one here or anywhere else in the country thinks about it or even knows about it, they have been at war down there for eighteen months. Hard, bloody, ruthless war. Both sides are in despair, exhausted, finished, but neither will give way an inch. For fifty years those people have been pawns in the chess game of international politics. Now the pawns have gone mad. And still there are people who go on playing with them.”

Ten minutes later the helicopter rose, humming straight up into the sky, wrapped in its own roaring swirl of air. Through the segmented plexiglass Manuel Ortega saw the white police cars break away and drive off. Only Uribarri remained on the concrete apron. He stood there, his feet apart and two fingers on the brim of his hat, quite still. He swiftly became smaller. Soon he vanished from sight.

Manuel Ortega wiped the sweat from his brow and looked at the woman sitting beside him with her book open on her knee.

“What fearful heat,” he said.

“Wait till we get there,” she said without looking up. “We’ll have much more reason to complain then.”

“There’s no proper airfield here,” said the pilot, staring downward.

The country below them was without contours. It looked as if the sun had not only scorched all life out of it but also reshaped the whole of the surface of the earth into a hard rugged crust of stones and soil, yellow-brown flecked with gray.

“There is in fact nowhere in the whole province where one can land. The army fixed up a landing strip just south of the town for its own small observation planes. But even there it’s very dangerous to try to land a plane.”

Manuel Ortega yawned. He had slept for a while and had just woken up. The woman at his side appeared calm and composed. She was wearing dark sunglasses and was sitting with her elbow on her knee and her chin supported by her hand. Her fingers were long and thin. She was looking toward the ground.

“They say it’s because of the heat,” said the pilot. “The asphalt melts, and when they tried using concrete, the blocks swelled up and broke. Strangely enough, the nights can sometimes be very cold.”

Manuel Ortega blinked and shook his head. But he still could not focus his eyes to get a clear picture of the desolate landscape below.

“You’ll soon see for yourself. The provincial capital is just behind that ridge. We’ll be there in ten minutes.”

The helicopter rose a little to climb over the ridge with a
comfortable margin. The peculiar sun haze made judging distances hazardous.

All visual observations must be very uncertain, thought Manuel Ortega.

He had not even seen the mountain himself until the pilot pointed it out to him. Now they flew over it. He saw ragged, crumbling chunks of stone and scrubby bushes and suddenly a road with carts and a few gray huts. Then the first people, a great number of figures in straw hats and white clothes. They were walking in a long file with bent heads and woven baskets on their shoulders. More figures, a swarm of them, a great open gash and tracks and dark entrances into the mountain. More huts, a smelting works, tall and gray and sooty, and a plume of poisonous purple-yellow smoke which shot out of the tallest chimney and at once spread itself and sank like a membrane toward the ground.

“The manganese mines,” said the pilot. “If it weren’t for them, the whole damned country could be evacuated and given back to the mob that lived here in the first place. There’s the town, by the way.”

Manuel Ortega raised his eyes and saw a gray-yellow plain, diffuse and rugged and endless. In the middle of it he could see a group of square boxlike buildings, looking as if someone had happened to drop a collection of white-painted building bricks and then had not bothered to pick them up again. Diagonally down toward the town ran a dead straight gray-white ribbon which must be a highway. When they got nearer he saw that there was some sort of jumble of buildings around the tall white structures, and also a slope with villas and some tentative, dusty grass.

The helicopter droned in a wide curve around the western outskirts of the town, swept over the roofs of a row of large gray barracks and sank toward the ground.

The pilot let his machine down slowly and with infinite care, swearing all the time.

“If the Bolshies want to take this bloody country from us, then they’ll have to use parachute troops. No sane person can land here.”

“What Bolshies?”

“Well—the Bolshies,” said the pilot, vaguely. “Down there.”

He made an indefinite gesture toward the hazy mountains far away in the south.

“The government in the country you’re alluding to was not Communist,” said Manuel Ortega pedantically. “At the most it was Socialist and democratic. Moreover, it fell, as you perhaps know, three weeks ago and was replaced by a right-wing one.”

“Thank God for that,” said the pilot.

At last the helicopter was standing on the ground. The pilot switched off and the shrill whistling of the blades above was heard as the engine gradually turned over more and more slowly. He climbed out of his seat, opened the hatch, and jumped down to the ground, stretching out his hand to the woman. She took it and jumped down lightly. Manuel Ortega noted that she smiled swiftly and automatically as her eyes met the pilot’s. He himself picked up his briefcase and raincoat, put one hand on the pilot’s shoulders, and jumped. His right leg gave way under him and he nearly fell headlong.

As he looked around he felt the hot, uneven asphalt burn through his thin soles. The heat was unbearable. He was already soaked through with sweat.

The airfield was very small and surrounded by a double row of barbed-wire fence. The ground was covered with coarse gravel and the buckled asphalt runway was perhaps a hundred and fifty yards long. At the far end of it lay the burnt-out wreck of a small aircraft which had crash-landed.

“Yes,” said the helicopter pilot. “That was their Piper Cub. Now they’ve got only the Arado left.”

In one corner of the enclosure was an arched corrugated shed. In front of it stood a gray sedan. It had evidently been
waiting for them; before the rotor blades had stopped whistling, the car began to roll across the bumpy field. It stopped, and a tall man in a crumpled striped linen suit got out.

“My name is Frankenheimer,” he said.

He put his hand in his pocket and produced his identity card. Manuel Ortega recognized his brother-in-law’s flourishing signature.

The wail of a siren rose from behind the iron shed, and a white jeep swung onto the field. The man in the linen suit glanced at it and said: “Our car is a good one, though it’s small. I and my colleagues drove down in it. I suggest that you use it while you’re here.” Then he said: “I think so. In fact, yes.”

The car was French, a CV-2 type Citroën. Manuel had seen some like it in Sweden.

The jeep braked a few yards away from them, and two police officers in white uniforms climbed out of it. The one who had the most stripes on his sleeve saluted and said: “Lieutenant Brown of the Federal Police at your service. I bid you welcome. Unfortunately neither General Gami nor Colonel Orbal was able to meet you personally. They have asked us to convey their apologies.”

“Are you the Chief of Police?”

“No. Captain Behounek is the Chief of the Federal Police. He could not manage to come either, but he is prepared to meet you later today. I’ve been detailed to take you to your quarters.”

“We prefer to use our own car. But perhaps you’d be good enough to see to the luggage.”

“Of course,” said Lieutenant Brown, glancing at the man in the linen suit.

He looked totally unconcerned.

“Aren’t you going to come too and have something to eat?” said Danica Rodríguez to the pilot, who was standing close to her and shifting his feet.

“I’d like to of course, but I must be back at the base before it gets dark. But some other time …”

After a pause he added: “Anyhow, I’d rather get away from here before civil war breaks out or there’s an earthquake or a volcanic eruption or something.”

Manuel Ortega looked around with interest as they drove past the barracks. Inside the rusty fence he could see only a very few soldiers. They were half lying in the meager shade below the walls.

The man in the linen suit turned off the main street and drove in behind a stone wall along a narrow beaten track. To the right was a jumble of small tottering shacks. Most of them were clumsily put together with twine and planks; others consisted of rusty tin plates propped up with posts. Children were swarming about everywhere—dirty, ragged, half-naked, and emaciated. Women with faded strips of cloth wrapped around them were sitting on the ground. They were busy with iron pots and small charcoal fires. Others were walking along the street with water jars on their heads or buckets slung from yokes across their shoulders. Some of them turned their heads and stared at the car with apathetic, animal-like animosity. From the buildings rose a heavy rank stench of decay, sweat, and garbage.