Assignment Golden Girl

by Edward S. Aarons

  With Love to

  GRACE

  One

  THE FIRST explosion rolled through the mid-morning heat and haze, reached down, and touched Durell in his sleep. He turned over on the bed in his room in the dilapidated Pakuru River Hotel, thinking it was no time for more trouble.

  The second blast was closer, somewhere in the sweltering capital of Pakuru itself. A soft mist of powdered plaster drifted down over the tattered mosquito netting. Durell opened his eyes. The bed shook. The window rattled.

  "Get out of my bed," he said firmly.

  "Sam, please. I'm so frightened."

  "Out!"

  "It's the Neighbors. The Ndohuzas." She used the Pakuru word for the new, copper-rich nation to the north, a word that Pakuru had traditionally applied to the adjacent tribal conglomeration. The word Neighbors was always used by Pakuru for the People's Democratic Republic of Ndohuza. "Sam, they're all around the city. You must help me."

  He felt the weight of her thigh across his belly, the sweat-slick smoothness of her breasts. It was too hot for it. He turned and lifted her bodily and dropped her on the floor beside the bed. The mosquito netting tore. Outside in front of the ramshackle hotel there was shouting in Banda. A whistle blew. A truck snorted into life.

  "Sam ..."

  Her head came up over the edge of the sweaty mattress.

  "Sally, I told you to sleep on the floor."

  "It's so hard! You're so cruel!"

  She was very pretty, one of those marvelous African strains of Boer and Chinese and Banda. She had a tattered British passport and an address in London, and he had already checked on it before the power lines were knocked out by the unfriendly Neighbors. There was no such address in London, and the job she claimed to have, writing for a little sociologically oriented magazine entitled Toward Sunshine, did not exist. The magazine with the unlikely name was actually published, but they had no Sally Hukkim on their payroll.

  "Sam, I think it was the airfield," Sally said.

  "I'm sure it was."

  "And the town generator. There are no lights."

  "Get dressed, Sally."

  She watched him slide his snubby-barreled .38 S&W from under the depressed pillow. She had eyes like gold coins, and they were wide with what she tried to project as pure fright. He did not think anything in the world had frightened her ever since she was five years old. "What are you trying to do?"

  "I think you should put some clothes on," he suggested.

  Her body flowed like a liquid brown snake up and over the edge of the bed. "Is Prince Tim coming today?"

  "I hope so."

  "I heard he was still out in the jungle with the Army, playing games with the Nieighbors."

  "Yes."

  "When he comes in, you're leaving with him, aren't you?"

  "I hope to."

  "Will you get me out of here with you, Sam?"

  "No."

  'Please! What will I do here in this awful place with all this fighting. I'm not a war correspondent, I'm just a stupid little sociologist studying tribal customs. The Neighbors!" she snorted delicately. "They just want the railroad for the Chinese right-of-way."

  "I suppose so."

  "What will I do?" she insisted.

  "Write a little article on the social impact of tribal, jungle, ideological warfare for that magazine of yours."

  "But I couldn't get it out. I can't even get out myself! None of us can. But you've got that Mooney plane out at the field. You can help me, Sam. I'll do anything you say. I mean anything. I'm counting on you."

  He said nothing, but got up and moved across the big, high-ceilinged hotel room for his clothes. It was like walking through thin, warm molasses. The gun felt slippery in his fingers. There was more shouting in the Banda tongue down on the road through the giant eucalyptus trees that only added to the smothering heat. From the window he could look down at the dusty front of the Pakuru River Hotel. Some local constabulary stood there, big black feet splayed in the dirt, their uniforms long having lost the smartness designed by Prince Tim. Their automatic rifles were Chinese-built, Russian-designed AK-47 assault weapons. Their eyes were frightened, and they didn't seem to know what to do.

  Over the town that sprawled in the cup of the valley— the newly designated capital of the tiny, independent nation of Pakuru—a mushroom cloud of black smoke still billowed up from the reed-thatched tribal palace area. Durell looked northward to where he had left the Mooney four-seater that had flown him from Johannesburg. Another cloud of smoke came from the airport, and he swore softly, seeing his problems doubled and quadrupled. Two of the constables went and sat under the eucalyptus trees across the road and lit brown Portuguese cigarettes. Nailed to the trees over their heads were several signs in Chinese, painted in red calUgraphy, echoing the thoughts of Chairman Mao Tse-tung. The signs had been dutifully planted here in southeast Africa by the Peking corps of engineers who had lived in the Paturu River Hotel while trying to make a deal for the right-of-way across Pakuru to the sea from the copper mines at Mbuli. Durell stared at the battered signs and wondered how Prince Tim had ever gotten the nerve to kick them out of his little country.

  "Sam, you can look at me now," said Sally. "I'm all dressed. I think you're afraid of women.*'

  He only smiled.

  "Or afraid of just little me.''

  "No," he said. "I simply don't trust you."

  "But you know all about me. That's your business, to know about people, isn't it? It's your job?"

  "What does that mean?"

  "Well, everybody knows," she said defensively, "that you're an American spy. A CIA agent. From K Section, isn't that right?"

  He hadn't told anyone. He hadn't brought any papers with him from the briefing he'd had with Johnny Redwing, the Shawnee, in Johannesburg. Nor did he talk in his sleep. He had been checked out for that long ago, at the Maryland Farm where he'd been for retraining and rest after his last bit of work in Tokyo.

  He stared at her.

  Her golden eyes fluttered and dropped. She stood near the door of the big, plaster-walled room, near where she had first dropped her battered traveling kit when she had come in last night and appealed for a place to stay. She wore a Pakuru dress, an intricately dyed and designed skirt in native patterns, a kind of light cotton shawl, and a band of golden beads holding her hair back from her forehead. Durell kept staring. Sally Hukkim was a tall girl, almost as tall as he was, with the proud and erect carriage of the Pakuru women. She fastened golden hoop earrings in her fine ears while he watched, her pale yellow eyes serene, smiling secretly. With her faintly slanted eyes—her heritage from the mysterious Chinese ancestor —and pale brown skin (from the Indian merchant who had fathered her?) she looked like the best of the Pakuru girls, perhaps several shades of coffee color too light to match their rich brownness. More important, Durell thought, was her innate pride and bearing in that outfit. She could have been local royalty, and he looked at her twice, wondering what bothered him about her appearance but unable to put his finger on it precisely.

  "You like?" she asked demurely.

  "I like indeed."

  "You silly man, throwing me out of your bed."

  "My choice. No regrets for either of us."

  She watched him move to the door. "Where are you going? It isn't safe out there, is it? I mean, terrorists— those explosions—"

  "I have to see if the plane is still in one piece."

  "I'm hungry," she said.

  "There's no food in the hotel."

  "Will you give me a lift into town then?"

  He nodded and opened the door. He had been only half listening to Sally. All through their conversation and dressing the chattering voices of the tattered, frightene
d police down on the road had provided a background of sound counterpointed by a chittering of monkeys and a twittering of birds in the leafy green heat of the eucalyptus woods bordering the sluggish brown Pakuru River. Once there had been a lawn and elegant tennis courts, and tea was served to the British colonials who had ruled this tiny enclave in Africa, living their London life usually better—certainly better serviced—than at home.

  Now everything had gone silent outside.

  Suddenly Durell wished he had never heard of Prince Atimboku Mari Mak Mujilikaka, Elephant Emperor, Lord of Lions, Master of the Moon, Stars, and Sun, hereditary king and prince of the complicated tribal chiefs and clans of the convoluted Pakuru society.

  Prince Tim, the State Department people called him, not without a perverted sense of affection. A whole new bureau had been built up in Foggy Bottom in Washington dedicated to the proposition that Prince Atimboku, B.A., M.S., Ph.D. at Yale University (Durell's own alma mater), onetime militant member of SDS with a lengthy police record of arrests for rioting, window smashing, fire bombing, illegal protests, and possession of pot, hash, and LSD—all this in the person of the Lion of Lions of

  Pakuru was suddenly dear and precious to the security of the United States of America.

  Durell listened to the silence outside the hotel.

  "What is it?" Sally asked.

  "Be quiet," he hushed her.

  "Why has everything gone so still?"

  He opened the door and found out.

  They were surprised in their stealthy approach down the long, wood-planked corridor from the lobby stairs. There were three of them, black tribesmen from the Neighbors, that friendly coimtry that prated of peace in the United Nations councils and systematically organized terror and sabotage in adjacent, newly independent nations of southeast Africa under the guise of local PLMs— People's Liberation Movements. The fact that Pakuru had just celebrated its second anniversary of liberation from colonial rule made no difference to the railroad-building, copper-mining Neighbors. They wanted more, assiduously borrowing Peking's money, arms, and terror techniques to get it. And they had sent the trio of murderers standing at the top of the stairs to insure their getting that one little piece more to finish their jimgle railroad.

  There were two screams—one from the hideously painted leader of the trio, the other from the girl behind Durell. A Thermit bomb flew hissing through the air in the brown corridor. It missed Durell, slid along the plank floor, and burst into flames against the wall. Sally screamed again. Durell's gun was ready. He fired at their knees three times. One of the men went yowling and screeching headfirst down the staircase. The second collapsed like a bowling pin. The third kept coming, shouting, ''Kande nendi shum pego!"

  Which meant, Durell supposed later, "Death to colonial imperialists!"

  He aimed for the leg, missed because Sally screamed again, and then the sweaty, jangly-beaded body crashed into him, and a machete whirred through the air with enough strength to decapitate him. Durell ducked, brought his knee hard up into the man's groin, swimg backward, and carried the struggling PLM fire bomber with him until they crashed into the wall. Smoke began to thicken in the hallway. The other man's breath smelled of pushd, native beer. His teeth were rotten. His eyes were maniacal. Durell did not want to kill him. Durell was, after all, a neutral in the war between Pakuru and the Neighbors. He yanked the man forward, slammed his head into the wall, spun him around again, and hurled him down the corridor toward the flames. Durell glimpsed white, crazed eyes in a contorted face and heard a high, ululating scream followed by a crash of glass as the man kept going and flung himself through the far window.

  Durell drew a deep breath and walked to the one with the shattered knee. The man was crawling slowly backward down the steps to the deserted hotel lobby.

  "Who were you after, shumba?" He gave the man the Banda name for pig. "Was it me?"

  Through the man's pain came a toothy grin. "Partly, laki/' He returned the compliment by calling Durell a carpet snake. "Only partly."

  "The girl?"

  The man said nothing, looking down the hall at Sally Hukkim's aristocratic figure in her native outfit. He spat on the floor. There was blood in his spittle. Durell felt the heat of the fire at his back.

  "Well?"

  "You, laki, Yankee imperialist spy."

  Sally came up behind them, her face shining from the crackling blaze. "Sam, let's get out of here!"

  "Help him down."

  She was repelled by the suggestion. "I wouldn't ever touch him!"

  "Why not? He's harmless now."

  "He—he tried to kill you."

  "That's right."

  "Lordie. I thought—I hoped—I'd be safe with you."

  Ruefully she walked past Durell, still with her head held regally high, and descended the steps to the empty lobby. Durell picked up the wounded man, slung him over one shoulder, and followed.

  Two

  "HARVEY," Gloria said, "get up.''

  "Hmmm?"

  "Harvey!" she shouted.

  Harvey Gladstone lay in the sling bed, arms and legs dangling, his worn, bearded face up tilted to the rafters. His eyes were open, but they were unseeing. Sweat dribbled down his dangling arms. It was only nine o'clock in the morning, but the heat was already suffocating.

  "Harvey, aren't you going to do anything?" Gloria asked. Her voice held the shrill, nagging, shrewish note he had come to know only too well. There would be no escape from it. It would simply go on and on and on until he responded somehow.

  "What do you want me to do?" he asked.

  "Something. Anything! You promised me you'd get us out of here once and for all. Golly, I'll be glad to get going."

  "There is no way out," he said flatly.

  "But they're coming closer!"

  "Sure, sweetie."

  "They'll kill us!"

  "You maybe. Ravished. Raped. Enjoyed by all those Neighbor bucks. Not me. They'll need me. I'll be all right."

  "You son of a bitch," she whispered. "You got me here. All those promises. Those fancy words. Now you'll get me out. I don't intend to be spread and pinned by a gang of—"

  "Shut up." He knew her choice of words, and in Pakuru it was dangerous to talk like that. He knew everything about Gloria, past, present, and future. He could predict her every mood, her every ploy in conversation. She lived only in her crotch, he thought, and added tiredly to himself, You're not man enough to fill the bill. No man would ever be for Gloria.

  The trouble was he had gone all the way and married her. Harvey Gladstone, chief of operations of Pakuru National Railways, state adviser on economic and industrial development to Prince Atimboku Mari Mak Mujili-kaka, pride of the British Colonial Affairs Officers in the good old days—^he, Harvey, was now down to six hundred miles of rusting rails, an empty office, a bombed-out yard, sabotaged engineering works, and a bitch of a wife. He had married Gloria four years ago on leave to the States. He had found her in Sweeney's bar in New York, and she was one of those New York career girls, slick and glamorous, still honeysmooth with her North Carolina accent, and twenty-five years younger than he.

  Well, hell, he had been glamorous enough to her, too, even though pushing the mid-century mark on his birthday calendar. Big African white hunter railroader type, taming the jungle, living off the fat of Pakuruland. Lots of changes since then. In Africa, in Gloria, in himself. He wished bitterly he could have seen the future in Sweeney's mirror that night he first picked her up and took her to his hotel suite.

  The fat of the land. Funny thing. That was the same time the CIA type from Washington, all Ivy League and smooth talk, had recruited him for part-time work in Pakuru. "Just to keep an ear to the ground for us, Harv. Nothing to it. A monthly report, that's all, just a precis on odds and ends you pick up. We're quite interested in what happens over there, you see. Peking is talking about building a railroad, a big three-hundred-milHon-dollar credit to that crazy Commie outfit running the country just north of Pakuru. Might b
e nothing in it at all. But you can use ten thousand a year just for that, can't you?"

  He had tried to protest that he, as general manager and chief of operations, didn't need bribes. But it turned out that the white-haired, youthful-faced CIA type knew all about the gambling debts he'd run up in the Casino at Pakuru that the English had built. Knew all about the native girls, too. Knew his bank balance to the penny. Knew about his crazy need for Gloria.

  Nothing to it. Not for four years. And now this fellow, Sam Durell, had shown up to collect his money's worth on all that salary.

  He felt a deep, squirmy feeling in the pit of his stomach and knew he was scared.

  Afraid of the past, the present, the future.

  Afraid of Durell.

  "Harvey, please," Gloria said, wheedling now.

  "Is there anything for breakfast?"

  "I've gotten a couple of eggs from Ntsu."

  "Those native marbles? Didn't a shipment come in from Johannesburg that last run we made on 907?"

  "It's gone. It went to the palace naturally. The regent took it all—for the people, he said. As usual the people are starving."

  Harvey Gladstone rolled out of the sling bed, wearing only his soiled underwear, and looked for the Gilbey's bottle. The gin was gone. Gloria moved in front of him so that he finally had to meet her stone-blue eyes, her angry slash of red lipsticked mouth. She was still built as lusciously as when he'd first met her, the heat of Africa and the Pakuru diet hadn't bothered her too much. Hell, she wasn't more than twenty-five, still taking her youth for granted. There was a little puffiness around the angry eyes, the nose wasn't as delicate as it used to be, and the white-blond hair tied with a black grosgrain ribbon, black that matched the jet earrings in her small-lobed ears; why did she have to wear earrings at nine o'clock on a son-of-a-bitch morning when the Neighbors were blowing up half the town? No, she hadn't changed much.

  She had begun to nag him early about getting a decent job back in the States, instead of playing big frog in this jungle pond. When he told her that railroading was dead in the USA, at least the railroading he had been born into, she told him to get into another field. But Harvey's grandfather and father had cut their teeth on the spikes of the Denver & Rio Grande, and the glamour and history and all the lore of the D&RG and its counterparts had become something permanent in his blood. He refused to give it up and paid for the refusal with four years of bitching and nagging. He'd offered her a divorce, offered to send her back to Manhattan. Contrary, she had refused. And looking at her as she bent to pick up a pack of cigarettes, watching the smooth swell of her hips and buttocks, he felt a perverse, hot need of her, an immediacy that infuriated him with his own weakness.