Assignment Black Gold (14 page)

Durell looked up and down the long, empty shore. In this
place, at this time, for one of the rare moments in his business, there seemed
to be no danger in sight. He heard the girl call, saw her wave joyously to him
as she plunged deeper into the sea. He stood up and undressed, carefully put
the rifle and his handgun where the sand would not damage them. Then he
ran after her.

The salt water was a refreshing shock. He dived under a comber,
came up, swam strongly, dived again. He heard the girl call to him over the
crash of the breakers; she waved and swam toward him. He felt the tug of the
undertow, not too bad, and saw the sky turn lilac and orange and a dark, deep
blue to the east as the last quivering tip of light from the setting sun
vanished from the ocean’s horizon. He felt her body against him, warm and
smooth, wet and pliant, and her head came up, her face turned toward him. He
kissed her. Her mouth was rich and willing. Her eyes had lost their haunted
look.

“Oh, Sam!”

A breaking wave threw her against him. Her waist was
surprisingly smooth and slim and supple. He felt a rush of desire for her that
overcame his natural and ingrained restraint. It was a rare moment, recaptured
from childhood; but they were not children. Her body slid warmly against him,
and he saw her laugh as a breaker crashed over them, tumbling them. to the
bottom as they clung to each other.

“Let’s go back,” he said.

“Yes. Oh, yes, Sam!”

They made love with their wet, tingling bodies while the
night spread over them. The last of the Seagulls had soared home. The stars
reeled in the black, infinite depths of space above them. Kitty responded
to him with a desperate passion, as if love had been something almost forgotten,
eagerly recaptured. Her body was quick, voluptuous, as if her Portuguese blood
had overwhelmed her prim Yankee side. There was no restraint in her. Durell
felt almost overwhelmed. It was like a fierce battle, in which she was
trying to prove something to him, and in which she succeeded.

“Sam, don’t stop. Hold me.”

“We must.”

“Why? Why?”

“We have to go on. The moon is up."

She came out of their lovemaking as if out of a dream, her eyes
dazed but aware of him, her long hair swinging as she looked up at the black
sky. The moon was a fat crescent over the sea’s horizon, silvering the combers
as they roared in toward the beach. The sound of the surf, now that it was
dark, seemed faintly ominous.

She sighed. “All right. How much farther is it?”

“About five miles to the river mouth.”

“There is no river to the south of us.”

“It was one of Lepaka’s little jokes. He said there is a
river.”

“It’s dry,” she said. “Almost always dry.”

“We’ll see.”

She dressed quickly, and he regretted seeing the slim, fine,
velvet lines of her body lost in her clothing. He looked up and clown the beach
in the moonlight, which turned everything silver and ebony. It was as empty as
before. The girl picked up his rifle and checked it for him. He took it
from her and examined it for himself.

She laughed. “You don't trust me?”

“I don‘t trust anybody.”

“Not even after—after—”

“You needed it. So did I.”

“You sound angry, Sam. Should I be ashamed, because of
Brady, because it’s so soon after we found him?”

“No. You told me it had been over with Brady for several
months.”

“Than what is it?”

“The Apgaks want to kill you. Me, too, of course. They think
you know something about their plans to take over Lubinda, and they don’t want
you to tell me. Brady never had a chance to transmit to Washington what he
knew. They don’t want me to find out from you what it might have been.”

“But they’re all mistaken about that. I don’t know what was
in Brady’s mind.”

“Komo thinks you do. He can’t afford the men to guard you,
since you refused to take the night plane. So he put you in my care.”

“But if you’re a target, too—”

Durell was grim. "I'm used to it. My real job is to
help Lepaka save the government here. We’d like to keep the Apgaks out, if
possible. They’re the real colonialists. They’d tie up Lubinda economically and
politically, make it a vassal state. This is a tiny bastion of democracy
surrounded by nations leaning the other way. That's why the things Brady
learned are so important. It’s tied up with the oil here, but how or why it fits
together, I don’t know yet. As for the Saka—”

Durell paused thoughtfully.

The girl said, “You’re interfering in local affairs, coming
all this way to bring the old man back.”

“If we can find him. I’m working with Lepaka only out of
expediency. The Saka is solid, mature. wise. He can keep the local government
resisting the Maoist Apgaks. So I’ll do what I can to help Lepaka find
the old man."

“And I’m only incidental to that job, too, is that it?”

“Keep trying to remember if Brady ever hinted at anything
useful.”

“Do you believe I’m lying to you, Sam?”

“No.”

“You do think so.”

“Let’s not quarrel,” he said gently.

“All right.”

“You’ll remember something.”

“There’s nothing to remember,” she said sharply.

“All right.”

“Yes. All right.”

They began walking again, hostility between them.

The
Suidwes
Lugdiens
night plane from Lubinda to Luanda roared high overhead as they walked along
the lonely beach an hour later. Durell listened to the thin, high thunder of
the jets and watched the winking lights and wondered if Betty Tallman was on
it. Kitty refused to raise her head to look at the plane as it moved along the
coast southward.

The high bluff, inland from the sea, lowered more and more,
until at times the beach merged with the sparse growth and the stunted trees.
The jungle that had been evident when they first started was long gone
now. Patches of sand extended far inland. A warm wind from the interior brought
a hot, dry lifeless smell to the air instead of the previous ozone from the
ocean. Once, he saw a dozen reedbuck lift up, shaking their slender yellow flanks;
they moved inland, away from the beach. Again, among the stunted, twisted
trees, he thought he saw something else move, black and formless, darting from
shadow to shadow. He could not be sure if it was a man or an animal. He kept
the .375 Magnum ready, looking and watching, although Kitty was unaware of his
sense of being watched. The moon slid lower to the horizon of the sea. The sand
grew firmer, which helped their walking. The way seemed endless.
Driftwood, dry and silvered by the African sun, began to show up in high piles
along the dunes, as if driven there by inland floods that had raked and
scoured the interior. The sea bluffs vanished and there was nothing but a fiat
plain, rising ever so gently, from the coast to the interior.

“Sam?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not an animal.”

“I didn’t know you saw anything.”

“It’s a man.”

“He’s out of range now,” Durell said. “In this light,
anyway.”

“Would he be an Apgak?"

“If Madragata gets any kind of a hint of where we are and
what we’re trying to do, he’ll bend every effort to find us and kill us.
He has to.”

She shivered. “This country needs stability, Sam, It’s like
a baby wobbling on its feet, just taking its first steps. Lubinda is
poor. You can‘t imagine how poor it is. The oil exploration offshore is its big
hope. Its only dream. Otherwise, Lubinda has nothing.”

He watched the semi-desert inland, and then Kitty checked
herself abruptly and put a hand on his arm.

“Civilization,” she said grimly.

Two fishing boats were drawn up on the beach, long
shapes with outriggers tilted toward the black sky. The moon outlined their
hulls in silver. The masts were canted to one side, the sails brailed up. The
beach itself was scuffed and marked by a trail left by perhaps two dozen men.
Several of the heel marks looked as if some of the men had been dragged. Durell
remembered the two fishing boats he had seen from the oil platform, far
out to sea. It was possible, he thought. There was no one in sight here now. No
guards had been left with the primitive boats. He moved closer and looked at
the sails, and they were red, like the ones he had seen from the Lady.

“What is it, Sam?”

“The drilling crew who were taken off the rig—I think they
were brought here.”

“Should we follow them?”

“Not now. We follow Colonel Lepaka’s instructions."

They did not have far to go for the first landmark.
The character of the beach changed again, for perhaps half a mile ahead. A long
tongue of sand swept in a crescent out to sea, and the beach was flat,
watermarked, filled with more inland debris than before. When he looked
toward the interior, he saw that they had come to the edge of a dry riverbed
that curved far inland between the sparse, stunted trees and the black,
shapeless brush. On the map he had seen during his briefing in
Washington, it was marked as the
Bieu
Zei
River. Torrents brought about by seasonal rainstorms in
the far interior had swept everything before them, time after time, until there
were great heaps of litter, the bones of antelope and larger animals drowned in
the floods, even the unmistakable neck and skull of a giraffe. He saw now
why Lepaka had referred to this stretch as the Bone Coast. The litter of bones
gleamed ghostly white in the light of the setting moon. Everything had been
picked clean by the sea birds and vultures that followed the innumerable flood
victims.

Kitty shuddered. “What a horrible place.”

The watercourse was dry now, except for a tiny trickle toward
the far edge of the little delta. Durell moved across the tidal sands, hating
to leave the distinct trail of their
bootprints
He
went from one huge tangle of brush to another. Sometimes the dry tree trunks
and heaps of bones were high enough to form a barrier that forced him to detour
around them. The trickle of water barely flowed on the far side. He knelt
beside the tiny stream and tasted the water carefully. He spat it out. The
water was brackish.

“We’ll go inland now,” he said.

“Just who or what are we looking for?” Kitty asked.

“The Saka’s former favorite wife. Komo Lepaka’s adoptive
mother.”

When he looked up the wide, dry watercourse, it didn’t seem
as if any human being could live up there.

Chapter 13.

The place was like a desert mirage, an illusion. They came
upon it unexpectedly, an old Rhineland castle built by an ambitious German
settler hungry for something to remind him of home. The stones had collapsed,
and it was only a pile of ruins except for one fingerlike turret probing
the sky above a ridge of reddish rock. The village had been built around the
ruins.

“
Maka
,” Durell
said. He tried the tongue-click he had heard from Colonel Lepaka, and failed.
“Mother. We have come to help you.”

The old woman simply stared at him from fathomless dark eyes.
Her face was incredibly wrinkled. There was no sign that she understood him or
even heard him. For ten minutes she had simply sat there, defying him, in a
sense, to communicate with her.

The smell of smoke was thick and choking in the midnight
air. The glow of fires from the huts that had been burned cast enough
ruddy light for Durell to see the old woman’s face with reasonable clarity. She
wore a fine striped robe and large, thin gold hoops in her ears, which
had grown enormous and pendulous from the weight attached to them throughout a
lifetime. She squatted in front of her hut, one of the few that had not been
put to the torch, with her feet tucked under her, her hands resting palms up,
one within the other, in her lap. She was as tall, Durell judged, as Komo
Lepaka. There was wisdom in her small black eyes, and a deep hunger he could
not fathom.

"
Mak
a,"
he said. “Surely you understand me.”

The woman looked at him, unblinking.

Some of the villagers were straggling back from the scrub
brush and sand to which they had fled. It must have happened only an hour ago,
Durell thought. The village had been raided and put to the torch, and so far he
had counted two bodies of old men. The livestock, two cows, and any number of
dogs and goats had all been slaughtered by cutting their throats. The primitive
Apgak thatch huts had been burned at random. some here, some there. In some
ways, it was worse than a natural cataclysm. Durell saw no young women, no
young men. He assumed they had all been taken away—those who had not fled in
time.

“Kitty?” he called.

He saw her moving among some of the old people, tending to
their injuries. She heard him and looked up and came walking over to him. Her
face betrayed her anger and her anguish at what had happened to these simple
people.

“Is this the one?” she asked, looking at the old woman.

“I think so. The Saka’s first wife. She won’t answer
me.

She isn’t in shock, nothing like that.” Durell paused. “My
Apgak isn’t very good, perhaps. But you speak it, don’t you? You’ve been
teaching English to the children in Lubinda.”

“What do you want me to ask her?”

“Let’s see if she responds to anything,” Durell said.

“Talk to her, Kitty.”

The girl sank to the hard-packed earth in front of the hut,
her movement graceful and accomplished, and seated herself cross-legged in
front of the old woman. She offered the canteen of water that Durell had given
her.

Smoke drifted over her head. Oil in the empty, sandy
wilderness beyond the dry riverbed, a few jackals howled. A bird beat the night
sky with invisible wings, veering over the raided village. Durell stepped back
a bit from the old woman and the girl. They sat quietly, staring at each other
in an almost formal silence that was both a greeting and a measurement.