Assignment - Sulu Sea

by Edward S. Aarons

  “You’re well-informed, Tommy.”

  “It is my business to be, sir. And I still think it would be wisest if you stayed at the consulate."

  “No, I’ve chosen my bed, and I’ll sleep in it.”

  “Peacefully, I trust,” the Chinese murmured.

  Durell found only one wrong note on the drive, and that dealt with a remark about Dendang, or Fishtown. They were halted for a troop-carrier convoy, burdened with solemn brown men under big helmets. Dusk was imminent. At the same moment, grenades exploded with a muffled crumping noise a few blocks away, but the site was invisible under the old banyan trees that lined the road. The people at the sidewalk stalls, selling or buying egg noodles, bananas, batik, hammered brass from India and carved sawo wood images from Bali, seemed undisturbed either by the troops or the explosions. Traffic waited patiently for the convoy to pass. A crowd of Malays gathered around a cockfight in a dusty alley nearby never paused in their heated gambling.

  Against the loom of the ancient Portuguese fortress on the waterfront, Durell glimpsed a maze of waterfront alleys, mat huts, sampans, Dyak long houses, Chinese tearooms and Moslem prayer houses all built in a rickety nightmare of alleys and canals over the fetid harbor water. He asked Lee if that was Fishtown, run by Prince Ch’ing, and Tommy Lee's smile was quick and nervous.

  “Oh, you have heard of our local ogre? Ch’ing is the favorite whipping boy for every bad thing that happens in this part of Borneo.”

  The big, pleasant young Chinese seemed defensive and embarrassed, and Durell thought it odd. He filed the item away for future reference as the car swung ahead and they sped up a wide boulevard lined with pleasant, stuccoed villas smothered with oleanders, frangipani, palms and bamboo hedges. Some of these houses were privately guarded by armed men. There was a padang, or square, on this headland forming the north shore of Pandakan Bay, lined with some public buildings—the Indian-style Hotel des Indes, with its ornate fretwork and towers, opposite a mosque and a sidewalk café and a modern sugar cube of a hospital—all fronting on the green padang that was equipped with a Victorian, gingerbread bandstand under a gilded Moorish cupola.

  “Drop me off at the hotel, quietly,” Durell said. “Is that the Pandakan Hospital, by the way?”

  “Yes, sir. I understand you may wish to visit the Papuan schoonerman named Simon." Tommy’s smile flashed big, white teeth. "Dr. Malachy McLeod mentioned it before he left for Tarakuta.”

  “I see. How is Simon doing?”

  “He is on the critical list, sir. If I can assist you—”

  “Don’t worry, Tommy, I’ll be calling on you.”

  There was no sign of tension in this Western oasis perched on the breezy hill overlooking the bay. The cafes were crowded and the height of land yielded a relatively cool breeze that rang melodiously with the scores of bicycle bells and betjas sweeping around the padang. A Malay boy took Durell’s grip and vanished with it into the high, cool fret-work of the enormous lobby of the Hotel des Indes. Durell felt hot and gritty from the long trip, as if he had been traveling forever; and it had not been a restful flight shared with Willi Panapura. He longed for a cool tub, a tall bourbon, and a. good meal, if one was available.

  He sent Tommy Lee on with instructions to notify Dr. McLeod he had arrived, if contact with Tarakuta was possible, and then followed the boy from the desk to his room on the third floor. There were wooden shutter doors for ventilation on all the rooms to catch and circulate the vagrant breeze from over the harbor. Willi had reserved a corner room for him that yielded a magnificent view of sea and shore, of the myriad islands like greenish curd in a milky ocean all the way to the horizon. The harbor docks and quays looked abnormally empty of shipping. Smoke lifted like a thick black serpent from a distant quarter of the town, and he saw with some surprise how narrow a crescent of civilization existed here. The island’s jungle pressed hard like another dark green ocean against the glimmering river and canals, the tea and chinchona plantations on the mountain range that formed the spine of the island like the armor of some prehistoric reptile. But directly below his balcony was the calm and order of this European quarter, with its hospital, churches, cafes, shops and green land and bandstand.

  “Will there be anything more, sir?” the Malay boy asked.

  “A bourbon and soda, with ice, if you have any.”

  The boy grinned. “Yes, sir. It is already ordered.”

  “And who ordered it?”

  “I cannot say, sir. It was on the chit for this reservation, Mr. Durell.”

  His room was huge and airy, with high ceilings and stuffy plush furniture that might hide anything in the way of insect life or security microphones. The bed was enormous and canopied with blue mosquito netting. The bathroom could have doubled for the pool at the Taj Mahal, with gold-washed faucets, a huge marble basin, and a tub that stood on legs shaped out of cast-iron winged griffins. The sounds of traffic drifted pleasantly through the windows as Durell tossed his bag on the bed and gave the room a routine fanning. He did not know how much of his visit might interest the caretaker police regime here in Pandakan, but a certain amount of efficiency was obvious at once. In two minutes he uncovered a mike in a tall lamp made out of a many-limbed Hindu goddess with an inappropriate number of breasts on her abdomen, and another behind a batik hanging on the wall. Next to the tapestry-like cloth was a photograph of the last Sultan, a fat, smiling man whose face did not resemble the way he had looked when an assassin’s bullet had smashed the back of his skull a month ago. The microphone bugs were attached by tape to a hole in the plaster wall. He did not disturb them, but his reflection in the large mirror on the opposite wall turned dark and saturnine.

  A pair of double-leafed, carved doors of jackwood apparently opened into the next room to form a suite, if desired. They were locked, but did not stay locked. He turned the bronze handle downward and had them in his hands when he felt a movement in them and they clicked open.

  He found himself face to face with a plump, tall, brown-skinned stranger with pale amber eyes and a smiling mouth and a totally unpleasant Webley pointed at the pit of his stomach.

  He remembered thinking with dismay that to be surprised this way usually happened only once to someone in his business. His reaction was swift and savage. His right hand knocked at the other’s gun while his left stabbed with stiff fingers at the brown throat above the braided uniform collar. Before he saw the military tabs indicating a full colonel, it was too late to check his attack, but he prevented it from being lethal.

  Fortunately, the gun did not go off. It went spinning across the polished floor to the bed, while the other man drove his left fist into Durell’s stomach. By then Durell’s karate attack found its mark and the man stumbled back, clutching and strangling, all interest lost in anything except getting the next breath of air into his lungs.

  Durell picked up the Webley and emptied it, noticed the safety was on, and felt a bit worried. On the other hand, he owed no apology for reacting to the colonel’s sudden appearance. He helped the plump brown man to his feet. The adjoining room was empty except for a very efficient Japanese tape recorder that was turning slowly with a two-hour reel on it, connected by wires to the microphone bugs in Durell’s room.

  He snapped off the tape recorder before he spoke, and the colonel’s yellowish eyes followed him and he gave a short, choppy nod of his cropped bullet head and spoke uncomfortably. “Perfectly correct. I apologize, Mr. Durell.”

  “You surprised rne, and you have my apologies, too, Colonel Mayubashur."

  “You know me? I am head of the local police.”

  “Ruler pro tern of these islands, too, I understand.” Durell smiled. “Do you personally bug every visitor’s room, sir?"

  “You are not an ordinary visitor, Mr. Durell. We are not stupid or ignorant, sir. Surely you must realize from your briefing that the political climate here is most explosive, and any outside interference is most unwelcome.”

  “I am not here to interfere.”r />
  “No?” The amber eyes were like a jungle cat’s. “Then perhaps you will explain why a man in the K Section of the United States Central Intelligence Agency honors our disturbed little islands with his presence. You have a saying, do you not, about fishing in troubled waters?”

  Durell started to reply and then someone knocked and he went to open the door. It was the Malay bellhop With a tray of bourbon and soda and a bucket of ice. The bellboy pretended Colonel Mayubashur did not exist; he grinned and bowed to Durell, and departed, round-eyed. Durell poured the bourbon, which was a good Kentucky vintage, and offered a drink to Mayubashur.

  “Thank you, no, Mr. Durell. No alcohol for me.”

  “You are a Moslem?”

  "Forty percent of Pandakan’s people are Moslem, twelve percent are Hindu, thirty me Buddhist, six percent Christian. and the rest devote their prayers to the twin gods of materialism: Marx and Lenin.”

  “Nicely put.”

  “But an extremely ticklish balance, however nice.”

  Colonel Mayubashur had recovered quickly. He put a cigarette in an ornately carved ivory holder and lit it with a gold Zippo and regarded Durell with cool, amused eyes. Durell liked the irony he saw, and felt a rapport he could understand and appreciate. Mayubashur spoke in quiet, perfect English.

  “Will you explain your presence here, Mr. Durell? You are not a tourist, come to admire the exquisite Javanese silver filigree work of our Snake Temple. I should not like to arrest you."

  “I would not advise it,” Durell said. “I can assure you I’m not a political agitator and have no interest in the outcome of your plebiscite next week."

  The colonel’s almond eyes were not amused. “Then why have search planes from the famous U.S. Seventh Fleet been seen flying at extraordinarily low levels recently, over the Borneo coast and our little islands?”

  “I can’t say.”

  Mayubashur sighed and sat down, crossing elegantly booted legs. The boots were English. “I do not object to cooperation with America. Since the Sultan’s assassination, I am thrust into a position of power I do not enjoy. The days ahead are dangerous, filled with stubborn nationalism, a threat of internal revolt, and a shaky political leadership based on a bumbling and mismanaged bureaucracy left to us by the departed Sultan of Pandakan. If your visit is innocent, Mr. Durell, I trust you will enlist my services. I could be useful to you, if you wish.”

  “You might, at that.”

  “Let us see. You arrive with Miss Panapura, in her private plane. She is a remarkable young lady of extraordinary talents. She has flown off to see her beloved grandfather, who is ailing since his schoonerman, Simon, was put on the critical list over there.” The colonel nodded across the padang to the hospital flanked by crowded sidewalk cafes. The late sunlight struck slantwise into the square, and traffic had slowed a bit, though there was still a steady stream of trishaws and bicycles and buses, with here and there a European car nosing around the green. “I am waiting,” Mayubashur added, “for Simon to recover his senses to tell me what happened to him—just as you seem to be.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But it is true, yes? Mr. Durell, if it is a question of smuggling arms to guerillas who refuse to recognize the United Nations plebiscite, or to others who claim one national loyalty against another, I must warn you—”

  “I’m not smuggling arms,“ Durell said shortly.

  “If you cannot speak truly as to your mission here, then it is regrettable, and I must—”

  Colonel Mayubashur never finished his words. Durell, from his hotel window, saw it all happen before any sound reached them. A battered, closed sedan, painted a bright blue with a yellow hood, screeched out of Government Road into the square on smoking tires, at a speed that made the bicycles and pedicabs scatter like a flock of frightened chickens. There was no time to react before the careening car mounted the broad sidewalk where the tables and chairs of the outdoor cafes were filled with people sheltering under awnings from the evening sun. The uniformed cop on his wooden platform had a hand lifted to loosen his tommy gun when the first grenade exploded.

  The flat cramp! lay a pail of black smoke on those enjoying their ices and drinks. The striped awning billowed up like a balloon and then collapsed in wavering rags. A man flew backward into the gutter like a limp doll. A woman ran three steps on legs from which her right foot was missing. There were screams and shrieks and then, in rapid succession, three more grenades exploded as the gaily painted car roared by.

  It was simple mass murder.

  Where a moment before the sidewalk had been blight and colorful and animated, filled with chattering, innocent people, there was now a bloody, tortured confusion, with flames crackling from a shop front and the shrieks and screams of the wounded and the incredible heaps of rags that represented the dead.

  It all happened in less than five seconds.

  Durell heard Colonel Mayubashur race for the door. By the time he turned back, the car had Whirled around the square and was heading back the way it came. There was no chance to see the occupants or even guess how many of them there were. But because of Durell’s vantage point on his balcony, he noted a peculiar thing. He could see the side entrance to the Pandakan Hospital, Where the emergency doors stood open. An ambulance was already starting out when the blue and yellow sedan shot up the alley from the back way, having doubled back upon itself to a spot directly opposite the bombed cafes.

  And all at once Durell knew what was happening.

  He loosened the gun in his underarm holster as he ran from the room.

  chapter six

  THE odds were against his making it on time. People ran in panic down the hotel corridor beyond his door, and the colonel had vanished. Durell skipped the elevators, since their open cages were too slow and too vulnerable, and hit the marble stairs three and four at a time. The lobby was a turmoil of frightened people, all shouting at once. Two stretchers with European victims of the bombing were being carried through one set of hotel doors as Durell slammed out through the other. He had to buck the tide of people running for shelter against an expected second bombing.

  Traffic bad vanished as if by magic, along with the colorful crowds in the shops and stalls, except for those lying at the scene of the blasts. The squatter merchants with their batik cloth and bananas and carved teak, shells and combs, had been erased as if by a sweep of a giant‘s hand. Only the scent of braised beef, a dish known as satay cooked on bamboo skewers over charcoal braziers, remained in the air—and the scent of cordite and of something much worse, from the wrecked cafe.

  Steel shutters clanged shut vibrantly as the shopkeepers decided on discretion. Durell swung right, ran across the wide, hot pavement, and heard the whistle of a military policeman shrilling after him. He paid no attention. Since he did not head for the scene of the bombing, no one pursued The main entrance to the hospital was crowded with those who were superficially wounded and others searching for friends and relatives. A steady hubbub, with an occasional shout of anger or despair, filled the hot evening air. Durell ran across the central mall and swung around the ornately carved bandstand to the emergency drive in the back of the hospital. He was halted by a slim Malay nurse who tried to bar his way. "Sorry, sir, but only patients are admitted through here—”

  “I’m looking for a patient here, a Simon Smith—’”

  “Please join the others, sir, in the lobby, and do not disrupt our‘ routine. We have much to do.”

  “This isn’t a new patient,” he said quickly. “He’s a sailor, brought in about four days ago, a Papuan—”

  “Oh, yes, Simon is on the third floor." The Malay girl’s smile was without meaning. “But you really can’t go up—”

  He swung around her protests and took to the steps, and iron and concrete stairwell, and he could hear other running feet clattering on the flight above. He knew he was too late, even before he swung through the doors and came out on the topmost, third-floor corridor.

 
There were three shots, careful and deliberate and horribly efficient. The door to the patient’s room did little to muffle the explosive noises.

  Two men burst from the room. One carried a big black man in a patient’s gown, slung over his shoulder. They started running toward Durell, saw him, and halted. Both had automatic machine-pistols in their hands, and both were big, blank-faced Chinese with tiny black eyes. They wore dungarees and sport shirts flapping over their belts, and the gay rayon patterns were in startling contrast to the blood spattered over them.

  “Hold it!" Durell shouted.

  The one with the black man slung over his shoulder spoke in rapid Chinese and his companion lifted his automatic without hesitation and spattered the corridor with shots like a riveting machine. Durell had only the warning of the man‘s hand jerking up as he triggered his weapon. He threw himself headlong on the waxed corridor floor and squeezed off two shots as he went down. Bullets powdered the concrete walls and showered the place with flying dust and debris. The big Chinese staggered as a slug took him, but the man was too insensitive to pain or more terrified of retreat than of immediate death. The explosive roar of his machine-pistol went on for another eternity for Durell. He felt like a fly on a wall. He fired again at the huge figure, and this time the slug went home. The machine-pistol kept clattering, but the shots stitched huge holes in the ceiling plaster and smashed a light globe and then ended as the man fell against the wall.

  Durell got up with care. The Chinese gunman was dead. He kicked the machine-pistol away, down the hall, just to be safe, and ran after the second man who had carried off Simon Smith. But by the time he reached the stairwell, the kidnapper had already gained the street level. A car started up and he wen! to a window and saw the big Chinese tumble his burden into the rear seat and leap aboard as the sedan lurched forward. Durell raised his gun, then lowered it. Pursuit was hopeless.