Assignment - Suicide (17 page)

“You look troubled, Sam,” Valya said.

“We haven‘t much time. This is the last day of April, and
tomorrow will be May Day.”

“All right, Sam.” Her face sobered. “I just thought, for
this moment, we could forget.” She shrugged. “Come, I’ll take you to the car.”

He was surprised. “Do you know where we are?”

“I think so. Remember, I was with Gregori’s guerrilla hand
for over a year. We hid in these swamps until I knew every pond and slough and
every tree and bush. The ear is over that way. It isn’t more them a
twenty-minute walk.”

Durell‘s watch had stopped, but by the sun it seemed about
nine o’clock, according to his rough estimate, when they reached the paved road
they had used yesterday. It seemed as if much more time had passed since he had
trudged with Gregori to the dugout. The sunlight winked on budding leaves and a
flash of red in the branches overhead marked the passage of a cardinal.
There seemed to be no traffic on the road. He ran across it with Valya and
found the trail where Vassili had driven the car to its hiding place and waited
for a few moments, his senses alert for alarm. Nothing happened. The little
ravine that hid the Zeiss was completely hidden from the road, and for a moment
he thought Valya had lost it and led him to the wrong place. Then she touched
his arm and pointed and he caught the gleam of metal through the foliage.

Durell stood up carefully and parted the brush to study the
scene. It looked safe enough. The car looked untouched since they had left it.
He glanced at Valya and she nodded. “It is all right, Sam."

“We‘ll wait for a moment.”

Nothing moved in the brush of the ravine. The morning
sunlight felt warm on the back of his head. For five minutes he listened,
scouting the area with all his senses. It seemed safe enough. But there was no
scolding of squirrels, no flight of woodland birds. It was too quiet, and
he was not satisfied. The car looked innocent and deserted, untouched
since they had left it yesterday. There was no breeze; the tender young leaves
stood motionless on the trees.

He waited five more minutes and then stood up.

“All right,” he told the girl. “Cover me with the rifle.”

She nodded and lay prone. Her eyes reflected tension
and concern. He went down the slope of the ravine toward the car. He opened the
door of the car, looked inside, felt for the key under the sun visor where he
had seen Gregori put it. The key was there. He turned and waved to where Valya
waited and she stood up and ran toward him as he slid behind the wheel and
stepped on the starter.

Nothing happened.

There was a grinding sound and nothing more. The engine did
not catch. The noise of the starting motor seemed shattering in the woodland
silence. The gas showed half a tank of fuel still available.

“What is wrong?“ Valya asked.

He made no answer. He slid out of the car and went around to
lift the hood. One glance showed him the tangle of torn wires from the
distributor cap. Alarm screamed in him. He suddenly knew he had been cleverly
trapped. He did not move from his position bent over the engine. The P.38
pistol was in his pocket, and after a moment of listening and hearing nothing
at all, he took his right hand from the distributor cap and rested it on the
hot metal of the fender and then reached into his right-hand pocket for the
gun. His fingers closed over the butt and he looked up at Valya. She was
standing on the opposite side of the car and he saw that she wasn’t looking at
him now. She was looking at someone or something behind him.

Gregori’s voice came quietly at his back. “Leave your weapon
where it is,
gospodin
.
I beg of you. I do not want to kill you.” ‘

“Very well,” Durell said.

“
Spaceeba
.
Thank you. Take your hand from your pocket—empty."

Durell straightened and turned with his hands empty. Gregori
stood a few paces from him. The burly man was not smiling. His face looked
bearded and haunted, lined deeply with pain. His right arm was in a crude and
bloody sling, and he held the target rifle in the crook of his left
elbow, awkwardly; but his finger was on die trigger and the muzzle
covered Durell adequately enough.

“Are you alone?” Durell asked.

“Vassili and Elena are still at the dugout. You caused us a
great deal of trouble,
gospodin
.”

“What happened to your arm?”

“It is broken. A stupid accident. The guards almost caught
me and when I ran I tripped and
tell
and broke the
arm. They did not catch me but they did their work successfully, even though
they are not aware of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I am not ambidextrous. There is no marksman among us who
could carry out our task, except myself. And now I could not hit anything
unless I was as close to the target as I am to you. Valya?”

“I am sorry,” the girl said.

“Do not touch your rifle yet. You look well. You must
have had a pleasant night in the swamps.”

"Not very pleasant.”

Gregori said: “What took you so long to get here, then? I have
been waiting for you two since after midnight.”

“We were lost.”

“I see. Well. At least you weren’t captured. It was my
greatest worry. I will need Durell now, more than ever. The car would have been
folly, you understand. Everything has been upset by what you two have done. The
guard detachment at the missile base has been alerted. We had to run and hide
and run again through most of the night. They did not find the dugout,
fortunately, so we are safe again. And the search has spread out beyond us, so
we are inside the perimeter of their efforts and we shall stay there. It will
be safest, close to them. As for the car, Durell, you would not get more than
three kilometers in it. All the roads are blocked and guarded with tanks and
machine guns. We are completely encircled. You could not even escape on foot
now."

Durell accepted Gregori’s words; he spoke too earnestly to
be lying. He put the P.38 on the fender of the car and stepped a little away
from it to place Gregori at ease. Valya stood with her hand at her throat, her
manner uncertain, waiting for a signal from him. But he knew there was nothing
to be done at the moment. The rifle in the crook of Gregori’s arm was
pointed unwaveringly at him, the silencer on the muzzle awkward and black in
the sunlight. Gregori came around and picked up the pistol in the fingers
of his right hand, moving painfully with the sling around his right arm. A
fresh spot of blood appeared on the muddy, bloody bandages. His thick black
brows scowled first at the girl, then at Durell. He seemed to be trying
to decide something, and then he made up his mind.

“Very well. We will all go back to the dugout. I was hoping
Mikhail was with you. He did not leave with you?”

“No. He ran away in the opposite direction,” Valya offered.

“Toward the base?”

“Yes,” Durell said.

“Then he has deserted us,” Gregori said heavily.

Valya said defensively: “Do not condemn him before we know
the truth!”

“No?” Gregori asked, scowling. “Then where is he?”

“Perhaps he was captured. Perhaps he is lost."

“Let us pray they have not caught him. He would break like
an egg in my fist, and spill as much juice. I do not have your faith in
Mikhail, Valya. I do not trust him; I never have. It is you who brought him
into our organization, but I consider him too weak and temperamental for this
business. If the troops have captured him, then Kronev is questioning him at
this moment. How long do you think he could hold out against Kronev’s methods?”

Valya looked down at her feet, silent. Gregori sighed and
shrugged and hitched the rifle to a more comfortable position. “It is
foolish for us to distrust each other now. Death is all around us. If we
quarrel and fight between us, we will all die that much sooner. Pick up
your gun, Durell. And your rifle, Valya. We will go back to the dugout.”

Durell picked up the pistol. He watched Gregori closely,
seeing the pallor on the man’s broad, strong face, the grimace of pain that
twisted his mouth and dark, bushy brows.

“You say you need me more than before,” Durell said to him.

Gregori drew a deep breath. “This stupid accident with my
arm. I am the only marksman in the unit; Vassili is not half as good as I, and
Elena is totally hopeless except with a machine gun, which we do not have,
unfortunately. What kind of a marksman are you,
gospodin
?”

Durell said nothing.

Gregori said, “When the time comes, you will be my eye and
my arm, Durell. Do you understand?”

“No.”

“
lt
should be perfectly clear.”

“It is clear. But I am not a murderer.”

“You have no choice,” Gregori said quietly. “If you refuse,
your entire mission fails. You cannot get out of here and reach Moscow to alert
your Embassy. We are surrounded by steel and death, my friend. We are all
trapped here, thanks to your attempt to‘ escape last night. What choice is left
open to you now? If you cannot carry out your original plan to alert your
Embassy, then you must stay here, right? And if you stay here, then tomorrow
morning at a certain hour Comrade Z will come along in his limousine to carry
out his first step to gain complete power through the confusion of war.
Do you intend to let him do it?”

Durell felt cold. Gregori’s logic could not be denied. “And
if I am not the marksman you think I am?”

Gregori said quietly; “I think you had better be.”

“And if I miss?”

“You know the answer to that as well as I.” Gregori laughed
without mirth. “Come, it is not too safe here by the car. We are too near the
military road. You do not have to make up your mind at this moment. There is
plenty of time. Until tomorrow, eh? But I think, Mr. Durell, you will make an
excellent assassin.”

Chapter Fifteen

THE DAY seemed to have no end.

He ate black bread and salt fish and drank bottled
Narzan water that Vassili produced from his canvas rucksack, although Vassili
and Gregori preferred the vodka that seemed to have no effect on them. It was
calm and quiet in the swampy forest where they waited through the long hours. Now
and then a helicopter With the red star of the Soviet Air Force whirled and
plodded through the blue sky above the treetops, and once a patrol of
green-uniformed soldiers worked awkwardly through the brush only fifty
feet from the dugout entrance. They were not discovered. And there was no traffic
except for an occasional military truck that came grinding down the road
through the ravine to the bridge that Vassili watched.

Durell‘s post was with Vassili through the daylight hours That
dragged by. Working with infinite patience, Vassili had cleared with his
hands a narrow space from the rock ledge above the road that commanded the
approach to the wooden bridge below. Through the avenue in the brush, Durell
could see the sentry tower clearly, and even hear the murmur of the guards’
voices as they talked and smoked in the sunlight that filtered down
through the trees to where they stood. Durell checked and rechecked the target
rifle. He would have preferred to squeeze off a few shots to test the
trigger tension and learn if the gun had any special idiosyncrasies. The sights
were fine, and whenever the wind shifted slightly he made adjustments to
account for possible deflection and elevation.

He had not made up his mind what to do about this desperate
situation. He knew that if nothing occurred to change the situation by morning,
he would have to squeeze the trigger.

The sun was hot in the clear blue sky. The rocky stream at the
bottom of the gorge chuckled and gurgled. A truck came grinding down the
ravine, halted at the sentry tower on the‘ other 'side of the bridge, and then
went on. He heard the soldiers in the troop carrier laughing and joking. Dust
lifted in a thin cloud and rolled over his hiding place above the road.

Durell looked at Vassili curiously. The man was only in his middle
twenties, a child of the Soviet state, a man who knew nothing beyond Communist
propaganda and a state-dominated way of life that had always regulated his
every thought and act. There was intelligence in Vassili’s narrow eyes.
Vassili‘s hair was like straw, and his eyes were a clear blue. His mouth was
thin and sensitive. Durell said: “How did you get into all this, anyway,
Vassili?”

The thin man shrugged. “How does one know which way life
sets you to drifting? Something happens and you do something about it and in
turn you find yourself pushed again by something else in yet another direction.
My lathe broke down.”

“Your lathe?”

“I was foreman on a night shift in a Moscow factory. We made
machine parts—I don’t know what for, they were small, fine pieces, like
jewels—for something that we never saw and never asked about. I was doing well.
I made almost two thousand rubles a month. I won the Stalin Prize for efficiency.
All my life I studied at the technical school and worked hard. I was ready to
get married when the lathe was ruined."

Vassili laughed with soft bitterness and rubbed the pale bristle
on his jaw. He looked dirty and desperate, the epitome of an outlaw, and it
occurred to Durell that he himself certainly looked no better. He saw Vassili
grin, white teeth gleaming strongly, but there was no laughter in his eyes.

“Some technical recruits were put under my charge; they were
supposed to be graduates of the technical school operated by my factory. They
were supposed to be competent. I thought they could be trusted to do the work
properly. Those lathes were very fine machines, you understand. I cared
for them as a mother cares for her children.”

“Were they Russian-made?”

“German,” Vassili said shortly. “So they were hard to come
by. Well, one of the recruits was careless and didn’t shut down the lathe he
was operating when the machining was done, and the machine was badly damaged.
They got me out of bed that morning. My father and mother, too. It was five
years ago, you know, and best forgotten.”