Assignment- Mermaid

by Will B Aarons

  "Not many,” Durell said blandly. "And the terrain will be flat as your maiden aunt’s chest.”

  "I have no maiden aunt.” Reluctantly she shut down the equipment.

  "Just a figure of speech.”

  "If I did, she would not be flat-chested.” She kept her eyes ahead.

  "I believe it,” he said. "How is the fuel?”

  "Going fast at this altitude, but there is plenty. Our range is four thousand kilometers, plus a forty-five minute reserve. Costa always keeps the tanks topped-off.” She pressed an earphone against her head. "Now we’re cutting through the Port Said radio beacon,” she said.

  On the right, the light at the Damietta mouth of the Nile poked abruptly above the horizon. Lamps of fishing boats flashed beneath them. Then there were the darker strands of barrier islands, and they hurtled over the el Manzala Lagoon so low that Durell thought he smelled the tidal mud.

  He glanced with satisfaction at the instrument panel clock: they had made up the lost time.

  Moments later, they rocketed over the long causeway of Route 7, between el Matariya and Port Said.

  Rising thermals of warm air filled their path with invisible ruts as they flew a grazing trajectory just above the earth. Durell’s seat jarred and jolted as the fuselage made tortured snapping noises.

  Sirena spoke in a taut voice: "Port Said Tower is trying to raise us. What should I say?”

  "Nothing.” He surveyed the sky, and added through clenched jaws: "Five more minutes, that’s all we need.”

  "They demand that we identify ourselves.”

  Durell shook his head, slashed the air with a hand. Sirena’s eyes strained ahead, her lip between her teeth. Suddenly she gasped, "My God!” and yanked back on the control column.

  Durell had just an instant to recognize the white radiance of a ship’s mast-top navigation light, so close below that its glow flashed like lightning across his retinas.

  Then the plane was arcing hundreds of feet into the air, and he saw the canal as an icy ribbon of starlight. He thought with alarm of ground-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft guns that bristled along the Sinai truce line, a few miles ahead. "Swing her around quick,” he barked, "unless you want to thread a flock of SAMs.”

  "The canal wasn’t exactly where I expected it to be,” Sirena said. She banked the plane sharply, gentled back the throttles.

  "Bear south until we see the bypass.” A line of white-red-white navigation lights came at them. It had to be the Nereid’s convoy, he thought.

  "The Egyptians are looking for us. The radio has gone crazy,” Sirena said.

  "It won’t be easy to find us at this height, and those ships will confuse the picture on radar.”

  They sped over the bypass. Durell identified the shining rails of a canal-side railroad next to Route 4, which also paralleled the waterway. His eyes turned darkly to the sky once more in a search for Egyptian fighters. The lights of Ismailia shone to the south. At least they had got here ahead of the khamsin wind.

  Then the city went dark.

  Its lights had just been blotted out.

  And Durell knew the margin between where he sat and the savage fury of the desert storm was a matter of scant minutes. "Set her down,” he told Sirena.

  She nodded wordlessly, brought the plane out of a low, tight circle. There was a whine of hydraulic pumps as flaps extended and landing gear lowered to drag sluggishly in the air-stream.

  Below, the ships’ running lights marched away to the north, vessel after vessel.

  At the last moment, Sirena flicked on powerful landing floods, and their beams exploded against a narrow highway shining blackly against the sand. It floated up toward them at better than 100 miles per hour.

  A slewing sensation in the pit of Durell’s stomach, as Sirena made a final correction.

  A bump, an airy hop. And they were safely down.

  Sirena sat limply in the pilot’s seat; Durell rubbed a jaw that had been clenched so hard it ached.

  Link’s mocking face came through the compartment doorway. "Where are the redcaps?” he said.

  "You’ll have to carry your own,” Durell said, just as glad for the momentary break in tension.

  "If this is Egypt, I’ll take Baltimore,” Link said.

  "Let’s get out of this can.”

  They went to the rear, and Link kicked the packaged rubber boat he had bought out the hatch. Durell carried the Uzis, and Sirena came along with the spare clips. An eerie, waiting silence pressed heavily on the night. A lone cricket chirruped indignantly. The breeze was fitful, like straining ghosts.

  "The ships are entering the bypass,” Link announced.

  "Get the raft inflated.”

  Link yanked a cord. The raft swelled and took form with a long hiss of compressed air.

  "What about the lady?” Link asked.

  "She will stay here, with the airplane.”

  Sirena hugged herself. She still wore only light slacks and bare midriff, and there was a desert chill in the air. "What if a car comes?” she asked.

  "That isn’t likely,” Durell said, as he slung a weapon over his shoulder. "International Route 44 handles nearly all the traffic now. It’s a couple of miles west of here. Besides, the khamsin will shut down everything for a while.”

  "But what if. . . ?” she persisted.

  "Direct them around the plane with a flashlight. Tell them mechanical problems forced you down, and that help has been sent for. Satisfied?”

  She squinted down the dark road and did not answer.

  There came a bone-chilling rumble, and they looked up at the dangerous sky. Tiny blowtorch trails sped above the canal to the north.

  "MIGs,” Durell said, his voice toneless.

  "Looking for us?” Link said.

  "What do you think?” Durell gripped the rubber raft. "Let’s get this down to the water.”

  They slipped and slid down the sandy slope to the water’s edge, the raft between them. The first ship loomed enormously as the convoy approached. It passed, then another and another, their low wakes sucking at the sand. Diesels throbbed, generators whined, bilgewater splattered from pumps. There were tankers, tramp freighters, cruise ships, short-sea traders.

  Durell recalled that the Nereid was third in line. It already had slid past, but its silhouette stood out crisply against the moonlighted sky, modest in size but with fast lines.

  There came a rattle of chains and splashing of anchors all up and down the convoy.

  Durell turned to Link. "Can you climb an anchor chain?”

  Link slung his Uzi. "I’ll do anything to crash a party, old boy.”

  Sirena touched Durell’s shoulder. "Come back soon.”

  "Half an hour, forty-five minutes.” He took a breath. "If we’re not back when the convoy moves out, take off without us. If anyone questions you later, say I forced you to run from the police on Rhodes, but you got away from me. You never heard of me, afterwards.”

  "That will be hard to pretend,” she said. "Just come back amésos, quickly.”

  Just as they launched the rubber boat, the khamsin struck.

  9

  "All we want is to get Lazeishvili and beat it.” Durell had to hurl the words against the shrieking wind. Sand stung his face and hands, gritted between his teeth.

  "Find Charles Cullinane,” Link called through the fury.

  "He smuggled the Russian aboard?”

  "Any crewman should be able to take us to him.”

  The stern of the Nereid rose high above, a black steel curtain that pinged under a barrage of sand. Beyond the ship’s hull, as Durell lifted his gaze briefly, only a scattering of stars directly overhead glowed feebly through a gauze of dust thousands of feet high.

  The anchor chain was a taut line from forecastle to water.

  He moored the raft to it and went up first. The deck was a dark haze. The storm made a black blizzard that howled around bridge and funnel. There was no one about, as far as he could see. Despite the wind, the Nere
id sat solid as a piling in the canal.

  Link appeared, hauled himself over the railing, crouched beside Durell. They unslung their weapons, threw the cocking levers, went down the deck in a hurried crouch. The only light visible from this angle came through windows of the upper bridge.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Durell caught sight of a patchy discoloration on the deck as he hustled by. He halted Link with an outstretched hand, went back and knelt to shine his penflash. Dust glittered through the narrow, lancing beam that showed a portion of a large yellow smear. It looked like fine mud, and brought to mind what he had found in the sunken barrel, off Rhodes. The coincidence startled him—until he realized it could not be coincidence. The odds against it simply were too high.

  The barrel must have been dropped on the deck of the Nereid, spilled some of its contents, then rolled overboard.

  Link came back beside him. "What have you found?”

  Durell shook his head and spit over the lee rail. "Come on,” he said.

  Stays moaned against the weight of the tempest, as they padded quickly on down the deck. Sand bit and gouged and fell in sheets down exposed bulkheads, capstans, anything that stopped its pelting flight. Durell flagged for Link to follow as he entered the abrupt stillness of a deckhouse, skipped down chiming steel ladders into the Number One hold.

  The air was hot now, stifling down here, and sweat trickled down their cheeks in muddy rivulets. The deck throbbed to the ship’s idling diesels. Wind beat and buffeted the hull plates with muffled savagery. Dust motes swarmed in the narrow beam of Durell’s penflash.

  "Empty,” he said, and turned to Link. "What was the cargo to Russia?”

  "Spare auto parts. I saw them loaded myself.”

  "And on the return voyage to Italy?”

  "Don’t know, old chum. Apparently nothing.” Durell’s throat felt raw from the sifting dust. "A shipping company can’t make money off empty bottoms,” he said.

  "Then where’s the cargo? You’ll have to ask Panagiotes, won’t you?”

  "I think I know part of the answer. It was unloaded in some port we don’t know about or transferred to another ship—possibly off Rhodes—after the Nereid was reported missing.” He drew a dusty breath. "The Mermaid Memo was part of its log, thrown overboard there to cover its tracks.”

  "No one was likely to have noticed or given a damn,” Link said. "But it just happened that a top-flight atomic scientist and major Russian dissident was a stowaway. Too bad for Panagiotes—or whoever is behind this chicanery.”

  "Let’s check the next hold,” Durell said.

  He led the way through another bulkhead. Fine dust covered everything, and sweat that dripped from his face made black dots in it. He blew a rough breath of frustration as his penflash showed only barren deck-plating in the Number Two hold.

  Link coughed into his fist, as the wind screamed outside. "Empty again,” he said.

  "Not quite,” Durell said, and held the needle beam against a far corner of the huge compartment.

  Both men peered, as hurtling sand pounded the hull with a malign, hissing sound. They picked out a faint outline of what seemed to be heaped canvas.

  Only it was not canvas.

  It was the dark rubberized material of body bags.

  Apprehension seemed to stiffen Durell’s fingers as he worked at fastenings on the first bag in the pile. A stench of blood and feces and stale urine assaulted his fraying nerves. He could only hope that his mission would not end here, ruined and aborted, over the corpse of Aleksei Lazeishvili—but the hope was frail. Then a face, stiff and yellow in the probe of the penflash, came into view.

  "That isn’t Lazeishvili,” Link said.

  "Cullinane?”

  "No.” Link wrinkled his nose above his pencil mustache, used a sleeve of his elegantly tailored jumpsuit to wipe sweat and mud from his forehead.

  The unknown contents of the remaining bags kept any feeling of relief from Durell. There were three of them, and they went through the same routine with each. All wore the insignia of maritime officers. One wore the stripes of a captain in the Greek merchant marine.

  Durell stood and stared down at the dead men, his mouth dry with a sense of being snared and crushed in the monstrous belly of steel all around him.

  Huge motors throbbed and pulsed beyond the bulkhead. There came a sound of pumps, whining in the dust, as the storm moaned and bellowed at the ship.

  Durell saw clearly that a dangerous new factor had been added to the equation: he no longer was prying aboard a ship of commerce crewed by indifferent merchant seamen. Whoever was in control had killed enough. They would not hesitate to kill again.

  Link broke the silence. "Mutiny, do you think?”

  "Maybe. Maybe piracy.”

  "I suppose they resisted.” Link indicated the corpses.

  "The killers must have bagged them, intending to wait until they reached the Gulf of Suez to dump them overboard. There was too much risk they would be found in the canal.”

  "It doesn’t look good for Lazeishvili, does it?”

  Durell aimed the penflash at a hatch. The engine room had to be on the other side of it, to judge by the sound. "We won’t settle anything more here,” he said. "Come on.”

  He cracked the hatch, then slid his hand back around the Uzi. Its grip-safety made a small pressure just under the web of his thumb. A scent of warm lubricating oil came with a wedge of light from the engine room. Cautiously, he bent to the opening, looked, ducked back.

  He’d seen three crewmen oiling, wiping, reading gauges.

  Above them, on a grill-floored catwalk that ran along one side of the hull, stood a fourth man, watching the others. From his hand dangled a heavy automatic pistol.

  It was obvious he had the three crewmen under guard.

  Durell swore softly, wiped a palm against his thigh, then strode through the door.

  Startled blue eyes stared at him out of a flat face that was topped with a seaman’s knit cap. Parted lips sucked a hissing breath.

  "Be still,” Durell shouted up to him in Greek, his Uzi raised.

  A snarled syllable came out of the flat face as the pistol swung over the railing, and Durell had no choice.

  The submachine gun bucked and stammered in his grip.

  The man’s blue cap popped from his head like a cork, and his legs went from under him as if he had slipped on ice. Blood dribbled through the grating and splashed on the gray-painted deck.

  As Durell turned to the three crewmen a prickling dismay crept up his spine.

  The man had said, ''Ktoh—?”

  It was Russian for "Who—?”

  The Russians had got here before Durell.

  The three crewmen held a stunned silence and peered over machinery behind which they had sought cover. Link strode in, saw the dead Russian, looked musingly at Durell.

  Durell demanded in Greek: "Where is the crewman named Charles Cullinane?”

  A bull-chested sailor replied: "He isn’t aboard the Nereid, sir.”

  "What happened to him?”

  "Jumped ship. He was smart.”

  "Where? Where did he jump ship?”

  The three seamen argued briefly, in snarling, spitting whispers. Durell missed most of it. Then the bull-chested one said: "Rhodes. Don’t say we told you, parakaló, please. We were sworn not to mention Rhodes to anyone. But maybe you, sir, can get us off this devil ship?” Durell and Link exchanged exasperated stares. Link turned back to the men, and snapped: "What about Aleksei Lazeishvili?”

  "Who?”

  "A stowaway. Cullinane looked after him.”

  "Ah! The stowaway!” The bull-chested sailor lowered his rough voice conspiratorially, jerked a thumb topside. "Bridge. Officers’ quarters, the last any of us saw.”

  "He’s still aboard,” Durell said, hardly daring to believe. "Cullinane abandoned him.”

  "That’s impossible.” Link was defensive.

  "Any kind of snafu seems possible with the HRC,” Durell muttered.
Abruptly, he caught his breath and rolled his eyes toward the overhead. Sounds of running feet came dimly through the plates, despite the raging noise of the windstorm.

  A tall, bald-headed seaman, one of the three who had said nothing up to now, broke for a compartment door on Durell’s left. "I’m getting out of here!” he shouted, and vanished through the hatch.

  There came a scream, the shattering rattle of automatic fire, and the man toppled back into the engine room riddled with bullets.

  Link cut for the door to Number Two hold, collided with the barrel-chested seaman, shouted, "Out of my way, you fool!” The third seaman had thrown himself to the deck. Durell waited calmly, his aim braced against the motor-housing.

  A figure darted into view, and he triggered a burst into the gloomy hatchway. A stung moan, a rolling clatter, and a man and his Avtomat Kalashnikov assault rifle tumbled over the crewman Durell had just killed.

  The reek of hot rifle oil and burnt gunpowder mixed in the sifting dust, as Durell lunged for the opposite exit.

  A sickly stench brought back to mind the decomposing bodies in this dark chamber. It didn’t take long in this climate, Durell thought. Link and the burly crewman were barely visible where they waited, their backs flattened against the hull.

  Durell spoke harshly to the sailor. "Show us to the officers’ quarters.”

  The sailor showed the whites of his eyes. "Not me, friend.”

  Durell jabbed the muzzle of his Uzi into the man’s gut. Shouts of alarm from topside cut through the screeching wind.

  "Are you mad?” Link said. Sweat gleamed in crescents under his eyes, as he added: "This place is a hornet’s nest.”

  "Get hold of yourself,” Durell said angrily.

  "Do we have a chance?”

  "You’ll have to fight your way off, no matter how you go. Might as well make it pay.”

  Link drew himself up and told the sailor: "You heard the man. Officers’ quarters. Chop-chop.”

  The upper deck was a geometry of shadow on shadow, hazed in wind-whipped sand. The sand bit and gouged Durell’s cheeks as he crouched to catch his breath beside a deckhouse. The luminous dial of his wrist chronometer showed that almost twenty-five minutes had elapsed since rowing away from the sandy canal bank. He did not know how much longer the convoy would stand idling. He gave a thought to Sirena, who waited alone in the wailing darkness, and hoped her nerve would hold until he returned.