Assignment Afghan Dragon by Unknown Author

beyond the village ruins, it was just a short sprint to the tumbled boulders in the neck of the gorge. He kept a grip on the girl’s hand when he ran for it. Two shots racketed up and down the canyon. The bullets went wide. In another few moments they were across the riverbed, clambering up the steep slope to the level where the van was parked. They were exposed up here against the starlight, but Zhirnov apparently did not spot them. Or perhaps he was content to let Durell go, thinking that with the girl planted at his side, he might gain his objectives more easily. Durell did not trust Anya in any way. Her behavior seemed sincere, but there was a competent toughness underlying her words and her actions.
    It took five minutes to work their way back to the ledge where the van was parked. In that time, there was no sound or movement from the ruins below. The girl slid quickly in beside the driver’s seat; he took the wheel himself.
    When the engine turned over, the mechanical roar seemed to fill sky and earth. He was sure that Zhirnov would begin to fire at them in his frustration.
    But nothing happened. The man had disappeared. Or given up. Or was content that Anya was with him.
    He began to feel his aches and bruises from the fall down the canyon side as he backed the van carefully up toward the road above. Before this business was over, he knew there would be another time and another place when he would meet Pigam Zhirnov again. He would settle the score for Fingal when that happened.
6
    She said her name was Anya Lubidovna Talinova. She seated herself in the single chair in DureU’s tiny room in the provincial hotel and sat back, her arms stiffly bent, pushing her palms against the seat on either side of her hips. Her manner was defensive. Her eyes were big, watching him as if he were some strange beast about to devour her. He wondered what sort of tales she might have been told about Americans. She did not express any inner guilt for helping him to escape from her two fellow agents. Her dark eyes were fathomless as she watched Durell’s every move as he checked out the room.
    “We’ll have to leave,” he said. “Very soon. Zhirnov knows of this place, so it’s no longer safe for you.”
    “For me?” she asked.
    “He will consider you a traitor, perhaps a defector. You betrayed him back there by helping me to get away. What else could he think? Your career with the KGB is finished, Anya. By the way, what is your rank?” “Lieutenant-Colonel,” she said.
    He tried to picture her in a military uniform, complete with shoulder boards and medals. “So young?”
    “I’ve done good work for my country.” Her chin was proud. “I have earned my promotions.”
    “But you wifi be suspect from this moment on,” Durell pointed out. “Didn’t you consider that, when you chose to help me?”
    “Yes, I thought of it.”
    “Then why did you do it?”
    “It was Jones and Anderson—Zhirnov—who were suspect in my mind, for what they were doing, not I.”
    “What were they up to? What was your team supposed to do?”
    She was silent for a moment. Durell moved quietly around the room, checked his bag, then stepped out through the slatted doors to the wooden balcony that ran around three sides of the inner courtyard of the caravanserai. The night air smelled of the briny lake and the reed swamps all about. It felt heavy and warm and sticky in his lungs. The moon was down. When he looked at his watch, he saw it was only an hour before dawn. He could not see his Toyota Land Cruiser, which had been parked in an alcove to the right of the main courtyard gate. The Baluchi caravan men and their women who had camped inside the court all seemed to be asleep. Their charcoal-cooking fires were faint glowing embers, scattered here and there between the recumbent forms. One of the camels snored, loudly and persistently. The wind blew smoke upward from the charcoal fires, across the wooden-railed balcony. There were no lights in