Assignment - Mara Tirana

by Edward S. Aarons

  Gija slid a finger across his throat, but Durell shook his head. “No, we’ll let him go.”

  “He’ll trace us. He’s clever, this one,” Gija said.

  Kopa said flatly: “If I refuse you now, you’ll kill me. To die without purpose is rather distasteful. So I will do as you ask.”

  “Good,” Gija said. “On your feet now.” He looked at Mara and then at Mihály, exhibiting surprise. “Is this the little brother, Mara?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the matter with him?”

  Durell said: “We have a juvenile delinquent on our hands.”

  Gija took Mara and Mihály in one of the cars and assured Durell he would get them back “home.” No mention was made of the barge Luliga. Durell took a gun from Gija and waited for five minutes before he ordered Kopa to drive in the second car to Racz Prison. It was almost noon. The sun was bright. To the east, the vast plains of Hungary stretched to the horizon. Across the vast Danube there was woodland, the ruins of a medieval tower, a church spire, a small village. To the south was the industrial haze of Budapest.

  “Once inside,” Durell said, “it is your life or mine. Don’t mistake me. You die first, if there is any alarm. You will take me straight to where you’ve detained Miss Padgett. Stop for nothing. If you are questioned, use your seniority and rank to ignore any delay. Act purposefully, as if you have much on your mind.”

  “You speak Russian well,” Kopa said. “I can see why your dossier is so involved. You will get away from Racz, I promise you, since I have no wish to die. But you will never get back home. And you won’t locate Stepanic before I do.”

  “We shall see.”

  “I could admire you professionally, except that what you do today would hardly be approved by your superiors.”

  “They’re not here,” Durell said. “And I am. Now let the guard identify you and drive through the gates when he opens for you.”

  They were at the grim outer walls of the prison. It was an isolated pile of gray stone, a former army barracks of the old Horthy fascist regime, with a bloody and sinister reputation. Open fields had been cleared around it, and the . environs of Racz looked distant beyond the undulation of brown autumnal land. Not even the harsh bright sunlight could ease the pall of ominous air that clung to the prison.

  Their challenge was brief, the guard saluting as Kopa drove through the gates. Inside, there were parade grounds, barracks, watch-towers and barbed-wire compounds, in which several hundred men in anonymous gray plodded around and around. Durell wondered if these were prisoners from the uprising. Kopa halted the car before a small residential-like structure built against the prison’s stone outer walls.

  “Miss Padgett is here, quite comfortable, and unhurt’"

  “Get out,” Durell said. “And be careful.”

  Kopa looked shorter and chunkier than usual, as if defeat had already crushed him into the earth. His small eyes touched Durell’s face and dropped to the hand on the gun in Durell’s pocket. He nodded and entered the building. From one of the barracks behind them came a thin, remote wailing that was difficult to associate with a human throat.

  A uniformed man behind a desk and a moustached sergeant jumped to their feet as Kopa entered. None gave Durell more than a passing glance.

  “I am taking the American woman with me now,” Kopa announced.

  “But Colonel, General Murovanov is driving out from Budapest himself to speak to her,” the moustached sergeant said.

  “Arrangements have been changed. I take her with me.”

  “You will have to sign a receipt for her custody, Colonel—”

  “Naturally. You will please get her, Sergeant.”

  The sergeant nodded to the uniformed man at the desk, who went away. Durell stood at the doorway. He did not think Kopa had a chance to signal an alarm. The moustached sergeant sat down again. A steam radiator made a clanking noise. Dust danced in the sunlight that came through one of the windows. It seemed to Durell he could still hear the wailing that came from the cellblock across the courtyard.

  The place smelled of death and blood and dust and defeat. The guard seemed to be taking a long time in getting Deirdre. Apprehension touched him. Maybe it was happening too easily. Kopa might have arranged for an alarm somehow. He did not underestimate the man. Somewhere in the building an iron door clanged. Kopa lighted a cigar.

  One of the attendants in the waiting room began to type laboriously on a series of cards.

  A new danger offered itself. What would happen when Deirdre was ushered in and recognized him? How much might she give away? She would not expect him here. She might say something that could alert the guards, ruin everything.

  Maybe Kopa counted on this.

  He touched Kopa to urge him forward into the hall to the detention cells, thinking to intercept Deirdre out there.

  But it was too late.

  The guard appeared, holding Deirdre by the arm. He looked upset. “Colonel,” he blurted, “the American woman says she will not eat or drink until she is released. A hunger strike, in protest—”

  “Be quiet, Banya,” Kopa said quickly. “Miss Padgett, we are leaving at once. My assistant and I will escort you to Budapest, where suitable arrangements will be made for your prompt return to Vienna. Do you understand?” Deirdre did not seem to listen. She was looking at Durell, who stood tall behind the squat security colonel. Her face went white. What saved the situation was that, to the others in the room, she might have been staring at Kopa. Her lips parted, and a small, brief sound came from her. Durell silenced her name in his throat, and he put everything he could into the way he looked at her—a warning, a smile of encouragement, a promise of freedom.

  She stood proud and beautiful and adamant, untouched by the nightmare hours behind her. She looked wonderful. Her eyes widened and seemed to drink in the sight of Durell. It was very quiet in the anteroom.

  Then she looked away from him. “I am ready to leave at once.”

  “Good,” Kopa said.

  She was a stranger as she came toward them and walked to the door. She did not come close enough to Durell for him to touch her. Kopa turned, puffing his cigar with apparent ease, and led the way out. Deirdre hesitated on the doorstep as the sunlight struck her eyes, and now Durell saw the lines of fatigue on her face, the dark violet of sleeplessness under her eyes. Anger moved in him. He walked ’ beside her, a step behind Kopa, as they returned to the car.

  Ten minutes later they drove out of Racz Prison with Kopa at the wheel. And as they passed the guard at the gate, the sirens went off.

  Kopa’s face blanched. Durell took Gija's gun and pressed it into the back of Kopa’s thick neck. “Drive. It’s for your life, Colonel.”

  “I do not know how this happened—” Kopa stammered.

  “You know. You gave the alarm yourself. Was it your cigar?” Durell paused, and Kopa moved his head in a slight, reluctant nod. “It's not important. If we don’t escape them, you’ll die.”

  “But you—you will go, too,” Kopa whispered. “And Miss Padgett—”

  “We’re prepared for that”

  “You’re bluffing.”

  “Any time you care to call my hand, Colonel, you’re welcome.”

  The little car rocketed ahead as Kopa stepped on the gas. The road was empty. Behind them, the blue air was cracked and shattered by the ululating alarm of the prison siren. Durell ordered Deirdre down on the floor of the car for safety as they screamed around a curve. There was a bus lumbering ahead in their direction. Woodland cut off the gray walls of the prison behind them. The bus was slowing, perhaps in response to some regulation about the sirens. There wasn’t much room in which to pass. Kopa made a gasping sound and wrenched too hard at the wheel. Perhaps he was not a good driver. Or it might have been a deliberate error of judgment. The car slewed on the paving, hit the gravel shoulder with a jolt and careened past the halted bus with a sound like a handclap of compressed air. Kopa wrenched at the wheel again and Durell reach
ed over his shoulder and steadied it for him. The road ahead was straight fortunately, with a cross-road coming in at an angle from the river.

  “Turn right!” Durell shouted.

  “I can’t I—I’m sick, I—”

  Durell pulled at the wheel, fighting Kopa’s panicky strength. A copse of woodland, an embankment a wire fence flashed past the windshield. He straightened the wheel and felt Kopa suddenly slump to his side and the car slowed as the man’s foot slid off the accelerator.

  “Colonel, sit up or—”

  The only response was a dim expiration of breath from Kopa. The man’s eyes were sightless, open, staring. Started. Durell had no choice but to guide the car into the side road as their speed slackened. Deirdre sat up. “What happened to him?”

  “He fainted,” Durell said briefly. “Looks cyanotic. Maybe a heart attack, but I’m not sure.”

  “Could he be shamming?”

  “I doubt it.”

  Kopa’s lips were slack and blue. Durell got out and yanked open the door to the driver’s side. The road was empty. There was no sign of the bus they had grazed, and he couldn’t hear the prison siren. Deirdre got out on the road beside him. Ahead, there was a glimmering of water from the placid Danube.

  “What can we do? They’ll be after us in a few minutes.”

  “Think you can drive this car, Dee?” He looked at her sharply, and she nodded. “Wait a minute, then.”

  He reached in and hauled Kopa’s slack, heavy body without ceremony from the car to the brush beside the road. Kopa’s faint was genuine, without doubt. Fear or tension or the desperate chance he took in passing the bus could have brought it on. It didn’t matter. Durell carried him deeper into the woods until they were safely hidden from the road, then dropped him there. Kopa looked as if he were dying. His breath was dim and shallow. His mouth was ugly, gaping. His eyes bulged, open, unseeing. There was nothing Durell could do. Turning, he ran back to the road. Deirdre sat behind the wheel. The road was still empty. “Head back,” he said.

  She was startled. “Back?”

  “The prison people will turn down here—the bus driver will direct them. If we’re lucky, we’ll pass in the opposite direction. Maybe it will work. It’s got to work.”

  They went by the bus a minute or two later. Two official cars were parked beside it and a small crowd of passengers and uniformed guards were gathered around the excited bus driver. Deirdre drove by without haste. Her face was pale, but her hands were firm on the wheel. Scarcely no one turned to look at them, since they were coming from the other way.

  “What now?” she whispered.

  “We swing through Racz and then downstream again to the Luliga. That’s a barge we’re sailing on down the Danube, Dee.”

  She looked skeptical, saw his grin, and said: “Would you mind driving now? I think I—I haven’t slept—and I’m so shaky with relief and joy at seeing you, Sam, darling. I never knew what it was really like over here, walking through a jungle of enemies, and you came after me—”

  “Hush,” he said. “Stop the car and I’ll take over.”

  She halted on a small side street in Racz. Neither moved for a moment. Then she made a small sound and turned to him and Durell took her in his arms, gently, then aware of the fierce and trembling desire and relief with which she responded. Her lips were cold. He touched her face with gentle fingers.

  “You’re all right, Dee?”

  'Yes. Yes, now I am. Can we ever—I mean, can we really get out, though? I feel so lost and helpless, I can’t think of what’s next—”

  He said only: “Dee, I love you.”

  “Yes, Sam,” she whispered. “Yes. Oh, yes.”

  He drew a deep breath. “We still have some rough hours ahead. I don’t like leaving Kopa in the woods. He may come to and lead the chase after us again. But he was so much dead wood for the moment, I thought it best to get rid of him.”

  “I hke it better this way,” Deirdre said. “Just you and me—against all of them.”

  “Don’t romanticize it, sweetheart. It’s rough and dirty and dangerous and bloody.”

  “As long as I’m with you, it’s all right.” She kissed him, and then began to laugh softly, staring at the quiet little street. “It’s incredible.”

  “What is?” he asked.

  “I’m hungry,” she said. “I’m suddenly absolutely starved.”

  CHAPTER XIV

  It was Adam’s fifth day. He could walk without Jamak’s cane, although his leg still ached and he limped a little. His uniform had been buried near the wrecked capsule, but he wore a coarse shirt, trousers and boots donated by the old man. He knew this might lend itself to an espionage charge, but it seemed the least of several evils.

  It had been strange to come upon the wrecked space capsule in the ravine the day before. Even from an open vantage point above, he missed it until Lissa pointed it out for him. Having crashed at night, the area looked totally unfamiliar.

  The one-ton mushroom bell had floated down on its parachute apparatus at the same angle of descent as the slope of a gravel spill at the head of the ravine, and the rock slide it had started on impact was already darkened by the recent rains into a similarity of appearance with the other slopes. Rugged pines grew here, and their green upper limbs formed a canopy over the shattered brush below. It was as if the capsule had slid conveniently into a tunnel for camouflage. Only the most direct air search could spot this place, he had thought. And it was doubtful if any humans passed this place in the craggy mountains more than once a year.

  The parachutes had been gathered up by Jamak and Lissa long before, and buried under the pines. The escape hatch, opened by explosive bolts, stood open in the shadows. Adam felt strange, viewing the wreck. This vehicle had soared into the voids of space, and the scarred metal, the rust-like color, a result of the heat that had melted part of the special skin of one-sixteenth alloy of nickel, chrome, and steel, made the wreck seem tragic in its twisted silence. The capsule was surprisingly small—not more than ten feet long and six feet wide. The interior contained a plastic, crush-able couch, against the broad “screen” face of what might have been a huge TV tube. The couch was only two feet wide, providing what the NASA team had facetiously termed his “living space.”

  But packed inside the bell was over two hundred pounds of instrumentation. The damage was surprisingly slight, even with the shock endured during the emergency re-entry program.

  Lissa helped him unload the tapes and miniaturized instruments. She had been impressed by what she saw when she peered through the hatch.

  “All this equipment,” she commented. “You had to watch all these dials and instruments? And this strange seat for you—”

  He explained what he could of the capsule control system and the electronic controls to maintain capsule altitude during flight. These were the first tapes he rescued, since it was here that the failure had begun. Crouching inside the narrow space, he disconnected the telemetry system, the radio beacon, and indicated for Lissa the system of gyroscopes and reaction jets by which the initial orbit had been achieved.

  “The Space Task Force boys calculated over 126 separate measurements for environmental control alone,” he told her. She reached down through the hatch for the instruments as he detached them, using the tools provided inside for disconnecting cables and tapes. “Temperature, pressure, atmospheric composition—it’s all here. Anyway, I survived,” he grinned.

  “Could you—see what it’s like up there?” Lissa asked.

  “A little. I had this periscope that worked for both navigation and viewing on this eight-inch screen.” He pointed it out among the complex litter of instruments. It had been hot and cramped inside the bell, and his leg gave him difficulty. Eventually, he yielded and let Lissa go in to finish securing the recorded tape data under his direction. Her smaller size made it easier to disassemble what was needed.

  “With all this,” she said, her brown eyes sober, “how did you go wrong and come down h
ere?”

  “That’s what the lab boys will find out, back home —if we can get this stuff out to them. The automatic reentry system failed, you see. When I was at orbital altitude, I could see over 1,700 nautical miles on the earth, on that screen—or so the engineers told me. There were filters I could swing and interchange to measure the angle of the rising sun, and indices to measure the capsule’s relation to the earth and its pitch and yaw. It let me calculate the bell’s proper position when I fired the retrograde rockets manually, for re-entry, and I could watch the parachute deployment, too, through the periscope screen. Besides—” He paused, seeing her confused smile. “I’m sorry, Lissa. It gets technical, and I’ve lived with this stuff in training for over three years.”

  “No, it—you’re different, when you talk about the flight.”

  “I guess I’m just glad to be alive,” he said.

  All at once, he had wanted to get away from the sad wreckage of that shiny vehicle in which he had soared to the stars. Its streaked, heat-rusted metal, cracked and cratered and crumpled, had an air of desolation that made him shiver. “Let’s get away from here,” he had said. . . .

  They had returned to the hut by evening. The miniaturized instruments were now hidden in the hayloft of the stone bam. The tapes and cameras had not proved too much for Lissa and himself to pack through the mountain gorges back to the hut. But that night, Lissa returned to Viajec.

  “I must go now,” she explained. “There are sick people waiting for my attention, and there is no one to do my work. Besides, Petar Medjan will come back here if I stay on Zara Dagh.”

  He felt a sudden anxiety for her. “I don’t like your being down there with him.”

  “Do not worry about me, Adam.”

  She had smiled, touching his cheek in an oddly tender gesture. Something good had grown between them on the long hike to the wrecked capsule. She had laughed and sung peasant songs in a throaty, captivating voice. When she returned to Viajec, he knew she could cope with Petar Medjan, yet he felt a helpless anger as he watched her slim, proud figure move down the trail and out of sight. Her life held little joy. And he felt an overwhelming desire to do everything for her, to make her laugh and sing always.