Assignment - Ankara by Edward S. Aarons Read Free Book Online

his thrusts, and he became impotent, and in his frustration he screamed to the men to beat her. But first she managed to kick and claw at Ali Khalil’s groin and injured his sex to the point where he went screaming into the trees, doubled over.
    Afterward she lay placid and endured it all with an animal vacuity. But she could not fight against all of them, and when the Arabs threw themselves lustily upon her, she no longer resisted. By holding herself detached from the intense pain and humiliation, she saved her reason that night under the olive trees. They debased her again and again, in curious ways, to satisfy their lusts. It seemed to go on endlessly, a nightmare of rape and defilement, of degeneracies she had only vaguely heard about. And the men were urged on again and again by Ali Khalil, who sat on the ground hugging himself, and the diamonds on his hands flashed and winked under the cold stars.
    Later, when she was abandoned in the stark dawn of the red and yellow barren hills, she tried to walk back to the city in her torn clothes.
    That was when John found her.
    He had been to the monastery nearby at Bir-el-Echem, for the purchase of his precious, ancient books in Aramaic, and he stopped his car and took her to his shabby little house he had rented on the outskirts of Beirut. She was incoherent, and for several days she wasn’t sure where she was or what was happening to her as he bathed her and nursed her and got a native doctor to attend to her injuries. He made no complaint to the police. Nor did she. He arranged for her job at the night club to be filled by someone else, without fuss or questions asked. He was just a vague, impersonal, rather waspish man in a clerical collar, who fed her and helped her to bathe as if she were a child, and he talked to her about the States and about the precious books he wanted to get back to Philadelphia, to the mission library, in the States.
    He was a strange man, not particularly godly, she thought later. He drank too much, and there was a wild intensity in his manner that sometimes frightened her. But he was kind to her. And she needed kindness then.
    For hours he worked on the musty, leather-bound books and scrolls he had gotten from the monks at Bir-el-Echem, usually when she was sleeping. And sometimes he was gone for a day, or a night, and he did not tell her where he went or why. He did no actual missionary work that she could see. But he told her his work was finished in Lebanon and that he was going home to the States, and if he could get the manuscripts out of the country without their being seized by the Arab authorities, his work would be a success.
    She agreed to help him, by posing as his daughter, and he got her a new passport and photograph and visa, and together they slipped safely across the Turkish border and into the Caucasus Mountains. When they reached Karagh, he insisted he had to meet someone there, and they waited four days, while he went about his business. She did not question him. And then the earthquakes had come, imperiling the whole venture. . . .
    She looked up suddenly now, in the Turkish hut, her memories abruptly halted as John came toward her. In the dim light, he looked gaunt and somehow dangerous, his pale eyes absorbing her. She knew that he had almost a psychotic fear that someone was trying to steal his medieval manuscripts, and his obsession had grown worse, since the earthquakes had trapped them here.
    He was looking at her differently, somehow, and she realized, with a small shock, that he was looking at her figure in a way he had never looked at her before. She hadn’t thought of him as a man, at least not that way. Perhaps it was his clerical collar, or the curious tenderness he had shown her when he led her back to health in the week after the incident with Ali Khalil. She knew her body was magnificent, all tans and creams, smooth and firm and vibrant, with bold breasts and a narrow waist and womanly hips. Perhaps he hadn’t