Assignment - Suicide (13 page)

Gregori grinned ironically. “I and the survivors with me
were accused of having voluntarily allowed ourselves to be cut off behind the
German lines. Having been out from under the political commissars for a time,
you see, we were considered contaminated. I was accused of being a spy and a
traitor. I was under suspicion of being an enemy of the people. For six days
they pushed a confession at me to sign. I wouldn’t sign anything. I was in prison
for thirty-two days and nights, altogether. The attentions of the NKVD were not
pleasant. Finally, because of Borka, I was released. My story was confirmed.
I was returned to my rank, made to sign a paper that I had been well treated,
and went back to the front.” Gregori straightened from his lounging position at
the rail. “I will do anything to keep those days of terror from returning.
There are men of ambition in the Politburo who would like to step into Josef’s
boots. If I die trying to stop it, I will die happy.“

The tug‘s horn brayed on two short signal notes. A wisp of
steam drifted over the stern deck and Gregori looked sharply at the shoreline
downstream in the direction they were going. The wake of the tug showed a
gradual veering toward the western shore of the river.

“We are at our first rendezvous,” Gregori said briefly.
His military training showed through the easy stance of his big body. “You will
not give us any trouble, Durell. Nor Valya, either. You know how I feel. We are
going to kill Comrade Z before he can do any damage, before he can start a war
and take the place of Stalin. Nothing can stop me. I am a marksman who never
misses. If you make anyone look at us when we go ashore, if you even so much as
twitch an eye, you will die. Understood?”

Durell nodded.

They were approaching a small village with a rickety wooden
wharf backed by new corrugated iron sheds that stood in sharp contrast to the
wooden hovels of the villagers beyond. The sun was warm, the surface of the
river sparkled. The air was soft and smelled of spring. The woman captain of
the tug was expert as the diesel slackened and the tug lost way. She handled
the two barges astern with quiet ease as a large skiff put out from the wharf,
rowed by an old bearded man in a leather cap. Elena, Vassili and Mikhail came
out of the tug’s cabin.

Gregori spoke to Durell. “You and Valya get in with Elena.
Remember my advice. You consider escape all you like, but don’t try it here.”

The tug did not lose all its forward way while they climbed
into the skiff. The old man who rowed it had a face like a withered yellow
apple. A clatter of steam winches and the thump of an engine came from the
wharf.

It took only five minutes to reach shore, and there
was no wasted conversation. Vassili carried two large burlap bags that bulged
with unknown contents. The tug brayed a brief salute and went on its way.
Durell helped Valya to the dock with him. She stood close to him, one hand
unconsciously hiding the livid, swollen scar on her face. There was defeat in her
eyes.

No one troubled them as they circled the warehouse and
passed a gang of stocky laboring women with picks and shovels. A Zeiss sedan
was parked in the shade of the warehouse, the keys in the ignition lock.

“You drive,” Gregori told the silent Vassili. “Mikhail,
Elena, up front. Valya will ride in back with me and Durell.”

“Let the girl ride up front,” Elena objected. “It will be
safer."

Gregori said heavily, “I am in command here.”

“Are you? My orders from—”

Gregori snapped, “Shut up.” His manner had changed subtly.
“We will operate under Army discipline from this point on.” His voice had not
lifted from its habitual rumble, but there was iron in his inflection.
“Go on, Vassili, what are you waiting for? Drive. You know the way. You saw the
map."

Mikhail said, “And if we are stopped at a check point?”

“Kronev has no idea where we are or why—unless you talked
too much, dancer."

They got into the sedan as Gregori directed. Valya sat next
to Durell. Her hand crept into his and stayed there when he squeezed her fingers
reassuringly, but she did not look at him. Vassili drove like a mad taxi
driver, backing up with a shower of gravel and a clashing of gears. Just beyond
the muddy main street of the village was an asphalt two-lane highway heading
generally south and west. They were well beyond the metropolitan radius of
Moscow, and the countryside was fiat, rolling now and then into thick
woodland, with an occasional kolkhoz exhibiting vast fields being plowed
by bellowing tractors. There was little traffic on the well-paved highway.

“This is the Kharkov road,” Gregori explained. “We will be
on it for perhaps five hours, if Vassili does not kill us all the way he
drives.”

“But we’re not going all the way to Kharkov,” Durell said.

“Of course not. We will visit some old battlefields,
though, before we are finished with the trip. Relax. Vassili, did the old
sea witch give us enough to eat?”

“And to drink,” Vassili answered shortly. “In the paper
bag."

There was salted fish, several loaves of black bread,
raw onions and cucumbers in the lunch hag. And several bottles of vodka. Durell
was hungry and did not hesitate to join the others with the food. Valya ate
very little, explaining that her jaw hurt when she chewed. Her manner was
subdued, as if the weight of defeat was too much for her former spirit to
accept. It worried Durell, but in the closely packed quarters of the sedan,
there was little he could do to reassure her.

Vassili drank vodka straight from the bottle, as if it were
water, driving with one hand as they roared down the monotonously straight
road, through village after village. As the hours went by, Durell felt tension
building up in the group.

After the third hour they halted at a government-owned
gasoline station. It was the first Durell had seen since they had left
the tug. He did not stir, but his senses sharpened when he looked at the
telephone lines that stretched back from the station across the bleak, flat
landscape. A
stolovaya
was built
alongside the gas station and a few cars were parked in the muddy area before
the eating place. Two Russian sailors came out of the rest room, singing and
hanging on to each other. A stout man, his wife, and two children were in the
restaurant at a table near the window.

“Valya, your Intourist coupons will save us money, for
gas," Gregori said. “Let me have them, please.”

The girl handed a small coin purse to Gregori. He grinned at
Durell. “You will stay here unless you have to relieve yourself,
gospodin
. Vassili
will go with you to the rest room, and Elena will go with Valya. What I said at
the river bank applies here as well."

They all got out as the attendant filled the gas tank.
Gregori stayed with the pump man, joking with him, asking about the road
conditions, telling the man they were all from the Red Star Lock Factory on
their way to a spring vacation at the factory’s cooperative resort hotel in the
Crimea. The pump man exhibited no curiosity except to look twice at Valya’s
battered face.

“She was in an accident, citizen?"

“Poor Valya. She fell downstairs last night.”

“She should have medical care.”

“Ah, but that might have delayed our trip, citizen. We
planned this vacation all winter and arranged our holiday time to coincide.”

“Naturally. You will enjoy it down there now.”

Durell walked away beside Vassili. Valya entered the rest
room a step ahead of Elena. There was nothing in Valya’s manner that indicated
any will to revolt. It was as if the damage to her face had broken and bruised
more than the skin of her cheek. He felt worried about her. And the pressure of
time slipping by was like a darkly moving curtain in the back of his mind.
There were only two days until May Day, when a man with a lust for power could
send the world up in flames.

Durell weighed his chances as he stood outside the gasoline
station. Vassili waited patiently a. step behind him for the two women to
return. The attendant had finished and had taken the Intourist coupons as
payment. Durell wore the clothes Valya had given him in Leningrad, and nobody
had thought to take away the documents that identified him as a
lieutenant of the MVD. If he raised an alarm in this desolate little village,
he might bluff his way out of it with his papers and gain control of the group.
Or he might be exposed by Elena’s vindictiveness as an American agent. He had
no illusions as to what would happen then. But the telephone, just inside the
station door, tempted him.

Durell‘s muscles tightened with the decision he made. The
phone was only twenty feet away. He began to walk toward the log station house,
and then Valya and Elena came out of the rest room.

“Let’s go,” Vassili murmured. “We have lost enough time
here.”

For another moment Durell weighed his chances. He would
never live to reach the phone. He knew that. Nor would Valya survive. He could
not risk hurting her more than she already had been hurt.

“Into the car,
gospodin
,” Vassili ordered.

He got in.

Chapter Twelve

THEY arrived at their destination at dusk. From the Kharkov
highway they had turned into a graveled road that quickly deteriorated into mud
and dust, winding westward into swampland and woods, Half an hour before their
trip ended, Vassili had turned the car off that road as the sound of an
approaching truck met them. The truck went by as they hid in a deep brushy
gully marked by a giant white oak, and Durell glimpsed a troop carrier jolting
by, loaded with Red Army infantrymen carrying rifles with fixed bayonets.
When the truck was safely by, Gregori ordered everyone out of the car.

“There will be road barriers from here on. We’ll leave the
car here and walk the rest of the way.”

Durell stood beside him. “You seem to know the way well,
Gregori."

“Of course. I know all this area. I knew about the missile
base here and all the others. The only question was which one Comrade Z would
use for his attack. Marshall learned that. Everything else has been prepared, a
base for operations near each missile installation.” Gregori went around to the
back of the sedan and unlocked the trunk. From it he took a small, heavy wooden
box and handed it to Vassili, who heaved it to his shoulders. “Carry the
grenades, Vassilivitch. The rifle is mine.” There Was a hunting rifle
of unfamiliar design in a built-in rack in the ear trunk; the barrel was chased
with silver, and a polished wooden box contained a perforated blue-steel tube
that fitted snugly over the muzzle. “A silencer.” Gregori smiled. “l can
shoot the eye out of a squirrel at a hundred yards.”

“And the grenades?” Durell asked.

“If Comrade Z’s car is armored we will have to smoke him
out.”

It took ten minutes to hide the sedan in the brush after
pushing it into the ravine Well out of sight of the road. Durell worked readily
with the rest of them. Elena and Mikhail obliterated their tire marks and when
Gregori was satisfied they set out on foot, carrying burlap bags of
provisions as they struck cross-country through the swampy woods.

In single file, with Durell and Valya in the center,
Gregori led the way. Long purpling shadows reached through the swampland as the
sun sank. The terrain was irregular, out up by small gullies where sluggish
streams flowed. The brush was misty with spring green. Squirrels
chattered at them, and now and then a flash of blue came through the twisted
branches overhead as a jay took alarm. Mosquitoes whined around their heads.
Once they came to a high barbed wire fence that blocked them, and Gregori
vanished to the right for ten minutes and then returned silently as a ghost.

“There is a watchtower two hundred yards west. Be silent.”

Vassili produced a pair of wire cutters and snipped enough
of the strands away to permit them to duck through. There was no alarm. They
crossed one stream on a rough log bridge and waded through another a moment
later. The water was icy and the ground grew equally chilly as the sun
vanished. Even after all the years that had passed, the woodland still carried
the scars of bomb and shell. Blasted tree stumps and craters and signs of brush
fires were on every hand. It was a desolate and haunted land.

The ground rose and they followed a wooded ridge that
overlooked a deep gorge. A paved asphalt road wound through the stream bed
below. A truck passed down there, carrying concrete conduits, heading west.
Gregori pushed rapidly on and Durell noted the exhaustion on Valya’s bruised
face.

“Can you make it?” he whispered to her.

Her smile was distorted. “I haven’t done this sort of thing
since I was a child.”

“How does your face feel?”

“It throbs. I think it might be infected."

Durell scowled. “Would you remember where the car is
hidden?”

“Yes. I could take you back there.”

“Tonight?”

“If we can.”

“Good. Lean on me,“ he whispered. “Save your strength.”

He was aware of Mikhail looking angrily back over his
shoulder at them. The dancer’s movements were very nervous, expressing a fear
that went beyond the general danger surrounding them. Durell knew that if any
of the guard units discovered them, they would be shot on the spot. But
Mikhail‘s nervousness seemed to go beyond that.