Assignment Star Stealers

by Edward S. Aarons

  "What is it?"

  "I do not know, sir. It is very strange."

  Durell listened. The cold night wind, still blowing from the east, made the sand hiss around his feet. The pale moon showed Kadir's gleaming eyes.

  "I hear it," Durell said suddenly.

  Someone, or something, was out there in the dark of the desert, weeping and groaning and making uncouth sounds. There was a sudden slide of sand, a groan, a thud. Durell scanned the ridge of the dune ahead. Nothing. Kadir looked frightened. Durell moved forward, then halted. He heard breathing, hard and heavy, as if it were painful to draw air into someone's laboring lungs.

  Then a shape suddenly lurched over the dune, arms outspread for balance, as if to take flight. There was a choked scream, a turning movement, as if the creature wanted to flee. Durell scrambled up the dune and tackled the long legs and brought the man down.

  For a moment he was tangled in weakly struggling limbs and a stinking cloak. A feeble fist struck at his face. Sounds gobbled from a terrified throat.

  "Take it easy," Durell said.

  There was a gasp and a shudder and the man went down on his face. Durell knelt, hearing Kadir trot up the dune to join him. The body was limp, unconscious. Gently, he rolled the man over and saw his face in the moonlight.

  It was Richard Coppitt.

  Amanda said, "Richard, please! Don't be stupid. You're safe. Please. No one will hurt you now."

  "Don't touch me!"

  "We only want to help you," she said.

  His eyes gleamed with feral terror in the lamplight. Irhan Kadir was on guard outside the tent. Durell had circled their small camp for a half mile around, and found nothing. Richard had been alone. He had been walking from the east, from the direction of the oasis of Foum Asni.

  He had been crudely tortured, tied up too tightly, beaten, and humiliated. His face was bruised, one eye was closed, and his body was bloody. Some teeth had been knocked out.

  But these were superficial injuries. TTie real damage was inside the young man. Obviously, he had never experienced physical violence before. That complicated and brilliant brain had short-circuited, somehow. Now and then he made the irrational gobbling sounds, and his vulnerable . face turned this way and that, like a wild creature seeking escape from a trap.

  "Who did it, Richard? Who beat you?'' Durell asked.

  "Huh? Huh? Daddy."

  "What?"

  "I want Daddy!"

  Amanda made a sound of dismay. "Sam—"

  "Be quiet. Richard, listen to me. You're safe. Safe, understand? No one will hurt you now. We'll get the men who did this to you. Won't that make you feel better?"

  "Yes. Daddy—?"

  "It's all right, Richard."

  Richard spoke with brief clarity. "One was Chinese. Strange little man. Then he—did things to me—" Richard rocked on his haunches, and a wailing came from his open mouth. The keening noise spiraled up and up, and Amanda took his head and rocked him against her breast. She looked at Durell with anguish. "What's happened to him?"

  "Skoll and Chu Li caught up with him and questioned him in their inimitable fashion. They're both expert interrogators. They probably bought off Richard's R'guibat escort. Anyway, Richard never had such treatment before. It's knocked him off balance. After a while, he may recover from the trauma. It's hard to tell. But somehow, he escaped from them. He didn't know where he was going when Kadir heard him. If we'd missed him, he'd have died in the desert."

  "What can we do with him?"

  "We take him on with us," Durell said.

  "No, he needs medical care, psychiatric help—"

  "We keep going, Amanda."

  "Sam, that's cruel!"

  He sighed and waved at the desert ahead. "I have to get the answers from him. Skoll questioned him, and maybe learned where to find the star stealers' base out there. Richard has to tell me."

  "Sam, he needs a doctor—" she whispered.

  "I'm sorry."

  27

  FOUM ASNI consisted of a single street and a cluster of small houses under drooping palms around a brackish brown pond. Its fortress wall was of red stone, like an island port in the middle of the ocean of sand. It looked unchanged by the outside world for centuries, serving as a caravan stop for the Taureg camelmen on their nomadic raids south to the ancient empires of Mali and Songhay and Timbuktu. But then you heard a sign creak and saw the Coca-Cola emblem over the depressing store. The old fondouk had been made into an inn, and there the Chleuh shopkeeper sold everything from needles to canned French groceries, transistor radios and soft drinks, tea leaves, gasoline, and ivory.

  There was no sign of Skoll nor Richard's escort of R'guibat Tauregs. Perhaps they had sold Richard to the Russian, since slavery was still not unknown here. Skoll could have offered them enough to tempt their loyalties.

  Irhan Kadir, who was a Chleuh himself, went into the flyblown shop to make inquh-ies. The shopkeeper came to the door, his hand in a large leather pouch, a choukhara, that served as his cash register. There was a spate of guttural dialect, and Kadir smiled and said some more and then came back to the halted truck.

  "He wants money. Si Durell. He knows where the Russian and the Chinese man have gone."

  Durell gave Kadir a small wad of dirhams and watched the bargaining. The shopkeeper rolled his eyes and pretended fright. Kadir soothed him, and the money changed hands. The shopkeeper vanished into his dingy place and came out with a pocket compass which he gave to Kadir. There were salaams, a few more words, and Kadir rolled back on his short, pudgy legs.

  "We must hurry, Si Durell. You guessed correctly what happened to Richard. The R'guibat sold him to Skoll."

  "How would that man know?"

  "The whole village knows about it. As a tribesman, the shopkeeper told me, but no one not from Foum Asni will ever hear of it, otherwise. But Skoll and his friend went toward the Tazen Hammada in their Jeep." Kadir shuddered. "It is terrible country. I am an intelligent man. Si Durell, I am well traveled and quite learned, but the name of Tazen Hammada stilj frightens me. It is peopled by djenoun, evil spirits, ghosts out of the past. Dead men have wandered there for centuries, from the times when the Tauregs conquered all the lands to the south, where the black men live, on the other side of the desert, where there are trees and rivers and many dead cities."

  "How far is it to this area?"

  "Three more days by truck. There are no roads. There are travelers' routes to Timbuktu, and some tourists go there, but not to Tazen Hammada."

  "We'll need more water, food, gasoline."

  "I have arranged for it. Si Durell." Kadir was still frightened. "Must I go with you, sir?"

  "I'll pay you well."

  "And the sick man, young Richard? He should be left here, I think, or he might die in the Tazen country."

  "He comes with me," Durell said.

  The heat built up. Sand and a dry wind sapped all the juices from the body, created longings for a deep, cool bath. The heat parched the throat and blinded the eyes and scraped skin from the flesh. On the second day out from Foum Asni, the truck broke down. Hadj Kadir was hopeless with machinery, and it took Durell until evening to clear the carburetor and fuel line of sand. Amanda wanted to halt for Richard's sake, but he forced them on by compass and headlights, a tiny craft in the limitless ocean of sand and rock and an occasional patch of scrub brush in the eternal wind.

  On the morning of the third day Durell got out the direction finder he had taken from his room in Agadk when he picked up Amanda in the truck. There was just the faintest click from its electronic inner works. He turned the antenna by hand, quartering the horizon, but the signal was too weak, and promptly faded entirely.

  At noon they were hit by a sandstorm that engulfed the sky in a gray, blowing hell. There was an upthrust of red rock ahead, and Durell ran the truck into the lee of the wind before the storm roared over them. The canvas top of the truck ripped and split with a loud explosive sound, and in the semidarkness they all struggled
to repair this damage to shelter Richard. It occurred to Durell, as he watched Amanda attend to her stepson, that he had not slept with her since they had left Agadir, and she made no move toward joining him in his blanket at night.

  When he finished the truck repairs, he sat with her in the lee of the tall pinnacles of red rock. She was bundled in a blanket, and only her sand-rimmed eyes were visible.

  "I think it's hopeless, Sam. I could have gotten one of the company planes to get us here."

  "And we'd be spotted at once."

  "So? You'd know where the place was, at least, and then an organized group coxild go in after it."

  "Not likely. First of all, the borders are pretty vague down here, and there'd be every chance of an international hassle. And any plane this far off the usual lanes would be an alarm signal. Our search satellites haven't sensed a thing. The place is well camouflaged." He shook his head. "No, the only way in is the way we're going."

  "If you can trust Kadir."

  He went to see how Richard was. The young man lay on the floor of the truck, his eyes blank. His physical injuries were healing. His damaged eye looked useful again. His puffed mouth was mottled with yellow and purple, but the swelling was gone down. The damage, he thought again, was inside, in that brilliant mind.

  "Richard?"

  "I hear you."

  *'Do you know who I am?"

  *'I know, now."

  "Well, you're much better. Want to talk?"

  "Where are we going?"

  "To knock out Von Handel."

  "You're crazy."

  "Did Skoll beat up on you?"

  "A Russian. And a Chinese. It was—nightmare. I never felt—I'm finished."

  "You'll live," Durell assured him.

  "I can't think straight. I mean—my work—I feel as if somethins is wrong with me."

  "You'll get better."

  Richard closed his eyes and went away somewhere inside his mind.

  That night the desert seemed colder and emptier. Hadj Kadir slept in the body of the truck, near Richard. The stars seemed on fire in the velvet sky. Amanda lay beside Durell, her face turned up to the black void. She had been quiet for several hours, but he knew she was not asleep.

  "Amanda," he said. "Tell me about Hannibal's death."

  She was silent, except for a quick, sighing inhalation that lifted her breasts.

  "Amanda?"

  "I don't want to talk about it."

  "And you haven't really wanted to think about it, either. Maybe you weren't ready to consider it. I don't mean dwelline on the accident in a morbid fashion. Just to think about it."

  "Why?" she asked coldly.

  "I'd like to know what really happened."

  "The machine failed when they were five hundred feet above the landing pad at a factory in Illinois. Han and the pilot—his name was Philip Goodover—were in the helicopter. It fell like a stone. They were killed."

  "Were vou there? Did you see it?"

  "No. No."

  "Was Stephenson there?"

  "He had been. They flew from Chicago together. Steve had to get back. He was going into a conference about a proxy problem, and Steve flew back in the Beechcraft."

  "You weren't with Steve?"

  "I was in Washington."

  "Amanda, you're not helping me. A week ago, I thought it might hurt you to talk about it. Now I think it's time to give it some evaluation, from the perspective of time and distance. I know you loved your husband. Now perhaps you love Steve—or even me. You can look at it clearly. I think you must."

  "What are you getting at, Sam?"

  "Was there an official investigation?"

  "The local police came. The plant security guards were there. The Sikorski people made out a report for the FAA. Metal failure, stress. It was aU rather vague. Why do you ask? You make it sound as if it weren't an accident! What does that mean? What right do you have to question it?" Her voice lifted, and she sat up and faced him, seated tailor-fashion on the stone ledge. There was starshine on her face, reflected on a trickle of silent tears. "I have gone over it, Sam. I've done nothing but think about it. I wished I'd been in the chopper with him. I—"

  There was a warning note in her voice that made him speak soothingly. "All right, Amanda. Easy. I'm sorry I brought it up."

  She stared without moving for a long moment.

  "No, you're not sorry about anything," she said.

  28

  "Gold and slaves," said Hadj Irhan Kadir, the scholar. "That is what drew the Berbers down into the salt stone desert." He sat in the front of the truck with Durell. Amanda was with Richard. They were moving again, and to pass the time Kadir spoke as if he were lecturing a class at his medersa. "Great cities and empires once flourished here. Some, like Kumbi and Tekrur, are totally lost. We might be driving over their buried ruins. Only Allah knows. Others, Gao and Jenne and Timbuktu, have survived, but without their past glory. Cities such as Tichitt and Taghaza are gone, too. In your year of 1352, Ibn Batuta, the sage, traveled from Fez and Sijilmasa. On the way he complained of the water being bitter at Taghaza, and the place being plagued by flies. It was a journey of ten nights for the caravan captains.

  "Al Bakri, another Muslim traveler, described the pomp and majesty of local rulers, and told of Ghana's army with iron spears and gold-mounted swords, and orchestras of drums called deba, A certain king of Ghana in your seventh century had one thousand horses and they slept on carpets, with ropes of silk for their halters. A writer of Timbuktu collected these stories in a book called Tarikh-al-Fattash, the Chronicle of the Seeker. After Ghana was conquered by the Muslim Almoravids, new names appeared—the Fulani people, and the states of Tekrur and Kaniaga."

  Kadir sighed and wet his lips with water from the canteen. The sandstorm had left the sky an unnatural color in the west, on this afternoon of their jolting truck trip.

  "In the year 1312, Mansa Kankan Musa lifted Mali to its greatest power and fame. It was one of the largest empires in this part of the world, and we know much of it from Ibn Khaldun, who lived in Timbuktu when the land was highly cultivated and safe. At the end of that century, Gao rebelled, and the Tauregs of the southern Sahara— this desert we now cross—seized Timbuktu. Later, of course, blessed Sunni Ali came to power and founded the Songhay Empire. It was a time of marvelous business and many universities in that city. Today, Timbuktu is small and dirty. It is nothing. The old glory is dead. Islam came to Timbuktu with the Tauregs, as Allah willed. The Tauregs looked for conquest and wealth, and built great schools and encouraged many writers. Even today, there

  are many 'ulama with Muslim pupils, but most of it has died. It was as Allah wished it to be."

  Durell touched the brakes of the truck.

  "What is it?" Kadir asked.

  "Up ahead. Something doesn't belong there."

  Under the western sun the desert gave off shimmering red and brown hues that flashed in the residue of light. DureU took off his sunglasses and looked again. The tiny dark spot was still there, unmoving. He turned the truck that way, across flat ledges of rock and shale.

  "It's a man," said Amanda.

  Durell stopped the truck. The radiator steamed; their water was getting low. There was nothing to see under the sky of the hammada's rocky wasteland, except that single huddled figure lying in a pool of sand directly in their path.

  "Stay here," he said.

  He got out and walked the hundred feet up a slight slope of gritty rock. The wind flapped the figure's clothing, and for a moment he thought the man was still alive. Even through his glasses the hot glare of light on the plateau seemed intolerable. The truck door slammed and he saw that Amanda had gotten out, but she just stood there, watching him. There seemed to be something defiant in her attitude.

  "Comrade Chu," he murmured aloud.

  The Chinese agent from the Black House lay on his side, knees drawn up, fists clenched against his chest. A small wave of sand had already washed over one crooked leg. Something coppery glinted
in the sun, and Durell picked it up and saw it was a single cartridge shell.

  Chu Li had been shot neatly in the back of the head. He had never known it was coming. It was not possible to tell, however, what expression he'd had at the moment of his death. The bullet had ricocheted around the inside of his skull and pushed fluids and brain matter out with sudden hydrostatic pressure that distorted the dead man's features in grotesque ways.

  Skoll must have been very confident of success, to kill his temporary ally like this.

  Durell turned and walked back to the truck. So much for embracing the bear, he thought.

  The direction finder was in the back of the truck. He climbed over the tailgate and looked down at Richard. The young man stared blankly at him with no recognition in his eyes.

  '*How are you feeling now?"

  The lips moved, and the face spasmed with horror, as if nightmares shrieked behind the blank eyes. Durell took the direction finder and carried it a short distance from the vehicle and sat it on a flat ledge of stone. The hot wind flattened his sweat-soaked shirt against his back.

  Amanda came up and looked at the distant body, "It's the Chinese gentleman, isn't it?"

  "Yes."

  "How did he die?"

  "He was shot. Executed is a better word for it."

  -But—why?"

  "We'll soon know."

  He snapped switches, set up the loop antenna, turned dials. The machine hummed. He waited, trying one adjustment after the other, quartering the horizon. The sun was dropping in the west. He looked for any sort of landmark that might have been a clue to Skoll. There was just the emptiness of the hammada in every direction.

  Then suddenly the machine began to click. Once— twice—then a spate of rapid chattering sounds. He turned the loop slightly. The chattering faded. He turned it the other way, and got a noisy hammering. The antenna pointed south-southeast. The signal was loud and clear.

  They were almost on top of the station.

  29

  Hadj Irhan Kadir said, "You must excuse me, Si Durell. I am not, like yourself, a man of violence."