Assignment - Ankara Page 9

  He tried to shout, but no sound came from him. He was hit again, and then again. He could not see his enemy. He felt the hard earth slip away from under his struggling limbs, yielding to a black, soft darkness. . . .

  But he did not lose consciousness completely. A desperation to live, to fight back, kept some of his senses functioning. He heard footsteps running away. He heard someone shout. He smelled the gravel under his face and opened his eyes and rolled over and saw the sky and the hut reel in a crazy kaleidoscopic pattern before they steadied under the effort he made.

  “Kappic!” he called. “Kappic!”

  He heard a faint cry of response and pushed himself up onto his feet and staggered, crashing against the doorway of the hut. Dim figures were running toward him.

  “Kappic, stay on your post! Let no one out!”

  He heard an answering call and drew a deep, shuddering breath. His scalp was bleeding. Francesca stood behind him, touching him anxiously. He shrugged her off. He saw Susan and John Stuyvers standing near their hut, their attitude uncertain. Anderson and Wickham were walking toward him from the dark blur of the olive trees. He took his gun from his pocket.

  “Stay where you are—all of you! No one must move!”

  They froze as they were. He heard Wickham expostulate, heard Anderson call anxiously if he was all right, while John Stuyvers, at a distance, demanded to know what had happened. Durrell took a step forward and his foot crunched on metal. He stood there briefly, aware of a squirming nausea in his stomach; but determined not to yield to it.

  He had stepped on the small green case that had held the Uvaldi tape. But the case was empty now.

  The tape was gone. . . .

  Later, in the minutes that followed, he knew he had done all that could be done. Carefully, each watching the other as he directed, he drew them forward out of the darkness of the night, off the small field and out of the olive grove, and finally into Francesca’s hut. He ignored their questions. He did not permit Francesca or Susan to touch him when they wanted to attend to his scalp wound. He knew that every moment and every move had to be arranged just right, or everything would be lost.

  If he had been unconscious even for a few moments, there would be no point in what he did. But he knew that his attacker couldn’t have escaped.

  He questioned Kappic first.

  “Put your gun on the table, Mustapha.”

  “My gun?” the Turk said. His dark face frowned. “But why?”

  “Just do as I say.”

  “Very well.” Kappic slid his service pistol from its holster and put it on the rough board table. In the lamplight, his features scowled, and his moustache made him look fierce and angry and hurt. “You do not trust me, Durell?”

  “I trust no one now. You were on guard at the footpath?” “As you ordered me.”

  “And no one went by?”

  “No one. It is the only way out of here.” Kappic gestured. “The cliffs rise on one side, they drop on the other. There is only the path to the village. No strangers came here or left.”

  “Good. But where was Anderson and Colonel Wickham?” Anderson bulked hugely in the lamplight. His voice was a growl of dismay. “Wickham wanted some more raki. I woke up when he left his pallet, so I went down to the village with him to keep an eye on him. We had passed Kappic when we heard your shout. What happened to you, Cajun?” The Tennessean’s drawl was thick with urgency. “Who slugged you?”

  “One of you,” Durell said. “And one of you has the tape.” “But—”

  Durell cut him off. He went on with his questions. It quickly developed that each of them had been in sight of another, as far as could be determined, from the moment he first called. He knew there was an error here, that it had to be one of them, somehow. But repeated questions did not break the deadlock, and after a few moments he drew a resigned breath.

  “All right. Somebody—one of you—took the tape from me. You’ll all have to be searched.”

  Anderson said, “If an enemy agent were after that tape— and I reckon somebody is, judgin’ what happened to Dr. Uvaldi—his only object would be to lose or destroy the tape, Cajun, to prevent us getting the information on it back to home base.”

  Durell nodded. “But he—or she—had no time to ditch the tape. He—or she—took it from its container, but couldn’t get away or out of sight of any of you others.”

  “We can search the area, though,” Anderson insisted. His big head ducked as he stared in pale hostility at the small group.

  Durell nodded again. “We’ll search each other, first. If nothing turns up, we’ll search both huts, then every inch of ground between here and where Lieutenant Kappic stood guard.”

  “Let me help you first,” Susan whispered. “Your poor head—”

  “Francesca will search you,” Durell said flatly. “Your clothes first. Then strip down. Use a blanket for a screen, if you wish. Francesca will search you everywhere, do you understand? Your clothes and your body.”

  “I won’t submit—” Susan began.

  “You will. Francesca?”

  The dark-haired girl looked pale. “I understand. And then Susan can search me.”

  “All right. The men will search each other.”

  But nothing came of it. No one had the tape.

  It was not in either hut. It was not in the field and not in the olive grove. It was not on the roofs of the huts. And while the search went on, each man watched the others, to make sure that somehow, if the tape was still, incredibly, on someone’s person, it was not thrown away or hidden or destroyed.

  It was a long, exhausting hour. And the tape was not found.

  Durell ordered a second search. Negative. He settled the matter, then, by keeping everyone in one hut, while the night dragged out its long hours. No one slept, and he wanted it that way. Let them watch each other, he decided. Let them suspect each other. If someone made the smallest move to hide the tape, wherever it might be, someone else would spot it.

  He returned Kappic’s gun, and explained to the Turk and Anderson, “I lost the tape. I was outsmarted and now I’m being out-tricked. I don’t know how, but I’m sure one of these people—one of us—has the tape hidden somewhere.”

  “We’ve searched them all,” Anderson drawled. “It just ain’t a particle possible, as Pappy used to say, every time the revenue people found one of his stills.”

  Durell looked sharply at the grinning courier, then smiled, too. He felt better for the other’s casual humor. “It is possible. It’s happened. I don’t think the tape was swallowed, because the plastic would cut up the intestinal tract—and I don’t think we’re up against a suicide type here.”

  “Just a mighty clever one,” Anderson said. “So what do we do?”

  “We take them all with us, tomorrow.”

  “But suppose the tape is just thrown away?”

  “We can’t let that happen. We watch each other, and we wait.”

  “Maybe we watch an empty barn, eh?” Kappic suggested.

  “Let’s hope not,” Durell said.

  Anderson grunted. “The way you figure it, we’re looking for just one traitor. But maybe there’s a team of them. Two, anyway. And they’ve been giving us the old razzle-dazzle by passing the tape back and forth between ’em, during the searches.”

  “I’ve considered that,” Durell said. “But which two is it?”

  Anderson and Kappic were silent.

  Durell watched, and waited.

  Chapter Nine

  THE fog came back in the morning, and there was no sunrise. The mist drifted over the mountaintops in a thin tide that hid the dawn in a curtain of pearly iridescence, then poured sluggishly, like steam, through the valleys and crannies of the countryside. The light was a long time coming. Bonfires were built by the villagers at each end of the improvised airfield across the river, and for long minutes after the dawn, their ruddy, leaping light was stronger than that of the feeble sun.

  Durell and the others waited ne
ar the fires at the southern end of the field. They had been up for an hour, with only a thin soup and a cup of tea for breakfast, provided by several village women who appeared in silence, unsmiling, to serve them the food. Afterward, they trudged, shivering, through the predawn darkness of the streets and across the ruins of the bridge to the rough field.

  The dawn air was wet and penetrating. The sound of the river was a steady, unrelenting roar against the twisted abutments of the bridge. The noise of the water made it difficult

  for those who were listening for the sound of the promised plane.

  Durell stood near Susan Stuyvers. She clutched the big black handbag in both hands, holding it to her breast, and stared blankly at the dark sky. John Stuyvers looked like a grim, harassed prophet of doom beside her, his eyes smoldering with that strange fanatical light. Durell walked to where Francesca Uvaldi stood alone, apart from the others.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, thank you,” she nodded. “But I wish—I can’t believe the plane will really come here.”

  Durell said nothing. In the cold mist of morning, the little group huddled on the edge of the field. For a moment, catching Kappic’s alert eye and Anderson’s nod, he had a moment of sinking doubt.

  The risk he was taking could not be measured, if he was wrong. He told himself that no one had had a chance to get rid of the tape from the instant it was taken from him outside the hut. At every minute of the long night just past, all of them had been under close watch, with Kappic and Anderson checking each other. They had reported nothing. Both huts had been thoroughly searched again at dawn, and every inch of the surrounding ground had been covered. If someone here had the tape, it was still hidden on their person, somehow.

  But he could not find the answer here. He had checked Francesca’s sketch box and the Stuyvers’ old manuscripts, and turned up nothing. There were no false compartments in any of the luggage the others carried. Whoever had the tape had concealed it in some way that defied discovery here. But at least, by watching them all through the night, he had made sure that the traitor had had no chance to destroy it or get rid of it.

  One of them, too clever to be caught under these circumstances, still had the tape. Durell was sure of this. He had to play a waiting game, he decided, and never relax his watchfulness until, at the airport in Istanbul, a proper search could be made. At least, he thought, the person with the tape was caught in the group, and couldn’t make a move now without betraying himself.

  Yet Durell wondered if he could be wrong. He’d had no sleep, and his eyes felt gritty and his body ached with fatigue. He started toward Kappic, then felt Francesca touch his arm and speak to him again.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier if you and I had a truce, Sam?”

  “I offered one last night,” he said.

  “I know. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Since that man caught me last night—I feel as if everything in the world was turned upside down,” she murmured.

  “It sometimes happens like that,” he said. “When we have a close brush with death, our perceptions are usually sharper for a time afterward.”

  She smiled. “So I ought to see what a sterling character you really are, is that it?”

  He grinned in return. “Is that too much to hope for?” “No. I wish you’d forgive me for getting so weepy last night.”

  “That’s understandable, too.”

  “No, it isn’t. I don’t understand it, anyway. I wasn’t crying for my father, you see. I know this may make me seem even more suspicious, but Roberto Uvaldi was just my stepfather, for one thing. We never got along, and we never meant much to each other.”

  “Then why did you make this rough trip to see him?” Durell asked. “Visiting Dr. Uvaldi, or searching for peasant designs for your couturier concern, is just an excuse for coming to Karagh, isn’t it?”

  She was silent, biting her lip now. Durell watched her, one part of his mind still wrestling with the problem of how the tape had been hidden from all the searching he had done. It could not have been chewed or swallowed—the sharp plastic would be too dangerous to ingest. He had insisted that Susan search Francesca thoroughly, stripped to the skin, and then the dark-haired girl had searched Susan. He found no ready answer, and spoke next from a sudden hunch as he regarded Francesca.

  “You’re after John and Susan Stuyvers, aren’t you?”

  She looked up, too startled to speak—and at that moment, they all heard the sound of the plane overhead.

  It was like a miracle, since each of them privately had already abandoned hope of rescue that morning. There was nothing to see in the misty dawn sky. The fog crept down the valley and clung to the mountainsides in a thick blanket, and nothing except a faint, pearly radiance marked the presence of the sun, there beyond Musa Karagh.

  It was a piston engine, and a light one, at that, Durell thought, listening to the muffled wash of the prop as it beat back and forth between the shoulders of the mountain. It sounded high and to the north, groping away from them; then it turned, faded, and suddenly came back lower and stronger than before. It was like something not quite a part of the rocky, torn world here below, in this desolated valley. Yet the sound of it was real enough, beating in their ears with a promise of rescue, defying the cold and the fog to reach them.

  The KT-4 made a single pass overhead, still invisible in the mist, and turned at the far end of the valley. Kappic shouted to the villagers who tended the fires, and more wood was thrown on the flames so that the crude beacons flared up with suddenly increased brightness. Apparently it was just what the pilot needed. The sound of his engine came washing back up the valley, with a lower beat; and then a shout from the villagers greeted it as it broke through the thick, rolling mist overhead.

  Durell had never seen this type of aircraft before. It was a newly developed design, lightweight, with superb lifting capacity for its size and rated power. Its wings were abnormally long and delicate, its landing gear spidery as it lowered from the shiny undersurface of the fuselage. The Air Force markings stood out brightly in reflection from the bonfires below.

  Then the KT-4 roared overhead and wide flaps seemed to sprout from the long wings and its air speed dropped perceptibly. It settled like a giant moth down to the rough field beside the river. Anderson murmured in admiration at the way the pilot handled the aircraft; then the wheels touched and the ship bounced. A collective sigh came from the villagers. One long, delicate wing shivered, dipped, almost grazed the earth. The plane touched again, bouncing toward the end of the field, and the brakes squealed.

  Then it stopped.

  As if they were all one, everybody ran for the ship.

  The pilot’s name was Harry Hackitt. He wore a major’s oak leaves on his shoulders, and his freckled face showed him to be no more than in his twenties. His grin was as wide and amiable as his Texas drawl, and his cowboy boots were scuffed and battered. The KT-4 needed only a crew of one, and Hackitt was it—pilot, navigator and radioman—easy and unconcerned.

  Colonel Wickham reached him first, speaking rapidly and pompously. Hackitt’s salute was careless and sloppy, just short of an insult. But Wickham’s rank could not be denied, and Durell let the colonel organize the evacuee party, arranging the seating in the narrow fuselage cramped with bucket seats and jump equipment and radar devices under metal shields. Hackitt produced several cases of emergency rations, which were tossed out to the waiting villagers. The Turks accepted the food with dignity, although every man among them must have been trembling with hunger. Coffee in gallon jugs was welcomed by the Americans. Durell gave a cup to Francesca and then to Susan, who frowned because she was second in his choice; then he accepted a cigar from Harry Hackitt and moved a little away from the plane as the others climbed aboard.

  The pilot drifted beside him, chewing the cigar and looking even younger because of it.

  “You’re Durell, huh?” the Texan asked quietly. “The one they call the Cajun?”

  “Yes.” />
  “Who do you know in Ankara, chum?”

  “Dinty Simpson, for one,” Durell said.

  “Right. He gave me a message for you. But first you better brief me on the fat crow who’s giving all the orders and making with the hot wind, huh?”

  “You mean Colonel Packard Wickham?” Durell met the Texan’s freckled grin with a smile. “I think his bark is worse than his bite—but I wouldn’t swear to it.”

  “I know the type,” Hackitt mused. “Big wheel in the Pentagon. Always on the make, hanging around Big Daddy like flies on a honey pot.”

  “Big Daddy?” Durell asked.

  “The old man. Don’t you know Happy Hackitt?”

  Durell nodded. It was a name that anyone in Defense and Joint Chiefs hastened to obey. “Yes, I know Hap. Is he really your father?”

  “Sure thing. So Colonel Wickham don’t worry me the teensiest bit, see? Don’t let him dog-bite you either, Mr. Durell.”

  “You said you had a message for me from Dinty.”

  “Oh, sure,” Harry said. He shrugged. “It wasn’t much.

  Kind of cryptic, matter of fact. He just said you’re to trust nobody. Repeat, nobody.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Well, he said to be careful, for God’s sake. I quote him literally, Mr. Durell.”

  “That goes for all of us,” Durell suggested.

  Hackitt threw away his cigar. “Let’s try flying, shall we?”

  Anderson came toward Durell as the others boarded the KT-4. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Cajun. I’m not sure I ought to go along, unless you insist it’s the right thing to do.”

  Durell stared at the big man’s amiable face in the misty light. “What are you getting at?”