Assignment Star Stealers

by Edward S. Aarons

  Hassan said, "It would be best if I took you back to Fez now. Si Durell."

  "Why?" Durell asked. "WeVe come this far—"

  "Si Dodd went south from here, alone. He is remembered by these people, as I said before, because of the small case that was chained to his wrist. No one here ever saw anything like it before."

  The eyes of both Tauregs were black and fathomless. Amanda moved closer to Durell, but he didn't look at her.

  "Then why shouldn't we go on?"

  Hassan shrugged. "The local figh —a schoolteacher— says Si Dodd was a—was mad."

  "Insane, you mean?"

  "Strange, let us say."

  "Was he well and alive when he came here?'*

  "Oh, yes. But he went on into the hammada —the desert of stones to the south of this place—and he promised to return in two hours. He did not. No one has heard from him since."

  "We'll go on," Durell said.

  "It is like looking for a special pebble on a mountainside, sir."

  *'I must find him."

  "With the lalla?" Hassan looked at Amanda and referred to her as a noblewoman. "Perhaps the lalla should remain in this village, in safety."

  "No," Amanda said quickly.

  "We'll go on," Durell said again.

  The sun was still quite high in the west. There seemed to be no road, but Hassan drove the Rover with decision. They bounced across a wasteland of stony, scrubby dunes that rolled toward the sun for perhaps half an hour, then Hassan turned due south. Durell could make out no guide signs or paths. Their progress was slow and tortuous. A thin hot wind whimpered and hissed along the sides of the Rover; the car's metal was too hot to touch. They followed the dry bed of a tiny oued for another ten minutes, almost at walking pace.

  "Hannibal, my husband, used to come here," Amanda said suddenly. Her words came in a series of jolts that matched the creaks and groans of their vehicle. "He used to joke about it. Said he was aptly named. The Carthaginians, and all their generals named Hannibal or Hamilcar, made an empire out of this land."

  "What did he come here for?"

  "Oh, mostly to hunt. He used to spend two or three weeks in the Rif and the Middle Atlas, and sometimes he skied at Djebel Habri." Her glasses reflected the glaring wasteland ahead of them. Her face looked strained.

  "Did Richard ever come with him?"

  "Oh, yes. Several times. He loved it—the land and the people, I mean." Amanda smiled tiredly. "My stepson is a brain, Sam, not a sportsman."

  "You shouldn't have come with me today."

  "You couldn't have stopped me," she said.

  Suddenly the Rover lurched, tilted far over to the left, and came down with a crash that jolted them all. The wheel spun out of Hassan's hands. For another moment they tilted, engine racing, dust rising from under the tortured wheels. There was another jolt forward, and then the engine stalled. They were canted at a severe angle over a gully eroded by winter rains, when the oued was seasonally full of water.

  "Si Durell—'*

  "Start it up again," Durell ordered.

  The engine whined, coughed, and died. The Taureg tried it again, and a third time. Durell climbed out and helped Amanda after him. Then he reached inside and slipped the Remington rifle from its boot. The Blue Man looked at him with dark, troubled eyes, then walked around the Rover and shook his head.

  "It was careless of me. I am sorry. I have been cursed by evil djenoun. Their spirits have worked bad things with me lately."

  "How far are we from where you were taking us?"

  "We are there now. Allah was kind."

  The Taureg pointed ahead to the end of the ravine. Two dromedary camels were silhouetted in black against the blasting glare of light. The air was like an oven. Mounted on the camels were the hooded, veiled figures of two desert riders. They looked as if they had stepped out of the Victorian pages of a Saharan romance, but their short, stubby AK-47 automatic rifles—^Russian-made— were as modem as tomorrow. They were motionless. They did not call out or come forward.

  Durell appreciated the weight of the rifle in his hand. "Did you expect this, Hassan?"

  "They will take us to Si Dodd."

  ''Insh'Allah. As God wiUs."

  "It was arranged. We were expected."

  "By whom?"

  Hassan shrugged. Perhaps he smiled under his veil, but Durell couldn't be sure. Amanda moved closer to Durell. Without the movement of the Rover, the air was lifeless, burning the throat and lungs. The wind whimpered and made sand rustle and hiss along the rocks of the little defile. Durell looked back the way they had come. Two more riders sat their camels at the other end of the ravine. He sighed quietly.

  "Get back in the car, Amanda."

  Hassan said, **Yes, it would be best, Lalla Coppitt."

  "What is it, Sam? What is it all about?"

  "I think we've been double-crossed—either by Olliver or our obliging boy here, Hassan. Just do as I say.''

  She moved around into the thin shade thrown by the Rover, but she did not get into the car. Her shoulders were straight and square and defiant. Somehow, she did not seem to be riding her tiger of fear any more.

  "Which way, Hassan?"

  "Ahead, Si Durell."

  "How long have you worked for Olliver?"

  "I am not the man he thought he was sending." Hassan paused. His eyes were suddenly malevolent over his dark veil. "You might as well leave the rifle. It is empty."

  Durell checked the magazine and sighed again and put the rifle aside. He still carried his S & W .38, but it was a peashooter against the automatic weapons that glinted at a slant among the camel riders.

  He started walking.

  When he looked up, the Tauregs at the end of the defile had vanished. Hassan was walking in the other direction. Only Amanda remained beside the wrecked car. She strained forward a little, as if she were about to run after him, and he flipped a hand to wave her back and came to the end of the defile and found Jimmy Dodd.

  The heat of the past three days had dessicated the body like a mummy, and a desert jackal had begun to feast on the remains. Still, Dodd was recognizable. Durell was glad he had made Amanda stay back. Spread-eagle, crusted with blood on the face and groin and belly, still tied down to the stakes as he had been when life left him, the tormented face, sightless, glared up with a madman's ferocity at the blazing sun above. Durell looked at the stump of the left hand, the blood in the crotch, then at the attache case that lay open, a few feet away. He walked over to it and touched it with his toe. The wind had j scattered bundles of paper the size of American currency | down the shale slope toward the first of a sea of sand dunes that stretched southward. Some of the blank, carefully cut paper fluttered on the wasted branches of scrubby bushes. He picked one up and turned it over and over in his fineers. The amount of useless paper would have weighed the same and taken up the proper space for one million dollars in American bills.

  He looked at the mad, sad, dead face, and wondered if Jimmy Dodd had ever known.

  "Si Durell!"

  The voice hammered and echoed through the brassy heat. He looked back up the defile and saw that Amanda was still safe beside the wrecked Rover. To the left, above him, were the four camelmen, dressed as Meharis, and then a fifth rode up and he recognized Hassan. The five riders came slowly down the slope, but paused thirty feet from where Durell stood beside the dead man.

  "Si Durell, as you notice, we were tricked and cheated. We do not like it. We are honorable men, and we demand to be treated with honor."

  "You are murderers," Durell said, facing them.

  "Perhaps so. You will have four days to deliver the money that was promised to us. Then you will receive the information that was bargained for. Do you understand?"

  "You didn't have to kill him," Durell said. "Who are you working for?"

  They simply sat on their camels and stared at him.

  "You're not really Blue Men," Durell said.

  The heat hammered at the back of his neck.r />
  "Is one of you Richard Coppitt?" he called.

  They looked down at him from their height on the dromedary camels. The sunlight winked and crashed along the barrels of their Russian-made guns. Then, almost as one, they reined their camels to the left and vanished over the top of the small ridge.

  The wind seemed stronger as he turned and walked back up the ravine to where Amanda waited beside the ruined car. The sand stung his eyes and scoured his face. The sky was molten white, where the sun still promiyed three more hours of tormented daylieht. There was sand in his shoes and inside his shirt, and he felt the heat of his burned skin along his forearms.

  *'Did you find your friend?" Amanda asked.

  *'I found him."

  "But is he—was he—?"

  "They tortured and killed him."

  "I don't—understand. I don't know what you are or what you're doing, Sara."

  "I didn't ask you to come with me, Amanda."

  "I know, but—what's it all about?"

  "We'll have to ask Richard—some day."

  He walked around the Land Rover and saw that one wheel was hopelessly smashed. When he hauled out the jack to replace it with the spare, the hydraulic lift didn't work. There was nothing else available he could use for repairs. The car was useless. He opened the doors and found two canteens. He took one of the large five-gallon cans of water, filled the canteens carefully, and handed one to Amanda. He checked the loaded cylinder of his .38 and thrust the weapon into his waistband. Then he opened the dash compartment and rummaged in there and found a three-cell flashlight and a small tool kit. Over the windshield of the Rover had been aflSxed an auto compass, the black disk floating in oil. He used a screwdriver from the tool kit, removed the compass, and walked away from the car for a few steps. The compass would be out of calibration, since it had been adjusted for the deviation caused by the metal in the vehicle. But it ought to operate reasonably well enough.

  "What are you doing?" Amanda asked.

  Her hair had come loose, and the dark coppery strands clung wetly to the perspiration on her cheek. The wind was strengthening, and little flecks of sand had gathered at the corners of her mouth.

  "We have to get back," he said.

  "Do we walk?"

  "It's their idea of a little joke."

  The sun was at their backs, but the wind blew hot, stinging sand in their faces. Amanda kept stride with him, and did not complain. The tracks made by the Rover on their way out from the ksar where they had talked to the villagers were easy to follow. He tried to calculate how far they had gone, and estimated that with the rising moon, they could reach the oasis no later than two hours after sunset. But the Rover, driven by Hassan, had taken a roundabout and twisting route across the stony desert. If he could have used the auto compass accurately, they could probably strike out in a straight line for the village; but he was dubious about this, and he kept to the tire tracks that led them from one patch of sand to the next.

  After a time, Amanda simply kept her head down and no longer looked where she was going, guiding herself by Durell's hand. He had to concentrate on where he put his feet in the stony earth, skirting pools of sliding, slithering sand. His lungs ached. Climbing up one low ridge after the other was almost as difficult for Amanda as sliding down the other side, but she did not complain. Her elegant boots were quickly ruined; his own shoes were worse. The sun was a trip-hammer on their backs.

  Once, off in the distance, he thought he saw the green ribbon of the oued oasis, but the glare dazzled his eyes even through the sunglasses, and he decided it was a mirage and chose to follow the tire tracks that swung toward the vague, purplish haze of the Atlas mountains.

  "Wait," Amanda gasped.

  She sank to her knees in the thin shade of a low rise. He sat down beside her, trying to draw the overheated air into his lungs; it seemed to clot in his throat.

  "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I must rest a bit."

  He gave her some water from his canteen. She sat hugging her knees, and laughed without amusement. "I suppose I'm iust hindering you, just a nuisance to you, Sam. I guess it was a foolish impulse that made me force myself on you today. It—it's something like a nightmare, only we're awake and walking through it."

  "I'm glad you're with me."

  "It's nice of you to lie that way."

  "No lie."

  "I hate this country," she said.

  "It has its good points."

  "Do you have the feeling that those men on the camels are watching us? I don't think they'd just let us get lost out here, do you? You said it was their idea of a joke.

  He felt sure the Blue Men were long gone, but he didn't say so. She reached in her shoulder bag and took out some cigarettes and offered him one. He shook his head, but lighted hers for her, and watched her as she inhaled. She was a fine, lovely woman with more real courage than most, despite her overlong grief and claim to fears. He tried to imagine what it must be like to lose someone you loved as much as she loved her husband. He looked up at the hot white sky. The wind was steady now, blowing in their faces, and he made her turn her back to it; but the sand was like a multitude of creeping fingers, in his hair and ears and eyes, in his throat and nostrils, sliding into his shirt and trousers and shoes.

  "We'd better get on with it," he said.

  "How much farther?"

  "Not far," he lied.

  The tire tracks disappeared abruptly. The sun was low now, but the glare of the horizon and the long flat black shadows made the desert look like a lunar landscape. Ahead was a wide stretch of barren stone, with one or two little shrubs bending in the wind. The tires had left no marks on the ground ahead.

  "What do we do now?" Amanda asked.

  "We'll take a chance and go straight on.'*

  She took off her sunglasses to wipe her forehead and push her thick hair from her eyes. Exhaustion had left its mark on her face.

  "It will get cooler when night comes," he said, not admitting his worry to her.

  "About Richard," she said abruptly. "How long shall I wait in Fez for word from him?"

  "As long as necessary, I hope."

  She hugged her knees. "Am I doing the right thing? I mean, I owe it to Hannibal, Richard is his son—"

  "Your husband is dead," he said bluntly. "He was killed months ago. You have to get over it."

  "I know, I want to, but—" She paused. "It was never my wish to be one of the richest women in the world, Sam. Lately, all I've wanted is to go back to that little girl who used to hang around the Trois Belles''

  "You can't ever go back to that."

  "I know. You don't have to be cruel about it. But you have been kind to me, too."

  Durell said, "All I want is to get Richard, to bring him back to the States, and find out what he's been up to."

  She looked at him, the wind blowing her red hair like defiant banners. Anger moved in her eyes. "Is that all it is? I thought that you, for old tune's sake—"

  "I do not and cannot live by those rules, Amanda. If I did, I'd be long dead, like Dodd." He stood up. "Come along, we have a way to go yet."

  She did not move, but sat staring at the northern horizon and suddenly shivered. "Ever since Hannibal was killed, I've tried to do what I thought he might have wanted me to do. . . ."

  "You have to live your own life. You have to be Amanda, again."

  "Money has its burdens, you know. Steve always has so many papers for me to sign, so many decisions to make. He explains the business aspect of it to me, but really, all I do is what he tells me. I fly here and there in company planes and preside at corporate meetings. It's important for the HCI image, Steve says."

  "Do you always follow his advice?" Durell asked. "Suppose you made up your own mind about some of the problems he presents? You could learn what it's all about and make your own decisions, eventually."

  She thought about it and then shook her head neeative-ly and reached for his hand to help her up. She was limping when they started to walk ag
ain, but she said nothing about it.

  When night came, suddenly and swiftly, the effort to keep going was enormous. They had walked for over six hours, and now he had only the stars to guide him. With the sun gone, the chill of the desert came over them, and the wind lost its heat and slashed bitterly at them. He arranged masks for themselves, tearing his shirt and tying a strip of cloth over Amanda's nose and mouth. When she stumbled, he caught her and forced her up again. His own chest ached, and his legs trembled.

  "Let's go," he said.

  "I can't. I'm sorry."

  "You must."

  "I think we're lost," she said calmly.

  "No."

  But it was true. They should have made it back to the village long before this. He kept his arm around Amanda's waist, aware of the pressure of her body against him.

  "It seems silly," she gasped, "but we could really die out here, couldn't we?"

  The stars were blotted out by the blowing sand, and he turned through a fount, a narrow gorge, and at the other end he saw only a vast sea of dunes. He stopped and Amanda sank down in a tongue of sand that made a niche among the tall, strangely shaped rocks that sheltered them from the wind. Amanda was shuddering with the cold.

  "What will happen to us, Sam?"

  "If we keep going east, we're certain to hit the piste that runs down from Rissani to Taouz."

  "I thought we were south of Taouz."

  "I hope not." There were no other roads into the Sahara from that point, but he didn't tell her that. "We have enough water to keep us going imtil we find oiu: way out of this. But the auto compass isn't much use, I guess."

  She leaned her shoulder against him, and he felt her quake and shiver. At first he thought it was the cold. Then he realized that she was crying.

  "Excuse me, Sam," she whispered. *'It's just that—I've been so alone with no one to depend on for so long. And now you've come back into my life, and it's as if I'm a little girl again, hero-worshipping you from afar."

  "You're a brave, lovely woman, Amanda."

  "Oh, yes," she said bitterly. The wind mourned around the rocks above their heads, and sand blew in a tiny whirlwind over them, and she ducked her head against his chest. "Pretty hopeless, trying to do a stupid thing. I've been clinging to the past, but you've made me think for myself for the first time. I mean, about trying to be two people at once—^for myself, and for Hannibal. It may be too late for me, now."