Assignment - Suicide (15 page)

“You would not hurt her!"

“But Gregori and Elena would.” Mikhail rose slowly, shrugged
dirt from his shoulders, and nodded "Yes. you win on that point.” He moved
ahead at a gesture from the gun, and Durell followed closely as they worked out
of the tangle of blackberry brush.

It would have been a reasonable compromise, Durell thought
later, and everything might have been different if luck hadn't upset things at
that moment. In order to reach the path that led to the ridge and the long way
back to where the Zeiss was parked, they had to
recross
in front of the dugout entrance.

Elena stood there, with Gregori beside her.

The woman saw them first. She had a hand-gun lifted,
ready for them. There was a silencer on the gun, and without calling a warning
or an order, she aimed and fired. The report was only a small, flattish
noise. Gregori gave a subdued oath and knocked the gun up, and his moment of
attention to the woman gave Durell the chance he sought. He did not know where
the bullet had gone, but he was aware of its passage a little to the left of
him. He spun on his heel, clubbed savagely at Mikhail, and grabbed for Valya’s
hand.

“Run!”

Another silent shot followed, and a twig clicked down from
overhead. Valya stumbled, caught herself, and ran alongside him. He saw Mikhail
rise up, his face bloody, and the dancer went stumbling off in the opposite
direction from the dugout. Then Gregori’s footsteps came pounding after Durell.

Valya could run almost as fast as he. She did not slow him
up. Although he had the P.38 again, he did not even think of firing back.
Any alarm would bring down the guards and the Soviet Army men who were
stationed at the base nearby. There was nothing to do but run and hope for
better luck.

The brush tore at his face and clothes, and once Valya
tripped and fell and he had to spin around and help her to her feet again.
Gregori’s progress through the woods after them was surprisingly silent and
swift, considering the man’s bulk. He was fifty feet behind them when the
chase began. Durell swung downhill, away from the ridge where Vassili might cut
them off. His course also took him away from where he wanted to go, toward the
hidden car, but there was no help for that. The brush thickened and slowed his
progress. But it also checked Gregori. Then all at once Durell’s feet found
hard, paved surfacing. In the moonlight he saw a doubled-
laned
asphalt road that curved sharply north and west. He halted at the edge.

“What is this?” he asked Valya.

Her breathing was ragged. “I don’t know. A military highway,
perhaps. For the missile base.”

“Come on."

He ran along the edge of it with Valya just behind him. At
the curve of the road he looked back. Gregori was just emerging from the brush.
Durell turned the curve of the road and halted again. A sentry tower loomed up
among the tall, leafless trees ahead. At the same moment a spotlight
suddenly flared, cutting a wide swath through the brush. A voice called:
“Halt! Who is there?”

The spotlight stabbed down the asphalt roadway to the bend.
Durell threw himself fiat and dragged Valya with him. She made a little
whimpering sound and was silent. Booted footsteps pounded on a wooden platform
in the trees almost over their heads. The camouflage of the sentry post
was almost perfect. The spotlight went out, then went on again, flooding
the roadway with relentless brilliance. Gregori had not come around the bend of
the road. The light had forced him back as effectively as a solid barrier.

Another man’s voice spoke irritably, and the first
sentry replied in defense.

“Go back to sleep, Pushka.”

“But I heard someone running, Lieutenant.”

“Idiot!
Vui
piani
!
You’re drunk.”

“Da, Lieutenant.”

“Turn that damned light off."

The spotlight went out. Durell felt Valya’s body stretched
beside his begin to tremble in violent reaction. He put his arm cautiously over
her and drew her close to him. More footsteps moved heavily on the concealed
platform in the trees above. In the sudden darkness that followed the
extinguishing of the searchlight, Durell could see nothing. The footsteps
faded. An invisible door slammed. Silence came back to the woods.

He counted ten, then tapped Valya’s shoulder and got to his
feet. The wind made clicking noises in the brush. Without further word, he took
the girl’s hand and drew her away from the road, down the slope of the hill
into the deeper wilderness of woods and marshland that surrounded them. When he
thought it was safe, they began to run.

Chapter Thirteen

AN HOUR LATER Durell signaled Valya to halt. He had Worked
his way south, using the position of the moon as his guide, but he had no real
idea how much the irregular land had caused him to deviate. The moon was almost
gone now, and the wind had died as well, but there was a steady, mechanical
humming in the air that was more like an inaudible pulsation than anything he
could clearly define.

“What is it?” Valya asked.

“I don’t know. Hush.”

Twice during the past hour they had had to crouch in brush
and remain silent and motionless while patrols went by. The whole area was an
armed camp, Durell realized, and he mentally doffed his hat to Gregori, who had
led them from the car to the dugout without a sign of danger. He wondered where
the Russian was now. Not too far behind. He did not underestimate the man.

“Let me see your face,” he asked Valya.

“No, Sam.”

“Does it hurt now?"

“No. It is all right. Please don’t worry about me, Sam.”

“Look at me, Valya.”

She raised her head slowly. Her eyes sought his, the only
moving thing about her, and he read her pain and her love for him in their
wide, darkening depths. He said softly: “Thank you for coming with me."

“You do not really understand.”

“I think I do. Will you go all the way with me now?”

“I have no choice. I can never go back now.”

“Are you afraid of What Gregori might do?”

“We are caught between them. But it isn’t that. During the
war, we who survived and got back to our own lines were treated as criminals
and traitors. It will
he
the same again. From both
sides. I have nowhere to go except to stay with you, if you want me to stay
with you.”

“I do,” he said.

She nodded and looked down again. Her long hair had loosened
and her sturdy clothing showed rips and tatters from their flight through
the brush. She kept the wounded side of her face turned from him. What he could
see of her profile was beautiful and classic in design. If she was in
pain, she no longer betrayed it.

Frogs thumped in the nearby boggy patch of hollow land, and
the shrilling noise of peepers suddenly made Durell think of spring in
Connecticut, when he had studied law at Yale and earned his tuition by dealing
a Saturday-night poker game at Gondy’s, over in Savin Rock.

“Sam,” Valya whispered. “Can you find the car?”

“I think so.”

“We have tomorrow and tomorrow night before anything
happens.”

“Unless Mikhail pulls the cork out of the bottle,” he said.

“The cork?"

“You noticed that when Gregori and Elena jumped us, he
didn’t run back to join them. He ran the other way.”

“Yes, I noticed,” Valya whispered.

“Will he betray us?”

“He is jealous of you. He was always out of place with our
group. I think he joined it only because of me, and now that he has lost me
Because of what has happened, he is not reliable. I cannot guess what he will
do.”

“But he knows you’ll be shot if he betrays you, doesn’t he?”

“Yet if he thinks he has lost me, anyway . . .”

He did not press it further. The mechanical pulsing that had
caused him to halt here was suddenly deepened in tone and became a strong
throbbing, with a minor note in a high key, like the whining of electric
winches. The sound spread through the marsh and woodland all around them.
Durell stood up. The earth under his feet began to shake and tremble.

“What is it?” Valya asked.

He studied the dark land to the west. The ground sloped down
and then up, rising through a copse of hardwood trees, then an open patch of
swamp to a low ridge. A faint glow came from that direction, outlining the
trunks and limbs of trees against the dark loom of the sky.

“Let’s go see.”

It took only five minutes to cross the hollow. Near
the top, Durell proceeded in a crouch for twenty feet and then slid silently to
his belly. Valya came to rest beside him. He looked down on a scene that a few
years ago would have defied his imagination with its fantasy.

The humming sound had lifted to a new intensity. Below them
was a wide, natural bowl in the terrain, and Durell lifted his gaze briefly
to study the interlaced camouflage nets that stretched from the treetops above
him to the trees far on the other side of the area. Totally invisible from the
air, the missile base deep in these wild marshes was floodlighted from various
vantage points around the high perimeter of the bowl. There were concrete cubes
that housed machinery, a long wooden barracks, a radar tower, a mobile rocket
battery, and an anti-aircraft battery of the Nike type. Uniformed troops and
technicians moved smoothly and efficiently through their appointed tasks. As
Durell watched, a vast section of the earth that included trees and buildings
began to lift upward as if on a giant hinge, like the cap on a bottle sunk into
the soil. The whining lifted to an ear-splitting scream that rose until it
passed beyond his auditory range but made the atmosphere all but intolerable
with its vibration. Light glowed from the pit as if from an inferno, exposed
under the vast lid.

Valya moved on the damp turf beside him. “What is it?”

“Be quiet,” he whispered. “There are sentries around.”

“But are they going to fire—”

“We’ll see.”

The huge hinged section of land had lifted to a vertical
angle, exposing concrete work below and a deep floodlighted chamber with
steel rails and a gantry crane hidden in an abyss where he could not see. There
were dim shouted orders as the machinery whined to a halt. The uniformed men
scurried for safety, diving down one of the concrete buildings to the left. A
deep pulsing filled the night. The earth trembled. Up from the depths
came the long railed finger of the modified gantry crane. A siren
moaned softly. Then a needle snout of glistening, shining steel alloy slowly
and smoothly rolled upward until half of the lean, vicious length of the rocket
was exposed to the floodlight glare. The machinery down in the bowels of the
launching pit pulsed harder, then abruptly cut off.

Silence filled the aching vacuum.

Durell waited, eyes narrowed, memorizing what he saw. His
body was braced for the shattering blast of rocks that would come next.

Nothing happened.

A man’s harsh command, amplified over a speaker
system, ended the silence. The machinery began to hum again. The nose of the
huge rocket slid down the steel track into the pit again. The vast lid of
steel, covered with earth, brush, trees and buildings, began to lower like a
giant trap door, the vegetation thrashing and bending in its unaccustomed
angle.

Durell let out a long breath. “A dry run,” he muttered.

Valya lifted her head. “I don’t understand what—”

What followed came fast, with no warning at all. The whine
of the machinery had covered the crunching booted footstep of the sentry behind
them. The first hint of danger for Durell was the sharp prick of a
bayonet just under his ribs.

“Do not move,“ a man said.

Durell turned his head with extreme care. He had been
propped on his elbows to watch the nightmare scene below. He did not try to get
up. The pressure of the bayonet in his back was warning enough. He could see
nothing of the sentry except the man’s booted feet with green uniform trousers
stuffed into the tops of his boots.

“Who are you?” the guard asked in his thin voice.

“Lieutenant Andrei Vassilov," Durell said quickly. “Get
that damned blade out of my back, you fool.” His voice carried authority and
conviction.

“A lieutenant, comrade? Stand up and let me see your face.”

Durell rolled over from under the bayonet and stood up.
Valya got up with him, shrinking to one side. Her face was expressionless. The
guard was a thin, dark-featured youth with Mongol features; his Russian accent
was heavily tinctured with Uzbek. He wore a thin dark mustache and there was
something wrong with one side of his jaw, as if he had been wounded and part of
the bone shot away, giving his face a lopsided, evil look. There was triumph
and suspicion glittering in his slanted eyes.

“Your papers, Lieutenant,“ he said sardonically.

“Of course. Point that rifle somewhere else, damn you,”
Durell said, simulating official anger.

“My orders are to shoot anyone found in this area without
proper authorization. I have not seen you here before.”

“I arrived only this morning for duty,” Durell said.

“Then you will have papers to prove it. Let me see them.”

The huge lid of earth had settled back into place in the
launching pit below the ridge where Durell stood. Several of the floodlights
winked out. The Uzbek soldier stood a few feet back from Durell, his rifle
ready, the bayonet winking wickedly in the reflected light from the scene
below. His lopsided face looked alert and dangerous, with a primitive caution
that Durell did not care to tempt.

“Here are my papers,” he said.

“Put them on the ground. Then step back,” said the Uzbek.

Durell put his fake passport on the turf and went back two
steps. The soldier did not seem concerned about Valya. He glanced at her once,
saw she had not moved, and stooped to pick up Durell’s papers. It was an
awkward position for a man with a rifle to maintain, even for the few
seconds it was necessary for him to reach for the passport. Durell jumped for
the rifle, kicked at it, and chopped at the side of the guard’s neck. The
Uzbek made a grunting sound and stumbled forward. His helmeted head caught Durell
low in the stomach and drove him backward with the impact; a root caught at his
heel and he fell.