Assignment - Manchurian Doll

by Edward S. Aarons

  “You can’t stand still, Nadja. They’ll hunt you down and kill you, too, otherwise.”

  “I know.”

  “Nadja, I want you to go in the boat with us tonight. We can delay no longer, whatever the weather. Do you know the village of Ospesko?”

  She started. “Yes. It is—familiar.”

  “Do you remember it?”

  “I think—yes.” She bit her Up. “May I sit down?”

  “Of course,” he said quickly.

  They had come to a curve in the beach where no houses were visible. The village was behind them. He found a place in the black sand under an outcrop of rock, and the girl sat down stiffly, favoring her injuries. The water moved in a bright pool at their feet. There was a strange and primitive beauty this place, a privacy and intimacy that touched them both simultaneously. The girl looked at the gush of tidal seas that came and went in the pool below them and bit her lip.

  “I do not want to go with you,” she whispered.

  “Maybe, if you are there, you will remember more than you can from here.”

  “I do not want to remember.”

  “You’ll never be yourself again, if you don’t. And Colonel Kaminov will have to come out of his hiding place and give himself up to his executioners. Do you want that?”

  “No!”

  “Then help us,” he urged.

  She shuddered. “I don’t want to go back.”

  “There is no other way to go.”

  She nodded, nodded again, hung her head in despair. A hot wind blew from the sea, and on a dark rock at the end of the high promontory, a wild cormorant perched to watch the sullen waves. The sea was clouded with a shining surface vapor that hid the rocky offshore islands, detaching them from their anchorages in the ocean so that they seemed to float like shadows on the horizon of strange light. Behind them was a grassy field and then a pine woods that reached in a long tongue of trim green toward the shore.

  “My name was Natalie,” the girl whispered abruptly. “They changed it in Moscow. My father was a French doctor in a mission near Ospesko. I remember this. They killed him—the guerilla soldiers. And my mother. She was half Manchurian.” She smiled. “He used to call me his Manchurian doll.”

  “Your father?”

  “No. Alexi. When he found me and took me with the other refugee children to Vladivostok. It was all confusing, I was terrified, I’d been a prisoner so long—”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know where. It was an old man who kept me.” She shrugged. “He fed me and kept me alive. But it was terribly dirty. He was Pere Jacques, a crazy Chinese, an old man with old and filthy habits. I don’t want to talk about it. I was only twelve years old then.” She hung her head once more.

  Durell was quiet, aware of the importance of her words, but not wishing to disturb her. “How far was it—the old Chinaman’s place—from Ospesko?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you told Alexi Kaminov about it—”

  “No, don’t you see? He knows where it is, because he found me there, when he was doing a military survey of the coast there. I was sick by then, delirious, almost as crazy as the old Chinaman, and I don’t know how long I was in the hut. I never stepped out of it for weeks, for months.” “Didn’t you try to escape?”

  “I was afraid to go outside. The old man—Pere Jacques —kept telling me they were still hunting for me and would kill me. I believed him—a child of twelve, tormented, half crazed by what had been done and by what was being done all the time—I had to do everything the old man said. I had to submit in every way, in that filthy, horrible place.”

  She began to shudder violently. Durell waited. Then he said: “You were, to all intents and purposes, a slave.”

  “Yes. To old Pere Jacques.”

  “Do you know your real name?” he asked. “Your father’s name, I mean? If you were really someone named Natalie, you were French, not Russian.”

  She shrugged, breathing deeply. “It made no difference. I was less than human then, less than an animal, and I was grateful to belong anywhere. I clung to Alexi as if he were a god. I worked and studied hard to please him, when he took me with him, along with the other children, across Siberia to Moscow. He was like—like a knight, so handsome and brave, so clean and gentle. I loved him. And then, as I grew up, I loved him differently. And I think—I don’t know—I was grateful for any word he gave me, any glance he turned my way. He never touched me,” she added suddenly. “He knew I couldn’t bear it. It—it made me think of the old Chinaman, and I would get hysterical if I thought a man—” She paused again. “But I think I’m over that.”

  Durell looked at the water and felt the warm wind on his face. Out at sea, the small black islands seemed to float like ships on the mist. A feeling of electric oppression in the air gripped him. Small breakers curled upon the black volcanic beach. Nadja gripped his hand convulsively.

  “I don’t want to go back there,” she whispered.

  He felt an overwhelming pity for the child she had been, a deep and terrible anger for the cruelty of man against man. He recalled her reputation as an efficient and heartless agent of the KGB in Tokyo. It was all a fraud, a cover and a defense for a frightened girl who still cowered in the body of a beautiful woman.

  “Will you kiss me?” she asked quietly.

  “Do you want me to?”

  “Yes. It is important. It may tell me something about myself and you and Alexi. I don’t want to stay a schoolgirl forever, wrapped in a dream that perhaps never existed for Alexi.”

  He kissed her. Her lips were firm and cold. The thick strands of her silver-white hair were scented with the sea wind and the pines. He felt her body shudder. He held her gendy. Then her arms came up and around him, and he could feel the effort it cost her, and then he pulled her body to him and held her in the warmth of a quiet embrace. Her mouth moved. She stirred, made a small sound in her throat, and her lips softened and yielded to his. He felt her breasts against his chest, through the thin shirt she wore. Her arms tightened convulsively. He held her gently.

  She drew back then and stared at the islands floating in the misty sea. Her lips were parted, and her eyes were filled with tears. Her breathing was irregular.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Was it so bad?”

  “No, it—it—” She was pale. “I will go with you.”

  “To Ospesko?”

  “Wherever I must go. I can promise nothing. I may not be able to find the place where Alexi first discovered me. He must be waiting there. But I may not find it.” “Without you,” Durell said, “he is lost.”

  “Without him,” she said, “I will die.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Okiku II was a steel diesel trawler of 200 tons, with a rakish bow, twin screws, and the latest electronic equipment in radar and sounding gear. She drove ahead, solitary in the hissing Japan Sea, under an evening sky of dark yellow that was clouded from horizon to horizon, striated with an elemental movement that arched from circle to circle of the hemisphere. From the south, the wind blew like the hot breath of a wakening dragon. The dragon stirred in the slow, deep heave of the sea that gleamed with a ceramic quality in the lessening light, glazed under the heavy ground swell that felt like the breathing of some primeval creature. The course was 280° and the speed was a steady 22 knots.

  The crew had been replaced by Tagashi’s men, half a dozen Japanese from Miyako who worked the ship with ease, their white headbands gleaming strangely in the dusk, their naked feet gripping the steel deck. They did not chatter or quarrel as fishermen normally would.

  Tagashi stood forward, scanning the horizon as it merged with the lowering night. Nothing was visible except a dim haze to the west that might be the mainland, or might be a lower cloudbank on the rim of the sea. He adjusted the lenses carefully and spoke to Durell.

  “The timing has been correct, Durell-san. In one hour, we shall be in sight of the shore, but it will be dark by t
hen. Unfortunately, radar knows neither night nor day. We may be expected, if Omaru made contact with new radio equipment.”

  “We should count on it,” Durell said grimly. “But Omaru doesn’t know our exact course or our landing point.”

  Tagashi nodded at the circling sea. “The net waits for us, Durell-san. It will be spread far and wide. In one hour, we will know.”

  “But they want Kaminov, too,” Durell pointed out. “They won’t move too soon. They’ll watch for us and let us land and hope we lead them to Kaminov, wherever he is. So it will seem easy at first, but we mustn’t deceive ourselves. They will let us in all right and try to follow us. lf we locate Kaminov, our troubles will then begin. But then we have one point in our favor: the Chinese and the Russians are secretive, even with each other. Their cooperation may not be too good. And don’t forget, Omaru is being paid to handle this operation. They will insist that he carry out the action.”

  “Perhaps.” Tagashi looked moody. “I dislike the sea. I am not a man of the sea. It makes me uneasy.” He sighed. “Well, then, we know they will wait and watch and let us land. And we will know that what seems easy is only a trap.”

  “Maybe we can make it snap on their own fingers,” Durell said.

  The smoothness of the sea was deceptive. The heavy ground swell made the sharp prow of the Okiku dip deep into the glazed green water. Then the boat lifted, spuming, shaking foam from its rails. The crew went about their business of tending the big dragnets and winches. The world seemed to wait in hushed fear under the breath of the southern dragon.

  The Hokkaido radio chattered out its first definite typhoon warning for the area. Only the beginning of the report could be heard above the abnormal static in the radio. All ships at sea were warned to expect winds of 100 to 150 miles per hour velocity. The operator who gave the expected direction and course of the tropical storm faded into a series of abominable cracklings at the crucial moment. They could only hope for the best.

  Durell found Nadja seated on the edge of her bunk. The mate’s cabin had been given over to her, and another to Durell and Tagashi in the crew’s quarters aft of the main holds. The Okiku lifted, rolled, plunged, creaked and trembled with the drive of her powerful engines.

  “Did you get any sleep?” he asked.

  She wore dark slacks and a black singlet and dyed black sneakers. She shook her head. “No. I cannot sleep.”

  “We’ll be there soon. The coast is just over the horizon.” “I know. I can feel it. Will the storm be very bad?”

  “We may be lucky. We may stay in the fringes of it.”

  “I saw a typhoon once,” she said. “I hope never to see another.” She looked up, questioning. “We will land near Ospesko?” Her eyes searched his face. “It is a rocky shore, except for the river banks there.”

  “We’ll make it. Do you remember the town?”

  “A little, now. I have been trying to recall. My father went there on administrative business for the mission, now and then.” She smiled. “It was usually a holiday for me. In those days, a, French doctor and a Chinese wife had no difficulty in moving about. I remember swimming there, on a small beach a few miles to the south of the river mouth.” She paused. “It is a protected place. We could land there.”

  “Good.”

  She looked at her hands. “Do you think he is still alive? Do you think Alexi is waiting for us?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  ‘‘But you are not sure?”

  “No.”

  “They will kill you, if you are caught.”

  “And you? Aren’t you afraid?”

  “Not any more,” she said. “Except—”

  “Except what?”

  “I don’t want to go back to that awful place.”

  “I’ll be with you,” Durell said.

  “Yes. That makes it better.”

  Durell said: “Tell me more about this swimming place that you remember. Omaru’s code books direct a landing a few miles below Ospesko, too.”

  “It may be the same place. The rest of the coast is very rugged, with steep cliffs and rocks.” She smiled wanly. “It is coming back to me. I remember a small trail down the mountainside. There was a hut there, and an old Chinese watch-tower. But all that may be gone now. It was over ten years ago.”

  “Was the tower lighted at night?”

  She frowned slightly. Her gray eyes were clouded. “I think so. I remember seeing a light, once, when dusk came.”

  “All right,” he said. He stood up. “Well know very soon. In an hour, perhaps, Nadja.”

  “My name is Natalie,” she said.

  Tagashi was satisfied that everything that could be done was completed. The crewmen, each a picked expert in his line, had heightened the two steel masts that supported the trawl gear over the ice hatches by twelve feet, with the simple addition of prefabricated spars. A bright yellow stripe had been painted along the Okiku's sides during the day, from the sharp bow to the rakish stem. The vessel’s painted name and home port were hidden by new plates bolted into place in holes that had been covered by false rivet heads. Now the Okiku looked like a vessel of Siberian design, working out of Vladivostok. Nothing could be done to change the sleek lines of her Japanese bow, but the Russian trawlers were not too different. A small cabin was rigged from prefabricated sides hauled up out of the hold and placed on the foredeck, further altering her silhouette. It would take a close examination to identify her as the dragger that had left Miyako over 24 hours ago.

  The first strong blast of wind came as complete darkness fell.

  Tagashi did not like the sea. His brother Yugi, a colonel in the Imperial Army, had sailed away on a transport to campaign in Burma, and had never returned. Tagashi had searched the records, using the privileges of his wartime position, for a hint of his brother’s fate; but Yugi, a philosopher more than a soldier, was simply listed as missing. He wondered often if his brother were still alive somewhere in the jungles down there.

  Tides of change swept the world, and the enemy of yesterday was today’s ally. It was not Tagashi’s business to question the policies of the new government. Nippon could never go back to the rigid caste system of authority of the old days. The aristocracy was dead, reduced to mercantile enterprises; the way of the warrior was equally dead.

  Tagashi expected to die. He did not know how Durell, the

  American, felt about this operation. For himself, he could not see how he could survive.

  He was familiar with death; he had been an intimate of death throughout his professional career in the kempei-tei, and he was not afraid. He had done all that could be done. But the sea, with its rise and fall, its turbulence, and the hot wind all reminded him of the day Japan lost the war.

  He had a dream that plagued him, and the sea always brought back to reality that day aboard the police cutter, when he went with his fellow members of the kempei-tei unit to bum their records. Heaven itself, that day, had fallen in wrath to erase the foundations by which all men governed their lives. The sea and sky were peculiarly white, matching the white ceremonial robes of his friends. They faced each other in two silent rows that night, drinking tea, their shaved heads bowed in submission to their inevitable decision. The war was over. They had vowed not to survive it. The new world ahead was intolerable, without honor, without duty to the Emperor and the Empire. Nippon was defeated, and guilt lay upon that double row of men who faced each other with their ceremonial knives glittering on the mat between them.

  The whiteness of their robes was like the unnatural whiteness of sea and sky on their small boat, blending with the foam of the sea, and the sounds—ah, the sounds, Tagashi thought, the hiss of foam and the hiss of the knives cutting through skin and muscle, flesh and intestine, in the approved ritual arc. . . .

  He alone had not killed himself with the others.

  His orders had been to survive, to direct the rebuilding of a new police organization, to cooperate with the conquerors and to live for the new Japan. />
  It had not been easy.

  Not since that day had he been at sea, and there lingered in him a certain dread, a certainty that the ghosts of his companions who had died in honor would wait for just such a moment as this, to rise up from the sea and claim him a second time, as he had sworn to join them at first—

  He awoke in his cabin, shuddering, covered with sweat. Durell sat on the other bunk of the tiny compartment, watching him. The curtains were blacked out, and Durell’s face was harsh and lean in the yellow lamplight.

  “You were dreaming, Tagashi-san,” he said quietly.

  Tagashi wiped a hand over his mouth; his mustache felt prickly and there was sweat on his chin. “Yes.”

  “Not a pleasant dream,” Durell said.

  “It happens now and then. Memories from the war—”

  “I understand.”

  “Did I disturb you?”

  “No. It’s all right, Tagashi.”

  “One did many things during the war that were not to one’s taste. But we obeyed. We wished to obey. All my friends of those days are dead now. They died just after the war. They killed themselves.”

  “And you did not,” Durell said flatly.

  “I had my honor, but I had my orders, too. Even in the ashes of the old way, orders had to be obeyed. I saw them all die, and then I left them on the boat and came back ashore to meet your soldiers and sailors who were landing. All Japan was obedient that day, according to what each man and woman was told to do.”

  “I understand. It’s all right, Tagashi.”

  Tagashi said: “It will never be all right for me.”

  Durell stood up.

  “We are near the shore.”

  The smell of land was in the dark, windy air. The night felt close and heavy and thick. The big trawler lifted and fell as it slowed and became more restless in the huge, silent swells that pushed rhythmically northward from the center of cyclonic disturbance. A few drops of rain fell. From off the port bow came the sudden blinking of a signal light, bright in the darkness.