Assignment- Tiger Devil

by Will B Aarons

  His body was a hot, trembling urgency, and Ana was startled to feel herself respond physically. Yet her mind was detached, distant, up there with the Southern Cross, blazing in its clarity.

  Her hand sought the mouth of the leather bag.

  The Tokarev was heavy, brutish in her grasp, as Peta struggled atop her.

  Ana's detachment suddenly shattered, and she squirmed to avoid him and brought the big pistol, awkward and outsized in her delicate hand, toward Peta's oblivious head.

  Now she was in a hurry. It had gone on too long; she'd carried it too far. . . .

  Peta buried his face into her lovely neck, uncaring as she heaved to throw him away. Her mind was a tumult of fear and desperation, her rushing breath dry behind her teeth.

  She raised the gun to Peta's temple

  Chapter Eighteen

  Durell knocked the gun from Ana's hand, heard a chirp of pain, threw Peta sprawling in the sand. Peta came up on the balls of his feet and just stood there, naked, dazed, ribs heaving.

  "Get back to the camp. Get some clothes on," Durell said.

  Ana's tawny arms clenched Durell, and she sobbed against his chest. Durell grasped her shoulders, pushed her back a step, saw Peta disappear into the brush.

  "Aren't you going to do anything?" Ana demanded.

  "Voices carry in this damp air," Durell replied. Ana's face went down, and Durell pushed it back up, a finger under her chin. Reflections from the water made a silken net across her breasts and stomach. "Why did you do it, Ana?" he said, his voice rough.

  "I came to get his gun." Her eyes flared. "He shouldn't have that gun, Sam!"

  "Another second and you would have killed him." Durell wanted to hit her.

  "He threatened you with it—"

  "And I told you I needed him." Durell slapped her with a short blow, saving most of his strength from harming her, and she fell against hun. "Don't help me anymore. Ana," he said.

  Ana clung to him, whimpering. "I'm sorry. It was awful. Not like . . . . " Tears starred her eyes as she turned her face up to him, and he felt the urgent press of her body against his. "Not like—if it were us."

  Durell stared down at her and did not move. She was more of a stranger now than on their first encounter, standing here naked as a snake.

  Ana's arms tightened around him, and she spoke rapidly, her voice thin. "Sam—Sam, darling. Please, make it like it would have been at my house."

  Durell twisted away from her, found the Tokarev. He threw it into the river and admitted to himself that he felt better with it gone.

  "I've got to find Peta," he said.

  As he topped the riverbank, he glanced back. Ana stood watching him, hands on rounded hips, fire shining in her brassy eyes.

  For long moments of worry, Durell thought Peta had run away. He was not in the lean-to; he did not respond to Durell's calls. Durell found him sulking in the Fiat. They exchanged brief stares. Durell spoke first. "You shouldn't have gone to the river. I might have needed you."

  "I wanted to bathe."

  Durell heaved a breath, rested his hands on the damn car roof. "We've got a job to do, Peta. I thought you could hold up your end of it."

  "Don't speak to me like a child."

  "I'll take you for a man when you can be depended on as one."

  "I showed Miss Morera T was a man."

  Durell gazed at the youth's hooded eyes. "Son, there are dangers in this world you never guessed. In the jungle you know what is real, and what is shadow. You must learn the same distinctions in people."

  "How?"

  "Start bv keeping your distance from Ana."

  "She likes me."

  "That's a shadow."

  "You're jealous."

  "She might have killed you with that gun."

  "What gun?"

  Durell stared at him. "Just look in your pouch," he said and turned angrily away. There was no point in arguing it. Peta would only find a way to rationalize what had happened and end by insisting he could take care of himself.

  It would be harder than ever now to win his cooperation, Durell decided.

  But he would have to have it this day,

  Bartica was two more hours away, hours of grinding driving, clearing the road of fallen debris, heaving and pushing at the rear of the little car. Ana ignored Peta, and the Indian youth grew sullen. Durell kept his eye on both of them.

  The first light of dawn colored the sky copper as they drove at last into Makouria and were ferried to Bartica. The day heated rapidly, and a crochet of mist lifted from the Essenuibo, an oily, sizzling flood of silver and tea-brown, iron-grav and violet tbat was four miles wide below Bartica. Three miles west of town the Mazanini and Cuvuni rivers joined before spilling into the Esse-quibo, and the mingling of waters was enormous at the hill-crowned point of the town. Motorboats buzzed to and from riverside houses; timber rafts floated down from distant concessions headed for ocean-going steamers waiting at Kaow Island; an old trading launch carried a few diamond and gold prospectors, bananas and salted fish.

  Bartica was the jumping-off place for the interior, an indispensable port of call during the gold rush early in the century. The increasing use of aircraft had diminished that importance, but Durell noted that it still bustled with traders and humming sawmills. Men of every race moved among donkeys, goats, chickens and dogs in its dusty streets, many of them porkknockers, baleta bleeders and woodcutters with machetes or cutlasses hanging from their belts. Most of its houses had rusting tin roofs, and the forest towered over its fringes and the river banks on all sides.

  Durell spoke to Ana. "Which hotel has your reservation?"

  "Let me stay with you, Sam."

  "Which hotel?"

  "I know I was wrong to do that with Peta. Don't hold it against me."

  Durell stopped the car. Down amid mooring poles washerwomen sang and scrubbed clothes on big green-heart logs. A giant blue butterfly wafted through the air. The sun pained the eyes and a dark sweat stain had begun spreading across Durell's shirt. He was in no mood for debate.

  "Get out of the car," he said.

  "Here?" Ana glanced about. "What for?"

  "It's the end of the line."

  Ana regarded his grim stare. "All right," she said, and made a moue with her provocative little mouth. "You win. Take me to the Baro-tika Hotel, over on Second Street."

  Durell told Peta to wait in the car, while he carried Ana's bag into the old hotel. A few dignitaries akeady were here and stood about the lobby chatting with the air of conventioneers between seminars. The bar was open, but honest working men disdained it now, and it was depressing with unaccustomed propriety.

  Durell dropped Ana's bag in front of the polished splendor of the mahogany main desk, and his gaze mingled briefly with Ana*s. He decided there was a reflection of relief in her sugary eyes, after all.

  "Be seeing you, Sam," she said.

  He nodded. They did not touch. He turned and walked away.

  As she stepped onto the shaded porch, Otelo Antunes strolled toward him. A supercilious smile twisted his thin lips. He was dressed in a smart suit of lightweight gray cloth, and his black eyes were slick with self-satisfaction.

  "Ah, Mr. Durell." A big hand went for the steno pad in his pocket. "You're to be a guest at the dedication, I presume?"

  "You presume?" Durell started to turn away,

  "Unless you're here on K Section business."

  Durell wondered how long Otelo had known this; how he had found out. But he did not wish a public discussion of the subject. He paused and said in a low voice: "Stay away from me. Don't think you can be lucky twice."

  "It's you who will need luck, after tomorrow."

  "You've written a story?"

  "And turned it in to my editors, Mr. Durell. It's already being set in type for publication tomorrow afternoon."

  Durell's face did not change, as he said: "Thanks for the warning. That gives me a little more than twenty-four hours."

  "Better enjoy them,
Cajun, because then your life will be worthless, to judge by what happened to Mr. Boyer."

  Durell did not bother to reply. He knew Otelo was just a tool. He left the newsman standing there and went back to the car, aware that his usefulness would be ended after tomorrow—even if he could save his life.

  Chapter Nineteen

  "Where are we going?" Peta asked.

  "To the seaplane landing. I'll have to charter a plane to take us up the Mazaruni this afternoon."

  "I do not want to go," Peta said.

  "Neither do I."

  "That country belongs to the Warakabra Tiger."

  "Your father's claim is there, isn't it?"

  "I won't tell you."

  "You'll have to take me, Peta. I've a hunch Dick was there. All I can do is follow his trail."

  "Will you give me my diamond?"

  "When I can."

  Peta sat far back in a comer of the car, arms folded, sunlight fatty white on the scar welts of his arm. They passed fishermen in straw hats repairing nets down by the water. Black smoke from the town's electrical generating plant spoiled a brilliant sky that was dotted with small white clouds. The clouds drifted from horizon to horizon and bore blue shadows across the river and simmering jungle.

  Peta watched the great band of water stretched north toward the sea, and said: "My father was a criminal. They put him on Devil's Island, and he never went back to his home."

  Durell made no reply, eyes on the road as they wound past the crumbling river wall.

  "My father told me how they buried the dead," Peta resumed. "They took them onto the ocean in a small boat, and, when they reached a certain place, they rang a bell. All the sharks came to the boat. Then they threw the dead overboard. The sharks knew what the bell meant."

  There was another long pause, then Peta said: "My father had a fear of being fed to the sharks like that. Now I'm afraid the Warakabra Tiger has eaten him."

  "He may be alive, Peta. He may know more about the Warakabra Tiger than anyone. You've got to help me find him."

  Peta spoke angrily. "So you can steal the rest of his diamonds? Maybe to give to your fancy woman, Miss Morera?"

  "I didn't steal your diamond; the police took it."

  "You lie. If I had the diamond. Miss Morera would see who is generous."

  "Talk of generosity after you find the courage to help your father," Durell said.

  He parked beside the landing where two small floatplanes were tied up at a long dock of weathered planks. A man with sunlight glancing from his aviator's sunglasses inspected the left pontoon of a Cessna. Scores of steel fuel drums were scattered about here, and the jungle-river scent reeked of gasoline.

  Durell and Peta descended steps cut from the earth of the riverbank and topped with wide boards. Water wrinkled away from the floating dock as they walked out to the planes.

  The pilot was a young man with an enormous blond mustache that curled at the ends. He had a short, solid build and a broad head with a crooked nose, and reminded Durell of a prize fighter.

  "Hey, you an American?" he asked, when Durell spoke.

  "Don't spread it around."

  "Tourist?"

  "Can you fly us up the Mazaruni this afternoon?"

  "Whereabouts? Mazaruni's a mighty long river." The man had a Southwestern accent.

  "That new Chinese dam would be fine."

  "Just looking around, huh?" The man grinned, but Durell could not see his eyes through the glasses. "You don't look like a tourist."

  "Do you want the job or not?"

  The man wiped his mustache and spat into the river. "Nope. Don't think so. Plenty of business between here and Georgetown today. Lots of work tomorrow, too. How about the day after?"

  "It's got to be today," Durell said. "I'll pay you seventy-five."

  The smoked lenses peered at Durell. "Tell you what: make it a hundred, and I'm yours. I could pick up more on the shuttle to Georgetown, but these muckety-mucks just make me tired."

  "You've got it," Durell said.

  "When you're ready to take off, you can find me here or over at the Kyk-over-al Hotel, my favorite flea-bag. Just ask for Rick Kirby." The pilot shook hands with Durell and strode away.

  Durell folded the stock of the AK, put the weapon in his suitcase, then stowed the suitcase in the red and blue airplane. Then he had Peta show him to Dick's riverside shack, found its shutters closed and door boarded up, and decided to wait for midafternoon to break in. Nearly everybody napped after lunch, and there would be less risk of being seen. Next, he drove out of town and pushed the Fiat over a high bluff into the river. With it out of the way, the police—or Leon's agents—-were less likely to spot him, he decided.

  It meant he had burned yet another bridge behind.

  For a man with no option of turning back, it hardly mattered.

  He felt a nagging worry about the police, and chose a hotel in a run-down section of town by the Mazaruni River for a rest. It was near an open market that gleamed with oranges and mangos and fresh river fish. Across its dilapidated front was a sign so weatherworn as to be hardly legible: TWO GENTLEMEN. Lettering of more recent vintage stated that rooms were available by the day, week or month. Two domino games were in progress on the front porch, and men smirched with jungle mud came and went through the front door with glasses of rum and beer.

  It was the next step above the loggias, open-sided, mud-and-thatch lodgings where you could sling your hammock for a few pennies a day, and Durell judged that the police kept clear of it.

  Inside, Durell guessed by the dingy elegance of faded damask drapes that the place had been successful enough during the gold rush days. Its ceiling fans twisted slowly, stirring the growing weight of hot, humid air, and potted rubber plants and palms showed dead brown spots under fine red dust.

  They had food brought to their room, where another ceiling fan turned listlessly, and a mild stench of fishguts crept up from the riverbank. Durell ate lavishly of fried steak and metemgee, a delicious concoction of edoes, yams, cassava and plantains cooked with coconut milk and grated coconut. Peta had fish and pepperpot. "I was never in such a place," he said, and poked a chunk of fish into his mouth with his fingers.

  "It's a big world. You may see a lot of it, if your father has struck it rich," Durell said.

  *'He was due back last week. Something has happened to him."

  "We will see," Durell said.

  They ate in silence and waved away the flies. Then Peta said, "If I were rich, Miss Morera would like me even better."

  "Ana is not for you, son. Put her out of your mind."

  "You want her." Peta's eyes narrowed to slits of jungle-green.

  Durell ignored the challenge and shook his head in silence. Peta simply refused to recognize the menace she had been to him. Durell sensed he had earned only increased hatred and suspicion by his intervention. He recalled the scene on the sand, the struggling bodies, the raised pistol—he wondered if Ana could have pulled the trigger. She had done enough damage as it was. Peta's cooperation seemed further away than ever.

  He thought he might try to force it, but the kid was strong-willed, and pressuring him too much could backfire.

  His best hope, he decided, lay in Peta's concern for Claudius. Once the boy made up his mind to go for his father, the tables would be turned: Peta would realize that only Ehirell could help him then.

  Durell peered through the slats of the windows, then checked the hallway. Everything appeared to be normal. "We'd better get some sleep, now," he said. "I don't know when there will be another chance."

  Peta pushed back his empty plate, licked his fingers, gave a lazy yawn. "I don't like it in here. It stinks of people. I'll sleep on the veranda," he said. He took a rush mat from the floor and tossed it onto the shady veranda and closed the door.

  The sun went under a cloud as Durell waited a moment, then moved to the telephone and placed a Georgetown call with an indifferent operator. His room had not been reserved, and he regarded the r
isk of a tapped line as nil. Troubled winds fluttered against the steel-gray river, seen through the window, and an abrupt rush of air cooled the room.

  The receiver emitted impatient whistles, made kissing sounds against his ear.

  Then the tin roof rattled as if under a curtain of chains, fell briefly silent, resumed with furious noise under the rain shower's solid impact.

  Someone answered, a clerk or secretary, impersonal and businesslike. The call was switched to Mr. Mitchell.

  "Chad? What do you have? This is an open line, so make it quick."

  "Your sub appears to be headed for Cuba, Sam."

  "And Perez?"

  "Nothing has come through on him."

  Durell swore. He'd hoped for confirmation that Leon was a foreign agent bent on the destruction of the government. With that he might have convinced the Guyana Defense Force to furnish commandos to go into the jungle with him. Now that was out. He had only himself and whatever use he could make of the reluctant Peta.

  He spoke over the pounding rain. "Otelo Antunes just bragged that his paper will break a story tomorrow naming me as a K Section agent."

  "That son of a bitch. That means the same thing could happen to you that happened to Boyer. You'd better get to the safety of the embassy while you can."

  "They'd like that. You'll have to try to stop publication."

  "What if I can't?"

  "I move ahead, one way or the other."

  Durell replaced the phone in its cradle, rubbed the stubble that had begun to show on his chin. At least he could assume that Cubans were involved here. It came as no surprise—Cuba was the logical jumping-off place for revolution in Latin America.

  Now he had to consider the possibility that there was a connection between the Cubans and the Warakabra Tiger that terrorized the far reaches of the jungle.

  The question was how—and why.

  He lay down, hoping for a brief sleep.

  The hot air siphoned sweat from his pores, and the bedspread turned moist under his back. Thoughts tumbled roughly through his mind, without order in his drowsiness, thoughts of Ana and Otelo and Leon—thoughts of a continent on the brink of bloody revolution.