Assignment - Ankara

by Edward S. Aarons

  He could not decide what to think about Francesca Uvaldi. Without her identification papers, he had to accept her word for what she was. Yet he could think of no reason why she should pick Dr. Roberto Uvaldi’s name out of a hat and use it—unless, somehow, she had been waiting for him at this place, hoping he would come along exactly like this.

  It was possible. If his errand to Uvaldi was as important as had been indicated, he could take chances on no one— especially a girl as lovely and distracting as Francesca. She was angry with him for his attitude about the gun, but he couldn’t help that. In any case, when they got through to Base Four and found Uvaldi, he would know all about her then.

  Durell had been briefed only sketchily by the K Section man in Ankara. A certain amount of the usual security provisions had been dispensed with at the meeting, and Durell hadn’t liked it. He had been trained in caution, working for the Central Intelligence Agency, and before that he’d put in a term with the old OSS, long ago, in Europe. He knew that to be careless in details could jeopardize your survival factor. In Durell's business, you never opened a door without considering what might wait for you behind it; you never entered a room without being ready for a surprise; and you never turned a comer in a hurry, or turned your back on anyone.

  His business was the dark, silent war that blew hot or cold as the world powers happened to dictate it. In this business you could die quickly and anonymously, in strange and forgotten comers of the world. He had survived this far by taking a professional attitude toward his work and toward the men he was engaged with. He never underestimated his opponents. They were men like himself in many ways, as fanatically dedicated to their goals as he was dedicated, without fanfare, to defending what was important to him.

  Durell took his risks with the objectivity of a gambler, holding to the teachings of his grandfather, old Jonathan, down in Bayou Peche Rouge in the Mississippi delta country. The old man was one of the last of the riverboat gamblers, and he had trained Durell as a boy and a young man in all the treacheries as well as the rewards that greeted the hunter and the hunted.

  Dinty Simpson, the K Section man in Ankara, tried to be brief and crisp when he talked to Durell in the plush lobby of the hotel there, but Dinty could not hide his nervousness.

  “I’m sorry to pull you out of Paris on such short notice, Sam, but we don’t know what’s happening over by the frontier or in the Caucasus Mountains right now—the section the Turks call the Kavkas. Our radio isn’t being answered, and the courier who was to accompany Dr. Uvaldi back home may be dead. For that matter, Uvaldi may be dead, too. We just haven’t heard anything and we just don’t know, thanks to the earthquakes. We’ve tried through the NATO bunch here to contact a Turkish frontier regimental headquarters near Musa Karagh, but we’ve only gotten garbled responses—they’re desperately involved in rescue and relief work in the valley towns, and in trying to hang on to their guard posts at the same time. Then, the nearest Turkish divisional HQ is twenty-two miles to the south of Base Four, and the roads are impassable—they were never much, anyway, even without the recent landslides to block the way. The infantry on the frontier has to guard such bridges and open paths—cattle paths, really—as still exist. So we have to reach Base Four ourselves. Somebody has to go into that country and get Dr. Uvaldi’s radar tapes.”

  “I don’t know much about Base Four,” Durell said.

  “Well, it’s the new radar scanning station on Musa Karagh, a mountaintop near the Georgian frontier, and it’s loaded with some extraordinary new electronic gadgets to check on the two launching sites at Kapustin Yar, near Stalingrad, and at Tyratum, by the Aral Sea. These two locations have been positively identified for some time, but what’s been going on there lately has been anybody’s guess.”

  Dinty Simpson was a sandy-haired man in his middle thirties, and he looked like a junior attorney in some vast law firm on Wall Street. His horn-rimmed glasses gave him an owlish look, and he had a bad case of nerves, Durell saw, watching him pace the carpeted floor of the Ankara hotel lobby. It was raining in Ankara that day, discouraging the pigeons who roosted on the statues of Kemal Ataturk in his dinner jacket costume, the symbol of Turkish reform. The local newspapers were full of the cataclysm that had taken place in the rugged mountains of the eastern frontier.

  Dinty made a soft sound of discouragement. “We sent a courier out of the Embassy, a very competent chap named Bert Anderson, to pick up Dr. Uvaldi and escort him and the tapes back to Washington. Know him, Cajun?”

  “No,” Durell said.

  “Well, no matter. Bert is tough and absolutely dependable —comes from the hills around Nashville, Tennessee, talks with a hillbilly drawl. But don’t let his slow manner fool you; he can be quick as a cat and twice as smart. You can trust him at your back all the way; I guarantee it. The trouble is, the Base may be a mess, wrecked by the quake and full of casualties. Bert Anderson may be hurt, too, but we just don’t know. Or maybe it’s something just as simple as being detained by an isolated frontier guard. Anyway, we can’t wait. So you’re going in to help Anderson and Uvaldi out— or take Andy’s place, if something happened to him, which seems inconceivable, knowing him as I do. The main thing is to bring out Uvaldi and the tapes—if they can be found,” Simpson said grimly. “And you’ve got to find them, Cajun. Don’t let anything stop you. The Turkish government will help; they’re giving you an infantry lieutenant who was bom in the Kavkas area and he’ll guide you and smooth the way if you run into any military blocks on the road. But even if there are any delays, you’ll have to cut corners any way you see fit.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’ve sent for Bert Anderson’s dossier as well as Dr. Uvaldi’s, but they haven’t come in yet—transportation has been confused these past forty-eight hours—and there’s no more time to lose. Andy will have identification, of course, and he wears a gold ring with a small, polished piece of anthracite in it—looks like an onyx, but it’s coal. As a kid he was caught in a mine disaster, and wears the chunk of coal as a good-luck charm.”

  “He sounds good to me,” Durell said.

  “The main thing is that Dr. Uvaldi’s tapes have to get to Washington as soon as possible.”

  “May I ask what Uvaldi found on his radar scannings?” Dinty Simpson shrugged and poked at his horn-rimmed glasses. “It’s classified, but there’s been enough talk about it back home in the press to tell you this much: it deals with this radically new type of nuclear weapon we’ve been working on—the one that may be the key to our survival. Quite different from the H-bomb, being primarily an antipersonnel weapon that discharges deadly neutrons without the blast, heat and fall-out of the big bombs.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” Durell said. “But it’s only in the conceptual stage, back home.”

  “Right. And our friends across the border may already have it. At least, Uvaldi’s scannings have shown some activity on it up toward Kapustin Yar—especially threatening if it’s sprung on us as a surprise. My guesses may be all wrong, but Washington wants to announce we know about it before somebody pulls the trigger. Publicity might inhibit a surprise offensive, on the theory of announcing all deterrent knowledge at once. Uvaldi’s discoveries are all on his coded tapes from the radar equipment at Karagh. Andy was supposed to fly him out yesterday, but the ’copter we sent couldn’t land in the fog and wind. Couldn’t see a damned thing, as a matter of fact, except hints of a lot of wreckage on the mountaintop. It won’t be easy to get in there, Cajun— and your troubles may not come just from the general confusion in the disaster area.”

  “I understand,” Durell said.

  “Well, be careful, for God’s sake,” Simpson said urgently. “If Uvaldi is dead—well, get his tapes, any way you can. Anderson will be a big help, too—as I said, he’s a tough ex-mountaineer, absolutely secure. That is, he’ll help if he’s still alive.”

  “We’ll see,” Durell said.

  He was thinking of Dinty Simpson, and the remote, modem world of
Ankara he had left that morning, when he climbed back into Lieutenant Kappic’s jeep with Francesca Uvaldi and started on his way again. The road climbed steeply into the rugged mountains, twisting into the heart of the earthquake area. The road was more primitive, strewn with rocks that had crashed down the mountainside. Twice they had to halt and remove fallen trees in their way. The day grew colder and darker, and even Kappic slowed down as a concession to the thickening mist, which could easily hide a crevass or obstacle that might wreck them in this desolate place.

  Durell gave the girl a chocolate bar from their relief supplies strapped to the back of the jeep and questioned her casually. She spoke freely from her huddle of blankets beside him.

  “I must admit I haven’t seen my father in two years—he’s so absorbed in his work at the base here. There are just the two of us, anyway, and I’ve always been more or less on my own.” She looked at him with careful gray eyes. “I didn’t know you were associated with Dad’s work.”

  “I didn’t say I was,” Durell remarked.

  Her lashes made small, dark fans against the impeccable creaminess of her cheeks. “You’re as bad as Roberto, when it comes to security. Everything so ridiculously hush-hush— when the other side probably knows all about it anyway, and the only people kept in ignorance are our own! I resent it, sometimes, but—well, I’m sorry I was so suspicious when you wanted my gun, back there.” She paused. “Was it be-casue I spoke first in French? I speak French, Italian, and a little Portuguese. And even Russian. Took it up as a hobby in a spirit of patriotic preparedness, or something, last year. But my work demands a working knowledge of these languages, you see.” She patted her sketch case. “Mini of Roma has the bright idea of making Byzantine design all the rage next season, so here I am in Turkey making authentic, derivative designs for the silk-screen people. It will cost you a fortune for a veil and a wisp of the usual diaphanous stuff when I’m through. Doesn’t leave the poor husbands much for the traditional loaf of bread or jug of wine. Anyway, last Thursday I found some free time and got to Ankara, but the red tape held me up and then the earthquakes began—” She paused and shivered. “Do you suppose everything is all right up ahead?” she asked, nodding toward the tumbled dark mountaintops.

  “I don’t know,” Durell said.

  “Hasn’t there been any word at all from the Base?”

  “No.”

  She was silent then, and Durell watched Kappic’s driving and the twisted road ahead. He continually expected to run into frontier guard detachments from the local divisional HQ, but none were in sight. Through the fog he could see the scars of small landslides that had tumbled debris down into the gorge where the road twisted. The air was thinner and sharper now as they climbed.

  “Does your father expect you, Francesca?” he asked suddenly.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I wrote that I might get here, but perhaps he hadn’t had time to receive my letter. I—”

  At that moment Kappic slammed on the brakes again. The heavily-loaded jeep swerved crazily on the mountain road. Out of the mist ahead loomed a great pile of rock and rubble that barred their way with an impossible tangle of debris.

  The girl gasped as the jeep seemed about to slide off the road into the black-walled ravine at their right; but Kappic’s strength saved them again. The wheels locked and spewed out gravel, and they came to a lurching halt.

  “I am sorry,” Kappic grunted. “This was not expected.”

  They could go no further in the car, short of using a bulldozer to clear the road. To the right, the mountain gorge dropped impossibly down to a dimly heard stream racing among fallen, ancient pines and mossy boulders. To the left, the tortured slope was ripped and torn by the landslide. It would take hours for heavy equipment to dear the roadblock ahead.

  “How far are we from Base Four now?” Durell asked.

  Kappic wiped his heavy moustaches and sniffed at the air. The silver Byzantine crescent on his lambskin military cap gleamed wetly in the fog. “The village of Karagh should be directly ahead, in a small valley about two miles from here. I used to be a shepherd boy in these mountains, you know.” He grinned suddenly. “The road divides before it reaches Musa Karagh, however; and the new military road goes for a mile up to the mountaintop where your American installation is. We shall have to walk, I am afraid.”

  “Doesn’t anybody live around here?” Francesca whispered. “I didn’t think this area was so isolated.”

  “Karagh is a village of only a few hundred people.” Kappic was perspiring, although the air was cold. “My family all died of a fever twenty years ago. Now there are visiting nurses of the Red Crescent, and sanitation, anyway.” He shrugged. “One can only hope there are some survivors. The town has been cut off completely by the earthquakes.”

  The girl suddenly stood up in the jeep and pointed. “Oh, look—there is someone!”

  Durell had already glimpsed the two people clambering over the rubble toward them. They appeared suddenly, close at hand, the man limping clumsily, the woman younger and more purposeful. He saw in the first glance that the man had gray hair under his wool hat and a thin, harsh face. The girl, in her twenties, had straw-colored hair bound severely under a colored scarf. She wore no veil, and they were both in European clothing, the man wearing a severe black suit, dusty and tom at the knee and slightly bloodied where his leg had been injured. The girl wore a gray felt skirt and sweater under a mannish-styled jacket, and she clutched a large leather bag worn as dark and smooth as a saddle.

  “Don’t any of you move!” the man called in English. His voice rang as gray and metallic as the rifle in his hands. “Hold it just like that, eh?”

  Kappic cursed and made a sudden move for his holstered gun in his bandolier belt. Durell touched his arm. “Wait. He may shoot.”

  The man’s eyes were wild with shock and desperation. But the rifle covered them with steady purpose as he limped and slid down the rubble heap blocking the road and then came toward them.

  “Put down your gun,” Durell said quietly. “You don’t need it against us.”

  The man halted, surprised. “You’re an American?”

  “Yes. Put away your weapon.”

  The man breathed hard. Durell noted with surprise that he wore a clerical collar with his severe black suit. His face was angular, hard and pale, with a bloodless slash of a mouth and prominent cheekbones. His yellowish-gray hair was long and lank. The girl touched his shoulder then and murmured something; her brown eyes swept over Durell and Francesca and Lieutenant Kappic, and then returned to Durell. Her oval face was devoid of all make-up, and her pink lips were firm and hard. She held tightly to the black leather bag she carried.

  The man said harshly; “You must all go back. There is nothing but ruin and desolation behind us, in a Godless land. The Lord has forsaken this place and its people.” “Father—” the girl murmured. “Father, he’s an American. He’s probably going to the radar base on Musa Karagh.” “You must all go back,” the man insisted. He favored his injured leg, but the rifle was held steady in hands that seemed familiar with the feel of it. “Susan, we must use their car. Get the keys.”

  “Will you take our vehicle at the point of your gun?” Durell asked.

  “If I must!” the man gasped.

  “You’re a strange sort of minister,” Durell said flatly.

  The girl spoke in a quiet voice. “My father has been grievously hurt, as you can see.” Her pale brown eyes never left Durell’s face, and she looked puritanical as she confronted him. “Our name is Stuyvers—my father is John, and I am Susan. We’ve lost everything. All our work in Karagh and the Caucasus Mountains beyond has been destroyed. The people are dead or dying. Our car is on the other side of this landslide—we were trapped in it for hours this morning, digging our way out with our bare hands. We’ve only just succeeded. Can you understand? My father isn’t quite himself at the moment.”

  Lieutenant Kappie spoke with sharp authority, his gutteral voice grumbl
ing like a bear. “What were you people doing in Karagh, exactly?”

  Susan Stuyvers replied without looking at him, still watching Durell with that strange intensity. “We were sent here on a two-month mission for the U. C. Church Mission of Izurum. We had only begun to labor in this new vineyard, but God saw fit to disapprove of our work. Perhaps we sinned. We do not know. But my father is in a state of shock—”

  “I will take the car,” the man said thinly. “We must flee this land. Daughter, be careful. Take the ignition keys from the lieutenant.”

  “I am sorry,” the girl said. “He must be obeyed.”

  Durell said, “I only understand that he has a gun at our heads. But we are not turning back.”

  “You must!” the man shouted. He lurched forward, his eyes ferocious and pale, luminous in the misty light. “Now give me the keys!”

  Kappic’s hand still hovered over his holstered pistol. The Turk’s temper was highly volatile, and Durell could not have predicted what might happen in the next moment. The missionary was obviously unbalanced by disaster, and capable of any wild act. On the other hand, the Turk was a soldier not likely to yield, even in the face of the man’s rifle.

  For a moment, they continued to stare at each other. In the strange light of afternoon, the mountains stood hushed, veiled in fog, the earth and trees and sky heavy with a sense of waiting. The light changed, turned yellowish and somber, playing on the face of the man with the gun.

  Durell felt it first.

  There came the faintest tremor of the earth under his feet. The road shifted fractionally, a hair’s breadth, nothing more.

  Then a distant rumbling sounded, as of a faraway convoy of heavy trucks down in the gorge. Stuyvers felt it then. His mouth opened and his eyes clouded with sudden, dawning terror.

  The earth shifted again—violently, this time. There came a shattering roar from the mountaintop. Susan Stuyvers screamed. The trees swayed, as if a cold and violent wind suddenly blew upon them all. Durell’s legs buckled, and he staggered; but he did not fall. The earth shuddered again, and as a tree Snapped and crashed nearby, Susan Stuyvers screamed again and Kappic cursed and John Stuyvers, with his injured leg, went down on all fours, losing his rifle.