Assignment - Sulu Sea (26 page)

Old Joseph Panapura was waiting for him beside a tray of
bourbon and soda and a bucket of ice on a finely carved Tang table,
placed between the tall windows overlooking the
padang
. The old man wore a
seersucker suit and black shoes and a black string tie over a silk shirt; on
his knee was a salty
visored
marine cap; his gaunt
height and cloud of silvery hair made him look very fragile. But his brown eyes
were alert and quite wary.

“Samuel, will you soon be leaving Pandakan?”

“Tomorrow, I think. A MATS plane has been given permission
by the provisional government to pick me up at the airport.” He smiled at the
old man. “I shall give your respects to my grandfather, sir, when I see him
again.”

“That would please me. Tell him I am well, and that you are
all he said you were in his letters. I am well pleased with you, Samuel, except
for one disappointing matter.” The old man poured his bourbon neat. His hand
was not very steady. “I am worried about Willi, of course. Have you seen her?”

"Not since I came ashore.”

“Will you see her?”

“I don’t think it would be wise.”

"Samuel, I think you must. All women cherish an ideal, a
vision of a Galahad on a white horse, and I aided and abetted such a dream for
Wilhelmina, in you. But your life is not for her."

“I agree.”

“Do you love her, Samuel?"

He did not know how to reply. He felt many things, a conflict
of tides that pulled him this way and that. It was warm in the room. He heard a
fair imitation of an American band down in the lobby of the Hotel des Indes, a
form of twist played by a smiling Malay orchestra, a combo wearing tight pants
and loose shirts and playing island instruments. He remembered an island saying
he had once read. “The Chinese travels for business and gain, the Japanese marches
as a conqueror, and the Malay runs to a cockfight—but always the Malay
wins the Chinese gold and takes the Japanese sword.”

Durell said: “I must leave Tarakuta, sir. And Willi will stay
here.”

The old man watched him for a long, grave moment. If he
sighed, it was the merest breath of disappointment. “You know what is best for
you, Samuel.”

Colonel Mayubashur was at the Sultan’s palace. His rather plump
figure looked natty in a uniform emblazoned with ribbons that read like a
directory of American and British military decorations. Durell had no doubt
they were all deserved and given with grateful thanks. The colonel looked amused,
and he showed more self-confidence here in his palace quarters, when
Durell answered his summons, than he had shown at the Hotel des Indes only four
days ago.

“I am happy for your recovery, Mr. Durell. And you will be
happy to hear the political news—from the horse’s mouth, as I believe you say.”
Mayubashur laughed lightly. “By the right of a Preservation of Public Security
Ordinance, passed by the provisional government of the former Sultanate of Tarakuta,
we have been able to define and detain subversives, Communists, racial
agitators and the like——and expel as undesirable any and all Western
imperialist agents.” The smile came and went, quickly. “The plebiscite has been
postponed indefinitely, by my order under the Public Security Ordinance.
The U.N. commission agreed to this, in view of the extraordinary circumstances.
No date has been set for a new vote. I shall remain in office here at the
palace for some time. It is a burden I accept in the interests of the people.”

There was wry irony in Mayubashur’s voice. Durell met his
smile with one of his own. It was not his business, he thought, if a new
dictatorship had just blossomed here on the islands off Borneo. It would not
last long. The colonel was too intelligent to expect that. One or another of
the new imperialist powers of Southeast Asia was sure to swallow up Tarakuta in
the next few months. Mayubashur might be a very brave man, or a fool. Either
way, whichever expansionist nation seized the islands, the colonel stood a good
chance of being shot against the nearest wall.

“I am ready to go whenever you say, Colonel," Durell murmured.
“I hope the expulsion, however, is not a public one.”

"No, you have rendered Pandakan a service.
Incidentally, the U.S. Polaris submarine 727, the
Andrew Jackson
, has been refitted most speedily. Your Navy’s
tugs have taken her from our territorial Waters, and there should be no further
problems. A number of crew replacements are being flown from Hawaii’s CINCPAC
headquarters. And peace is restored on Bangka Island. The Red Crescent is at
work helping the victims of the typhoon.”

“When do you want me to leave?"

Colonel Mayubashur stood up. “Now. I will escort you to the
airport personally, Mr. Durell.”

She was waiting there. He had not sent for her, and he knew
he might be wrong in avoiding a last meeting with her, and yet he had known,
too, he would have a last word with her before he left. The MATS plane was
Waiting on the airfield, but the colonel and his smart military escort
were patient.

In the heat and noise of the airport shed, she looked immaculate
and cool, totally different from the way he had grown to know her. Instead of
shorts, sneakers and a man’s faded shirt, she wore a smart white frock and a
wide-brimmed hat of leghorn straw with a blue ribbon around it that matched the
blue of her eyes. The white linen dress set off the tan of her face and long,
graceful throat. Her bared shoulders were golden with the gold of old Polynesia
and the long, Pacific sunlight. Her hair was done in a tight braid,
thick, translucent, heavy and glorious. Her walk as she came toward him was the
total evocation of her womanhood, her hips moving with that indefinable
essence of femininity. He knew the effect was designed for him. He knew she was
saying,
Sam, darling, all I am is yours,
if only you ask for me.

She left the bearded, unhappy figure of Malachy McLeod
on a bar stool across the echoing, crowded airport shed. Beyond the Chinese
merchants, the Malay craftsmen, the occasional idling Dusun or Dyak from
Borneo’s mainland, and all those who ate or bargained in the airport shops, he could
see only her, and the image she made of everything that belonged in a place, a
time forever behind him.

She was smiling. “Are you really going, Samuel?”

“It seems I must. Colonel Mayubashur insists.”

“I’ve gotten permission to fly you back to Manila in
my
amphib
, if you prefer.”

He was dismayed. “Is your plane here?”

"It wouldn’t take five minutes to be airborne, just
the two of us. I’m ready to travel, Sam.” Something flickered in her eyes,
and she stopped smiling and her voice became almost inaudible. “I know I‘m
being cruel to Malachy; he told me to go to you. I’m totally shameless, Sam.
Take me with you.”

He felt a check to his breathing. “I can’t, Willi."

“You could make it possible. It’s not too late.”

“It’s too late for me, and it’s my fault, Willi, not yours. I
should have listened to my grandfather long ago, and come here to find
you years ago. It wasn't too late, then.”

“Sam, I don’t know how I feel about Malachy.”

“You’ll be certain, after I'm gone for a time.”

“How can I ever forget you?”

“I’d be happy if you didn’t,” he said. “I won’t ever forget you,
either, Willi.”

She looked up at him with her blue eyes clouded in her golden
face. “Something happened to you in those last minutes on Bangka, didn’t it?”

“No, it happened to me long before then," he said.

He would have to settle the matter of his moment of frozen
hypnosis as he looked at the A-3 missile, of his wish to let the Chinese
technicians throw the last switch. He remembered how he had felt sucked into a
darkness and ashen doom. Maybe the feeling was something like combat fatigue,
and General Dickinson McFee, back in K Section’s Washington headquarters, would
know all about it. But it made, for now, a thing that kept him forever from
Willi Panapura’s innocence.

He took her arm and walked her back to Malachy, who looked
stunned and then was blustery behind his wild red beard. They shook hands and
said goodbye. Willi was silent, and then she slid her hand in the crook of
Malachy‘s elbow. The Irishman reached across his chest and touched her
fingers and let them curl lightly in his own for just a moment.

Durell said goodbye again and kissed Willi, a quiet kiss on her
lips, and then he turned and walked out of the airport shed into the stunning
heat and bright sunlight on the airfield.

Colonel Mayubashur fell in step with him and went with him
as far as the big, silvery MATS plane that stood waiting on the strip to take
him home.