Assignment Black Gold Read online

  Chapter 1.

  “Durell!”

  The shout came echoing out of the blackness.

  “Durell!”

  Hobe Tallman, Betty’s husband, said nervously, “They’re not sure he’s here, dear."

  “Of course they know he’s here,” Betty snapped.

  “Otherwise. why would they bother us?”

  “ ‘Bother’ is an understatement," Hobe muttered.

  There was nothing to be seen from the windows of the bungalow. The smell of the river came in with the hot night wind, a smell compounded of mud and sewage and rotting vegetation, and a whiff from the stack of the WDT diesel working a mile or more away up the beach in the LMO Company’s storage yard. Durell had snapped off the lights in the bungalow with the first rasping, stuttering shots.

  Something splashed in the river. Then the night was silent. He stood beside the window near the door to the veranda, a tall, dark outline in the blackness. Dim light from the African night sky made a pale halo of Betty Tallman's mop of blond hair. She had obviously let herself go pretty badly these past two months. He knew little about her except that her Gulf accent matched Hobe Tallman’s Texas drawl. She had been a bar girl in Galveston, a nightclub singer in Houston, and finally a secretary in the offices of the Lubinda Marine Oil building in New Orleans when Hobe had married her. Hobe was pushing forty and a little scared about it. Betty was only in her mid-twenties. Whatever urges had brought them together had long since been dissipated by the African heat.

  “Durell!"

  The shout came for the third time from the hot darkness near the river. Durell moved silently toward the open window. He had a snub-barreled .38 S&W in his hand, comfortable to grip, There had been no comment from the Tallmans when they saw he was armed. In Lubinda, these days. most men carried weapons or were never far front reaching for one. He flattened his back against the wall near the window and called back.

  “Yes?”

  “Senhor Samuel Durell?”

  “Yo.”

  There was distant laughter. “Come out, senhor. We have no quarrel with Mr. Tallman or his wife. We wish to talk to you."

  “Go ahead and talk.”

  “You come out, and we let the Tallmans go.”

  “Who are you?”

  “We will introduce ourselves properly face to face. You have fifteen seconds to come out.”

  The voice was confident, with the Lubindan accent that was the legacy of Portuguese colonials and Catholic mission schools. It was deep, from a thick chest. Even amused. Durell looked at Betty Tallman, attracted by the sound of her hands searching for something in the dark living room of the bungalow. She had her handbag out, and a cigarette in her mouth, and was about to snap a lighter into flame. He jumped, slapped the small gold lighter from her fingers, then more gently took the cigarette from between her lips.

  “You can get your head blown off, Betty, making a target out of yourself like that.”

  “Oh, shit. They don‘t want us. They want you, Durell. Why don’t you go out there, the way they want, and make them leave us alone? Ho-be and I have always been friends with them."

  Hobe said gently, “Betty, please. Durell knows what’s right.”

  “Why should we be killed because of hint?”

  “Betty. . .”

  “You’re a worm, Hobe. Nothing but a creepy little

  worm. Throw hint out. Throw him to the wolves, ha ha. I need a drink.”

  “You’re just tired, Betty—”

  “You’re damned right I’m tired. Sick and tired of this place, of oil, of your men tramping in and out, making passes at me, of everything going down the drain in this heat and muck.”

  Durell turned in the shadows to Hobe Tallman’s short, stocky figure. “Who are those people out there?"

  Hobe sounded helpless. “Apgaks. Local terrorists. Gangsters. Independents."

  There was a sudden burst of gunfire from the bush and the jungled riverbanks. Automatic weapons. They sounded to Durell like Russian-made Kalashnikov rifles. More firing came from behind the bungalow. Something flickered, and in a low, looping arc of sputtering flame came out of the darkness toward the side of the house. There was a sudden explosion, a burst of fire, the quick conflagration of a gasoline bomb.

  “Oh, Jesus, my car!" Betty shouted.

  Her Mercedes was abruptly outlined in flames. It had been their only transportation back to the coast.

  It was about fifty yards from the bungalow to the banks of the Lubinda River. At this point, five miles from the town on the West African coast of the little independent enclave of Lubinda, the river was a couple of miles wide, really an estuary or bay, threaded by channels, islands, mud banks, and scrub brush, with an occasional coconut palm rising above the flat, miasmic delta. it was relatively familiar country to Durell. He had been born and raised a Cajun in the Louisiana delta parishes, at Bayou Peche

  Rouge. Yet there were differences. There was something untamed, savage, and bloody in this country so recently proclaimed an independent republic.

  A rifle slammed from the big kitchen in the rear of the bungalow; slammed again and a third time. Durell waved a hand downward at Hobe, who took his place at the window with his own rifle, and moved toward Betty’s rigid figure in the shadows. He could smell the heavy perfume she used. She wore only a halter and a pair of pink cotton shorts, and an animal magnetism emanated from her tall, rich body. She had found herself a bottle in the cabinet against the far wall and was pouring herself a drink. Her pretty face, angry and frightened, turned toward him.

  “They’re going to rape me, you know that?" she said tightly. “Then they‘ll kill us all.”

  “They‘re not in here yet.”

  “They’ve cut the telephone wire, right? We can’t raise the Lubinda once on the radio—the bastards there are all asleep since we shut down the Lady. Did you hear what the Apgaks did to the Jacksons last month?”

  “No.” He wanted to go past her, but she deliberately moved in his way.

  “George was a derrickman working the double board He came back from the rig on the crew boat after his tour”— she pronounced it “tower”—“and went home to his bungalow up the river. They were waiting for him. They killed him, cut oil his head and his testicles, gang-raped Milly, killed their two little girls. Milly was flown home a week ago last Tuesday. A raving idiot.”

  “Get out of my way, Betty."

  “Go on out to them,” the woman urged. Her eyes were desperate. “You’re the only one they want. We’ve always gotten along fine with everybody. Get out, and they’ll leave Hobe and me alone.”

  “Not yet.”

  “They’ve burned my car. Next they’ll burn the house. Then we'll all have to run out, rind they’ll have us. Damn you, Durell, you’ve brought us nothing but trouble—”

  He pushed past her, went through to the kitchen where Tallman’s servant, a brown-skinned Lubindan named Henrique, turned nervously from the window with his rifle.

  “Sir, they tried to come in from the bush out there.”

  Henrique's gray head seemed palsied.

  “Did you get anyone?”

  “I’m not a very good shot, sir.” The man paused.

  “What do they want from you, sir?”

  “I don‘t know.”

  “How do they even know you came here to visit?”

  "I don’t know that, either,” Durell said.

  “They say you are an American spy, senhor.”

  “Who says that?”

  Henrique shrugged. “The people. Everybody.”

  Durell looked through the shattered glass of one of the kitchen windows. The glare of light from the burning Mercedes was dying down. A wall of bamboo marked the end of the neat
ly clipped colonial lawn and rose beds. Through the smells of the burning car came the faint, evanescent scent of night-blooming jasmine.

  “How many do you figure are out there?” he asked.

  Henrique’s brown face was plainly frightened. “Thirty or forty, sir.”

  Durell considered the estimate and guessed the terrorists numbered closer to a score. It was still a sufficient number to overwhelm them.

  He decided he would have to respond to their calls.

  Chapter 2.

  He had flown to Lisbon via Pan Am from Washington, then taken a TAP flight via llha Sao Tomé to Angola, landing at the President Craveiro Lopes airport, a couple of miles outside of Luanda. While waiting to have his visa checked, he listened to the Portuguese and Bantu spoken around him, then went to a branch of the Banco Beuguela and changed his dollars into the escudos of the Overseas Province of Angola. With enough angolars in his pocket, he changed those into rands at a discounted rate for Southwest Africa. which had been newly renamed Namibia.

  He took time to make a call to 75021-2, the Centro de Associaco de Angola, on Largo Diogo C50 7. The Portuguese authorities were friendly and courteous, but they refused flatly to give him t travel permit to Lubinda. The future of the new republic to the south. along the West African coast, was still insecure, they said; there was fighting along the frontier and on the perimeter of the Kahara Desert on the coast near Namibia. Many of the European residents were fleeing—some being pulled out by the companies they represented. others simply packing up and taking the first plane or ship available. The Apgaks were everywhere, he was advised. “Very dangerous, senhor. There is no business there for you. We cannot permit you to expose yourself to such dangers.” The Portuguese were polite but firm.

  It took twenty-four hours for Durell to arrange passage with a bush pilot who had formerly flown for Suidwes Lugdiens. Southwest Airlines in South Africa. He got a charter to Lubinda‘s small capital at a cost of 500R, which took almost seven hundred of his American dollars.

  While he waited, he walked around Luanda, the “City of Bougainvilleas." It had been built in tiers on top of its origins as a fort. The assimilado system. which forbade all color bars, seemed to work well enough. The persistent cancer of guerrilla movements was not evident here. There were open air cafés, old houses with bright tiles, and in the new quarter, vivid Portuguese skyscrapers along broad boulevards and squares. The lower, Or Old Town, was a maze of cobbled streets and tiny nooks and corners. There were shops selling jaspers and agates from the Kahara and Namib desert shores, the old San Miguel fort on the waterfront, and chapels dating back to 1644. Durell felt no urgency. Eventually, the South African bush pilot showed up, shared a drink of fiery Cape brandy with him at a bright sidewalk cafe, and they took off for Lubinda.

  Now, on the evening of the same day of his arrival in the tiny, independent enclave, he was trapped with the Tallmans, on the first move he had made.

  In Durell’s business, anonymity was a key asset to accomplishing the jobs he had to do. He avoided encounters with local police and used whatever cover had been assigned him back in Washington. He trusted no one. As a chief field agent for K Section, that anonymous troubleshooting branch of the Central Intelligence Agency, he had long ago learned to live with caution. It was one way to stay alive a bit longer. His dossiers were registered in the intelligence files of the British M16. the French Sureté, the German DNB, the KGB in Moscow, the Black House in Peking. He was familiar with all the dark and dangerous corners of his lonely world, and he treated these dangers with respect. His survival factor had gone below the minimum in the computer personnel analyzers at No. 20 Annapolis Street, K Section’s headquarters in DC. He took all the precautions he could, whether in a Malayasian jungle or a London hotel. He never turned a corner without a thought for what might be waiting for him. And he had survived where others had gone down from a moment’s lack of attention, a careless gesture, or a trust misplaced.

  Durell was a tall man, with thick black hair touched with gray at the temples. He had a heavy musculature that made the swift grace of his movements a surprise. He could kill. and had done so, in a dozen different ways, with any assortment of weapons or with his hands. He spoke a dozen different languages, a score of minor dialects, from Arabic and Swahili to Japanese. He regularly took refresher courses at the Maryland “Farm” operated by K Section, but he usually disdained the tricky gadgets dreamed up by the gimmick boys in the basement lab of the graystone building at No. 20 Annapolis Street. in line with his habitual sense of caution, he preferred to work alone.

  He knew he could never go back to the normal world of a commuter’s job and a suburban home. He had been in the business too long for that. He did not think he could adapt to life on the outside. Although he was devoted to what he thought was necessary to be done, he did not consider himself a patriot. engaged in a dark and deadly war for the peace and security of the free world. Durell’s life was one lived on the knife-edge of terror and danger. of competition from those equally intent on reaping the intelligence data that had become one of the most valued commodities On this troubled globe.

  He stood still, listening to the sudden silence from outside the besieged bungalow.

  There was only a low crackling of flames from the burning Mercedes parked alongside the primitive road between the house and the riverbank. Durell tapped encouragement on Henrique’s bowed shoulders and watched the way the man held his rifle, then left the bungalow kitchen. Cicadas sang in the darkness Outside. There was no wind. He did not return directly to the living room, but turned right, into Hobe Tallman’s study. Hobe, as general manager for Lubinda Marine Oil, had an office here as well as in the town. The red light from the fire-bombed car gave him shadowed glimpses of a large, neat desk, cleared of papers, several large geological charts and cross-sectional surveys of the bottom offshore, marked with red and green and blue crosses from distances of five to twenty miles out. Durell considered the shale, sand, and rock formations patterned in color. There was a bulletin board listing crews’ names of floormen, roughnecks, tool-pushers, drillers, and motormen, a sheaf of porosity logs and core analyses determining permeability and fluid content below the ocean bottom. There were invoices for casing pipe and wrenches, air conditioners and quebracho from South America, the tannin extract used as a thinning agent for drilling mud. There was even a roster for the D.&D. Club—the Derrick and Desk Club for women employees, mostly the wives of the various drilling crews.

  Lubinda Marine Oil operated on a shoestring, Durell thought. Only one drilling rig had been towed offshore so far, and it stood idle, just beyond the horizon of the South Atlantic. There was a fine model of the rig, Lubinda Lady I, on a polished mahogany table near the desk. The miniature was complete with derrick, drawworks, engines, and pumps, a submersible offshore jack-up rig designed to raise the huge hull above the action of the waves. There was even a tiny stack of drill pipe, racked in stands beside the drill.

  Durell moved past the model to the window. There was no sound or movement from the bush outside.

  “Mr. Durell?”

  Hobe Tallman came into the room. The small man, whose thin hair was the color of sand, peered out of the study window. His face was pale in the lurid light.

  “What do you make of our chances, Mr. Durell?”

  “I don’t know. You’re more familiar with local conditions than I.”

  “I had no idea the Apgaks were active this week. I’d never have invited you here it I thought it might be dangerous.”

  “Who’s watching the front ot the house?”

  "Betty’s alert.”

  Durell said, “Can she fire a gun?”

  “She’s a crack shot. She’s responsible enough.” Hobe took a deep, uncertain breath. “I’m sorry about the things she said to you. Naturally, it’s unfair to assume you would sacrifice yourself by going out to those murderers.”

  “Is she drinking now?”

  Hobe said, “She drinks too much. But yo
u have to understand hor. This isn’t her milieu. Hardly anyone’s, for that matter. She’s been nervous and upset lately, that’s all. She’ll get over it.”

  Durell looked levelly at the smaller, older man. “Perhaps I should give myself up to them, rather than endanger you and your wife. Obviously, they only want me.”

  “I don't understand it.” Hobe peered carefully out of the window. “Maybe they‘ve given up and gone.”

  “Not likely. They’re still waiting. The question is, how do they know about me and why do they want me? I arrived in Lubinda just this afternoon. I went to the hotel, registered, had lunch, walked around, went to Matty’s office, looked for Brady Cotton. Then I took a nap and you and Betty offered to drive me out here. How do they even know my name?"

  Hobe shrugged narrow shoulders. “The Apgaks have sympathizers in the government. Spies in your hotel, perhaps.” Tallman licked his lips. “I don’t like this quiet. They usually come with a rush, get it over with.”

  “I thought Lubinda was happy with independence.”

  “We think the Apgaks are financed by Maoist Chinese. Like the guerrillas in Angola. Russia probably tries to buy dissent here, too. They don‘t want to see the new government work out as a liberal democracy. There was a short and vicious civil war when independence was declared. A lot of good people were killed. It stopped our drilling, of course, only a week after we’d spudded in and proved the DHC—the downhole comparability. The home office back in Houston is raising hell. But there’s nothing I can do, for the moment.”

  Hobe paused suddenly, raised his rifle as if he saw movement out beyond the window, then lowered it with a shake of his round head. His voice was suddenly blunt.

  “Just who are you really, Mr. Durell?”

  “I’m a man looking for a friend.”

  “You mean Brady Cotton? They tell me you’re his lawyer as well as his friend. Everybody says Brady has come into a lot of money.”

  Durell nodded, watching the window. “His aunt died in New Orleans.” There was still no sound from outside. The fire-gutted Mercedes was just a shell. It would be a long walk back to Lubinda. He said, “Your bush telegraph is pretty good, Hobe."