Assignment - Ceylon

by Edward S. Aarons

  Following Durell on the rickety plank walk, she suddenly slipped and fell to one knee, shook her head, and lifted herself again. Durell had not paused at all. He didn’t even look back at her now. He was moving faster, heading for the western shore of the island.

  She had practiced yoga for most of her adult life, both in body and mind, and she knew she could use prana to make her body keep up with him somehow. It was a matter of mental and physical discipline. But deep inside, something trembled weakly within her. All her life, she had put her faith in the gentle and peaceful teachings of the Buddha. Suppose this stone, this new declaration from Buddha himself, stated other precepts, perhaps indicated that Sinn was right, that the world was always in the grip of evil and always would be a domain of darkness? Where would her faith be then—and the faith of a hundred million others? Her world, yes, her mind and her spirit, would be destroyed. And what would Durell—this stranger whom she had clasped in her body, accepting and yearning and crying out for him—what would Durell do- about it?

  Everything in her life seemed to have gone wrong: her marriage to Ira Sanderson, her son George, everything. The ambition she had nurtured in politics and statesmanship, her struggle to rise in the vortex of politics that engulfed her new, beloved nation—it all seemed a hollow effort now. Other men and other powers sought to make a mockery of independence and dignity. There was Colonel Skoll, who probably died in agony. And Durell, whose purposes she could not guess, sometimes. And this cold malignancy, this gross, fat, evil thing who called himself Dr. Mouquerana Sinn.

  She wanted to stop and weep. Her legs suddenly felt watery, her muscles trembled, she ached and pained all through her body. Her spirit felt dead. She could go no farther. She was only a burden to Durell, and she did not know why he had accepted her.

  His brooding strength appalled and frightened her. He was like a machine, like that tiger in India, all-knowing, wise, his blue eyes hiding a blaze of power and will. He would not be easily defeated. But it was hopeless. What could they do?

  Ahead of her, Durell paused on the end of the broken-board walk. The placid green sea shone ahead of them. The sun was a huge, intolerable bail of heat low on the empty horizon.

  Empty?

  She saw him point, and looked in that direction.

  A small boat drifted languidly on the oily sea. Two men were in it, watching them.

  Willie Wells could feel the poison moving in him. It wasn’t bad yet, only a minor ache along his nerves, a dullness in the nape of his neck. But he knew he would never be at the peak of efficiency as he was now. Each minute, each hour, that the poison remained without its antidote, he lost a bit of his strength, some of his power, minuscule at the moment, but growing steadily, numbing his senses and sapping at his strength. It had to be done quickly, he thought. Now. Or tonight. He had plenty of time left, of course. All day tomorrow, all of tomorrow night. But how would he be then? He couldn’t guess. No use taking chances. It had to be now, as soon as possible, or Durell would slip away from him while he weakened steadily, lost his cunning, lost the determination to live.

  Dog eat dog, he thought. It had always been that way with him, all through his life, even as a kid in the wrecked slums of Philadelphia. He had tried to put those early years of frustration and anguish out of his mind long ago. As an adult, aware of himself, of his strength and his intellectual capacities, he thought he had succeeded in shoving those rotten memories out of his thoughts, washing himself clean, so to speak, in a lonely and fierce independence. Hatred had helped. It gave him a measure o: strength to carry on through those early years, although later that strength turned out to be false and undependable. The behavior of the people he had met in the army in Vietnam, and later as a mercenary in Africa, turned out to be surprising and unpredictable. Those who should have understood and sympathized with him as a brother turned out to be his worst enemies. On the other hand, a man like Durell had helped and encouraged him. Even the chief of K Section’s operations, that strange little man in gray named General Dickinson McFee, had proved cooperative in giving him a boost upward. But now there was this, and you were back to basics again, the fundamental problem of staying alive.

  Willie Wells sighed. He knew he had lost the first round. The poison that Dr. Sinn had injected in him ate like the slow drip of some vitriolic acid. From his perch in the tree, he had watched Durell explore the deserted fishing village and the boats, picking up this and that, getting water, the length of rope, the blanket, the club. The woman didn’t seem to be slowing him down any. Wells wondered if he could use the woman somehow, but then dismissed it. Durell was a professional. His prime motivation here was survival. He would sacrifice the woman, if necessary. He tried to put himself in Durell’s place for the next twenty-four hours but could not imagine himself in such a situation. Was his nerve going? He slid his fingers along the smooth, warm stock of the rifle. A good machine, he thought. He had plenty of cartridges, but the rifle might not be enough, there would have to be something more to trap Durell, this man who had been his friend. He shook his head, felt perspiration run stinging into his eyes, and dried his hands on his thighs to keep a better grip on his weapon. How had he missed? It should have been a clean shot, seeing Durell on the deck of the wrecked, beached fishing boat. He had never missed such a shot before. Maybe, he thought, there was something in him that kept him from wanting to kill Durell, and some trick of the subconscious had made his aim go bad. He hoped it wouldn’t happen again. Dog eat dog, he thought again. No time now for sentimentality. No profit in allowing the mind to play tricks on him. It was kill or be killed. He knew that Durell would show him no mercy, if Durell had such a possibility.

  Wells moved slowly through the late afternoon heat of the island. Mouquerana Sinn was probably watching from that tower in his palace. Enjoying all of it. A perverted sense of amusement, that monster had. But his offer had been good. Sinn had played very effectively on his old memories, recalling the bad days of childhood and his early youth in the black ghetto, making him remember the bad times in Vietnam, building on his resentment, promising, promising him everything he had ever dreamed of achieving back in those rotten days.

  All that stuff about Sinn being a messenger of evil was crap, of course. The monster was insane. Mad, yes, but not stupid. He was like a dark malignancy sitting up there, back in his palace, ruling this island like some god—no, not a god, a devil.

  Willie paused to drink sparingly from the canteen of water Sinn had allowed him to have. The rifle felt heavy, and one finger of his left hand was numb, tingling and prickling. He wondered what sort of poison had been injected in him. Something that affected the nervous system, maybe. He worked his left hand anxiously, rubbing the thumb, clenching and unclenching his fist. After a moment, the strange numbness went away.

  He moved on. He was on slightly higher ground than the mangrove swamp into which Durell and the girl had vanished. Sooner or later, they would have to come out of there, or the insects would eat them alive. Nobody could stand it in there for very long. He guessed that Durell would try to make for the western coast of the little island, exploring the area for a place in which to hole up for the night. Probably he was planning to set a trap. That would be like Durell. He would offer bait, expect him to come in with another rush, and fall into some kind of snare. He had the rope, the blanket, the club. A pit, maybe. Like an animal trap. He’d have to watch where he put his feet with every step he took. That would slow things down. But he had time. Time was on his side, wasn’t it? Forty-eight hours, Sinn had said. No, two hours had already gone by, at least. He had no watch. It was one of Sinn’s malicious little tricks, to take the watch away from him. To balance the odds, the monster had said, giggling.

  Suddenly he wished Durell dead with all his heart and mind. He felt defeated. It was hopeless. Durell was too good at this sort of thing, too quick and clever to be caught.

  Good, Wells thought. Keep hating him. Maybe next time you get him in your sights, you won’t want t
o miss.

  twenty-one

  Durell looked at the small powerboat idling offshore. The two men in it were PFMs, Dr. Sinn’s men, and they carried their AK-47s with an expert ease. One of them spotted him and Aspara and nudged the other, and they laughed, the distant sound drifting over the heat on the water. They waved their weapons, urging Durell back from the end of the little plank walk. Plainly, Sinn had his eye on them and had encircled the little island with guards to prevent any possible chance of escape by sea. He turned back with Aspara, to a beach littered with broken, rotting palm fronds from a past typhoon.

  The men in the powerboat roared off, presumably to report to Dr. Mouquerana Sinn.

  “We’ll head south,” he said. “The land is just a bit higher there. If we could find a cave—”

  “Wells would find us there,” Aspara said.

  “I’d want him to, if I have a little free time before he shows up.”

  “Will you set a trap?”

  “It’s our only chance.”

  “I don’t see any chance at all. Even if you win against your countryman, we are still caught on the island, we are still in Mouquerana Sinn’s hands. Would you agree to work for him, after all this?”

  “He knows I won’t,” Durell said.

  “Then what can be his purpose?”

  “Amusement. Revenge. I don’t know.”

  “You think he will execute you eventually?” “Eventually, yes. After he squeezes me dry of all I know about K Section operations.”

  “And me? What do you think he will do about me?” Durell did not reply. He did not want to tell her what he thought she faced on this lonely little island with Sinn and his men. He had seen no other women here. Perhaps Sinn had no use for women himself, as he had said; but the other men, the PFM terrorists and the guards, would be hungry for girl-flesh, more eager than cautious, and especially hungry for a woman like Aspara. She would be used by them until she died, sooner or later. He said nothing to her question, but she was an intelligent woman, and she surely could anticipate what was planned for her.

  They came to the forested southern end of the island shortly before the sun went down. From a tree-covered rise, Durell could look down on the small cove and dock where they had landed from Jaffna, what seemed years before. The junk was still tied up there. He could see part of the trail that wound up through the wooded slope toward the old palace on its knoll near the center of the island. Some armed men moved along the trail, carrying crates and bundles unloaded from the vessel; and more men were gathered along the dock and around the few palm-thatched stilt houses that comprised their barracks. Durell stared at the area for a long time, while Aspara looked backward for any sign of Willie Wells. The guns down there were tempting. Perhaps in the night, in the cover of darkness, there might be a chance to do something. Then he remembered it was a full moon, or just past full. The sky was cloudless and apt to remain so. Moreover, these were picked men, very alert, very capable.

  He filed the thought away as a possibility and turned back to where Aspara stood guard behind him.

  “He’s there,” she said quietly. “I just saw him.”

  “Where?”

  “Sitting down. His back against that tree. I don't want to point or look directly at him.” Her voice was soft and calm. “I don’t believe he thinks he can be seen.”

  Wells was just an irregular shadow hunched down against the bole of the tree. The setting sun was almost at the horizon now. A long track of blood-red water led to the west. Durell saw the momentary glint of light on the steel barrel of Wells’ rifle.

  “Why doesn’t he shoot now?” Aspara asked.

  “Maybe this area near the dock and the junk has been ruled off limits,” Durell said. “We don’t know all the rules of this thing. Mouquerana Sinn may have just neglected to tell us the boundaries in which this game can be played.”

  Aspara shuddered. “You said it’s not a game.”

  “No.”

  Durell was waiting for something. He wasn’t sure what it was, but it was there, ready to be found, if he knew when and where to look. He could not explain the feeling he had. He moved off to the left, where the thick boles of trees protected his back. He pulled Aspara with him into the shelter of the woods. The camp by the wharf consisted of one long, barrackslike building on stilts, with a thatched roof and several smaller houses under leaning palm trees. There was a small beach to the left of the cove, and a plank landing there, presumably for the power boat that kept circling the island as a guard. The faint smell of cooking fires drifted up through the dense tropical growth of wild bamboo, and it stimulated his stomach juices, making him aware of his hunger again. He counted at least twenty men, with two apparently rated as officers, and then gave it up and turned aside.

  “Let’s go,” he told Aspara.

  A second small stream ran toward the western shore of the island, midway back up the way they had come. He had missed it coming south, because they had chosen an inland path for cover against their pursuer, but by circling closer to the mangroves that lined the beach, using the tangled growth for new shelter, he came across the little tunnellike aperture where the fresh water flowed.

  The moon was up, and everything around him made a phantasm of ebony and silver. In two hours, he built the trap. It was slow work, and he had to pause frequently to listen, rest, and listen again. Somewhere out there in the black pattern of shadows was Wells, patiently waiting, hunting him. Wells would be annoyed now, because of his first misses, but he would not let his impatience make him careless. Although the night made it easier to make an invisible approach, it also helped to shelter Durell and Aspara. Nothing made a good target in this strange pattern of dense blackness, with shafts of moonlight streaming down like spotlights through the mangrove branches overhead. He worked patiently, digging at the mucky soil with the pieces of wooden oar he had salvaged from the fishing village. It was hard, backbreaking work, exhausting, and he felt the need of food more strongly with each passing moment. Now and then Aspara spelled him while he went on a wide, circling sweep of the area. There was no sign of Wells nearby. Inland, the island lifted a few feet higher, and there was a dense tangle of broken branches, bleached bone-white, where past storms and tidal waves had tossed broken trees and wreckage in a long barrier line just at the inner edge of the mangrove swamp. The little stream issued from under this barrier, and at this point, it seemed impossible to climb above it without circling north along the shoreline to flank it. He found a kind of burrow here, a natural hole in the tangled tree trunks and branches, and explored it carefully. The ground inside was dry. It went back about eight feet, and was about three feet wide, and its entrance could easily be hidden by dragging a few of the looser limbs free of the barrier wall and covering the mouth of the entrance with them.

  Refuge for the night, he thought. He drank lightly from the stream, although the water seemed a bit brackish. When he returned to the pit he was digging, he told Aspara to spread the blanket in the burrow and try to sleep.

  “What will you do?” she asked.

  “I’ll finish this.”

  “But he won’t be so foolish or careless as to fall into it, Sam, will he?”

  “No. He’ll be expecting it. He won’t be caught in this one. But I’ll dig another.”

  “You can’t possibly, with just sticks and a broken paddle.”

  “It has to be done.”

  He used his knife to sharpen stakes and chose a sapling that had plenty of spring to it, then he lashed the netting he had salvaged to other spring branches, using the heavy coil of rope he had found aboard the wrecked boat. The moon lifted higher and higher in the night sky. Although the heat of the sun was gone, the air still felt heavy and humid, and there was little change in temperature and no relief. Aspara helped as much as she could, sharpening the stakes, lashing the trap-line when he brought his weight down on the limb to curve it downward.

  The snare was arranged so that if it were tripped by anyone approachin
g their burrow, the sapling, net, and stakes would all come loose, snatching up the victim and carrying him aloft and helpless, tangled in the bag of the net. He needed to use only half of the net itself for this snare. When he was finished finally, bathed in sweat, he deliberately made only a halfhearted effort to hide his work.

  Aspara said, “But he’s sure to spot it.”

  “With a little effort, yes. I want him to.”

  “But then, all this work is for nothing!”

  “We’ll build another. The idea is that he’ll avoid this, think the path is safe from here on, and come on toward us. He’ll not be looking for a second booby trap. And if there’s time, I’ll build still a third.”

  It was close to midnight, he judged, when the second snare was ready. He had used all of the net and most of the rope. At times, he had insisted that Aspara get some sleep, but she refused to leave his side. He felt dulled by fatigue, dirty and unwashed, and hungry, exhausted by the tension of constantly listening for Wells’ approach. Maybe Wells had been concealed nearby all this time, watching everything, anyway. The man was quite capable of playing that sort of game, amusing himself by letting Durell use up what energy remained to him. Aspara found it difficult to accept the brute strength that Durell exhibited during his steady toil. She shuddered at the last trap, another spring snare that would let loose two rude javelins cut from saplings, sharpened to a point with the knife and triggered to fly with venomous force when tripped. But at last it was over. He had done all he could.