Assignment Afghan Dragon (7 page)

“Perhaps.”

“It will not fool Zhirnov.”

“Perhaps not.”

“And why did you tell Chadraqi to drive north if you intend to go that way, yourself?”

“Because Zhirnov might think that we, in turn, plan to go south. But we’re going north, too.”

“In the van?”

“Only part of the way. Then south, to Zahidan.”

“Ah, yes,” she said. “The airfield?”

“Yes.”

The girl drove the van with an easy expertise, and her competence put Durell’s nerves a bit on edge. In the dawn light, the road to Zahidan was occupied only by a few goatherders, a single camel-train, and once they were overtaken by a local bus that passed them with a blare of the horn and flash of light. As soon as they were away from the lake region, with its swamps and reeds and salty humidity, the desert quickly took over again. In this area of the world, at this time of the year, the average mean temperature stood at 120° normally. Today, Durell thought, it would be hotter than that.

Anya kept watch in her rear-vision mirror, but the rough, narrow dirt road behind them remained empty. There was no obvious pursuit. She looked different than she had yesterday, when she posed as a young American girl traveler. She drove as fast as she could, mindful of the oncoming heat of the day, and her long dark hair blew extravagantly in the wind. Now and then Durell studied her from the comer of his eye, and he knew she was aware of his scrutiny. She had a fine profile, a strong chin, a delicate and aristocratic nose. Her brows were naturally arched, and he doubted if she knew the techniques of plucking and reshaping them. Her underlip was full, almost sensuous, and her long, lithe body was rounded and womanly where it ought to be. Now and then the van lurched when they hit a pothole, and he was thrown against her. He could feel the warmth of her thigh through the light slacks she wore. They had not briefed her back in Moscow that it would be more appropriate in this country of Moslem tradition for her to wear skirts.

After a time he took Homer Fingal’s book of Tao poetry from the wide pocket of his bush jacket and studied it. It was a slim volume in Chinese Mandarin, bound in well-worn blue leather. Durell's knowledge of Mandarin was reasonably good enough for a sketchy translation as he opened it from the right side. The girl at the wheel gave him a sidelong glance.

“Yes,” she said, “your dossier in our files tells us you are versed in a number of languages. I do not read Chinese, however. Is the book yours?”

“It was Homer Fingal’s,” he said shortly.

“But Kokin was not certain, when he found it—”

“He doesn’t read Chinese, either, I gather. Pay attention to your driving, please.”

She looked away, her mouth compressed with dissatisfaction. Homer Fingal, as an Orientalist, had been competent and scholarly. As an agent for K Section, he had fumbled and stumbled and eventually fallen into the pit of death. And yet, Durell thought, there might be something . . .

Most of the little chapters, arranged in a format of poetry, consisted of negatives and contradictions, the teachings of Tao Te Ching in mystical and often baffling anomalies. Fingal had long ago underlined the most puzzling passages, judging by the pencil smears and well-thumbed pages of the booklet. Durell read:

Bend, and you will be straight.

Be empty, and you will remain full.

Be old, and you will stay new.

The Sage keeps to One, and becomes All.

He saw nothing helpful in the phrasing. He read another of the groups of characters:

Between yes and no there is no difference.

Between good and evil, is there a difference?

The ignorant are bright,

The witty are stupid.

Tao is a thing both visible and intangible;

But there is substance and essence in it.

All things in the Universe come from Being,

And being from non-being.

Returning is the movement of Tao 

And weakness is the appliance of Tao.

Durell put down the book for a moment. He saw nothing but obscure scholarly academics in Homer’s little book. Yet he had carried it with him to the rendezvous where he had met his death. The old underlinings meant nothing. Did the fact that it was simply Chinese have importance? That alone could be Homer’s message. Homer Fingal was supposed to have instructed him on how to find Nuri Qam, the Afghan Deputy Minister who had handled the case of Professor Berghetti and the objet d’art that was known as the Afghan dragon. Were the Chinese in on it as well as the Russians?

He read:

As Tao is to the world,

So are streams to the rivers.

The rivers become kings, rising and lowering. 

herefore the Sage, to be above the people, 

Must keep below them.

Another bus went by, coming from Zahidan. This one was crowded with locals, almost all men, their heads and bodies wrapped in ragged clothes against the dust. Anya had to pull off the road to let the juggernaut go by; there was no room on the narrow path for both vehicles. She clashed gears nervously as she started up again. The sun topped the edge of the plain to the east, and the first hot shafts struck the open pages of the Tao Te Ching book. It was then, in the slanting light, that Durell saw the thumbnail marks made by Fingal under certain passages.

The city of Tao is to the north.

The net of heaven is vast and wide,

But nothing escapes wisdom.

In the palace of the Sage there are no walls. 

In the house of Tao there were many windows. 

But no one truly lives there.

Durell closed the blue leather book. Homer Fingal might have been an erudite academician, more suited to library stacks than this cruel and brutal land, but he had managed to do his job. To the north was Meshed, a holy city. It was noted for its bazaar, a place of no walls and many windows, where the merchants did not live, but only carried on their trade.

He knew where to go.

He was in luck. There were two flights a week on a feeder line of Iran Air that flew from Zahidan to Meshed in the ostan of Rhorasan, and they had hit the right day. Anya had no objection as Durell bought their tickets, producing their papers for the lackadaisical clerk. Meshed was less than one hundred miles from the USSR border. Their flight was scheduled to leave at 0945. It was a flight of about 700 kilometers, and Durell figured that the approximate 400 miles could be covered in less than two hours, bringing them to Meshed about noon. They had almost an hour in which to wait, and they cleaned up in the primitive facilities available. He was a bit concerned about letting her out of sight, but she seemed as anxious to accompany him as before. There was a teahouse near the airfield, and Durell bought breakfast for them, paying less than fifty rials, and then got extra cups of hot tea, although the sunbaked airfield thermometer already registered 105°. Somehow, Anya managed to remain cool and fresh-looking. She bought a silk scarf for her long dark hair, and did not offer to share the expense of the plane fares when Durell paid for the tickets. White-necked crows perched on the telephone lines, and an occasional bus wheeled recklessly in and out of the airfield parking area. Durell put the van in the least conspicuous place he could find. The dust of their drive had obscured both the faded designs and the license plates. He locked it up, although he did not expect much to be left of the vehicle after the usual thievery of tires, wheels, and anything removable.

“Was there something you wanted to save out of it?” he asked the girl.

“No. Nothing. I never want to see it again. It stinks of Kokin. I don’t want to remember him.”

“But you were part of the team,” he said.

“I did not kill or torture your friend Fingal. I was left behind on the road, away from it all, to keep watch. I did not know what Zhirnov and Kokin planned to do.”

She turned away and sat down on a crude bench in the shade beside the hangar. Mechanics nearby were working on several planes, and there was a slight stirring of activity in the hangar shed as the bi-weekly flight was prepared. The girl’s face was somber as she regarded Durell.

“I am afraid of Zhirnov. I do not wish to be a failure in this mission, but I think that you and I, from our different nations, are only pawns in this matter. Our enemies are the same. We are being used as bait for bigger fish, and that is why I have left Zhirnov.”

“Were you lovers?”

She grimaced. “No.”

“Are you married?”

“No.”

“No men at all?”

“That is no concern of yours.” She sounded almost prim. “Are you not listening to me? Zhirnov, Kokin and I were sent out together, but I do not think we are employed by the same people. You and I have perhaps the same objectives. But the agencies we each work for have other goals, I think.”

“You’re being ambiguous.”

“Perhaps.” She shrugged. “I can explain no more.” “You can tell me what’s so damned important about this little dragon.”

“The dragon is only an excuse, this statue from old China. An excuse to blow up a small incident into a large war. It is encouraged by elements in your country and in mine, as well as in Peking.”

“Do you know where the dragon is?”

“If I did, I would not be sitting here, not knowing what to do.”

“Just what happened to Professor Berghetti, who found the thing in the first place?”

She shook her head and got up and went into the hangar. He followed her, but she only bought some local cigarettes and came back to the bench, blinking in the hot glare of morning sunlight. She struck a match to the cigarette and inhaled deeply, blew out the smoke, and looked gloomily at the waiting plane.

“I am sorry,” she said. “You seem to know where you are going and what you must do. I do not. Not any more. I must make some important decisions, and I am not prepared to do so, as yet.”

“Berghetti,” he urged her.

“Oh, he found the statuette, along with other old artifacts, in the Afghan area of the Seistan, near Qali-i-Kang. Berghetti was a foolish old man. He tried to smuggle it out across the border, but he was intercepted and arrested, and Pasha Nuri Qam, the Interior Deputy Minister, took charge of the case, claiming the art objects for Afghanistan. It all came out in the newspapers. Berghetti refused to tell where he had— how do you say it?—cached the dragon. Peking, of course, immediately claimed the objects and made very threatening pronouncements. But Berghetti himself, we think, was helped to escape from the jail by Mr. Nuri Qam, in order to retrieve the dragon from where the professor had hidden it. Since then, Qam has fled—he took an enforced vacation from his offices in Kabul— and he is believed to be in Meshed.” The girl crushed out her cigarette. “So we are going there, is that not so?”

“Yes.”

“You know Nuri Qam?”

“We went to the same university, back in the States. We were classmates.”

“Ah. Yale, I think?”

“You’ve been briefed about me,” Durell said.

“A little. We know more than you think. You are to find Berghetti, wherever he hides, retrieve the dragon, and give it back to the Afghan authorities, namely Nuri Qam. As a gesture of goodwill, international cooperation, yes?”

“Yes.”

“But it is not so simple, my friend.”

“I realized that when Fingal was killed by your team. Why do you want the dragon? What’s the USSR to do with it?”

“If I knew that, I would know why Colonel Cesar Skoll, my superior, is imprisoned and taken from this mission. I would know what Zhirnov’s and Kolin’s true orders were and why all this is so important to Moscow and Peking and Washington.”

“But you don’t know,” Durell said flatly.

“No. 1 feel that something is very wrong in this matter of the dragon, and that you and I are being used as fools by people in both our countries whom we would not approve of.”

“When did you last see Skoll?”

“He was arrested over two weeks ago.”

“He’s not a man who would care for prison,” Durell said. He remembered Cesar Skoll very well, from assignments in Malta and Morocco and Ceylon, where in the past their paths had crossed, mostly as competitors and deadly enemies, and sometimes as unwilling allies. He admired Skoll, had been amazed at the man’s brute strength, his quick wit, his unswerving honesty and dedication, his roaring laughter. Colonel Skoll was not a man who would go down easily.

Powerful forces must have been at work to remove him from this mission. Perhaps equal forces were at work back in Washington, controlling and manipulating his own efforts.

A loudspeaker announced their flight. Durell picked up his bag and motioned Anya to her feet. In the ramshackle waiting room, he saw the other passengers for the first time. There were no more than eight of them: an elderly German tourist and his tall, languorous blond young bride. There were two youthful Iranian officials, who despite the morning heat wore their dark coats and neckties as emblems of their office; a Chinese of uncertain age, wearing a white Panama hat; an Indian, very dark, with angry, defensive eyes; and two American businessmen, sharp and alert, carrying their attache cases as if they were boarding a commuter train from Manhattan to Greenwich.

The Chinese bobbed his head and smiled affably at Durell. He mentally flipped through the dossiers of Peking’s Black House agents, but the man’s face rang no bells. The blond German wife gave Durell a direct, appraising look; her stout husband grumbled in German about the heat.

Durell and Anya trailed after the little group.

“One more thing about your boss, Skoll,” he said. “Did you have a chance to speak to him before coming here with Zhirnov and Kokin? Did he give you any hint as to why he refused the mission and was subsequently arrested?”

She frowned. “Only briefly. Skoll is old-fashioned, you see. He feels protective toward women, despite feminine freedom in socialist society. He only told me to be very careful.”'

“In what way?”

“He suggested that Zhirnov was—headstrong? And apt to cause unnecessary difficulties. Skoll had nothing but contempt, of course, for Leonid Kokin. A mere assassin.”

“Did Skoll expect to be arrested?”

“Oh, yes. He was clearing out his desk when we last spoke to each other.”