Durell heaved, tried to slide down and out of the constriction, failed, tried again, failed again, and heard a roaring in his ears that was not made by the storm. He could not breathe.
Omaru laughed.
Durell dug into the folds of flesh under the man’s chin with his free hand, seeking the jugular, but Omaru pulled in his head like a giant turtle and there was no opening. He tried to bring a knee up, but he was held too closely for that. He felt a popping in the sinews of his chest and shoulders as Omaru increased his effort. There was not much time left. He smashed at the man’s shaven head with his free hand, but it was like hitting stone. He thought he heard Nadja cry out, but he wasn’t sure. Then he managed to get one foot hooked behind Omaru’s ankle and he surged to the right, trying to throw the man off balance. He might as well have tried to uproot a tree.
Now the ache in his lungs and chest was a scream of anguish. Only seconds remained. There seemed no way to reach a vital spot in the man through the layers of fat and muscle that girdled his body.
He heaved convulsively once more, and Omaru lifted him and swung him about toward the bank of the stream—and slipped and staggered. For a moment it seemed as if the big man would keep his grip. And then Durell felt a slight release and he let himself go instantly, dropping downward out of the loop of those monstrous arms.
It gained only a small respite. Omaru fell on him like a pile-driver, slamming him down into the wet, slippery earth. Durell wriggled aside, reached out and closed his fingers on the thorny stem of a dark, flailing bush. Instantly he whipped the vine around the man’s naked head and tightened it with two quick loops around Omaru’s thick throat. Omaru tried to pull his head back, but it was too late. The wiry branch caught under his chin and his effort to retreat only tightened it.
Omaru raised himself a few inches and dropped his weight with a crushing thud on Durell’s body. Durell clung to the thorny vine. Its leaves lashed his face and exuded a faint, pungent odor. Omaru made a thin choking noise and tried again to pull away, rolling aside to release Durell from his weight. Durell almost let him go. Instead, he lashed the vine around his wrist for a better grip. Omaru made a strangling noise and lurched to his feet like a tethered, stampeding animal. He dragged Durell up with him. Durell braced with the vine taut, and the other man stood with his ponderous legs apart and clawed at his throat. His massive arms lashed out wildly at Durell. Each blow was like a battering ram, shaking his body, jarring him to his feet. He held on. The vine slipped slightly and the thorns dug into his flesh and he felt the warmth of blood on his wrist.
Omaru suddenly sagged to his knees.
His big arms lifted in an odd gesture of supplication. Durell stood braced, holding the double loop tightly around the thick throat. Then Omaru suddenly toppled to one side and his body slid down into the gushing torrent of the stream.
Durell could not hold the weight any longer. The vine was uprooted, torn from his grip. He glimpsed the other’s wild, congested face in the darkness, and then it vanished, caught in the strength of the flood. For a moment Durell thought he heard Omaru crying something in a thin voice.
And then he was gone.
They walked back slowly, making their way down the brushy mountainside below the place where the hut had been. The wind came and went. More rain fell, but it lacked the violence of the past two hours. The sky was lighter, and now and then the clouds tore apart and yielded a glimpse of stars and a thin, pale moon through their shredded fragments.
It took forty minutes to reach the beach, and then another hour to make their way along the shore, picking out a path among the rocks and around an occasional fisherman’s hut. Kaminov moved slowly, limping, supported gently by Nadja. Now and then they stopped to rest.
They did not talk much. All their energy had to be saved for moving forward, before the night ended.
Durell lay on his back on the damp sand, watching the dark clouds reel overhead, and Nadja sat down beside him. He ached in every bone and muscle. With Omaru dead, however, there was no longer any liaison between his outfit and the Chinese coastal troops. As confusion spread wider and wider, they might, with luck, slip through to the rendezvous point. The surf was thunderous against the rocky beach, however, and he had little hope that Tagashi and the Okiku had survived the storm.
Nadja touched him and he looked at her.
“The storm passes,” she said quietly.
“Are you all right?”
“Everything is better for me, thanks to you.”
“I’m glad. And Alexi?”
“It’s extraordinary. He is different. He was so quick, so ferocious with Omaru’s men. He saved us, and yet—he is not strong, as he used to be.”
“He’s been through too much,” Durell said.
“Yes. And what is different is that he needs me now, not the other way around, as it used to be. He once saved my life and reason, and now he—he needs me. And he looks at me as if I, too, am different.” She paused and pushed up her long, pale hair, fastening the knot at the nape of her neck. It was a feminine gesture, unlike her. Durell could not see her face in the shadows. She looked briefly at the Russian, who sat a little apart from them, his back against a rock that jutted up from the dark sand. Her voice softened. “I am not sorry about anything. I would not change anything now.”
“I’m glad,” Durell said.
She turned her face toward him and he saw her gray eyes shining oddly. “Do you think we will get by the coastal guards? Will we make it to the rubber boat?”
“I don’t know,” he said truthfully.
“For a little while, I did not care if we succeeded or not. I was ready to die. But now—everything is different. We must not fail now.”
He looked at his watch. The dial glowed in the dark. It was past three o’clock in the morning. The wind that blew from the sea came from a different quarter now, and the touch of it was cold, without the unhealthy and unnatural warmth of the past few hours. He saw Nadja shiver slightly in her wet clothing and he stood up.
“We only have a few hours before dawn,” he said.
“I know. Whatever happens, I want you to know that I—I am grateful. For everything.”
She stood on tiptoe and kissed him.
Her lips were cool.
They reached the rubber boat an hour later. Nothing had disturbed it. It was still safely hidden in the little cove that Nadja had directed him to when they first arrived. Toward the river mouth and the village of Ospesko the sky was pierced by wavering searchlights. Now and then they heard military trucks on the highway, farther inland. But there were no patrols on this beach, and it was clear that Omaru’s followers had been demoralized and scattered by Omaru’s death. And the Chinese, perhaps from lack of information from their suspicious Russian allies, were not making too thorough a search for them.
Durell walked over to Kaminov on the beach. The Russian had been silent and distant through the dangerous trek along the shore. He stood looking at the dark sea, streaked by heavy combers that raced and smoked out of the night. As Durell neared, he turned and held out his hand.
“We have not had time to speak before,” he said. “I knew I could trust you to come for me, Durell.”
“You didn’t make it easy, Alexi,” Durell said.
“Because of Nadja? But I would not go anywhere without her.”
“Yes. She still needs you, you know. But it may help her more to let her think you need her now, in turn.”
The man nodded his shaggy blond head. I understand that. How can I express my gratitude to you? I searched my soul for many years, but it is difficult to leave everything at home and go to a strange place, among strangers, and join those one always regarded as enemies.”
“I am not your enemy,” Durell said.
“I knew that long ago. That is why I asked only for you.” Kaminov paused. “Well, I shall try to be grateful. I have much information for your military people about the Peiping troop movements recently ordered in Southeast Asia.
You shall receive it in time to take counter-measures, I am sure. It is all memorized—and it is all accurate.”
Durell said dryly, “We would appreciate having it, Colonel Kaminov.”
Far out to sea, a light winked briefly and then disappeared and did not come on again.
It was the Okiku.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Durell awoke with the sunlight shining in his eyes, warm and friendly. It soaked in a golden flood through the screens of his room in the Japanese inn. For a brief moment he still felt the surge and lift and fall of the Okiku as it fought its way back across the Japan Sea. But that had been three days ago. The feeling passed as he sat up.
Tagashi sat at a low lacquered table near the window, drinking tea and eating a breakfast of raw fish and rice. He wore an ornate kimono of heavily embroidered yellow silk, and his cropped gray head looked dark in outline against the sunlight. The inn was quiet, except for a maid’s dim giggle somewhere in the kitchen area. They were fifteen miles from Haneda Airport in Tokyo. Beyond the windows, the small formal garden, landscaped with meticulously miniaturized trees and rocks and streams, looked golden and
beautiful with its banks of chrysanthemums. The late September sun was warm. The sound of bees filled the air. Tagashi sipped at his tea and did not turn his head. "You are awake, Durell-san,” he said quietly.
“Yes. How did you know?”
“I listened to your breathing. One falls into the habit of listening for many things. You are rested?”
“Yes. And you?”
“Quite well, thank you.” Tagashi’s voice was formal. “I have also been listening to the radio. And I received a dispatch from our own information office on Hokkaido. There has been no official protest as yet, according to Washington. It seems that the matter will end in silence.”
“How are our guests?” Durell asked.
“Quite safe.”
“Are they nervous?”
“They feel strange. The girl is most helpful, however. She is familiar with Japan, which Colonel Kaminov is not. She does not leave him for very long. Together, they have been dictating a report on the Chinese military dispositions. A man from the SEATO office in Tokyo was here an hour ago and took it away with him. He asked me to thank you. He said he knew Eliot Barnes.”
Durell nodded slowly. “We paid a high price, Tagashi.”
“It could have been higher,” the Japanese returned. He turned his head and looked soberly at Durell. His dark eyes were without depth. “I did not expect to survive. I did not wish to. There were too many memories in this that haunted me. I thought I would let the sea take me. I almost permitted it. But then I felt that I should try to take you back here. It would have been impossible if I had yielded to my instincts, would it not?”
“I’m grateful,” Durell said.
“One must to live, it seems, in this new world of ours. It is not a happy place. Each generation sees changes. The young can adapt easily. It is more difficult for us, who knew the older and more secure ways of authority and discipline.” Durell stood up. He ached here and there from various bruises all over his body. His ribs still seemed to crack with each breath he took, and he remembered Omaru’s deadly grip with a small shudder as he poured some tea for himself.
“And the Baroness Isome?” he asked.
Tagashi said: “She is dead.”
“How did she die?”
“It goes back to Yuki’s young man—the one who worked for me two years ago. I sent him into Isome’s service and he vanished. That evil, licentious woman used him for her own purposes. She drugged young men and burned them out in the flame of her evil. Somehow she discovered that the boy was really my agent. She tortured him and killed him.”
“Did Yuki learn this?”
“No. She does not know the whole truth. When we returned, I found Isome at the island house of Omaru. I gave her a choice of public trial, pretending to have proof enough to bring to court, or a quiet end by her own hand. She was Japanese, after all. A traitor to the nation, but she did what was required, when I suggested it. She was not an ordinary woman.”
“You sound as if you knew her quite well,” Durell suggested.
Tagashi looked away. “Yes.”
But he spoke no more of Isome.
Durell had breakfast and Tagashi went away to make security arrangements for the trip to the airport and the Pan American flight that would take Colonel Kaminov and Nadja to the States. Tagashi was a careful man. It seemed to Durell that the Japanese had found some kind of peace with himself.
When he finished his tea he went outside into the sunlit, garden and sat down on a stone bench near the carp pool and waited for Colonel Alexi Kaminov. He knew that Kaminov would come to him. He did not have to wait there long.
The Russian had shaved his ragged beard and cut his long yellow hair. He looked younger and fresher than Durell remembered. Tagashi had gotten a light gray suit for him, with a sport shirt and imported English shoes from Hong Kong. His blue eyes were sober, and then he smiled briefly and sat down. His English was only slightly accented.
“We will leave soon, I understand. I will let Nadja sleep a little longer. I cannot think of her as Natalie, although that is the true French name her father gave her. We will be married in California, if there are no legal objections. I suppose we shall have to live quietly for a long time. When our work for you is done, we will have to disappear, because the KGB has a long memory and a long arm for revenge.” Kaminov paused. “I explained all this to her. But she looks forward to it. She is a wonderful girl.”
There was a moment’s silence. Kaminov sighed. He looked at the fish in the carp pool, at the flowers, at the bees that hummed and flashed over the garden. He spoke on a note of sadness.
“She is not as I remembered her, my friend.”
“You remembered her as a frightened child,” Durell said. “A child who adored you. She is a woman now. You will have to discover her all over again. But you, Alexi, are not quite the same, either.”
Kaminov laughed softly. “Yes, I have changed. You were always a perceptive man, Durell.” He paused. “You knew all along it was just a trap, set for you?”
“Yes, I knew.”
“But you came, anyway?”
“It was my job.”
“Did you know I was part of the trap?”
“I suspected it,” Durell said.
“Our business deals in involuted circumstances. One sees white—and suspects black. One walks a straight path—but it is really crooked. Lucky for me,” Kaminov said easily. He crossed his artificial leg over the other. “I was assigned to lure you to the mainland. I had reported fully on our encounter some years ago, at the Hungarian border. It is part of your dossier on file at KGB headquarters. The organization never forgets details. It is most efficient. It picks this and that from the machine, estimates probabilities, and plans future projects. It chose me, because of you.”
“Did you intend to go through with it and trap me?”
“At first, yes.”
“And I would have been executed,” Durell said softly. Kaminov’s eyes smiled candidly, but under their blueness was an opacity like that in Tagashi’s eyes. Durell wondered what he himself looked like, to others. The business changed everyone, sooner or later.
“Surely,” Kaminov said, “you knew I could not have reached you through Omaru without the connivance of my superiors. It was all arranged. They had already appointed the prosecutors for your spectacular trial in Moscow. At the moment, Moscow feels a need to cry outrage on the international scene. And you have long been a great problem to them. I thought I had made peace with myself, but—are you angry, Durell, because I would have helped to execute you?”
“There is no purpose in anger.”
“Of course, the trap snapped on those who would have snared you. And all because of my sentimental protectiveness toward Nadja. I gave her pity, thinking her a child all this time. Now it is different. She is a woman.” Kaminov smiled ruefu
lly. “It is like suddenly finding a fortune when one is fumbling for a cigarette in the dark. I do not quite know what to do with the gift. It—it overwhelms me.”
“Do you still love her?”
“Not as before. She was a child, in my eyes, and now—I am a little frightened, I think. The feeling is so strong, this new kind of love I feel—”
“How did Nadja get into your boss’s plot?”
“Oh, they are very clever. She was unexpected, of course—called in to safeguard my suspected tendencies. But they outsmarted themselves. I changed everything when she was included in the operation. Somehow, I—I felt she was more precious to me than anything else in the world, a little human being who had been entirely dependent on me for survival. And I suppose her need for me filled a like need in myself. At any rate, I was suddenly sick of the plan to trap you. I changed the rendezvous point in the coded message through Omaru’s pipeline, and then I simply disappeared. Vanished from the face of the earth.” Kaminov laughed softly. “Ah, Peiping and Moscow must have been quite disturbed!”
“Was it only then that you decided to defect?”
“Yes, really only then. Because of Nadja. Can you understand, Durell? She represents an idyll, a sweet dream, the one lovely moment in my sober life. Oh, I know her reputation as a KGB field officer, hard and dedicated and ruthless. But this image did not agree with the weeping, dirty-faced child I had saved in Manchuria long ago. I decided to see if she would defect with me, and step by step, the dream became reality and I risked everything to make it come true, thinking of how our lives would be together, in the West.” Kaminov sighed. “But she is different.”
Assignment - Manchurian Doll Page 18
