Assignment - Karachi

by Edward S. Aarons

  “He is jealous of you.”

  “Has he any real reason?” Durell asked.

  She frowned slightly. “Hans has been in love with me for a long time. Don’t be fooled by his inarticulate nature. We met at the Sorbonne, years ago. He’s well-educated, intelligent. He simply prefers the physical life of a mountain guide to the sort of scholastic existence I’ve chosen.”

  “Are you in love with Hans Steicher?” Durell asked.

  “I don’t know. I can’t decide.”

  “I still think you need a drink.” He watched her shiver again under the red robe. In the moonlight she looked half nude, and he suddenly remembered how she had looked stripped before the lecherous Omar. He got a flask of bourbon from his bag and a glass from the bathroom and carried the drink back to her. She brought it to her lips with both hands. He heard the glass rattle faintly against her teeth.

  “You’re still in a state of shock,” he said gently. “You must put what happened tonight out of your mind.”

  “How can I? Poor Ernst! What a horrible end for him!” “All men have to die,” Durell said.

  “For Uncle Ernst, it should have been in a featherbed in the Tyrol, in the Alps. Not in that terrible underground hole.” “He was a stubborn and brave man.”

  “So are you,” she said. “And if Ernst could end like that, I can’t help fearing and wondering—”

  “We’re safe now,” Durell said. “At least, for tonight.” “How can I ever sleep again?” she whispered. “I’m so cold—”

  A telephone rang somewhere in the house. The girl sat rigidly on the edge of his bed, watching him. A moment later a servant rapped softly on the door.

  “Mr. Durell?”

  He went downstairs with the man to answer the phone. Sarah Standish had come down, too. Her pale brown hair looked disheveled, and there was a look about her eyes as if she had been crying. But she stood in prim pride, saying, “It’s urgent, for you. From Mr. Donegan, in Karachi.”

  Durell nodded and listened to Donegan’s excited voice rattle in the receiver, along with numerous frying, crackling noises.

  “Sam? You were right. I checked with monitors we have working with the Pakistan Government up in the Gilgit range—past where you are now. They reported some clandestine radio traffic in code from the ’Pindi area that interrupted the routine transmission to the Kazan station. A Chinese boy we’ve got broke it down fast. An ‘investigative patrol’ is urgently requested for Area BH-21—and dollars to doughnuts, that’s S-5. The acknowledgment came back on the Chinese military wave length. You’re going to have to push hard to get there first.”

  “All right. Have you passed this to the Pakistani people?” “Not yet. Just got the word from the monitors, myself.” “Good. If we go in fast, there may be less trouble than if we alert the Pakistan military and they go in up there with heavy troop movements. That will mean martial law and may hold us up too long.”

  “It’s risky, though, just using K’Ayub’s patrol.”

  “What’s important is to move faster than anyone else now.”

  “Whatever you say.” Donegan paused. “Listen, Sam, I’m really damned sorry about what happened to Jane King.” “Not your fault,” Durell said, and rang off.

  Sarah Standish was waiting for him upstairs in the airy corridor between the bedrooms. Her scrubbed face was solemn, and she wasn’t wearing her glasses. Her eyes were wide, a lovely gray, troubled by what had seemed to him earlier to have caused tears.

  “I know something rather desperate is going on,” she said. “But we’re leaving tomorrow, unless you’ve placed some official obstacles in our way.”

  “No. We leave right on schedule, Sarah.”

  “Good. I’ll want to talk to you tomorrow. I have a few things on my mind, but I’m sure they can wait. We all need sleep right now. The guard has been doubled, and I’m sure we won’t be disturbed again.”

  “I’m glad of that,” he said drily.

  His tone made her look up with sharp irritation. “Are you still angry because I protected my guests against the search you demanded.”

  “I think I understand how you feel,” he said.

  “Do you? I know you don’t like me. Most people don’t; but I can’t help that. I know you don’t care for the job of looking after me, either. I was rude about it when we first met, because I didn’t like the idea, either.” She tried to smile, but her tension made it a feeble gesture. “Can’t we call a truce between us, Sam?”

  He wondered what she really meant. “It’s fine with me.”

  “Good. I’m glad. Good night, then.”

  Turning, she walked down the corridor to her own bedroom. Durell waited until her door closed, then went into his room. Only the moonlight glowed silver through the veranda doors inside. He glanced first at the huddle on his bed under the thin sheet, and walked to the veranda. A guard patrolled the garden at the foot of the bougainvillaea climbing the house. He wondered where Hans was, and what the big man was thinking. Not golden thoughts, he decided wryly. He turned back to the bed.

  Alessa was waiting there. Her arms reached out to take him.

  “Sam? Hurry.”

  “Everything is quiet now, Alessa.”

  “Make it so, Sam. Make it fine for me. Make me forget that horrible old man and what he wanted to do. Make me forget poor Uncle Ernst.”

  Her body was warm, trembling against him as he slid beside her. He felt a small wonder, but no surprise. There had been an inevitability about this moment from the first time they looked at each other, as if some irresistible chemical had bonded them in an urgency he had never known before.

  She shivered, burrowing against him, demanding the warmth and safety of his love, asking for assurance that she was still alive after the cold touch of death that had missed them tonight.

  Then she made a small sound, drew back.

  “What is it?” he whispered.

  “I want you to know—there was a boy once, in Paris— but you must be gentle.” He felt tears on her cheek, crushed against his chest. “Am I so awful, really, to want to forget Uncle Ernst?”

  “You won’t forget him,” Durell said. “It’s just for now.”

  “Yes. For now.”

  He felt detached when he took her, aware of a curious objectivity, as if part of him stood aside and regarded their union as a segment of a larger pattern that still hovered with dangerous vagueness in the back of his mind, forming a nearness to disaster, a union with cruelty and death.

  chapter twelve

  THE convoy of two trucks, two jeeps, and a station wagon of equipment that included a powerful military field radio, left shortly after dawn. The mountain troopers numbered twenty-four men, all tall, tough, rangy members of K’Ayub’s Frontier Rifles. The day was hot and clear. The road north from Rawalpindi was crowded with traffic for the first hour— Army transports, bullock carts plodding the edge of the fields, bicycles, men carrying bundles and bales on their shoulders.

  The oppressive morning heat lifted as they wound up toward the hill station of Muree, the most historic of the British military posts and summer resorts, 7,500 feet above sea level. Along the road were rice paddies flashing in the sun, then terraced farms and maize and potatoes, mud-house villages and then houses with thatched roofs. In a short time the convoy roared through groves of long-needled Chiel pine that sheltered old-fashioned resort hotels placed at vantage points for the views. The villages they passed had narrow streets, some of them banned to auto traffic. At eight thousand feet the road became tortuous, switching back and forth up the terraced mountainsides, now and then with a glimpse of the far mountains of Kashmir, where snow lingered on the peaks like an illusion in the clear August sky.

  Before leaving Rawalpindi, Durell had checked with K’Ayub about the police investigations of last night. There were no significant clues to the murder of the music shop proprietor. Bergmann’s body was in the morgue. A high-powered radio transmitter had been found in Kou Li’s teahouse, but there
was no sign of the Chinese. Omar, too, had vanished, but K’Ayub was confident of an imminent arrest. Durell was dubious.

  “If Bergmann told the location of his survey map, and it was taken from the music shop,” he had said, “then they’ve got the jump on us, Colonel.”

  K’Ayub was solemn. “Then we should proceed to our destination with all possible speed.”

  “I have the feeling the chart is with someone in our group,” Durell insisted. “But Sarah Standish forbade a search last night.”

  “With some wisdom,” K’Ayub said. “If someone has the chart, it proceeds with us, does it not? When the time comes on S-5 to resurvey Bergmann’s path, we will take the necessary steps to learn the truth.”

  “It may be too late by then,” Durell insisted.

  “If we hold up the convoy now, the procedures and formalities would delay us too long,” K’Ayub pointed out. “I’m sure you see that.” He had paused. “We will proceed at once, then.”

  At noon, they stopped for lunch at a mountain hotel run by a young Swiss couple above the village of Ramathgali. Durell had been riding in the second jeep with Alessa, Rudi and Sarah. A curiously taut silence held the others. The driver was Zalmadar, K’Ayub’s Pathan trooper. There had been no trouble at the two military checkpoints below. K’Ayub rode in the point jeep with Hans, and the two truckloads of troopers and the station wagon of supplies followed.

  There were woodcutters weighing wood on old-fashioned scales suspended from a tripod beside the road below the hotel’s porch, and women in black washed clothes in an irrigation ditch among the pines. Cigarette and candy sellers in bright skullcaps pedaled by on bicycles. Another hotel, glimpsed through the trees, was a relic of British days, since it sported a cricket field and several tennis courts.

  Alessa asked Durell to walk back into the pines to see some old Buddhist ruins nearby. He was faintly amused by her deception. She had been withdrawn all morning, not meeting his eye, and he would have preferred a few moments alone with Sarah. His glance caught Hans’ glowering features when Alessa touched his arm, and Durell went a little reluctantly.

  The ruins were hidden in the pines about five hundred feet above the hotel. The air was warm, pungent with the Chiele needles. In one sunny corner of the ruins, on a flat, mossy platform of stone, some men sat sewing shirts with hand-operated machines. They looked at Durell and the girl with polite, reserved eyes, and kept on working.

  “You can see Kashmir from here,” Alessa said, pointing across the fleecy sky. “And that way are the Karakorums. That’s the summit of Nanga Parbat—26,650 feet high.”

  Durell admitted the view was breath-taking. Far beyond were the famous peaks of Everest, Kankenjunga, and Austen’s famous Annapurna. Alessa spoke pedantically about the crossroad invasion route of empires here. Persians, Greeks, White Huns, Moguls and British, she said, used this route to conquer the people. She told him how the Buddhists came to die Punjab and converted King Asoka to Buddhism and how this area became one of the greatest seats of Eastern learning and philosophy.

  “You can read about it in the manuscripts of Fah Hian, a Chinese Buddhist who made a pilgrimage here in 400 a.d.” Wild olive trees had rooted in the cracks of the massive stone ruins where they stood. Nearby was the major shrine, the stupa, in the form of a massive Buddhist figure with a circular hole in the navel worn smooth by generations of pilgrims begging relief from internal pains. Beyond several smaller stupas was a chapel of red and black, then a long block of monastery cells, two stories high, with broad verandas above.

  Alessa went on as if lecturing at the Sorbonne. “When the White Huns came down from China, led by Toramana and his hordes, most of these monasteries were destroyed. By the seventh century, when Hsuan Tsang, another Chinese pilgrim, came through here, most of it was desolate, with only a few monks still attending the shrines. The Moslem conquest of nine hundred years ago finished the job of destroying Buddhist culture here.”

  A small boy came along, selling mangoes. Durell bought two as they walked toward the monastery ruins. “You didn’t bring me here to lecture on history I already know, did you, Alessa?”

  She stared at the distant, soaring mountains. “I’m sorry. It is just that it is embarrassing, after last night—”

  “There is no need for that.”

  “But, you see—Hans knows about it.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know, Sam. But he is dangerous, so possessive toward me. It is frightening, I think. Yet I am fond of him, and I am afraid for you, because of him.” She stooped and plucked a cinquefoil growing in a grassy area between the stones. “There’s something more. Have you noticed that

  Rudi and Sarah were quarreling this morning. He is very upset by her behavior.”

  “He ought to be,” Durell said drily. “When eight hundred million turns cool, it’s reason enough to be upset.”

  “That’s not fair. You don’t like Rudi, and you still think he had something to do with poor Jane King’s death, don’t you?” “Yes. And more.”

  “I wish—” She paused, bit her lip. “I’m sorry. My mind is really only on the crown. I can’t stop thinking about what that old man said last night—the directions to a Cave of a Thousand Skulls. Do you think he was lying?”

  “Perhaps. Maybe he was just stalling with some mumbo-jumbo until he got us where he wanted us.”

  She shivered in the mountain air. “You are probably right. Let’s go down. I think the others must be waiting for us, by now.”

  By afternoon they were in the valley of Swat, the convoy making good time along a tunnel-like road through tamarisk trees whose branches met in a lacy bower overhead. Here, where the British had fought the wild Pathan tribes, were a number of rivers, mud villages with flocks of geese, china-berry trees, and an occasional giant lizard. The air was cooler. Twice the convoy stopped at small mosques and the Moslem guards went in to pray while the mullah chanted passages from the Koran.

  At evening they pulled into a small village nestled below a high ridge, where a border patrol post and checkpoint were established. The road had improved again, and there was evidence of an enlightened government in the small schools and clinics they had seen. But there was no farm machinery, and the few telephones belonged to the police and military stations.

  The language here was Pushtu, and the populace followed the Sunni, or orthodox Moslem creed. There was a stone hotel run by a lean, dour Swati in a beaded skullcap, and Ajjar servants. Beyond the village, the road diminished between the rock walls of a canyon shaded with blue spruce, silver fir and walnut trees. The running water made a constant murmur in the background.

  Durell went with Colonel K’Ayub to the military station at one end of the village. It was a low, fort-like building of gray stone, with an immaculate white floor in the large common room. Rock pigeons and roosters made a steady burbling on the roof. K’Ayub spoke to the officer in command, Lieutenant Mungial Ali Khan, a thin man with a fierce mustache. In the radio room, K’Ayub considered several coded transmissions. It was evident to Durell that K’Ayub was a man who received much respect here.

  “There is a report of early snow in one of the passes,” K’Ayub said. “But it is only a few inches. We should get through easily.”

  “Any Chinese troop movements?” Durell asked.

  “Some activity, but we are not sure of the direction of the probe. Some refugees rioted over in Kashmir, and there is always a trickle of Tibetans out of the east. Perhaps the people spotted were these groups. The border patrols have nothing else to report. Conditions on S-5 are normal, they say.” K’Ayub flicked another of the radio reports. “There was a small rockslide north of Lake Mohseri. The road will end there for us. We will have to walk in from that point.”

  “How far?”

  K’Ayub shrugged. “Almost thirty miles. My men and I could do it in a day and night, but the women—let us count on three days. It is a difficult climb at the end. The altitude is fifteen thousand feet. We have oxygen mas
ks, of course, but we will have to carry everything—food, equipment, radios, tents. I am mainly concerned about the snow reports. And there is no radio check from our patrol near Mirandhabad. The Pakhusti radio, which is really only a hobby of the Emir’s, has also been silent.”

  The next morning was gray, with a slight drizzle seeping down from the overcast sky. They started early. Sarah rode in the lead jeep with K’Ayub and Hans. Durell remained with Alessa and Rudi. The road climbed steadily through rocky gorges and across small plateaus where creaking bullock carts made way for them. The land grew wilder and more desolate, and the cold rain and mist blotted out the distant Karakorum range. Before noon the road degenerated into rutted tracks that made the vehicles jolt and groan. Low gear was almost in constant use, and the whine of the engines echoed back and forth from limestone cliffs. There was another military checkpoint in a Sujjer village, one more at an aerie-like settlement of Kohistanis. The air was thin and sharp, and the rain had an icy sting.

  At the top of the pass marking the frontier of the Pakhusti emirate, the convoy halted for an hour to save one of the trucks that had broken down. K’Ayub’s men levered the rear wheels out from between the jumbled rocks that pinned the truck. They ate here, cooking on gasoline stoves that sputtered erratically at the high altitude. The rain stopped, and the scudding clouds suddenly shredded away and revealed the valley ahead, between the looming high peaks.

  Durell walked ahead with Sarah to look down at Lake Mohseri. A cold north wind blew, and the visibility became sharp and crystalline. The valley was long and narrow, the lake nestling in grayish light between long arms of the mountains. Even from here it was possible to see a few fishing boats at the near end, and a faint, jewel-like glitter on the far shore indicating the town of Mirandhabad.

  Beyond, the valley lifted in a narrow gorge and vanished in a twisted jumble of hogbacks and peaks.

  Sarah pointed. “There, that’s the Crown of Alexander, S-5.”

  The twin peaks floated majestically, two enormous upthrusts of rock capped by snow on the higher slopes, with vast battlements of cliffs that lifted in sheer splendor for thousands of feet, into the clouds. It was too far to make out details, but its size was awesome for its clarity.