Assignment Afghan Dragon (4 page)

Mort Jones said, “Tell him, Annie. It’s something we don’t know what to do about. It’s too big for us. We don’t want trouble with the cops, either. We can all throw in with each other. Friendly, like. No need to argue or fight about it. You’d lose anyway, buddy. We’ve got you by the short hairs. So we’ll show you this thing, and afterward we can work out a deal, if you’ve got the right connections.” Mort laughed thinly. “Which we think you do. You don’t look like one of these businessmen sent over from the States by your corporation. There’s a smell about you, mister, that I could catch a mile away. You smell like a cop. But maybe not an honest cop. Maybe you’re not above a little deal, anyway.”

“I’m not a cop,” Durell said.

“Well, you’re something,” Mort argued. “Anyway, we don’t want to hang around here too long. The locals might come sniffing around any minute. So be a good fella, huh? And first off, throw your gun away. We’ve got you in our sights.”

Both men moved slightly, as if on signal, and Durell saw their weapons, snubby automatic rifles that outpow-ered his .38 beyond any chance of discussion. He was not too surprised. The girl moved quickly out of his reach, drawing back along the wall. All this time, the taller man, Charley Anderson, had left the talking up to the fat boy. Now Anderson spoke, his voice harsh as the desert Durell had left behind.

“You’ve got ten seconds, Durell.”

Durell said, “I’ll go with you. But I’ll keep my gun, if this is to be a friendly enterprise.”

“No. Toss the gun to Annie.”

Durell looked at the man’s rock-hard face and reached carefully for his weapon and held it flat in his palm, then threw it to the girl. She caught it deftly and backed away some more until she stood with her companions.

“Sensible,” Anderson said. “Now get up front in the van, between Mort and me. Annie, you get in the back.”

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

“What’s so big about this that you can’t handle it yourselves?”

“We can handle it, all right. But you could tell us something about it. Get in.”

They headed southwest, leaving Ur-Kandar and the lake with its shining Greek column behind them. They were on the road back toward the place where Fingal had died. Nobody rushed out to stop them. The sound of the VW van didn’t seem to disturb any of the sleeping villagers.

Mort Jones drove. There was an excitation in the fat man that disturbed Durell. Mort hummed, whistled softly, made clucking sounds with his tongue. He did not seem to be high on anything, however. He handled the little bus casually, his fat fingers drumming on the wheel. Now and then Durell felt the muzzle of Anderson’s gun grate against his ribs. He felt no desperate alarm as yet. Curiosity about this trio had risen within him to the danger point. Annie sat behind them, clinging for support as the bus jolted on the rough road. Now and them he glimpsed her face in the rearview mirror. She looked tense and a bit sad, her eyes inward-viewing.

The interior of the van was a surprise. Under the surface clutter of blankets, bedrolls, boxes of equipment that included shovels, rock hammers, and even mountain-climbing gear, the van was scrubbed spotless. The cooking utensils were stainless steel and copper, polished to a high shine, and neatly stowed. The contradiction troubled him. He wondered if it was the girl’s influence. Their outward appearance was only a facade. Perhaps Annie was brought up with a sense of tidy housekeeping. But the two men, under their casual grime, were equally meticulous.

The equipment was all relatively new and expensive, some of it from Abercrombie & Fitch, according to the labels. Either they had indulgent parents or their drug-smuggling operation was not as petty as it seemed.

“It looks as if you’ve been making out pretty well,” he said finally.

“We do okay,” Charley told him.

“You said you were from Philly?”

“Yes. Philadelphia.”

“How long have you been out of the States?”

“Only a couple of months. Mort, we’re coming up on it now.”

“I know,” the fat man said.

“It’s to the right, from this direction.”

“I know,” Mort said impatiently.

Durell said, “How were the Flyers making out when you last heard?”

“They’ll never win the pennant,” Anderson said. “Just shut up, Durell. If you aren’t a cop, you’re the next thing to it. Snooping around, estimating what we make, looking at our equipment—” Anderson’s gun pushed again at Durell’s rib. “We had a job for a while. All three of us. Annie here majored in archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania. Mort was. interested in geology until his folks bugged him so much he got rid of them.”

Durell turned his head to the driver. “How did you do that?”

Mort Jones giggled. “I killed ’em.”

Anderson said, “Cut the shit, Mortimer.”

“Well, I did, in a way.”

Anderson spoke to Durell. “We had a little job with the Berghetti expedition. Hunting old stuff here, and across the border in Afghanistan. I was straw boss for the gooks. You ever hear of Professor Berghetti? An Italian from the University of Milano. Pretty famous, I gather. Interested in Asian cultures, including China. You’re in with that stuff, too. We checked out your hotel room. Two -books in Chinese, Tao Te Ching, and all that stuff in ancient Chinese graphics. Surprised?”

“No,” said Durell.

“We were just curious about a guy who murders, that’s all.”

“I haven’t killed anyone lately,” Durell said.

Mortimer Jones snickered.

Anderson went on, his voice pedantic, “The old caravan routes used to come out of China and across the Gobi and the mountains and then forked out, some going west, some south to Afghanistan and Iran, which was Persia in those days, and a pretty nifty empire, too. I had long talks with the professor about it. He was looking for the remains of a treasure caravan that belonged to Prince Chan Wei-li, the son of the illegitimate Emperor Shu. The Prince only ruled for eighteen months and tried to establish himself permanently with alliances to the kings of Khwarizm, who offered a few thousand mercenaries to the Emperor to fight the Mongols. Caravans took a long time to travel here, of course. By the time it got here, both the Khwarizm dynasty and the Emperor had been deposed by the Mongols and things were in a mess. The caravan vanished. Had some priceless treasures—jewels, art work, gold, so forth. Sounds like a talltale, doesn’t it?”

 “These things happened,” Durell said.

“Anyway, the professor got some clues from some old Chinese scripts, detailing Prince Chan’s treasure, and more hints from some old Moslem scripts he studied in Meshed, and he was digging for the stuff. Annie, Mort and I helped him.”

“Did you find anything?”

“We’ll show you. Turn here, Mort.”

Durell knew he was in deadly danger.

Mort Jones turned suddenly toward an almost invisible goat track that led down through the barrens under the light of the moon. The fat man drove violently, and the turn shoved Durell hard against Charley. Anderson’s gun dug cruelly into his side again and the man smiled.

“You know all about Berghetti, don’t you, Durell? Your friend—the one we found dead—did he know about the dragon, too?”

Durell said flatly, “What dragon?”

“Come, come, Mr. Durell. None of us are as innocent as we appear, are we?”

The van jolted violently as Mortimer casually took it over sharp rocks and around a hairpin descent. The land here, which fell away to the marshes, was marked by a wide series of gullies, ravines and escarpments descending to the lower altitude of the Hamun Lake system. The wind that came through the van’s window was sharp and cold, blowing from the heights of the Mokran. In the moonlight, the land looked empty. Annie muttered something as the van jolted again. This was not the path he had taken earlier to find Fingal’s tortured body at the abandoned village. They had only gone about ten miles from Ur-Kandar. He turned to look at the girl. She half crouched, trying to keep her balance against the wild lurching of the vehicle as they ground downhill under Mort’s guidance. The girl’s eyes were a gray vacuum, sucking fight into their depths and giving nothing back. In the flickering light, he saw the two thin Chinese books he had found in Fingal’s room, among a scatter of other volumes he could not identify. The comers of the girl’s mouth trembled just a bit.

“Did you kill Fingal, Annie?” he asked.

Her voice was bland. “Was that his name?”

“You should know. How long have you been with Charley and Mort?”

“Long enough.”

“Which one is better in bed?”

Her voice was flat. “Fuck you,” she said.

The VW van jolted to a halt. A cloud of dust and sand boiled up around them briefly. Anderson reached out for the door handle and backed out and away, holding his weapon level.

“Come on out, Mr. CIA man.”

Durell did not argue his knowledge. He slid out, facing Anderson, and saw that Mort had stopped the van on a wide ledge of reddish stone, beyond which was a deep drop into a ravine filled with tumbled boulders and the dry bed of a river that didn’t seem to have flowed for centuries. The bottom of the little canyon was relatively flat, perhaps forty feet down, with a trail suitable for goats zigzagging down from the ledge. The rim of the moon touched the opposite height of the valley. He heard the VW door slam as Mortimer got out from behind the wheel. The springs of the van creaked. The girl used the rear doors. Durell ignored the automatic weapon in Anderson’s hands and walked to the edge of the narrow rock ledge where Jones had stopped the VW.

This part of the country had flourished ages ago, before the deserts crept in and the river dried up. He saw rains among the boulders, a few ancient columns of serpentine shape, half-shadowed, white against the black where the moon’s rays failed to reach. There was a Byzantine look to the ruins, although the village had never been much, and a crude dam downstream testified to the engineering capacities of the ancients who once flourished here.

“What do you think of that?” Anderson asked.

“Did Professor Berghetti dig here?”

“Hell, no. We found it ourselves and kept it to ourselves. Our private dig, see? We’d take time off from the main search area, which was south of here. The old prof didn’t seem to mind when we disappeared.”

“You never told him of this place?”

“As I said, we kept it to ourselves. We hoped we’d find the old man’s treasure. Of course, we figured most of it was just a pipe dream, but you never can tell.” Anderson shrugged his shoulders. “Let’s go down. We’ll show you what we found.”

“I’m not interested,” Durell said.

“Sure, you are. That’s why you came here, isn’t it? You and Fingal. You found something, that’s a fact. And that’s why Fingal is dead, right?” Anderson’s eyes were lost in deep pockets of shadow. “Well, let’s go down, anyway.”

“If you’re going to kill me, do it here,” Durell said. “We just want to show you what we found, and ask what you think of it.”

Mortimer Jones had advanced to stare down from the rimrock at the rains in the valley below. A little smile played on his fat lips. The girl stood a little apart from them, watching and waiting.

Durell said, “You’ll never get away with it. I figure Mortimer is your interrogator, right? He looks like he’d have fun in that sort of work. I guess he did the job on Fingal—cutting away the eyelids, emasculating 'him, all that. Mortimer tends to go overboard. It wasn’t a wandering band of brigands who caught Fingal. It was you three.” He turned to the girl. “Anya, did you enjoy watching what Mort did to Fingal?”

She said, “My name is Annie.” There was sudden alarm in her eyes. She looked at Anderson. “What’s the matter with him, anyway? Doesn’t he believe us?”

Anderson said, “He knows.”

Durell said, “
Tovarich
, you mentioned the Philadelphia Flyers not winning the pennant. They’re not a baseball team. They’re an ice hockey team. No pennants for them. Just the Stanley Cup. You had good training, fairly good schooling. But not good enough.”

He drew a deep breath. “You’re Russian. Soviet agents. All three of you.”

Mortimer made a hissing sound. Durell watched him with only part of his attention. The man was excitable and vicious, but it was apparent that Anderson gave the orders. Durell was a cautious man, but not one who refused risks. He had not made the statement that exposed Anderson’s cover without thought.

“We have to kill him,” Mort Jones said.

“No,” said Annie.

Anderson said, “Not yet.” He looked curiously at Durell. “You don’t really know why you are here, do you? They have not briefed you completely?”

“I’d like to know why you are here,” Durell said. “The Soviets have interests along the Afghani border, of course: So do the Chinese. But this masquerade? This searching for artifacts in the desert? Was it worth Fingal’s life?” He looked at Mortimer Jones’s sweaty face in the moonlight. “And do you usually work with such freaks, Anderson? Jones is not competent.” He switched suddenly, easily, to Russian. “Jones should be eliminated, not I.” Invective, foul and not distinguished by its inventiveness, poured from Jones like trash flowing along a sewer. Durell heard the girl draw a deep, weary breath. But most of his attention was centered on Anderson. The danger would come from that one; Anderson would make the decision. He did not know why they had performed their convoluted charade; it didn’t matter, at the moment. Just now, it was enough to consider the simple matter of survival.

Durell had a knife in a sheath fastened to the inner seams of his shirt collar at the nape of his neck. It could be pulled out hilt-first, fitting the palm of his hand in throwing position in split seconds. They had not searched him, except to take the .38, which Anderson had thrust into his wide belt. Durell had been trained in the use of the narrow, vicious blade at the Maryland “Farm” run by K Section, but he decided in that moment not to use it unless they tried to go over him more thoroughly.

Anderson moved his gun slightly. “We go down, Go-spodin Durell.” He jerked his head toward the man called Jones.

“Why? What’s down there?”

Jones grinned. “Perhaps the end of your career, Cajun. Yes, we know your code name. It’s been in our files for a long, long time. With a red tab attached to it. Which means, as you of course must know, that you are to be handled with extreme prejudice, as I believe your own official phrasing puts it.”