Assignment - Afghan Dragon

by Edward S. Aarons

  “Hey, Charley.”

  The taller one, thin and dark-haired, with a strange intensity that could be dangerous, hooked his thumbs in his wide, brass-studded belt. They were all bare-footed, dirty, unkempt in blue jeans, tie-dyed, and shirts of ancient stripes that hadn’t seen wash-water for some time. The girl, also dark-haired, slim and somehow of better quality than the two men, tossed back her long black hair. She grinned slowly. The fat one looked worried, holding the water can. The thin one happened to be empty-handed, and Durell watched his dirty toes curl slowly and tensely into the dust of the road.

  “So there he is,” the girl said. Her voice hinted at distant cultivation. “No more fun and games. My, he looks angry. Mister, we just found your car and figured it was broken down and you went off somewhere on a lift.”

  “Nature called,” Durell said.

  “My, aren’t we delicate; ha-ha, you had to take a crap, you mean?”

  Durell kept his eyes on the tall, dark one with the angry, intense eyes, who said, “Shut up, Annie . . . You American?”

  “Yes.”

  “We were borrowing some of your stuff. Finder’s keepers, we figured.”

  “Put it back,” Durell said.

  “Sure.”

  “All of it.”

  “Sure.”

  “Now.”

  “My, my,” the girl named Annie said. “Isn’t he the hard-nosed establishment type, Charley.”

  Charley was the dark man with the curled toes. The fat boy turned and tossed the water can back into the rear seat of the Toyota. The can was heavy, but he made the gesture without effort; he was stronger and harder than he looked. The girl shrugged and swung Durell’s luggage into the back seat, too. The man named Charley kept staring, motionless, at Durell.

  “What’s down there?”

  “Nothing,” Durell said.

  “There are some old tracks.”

  “They go to a dry well. Some abandoned houses. What’s your last name, Charley?” Durell asked. “Anderson.”

  “Are you going to start something?”

  The man’s eyes touched the gun in Durell’s belt. His teeth gleamed in a vague smile. His eyes were hard and reluctant. “I guess not.”

  “Good.”

  It was not uncommon to spot American youths in this desolate part of the world. Marijuana, hash and heroin were cheap and easily available. Some of them had gone into petty smuggling; they became minor entrepreneurs, supplying the big drug syndicates; they survived that way. Others often gravitated to the larger towns like Kabul, and gave blood donations to gain the money needed to support their habits, if they were too far gone to be enterprising on their own. This trio, with their van, looked relatively affluent, despite their outward grubbiness. Durell would not have been surprised to learn that their college degrees, came from prestigious Ivy League universities.

  The girl, Annie, said, “Oh, hell, let’s get going, Charley.”

  Charley was the obvious leader. He said nothing. His fat young friend stepped on his cigarette and began picking at Ms nose, engrossed in what he found there. The girl moved toward Durell with a defiant swagger, a swing of ample hips, a jiggle of her breasts under the shirt that made it plain she disdained a bra.

  “And what’s your name, stranger?” she asked, mocking a Western accent.

  “Durell,” he said.

  “I’m Annie Jackson. You know Charley Anderson. Mortimer—Mort Jones here—is tripping a bit. You don’t mind?”

  “It’s your business,” Durell said.

  “We’ve been here a couple of months. It’s a real trip. Where are you headed for? You with one of tire oil companies?”

  “Ur-Kandar,” Durell said.

  “That’s the next village, huh?”

  “Yes. And you?”

  “We, too.”

  Their car was headed in the wrong direction, but Durell said nothing about it. He watched Mort and Annie reload his Toyota. Charley’s toes slowly uncurled in the dust of the road. Finally he bobbed his head, as if he had made a decision, having absorbed all of Durell with his intense, angry eyes, and then he joined his companions.

  Nothing more was said. Hostility lingered in the air, wavering like the heat waves over the barren landscape. Durell saw that Anderson had spotted the vultures high in the sky, but perhaps that didn’t mean anything to him. In a few minutes, Durell’s possessions had been reluctantly returned to his vehicle.

  As he swung into the Toyota behind the driver’s wheel, he heard the girl calling to him. He switched on the ignition, but then he felt an urgent thump as Annie’s hand slapped the side of the car, and he paused. She was not alone. Charley Anderson stood a few steps behind her, his thick black brows twisted into a glowering scowl. The girl held something out to Durell.

  “Please. I’d like to apologize.”

  “What is it?”

  “Take it. A peace offering,” she said, smiling.

  “That’s not necessary.”

  “Please.”

  Close up, her features were clean and regular, and if she were less unkempt and tidied up, she might even have been beautiful. Her long dark hair was thick and lustrous, even through the desert dust; her mouth was perhaps a bit too wide, but the lower lip was full and generous. Her eyes were gray, dancing with amusement above fine, rather high cheekbones. Her body was lithe, perhaps a bit too thin—was she hungry?—but she had long, sturdy legs, seen through the tight jeans, and equally sturdy hips and thighs.

  He saw that what she offered him were two small plastic packets containing a smidgin of white powder in each. Her smile coaxed him.

  “Maybe you’d enjoy it,” Annie said.

  “Do you like being a pusher?” he asked.

  “Oh, no. It’s nothing like that. This is just by way of apology. And we’ve got plenty.”

  Charley Anderson said, “Come on, Annie. He’s too straight.”

  “Well, I don’t want him angry at us. He’s a fellow American, after all.”

  “I’m not angry,” Durell said.

  He thought the urgency in the girl’s gray eyes was more than the situation called for, but he couldn’t fathom the expression there, and after a moment of staring at her, he put the Toyota into gear and drove away, leaving them and the multicolored van lost in a cloud of dust behind him.

  3

  Ur-Kandar was a small village beside a tributary lake to Lake Hamun, with one or two modem houses of concrete block and tin roofs, and the rest of mud walls, clusters of Asian compounds along the marsh, briny shore. It was clear that the new dams on the Afghan side of the border, along the Helmand and Khash Rivers, were playing havoc with the water levels here in Iran. The main industry was the weaving of assirs, reed window shades, and round boats also made of reeds. The mountains of the Mokran, southward in Baluchistan, loomed with bristling peaks against the horizon. The area was a wide, interconnected series of lakes and ponds and marshlands, trapped between the sands of the Dasht-i-Lut and the mountains. Durell assumed that the far side of the lake, which looked deceptively inviting in the afterglow of the setting sun, was Afghanistan. There were telephone and power lines in Ur-Kandar, and he saw that there was a central post office and Phone Central near the assir factory. The Phone Central was marked with the dusty, flaking royal emblem of Iran. A metal Coca-Cola sign hung beside the emblem, marked with Farsi script.

  He saw no other cars along the dusty, twisting street where the houses presented their backs to the public, behind high compound walls. At the far end, where the lake shore began, a single mined Greek column thrust against the purpling sky, and Durell wondered if any of Alexander’s armies had marched through this place long, long ago.

  The smell of food cooked over charcoal fires pervaded the air, and he realized he was hungry. The police station stood next to the central telephone office, opposite a small faience-decorated mosque, and beyond that was a caravanserai, and old inn with a central courtyard and rickety wooden balconies overlooking the dirt square where s
everal camels and sheep from a Baluchi caravan were already bedded down for the night. The Baluchi, tall proud men in black robes and black tents, watched their stately women preparing their meals over charcoal and camel dung fires. A melodic chanting in deep masculine voices came from somewhere along the lake shore, where several reed fishing boats were drawn up with masts canted against the darkening sky. Just next to the old Greek column, whose majesty still defied more than twenty centuries, was the serpentine minaret above the local mosque.

  “Sir? I think very much the accommodations may not be satisfactory—”

  The clerk’s voice came in Farsi. Durell answered in kind, aware that he had grown a bit rusty in its use since his last visit to Tehran.

  “A single room, please.”

  “Luckily, we are not crowded; the Baluchi use their own tents, but there are few amenities for ferenghi. And the room will cost one hundred rials—”

  “That’s too much. I’m not a stranger here.”

  “No, you speak our language quite well. We can arrange it, perhaps, since the true proprietor is away in Hormak on family business, may it be successful, Allah willing.”

  The clerk’s desk was simply two boards placed across two rusty oil drums. An old oil lantern, of the type once used on railways, provided the only light in the tiny cubicle that faced the entrance to the inner courtyard. Smoke drifted in from the nomad cooking-fires.

  “My name is Chadraqi,” said the clerk. “I would suggest you place your car behind the inn. There is a little fencing there, and a shed. Lock it up well and remove what you consider valuable, sir. The boys in Ur-Kandar are thievish. They are only playful, but it might prove annoying.”

  Durell envisioned the Toyota stripped of wheels and everything moveable. He slid an extra fifty-rial note across the rough counter.

  “Let me hire a man to guard it, then.”

  “Yes, sir.” Mr. Chadraqi was pleased. “You are generous. I can get a most reliable man, my brother-in-law, in fact, who can be trusted to remain awake all night—”

  “See that he does. And one more thing.”

  The clerk was expectant, balancing on tiptoes. “Yes, sir?”

  “I will need the telephone.”

  “Ah, sir, that is only open and available for two hours each day, except Friday, from ten o’clock in the morning until the noon prayers.”

  “Who is in charge of the office?”

  “I am, sir.”

  Durell smiled. “And of course, you can open it for me?”

  “That would be against government regulations, I am afraid.”

  “Rules are meant to be bent, if not broken.” He put another note on the plank table. He knew he was being robbed, but the thought of Fingal, and visions of his lid-less blind eyes staring into the sun, troubled him even more than before, and he felt impatient.

  The deal was quickly made. In an hour, the clerk would be free. He offered to send up dinner, a stew of mutton and eggplant called khoreshe bandijan, prepared by his wife, which Durell accepted, along with a pot of thick, hot tea. His room had a small water faucet, of which Mr. Chadraqi was inordinately proud, and Durell could wash there, he said.

  The room was a whitewashed cubicle with a metal cot, straw mattress, a rug that might have been colorful once, but now showed only the gray of age. A flimsy door opened onto the wooden gallery, whose rail was burrushed by countless greasy hands through the years. The air felt cooler when Durell stepped outside. Night had come. The smell of methane was sharp and discouraging. Overhead, the stars reeled, and he saw in them the glare of Fingal’s blind eyes, sliced open to the sun. He looked down at the small cooking fires of the caravan men, who huddled over their food and muttered together in an incomprehensible Mokran dialect, humped shadows that seemed primordial in aspect. He turned back into the room and closed the wooden door to the gallery, lighted a kerosene lamp and searched the cubicle thoroughly, although he expected to find nothing alarming inside.

  Later, he stripped off his clothes and washed at the single basin. The faucet issued a single trickle of yellowish, pungent water. He managed to get off most of the desert dust, and then took his Smith & Wesson .38, the heavy metal somehow comforting now, and broke the gun down, wiping and oiling it and carefully checking each cartridge before he reloaded. He listened to the noises in the inn, but heard nothing exceptional.

  Durell had killed before; he was an expert at it. He could destroy a man in many ways, using his hands, his feet, a roll of paper, a needle, a knife. It was sometimes a necessary part of his business. He had seen men die, men who had been his friends, but who allowed one fatal moment of distraction to overcome them. It was a strange, silent war he engaged in, lonely and dark, and he knew he was no longer like most other men. His long years with K Section had changed him in ways he did not like, but which were necessary for survival. Survival was the name of the game. He could smell danger from far off, sense it with an instinct derived from training and experience. In a world where information and data from the other side could spell the difference between peace and holocaust, where facts were commodities commanding the highest price, life or death, he had managed to survive reasonably well so far.

  When he considered the scars on his body as he bathed at the washbasin, he recalled the jungles and deserts, the alleys of the world’s great cities, its most remote areas. He could sense danger here. He could not as yet put his finger on the source. Fingal, that blunderer, had been killed in a manner which indicated a casual murder and robbery, and his murderers used local methods of cruel amusement to make it look like a chance encounter with strangers. Durell did not believe it. Every stitch of the man’s clothing had been taken, but the car had been left behind, and this surely was a prize, if only for its cannibalized parts.

  He considered the two thin volumes of Chinese orientalism he had retrieved, and studied each page swiftly, starting with the book of ink sketches, pausing to reread an underlined passage describing the wen-jen, the gentlemen-scholars of Chinese ancient centuries. Ink and brush were used both to represent an object, such as a plum tree, and to allude to the plum tree as a reference. The wen-jen masters became what they painted, it was believed; the ch’i, or spirit of the subject, became part of the artist’s hand and then of the ink. Durell closed the book, wondering about Fingal.

  In the text of Tao Te Ching, he read two or three passages, underlined by Fingal:

  Tao is always inactive

  Yet Tao does everything.

  Kings are increased by being lessened.

  It is not desirable to be as prominent

  as a single jewel,

  Or as monotonous as a number of

  precious stones.

  None of it seemed to mean very much here in Ur-Kandar.

  In an hour he was on the telephone at the government station, led there by Mr. Chadraqi and allowed in through the back door. The place was closed and padlocked, but the clerk had a key to the rear entrance. It smelled of Turkish Tobacco and stale cooking and sweat.

  “I will wait outside, sir.” Chadraqi seemed a bit nervous. “You will not be long?”

  “No longer than necessary,” Durell said. As the clerk sidled away, Durell added, “Tell me, have you had many foreigners coming through Ur-Kandar lately?”

  “Yes, many, sir. Oil men, travelers of all sorts.”

  “Any Chinese?”

  The clerk looked blank. “Chinese?”

  “Diplomats, salesmen, engineers—”

  “No, sir.”

  “None at all?”

  “I have never seen a Chinese,” said the clerk.

  “All right.”

  “Why do you ask about Chinese?”

  “I don’t know,” Durell said.

  When he was alone, he began the tedious work of getting a connection through to Tehran. The instrument clicked, whined, buzzed. The operator sounded as if he were on the moon. He spoke pure Farsi, clearly and distinctly. “Tehran, yes, sir.” Then the line went dead. Durell waited.
He tried to control his anger. Then, as if the operator had moved himself next door, Durell heard, “The number again, sir?” Durell gave him the number of the U.S. Embassy on Takhte Jamshid Avenue. Another long wait. He looked through the dusty window to the end of the road, where the Greek column shone white and ghostly against the edge of the lake. He smelled tobacco smoke as someone passed outside. He heard a mutter of voices speaking in Farsi. At least he heard, “Stanhope here.”

  “Get me Ben Kahlmer.” His voice was harsher than he meant it to be.

  “There is no such person—-”

  “In Blue Jay 5. K Section.”

  “Sir, I can’t just—there is no—”

  “Tell him it’s Sam Durell.”

  “Durell. Yes, sir. Sir—?”

  “I’m waiting,” Durell said.

  “Are you speaking on a clear line?”

  “All the way.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t—”

  “You’d better.”

  “Yes, Mr. Durell.”

  He waited again. Not very long. Ben Kahlmer was K Section’s Central in Tehran, a man of economics, a former oil market analyst, a middle-aged man who had spent most of his life exploring Saudi sand dunes for petroleum. He had developed personal financial troubles, and K Section recruited him four years ago by bailing him out at the bank. Kahlmer was grateful for the salvage of his middle age. He had proved proficient and loyal.

  “Sam?”

  “Ben, I need a relay to Washington. Scrambled.”

  “No can do, Cajun. Transmissions are heavy, busy, busy. Much ado about nothing, but we’re tied up. You’d better give it to me. I’ll transmit in about three hours. Did you meet Fingal?”

  “I saw him.” Durell tried to control his anger. “The little bastard is dead. The hard way.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Sam, your line is clear—”

  “No help for it. What I want from Washington is a new briefing. This thing isn’t the simple search-and-deliver chore I was led to believe. Somebody knew Fingal was coming down here to meet me, to give me new data. Somebody ambushed him. It wasn’t just a desert amusement, wiping him like that. I don’t know what they got out of him, but whatever it was, it was important enough to use extreme prejudice. The poor slob wasn’t ready for any of it. He—”