Assignment - Sulu Sea (20 page)

"I—I’m afraid! I couldn’t help myself—”

“You could, but you got greedy, didn’t you? Did Prince Ch’ing
pay you much?”

“No, no, he paid nothing!” Lee’: voice rasped in pain with
each Word forced through his injured throat. He coughed and said: “I’ll tell
you what I can. But if they find out—”

“Are any of Ch’ing’s men around?”

“Four, in the village. I brought them, for patrol work. It pleases
Ch’ing to make me an errand boy. They will come along soon, and the car should
be moved.”

Plainly, Lee’s fear of Ch’ing equaled his fear of Durell. Durell
shoved him into the car. He asked Willi to drive, and handed her the sarong and
sandals he had stolen from behind the fisherman’s hut. Doffing the smock,
she wrapped herself deftly in the garment, and with the graceful movement it
seemed as if she transformed herself into an island woman, tall, proud, ineffably
beautiful, and no longer Western. Her alien magnificence settled on her
with the Malay dress. She looked pagan. He could tell nothing from her face as
she slid behind the wheel and started the car.

“Is Prince Ch’ing on the island?” Durell asked Lee.

“Yes, but you can‘t drive on the beaches. They are all patrolled.
You couldn’t reach him alive this way.”

Durell drew a deep breath. “Tommy, have you seen the submarine,
the
Andrew Jackson?
”

Lee shivered and was silent.

“All right,” Durell said. “I’ll find her myself.”

At that moment a sound came to them, as if something giant
and primeval were rushing at them from out of the dark night.

                                                                                     
chapter
seventeen

IT WAS a wind. It blew across the Celebes Sea and the Macassar
Strait with a peculiar, rancid odor, a smell of brine and stagnation. The gust
came suddenly, leaping upon the palms and jungle growth to make a great
rattling of dust and dark sand and spray that rode inland like a curtain before
a charging host of invisible horsemen.

Then it died, and the night was hot and black again. An overcast
hid the glittery stars. A hush fell over the beach. From the sea came a long
groaning, a rush of water going out and then coming in. The land shook under
the impact of one giant comber that smashed out of the pelagic darkness. The flares
of the octopus hunters lifted wildly up and then down, along with the screams
of terrified men. The water rushed, seething, to carry the debris of
vegetation and animal and sea life with it, far into the jungle. Then it went
back and everything was almost as it had been before.

“What was that?” Tommy Lee whispered, shaken.

“A storm is coming.” Willi’s calm was the same calm that had
followed the first raging breath from out of the dark night. “I think it
will be very bad.”

Durell thought of his plans. “How much time do we have?”

She spoke coldly. “An hour, perhaps. Or two.”

“Are you worried about the schooner?”

“The boat is my affair."

She was changed, remote and alien, like the sarong she wore,
and he knew he had changed her. But it was not the time to consider it. He
needed all his attention for Tommy Lee.

The road had turned into a solid macadam highway that cut
through the coastal jungle. Lights glowed from a. settlement farther up the
coast, and a radio tower on the mountainous spine of the island winked with
red, yellow and green lights. The jungle was thicker here, and Durell heard the
swift rush of a stream tumbling from the upper heights. He ‘told Willi to stop
the car and pull off the road and signed to Tommy Lee to get out. The Chinese
did so, dabbing at a trickle of blood from a corner of his mouth. In the dim
light, his round face looked anxious, and his voice reflected an
eagerness to be rid of his guilt.

Mr. Durell, I know I can’t escape my punishment for what I’ve
done. But you must believe me that it seemed harmless enough, at first.
It was all for my uncle and aunt, in Dendang.”

Durell said grimly: ‘They were gone when I called.”

“Yes, they are hiding now. But I saw my whole life destroyed,
my citizenship, my job—I have always worked hard at the consulate. Someday
there might be an investigation, but I thought I was safe. I never intended to
be a spy, you see. The consul trusted me, I hoped someday I could establish
myself honestly, but my parents were in Wei-pei, near Shanghai—my true parents,
I mean—and Ch’ing learned about them, as he made it his business to get blackmail
evidence on all Chinese in Dendang. I was one of the biggest fish caught
in his net.”

“Does Prince Ch‘ing work for Red China?”

“There can be no question of this, although he believes in
personal free enterprise, as your visit to Dendang must have shown you.” Lee
smiled wryly, timidly. “He had orders recently to put pressure on all the Hakka
people here and in Dendang.”

“Was it to vote a certain way in the plebiscite next week?”

Durell asked sharply.

“Yes, but I do not know whether it was to be for Indonesia or
Malaysia. Mr. Durell, I am trained in the old Chinese virtues. I honor my
parents and my duty to them must come first. Perhaps by your standards
this is wrong, and I struggled with it long and hard myself. Yoko tried to
help, but I could not tell her the truth. You do not know how terrifying Ch’ing
can be. He smells of evil like something rotting in the sun.”

It was an old Communist trick, Durell thought, to pick up agents,
create turncoats and traitors, by the pressure of blackmail. He spoke harshly.

“Ch’ing wanted to know about the
Andrew Jackson
, right? You had cables about her passage through the
Bandjang Channel and the time she was to sail past Pandakan. You knew her
passage was nonpolitical, and Mr. Kiehle, at the SEATO meeting now, gave you
orders to keep her presence secret until after the plebiscite, right?
Otherwise, the enemy propaganda would have a field day, charging American
imperialist interference and all the usual nonsense that helps persuade the
innocent and fatten the greedy."

“Yes,” Lee whispered. “Ch‘ing Wanted to know about the submarine—her
course, her estimated time of passage.”

Durell said flatly: “And you gave it to him.”

Lee nodded. “He threatened terrible things to my parents in
Wei-pei. He said Peiping would execute them.”

"All right. One more thing. You actually saw that
Jackson
here, didn’t you? The sub must
be here. Otherwise, there can
he
no reason for his
acts. Is it near the tin-loading docks?”

Lee was startled. “But how do you know?”

“It had to be captured, for Holcomb to be found ashore here.
It must be on this island that he was first kept prisoner. The only
place, according to the charts, where a. boat the size of a Polaris sub could
be hidden is in Ch’ing’s private little port. I know it hasn’t been spotted by the
search planes, but the answer to that is easy, too. It’s been
camouflaged, hasn’t it? It’s at dock under big nettings?”

Again Lee nodded and swallowed noisily. “Everything you say
is true.”

“What about the sub’s people?”

“Some are dead,” Lee whispered.

“And the others are still prisoners?” Durell paused. His mind
leaped ahead, putting the pieces of the puzzle together with trained accuracy.
“Of course, Ch’ing had to keep some of the Jackson’s people alive. They‘d know
how to dismantle her."

Lee was startled. “
Dismantle
—?”

“Peiping couldn’t hope to get a crew capable of running her
north, through the Seventh Fleet. The only way to get her to the Chinese
mainland would he to take her apart and load the parts, especially the nuclear
warheads and the A-3 missiles, on the fake ore-carrying freighter in Ch’ing’s
port.”

“Believe me,” Lee whispered, “I did not dream, when I made
my first error and yielded to fear, it would lead to such a monstrous
thing. But what I gave to Ch’ing was merely pilot information. How could the
sub be captured?”

”I don't know," Durell said, “but I mean to see it with
my own eyes.”

The road curved sharply inward and swung through the single
dusty streets of two Malay
kampongs
,
where the oil lanterns shone first on a crowd of Malay men, with their high
cheekbones and short noses and round eyes, short and compact, surrounding a
cockfight pit. In the second village, the main attraction was a shadow play.
Beyond, there was a Hakka labor compound for the tin mines, and a new clearing
of rice paddles hacked out of the lowland growth. In the glare of the car’s
headlights, orchids glistened, shrouding trees and vines, and now and then the
bright, eerie eyes of small animals shone back at them. Willi drove the car
with care. Tommy Lee told Durell how he had come to Bangka from Pandakan in a
fast launch.

“It was strange,” he added. “Some very fast boats went by us,
like your PT types, but they flew no flag. They were headed this
way, but did not bother us. I don’t think they even saw us. But I’m sure they
were not American Navy boats.”

"Have you heard of any guerilla raids, any 'freedom
fighter' maneuvers, designed for Bangka?” Durell asked.

“Everything is possible. The islands are like tinder, waiting
for a spark. You saw how it was in Pandakan, with the terrorist bombings. On
the other islands, they raid the
kampongs
and try to terrorize the people into voting one way or another. . .. , We can
go no further, Mr. Durell, on this road.”

They had come to a fork, and to the right the jeep trail turned
downstream, back toward the coast, following the little river that appeared
before them. To the left, the trail was little more than a trace between high,
vine-twisted trees. No guards were in sight.

Tommy Lee explained the dilemma. The road to the right went
back to the coast to circle the island to Bangka’s port and Prince Ch’ing’s
stronghold. The submarine was there. But the road was guarded, mined,
patrolled. It was impossible to hope they could get through. Durell looked at
Willi Panapura, who nodded and moistened her pale mouth.

“It’s true, Sam. They’ll be on guard that way.”

“And the other road?”

“It goes across the mountain, through the rain forest.”

“Then we’ll take it.”

“But you don’t know the rain forest, Sam—the swamps, snakes,
heat and mud. No one goes there, ever.”

“But you said old Joseph practically lived there when he was
a coast watcher against the Japanese, long ago. You learned how to walk through
it yourself, from listening to his stories. If it’s the only way to get to Ch’ing
and see if the sub is hidden there, as I think it is, then we go through it.”

She was silent and pale. “I’ve never been in the rain forest
here myself. I couldn’t be sure. If We failed, it would be my fault, and I
couldn’t bear that.”

Tommy Lee coughed. “I know I can expect nothing from you,
Mr. Durell, but even if you got through, what can you hope to do against
Ch’ing’s private army? How could you get to the submarine? Ch’ing lives in a
fortress—literally. You’ve Seen the old Portuguese castle in Pandakan Harbor?
This one on Bangka is like it, built on the deep-water lagoon. I don’t know if
the sub is there, but I know there is a barbed wire compound nearby, and armed
guards. It is useless—”

“Shut up,” Durell said. He watched the girl. “Willi?”

“All right, Sam. We’ll try it,” she whispered.

The trail worsened at once. The little river ran between high
banks of red soil that glowed with sandy, gristly reflections in the
headlights. The sound of the river was a steady muttering as it fell to the
sea, compounded with the ever-present, distant booming of the surf that seemed
audible everywhere on the island. The car bounced and skidded treacherously.
The heat was unbelievable, and the small stir of air made by their movement was
like the slow waving of a branding iron before their faces. Durell looked at
the sky. One part was clear, and the Magellanic Clouds and Southern Triangle
had a. wild, unnatural, blue-white brilliance. Beyond, like a dark shadow
creeping to devour the world, was a black emptiness that was not empty at all,
but filled with the whirling torrents and threshing power of lightning,
rain and incredible winds. He felt the fine hairs on his forearms lift with
the electric tension.

“We cannot go much farther,” Lee muttered. “The road ends at
a footbridge. There was once a teak lumbering operation here, but it no longer
exists. . . .”

As he predicted, the thread of trail rapidly gave out. The car
jolted dangerously. Then the road lifted at a forty-degree angle that made the
wheels spin helplessly in the soft jungle debris, tilting them in one place.
The headlights shone at a crazy angle into the high, leafy tops of umbrella
trees, wakening a wild storm of huge moths that came fluttering softly toward
them on darting, iridescent wings.

“Douse the lights," Durell ordered. He looked at Willi.
“Can you take us across the island from here?”

“I don’t know. It’s eleven miles or more. I’ve never done it,
you understand; I can only try to remember Grandpa Joseph's stories—”

“Let’s start then," Durell said.

There was a three-cell flashlight in the car. Durell
pushed Tommy Lee ahead, up the slippery path to the lip of the river gorge. The
ravine was deep and narrow, and the water looked like thin blue silk in the
glimmering starlight. They walked for some moments atop the ridge, through
sudden clouds of gnats and giant moths, and then they saw the bridge.

It was just what Lee had described—a narrow footway of vine
cables swaying over the deep gorge that blocked their way—a bridge of shaky
slats and a rope handrail anchored to trees on both lips of the ravine. Durell
shone the flashlight on the white water below and then probed across the
bridge.