Assignment- Tiger Devil

by Will B Aarons

  "I can't do that," Durell said. He sat heavily on the enormous old bed and kicked off his shoes. "I'd like to rest now. I have to drive to Bartica soon."

  "Bartica?" Her face brightened. "I'm going there in the morning, flying up with Calvin. Everybody's going. A new dam is to be dedicated day after tomorrow, 'way out on the Mazaruni, and we're all getting together in Bartica before being shuttled out by air. It'll be fun, parties all night. Come with us."

  "Sorry, no," he said. "I'd best stay away from Eisler; I'd advise.you to do the same. Especially after tonight."

  Her smile was knowing. "He wouldn't blame me for what happened. He doesn't credit me with enough brains to be dangerous. Just because I'm a woman. Isn't that silly?" She watched him over the rim of her glass.

  "I won't make that mistake," he said.

  "You wouldn't."

  She put her glass on the writing desk, and the small reaching movement loosed a silken flow of fabric over her breasts. Durell watched with pleasure, always aware of the sounds of the house, the night noises beyond. This room was a world apart, remote and still—as the eye of a hurricane, he thought.

  He said, "You'd better go to your bedroom."

  "This is my bedroom." The tapered ends of her fingers touched the wall behind her.

  The light went out.

  The robe made a whisper like tall wheat around her long legs. Next came a muffled splash as it fell from her shoulders onto the wide planks of the polished floor. She stepped through ingots of starlight, and they leaped from the floor and wiped along her thighs and in the soft round-ings and hollows of groin and belly.

  She paused, one knee on the bed, arched figure proud as a caryatid. "Do you want me to go now?" she said.

  Durell pulled her down, took her in his arms.

  "Oh, Sam," she breathed.

  "Hush," he said.

  He was acutely conscious of the lush gift of her body next to him, her hungry touch, the mingling of freshness and perfume that was her hair and neck—yet the deeper awareness of training and instinct continued functioning unimpaired.

  "I've been waiting so long ..."

  "I said be quiet. What's next to this room?"

  "The guest room."

  He rose, slipped quickly into his shoes.

  She rolled onto an elbow, her lovely body streaked with milky light. "Don't go," she said.

  "Are there other guests?" His voice was urgent.

  Comprehension dawned in her spangled eyes. She drew in a breath, scooped up her robe. Durell did not have to be told more. He crossed the room quickly, urged on by a need for surprise. Ana came behind as he moved quietly down the hallway to the next room.

  He swept the .38 S&W from its belt holster and threw open the door. Wooly darkness. - A glint of steel, and he flung himself to one side.

  There came the vicious whizz and thud of a knife.

  Ana screamed.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ana vanished from the comer of Durell's vision.

  The knife that protruded from the wall had time to claim only a fragment of his attention, as he hurled himself toward a rangy shadow, withholding his fire.

  Something exploded against his head, a pitcher or a table lamp. He hit the floor, saw wizard's images behind his eyes. There was the sound of a swift footfall, a clatter at the jalousied balcony door. He lifted his reeling gaze. Seen briefly against the night sky was a darting blur.

  "Peta!" Durell yelled.

  He scrambled up, burst onto the balcony. His eyes swung left, then right, reflecting the night. Peta's feet padded down a stairway. Durell took the stairs two at a time, was halfway down, when he heard a running crunch across the lawn.

  It seemed insane to follow the Indian youth out there, but Durell had no choice.

  He needed the boy desperately.

  The half-breed's naked shoulders flashed away in the middle distance, headed toward the sugar mill, Durell vaulted the railing. The solid earth stung his feet. A jacamar burst from hibiscus foliage, its white throat plumage a pale meteor against black shadows. Durell sprinted in pursuit as puddles splashed underfoot.

  Leon would be out here somewhere, probably those from the Peerless as well. Durell put the thought out of his mind and ran on.

  He neared the long star shadows of the double water towers, aware that a dim figure angled toward him from the right. It was not Leon. 'Sir! What happened?"

  'What the hell are you doing out here, Ajit?" Durell grabbed the man roughly, pushed him into deeper shadows between the rusty tanks.

  "I heard a scream."

  "I told you to stay away from trouble."

  Durell's breath was ragged and raw in his throat as he glanced at the mill with its smoldering incinerator, then back at the house. A confusion of movement rippled darkly from the barn, surged in his direction.

  There were eight, maybe ten men.

  Ajit followed his gaze and his eyes went round when he saw the guns that gleamed in their hands.

  Durell spoke rapidly: "Get back to the workers' ranges. You're endangering your purpose here."

  Ajit ran away, along the dark side of the building. The men were spread out and advancing like skirmishers, at a slow trot, uncertain of their quarry^s whereabouts. Durell ducked into the mill.

  Red night lamps provided the only illumination in here. Their light scattered weakly against stainless steel vats and white-insulated tanks bound together by ligaments of pipes, electrical conduits, conveyor belts, ladders, raised walkways. Steam clanked and pumps hummed as boilers maintained a low head of pressure through the brief hours of rest. Durell grasped the layout at a sweeping glance. It was similar in all basics to the Louisiana mills he had known in his boyhood.

  "Peta," he called, "those men who burned your house are just outside. Let me help you."

  His voice mocked him from the high roof and distant walls.

  There was little time, and he moved in a hurried crouch past a molasses tank, several large centrifuges, boiling pans. The air was hot and sweet. It would be fiery during the day, heated by simmering cane juices and the equatorial sun on the iron roof.

  Durell wondered what kept Leon. He heard nothing to indicate Peta's movement, could not be certain the boy was here, as he continued toward the far end of the mill. He rounded big vessels that were vacuum evaporators and looked past the insulated tank of a juice clarifier. The end of the plant was blocked by heaped cane, a cane feeder table, cutters and shredders, and the long slope of a conveyor that carried bagasse to the incinerator outside. Something stirred, a shadow of a movement, the barest token of a presence.

  And Durell saw that Peta had hidden in a maintenance pit beneath the cane feeder table. He easily could have fled before now, but he awaited Durell's approach with eyes of jade and ruby that showed sullenly under the low red lighting. Durell bent, offered a hand. "Let's get out of here, Peta."

  Peta backed away in the darkness of the pit. He looked dangerous. "You come down," he said in liis strange accent, compounded of the Arawak tongue, French and English.

  Durell stared at the boy, the tardiness of Leon's pursuit nagging at the back of his mind. He did not know where the man was or what he was up to. He thought of Ana and felt a twist of unease for her. He slid in beside Peta. The candy scent of the mill was mixed here with the odor of grease, and oil dribbled from the machinery low overhead. The rangy youth's coppery skin was bathed in sweat, as if he had run all the way to Ana's plantation, and the scar welts on his arm looked almost fresh and bloody in this light. He carried a simple bag of animal hide, strung over one shoulder.

  Durell said, "What do you want, Peta—why did you miss with the knife?"

  "Maybe I should not have missed," Peta said. Hostility simmered in the green pans of his irises.

  Durell spoke bluntly. "You want the diamond. Yon were hiding at your house, when Ajit said we were coming here, and you ran after us. You let me catch you now, because you'd rather face me than lose it."

  "It's mine!" Pet
a's eyes narrowed above the sharp blades of his cheekbones, and he lunged for Durell, and Durell swatted him away. Peta's eyes went dull. He shook his head, focused on Durell. "Where is it?" he demanded.

  'You must tell me where your father is, Peta."

  'I'll tell you nothing. Mr. Boyer said he brought the diamond from my father for me. He was afraid they would catch him, so he hid it."

  "Afraid who would catch him?"

  "I don't know."

  "Where's your father?" Durell repeated.

  Peta's answer was a stubborn stare.

  Durell regarded the youth with anger and resentment. He would have beaten the information out cf him, if he'd thought he could break his will—and if there had been time.

  Against all logic, Peta again gathered himself to spring at the more competent and powerful man.

  Then he was checked by a voice that called Durell's name.

  Durell knew it must be Leon.

  Durell peered through the slit beneath the feeder table, saw that it must have been Ajit who slowed his pursuers. If the Asian had been a willing decoy, it had taken his last reserve of courage. He looked whipped and frightened up there in the red shadows of the centrifuges, where Leon held him at gunpoint.

  Leon called: "Senor Durell—we caught a coolie-man. He doesn't belong here. Maybe he killed Richard Boyer and was trying for you at the house. I'll turn him over to the police for you, to make up for our misunderstanding. Come out, now."

  "Maybe we should do as he says," Peta grumbled.

  "Think so? Watch." An aluminum stepladder stood in front of the feeder table, and Durell reached out and tipped it over.

  A burst of automatic rifle fire tore savagely at the disturbance, and the ladder jiggled and hopped.

  "The only way we'll get out of here alive is to fight our way out," Durell whispered.

  There are many more of them. Can we do it?" "All we can do is try," Durell said.

  He regarded the two men in the dim red distance. Leon held what looked to be a machine pistol with detachable scabbard stock. Ajit stood beside hkn in the awed slouch of a man at an executioner's post. Durell sweated with concentration, debated the tactics of escape as unseen feet scraped and whispered closer through the gloom. He was urgently aware that time was on the side of the encroaching men, that others would be outdoors, covering the exits. Even in the dark, he viewed an open dash to the Fiat with a sense of dread.

  He judged they still did not know his exact location; that he might throw them into confusion, if he could kill their arrogant leader up there by the glistening centrifuges. But now Leon had taken cover behind one of the vessels, his face hardly visible.

  It was a slim chance, but Durell decided with misgiving that he must try. He steadied the snub-nosed .38 with both hands and aimed. The light was intolerable, the range impossible, and he might hit Ajit.

  He squeezed the trigger; the pistol bucked, and metal sparked and rang as the bullet went wide of the mark.

  Slugs slapped, spanged and tore around the feeder table. The racket was ear-splitting, where Durell and Peta hunched in the maintenance well, bits of cane and splinters of lead raining down on them. Peta's lips skinned back and showed teeth clenched against the fury. Durell's guts squeezed with foreboding as the gunfire continued to rage; short, overlapping bursts that moved closer and closer. It was a standard infantry tactic; dart, fire; dart, fire, each man covering the next. They were as well-trained as front-line troops.

  Windows crashed. The air seemed hotter, the breathing harder as the barrage raked over them. A relay snapped and a pump hummed nearby with a jarring normalcy.

  A heightening sense of urgency told Durell he must slow the advance. He popped his head up, glimpsed, ducked. The gunfire was a wild, stuttering storm, but the fire was unaimed, came from the hip. He steeled himself, abruptly raised his head once more. Bullets whiffed and ricocheted. He quickly aimed and fired, and a pale form slid from atop a tank and thudded among pipes and machinery.

  There were no more calls from Leon, only the slap of darting feet, the rattle of automatic rifles.

  Peta*s eyes slid toward him, and the youth nodded impassively upwards. Durell quenched a brief spark of panic, and his arm levered the .38 high, and it roared. A pink nebula of fluid and fiber burst from the skull of a man on a catwalk, up in the high shadows. He bounced against a railing, sprawled half off the walk, and Durell hoped fervently for his automatic rifle, but it caught in something or was held by a sling.

  A sudden quiet descended on the vast, gloomy room.

  Peta raised his eyes slowly. "What are they doing?'* he whispered.

  Durell made no reply. He did not know. He considered the half-breed, saw a black pearl of blood stuck to a splinter wound on his forehead. The boy's poise under threat, his nerveless composure reached beyond his years to millenniums of hunters and what they had learned in the wild about facing danger and overcoming fear. His life, spent on the banks of primitive rivers and dusky jungle paths, had been self-reliant and testing of his courage, and Durell struggled against a rare awareness of kinship that spanned race and time and place.

  Durell knew he would sacrifice the young hunter to save himself and his mission, if it came to that. Such choices had been forced on him before, and he had made them without looking back. And yet . . .

  He told himself not to think in terms of saving Peta.

  The silence rang in Durell's ears, and sweat was acid in his eyes. It was not credible that the loss of two men had taken the fight out of the others.

  Something slithered toward them through the ruby shadows.

  A steam hose.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Durell watched with growing alarm as another hose came from a different direction. Now there were three of the things, worming closer.

  Nausea spread in Durell's stomach as he realized he was to be boiled alive.

  He studied the pit that was to become a scalding vat, mind working furiously. The low bed of the feeder table made upward escape impossible. He could crawl out from under on the other side, but the men were certain to see him lethal seconds before he could reach a door—and, if they did not, there would be the guard beyond it, and another automatic rifle.

  He cast frantically about for an element of surprise, something that would delay the men in front and disconcert the man at the door at the same time.

  Blubbering water vented darkly from a hose, then another. A fizz, a hiss, and burning white vapor and boiling spray roared and blasted toward them. The racket assaulted Durell's brain, stabbing like a knife. The hoses were rubber-coated coils of steel, easy to shove across the smooth concrete floor, and they inched toward the pit inexorably.

  Peta winced, ducked back, clutched at a red patch where steam had touched his shoulder.

  The hoses slid into the pit one after another, steel nozzles screaming, steam roiling blindingly, as the temperature of the thickening, reddish air leapt up. Durell captured one of the hoses, pointed it away from the pit. He dared not throw it toward the men for fear its stijff coils would twist back on him and scald his face. Peta followed his example as the rubber casings grew hot, then searing, and the third hose deluged the pit with steam.

  There was a shattering roar of gunfire. They released the hoses and ducked as bullets chipped the concrete.

  A wave of quick motion rippled down the steamlines as unseen hands straightened them with a jerk. They slid relentlessly back into the pit.

  A hellish fire-opal color suffused the boiling cloud. Durell's clothing sopped up the moisture, and it stung his skin. Peta slapped and nibbed where the spray spattered his naked back and legs. They avoided iron rods of steam that would have flayed them instantly, by staying between the hoses. But the heat was crushing, the scorching, sodden air almost impossible to breathe.

  And there seemed no way out of it.

  Peta never made a sound, just slid to his knees, hands groping weakly at the greasy concrete wall. His head drooped between the bunched muscles
of his shoulders, and it seemed to take a last effort to raise his face. His dazed eyes met Durell's with an anguished, despairing plea.

  Durell reached for him, slumped onto all fours, coughed and gagged in the live steam.

  Then his arms gave way, and he was distantly aware as his chin struck the floor.

  The steam kept up its screaming assault.

  Durell's body was a dim outline beneath the suffocating stew of vapor. The cloud leaped up to enfold the length of the cane table, then swelled out with ragged, twisting edges until it formed a billowing red curtain of doom from ceiling to floor.

  Leon and his men watched from a safe distance, waiting.

  The scalding fumes darkened the iron ceiling with condensation; the steel cutting table glistened wetly. Water dribbled and dropped and mixed with the hot water that rushed from the hoses with the steam. The floor of the pit was covered with water.

  The water filled Durell's nostrils, and he choked and struggled for breath. He dimly imagined that hot forks jabbed his neck, his back, his hips. He wanted to sink back into the deathly sleep from which he had been aroused. Then he was aware of the water again; aware that he could not breathe. His head jerked up sputtering and snorting. The shrieking of the steam battered his ears; he tried to shake it out of his head. His eyes opened on the dark hell-hole around him.

  Remembrance came grimly.

  The steam was eating him alive.

  His hair swung limply as he raised himself on shaking arms. He knew he would lose consciousness again, unless he got out of here immediately. There was only one hope, and it was a long shot.

  He slapped Peta, splashed water on the youth's hot face, slapped him again. Peta moaned, blinked. Durell yanked him from his back to a sitting posture, nerves jangling with a fear that the steam would be cut off too soon, leaving them exposed.

  "Crawl out!" Durell shouted over the raging steam.

  A weak hand clutched at Durell's shirt. "Where's my diamond? I don't leave without you," Peta said stubbornly.

  "You idiot! Do as you're told!"