“What language were you speaking?” said Madison. “It didn’t sound like any lingo I ever heard.”
I masked the flashlight and looked at him. He knew too much already. If the Countess Krak ever got her hands on him, I was dead for sure!
Before I could stop him, Madison took the flashlight and began to paw around in the mound of papers I had spilled out of the sack to get my radio. “Well, look at all the passports!” he said. “Inkswitch, Federal Investigator; Achmed Ben Nutti, United Arab League; Sultan Bey . . . I don’t see any here for Smith.” He looked up. “What is your real name, anyway?” He looked back at the papers. “And what’s this writing?” I had used a blank Apparatus gate pass to scribble amounts of money on: the printing was three-dimensional, of course, and it plainly said, Coordinated Information Apparatus, Voltar Confederacy. It even had the logo the Fleet called the “drunks.” “Three-dimensional printing?” he said. “That’s out of this world, man.”
At first I hadn’t stopped him because I was thinking of something else: about what to do with him. Then I hadn’t stopped him because the gesture of doing so would have alerted him to the fact that he was into something secret. And when he hit the gate pass blank he had gone beyond mere stopping. Code break. Madison would have to be shot.
Then, much as it was unlike me, I stayed my hand as it reached instinctively toward the machine gun. Madison was too valuable. Madison could wreck men’s lives and start wars and raise hells in a way Voltar had never heard of: PR. Lombar was always looking for ways to ruin people and this was one he had never heard of.
Despite my condition, decision was swift. When the tug picked us up, I would simply order Captain Stabb to take Madison back to base, put him in detention and ship him off to Lombar with a note. Maybe it would make Lombar less brutal on me if I gave him such a gift. It would not only get Madison safely beyond any Krak interrogation—which would be extremely fatal now that he knew my other names—it would also put me in good with Lombar Hisst.
I had to dissimulate. But I am trained in that. I forced a chuckle. “Your instincts as an investigative reporter will get you in trouble yet, Madison,” I said. “Just don’t spread it around and you’ll find out all about it someday.”
“Oho!” he said. “I smell a story! Eighteen-point Mystery Man Tells All.”
He sealed his fate right there.
PART FIFTY-NINE
Chapter 2
After a tense interval that seemed hours my radio went live. Raht’s voice: “I’m in the New York office now.”
“What the hells was the delay?”
“This analyzer hasn’t been used for years,” said Raht. “I couldn’t find a power pack. But it’s operating now. Just hold down your transmit plate and I’ll get it into the computer.”
I did. There was a pause. Then Raht came on again. “It’s a good thing I checked before I called the base. You’re not on Chios.”
“You must be making a mistake,” I said. “I am definitely on Chios, right beside the ruins of Emboriós. Check again, you idiot!”
There was a pause. “I rechecked. You’re not on Chios. I have the Voltarian grid map of this planet right on the scope. You’re at 43-17-4.1052 exactly.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything. Give it to me in Earth geography.”
“Let me get a blowup of an Earth globe, get it to the same scale and superimpose . . . Here it is. You’re 340.2 yards up from the beach and 9.1 miles west by south of Karaburun.”
“WHAT?”
“You’re just across a narrow strait from Chios. You’re on the Turkish mainland.”
Oh, GODS! I had gotten turned around in the rain and dark! And ruins were a dime a dozen in this land!
The ground under me went suddenly hot.
“Raht,” I pleaded, “please, please tell them at the base to send that tug quick. I’ve GOT to get out of Turkey!”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll relay the message. But don’t go running off. They’ll have my head if they make a fruitless trip. I’m gone.”
Madison said, “Who is that you’re talking to?”
I was numb from shock of finding where I was. “New York,” I said.
“On that little thing?” said Mad. “It’s not much bigger than a cigarette lighter.”
I didn’t answer him. He’d find out all about real electronics soon enough. On Voltar. I was more interested in that blackness out there. I couldn’t see much but I had to be alert for the tug.
I hoped they didn’t direct their blueflash this way when they settled down on that expanse of pavement. It was around a shoulder of the hill but still, I must take care to protect my eyes with my arm. I didn’t care if Mad got a pupil full of it. He’d be knocked out soon enough anyway, for shipment.
It seemed like hardly any time at all before I saw a haze of light. But wait, there was something wrong. The whole terrain was getting gray.
IT WAS DAWN!
With a sudden sickening I realized I had been too late! They couldn’t make it in the short span of darkness that had been left.
I moaned softly.
The intensity of morning twilight increased. Bushes began to take on detail. The waves in the surf below were no longer just white streaks.
It stopped raining. There were clouds but even these were thinning.
The ships!
The Golden Sunset, two or three miles away, was growing distinct. It was obscuring nearly all of another craft beside it. I could not make out the kind of vessel the other was. A fishboat? A yacht? A patrol craft? All I knew for certain about it was that it wanted me! And here I was pinned down, hidden it is true, but trapped in Turkey, the very place I must not be.
To my left, lying out in the water, three islets emerged from the twilight. And then directly before us but some miles away there seemed to be a bulk of land.
Suddenly a random shaft of sunlight moved in under the scudding clouds. It was from directly behind us.
The sun rises in the east, I told myself. My cave in the cliff was facing due west. I was looking across the narrow strait at Chios. Any hope I had that Raht might be wrong collapsed. Even the sun said I was in Turkey.
There is something discouraging about having a thing you already know pounded home with sledgehammer force.
Chios was only a few miles away. A wild plan to swim for it folded up like a popped paper bag.
MEN!
They came from around an outcrop on the beach. One, two, three, four, five, six . . . BLACK JOWL!
They were working north along the beach. They must have landed in a quieter cove to the south, not choosing to dare the pounding surf opposite me where we had landed.
THEY WERE SEARCHING!
Scattered out they would examine the shore and then the slope above it with their deadly eyes.
Black Jowl was carrying a hand radio. He would pause and speak in it from time to time and look out toward the ships. Oh, Gods, on those ship radios he would be in communication with all the world. What was he ordering? A general mobilization of the armed forces of Turkey? Maybe at any moment now fighter planes would come screaming out of the dawn sky: I keened my ear for the clank of tanks, the scuttle of infantry. I scanned the horizon: maybe the Turkish navy would show up. After all, I had entered the country without passing through immigration: they would use that as a crime to turn me over to Black Jowl and then stand back laughingly as I was stoned alive. That is, if they did not kill me on the first frontal assault.
I looked to my machine gun. I upended the barrel. A stream of water came out. Never mind, it would still shoot. I braced myself on my elbows and drew a bead on Black Jowl. Then I paused. It was only a .22-caliber weapon and while I had heard that a .22 would travel a mile, I didn’t think it had a very lethal impact at long range. I had better wait.
A shout rose up above the distant boom of surf. The men raced forward.
One was pointing.
Our inflatable!
Oh, why hadn’t I pushed it b
ack into the sea?
Black Jowl came and stood before it. He talked into his radio, looking at the ship.
How had they known the inflatable was there? And then I realized they had followed us in on radar last night. Probably the thing even had a radar target on it!
The men fanned out. I knew what they were looking for: footprints!
They found the trail! Probably blood from my broken feet. No, that would have been obliterated by the rain. But they seemed to be following something.
I cocked my machine gun.
Suddenly the black-jowled man shouted something to the rest of them. They halted.
The black-jowled man was talking into his radio. I could not hear what he was saying due to the hiss and boom of the sea. Oh, if I only had a listening device. But then, I didn’t need it. From his gestures to the men it was very plain that he knew I was up there on that cliff.
But it was puzzling. They did not come charging up. They were just standing there three hundred yards away, looking first to the cliff and then to the black-jowled man.
His communication seemed very lengthy. I could guess what it was: he was ordering a full frontal assault by the combined forces of NATO! Then women with stones would act as the mop-up squad.
Then something very peculiar happened. Black Jowl removed his radio from his mouth and made an arm signal to his men.
They picked up the inflatable, punched the gas out of it and folded it up. Black Jowl was making sure I did not escape by sea!
Carrying the craft they filed off to the south. They vanished around a turn of the beach. Very soon, in two boats, they came into view again.
They headed for the ships.
I watched as they crossed the water. I looked up at the sky for any fighter planes.
At long last they boarded the vessels.
Sometime later the yacht, still obscuring the other ship, got under way. Both of them sailed northward. For Istanbul?
My radio went live. It was Raht, of course. Nobody else had a matching unit for this frequency. “Officer Gris?”
“Yes.”
“I got a message for you here. Just sit tight. You’ll be picked up about sunset.”
“Thank Gods.”
He clicked off.
“Another name?” said Madison. “Something Gris? That sure is a funny language. Sounds like Chinese but it’s not Chinese as Chinese is in tones and I used to have to order my laundry in Chinese. It sure isn’t Russian. Sort of liquid and lilting. I don’t think I’ve ever heard some of those vowels. And that S isn’t really an S. One does it by actually blowing one’s breath. It sounds more like HIST.”
“Shut up!” I snapped at him.
But never mind, he’d be meeting Lombar Hisst soon enough, the poor fool.
Something was bothering me. Sunset? It wouldn’t be dark yet at sunset for this was late spring and the twilight was long even in these latitudes. Raht must have meant AFTER sunset. Yes, he was so (bleeped) inaccurate: he had probably just omitted the word after.
Now, if I could live through today without discovery, I thought all would be well.
Little did I know the forces of evil that were at that very moment churning in the world. And that I was at the very center of the vortex!
PART FIFTY-NINE
Chapter 3
Throughout a long and worried day I suffered.
The goat cave stunk a bit more than even I could stand and that’s saying something for an officer of the Apparatus.
Although we had hundreds of square miles of water to look at if you included both the strait and the Aegean beyond it, visible to the north, we didn’t have a single drop to wet our parching throats.
About noon the rain clouds cleared away and the sun, moving westward, began to pour into the cave. It made things worse.
Madison kept turning on his radio and getting rock music. I recognized the Hoochi-Hoochi Boys that Nurse Bildirjin adored. They were singing Turkish with English slang.
Get stoned with me,
You oughta get stoned with me,
Can’t you see I’m dead without you.
Take my joints,
I’ll never puff them.
Grab my bong . . .
“SHUT IT OFF!” I screamed at him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just thought I ought to soak up some of the local folk songs. I’m in a culture lag. One minute you’re talking a language nobody ever heard before that I know of and the next, I’m getting pop music in English and Turkish. What did those Turkish words mean?”
“Oh, shut up!” I begged him. I was getting feverish. You don’t smoke marijuana continually as I had been for weeks past without acquiring a throat that is very sensitive to lack of water. What I wouldn’t give for an ice-cold Seven Up. Almost instantly I saw, actually SAW, the green can before me, eight times as big as life, frosted with dewy drops. I steeled myself. I did not reach for it. It vanished.
As the afternoon wore on, the sun, glancing off the water, made my eyes burn and raised the shelter’s temperature—and its stink—beyond endurance. I kept reaching for the cans of Seven Up but they continued to vanish.
Finally the sun was very low, boring into the cave in a last determined effort to get me. It won. I sank into a faint.
A hand was shaking me. “I think somebody is calling that other funny name you’ve got—Gris, Gris.”
I stared up groggily. It was Madison. I felt annoyed. “For Gods’ sakes, if you’re going to say it, say it right. What you are trying to enunciate as an English G is pronounced halfway between HA and TH with a throat rumble.”
“No, no, listen!” said Madison. “Somebody is calling it.”
I sat up. Yes! There it came from afar, “Officer Gris! Officer Gris!”
I scrambled to my feet. It was still daylight. The fools must be flying the tug around in daylight! They’d get us all exterminated for a Code break!
I started to rush out. Madison was thrusting something at me. My sack of money and papers. I grabbed it.
On flying feet I rushed from the cave. My feet didn’t fly very long. I stepped on a stone. Agony!
Limping, I made my way along the goat path. I rounded the shoulder of the cliff. I came to the flat area. I stopped.
There sat the huge, bulletproof, 1962 Daimler-Benz, the red eagle blazing on its side!
There was Ahmed the taxi driver.
There was Ters the driver.
BUT THEY WERE DEAD!
I had killed them with a bomb!
Thirst and repeated shocks had caught up with me!
Now I was not only having delusions, I was also being haunted by ghosts.
Ters gave his evil laugh.
I fainted dead away.
PART FIFTY-NINE
Chapter 4
When I came to it was dark.
I was lying on the fatal car bunk.
We were rolling along.
“He’s come to.” It was Madison’s voice. He was in back with me. Ahmed was in the front seat beside Ters who was driving.
By the dim light coming up from the bar I could see Madison opening a paper sack. He uncapped a Coke and handed it to me. I propped myself on an elbow and drank thirstily.
“This is a nice car,” said Madison. “A real antique. What’s the eagle on the side stand for?”
“Folly,” I said.
Ahmed in the front seat turned. “Glad you’re awake. Have you been ill?”
He must still be alive. I could hear his voice. “Shock,” I said.
“It’ll do that to you,” said Ahmed. “But you’ll have time to recuperate. It’s almost 225 miles to Afyon. Ters and I will take turns driving, we’ll take it easy and we’ll get you safely home.”
“Oh, no!” I cried. “Don’t take me there!”
“Why not?” said Ahmed. “Oh, by the way, I have a message from Doktor Muhammed Ataturk.”
I stiffened. He meant Prahd Bittlestiffender, the young cellologist I had kidnapped on Voltar. “Is he af
ter me, too?” I said.
“No, no,” said Ahmed. “Of course not. We’re all your friends, remember? The young doktor was the one who sent us out here to get you after Faht Bey turned your request down.”