Assignment- Tiger Devil

by Will B Aarons

  Durell was suspended among the branches of the manni tree, down beside the hull of the Peerless. Words from across a numbed distance snaked through the broken crockery of consciousness, worried his comprehension.

  "Mr. Durell?"

  He could not open his eyes, or, he thought in confusion, he was blind.

  The words came again: "Mr. Durell?"

  The world heaved on springs and was smothered in a vile odor of slime. His lips tried to articulate something as he groped toward an inferno that roared at the back of his head, where a bullet must have clipped his skull. The momentum of his dash from the wheelhouse had carried him over the ship's rail. It came back to him as a dream of anxiety that he might have had hours or only seconds ago.

  He felt a hand dig roughly into his jacket, remembered vaguely the heavy limip in his trousers pocket. Sight returned dimly, and the sky blinked at him through the canopy of the tree. Swirly star-banners. A shaggy-haired form.

  Peta labored through another of Durell's jacket pockets. Instead of returning to the corial, he had waited at the tree they had climbed to board the hulk.

  Now he wanted what Durell had found—

  A pounding chattering and muzzle flame erupted from the ship's rail, where someone fired blindly into the fo-hage, not knowing if Durell was dead or ahve, hoping to finish him with wild shots.

  When it stopped, Peta was gone. Durell could only wonder if the youth had fled or been shot out of the tree. There came a raw stench of gunpowder over the reek of primal mud and decay. The teeming Demerara was a powerful murmur a few yards away, and a foghorn sounded from a humid distance where its mouth was Georgetown's harbor. Durell shielded a penflash with his body as he studied the object taken from the wheelhouse. Flaky brown vegetable residue clung to it, and he rubbed it away to reveal a lightly pitted stone.

  It was a diamond.

  A raw diamond the size of a prune.

  He heard a command, and a rope ladder slapped down the side of the ship. It was no surprise that the command was in Enghsh. The language of Guyana's last colonial masters was the national tongue for descendants of African slaves and of imported plantation laborers, Portuguese from Madeira, Hindus and Moslems from India, Chinese.

  Durell reached out hurriedly, gripped a thick limb and worked toward the center of the tree until he found the liana-webbed trunk. A hairy something scuttered across the back of his hand, and he jerked back, almost falling. There were tarantulas here that grew six inches across. He wiped sweat from his eyesockets, as his thudding heart rapped against the wound at the back of his head. Then he hung from a low branch and dropped into the muck. The light splash was lost in a cacophony of insect and toad voices.

  There was no sign of Peta in the sprangled vegetation.

  Durell had only one thought in mind, and that was to get away from the ship before the men could reach him.

  Boots scraped and thudded down the hull plates, off to his left. In moments the jungle would be rife with armed men—as it already was with lethal spiders and scorpions, alligators, perhaps a jaguar.

  He hoped that Peta had not already taken the coriM. The Demerara was a mile wide here. With battering rafts of flotsam swept down from the rain forests, tricky currents and deadly predators, it was nearly impossible to swim.

  He kept his snub-nosed .38 Smith and Wesson Special in its holster and dived into the foliage, bearing north. He'd need both hands to tear his way through, and then he'd be lucky if he got very far.

  Mud sucked at his feet, shaggy lianas enmeshed him, vampire bats fluttered through the branches—the natives called them "Dr. Moses," he remembered, after an old physician notorious a century before for bleeding his patients. The mosquito-borne diseases of malaria and yellow fever had been stamped out, but many inhabitants still slept under netting for safety from the vampires. Durell sensed things slithering and crawling, as the men stirred up monkeys and labbas and God only knew what else in tihieir search of the swampy brush. Their lights washed and winked and splattered into coins of radiance on knife-edged awaraballi palms, and when they called to each other, their voices were mufiBed in the black hell.

  Durell stayed close to the riverbank. It was madness to stray far from the Demerara, since most of the eoimtry was uninhabited and unexplored. Only swamps, bloated rivers and rain forests stretched for hundreds of miles in a titanic wilderness.

  He tripped over the loop of a manni root, struggled from one handhold to the next as heart-shaped caladiums slapped him and prickly bactris fronds tore at his clothing. Every leaf spilled a measure of water, and he was soaking, and his breath shouted in his ears.

  It had been easy, going to the Peerless, Peta had searched out a deer track with flagrant skill, but Durell now failed to pick it up, was unsure of its location.

  His pursuers had fanned out; some could have passed him and doubled back. Like the bushmasters and coral snakes, one might strike at any time.

  Suddenly he broke into a tree-vaulted space where a stream ran through. He glanced about, felt a tremor of relief. This was the small cove in which the corial had been hidden. He called softly for Peta, aware of yellow beams of light that rippled overhead, the dim slosh of boots as the men approached from behind.

  Peta made no reply.

  He risked a second hoarse whisper, this time for Thomas, the grizzled old boatman who had ferried them across with his ten-horse outboard.

  There was no response.

  The water was warm as he waded in an ankle-deep stew of algae, bending toward the river through undergrowth, spreading fronds and tvrigs as he went. The stream widened to a glistening stage with curtains of foliage hanging in the flies.

  The black length of the corial sat like a coffin washed up by the current. Durell rushed to shove it off and saw that it was a coffin of sorts.

  Old Thomas lay dead in there.

  The dim shape of his body sprawled on the bottom, mouth open in death-awe, eyes glittery against his black face. Durell questioned the killer's presence with a glance to right and left, saw nothing, pushed again, and the boat broke loose from the sucking mud. As he waded after it, the cove was a welter of smells, overripe hog plums, figs, swamp gas, bush cow droppings.

  He heard the men distinctly now. But for the dugout, they would have trapped him against the stream. Urgently he threw a knee over the boat's gunwale—and a low rattle of droplets sounded at his back.

  His belly went cold as he twisted just in time to block a naked forearm and deflect the wet flash of a knife. Instinct rammed signals through his nerves as the knife looped back toward his spleen. He caught the knife hand, rammed his knee in the direction of a groin that was -a guess in the ebony shadows. He missed and lost his footing, and his face hit the tepid water as the other's knee thudded hard between his shoulder blades. A brutal hand clutched his hair, pushing him down. Durell clamped his lips against the sour water, hung onto the knife hand and heaved, struggling for a foothold on the yielding bottom sands.

  The man held him under with a bullish strength, but could not shake his knife hand free of Durell's grip.

  Durell's lungs began to bum.

  He grabbed an ankle and felt the man totter, lifted the leg with all his muscle and crashed his head into the man's abdomen. The man stumbled back, still clinging to Durell's hair, trying to hold him under, and Durell had only a fraction of a second to exploit his advantage.

  He reached up and around, fingers sliding over a rubber wetsuit, and grabbed heavy airtanks and wrenched the man over onto his back. Durell's mouth came out of the water with a taste of scum, and he twisted the man's arm and ground the knife between his ribs. Flippered feet thrashed into the air, and hands floundered whitely. There was a gargled scream. Durell plunged the blade into the frogman's heart.

  Durell swayed, snorted the foul jungle soup from his nose.

  His breath caught in his throat as he felt the water vibrate with movement, and he reached the stream bank in three crashing strides.

  Piranhas.
>
  One of the short, silver brutes came out with him, teeth clamped fanatically in his thigh. Durell cut it loose with the knife.

  They rioted over the corpse, frenzied the surface of the creek where the corial drifted hopelessly beyond reach.

  The men shouted from scant yards away, and Durell knew they had heard the commotion. All he could do was swim the stream or the river—and the stream was out of the question. He ran for the river and almost fell over something black and pliant—the frogman's rubber boat, tucked among mangrove roots.

  He gave a brief thought to Peta, perhaps wounded, hidden in some tangled thicket, then clenched his lips and shoved the little raft onto the swift waters.

  Long seconds passed as he paddled furiously, eyes on a black line that was the far shore, but there were no shots. No boats followed him.

  The river was milky under the stars, overlain with chill vapors and vegetable odors. Its roiling current bore mats and rafts of tangled logs, lianas, seed pods, blossoms— then something more.

  It came ominously out of the low, thin mist, its bow wave a trembling, shining thunder. The enormous steel whaleback of its hull passed on a ripping slur of turbulence.

  A submarine.

  With little more than its great black sail above the surface, it surged toward the Atlantic.

  Chapter Six

  The rubber boat touched shore and Durell scrambled up the grassy face of a dike. He looked back, hstened, did not know if the men were out on the river now or not. Inland was a field that glimmered with orange coals where leaves had been burned from sugarcane in preparation for the harvest. The smoke touched his nostrils with a sweet fragrance. House lights shone from the middle distance. A piccolo frog piped. A steady breeze chilled Durell through his soaked clothing, and he buttoned his coat and began walking.

  The dike ended two miles upriver at the edge of the plantation country, an uncomfortable hike in squishy shoes and clinging trousers. There, among canted moorings and a weatherbeaten dock, was old Thomas* hovel. Durell's rental Fiat was parked behind it at the end of a red dirt road.

  There was no sign that Peta had made it back here.

  Durell dug a wad of mechanic's rags from the car trunk and hurriedly cleaned his .38 of corrosive moisture. He could field-strip the weapon blindfolded, if need be.

  As he worked, he debated driving the mile or so to Peta's shack to see if he was there, but decided against it.

  It was more important to get the big diamond safely stowed.

  The Berbice Hotel was on High Street near the Victorian-Gothic-Rhenish Town Hall, an enormous building of gray weatherboard. Chad had wanted to put Durell up at the modem, white cube of the Hotel Tower, which looked like something imported from San Diego and was almost directly across Main Street from the embassy, but Durell had preferred the Berbice. He liked the distance it kept between him and the other Americans, and the shady saman trees that spread drifts of pink flowers on the lawn and the garden of cassias, plumbagos and jacaran-das. It had the lazy elegance of bygone days, when travelers spoke of Georgetown as the loveliest city in the Caribbean.

  The lobby was busy and so was the bar, where a gaggle of technocrats from African states, in town for an international forum of some kind, traded drmks with a North Korean and a Mao-jacketed Chinese from the PRC mission.

  The government of Guyana took pride in its Third World status: a memorial to Mahatma Gandhi stood in the Promenade Gardens, and, at the Company Path Garden, over at the old Anglican Cathedral, there was a monument to the founders of the nonaligned movement: Nasser, Nkrumah, Nehru and Tito.

  Durell asked the desk clerk if there were any messages for him, and the clerk, looking askance at his muddy clothing, stuck a finger into a pigeon hole and withdrew two slips of paper. One asked that Durell return a telephone call from Chad. The other, written in a looping, feminine hand, said: "Welcome to the Garden City—they like to call it that here. How about a drink for old time's sake? Ill be at the Toucan Patio until eleven or so." It was signed, "Ana."

  Durell glanced at the gilded clock above the desk. It was almost ten.

  He made his voice louder than normal, as he said, "I want this placed in the hotel safe." He dropped the big, dirty stone on the rosewood counter so that it bounced off and he had to pick it up from the floor. He hoped he was not too obvious. But you couldn't catch a fish if you didn't bait the hook.

  The unquestioning clerk scooped the gem into a manila envelope, wrote Durell's name across it and disappeared behind a partition of key boxes. He returned a moment later and gave Durell a receipt.

  Durell felt eyes all over him in the crowded lobby.

  Durell inspected his room in detail, using all the standard procedures, but it had not been entered during his absence. No dust, no wrinkles, no pulled threads. Everything exactly in place. Then he went a step further, regarding the walls and ceiling with care. He found no damp or off-color daubs of paint and could conclude that no listening devices had been planted behind the plaster. Thankfully, DureU noted that his room was higher than any of the surrounding buildings, out of reach of snipers and sensitive sound-gathering equipment. High Street was quiet beyond the old-fashioned Demerara windows that were vertical louvers you could push out with a pole to catch the tradewind. Strollers took the air near the wooden, flying-buttressed bulk of St. George's Cathedral.

  Durell showered the stench of the swamp away, apphed antibiotic salve to the scalp wound and numerous small cuts and scratches and put on a fresh drip-dry seersucker suit. Then he dialed Chad's apartment.

  "Where have you been?" The State man sounded tured and angry.

  "Well talk about it later."

  "I hope you weren't bugging Calvin Eisler."

  Durrell said nothing.

  "It's better to go through channels. I tried to contact Eisler through his cutout all afternoon. Then about five o'clock, the goddamn cutout tells me he won't try to set us up with Eisler anymore. He's very tense, Sam. Very uptight."

  "Do you think he spoke with Eisler?"

  "I think so, but he won't admit it. I think Eisler put a chill on him." Durell heard a spewing sound, as Chad blew cigarette smoke on the mouthpiece. Chad said, "Listen. The ambassador's nervous, Sam. Eisler swings a hell of a lot of weight, and the ambassador feels we can't afford to alienate him."

  Durell said: "The ambassador's nervous. I'll keep that in mind."

  "Don't be sarcastic. Guys like you just don't live in the real world, that's all."

  Durell made no reply. He said, "Did the technical interviews turn up anything?"

  "They were negative—those that were administered. Almost half of the Guyanese employees of the embassy simply refused to submit to the polygraph. We couldn't force them."

  Durell's voice sounded angry. "Then we just have to assume that embassy security is shot. Work on the theory that everything's bugged, photographed, compromised. Tell the ambassador to shut down communication of all classified matter until further notice."

  "Isn't that a bit extreme?"

  "Somebody told Otelo Antunes about Dick. You've got people who won't take a lie detector test, so it's only reasonable to initiate what countermeasures we can."

  "All right. I just hope you're not overreactmg." Chad's voice softened hopefully. "It would help if I could tell the ambassador what you've been up to."

  "Would you believe I found a fabulous diamond, and saw an ahen submarine on the Demerara?"

  "Oh, shit. Go to hell." Chad hung up.

  Chapter Seven

  The Toucan Patio, on Orange Walk near Bourdo Market, had no toucans and was not a patio. It was a clapboard fortress against the climate, its walls riddled with latticework and lathe-turned grills and Demerara windows. A second-story veranda looked into fronds of young coconut palms, and, rising above an iron-frilled roofpeak, there was a wind tower where patrons could enjoy the evening breeze with their Russian Bear or Bookers' rum.

  Durell parked the rental Fiat and waited for headlamps to go out i
n a steel-gray Volkswagen that stopped half a block behind. He could have eluded the tail easily enough, but had chosen not to. The street was wet, and the wind rattled the palm fronds and brought the smell of more rain to come. Durell entered the nightclub through a doorway with a Red Spot beverage sign hanging beside it. He asked for Ana Morera's table and was sent on a three-story climb up a dim and dingy staircase that spoke faintly to his nostrils of mildew and kitchen grease.

  He wished there was another way down, but saw no evidence of one.

  Either this was an off-night, or Ana was a prized customer: she had the top of the wind tower all to herself. Another possibility, Durell thought, was that she had I arranged it that way.

  She sat in the golden lamplight, a drink before her, a silver-tipped cigarette burning in an ashtray of Indian pottery. She did not face the entrance, and Durell had a moment to study the room from the shadows. The small space was floored with rush matting and enclosed on three sides by many-paned windows that were half-opened. On the fourth side was a wall of polished greenheart that bore trophy heads of five jaguars.

  Then he moved into the room, and her oval face warmed Eis she saw him. He remembered the provocation of her small mouth, the determined brown eyes that might turn to melted caramel or reflect inner fires like brass before a Sreplace. Her long black hair was skinned back in an enormous bun that emphasized the proud lift of her chin and made the stem of her neck seem fragile. The low :ut of her simple black dress displayed a cleavage of breasts buoyant with youth.

  Durell sat down without speaking, took the hand she languidly offered. It was cold, and he wondered if that pvere the shaved ice in her gin-and-it, or something else.

  She smiled and said: "I've grown up since you last saw me. I'm a big girl now. Yes?"

  "Only in the right places," Durell said.

  Her eyes were amused, her manner competent beyond ber years. Durell considered the change in her since her college days at American University, where she had revived a cum laude degree in International Studies. Now jhe seemed even more sure of herself, if that were possible, vain with the unpredictable brilliance of Spanish conquistadores and the beauty of Castilian court ladies, whose blood ran in her veins. She had been accepted at Yale University Law School, and every recruiter in K Section ;vas rubbing his hands in anticipation of adding her to ;he agency's select list of career officers. And then she'd slipped from their grasp.