Assignment - Sulu Sea (25 page)

But he could not be like them. He groaned and he knew he had
never felt like this before, and he was afraid of himself.

“Ch’ing!" he shouted.

The rain wiped out his harsh voice. He called again.

“Ch’ing, get them out of there!”

The fat man turned his round face toward him. The wide flesh
rippled, the mouth smiled insanely. He spoke to the technicians and they looked
at Durell and went back to their work, dedicated to death. Durell wondered at
their discipline. But was he different from them? Then he lifted the Sten gun.

Shots clattered dimly through the rain. There was a noise to
his left, and something hit him, and hit him again, and one leg was knocked out
from under him. He tumbled down in a fiery anguish. Ch’ing loomed over
him and he squeezed the Sten’s trigger and kept the hammering, yammering gun pointed
at Ch’ing’s falling, enormous weight and then at the two men on the truck. . .
.

There were other shots. He heard American voices. Someone
called his name. Durell rolled over and got one knee doubled under to crouch in
the wet puddle of the courtyard. He fell over. He got up again. Ch’ing was
dead, slumped against the heavy wheels of the truck. Rain washed the blood that
stained his silken robe. The two technicians also sprawled in awkward death
below the sleek implacability of their stolen missile. . . .

Durell sighed. Men ran through the gate, and they wore blue
U.S. Navy dungarees, and they came with the Hakka Chinese who had freed them
from their prison compound.

Durell tried to walk toward them, and instead, he fell forward
into the dark rain, into deeper darkness.

         
                                                                            
chapter
twenty-one

THE sun was a laughing mockery of the wild night. The wind was
a gentle chuckling, and the sea whispered intimacies that seemed incredible
after the wild savagery of the dark hours. He felt the free heave and lift and
proud surge of the
Tarakuta’s
deck.
He enjoyed it with an inner silence, motionless, rolling with the roll of the
sea but without motion of himself. He was aware of the sun beyond his closed
eyelids, grateful for the warmth on his face, of the hundred little normal
sounds of the schooner in motion.

“Sam? Cajun?”

He opened his eyes and looked at her, and everything was the
Way it had been before. He thought of several inanities and said: “It’s getting
to be a habit.”

“I don’t think there will be another time.”

“Let’s hope not," he said.

“Does anything hurt?”

“Everything.”

“It’s nothing serious. Some bruises—oh, a lot of them, and a
flesh wound in the shoulder and a bullet through the calf muscle of your
left leg. Some skin abraded off the left side of your jaw, too." She
paused. “Did you know that your face looks very nice when you’re asleep, Sam?”

“No.” He smiled. “Nobody ever told me."

“Well, it looks different. Troubled, but nice. But now that you’re
awake, you seem to be somebody else again.”

“Listen,” he said. He sat up. “Where is Malachy?“

Her hands went fiat against his chest. “He’s hobbling along.
He got a bullet in the leg, too. He’s making out his report for the consulate.
We’ll be in Pandakan in half an hour. There will be an ambulance to take you to
the hospital there.”

“I thought you said it wasn’t anything serious.”

“Malachy thinks you should be checked over for a day.”

“I won’t stay.”

Her smile was mischievous, triumphant, like a lovely child’s.
“I told him you wouldn’t, Sam.”

“. . . Willi?”

‘It's all right.” She spoke too quickly. “I’ve thought about
it all night. It’s all right now, Sam."

“No, it isn’t.”

But she put her hands on his face and knelt beside him and
spoke quietly of the hours while he had been sleeping off an injection of
morphine
sulphate
stuck in his arm by Dr. Malachy
McLeod, and so he learned of what had happened. She wore white shorts and
dirty, scuffed sneakers, and a man’s faded blue shirt. Her heavy, honeyed hair
was braided like taffy from a candy-making machine; it lay across her left
shoulder and down across the cotton breast of her shirt. Her eyes never left
him. She sat, long-limbed and tanned, in the shade of an old awning of canvas,
stretched above the schooner’s deck, and it was as if the wet horror of last
night, of the rain jungle and the beaches and the fighting, had never
been.

Most of the
Jackson’s
crew, she told him, had been rescued, armed with weapons seized from Ch’ing’s guards,
and they
 
were back aboard the sub,
putting things together again But the captain had been executed on the
first day of captivity. No trace of Pete Holcomb’s body was found.
Presumably when his hasty grave was discovered by Ch’ing, his remains had been
thrown in o the lagoon for barracuda and shark to remove all traces.

All three missiles taken from the sub had been recovered. When
Willi mentioned these, her mouth shook and her eyes went wide. “You stopped
them from exploding one of them, didn’t you?”

Durell’s teeth began to ache. “Go on, Willi."

“Well, some Seventh Fleet tugs are on the way, with a new crew
or the sub. She can sail by tomorrow morning, they say.”

“And what’s the reaction in Pandakan?”

“The Seventh Fleet is coming in no matter what.”

Durell rubbed a finger across his lower lip “It will
stir up a lot of fleas on the body politic. But that ends my job here,
Willi. I’ll be going home."

Her eyes were big. “And where is home for you, Sam?”

“Wherever I’m sent. A Geneva hotel, my apartment in Washington,
a tent in the Sahara. I never know."

“Must you really go on with it?”

Someone had to, he thought. But he remembered his feeling as
he stood in the rain near the monstrous A-3 missile and waited for its
thunderclap. He remembered the sensation of those moments, when he had felt sucked
under by a tide of suicidal despair and was tempted to let the Peiping imperialists
do what, in their desperation, they felt they had to do. Men often suffer a
death-wish, he told himself. It was not important. There is a fascination with
heights, a morbid desire to throw yourself into an abyss, a toying torment of
wishful yearning to find the other side, to make an end and, perhaps, a
beginning. It was nothing to brood about, and he should forget those moments
when he had felt sucked up into an incipient maelstrom of bursting atoms, when
he had hesitated and stood, shaken with desire and yet a loathing, a love and a
hate, an exhaustion and an exhilaration he had not known before.

It was nothing, he told himself silently.

But it was also everything.

He looked at the waiting girl. “Willi, you belong to Malachy.
If I hadn’t come along, you would marry him. Right now, you’re in love with a
dream that was told to you when you were just a little girl. But the dream
doesn’t exist, and you must not let it beguile you.”

“You were not a dream yesterday," she said. “You’re not
a dream now.”

“I must go away,” he said.

“Perhaps not.”

The
Tarakuta
rounded the harbor mole and the distant beauties of Pandakan were unrolled as
if painted on a silk screen, the city white and gold against the deep green of
tea terraces and palm plantations on the hills. Astern, far across the
shimmering lime of the sea, a distant line of fairy mountaintops floated,
detached /and serene, above the invisible mainland shore of Borneo. He watched
the brightly painted fishing boats move in the harbor and saw a dark scar
in the mat
roofings
of Dendang, and Malachy saw
him consider it and tugged at his wild red beard.

“They had a fire there last night. Ch’ing‘s private
little empire of lust was totally burned out.”

“An accident?” Durell asked.

Malachy shrugged. “Colonel Mayubashur is proud of his efficient
fire department. They’re usually pretty good—but they weren’t very quick
about it, last night.”

“Is the colonel a friend?”

“He’s not an enemy.” Malachy’s voice was studied and normal
but part of him was absent, or guarded deeply behind the facade of his talk. He
looked big and tough, his red beard afire in the pressing afternoon heat;
his red hair blew in the hot breeze. There might never have been a storm last night.
He walked awkwardly, because of his wounds, and a pallor around his mouth
bespoke several kinds of pain. Now and then he looked at Willi, behind the
schooner’s wheel. There was nothing in Malachy’s eyes except the usual mixture of
Gaelic wryness and bittersweet love as he said absently: “How did Ch’ing do it?
About the
Jackson
, I mean.”

Durell pulled his thoughts together. “He got the codes from
Tommy Lee, of course. I’ll have to put that in my report to Washington when I
file from your office in Pandakan. Ch’ing blackmailed Lee through
his parents, and got the special cipher for the
Jackson
, the red code for emergency operations and alerts. And
Ch’ing used it to lure the sub into the booby-trapped lagoon. The Chinese
freighter, I suppose, was used as part of the lure, putting their radio on the code
line that meant a world emergency. That was the night, you remember, the
Pandakan radio was knocked out by a terrorist bomb. No bearings or
confirmation could be made. The
Jackson’s
captain can’t be blamed. That code shouldn’t have been out of our hands for an
instant.”

Malachy nodded. “I suppose Washington will lop my head off,”
he said gloomily. “We were all too complacent about it.”

“You live with disaster so long,” Durell said quietly, “with
threats from Big Daddy Bear in Moscow and the Chinese in Peiping, you
don"! see it any more. You accept the Tommy Lees as part of a normal
pattern and stop worrying. But it’s the Tommy Lees who can give us the biggest
headaches. . . . What will you do if they can you, Malachy?"

“I’ve got plenty of medical work to do here in the islands,”
McLeod said. “If they’ll let me. Let’s get back to the Jackson, Cajun.”

“Well, by the time the skipper knew treason was afoot, it
was too late. The boat was boarded and taken over. When the crew was marched
ashore and some of the boys tried to fight, Ch’ing picked every tenth man
out of line, I understand, and lined them up for execution. That must be what
Pete Holcomb babbled about when Willi first found him. Pete must have
escaped in the dark when everybody was watching the executions, even though
he’d been badly hurt, probably in the early fighting when the sub was
first boarded. We’ll never know, I suppose. But we know he was dying of wounds
and shock when Willi found him. If that hadn’t happened, the
Jackson
might well have simply vanished,
taken apart piece by piece under that camouflage net, and nobody would be
the wiser until Peiping copied enough A-3’s to announce it to the world. Too
bad for us all, by then."

Malachy was silent, watching the harbor vista swing open beyond
the schooner’s bow. He did not look much like a respectable member of the
medical profession. He wore hacked-off dungarees with a rope belt and a white
singlet. His naked feet gripped the deck with a slight curling motion. He
looked over the rail and said: “What will you do about Willi, Cajun? You can’t
leave it at nothing. She‘s in love with you.”

“No, she’s not. She’ll marry you, Malachy. Last night she made
up her mind, and she chose yon.”

Malachy’s eyes widened. “Listen, Cajun, I’ve loved that girl
since she was ten years old, and if you’ve hurt her, as I think you might have,
last night, and then if you don’t—”

“Don’t be an ass. You give up too easily.”

“‘It’s hard to keep fighting when you’re hurt,”
Malachy said quietly.

Miss Hanamutra was hack in the antiseptic, cool corridors of
the Pandakan Hospital, wearing her nurse’s cap on her dark, rich hair. Except
for a pinkness at the corners of her almond eyes, she seemed self-contained.
Her smile for Durell was professional, as if their evening of terror shared in
the alleys and canals of Dendang had never happened. She cranked up the bed,
adjusted the sheet, closed the blind against the hot sun. She smelled of
lavender and isopropyl alcohol.

“There are policemen in the corridor, Mr. Durell,” she said quietly.
“But they are only here to guard you.”

“Do I look frightened?”

Her smile was the flight of a bird. “Did you not
expect to see me here? Where else would I go? The whole city knows Prince
Ch’ing is dead, and all the Chinese talk rumors of piracy and an American
atomic submarine damaged by some trick of the Peiping government. The air
shakes with the thunder of jets, but they do not come from Indonesia or the Malaysian
airstrips in Borneo. They come from your Seventh Fleet.”

Durell nodded. “I’m sorry about Tommy. We might as well talk
about him, Yoko. He was a traitor; he fell into debt and he betrayed his
country. He caused the deaths of many men. He began it all. And he paid for
it.”

“Did he die--easily?”

“No man dies easily.”

“Oh, you are cruel,” she whispered.

“I was not the one who killed him.”

“I know. But you are so hard about it.”

“When a man betrays his country, and proves weak in the face
of temptation, and when that temptation involves perhaps the fate of many, many
others, then I am hard about it, yes. I am sorry for you, Yoko. Did you love
him very much?”

“Very much, yes. We were lovers.”

“I am sorry,” he said.

She looked at him with dark, opaque, sloe eyes. “No, you are
not sorry. It does not matter to you at all.”

On the third day he moved across the
padang
, the green, into his
former room at the Hotel des Indes. He walked with a slight limp. The heat was
oppressive, the sky was a bowl of bronze rimmed with intense cobalt. The
sidewalk sellers of rice and noodles and shrimp, of little ivory carvings and batik,
were all busy again. The cafes were crowded. He had not heard a single grenade
go off for the past forty-eight hours.