The Best Ye Breed

I PAUL KOSLOFF

Happily, it was a grim night. It was cloudy and there was a fine drizzle. Paul Kosloff didn’t know whether or not the grounds of the mansion were patrolled, either by men or by dogs, but, if they were, either man or beast was going to be shelter-conscious.

Most likely, the grounds were so patrolled. His target was known to be security-conscious almost to the point of phobia.

The iron picket fence surrounding the estate was his first hurdle. There were no trees near it and it was too high to climb easily. Besides, undoubtedly it was gimmick-wired at the top in such manner as to tip off the guards—either that or electrocute him. He was going to have to go through it.

The main gate was out of the question. He had seen the two men stationed there, one to each side in armored booths and undoubtedly armed to the molars. He continued to stroll along, on the other side of the street, following the fence. And, yes, behind the house was a smaller gate which was unattended.

Paul Kosloff crossed over to it. It had a heavy lock. He brought a scrambler from his pocket and activated it, then an electronic lock pick which he had gotten from the boys in the Rube Goldberg department. Its magnets sucked up to the lock, over the keyhole, and he slowly rotated it. When the lock reluctantly gave up its secrets, he pushed the gate open and slipped through. He relocked it, then deactivated the scrambler.

Thus far things were going better than he had hoped. Bending almost double, he scurried toward the rear of the mansion.

Luckily, this part of the estate was mostly gardens, complete with trees, complete with shrubs. He had a good chance of going undetected, certainly until he got reasonably near the house.

The dog, running hard, a brown streak with distended, slavering jaws, was upon him almost before he spotted it. A Doberman pinscher, recognizable even in this light by its long forelegs and wide hindquarters.

Paul Kosloff had worked out with war dogs while taking commando training long years before. He had just time to fling himself into position before the dog jumped. He spun sideward to the left and his right hand shot out and grabbed the right paw of the large smooth-coated terrier. He continued to swing mightily. The dog had time for only one loud yelp of confusion, before he smashed it into the trunk of a tree.

It fell to the ground, momentarily, at least, stunned. Paul Kosloff, to make sure, kicked it twice in the side of the head, immediately behind the clipped ears.

He wiped the back of his left hand over his forehead, finding a beading of cold sweat there. He shook his head and continued on his way toward the house.

A chink of light began to manifest itself, and a door was opening. He dodged behind the bole of a large tree, and flattened himself against it.

A voice called, “Roger! Is that you, boy?”

Paul Kosloff held his breath.

“Roger! What have you got, boy?”

A few moments later, there was a curse and Paul Kosloff could hear someone approaching.

The voice was closer this time. “Here boy, here boy. Damn it, what were you yelping about?”

As the footsteps came closer, Paul Kosloff slithered around the tree trunk, keeping it between himself and the other.

Completely on the other side, he bent double once again and headed for the house and the open door. It was all in the laps of the gods now. Was there anyone else inside? Behind him, he could still hear the guard, still calling the Doberman. The fat was going to be in the fire if he discovered the unconscious watchdog.

Paul Kosloff hurried into the interior of the large house and found himself in a small guardroom, furnished only with a single table and two chairs. On the walls were flac rifles, shotguns and laser beam pistols.

There was another door at the far side of the room. He got through it in a hurry and closed it behind him before speeding down the dimly lit hall beyond. Given luck, he wouldn’t run into any servants. Not at this time of the night. It was past two o’clock.

He came to a small elevator and looked at it for a moment, but then shook his head. The man he was seeking was noted as a nut on burglar alarms and related devices. He might even have something like an elevator rigged.

He found a flight of narrow circling stairs slightly beyond. A servant stairway by the looks of it. He started up. His destination was on the third floor. He wondered if there were any more guards.

At the third floor, he peered cautiously down the ornate hallway. And, yes, there was a guard before the door that was his goal.

The other’s back was turned. Paul Kosloff took a desperate chance and sped across the heavily carpeted hall to the room opposite. The chance paid off. The door was unlocked. He entered the room beyond quickly, closed the door behind him.

He fumbled at the wall for a light switch and found it. The plans of the mansion he had studied had been correct. It was a billiards room, the table in the exact center. He strode over to it, took up the eight ball and then returned to the door and flicked off the light.

He had to gamble now that the guard’s back was still turned. If it wasn’t, he’d had it. He opened the door a narrow crack and rolled the ball toward the circular staircase. It began to bounce down the stairs, at first slowly, then faster. It didn’t sound much like footsteps to him, but it would have to do.

He kept the door open, the slightest crack, and watched as the guard came hurrying up and hesitated, looking down the stairwell. The ball was well along by now and going faster. At this distance it sounded more like a person descending as fast as possible.

The guard suddenly flicked his hand inside his coat to emerge with a laser pistol, and began hurrying down.

Paul Kosloff gave him a few moments, then left his hiding place and hustled along the hall. He gently tried the doorknob of the room that was his destination. It wasn’t locked. He pulled a comb from his pocket, drew it through his hair a couple of times and returned it. He straightened his suit, moistened dry lips, then opened the door and walked through, nonchalantly.

The man reclining on the bed, reading, looked up at him.

“Paul Kosloff?” he said.

“Well, I’m not the ghost of Spiro Agnew,” Paul Kosloff said, closing the door behind him. “What in the hell is this all about?”

“How did you get in without detection?”

“I didn’t completely. You’ve either got a dead dog or one with a whale of a headache out in your garden. Again, what’s this all about?” Kosloff pulled up a chair without invitation and sat down.

“A double motive,” the man in the bed said. “First, I wanted to find out whether you’re as good as you’re supposed to be as an espionage-counter-espionage agent. And, second, I wanted to give you an assignment without anyone, anyone at all, even knowing we’ve ever met. Do you know who I am?”

“You’re the head of what some of us field men call the Commission of Dirty Tricks of the State Department, often working hand in glove with the CIA.”

The other looked at him. “Very few people know of me. In my section, we need publicity like a broken leg.”

Paul Kosloff said evenly, “Yes, I know. I was just a child when the Bay of Pigs took place, but there have been other farces since. Publicity doesn’t help.”

The man in the bed was obviously not pleased at that. He said, “Kosloff, do you consider yourself a patriotic American?”

The cloak-and-dagger operative said reasonably, “How could I be? When a special bill was brought before Congress to grant me citizenship, it was decided my odor was too high and it was turned down. Let’s face reality. I’m persona non grata everywhere, including the country of my birth—Russia—where they took a dim view of my ‘defecting’ even though I was a child in arms at the time and all the rest of my family had been liquidated in the purges. Relatives smuggled me out over the Finnish border and finally got me here to America.”

The commissioner said, “What I should have said was, ‘Are you basically pro-American or anti-Communist?’ ”

The international troubleshooter took him in. “I thought they meant the same thing.”

“Not necessarily.”

Paul Kosloff was getting tired of this routine. He said, “All right. I’ve been ordered to contact you secretly. What do you want me to do?”

“Stop a revolution.”

“That’s my specialty. That’s what you people have been having me do for… as long as I can remember. Why the buildup? Do I have to assassinate some present-day Trotsky or Mao, or what?”

“The revolution is to take place, or is taking place, in North Africa, all of North Africa, but we are particularly concerned with Algeria, Tunisia and Libya.”

Paul Kosloff stared at him before saying, “They’ve already got Marxist governments there. Perhaps not totally commie, but awfully close to it.”

“That’s what I’ve been building up to. The revolution we’re talking about is against the socialist-communist-anarchist, call them what you will, governments in North Africa. It would also involve the Sudan, which considers itself socialist, and Mauretania, also supposedly left wing. A certain El Hassan and his followers wish to overthrow them all, not to speak of the right-wing military dictatorships to the south.”

“Why not let him?” Paul Kosloff growled.

“His ultimate aim is to unite all of Africa north of the Congo.”

The troubleshooter pursed his lips in a silent whistle. “It’d be a neat trick to pull off but I still say, why not let him? If those first countries you named aren’t commie today, they will be tomorrow.”

“Because if we do, it’s one more nail in the coffin of our economy.”

Paul Kosloff waited in silence.

The other said impatiently, “I assume that you haven’t read a book published way back in the 1950s by Vance Packard, a muckraker of the time, entitled The Waste Makers. In it, he points out that although the population of America was but a small fraction of the world’s, the United States economy was using up some fifty percent of the Earth’s resources. He also pointed out that ten years before the United States had been the largest exporter of copper in the world, but was now the largest importer. His book was ignored and all efforts were continued to raise the gross national product year after year. One by one we lost self-sufficiency in almost every raw material we needed for our industry.”

“What’s all this got to do with it?” Kosloff said.

“We need North Africa’s oil, her nickel, copper, iron, chromium, phosphates. We need them badly. The area is comparatively untouched, so far as raw materials are concerned. Practically nothing save oil has been exploited to date. We have reached accomodation with the present regimes in these leftist nations and purchase almost everything they produce and have either sent in, or have made arrangements to send in, further development teams to begin the exploitation of still more of their resources.”

“Well, why couldn’t you do the same with this El Hassan?”

The other nodded, but said impatiently, “Because that’s one of the strongest planks in his revolutionary platform. He contends that the non-developed countries with raw materials, especially North Africa, are being robbed by the industrialized countries such as the United States of the Americas, Common Europe and Japan. He wishes to shove prices for raw materials sky high.”

“Can he do it?”

“If he wins his revolt, he probably can, and, if he does, so will the other nondeveloped countries. The Arab oil cartel was an early example of what can be done in that field. Eventually, it could mean collapse of the economies of the developed nations.”

“I see. Who is this mysterious El Hassan? I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of him.”

“You haven’t!” The other was surprised. “Where have you been these past few weeks? He’s come on the scene like a whirling dervish in a revolving door.”

Paul Kosloff took him in. “I’ve been back in the boondocks in South America, trying to track down a present-day Ché Guevara. It turned out that he was a myth and didn’t exist. There weren’t any papers in the area. But even if I’d been in one of the larger cities, I doubt if I would have heard about this El Hassan. Censorship is all but universal and one of the great taboos in running stories telling about revolutionary movements abroad. They don’t want to let the people know that revolutions are possible—anywhere.”

His superior leaned back. “Very well, El Hassan isn’t as mysterious as all that. We have a very complete dossier on him. In actuality, he’s an American.”

“An American!”

“That is correct. His name is Homer Crawford and he took his doctorate in sociology at the University of Michigan. He’s an American black who was given a position with the Sahara Division of the African Development Project of the Reunited Nations. He and his team, also largely American blacks, had the job of speeding up the modernization of North Africa. In their case, largely in the Western Sahara. Their task was to break down bottlenecks. Break down tribal lines. Talk the desert peoples into going to the new schools, taking jobs with the new irrigation projects, building the new dams, drilling the new oil wells, opening up the new mines, getting out from under their traditional religious taboos.”

“And?…”

“His team, thinking things weren’t going fast enough, got together with other organizations that were attempting to accomplish much the same thing. The Africa for Africans Association, a private, nonprofit outfit working out of New York; Great Britain’s African Department, though they largely work further south; the French Community’s African Affairs sector; and various others. All of these groups consist of members with African racial backgrounds, blacks who were born and educated abroad but have returned to the continent of their racial heritage to goose it forward into the modern world.”

Paul Kosloff said unhappily, “Sounds pretty damned praiseworthy to me.”

“Ummm,” the other looked down at a paper he had on the bed. “Unfortunately, Crawford and his close intimates evidently came to the conclusion that those people weren’t going to be goosed unless stronger measures were taken. Most of them are tribesmen with a ritual-taboo social system. At that stage of development, Crawford seemed to think, they needed a hero to follow, a charismic hero to lead them into the promised land and to ruthlessly break down all barriers that stood in the way. He modestly volunteered for the job.”

“And?…”

“His forces are sweeping North Africa. It would seem that the area was rotten-ripe for such a development. The old tribes and clans were going under with the coming of the new roads, the airlines, the new industries. What does a tribe of, say, Tuaghi—that’s plural of Tuareg—that formerly conducted caravans of camels across the Sahara, do when roads are pushed through their areas and trucks by the thousands start speeding over them? What do bands of former brigands do, in the face of the new weapons of the white man? What do clans of Tedas, who formerly herded goats, do, when the officials of the Sahara Afforestation Project buy up their animals and shoot them? Goats are the most destructive animals in the desert, so far as trees are concerned. They prefer the bark of young trees to grass. What do former Heratin serf farmers do, familiar only with their primitive agricultural methods, when the new solar-powered water wells go in and the oases are expanded a hundred fold, so that modern mechanized methods can be utilized?”

“So El Hassan is succeeding?”

“Fantastically. He was, the other day, recognized the head of state of all North Africa, by India. Who’ll follow her example, God only knows.”

“India? Why?”

“Because she’s smart enough to jump on the bandwagon. North Africa is poor in textiles. United, the market would consist of tens of millions. India is desperate to export her cotton textiles.”

Paul Kosloff took in a deep breath.

He said, “So it looks as though El Hassan might make it. Where do I come in?”

His superior looked him straight in the eye. “You’ve been called the Cold War’s Lawrence of Arabia. You’re our most dependable field man in these cloak-and-dagger affairs. We want El Hassan stopped by fair means or foul.”

Paul Kosloff looked at him cynically. “So who are you going to send in to try the fair means?”