Assignment Golden Girl

by Edward S. Aarons

  "Gloria . . ."

  She recognized the look in his eyes and returned it with contempt. "For God's sake, Durell will be here any minute, the town is infested with Neighbor terrorists, and you—^you look at me like—"

  "Anything you say, Gloria."

  "Well, clean up and shave at least. The way you've fallen apart like a tired old man—"

  "All right, Gloria."

  They lived in one of the European bungalows not far from the royal compound where the Queen Mother, the She Elephant of Pakuru, normally resided with her retinue of tribal chiefs' wives and the children of the old king, father of Prince Tim, who had died of gluttonizing the second day of independence for Pakuru. Prince Tim had been in the US then, still at Yale, Harvey recalled.

  He wandered through the big, airy living room of the bungalow, Gloria behind him, nagging on about finally, at last, thank God, they were leaving this place. Harvey paused in front of the gleaming model of Old 79. Other white men in Africa mounted elephant tusks, rhino heads, buffalo horns, native spears, shields, and wood carvings as trophies in their homes. Harvey had all that, of course. But they were relics left by the British colonial administrator who once had lived here. Harvey's contribution was the three-foot scale model of Old 79, the first locomotive used on the Pakuru National Railway.

  He'd built it himself, machining each brass part with loving precision, the drivers and rods and steam box, the pistons and lights, piece by piece, riveted and brass screwed, enameled and lacquered until it was a thing of gleaming beauty that always lifted his heart when he paused to stare at it.

  Gloria thought it was a waste of time. "Retreating from reality," she said once. "Playing with that toy."

  Old 79 was not a toy. Any railroad man would give his eyeteeth to own her. And he would have to leave her, he thought, maybe today or tomorrow when Durell came to collect.

  He turned away and began to dress.

  He knew why Gloria was preening herself this morning. She had her eye on Durell. He knew the signs. She letched for Durell from the moment he first came here only forty-eight hours ago to find Prince Tim and get him out of the country.

  The worst of it, he thought, was that he no longer cared. Not about Gloria, Pakuru, or anything.

  He just wished he could take Old 79 with him.

  Three

  IT WAS a mile walk from the Pakuru River Hotel into the town itself. There was no transportation available at the hotel. Sally, matching Durell's long stride, carried her small suitcase that presimiably contained all of her pitiful belongings. She adapted herself to Durell's silent wariness as they proceeded on foot along the river road under the smothering eucalyptus trees. The constabulary had vanished. Behind them the hotel crackled merrily, adding its smoke in the blue African sky to that from the airport and the fire blazing somewhere near the Queen's palace. The Indian owner and the lackadaisical help had all vanished promptly along with the police when the three terrorists had appeared.

  The smoke over the town cast a pall over the hot, pale African sky. Pakuruville, the capital of the small kingdom now independent after sixty years as a British protectorate, was an odd mixture of tribal provincialism and modernism. The old town was little more than a native village on the northern flank of the steamy valley, home of the Elephant Queen and the royal cattle, set in an enclave of beehive thatched huts that surrounded the circular cattle enclosure. In other huts around the relatively modem royal palace were Prince Atimboku's royal wives —none named queen as yet—and still other huts housed embassies from subsidiary tribes and courtiers from the scores of clans. The government set up by the British when they lowered the Union Jack was a National Council of such tribal emissaries, plus various ministries of National Affairs, Education, and Transportation. Harvey Gladstone was the only white who served in a ministerial capacity, since only he seemed able to keep the railroad running—until the Neighbors went on their rampage, goaded by Peking's insistence that the right-of-way for their railroad had to go through Pakuru's territory.

  To the west of the city was a high veld, rich and fertile, and mountains that yielded some promising mineral exploration. East and south were salt flats and the infested swamps of the so-called Emerald Lake, habitat of rhinos, hippos, crocodiles, and imiumerable flocks of great and pink flamingos.

  Qn hearing that he had been named head of the new Pakuran government. Prince Atimboku Mari Mak Muii-likaka had pronounced, "I shall lead my nation across the dismal swamps to a safe and peaceful haven."

  It had become the motto of the newly independent and sovereign nation.

  In his plush suite at the Waldorf in Manhattan Prince Tim had then taken off his tattered blue jeans and fringed Buffalo Bill shirt and donned his best native costume, an oxtail cape and otter fur cap decorated with the tail plumes of the widow bird and red touraco feathers. He trimmed his wild beard and hair and assumed the role of the Lion King.

  The first thing he did was order the group of Chinese engineers out of his country.

  The second thing he did was order the imprisonment of all rivals to his princely stool—some thirty-eight princes and princesses of rival clans and tribes. Flying in a privately chartered Pan Am 707, he assumed control of the government, forsaking his hippie collegiate ways, leaving behind his guitar, pot, hash, and all the sycophants around him, disdaining the Black Panthers and upstarts and aliens. He moved into the Victorian plantation house that was his palace in Pakuru.

  War came immediately, declared by the Neighbors who charged Prince Tim with being the imperialist, warmongering tool of Western capitalism.

  Nominating a certain Colonel Abdundi as commander of the Army, Prince Tim promptly took to the field—or the jungles—to conduct the fighting along the northern frontiers.

  The trouble was that the Neighbors infiltrated all around his ragged forces, burning villages to his rear, seizing river boats, blowing up bridges, terrorizing tribes, and running off cattle after setting torches to the mealie fields.

  When Prince Tim disappeared, Durell was sent in to find him and bring him to safety.

  "Sam," said Sally, "I'm splitting."

  "Going your own way?"

  She looked back at the smoke over the burning hotel. "Doesn't it bother you? They came after you, darling. Because of you old Implana's hotel is gone, three men have been hurt—maybe killed—and here you walk along cool as a cucumber."

  "Not quite that cool."

  "Well, I'm not hanging around you any more. It's too dangerous. It was a mistake."

  "All right."

  "I don't think any of us will get out of here alive."

  "That remains to be seen."

  "Your Prince Tim is a coward!" she said angrily. "He's vanished, right? Nobody heard that he's dead, so he's probably reneged to the Neighbors. Or else he vanished with the royal treasury and is headed for the Riviera or Gstaad or PortolBno to live it up, and the people who named him Lion King be damned." The tall girl's voice was surprisingly bitter. "Why doesn't he have the guts to show up? He ought to be right here taking care of things. I guess he finds reality a lot different from schoolboy window smashing, right? The bastard! He belongs right here, right here helping the people out of their demoralization. He should be sitting on his stool and giving orders instead of playing cowboys and Indians out in the bush."

  "What are you so upset about?" Durell asked.

  "I don't know. It just gripes me." She pushed back her dark hair with long, sensitive fingers. The heat didn't seem to trouble her. She still kept her long, strong pace adapted to Durell's stride, her haimches swinging to keep up with him. Beads and gold hoops around her neck occasionally rattled, jingled and clacked with her movements.

  "Where will you go?" Durell asked.

  "I'll be at the Casino with the rest of the refugees."

  "Good luck," he said.

  She halted abruptly in the dusty road. "Sam—"

  He looked at her tall, royal figure. "Yes?"

  "Don't you care, Sam?" />
  "About what?"

  "You and me—"

  "There never was a you-and-me, Sally."

  "I know, but I'd hoped—"

  "I have work to do."

  Her golden eyes flashed in her brown face. "Oh, you are a cruel man."

  "Write me up in Toward Sunshine," he said. He turned and walked on.

  The greater part of Pakuru across the valley from the royal kraals and beehive huts was relatively modem. There were two wide boulevards planted with palms and hibiscus shrubs and oleander. There were perhaps a hundred private cars in Pakuru, two buses, a few thousand bicycles. The European part of the town consisted of neat, multicolored bungalows staggering up the hillside toward the Casino's mountain crest, where whites from South Africa and Rhodesia were encouraged to come and spend their vacation money and gamble on the wheels and baccarat tables. High up there was a modern golf course, two swimming pools, and the gaunt ribs of a modem steel-and-glass-cubicle hotel halfway through construction.

  When the railroad and the highways were blocked by Neighbor troops, the exodus was halted. The bridges and roads were utterly dangerous. Nobody had come in or out of Pakuru for the last ten days except for Durell in his chartered plane from Johannesburg. The runways at the airport had been bombed and not repaired, so jets could not land. Over the heat of the morning came the wailing of fire sirens as the two fire engines of the mimicipality raced from one point of alarm to another.

  Durell was crossing the bridge to the modern town behind two creeping truckloads of ragged, frightened militia when he spotted the taxi with the yellow-fringed roof and hailed it. He considered himself lucky when the brown-skinned driver swerved to the paving and picked him up.

  "Where to, sah?"

  "The airport," Durell said.

  "No airport there no more, sah."

  "Take me there, anyway."

  "It will be fifty grunwabis, sah."

  "Fair enough." It came to five dollars.

  The airport stank of burning wood and cordite and some unmentionable odors Durell did not care to identify. The airport was only a narrow strip of pavement running along the river bank with a low, wooden immigration shed and a concrete block waiting room for the tourists who came up from South Africa to relax at the Casino. The hangars were of corrugated steel, and they were blackened and twisted by the terrorist raid. Smoke still curled from the skeletal wreckage of several planes.

  "Here you are, sah."

  "Wait for me."

  "I don't know. Them Neighbors might come back."

  "No, they won't. There's nothing left here for them to blow up."

  A few soldiers stood or squatted here and there in the dust around the runway. An ambulance was parked in the thin shade of the immigration shed, a high-bodied square vehicle with a peeling red cross painted on its sides. Durell hoped he would never need Pakuru medical aid. He got out, feeling the sun hit the back of his neck like a branding iron, and wondered for the dozenth time why the capital city had been located here instead of in the cooler, high veld to the west. His pilot. Hank Sansom, provided by the Cape Town Central of K Section, had been bunking in the immigration shed. He headed there, walked around the ambulance, looked inside it, saw two dead soldiers in their Pakuru uniforms, and walked on, skirting the smoldering wreckage of a truck and a jeep and a dead goat.

  A small group of Pakurus, some in European clothes, others in patterned native skirts and skins, stood in front of the wrecked building. One burly man, several shades darker in color than the others, with a small squad of armed men loitering behind him, saw Durell and broke off his conversation and came striding across the hot dust toward him.

  "Ah. M'sieu Durell?"

  It was Colonel Armand Abdundi, head of the Pakuru Army. He was supposed to be somewhere up north directing the defense against the terrorists in the bush.

  "Colonel," Durell nodded.

  "Terrible tragedy. Disgraceful. Merde. You have my apologies." Abdundi spoke English with a French accent.

  His uniform was trim with the polished brass and a number of unidentifiable medals and ribbons strung across his burly chest. He had high cheekbones under slightly slanted, muddy eyes, a scar across his neck, other tribal scars on his cheeks. His mouth was wide, full lipped, and hard. His dark eyes regarded Durell with neutrality. "If only I could have foreseen this. But these devils strike here, there, and everywhere." He gave an expressive shrug to his huge, meaty shoulders. "I am truly, desperately sorry."

  "About my plane?"

  "It is wrecked, of course. Hopeless."

  "And my pilot?"

  "Come."

  Durell followed Colonel Abdundi's massive, slightly swaggering figure through the dim, smoky interior of the gutted plane hangar. Abdimdi talked in a rambling voice of the suddenness of the terrorist raid, of the collapse of the defensive front along the northern boundary, of the retreat of the Pakuru Army harassed by groups of the PLMs, of falling back on the capital.

  "And Prince Atimboku?" Durell asked finally.

  "Ah."

  "Well?"

  "His Highness has vanished, sir. But he will be here."

  "When?"

  "His Highness should be here now."

  "But he isn't," Durell stated.

  "His Highness will be here."

  The hangar had an L-shaped appendage to the rear which the fire bombs hadn't succeeded in wiping out. There was a flight of steps going up under a thatched roof to a series of little cubicles used by airport personnel, some as offices, some as rest rooms. Hank Sansom had chosen to stay here near the Mooney until Durell could get Prince Atimboku and fly him out to safety, if possible, where the State Department could discuss his country's future with him. Hank Sansom was a young man whose services, engaged by Cape Town's Central, had been invaluable so far. A Texan accustomed to range flying, he knew the African bush, swamps, and mountains intimately. There was something irrepressible about Hank, who had taken to K Section employment with gusto, looking forward to his tasks with enthusiasm. Durell, who was a senior field agent under Gen. Dickinson McFee for more years than he cared to remember, was of quite a different mood.

  "I am sorry," Colonel Abdundi said, opening one of the cubicle doors.

  Durell stepped in after waiting to see if the Pakuni would precede him. He did not like to have anyone at his back. He was a careful man and counted on that caution to keep him alive a little longer, even though his survival factor in the psych charts kept by Dr. Samuelson at No. 20 Annapolis Street in Washington indicated that his time had long run out. He saw no way to ask the huge colonel to go ahead of him without giving inexcusable offense.

  "We have not touched him," Abdundi murmured.

  Flies made a persistent buzzing in the room. The cubicle was small, hot, and airless with a tiny window overlooking the wreckage of the runway. The glass was broken, but whether it had been smashed recently or not, Durell did not know. There was the unmistakable smell of death in the humid, fetid air.

  Hank Sansom sat with his long legs splayed out before him, his Texas boots newly polished and shining. His lanky frame had slid forward on the wooden chair until he seemed to be hanging on the edge of it by his lean hips. His young face smiled under the screen of wet, blond hair. His eyes had the look of an idiot's surprise.

  He had been split from crotch to chest with a native tonga knife which lay abandoned, trailing blood and internal matter, on the plank floor of the little room.

  Colonel Armand Abdundi brought some bottled South African beer and set it on the charred hood of a wrecked jeep inside the hangar door. "You have had some experience in these matters, I am sure," Abdundi said smoothly. His brown lips curled in some kind of secret amusement. The sight of Hank Sansom's multilated body had not affected him at all. "One must consider the meaning of it. Naturellement, it was not an accident. He did not die as an innocent bystander to the bombing of the runway."

  "He was murdered," Durell said.

  ''Oui."

  "He was a pr
ime target of the PLM."

  "Well, we don't know that—"

  "So am I," said Durell. "A target, I mean."

  In the splash of sunlight that came through the still smoldering hangar doors, Durell looked tall and heavy, a big, muscular man with black hair streaked at the temples with gray. He moved lightly for all his size, and his hands were a gambler's hands with long, deft fingers. He knew how to kill with those hands and had done so when it was necessary and knew he would do so again. Some of this showed in his dark blue eyes, made darker by his present anger. He had put on a khaki bush jacket back at the hotel with brown boots and an open-collared shirt. There were dark stains of sweat across his broad shoulders. He did not look away from Abdundi's bland, brown stare.

  "I have considered your credentials, Mr. Durell," said the colonel. "There are some aspects in them that are quite questionable. Are you a mercenary looking for employment with our armed forces? We could use a man like you."

  "I'm not for hire."

  "Why do you say you are a target for murder?"

  "Perhaps there are elements here who would not like to see me help his Highness Prince Atimboku out of a difficult situation. As governing head of this nation—"

  "That is a debatable matter," Abdundi said bluntly. "Completely debatable."

  "Only if Prince Atimboku is dead."

  "No. There have been questions raised as to his legitimate claim to the Lion Stool." Abdundi's eyes might have smiled; Durell was not certain. "The old king, Ngatawana IV, had many sons and daughters. It is customary in our country for the eldest of whatever sex to succeed to the stool. Of course, many of Prince Atimboku's brothers and sisters from different mothers have disappeared. Some, I must say, under strange circumstances. Does this seem odd to your western mind?"