Assignment Moon Girl (24 page)

“Madame Hung!" he yelled.

She was his, he told himself, and Ramsur Sepah must not
cheat him. He knew he was not thinking rationally. But he couldn’t help
himself. Rubble filled one end of the room. In the dim, dusty sunlight
that sifted through the chinks of rock, he looked for the Chinese woman. She
was gone.

“Tanya?”

“I am here. Safe enough."

“Your father?”

Professor Ouspanaya replied. “Also safe. But Sepah is gone.
He staggered out through the door.” Ouspanaya bent over, retching. The fumes
from the explosion strangled his next few words. Then he spoke more clearly.
“You must follow him, Durell. He must not escape.”

“I want Madame Hung.” Durell stood up. “Where is she?”

“Buried in the debris, I think. But Sepah—”

“All right.”

You can’t always keep promises to yourself, Durell thought
regretfully. The hope of settling his personal score with the woman had to be
put aside. She might be dead. She might not. But time had run out. He pushed
Ouspanaya and his daughter out of the wrecked room. The high-explosive shell
that had cracked the mountain’s face had done more damage in the next
bunker-like cave. The bodies of several rebel soldiers were sprawled in the
nibble. The way to the right was blocked, choked with debris. Sepah couldn’t have
gone in that direction.

They ran the other way, climbing over wreckage. Gunfire
echoed and clamored above and below them. A wounded man screamed somewhere.
Tanya tripped and fell. Durell picked her up and urged her on. A sloping ramp
led them downward. The mountain shuddered continuously under a barrage of
shells. A trail of bloodstains showed them the way Ramsur Sepah had gone, but
he was out of sight. Wreckage, abandoned weapons, and the bodies of dead and
wounded hampered their speed. To a wounded soldier seated with his back to the wall,
Durell snapped. a question. The man pointed to a nearby embrasure.

“General Har-Buri just went in there, Colonel.”

It was a small chamber hewn out of solid rock, with a single
door opposite. Durell opened it. It was a cargo elevator, designed to raise
munitions to this upper level. The platform was far down and out of sight.
Durell pushed a button. Nothing happened. The power was off. He reached into
the shaft for the cables, and Tanya helped him haul the platform up. It seemed
to take forever, but at
last
it appeared, and they
stepped in. There was blood on the platform.

“He used this way to get down,” Ouspanaya murmured. “But why
do you insist on following him?”

“It’s a paper chase,” said Durell. “He’s trying to escape. I
don’t think he plans to make the gesture of dying with his men. To Sepah, that
would be foolish. Better to live and fight another day. He’ll show us the
way out.”

The cage lowered them two levels before he spotted more
blood on the floor of the passage outside the shaft. They got out and ran
that way. Ouspanaya was unable to move fast, but Tanya helped him. The passage
seemed remote from the fighting going on around and inside the mountain.
The sound of gunfire was dim. Daylight shone ahead, and Durell slowed his
pace, waved Tanya behind him, and approached the opening.

He looked out at the triangular plateau where the tiger’s
pit was located. The hot sun was dazzling. They were to the left of the big
tomb entrance he had used with Mahmoud, and there was no sign of fighting
here. The old columns and walls stood peacefully, as they had been for
thousands of years. He heard the drone and scream of a jet bombing the other
side of the mountain, but nothing was happening here.

“There he is,” Tanya said suddenly.

“I see him.”

Ramsur Sepah had fallen to his knees just a short distance
from the pit. He was struggling to lower a ladder that Mahmoud must have used
occasionally to get down into the caves. Durell remembered the gateway that led
out into the valley to freedom, on the other side. It was Sepah’s only hope for
escape, and he obviously had a key to unlock the bars there.

“Sepah!” Durell called.

The man turned his head and looked back at them across the
plateau. Then he seemed to make a supreme effort and lifted the ladder and
began to lower it into the cistern. Durell broke into a run, leaving Tanya
behind.

“Sepah!”

Perhaps fifty yards separated them, Durell felt his own
strength ebb as he ran. He stumbled, caught himself against the base of a
broken column, and went on. A dip and a low wall cut Sepah off from sight. When
he rounded the wall, he saw that Sepah had managed to lower the ladder and was
about to descend. From
 
deep down in the
lower caves came the sudden roar of the tiger.

Tanya caught up to Durell. “The animal has not been fed
today.”

“I know.”

“He was harmless, as long as he was glutted with food, but—”

Durell fired a warning shot in the air, to get Sepah to
halt. But then Sepah fumbled in his pockets, took something out, and threw it
at them. It was a grenade. But the effort threw him off balance as he took his
first step down the ladder. Even as the grenade winked through the air,
Durell saw him fling out one arm wildly as the ladder slipped from the
edge of the pit. Durell threw Tanya to the ground and fell on top of her.
Behind them, Ouspanaya dropped, too. The grenade arched through the sunlit air
and Durell ducked his head. When the blast came, it was near the wall that
sheltered them. Gravel and sand spouted in the air and then showered harmlessly
down.

Through the sound of the explosion, like an echo, came
Sepah‘s scream and the roar of the tiger in the pit.

Durell got up slowly. Tanya’s face was white. They walked to
the pit and found the ladder still available, leaning within reach on the other
side of the cistern. Neither Sepah nor the tiger could be seen.

“You cannot go down there now," Tanya whispered.

“I must. Follow me, after a minute or so.”

He climbed carefully into the pit that held so many harsh
memories for him. Scuffling and dragging sounds came from inside the
cave. There was a moment’s silence. He looked up and signaled to Tanya and her
father to follow, then took his last grenade in one hand and the machine pistol
in the other and walked into the cave, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the
gloom. The animal had gone into the chamber where the jewel chests were stored,
dragging Sepah’s body with him, Durell paused in the entrance. The beast was
crouched over what looked like a mass of bloody rags. The great green eyes
glowed balefully as he raised his gun. The tiger knew him. Durell aimed between
the emerald eyes and fired once. . . .

There were keys in Ramsur Sepah’s pockets. He took them and
walked to the opposite end of the tunnel, where he could see the open valley
beyond the steel gateway. One of the keys unlocked the bars. He stepped out
into freedom.

A long file of uniformed men was crossing the shoulder
of the mountain toward him. Durell made Tanya and Ouspanaya sit down. He stood
beside them and waited.

A familiar young figure broke into a run from the deploying
soldiers and came on ahead. Durell put down his gun and kept his hands in plain
sight.

“Hello, Hanookh,” he said. “What took you so long?”

Chapter Twenty

THE doctor shook his head, disapproving of Durell in every
bristle of his lifted eyebrows. “I told you two weeks ago, at your hotel, that
you belonged in a hospital.”

“I had to go somewhere,” Durell said. “Duty called.”

“Lunacy,” the doctor snapped.

“That’s right. I went to the moon.”

Rafe Hannigan laughed softly from a corner of the room.
“Don‘t mind him, Denis,” he told the doctor. “The Cajun just had a few bad
dreams.”

“He also has two cracked ribs, broken teeth, a suspected fracture
of the fourth vertebra in his neck, perhaps a concussion, and some rather odd
injection marks as well as more contusions and abrasions than I care to count.
Luckily, his spleen wasn’t ruptured, after all.”

“He’s tough,” Hannigan said. “He can take anything.”

Durell sighed. “I wish you’d been with me, Rafe.”

“I led the cavalry charge, didn’t I?”

“Yes, about five hundred yards behind Hanookh, and in
an armored car.”

They were in a pleasant, sunlit, air-conditioned guest room
in the back of the Teheran embassy. The temperature outside stood at 110°, but
it was cool and comfortable around Durell’s bed. He had slept around the clock
and then dictated reports to General McFee for encoding to Washington, then a
report to Iranian Security, and a pleasant personal letter to Professor
Ouspanaya. Then he’d ordered flowers sent to Tanya, at the USSR embassy.
The secretary who took this flood of work lifted her eyebrows at this
last. She was not Miss Saajadi. She was a plump redhead from Brooklyn.

“I’m not sure we’re allowed to send roses to the Russians,”
she said primly.

“Would you prefer a bomb?"

“Really, Mr. Durell, I know I’m new at this job, but the
briefings I got from No. 20 Annapolis Street—”

Rafe Hannigan had intervened. “They didn’t brief you about
the Cajun, Miss Moriarity. Better do as Sam says.”

“It’s very irregular.”

“Do it,” Hannigan said quietly.

She flounced away. Hannigan brushed his Iranian-type
moustache with a lecherous gesture as he watched her walk. Afterward, Durell
slept again and then was awakened for the doctor‘s probing, prodding, and clucking
remonstrances
. There was a note from Tanya in
Russian, on USSR embassy stationery.

“Thank you for the roses and all you have done. Papa will
keep the bargain he made.”

Rafe Hannigan took the note and frowned. “What bargain,
Cajun?”

“Never mind.”

“You didn’t get involved with that chunk of Siberian ice,
did you? She’s beautiful, but she’s got a computer for a heart.”

“That’s what you think.”

“Cajun, you’re in enough trouble back home. The assignment was
a bust. You were supposed to bring the girl here first, for questioning—”

“So you could pick her brains, too? She had enough of that.
In this way,” Durell said, “they think we got her back to them as a gratuitous
gesture. It’s humiliating to the KGB, and a burden that will make them very
unhappy. They’ll owe me reciprocity, some day.”

“That’s not enough. Your job was to get the dope from her on
their lunar program.”

Durell sighed. “I’m a sick man. I need some consolation.
Where is Lotus?”

“I am here,” she said.

The Chinese girl had been sitting gravely just beyond his
line of vision near the bed. Her hands were folded demurely in her lap, but her
lovely eyes were eloquent as she looked at Durell—and a little afraid.

“What will happen to me, Mr. Sam?” she asked.

“I’m not buying you roses,” he said. “You’re coming to the
States with me, when they let me out of here. Under my personal escort.”

“Will it be a quick trip?”

“We’ll go the long way around. Did I thank you for getting
Hanookh and Hannigan for me, when I didn’t come out of Ramsur Sepah’s garden
party?”

“You owe me no thanks.”

“We’ll see. You’re very beautiful, Lotus.”

“It is you who are beautiful, Mr. Sam.”

Hanookh came in and remained a few minutes, long enough to
announce that he was now in charge of his security department, replacing the
former Colonel Saajadi. They shook hands in mutual esteem, and Hanookh left
some newspapers that announced, in a brief, noncommittal item, that a nomad
revolt in a desert settlement in the Dasht-i-Kavir had been quieted by prompt
military and police action. An obituary item on Ramsur Sepah deplored his
untimely death due to a heart attack.

Ten minutes after Hanookh left, Miss Moriarity returned with
a fat envelope carrying the state seal of the USSR embassy. “A messenger
brought this for you,” she said in disapproval. “It’s quite irregular.”

“To be fraternizing with the enemy?” Durell grinned.

Hannigan said: “Whatever it is, Cajun, give it to me.”

“It’s from Professor Ouspanaya. It‘s what Washington hoped
to get by grabbing Tanya and holding her for interrogation.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When we escaped from Har-Buri’s mountain, Ouspanaya said
he’d give me this. I didn’t ask for it, but I

didn’t refuse, either. It’s the full documentation of the

Special Training Program for Lunar Landing Experiments
conducted by the professor’s special team. The works. The good and the bad;
where it was useful, and where it failed. It will save our NASA people a lot of
trial-and-error headaches.”

“But that’s what McFee was praying for!” Hannigan exploded.

Durell sighed and closed his eyes. Hannigan rushed from the
room with the envelope. There was a small silence. Then a frightened voice
said, “Mr. Sam?”

“Yes, Lotus.”

“Is Madame Hung really dead?”

“I don’t know. But you won’t have to be afraid of her ever
again."

“I have never seen the Western world. Will I like it?”

“You will like what I’ll show you.”

“Istanbul?”

“And Rome.”

“Paris?”

“And London.”

“It will take so many days to show me these wonderful
places, Mr. Sam.”

“We’ve got time,” Durell said. “We’ll make the most of it.”