Assignment - Afghan Dragon Read online

  For Kathy

  In the beginning, P’an Ku, the giant, labored for eighteen thousand years to construct the world with his hammer and chisel. He dug out the seas, and built the mountains, the valleys and the rivers. His companion was the Dragon.

  The Dragon is the greatest of all beasts, the one most filled with the principles of Yang. He is larger than large, smaller than small, stronger than strong, wider than wide. His breath is a cloud upon which he flies up to Heaven in the spring. In the autumn, he sleeps at the bottom of the sea. He rides the skies, visible or invisible. He possesses a pearl which is the soul of the moon. He is everywhere and nowhere; no man can find him.

  —Chinese Legend

  1

  Desolation lay all around him.

  He stood quietly in the hot wind out of the Dasht-i-Lut and heard the harsh whisper of sand slithering across the outcrop of reddish rock. He tried to listen with all his senses. Overhead, the sun struck at him out of a coppery, oppressive sky, unrelenting and implacable, a weight upon his head and shoulders like the pressure of an unforgiven sin. A single vulture began to circle high in the glaring heavens, patient and filled with deadly grace. In a moment, it was joined by a companion, and the next time he looked, through the sheltering lenses of his sunglasses, there were three. Sweat trickled from the nape of his neck and down his spine, collecting on his shoulder blades, soaking his khaki shirt, spilling in endless rivulets across his belly and down his groin and legs. The gun in his right hand felt like a child’s toy against the infinite hostility of the elements.

  Durell felt lost, but he was not lost; he felt alone, but he knew he was not alone.

  Behind him, where he had left the corrugated dirt road—a graveled thread coursing pitifully across the rocky landscape—a low ridge of reddish rock, which was carved grotesquely by eons of wind, hid the top of his Toyota Land Cruiser. He had rented it in Kerman, after Jules Eaton had been refused a landing permit in Zahidan. Air traffic was temporarily bogged down in red tape. There was little traffic in this direction. He listened to the singing silence of the wind. Tongues of sand, pushed by elemental forces, wriggled against his boots. A telephone pole canted above the top of the little ridge beside the road. In the distance were the purple mountains of the Mokran, where the black-robed Baluchi tribesmen lived. He heard something bang, thump and creak. And again. Bang, thump, creak. Artifact. Man-made. But out of sight along the rutted track that led downward and to the left and vaguely north, beyond another outcrop of rock.

  Most of the day he had been driving through this emptiness, trapped between the coastal mountains along the Gulf of Oman and the carved sands of the Dasht-i-Lut. The hot smells of sand and rock, the malodorous whiff of an occasional camel train passed with care along the track, the reek of a diesel oil truck now and then, had filled his nostrils and every pore of his body. Now he smelled something strange—methane, marsh gas, sulphurous and noxious. He was near the briny waters of the outer Hamun Lakes, more particularly, Lake Hab. He wished Fingal had chosen another rendezvous. It would have been easier to let Jules Eaton fly him on to Meshed, to contact Fingal in the relative comforts of that Shi’ite town dedicated to Islam’s God with its fairy-tale palaces and minarets, its mosques and tombs dedicated to ancient greatness. But Fingal had insisted that they meet here, and Durell's briefing was fixed and obdurate.

  Search and deliver, he thought.

  Bang. Creak. Thump.

  Durell moved at last, having waited five minutes after turning off the Toyota’s engine to let its sound die away, fading, beating, echoing. He walked forward. His boots grated on sharp shards of stone that twinkled and refracted the white light of the sky. The track led downward another two hundred feet, and he smelled the swamp gas again, carried on the hot, scouring wind. It made him thinlc briefly of the Louisiana bayous, of dark rich delta land, trails through the five oaks and narrow dikes that afforded footing inches above the muddy, stagnant water. His boyhood was long ago and far away. The world had changed, losing its simple naivety; slogans were despised, patriotism scorned; suspicion and cynicism were today’s watchwords. And all the while a thermonuclear weight hung just below the horizon, like a devastating offspring of the sun that beat down on him at this moment. It was a weight delicately and precariously balanced only by the efforts of many men like Durell, against lust and madness and the inexcusability of potential error.

  He looked at his watch. He was fifteen minutes late for his rendezvous with Fingal. A trailer-tank had jackknifed on the road through the Mokran mountains to the south, sliding into a Baluchi camel caravan, killing two nameless nomads and four proud, robed women in the ensuing explosion. He had been worried about the police then, who were cold and efficient, regarding him as a foreigner, a ferenghi. His cover papers that described him as an American archaeologist on his way to join Professor Berghetti’s Italian expedition had sufficed. They hadn’t found his weapons. But the delay made him this late, and he began to regret it and worry about it. You could plan and lay out a seemingly faultless operation, and an accident, unforeseen and destructive, could throw the whole thing, crumpled and useless, into the wastebasket.

  He paused. Bang. Thump.

  He turned a comer of the trail and saw the little enclave of stone huts clustered around a long-dry well, with its dead date palms, and some old nomad’s private domain, abandoned in endless time, perhaps only last year, perhaps a century ago. Except for the pressures of wind and sand, there was little to change the shape of things here.

  “Fingal?” he called softly.

  No one answered. Nothing lived here except the three—no, four, now—vultures circling the copper sky with hungry patience. Durell paused for another long minute and considered the angular shadows cast by the tumbledown huts. The sun would set in two hours, he guessed. He sniffed at the methane gas from the swamps, still some miles away to the north and east, according to his maps.

  There was one main house amid the date palm stumps where the roof had fallen in. The north wall had collapsed in a rubble of dried mud bricks that perhaps had been built in the same tradition as those of ancient Mesopotamia. Aside from the dilapidated wreckage of some machinery, scavenged beyond identity, he could have been back in pre-Biblical days. He felt oddly reluctant to proceed. The gun in his hand, which should have felt reassuring, was simply hot and heavy, perhaps impotent.

  Durell was a tall man, with thick black hair touched with gray at the temples. He had a heavy musculature, that was deceiving, since he moved with a light grace and a deft precision; his hands were long-fingered, the hands of a gambler adept at cards, perhaps inherited from his old Grandpa Jonathan, who had been one of the last of the Mississippi riverboat gamblers. He was a far distance from that time and place. He had been in this business a long time, he thought; perhaps too long. He was not a stranger to danger. The rhythm of the words made his mouth quirk. Behind the metal-rimmed sunglasses, his eyes were a very dark blue, almost black when he was thoughtful or angered. There was a time when he had indulged himself in a moustache, but it had become an identifying mark, fisted in too many dossiers, and he had shaved it off long ago.

  “Fingal?” he called again.

  Homer Fingal had always been a fool, a dominated man, a man he would not have chosen for this rendezvous. A bit pompous about his rebellion from an authoritative family and breeding. His father’s name was Wellington, but Fingal had married a girl named Sarah Fingal, and as a gesture to demonstrate his “now” presence and his acceptance of equality between the sexes, and perhaps to defy and irritate his father, he had taken Sarah’s maiden name for his own. He had been rejected for the Foreign Service, of course, and several posts in State. McFee, the boss of K Section, had pi
cked him up mainly because Homer Fingal was a top-rated Orientalist.

  Durell moved on down into the deserted settlement.

  His boots grated on the sharp shale of the descent. The wind shifted again, and he felt a surprisingly fresh drift of air from the cooler blue lakes to the north. A sand-devil whipped and whirled around the caved-in well for a moment. The first hut was empty. The second held the skeleton of a dog, dusty and dry, webbed with filaments of unidentifiable stuff. Little mounds of discarded debris, half covered with sand, lay here and there in the compound. But the tracks of Fingal’s vehicle, wide tires designed for sand and shale, led in an arc turning behind the central house. Durell paused. The sun seared the back of his neck. Sweat fogged his sunglasses. The wind died.

  Finally, taking his time, cautious in the manner that defied K Section’s computer analysis of his survival factor, he turned the comer and found Homer Fingal, almost as he had expected.

  It was a place for death, but not this kind of death.

  The long, thin body had been staked out with pegs between the stumps of two dead date palms. Fingal was naked, and there was no sign of his clothes. Durell did not approach closer than ten feet, studying the crude camel’s hair ropes that stretched from wrist and ankle to the wooden pegs driven into the sand; then he considered the scuffed footprints all around. He thought of booby traps, of explosives hidden in some innocent-looking item just lying about. He saw Fingal’s car, a dusty, hard-driven Chevrolet that must have cost a small fortune to bring into Iran. Or perhaps it had come with one of K Section’s shipments. Funds were no problem on this job. The assignment had Q clearance. Durell walked carefully to the battered sedan, put his hands on the open driver’s window, quickly withdrew them when the heat seared his palms. Fingal’s jacket lay across the back of the driver’s seat, behind the wheel. He did not touch it. When he looked back at the body staked between the palm stumps, he saw the thin chest lift uncertainly in a shallow breath.

  He turned and walked slowly back and smelled the man. It wasn’t just that Fingal was dead, although his body did not know it yet. They—he was sure it had been more than one man who had trapped Fingal here—had done a fine, savage job on him. Flies buzzed around the thick clots of blood in the crotch, where Fingal’s genitals had been hacked off. Even worse, they had surgically, most precisely, excised Fingal’s eyelids, so that the eyes were open and blind, the eyeballs curiously wrinkled from dehydration as they stared up into the glare of the sun. Fingal’s thin, sandy-colored beard, one that he usually cropped meticulously, stood straight up, stiff as a shaving brush. The man’s mouth was open, and Durell could see the gold fillings in his teeth when he brushed away the buzz of flies.

  He knelt beside the body.

  “Fingal?”

  The chest heaved convulsively, and he could see the failing heart beat under the ribs.

  “Fingal?”

  The lips moved, quaking, closing, opening, like an old man without teeth.

  “Yo.” The whispered sound was softer than that of the sound driven by the wind.

  “It’s Sam. Sam Durell.”

  “You—you’re too late.”

  “It couldn’t be helped. Fingal—?”

  “Kill me, Sam.”

  Durell unscrewed the cap on the water canteen hooked to his belt under his bush jacket. He carefully dribbled a few drops on the parched, cracked, white lips.

  “Kill me now. Please.”

  “Take it easy.”

  Even while he knelt, his attention concentrated on the whispering sounds that came from Fingal’s mouth, he was aware of the sand blowing, the dead palm stumps, the smell of brine and the smell of Fingal’s body, and of the vultures circling in the high yellow vault of the sky.

  Durell said, “You’ve been here for hours. I’m only fifteen minutes late. Can you tell me what happened?”

  “Dawn,” whispered the white mouth. “All day. I’m glad it’s night now.”

  Fingal was blind.

  Durell said, “Who did it?”

  “Hmmmm-mmmm.”

  Durell dribbled more water between the teeth. The man’s beard had been waxed, and the wax had melted in the heat, but it still stood erect, somehow obscene. Some of the skin had been removed in careful patches from Fingal’s belly and flanks. Some of his toes had been chopped off, and both thumbs. The mortal wound was difficult to see. Probably in the back. Fingal was glued to the sand with his dried, crusted blood.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Durell said. “No violence. You were detailed only to take me to where Nuri Qam is hiding. He’s the one who borrowed me from K Section, right? Mr. Qam asked for me. A matter of diplomatic courtesy. You were just a messenger, Fingal. What did they want from you?”

  “The dragon,” Fingal whispered.

  “What dragon?” Durell thought Fingal might be hallucinating in his last moments before dying. “Do you mean Berghetti’s dragon?”

  “Yo.”

  “They asked you about it?”

  “Yuh. Sam?”

  “All right, Fingal.”

  “I hurt. Kill me. Did you see what they did?”

  “I’ll get you out of here,” Durell said.

  “No, no! Don’t move me.”

  From far away, Durell heard the sound of a truck rumbling along the rough highway where he had left the Toyota.

  “Go to Meshed,” Fingal whispered. “Nuri Qam came across the border there from Afghanistan.”

  “Meshed? I thought he’d be in Kabul.”

  “He’s there. Sam?”

  “No, I won’t do it, Fingal.”

  “Please.”

  “No. Tell me—”

  “Say goodbye to Sarah. Don’t—tell her—what they did.”

  All at once, without warning, Fingal was dead.

  2

  Durell took the keys from the Chevrolet. He would have liked to splash the vehicle with gasoline and toss a match on it, but the fire and smoke would inevitably bring police, even to this barren place, and he did not want that. He did not linger in his thoughts about the way Fingal had died. In Durell’s business, you went as silently and as unobtrusively as possible, in life as well as in death. Fingal had not been trained for its darkness and cunning, and although Durell had never been close to the man, he felt anger at the way Fingal had been used and betrayed. He had no doubt that there was betrayal here, because Fingal had been led to believe the mission was a simple one, merely that of a courier to relay a single scrap of information in a puzzle whose outlines Durell could scarcely perceive as yet. He wondered briefly what Fingal’s father, General Wellington, would think when he learned of Fingal’s death. The old man, the terror of the Pentagon and close ear to Sugar Cube, might only be relieved that his embarrassing, scholarly son was finally out of the way. He did not think Fingal’s wife, Sarah, would feel quite the same way.

  He took his time destroying the identity of the Chevrolet as much as possible; he removed the license plates and buried them in the sand at some distance, smoothing the sand into wind ripples to conceal the cache. He could do nothing about the serial numbers on the engine. On the back seat he found two books, slim volumes that were well-dog-eared and annotated: the first was a collection of classical, monochrome, black-and-white paintings ranging from the tenth to the eighteenth centuries, with quite adequate reproductions of Mu Ch’i’s tiger and Lo Chih-Ch’uan’s delicate landscapes. One page had been turned down over an illustration of a thirteenth-century print of Ma Lin’s, a misty storm of black ink. The text was in Chinese, and the word ch’i-yiin, spirit resonance, had been underlined.

  It didn’t seem to mean anything.

  The second book was a thin volume of Taoist poetry and interpretation, also in Chinese, by the Chinese scholar Ch’u Ta-kao. Durell opened the yellowed leaves at random. Tao produces all things. Virtue feeds them. All things appear in different forms and each is perfected by its innate power.

  Durell put both books in his bush jacket pocket and turne
d away to climb the hill back to the highway.

  The sun was lower now, but the impact of its heat struck as forecefully as before. The wind had died completely. Durell moved faster now, not looking back at Fingal’s body. In a few moments, the abandoned oasis was out of sight and below him. Sweat stained his back. He started to put his gun away, tucking it into his belt, and then he saw the roof of his Toyota and saw that another vehicle was parked behind it, and he remembered the rumbling sound of a passing car or truck on the rough, graveled road while he was down below. The vehicle had not passed. He stopped short and listened and presently heard voices, a male, another male, and then a female giggled. It sounded harmless enough. Even reassuring. He swung right, keeping below the rim of the road embankment, and when he had gone about fifty yards, he climbed again and came out on the road behind the two cars parked there.

  The second vehicle was a VW van, ancient, rusty and dusty to the point where the original painting, all sworls and blobs, was barely visible under the coating of desert sand. The license plate was Afghani. This place was, after all, only about forty miles from the Afghan-Iranian border.

  The two young men and the girl seemed unarmed and harmless enough, and he did not think they were aware of his presence behind them, as they explored his Toyota, climbing in and out with a youthful, animallike curiosity punctuated by the girl’s laughter and the men’s comments. He was being ripped off. They had removed his extra jerry cans, his spare water tank, his battered leather luggage. They were speaking to each other in English— American accent—and apparently enjoying themselves. One was smoking a cigarette, but he could not smell the smoke from here and couldn’t be sure if it was pot or just plain tobacco.

  “Hey!”

  The fat one had turned, lugging the plastic water can, and saw him standing there, a tall, enigmatic silhouette against the lowering sun.

  “Hey, people,” the fat one said.

  They all turned to stare at him, guilt and some surprise on their faces, changing in a swift blur to defiance and animosity, even resentment, that their thieving game was about to be interrupted.