Assignmnt - Ceylon

by Edward S. Aarons

  “Yes. You’d do it too.” Wells’ grin was taut, stretching his mouth. “You might as well kill me now, Cajun. I won’t give up.”

  “I just want to tell you,” Durell said, “that your order; are based on an error in Washington. I have not defected Repeat, not. Can you contact McFee?”

  “Not right here, old man. Not right now.”

  “When you can, then. Ask them to check on someone named Dr. Mouquerana Sinn. He’s taken over Madame Hung’s apparatus, he’s grabbing off picked men fron every intelligence outfit in the world.”

  “Nuts.”

  “And he’s trying to take me over too. Got that?”

  “Hung is dead. You killed her yourself.”

  “Not quite. We didn’t get all of her outfit either. This new man is collecting the pieces. He wants money. Tel Washington I’m authorizing the payment of the ransom for Ira Sanderson. I may get him out of it, maybe not.” “You know where he is?”

  “I’m getting ideas.”

  “You’re also crushing my larynx,” Wells said. “Ease up on your gun, huh?”

  Durell only pressed the muzzle of his .38 harder unde] the black man’s jaw. He couldn’t read anything in Wells dark eyes. Then he withdrew a little and suddenly moved back, rising to his feet. Wells lay with his arms outstretched, his long figure quiet in the shadows of the vine-grown tree. Durell picked up the man’s rifle. He was sure that Wells had other weapons, but it was a poor time to try to search the man’s dark clothing for knives or small handguns.

  “Get up,” he said quietly.

  Wells slowly rose to his feet, rubbing his throat. “What was the name again?”

  “Dr. Mouquerana Sinn.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “The next time you come after me, if you haven’t checked it out, you’re a dead man, Willie.”

  “I won’t miss, next time.”

  “One other thing: a Russian KGB man named Andre: Kubischev. He’s reported missing, a defector like me. And he looks something like me, generally. Have the analysis people check the dossiers. We’ll have something on him.” Wells watched Aspara and Skoll, down below. “Is she your woman?”

  “She’s a Sinhalese politician. She’s curious about what goes on in her own country.”

  “Did you tell her much?”

  “She’s intelligent. She can put two and two together.” Wells nodded. “I’ll think about it—-but I still believe you’re a bastard who sold out. I’ve sold my own services for money many times since I left Vietnam, but I never welshed on a contract or crossed the paymaster.”

  “Start walking,” Durell said.

  “Sure. But I won’t ever be far behind you, Cajun.”

  Durell watched the man slowly climb the hill and vanish into the deep shadow of the woods above the walauwa. From up here. he could see the glint of moonlit water on the artificial tanks dotting the mountainous countryside. The sky held the glow of light from Kandy, far in the distance.

  “Comrade Cajun?"

  It was Skoll’s voice, deep and rumbling, seeking him. “I’m coming,” Durell said quietly.

  twelve

  The full moon set behind the western mountains shortly after midnight. They had gone through Matale into a thinly populated district of forested mountains, scattered tea and rubber plantations, gleaming reservoirs built by kings long dead. Here and there in the tangled vegetation of the valleys were ruins attesting to ancient glories of kings who built temples and palaces, now forgotten or ignored. The lights of the Rolls briefly touched on a startled herd oi white deer, who bounded away immediately, leaving Durell to wonder if it had been an illusion.

  The road was rough as they climbed farther beyond the small town of Rattota and turned east again. None of them had eaten, but Aspara had several flasks of water in a kit in the back of the Rolls, and it eased their thirst. When Durell was finally certain they had lost all pursuit, he said, “Stop at the first clearing we come to, Aspara.”

  She was driving carefully, showing little fatigue. “Why here? This is truly nowhere, dear Sam.”

  They crossed a flimsy bridge that creaked under the weight of the car. Under them, a small gorge held a rushing stream that was buried in the darkness.

  “Right here,” he said. “Skoll?”

  “Yes, Comrade Cajun.”

  “We’ll all get out.”

  “As you say,” the Russian rumbled. “You wish to have a long talk, I think. Heart to heart, eh? Out of the car, where you can watch us both.”

  “That’s right.”

  Near the rutted road that lifted into abandoned rubber plantations, a ruined devala, a Tamil temple dedicated to the Hindu Vishnu, made rectangular, broken angles against the star-swept sky. The mountain wind felt cold, and Aspara shivered against him. Her shadowed face and dark eyes were enigmatic as he indicated that they walk toward the devala.

  “This land is haunted,” she murmured. “Some of the PFM bands used to hide around here, until the government troops used tanks and planes to chase them away. But it may still be dangerous.”

  Durell took out his gun.

  Aspara said, “Why do you point that at me, dear Sam?” “I want some answers. From you and Colonel Skoll. If I don’t get them, I’ll leave you both here to find your way back on foot. It may take a couple of days, and by then I’ll have gone on alone. The choice is yours.”

  Aspara shivered violently. “I am a Buddhist, not a Hindu. Must we stop at this temple?”

  “You haven’t been quite honest with me, Aspara.”

  “But I offered to help. You abandoned my son—I’ve been worrying and worrying about him—”

  “Never mind George. I have the feeling he’ll show up again. Sit down. You too, Skoll.”

  The Russian sighed. “I am hungry. But I sit, as you command.” He laughed thickly. “I know what you wish to ask. You ask it at the point of a gun. That is no way for two comrades, both of us in trouble, to cooperate.”

  “It seems the only way. So tell me about your man who defected to this Dr. Sinn. Tell me about Sinn, everything you know about him, and what he’s doing with the remains of Hung’s organization.”

  “Ah. Hung?” The big Russian shrugged, fumbled in £ pocket for a cigarette, started to light it, then kept turning it over and over in his thick fingers. “That woman still gives me nightmares. She alone could have destroyed the world, the way she manufactured crises between our nations in order to profit by selling false data to you, to Moscow, to Peking. Her network was fragmented, after we beat her at Malta. But many of her people escaped our nets, eh? Petty chiefs of intelligence. Now someone has gathered them up and recruited new aides to carry on that dirty business.”

  “It’s your Dr. Mouquerana Sinn.”

  “Yes. So I think. One cannot be certain yet. He is only a name to me. But he has much money. He kidnapped your Ira Sanderson and demands half a million in cast and a plane to escape from Ceylon. What has your embassy done about the ransom demands?”

  “They’re waiting for word from me or Washington.” “But the time limit is up at dawn today, eh?”

  “What else do you know about this man Sinn?”

  “Very little.” The Russian grinned. “In your beautiful car, Madame Aspara, you have a little liquor cabinet? Perhaps a bit of vodka? I starve for it. It would be helpful to persuade this American that I am not his enemy, because I no longer believe he sold himself to this Mouquerana Sinn.”

  Aspara spread her delicate hands. “I am sorry.”

  “No matter.” Skoll turned his broad face toward Durell “I have little information to give you. The PFM takes his orders, we know that. Where he comes from, who he is what nation or race bred him, we do not know. He may be Portuguese, Tamil, Sinhala. Perhaps some Chinese, 1 cannot say. But very brilliant, I think. Too brilliant for my poor, dry mind to cope with now.”

  Durell looked at the bridge, the parked Rolls, and listened to the rush of water far below. The hills were silent around them. He said, �
��Aspara, I need your help too.”

  “I am here,” she said, “only because this is my country my beautiful Sri Lanka, my struggling nation. You and Colonel Skoll intrude on us here with your world rivalries—"

  “Not so,” Skoll said. “We have a common enemy in this man we seek. He has stolen some of my people, including this Kubischev, whom I trusted with my heart, who betrayed me, who has caused certain important people in Moscow to suspect me too. In a way, I am as desperate as Comrade Cajun to solve this riddle of Dr. Sinn. We have no aims against Ceylon.”

  “I am not certain of that,” she said. In the starlight, she seemed more beautiful than ever, despite her fatigue and remote manner. “What can I tell you, dear Sam? I have seen a side of you that I only suspected and never quite believed. You can kill. You can abandon my son. I wish I had never become involved, and yet it is my duty. So I am here. And you would leave me in these desolate mountains, if I do not assist you.”

  “I don’t want to do that,” Durell said. “I saw those artifacts that Ira had on his table at the walauwa. They are not insignificant. And your government must have had a hint of what he was doing and where he was digging.”

  “Yes. Near here, not many months ago, as I said, a band of terrorists were surprised by our police and wiped out. But there was some bombing, and an ancient tank was destroyed and the reservoir ran out and flooded a small valley. When tilings were pacified, Ira came here to dig, and in the hillside that was exposed, he found certain caves where very, very old things had been hidden for centuries. Perhaps for over two thousand years. He was still digging when the PFM came back there and took him, we understand, for ransom.”

  She paused. “It is a very old place, a place of old kingdoms. It goes too far back to contemplate.”

  “To the time of Buddha’s visit to Lanka?”

  “Perhaps. I do not know.”

  “And do you think Ira found this mythical Buddha Stone? Tell me, Aspara. This time I don’t want you to hold anything back.”

  “It is an old secret,” she whispered. “Perhaps only a peasant’s tale. You know of our Adam’s Peak, the mountain that is believed to be the place where Adam, fleeing from the Garden of Eden, was permitted to rest and stay? It is sacred to Hindus, Moslems, even to Buddhists.”

  Skoll said, “But that place is far to the south of Kandy. We are north now.”

  “Yes, of course. It is said, however, that at the time of Buddha’s visit to Lanka, his sacred spirit moved him to dictate certain precepts that he had come to accept in regard to man’s behavior in this universe. It was never found, naturally, but the peasants believe it to this day, they believe that a scribe wrote these dictates of Buddha on a stone, carving them for eternity. It was lost, they say, far over a thousand years ago. But—” Aspara shook her head“—it cannot be accepted.”

  “Why not?” Skoll asked.

  “Can you imagine what would happen to that part of humanity that believes in Buddha? For countless generations, a whole concept of religion was created. If anything is added by the Buddha Stone here in Lanka, anything that might shake or change the beliefs of hundreds of millions of people.” She paused, shivering again. “It could be a disaster. We Buddhists are peaceful, for example. Can you imagine if perhaps an ethic contrary to peace were found inscribed on this stone? No, no. It cannot be. It must not be found.”

  “But Ira found it?” Durell asked.

  She drew a deep breath. “Shortly before he was kidnapped—two poya days ago, about two weeks before he vanished, he telephoned me. We had not seen each other for a long time. But he was very excited. He said he had made an immense find in the newly uncovered caves, after the reservoir was destroyed and the water ran out and exposed this area. An ancient capital, he said, from Buddha’s times. Some evidence that Chinese merchants had traded here, so long ago. Chinese gifts, priceless. And— the Buddha Stone. He said he hoped to find it.”

  Durell said, “I think he did. I think his kidnapping was a cover-up. This man, Dr. Mouquerana Sinn, has it. He wants to get it out of the country to—somewhere. Certainly it could shake the world. It is the sort of deviltry that Hung herself could not have handled.”

  He stood up. The wind felt cold as he looked at the loom of dark, starlit mountains to the east. He tried to connect Aspara’s words to his own predicament. It fitted together somehow. He took a deep breath of the clear air.

  “Aspara, you must trust me.”

  "I am afraid,” she whispered. “All my life, I have followed the sacred precepts—”

  “Trust me,” he said again.

  Skoll said, “In the capitalistic imperialist societies of the West, the superstitions of religion are often a great factor in controlling the downtrodden masses—”

  “Shut up,” Durell said.

  “But this is more than a simple matter of rescuing one of your diplomats, Comrade Cajun. More than clearing your name or eliminating a defector from my department. Perhaps even more than stopping at once any revival of the Hung apparatus under this man Sinn.”

  “Yes, it is,” Durell said.

  thirteen

  He walked quietly back to the car.

  They had to walk the last four miles to the site. A rough road cut across a forested slope of the mountain, and then the trail deteriorated into little more than a footpath and the great Rolls could go no farther. It was past two in the morning before they reached the place where the government police had dug out the nest of terrorists who had been camped here. Durell hid the car as best he could where the passable road ended. The place where the artificial lake had been was a deep, wide scar in the thick vegetation, with one of the high dikes bombed out and only a trickle of water from a mountain spring making a thread of silver in the starlight. High slopes surrounded the site. Here and there amid the scarred area were blocks of stone, tipped crazily this way and that, and he saw the dark mouths of caves, some with temple facades eroded by the ages when irrigation water had covered them.

  “It is terrible,” Aspara whispered. “I do not wish to go on. I am too tired.”

  “You must go on,” Durell told her. “Come.”

  The path was devious, filled with small stones, marking the recent footpaths the PFM had trodden amid the litter of the ages. A solemn silence filed the air. A bird hooted, lonely and high on the mountain above. Durell paused at the sound and looked and listened. Skoll, huge and powerful at his side, took out his gun and faced and searched the other way. His voice rumbled softly. “It is nothing.”

  “Perhaps.”

  "Da. Perhaps. I do not like this place. I agree with Madame Aspara.”

  Durell said, “You smell a trap?”

  “I smell something, yes.”

  The tank had been a large one, quite deep, filling the length of the valley beneath them. Durell climbed down slowly toward the dried mud bottom of the old reservoir. Now and then they passed crumbled cut stones that marked forgotten structures. He kept his eyes on the cave mouths. Most were on the opposite side of the emptied tank. He led the way across the high dike, noting that more sculptured stones had been used to form its base. This place had been old when the reservoir was first built. The bulwark was broken on the far side, by the bombs recently. The little mountain stream just trickled through. He held Aspara’s hand as they climbed down in the gap, then up again.

  The bird hooted once more.

  Durell could see nothing on the hills or in the valley. He lifted his gun, then lowered it. With less than three hours to dawn, the night was darkest now. The starlight helped him pick out the remains of a main path that twisted up from the dried mud banks of the emptied tank. The girl breathed quickly and lightly in the high mountain air. Now and then she adjusted the saree she wore, to help her with the climb.

  The old bunkers of the PFM were still visible on the mountainside, scarred and littered with broken shell casings. The remains of old cook fires, a torn blanket, a canteen, some rags hanging from a tree limb, testified to the surprise battle
here. Durell studied the shattered bunkers and moved across a clearing to where a new nylon ten stood out against the wreckage.

  “Ira’s?” he asked Aspara.

  She nodded, her eyes alert and aware, covering an almost primitive fear in her mind. Durell knew her fear came from reluctance to have her faith shaken and uprooted by any new findings here, perhaps a new doctrine in the hands of unscrupulous foreigners, as she would think of it.

  “Don’t worry,” he said.

  “I can’t help it.”

  A new path had been cut down the dried mud sides ol the old reservoir. He pointed to it. “Did Ira have a crew ol workmen with him?”

  “It is possible. But he often liked to dig alone. He was an amateur, after all.” She smiled faintly. “With the luck that so often comes to amateurs, I think.”

  He led the way down the new path. It took him along a line of cave mouths, small openings in the mud wall framed with stone plinths from which ancient carvings had long been eroded by the water. A larger opening farther on drew him to it. In some places, the path cut into the cracked earth was still wet and slippery. Footprints, some booted, some barefooted, still showed in the yielding soil. The bottom of the tank was only ten feet below the path cut into its newly exposed sides. Durell halted. Something lay there, sprawled in obvious death, arms and legs at awkward, unnatural angles. Aspara sucked in her breath.

  “It’s not Ira,” Durell said quickly. “Perhaps one of his assistants.”

  “Yes, he wears only a loincloth. Thin and half-starved.” Aspara’s voice was touched with bitterness. “One of my poor countrymen.”

  Skoll said, “He was shot through the head. Like an execution, eh?”

  Durell had brought the torch from the Rolls, and now he took it and held it in his left hand, his gun in his right, and approached the largest of the caves that had been exposed by the lowered water. His boots squelched in soft mud as he stepped just inside.

  “You and Skoll stay here. Skoll, be careful.”

  “I shall be,” the Siberian grumbled. “But I should like to go in with you.”