Assignment Afghan Dragon (17 page)

“Nonsense. He must be. When you recover the dragon, you must call me, then go to Qali-i-Kang and I will arrange for Berghetti to be released into your custody. Further instructions will follow.”

“All right. Take care, Nuri.”

“I will, I will.”

Durell got a second call through to Sarah Fingal’s apartment in Meshed. For four rings, the phone was not picked up, and he was afraid she could not be reached. Then he heard her quiet, subdued voice.

“Oh, Sam, are you all right?”

“Not really, Sarah. I need more help.”

“I really don’t want any more to do with this. I’ve been in touch with General Wellington. The man is a beast. This affair killed Homer, and he doesn’t seem to care a bit.” She paused. “What do you want from me now?”

“Check back with McFee in Washington. I want all the latest in Nuri Qam’s dossier. If K Section doesn’t have it, NSA’s computer at Fort Meade will, I’m sure.”

“Just what are you looking for?”

“Nuri Qam’s brother has allegedly been in Tehran. Name is E. Dochi Chagha Qam. He’s an art collector. You might also get the latest rundown on Nuri’s background, his travels in recent years, political associates, his problems in Kabul.”

“Is something wrong about Nuri?”

“Something is wrong with everybody in this thing, Sarah. Will you do this for me?”

“I will,” she said reluctantly. “For Homer’s sake. How will I get in touch with you?”

“I’ll call you from Qali-i-Kang.”

“That’s a godforsaken place.”

“That’s where the dragon was found,” Durell said.

His luck continued to improve. He took Anya back to the hotel and found the young trio, Howard and George and Lucy, desolate. They were the usual run of American student wanderers; their lines of survival still ran back to the bank accounts of their establishment parents.

Lucy had lost their money.

The little hotel room was thick with their gloom. Lucy was weeping, doing a
mea culpa
bit, and the tears had not improved her few attractions. Her long nose was red, her hair disheveled. She sat cross-legged on the floor by the window, while George, with his pigtail awry, berated her. She looked as if the world had dissolved under her feet.

“I don’t know
what
happened!” she protested, and hiccupped. '‘One minute I had the purse, the next it was gone! I don’t even know when it disappeared or was taken.”    

George pulled at his pigtail nervously. “You bitch, I can’t ask for more money from back home, right now.”

“I know,” Lucy said ruefully.

Durell spoke from the doorway. “So you’ll have to skip sightseeing here in Herat, okay?”

Lucy looked tearful. “What do you mean?”

“I’ll pay you—the three of you—a thousand dollars to take Annie and me south—as fast as you can drive.” “Jesus, a capitalist,” George sneered.

Durell said, “The local fuzz doesn’t take kindly to young Americans who are broke and ready to panhandle. This place is the Ritz compared to the local jail. They’ll probably slap a drug smuggling charge on you, too, unless you come up with a heavy bribe of bread, which you can’t do.”

Lucy hiccupped again. “I wanted to see Herat—” “Another time,” Durell said. “We’ll get gas and an extra jerry can and be on our way. Right now,”

Lucy climbed awkwardly to her feet. Her shoulders were slumped. George looked greedy. Howard was amused.

“All right, Mr. Durell,” Lucy said mournfully.

It was two hundred miles from Herat to Chakhansur near the border, beyond Farah; the latter half of the way was on a dubious secondary road. The distance was deceptive. There were river fords along the Harut River, mountain passes toward Sadzawar, where the eastern peaks lifted to 12,000 feet. More mountain passes at Farah, and then the Khash Desert, through which the Khash River flowed to lose itself in the salt marshes and the Helmand lakes. The Afghanis were building dams along the Helmand and Khash-Rud, to the annoyance of the Iranians in the Seistan
ostan
across the border. The best bus schedule, as Durell had discovered, was a journey of about three days by road. And at the end of it was the Dasht-i-Margo, another desert of burning bare rock and sand, before they could reach Qali-i-Kang near the junction of the Helmand and Khash Rivers.

They left Herat at noon, heading south. The girls slept in the back of the van while Durell took the wheel from Howard. The two young men sat in sullen silence beside him. Altogether, Durell estimated they were at least ten hours behind Zhirnov in the Ferrari. But the Ferrari was not built for the questionable roads ahead, and its highway speed would be negated as they moved south.

The van had surprising power, and he negotiated the rising hills and twisting passes south of Chahar Burjak with no problems. The mild weather of Herat soon yielded to a harsh heat raised by the flashing, reflected sunlight on bare, scorched rock. The temperature began to drop as they climbed up through the first mountain passes. Durell took the hairpin turns fast, to the point where both Howard and George looked a bit fearful. The road itself was not the only hazard. There were no railroads in Afghanistan, and commercial traffic was by truck, and the truck drivers drove with hair-raising abandon that created problems whenever one came their way. Durell’s face was set. He did not slacken speed at any time, whatever games of chicken the oppositing drivers tried to play.

It was during a relatively quiet interlude that George pulled out the antenna of a powerful shortwave radio receiver, sat it on his lap, and thrust the antenna out of the van window and began to fiddle with the dials—presumably to get his mind off Durell’s driving. Their elevation at the time was quite high, south of Chahur Burjak, and reception was loud and clear. For a few moments, they picked up Turkomen and Russian stations, then for just an instant as George idly turned the dials, Durell heard the flat no-nonsense news reports in Mandarin from Peking.

“Turn it back,” he said.

“It’s just Chinese. You understand Chinese?”

“He does,” Howard said. “Like me. Maybe he learned it in Nam.”

“Man, what are you, Durell?” George complained. “Some kind of cop, or something?”

“No.”

“A spook, then. Anybody who understands Chinese—”

“Turn it back, Georgie,” Howard said.

The news report came in crisply. It recounted the accidental death of General Chan Wei-Wu in a Peking suburb from a gunshot wound. The Deputy Chairman expressed his regrets. A Madame Strelsky was also a victim of the shooting. A successor to the General would shortly be named to the General’s post. And that was all.

Durell nodded to George, who promptly picked up a pseudo-rock band from Bucharest. Durell wondered what was really happening in Peking. But it occurred to him that nothing would stop Mr. Chou from continuing his search for the dragon unless he, too, learned the news.

It was past noon when they came down into the valley of the Harut for their first ford of the shallow, rippling river. Five miles later, as they climbed the opposite hills toward Qali Adraskan, they came upon the Ferrari.

The wreck was about a mile away. Apparently Zhirnov, no Grand Prix driver, had taken a wrong turn onto a road that petered out into a goat track along a barren spine of the mountains. Durell turned off also, to follow the track, driving with care. Except for the one spot from which he had spotted the wreck, it was invisible from the main highway. Up here, the wind was still like a blast furnace, and the sun’s heat bounced off the glittering rocks in waves of fury. No one was in sight. Far below, he glimpsed the winding curves of the Harut Rud. There was a small village at a bend where a local dam had been built. But where the Ferrari lay was only a place for goats and wandering tribesmen.

Possibly hyenas, too, Durell thought as he braked the van. The wreck could not have occurred more than a few hours ago, yet the Ferrari had been picked clean of every removable part by human scavengers.

He picked up Howard’s Remington and stepped down to the hot stony path, fifty yards from where the sports car rested without wheels, tires, and possibly even the engine.

“I thought you were in a hurry,” Howard asked.

“I am. But there’s a time for care, too.”

“Nobody’s around,” George said petulantly.

“We don’t know that.”

“I heard these hills are dangerous,” Lucy observed.

“Yes. Stay in the van. You, too, Annie.”

Anya shook her head. “No, I’ll go with you.”

A high cliff of soft stone loomed to the south, the rock reddish, reflecting the white sky with a bloody glare. The cliff was eroded by several canyons, filled with crumbled rock, that led upward to the farther summit.

“Zhirnov wouldn’t still be here,” Anya murmured.

He gave her the rifle. “Just the same, cover me. If not Zhirnov, there may be a few tribesmen who don’t care for strangers poaching on their territory.”

“But we’re wasting time—”

“There’s a Kalashnikov automatic in the Ferrari that I don’t think anyone could have found,” he said. “And I want it.”

But the deck over the Ferrari’s luggage space had been removed, he saw. He walked closer, careful of his footing on the treacherous shale. Nothing green grew here. Certainly there was no reason for Zhirnov to have turned off, except through error. The wind made a thin whining sound as it came down the narrow canyons nearby.

“But where did he go?” Anya murmured. “If he wasn’t hurt in the wreck, maybe local tribesmen took him—”

“No signs of violence,” Durell said. “Zhirnov would land on his feet somehow, go south in some way.”

He came to a halt beside the wrecked car. Something was wrong in the atmosphere, but he could not define it. He listened to the wind and felt the hot sun on the nape of his neck. He walked around the car, not touching anything. There was no blood on the leather seats, no bullet holes, though the glass on the right side doors were starred and shattered. The stony ground yielded no footprints. He came back to the rear of the wreck and looked deep into the open trunk, remembering the secret compartments Nuri Qam had described, the method of pressing at opposite diagonal comers to get at the automatic rifle and the storage compartment there. Both flaps were open. He felt inside. No gun. No dragon box. His fingers ran rapidly around the edges of the secret flaps. No gouges, knife marks, nothing to indicate that the small doors in the luggage area had been forced open.

He straightened—and the sound of a single rifle came with a sharp, rolling report that echoed back and forth from the rocky mountainside.

The bullet hit the car with a sharp thud. Durell dived for Anya and threw her flat to the stony ground. The girl gasped, moved under his weight, tried to rise.

“Keep down,” he snapped.

“Is it—Zhirnov?”

“Maybe just thieves, hill people.”

They waited. In the van behind them, the trio of young people watched with puzzlement. They did not get out of the vehicle. He carefully raised his head and surveyed the washed-out canyons. He saw nothing. Sunlight flashed on the sharp bits of rock that littered the slopes. Any of the glintings could have been the reflection off a rifle barrel. He raised himself up.

“Crawl under the car, Anya. It will be safer.”

She said, “You feel you must protect me?”

“Why not?”

“Then you must trust me now?”

He was not about to engage in that topic just at the moment. When the girl rolled under the protection of the car, he stood up and raced for the nearest canyon mouth, using a zigzag direction to confuse die ambushers. But there were no other shots. Except for the wind and the swift crunch of his boots on the shale, there was no sound. He paused, clearly exposed, aware of something very wrong.

“Zhirnov!” he called.

The reply was little more than a groan.

“It is I. Chou. That was my last bullet.”

Durell swore and scrambled up the rocky slope toward the voice. His gun was ready, and he was aware of the danger of a trap, of imminent death. He climbed on.

He found Mr. Chou, the Chinese Black House agent, behind a large boulder that was precariously balanced against the tilted rubble filling the canyon. The stout Chinese lay on his back, and the rifle he had used for his single ambush shot had fallen away, out of reach. The man’s white suit was dusty and torn, and one of the round lenses in his glasses was broken. Durell bent and removed the rifle and checked the action. The chamber was empty. He tossed the weapon away and knelt beside Chou.

“What happened here?”

“Death has come to me here,” Chou said. He made a face of pain. “Not unexpected. But it is very painful. I was shot in the back.”

“Zhirnov?”

“He escaped. I do not—know where.”

“You tried to ambush him?”

“I—Freyda and I—yes. We knew he was coming this way. I had some greedy tribesmen with me. They preferred to loot the car to doing what I paid them to do.” Mr. Chou moved his round head in negation. “My legs are not mine. The sun grows dim. I wish I had reached you with my last shot. I waited and waited. I directed the tribesmen to set up false barricades on the highway and led him here. But Zhirnov was too quick.”

“Where did he go?”

“I do not know. I—”

Durell said flatly, “But it was all useless, Chou. The General is dead. The report came over the Peking radio. He and his mistress are dead. Did you know she was Freyda’s sister? The hawks in Peking have no leader now. You have no employer. There will be no further pressures from Peking over the dragon.”

Chou was silent a long time. Durell thought he was dead. Then his eyes blinked. “This is the truth?”

“I would not lie to you now.”

“But the dragon—”

“Zhirnov has it.”

The man’s breathing was erratic, and Durell could see the pool of blood under his back, where the shot that had finished him broke his spine.

Durell said, “You’re sure Freyda was taken?”

“Yes.” Chou had trouble breathing. “My grandfather—I was a little boy—belonged to old China. He was full of moral maxims. ‘A single false move loses the game,’ he would say. Or, ‘Knowledge is boundless; but one man’s capacity is limited.’ I thought I had forgotten those sayings . . . The General is truly dead?”