The Assignment

Read The Assignment for Free Online

Book: Read The Assignment for Free Online
Authors: Per Wahlöö
Tags: Fiction, General, Suspense, Thrillers, Mystery & Detective
and looked at the clock.
    “I must be going now, I suppose, Miguel. I can hear the helicopter.”
    “Are you armed?”
    “Yes.”
    “What with?”
    “An army revolver.”
    “Where is it?”
    “In my case.”
    “Wrong place, Manuel, wrong place. Here! Here!”
    He slapped the left side of his chest with the flat of his hand.
    “You’ve always been so dramatic, Miguel. Are you quite certain that you’re not exaggerating the risks?”
    “No! No! I know I’m not exaggerating. They’re mad. They’re out of their minds. They’ll try to kill you, if only for fun, or to be able to say someone else did it.”
    “Who?”
    “Everyone. Anyone. Although no one here or anywhere else in the country thinks about it or even knows about it, they have been at war down there for eighteen months. Hard, bloody, ruthless war. Both sides are in despair, exhausted, finished, but neither will give way an inch. For fifty years those people have been pawns in the chess game of international politics. Now the pawns have gone mad. And still there are people who go on playing with them.”
    Ten minutes later the helicopter rose, humming straight up into the sky, wrapped in its own roaring swirl of air. Through the segmented plexiglass Manuel Ortega saw the white police cars break away and drive off. Only Uribarri remained on the concrete apron. He stood there, his feet apart and two fingers on the brim of his hat, quite still. He swiftly became smaller. Soon he vanished from sight.
    Manuel Ortega wiped the sweat from his brow and looked at the woman sitting beside him with her book open on her knee.
    “What fearful heat,” he said.
    “Wait till we get there,” she said without looking up. “We’ll have much more reason to complain then.”

“There’s no proper airfield here,” said the pilot, staring downward.
    The country below them was without contours. It looked as if the sun had not only scorched all life out of it but also reshaped the whole of the surface of the earth into a hard rugged crust of stones and soil, yellow-brown flecked with gray.
    “There is in fact nowhere in the whole province where one can land. The army fixed up a landing strip just south of the town for its own small observation planes. But even there it’s very dangerous to try to land a plane.”
    Manuel Ortega yawned. He had slept for a while and had just woken up. The woman at his side appeared calm and composed. She was wearing dark sunglasses and was sitting with her elbow on her knee and her chin supported by her hand. Her fingers were long and thin. She was looking toward the ground.
    “They say it’s because of the heat,” said the pilot. “The asphalt melts, and when they tried using concrete, the blocks swelled up and broke. Strangely enough, the nights can sometimes be very cold.”
    Manuel Ortega blinked and shook his head. But he still could not focus his eyes to get a clear picture of the desolate landscape below.
    “You’ll soon see for yourself. The provincial capital is just behind that ridge. We’ll be there in ten minutes.”
    The helicopter rose a little to climb over the ridge with acomfortable margin. The peculiar sun haze made judging distances hazardous.
    All visual observations must be very uncertain, thought Manuel Ortega.
    He had not even seen the mountain himself until the pilot pointed it out to him. Now they flew over it. He saw ragged, crumbling chunks of stone and scrubby bushes and suddenly a road with carts and a few gray huts. Then the first people, a great number of figures in straw hats and white clothes. They were walking in a long file with bent heads and woven baskets on their shoulders. More figures, a swarm of them, a great open gash and tracks and dark entrances into the mountain. More huts, a smelting works, tall and gray and sooty, and a plume of poisonous purple-yellow smoke which shot out of the tallest chimney and at once spread itself and sank like a membrane toward the ground.
    “The manganese

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