Assignment - Karachi

by Edward S. Aarons

  “Pakistan doesn’t exercise much control over the Pak-hustis,” Durell said. “And the Pathans are in the way, besides the Chinese just over the hill, as you suggest.”

  “You’ll have a military escort all the way with the expedition.”

  “What expedition?”

  “To S-5, naturally. That’s where the nickel is supposed to be. S-5 happens to be a mountain that’s also called Alexander’s Crown. Ever hear of it?”

  “No,” Durell said.

  “Read this, then,” Kallinger said.

  He pushed two newspaper clippings across the small table to Durell. Durell read them in the light that cams through the window from over the Bosphorus.

  The first was from Al Ahram, an English-language Pakistan newspaper of reasonably good repute:

  —Rawalpindi, June 7. It has been reported that three survivors of the ill-fated Austrian mountain-climbing expedition to explore and scale Alexander’s Crown, the frontier peak labeled as S-5 in Pakhusti State, are on their way back to this city. Three male members of the group are known to be dead, either through accident or difficulties with local dissident tribesmen. The survivors, two men and a woman, are expected in Rawalpindi in a matter of days.

  The second clipping was from the New York Times, dated two weeks later:

  —Karachi, June 22—Two survivors of the von Buhlen expedition to the mountainous State of Pakhusti arrived here today and made immediate preparations for a new assault on S-5. Interviewed here today, Alessa von Buhlen merely stated that there had been no success in her attempt to verify the fabled story of Xenos’ march to recover the crown of Alexander the Great.

  Hans Steicher, the well known Alpine guide who led the expedition, as well as two other missions of British and Italian origin in the past years, had no comment on the disastrous failure of the romantic attempt.

  The adventurers’ assault on S-5 was based on an obscure legend long known to military historians of Alexander the Great’s Asian conquests. Professor Damon D. Johnstone of Columbia University, a specialist in Hellenic antiquities of Alexander’s time, denied any possible truth to the tale of Xenos’ march with a thousand men to retrieve a crown yielded to the Macedonian conqueror by a king of the Indus over two thousand years ago. Fragments of Buddhist writings and fables that survive the Mogul conquests in later centuries contain obscure allusions to the massacre of the thousand foot soldiers of Alexander’s army, but these are generally discounted as local folklore, Professor Johnstone said.

  The two survivors, who will be joined by selected others, remain in Karachi for a new expedition to be immediately reorganized for a second attempt at S-5, according to Dr. Alessa von Buhlen.

  Kallinger yawned and brushed his shaggy Turkish moustache as Durell returned the two clippings. “The first of these came by courier from Rawalpindi yesterday. The New York Times item was in a batch of stuff from Washington this morning. I put it all together for you, Sam.”

  “I notice there’s nothing in these clippings about nickel,” Durell commented.

  “Naturally. What really happened was that this climbing expedition after alleged ancient treasure ran into hard luck all the way. Bad weather, defecting porters, alienated tribesmen—even some Chinese military patrols sticking their noses over the Sinkiang border. The frontier at that point is rather vague, you know. Even so, they all came down off S-5 alive, according the Pakistan military report. There was trouble with the Pakhustis under their Emir at Mirandhabad for some time—the Emir has been pushing for autonomy, backed by the Pathans, Afghanistan, and the Chinese. But the climbers were all definitely alive—when they came down off S-5—five men and the girl, Alessa von Buhlen. Her doctorate is in ancient history, by the way. It was afterward that things began to happen. Disappearances. And murder. Only Hans Steicher and Alessa—who happens to be built on the order of the Valkyries, by the way, no matter what her university degrees—pity I don’t have a snapshot for you, Sam—and Bergmann, a geologist, made it back to Rawalpindi.”

  “Then Bergmann disappeared,” Durell said. “The Times says there were only two survivors—Alessa and Hans Steicher.”

  Kallinger nodded. Out on the Bosphorus, a tug hooted. It was growing dusky in the tobacco agent’s office. Lights gleamed like iridescent jewels on the European side of the straits.

  “The Pakistan security police report two attacks since, one on Alessa, another on Hans. A knife thrown at Alessa, and a mugging job on Steicher. No permanent damage. Obviously, someone wants to silence everybody who hunted abominable snowmen, nickel and jewels on S-5, eh?”

  “You think it’s because of the nickel ore?” Durell asked.

  “Bergmann made a report, and a map, and both disappeared with him. You’ll have to find out. We’re reasonably sure the alleged treasure wasn’t found, and even if it were, we aren’t interested. But Bergmann was excited about the nickel strike, and talked about it before he vanished. Washington wants to know what was really found up there. Somebody is trying to stop these people from going back—maybe the Emir at Mirandhabad, maybe the Chinese, maybe your friends at No. 2 Dzherzinsky Square. The second expedition fitting out now has the immediate blessings of American and Pakistan interests. And there’s more.”

  Kallinger took an envelope from his desk and handed it to Durell. It contained five thousand dollars.

  Durell smiled. “You’ve counted it?”

  “Every penny. I’m a businessman. It should cover expenses.”

  “Who’s covering the cost of the new expedition? They take a little more to finance than a ride on the Staten Island ferry.”

  “Sarah Standish. The Standish. She’s going along. You’re going, too, as Sarah’s bodyguard. We’d hate to have anything happen to her.” Kallinger’s dark, sunken eyes might or might not have been amused. “The richest, nickel-plated member of Park Avenue society. The world’s best-known business woman. Head of Standish Nickel, unromantic, hornrimmed glasses, and the despair of every couturier in Paris, Rome and Houston. She’s in love, Sam.”

  He waited.

  Kallinger seemed disappointed. “She’s in love with Alessa von Buhlen’s brother, Rudi. I have a thumbnail dossier on him for you. He’s in Karachi now, with Miss Standish. Hans Steicher is in ’Pindi. Rudi and Sarah may be enjoying a pre-marital honeymoon. I wouldn’t know. Maybe morals change when you get up to eight hundred millions, give or take a few score. Although I must say, Sarah Standish has never had a breath of scandal touch her, giving her the benefit of the doubt. Anyway, she’s financing the new expedition and going along. Do you want to read Rudi von Buhlen’s dossier?”

  “Tell me,” Durell suggested.

  “You look annoyed, Cajun.”

  “I don’t look forward to being a bodyguard and a nursemaid.”

  “It’s all in the day’s work, Sam.”

  “Not my kind of work,” Durell said.

  “Think of all that money!” Kallinger protested.

  “You think of it, Harry. It may be big in your businessman’s mind, but not to me.”

  “She’s in danger. Look what happened to the original expedition. We can’t take chances; we can’t let anything happen to her.”

  “If she’s worried, let her hire an army. She can afford it.” Durell paused. “She can do whatever she likes.”

  “But she isn’t worried, Cajun, that’s the trouble. Our State Department people had a hell of a time with her. She insists she’s only interested in the historical and archeological aspects of what’s on S-5. Nickel in itself doesn’t interest her. That’s for the employees, she says. As for danger, she feels that Rudi is company and protection enough for her.”

  Durell’s mouth tightened. “Tell me about Rudi.” Kallinger laughed dourly. “Rudi looks more English than Austrian—wears his hair long, English style, over his ears. Pretty good mountain-climber, too—in the Alps. Full name is Rudolf Wolfgang Freihausen von Buhlen. Age 31, bom Vienna, father a British legation colonel, now deceased, mother a baroness of the Hapsburg
nobility, living on pensions and nostalgic dreams of Emperor Franz Josef’s time. Rudi was educated at the Hausfulden Gymnasium, then the Sorbonne, and took a graduate degree at Oxford. He lives extravagantly. No political identifications, but an uncle was connected with the Rote Kapelle—the “Red Orchestra” affair in 1942, a German Communist espionage network run by old and prominent German families. It took guts, under Hitler. The Rote Kapelle people were uncovered by the Abwehr and most of them were executed, charged with high treason, along with a grandson of Admiral von Tirpitz. They were hung from meat hooks borrowed from a Berlin abattoir. Hitler enjoyed the view. Anyway, so much for the uncle. Rudi professes no politics. Interested Cajun?”

  “Go on.”

  “Rudi drives a Ferarri, races at Cannes, climbs the Alps. Married an English heiress, Elizabeth Dunning-Broome, in ’55, divorced in Mexico City in ’59. No financial settlement. Gambles a lot, plays in Riviera society, arrested twice on vice charges, both times dismissed, and is reputed to have slept with a hell of a lot of women. He met our Nickel Queen in Switzerland last winter at a skiing party. Sarah Standish finally fell. She’s in love, as I said.”

  “I doubt that,” Durell said. “I’ve met her.”

  Kallinger nodded. “I know you have. That’s why the long arm of K Section plucked you out of your cozy villa down the coast and interrupted your vacation—and your love-life with that Italian brunette, of which I know officially nothing, mind you—and is ordering you to Karachi to look after Sarah.”

  Durell said one word, briefly.

  “I gather from that,” Kallinger said, “that you don’t like the job with Sarah. Have you counted that five thousand dollars, Sam?”

  “I don’t have to, if you did.”

  “Then sign this receipt.”

  Durell signed. “What about Alessa von Buhlen—the Valkyrie with a doctorate?”

  Kallinger looked embarrassed. “I blew all my conceit in quoting Rudi’s dossier, Sam. We don’t have as much. Beautiful and brainy. Her Ph.D in history came from the Sorbonne—Greek history, naturally. They say the tumble-down family schloss—their old castle outside of Vienna—is a museum of antique pieces. An athletic type, too—she skis and climbs mountains. No romantic attachments we know of. Does all this give you ideas, Cajun?”

  “Some,” Durell said.

  “Have fun, then.”

  On his way to the airport later, Durell reflected on what he knew of Sarah Standish. He had met her at two Washington cocktail parties and once had been invited, with Deirdre Padgett, to the Standish summer estate at Southampton, on Long Island. Deirdre went to finishing school with Sarah, and they were reasonably good friends—or as friendly as you can be with eight hundred million dollars.

  Durell’s impressions of Southampton were not the best. Maybe it was the aura of all that money which, whoever the individual owning it, lends an air that sets you apart from normalcy. Vast wealth has its corollary in isolation— splendid, perhaps, but inevitably disturbing. It lent an arrogance and indifference to the normal problems and ethics of ordinary men.

  Sarah Standish was not popular in the gossip columns; she did not belong to the celebrity set, like other fashionable heiresses. She was quiet, repressed, not beautiful, given to tweedy suits and painfully simple hair styles. Her escorts were always discreet and anonymous. Until her engagement to Rudi von Buhlen in Switzerland last year, no hint of romance had ever touched her austere personality. Until then, the private life of the Nickel Queen was an enigma, jealously guarded against sensationalism.

  During the Southampton weekend, Durell had seen very little of his hostess. But what he saw, he remembered.

  She rarely smiled. She had a rather wide mouth, only faintly touched with lipstick, a broad and intelligent forehead, wide and solemn gray eyes, pale and smoky. Her manner was earnest, whether playing tennis or sitting at the head of her dinner table. A tall girl, she affected only the simplest of jewelry; her quiet voice gave the impression that she was thinking of things other than her immediate words. She took a personal interest in the complex corporate structures of Standish Nickel. Part of her weekend had been taken up by lengthy conferences with executive types who came up to the rambling estate, closeted themselves with her in her office, and drove away again without mingling with the other guests.

  Durell remembered Deirdre Padgett’s comment about Sarah’s engagement.

  “I’m worried about it,” Deirdre said. “From what I know about Rudi, he’s the type who can break Sarah’s heart.”

  “You can’t do anything about it,” Durell told her. “A girl like Sarah Standish is going to do whatever she pleases.”

  “I know. And that’s the trouble. She’s really shy, intensely lonely, and quite starved for affection, I think.”

  “Under that grim exterior?”

  “I may be wrong. I’ve really lost touch with her, after all these years. But she’s reaching for love, and she may be hurt. Not all the Standish money can help her in that.” Durell had had other matters on his mind then. He never expected to cross Sarah’s path again. And now he was assigned to play bodyguard to her arbitrary and neurotic personality.

  He did not look forward to it.

  He left Istanbul an hour after his conversation with Henry Kallinger, catching the Pan American Orient jet that set him down in Karachi just before dawn.

  chapter three

  PATIENCE was something you learned, absorbed, and had pounded into you by its exercise and the grim examples of those who had failed to practice it. Patience could mean long days of solitude in a dismal, ill-smelling room, watching a doorway across the street—-or simply doing nothing, until the other side made a move, goaded by your inactivity. Or it could mean facing frustration with new resolve and new tactics. Or enduring the monotony of a routine that involved the hurry-up-and-wait tempo of war.

  Patience in this case, Durell thought, consisted of steadily, grimly, unendingly putting your left foot ahead in the soft, yielding sand, throwing your weight forward on hip and knee, and using the momentum thus gained to get your right foot up there for just one more step ahead. And then another. And another. Again and again.

  Patience meant to keep walking. To stay alive.

  There came a time when he had to stop. And this, too, was a part of his patience.

  The sun and the heat were incredible. Plodding between the brazen sand and the shining sea, he seemed to be motionless, making no progress, like a bug in the bottom of a deep, slippery bowl where all the unbelievable radiance of the sky, desert and ocean poured in and concentrated in one vast flame to destroy him.

  The buzzards and the kites circled steadily overhead now, dark and silent shadows in the brilliance of the morning sky.

  The ancient Arab watchtower was out of sight behind him. Ahead, there was nothing different. He saw another dhow far out on the Gulf. There was no wind. He was grateful for this, because the wind would have cut at him like a hot, melting knife. Inland, to his left, there was nothing but sand, rock and scorpions, a series of natural terraces devoid of any scrap of green, rising to a shimmering and unnatural horizon.

  “For the love of Allah!” Mahmud Ali gasped.

  The man fell to his knees in the shadow of a bronze-colored boulder.

  “Leave me here,” he whispered. “Or kill me now.” Durell stood on his feet. “Get up and walk with me.”

  “I cannot.”

  “You must!”

  “I want to die.”

  “So you shall,” Durell said. “Very slowly, and with much more pain than you now suffer.”

  The man’s face was skeletal. He coughed a little sputum, and there was some blood in it. His broken arm dangled uselessly at his side as he swayed on his knees. Durell looked down at him without expression. His mouth was as dry as the sand; his body ached and flamed. He had tom part of his white shirt as a bandage to stop the superficial bleeding of his left leg, and so far he had been able to go on, determined to live. He held the Schmeiser lowered, in
his hand at his right side.

  The assassin had told him little, until now. When he had stopped the jeep in the dawn at the base of the watchtower, two hours ago, he had been following simple orders to kill Durell. Durell had acted first, but in the struggle, Mahmud Ali fell from the jeep, the car went over the cliff to the beach below, and Durell fell free with it. Mahmud Ali had managed to crawl to the top of the tower to look for him. He had not been able to find strength to fire at him until at last he squeezed off the single shot that had warned Durell. Now they were both abandoned, dying, lost. Durell would not admit this.

  “Am I the only one who was signed for death?” he asked.

  “No,” Mahmud whispered.

  “Who are the others?”

  “The rich one. The rich American lady.”

  “Sarah Standish?”

  “That is her name.”

  “And who else?”

  “All the others who would climb the mountain.”

  “Why?”

  “I am a simple man. A soldier. I never ask why. It is not for me, such a question. To ask it is to ask for the sword at my throat.”

  “Suppose you were to ask, anyway?” Durell insisted. “Who would you ask such a question?”

  The man said nothing.

  “You are dying,” Durell told him. “Will you speak of murder to Allah?”

  “If He asks,” Mahmud whispered.

  “Get up. You will speak of it to the officials in Karachi.”

  “I cannot get up.”

  Durell paused. He did not know how much farther he had to walk through this inferno to find someone who might help. Perhaps all day. Or forever. He did not know if anyone even knew he was missing. Kallinger, in Istanbul, had told him to work with Colonel K’Ayub, a Pakistan security officer who would command the escort patrol with the expedition. Was K’Ayub even aware that he had landed in Karachi early this morning and had been swallowed up in the sands of the Sind? Did K’Ayub even miss his jeep, his military driver who was supposed to meet Durell at the airport?