Assignment - Ankara

by Edward S. Aarons

  “Did you tell John about it?”

  “No, I—I didn’t mention it at all. And you saw what happened on the plane when Anderson tried to grab the bag.” “I know, but isn’t it possible that someone else might have gotten into it?”

  “Who’d know what to look for?” she asked. “And where?” Her question stopped him for a moment. Then he said, “But in the plane John dozed for long stretches at a time: he was drinking raki with Colonel Wickham. . . .”

  “That’s true, but I doubt if anybody could be light-fingered with John,” Susan said. She looked at him with dull, tawny-yellow eyes. “I don’t suppose you believe me, now that the business of the heroin has come out. I didn’t know anything about it. John used me. But it’s too much to ask you to accept that. Still, I wouldn’t lie to you, Sam. Not ever. I didn’t know about the heroin. And I don’t know what happened to the tape.”

  He did not know of anything more to say. He turned away, and Susan watched him go with disenchanted eyes as he crossed the hold to speak to Francesca next.

  Susan knew now that the dreams Durell had stirred in her were futile and meaningless, a last glimmer of the girl she might have been, if the world had treated her differently. Durell would never belong to her. He could not trust her, and therefore he was incalculably beyond reach. Last night he had pretended interest because of the missing tape. But it was all a game, a cruel joke that life played on her, twisting this last, desperate trip with John into a kind of dark, gray nightmare of cold and hunger and fear.

  She did not hate Durell because he turned her down. She knew what she was and all the things she had done, up to and after what happened with Ali Khalil in that deadly olive grove. Since then, with John, she had thought John’s kindness marked a new beginning. She had not known that she was only someone useful to his scheme in the criminal conspiracy to smuggle heroin into the States.

  Now she knew there was something sick and evil in John.

  But it was all over. There was no way out of the trap. Whatever happened now, she was the loser. Nothing could be more helpless than her situation at the moment, she thought.

  And, thinking this, she began to feel better, as if some dark weight had suddenly lifted from her.

  She began to consider how she might help Durell. . . .

  Francesca Uvaldi sat quietly on her blanket, one shoulder pressed against the cold plates of the bulkhead. Her head was tilted back, resting against the hard comfort of one of the refrigeration pipes, now fortunately not in use. Her eyes seemed to be closed as Durell walked over to her, but he felt she had been watching all the time he was with Susan. Somehow she had managed to braid her dark, shining hair into a regal coronet that framed her oval face. Her mouth was in repose, but the corners drooped a little in sadness and exhaustion. She shivered in the cold of the trawler’s hold.

  “Francesca?” Durell said. “You know I need your help?”

  She opened her gray eyes and he saw the way her dark lashes made delicate fans across the immaculate perfection of her skin.

  “I can’t help you, Sam,” she said. “I know what you want; I heard you with Susan, but I can’t help, either. Of course, Susan may be lying. I don’t know. That’s not for me to decide any more.”

  “Was it ever your decision, Francesca?”

  She nodded. “Yes. It’s time for all of the truth now, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  She said wearily, “I’ve been after a shipment of heroin that we suspected John Stuyvers and Susan of smuggling from Lebanon. That’s all.”

  “ ‘We?’ ” he repeated.

  She smiled ruefully. “I really do work for Illini of Roma, Sam. I’m a designer, all right. But some time ago I was approached by some people from our Embassy in Rome, acting for the U.N. International Narcotics Control Commission. They thought that with my sketch book and ‘cover’ identity, I could snoop around down in Naples and spot a heroin refining factory there.” Francesca shrugged. “I was successful in helping them, and it was exciting, so I went on from there. I worked with an Englishman, but the syndicate killed him in Ankara. I had to go on, to Karagh. Our information identified the smuggler as posing as a missionary, and as soon as I spotted John and Susan Stuyvers, I knew I had it. But in the confusion of the earthquake—there was no law to appeal to, and you were after the Uvaldi tape, you said; but I couldn’t be sure who you were, really, or where Anderson fitted into the picutre—so I decided to wait and see. I had to be certain that Stuyvers had the heroin with him. I couldn’t trust anybody, just as you couldn’t trust me.” She paused and smiled ruefully. “I was so sure of myself. I’d been successful before, in Naples, and I thought I could handle anything. I felt as if I didn’t need help. But I was really all mixed up about things. I’m afraid I’ve bungled everything, for myself and for you.”

  Durell nodded. He was not surprised by Francesca’s admissions. It fitted the pattern of activity she had developed, and although he had not come to a decision about her before, he accepted what she said now without comment, and went back to his main purpose.

  “About the tape, Francesca,” he said. “Susan claimed she had it in the bag, while we were in the plane. Do you think she was in the heroin deal with John?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think she’s as black as she paints herself. But you’re not really interested in the heroin, are you, Sam?”

  “I’m only interested in finding that spool of tape.”

  “Yes, you would be.” She sighed. “And what will you do then?”

  “We’ll get out of here,” he said quietly. “There must be a way.”

  “And if you got out of the hold? There are all the men in the crew. Perhaps not all of them are armed, but—” “All I need is a gun,” he said.

  “And you’d try to take over the boat?”

  “I have to,” he said. “I must try.”

  “They’ll kill you, of course. Some of us may be killed.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  She shook her head. “I’ll never be as afraid again as I was last night, when—Anderson, I guess; he’s the one, isn’t he? —when Anderson attacked me outside the Stuyvers’ hut.” “You have to stop thinking about that,” he said gently. “But I don’t want to. I don’t think I should forget it, because it’s important to think about, and there are too many thinks I skipped around and avoided lately. If it wasn’t for the lucky arrival of that old peasant woman bringing the tape to Stuyvers, and scaring him off—and he attacked me because he thought I saw him wandering about like that, right?—well, he’d have killed me.” Her gray eyes regarded him gravely. “I’m sorry, Sam, but I really don’t know where the radar tape is. I never saw it. I never saw Kappic slip it into my sketch box, and I never saw Susan take it out.” He nodded. “Did you see anybody touch Stuyvers’ bag in the plane?”

  “Only Anderson, that one time.”

  “No one else? You’re sure? Please—try to remember.” She frowned in thought. “I have the odd impression—I was busy taking care of poor Lieutenant Kappic most of the time—but before that, while I was talking to him—it must have been after he had his change of heart and put the tape in my sketch box—I got the feeling that someone got up while John was asleep with the bag on his lap and—and stood beside him for a few moments, doing something. I saw it from the comer of my eye—”

  “Who was it?” Durell asked.

  She laughed without humor. “I have the silly notion it was Colonel Wickham.”

  “Of course,” Durell said quietly, and he stood up.

  He looked very tall, a lean shadow in silhouette against the naked light bulb in the hold, as he stood before Francesca in the corner. His face was in the shadows, and she could not read anything there.

  She felt somehow stripped naked under his gaze, and yet the thought was not displeasing, and it went beyond the physical desire she felt for him. She understood her need for this man, for however brief a time they might be allotted each other; it was due to her awareness of
death the night before; she wanted him, in order to assure herself she was still alive. In that way the maniacal, battering attack on her person, which had shattered all the deluding security of self and her immortality, could be put in proper, healthy perspective. She wanted him to make love to her soon. If they lived. If it could be arranged. But it was more than that, too. She no longer wanted to be alone.

  She no longer felt adequate to move through the world’s maze in prideful isolation. What she needed was assurance from a man like Durell that she could still go on somehow, doing her job for the U.N. Commission, using her brain, which was good, and her courage, which had never been questioned before, toward something useful, something no longer academic. Up to now, she had never really hated the smugglers she was pitted against. The jobs assigned to her has been like objective mathematical problems to be coolly computed and resolved. But she hated John Stuyvers now, and regarded Susan without pity—and some jealousy, too. No, nothing would ever be the same again.

  She looked up at Durell. “Sam?”

  “Yes, Francesca. It’s all right.”

  “What are you going to do about Wickham?”

  “I’m getting out of here. I’m going to find him.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  THERE was an iron ladder going up the bulkhead to the hatch over the hold where they were held prisoner. The hatch was really a trap door within a larger framework, the main hatch-cover that provided the ceiling area for the compartment. The hold itself, lined with rusted refrigeration pipes, its metal plates sweating with condensation, was about twenty feet square, covering the width of the vessel’s beam so there could be no passage from the holds forward to the engine room and compartments aft, without going through here or using the upper deck.

  Durell considered this, standing spread-legged against the lift and fall and plunge of the trawler. The bare light bulb danced and jerked on the end of its single cord extended by an iron pipe from the aft bulkhead. The pipe was hinged, so the light and wire could be swung aside to clear the way for the seine purse when the netted catch was dumped in here. It could be reached from the steel rungs of the ladder that went up to the trap door in the hatch ten feet from the slippery, rusted deck where he stood. Durell ignored it for a moment and studied the rest of the compartment, aware that John Stuyvers was watching him with harsh curiosity, and aware, too, of Susan’s blank face turning to follow him and of Francesca Uvaldi’s quiet composure. They watched and waited and expected anything from him now.

  There was no door, no other entrance from the below-deck level. He considered the multiple rows of refrigeration pipes that circled the walls. Aft, against the bulkhead that separated them from the engine room, was a steel plate in the wall, perhaps two feet square, just above the section where most of the coil pipes went through the bulkhead. Durell turned to it, considered its riveted surface and saw that the hinges made it into a small trap door. Paint had once sealed it tight, but the alternate degrees of heat and cold down here had long since flaked away the painted seal and revealed the outline of the hinges and the dogged-down handle.

  John Stuyvers stood silently beside him.

  “Where do you suppose it goes?”

  “Into the engine room,” Durell said, “and the refrigeration pumps. But we can’t make it out that way. Somebody would see me at once. In any case, we have nothing to open this with. No hammer or wrench.”

  “Susan could get us out,” John said carefully.

  “How?”

  “There’s a guard up on deck, right?”

  “Perhaps. The may just have fastened down the hatch in this weather and sealed us in, though.”

  John said, “Let’s put the girl to work. She could twist one of these clumsy fishermen around her little finger, you know?”

  Durell looked at the blonde girl. “What do you think, Susan?”

  “Yes, I’ll try,” she said at once.

  “All right. Go on up the ladder and bang on the trap door. See if there’s any answer.”

  “And then?”

  “Tell the watch you want to see the captain, at once.” “Smile at the bastard,” John grated. “Give him the works, baby.”

  “I don’t see what good—”

  Durell listened to the crash and hiss of the sea breaking on the foreward deck. “If there is any watch at all, it’s probably only one man. We’ll have to take him right here. So I’ll be on the ladder behind you, Susan. Go on up, now.”

  She bit her lip, nodded, and climbed up. Durell mounted behind her. She leaned back in order to rap feebly on the wooden trap door in the big hatch-cover overhead, and Durell felt her body tremble against him.

  “Take it easy,” he said quietly. “When I reach up past you to grab him, just hang on, understand? Don’t let yourself fall.”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  “If you do, just keep yourself loose. It’s awkward, I know. But do your best, Susan. Rap again.”

  She banged her fist against the trap door once more and cried out. Up here close to the deck, they could hear the loud thunder of the sea, the bursting of combers against the bow, the wash and surge of water pouring across the trawler’s deck. Durell, clinging to the ladder with one hand, reached up beyond Susand and shoved at the trap. It would not yield. He hammered on it as loudly as he could.

  He had almost given up, thinking the fishermen hadn’t bothered to post a watch here, when there came a rasp of metal being withdrawn, and then the trap door moved. "Da?”

  A hairy, bearded face was thrust down out of the upper windy darkness of the deck; a woolen cap was jammed over unkemp hair, a scarf over the mouth muffling the single word of annoyed inquiry. Water sprayed down through the trap door and soaked Susan and Durell below.

  Susan cried out, “Help me. Please. I’m ill.”

  The fisherman answered with a spate of unintelligible words. Durell spoke in Russian. “The lady is sick and she needs help. Do you have a doctor aboard?”

  “A doctor?” The man laughed. “We are only a small fishing boat, only ten men. What is wrong with her?” “She wants to see the captain.”

  “Oh? What for?”

  Durell winked. “Perhaps she wants to bargain with him for better treatment, eh?”

  “She does? She’s plain enough, but she could begin by bargaining with me—”

  The fisherman, laughing, crouched over the trap door and leaned a little farther down to look at Susan. Durell took the chance then. He reached up and around the girl, awkwardly because Susan was in his way, and caught the man around the neck and yanked hard. The effort made one foot slip off the rung of the ladder and his weight suddenly came down full force as the crewman bellowed. Durell’s elbow slipped perilously from around the watchman’s neck. But the sudden dragging yank was enough. The man plunged headlong through the trap door, slamming past Susan and falling with Durell to the deck of the compartment below.

  The fisherman struck first, and Durell came down on top of him. The impact was stunning. It was a long drop down. Durell felt darkness swirl around him and forced himself to his feet, staggering. The fisherman lay sprawled on the deck, his breathing quick and shallow, his eyes closed. Durell felt his pulse, flicked back an eyelid. There was no blood. He got painfully to his feet again, searched the unconscious man for a weapon. There was only a long, sharply-edged fishknife. He took it, weighing it in his hand.

  “Sam?” Susan still clung to the ladder above him. “Are you all right?”

  He nodded. “You can come down now. The guard is only knocked out. He’ll have to be tied and gagged for a while. Tear up one of the blankets for the job, will you?”

  John Stuyvers stood over the unconscious crewman, crouching slightly. “You ought to kill him,” Stuyvers whispered. “Get rid of him.”

  “He’s only a fisherman,” Durell said. “Don’t touch him.” Susan came down the ladder and he climbed back up to take her place. John Stuyvers was on his heels immediately. “I’m going with you, Durell. I’m not stayin
g in this stinking fish-hold another minute.”

  “You’ll stay,” Durell said harshly. “I’ve got to find Colonel Wickham first. Nothing can be done until after that.” “What do I care about that fat slob?” Stuyvers breathed angrily. “I want out, understand? I want that bag backl You could use me, you said—”

  “Later. Meanwhile, stay here,” Durell said.

  He heaved himself up, kicked once, and wriggled through the trap door and got out on deck.

  Rain slashed at him coldly, spitefully, and made him gasp. He was conscious of confused noises and movement in the dark of the night—the plunging of the trawler, the dark racing seas that burst in explosive agony over the trawler’s bow and beam, the clatter of a loose block, the screech of the wind in the halyards and dragnet tackle from the mast aft.

  He looked toward the stern housing, where a single lighted window showed, then quickly covered the trap door again to cut off the light that shone up from the storage hold below. He saw no one on deck, but in the wild darkness he could not be sure. There was certain to be another watch posted, perhaps up forward, perhaps in the tub-like crow’s nest that plunged in wild arcs atop the stubby mast. But there was no sign of alarm, and after a moment he slid across the wet deck and hunched down in the lee of the main bulwark, out of the cutting wind and rain. He kept the fisherman’s knife ready in his hand.

  The raging sea was dark and empty in every direction. The storm was no real danger to the sturdy, diesel-powered trawler—but it offered precious delay in its progress toward shore. Durell considered the cabin housing aft, where the single square window shone with a yellow glow against the driving black rain.

  Somehow he had to find Colonel Wickham—find him and ask him the question that desperately needed an answer. Until then, there was no point in planning further.

  There was the possibility that Wickham, shamming drunkenness, had been dumped into one of the crew’s bunks below—in which case he would not be alone, and it would be impossible to reach him, armed only with the knife.