Read Assignment Afghan Dragon for Free Online

the marshes, was marked by a wide series of gullies, ravines and escarpments descending to the lower altitude of the Hamun Lake system. The wind that came through the van’s window was sharp and cold, blowing from the heights of the Mokran. In the moonlight, the land looked empty. Annie muttered something as the van jolted again. This was not the path he had taken earlier to find Fingal’s tortured body at the abandoned village. They had only gone about ten miles from Ur-Kandar. He turned to look at the girl. She half crouched, trying to keep her balance against the wild lurching of the vehicle as they ground downhill under Mort’s guidance. The girl’s eyes were a gray vacuum, sucking fight into their depths and giving nothing back. In the flickering light, he saw the two thin Chinese books he had found in Fingal’s room, among a scatter of other volumes he could not identify. The comers of the girl’s mouth trembled just a bit.
    “Did you kill Fingal, Annie?” he asked.
    Her voice was bland. “Was that his name?”
    “You should know. How long have you been with Charley and Mort?”
    “Long enough.”
    “Which one is better in bed?”
    Her voice was flat. “Fuck you,” she said.
    The VW van jolted to a halt. A cloud of dust and sand boiled up around them briefly. Anderson reached out for the door handle and backed out and away, holding his weapon level.
    “Come on out, Mr. CIA man.”
    Durell did not argue his knowledge. He slid out, facing Anderson, and saw that Mort had stopped the van on a wide ledge of reddish stone, beyond which was a deep drop into a ravine filled with tumbled boulders and the dry bed of a river that didn’t seem to have flowed for centuries. The bottom of the little canyon was relatively flat, perhaps forty feet down, with a trail suitable for goats zigzagging down from the ledge. The rim of the moon touched the opposite height of the valley. He heard the VW door slam as Mortimer got out from behind the wheel. The springs of the van creaked. The girl used the rear doors. Durell ignored the automatic weapon in Anderson’s hands and walked to the edge of the narrow rock ledge where Jones had stopped the VW.
    This part of the country had flourished ages ago, before the deserts crept in and the river dried up. He saw rains among the boulders, a few ancient columns of serpentine shape, half-shadowed, white against the black where the moon’s rays failed to reach. There was a Byzantine look to the ruins, although the village had never been much, and a crude dam downstream testified to the engineering capacities of the ancients who once flourished here.
    “What do you think of that?” Anderson asked.
    “Did Professor Berghetti dig here?”
    “Hell, no. We found it ourselves and kept it to ourselves. Our private dig, see? We’d take time off from the main search area, which was south of here. The old prof didn’t seem to mind when we disappeared.”
    “You never told him of this place?”
    “As I said, we kept it to ourselves. We hoped we’d find the old man’s treasure. Of course, we figured most of it was just a pipe dream, but you never can tell.” Anderson shrugged his shoulders. “Let’s go down. We’ll show you what we found.”
    “I’m not interested,” Durell said.
    “Sure, you are. That’s why you came here, isn’t it? You and Fingal. You found something, that’s a fact. And that’s why Fingal is dead, right?” Anderson’s eyes were lost in deep pockets of shadow. “Well, let’s go down, anyway.”
    “If you’re going to kill me, do it here,” Durell said. “We just want to show you what we found, and ask what you think of it.”
    Mortimer Jones had advanced to stare down from the rimrock at the rains in the valley below. A little smile played on his fat lips. The girl stood a little apart from them, watching and waiting.
    Durell said, “You’ll never get away with it. I figure Mortimer is your interrogator, right? He looks like he’d have fun in