Slowly, his smile faded under the expression of disgust on my face. “Mr. Victor, you don't look very grateful that I have rescued you.”
“Rescued me from what?" I asked, looking at the hectic turmoil still going on around us.
"From your captor." He indicated what was left of the sheikh.
"1 wasn't his prisoner."
“You weren't? But I thought-—"
“That's your trouble, Potemchenko, you thought! You really shouldn't think! Every time you do, you bump someone off. And you have a positive talent for killing the wrong people! First Ben-Kavir, who was helping me, and Basra, that poor innocent cab driver. Then Dr. Suno Wong, the Red Chinese scientist, just at the time when he might have led to the recovery of Anna Kirkov. And now Sheikh el Atassi, without whose help I would never have picked up her trail again. You’re supposed to be cooperating with me, Potemchenko, not making a hobby out of slaughtering the very people who are most useful to me. If Moscow knew how you were fouling me up, it would be good-bye Potemchenko And if you don’t stay out of my way, I'm liable to tell them. So get off my back, Potemchenko! And stay off!"
“You dare to talk to me like that, Yankee pig! I am not afraid of you! When Moscow learns how right I am in judging you an imperialist double agent, they will reward me for keeping you under surveillance!" Still, my words must have worried him more than his reply indicated. After he'd spit his answer out, he dropped to his belly and crawled back towards the shelter of his car. Watching his snakelike progress, I could see why we hadn't spotted him coming before. His brown suit merged into the earth and by the time he was a few feet away he was invisible.
But the evening clothes of Mustafa Ben Narouz provided no such camouflage. Because they showed up so well, I spotted him immediately as he crawled off at an angle from Potemchenko’s path. He had picked his time well, and in all the Moslem-Sikh-Chinese-Pakistani confusion, nobody noticed him trying to make his escape except me. I opened the door of the car, crawled over Sheikh el Atassi’s corpse, and inched my way along the ground after Ben Narouz.
It soon became obvious that he was trying to reach the tank-carrier parked down the road. He pursued a circular route, skirting the edges of the battle, and I followed about fifty feet behind him. When he reached the road he bolted for the truck and I trotted behind him, keeping to the shadows.
Ben Narouz ran past the tailgate and pulled himself into the cab alongside the driver. I took a chance that the rear of the van was empty and raced up the tail-ramp to hide in the darkest comer I could find. The chance paid off. There was no one there. I could hear the muffled voices of Ben Narouz and the driver through the partition separating the van from the cab.
I couldn't make out what they were saying, but I guessed from the tones of their voices that the Egyptian was ordering the Chinese driver to take off and that the driver wanted to wait until the tank fought free of the Pakistani cavalry and returned. Ben Narouz’s authority must have won out, because after a short while the driver climbed out of the cab to come around back to flip the tailgate ramp inside the truck and close the doors on it. A moment later, the tank-carrier took off up the road with a roar.
There was a peephole slot in the metal tail-doors, and I made use of it. As we shot past where the battle was still raging, the elements of a surrealist Keystone Cops chase scene began falling into line. First the tank itself, almost wistfully, fled from the Pakistanis and chased after the carrier like a fledgling bird trying to catch up with a mobile nest. Behind the tank came the horsemen, their sabres bouncing uselessly off the armor, charging again and again in a frenzy of frustration born of their obsolescence in these days of mechanized warfare. Like- wise, many of them were frustrated in their attempts to whip their horses to a fast enough gallop to catch the now speeding carrier. Then, coming in at an angle, two cars—Potemchenko's, and the one being used by Alan Foster and Vickie Winters—bypassed the tank and the horsemen to pull onto the road and chase after the speeding carrier. The two cars were well-matched, maintaining a fast-paced race, side-by-side, while the occupants lobbed hot lead from auto to auto. The road curved sharply and I couldn't see any more until another curve showed me the Pakistani cavalry cutting across the fields in an evident attempt to intercept the tank-carrier. A. moment later I saw the objective from which they were trying to cut off Ben Narouz.
It was a large military transport plane, a reconverted bomber, a four-motor job of the type used by the Red Chinese in the Korean War before the Russkys started supplying them with jets. We screeched to a halt beside it just before the Pakistanis converged on the plane. Ben Narouz and the driver scuttled up a ramp and through the plane's door. A moment later the ramp was shoved away and the door closed and locked.
The Pakistanis were galloping toward the front of the plane, but were still a short distance away. I let myself out of the truck and scuttled under the mid-section of the plane for cover. I was in luck. They must have been loading the plane when all the excitement started. The bomb-bay doors were still open. As I was pulling myself up and through them, I saw the two cars pull up, one a short distance behind the other, and vague figures started running from them.
Inside the plane's belly, I found a hiding place between two crates and settled myself. There was the sound of a machine gun chattering from up front. A moment later there was the cough of a motor as the pilot started revving the engines. A female shadow blocked the dim light from the bomb-bay opening and a moment later a male shadow pulled itself up alongside it. They disappeared in the darkness of the interior as rifle slugs began bouncing off the fuselage near where I was hiding. A third figure followed them after a while, poised in a silhouetted crouch for a moment and then also vanished into the blackness. Then a hand reached up through the bomb-bay, followed by an arm covered with the sleeve of a Pakistan uniform. But before the soldier could pull himself inside, an auxiliary motor whirred and the bomb-bay doors started to snap shut. He dropped to the ground before his arm could be pinched off by them.
Now it was pitch-black inside the plane. The sounds of battle lasted a while, but subsided soon after the plane began to move. They abated even more, and finally dropped out of earshot as the plane rose from the ground and gained altitude.
"You okay, Vickie?” I could barely hear the whisper over the noise of the engines.
“I'm all right," answered the voice of Victoria Winters. "But you'd better light a match, Alan. We don't know how soon this plane is going to land and we'd better find ourselves a good hiding place and try to figure a way of getting out without being seen."
A cigarette lighter illuminated the face of Alan Foster, the C.I.A. agent, and then, as he raised it higher, Vickie’s face as well. “I suppose you're right," he said. “But you know, if we're headed for China, we're as good as dead now." So he'd spotted that Chinese tank for what it was, too; it figured. “Anyway, I'm not even too sure what the hell we're doing here. I think we've dived right out of the Russian frying pan into the Chinese fire."
“We had no choice," said Vickie. “It all happened too fast. There was no time to discuss the pros and cons. If we didn't want to lose Steve Victor, we had to get on this plane before it took off."
“I don't know. We aren't even sure that he’s on. board."