Assignment Maltese Maiden

  Chapter 1

  “We count seven,” said Fisher. “And two smaller bodies. Possibly dogs. It’s not possible there would be children in the villa, is it?”

  “No,” Durell said.

  “Make it dogs, then. The SR-7 aerial photo on yesterday’s sweep also picked up a lot of metal. Probably weapons. The place is like a fort. Does that trouble you, Cajun?”

  “Certainly it troubles me,” Durell said.

  “And two vehicles. A private sedan—Gordon thinks it’s a Mercedes, but he’s always pushing his ID work too fine—and definitely a military scout car.”

  Durell looked up. “Troops?”

  “We don’t think so.”

  “What does SAMOS say?”

  “Weapons or weather on the radar plot?”

  “Both.”

  “Weather will be so-so. Clear and hot on the Libyan coast from Benghazi west, but there’s a ghibli coming— after all, it’s still spring. You get a lot of these storms blowing in from the desert at this time of year, from the Fezzan. You’ll probably experience a twenty-degree temperature rise by 0900—maybe up to 120° Fahrenheit—and a wind force of maybe forty knots. Lots of sand, very fine stuff. Blows right out over the Mediterranean. I remember the ghiblis when I was at Wheelus, before the locals took over.”

  “And radar?”

  “There’s a new airbase with six MIG-21 ’s about thirty miles east along the coastal, this side of Tripoli. Near Zanzur. All planes on the ground. They have a Soviet T-59 radar system, and they’ve probably picked up Hammersmith already. But we’ve come from the Gulf of Gabes and we’re well off territorial waters, so no sweat, unless they get curious when we loiter.”

  “Can they pick up our landing craft?” Durell asked.

  “I doubt if they have IFDP equipment.” Fisher paused. Infra-Red Detection, Personnel, was Lieutenant Fisher’s pet. He loved it. His young, tanned face was serious and filled with curiosity, all at once, and he considered Durell’s height and expressionless face. “Are you taking your whole crew of spooks with you when you go ashore?”

  “I’ll leave Al Daimler. Al will take over your communications. We might have to radio urgently to Washington, using Hammersmith as a relay.”

  Fisher said wistfully, “I wish I knew what it was all about.” He looked envious for a moment. “Remember, you only have fifteen minutes ashore.”

  Durell nodded. “Let’s launch and go in.”

  The USS Hammersmith, a new communications DE attached to the Sixth Fleet on surveillance duty in the eastern Mediterranean, lay well off shore of the Libyan coast, out of optical sightline over the horizon from the beaches. She bristled with scoop antennae and radar dishes and electronic probes. At 0400 that morning Durell and four other men from K Section, all gathered and assigned to him from various Centrals in Europe and North Africa, left the destroyer in a small landing-craft and headed through the warm darkness toward the invisible shore. Durell wished he could have taken Lieutenant Fisher’s magical IFDP equipment with him; the gadget was uncanny, probing the blackness for animal body heat, pinpointing men and animals alike from remarkably long range.

  The only thing it didn’t do, Durell thought wryly, was to differentiate between male and female bodies in its heat-seeking sensors. He hoped the girl was in the villa. She had to be, he thought. He didn’t much count on Dickinson McFee being there, a prisoner or not. But if the girl was in the villa, he’d know where to go from there.

  The dawn was cool, cloudless and windless. There was only a two-foot surf to cope with as the whaler grounded on the gravelly Libyan beach. A row of dunes, topped with sparse green scrub, sheltered them from the coastal road that ran west out of Tripoli. Long ago, this Barbary coast had seen the American assault on Tripolitanian pirates in the Mediterranean, immortalized in the US Marine Corps hymn. It was still alien territory to Americans a century and a half after the attack. Soviet aid to the new Libyan revolutionary regime and its alliance with Egypt had provoked hostility to the USA. The sea felt warmer than the air as they splashed ashore from the boat.

  Durell had four men with him. He would have preferred to go in alone, but this was a Q Operation, and he had never known one like this before, one having no restrictions and orders to use every means possible, lethal or otherwise, to accomplish the ends required. Each man wore a drab jumpsuit without identification. Each man was an expert, armed with small, powerful machine-pis-tols, grenades, rope, emergency rations, food and water, knives, amphetamines, Demerol, and a suicide pill. Durell carried the small GK-12 transceiver, which had never been used to date. Everything he sent would be relayed in seconds to No. 20 Annapolis Street in Washington, for consultation with the Joint Chiefs and Sugar Cube, the code name for the White House.

  Of the five men only Durell knew the purpose of their assignment. He wished it had never happened. He still was not certain of the validity of this job. Only he had been permitted to memorize the Q code, as yet never used on the transceiver, to communicate with Hammersmith.

  They were a quarter of a mile from the target—the white, pink-roofed villa perched on the dunes above the sea. Their landing point, according to the NASA-provided satellite chart and expanded by high-intensity photography, showed they were to the east of the house, and only two hundred yards from the paved coastal road that flanked the sea.

  “Get up on the ridge along the road. Keep down. But stop any traffic that comes along,” Durell said.

  “Suppose they want to barrel through?” Keefe asked. “Stop them,” Durell said.

  “And if it’s just a camel driver?”

  “Nobody. Clear?”

  “Right, Cajun.”

  They moved soundlessly, with expert quickness, up the beach and along the rise until they flung themselves into the sand and scrub that paralleled the road. The sky to the east was suddenly alive with dawn color. Shadows took on sharp outlines against the swiftly growing brightness. There were a few doum palms along the road, a wild fig tree, and then the outline of a well and more trees, wind-carved into extraordinary shapes, near the villa. Nothing moved. He saw no men or animals, nothing to cause alarm. The road was empty.

  “All right, move along. Charley, take Damon with you and cut south, make a quick sweep, and come up on the target from the west.” Durell looked at his watch. “Make it ten minutes.”

  “It will be broad daylight then,” Charley said.

  “We want to see what we’re doing.”

  “Do we go in firing?” Keefe asked.

  “Only if we get static from them.”

  “No friends to worry about?”

  “Maybe. That’s the problem.”

  Keefe looked disappointed. “It will be tough, trying to be selective. Hell, we have Q clearance.”

  “Only as a last resort,” Durell said. “And it doesn’t opt for a massacre. Let’s move.”

  Charley Mills, who had come from Paris as an expert safecracker, and Tom Damon, a tall, studious man who spoke Russian, Mandarin Chinese, and the Arab Libyan dialects of both the Fezzan and the Tripoli cosmopolitan tongue, got up and ran across the road in a crouch. There was nothing but sand, great seas of it rolling endlessly to the south beyond the highway. They went up over a dune and vanished.

  Keefe stirred restlessly, shivering in the dawn chill of the sea and desert. “Now, Cajun?”

  “You’re trigger-happy,” Durell said. “Take it easy.” He knew that Keefe had been pulled out of Sofia, in Bulgaria, where he had operated as a demolition expert under K Section’s Central there. Despite his Irish name, Keefe had strong Slavic cheekbones and a deep glint in his greenish eyes. Durell looked at the fourth man. Solid and chunky, Perozzo had been an acrobat, a high-wire man, a code expert a
nd a knife man. Perozzo had already been in Rome when the others gathered for the quick trip down to Naples to board Hammersmith. He was the oldest of the group, a man in his early fifties, tough as oak, an Italian who had grown up under Mussolini’s Fascismo and who had been a settler in Libya when that nation was under Italian colonial rule. His boyhood had been spent in Tripoli. After the war, he had gone into G-2 and eventually K Section.

  “Do you know the place, Carlo?” Durell asked. “Do you remember it now?”

  Perozzo nodded. “It comes back to me, Sam. It used to be the Contessa Bertollini’s villa. An old, old lady when I was a kid. Fabulous. Rich as Croesus.”

  “Were you ever inside?”

  “With my papa.” Perozzo shrugged. “He sold the Contessa fruit from the Tripoli markets.”

  “And you’re sure you remember the layout?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “All right.” Durell adjusted his machine-pistol and hitched the small GK-12 transceiver tighter on his belt. Keefe pointed to it and said, “Why not let Hammersmith know we landed okay?”

  “And have the MIGS come barreling over on a radio alert?”

  “Hell, the natives are all asleep over there.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Durell warned.

  He started at a slow trot along the road, keeping to the seaward side of the dunes, his head just above the line of sight across the highway. Charley Mills and Damon had disappeared to the right, across the road. Keefe grumbled about the sand in his shoes. A dawn wind came up, blowing from the south with fitful strength, smelling of the dry desert sand and the infinite unexplored wastes that stretched across North Africa toward the equator. The wind was hot. A little sand rasped across Durell’s jaw. Perozzo’s gray hair blew in the breeze.

  In five minutes, they came to the last rise of dunes before the beach where the villa was situated. Durell turned his head and looked north over the lightening sea. There was little surf, and the water was turning blue. The boat that had landed them from Hammersmith was out of sight. The DE herself was still over the horizon. He motioned Keefe and Perozzo down and took his field glasses to examine the villa.

  “When did she die?” he asked Perozzo.

  “The Contessa? Years and years ago.”

  “Who inherited the estate?”

  Perozzo shrugged again. “No idea. In any case, the new revolutionary government would have disallowed all former laws, even those of King Idris, I think, pertaining to Italian colonists.”

  The house had shining white walls, pink window-trim, and pale red roof tiles that slanted this way and that in a picturesque architectural jumble. A high white wall of stone surrounded the grounds, but from the crest of the ridge, Durell could see down into part of the garden, still harboring dark shadows, where palms and oleanders and date trees grew. There was even a white and blue tiled pool, a balconied terrace, high windows with massed grayish draperies. A German shepherd prowled along a marble-slab path toward the pool and the beach, his nose to the ground. One of Lieutenant Fisher’s infra-red body-heat blips, he thought. There would be another one somewhere. And seven humans.

  Keefe shivered slightly beside him on the sand.

  “Are you cold?” Durell asked.

  “No.”

  “Then give me your gun.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Give it to me.”

  “Merde,” Keefe said.

  He handed over the machine-pistol. Durell thrust it toward Perozzo. “Carry that, Carlo.”

  Keefe was angry. His voice lifted. “What the hell do you think—?”

  “Shut up,” Durell said.

  He studied the place through the glasses again. A driveway led down from the coastal road, passing through high arched gates in the white stone wall. The gates looked solid, made of planking and iron straps. The green of the lawns, watered by the well, became achingly bright as full daylight broke. A flat area of sunroof was on the other side of the villa, and as Durell watched, he saw the small black roundness of a man’s head moving visibly just over the edge of the red tiles. The man stretched his arms and yawned. Durell could not see the rest of his body or make out how he was dressed.

  “Sure you’ve got the right place?” Keefe asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Here comes something,” Perozzo said. “A truck.”

  At the same moment, Durell glimpsed Tom Damon and Charley Mills moving in from the other side of the highway. They were obviously not aware of the watcher on the roof. But then the sound of the approaching vehicle alerted them, and they ducked down in the sand. Long black shadows were cast by the rising sun. Durell could feel the temperature begin to rise.

  The truck racketed toward them, a small dark shape at first, far down the coastal road. The wind blew a bit stronger. Sand swirled in the air. To the south, the sky was not as clear and sharply blue as it was overhead.

  “Supplies,” Perozzo said suddenly. “From the Tripoli markets. My old man’s former business, by God. After all these years.”

  “Things have changed,” Durell said. “Let’s see if you’re right.”

  “He’s slowing up.”

  The truck was a battered former Army six-wheeler, fixed up now with wooden plank sides and a flapping striped canvas over the body. It was painted a bright lilac. One of the windshield panels was broken. Because the sun was behind the vehicle, Durell could not make out if the driver had a companion.

  “We’ll go in with the truck,” he decided.

  “Does the Q authority still hold?”

  “Yes. Except for the girl.”

  “Hell, we’re working in the dark. If you know what this is about, you ought to tell us, Cajun.”

  “You know all you have to know. Don’t kill unless you have to. Under no circumstances do you hurt the girl.”

  “Give me my gun back then,” Keefe said quickly.

  Durell looked at the man’s broad, hard face and saw what he did not like in the greenish, slightly slanted Slavic eyes. He nodded. Perozzo gave Keefe the machine-pistol. It was evident in the way Perozzo relinquished it that Perozzo did not like Keefe.

  “Let’s go in,” Durell said.

  He stood up and ran for the gate to the villa as the truck slowed and turned off the highway.

  Chapter 2

  The guard on the sunroof could not see them when they dropped out of his line of sight down the dune. Then the high wall of the villa hid them from the windows facing this way. Durell was in the lead, with Keefe half a step behind him at his left elbow. Perozzo came more slowly, looking backward. Damon and Mills stood up from their hiding place across the road and reached the gate first.

  The truck driver, a middle-aged man dressed in striped Arab robes and a ragged burnoose, had gotten down from the battered lilac cab and was opening the plank gate. A small boy of about twelve, with a delicate elfin face, was helping him. The boy saw them first.

  His small mouth opened in a round O and he said something to his father, who turned quickly, the skirts of his robe swinging, and he started to shout something. Keefe clubbed him across the chest with the stock of his gun and sent him sprawling against the truck fender. Perozzo said, “What for?” and ran into the garden with Durell.

  A path led between thick oleanders and springtime flower beds surrounded by broken Roman columns and a few pieces of antique sculpture. A flight of steps led up to the double front doors. Damon and Mills spread out to the right and left, and all at once there was a sharp burst of gunfire as the guard on the roof saw them.

  The door was locked, built of blue planks and strap bars in Moorish fashion. Durell swung left along the balustrade toward the windows. Several had closed wooden lattice shutters, and he tore at the first, broke it open, and smashed the glass beyond with his gun butt. The Arab boy was screaming, bent over his father at the truck. There was another burst of gunfire from the other side of the house, the quick reply of Damon and Mills. A dull boom shook the early morning air as Keefe used a gre
nade to blow open the door. It wasn’t necessary, but Keefe was the demolitions man.

  “Let me go in first,” Perozzo said, at the window.

  “No.”

  “You know what it’s all about. We don’t.”

  Durell ignored him and stepped over the broken sash into cool morning dimness inside the villa. The stench of cordite from Keefe’s grenade drifted in the dark air. He heard Keefe yell and then he ran across the shadowed room, aware of sheets over the furniture, of rococo ceilings and moldings, an Italian marble fireplace black with dust. To the right was the central hall, with twin marble staircases leading upward. A gallery window let in triple shafts of bright dawn sunlight here. The place smelled musty, and a thin layer of sand lay on the stone floors, drifted in from past ghiblis across the Sahara from the Fezzan. Keefe stood beside the shattered remains of a Roman copy of a Hellenistic bust that had stood on a pedestal inside the doorway. Keefe grinned.

  “We’re in.”

  “Watch it.”

  There came a growl, a streak of animal movement, and a large brown dog launched itself at Keefe from the first landing of the twin stairs. Keefe shot the animal down in midair, and it fell flat, with a dead thud, at his feet.

  From upstairs came guttural shouts, a yell of puzzled anger, a thick order. The language was Russian.

  “Look for the girl,” Durell snapped.

  More gunfire came from Damon and Mills on the other side of the villa. Durell swore in frustration, ran down the corridor between the twin staircases and found a sun-room, a kitchen dirtied with unwashed dishes and empty cans of Egyptian food, an American camp stove. Beyond the kitchen door was the driveway that curved around from the front of the house, and the Mercedes sedan and the scout car were parked here. Durell stepped outside, and a thick-set man came around the corner of the villa and shot at him without waiting for identification. The bullet spattered on the stucco wall near Durell’s head. He jumped from the steps, turning, and came up with his gun leveled at the man.

  “Drop it.”

  The man did not understand English. He started to fire again, his broad face pale and frightened, and Durell shot him in the arm. The man spun away, yelling, and fell to his knees, dropping his gun. Durell went to him and kicked the gun out of reach. The man was built like a barrel, hairy-chested, wearing only the pants of striped pajamas. His straw-colored hair was awry from sleep. His blue eyes shimmered with pain and shock as he clutched his broken forearm.