Assignment Afghan Dragon Read Free Page B

sturdy hips and thighs.
    He saw that what she offered him were two small plastic packets containing a smidgin of white powder in each. Her smile coaxed him.
    “Maybe you’d enjoy it,” Annie said.
    “Do you like being a pusher?” he asked.
    “Oh, no. It’s nothing like that. This is just by way of apology. And we’ve got plenty.”
    Charley Anderson said, “Come on, Annie. He’s too straight.”
    “Well, I don’t want him angry at us. He’s a fellow American, after all.”
    “I’m not angry,” Durell said.
    He thought the urgency in the girl’s gray eyes was more than the situation called for, but he couldn’t fathom the expression there, and after a moment of staring at her, he put the Toyota into gear and drove away, leaving them and the multicolored van lost in a cloud of dust behind him.
3
    Ur-Kandar was a small village beside a tributary lake to Lake Hamun, with one or two modem houses of concrete block and tin roofs, and the rest of mud walls, clusters of Asian compounds along the marsh, briny shore. It was clear that the new dams on the Afghan side of the border, along the Helmand and Khash Rivers, were playing havoc with the water levels here in Iran. The main industry was the weaving of assirs , reed window shades, and round boats also made of reeds. The mountains of the Mokran, southward in Baluchistan, loomed with bristling peaks against the horizon. The area was a wide, interconnected series of lakes and ponds and marshlands, trapped between the sands of the Dasht-i-Lut and the mountains. Durell assumed that the far side of the lake, which looked deceptively inviting in the afterglow of the setting sun, was Afghanistan. There were telephone and power lines in Ur-Kandar, and he saw that there was a central post office and Phone Central near the assir factory. The Phone Central was marked with the dusty, flaking royal emblem of Iran. A metal Coca-Cola sign hung beside the emblem, marked with Farsi script.
    He saw no other cars along the dusty, twisting street where the houses presented their backs to the public, behind high compound walls. At the far end, where the lake shore began, a single mined Greek column thrust against the purpling sky, and Durell wondered if any of Alexander’s armies had marched through this place long, long ago.
    The smell of food cooked over charcoal fires pervaded the air, and he realized he was hungry. The police station stood next to the central telephone office, opposite a small faience-decorated mosque, and beyond that was a caravanserai, and old inn with a central courtyard and rickety wooden balconies overlooking the dirt square where several camels and sheep from a Baluchi caravan were already bedded down for the night. The Baluchi, tall proud men in black robes and black tents, watched their stately women preparing their meals over charcoal and camel dung fires. A melodic chanting in deep masculine voices came from somewhere along the lake shore, where several reed fishing boats were drawn up with masts canted against the darkening sky. Just next to the old Greek column, whose majesty still defied more than twenty centuries, was the serpentine minaret above the local mosque.
    “Sir? I think very much the accommodations may not be satisfactory—”
    The clerk’s voice came in Farsi. Durell answered in kind, aware that he had grown a bit rusty in its use since his last visit to Tehran.
    “A single room, please.”
    “Luckily, we are not crowded; the Baluchi use their own tents, but there are few amenities for ferengh i. And the room will cost one hundred rials—”
    “That’s too much. I’m not a stranger here.”
    “No, you speak our language quite well. We can arrange it, perhaps, since the true proprietor is away in Hormak on family business, may it be successful, Allah willing.”
    The clerk’s desk was simply two boards placed across two rusty oil drums. An old oil lantern, of the type once used on railways, provided the only light in the tiny