Assignment Moon Girl Read online

  “The girl was seen in Isfahan,” he said quietly. “No mistake. After all, her face has been on the front pages of newspapers all over the globe. She was first spotted in Kashan—a center of the Shi’ites, you know, fervently religious. The famous Mullah Kashani was born there. But the locals are known as cowards and thieves. Tanya was spotted with a camel caravan going north.”

  “How could that be?”

  Beele only shrugged. “Next sighting, Isfahan. ‘Esfahan, nesf-e jahan. Isfahan is half the world,’ they say. She was with some tourists doing the Tchahar Baq-the Four Gardens—shopping district. She didn’t belong. But she had that exalted look the locals get there. The city has its magic. Secret, ornamented, heavy with history, old man.”

  “Stay with the girl,” Durell suggested.

  “She was picked up by Mahmoud Lakh.”

  “Who is he?”

  “They say he’s one of Har-Buri’s hashishim. An assassin. The constables spotted them, but they got away. Trail is clear enough, however.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Four days.”

  “She wasn’t spotted since?”

  “Hanookh saw her. Couldn’t take her from Mahmoud. Not there. It was near the tomb of Baba Qasem. Hanookh tried, but Mahmoud was quicker and slicker.”

  Hanookh spoke from the front seat. “Am I to commit suicide? They went into Bakran’s house. Behind the wall, Bakran had twenty men. I went for the police, but they were too late. The girl was gone when we raided. So now we have only Mr. Beele’s guess as to where she is. Nazdik—somewhere near. But our curious followers are gaining on us, gentlemen.”

  Ike Sepah complained. “I’m doing the best I can, Hanookh.”

  “You should drive like you make love. Tond and garm. Fast and hot.”

  “What would you know about my private life?”

  Hanookh laughed. “I hear tales about you.”

  Beele sighed. “Tanya is not a myth, Durell. She’s here and she’s been on the moon. What happened to her can be of vast importance to your space program, if you can get a few answers from her.”

  “We wouldn‘t kidnap her,” Durell said.

  “Naturally. But an hour’s questioning, skillfully done—well, her data would be invaluable. And you’d gain goodwill in Moscow when you returned her.”

  “It doesn’t add,” Durell said. “No space probes were reported or traced. She just appears running wildly down a street in Teheran saying she’s been on the moon.”

  “Mysterious, I admit,” Beele said. “But there will be some explanation, I’m sure.”

  “But not what we expect,” Durell said.

  They went on for two more hours, over a vast and featureless gravel plain. The hot wind whined, lusting for their lives. Presently a range of hills appeared, with a flat tongue of sand dunes between, interspersed with stony hills like the mesas of the Southwest. Beele ordered Sepah to bear closer to the left-hand ridge. The sun went behind the rise, and long shadows engulfed them. It would soon be dark. Durell looked backward again.

  “They are still there?” Hanookh asked quietly.

  “Both parties. Separated, but coming on.”

  Durell took field glasses and scanned the desert behind their rocking car. It was difficult to see through the dust that boiled up behind them. But then he glimpsed a flash of light on glass, to the southeast. Sweeping more to the north, he spotted another glimmer, about six miles apart from the first. As the sun set, the air turned cold and Hanookh broke out sweaters for them all.

  “We have to shake them,” Durell said.

  “I don’t see how,” Beele murmured.

  “Duck out of their way. Let them collide with each other. You say there are ruins ahead?”

  “Another five miles, at the foot of that ridge.”

  “That’s out of our way,” Hanookh objected.

  “We have to try something, or they’ll cream us tonight.”

  The ruins were like vague dreams rising from a sandstone cliff that thrust up like the prow of a ship from the soft sand of Satan’s Mouth. There was a wall or two, still with a few blue tiles, some broken columns, a tumbled monument in the shape of a faceless, winged bull eroded by two millennia of wind and sand. The shadows were sharp and deep when Sepah turned the car into the tangled ramps and broken walls of the site.

  “The Henderson-Smith group had a dig here,” Beele explained. “Some years ago, they hoped to strike it big. But they gave up. Too dangerous, and the government was quite hostile to the whole project.”

  Sepah said: “You were stealing our national heritage, Mr. Beele.”

  Durell interrupted. “Stop here, Ike.”

  “But they can see our tracks.”

  “I want them to. Everybody out. Take your rifles, grenades, everything we’ve got—food and water, too. Beele, can you do some climbing?" The Englishman nodded. “Good, let’s go,” Durell went on. “We’ve only got a few minutes. They’re coming on like homing pigeons now.”

  It was almost dark. Durell led them up a broken wall of ancient brick and tile, moving away from the parked Rover. The wind mourned in the ancient ruins. Here and there were signs that caravans had halted in this place; but no living thing was in evidence as they climbed onto a ridge of rocky ledges. In the east, a huge pale moon began to sail over the bleak sky of the Dasht-i-Lut. Two plumes of dust, like tiny dervishes, converged toward them.

  “You make a good hunter, Shemouel,” Ike said approvingly.

  “Don‘t fire unless necessary. Wait for me.”

  The Farsi’s eyes gleamed mockingly. “We have laws in our country against gunfighting. This is not your wild West.”

  “The West you see in our movies never existed,” Durell said shortly. “Take it easy.”

  The nearer car had turned on headlights. The wind blew bitterly, cold and rough against his cheek. Durell pumped a cartridge into the chamber of his rifle and settled down. Their car was still visible in the gloom of the ruins below. The first vehicle came on with reckless speed, the men in it apparently worried because they had disappeared. But the second car had vanished in the swiftly dropping curtains of night, and he felt a little worried about that.

  “Beale?”

  “Yes, old chap.”

  “This Har-Buri, and his Garden of Alexander. Tell me more about it.”

  “I can only give you directions. Never been there, myself. Half a day’s drive tomorrow morning—”

  “We’ll make it tonight.” Durell sounded hard. “And I’m not counting on our two Iranians to take our side.”

  He paused and looked at the Englishman. “I don’t even count on you.”

  Beele smiled. “Right you are.” He reached into his shirt pocket. “Here, I made a map of what I think is Har-Buri’s private hideout. Don’t give it to Sepah. His I.S. would like to have it, but we see no point in doing work for them gratuitously, eh?”

  Durell pocketed the folded paper. “Here they come.”

  The first vehicle looked like a U.S. Army surplus half-track. Its engine threw rough echoes back and forth among the proud columns in the "moonlight. It nosed cautiously around a shattered wall like a suspicious, antediluvian animal, treads clacking and squealing. Durell tried to count the men aboard, but the light was bad. Eight, he thought. And all armed with automatic weapons. Moonlight gleamed on pajama-striped clothing as they jumped out, voices guttural in Arabic and some Persian. They scattered with efficiency to close in on the abandoned Land Rover.

  “I hope they don’t wreck the buggy,” Ike Sepah whispered. “It’s a long walk home, Shemouel.”

  “Whose men are they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s have an intelligent guess.”

  Sepah was reluctant. “Har-Buri’s, I think.”

  “Or working for the Chinese?"

  Sepah shrugged and said angrily, “Or maybe the Russians have hired the natives to do the dirty work.”

  Durell looked at the young man. “Are you neur
otic about such terms as colonialism?”

  “I am from an old and proud people, Durell. My country was civilized and trading with China when you lived in the swamps and forests of western Europe.”

  “Does that prove anything now?”

  “We were singing Hafiz’ love songs when you were organizing barbaric crusades. We ruled the world and fought the Greeks and absorbed Alexander’s men while you fought wolves in the forest.” Sepah shook his head; he looked young no longer. “The world is strange. Loyalty is confused, these days.”

  “But you obey the Shah?”

  “The people need land reform, medicine, schools. We must keep up with the modern world. You offer help, and so do our traditional enemies, the English and the Russians, who fight over a way to the Persian Gulf and our oil. Ah, but now is no time for politics. I think we must now fight for our lives in this place.”

  Sepah lifted his rifle, but Durell pushed it down again. “Wait. The other party is coming.”

  From the north, closing in with suspicion equal to the first group, came another vehicle. No headlights. Durell had already made up his mind what to do. Hanookh and Sepah were engrossed in the oncoming clash below. When he looked at Beele, however, he found the Englishman’s pale eyes bright with curiosity upon him.

  “Cajun, old man, you didn’t return my map.”

  “I don’t intend to.”

  “Very good. Shall I cover for you?”

  “If you will.”

  “Which vehicle will you take?”

  “The fastest. That first one.”

  “Good-o. It’s Russian-built, you know.”

  “No matter.”

  “Bear away north-by-northwest until you come to more sand hills. They shift a bit each year. Careful you don’t bog down.” Beele spoke softly. “It’s gravel up to that point. Don’t go into Shekarab. You’ll see the lights. Couldn’t vouch for the friendliness of the caravan people there. From then on, it’s unsurveyed. Keep Shekarab to starboard for fourteen miles, then bear due west. Thirty-two more miles, and you’ll be there.”

  “Thank you, Beele.”

  “The Iranians will be grateful if you nail Har-Burl.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” said Durell.

  Down below, a rifle cracked, and then another, as the two pursuing parties clashed in the darkness over the abandoned Rover.

  Chapter Three

  IT WAS simple enough to slip away in the dark, covered by the bitter firefight between the unknowns below. Durell scrambled down with care, circled, took the half-track, and was relieved to find the ignition keys there. He was off and running before anyone could organize pursuit. And from the ridge where Beele and the two Iranians were hidden came a sudden burst of rifle fire and grenades to distract the enemy long enough for him to vanish into the desert gloom.

  He felt better, once he was alone. It was easy to maintain the compass courses Beele had indicated. He checked the fuel gauge, his .38, and the rifle, and shrugged into an evil-smelling sheepskin coat he found on the driver’s seat. He turned the car north over a wasteland as empty as any moonscape that might be imagined.

  It was like playing poker in the dark, he thought, with an unknown number of players at the table, Even the stakes were invisible. Old Grandpa Jonathan would have enjoyed it. But this wasn’t the warm comfort of the Louisiana bayous. This was the Dasht-i-Kavir, a dreaded desert that had been killing men since ancient times. And although the modern world of swingers and H-bombs was just over the horizon, he might truly have been on the moon. . . .

  He wondered why he had so many reservations about Tanya Ouspanaya. Had she really been the first to cross forbidding space and exist there for any length of time? If so, how had she returned, and why was she so far from her own country? Nowhere had he heard a whisper about the crash of a space capsule. He could see her face clearly in his memory—he had seen enough pictures of her, and even studied her file dossier routinely, back in Washington. A girl of strange beauty, dedicated and stern, a scientist with a luscious mouth and entrancing Oriental eyes. The few press interviews she had given had been grim and hostile. He pictured her running in wild panic, lost as a moonbeam in the alleys of Teheran. It didn’t add up to much. But there were some hard facts to consider.

  First, there was no doubt that the Russians and Chinese believed she was here, that she had been on the moon, and that she was immensely valuable. Others thought so, too. Iranian politics being what it was, a rebel like Har-Buri could make capital out of seizing her for secret ransom. Peking would pay heavily for her, in terms of political and military aid for a coup against the Shah. Perhaps the Soviets would do the same. Somewhere in this mélange of cross-purposes, there had to be a key to unlock the riddle. Har-Buri and his desert hideout might be that key. And there was only one way to find out.

  He was not followed. He drove for an hour, while the crescent moon sailed over a gravel desert filled with black and silver shadows. The wind was cold. He hoped Beele and the two Iranians had made it safely away. Then the sand hills Beele had mentioned loomed ahead, and he had to concentrate all efforts on maneuvering the lumbering truck over the grinding, dusty slopes.

  Twice he bogged down, and spent long, bitter minutes struggling to get the vehicle free. He had never known such emptiness before. He might have been the last man alive in a scourged and desolate world. It was long past midnight when the half-track slid down the last dune onto a rocky terrain that reached endlessly northward before him. He rested then, checked fuel and vehicle tracks, and his gun, and slept for twenty minutes. The cold made his teeth chatter. And he knew that when the day dawned again, the Dasht-i-Kavir would become an inferno once more.

  There were lights ahead. He crossed a well-marked caravan track while keeping the dim flicker of campfires to his right. That would be Shekarab, a lonely outpost for travelers in this wilderness. He hoped the sound of the truck’s laboring engine wouldn’t carry that far.

  In time, he turned due west. The moon now rode ahead of him. There was a loom of higher land about five miles away, and far ahead, where a single massive thrust of rock stood like a sentinel in the fiat desert, was his goal. He was paralleling the caravan trail now. And this was hopeful, since they marked the routes traveled since antiquity. If there were ruins ahead that had become Har-Buri’s secret fortress for rebellion, it was as good a place as any, and not too far from Teheran.

  By dawn he found it. The high pinnacle was just where Beele had said it would be, massive, immense, with a rubbled base that stopped even the half-track. Durell hid the vehicle between high boulders on the west side, where the rising sun would past concealing shadow; he took his sunglasses and belted on his revolver and a full canteen of water. Then he unfolded Beele’s map and studied it for an intent minute. By the end of that time, he had committed to memory every wriggly line and dot on the paper. Satisfied, he struck a match and burned it to ashes before he started to walk.

  A natural trail led up from the base, but it was too obvious and dangerous. On foot, the water canteen banging irritatingly against his hip, he rounded the northern side before he found the first ancient artifact, a tumbled column with fragments of Corinthian carving. A gateway, once. A third of the way to the summit, the trail ended. If anyone lived here, there was no sign of it. Then he discovered a little valley cupped in a fold of the pinnacle. Invisible from below, shadowed from above, it defied discovery except by chance, and he wondered how Beele had learned of the place.

  Then he heard the tiger roar.

  It was full daylight now. The sun was like a branding iron across the back of his neck. The sound of the tiger, incredible and unexpected, came as if from under the rocks where he stood. Then he heard the animal again. He turned his head from the glaring sunlight and the valley took on definition. He saw more ruined columns, a few date palms and tamarisks leaning over a brackish brown pool, a gateway that looked new, opening into the face of the cliff. A well-beaten track led from the pool to the gate. The greenery
in the valley looked like a mirage in this wilderness of stone and sand. He reflected that without Beele’s map, he might have spent days finding his way here. It would have been impossible, without the Englishman’s previous work.

  The tiger grumbled somewhere, and the hair prickled on the nape of Durell’s neck. Nothing moved. Then a man howled in sudden fright. The sound ululated in the ochre sky. He turned and climbed toward the sound. A dim track led deeper into the depression, but the sun was behind him and he remained in deep shadow. He felt as if unseen eyes were watching him. His sense of danger shrilled sharp warnings in his mind.

  He came to the steel-barred gate in the face of the cliff. The trail ended here. From the darkness beyond came an animal stench that checked him. There were outer bolts and bars on the gate. Within, only darkness loomed.

  Then he heard the girl scream.

  The gate hadn’t been on Beele’s map, but he waited no longer. The bars were oiled and slid easily aside, and he stepped into the abrupt coolness of the cave. Dim light flickered ahead, sunlight that seemed around a further bend in the passage. He moved forward, gun in hand, through several chambers filled with chests and furniture, at which he gave only a cursory glance. Then he heard the girl’s running footsteps, and saw her fly toward him, long hair streaming, her face a mask of terror.

  Behind her, the cat lay twitching with a rope around its neck, sprawled on the sand floor of a pit that was flooded with hot sunlight.

  The running girl checked herself, crouched warily.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Sam Durell,” he said.

  Chapter Four

  DURELL was conscious of her nakedness and of the rich perfection of her body under the grime and bloody scratches that marked her. Her pale hair tumbled heavily about her shoulders. Her full breasts lifted and fell rapidly, her hips quivered with muscular tension. §he shrank from him. Her eyes were as wild as any Jungle beast’s, he thought, devoid of all human rationality. Small wonder, if she had been in this stinking place for long. The girl’s mouth opened as if to speak, closed, then opened again.