Assignment- 13th Princess

by Will B Aarons

  The prince looked stunned.

  Durell took the instant before he recovered to lunge for the staff that held the brass crescent emblem. He heard a commotion and knew the two guards were bounding after him from their positions at the rear. He took no time to look at them but yanked the staff from its heavy base plate and stabbed its butt blindly and viciously backward. It smashed into someone, jarring his wristbones, and he heard a howl, spun, saw the heavier of the two bent double.

  The smaller one came on, clawing for his gun.

  Prince Tahir leaped from his chair, his dark face swollen with wrath.

  In one sweep of lightning motion, Durell slammed the blunt end of the staff across Tahir’s chin, then made a thrust of the wicked crescent tips that ripped out the smaller guard’s throat.

  The man sank to his knees as panic bloated his eyes, and his fingers scrabbled at a jagged rip in his neck. Blood and breath spewed and babbled.

  Tahir was out cold.

  The larger guard was still bent double, gasping through a wincing face, when Durell mercilessly broke the heavy staff across the back of his skull.

  “And then there were none,” he muttered with some satisfaction. “Uh-oh, spoke too soon.”

  Another man appeared in the doorway, his face alarmed by the ruckus. Durell threw the double-pointed brass crescent like an ax, and its horns thudded into the man’s chest. He screamed, tumbled away.

  Durell scooped up a fallen Beretta automatic, ran and burst through a cypress-framed window. He hit the yielding turf in a glassy shower, came up on the balls of his feet, and sprinted through the pines. Shouts and bellows echoed from inside the mansion.

  His thigh was stiff, and a red stain seeped into the cloth of his slacks above torn sutures. The wound burned and complained. He gritted his teeth and kept going, his eyes on a shiny speedboat moored down the shallow slope.

  Now came the spiteful snapping of gunfire, and a twig fluttered down in front of him.

  Then he was out of the pines and in the sky’s white glare. The sea was starkly blue. He crossed a pebbled beach to a floating dock, hurled himself into the rakish launch and cast off as slugs spanked the water.

  A thirty-foot power cruiser was idling up to its moorings as half a dozen men burst shouting from the house. Durell watched over his shoulder as it swung around and gave chase, but it was too slow. Ten minutes later it was reduced to a white speck in his wake and turned back to the island.

  A bone-wrenching half-hour went by as the light boat crashed from wavetop to wavetop, then he was in the Bosporus between the Haydarpasa railway station on the Asian side and the enigmatic walls of Istanbul on the European. He cut across the bow of a sparkling white ferry, overtook a Lyle tramp steamer with its maroon hull and yellow funnel, then angled toward Nadine’s yali.

  A few moments later he docked the boat and entered the house through a door that stood open to a ground-level sundeck.

  A house fly buzzed and batted against a window.

  The efficient hum of a refrigerator came from the nearby kitchen.

  The house seemed empty as he moved through warm, silent rooms. But then he heard something else. It might have been the scrape of shoe leather, a gasp, he did not know. His hand went under his jacket to the Beretta in his waistband as he stopped, listened, went on.

  The sundeck door puzzled him. It did not seem likely that Nadine would have left it open.

  He whiffed expensive cologne, then the burnt odor of dead embers as he turned into the sitting room. Draperies blocked a sun that struck hotly now against streets and heads and steel decks of ships. A mound of cold ashes filled the domed fireplace, as if Nadine had sat up all night—the fireplace had been clean the day before.

  There came a broken, panting sound.

  Mirrors around the room reflected his soiled clothing and taut face as it swung back and forth. Then he stepped around a sofa, and there was Nadine.

  She was hardly recognizable.

  Her perfectly shaped face was distorted by angry blue lumps and swellings, the dazzling platinum hair matted in bloody tangles and cords. A sleeve of her dress had been ripped off, buttons popped loose. A massive braise blemished the pendulous whiteness of her exposed left breast. A flutter of eyelashes showed the incredible blue of her irises as he gently tugged the hem of her dress down. He did not know what they might have done to her, but he judged by her eyes that she had told them all they wished to know.

  She whimpered as he laid her on the sofa. “Oh, Sam—I screwed everything up.”

  “Just take it easy.”

  “Can you forgive me?” she asked through swollen lips.

  “For trying to protect your daughter? Nothing to forgive.” He worked each elbow and knee, then moved firm, probing hands down the slender width of her rib cage. She sucked in a sharp breath. “You’ll be all right,” he said. “A rib may be broken. I’ll call an ambulance.”

  He started for the phone, and her small hand gripped his wrist. “It was Prince Tahir’s men,” she said.

  “I guessed,” he said. He remembered the cabin cruiser he had encountered as he fled the island and Prince Tahir’s boast that he would know Princess Ayla’s whereabouts within the hour. “I passed them on the way,” he said.

  “I had to tell them where she was. They just kept knocking me around.” Tears welled into her eyes. “It seemed there was no end to it.”

  “Don’t get excited.”

  “I had just told Sheik Zeid.”

  “So he and Prince Tahir will be headed for the same place. That will fit Tahir’s plans perfectly.” Durell chewed on his lip.

  “Do you think he would harm Sheik Zeid?”

  “We may have a brief grace period,” Durell said. “Prince Tahir has to have possession of a certain document before he makes his move. The trouble is, Sheik Zeid has that document, and he doesn’t believe that Tahir and Princess Ayla are threats.”

  “Sam! You don’t suppose—that Ayla is in this with Prince Tahir?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She held his darkening eyes with a pained gaze as an apprehensive shiver seized her. “No! I won’t believe it,” she moaned.

  “Then why is Ayla hiding?”

  “It’s beyond me. She made me promise not to tell anyone where she was, not even Sheik Zeid—but I told him anyhow, because I know they love each other.”

  “I just remembered something—Dara was to tail Sheik Zeid this morning.”

  “Your wife?”

  “She isn’t my wife. She’s an Israeli intelligence agent.”

  “I don’t understand. Everything is crazy.”

  Durell blew a short breath through his nose. “I owe you the truth,” he said. “She may be a killer.”

  “You mean she might—she might. . . .” The words stuck in her throat.

  Durell nodded.

  “Ayla?”

  “Yes. And if she overheard your directions to Sheik Zeid, she’s already on her way there.”

  Nadine’s face went white. “I’ve been such an ass. If only I’d told you yesterday—”

  “Don’t waste your breath,” Durell interrupted. “Tell me now.”

  Chapter 21

  A roadblock had been thrown across the dirt road that wound along the wavering edge of the valley of peribacasi, “fairy chimneys,” the weird natural pinnacles of ancient Cappadocia.

  Durell had cut off from the asphalt highway between Urgiip and Göreme in central Turkey, following Nadine’s careful instructions, and had expected to come in about three kilometers to the white stone house where Princess Ayla hid.

  He had gone little more than a kilometer when he glimpsed the barricade at a twist of the road about five hundred yards down the scrubby, rocky slope. Two soldiers armed with automatic rifles stood down there. He killed the engine of his green VW, glided into a graveled nook beside the trail, and decided regretfully that he must cut across the low ridge on foot.

  The sun was blistering, but a breeze up here helped s
omewhat. At the crest, he squinted across the glare for the roadblock, but it was hidden behind ridges and outcroppings. To his rear the snowcapped volcano, Erciyes Dagi, sparkled against a radiant sky. The ashes it had spewed in the Tertiary Age had become soft tufa stone from which eons of weather had carved the white, pink, and yellow spires that spread across the bleak landscape below.

  Greek Christians hiding from raiding Arabs, Mongols, and Turks had found refuge in these weirdly needled valleys, Durell recalled. For a thousand years they had chipped and scraped and bored in the earth, hollowing out cavern churches, monasteries, even whole villages stocked with the necessities of life to house them in times of invasion.

  The dusty, savage land seemed incapable of supporting human habitation, but he could look down on a small village heaped in a narrow valley. Poplars grew dark and green along a dry watercourse. Apricots lay drying in the sun on flat rooftops. Veiled women strung washing.

  It was a peaceful scene, and he would have liked to rest here, but that would only stiffen his leg and remind him of its pain.

  Besides, there was no time.

  After calling an ambulance for Nadine, he had contacted Rob Thawley at the consulate, and Thawley had reported that General Abdurrahman had rejoined his division on Cyprus during the night. His troops had embarked on transports, ostensibly for normal rotation back to Turkey.

  But an NRO satellite showed that the transports were holding station in the Mediterranean rather than steaming for home.

  Durell had hung up convinced that the armored division only waited for Prince Tahir’s signal to swing southward for Suez and Dhubar.

  Burdened with an overpowering sense of urgency, he had chartered a plane for Kayseri, where he had rented the VW.

  He might have been too late already—and now the roadblock stole more precious time.

  His thigh wound burned and throbbed as he made his way down the slope and along the limit of the valley of fairy chimneys, his gait a stiff, swinging limp. Sweat rolled down his cheeks and spattered in the thirsty soil. The road came again into view on his right. He kept his distance from it, even though its smoothed surface would have eased his way. With a game leg he could not afford to be surprised where the route twisted and dipped among outcroppings and ravines.

  He glanced back, listened, perceived nothing to show that the soldiers at the roadblock suspected his presence.

  A lark warbled.

  The air was redolent of wild herbs, and the sky looked hard as lapis lazuli, infinitely high and melancholy.

  He dropped prone in the scrub as a farmer rode a donkey around a bend, straddling the animal between two deep straw baskets, his scuffed shoes flattened at the heels to avoid the effort of tying and untying them. Durell was tempted to bargain for the donkey, but the farmer might say something to the soldiers about it. He let the man pass, and when he had clip-clopped out of sight, Durell hauled himself up and told himself that he must go on. The torn thigh must be made to function as long as possible.

  There was dark, damp scarlet in the gray dust where he had lain.

  He hobbled on under the brazen sun, his pace slow through the clutching scrub brush. The sere land dipped and heaved, each change in grade a challenge.

  A high fang of stone rose above the close horizon of the next hill. Its surface was scraped and chiseled, a score of dark cave openings staring out of its steep sides. Then he topped the rise and saw more spires and cliffs that had been honeycombed with tunnel entrances.

  To his left, on a sloping shelf of alluvium, was the country estate of Dr. Kemal Kose, if Durell had his directions correct. A vineyard stretched down its rearward slope; big leaves danced in the hot breeze, tossing the light of a lowering sun. Lemon trees and poplars shaded the grounds.

  Nadine had said the house was vacant for the summer, except for Princess Ayla.

  It would be crowded enough now, Durell thought.

  A pair of helicopters was parked on the lawn. They bore the star and crescent insignia of Turkey. They were painted dark green, and Durell took them for military aircraft, remembering that the home base of General Abdurrahman’s division was an army post in this region of Cappadocia. A handful of soldiers lounging in the shade must have come from the skeleton garrison remaining at the post, he reasoned.

  A needling impatience gripped him as he glanced at the sun. Sunset was still half an hour away, but he’d better not wait if Prince Tahir had Sheik Zeid down there. He spared a thought for Princess Ayla, but she was secondary at the moment.

  As for Dara—he couldn’t afford to worry about her now.

  Until Sheik Zeid was out of danger, no one else counted, including himself.

  He studied the layout and decided his only choice was to work his way down into the valley below the house and come up to it through the sheltering rocks and then the vineyard. It was a long way around. He sat on the warm soil and ripped his trousers open above the oozing wound. His thigh was caked with blood. The flesh was tender and inflamed, and shooting pains raked out when he touched it.

  He got to his feet, aware with sudden concern that he was nearing exhaustion, and stumbled on down the slope. He was a man of bullish stamina, his body conditioned by years of hardship, and he had a driving determination that left little thought for personal discomfort or the frailties of flesh and bone. There was something to relish, he had learned, in the mastery of will over body that seemed to call forth reserves of strength from an almost mystical source.

  He slipped and plodded.

  He kept going somehow, pressed on by the loom of impending disaster, images of violence floating before his mind—Sheik Zeid bloodied and dead; the Mideast in flames; and the flames spreading and spreading. . . .

  He stopped suddenly, tall form wavering a bit, ear cocked.

  Someone was weeping.

  He turned his face up the steep slope as his eyes followed hand-hewn steps in the soft rock face. He wound his way up, and the sound grew louder. He came to a tunnel entrance, hesitated briefly, slid inside, the fingertips of his left hand trailing along the wall.

  There came a tight gasp, then, in English: “Oh, no! Please—please don’t!”

  Durell’s eyes found Princess Ayla, crouched in a nook in the tunnel, her beautiful face wet with tears, and he realized with abrupt consternation that she was speaking to him.

  “Don’t kill me,” she pleaded.

  “I won’t harm you,” he replied, his tone soothing.

  She wore boots and riding britches, and her long, raven hair was done in a chignon that had loosened. He read disbelief and horror in her black almond eyes. “Your wife. . . .” she sobbed.

  “Dara isn’t my wife,” he said wearily.

  “Then why . . . ?”

  “There isn’t time to explain. What did she do?”

  The words came in a rush. “She shot at me! She’s after me—if I hadn’t known these caves and hills since childhood, she would have—oh!” She buried her face in her hands, then wiped her palms back across her slick cheeks. “I was horseback riding.” Her voice strained against grief. “She killed my horse; she killed Omer!”

  Durell’s eyes swept the vista beyond the cave. He spoke calmly. “Do you know where she is?”

  Princess Ayla waved vaguely. “Out there, somewhere.” She shivered violently. “Please, don’t let her—”

  “I won’t.”

  “Why would she do this to me?”

  “She thinks she has reason enough.” He drew a thoughtful breath. “Your father’s down there at the house, isn’t he?”

  “Yes. I saw him arrive.”

  “He may have Dara now. Why haven’t you gone down?”

  “I can’t—I mustn’t!”

  “You know Sheik Zeid is there, perhaps in danger?”

  She bowed her head. A stick of soft, shiny hair fell past her smudged cheek. “I would only make matters worse,” she said softly.

  “You’ll have to tell me about that, later. All of it.”

  A t
ear from her downturned face made a mud pearl. “I. . ." She shook her head.

  “You’ll have to.” He moved on his knees to the edge of the cavern. The sun rested on western hills now, its low rays washing the countless stony spires with muted hues of pink and amber. Threads of purple dusk lay through the valleys and gorges.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “Give me your bracelet,” he said, and extended a hand. She did not ask why, surprising him. He felt the twisted band of gold and rubies in his palm, turned, gave her a nod. Behind her, where the cave widened into a chapel carved from the living rock, a carved-out window brought twilight beams shining against primitive wall and ceiling paintings of saints and emperors long dead.

  “My father gave me that,” she said and indicated the bracelet.

  “Good.”

  “Is that your price for protecting me?”

  Durell felt sorry for her, then closed his mind to it. “I don’t want your jewelry,” he said. “I’m only borrowing it.”

  “I don’t know why I trust you,” she said.

  “Any port in a storm.”

  He got to his feet. Pain hammered in his thigh, and he felt sweat on his forehead. “I’m going down now,” he said. “Keep out of sight.”

  The first stars winked in a sky of ivory and roses as he limped down the weathered stairs and came out once more in view of the house, beyond the sloping vineyard. It seemed peaceful in the lull of dusk, but the cooling stillness held the ghosts of countless warriors—Hittites, Phrygians, Cimmerians, Scythians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, just to count those who had fought here before the beginning of the Christian era.

  Durell supposed more ghosts would be added tonight.

  He hoped his would not be one of them.

  He made his way up through the leafy vineyard, left leg dragging, jaws clamped tightly. A day had passed since he had eaten, but he felt no hunger, just a slight nausea at the top of his stomach. He knew as he worked his way through the settling dusk that the odds were implacably against him. But the consequences of failure ruled just as stubbornly against turning back. Disabled as he was, his best hope lay in avoiding physical stress. He was aware that there could be no repeat of the quick agility that had gained him freedom from Prince Tahir that morning.