Assignment - Sulu Sea (13 page)
Read Assignment - Sulu Sea Online
Authors: Edward S. Aarons
Ch’ing smiled at Durell’s gun, and spoke very softly. “What
would happen if it became known that an important agent of the American CIA had
arrived here in Pandakan at this critical time? The news would echo around the
world like a thunderclap and bring charges of interference. Such charges have
been made before, and may be made again, eh? This time, however, you may lose
all the trust and respect you may have won in this part of the globe. Do you
understand me?”
“You know a great deal about me.”
“I have my sources of information,” Ch’ing said.
“Is Tommy Lee one of them?”
“Yes, but only one.” The grotesque, shaven head bobbed back
and forth briefly. “And it is well known that units of your famous
Seventh Fleet are venturing quite close to our island waters. It makes the
United Nations commissioners uneasy. It makes those who claim hegemony over
these islands even more uneasy. Now you are here. If you should be found in
incriminating circumstances, seeking to agitate for one side or another, it
would create quite an international scandal, one would think.”
“As you well know," Durell said, “I am not here for any
political purposes.”
“I know nothing,” Ch’ing smiled. “I do not know if you are a
fool or a brave man, to come here.”
“Must I be one or the other?”
“I think so. How many of your associates are within call,
Mr. Durell? Do you intend a raid upon my establishment as your prohibition
agents once raided speakeasies in your country? Surely you did not come here
alone, so brashly, to ask about a Papuan sailor who owed me something
for gambling debts and needed to be exposed as an example to
others who fail to pay up.”
“Simon did not gamble here,” Durell ventured.
“Did you know him?"
“I know that isn’t the reason you snatched him."
“Can you suggest any other reason, sir?”
Durell said coldly: “That's why I am here. I also want to know
how you managed to kill Commander Holcomb, off the
Andrew Jackson
.”
He let the names drop into a silence so vast, so vibrant, so
filled with venom as to seem like a pit of snakes. He knew he breached
security to mention either Holcomb or the submarine. But the risk proved worth
it.
Durell had never subscribed to the myth of Oriental inscrutability.
Chinese betrayed shock, surprise, pain or alarm the same as anyone else. Prince
Ch’ing had an advantage in the thick folds, pads and layers of fat that
enveloped his carcass. But the stillness with which he looked at Durell was eloquent
enough. He knew he had managed to slice through the suet to something vital.
The plump, bejeweled hand that absently caressed the black
silken hair of Paradise as she knelt at his feet was abruptly still. Then the
fat fingers coiled and twisted thickly in the girl’s coiffure. She made a
quick whimpering sound of pain and the huge fat man kicked at her and sent her
rolling over and over across the floor.
“Clumsy child!” he screamed. “Out of my sight!”
“B-but sir, I did nothing—”
“Get out!”
Paradise went white with terror and regret. Durell wondered
in passing what punishment Ch’ing usually meted out to the victims of his
temper. But he did not take his eyes from that vast moon face and the two
raisin eyes in the suety flesh. Light slid along the bald, glistening scalp.
The massive shoulders shrugged under the thick brocaded silk robe.
“Your pardon, Mr. Durell. You have bewildered me, and I am
not accustomed to it. Perhaps you may elaborate. It would be most appreciated.”
A voice spoke from nowhere, seemingly, in swift Mandarin
that was incomprehensible to Durell. The words had an electronic timbre that
indicated a modern intercom wired under Prince Ch’ing’s trappings of incense.
bronze Buddhas and silken mysteries. The speaker, he decided, was behind a glass
case across the room that held a collection of old Chinese porcelains, jades,
and Javanese woodcarvings of sawo, teak and jackwood, against a background of
silk scrolls. Prince Ch’ing’s head was cocked to one side, his shaggy caterpillar
brows lifting as his mouth drooped and he drew in a long, slow, decisive
breath. Ch’ing barked a single word at the end of the report. The girl,
Paradise, cowered in a corner with a hand to her mouth.
Prince Ch’ing looked slowly at Durell. “Sir, you placed your
hands on my mother, it is said.”
“If the old lady downstairs is your mother, yes, I did.”
“You treated her with rudeness and discourtesy.”
“Well, she runs the women‘s end of this establishment.“
Durell laughed with deliberate insolence. “And it seems
quite fitting.”
“What is fitting, Mr. Durell, is that you will now
die, whatever the consequences.”
“Tell me about Holcomb, first," Durell said
easily.
But Prince Ch’ing had changed. Somewhere a raw nerve had
been exposed and hung, quivering and crawling, twisting the fat man’s face. He
stood up with remarkable speed and spoke aloud to the hidden intercom system.
The lights flicked out.
Durell found himself in sudden, complete darkness.
Paradise screamed.
He could not tell if her scream was one of pain or simple surprise.
But he was aware of swift movement ahead and to his right. He jumped for Prince
Ch’ing, knowing his only safety lay in being close to this massive man. But
where Ch’ing had stood, there was nothing. He swung left, toward Paradise. He
could see nothing in the absolute blackness, Something hissed through the air
and thudded into a pillow. It had to be a knife. Which meant that Ch‘ing was
already gone, out of danger, and he was trapped here, like a mouse in a bottle,
with no way out and no hope of eluding the attack. In another moment the lights
would come on and his situation would be hopeless.
He slammed into Paradise, knowing instantly it was she from
the silken contact of her body. She stifled a scream. He hauled her aside in
the darkness and a knife thudded into the teak paneling. The girl writhed
frantically in his grip.
“Paradise, you’ve heard too much, he’ll kill you, too, don‘t
you see? You’ve got to help me!”
She trembled in his arms. He could see nothing of her. A
voice echoed like a rolling wave through the dark room.
“Durell!”
It was
Prince Ch’ing, on the intercom. “Give it up and answer my questions, and you
may live. Otherwise —”
The girl breathed: “He lies. This way.”
She pulled him to the right. He stumbled over a fat pillow,
and the girl also fell. A shot exploded, the muzzle flame splitting their inky,
luxurious prison with a brief glimpse of the room. Shadows jumped and slid
around them. Durell fired at the other muzzle flare. But the hammer
clicked uselessly; his gun was still wet from his swim in the canals.
“Hurry!” Paradise whimpered.
But then she halted and he bumped into her yielding body. A
panel slid aside and a gleam of light shone briefly. It was the stairs to
the lower level. A blind shot screamed after them. Curtains hissed as Paradise
pulled him through the archway.
He started down the stairs, but from below came the solemn
boom of a gong, and a rush of sandals coming up toward them. He halted with the
girl before the elevator pit. The cage was above them, since they had descended
one level. The barrier gate was of ornate, but flimsy, bamboo. Obviously,
they couldn't get out by way of the stairs. Nor could they use the elevator.
But—
“We can swim, or take our chances with Ch’ing,” he decided,
watching the girl. “Ch’ing Will kill you, too, because he forgot you were in
the room, Paradise.” He looked over the bamboo elevator gate into the deep pit.
“So we have to jump.
Far down the shaft, he saw the murky harbor water, on which
these houses and entire complex palace had been built. The elevator cables were
motionless. It would be tricky to avoid their loops in the jump. He tore the
bamboo gate loose. From below came shouts, above the repeated reverberations of
the gong. The girl drew back from the shaft in pale fright.
“Do you know how deep the water is?” he asked.
“I have no idea. It is so far down. . . .”
“Well, we can’t stay here. Jump, Paradise.”
She looked at him dubiously, trustingly, then leaped feet first
down the dark shaft. He watched her silken clothing balloon up above her head,
glimpsed her legs bared by the rush of wind in her fall, saw her graze one of
the cables for a heart-stopping instant. Then there was a small, forlorn splash
as she hit the water four levels below.
He waited and watched.
She did not come up.
A man shouted. A dozen of Ch’ing‘s tong hatchet men stumbled
up the landing. There was no time to wait or ponder.
Durell went through the bamboo gate and jumped as the girl
had done, feet first, down to the black, glimmering water far below.
chapter twelve
HE HAD known few moments in his life when he was so sure of
impending death. In the seconds of his fall, he counted his chances and felt
that every fraction of his survival factor had abruptly swung to zero. He could
be impaled hideously on hidden pilings just under the water's surface. He could
strike one of the elevator cables and be snared and hung up, with an arm or leg
wrenched from its socket, or, if lucky, have his neck broken instantly. The water
might be clear, but too shallow; he could plummet so deeply into the ooze of
the bottom that he might stick there, like a fly caught on gooey paper,
with no time to free himself before his lungs burst for lack of air.
Yet there was also in that moment of death a sense of clarity,
of freezing calm, that had helped him on other occasions. He could not explain
the sensation. It had come to him before, when he gambled, or found himself in
an impossible corner. It was a feeling that a cold assessment of his survival
factors would show him a way out. And it usually did.
He smashed through the oily surface of black water cleanly,
without a flaw. There was no shock, for the harbor water was warm, scarcely
less so than the air. He went down and down and felt something snatch at his
shoulder and tear at the fabric of the coolie jacket he wore. Barnacles, perhaps,
on the stilts that supported Prince Ch’ing’s pleasure palaces. The instant his
feet struck the yielding ooze of bottom mud, he struggled sidewise, careful
that in his momentum he didn‘t smash his brains out against a pier. For a
panicky moment he felt something pluck and seize at his trouser leg; it was a
piece of flotsam, as sharp and smooth as a spear point. He doubled over
and tore the trouser leg open, underwater. His leg was bleeding. It did not
matter. He was only concerned with the bursting in his chest as his lungs began
to scream for air.
He surfaced in the unreal, familiar gloom below the stilts and
pilings of Dendang, a gloom streaked yellow with distant light glimmers,
lapping softly about him, filled with the odors of decay and soft white
growing things he did not identify. Close overhead was a tangle of timbers
cross-hatched and strutted to support a solid floor from which streamed
many long, mossy growths, like the beards of ten thousand Taoist monks, some of
which reached into the oily water. He heard a distant, echoing splash. Light
came and went. A dull pounding shook the air briefly. He turned and
twisted, treading water.
“Paradise?” he called softly.
There was no reply.
Neither was there any pursuit. He saw the square of light glimmering
on the water where the elevator shaft Ended a bit to his left, and a coil of
the cable was moving as if the cage were being used. Prince Ch’ing, no doubt. A
clattering of Cantonese reached him curiously garbled, echoing.
“Paradise?” he called again.
Something splashed
behind a barricade of pilings. He swam carefully toward it, pulling
himself along by cross-struts stints between the piers, sometimes swimming
across brief open areas. Light glimmered from a
klong
ahead, crowded with sampans,
and the familiar odor of charcoal cooking and rice pots touched him. Water
suddenly gurgled and splashed heavily nearby. Something flopped and
gasped like a pale fish on the planks that formed a walk under the floor
of the buildings overhead.
“Paradise?” he called softly.
“I am here, Mr. Durell."
‘He reached her with several swift strokes and hauled himself
out upon the plank beside her. The yellow lantern light from the canal
filtered in with long, irregular fingers to touch her wet body, the
clinging strands of green moss wound between her breasts and thighs. She was struggling
to free herself from these unnatural bonds, her face ghostly in the pale light.
“I’m glad you’re safe,” he whispered.
She shrugged, her smile bland. “Oh, I hated Prince Ch’ing.
All his girls hate him. He would have killed me, for amusement, for strange
moment of pleasure to self.” Her round, flower face was concerned. “But
you bleed from your leg—”
It’s just a scratch. I grant you, this looks like a
poisonous world down here. I’ll attend to it after we get out of here.”
But I cannot help, she said. “We call this the land of evil
tigers. Many people live down there—those who have no house, no sleeping mat on
a sampan, or who hide from the police. Such people live here under the houses
and they are like wild animals, who kill for a bite of food or a copper coin.”
She shuddered, leaning wetly against him. He said: “What will
you do, though, if we escape from here?”
“Oh, I have relatives who will send me to Manila, out of
Ch’ing‘s reach. It will be all right. You owe me nothing.”
Her eyes looked luminous, with a childlike innocence. There was
a phosphorescence in the water that created eerie illusions, he saw. The girl
clung to him for a moment, shivering, then drew back and said: “You must lead
us out of this evil place. The thought of the white tigers frightens me as much
as Prince Ch’ing.”