Assignment - Sulu Sea (5 page)

“One more leg to this trip,” Willi said, as they
disembarked. “We‘ll be more comfortable in my own plane, right there. Another
three hours, and we’re home safe.”

The commercial flights to Pandakan, since guerilla war
in Borneo between Indonesia and Malaysia had erupted, were erratic and
dangerous these days. At best, Garuda and Qantas Airways made only two
scheduled stops in the Tarakuta Islands, and even these had been discontinued
by the uncertain status of the sultanate being sought for nationalization by
the two quarreling republics.

"The Tarakutans want nothing much to do with either
side,” Willi said bitterly. “The people of Pandakan are a mixed lot—Dyaks and
Dusuns, Malays, of course, some Hindus and quite a few Chinese. The Oceanic
Chinese aren’t sure which Way to go—to Peiping’s new imperialism, or to be
noncommittal. They just look vague and obscure if you ask them a political
question. But these days the tables are turned, Samuel, and the former colonial
powers raise hell trying to thrust other people under their thumbs now.

It would be a lot better for Pandakan if the world just let
us be.”

“That’s not likely to happen."

“I know, and it burns me, the brazen greed with which the
former colonial powers claim the Tarakutans. I hate to think what Will happen
if the wrong parties get control next week.”

The heat was stunning, stupefying, as they walked across the
strip to a rickety dock Where her twin-engined amphibian plane was tied. The
nipa huts of the village at the edge of the airstrip made a familiar pattern:
there was the tin roof of a Chinese trader‘s hut, a whitewashed school where children
played, and dogs panting in the dusty shade of the single street. Offshore, the
striped, triangular sails of Moro fishing boats shimmered against the hot
leaden color of the Sulu Sea. The horizon was lost in the haze of unbelievable
eat.

The airport Filipinos greeted Willi by name and with
cheerful grins. The plane was fueled, and from the way the local mechanics
scurried about to help, Durell realized that Willi commanded special service
wherever she went in this corner of the world-—which might be useful, he
thought, in the next two days.

The amphibian’s cabin was oddly equipped. There were two
comfortable seats with twin controls in the nose, but the rest of the ship was
stripped of its plush interior to accommodate an assortment of fish
tanks, animal cages, and miscellaneous cages stuffed with cotton to hold,
presumably, rare shell specimens.

Durell gave her a small smile. “Ever since I was a boy, I’ve
heard what a bright girl you are, Willi.”

“Which galled you, huh?”

“Beauty and brains is a rare combination. Do you think
anything as big as a nuclear sub could get lost in the Tarakutas?"

“You could lose anything, in or off Borneo.” She frowned. “I
see what bothers you, though, I flew over Poelau Bangka, the island where we
found Pete Holcomb, so low that I knocked some coconuts off the trees. I saw no
sign of a sub. But you must realize what these islands are like. They float
in a sea of milky channels, and the water is pretty shallow all around, with
only a few navigable channels between coral reefs and mangrove swamp. Believe
me, you need everything: fathometers, radar, radio-beacon equipment, to keep a
boat from going aground. It can get pretty Weird, even to me, and I’ve spent my
life in Borneo. Of course, old Joseph knows every little channel like the back
of his hand, and nobody alive, not even poor Simon, can navigate the passages
as he does. But just how a boat like the
Jackson
could disappear—well, I just don’t know. Most of the sea is so shallow that
when you fly over it, it's hard to distinguish land from water. If your
sub was heading toward Pandakan through the Bandjang Passage, though, she
shouldn’t have had any trouble at all. But the Bandjang freighter routes are
forty miles from Bangka, where I found Holcomb."

Durell frowned “It doesn't make sense. The Polaris boats are
equipped with the most advanced navigational and internal guidance systems
possible. It couldn't go off-course by accident"

“Pete Holcomb didn’t die of torture by accident,
either," “mi said. “Some pretty crude things were done to him, and that's
why he was half out of his mind when poor Simon met him on the beach. Simon had
to use his machete to keep him off, and thought he was the cause of Holcomb’s
death. But when Malachy examined the body, he said the only case like it was
when he did a post-mortem on a Chinese gambler, last year, in Fishtown.”

“Fishtown?”

“It's really named Dendang, a part of Pandakan. The place
was originally settled by Dyaks from the Borneo mainland, not far off, but now
it’s practically autonomous, run by Prince Ch’ing—the richest and most
loathsome man in the islands. The prince claims descent from a claimant to the
throne of the dowager empress Tzu
H’si
, of China, but
whose great-grandfather was born ‘on the wrong side of the blanket,’ as our
Victorian ancestors used to say. In any case, besides holding a monopoly on the
local tin sluice mines, he’s the head of the neighborhood Mafia, or
whatever the Chinese opium-cum-gambling rings call themselves.”

Durell settled back thoughtfully. “I’m afraid our own
grandfathers were right. You’re both beautiful and bright, Willi.”

“You don‘t like it?”

“I’ll reserve judgment."

With that, Willi gunned the plane away from the dock and
across the shallow waters of the bay as if they were jet-assisted. He decided
not to irritate her again until they were safely on the ground once more.

The flight to Pandakan took up most of the remaining
daylight hours. There Were sandwiches, with coffee and bourbon, in a tiny
refrigerator located in the tail of the plane, and Durell served them while
Willi flew over the seemingly endless expanse of Water and island of the
Sulu Archipelago. He noticed that she had the latest World Aeronautical Charts
put out by the U.S. Air Force. and now and then, over an obscure light or radio
beacon, she waggled her wings briefly. Now and then an oil tanker or ore
carrier was visible on the glittering ocean surface. But he was surprised by
the number of islands that lifted and fell over the horizon. They put down to
refuel before dusk at Balabuco, taking off without delay. Now and then the girl
spoke briefly into her throat mike and listened to radio direction
signals, and then, slanting in a more southerly direction to parallel the
looming purple mountains of what had once been Dutch Borneo, she set the
automatic pilot and dozed, ignoring Durell and leaving him to his thoughts.

He tried to imagine what could have happened to a nuclear
submarine in these waters. He thought of a number of disastrous things, but all
of them were noisy and certain to have been noticed by somebody, somewhere. He
gave it up and decided to wait until he could ask a few questions at Pandakan.

                                                                                               
chapter five

PANDAKAN was hot, dirty and decaying. Its streets were
pitted with holes and the canals clotted with refuse. Under the old colonial
administration, the waterfront had been kept reasonably clean and efficient,
with white government buildings and warehouses bulging with tin ore, rubber and
copra. The boulevards radiating toward the low hills surrounding the harbor had
been well maintained, adorned with royal palms and decorated with a central
mall of green lawns and flower beds. The main streets of the European
section had boasted fine old Victorian structures, all painted white,
with government missions and business offices of trading companies in neat,
well-tended rows.

The buildings and boulevards were still there, with the palm
trees and flower beds, but everything had wilted slightly around the
edges since the colonial administration had been given forty-eight hours
recently to pack up and get out; There were chuckholes in the street that
nobody bothered to fill, some cornices of masonry had fallen from some of
the Victorian facades and allowed to remain there, the grass in the central
malls had gone to jungle weeds, and where white-gloved Malay policemen had
stood on their little wooden platforms under umbrellas to direct the tonga,
bicycle and auto traffic, there were now battle-helmeted, uniformed soldiers
with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders, patrolling the crowded
sidewalks in pairs and cautiously considering the sidewalk cafes that seemed to
have lost considerable clientele since the most recent wave of Red and
Indonesian terrorist bombing.

But no city and harbor could have had a lovelier setting,
Durell thought. A narrow river bisected the town, flowing from the green
jungly
uplands of the island. There was a green promontory
capped by a hotel and several gleaming consulates to the north. On the other
arm enfolding the harbor was a native quarter built out over the placid waters,
a vast, tangled jumble of reed and thatch-roofed huts, nipa shacks, Dyak houses
and shanties built on piers in a labyrinthine maze of waterways crowded with
native canoes and fishing praus and of plank walks that swayed and
twisted precariously over the harbor water, without plan or rhyme or reason.

“Dendang, otherwise known as Fishtown,” Willi said briefly
as she circled toward the airport landing strip and let down the amphibian’s
wheels. There was a high radio tower to be avoided, several more beacon towers
whose lights blinked in the last rays of daylight-apparently the local
technicians left them on all day—and then a bumpy landing on the plane’s fat
rubber tires, not because of any clumsiness on Willi’s part, but because there
were mortar potholes from recent fighting in the center of the main
runway. “Most of the local Chinese,” Willi went on casually, “live out over the
water. The Malays live in town, and the European whites, who get fewer every
day, live on the South Point. In between are the indigenous natives who never
seem to have a say in what's going to happen to them, one way or another.”

She paused and taxied the amphibian in front of the tin
hangar sheds and leaned across him to open his door. “If you don’t mind, I’ll
drop you off here and fly on down to see Grandpa Joseph. I’m worried
about him. A man in his nineties—well, you never know. I’ll be back in Pandakan
before morning, if you trust me. And I used the radio to reserve a room for you
at the Hotel des Indes. It’s still got running water, but I suggest you stick
to tonic or Evian water-—which you can still get here, oddly enough, all the
way from Paris.”

“Thanks,” he said drily. “And what did you tell the local
radio people I Was? A spy?"

“I said you were an oil salesman from New Orleans."

“Fair enough.”

“So you do trust me?”

"Have I a choice?" he smiled.

She grinned in return. “Not much, really. All I need to do
is say one word, and the local commandos would pop you into the old Dutch
dungeons, across town.”

“Don’t say it then. I’m on your side.”

“Good luck,” she called.

Before he reached the knot of customs men outside the
terminal, she had gunned her plane, which was obviously familiar enough to the
local people to cause no interest, and had taken off into the clear evening sky
again.

A car waited for him from the consulate, and he was given
diplomatic clearance for his single piece of luggage. The local officials,
small brown-skinned men backed up by inevitable khaki-uniformed soldiers with
sub-machine guns, seemed disappointed when he was waved through. The man from
the consulate was Chinese.

“Mr. Durell? Please, come this way.”

The heat here was worse, if possible, than at the landing
strip at Balabuco, since they were only a few degrees above the equator. It was
the humidity, Durell told himself, and he wished he could stop at the airport
bar for a cool drink. But this obviously was not on the agenda. The
air-conditioning in the terminal had broken down, and the modem glass windows
made to be kept sealed had been forced open to admit the dust and heat of the
landing field, and nobody seemed surprised.

The Chinese from the consulate was tall, broad of face, a
smiling young man in an impeccable gray suit with an Ivy League necktie, thick
black hair that glistened with vitality, and an easy, bouncy, athletic stride.
His handshake was quick and strong. His teeth gleamed.

“This way, Mr. Durell. I have a car waiting to take you to
the consulate.”

“Thank you. Is Mr. Kiehle, the consul, back from
Singapore?"

“He is not expected until next week—until after the
plebiscite, that is—if there is a plebiscite.” Mr. Lee showed his white teeth.
“One never knows from day to day the future course of these islands.”

“Then is the vice-consul, Dr. McLeod, in Pandakan?”

“No, sir, he has gone to Tarakuta Island. He will be back
tomorrow or the next day. It is uncertain.”

“Then who is minding the store?" Durell asked,

Young Mr. Lee’s intelligent sloe eyes blinked. "It
seems that I am, as first secretary in the consulate."

“I see. Well, I’ll accept a lift to the Hotel des Indes,
since I've got a room reserved there. I’m not staying at the consulate
here."

“But I understood, sir—the guest room is prepared—”

“Do oil salesmen get such preferential treatment?” Durell
asked. “We’ll make it the Hotel des Indes."

Mr. Tommy Lee bit his lip and seemed frustrated, but his
expression passed as quickly as the shadow of a vulture over the baking
airport. “As you wish, Mr. Durell. It may be a bit dangerous, since two bombs
have already gone off in Salangapur Square. That’s in the center of town.
Several women were killed by the terrorists at a sidewalk cafe, and there have
been rumors of guerilla invasions at any moment.”

“From where, Mr. Lee?"