Assignment Golden Girl Page 10

  "All right," he said sullenly. "Let's get back aboard."

  "You'll leave Sally alone?" Durell insisted.

  "I promise."

  Sally said grimly, "Now you're on his death list too, Sam."

  Eighteen

  OYASHI had a white bandage across his forehead. His dark Oriental eyes looked strange, watery. "Very good at binding up wounds, that Gloria is."

  "Have you had anything to eat?" Durell asked.

  "I don't dare eat. I lost my insulin and my syringes. I think my blood sugar is beginning to jump up like an Olympic pole vaulter."

  "What will happen?"

  "I can last a couple of days. Then the coma comes on." Oyashi spoke calmly. "Coming here to Pakuru was a calculated risk. I could have stayed near good medical attention in Israel, and I was pretty happy there. A frontier country, you know? And the agronomy there is a challenge. But Sally talked me into coming here to the Ngami people. Organizing kibbutzlike settlements to help the Ngamis become self-sufficient."

  "How did you get your medical supplies?"

  "Here. Off the train. It used to run three times a week like clockwork, thanks to Harvey."

  "The route goes through Ngami country?"

  "Once we're beyond the desert, yes."

  "Do you have any extra insulin there?"

  "No. That was why I came to Pakuruville to replenish the stock. Insulin deteriorates in heat. The refrigeration broke down—the generator that made the power for my box went kaput. So I came to Pakuruville." Oyashi smiled wryly. "My bad luck. You don't have to worry about me, Cajun. I told you, I'm not in your business any more. If I don't make it on this train to the coast, I won't be in any business at all."

  "How do you feel now?"

  "Just fine."

  Durell could see he was lying. "Try to hang on, Levemore. I have the feeling I'm going to need you."

  "Secret agent pro tem?"

  "Something like that."

  Oyashi sighed. "I liked the life. Okay, Sam, I'm on your side—for whatever that's worth."

  Durell took the throttle. Harvey had shown him what to do after they had filled the water tanks at the river, and then Durell had sent Harvey back to get some much needed sleep. The engineer had gone quickly to the coach to rejoin Gloria, not hiding his anxiety about her.

  Beyond the bridge the jungle thinned out into a wide, watery world of flat swamp and mud. The tracks proceeded on causeways built up above the level of the Great Swamp, sometimes on trestles, sometimes on the mounds of earth that reminded Durell of the old Indian routes through the Louisiana bayous, the chenieres he used to follow as a boy when hunting. Their speed averaged only a bit more than twenty miles an hour. Noon came and went in stifling, humid heat. The sun, no longer hidden behind the interlaced branches of jungle growth, beat down upon the train and the passengers with merciless cruelty. The passengers were given Army rations and little enough of that, and they became restless, demanding more water. The women were irritable; the men angry. Soon enough, however, the heat in the confines of the coach had them panting with silent, sullen exhaustion.

  In the two weeks since the railroad had stopped operating, the African green had already imposed its will on the rails and roadbed. Grass had sprung up between the sleepers, and they had to stop now and then to remove great ropelike vines and trees that had fallen across the way. Once out above the Great Swamp the way became clearer, but each trestle bridge had to be inspected before they crossed it to search for rotted timbers or faulty ties.

  Abdundi controlled his soldiers with efficiency, using them as labor gangs and guards. Their faces were sullen but respectful, and it was plain that their loyalty depended only on their wages and their immediate well-being. Twice fights broke out between them. Just as they began crossing the swamp, a sergeant was killed after he kicked one of the troopers who lagged in his work. No one bothered to bury the body.

  Far off in the southeastern haze over the miles and miles of seemingly endless swamp, a loom of violet mountains apeared. This was about mid-afternoon. Here and there the Great Swamp yielded to patches of veld with fever trees and thorn bushes and eucalyptus on the brief flatlands of the savannah. From the engine cab Durell watched ibis and zebra and a pride of lions in the shade of a clump of shaggy doum palms. At two in the afternoon someone in the passenger coach spotted a laki, a carpet viper, and there was terror and panic until the little snake was caught and killed. No one was bitten.

  When they came to another stretch of the veld between long arms of the Great Swamp, Durell told Abdundi to try for some antelope meat since everyone was getting hungry again. The soldiers in the ore hopper tried ineffectually to fire at the little herds of ibis and zebra, but the animals were too frightened by the train's passage to come within firing range.

  Sally jumped down into the engine cab from her place in the tender. Behind her the tall, thin silhouettes of her warrior guards were black and stoic against the westering heat of the sun.

  "Yo, Sam."

  She still wore her native costume, all bright colors and bangles, beads and hoops of gold around her slender neck. The heat did not seem to bother her, and Durell wondered how she kept so neat and cool when everyone else was sweaty and stained with the interminable clouds of soot from Old 79's stack.

  "Everything all right?" he asked.

  She grimaced. "Kliwama gives me the willies."

  "Your mother sent him to keep you alive."

  "I know that," she said impatiently. "But I can't even speak to you for a moment alone without their watching us. Do we keep on going without a stop?"

  He looked at the lowered pile of cordwood in the tender. "We'll need more firewood and water soon."

  "And I want to talk to you alone," she insisted.

  "You're not worried about Atimboku now, are you?"

  She shook her head and leaned against the cab window. The train was rocking steadily along a narrow causeway that led toward the green glimmer of Emerald Lake ahead. Durell judged they had come less than a third of the distance to safety, and he felt a silent uneasiness because they had not yet encountered opposition to their travels from the Neighbors. Harvey had assured him that the rails south of Pakuruville were undamaged, but he couldn't be certain of that.

  "Why do you ignore me?" Sally asked bluntly.

  "I didn't think I was doing that."

  "Last night at the hotel—did you know who I really was?"

  "I had some ideas about it," he admitted.

  "But you threw me out of your bed."

  "A matter of policy."

  She made an impatient sound. "Oh, you're a cruel man! Am I such an unattractive person after all?"

  "You're very beautiful, Salduva."

  She grinned and made an uncouth sound. "I'm Sally, remember? A rose by any other name ..." She shook her head and made her earrings jingle, then put her hand on his arm. "I want to be alone with you, Sam. I really owe you so much. You've saved my life. Atimboku is power-mad and immature, and I'm the only real opposition he has."

  "Aside from the Neighbors," Durell said drily.

  "Yes, there's that."

  "But would you have stood up to them as he has? He may be slightly insane as you say—and cruel and murderous, too," Durell admitted. "But his politics are approved by my bosses. They want to see him on the royal stool. Atimboku says you approve of the Maoist Chinese."

  Her eyes were velvety and unfathomable. "Would that make any difference between you and me?"

  "I told you there is no you-and-me between us."

  "Not yet," she said.

  "I just don't trust you, Salduva."

  "But you don't trust your Peck's bad boy, Prince Tim, either, do you?"

  "No."

  "Suppose I really were a collaborator with the Maoists? Suppose I wanted the royal stool only to turn Pakuru into a Communist state? Would that make such a difference in how you feel about me?"

  "Are you speaking hypothetically?"

  "Maybe."

&nb
sp; "Then I'll answer the same way," Durell said flatly. "I know nothing about you, Sally. You claimed to be a correspondent for Toward Sunshine, an English publication that sponsors Communist Chinese theory and violent tactics of revolution. The British may be tolerant enough about that sort of thing, but I'm afraid that K Section for which I work would not be."

  "Yes," she said bitterly. "And your CIA is hardly a gilded hly, either."

  "I'm not going to go into dialectics," Durell said. "In my business nobody hands out medals for a big mouth. It's a different world from yours, Sally. A silent world. But it's a world at war, and I work in it, and I do my best, and I've never done anything against my own conscience. The free world has been suffering pressure and endless attacks for a quarter of a century. A great many people back home don't seem to realize that world peace is a two-way street. It takes two sides to make war and both sides to make peace. It can't be done unilaterally unless one side chooses to commit suicide. As long as the enemy is active, seeking power, trying to extend his own ideology over the whole globe, whether or not it's wanted or needed by others, then I've got a job to do, and my business will stay active."

  Sally spoke caustically. "I didn't know you were allowed to think that much for yourself. You're a strange, hard man, but I—"

  Durell waited.

  "Have you ever killed any of your—business rivals?"

  "Yes," he said.

  "How did you feel about it?"

  "Well, usually they were trying to kill me," he said. "Like Colonel Yi would like to kill me."

  This time she was silent.

  "Do you know Colonel Yi?" he persisted.

  She bit her lip. "I've met him. In Pakuruville. We were reasonably well acquainted before Atimboku came back from the States to claim the royal tool."

  "How friendly were you?"

  She touched the golden bracelets on her left arm. "We talked a lot about the railroad he was building, the one he was in charge of for the Neighbors."

  "Yi is not a railroad man. He's in charge of security for the Peacock Branch of the Black House in Peking."

  "Your counterpart?"

  "Not exactly. But something like it," said Durell. "When were you last in contact with him?"

  She turned away. Durell saw Khwama stand up in the tender, his seven-foot height black against the glare of the merciless sun. For a moment Sally looked oddly frightened. Durell suddenly swore to himself.

  "Sally?"

  "I don't want to talk to you any more," she said.

  He called to the sweating firemen and gave over the throttle to the half-naked man, who grinned and bobbed his head and eagerly took the engineer's seat in the cab. Durell had not yet intruded into Sally's little comer of the tender behind the stacks of firewood. Now he followed her, clambering over the diminished pile of logs. She heard him above the rimible and clatter of the locomotive and turned her face angrily toward him.

  "Go away!"

  Khwama hefted his spear. His expression told Durell nothing. Durell kept after her, and she turned again, her eyes blazing. There was a little pallet that Khwama had arranged for her to sleep on, and at the head of it, serving as a cushion, was Sally's big, native handbag. Without warning Durell swept it up. Instantly Sally grabbed for it. "Give me that!"

  The cloth bag was quite heavy, and it bulged with a solid rectangular object. Khwama rumbled something and his two companions climbed down off the cordwood. Durell ignored them. "What do you have in here, Sally?"

  "None of your business!"

  He opened the bag before she could grab it away. His back was to a corner of the tender, and he could see the tall, looming figures of Khwama and his two men behind the girl's furious body. When he reached inside the bag, Sally launched herself at him, her long nails scratching for his face. He pulled out the small, black transceiver from inside a cloth wrapping. It was Chinese made. He saw Sally's face change, becoming sullen and petulant.

  "Did you use this?" he demanded.

  "No."

  "Is that the truth?"

  "I've always told you the truth!"

  "Were you planning to call Colonel Yi and tell him where we were on the railroad line?"

  Her mouth tightened. She was silent.

  Durell weighed the heavy little radio in his hand. Then abruptly he flipped it over the side of the tender as the train rumbled along.

  "Maybe," he said, "I should have left you to Atimbo-ku's mercy."

  Khwama lifted his spear, then lowered it.

  There was a sound in the sky, audible even over the ever present roar and clatter of Old 79's progress.

  There were two planes in the pale sky.

  As Durell looked up, he saw them peel off in assault formation and come down at the train dropping bombs as they dived.

  Nineteen

  MANY men at war have described varied reactions to being bombed. To be pinpointed as a target by some alien high above, to know the helplessness of having no sanctuary, can create a paralyzing fear unlike any other fear. Some men react with unreasoning rage—as Khwama did. Silhouetted against the brassy African sky, his tall black figure tilted back as he balanced on the engine tender, and his arm swung and sent his long spear spinning futilely into the blue high above. His companions followed, their primitive reaction being to strike back at the roaring machine that dived for them with all the accuracy of a hawk after a flock of chickens in a kitchen garden. The dark, spinning shafts of their spears made beautiful useless arcs against the sky.

  Others on the train were like the chickens, sitting in dumb, hopeless paralysis as they watched destruction hurtle down at them in the shape of black, ovoid bombs. The first blast occurred about fifty yards up the rails, a direct hit on the right-of-way. A gout of flame, mud, wooden sleepers, and twisted steel lifted against the emerald-blue waters of the adjacent lake. The thunderclap of its explosion was followed by two more, one in the water, another directly behind the supply coach. There was a rattle of machine gun fire from Abdundi's men in the hopper car. A few more futile shots ranged from the coach behind. Then machine gun fire came back at them from the sky. Metal clanged, bullets whined, smoke and steam burst from somewhere in Old 79's ancient machinery. Everywhere along the trapped train came yells and curses and women's screams.

  Harvey applied the brakes. There was a blast of engine sound as the two planes swooped low overhead. There were no markings on the aircraft, but Durell saw they were old MIG-17s, probably discards from the Egyptian Air Force built up by the Russians. Armament of all kinds had flooded down through the continent, even as far as southeast Africa. Durell was not surprised.

  The two jets banked, screaming far out over the low, swampy waters of Emerald Lake, and came back again, this time for a broadside attack.

  The train came to a halt just before the area of track torn up by the first bomb. Men and women were jolted off their feet in a crazy scrambled of twisted arms, legs, and torsos. Durell felt Sally's body bump violently against him.

  "Get down!" he called.

  Her face showed only anger, no fear. She was concerned about Khwama and his men, who still stood atop the cordwood in the tender, defiantly balanced to cast more spears. Passengers came pouring out of the coach, stumbling awkwardly down the shallow embankment to the dubious shelter of the mud and reeds alongside the rails. Machine gun bullets kicked up the water, moving toward them in a pattern of quick, ugly spouts as the planes ranged in on the halted train. Colonel Abdundi's men, routinely trained, flung themselves down in a ragged firing line and began shooting with their Kalashnikovs at the MTGs. Durell threw Sally dovm to the steel floor plates of the cab and tried to shelter her with his own body. With a thunderous, airshaking roar the enemy planes slammed overhead. Wood splintered, metal shrieked, and a man began to scream in a high undulating voice. Smoke drifted over them all.

  "Khwama!" Sally called.

  "Stay down," Durell told her angrily.

  "He'll be killed, the idiot!"

  "We can all be kil
led. Was it you who radioed to Colonel Yi where we could be found?"

  "No, I didn't, I told you, no!'' she cried.

  Durell turned his head as Harvey climbed back over the tender toward the coach. Gloria was not among the refugees who had fled the railroad car to find concealment in the swampy brush nearby. The planes were commg back for a third run at them. Harvey's face was twisted with desperation. He jimiped across the couplers to the coach as the first burst of machine gun fire in this low flying assault caught him. It looked as if Harvey were caught up and flung like a pebble from his perch on the forward coach platform. He went down, oddly silent, to the cinders on the sheltered side of the track, rolled over twice, and lay still.

  Durell swore. "Stay right here, Sally."

  "Is he dead? If he's dead, who can help us with the train?"

  Durell jumped down from the engine cab and ran toward the fallen man. There were other wounded and dead passengers lying like broken dolls alongside the train. Smoke gushed from the back end of the coach where Gloria's and Atimboku's compartments had been located. He did not see Prince Tim among the people crowded in fright alongside the embankment. Some of them had taken to the swampy water and were bogged down in the mud up to their necks.

  "Harvey?"

  Durell knelt beside the engineer and gently lifted the man's head. The roar of the planes diminished, then returned for another strafing run. Smoke blew over him, and he coughed. There was blood on Harvey's left leg, and the man's face was paper white. The leg was bent at an awkward angle under Harvey's body. Durell swore again and looked up as uncertain footsteps ran toward him. It was Gloria. Her long hair was disheveled and her face was angry.

  "What is it?"

  "Harvey's leg," Durell said grimly. "Give me a hand with him."

  "He looks badly hurt."

  "It's mostly shock from the bullet knocking him down.

  You'll have to take care of him, Gloria." "But who's going to run the train now?" "I guess I'll have to," he said.

  It was oddly quiet after the planes left. Their squat shapes diminished like angry gnats in the white hot northern sky over the lake. Smoke curled from the fire in the coach, but Abdundi's men were getting the blaze under control, and some other soldiers were already working with picks and shovels to fill in and repair the bomb crater in the track ahead. Durell made a mental note of Abdundi's eflBciency. He counted heads and learned that Khwama and his men and Sally were not hurt. One of the firemen had been killed, and two male passengers, one the little Pakuru that Atimboku had wanted to shoot, another a white man from South Africa. There were half a dozen wounded, and the brown Indian doctor among the refugees worked quickly to do what he could with them. There was a look of shock on the faces of most of the passengers who wandered dazedly about, studying the damage done by the two-minute aerial attack. The worst loss was in the food supplies which had gone up in the brief fire aboard the coach. Everyone now complained again of hunger and anxiety lest they be delayed here long enough for the planes to rearm and return for another attack.