Assignment- 13th Princess

by Will B Aarons

  He had no way of knowing what went on behind Princess Ayla’s lovely face, but it would be easy, thinking of Prince Tahir, for a woman of her ancestry and rearing to be overwhelmed by dynastic compulsions. Through her and her alone, Ottoman blood once more shared a throne. The domain was small, Durell considered, but it was fabulously wealthy. And in those riches, siphoned in from the rest of the world in immense oil payments, lay power of untested dimensions.

  He concluded it would take more than the rabble in the street to frighten her away from that.

  His only hope was that she would leave for her husband’s sake, but he had to weigh the alternatives if she refused, and his eyes went to the eager, deadly Dara.

  Then his ear caught the shrill of a siren over the polite chatter of conversation that filled the ornate hall. He pushed aside a heavy velvet curtain and peered through French doors. An enormous garden was out there and at least a platoon of soldiers, barely visible in the starlight. They lounged idly, rifles slung, the orange coals of cigarettes glowing against their patient, fatalistic Bedouin faces. Behind them a high wall blocked the city from view.

  The curtain swung back into place as Durell removed his finger and turned his eyes back to the chandeliered chamber. He saw Dara a few paces away now and surrounded by admiring courtiers and diplomats. The reception line still moved before Sheik Zeid and Princess Ayla, while Yilmaz hulked behind them, his olive face swinging mechanically back and forth over the gathering, eyes never resting.

  Dara broke free of the huddle of men and sauntered to his side. “I couldn’t breathe,” she said. She fanned herself.

  Durell smiled. “You and the princess seemed to hit it off well.”

  “I have an invitation to brunch tomorrow—provided there is a tomorrow.”

  “Did she doubt there would be?”

  “She must, if she’s human.”

  “She may not be, by our standards—the queen bee isn’t just a bee. Anyhow, we’re in luck—you may be the only woman in the city she can relate to.”

  “Don’t forget my brilliance and cunning, dear; it wasn’t easy to get the invitation.”

  “I’ll see you get a medal,” Durell said in a dry voice.

  “You’re invited, too.”

  “I’ll see you get two medals.” He glanced swiftly around the room, satisfied to leave.

  Dara touched his arm. “Sam—I don’t trust her. There’s something—something about those eyes.”

  Durell rolled his lip under, tasted salt from the beach. “Don’t look now,” he said, “but those eyes are drilling right into the back of your head. From the way they look, I’d say you’re not the only one concerned about trust.” He blew through his nose and said: “Let’s call it a night.”

  They left the palace and walked along the bay-front street, the scrape of their footsteps coming back at them from the walls, warehouses, and mud-brick tenements. Yemenis and Sudanese, immigrants, inhabited the cheap, unsanitary housing now. Little Dhubar had a crippling labor shortage and had imported them to dig ditches and toil on the docks while most of its citizens took the better-paying oilfield jobs or engaged in commerce. The air was hot and humid after the crisp coolness of the air-conditioned palace, and Durell felt sweat beginning to prickle at his neck.

  Dara was light as a shadow against his arm, her hair frosted by the glow of distant street lamps, her face serious. “Sam, I’m more concerned than ever, now that I’ve met Princess Ayla,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The way she cut you off, and. . ." Dara thought a moment. “I tried to bring up conditions here—her situation—but she simply would not discuss it. I have a feeling she’s hiding something.”

  “There’s nothing concrete to base that on.”

  “No, but that hook in your jaw you mentioned in the hotel?”

  “Yes?”

  “I hope Princess Ayla didn’t just see it, somehow.”

  The wind had increased to a fresh breeze that stirred Dara’s hair and shattered reflections on the bay with the small waves it made. A clang of buoys sounded from the Dhubar channel. The stench of burnt things came on the breeze and touched Durell’s nose, but there was no sound of gunfire now. An eerie quiet shrouded the city.

  Durell was aware of worry gnawing at the back of his mind. His voice was low and coarse, as he told Dara: “I must get her out of the country tomorrow.”

  “What if she won’t go?”

  “She’s got to.”

  “You’re making it difficult and dangerous, Sam.”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re exposing yourself, trying to be gentle.” She watched his face, but he showed no response.

  They walked on in silence. Durell glanced back over his shoulder. The street was dark, except for puddles of light beneath the widely separated streetlamps. The wreckage of a charred bus blocked an intersection that was strewn with broken glass and stones.

  Dara’s voice was abruptly argumentative. “You’ll have to use force,” she said.

  “How much force?”

  “As much as necessary.”

  “Even to killing her?”

  “Maybe that’s best—do I surprise you?”

  “No.”

  She became more eager. “What do you think of it? We can pull it off, working together.”

  “No.”

  “The Ottomans held Israel once, too. I don’t trust them. Maybe they want their old empire back. Israel would be on the list.”

  Durell spoke flatly. “Dhubar isn’t a military threat to anybody. Its army is strained to provide internal security.”

  As if she had not heard him, Dara said: “I’ll do it. At the brunch. You stay away.”

  “You’re crazy. They’ll tear you limb from limb.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You’re under my orders. It’s you who will stay away tomorrow.”

  They had stopped in the darker shadows of a warehouse, and they stared stubbornly at each other, Dara’s eyes raised defiantly to his.

  “Israel is a sovereign state,” she spat. “I have to consider its security first.”

  Durell pushed her roughly back against the corrugated metal wall of the building. He shoved his fist in front of her eyes, suddenly grown round. He growled: “This is sovereign here. You will do whatever I say.”

  He expected a knee aimed at the groin or a chop to the neck, but he was not prepared for her complete turnabout, as she replied meekly: “Yes, Sam. Whatever you say.”

  “Do I have your word on it?” He held her by the shoulders.

  “I promise, Sam.”

  He could not fully believe her even as her thin, sensitive lips closed over his, and she pressed hungrily against him. “Maybe I’m trying to impress you,” she murmured. “I—I’ve been all confused since this morning.”

  “Then just do as I tell you,” Durell said.

  “You’re the most exciting man I’ve ever known.”

  “Just don’t get out of line.”

  He accompanied her to the pier where Major Rabinovitch waited in the Nedji and offered to go with her to the zarook, but she told him it was better if she went alone this time. He gave her that courtesy, reasonably sure she could take care of herself, and watched for a moment as she strode away, a lithe, supple shadow in the night. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his slacks, still troubled by Dara, and twisted his head around to the way he had come. The dark odor of the oil field came to him even here, standing over the water. He might have heard something over the soughing of the breeze, the low crash of small combers against the breakwater. He listened again as the water snapped and chimed at the pilings beneath his feet. Nothing.

  He looked for Dara, but she had vanished from sight.

  He pulled a breath and started for the hotel, roweled by the need for urgent action, aware of a sense of impending disaster that he seemed helpless to prevent.

  A few minutes later, a pair of police officers wearing pistol lanyards under t
heir epaulets detained Durell at the entrance to his hotel, reminded him of the curfew, and asked politely why he was breaking it.

  He told them he had attended the emir’s reception at the palace and produced his papers.

  “You have a diplomatic passport, I see.”

  “I am a diplomat.” Durell watched their faces. They were unremarkable in any way.

  “Very well.” He was waved into the bumed-out lobby.

  It was a grotesque mess. Its plate-glass walls lay on the floor, heaps of bright splinters in water that swam with the aftermuck of fire—char and dead embers, bits of plastic melted and twisted, scorched stationery, soggy newspapers, and black-quilled masses of singed furniture stuffing. The place reeked of burned plastic and varnish, and even a little wood, clear up to Durell’s floor, although the blaze had been confined to the lobby.

  The door to his room stood open.

  He pulled his pistol and slid in sideways, thumbed the light switch and surveyed the destruction with impassive eyes. Obscenities and threats scrawled on the wall made it apparent that the vandals had singled out his room. The mattress had been slashed, the mirror over the dressing table looked as if it has been smashed with a rifle butt, and everything that could be moved had been turned topsy-turvy. Clothing from his and Dara’s suitcases was strewn everywhere.

  He kicked open the bathroom door. More wreckage.

  He regarded the damage and considered his predicament. Obviously his cover had been blown, but that did not surprise him, not after London. Whoever came here had hoped to catch him and leave his body vandalized beyond recognition, just as they had this room. He shook the image out of his mind and concentrated on the next step as the pulse thudded against his temples and alarms jangled dimly in his mind.

  He must get out of the hotel immediately, of course.

  He decided he would go to the dhow and spend the night there, and tomorrow he would arrange for other quarters. . . .

  He swung back to the bedroom, thinking he’d heard something, the shudder of the elevator, perhaps, or merely the sob of the wind.

  Gun in hand he stooped about the room and snatched his and Dara’s belongings from the floor and tossed them onto the ripped bedding, his mind going back to the Thirteenth Princess. With luck he would have her out of the country by nightfall tomorrow. Then crews paid with K Section funds would steal through the city in the early morning hours and nail up posters that announced the hated Turkish princess had fled. The posters were already printed—and bore the stolen imprimatur of a printing house known to favor the radicals.

  The population would be unlikely to support further violence against the emir alone.

  Durell threw the accumulated clothing into the suitcases indiscriminately, thinking it could be sorted out later, and glanced once more about the room.

  They would be back, he thought.

  If not in an hour, then in two.

  There came a banging at his door.

  Chapter 9

  Durell’s face snapped toward the door.

  His forefinger felt oily on the trigger of his revolver as he stood stock-still. He did not speak. The wind purred out on the balcony. Seen from the corner of his vision, drilling rigs beyond the fringe of the city sparkled with strings of lights, and the new desalinization plant was a nest of pearls to the south.

  The knock came again.

  Durell moved swiftly and silently to the wall beside the door and doused the lights.

  “Mr. Durell, sir?” The words conveyed an Arabic accent.

  “Enter.” Durell unlatched the door, but remained flush with the wall, his arm cocked, his pistol barrel pointed at the ceiling.

  A sheet of light fell from the corridor into the room, and Durell reached suddenly , and got a handful of the man’s collar. The other resisted only weakly as Durell spun him to the floor and knelt on his chest, a grip on his throat, the gun at the point of his nose.

  “What brings you? Speak!” Durell hissed in Arabic.

  “Don’t shoot, sir!” The man gasped against the pressure of Durell’s knee, speaking with broken breaths, wide eyes fixed on the muzzle of the gun.

  “Then tell me your purpose.” Durell gave a twist to the man’s collar and saw his cheeks bloat darkly. “Quickly, now.”

  “Princess Ayla—”

  “Princess Ayla what?”

  “Oh, sir! The princess sends a message.”

  “Let’s have it, then.” Durell’s voice was a soft menace. Without ceremony he yanked the man from the floor and shoved him against the wall, banging his head so that it rocked. Then he stepped away, being careful to keep the man covered, closed the door, flipped the fight switch, and regarded his catch. He was an Arab of middling size, and wiry, but there was no fight in his white-ringed eyes and he seemed to have swallowed his tongue. His fine wool thaub, with its border of silver embroidery, marked him for a man of some consequence, and Durell guessed he had not seen the business end of a revolver many times in his life.

  “What’s the message?” Durell demanded.

  The man swallowed, and his hands fiddled nervously with his beard. “Yes, sir. Princess Ayla says you are to meet her at the Mobarek Mosque, in the courtyard there.”

  Durell’s pulse quickened. “When?”

  “Half an hour.”

  “Very well.” Durell pushed his revolver into the frightened man’s belly. “You come, too.”

  The man’s eyes bugged beneath his ghutra with its black-corded agal, and his fingers twiddled an invisible lute of fear. “But I must return to Her Highness. She awaits word of your compliance. She will not leave until she has it.”

  Durell’s jaw muscles knotted as he tried to read the man’s face. “Go, then,” he said.

  The Arab darted for the door, his breath rasping against a terror-constricted throat.

  Durell pushed the snub-nosed pistol into his waistband and waited as a few moments ticked by. He wished he might have taken the man with him: he would have served as hostage and shield, might even have warned Durell of an ambush for fear of his own life.

  If someone were trying to lure him into a trap, the strategy had been thought out with the precision of a chess master.

  The princess would not come, they said, unless the messenger returned. Which meant that Durell must walk into the unknown alone.

  He took the elevator down and found that crews had arrived to clean the lobby and make temporary repairs. Plywood sheeting was going up over broken windows, but the warm, sultry wind still whistled through and brought the scents of dust and imported Persian charcoal, of animal pens and oilfield gas. Trash barrels sat about, loaded with debris. Water was being swept out and mopped up. With the plywood shutting off light from the street and the dim glow of only two or three serviceable lamps, the big space was gloomy as an underground bunker.

  Durell glanced at his wristwatch as he strode briskly to a row of telephone booths. It was almost midnight. He fed change into an instrument and waited impatiently as it rang, his eyes ranging back and forth across the lobby. Only hotel employees seemed to be about. When a receiver was lifted at the other end of the line, he asked for a military attache at the U.S. embassy. “Well, wake him up,” he said in a tone of stifled anger. And then:

  “Major Mills? Sam Durell. Yes. Where’s Task Force Talon?”

  “On station in the Persian Gulf. Arrived approximately one hour ago.”

  “Get me a chopper. Immediately.”

  “Where do you want it?”

  “Just a minute.” Durell reached inside the sleeve of his jacket and withdrew from the lining a piece of blue flimsy that was folded in a square chip. He flicked it open and smoothed it against a telephone directory and studied the finely detailed map of Dhubar City that had been drawn over a grid on it. He held his fingertip on one of the squares, and said: “Coordinate twenty-three. The Mobarek Mosque. In the courtyard.”

  “Roger,” the major said, his tone crisp. “How about I include a squad of leathernecks?”
>
  “Thanks, major, but my job is to prevent a war, not start one,” Durell said and hung up.

  As he strode out of the hotel, he saw a look of wonder in the eyes of the cleanup crew. Only a kaffir—an infidel—fool would go out there tonight, they were thinking.

  He almost bumped into Dara, who returned from the Nedji with hurried footsteps. He took her arm and held her in the shadows, and said: “Our room isn’t safe. Don’t even go in the hotel. You can call for your luggage later.”

  “What happened?” The breeze flipped a yellow curtain of hair across a cheek, and she tossed her head.

  “They trashed the room.” Durell sucked an angry breath.

  “They? Who?”

  “Someone.” Durell shook his head. “I don’t know. Come on.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get the Thirteenth Princess.” Durell stepped away.

  “You’re joking.” Dara caught up with him.

  “If there’s a joke, it’s on me. We’ll find out. But watch yourself.”

  The wind fluttered her dark dress against the soft turnings of her legs as they moved into the street, crossed the thoroughfare, and turned into a side street. There was no good excuse for breaking the curfew now, and Durell hoped fervently to avoid the military and police patrols that roamed the city. In this narrow byway the starlight crusted the nearly windowless mud buildings with a leaden efflorescence, and sand blew from the rainspouts. The falling sand made a thin, spattering sound against tin awnings here and there, and paving stones polished by generations of calloused feet held the sand in soft puddles.

  Dara’s breathing came light and quick beside him. “How did you arrange it?” she questioned.

  “The princess? She must have had a change of heart. She sent for me.”

  “Sam, wait.” Dara stopped, her face wan and troubled. “Do you know what you’re walking into?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  Dara did not say anything.