Assignment - Mara Tirana (19 page)

For hours, Durell watched Deirdre sleep under rough blankets in a cubbyhole in the forward hold, among the munition crates. It was the only place to hide her after they rejoined the
Luliga
at a dock just north of Budapest. Gija had returned safely. And there was no problem in recognizing the new steel barge as she delayed at the pier on the pretext of engine trouble. Captain Galucz, bearded and tubby, ordered Deirdre hidden at once in the cargo compartment.

Shortly after Deirdre fell asleep, Durell went aft to the pilot house. Gija was in Mara’s cabin, talking earnestly to the blonde girl. Mara looked tense and defiant; Gija was quiet and persuasive.

“Your brother does not want to come with us, Mara. You must face this. He is like a time bomb, ticking aboard.”

“He does not understand,” she murmured. “He is a victim of propaganda, of brain-washing, since he was a child.” “Whatever the reason,” Gija said gently. “If he were not your brother, do you know what we would do with him now?”

She looked at him fearfully.

“We’d drop him overboard—well anchored and wired to stay on the bottom forever.” Gija paused. “He cannot be trusted. It would be safest for us.”

“I promise you that Mihály—”

“You can promise nothing in his name, Mara.”

She looked at Durell with frightened eyes. “What will you do with him, then?” Gija looked at Durell, too, “What do you suggest?”

“Where do you have him now?” Durell asked.

“Up forward, with Tomas,” Gija answered.

“And when we’re boarded for inspection? He’ll yell for help from the security police. How do you stop that?” “We tie and gag him for that time and hide him with the cargo.”

Mara said: “He promised he will do nothing to endanger me.”

Gija shook his head. “Mara, you cannot trust him. I know how much you love him, and what you’ve risked for him. But what can we do? Even if we got him safely to the West, he would head straight for the nearest Soviet embassy and give us all away. It would ruin the whole underground.” She bit her pink lip. “I can’t tell you what to do, then. I’m sorry I brought all this trouble to you.”

Durell went forward to talk to Mihály. He was locked in a crewman’s cabin in the bow. The moonlight made the Danube waters look phosphorescent as the
Luliga
smashed her way downstream. He felt uneasy. He saw how Gija had taken to Mara, how protective he was toward her. But Gija’s hard sense of values was still secure. He was absolutely right. The safest thing was to kill Mihály. Too many people might die because of his sulky defiance. And Mara might soon persuade Gija otherwise.

Mihály lay on the bunk with his handsome face turned toward the steel wall, when Durell stepped in. He looked briefly at Durell, his eyes sullen, then turned away again.

“Mihály, I won’t fool with you,” Durell said. “We know it was a mistake to try to rescue you.”

“A mistake you will regret,” the boy said.

“Not likely. We are debating what to do with you.” “Put me ashore,” Mihály said. “I refuse to be kidnapped.”

“If you persist, we have no choice except to get rid of you in a way that will guarantee your silence and our safety. Do you understand?”

Mihály sat up on the bunk. ‘You wouldn’t kill me. I know you Americans. You’re all soft and idealistic, too delicate to do such things.”

Durell said softly: “Don’t delude yourself, Mihály.” The boy started to speak again, looked at Durell’s eyes, and a pallor touched the corners of his mouth. “You wouldn’t,” he whispered.

“It may be necessary. I thought I’d warn you.” 

“Mara wouldn’t let you touch me—”

“Mara has nothing to say about it. You should know, Mihály, that you are dealing with desperate men on this barge. When we are stopped for inspections, you risk blowing us all up.” Durell told the boy briefly about the wiring and detonating caps set in the munitions cargo. “We all go up together. So it’s up to you, when the inspectors next board the
Luliga
, whether you want to destroy yourself along with us.”

“I don’t,” Mihály whispered. “I promise I won’t.”

“You have your bargeman’s papers?”

“Yes. Gija gave them to me. But I haven’t looked at them.”

“Study them. Memorize them. Your life depends on it,” Durell said quietly, and went out.

He returned to the cargo hold where Deirdre slept and sat beside her, looking at her in the dim light of a small bulb. Her dark hair spread in a soft fan across the rough blanket bundled under her head as a pillow. After a time, Durell stretched out beside her and slept, too, although aware of the steady beat and thrust of the barge moving downstream. For a time he hovered between sleep and wakefulness, and he was not sure when he truly slept and when he listened, with that trained suspicion and alertness that never deserted him.

He woke instantly when Deirdie called him.

“I’m here, Dee.”

“I’m—I thought it was a dream—youi finding me—”

“It’s all right.”

She trembled. “Hold me close, Sam.”

He took her in his arms. They were alone in the dim shadows of the cargo hold. Overhead, there was a thin slice of night sky where the hatch had been hauled aside for ventilation. The air was cold and crisp. The stars were like swinging lamps against velvet. “Are you all right?”

“Don’t let me go,” she said.

“I won’t.”

“Can you forgive me, Sam? I never really understood your work; I never knew how it was. Intellectually, yes. But not how it could tear at your insides. I was never so afraid—not just for myself, but for everyone trapped by the forces of ambition and tyranny and terror. Why is it? Why are men like that?”

“History hasn’t changed,” he said. “If we were on deck now, you’d see on the river banks the ruins of old Roman walls and camps, the periphery of the Imperial Empire, the checks against the barbarian hordes. It has always been like this.”

“And will it always go on?”

“I don’t know. I hope not.”

She was silent for a moment in his arms. “Can you get us out, Sam?”

“I’ll try.”

“I know. But if something goes wrong tomorrow—”

“Nothing will go wrong,” he said.

“But if it does—we’ve lost so much time, you and I —in not understanding each other. I was foolish. For almost a year, darling—”

“We’re together now,” he said.

She moved against him, warm and yielding. “Yes. Together, now. Let’s—let’s not forget how it used to be. . . .”

Kopa flew east the next morning. On a whim, he had the plane follow the course of the Danube, obtaining air clearance for the trip. It pleased him to spot the barge
Luliga
far below on the silvery river, plodding along so slowly, like a child’s toy. The sunlight was bright on the Danube as the stream narrowed toward the east and the high gorges of the Iron Gates. He felt sure of himself now. His web of control spread north and east. Gija’s dossier gave him what he needed to know last night.

He lit a cigar, although the doctor who attended him shook his head in protest. Kopa waved a thick hand to ward him off. He felt fine today. A few hours sleep, a glimpse of success, had worked wonders. These doctors didn’t know everything. Perhaps it was only indigestion.

By noon the plane had landed at a military airstrip twenty miles from the village of Viajec. When Kopa disembarked, he found Lieutenant Petar Medjan waiting to report to him, with a car standing by at the edge of the airfield. Kopa’s shrewd eyes sized up Medjan quickly—a mixed breed, he decided, with too much Turkish blood in him to be truly trustworthy, although his records so far showed a ruthless efficiency. He could appreciate the physical bulk of the security man, and suspected at once that Petar Medjan lived too close to the routine of the village where he had been born ever to rise to any great height in the security police hierarchy. But just for this reason Medjan could be useful, the perfect man to ferret out just what was needed, and to do so quickly.

"You’ve placed the subjects under surveillance?” Kopa asked, as the car sped along the road toward Viajec.

“They were gone, Colonel, before the orders came through from headquarters.” Then Medjan added quickly: “It turned out all right, however. We’ve had a busy night.” Kopa was startled, and pushed his cigar at the big Turkish lieutenant. “You didn’t let them guess we know Stepanic is on Zara Dagh?”

“No, no. Nothing like that, Colonel. They tried to move out, and it cost me the death of one man. We found his cycle in a stream beside the road—he evidently tried to stop them, growing suspicious somehow—and they killed him. But the father, Jamak, was also killed. We searched all night in the stream until we found both bodies.”

“And the suspects?” Kopa asked harshly,

“They returned to Viajec and Zara Dagh.” Medjan smiled. “They are under observation at this moment. The American is with them.”

Kopa was relieved. For a moment he thought these stupid provincials might have spoiled everything. Nothing could come between himself and success now. He could not afford it. His first reports to KGB headquarters, coded from Budapest, were deliberately ambiguous. There would be some lifted eyebrows, a few questions murmured, but the generalities he had reported would gain desperately needed time to repair the situation.

Petar Medjan was uneasy in such close contact with someone like Colonel Kopa. His isolated mountain district had never seen such excitement and activity. He did not like it. He knew he was not particularly clever. He accepted his limitations and realized that he operated best in the village of his birth. He was at home in Viajec, on Zara Dagh, in the tumbled, wild mountains of the district. He knew his way here like a blind man knows his own home. He resented the intrusion of all these outsiders, who had no knowledge of the villagers and their problems.

Petar Medjan thought of himself as a protective overseer for the Viajec district. In his way, he tried to do what was best for his people. He was cruel, yes. But a father must whip his sons occasionally. And he tried to be fair. Yes, he was honest and fair in everything—except in the matter of Lissa.

Here, where his passion had ruled, was the scene of his biggest mistake, the threatened disaster that could destroy him.

He told Kopa everything he knew about Jamak and Jelenka. He mentioned his visit to Zara Dagh, putting it in the light of a routine check. He did not mention what happened with Lissa, of course. Anyway, wasn’t he willing to marry the girl? So it was no crime, what he had done in the barn. She would marry and love him eventually.

But now everything was changed, everything hung in the balance.

Kopa could ruin everything. And like a diabolical nemesis, Kopa put his hand right on the sore spot and twisted.

“This girl,” he said. “The village nurse, you say?”

“Yes, Colonel,” Medjan muttered.

“An educated girl. She would have recognized Stepanic, known what his orbital flight meant, arranged to hide him and get word to the West to rescue him. The old people wouldn’t have been up to it, otherwise. It is the girl we must question.”

“I don’t know,” Medjan said.

“Is she pretty?”

“I pay no attention. She works in the village with a certain efficiency. She is practically a doctor to the peasants. They do not love her, because she has strange ways, but they respect her.”

“I seem to hear a reluctance in your voice, Lieutenant, when you discuss this girl.”

"I—I am fond of her, a little,” Medjan admitted.

“Ah? And that means—?”

“Nothing else, Colonel.”

“If she proves a traitor, she will be shot. You may be in trouble yourself, by association. I want to question her when we reach Viajec. Will she be in the village, or on the mountain?”

“I will get her for you,” Medjan said glumly.

As it turned out, he did not have to go far. As they crossed the stone bridge into the main street of the village, he saw Lissa striding along with her usual proud carriage, looking neither to right nor left.

Viajec had only one paved street, an extension of the auto highway from north to south in the long valley between the mountains. The villagers had no idea where the road began or ended. It did not concern them. Their world was bounded by the terraced vineyards, the orchards, the hunting preserves in the wooded hills. They were isolated and illiterate, tied to the land and their customs as effectively as their ancestors had been. The few shops in Viajec catered only to basic needs. There was a single power line stretching along the highway into the village—everywhere else, kerosene lamps and stoves served for light and heat. One branch went to the police building, a small stone structure from the Turkish pasha’s time; the other served the small military barracks that usually was empty, but which now was crammed by alien troopers who had already rubbed most of the Viajec people the wrong way.

Medjan, who looked on the village and the souls in it as a form of personal property, resented what was happening here, and at the same time felt alarm for his own safety. He knew that Kopa could destroy him. And so, when he saw Lissa crossing the bridge, he did not dare pretend he failed to see her and pointed her out accordingly.

“If you like, Colonel,” he said, “I will question her for you—”

“Arrest her now, Medjan, but do it quickly and quietly, to prevent a local alarm. Can you get her into the police building on some pretext?”

“Of course.”

“Then do so now.”

Lissa knew at once that she was in trouble. She heard Medjan call her and saw his bulky figure jump from the official car. Her first impulse was to turn and run. But she knew this was impossible. There was nothing to do but face him, as she had always faced him until that day in the bam, as if nothing had changed between them.

She had not wanted to go into Viajec after their abortive attempt to escape. She had thought to stay on Zara Dagh with Jelenka, who sorrowed in dark silence and did not yet weep for Jamak. She wished her mother would blame her for what happened on the road, for that nightmare moment of violence that had served no purpose. But Jelenka was silent. She moved about the hut as quietly as always, and it seemed to Lissa that almost all of her mother’s conversation must have been directed only to Jamak, as if he had been the reason for her life and the core of her universe.