Dragons Of Englor rb-24

by Джеффри Лорд

  She went through her reply twice. Then she made the signal-hands folded across the stomach-that there was more to come. After that she pointed along the southern edge of the cove, clenched her fist twice, and repeated that sequence as well. Blade flashed the code for «acknowledged and understood,» then put the binoculars away. Rilla stepped into the water, waded out until it was up to her waist, then plunged forward.

  Blade sprang to his feet, picked up his gear, and began to move, keeping Rilla in sight as much as possible. Sometimes trees or bushes cut off his view of her, but each time he saw her again she was still swimming strongly. Her steady movements gave him the impression she could go on swimming like that for hours or even the whole day if she had to.

  At last Blade broke out into the open and saw what must have been Rilla’s intended rendezvous just ahead of him. A spur of bare gray rock curved out into the lake from the shore. Rilla was swimming strongly for the sheltered patch of water between the spur and the shore. There she and Blade would be completely invisible. No one watching from any other part of the cove would see anything more suspicious than Rilla swimming along the shore, disappearing briefly, then swimming back the way she came.

  Blade crawled forward on his hands and knees, taking advantage of every rock, bush, and fold in the ground. He reached the water’s edge to find the surface before him blank and empty. He was just beginning to worry about this when. Rilla’s water-sleek head popped up from the surface like a seal’s.

  She grinned. «It is good to know that you are real. I was beginning to wonder.» The grin faded. «It is not a good situation at the resort.» Her English was almost unaccented, but so precise that no one would mistake her for a native speaker.

  «How is it not good?» said Blade.

  «They have six uniformed Security men in since three days ago, instead of only two.»

  That was not as bad as Blade had feared. Six Security men-one section-could not do a very good job of covering a resort area that spread over a mile of shore and several miles of forest. On the other hand, there was no way to know how many more Security people had come in disguised as dishwashers, masseurs, or truck drivers.

  «Do they seem to be investigating anything in particular? Or are they just wandering around waiting for something to turn up?»

  Rilla took so long to answer that question that Blade began to wonder if she hadn’t understood. When she did answer, he realized she’d merely been trying to give as precise an answer as she could. Nude, treading the cold waters of the lake, and confronting an Imperial secret agent, she was still determined to give a scientist’s precise answer to any question. Blade’s respect for her went up another notch.

  «They go nowhere in particular,» she said. «They have not spent enough time in any one place to see very much.» She frowned. «I am almost certain they do not suspect me, yet.»

  «Good,» said Blade. «Can you be ready to escape tonight?»

  «Tonight?»

  «If you can, take what you’ll need,» Blade added.

  She nodded. «I have the essential material of my research on film, everything that is not common knowledge. I have no hiking gear, though. I do not think it would be wise for me to try to get it.»

  She was probably right. «Do you at least have good shoes? That’s the one thing you’re certain to need. We’ve got at least a twenty-five-mile walk ahead of us, possibly twice that much.»

  Another nod. «Oh yes, I have that. It will not be hard for me to get out of my cottage at night, either. Where do I meet you?»

  Blade disliked the idea of using the same place twice. On the other hand, where they were now offered the best concealment of any place along the whole shore of the cove. Anywhere else, even a casual passerby might catch a glimpse of them. Security men were close at hand, so that casual passerby might feel more willing than usual to tell them what he’d seen, to prove his loyalty to the Red Flames.

  Blade made a gesture that took in the water and the land around them. «Here, at midnight or as soon after that as you can come. Dress as warmly as you can, and try to bring some food.»

  Rilla smiled. It was obvious that she would have laughed out loud if there’d been no danger of being overheard. «My friend, I grew up in the North Country of Russland. There the woods stretch for ten days’ fast walking from one village to another, and it does not go above freezing from September to May. Give me advice about things I do not know so well as traveling in forests.»

  Blade smiled back. «When the time comes, I will.» He gave her the recognition code for the night rendezvous, then lay still while she swam back out into the cove and back toward the beach. Again she swam with a strong and sturdy grace of movement. Blade was half tempted to wait and watch her climb out of the water again. He would not at all mind seeing her body gleaming naked in the sun again.

  But it was never wise to spend a single unnecessary second in any place that might be dangerous. Before Rilla was halfway to the beach Blade was crawling back up the slope again. Long before she climbed out of the water he was back in the forest, heading for his hiding place and the few hours of sleep he would need before the night’s work began.

  Chapter 14

  Blade returned to the cove that night, grimly prepared to have any number of things go wrong. Much to his surprise and delight, nothing at all out of the ordinary happened.

  He reached the shore at 11:30 and lay under cover in the forest until midnight. Then he crawled along the shore and out onto the little rock spur, far enough to be well hidden. Then he lay down again to wait. Half of any field mission was always waiting for things to happen, to him or to others.

  Rilla Haran came slipping along the shore just before one o’clock in the morning. A half-moon gave Blade enough light to see her clearly without the infrared viewer. She was carrying a small sack over one shoulder and a walking stick cut from a fallen branch in one hand. She was also quite obviously having to work hard to keep her nerves under control.

  Blade didn’t blame her. Her long training and brilliant scientific mind were no real preparation for tonight or anything that might come after tonight. Before tonight she’d been in comparatively little danger. The Security Administration might suspect her, but scientists like her were seldom bothered without very good reason. They were too valuable to the Red Flames’ war effort.

  After tonight, though, Security would have all the reasons they could need to arrest her, torture her, and stand her up against a wall. She had made her final break with the Red Flames. After tonight she would be out in the open, exposed, vulnerable, and protected only by men whose abilities she had no way of knowing. This would last until she reached Englor.

  So Rilla had plenty of reasons to be even more nervous than she seemed.

  At the edge of the forest she stopped, crouched down, and gave the recognition signal three times. Then she slid back under a bush, waiting and watching. Blade crept out of cover and returned her signal. Then he crawled along the shore until he was safely hidden behind the same clump of bushes that sheltered Rilla.

  «Any trouble?» he whispered.

  She shook her head, licked dry lips, and swallowed several times. Then suddenly she raised her head and kissed him lightly on the cheek. «Thank you,» she said quietly.

  Blade smiled. «Wait until you’ve got a little more to be thankful for. We’ve got a bit of a way to go yet.»

  They moved out through the forest at a good pace, one neither of them would have any trouble keeping up for days on end. If they did end up having to walk for days, it would mean something had gone fatally wrong with Route Purple Two, and they would have very little chance of getting out of Rodzmania alive. Blade was also determined that even if things came to that they would still go down fighting, and that meant saving their strength.

  They covered half the distance to the primary pickup before dawn. They could have gone farther, but ahead lay a stretch of farming country with fewer woods to provide cover. They found shelter in the cellar of an aban
doned farmhouse and settled down for the day, taking alternate three-hour watches. The day passed without trouble and with few signs that there were any other human beings in all the world. Blade found he could easily imagine he and Rilla were Adam and Eve, alone in a world just created out of whatever had gone before it.

  If this was Eden, though, it held far too many snakes, in the form of Russland soldiers.

  At nightfall they moved on. They had to move more carefully during this night’s march, giving the scattered farms a wide berth, staying off the roads, and twice ducking for cover as Russland patrols passed too close for comfort. One patrol was eight soldiers in two jeeplike vehicles, the other was a truck bristling with machine guns and searchlights, which fortunately weren’t turned on.

  Two patrols were nothing unusual. No doubt the Red Flames had discovered Rilla’s disappearance by now. But they didn’t seem to have launched an all-out manhunt. Even when they did, it might not be disastrous. They might indeed comb the land house by house, but that would take time-perhaps more than enough time for Blade and Rilla to make their way safely along Route Purple Two and home to Englor.

  They were only four miles from the pickup at dawn. Again they found safe cover while the sky was still gray and settled down as comfortably as they could. This day’s cover was under a bridge, a damp hiding place swarming with mosquitoes that kept both of them from getting any sleep. Rilla was bitten until her eyes were swollen half shut, but she did not protest.

  «Mosquitoes are nothing,» she said, brushing some off her neck. «To get away from my masters, I think I would risk tigers or sharks. The Red Flames give a scientist much, so it was easy to do what they wanted for a long time. Too easy, and too long, I think. I was not as strong as I should have been, not soon enough.» She shook her head. «They asked what they should not have, and I gave them more than I should have. Now it is too late for me, but perhaps for others, there is still time.»

  Blade didn’t know what to make of these rather cryptic words, and didn’t particularly care for their grim, almost fatalistic tone. He did not try to get anything more out of Rilla about her work.

  Then the day ended and they started out across the last four miles. Blade would not have been at all surprised if the pickup point had been deserted, perhaps with some coded sign that it had been permanently abandoned. He was even prepared to find nothing at all, or even several bodies littering the grass and a Russland machine gun trained on them from the woods.

  Instead he found four men who gave the proper recognition signals and understood his. That was exactly as he’d expected. What he hadn’t expected was that one of the four men would be Piedar Goron. By now they were well outside Goron’s normal area of operation, the area he knew as well as he might know the face of his wife. Blade had thought Goron was too good an underground man to take the risks involved in moving outside his own territory, except in an emergency.

  Goron took Blade aside as soon as they’d moved a safe distance into the forest. «There is going to be a problem in getting you and Rilla out of here, one we had not anticipated.»

  «Purple Two’s blown?»

  Goron shook his head. «I wish it were that simple. No, as far as we know, it is still secure. Or it would be, if we could use it.»

  «Why can’t we use it?»

  «They will not let us.»

  «Who won’t let us?» Blade’s irritation showed in his voice. Goron seemed to want to talk in riddles, and Blade was in no mood to put up with it. Or had something happened to shake Goron so badly that he couldn’t speak clearly and concisely?

  With a little prompting from Blade the story came out. It was quite simple. A Priority One message had come to the Rodzmanian underground from Englor. It had stated that no, repeat no, deviations from any of the standard routes were to be used in connection with Operation Housepainter-Rilla Haran’s defection.

  «A flat prohibition?» said Blade.

  «Yes.»

  «No reason given in the message?»

  «None.» That didn’t sound like R. Blade was almost certain enough of that to say it out loud, but not quite. Damn it, he wished he knew just a little bit more than he did about the ways and methods of the Special Operations Division, enough to know whether R ever sent messages like this one. He would have known that much if he’d really been a senior Special Operations man, with fifteen years’ experience as an Independent. But he was Richard Blade, stranger from another Dimension. He knew enough about Special Operations to do a competent job for it in the field, but not enough to guess what might go on in the Division’s bureaucracy at home.

  Unfortunately, there was no reason why someone in Englor could not have given this half-witted order. An intelligence organization could easily commit all the errors, crimes, and follies of any other bureaucracy, and a few more besides.

  «The message had the standard double confirmation?» said Blade, probing further.

  «Yes, damn it!» exploded Goron. His anger burst out in a roar that made birds and small animals dart away in fright. It seemed loud enough to be heard beyond the edge of the forest, a good three miles away.

  Blade decided to let the issue drop. Further questioning would not alter the facts or produce any essential or even useful information. It would simply add to the strain that Piedar Goron was already enduring, and Blade would do much to avoid that. He would do nothing to add to the burdens of Goron and his comrades in the Rodzmanian underground.

  Goron seemed to sense this change in Blade. He took several deep breaths, and when he spoke again his voice was, level and calm. «We will still use Route Purple Two, but we will use the same exit as Purple One. That should keep them happy in Englor. There is no critical increase in risk. In fact, conditions are unusually favorable for the exit operation. Number 37’s squadron is on a field-deployment exercise, so-«

  The plan unfolded, Blade’s mind worked along two parallel tracks, assessing the plan as he memorized it. It seemed entirely acceptable: It would certainly get Rilla and him back to Englor days or even weeks faster than any other plan, if it worked as Goron described it.

  And if it didn’t? Well, if it didn’t, Blade and Rilla would at least be near the seacoast, and the sea still belonged to Englor. Once again there was a road home across the sea, if all else failed.

  Chapter 15

  The edge of a fog bank lay across the airfield, creeping in from the sea only five miles away. It made the darkness even deeper, dimming the runway lights to faint and fuzzy yellow glowworms somewhere far off in an unguessable distance.

  Blade rolled down the window of the truck cab and peered out into the darkness. From the map and what he’d seen before the fog closed in, Blade could reconstruct everything within two miles of where the truck was parked.

  In front of the truck lay the concrete strip of the runway, stretching half a mile off to the left and a mile to the right. On the far side of the runway was a parking strip. On it stood a dozen light bombers of the Sixth Maritime Patrol Squadron of the Rodzmanian Air Force. One of those bombers would take Rilla and Blade home across the Nord Sea to Englor.

  Of course they would need some help. Blade looked past Piedar Goron at the wheel of the truck and off to the left, to see if that help could be in sight yet. There was nothing to see except the dim lights of the airfield’s hangars and control tower. Blade looked at his watch and realized that it was still a good ten minutes before the pilot was due.

  «Thank God, Josip is in a maritime squadron,» said Goron. «Otherwise we would not be able to do our work tonight. The regular bomber squadrons do not fly in this kind of weather. There are not many Rodzmanians in the maritime squadrons, either, and most of those are truly faithful to the Red Flames.» Goron’s face twisted, as if he wanted to spit at that thought.

  The pilot that Blade knew only as Josip came from an old and distinguished Rodzmanian family. In this respect he was unlike most Rodzmanians who had been permitted to join the armed forces under Red Flame rule. Most of them were
«the people from nowhere,» as Goron put it. They were fervently loyal, and any of them would gladly shoot Blade, Rilla, Goron, and Josip without thinking twice.

  Josip was different. He came from among those Rodzmanians who normally held themselves rigidly aloof from the Red Flames. So when he wanted to serve them, they welcomed him with open arms. At thirty he was a lieutenant colonel in the Rodzmanian Air Force, with power and privileges superior to nearly all Rodzmanians and a good many Russlanders as well.

  He’d paid a price for this, of course. Not all the Russlanders trusted or accepted him, and his own people despised him. His family not only never spoke to him, they never spoke of him. Even by the standards of the underground, his life was a lonely and grim one. Blade was glad Josip would be flying them out to Englor, to enter a life of exile but also of freedom-freedom to work openly against Russland, more freedom than any Rodzmanian could hope to know until the Red Flames were driven out.

  Blade turned to look into the back of the truck where Rilla sat cross-legged on a pile of toolboxes and empty ammunition crates. She wore the same clothes she’d worn away from the resort, and over them a winter flying jacket so bulky that it almost concealed even her spectacular figure. She was pale and silent, obviously very much on edge but just as obviously doing a heroic job of concealing it. Blade was tempted to try giving her some reassurance, but decided against it. She was proud enough to resent it.

  Blade also didn’t want to try filling her with an assurance he didn’t feel himself. Perhaps it was just the darkness and the fog, but his intuition told him that this affair was not going to run smoothly right to the end. He wanted very badly to believe that by dawn they would be drinking strong tea and eating eggs and bacon in Englor. He couldn’t quite manage it.