Assignment Zoraya

by Edward S. Aarons

  "Yes. Well, I thought just a message—"

  "When matters are settled here. When security and law and order are established again. Tomorrow, Mr. Fenner. I simply want to be sure that it was Mrs. Esme Kenton you sent the captain to see. That explains a great deal of it."

  "Does it?" Fenner asked.

  "Where is Mrs. Kenton now? Do you know?"

  "Why, in heT room, I suppose."

  "Did you see her arrive here at the al-Zaysir?"

  "Why, yes, I—"

  Ta'arife waited.

  Fenner said nothing. His face felt hot.

  "Well?" Ta'arife said. He breathed softly. "Was she alone, Mr. Fenner?"

  "I don't know."

  "You saw her with your own eyes."

  "Yeah. Yes."

  "The girl was with her?"

  "I didn't really get a good look," Fenner mumbled. "I didn't think anything at all about it."

  "Was the girl with Mrs. Kenton?"

  "A girl was with her. I don't know who she was."

  "I see. Thank you."

  Fenner watched the slim, elegantly uniformed Arab turn and walk out of the bar. Ta'arife walked straighter, more confidently than when he'd come in. What in hell? Fenner thought vaguely. What did I tell him? Nothing. Maybe the girl is a spy. Anyway, it was nothing to him. Nothing at all.

  Ta'arife was gone. Fenner reached for the bourbon and splashed a drink in his glass. He held the glass in both hands because he was shaky and felt sick to his stomach.

  He wished the damned wind would stop blowing now.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The storm ended an hour before dawn, blowing itself out over the Arabian Sea: a high cloud of churning sand spinning away into the darkness. The stars came out. The air was still and cold. The moon shone on the smoothly rippled sand, the dark cliffs, the jagged flint plateaus, the black and ominous ridges of the d/ebels in the interior.

  Durell heaved against the door of the truck cab. ITie sand had blown up in a long smooth dune against it, overlapping the front wheels and the motor hood. It took a few moments of hard effort to shove the door open wide enough so he could slip out. Zoraya followed him. Her face was calm. There was no trace of the tears he had seen her shed.

  "Do you know where we are?" he asked her.

  "Near Ain Gemilha. I can tell by the shape of that ridge," she said, pointing.

  He looked back, over the way they had come. There was no trace of their tire tracks in the smooth tongues of sand that shone white in the moonlight.

  "What about the Al Murra?"

  "They will not follow us out/'

  "You seem sure of that."

  "They will think we are dead. Buried by the storm."

  He walked around to the back of the truck, slogging through the soft, yielding sand that had blown here, too, under body and between the wheels. He wondered if they were stuck here, if they could get the motor started, but he decided to put that off for now.

  "Effendi?"

  He saw the nakhoda, Abdhuahram, jump from the tail gate under the canvas that was weighted with sand. The nakhoda looked barbaric with his thick black beard, his turban, his naked torso.

  "Effendi, you are both safe?"

  "Yes," Durell said. "And the prince?"

  Tha nakhoda shrugged. "I did what I could for him. His back was bleeding where Ibrahim lashed him. He is ill."

  "Ill? How do you mean?"

  The big man shrugged again. "He will not speak to me."

  "Why not?"

  "See for yourself, effendi."

  Durell lifted the canvas flap. Moonlight flooded the sheltered body of the truck. Amr al-Maari sat cross-legged on the floor, his hands on his knees, his eyes staring at nothing at all. For a moment, Durell could not even tell if the small man was breathing. He saw that the past twenty-four hours had squeezed weight and fat off the man; Amr's face looked thinner, with a trace of the sharp fox features Durell remembered from long ago.

  "Bogo," he said. "What is it?"

  Amr did not move.

  "Are you sick?" Durell asked.

  "Yes," Amr whispered.

  "Where? What is it? We'll get a doctor today—"

  "It is in my heart. You can do nothing for me. I am going to die today."

  "Nonsense. Today you are going into Jidrat with me and make everything right again."

  Amr did not move or reply.

  "Did you hear me, Bogo?"

  "I heard you. I was whipped like a slave, and they laughed like jackals at Prince Amr al-Maari. They played with me, made sport of me, and I was a fool." Amr sighed.

  "We all make mistakes."

  "My whole life has been a mistake."

  'That's as Allah wills."

  "I am not a true believer. There is no consolation for me there."

  Durell said, "Are you hungry? Thirsty?"

  "No. Do not trouble yourself with me, Cajun."

  "Are you still my enemy? Or my friend?"

  Amr did not answer.

  Durell tried to start the truck. It would not start. The motor ground fitfully for a few moments, and then the battery was dead and nothing happened. He felt the emptiness of the desert holding them in a giant cold hand. When the sun came up, that would end. It would be hot. And the sun would kill them if they remained here.

  "How far are we from Jidrat?" he asked.

  Zoraya answered. "A few miles. Six or seven."

  "Can we walk?"

  'Tor a little time. But not in the heat of the day."

  "We have to walk," Durell said.

  "I will try," she said. "But Amr will not come with us."

  "We'll see about that," Durell told her.

  He went to the back of the truck. The nakhoda sat on the sand there. Durell looked inside and saw that Amr had not moved. He still stared sightlessly at the shame of his lashing.

  "Come on, Bogo. We've got to walk."

  "To Jidrat?"

  "Yes. To your grandfather, the Imam."

  "And when we get there?"

  "You will do what must be done. Come down out of the truck now."

  "I would rather die here."

  "But I don't want to die," Durell said. "And neither does Zoraya. Would you want her to die here like this, alone in the desert with no chance to get help?"

  Amr turned his head slightly and stared at Durell for a long time out of expressionless eyes. "She loves you," he whispered.

  "No."

  "She loves you. She is not mine now."

  "She has always been yours. Always. Before your wedding as children, and afterward. After the Al Murra took her, she was still yours. Why don't you believe her?"

  "Did she tell you this?"

  "And more."

  "I wish ... I would like to know the truth—and believe

  "Ask her again. You're not too proud now. Your pride has been humbled, Bogo. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe now you know what it is to be a human being, an ordinary mortal."

  "Yes. I know pain. And humiliation. And sorrow."

  "And fear?"

  "No."

  "Love?"

  "I have always loved her," Amr said quietly.

  He climbed down out of the truck.

  As he did so, the ground leaped with the explosion.

  The high scarp of limestone cliff stood clear and sharp, about a quarter of a mile away, seen through the desert night under the waning moonlight. The cliff dissolved in the explosion.

  Durell, who had been standing to face that way, saw the first streak of flame, the burst of white concussive force.

  He did not know where it came from or what caused it.

  The solid rock of the earth seemed to leap skyward, all in one movement, almost all in one piece. The sheet of flame spread. There were minor explosions, like a sub-harmony in some madman's symphony. The cliff leaped up and seemed to hang there against the face of the moon, and then it crumbled, broke apart and cracked into vast fragments that also seemed to hang against the sky before slowly falling with a v
ast, rolling thunder of sound that struck them like the force of a giant's blow.

  Wind and sand came first, and then sound—crushing them with the impact, driving them to the earth with the surprising blast. There seemed to be no end to it. Explosion after explosion rocked the desert and the night. Stones fell all around them, clattering on the flint, thudding into the sand.

  Durell shouted soundlessly into the blast arid threw Zoraya under the shelter, of the truck and then pulled Amr with him.

  The nakhoda was not so fortunate.

  A stone the size of a melon, jagged on one side, came arching invisibly from the broken cliff along with all the other stones, and it struck Abdhuahram in the back of the head. For one moment, he was aware of the sound of the earth's being torn apart, and for another moment he knew an anguished pain, and then he toppled forward and slid down the sand back toward the truck, his giant's body asprawl. He was already dead.

  Durell, hugging the earth, waited for the sounds to die. The whole thing did not last long, although at the time it seemed to take an eternity.

  When silence returned, deep and awesome, he looked at Zoraya!

  "Are you all right?"

  "Yes. But what—"

  "It was a storage dump for ammunition and supplies. Nothing else could have done that."

  "In the cliff?"

  "There are probably caves there/' he said. He looked at Amr. "And you? You're not hurt?"

  Amr was staring off into the desert. "Someone is coming/ he said. "It is a woman."

  Esme Kenton had remembered the gun, finally, after a long time. She did not know how much time went by before she thought of it. And-even then—when she found herself looking at the small, pearl-handled .28, the ridiculous little mechanism that Paul had given her so long ago—it had no meaning for her.

  It lay under the table in the cave where Messaoud had kicked it when she had failed to save Paul's life.

  She felt cold. Cold. The fat Arab with the huge paunch had finally let her alone. He sat near the mouth of the cave, looking out at the storm. She heard the wind for a long time without knowing what it was. She thought the sound of the storm and the sand was something inside her head because she ached all over, deep inside her body; because they had been cruel and brutal and deliberately tortuous to her. Messaoud had dragged her partly to one side after* the fat one was through—Messaoud, gasping and panting, with his bloody eye still dripping. Messaoud, however, had fainted, lying across her.

  She could feel his thin, bony weight across her stomach now. He had been quiet for a long time. The fat Arab sat at the mouth of the cave and talked to himself, but his voice was scarcely audible above the roaring tumult of the sandstorm outside.

  She waited for a long time.

  Once, she turned her head and looked at Paul's body. Then she turned her head away and did not look at him again.

  The storm had just ended when she realized she was looking at the forgotten gun.

  It was loaded. It was about four feet away.

  It could have been a million miles away because Messaoud still lay, sprawled out upon her, unconscious. He had stopped bleeding but she could feel where his blood had dried upon her naked leg. He was groaning softly with each breath he took. A sound that went, "Agh-sgh-uh," with a regular, hypnotic rhythm. The other Arab paid no attention to him, or to her now. He was only interested in the storm.

  She moved her left arm, the hand that was nearest the table. Just a little bit. An inch, and then another inch. Mes-saoud went on groaning. She tried not to move any other part of her body, not to awaken him. She knew that when he woke up and found himself blind in one eye—when it all came back to him—well, then he would kill her.

  So she had to kill him first.

  She felt very calm. She felt detached from the pain that lay in her body. She felt as if her hand had a life of its own, creeping toward the gun that lay in the shadows under the table.

  The gasoline lantern on top of the table sputtered and she thought it was going to go out; but then the hissing flame steadied and went on shining, with its garish brightness, on the inside of the cave.

  She got her arm stretched out straight away from her toward the table, as far as she could go, and then she tried to stretch her wrist and her fingers.

  The gun was too far away. She couldn't reach it.

  Messaoud groaned and moved. She lifted her hips as he shifted his weight, and she slid a few inches closer to the table.

  Not enough. She tried again.

  Messaoud rolled over her and his head fell from her hip and he hit the hard floor of the cave and became conscious again with a loud groan. He raised his head and looked at her and she saw the clotted horror of his torn eye and she saw the way his other eye looked at her and then she lurched up and grabbed the gun and caught it up in her hand.

  Messaoud shrieked a warning and then she rolled away and held up the gun and fired it. She saw the bullet go into his face, a small black hole dotting his hollow cheek like magic. She fired again, and then again, and Messaoud fell away from her and his body twitched. But she didn't go near him again.

  The fat Arab was on his feet in the mouth of the cave, staring stupidly at her.

  There were six bullets in the .28. She had used three on Messaoud. She spent two on the fat man, feeling very cold and sober as she shot him once in the stomach and once in the head. She knew the fat one was dead before he fell.

  Messaoud was groaning, flapping his arms, rolling around.

  Esme stood up slowly. She felt very strong and clear-headed.

  She walked across the cave to where Messaoud lay groaning and knelt beside him with the gun in her hand.

  "Messaoud, can you hear me?"

  "Yes, Englisi lady. Help me, Englisi lady."

  "All right, Messaoud."

  She put the gun to his ear and squeezed the trigger and sent the last bullet crashing into Messaoud's brain.

  She did not consider it an act of mercy.

  Now she felt very steady. She knew exactly what she had to do. She picked up her torn clothes and put them on quickly but carefully. She stared at the cave opening. Yes, the wind had died. The storm was over. She looked back only once, before she left the cave.

  "Good-bye, Paul, darling," she said. Then she went out.

  Paul had not told her where the arms cache was, but she knew. He didn't have to tell her. It could only be in one place—where he had been digging; in a new fissure he had mentioned last week and then never discussed again. When she had gone looking for it, alone, she had seen it was blocked up with stones. It was not far from the well of Ain Gemilha.

  That was where Paul had found the arms. She climbed down the path from the cliff to the narrow wadi where the Ford pickup truck was parked. She was surprised to see it still there, although there was no reason why it shouldn't have been. Still, it seemed as if it must have been someone else who drove out here with Messaoud so long ago, in the beginning of this night. Not Esme Kenton.

  It did not take long to do what she had decided upon. The wadi had sheltered the truck from the blowing sand. She had no trouble starting it. She saw by the position of the waning moon that it would soon be dawn. But that didn't matter. She backed out of the wadi and drove on down the road and in a very few minutes she was at the well of Ain Gemilha. There was a flashlight under the seat in the driver's cab. She took it out and went down the old, worn, circular stone stairway to the bottom of the cistern, where the sky was only a dim starlit circle above her.

  She went to work on the stones which Paul had used to block up the fissure. Her fingernails broke and bled, but she didn't feel it.

  The opening beyond was a tunnel that had been cut two thousand years ago by the pre-Nabateans who had built the walled town of Ain Gemilha. It was a common and wise practice in those ancient days to make sure of access to a water supply during times of war, when the town might be beseiged.

  The arms were stacked in here, in the tunnel that led to the top of the ancient
mound. Her flashlight touched stacks of boxes of ammunition, grenades, mortar shells, cannon shells, dynamite, rifles, machine guns, cartridge belts. Enough there to make sure the Q'adi could surprise his ally, Colonel Ta'arife, when the time was right for beginning his jihad against all the world.

  "Well, Esme," she said aloud.

  She laughed softly and forced open one of the wooden crates with a stone. It held grenades. She took one of the grenades and examined it carefully and saw that it was all right. Paul had once taken the trouble to show her such things when they found an abandoned arms dump in the Sahara desert, after the war.

  None of it took very long.

  She went down the tunnel to the entrance at the bottom of the cistern and there she pulled the pin from the grenade and threw it into the tunnel. Then she lay down flat on the hard, cold floor of the dry well.

  When the explosions were over and the earth stopped shaking and the stones stopped falling, she got up and climbed up the steps again.

  The Ford was wrecked. It could not be used. It did not seem to matter, however, and she started to walk along the road and presently she saw the truck and the two men— Durell and Amr—and the girl.

  The first pearly light of dawn touched the eastern sky as Esme Kenton walked up to them and told them what had happened and what she had done.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Colonel Ta'arife finished talking to his aides just as the first light touched the smoldering city. He met them in the Caf6 Ozmani, and the aides were not military officers who had joined in the revolt that so far, with Faiz still standing, seemed to be a failure. These men were an evil-looking crew, scoured from the slums of the city. They were professional street agitators, orators, rabble rousers who knew how to inflame a crowd with well-chosen slogans about imperialism, oppression, and exploitation.

  They listened and nodded their heads. Two of them yawned and grunted; they'd had a hard day yesterday. He told them they would die if they failed in this job. Many years ago, when Ta'arife went to Oxford in England, he was invited to partake of a typical English weekend that had included a fox hunt. He wished he could explain to these evil-looking men what a fox hunt implied; how the quarry was chivvied from covert to covert, driven and herded into position the way a sheepdog runs his herd of sheep. There was no way to explain all this. But he did the best he could. His men understood. They said they would be ready. Then he walked back through the empty streets that still had not wakened to the renewed growl of the mob that slept, spent from yesterday's exertions. It would begin soon. The animal would arise, the sleeping troops would yawn and scratch and drink their black coffee and look up at the loom of Faiz, above Jidrat, and they would wonder if today Allah would gather them all to his bosom in paradise. He walked back to the Hotel al-Zaysir feeling a renewed confidence. The only thing missing, of course, was a report from Messaoud. But he was sure that Messaoud would learn from the Englishman, through his wife, where the Q'adi's arms were hidden. After that, the future would be clear.