Assignment - Mara Tirana by Edward S. Aarons Page A

impulse was to go after her, get her out of Kopa’s hands. He knew the sort of methods a man like Kopa might use on Deirdre—it was only too evident in the dossier he had read. Kopa could destroy her in many subtle ways, and the thought of Deirdre in his hands was almost intolerable. He had to get her free, back home, and safe.
    And he had to go after Stepanic, too.
    The choice between his job and Deirdre was sharp and clear. There was no way to do both.
    He had to abandon one or the other.

CHAPTER VII
    The rain had stopped, and now a mist hung low over the dark, smoothly flowing waters of the Danube. The mist was a help. A speedboat, hidden in the reeds along the shore a short distance from the boathouse was Gija’s immediate destination. Durell walked ahead of him with Mara, not quite sure if he, too, was a prisoner. The immediate choice of action was taken from him by Gija’s gun.
    There was no sign of Otto Hoffner.
    “You two sit in the middle,” Gija said softly. “Use the oars. And for your life, don’t make any noise.”
    They pushed away from the bank and immediately felt the thrust of the dark, deep current going downstream. Durell, after the blonde girl’s first awkward efforts, took both oars. He could not see where they were going in the mist, but Gija had a riverman’s sixth sense of direction. In a few minutes the shore was out of sight, and they were surrounded only by the lapping black water, the curling fog, and the dim sounds of river traffic downstream.
    The girl was shivering. Durell could feel it in her shoulder as she sat beside him and pressed against him.
    “Are you all right?” he asked softly.
    “Yes. No. I feel sick. My head hurts.”
    “You weren’t hit very hard.”
    “I don’t want to go back. Please. Make him put me ashore again. I’ll be killed, shot, if Kopa gets his hands on me again.”
    “What about Mihály, your brother? Or was all that just a fancy fairy tale to get my sympathy?”
    She looked at him blankly as he pulled on the oars. “No, no. It was all the truth. Mihály is abandoned now. I can only hope and pray they will do nothing to him. He is only a boy. An innocent. He knows nothing of what they’ve made me do, to keep him safe. He knows nothing of the threats Kopa made to me, concerning him.”
    “Be quietl” Gija snapped.
    Durell looked up at the bargeman. Gija sat tensely in the stem, a hand on the tiller, just beyond the engine housing. He was studying the opposite river bank, lost in the shrouding mist. A glow of intense bright light made iridescent halos through the fog, and the snarl of the patrol boat seemed to come from all directions, growing imminently louder.
    “Stop rowing,” Gija whispered. “For the love of God—”
    They drifted in milky-white silence, unbroken except for the lap of current against the boat’s sides. Mara sat tensely, her shoulders straight, her face turning this way and that as if she could see through the night gloom. The glare of the patrol boat’s searchlight seemed to be coming from upriver, astern. Then the roar of its motor seemed to shake the wet atmosphere as it started again. It seemed as if the patrol was bearing straight down upon them.
    Each droplet of fog hanging in the air seemed to catch the searchlight’s brilliance. In the glare, Durell saw Gija’s face go tense. They drifted on. The motor screamed invisibly toward them. The brightness increased. . . .
    And then, miraculously, it went by, and they were left rocking heavily in the wash of the enemy’s wake.
    “Go on rowing,” Gija said.
    The waterfront of Bratislava was a busy place, a key port for the Danube traffic that went a thousand miles downstream, through Hungary and Yugoslavia and the Iron Gates into Rumania and the Black Sea ocean ports. The fog was cut somewhat by the glare of lights on the docks and factories, both munitions and machinery works, concentrated along the waterfront. Once around the bend in the river between the mountain