Assignment - Bangkok

by Edward S. Aarons

  “It belongs monastery. I work for bhikkhus. They need me, they telephone.” The man smiled for the first time. “Very modern, up-to-date, first class. Gives me much importance.”

  “Can you call anyone in the city?”

  “No.”

  The boy said, “My father means he has no other friends in Chiengmai who own telephones, so he can’t call anyone but the abbot or the monks in the wat.”

  “But it’s connected to the regular system?”

  “Oh, yes, sir. You wish to use? Please do so.”

  Durell tested the black telephone. There was a humming in his hear. He heard more noises from the street growing louder again. The two straw hats out there were getting frustrated. All at once the telephone clicked and a woman spoke in Thai, asking what number he wished to call.

  He gave James D. James’ number in Bangkok.

  The operator was appalled. “It is long distance, very expensive.”

  “I’ll pay,” Durell said.

  “You not Thai. You not speak good Thai,” the woman said in English.

  “Just get me the number.”

  It was a risk, of course. He did not know how far-reaching was either Savag’s intelligence system or the Muc Tong’s. Nor did he know if James’ phone was being tapped.

  The father of the temple boy got up and began to apply pigment to his face while he waited at the telephone for the connection to go through. He heard a sing-song radio playing in the next apartment, another radio blasting Western soul music. There was shouting and argument in the alley. Kem did not appear. The telephone seemed to have gone dead. He felt the brownish makeup going on his face, in his ears and down his throat and across the back of his neck. The telephone crackled and then he heard a distant ringing. He wondered if there would be trouble for the make-up man and the young temple boy. If the call were traced by the Muc Tong or Savag, it might also uncover Kem as a sleeper agent put on active duty. But there was no help for it. He wouldn’t have come into Chiengmai at all, if not for Mike’s urgent plea for explosives. The odds in the gamble were not too favorable, Durell thought. “Hallo?”

  Suddenly Jimmy James’ voice was in his ear. The makeup man added hair to Durell’s eyebrows with spirit gum.

  Durell said, “Red Fish here. I’m on my way to Brooklyn Omega.”

  There was a long pause. Then, “Is your phone secure?” “No.”

  “Then hang up.”

  “I need some answers.”

  “Then I’ll hang up,” James said flatly.

  “Are you being bugged?”

  “I’ve been questioned. You’re ordered out of the country. Understand? They’re on to you, they’re out to get you. I’ll send someone else in after Mike.”

  “It will be too late, by then,” Durell said. “Is Miss Ku there?”

  “What?”

  “Your little helper.”

  “Yes, of course she’s here. Why?”

  “Put her on the telephone,” Durell said.

  “Well, she’s not actually in the house. But I expect her back any moment. Look here, old boy, I don’t know what you’re doing, you should be at your destination right now. Where are you?”

  “When did you last see Miss Ku?”

  “A few hours ago.” James’ voice sharpened with irritation, anxiety—perhaps fear. “Why are you interested?”

  “I just saw her in Chiengmai with General Savag.” “She’s in Bangkok. I tell you, she’ll be back any moment. We have a supper party planned for some Embassy people. She acts as my hostess, since I’m a bachelor.”

  “Are you sure she’s in Bangkok?”

  “I’d stake my life on it.”

  “You may have to,” Durell said, and hung up.

  17

  “You look fine,” Kem said. “Tall, of course, but you can pass for a Chinese mixture anywhere up here. A man from Yunnan, perhaps, with Russian blood? No problem, Sam.” Kem paused. “At the temple, I inquired about the Muc Tong. The Sangha brothers were very helpful. But come, we must go.”

  “What shall I pay the make-up man?”

  “Nothing. He makes tarn boon—much merit—by helping the bhikkhus. He will say nothing. In any case, he is an acharn, a wizard, and the people are still superstitious and believe in phis, spirits, and wizardry. They will not bother an acharn."

  They left the tenement by way of the rickety stairs to the alley. Two solid-looking men sat on the bottom steps, as if on guard, and they jumped up respectfully as Kem led the way. There was no sign of the two men in straw hats.

  “I wish we could take a samlaw,” Kem said, “but it would not look right for a bhikkhu to ride that way.” He bobbed his bald head. “We must walk back to the hotel, but not too fast. I wish to meditate.”

  “Flivver,” Durell said, “I don’t doubt your sincerity, but we have work to do.”

  “I do the Lord Buddha’s work,” said the monk. His black eyes twinkled. “But sometimes the way is most mysterious.”

  As they walked back to meet Benjie, Kem told him that the Muc Tong was everywhere. An alert had gone out for a tall American—Durell, obviously. There was also a police alarm throughout the city. Kem did not know if it was military or civil police. In the dark makeup and bushy brows put on by the acharn, Durell felt as if any of the hundreds of night passersby could see through the fraud. But no one looked at him twice. Now and then a woman gave Kem a quick wai, a smile, and hurried past. A police car hooted by, but did not slow or give the monk and the tall Chinese their attention.

  Benjie, waiting nervously in the hotel room, was startled by Durell’s appearance. “Lordie, you’ve changed over for sure, Cajun. It’s a good job. There are plenty of mixes like you up in the mountains.”

  “Did you get the dynamite?”

  “It’s in the jeep, behind the hotel. But I think some security people followed me here. I’m nervous.”

  “We’ll go out the back way.”

  The jeep was parked in deep shadow under slender palm trees. The explosives were in a small wooden box in the back. Durell pried it open and examined the sticks and the detonator and battery quickly. Everything seemed in order.

  “I hope it’s enough,” Benjie said. She looked pale and wan in the gloomy shadows behind the hotel.

  “It will have to do.”

  The exit from the parking lot came out on the main street fronting the hotel. Bicycles and cars flowed by in a steady stream. Lights shone in most of the back windows of the hotel, but some of the bamboo shades were drawn. The sweeping overhang of the Thai roof kept the upper windows in shadow. He couldn’t tell if anyone watched them from up there, or not. The jeep, easily identified as Benjie’s, could trap them on the road back to the logging camp. Benjie and Kem were also uncertain. Durell walked into the shadows of the lot to examine an old flat-bodied truck parked near the kitchen entrance. The kitchen was closed and dark at this hour. The truck was empty.

  Kem stood beside him. “We must not steal it, Sam.”

  “The jeep is dangerous,” Durell said.

  “I would not sin against the Way of the Sangha.”

  “We’re fighting an evil thing, Flivver.”

  “True. Perhaps I can rationalize the move. I agree about the jeep. I’ll get the dynamite.”

  The truck was an old rattletrap, with a simple ignition system that Durell shorted in a moment. Kem brought the explosives and Benjie helped him stow it on the floor of the cab. The wheel felt greasy and the cab smelled of old sweat and stale food. The gas tank looked to be half full— just about enough to get them the fifty miles back to the logging camp and the plane.

  The engine started with a fearful racket that echoed back from the walls of the hotel; but no one came yelling as Durell backed and then turned toward the exit and the traffic on the boulevard. He thought he glimpsed the two straw hats again, near the lobby entrance. For a moment he was sure they had spotted him, but their eyes passed over him without interest.

  In twenty minutes they were on the road
heading east into the mountains again, leaving Chiengmai behind.

  18

  At midnight, they arrived at the camp. It was deserted. The elephants were gone, the sheds were empty, and fire had burned down the machinery shack. The embers still smoldered, a dark and evil glow in the black night. A warm wind blew up the valley and made the charred beams flicker and spark. The racket of the truck’s engine echoed back and forth from the black mountainsides, and Durell shut off the engine some distance from the camp, the moment he spotted the fires.

  “Oh, God,” Benjie murmured. “I’m cleaned out.”

  “All the people have gone,” said Kem. “I pity them.” Durell said, “The Muc Tong may still be around.”

  He got out and listened to the wind in the black forest around them. The trail ahead was empty. From what he could see of the main street, only a single lost dog ambled about, sniffing at the ruins and under the stilted houses.

  The bungalow across the creek had been burned down. “The plane?” Durell said.

  Benjie’s face was pale. “Maybe they missed it. The airstrip is a bit away from the village, remember. Do you still think I’ve got a hand in the Muc Tong, Sam?”

  He didn’t reply. He probed the ruined village without seeing anything except the dog that now trotted away into the brush, holding something in its jaws. He started the engine again. “They were here an hour ago, at least.”

  “Is it not a risk to drive through?” Kem asked mildly. “We make a good target.”

  “Better than on foot,” Durell said.

  He forced the old vehicle into gear and tramped on the worn gas pedal. The truck creaked and rolled forward, into the main street. He drove faster, dust rolling up into the blackness behind them. In the glow of the dying fires he now saw two or three bodies, sprawled in front of different houses. Benjie sucked in her breath, but said nothing. Their headlights flared and touched on the pitiful wreckage of the logging compound. Momentarily, Durell expected a hail of bullets from the shadows; but nothing happened. They were through the village in less than a minute, and bounced recklessly down the jeep trail to the landing strip. The stench of burning oil and exploded grenades still lingered in the air. The trees blocked out the valley for some moments, and then Durell saw the glimmer of the river, silvery in the starlight. In another minute they came out of the woods and roared onto the landing strip cleared on the shelf of the mountainside.

  The Apache was still there. The Muc Tong had missed it.

  At dawn, they were over the Golden Triangle. The folded mountains of shale, schist and limestone, with intrusive granitic caves, were just turning from black to dark green as the sun touched the eastern slopes with bright gold. Once they were buzzed by a Phantom F-4-E, and Durell did not know if it carried the U.S. emblem or the Thai Royal Air Force insignia. Benjie had dodged the screaming plane by dropping the little Apache into a sickening dive, and then she flew through dark valleys with the loom of the mountains on either side, seeming to touch their wingtips. The jet had thundered up and circled and buzzed them again. Benjie bit her lip and leaned forward, holding the controls lightly in her fingertips. A mountain slope rushed at them and she banked steeply, the engines protesting, and they flew even lower down another valley, above a small river that glimmered in the starlight and guided them for a few moments.

  Kem murmured some Buddhist prayers as Benjie tipped the wings this way and that, flying low over the meandering river with the steep mountains all around them. When they came up again, just above the treetops, the Phantom was gone, its thunder fading away to the west.

  “Xo Dong,” Benjie said now.

  She pointed north. The dawn light touched the forested slopes, the granite cliffs, a few cultivated fields where a few tribal peasants were gathering at dawn to work the tobacco, tea or poppy plots. Far to the north, a road wandered toward the borders of Burma and Laos. The village was a thin row of stilted, thatched houses on a branch of the road, below a series of broad terraces planted with tea.

  “My place,” Benjie said. “The one I bought from the discouraged Frenchman. It made a profit of ten, twelve thousand a year for a while. Then I had to give it up when the insurgents scared off the workers.”

  She flew lower, between two heavy shoulders of the mountain that gave Durell a glimpse of a broader river that twisted sinuously to the south. The sun came up over the eastern folds of the mountains with a flare of gold, and the sky turned from black to orange and blue.

  “Are you sure we can land here?” Kem asked anxiously.

  “There’s the strip, bhikkhu” she said.

  It was an overgrown clearing cut from the tangled foliage above the terraces of the tea plantation. Long, thatched drying sheds flanked one end of the small field. Durell searched the ground carefully, but saw nothing human stirring down there. As they flew lower, he noted that the roofs of the drying sheds had tumbled in, and an air of decay hung over the whole area.

  Benjie bit her lip again. “Everything I’ve ever worked for is going to pot. I’ll be broke in six months, if this keeps up. And now with Chuk threatening me about the bank loans—I don’t know what I’ll do. And you—with your ideas about Mike and me ...”

  “You have the motive,” Durell said. “It’s easy money, and you need money desperately.”

  “I’ll manage,” she snapped. “And without the Muc Tong, or you.”

  The wheels touched. The plane bounced, then the girl steadied it and they ran down the length of the clearing toward the sagging drying sheds. The air here was cooler than in Chiengmai. The dawn sky was clear and bright as Benjie rolled the Apache to a halt.

  “We’ll hide the plane in the sheds,” Durell suggested. They worked quickly, hurried by the light of the morning. All around them, the mountains sighed with the dawn wind. From far off, a plume of dust lifted off the Thai military road to the border. A blue haze of smoke came from over the mountain spur where they had landed, but Durell could not spot its origin. Benjie took a pack from the luggage compartment of the plane and said thinly, “Breakfast. A Thermos of tea and sandwiches. Okay?”

  “Fine,” Durell said. “I’d like your binoculars.”

  She looked at the vehicular traffic on the distant road. “That’s Third Army security patrol. They waste their time. All the business is here in the hills, and they’re careful not to interfere. The insurgents are here, all around us. That’s why I had to give up this place. It’s falling apart.” She pointed through the weed-grown terraces, where a large teak bungalow overlooked the tea plants. Everything was desolate. The main house had been firebombed, and stood in gutted black ruins. No one was in sight. Nothing stirred.

  “Who uses those fields over the valley?” Durell asked. “Laiao tribesmen, poppy growers. The plants have just been harvested.”

  “And taken where?”

  “Mike will know if he’s alive. If we find him.”

  They ate quickly in the cool shelter of the drying shed, beside the plane. Kem bared one shoulder of his saffron robe and murmured prayers, his black eyes opaque, seeing nothing of the present world while he drank his tea noisily from a small bowl he fished out from under his robe. Finally he said, “Sam, I’ve been here before, on a small pilgrimage, last year. It is a bad place. The Communists are everywhere. Of course, these hill people are alienated from Bangkok, since the Thai consider themselves superior to them. They will be hostile to us. Please stay close to me. They will not offer harm to me or to anyone with me, I think.”

  “The rebels have no respect for bhikkhus,” Benjie snapped. “You monks have had trouble with them before.”

  “But I have friends here.”

  Xo Dong was over in the next valley. There was no way to get there except by walking. Durell took the dynamite pack, strapped to his back, Kem carried the batteries, and Benjie had her haversack. The trail was narrow and tortuous, following the natural slope of the mountain. In twenty minutes, they were sweating in the lee of the mountain, cut off from the morning breeze, and th
e sky took on the hue of copper. The trail had been used by oxen, and once Durell paused to examine the droppings.

  “There’s still traffic along here,” he said.

  “It’s the opium growers,” Benjie said. “You’d think they’d also keep up the tea plants, though.”

  “More money in poppies, I imagine.”

  The trail dipped down sharply and they heard the trickle of a mountain stream ahead, and then Durell saw a relatively new military sign nailed to a tree.

  “ ‘Yoodt,’ ” he read. “It means, ‘Stop.’ ”

  But no one was in sight, and they walked down to a rope bridge over the stream. Another sign greeted them.

  “ ‘Ham,’ ” he read again. “ ‘Forbidden.’ Were these here before, Benjie?”

  “No. But I haven’t been here for over a year.”

  “It’s signed by General Uva Savag, right? So we’re within his military jurisdiction.”

  “Yes.”

  They crossed the bridge without being challenged. The rutted trail came out of the woods and skirted several cultivated plots where tobacco and bananas were being grown. Normally, there would be women in their lampshade hats, weeding the soil, while children tumbled with the patient bullocks. But again, no one was in sight. A house at the far end of the field was empty; the charcoal stove was cold; and the scrawny chickens and one disgruntled pig scattered away as they neared.

  “The land of sanook,” Kem murmured. “But there is little happiness here.”

  There was a little weaving loom in the house, where the woman had been weaving cloth. On one wall was a faded poster of Ho Chi Minh, next to a yellowed photograph of Mao.

  “This is a Lao-type house,” Durell said.

  “Oh, yes,” said Kem. “Over eight million Lao live in northeast Thailand. Ethnically, they are a branch of the Thai people, and they call themselves the ‘Children of the Thai.’ But many of them belong to the Pathet Lao, and lately, Peking organized a ‘Free Thai’ movement here to encourage terrorism and insurrection against Bangkok. In 1965, the Chinese Foreign Minister, Chen Yi, called publicly for guerrilla warfare, and now the rebels are organized as the ‘Thai Patriotic Front.’ The gangsters of the Muc Tong work hand in glove with them.”