Assignment Golden Girl Page 4

  "The yards and terminal facilities," he said quietly, "were sabotaged by the PLM people some time ago. Two weeks back, I thiiJc it was. Everything useful was blown up."

  A larger building loomed ahead, obviously the central administrative building of the defunct railway. Built of concrete block without adornment, it stood in the hot sun with a single Pakuru red, gold, and black flag hanging limply from a wooden pole in front of it. The bushes and landscaping had not been attended to for some time. The grass was knee-high. But the place looked as if it had been built like a fort. More ragged soldiery lounged in the shaded areas nearby as the trucks came to a screeching halt.

  "Out," Abdundi snapped.

  They were pushed and shoved toward the building entrance. The armed guards with their bandoliers—one had a BAR of World War II vintage set up in the tall reeds at the river's edge—gave way reluctantly and hos-tilely. There were air conditioning units in some of the windows, but they weren't working. It was hot and shadowed inside.

  "My ministerial suite was upstairs," Harvey murmured sardonically.

  "That is where we go," Abdundi grinned. His teeth were long and yellow in his chocolate face. ''Apres vous,"

  They stumbled up a stairway to the second level of the railroad building and down a long corridor.

  A man stood there waiting for them.

  Gloria sucked in a deep breath and shivered as if she were about to be raped.

  Prince Atimboku Mari Mak Mujilikaka, Elephant Emperor and Lord of the Lions, stood six feet six inches tall, naked to the waist except for another of the cartridge bandoliers across the broad, rippling pectoral muscles of his massive young chest. He looked enormous, strong, and proud with an aura of power that struck them like a blow. He wore a headband of ocher-stained pegs above a broad forehead and a fierce, straight nose. He also wore a leopard loincloth, mihtary boots, and the dark tail plumes of the widow bird in his hair.

  "Oh my," Gloria breathed. "What a man!"

  Durell smiled. "Prince Tim? I'm glad you made it."

  "Thank you. Please enter." The gesture of the strong arm and hand was intensely royal. Prince Tim's brown eyes gleamed with hidden amusement, but there was cold cruelty there and even some apprehension, Durell thought. "You are the American, Durell?"

  "Yes."

  "I understand your plane was destroyed?'*

  "Yes."

  "I was ready to go with you. It is urgent that we leave Pakuru at once. It is not a matter of flight from the enemy, but a need to appeal for help to the conscience of the world."

  Gloria did not hide her disappointment at being ordered into another room with her husband. Prince Tim scarcely spared her a contemptuous glance and gestured Durell ahead into a large office in which the steel furniture had been shoved toward the windows to make a fire barricade. Prince Tim stank of jungle and swamps and masculinity like a magnificent, giant cat. There were bottles of Cape Town brandy and Johannesburg beer on top of one desk, together with primitive wooden platters of some grayish food. Two Sten guns and an Israeli Uzi automatic were propped in one corner of the room near the liquor.

  "Sit down, Durell."

  "When did you get back from the front?"

  "Front? There is no front, man. The Neighbors slid all around us like a flood. We never had a chance. I haven't slept for three nights. Those cats play rough."

  "They're not playing," Durell observed. "They mean to take your country away from you."

  Prince Tim nodded. "Drink?"

  "No, thanks."

  The Pakuru stared at him moodily. "You may be right. They preach 'Black is beautiful,' y'know? But I wonder how the Chinese will treat us if they get their candidate on the top stool here. When I first came back from New York, they did nothing but chant praises and get the Liqoqo —that's the Royal Council—on their knees to me. The minute I told the Neighbors it was no deal—about giving them half the countryside for their railroad—everything changed. Man, it's a real bust."

  "Are you giving up?" Durell asked. "Running out?"

  "I've got enemies everywhere. Everywhere.'*

  "I'm here to help you if I can."

  "So I hear. But can you?"

  "I'm going to try."

  "I can't trust anybody. Not here, not in the jungle. Too many others in the royal family want the stool."

  Durell decided to try the Cape Town brandy after all.

  There were no glasses. He found a wooden cup and poured three fingers for himself. Hitting his stomach, the fiery liquor made the day's heat seem temperate. He watched Prince Tim's tall, leonine figure stride back and forth in the abandoned, wrecked office and tried to equate this man with the campus radical who had been in the forefront of violent demonstrations in New Haven and New York. Prince Tim carried himself well, but there was a desperate quality to his eyes and face, to the way he handled himself, to the quick turns of his head, and the red-brown glare in his eyes as he stared at Durell.

  "Are you laughing at me, man?"

  "No," Durell said.

  "Think I've blown it all?"

  "Almost. Not quite."

  "Well, you're honest, anyway."

  "Where have you been all this time?" Durell asked bluntly. "You can be honest with me, too. Have you been fighting in the jungles or doing something else? You had plenty of word that we were ready to help you get out."

  "I didn't want to run," Prince Tim said sullenly. His voice was deep and harsh. "The way I figure, the whole world is watching me, considering my record when I was at school in the States. Most would like to see me go imder, I guess."

  "I think you're right," said Durell bluntly. "And you'll be in even more of a spotlight in the days to come."

  The Pakuru prince stared at him for a long time. Outside they heard the purling of the river, the low murmuring of the soldiers, the squawk of a bird in the trees along the riverbanks. Metal out on the railroad yards suddenly cracked and sang, expanded by the sun's intense heat. Durell's tanned face gave nothing away, but Prince Tim jumped a little at the sudden sound.

  "I don't make you, Durell. Why should you help me?"

  "It's my job. I do what I'm told."

  "You could get killed real easy, man."

  "I'm aware of that."

  "And you don't much like me, do you?"

  "Not particularly," Durell said.

  "But you'll get me out?"

  "I'll try."

  Prince Tim spoke with explosive anger. "Your people won't use me, understand? I won't let anybody use me."

  "The State Department understands that."

  Prince Atimboku turned away, his broad naked shoulders gleaming with sweat. He picked up a tonga knife, a wickedly curved blade two feet long, and suddenly splashed impotently at the air with it. His mouth dropped downward, and he looked at Durell from under lowered eyes.

  "It's like in the days of Shaka. Do you know about Shaka?"

  Durell nodded. "He was a great killer over a century ago. Your mothers here still frighten their children by telling tales about him. It was during the time of people movement, as Pakurans call it. Invasions, massacres, whole tribes wiped out."

  "But Pakuru survived," Prince Tim said.

  "Do you intend to emulate Shaka?" Durell asked flatly.

  "I can't. The Neighbors are too strong. The Chinese Reds have armed and helped them, trained them, backed them with money and materiel. Man, I came home to become king here, and I stepped right into a snake pit. Not just the foreign enemies either. Enemies here at home. Pretenders to the stool. Lots of them."

  "I've heard that you've killed off some."

  "There are plenty left."

  "Do you intend to eliminate the others if you can find them?"

  "I don't know. I'll do what I can." Prince Tim leaned back against a battered desk and shook the tonga at Durell. The hot sunlight ran wickedly along the razor-sharp edge. "Will you get me to the UN? It's my only chance to protest, to tell the world what's happening here. A naked power play, an open-faced grab of
land and people. I'm the legitimate, hereditary ruler of Pakuru, a constitutional monarch, and I intend to keep my country and my people whatever it costs. Not for you and not for them but for Pakuru itself, understand?"

  "I'll try to help," Durell said.

  "That son-of-a-bitch Harvey," Prince Tim said. "He was supposed to keep communications open. There isn't a plane, a train, or a road available. How can we get out? We sure as hell can't walk."

  "There's one locomotive left," said Durell.

  Prince Tim stared at him. "And the tracks?"

  "We can take a work gang with us."

  The Pakuru was silent for a moment. "It will be murder. Something like six hundred miles. The land is infested with the Neighbors and their Chinese Red advisers."

  "Take Colonel Abdundi with us and some soldiers."

  "I don't trust him," Prince Tim said. He put down the tonga knife decisively. "All right. Get the locomotive fixed up. Get Harvey off his ass and away from that zaftig wife of his. We don't have much more than twenty-four hours before the balloon goes up. If they get me here, I'm done for." Prince Tim looked suspicious. "You think it's funny, don't you?"

  "No, it's not funny."

  "About me, I mean. The boy rebel. All those headlines back in the States. Peck's bad boy, huh? Real revolutionary I was. Now I've been given a chunk of the Establishment, and I'm fighting hke hell to keep it. But don't get the wrong idea, y'know? I'm going to run Pakuru the way / want it, not the way your State Department would like to see it go."

  "We won't mind that."

  "I'm going to stay on the royal stool if I have to wipe out every one of these httle ignorant local bastards who claim it, too."

  "We won't interfere with domestic policy either," Durell said flatly.

  Prince Atimboku laughed suddenly, showing strong white teeth in his handsome face. "You're pretty cool, Durell. I've got some personal news for you. I'm not the only one the Chinese are after. Did you ever hear of a man named Yi Chen-Chuan?"

  "Who?"

  "Colonel Yi no less."

  Durell took a deep breath. Many things suddenly fell into place for him. "Where did you hear that name?" he asked.

  "You asked me where I've been for the past few days while you were waiting for me. Well, I've been with the Man. The Man from the other side. I tried to make a deal with them to leave me alone. Does that surprise you?"

  "No."

  "You don't take anything for granted, do you?"

  "No. About Yi—"

  "Make you anxious? Well, Colonel Yi tried to buy me —and the stool. If I don't play ball with him, he says, they've got another candidate." Again there came a change over Prince Atimboku. From grim humor his brows lowered until his eyes looked suspiciously paranoid. "As I said, there are plenty of other candidates. I barely escaped and got away. Who is he?"

  Durell said, "Colonel Yi Chen-Chuan is second in command of the Peacock Branch, Black House, Peking."

  "Intelligence?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, he knows you're here, Durell. He's gunning for you. Why?"

  "I hurt them once. It's another story."

  In the files of the dreaded Black House Durell's name was marked with a red tab ordering execution on sight. He had frustrated them twice on past assignments, and he knew a little about Colonel Yi—enough to make him shiver inwardly. A round, Buddha-like figure with a smiling and benign face, Yi was infamous for his penchant toward incredibly sadistic tortures. A historian of the Middle Kingdom who had specialized on the more brutal aspects of the emperors' methods of removing enemies, Yi was now regarded kindly as the hatchet man of the new emperors of China in modern day Peking. Colonel Yi's presence in southeast Africa indicated the importance attached to the successful completion of their railroad project for the Neighbors. More, Colonel Yi had a personal enmity toward Durell. In Japan not long ago Durell had killed the man's brother. It explained the attack on him this early morning, which would be only the opening of Yi's campaign to eliminate him.

  He would have liked to have a couple more fingers of the Cape Town brandy, but he was aware of Prince Atim-boku's eyes watching him. He stood up. The morning heat was like a heavy weight across his forehead.

  "That Gloria," Prince Tim said abruptly, smiling.

  "Harvey's wife?"

  "Hell. I'd like her to come with us."

  "I wouldn't—"

  The huge Pakuru laughed. "I'll pick the passengers. You get the train running. Remember, we have less than twenty-four hours to make it. And I've been without a woman for some time. She's more than willing, I think."

  Six

  "IT CAN'T be done," Harvey said.

  "Why not?"

  Harvey flapped his arms. "It's hopeless. She's a wreck. Her boiler could burst, that pilot wheel that's cracked, the matter of fuel, water stops—"

  "She's a wood burner?"

  "Yes, but—"

  "We can get a gang of men chopping eucalyptus logs for firewood around the clock. Use one of those two old coaches," Durell suggested. "Load it with cordwood."

  "We need a welder, a forge man, tools—"

  Durell said, "Harvey, do you want to live?"

  Harvey Gladstone made his eyes round. "Who doesn't?

  But you're asking the impossible."

  "Do it," Durell said.

  "We have no electric power for the winches or the overhead hoist—"

  "Use steam."

  "Steam?"

  "That donkey engine over there. Come out of it, Harvey. You're an engineer. You can rig it up."

  "Maybe. But the railhead here in the yards—the bombs made spaghetti out of them."

  "I saw a stack of rails down by the riverbank under a thatched shed. Rusty but serviceable. Use them and load any spares in with the firewood in case we run into some bad spots going east."

  "Sam, I don't think—"

  "Do it," Durell said again. "Old 79 is our only way out."

  The ancient locomotive stood in the shadows of the engine shed, dusty, rusty, and forlorn. Her splendid red and gold paint had long peeled in great strips from her rusting boiler, her pilot staves were broken, and one pilot wheel was indeed cracked and needed replacement. Her high stack almost touched the sheets of corrugated tin that lay askew on the iron beams that formed the open workshed. Her pressure gauges and throttle in the square wooden cab looked frozen, the glasses cracked, the numerals on the dials almost illegible. On a parallel track two once elegant first-class coaches of the Pakuru National Railway still reflected some of their Edwardian splendor. One coupler would have to be replaced, but there were an overhead crane, winches, a workshop, a huge pile of metal debris from which parts might be forged. Durell climbed into the locomotive cab, and the smell of old iron and oil touched off memories of his boyhood when he had worked those long summer days in the Bayou Peche Rouge roundhouse.

  "Where is Gloria?" Harvey asked plaintively.

  "She's safe in the Ministry of Transportation building."

  "With Atimboku?"

  "She'll be all right," Durell assured him.

  "Did you see the way she looked at him?" Harvey complained.

  "Don't worry about it."

  Harvey sighed and looked around the hot gloom and, dust of the engine shed. "I'll see what I can do, Sam."

  Durell went out into the glare of simlight outside. The neat webbing of tracks that formed the terminal yard was indeed a mess, pocked by dynamite craters, rusted, signal towers canted, and the switching tower collapsed in a heap of rubble. He put on his sun glasses, and a small boy came running toward him across the rusty spiderweb of steel.

  "Mister! Mr. Durell?"

  "Yes," Durell said.

  "Come quick. Telephone."

  "Where?"

  The boy pointed. He was naked except for a tiny pair of khaki shorts. His white teeth gleamed in his dark face. There was a shanty across the yards once used by a watchman perhaps, hard against a tall bamboo fence.

  "Does the telephone work?" he ask
ed.

  "Yes, sir, yes, everything works fine in Pakuru!" the boy said proudly.

  No one interfered as he walked across the tracks toward the high fence. The guards around the administration building where Prince Atimboku Mari Mak Mujili-kaka had made his headquarters were not interested in anyone going away from the place. He was watched but not stopped. He noted that Prince Tim's truck was gone and thought that ought to make Harvey feel better about Gloria, but then he didn't know if Gloria had gone with him or not, and he decided not to report it to Harvey.

  The shack was empty, smelling of stale food, vermin, desolation, and old smoke from the burning when the yards had been sabotaged by the PLM. The sun hit the back of his neck Uke a fist. There was little relief from the heat inside the shack.

  "There, mister."

  Durell stared at the small, ragged boy. "How did you know where to jfind me?"

  "The lady say you be here. I look everywhere and find you. Not hard." The boy grinned. "The lady anxious to speak you."

  "What lady?"

  The boy shrugged. "I don't know name."

  Durell gave him some coins and watched him trot off with the dogged stride of a Pakuru tribesman. He stood very still in the hot shadows, touching nothing, only his eyes moving. There was a straw pallet in one corner, a broken desk tilted on three legs, a radio-telegraph table holding smashed equipment. A telephone dangled off the hook, fastened to a plank on the wall. He did not touch it immediately. Listening, he could hear the birds again on the other side of the bamboo fence on the river bank. Sweat ran down his back and soaked his shirt.

  Nothing ticked or whirred or hissed. Very gingerly, he pulled open one of the desk drawers. It was empty. He tried the others. They were all empty. He toed the mass of straw that had served as the watchman's bed. No bombs were hidden there either.

  He picked up the telephone.

  Someone breathed quickly and shallowly into his ear.

  "Sam? Sam?"

  It was Sally Hukkim.

  "Hello, Sally," he said.

  "Oh, thank goodness. The boy reached you. Sam, I'm in terrible trouble. Someone ratted on me. They're after me."