Assignment Afghan Dragon (2 page)

He took his time destroying the identity of the Chevrolet as much as possible; he removed the license plates and buried them in the sand at some distance, smoothing the sand into wind ripples to conceal the cache. He could do nothing about the serial numbers on the engine. On the back seat he found two books, slim volumes that were well-dog-eared and annotated: the first was a collection of classical, monochrome, black-and-white paintings ranging from the tenth to the eighteenth centuries, with quite adequate reproductions of Mu Ch’i’s tiger and Lo Chih-Ch’uan’s delicate landscapes. One page had been turned down over an illustration of a thirteenth-century print of Ma Lin’s, a misty storm of black ink. The text was in Chinese, and the word ch’i-yiin, spirit resonance, had been underlined.

It didn’t seem to mean anything.

The second book was a thin volume of Taoist poetry and interpretation, also in Chinese, by the Chinese scholar Ch’u Ta-kao. Durell opened the yellowed leaves at random.
Tao produces all things. Virtue feeds them. All things appear in different forms and each is perfected by its innate power.

Durell put both books in his bush jacket pocket and turned away to climb the hill back to the highway.

The sun was lower now, but the impact of its heat struck as forecefully as before. The wind had died completely. Durell moved faster now, not looking back at Fingal’s body. In a few moments, the abandoned oasis was out of sight and below him. Sweat stained his back. He started to put his gun away, tucking it into his belt, and then he saw the roof of his Toyota and saw that another vehicle was parked behind it, and he remembered the rumbling sound of a passing car or truck on the rough, graveled road while he was down below. The vehicle had not passed. He stopped short and listened and presently heard voices, a male, another male, and then a female giggled. It sounded harmless enough. Even reassuring. He swung right, keeping below the rim of the road embankment, and when he had gone about fifty yards, he climbed again and came out on the road behind the two cars parked there.

The second vehicle was a VW van, ancient, rusty and dusty to the point where the original painting, all sworls and blobs, was barely visible under the coating of desert sand. The license plate was Afghani. This place was, after all, only about forty miles from the Afghan-Iranian border.

The two young men and the girl seemed unarmed and harmless enough, and he did not think they were aware of his presence behind them, as they explored his Toyota, climbing in and out with a youthful, animallike curiosity punctuated by the girl’s laughter and the men’s comments. He was being ripped off. They had removed his extra jerry cans, his spare water tank, his battered leather luggage. They were speaking to each other in English— American accent—and apparently enjoying themselves. One was smoking a cigarette, but he could not smell the smoke from here and couldn’t be sure if it was pot or just plain tobacco.

“Hey!”

The fat one had turned, lugging the plastic water can, and saw him standing there, a tall, enigmatic silhouette against the lowering sun.

“Hey, people,” the fat one said.

They all turned to stare at him, guilt and some surprise on their faces, changing in a swift blur to defiance and animosity, even resentment, that their thieving game was about to be interrupted.

“Hey, Charley.”

The taller one, thin and dark-haired, with a strange intensity that could be dangerous, hooked his thumbs in his wide, brass-studded belt. They were all bare-footed, dirty, unkempt in blue jeans, tie-dyed, and shirts of ancient stripes that hadn’t seen wash-water for some time. The girl, also dark-haired, slim and somehow of better quality than the two men, tossed back her long black hair. She grinned slowly. The fat one looked worried, holding the water can. The thin one happened to be empty-handed, and Durell watched his dirty toes curl slowly and tensely into the dust of the road.

“So there he is,” the girl said. Her voice hinted at distant cultivation. “No more fun and games. My, he looks angry. Mister, we just found your car and figured it was broken down and you went off somewhere on a lift.”

“Nature called,” Durell said.

“My, aren’t we delicate; ha-ha, you had to take a crap, you mean?”

Durell kept his eyes on the tall, dark one with the angry, intense eyes, who said, “Shut up, Annie . . . You American?”

“Yes.”

“We were borrowing some of your stuff. Finder’s keepers, we figured.”

“Put it back,” Durell said.

“Sure.”

“All of it.”

“Sure.”

“Now.”

“My, my,” the girl named Annie said. “Isn’t he the hard-nosed establishment type, Charley.”

Charley was the dark man with the curled toes. The fat boy turned and tossed the water can back into the rear seat of the Toyota. The can was heavy, but he made the gesture without effort; he was stronger and harder than he looked. The girl shrugged and swung Durell’s luggage into the back seat, too. The man named Charley kept staring, motionless, at Durell.

“What’s down there?”

“Nothing,” Durell said.

“There are some old tracks.”

“They go to a dry well. Some abandoned houses. What’s your last name, Charley?” Durell asked. “Anderson.”

“Are you going to start something?”

The man’s eyes touched the gun in Durell’s belt. His teeth gleamed in a vague smile. His eyes were hard and reluctant. “I guess not.”

“Good.”

It was not uncommon to spot American youths in this desolate part of the world. Marijuana, hash and heroin were cheap and easily available. Some of them had gone into petty smuggling; they became minor entrepreneurs, supplying the big drug syndicates; they survived that way. Others often gravitated to the larger towns like Kabul, and gave blood donations to gain the money needed to support their habits, if they were too far gone to be enterprising on their own. This trio, with their van, looked relatively affluent, despite their outward grubbiness. Durell would not have been surprised to learn that their college degrees, came from prestigious Ivy League universities.

The girl, Annie, said, “Oh, hell, let’s get going, Charley.”

Charley was the obvious leader. He said nothing. His fat young friend stepped on his cigarette and began picking at Ms nose, engrossed in what he found there. The girl moved toward Durell with a defiant swagger, a swing of ample hips, a jiggle of her breasts under the shirt that made it plain she disdained a bra.

“And what’s your name, stranger?” she asked, mocking a Western accent.

“Durell,” he said.

“I’m Annie Jackson. You know Charley Anderson. Mortimer—Mort Jones here—is tripping a bit. You don’t mind?”

“It’s your business,” Durell said.

“We’ve been here a couple of months. It’s a real trip. Where are you headed for? You with one of tire oil companies?”

“Ur-Kandar,” Durell said.

“That’s the next village, huh?”

“Yes. And you?”

“We, too.”

Their car was headed in the wrong direction, but Durell said nothing about it. He watched Mort and Annie reload his Toyota. Charley’s toes slowly uncurled in the dust of the road. Finally he bobbed his head, as if he had made a decision, having absorbed all of Durell with his intense, angry eyes, and then he joined his companions.

Nothing more was said. Hostility lingered in the air, wavering like the heat waves over the barren landscape. Durell saw that Anderson had spotted the vultures high in the sky, but perhaps that didn’t mean anything to him. In a few minutes, Durell’s possessions had been reluctantly returned to his vehicle.

As he swung into the Toyota behind the driver’s wheel, he heard the girl calling to him. He switched on the ignition, but then he felt an urgent thump as Annie’s hand slapped the side of the car, and he paused. She was not alone. Charley Anderson stood a few steps behind her, his thick black brows twisted into a glowering scowl. The girl held something out to Durell.

“Please. I’d like to apologize.”

“What is it?”

“Take it. A peace offering,” she said, smiling.

“That’s not necessary.”

“Please.”

Close up, her features were clean and regular, and if she were less unkempt and tidied up, she might even have been beautiful. Her long dark hair was thick and lustrous, even through the desert dust; her mouth was perhaps a bit too wide, but the lower lip was full and generous. Her eyes were gray, dancing with amusement above fine, rather high cheekbones. Her body was lithe, perhaps a bit too thin—was she hungry?—but she had long, sturdy legs, seen through the tight jeans, and equally sturdy hips and thighs.

He saw that what she offered him were two small plastic packets containing a smidgin of white powder in each. Her smile coaxed him.

“Maybe you’d enjoy it,” Annie said.

“Do you like being a pusher?” he asked.

“Oh, no. It’s nothing like that. This is just by way of apology. And we’ve got plenty.”

Charley Anderson said, “Come on, Annie. He’s too straight.”

“Well, I don’t want him angry at us. He’s a fellow American, after all.”

“I’m not angry,” Durell said.

He thought the urgency in the girl’s gray eyes was more than the situation called for, but he couldn’t fathom the expression there, and after a moment of staring at her, he put the Toyota into gear and drove away, leaving them and the multicolored van lost in a cloud of dust behind him.

Ur-Kandar was a small village beside a tributary lake to Lake Hamun, with one or two modem houses of concrete block and tin roofs, and the rest of mud walls, clusters of Asian compounds along the marsh, briny shore. It was clear that the new dams on the Afghan side of the border, along the Helmand and Khash Rivers, were playing havoc with the water levels here in Iran. The main industry was the weaving of
assirs
, reed window shades, and round boats also made of reeds. The mountains of the Mokran, southward in Baluchistan, loomed with bristling peaks against the horizon. The area was a wide, interconnected series of lakes and ponds and marshlands, trapped between the sands of the Dasht-i-Lut and the mountains. Durell assumed that the far side of the lake, which looked deceptively inviting in the afterglow of the setting sun, was Afghanistan. There were telephone and power lines in Ur-Kandar, and he saw that there was a central post office and Phone Central near the assir factory. The Phone Central was marked with the dusty, flaking royal emblem of Iran. A metal Coca-Cola sign hung beside the emblem, marked with Farsi script.

He saw no other cars along the dusty, twisting street where the houses presented their backs to the public, behind high compound walls. At the far end, where the lake shore began, a single mined Greek column thrust against the purpling sky, and Durell wondered if any of Alexander’s armies had marched through this place long, long ago.

The smell of food cooked over charcoal fires pervaded the air, and he realized he was hungry. The police station stood next to the central telephone office, opposite a small faience-decorated mosque, and beyond that was a caravanserai, and old inn with a central courtyard and rickety wooden balconies overlooking the dirt square where several camels and sheep from a Baluchi caravan were already bedded down for the night. The Baluchi, tall proud men in black robes and black tents, watched their stately women preparing their meals over charcoal and camel dung fires. A melodic chanting in deep masculine voices came from somewhere along the lake shore, where several reed fishing boats were drawn up with masts canted against the darkening sky. Just next to the old Greek column, whose majesty still defied more than twenty centuries, was the serpentine minaret above the local mosque.

“Sir? I think very much the accommodations may not be satisfactory—”

The clerk’s voice came in Farsi. Durell answered in kind, aware that he had grown a bit rusty in its use since his last visit to Tehran.

“A single room, please.”

“Luckily, we are not crowded; the Baluchi use their own tents, but there are few amenities for
ferengh
i. And the room will cost one hundred rials—”

“That’s too much. I’m not a stranger here.”

“No, you speak our language quite well. We can arrange it, perhaps, since the true proprietor is away in Hormak on family business, may it be successful, Allah willing.”

The clerk’s desk was simply two boards placed across two rusty oil drums. An old oil lantern, of the type once used on railways, provided the only light in the tiny cubicle that faced the entrance to the inner courtyard. Smoke drifted in from the nomad cooking-fires.

“My name is Chadraqi,” said the clerk. “I would suggest you place your car behind the inn. There is a little fencing there, and a shed. Lock it up well and remove what you consider valuable, sir. The boys in Ur-Kandar are thievish. They are only playful, but it might prove annoying.”

Durell envisioned the Toyota stripped of wheels and everything moveable. He slid an extra fifty-rial note across the rough counter.

“Let me hire a man to guard it, then.”

“Yes, sir.” Mr. Chadraqi was pleased. “You are generous. I can get a most reliable man, my brother-in-law, in fact, who can be trusted to remain awake all night—”

“See that he does. And one more thing.”

The clerk was expectant, balancing on tiptoes. “Yes, sir?”

“I will need the telephone.”

“Ah, sir, that is only open and available for two hours each day, except Friday, from ten o’clock in the morning until the noon prayers.”

“Who is in charge of the office?”

“I am, sir.”

Durell smiled. “And of course, you can open it for me?”

“That would be against government regulations, I am afraid.”

“Rules are meant to be bent, if not broken.” He put another note on the plank table. He knew he was being robbed, but the thought of Fingal, and visions of his lid-less blind eyes staring into the sun, troubled him even more than before, and he felt impatient.

The deal was quickly made. In an hour, the clerk would be free. He offered to send up dinner, a stew of mutton and eggplant called
khoreshe bandijan
, prepared by his wife, which Durell accepted, along with a pot of thick, hot tea. His room had a small water faucet, of which Mr. Chadraqi was inordinately proud, and Durell could wash there, he said.