Clive Cussler - The Assassin

“Look out!”

Suddenly Isaac was roaring in her ear, “Down! Down! Get down!”

An immense boulder, triple the size of the others, flew at the auto.

Isaac shoved Edna down. It cleared their heads by inches and hit the guard wall that stood between the edge of the road and a sheer drop. It smashed through the wall, scattering stones, and tumbled into the ravine. Shouts of triumph from the top of the slope announced another rolling at them.

“ IB was both right and wrong last night,” Edna Matters typed in the morning.

The air was bitter cold. A strong wind was blowing and the sky was full of dust clouds. Wish Clarke sat behind the Maxim gun. He was covering the ridge at the top of the slope. Isaac Bell was starting to climb it with field glasses around his neck and a revolver in his hand. He was hoping to spot Tiflis and a route on which they could make a run for the capital city.

Thanks to taking cover under an overhang of rock. WC and Envoy Stone and sister Nellie were not flattened by giant boulders. IB and I were also extremely lucky where we shivered all the long, cold night. But the last boulder that thundered down the hill before it was too dark for our enemies to aim another smashed us dead center.

We are down to two Peerlesses. We managed to rescue some of the water before the wreck fell into the ravine and was swept downstream in a furious torrent. But we could save none of the tinned food and none of the extra gasoline, which presents a serious difficulty as we very likely do not have enough gasoline left to reach Tiflis even though we believe it is close, just over the hills that we somehow got on the wrong side of when we got lost yesterday.

Looking on the bright side, as Detective WC is wont to say, the renegade Cossacks, or Social Democrat revolutionaries, appear to have been thoroughly routed. Though whether that is true, we don’t really know, as the night had turned dark as a coal mine by the time the boulders stopped hurtling and the shooting had stopped. I am absolutely certain that this reporter is not the first from the civilized world to say, ‘Thank God for the Maxim gun.’

Additional credit goes to IB, WC, and sister Nellie, who had refused to return Envoy Stone’s pistol. As we prepared to get under way in our remaining two autos, IB read over my shoulder and demanded edits. He asked me to write the following, which embarrasses me in its immodesty. He demanded I write that EMH was a dependable belt feeder who allowed him to employ our Maxim gun to great advantage.

IB then demanded I change the word ‘dependable’ to ‘superlative.’ Everyone’s an editor. But to be fair, poor Isaac is reeling on his feet.

My sister Nellie has fallen in love with him.

Edna Matters stared at the page.

Who had written that? If a typewriter could blurt, the machine had blurted it out.

She glanced over her shoulder. Isaac had started up the slope. Suddenly he stopped. Something up the road had caught his attention. She raised her fingers to the keys and typed slowly.

Nellie is not the easiest person to read. In fact, she is often a cipher, a blank slate behind her smile. But in this case, I can see that she has fallen hard for IB.

Which creates quite a quandary as I have, too. Starting the night in New York he helped me through my other quandary. Which I believe means I fell first… However, being first on line won’t help me one bit. My dear Isaac is falling for her. He doesn’t know it yet. But I can tell. I wouldn’t call it love. But he is fascinated and, being a man, probably doesn’t know the difference—

She stopped typing and cocked her ear to listen. Someone was shouting down the slope in broken English.

“They’re waving a white flag,” Isaac Bell called down to Wish Clarke.

It looked like a dirty shirt tied by its sleeve to a rifle. The man waving stepped warily into view and Isaac Bell immediately recognized the black, wavy pompadour hair. It was Josef the Georgian chauffeur he had befriended in Baku. The one that the other chauffeurs claimed was an informer for the secret police.

“What’s he yelling?” asked Wish.

Isaac Bell strained his keen hearing to its utmost and heard, “You give gun. We let go.”

He ran down the slope and joined Wish in the lead auto. “They want our Maxim.”

“I would, too, in their position,” said Wish.

“They’re welcome to it,” said Bell.

“What?”

“We’ll trade it for a cease-fire and directions to Tiflis.”

“They’ll kill us,” said Rockefeller.

“That thought occurred to me,” said Bell. He looked at Wish.

Wish said, “Isaac, why don’t you talk to him? I’ll get the gun ready to travel.”

Bell cupped his hands and shouted very slowly and clearly, “Tell your friends to come out where we can see them. All of them.”

Josef shouted over his shoulder.

Twelve men started down the slope. They were dressed in workmen’s clothes and they looked very sure of themselves. Bell counted only three rifles. The rest carried pistols. They descended to the road and started toward the autos, fanning out and covering one another with military discipline.

“That’s close enough,” Bell called, stopping them at fifty feet.

“You act suspicious,” said Josef.

“I don’t like people who roll boulders at me.”

“Not us. Cossacks. We chase them.”

“So did we,” said Bell. From what he had seen, heavily armed Cossacks were not easily chased. If what the chauffeurs in the Hotel de L’Europe’s stables told him was true, then an Okhrana informer could arrange for the Cossacks to be called off or driven off by loyal troops if they were renegades. How had Josef found them here in the middle of nowhere? How had he known about the machine gun?

“Who are you, Josef? Who are these men?”

“Social Democrats.”

“Aren’t they illegal?”

Josef flashed his cheerful smile. “Reason we are wanting gun.”

“Are you their leader?”

“No, no, no. They ask me translating.”

“But you just said ‘we.’”

“Mistaking translating.”

“Translate this: Guide us to a road to Tiflis. When we see the town, the gun is yours.”

“Tiflis no safe. Much unrest.”

“Pogromy?”

“Politicals. General Prince Amilakhvari dead. Hateful Russian. Oppressing all Caucasia. Russians bringing for priests to pray on. People protest. Social Democrats protest. Police shooting Social Democrats.”

“You want our gun to fight the police.”

Josef’s smile disappeared. “Not your business.”

“If he’s a translator,” muttered John D. Rockefeller, “I’m my old maid aunt Olymphia.”

The Social Democrat fighters led the way on foot. Wish Clarke covered them with the Maxim gun. Bell drove his Peerless. Rockefeller, Edna, and Nellie trailed in the second car. The wind continued high, buffeting them and blowing dust, and the sun grew hot.

They climbed a steep road up a mountain. When they finally reached a broad plateau — an open brown steppe bare of vegetation and baked brown by the sun — their guides met up with a pair of horse-drawn phaetons. The men squeezed into the wagons and started across the flatter ground on a dusty track. After about four miles there were signs of recent roadwork, surveyors’ stakes, and the cutting of streets as if the area was to be developed.

Quite suddenly the plateau ended at the rim of a cliff.

Tiflis lay below them, one thousand feet straight down.