Assignment - Ankara (18 page)

“It is ridiculous, sir. I will not go with you, and my daughter and I will take our chances right here.”

“There’s no time to argue,” Durell said. “You go after Susan.”

“But you don’t understand—we’ll be thrown in prison— perhaps shot as spies. You’ve heard how hysterical they are about such intrusions. I—”

“You can’t stay here—not alone.”

“Then why don’t we simply refuse rescue? Isn’t it better to take our chance with the sea, in the hope that some friendly vessel may pick us up?” John Stuyvers looked desperate. “It’s the end of everything—for all of us, I mean—if we’re captured.”

“We’re being rescued, not captured,” Durell pointed out. “Those are simple fishermen over there, performing an act of human mercy. We have to act on that assumption until they behave otherwise.”

“They’ll throw us in prison!” Stuyvers spat. He swung violently toward Susan. “You stay with me. We won’t leave the plane.”

An impatient hail came from the trawler. In the dusk, the lights of the vessel lifted and plunged through the curtains of rain. There was still enough daylight to make out the thin thread of line that connected the derelict with the fishing boat.

“We won’t stay alive for an hour in this sea,” Durell said. “None of us will see the morning, if we don’t get off this wreck right now.”

“But you don’t understand!” Stuyvers shouted. “They’ll find out—”

Durell hit him. He gave no warning, and threw a single, devastating punch. Stuyvers’ head snapped back and he crashed against the bulkhead and slid to the floor. Durell hauled him to his feet.

“Help me put a line around him,” he said to Anderson, who had regarded the episode with detached amusement. “Let them pull him through the water. He’ll survive.” “He’s awfully anxious not to have anyone go through his precious black bag,” Anderson said quietly.

“You noticed that, too?”

“Of course. But you don’t seem to mind their finding whatever Stuyvers has hidden in it, and that’s what puzzles me. I can’t figure out what you’ve done with the tape, if you’re not to abandon it here.”

“They’ll get aboard the fishing boat,” Durell said. “You’re sure of that?”

“Just help me for the moment with Stuyvers, will you?” When Susan and John had been hauled safely to the pitching trawler a minute later, it was Wickham’s turn. The colonel was glassy-eyed with fear and drink.

“Don’t like the idea of surrender, m’boy. Don’t like it at all,” he mumbled.

“They’re not ogres,” Durell said patiently. “Believe it or not, they’re just people like you and me. It’s a matter of accepting rescue, not surrender. You heard what I told Stuyvers. Now get going.”

“But it’s common knowledge—these fishing boats are all used for spying. They’ll torture us for information—"

“Let’s worry about that later,” Durell said.

“Always was afraid of this sort of thing. Nightmares all my life about it.” The fat man shuddered. “Now it’s real. On the other hand, I can’t stay, can I?”

“No,” Durell said.

The fat man stepped out on the wing, teetered against the slippery metal underfoot, and plunged ahead with the lift and fall of the sea. The spotlight from the trawler pinioned him in its glare as he lurched along the guide rope toward the fishing boat just off the wing tip. What happened seemed inevitable. A sea heavier than usual crashed over the wing surface and blasted Wickham into the water in a twinkling. The man’s scream was a thin sound of despair in the dusk. The fishermen on the boat laughed and hauled rapidly on the lifeline. There was a thrashing struggle in the dark sea, and Wickham was hauled out of the water like an over-stuffed doll, stripped of all his dignity.

“Mustapha?” Durell said next.

The Turk shook his head. “With my broken leg, I cannot run even as fast as your military friend.”

“Just let them pull you over. Try to favor the leg as much as possible,” Durell said gently.

The Turk was sweating. “But it is not the leg that worries me. It is the Moskofs. Early in life I was taught to fear them. Then, in the city of Ankara, I became bewildered, like many young men in these new times, and I listened to the voices of traitors. And I became one myself. How can I apologize to you, my friend, for the trouble I made for you? It was stupid, and I am still confused. You cannot forgive me. I do not forgive myself. And now that I see things more clearly, I cannot believe those men on the boat will save our lives as a simple gesture of humanity.”

“They’re only fishermen, I hope,” Durell said quietly. “In any case, they are people like you and me. We can only hope for the best.”

“As a boy, my mother frightened me with stories about the cruelties of the Moskofs in the old wars, like barbarians, and I have been remembering—”

“You’re a man now, not to be frightened by old women’s tales.”

Kappic shook his head. “When they see my uniform, they will ask no questions. They will shoot me. You will see.” He nodded slowly. “But I trust you. So I will go. It is in the hands of Allah.”

“Anderson will go along to help you,” Durell said abruptly. The big courier was startled. “I thought it would be best to leave this sinking ship last, amigo. After you.”

“Kappic needs a hand with his leg. The two of you can get across together.”

Anderson hesitated, then shrugged. “Okay. Come on, Lieutenant.”

It took slow, tortuous maneuvering to get the injured man across the wing and into the sea and then have him hauled to the trawler’s deck. The wind had picked up strength, and the pilot of the trawler had difficulty keeping the derelict in the lee of his vessel. Twice the trawler drifted down and grazed the wing-tip and made the entire hulk shudder and threaten to slip under the next roaring sea that piled down on them in the darkness. Each time, with much shouting, the ship pulled away before the fragile plane was crushed under the fisherman’s steel bow.

Anderson’s enormous, but gentle strength saved the Turk. He checked Kappic’s line and lowered the injured man into the sea, then cupped his hands and shouted in Russian to the trawler crew, and the fisherman quickly fashioned a sling that helped Kappic haul himself to the deck.

A moment later Anderson joined him aboard the trawler.

Durell was the last to abandon the derelict. In the few moments while the line was adjusted, he turned slowly to Harry Hackitt’s body. The young Texas boy’s face looked blank and unknowing, and Durell shook his head.

“I’ll tell Big Daddy all about you, Harry, if I make it,” he said.

KAPPIC’S leg ached as if it were being seized by all the demons of his grandmother’s folktales, yet he could ignore it. The shame at being captured by the Crimean fishermen far outweighed his physical anguish. The vessel, which looked so trim and new from a distance, needed a new coat of paint and harbored an atrocious stench that turned his stomach. The crew looked curiously at each member of the KT-4 party as they were hurried below to shelter and warmth. Two of the fishermen held machine pistols to cover each in turn as he or she was brought aboard. Blocks rattled and the big seine net from the trawl gear flapped and blew loosely in the wild wind. The deck was slippery with fish offal, and Kappic noted that one of the cabin doors had been smashed in some recent accident and replaced by a piece of stiff and dirty canvas.

He felt the fishermen’s hostility the moment they spotted his Turkish army uniform. There was a sudden hush among the bearded crew as he came clumsily aboard. His leg was afire, and he dripped blood through Francesca’s crude bandages as he clung to the rail. He knew that the damage done to his leg was beyond all repair now. The bones had ground back and forth, tearing flesh and tendon until nothing was left for a surgeon to work with. It meant the end of his career. The end of everything important to Mustapha Kappic, who had run a difficult, stormy path from his native mountain village to the trim Army career in Ankara. All over, now. He felt a wave of sorrow for the small peasant boy who had dreamed his dreams in the frontier wilderness, and then he straightened, conscious of the need for dignity under the cold eyes of the Crimean fishermen.

One of them pointed to his bloody bandages and shook his head. Another, a chunky bearded man, wearing some semblance of a uniform, said something to him in a gutteral dialect. Kappic replied in Turkish. They did not understand him. The captain in the visored naval cap was irritated and gave rapid orders to his crew to hurry with the rescue operation, and then turned as Anderson came aboard. The big American was grinning. He spoke in rapid, fluent Russian to the fishing captain and pointed to Kappic and then back across the heaving seas to the derelict plane. The captain seemed uncertain, but respectful, confused by Anderson’s quick Russian.

Then Anderson’s tone became a command, and the big man looked different suddenly, as he strode away from the group standing on the slippery, dirty steel deck of the trawler. And Kappic felt the first vague twist of alarm, the first slide into despair.

All at once he knew what had to be done.

He himself was finished. It had to be so. And all the others would be finished, too, unless—unless. . . . The idea crystallized, grew hard and cold in his mind. Someone had to be sacrificed.

Somehow he had to make amends for his mistake. He had to choose one to denounce, to be taken as the goat while the most important of the group was given a chance to escape. He did not decide willingly. He felt regret, and a sense of guilt, but his duty allowed him no wavering when he turned to watch Durell move out along the wing, a dark figure in the spotlight’s glare. Then he turned to the fishing captain and used his halting, army-sponsored Russian and pointed to Bert Anderson.

“Do not believe that big one here,” Kappic said. “He is an American spy. The rest of us are only refugees from the earthquakes, which I am sure you have heard about.”

The bearded captain spat on the deck. “I have heard of your troubles, Turk. Am I to believe you when you say this one is a spy? Why should you help us?”

“The rest of us are innocent,” Kappic said urgently. “If you call your shore station, they will confirm what I say. He is a spy. Your planes are looking for us, because of him. Did you not hear of this, on your radio?”

“We do not use it much.” The captain’s eyes were hard, a yellowish color. “I do not understand what you are doing in Soviet waters—but you are all my prisoners. Is that understood?”

“Of course, and I—”

Kappic pretended to step forward impulsively and collapsed on his injured leg. The pretense was not difficult to achieve. He fell to his knees on the slimy deck, smelling the fish scales and fish blood that stained the steel plates. He felt something grate in his broken leg and a piercing pain shot up the inner side of his thigh into his groin, like the sadistic stab of a bayonet into his abdomen. The feeling was at once terrifying and satisfactory. The Moskofs would not think he was faking his distress now.

Anderson came striding back along the deck, followed by a protesting fisherman. The captain, confused by Kappic’s fall and Anderson’s impatient shout of command, turned angrily to the big man and smashed at him with a back-handed blow that caught Anderson by surprise. Anderson fell back, shouting, a rage in him that Kappic was interested to see. The captain shouted in return, substituting loud rage for his confusion. Two of the crew jumped on Anderson and threw the big man down on the deck. Anderson made the mistake of struggling. The fishermen began to beat him, and one picked up a heavy wooden billet and smashed it down across Anderson’s head.

Anderson’s big body shivered strangely and lay inert.

The captain grunted an order for Anderson to be taken below, then turned malevolent eyes to Kappic. “Can you walk, Turk?”

“I can crawl,” Kappic said.

“Then crawl into my cabin, if you have to. We shall see about your story. The American shouts he is one of my people —and you, a Turk, offer me stories about spies. It is topsyturvy, you understand. I am not one of your politicians, Turk. I am only a fisherman, and my ship has been damaged in this cursed storm, as you have seen. If you are lying, it will be simple to kill you.”

The captain signalled to another crewman, who hauled Kappic to his hands and knees and urged him toward the steel deck housing. Kappic gasped and struggled forward. Before he fell across the threshold, he looked back and saw that Durell had successfully joined the others on the trawler’s deck. Beyond Durell, the sea was whipped by a vengeful wind that seemed determined to smother the fragile-looking wreckage of the KT-4. Then the trawler’s spotlight blinked out, and only a violent darkness raged where the derelict had been.

A taste of steel came into Kappic’s throat as he crawled into the cabin. If Allah was good to him, he would die soon. But not until he had dealt this particular Moskof one last blow.

The captain was obviously his own radio operator. The radio equipment stood on a desk beside a worn leather couch in the small cabin, and the bearded skipper threw himself into a rickety swivel chair with a grunt, considered the radio with the obvious distaste of a simple man for modem complications, and then snapped on the various switches. A low hum filled the warm air of the cabin as the transmitter began to warm up.

One of the crewmen prodded Kappic forward, and he crawled into the cabin, thinking of himself as a dog who dragged a broken leg behind him. The pain in his belly and groin was a steady stabbing, like white-hot knives shooting up into his intestines from between his legs. His hands and face were slippery with blood, and when he forced himself to rise, he felt a terrible fear that he would faint and fail to do this last act of his life.

“Tell me, Turk,” the captain said, “what were all you people doing, hanging to that bit of rubbish in the middle of the sea?”

“We were shot down,” Kappic whispered. “Many hours ago. By your planes.”

The captain looked impressed. “Do you know why, Turk?”

“No. Perhaps because you are afraid of the rest of the world, afraid when a plane is storm-tossed and crosses your borders. So you shoot first and ask questions later. We were flying toward Istanbul—”