Assignment- Tiger Devil

by Will B Aarons

  Leon went on. "The East Indians will be most thankful to us for coming to their aid. They will form a government and call on the socialist states of the world for overt assistance, just as the Angolans did—and the U.S. can hardly afford to oppose us without suffering the condemnation of the rest of the world. Out of the destruction will emerge a new addition to the socialist camp."

  Leon gestured disparagingly at the electronic equipment beside him, and added, "Then there will be no need for this silly game. Diamonds all over Guyana will be extracted openly for the further liberation of the continent."

  "How much of this did Richard Boyer learn? He was your prisoner, wasn't he?"

  "Senor Gibaudan led him right into our hands—unintentionally, of course. We had suspected that the old man was hiding in the vicinity. Somehow Boyer contacted him, and they came here to reconnoiter our position."

  "What about the news story?" Durell asked. He saw his breath in the cool, humid air.

  Leon spoke freely, preening his ego. "We had reason before Senor Boyer turned up here to believe he was onto our scheme. Nothing moves without leaving a trail, and the East Indians at Miss Morera's plantation may have dropped hints of our activities on the river—Boyer had wormed his way into their confidence. He had to be eliminated, but only after the most elaborate preparations had been made to ensure that the act would not be traced to us, but would be blamed on his East Indian friends. Revealing him publicly as an operative of your hated agency was a stroke of genius, don't you think?"

  "But the story broke while he was in the jungle," Durell said.

  "Yes, and Boyer was shot when he stumbled across our men on the Peerless, after escaping from us here—but the end result was the same, wasn't it?" Leon's gaze sharpened. "And tomorrow—"

  "Tomorrow your whole plot goes down the drain. Whoever is helping you at the dam has failed to plant explosives on it. Security is too tight. It's impossible."

  Leon might have smiled, the rubbery mask of his face wrinkling up around the simmering black eyes. "I need no help," he said. "It will be done. In fact, you will see— or at least hear it. That is why it pleases me to spare you temporarily, so that I may enjoy your anguish as you experience the complete ruin of your mission. Then will be time enough to dispose of you and your friend."

  Rick spoke up. "Hey, old buddy, I don't know anything about this business. Hell, I was just going prospecting with this guy."

  Leon's eyes glittered at Durell. "Your friend has a sense of humor."

  "He's telling the truth—after a fashion," Durell said.

  Leon turned to Rick, and said, "Then there is really no point in waiting to be rid of you, is there?"

  Grapes of sweat hung from Rick's blond eyebrows, and his lips moved, but no sound came out. He looked at Durell with wide, gray eyes.

  Durell's voice was calm. "Maybe your plans aren't one hundred percent sure," he told Leon. "They never are in our business; there's always the element of risk, the chance, however remote, that something will go wrong. Rick happens to be a pilot, and his plane is parked on the lakeshore not far from here if you go straight across the water. Maybe you'd like to keep Rick around—just in case you need him."

  Leon thought about it for a moment. Insects clattered against the lantern chimneys. Mosquitoes sang around Durell's ears. Tiny crickets hopped and chirped on the earthen floor. The cooling hours of night had thickened the scent of the looming forest, and Durell briefly considered its tangled depths, wondered about Peta, who must be out there somewhere—^unless he had turned back after all.

  Rick's eyes shifted nervously from him to Leon.

  Finally, Leon said, "Have you proof of this?"

  "I've got a pilot's license," Rick blurted and eagerly tossed his wallet onto the table. "And here are the keys to my plane." He yanked the key ring from his pocket with a metallic rattle.

  "Very well," Leon said. "An intelligent suggestion, Senor Durell." He stood up and grasped the Stechkin casually, sure of his competence. "You will be held under close guard, and you will be shot on the slightest provocation. Is that clear?"

  He ordered the guards to take them.

  Durell glanced at his watch as they were marched across the orderly clearing. In a few hours the dam would go, and the peace of a continent.

  He was powerless to prevent it.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  "We're in one hell of a mess now," Rick said. "We've got to get out of this place."

  He stared through the rough saplings that barred the walls and roof of their small prison. It was a six-by-six cage, out in the open where the sun would fry them in half a day—^but they did not have to worry about that, Durell thought. The hour of the dedication had been set for the cool of the morning, and everything would be over long before noon, if Leon had his way.

  Rick's tone was incredulous, as he said: "That spic was going to shoot me on the spot, until you spoke up."

  "He still will," Durell said.

  "Yeah? What if he runs into trouble tomorrow?"

  "Then you can fly him out—and he can shoot you somewhere else." Durell scrutinized the dirt floor, killed a couple of umbrella ants and sat down wearily.

  "I'd bet we could take this thing apart with a little effort," Rick said. He yanked at the vine lashings, and their guard leveled his rifle at him and made a hostile, shoving motion. Rick stepped back from the bars, helpless anger wavering in his eyes.

  "I wonder where that kid is," he said. "Bet he hightailed it."

  "I have a hunch he's out there, somewhere." Durell rubbed a sore thigh muscle and watched the guard.

  *'I guess he's no good to us anyhow. What could he do?" Rick sank down beside Durell, and said in a dismal voice: *Tm not scared of dying; I just hate the idea of sitting here waiting for it."

  "Look," Durell whispered. He slid a hand behind him and grasped one of the bars and lifted the cage an inch off the ground.

  Rick's eyes widened. "Well, I'll be damned." He grinned. "When?"

  Durell kept his eyes on the guard, some fifteen paces away. "I don't know yet," he said. "There's nothing to do but wait."

  "Guess you're right," Rick whispered. "Reckon we couldn't run far with a bucketful of slugs in us." He leaned against the bars and fixed his eyes on the guard, as if willing him to vanish.

  But the guard kept a stubborn watch on them, his automatic rifle cradled in his arms.

  An hour passed. The guard might have been carved from stone for all that his hooded eyes strayed from the men in the cage. Lights that shone through flimsy thatch walls of the lodges went out, one by one. From somewhere came the low voices of men, the scrunch of shovels and rattle of gravel against sieves, and Durell realized that the rape of the rich claim was progressing on three shifts.

  Another hour went by. Durell thought of Ana back in that chill mountain cave and wondered if she had kept her word not to interfere with Peta. She might have prevailed on him to stay with her.

  He put the thought out of his mind as his eye caught activity at the far end of the encampment. A squad of Cuban soldiers in their tiger-striped uniforms and heav-

  "Where do you think they're going at this time of night?" Rick asked.

  Durell's voice went taut. "Someone must have stumbled into their surveillance network."

  "Peta?"

  Durell felt his stomach lurch. They would not trouble to take the youth prisoner—they would make another of their examples of him, leave his mutilated body to frighten away the next intruder.

  The two men stared at each other, then both turned brooding eyes back at their guard.

  Fifteen minutes, perhaps half an hour elapsed, and shouts came out of the gloom, followed by the rattle of automatic weapons, two bursts in rapid succession that cracked back and forth among the hills. Long minutes passed, and nothing else happened.

  The soldiers did not return.

  Rick nodded, caught himself, crossed his arms over drawn-up knees, kept sleepless eyes fixed on the guard.

&nbs
p; A man came from one of the huts and made a circuit of the camp, extinguishing lamps until only two or three were left burning. Huge moths fluttered around them, hopelessly dazed by their attraction. The shadows of the bars, thin in the low light, fell across Durell and the dirt floor and reached out toward the guard. The forest made sounds of grief with its rasping, whining breath, its lost wails and shrieks. The stars spoke of cold eternity.

  Durell considered the dam, glanced at his watch, realized how, shortly, people in Bartica would rise from comfortable beds to come here and be blown to bits. An overwhelming sense of urgency flooded through him, but he somehow found the discipline to contain it. He told himself that he must be patient. And another hour passed. The first guard was relieved by a second. He felt despair.

  The air had become very still, filled with thin juncle vapor, and a fur of mist lay over the wide, sluggish stream. The world seemed to hold its breath. Speckles of dew gleamed on Durell's clothing. Rick had surrendered to fitful slumber and shivered and muttered. For hours now Durell had sat unmoving. One guard succeeded another, and he had watched through slitted eyes, legs drawn up, chin resting on his knees. Through all those interminable minutes he had waited and hoped, senses stalking a turned back, a nodding head.

  But the guards were alert and disciplined; the moment had not come.

  And then it happened.

  Durell's thoughts had drifted to that vague familiarity in Leon's eyes, and he studied the man's image on his mind even as his gaze monitored the guard. The wild pigeons might have burst from the forest first, or maybe he was startled by a sudden parting of banana and palm leaves at the clearing's edge—in memory the two things would merge. The next sight was what etched itself vividly into his brain.

  The whip-form of Peta Gibaudan broke from the jungle, lips drawn back, face twisted with fury. The long whoop that vented from his chest said death, and the cutlass in his hands said first come, first served.

  The youth's beastlike charge stunned Durell. He watched what happened over the next three seconds with a clarity unclouded by thought or reaction.

  Peta's green eyes found the guard, and he twisted toward him with demented rage. The guard was quick, but not quick enough as he swung around from the waist and brought the AK muzzle toward the figure that hurtled at him. The cutlass made a silken yellow arc high above the guard's head, and the AK's barrel staggered up with a burp of panic, coughed thin smoke. The cutlass hissed, disappeared, and Durell's eyes found its point gleaming in a fountain of blood between the guard's shoulder blades, lodged there after cleaving from the junction of neck and clavicle through the spine.

  Durell hurled the cage onto its side, ran for the AK.

  "Where's Ana?" Peta cried and whipped the big Browning from his waistband.

  Durell paused with a stare. "Don't you know?"

  Peta's head made a sweeping gesture at the camp. "They got her."

  Durell scooped the assault rifle from the dust, recovered a belt of clips that dripped with gore, tossed a couple of the guard's hand grenades to Rick, who moved toward the jungle.

  The shocked silence of the camp gave way to sharp voices within the huts. A face looked out, and Durell squeezed short bursts through the flimsy walls, heard screams. He aimed at the next hut and the next, telling himself he could not afford to worry if Ana was in there somewhere where dust and splinters and lead flew. Shouts of terror and pain mingled with the racket of frightened birds.

  "Let's get the hell out of here," he yelled.

  "I came to save Miss Morera," Peta said, his face stubbom.

  "She'll have to take her chances for now. Save yourself."

  Durell fired a last burst at the huts, and they ran into the jungle.

  The pursuit was swift and relentless.

  Durell did not know how many men were after them, or how many parties they had split into. Clearly, Leon had thrown every available man into the hunt, and they knew the topography stone by stone, tree by tree.

  Durell first tried for the cliff where they had found Claudius, but was cut off in a brief and fierce fire fight before making a hundred yards in the overpowering darkness. There was a second blind encounter when he took a different direction, and it seemed the Cubans knew every move he made. Then he remembered the infrared spotters and cursed himself for not having tossed a grenade into the control center. As it was, they exposed themselves to instant death every time they stepped from behind a tree or boulder.

  "So what do we do?" Rick whispered as they hunched in a narrow ravine.

  "Backtrack," Durell replied. "Stay on your belly and follow me down to the edge of the camp."

  "We will get Miss Morera this time," Peta whispered. "I saw the men take her from the cave. I—I hid."

  "It's all right, Peta. You finally came."

  "They must have eyes like cats to see through the dark. They nearly got me as I came down to the claim."

  "I heard the shots," Durell said. He started crawling.

  "What do you think they've done with her?"

  Durell glanced toward the sound of Peta's voice, back there in the black air. "I can't say—but Ana's at the bottom of the list, son. Leon must be stopped before anything else," he said in a grave voice.

  Fifteen minutes of slithering on sore elbows and knees, and they arrived at the fringe of the camp. Leon's men made little effort at silence, sure of Durell's limited vision, and their superiority in numbers and firepower. Their shouts echoed all around.

  Durell pushed a bit closer to the camp, until he found himself scrambling over a springy, crackly mass that was only part of the enormous amount of brush and trees cleared by the Cubans for their encampment.

  "We can't just sit here," Rick said, his tone edgy.

  "Give me your lighter," Durell said.

  He felt Rick's fingers, cold and damp, as they placed the lighter in his palm. He sparked a flame and thrust the lighter down through the branches and twigs and wet leaves and fronds to the dry rubbish beneath. The brush smoldered and stank for a long moment, then exploded into blaze. Sparks spun up through the foliage, and the stems and bark of small plants browned, spewed resinous flame.

  The heat became intense.

  The flames spread.

  Durell hurried on down the border of the clearing, started more fires in dead brush left by the efficient Cubans.

  By now men both in and out of the camp were in turmoil, their voices alarmed as they rushed about like distressed ants in the flash and glow of the conflagration. Guns racketed, and slugs pattered through the thick leaves around Durell.

  Peta raised the Browning, and Durell slapped it down. "They don't know where we are—they're just shooting at the fire, hoping to catch us. Don't give us away."

  Rick turned a scorched face away from the blaze and spoke to Durell. "You were pretty smart—this heat will blind the infrared sensors."

  "The fire will help us in more ways than one," Durell said, and he gathered himself to dash away from the flames.

  "How's that?" Rick said.

  Durell had to lift his voice to be heard over the roar and sputter behind them. "Let's just get put of here for now," he said and scurried away.

  A minute later he glanced back to see an immense greenheart make a towering candle against the night. White sparks showered into the crowns of adjacent trees, and a sloth fell a hundred feet like a fiery, screaming bomb. The fire billowed from tree to tree, its front broadening in a silken tide. Smoke drifted through the air, stifling the lungs.

  "It's coming up the slope after us," Peta observed.

  "Then keep your ass moving!" Rick shouted.

  Durell's grim eyes scanned the forest quickly, but picked out no men among the writhing, mangled shadows. They could be down by the camp, or up ahead. They might be anywhere, he thought.

  They jumped to their feet and ran, zigging and zagging through the orange lucency that jittered and shivered eerily under the forest roof. Vague forms of panic-stricken animals, capybaras, labbas, anteat
ers, scampered past the comers of Durell's eyes. He hoped the cleared swath they had encountered on their way here would serve as a firebreak, angled toward it, coughing now as the acrid smoke stung eyes and lungs. His tongue was dry as felt against the roof of his mouth, his guts knotted with alarm.

  The racing sheet of flame thundered like doom as they rushed into the cleared stretch, and Durell glimpsed the nude dawn straining above the eastern horizon.

  Suddenly the crackling roar was that of guns, and Durell realized an instant too late that Leon had waited in ambush here to cut them down as they fled the blaze. He dived and, in midair, saw something small and dark bounce a few yards to his right.

  "Grenade!" he yelled.

  Then there was a blinding light. . . .

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Durell willed himself to see.

  The air was bright with smoke, and his senses recoiled from its stench. A sputter and hiss of dying embers came through the throbbing in his skull.

  Dim black forms.

  Great naked shafts against a sapphire sky.

  His eyes fluttered, closed against the glare. It was as meaningless to him as a dream or the rush of alien land beyond a window. He could not think about it as he lay there in the hot sun and prickly stubble. He felt his throat move, heard a groan, kept his eyes closed.

  It might have been a second later, or an hour, when a voice said, "Mr. Durell?"

  Violent memories abruptly flooded his mind—the terror of the forest fire; the hand grenade. The Cubans . . .

  He reasoned there was no point in prolonging it and opened his eyes. The broad, shaggy-haired form that leaned over him was Colonel Su Chung. His narrow eyes widened slightly and briefly at Durell's gaze. He made no move with the Tokarev pistol that hung loosely in his hand.

  "So you finally made it," Durell said.

  "Thanks only to the fire."

  "I hoped you'd see it. The Cubans. . . ? "