Assignment Maltese Maiden Read online

  Durell felt a kindred knot in the pit of his stomach as he met Skoll’s pale stare.

  “Madame Hung,” he said flatly, “is dead.”

  “Tovarich Amerikanski, it was Madame Hung.”

  “I killed her myself. In Singapore.”

  “Did you bury her?” Skoll asked grimly.

  “No.”

  “Then she survived.”

  “No,” Durell said.

  “She frightens me, that woman. She is too evil. She is crueler than the winter wind in my home village. Icier than the Arctic. Did Satan spawn a woman, it would be Madame Hung. You know this. We both know it. You would be wise to be as frightened as I am, if she is here, if she is our antagonist. So I say we have a mutual enemy. And we should work together.”

  “You tried that before. In Morocco. In Tokyo.”

  “This time—”

  Damon came in. Tall and quiet, his gentle voice betrayed no excitement.

  “Sam, we have to get out. There are troops coming down the highway. We only have a few minutes.”

  Durell had memorized the chart of the area that Lieutenant Fisher on Hammersmith had given him. The coastal road from Tripoli ran through Zanzur and Az Zawawiyah, and at Zuwarah, forty miles from the Tunisian frontier, a route ran south through the Gefara, toward a village named A1 Jawsh, in the foothills of the two- and three-thousand-foot heights of the grim Jabal Nafusah.

  Beyond the mountains was only the dead emptiness of A1 Hammadah. But another road doubled back along the mountain foothills and curved north again through Bir al Ghanam and back to Tripoli. The whole route would be well over two hundred miles, he estimated.

  “Damon, check to see if the vegetable truck is all right. There are some empty gas cans around the villa for the Mercedes. Load them on. Get rid of most of the vegetables. Keep just enough crates for a screen. Talk to the driver. Try to keep his son quiet.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Durell went to the window. Far, far off to the east, he thought he saw the glitter of windshield reflections on the highway. Then the sandstorm intervened again, and there was nothing but brown, blowing clouds.

  Skoll chuckled. “You are too late to get away, you see. I have changed my mind. We will not work together.”

  “You’re coming with us, Colonel.”

  “Comrade Cajun—”

  “I’ll leave your other men here. They won’t have to wait long. Don’t play games with me, Skoll.”

  “You do not like the thought of Madame Hung beating us both to it, hey?”

  “Move.”

  Skoll got up, taking the vodka bottle with him, and proceeded to the front door. Keefe ran downstairs, his ma-chin e-pistol lifted. Perozzo was talking earnestly to the Arab truck driver. The boy began screaming imprecations in Arabic, and the father slapped him across the mouth, backhanded. The boy started to spit blood.

  “What is your son’s name?” Durell asked in Arabic.

  “Ahmad Sabri, sir,” said the father. The man was badly frightened.

  “Tell Ahmad we will pay you both one week’s wages for rental of the truck. Damon, pack in those extra gas cans. Perozzo, do you have the ignition keys?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let’s move out.”

  Perozzo gestured toward what looked like a heap of striped rags. “We got a break. Some extra abas, in a closet at the back of the villa. Maybe they belonged to former servants. We can wear them. Be less conspicuous, maybe.”

  The boy began to smile as the father explained the extraordinary wages. His fury faded, but his black eyes still snapped with a resentful temper. Durell opened the door and gasped as the hot wind of the ghibli hit him. The wind would be Force Six or Seven, and Hammersmith, out in the shallow water near the Querqenah Islands, would be having a hard time of it so close to shore. Lieutenant Fisher had orders to back off if they had not returned by 0900. It was almost eight o’clock now. The wind brought sand that scoured their faces as they trooped outside. Durell put on sunglasses, as did the others. Skoll winced and grumbled and pretended to stumble.

  “How far can you run, Cajun? It is hopeless for you! The soldiers will be here in less than a minute!”

  “Get aboard, Colonel. Step on it.”

  “What will you do with me?”

  “Kill you, if you don’t cooperate,” Durell said.

  Skoll looked at him and shrugged and got in the truck with Keefe and Perozzo and Damon. They would have to leave Charley Mills’s body behind in the villa, but that could not be helped. There was no identification in the drab jumpsuits they had worn ashore.

  The truck motor coughed, died, groaned and caught finally. The sand was already piling up on the windshield. Groaning, the truck backed out of the villa gates onto the highway again. Durell drove. The Arab and his son were huddled in the back, under the ragged striped canvas covering the crates of vegetables. Durell looked back along the coastal highway. There was nothing to see but clouds of blowing brown sand and grit. Then he caught the glimmer of headlights shining through the gloom. Overhead, beyond the thirty feet of whirling sand, the sky was extraordinarily bright and clear. Durell threw the ancient gear into first and turned the truck westward, toward Zuwarah and the desert.

  Chapter 9

  The blowing dust and sand ran down the windshield like saffron rain. There was nothing to see, not even the Mediterranean on their right as they followed the coastal road. The truck rattled when Durell trod the gas pedal and pushed the speedometer needle up to forty. The lilac-painted old vehicle would not go faster.

  He kept watching the rearview mirror. For a minute or two, he glimpsed the military convoy’s headlights, not far behind. Then the villa was blotted out by the increasing tempest of the ghibli and the fights disappeared. He concentrated on the road ahead.

  Keefe and Damon were in the rear of the truck, with Saad, the vegetable dealer, and the boy. Keefe had tied them up to keep them from jumping off the tailgate. Cesar Skoll sat in the stake body just behind the cab. There was no rear window in the cab, and Durell could smell the vodka on the Russian’s breath. Perozzo shared the front seat with Durell, watching the road ahead. The storm made speed impossible, even if the old vehicle could have gone faster. Although the truck was crowded, there was one more passenger—in Durell’s mind.

  He kept thinking of Madame Hung.

  Twice before, he had crossed that infamous woman. Each time, he had endured agony, escaping at the last moment, hoping the woman from Singapore was finished.

  Apparently she was like a cat with nine lives. He felt a cold tremor as he visualized that smooth face and almond eyes as black as the pits of hell. Her cruelty was beyond all dimension. A lust for power ruled the woman, and she had achieved it with her personal intelligence network, gaining information by torture, blackmail and murder. She belonged to no country and no cause. She would sell anything to anybody—although Peking’s Black House was her major market. Even the traffic in slavery through the obscure areas of the Arab world was dominated by the Hung people. She was as elusive as opium smoke, as deadly as a striking snake. No one knew her age or origins. The dossiers in Moscow and Washington were frustratingly blank. Only the results of her presence in the toll of dead agents, broken men and women, and the manipulation of world terror through the power of intelligence were evident now and then. She was everywhere, Durell thought, and yet was never seen except by himself, that time in Singapore, when Hung skewered the lips of the K Section girl, Jasmine, with steel pins to insure her silence.

  Durell shivered again.

  “Sam?” Perozzo guessed his thoughts. “You are thinking of this Chinese woman?”

  “We had better think of her,” he said grimly.

  “I am frightened by her.” Perozzo’s words were quiet, but his seamed face looked unnaturally taut. His quick Italian eyes were somber. “I have never had the misfortune to encounter her, and I had hoped I never would.”

  “Do you want out?”

  Perozzo hesitated fracti
onally. “No.”

  From behind them, through the windowless back end of the truck cab, came Skoll’s rumbling chuckle. “But I want out, comrades. I do not want to deal with anything she touches.”

  Keefe called, “Hell, she’s only a woman.”

  “No, she is more,” said Skoll. “She is the ice in the wind that blows across Nembli-Siborsk, my home village in Siberia. She is the Black One, the evil that walks the world.”

  “Shut up,” Durell said.

  “Admit it, Comrade Cajun. You are afraid, too.”

  “There’s only your word for it that she’s involved in this business here.”

  “She is involved in everything. She was at the villa. And your Anna-Marie, where is she now? And McFee? No, Hung has them both. For one kopek, I would jump from this truck and disappear from the whole affair.”

  “Not a chance,” Durell said. “You have a lot of questions to answer, Cesar. How did you know about Signorina Bertollini in the first place? And about General McFee? And the Project Pilgrim papers?”

  “Ho. Intelligence is my business, Comrade Cajun. Would you pick my brains? Are you so desperate? Would you torture me for what I know?”

  “I would,” said Durell. “I will.” But he had no chance to press it. From the back of the truck, Keefe called out, “They’re coming after us, old buddy.”

  Headlights flickered for a moment through the blowing sand behind them. Then they vanished again. Durell stepped harder on the gas. The old engine rattled in protest. He gained another three miles per hour out of it, no more. The coastal road curved south, and they made out a few flickering houses as they passed through the nearest village. No one was in sight. The wind and sand had driven them indoors. Perozzo’s face was etched with reddish grit that blew into the truck cab. Durell tried the windshield wipers with only small success. The headlights gleamed in the rear mirror again, a bit closer. He urged the old truck on as fast as he dared.

  Perozzo said, “There is a turnoff pretty soon, at Zuwarah, heading south through the Gefara district.”

  “How much time until we get there?”

  “Ten, fifteen minutes. If they don’t catch up with us.” Perozzo twisted on the seat and stuck his head out to look backward. “I’d hate to spend twenty years in a Libyan prison for illegal entry into the country.”

  Cesar Skoll laughed thickly. “If they don’t shoot all of you as spies, gentlemen. The Libyan revolutionary gov-emment is paranoid about spies. Me, I have a legal passport and visa; i don’t have to worry.”

  Durell concentrated on driving. The road had gentle curves at this point as it followed the beach, but now and then there were drifts of sand, inches deep. He drove with one hand while he fixed a handkerchief over his mouth to keep from breathing in the wildly-blowing grit. Closing the cab window did not help. The Force Seven wind drove the stuff in through every joint of the rattletrap truck.

  Suddenly a house flickered by, then another. He glimpsed some African orange trees, the nets of local fishermen and fish traps anchored in the sand. For a moment, the wind shifted and Durell smelled salt and seaweed. The surf crashed with whitecaps on the wind-driven, cobalt sea. Perozzo leaned forward to peer through the windshield. Some goats loomed up, their tails turned toward the wind and blowing sand and red dust. Durell looked in the rear mirror. The lights were still behind them. Sweat trickled down his chest and belly. He swerved to avoid another goat and saw a goatherd wrapped in his robe like a mummy, leaning against the force of the storm. The old truck jolted over something and Perozzo pointed a finger. Some eucalyptus trees, bent in the wind, flickered by.

  “There.”

  Durell braked and swung left. The vehicle creaked and threatened to turn over. There was a sudden jolt as they plowed through a thick ridge of sand blown over the road. It was not a highway, only a trail. He glimpsed a few more houses, and Perozzo said, “Turn here, Sam. Quick. Now stop.”

  He swung the wheel again and the truck went between a grove of leaning, thrashing palms, and then he came to a halt. The radiator hissed and rumbled. Something under the truck gave off a loud metallic crack. He leaned out to look back.

  The red-brown sand made a billowing curtain between them and the highway. Through the hiss of wind and sand he heard the heavy rumble of military trucks approaching from behind the collection of houses. The lights flared, coming on fast. Saad, the vegetable man, began to cry out something, fear in his voice.

  “What is he saying?”

  Perozzo spoke to the Tripolino briefly. “He says he is a devout member of the Senussi sect, he was always loyal to King Mohammed Idris al Mahdi al Senussi. Zealots, all of them. I gather he doesn’t like the new military regime.”

  The trucks went by, headlights fading. Perozzo exhaled gently. “Follow the trail now, Sam. It connects up with the southbound highway to Al Jawsh, in just a few miles.”

  The storm grew stronger as they turned south into the Gefara. Now and then they had to stop and clear the windshield of accumulated sand. Durell saw no other traffic. If the military trucks had actually been chasing them, they were well ahead now, and being behind them was the safest position. He could see little of the land on either side of the road. The Libyans were inefficient at agriculture, and the few fields nearby were poorly kept; they were a pastoral people, preferring to graze goats and sheep, and most of the Italian farm acreage from colonial days, the olive orchards and almond trees and peanut plants, had gone back to dust and sand. Even the esparto grass, called halfa, once a valuable crop, had been greedily uprooted and destroyed without thought for the future.

  In two hours, the road crossed the wind-eroded plain and began to wind through the bleak foothills of the Jabal Nafusah. Durell felt thirst and hunger now. They had emergency rations in their jumpsuits, and in the back of the truck, Keefe found several bottles of red wine, labeled Rosso d’Africa. It was definitely palatable.

  By noon the ghibli began to ease. The air slowly cleared, and Durell looked for the military convoy ahead of them, but the twisting gravel road was empty. Sheer red cliffs towered to their right. Beyond the patches of stony gravel, the landscape presented a vast emptiness waiting to swallow them up. The heat was a smothering blanket over the desolate, sunstruck land. Their speed slowed as the grades increased. Now there were deep wadis with sheer limestone sides, brutal and awesome. The dry waterbeds held no signs of life. To the south loomed the red crests of the Jabal Nafusah, with craggy, crumbling limestone cliffs. Now and then a lonely Beduwi, tending his goats, turned to stare at them. If he could see they were foreigners through the robes and djellabahs they had found at the villa there was no evidence of alarm. They went through two more desolate Berber villages, and at the next settlement Durell brought the truck to a halt. The radiator was steaming.

  “Carlo, ask Saad to speak to someone for water. And see if some soldiers went through here.”

  Perozzo was dubious. “Saad won’t cooperate.”

  “Tell him we’ll kill his son, if he betrays us.”

  “Sam, you can’t—”

  “Tell him.”

  Perozzo spoke rapidly through the rear cab window to the Arab. The man’s face did not change. He said something in a pleading tone to the boy, whose sullen expression flared with anger. There was another quick exchange, and then Saad climbed down from the rear of the truck.

  “Damon?” Durell called. “Go with him. Don’t say anything, if you don’t have to.”

  “They’ll know I’m not Libyan,” Damon said. “These Berbers are always suspicious of strangers.”

  “Just listen and make sure he doesn’t pull anything. Keefe, keep your knife at the boy’s throat.”

  “You bet,” Keefe said.

  Durell watched as the Arab and Damon approached the Beduwi. They were fierce-looking men, fanatic Abadites, an Islamic sect whose ancestors had fought off invaders from the Phoenicians to the Turks. Behind them were some patches of green barley fields and wind-bent palms. The intense light and black shadow made
patterns of alabaster and ebony in the village, but from the stone houses there was not a sign of life. Above the moan of the wind came a distant bleating of sheep. The sun slammed down implacably on the truck. Nearby were the stone ruins of an old Roman olive press, and a few forgotten limestone columns going back to antiquity. The road ahead was empty, but Durell could not see beyond a curve that went around a high mass of reddish rock. The mountains loomed in a tortured range across the southern horizon.

  “Comrade Cajun, I dislike this place,” said Skoll. “We should go a little farther, I think, to another village, one that might be a little more open.”

  “We need the water.”

  “We need to live,” said Skoll.

  Damon and Saad were still talking to two bearded villagers when the first shot was fired. Durell did not see where it came from. The heavy sound of the rifle echoed from the rocky slopes like the crack of doom. The two Beduwi tried to turn and run. Damon grabbed at one, spun him around, and then four more shots broke the sullen heat of the day. Before the echoes died, Durell was out of the truck and down behind the front wheel, his gun in his hand. Damon shouted something and started back, then stumbled and fell to his hands and knees. Saad started to run away toward the nearest house, then changed his mind and turned back to the truck. Durell swore as Keefe jumped from the back of the truck, holding the boy with a heavy arm around the youngster’s throat.

  “Don’t!” Durell yelled.

  The trouble this time did not come from Keefe. Skoll came out of the back of the truck like a behemoth, charging around the tailgate toward Durell. Durell was watching Damon stagger when Skoll hit him in the back. He fell forward against the dusty wheel, banged his shoulder against the hubcap, and started to rise on his right leg when Skoll hit him again, yelling something to the villagers. Keefe’s machine-pistol rattled from the back of the vehicle. The two Beduwi ran into the nearest house. Skoll charged after them.

  “Hold it!” Durell called.