Assignment - Suicide

by Edward S. Aarons

  “Yes, I noticed,” Valya whispered.

  “Will he betray us?”

  “He is jealous of you. He was always out of place with our group. I think he joined it only because of me, and now that he has lost me Because of what has happened, he is not reliable. I cannot guess what he will do.”

  “But he knows you’ll be shot if he betrays you, doesn’t he?”

  “Yet if he thinks he has lost me, anyway . . .”

  He did not press it further. The mechanical pulsing that had caused him to halt here was suddenly deepened in tone and became a strong throbbing, with a minor note in a high key, like the whining of electric winches. The sound spread through the marsh and woodland all around them. Durell stood up. The earth under his feet began to shake and tremble.

  “What is it?” Valya asked.

  He studied the dark land to the west. The ground sloped down and then up, rising through a copse of hardwood trees, then an open patch of swamp to a low ridge. A faint glow came from that direction, outlining the trunks and limbs of trees against the dark loom of the sky.

  “Let’s go see.”

  It took only five minutes to cross the hollow. Near the top, Durell proceeded in a crouch for twenty feet and then slid silently to his belly. Valya came to rest beside him. He looked down on a scene that a few years ago would have defied his imagination with its fantasy.

  The humming sound had lifted to a new intensity. Below them was a wide, natural bowl in the terrain, and Durell lifted his gaze briefly to study the interlaced camouflage nets that stretched from the treetops above him to the trees far on the other side of the area. Totally invisible from the air, the missile base deep in these wild marshes was floodlighted from various vantage points around the high perimeter of the bowl. There were concrete cubes that housed machinery, a long wooden barracks, a radar tower, a mobile rocket battery, and an anti-aircraft battery of the Nike type. Uniformed troops and technicians moved smoothly and efficiently through their appointed tasks. As Durell watched, a vast section of the earth that included trees and buildings began to lift upward as if on a giant hinge, like the cap on a bottle sunk into the soil. The whining lifted to an ear-splitting scream that rose until it passed beyond his auditory range but made the atmosphere all but intolerable with its vibration. Light glowed from the pit as if from an inferno, exposed under the vast lid.

  Valya moved on the damp turf beside him. “What is it?”

  “Be quiet,” he whispered. “There are sentries around.”

  “But are they going to fire—”

  “We’ll see.”

  The huge hinged section of land had lifted to a vertical angle, exposing concrete work below and a deep floodlighted chamber with steel rails and a gantry crane hidden in an abyss where he could not see. There were dim shouted orders as the machinery whined to a halt. The uniformed men scurried for safety, diving down one of the concrete buildings to the left. A deep pulsing filled the night. The earth trembled. Up from the depths came the long railed finger of the modified gantry crane. A siren moaned softly. Then a needle snout of glistening, shining steel alloy slowly and smoothly rolled upward until half of the lean, vicious length of the rocket was exposed to the floodlight glare. The machinery down in the bowels of the launching pit pulsed harder, then abruptly cut off.

  Silence filled the aching vacuum.

  Durell waited, eyes narrowed, memorizing what he saw. His body was braced for the shattering blast of rocks that would come next.

  Nothing happened.

  A man’s harsh command, amplified over a speaker system, ended the silence. The machinery began to hum again. The nose of the huge rocket slid down the steel track into the pit again. The vast lid of steel, covered with earth, brush, trees and buildings, began to lower like a giant trap door, the vegetation thrashing and bending in its unaccustomed angle.

  Durell let out a long breath. “A dry run,” he muttered.

  Valya lifted her head. “I don’t understand what—”

  What followed came fast, with no warning at all. The whine of the machinery had covered the crunching booted footstep of the sentry behind them. The first hint of danger for Durell was the sharp prick of a bayonet just under his ribs.

  “Do not move,“ a man said.

  Durell turned his head with extreme care. He had been propped on his elbows to watch the nightmare scene below. He did not try to get up. The pressure of the bayonet in his back was warning enough. He could see nothing of the sentry except the man’s booted feet with green uniform trousers stuffed into the tops of his boots.

  “Who are you?” the guard asked in his thin voice.

  “Lieutenant Andrei Vassilov," Durell said quickly. “Get that damned blade out of my back, you fool.” His voice carried authority and conviction.

  “A lieutenant, comrade? Stand up and let me see your face.”

  Durell rolled over from under the bayonet and stood up. Valya got up with him, shrinking to one side. Her face was expressionless. The guard was a thin, dark-featured youth with Mongol features; his Russian accent was heavily tinctured with Uzbek. He wore a thin dark mustache and there was something wrong with one side of his jaw, as if he had been wounded and part of the bone shot away, giving his face a lopsided, evil look. There was triumph and suspicion glittering in his slanted eyes.

  “Your papers, Lieutenant,“ he said sardonically.

  “Of course. Point that rifle somewhere else, damn you,” Durell said, simulating official anger.

  “My orders are to shoot anyone found in this area without proper authorization. I have not seen you here before.”

  “I arrived only this morning for duty,” Durell said.

  “Then you will have papers to prove it. Let me see them.”

  The huge lid of earth had settled back into place in the launching pit below the ridge where Durell stood. Several of the floodlights winked out. The Uzbek soldier stood a few feet back from Durell, his rifle ready, the bayonet winking wickedly in the reflected light from the scene below. His lopsided face looked alert and dangerous, with a primitive caution that Durell did not care to tempt.

  “Here are my papers,” he said.

  “Put them on the ground. Then step back,” said the Uzbek.

  Durell put his fake passport on the turf and went back two steps. The soldier did not seem concerned about Valya. He glanced at her once, saw she had not moved, and stooped to pick up Durell’s papers. It was an awkward position for a man with a rifle to maintain, even for the few seconds it was necessary for him to reach for the passport. Durell jumped for the rifle, kicked at it, and chopped at the side of the guard’s neck. The Uzbek made a grunting sound and stumbled forward. His helmeted head caught Durell low in the stomach and drove him backward with the impact; a root caught at his heel and he fell.

  Nothing had gone right. Durell saw the guard lunging erect with the rifle still in his hand, bayonet winking and driving for his throat. The Uzbek looked savage. Durell tried to get a leg flexed and aimed for the guard’s belly, but the blow in the pit of his stomach had slowed his reflexes. Death was only an instant away when Valya struck with something in her hand at the back of the man’s head. The guard made a low animal sound and was knocked off balance enough so that the bayonet plunged into the sod only an inch from Durell’s throat. Valya struck again. She had a rock in her hand, and the guard’s helmet fell off, hitting the earth with a low ringing sound. In the dim light from the launching pit, Valya’s face looked as savage and primitive as the Uzbek’s.

  Durell scrambled to his feet. “Valya!”

  She stood still and the rock fell from her fingers. There were smears of blood on it. She began to tremble violently.

  “Get away from him,” Durell said firmly. He knelt beside the sprawled body of the soldier. The back of the man’s head was bloody, but no serious damage had been done. He rolled the man over. His twisted face looked gray and unnatural in the dim light. His eyes were open and glittering. But he wasn’t breathing. He had f
allen face down on a sharp stone that had neatly penetrated his left temple. The stone still stuck into the vulnerable part of his head.

  “Is he—is he dead?” Valya whispered.

  “Yes, he‘s dead. But you didn’t kill him. It was the way he fell.”

  “But I couldn’t let him—”

  “Get hold of yourself,” Durell said. She was trembling more violently than before. He thought she was going to be sick, and he took her shoulders and turned her away and pushed her toward the brush nearby. “It wasn’t your fault."

  Durell looked down toward the launching pit. There was no alarm. As he watched, the remaining floodlights winked out and the dark night swooped back and covered the scene as if it never had been. A man’s voice called a last command, and then silence came. He knelt over the dead guard, his mind jumping ahead to future possibilities. The guard would soon be missed. There was no way of guessing when he was due at his check post. Make it ten minutes to be safe. Give his commanding officer another five minutes to let irritation grow into alarm. Another five to send a second sentry searching for the Uzbek. Twenty minutes. Time enough.

  He stood up, dragging the dead man upright, hoisting him to his shoulders. Valya watched him. “What are you going to do with him?”

  “Bury him or hide him,” Durell said. “Pick up his helmet and rifle.”

  She did as she was told. Her steps were stumbling and uncertain as she followed him down the slope. His burden was heavy; he was sweating in spite of the chill of the night. Somewhere to his left in the darkness he heard the trickling of a small stream, and he headed that way, trying to move silently through the brush with the dead man. Now and then the soldier’s uniform belt or sleeve would catch on a twig or branch. Valya untangled it each time. She said nothing more. When Durell had gone about a hundred paces upstream, he felt his feet sinking into bog. He paused, aware of the rank smell of swamp vegetation around him, hearing frogs that boomed and racketed all about. He heard no sound of alarm above those nocturnal noises. Ten minutes had gone by. He dropped the dead man from his shoulders and straightened. The sweat cooled on his body. Valya was a tall shadow beside him.

  “We’ll leave him here,” Durell decided. “They may not find him too soon.”

  “Where can we go?” she asked.

  “To the car."

  “I don’t know where it is. I couldn’t find it now. I don’t know where we are.”

  Durell looked up at the sky. The moon was gone. The night was totally dark and there was no way of judging his direction. The dead man was just a shapeless mass of shadow in the mud at his feet. He drew a deep breath to steady himself. At the same time he now heard through the ululations of the frogs a high, faraway shrilling sound. It was a military whistle. He looked hack toward the launching pit and saw a light wink on, wink off, wink on again. He wondered if the Russian military used dogs, and he picked up the guard’s rifle.

  “Can you use this, Valya?”

  “I don’t want to touch it,” she whispered.

  He took the P.38 he had regained from Mikhail. “Then keep this."

  “It is hopeless," she said. “They are already aware of us. They know that someone spied on them over there. We can’t get away.”

  He said angrily: “Don’t you want to try?”

  She looked at him, startled by his voice. She looked down at the dead man. A whistle blew, nearer this time. Durell shook her shoulders.

  “Come on,” he said.

  They ran. It was a time of nightmare, a time of horror. It had no end, and distance had no meaning. Durell tried for high land to get out of the swamp, but apparently they had headed into a vast area of bog from which there was no easy escape. The mud dragged at their feet as they floundered through knee-deep pools, tripped over roots, slammed into invisible trees. Now and then a man’s dim shout drifted after them, heard over the harsh laboring of their lungs. Once they heard the sound of a car on a road nearby, and they veered sharply away from it. Valya fell and he picked her up and her weight dragged dead in his arms. He slapped her face lightly to urge her on. She shook her head and he picked her up and carried her for a distance, his own legs growing leaden with exhaustion, until a warning tremor in the muscles of his arms and shoulders told him to put her down. She walked on with him for ten minutes after that. Lights still winked doggedly behind them. They could not be shaken. He had no idea where they were heading. He knew the danger of traveling in a circle in the utter dark of night, and he made deliberate angular turns to compensate for it, but he still had no assurance that they might not blunder into a squad of searching soldiers at any moment. He clung to the idea of escape and permitted nothing else to diminish his purpose.

  He was not sure when he heard the silence around him. He lay on his back, with Valya beside him, her arm across his, staring at a black, invisible sky that somehow seemed to turn slowly with the giant spinning of the earth. He tried to see what time it was, but mud caked his hands and arms. Both he and the girl were caked with mud from head to foot. Half his clothing had been torn away, and he could not see what condition Valya was in. He listened to her labored breathing and worried about her state of mind as well as her physical endurance.

  “Sam?” she said quietly.

  “I’m here. Try to rest.”

  “Can you go on?”

  “In a few minutes.”

  “Then go on without me. Leave me here.”

  “I couldn’t do that.”

  “If they catch me, it is not important. I am a Soviet citizen. I can have some kind of explanation. I may be imprisoned or shot, but that would end it. I would just be a name in their files. But if they capture you—have you thought of what might happen, Sam?”

  “It has occurred to me,” he said wryly. “Save your breath.”

  “No, I cannot go on. Not another step.”

  He propped himself up on his elbow. Drying mud fell from his arms. He could see nothing, hear nothing. Somehow, at some moment during the past quarter-hour of headlong flight, they had either eluded their pursuers or the chase had been called off. He looked up at the sky. A thick overcast blotted out moon and stars like a black blanket. The chill wind had died and he no longer felt cold. The air was still, pregnant with rain. He could only dimly make out the holes of trees, the tangled underbrush, the stretch of swampland that surrounded them. Where they sprawled the ground lifted in a tiny hummock that was like a dry island in a primeval world of muck and ooze.

  “Sam?”

  “Still here."

  “Please go on. Go now. I'll be all right.”

  “How is your face?”

  “It doesn’t hurt any more.

  “You’re lying.”

  She was silent except for a faint chattering of her teeth. Durell rolled toward her and felt the warm softness of her hip and thigh against him. He wondered what they would look like in the dawn light, tattered and ragged and caked with mud. He reached gently for the dim oval of her face. She tried to turn away with a little moaning sound, but his hand was easy with her, touching her cheek, her eyelids, her tangled hair.

  “I’m glad it’s so dark,” she whispered. “Are you going now?”

  “Not without you.”

  “But I am nothing but a handicap, a danger to you, now.”

  “No."

  He felt a warm drop of rain on his forehead. Another drop fell, and another. The budding leaves on the underbrush reflected the soft, cleansing patter of the bursting drops. The rain made Durell suddenly realize he was thirsty. He did not mention it. He saw Valya stand up.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.

  "If you do not leave me, then I must leave you. I cannot stay here with you. You are a stranger to me. You are a foreigner. I deserted my country and my people.”

  He stood up with her, but she moved back from him. He wished he could see her face. She sounded as if she were crying.

  “You’re not alone, Valya. How can you say that, when I’m here with you?”<
br />
  “Are you all I have?” she cried. “Am I alone, except for you?”

  “Valya, you’re tired, you’ve had a terrible time—”

  “Yes, terrible. But there were other bad times for me, right here in this very place, when I was a child. l remember them well. But there was a difference, then. I was with my own people. Now I’m alone.”

  “You don’t have to be frightened of that. You have me.”

  “Have I?” she cried. “Have I?”

  Suddenly she turned and began to run from him. He stood rooted for an instant, then called her name as loudly as he dared. She did not answer. The dark rain swallowed her, but he heard the sounds of her thrashing flight through the wet woods, the sob of her breath. He gave chase, anger mingling with pity in him. He caught her at the edge of a small pond, seized her arm and pulled her about. She fell against him heavily and he felt the wet mud that clung like clay to the firmness of her body.

  The rain hissed down upon them, beating on their bent heads. It felt warm and cleansing. The mud began to slide from Durell’s shoulders, from his arms and his hands, sliding to the darkness at his feet.

  “Valya, we’ll both rest here until morning. We’re both tired. It won’t do us any good to stumble around anymore in the dark. We’ll stay right here. Agreed?”

  She sobbed and clung to him. Her weight dragged at him and he eased her to the grassy bank of the pond. Her body trembled in his grip, under his hands. And suddenly she buried her face against his chest and lay close to him, pressing the length of her body against him as tightly as she could.

  “Hold me,” she whispered. “Don’t let me go.”

  “I won’t let you go.”

  He felt the heat of her under his hands as the rain washed away the mud that covered her tattered clothing. When he kissed her, her response came with desperate, frantic violence.

  Chapter Fourteen

  A STRAY SUNBEAM filtered through the interlaced trees overhead and wakened him. Durell did not move for a long moment. He stared up at the blue dawn sky and listened and remembered, aware of Valya's weight against him, her long golden hair in a tangle across his chest. She breathed evenly and lightly. His left arm tingled where she lay against it. The sky was a warm, washed blue of spring. A plane droned by overhead, a silvery twin-motored Russian version of the Dakota C-47. He turned his head carefully and saw that Valya was awake and staring at him, although she had not moved, either.