Chapter One

THE bridge appeared at the last moment, and Kappic pulled the jeep’s wheel violently to one side. A mist hung over the mountain road and blanketed the whole earthquake area, and the fact that the bridge was wrecked was not apparent until it was almost too late.

The Turk, muscles bulging, used brute force to brake the speeding vehicle. The wheels kicked up a shower of gravel as they slewed sidewise. Durell hung on to the windshield bar as Kappic wrestled with the wheel. The jeep rocked to a halt a few feet from the rushing, swollen mountain stream, and the motor stalled.

In the sudden silence, Durell heard the sighing of the wind in the pines and the rushing voice of the little river that blocked their way.

“You drive like a lunatic, Kappic,” he said.

The Turk grinned, showing white teeth under his bushy black moustache. “But you said you were in a hurry, Mr. Durell.”

“In a hurry to get there—not to be killed.”

Kappic shrugged and pointed to the left. “I think we can ford the stream over there.”

The view was one of solemn desolation. Not a hut or a human could be seen in the sullen vista of tumbled mountain and pine forests on the eastern Turkish frontier. The mist moved in shredded streamers through the afternoon light, hiding the tops of the more distant peaks and their destination, on the craggy crest of Musa Karagh. This primitive road was the only auto route into the desolated area, according to Durell's briefing. The last landing strip in Barthum was twenty miles back, where he had disembarked from the emergency flight that took him eastward out of Ankara.

Not even a helicopter could risk landing in the winds that tore in every direction around the rugged shoulders of Musa Karagh.

He turned to the more immediate problem of getting across the river. The wrecked bridge was just one more bit of evidence of the violence wreaked by the earthquakes that had begun two days ago. The span’s main timbers had cracked and splintered, as if twisted in a giant’s grip, and the planks had been spilled into the swollen stream for a long distance down the narrow, foggy gorge.

Durell got out of the jeep and stared up and down the river bed. Kappic clucked his tongue and climbed down to join him, looking like a chunky bear in his greatcoat and lamb’s-wool military hat.

“The ford is beyond that bend, there, where that pine tree has fallen into the water,” said the Turkish security officer. “If we are careful, and Allah watches over us, we can get the jeep across.”

“All right, we’ll try it.” Durell looked curiously at Kappic. “Were you here when Base Four was first built, Lieutenant?” “Yes, as liason officer to the NATO group. I was assigned to security during the construction period. But I was transferred back to Ankara when the job was done.”

“How many men run the radar scanners on Musa Karagh?” The Turk shrugged. “Perhaps twenty. No more than that.” Durell stared at the misted mountains. “And how far is Base Four from the frontier?”

“The Moskofs are only twenty miles beyond Karagh.” To Kappic, as to all Turks, the Russians were invariably referred to as “Moskofs.” “Do you think they have taken advantage of the earthquakes and the confusion, Mr. Durell? You have seen the roads, the villages, the refugees. It would be as difficult for them to reach Base Four as it is for us.” “We still can’t lose any time,” Durell said.

“I understand this.”

Everything here was marked by the destructive force of the tremors that had shaken several hundred square miles of mountain wilderness. The Red Crescent was rushing doctors and medicines and food into the area, but the roads were primitive and the villages isolated in mountain valleys. A stunned apathy brooded over the shocked population. Landslides had changed the familiar face of the mountains, and the angry, uncertain earth movements had collapsed houses and mosques and bams and swept away the fruits of a lifetime of bone-cracking toil. It was possible, Durell thought, that the tremors had brought down the radio transmitting mast at Base Four, too. He hoped that the strange silence from the radar installation was due only to this, and nothing more.

He felt an impatience with Kappic, the Turk, that was not justified. Kappic had smoothed their way through the enormous confusion at the refugee evacuation center in Barthum, and commandeered the jeep that saved hours in getting away from the airstrip. But even the loss of an hour or two could tip the scales in the wrong direction, Durell thought. Other men might be toiling across the desolated mountains from beyond the frontier, intent on reaching the radar base at Musa Karagh. There had been an unusual urgency in the orders that took him from Paris to Ankara two days ago. Any further delay was dangerous.

Durell was a tall man who moved with lithe and easy coordination. His hair was thick and black, streaked at the temples with gray. His hands were like a gambler’s deft and strong, able to perform magic with cards or weapons, and in themselves they could be deadly and precise instruments of killing. His dark blue eyes often seemed black when he was frustrated. His Cajun temperament often worked against the long training and conditioned reflexes instilled in him for survival. He wore a dark suit and a dark blue knitted tie and a raincoat with a liner against the chill spring air of eastern Anatolia. Under the coat, in a specially tailored pocket, he carried his gun.

He considered the wrecked bridge carefully, then studied the opposite bank of the little river. If a roadblock and trap had been prepared for him, this was as good a place as any. From Barthum to this point they had passed through half a dozen shattered villages, cluttered with refugees, scarred by fire and tumbled houses shaken by the two days of earthquakes in the region. But now they had entered the desolate mountain gorges and passes of the frontier area, and not a house was to be seen. The pine woods ahead were wreathed in smoky fog that moved with the chill wind, creating images on the steep slopes that changed constantly. The road beyond the fallen bridge looked safe enough, however.

But he wasn’t sure.

The rocky mountain stream ran a swollen, savage course, and here in the heights the air was chill and biting. Durell shivered a little. But the Turk, Kappic, strode forward with eager strength, scrambling down the embankment to study the wreckage bridge structure. Durell stared again across the river where the road went on, climbing steeply into the pines. Nothing stirred in the mists that shrouded the rocky slopes -there.

“Come alone!” Dappic called. “There’s a ford, all right, just around the bend upstream.”

They walked to the left, through the smoky mist. Great boulders had tumbled down the mountain to rest in the narrow gorge. But walking was made easier by a small strip of sand that followed the water’s edge on their side of the river.

Durell noticed the tracks first.

“Somebody’s tried to use the ford ahead of us, Kappic,” he said.

There were narrow tire marks in the sand beside the river, made by a light-bodied European car. The tread pattern looked quite fresh, and Durell walked more carefully.

They were almost to the bend when they heard the girl scream.

Her voice was thin and frightened above the roar of the water. At the same time there came a metallic crash as if a car had turned over in midstream.

Durell ran, digging his toes into the sand. A fallen pine blocked his way and he hurdled it, with Kappic at his heels. Then he stopped abruptly.

As Kappic had predicted, there was a ford here—a flat rock ledge where the water flowed in green, smooth silence, extending from bank to bank as a shallow shelf of moderate depth. Halfway across, a blue French Dauphine had slid off the ledge and hung precariously in the boiling white water beyond. The current sent up gouts of spray all around it, and for a moment Durell could not locate the source of the scream.

Then he saw the girl clinging to the front of the car, up to her thighs in the quick current. She turned a white face toward them as they rounded the bend and halted.

“Oh, please!” she called in French. “Help me!”

“Hang on for a moment!” Durell shouted. “Can you hold on?”

“I—I'll try!”

Her appearance was incongruous in these wild mountains.

Her clothes were smart and expensive, a gray traveling suit with a white blouse and a fur piece to which she clung desperately, trying to salvage it. The current tore strongly at her clinging skirt, and revealed long, shapely legs.

“Cover me, Kappic,” Durell said quietly.

The Turk lifted heavy brows in surprise. “You think there is something suspicious here?”

“I don’t know.”

The Turk drew his gun. Durell could see nothing dangerous in the dark green pine woods across the river; but that might be just why this spot was chosen, if a roadblock had been arranged here to intercept him. He did not know who might try to keep him from reaching Base Four in Musa Karagh, but his instructions back in Ankara had been clear enough. He took no chances.

The water was icy, numbing his legs when he stepped out on the rocky shelf toward the girl. Her dark hair had come loose and streamed around her tense shoulders. She slipped suddenly, before he got halfway to her, and lost her fur scarf with a little cry of despair.

“Hang on!” he shouted again.

“I—I can’t!”

He realized that he had called out in English this time, and she had replied in kind, abandoning her French. Then he lunged for the car, caught it for support, and worked his way around to the front where the girl hung on desperately. At that moment he felt the little car lurch a foot or more farther off the edge of the rock shelf, sliding further into the boiling water below. The girl lost her grip and screamed again—and then tumbled into the white current.

Instantly he abandoned his grip on the car and dived after her. He no longer thought of a possible trap. The icy current slammed him downstream in tumbled confusion as he saw the girl’s face momentarily in the foam. He lunged for her, caught her hand, felt her wet fingers slip through his, and caught at her again. This time her arms went around him in strong panic and her wet body clung to him with frantic strength. They both went under, tumbling headlong downstream. When he came up, gasping, he twisted in her grip and saw the small car roll over and over toward them, as if a giant’s hand playfully turned it in the current. He yelled, shoved the girl aside, and felt something graze his leg as he stumbled. The car crashed violently on the rocks he had just quit and hung there, shattered, streaming water.

Durell got to his knees in the current and pulled the girl up with him. Her eyes were panic-stricken, dismayed, as she stared at the wrecked car, and he slapped her white face.

“Let go of your grip on me,” he rapped. “Try to help yourself!”

“But my sketches! I’ve got to get them—in the car—”

The current had thrown them against the opposite river bank, where the shallow water gave him a welcome foothold. He took her wet hands in his and hauled her bodily onto the dry shore under the pines. They were both soaked, and the mist and wind driving down the gorge bit clammily through their clothing. The girl shuddered violently in his arms and continued to look in despair at the wrecked car.

“My book of sketches—in the back seat—I’ve got to get them—” She shivered, started back to the river’s edge. “All my work is in there—”

“Hold it.” Durell studied the stream a moment, then nodded. “Stay here.”

He plunged back into the current, wading toward the rocks where the Dauphine hung. Alone, he was able to keep his footing with relative ease. The water boiled around the wreck, and for a moment he did not think he could pull the twisted door open. But on the third try it yielded, and he reached inside for a tightly locked, large, fairly flat leather case and hauled it out. A moment later he climbed back on the bank where the girl stood watching.

“Th-thank you. I thought there wasn’t—another soul around—for miles.”

He handed the case to her. “What were you doing here?” “Trying to get to—Mosa Karagh.” Her teeth chattered. “I guess I was foolish to try it alone, but everything here is so mixed up and everybody is so busy with the refugees and all—”

Before he could ask her more, Kappic yelled at them from upstream, and Durell called back for the jeep. But Kappic came trotting like a shambling bear on the opposite bank and paused, hands on hips. His grin across the stream showed his white teeth under his shaggy moustache. “Who is the foolish young lady?”

“I don’t know yet!” Durell called. He returned to the shuddering girl. Her lips were blue. “We’ve got chocolate, hot coffee, and raki in the jeep. You’ll be all right in a minute. But I’ve got to know why you’re going to Musa Karagh. You know it’s a restricted area, don’t you?”

She nodded dumbly, her teeth chattering.

“Who are you, anyway?” Durell asked.

“F-francesca. The raki ought to be good. Can’t you tell your infantry lieutenant to hurry with that jeep?”

“Francesca what?”

“Uvaldi. I was on my way to see my father when the quakes began out here. I first heard about the tremors at the Yesilkoy Airport in Istanbul—you know, where the storks get in the way of all the planes. That was two days ago. I was doing some sketches for fashion designs—I work for Mini of Rome —trying to get some native motifs for silk patterns.” She smiled uncertainly. “That’s why I wanted to rescue my sketch case. I’m grateful to you for that—and for saving my life, I think.” She looked at Durell again and her slightly slanted gray eyes were alarmed. “You look at me as if I said a nasty word.”

“Your name is Francesca Uvaldi?”

“Of course. My father is Dr. Roberto Uvaldi—he’s the chief at the American radar base in Musa Karagh—Base Four, I think it’s called.”

Chapter Two

EVEN disheveled as she was, Francesca Uvaldi was one of the loveliest women Durell had ever met. She had the black hair and deep gray eyes of North Italy, and under her wet, clinging woolen suit, her body left nothing to be desired— long-limbed, high-waisted, full-breasted and lithe. Her voice was throaty, her accent American. Her mouth had a seductive, full tremulousness that was inviting. Durell put his wet coat around her to shield her from the bite of the misty wind. He heard the jeep sputtering as Lieutenant Mustapha Kappic pushed it across the ford upstream. He didn’t worry about Kappic. He kept his attention on the girl.

“Have you any identification?”

She shrugged ruefully. “Just my sketch box. I lost my handbag, everything, in the darned river—even my sable neckpiece.”

“May I see your sketches?”

She stared in resentment. “Don’t you believe me?”

“Please open the case,” he said quietly.

The girl sighed with relief when the unwieldy box proved to have been water-tight. Durell fingered through the sketch pads, the boxes of pastel chalk, the rolls of finished sketches. They were all of women, fashion designs of dress and design motifs, and on each sheet of paper was printed: Mini—Roma. He knew of the famous fashion house, of course, that competed with the best of the Paris coutouriers.

“I was hoping to get some more primitive, basic designs here in the mountains,” the girl offered. “Are you satisfied?” There was nothing else in the case, and Durell closed it and returned to her. Francesca said coolly, “You’re an American, too, aren’t you? Who’s the fierce-looking Turk in the jeep? He looks like a Caucasian mountain bear.”

“Kappic is an infantry officer. You’re familiar with uniforms, it seems.”

“I’ve seen a few.” She grinned now. “Are you on your way to Base Four, too? You can take me with you, if you are. I’m worried about my father—nobody’s heard a word out of Musa Karagh for days, you know. Unless you’ve got some news—” She paused hopefully.

Durell nodded. “Before we go, however, I’ll have to take your gun.”

Her eyes widened, slanted up. “My gun?”

“Your skirt is wet. I can see it strapped to your leg.”

“Oh.” She looked uncomfortable for a moment, then smiled brilliantly. Her laughter was brief but convincing. “A girl has to be careful in these mountains, after all. One never knows. And I was traveling alone—”

“I understand,” Durell said. “But I must have your gun.” She frowned. “But how do I know I can trust you?” “You don’t. No more than I can trust you,” he countered. She shivered in the cold wind, and pushed aside a thick tendril of dark hair blowing across her cheek. “Are you actually afraid of me?”

“Perhaps,” he said. “But let’s not argue the point now.” “All right. Turn around.”

He shook his head. “Not while you handle the gun.”

She stared. “You are strange! One moment you risk your life to rescue me, and the next you won’t trust me to—” She shrugged. “Oh, all right, if that’s what you want.”

Her leg was long and firm. Her gun was a pearl-handled .22 caliber Italian revolver, ornately etched along the barrel. She held it delicately by the muzzle and he took it and dropped it into his wet pocket as the jeep drew up, bouncing on the rocks.

“We have some blankets and food,” he said. “Better strip out of those wet clothes and get dry.”

“But I can’t travel around in just a blanket.”

“Until your dress dries—unless you care to take your chances with pneumonia.”

Her gray eyes flashed angrily, but she made no reply. From the chest strapped to the back of the jeep, Kappic took two rough, gray blankets, and both the Turk and Durell turned and waited while Francesca Uvaldi stripped out of her wet traveling suit, scrubbed her hair, bound a towel around it, and wrapped herself in the two woolen sheets. The wind was cold and raw, biting into Durell’s wet clothing, but there was only a spare shirt to change into and a sheepskin overcoat, among the items hurriedly thrown onto the jeep to help such refugees from the quakes as they might encounter. He changed into the rough woolen shirt, threw away his topcoat and put on the sheepskin, wearing it as the local inhabitants did, with the hide out.

He could not decide what to think about Francesca Uvaldi. Without her identification papers, he had to accept her word for what she was. Yet he could think of no reason why she should pick Dr. Roberto Uvaldi’s name out of a hat and use it—unless, somehow, she had been waiting for him at this place, hoping he would come along exactly like this.

It was possible. If his errand to Uvaldi was as important as had been indicated, he could take chances on no one— especially a girl as lovely and distracting as Francesca. She was angry with him for his attitude about the gun, but he couldn’t help that. In any case, when they got through to Base Four and found Uvaldi, he would know all about her then.

Durell had been briefed only sketchily by the K Section man in Ankara. A certain amount of the usual security provisions had been dispensed with at the meeting, and Durell hadn’t liked it. He had been trained in caution, working for the Central Intelligence Agency, and before that he’d put in a term with the old OSS, long ago, in Europe. He knew that to be careless in details could jeopardize your survival factor. In Durell's business, you never opened a door without considering what might wait for you behind it; you never entered a room without being ready for a surprise; and you never turned a comer in a hurry, or turned your back on anyone.

His business was the dark, silent war that blew hot or cold as the world powers happened to dictate it. In this business you could die quickly and anonymously, in strange and forgotten comers of the world. He had survived this far by taking a professional attitude toward his work and toward the men he was engaged with. He never underestimated his opponents. They were men like himself in many ways, as fanatically dedicated to their goals as he was dedicated, without fanfare, to defending what was important to him.

Durell took his risks with the objectivity of a gambler, holding to the teachings of his grandfather, old Jonathan, down in Bayou Peche Rouge in the Mississippi delta country. The old man was one of the last of the riverboat gamblers, and he had trained Durell as a boy and a young man in all the treacheries as well as the rewards that greeted the hunter and the hunted.

Dinty Simpson, the K Section man in Ankara, tried to be brief and crisp when he talked to Durell in the plush lobby of the hotel there, but Dinty could not hide his nervousness.

“I’m sorry to pull you out of Paris on such short notice, Sam, but we don’t know what’s happening over by the frontier or in the Caucasus Mountains right now—the section the Turks call the Kavkas. Our radio isn’t being answered, and the courier who was to accompany Dr. Uvaldi back home may be dead. For that matter, Uvaldi may be dead, too. We just haven’t heard anything and we just don’t know, thanks to the earthquakes. We’ve tried through the NATO bunch here to contact a Turkish frontier regimental headquarters near Musa Karagh, but we’ve only gotten garbled responses—they’re desperately involved in rescue and relief work in the valley towns, and in trying to hang on to their guard posts at the same time. Then, the nearest Turkish divisional HQ is twenty-two miles to the south of Base Four, and the roads are impassable—they were never much, anyway, even without the recent landslides to block the way. The infantry on the frontier has to guard such bridges and open paths—cattle paths, really—as still exist. So we have to reach Base Four ourselves. Somebody has to go into that country and get Dr. Uvaldi’s radar tapes.”

“I don’t know much about Base Four,” Durell said.

“Well, it’s the new radar scanning station on Musa Karagh, a mountaintop near the Georgian frontier, and it’s loaded with some extraordinary new electronic gadgets to check on the two launching sites at Kapustin Yar, near Stalingrad, and at Tyratum, by the Aral Sea. These two locations have been positively identified for some time, but what’s been going on there lately has been anybody’s guess.”

Dinty Simpson was a sandy-haired man in his middle thirties, and he looked like a junior attorney in some vast law firm on Wall Street. His horn-rimmed glasses gave him an owlish look, and he had a bad case of nerves, Durell saw, watching him pace the carpeted floor of the Ankara hotel lobby. It was raining in Ankara that day, discouraging the pigeons who roosted on the statues of Kemal Ataturk in his dinner jacket costume, the symbol of Turkish reform. The local newspapers were full of the cataclysm that had taken place in the rugged mountains of the eastern frontier.

Dinty made a soft sound of discouragement. “We sent a courier out of the Embassy, a very competent chap named Bert Anderson, to pick up Dr. Uvaldi and escort him and the tapes back to Washington. Know him, Cajun?”

“No,” Durell said.

“Well, no matter. Bert is tough and absolutely dependable —comes from the hills around Nashville, Tennessee, talks with a hillbilly drawl. But don’t let his slow manner fool you; he can be quick as a cat and twice as smart. You can trust him at your back all the way; I guarantee it. The trouble is, the Base may be a mess, wrecked by the quake and full of casualties. Bert Anderson may be hurt, too, but we just don’t know. Or maybe it’s something just as simple as being detained by an isolated frontier guard. Anyway, we can’t wait. So you’re going in to help Anderson and Uvaldi out— or take Andy’s place, if something happened to him, which seems inconceivable, knowing him as I do. The main thing is to bring out Uvaldi and the tapes—if they can be found,” Simpson said grimly. “And you’ve got to find them, Cajun. Don’t let anything stop you. The Turkish government will help; they’re giving you an infantry lieutenant who was bom in the Kavkas area and he’ll guide you and smooth the way if you run into any military blocks on the road. But even if there are any delays, you’ll have to cut corners any way you see fit.”

“I understand.”

“I’ve sent for Bert Anderson’s dossier as well as Dr. Uvaldi’s, but they haven’t come in yet—transportation has been confused these past forty-eight hours—and there’s no more time to lose. Andy will have identification, of course, and he wears a gold ring with a small, polished piece of anthracite in it—looks like an onyx, but it’s coal. As a kid he was caught in a mine disaster, and wears the chunk of coal as a good-luck charm.”

“He sounds good to me,” Durell said.

“The main thing is that Dr. Uvaldi’s tapes have to get to Washington as soon as possible.”

“May I ask what Uvaldi found on his radar scannings?” Dinty Simpson shrugged and poked at his horn-rimmed glasses. “It’s classified, but there’s been enough talk about it back home in the press to tell you this much: it deals with this radically new type of nuclear weapon we’ve been working on—the one that may be the key to our survival. Quite different from the H-bomb, being primarily an antipersonnel weapon that discharges deadly neutrons without the blast, heat and fall-out of the big bombs.”

“I’ve heard of it,” Durell said. “But it’s only in the conceptual stage, back home.”

“Right. And our friends across the border may already have it. At least, Uvaldi’s scannings have shown some activity on it up toward Kapustin Yar—especially threatening if it’s sprung on us as a surprise. My guesses may be all wrong, but Washington wants to announce we know about it before somebody pulls the trigger. Publicity might inhibit a surprise offensive, on the theory of announcing all deterrent knowledge at once. Uvaldi’s discoveries are all on his coded tapes from the radar equipment at Karagh. Andy was supposed to fly him out yesterday, but the ’copter we sent couldn’t land in the fog and wind. Couldn’t see a damned thing, as a matter of fact, except hints of a lot of wreckage on the mountaintop. It won’t be easy to get in there, Cajun— and your troubles may not come just from the general confusion in the disaster area.”

“I understand,” Durell said.

“Well, be careful, for God’s sake,” Simpson said urgently. “If Uvaldi is dead—well, get his tapes, any way you can. Anderson will be a big help, too—as I said, he’s a tough ex-mountaineer, absolutely secure. That is, he’ll help if he’s still alive.”

“We’ll see,” Durell said.

He was thinking of Dinty Simpson, and the remote, modem world of Ankara he had left that morning, when he climbed back into Lieutenant Kappic’s jeep with Francesca Uvaldi and started on his way again. The road climbed steeply into the rugged mountains, twisting into the heart of the earthquake area. The road was more primitive, strewn with rocks that had crashed down the mountainside. Twice they had to halt and remove fallen trees in their way. The day grew colder and darker, and even Kappic slowed down as a concession to the thickening mist, which could easily hide a crevass or obstacle that might wreck them in this desolate place.

Durell gave the girl a chocolate bar from their relief supplies strapped to the back of the jeep and questioned her casually. She spoke freely from her huddle of blankets beside him.

“I must admit I haven’t seen my father in two years—he’s so absorbed in his work at the base here. There are just the two of us, anyway, and I’ve always been more or less on my own.” She looked at him with careful gray eyes. “I didn’t know you were associated with Dad’s work.”

“I didn’t say I was,” Durell remarked.

Her lashes made small, dark fans against the impeccable creaminess of her cheeks. “You’re as bad as Roberto, when it comes to security. Everything so ridiculously hush-hush— when the other side probably knows all about it anyway, and the only people kept in ignorance are our own! I resent it, sometimes, but—well, I’m sorry I was so suspicious when you wanted my gun, back there.” She paused. “Was it be-casue I spoke first in French? I speak French, Italian, and a little Portuguese. And even Russian. Took it up as a hobby in a spirit of patriotic preparedness, or something, last year. But my work demands a working knowledge of these languages, you see.” She patted her sketch case. “Mini of Roma has the bright idea of making Byzantine design all the rage next season, so here I am in Turkey making authentic, derivative designs for the silk-screen people. It will cost you a fortune for a veil and a wisp of the usual diaphanous stuff when I’m through. Doesn’t leave the poor husbands much for the traditional loaf of bread or jug of wine. Anyway, last Thursday I found some free time and got to Ankara, but the red tape held me up and then the earthquakes began—” She paused and shivered. “Do you suppose everything is all right up ahead?” she asked, nodding toward the tumbled dark mountaintops.

“I don’t know,” Durell said.

“Hasn’t there been any word at all from the Base?”

“No.”

She was silent then, and Durell watched Kappic’s driving and the twisted road ahead. He continually expected to run into frontier guard detachments from the local divisional HQ, but none were in sight. Through the fog he could see the scars of small landslides that had tumbled debris down into the gorge where the road twisted. The air was thinner and sharper now as they climbed.

“Does your father expect you, Francesca?” he asked suddenly.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I wrote that I might get here, but perhaps he hadn’t had time to receive my letter. I—”

At that moment Kappic slammed on the brakes again. The heavily-loaded jeep swerved crazily on the mountain road. Out of the mist ahead loomed a great pile of rock and rubble that barred their way with an impossible tangle of debris.

The girl gasped as the jeep seemed about to slide off the road into the black-walled ravine at their right; but Kappic’s strength saved them again. The wheels locked and spewed out gravel, and they came to a lurching halt.

“I am sorry,” Kappic grunted. “This was not expected.”

They could go no further in the car, short of using a bulldozer to clear the road. To the right, the mountain gorge dropped impossibly down to a dimly heard stream racing among fallen, ancient pines and mossy boulders. To the left, the tortured slope was ripped and torn by the landslide. It would take hours for heavy equipment to dear the roadblock ahead.

“How far are we from Base Four now?” Durell asked.

Kappic wiped his heavy moustaches and sniffed at the air. The silver Byzantine crescent on his lambskin military cap gleamed wetly in the fog. “The village of Karagh should be directly ahead, in a small valley about two miles from here. I used to be a shepherd boy in these mountains, you know.” He grinned suddenly. “The road divides before it reaches Musa Karagh, however; and the new military road goes for a mile up to the mountaintop where your American installation is. We shall have to walk, I am afraid.”

“Doesn’t anybody live around here?” Francesca whispered. “I didn’t think this area was so isolated.”

“Karagh is a village of only a few hundred people.” Kappic was perspiring, although the air was cold. “My family all died of a fever twenty years ago. Now there are visiting nurses of the Red Crescent, and sanitation, anyway.” He shrugged. “One can only hope there are some survivors. The town has been cut off completely by the earthquakes.”

The girl suddenly stood up in the jeep and pointed. “Oh, look—there is someone!”

Durell had already glimpsed the two people clambering over the rubble toward them. They appeared suddenly, close at hand, the man limping clumsily, the woman younger and more purposeful. He saw in the first glance that the man had gray hair under his wool hat and a thin, harsh face. The girl, in her twenties, had straw-colored hair bound severely under a colored scarf. She wore no veil, and they were both in European clothing, the man wearing a severe black suit, dusty and tom at the knee and slightly bloodied where his leg had been injured. The girl wore a gray felt skirt and sweater under a mannish-styled jacket, and she clutched a large leather bag worn as dark and smooth as a saddle.

“Don’t any of you move!” the man called in English. His voice rang as gray and metallic as the rifle in his hands. “Hold it just like that, eh?”

Kappic cursed and made a sudden move for his holstered gun in his bandolier belt. Durell touched his arm. “Wait. He may shoot.”

The man’s eyes were wild with shock and desperation. But the rifle covered them with steady purpose as he limped and slid down the rubble heap blocking the road and then came toward them.

“Put down your gun,” Durell said quietly. “You don’t need it against us.”

The man halted, surprised. “You’re an American?”

“Yes. Put away your weapon.”

The man breathed hard. Durell noted with surprise that he wore a clerical collar with his severe black suit. His face was angular, hard and pale, with a bloodless slash of a mouth and prominent cheekbones. His yellowish-gray hair was long and lank. The girl touched his shoulder then and murmured something; her brown eyes swept over Durell and Francesca and Lieutenant Kappic, and then returned to Durell. Her oval face was devoid of all make-up, and her pink lips were firm and hard. She held tightly to the black leather bag she carried.

The man said harshly; “You must all go back. There is nothing but ruin and desolation behind us, in a Godless land. The Lord has forsaken this place and its people.” “Father—” the girl murmured. “Father, he’s an American. He’s probably going to the radar base on Musa Karagh.” “You must all go back,” the man insisted. He favored his injured leg, but the rifle was held steady in hands that seemed familiar with the feel of it. “Susan, we must use their car. Get the keys.”

“Will you take our vehicle at the point of your gun?” Durell asked.

“If I must!” the man gasped.

“You’re a strange sort of minister,” Durell said flatly.

The girl spoke in a quiet voice. “My father has been grievously hurt, as you can see.” Her pale brown eyes never left Durell’s face, and she looked puritanical as she confronted him. “Our name is Stuyvers—my father is John, and I am Susan. We’ve lost everything. All our work in Karagh and the Caucasus Mountains beyond has been destroyed. The people are dead or dying. Our car is on the other side of this landslide—we were trapped in it for hours this morning, digging our way out with our bare hands. We’ve only just succeeded. Can you understand? My father isn’t quite himself at the moment.”

Lieutenant Kappie spoke with sharp authority, his gutteral voice grumbling like a bear. “What were you people doing in Karagh, exactly?”

Susan Stuyvers replied without looking at him, still watching Durell with that strange intensity. “We were sent here on a two-month mission for the U. C. Church Mission of Izurum. We had only begun to labor in this new vineyard, but God saw fit to disapprove of our work. Perhaps we sinned. We do not know. But my father is in a state of shock—”

“I will take the car,” the man said thinly. “We must flee this land. Daughter, be careful. Take the ignition keys from the lieutenant.”

“I am sorry,” the girl said. “He must be obeyed.”

Durell said, “I only understand that he has a gun at our heads. But we are not turning back.”

“You must!” the man shouted. He lurched forward, his eyes ferocious and pale, luminous in the misty light. “Now give me the keys!”

Kappic’s hand still hovered over his holstered pistol. The Turk’s temper was highly volatile, and Durell could not have predicted what might happen in the next moment. The missionary was obviously unbalanced by disaster, and capable of any wild act. On the other hand, the Turk was a soldier not likely to yield, even in the face of the man’s rifle.

For a moment, they continued to stare at each other. In the strange light of afternoon, the mountains stood hushed, veiled in fog, the earth and trees and sky heavy with a sense of waiting. The light changed, turned yellowish and somber, playing on the face of the man with the gun.

Durell felt it first.

There came the faintest tremor of the earth under his feet. The road shifted fractionally, a hair’s breadth, nothing more.

Then a distant rumbling sounded, as of a faraway convoy of heavy trucks down in the gorge. Stuyvers felt it then. His mouth opened and his eyes clouded with sudden, dawning terror.

The earth shifted again—violently, this time. There came a shattering roar from the mountaintop. Susan Stuyvers screamed. The trees swayed, as if a cold and violent wind suddenly blew upon them all. Durell’s legs buckled, and he staggered; but he did not fall. The earth shuddered again, and as a tree Snapped and crashed nearby, Susan Stuyvers screamed again and Kappic cursed and John Stuyvers, with his injured leg, went down on all fours, losing his rifle.

Durell jumped for the gun, caught the barrel, thrust it up while his right swung hard into Stuyvers as the man rose to his knees. The rifle exploded abruptly, making a thin, spiteful crack against the roaring of the tortured earth. Francesca cried out something as Stuyvers fell again. The man’s body was alive with furious muscle, surprisingly hard and wiry, as he struggled to regain his weapon.

“Hold it!” Durell shouted.

The man’s face was a mask of fury. Durell hit him again, pulling the punch, and Stuyvers’ head snapped back. Something struck Durell a stunning blow in the back and knocked the wind out of him. He rolled aside, not knowing what it was. For an instant he stared up at the mountainside above the road and was completely disoriented. It seemed as if the earth had heaved up like a giant wave and was toppling down upon him in a giant, crushing comber of torn rock, soil and splintered trees, poised there for an instant of eternity against the ochreous sky above.

He shouted, saw that Kappic had thrown the two girls behind a great boulder. A vast, rumbling, grinding noise shook the air.

“Get up!” he gasped to Stuyvers.

The earth shook violently. He extended a hand to the man, and the missionary gaped at the hillside, where the landslide was beginning. His mouth closed, opened again. Durell pulled him angrily erect, a shower of flying pebbles pelted them. A stone struck Stuyvers in the cheek and laid open a raw, ugly gash. He did not seem to notice it.

“Susan?” he called thinly.

“Hurry!” the girl cried.

They staggered to the shelter of the boulder as a long, roaring tongue of earth slid down the black mountainside in horrifying majesty. It struck the jeep on the road like a battering ram and swept it into the dark gorge as if it had never existed, except for a brief shriek of crushed metal.

Stuyvers threw himself down beside his daughter. Durell crouched next to Francesca, with Kappic on the other side. For eternal moments, the earthquake shook the mountains around them. Francesca’s protective blankets were disarranged, and her long legs gleamed tan and firm in the ochreous light. But despite her fear, Durell noticed, she had managed to save her precious sketch case. She clung to his hand with a tense, frightened grip—and then as suddenly as it began, it was over.

The silence, after the terrible roar, was shocking.

There came a few last crashing notes as rocks still rolled to the bottom of the gorge. Then only the wind whispered in the splintered pines.

Durell stood up. His legs trembled in reaction to the uncertain shifting of the earth. He looked questioningly at Kappic, who nodded, shaken.

“It is over, for now. A bad one, eh? There may be another tremor—”

“We’ll chance that,” Durell said. “Let’s get out of here.” “How?” Kappic asked pointedly. “The jeep is gone.” “Then we’ve got to walk,” Durell said grimly.

Slowly they all rose to their feet. The tremor seemed to have jolted the missionary, John Stuyvers, back to his senses. He began to mutter apologies, clinging to his frozen-faced daughter. Their black saddle-leather bag lay on the road, and Durell picked it up to hand it to them. It was astonishingly heavy, and the girl, Susan, saw his surprise and spoke quickly.

“We have some medieval Bibles and manuscript scrolls in there—we bought them from some monks when we were in Lebanon, at the monastery at Bel-el-Echem. They are priceless relics, written in Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek. We hope to take them back to Philadelphia with us.”

There is no doubt that the bags contain books, Durell thought, handing it to her. “Does the Lebanese government know you’ve taken these out of their country?”

She smiled evasively. “Father paid the monks well for them.”

“I see.” It was none of his business, Durell thought, if the missionary was trying to bring back religious relics to the States illegally. But since no detail could be overlooked in his business, he made a mental note to inspect the bag’s contents as soon as possible.

He walked ahead, climbing over the rubble that blocked the mountain road, and forced his way through twisted tree limbs and around huge rocks. It was growing dark. On the other side of the roadblock he saw the crushed wreck of an American car, partly exposed under the weight of loose gravel that looked dark where the Stuyvers had dug themselves out. Ahead, the gorge widened into a narrow valley cupped in rough mountains, and far in the distance through the haze he saw a ruined village clinging to the hillside. It would be Karagh, he thought, noting the terraced fields and stone houses. A stream had overflowed its banks beside the village, and there was a white guard post hut near a bridge that crossed the swollen little river.

No lights shone there, but he thought he saw a few dim, mote-like figures stirring feebly after this latest quake.

A sound behind him made him turn quickly. It was Kappic, grim and pale. Kappic had his heavy automatic in his hand.

“What do you make of it, Durell?” the Turk asked.

“We must go on.”

“The village is ruined. You see, not even a helicopter could land on those orchards. But some people are still alive down there, it seems.”

“Shouldn’t there be a regimental frontier guard detachment at that bridge?” Durell asked.

“There usually is. The frontier with the Moskofs is not far off here,” Kappic said. He frowned. “The detachment must have been sent on relief duty elsewhere.”

“Maybe,” Durell said. “Anyway, we can leave the Stuyvers couple and the Uvaldi girl in the village. You and I can go on up to Base Four on foot.”

The Turk nodded slowly. His dark eyes reflected shock and grief as he looked down at the rubble of the distant mountain village. Something had caught fire down there, and a thin finger of smoke probed the misty, evening sky.

“Allah help us all,” Kappic murmured. “Let us go on, as you say—if only to attend the funerals.”

Chapter Three

THE hut was dark and cold, and one corner of the roof sagged dangerously over the single interior room. But the Russian-style tiled stove still worked, and there was a little charcoal. Francesca was accustomed to caring for herself under any strange conditions. She was alone in the hut, except for the scent and memory of some goats, and on the twisted rafters above, a couple of pigeons burbled uneasily.

She was not afraid, and Durell had returned her ivory-handled gun before he left her in Karagh village.

“You won’t mind staying here a few hours?” he asked. “It might be difficult to hike up to the base on the mountaintop. Kappic talked to the headman here, and you’ll be better off in the village.”

“I’m worried about my father,” she had said. “I had no idea conditions were so bad here. And I have no clothes—” She gestured to the blankets she had fashioned for herself, and Durell wondered how she had made herself look so desirable and seductive, even like this.

He looked at the red-eyed pigeons on the rafters. “You have only the birds to watch you. But the Stuyvers are in the next hut, anyway. If you need anything, I’m sure they’ll be glad to help.”

Her eyes slanted up to meet his. “Aren’t they rather strange? For missionaries, I mean?”

Durell grinned. “He’s a smuggler.”

She stared in shocked silence. “A smuggler? But then you—

“Rare old Biblical manuscripts in Aramaic, out of Lebanon.” He shrugged. “None of our business, of course. They’ve been through a lot, I gathered, but I think they’ll be all right now.”

Francesca sighed with quick relief, then frowned again.

“Well—” She looked dubious. “You’ll be back tonight?”

“As soon as possible,” he promised.

When he was gone, she gladly dropped her air of helpless femininity that she had donned for him. She did not know if he had been deceived by any of it, or not. She could guess what Sam Durell was, with a reasonable degree of certainty, and she was aware of his function in the scheme of things here. She considered him a dangerous man. And yet he could be useful, if she played things correctly. The next few hours would let her know. And, meanwhile, she had her own business here.

She got a fire going briskly in the stove, and although it leaked smoke, the chill was quickly taken from the hut. She found an oil lantern with a little kerosene in it, and lit it. The resulting yellow glow cheered her. She was not immune to shock, and the day had been full of unpleasant surprises.

Durell, before he left, had found some peasant clothes for her, with his quick efficiency, in an abandoned hut they had passed when entering the ruined village, and she turned to these now that her quarters were growing more comfortable. Casualties in Karagh had run to almost a third of the small population, and no one remained to help, except for a local doctor and nurse from the Red Crescent. The guard detachment had been sent on an alert to frontier stations. Other villagers had fled into the mountains for safety, and were missing. The few remaining Turks were huddled in the main town hall, eating at communal tables and sleeping in dormitories while the harried native doctor tended to their injuries.

The village, pitched on the steep mountainside below Base Four, showed few signs of the usual Americanization that followed such nearby projects. The single street was paved with stone slabs and ended at her hut, and except for one or two curious villagers, the men in sheepskin coats and the woman, shapeless, swathed and veiled, who peered dubiously at them when they arrived, she had seen no one. And those who had gathered nearby had been dispersed abruptly by Kappic’s harsh orders.

There were rough curtains over the single square window in the hut, and she pulled these tight before changing her clothes, luxuriating nakedly in the glow of heat thrust out by the charcoal stove. Aside from a bruise on her hip, acquired when she was swept downstream from her wrecked car, she had suffered no real injuries. Her body had a smooth ivory perfection with a blush of pink, perfect health under the silken skin. Few men had seen her like this, tall and proud in her nakedness. She moved with the easy, rippling articulation of an uninhibited animal, her dark hair loose, gleaming in the dim light of the oil lantern. She dried herself carefully and attentively before putting on the woolen peasant’s clothes Durell had given her, and she remembered with some pleasure the way he had looked at her, aware of her as a woman, yet with a reserve for the business he had at hand.

He was interesting, she thought regretfully. Perhaps in another time and place, their instinctive chemistry might have brought about some enchanting results.

Durell might be a problem later, when events were better clarified. She knew she couldn’t keep the truth from him indefinitely. True, Roberto Uvaldi was her legal father, and her identification papers would have shown this. But she hadn’t seen Uvaldi for many years, after he had married her mother in Rome; and to tell the truth, she had never liked her stepfather. He was a barren man, too narrow in his interests, and she preferred the humanists, the artists and poets, the creators. But Roberto went through life wearing blinders that restricted his vision solely to his electronic theories. Perhaps he was a genius, as they said. But she and her stepfather had been estranged for years, and she did not look forward to meeting him again.

Francesca dressed quickly. The skirt and blouse were large for her supple body, but the clothing was warm. There was no time to lose.

The night air felt cold when she stepped out of the hut. To the left, a narrow, dangerous path led back to the village, where a few lights now shone. But no one moved down there. The mist rolled slowly up the steep mountainside like plumes of steam, and she paused to adjust her vision to the gloom.

The two huts were in a natural cul-de-sac, walled in to the north and east by towering, sheer rock cliffs that hung over the roofs. The hut where John Stuyvers and his daughter Susan were sheltered was the inner one of the two, almost backed up against the cliff wall sixty yards away. There were primitive garden patches, and on the village side another steep drop, fit only for goats, and guarded by a stone wall, hemmed in the area on the third boundary. Access was available only by the narrow path leading west to the village.

Francesca watched and waited, and for the first time a sense of fear touched her with cool fingers. Perhaps she ought to wait she thought. But she was alone. She could trust no one. In the confusion of the quakes, all normal balances had shifted, all appearances were treacherous and distorted. She could have waited in Ankara and wired back to Rome for help; but there had been no time, once the earthquakes began and offered confusion to her quarry.

As it was, she thought, she was almost too late.

But she had her gun again, since Durell had returned it, and she knew how to use it. There was nothing else she could appeal to, here in this mountain wilderness. She was on her own, and if she waited much longer, the quarry that she and Martin Cambridge had chased across half the world might be lost for good.

Martin was dead in Ankara, the victim of an alleged auto accident that had crushed the screaming life out of him on a narrow side street behind the hotel. But it was no accident, Francesca thought bitterly. The other side was alerted to their danger, and Martin Cambridge had known too much. So they killed him. From their point of view, death is the simplest way of eliminating problems. She didn’t want to think about it, because the same thing might happen to her, right here, tonight.

She drew a deep breath and moved off into the misty night. A few small, scrubby trees gave her shelter for the first few steps, and she paused when she reached the opposite side of the grove. A dim light shone in the windows of the hut where John Stuyvers and Susan were sheltered for the night.

She took one step toward the hut, and a sound stopped her.

She wasn’t sure what it was.

It might have been the thin rattle of twigs in the tree limbs overhead. Or it might have been a footstep on the coarse, gravelly soil.

She looked to the right and left, then suddenly spun around to look behind her.

Nothing.

The village was bleak and desolate, shattered into dark heap of rubble by the quake disaster. She looked up the blacksoar-ing slopes of Musa Karagh, toward Base Four where Durell had gone. The summit was dark, lost in the mist.

She shivered, for no immediate reason.

Francesca Uvaldi was not normally given to an unreasoning attack of nerves. But fear surged in her now without warning. She knew she was playing a dangerous game, but she was accustomed to this. She knew the danger very well, and Martin Cambridge had paid the price for carelessness back in Ankara. She could have quit then, or asked Rome for more help, gotten someone else from the bureau to fill in. But she had gone on, urged by the need for haste.

Now, abruptly, she wished she had been more cautious about it.

She heard the sound again, and whirled about.

A shadow moved thirty feet to her left, above her on the rocky slope hanging over the Stuyvers’ hut.

“Who’s there?” she called softly.

There was no answer. She stared hard at the area, but she could not define anything.

“Who is it?” she called again.

The trees rattled dimly behind her.

Shivering, she tightened her grip on the ornate little gun. It gave her little assurance now. She told herself it could be a

villager up there, prowling the two huts out of simple curiosity about foreigners. Or it could be a looter, or someone bereaved or half-crazed by the tragedy that had almost destroyed the village.

She started toward the Stuyvers’ hut again, walking quickly and silently. She did not want to cry out and let the Stuyvers know she was approaching their window. She could see the dim glow of the oil lamp inside, but from this point she could not quite see into the hut, and this was what she intended to do.

Something moved again, crouching low, and streaked down the hillside with feral speed to get between herself and the hut. An animal? A dog, or a donkey? No. Too big and too fast for any animal here.

A man, then.

Her heart began to hammer violently. Pausing, she lifted the gun. The trees were twenty feet behind her now. Her hut was even farther, and she could not remember if there had been a bolt on the door. Her panic impulse was to run back to shelter. But if she turned now, she had the feeling that whoever or whatever stalked her out here would leap with rending claws upon her back and bring her down.

She could only go forward.

There was a dim, dirt path that angled up the slope of the hill toward the Stuyvers’ hut, and she took several determined steps along it, climbing above the empty village street. A few huge rocks lay embedded in the dead grass, and she swung left again, climbing the small field to get above the boulders as she scanned them closely. She saw nothing more. No movement, no flickering shadowy shapes. Perhaps it had been her imagination, after all. There was nothing here.

She walked ahead again.

A silhouette appeared in the small window of the Stuyvers’ hut. It was Susan, straight-backed and prim. The shadow flickered quickly and was gone. Francesca turned downhill again, picking her way toward the hut. Mist touched her face with cool, damp fingers.

Then the first blow fell.

She hadn’t heard or seen anyone. She was not at first aware of what had happened. The violence was crushing, like the onslaught of a landslide. She sprawled on hands and knees on the rubble and felt something thud into her back, then smash into her head. She thought dimly of her gun. It was gone. Panic screamed in her throat, fighting the pain. She twisted violently, summoning strength to turn and see what it was. A darkness blotted out the sky. There was a wedge of a face, pale anonymous. Something smashed across her mouth. She was being struck cruelly, again and again. She tried to scream, but couldn’t. A crushing weight slammed down on her chest. She tried to draw up her legs to kick, but it was impossible. Through the roaring in her ears she heard a low grunting, as blow after blow struck her. She was being beaten to death in endless, demoniacal fury. She tried to flail back with her arms, her fingers twisted into claws, but the effort was feeble. The blows seemed remote now. She was beyond pain. Through the dimness she saw fanatic eyes, a savage mouth. . . .

Then, miraculously, there seemed to be a light somewhere, and a voice called. The blows stopped. She thought: He ought to kill me. It’s a mistake if he stops now.

As if she had requested death, her thoughts were crushed by one last blow that dropped her into a dark chaos. . . .

Susan Stuyvers stood in the doorway of her hut with the lamplight streaming out around her. She could see nothing in the little cul-de-sac that held the two huts. Her face was quite and impassive, her hands folded primly before her. With her hair brushed stiffly back from her severe forehead, she looked puritanical and patient.

“John?” she called into the darkness.

He appeared like a ghost beside her at the doorway to her hut. He was breathing hard, as if a restless demon had seized him. His narrow face was grim and furrowed with trouble, and his pale eyes regarded her angrily.

“Was that you, Susan?”

“No,” she said. “I thought I heard a strange noise.”

He did not look at her. “So did I. I was sitting back there, behind the hut—” He waved toward the towering cliff that blocked all exit in that direction. “Someone is out there. But it doesn’t matter. Come inside.”

She followed him dutifully into the hut, closing the door. John had not bothered to light the stove, and the air was chilly as the night deepened. As usual, Susan reflected, she had to do everything, attending to all the details, but she did not resent it. She owed John too much. She watched him sit on the big peasant bed and stare at her, and she noted irrelevantly that his clerical collar was dirty and awry.

“What do you think, Susan?”

“There is nothing to think about.”

“Were we brought back to this abomination by accident? Or plan?”

“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “But the books are safe.” He made a sound of dismay, chopping the air before her face with a hard, narrow hand. “Who knows when we can get home now? With all the refugees, I thought it would be easy. How can you be so calm about it?”

“We have to wait. We have no choice, have we?” Her level voice was barren. “You were foolish to panic and try to use the rifle on men like them, back on the road.”

“What else could I do? How could I know who they were?” “You could have waited. You could have spoken to them first.”

“All I saw was that jeep we needed.” He breathed hard. “I am dreadfully worried, Susan.”

“I know. The books mean so much to you,” she said patiently. “But you always said that American officials would pay no attention to them.”

“I’m worried about Durell.”

“Not the girl?” she asked.

“I think they are together,” John said.

“I think not.”

She did not give her reason for her assessment of the situation. She knew that when he was like this, no amount of logic could calm him. He was obsessed by the religious relics in the saddle-leather bag, and she felt sorry for him, but at the same time coldly determined to get away from this place for reasons of her own.

He was a strange man, she thought. He had a tall, muscular frame, a wire-tight virility, a maniacal devotion to his ends. But she was not interested in his missionary efforts, and indeed, she had seen little of his work in that direction.

She was not his daughter.

She sat piously, knowing that for now no one must get beneath the prim, drab exterior she had managed to maintain since those days in Lebanon. To look at her now, she thought wryly, no one would recognize her as a glamorous night-club entertainer, sleek and svelte under the muted pink spots, a sheath of rippling gold on her body. John had saved her, but she knew she would go back to that, some day. She had no voice, and little enough real talent, but her figure more than compensated for whatever else she lacked.

She had been restless in New York, and the deal that Tom Huppman suggested, touring Egypt and Lebanon and cashing in on the oil-rich Arab sheiks, seemed just the thing to break the monotony. But disillusionment come fast after she arrived three months ago. There was too much competition from the blonde, warmly fleshed, amoral women from Middle Europe, who were there for the purpose of attracting rich Arabs and went willingly to bed with them, first on the basis of being a mistress and then, somehow as it always happened, working as a call girl in the plush tourist hotels, and then finally going downhill into the worst sort of degraded, nightmare existence in the cribs, passed from hand to hand, from camel driver to oil-rigger and anyone else willing to part with money.

Luckily, she had been smart enough to see the handwriting on the wall, and she never took that first step, no matter how much Ali Khalil ben Tourami tempted her. Thinking about it in the warmth of the hut now, she could still see the glitter of Ali Khalil’s diamond-studded hands, still feel his fat and searching fingers, still hear his softly whispered insistence like the hissing of a snake. It had been a mistake to reject him with such open contempt, however. She hadn’t played it smart, but there was something about the Arab that made her flesh crawl. She was no angel. She knew all about men, and used what she knew to good advantage, usually. But Ali Khalil was something she couldn’t bring herself to take.

His anger when she rejected him was sudden and venomous. Even now, remembering, she felt cold and frightened, as if poised on the edge of a graveyard pit.

She had gotten into a taxi in downtown Beirut one night and given her hotel address, overlooking St. George’s Bay, where every guide eagerly told the story of the slaying of the legendary dragon. She hadn’t paid much attention to the route the driver was taking, weaving through the traffic of crowded buses and clanging trolleys. She had left Ali Khalil that evening at the Ghalainni, for the last time, she hoped, turning down a conciliatory offer from him to go sightseeing at the ruins of Baalbek. When she suddenly realized the driver of her taxi was not taking her back to her hotel, it was already too late. There were no police around. And at her sharp protest, the cab driver simply speeded up, rocketing out into the barren desert mountains behind the city, the Syrian border was not far. When she tried to jump out, the cab simply went faster, and she did not dare. Finally the car slowed near a copse of olive trees growing below the looming walls of what looked like an abandoned monastery, and here they were surrounded by half a dozen evil-smelling, rough-handed Lebanese, led by Ali Khalil.

She knew at once what was going to happen, and when Ali Khalil tried to drag her from the cab, she fought and screamed in the night, stabbing at him with a nail file hastily pulled from her purse. But she was really helpless to fight back, unless she wanted to be killed for resisting too much. Ali Khalil ordered her stripped, and it was done slowly, so he could relish the slow exposure of her body in the moonlit copse of olive trees. He was a fat, giggling man, and he paid no attention to her curses and protests. He ordered her flung to the ground naked, and spread-eagled by his helpers, and then he threw himself upon her. But she fought against him, twisting and turning her body to avoid his thrusts, and he became impotent, and in his frustration he screamed to the men to beat her. But first she managed to kick and claw at Ali Khalil’s groin and injured his sex to the point where he went screaming into the trees, doubled over.

Afterward she lay placid and endured it all with an animal vacuity. But she could not fight against all of them, and when the Arabs threw themselves lustily upon her, she no longer resisted. By holding herself detached from the intense pain and humiliation, she saved her reason that night under the olive trees. They debased her again and again, in curious ways, to satisfy their lusts. It seemed to go on endlessly, a nightmare of rape and defilement, of degeneracies she had only vaguely heard about. And the men were urged on again and again by Ali Khalil, who sat on the ground hugging himself, and the diamonds on his hands flashed and winked under the cold stars.

Later, when she was abandoned in the stark dawn of the red and yellow barren hills, she tried to walk back to the city in her torn clothes.

That was when John found her.

He had been to the monastery nearby at Bir-el-Echem, for the purchase of his precious, ancient books in Aramaic, and he stopped his car and took her to his shabby little house he had rented on the outskirts of Beirut. She was incoherent, and for several days she wasn’t sure where she was or what was happening to her as he bathed her and nursed her and got a native doctor to attend to her injuries. He made no complaint to the police. Nor did she. He arranged for her job at the night club to be filled by someone else, without fuss or questions asked. He was just a vague, impersonal, rather waspish man in a clerical collar, who fed her and helped her to bathe as if she were a child, and he talked to her about the States and about the precious books he wanted to get back to Philadelphia, to the mission library, in the States.

He was a strange man, not particularly godly, she thought later. He drank too much, and there was a wild intensity in his manner that sometimes frightened her. But he was kind to her. And she needed kindness then.

For hours he worked on the musty, leather-bound books and scrolls he had gotten from the monks at Bir-el-Echem, usually when she was sleeping. And sometimes he was gone for a day, or a night, and he did not tell her where he went or why. He did no actual missionary work that she could see. But he told her his work was finished in Lebanon and that he was going home to the States, and if he could get the manuscripts out of the country without their being seized by the Arab authorities, his work would be a success.

She agreed to help him, by posing as his daughter, and he got her a new passport and photograph and visa, and together they slipped safely across the Turkish border and into the Caucasus Mountains. When they reached Karagh, he insisted he had to meet someone there, and they waited four days, while he went about his business. She did not question him. And then the earthquakes had come, imperiling the whole venture. . . .

She looked up suddenly now, in the Turkish hut, her memories abruptly halted as John came toward her. In the dim light, he looked gaunt and somehow dangerous, his pale eyes absorbing her. She knew that he had almost a psychotic fear that someone was trying to steal his medieval manuscripts, and his obsession had grown worse, since the earthquakes had trapped them here.

He was looking at her differently, somehow, and she realized, with a small shock, that he was looking at her figure in a way he had never looked at her before. She hadn’t thought of him as a man, at least not that way. Perhaps it was his clerical collar, or the curious tenderness he had shown her when he led her back to health in the week after the incident with Ali Khalil. She knew her body was magnificent, all tans and creams, smooth and firm and vibrant, with bold breasts and a narrow waist and womanly hips. Perhaps he hadn’t considered the way they had been living up to now, in a neutral privacy, out of consideration for what had happened to her. But if he had asked her to bed with him, she would have done so. She felt she owed him anything he asked for.

Whatever he was about to say, whatever he was about to do as he reached out a hand to touch her as she sat there, was interrupted just then. Someone knocked on the hut door.

The quick rise of strange excitement in her died abruptly. John turned, facing the door. His breathing made a harsh sound in the little room.

“Who is it?” he called.

It was Susan who opened the door, before John could stop her. But it was only an old peasant woman from the village, who spoke to them in a dialect neither could understand. . . .

Chapter Four

IT WAS long dark when Durell and Lieutenant Kappic reached the high wire fence that encircled Base Four on the summit of Musa Karagh. It had been a long, hard climb up the military road that switched back and forth along the rocky slopes, and they had met no one on the way. Landslides, rocks, and uprooted trees marked the passage of the earth tremors that had shaken the mountain.

They were above the mists that shrouded the valley village below, and in the starlight and the dim glow of the moon that shone from behind ragged clouds, Durell saw that the striped guard booth was empty and the wire mesh gate in the fence stood wide open. A silence, emphasized only by a thin wind in the pine trees, enveloped everything.

Kappic pointed to the deserted barrier. “What do you think of that? I do not like it, my friend.”

“Nor do I.”

“Can they all be dead up here?”

“Let’s go see,” said Durell.

They went through the open gateway, climbed a winding graveled road, then crossed a lot where flying rocks and debris had smashed a U.S. troop truck and a command car into twisted wreckage. Nobody challenged them. No floodlights showed them the way ahead.

They passed a mound of rubble of stone and splintered wood, that had been a laboratory and officers’ quarters, judging by a broken wooden sign on a shattered doorway, and then climbed a flight of stone steps that slanted crazily from the effects of the quakes. Evidently the tremors had struck with particular ferocity at the mountaintop, slicing off huge ledges of red rock and sliding houses, men, and equipment down to destruction far below.

Lieutenant Kappic looked pale. “Do you think everyone is dead? It would explain why no word had come from here to your headquarters in Ankara.”

“I hope not.”

“Professor Uvaldi and his tapes must surely be gone from here.”

“Perhaps.”

They reached the top of the stone stairway to a level area where the radar towers had soared into the sky. In the starlight, everything looked as if a giant hand had reached playfully down from the smoky heavens and swept everything aside in a crushing, implacable grip. The steel girders and dish-shaped radar screens were tumbled and twisted in utter ruin, like a child’s toy. Rocks strewed the level area, and one huge boulder had smashed through the radio shack at the base of the antenna tower. Wires hung like tangled spider webs, torn and gray in the starlight.

“It is terrible,” Kappic whispered.

“Hold it, Mustapha.”

Someone was coming toward them at last, limping, calling in a harsh challenge. In the dim light, Durell saw a chunky, grizzled sergeant in a torn uniform. His face was battered, his nose broken and swollen. But the man held an Army Colt .45 in a big, rock-like fist.

“Hey, now,” the man said. “You got our rescue message?”

“No,” Durell said. “But you can put down your gun.” He gave the sergeant his identification card and the man looked at him quickly, nodded to the Turk, and blew out a gusty breath of immense relief. “You got any military rank, Mr. Durell?”

“No.”

“That’s too bad. We need somebody to give orders around here. Somebody’s got to take charge of this mess, and I’m having my own troubles. I’m Sergeant Frankie Isaks. From Brooklyn.” He grinned quickly, then stopped smiling as he turned his head and surveyed the ruins behind him. “We took one hell of a clobbering up here, as you can see.”

“Are you the only survivor?” Durell asked.

“Only five of us are still alive—including Colonel Packard Wickham, who got stuck here with us a couple of days ago while on an inspection tour for some Congressional committee. You know the deal, I guess, Mr. Durell. Anyway, Major Donahue is dead, and so is Gilbertie, Langston, Cohen, O’Toole, Lieutenant Marriot—and what’s left of us, only me and the colonel can get around much. And even the colonel ain’t in such hot condition, although it ain’t from being hurt.”

“What’s the matter with him, Sergeant?”

“I’ll take you to him. He just ain’t himself.”

“Have you been sitting here like this for the last few days?” “Mr. Durell, I couldn’t even walk until this morning,” Isaks said. “And I spent the whole day huntin’ for survivors and collectin’ the dead, as far as I could go.”

“You said something about getting a message out—”

“I spelled out an S.O.S. with some sheets and stones, hoping a plane might fly over. I heard one, but it didn’t sound like one of ours.”

Durell waited as the sergeant paused significantly. “Did it land?”

“No, sir.”

“Did it circle the area for long?”

“No, sir. And if flew away across the mountains into Georgia, sir.”

“You’re sure of this?”

“Yes, sir.”

Durell nodded. “All right. Go on.”

“Well, I couldn’t see this plane in the fog; but I kept expectin’ somebody might send somebody over from our side, too.” Sergeant Isaks’ tough mien suddenly crumpled in grief, and his harsh voice sagged to a horrified whisper. “Nobody had a chance here, Mr. Durell; it come so quick.

Some of the fellows were at mess, and the building collapsed on them—it was awful, the screaming—the son-of-a-bitchin’ quake brought the tower down on a couple of other guys, cut Hughie Lashon right in two—and part of this field was just sliced away and went down the mountain with a roar like—like—”

‘Take it easy, Sergeant,” Durell said gently.

The burly man pulled himself together with a visible effort. “Yes, sir. I'll take you to Colonel Wickham now, sir.”

They had to pick their way through the debris that littered the field, working toward one shack that still stood intact, a little to the south of the huge mass of crumpled steel that had been the radar tower facing the Soviet border. The shredded clouds had thinned a little, and moonlight brightened their way. A row of bodies lay under canvas nearby, mute evidence of the sergeant’s grim tasks that day. Lieutenant Kappic muttered angrily to himself as they followed Isaks to the shack.

A battery electric lantern lit up the interior. It had been an office of some sort, with filing cabinets ranked against one wall, a green issue desk, a swivel chair, and a field cot against another wall.

Colonel Packard Wickham was sprawled on the cot. He was not alone. He had three empty bottles for company and consolation.

Durell saw at once that here was a man pushed close to destruction, demoralized by fear. Wickham was flushed a dangerous red, contrasting with the thick white brush of his hair. He was stout, a desk soldier, and perhaps a fine administrator back in the Pentagon. But he did not belong here. And being here, caught by the accident of natural cataclysm, he was close to disintegration.

The room reeked from the whisky he had drunk, and from a sour sort of illness. His eyes were dull and bloodshot, his mouth loose and disorganized as he turned his head to stare at Durell and Kappic.

“Who’re you?” he muttered. “This’s restricted area—no visitors authorized—”

“Get on your feet, Colonel,” Durell said. He reached across the fat man and plucked a half-empty bottle of Canadian from his clutching fingers. “We’ve come to help you get out of here.”

“Help? Ain’t any help, m’boy. All alone here. Nobody to obey orders.” He looked in sudden, flushing anger at Isaks. “This son of a bitch here refuses t’obey anything I say—” “Colonel, that’s not so,” Isaks protested. “I only told you—” “That’s all right, Sergeant,” Durell said. “Get up now, Colonel Wickham.”

“You an Army man?” Wickham muttered. He grunted and pushed himself to his feet and stood swaying unsteadily, eyes fixed on the bottle in Durell’s hand. He licked his lips. “Guess everybody else is dead, huh? Shouldn’t have come here in first place. Stupid inspection tour. Free junket. See the world on expense chits, hey? Wife told me t’get the hell out, anyway. What better way’n a free trip abroad, pal? Who figured an earthquake? Everybody’s dead now, dead, dead—” Durell slapped him hard, to check the rising whine of panic-hysteria. Wickham flopped heavily back on the cot. For a moment his pale eyes sharpened with malevolence, and Durell had the momentary thought that he wouldn’t envy any of the men who worked under Wickham’s command back home. Wickham muttered something to himself, scrubbed his brush of thick white hair, and looked up at Durell from under lowering white brows.

“All right, ’s all right. Let’s see your credentials, mister.” Durell showed him his I.D. card. Wickham stared hard at it, and Durell got the impression that the man’s eyes were unfocused and he couldn’t see well enough to read at the moment.

He took the card back and said, “I’ve been sent here to escort Dr. Uvaldi back to the States, along with some important scanning tapes he recently made. Is Uvaldi still alive? Or do you have the tapes, Colonel?”

“Me? That’s mighty strange, mister. I think you’re a liar. A courier named Anderson already came for Uvaldi and both of ’em went off the Base together; the lucky bastards.” Sergeant Isaks said quietly, “They went down to the village, sir. Anderson got here yesterday morning after the quakes began. He’s the one who snapped me out of it and got me going again—a hell of a nice guy, Mr. Durell. But nobody’s heard a thing from him or Uvaldi since they left.” “This Anderson,” Durell said, “Did he have proper credentials?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And did he wear a ring made out of a lump of coal?” Isaks grinned. “It was a black stone—it could’ve been coal.”

Durell was satisfied. He turned to Kappic. “Do you think they got out of the village?”

Kappic shrugged, his eyes brooding on Wickham. “Ankara would have heard of it by now, if they had succeeded. They may both be in the village, still. Or they may be dead.” Durell swung back to Wickham. “Did Uvaldi take his tapes with him?”

“Huh?” Wickham stared blankly. “How should I know? None of my business, all that nonsense. Got no use for these head-in-the-clouds scientist fellows. Not efficient at all. Make a mess out of the paper work.”

Sergeant Isaks knew nothing about the tapes, either. He hadn’t shaved for two days, and his face looked gray and sunken. “The records of the radar scanning operations were kept in storage here, usually, in these filing' cabinets,” he said. “Most of it was negative, routine stuff. Mr. Durell, I—I want permission to fix the bulldozer, if I can, so we can clear the road. There are five of us still left who’ve got to get off this mountain, or we’ll go nuts. The colonel won’t say yes or no, so I figure I got to take it on my own responsibility to get the dozer going again.”

“Of course. Go to it. But you’d better get some rest first, Sergeant. Do you have enough food up here?”

“Yes, sir. Plenty.”

Durell looked at Kappic. “There ought to be some way to get some of the provisions into the village. I’m sure it can be used down there.” He spoke to Isaks again. “Get yourself a hot meal first and take care of your other men.” He considered the filing cabinets and frowned. “You say your routine radar tapes are stored here?”

“Yes, sir. They’re all coded, you know. They don’t make any sense at all unless they’re run through a special machine back in Washington.”

“All right. Thank you.”

He began to search, quickly and methodically. Wickham took advantage of the moment to retrieve his bottle and took several long swigs, eyeing Durell’s activity with growing irritation. Kappic muttered and tugged at his huge black moustache and went out after Isaks. The wind made a keening sound around the shack. Durell paid no attention to the red-faced American colonel. He went through the filing cabinets, one after the other, not quite sure he would recognize Uvaldi’s last tapes even if he saw them. Those that he found were small, in reels no larger than a typewriter ribbon. They were dated, fortunately, which helped to discard those he found. None were dated within a week prior to the earthquakes.

Whatever Uvaldi had learned from the radar scanning of Soviet territory, just beyond those rugged mountains to the east and north, was missing from these files.

Uvaldi and the courier, Bert Anderson, must have taken the tapes to the village, when the tremors interrupted their trip.

Durell lit a cigarette, fighting off a sense of disaster and defeat. He could cope with reasonable confidence against the plots of other men and human dangers. But acts of nature like this, which destroyed a countryside and killed innocent men, women and children with a wanton hand, were things no one could anticipate.

He wondered if Uvaldi was still alive. But there was only one way to find out. He had to get back to the village at once.

When he started from the shack, however, Wickham lurched to his feet, breathing gustily.

“Hey, now! You aren’t leaving old Packy here, are you?”

“For a short time only, Colonel.”

“Well, now, look, I’ve got important business back in the States. You’ve got to take me with you, Durell! I insist. I order you to—”

“I’m not obliged to take orders from you,” Durell said calmly. “But if I can get you out of here, Colonel, I will. But not just now.”

He walked out into the night, found Kappic watching Sergeant Isaks bully the shocked, haggard remnants of the radar post company into work on a wrecked bulldozer, and began the walk down the mountainside again in company with the Turk.

Chapter Five

THEY came down into Karagh at the opposite end of the village from where he had left Francesca and John and Susan Stuyvers. It was late in the evening, and here and there a fitful light glowed with stubborn tenacity in the stone huts that had survived the cataclysm. The square white command post at one end of the river bridge was bolted and empty, the detachment of guards off on another mission that no one in Karagh knew about, when Kappic questioned the villagers.

Except for the single main street, the other narrow alleys of the frontier town consisted of stone steps or ramps going up or down, so that one house always towered over its neighbor below—except where some had collapsed and crushed the others under tangled heaps of rafters, stone blocks, tiles or sod roofs.

The streets were empty and open to the night wind, soundless under the clearing, starlit sky. Durell’s footsteps rang hollowly on the paving as Lieutenant Kappic indicated a larger building ahead.

“The town hall of Karagh,” Kappic said in a hushed tone. “I remember it as a boy.”

The building had once been an ornate caravansary, and now served as a government-sponsored travelers’ inn. It had survived the quakes better than its neighbors, and now did duty as a combination hospital and communal kitchen for the peasants who had survived the past forty-eight hours of terror.

There was a large courtyard, entered through the tunnellike arcade of intricate Byzantine stone design that still seemed redolent of spices and charcoal fires fed from ancient camel caravans. A number of dull-eyed people were huddled here and there around small fires in the courtyard, using makeshift tents of skin or wool, crowded together with vague, looming shapes of rescued cattle, sheep, or dogs. There was even a bright-eyed, unblinking hunting hawk on a makeshift standard, kept in place by a long golden chain linked to an old man’s wrist. The refugees looked at their approach without interest, however, their faces filled with the listless despair of the homeless the world over.

Kappic asked the bearded old man with the hawk a few questions, speaking in rapid, barking dialect. The hawk’s bright yellow eye watched Durell and the lieutenant with interest, unlike his human neighbors. The old man pointed toward the rear wall of the courtyard, where a heavily arched, Romanesque doorway led into a wide stone hall. Here the injured of the village had been laid out on straw pallets, and an indescribable smell of blood and suffering filled the close, humid air. Kappic halted, a spasm of sympathy crossing his dark face, and then he went on down the aisles in the big stone room toward a small, harried man in a white coat who was bent over an old woman to examine her with a stethoscope. Durell waited. The doctor answered Kappic’s questions with an air of exhausted patience, his attention centering on the old woman’s groaning figure. Kappic barked something again, and the doctor finally straightened up, gestured to the right, and looked down at the woman again. She had died in the brief moment he had turned away from her.

Durell followed the Turk out of the stone hall. Kappic looked puzzled. “You will be glad to know that Dr. Uvaldi is here, quite alive and only slightly injured. He was brought in by a group of peasants who were searching for survivors on the road to the north.”

“The north?”

“Yes,” Kappic said grimly. “Where the Moskofs live.” “That doesn’t make sense,” Durell said. “Why would Uvaldi be heading for the Soviet border?”

The Turk shrugged. “Perhaps he was confused.”

“What about Anderson, the American courier who was supposed to be with him? Hasn’t he been found?”

“Not yet. It will be interesting to see what Uvaldi has to say about it all, eh? He was only bruised and knocked about by some falling rock, but he has been awake for the past two or three hours, the doctor says.”

The Turk led the way up a circular stone stairway with its treads worn smooth and shallow by centuries of use by sandal-footed caravan men. Dim emergency oil lamps lit their way. On the upper floors surrounding the courtyard the rooms were little more than cubicles, monastic in size and sparsely furnished. The dim, vaulted stone arches cast long shadows everywhere. The smells, if anything, were worse up here than below.

“This way,” Kappic said.

They turned a comer of the corridor—and darkness greeted them.

“Hold it,” Durell said.

Their shadows stretched uncertainly before them, cast by the flickering lanterns in wall sconces at their backs. But no lantern shone ahead. The wide corridor ran the length of the ancient caravansary, with narrow slitted windows overlooking the interior courtyard. In the dim glow from the charcoal fires where the refugees huddled outside, Durell saw a wall sconce from which a lamp had been removed. Beyond that, only the darkness brooded.

“Dr. Uvaldi is in there—the third door down, I was told,” Kappic whispered. “Wait here. I will find an extra lamp.”

The door Kappic pointed to was slightly ajar, a line of deeper black against the ancient brooding stone of the corridor. Durell nodded and heard the Turk retreat around the corner. He moved toward the wall, training and instinct lifting clamorous warnings inside him. He didn’t need the Turk to tell him something was wrong. He began to move forward after a moment, close to the wall, approaching the door to Uvaldi’s cell.

No sound came from inside. Light flickered behind him and he turned his head and saw Kappic returning with a lantern. The Turk looked huge and burly in the odd light. The crescent moon insignia on his lambskin military cap winked and glistened in the oil lamplight. Durell nodded to the Turk and drew his gun and, as Kappic held the lantern high, Durell pushed open the door suddenly and went in fast, at a low, hard crouch.

Nothing happened.

Kappic’s lantern showed a barren little cell exactly like all the others they had passed. There were two cots in it, but one was empty. Durell expelled a long breath and walked over to the man who lay on his back on the other cot.

“Is it Dr. Uvaldi?” Kappic asked, his voice harsh.

“Yes,” Durell said. “He’s dead.”

“Dead?”

Durell stared down at the man on the cot. There was no mistake about Uvaldi’s identity, according to the description given to him by Dinty Simpson in Ankara. Short, dark of skin, with a broad flat forehead and a shock of gray hair and spade beard, Uvaldi lay in his clothes with his eyes open, the whites faintly glittering in the light of Kappic’s lamp. The man’s tongue protruded slightly from between his small white teeth. Durell touched his cheek with the back of his fingers. The flesh was still warm. There was a mottled bruise on the dead man’s flat forehead that had already turned yellow in the past twenty-four hours. A bandage had been neatly applied to the left wrist—apparently the work of the Turkish doctor below.

“But what is it?” Kappic insisted hoarsely. “I was told he was recuperating very well, that he was only slightly injured and resting—” The Turk’s military boots scraped harshly on the stone floor as he neared the cot.“Was it a heart attack, do you think?”

“No,” Durell said.

He flashed the light all around the cubicle. If Uvaldi had been ready to leave for the States, there was no trace of luggage, either handbag or attache case. Gently, Durell turned the dead man over.

There was a small tear in the back of Uvaldi’s checked coat, and he parted it with careful fingers, aware of Kappic’s tight breathing beside him. Under the torn cloth was the gleam of a shining steel pin, an eight of an inch in diameter, and certainly long enough to reach a man’s heart. Durell had seen a weapon like this before, among samples taken from the equipment of enemy agents. He straightened, and as Lieutenant Kappic started to ask another question, he said flatly, “We’re a few minutes too late, Mustapha. Uvaldi was just murdered.”

He turned away from the dead man, aware of Kappic’s silence, aware of a sense of defeat. He hadn’t known Dr. Uvaldi, except as a name, a contact to be made and a package to be escorted home. If Uvaldi had died naturally, or as a result of the earthquakes, he would have accepted this and gone on, accustomed to the ironic turns of fate. But this was neither an accident nor a natural event.

Someone had had a purpose in killing Uvaldi. And it had been done recently, within the past half-hour.

There was no expression of surprise on the dead man’s bearded face, but that was not necessarily of significance, because this method of killing was swift and practically painless.

He made a rapid, thorough search of the sparsely furnished cell, opened the single narrow window and looked down at the courtyard below. The smell of charcoal smoke and dung, of huddled cattle and sheep and men, filled the cold night air. He heard the mutterings and groanings of the ragged refugees and the thin bleating of a goat. He returned to the dead man and searched the body while Kappic held the lamp.

There was nothing to be found. The tapes were gone. “Mr. Durell?” the lieutenant said quietly.

“Somebody beat us to it.” Durell’s voice was hard, angry. “There was a leak somewhere, somehow. Somebody knew that Uvaldi had something important for us.”

“But how could that be? Your security was excellent.” “It couldn’t have been. It rarely is.”

“But this means—”

“Somebody is in this village with us right now,” Durell said, turning to the door. “Trapped in the valley, too. He’s got the tapes, and we’ve got to find him.”

“Are you sure it was a man?”

Durell looked at the dark face of the Turk. “I’m not sure of anything. Something bad must have happened to Bert Anderson. He’s tough and knows his business.” He paused. “You may be right, though—it could have been a woman.” “Perhaps the Stuyvers woman—or the girl we found, who calls herself Dr. Uvaldi’s daughter?”

“Let’s ask her,” Durell said.

Kappic started out of the cell first. The stone corridor was still dark where the lanterns had been removed, and only a dim glow filtered around the hall corner from the other area of the ancient caravansary.

There was no warning as they moved out. The man charged them like an enormous engine of fury.

Kappic, who was built like a bull, was hurled aside like a child. He slammed into Durell, was thrown off balance against the cell doorway. There was a grunt and curse from the Turk, the scrape of driving shoes on the stone floor. Kappic’s strangled shout echoed oddly as Durell spun around him, glimpsing a tall shadow that leaped toward the lighter comer of the corridor. The man who had been hiding in the dead end of the hallway had tremendous size and strength. But before he could get away from Kappic’s thrashing figure, the other had burst free and leaped out of sight.

Durell sprinted after him. He could not tell if the tall man was armed, but he got his gun out before he reached the turn in the corridor. Kappic pounded hard at his heels. There was a shout from ahead, a cry of pain, and as Durell rounded the corner, plunging into the lighted area, he saw the white-coated doctor on his hands and knees, shaking his head in a stunned way, his stethoscope bent and twisted as if trodden on by a heavy foot. Grating footsteps clattered on the stone steps to the ground floor below.

He ran around the doctor, shouting, hoping to get someone downstairs to delay or stop the fugitive. So far, he knew only that the man was big, powerful and ruthless—and perhaps panicked by having been trapped in the corridor when he and Kappic arrived. The man must have been cursing his bad luck in choosing the precise moment when he and Kappic left Uvaldi’s cell to make a break for it. But beyond this, Durell had not seen the man’s face and had no idea of his identity.

He slammed down the worn, circular steps just too late to catch another glimpse of his quarry. In the main hall to his right, where the sick and injured earthquake victims had been gathered to lie on their straw pallets, a native woman stood staring, open-mouthed. She pointed wordlessly toward the open entrance to the courtyard, saw Durell’s gun, and tightened her mouth in antagonism. He did not stop to find out what this meant. With Kappic at his heels, he ran out into the courtyard.

Smoke from the campfires of the refugees drifted with the cold night wind across his face. He halted, looking at the strangely medieval scene. Kappic paused with him.

“Is he here?”

“I don’t know,” Durell said quietly.

“Be careful, then.”

The tunnel-like passage to the street opposite them was a dark hole beyond the fires and the huddled, listless shapes of the villagers. Durell was aware of a few curious, pale faces turned toward him, but there was a strange, oppressive silence that seemed hostile, like a dark pall of the family groups hunched about their fires. Any one of the black shapes around any of the campfires might be their man, holding those next to him in the silence of terror. He tried to pick out the biggest of the men, but they were only anonymous shadows in the strange, ruddy glow of the charcoal fires.

Kappic swung harshly toward the nearest group and barked a question in gutteral Turkish. He received shrugs and a gesture from a withered old woman. She pointed to the arcaded entrance of the courtyard. Durell started that way without waiting for more.

They were too late again.

A shadow suddenly lunged from the darkness of the tunnel, silhouetted against the gray night light in the street beyond. Durell shouted a warning and threw a snap shot at the dim, huge figure. He missed. The man vanished to the left, and as Durell plunged for the courtyard exit, a bundle of rags around the last campfire spitefully thrust out a foot to trip him. He stumbled slightly, kept going, but the momentary delay was enough. By the time he reached the village street, there was nothing to be seen again.

Kappic breathed hard beside him.

“He is fast, this one.”

“And big," Durell said.

“Not big enough to hide forever in the village.”

“We don’t have forever in which to find him,” Durell said.

They spoke in quick, soft whispers, scanning the ruined village street before them. Nothing stirred except for the shape of a cat slinking in the shadows of the rubble of a wrecked house. With the clearing sky, the stars shone like burnished metal over the dark gloom of the surrounding mountains. The air was cold, cutting at Durell’s face. The street slanted upward, following the shoulder of the mountain, for several hundred yards toward the huts where Durell had put Francesca and the Stuyvers couple. But nothing moved that he could see, except for the prowling cat.

They started up the street, hugging the shadows of the dark stone houses. Durell had the indefinable sensation of being watched. He tried to put himself in the place of the fugitive in order to out-think his quarry. The man was frightened, despite his size and physical strength. He had just committed a cold and brutal murder, and stolen the tapes from the dead Dr. Uvaldi. So far, he had been successful. But at the last moment, he had been unwittingly trapped in the caravansary, and it was plain that Durell’s arrival with the Turk had been totally unexpected. There was no way at the moment to guess the man’s identity. But it didn’t matter. He was a murderer, an enemy agent trained in cunning and force, in brutality and violence, dedicated to his mission. Durell wondered if he was armed. No shots had been returned for the one he had snapped at the running man. But that didn’t mean anything necessarily, either.

The cat suddenly scampered away up the middle of the stone-paved street, tail erect, moving in quick erratic leaps, as if chasing an evasive rat. It vanished among the towering mass of rubble where a stone house on the slope above had collapsed in yesterday’s tremors and poured a small landslide of building blocks and timbers on the house below. The street was partly blocked at this point, almost like a deliberate barricade. He could not see completely around it, and halted again.

“I do not like this, Durell,” Kappic whispered.

“You think he’s waiting somewhere for us?”

“We are his only known enemies. It would be wise for him to get rid of us—”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

Kappic was slightly ahead, halted under the crumbled wall. At that moment the cat uttered a thin scream of fright and came scampering out of the rubble again, streaking across the village street. Another movement caught Durell’s eye, overhead on top of the wall. It was only a vague shifting of the shadows up there in the ruined house, but it was enough—

He shouted a warning, leaped forward, and shoved Kappic ahead and out of the way with both hands. Simultaneously, a huge building stone came loose from the top of the wall and crashed down upon the spot where the Turk had been standing. Durell jumped over it, ignoring Kappic who was sprawled in the street, and leaped up onto the rubble heap. Above him loomed the tall, massive figure of his opponent, outlined for a frozen instant against the starry sky. Then, with astonishing speed, the man turned and leaped away and vanished.

“Halt!” Durell shouted.

He fired again at the flickering shadow, then jumped from the rubble after him. Kappic shouted something from below, but Durell did not pause. Beyond the wreckage of the house, a flight of stone steps led up into a narrow alley that climbed the mountainside. Several other houses had suffered collapsed roofs here, and their tiles littered the paving. Durell scrambled upward, gun in hand, angry at the other man’s attempt to kill them and frustrated by the fugitive’s speed. He reached the top of the stone steps and looked to the right and left. The wind blew across an open field that tilted sharply upward to a stone wall, where barren fruit trees rattled their limbs under the starry sky. He paused, drew a deep breath. To the left were more houses; to the right were the back gardens and plots of the villagers, reaching toward the end of the settlement where Francesca Uvaldi was quartered. He started that way.

The man had fewer choices of hiding places now, having been flushed out of the village streets and away from the earthquake rubble. But again he was nowhere to be seen. Durell moved cautiously, aware of the danger of another lethal trap. He heard Kappic call faintly from the street below, but he did not reply, hoping their quarry might think they were both still down there. A stone wall with a wooden gate in it blocked his way. Beyond was a small orchard, a field of brush, and a stone hut. He eased up to the gate, paused, listened, breathing lightly, hoping to catch some sound that might betray the other’s position. But he heard nothing except the wind in the fruit trees. Then there was a vague shouting from the dark shadows of the caravanary behind him. He turned his head and saw lights flickering down there, and a small group of men came out into the street with torches and lanterns. Perhaps the doctor had rallied them to hunt for the murderer. The villagers scattered, some heading toward the small bridge over the flooded river at the lower end of the village. A few others moved tentatively in Durell’s direction; but they were too far away to do much good, and he did not want anyone else to confuse the area at this moment.

He went through the gate fast, dropped into a crouch, felt something whistle through the air close to his head, breaking with a clatter against the stone wall. It was a rock, thrown with brutal strength and speed. Durell leaped up and ran forward through the orchard. The earth was hard and rubbly underfoot. He heard a man’s thick-throated cry and saw his quarry rise like a giant from the shadows and run away again, from the opposite side of the clustered fruit trees, zigzagging into the brushy field beyond. Durell drove after him, holding his fire. If the man had had a gun, he would have used it instead of throwing the rock. And if it was possible to capture the killer alive, he wanted to do so.

He fired once into the air, however, as a warning, and kept running. He closed the gap only slightly. Ahead, and a little to the left down the slope, was Francesca Uvaldi’s hut, and beyond that was the one occupied by John and Susan Stuyvers. The big man wavered, slowed, half-turned. In the starlight, Durell saw his chest heave as he struggled for breath, saw the dark open mouth in a strong, frustrated face, and also saw that the man was wearing a dark suit of Western clothes. The man ran again, evasively, down the hill—and then suddenly went down with a cry of alarm and surprise to go headlong down the gravelly slope.

Durell was on him in a moment.

“Hold it,” he gasped. “Don’t move.”

The man looked up at his gun and said something in English between panting breaths and then lunged up again. Durell hit him with the gun barrel to drive him back, but he wasn’t to be stopped. The man tried to grapple with Durell, and his lightning move was unpredictable. His strength was enormous. He shouted something and Durell hit him again, trying to break free of the other’s grip; but he felt himself flung aside. He staggered, tried to regain his balance. The man started to run again, and Durell jumped, brought him down on all fours. They locked together, rolled over and over down the hill toward the hut.

“Let—go!” the man gasped.

He punched at Durell’s throat and tried to knee him. Durell slammed the gun against his opponent’s jaw and the man’s head snapped aside and blood gushed from a broken tooth.

“Hold still,” Durell rasped.

The man turned an astonished face upward. “You’re American?”

“What did you think?”

His chest heaved. “I didn’t know—Russian, maybe—”

“Here, among these Turks?”

“Somebody killed Dr. Uvaldi—I thought you were the one who did it—”

"Hold still,” Durell said again. He stood back and leveled the gun at the man, who turned his head and gestured carefully toward some boulders in the rubbly field.

“I think somebody is back there—a girl. Didn’t you see her? I tripped over her. I think she’s dead.”

It could be a trick, Durell thought. The man spoke with a Tennessee twang, and his clothes were American. He looked at the man’s hands. A black ring that could have been fashioned from a lump of coal glistened on one of his fingers. “Just a minute,” Durell said. “Who are you?”

“I was sent to take Dr. Uvaldi back to the States,” the man said. “But I was too late to save him, I reckon. I’m Bert Anderson—folks call me Andy—and I’m a diplomatic courier out of the U.S. Embassy in Ankara.”

Chapter Six

ANDERSON climbed slowly to his feet, absently dusting his clothes, a rather rueful smile on his wide mouth. He looked even bigger and tougher close up than when Durell had chased him at a distance. There was something of an amiable frog in his expression—he had a broad mouth and large gray eyes, long legs and a barrel chest that gave an impression of awkwardness that, Durell knew, was not justified. He dabbed at a cut on his cheek and sucked at his broken tooth. His hands were big, with thick wrists—and now Durell saw that the ring he wore was a cut and polished piece of coal. Anderson must have weighed thirty pounds more than Durell, who was a large man, and he stood two inches above Durell’s six-foot-one.

“Suppose you tell me who you are,” Anderson suggested grimly. “You seem to know a lot about my business.”

“Have you an I.D. card?” Durell countered.

“Sure.”

“Let’s have it.”

Anderson shrugged and carefully handed him a plastic-cased card. Durell glanced at it and handed it back.

“All right, Bert.” He was satisfied. “It looks like we’re in this together. Ankara sent me to help you and Uvaldi out of here, with the radar tapes, and get you to Washington. My name is Durell.”

“Sam Durell?” Anderson was surprised, then grinned his frog’s grin again. “Heard about you, friend. I’m impressed. Who’s the Turkish cop with you?”

“A friend. He’ll escort us part of the way. Have you got Uvaldi’s tapes?”

“No. I don’t know where they are.”

“What happened to them?” Durell asked sharply.

“I don’t know. Look, we’d better see about that girl—” Durell hesitated, then saw Kappic jogging uphill toward them out of the darkness, and nodded. He turned with Anderson and retraced his steps among the boulders strewn over the brushy field.

“Here she is,” Anderson muttered. “Jesus, look at her.” Durell knelt quickly beside the still figure of Francesca Uvaldi. He thought for a moment she was dead. Then she moaned and lifted one hand in a feeble, defensive gesture, and he turned her gently until he could see her face. Wincing, he helped her sit up on the stony ground, his fingers on her pulse. She drew a long, sighing breath and opened her eyes wide and suddenly began to scream in terror.

“It’s all right,” he said quickly. “It’s Durell.”

Her scream ended. She touched her throat wonderingly, looked at Anderson’s huge, looming figure, saw him smile quickly, and returned her dazed glance to Durell. Her face was battered and bloodstained, and there was a deep cut on her temple; her dark hair was loose, streaming down her shoulders.

“Somebody—somebody tried to—kill me,” she whispered, wonderingly.

“That’s obvious. Do you know who it was?”

She shook her head in silence.

“Did you see anything of him at all?”

“Only a shape, a shadow—he wouldn’t stop—I hurt all over. He was like a madman—”

“Can you tell us why you were attacked like this?”

She hesitated. “No.”

“There must be a reason,” Durell insisted.

“No. No reason. A—a looter, perhaps.”

She was lying, even dazed as she was. Durell had the impression she had quickly regained control of her clever, alert mind. She was giving nothing away. But it was obvious that she certainly couldn’t have been in the village to kill Uvaldi if she had been unconscious here at the time. The bruises on her face and body couldn’t have been faked.

He said abruptly, “We found your father, Francesca.”

“Oh?”

“He’s dead. Someone just killed him.”

If he was ever to catch her off guard, he thought, brutality now might do it, however cruel it might be to tell her about it like this. She stared at him for a moment without comprehension. Her eyes widened, then narrowed; she moistened her bruised lips with her tongue.

“I—I hurt,” she whispered.

“Didn’t you understand what I just said?” Durell insisted.

She nodded without replying. She closed her eyes and her face became a mask, innately lovely despite the scars and blemishes inflicted on her. Durell straightened and looked Anderson and at Kappic, who had joined them silently, then nodded and lifted the girl in his arms and carried her down the hill to the hut where he had left her two hours ago. Anderson and Kappic followed, walking heavily. Inside the hut, Durell put the girl down on the big peasant bed and turned to Kappic. “Better get Susan Stuyvers to look after her, Lieutenant. She’s in the next house.”

“Shall I bring the father, too?”

“Not just yet. Just tell them there’s been an accident here.”

Francesca seemed to have fainted. He watched her breathing and saw where the native clothes she wore had been ripped and stained by her struggle. No, it hadn’t been faked. But the girl, even though dazed, was acting strangely. He was sure she had grasped the news about her father’s death, and he felt annoyed because he wanted to trust her and knew he couldn’t.

He turned to Anderson as Kappic went out. “We have only a few moments before the Turk gets back. Kappic was cleared by our security people, but we have to be careful just the same.”

“Right.” Anderson’s slow Tennessee drawl sounded strange in the peasant hut. His gray eyes were direct, watching Durell. “I can’t tell you much. Dr. Uvaldi looked worse yesterday from his injuries than he did this morning, so we decided not to move out until tonight, if he improved. I decided to wait, and I got the local medic to take care of him, at the inn.”

“What about Uvaldi’s tapes?” Durell asked.

“He had them—then,” Anderson sighed.

“Did you see them?”

Anderson shrugged. “They were in a small attache case, and he wouldn’t show ’em to me. But I got a look at them, when he was sleeping. They were there, all right. He was spooky about security, so I didn’t bother him, once I was satisfied I had the real thing and we were on our way home.”

“What happened this evening?” Durell asked.

“Well, I heard there was a ham radio operator in Musa Karagh, a retired Turkish army sergeant. I know a little about radio myself, so I went looking for him, thinking I might get word back to Ankara about the situation here and conditions at Base Four. But the man was hard to find. And when I located his place, he was dead, killed when a wall of his house collapsed on him.”

“And his radio?”

“I found it, all right. The aerial was down, of course, and the components were banged up a bit, but I hunted around in the wreckage for spare parts. He had ’em. Then I went to work putting the thing together again, stringing up the antenna wire, and so forth. The batteries were okay. I finally got it working, but I lost track of time while I was at it. I wasn’t worried about Uvaldi, because the doc said he’d be okay, and he was sleeping like a babe when I left him.”

“It was a long sleep,” Durell said grimly.

“He was alive when I left him in the afternoon.” Anderson started to say more, then shrugged. “Anyway, I got the radio going and raised Ankara. They were glad to hear from me, and they asked about you. I didn’t think you were here already—that’s why I took off, back at the inn. I’m glad to have you backing me, though—somebody is around who’s tough and smart, and he’s going to try every which way to stop you and me from getting out with the tapes.”

“What else did Ankara say?” Durell asked.

“They’re sending a KT-4 first thing tomorrow morning— one of the new types, lands on a dime, carries ten for a four-thousand-mile range. I told them to land on one of the fields across the river. Nothing else except a chopper could sit down there, and the fog socked in the whole valley yesterday, so nothing could fly in. Tomorrow it should be okay.”

Anderson paused and spread his big hands and looked curiously around the room. Francesca seemed to be asleep. The charcoal fire in the tiled stove had gone out, and it was growing chilly in the hut. Anderson shook his head slowly and grinned his wide grin, and Durell found himself liking the man and glad he was on hand.

“I ought to resent Ankara sending you to help me,” Anderson said. “I’ve been in the business almost as long as you, Durell. But I’m in a jam here, no mistake. The tapes are missing, and we’ve got to find them fast, before whoever got them manages to escape from this valley.”

“What happened when you got back from locating the radio?”

“Uvaldi was dead. It was only two or three minutes before you showed up. I had no time to ask questions or learn if any strangers had been around. You and Turk came along and I figured I’d really bought it—I lost my gun yesterday, in the quake. So I hid in the hall—”

“Are you the one who turned out the lanterns?” Durell asked.

“No. I found the blasted things just the way you did. My only thought was to get away from you and the Turk—you looked dangerous to me. I had an idea of getting back to Base Four and picking up Sergeant Isaks and some other men for reinforcements. Dinty Simpson said on the radio you were coming, but I couldn’t be sure when, and I didn’t even guess it was you, back at the inn.” Anderson grinned. “Glad I didn’t brain you when you were chasing me, anyway, Cajun.”

Durell smiled. “My luck. Do you know Dinty well?”

“Just from around the Embassy.” Anderson’s prominent gray eyes looked almost colorless in the pale light of the kerosene vapor lamp inside the hut. Then, as Durell wondered what was taking Kappic so long in fetching Susan Stuyvers to take care of Francesca, Anderson walked over to the bed and frowned at the unconscious girl. His big hands looked surprisingly gentle as he adjusted the thin blanket over her form.

“Quite a looker,” the courier said. “Who is she?”

“She’s Dr. Uvaldi’s daughter.”

Anderson was startled. “Hell, Uvaldi never mentioned her.”

“He wasn’t expecting her.”

“I mean, he never mentioned having a daughter.” The big man looked troubled. “Do you trust her?”

“I don’t trust anybody,” Durell said quietly.

Anderson nodded, not surprised. “Yeah, I know your training, Cajun. You’d kill her or me or anybody in your way, if it was necessary. Killing is part of your business, I hear.”

“Not exactly,” Durell said.

“Well, I hope you trust me,” the big man said. He started for the door of the hut. “I’m going to see this Susan Stuyvers.”

“Why?”

Anderson drew a deep breath. “Because she’s got the tapes.”

Durell looked quickly at the sleeping girl. Francesca had not moved.

Anderson said quietly, “It can’t be anyone else. When I came back after hunting for the radio, the local medic stopped me down in the inn. He said Uvaldi had sent an old woman with a small package to the missionary’s daughter, only a short time before I returned.”

“Why would Dr. Uvaldi do that?”

“Search me. Maybe he thought I’d gotten into trouble and wasn’t coming back,” Anderson said. He looked angry for a. moment. “Of course, I’m not sure the old woman really delivered anything to John or Susan Stuyvers, and even if she did, I’m not sure it’s the tape we want. But that’s why I want to see her.”

Durell was silent. Until he had more facts, there was no point in jumping to quick and possibly wrong conclusion. He felt trapped in this desolate valley, alone with an urgent problem to solve. Back home, in Washington, they were waiting impatiently for Uvaldi’s taped data. Something big was brewing over the mountainous frontier, and whatever it was, Washington had to know about it. He was glad he had met with the Tennessean, Anderson. But everyone else here could only add to his uncertainty. He could trust none of them. And he was trapped here as much as any of them. The only positive fact he had was Dr. Uvaldi’s murder and the ominous loss of the tapes. It meant someone was lying, and that person was in Karagh or somewhere in the valley, determined to head for the Soviet border with the tapes Washington needed.

Durell walked quietly over to the girl who called herself Francesca Uvaldi. She breathed quietly and easily, as if in a natural sleep of exhaustion. Under the thin blanket, her body looked firm and shapely. Her face was composed and lovely. Then, as he continued to look down at her, she turned on the bed and whimpered and flung out an arm, disarranging the blanket and exposing a firm, tanned breast. He straightened the blanket to cover her nakedness and returned to Anderson.

“I think we’d better not say anything directly to Susan Stuyvers,” he suggested. “Let’s see what she has to offer on her own initiative.”

“But even if she’s loyal, she may not trust us. She might decide to keep quiet about the tapes, anyway.”

“In that case,” Durell said. “I’ll have a look at that black bag she’s so eager to hang on to.”

Chapter Seven

THE opportunity to check on the missionary and Susan came sooner than expected. John Stuyvers arrived with his daughter, herded into the hut by Kappic. The gaunt missionary looked disheveled, full of protests. His fanatic’s eyes considered Francesca with something like dismay, but then he dismissed her and refused to look at her, as if she were something unholy and not to be permitted near him. Susan, on the other hand, was calm and coldly efficient. She took Francesca’s pulse, put the back of her hand to the other girl’s cheek, nodded, and went to the tiled stove and built up the charcoal fire, then found some water in an earthen jar, picked up a battered teakettle from one of the crudely carpentered shelves, and began heating the water in it. John Stuyvers sat on a stool and watched Susan with baleful eyes. Durell lit a cigarette, and ignored John Stuyvers’ complaints, nodded to Kappic and Anderson, and stepped outside.

The wind had died, but an overcast hid the mountains and the stars. He hoped the fog would not return, in view of what Anderson had said about the KT-4 coming in the morning. The courier had done a good job, finding the radio and getting a message back to Ankara. Durell flipped away his cigarette and walked through the grove of twisted trees toward the Stuyvers’ hut.

A lantern burned inside, and the door was unlocked. The hut was very much like the other, furnished sparsely in peasant style, with two small windows in the stone walls. There was a roaring fire in the stove, and the air felt immoderately hot and stale. The big bed was rumpled and disarrayed. He walked to it and felt the pillow and noted its warmth. There was a faint scent of perfume near the bed and this surprised him, because Susan’s puritanical appearance had ruled out all cosmetics and feminine adornments.

He could not find the big black handbag she had been so anxious to keep with her, back on the mountain road. He had the feeling he ought to hurry, that John or the girl might return almost at once, and he began a rapid search of the cupboards and shadowed corners of the hut. They yielded nothing. He paused once, thinking he heard the grate of a footstep outside; but no one came in and he went on, deciding there was no place here that could be used as a hiding place except the bed itself.

There was nothing under the pillow, but when he heaved back the heavy mattress and exposed the ancient springs, the black bag came to light at once. He picked it up, feeling the weight of books inside, and noted the fine leather and French manufacture. He tried the lock. There was a small keyhole, but the bag was tightly sealed. It did not delay him long. He carried with him some picklocks, and he chose one of the small steel instruments with care, and worked it into the keyhole.

The bag came open.

For a moment he studied the scrolls and books inside. There were two large, leather-bound tomes with heavy covers and ancient parchment pages handwritten in Aramaic and illuminated in medieval fashion. So far, John and Susan Stuyvers’ story was verified. The books would have an extraordinary value back in the States. He put them aside with care, together with three small, tightly rolled scrolls on wooden pins, sealed with wax. He did not break the seals. Under the manuscripts, he found personal feminine articles in a small leather side pocket, a small vial of perfume, lipstick, a gold comb. He tried the pocket on the other side, and knew at once his search was successful.

The small steel box might have held a typewritten ribbon, and there was an official U.S. insignia stamped on the green enameled top. A piece of cloth tape held the little lid fast.

Durell flicked open the seal and carried the box into the lamplight. Inside was a metal spool and a reel of white plastic ribbon imprinted like Braille, with a complicated series of dots and dashes forming an incomprehensible pattern. Without the decoding machine in the Pentagon, half a world away, the data on the ribbon was meaningless. But he did not underestimate the opposition. Given time enough, they could decode the information here. And even if they couldn’t, simply delaying its delivery to Washington, where it could be broadcast to the world as deterrent knowledge, might have disabling effects on American security.

Durell replaced the spool of ribbon. The importance of this small box was incalculable, and he did not relish its possession. All the others knew who he was. He stood as a natural target for any enemy masked among them. Not that he avoided danger; he was accustomed to it, and it was part of his job. But if he were someone’s target and he kept the tape on himself, he might add to the peril of failure.

He paused and listened. The hut was silent. He wondered briefly why Uvaldi had sent the tape to Susan Stuyvers by way of the old peasant woman. But Uvaldi would never answer any questions now. And why hadn’t Susan come straight to him with the tape? He needed answers, and there were none, for the moment.

He turned back to Susan’s bag and began repacking the brittle scrolls and the heavy Biblical tomes—then paused as his senses caught a sound he should not have heard. He listened, but there was nothing now. Turning, he pocketed the tape, took out his gun, and walked to the closed door of the hut and stood for a long moment, motionless, alert, tense. Then he went back, replaced the leather bag under the mattress, blew out the lamplight, and returned to the doorway in darkness.

He had the feeling he had been watched every moment of the time he had been in the hut. But there was nothing to be seen outside. Then he heard a light footfall from the direction of the other hut and he saw the missionary’s daughter walking openly toward him. But she was too far away then to have been the source of the sound that had alerted him. He stood still, watching her, and when she came up to him her features were quiet and smiling.

“Hello. Did you blow out the lantern?”

“Yes, I’m sorry, I thought—” He paused. “Did you see anyone else outside, on your way over?”

“No one.”

“I was wondering if you were comfortable here with your father,” he suggested. “Perhaps you’d like to share the other hut with Francesca, and I could bunk here. We’ll all be leaving Karagh tomorrow, you know.”

Her tawny eyes regarded him with that steady, disconcerting stare he had noticed on the road that afternoon. Unerringly, she had walked straight to the lamp, found a match, and lit it, then returned to close the hut door. “And how will you manage our departure, Mr. Durell?”

“An American plane is coming for us, in the morning.”

“I see. And will you be taking John and me with you?”

“As American citizens, you’re entitled to all the help and protection our government can afford.”

“Thank you.” She smiled again. He waited for her to glance at the bed, where he had replaced the bag of manuscripts and books, but she did not look that way. Neither did she mention the tape. “I will stay here with my father, I think,” she said quietly. “Francesca is still asleep, and I’m sure she’ll be all right. I came back here to find you, naturally.” Her voice was still pitched low, but it was no longer flat and colorless as it had been before. Something about her manner and figure looked different, too. There was color in her cheeks, perhaps from the cold night air. And previously she had moved with a flat-footed, graceless stride. Now, when she walked away from the lamp on the table, her body adopted a feminine posture that was suddenly and deliberately provocative. Her smile was full of secrets. He saw the passion in her pale mouth and in the curve of her chin and throat, and his estimate of Susan underwent a swift and radical change. She looked up again, her pink mouth curved in the smile she held for him. “You see, I knew you would be here. I came as quickly as I could.” “How did you know that?” he asked.

“From the way you looked at me, when we first met.” “You’re imagining things, I think. And your father—”

“He’s drinking brandy with Kappic, the Turk. John likes brandy.”

“That’s not very characteristic of a devoted missionary.” “John is not characteristic of anything. He is a very unusual man. Like you, his pattern isn’t often repeated. You’re different, too.”

“How, different?” he asked.

“You know,” she said. In the small silence, he saw that she was breathing faster. She added, “There is something between us, isn’t there? I felt it right away. It shook me up terribly. Does that surprise you?”

“A little.”

“I suppose everything they say about a minister’s child is true,” she said, and smiled. Then she came toward him with a sliding, graceful, hipswinging walk and lifted her face to his. “Don’t you want to kiss me, Durell? It can be very exciting. Didn’t you come here for that? You’re not all that surprised, are you?”

“Look, Susan—”

“If you’re worried about John, he won’t be back for some time yet.” Her mouth trembled, pouting; her intense, pale gaze never left his face for a moment. “Don’t you like me?” she whispered. “Is it the way I must dress, or do my hair? John insists on it, you know. But you know I’m not the way I look, don’t you? You can feel it, I’m sure. Otherwise, I—I couldn’t have misunderstood you, could I?”

“I think you have.”

“But if you didn’t come here for me—” She stepped back, and her face changed, became wary and hard, touched by a random fear. Her eyes slid away to the bed for just a flicker of an instant.

Durell said quickly, “But I did come to see you, Susan.”

It hung in the balance, then. She could tell him about the tape now, he thought, since she must know about it. Or did she? Perhaps her father had seen the old peasant woman leave alone, and received the tape sent to him by Uvaldi, without Susan’s knowledge.

She kissed him then, with no warning except a quick reach of her arms and a clasping of her hands behind his neck to draw his head down to hers. She gasped, her mouth warm and alive and moving against his lips. Her hands came around to cup his face, her fingertips moving, pressing against him. He was suddenly conscious of the small metal box in his pocket. Could she feel it when she clung to him? Had she arranged the bed in deliberate, but careful, disorder so that she knew he had been searching here? He felt her breath more rapidly,, and then she pulled away and looked up at him from under her lashes and smiled. She quickly shoved down the shoulders of her prim, simple dress, tugging at the cloth with crossed arms until it tumbled to her narrow waist as she sank down on the big peasant bed.

She wore nothing under the dress. She drew a deep breath, aware of her firm, proud breasts and moved slightly, to make her flesh tremble.

“Now,” she whispered. Her eyes were bright, delighted. “Now you see me as I really am. Do you like me now?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want me?”

“Any man would.”

“I’m not just interested in any man.” She spoke with panting breaths. “I’m only interested in you, Durell. From the first time I saw you—”

“Susan—”

“Don’t talk anymore.”

She pulled him down toward her, her body warm and smooth and alive. He could not deny her quick passion. He saw her intense stare, her open mouth, the thin gold necklace swaying, pendant, between her breasts—

A footstep sounded outside above the quick, animal gasps of her breathing. He pushed her away, stepped back, and said, “Now isn’t the time, Susan.”

“Yes, yes it is—”

“Someone is coming.”

“What? She seemed not to comprehend. “Who?”

“John, probably. Move quickly.”

She turned her head, her eyes oddly blind, and looked toward the door. Someone knocked loudly and imperatively. With a quick movement, she pulled up the top of her dress and fastened the button at the throat, smoothed back her prim blonde hair, and transformed herself, immediately and completely, into the minister’s daughter again. Only the quick intensity of the way she breathed might have betrayed her. “Who is it?” she called.

The knock was repeated.

“Are you all right?” Durell asked her softly.

“Yes. Of course, I must be. We—later, at some time—” He nodded and went to the door and opened it.

Colonel Wickham stood there, fist upraised to knock again.

Chapter Eight

THE colonel had pulled himself together since Durell last saw him in the wrecked office at Base Four. His face was still flushed and florid, and there was a trace of yellowish bloodshot in his eyes, but his white brush-cut hair was groomed and his mouth had tightened and his slack figure was carefully uniformed in a remarkably fresh outfit. He stepped inside the hut without ceremony, pushing past Durell.

“Been looking for you, Mr. Durell. Why haven’t you reported to me? I want to know what’s been going on here in the village.”

“How did you get down from the Base?” Durell countered. “I walked, of course.” There was pompous satisfaction in the fat man’s voice, as if he challenged Durell to doubt that he could have made it. “I don’t intend to be left behind in this damned hole, no matter what sneaky and treacherous plans you’ve been making to desert me here.”

“Now, just a moment—”

“Whatever you plan to do,” Wickham said quickly, “I’m going with you. You can charge me with pulling rank, if you like—and you don’t have to like it. But as top-ranking officer in the military establishment here in Musa Karagh, I’m giving the orders henceforth. Is that clear?”

Susan Stuyvers said in a flat, toneless voice, “But of course, Colonel Wickham.”

Wickham whirled and stared hard at her, as if seeing her for the first time through the false fury he directed at Durell. “Oh, it’s you. Where’s the reverend, Miss Stuyvers?”

“In the next cottage, visiting with the others,” Susan said smoothly.

“Oh. And you’re here with Durell—” Wickham paused and stared with sudden hardness at the girl, then at Durell, and licked his lips. He started to say something, and a cunning came into his bloodshot eyes and he decided against it. “I see. Durell, did you find Dr. Uvaldi?”

“We did.”

“Ah, good!”

“What?”

“He’s dead.”

“Didn’t you expect it, Colonel?”

“What? What do you mean?” Wickham sputtered. “Was it the earthquake, after all?”

“It was murder. And the coded tape he carried is gone, too.” There was abrupt silence in the hut, except for Wickham’s wheezing, tempestuous breath. Some of the flush faded from the man’s jowls, and his gaze faltered and swung away from Durell’s dark, steady eyes.

“Oh, God. Oh, no.”

“You know what it means, Colonel? It means there’s an enemy agent loose somewhere in Musa Karagh.”

“Well—Well, but that’s your business, isn’t it? That’s in your line, what you’re trained for, right? Why are you wasting time here?”

“I’m not, Colonel. How long have you been down from the mountain?”

“About an hour. But—” Wickham sucked in a longer breath. “Are you suggesting that I am suspect?”

“Yes. Everyone is, until I get the tapes back.”

Durell waited, wondering if Susan Stuyvers might now mention the spool of coded ribbon delivered to her by the peasant woman from the village inn. But Susan had sat down, hands folded placidly in her lap, her blonde head bowed, and there was no hint of the passionate woman he had seen a moment ago. She was remarkable, Durell thought—and perhaps dangerous. Perhaps she had been acting a role the last few minutes in order to keep him off guard. But he touched his pocket, to make sure the tape was still there, and sighed silently. Perhaps Colonel Wickham had been loose in the village, too, when Dr. Uvaldi was murdered.

Nothing was certain. No one could be trusted.

Durell arranged with Kappic to keep guard at the end of the little valley, hemmed in by cliffs, where the huts were located. No one could get in or out without the Turk, or Anderson, his alternate relief, spotting an intruder. Finally, Durell found himself alone for a few moments in the hut with Francesca Uvaldi.

The girl looked calm enough in her exhausted sleep. Anderson had managed to find a scratch meal for them all, together with a bottle of milk raki that pleased the colonel. Durell had said nothing about finding the tapes in Susan’s hut, among the missionary’s books. For the moment, he decided it would be safest to go on as if the tape was still missing. Someone among them was as anxious to get the Uvaldi tape as he had been, judging from the attack on Francesca. He frowned, lit a cigarette, and stared at her as she slept on the bed. Then she turned over, the blanket pulled up to her chin, and looked wide-eyed at the rafters overhead, where the pigeons moved and burbled. She saw Durell and her mouth tightened a little, and he noticed the tear stains on her cheeks, and presumed she had taken her few moments alone to weep silently.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m such a fool.”

“You don’t have to be ashamed of mourning your father.” “Roberto? No, it’s just that—I made a lot of mistakes today. I thought I was so clever—and I only succeeded in getting beaten up within an inch of my life. I’ll never forget it. Never.” She shuddered with the memory of the savage attack. “Did you find my gun outside, Sam?”

“No.”

“Then he must have taken it.”

“Who was it, Francesca? Who attacked you like that? And why?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know, and—” She paused, looked at him with careful, slanted gray eyes. “How do I know who you really are, Sam? We all seem to travel under false colors here. None of us are what we claim, are we?” “And what are you, really?” he asked grimly.

“I can’t tell you—yet.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“I want to, but—I’m afraid, I guess.”

She turned her face away from him and began to cry again.

Even as she wept, her behavior caused frustration and dismay. She did not understand herself. She had never felt like this before. Always in the past she had been complete, aloof from the troubles of others. Roberto once had called her a cold and beautiful bitch, sterile and heartless. But she did her work well, efficiently and alone. There was satisfaction in using her courage and wits against the enemy, as she thought of it. But she knew her detachment was a fault, although until now it hadn’t troubled her; she’d been quite satisfied with herself.

Now everything was shaken and changed.

She had groveled in the dirt, shrinking in terror from the degradation of savage blows, and she had felt the chill of sure death approach her. An intimation of mortality, she thought grimly. The pain had debased her, reducing her in those poisoned moments to one vast, quaking heartbeat, no better or worse than anyone else in the world.

Her body still ached with her bruises, but she was warm and reasonably comfortable now, and she looked up at Durell with a touch of wonder. She wanted to trust him. She felt alone for the first time in her life. She needed someone now, and yet—

He had been gone a long time. Maybe with Susan—

She was surprised at the twist of jealousy she felt. Durell was different from all the other men she had known. There was a reserve about him, an objectivity in his dark eyes when he looked at her. She shivered inwardly, but it was not unpleasant, being watched this way.

“Sam?” she whispered. She smiled. “I’m hungry.”

“We all are. But there’s very little good for any of us here.”

“Being hungry means I feel better, though, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. I’m glad. You had a close call.”

She lifted herself on the bed. “I wish—we could be alone for a little while. Not here.” Her gray eyes tilted up at him. “But somewhere.”

“Some time,” he nodded. “Perhaps.”

Susan Stuyvers lay stiffly on the bed in the adjacent hut, acutely aware of John sprawled in a chair across the room. Something in her had changed. She hadn’t told John about her encounter with Durell, and it was the first time since he had saved her, out on the Lebanese desert, that she had kept anything from him; and in a way, this frightened and excited her, all at the same time.

She lay still, moving the palm of her hand slowly against her cheek. In the pale light of the lantern, she saw John stir, breathing gustily, and she smelled the staleness of the Anatolian brandy he had been drinking with Colonel Wickham. Her sense of his strange fanaticism echoed strongly, like the movement of fear within her, and she wondered about it. She felt different, as if her life had suddenly moved into another cycle, a new direction. It was Durell, she thought. He had done it, and she was like a moth attracted to a deadly flame. John would never allow it. But she felt as if it was irresistible. Durell was different because he could make her do whatever he asked, out of strength and conviction; and she thought of this and wondered how it would be, to belong to such a man, after all that had happened to her lately. And she felt an inner yearning to give up everything and let him do whatever he wanted, to be mindless and empty and live in waiting, just to be filled by him.

She was tired of scheming and fighting and clawing toward something better for herself in this world—something she didn’t yet define or recognize. . . .

John stood up suddenly and walked to the bed and stared down at her. “Susan, my dear.” His voice was deep, quiet. “You are awake.”

“Yes.”

He sat down quietly on the bed beside her, a gaunt and feverish man she did not understand, except for his strange, aloof kindness toward her. His thin face loomed over her.

“Fancy this, getting as far as Istanbul, and perhaps further, as guests of the U.S. government, travel expenses all paid!” “Does it please you, John!”

“I have been thinking of many things. We will go to Naples, in Italy, and rest in the sun there, while I arrange for the books and scrolls to be sent to the mission library in Philadelphia. I am determined to do this thing, Susan. Under the laws of man, taking the books from Lebanon is an illegal act, perhaps. But in the eyes of God, these things belong with those who treasure and revere them.”

“I understand, John.”

“But I have been thinking, Susan—perhaps the mission committee will not approve of my act. I may have to resign, give up the collar and my work, change my whole life afterward—”

“Oh, no.”

His thin face smiled. “I think my work as a missionary will be finished then. A different life has been beckoning to me, since—since you came into my world, my dear. You— you have never been like a true daughter, you know.”

“I—I’m sorry, John. I tried to do exactly what you told me.”

“It isn’t that,” he said quickly. “I feel differently about you.”

She stared at him, aware of the way he was looking at her, and she felt excitement, and a little fear.

“Can we talk about it in Istanbul? Or Naples?” she asked.

“Of course. Go to sleep, Susan.”

He got up slowly and went back to his chair.

Lieutenant Kappic and Colonel Wickham walked slowly back from the village. The local doctor, who had taken charge of village administration when the mayor was killed by a collapsing house, had agreed to send a squad of men to make sure the field across the river was safely cleared for the expected landing of the plane in the morning. The other villagers had calmed down after the excitement at the inn, and the community had settled back into the cold darkness of the night.

The earth was silent and steady now. There would be no more tremors, the older men said. If the sun shone tomorrow, the rebuilding work would begin, all through the mountain district of Musa Karagh.

Kappic did not like Wickham, so he walked back to the huts without talking. Kappic had found a half-eaten haunch of lamb and a stale loaf of bread in a ruined house near the wrecked river bridge, and he had shared it with the others at the inn. Their bellies were cramped with hunger and the salt taste of impending starvation.

He knew what it was to feel your belly growl and sense a creeping weakness in your limbs when there was nothing to eat. As a boy, he had been a goatherd in these hills, near the military frontier posts where the Moskofs watched. There had been nautral calamities in those days, too, and hunger was a common thing, almost a normal state of affairs. And if he had his choice, his heart and memories were with the simple peasants of Karagh, and not with the official dignitaries his Army career had brought him to meet.

When he gave the food to the doctor at the caravansaries, the man’s eyes had been grateful and surprised. He had not expected Kappic to side with the miserable poor of this calamity-stricken village. The years had changed him, and the young goatherd who had been Mustapha Kappic was outwardly submerged in the modern uniform of the Army official from Ankara. But the roots of one’s heart, Kappic thought, remained in the soil that gave one birth.

He only had wanted something better for his people when he first went to Ankara. And he had quickly found others who felt the same way. Or seemed to. As a young shepherd in a new and unfamiliar uniform, seeing wealth and waste where he had only known poverty and the necessity to save, he had felt confused by those he met who talked of black being white, of his country’s ancient enemy being truly a friend. He had become involved before there was time to draw back, before he understood. And even now he felt confused. He wished he could understand why he felt as if he had removed himself from the amicable alliance with Durell. According to that little group of plotters back in Ankara, Durell was simply an agent of the enemy, the true enemy of his people. Kappic sighed. He did not understand. He knew what his orders had been from the group to which he so dangerously belonged, the men who could destroy him by informing, with safety to themselves, of his thoughts and his talk in the past. He was trapped, ordered to obey, to do what had to be done.

Kappic felt confused. He was not supposed to consider anything else. Yet he was a soldier, and he had other duties, too. The villagers, in their misery, had claimed first place in his emotions. He could be shot for his attitudes now. And if he failed to perform what his strange friends had ordered, he could be destroyed for that, too.

He was not afraid. He just wished he could see things clearly, once and for all, before he took this last, irretrievable step that might brand him as a traitor. Soon he would have to make his choice. Until then, he was determined that no man would read his mind and his heart.

Colonel Wickham walked beside the Turk and thought about the morning ahead. He told himself he had only to wait until then. The plane would come. After that, everything would be different. Then this idiot’s nightmare would end. Then he could make his move.

But he would have to watch Durell and Anderson. Those two were a dangerous, competent, somehow terrifying pair. Their training had molded them alike, into men who were not like other men in their dedication and purpose.

A man had to play chess in everything that mattered, Wickham thought. Life itself was a chess game, to be carefully schemed out, planned and executed with cold calculation.

Wickham liked chess. He had played it since he was a boy. He preferred the crisp, safe logic of the game to the unpredictable emotionalism of life. On the chessboard, the only uncertainty was the intellectual capacity of your opponent and his emotional stability in the face of your attack, apparent or real. It was strange how calm one could be in the quiet of a study, facing the board, with your antagonist only a dim and unimportant shape across the table. Here, in these wild mountains, everything was different. Emotions you never suspected had seized you and almost destroyed you.

They all thought they were so strong and smart, Wickham reflected. Durell, Anderson, Kappic—and those two women, each so different from the other, yet so much alike, really.

Like Betty, back home in Arlington.

Betty had lived with him as his wife for ten years, yet she never came to know the man he might be, or actually was. Wickham chuckled, and felt Kappic turn his head and stare coldly at him as they labored uphill toward the huts. Kappic’s eyes looked cruel in the night, shining white with a peculiar crescent look.

Betty looked at him like that, now and then. Did she suspect what he really could be, some day? Hard to tell. Wickham knew his own limits. He was a physical coward. And yet his purpose was strong and implacable, and his ambitions could not be discouraged.

If he got out of this alive, he would see to it that things were different in the future. He would arrange it so that nothing like this could happen again.

One couldn’t always cope with the cruelties of nature. Disaster struck everyone, without warning or prejudice.

Well, he’d show them all, Wickham thought.

They’d get some surprises, tomorrow. All of them. . . .

Durell awoke suddenly, all at once. He did not move. He waited, orienting himself in the darkness of the hut. A pigeon stirred sleepily on the rafter overhead, and someone sighed and moved in the big peasant bed across the floor from his pallet. Francesca? She was alone in the bed. Kappic was on guard outside, at the entrance to the little cup-like space among the craggy cliffs, where even a goat could not descend.

Carefully he looked at the glowing hands of his watch on the underside of his wrist. Four in the morning. He sat up, knowing that something had alerted him. The tape, in its green metal box, was still in his pocket. He touched it to reassure himself. No one was near him. No one—

He was alone in the hut, except for the sleeping girl.

Wickham and Anderson were gone.

Durell stood up quietly, all in one movement, and walked to the door and paused, listened, then opened the door and looked out at the night.

Nothing.

He heard the steady pulse of his blood in his ears and the strange, singing pressure of the mountains and loomed gigantically all around him. The Stuyvers’ hut was dark. He turned his head and looked beyond the little copse of olive trees where Francesca had been attacked. He did not see Kappic at his post on the trail, but that meant nothing. He wondered about the colonel and Anderson, and took a step from the doorway of the hut—

Too late, he saw what had wakened him and brought him outside.

A broken tile from the roof lay at his feet.

And even as he turned his head sharply, sucking his breath in with surprise, something landed on him from above, where the threat had been crouching darkly on the edge of the roof, waiting for him. . . .

The impact sent him crashing to the ground. There was an instant of dismay, when every reflex screamed and drove him upward against the implacable weight that pinned him down. He got his legs flexed and heaved up—and felt the sharp blow on the back of his head, aware of the bone-jarring strength with which it was delivered, and then aware of harsh gravel grinding into his face, of hands rapidly searching him, ignoring his gun, delving in his pockets—

He tried to shout, but no sound came from him. He was hit again, and then again. He could not see his enemy. He felt the hard earth slip away from under his struggling limbs, yielding to a black, soft darkness. . . .

But he did not lose consciousness completely. A desperation to live, to fight back, kept some of his senses functioning. He heard footsteps running away. He heard someone shout. He smelled the gravel under his face and opened his eyes and rolled over and saw the sky and the hut reel in a crazy kaleidoscopic pattern before they steadied under the effort he made.

“Kappic!” he called. “Kappic!”

He heard a faint cry of response and pushed himself up onto his feet and staggered, crashing against the doorway of the hut. Dim figures were running toward him.

“Kappic, stay on your post! Let no one out!”

He heard an answering call and drew a deep, shuddering breath. His scalp was bleeding. Francesca stood behind him, touching him anxiously. He shrugged her off. He saw Susan and John Stuyvers standing near their hut, their attitude uncertain. Anderson and Wickham were walking toward him from the dark blur of the olive trees. He took his gun from his pocket.

“Stay where you are—all of you! No one must move!”

They froze as they were. He heard Wickham expostulate, heard Anderson call anxiously if he was all right, while John Stuyvers, at a distance, demanded to know what had happened. Durrell took a step forward and his foot crunched on metal. He stood there briefly, aware of a squirming nausea in his stomach; but determined not to yield to it.

He had stepped on the small green case that had held the Uvaldi tape. But the case was empty now.

The tape was gone. . . .

Later, in the minutes that followed, he knew he had done all that could be done. Carefully, each watching the other as he directed, he drew them forward out of the darkness of the night, off the small field and out of the olive grove, and finally into Francesca’s hut. He ignored their questions. He did not permit Francesca or Susan to touch him when they wanted to attend to his scalp wound. He knew that every moment and every move had to be arranged just right, or everything would be lost.

If he had been unconscious even for a few moments, there would be no point in what he did. But he knew that his attacker couldn’t have escaped.

He questioned Kappic first.

“Put your gun on the table, Mustapha.”

“My gun?” the Turk said. His dark face frowned. “But why?”

“Just do as I say.”

“Very well.” Kappic slid his service pistol from its holster and put it on the rough board table. In the lamplight, his features scowled, and his moustache made him look fierce and angry and hurt. “You do not trust me, Durell?”

“I trust no one now. You were on guard at the footpath?” “As you ordered me.”

“And no one went by?”

“No one. It is the only way out of here.” Kappic gestured. “The cliffs rise on one side, they drop on the other. There is only the path to the village. No strangers came here or left.”

“Good. But where was Anderson and Colonel Wickham?” Anderson bulked hugely in the lamplight. His voice was a growl of dismay. “Wickham wanted some more raki. I woke up when he left his pallet, so I went down to the village with him to keep an eye on him. We had passed Kappic when we heard your shout. What happened to you, Cajun?” The Tennessean’s drawl was thick with urgency. “Who slugged you?”

“One of you,” Durell said. “And one of you has the tape.” “But—”

Durell cut him off. He went on with his questions. It quickly developed that each of them had been in sight of another, as far as could be determined, from the moment he first called. He knew there was an error here, that it had to be one of them, somehow. But repeated questions did not break the deadlock, and after a few moments he drew a resigned breath.

“All right. Somebody—one of you—took the tape from me. You’ll all have to be searched.”

Anderson said, “If an enemy agent were after that tape— and I reckon somebody is, judgin’ what happened to Dr. Uvaldi—his only object would be to lose or destroy the tape, Cajun, to prevent us getting the information on it back to home base.”

Durell nodded. “But he—or she—had no time to ditch the tape. He—or she—took it from its container, but couldn’t get away or out of sight of any of you others.”

“We can search the area, though,” Anderson insisted. His big head ducked as he stared in pale hostility at the small group.

Durell nodded again. “We’ll search each other, first. If nothing turns up, we’ll search both huts, then every inch of ground between here and where Lieutenant Kappic stood guard.”

“Let me help you first,” Susan whispered. “Your poor head—”

“Francesca will search you,” Durell said flatly. “Your clothes first. Then strip down. Use a blanket for a screen, if you wish. Francesca will search you everywhere, do you understand? Your clothes and your body.”

“I won’t submit—” Susan began.

“You will. Francesca?”

The dark-haired girl looked pale. “I understand. And then Susan can search me.”

“All right. The men will search each other.”

But nothing came of it. No one had the tape.

It was not in either hut. It was not in the field and not in the olive grove. It was not on the roofs of the huts. And while the search went on, each man watched the others, to make sure that somehow, if the tape was still, incredibly, on someone’s person, it was not thrown away or hidden or destroyed.

It was a long, exhausting hour. And the tape was not found.

Durell ordered a second search. Negative. He settled the matter, then, by keeping everyone in one hut, while the night dragged out its long hours. No one slept, and he wanted it that way. Let them watch each other, he decided. Let them suspect each other. If someone made the smallest move to hide the tape, wherever it might be, someone else would spot it.

He returned Kappic’s gun, and explained to the Turk and Anderson, “I lost the tape. I was outsmarted and now I’m being out-tricked. I don’t know how, but I’m sure one of these people—one of us—has the tape hidden somewhere.”

“We’ve searched them all,” Anderson drawled. “It just ain’t a particle possible, as Pappy used to say, every time the revenue people found one of his stills.”

Durell looked sharply at the grinning courier, then smiled, too. He felt better for the other’s casual humor. “It is possible. It’s happened. I don’t think the tape was swallowed, because the plastic would cut up the intestinal tract—and I don’t think we’re up against a suicide type here.”

“Just a mighty clever one,” Anderson said. “So what do we do?”

“We take them all with us, tomorrow.”

“But suppose the tape is just thrown away?”

“We can’t let that happen. We watch each other, and we wait.”

“Maybe we watch an empty barn, eh?” Kappic suggested.

“Let’s hope not,” Durell said.

Anderson grunted. “The way you figure it, we’re looking for just one traitor. But maybe there’s a team of them. Two, anyway. And they’ve been giving us the old razzle-dazzle by passing the tape back and forth between ’em, during the searches.”

“I’ve considered that,” Durell said. “But which two is it?”

Anderson and Kappic were silent.

Durell watched, and waited.

Chapter Nine

THE fog came back in the morning, and there was no sunrise. The mist drifted over the mountaintops in a thin tide that hid the dawn in a curtain of pearly iridescence, then poured sluggishly, like steam, through the valleys and crannies of the countryside. The light was a long time coming. Bonfires were built by the villagers at each end of the improvised airfield across the river, and for long minutes after the dawn, their ruddy, leaping light was stronger than that of the feeble sun.

Durell and the others waited near the fires at the southern end of the field. They had been up for an hour, with only a thin soup and a cup of tea for breakfast, provided by several village women who appeared in silence, unsmiling, to serve them the food. Afterward, they trudged, shivering, through the predawn darkness of the streets and across the ruins of the bridge to the rough field.

The dawn air was wet and penetrating. The sound of the river was a steady, unrelenting roar against the twisted abutments of the bridge. The noise of the water made it difficult

for those who were listening for the sound of the promised plane.

Durell stood near Susan Stuyvers. She clutched the big black handbag in both hands, holding it to her breast, and stared blankly at the dark sky. John Stuyvers looked like a grim, harassed prophet of doom beside her, his eyes smoldering with that strange fanatical light. Durell walked to where Francesca Uvaldi stood alone, apart from the others.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, thank you,” she nodded. “But I wish—I can’t believe the plane will really come here.”

Durell said nothing. In the cold mist of morning, the little group huddled on the edge of the field. For a moment, catching Kappic’s alert eye and Anderson’s nod, he had a moment of sinking doubt.

The risk he was taking could not be measured, if he was wrong. He told himself that no one had had a chance to get rid of the tape from the instant it was taken from him outside the hut. At every minute of the long night just past, all of them had been under close watch, with Kappic and Anderson checking each other. They had reported nothing. Both huts had been thoroughly searched again at dawn, and every inch of the surrounding ground had been covered. If someone here had the tape, it was still hidden on their person, somehow.

But he could not find the answer here. He had checked Francesca’s sketch box and the Stuyvers’ old manuscripts, and turned up nothing. There were no false compartments in any of the luggage the others carried. Whoever had the tape had concealed it in some way that defied discovery here. But at least, by watching them all through the night, he had made sure that the traitor had had no chance to destroy it or get rid of it.

One of them, too clever to be caught under these circumstances, still had the tape. Durell was sure of this. He had to play a waiting game, he decided, and never relax his watchfulness until, at the airport in Istanbul, a proper search could be made. At least, he thought, the person with the tape was caught in the group, and couldn’t make a move now without betraying himself.

Yet Durell wondered if he could be wrong. He’d had no sleep, and his eyes felt gritty and his body ached with fatigue. He started toward Kappic, then felt Francesca touch his arm and speak to him again.

“Wouldn’t it be easier if you and I had a truce, Sam?”

“I offered one last night,” he said.

“I know. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Since that man caught me last night—I feel as if everything in the world was turned upside down,” she murmured.

“It sometimes happens like that,” he said. “When we have a close brush with death, our perceptions are usually sharper for a time afterward.”

She smiled. “So I ought to see what a sterling character you really are, is that it?”

He grinned in return. “Is that too much to hope for?” “No. I wish you’d forgive me for getting so weepy last night.”

“That’s understandable, too.”

“No, it isn’t. I don’t understand it, anyway. I wasn’t crying for my father, you see. I know this may make me seem even more suspicious, but Roberto Uvaldi was just my stepfather, for one thing. We never got along, and we never meant much to each other.”

“Then why did you make this rough trip to see him?” Durell asked. “Visiting Dr. Uvaldi, or searching for peasant designs for your couturier concern, is just an excuse for coming to Karagh, isn’t it?”

She was silent, biting her lip now. Durell watched her, one part of his mind still wrestling with the problem of how the tape had been hidden from all the searching he had done. It could not have been chewed or swallowed—the sharp plastic would be too dangerous to ingest. He had insisted that Susan search Francesca thoroughly, stripped to the skin, and then the dark-haired girl had searched Susan. He found no ready answer, and spoke next from a sudden hunch as he regarded Francesca.

“You’re after John and Susan Stuyvers, aren’t you?”

She looked up, too startled to speak—and at that moment, they all heard the sound of the plane overhead.

It was like a miracle, since each of them privately had already abandoned hope of rescue that morning. There was nothing to see in the misty dawn sky. The fog crept down the valley and clung to the mountainsides in a thick blanket, and nothing except a faint, pearly radiance marked the presence of the sun, there beyond Musa Karagh.

It was a piston engine, and a light one, at that, Durell thought, listening to the muffled wash of the prop as it beat back and forth between the shoulders of the mountain. It sounded high and to the north, groping away from them; then it turned, faded, and suddenly came back lower and stronger than before. It was like something not quite a part of the rocky, torn world here below, in this desolated valley. Yet the sound of it was real enough, beating in their ears with a promise of rescue, defying the cold and the fog to reach them.

The KT-4 made a single pass overhead, still invisible in the mist, and turned at the far end of the valley. Kappic shouted to the villagers who tended the fires, and more wood was thrown on the flames so that the crude beacons flared up with suddenly increased brightness. Apparently it was just what the pilot needed. The sound of his engine came washing back up the valley, with a lower beat; and then a shout from the villagers greeted it as it broke through the thick, rolling mist overhead.

Durell had never seen this type of aircraft before. It was a newly developed design, lightweight, with superb lifting capacity for its size and rated power. Its wings were abnormally long and delicate, its landing gear spidery as it lowered from the shiny undersurface of the fuselage. The Air Force markings stood out brightly in reflection from the bonfires below.

Then the KT-4 roared overhead and wide flaps seemed to sprout from the long wings and its air speed dropped perceptibly. It settled like a giant moth down to the rough field beside the river. Anderson murmured in admiration at the way the pilot handled the aircraft; then the wheels touched and the ship bounced. A collective sigh came from the villagers. One long, delicate wing shivered, dipped, almost grazed the earth. The plane touched again, bouncing toward the end of the field, and the brakes squealed.

Then it stopped.

As if they were all one, everybody ran for the ship.

The pilot’s name was Harry Hackitt. He wore a major’s oak leaves on his shoulders, and his freckled face showed him to be no more than in his twenties. His grin was as wide and amiable as his Texas drawl, and his cowboy boots were scuffed and battered. The KT-4 needed only a crew of one, and Hackitt was it—pilot, navigator and radioman—easy and unconcerned.

Colonel Wickham reached him first, speaking rapidly and pompously. Hackitt’s salute was careless and sloppy, just short of an insult. But Wickham’s rank could not be denied, and Durell let the colonel organize the evacuee party, arranging the seating in the narrow fuselage cramped with bucket seats and jump equipment and radar devices under metal shields. Hackitt produced several cases of emergency rations, which were tossed out to the waiting villagers. The Turks accepted the food with dignity, although every man among them must have been trembling with hunger. Coffee in gallon jugs was welcomed by the Americans. Durell gave a cup to Francesca and then to Susan, who frowned because she was second in his choice; then he accepted a cigar from Harry Hackitt and moved a little away from the plane as the others climbed aboard.

The pilot drifted beside him, chewing the cigar and looking even younger because of it.

“You’re Durell, huh?” the Texan asked quietly. “The one they call the Cajun?”

“Yes.”

“Who do you know in Ankara, chum?”

“Dinty Simpson, for one,” Durell said.

“Right. He gave me a message for you. But first you better brief me on the fat crow who’s giving all the orders and making with the hot wind, huh?”

“You mean Colonel Packard Wickham?” Durell met the Texan’s freckled grin with a smile. “I think his bark is worse than his bite—but I wouldn’t swear to it.”

“I know the type,” Hackitt mused. “Big wheel in the Pentagon. Always on the make, hanging around Big Daddy like flies on a honey pot.”

“Big Daddy?” Durell asked.

“The old man. Don’t you know Happy Hackitt?”

Durell nodded. It was a name that anyone in Defense and Joint Chiefs hastened to obey. “Yes, I know Hap. Is he really your father?”

“Sure thing. So Colonel Wickham don’t worry me the teensiest bit, see? Don’t let him dog-bite you either, Mr. Durell.”

“You said you had a message for me from Dinty.”

“Oh, sure,” Harry said. He shrugged. “It wasn’t much.

Kind of cryptic, matter of fact. He just said you’re to trust nobody. Repeat, nobody.”

“Is that all?”

“Well, he said to be careful, for God’s sake. I quote him literally, Mr. Durell.”

“That goes for all of us,” Durell suggested.

Hackitt threw away his cigar. “Let’s try flying, shall we?”

Anderson came toward Durell as the others boarded the KT-4. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Cajun. I’m not sure I ought to go along, unless you insist it’s the right thing to do.”

Durell stared at the big man’s amiable face in the misty light. “What are you getting at?”

“Uvaldi’s tapes—have you found them? After all, my job is to deliver them to Washington.”

“It’s my job, too,” Durell said.

Anderson’s gray eyes were sober. “Then you did find them, Cajun?”

“No.”

“Then you’re sure one of this crowd has the tapes on him?59 “That’s the gamble I’ve got to take,” Durell said.

“We could strip ’em all down to the buff right here on the field before they get aboard, couldn’t we?” Anderson insisted.

Durell studied the misty sky. “We might get socked in by fog again if we delay too long. No, I think the tapes will be on the plane, somehow.”

Anderson paused, then grinned his mountaineer’s grin, slow, amiable, tight. “Good, then. I’ve heard a lot of things about you, Cajun, and I guess you deserve ’em all. Still, it’s a big risk. I still think we ought to strip them all down, right here and now, before we leave.”

“Let’s get aboard,” Durell suggested quietly.

He went into the plane behind Susan, who clutched her black bag to her breast as if it were life itself.

The fog had thickened in only the few minutes it took to turn the strange-looking plane into the wind, and Durell knew his sense of urgency in getting out of the valley now was justified. True, he was gambling everything on the conviction that somehow one of this oddly assorted group was the enemy, in possession of the Uvaldi tape. He could not conceive yet how last night’s search had failed to turn it up.

If he were wrong, the consequences were too enormous to contemplate. But he couldn’t be wrong, he told himself. One of this group was a traitor, an enemy. Before the flight was over, he had to determine which one it was.

The KT-4’s engine roared and the extraordinary, long wings shook. The field was curtained by mist that curled across the brawling river. Hackitt paused before climbing into the pilot compartment and spoke to everyone.

“Got everything you need, friends? There’s some rations tucked in the head yonder, if anybody’s hungry. And another Thermos of coffee. Nobody’s sick, are they? Because I don’t have any penicillin. We’ll fly about six hours—not fast, but high. Notice the wings? We’re practically a glider. My orders are to skip Ankara and head straight for Istanbul. Mr. Dinty Simpson will be waiting for all of you there.”

Anderson said, “Do you fly over the Black Sea, then?”

“Some of the way, huggin’ the Turkish coast,” Hackitt said. “Got a radar beam in Istanbul that pulls us home with no sweat.”

Durell took his seat with the others in the cabin. Colonel Wickham looked pale, and under the stress of the take-off in the fog, he abandoned all pretense and took his courage in the form of deep swigs from a bottle of raki. He coughed, wiped his eyes, and sat hugging the bottle against his little round belly for comfort.

The long, delicate wings of the KT-4 shivered as they trundled across the field to pick up speed. Fog whipped by, blurring the rocky, white-foamed river beside them. Nothing could be seen of Base Four on the summit of Musa Karagh, but Durell assumed that Sergeant Isaks up there was capable of holding out until more direct aid could be sent.

The lift-off came smoothly. In a moment the rough earth vanished under them, replaced by the fog. They seemed not to be moving, except for the vibration of the ship and the endless shaking of the wings. Durell remembered the steep red shoulders of the mountains all around the valley of Karagh as the plane lifted, banked, and lifted again. He thought he saw the loom of a cliff to the right, but the fog hid it before he could be sure. Colonel Wickham drank again, loudly, and then sat as if paralyzed.

It occurred to Durell they were less than twenty miles from the Soviet frontier. He started up, then sat down again.

He had to trust someone. It might as well be Harry Hackitt.

The KT-4 banked once again, then settled into a long, steady climb. It grew cold in the cabin, although some heat and pressurization was provided. Francesca found the Thermos jug of coffee and paper cups and poured for the others. Her long gray eyes met Durell’s in quiet understanding.

“I’m glad we’re leaving like this,” she said. “Together, I mean. Have you forgiven me?”

“But there’s nothing to forgive,” he said.

“Oh, yes, there is. I made things difficult for you.”

“And how do you feel about your own job in Karagh?” he asked.

She smiled secretly. “I think it will work out all right.” “Perhaps we ought to compare notes.”

“Oh, as long as you suspect us all, I don’t think it’s necessary. Not until we establish some mutual trust, Sam.”

A few moments later she went forward to give the pilot some coffee and Susan Stuyvers slid into the seat beside Durell. Under the peasant scarf that covered her head, her yellow hair looked severe, giving her face a prim and childlike look quite different from the passion that had been unveiled to Durell last night. He turned his head to glance at John Stuyvers, but the gaunt missionary seemed to be asleep in the last seat toward the tail of the plane.

“You haven’t even looked at me this morning,” Susan murmured. “Not really, except to wonder if I had that damned tape.” Her eyes slid sidewise, watching him. “What did that black-haired bitch say just now, when she gave you the coffee?”

He grinned. “You don’t sound like a missionary’s daughter, Susan.”

“Did she ask anything about me?” Susan persisted.

“Why should she?”

“She doesn’t like me. Haven’t you noticed how she looks at you? She doesn’t want another woman near you, Sam.” “You’re imagining things.”

“I’m not. You have that look of knowing women, darling, and I’m glad, but for now I want to feel as if you belong to me alone. Does that make sense?”

“Not much, considering where we are, and the company involved.”

“Oh, we’ll see each other again, in better times. I’m sure of it. Some day, when this is all over—” She paused, then whispered, “Please hold my hand, Sam.”

“Do you think it’s wise?”

She grinned like a gamin. “Well, you know what they say about a missionary’s children, darling.”

Durell said quietly, “But John is not your father, is he?”

“Of course not.” She smiled.

He held her hand.

The KT-4 circled, climbing above the summit of Karagh, then caught the homing beam and Hackitt set the autopilot and let the plane fly itself toward Istanbul. The course was north of west, taking them above the mountains and the shores of the Black Sea.

Back in the cabin, Colonel Wickham began to feel better. They were safely aloft and on their way out of the nightmare of Musa Karagh. Anything was better than staying with those dead men at Base Four. The plane seemed safe; the pilot competent, if young. After another drink or two, Wickham decided, he would pull a little rank and let everybody know that he was the commanding officer aboard, after all. No harm in that. It was necessary to compensate for the unpleasant image he might have created last night. Probably they suspected his panic and loss of control in yesterday’s situation. They didn’t understand how it was, but it wouldn’t do to have a chap like Durell report on that sort of thing. Wasn’t true, anyway. You could easily mistake exhaustion for having had a bit too much to drink. After all, when calamity strikes an isolated post like Base Four, wiping out officers and men, and you happen to be there— well, the responsibility for pulling things together is enormous. Takes it out of you, right? But things were fine now. The fog didn’t bother the pilot a bit. A man could relax now. You were never really scared, Wickham told himself. It was just frayed nerves, tension, from having to cope with that mutinous sergeant, isolated on top of that damned mountain. . . .

He had himself believing it, presently.

They were more than an hour’s flight from Karagh when the first incident occurred.

It might have been innocent; but Durell wasn’t sure. Perhaps it was only idle curiosity on Anderson’s part; but he never had time to decide about it later.

Almost everyone had succumbed to the steady, hypnotic drone of the KT-4’s engine and the uneventful flight through the misty sky. Wickham was asleep, as was John Stuyvers and Lieutenant Kappic. Susan rested her head in silence against Durell’s shoulder, and Francesca stared quietly out at the fog from her window seat across the narrow aisle. Susan’s eyes were wide open, looking at her past, or perhaps her future. She said nothing.

Yet one part of her was alert and watchful in the present.

She did not seem to notice when Anderson got up, ducking his head to accommodate his huge frame to the height of the cabin roof. The big man turned aft toward the galley and head, going past Durell with a brief, meaningless smile. Susan did not turn her head to watch him. But she was immediately aware of it when he paused, turned back at her empty seat beside John, and picked up the black handbag she had left there.

Before Durell could check her, she jumped up with a sharp cry. Anderson, who could be as quick as a cat, had already inserted a picklock in the bag. He opened it and flipped the handle back and reached inside. Nobody in the plane could see into it. But Susan, her face blanched white, leaped for the big man with a scream and tried to take the bag back.

“Give me that! How dare you—?”

Anderson swung away easily, turning his back to her. His wide mouth was set in a tight grin. “Take it easy, honey.”

“Why, you—John? John!”

Her shrill voice shattered the warm lethargy in the plane. She tried to squirm around the big man, reaching futilely past him in the aisle to prevent him from searching the bag. But Anderson’s size was too much for her. He shrugged her off easily and she fell back, panting.

“John!”

Stuyvers was on his feet, facing Anderson. His thin, hollow face looked demoniacal. “Close that bag, sir.”

“I’m curious, Reverend. Or is it just Mr. Stuyvers? Or is Stuyvers your real name at all?” Anderson said in his thick voice.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Your daughter—if that’s what she is—seemed mighty worried about this bag until an hour ago. Maybe she saw me watching her and decided to leave it here to look more casual about it. Well, I want to take those precious books and scrolls of yours apart, once and for all.”

“You have no right, sir.” John Stuyvers’ pale eyes flared. “They are too valuable to be tampered with by anyone who isn’t an expert. I resent your police methods, your insults and insinuations. You must not destroy these religious relics, whatever your motives.”

Durell looked away, glancing out of the window. He saw nothing but fog. Then he looked down and saw the dark surface of the sea, a thousand feet below. He was startled. He had assumed they were much higher and had cut back over the Turkish shore. But there was no land in sight as far as he could see through the mists below.

Then he turned sharply as Susan screamed. Anderson had pushed her aside, and she had fallen to the aisle floor between the seats. At the same moment, Stuyvers launched himself at the big man, grabbing for the books. Anderson swung the bag high and crashed it against the missionary’s head. It made a flat sound as it slammed against the thin man’s jaw. Stuyvers fell, sprawling, and blood trickled from his twisted, smiling mouth. He rested on his elbows, his clerical collar awry. There was something in the way he looked at Anderson that made the big man’s hands pause over the books.

Durell said sharply, “Stop it. All of you.”

“It is quite all right,” the missionary gasped. “Mr. Anderson will return the books.”

Anderson spoke quietly to Durell. “I was just curious. We could have cut those books open. The tapes might be in there, somewhere. Sure, maybe the scrolls are valuable, but I’ve got a job to do, and so have you.”

“When you provide an expert on old documents, I will be glad to have the books examined,” Stuyvers said coldly. “Until then, I do not trust any of you. Whatever you say you are, sir, you have proved nothing to me.”

Anderson hesitated a moment, then strangely shrugged and yielded, as if his interest in the whole affair had quite evaporated. He tossed the black bag aside in contempt, and it landed heavily on one of the seats. John Stuyvers picked it up and dragged it toward him and held it on his lap.

The tension abruptly eased.

Anderson said quietly, “I suppose I made a mistake. You have my apologies, Reverend.”

Stuyvers nodded and settled back into his seat near the tail section. The momentary threat of violence was gone, and Durell returned to the plane window. The fog had evaporated, replaced by a sudden wind that drove shredded clouds from the north across the foam-whipped sea, but even with the better visibility, there was no sign of the Turkish coast to the south. Durell frowned and lit a cigarette thoughtfully. The sea looked lifeless under the scudding clouds, and the buffeting wind made the slender wingtips of the KT-4 tremble violently as he stared at them.

The scene between Anderson and John Stuyvers had struck an odd, discordant note. Uneasiness made his nerves taut, and he searched for the cause. But it was natural for Anderson, also suffering from the uncertainty about the tapes and the tension of the flight, to make a move on his own. The big man surely resented Durell’s arrival on the scene in the first place, however easily he had accepted Durell’s authority.

Durell looked at his watch. They had been flying for two hours. It was difficult to guess their air speed over the ocean, but he was sure they should have been back over the Turkish shore by now.

He got up and went forward into the pilot’s cabin.

Hackitt had the radio earphones on his head and was calling with low urgency into his throat mike. He turned sharply as Durell came in, signalled for the door to be shut, and went on calling with worried intensity. His straw-colored hair was disheveled, as if he had run shaky fingers through it. Through the plexiglass bubble, Durell saw darkening clouds to the north and west and a low fogbank to the south. Under them, the sea looked hard and gray, untouched by the dim sun hidden behind the overcast.

“What is it, Texas?” Durell asked.

“I’m not at all sure, Mr. Durell.”

“Are we off course?”

“According to the beacon, we’re not.” Hackitt flipped fingers toward the control instruments. “We’re right on the nose, using the autopilot. Istanbul signals come in strong, but it’s got a funny way of fading now and then.”

“Is that usual?”

“No, sir, it sure as hell ain’t usual.”

“Can’t you talk to Istanbul directly?”

“I’ve been trying. But there’s a storm between us. I’ve never seen such weather. Must be the earthquakes, huh?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Durell said. “But why aren’t we over the Turkish coast by now?”

“That’s what worries me. My orders are to stay with the auto pilot, no matter what. You know the trouble some of us boys have had, drifting out of our air space. We lean over backward these days, and nobody is supposed to chance flying by the seat of his pants. Still, I just don’t know. I don’t like what I don’t understand, Mr. Durell.”

“Is your compass correct?”

“I’m not sure of that, either.”

“If it’s not, we could be halfway across the Black Sea toward Russia by now.”

“Yes, sir. But the beacon—”

“Never mind the beacon,” Durell said sharply. “Get off it and start using your own judgment. Right now!”

“I don’t know, sir; my orders are—”

“Head south, Major. Unless I’m wrong, we’re already being tracked by a dozen radars—and none of them our own!”

Hackitt’s freckles suddenly stood out in sharp orange spots against his skin. He bit his lip, leaned forward to snap switches, and took the controls in hand, settling himself in his bucket seat with his cowhide boots stretched before him. The plane lurched, then canted sharply as he swung the KT-4 in a long bank to port that headed them south toward land.

From behind them in the cabin came a shout of alarm— a man’s cry, but Durell was not sure who it was. It didn’t matter. Their maneuver brought another reaction immediately—from the sky above.

Like a thunderbolt, the first MIG screamed down across their new course, a dark streak of malevolent metal that left a thunderclap of jet turbulence behind it. The KT-4 slammed into it and shuddered. The MIG leveled off at wave-top level and scoured away to the north. It was followed almost at once by another—and then another. Hackitt licked bloodless lips.

“You were right. They were tailing us from upstairs.” “Guiding us, you mean,” Durell said softly.

“Huh?”

“You were following a false beacon that’s been taking us straight into Soviet air space, Harry. But it’s not your fault.”

“But how could that be? The signals were authentic—” “No. They were set up especially for us.”

Hackitt started to speak, then remained grimly silent. The knuckles of his hands on the controls shone white.

There came the sound of a blow, a woman’s scream, from the cabin behind them. Durell did not turn. He watched another MIG drop upon them from the clouds above, like a hawk upon a sparrow. And this time there came the unmistakable warning shots of wing cannon, thudding rapidly, the shells bursting ahead and to the left of their course. There was a flashing glimpse of the other pilot as the jet screamed past and banked to the north, a quick signal, an order to follow.

“What do I do?” Hackitt whispered. “We’re a clay pigeon to these gusy.”

“Keep heading south.”

“Listen, they’ll shoot us down!” Hackitt objected.

“Maybe.”

“What’s going on back in the cabin?”

“I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter just now.”

Another MIG dropped upon them. This time a machine gun stitched a shuddering row of ragged holes in the KT-4’s delicate wing. Metal tore loose and went shredding away like tin foil in the slipstream.

“Can you put us down on the water without killing us?” Durell asked.

Hackitt wet his lips. “Crash land?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe. We’re built to float a while, you know.” Hackitt grinned tightly. “This little ship can do a lot of surprising things—if I’m good enough to coax her into it.”

“How long could we float?”

“Six, maybe eight hours. The wings have flotation tanks in ’em.”

“Put us down, then.”

“On this sea?”

“You’ve got to.”

Hackitt said, “We could follow orders—land where they tell us. Put up a protest that we were lured into their air space by a false beacon—” “Maybe. But there’s something aboard that they want and which Washington’s got to have. Put us down,” Durell said.

“We might all be killed,” Hackitt whispered.

“That’s the general idea.”

Durell looked down at the sea below. The wind had covered the surface of the water with heavy whitecaps. It looked hard and cold and dark down there under the lowering skies. He drew a deep breath, and his mouth felt dry. He turned his head and stared back at the cabin door, then looked down at the sea again.

From above came the first warning scream of another jet fighter dropping upon them.

“Let’s go down,” he said quietly.

Chapter Ten

THE KT-4 floated downhill on a slope of air, sliding to the surface of the sea. The water waited sullenly for them. It seemed to reach up all around the horizon to embrace the dying plane.

“Here they come again,” Hackitt whispered.

The jets glistened like silver darts against the black overhang of clouds. At the same time, a burst of violently angry voices sounded in Hackitt’s earphones, audible even to Durell as he stood beside the Texan.

“What’s it all about?” Hackitt asked.

“They’ve tuned to your wave length, Harry. It’s Russian. It’s probably the squadron leader upstairs. He orders you to level off and follow him at once.”

“Back to his field?”

“He says you’ve intruded into Soviet territory. Follow—or else.”

Hackitt pulled off his earphones angrily. “To hell with that jazz. I was sucked off course deliberately.” He looked questioningly at Durell. “What do I do?”

“Put us down.”

“We could all get killed real fast down there.”

“It’s got to be done,” Durell said. “Keep banking south. There’s something over there—see it? On the water.”

A solitary shape had broken the heaving monotony of gray sea in their range of vision. It was only a blur, a splinter tossing on the uneasy surface of the water far to the south.

“Could be a fishing trawler,” Hackitt muttered. “Turkish, I hope.”

“Can you reach it?”

“Not unless you want to get shot to pieces here and now.” “Then get as close to it as you can before we crash. I’m going back to get everybody strapped in.”

The KT-4 sank lower, sliding on delicate, sensitive wings. Durell ducked through the narrow doorway into the main cabin. He looked up into a gun in Bert Anderson’s hand. Sprawled on the aisle floor behind the courier was John Stuyvers, bleeding from nose and mouth.

“He tried it again,” Anderson said gustily. “Why axe we going down?”

“You saw the MIGs?”

“Yes, but—”

“We’ll crash land to get away from them.”

“Are you crazy?” Anderson’s big, protuberant eyes seemed to pop even further in outrage. “We’ll drown in five minutes down there.”

“It’s the lesser of two evils.”

Colonel Wickham lurched to his feet, his normally florid face pasty white. “See here, Durell, you’ll kill us all! I demand —I order you to obey the instructions of those fighter planes out there! I’m sure it’s all a mistake—we can explain—the pilot’s at fault—”

Durell faced them all. “I suggest you all take your seats and buckle yourselves in. We’ll hit the water in less than three minutes.”

“But—it’s suicide!” Wickham whispered.

Durell pointed to John Stuyvers’ unconscious figure in the aisle. “Pick him up, Colonel. Help him, Susan. Strap him into the seat with you.”

Susan looked dazed. There were finger marks on her cheek where someone had struck her. Durell glanced at Francesca. She sat still beside Kappic. Kappic was disarmed. His dark, Turkish face was furious.

“This courier of yours,” Kappic said softly, “wants to take command. Everybody has gone crazy here.”

“All right, Bert,” Durell said. “Put down your gun.”

“Get out of my way,” Anderson said. “I’m going to talk to the pilot.”

“What for?”

“I don’t have to explain anything to you. Step aside!”

But at that moment there came a sudden rapid shuddering all through the plane, as if a giant hand quickly hammered a succession of blows all along the fuselage. Metal screamed, and smoke filled the compartment. The plane lurched, fell off on one wing. Durell staggered back to the pilot’s door, and Anderson fell with him. There was a confusion of hoarse shouts and screams in the cabin. Durell felt himself slide to the left as the KT-4 went into a long, turning spin. Air howled through the holes torn in the side of the cabin. One of the MIGs had become impatient and sent a burst of shells into the unarmed ship. Durell had a fleeting moment of concern over Hackitt, wondering if the young Texan had been killed—and then, groaning, the KT-4 began to pull out of its dive. Metal cracked and made loud protests as the strain on the long wings took effect. Durell shoved hard at Anderson’s weight. The man had struck his head against the compartment wall. He looked dazed, and offered no resistance when Durell took his gun from him.

Then they struck the sea.

The first jolt was like a hammer blow that slammed into Durell’s spine with enormous impact. He braced his shoulders against the bulkhead, his feet pushing at the nearest seat. The plane slanted up, leveled off, and came down again.

The second impact seemed worse than the first. Several of the others came sprawling down the aisle in a screaming heap near Durell as more metal crashed and tore. Someone screamed in terror and pain.

They struck a third time.

The tail came up and there came another tumble of bodies, arms, legs and anguished faces around Durell. He ducked his head between his knees and braced himself. The nose went down, and there was a vast crashing sound of surging water.

Then the nose lifted and the tail leveled off.

They stopped moving.

There was only the rise and fall of the sea on which they floated for the moment. The silence seemed deafening.

Durell was the first to move. He pushed at someone sprawled across his flexed knees and saw it was Wickham. The colonel was deathly pale. A streak of blood ran from under his brush of white hair. He looked dead. Durell shoved his weight aside and tried to stand up. Pain stabbed at his side. He tried again. He saw Francesca’s white face, and her mouth was open as if to scream at him. But no sound came from her. He stood up.

The floor of the cabin heaved up and down uncertainly. The sound of the sea came through the twisted metal sides of the cabin. Water poured in a thin stream, as if from a hose, through one of the holes torn by the MIGs bullets. It sprayed them all with an icy impact. Durell stared at it without thinking for a moment. He felt numb. He heard groans and whispers all around him as the others stirred. He saw Susan get up and look around uncertainly. She saw him and smiled at him.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes. Yes, I think so.”

“Good,” he said. “Help me.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No, I’m not,” he said, not sure if this was the truth. He pointed to the flooding hole in the plane’s side. “Let’s stuff that with some loose clothing or blankets.”

“Shouldn’t we get out of here?”

“The plane is supposed to float for hours. It’s safest here.” “But if we’re taking in water—”

“Get a blanket,” he repeated.

He moved away toward the stern, where the leak threatened to swamp them in minutes. Already the water was ankle-deep on the cabin floor, and it dragged at his feet with an icy grip. Susan thrust a thin coat into his hands. It was her own. He hesitated, took it, and crammed it into the jagged hole in the plane’s skin. The metal tore at the cloth and the water spurted wildly all around him. He crammed it in further and held it, twisting. The plug of cloth held. Only a small trickle oozed in, running to the cabin floor.

Durell straightened and looked out through the small port window before him. The KT-4 had snapped off one end of the starboard wing, but she floated easily, sustained by the extraordinarily long wingspan that remained. The Black Sea seemed anxious to fulfill its name; the swells were long and dark, racing down from the north with whitecaps riding the crests. The seas broke over the wings and poured in dark streams over the shining metal and smashed angrily at the cabin hull. Durell watched it for a moment. The plane lifted and fell lightly on the heaving water. They didn’t seem to be sinking. He turned away to consider the others.

Miraculously, no one was killed. Wickham was seated now, his uniform rumpled and bloodied from the crack on the scalp he had suffered. He sat on the aisle floor with his back against an overturned seat and whimpered as Durell approached.

“Colonel, can you stand up?”

The man’s eyes were blank with shock, and Durell turned to Susan. “Can you take care of him?”

“What can I do?”

“Just keep him quiet. Find a bottle, if there’s one that hasn’t been broken. I suspect his kit-bag has some Scotch. Feed him some.”

“Are we going to sink?” she asked. “Shouldn’t we climb out?”

“No. Not yet.”

She looked at Wickham with her face smoothed into an expressionless mask, once again in the flat planes of her public character. Durell left her and worked his way forward toward Francesca. The dark-haired girl was trying to get Kappic on his feet. The Turk’s face was a strange yellowish color. Francesca slipped and splashed in the water and fell against Durell. He steadied her and turned to the Turk. “What happened to you?”

“My leg—I think it is broken. I will try—” Kappic pushed himself erect, put some weight on his left foot, and grunted. Great beads of sweat suddenly jumped out of his dark skin. His mouth contorted as he reached down and pulled at his trouser leg. Blood covered his shin, and through the blood glistened the end of a splintered bone. The Turk looked up with his lips skinned back over white teeth. “Can you help me set it?”

“I know how,” Francesca said. She pushed back her dark hair. “But I don’t have the strength.”

“Anderson?” Durell said.

The big man still looked dazed. “Yes?”

“Can you help the lieutenant?”

“What about the pilot?”

“We’ll stay afloat for a few hours. Take care of Kappic, will you?”

Anderson gestured toward John Stuyvers. “What about him?”

Durell glanced at the missionary, who lay back on one of the seats, his face gray. His eyes were open and he kept muttering to himself.

“What is it?” Durell asked.

“My bag—I lost it—”

Durell looked through the tangled piles of coats and bags and paraphernalia that had tumbled about with the impact. He found the bag jammed under a broken packet of rations, and swung the load of books into Stuyvers’ lap. At the same time, he thought with despair that the tapes might be irretrievably lost now. In the confusion of the last few minutes, anything might have been done with them by whoever had it, since those who were set to watch the others, Kappic and Anderson, had been busy with other things. He had gambled against heavy odds, Durell thought—and now it looked as if he had lost. The tapes could easily have been jettisoned into the wreckage tumbled about the cabin. He surveyed the disorder with dark, angry eyes, then abruptly turned and went forward into the pilot’s compartment and closed the door after him. He spoke to the back of the Texan’s head.

“Harry?”

He spoke Hackitt’s name again, then stood still. There was a shattered panel of plexiglass in the pilot’s bubble. The straw-haired Texan sat at the controls, one hand gripping the wheel. The sea surged impersonally beyond the fragile nose of the plane. Hackitt had brought them down safely, skipping from the crest of one swell to the next, repeating the maneuver three times, until he was able to settle the ship on the surface of the uneasy sea.

But one of the MIG slugs had burst the plexiglass bubble over Hackitt and slammed into his back and ruptured the young man’s internal organs. There was not much blood, except for some that ran down one leg into the scuffed cowhide boots that Hackitt had worn to remind himself of Texas. Somehow the boy had brought them all down safely —and then he had died.

Chapter Eleven

DURELL eased out a long, slow breath. He did not touch the dead man. He squeezed past the pilot’s bucket seat to get a wide, sweeping glimpse of the sky. A distant, rumbling thunder of jet exhausts shook the dark vaulted clouds. Rain spattered on the glass overhead. He could not locate the jets until a dark pinpoint came through the lowering clouds and swiftly grew into the sleek, swept-wing shape of the MIG, screaming over the sea to observe them, crashing overhead with an ear-splitting thunder. Then it lifted gracefully in a long sweeping bank and vanished to the north.

Presently the ominous thundering ended, echoing away beyond the horizon.

Durell looked at his watch. It was almost noon.

He wondered how soon a vessel would come this way, prompted by radio directions from the MIGs, to pick them up.

He knew that whatever happened, he could not let himself or Uvaldi’s tapes be taken this way. Yet, there was nothing he could do. He wasn’t even sure he could stay alive.

The sea was choppy, setting in from the north, where the wind blew in spiteful gusts. The trawler they had seen from above was lost beyond the dark horizon of heaving swells and shredded clouds. Rain moved in thick patterns over the dark water, and a few drops found their way into the pilot’s compartment and touched Durell’s face. He studied the long, tapering wings that kept them afloat. In theory, the KT-4 could sustain itself indefinitely on a calm sea; but the Black Sea was not noted for being calm at this season of the year. Durell shivered. Already the cold was creeping into the wrecked ship, now that the engine was silent and the sea air attacked the cabin.

Perhaps the fishing boat they’d seen would try to reach them first. But even if the little vessel was on its way, it

would take three or four hours to be found. By now, other Naval forces would be steaming at top speed to pick them up.

I would be a race, Durell thought, between the clumsy trawler and the high-speed ships sent from the north to find them.

And there were other elements in the race—the question of how long the KT-4 would stay intact in the roughening sea, and how long the survivors could co-operate for their mutual safety.

Someone back in the cabin was a traitor. Durell was sure of this. But suspicion pointed in several directions at once, and he was haunted by the question of identity. Perhaps now that survival was paramount, the strain would crack his opponent’s facade of innocence.

But he made no mistake about this. His enemy was smart and ruthless. He—or she—had killed Uvaldi back in Karagh. Killed efficiently and professionally, with no hesitation. They were all in danger? Durell concluded—not only from the sea and what might be heading toward them from over the horizons of the sea, but from the killer among them who would not scruple to kill again if the success of his mission was threatened.

Someone knocked on the cabin door and opened it. It was Francesca. The dark-haired girl looked pale, and her large gray eyes were clouded with concern. She glanced quickly at Hackitt’s body and closed her eyes for a moment, swallowing.

“He’s dead,” Durell offered quietly. “Take it easy, Francesca.”

“Yes. I came here thinking there might be some medical kit for Kappic. Anderson helped me set his leg, but the pain is terrible for him. If I could just find some drugs, some morphine—”

“I think he’ll just have to stand still for it,” Durell said. “He didn’t ask for an opiate, did he?”

“No, but I thought—”

“He would refuse one, anyway,” Durell said. “And I want Kappic awake and with his eyes open, even if it does cost him some sweat.”

“I don’t understand. Do we stay on the plane, really? In this sea?”

“We have no choice. There are no life rafts,” Durell said. “Well, if you think we can survive. . . She paused and bent her head toward the main cabin. “Some of them back there seem determined to commit suicide, the way they behave.”

“I’m not so sure of that. Do you trust any of them, Francesca?”

“No, but—” She paused. “Kappic wants to talk to you, Sam. Alone, if possible. He’s got something on his mind, but I don’t know what it is. But he changed, the moment the MIGs shot us down.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure. It’s not just his broken leg, though God knows it must be painful for him. He—his voice, his manner —it just changed, that’s all. And he wants to talk to you.” “All right,” Durell said. “I’ll see him right away.”

“Please. Wait a moment.” The girl turned away, shivering, to look at the sea that washed sullenly over the KT-4’s wings. The sky seemed darker. The rain came down with a heavy persistence on the wreckage. The movement of the plane seemed more uncertain, and certain creaking, snapping noises sounded through the fragile length of the cabin as they lifted and fell on the choppy currents. Francesca said thinly, “If we stay afloat—and if a ship comes to take you prisoner —what happens to someone like you, Sam?”

“I might be shot,” he said. “Or given a big trial with lots of international propaganda.”

“Tried—as a spy, you mean?”

“Yes. If they didn’t execute me at once.”

She shivered. “I think I understand. I didn’t trust you. I didn’t trust anyone. Nobody here seems to be what they claim they are. But you—” She drew a deep breath. “Please let me help you, Sam.”

Anderson came into the pilot’s compartment just then. He had to duck to clear the overhead, and water poured in a small tidal wave across the floor when he opened the bulkhead door. The cabin beyond was awash in a foot of water, and Durell wondered if his improvised plug had given way; but his glimpse of it showed it was still sound. The next moment Anderson turned Francesca gently out of the pilot’s compartment and said, “Take care of our fiery young Turk, honey. I have some business with Durell.”

The girl hesitated, but went out at Durell’s nod. Anderson’s pale eyes touched the body of the pilot, covered the dark horizon of the sea from the bubble, and fixed on Durell. The big man looked different. His amiability was gone, replaced by a hard challenge.

“You’re responsible for this mess,” he said flatly. “I’ve got my job, the same as yours, and I put myself subject to your orders up until now. I didn’t ask for help when I was sent from Ankara—

“You needed it, though,” Durell pointed out drily. “Your charge, Dr. Uvaldi, got himself murdered.”

Anderson’s big hand sliced the air impatiently. “Sure, and you moved in and got the tapes. For a moment, that is. But where are they now? I’m equally responsible for getting that data to Washington, and I want to find those tapes before this cockleshell goes down.”

“We’re not going down—not for a time yet.”

“No? The water’s risen six inches since we struck. Wickham is getting frightened because we can’t budge the emergency door.”

“We all stay aboard!” Durell said sharply.

“And drown because you say so?” Anderson drew a heavy breath. “I’m tired of being kept in the dark. I think you’ve got the tapes; I think you’ve had them all along. You’d better hand it to me, here and now.”

“I don’t have them.” Durell met the big man’s flat stare. “For the next few hours we have a simple problem—one of survival. This KT-4 is supposed to float indefinitely, but we’re taking water. If we abandon ship and use life belts, we’ll die of exposure. There’s a storm making up. In any case, we’ll lose the tapes then—they’re aboard the plane somewhere. So we stay here until the last possible moment.” Anderson grinned tightly. “You know, none of us trusts the other. And I don’t trust you. I think you want to stay aboard until the Russians find us. Those MIGs damned well started the ball rolling. They’ll break their necks to pick us up before dark, that’s sure.”

“The weather may be on our side,” Durell pointed out. “It might break up the wreck, but it might also keep anyone from spotting us.”

“Well, which are you hoping for?” Anderson asked angrily. “I’ve got you pegged now, by God. You’re a phony. You’re not Durell at all. You killed Dr. Uvaldi and grabbed the tapes! You’re working for the other side!”

Durell nodded. “The same suspicion could apply to you, Bert. But it would be better if we worked together to stay alive. If you think I’ve got the tapes, though, and you want to try to take them from me—come ahead.”

Anderson hesitated. His big head was thrust forward and for a moment he studied Durell, then shrugged. “All right, let’s make the ship watertight,” he growled. “We’ll settle this later.”

He turned away, his shoulder dipping as he swung to the cabin door.

He was fast—but Durell knew he was fast.

Anderson came around in a full, spinning swing, his fist stabbing for Durell’s belly in a massive, paralyzing blow. But Durell stepped back and felt the man’s fist sink into him at the end of the stroke, and even then he knew the taste of the other’s enormous strength as the wind went out of him with a crash of pain. He staggered, slipped, and Anderson came in like a bull, his head lowered, a hard grin on his wide mouth. Durell brought up his knee and caught him on the point of the jaw, and Anderson went flying back against the bulkhead. Grunting, the big man shook his head and looked surprised. Before Durell could get his gun, he charged again. His attack brought him around the pilot’s seat, however, and the dead man slid forward with the jolting collision and Anderson tripped and stumbled over the stiffening limbs. His thrust at a judo stab for Durell’s throat missed its mark. Durell caught his arm and tried to twist it up and behind the other’s shoulders; but it was like trying to twist a telephone pole. Anderson grunted again and came around hard and fast. His pale eyes were suddenly cruel. He shook off Durell’s grip with a shrugging motion and grappled with Durell by locking him in a tight, bear hug that crushed the air from Durell’s chest and lifted him bodily from the cabin floor.

A roaring filled Durell’s ears, and the gray daylight grew dim. He couldn’t breathe. He tried to bring his arms up to burst Anderson’s grip apart, but it was impossible. The other’s muscles crushed in the ligaments and tendons of his rib cage with implacable strength.

“Don’t be a fool,” Anderson whispered. “Give me Uvaldi’s tapes.”

“No.”

“If I squeeze harder, your ribs will pucture your lungs. Take your choice.”

Durell’s anguish was unendurable. He knew too late that he had underestimated the big man in several ways, and this was a mistake that had proved fatal to others in the past. A strange lightness touched his mind. The roaring in his ears was like the pounding sea. He tried again to break the other’s grip, straining, trembling. He felt his strength drain away.

Then all at once he stopped resisting and collapsed, let everything go limp. The unexpected maneuver took Anderson by surprise, long enough for Durell to slip down and out and under the other’s grip, staggering to one side. Anderson spun, lunging, an expression of consternation on his face. Durell smashed at his mouth, felt his knuckles crack on teeth, and struck again, harder. Anderson moved back, and again tripped over the dead pilot. Durell chopped at his left arm just inside the elbow and saw the spasm of pain from paralyzed nerves and minor ruptures shoot across the other’s face. The next moment Durell stepped back and pulled his gun free.

“Now,” he gasped, backing away. “That’s enough, Bert.” The big man straightened slowly. “You’re pretty good.” “Not good enough against your bear hug, it seemed.” “You got out of it,” Anderson said. “Nobody ever managed that before.” He spread his hands painfully. “What do you do now? Shoot me? Drop me overboard?”

“We have to work together. You suggested it yourself.”

“But I still want those Uvaldi tapes,” Anderson whispered. “I promise that they’re safe for now,” Durell said quietly. “How can I take your word for it?”

“The tapes are on the plane. You know that. So it’s in our mutual interest to keep the plane afloat, right?”

Anderson nodded slowly. “I’ll go along with that.”

“Give me your weapons, then.”

“No, I—”

“I can’t take the chance that you’ll jump me again,” Durell said. “It’s either your gun or you go off the plane now.”

Anderson grinned uncertainly. “You wouldn’t.”

“Try me,” Durell said.

“But you wouldn’t kill me in cold blood,” Anderson began.

Then his smile faded as he saw Durell’s eyes, and he looked astonished. “I believe you would, at that. I’ve heard how you were trained. People mean nothing to you—just items in equations to be solved, to be used or eliminated without thinking twice about it, in order to carry out your mission.” “It’s not quite like that,” Durell said. “But if I had to, I wouldn’t worry about killing you, Bert.”

Anderson drew a deep breath. “No, I guess you wouldn’t. All right, here’s my gun.”

Durell pocketed the big man’s .38 Colt and kept his own weapon in hand as he gestured to the cabin door. “Now let’s find the new leak.”

The KT-4 was markedly lower in the water. Over a foot of salt sea surged over the cabin floor when Durell followed Anderson inside. The plane lifted sluggishly, and now and then the port wing went under and out of sight for long moments before laboriously spilling the foaming weight from its shining skin. The wind around the high tail fin made a mournful piping noise that accompanied the hollow drumming of rain falling on the hull.

Durell scanned the other passengers quickly. John and Susan Stuyvers sat together again, and Susan’s eyes searched Durell’s quickly before she looked away. She held the black bag on her lap. Colonel Wickham sat alone, muttering to himself. The trickle of blood from his scalp wound had dried in a crusty brown ribbon across his jowl. He stared at the sea in endless horror.

Durell turned to Francesca, who sat with Lieutenant Kappic. The Turk’s face was pale, and his broken leg was propped on the seat ahead. The bandage Francesca had applied looked secure. Deep lines of pain were graven on the young Turkish soldier’s face, and his eyes held a quick appeal as he regarded Durell with a rueful smile.

“I must talk to you—alone,” Kappic whispered.

Durell nodded, waved Anderson on, and paused while Francesca quickly got to her feet and went aft, too. Then he sat down in the girl’s seat and considered the young Turk. Kappic met his gaze for a moment, then looked away, wetting his lips. “I do not know how to say this, Durell,” he whispered. “I do not know how to begin. I am ashamed of my stupidity.”

“What is it, Kappic?” Durell asked quietly.

“When I was first stationed in Ankara, in the first big city I had seen in my life, I was idealistic; I talked of how things were with the peasants, and I—I met people who— who trained me to think in a certain way, who—who got me to work for them. I thought it was for the best, for my people. There was corruption, and misuse of funds, and the promised reforms were so slow in coming. . . .” Kappic paused and shook his head, winced with pain, and looked at Durell again with an appeal for understanding. “I thought I was doing the right thing, back in Karagh.”

Durell drew a long, slow breath. He did not want to stop the Turk from talking. His instinct told him that at long last there was going to be a break in the wall of silence that had stopped him so far.

“Kappic, do you have the tapes?” he asked quietly.

“No. Not now.”

“Are you the one who slugged me and took it, outside the Stuyvers’ hut? It had to be one of us—and you were outside, on guard.”

“You trusted me,” Kappic said slowly. “And I betrayed you. Yes, I took the tapes from you last night.”

Durell stared at the Turk’s tormented face. Kappic said quickly, whispering, “I am a traitor. But last night I thought I—it was the right thing, according to those people who taught me how to be a traitor, back in Ankara. Now I know how wrong I was. Now I know that the tales of cruelty my peasant mother told me about the Moskofs—it is all true. I saw how they shot this plane down, when we were lost and unarmed. I could not believe it would happen. I have been sitting here in pain much worse than the pain from my broken leg.”

“Kappic,” Durell interrupted. “Did you bring the tape aboard the plane?”

“Yes.”

“It’s here now?”

“Yes.”

“How did you hide it last night?”

Kappic grinned suddenly. “I took the tape off the spool and jammed it into the clip in the butt of my automatic. Here.” Kappic gave him his service pistol. His hands shook as he snapped the cartridge case loose. Three bullets were gone from the spring clip, and when Durell pressed down

on the topmost cartridge, he saw that there was ample room in there for the tape to have been hidden. But it wasn’t there now. He looked up, questioningly.

“You remember, you took my gun and Anderson’s, when you ordered each of us to search the other and then to search the hut. It sat on the table, in the hut, all the time, until you told me to take it again and stand watch with you for the rest of the night.”

“Kappic, where is the tape now?”

The Turk looked at him. “Can you forgive me, Durell? I have been a stupid man—I didn’t realize what I was doing, until I saw how, in cold blood, we were marked to be destroyed by the Moskofs—”

“It’s not important now,” Durell said. “Where is the tape?” “When we first crashed—and everything was confused, and I lay here in my double pain—I was afraid I might be dying. So while everyone was moving about, straightening things up after the crash, I took the tape and put it there— in Francesca Uvaldi’s sketch box.”

Durell turned quickly at the Turk’s whispered words. Francesca’s familiar box lay on the next seat. He reached over and took it, glancing up at the others in the rear of the plane, led by Anderson, who was searching for the leak. The locks on the box gave him no trouble. He snapped it open.

“There, with the pastel sticks,” Kappic whispered.

Durell turned the smaller box of pastel chalk over, spilling the sticks every which way. He looked again, searching through the whole container, and then he raised his eyes and met Kappic’s questioning, apologetic look, and Durell’s glance was dark and angry and dangerous.

“They’re not here, Kappic.”

Chapter Twelve

KAPPIC said, “But they must be.”

“They’re not.”

“But I put them there myself! And no one saw—I”

“Did Francesca handle the box afterward?”

“Yes, but just to move it about to make herself comfortable. I think—I’m not sure—I was in such pain from my leg, afterward—”

“She could have taken the tape from the sketch box?”

“I don’t know,” Kappic said miserably. “Perhaps it was anyone.”

“Mustapha, are you sure—?”

“Yes. I am sorry. I was a fool. I listened to evil people, who made me betray you, you who are my friend. It began long ago, when all I wanted was something better in the lives of the shepherd people where I was bom. And now— now I know, when I see how ruthlessly we were shot down, how little value is placed on innocent lives—” Kappic began to shiver. “It came to me suddenly that I had been tricked and duped, and I am still only a peasant boy, fit only to care for the herds in the hills. Yes, I am sorry.”

“Mustapha, will you help me now?”

The Turk looked ruefully at his broken leg. “Someone must have seen me open Francesca’s sketch box, and took the tape again, in the confusion. What can I do now? I have made a mess of things.”

“I want you to go forward,” Durell said. “You can work the plane’s radio, can’t you?”

“I have had some training, in military school, yes—” “We’ve got to raise Ankara or Istanbul somehow—let them know what happened to us. As it is, we’re literally between the devil and the deep blue sea. Do you understand?” Anderson walked back in time to hear Durell’s request. The big man paused and said, “Hell, the man’s leg is busted. Do you want to kill him? I’ll try to work the radio myself.”

Kappic straightened. “No, if I can walk—if I can understand the manner in which the radio operates, and if it works at all—”

“But those MIGs could use our signal to get a homing beacon on us all the quicker,” Anderson objected.

“We’ll take that chance,” Durell said. “Let it be a race, to see which side gets to us first.”

Kappic whispered, “I will try, my friend. And I will look and watch, to see what happened to what is missing.” He looked at Anderson. “It was you who communicated with Ankara last night and got this plane for us. You could have arranged for a radio beacon to pull us off course, too.” Durell drew a deep breath. “I’ve thought of that, Mustapha. Either our pilot, who is now dead, made a gross error, or was lured off his course deliberately. Anderson might have arranged it last night. But it also could have been arranged earlier.”

“Thanks, chum,” the big man said drily. “I appreciate your trust in me now.” He laughed barkingly.

“I don’t trust you or anyone,” Durell said flatly. “Not any more. Can you get to the radio now, Mustapha?”

Francesca came back and offered her shoulder for support. In the momentary silence, all that could be heard was the slosh of water on the cabin floor, the soughing of the wind and the muted thunder of the sea beyond the fragile metal walls that kept them momentarily safe. The young Turk swung his broken leg off the seat and stood on one foot, his breath hissing from between clenched teeth as he hobbled into the pilot’s compartment.

Durell watched the gentle manner in which the girl helped the injured man. Francesca’s eyes were wide and innocent; but he wondered how much of it was applied like the trace of make-up she still wore. There was no point in asking her about the tape Kappic had slipped into the sketch box. If she was the hidden enemy, she would simply deny knowledge of it. If not, she would come to him with it, sooner or later, of her own accord. Meanwhile, there was the more immediate problem of finding the leak in the hull, before they sank.

He turned back to Anderson. “Let’s find out where the water is coming from.”

The cold sea surged over his ankles as he moved aft. The puncture he had plugged earlier seemed to be holding up well. Nor could he find any other rupture in the vessel’s skin that could be letting in so much water.

There was a small storage compartment in the tail, reached by a narrow door beyond the last passenger seat. Durell tried the handle, but the door did not yield. The frame was sprung by the impact of their crash landing. He drove his shoulder against it impatiently, but got nowhere. “Let me,” Anderson said.

Durell stood aside as Anderson tackled the door. The man’s first effort smashed it open with a screak of protesting metal. A small tide of water gushed in from the tail compartment, surging in a foot-high wave between the seats. Durell peered into the dark cubbyhole beyond, saw equipment that he identified as photographic machines, radar and classified electronic components designed specifically for the KT-4. At first he could spot no possible source for the leak that threatened to sink them. The narrow, cramped space was dark and windowless.

“Get a flashlight,” he told Anderson.

In a moment he shone the beam of an emergency torch over the damp, riveted aluminum walls. The water sloshed heavily, eighteen inches deep here. At that instant, the KT-4 lifted sluggishly on a long, high sea, raising the tail section where they stood. The water gushed from around their feet, pouring forward as the derelict surged with the push of the ocean swell. Twisted metal gleamed for an instant, well below the water level, from behind a stand of apparatus.

“There it is,” Durell said. “The skin’s doubled, I think-The big rupture must be on the outside.”

“Can we move this equipment?” Anderson asked.

“I doubt it. It’s built as an integral part of the ship.” The KT-4 lifted and fell again on the seas while Durell tried to squeeze into the narrow space for a better look at the torn metal. He saw only enough to convince him that this was the leak they were looking for.

Anderson’s face was dim, frowning. “Can we fix it?” “We’ve got to,” Durell said. “Otherwise, we won’t last an hour.”

“Perhaps we’ll be rescued by then.”

“Or captured,” Durell pointed out.

“Better than drowning, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t know. The leak has to be fixed from the outside, if it can be done at all.” Durell spoke quietly, so the others in the cabin could not hear. “I can’t ask you to volunteer to go out there—”

Anderson’s pale eyes looked cold when he grinned. “Sorry, pal. I’m not a good swimmer. If the ship founders, I go down into the briny deep, anyway. But I couldn’t possibly make it around the tail from the outside.”

Durell wondered if he was lying. But there was no way he could decently prove it. Obviously, Anderson was challenging him to leave things as they were and take the chance they’d be picked up before the KT-4 sank. But the rate at which they were taking water didn’t offer much hope of rescue. He drew an impatient breath. Everything had gone wrong, right in Ankara, and he hadn’t wanted to be responsible for the lives of all these people aboard the KT-4. He knew that nothing was more important than the safe delivery of the Uvaldi tape to Washington. His life, and the lives of the others, didn’t matter in this. In Durell’s world, the individual had to be subordinate to the mission. It was not an easy thing to practice or accept. When you were called on to choose between the life of a friend and the success of an assignment, you had to choose the job first. But now—

He drew another deep breath. There was Francesca and Kappic and Colonel Wickham—and even the Stuyvers whatever they were.

Maybe Anderson would sacrifice him as readily, if things were the other way around. He didn’t know. He couldn’t tell what the big man was thinking. He turned away, his eyes searching the cabin.

“What are you going to do?” Anderson asked.

“I’ll have to go out there, if you won’t,” Durell said. “Kappic has a broken leg, Wickham is in shock, John Stuyvers can’t be trusted. You’ll have to help me when I’m out there, of course.”

Anderson’s laughter was a low, explosive sound, harsh and sardonic. “You’re going to trust me at the end of your lifeline?”

“Not entirely,” Durell said. “Let’s go forward.”

He started down the aisle to the pilot’s compartment again, and Susan Stuyvers reached out for him and stood up to face him. The blonde girl’s face was pale and tense.

“I want to talk to you,” she said tightly. “Alone, Sam.” “There’s no place we can be alone,” he said.

“We could go back there—where you’ve just been.” “We’ll make it later.”

“Please—it’s important, Sam.”

“At the moment, the most important thing is to stay afloat, Susan.”

It was cold and damp in the cabin now. Susan shivered, and her lisp were blue. John Stuyvers, slumped in his seat nearby, huddled under a blanket. His mouth moved, as if he were talking silently to himself. Then suddenly his eyes opened wide and he stared at Durell with his fanatical gaze. “Are we going to die, sir?”

“I hope not,” Durell said easily.

“It’s very cold in here. Can we have a little heat?”

“I think that’s quite impossible.”

As if stirred by the voices that broke the silence in the cabin, Colonel Wickham sat up. In his left hand he held an empty bottle of raki from when he first came aboard. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes were bright. His white hair looked stiff and bristly; his uniform was stained with the blood from his scalp wound.

“Got to get to Washington,” he muttered. “Most important. Highly placed people concerned—about me—and Betsy will raise hell. Got to avoid any more delays, Durell.”

Durell stared at the fat man. “Don’t you know what’s happened?”

“We’re wrecked, huh? I’m not stupid. All your fault, too!” Wickham’s voice grew harsh. “Going to give you a few minutes more—then take command myself. Understand? Court-martial for you. Traitors, all of you! Trying to kill me—” Durell shrugged and went forward, leaving Wickham to relapse into incoherent muttering again. Anderson gathered up two or three wads of blanketing and a length of nylon rope from the emergency compartment. Up forward, Kappic and Francesca had removed Hackitt’s body from the control seat and placed him in a cramped corner of the cockpit. Durell had to step over the dead man’s boots to stand beside the Turk. Francesca looked ill, and her gray eyes touched Durell in entreaty; he shook his head and turned to Kappic. “Can you raise anything, Mustapha?”

The Turk squeezed a shaking hand over his moustache. He had the earphones over his head and he stared at the radio in frustration.

“I don’t know. I can’t tell if the message is going out. We have power from emergency batteries, but I can’t raise an acknowledgement from Ankara or Istanbul.”

“Keep trying,” Durell said. “I’m going out on the fuselage to plug a leak in the tail section. Anderson will hold my lifeline.”

Kappic looked at him curiously, as if wondering how he could trust anybody now. But then he nodded. “I will stay with the radio. Be careful out there.”

A moment later Durell pushed back the shattered canopy and climbed onto the tapering wing. The instant he stepped from the shelter of the cabin he was shocked by the brutally cold wind that roared over the surface of the sea. Rain beat at him with icy intensity. The noonday sky was leaden, and nowhere in all the circle of the horizon was anything to be seen except the dim, heaving seas crowned with smoking combers. It seemed miraculous that the broken hull of the KT-4 had floated this long. The port wing was now definitely under water more often than not, and the graceful tail fin canted perceptibly as Durell found slippery footing and faced aft. He hooked one arm around the stubby radio mast that rose behind the pilot’s compartment and then leaned down to shout at Anderson’s upturned face.

“Pay out the line easily. If I tug twice, haul me in fast.” Anderson nodded and grinned. “Don’t worry, chum.”

A sea broke over the wing and drenched Durell with salt spray. The wadding of blankets and line with which he hoped to caulk the tear in the hull was clumsy and dangerous, but he worked his way slowly aft, following the slender antenna wire that stretched to the towering vertical stabilizer. He could see from here that one of the horizontal tail fins had torn partly loose from the crash—or perhaps one of the MIG cannon shells had burst just there. He ran for a dozen steps, then crouched as the derelict lifted violently under him above a racing sea. His feet slid helplessly outward until another sea made the wreck lurch the other way. More spray soaked him, and he clenched his teeth to keep them from chattering. The wind cut through him as if he were naked. He looked back, but he could not see into the pilot’s canopy now, and there was nothing to do but go on.

He reached the tail section in a last desperate rush, a race against the violent treachery of each sea that broke over him. With his free hand he clung to the towering stabilizer and caught his breath. His legs felt shaky. The wind moaned with new fury around the metal that protected him sow. He leaned aft as far as he could and stared into the foaming sea around the pointed tail of the ship.

Water broke in spurts of white spume around the conical after-section. When the wreck heaved up again on the next Swell, he glimpsed the shining edge of torn metal, ripped backward in a foot-square area. The next moment the tom plate was under water again.

The only way he could fashion a batten to hold back the leak was to lower himself into the sea.

He looked forward again. The nylon line seemed a slender thread to depend on, and the other end was in Anderson’s hands. But the longer he paused here, the weaker he would become in the freezing wind and spray. With no more hesitation, Durell slid into the welter of white water surging around the tail section.

He was pleasantly surprised when the sea felt wanner than the air. The surge of the swell pulled him away from the hull and he came up gasping and twisted to orient himself. The tail loomed enormously high from the surface of the sea, and it was drifting rapidly away from him. He struck out and caught the horizontal stabilizer and pulled himself along it. The torn gap in the hull was now a menace of sharp metal as the sea alternately pushed him toward it and pulled him away. The hull rose high again, then came down massively, smashing foam over his head. He gasped, coughed, twisted with the blankets under his free arm and tried to reach the hole where the water came into the aft compartment. The lifeline held him back. He pulled once on it for more free play, but nothing happened. Alarm rang in him. If he pulled again, Anderson might deliberately mistake it as a signal to haul him in again. And the job wasn’t done yet. Then another sea broke over him and he felt the line go slack abruptly and he was swept away from the ship, buried under roaring foam, then swept hard against the metal bulkhead. Something caught his leg and seemed to twist and he pushed away desperately. He was at the torn plate now. He shook his head and slammed the blankets into the gaping hole in the aircraft’s skin. But he could not hold them there. The tail lifted again, high overhead. For a moment he thought he had lost the battens as they streamed away from him. But they had hooked on a snag of tom aluminum and clung there. When the tail slammed down again, he crammed the rest of the blankets desperately into place, then grabbed at the lashings he had brought anri dived under the narrow, pointed segment and came up on the other side. The sea was deceptive and it took several moments to orient himself this time when he surfaced. He suspected he was growing weaker faster than he thought. He had only a few more minutes in which to finish the job.

Somehow he managed to throw the lashings around and around the broad stabilizer. He dived back under, caught the ends of the lines, and hauled them tight. The blankets he had stuffed into the hole were snug now. But he had to repeat the maneuver twice more before he was satisfied that the leak was caulked as best he could do it.

By then he had only enough strength to cling precariously to the edge of the stabilizer fin, washed by the surging seas, half-buried in the roaring tides that lifted him and dropped him into the bitter water. He waited, aware of the roaring wind, the pelting rain, the merging of gray sea and gray sky in a dark, confused world of water and air that had no definition in any direction.

Twice he tugged desperately on the lifeline.

Nothing happened.

Again he signalled for Anderson to pull him in.

And again there was no reply.

Chapter Thirteen

DURELL felt panic touch him. The nylon rope seemed slack and lifeless in his grip. He tugged a third time, felt the sea lift him up and away from the tail stabilizer. He fought back to the slippery surface and let the sea wash him halfway across it, and caught at the vertical fin. His wet fingers found no grip and slipped helplessly. When he tried to straighten up, the wind slammed at him with maniacal force. Its cold fury set up a violent trembling in him. He wanted to let go and fall back into the sea. He told himself he couldn't let go. The sea’s friendliness was deceptive. If he v. ent into it again, he would die.

He turned his face to the wind and let the rain slash at him. The sea had grown wilder in the last few moments, ind the horizon had closed in perceptibly. The KT-4 lurched is he clung to it, like a broken bird on the wilderness of the ocean. A sea broke all the way across the cabin and fumed down on the opposite wing. He straightened again. His fingers were numb. He waited until the tail section lifted sluggishly, then used the impetus to haul his feet under him, rise, and then ran quickly down the roof of the cabin, guiding himself by the slender radio antenna. He slipped at the last instant, his legs pulled from under him as if the sea were a malevolent entity bent on destroying him. Another comber broke over him and he fell, sliding down the side of the canopy to crash on the wing section below. Salt water closed over his head and he felt himself lifted away from the aircraft by the tidal surge.

At the last moment a hand reached out and caught his wrist, thrusting through the window next to the pilot’s seat. Pain twisted through his arm. His legs dangled over the leading edge of the wing. He struggled up, got one foot back on the wing, and threw himself out of the water again.

It was Anderson who had saved him.

The big man, grinning in triumph, shouted something that was snatched away by the wind. Durell caught the edge of the sliding window. His muscles trembled with fatigue as he tried to lift himself inside and failed. But Anderson’s huge strength helped him, dropped him, streaming water, into the cockpit at Kappic’s feet.

“You are all right?” Kappic shouted. He gestured to Anderson, who slammed the window shut. “You found the leak?”

Durell nodded, shivering. His eyes were locked with Anderson’s. He felt sick with fatigue, and now that he was in the comparative warmth of the plane’s cabin, his shuddering was beyond control.

Francesca threw a blanket around him.

“You’re a brave man, Durell,” Anderson said quietly.

“Why didn’t you pull me in when I signalled?”

“But you didn’t signal.”

“I did. More than once.”

“Perhaps I confused it with the tugging of the sea. We lost sight of you when you went into the water. I really thought you’d been drowned.”

Kappic nodded. “True. We did not know you were still alive until we heard your footsteps on the roof over our heads.”

Durell watched Anderson’s smile. The man’s challenge seemed obvious, but it could not be proved that he had acted wrongly. He turned back to Kappic. “Any luck with the radio?”

“I do not know,” The Turk said. “There is a bad storm all around us. Once I thought I heard an acknowledgement, asking for a better fix on our positon. I could not help, of course. I do not know where we are. But I kept sending, until the power faded.”

“We’ll hope for the best, then,” Durell said. “Let’s check the water level back in the cabin.”

“Please, you ought to rest,” Francesca said.

“Later.”

He went aft. The water in the main cabin seemed to be at the same level as before. It was colder in here now, and his breath plumed in vapor as he walked aft to the tail compartment where the leak first became evident. For several moments, because of the surging lift and fall of the derelict, he could not tell if more water was coming in, or not. But in any case, even if it was, it was at a much slower rate than before. Slow enough to remove the immediate peril of sinking, he decided.

He found lifejackets for everyone and insisted they be put on. Colonel Wickham was too apathetic to bother, and Durell had Susan adjust the jacket around the fat man’s shoulders. Susan’s teeth were chattering with the cold as she worked beside him.

“I’m so hungry. Isn’t there any food?” she whispered.

“Emergency rations, in the lockers. But it should be saved for later. If the storm worsens, nobody will find us for hours, perhaps not until tomorrow.”

She made a wry face. “If we’re still afloat, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“We’re in a pretty bad spot, aren’t we?”

“Yes, Susan.”

“I mean, we could be picked up by the wrong people, and for you that would be as bad as drowning, right?”

He nodded. “No use thinking about that now, though.” “I just wanted to tell you—if these are our last hours— I wanted to tell you something about myself—”

He shook his head. “Not now, Susan.”

“But I want to warn you about John, if we’re picked up and—”

“There will be other troubles, aside from John, then.” She bit her lip and looked angry. “You won’t let me touch you in any way, will you? I keep trying to reach you, and you just turn away from me. Why?” Her voices was low and intense, pitched just for his ears as she turned away from Wickham. “What is it you do that makes me feel like this?”

“Like what?” he asked.

“Like a person who’s afraid of falling, but who goes on to the roof of a tall building and looks down, anyway, even though he knows he might jump and kill himself, just on impulse. I feel that way about you. I think you might kill me, somehow. I’m afraid of you. But I can’t stay away from you.” “Help me with the other life jackets,” he said.

“You’re cold. You’re soaking wet and cold and shivering.” “I’ll be all right.”

“There’s an extra flight suit in the back,” she said. “Come with me. You have to get out of those wet things.” Her eyes glittered. “Please let me help you. It doesn’t matter what you do to me later. Let me help you now.”

“All right, Susan.”

They went aft to the rear compartment. Susan reached into a small locker and pulled out a blue khaki flight jumper and an extra pair of socks and Texas boots, reminding Durell sharply of the young pilot who lay dead up forward. Susan closed the small door behind her and they stood crowded against each other in the narrow, gloom space. “Let me take your clothes off,” she whispered. “Hurry.” His fingers were numb and clumsy when he tried to strip out of his wet coat and shirt. A violent spasm of shuddering left him helpless, and her hands deftly helped him. She breathed quickly, made small moaning sounds of commiseration. “You’ve saved our lives so far. I heard Anderson talking about it to that Italian bitch—”

“Francesca?”

“I told you, she’s got her eye on you. She wants you. I want you, too, and I’m going to have you.”

In the gloom, he saw the way she stared intently at him. “Now?”

“No. I have a feeling, all of a sudden, that we can wait. I have a good feeling about it now, because you let me help you. Here, get into the jumper. Can I help you get warm? You can hold me. You’re so terribly cold!”

“I’m all right now,” he said.

“Hold me. Like this.” She laughed softly. Her hands searched his body, seeking, playfully, with restrained passion. Her breathing quickened and caught in her throat. “Here, put your hands here.” She put his hands on her breasts, and they were firm and proud under her uneven breathing, and then she forced them down to her hips and thighs and she laughed again. “Does this make you feel better? You were right about the missionary's daughter. Except that I’m not—you know I’m not—and John is nothing to me now.” “Susan,” he said, “you make me remember what life is like.”

“I can do more for you,” she whispered. “Right now. I can tell you what you want to know.”

He adjusted the jumper slowly. “Yes?”

“I saw Kappic talking to you before, and I saw you looking through Francesca’s sketch box. Darling, darling. Just kiss me now. Because I have it. I took it for you.”

He stared at the blonde girl in the gloom of the tiny compartment. Something seemed to lurch wildly inside him. “The tape?”

He wanted to swear when Susan laughed softly. “Everyhing was so mixed up in the plane, for a while. It was really easy. I sat beside the box for a few minutes. Lieutenant Kappic had fainted, I think. And you were talking to Francesca. Oh, I hated you then, the way you looked at her! But I didn’t care. I saw Kappic put the tape in the box, and I took it from there.”

“What did you do with it?” he asked tightly.

“I put it in John’s bag. I just dropped it in. It’s safe now.” He let out a long slow breath. He felt exhausted, suddenly, as relief seemed to drain all his strength from him. “Yes,” he said. “We’ll leave it there.”

A sullen quiet settled over the plane in the next hour. The daylight was an ugly yellow, and the rain came down in relentless floods. Slowly the seas grew more violent. The

KT-4 lay dead in the water, floating only because of the special tanks in her long wings. But if more stress was placed on those extraordinary wings, Durell thought, they would sink like a stone to the bottom of the Black Sea.

For twenty minutes after he left Susan, he checked life jackets on everyone and then issued some of the biscuits from the packet of emergency rations. Wickham bolted his share with one gulp and asked for more, staring resentfully when he was refused. John Stuyvers muttered a thanks and nibbled at his biscuit listlessly. Francesca ate with Kappic, who looked feverish. Anderson sat alone, near the pilot’s compartment door, and Durell chose a single seat in the rear and rested, situating himself where he could watch the black bag on John Stuyvers’ lap.

There was nothing to do now but wait.

And he was accustomed to waiting.

Chapter Fourteen

THE trawler came upon them at dusk. Daylight faded prematurely from the rain-swept sky, and the fishing boat was not spotted until it loomed out of the mists to the north on a direct collision course, as if it intended to run them down. Anderson saw it first. Perhaps he was expecting it; Durell did not spend much time wondering about that now. But the big man was calm as he walked back through the cabin with Durell and pointed silently through the window at the plunging bow of the trawler.

It was the first object they had seen apart from the sea and sky since they had crashed six hours earlier.

Twice during the long afternoon Durell had heard the muted thunder of distant jets through the steady surge and hiss of the sea. The sound ranged from all quarters of the horizon, but not once had he glimpsed one of the searching planes, and he had the feeling that the thick overcast was playing the odds in his favor to conceal them from the hunters up above.

But the trawler seemed to have homed on them with speed and accuracy. He turned as soon as Anderson pointed silently to the approaching fishing boat and went forward into the pilot’s compartment.

“Kappic?”

The Turk had already seen the vessel. “It seems we have been found, eh?”

“Yes. but the question is, who is the lucky finder?” Durell asked. “Can you tell if that’s one of your boats, or is it from the Crimea?”

The Turk squinted at the trawler, which had changed course and slowed its speed and now began a wide, wary circle around them, swinging to the south. Kappic shook his head.

“I cannot tell. I cannot help you with this.”

“But you can’t be sure it’s not Turkish, right?”

“I cannot see too clearly.” Kappic rubbed his eyes with an angry fist, peered again, and shook his head. “But what does it matter, eh? We will know in a few moments.” Anderson spoke heavily. “It’s a Russian trawler.”

Durell turned. “How do you know?”

“I’ve seen that type before. Twin screws, steel hull, diesel engine, five hundred horse—”

“How many in the crew?”

Anderson shrugged. “Ten, twelve. It’s well mechanized.” His eyes locked with Durell’s. “Have you located the Uvaldi tape yet? Or do you plan to abandon it with the plane and give it all up?”

“I don’t know yet.”

The big courier looked angry for a moment, then shrugged. “Well, our fishermen friends who seem about to rescue us will settle things, I think. Do you speak Russian, Cajun?” “Some.”

“So do I We’ll have to do some fast talking, eh?”

The others in the cabin had seen the trawler and were roused from their apathy now. Even Wickham returned to reality long enough to shout with relief. John Stuyvers appeared, holding the black bag, and Durell, after one glance at it, decided to make no move about it now. What would happen, he did not know. It would not be long before he was identified, and his dossier in the MVD files at No. 2 Dzherzinski Square, in Moscow, where he stood high on the wanted list, would be flashed to his captors. Perhaps he would be used for propaganda—if he survived. Or perhaps he would simply vanish and never be heard from again. He had no illusions about himself. He would have to make a choice quickly. Death was part of his briefing commands, and he knew that no man could keep silence in the face of modern questioning techniques. Suicide was the alternative, and he had the means to do this. And yet—

He drew a deep breath, watching the trawler’s blunt bow smash through a sea, shattering the crest into white, smoking spume. Men crowded the rails of the small green ship and stared, pointing. Durell shoved back the canopy over the pilot’s compartment. The rain was thicker, heavier. A premature dusk daubed everything in one drab, smoky gray. The trawler did not fly any flags. She was perhaps a hundred feet in length, beamy and powerful. Her rig was made fast to a steel mast, and a thin plume of diesel smoke was shredded by the wind whistling around her stubby black stack.

A red star was painted on the side of the stack. And as Durell spotted it, a hail in Russian came to them. . . .

The rescue operation was a race against darkness, and its final stages were completed in the bright glare of the trawler’s powerful searchlights. In answer to the trawler’s hail, Durell shouted back in Russian. The trawler was the Djornia Makin, from Okrinsti-Don, near the Crimean coast. The fishing captain had a rustic dialect that verified his origin. As a rope was snaked across to the wrecked plane, Durell caught it and heard the next hail.

“Amerikanski?”

“Da!” he returned.

There was a hurried consultation among the men on the trawler’s bow. Durell held the rope, waiting, feeling the KT-4 surge heavily in the sea. The port wing was under water now, and he knew that if the trawler abandoned them, they didn’t have many minutes left. He turned his back to the cutting wind and pretended not to understand the next few questions bawled at him through the electronic loud-speaker on the fishing boat. The voice seemed deep and hostile, booming through the sound of the sea and the clamor of the storm. He shouted back with deliberate incoherence and signalled for speed in taking them off. The trawler backed away, its powerful screw churning up a thick current of foam that washed dangerously against the derelict. Then it came around to windward, providing a lee for them under its rail that offered some protection for the transfer.

The women were taken off first, Francesca going ahead. One end of the rescue line was made fast to the radio mast and she was able to run out on the wing, choosing her time between the seas, and then cling to the line as the fishermen reached down and hauled her aboard.

But then John Stuyvers halted Susan. He had adjusted his clerical collar, as an act of defiance, perhaps, after Durell advised them all that they were in soviet territorial waters and that they would all be in for a long delay in returning to the West. Stuyvers was pale, and his voice was thin.

“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.

Chapter Fifteen

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—”

“This cannot have been on your course to Istanbul, Turk.”

“We were lost. We were all refugees from the earthquakes—”

“The Americans are refugees?” the captain asked with heavy irony.

“They were helping with the relief.”

“How can you lie like a snake? You said they were spies. As soon as I make radio contact, I will know the truth.”

“I have told you the truth,” Kappic said.

And then he threw himself upon the radio.

He had gained enough time to see what he could use, and he had timed his effort with the last flicker of strength in him. The radio had to be smashed. Perhaps, with the few hours thus gained, Durell might be able to do something. But once the location of the fishing boat was sent out on the air, it would be over for Durell and his mission.

There was a heavy steel book end on the desk that held the radio logs and navigation texts of the captain. Kappic jumped for it. His fingers closed around the steel bust of Lenin like a claw, and with the same sweeping gesture, Kappic brought it down on the glowing radio tubes of the trawler’s old-style transmitter.

Glass shattered and wires tore free. Kappic smashed again and again at the equipment, in the brief seconds he was left untouched.

The captain’s bellow of rage and the shot were the last things Mustapha Kappic heard.

He felt as if a heavy board smashed into his back, and he was thrown away from the desk by the impact. He fell to the floor. There was a last twist of pain from his leg, and then he felt a wave of strange warmth sweep up from his vitals and into his chest. The cabin grew dim. He felt another jolt in his body as the dark shape of the bearded captain loomed over him, the gun smashed flame at him again.

But it seemed to be happening to someone else. He smiled, somehow thinking that he had done everything a man could do on this earth; he had died trying to help others, and in the performance of his duty. He had been a good soldier. Long ago, when he was a boy, he had dreamed of being a soldier, when he lived in the remote hills of his shepherd home. It seemed to Kappic that he was back there now in the soaring, singing, rugged mountains of his boyhood. He could smell the wind that came from the rocky meadows, and he saw his father walking along the path toward him, and he turned with a little cry of joy—and lost his footing somehow. Under him, a terrible cliff stood on the edge of an endless abyss, and in his earerness to run to his father, Mustapha Kappic, the shepherd boy, fell and fell, turning and twisting in the cold mountain air. And he never stopped falling. . . .

One by one, they were taken to the captain’s cabin for questioning. At first they were herded in one of the empty fish holds aft, near the diesel engine room—a steel box whose rusted, riveted sides sweated with the cold chill of the sea, malodorous, dimly lighted by a single small bulb, ringed with refrigeration pipes that fortunately had been shut off. No furniture, chairs or cots, were provided, and only as an afterthought had some woolen blankets been thrust down the hatchway. These were spread on the cold steel deck for the women, Susan and Francesca. Wickham had snatched one of the blankets for himself, and refused to part with it, standing in a comer of the cell and shuddering, his round face buried in the coarse wool

Durell had heard the two shots and waited for Kappic to return to the others. After a moment or two, he knew that Kappic was not coming back. He could guess that the Turk had deliberately sacrificed himself to gain something, and he supposed it could only be the radio. Obviously, for some reason, perhaps because of the storm, the trawler was not part of the search squadrons that were scouring the northern latitudes of the Black Sea during these hours.

It was possible they had been presumed lost and drowned, Durell thought, when the KT-4 was seen to crash in the sea.

The Stuyvers were questioned first—Susan being summoned, and handing the black bag to John before she left. She was not gone long. Then Stuyvers was called, and he in turn gave the black bag to Susan. The fishermen on guard at the hatch did not notice the maneuver, and John Stuyvers looked every inch the fanatical missionary when he left and when he returned. Neither said anything to the others. Then Francesca was called on deck.

She was gone a long time.

Durell crossed to the opposite side of the compartment where Anderson was sprawled on the deck. The trawler lurched under the impact of the heavy seas, and it was obvious they were in for stormy hours that night. Durell knelt beside the big man and shook him.

“Anderson, can you hear me?”

The wide mouth opened and sighed. The big eyes stared coldly. “Got a nasty crack—on the head—from those fools.” “What were you trying to tell them?”

“Your friend, the Turk—he screwed things up real good.” The courier’s voice was thick and uncertain. “He told the skipper that I was an American agent. God knows what he had in mind.”

Durell’s face was blank. “Mustapha opened you up like that?”

“Yeah.” Anderson’s nose had bled, and there was a trickle of blood from one ear. He kept shivering, and now and then his teeth chattered. He was badly hint. Yet outwardly he seemed to be recovering. His enormous strength was too stubborn to yield to the brutal blow he had received from his argument with the trawler captain. Durell saw that the man’s right hand was swollen, and the ring containing his good-luck charm, the chunk of coal from the Tennessee hills, was cutting into the puffy flesh.

“Let me help you with that, or you’ll never get it off,” Durell said, and began working to get the gold and black ring off. Anderson started to protest, then sank back, regarding Durell with calm eyes.

The ring came loose with some difficulty. Under it, the flesh looked tight, but hard and tanned as the rest of the big man’s hand. Durell glanced up and saw Anderson’s strange, hard face watching him.

“We were all betrayed by the Turk,” Anderson murmured. “He’s the one who probably arranged for the false radio beacon that pulled us off course. And also probably heaved the tape into the sea, no matter what he told us on the plane.” “Maybe,” Durell said. “But maybe we can use Kappic’s accusation to some advantage. It will help keep the fishing captain here off balance, trying to decide which of us is the real agent.”

“What good will that do?” Anderson asked.

“We need time. Something might turn up.”

“You always such an optimist, Cajun?”

“No,” Durell said. “But you see, the tape wasn’t destroyed by Kappic. I know where it is.”

Before Anderson could reply, Durell turned as Francesca came slowly down the ladder into the hold. Her face was pale. Wickham was summoned next, and Durell noted how the fat colonel responded eagerly, smirking at the others as if in some secret triumph. Wickham trailed the blanket with him as he climbed the ladder, moving awkwardly as the trawler pitched in the heavy seas.

Durell sat down beside Francesca. He saw from the marks on her face that she had been slapped around, and her eyes were shocked and quiet.

“Did they hurt you much?” he asked gently.

“Not really. It was just—terrifying. They’re simple fishing people, yet they’ve been taught to hate and fear us. The captain is the only educated man aboard, yet he just mouths newspaper and propaganda slogans—calls us imperialists, warmongers. It was senseless, and frightening.”

“It’s the trap the whole world finds itself in,” Durell said. “We move toward a destruction that nobody really wants. But it’s as if we all wear blinders that only permit each side to see their way, into the future, and every other possibility is to be ignored or destroyed.”

“I didn’t think you—you would feel like that, with your job—”

“What did the captain ask you?” Durell interrupted.

She shivered. “I couldn’t understand much of his Russian. But he’s got the fact that we’re carrying secret information back to Washington.”

“Where did he get that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t tell them anything?”

“Of course not.”

“Not even about your father, I mean?”

“My name meant nothing to them.” The girl tossed her black hair impatiently. Even without make up, after all the hours of this turbulent day, she looked somehow clean and lovely. Under the firm lines of her mouth, however, there was a soft, inner trembling, a beat that Durell did not miss. “But of course,” Francesca said quietly, “Susan Stuyvers spoke to them first, and now Wickham is probably spilling his fat little insides for a drink or a cup of coffee.”

“Perhaps not.”

“Wickham is a coward,” Francesca said flatly. “He’ll sell us out.”

“He can’t be blamed for everything, though.”

“He’ll tell them about you, Sam. They’ll do things, make you talk to them—”

“Did you see Kappic?”

“They said Mustapha is dead.”

“Did they say why?”

Francesca looked at her hands. “He smashed their radio.” “I see,” Durell said. “Good.”

She turned abruptly, her gray eyes anguished, twisting to face him. “How can you be so calm and quiet about it?” “I’m not, really. I’m as afraid as any man, I think.”

“Are you? Are you really? I’ve been watching you, trying to figure you out. If I thought you were a little more human, with the ordinary weaknesses of other men—” She paused and laughed bitterly. “It’s the little mother in me, you see. I don’t like men to dominate me. Just enought, you understand. But I seem to enjoy taking care of men who need me for something. It’ gotten me into trouble before, and I don’t want it to happen again.” She paused and shook her head in wonder. “Isn’t this a foolish time to talk about such things?” “No, it’s better than just shivering and worrying.”

“I suppose that’s it. But all the same—” She paused, then said without warning, “Do you care much for that Susan Stuyvers?”

“Why do you ask?”

“She isn’t what she seems to be. You know that. Both of them—Susan and John—will kill anyone who gets in their way, if they can.”

“None of us are in a position to try that,” Durell said. “They’ve taken all our weapons. Susan and John are as helpless as any of us.”

“But more desperate, perhaps.”

He smiled. “Yes.”

She stared ruefully at Durell. “I’m afraid I’ll never understand you. I was jealous of Susan for a little while. Now I think I know why you let her act the way she does with you.” “There’s nothing to be jealous about.”

“No.” She paused again. “And yet, I somehow wish you needed me. If only for a little bit.”

Chapter Sixteen

WICKHAM was still absent from the hold when Durell was summoned for questioning.

He smelled brandy in the captain’s cabin and saw the crudely wiped bloodstains on the deck, and wondered what had happened to Kappic. The fisherman who was his guard thrust him without ceremony along the deck into the cabin, and Durell’s brief glimpse of the stormy night was hopeful. The darkness and the howling wind seemed to funnel all its fury on the plunging fishing boat. The trawler was headed into the wind, her blunt bow thrusting and smashing into the ribbons of foam that whipped from her steel plates and fled in streamers through the noisy air. Everything creaked and groaned and gave forth metallic sounds of agony. Except for the riding lights on the masthead, everything was in darkness, and the bright glare of a gooseneck lamp and the heavy scent of Russian cigarette smoke in the captain’s warm cabin made Durell pause and blink and cough.

“So,” he heard in Crimean dialect, “this is the famous spy, eh?”

The captain was a thickset man with a black beard and a saddle nose. His hands were big and horny, resting on his desk. Durell noted the smashed radio at once, and lifted his brows.

“You have not been able to call for help?” he asked sharply.

The captain grunted. “Does that please you, Amerikanski?”

“Who charges me with being a spy?” Durell asked.

“The Turk, who was a fool, and who died because of it. And the American colonel, who likes to drink. And the big one with the face of a frog, who claims to be from the MVD—but is without credentials, of course.”

“They all accuse me?”

“Not all. Some say it is the big one.” The captain fumbled in his desk for a cigar and held it in his big, calloused hands, pointing it at Durell. “I am a simple man, comrade. I do not like it when people make puzzles and pronounce riddles and accuse each other. It is not for such a man like me to make judgments.”

“No. And you don’t want to make a mistake, either,” Durell said.

“Eh? You speak with a fine Muscovite accent—but I don’t understand your meaning.”

“You could lose your boat, your pension, your standing— everything, if you mistreat the wrong man, captain.”

“True, true. So are you the spy?” The captain grinned and showed a steel tooth in his lower jaw, gleaming above his bristly black beard. “You see what a simple man I am? I ask a question that needs only a yes or no as a reply.”

“It is Anderson who is the American spy,” Durell said. “I am Lieutenant Karili Obranovitch, Department 12, SK Division. I am Section Head for District Nine of counter-intelligence, formerly a security officer in the Guard Directorate of the Kremlin, a veteran of Stalingrad and four times wounded. I hold six military orders and six medals and graduated from the Soviet Army Counter-Intelligence School and the Institute of Marxism-Leninism and am a veteran of the Komsomol. My Communist Party Number is 2468-779. My records are filed in the Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del—MVD headquarters. I—”

The captain held up his hand, staring, then leaned back with an explosive curse. “You sound like a fine and noble Soviet citizen, Comrade Hero. You and the big one, who also claims to be from the MVD.”

“Naturally. It is Anderson who is trying to confuse you by claiming my identity.”

“He used another name. Kugriliov, I believe. And claimed to be a captain in Department 12, SK Division—but did not lay claim to as many wounds and military medals, comrade. But you agree on the department, anyway, eh?” Abruptly the captain lurched to his feet and thrust his head forward and shouted: “Now I want the truth, do you understand? A simple truth! You are an American spy! Admit it! Your own officer, Colonel Wickham, accused you!

“Me? Or Anderson?”

“You!”

“Impossible. Wickham speaks no Russian. He could not make such a distinction. What have you done with him, by the way?”

The captain shook his head with frustrated anger. “He is drunk, and asleep I am not inhuman. I let him turn in. After all, he is an officer.” The captain glowered at Durell’s tall figure. “At least he wears a uniform and has identity cards.”

The fisherman was obviously tormented by indecision. It was true, Durell thought, that he was a simple man, devoted only to his daily labor of harvesting the fish in the sea. Kappic, in breaking the radio, had put the captain in an untenable and tormenting position for hours, thanks to the storm that kept the from making headway and delayed their arrival at a Crimean port and contact with Soviet authorities.

The captain shouted something to the two crewmen on guard who vanished from the doorway. “Eh. Well. Now we shall see. We shall let you confront each other—you and this Anderson. We shall see who is the spy and who is the loyal Soviet citizen.”

Durell smiled. “And suppose you make a mistake, Comrade Captain?”

“A mistake will not happen.” The captain grinned cunningly. “But if I accepted your word for what you are—what would you have me do, eh? What would be your command, Comrade Counter-Intelligence Agent?”

“To proceed as you are for the moment,” Durell said.

“Ah. And how long does this moment last?”

“Until the storm ends. You know that one of the Americans aboard has information vital to our security. It was stolen from us by spying techniques, and my orders are to recover this information.”

“Yes. I know this much. It must not be permitted to reach America!”

“So it is vital that we discover who has this information, what it is, precisely, and then keep that person in custody,” Durell went on. “The others, who are innocent, must be returned to the Turkish authorities without creating an international incident. It is equally important to keep everything as quiet a possible in order to leave the enemy in question, not knowing what happened to their agent or the information they want.”

“True.” The captain made a thin, breathing sound. “You would have me turn all the others over to some Turkish vessel, perhaps?”

“Only when the true spy is first identified.”

The fisherman shouted angrily, “And how can I identify him? To the devil with all of you! In the morning when the storm dies, I take you ashore and turn you over to the military and wash my hands of all this.”

“You are not acting as a responsible Soviet citizen, Comrade Captain, when you take the easy course. It would go hard with you if I report that you made difficulties for me. I only need a few hours here to settle the question.”

“You shall have the time—down in the hold!” the captain snorted, chewing on his cigar.

Then he looked up as Anderson was thrust into the cabin. The big man still had a dazed look in his bulging eyes, and there was a grayish pallor under his skin. Yet his words were clear enough, spoken slowly and in faultless Russian.

“Have you decided yet, Comrade Captain?”

“I have decided only that one of you is a liar and an American spy,” the fisherman snapped. “But it is not up to me to decide such things.”

Anderson turned cold-bright eyes, like polished steel, to* ward Durell. His broad mouth grinned. “Very nice, Durell. You pose as my counterpart now, is that it?”

“Just as you did to me, back in Musa Karagh,” Durell said evenly. “That was when we were all betrayed.” He stared at the big man. “One of us was a Russian, or working for the Russians. One of us slugged Francesca, killed Dr. Uvaldi, and arranged for the false radio beacon that pulled us off course over the Black Sea.”

Anderson grinned. “And you think it was me?”

Durell spoke quietly.

“I know it was you. And you’re not Bert Anderson.”

Anderson sighed. The sea made a hollow, smashing sounds against the trawler’s hull. “Can you prove that, Durell?”

“I don’t think I’ll have to,” Durell said. “I wasn’t sure about anything, though, until I helped you take the ring off your injured hand, back in the hold a few minutes ago.”

“Yes, you saw my skin, then.”

“If you were really Anderson, and had been wearing that chunk of coal as a good luck charm since you were a kid back in the coal mines, your finger under that ring would have been white, and not evenly tanned as it is.”

Anderson nodded slowly. He spoke in English, his frog’s mouth smile rueful. “So you know the truth now. Then why go on with the masquerade? You’re fairly caught, you’ve identified me too late, and your mission has failed. There is no place you can go. You can gain nothing by adding to the confusion of our poor fishing captain.”

Durell said, “What happened to the real Bert Anderson, the diplomatic courier sent from Ankara?”

“I had to kill him,” the big man said crisply. “I took his ring and his credentials. I was briefed on his history before I ever came to Karagh—it was my job to intercept him and take his place. Our people in Ankara came through to us with very careful dossiers on your personnel there.” Anderson paused. “I buried the real courier on the mountainside and took his place. It was as simple as that.”

“Not quite. Uvaldi didn’t accept you, really, did he? He didn’t turn the tape over to you. Where did you slip up?” “Uvaldi was a naturally suspicious man, that is all. He insisted he should keep the tape on his person. I let him have his way, for the time, rather than make a serious issue out of it back in the village.”

“But you killed Uvaldi, too.”

“Yes, when I heard you had arrived in Karagh.” The man who called himself Anderson bulked big and powerful in the cabin. His pale eyes glittered ominously, touching the captain’s puzzled face as he listened to the incomprehensible English. He went on, “The mistake I made with you, Durell, was in the way I killed Dr. Roberto Uvaldi. You recognized the professional touch, eh?”

“Yes, it was obvious.”

“So you knew about me from the beginning,” Anderson sighed.

“I suspected everyone. But your use of the needle to kill Uvaldi alerted me to the presence of a professional. It could have been anyone.” Durell paused before Anderson’s wide, assured grin. “You’re the one who attacked Francesca outside her hut the first night?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Why did you try to kill her, too?”

“It was an error. I was coming back from where I had buried my radio and made my broadcast—first arranging for the KT-4, then for the false beacon to bring you all this way. It seemed the easiest escape route, and I’d have you, too, to hand over to my superiors.” Anderson laughed thickly. “I didn’t know who Francesca was, but I didn’t want anyone seeing me in that area—and she was acting rather suspiciously, anyway, sneaking up on the Stuyvers’ hut. I still don’t know why she behaved that way, however. Then someone came, after I jumped her, and I had to let it go and get out of there. That’s when I went back to the inn and killed Uvaldi. Then you came.”

“How did you know about the Uvaldi tape, in the first place?”

Anderson shrugged. “We know about Base Four, of course. And we had complete reports on Uvaldi’s work. The experimental program for personnel nuclear weapons at Kapustin Yar was sure to be spotted, but we aren’t willing to have the information transmitted to your people yet. So I was sent across the Caucasus Mountains to stop the shipment of records. The earthquakes were fortunate for me, creating confusion and disrupting communications and helping me in my work.”

At this point the fishing captain jumped to his feet with an impatient expletive and yelled to his armed guard in the doorway. One of them came forward with a machine-pistol pointed at both Durell and Anderson.

Anderson looked rueful. “So you now claim my identity, too? You are trained to spread confusion, but you won’t get away with it here.”

The fishing captain shouted, “Be quiet, both of you!” Anderson replied in Russian. “This man is a liar, a spy, a notorious imperialist saboteur and secret agent. I order you in the name of the MVD and the Party to arrest him at once.” “You do, eh’?” the man said heavily. “And how am I to know he is not the MVD agent, and you the spy?”

“It can be proved easily,” Anderson said. “I will turn over to you the object he was trying to smuggle to Washington.” Anderson turned and grinned at Durell. “You think I don’t know where Uvaldi’s tape is? I’ll give them to the captain, and that will convince him. I’m sorry for you, Durell. You’re a brave man, doing the same job as mine, but we happen to be born with different loyalties.”

“I think you’re bluffing,” Durell said.

“We’ll see.” The big man’s strange, gray face turned back to the captain and he spoke sharply. “Among the prisoners is a blonde woman who has a large black leather bag. Take it from her, but be careful. You will find some old relics in it, books and Aramaic scrolls. And among them will be a small roll of plastic tape. This is what the imperialist agent was trying to smuggle through to Washington.” Anderson turned to grin at Durell. “One must speak in the language of the propaganda press to these simple people. They are impressed by slogans. You are surprised that I know where to find the tape?”

“A little. You didn’t seem so sure of it an hour ago.”

“True. But since then I engaged in a mental exercise that involved the process of elimination. I can see that my estimate was correct. The tape is in Susan Stuyvers’ handbag, isn’t it?”

“No,” Durell said.

“No? You are bluffing now!”

“Send for it,” Durell said. “You’ll see.”

He had no further hope, as Anderson spoke to the captain again. The captain looked dubious, then shrugged and agreed, since he had nothing to lose by eliminating this test. One of the crew members was sent below to fetch the bag and Susan. The captain settled back and lit his cigar with a wooden match. A second crewman stood alert and ready with the machine-pistol in the cabin doorway. Durell and Anderson faced each other from opposite sides of the captain’s room.

Sooner or later, Durell thought, your luck runs out and the skill of any gambler defeats itself against the mathematical percentages. You had a long run for your money, he thought. You were lucky sometimes, and skillful, and you survived when other men died and failed. Each time you made it, your survival factor lessened and grew a little more desperate.

Now he saw no way out of the dilemma. He had gambled on a delay by confusing the fishing captain by claiming Anderson’s identity, but even then he had only played it by ear, hoping that the time thus gained might bring about some slight change of fortune, some small tipping of the scales that he could use. But even this was now going to be lost to him.

Anderson swayed slightly and grasped at the captain’s desk for sudden support. A look of surprised crossed the big man’s face.

Durell spoke quietly, “You’re badly hurt, you know. You need a doctor.”

“Yes. I know.”

“It’s a concussion, most likely.”

“Possibly. I have a blinding headache. But do not take any satisfaction from that, Durell. I’ll live long enough to turn you over to my people for whatever they decide to do with you.

It’s been a long time coming, you know. You’ve been in our files for some years, with a price on your head.” Anderson straightened again with an effort. “But don’t count on my passing out before the captain knows which of us is authentic, so to speak.”

“I don’t count on it,” Durell said. “I’m sorry you’re hurt.” “Are you?”

“I don’t hate you for doing your job. You’re damned good at it.”

“Thank you. I would have thought that you regarded me as a murderer,” Anderson said wryly. “An ogre, who kills wantonly, to be dreaded and destroyed, if possible—”

“We are at war, you and I—long, cold, dreary war that has no value in terms of humanity’s progress. No bugles blow, no trumpets blare for you and me,” Durell said.

Anderson’s mouth widened. “You truly think of it this way? I did not suppose—an imperialist agent like yourself—” He paused. “But you would kill me if you could, wouldn’t you?” “Yes,” Durell said. “That’s my job.”

“Then in a sense we are even.”

“Not yet. Nothing has been decided yet.”

“It will be—now.”

They both turned as the crewman who had been sent below pushed Susan, stumbling, over the cabin threshold. The man’s face was scratched, and he shoved the girl with a show of brutal anger. Susan fell and sprawled on the deck, her hair a thick screen across her face. Her head was bowed and her breathing was laboured as she lay on the steel deck.

The crewman held the polished black bag.

Durell started toward the fallen girl, but the captain snapped, “Stay where you are! Do not touch her!”

“Are you all right, Susan?” Durell asked quietly.

She lifted her head slowly. She had been hit in the face several times, and her lip was puffy and swollen. Her pale eyes stared at Durell without comprehension for a moment, and then she moaned, “Oh, God, look what they’ve done to me.” “It’s all right, Susan,” he said. “But you shouldn’t have offered any resistance. Don’t say any more now.”

Anderson spoke in guttural Russian to the fishing captain. “Open the black bag, comrade, but be careful of the old books the missionary had in there. They are valuable. But even more valuable is the little roll of tape you will find among them.

It is this tape that contains the coded information our scientists want to keep the enemy from stealing.”

The captain held the bag poised over his desk, and his small, shrewd eyes considered Durell. “Is this true?”

Durell drew a deep breath. “He is a liar and murderer, an enemy agent, Captain. If the tape is in the bag, then he hid it there.”

“You both give me only double-talk,” the fishing captain said angrily. “Well, we shall see.”

He opened the bag with a wrench and turned it upside down and dumped the contents on his desk.

Long ago, when Durell learned the fine art of bluffing at poker from old Jonathan, his grandfather, who knew all the ways and habits of the former Mississippi riverboat gamblers, he had been taught never to swerve from the course of a bluff. Once you start, you must stick to it, the old man said. No matter what the odds against you then, you have to face out your opponents to the bitter end.

Durell watched the heavy Biblical tomes and scrolls crash on the captain’s desk. The captain looked at them, shrugged and pawed around inside. He took out Susan’s lipstick and comb, uncapped the lipstick, took it apart. He shook the heavy old books, unrolled the scrolls, turned the pockets in the bag inside out. He scraped the inside with his fingertips, turned the bag upside down again, shook it, grunted, and stared at Anderson.

“Nothing, Comrade Liar.”

Anderson looked gray. “But the tape must be there! In the books, perhaps. Use your knife.”

Susan whispered, “Oh, no. Don’t destroy the books.”

But the captain nodded, took a heavy-bladed fish knife from his crewman, and slashed at the spines and heavy, thick covers of the books. Immediately he made a sound of satisfaction as two, then four, then a dozen small white sealed packets slid from the hollow space he found between the covers of the books John Stuyvers smuggled from the monastery at Bir-el-Echem.

“What—?” Susan began.

Anderson looked incredulous. Durell said nothing. He watched the girl for a moment, then turned back to the captain as the bearded man ripped open one of the packets and exposed a small spill of white crystals. The fisherman’s eyes widened, and he tasted some of the powder on the tip of his

tongue. It was very quiet in the cabin for a moment afterward.

“It is heroin,” the captain said. He looked shocked and angry. “These American are just dope smugglers!”

Anderson swung around to the white-faced Susan. “You and John?”

“No!” she cried. “No, I didn’t know anything about it!” “You’re lying!” Anderson shouted. “Now, where is the tape “I don’t know where that is, either!” she whispered. She stared in horrified fascination as the captain went on taking apart the old books and manuscripts, adding to the pile of white, sealed packets. “How much—how much is there?” Durell said flatly, “There must be half a million dollars, worth that John was trying to smuggle back into the states. That explains—”

“I didn’t know about it,” she moaned. “I swear I didn’t!” Anderson said impatiently, “But where is the tape?” Durell stared at the small, tumbled heaps of packets on the captain’s desk. He heard Susan sobbing. The bag was empty now, the lining ripped apart, disintegrated by the fisherman’s further search. The captain tossed the bag aside and pawed impatiently through all the little packages.

But there was nothing else.

The tape was gone.

Chapter Seventeen

YOU never know, Durell thought. He looked at Susan and Anderson and knew that everyone in the captain’s cabin had been taken by surprise. He thought of John Stuyvers, that thin, fanatic man in the clerical collar of a missionary, carrying all that dope from Lebanon, hidden in the priceless, and now rained religious relics. It explained a great deal about the man’s behavior, and a few other matters that had puzzled him. He watched the captain shove the heroin aside with an expression of distaste on his bearded face. He ignored Anderson’s explosive breath and stood up heavily, facing Durell.

Anderson said loudly, “It is a trick! The tape must be here! Look again!”

“Be quiet, Comrade Spy,” the captain said. “I will question the woman first.”

Durell said, “She does not understand Russian.”

“She will understand my fist. Tell her what I want.” “And that is?”

“This marvelously important bit of tape you two keep lying about. She knows where it is, eh? She had the bag, the drugs, and the tape was with the drugs, eh? I am not stupid. If the tape was in the bag, and you both expected it to be there, then she removed it. She will tell me where it can be found now.”

Durell spoke quickly in English. “Susan, don’t say anything at all. Not a word, please.”

She looked at him without comprehension and spoke through her battered lips. “Sam, believe me. Believe me, please. I didn’t know about John smuggling this heroin. Honestly. I didn’t know. I thought he was a real missionary, a little strange, perhaps, but I never suspected—”

“Never mind the dope. Just don’t tell them what you did with the tape, no matter what happens.”

“But I don’t know what happened to the tape!” she protested. “Don’t you believe me?”

The captain crossed the room and slapped her hard across the mouth, without warning. Susan shrieked and fell to the deck again. Durell did not know if her scream was more for effect, an appeal for pity, or whether her pain and terror were genuine. He looked across the cabin at Anderson. The big man’s face was hard and gray. His eyes were cold, his wide mouth clamped shut, unfeeling, without emotion, watching Susan as if she were some biological exhibit mounted for classroom inspection on dissection techniques. The captain yelled at her and caught at her yellow hair and dragged her up on her feet again and shouted in Russian at her.

“Where is it, you she-cat? Show me what it is these men are confusing me about, eh? Talk, do you hear?”

“She doesn’t understand Russian,” Durell said again. “She knows what I say!” the fisherman snapped. “I can see she knows very well what I want.”

He struck her again. Susan fell, sprawling, at Durell’s feet. She looked up at Durell through her tumbled yellow hair and her eyes held an appeal in them, and something else, in the shadows beyond her evident pain. She was trying to tell him something. Her lips moved, but he could not hear what she whispered, and he could not betray her attempt to tell him anything.

He dropped to one knee to help her.

“Let the bitch be!” the captain roared.

“Don’t hit her again,” Durell said.

“I want the truth, do you hear?”

Anderson spoke flatly, tiredly, from across the cabin. “This man, Captain, exhibits all the stupid idealism and capitalistic notions of chivalry, you notice. He is concerned for the woman. Would he be what he says he is, if he acts with such Western gallantry?”

The captain glared at Durell. “He is right, you know. I believe he is right.”

“I only ask for humane treatment for the girl,” Durell said. “She has done no harm.”

“A smuggler of dope?” Anderson asked drily. “A purveyor of drugs, a criminal, a whore—”

Susan tried to shrink away from the fisherman’s booted feet. The captain reached down to grab her by the hair again and dragged her back to the center of the room. “No,” Durell said.

His fist caught the captain a little high on the cheekbone, but it was a hard, crisp blow. The captain grunted and fell back, crashed into the ruined radio equipment, and cut his hand on the smashed tubes. He stared at the blood and yelled to the man on guard in the doorway, a rather stupid-looking fellow with restless hands on his machine-pistol. Durell swung and dived for the gun desperately. It was Anderson who stopped him. Anderson tripped him, and as he stumbled, the crewman with the pistol whipped him with it. Durell fell, and knew with dismay that he had played exactly the card that Anderson wanted. He tried to get up and Anderson’s knee caught him on the side of the head and threw him bodily back across the cabin. Susan screamed something he could not understand. He fell against her, felt her arm grab him to support him. Then he tried to get up.

The captain kicked him in the side and knocked him over again. Pain slashed through him. He heard a roaring in his ears that muted the captain’s angry voice. He tried to get up once more. The captain kicked him again. This

time he caught the captain’s booted leg and yanked hard and the bearded man came down with a shout of surprise and dismay.

But there was no advantage in it. Durell started to rise, and something cold and hard cracked into his cheek and grated against his teeth. It was the machine-pistol. The stupid-looking crewman stood over him, only too anxious to pull the trigger.

Durell expected to die in the next instant.

But it was Anderson who saved him.

Anderson spoke sharply, in a voice of command that brooked no more argument. The fisherman hesitated. In the brief respite, Durell pulled his head away from the gun. Anderson gave another order, and the fisherman grumbled and stepped back. The captain got heavily to his feet and peered at Durell with angry eyes and pulled at his black beard.

“So. It is settled, then. You are the American spy.” “No,” Durell insisted.

“You will tell us where this item is that you have been trying to steal from our military and take back to your country.”

“I don’t have it.”

“It was not in the bag. Where is it?”

“I don’t know.”

Anderson said in English, “Susan, did you take the spool of tape out of the bag?”

The girl just stared blankly.

Anderson went on quietly, “Susan, if I must, I will kill you, and Durell, and everybody with you. I must have that roll of tape. Can’t you understand? I do not enjoy being cruel. But cruelty is a necessary tool that must be used in my profession. I know it well, believe me. Where is the tape?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she whispered. “You removed it from the bag, didn’t you?”

“No.”

“It was you or John. I’ve watched and listened. Kappic had it, and he put it in Francesca’s sketch box. You saw the maneuver and stole it and put it in this bag with the books and the heroin.” He paused, and Susan just stared at him. “Does John have it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want me to kill John for it?”

She spoke in a flat, dead voice. “I don’t care, now.” Anderson sighed. His strange eyes turned to Durell. “It was you, then. You’ve done something clever, I think. You know where the tape is.”

Durell thought quickly. If he denied the accusation, he would commit the others to torture and perhaps death. He had no illusions about Anderson. He believed what the big man said about using cruelty as a tool and a weapon. He had been as surprised as anyone when the tape did not show up in the bag. But he could ask no more of the others. “Yes, I know where it is,” he said.

Anderson grinned. “On your person?”

“You can search me.”

“Not on you, then, if you are so ready to be searched. Where, then? I lose patience, Durell. And I have only a limited time, understand.”

“I won’t tell you where the tape is.”

“Oh, yes,” Anderson said softly. “Oh, yes, you will.”

And the nightmare began. . . .

He did not know how long Anderson’s questioning went on. The hours of pain were confused with the hours of the storm in which the trawler plunged and struggled to survive. The fisherman who followed Anderson’s orders was clumsy at this specialized job, and because of it there was the danger, Durell knew, that he could be permanently crippled. He did not think Anderson wanted to kill him. In fact, Anderson certainly was anxious to bring him alive to his superiors. So there was a limit beyond which the crewman was not permitted to go. But within that limit, the darkness waxed and waned, grew bloody and black, and the minutes fled screaming or dragged on bloody hands and knees across the floor of the night.

He heard Anderson speaking to him as if from a great distance. “Must I really hurt you, Durell? I admire you, you know. We are much alike, you and I.”

“No, we’re not. And you won’t really hurt me.”

“We are in the same profession—”

“I thought so, at first. But not now. Not for this.”

“Where is Uvaldi’s tape, Durell?”

“It’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“You’ll never find it.”

“But is it on its way to Washington?”

“Maybe.”

“How did you do it?”

Durell laughed.

“You are bluffing, Durell. You couldn’t have done it.” Durell tried to plunge across the cabin at the man’s big, looming figure. The fisherman caught him and flung him back. Durell hit him with a back-handed swipe of his left arm that sent the man reeling. The captain yelled and struck him in the back of the neck with something and Durell went down again on the deck. It heaved crazily under him. He opened his eyes and saw Susan staring down at him, wide-eyed, as if he were something out of a dark and alien nightmare. Her pale topaz eyes were blank, wide, twisting away from his gaze.

“Durell?”

He turned and looked at Anderson.

The captain said thickly, “Let me finish him, comrade. He is too stubborn. Or let me put him in chains and forget him until we make port.”

Anderson looked thoughtful. “You may be right, Comrade Captain.” He smiled widely down at Durell. “After all, the tape is of no real importance to me. My mission was a preventive one. The tape is on this boat, or at the bottom of the sea. If it is on the boat, it can be found at our leisure when we reach port. It cannot, in whatever case, be on its way to Washington from this point, eh? And that is all I must be sure of.”

“But are you sure of it?” Durell whispered.

Anderson said, “It would go easier with you if you could co-operate, of course. I’ll have the captain take you below, to think it over.”

Durell looked up at Susan. “And the girl?”

“Unimportant. A criminal, a prostitute, a useless breed. I let her go with you.”

It was a trick of some kind, Durell thought. But the beating he had just taken had slowed his mind, and he was grateful only for the respite. Susan helped him as he stumbled below. The pitching of the trawler in the stormy seas made him fall to one knee at the edge of the hatch. He told himself to hang on, no matter what else happened. He was beaten, but he would not give up. He could not give up. There was an answer somewhere. There had to be an answer. In a few moments, he told himself, he would find it. After a few minutes of rest. . . .

Chapter Eighteen

THE naked electric bulb in the hold swayed back and forth, back and forth, jerking and dangling on its wire with the erratic plunge of the trawler. Its harshness left no secrets to be exposed. Durell stared at the point of glaring light, hypnotized for several moments by its wild movement. He heard metallic bangings, clangs, thuds and dim shouts; the vessel creaked and groaned, and over all was the dimly heard, often felt, impact of the seas breaking over the blunt bows.

He had slept briefly. He was not sure how long he had been out. He sat up, aware of painful bruises, but grateful that nothing more serious had been done to him up in the captain’s cabin.

“Oh, thank God. Are you all right, Sam?”

It was Francesca. She knelt beside him, and he saw Susan, too, crouching next to the blanket that covered him. Francesca’s dark hair and slanting gray eyes wavered before his gaze. He blinked and focused more sharply. When he drew a deep breath, something seemed to stab him in his ribs; he tried again, and it was better. Nothing was broken. “How long have I been out?”

“Half an hour, or so,” Francesca said.

He looked at Susan. Her face was pale, stunned. “Did they call you back?”

“They stripped me and searched my body. Everywhere. I—” Susan paused and bit her lip. “I was telling the truth, Sam. I don’t know what happened to the tape. And I didn’t know about the heroin.”

Francesca said, “You’re a liar.”

Susan looked at the other girl and clamped her pale lips shut. Durell stood up painfully. The deck heaved and pitched under him. There was only John Stuyvers and the two girls in the hold with him now. Colonel Wickham was still absent. John Stuyvers sat a little apart and stared morosely at the sweating, chilly walls of their prison. Durell moved toward him, leaving the two girls without ceremony. The thin man had an unbalanced, fanatical look about him of explosive violence. Durell dropped to one knee beside him and spoke quietly.

“John? I want to talk to you.”

“Get away from me!” the thin man snarled. “Go back to your stupid games, huh? You’ve given me enough trouble. I wish I’d never seen you. They found the dope, Susan said. They tore up the books and found the stuff.”

“Did Susan know about it? Was she in the deal with you?”

Stuyvers grinned. “That pigeon didn’t tumble to a thing, even though I hauled her across Lebanon and half of Turkey. She swallowed the bit about the missionary deal hook, line and sinker.”

“Then she was innocent of the dope deal?”

“I needed her to round out the missionary front, I told you. Took her along to pose as my daughter.” The man’s thin mouth twisted and he looked at Durell with pale, violent eyes. “It was my big play. I schemed and sweated and killed for the stuff hidden in those books. Now the Russkies got it. And you know what they’ll do to me? I go to a slave-labor camp, if I’m lucky, if they just don’t stand me in front of a wall and shoot me. I thank you for it, Durell. You did just fine for me.”

“You can still get out of this,” Durell insisted. “I’m not interested in the dope angle. But none of us can afford to give up now.”

“Why not? If I helped you, what would I get from Uncle Sam? A life sentence in Alcatraz? I think I’d better choose Siberia.”

“Your sentence could depend on what you do now,” Durell said.

Stuyvers laughed bitterly. “You couldn’t change a thing. In any case, the fishermen have the stuff now. Have they dumped it yet?”

“No. It’s all in the captain’s cabin.”

Stuyvers licked his lips. “All that goddam beautiful money I was going to get. Down the drain, into the drink.”

“Listen, John, I want your help,” Durell said. “It might get you a chance to go free, somehow. I want to know what happened to the Uvaldi tape. Susan put it in the bag, on the plane, and only you and Susan had your hands on the bag while we were in the air and down here. What happened to the tape?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never opened the bag.” The man’s voice lifted on the sharp edge of irrational rage. His eyes were pale, blazing, furious. “Now, get away from me, hear? Get away!”

Durell stood up, bracing himself against the pitch and toss of the vessel, and moved away.

John Stuyvers watched with brooding eyes as Durell went to talk to Susan. It seemed to John that Durell had something he ought to. think about, but he was content now to enjoy the dark spasms of hatred in him. This hatred gave him strength and a reason to exist. It had no particular focus. It covered everything around him. He had worked hard, and he had been clever, and his masquerade as a missionary had even fooled Susan. He had committed every crime in the books; he had run crazy risks, lied, cheated and killed. He had no remorse about this. It was a dog eat dog world, in which you struck first and you struck to kill, or you got it in the back from the other fellow.

But he’d had it right in the palm of his hand, this time. Playing missionary, his passports were in perfect order, and Susan had worked out fine as a front. It had seemed certain he’d get the heroin through Istanbul to the Italian freighter to Naples, where the factory would refine and cut it for further transportation and distribution in the States. He was part of a big network and he could have won out, even with the U.N. International Narcotics Control Commission supposedly hot on his trail.

He could have handled anything but what had happened on this boat. He had it in his hands, in the bag.

He looked up, a sudden cunning in him. Durell had offered a deal, of sorts. And you could cut off your nose to spite your face, turning Durell down. Anything could happen. And things couldn’t be worse, could they? Maybe they could take over this stinking fish tub, which seemed to be what Durell had in mind. You could ride her someplace where you could jump off with the heroin. It was a chance, and Durell was offering it. . . .

John looked across the hold to where Durell talked to Susan, and made up his mind.

Susan was saying, “I’m sorry, Sam. I didn’t know. I haven’t anything to tell you or the captain. I honestly don’t know what happened to the tape.” She sat with her fine legs doubled under her on the blanket spread over the steel deck of the hold. Her yellow hair screened her face for a moment. “I told you what I did with the tape, when I took it from Francesca. I didn’t open the bag after that. Nobody did, as far as I know.”

“Did you tell John about it?”

“No, I—I didn’t mention it at all. And you saw what happened on the plane when Anderson tried to grab the bag.” “I know, but isn’t it possible that someone else might have gotten into it?”

“Who’d know what to look for?” she asked. “And where?” Her question stopped him for a moment. Then he said, “But in the plane John dozed for long stretches at a time: he was drinking raki with Colonel Wickham. . . .”

“That’s true, but I doubt if anybody could be light-fingered with John,” Susan said. She looked at him with dull, tawny-yellow eyes. “I don’t suppose you believe me, now that the business of the heroin has come out. I didn’t know anything about it. John used me. But it’s too much to ask you to accept that. Still, I wouldn’t lie to you, Sam. Not ever. I didn’t know about the heroin. And I don’t know what happened to the tape.”

He did not know of anything more to say. He turned away, and Susan watched him go with disenchanted eyes as he crossed the hold to speak to Francesca next.

Susan knew now that the dreams Durell had stirred in her were futile and meaningless, a last glimmer of the girl she might have been, if the world had treated her differently. Durell would never belong to her. He could not trust her, and therefore he was incalculably beyond reach. Last night he had pretended interest because of the missing tape. But it was all a game, a cruel joke that life played on her, twisting this last, desperate trip with John into a kind of dark, gray nightmare of cold and hunger and fear.

She did not hate Durell because he turned her down. She knew what she was and all the things she had done, up to and after what happened with Ali Khalil in that deadly olive grove. Since then, with John, she had thought John’s kindness marked a new beginning. She had not known that she was only someone useful to his scheme in the criminal conspiracy to smuggle heroin into the States.

Now she knew there was something sick and evil in John.

But it was all over. There was no way out of the trap. Whatever happened now, she was the loser. Nothing could be more helpless than her situation at the moment, she thought.

And, thinking this, she began to feel better, as if some dark weight had suddenly lifted from her.

She began to consider how she might help Durell. . . .

Francesca Uvaldi sat quietly on her blanket, one shoulder pressed against the cold plates of the bulkhead. Her head was tilted back, resting against the hard comfort of one of the refrigeration pipes, now fortunately not in use. Her eyes seemed to be closed as Durell walked over to her, but he felt she had been watching all the time he was with Susan. Somehow she had managed to braid her dark, shining hair into a regal coronet that framed her oval face. Her mouth was in repose, but the corners drooped a little in sadness and exhaustion. She shivered in the cold of the trawler’s hold.

“Francesca?” Durell said. “You know I need your help?”

She opened her gray eyes and he saw the way her dark lashes made delicate fans across the immaculate perfection of her skin.

“I can’t help you, Sam,” she said. “I know what you want; I heard you with Susan, but I can’t help, either. Of course, Susan may be lying. I don’t know. That’s not for me to decide any more.”

“Was it ever your decision, Francesca?”

She nodded. “Yes. It’s time for all of the truth now, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

She said wearily, “I’ve been after a shipment of heroin that we suspected John Stuyvers and Susan of smuggling from Lebanon. That’s all.”

“ ‘We?’ ” he repeated.

She smiled ruefully. “I really do work for Illini of Roma, Sam. I’m a designer, all right. But some time ago I was approached by some people from our Embassy in Rome, acting for the U.N. International Narcotics Control Commission. They thought that with my sketch book and ‘cover’ identity, I could snoop around down in Naples and spot a heroin refining factory there.” Francesca shrugged. “I was successful in helping them, and it was exciting, so I went on from there. I worked with an Englishman, but the syndicate killed him in Ankara. I had to go on, to Karagh. Our information identified the smuggler as posing as a missionary, and as soon as I spotted John and Susan Stuyvers, I knew I had it. But in the confusion of the earthquake—there was no law to appeal to, and you were after the Uvaldi tape, you said; but I couldn’t be sure who you were, really, or where Anderson fitted into the picutre—so I decided to wait and see. I had to be certain that Stuyvers had the heroin with him. I couldn’t trust anybody, just as you couldn’t trust me.” She paused and smiled ruefully. “I was so sure of myself. I’d been successful before, in Naples, and I thought I could handle anything. I felt as if I didn’t need help. But I was really all mixed up about things. I’m afraid I’ve bungled everything, for myself and for you.”

Durell nodded. He was not surprised by Francesca’s admissions. It fitted the pattern of activity she had developed, and although he had not come to a decision about her before, he accepted what she said now without comment, and went back to his main purpose.

“About the tape, Francesca,” he said. “Susan claimed she had it in the bag, while we were in the plane. Do you think she was in the heroin deal with John?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think she’s as black as she paints herself. But you’re not really interested in the heroin, are you, Sam?”

“I’m only interested in finding that spool of tape.”

“Yes, you would be.” She sighed. “And what will you do then?”

“We’ll get out of here,” he said quietly. “There must be a way.”

“And if you got out of the hold? There are all the men in the crew. Perhaps not all of them are armed, but—” “All I need is a gun,” he said.

“And you’d try to take over the boat?”

“I have to,” he said. “I must try.”

“They’ll kill you, of course. Some of us may be killed.”

“Are you afraid?”

She shook her head. “I’ll never be as afraid again as I was last night, when—Anderson, I guess; he’s the one, isn’t he? —when Anderson attacked me outside the Stuyvers’ hut.” “You have to stop thinking about that,” he said gently. “But I don’t want to. I don’t think I should forget it, because it’s important to think about, and there are too many thinks I skipped around and avoided lately. If it wasn’t for the lucky arrival of that old peasant woman bringing the tape to Stuyvers, and scaring him off—and he attacked me because he thought I saw him wandering about like that, right?—well, he’d have killed me.” Her gray eyes regarded him gravely. “I’m sorry, Sam, but I really don’t know where the radar tape is. I never saw it. I never saw Kappic slip it into my sketch box, and I never saw Susan take it out.” He nodded. “Did you see anybody touch Stuyvers’ bag in the plane?”

“Only Anderson, that one time.”

“No one else? You’re sure? Please—try to remember.” She frowned in thought. “I have the odd impression—I was busy taking care of poor Lieutenant Kappic most of the time—but before that, while I was talking to him—it must have been after he had his change of heart and put the tape in my sketch box—I got the feeling that someone got up while John was asleep with the bag on his lap and—and stood beside him for a few moments, doing something. I saw it from the comer of my eye—”

“Who was it?” Durell asked.

She laughed without humor. “I have the silly notion it was Colonel Wickham.”

“Of course,” Durell said quietly, and he stood up.

He looked very tall, a lean shadow in silhouette against the naked light bulb in the hold, as he stood before Francesca in the corner. His face was in the shadows, and she could not read anything there.

She felt somehow stripped naked under his gaze, and yet the thought was not displeasing, and it went beyond the physical desire she felt for him. She understood her need for this man, for however brief a time they might be allotted each other; it was due to her awareness of death the night before; she wanted him, in order to assure herself she was still alive. In that way the maniacal, battering attack on her person, which had shattered all the deluding security of self and her immortality, could be put in proper, healthy perspective. She wanted him to make love to her soon. If they lived. If it could be arranged. But it was more than that, too. She no longer wanted to be alone.

She no longer felt adequate to move through the world’s maze in prideful isolation. What she needed was assurance from a man like Durell that she could still go on somehow, doing her job for the U.N. Commission, using her brain, which was good, and her courage, which had never been questioned before, toward something useful, something no longer academic. Up to now, she had never really hated the smugglers she was pitted against. The jobs assigned to her has been like objective mathematical problems to be coolly computed and resolved. But she hated John Stuyvers now, and regarded Susan without pity—and some jealousy, too. No, nothing would ever be the same again.

She looked up at Durell. “Sam?”

“Yes, Francesca. It’s all right.”

“What are you going to do about Wickham?”

“I’m getting out of here. I’m going to find him.”

Chapter Nineteen

THERE was an iron ladder going up the bulkhead to the hatch over the hold where they were held prisoner. The hatch was really a trap door within a larger framework, the main hatch-cover that provided the ceiling area for the compartment. The hold itself, lined with rusted refrigeration pipes, its metal plates sweating with condensation, was about twenty feet square, covering the width of the vessel’s beam so there could be no passage from the holds forward to the engine room and compartments aft, without going through here or using the upper deck.

Durell considered this, standing spread-legged against the lift and fall and plunge of the trawler. The bare light bulb danced and jerked on the end of its single cord extended by an iron pipe from the aft bulkhead. The pipe was hinged, so the light and wire could be swung aside to clear the way for the seine purse when the netted catch was dumped in here. It could be reached from the steel rungs of the ladder that went up to the trap door in the hatch ten feet from the slippery, rusted deck where he stood. Durell ignored it for a moment and studied the rest of the compartment, aware that John Stuyvers was watching him with harsh curiosity, and aware, too, of Susan’s blank face turning to follow him and of Francesca Uvaldi’s quiet composure. They watched and waited and expected anything from him now.

There was no door, no other entrance from the below-deck level. He considered the multiple rows of refrigeration pipes that circled the walls. Aft, against the bulkhead that separated them from the engine room, was a steel plate in the wall, perhaps two feet square, just above the section where most of the coil pipes went through the bulkhead. Durell turned to it, considered its riveted surface and saw that the hinges made it into a small trap door. Paint had once sealed it tight, but the alternate degrees of heat and cold down here had long since flaked away the painted seal and revealed the outline of the hinges and the dogged-down handle.

John Stuyvers stood silently beside him.

“Where do you suppose it goes?”

“Into the engine room,” Durell said, “and the refrigeration pumps. But we can’t make it out that way. Somebody would see me at once. In any case, we have nothing to open this with. No hammer or wrench.”

“Susan could get us out,” John said carefully.

“How?”

“There’s a guard up on deck, right?”

“Perhaps. The may just have fastened down the hatch in this weather and sealed us in, though.”

John said, “Let’s put the girl to work. She could twist one of these clumsy fishermen around her little finger, you know?”

Durell looked at the blonde girl. “What do you think, Susan?”

“Yes, I’ll try,” she said at once.

“All right. Go on up the ladder and bang on the trap door. See if there’s any answer.”

“And then?”

“Tell the watch you want to see the captain, at once.” “Smile at the bastard,” John grated. “Give him the works, baby.”

“I don’t see what good—”

Durell listened to the crash and hiss of the sea breaking on the foreward deck. “If there is any watch at all, it’s probably only one man. We’ll have to take him right here. So I’ll be on the ladder behind you, Susan. Go on up, now.”

She bit her lip, nodded, and climbed up. Durell mounted behind her. She leaned back in order to rap feebly on the wooden trap door in the big hatch-cover overhead, and Durell felt her body tremble against him.

“Take it easy,” he said quietly. “When I reach up past you to grab him, just hang on, understand? Don’t let yourself fall.”

“I’ll try not to.”

“If you do, just keep yourself loose. It’s awkward, I know. But do your best, Susan. Rap again.”

She banged her fist against the trap door once more and cried out. Up here close to the deck, they could hear the loud thunder of the sea, the bursting of combers against the bow, the wash and surge of water pouring across the trawler’s deck. Durell, clinging to the ladder with one hand, reached up beyond Susand and shoved at the trap. It would not yield. He hammered on it as loudly as he could.

He had almost given up, thinking the fishermen hadn’t bothered to post a watch here, when there came a rasp of metal being withdrawn, and then the trap door moved. "Da?”

A hairy, bearded face was thrust down out of the upper windy darkness of the deck; a woolen cap was jammed over unkemp hair, a scarf over the mouth muffling the single word of annoyed inquiry. Water sprayed down through the trap door and soaked Susan and Durell below.

Susan cried out, “Help me. Please. I’m ill.”

The fisherman answered with a spate of unintelligible words. Durell spoke in Russian. “The lady is sick and she needs help. Do you have a doctor aboard?”

“A doctor?” The man laughed. “We are only a small fishing boat, only ten men. What is wrong with her?” “She wants to see the captain.”

“Oh? What for?”

Durell winked. “Perhaps she wants to bargain with him for better treatment, eh?”

“She does? She’s plain enough, but she could begin by bargaining with me—”

The fisherman, laughing, crouched over the trap door and leaned a little farther down to look at Susan. Durell took the chance then. He reached up and around the girl, awkwardly because Susan was in his way, and caught the man around the neck and yanked hard. The effort made one foot slip off the rung of the ladder and his weight suddenly came down full force as the crewman bellowed. Durell’s elbow slipped perilously from around the watchman’s neck. But the sudden dragging yank was enough. The man plunged headlong through the trap door, slamming past Susan and falling with Durell to the deck of the compartment below.

The fisherman struck first, and Durell came down on top of him. The impact was stunning. It was a long drop down. Durell felt darkness swirl around him and forced himself to his feet, staggering. The fisherman lay sprawled on the deck, his breathing quick and shallow, his eyes closed. Durell felt his pulse, flicked back an eyelid. There was no blood. He got painfully to his feet again, searched the unconscious man for a weapon. There was only a long, sharply-edged fishknife. He took it, weighing it in his hand.

“Sam?” Susan still clung to the ladder above him. “Are you all right?”

He nodded. “You can come down now. The guard is only knocked out. He’ll have to be tied and gagged for a while. Tear up one of the blankets for the job, will you?”

John Stuyvers stood over the unconscious crewman, crouching slightly. “You ought to kill him,” Stuyvers whispered. “Get rid of him.”

“He’s only a fisherman,” Durell said. “Don’t touch him.” Susan came down the ladder and he climbed back up to take her place. John Stuyvers was on his heels immediately. “I’m going with you, Durell. I’m not staying in this stinking fish-hold another minute.”

“You’ll stay,” Durell said harshly. “I’ve got to find Colonel Wickham first. Nothing can be done until after that.” “What do I care about that fat slob?” Stuyvers breathed angrily. “I want out, understand? I want that bag backl You could use me, you said—”

“Later. Meanwhile, stay here,” Durell said.

He heaved himself up, kicked once, and wriggled through the trap door and got out on deck.

Rain slashed at him coldly, spitefully, and made him gasp. He was conscious of confused noises and movement in the dark of the night—the plunging of the trawler, the dark racing seas that burst in explosive agony over the trawler’s bow and beam, the clatter of a loose block, the screech of the wind in the halyards and dragnet tackle from the mast aft.

He looked toward the stern housing, where a single lighted window showed, then quickly covered the trap door again to cut off the light that shone up from the storage hold below. He saw no one on deck, but in the wild darkness he could not be sure. There was certain to be another watch posted, perhaps up forward, perhaps in the tub-like crow’s nest that plunged in wild arcs atop the stubby mast. But there was no sign of alarm, and after a moment he slid across the wet deck and hunched down in the lee of the main bulwark, out of the cutting wind and rain. He kept the fisherman’s knife ready in his hand.

The raging sea was dark and empty in every direction. The storm was no real danger to the sturdy, diesel-powered trawler—but it offered precious delay in its progress toward shore. Durell considered the cabin housing aft, where the single square window shone with a yellow glow against the driving black rain.

Somehow he had to find Colonel Wickham—find him and ask him the question that desperately needed an answer. Until then, there was no point in planning further.

There was the possibility that Wickham, shamming drunkenness, had been dumped into one of the crew’s bunks below—in which case he would not be alone, and it would be impossible to reach him, armed only with the knife.

It would be better if he could find a gun, somehow.

He turned aft, his back to the wind. Spray Drenched him, made him shiver, and the deck tilted erratically, sliding side-wise under his feet. He clung to a stay, fought ahead a few feet, caught at the dark bulk of a winch. Overhead, the boom on which the dragnet was made fast slid back and forth, and blocks rattled and made cracking noises woven through the thunder of the sea.

He reached the cabin housing with a last rush, caught at a handrail and clung there for a moment as a sea broke over the side and surged kneedeep down the deck. He was next to the small, square window with the single light in it. He peered in, saw the crew’s messroom—a table, several chairs bolted to the deck, a samovar fitted in a niche in the opposite wall, a few amenities such as magazines and newspapers. One man sat at the table with his head cradled in his crooked forearm, asleep. There was nobody else.

Durell looked up at the bridge housing above, squinting against the slash of rain in his eyes. Now he could make out the dim greenish glow of the binnacle up there, or perhaps of the radar, that helped the wheelsman keep a reasonably close course to the north, bow into the wind. There might be one other man up there beside the helmsman, tonight, Durell thought. But their visibility was poor, since they hadn’t spotted him on the deck just now. Add a third man in the messroom. That left about nine unaccounted for. Say there were two—perhaps three—in the engineroom. Three or four others in their bunks, asleep. This did not count the captain, who would be in the familiar cabin aft, directly behind the wheelhouse.

Anderson was probably with the captain.

But where had they put Colonel Wickham?

Durell grinned tightly. The colonel’s uniform and his pompous air of authority must have impressed the fishing captain to some extent, at any rate. Men like the captain had an innate respect for all symbols of authority, and the captain could see and understand Wickham’s rank, where he had only been confused by Durell’s and Anderson’s claims to command.

Or it could have gone quite differently. Wickham could be dead, like Kappic. All of his plans to recover the Uvaldi tape might be based on a false premise.

But it was too late to think of that now.

He had to keep going. . . .

Durell drew a deep breath, came around the corner of the deck house, found the door aft that led inside, and stepped in, the knife ready in his hand.

He stood at one end of a short corridor, dimly lighted by a small emergency bulb. To his left was the galley, where the fisherman slept with his head on the table; Durell could hear the sound of his snoring, now that the noise of the storm was muted by the closed door behind him. The corridor ran fore and aft, and at the opposite end, only fifteen feet away, were narrow steel ladders going up to the bridge and down into the crews’ quarters and the engineroom. The air felt hot and dry and smelled of fuel oil and cooking. There was a closed cabin door to his right, on the starboard side of the housing. The space beyond would equal that of the galley where the crewman slept. Durell paused. Anderson could be behind that door—or Wickham. Perhaps both. He decided to pass it up, however, until he had gone further.

At the foot of the ladder forward he heard the restless shift of booted feet on the bridge above, and the dim muttering talk of the helmsman with a companion up there. The trawler shuddered as the blunt bow slammed into an especially heavy sea, and there was a grunt and a curse from the dim, blue-lighted bridge above. Durell turned abruptly and swung down the ladder going below.

The scent of oil and hot metal touched him. He paused, listened. He could hear the beat and throb of the diesel engine, but no voices. He dropped down the rest of the way to the steel-plated deck, the knife ready, every sense taut for a cry of alarm.

There was nothing.

He was in a tiny engineroom, and where he had surely expected some of the crew. There were none. There was a single light over the polished engine housing, and another over the array of dials and instruments. A locker door banged open and shut with the trawler’s heavy motion, Durell reached out for it, started to close it, then left it swinging as it was.

The scent of tobacco drifted through the hot, close air in the engineroom, mingling with the odors of sweat and polished steel. Durell waited another moment at the foot of the ladder. But no one had heard him come down. The narrow engine pit had a small catwalk beside it, and beyond was a door that was hooked open. A dim blue light shone from beyond, and the tobacco smoke came from there. It would be the crew’s quarters, he decided. He looked to the right, saw another door, and this one was closed. He had to risk it now. He crossed quickly, turned down the lever handle, and stepped in.

He was in a storeroom squeezed efficiently between fuel tanks and refrigeration apparatus. A dim blue light burned here, too. He leaned back against the wall as the trawler lurched in the wild seas. He could make out very little until his eyes adjusted to the pale blue light.

“Wickham?” he called again.

There was no reply. In this cubicle, the sounds of the sea and the groans of the struggling trawler were hushed and made remote.

“Wickham?” he called again.

Now he could see in the warm bluish air that there was a pallet in one comer of the compartment, and a man’s bulky form loomed there dimly. Durell held the knife ready as he knelt beside the man.

“Colonel, can you hear me?” he whispered.

Wickham’s eyes were open, rolling sidewise to watch the loom of his figure crouching above him. The man’s round, florid face looked oddly purplish in the strange light. Durell turned to study the door, and Wickham’s chest heaved and finally a long, sighing breath was sucked from his lips. “Thank God, it’s you.”

“Who did you think it might be?”

“Don’t know,” Wickham muttered. “I’ve been lying here, scared stiff, for hours. I’ve got to admit it. I don’t know how I ever—I guess I was so panicky, I just stumbled into this—” “You mean, pretending to be drunk?” Durell asked tightly. “Yes. It was a way out. Partly that.”

“And acting bombastic?”

Wickham’s grin was sick and frightened. “Yes. Yes, to the captain. I didn’t know what else to do. I was afraid—I thought they were going to torture me. I guess I’ve spent all my life putting on a front, acting like a big shot—”

“You did fine,” Durell whispered. “You did exactly the right thing.”

“Listen,” Wickham said, after a puzzled moment. “Listen, what are you doing with that knife? What are you thinking of? How come you’re here—”

“Colonel, I want the Uvaldi tape.”

“Huh?”

“The tape you stole out of John Stuyvers’ bag.” Wickham was silent.

“Well?” Durell asked. “You’ve pretended to be drunk most of the time, but it was only pretense, right? You knew, back at Base Four, what I was looking for and what my job is. You figured out where the tape must be, didn’t you? And when you got a chance, you lifted it.”

“I—I don’t have it.”

Durell put the point of his knife under Wickham’s chin. The man’s head jerked up; his eyes widened and flared with terror. Durell said softly, “Yes, you do. You have it. Quick, now!”

“How can I—how do I trust you? You and Anderson—you both claim—”

“You have no choice now,” Durell whispered harshly. “You’ve done just fine, colonel—whatever your motives or fears might have been. You put on a fine drunk act and dropped out of the scene—with the tape.”

“I’ve been drunk with fear,” Wickham said bitterly.

“All men are afraid, at times. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. But it’s time you sobered up now.”

“Betty always said—well, never mind. A man’s wife can be a curse, if she’s the wrong sort of woman. All right, Durell. Let me up.”

“Did they hurt you, Colonel?”

“No, no. I blustered and yelled and pulled rank—I insisted on being given separate quarters. The captain is just what he says he is—a simple man. He figured that anyone who got so gloriously drunk in our situation must have a lot of authority behind him.” Wickham grinned sheepishly. “Anyway, it worked. I really just wanted to get warm down here, that’s all.”

“Do you have the tape with you?”

“Oh, yes.”

“How did you get it?”

“I stole it, just as you say,” Wickham replied simply. “After all the fuss on the plane, I was looking for a bottle, for some brandy, and I thought Stuyvers might have some privately in that bag of his, with all those old books. So when Stuyvers dozed and I sat beside him, I—I got into the bag. He never felt it, never woke up. I didn’t know I was talented that way.” Wickham grinned again and sat up and began patting his pockets. “Anyway, I knew what the tape was, the minute I got my hand on it, even if it was rolled up and off the spool. So I forgot about more raki and plucked out the tape and kept it, that’s all. I didn’t know what to do about it after that. I wasn’t sure about either you or Anderson, you see, so I just waited. Maybe I thought I could grab some credit for turning up safe with it, back in the States. In the Pentagon, I’m a good pencil-pusher, and

maybe that’s all I’m good for; and Betty, my wife, keeps shoving me into things I just don’t have the stuff to handle—” “Let’s have the tape,” Durell said.

“Sure. Here it is.”

At last Durell held the tight roll of plastic ribbon in his hands and breathed out a long sigh. Wickham watched him curiously as he held the tape under the small blue overhead light. There was no mistake about it. He looked at Wickham and said, “Has Anderson been down here to see you?” “No. Not yet.”

“You weren’t searched?”

“Well, I acted drunk and clumsy and yelled when they started to paw me. The captain of this tub just has a healthy respect for uniforms, that’s all.”

“Good. That’s all right, then,” Durell said, straightening once more. “Now let’s get out of here.”

Wickham’s face and posture collapsed. “I can’t—I don’t know how to fight anyone—”

“Time to learn, then,” Durell said. “Let’s go.”

Chapter Twenty

DURELL opened the compartment door carefully. The beat of the laboring diesel engine filled the heavy, warm air. He could see no one in the engineroom. He stepped onto the steel catwalk beside the engine housing and listened for any sound of alarm from the main deck above, through the opening where the iron ladder spiraled up through to the bridge. Nothing there. He felt uneasy, and looked back for Colonel Wickham. The fat man stood uncertainly, his face blanched.

“Please—I’d rather stay here.”

“I’ll find you a weapon,” Durell said.

“I wouldn’t—I couldn’t use it—”

“Come on,” Durell said, indicating the ladder, “climb up.” “You want me to go first?”

“Yes.”

“But suppose—”

Durell pushed him toward the ladder. “Go ahead, Colonel.”

He began to feel hopeful in that moment. The trawler’s crew was either asleep, or somnolent in their sense of security. There was nothing to cause alarm. If there was any chance at all for surprise, it had to be seized now—

And just then someone screamed from the deck above.

The sound shrilled through the creaking and groaning of the ship and rode high over the muted anger of the sea. It pierced the hot, oil-scented air of the engineroom like a dart of flame, carrying with it a note of terror, outrage, and a fanatical death cry.

Instantly, Durell turned away from the ladder, spinning on one heel. He smashed into Wickham, shoved the fat man aside, and jumped for the doorway at the opposite end of the tiny engineroom. It was just swinging open. A startled fisherman stood there, mouth open, eyes worried and querulous. Beyond him, Durell glimpsed the bunkroom, with three tiers of bunks on each side, and several others of the crew sitting up, puzzled and alarmed.

There was no time for careful planning now. He drove into the first man, caught the sleepy, hulking man and sent him careening backward against the bunks. The man’s mouth gushed blood from a broken tooth. There came another wild scream from above-decks, but it was drowned by the roar of anger from the first fisherman down here. Durell tried to slam the bunkroom door shut as the man charged back at him. He was too late. A booted foot lashed out, caught his ankle, made him stagger. A horny hand grabbed for him. Confusion crowded the dim, smoky compartment as other fishermen tumbled from their blankets to the tiny deck between the tiers of bunks.

Durell did not use the knife-blade. He turned the hilt in his hand and used it as a weight for the hammer-blow of his fist in the fisherman’s face. The man yelled and fell back again, his face bloody. Durell grabbed a second time for the door and tried to slam it shut. This time he succeeded. But immediately there came a thundering shock as the crewmen trapped inside drove their weight against it. He reached for the bolt to dog it down, but could not quite make it against the wild pressure from inside.

“Wickham!” he gasped.

The fat man saw what was needed and hurried to him. He lent his weight to Durell’s pressure on the steel bunkroom door. The lever handle still seemed to evade its catch. And then, as Wickham heaved, the steel dog dropped into place and Durell was able to turn away.

“Thanks,” he breathed.

“What—who’s screaming up there?” Wickham gasped.

“We’ll soon know.”

He had glimpsed about five fishermen in the bunkroom. They were safely out of the way for the moment, unless there was another hatchway up to the deck, designed as an escape measure. He jumped across the engineroom, grabbed at the ladder, and hauled himself up.

A booted foot swung at him from above and missed. He grabbed at it, yanked hard, and another crewman tumbled down the spiral ladder to the engineroom deck. Durell did not look back. He hauled himself up into the narrow corridor above, between the galley and messroom. The fisherman who’d been asleep up there stood in the doorway with his mouth agape. He had , a gun in his hand, a Tokarev, half-raised; his eyes were vague and puzzled, having seen his companion vanish so abruptly down the engineroom hatch. The gun gleamed with a dull gray, oily light. It seemed to loom larger than the universe as Durell jumped for it—the muzzle lifting, jerking up in surprise, a small dark circle of blackness that held eternity as it suddenly burst with a flaring roar—

The shot cracked by Durell’s head. He caught at the gun, jerked it up, twisted hard. The crewman yelled, fully awake now. His strength was massive. Durell chopped at the inside of his elbow, chopped again at the man’s neck, aiming for vital neural centers. The fisherman’s eyes widened in inner astonishment and pain. He staggered, a hoarse rasp in his throat his only attempt at an outcry. He fell heavily. Durell caught up the Tokarev before it hit the deck and ran out of the deckhouse aft.

He was none too soon. There was a hatch from the deck to the crew’s quarters below, as he’d suspected. The imprisoned crew were just lifting it when he jumped on it, out in the rain and dark wind that lashed the afterdeck. A heavy iron bar dropped across the hatch into a seat, and he slammed it home, made it fast. He heard a dim, muffled pounding from inside, but it was futile, and contained no more danger.

Turning, he looked up at the afterend of the wheelhouse above and drew a deep, harsh breath.

The force of the wind had abated somewhat in the few minutes he had been below looking for Wickham. The rain had slackened, too, although he quickly felt its cold, sodden beat on his shoulders as he stood on the exposed deck. Wickham had not come out of the cabin with him. And there was no sign of the source of the scream that had precipitated all this.

He tried to remember the sound of it and identify it. But he could not even be sure if it had been a man’s scream, or a woman’s. He moved forward, away from the dim thumping and bellowing of the crew trapped below. Somewhere aboard the trawler was Anderson, and above everyone and everything else, Anderson had to be coped with quickly, or all would be lost. He wondered what Wickham was doing, and felt a momentary twist of remorse for the fat man’s terror—then he turned to the port side and went quickly up the outer ladder to the bridgehouse.

He was grateful for the heavy, solid feel of the Tokarev in his hand. It was a good gun, powerful and efficient. He was lucky that the sleeping crewmen from the messroom hadn’t been faster with it.

A narrow deck ran around the forward half of the bridge from the port ladder where he crouched. Somewhere an outer door crashed open and shut, repeatedly, as the trawler lurched and fell off into the trough of the sea. A deeper thud sounded from the wheelhouse, a scuffle of feet—and then again that strange cry of wild anguish was snatched by the wind and driven thinly off into the night.

Durell moved quickly around to the open door of the wheelhouse. Something white and small sailed past him and was snatched by the wind and vanished in the hissing sea below. He pushed forward quickly, taking in the scene with a quick glance that accepted and understood everything he saw in the light of the binnacle over the wheel.

The wheel was unattended. The bearded captain stood with John Stuyvers’ open black bag in the crook of one massive arm. Scattered on the chart table were the medieval manuscripts, Biblical volumes and scrolls in Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek. All the backs of the volumes were tom open, and the scrolls were ripped violently into shreds. Exposed on the chart table was a small pile of white packets taken from inside the thick covers of the books—the heroin that John Stuyvers had hoped to smuggle into the States.

One by one the captain was throwing the packets of heroin out through the open door of the bridgehouse, into the sea.

The helmsman had a gun pointed at Stuyvers. The thin man stood in his wet shirt, shivering, his lanky gray hair plastered in long strangs across his forehead. His pale eyes were wild. His mouth opened as the captain grinned and hurled another packet of heroin through the doorway, to jettison it into the sea. Again John Stuyvers cried in wild anguish as he watched.

Durell stepped into the wheelhouse at that moment.

The helmsman with the gun was no more alert than the other crewman below. His shot followed Durell’s by a split-second, crashing explosively in the wheelhouse. Glass shattered. Durell’s gun bucked and the man spun, yelling, and fell against the lashed wheel. His gun flew from his broken hand. Durell had aimed only to disarm him—and he had succeeded.

Stuyvers jumped for the weapon sliding about on the wooden deck.

“Hold it!” Durell snapped. “Let it go.”

The thin man paused, crouching, his arm outstretched. His breathing was ragged. “You know what they’re doing? Torturing me, throwing away the stuff, just to make me mad! I’m going to kill this son of a bitch with the beard.”

“No. I told you to stay below.”

“To hell with that. I came up to help. You can’t take this tub over all by yourself.”

“I’m doing it,” Durell said. “Now back up against that wall with the captain.” He turned and spoke rapidly in Russian to the bearded man. “Take the wheel and control this vessel, do you understand? Or else we’ll all go to the bottom of the sea.” The trawler was rolling heavily, suffering a brutal pounding from the combers that smashed over her beam, now that no one was at the helm. The straps lashing the wheel had burst when he helmsman fell against it, and the spokes were a spinning blur as the vessel lurched out of control. Durell stood spread-legged, braced against the long, shuddering slant of the deck. The captain’s face was pale. He threw Stuyvers’ bag down on the deck and spat.

“You must be a devil. How did you escape?”

“Never mind. Get to the wheel.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then we all drown, don’t we?”

“Perhaps that would be best,” the captain whispered. “If we lose, let us all lose everything, nyet?”

Stuyvers was staring at the polished leather bag sliding about on the deck. The trawler slowly righted, shuddering, and the brief case slid away from him, washing toward he open door of the wheelhouse. Stuyvers yelled and ignored Durell’s order to stand still and jumped to save it.

What followed came quickly, and was beyond recall. The captain was s stubborn and brave man. He seized the moment when Durell was distracted by Stuyvers, however briefly, and went for the gun on the deck. Before Durell could cover him again, the captain had it in his hand and its explosive roar shook the narrow confines of the bridge.

Stuyvers screamed, straightened, and stretched his arms up overhead and stood on tiptoe. A look of astonishment replaced the insane and fanatical determination to save the bag. Then he toppled forward, with the lurching of the trawler, and pitched headlong from the wheelhouse.

The black bag slid out with him.

Durell’s shot came hard on the heels of the captain’s. The bearded man spun, cursing, and grabbed at his shoulder and tried to lift his weapon to aim at Durell. He couldn’t do it. The bone in his upper arm was smashed by Durell’s slug. “All right,” Durell gasped. “That’s enough.”

“Do you think you can commit piracy here?” the man whispered. “You will be hanged for this!”

“Take the wheel and set a course to the south.”

“I cannot do that!”

“Do it, or drown,” Durell said harshly. “Quick!”

For a moment the captain still looked rebellious. The pain of his wound must have been enormous, Durell thought, and yet he stood on his feet, sturdy and defiant, a man of simple thoughts and acts. Sweat stood out on his face in great, glittering beads. The trawler shuddered again as a sea washed over her beam and heeled her far over. Great creaks and groans went snapping through the vessel from stem to stern. The deck tilted precariously and seemed never to right itself.

It was this, more than the threat of Durell’s gun, that made the captain co-operate. He loved his vessel and could not stand by and see it founder. He cursed again and jumped for the spinning wheel, caught it in his free hand, and twisted it hard.

Slowly, groaning, the trawler righted herself and lifted her bow from the troughs of the sea.

Durell picked up the captain’s gun and pocketed it and backed to the wheelhouse door and called for Wickham. The fat colonel appeared behind him in the dark rain of the outer bridge.

“Here I am,” the colonel said. “Did you know that Stuyvers just went overboard?”

“Yes. Take this pistol, Colonel, and hold it on these two. Be careful of them, make them keep a steady course to the south.”

Wickham nodded. “I think I can do that.”

“Make sure you do.”

“Where are you going?”

“After Anderson,” Durell said.

Wickham looked at him strangely. “There’s no need for that, Durell. None at all.”

“Have you seen him?”

“Of course. He’s in the captain’s cabin. You know that crack on the head he took, when he first came aboard from the plane and started yelling orders to the captain, and they slugged him and he hit the deck?”

“I was aware of it, yes,” Durell said.

“Well, it caught up with him. He had a massive concussion, and some internal bleeding. I know a little about these things. It’s a miracle he stayed on his feet the way he did, for this long. Anyway, you don’t have to worry about him now. The ship is all ours—and Anderson is dead.”

Chapter Twenty-One

FROM a window of the villa off the coastal highway that followed the shores of the Sea of Marmara, below Istanbul, Durell watched the steady stream of international shipping, of tramp Greek freighters from the Aegean to huge whitehulled cruise vessels that circled the Mediterranean on holiday tours. It was a warm day, and the air smelled of spring. There were almond trees on the villa’s terrace, within the high wall that sheltered the house from passersby in this resort community, and the trees were all in pink and white flower. The sun glittered on the sea and made the distant hills and shores hazy with fresh green. There was a beach close at hand near a tourist hotel, and a few hardy people were already gathered there to sun themselves near colorful cabanas and stare at the little ferries and fishing boats that plied back and forth to Buyukada.

Durell had slept the clock around, eaten a solid breakfast of sweet rolls, a huge omelet with tiny, delectable shrimp from the Bosphorus, and then enjoyed that vanishing delicacy, real Turkish coffee, served by a silent-footed, heavyhipped Istanbuli woman who pretended to understand nothing he said to her, and who vanished as quietly and mysteriously as she had first appeared when he woke up.

It had taken a night and a day to reach Istanbul—the night of riding out the storm aboard the trawler, and the fortuitous encounter with the Turkish destroyer with the first faint light of dawn—not precisely fortuitous, though, since a vast air and sea search had been flung outward from the point where a Pan Am airliner spotted the wreckage of the KT-4.

Only Colonel Wickham, Susan, Francesca and himself were taken from the trawler. The amenities had been preserved, and no charges of kidnapping or assault were made on either side. The Crimean trawler was permitted to go on its way with official thanks for the “rescue” work.

In Istanbul there had been reports to prepare, cables to file, arrangements for transport to make. Dinty Simpson had been on hand to meet Durell when they landed, and they went by car through the hilly streets of the ancient Byzantine capital to a quiet house with tiled walls and a peaceful garden court overlooking the Golden Horn and the domes and minarets of the Blue Mosque and St. Sophia. It was early evening, then, and a strange sense of unaccustomed peace filled the lavender sky to the west.

Dinty looked unchanged since the few days past, in Ankara. Still worried, still ruffling his thinning, sandy hair, still owlish in his heavy horn-rimmed glasses, looking much the harried law clerk. He pushed at the glasses with a nervous forefinger and grinned at Durell and seemed unable to stop grinning.

“We found the real Bert Anderson’s body, you know. The Turkish frontier regimental detachment that’s normally on post duty at Musa Karagh returned about an hour after you took off in the KT-4. They’d picked up the body on the way down from the frontier passes. Just luck, that’s all—but that’s the way these things happen sometimes, Cajun. It was too late to stop your going by the KT-4. By that time, I think you’d already crashed, following that false radio beacon, although we knew approximately where you were, of course. We were tailing you by radar all the way, if that’s any satisfaction.”

“Not much, now that it’s over,” Durell said, smiling.

“Sorry you had such a hell of a rough time. Things went into the usual snafu, didn’t they? We knew where you were, but we couldn’t reach you, and we didn’t want to precipitate any great hoohah of an international incident over it, although several naval units were out hunting for you all that night, playing tag with units from the other side. Oh, it was a great night for the gremlins, all right.” Dinty Simpson paused and looked at Durell. “You have the Uvaldi tape, of course.”

“Yes,” Durell said. “I have it.”

Simpson looked ready to collapse with relief. “Then your business is done, Cajun. Colonel Wickham and two guards will go by SAC bomber from here to Washington with it. You can relax, Sam.”

“Did you say you’re sending Colonel Wickham with the tape?”

Dinty Simpson grinned. “Oh, he’ll be all right with it. The two boys with him are tough hombres. Wickham may be a fumbler in the things you’re so proficient in, Cajun—and from what I gather, he pushed the panic button a few times and almost sank you all—”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I know you didn’t, Cajun. If you’re willing to forget that part of it, so am I.”

“Done, then,” Durell said.

He gave Dinty Simpson the little spool of tape, and Dinty got up immediately and left the terrace of the quiet house and was gone for a few minutes while Durell smoked a cigarette and watched the lights go on in the ancient hills of Istanbul and the ferries crawling like fireflies over the channel between Asia and Europe. Dinty came back with two drinks.

“Sour mash bourbon, Cajun. I hear it’s your favorite.”

“Thanks, Dinty.”

“Do you have any idea what you’ve managed to do, bringing out that information for Washington?” Simpson asked. He sighed and added fervently, “It ought to be on all the international press wires by tomorrow—this report of the experiments in personnel nuclear arms at Kapustin Yar. It will serve notice that we know what’s going on and are prepared to take countersteps. We live on the edge of a sharp knife, Cajun—we have to hope for and negotiate for disarmament and peaceful coexistence and at the same time keep our guard up at all times, remaining armed and ready to defend ourselves, as our only means of deterrent. Ambitious men have miscalculated our nation’s intentions before, in times past. But it must not happen this time. This time it would be too late to stop the final cataclysm.”

Dinty Simpson paused and laughed with soft embarrassment. “I didn’t mean to make a speech, Sam.”

“I second everything you’ve said,” Durell told him quietly.

Later that evening Susan was brought to the headquarters house by Dinty, who seemed confused and uncertain as to what to do with her. Durell’s report had been deliberately ambiguous about the part she had played in the events of the past two days.

He was surprised and impressed by the way she looked. From somewhere—perhaps from a consul’s wife—she had found a smart black cocktail dress and a few items of restrained jewelry and high heels. Her blonde hair had been washed and set in a softly shimmering pile of gold atop her finely shaped head. Her body moved in the black silk sheath in curves and hollows, soft and desirable, and her proud walk was the sort that made men turn and stare everywhere in the world.

Durell felt a brief pang of regret as he looked at her.

“Sit down, Susan.” He smiled at her. “Have a drink. I’m glad to see you’ve been taken care of.”

Her pale brown eyes regarded him with that same intensity with which she had stared at him when they had first met on the mountain road to Musa Karagh. “Yes, people have been good to me. I thank you, Sam. I can never stop thanking you, I suppose.” Her voice was husky and she paused and lit a cigarette. Her fingers trembled. “What are you going to do about me now, Sam?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“What did you put in your report about me?”

“Nothing.”

She frowned, very slightly. “I don’t understand.”

“The evidence was destroyed, lost overboard, Susan. You’re free to go, to do anything you like.”

She looked at him for a long, uncertain moment. “I don’t know what to say, Sam. I don’t deserve any kindness, you know.”

“I think you do. You can get a job here in Istanbul—I understand that American entertainers, singers, chanteuses, are in great demand here. Either that, or the Embassy will arrange for your passage back to the States.”

She looked down at her folded hands.

“What are you going to do, Sam?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Rest for a day or two, right here. Wait for orders. I never know where I’m to be sent next.” He thought of home, of America, of the quiet peace of his home with old Jonathan in Bayou Peche Rouge, down in the warm folds of the Mississippi delta country; he thought of Washington, of his apartment there, of General McFee and the K Section offices of the CIA. Wherever he was sent in the world, whatever far corner of the globe he happened to be in, he never felt far from home. He carried it with him, inside him, in quiet, tacit devotion. He did not admit openly to sentiment; but it was bred in him, in his flesh and blood and bone, and he knew that within a matter of hours, or a few days, he would go home again.

Susan spoke quietly, “And after this, you’ll be sent somewhere else, on another job, won’t you?”

“Yes. At any time, Susan,” he said gently. “Do you understand?”

She nodded slowly. She did not look at him. “How can I thank you, then? What can I give you to say ‘thank you’ for another chance? You know what you can have from me—for always, forever. But you won’t take it or stay—”

“No, Susan. I’m sorry. It can’t be that way.”

“But for just a day or two, you and I could—”

“It’s better not to,” he said.

She was silent. A freighter hooted briefly in the darkening ship channel near the Horn. Lights twinkled on both shores of the sprawling, fabulous city.

“I can get a job here, I suppose,” she said. She stood up, grave and proud. Her topaz eyes regarded him levelly for a moment. “Good-by, Sam.”

He did not touch her or kiss her when she turned and walked out. When she was gone, he made a few telephone calls that concerned Francesca Uvaldi and her assignment for the U.N. Narcotics Control Commission and made certain that what he had promised Susan would be granted to her. He spoke to Francesca at the hotel where she had checked in, talking at length and in some detail, and when an understanding had been reached, he borrowed a car from Dinty Simpson and drove to an address among the villas on the shore of the Sea of Marmara.

Francesca had given him the address.

“This place belongs to friends of mine,” Francesca said. “A lovely couple, from Rome, originally; they work at the Italian consulate here. They’ve gone for a holiday at Antalya. They won’t be back for a week.”

“I’ll be here a week,” he said.

“So will I. . .”

Now, in the morning, he sat on the terrace that overlooked the garden wall and the almond trees and watched the spring sunlight on the sea and heard the hum of bees and the more distant hum of motor traffic on the new highway from Istanbul. He smiled, thinking of the night just past, and the rest of the week to follow.

“Sam?”

He turned and saw Francesca step from the villa onto the terrace to join him. In the morning sunlight, her beauty was different from what it had been last night. She wore a light robe of red brocade with gold silk embroidery, and her face looked washed and scrubbed. He noticed that her rich, black hair was no longer done in the severely braided coronet she had worn before, and now it hung in thick, shimmering waves of jet to her shoulders, loose and free to the scented wind that blew from the beach below.

“I like your hair this way,” he said to her.

“Do you?” She smiled and kissed him and sat down beside him and helped herself to coffee. Her smile was inward, secretive. “Perhaps my hair is just symbolic, darling. You’ve gotten me all undone, you know.”

“Do you mind?”

“Did I act as if I did?”

Her grinned. “You’re very wonderful, Francesca.”

“You make me so, Sam.”

It had been simple and natural last night, an inevitable climax to everything that had been said and left unsaid between them, from the moment of their first meeting. She had surprised him, here in this place of private contentment. It was good to feel detached from the world for now, to step out of it and let time hang pendant on the winds of a Bosphorus spring. It could not last, he knew. It never did. Sooner or later, he would want to go home again, he thought once more; in hours or days. The world would intrude, either in the form of another sober visit from Dinty Simpson, or a coded cable from Washington ordering him back for another mission into that other world of dark deceit. And red danger would swallow him again.

He would welcome it. His business was necessary in a divided world.

But for now he was content with this hour of sun and quiet and Francesca. He saw the way her gray eyes slanted at him, anxiously, considering his lean face. He knew what still troubled her. In the warm dark hours of the night just gone by, when they lay entwined on the huge bed with the doors open to the night wind and the crescent moon hanging like an ancient symbol of Byzantium over the sea, she had talked quickly and softly, through occasional tears, of her pride and loneliness and isolation.

“I never knew what I was, before,” she had whispered. “I was too self-centered, too proud, to self-sufficient to give anything. I thought that anything coming my way was simply my due. But you taught me the truth, Sam. You and—what happened to me in Musa Karagh. A week ago I would have been merciless to Susan Stuyvers, insisting that she be held for prosecution. And I wouldn’t have understood your sympathy for her. But it’s different now.”

“Is it?” he had whispered in return.

“I want to prove it to you,” she said, moving against him like warm, smooth silk. “Now, Sam.”

There had only been brief, unhappy affairs in her life before. The men had left her. They had called her cold, selfish, unyielding. She set about to prove to Durell last night that she had changed.

Now she said, “Sam, please,” in a pleading tone, and the anxiety was no longer hidden from her gray eyes. He looked at her and smiled and she said: “Was it—was I, last night—”

“Yes, Francesca.”

“Will you stay, then?”

“As long as I can,” he said.

In a day or two, he would go home. But they were quiet now as the maid came in on slippered feet and silently served them more coffee. They sat together on the terrace and watched the sun brighten on the seas.

THE END

of an Original Gold Medal Novel by

Edward S. Aarons

Table of Contents

Chapter Four

Chapter Nine

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Twenty