Assignment - Suicide (20 page)

“There is no alternative. Where is Vassili?”

“He has his orders,” Gregori whispered hoarsely. He laid out
two grenades on the granite ledge beside Durell’s extra clip. “He is crossing
the stream a few hundred meters to the south, and he will circle up behind the
tower on the other side of the bridge. He will know the car when it comes and he
will throw the first grenade. That will be your signal. After that—” Gregori
shrugged and grinned. “After that, perhaps I will learn how to pray."

“What about Elena and Mikhail?”

“Elena. is with Vassili, to help him if she can. She has the
soldier’s rifle you got the other night. I have the thirty-eight.”

“Mikhail?”

“In the dugout.”

“Tied up?“

“Of course.”

Valya looked down and away, with lowered eyes and a serene
detachment from what was said that made uneasiness ride in Durell for a moment.
Then it faded. He wanted to ask if Valya had been the last to be with Mikhail,
but he cut off the question. Gregori adjusted his bandaged arm, looked with
approval at Durell’s preparations, and settled himself beside him. His eyes
were fever-bright, and there was an unhealthy flush under the bristles of
his beard. Valya sat against a tree nearby.

“Now we will wait," Gregori said quietly.

It was a beautiful, calm day.

It was the First of May.

The breeze died away all at once. A bronze beetle with abnormally
long hind legs crawled over a dead leaf near the muzzle of Durell’s gun and
fell a tremendous distance, all of two inches, to the gray granite, where it
kicked awkwardly for a moment before righting itself and hurrying on about its business.
A small clinking sound came from Gregori as he put aside a bottle of vodka. The
bottle was empty. Durell suddenly felt an irresistible craving for a cigarette.
He had not smoked for almost two days, and although he was not a heavy smoker,
he felt the need for a cigarette now. He pushed the thought from his mind and
looked at Valya and smiled reassurance at her. She did not smile in return.

From down in the gorge came the distant throbbing of a motor
car. Durell lifted his head and listened and relaxed a bit.

“It's a half-track,“ he said.

Gregori nodded. The sound came rapidly nearer, a rattling of
heavy, swiftly moving treads above the pulse of the motor. It came into sight
at the far end of the gorge, a gray-green, dusty military vehicle with an
armored cab and a stake-body truck assembly above the steel caterpillar treads.
The half-track was loaded with a squad of armed guards whose bayonets winked in
the bright, peaceful sunlight. At the near end of the bridge the vehicle
slowed, crept around the sharp turn, and then crawled over the wooden bridge to
the white-painted barrier beside the sentry tower. An arm was extended from the
driver’s side of the cab, holding a piece of paper, and the burly sergeant
appeared briefly, took the paper, scanned it, and nodded before he
stepped back. The motor of the half-track snorted, coughed a cloud of black exhaust,
and crawled up-grade and around the curve to vanish beyond the high scarp
across the little river.

Durell looked at the pattern of brown and green vegetation on
the opposite hill. There was no sign of Vassili and Elena.

Gregori’s round head lifted suddenly, listening.

“Do you hear that?” he whispered.

Another vehicle was coming down the road, moving at a fast
clip. This time there was no clanking and rattling. It was a big, fast-moving
car, and as Durell lifted his rifle higher, feeling the cool damp of sweat on
his palms again, the limousine appeared, a big black Zis with green-tinged, bulletproof
glass windows and windshield. A cloud of dust boiled up behind the speeding,
rocking car and it skidded slightly as it took the curve that brought it into
sight below.

Durell looked at Gregori’s tight, flushed face.

“That it?”

“
Da
. Good luck, my
friend."

A whistle skirled at the sentry tower, and the two guards at
the machine gun stiffened to attention. The other two guards in the stream bed
under the bridge came into sight, their faces stamped with simple curiosity.
The last two sentries in view took posts opposite each other at the approach to
the bridge.

The Zis was compelled to slow down for the right-angle turn
onto the bridge.

“Wait for Vassili’s grenade,” Gregori muttered.

The limousine was turning slowly now, and the front wheels
thudded onto the wooden planking of the bridge. Durell tried to see inside the
car. There was more than one man in the back seat. He saw dimly through the
tinted rear window that there were at least two men there, and possibly three.
He started to ask Gregori a question, doubt suddenly in him, and Gregori cursed
with soft violence.

“Vassili! Throw it! Throw it!”

The car was halfway across the bridge, still moving slowly,
an easy target for a lobbed bomb, when the shot came. It echoed sharply across
the gorge, a high, spiteful crack that ended the chattering of birds and
squirrels as suddenly as if a sound-track tape had been snipped. Durell scanned
the opposite slope, but there was nothing to see. Gregori lunged to his knees,
hugging his bandaged arm to his side. His teeth gleamed under stretched lips.

Valya whispered: “What could that be?"

A whistle shrilled from the sentry tower. The burly sergeant
ran out, holding up his hands in a signal for the limousine to halt. The
sergeant glanced nervously back over his shoulder at the slope where Vassili
and Elena should have been, and then the man shouted a command.

The car halted.

“Where is Vassili?" Gregori groaned.

The sergeant ran down on the bridge and pointed downstream,
talking quickly to the driver. Durell focused the hairline sights of his
rifle on the man’s face, saw the agitation of his mouth under his Mongol
mustache. A thin wild shout caused him to raise his head from the scope and look
downstream, where the little river ran glinting in the sun over a rocky bed.
The shout was repeated. At first Durell saw nothing but the shine of the
sun on white water, the motionless trees with their newly budding leaves, the high
wall of the ravine where the river turned and the road swung out of sight
toward the missile base. Then from behind a whitish boulder appeared the
figure of a man, black against the glinting water behind him. It was
Mikhail.

“Uncle Sergei!” he called. The voice was a thin, lost echo screaming
in the gorge. Durell looked quickly at Valya. She was biting her lip with
anxiety and there were sudden violet shadows under her eyes.

“Did you untie him?” Durell asked quietly.

“He promised me he would stay there.”

Gregori cursed in explosive monotones. Mikhail’s slender figure
was clearly visible now. There was still no sign of Vassili and Elena on the
opposite slope. Mikhail began to run awkwardly upstream, toward the bridge. His
course was erratic, his gait staggering, as if the single shot that bad preceded
his appearance had found its mark somewhere in his body. His face was only a
small white patch in the distance. The voice of the sergeant came sharply up
the slope and the two guards at the machine gun suddenly jumped to their weapon
and began to swing it around to cover Mikhail’s approach along the bed of the
river.

Nobody got out of the armored car.

“
Sergei!
” Mikhail
cried again.

A rifle cracked. And another. Mikhail stumbled, fell splashing
into the stream, and got up again. Valya made a little moaning sound and
crammed the back of her hand against her mouth. Gregori heaved to his feet. His
face was a pattern of utter despair. He held a grenade in his left hand and he
gave a tremendous, bull-throated shout as he heaved it with all his strength
down the slope.

The limousine had begun to slide forward past the barrier to
the sentry tower. Durell saw the small, spinning bulb of steel arc down through
the clear, still air. Everything seemed to stop. Time came to an end. He saw
Gregori standing straddle-legged in defiance on the ledge; he saw the
limousine still inching forward; he saw the sergeant turning slowly, his mouth
open under his luxuriant mustache, his eyes astonished. Mikhail had fallen and
vanished.

The grenade landed a few feet behind the Zis and exploded.

The burst of noise was monstrous in the ravine. A plank of
the bridge went lazily end over end into the air and came down with a slow,
echoing clatter. The limousine halted. Smoke billowed up, hiding it from sight.

The grenade had lifted the rear end of the car with a jolt and
swung it askew, so that it stood at a slant to the roadway. But still no one
got out. Gregori bellowed again, a raw animal sound of rage, and bent for a
second grenade. Durell shouted a warning too late. The machine gun clattered
and a curious grunting sound came from Gregori and he bent slowly forward from
the waist, his left hand holding his stomach, and pitched out of sight off the
ledge. Durell cursed and squeezed off a shot at the machine gunners that spattered
dust at their feet, as he intended. He saw the face of one of the gunners in
the cross-hair sights and aimed a few inches to one side of the man‘s head and
squeezed off a second shot. The two machine gunners retreated hastily from
their weapon. staring in surprise and fear at the ledge.

A screaming sound came from out of sight, over the lip of
rock where Durell sprawled with the rifle at his cheek. It was a steady,
unbroken noise that seemed impossible from a human throat. It was Gregori. At
the same moment, the burly sergeant stepped out on the platform of the tower, a
carbine in his hand. He was looking at something just below the ledge, where
the screaming came, and then he carefully raised the carbine to take aim. The
rifle in Valya’s hand cracked sharply, once, and then again. The big
sergeant dropped his carbine and folded over the rail of the platform. His legs
came up like the end of a lever out of balance, and then he toppled head
first from the high tower. His body made a faint thudding noise when he
struck the bridge, and a little burst of dust flashed up around him.

Silence came back to the ravine.

Durell looked at Valya. She was calmly reloading the
rifle.

Her face had changed to hard competence, from which all femininity
and indecision had been erased. She looked at him with the eyes of a stranger.

“Gregori is trapped down there. He would have shot
him."

“I understand,” he said quietly.

“Can We do anything for him?”

“I don’t know. It looks hopeless.”

She said angrily: “Are you blaming me because of Mikhail?
They’ve killed him. He’s down in the stream there. He tried to betray us, and I
did not want to believe he would do that. I thought because he loved me—well, I
deluded myself about him, that is all.”

“And ruined everything.”

“Not yet,” she said.

A stifled screaming continued to come from out of
sight under the ledge. Durell scanned the sentry tower and the machine gun
post. Nothing stirred. He could not see any of the guards; they had all taken
cover. And the occupants of the Zis were still inside, fearful of getting out
into the open. A whistle shrilled again and a shouted order came dimly up the
slope, but nobody showed.

Gregori kept on screaming.

“We can’t leave him there,” Valya said tightly. Her voice curled
up to the thin edge of hysteria. “I can’t stand it. He’s wounded and suffering.”

“Cover me,” Durell said. His words were flat and dry. “I’ll
go over after him.”

“But they’ll shoot you, too.”

“As you said, We can’t leave Gregori there. You’re not a bad
shot, Valya. You picked the sergeant with no trouble. Just don’t let them get
back to the machine gun.”

“Sam, please—”

Gregori screamed again. Durell laid his rifle
flat on the hot surface of the ledge and crawled on hands and knees to
where the brush formed a last screening barrier between his body and the enemy
eyes that watched for him. He glanced downstream, searching for Mikhail’s body
in the distance, but there was nothing to be seen. Little more than five
minutes had gone by since the Zis limousine had first appeared. Nothing
stirred, but there was dim shouting from inside the disabled car. Apparently the
occupants in the back seat were urging the driver to get out and try to start the
car moving again; and the driver was arguing back with understandable
reluctance.

Durell slowly and carefully worked the brush apart and looked
down the sharp slope. Trees grew crookedly out of the rocky scarp, together
with brush and grapevines. There was another ledge about twenty feet below,
covered with more brush, from which several wild cherry trees grew with twisted
trunks.

“Gregori?” he called softly.

The screaming stopped abruptly, became a low moaning.

“Gregori?”

“Go back," Gregori called faintly. “Don’t be a damn
fool.”

“I’m coming down for you.”

“Go back! I’m a dead man.”

Gregori lay on his back on a narrow shelf of stone not more
than two feet wide. Both legs dangled over the edge of the drop. Below, the
face of the cliff turned inward and there was a sheer drop to the rocky bed of
the river a hundred feet below, Sunlight glinted on mica in the asphalt road
that followed the river bank. A bird called plaintively. There was more muffled
shouting from inside the stalled limousine.

Durell slid over the edge of the cliff, finding
handholds on vine and brush. For one moment he was fully exposed to the eyes
that sought him from the sentry tower. A rifle cracked and the bullet
kicked up a spatter of gravel that stung his face. Valya‘s rifle replied
instantly from above him. He dropped five feet, caught another scrubby
vine, and worked his legs around until his searching toes found a tentative
grip. The thin foliage offered only a flimsy screen from across the
river. Sweat soaked through his shirt. From somewhere a rifle spoke again
and again a bullet sprayed gravel over his head. He could not move now. He could
not escape. His toehold was too precarious to permit any attempt to hide.