Istanbul Express (18 page)

Phyllis leaned upon her cane and lowered her head close to the children. She asked them a question. A chorus of little voices piped up in reply. The ice cream vendor added his own basso agreement, nodding vigorously and pointing off in the same direction as the multitude of smaller hands. Phyllis half spoke, half sung another query, and instantly the children were on their feet, licking the metal platters shiny-clean, handing them and the spoons back to the vendor, all of them grasping now for a hand of Sally or Jasmyn or Phyllis.

Surrounded by eagerly chattering children, the women were led out of the square, down a side street, and beyond the tight cluster of central buildings. The farther they walked, the more dispersed grew the dwellings, with farm animals bleating over the children's animated chatter. Above and to the right, away from the water's glittering surface, rose a rocky hillside. The ridgeline bore an ancient stone city wall, the parapets rising like uneven teeth. The women were led through a tumbledown opening, the flanking pillars all that was left of what once had been a mighty city gate. Beyond that point, the way became little more than a cattle track. Sally forced her way through the eager children to take Phyllis's free hand and help her over the rougher patches.

By the time they made it over the second hill, all three women were breathing hard. The children gathered about them at the crest, pointed forward, and competed loudly for the privilege of telling the story.

Sally looked down the swooping distance to where the hill joined the cliffside and fell in rocky jaggedness to the sea. They were at the highest point within sight, and the view was awesome. The Bosphorus shimmered like a brilliant blue mirror more than a thousand feet below. In the distance, the narrow strait's opposite shore rose like pale, frozen waves.

Phyllis shushed the clamoring children, turned her attention back to the vista, said, “I believe we have found our answer, ladies.”

Sally nodded agreement. The hilltop was marked by a series of small surveyor flags, and three piles of earth and stone marked the beginning of squared-off cellar pits, but otherwise nothing had been done. Yet the structure's intended purpose was alarmingly clear.

Jasmyn pointed toward the horizon. “Look, there!”

Sally squinted against the harsh sunlight, felt her chest fill with a sharply indrawn breath. Steaming toward both them and the Bosphorus's narrow entrance passage were seven enormous ships. Each silhouette sprouted over two dozen menacing gun barrels. And streaming out behind every central smokestack flew a flag.

“The hammer and sickle,” Jasmyn breathed.

“Soviet battleships,” Sally agreed.

“Come, ladies,” Phyllis said, returning to brisk urgency. “We have news to convey.”

Chapter Thirteen

“Watch out!”

Pierre drove wide around the horse-drawn hay wagon, sliding back into place before the oncoming truck could do more than clip his front fender. He sounded genuinely affronted as he said, “You are feeling more nervous than usual, perhaps?”

“The idea,” Jake replied, “is to arrive there in one piece.”

“First you tell me to hurry, and now you want me to slow down?” Pierre shook his head. “Perhaps you would be more comfortable in the backseat.”

Jake jammed both feet down on an imaginary brake pedal as Pierre swung the heavy consular vehicle around a ninety-degree bend, spewing gravel off the road and over the cliff and down the several hundred feet to the sea far below. “Maybe we should have taken the consulate's driver after all.”

“I thought the idea was to go in secrecy,” Pierre replied, not slowing even a little. “And to do so with all possible haste.”

“We won't be able to give them much help lying at the bottom of the sea.”

“Let us hope,” Pierre replied, accelerating to an even faster pace, “that they do not need our help at all.”

Jake had returned to the consulate from his meeting with Turgay to find both Pierre and the two Marines ready and chomping at the bit. At Jake's insistence, they took two cars minus drivers. The Marines were ordered to follow a few cars back and see if anyone tried to follow. Any move toward them, and the Marines were ordered to take what Jake called extreme evasive tactics. At the words, grins sprouted from both soldiers.

It was not until they stopped by the hotel on their way out of town that panic set in. Jake came racing out of his room and almost collided with an equally frantic Pierre. Jake
looked at the sheet of paper his friend was waving. “I don't believe this is happening.”

“Kumdare,” Pierre groaned. “By themselves.”

“Did they leave a time of departure?”

“It does not matter,” Pierre said, too impatient to wait for the clanking elevator, taking the stairs in three-step leaps. “They are ahead of us and without protection. That is all we need to know.”

Pierre glanced over to where Jake kept a death's grip on both the side armrest and dash. “You are beginning to make me tense.”

Jake shot an exasperated look at his friend. “I can't tell you how sorry I am to hear it.”

“Blinders,” Pierre said, taking a curve wide and fast, sweeping back just in time to avoid attaching them to an ancient bus which itself took the swerve like a boat on high seas. “I knew I had forgotten something.”

Jake forced himself to turn away from the precipice, tried not to think how naked it looked without a guardrail—just an empty void dropping out and down to distant rocks and glittering sea. He watched through his side window as the Turkish afternoon blurred past. Dark mustachioed men and kerchiefed women driving donkey carts piled like miniature mountains. Villages anchored by needle-slim minarets. Mud-brick walls, dusty children, bleating animals, metal roofs. Then rows and rows of carefully cultivated crops, distinguished at their speed more by smell than sight. Vineyards, olive groves, herb gardens, vegetable patches, all tilled in the timeless manner by human labor and wooden implements.

“Car wrecks,” Jake observed. “There's one at almost every curve.”

Pierre jammed on the brakes, swerved, slowed long enough to trade compliments with a Turkish driver, then sped on. “I agree. These people know nothing of proper driving.” He plowed through a flock of sheep, carefully avoided the
shepherd's flaying staff, finished, “Which is another reason why one must drive quickly. Any slower and trouble would have time to catch up with us.”

Jake sighed his way deeper into the seat, decided if he watched much more, he would not survive long enough to live through an accident. He crossed his arms, closed his eyes, and gave his fate grimly over to God.

Jake awoke with a start to the sound of screeching tires and blaring horns. To his vast relief, his eyes focused in time to tell him that all the noise belonged to other vehicles. He rubbed his face. “I fell asleep.”

“For almost an hour,” Pierre crowed triumphantly. “A grand testimony to my perfect driving.”

“That's impossible,” Jake said, trying to shake the remnants of sleep from his brain. “It can't have happened.”

“While you rested in my watchful care, I have discovered the secret of driving in Turkey,” Pierre declared.

Jake searched through his window, observed dismally, “We're not there yet?”

“It is quite simple,” Pierre continued. “The most important rule is, there are no rules!”

“I suppose that makes sense,” Jake said, “to a Frenchman.”

“Exactly!” Pierre blithely ignored a truck that was trying to cut into the stream of traffic from a side road by jamming its snout far into the road. Pierre simply swerved into the face of an oncoming vehicle, then swept back and continued smugly, “Once you understand this, the rest is quite simple.”

Jake raised himself up, suddenly more awake than he had ever been in his life. “Any sign of the Marines?”

“One car back,” Pierre said, risking a glance in the rearview mirror. “I must say, that corporal certainly does know how to drive.”

For once, Jake was not sorry when traffic suddenly snarled, leaving them crawling forward through an overheated cloud of diesel fumes. They entered yet another village, one removed
from time, sheltered in groves of hazelnut and beech. To one side, men turned an ancient concrete mixer and piled bricks beside an unfinished house, all by hand. To the other, tobacco leaves hung on a clothesline to dry. Underneath scrabbled a flock of scrawny chickens.

Pierre smiled at nothing, asked, “Do you remember Vera Lynn?”

Jake turned away from the window. “What?”

“ ‘We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when,' ” Pierre sang in a truly atrocious voice. “Do you not remember that, my friend?”

“I can't believe I'm hearing a Frenchman ask me that.”

“Vera Lynn,” Pierre sighed. “She sang for the heart of every Frenchman as we fled the German invasion of Paris.”

“I hate to spoil a good memory,” Jake told him. “But Vera wasn't singing for the French.”

“No?” Pierre mulled that one over for a moment, then shrugged. “Well, she should have been.”

“I'll be sure to pass that along the next time I see her,” Jake assured him.

“And Dooley Wilson. What was that wonderful song of his, ‘As Time Goes By'?”

“No more singing,” Jake begged. “And it was originally Satchmo's song.”

Pierre gave him an astonished glance. “You do not care for my voice?”

“Let's just say it runs a close second to your driving,” Jake said.

“And ‘Moonlight Serenade,' ah, that was a lovely one.”

“What's gotten you taking this walk down memory lane?”

Pierre shrugged easily. “Me, I am thinking how the war is behind us and yet the danger is with us still.”

“You don't seem very troubled by the thought.”

“Ever since the Bible lesson with M'sieur Levy, I have been thinking,” Pierre said. “My life is good these past weeks. Very good. I am married to a wonderful woman. I have work that
could be worthwhile if only the politicians would let me get on with it. My country is at peace once more. And I have friends. Good friends.”

“Thanks,” Jake said. “And likewise.”

“And,” Pierre continued determinedly, “I am thinking that I have begun to let my faith slip. I realized that last night. I have started to take my prayers and my studies more lightly. I do not seek to learn so swiftly now, because life is good.” Pierre glanced toward him, somber now. “But life moves in circles, does it not? Just as with politics and diplomacy and the currents of conflict that surround us.”

“Just who,” Jake asked quietly, “is the teacher, and who the student?”

“It is my responsibility to use these good times to prepare for the bad,” Pierre went on. “It is an opportunity I cannot afford to pass up. I can only remain strong and steadfast if I see these quieter times as opportunities to grow.”

“To prepare,” Jake added, admiring him.

“The Bible teaches me that with my faith I am building my life upon a strong foundation,” Pierre agreed. “But still it is
I
who must
build
.”

They passed the village's outskirts, and gradually the congestive grip on their speed was loosened. Jake said with a smile, “ ‘The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B.' You remember that one?”

“The Andrews Sisters.” Pierre laughed. “Oh yes. He made the company jump when he played reveille, blowing eight to the bar. I loved that song.”

“And Benny Goodman,” Jake recalled, grinning. “I remember when he came out with that new girl singer, Peggy—”

Then they were hit. And hit hard.

“Sir? Can you hear me in there?”

Jake stirred, groaned, shifted, and felt the glass around him tinkle and settle. He came fully alert, swung his head,
felt a swooping panic when he saw that the driver's seat was empty. “Pierre!”

“Over here, my friend,” he said through Jake's shattered window. “Can you move?”

Jake winced at the lance of pain caused by the nodding of his head. Pierre was bleeding from a gash in his forehead, but otherwise he seemed all right. “I think so.”

“Easy, sir,” Samuel Bailey said. “You took quite a hit.”

Jake reached for the door handle, realized it was not where it was supposed to be. Gradually the idea worked through his fuzzy brain that neither was his seat. Jake struggled to orient himself and realized his entire side of the car had been shifted over a full foot, sitting now where the gearshift had formerly been, resting up alongside Pierre's seat. His side of the car was concave, and he was jammed in so tight his legs could not even move.

“You will have to slide up and out of my side,” Pierre said.

Jake nodded, fought down a moment's panic when his feet did not respond to instructions, breathed more easily when he finally managed to extricate one leg. Sergeant Adams stuck his buzz-cut and shoulders through what remained of Pierre's door and said, “Here, sir, let me help.”

Limply Jake allowed himself to be gripped and tugged and pulled free. He half scrambled, half slid across and out of the door, then had to be helped to stand upright. He looked over to Pierre. “Are you all right?”

“It was your side that took the hit,” Pierre pointed out.

Jake examined his friend. “Then why are you holding your ribs?”

“Colonel Burnes!” A familiar voice with its coldly polished tones called out. “I thank the heavens you are all right!”

“Back off,” snarled a furious Sergeant Adams.

“Get out of my way, you oaf.” An immaculate Dimitri Kolonov tried futilely to brush by the leatherneck. “Call off your dogs, Colonel, I beseech you.”

But Adams was having none of it. He blocked the Russian's
advance, then rounded on a second man, a heavyset fellow with the slanted features of a Mongolian. “Either of you try to take another step, and I'll make me a Russian sandwich.”