Assignment - Ankara

by Edward S. Aarons

  “Francesca?”

  “I told you, she’s got her eye on you. She wants you. I want you, too, and I’m going to have you.”

  In the gloom, he saw the way she stared intently at him. “Now?”

  “No. I have a feeling, all of a sudden, that we can wait. I have a good feeling about it now, because you let me help you. Here, get into the jumper. Can I help you get warm? You can hold me. You’re so terribly cold!”

  “I’m all right now,” he said.

  “Hold me. Like this.” She laughed softly. Her hands searched his body, seeking, playfully, with restrained passion. Her breathing quickened and caught in her throat. “Here, put your hands here.” She put his hands on her breasts, and they were firm and proud under her uneven breathing, and then she forced them down to her hips and thighs and she laughed again. “Does this make you feel better? You were right about the missionary's daughter. Except that I’m not—you know I’m not—and John is nothing to me now.” “Susan,” he said, “you make me remember what life is like.”

  “I can do more for you,” she whispered. “Right now. I can tell you what you want to know.”

  He adjusted the jumper slowly. “Yes?”

  “I saw Kappic talking to you before, and I saw you looking through Francesca’s sketch box. Darling, darling. Just kiss me now. Because I have it. I took it for you.”

  He stared at the blonde girl in the gloom of the tiny compartment. Something seemed to lurch wildly inside him. “The tape?”

  He wanted to swear when Susan laughed softly. “Everyhing was so mixed up in the plane, for a while. It was really easy. I sat beside the box for a few minutes. Lieutenant Kappic had fainted, I think. And you were talking to Francesca. Oh, I hated you then, the way you looked at her! But I didn’t care. I saw Kappic put the tape in the box, and I took it from there.”

  “What did you do with it?” he asked tightly.

  “I put it in John’s bag. I just dropped it in. It’s safe now.” He let out a long slow breath. He felt exhausted, suddenly, as relief seemed to drain all his strength from him. “Yes,” he said. “We’ll leave it there.”

  A sullen quiet settled over the plane in the next hour. The daylight was an ugly yellow, and the rain came down in relentless floods. Slowly the seas grew more violent. The

  KT-4 lay dead in the water, floating only because of the special tanks in her long wings. But if more stress was placed on those extraordinary wings, Durell thought, they would sink like a stone to the bottom of the Black Sea.

  For twenty minutes after he left Susan, he checked life jackets on everyone and then issued some of the biscuits from the packet of emergency rations. Wickham bolted his share with one gulp and asked for more, staring resentfully when he was refused. John Stuyvers muttered a thanks and nibbled at his biscuit listlessly. Francesca ate with Kappic, who looked feverish. Anderson sat alone, near the pilot’s compartment door, and Durell chose a single seat in the rear and rested, situating himself where he could watch the black bag on John Stuyvers’ lap.

  There was nothing to do now but wait.

  And he was accustomed to waiting.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE trawler came upon them at dusk. Daylight faded prematurely from the rain-swept sky, and the fishing boat was not spotted until it loomed out of the mists to the north on a direct collision course, as if it intended to run them down. Anderson saw it first. Perhaps he was expecting it; Durell did not spend much time wondering about that now. But the big man was calm as he walked back through the cabin with Durell and pointed silently through the window at the plunging bow of the trawler.

  It was the first object they had seen apart from the sea and sky since they had crashed six hours earlier.

  Twice during the long afternoon Durell had heard the muted thunder of distant jets through the steady surge and hiss of the sea. The sound ranged from all quarters of the horizon, but not once had he glimpsed one of the searching planes, and he had the feeling that the thick overcast was playing the odds in his favor to conceal them from the hunters up above.

  But the trawler seemed to have homed on them with speed and accuracy. He turned as soon as Anderson pointed silently to the approaching fishing boat and went forward into the pilot’s compartment.

  “Kappic?”

  The Turk had already seen the vessel. “It seems we have been found, eh?”

  “Yes. but the question is, who is the lucky finder?” Durell asked. “Can you tell if that’s one of your boats, or is it from the Crimea?”

  The Turk squinted at the trawler, which had changed course and slowed its speed and now began a wide, wary circle around them, swinging to the south. Kappic shook his head.

  “I cannot tell. I cannot help you with this.”

  “But you can’t be sure it’s not Turkish, right?”

  “I cannot see too clearly.” Kappic rubbed his eyes with an angry fist, peered again, and shook his head. “But what does it matter, eh? We will know in a few moments.” Anderson spoke heavily. “It’s a Russian trawler.”

  Durell turned. “How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen that type before. Twin screws, steel hull, diesel engine, five hundred horse—”

  “How many in the crew?”

  Anderson shrugged. “Ten, twelve. It’s well mechanized.” His eyes locked with Durell’s. “Have you located the Uvaldi tape yet? Or do you plan to abandon it with the plane and give it all up?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  The big courier looked angry for a moment, then shrugged. “Well, our fishermen friends who seem about to rescue us will settle things, I think. Do you speak Russian, Cajun?” “Some.”

  “So do I We’ll have to do some fast talking, eh?”

  The others in the cabin had seen the trawler and were roused from their apathy now. Even Wickham returned to reality long enough to shout with relief. John Stuyvers appeared, holding the black bag, and Durell, after one glance at it, decided to make no move about it now. What would happen, he did not know. It would not be long before he was identified, and his dossier in the MVD files at No. 2 Dzherzinski Square, in Moscow, where he stood high on the wanted list, would be flashed to his captors. Perhaps he would be used for propaganda—if he survived. Or perhaps he would simply vanish and never be heard from again. He had no illusions about himself. He would have to make a choice quickly. Death was part of his briefing commands, and he knew that no man could keep silence in the face of modern questioning techniques. Suicide was the alternative, and he had the means to do this. And yet—

  He drew a deep breath, watching the trawler’s blunt bow smash through a sea, shattering the crest into white, smoking spume. Men crowded the rails of the small green ship and stared, pointing. Durell shoved back the canopy over the pilot’s compartment. The rain was thicker, heavier. A premature dusk daubed everything in one drab, smoky gray. The trawler did not fly any flags. She was perhaps a hundred feet in length, beamy and powerful. Her rig was made fast to a steel mast, and a thin plume of diesel smoke was shredded by the wind whistling around her stubby black stack.

  A red star was painted on the side of the stack. And as Durell spotted it, a hail in Russian came to them. . . .

  The rescue operation was a race against darkness, and its final stages were completed in the bright glare of the trawler’s powerful searchlights. In answer to the trawler’s hail, Durell shouted back in Russian. The trawler was the Djornia Makin, from Okrinsti-Don, near the Crimean coast. The fishing captain had a rustic dialect that verified his origin. As a rope was snaked across to the wrecked plane, Durell caught it and heard the next hail.

  “Amerikanski?”

  “Da!” he returned.

  There was a hurried consultation among the men on the trawler’s bow. Durell held the rope, waiting, feeling the KT-4 surge heavily in the sea. The port wing was under water now, and he knew that if the trawler abandoned them, they didn’t have many minutes left. He turned his back to the cutting wind and pretended not
to understand the next few questions bawled at him through the electronic loud-speaker on the fishing boat. The voice seemed deep and hostile, booming through the sound of the sea and the clamor of the storm. He shouted back with deliberate incoherence and signalled for speed in taking them off. The trawler backed away, its powerful screw churning up a thick current of foam that washed dangerously against the derelict. Then it came around to windward, providing a lee for them under its rail that offered some protection for the transfer.

  The women were taken off first, Francesca going ahead. One end of the rescue line was made fast to the radio mast and she was able to run out on the wing, choosing her time between the seas, and then cling to the line as the fishermen reached down and hauled her aboard.

  But then John Stuyvers halted Susan. He had adjusted his clerical collar, as an act of defiance, perhaps, after Durell advised them all that they were in soviet territorial waters and that they would all be in for a long delay in returning to the West. Stuyvers was pale, and his voice was thin.

  “It is ridiculous, sir. I will not go with you, and my daughter and I will take our chances right here.”

  “There’s no time to argue,” Durell said. “You go after Susan.”

  “But you don’t understand—we’ll be thrown in prison— perhaps shot as spies. You’ve heard how hysterical they are about such intrusions. I—”

  “You can’t stay here—not alone.”

  “Then why don’t we simply refuse rescue? Isn’t it better to take our chance with the sea, in the hope that some friendly vessel may pick us up?” John Stuyvers looked desperate. “It’s the end of everything—for all of us, I mean—if we’re captured.”

  “We’re being rescued, not captured,” Durell pointed out. “Those are simple fishermen over there, performing an act of human mercy. We have to act on that assumption until they behave otherwise.”

  “They’ll throw us in prison!” Stuyvers spat. He swung violently toward Susan. “You stay with me. We won’t leave the plane.”

  An impatient hail came from the trawler. In the dusk, the lights of the vessel lifted and plunged through the curtains of rain. There was still enough daylight to make out the thin thread of line that connected the derelict with the fishing boat.

  “We won’t stay alive for an hour in this sea,” Durell said. “None of us will see the morning, if we don’t get off this wreck right now.”

  “But you don’t understand!” Stuyvers shouted. “They’ll find out—”

  Durell hit him. He gave no warning, and threw a single, devastating punch. Stuyvers’ head snapped back and he crashed against the bulkhead and slid to the floor. Durell hauled him to his feet.

  “Help me put a line around him,” he said to Anderson, who had regarded the episode with detached amusement. “Let them pull him through the water. He’ll survive.” “He’s awfully anxious not to have anyone go through his precious black bag,” Anderson said quietly.

  “You noticed that, too?”

  “Of course. But you don’t seem to mind their finding whatever Stuyvers has hidden in it, and that’s what puzzles me. I can’t figure out what you’ve done with the tape, if you’re not to abandon it here.”

  “They’ll get aboard the fishing boat,” Durell said. “You’re sure of that?”

  “Just help me for the moment with Stuyvers, will you?” When Susan and John had been hauled safely to the pitching trawler a minute later, it was Wickham’s turn. The colonel was glassy-eyed with fear and drink.

  “Don’t like the idea of surrender, m’boy. Don’t like it at all,” he mumbled.

  “They’re not ogres,” Durell said patiently. “Believe it or not, they’re just people like you and me. It’s a matter of accepting rescue, not surrender. You heard what I told Stuyvers. Now get going.”

  “But it’s common knowledge—these fishing boats are all used for spying. They’ll torture us for information—"

  “Let’s worry about that later,” Durell said.

  “Always was afraid of this sort of thing. Nightmares all my life about it.” The fat man shuddered. “Now it’s real. On the other hand, I can’t stay, can I?”

  “No,” Durell said.

  The fat man stepped out on the wing, teetered against the slippery metal underfoot, and plunged ahead with the lift and fall of the sea. The spotlight from the trawler pinioned him in its glare as he lurched along the guide rope toward the fishing boat just off the wing tip. What happened seemed inevitable. A sea heavier than usual crashed over the wing surface and blasted Wickham into the water in a twinkling. The man’s scream was a thin sound of despair in the dusk. The fishermen on the boat laughed and hauled rapidly on the lifeline. There was a thrashing struggle in the dark sea, and Wickham was hauled out of the water like an over-stuffed doll, stripped of all his dignity.

  “Mustapha?” Durell said next.

  The Turk shook his head. “With my broken leg, I cannot run even as fast as your military friend.”

  “Just let them pull you over. Try to favor the leg as much as possible,” Durell said gently.

  The Turk was sweating. “But it is not the leg that worries me. It is the Moskofs. Early in life I was taught to fear them. Then, in the city of Ankara, I became bewildered, like many young men in these new times, and I listened to the voices of traitors. And I became one myself. How can I apologize to you, my friend, for the trouble I made for you? It was stupid, and I am still confused. You cannot forgive me. I do not forgive myself. And now that I see things more clearly, I cannot believe those men on the boat will save our lives as a simple gesture of humanity.”

  “They’re only fishermen, I hope,” Durell said quietly. “In any case, they are people like you and me. We can only hope for the best.”

  “As a boy, my mother frightened me with stories about the cruelties of the Moskofs in the old wars, like barbarians, and I have been remembering—”

  “You’re a man now, not to be frightened by old women’s tales.”

  Kappic shook his head. “When they see my uniform, they will ask no questions. They will shoot me. You will see.” He nodded slowly. “But I trust you. So I will go. It is in the hands of Allah.”

  “Anderson will go along to help you,” Durell said abruptly. The big courier was startled. “I thought it would be best to leave this sinking ship last, amigo. After you.”

  “Kappic needs a hand with his leg. The two of you can get across together.”

  Anderson hesitated, then shrugged. “Okay. Come on, Lieutenant.”

  It took slow, tortuous maneuvering to get the injured man across the wing and into the sea and then have him hauled to the trawler’s deck. The wind had picked up strength, and the pilot of the trawler had difficulty keeping the derelict in the lee of his vessel. Twice the trawler drifted down and grazed the wing-tip and made the entire hulk shudder and threaten to slip under the next roaring sea that piled down on them in the darkness. Each time, with much shouting, the ship pulled away before the fragile plane was crushed under the fisherman’s steel bow.

  Anderson’s enormous, but gentle strength saved the Turk. He checked Kappic’s line and lowered the injured man into the sea, then cupped his hands and shouted in Russian to the trawler crew, and the fisherman quickly fashioned a sling that helped Kappic haul himself to the deck.

  A moment later Anderson joined him aboard the trawler.

  Durell was the last to abandon the derelict. In the few moments while the line was adjusted, he turned slowly to Harry Hackitt’s body. The young Texas boy’s face looked blank and unknowing, and Durell shook his head.

  “I’ll tell Big Daddy all about you, Harry, if I make it,” he said.

  Chapter Fifteen

  KAPPIC’S leg ached as if it were being seized by all the demons of his grandmother’s folktales, yet he could ignore it. The shame at being captured by the Crimean fishermen far outweighed his physical anguish. The vessel, which looked so trim and new from a distance, needed a new coat of paint and harbored an atro
cious stench that turned his stomach. The crew looked curiously at each member of the KT-4 party as they were hurried below to shelter and warmth. Two of the fishermen held machine pistols to cover each in turn as he or she was brought aboard. Blocks rattled and the big seine net from the trawl gear flapped and blew loosely in the wild wind. The deck was slippery with fish offal, and Kappic noted that one of the cabin doors had been smashed in some recent accident and replaced by a piece of stiff and dirty canvas.

  He felt the fishermen’s hostility the moment they spotted his Turkish army uniform. There was a sudden hush among the bearded crew as he came clumsily aboard. His leg was afire, and he dripped blood through Francesca’s crude bandages as he clung to the rail. He knew that the damage done to his leg was beyond all repair now. The bones had ground back and forth, tearing flesh and tendon until nothing was left for a surgeon to work with. It meant the end of his career. The end of everything important to Mustapha Kappic, who had run a difficult, stormy path from his native mountain village to the trim Army career in Ankara. All over, now. He felt a wave of sorrow for the small peasant boy who had dreamed his dreams in the frontier wilderness, and then he straightened, conscious of the need for dignity under the cold eyes of the Crimean fishermen.

  One of them pointed to his bloody bandages and shook his head. Another, a chunky bearded man, wearing some semblance of a uniform, said something to him in a gutteral dialect. Kappic replied in Turkish. They did not understand him. The captain in the visored naval cap was irritated and gave rapid orders to his crew to hurry with the rescue operation, and then turned as Anderson came aboard. The big American was grinning. He spoke in rapid, fluent Russian to the fishing captain and pointed to Kappic and then back across the heaving seas to the derelict plane. The captain seemed uncertain, but respectful, confused by Anderson’s quick Russian.

  Then Anderson’s tone became a command, and the big man looked different suddenly, as he strode away from the group standing on the slippery, dirty steel deck of the trawler. And Kappic felt the first vague twist of alarm, the first slide into despair.