Assignment Afghan Dragon

by Unknown Author

  They left Herat at noon, heading south. The girls slept in the back of the van while Durell took the wheel from Howard. The two young men sat in sullen silence beside him. Altogether, Durell estimated they were at least ten hours behind Zhirnov in the Ferrari. But the Ferrari was not built for the questionable roads ahead, and its highway speed would be negated as they moved south.

  The van had surprising power, and he negotiated the rising hills and twisting passes south of Chahar Burjak with no problems. The mild weather of Herat soon yielded to a harsh heat raised by the flashing, reflected sunlight on bare, scorched rock. The temperature began to drop as they climbed up through the first mountain passes. Durell took the hairpin turns fast, to the point where both Howard and George looked a bit fearful. The road itself was not the only hazard. There were no railroads in Afghanistan, and commercial traffic was by truck, and the truck drivers drove with hair-raising abandon that created problems whenever one came their way. Durell’s face was set. He did not slacken speed at any time, whatever games of chicken the oppositing drivers tried to play.

  It was during a relatively quiet interlude that George pulled out the antenna of a powerful shortwave radio receiver, sat it on his lap, and thrust the antenna out of the van window and began to fiddle with the dials—presumably to get his mind off Durell’s driving. Their elevation at the time was quite high, south of Chahur Burjak, and reception was loud and clear. For a few moments, they picked up Turkomen and Russian stations, then for just an instant as George idly turned the dials, Durell heard the flat no-nonsense news reports in Mandarin from Peking.

  “Turn it back,” he said.

  “It’s just Chinese. You understand Chinese?”

  “He does,” Howard said. “Like me. Maybe he learned it in Nam.”

  “Man, what are you, Durell?” George complained. “Some kind of cop, or something?”

  “No.”

  “A spook, then. Anybody who understands Chinese—”

  “Turn it back, Georgie,” Howard said.

  The news report came in crisply. It recounted the accidental death of General Chan Wei-Wu in a Peking suburb from a gunshot wound. The Deputy Chairman expressed his regrets. A Madame Strelsky was also a victim of the shooting. A successor to the General would shortly be named to the General’s post. And that was all.

  Durell nodded to George, who promptly picked up a pseudo-rock band from Bucharest. Durell wondered what was really happening in Peking. But it occurred to him that nothing would stop Mr. Chou from continuing his search for the dragon unless he, too, learned the news.

  It was past noon when they came down into the valley of the Harut for their first ford of the shallow, rippling river. Five miles later, as they climbed the opposite hills toward Qali Adraskan, they came upon the Ferrari.

  The wreck was about a mile away. Apparently Zhirnov, no Grand Prix driver, had taken a wrong turn onto a road that petered out into a goat track along a barren spine of the mountains. Durell turned off also, to follow the track, driving with care. Except for the one spot from which he had spotted the wreck, it was invisible from the main highway. Up here, the wind was still like a blast furnace, and the sun’s heat bounced off the glittering rocks in waves of fury. No one was in sight. Far below, he glimpsed the winding curves of the Harut Rud. There was a small village at a bend where a local dam had been built. But where the Ferrari lay was only a place for goats and wandering tribesmen.

  Possibly hyenas, too, Durell thought as he braked the van. The wreck could not have occurred more than a few hours ago, yet the Ferrari had been picked clean of every removable part by human scavengers.

  He picked up Howard’s Remington and stepped down to the hot stony path, fifty yards from where the sports car rested without wheels, tires, and possibly even the engine.

  “I thought you were in a hurry,” Howard asked.

  “I am. But there’s a time for care, too.”

  “Nobody’s around,” George said petulantly.

  “We don’t know that.”

  “I heard these hills are dangerous,” Lucy observed.

  “Yes. Stay in the van. You, too, Annie.”

  Anya shook her head. “No, I’ll go with you.”

  A high cliff of soft stone loomed to the south, the rock reddish, reflecting the white sky with a bloody glare. The cliff was eroded by several canyons, filled with crumbled rock, that led upward to the farther summit.

  “Zhirnov wouldn’t still be here,” Anya murmured.

  He gave her the rifle. “Just the same, cover me. If not Zhirnov, there may be a few tribesmen who don’t care for strangers poaching on their territory.”

  “But we’re wasting time—”

  “There’s a Kalashnikov automatic in the Ferrari that I don’t think anyone could have found,” he said. “And I want it.”

  But the deck over the Ferrari’s luggage space had been removed, he saw. He walked closer, careful of his footing on the treacherous shale. Nothing green grew here. Certainly there was no reason for Zhirnov to have turned off, except through error. The wind made a thin whining sound as it came down the narrow canyons nearby.

  “But where did he go?” Anya murmured. “If he wasn’t hurt in the wreck, maybe local tribesmen took him—”

  “No signs of violence,” Durell said. “Zhirnov would land on his feet somehow, go south in some way.”

  He came to a halt beside the wrecked car. Something was wrong in the atmosphere, but he could not define it. He listened to the wind and felt the hot sun on the nape of his neck. He walked around the car, not touching anything. There was no blood on the leather seats, no bullet holes, though the glass on the right side doors were starred and shattered. The stony ground yielded no footprints. He came back to the rear of the wreck and looked deep into the open trunk, remembering the secret compartments Nuri Qam had described, the method of pressing at opposite diagonal comers to get at the automatic rifle and the storage compartment there. Both flaps were open. He felt inside. No gun. No dragon box. His fingers ran rapidly around the edges of the secret flaps. No gouges, knife marks, nothing to indicate that the small doors in the luggage area had been forced open.

  He straightened—and the sound of a single rifle came with a sharp, rolling report that echoed back and forth from the rocky mountainside.

  The bullet hit the car with a sharp thud. Durell dived for Anya and threw her flat to the stony ground. The girl gasped, moved under his weight, tried to rise.

  “Keep down,” he snapped.

  “Is it—Zhirnov?”

  “Maybe just thieves, hill people.”

  They waited. In the van behind them, the trio of young people watched with puzzlement. They did not get out of the vehicle. He carefully raised his head and surveyed the washed-out canyons. He saw nothing. Sunlight flashed on the sharp bits of rock that littered the slopes. Any of the glintings could have been the reflection off a rifle barrel. He raised himself up.

  “Crawl under the car, Anya. It will be safer.”

  She said, “You feel you must protect me?”

  “Why not?”

  “Then you must trust me now?”

  He was not about to engage in that topic just at the moment. When the girl rolled under the protection of the car, he stood up and raced for the nearest canyon mouth, using a zigzag direction to confuse die ambushers. But there were no other shots. Except for the wind and the swift crunch of his boots on the shale, there was no sound. He paused, clearly exposed, aware of something very wrong.

  “Zhirnov!” he called.

  The reply was little more than a groan.

  “It is I. Chou. That was my last bullet.”

  Durell swore and scrambled up the rocky slope toward the voice. His gun was ready, and he was aware of the danger of a trap, of imminent death. He climbed on.

  He found Mr. Chou, the Chinese Black House agent, behind a large boulder that was precariously balanced against the tilted rubble filling the canyon. The stout Chinese lay on his back, and th
e rifle he had used for his single ambush shot had fallen away, out of reach. The man’s white suit was dusty and torn, and one of the round lenses in his glasses was broken. Durell bent and removed the rifle and checked the action. The chamber was empty. He tossed the weapon away and knelt beside Chou.

  “What happened here?”

  “Death has come to me here,” Chou said. He made a face of pain. “Not unexpected. But it is very painful. I was shot in the back.”

  “Zhirnov?”

  “He escaped. I do not—know where.”

  “You tried to ambush him?”

  “I—Freyda and I—yes. We knew he was coming this way. I had some greedy tribesmen with me. They preferred to loot the car to doing what I paid them to do.” Mr. Chou moved his round head in negation. “My legs are not mine. The sun grows dim. I wish I had reached you with my last shot. I waited and waited. I directed the tribesmen to set up false barricades on the highway and led him here. But Zhirnov was too quick.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “I do not know. I—”

  Durell said flatly, “But it was all useless, Chou. The General is dead. The report came over the Peking radio. He and his mistress are dead. Did you know she was Freyda’s sister? The hawks in Peking have no leader now. You have no employer. There will be no further pressures from Peking over the dragon.”

  Chou was silent a long time. Durell thought he was dead. Then his eyes blinked. “This is the truth?”

  “I would not lie to you now.”

  “But the dragon—”

  “Zhirnov has it.”

  The man’s breathing was erratic, and Durell could see the pool of blood under his back, where the shot that had finished him broke his spine.

  Durell said, “You’re sure Freyda was taken?”

  “Yes.” Chou had trouble breathing. “My grandfather—I was a little boy—belonged to old China. He was full of moral maxims. ‘A single false move loses the game,’ he would say. Or, ‘Knowledge is boundless; but one man’s capacity is limited.’ I thought I had forgotten those sayings . . . The General is truly dead?”

  “Yes. According to Peking radio.”

  “ ‘The mischief of fire or water or robbers touch only the body,’ my grandfather used to say. ‘But those of evil doctrines destroy the mind.’ The old man often told me stories about lucky tortoises and dragons. I would have liked to see this particular dragon. ‘A man without thought for tomorrow will have sorrow today.’ ”

  Mr. Chou stared blindly up into the glaring sun. His smile was a child’s smile, of faraway remembrance. “The old man told me how P’an Ku, a sculptor who lived for eighteen thousand years, fashioned the world with his hammer and chisel. While he built the mountains and scooped out the seas and hollowed the river courses, P’an Ku’s eternal companions were the four auspicious beasts, the Dragon, the Unicorn, the Tortoise and the Phoenix. The dragon heads all the creatures; he is larger than large, smaller than small. His breath is a cloud on which he rides up to Heaven. The Dragon has five colors in his body, and owns a pearl which is the soul of the moon. He can be visible or invisible. In the spring, he rides the clouds; in the summer he swims in deep waters . . ." Mr. Chou’s voice trailed off. He smiled again. “I would have liked to see this dragon we all pursued. I would like to see my old grandfather again—”

  The Chinese made a thin sound in his throat. He smiled at Durell, a sad, sad smile, filled with doubts and regrets. His eyes turned up and remained fixed on the harsh sky. A vulture soared up there.

  The man was dead.

  Durell turned and looked down the narrow valley. Anya was climbing up from below. He decided to wait until she joined him, and he watched her small figure move among the rocks that had spilled at the base of the canyon. Nothing else stirred except for dust devils kicked up by the whimpering wind. The air felt suddenly cooler. He thought of Chou, and how each man turned back to his origins at the moment of his end. Anya appeared and disappeared among the huge boulders. He felt a sadness for Mr. Chou and for a world of men that never found peace until the end came. Would peace for all men come with the desolate peace of a dead, radioactive world? He shrugged off a shudder and knelt beside the dead Chinese to search the man’s pockets.

  He heard a small scream, quickly stifled, from Anya.

  She had come only halfway up among the rocks on the slope to meet him, the last time he saw her. Now he could not spot her down there.

  “Anya?” he called.

  His voice echoed in the narrow canyon. Down below, he saw Howard and George talking, standing beside the parked van. Anya did not reappear.

  “Anya?” he called again.

  He thought he glimpsed movement among the boulders where she had last been climbing, but he wasn’t sure, and he left Chou’s body and started down toward her, sensing the hostility of these bleak Afghan hills. Stony rubble rattled away from under his boots. He moved wide to the right, not retracing the way he had come up. Great reddish rocks towered above his head. It was like being lost in a stone forest. He could not see more than a few yards in any direction, and he turned downhill toward the center of the rock spill.

  "Sam!”

  Her muffled shout, quite near him, was quickly cut off. At the same moment, he heard the whisper of secret sound above and behind him. Anya’s warning came too late. He felt the shock of heavy weight as a man crashed down on his shoulders; he staggered, slipped in the rubbled shale, went down on one knee, his right hand and gun flung out to keep his balance. A booted foot crushed his wrist on the stone. He smelled sweat and rancid sheepskin. Something smashed against his head and drove him over on his side. His opponent was a giant, bearded and wild-looking, his teeth showing in a cruel grin. Durell tried to draw up a knee, failed, felt something hit the nape of his neck. The mountains reeled. The earth heaved under him. He had lost his gun. He suddenly thought that this was the way it was going to end, after all, here in these empty mountains, victim of a simple, sly ambush set by tribesmen.

  He heard more booted feet rush toward him and then he was buried under the weight of several evil-smelling men, and a torrent of blows rained down on him, He thought he heard Anya scream again, and a quick burst of sound from the van’s engine, far below. They were running away, he thought dimly.

  Then there came a last blow, and he slid inevitably into a darkness that was almost welcome.

  17

  It was dark and cold.

  His teeth were chattering, and with a great effort he clenched his jaw against the spasms of pain in his face. The pain grew as he crawled slowly up out of unconsciousness. He did not move. Perhaps someone would notice that his teeth were not noisy any more, but the cold shook him like an aspen in the wind. One side of him was warm, pressed against something smooth and yielding. It was a woman’s urgent body. He felt an arm around him, holding him close to the rounded heat. A naked leg and thigh closed over him, as if to impart the warmth of blood and living tissue to his own.

  He tried to give no hint of being awake again. He lay on his left side, with the woman spooned behind him, and when he opened his eyes, he thought he had been blinded, because he saw nothing at all, only a blackness unrelieved by even the faintest glimmer of light. Gradually he became aware of the smell of poorly tanned goatskins, of stale goat’s milk, of camel-dung smoke from cooking fires. The wind made flapping sounds, as if something were loosely blowing; there was a wooden creaking, too. He realized that he and the woman were lying inside a pitch-dark tent, in a place exposed to bitter mountain winds. His every muscle ached; there was a special pain

  in his ribs, and if several were not broken, they were at least badly bruised. His left hand throbbed where his attacker’s boot had stamped on it. He carefully tried to move his fingers. They worked all right, if stiffly and painfully.

  The woman wriggled against him, as if to get even closer to impart her warmth to his battered body.

  “Anya?” he whispered.

  He did not move when he spoke. He had p
itched it too low, and he spoke her name again. “Anya?”

  Her body came away from him with a startled, sudden thrust and jerk. He felt the chill wind against his back where she had been pressing against him.

  “Sam?”

  “Hush. Keep your voice down.”

  “I thought—I thought you were dying.”

  “Not yet,” he said grimly. “And you?”

  “I’m c-cold.”

  “They took your clothes away?”

  “Every stitch. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

  “Please. Just whisper. Is there a guard?”

  “Outside the tent.”

  “Come back. We might as well warm each other.”

  “I—now I am embarrassed.”

  He turned over, very carefully, testing his limbs and muscles. Nothing seemed to be broken or torn. On his right side now, he could see a glimmer of reddish light, in a long slit at ground level under the sides of the tent. It was obviously a cooking fire from outisde. He took the girl’s nude, warm body in his arms and held her close. She was firm and smooth against him, surprisingly womanly. She tried to pull back in the darkness, then came forward with a sigh to nestle against him.

  “I was only trying to keep you warm,” she whispered.

  “I know. Thank you.” He paused. “Did they hurt you?”

  “No. Some of the men wanted to—take me—but the chief said no, and he had to hit one with the rifle, and ever since we’ve been here alone. No food, no water, no fire. I don’t know what they plan to do. I can understand some of their dialect. They’re wandering nomads. Chou hired them to ambush Zhirnov. Did you see Chou?”