Assignment - Mara Tirana

by Edward S. Aarons

  He was almost to the barn when his eye caught a flicker of movement down the sloping field that led to the river’s edge. It was near the boatshed and the two small wharves. Rain drove in his face in a windy gust as he halted and turned his head that way.

  “What is it?” Otto whispered.

  “Something down there. IJe careful. Cover me, will you?”

  “I see nothing, but—yes, Herr Durell.”

  Durell moved into the shadows cast by the tall barn. He could hear cattle inside, then he followed the shadow off into the field, ducked under a fence, came to another and climbed a stile, and struck off through the stubble toward the shed, coming at it from the east. He was not sure what he had seen, but now that he was closer to the river’s edge, he made out the dark glimmer of a small launch tied up to the nearest pier, hidden from him before by a rise of the land. He could not tell if anyone was in the boat. He ran a few steps, became aware of his footsteps in the crunchy stubble, and slowed abruptly.

  He was being careless. His need to know what had happened to Deirdre was a wild clamor inside him. He walked more slowly, forcing himself to be cautious. In a few minutes he reached the boatshed, a small unpainted wooden structure. When he turned his head to look back, he could not see Otto Hoffner anywhere.

  There was a feeling of desolation around him, although the city lights of Bratislava seemed brighter here, just ground the narrowing gap between the mountain spurs of the broad, blackly sweeping river. Something rustled in the weeds growing down toward the water’s edge, and he turned his head that way.

  Someone thrust a gun in his back at that moment.

  “You will be careful, mister,” a man whispered in English. Durell stood still. “Do not call or signal to your friend in the lane, please,” the voice went on. “Or I will put a bullet in your spine.”

  “Who are you?” Durell asked flatly.

  “My name is Gija. And you?”

  “Durell. A friend of Harry Hammett’s. Did you kill him?”

  The man laughed. “Not I.”

  “Who, then?”

  “I think the girl did it. Drop your gun and turn around.”

  Durell dropped his gun to the wet ground in the shadows of the boathouse, then turned carefully. The man who had trapped him took a careful step backward, keeping his weapon out of reach of any thrust. He was a tall young man with sandy hair, wearing a sailor’s watch cap and a short peajacket; his trousers were stuffed into cowhide boots. His gun was a Magnum, powerful enough to drive a bullet through a car engine. In the dim, ochrous light, Durell saw that his face, under a reckless grin, reflected anxiety and uncertainty about his next move.

  “What girl are you talking about?” Durell asked.

  “She is in the boatshed. Be very careful, chum. I am nervous, as you can probably see. I came here to do a good deed, like a regular Boy Scout, and I find myself in serious trouble, and I do not like it. I am anxious to get back to where I belong. Since Mr. Hammett is dead, I have no information on my next step. And I haven’t seen young Anton since I sent the kid to Vienna.”

  “I’ve seen him,” Durell said. “He’s all right.”

  “Is he? He was supposed to return with Hammett.” Durell said carefully: “He’s all right. He—there was a small accident. But he’s safe in Vienna, at the American Embassy, as a matter of fact. I know all about you, Gija—how you came to meet Hammett and take him to the American astronaut, Major Stepanic.” Durell paused. “I work with Hammett. I want to know about the girl you say killed him.” Gija hesitated. He seemed to be alone. “Anton is Captain Galucz’ son. He will not like this. He is from the barge Luliga, where I work as river pilot. We’re loading at Bratislava for our trip downstream. It was arranged for Hammett to come with us and pick up Stepanic.”

  “Let me see the girl,” Durell insisted.

  “How can I trust you? I know nothing about you—”

  “Is she in the boatshed?”

  “Yes,” Gija muttered. “But be careful, and walk slow ahead of me, hey? Real slow.”

  Durell turned the comer of the boathouse to an open door that faced the river above a wooden platform. The patrol boat was returning, rounding a bend in the mighty stream; its engine echo snarled back and forth from the river banks. But there was a difference now—a bright probe of a spotlight swept across the dimpled water, seeking with random stabs and starts, touching a moored tugboat and scow close to the Austrian bank, then swinging along the far shadows of the opposite side. The patrol came at a fast clip, the light swinging back and forth.

  “Quick! Inside,” Gija breathed.

  Durell stepped into the boathouse. His heart was clutched by tension, expecting to see Deirdre here, in God knew what condition.

  Gija had a flashlight. It shot past Durell and touched the girl who lay huddled in a corner of the shed, illuminating her lumpy tweed coat, a strand of blonde hair, a trickle of blood from a scalp wound, and big frightened eyes that looked blindly into the glare of Gija’s light.

  It was Mara Tirana, the woman who had last seen Durell slugged by Kopa in the hotel room at the Bristol.

  Durell let out a long, exhausted breath and turned abruptly to Gija.

  “And the other girl? The one who was with Hammett?” he asked sharply. “Where is she? Damn you, what happened to her?”

  “I don’t know. I was down here by the river bank, and all I know is that there was a scuffle, a quick fight. It was difficult to see clearly, and I was too far away—a little late in arriving at the rendezvous, but not more than a few minutes. I thought I heard a woman scream, but I assumed it was this one. Was there another?”

  “Yes. Didn’t you see her at all?”

  “I heard the scream. Nothing else.” Gija looked worried. He had sandy brows that met above the bridge of a strong nose in his reckless face. He looked rakish in his pea-jacket, slightly shorter than Durell, built in a slim and wiry fashion. “Do you know this one?” he asked, gesturing toward Mara.

  “Yes. We’ve met. She’s not a friend.”

  “Yet whoever killed Hammett put the slug on her,” Gija said, in his curiously accented but colloquial English. “He left her for dead. The other one might explain it— there was that scream, and maybe she struggled, and the assassin had no time to make sure this one was put out of the world.”

  Durell nodded. It could have happened as Gija suggested. But where was Kopa, then, and where was Deirdre? Kopa had her—there could be no doubt of that. An image of Deirdre in the bald man’s hands made him suddenly shiver. It was like a nightmare come true. All these years in the business he had tried to keep her safe, detached from his work and the dangers surrounding him. But she had come here and the danger had reached out for her and taken her. She might be dead now. But he did not think so. His mind jumped ahead, putting himself in Kopa’s place. The enemy agent had a powerful motive for going after Deirdre, and that motive was to trap bigger game. Himself. It was just as this girl, Mara, had tried to tell him, back at the Bristol Hotel. She had tried to warn him exactly of this, before Kopa came in and slugged him and prevented her from giving him the details.

  He turned and looked at Mara with new interest.

  “What happened to you?” he asked.

  She coughed and made an inarticulate sound. “He took your girl,” she whispered. “They will be in Czechoslovakia by now.”

  “How did Kopa plan to get there?”

  “He had another boat waiting—a mile downstream.”

  Durell gestured toward the tall young sailor. “Why didn’t Kopa wait for this one, too, Mara? Gija has what Kopa wants to know about the American spaceman, Major Stepanic.”

  “He was frightened off. I—I frightened him.”

  “How? Why?”

  “I could not endure it,” the blonde girl said. She looked down. “Please untie me. I am your friend. Please believe me.”

  “Who hit you?”

  “It was Kopa.” And then she began to cry, in great racking sobs. Gija looked a
t her with astonishment. Durell could have taken him then, wresting the Magnum from him. But he was thinking fast, far ahead. There was Deirdre’s kidnapping to consider, and Harry Hammett’s mission. He didn’t want to antagonize the bargeman. Too many things had gone wrong already to add any unnecessary complications. “I couldn’t bear it,” Mara was whispering. “I do not wish to hurt anyone. But Kopa was suspicious, because you and I were talking in your hotel room. He demanded to know what we were saying. But I simply told him you had caught me searching there, as he had instructed me to do; and that his arrival saved me. He did not believe me entirely.” She paused and looked up, her eyes filled with bright tears. There was a naivete in her that somehow was convincing. “I cried out a warning to Harry Hammett and the girl who was with him. Kopa won out anyway, killing Mr. Hammett. Then he struck me. I was unconscious.” She touched her injured scalp wonderingly. “Then this sailor caught me as I tried to crawl away across the field. I think Kopa left me believing I was dead. But he has Miss Padgett now. And he is taking her into Czechoslovakia.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  She nodded slowly. “It is part of his plan to capture you on Soviet territory, so you can be executed without any international fuss.”

  “Using Deirdre, as bait, to get me into his hands?”

  “Yes. Exactly.”

  “Do you know where he intends to keep Deirdre a prisoner?”

  “Yes. In Moralova Castle. A few miles east of Bratislava.”

  Durell stared at her. Everything could have been arranged—the girl’s head wound, her apparent willingness to defect to the West, her spilling of information that might be intended to lead him precisely where Kopa wanted him to go. He did not know what to do. He did not trust Mara now.

  There was no time to pass this information to Otto Hoffner, waiting in the dark field above. In any case, the decision was taken from him when Gija raised his gun abruptly, looked at his watch, and said: “Come, we will all go. We have no more time for talk.”

  “Go where?” the girl asked wonderingly.

  “Back east.” Gija grinned at her. “I'm sorry, beautiful, but we can’t leave you in Austria. You might betray our underground organization, now that you’ve seen me and know about the barge, Luliga. Captain Galucz will have to decide about you. Maybe he’ll simply drop you into the river.” Mara turned in desperate appeal to Durell, who said: “Then you’re going back to your barge?”

  “As planned. I promised I’d bring an American to help Stepanic, and I will. You’re as good as anyone, maybe better than Hammett, seeing he didn’t get very far, eh? So you come in his place. And we take the blonde tear bomb with us. We sail in the hour.”

  Durell hesitated only a moment. Gija was his only contact with which to reach Stepanic. With Hammett dead, the chance of getting Stepanic safely out of hostile territory might be lost forever, if someone didn’t go on the barge now.

  But there was Deirdre.

  He had to assume responsibility for taking over Harry Hammett’s mission now, since his call from Washington. But Deirdre was a problem he could not immediately solve. He had to make a choice. His impulse was to go after her, get her out of Kopa’s hands. He knew the sort of methods a man like Kopa might use on Deirdre—it was only too evident in the dossier he had read. Kopa could destroy her in many subtle ways, and the thought of Deirdre in his hands was almost intolerable. He had to get her free, back home, and safe.

  And he had to go after Stepanic, too.

  The choice between his job and Deirdre was sharp and clear. There was no way to do both.

  He had to abandon one or the other.

  CHAPTER VII

  The rain had stopped, and now a mist hung low over the dark, smoothly flowing waters of the Danube. The mist was a help. A speedboat, hidden in the reeds along the shore a short distance from the boathouse was Gija’s immediate destination. Durell walked ahead of him with Mara, not quite sure if he, too, was a prisoner. The immediate choice of action was taken from him by Gija’s gun.

  There was no sign of Otto Hoffner.

  “You two sit in the middle,” Gija said softly. “Use the oars. And for your life, don’t make any noise.”

  They pushed away from the bank and immediately felt the thrust of the dark, deep current going downstream. Durell, after the blonde girl’s first awkward efforts, took both oars. He could not see where they were going in the mist, but Gija had a riverman’s sixth sense of direction. In a few minutes the shore was out of sight, and they were surrounded only by the lapping black water, the curling fog, and the dim sounds of river traffic downstream.

  The girl was shivering. Durell could feel it in her shoulder as she sat beside him and pressed against him.

  “Are you all right?” he asked softly.

  “Yes. No. I feel sick. My head hurts.”

  “You weren’t hit very hard.”

  “I don’t want to go back. Please. Make him put me ashore again. I’ll be killed, shot, if Kopa gets his hands on me again.”

  “What about Mihály, your brother? Or was all that just a fancy fairy tale to get my sympathy?”

  She looked at him blankly as he pulled on the oars. “No, no. It was all the truth. Mihály is abandoned now. I can only hope and pray they will do nothing to him. He is only a boy. An innocent. He knows nothing of what they’ve made me do, to keep him safe. He knows nothing of the threats Kopa made to me, concerning him.”

  “Be quietl” Gija snapped.

  Durell looked up at the bargeman. Gija sat tensely in the stem, a hand on the tiller, just beyond the engine housing. He was studying the opposite river bank, lost in the shrouding mist. A glow of intense bright light made iridescent halos through the fog, and the snarl of the patrol boat seemed to come from all directions, growing imminently louder.

  “Stop rowing,” Gija whispered. “For the love of God—”

  They drifted in milky-white silence, unbroken except for the lap of current against the boat’s sides. Mara sat tensely, her shoulders straight, her face turning this way and that as if she could see through the night gloom. The glare of the patrol boat’s searchlight seemed to be coming from upriver, astern. Then the roar of its motor seemed to shake the wet atmosphere as it started again. It seemed as if the patrol was bearing straight down upon them.

  Each droplet of fog hanging in the air seemed to catch the searchlight’s brilliance. In the glare, Durell saw Gija’s face go tense. They drifted on. The motor screamed invisibly toward them. The brightness increased. . . .

  And then, miraculously, it went by, and they were left rocking heavily in the wash of the enemy’s wake.

  “Go on rowing,” Gija said.

  The waterfront of Bratislava was a busy place, a key port for the Danube traffic that went a thousand miles downstream, through Hungary and Yugoslavia and the Iron Gates into Rumania and the Black Sea ocean ports. The fog was cut somewhat by the glare of lights on the docks and factories, both munitions and machinery works, concentrated along the waterfront. Once around the bend in the river between the mountain spurs, Gija kept the boat close inshore on the Czech side, working in and out among the jutting piers to avoid the patrols that moved ceaselessly up and down the shipping channel.

  The barge Luliga turned out to be comparatively new, a steel box over two hundred feet in length, powered by two semi-diesel engines. It was painted black, with huge gaping hatches that even now were receiving the last of the cargo in nets that carried numerous wooden crates into the holds. Like all barges, the Luliga had a comfortable housing aft for the crew, although most of the men aboard her now were dockworkers who began to leave as hatch after hatch was sealed down tightly.

  A whistle blew as Gija waved Durell’s oars in and started the launch motor. They idled in the deep shadow of the next pier, holding their position against the thrust of the current with only an occasional revving of the engine. The noise didn’t matter now, since it was drowned by the clamor and chugging of donkey engines and screeching winch
es on the dock. When the dockworkers were all ashore, there came a deep, throbbing burst of power as the Luliga’s engines were started. Gija said: “We’ll go aboard now. It will be up to Captain Galucz to decide what to do about you. He will expect his son Anton to be with us.”

  “Is the captain one of the underground?” Durell asked. Gija shrugged. “Half and half. He does what he does for money, or for the hope of money. You have some?”

  “I’m only substituting for Hammett. I didn’t get much.”

  “That will not go down well with Galucz.”

  “I can promise him a reward,” Durell suggested. “Promises can’t be eaten. Well, we’ll see. Here we go,” Gija said.

  A few moments later the launch was up against the massive, blunt stern of the barge. A rope ladder came snaking down and Gija gestured with the gun. They were hidden from the docks by the bulk of the barge, as first Mara, then Durell climbed up to the crew housing.

  They were greeted by a stout bearded man in a thick turtleneck sweater, his head covered by a captain’s cap with a cracked and misshapen visor. This was Captain Galucz. The man’s thick brows came down in a scowl as he considered Durell and Mara; then he muttered something to Gija. Gija shrugged, and Galucz turned to Durell and spoke in roughly accented English.

  “My son, Anton—where is he?”

  “Safe in Vienna, captain.”

  “Why did he not return to you?”

  “There was an accident. He is well, I assure you. He is at the American Embassy.”

  “Was there trouble?”

  “No, no,” Durell said. “Otherwise, why should I be here?”

  “You are not the one who was sent originally, Gija tells me. There was a killing.”

  “Yes. And a kidnapping.”

  “And this woman? Gija says she is a spy.”

  “I do not know,” Durell said.

  A cloud of steam floated from the dock across the tiny afterdeck of the barge. The captain looked uncertain. He touched his hard, round belly and wet his lips that seemed bloodless between his gray beard and moustache. A whistle sounded piercingly on the dock. A man shouted, and the captain waved a gloved hand at Gija’s gun.