Assignment The Cairo Dancers

by Edward S. Aarons

  Durell felt a slow dread. "Did you check Herr Bellau? Or has he slept through all this?"

  Simon was stunned. "But I put a guard on his hut. If that little dwarf had anything to do with Lisl—"

  Durell ran for the Inspector's quarters. When they threw open the door to waken Bellau, they found only the Bedouin guard. The Arab lay sprawled on his back, teeth glittering between surprised lips. A knife had been plunged into his heart. Durell swore, dropped to one knee. The man had been killed some hours ago. Simon's breath hissed in angry dismay.

  'They are both gone, then," he whispered.

  Durell nodded. "But where?"

  The Bedouins went out on foot and camel to scour the rocky wilderness. It must have looked like this to Moses, Durell thought grimly, during his forty years of wandering with the Children of Israel. Two men took the jeep toward the border, ten miles away. Diu-ell accepted a cup of mint tea from the Bedouin cook and watched Simon pace like a caged bear, while a wail of lament lifted from the black tents when the news of the guard's murder reached the Bedouin women.

  "They've taken her," Simon gritted. "I should have expected it. Even if Steigmann accepted the Dancers' help out of panic, back in Munich, it's obvious that now he is an unwilling prisoner, and they need Lisl to make him talk. They snatched her once. Why not again?"

  "But who would know we're here?"

  "How do they know anything?" Simon exploded. "They have their spies everywhere, even among us, among the Bedouins."

  "And there's been no word from Ben-Haakim?"

  "Nothmg."

  Durell walked to the Bedouin tents and spoke in rapid Arabic to a young, hawk-faced man who turned out to be the son of Sheik Ben-Haakim. His name was Josef. He spoke English, Hebrew, and French as well as his tribal tongue, and had studied under a grant from -the Israeli government. His manner, as he told this to Durell, was dignified and grave.

  "We heard nothing. It was done with great craft and stealth, and it was also done with the willing agreement of the two who have disappeared. Otherwise there would have been an alarm. I will avenge the murder of my brother, who guarded the German, but even so, unless the girl went willingly, or was forced into silence, they could not have escaped."

  "Lisl Steigmann did not go willingly."

  "It must have been so," Josef insisted. "But we will soon know the truth." His intense eyes were darkly brooding. "The other alternative is that some of my people are not to be trusted. One cannot know. Some are gullible and greedy, and in a ferment over the religious frenzy that has seized some of the Bedouins, to my shame. The coming of a new Prophet seems to them a time for glory and adventure, as in the old days, and a renewal of our ancient greatness."

  "Do you really believe in the Second Prophet?"

  "Of course not. I know that El-Raschid is an adventurer, perhaps a madman, but more crafty and dangerous than one might imagine. His influence keeps spreading." Josef eyed him with speculation. "Major Asche is going on a search party himself. We leave in five minutes. Can you ride a camel?"

  Durell nodded. "I've managed before."

  "These are racing camels. We have only three. Major Asche will use one, and I will ride another. If you wish, you may have the third. We will search the Southern Quarter. It is a very bad land, cursed by Allah since the days the world began."

  "Did your father, Ben-Haakim, ever give you a hint as to where he thought El-Raschid might have his headquarters?"

  "Never, Mr. Durell. We will have to put our faith in Allah to lead us safely through this day."

  Durell respected Josefs sincerity but preferred to put his trust in solid weapons against the Prophet and his crew of fanatics. He decided it was no time to withhold what he knew and walked back to Simon, who was supervising the loading of the water bags on the three camels. The sun struck at the back of his neck like the blow of a fist. Some of the Bedouins had gone to work, following their daily routine, at the Na-batean dam across the flinty wadi. Durell took from his pocket the medallion he had found on the Dancer he'd killed when he escaped from the hut in the desert.

  "This is more in your line, Simon," he said. "You're the expert on antiquities in this part of the world. What do you make of this?" The heavy medallion caught the sunlight in the palm of his hand and cast sparkles of hot brilliance in

  Simon's angry eyes. Durell had rubbed some of the grime from the engraved surface, and the image of the Dancing Monk was cleariy visible, his small foot upraised, his arms lifted, his haloed face touched with a frenzy of joy. He watched Simon's eyes. "Carole had a postcard she intended to give you, back in Munich, with this same figure on it, from a Byzantine mosaic in the museum. Maybe she only learned the name of the *underground railway' run by the Dancers, and it's obvious that El-Raschid took this motif as a symbol of his movement. Things moved too fast to check it out, but as neariy as I can recall, there was once a sect of monks who lived in the Sinai and believed in a particularly joyous relationship with God, one in which they often danced themselves to exhaustion to express their happiness, which they felt was demanded of them. I know there are still some orthodox monasteries in the Sinai, devoted to Old Testament traditions, and some of them go back over a thousand years in unbroken occupancy."

  Simon nodded thoughtfully. "Yes, there are still a few. But the Dancers were supposed to have been extinct for three hundred years or more. They had a monastery on a peak called Djebel Kif, some forty miles over the Egyptian border. I should have thought of this sooner."

  "Have you ever seen Djebel Kif?"

  Simon shook his head. "Very few men travel that way. It is most inaccessible. The Bedouins think it is accursed by Allah, and I suppose it is one of the most desolate and forbidding places in the world."

  "Desolate or not, that's where El-Raschid and his kidnapped crew of scientists must be," Durell decided.

  Simon nodded. "If true, it is a prime location to launch surprise attacks either East or West, perhaps in both directions, to begin a war that could touch off flames everywhere. It's the highest peak around—which means that Steigmann's laser beams, if he's perfected a weapon out of them, could reach several capital cities within hundreds of miles of here."

  "That's where we go, then," Durell said.

  Simon's face was like stone. "You say Carole had learned of all this?"

  "Not all of it. Just a hint. What's the matter?"

  "Her death is my fault, then," Simon said roughly. "All this trouble, and Lisl's disappearance now—I might have stopped it all some months ago."

  "You didn't have this information then. Don't blame yourself so much, Simon."

  "I must. First Carole, now Lisl—she's innocent, she doesn't know what we're fighting against."

  "I think she does, now."

  Simon looked up at him from under frowning brows. "Did you and Lisl—I mean—"

  "She's a fine girl," Durell said. "That's all."

  Simon straightened. "Yes. Yes, she is. If only we can find her alive."

  Chapter Twenty-two

  JOSEF ASKED that some of his brethren be taken with them —sturdy desert men whose faces were as flinty as the rocky wasteland into which they proceeded to trail Bellau and the girl. Their camels were not as swift as those Durell and Simon used, but speed was impossible in any case. At first, there was no visible trail in the stone gully that led toward the frontier, but now and then one of Josef's men dismounted and turned over a piece of flint and said something to Ben-Haakim's son. It was an hour before they came to a pool of sand beneath a red escarpment where, in a moment of carelessness, a print had been left.

  "They came this way," Josef announced.

  "Were they walking?" Durell asked.

  "To this point, yes. Just the small man and the young lady."

  Simon bit his lip. Either Bellau had persuaded Lisl to come with him voluntarily, as Josef thought, or he had forced her on this mad walk. Durell said: "But not even Bellau would try to walk forty miles across country to Djebel Kif, Simon. He must have arra
nged a rendezvous with the Dancers close by."

  "That means Bellau was always one of the Dancers' men, then," Simon muttered.

  Durrell nodded. "Let's get on."

  They found the rendezvous point twenty minutes later. Simon announced they had crossed the unmarked Sinai frontier, which meant a ten-mile walk through most of the night for the girl. Durell swore softly in exasperation. How Simon knew the boundary in that trackless wilderness of burning canyons was a mystery. In another stretch of glaring sand amid the red rocks, Josef suddenly urged his camel forward and came upon the tracks of a jeep and the footprints of both Bellau and Lisl and other men. The vehicle tracks swung in a circle and headed southeast toward the jagged peaks on the horizon.

  "These are Czech tires," Simon said tightly. "The Egyptian army has some of these machines."

  "But the Dancers might have stolen some by raiding a depot," Durell suggested. "I don't think the Egyptians are in this officially, even though they'd like to be."

  "What bothers me is how Bellau arranged all this when we had him a prisoner."

  "He came willingly," Durell pointed out. "He's not a man to underestimate. In fact, we've done just that, even though we both know how he survived like a cat with nine lives through the war and all the purges. Maybe our little Inspector is more dangerous than El-Raschid, himself. Bellau must have known the Dancer headquarters all along, and got out of our camp with the help of one of Josef's men."

  "It will be a cruel day for that one, when Josef finds him out," Simon said grimly.

  They pushed on into Sinai territory. The sun whipped them with red-hot flails, and Durell was grateful for the Bedouin burnous that Josef gave him. Progress was an anguish of trial and error, with frequent backtracking and circling of raw, crajggy heights that might have been a landscape on the moon. Nothing was to be seen alive here. The only sound was that of the occasional wind that flapped their robes. The camels made an aroma that could be cut with a knife. Now and then sand blew toward them and found its way with uncanny skill into every crevice of the flesh. But for the most part there was only rock, red and gray, looming ahead and behind, to right and left. There was no visible trail that Durell could see, but the Bedouins seemed to know the way.

  During a rest halt in the shade of a towering cliff, Durell again heard the distant thunder of a jet. It shook the yellow sky and made sand trickle down the scarp behind them. He drank water sparingly and searched the sky, but he could see no contrail this time. Major Asche urged Josef to press on but the Bedouins insisted on the full measure of their mid-morning rest.

  When they mounted again, following a desolate valley where they could spot again the jeep tracks, they went only three miles and then Josef pointed to a thin ridge high above them.

  "We go that way. The jeep moves faster, but must take a roundabout path. The camels can take us over that cut and save eight miles."

  "But we can't catch up with them," Simon protested.

  "There was never any hope of that," Josef said. "But we can find where they have gone, and perhaps learn what happened to Ben-Haakim, my father. I search for someone, too. Major. My father is very important to me."

  "I'm sorry, Josef. I've been thoughtless."

  "I know how you feel about the girl, Major. But it will be as Allah wishes, and no other way, no matter how men seek to change the road of destiny."

  Josef's search ended before their own. Two hours of laborious climbing, where they often had to lead the ugly-tempered camels on foot, brought them to the first sign of human habitation, the remains of a Bedouin camp and a well known only to these nomads. The well had been destroyed with an explosive charge and the tents torn into rags. Three bodies sprawled in the blinding sun, and as they approached, there came a flapping of great wings and great, ugly vultures lifted clumsily into the ochre sky and circled resentfully high above the corpses.

  The three dead men were Bedouins, and Durell was able to recognize them as Ben-Haakim's people from Cairo. The wind flapped their dark robes open. The vultures had been having a feast. Josef gave a small cry, torn from his stoic throat, and leaped forward to examine the corpses.

  "My father?"

  But Durell saw that the fat figure of Sheik Ibrahim Ben-Haakim was not among the dead men. At the same moment, the silence was shattered by a crash of a rifle. Durell whirled, saw that one of Josef's men had his gun at his shoulder, and that the target was a dim figure clambering over the crest of the ridge. The figure waved a feeble arm and Durell jumped and knocked away the Bedouin's rifle before he could fire again.

  "Hold it!"

  Josef stared with narrowed eyes at the man who staggered down the slope toward them. Durell heard the Bedouins suck in their breath at what had almost been done.

  "Allah is good," Josef whispered.

  "Yes. It's Ben-Haakim, your father."

  All of the men belonging to Ben-Haakim had been slaughtered; only the clever, fat sheik had managed to escape. A bullet had creased his scalp, creating a bloody wound that had looked mortal to the Dancers who had ambushed his little caravan at this spot.

  "God saw fit to blind those devils to my true condition," Ben-Haakim told them, a few minutes later. Simon was attending to his scalp wound. The fat man panted and grinned at his son and winked his one good eye. "Allah gave us wits to survive; is it a sin to use them if we can? But those devils shall not live long, however clever or strong they are. The True Prophet shall not be denied, and the madmen who defy Allah by proclaiming a new son to Him will meet a satisfactory end, I promise you."

  "Are you sure it was the Dancers?" Durell asked.

  The fat man grunted. "They waited like thieves in the night. We were careful, but this is their land, and they know it well. We pushed on too quickly, against my better judgment, may Allah forgive me. And so we were sleepy and tired and not as watchful as we should have been. But Allah will grant Paradise to these poor men who died here."

  "Do you know Djebel Kif?" Durell asked.

  The fat man grinned and nodded his head. "For an American, I can see that you are clever enough. You have learned of the devil's home without me."

  "Were you there?"

  "We went near enough. But it is hopeless."

  "Nothing is hopeless," Simon insisted.

  "Then we will go to Djebel Kif and you may see for yourself. No man can go up there who is not wanted. Not even an army."

  Durell said: "Maybe so, but there's a way around that, because I am wanted by El-Raschid. So I will go up there."

  Chapter Twenty-three

  DJEBEL KiF loomcd against the yellow sky like the true hotne of Ben-Haakim's Shaitan. They reached it on the afternoon of their second day across the Sinai. The dead men had been buried, and Ben-Haakim, rested and fed, seemed as good as ever. That morning they crossed a military road that twisted through the ominous landscape, but no one was sighted, and Josefs scouts reported no watchers following their progress.

  They halted in the shadow of a canyon wall and stared ahead at the bulk of Djebel Kif, a black pillar of basaltic stone that soared above the tumbled crags about them. On the very summit, like a medieval citadel, stood the ruins of the old Byzantine monastery, with foundations sheer against the steep cliffside. There was only a collapsed dome, an arcade, a few stretches of crenellated and buttressed walls against the hot sky. Nothing stirred up there. The desert wind blew stinging sand in their faces as they silently studied the stronghold. Then Ben-Haakim murmured:

  "Do not be deceived. It looks deserted, but it is filled with men and machines. Some Bedouins wandered up there last. month in search of water, hoping the spring still yielded to the ancient well. But only one man came back, and everyone took him as struck by the madness of the sun, from his tales. When I heard of this, as we came toward you from the Nile, I looked for this man, but I was told he had been murdered. All I could learn was that he never stopped babbling about the devils who haunt Djebel Kif."

  Simon Asche was doubtful. "And how does anyone get up th
ere, Ibrahim?"

  "There is a road to the south, out of sight. It is the only way up the cliff, and it is well guarded."

  "How do they get supplies up there?" Durell asked.

  "They are transported first by regular plane to a landing place east of here, and then taken by helicopter to the peak," Ben-Haakim said.

  Simon shook his head. "From that peak, they can spot a fly ten miles away. We can't get up unseen. But perhaps an Israeli army raid across the border—a quick stab and attack, and then retirement across the frontier—"

  "We have no time for that. Bellau and Lisl are up there," Durell said. "Something critical is brewing, for El-Raschid to move so boldly."

  "I cannot permit you to go up there alone."

  "There's no other way," Durell insisted. "El-Raschid wants me, for what I know, and seems to think he might recruit me into his services." He smiled grimly. "I think I'll just let him take me prisoner."

  "And then?"

  "Then I'll have to play it by ear."

  "It is death," Ben-Haakim said gravely. "You are a brave man, but your foolishness may be an affront to Allah." The one-eyed man paused, frowning. "It is said there are secret ways into this mountain, this home of Shaitan, from down below. No man of our tribe ever came here, thinking this is an accursed place, as it truly is. But perhaps we can iSnd the entrance tonight, when it is dark, and reach you, Mr. Durell."

  Durell nodded. He liked this fat rogue and his straight young son, and all of Josef's brethren. Simon still protested that it was his responsibility, since he should have taken better care of Lisl, but Durell cut him off.

  "I'm counting on you to bail me out of that vulture's nest, if I can't escape myself."

  "When will you go?"

  "Right now. We haven't much time. If all our theories are correct, El-Raschid may make his move at any moment."

  An hour later, he walked around the base of Djebel Kif. Simon and his Bedouins were hidden two miles behind him. The sun burned with stubborn vengeance, a great red ball in the west that seemed to increase its furious assault on his senses as it sank below the jagged horizon. The wind blew grit into his eyes and nostrils, and he used his burnous to keep its choking thickness from his throat.