Assignment - Suicide Read online

  Mikhail’s hearing was uncertain for a moment, then he turned on his heel and went forward along the tug’s deck to vanish into the cabin. Gregori grinned. His dark unshaven jaws glinted blue in the warm sunlight. He wore a heavy leather jacket, open to his belt. His eyes were friendly.

  “Keep an eye on your back, American. He is not too stable emotionally.”

  Durell said: “Where are we going?"

  “You will see when you get there. I would much prefer not to have to watch you. I would like your word that you will not try to escape. A sort of parole, if you will."

  “No.”

  “You are stubborn.”

  “I’m not your guest. Let‘s not play with words. I‘m a prisoner.”

  “Would you prefer to be a prisoner of the MVD, in Liubyanka? The sun is not so warm there. The air is not so pleasant.”

  “If I can escape from you, I will do so,” Durell said.

  Gregori’s small eyes under his beetling brows touched Valya. “And you, doragaya? Will you help our American friend?”

  “If I can," she whispered.

  “You were in the war?” Durell asked.

  The burly Russian nodded. “I was a captain in the Infantry. We fought before Moscow that winter, and later we advanced on Rzhev. That was after the German defense was smashed in the Kokeshkino region. One of our armies advanced to Vyazma, and we drove southwest with our tanks through a three-mile corridor in the enemy lines. But the Germans closed the point of our breakthrough and cut us off. We had no food, no arms, no ammunition. And no hope. We were pounded by Stukas, shells and shrapnel. We ate our dead horses. I escaped with two other men, Borka and Alyesha. You remember them, Valya?”

  The girl nodded. “Why do you speak of these things? The war is over.”

  “I do not forget how it was in the forests. I don’t want to forget it.” Gregori swung idly back to Durell. He no longer looked happy or carefree in his brute strength. “Valya was only a child, but she was a great help to all of us who were trapped there. We formed guerrilla detachments and fought as long as we could. When we finally escaped back to our own lines I was thrown in Liubyanka prison. It is a miracle I wasn’t shot on the spot.”

  “Shot? Why would your own men shoot you?”

  Gregori grinned ironically. “I and the survivors with me were accused of having voluntarily allowed ourselves to be cut off behind the German lines. Having been out from under the political commissars for a time, you see, we were considered contaminated. I was accused of being a spy and a traitor. I was under suspicion of being an enemy of the people. For six days they pushed a confession at me to sign. I wouldn’t sign anything. I was in prison for thirty-two days and nights, altogether. The attentions of the NKVD were not pleasant. Finally, because of Borka, I was released. My story was confirmed. I was returned to my rank, made to sign a paper that I had been well treated, and went back to the front.” Gregori straightened from his lounging position at the rail. “I will do anything to keep those days of terror from returning. There are men of ambition in the Politburo who would like to step into Josef’s boots. If I die trying to stop it, I will die happy.“

  The tug‘s horn brayed on two short signal notes. A wisp of steam drifted over the stern deck and Gregori looked sharply at the shoreline downstream in the direction they were going. The wake of the tug showed a gradual veering toward the western shore of the river.

  “We are at our first rendezvous,” Gregori said briefly. His military training showed through the easy stance of his big body. “You will not give us any trouble, Durell. Nor Valya, either. You know how I feel. We are going to kill Comrade Z before he can do any damage, before he can start a war and take the place of Stalin. Nothing can stop me. I am a marksman who never misses. If you make anyone look at us when we go ashore, if you even so much as twitch an eye, you will die. Understood?”

  Durell nodded.

  They were approaching a small village with a rickety wooden wharf backed by new corrugated iron sheds that stood in sharp contrast to the wooden hovels of the villagers beyond. The sun was warm, the surface of the river sparkled. The air was soft and smelled of spring. The woman captain of the tug was expert as the diesel slackened and the tug lost way. She handled the two barges astern with quiet ease as a large skiff put out from the wharf, rowed by an old bearded man in a leather cap. Elena, Vassili and Mikhail came out of the tug’s cabin.

  Gregori spoke to Durell. “You and Valya get in with Elena. Remember my advice. You consider escape all you like, but don’t try it here.”

  The tug did not lose all its forward way while they climbed into the skiff. The old man who rowed it had a face like a withered yellow apple. A clatter of steam winches and the thump of an engine came from the wharf.

  It took only five minutes to reach shore, and there was no wasted conversation. Vassili carried two large burlap bags that bulged with unknown contents. The tug brayed a brief salute and went on its way. Durell helped Valya to the dock with him. She stood close to him, one hand unconsciously hiding the livid, swollen scar on her face. There was defeat in her eyes.

  No one troubled them as they circled the warehouse and passed a gang of stocky laboring women with picks and shovels. A Zeiss sedan was parked in the shade of the warehouse, the keys in the ignition lock.

  “You drive,” Gregori told the silent Vassili. “Mikhail, Elena, up front. Valya will ride in back with me and Durell.”

  “Let the girl ride up front,” Elena objected. “It will be safer."

  Gregori said heavily, “I am in command here.”

  “Are you? My orders from—”

  Gregori snapped, “Shut up.” His manner had changed subtly. “We will operate under Army discipline from this point on.” His voice had not lifted from its habitual rumble, but there was iron in his inflection. “Go on, Vassili, what are you waiting for? Drive. You know the way. You saw the map."

  Mikhail said, “And if we are stopped at a check point?”

  “Kronev has no idea where we are or why—unless you talked too much, dancer."

  They got into the sedan as Gregori directed. Valya sat next to Durell. Her hand crept into his and stayed there when he squeezed her fingers reassuringly, but she did not look at him. Vassili drove like a mad taxi driver, backing up with a shower of gravel and a clashing of gears. Just beyond the muddy main street of the village was an asphalt two-lane highway heading generally south and west. They were well beyond the metropolitan radius of Moscow, and the countryside was fiat, rolling now and then into thick woodland, with an occasional kolkhoz exhibiting vast fields being plowed by bellowing tractors. There was little traffic on the well-paved highway.

  “This is the Kharkov road,” Gregori explained. “We will be on it for perhaps five hours, if Vassili does not kill us all the way he drives.”

  “But we’re not going all the way to Kharkov,” Durell said.

  “Of course not. We will visit some old battlefields, though, before we are finished with the trip. Relax. Vassili, did the old sea witch give us enough to eat?”

  “And to drink,” Vassili answered shortly. “In the paper bag."

  There was salted fish, several loaves of black bread, raw onions and cucumbers in the lunch hag. And several bottles of vodka. Durell was hungry and did not hesitate to join the others with the food. Valya ate very little, explaining that her jaw hurt when she chewed. Her manner was subdued, as if the weight of defeat was too much for her former spirit to accept. It worried Durell, but in the closely packed quarters of the sedan, there was little he could do to reassure her.

  Vassili drank vodka straight from the bottle, as if it were water, driving with one hand as they roared down the monotonously straight road, through village after village. As the hours went by, Durell felt tension building up in the group.

  After the third hour they halted at a government-owned gasoline station. It was the first Durell had seen since they had left the tug. He did not stir, but his senses sharpened when he looked at t
he telephone lines that stretched back from the station across the bleak, flat landscape. A stolovaya was built alongside the gas station and a few cars were parked in the muddy area before the eating place. Two Russian sailors came out of the rest room, singing and hanging on to each other. A stout man, his wife, and two children were in the restaurant at a table near the window.

  “Valya, your Intourist coupons will save us money, for gas," Gregori said. “Let me have them, please.”

  The girl handed a small coin purse to Gregori. He grinned at Durell. “You will stay here unless you have to relieve yourself, gospodin. Vassili will go with you to the rest room, and Elena will go with Valya. What I said at the river bank applies here as well."

  They all got out as the attendant filled the gas tank. Gregori stayed with the pump man, joking with him, asking about the road conditions, telling the man they were all from the Red Star Lock Factory on their way to a spring vacation at the factory’s cooperative resort hotel in the Crimea. The pump man exhibited no curiosity except to look twice at Valya’s battered face.

  “She was in an accident, citizen?"

  “Poor Valya. She fell downstairs last night.”

  “She should have medical care.”

  “Ah, but that might have delayed our trip, citizen. We planned this vacation all winter and arranged our holiday time to coincide.”

  “Naturally. You will enjoy it down there now.”

  Durell walked away beside Vassili. Valya entered the rest room a step ahead of Elena. There was nothing in Valya’s manner that indicated any will to revolt. It was as if the damage to her face had broken and bruised more than the skin of her cheek. He felt worried about her. And the pressure of time slipping by was like a darkly moving curtain in the back of his mind. There were only two days until May Day, when a man with a lust for power could send the world up in flames.

  Durell weighed his chances as he stood outside the gasoline station. Vassili waited patiently a. step behind him for the two women to return. The attendant had finished and had taken the Intourist coupons as payment. Durell wore the clothes Valya had given him in Leningrad, and nobody had thought to take away the documents that identified him as a lieutenant of the MVD. If he raised an alarm in this desolate little village, he might bluff his way out of it with his papers and gain control of the group. Or he might be exposed by Elena’s vindictiveness as an American agent. He had no illusions as to what would happen then. But the telephone, just inside the station door, tempted him.

  Durell‘s muscles tightened with the decision he made. The phone was only twenty feet away. He began to walk toward the log station house, and then Valya and Elena came out of the rest room.

  “Let’s go,” Vassili murmured. “We have lost enough time here.”

  For another moment Durell weighed his chances. He would never live to reach the phone. He knew that. Nor would Valya survive. He could not risk hurting her more than she already had been hurt.

  “Into the car, gospodin,” Vassili ordered.

  He got in.

  Chapter Twelve

  THEY arrived at their destination at dusk. From the Kharkov highway they had turned into a graveled road that quickly deteriorated into mud and dust, winding westward into swampland and woods, Half an hour before their trip ended, Vassili had turned the car off that road as the sound of an approaching truck met them. The truck went by as they hid in a deep brushy gully marked by a giant white oak, and Durell glimpsed a troop carrier jolting by, loaded with Red Army infantrymen carrying rifles with fixed bayonets. When the truck was safely by, Gregori ordered everyone out of the car.

  “There will be road barriers from here on. We’ll leave the car here and walk the rest of the way.”

  Durell stood beside him. “You seem to know the way well, Gregori."

  “Of course. I know all this area. I knew about the missile base here and all the others. The only question was which one Comrade Z would use for his attack. Marshall learned that. Everything else has been prepared, a base for operations near each missile installation.” Gregori went around to the back of the sedan and unlocked the trunk. From it he took a small, heavy wooden box and handed it to Vassili, who heaved it to his shoulders. “Carry the grenades, Vassilivitch. The rifle is mine.” There Was a hunting rifle of unfamiliar design in a built-in rack in the ear trunk; the barrel was chased with silver, and a polished wooden box contained a perforated blue-steel tube that fitted snugly over the muzzle. “A silencer.” Gregori smiled. “l can shoot the eye out of a squirrel at a hundred yards.”

  “And the grenades?” Durell asked.

  “If Comrade Z’s car is armored we will have to smoke him out.”

  It took ten minutes to hide the sedan in the brush after pushing it into the ravine Well out of sight of the road. Durell worked readily with the rest of them. Elena and Mikhail obliterated their tire marks and when Gregori was satisfied they set out on foot, carrying burlap bags of provisions as they struck cross-country through the swampy woods.

  In single file, with Durell and Valya in the center, Gregori led the way. Long purpling shadows reached through the swampland as the sun sank. The terrain was irregular, out up by small gullies where sluggish streams flowed. The brush was misty with spring green. Squirrels chattered at them, and now and then a flash of blue came through the twisted branches overhead as a jay took alarm. Mosquitoes whined around their heads. Once they came to a high barbed wire fence that blocked them, and Gregori vanished to the right for ten minutes and then returned silently as a ghost.

  “There is a watchtower two hundred yards west. Be silent.”

  Vassili produced a pair of wire cutters and snipped enough of the strands away to permit them to duck through. There was no alarm. They crossed one stream on a rough log bridge and waded through another a moment later. The water was icy and the ground grew equally chilly as the sun vanished. Even after all the years that had passed, the woodland still carried the scars of bomb and shell. Blasted tree stumps and craters and signs of brush fires were on every hand. It was a desolate and haunted land.

  The ground rose and they followed a wooded ridge that overlooked a deep gorge. A paved asphalt road wound through the stream bed below. A truck passed down there, carrying concrete conduits, heading west. Gregori pushed rapidly on and Durell noted the exhaustion on Valya’s bruised face.

  “Can you make it?” he whispered to her.

  Her smile was distorted. “I haven’t done this sort of thing since I was a child.”

  “How does your face feel?”

  “It throbs. I think it might be infected."

  Durell scowled. “Would you remember where the car is hidden?”

  “Yes. I could take you back there.”

  “Tonight?”

  “If we can.”

  “Good. Lean on me,“ he whispered. “Save your strength.”

  He was aware of Mikhail looking angrily back over his shoulder at them. The dancer’s movements were very nervous, expressing a fear that went beyond the general danger surrounding them. Durell knew that if any of the guard units discovered them, they would be shot on the spot. But Mikhail‘s nervousness seemed to go beyond that.

  “Right here,” Gregori whispered hoarsely. “See, the bridge down below. Comrade Z will have to come along this road. Here is the spot, I am sure of it.”

  They were on the highest point of the ridge, and far below through the brush and ragged trees was the paved road, winding for a short distance along the bottom of the gorge beside the rocky stream, then turning abruptly to cross the stream by way of a wooden bridge. There was a watchtower at the opposite end of the bridge and a white-painted barrier. Two soldiers in dark green uniforms stood there, small in the distance, leaning on their rifles and smoking. Gregori made a satisfied, clicking sound with his tongue.

  “The dugout is just beyond,” he said.

  Their ultimate destination was a hundred yards below the crest of the ridge, out of view of the gorge and the bridge. Here, too
, there was still evidence of war. Gregori paused to study the slope of ground, nodded, clicked his tongue again, and chose a narrow defile between jutting boulders that led through a bomb crater. Dimly visible through the growth of brush was a log barrier and a doorway clogged with dead weeds and stones.

  “Here is where Borka died," Gregori said softly. “And Alyesha and Petra. All of them brave men, starving and cold and desperate. Here is where we stay until our task is finished.”

  The dugout proved to be in good condition when they had cleared the entrance. Some of the winter‘s chill persisted, but it was dry, with a high ceiling of logs cleverly niched and joined to stand indefinitely. Wooden bunks stood against one wail, and a fireplace with a concealed chimney led up by way of tin flues opening through the earth overhead.

  “Elena, Valya, you two will clean up. We will sleep here for two nights, at least. There will be no fires, no smoking, understood? And no unnecessary noise. One of us will always be on watch here, another at the point overlooking the bridge. There will be patrols now and then, since we are only half a mile from the missile base. Be careful. Our lives depend on the cleverness of your sight.” Gregori sighed. “We will rest between our duties, when we can."

  Their food that night consisted of more salted fish, black bread, and vodka. Water was supplied from a small stream that trickled over the rocks near the dugout entrance. It was dark when they finished eating, but a bright moon rose an hour later, flooding the wild wasteland of swamp and woods with a cold silvery light. The temperature dropped abruptly, but there was no wind, and a hushed, absolute stillness pervaded the night air.

  After eating, Gregori beckoned Durell outside. In the clarity of the moonlight, the Russian’s broad face was sober and dark.

  “Gospodin Durell, are you a good shot?”

  “Yes,” Durell said. “Perhaps as good as you, Gregori. But I will take no part in your plan for murder.”