Assignment Madeleine (17 page)

The jet screamed overhead in a wide sweep and went back for
another pass at the rebel convoy. Quick, repetitive noises came from its wing
guns. Through the glasses, Durell saw spurts of rock and sand spout in regular
patterns along the road into the parked trucks. Most of the guerrillas were
already out of sight, hidden by rocky cover and ditches nearby. The truck that
had crashed was burning now, sending a. thick column of smoke straight up into
the white sky.

The prisoners remained in a huddle like sheep in the middle
of the road. Durell had no doubt they were being covered by the men hidden
along the highway. They were caught helplessly between two fires, and it
was impossible that the pilot of the jet could distinguish their predicament.
The jet made one more sweep, and the prisoners went down like grass before the
blade of a scythe. Durell lowered his glasses. There was a taste of acid in his
mouth.

Chet Larkin stood beside him. “That was plain murder,” he
whispered.

Durell looked at the vanishing jet. “He didn’t know that.”

“Isn’t there anything we can do?”

“Nothing, except stay here where they can’t spot us.”

Durell looked at him quickly. Chet seemed to be little more
than a boy. The shock of what he had just witnessed had made him pale. He said
quietly, “The prisoners were Moslems, presumably loyal to the French. The
rebels don’t want any of that. They fight it with terror. If the jet
didn’t get those poor devils, the rebels would have had some amusement with
them tonight before executing them. They don’t have very pretty methods of
torture. In a way, they were lucky to end the way they did. Quickly.”

“Maybe we could make a rush for it and grab one of the
trucks.”

“There are about a hundred rebels down there. It’s four hundred
yards from here to the road, over a clear slope. We have just two carbines.”

The jet was gone, screaming away to the north. It would be
back in Algiers in a matter of minutes. The liaison plane showed as a
glistening flash of yellow in the sky over the brown hills, and then
that, too, vanished. The guerrilla troops straggled back to their trucks.

“Everybody up,” Durell said. “Get behind these rocks. They’ll
be passing this way in a few minutes.” He looked at the prisoner. “Remember
what I told you, Charley.”

L’Heureux looked angry for some reason. “You still going on
to Baroumi?”

“Certainly. We’ve got to get to the bank, remember?”

L’Heureux lost his scowl and laughed.

The guerrilla
harkas
reassembled and rolled by their hiding place without
incident. When they were gone, Durell left Chet to guard the prisoner and
walked alone to the wrecked truck beside the road. It was still burning, and it
was far beyond hope of salvage. The scattered bodies on the road had been left
where they had fallen in the blazing sun. In a few minutes the place would not
be pleasant. He looked up as a shadow flirted over him and saw the
first of the turkey vultures in the white-hot sky. The rebels had picked
up all the arms that had been strewn about. He picked up a grenade on one of
the bodies and pocketed it, seeing it was of American manufacture. He wondered
wryly by what devious channels it had reached this place and those dead hands.

He walked back to where the others rested in‘ the shade of a
small gully. L’Heureux was talking persistently to Madeleine in a low voice,
although Chet was supposed to have kept him under gun point, away from the
redheaded girl. Chet was arguing softly with Jane, and L’Heureux had taken the
chance. Durell announced they would wait in this spot until just before dusk
before going on to Baroumi.

Once more that afternoon the yellow liaison plane came circling
over the brown hills, but it was too far away for them to attract its
attention. And once, to the rear, a trick of terrain and wind brought them the
irregular beat of gunfire somewhere.

Durell drank little of the brandy and a swallow or two of
water and smoked the last of his cigarettes. He was accustomed to waiting. He
knew that patience during the ordeal of boredom and waiting was a prime
requisite in his business. He thought of Deirdre. He thought of Orrin Boston
and Hadji el-Abri. Boston was gone now, fallen in the silent war, but someone
else would inevitably take his place, because Orrie’s job was still unfinished.
It was only a straw, el-Abri said, perhaps of no significant weight. A small
episode woven into the desperate pattern of vast and terrifying events. But he
remembered the Kabyle’s estimate of that straw. No man could say which straw would
tip the delicate balance of events toward peace or toward war.

Durell did not regret being here. It was his job. He could
not conceive of doing anything else.

At four o’clock Chet Larkin reached a decision. His throat
still ached where L’Heureux had stabbed at him With that brutal judo cut. His
head ached from the sun and the heat. His thirst was enormous, but he had taken
no more water than Durell, turning the bulk of his share over to Jane. If
things went wrong at Baroumi, they would be in real trouble, he thought. He
knew that Durell was thinking about the rebel
harka
that had come this way, and
he wondered what they had been up to. Then he decided it didn’t matter. Right
now he had to tell Jane what he had decided to do. He felt better about it now,
having made up his mind once and for all. Back there in Marbruk he had made a
mistake. He had been blind not to know that what he had told her was all wrong.

He got up and walked over to where Jane sat with her back
against a dark red boulder. She looked tired, almost ill. There were deep
shadows under her eyes, and her face still had that pallor of impending heat
exhaustion. He could not read the expression in her eyes when she looked up at
him and he sat down beside her.

“You keep watching him,” he said.

“Who?”

“L’Heureux.”

“Maybe he fascinates me,” Jane said flatly.

He sighed. “Jane, this is silly.”

“You’re the one who’s being silly. Over nothing at all. Absolutely
nothing.”

“You’re lying,” he said. “And you know it.” He paused, trying
to find a way to begin over again. It seemed impossible. During this day
she had gone somewhere totally beyond his reach. She was like a different
person, one he didn’t know at all. Her eyes regarded him without seeming to see
him. As if she were looking through him, and he wasn’t really there for her to
see.

She was like a sleepwalker, he thought, dazed by the heat,
the exhaustion of their morning ordeal, by what she had seen happen on the
road. “Jane, listen. Are you listening to me?"

“Of course I’m listening.”

“Last night I was willing to do anything you asked. Anything,
you understand. I was ready to give up something I’ve worked for all my life.
This chance to work out here on the geophysical teams is something I’ve always
wanted to do. I wanted to be on my own, especially after the way things were
all last year in Houston, living in your house. You know what I mean. Your
house, your friends, your car. I don’t ever want to be dependent on anyone like
that.”

“You really mean being dependent on my father, don’t you?’

“Yes, I guess so. And on you, too.”

“You never needed me, Chet."

“I didn’t many you for your money, if that’s what you mean.”

“I know that.”

“But I do need you, Jane. I need you with me, beside me,
helping me, maybe. I need to have the feeling that you and I are like—well,
like one person. But it isn’t that way, and it never will be that way. I
thought maybe there could be a compromise. But everything has to be the way you
want it. Soft and easy. Have fun and drink and run around with the country club
crowd and let your father do the work.”

Jane turned her head slowly to look at him. “What are you
trying to say, Chet? We’ve been over all that. You’re exaggerating things and
you know it. I just want what I think is best for us. I’m not a child. And I’m
not a fool. I know what the world is like. Tomorrow we can all be ashes. Why
not enjoy what we can get today?”

“Jane, listen—”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re always castigating
yourself about imaginary things. Like those Middle Ages monks who wore hair
shirts and tormented themselves for their ideals. But this is the twentieth century
and there’s death in the air for all of us.”

“That doesn’t mean a man has to stop and just fold his hands
and wait to die because some maniac might push a button on the other side of
the world, Jane. Don’t you see, we can’t play and have fun every day of our lives
because it
might
happen. I thought
last night I was ready to give in and do things your way. But I’ve been thinking
about going back—you know, to Texas, and all that—I’ve been thinking about it
all day.”

“There’s nothing to think about,” she said coldly. “We’ll go
back, if we ever get out of this."

“No, Jane,” he said. “You’re wrong. I’ll get you to Algiers,
somehow. I promise you that. But I won’t go on that plane with you.”

Her eyes were simply blank. “What does that mean?”

“If you insist on going home, I can’t stop you. But I wish
you wouldn’t. I wish you would stay here with me, where my job and my work is.
I only want you here with me as my wife, Jane. I love you. You know that. But
it you insist on leaving me, I can’t go with you.”

“Are you deserting me?" she whispered.

“It’s the other way around, isn’t it?”

“You know how I hate this place.”

“But it won’t be forever, Jane. Don’t you see that?

Maybe just another year—”

“A year!”

“—and there’s a future here for me, a reputation to build in
the field I want to work in for the rest of my life. I can’t give it up.”

“And I can’t stay,” she said flatly. “Not now,
especially not now.” She wasn’t going to tell Chet about the baby. Not ever, as
far as she was concerned. She felt betrayed. She had been so sure of Chet. But
he was different now. She searched his face, looking for any sign of the change
in him. She didn’t understand him at all.

“You don’t love me anymore, is that it?” she said slowly.

“You know that's silly. You know I do.”

“Just because I went with Charley and he got nasty—”

“No, not because of him. Not at all.”

“Yes, it is,” she insisted. “That’s what made you change.
You think I’m a tramp, just because he tried to get funny with me, a man like
that, who's been in prison so long—”

“Jane, please—”

She got up and walked away from him.

He didn’t go after her.

He was through with chasing after her, he told himself.

They reached Baroumi just before sunset and waited in a
small ravine in the hills for the desert dusk to deepen. The road into the Arab
village was empty. Nobody moved in the
douar
.

A few stunted pines grew in the ravine, with ragged grass
cropping out on the stony slopes. In the village itself, some date palms showed
their plump yellow-green tops above the
mechtas
. Durell left the others in the ravine and walked
forward with the carbine and field glasses to the top of the slope, where
he could look down on a barley field and another grove of date palms and
a vineyard into the market place.

The shadows were long and deceptive. A hot wind blew from
the arid south, shaking the shaggy palms. He saw nothing. Nothing moved. There
was no sound. Nobody waited in the market place. Smoke curled lazily from a
burned-out hut nearby, and the barley in the field looked as if it had
been trampled by a company of running men.

Durell’s mouth tightened as he swept the small settlement
with his field glasses. Baroumi looked utterly deserted. Then something
moved at last, slinking in the shadows of an alley off the market place. He saw
it was a dog. The dog was dragging something out of sight. He kept watching.
The dog was a thin,
ribby
mongrel, hauling his morsel
out of the alley to settle down beside it. It was the body of a Moslem woman,
dressed in a torn and dusty black gown, her veil off, her lanky black hair dragging
in the dust. He turned the glasses elsewhere. Now he saw the pockmarks of
bullets scarring the houses and more evidence of fire and looting.

But surely, he thought, somebody had been left alive in the
douar
.

He saw nothing in motion except the dog.

There was a communal well in the market place, and to the
left was a second collection of houses indicating another spring. Glass
suddenly glittered in reflection of the setting sun, and he adjusted the
focus of his lenses. It was a red Ford truck of ancient vintage. It stood alone
behind one of the houses that seemed larger than die rest. It didn’t look
damaged. It simply seemed to be abandoned.

Looking down at the village, he had the feeling he had seen
all this before. Especially the house with the truck behind it.

He studied the road twisting into the northern hills toward
the coast. Nothing moved except a dozen buzzards picking at things that lay in
the roadside ditches. Then the wind shifted, and Durell smelled the town, and in
the wind were the odors of charred wood, and of death.

He turned and went back to his party. Chet was covering
L’Heureux with his carbine.

“There's a truck in the village,” Durell said. “It may not
have any gas in it, and it may not work at all, but it’s the only one I can
see. There's nothing else.”

“Can we go down there?” Madeleine asked.

“There doesn’t seem to be anything to stop us.” Durell looked
 
“I don’t think there’s anyone left alive.”

Madeleine touched her throat. “Was it the raid?”

“They were all killed or taken prisoner by the extremists.”