Assignment - Karachi

by Edward S. Aarons

  He sat with Alessa at a ten-minute break shortly before dawn. She stared straight ahead, refusing a cigarette, huddled in her fleece-lined coat, her face partly hidden under the folds of her hood.

  She said abruptly, “I do not have what you were looking for, Sam. I cannot tell you what I did with it. That night in Rawalpindi gives you no right to ask that I betray anyone.”

  “Then you know something that might betray Rudi?”

  “I did not say that.”

  “Alessa, you’re thinking the same things I do, about Jane King and Ernst Bergmann, and wondering if your brother—”

  “No,” she said sharply. “Rudi is all the family left to me. He must be protected—saved, if you like. When you spend your life in history, you come to value a sense of continuity in man. Family, too, represents such continuity. The survival of a name, a blood line, always in the last analysis rests with the individual.”

  “At any cost? And even if the individual is unworthy?”

  “I cannot judge that. I simply deny your suspicions. I refuse to believe you are right.” She turned to look at him. “I am sorry, Sam, for many things. But you and I are too different.”

  The ten-minute rest period was over. They got up to march again.

  At dawn a light rain fell again. They stopped for breakfast in a rocky, treeless area shrouded in mist. Tumbled peaks loomed in vast, ghostly shapes all around them. The wind breathed of snow and ice in the upper altitudes ahead. K’Ayub’s men quickly set up canvas shelters, pegged against a sheer rock wall that soared out of sight in the clouds above. Other troopers fanned out ahead and to the rear to cover the line of march.

  They had lost the Pakhustis, it seemed, by the simple ruse of the night march. Then Zalmadar, K’Ayub’s Pathan servant, returned from scouting the trail ahead, speaking earnestly to the colonel.

  K’Ayub turned to Durell. “We have a problem ahead. The trail goes down a sheer rock face a mile to the north. Zalmadar says that dynamite charges were set off some time ago and destroyed the path cut into the rock. We cannot go around it. Our route offers no alternatives. But perhaps Hans Steicher can show us how to bridge the gap.”

  “Any sign of who sabotaged the trail?” Durell asked.

  K’Ayub shrugged. “The Emir’s men—or perhaps a Chinese patrol—although this is pretty far over the border, even for them.”

  They went ahead to look at the trail. The gorge that cut across their way had to be descended and then climbed on the other side. The path that led down was shattered in several places, with gaps of more than twenty feet across. Below was a sheer drop of hundreds of feet.

  Hans knew his business. From his pack he took a handful of steel spikes and a hammer and began to climb across the first gap like a huge fly clinging to an impossible rock face. With the hammer, he drove in the spikes at regular intervals. Yet it seemed inevitable that he would slip and fall. Durell stood beside Alessa on the path, watching. Her face was pale, watching the big man, her eyes never leaving his labored progress.

  By carefully selecting small cracks in the stone face and driving home a series of pitons as hand grips, the big man swung across the first gap in a matter of twenty minutes. He waved to them, went on down the narrow path to the next, and went through the same procedure, trailing the climbing rope behind him to fashion a series of safety holds. The rain increased, and the wind thundered in violence around the rock pinnacles. The troopers waited, with Zalmadar belaying Hans’ climbing rope at the edge of the gorge. Finally, Hans Steicher signalled the others to follow.

  The colonel went first, using the nylon line, his legs occasionally dangling over the dizzy drop below. He made it with what seemed to be comparative ease. Half the troopers then followed. Rudi and Sarah Standish went next, and Durell was interested to see that Sarah showed no fear. Alessa, a fine climber in her own right, covered the stretch of perilous path in a few, easy moments.

  Durell followed.

  The first gap wasn’t difficult, using the pitons. And the second. On the third, close to the end, one of the spikes suddenly ripped free of the crumbling gneiss and he dropped violently into space.

  Even as he fell, he whipped the nylon rope around his wrist. The other end was belayed by Hans, who had stood on monolithic strength to anchor the passage of the others across the abyss. Durell swung in a short, savage arc against the brink at the other end of the path; he twisted, got his legs up and flexed his knees to break the impact with his booted feet. The nylon rope stretched, bouncing him back in a spin. The misty sky and wet rocks far below turned giddily under him. Pain shot through his arm and shoulder. He looked up, turning helplessly on the rope. Some of the troopers were shouting in alarm. Their voices had a curious, echoing quality in the misty chasm. He saw the heads of K’Ayub and Alessa peering down at him. He looked at Hans Steicher.

  The big man was braced, holding the climbing axe he had jammed into the yielding gneiss to belay the rope that kept Durell from dropping to his death. There was no slackening. The line could have been anchored in steel, as Hans began to pull him up.

  It was a laborious effort, with quick disaster waiting for any slip. Durell caught a grip with his left hand on the line and slowly walked his way up the rough face of the cliff. Hans pulled at the same time, allowing no slack in the rope. The man’s face was grim. It seemed forever before Durell looked over the top edge of the path that was his goal. K’Ayub reached down and offered a hand. He shook his head and hauled again and Hans gave one more heave that brought his knees and then his booted feet onto solid ground again.

  Durell drew a deep breath and looked into Hans’ eyes.

  “Thank you.”

  Hans was unsmiling, his enmity still unabated. “Next time,” he said softly, “I may not be able to belay in time. Perhaps you will fall again—later.”

  No one else heard the remark. Was it a threat? Durell wondered. A promise of destruction later, when it was safer to accomplish? He did not know. He walked on, to join the others.

  They paused for an hour on the opposite side of the gorge, then marched on all day, with regular halts for rest. The rain did not stop, except to give way in the late afternoon to a cold, penetrating fog that seemed to crawl right into their parkas. Once they came to a small village of Hunzas and were ferried across a rushing tributary of the Indus on an ancient wooden barge. They camped that night at a stupa, a small Buddha figure, centuries old, erected long ago by travelers on the trail they followed. But there were no recent offerings in evidence at the shrine.

  The second day the ascent was an average of 40 degrees, a steady climb that demanded long traversing techniques, more ferrying across icy glacial streams, and once they fashioned a rope handrail to ford a smaller river, wading chest-deep in the frigid water melted from the ice of the mountains ahead. They camped again in an abandoned monastery that seemed like a miracle in the stony wilderness. No fires were permitted now. They ate cold rations, used their sleeping bags on the stone floor of the crumbling Buddhist building. K’Ayub set out his routine pickets. They all slept in a huddle on the cold common floor of the ruins.

  The next day they reached the first snow. It was a foot or more thick, lying unmelted in the perpetual north shadow of a giant monolith that soared several thousand feet above their heads. They put on crampons, metal plates with sharp cleats worn on their boots for better footing, and unsheathed their ice axes. Zalmadar acted as lead man, poking ahead on reconnaissance with his axe or a pole, probing for crevasses. In the morning they traversed a long, steep slope, moving diagonally across the lesser mountain. Traversing was a special technique that demanded the ankles be bent outward, so that your body remained vertical while your feet assumed the same angle as the snow. It was a temptation on any steep slope to lean inward, which was a sure way to guarantee a slip. Beyond the snow slope was a series of smooth ice ledges. Here Hans used his tubular ice pitons, driving the hollow metal spikes into the ice where they froze solidly and made a rope ascent possible. K’Ayub�
��s men were tireless, uncomplaining. By noon the overcast lifted and gave them their first true glimpse of the wild, tumbled mountains that soared around them.

  They were in a long, shallow valley, free of snow again, between two towering ranges of peaks that ended in a col directly ahead, where the twin summits of S-5 blocked their way. Far to the west in the valley was another Hunza village, an oasis of terraced green against the gray and brown and white of the mountains. Misty in the distance, the towering Karakorums loomed against the sky. In contrast to those more distant peaks, S-5 looked relatively small for which Durell felt mildly grateful. Yet he noted the snow fields in cold, lavender blankets along the north and eastern shoulders of the twin peaks. And up there, in that vast empty stillness, nothing seemed to love or live.

  Sarah Standish pointed to the peaks, her face flushed with the cold, half hidden under the hood of her parka. “How far do you think it is?” she asked.

  “Fifteen—eighteen miles,” Durell told her. “We may reach it by noon tomorrow.”

  She looked backward along their trail. “I have the oddest feeling that we’re being watched all the time.”

  “It’s quite probable.”

  “I never—I didn’t think it would be like this.” She made a vague gesture with her gloved hands. “So—empty.”

  “Do you regret coming with us?”

  “No. Why should I?”

  “You and Rudi have quarreled, haven’t you?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “I think you should tell me about it,” Durell urged. “It’s not wise to keep secrets from the rest of us up here.”

  “It’s purely a personal matter,” she murmured.

  The march was resumed. The brief noonday sun yielded to a thin overcast that was driven across the sky by a southeasterly wind. The air felt colder. The thin atmosphere tended to exhaust them quicker than the day before.

  By four o’clock the wind was howling, and huge plumes of snow drifted in ragged shreds from the peaks around them. The snow came down upon them with a rush, blotting out everything.

  Camp was made a little earlier as a premature darkness fell. It was too dangerous to proceed in the snow in the night hours. This time there was no ruined monastery to shelter them, and the tents went up again.

  Durell shared a tent with K’Ayub. For an hour after their dinner, he listened to the wind and the hiss of hard-driven ice particles around the tent flaps. The pressure of the storm increased steadily, the wind shrieking and threatening to tear the tent to shreds. Every hour, the colonel got up and patrolled the site, spoke to his men, checked the sentries. He seemed tireless, calm and efficient, in his element up here.

  Durell dozed restlessly. Once, it seemed, he heard someone cry out, and he sat up and got out of the sleeping bag. The oil lamp in the tent was turned low. As he stood, KAyub came back in, dusted with snow, and lifted inquiring eyes.

  “I thought I heard something,” Durell said.

  “It is only this accursed wind.”

  “Is everything secure?”

  “Zalmadar says the snow will end soon, and tomorrow will be warm.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  But he slept uneasily for the rest of the night.

  The camp was astir at dawn. Cooking fires were permitted in the thin air at 12,000 feet elevation, and the smell of coffee filled the air. The snow storm had ended. The sky was clear. Durell dressed in the wool-lined mountain outfit, fastened his boots, and walked to the nearest campfire where Alessa was pouring coffee.

  “Good morning.”

  She looked at him quickly, then turned away. Since the night in Rawalpindi, she seemed afraid to meet his gaze. Hans hovered in the background at the next cookfire, but he was staring off to the north, at the looming peaks of S-5, their goal. The snow glittered everywhere, only a few inches deep, with many cleared spots ahead along a sharp ridge that lifted to the shoulders of the fabled mountain. To the west and north, the mighty Karakorums loomed as an impregnable wall, casting back brilliant sunlight.

  Durell took a cup of coffee from Alessa. “Isn’t Rudi up yet?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him.”

  He looked further around the camp. “And Sarah?”

  “I haven’t seen her, either,” Alessa said.

  Durell walked toward Sarah’s tent, then turned and looked back at the blonde girl. “Sarah shared this tent with you, didn’t she?”

  “She was gone when I got up,” Alessa said quietly.

  “Gone?”

  “I haven’t seen her or Rudi this morning.”

  His alarm came in a swift, angry surge that broke in dismay over the bright, promising morning. He went quickly to the girls’ tent, knocked on the pole, lifted the flap. The two sleeping bags were empty. He turned and walked to Hans, who crouched at the fire and washed his messkit in the light, crunchy snow.

  “Where is Herr von Buhlen?” Durell asked.

  Hans looked at him with his usual blank, stony face. “I have not seen him. He is gone away, I think.”

  “Where?”

  Hans shrugged. “It is his own business, perhaps.”

  It took only five minutes for Durell and K’Ayub to prove the dismaying fact. There was no sign in the camp of Rudi or Sarah. Their rucksacks and equipment were missing. Some food had been taken from the common packs. On the snow-field behind them there were no footsteps, no trace of which direction they had taken. It could only mean one thing.

  Some time during the night, while it was still snowing hard enough to cover their tracks, Rudi and Sarah had deliberately left the camp.

  They were missing.

  chapter fourteen

  AT EIGHT o’clock that morning the snowfields changed color from pale lavender to a dazzling, blinding white that demanded snow glasses. K’Ayub came out of his radio tent and nodded to Durell.

  “I have sent Zalmadar and four other men back along yesterday’s trail after Miss Standish and Herr von Buhlen. They have just reported, by their walkie-talkie. It is possible they are heading for Mirandhabad.”

  “Alone?”

  “There was no sign of violence.” The Pakistani was calm. “As far as I can determine, they left us of their own free will. Sergeant Zalmadar will determine that.”

  Durell was angry. “Sarah Standish is my responsibility. My job is to make sure she remains safe. You should have let me know you were sending Zalmadar after her; I’d have gone along.”

  “I am sorry. I cannot permit that. I understand your quandary—you must protect Miss Standish, and also verify the discovery of nickel on S-5. I cannot concern myself, however, with which is more important to you. It is my judgment that those two left us willingly. If she was misled or hoodwinked—” K’Ayub shrugged. His voice was hard. “I must go on to S-5. It is only a half-day’s march from here. And I have been getting radio reports. Two Tibetan refugees picked up by our frontier posts reported some Chinese probing activity in the mountains beyond S-5. I think speed is vital. I pleaded with Karachi to send a division here immediately, however the Pakhustis might resent it. But no move will be made until the nickel is verified. I have taken it on myself to survey the roadway to this point—two of my men are engineers—and if mining development promises, it must be considered as a practical measure.”

  “I think Sarah Standish is in grave danger,” Durell insisted.

  “I cannot spare guides to accompany you. And I will need you on S-5. It is my decision, Mr. Durell, that you come ahead with us. More than a decision. It is an order. After all, the life of one woman—”

  “A most important woman,” Durell insisted.

  K’Ayub’s shrug was indifferent. To his Moslem mind, none of Sarah’s wealth or influence raised her to an equal scale with any man. His lynx eyes were adamant. He was going on.

  Durell looked at Alessa, then at the peaks ahead. K’Ayub was in command. He refused to send more men after Sarah, denied Durell permission to go alone. Sergeant Zalmadar w
as big, tough and competent. The Pathan would travel fast, perhaps overtake Sarah and Rudi before they could reach Mirandhabad. He had no choice. They had to go on.

  The last five hours of the march were the most difficult. By noon they were on the lower shoulders of the southern peak of S-5. On every horizon, the outlook was desolate, as alien as a lunar landscape. Durell could see the vast, domeshaped thrust of rock on the southern peak that Alessa identified as Roxana’s Breast. The old man, Omar, in the bazaar of Qissa Khani, had mentioned it, and he sensed a growing excitement in Alessa as they toiled upward to their goal. Her face was flushed, her eyes bright with-anticipation. Not once did she mention Rudi or Sarah.

  “Do you think Omar told us the truth?” she asked. “I believe I know the exact spot he mentioned, from where we might get a clue about the North Peak. Poor Uncle Ernst went there alone, interested by some unusual fault he had glimpsed. But I gather the light has to be just right. Oh, if we can find it! If there is a Cave of a Thousand Skulls, it will verify all my research. I could write several papers on it for—”

  “Take it easy,” Durell suggested. “We’re not there yet.”

  She looked up at him, her excitement dashed. “You are worried about Sarah?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I am sure that Rudi can take care of her. He is an excellent climber. It seems to me that perhaps they had a sudden impulse to abandon the climb and go to Mirandhabad —perhaps to be married there. Why not?”

  “Then why not tell us, or leave a, note?”

  “Rudi has always been impulsive, unpredictable. Perhaps they were together last night, and felt too impatient to wait longer—”

  “Did you hear her leave your tent last night?”

  “I was fast asleep. But if she was taken by force, I’m sure I’d have been wakened by any commotion. That is why I am not concerned. Sarah went willingly with Rudi.”

  “Alessa, listen to me—Rudi has Ernst Bergmann’s chart, hasn’t he?”