chapter thirteen
THE sea whispered seductively, and there was the brightness of an intolerable, tropic dawn in his eyes. The world lifted and fell, carrying him forward on the surges of global tides, with soft susurrations of sound and a clear whimpering of wind and the occasional slap and rattle of canvas and blocks. He gritted his teeth to hold on to his stomach, thanks to a pulsing headache and the queasy movement under him. He felt about cautiously. He was in a narrow hammock, and only inches below his swinging rump was a polished plank deck, already hot to the touch. He opened his eyes and stared straight into an enormous, blazing white sun, and shut them again.
“You crazy Cajun,” someone said.
The world tilted far over and someone called a soft order and blocks and sails rattled and slatted and he knew he was on a boat, and a sailing boat at that, under full way, racing the dawn breeze. He opened his eyes and turned his head aside and looked up, into Malachy McLeod’s red beard.
“Nice to have you return from the land of Nod, Sam’l me boy,” said Malachy. “Are you surprised at seeing it is me?”
“Was it you who slugged me?”
“It was. A regrettable error."
“And the girl? Is she—?"
“Safe and sound, and as pretty a piece as I’ve seen in a long time. You have a sure affinity for lovely females, Samuel, that never seems to desert you.”
“Shut the blathering,” Durell said.
“ 'Tis deserving you are of every ache and pain you suffer, for trying what you did last night. But I take off me hat, figuratively speaking, for that in which you succeeded.”
“I succeeded in little, Malachy.” '
“You may decide differently. A bit of coffee, with rum in it?”
“Yes, please."
He could see clearly now. First there was the boat, a lovely, clean-lined, clipper-bowed schooner that seemed to belong to the Maine coast, in another age. The taut, gaff-rigged canvas was bleached a blinding white by the equatorial suns and rains of fifty years, and her tall pine masts towered skyward against a heathenish heaven of brass. The scrubbed deck was as white as her canvas, and the teak railings were polished the color of very old honey. He turned his head, and pain thrust at the back of his skull. An old man who looked much like his grandpa Jonathan, except for the unmistakable Polynesian cocoa of his skin, held the wheel, serenely guiding the ship as she heeled through greenish, milky seas. Several Malay boys served as crew, on deck and in the rigging. The wind blew with a hard freshness, considering the white clarity of the sky and the enormous heat of the morning sun. Beyond the port rails were a hundred islands of mangrove and swamp, slowly gliding by. The channel looked narrow and devious. No other vessels or humans were in sight, ashore or on the empty sea.
He returned his gaze to Dr. Malachy McLeod.
The bearded Malachy had a vast mane of red hair blowing in tangles in the dawn wind. He had a chest as solid as a keg of Irish whiskey, and a face that, bewhiskered or not, was as taut as a poet's and as competent as the ship. Malachy spoke with a deliberately exaggerated brogue.
“Sure, and you can guess this is the Tarakuta, Samuel —the finest trading schooner in the Celebes and Sulu Seas. ’Twas I who coshed you, thinkin’ you was some heathen devil chasm‘ after the poor girl named Paradise. We were lookin’ for you, having received your message from the consulate, and figurin’ you wanted the ship in the harbor. Where? says I. Off Dendang, says Willi. So then we saw the Morse code, and we were already ashore, worryin’ for fear you were foolhardy enough to seek to slay the monster, our own Prince Ch’ing, in the very heart of his evil den. ‘Twas sore worried Willi was, indeed, and I admit to instant jealousy, me Cajun boy. Willi herself interpreted your message as to where you might be needin’ us.”
“And where is Willi now?" Durell smiled.
“Behind ye, lad, and don’t stare too hard.”
She came carrying coffee like an island goddess risen from the sea, bearing in her hands an amphora of sacred oils. Willi Panapura in her shorts, in the Luakulani Palms on Oahu, had been something to study. Here on the White, scrubbed deck of the Tarakuta, in the swaying shadows of the sun-bleached sails, and wearing her diving bikini and an air of feminine pride and mystery, and little else, Willi was beyond words.
She smiled and knelt gracefully beside Durell’s hammock and handed him the coffee mug like an offering made by a Polynesian goddess. Her eyes locked with his, then disengaged and searched upward for Dr. McLeod. “Has Malachy been using the brogue he learned when he played in The Informer at the Yale Drama School, ages ago? And is he still playing at being a spy?”
Durell said: “In self-defense, it wasn’t so long ago. We were doing postgraduate work then. The critics ignored him, but he himself decided he was grand. And still thinks so.”
“Malachy, I apologize," Willi said contritely. “But please drop the phony brogue instantly. The Irishisms affect my stomach like a following sea.“
McLeod laughed and spoke in a normal American accent. “Sorry, darling. Being an extracurricular agent involves some histrionics, as I see it. I get carried away.”
The way Malachy’s eyes dwelt on Willi's golden image made it plain he was hopelessly in love with her. But Durell was not sure that Willi responded. He could sense that Willi was intrigued by his own appearance, after all the years of their childhood antagonisms. All the flattering little signs were there. But he was not happy about it. His work was lonely and dangerous, most often performed in squalor, with too many moments of despair and terror. Willi did not belong in that world. Nor could she ever belong to him. Yet he was aware of temptation. Did his work demand that he give up all hope of someone like Willi? He did not approve of emotion mixed with his work. It slowed the reflexes, distracted the eye from the shadow that might be fatal, the hinted image of a lurking assassin. Love was a luxury he had been forced to deny too long. Was it too late to turn back, to ask for what Willi might offer? Durell would have shrugged off any suggestion that he was a patriot, totally dedicated to his work. But each time his annual contract with K Section came up for appraisal and evaluation, he knew an agony that was eased only when the issue was settled for another year. His work was more than his business, simply. It demanded a complete integration of what he was and what he must make of himself in order to survive and function usefully.
He pushed aside the thought of any romantic idylls with Willi. It was too late for that, yes. He even regretted the tension that existed already, this triangular tautness between himself, Malachy and the girl, that could be so dangerous to their success, to their continued lives. Malachy had become moodily withdrawn as Willi knelt beside the hammock and handed him the rum-laced coffee.
“Does your head still hurt?” she asked.
“Malachy is enthusiastic and accurate.” Durell winced and gasped at the sixty percent rum in the coffee. He stood up, and the deck tilted one Way and he tilted another. He sat down and then tried again. This time he managed to keep on his feet while the horizon swam about. The sky was cobalt, the sea a lime green, the islands a darker, ominous green, implying fetid swamps and desperate shadows. He steadied his gaze on the horizon. After a time the coffee and rum stopped sloshing about and performed its designed function. He felt better. He said: “Are we sailing anywhere in particular?”
“I thought we should wait for you,” Malachy said. He spoke tersely. “You're in charge of the apparatus and the operation—such as it is.”
“I’d like to see where Willi found Commander Holcomb’s body," Durell said.
Willi suggested: “That was on the east shore of Bangka, as I told you. About two hours’ sail from here."
“Good enough.” He waited while she called to the man at the schooner’s wheel and the course was changed. Then he waved toward the mangrove islets. “Who lives over there?”
“Just some Dusuns who work at lumbering. We just passed one of their logging ponds. Very decent people, really.”
Durell looked at Malach
y. “But no sign of the Jackson?”
“Nothing. No wreckage, no rumors of survivors."
“Did you check the kampongs?”
“Everything, Sam. Nobody has heard a thing.”
As if to mock Malachy, a dim howling came from the cobalt sky. It was an unnatural interruption to the sounds of wind and sail and sea, and it wove like a surgeon’s scalpel through the hiss of the bow wave. Durell looked at the faint vapor trail in the sky to the north. The howling grew louder momentarily, then faded.
“One of ours?” Malachy asked.
Durell shook his head. He knew the sound of the new Soviet MIGs, and this was one of them. The Seventh Fleet units outside Tarakuta territorial waters would he out searching, too, but the howl of evil up there had come either from Indonesia or from the Malaysia Federation. They were all involved in a giant chess game, he thought, in which pieces were released to control certain areas of the global chessboard. Neither side dared to begin an exchange, since the end result was beyond calculation. No one could foresee which might be the deciding, surviving piece of artillery. That howling plane up there might be one of Sukarno’s, or from Malaya, and it might meet with one from the Seventh Fleet. He shook his head slightly.
“What is it?” Malachy asked.
“It seems to me that the former colonies here are infected with a neo-imperialism of their own, now that they are independent. The world is full of ironies.” He looked at the bearded man. “And plenty full of sad, Irish philosophers, Malachy.”
Somewhere in this tangle of sea and island, Durell thought, there was one reality, and that was a submarine, huge and black, the most modern, lethal fighting engine yet devised, with a crew of brave men, a nuclear engine of the latest design, and sixteen A-3 Polaris missiles that packed a devastating wallop. The A-3 was a ninety percent new missile ranking with the best of the land-based rockets, its payload a one megaton-warhead that could fly 2,875 miles from sub to target. Unlike the early “mud-sucker” Polaris subs that had to operate close to shore because their A-1 missile range was only 1,300 miles, the Jackson’s flexibility was enormous. Her submerged displacement of 8,000 tons compared to that of a pocket battleship, and from hundreds of miles offshore, she could strike Peiping from the Arctic or wipe out the Siberian industrial complex of Irkutsk while submerged in the China Sea off Shanghai.
Communications with this class of ship were considered —and had to be—tamper-proof. Each of her city-busting A-3’s was always electronically zeroed in on selected targets.
How could the Jackson simply disappear?
She might be on the bottom, crushed to rubbish by the awful pressures of the Pacific deeps, due to some natural calamity. But he did not think so. He felt sure the Jackson was here, within reach, somewhere in this empty, drowned sea of molten lead and patchy green, labyrinthine island channels. He had to find the Jackson, and it had to be done soon.
Willi changed the bandage on the back of his head and took a breakfast tray from the Malay cook. The eggs were small, the bacon canned, the coffee flavored with chicory. She looked as if she would have liked to spoon-feed him, and Malachy glowered in his beard and stared at the horizon.
“You gave us such a fright, Samuel,” Willi murmured. “We received your message to come into Pandakan Harbor, but then we did not know what to do. If not for your signal, and a bit of luck, being on hand—” She paused. “We’ve learned the nurse, Yoko Hanamutra, got safely out of Dendang, by the way. Malachy used the radio-phone to make inquiries. What I don’t understand is why you went up against Ch’ing all alone. Not even the police, or Colonel Mayubashur, challenge that monster’s control over Dendang.”
“Well, someone should. Prince Ch’ing interests me,” Durell said. He considered the girl and saw no point to keeping his thoughts to himself. “I have to operate on the assumption that whatever happened to the missing sub was not a natural accident. Everything points to human interference—otherwise, how did Pete Holcomb get ashore, and how did he receive his injuries? He was tortured, you said, and hurt deliberately, by men, not in an accident. And he asked for me, which meant it fell within the scope of my business. Otherwise, he simply would have asked for maritime aid, shipping assistance—that sort of thing.” He paused. “No, we have to assume a human agent in what happened to the submarine.”
“But I still don’t see—” Willi began.
“Why I’m interested in Prince Ch’ing? To hijack an item like a Polaris sub isn’t a picayune job, Willi. It takes organization and a lot of men. And Ch‘ing has both. We haven’t really ‘been able to appraise the political orientation of the Oceanic Chinese people in this area; they might be loyal to local government, and they might obey Peiping, either out of conviction or blackmail pressure because of relatives at home. I won’t be satisfied until we've turned our fat prince inside out and have seen what makes him tick." Durell finished his coffee. “The girl last night—Paradise—was a big help. You did say she got safely away? She’s a nice youngster.”
“Nice? Working for Ch‘ing?” Willi sniffed.
“Your prudery is showing. She saved my life.”
Willi‘s voice had cooled some twenty degrees. “She and Yoko are both safe, we think. Yoko is still looking for Tommy Lee, who seems to have vanished completely.”
“I’d like to get my hands on Lee,” Malachy grunted. “Do you think he sold out, Cajun?"
“It’s a question. He could have been tempted by Colonel Mayubashur, who seems to want independence for the whole island group. Any of the other interested parties may have offered him something substantial—Malaysia, or Big Brother Sukarno, or the Red Chinese. Yes, I think cur Tommy Lee is playing a double game.”
Malachy tugged at his beard. “Peiping is a long way from here, though. We’ve got lots of Hakka people in the archipelago—Chinese from Southwest China, originally—but they’re good, loyal folk, here for generations. Still, some of their labor trade unions might contain Communist cells. As for Prince Ch’ing—well, he makes me nervous, Cajun, I must admit. Too rich and too fat and too immoral, a millionaire gangster Who plays Big Daddy to the locals, like an old-time ward heeler handing out food baskets to the needy voters. He owns the House of Pleasure, which you seem to have explored thoroughly.” McLeod paused and Willi bit her lip. “Ch’ing‘s pretensions as a prince of the Manchus may be just a vanity, sure, but he owns one of the major islands here, with tin sluice mines, and has a thousand Hakkas working there in a kampong all his own. When he isn‘t in that damned pagoda in Dendang, you'll find him watching the tin ore getting loaded aboard one of the tramp freighters that come by now and then."
“You make interesting noises, Malachy. So Prince Ch‘ing owns and operates a loading port?”
“Right. But the sub isn’t there. We flew over it, Willi and I, and looked. So did the Seventh Fleet jets. There’s only a small merchantman there now, loading. Nothing else.”
Durell’s face was suddenly quiet, attentive. “Let me guess, Malachy. This island that Ch’ing owns, where this tin-loading port is-it’s the same island where you found and buried Commander Pete Holcomb, right?”
Malachy McLeod nodded shortly. “Aye, it is.”
The old man at the schooner’s wheel was like an antique stone image carved on a lost Pacific atoll. His face, burned a dark mahogany, was shaped geometrically into rugged, hewn lines. Durell was not surprised that this aged whip of a man, with his snowy hair blowing in the sea wind, reminded him strongly of the courtesy and strength of his own grandpa Jonathan. Those two old men had remained friends even when half the world and half a century separated them. He felt like a boy again, standing cap in hand before this gaunt old islander.
Joseph Panapura spoke quietly. “You look like he once was, son.”
“I could ask for no more.”
“Remains to be seen if you’re even part the man Jonathan was, and is.” Old Joseph’s voice could carry easily above the sough of the wind and the murmur of the sea. His long white hair blew across
craggy brows and jutting cheekbones. “You were reckless, Samuel, even if you don’t complain of an aching head. Prince Ch’ing really runs these islands.”
“Getting a few lumps made what I learned cheap at the price.” Durell smiled. “I wasn’t killed. The dice fell right.”
The mahogany mouth twitched. Durell felt as if he were addressing some pagan island deity. The old man was part of the vessel, joined to it by big gnarled hands on the wheel, his feet planted on the canted deck, by his eyes flicking to the taut curve of the sail and the shifting colors of the sea. Another jet chased its thunder along the ocean’s horizon. The absence of other shipping in this shallow ocean was startling. No native junks, outriggers, fishing sampans or rusty freighters. One would not guess this was the wide Pacific, considering the countless green islands that floated like uncertain mirages on every quarter. The violence of the sun made the colors of the sea change from moment to moment. Obviously, no one but old Joseph could be trusted to guide the hissing keel of the Tarakuta through these shoal channels; and even his skill was more mystical than scientific. This was a world of tortuous inlets and seaways bounded by volcanic rock, coral, and shifting mangrove swamps and shoals. Now and then, when it seemed the schooner must surely go aground, the old man touched the wheel and the sharp clipper bow swerved to find a new opening in the channel, glimmering a green-black or perhaps a pale, churned milk. The Malay crew responded alertly to invisible signals from the old man at the wheel.
“We’ll help you do your job,” Joseph said bluntly. “Maybe we’re the only people who can help, politics here being What they are. Maybe the Tarakuta is all you can count on. You understand me? I hate to think of all those fine men and young boys lost somewhere in these islands.”
“Then you agree the submarine is here, somewhere? Do you think we can find it?”
“We’ll need some luck. But every gambler needs luck. Only thing, you must never count on it.” The old man’s carved, mahogany face was still. “I am concerned about Wilhelmina, however. Have you lost your sight, Samuel?"
Assignment - Sulu Sea Page 11