Assignment- Sheba Read online

In that environment, the loss of Durell—a blow to morale in any case—could be disastrous, McFee thought. Of course, the agency would recover, but this was a bad time for such a thing to happen.

  Conclusion: Withhold word until Durell’s death could be confirmed.

  Then would be time enough. Men all over the world, unknown and unsung in their hazardous occupation, could wait a few hours or days to raise a glass and share a memory of Sam Durell.

  3

  Durell awakened with a start, tried to raise himself on an elbow, felt a pulsing ache in his shoulder and fell back. A hair rug prickled his skin. He lay for a second with his eyes closed. Dizziness washed him back and forth.

  He was aware that someone was using a rough cloth to wipe the sweat from his forehead and temples, where his thick black hair showed traces of gray. The smell of spices and woodsmoke stung his nostrils. His mouth tasted of bile. His tongue was sticky, swollen with thirst.

  The rush of a jet battered his ears, then he felt the earth shiver and heard angry concussions in the distance.

  Durell licked his lips and opened his eyes again. Through a shifting haze, he saw a small, fawn-colorcd face surrounded by long, rusty-gold hair, its wide-set eyes the color of quicksilver beneath a spring blue sky.

  “You have been ill. I am Deste Giroud.” She spoke in English, but she was robed in the customary Ethiopian shamma of homespun cotton.

  Durell struggled to pick up his splintered thoughts. He saw over him a thatch roof blackened by the smoke of cooking fires. Sunlight glared from a square doorway, the only opening in the stone tukul. Durell winced and looked away to see a dusky woman bent over a cooking pot. She grinned and nodded at him, making clucking sounds. Her cheeks were freckled with small ashes from the stone firehole.

  The ground quivered with a series of detonations. Artillery fire, Durell thought.

  Deste put a gourd to his lips. It held rainwater. The water smelled slightly of a stone cistern where it had been stored. Durell held a sip on his tongue. It felt cool and good. He rinsed his mouth and spat the water onto the dirt floor. Then he drank the rest of the water in the gourd.

  He felt for the .38 instinctively. His hand slid across his chest, then down to the waistband of his bathing suit. Then he remembered leaving it in the locker with his clothes and passport.

  Things began to come back.

  Sheba—he was to have met her on the beach near the boat dock. She would recognize him as an American wearing red bathing trunks. As a countersign, she would flash a metal locker key tab stamped with the numeral 51. He would show her his locker tab, bearing the number 52. It all had been arranged.

  Except for the ELF.

  Durell cursed the foul-up.

  No one had suspected that the ELF would hit the Villa d’Este at that very hour. In fact, the ELF was so random in its activities that the Villa d’Este might as easily have escaped forever. The Eritrean Liberation Front had been raising hell for years and seldom did big damage, a bomb here, a shootout there. The typical work of a guerrilla movement that could not mature, living off of the scraps of harassment rather than the red meat of strategic victories. But lately it had gained strength against a confused and divided military government that had overthrown the 3,000-year-old monarchy.

  Durell had been told to conceal his presence from the new regime. Because of the talkative nature of diplomats, that meant from the U.S. embassy as well. The old emperor had been friendly with the U.S., but the military rulers had not made their position clear and relations were strained. K Section was not to do anything that would tip them the wrong way.

  Durell’s vision had cleared now.

  The girl bent over him and fanned the blue flies from his face. He wondered: Did that lovely face belong to Sheba?

  She did not reply to the question in his eyes.

  From the bones of dreams still rattling in his brain, Durell knew he had been delirious. He might have mentioned Ineyu. If so, it could lead to the death of a good central. He thought he remembered calling out something about the RT12, the geophysical research satellite, but he could not be sure.

  “Did I talk much?” he asked.

  “Very little.”

  “How little?”

  Deste pursed her small apricot lips and thought for a moment, as if trying to recall.

  She is working too hard at it, Durell thought.

  Then she said, “You mentioned a General McFee. Was he at the Villa d’Este? I hope he was not injured.”

  “What else?”

  “Sheba. Yes, Sheba. Is she your lover?”

  “The job’s open,” he said.

  “I’m surprised.” She smiled.

  There must have been more. She was not leveling with him. His dark blue eyes became darker as he waited.

  She sighed. “That’s all,” she said. As if to change the topic, she said, “You lost much blood. Your shoulder there.” She pointed to a plaster over the torn flesh where the bullet had struck. It was a superficial wound, but his weakness told him it had bled profusely.

  He kept his eyes on the girl’s face as she dabbed at the sweat on his cheeks.

  She looked so innocent.

  It was a most lethal quality.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “A fisherman’s house. They helped me carry you here. I pulled you from the water. I shamed them; they didn’t want to help. I called them cowards. I told them they were afraid of the feranji even when he was helpless and naked. They said, ‘What good is he to us? He has nothing worth stealing.’ ” She laughed and her small, perfect teeth gleamed in the low light.

  That fit, Durell thought. The fisherpeople were Tigrinyan, one of the two principal tribes of Ethiopia. But across the strait from their islands, wild Denakil tribesmen roamed the salty, lava-strewn desert. They paid allegiance only to the rifle and sword. They were among the world’s fiercest people. It was the custom for a young warrior to present the scrotum of an enemy to his proposed bride.

  Over the ages, the fisherpeople had found it necessary to adopt the Denakils’ savage ways to some extent in order to survive against them. Durell probably owed his life to the fact that he had left his pistol in the locker. The Denakils had been known to kill a man for his gun—the Tigrinyans might be as bloodthirsty.

  Durell remembered the girl firing at him from the speedboat, her hair aflame with the sunlight.

  “Did you see what happened?” he asked.

  “I was in a dhow, watching the man dive for pearls— I am a naturalist. I thought the woman had killed you. She looked very frightened. Why did she shoot you?”

  “I’ll find out. She missed. I got this from the ELF.” He touched the plaster and winced.

  “Did you know her?”

  “No.”

  It must have been Sheba, Durell thought. She had been surprised by the ELF raid, too. But it had given her an excellent chance to pick him off. She had been just a bit too hasty. She would have used the rifle on him even if there had been no raid. Maybe the high-velocity slug would have knocked him over as he stood waiting by the boat pier or maybe later, after they had made contact and she thought his guard was relaxed.

  She could still be out there, somewhere. She might have seen his rescue.

  The rifle’s deadly reach was long.

  Alarm gnawed through Durell’s guts, a hot, ravenous worm. He suppressed it, tried to relax the muscles tightening on his long frame. He needed rest before anything.

  “You are a naturalist?” he asked.

  “I was educated at the Sorbonne in Paris. I am half Ethiopian. My father was French. He was an attache with the embassy in Addis Ababa when he met my mother. She was flown to Paris in a courier plane to give birth to me.”

  Durell brushed the sweat from his eyes. It glistened all over the hard ridges of his body. He was in one of the hottest spots in the world, he reflected. It was a few miles south of Massawa, the main port of Ethiopia’s northernmost province of Eritrea. The Italians had built Massawa in
to a modem port in the 1930s, during the latter days of their fifty-year colonial hold on Eritrea. In 1935 the Fascists had launched their conquest of Ethiopia from Eritrea with war supplies brought from Italy via Massawa, their mustard gas and bombs taking a ghastly toll of the poorly armed tribesmen. The British had kicked the Fascists out in 1941. The U.N. had administered Eritrea for many years, but it was annexed by Ethiopia with its consent in 1962. But the ELF was not buying that combination—it wanted an independent Eritrea. And it did not much care how it got it, Durell thought.

  Whoever controlled Eritrea’s 500 miles of Red Sea coastline would have their grasp on the throat of one of the world’s strategic waterways.

  Again the sand beneath Durell shuddered to distant, surly explosions. He crawled to the doorway of the tukul. The sunlight clawed at his eyes. The heat, which seldom went below one hundred degrees even at night, pounced humidly, smothering him. It was late afternoon.

  The copper sea stretched 900 miles north to the troubled Gulf of Suez and 200 miles east to the shores of Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

  Durell looked toward the mainland and saw an Ethiopian gunboat shelling the low, rocky hills. An American-made FI05 fighter bomber wheeled sharply above an orange-ribboned blossom of smoke. The government was making a show of chasing the ELF into the wasteland. Durell knew the ways of such terrorist bands: they were dispersed over the countryside by now, herding their sheep or cutting their grain.

  Beyond the gunboat, the red tile roof of the beach club still smoldered, its concrete walls intact. The half-dozen small private airplanes that had been parked beside its landing strip when Durell flew in that morning were gone, except for one. It was a charred heap of twisted metal. Durell’s charter pilot had left before the attack with instructions to return in two hours. It was long past that time now. Soldiers idled about the grounds of the club. Durell conjectured that they had been left to guard against looting. A helicopter fluttered up from the lawn, bearing the last of the dead and wounded northwest, toward Asmara.

  That would be Durell’s next destination.

  He was glad he was not one of those being taken in the helicopter.

  Pearl divers continued to work between the island and the mainland, unconcerned with the racket of the gunboat’s sporadic barrage. Gulls scavenged around the boats, flying up in a white whirlwind as each round was fired, then settling back onto the water.

  As Durell watched, a small workboat churned around the water. It groped its way back and forth among the pearl divers at slow speed, dragging the bottom. When it got too close, a Tigrinyan shouted curses at it for disturbing the oyster beds.

  There was no sign of Sheba—if that was the real identity of the girl with the chocolate hair. Durell had taken care to cover himself in the stone doorway. He had drawn no fire, but she might not have seen him. He would have to wait until night to cross the open water.

  He went back inside the tiekul, his mind full of dark thoughts about Sheba and his mission.

  “Anchi! You, girl!” Deste commanded.

  The woman working over the cooking fire brought Durell a wooden bowl containing spicy wat with chunks of fish. She handed him a round, spongy cake of bread called injera.

  Durell sampled the dish. It was laced with red pepper, but good. He ate with relish, spitting out the fish bones. Deste sat on the earthem floor in front of him, her knees nearly touching his. She watched him curiously.

  Durell saw nothing sinister in her eyes. She would be too clever to let it show. He had no reason to believe or disbelieve what she had told him. You went by patterns, and the pattern for Deste had not been formed yet. That made her potentially very dangerous. She had pulled him from the water, but he had been saved from death before for ulterior purposes.

  He hoped he would not have to kill Deste.

  He hoped she would not try to kill him.

  Suspicion was a perpetual traveling companion for Durell. He had learned early in life to look behind the faces others presented to the world. You usually found something quite different there, whether that face belonged to a woman, a man or a government. K Section had fully developed his instincts, making him into what he knew he was best suited to be—a solitary soldier, venturing amid the midnight armies of a planet that sometimes appeared bent on insanity and destruction.

  He preferred the solo role in which his name never was mentioned in the applause. Danger and caution ran in his veins. He had learned to give and to take in the cities and jungles of the world. He was good at it.

  Suddenly, Deste said, “Tell me about yourself.” She had made up her mind about something, Durell thought.

  “You know enough.”

  She hesitated, then placed her hand in his. Her delicate sand-colored fingers were lost in his loose grip. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You owe me a favor,”

  “I thought so,” Durell replied,

  “You must help me get to Asmara.”

  The pieces of a puzzle all fell into place in Durell’s mind. She could serve a purpose in a plan that he had been shaping.

  “Tell me why,” he said.

  “I can’t go alone. I have no means. I am a woman.”

  “It has to be more than that.”

  “All right.” She took a deep breath and her proud breasts lifted the front of her shamma. “My mother was a member of an ancient noble family. My grandfather was a favorite at court, but long ago there was a political dispute. He was exiled to an amba, a high, flat-topped mountain. Emperors have always used the ambas to isolate pretenders to their thrones and nobles who were dangerous to them. My family never recovered the confidence of the court, but it was allowed to retain its titles and estates. Now the new government is suspicious of all of the makuannent, regardless of differences among them in the past. Many have been imprisoned; some have been executed. I am afraid I will share their fate if I am caught.”

  “So you are in hiding,” Durell said.

  “Exactly. I was doing research on the coast when the coup took place. I had been out of touch for weeks when I finally heard of it. I feared for my life. I didn’t know what to do, so I came here. I had worked among these people before. They gave me shelter. I had no money, but I promised I would pay them well. They are becoming impatient. They have gone through my suitcase and taken the only silk dress I packed. They also took my camera, although they don’t know what to do with it. I must leave here. If you will take me to Asmara, I can find out how my family has fared.”

  “And if they have been taken into custody?”

  “That is not your worry.”

  “Just keep that in mind,” Durell said.

  The gunboat slammed two more rounds into the air and the gulls squawked angrily. Durell wondered about what lay ahead of him as he waited in the smoky hut, smelling of fish and sweat. His enemies, shadowy, phantomlike, were out there. If they thought him dead now, they would recognize their mistake soon enough. And they were engaged in something so monstrous that they would go to any end to conceal it, until the right moment.

  Then it would be too late to avoid awesome damage and horrible loss of life—without paying the price. And paying it again and again.

  Durell recalled the photograph. It covered thousands of square miles. An intelligence analysis specialist had detected, almost lost in those vast distances, one tiny, brilliant pinpoint of light. Its source was unknown to any government.

  He wondered: if maniacs could get what they asked by threatening an airliner with a hand grenade, how fantastic would be their demands through atomic blackmail?

  4

  The messages kept coming through the predawn darkness. They came from London, Buenos Aires, Capetown, Calcutta and Baghdad, as each man in his distant corner of the planet scrutinized his inner self and arrived at his personal commitment to help Durell if he could—and, if he could not, to avenge him.

  Nothing like it had ever happened before.

  The communications center in K Section’s Washington headquarters hand-deli
vered each message to the desk of General McFee, who was now dressed in a gray pinstripe suit, white shirt and solid charcoal tie.

  He felt ambivalent as he shuffled the forms.

  He should be angry.

  He had not authorized dissemination of a death report on Durell. Yet the requests had begun arriving only minutes after McFee himself had first been informed. In hindsight, he realized the impossibility of keeping the news from the men in the ranks. Agents frequently died in the performance of their duties. The dark gleaning and milling of information went on. But it was different with Cajun. Known only in legend to many of his colleagues, he had been their model, the paragon of their profession.

  Contrary to McFee’s fears about damaged morale, the response to the loss of Durell revealed a strength of heart and will to go forward that surprised the little gray man. So, although he should have been angry about the flaunting of broken security indicated by the messages, McFee instead allowed himself the semblance of a smile.

  Sheba had communicated the subsequent reports McFee had demanded. She claimed to have seen Durell go under, either drowning or already dead. McFee ordered that she be queried again. He wanted every detail: how did she know the victim was Durell? How did she explain her escape, while Samuel, with all of his experience, had been killed?

  McFee just could not believe that Durell was dead.

  Sheba would have to prove it.

  Yet, she was only an auxiliary; how much could he expect of her? Compared to the scope of K Section’s responsibilities, its professionals were so few that locals and foreign-employed Americans had to be recruited to fill the gaps. Their duties were important, but normally routine. They read and listened, developed sources and gathered information. Once or twice a month, they forwarded the data to K Section for analysis. But sometimes they became pivotal to a mission; the professionals had to rely on them in the field.

  They seldom liked the dangerous role.

  Occasionally they brought disaster to an operation.

  McFee studied the message of Tom Hennessey. He had radioed from Cairo, where he was running K Section’s control temporarily.