Assignment - Suicide (2 page)

Durell shrugged. “Pay your money and take your choice. Is
this a guessing game were in? A game of button-button, or patty-cake?” He felt
very angry. “Sukinin knew enough about Luke‘s job over there to convince me. He
has a contact all set up for one of us to go over and get Luke out. And help
this underground, or whatever it is, to stop Z from punching the button on May
Day."

“Eight days from now,“ McFee said quietly. He was very
still, a gray shadow in a gray, windowless room. “I got all the data on the way
we contact Luke, from Sukinin’s tapes. Sukinin knew all about you, too. Where
did he get it?”

“From Luke Marshall,” Durell said. “No one else.”

“Then Sukinin isn‘t lying?”
 

“Not for my money."

McFee said: “Put out that damned cigarette. And go home and
shave off the mustache.”

“There’s one thing,” Durell said.

“Yes?”

“Was Sukinin’s auto accident just an accident?”

“No,” McFee said. “They were watching your place. We’ve
already found the ear that killed him. Stolen and ditched. No prints. They were
watching for Sukinin to try to reach you. The poor bastard was caught between
the devil and the deep, no question about it. Working against us, hiding from
the FBI, dropping the mission he was assigned to just to reach you with Luke’s
message. Cross and double-cross. It’s all in the day’s work, Sam."

“It means they’ll expect somebody to go over and reach
Luke."

“That‘s right,” McFee said.

“They‘ll be waiting for the pigeon."

“Does it frighten you, Sam?“

“Sure,” Durell said. “I‘d be a fool if it didn’t."

McFee nodded. “You’ve got it straight. Sam? Sukinin said
there are two factions over there, both illegal. One, headed by Z, wants
immediate war because they think they’ve got the jump on us with their ICBM.
The other faction—Sukinin’s people—is protecting Luke and opposed to one-man
rule again, and war. Both are operating outside the law. You get to Luke and
get what he knows. If you can’t get out with it, go to Moscow and reach Alex
Holbrook, our man at the Embassy. The code name is Operation Dart. If the thing
is authentic, Alex will blow the news to the world. Publicity might stop it.
But it’s a devil‘s brew. God help you, Sam.”

Durell went to the door. “I’ve been tired of my desk for a
long time now, General."

“I’ll keep it clear for you,” McFee said. “Until after May
Day, anyway."

Durell floated earthward under the black canopy of his
chute.

There came a streak of flame like a sudden orange scar
across the black skin of the sky. And there came a scream like that of a
thousand banshees and a thunderclap that shook the Russian heavens. It happened
very fast. The patrol jet came from nowhere, howled away into the cold night,
and except for the light echoing thump that carne to Durell like an
afterthought, the thud-thud-thud of its cannon burst, it might never have been.

Helpless with rage, Durell watched. The DC-3 that had
dropped him had completed its swing and was pointed toward the sea. Pointed
down now, spilling flame like a gutted barnyard animal.

Durell twisted in the shrouds of his black parachute, sick
anger swelling in him, a coppery taste in his throat. There was nothing he could
do. The plane was down at the horizon, still emitting great gouts of fire,
and then it crashed into the sea and the flame was snuffed out as if a
giant thumb had tweaked the flame of a guttering candle. No more husband
for Susie, no more father for the Texas twins.

The dark sky was silent again.

New they’ll be waiting for you, Durell told himself. The
careful plan was already in jeopardy down there as alert changed to alarm and
then search. Nobody would mention the DC-3. It wouldn’t make headlines in the
papers back borne. The Soviets wouldn’t mention it either, or do anything to
disturb the new era of smiling, friendly enmity.

But they would look for the foreign spy now, putting two and
two together to add up to a manhunt for him. And hack home, McFee would never
know what had happened. . . .

The earth swung under his feet and rushed up to meet him.
Here and there through the cold rain he glimpsed a light against the dark loom
of fiat dunes and marshland. A dim ribbon went twisting through bunched
darkness that had to be trees. He looked for the landmark on which he had been
briefed: a crossroad near the electric rail line that took Leningrad’s workers
to the seashore resorts, and a
dacha
set back in a triangular grove near a small stream. He didn’t see any of it.
The ground lifted faster now, threatening him. The jet plane was gone. Off on
the horizon, a searchlight suddenly stabbed a white finger into the sky
and wove a pattern against the low overcast. It was joined by several others.
He looked to the left and to the right. A light winked briefly, tiny and
feeble against the dunes and fields and woodland. The light went out. He
saw the high-speed electric line, the stream, the crossroad. He judged it to be
about two miles away.

He landed hard, rolled over, felt the drag of the big black
chute, and scrambled to his knees; he was pulled down by the wind and got up
rapidly and stood leaning against the drag of the canopy, hauling it in hand
over hand, working swiftly and sweating under his flying clothes.

His heels were dug deep into soft, yielding sand. He was on
the soil of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic.

Chapter Two

THE PARACHUTE made a tight but awkward bundle under his arm
as he trudged over the dunes. The darkness of trees loomed up ahead and he
quickened his pace, presently trotting through plowed loam; he oriented himself
by the probing searchlights to the north. He saw no houses, no roads, nothing
but the flat emptiness of fields ahead of him and dunes at his
back. Farther ahead was woodland, black in the dark rain. lo among the trees,
the ground was still crusty with frost.

A dog began to bark with a high, excited yelping, somewhere
directly ahead. He stopped to listen, but the barking did not come nearer and he
kept walking through the brush that began at this point, still carrying the
bundled chute. He couldn’t leave it here as evidence after the alarm that had
been sounded, but he was anxious to get rid of it.

The air felt cold and crisp in his lungs, smelling of the
sea and pines. The Woods and brush thinned and he came to the electric rail
line on a high embankment ahead. He climbed it and followed the shimmering wet
rails for several hundred feet before it crossed a muddy dirt lane that swung
in the direction he wanted to go. He tried not to think any more about the
Texas pilot. He tried to move as fast as possible, compatible with caution. The
neighborhood would be aroused by the cannon firing in the sky and the
crash of the plane.

Another dog began to bark behind a wooden fence that sagged
in front of a small
izba
,
a log house with ornately scrolled carving around the yellow-painted door and
roof eaves. A lamp glow came from the narrow windows that faced him and someone
moved around in there, carrying an oil lamp. The glow went out and reappeared
in a second window, but no one stepped through the door and Durell trotted
quickly by as the dog yelped in frustration at him.

The road twisted sharply to the right. The sea wind was
bitterly cold, thrashing noisily in the brush, bending young pines and white
birch to its will. Once as he jogged along he smelled wood smoke, pungent and
warm, and he thought briefly of the bayous and cabins where he had fished
the lagoons and the still green channels with his grandfather. That was all
long ago and far away. He passed another
izba
, newer than the last, and he
was startled to see a. television antenna on its roof. Somehow he had not
expected it. This second
izba
was dark and offered no danger. The
dacha
he sought could not be too far away now. He heard the quick, icy gurgling of a
stream and a moment later the lane crossed it on a crude wooden bridge. Ice and
snow still gleamed white on the banks below. He looked back toward the sea and
the beaches and saw that the searchlights in the sky had winked out.

There will be no mercy if you are caught, Durell thought. It
will do no good to tell them about Sukinin, their own agent who had died in
Washington. Their men were in America just as he was here—more of them, in
fact. It would be useless to mention Luke Marshall, to demand to know where he
was and why he had vanished from the Embassy. If you asked, you met a wall of
cold, persistent silence. If you were careless or unlucky, you met a cold
bullet in the back of the head.

Durell stopped short. He listened and melted into the wet
black underbrush beside the lane. Somewhere ahead, beyond a bend of the road,
was a car, the motor idling softly. His breath made a long plume of vapor in
the frosty night. He wished for a moment that there was a moon, or at least
stars. The night was luminous enough, however, in spite of the thin rain,
because of the reflected glow of Leningrad’s city lights far in the
distance, pale against the overcast. But there was little he could see here.

The sound of the motor ended and nothing more happened and
he walked around the bend and came in sight of the
dacha
.

It was surrounded by a high fence topped with barbed wire,
and off in the distance was the height of a watchtower that looked dark and
deserted. A small gate stood open, inviting Durell forward, and he stepped
through it onto a carefully trimmed, hedged lawn. Dimly through the rain he saw
the massive bulk of a vast country estate. The big stone palace, in the style
of the French Renaissance, was dark. To his left, however, was the gatehouse,
squat and low and functional, graced only by extraordinarily wide eaves of
carved wood. The gatehouse stood at the end of an asphalt lane that passed
through an iron gateway to a wider road beyond. He had come upon the
dacha
from the rear. Electric lights
glowed in the narrow windows of the gatehouse and Durell paused at the edge of
the trimmed garden hedges and checked the description of the place with what he
remembered of Sukinin’s words; it looked the same. He walked out across the
lawn, skirting patches of lingering snow under the low boughs of pine and
cedars. The car in the driveway was a small Pobeda, painted black. He touched
the motor cowl and found it was warm, but not too warm. It was parked in deep
shadow under a giant pine.

And then someone spoke to him from the darkness at his back.

“
Eezve
neetye
.
Excuse me. Kindly do not move for a moment,
gospodin
.”

Durell stood quite still. It was a woman’s voice, but there
was no softness in it. Pitched low, it carried the ultimate command and he
obeyed, aware of being called “mister” rather than comrade or citizen. He had
not expected a woman, somehow. Footsteps crunched lightly in the ice under the
pines. A bough was moved accidentally and a shower of cold rain spattered him
as he stood beside the Pobeda.

“
Gospodin
Durell?”
the woman asked.

“Da.”

“
Spaceeba
.
Thank you. Please turn around.”

The woman’s voice was young but unfriendly, and her face was
dim and remote as he turned to look at her. He still carried the parachute
bundled under his arm. She was tall, and in the dim light shining from the
windows of the
dacha
, he saw that she
was young, still in her twenties, certainly, and she had a- dark blue scarf
knotted about her head. He could not see the color of her hair. Her eyes were
dark blue, like his, and her face tanned and golden-textured. She might have
been beautiful, Durell thought, except for the small machine pistol in her
gloved hand.

“You are on time,” she said in Russian, “but you caused some
trouble. It may
he
difficult now. It will be wise to
wait a few minutes and see what develops. Come inside with me."

“Put down your gun,” Durell said. “Aren’t we friends?”

She did not smile. Her face was severe. “No, we are not
friends. I do not think we will ever be friends. We are temporary allies in
this matter, no more than that. We have much to do and not much time. We cannot
leave
si
chas
.
Right now we must wait. Please go
ahead of me into the house.”

He obeyed the chill command of her gun and moved on toward
the front door, and when he stopped there she said sharply: “The door is not
locked. Do you enjoy the cold and the rain, that you like to wait in it?“

He drew a deep breath. “Luke Marshall was supposed to meet
me here.”

“
Gospodin
Marshall
will meet us in the city."

"How well do you know him?” Durell asked.

“We have met.”

“Is he still safe‘? Is he all right?”

“No, he is not all right. He is not dead yet, but there is
no hope for him."

Durell stepped through the doorway. The house was overheated
to the point of discomfort after the frigid spring night in the pine woods. A
log fire burned in a huge hearth and there was also an old Russian stove
of ceramic blue tiles that emitted stifling waves of heat from the far
corner. There was a square oriental rug and heavy walnut furniture, an armoire,
and a Biedermeier sofa. Tea simmered in a copper kettle on top of the ceramic
stove. There was a tray on a table nearby, with apples, cheese and a square
loaf of black bread. Two doors opened from the main room, which had a carved,
beamed ceiling.

Durell ignored the girl’s gun and opened one door after the
other. The first yielded to a kitchen equipped with a wood-burning stove,
a round walnut table, and several unpainted kitchen chairs. The second was a
bedroom furnished with a high and massive bed that required a small stool by
which to mount into it. Curtains of rough, chintzy material covered these
windows. The electric lamps were shielded by cheap paper shades. There was no
one else in the
dacha
.