Assignment Golden Girl

by Edward S. Aarons

  Like Pavlov's dog. They had made him into a machine endlessly trained to hunt and kill, to react in specified ways to certain stimuli and situations. Like a mathematical formula. Follow the equation, and you had such-and-such a percentage of chances for survival. Break the rules and your dossier in Washington on the other side of the world got the black tab.

  He felt the softness of Sally's weight lowered gently upon him. He put an arm around her. She was slim and supple. Everywhere that she touched him her fingers implored him gently and with love. He did not doubt her.

  "Sally?"

  "Sam, please don't turn me away again."

  He laughed. She heard him laugh before but not like this. It was as if he were a different man.

  "Thank you, Sam."

  Their bodies moved in the tall grass. The wind made the reeds sway gently over their heads. Sally's face was transformed. The island was the world, the world was the island. The moon sailed briefly behind a tiny cloud. When it came out again moments later, there were new shadows before him.

  Durell turned his head.

  There had been no sound, no footfall, no slightest crackle of dried twigs imder naked, thorn-calloused feet. But the three silhouettes towered high against the night sky, black and thin, merging into the thin, black lines of their spears.

  Kwama and his warriors.

  Durell rolled aside, stood up.

  Khwama said, "I am sorry."

  SaUy said, "Oh, damn!"

  Twenty-Three

  THE KAISATA Desert was a subtle, sinister entity with a strange, unearthly life all its own. It held very little ground water for more than a short stretch. In the early hours of morning the train crossed into it almost without notice across grass and scrub savannah. According to Oyashi under the scrub there was sand from three to five hundred feet in depth. The tracks ran for some one hundred miles toward the distant loom of higher ground. Here and there they passed a few native towns of shanties and scrubby cattle enclosed in ragged brush shelters.

  Old 79 ran smoothly. At Mokhehle Station Durell had gone over the generator, air pump, lubricator, globe valves, pump governor, sand covers, pop valves, and brake cylinder. While fresh water was added and more firewood stacked in the supply coach and tender by the villagers, he had taken apart and put together two of the pressure gauges and valves in the engine cab. The train ran smoothly enough, but somewhere in the massive machinery was a slight groaning and strain he could not identify. It was an old, old engine. He kept listening for the tiny shriek of protesting metal. It came and went. They had been delayed longer than expected at Mokhehle, and it was almost two o'clock in the morning before they could pull out. There were no further signs of the Neighbors or Colonel Yi. They had crossed the long trestle bridge without incident.

  The cool wind of the Kaisata Desert was a welcome change from the steamy heat of the jungle and swamp they had left behind them. They had gone through the moimtain pass with its 4 percent grade without trouble, although Old 79 had creaked and groaned and labored like a stout old man climbing a long ramp. Their progress through the pass was excrutiatingly slow, at times only five miles an hour. Durell had hoped to reach and cross the open ffoor of the desert depression during the night hours. But now he could smell the dawn in the air, although the sky to the east was still dark. The moon had set while they were on the downgrade heading for the desert bottom, and he'd had to apply brakes and sand with care to control the rocking train. It was then that he had first noticed the faint warning squeal and whisper of angry steel somewhere forward in the locomotive.

  Oyashi came up from the tender and stood beside him for a moment. His face looked drawn and gray, a shocking change in the past twenty-four hours,

  "You need some rest, Cajun."

  "I'm fine. What about you?"

  Oyashi's shoulders lifted, hunching as if he were cold. "I'm holding out. Can't I take over?"

  "No, it's all right. Did you check the train?"

  "Everybody is asleep."

  "Atimboku?"

  "Locked in his compartment. Is he sulking?"

  "Maybe. What about the Gladstones?"

  "Harvey's badly hurt. The doctor says he needs a hospital but quick."

  "We'll get there. Is Gloria watching him?"

  "The whore with a heart of gold. Yes."

  "She's just out of her element," Durell said.

  "Always has been. Are you hungry, Sam?"

  "No."

  "I am." Oyashi grinned crookedly. "But I don't dare eat without insulin."

  "You'll be all right."

  Oyashi tapped a gauge on the front wall of the cab. One of the native firemen opened the boiler door. The flames inside roared hellishly. The fireman threw in logs

  with a smooth, easy rhythm, then slammed the door shut, grinned at Durell, and went back to his place where he squatted in the tender.

  Oyashi said, "We're running low on water again."

  "Climbing the grade used up more than I figured."

  "There's a place out there." Oyashi waved a limp hand forward. He looked very tired. "In the middle of nowhere. An old watering station. If we make it that far. And if it hasn't been sabotaged."

  "We'll make it."

  "What happened between you and Salduva?"

  "Nothing."

  "Come on."

  "Nothing," Durell repeated.

  "She needs you, Sam."

  "Only for the moment."

  "Well, don't be too hard on her."

  "She's a fine girl," Durell said.

  Oyashi said, "Better than you know."

  The Kaisata Desert waited for them, hungering. The landscape in the Ught of the stars was terrifying, a place of wild volcanic rock and lava, dried salt beds, searing wastes of flat sand. Even before the sun came up the air seemed to shake with potential heat. The salt flats here were occasionally mined by the Kaisata people, but the temperature by day could rise to a blinding 120 degrees. With the first rays of the morning sun Durell felt the heat begin to rise. The rails ran straight and true into an infinity of flat, pure white sand. Here and there were stony basalt out-croppings, even a small clump of acacia trees. The salt flats mirrored the sun. They were blinding. Durell put on his sunglasses.

  The sound of the train wheels changed to a deep rumble as they ran over a wide, thick slab of basalt, passed a stretch of scoria —slaglike lava. Something screamed briefly again in the forward bowels of the locomotive.

  When the sun was fully up over the opposite rim of faraway hills, the salt flats shone like brilliant mirrors reflecting the white sky. The air vibrated. The metal in the locomotive cab became too hot to touch with bare hands.

  The heat from the open boiler door when the firemen added fuel seemed hardly less endurable than the blasting heat of the air. Khwama and his men found a canvas somewhere and rigged a tentlike shelter in the open tender. The canvas made flat popping noises as it flapped in the wind caused by their passage. An hour after sunrise the opposite mountains seemed no closer, hanging like a mirage on the horizon far ahead in the foothills of the Ngami country where Oyashi lived. After those hills were the border and then the Indian Ocean. Durell told himself to think of nothing else. One thing at a time.

  The passengers in the coach began to knock away the wooden barriers over the windows. The heat in there was intolerable. When some of the glass windows stuck, the refugees broke them, trying to gulp a little of the wind as they rumbled sedately along the track. When they found that the wind scalded their throats and burned their lungs, they settled back gasping in the ovenlike coJB&n of their coach.

  Another hour passed.

  The mountains looked as far away as before.

  The sky was white. The salt flats, like lakes, reflected the heat and flashed it over the flat landscape. Over and above the steady rhythm of the drive pistons and the smell of hot ash and cinders from the stack came another odor from forward of the locomotive where Colenel Abdundi's men sheltered in the steel ore hopper. The car was like a br
oiler. Durell leaned from the cab, feeling the passage of air like a hot blade against the side of his face. The soldiers in the hopper had also rigged up some kind of tent shelter over the open top of the hopper. Rags and canvas flapped with their slow progress. A lookout was supposed to be posted up there in the front of the hopper studying the track for mines or possible flaws in the rails. He could see no one on duty under the scalding sun and didn't blame the men. They would all just have to take their chances.

  When he looked out ahead again, he thought he saw a smudge on the horizon where the rails diminished to a pinpoint in the white light. He blinked his eyes. The smudge was gone. He took oflf his sunglasses and polished them and looked again. It was there, but he could not define what he saw in the dancing heat waves.

  Oyashi said, "It's the watering station. There's an open salt mine nearby. A few huts. A well. The workmen are underwritten by the government. It's a state project. Mostly criminals are sent to work out part of their sentences."

  "Dependable?" Durell asked.

  "Hard to say. How would you feel working out in this helHsh place?"

  Durell pushed the throttle forward a little. Their speed improved slightly, but the little shriek of metal up ahead became sharply defined now. An oil pipe must be broken somewhere. The steel was protesting without lubricant. He wished Harvey were up and around. But Harvey was hurt, perhaps dying. He couldn't count on anyone. When the sound of the low screaming became louder, he eased back on the throttle again. Their progress became a tortuous creeping across the flats.

  In fifteen minutes the smudge became a water tower, a few shacks, some doum palms, some low barracks set apart from the rails. The scene danced and fluttered before his eyes. The sun was directly overhead now. He scanned the white skies, and the light hurt him. The sand of the desert was hardened with crusted salt evaporated from the lake bottom a hundred thousand years ago. There was a ribbon of track leading toward the cluster of huts and the water tower. Then he saw it was not a trail but marks made on the hard-packed desert floor by a vehicle of some kind. He slowed the throttle even more, and the train crept cautiously toward the tiny oasis.

  Oyashi began to swear in Japanese.

  "I don't see a soul," he said.

  Durell nodded. He used the brakes cautiously, and the engine groaned to a halt a short distance from the water tower and the shacks. Steam jetted, and the sound of the engine was like the panting of a great, exhausted beast.

  "Oyashi, tell everyone to stay in the coach."

  "They're already climbing out." "Get them back in!" Durell snapped. The water tower with its long spout was tipped to one side, and there was a great gash in the curved planks where one of the steel guy ropes had been torn off. Durell swung down alone from the cab and stood beside the locomotive. There was a thin wind as hot as a blast from hell. Sand whispered. He heard the thin drip of water from the spout and saw the glittering drops fall and evaporate with faint sizzles the moment they struck the ground. He could feel the heat of the earth moving through the soles of his boots. The sun struck at the back of his neck like the flat of an ax. His lungs were filled with scalding air, and his mouth tasted of brass. "Sam?"

  "I see it," Durell said. "The tower is wrecked." "That's right," Durell said. "No water." "Can we go on?" "We need water."

  Colonel Abdundi came down from the coach. His brown face gleamed with sweat. His eyes looked unnatural. He walked past Durell as if he didn't exist and yelled something up to his men in the hopper forward. His voice sounded like something in a cave. Two or three of his men climbed down. They looked sullen. They had left their weapons in the ore car. Probably the guns were too hot to hold.

  "What about the well?" Durell asked. Oyashi shrugged. "The cistern is over there." He walked with the Japanese past the shacks to the clump of doum palms. The shaggy trees drooped, offering only tantalizing shade from the blasting sun. Beyond the cistern was the track he had seen before. There should have been men, vehicles, going out toward the distant salt flats. But there was nothing here.

  The cistern was built out of concrete block, a wide circle with a plank cover. The concrete blocks had been breached on one side, and water had gushed out of the cistern to be swallowed up instantly by the hot sand.

  "Get Abdundi's men here," Durell said grimly.

  "What do you suppose happened?"

  "A prison mutiny. A break-out. You said the salt workers were convicts? So they've left after wrecking the place."

  Abdundi called to his men. No more than half a dozen responded. Two of them carried their Kalashnikov rifles in a way Durell did not like. Their eyes rolled. They were frightened and angry and suspicious. Durell walked over to the French-speaking Army man and told him what he wanted. Abdundi shrugged and spread his hands. It was hard to breath. In the few minutes they had been out in the sun their shirts were soaked, and Durell could feel the desert sucking moisture from his body.

  "Ce n'est pas possible," Abdundi said. "The day has been very difficult for my men. They are stubborn."

  "Can't you control them?"

  "I shall try."

  "We can't go on without water. Tell them we'll all die here if we're marooned in this place."

  The cistern wall had been breached about a foot above the surface of the sand. All the water above that point had drained out, wasted, lost. Durell started to rip the plank cover oflf the structure. Oyashi tried to help, began to pant, and gave up, shaking his head. His eyes told Durell he was sorry. Durell waved toward the shade of the doum palms, and he gave Oyashi the AK-47, and the Japanese went over there and sat down, his face strange, the automatic rifle across his knees. Abdundi's men looked at Oyashi and went to work, following Durell's lead. In a few moments they had enough planking torn away to reveal the bottom of the cistern.

  A few inches of greenish, brackish water remained.

  "All right," Durell said. "Get the buckets."

  Abdundi shook his head. "Working in this heat will kill the men. We must wait until evening."

  "We can't wait. Someone persuaded these people to get out. They've probably heard the Neighbors were coming." Durell's tongue felt like cotton. He watched the horizon shimmer and dance. "We need the water. We can't stay here through the afternoon. The people will die.''

  "I agree, but the men speak of mutiny.'*

  "Can they run the train?"

  "No, but—"

  "Then tell them they will die, stranded here; we'll all die if we have to stay here."

  Durell walked back to the locomotive and opened the water intake valves and then walked forward studying the oil lines, wondering about the squeal of tortured metal he'd been hearing. He could find no damage. It would take a railroad master mechanic to locate the problem. Maybe Harvey could do it, but Harvey was still unconscious, thanks to Atimboku's violence. He had to hope for the best. He waited until a bucket brigade had been formed, carrying water in pitifully small quantities from the wrecked cistern to the locomotive. It was a haphazard operation at best, perhaps futile. But he would not stay here. He could not. He walked slowly back toward the coach. Sally called to him in a low voice from the tender, but he waved her back into the shade of the canvas that Khwama had rigged.

  The coach and the refugees were intolerably hot, a scene of human misery and suffering. There came a clamoring like the calls of distressed birds when he appeared, and the questions in half a dozen languages barraged him. He smiled and waved them back to their seats. The little Indian doctor asked if the people could leave the car and get into the shade.

  "It's worse outside," Durell said. "No one is to go out in the sun for any reason."

  "Is there danger from—anything else?"

  "We don't know."

  Harvey looked as if he were dying. There was a bad smell in the compartment. He lay on one of the leather bench seats, and Gloria sat opposite him. Her hair had come down in long, yellow strands on each side of her face, and she looked older and tired. Her eyes were haunted. She clasped her hands betw
een her knees and looked up at Durell.

  "He's hurt real bad, Sam."

  "Has he spoken to you?"

  She shook her head. Her hair swung. "He came to a little while ago and just looked at me. Nobody ever looked at me like that before. Like a wounded animal. I asked if I could get him an3^hing, but he wouldn't speak to me. I think he hates me now." She made a sound like a laugh, but it was not a laugh. "Funny. I wanted him to hate me. To convince him we should break up. Now I don't like it, not at all. I want to help him. It's funny, huh?"

  "No."

  Durell felt Harvey's pulse. It was thin and ragged. His breathing was quick and shallow. A sheen of cold sweat covered Harvey's face. Under his closed eyelids his eyes rolled and twitched. His fingers gripped the side of the bench seat. His leg was bandaged and tied down so it couldn't be moved. There was a great bruise on the side of Harvey's face where Atimboku had hit him.

  "It's not his leg," Gloria whispered. She hunched forward on the seat as if she had a sudden cramp in her belly. "It's not even what Atimboku did to hurt him. It's me."

  "What?" Durell said.

  "It's the way he caught us. What he saw." She made the false laughing sound in her throat. "Funny thing, how I was caught. Atimboku pinned me. I didn't want it really. I did before, other times, but not then. But I can't tell Harvey that. I think we're finished."

  "That's what you wanted."

  "Yes. But not now."

  "Where is Atimboku?" Durell asked.

  "In his compartment. He's been drinking. He began all of a sudden after he beat up on Harvey. He's locked himself in, but I can hear what he's doing. He's smashed two bottles so far. I'm afraid of him."

  "Just keep your door locked," Durell said.

  "How long will we be here?"

  "I don't know."

  Twenty-Four