Assignment - Karachi

DURELL awoke to the sound of the birds and an awareness of the swift shadow of wings across his face. He identified the mewing and cawing and screeching as gulls and crows and kites, even before he opened his eyes. The wings belonged to a buzzard. He threw an arm across his face to cut out the blinding glare of the sun as it rose over the Sind, and then rolled carefully on his right side; the buzzard lifted swiftly on the hot thermal currents rising from the juncture of the beach and the thundering sea. He watched it soar up to the ruins of the old Arab watchtower on the sandstone cliff above. It perched there, and waited.

His left arm ached. The noise of the surf and the smoky spume from the nearby breakers touched him. The sun was already hot, as hot as any dawn on the shores of the Gulf of Oman in August. He squinted against its stinging rays, aware of a stiffness in his face, a bruise on his temple, a feeling that someone had stood over him with a sledge hammer and successively pounded each and every portion of his anatomy.

He did not know how long he had been out. He had come a long way last night, flying east on the Pam Am jet, out of Istanbul. Everything had been routine. The military jeep met him at the Karachi airport in the relative coolness of four o’clock in the morning. He had expected to go directly to the Embassy and talk to Daniel Donegan, but the Pakistani driver, slim and dark-haired and hawk-faced, very trim in his khaki uniform, had taken him somewhere else, supposedly for an immediate interview with Colonel K’Ayub.

Durell sat up. He wondered why he was still alive. In his business, a moment’s carelessness could usually be equated with disaster. He remembered the driver’s name. Mahmud Ali. As common as John Smith, in this part of the world. He blinked at the glaring sun and turned his head with care to examine the beach.

There was nothing to be seen except the blaze of white sand and the long lines of combers smashing belligerently at the coast, in either direction, as far as the eye could see. To the south, where he would have to go, if possible, the shore curved slightly eastward and was lost, at a distance of some miles, beyond the bulk of a clay cliff scarp. On the sea itself, the horizon was marred by a thin plume of smoke from a tanker funnel. Closer at hand, but as far as the moon, was the bellied dirty sail of an Arab dhow catching the morning wind.

He began to sweat. If the object of the jeep ride had been to kill him, and the immediate effort was frustrated— although he had no clear memory of what had happened up there at the Arab watchtower—then its ultimate purpose might still be achieved, unless he could get away from here fast. The sun was a magnet, sucking liquid from every pore, draining him of vitality.

“Mahmud!” he called.

His cry startled the buzzard on the watchtower and it took off reluctantly, on enormous flapping wings that made a series of sharp reports in the hot, smoky atmosphere before it vanished over the edge of the cliff. Durell stood up and looked for the driver of the military jeep.

“Mahmud!” he called again.

He saw the jeep at the foot of the watchtower, about fifty yards from where he had awakened. Durell took off his coat, slung it over his shoulder, and plodded across the sand toward it. Then he paused and turned around and went back across the beach to where he had been first, and looked for his gun.

He could not find it.

He had been wearing a dark blue suit and white cotton shirt and a dark blue knitted necktie when he boarded the Pam Am plane in Istanbul, with orders to see Donegan in Karachi and make immediate contact with Miss Sarah Standish. The suit coat had a special pocket tailored in it for the snubby-barreled .38 revolver he preferred to the trick items issued by the lab boys at No. 20 Annapolis Street in Washington, hub of the K Section network of the CIA that spread out all over the world.

He looked for the gun in the sand, smoothing the grains with the soles of his shoes. It was not there. He dropped to his knees, worried now, even a little afraid, because Mahmud Ali had had a U.S. Colt’s .45 in a web belt and a machine-pistol in the jeep, and the last thing he remembered was that Mahmud Ali had told him he was going to kill him.

The gun was gone.

He straightened, regretting having called the other’s name. The beach was lonely, empty. The surf crashed and thundered, the seagulls mewed, the kites soared patiently overhead. The buzzard, however, was gone.

The jeep lay on its back, fat wheels uppermost, like a beetle turned over and helpless with its legs in the air. The front end was badly crumpled where it had struck after its fall from the road on top of the cliff, where the first eroded walls of the ancient watchtower lifted into the yellow sky. Durell walked carefully to the jeep. The exertion made sweat pour out of him, and he loosened his necktie and then felt for his wallet which contained five thousand dollars from Henry Kallinger, the K Section man in Istanbul, for which he had signed an expense chit, and his ID cards. He was not traveling under a cover identity this time.

He still had his wallet. He wished he still had the gun.

Then he found the machine-pistol, a World War II Schmeiser of German manufacture, sticking half out from under the body of the tan jeep. The sun had touched it and it was scalding hot, but he picked it up and felt better with it in his hand.

There was still no sign of the man who had brought him out here to kill him.

It was not an auspicious beginning, he thought. He had been told in Istanbul that his first contact for this trip into the north to Pakhusti province would be Sarah Standish. Donegan, in Karachi, would brief him further. He had not expected treachery so soon.

His watch was still running and he saw it was only six o’clock in the morning, and already on the beach the temperature was well over 100 degrees and it would get steadily hotter. He had not been knocked out for very long by the fall over the cliff. An hour, at the most. Enough for the sun to rise and the buzzard to find him.

He stripped off his clothes, aware of the bitter solitude of the wasteland around him. The tanker on the sea had gone over the horizon. The Arab dhow had inched farther away, southward. He walked across the hot sand and went into the lukewarm surf and bathed clotted blood away from a long scratch across his ribs and another gash on his left leg, obtained when he went over the windshield of the jeep and fell free down the cliff. The combers pushed and hauled at him, and he did not stay in the water long. By the time he walked back to the thin line of shadow under the watchtower, the wetness had dried off his tanned skin.

Durell was a tall man, well over six feet, with black hair tinged gray at the temples. He was solidly built, with a heavy musculature, but he moved and walked with a light and easy manner, in good co-ordination, like a man in a jungle wary of snakes and pitfalls. He often thought of his world and his business as a jungle. He had strong hands, with delicate and agile fingers, equally adept at manipulating cards or in use as devastating and lethal weapons.

He wondered if he had killed Mahmud Ali with that surprise
karate
blow. He hoped not. He had some questions to ask.

Durell scanned the beach with somber, dark blue eyes that seemed an angry, killing black in the sunlight. He had a way of holding his head as if he were listening for something more than the crying of the birds and the thunder of the surf. In Durell’s business, which was the cold war of defense, silently fought in every alley of every city in the world, you never entered a room carelessly, you never toned a corner without considering what might lie behind it, you never took friend or foe for granted. He had known many good men whose moments of carelessness proved a rendezvous with eternity. His own safety factor, he reflected, had long run out. But he was a gambler, trained in calculated risks by his old grandfather Jonathan, down in Bayou Peche Rouche in the Louisiana delta country. The old Cajun had been the last of the riverboat breed, shrewd in the ways of men and cards. He had taught Durell well, as a boy, and the man today remembered the lessons.

But he had been almost fatally careless an hour ago. Even though there had been no cause for suspicion, it was his job to be suspicious.

And at this moment, the silence itself was suspicious. The kites and the buzzard had gone away from the watchtower.

The tower loomed in silhouette against the ochre sky and the scorching sun of the Sind. Its rounded, ancient base was crumbling. The structure was long-abandoned, once a guide for the dhows, those Arab boats whose design had not changed in a thousand years, whose trade in gold, spices and slaves took their brown sails to every corner of the glittering Arabian and Indian Seas. A series of steps cut into the stone tower circled to the battered pinnacle. Nothing moved up there. The searing sun was behind the tower, turning it black against the white glare, defying detail.

Durell moved away from the wrecked jeep. The Schmeiser pistol in his grip was almost too hot to handle, from having lain in the sun. The surf thundered heavily behind him.

The shot came abruptly, a hard flat sound against the brazen sky. The report was familiar. It came from his own gun.

The bullet kicked up a little spurt of sand five yards from Durell’s left foot. A bad shot.

But Mahmud Ali, or the man who had taken Ali’s place in Colonel K’Ayub’s jeep, was still alive up there.

Durell ran to the shadows at the base of the clay cliff, the air like iron in his lungs, and then halted. There was no second shot. A seagull skimmed low over the surf behind him. The dhow was out of sight. The tower loomed overhead.

He began to climb the cliff with care, keeping to the darkest shadow. His legs trembled, and the gash on his left thigh began to bleed again, and his left arm ached when the bone was bruised by his fall. He was halfway up when a small stone came clicking and tumbling down the slope of sand and shale. Nothing followed. He waited for several long breaths, sweating, and then climbed up to the foot of the circular steps cut into the base of the old stone tower.

“Mahmud!” he called.

His voice echoed, was swallowed up by the sun.

He considered the stone stairway cut into the round tower Part of the time that he ascended, he would be exposed to view from the top. Part of the time he would be safe.

You can’t have everything, he thought.

He hit the steps at a hard, fast run, taking them two then three at a time. His momentum swung him perilously outward to the edge. He glimpsed the brazen sea, the wasteland of inner desert called the Sind, the beach far below from this height. There were no rooms in the tower, only a platform sheltered behind the medieval, crenelated block of the topmost wall. Halfway up he stopped, flat against the hot stones. They seared through his shirt, burned into his shoulders. He pushed away again, made the last two dizzying circuits of the circular stairway in a final rush.

On the last few steps he saw dried streaks of blood where Mahmud Ali had dragged himself onto the platform. It was too late to stop. He had the Schmeiser ready when he stepped through the opening in the top wall and jumped down onto the platform.

He need not have been so wary.

The driver sprawled on his face, Durell’s gun on the stone floor a few inches from his hand, his head thrust partly through one of the fire openings in the watchtower wall. There was a lot of dried blood on the sandy floor.

Durell drew a deep breath and walked over to the man and turned him over. Mahmud Ali’s eyes were open. They were alive with hatred.

Durell looked down at him and felt in his sweat-soaked shirt pocket for a crumpled pack of Camels. The helpless man glared up at him. Durell lit two cigarettes and handed one to Ali, who took it with no change of expression on his gray face.

“Obviously,” Durell said, “you missed.”

“I was too weak to aim properly,” Ali said in English.

“Are you badly hurt?”

“I am dying.”

“I think not,” Durell said. “Perhaps not yet.”

“You will kill me now?”

“Not yet,” Durell repeated. “First you will talk to me.”

The man took the cigarette from his gray lips and made a spitting sound, then began to vomit over himself, trying to turn his body to ease the spasms, but unable to move. Durell did not touch him. He saw that Mahmud Ali’s left arm was broken, and there was a splinter of broken rib sticking out of the man’s military khaki shirt. He picked up his gun from the sandy floor and pocketed it and kept a grip on the Schmeiser he had taken from the jeep. The air began to smell sour. After a moment or two, the man’s sickness passed.

“Does it hurt you to breath?” Durell asked quietly.

“It hurts to live.”

“Your chest is crushed?”

“I fell on a stone from the jeep.”

“Why did you bring me here?”

“To kill you.”

“Why?”

“To stop you.”

“Why?”

“It was ordered.”

“By whom?”

The man glared at him and tried to sit up and fainted. Durell waited. He felt the first touch of thirst, and knew that in this sunlight he could be dehydrated and dead before evening. From the top of the tower he had a fine view of the coast. Karachi was to the south, but he could not see it over the blazing desert dunes. The Sind had been a wasteland for thousands of years, a death trap for ancient invading and defending armies that clashed on the flanks of the sub-continent of India. Southward was the Indus River but the waters, pending irrigation projects that never seemed to be completed, had not reached here and perhaps neve: would. Hawk’s bay, the former English beach suburb of Karachi, was at least ten or fifteen miles down the coast to judge from the distance he had innocently ridden in the jeep with the unconscious man. He remembered they had followed a road and had seen the lights of houses, after leaving the predawn quiet of Karachi’s modernized boulevards, and then there had been only this desert, a simple and primitive track that followed the sandstone and clay scarp above the beach.