Duel of Assassins
Authors: Dan Pollock
DUEL
of
ASSASSINS
Dan Pollock
Tusitala Press
The
line from the
Hagakure
in chapter ten is quoted from
The Way of the
Samurai
by Yuko Mishima, translated by Kathryn Sparling, copyright © 1977,
Basic Books, Inc., New York
This
book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either
the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual eents or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.
Copyright © 1991 and 2014 by Dan Pollock
All rights reserved
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
(from 1992 Pocket
Books edition):
This novel and its writer owe a considerable
debt to the following:
for making it all possible, Angela
Rinaldi;
for making it happen, Jed Mattes and Bill
Grose;
for editorial acumen and persistence,
Dudley Frasier;
for unflagging collegial support, Douglas
Clegg;
for structural insight and tutorial zeal,
James Sewell;
for guidance in Soviet matters, Paul
Goldberg;
and for invaluable technical assistance:
Lt. Col. Harold Barr, USAF (Ret), Kenneth
Goddard,
David and Marie-Luise Pal and Ted
Zahorbenski.
By the same author:
Lair of the Fox / Orinoco / The
Running Boy / Precipice
The author welcomes comments and
questions on his blog:
http://danpollock.blogspot.com
Or email:
[email protected]
For Constance, my darling wife
“The only tough part is the
finding out what you’re good for.”
—Owen Wister,
The Virginian
Lake Lugano, Italy–Spring, 1991
He wasn’t sure whether he was in hiding, or early
retirement. He’d led an active, Odyssean life. Dropout and hitchhiker at
seventeen, carnival roustabout at eighteen, blue-water sailor and international
vagabond at nineteen. Then, by dizzying turns in his twenties, he became a
political defector, special forces commando, assassin and fugitive.
Now, in his mid-thirties, youth’s roller-coaster ride seemed
pretty well over. It had deposited him on a tranquil Alpine lake—a still-young
man with an incredible past and no discernible future. And with nothing to do
on this cloudless morning but guide a slightly-bigger-than-bathtub-size
sailboat across sparkling sapphire water in a sigh of wind.
Or maybe blow his brains out.
Or start all over.
Another possibility was that someone would track him down
and blow his brains out for him, or—more exotically—jab him in the buttocks
with a poison-tripped umbrella.
A final one was that there would come one last summons from
the General. But that possibility was daily diminishing. The General, exiled
and apparently under virtual camp arrest, continued to concoct his grand plans
and promulgate them along his secret network. But the time to act on those
plans was rapidly slipping past. The General was on the point of becoming a
relic, ending up very much as had old Chiang Kai-shek on his tiny island,
shaking a withered fist at the mainland colossus. Events were passing the old
soldier by. The summons must come soon, or not at all.
And if it did not come, the still-young man would have to
think seriously and quickly about turning his hand to something new. Or, more
likely, set about marketing his hard-won lethal skills, since he didn’t fancy
being a hired yachtsman again and couldn’t imagine working indoors.
In harmony with these mental meanderings, he tacked the tiny
boat lazily back and forth across the rippled mirror of Lake Lugano on the
Swiss-Italian frontier. Each swing of the little boom and windslap of miniature
mainsail carried him a bit nearer the spot from which he’d pushed off an hour
before—the steeply terraced, picturebook village of Gandria at the foot of
Monte Brè, five kilometers east of the town of Lugano.
The final tack fetched him perilously near the seawall
windward of his
albergo
, before he rounded dead into the wind, then
backed the main and used the rudder in reverse to drift back slowly under the
corrugated tin roof of the ramshackle quay. The hotdog landing was completely
wasted on a pair of muscular, Nordic-looking girls waiting impatiently to take
the boat out. One of them grabbed the bow line from him as he stepped off.
“Sie kamen dreizehn Minuten zu spät!”
she said,
poking her sportwatch. “You are late thirdeen minutes!”
“Sorry, ladies. Ran into some nasty weather out there.” He
smiled as he trotted past them up the half-dozen steps to the albergo’s
terrace. He settled at an empty table, extending his long, bare legs to a
nearby plastic chair and was presently provided his standard morning
fare—cappuccino, roll and the
International Herlad-Tribune
printed in
Zürich.
Whatever he was doing in Lugano, he really oughtn’t
complain. The morning sunlight was a benediction, the onshore breeze fanned him
attentively, the terrace was bright with flower boxes, and a sparrow on the
railing was eyeing his breakfast cheerfully. The only imperfection was a wet
itch under his bathing suit from sitting too long on a waterlogged boat
cushion.
He folded the newspaper back to the sports pages. Another
baseball season was under way. He hadn’t seen a game in nearly twenty years,
yet it was still comforting to scan the agate-type hieroglyphs of standings and
box scores, old teams with new players, all conjuring the slow summer game.
With less enthusiasm he flipped back to the headlines. The
world had changed so drastically in recent years that his long-ago defection
now seemed almost quaint. The East-West twain and European powers were getting
ready to meet again in mid-July, he saw, at yet another symbolic site—Potsdam,
where the Allies had assembled in ’45 to divide the defeated Germany. The
ongoing wrangle over European realignment was expected to top the agenda, with
everyone scrambling for a piece of the big new pie.
He was skimming the tedious story when the breeze riffled
several pages and his eye was caught by a by-line on an opinion piece.
Charlotte Walsh was a Washington-based columnist specializing in foreign
affairs. She was also an attractive lady whom he’d spotted several times on a
correspondents’ roundup shown on CNN’s European feed. He’d paid special
attention because his contacts told him she was presently sleeping with an old
rival. Small-world department.
She, too, was writring about Potsdam:
WASHINGTON—In
the aftermath of yesterday’s surprise announcement that Potsdam’s Cecilenhof
Palace is going to be dusted off for the next round of multinational summitry,
perhaps a few random observations and speculations may be indulged. One
wonders, for instance, if the Soviet members of the selection committee somehow
prevailed over their North American and Euoprean counterparts. For Soviet
President Alois Rybkin is known to have a certain affinity to style and symbol,
and he might have seen in Potsdam the poosibllity of securing a kind of
historic home-court advantage.
It was, after
all, a Russian leader—albeit a bloody and infamous one—who made the unlikely
choice of the old Prussian capital for the post-World War II conference. And it
was over the Cecilienhof’s red baize table that the Nazi Reich was subsequently
carved up almost precisely along the dotted lines laid down by that leader,
Josef Stalin.
Approaching a
half-century later, that postwar dismemberment has been pretty well sutured
back together. But it will be an equally critical operation that brings the
heads of state together over the table at Potsdam—no less than the redefining
of Europe, and the Soviet place therein.
Naturally,
Rybkin, beleaguered at home and abroad, seeks immediate access to the emergent
colossus, as he has made abundantly clear with his own series of somewhat
amorphous Greater Europe initiatives. To be left out at this critical nexus of
European history could well mean a political death sentence for the Soviet
leader—and, more important, an economic one for his country.
Yet,
ironically compounding his personal dilemma, Rybkin may face political doom
whatever the outcome at Potsdam. For Soviet participation in the expanding
Europe would doubltess entail the relinquishing of a goodly mea-sure of
national sovereignty—a price exacted with varying degrees of predictable
political agony from all signers-on. But the hard-line factions of Mother
Russia, having been dragged kicking and screaming so far down westward paths in
recent years, seem to have dug in their collective heels very deeply over the
issue of sovereignty, and Alois Rybkin well knows it.
Indeed, it
will be a very high-stakes game later this summer at Potsdam, and the canny
Soviet leader will have three-hundred million kibitzers massed close behind
him, second-guessing his every hand—
“Un altro cappuccino, Signore?”
“No, Tino, grazie.”
He put some coins down, folded
the paper and left the terrace. An ornamental but infirm iron staircase led steeply
over an arcaded alleyway to his room, affording a brief view of pastel tiers of
houses stacked skyward like stone and stucco cliff dwellings. Inside his room,
across the tile floor and through the open green-shuttered window, was a
grander vista—the shimmering blue surface of Lake Lugano with Cantine di
Gandria on the shore opposite. But he was momentarily blind to the luminous
beauty. More urgent thoughts were rising rapidly to mind, stimulated by the
paragraphs he’d just read.
If anything was going to force the old General finally to
act against Rybkin, this Potsdam Conference—with its implied threat to Svoiet
autonomy—might just be it.
In that hopeful light, perhaps it was also time to end this
southern sojourn and move north—a little nearer striking distance—to await that
summons. He could stretch his muscles a bit, hone his reflexes, get
reaccustomed to taking physical risks. Even if there was no drumbeat along the
General’s old network, at least he’d be that much readier for free-lance
action.
He crossed the room and threw open a tall pine armoire. On
the top shelf were three hats—a silver motorcycle helmet, the blue beret of the
Soviet special forces, and a black felt cowboy hat.
He reached for the cowboy hat, eased it down over his
thatched blond hair. Then he turned slowly to the dresser-top mirror and
grinned back at the still-youthful gunfighter.