The Balkan Assignment (32 page)

I stretched out on the grass beside the fire. Contrary to all of the outdoor stories that I had ever read, an open fire, no matter how well banked and reflected will not keep both sides of you warm at once. I lay a long time shivering first on one side and roasting on the other, but after a while, sheer exhaustion forced me into a fitful doze. I slept badly that night for obvious reasons and awoke long before dawn, half frozen, starved and definitely feverish. I ached horribly in every bone and joint. The chase lasted three days; three days of sweltering heat and frozen nights punctuated with periods of delirium when I moved mechanically, stumbling over and around obstacles until sanity returned. I picked what food I could find along the way, fruits and edible roots that I had learned to identify in Vietnam. I also shot a small animal, a type of rodent that I had never seen before. I fired the pistol before it occurred to me that Klaus or Mikhail might hear the shot. That was at the end of the second day and I was half dead with exertion and hunger. The animal was small, smaller than a rabbit but it was one of the few animals that I saw and the only one that gave me a clear shot. I roasted and ate what little meat there was on the damned thing that evening, forcing myself to save a small portion for the next day. My right arm had begun to loosen a little, even though every movement remained hellishly painful. That afternoon I took off my jacket and shirt and let the sun burn down on the huge purple welt that had spread along the top of the shoulder and upper arm as I walked on.

It rained briefly in the afternoon of the second day; a shower that soaked me thoroughly but did not wash away the tracks. All during the afternoon an excitement, that not even the rain dampened, had been growing in me. I was convinced that the tracks were becoming fresher. The dense forest of the intermediate highlands had been left behind and the gradient of the plateau was steepening as we climbed closer and closer to the northern flank of the Shan Mountains separating China from Burma. I judged that I had covered some thirty miles by the end of the second day, and I was sure that Klaus and Mikhail were no more than a few hours ahead of me. How, I'll never know, but apparently I had gained on them. The rain in the afternoon was a parting shot from the monsoon that I could see still ranging the lower plateau to the south. The annual rainfall as reflected by the vegetation, was sparser at this higher elevation. The firs were taller and more widely spaced and the underbush was thick but not as prolific as the fleshy, damp growth of the lower plateau. The grasses on the open savannahs were growing again in the wake of the winter rains, waving gently in vistas of emerald-green across the occasional wide expanses of plateau that lay open to the blue skies piled with towering thunderheads.

Ahead, the plateau came to an abrupt end. The terrain rose steeply to a line of ridges and strode forward several miles to the high peaks. At the base of those peaks lay the BurmaChina border and safety for Klaus. Hours deep into that second night, my legs gave out and I slept where I fell; slept deeply, the bitter cold of the high night air unfelt until before dawn and I was awake and on the way again, trudging endlessly into my peculiar fever world.

Klaus had avoided the tiny villages scattered widely through these frontier lands on the Burmese border as almost all had their own tiny police garrison. Occasionally a military aircraft flew endless search patterns along the mountain routes, and I knew that they were only watching the border area and not yet searching for us. I had wondered briefly what Ley had done when he discovered that the three of us were missing; and then dismissed the thought. It made no difference to me . . . he had what he wanted. The trail was entirely gone now, lost in the deep grass and flinty soil, but it made no difference; there was only one way to go and that was due north. The border snaked south in a deep U, poking into Burma until it was less than sixty miles from Lashio. The oil camp *as twenty miles north and east of Lashio, leaving Klaus with only forty miles to run to safety. Rather than trailing the two of them any longer, I was now moving diagonally across their line of march to reach the border highlands first. There was only one way into China within fifty miles —a pass at nine thousand feet guarded by a border station. There was no other way he could go.

An intense blue sky accentuated the ominous dark

clouds that had drawn up in military order along the southern horizon. An occasional flicker of lightning stabbed the land as if to mark off miles traveled. The northern slope of the ridge slipped away and down some distance to a shallow valley on the far side of which stood a tiny stone hut marking the border between Burma and China. South, the slope dropped much more precipitously to a steep-sided canyon filled with dense stands of fir. A thin watercourse made its hesitant way along the bottom of the valley, occasionally bold enough to claim odd acres for coveted marshes. From where I sat with my back resting against the bole of a wind-twisted tree on the summit, I could see the toiling figure with the knapsack trudging toward me. Klaus walked rapidly, but with the jerky movements of a man close to exhaustion. An occasional small meadow skirted a tiny marsh, almost hidden in the black firs that marched up the nearly vertical east and west walls of the canyon. The aspect of the countryside was similar to that of the High Sierras or the Colorado Rockies. Even the trees and the vegetation were similar. Klaus stepped out into the first meadow. I could see him plainly now as he stopped and looked around. He was a tiny stick figure still a mile or more away, but when he peered up the canyon at the ridge I started as if he were staring directly at me. Finally, he shrugged out of his pack and dropped down on the grass in a way that left no doubt as to his weariness.

It occurred to me that I had reached the point where I could wait calmly knowing that within the next few hours I would kill a man I had once considered a friend. But for some reason, I did not feel the same horror at knowing that Mikhail would probably go on living, even though he had killed Vishailly in cold blood. I did not know Vishailly well or the policeman Bowen at all, but I did know Peter Schenk. Did I have to be intimately involved with a person who had been murdered before the repugnance of that death did more than touch me; before it dragged me into involvement? Apparently, because here I was, on the farthest border reaches of Northern Burma, preparing to kill a man who had once been my friend because he had ordered the death of another friend. An "eye for an eye" says the Christian Bible, and though I am not a Christian, the aptness of this directive from the Almighty, however much discredited by the New Testament, served as my justification. I had lost sight of the more universal teaching .. . "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" . . . on the march north. I watched the long line of black clouds at the horizon moving inexorably .northward while Klaus rested. The storm was covering in hours the distance that had taken us three days. A tiny, silver flash twinkled against the cloud bank. I stared hard at the spot and saw it again. An aircraft! An aircraft moving along the face of the storm in an unmistakable search pattern. I watched coldly, hating its appearance and the person or persons directing it because I knew that they were searching for us. As the minutes dragged on, the aircraft came closer and I could see that it was not an airplane but a helicopter. The sky above remained cloudless, a startling, almost unbelievable blue. After a while, Klaus picked up his pack and disappeared into the trees on the near side of the meadow. He was less than an hour away now; plenty of time before the storm would strike I judged.

The ridge at the head of the canyon rose steeply some,-eight hundred feet; a few clumps of trees and scattered boulders clung precariously, but no other cover of any kind. Directly below the edge of the ridge was a shelf of exposed granite, wind-polished to gleaming smoothness; a natural place to rest before beginning the final, difficult climb to the crest. It was at that point that I intended to kill Klaus. Time stretched out through the long afternoon like a thread of elastic, tension mounting .

. . and then the abrupt snap. Mikhail stood on the far edge of the same clearing in which I had watched Klaus rest not more than twenty minutes before. He stood unmoving, just barely out of the trees examining every inch of the meadow and the canyon wall that he could see. This was his forte .. . mountain games of hide and seek, search and kill. He knew exactly what he was doing whereas Klaus was merely running for his life. Mikhail knelt down and examined the grass, moved off a few paces and repeated the process until finally he came to his feet and stared at the trees on the far side of the meadow, calculating, planning. Then instead of following Klaus's trail, he struck out across the meadow on a diagonal that would lead him to the east wall. And I knew what he was going to do. The floor of the canyon twisted and turned, not a great deal, but enough to slow a traveler. Mikhail was aiming to climb the east wall, travel along the rim and be in a position at the head of the canyon to shoot Klaus when he emerged from the trees.

But Mikhail, as I had done time after time, had also misjudged Klaus Maher. Klaus did not emerge from the trees at the foot of the north wall at the time I had estimated. I glanced at my watch and waited. Ten minutes more passed and still he was hidden from view within the trees. Mikhail was now climbing above the tree line on the eastern wall just below the rim, moving crabwise along the steep slope.

Damn Mikhail! I wanted to shout, I wanted to scream at Klaus somewhere in the trees below to warn him that Mikhail was waiting for him. Damn Mikhail, damn Mikhail and his stupid honor! He had no business here .. . but I was more than a mile away and even if I could have made myself heard and understood, Klaus would know that I was still ahead of him. There was absolutely nothing I could do except to watch the scene below play itself out.

A quick glance behind showed no movement of any kind in the valley. A tiny trickle of smoke rising from the stone hut made me realize with a start that I was ravenously hungry. As if waiting for that realization, a stomach cramp attacked and left me lightheaded. In just that swift moment of time, the situation in the canyon changed. Somehow, Klaus had known or guessed that he was being followed. He had also guessed, and correctly, that the open space between the tree line and the ridge crest was a perfect spot for an ambush as there was no cover of any consequence in the entire eighthundred-foot climb. At any rate, Klaus must have spotted Mikhail scuttling along the eastern rim and waited just inside the tree line for Mikhail to come within range. Mikhail, concentrating on negotiating the steep slope was caught by surprise. He was above Klaus on the slope, still well above the tree line and sharply outlined by the bold sunlight. Klaus's first bullet knocked him from his feet and sent him rolling down the slope twenty feet to a stand of stunted scrub pine.

The sudden crack of the rifle broke the midday silence, startling myriads of unseen birds and animals into a mismatched chorus of warnings. There was no movement to be seen either from the trees or from the slope:

Twenty minutes went by, twenty minutes during which I forgot about twisting hunger pains and stared painfully about the valley. All I could see of Mikhail was one booted foot. The rest of his body was hidden by the tree. Then Klaus appeared, climbing from a stand of trees several hundred feet behind Mikhail. He was coming up to make sure that Mikhail was dead, leaving no loose ends whenever and wherever possible. To say that I was torn between horror and a fierce joy is an understatement. I was about to witness a cold-blooded murder again, and yet I knew if it happened, I would have my chance at Klaus. If ever the relative value of a human life was in the scales .. . I saw Mikhail suddenly struggle into a sitting position and fire twice at Klaus. The first bullet spurted dirt behind as Klaus threw himself against the slope and slid uncontrollably down toward the trees. Somehow, Klaus managed to stop himself, somehow he had managed to retain his rifle and as Mikhail came down the slope firing, Klaus coolly ignored the rain of bullets and shot him once through the chest. Mikhail slithered to a stop and the carbine dropped from his hands. His left hand wavered feebly for balance and he pitched forward onto his face to roll down the slope and disappear into the trees. Klaus got shakily to his feet and reloaded the rifle, retrieved his pack and scrambled back down the slope into the trees once more. So I was to have my chance after all .. .

I watched from above as Klaus climbed the steep north wall. At the far end of the canyon I could see a dark curtain of rain descending from the black cloud mass. Still, above the ridge, the sky was absolutely clear and intensely blue.

As he climbed closer and closer, I could plainly see his red face, bright with exertion. He glanced impatiently back at the curtain of rain bearing down from the far end of the canyon. We both saw it at the same time—a helicopter emerging from the rain. A tiny silver dot at first against the blue-black of the heavy cloud, it hesitated over the end of the canyon and then began a slow search pattern back and forth along its length. The rain was approaching fast but so was the helicopter, and it was unclear yet which would reach us first. Klaus climbed on quickly now, the rifle slung across his shoulder, muzzle downward to free both hands for climbing, but still ready for instant use. He rarely missed a trick, did Klaus.

He was less than twenty feet from the crest when I got slowly to my feet to stand in full view of both Klaus and the helicopter. Silhouetted against the bright blue sky, it was impossible for either not to see me . . . but they didn't. Klaus continued to scramble forward up the slope, desperate to gain the top and its sheltering trees before the crew of the helicopter spotted him. Then a swirling curtain of rain wrapped around the aircraft and hid it from view. Klaus sagged wearily against the rocks to rest a moment and looked up.

An instant's panic showed on his face.

"Chris," he gasped, "how did . . . you get up there?" I stared down at him for a long moment before I answered. "I walked a little bit faster." Klaus took a deep breath and straightened until he could look up at me without having to crane his neck. He saw the pistol in my hand and swallowed hard. The rain danced about us for a brief instant, huge drops that soaked us in seconds. The deep beat of the helicopter could be heard somewhere over the valley.