Assignment Afghan Dragon (19 page)

She said simply, “I am frightened.”

He moved to the far side of the tent where the flap was up and got down on his stomach and peered out. At first he could see only a dim red glow from the campfire; then he made out the black shapes of other tents nearby. He counted four, with the shapes of tethered camels beyond, against a rise of rock. There were no more than a dozen of the beasts, and since the women usually walked and the camels carried camp equipment, he assumed there were about a dozen fighting men in the group, as well.

He ducked back when the guard’s booted feet came around the tent. The man came very close to the low-pitched edge of the tent. Durell looked up at the sky and saw a bright spatter of stars against cold velvet. The tip of the moon gleamed above a jagged ridge of mountains. They could not have traveled far from the ambush site, but then elevation here in these wild hills was high enough to cause the night’s biting cold. The other tents were pitched in a rough line at the base of a rock abutment for shelter from the wind. That meant the next tent was the one where Freyda had met her agonies.

The sentry’s boots sounded again. Flat on his stomach, Durell waited, then suddenly slid out from under the tent flap, grabbed the man’s ankle, yanked hard. There was a muffled sound from the guard, but before his voice lifted in a yell of alarm, Durell had him down with a heavy thud and clapped a hand over his mouth. The man’s rifle clattered as it fell. He was wearing Durell’s wristwatch. His clothing stank of rancid fat and sweat. The shock of his sudden fall had knocked the breath out of him, and Durell’s stiff fingers stabbed for his larynx. The man tried to jerk his way free; he was thickset and strong, but there was no air in his lungs when Durell cut it off. They were locked together for a long minute while the man thrashed under him. Durell watched the eyes change, popping, growing glazed; he stabbed deeper and something suddenly crushed. There was a strong sound from deep inside the sentry’s body, a tremor, and then the guard was still.

Durell did not move, waiting and listening. The noise made by the guard’s falling rifle had seemed quite loud, but no one came to investigate. The camp was asleep. But it would not be so for long, he thought grimly.

He got to his feet, picked up the rifle. He also retrieved his watch from the dead man’s wrist. Erect, he could see that the camp was pitched close to a wall of a narrow pass in the mountains. A stream tumbled down through the rocks a bit below the site. There were only the five tents he had counted. The dung fire was almost out, leaving only a small heap of glowing coals occasionally spitting sparks in the gusty cold wind. No other tribesmen were outside the tents.

The rifle felt reassuring as he moved toward the adjacent tent. In a moment he brushed aside the flap and stepped inside, ducking low under the black hide covering.

“Freyda, don’t make a sound,” he whispered.

There was a muffled whimpering from the darkness that reeked around him. He closed the tent flap and heard a scraping noise, a quick inhalation of breath; his foot touched a leg and he dropped quickly to his knees.

“Freyda? It’s me. Sam Durell.”

“Oh, no,
nicht
. . ." The words became garbled German. He smelled blood inside the tent. Even though he was only a foot or two away from the woman, he could not see her. “It is so?” she finally gasped. “It is the Cajun?”

“Keep your voice down.”

“But how did you—why should you—?”

“Are you badly hurt?” he whispered.

“Hurt? Ach, yes, I am hurt. A young girl dreams of men, older women dream of men, but these are stinking, filthy animals. Shall I tell you the things they made me do, naked before them, one after the other—”

He clapped a hand over her mouth to quiet her rising hysteria. He was glad he could not see her in the darkness. He said, “Did you know that Chou is dead?”

“So? What do I care for that Chinese? It was all his fault, in any case. If not for my sister in Peking—”

“She’s dead, too,” he said bluntly.

He felt her body jerk as if he had struck her. But he knew that brutality was necessary. “Listen, Freyda. It came over the Peking radio. Madame Strelsky and the General—both dead in an alleged lover’s quarrel. There’s no reason to doubt it, do you understand? She will never leave China now. She will be buried there.”

“No.”

“It’s true.”

“No! Go away.”

A sob caught in her throat. He moved back a little and waited. Freyda was silent for a long time. Her teeth finally began to chatter. He was ready to stifle her if she screamed or raised her voice.

“Freyda?” he whispered.

“What do you want?”

“I need your help.”

“From me?” Her laughter was harsh, almost soundless. “You have not seen what I look like now. My face—they used knives. My breasts, my stomach, my feet. I cannot walk. How can I help you?”

“Did you see Zhirnov?”

“Him? Yes.”

“Is he here in the camp?”

“Oh, no. That one is like a cat. He got away from Chou and his men.”

“You’re sure of that?” It was as Durell had suspected.

“With the
verdamnt
dragon, yes.” She paused. “And Chou turned on these savages and shouted at them and they rejected his appeal and attacked us—we, who paid them in the first place. They are treacherous, inhuman—”

“All right.” He silenced her. “I’ll come back.”

“Do not hurry,” she said.

He slipped silently out of the tent. But he chose an unfortunate moment to make his exit. Two men had just come out of the tent beyond the dying fire. Both carried rifles, but they held them loosely, muzzles pointed down. They saw Durell at the same moment he spotted them. He could not stop their shouts of alarm. One of them, bulky in a heavy Army coat, raised his rifle, an automatic Kalashnikov. Durell fired at once, his slug hitting the man in the chest, knocking him backward with his legs in the air as he hit the ground. The second man shouted and ducked back, and Durell ran across the campground, hurtling over the glowing fire, and got back to Anya’s tent. The rifle he had taken from the guard back there swung lightly in his hand.

“Come out, Anya! Quickly!”

The girl had trained reflexes. She ducked out into the cold night air at a low crouch that made her a small target. All around the camp, there were shouts and yells as men tumbled from their tents. Durell retreated with Anya out of the dark red glow of the firelight, backing toward the opening of the little ravine. Moonlight showed him black-and-white images of the turmoil among the tents. He fired high over the heads of the confused tribesmen and retreated another dozen paces to the shelter of some boulders. A glance over his shoulder showed him the trail down the mountain from the river road where they had first been ambushed. All around him, the hills were a contorted sea of cruel peaks and jagged valleys. He could only judge his general direction by the position of the moonrise.

“It is hopeless,” Anya gasped. “We cannot escape.”

The men still shouted and ran from tent to tent in the gloom. The wind made a piping sound, blowing dust up from the ground. Durell lifted the rifle and fired two more shots as several figures started toward them.

“Stay here,” he said to Anya. “I’m going back.”

She was appalled. “What for? We can run—”

“Freyda needs help. And they have my money—

Most of the tribesmen had vanished, leaving only the man he had first hit sprawled beyond the campfire. Durell ran in a zigzag course back to the fire. A single shot whipped out of the darkness, seeking him out. He ignored it, reached the fallen man as another shot smashed into the stony ground nearby. The dead man was big, muffled in his Army coat with flaps that spread around him and made him look like a giant, fallen insect. The shadow of the cliffs provided adequate darkness. Durell put down the rifle and rapidly searched the dead man. The tribesman had been a chief, evidently. He found his wallet, passport and .38 handgun almost at once. Luck, he thought. But the luck did not hold. When he arose again, only moments later, two men hurtled at him out of the cold, windy darkness.

His reflexes were still' slowed by the beating he had taken when they first captured him. The first man jumped feet first, his boots slamming into Durell’s ribs, knocking him over. He rolled, grabbed at a leg, pulled the tribesman down over him before the second man could fire into his exposed body. They rolled over and over toward the glowing embers of the fire, then into the hot coals. The caravan man landed face first into the pit and screamed from the depths of his gut as his face was seared. Durell kept rolling, the coals clinging to the back of his coat; he smelled charred cloth and broiled flesh from his enemy’s face. The second man circled, rifle ready, as Durell, on his back, kicked upward and caught him in the groin with the heel of his boot. From the other side of the camp came screams and yells as several camels broke loose and lumbered out into the darkness. The camels were more precious to these people than anything else. With their chief dead, they were close to panic, and then attention was divided between recapturing Durell and the big animals. Durell scrambled up and ran for Freyda’s tent.

Someone else was in the dark interior beside the injured woman. He saw the flicker of a knife as the person arose from the prone figure. A hissing spate of dialect came at him and then the knife flashed and he felt the curved point hiss through his sleeve. He grabbed for the other’s wrist and twisted, felt a twinge in his battered ribs, and twisted harder. He realized it was a woman, perhaps one of the tribesmen’s wives. He swung his fist in a roundhouse blow that knocked the woman off her feet and across the tent. Picking up her knife, he found a match in his jacket and struck it. His fingers shook. One glance in the tiny bomb flare was enough.

Freyda’s throat had been cut from ear to ear.

The tribeswoman hissed at him in her mountain dialect that needed no interpreter to make her meaning clear. Durell took the bloody knife with him and ducked out of the low tent, ignoring her. Gunfire sounded up the narrow pass as the men tried to retrieve their stampeding camels. He ignored it, ignored the bodies of the men he had killed by the campfire, and jogged back to where he had left Anya.

A man was with her. It was Howard, from the van.

“Oh, it’s you,” Howard said calmly. “I came back to see if I could help.”

He held a hunting rifle competently, as if he knew how to use it. His young grin made his white teeth flash in the moonlight. “I guess I missed all the excitement.”

Durell suddenly felt exhausted. “You okay, Anya?”

“Yes. But Freyda—”

“Forget it.” He turned to the young man. “Where is your van?”

“Back on the road, about four miles from here. Most of the way is downhill. Need some help, Mr. Durell?”

“No, I’m all right,” Durell said.

“You look funny. They really beat up on you, didn’t they? Lucy can fix you up. She studied nursing for a while. And I was a corpsman for a year, in Nam.”

“That may come in handy,” Durell said.

He took Anya’s hand and they started down the narrow pass, moving quickly away from the caravan camp.

Southward were the salt lakes of the Gaud-i-Zirreh. To the north was the Khash desert. The road was mostly dirt, paved only in sections where dam construction on the Khash and Helmand Rivers was in progress. The heat was intolerable. The mountains were far behind them, and it was noon of the second day of their tortuous drive south after they left the wrecked Ferrari. Chakhansur shimmered like a mirage ahead, a spot of green oasis in the barren land. Howard and George slept in the back of the van. Lucy and Anya sat up front with Durell. He had allowed Howard to drive for a few hours during the night, then returned to the wheel at dawn. His weariness went bone-deep from the irregular jolting on the rippled dirt roads. Groups of nomads in their black woolen robes, herding camels and goats, passed now and then on the trail. A few construction trucks also occupied the track. They had stopped at midmoming at a small village near the Khash-Rud, where a
hammam
, a small Turkish bath in a government-sponsored inn, was available. There were no facilities for the girls. Later, Lucy prepared a meal for them on the van’s propane stove. From the post office next to the hammam, Durell had tried to call Sarah Fingal in Meshed. It was impossible to get a connection this time.

In Chakhansur, a place that seemed as remote as the moon, he tried again. Some Americans worked here on another of the dams, but the town was dusty and secretive behind its blank house walls and drooping date palms. The jail stood at one end of a small square, flanked by two mosques with minarets that scratched at the brazen sky. Although the Helmand Lakes were just twenty miles off, there was no relief from the heat. In ancient times, this area had been fertile and prosperous, until the Mongols laid it waste and destroyed the
qanats
that brought water underground from the rivers. Most of the laborers were Hazaras here, a cheerful, hard-working tribe universally scorned and avoided by the rest of the population, for reasons lost in the darkness of the past.

It took only twenty minutes to get through to Sarah Fingal this time, while Howard and George and Lucy wandered about the dusty square and considered the tiled mosques on either side of the government building. The clerk inside was efficient. When Durell heard Sarah’s voice above a thin crackling in the phone, he blew out a breath of relief.

“Sarah?”

“Oh, good, Sam. Are you all right?”

“Reasonably. Did you get Washington?”

“I spoke to McFee himself.” Sarah’s voice was crisp and alert, unlike the dullness that had clouded her mind after learning of Homer’s death. “McFee gave me quite a handful for you, and a lot of instructions for me. You haven’t gotten the dragon back, have you?”

“No.”

“You won’t find Professor Berghetti in jail there, either. I’ve been on the phone, myself, to Hal Oberman in Kabul, early this morning. A man named Andrews, an American, got Berghetti out on forged papers from Kabul at four o’clock this morning.”

“Andrews has to be Zhirnov,” Durell said.