Assignment Burma Girl

by Edward S. Aarons

  “Some of these native pilots are pretty wild as air jockeys. Here he comes again. He means business.”

  This time, above the banshee scream of the jet, there came the unmistakable thud-thud-thud of its nose cannon. No shells hit the Dakota apparently, but if it was meant as a warning, it was clear enough. The Dakota lurched and trembled and dropped even lower. The tumbled landscape below was dark and jagged. No lights shown down there. Durell turned his head, searching for the jet. It was circling again, higher this time, and he doubted that the pilot would have more patience if they failed to follow his command to turn back. Then he heard the port engine sputtering.

  “Son of a bitch,” Locke muttered. “He nicked us.”

  A gout of flame burst across the wing. Locke quickly switched off fuel and ignition on that engine. The ship sagged wearily, too heavy to be supported by the surviving engine on the opposite wing.

  “Now we’re in for it,” Locke sighed.

  “Can you put us down here somewhere?”

  “There are some rice paddies around the next bend. Right in the middle of the jungle. It won’t be a picnic.”

  Durell looked at his gaunt face. “Can you do it?”

  Locke drew a tight breath. “I don’t know, frankly.”

  “You’ve got to try.”

  “Sure thing.”

  The jet pilot above them had spotted the flaming engine and passed high overhead, a streak of red and silver thunder against the night sky. Durell stopped looking for him. He watched Simon Locke’s hands shake as he worked the controls. Then his hands grew more steady as he pulled the wheel back and the heavy plane lifted slightly, soaring on a delicate updraft that took them over a dark hump of a mountainside rushing at them.

  Locke cut the starboard engine. The sudden silence was eerie. Durell could hear the government jet like a distant grumbling on the horizon, but he couldn’t see it. He watched the dark land rush up at them.

  The river was out of sight, several miles to the west, behind rising hills and dark gorges. Durell could make out nothing of the ground below, but Locke seemed to have the eyes of a cat. He tilted the ship to the left and dark masses of land slid by, higher than the wings. A flat area came in sight ahead.

  “Those are rice paddies, some opium fields,” Locke muttered. “Are the girls all right?”

  Durell looked back at them, “Yes.”

  “Hang on, Cajun.”

  The ground lifted with dismaying speed, dark and formless, impregnable. Locke pulled back on the wheel. The nose lifted, their air speed dropped abruptly, the indicators on the instrument board wavered and fell. Trees in great, towering bunches flicked past.

  “Now,” Locke whispered.

  He pulled the nose up again. For an instant they seemed to hang, motionless and helpless in a dark void.

  Then they crashed.

  There came seconds of ear-splitting, metallic screeches, a jolt, another jolt, a smashing noise as the tail broke away. Durell’s head was snapped forward, then back. He felt as if an immense fist had come up and slammed into his spinal column. His head struck the instrument panel. The plane plowed on, screeching, splashing. Water and mud abruptly smeared the windshield. Then there came one last, devastating, smashing blow.

  And silence.

  There was no fire.

  For a moment that seemed eternal, Durell could not move from the tangled wreckage. The cabin lights were out, and he felt blinded. There was a ringing in his ears, a numbness in one cheek, an ache in his left arm. He did not think anything was broken. He fumbled with the safety belt, tried to stand up. His scalp raked a jagged aluminum girder. He looked at Locke and saw that the white-haired man was already free of his bucket seat and turning to the rear.

  “You all right?” Durell asked.

  “Just great.” A trickle of blood ran down Simon’s gaunt cheek. “But the girls—”

  They went back together into the cabin.

  The cargo was a jumbled mess, piled over the last pair of seats, blocking the fuselage beyond. Then Merri Tarrants’ thin cry came to them and she stumbled out of the tangled darkness.

  “Si? Si, honey, are you all right?”

  Locke spoke soothingly as she fell against him. “I’m fine, pet. How is Mrs. Hartford?”

  “Perfectly safe,” Eva said coolly. “You did splendidly, all things considered. But where are we?”

  They clambered painfully from the wreckage. The night was utterly dark, although Durell estimated that dawn could not be more than two hours away. In the starlight, after a moment when his eyes adjusted to the night, he saw they stood knee-deep in a watery ditch beside a rice paddy. The field stretched away on both sides, ending in a tall, hedge-like wall of bamboo and teak trees. No house was visible. Nobody came running or shouting toward the wreck. Dim bird sounds came from the forest, but they heard nothing else, except the slow creaking of metal as it cooled in the tangled frame of the ship.

  “How far are we from Nambum Ga?” Durell asked.

  “Twenty—thirty miles, that’s all.” Locke stood with his arm protectively around Merri. “I don’t recommend that we walk it, in these hills. There’s an easier way.” He pointed a long arm to the west. “The river is just beyond those hills—maybe three miles. An hour’s hike, if we’re lucky and find a trail. If we circle the field, there’s bound to be one somewhere, and we can turn up on the river bank. We might be able to signal Van der Peet’s boat when he comes around the bend, like they say in the song.”

  “Good enough,” Durell said. “Let’s get started.”

  They found the trail in a few minutes, leading westward from die rice field. Simon looked ruefully at his wrecked plane before they moved on.

  “There goes your thirty-three per cent investment, pet,” he said to Merri. “Are you mad at me? Manhattan is now at least another year away for you.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Merri said, not unkindly. “I was a fool ever to get mixed up in this crazy deal. Where’s the profit?”

  “No profit, pet. Just the satisfaction of helping Sam here do a job for God, country, home and mother.”

  “Yes? Well, I’m no patriot.” Then the small girl shrugged. “I guess we can write it off as a tax loss, anyway.”

  Durell walked along with Eva Hartford. He felt concerned about the rigidity of her silence, her unnatural calm. But she assured him she had not been hurt in the crash. Her face was a careful mask, lovely and remote, and the look in her pale brown eyes made her unattainable.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked her.

  “Thank you, yes. I just want to get on with this. You’re interested in reaching Paul, if he’s still alive, aren’t you? And I want to find out about Emmett.”

  “That needn’t make us enemies.”

  “Perhaps it does. I don’t know.”

  “What are you angry about?”

  “I’m not,” she said. “You just disturb me.”

  “Why?”

  “I never met a man like you before, with such a singleness of purpose. Doesn’t anything ever discourage or bother you?”

  “You do,” he said, but she did not question this, and he did not elaborate.

  The trail was like a tunnel cutting through the tall bamboo woods. No one could glimpse the sky. Fortunately, Simon had a flashlight that helped them on their _way. Here on the ground, the chill of their former altitude gave way to a miasmic heat that drenched them all in perspiration and threatened quick exhaustion. But Locke, in his anxiety to intercept the river boat before it went by, urged them on at a quick pace.

  Eva walked with a determined stride, but after a few moments she began to stumble over the tangled roots that obstructed the trail. The feeble glow from Simon’s flashlight reflected back a world of dark green foliage like a tidal sea waiting to drown them. Eva’s face soon became pale and exhausted.

  “Which one are you thinking of?” Durell asked quietly. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Aren’t you really concerned
about Paul? Is it only Emmett?”

  “Why can’t I be concerned about both?”

  “You could be. But you’ve admitted your major interest is in Emmett. Mine is in Paul. He’s my job. I’ve got to get him out of there. But if you insist on chasing ghosts—”

  “He’s alive!” she said fiercely. “He must be! I’ve got to make things up to him—” She stumbled again and went down on one knee. Durell caught her and lifted her up. For a moment she resisted, trying to draw away, and then she gave a shaky laugh. “I try to be too independent, perhaps. I always have been. Money hasn’t helped my disposition, I’m afraid. People say I’ve learned all the bad habits of the rich, and none of the good ones.” She looked at the encroaching jungle that closed around them overhead, and she shivered a little. “Are there snakes here? I’m afraid of snakes.”

  “Kraits, king cobras, yes,” Durell said. “Not likely to bother us, however.”

  “May I hold your arm?”

  “Of course.”

  They went on, following the tunnel-like trail up a long, winding slope, then beside a tumbling stream that went downhill again. The trail crossed the stream on rough log bridges at several places. They met no one. Even the distant thunder of the searching government plane had faded away. At each bridge, Simon and Merri paused and Simon shone the flashlight on the tricky path until Durell and Eva rejoined them on the other side.

  “We’ve got to step on it, or Piet will pass us before we reach the river,” Simon said. “I don’t relish working our way on foot upriver for thirty miles.”

  The world was a primeval, menacing green, with night-blooming epiphytes and creepers trailing from the overhead branches like dim, pulpy stars. Now and then they disturbed a group of monkeys, and there was a brief chattering and crackling of limbs, a further scolding as the animals retreated to a safe distance, and then a renewed protest from sleepy birds. Once they disturbed a water buffalo that surged up out of a mudbank beside the stream and stared at them with stupid eyes, swinging its huge, shaggy head in puzzlement. It started to follow them, then gave up and returned to the stream.

  An hour later they reached the river, scratched and battered by the brush and exhausted by the dense heat of the night. Mosquitoes swarmed around them in clouds when they ventured out on a sand bar to inspect the river’s course, upstream and down.

  There was no sign of the brightly lighted river boat. “He can’t have gone by yet,” Simon decided. “We’ll wait out here—maybe an hour, maybe less.”

  “Will Van der Peet stop for us?” Merri asked.

  “I’ll signal with the flashlight. Morse code. He’ll know it’s me. Don’t worry about it.” The starlight shining on the sand pit made Simon’s white hair look silvery, and his shaggy brows cast deep shadows over the hollows of his eyes. “Might as well settle down.”

  The river was broad and torpid under the stars. No lights gleamed anywhere up and down its banks. Northward, the land lifted until the river seemed to issue from between towering cliffs on either side. Locke sat down on the sand and began talking to Merri in a low, urgent voice. Durell watched Eva stand uncertainly for a moment; then she walked slowly along the edge of the water, back toward the shadowed privacy of the trees. He followed, found her seated in deep shadow where Locke and the other girl could not see her.

  She was crying.

  He stood looking down at her and lit two cigarettes and gave her one.

  “Please leave me alone,” she whispered.

  “What is it?” he asked gently. “I want to help.”

  She looked up at him. “Why do you always make me feel so mean and wicked? I never met any man who could do that to me.”

  “I don’t mean to.”

  “What do you feel about me? Do you feel sorry for me? I almost think you do.”

  He sat down beside her. It was a little cooler here beside the placidly flowing water. Her face was earnest, her pale eyes searched his curiously. Her tears had stopped. “What is it that makes you so resentful?” he asked. She said flatly, “I know what men are like.”

  “Does that include your husband?”

  She said nothing.

  “Do you generalize about all men like this?” he asked. “You don’t know. Nobody will ever know.” Her voice was low and furious. “The things I had to do, once, just to live—” She laughed angrily. “You wouldn’t come near me, if you knew. If Emmett had been alive and with me, it would never have happened. But I was all alone, I had no choice, and things just—happened.”

  “You never showed me Emmett’s letter,” he said. “Do you have it with you?”

  “I destroyed it.”

  “Why?”

  “I guess I didn’t want to believe it was genuine. I thought it was from a crank. Then, after I burned it, I regretted it. But I had memorized it and I thought about it all the time, and here I am.” She looked around with taut eyes. “In the middle of nowhere. I must be insane.”

  “You can’t live alone, for only yourself, the way you do,” Durell said. “No one can.”

  “You do,” she said. “Don’t you?”

  “I have to,” he told her briefly. “It’s the only safe way.” “Then we’re alike. I felt that right away. You’re as lonely as I am. You can’t trust anybody, and neither can I.” “Sometimes you have to trust someone,” he said. “Well, you don’t trust me.”

  “I want to,” he said.

  “Listen,” she began, “I want—” She paused and bit her lip and hugged her knees as she sat on the sandy river bank. The water purled softly at their feet. They could not see Locke or Merri Tarrant. It was as if they were set down in the middle of a new and strange, primitive world, stripped of all pretense. The girl’s breathing changed, quickening. She reached up and quickly undid her ash-blonde hair and let it tumble down to her shoulders. It softened her, made her seem more vulnerable, somehow. She smiled at Durell as if in sudden shyness. “You make me so curious about you. I don’t understand you at all. It’s as if you’ve found something that keeps you going, in spite of all the things that might destroy you. They give you strength, where I am weak. I’m no good, I told you. I have these strange feelings—it’s like a drug. I want to explore and I want to destroy. I want to pull down the world that men make, down around their ears.”

  “Is that what you did to Paul?”

  “I certainly didn’t help him.” She suddenly turned to Durell, her lips parted. “Tell me, do you think I’m beautiful?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want me?”

  He said nothing. She jumped to her feet and stood over him. “Most men want me. It’s a strange thing. I hate them, and yet—some of them are appealing, until—afterward, I have only contempt for them. Isn’t that strange?”

  “No.”

  “You think not? Maybe I’d change my mind about you, if—”

  “No,” he said.

  “We have time. We’re alone. Nobody will know.” She pulled angrily at her blouse and shrugged out of it. In the starlight, her body looked smooth and sleek and richly feminine, full of pride. She stood before him in bold challenge. “Do you like me, Sam? Do you?”

  “You’re very beautiful,” he said.

  “Nothing else? You don’t feel anything? Touch me,” she said. She dropped to her knees beside him. “Go on. Do what you want.”

  “Stop it, Eva,” he said. “You’re only hurting yourself.”

  “I want you to do it with me. I want to know if you’re really different.”

  “Why is it so important to you?”

  “It just is, that’s all. Here we are in this strange place, alone, on a mission that may kill us both. I’ve got a feeling I can find out what’s wrong with me, if it turns out to be different with you than with—” She paused. “Anyway—”

  “Different than with Paul?”

  “And all the others.”

  He stood up. “I’m sorry, Eva. Let’s go back to Simon.” She turned quickly to block his way. Her body was smoo
th, vibrant, challenging. He looked at her carefully, his face expressionless.

  “Oh, you son of a bitch,” she whispered coldly. “You think you’re too good for me, is that it?”

  “No.”

  “You’re all alike!” Her voice lifted abruptly. “You’re no different from any of them! You’d like to have me, all right, but you’re afraid. You talk about Paul and make excuses. Next thing you’ll say you turned me down for my own good.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  She tried to slap him. He caught her wrist, as he had done before, and threw her off balance. She fell to the cool sand of the river bank and dragged him down with her, on top of her. Instantly her arms locked about him and her lips pressed against his and her body moved under him in wanton invitation.

  “Now!” she whispered. “Now, do it—”

  He forced her arms away and stood up.

  “It’s no good, Eva. Not like this. Come on.”

  For a long moment she lay gasping on the sand, looking up at him with hatred that slowly yielded to a child-like wonder and puzzlement. She touched her mouth and then her breasts and looked down at herself as if discovering something new she had never seen before. He handed her her blouse that she had stripped off.

  “You think I’m a tramp,” she whispered. “That’s what I was and that’s what I’ll always be. That’s what Paul thinks, and he’s right, I guess. I’ll never be anything different.”

  “Get up,” he said.

  From die river came a loud hooting whistle that echoed and screeched through the dense forests on the river banks. Durell turned and saw the paddle-wheeler swinging against the shallow current, moving toward the sandbar, for all the world like a Mississippi showboat lit up like a Christmas tree, in incongruous contrast to the primitive river on which it sailed.

  He took Eva’s hand and helped her to her feet and when she had put on the blouse, they walked out on the sandbar to wait for it.

  Van der Peet was a young Dutchman with a ruddy face, a body as solid and chunky as the dykes of his native Holland, and a hard, strong handshake. He wore a battered, white visored cap with the insignia of an Amsterdam ferry service on it, a striped singlet and thin white ducks. He was not surprised to meet Simon, Merri, Eva and Durell in the middle of nowhere like this, explaining that he had watched the jet buzzing the plane, after he had recognized the Dakota as one of Simon’s.