Read Assignment - Manchurian Doll for Free Online

sounded briefly as they flashed through a village nestled against the dark mountainside. The night was black except for the occasional flicker of town lights along the railroad’s right-of-way.
    The Minayoru Tunnel was one of many bored through the crests of Japan’s rugged heights, and Durell and Tagashi had selected it because of the motor road that curved alongside near the entrance and then divided into several lesser highways in the mountains. It gave them a choice of routes for the last hour’s drive by car to reach Akijuro on the shores of the Japan Sea.
    Tagashi had arranged for the train crew, the car, the split-second timing to halt the train and kidnap Nadja Osmanovna.
    It was necessary to operate as quickly and quietly as possible, to avoiding attracting the attention of the local police.
    At precisely 10:31 the Blue Dove swung into the last upgrade to the Minayoru Tunnel. The train was slashing along at seventy miles an hour when Tagashi pulled the emergency cord. At that moment, Durell appeared at one end of the target coach and Eliot at the other. The brakes hissed, the whistle shrieked, the train lurched. The two plug-ugly guards had been standing idly, smoking, outside Osmanovna’s compartment. Tagashi’s two men came out of the next door, shouting angrily as if in a quarrel. No one else was in sight.
    Tagashi’s men were tough, bandy-legged professionals. Either of the two Russian guards looked big enough to break them in two, but as they turned their flat, solemn faces in startled suspicion, the Japanese sailed into them with deadly and efficient ferocity.
    There came the flat sound of a karate chop, a grunt, a thud. One of the big KGB men slammed to the corridor floor. The other was a bit faster—but it did not save him. The two Japanese swarmed over him with a series of lightning blows; the man’s jaw dropped, his eyes glazed, and he went over like a felled tree. Tagashi’s men stepped aside, bowed, panting, as Durell and Eliot Barnes met outside the compartment door.
    Eliot grinned widely. “After you, Cajun.”
    Durell tried the door. It was locked. He fished out a picklock, inserted it quickly, and slid the latch inside, just as the train came to a grinding halt on the curve outside the tunnel. Eliot followed him in and the two Japanese dragged the Soviet agents over the threshold and out of the corridor.
    “Nadja Osmanovna?” Durell asked quietly.
    The girl was on her feet, her eyes wide, her hands at her sides a little distance from her smoothly tailored hips. She looked at the two unconscious guards, then at Durell, and her pale brows lifted in arrogant inquiry. She showed no fear.
    “What does this mean, please?”
    Durell deliberately replied in English. “You will come with us quietly. We are friends. There is no reason to be afraid. But we must hurry.”
    She was alone in the compartment. There were two leather grips on the rack, and Eliot slid past Durell and fanned the place, picking up the girl’s leather handbag and searching it briefly, then giving it to her. He took down her thin raincoat from a hook. Nadja Osmanovna—she looked much younger than Durell had expected—followed Eliot’s movements with wide, intense interest that was almost clinical. “And just what do you think you are doing?”
    Durell said: “We’re taking you with us.”
    She shook her head in negation. She did not fill the description he’d been given. She had been called inhuman, a dedicated and efficient member of the KGB. He saw only a girl in her late twenties, with thick wheaten hair pulled primly back from a rounded, intelligent forehead. She had wide dark eyes with heavy lashes, a full and sensuous mouth that contradicted her apparent self-possession. She wore no makeup, and her severely tailored gray suit befitted a schoolmistress rather than the image of an Oriental Mata Hari. Her body was good. Her face was a golden tan, with broad high cheekbones and finely sculptured hollows. But her jaw