Assignment- 13th Princess

by Will B Aarons

  They had no difficulty finding the mosque. The glazed tiles of its onion-bulb dome sparkled against the ultra-marine sky. Durell regarded its arched portal with care as they strolled past, then they turned to pass it again.

  “I don’t see a courtyard,” Dara said.

  “It will be behind the building.” Durell looked up and down the street. “There’s a high wall back there. We’ll have to go through the inside Of the mosque.”

  A scout car snorted into the narrow street, bumping and lurching over the paving stones, and Durell jerked Dara into a doorway. He waited until the patrol had passed, waited half a minute more, ducked into the mosque.

  They moved soundlessly across prayer rugs arranged on a worn, limestone floor. It was cool in here. Pigeons roosting in the dome made guttering noises, and half a dozen large clocks that stood around the elaborately tiled walls clicked and clacked. Wrought-iron chandeliers shaped like wagon wheels hung on long ropes, but the only light was a muted glow from the area of the Moorish-columned mihrab and minber.

  He tested the latch on a blue-painted plank door, a thin ribbon of light gleaming on the barrel of his gun, held down by his thigh. The door was unlocked. It groaned a little as he pushed it open with two fingers. He flagged Dara to a halt and listened and sniffed the still air for the scent of a cigarette or perfume or anything out of the ordinary. Only a musty odor teased his nose. There was almost no light in there, the only illumination coming from a narrow window high to the left, above a flight of stone steps worn hollow by ages of use. The gusty breeze made sounds like an enormous towel being thrown again and again at the dome of the building. Quickly he stepped through, Dara coming behind, and found a second door and slid silently into the courtyard.

  It was a confusion of star-frosting and shadows, black on gray.

  No one called. Nothing moved.

  Dara reached into the bodice of her black dress, and the silver derringer shone in her hand.

  “You take one side, and I’ll take the other,” Durell said.

  They parted, moved down two sides of the arcaded courtyard wall. Shadows behind the columns were dense. Water tinkled from a fountain in the center of the courtyard and fell into a pool impounded by low, circular walls decorated with arabesque tiles. There were aloes, fig and orange trees, a large grape arbor. Crickets chirruped and mosquitoes whirred angrily against the flute notes of a bulbul that sang in the shrubs.

  There was no sign of the Thirteenth Princess.

  No one was in the courtyard.

  “What now?” Dara asked.

  “She may have been delayed.”

  “I don’t like this.”

  Durell’s voice was low and patient. “We’ll wait.”

  The wind swept against the dome and minarets and fell into the courtyard and stumbled weakly among the trees there. A roof-mounted air-conditioning unit purred somewhere nearby. Durell thought of the navy helicopter, shone a penlight on his wrist chronometer. It was due soon.

  He studied the gloomy courtyard, judged its dimensions, decided there seemed to be room for a landing on its south side, between the pond and arcade. It would be tight, and there was the wind to consider. The pilot must make the final decision after a look under his landing floods. If it could not be accomplished, a lowered sling would have to suffice.

  Durell did not know what he would do if the princess refused to go. He dismissed the idea.

  She had to go.

  Dara stood next to him, almost military in her straight bearing and disciplined silence. They watched and listened as more minutes passed. Then Durell heard the dim flutter of the helicopter, still out over the gulf.

  At the same moment a wooden groan announced the opening of the courtyard door.

  Chapter 10

  Durell hurried up the length of the courtyard, toward the mosque, aware of the brisk tap of Dara’s feet on the stones of the arcade floor behind him. He thought he saw movement at the door up there, but the night shadows obscured everything. He slowed and moved closer, pistol ready. A sobbing gasp that came through the hollow moan of the wind stopped him dead in his tracks.

  Then he bent slightly, crept forward, picked out the form of a huge man who struggled feebly to rise from the ground.

  “Yilmaz!” Dara cried.

  “He’s been shot,” Durell said with stifled dismay.

  He knelt beside Princess Ayla’s bodyguard. The man’s shirtfront was sopping with blood, and the hand that he extended weakly toward Durell was streaked with blood that had run down his arm and dribbled from his fingertips. Durell struggled against a sense of defeat that rose in him as he cradled Yilmaz’s massive head and loosened his tie.

  “What happened?” Durell asked.

  “Army—patrol. I ran. They—” The big Turk grimaced and clenched his eyes shut. His breath came in shallow, panting waves. Only an animal stamina had carried him this far, Durell decided, but he seemed less than halfconscious now, was on the point of giving up.

  “Where is Princess Ayla?” Durell urged.

  “I came to—” Blood bubbled in Yilmaz’s words, and he coughed and widened his eyes. Durell waited. Something feral, cunning, hunted gathered in him to flee, but he denied it. Yilmaz licked his lips, smearing blood from his tongue, and gasped: “She—she left—”

  The Turk stiffened as if jolted with electricity, and as suddenly went limp.

  Durell and Dara exchanged stares.

  “She played you for a sucker, Sam. She’s out, but you’re going to take the rap. You’re—”

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m just telling you.”

  “We don’t know what happened.”

  Dara nodded toward the dead Turk, and wings of her short, blond hair fell past her cheeks. “You won’t find out from that,” she said.

  The battering racket of the helicopter came abruptly from just beyond the walls, and Durell craned his face up to the sky. The naval helicopter banked into view, coming around the icy sheen of the dome of the mosque, and settled low and uncertainly toward the courtyard. Landing lights blasted away the darkness. There was a tornadic whirl of wind, and the shrill of jet turbines ripped the air as the chopper cozied into the only small space that would accommodate it.

  Dust and sand raised by the spinning rotor blades choked and stung Durell as he ran for the machine, ripping through shrubs and hurdling benches. He banged on the cockpit door with the butt of his pistol. It swung open, and a helmeted crewman leaned into the wind and noise.

  Durell shouted to be heard: “Tell the pilot—return to your ship.”

  The crewman made a face of incomprehension.

  Durell spun his arm around and pointed to the sky.

  The crewman nodded this time. “What about the passenger?” he called.

  The wind stood Durell’s thick black hair on end as he shook his head. “There isn’t any,” he yelled. “Just get the hell out of here.”

  The door snapped shut; the noise of the turbines rose to an earsplitting shriek; the craft lifted away.

  In the comparative silence after its departure, Durell felt as if he had been abandoned at the bottom of a black abyss. He became aware of Dara at his side. She spoke in a tone of dread. “Something tells me it’s going to be a long night, Sam.”

  Durell made no reply, but the sweat soaking his collar felt suddenly chill. He cast his gaze around the courtyard one more time, then entered the door Yilmaz had come through, stepping over the corpse that lay like a fallen tree. He pushed through the second door into the dimly lighted mosque, and headed for the street entrance.

  He had taken only a couple of steps when he froze at the clatter of feet out there.

  Then the Arab who had brought Princess Ayla’s message to him burst into the mosque, aimed an accusing arm at Durell, and shouted: “That’s him!”

  The whole Dhubaran army seemed to be tumbling inside behind him.

  “Halt! Halt!” an officer bellowed.

  But Durell was back in the space between
two doors and herding a momentarily confused Dara toward the stairs on the right. He heard the confused slap of many running feet as he stumbled over worn stone steps, righted himself, scrambled up past Dara, and tugged urgently at her hand. He could barely see in here. Now she followed the ring of his heels in the darkness, her breath gusty and light. Eight steps up he stopped at a landing, where the staircase doubled back and the night sky shone through a single high window. Dara ran into him, bounced off, started up the next flight, but he grabbed her and held her back. He studied the window, blood pounding in his ears, and seemed to be looking up from the black depths of a well. Then the soldiers hurtled through the iron-studded door below and through the second door and into the courtyard, and there was an immediate shout and hubbub as they found the body of Yilmaz.

  Durell gritted his teeth and waited, pressed against the wall, holding Dara still. He heard a command in Arabic to scour the courtyard for the two foreigners, and then he breathed a little easier. They had a minute or two before the search returned to the interior of the mosque. He waited a few seconds, then led Dara on up the stairs to where he could just reach the window. He held Dara beneath the armpits and raised her light, svelte frame until she could catch the window sill and crawl through, and then he hauled himself up to follow. They came out on a narrow walkway that embraced the enormous, shining bulb of the dome. The wind whipped and tore at them. Lights of the city’s modem office towers blazed over the mud and tile rooftops. Oilfield flares and rig lights winked in the distance. The harbor, viewed between the taller buildings, was a dark glass.

  “We’ll have to jump to the street,” Durell told Dara. “They’ll come back to the stairs when they don’t find us in the courtyard. Can you do it?”

  “Sure.” She knelt and looked down into the alley.

  “Just keep your knees loose.”

  “I know,” she said impatiently. She lowered herself over the edge of the walkway, the breeze billowing her skirt to show flashes of white thigh. Her voice came as a strained whisper—“Here’s hoping!”—and she let go. A soft thump and a gasp came back to Durell’s ears, but nothing to indicate harm or fear, and then he turned loose, felt a rush of air and then the solid slap of the paving stones on the balls of his feet. He pitched, rolled, smacked into Dara, and came up in a tangle of arms and legs.

  Quickly and soundlessly they moved toward the street, the rough plaster of the wall scraping their backs as they went sidewise in the shadows. Durell heard the commotion of the soldiers from above now, as the search for him went into the upper reaches of the mosque. He peered around the corner of the alley, into the street where two troop trucks loomed darkly. They were parked in front of the mosque, and a single guard walked to and fro beside them.

  Durell signaled Dara to stay out of sight, waited until the guard had turned and was walking away, then hopped three long, silent strides to hide himself behind the tailgate of the first truck.

  When the guard passed on his return, Durell hammered .the hard edge of his palm against the nape of the man’s neck, and the other dropped in his tracks. Durell caught him as he fell and dragged him into the alley and laid him down.

  “Did you kill him?” Dara asked.

  “I’m not asking for more trouble. He’ll just have a stiff neck for a week or so.”

  “They will kill us, if they get the chance—they’ll certainly kill me, if they find out—”

  “Let’s beat it,” Durell interjected.

  They ran to the nearest track, hopped into the cab, and roared away.

  “What will you do now?” Dara asked.

  “Get to the American embassy, try to find out what the score is.” Durell drove with one hand and wiped sweat from his brow with the other.

  “I’m not sure I want to know the score.” Dara’s tone was sour. She held her lower lip between straight, white teeth.

  “At least Princess Ayla’s out of the country.”

  “Yes—and the army’s after us. We should have got on that helicopter.”

  Durell did not bother to answer, his mind busy with other matters. He would have preferred to deal with a K Section Central here, but Dhubar was a newly important country in which his agency had no Central. It simply lacked the funds. The ambassador he must rely on, Norman Swayne, knew nothing of Durell’s mission, only that he was a U.S. intelligence officer, and that he was to be given consideration and assistance. Such arrangements seldom worked well. The diplomats, fearful for their carefully cultivated relationships with the host country, viewed K Section operations with suspicion and trepidation. Men such as Durell, on the other hand, tended to play fast and loose with the rules and to rely as little as possible on a State Department that had its own aims and means of achieving them.

  They came to a roadblock, were waved on, thanks to their military vehicle.

  The city seemed as empty as the desert that pressed against it on three sides. The bark of a dog echoed down a barren, windy alley. A rat darted through the glare of the headlamps as the truck rumbled and jounced down a back street. The reek of dead fires was everywhere. Durell’s wristwatch read one-thirty.

  Dara spoke over the squeak and roar of the truck. “Did you ever stop to think what these people would do to me, if they found out I was a Jew?”

  Durell glanced at the rear-vision mirror. “You knew when you volunteered to come here.”

  “It just seems that everything has fallen apart.” She lowered her big hazel eyes toward her lap.

  Durell had never seen her this depressed before. It worried him, and it annoyed him, but he decided to keep that to himself. He put an arm gently around her shoulders and pulled her next to him. “Don’t waste your time thinking like that,” he said. “Everything will come out all right.”

  “But what if it doesn’t?” Her eyes turned defiant. “If they catch me, I’ll kill myself.”

  Durell spared a glance from the road to try and judge if she were serious. “Are you that frightened of them?” he asked.

  “Not frightened—I just won’t give them the satisfaction of doing—the things they would do.”

  Durell saw a stubborn hatred on her freckled face, a hatred that would live beyond the grave, if such a thing could be. He thought then how little he really knew about this woman in the intimate pose of his wife. She was in her early twenties, spoke the American idiom like a native—which meant she must have been stationed there for some time. Her walk was a slightly but clearly prideful swagger, as if she were ready for any challenge. She had never shown real fear—not until she mentioned capture by the Arabs—and then it had been fear of humiliation and the violation of her pride more than of her body.

  You couldn’t talk about it to a person who felt like that, he thought. There was nothing to be said.

  He peered ahead, down the dark, narrow street. “We’d better ditch the truck here and go on to the embassy afoot,” he said.

  “The situation is grave—very grave, Mr. Durell.”

  “Tell me what you have learned, Mr. Ambassador.”

  Norman Swayne touched his silver hair above the right temple, made a tent of his fingers and delicately cleared his throat. “The palace believes you took the princess.”

  “Go on.”

  “They believe you kidnaped her.”

  Durell’s face hardened. “They are mistaken,” he said.

  “Are they? I must tell you, I’ve dealt with K Section personnel before.” The ambassador’s thin, dry lips smiled without amusement. “I found them capable of nearly anything.”

  “I did not kidnap the princess,” Durell repeated firmly.

  “I don’t expect you to admit it to me, even if you did, Mr. Durell.” Swayne smiled politely at Dara. “Forgive me, Mrs. Durell. It’s quite late, I know—would you care for coffee?”

  “Thank you, no,” Dara said. She looked a bit haggard, Durell noted, her short hair windblown; sandy, ocher smudges on her black dress. He sat with her on a low, sumptuously upholstered divan to one side of the
sweeping, tidy vista of Swayne’s desk. His chair was higher, so that he looked down on them, and Durell resented the cheap trick and felt not the least intimidated. From the monochrome yellow carpet to a Nineteenth Century painting of the Hudson River that dominated the walls, the office might as well have been in Denver as in Dhubar.

  The ambassador straightened his tie and leaned toward them. Despite the late hour and Durell’s unexpected arrival, he was impeccably dressed in an off-white suit with vest, soft white shirt, and club tie. His dark tan told Durell that he had spent a lot of time outdoors, probably at the new golf club with oil company executives or falconing and cruising to the Persian Gulf islands with his late friend, the old emir. “What are we going to do about this, Mr. Durell?” he said delicately.

  “We’ll see,” Durell said. “What makes them think I kidnaped the princess?”

  “It’s rather painful for me to say.”

  Durell spoke with a wry drawl. “Give it a try.”

  “Yes. Well, they say your lovely wife”—he nodded graciously toward Dara—“is a Jew, an agent of the Shin Beth.”

  Durell tried not to show his sense of shock and alarm, but his efforts were wasted on the old ambassador, who just smiled—this time sincerely.

  Dara handled it better. “Horseradish,” she snorted.

  The ambassador was amused. “I told them it was absurd, my dear.”

  “But you didn’t believe it was absurd,” Durell said.

  “No.” Swayne’s eyes went steely.

  “And they didn’t believe it when you told them.”

  “No.” The ambassador drew a deep, slow breath. “I’m afraid they wish to take you into custody. And Mrs. Durell as well.”

  “We have diplomatic immunity,” Durell replied.

  “Quite so.”

  Dara spoke, her voice thin and uncertain. “The worst they can do is deport us.”

  The ambassador peered at them from beneath his high forehead and shaggy, white brows. “Not—quite—so,” he replied. He took another breath and looked up at the ceiling. “You see, we have an exceptional situation—let us say it is unique.” He cut his cunning old eyes back at Dara. “The wife of the ruler of a nation has disappeared, is believed to have been the victim of foul play—she left her infant son behind; would she have done that voluntarily? And the ruler is consumed with anger”—Swayne lowered his voice—“and desire for revenge. Now. How might he vent this fury? He could embargo oil exports to the country he believed responsible—say a three-month hiatus, just a slap on the hand. But a dangerous display of power that would temporarily weaken us and possibly create an outcry for military intervention. That would make other Arab states—and more importantly, the Russians—very nervous. Someone could miscalculate, and. . . .” He lifted his frosty brows and held out his hands.