Assignment- Silver Scorpion Read online

  As a chief field agent for K Section, that trouble-shooting, free-swinging branch of the CIA directed by General McFee, he was not surprised to be sent into any dark and dangerous corner of the world. There was a clause in his contract that gave him the right to refuse an assignment, but he had never used it. He had been in the business too long to quit now, no matter how low his survival factor had dipped in K Section's statistical charts. He knew he would never be allowed to quit.

  He knew too much.

  Fawcett Gold Medal Books by Edward S. Aarons:

  ASSIGNMENT-ANGELINA

  ASSIGNMENT-ANKARA

  ASSIGNMENT-BANGKOK

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  ASSIGNMENT-BUDAPEST

  ASSIGNMENT-THE CAIRO DANCERS

  ASSIGNMENT-CARLOTTA CORTEZ

  ASSIGNMENT-LONG HAI KILL

  ASSIGNMENT-THE GIRL IN THE GONDOLA

  ASSIGNMENT-GOLDEN GIRL

  ASSIGNMENT-HELENE

  ASSIGNMENT ,NT-KARACHI

  ASSIGNMENT-LILI LAMARIS

  ASSIGNMENT-LOWLANDS

  ASSIGNMENT-MADELEINE

  ASSIGNMENT-MALTESE MAIDEN

  ASSIGNMENT-MANCHURIAN ,DOLL

  ASSIGNMENT-MARA TIRANA

  ASSIGNMENT-MOON GIRL

  ASSIGNMENT-NUCLEAR NUDE

  ASSIGNMENT-PALERMO

  ASSIGNMENT-PEKING

  ASSIGNMENT-SCHOOL FOR SPIES

  ASSIGNMENT-SILVER SCORPION

  ASSIGNMENT-SORRENTO SIREN

  ASSIGNMENT-STAR STEALERS

  ASSIGNMENT-STELLA MARNI

  ASSIGNMENT-SUICIDE

  ASSIGNMENT-SULU SEA

  ASSIGNMENT-TO DISASTER

  ASSIGNMENT-TOKYO

  ASSIGNMENT-TREASON

  ASSIGNMENT-WHITE RAJAH

  ASSIGNMENT-ZORAYA

  CATSPAW ORDEAL

  COME BACK, MY LOVE

  THE DECOY

  DON'T CRY, BELOVED

  ESCAPE TO LOVE

  GIRL ON THE RUN

  HELL TO ETERNITY

  PASSAGE TO TERROR

  THE SINNERS

  STATE DEPARTMENT MURDERS

  ASSIGNMENT

  SILVER SCORPION

  by Edward S. Aarons

  A FAWCETT GOLD MEDAL BOOK

  Fawcett Publications, Inc., Greenwich, Conn.

  ASSIGNMENT SILVER SCORPION

  All characters in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Copyright (c) 1973 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof.

  Printed in the United States of America June 1973

  To my wife Grace

  ASSIGNMENT

  SILVER SCORPION

  Edward Aarons

  Chapter 1

  "WHY DON'T you just ask me to kill myself?" Durell said. The girl delicately fingered back a skein of brown hair that clung to her face with loving persistence. "I don't know what you mean, Sam."

  "I mean that I'm not going in there," Durell said. "I've flown from London to Lisbon to Lamy, in Chad. And to here. But I'm not going on."

  "Did you speak to Tom Adams in Lamy?"

  "Yes. He's down with a fever. He gave me some briefing sheets and referred to you as Finch, our Central in Boganda. Or has the name of this country changed again?"

  "I'm Finch. So I'm a girl. Does it bother you? It's your job to go on."

  "My job," Durell said, "is to stay alive-first, last, and always."

  He disliked her. He disliked this place. He hated what she was asking him to do. Most of all, he had nothing but distaste for her. He stood up.

  She said, "Sit down, Cajun."

  He sat down. He was almost amused by the imperative in her voice. She was taking the business in a very big way, making a production out of it, the way she made a deal out of everything she said and every gesture she made, even to studying the grimy dirt on her bare feet. He had to admit they were small feet for a tall girl, with a fine arch and delicate ankles. But they were very dirty.

  He wondered who had given her this job. If and when he ever returned to Washington, he'd see that the knot headed bureaucrat was shoved off to the boondocks.

  His drink, which he hadn't touched, spilled over on the plastic table top. The table jiggled. The plank floor shook and vibrated under the soles of his boots. Even the cigarette smoke that clung in the air like the seven veils of sin made abrupt jigs and jogs in their drifting wreaths. Dust fell from the ceiling. From far in the distance came the repeated roll of thunder. But it was not thunder.

  Nobody stopped dancing. There was a fat German woman tourist with a lithe, Adonis-faced gigolo picked up at Cannes, and she laughed and said something to her stud, and Durell wondered if she was recalling the Gotterdammerung at Berlin. She was old enough to remember the Nazis clearly. There was a Japanese couple, who looked only fleetingly alarmed. There were "liberated" Natanga couples who wore mod clothes and miniskirts, their purple-black faces streaked with sweat. They wore their tribal scars and tattoos as if they had become ashamed of them, which was too bad, Durell thought. A man without a link to the past drowned in a swamp of crocodiles, without a lifeline to turn to. The band was Portuguese, four of them, seated on a little stand at one end of Christophe's boite. Last week, before the attempted military coup, it had been named Ahmad Feranni's. The rebellion changed all that. Moslem names were no longer popular here.

  "Well?" the girl asked.

  "Why are you so impatient?"

  "There isn't much time."

  Durell listened to the steady crump of mortar shells landing in the Getoba District of the capital city, at the other end of the world from Christophe's. People were dying there. Moslems and Indians and any unlucky traveler who happened to be in the bazaars when the military finally closed the net on the last luckless rebels still acting against genocide. They were dying in any case. He couldn't save them. The girl was being ridiculous.

  Finch brushed back the tendrils of brown hair that persisted in caressing her cheek and covering her eyes. He wondered why she didn't wear a barrette or a hair ribbon or something. He wanted to slap her.

  "What is your first name again?" he asked, simply to irritate her.

  Her eyes were bland. "Georgette. Georgette Finch. There's more to me than just my name. You've been looking at it."

  "I'd guess 38-24-38. A womanly woman."

  "You have the insufferable superiority of man."

  "And you have the arrogance of youth," he countered. "I'm not going into Getoba. Why should I?"

  "I think you're scared," she said. "That's why you're being flippant. Do you have a cigarette?"

  "I don't smoke. And I'm scared of you, of course."

  She said promptly, "You're not going to bed with me. I can see that's what you want. I'd kill you."

  "You'll kill me in bed or out of it in Getoba. I'd rather die in bed, Finch. Who recruited you to K Section?"

  "Why does that matter?"

  "I'm going to see that the idiot gets fired," he said.

  She contemplated her dirty feet. "The man was General Dickinson McFee, your boss." She paused. "And you're going into Getoba. Tonight. After you see His Excellency, the President, Inurate Motuku."

  He still disliked her.

  The shelling at the other end of the city went on for exactly five minutes. The Portuguese band switched to fado music, and the dancers gave up, and a soulfully tragic woman in a costume out of the Algarve began to sing a lament for the sailors who went out from Lisbon centuries ago with Vasco da Gama and circumnavigated this troubled continent of Africa. The woman's voice had a nice tremolo. No one understood the words, but trag
edy clung like limpets to every syllable and note. Durell watched Georgette Finch get up and walk to the bar to buy some cigarettes from the bartender. Every man's eye followed the shivering bottom of her stained dungarees and the bounce under her white shirt. He sighed and finally drank his drink. The liquor was a Japanese imitation of Kentucky bourbon. The air was oppressive, hot, and steamy. Outside, as the night deepened, the capital city, for all its modern white cubes built by World Bank funds and aid from Moscow, Peking, and Washington-the government was not fussy about ideological payments-began to feel and smell like the surrounding swamp and jungle. Death crept out there and mourned with the f ado singer's music. Every hour on the hour the mortars crumped and banged and splashed somebody's entrails on the bamboo and thatched huts that went up in smoke with each explosion. Anyone who tried to get out of the Getoba District was summarily shot at noon the next day on the lawn in front of the pristine Presidential palace. Durell sighed again and watched Georgette Finch undulate back to the booth. The f ado singer watched her with vicious eyes.

  "Let's cut out all the nonsense, shall we?" Miss Finch said, sliding into the booth. "I know all about you, Sam Durell. You're tough as they come, cruel as a katula viper. Why try to put me on? This isn't really the Age of Aquarius. A new day will dawn, but not tomorrow. I've done a good job here for K Section, and nobody bothers. My cover is intact."

  "You think," he said.

  "No, it's true. I know the business. I went through basic training summa cum laude. God, if my friends knew I was working out here for the CIA, they'd never speak to me again."

  "Then why are you doing it?"

  Her eyes challenged him. "Why do you do it?"

  "It pays a lot of money," he said.

  "Bull crap," she said.

  "Are you a patriot?" he asked.

  "Semantics. Don't try to mix me up."

  "That would be impossible. You're mixed up enough. Do your parents know you're here?"

  "I've been in this country through three name-changes so far. I wasn't here when it was part Portuguese, part

  British, of course. But then it was Uranda-Boganda, Boganda, Natanga Boganda. Now it's just Boganda, which irritates the Natanga tribe. Boganda means `unity? Nifty, huh?"

  "I know."

  "I came here as a Peace Corps baby and stayed to take a job teaching English to the children of the local government clerks and the clerks themselves, and now I work for the government as an official interpreter and clerk, class two. I like it here. I have empathy for this country. I want to help them. I want to help everybody."

  "You'll get killed," he predicted.

  "No," Georgette said. "That's your hang-up, not mine. You're the one who does the dying."

  "I do a little of it every day," he said. "Why do I have to go into Getoba?"

  "The President will tell you. Inurate Motuku is a very nice man. I don't like his wife, but he's a peach."

  "Do you know that you keep using slang straight out of the twenties?" Durell asked.

  "I wish I were back there," Georgette said. "But that was thirty years before father inseminated mother." She looked at him with sudden anger. "You keep looking at my dirty feet. They turn you off, don't they?"

  "That's right."

  "Well, I like going bare foot."

  "More empathy with the natives?"

  She spoke between her teeth. "To hell with you."

  Durell said, "I wouldn't touch you with the proverbial ten-foot pole."

  "Don't brag," Georgette sighed.

  They came in as the fado singer finished her last lament. They were as silent as ghosts, they were obscure, they slid into Christophe's like smoke. They wore dark, London made suits about the color of their square faces, and their eyes were as dark as the night, muddy-red with exhaustion. Killing was a tiring business, Durell thought. They looked at him and the girl without seeming to and took a stance at the end of the bar where he couldn't get out without passing close to them. They were big and tough and professional. The heat didn't bother them, although everyone else was sweating. It was their country, after all.

  Durell was aware of the faint bulge of his gun under his seersucker striped coat.

  "Excuse me, Georgette," he said. "The FKP is here. Right behind you. Don't turn around."

  She pushed back her hair. "How many?"

  "Two."

  "They always go in twos. Looking at us?"

  "They're very careful not to."

  "There is a men's room in the back."

  "Yes, I know."

  She surprised him by saying "Good luck" and made a business again of looking for another cigarette in her fringed handbag. He saw the small .28 revolver in there among her feminine artifacts. She had long dark lashes that made twin fans on her cheek. Her hands did not tremble.

  He got up and walked to the bar and ordered another drink to be sent over to Georgette and then paused and looked at the two FKP men. Their tribal scars made beaded black pearls on their hard cheeks. One of them met his gaze without smiling; his averted lips were glum. Smoke curled from the big black mahogany beams that patterned the ceiling; the place was like a cave. Durell turned and went into the men's room at the back of Christophe's. Behind him the tables seemed quieter, the patrons more restrained, but maybe that was because there was an interlude between musical entertainments. He didn't think so.

  The men's room was just a closet at the end of a narrow hallway where the plaster had peeled like poor papier-m?ch?. It reeked of urine, vomit, sweat, and mud. There was a small window about two feet square in the wall opposite the door. He fastened the hook on the door but saw that one good push would tear the rusty metal free of the termite ridden wood. There was no urinal, no wash stand, just a cracked concrete hole in the floor. He felt a momentary pin prick of anxiety for the girl and dismissed it. The window opened easily. The hinges were well oiled. He pulled himself up and got his shoulders through, as someone knocked quietly on the door behind him. He didn't stop. He came out head first into the warm black offal o the night and rolled over, got up on his feet. His passport was in his right-hand breast pocket. He shook his gun free into his left hand. Crickets harped at him with violent strings. Something scuttled away up the short alley, which ended in gloom under a tall cassia tree. He moved fast for the deeper shadows, but he paused before he reached the opening to the side street that went to the palm-lined main boulevard of the capital.

  Footsteps were running somewhere in the night.

  A car blocked the end of the alley at the boulevard.

  Overhead, a palm frond clacked in the faint breeze that came from the Natanga River. The breeze smelled of sewage and swamp and the indefinable effluvium of an African city. He went back the other way and found a wire fence at the opposite end of the alley, about nine feet high. He turned left along it, ran fast, then jumped, caught the iron pipe at the top, and clambered over. Somewhere behind him a man called in Telek dialect, "Did you see him?"

  Another man said, "Bahundi gamlem."

  "He went over there," came back in English.

  Durell moved silently, for all his size. He had been in the business for longer than he cared to remember, and he was equally at home in Paris or London, Bangkok, or the jungles of Asia and Africa. He had long ago learned that, survival was the touchstone of success in this business. You accomplished nothing by dying. And even less by capture and interrogation. He found himself in another alley that twisted away from the modern facades that fronted on Unity Boulevard

  . The river was not too far, away. In daylight you couldn't see the other shore, and it looked more like a lake than a river. This was the old colonial district of the city, a place of homes for clerks and 7 various European bwanas who had long ago been given their walking papers, expelled by the rush of giddy independence here some years ago. There were pale, whitewashed villas surrounded by lush gardens, now overgrown; and some of the houses were boarded up. Most, however, were now occupied by the new breed of government functionaries who see
med to multiply like flies, imitating the bureaucracies of the West, but with even more of the self-important inefficiency of their European tutors.

  He ran silently down the alley, away from the wire fence behind Christophe's. The town was under military curfew, although in this area violations were still winked at, and the few tourists who remained in Boganda, in addition to shocked diplomats dismayed by the events of the past week, were permitted a certain amount of freedom. No one, however, was eager to walk the streets at this midnight hour. He had free passage down the lane toward the river.

  One week ago, before his flight to Lamy, Durell had been putting in time in London, at K Section's massive Central not far from the Embassy. From Lamy in Chad, where he had talked briefly to Tom Adams, he had flown on the battered BPAL DC-8-the Boganda People's Air Line-south and east toward Mozambique, above the sweltering east coast of Africa to this city, poised between mountain and river, savannah and jungle. He had landed in the middle of yet another rebellion against President Inurate Motuku, the grand old man of Boganda's independence, darling of the State Department and recipient of a generous tide of AID, World Bank, and US foreign aid millions for overcoming a local Communist attempt at a coup. Motuku never failed to receive glowing and favorable mention in the Western press. Durell still did not know what the job was; he was simply pleased to get away from the analysis desk at London's Central.