Assignment - Suicide (16 page)

Nothing had gone right. Durell saw the guard lunging erect
with the rifle still in his hand, bayonet winking and driving for his
throat. The Uzbek looked savage. Durell tried to get a leg flexed and
aimed for the guard’s belly, but the blow in the pit of his stomach had slowed
his reflexes. Death was only an instant away when Valya struck with
something in her hand at the back of the man’s head. The guard made a low
animal sound and was knocked off balance enough so that the bayonet plunged
into the sod only an inch from Durell’s throat. Valya struck again. She had a
rock in her hand, and the guard’s helmet fell off, hitting the earth with a low
ringing sound. In the dim light from the launching pit, Valya’s face looked as
savage and primitive as the Uzbek’s.

Durell scrambled to his feet. “Valya!”

She stood still and the rock fell from her fingers.
There were smears of blood on it. She began to tremble violently.

“Get away from him,” Durell said firmly. He knelt
beside the sprawled body of the soldier. The back of the man’s head was bloody,
but no serious damage had been done. He rolled the man over. His twisted face
looked gray and unnatural in the dim light. His eyes were open and glittering.
But he wasn’t breathing. He had fallen face down on a sharp stone that had
neatly penetrated his left temple. The stone still stuck into the vulnerable
part of his head.

“Is he—is he dead?” Valya whispered.

“Yes, he‘s dead. But you didn’t kill him. It was the way he
fell.”

“But I couldn’t let him—”

“Get hold of yourself,” Durell said. She was trembling more
violently than before. He thought she was going to be sick, and he took her
shoulders and turned her away and pushed her toward the brush nearby. “It
wasn’t your fault."

Durell looked down toward the launching pit. There was no
alarm. As he watched, the remaining floodlights winked out and the dark
night swooped back and covered the scene as if it never had been. A man’s voice
called a last command, and then silence came. He knelt over the dead guard, his
mind jumping ahead to future possibilities. The guard would soon be missed.
There was no way of guessing when he was due at his check post. Make it ten
minutes to be safe. Give his commanding officer another five
minutes to let irritation grow into alarm. Another five to send a second
sentry searching for the Uzbek. Twenty minutes. Time enough.

He stood up, dragging the dead man upright, hoisting him to
his shoulders. Valya watched him. “What are you going to do with him?”

“Bury him or hide him,” Durell said. “Pick up his helmet and
rifle.”

She did as she was told. Her steps were stumbling and
uncertain as she followed him down the slope. His burden was heavy; he was
sweating in spite of the chill of the night. Somewhere to his left in the
darkness he heard the trickling of a small stream, and he headed that way,
trying to move silently through the brush with the dead man. Now and then the
soldier’s uniform belt or sleeve would catch on a twig or branch. Valya
untangled it each time. She said nothing more. When Durell had gone about a
hundred paces upstream, he felt his feet sinking into bog. He paused, aware of
the rank smell of swamp vegetation around him, hearing frogs that boomed and
racketed all about. He heard no sound of alarm above those nocturnal noises.
Ten minutes had gone by. He dropped the dead man from his shoulders and
straightened. The sweat cooled on his body. Valya was a tall shadow beside him.

“We’ll leave him here,” Durell decided. “They may not find
him too soon.”

“Where can we go?” she asked.

“To the car."

“I don’t know where it is. I couldn’t find it now. I
don’t know where we are.”

Durell looked up at the sky. The moon was gone. The night
was totally dark and there was no way of judging his direction. The dead man
was just a shapeless mass of shadow in the mud at his feet. He drew a deep
breath to steady himself. At the same time he now heard through the ululations
of the frogs a high, faraway shrilling sound. It was a military whistle. He
looked hack toward the launching pit and saw a light wink on, wink off, wink on
again. He wondered if the Russian military used dogs, and he picked up the
guard’s rifle.

“Can you use this, Valya?”

“I don’t want to touch it,” she whispered.

He took the P.38 he had regained from Mikhail. “Then keep
this."

“It is hopeless," she said. “They are already aware of
us. They know that someone spied on them over there. We can’t get away.”

He said angrily: “Don’t you want to try?”

She looked at him, startled by his voice. She looked down at
the dead man. A whistle blew, nearer this time. Durell shook her shoulders.

“Come on,” he said.

They ran. It was a time of nightmare, a time of horror. It
had no end, and distance had no meaning. Durell tried for high land to get out
of the swamp, but apparently they had headed into a vast area of bog from which
there was no easy escape. The mud dragged at their feet as they floundered
through knee-deep pools, tripped over roots, slammed into invisible trees. Now
and then a man’s dim shout drifted after them, heard over the harsh laboring of
their lungs. Once they heard the sound of a car on a road nearby, and they
veered sharply away from it. Valya fell and he picked her up and her weight
dragged dead in his arms. He slapped her face lightly to urge her on. She shook
her head and he picked her up and carried her for a distance, his own legs
growing leaden with exhaustion, until a warning tremor in the muscles of his
arms and shoulders told him to put her down. She walked on with him for ten
minutes after that. Lights still winked doggedly behind them. They could not be
shaken. He had no idea where they were heading. He knew the danger of traveling
in a circle in the utter dark of night, and he made deliberate angular turns to
compensate for it, but he still had no assurance that they might not blunder
into a squad of searching soldiers at any moment. He clung to the idea of
escape and permitted nothing else to diminish his purpose.

He was not sure when he heard the silence around him. He lay
on his back, with Valya beside him, her arm across his, staring at a black,
invisible sky that somehow seemed to turn slowly with the giant spinning of the
earth. He tried to see what time it was, but mud caked his hands and arms. Both
he and the girl were caked with mud from head to foot. Half his clothing had
been torn away, and he could not see what condition Valya was in. He listened
to her labored breathing and worried about her state of mind as well as her physical
endurance.

“Sam?” she said quietly.

“I’m here. Try to rest.”

“Can you go on?”

“In a few minutes.”

“Then go on without me. Leave me here.”

“I couldn’t do that.”

“If they catch me, it is not important. I am a Soviet
citizen. I can have some kind of explanation. I may be imprisoned or shot, but
that would end it. I would just be a name in their files. But if they
capture you—have you thought of what might happen, Sam?”

“It has occurred to me,” he said wryly. “Save your breath.”

“No, I cannot go on. Not another step.”

He propped himself up on his elbow. Drying mud fell from his
arms. He could see nothing, hear nothing. Somehow, at some moment during the
past quarter-hour of headlong flight, they had either eluded their pursuers or
the chase had been called off. He looked up at the sky. A thick overcast
blotted out moon and stars like a black blanket. The chill wind had died and he
no longer felt cold. The air was still, pregnant with rain. He could only dimly
make out the holes of trees, the tangled underbrush, the stretch of swampland
that surrounded them. Where they sprawled the ground lifted in a tiny hummock
that was like a dry island in a primeval world of muck and ooze.

“Sam?”

“Still here."

“Please go on. Go now. I'll be all right.”

“How is your face?”

“It doesn’t hurt any more.

“You’re lying.”

She was silent except for a faint chattering of her teeth.
Durell rolled toward her and felt the warm softness of her hip and thigh
against him. He wondered what they would look like in the dawn light, tattered and
ragged and caked with mud. He reached gently for the dim oval of her face. She
tried to turn away with a little moaning sound, but his hand was easy with her,
touching her cheek, her eyelids, her tangled hair.

“I’m glad it’s so dark,” she whispered. “Are you going now?”

“Not without you.”

“But I am nothing but a handicap, a danger to you, now.”

“No."

He felt a warm drop of rain on his forehead. Another drop
fell, and another. The budding leaves on the underbrush reflected the soft,
cleansing patter of the bursting drops. The rain made Durell suddenly realize
he was thirsty. He did not mention it. He saw Valya stand up.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.

"If you do not leave me, then I must leave you. I
cannot stay here with you. You are a stranger to me. You are a foreigner. I
deserted my country and my people.”

He stood up with her, but she moved back from him. He wished
he could see her face. She sounded as if she were crying.

“You’re not alone, Valya. How can you say that, when I’m
here with you?”

“Are you all I have?” she cried. “Am I alone, except for
you?”

“Valya, you’re tired, you’ve had a terrible time—”

“Yes, terrible. But there were other bad times for me, right
here in this very place, when I was a child. l remember them well. But there
was a difference, then. I was with my own people. Now I’m alone.”

“You don’t have to be frightened of that. You have me.”

“Have I?” she cried. “Have I?”

Suddenly she turned and began to run from him. He stood
rooted for an instant, then called her name as loudly as he dared. She did not
answer. The dark rain swallowed her, but he heard the sounds of her thrashing flight
through the wet woods, the sob of her breath. He gave chase, anger mingling
with pity in him. He caught her at the edge of a small pond, seized her arm and
pulled her about. She fell against him heavily and he felt the wet mud that
clung like clay to the firmness of her body.

The rain hissed down upon them, beating on their bent heads.
It felt warm and cleansing. The mud began to slide from Durell’s shoulders,
from his arms and his hands, sliding to the darkness at his feet.

“Valya, we’ll both rest here until morning. We’re both
tired. It won’t do us any good to stumble around anymore in the dark. We’ll
stay right here. Agreed?”

She sobbed and clung to him. Her weight dragged at him and
he eased her to the grassy bank of the pond. Her body trembled in his grip,
under his hands. And suddenly she buried her face against his chest and lay
close to him, pressing the length of her body against him as tightly as she
could.

“Hold me,” she whispered. “Don’t let me go.”

“I won’t let you go.”

He felt the heat of her under his hands as the rain washed
away the mud that covered her tattered clothing. When he kissed her, her response
came with desperate, frantic violence.

Chapter Fourteen

A STRAY SUNBEAM filtered through the interlaced trees
overhead and wakened him. Durell did not move for a long moment. He stared up
at the blue dawn sky and listened and remembered, aware of Valya's weight
against him, her long golden hair in a tangle across his chest. She breathed
evenly and lightly. His left arm tingled where she lay against it. The sky was
a warm, washed blue of spring. A plane droned by overhead, a silvery
twin-motored Russian version of the Dakota C-47. He turned his head carefully
and saw that Valya was awake and staring at him, although she had not moved,
either.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Darling,” she murmured. “Darling.”

He had no idea what time it was, but they had slept with the
sun on them for at least an hour or more, judging by the way their clothes had
dried. He saw the sleek line of her shoulder and the full swelling of one
breast and her eyes followed his and a faint flush touched her check. The
wound on her face looked clean and pink this morning. It was healing well. The
swelling was gone. She made a gesture to adjust her tattered blouse.

“What must you think of me?" she whispered. “Please do
not look.”

He smiled. “It's too late for modesty.”

“Forgive me. I was not myself last night.”

“You were wonderful.”

“I see. And this morning.”

“You’re fishing,” he said.

She frowned. “Fishing?”

“For me to tell you that you are beautiful.”

“I love you, Sam, even though you tell lies.”

He smiled and drew his arm from around her and sat up. She
said: “I don‘t care if you do not love me as I love you, Sam. I don’t expect
anything, really, except—”

“Stop worrying,” he told her. “Are you hungry?”

“You must take me with you now, Sam.” She looked frightened
for a moment. “Promise you won’t leave me if we get out of this, and if you
accomplish your mission.”

“I won't leave you," he said.

“Will you be able to take me with you to America?”

“Yes, we’ll work it out somehow.”

“Promise,” she insisted.

“I promise."

“Then there is something to live for, after all.” She spoke
with the earnest sobriety of a child. “But you have your girl there, haven’t
you?”

“I had one, once. Not now."

“Then I won't ask you if I can be your girl. We will know
about it later." She kissed him and stood up, straightening her damp skirt
and blouse, shaking her hair and making all the feminine gestures of a woman
dismayed by her appearance. She went down to the edge of the pond and began
braiding her long hair as well as she could by the reflection she could
see in the still water. Durell studied the sun, orienting himself to calculate
the direction he should take in order to find the car that Gregori had
hidden half an hour’s walk from the dugout. He had no idea how far they had traveled
in their headlong flight last night, nor in which direction. The swamps
around him gave no clue, nor was there any sign of human habitation anywhere.