He climbed down the encrusted iron rungs, lowered himself into the curded water, felt his feet sink further inches into the bottom slime, and slogged back the way he had come. He passed one branching corridor, then another: it would be easy to get lost down here, but he remembered the way.
He peered into the darkness of each junction, looking both ways, and explored a distance in some of them, but there was no sign of the old man.
A sense of warning grew in him.
Mkondo was to have been his guide. No one had prepared Durell for him simply to disappear. Where had he gone? What was he up to?
The arched walls mocked him, as he called: "Mkondo, Mkondo!”
And then came the explosion.
13
A second explosion, sharply defined, jabbled the water around Durell’s boots.
Now there were gunshots. Screams. All muffled, as if coming from under a pillow, down here.
He thought of those in the market square, and his breath caught in his chest: Teresa, the magazine crew—Deirdre. The brick walls clamored to the noise as he turned around and splashed with leaping strides back to the market restroom. He clambered up the rungs and crawled back into the empty room.
A quick look out the window showed dust and smoke rising from somewhere out of sight on a street bordering the far side of the market. Evidently that was where President Ausi’s vehicle was, because it was no longer in the square.
There came a snapping report of pistol shots.
The market throng milled, shouting and screaming.
Kakalaars swirled up from the barber’s mango tree, flapping and chattering alarm.
The scout car that had led Ausi’s procession was nowhere to be seen. As Durell watched, the big Lincoln came to a bobbing halt half in the street, half in the market, the doors flew open, and the high officials and uniformed generals spilled out and ran away. At the same time, Teresa’s silver Rolls managed to crash through a narrow opening alongside the stalled Lincoln, mangling the doors of both cars as it zoomed down the street, away from the rising smoke.
The panic reactions spoke worlds: everyone feared a coup—if the motorcade was leaving in the same order it had arrived, Ausi’s command vehicle would be the car on fire around the corner. Chances were, Durell thought, that those fleeing in the first flush of fear didn’t even know if Ausi had survived: their only priority was to get where they felt they would be safe, and wait for events.
Durell had viewed and assessed the situation in a couple of seconds—the time it took for the Panhard armored car bringing up the rear of the procession to ram the Lincoln aside, enter the street and clear it with the harsh chatter of its twin machine guns.
The explosions must have signaled an attempted assassination of Field Marshal Ausi—whether successful or not, Durell had no way of knowing.
The marketplace was in pandemonium; a shouting mob pressed toward the street to see what was going on. The Land Rover still was parked beside the central shed. Heat waves had begun to roil up from the shed’s corrugated roof. He glimpsed Jerry running, a flicker of red hair and ashen face, then the photographer vanished in a swirling sea of humanity.
Deirdre and Wells were nowhere in sight. He started to go look for them, but checked himself. He’d be risking a lot, maybe needlessly. Sweat dripped down his face. His eyes had darkened to the color of ripe mulberries. The acrid scent of burned explosives crept into the latrine, and then came a rising, despairing howl of many voices. The people stampeded back from the street into the market square, panic in their eyes, mouths round with screams that could not be heard because of the one, big scream. Durell’s breath made a noise of horror.
The armored car was charging back into the square, plunging into the wave of scattering men, women, children, guns spitting at the hysterical crowd. It crushed vendors in their stalls, broke and scattered pottery and fruit, littering the earth with the colors of blood and mocking gaiety. Many were trapped against the wall where earlier the executions had taken place. They scrambled up and over the wall like ants, but the twin 7.62mms found them and chopped them down in
bunches as blood and tissue splattered and screams and shrieks echoed horribly under the azure sky.
Someone—Ausi or one of his lieutenants, or perhaps just the commander of the armored car—had gone crazy.
Durell’s stomach twisted into knots: he still could not catch sight of his people.
A sense of grim horror came with the wails and moans of the fleeing and the wounded as the armored Panhard squashed the fallen and the slow, tumbling them across the debris-strewn earth.
Every instinct demanded that he get Dee out of there, if it was not too late already. He took a last glance out the high window. Bodies littered the ground like leaves. Bullets thumped and soughed. People still streamed away in every direction, running for their lives.
He bent next to the door, wiped sweat from his eye-sockets—then sensed something behind him and turned to see old Mkondo rise through the latrine floor.
His frown was ferocious, his eyes cunning and fevered.
"I kill him, bastard Ausi. I kill!” he cried.
"Are you sure? Did you see him dead?” Durell demanded.
Mkondo’s stare was haughty. "No see. Run!” he explained.
"Then you don’t know, you’re only guessing.” There was no time to discuss it further. "What’s in that bag?” he asked. "Grenades?”
Mkondo handed the bag to him for reply, and Durell jerked it open and saw that three fragmentation grenades remained. "Where’d you get these?” he asked, his tone impatient.
Mkondo’s eyes did not falter; he said nothing.
"Never mind.” He spat. He cursed, dangled the bag from his shoulder and darted out the door.
The Panhard was on the other side of the latrine building. Three quick, cautious steps took him to a corner, where he could see. A siren sounded, far away.
The street was in confusion as pedestrians fled among honking vehicles. The sun hung high overhead now, its rays spiking out of the clear blue sky.
The armored car squatted amid its butchery. Its engine raced with an angry, bestial roar. Its hot guns were quiet for the moment. In a corner of the wall behind it huddled a few survivors, eyes rolling in terror. The rest had cleared out. The square looked like a battlefield.
Durell took a long moment and considered it.
Sirens were coming this way.
The shed, next to which he’d last seen Deirdre, was about fifty yards away, most of the distance exposed to fire from where the Panhard now sat. The grounds were a grisly rubbish heap; the dead and wounded made it a treacherous obstacle course.
"Dee!”
His shout echoed from surrounding buildings. The only answer was the mutter of the armored car’s engine. The government Lincoln lay battered and empty, two doors flung open. A police car rushed past it, headed toward the column of smoke, which Durell had decided must come from Ausi’s burning vehicle. An ambulance came by, too. But there were other sirens that had not yet reached here.
"Dee!”
She could be hiding, keeping down, out among the fallen bodies and smashed stalls, but there was no sign of her or Wells, either. It seemed logical to conclude that Teresa had been spirited away in the Rolls by her bodyguards.
His eyes slid to the Panhard, nerves taut. He weighed a grenade in his hand, aware of the valleys in its cross-hatched form. He knew he should clear out. All his training and experience weighed against risking himself further. He cursed McFee for sending Deirdre here and himself for permitting her to stay.
Those huddled fearfully in a corner of the wall behind the armored car slipped away suddenly and quietly, like a trickle of quicksilver.
Mkondo tugged at his arm, and he looked around at him.
"Come. Quick,” Mkondo said.
Durell brushed him back and called one more time: "Dee!”
He thought he was hearing things when she answered:
"Sam? Over here!”
Her voice had barely carried; maybe she’d replied before. She was near the main produce shed, where he’d guessed. He’d never make it the whole distance as matters stood.
"Let’s get that armored car,” he told Mkondo.
Mkondo’s face showed puzzlement, so Durell pointed at the vehicle and held up a grenade. Mkondo’s face wrinkled around a gap-toothed grin and he said something in his native tongue.
"You got it: today, boom!” Durell said. Mkondo’s eyes lighted with anticipation. Durell tossed him a grenade and used hands to show where to go and how to approach the armored vehicle. Durell would go the other way, leaving first. He had sprinted about halfway to the big shed when the twin 7.62mms blazed, and he hit the turf. Bullets ricocheted in flocks. He breathed dust, and his mouth was full of grit.
Then the engine snorted and the turret whirred.
Durell dared to raise his eyes above the remains of a woodcarver’s stall, saw Mkondo run behind a water cart, the turret tracking him. The old man was amazingly fast. The machine guns hammered and the cart showed glistening quills as water spouted from holes in its metal tank.
Durell ran again, with no way of knowing whether Mkondo had been hit. He dived for a tangle of wreckage inside the shed as bullets snapped and whistled over his head, thumped against the hard-packed earth, rolled twice and smacked into something. A dead man—one of Teresa’s bodyguards. Durell regarded the well-dressed corpse: he might have thought the man had got left behind and caught a bullet—except for the stiletto protruding from his kidney.
The armored car kept up its fire, as his eyes searched, and he called for Deirdre.
"Sam!” She showed herself.
Durell wormed to where she hid behind bags of millet. Her raven hair had come undone and tumbled in an unruly fall about her neck, and her gray eyes were stricken. There was a scratch on her cheek; her white suit was smudged.
"Are you all right?” he asked.
She glanced about with a dazed face.
"Keep down,” he said. "Where’s Willie?” His voice was hoarse.
"I don’t know. He just—disappeared.”
He put an arm over her shoulder, felt her weight come thankfully against him. She seemed unharmed.
The twin machine guns hammered again, chopping, and hacking at sides of beef, bags of grain, crates, baskets. Fish slid from a counter; Durell felt a shower of cooling ice.
"Where did Jerry go?”
"I saw him run away.”
"Teresa?”
"I’m sorry, I—”
"It’s all right.”
"Everything happened so fast----”
"And they all just left you here.” Anger rumbled in Durell’s voice.
"They meant no harm, Sam. Everybody was running.”
"It’s a hell of a thing,” Durell said, and added, glumly, "I thought I could count on Willie.”
"Don’t judge too harshly,” Deirdre said. The words seemed to catch in her throat, as she went on. "He might have been—hit. . . ."
"We have to get out of here,” Durell said. The firing had stopped, and he looked up just as the armored car clashed its gears and lurched into motion. "They’ve decided to come and have a look. Better stick tight.”
"I love you, Sam, darling."
"Cut it out.” His smile seemed to reassure her. Her hand was icy.
He removed the canvas bag from his shoulder, opened it and inspected the two hand grenades.
"What are you going to do?” Deirdre asked.
"Whatever I can.”
"You can’t fight that monster.”
The armored Panhard came slowly, as if wary and scenting the wind. Tension in him wound to the breaking point: he’d get only one chance.
He never saw Mkondo, but the old man’s grenade boomed beneath the rear of the armored hull. The ground shivered, a blossom of black and dirty-gray smoke puffed out, and shrapnel rang against steel. It stopped, swung its turret to the rear and scanned back and forth for its assailant.
There wasn’t a second to waste. It was about twenty yards away. Smoke and dust of the explosion just now wafted over Durell.
Sirens that had seemed to hover so long in the background were loud.
The Panhard’s guns stitched dust blossoms, searching for Mkondo. Durell still couldn’t see him, as he jumped from Deirdre’s side and sprinted straight at the machine. He was aware that he was visible to the driver, but the gunner and commander couldn’t see him, because their periscopes were turned to the rear with the turret. The driver must have yelled an alarm as Durell ran, because the turret started swinging back toward him, but he got there before its guns could train on him. He slid like a base runner and fetched up against one of the deeply treaded front tires, below the maximum depression angle of the machine guns. He yanked pins on both his grenades, released the safeties, and their levers pinged away.
Next to him lay the smashed remains of a woman whose teeth had been mashed through her lower lip and were starkly white against her bruised black flesh.
He ignored it as he packed the canvas bag and its grenades between the wheel and the hull of the car, looping the strap of the bag around the axle, then back over the bag to hold it in place, working with desperate speed.
The grenades hissed as their fuses burned down.
The driver must have thought he had run on by, and the turret periscopes were turned once more to the rear. A man sobbed and moaned, dying.
Durell ran.
He heard the electrical whine of the turret, tripped over a corpse, scrambled to hands and knees, and his back muscles tensed out in the open arena of straw and blood and death. The earth kicked his knees. A tremendous noise shocked his ears, and shrapnel buzzed.
He found himself on his back, surprised eyes wide against the immense, cloudless sky.
He rolled onto his stomach, kept flat and looked back at the vehicle.
The left front wheel had been, blown off, so that corner of the hull had collapsed onto the earth, canting the turret at an angle several degrees from the horizontal. Its guns could not effectively fire to the right, and that was the direction in which Deirdre waited. The wheel made a hollow rumble as it rolled and bounced across the market square, slapped the bloody stone wall, spun and fell onto its side. Fire crackled out of the Panhard. There were screams.
Durell scampered for Deirdre, noted another of Teresa’s bodyguards who had been killed, also with a knife in the back. That only left one—and he might be dead, too, if you looked closely enough, he thought. But then he remembered that someone must have driven her Rolls-Royce out of here and supposed at least one of the SB men had survived.
Deirdre was standing, waiting for him.
His eyes searched for old Mkondo as he took her hand, tugged her toward the street, hustling as fast as he could. The sirens were almost on top of them. Deirdre ran awkwardly: he realized they would not reach the street. Mkondo’s head rose from behind a pile of crates, a brown coconut with a cotton fringe. He yelled something that sounded like a savage cry of victory. Durell swung his arm to beckon him and cut back, running into the latrine building with Deirdre. Mkondo burst in behind them. They were breathing hard, their gasps resounding from the stone walls. "We’ll have to go back the way we came,” Durell said. "You lead,” he told Mkondo, and pointed at the hole in the floor.
As Mkondo descended the iron rungs, Durell regretfully switched his rubber boots to Deirdre’s feet.
The sirens screamed to an ear-battering peak of noise and fell silent. Durell peered out, saw at least three trucks loaded with soldiers pull into the square. Everyone else had vanished: there were no shoppers, tourists, sightseers—no one. The red-bereted troops dismounted and fanned out.
He scrambled down the rungs and felt the slime and ooze close over his feet. Deirdre came last, hips swaying, and Durell’s hands steadied her.
The stench was worse than he remembered—maybe it was the heat of the day. Mkondo led, splashing and cursing in some arcane language. Deird
re was in the middle. "Lord, I can’t breathe,” she panted.
"It isn’t very far,” Durell said.
They seemed safe for the moment. He tried to put the intolerable stench out of his mind. Willie came to mind: he hoped the black K Section agent was not dead, but if he wasn’t, what could have happened to him? He couldn’t have missed Durell and Mkondo going after that armored car, if he had been alive and in the square. Jerry must have just run away, of course. But that would have been out of character for Willie.
"Rest a minute,” Deirdre gasped.
"Mkondo! Wait!” Durell called.
The old man came back to them, frowning. Deirdre leaned against the arched brick wall of the passage and held her side.
"Listen,” Mkondo said.
Durell heard something. "What is it?”
"Soldiers. My house.”
They stared at each other. "They found the raised manhole cover,” Durell said. He cursed under his breath.
Deirdre spoke. "Mkondo can’t go back to his house?”
"Not ever, I’m afraid; we’ll have to take him out of the city with us.”
"If we can get out,” Deirdre said.
"How far would you say we are from the cathedral?”
She thought a moment. "About a mile.”
"It should be connected with the sewer system,” he said.
Durell used English and Swahili to explain as best he could to Mkondo that a tunnel led from the cathedral to the river, and how to find the tunnel entrance under the dais. That was in case they should get hopelessly separated. Then he asked Mkondo to try to find his way to the cathedral through the sewers, then come back and take them there. It would be simpler and faster doing it that way than with the woman to look after while exploring, he said.
Mkondo seemed to grasp the idea. He nodded ’back of him to remind them of the soldiers, waggled a finger at the two of them, and said: "Hide.”
"We will,” Durell said. "Go now.”
Assignment- Tyrant's Bride Page 8