Assignment- Sheba

by Will B Aarons

  1

  Durell was stuffing his shoes into a locker at the Villa d’Este, an exclusive club on the shore of the Red Sea, when the first explosion bounced dust from the sill of an iron-barred window.

  The two other men in the locker room froze, waiting for their senses to decipher the sound. Round-eyed, they looked at each other; one in his fifties, his graying mustache curling into the corners of his slightly parted lips; the other, in his twenties, tanned and hard, his thumbs hooked into a scanty yellow bathing suit he had pulled halfway up his thighs. Father and son, Durell had guessed. Italian. Their patois told him both had been reared in Eritrea, descendants of immigrants who had come when it still was a colony of Italy.

  Durell reflectively recognized the crump of the hand grenade, followed by two more in rapid succession.

  He dug for his snub-nosed .38 S&W. It was behind his shoes, tangled in his pants where he had rolled it for safekeeping. Too late. The pounding of boots came from the hallway. He left the gun, jumped a scrubbed wooden bench, and headed for a door that was the only avenue of escape. His mind and body had been honed for survival by more years of danger than he cared to remember as chief field agent for K Section, the trouble-shooting branch of the CIA.

  The angry rattle of submachine guns mingled with screams from the restaurant and bar. It had to be the ELF, Durell thought He did not want to get caught in Ethiopia’s war.

  He had his own.

  Durell leaped to the blind side of the door as a boot crashed into it from the outside. It burst inward, swinging to cover him against the concrete wall. He heard the young Italian scream, “No! Per piacere! Please!” and was deafened by the slamming sound of a submachine gun. The acrid smell of smokeless powder filled the air. The young Italian threw his arms toward the ceiling and toppled onto his back as slugs tore sodden blue holes across his chest and jarred into the row of lockers behind him. The bullets blasted away half of the elder Italian’s high forehead, spraying blood and tissue glimmering into the barred sunrays. He pitched forward, his look of astonishment unchanged.

  Durell waited.

  The terrorist started into the room and Durell saw the snout of his Arab-supplied Russian AK47 assault rifle and gave it a practiced yank with both hands. The guerrilla lurched forward off balance; Durell smashed him in the Adam’s apple with the hard edge of his palm. The gunman’s eyes rolled and he gagged and grappled at his throat, buckling to the floor. Durell thrust his knee hard into the bloated face, felt the nose go mushy. The blow snapped the man onto his back with a broken neck.

  Others would be coming.

  The racket of guns, and slaughter came from everywhere in the building and palm-shaded grounds outside.

  Clad only in red bathing briefs, Durell ran down the narrow corridor bisecting the building. His shoulders prickled as he thought of bullets hammering into his back. He tried a door on his right. It opened into a closet stacked with cans of chlorine and pool equipment.

  Anger wrenched the pit of his stomach. He quelled it. Anger was too expensive in his profession. Survival went to the cool-headed, the calculating. If you survived long enough, the characteristics became ingrained. You became a master at figuring the odds under pressure, like his Grandpa Jonathan, one of the last Mississippi River gamblers. He had raised Durell on his old sidewheel riverboat, Trois Belles, beached on Louisiana’s Bayou Pech6 Rouge. By the time Durell left for Yale, the old man had taught him all he knew about hunting and being hunted, about the flaws and strengths of men. After Yale had come K Section, every mission a no-limit poker game with survival the stakes. Durell’s mind combined a gambler’s instinct with a computer’s cold mastery of probabilities.

  But in the Villa d’Este that computer was missing a vital bit of information.

  Only the previous afternoon, Durell had been working in Ankara. He had been sent there to reorganize K Section’s network in the aftermath of political dissension between Turkey and the U.S. that had threatened to kill U.S. intelligence efforts right down to their roots.

  The mysterious General Dickinson McFee, gray little chief of K Section, had met him on a bench under a lemon tree, his ever-present blackthorn walking stick held loosely between his knees.

  “We’re in a hurry, Samuel,” he said. “Ineyu Worota, our Ethiopian Central, has been missing for forty-six hours. You’ve seen the satellite photograph. If it shows what we fear, the world has entered a calamitous era; perhaps the final era of civilization. Ineyu disappeared about the time the photo was taken. He may rtfi&y well have information pertaining to it—if he is not dead. You must find out what the photo means, Samuel; you must bring Ineyu back to us. Sheba, our employee in Asmara, has an important lead.”

  “I’d like to see a floor plan of the Villa d’Este, sir,” Durell said.

  “It is not readily available.”

  “This is basic; I need those plans to memorize. We could arrange for Sheba to drop them in Asmara, before I go down to the coast.”

  “Every minute counts. There is no time for further arrangements. We must move.”

  “I’m in no hurry to die. She’s asking me to go into a strange building and take off my clothes. What if something happens?”

  “We would miss you sorely, Cajun.” McFee seldom used Durell’s code name.

  “But you could do without me.”

  “We could. You have to go.”

  “I could turn down the assignment.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense, my boy. You’ve never turned down a mission. Will you now, merely because you don’t know your way around a bathhouse? Your plane leaves in half an hour.”

  The “bathhouse” was turning into a Byzantine nightmare.

  A second door led to the kitchen. Two terrified cooks hid beneath a work table. Durell ran past them and jerked open another door just as guns hammered from the far end of the room. Milky water squirted from holes in a stainless steel kettle of simmering pasta. It hit the hot burners and sputtered into steam. Plaster stung Durell’s face as a bullet drilled into the wall half an inch from his ear.

  He slammed the door closed behind him, muffling yells of pursuit. Open French-style doors beckoned from across a wide, carpeted hallway. He sprang swiftly through the exit and onto a saffron beach. He was a tall, muscular man in excellent physical condition, and he was not breathing hard. He had plenty of speed left, but he could not outrun the bullets he expected to be spraying around him any second.

  The Ethiopian sun struck at him like a dragon, fiery and blinding.

  Bathers ran in either direction, far down the beach. Seagulls scolded and fought over their picnic lunches. At a nearby pier, power cruisers and sailboats were casting off their moorings in frantic confusion.

  Durell glanced over his shoulder without breaking stride and saw the nearby nude, strangely soft-looking bodies of victims lying on the lawn around the swimming pool. In the far distance, beyond the whitewashed walls of the club, the dusty blue escarpment of the great Rift Valley wavered through rising heat waves like a troubled curtain. Nothing but rocks and sand stretched away from the club’s grassy compound.

  Or the Red Sea.

  Dhows of fishermen and pearl divers worked the neck of water between Durell and a barren island of the Dahlac group. The island shimmered on the sea like a hot rock. Durell figured it at a quarter of a mile.

  He ran to the end of the pier and dived into the tepid water.

  He swam outward beneath the surface. His locked breath rang in his ears. When it felt as if his chest would crack open, he nosed above the water. Shouts came from the beach. They sounded hollow, lost in the vastness of sea and desert. He glimpsed back and saw a man on the shore whip aside a white tunic, revealing camouflage fatigues and a submachine gun.

  Th
e water around him coughed spumes of spray; he felt something sock his left shoulder and the muscles, just above the collarbone went numb.

  He dived.

  Above him he saw bullets plow paths of bubbles in the lucent water, making a sizzling noise. The feeling was coming back in his shoulder. It burned as salt probed the wound. He seemed to have the full use of his arm. His lungs ached for oxygen.

  He carefully raised his head out of the water again. A volley of slugs immediately plopped into the swell six feet to his right. He looked back. Now three of the terrorists were taking turns firing at him. They stood abreast, laughing. The scorching wind tore at flames and thin gray smoke rising from the club building behind them.

  He ducked beneath the surface once more. He wondered how much further he could go like this before becoming exhausted. The chrysolite waters pressed back, coiled around his arms and legs, pulling him down toward the bottom where schools of jeweled fish sparkled among the rocks. A man of ordinary endurance would have died there, muffled from life-giving air by six feet of lazily shifting liquid. He would have thought, “too far,” and let the water into his tortured lungs, accepting a moment of agony for final rest in the warm, lulling depths. But Durell’s mental discipline pressed him beyond that point. When he hastily arched back to the surface, his limbs were dead weights. He breathed in great watery gusts. He strangled, fought for control, only half heard the distant stutter of guns. He had moved beyond their accurate range, but the bullets still were deadly. They splattered over a wide area now, like gravel thrown into a pond.

  A concussion hit him in the chest and stomach.

  Durell heard shouts ahead of him.

  The guerrillas were firing rifle grenades at pleasure craft that had begun milling among the fishing dhows, their operators drawn to the danger line by curiosity or the promise of thrills. The boats began to scatter.

  Durell felt his last hope of salvation was going with them.

  He could not get his breath. He choked, fought to keep from drowning. The shoulder wound had taken its toll of his strength. He laid his face in the water and tried to rest while floating.

  Through the firing and explosions, he heard the thrumming of a powerful engine. He lifted his head, but could hardly see. His vision was blurred by pearl droplets; the salt water stung his dark blue eyes.

  A motor launch glided toward him through the geysers.

  A woman stood at the gunwale. Her chocolate hair was worn in a superb Afro; sparks of sunlight played on the soft curls. She wore the merest suggestion of a black bikini around her slender hips. Its strings were almost overtaxed by her full, taut breasts. Her pouting lips frowned. Her wide-set almond eyes were grim.

  Pressed against her naked shoulder was the stock of a hunting rifle. She aimed at Durell and fired. He tried to dive as the boat coasted closer. Water seared his trachea, his chest shook with spasms. He had no strength left.

  The girl rammed another round into the rifle’s chamber.

  Durell had only a second to think that it should end this way after so many dangerous alleys and lonely nights.

  She fired again.

  Then there was nothing.

  2

  At 4 a.m. a coverlet of still fog lay over Washington, D. C. It swallowed the echoes of a jet rumbling away from National Airport and shed iridescent dew on sleeping bags of youths slumbering on the Mall. The city slept, but fights glowed here and there in the mist. They came from a few windows in the Pentagon, the White House and K Section headquarters at No. 20 Annapolis Street. In such neutral centers reposed the consciousness of the nation, awake even in the dead hours, listening, relaying, commanding.

  Sometimes General McFee spent the night at his narrow limestone house on Connecticut Avenue, but tonight he had secluded himself behind the bulletproof windows and sophisticated alarm devices of his office-apartment on the top floor of the K Section building. A buzzer sounded from the candlestick table of Hitchcock design next to his bed. McFee’s hand found the telephone receiver immediately in the dark room. “Yes?”

  “General, sir? I’m sorry to awaken you, sir . . .”

  “Yes, yes?” McFee never slept deeply. He spent his nights in a twilight state, his body at rest, but the gates of his mind open. Its thoughts flowed from pool to pool, streams of water poured onto a dry street, seeking gravity, making surprise turns and unexpected connections.

  “Q communication, sir, Asmara, Ethiopia.”

  McFee tightened his grip on the receiver. Asmara meant Sam Durell. The Q designation got top priority treatment. Its urgent transmission superseded all other activities in the worldwide relay network K Section had diligently built up over the years. Q stood for trouble.

  “Read it,” McFee said.

  “Cajun dead. Eritrean Liberation Front raid near Massawa, approximately 200 hours EST. Appears nonprejudicial.”

  “Where’s the body?” McFee demanded. The flesh paled beneath his manicured fingernails as he squeezed the telephone.

  “Body?”

  “Query Sheba. I want a full report. Get an eyewitness account out of her. I want it within eight hours. Arid where is Sam DureIl's body!”

  “Yes, SIR!”

  McFee replaced the receiver, his hand trembling slightly. Non-prejudicial? The term really meant accidental. That was impossible. McFee would pit Durell against the best intelligence agents in the world: none was more skillful or professional. Yet Sheba—or her informants—-expected K Section to believe Durell had been killed by third-rate terrorists.

  Someone was lying.

  They would sweat before he was through, McFee thought.

  He turned on the bedside light, swung his short, wiry legs off of the bed and thrust his arms into a gray dressing robe. He almost never allowed his mind to swerve from its orderly, objective grasp. Now, as he paced the floor behind the steel door of his apartment, he impatiently tried to pull his thoughts together.

  He had lost many agents. It was a price one paid. But Samuel . . .

  McFee sat before the cold fireplace in his living room. He recalled the time he had surreptitiously left through its chimney to put himself—presumably with the Pilgrim Papers—at the mercy of the evil Madame Hung. He had known that Durell would follow his trail, and that Durell would triumph.

  He had staked his life on it.

  They had quarreled from time to time. McFee had even threatened Durell—there had been that occasion in Washington’s Rock Creek Park. But the threats had been meant only to guide Durell in doing what had to be done.

  McFee paced, a little moth-gray figure. He turned his blackthorn walking stick around in his hands. It was a deadly instrument; a pistol in its handle, poison needle in its tip; in its shaft a thermite bomb and other lethal gadgets cooked up by the boys in the basement laboratory. How useless such a weapon was when he could not close with the enemy. He was confined by the nature of his position to administrative tasks while men, good men, hunted and were hunted in places like Paysandu, Damba, Mosul and Omdurman.

  He had sent them to do it, to live or die according to their skill and luck. Some said—and McFee did nothing to discourage the rumor—that he had no feelings.

  McFee’s gray eyes became almost colorless.

  Cajun’s luck had run out.

  They had known the results of the computer printout. Durell’s survival factor stood at the incredibly low .8021 on a scale of ten.

  McFee had asked him to take over as chief of Analysis and Synthesis only six months previously, after Durell had returned from an affair in Tanzania that added two more angry scars to his body.

  Durell had suggested Hal Jamison instead. “But I want you,” McFee had insisted. “You’ve taken enough risks in the field. There comes a time in every man’s career . ..”

  “I’ll work at what I do best until the numbers catch up with me, sir. I won’t take it.”

  “You will, if I order it.”

  “If you order it, don’t ask me to renew my contract.”

&
nbsp; The Russian KGB had placed a red tab on Durell’s file; so had Peking’s dreaded Black House. The tabs marked him for assassination. Countless free-lancers wanting to make a mark for themselves and professionals living under a cloud because Durell had damaged or ruined their careers waited only for the right place and opportune moment to kill him.

  “People all over the world want your head on a pike, Samuel. You can’t leave us! you’d be as good as dead.”

  “I’ve learned a lot about staying alive.”

  “No education can beat the odds forever. At least think about it.”

  Durell had said nothing.

  Now McFee wished he had pressed the matter further. He swung the blackthorn walking stick and made a sound like a batter fanning a fastball. He could easily crush a man’s skull with the weapon. He tossed it onto his rumpled bed, took a heavy pipe with a bent stem from his desk. He packed it with his special mixture and lighted it with a silver butane lighter, watching the smoke evaporate in the currents of air-conditioning chilling his quarters.

  The thing now, he thought, was whether to disseminate the report of Durell’s death. His mind had focused again. It made him feel better.

  Point A: As far as K Section is concerned, there is no corpse.

  That could change momentarily, of course. But until it did, Sam Durell was not dead to K Section. If no body was ever found, an agent remained immortal in K Section files. Never had a missing agent’s dossier been doublelined. No matter what an eyewitness said. Men had been missing before and had turned up. McFee remembered the case of Ian McAllaster. He had been gone twenty-seven months. Two trained agents had sworn he had been blown to bits near Canton. Charley Fretz had been in limbo even longer. Nearly six years. He had been clobbered by a Russian tank shell fragment in Budapest. Had amnesia. There were other examples.

  Point B: K Section had taken a beating recently from small-minded, publicity-oriented politicians. Congressional hearings, supposed to have been secret, but leaked to the press, had endangered half a dozen operations and scores of agents.