Assignment Moon Girl (23 page)

Chapter Nineteen

DURELL unbolted the door. He did not open it at once, but
stood listening for several moments. Boots clattered on the spiral stairway. A
guttural command rapped against the rock wall. He dried his hands and picked up
the machine pistol and made certain he still had the grenade tucked inside his
shirt. He looked at Tanya.

“You still have your grenade?” When she nodded, he said, “I
think our best weapon is my colonel’s uniform. Walk out ahead of me, as if
you’re my prisoner. I’ll have the gun pointed at you.”

“And if we are stopped?’

“We’re going to see General Har-Buri.”

Another explosion shook dust from the ceiling. It was
followed by the muffled whistle and thump of a more distant bomb. Everything
went quiet outside the door. Durell opened it. The tunnel and stairs were
deserted. He urged Tanya ahead, closed the door behind him, and walked to the
steps. There was a smell of dust and explosives in the air.

“Which way was Har-Buri’s apartment?” he asked Tanya. “Can
you remember?”

“I was taken up, from the map room, the first time.”

They climbed the steps quickly. There was a confusion of
distant shouts, firing, the jangling of phones in the mountain fortress.
A white-eyed lieutenant ran toward them at the top of the stairs. He had a bad
gash over one eye and blood covered his face.

“Where is General Har-Buri?” Durell snapped.

The wounded man jerked his weapon backward. “That way,
Colonel.”

“Good. How big is the assault?”

“Two battalions, and tanks. Some bombers. We’ve been
betrayed, Colonel.” The man looked anguished. “In another hour, we would have
moved out.”

“Then we’d have been caught in the open desert,” Durell
said. “They can’t beat us here.”

“We are all dead men, sir.” The lieutenant looked at Tanya,
then back to Durell. “You have a strange accent.”

“I’m liaison, from Cairo,” Durell said. “Carry on.”

As the lieutenant went down the stairs, the whole mountain
shuddered as heavy shells struck its outer bastions. The lights
flickered, went out, then came on again. The corridor sloped upward to a
glimmer of light from another gallery opening in the rock. Soldiers with
machine guns were posted there, and the guns hammered frantically, firing
at invisible targets out in the daylight. Acrid smoke drifted back through the tunnel.

“The other way,” Tanya murmured.

He would have liked to look out at the desert to see what
was happening, but there was no time. A group of officers came down the tunnel,
talking angrily. They saluted Durell’s uniform and went on. There was another
corridor here, where more telephones rang. The smell of cigarette smoke and
coffee touched him. They went through an anteroom and found themselves in what
looked like a large living room. This would be Har-Buri’s private apartment.
Durell closed the door, crossed the fine carpet, and opened the next
door. A man jumped up, spat a cigarette from his mouth, and started to raise
his gun. Durell slammed his machine pistol into the alarmed face, and the guard
fell away, arms flailing. Durell jumped over the man to the next door. It
was locked. Turning, he saw Tanya kneel beside the unconscious man. She held
out a ring of keys.

“You can be very brutal,” she whispered.

He didn’t bother to reply. The key worked. He edged ahead,
and daylight greeted him. It was a small cave chamber, like a prison cell, with
a simple cot, a chair, a bucket of water in a corner. The sunlight came from a
very narrow slit in the rock.

A man on the cot looked at them with haggard eyes.

“Hello, Professor Ouspanaya,” Durell said.

Tanya cried out and fell on her knees before the man on the
cot. Her words of greeting to her father were half strangled by her sobs.
Durell hadn’t thought her capable of such emotion. He turned to the sunlit, narrow
opening. The glaring sun on the desert far below blinded him for a moment.
Explosions mushroomed on the barren plain down there. Through it, he saw the
glint of armored cars and tanks deploying around the mountain. As he watched, a
shell from the fortress made a direct hit on one of the old
Shermans
.
It blew up with a blast that shook the air and then began to burn with a black,
oily smoke. He saw that the tanks were trying to reach the base of the
mountain, where the fortress guns would be unable to bear down on them. He
didn’t think they’d make it. From what he could see, he judged that this cell
was halfway around the mountain face from the little valley that led to the
prison pit and the cisterns. It was the only escape route he knew. Any tunnels
or elevators to the vehicle park he had seen before would be too crowded with
rebel
soldiery
.

“Durell?”

Ouspanaya stood with his arm around his daughter. Tanya was
grave. Her father still was handsome, a big man battered around the edges by
recent events, but filled with an angry strength.

“Tanya says you know what they made me do to you. They are
devils, efficient and ruthless. I tried to say it could not be done in this
place. But they provided equipment and workmen. I could not help myself. They
wanted to see how I had managed the lunar training with Tanya. I warned them of
the danger, by reminding them of the effects on Tanya’s mind. It did not matter
to them.”

Durell said curiously, “How did they get you?”

“It was Ramsur Sepah. Who could suspect that dignified
parliamentarian? He came to the Caspian villa to call on me, a gentlemanly,
courteous visit. Even Sergei, my KGB guard, was not suspicious. It was done simply
and quickly. They got me to Sepah’s car, suddenly forced me in at gunpoint.”
Ouspanaya paused grimly. “They killed Sergei.”

“And they took you here?”

“Yon were already a prisoner. Before we left the villa, they
got my medical kit and drugs—the same used on my poor daughter in our
unfortunate attempt to speed up our space program. I had to put you through the
same routine. You see, they showed me Tanya in that pit, with the tiger. They
made her danger very clear. So I obeyed.” The Russian spread his hands
helplessly. “Can you understand?”

“You don’t have to apologize,” Durell said thinly.

“All we have to do is to get out of this place.”

“But the mountain is under attack. How did the government
finally learn of it all?”

Durell went to the cell door. The shocks of shell blasts
came more frequently now. He heard an angry quarrel between some officers
nearby, and decided to wait a moment and turned back to Ouspanaya.

“It was a long shot, but I backed the right filly. A little
Chinese girl who’d been mistreated by Madame Hung. She came over to my side. I
gave her instructions to contact my young Iranian friend, Hanookh, and
Hannigan, at my embassy. I also told her enough then, so that if she called in
Hanookh, he‘d know where to find this place. It was all contingent on whether
she saw me leave Ramsur Sepah’s garden party.”

“You suspected Sepah then?”

“No, but it had to be someone in an important government office
who backed Har-Buri. I didn’t know Sepah and Har-Buri were the same man. But
treason was brewing in high places, and Sepah stood high enough to be the big
one.”

Tanya spoke to her father. “Durell seems like a monster,
sometimes, but he is kind, and thoughtful—”

“A real Boy Scout.” Durell opened the cell door.

“Let’s go.”

He had no idea how to make their way safely back through the
tunnels. But they had to get out quickly. Once the regular Army broke in, there
would be no quarter for anyone found here. The fighting would be savage,
the killing bloody and indiscriminate.

Durell walked a step or two behind Tanya and her father, as
if he were escorting them. He halted a panting, running soldier. “Where is
General Har-Buri?”

“Headquarters,” the man gasped. “Up there, Colonel. But you
better hurry. They’ve hit the vehicle park.”

At the next turn in the tunnel, Tanya said, “Why do we come
this way? It is not the way out.”

“I have some debts to call,” Durell said grimly.

“Give me your grenade.”

“You’re not—”

“Don’t worry. I’m not really a monster.”

She gave him the weapon reluctantly. It was a Chinese Mark
IV, fresh from its crate. Ahead, he could see a lighted anteroom, the corner of
a desk, the shadow of a soldier speaking urgently into a phone. A sudden series
of shell blasts made the lamp cord jangle and dust boil around them. Durell
drew a deep breath, signaled to Tanya and her father to take cover, and pulled
the pin on the Mark IV. Tanya gasped. Durell threw the grenade as far down the
corridor as he could, then stepped quickly into the anteroom. The soldier at
the desk was a major. His gray face was haggard.

Durell pushed Tanya ahead of him and spoke quickly. “The
general wants these people, Major.”

Suspicion suddenly flooded the rebel’s yellowed eyes.
He lurched across his desk for a pistol there, and Durell’s grenade
finally exploded down the corridor. The blast was thunderous. The lights
went out as a cable was severed. In the darkness and smoke, the rebel major
cursed and ran out to inspect the damage. Durell pushed quietly into the next
room.

It was the darkness that betrayed him. Something struck his
head, and a ponderous weight threw him staggering against an invisible wall.
Another blow, like a fist on the back of his neck, drove him to his
knees. He lost his gun. He thought dimly that, somehow, he had been expected.
He heard Tanya gasp, and there was a scuffling struggle, a muffled thud, as if
a body had fallen. The darkness was absolute. He did not move for a moment.
Someone took a long, slow breath. The distant bursting of shells compressed the
air in the tunnels and hurt his eardrums. But he ached all over, anyway. He
thought the crackle of small-arms fire was closer now, inside the
mountain itself.

His head gradually cleared. He knew his gun had fallen
nearby. Very carefully, he extended a hand to find it. Immediately,
someone stepped on his fingers with crushing weight.

Then the lights came on dimly, at low voltage.

He looked up at the massive image of Ta-Po.

The fat Chinese smiled benignly. He removed his foot from
Durell’s hand and toed the machine pistol aside. He had another, his own,
pointed at Durell’s head. Professor Ouspanaya was sprawled on the floor. The
worst of it was Tanya, standing white-faced beside Madame Hung, who held yet
another machine pistol at Tanya’s head.

“Be very, very careful, Durell,” Ta-Po said softly.

“You have my word.”

“And-welcome to Iskander’s Garden.”

“Where the flowers of evil grow,” Durell returned. “Where
is your puppet, the self-appointed General Har-Buri?”

“He is directing the defense of this wretched place. Are you
the one who betrayed us‘? How clever of you!”

“Not quite. You know you’ve lost the game, Ta-Po? Listen to
the gunfire. It’s coming nearer.”

“It was Lotus then.” Ta-Po nodded his massive head. “You
used the misguided child to inform Teheran of our little rebellion, I suppose.”

“You never expected it to succeed, did you?”

Ta-Po shrugged. He wore his incongruous blue serge suit like
a tent over his enormous fat. Madame Hung stood like a carving of utterly
malicious evil, wearing an embroidered
chongsam
. Her
face was like old ivory, the epitome of every human wickedness ever conceived.

“We have Tanya,” she said thinly.

“Not for long. You can’t get away from here.”

“If I must die, Durell, the whole world must die with me. It
is a promise I have made to myself.” Her hatred was like a foul presence about
her. “And I shall see you dead first, Durell.”

Ta-Po spoke harshly. “But our puppet, Har-Buri, is a coward,
my dear. He has deserted us and his men, seeking escape only for himself.”

Durell did not move. “Har-Buri is getting out?”

“We believe so.”

“How?”

“We only know we have been abandoned here.”

“After all we did for him, too,” Madame Hung hissed. “It is
typical of his backward, feudal morality.”

Durell laughed. His head still hurt. “Yes, you did a lot for
him. You took a fine gentleman named Ramsur Sepah, worked on his
ambition, killed his son, promised him the world if only he’d turn Tanya over
to you. You subverted him and destroyed him.”

“A stupid fool, eroded by greed,” Madame Hung snapped. She
moved her gun to cover Durell. “Ramsur Sepah is too puffed up with his own
petty importance to know how we used him. Like putty, we molded him to our
suggestions. He even deludes himself by denying the fact that we killed his
son.”

“Not any longer,” came a new voice. “Please make no moves,
anyone. Professor Ouspanaya, stand beside Durell. Do nothing else.”

It was Ramsur Sepah. ‘He had a bloody bandage on his head,
and his khaki uniform was torn in a dozen places. He had been wounded in the leg,
but he stood straight and proud, his large hawk’s nose jutting angrily, his
bushy, upturned brows bristling.

“True, I was a fool, Ta-Po, used for your personal aims. But
my goals were my own, and I still believe in them. It I have been wrong—” He
paused, drew a long breath. “I believe in the old virtues, but the world changes,
and rejects them. If I have killed, and caused men to die, as they die at this
moment, it has been for what I believed to be the better of two worlds.” His voice
hardened. “But I did not know, truly, Madame Hung, that you killed my only,
cherished son.”

She made the mistake of laughing at him.

And everything seemed to happen at once.

With a deliberation that was swift, but devoid of passionate
anger, Ramsur Sepah swung his gun and fired twice at Madame Hung. At the
same moment, the outer wall burst open upon them with a tremendous, ear-splitting
blast of rock and debris. The lights went out for the last time. Durell felt
the shell-burst like the flat of a board across his chest. Dimly, he was
aware of sunlight suddenly shining through the thick dust that boiled about
him. A shell had struck the outer wall of the mountain fortress only a few
yards away. There was a weight across his legs, and for a moment he knew panic,
fearing paralysis. He pushed and shoved and struggled free, coughing and
blinded. It was Ta-Po’s body. He didn’t know if the Chinese was alive or dead.
He didn’t care. A rage of frustration stormed in him.