Lissa said: “She wants a gun for herself and Petar. She insists we must all be armed, each one of us.”
“All right,” Durell said. “We’ll take the chance.”
But there were too many of them, he thought. It would be a miracle if they could survive the mountain rigors and escape pursuit. Alone with Stepanic, he could make it easily. Or with Gija. But there were the girls, and Medjan, and the old woman. They could go no faster than the slowest among them, and be no stronger than the weakest of the group.
Nevertheless, a start had to be made.
Lissa and Adam led the way. And when they left the hut, it had stopped raining, and in the east there was the beginning of moonlight to show them the ancient way across the wilderness of the mountains.
They had walked only half an hour, moving in single file with Lissa in the lead, hoping to put as much distance as possible between themselves and pursuit before sheltering for the night, when Gija trotted up beside Durell. When he spoke, there was anguish in his voice. “They’re gone,” he whispered. “Mama—Jelenka—and Medjan.”
“You’re sure?”
“They went back to the hut, I think. Can we stop a moment? I thought I heard—I’m not sure what I heard.” Gija was tormented. “I think I know what they have done, those two. Who could have thought it?”
Durell signalled for a halt. They had crossed a valley and toiled up a slope opposite to Zara Dagh. Dimly through the night they heard a thump of grenades and the rattle of machine-gun fire. There were -muzzle flares, like fireflies, far off in the frosty night.
Gija groaned between his teeth.
“Jelenka didn’t want to come,” he whispered. “She wanted to die here. And Medjan could not leave Viajec. His soul was part of Zara Dagh. I misjudged him. He was cruel and evil, but he’s of the same clay that I am made.”
Together they listened to the faraway sounds of battle on the mountainside. Durell drew a soft, deep breath. In his mind he could see the strangely allied pair, the staunch old woman and the big, moustached Turk, besieged in the stone hut. With luck, they could hold out for hours.
They would not be taken alive.
They would fight as if they were all trapped in the hut and so buy precious time, adding to their margin of safety with every moment.
Gija wept.
And then Mara Tirana came and stood beside him and her hand touched his and her fingers entwined in his, and Gija looked down at her and knew this was the end of one thing and the beginning of another.
After a time, they all walked on over the dark mountain.
CHAPTER XX
Four days later they saw the Danube again. On the first night they had halted when it began to rain again, turning off the dim path that Lissa followed to find shelter in the dim, vine-grown ruins of an old Roman watchtower. They showed no lights. They huddled together without fire, sheltered partly from the cold wind and rain, listening to the frozen trees clash all around them in the night. Flares burst in the sky over Zara Dagh to the north. They were being hunted from the air, too. Durell could hear the dim beat of a piston-engine plane slowly scouring the dark night. But they were safe here. Petar Medjan and Jelenka had bought for them the precious time they had needed.
He helped Gija bandage Lissa’s wrist while they ate cold, canned rations. Afterward, Durell spoke briefly to Adam Stepanic and they checked on the instrument packs together. Adam seemed embarrassed.
“I didn’t expect it would be you to come in after me.” Durell shrugged. “The man who got the job was killed before he was fairly started. I came in after Deirdre, and got the assignment then.”
“I really don’t know what to say. Another day, maybe, and I’d have given up. I can’t thank you—”
“We’re not out yet,” Durell said. “And I don’t do this sort of thing for thanks, of course.”
“But I want to explain about Deirdre—”
“You don’t have to explain anything.”
“But I should. You see, we thought—I thought I was in love with her. But this past week with Lissa—well, we found something—Lissa and I, I mean—”
Durell cut off Adam’s awkward phrases. “Why not tell Deirdre about it as gently as you can?” he smiled.
“I don’t know what to tell her,” Adam said miserably.
“After all her loyalty in this thing—”
“Tell her the truth,” Durell suggested.
He got up and sat with Lissa and listened to her brief account of Adam’s week on Zara Dagh, while Adam spoke to Deirdre. He knew Deirdre would make it easy for him.
He lighted a cigarette, careful to shelter the match in a comer of the old Roman wall. There was an inscription in Latin in the ancient stone, and he touched it with his—fingertips as he traced it out. It was a memorial tablet to the wife of F. Galba, centurion in the legions of Trajan, Emperor of Rome. The wife had died of fever. . . .
The match went out and he read no more.
This had endured all through the ages of man, he thought. There was a timelessness in the love of man for woman. For almost two thousand years these words of love had endured on this bleak mountain top, a quiet prayer to pagan gods for the soul of a woman, spoken from the agonized heart of a soldier stationed on the battlefront of the war against barbarians. . . .
Men did not change, Durell thought. He looked at the little group sheltering from the wind in a comer of the ancient, crumbling wall. The wind rattled bare branches overhead. There was a smell of snow in the air, and hecould only hope it would hold off. He watched Gija and Mara Tirana. They lay quietly in each other’s arms, remote from the others. She had lost her intolerance for another’s problems, he thought; and this was good. She had stopped being absorbed in herself and her tragedy, and accepted Gija’s, and this was good, too. Let them weep together and begin anew together. They had each found what was needed in the other.
Adam Stepanic finished talking to Deirdre. Durell watched him get up and cross the shelter to Lissa. They sat in silence. The wind whimpered. Dark clouds made the night impenetrable, except where another flare burst on the peaks of Zara Dagh.
Deirdre sat down beside him. She touched Durell’s face and then put her hand in his. They sat like that for a time, and then they slept.
They reached the Danube on the fourth day. Gija went ahead to contact the underground in the town below, and came back that the purge of the organization seemed to have ended with the Luliga’s self-destruction. A fishing-boat would take them down through the delta. It would be slow, but safer, and they could reach the Black Sea that way. And the boat had a navigational radio that could be used to contact a NATO air base in Turkey.
The boat was small and crowded. It took devious channels through the vast, drowned wilderness of the Danube delta. The sky hardened and turned a cold blue. There was no warmth in the sun. They slept and ate in the holds, except when the crew signalled it was safe to come on deck. Then they sat in the chilly sunshine and looked at the birds in the reedy swampland and the distant hump of a wooded island and smelled the salt of the approaching sea.
The next day they were well beyond the coastal waters. By nightfall, they were picked up by an Army helicopter based on the Turkish mainland. Twenty-four hours later they were in Istanbul.
General Dickinson McFee was already waiting for them at the Divan Hotel near Taksim Square. The sun seemed warmed here, shining on the crowded international shipping in the Bosporus and the Golden Horn. McFee, a small, tightly-strung, gray-haired man with crackling authority, wasted no time.
“Stepanic is already headed for home, Sam,” he told Durell. “Got his orders fifteen minutes ago. His electronic equipment and tapes from the capsule are being flown to Washington in a SAC bomber. We’re giving out to the press that he was recovered in the wilds of Anatolia. No use making an unnecessary international incident out of this thing.”
Durell nodded. “About this girl, Lissa—you can arrange a special entry visa for her, can’t you?”
; “It’s already done, Cajun. She'll fly commercial, of course; we’ve arranged passage, drawn against Stepanic’s flight pay—we have to stick within the budget these days.” McFee turned his trim, narrow head and looked hard at Durell. “I thought Major Stepanic and Deirdre were—”
“It’s all over,” Durell interrupted.
“Did you fix it, Cajun?”
“It happened by itself.”
“I’ll bet. . . . One other thing: this young man, Gija, and Mara Tirana. Can we arrange something for them? Should we?”
“You’ve got the authority, Dickinson, and I recommend it. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Gija. I think it would be best if they all flew together in tonight’s flight. I wouldn’t want them picked up by other agents and questioned as to how we got Stepanic out. The best place for them is Washington. You can use some authority from a Congressional committee, can’t you?”
“All right, we’ll do that, then. Something can be arranged for them as refugees seeking political asylum.” McFee paused. “You’ll make your report about Harry Hammett, of course?”
“I'll write it up when I get back.”
“When do you want to fly?”
“Any time. With Deirdre, of course.”
McFee smiled thinly. “Istanbul is a romantic place, not bad for a few days’ rest, Cajun. You and Deirdre are in no hurry, are you?”
“No,” Durell said. “Not now.”
They shook hands. McFee was busy. He did not often come aboard from K Section's headquarters in Washington. Durell watched the dynamic little man leave the hotel lobby, and then he took the elevator up to his room. He could see the shining sweep of the Sea of Marmara and the dome and minarets of St. Sophia’s basilica near the Galata Bridge. Ancient Byzantium, he thought, still endured. He would enjoy showing Deirdre the Blue Mosque, the Grand Bazaar, the Hippodrome of Constantine the Great.
They had connecting rooms. He heard the shower going in her bath when he knocked, and then she called his name and he went in and sat down to wait for her.
She came in wearing a new robe he had purchased for her that morning. Her long, dark hair was soft, incredibly alive; her eyes smiled at him. There was a tentative invitation in the corners of her mouth.
“Well, what did McFee say, darling?”
“We have some time to ourselves. I thought perhaps we could spend a few days here, Dee. We have a lot to talk about.”
He would tell her, he decided suddenly, about the inscription he had read on the stone in the light of his cigarette match, that first night of their flight from Zara Dagh. For two thousand years, a centurion of Trajan’s legions had declared his love for his lost wife. She had gone with him on the military duties demanded by Rome. Perhaps they had discussed her staying at home, as he had discussed his own duties with K Section. Perhaps the centurion wanted his wife to remain safe in the Eternal City. But she had gone with him on the campaign and lonely outpost duty in the wilderness of the barbarians, where she had died.
Was it worth it? he wondered. The centurion thought so, although he had lost his heart's love. They had been together. Neither time nor distance had separated them.
His was not a unique decision. And now Durell had made his own, and he wanted to tell Deirdre that there was a time in their lives when caution could prove a tragic trap to deprive them of happiness forever. She wanted to share his world. He would open the door, then, and let her in, and hope it would not end for them as it had for the centurion on Zara Dagh. And if it did—well, there would be a time behind them, and this time right now, when he looked at how beautiful she was and wanted her.
And Deirdre said: “When will you tell me to go home again, Sam?”
“Never,” he said. He walked toward her and she opened her arms to him and he said: “Home is here.”
THE END
of an Original Gold Medal Novel by
Edward S. Aarons
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
Assignment - Mara Tirana Page 19