Assignment - Sulu Sea

by Edward S. Aarons

  But the fresh air that poured in provided oxygen for the flames inside. There was a great roar, and he picked Willi up and threw her bodily outside. It was ten feet to the mucky ground below. He jumped after her, rolled over twice, caught her arm, and hauled her to her feet.

  The jeep was driving away, crowded with its armed Hakkas led by the man in the Block island cap. Luckily, none of them looked back. Durell led the girl, coughing and gasping, into an irrigation channel of the rice paddy behind the hut. They fell into the tepid, muddy water, heedless of their scratches, burns and bruises, and did not move until the jeep was gone.

  The hut went up with one grand explosion that sent sparks sky-larking above the jungle. A black mushroom cloud followed. Then the structure collapsed in a heap of smoking embers.

  Fong, the Chinese owner of the hut, had been taken away in the jeep. For the moment they were safe, Durell decided.

  Willi said gloomily: “I must look awful.” Then she laughed softly. “So do you, Samuel. Mud, salt, soot, from head to foot. But we’re alive, anyway—and I’m grateful." Her great eyes sobered and she touched a finger to his lips. “The old gentlemen were right, you know. Our esteemed grandfathers said we belonged together, and I begin to think we do.”

  “You’re forgetting about Malachy,” he said bluntly.

  “He’s on the boat. You and I are here. Do you really think we’ll escape? They know we‘re ashore now, and they’ll come back after us.”

  “We’ll go to them, instead,” Durell decided. “I came here to look over Ch’ing’s operation, and that’s what we‘ll do.”

  “That tactic worked in Dendang, Samuel, but it’s a long way around by the beaches. Crossing inland means going through the rain forest, and nobody ever goes there.”

  “Then that’s the route we‘ll take.”

  She shuddered slightly. “You don’t know what the rain forest is like. It's dangerous in ways that might make Ch‘ing’s boys seem the lesser of two evils. Fong could have helped us. He hates Prince Ch’ing, and he’s been useful before, when I came to the beach for specimens. He’s one of the few rebellious souls permitted to stay on Bangka—mainly because he’s a sort of hermit-philosopher, I guess. I hope they don’t hurt him.” The girl paused. “Samuel, just don’t try to leave me somewhere while we’re here. I don’t want to be safe. I want to be right beside you, whatever you plan to do.”

  He smiled and stood up and held out his hand to her.

  They walked west to the beach. There was no sign of the Tarakuta. A dozen islands loomed offshore, making a shallow channel that insinuated itself tortuously between the clumps of green land on the stagnant surface of the sea. He knew this passage paralleled the main shipping lane to Pandakan. Probably it looked the same, in width and length, as the one the regular freighters used. If he were Ch’ing, and wanted to discourage visitors, it would be a simple matter to shift about navigational buoys to ward off all boats except his own in these waters.

  He was silent, while the birds called and the sea thundered on the wide beach. When they came to a curve in the shore where a fishing kampang blocked their way, and a road showed traffic in the form of trucks crammed with coolie workmen, Durell halted. It would soon be dark but the enormous heat was persistent. He could not see the swollen sun through the high trees, and the faint wind from the sea did not touch them.

  He drew Willi down behind a tangle of vines, out of sight of the villagers.

  “How much farther to the deep-water port?"

  “Perhaps four miles. I didn’t think we’d get this far." She was frowning. “Something is different. I’ve been here twice before, on the beach, before Ch’ing closed this area to outsiders.”

  He watched her carefully. She lifted a hand to point to the curving shore ahead, then dropped it, frowning with uncertainty. She looked beautiful whether she smiled or was troubled, and this disturbed Durell, because he could not afford to lose his detachment. Yet he could not ignore the essential femaleness of her body in the brief smock as she clung to him. He could have wished her safely aboard the Tarakuta, and he knew he was guilty of deliberately manipulating the situation so he could use her knowledge of this isolated island. It wasn’t quite fair. She was not a professional and she did not know the risks of his business. He did not doubt she would willingly accept them, if he told her what might come; yet the fact remained that he was here because it was his job to be here, and she was, in a sense, only an innocent, but very useful bystander. You used any tool, any weapon that came to hand, in Durell’s business. He knew this, and yet he could not completely rid himself of the overburden of guilt and responsibility for the girl, He watched her bite her lip and sigh.

  “What is it?” he asked again.

  “I’m not sure. I Wish I knew where the Tarakuta was. Poor Joseph forgets his age and thinks he’s still a young man, sometimes, with your grandfather—”

  “I thought the kampong disturbed you.”

  “Yes. It looked different for a moment. But I can't tell what it is. Maybe I’m just worried about Joseph.”

  “Aren‘t you at all concerned about Malachy?”

  She was silent, her eyes brooding, “I’m all mixed up, aren’t I? . . . How long do we stay here?”

  “Until dark, Half an hour, perhaps. Then we can get around that fishing village and see what’s up the coast.”

  “I wish I had some more clothes. I feel kind of funny running around like this with you.”

  He grinned. “I haven’t complained.”

  Her smile was slow to come, but it grew like a secret blossom, unsuspected, entirely different from any other expression he had seen before. She sat with her back against the horizontal bole of a fallen sago palm, and her long hair half hid the smile and made it something more mysterious than before, He felt as if she had come to a decision about him.

  They waited for darkness.

  Some quirk of the wind kept the insects from them in their hiding place near the fishing village. There was a last howling tumult in the sky, where a final sweep was made by three jets of the Seventh Fleet. One plane peeled off and made a low pass over the island and vanished. The land seemed to shake with the impact of its power, and then it was gone, and with it the sunlight, as if a curtain had been dropped over the green of the Celebes Sea.

  “Sam?” Willi whispered.

  “Yes?”

  “Aren’t you thinking of ways to get off this island?”

  “Not yet. Not until I’ve found what I came to find.”

  “How can the submarine be here?”

  “It’s here," he said. “It must be.”

  “That jet fighter--it had a message for me, you know.” Her voice was quiet, sad. The evening darkness hid her face, except for the wide luminosity of her eyes. “It seemed to speak of the end of one time and the beginning of another, like the cycle of life the Buddhists believe in, where everything changes and yet is the same. Poor old Joseph, though—for him the change will be permanent. The Indonesians are going to move in, and these people will live different lives. The simple ways of fishing and farming and growing rice and coconut palm oil will be gone. The Malays won’t be able to live their bright, happy-go-lucky patterns any more, will they? And the Tarakuta will be replaced by fast, shallow-draft diesel vessels to do the trading. There won’t be a place in this world any more for poor old Joseph—or for me.”

  “It may not end that way.”

  She went on: “It will come with pain, like every new thing born, but the pain will go and there will be a new life in its place.”

  “But not necessarily a better life, is that it?”

  “Who can say?” She turned suddenly to him. “How much time do we have before we move on?”

  “Half an hour."

  Her eyes were enormous in the tropic gloom. “Haven’t you thought how strange it all is, after all these years, when you were just a bloody name I hated, because you were held up as the embodiment of all the ideal virtues I should emulate, how we’ve m
et? And you hated me, too, because those two dear old men thought we should get together, somehow.”

  “I don’t hate or resent you now, Willi."

  “I know you don’t. I could tell when you changed. But you haven’t tried to kiss me or make love to me, either."

  “You belong to Malachy McLeod,” he said harshly.

  “Not yet.”

  “But you will. You’ll marry him.”

  “Maybe. But for now . . . we may never get away from here alive, isn’t that true?” she whispered.

  He hesitated, then nodded. “It’s possible.”

  “Doesn’t it trouble you, Samuel?”

  “Of course.” He was about to say that he had lived in close proximity with death and danger longer than he cared to think about. He was not accustomed to it. If you grew used to it, then you were no longer of much value in the business. “What troubles me more, Willi, is that you’re in danger here, too, and the job is mine, not yours.”

  “I don’t mind sharing the risk, since it’s important.”

  He nodded. She touched the palm of her hand to his face and looked deeply into his dark blue eyes. “How many times have I wondered what you looked like, Sam! How many times did I dream what manner of man you might be!”

  “I did the same about you,“ he admitted. “But that was when I was younger, by a good bit.”

  “Must we always lose our dreams when we grow up?”

  “It’s usually best, these days.”

  “But you’re not disappointed in me, are you?”

  “Not at all. You’re very beautiful and desirable, Willi. Perhaps too beautiful, too desirable.”

  She kissed him. Her long hair came undone with a shake of her head, and its honeyed fragrance brushed his face and served as a curtain to hide them from the swooping darkness in their jungle lair. If you believed in the immutability of man’s fate, he thought, then this was all predestined, written long ago in the shining stars over the Pacific. She was an idyll of his youth. But long ago he had put dreams aside, when he agreed to live apart from other men in his world of shadow war. He wondered if he had gone too far down that road to find his way back. He was aware of the promise and sliding warmth of her body. The sea thundered on the reef like his pulse beat. The sigh and movement of the night air was an electrical anguish, a reflection of the storm just over the horizon, absorbing them totally. . . .

  But he could not take Willi into his world; he had to let her go. She belonged to the sun, the sea, the cobalt sky of the Pacific. Nothing was inevitable. It was only a dream of two old gentlemen-pirates, who lived in a world that would never be seen again.

  “Willi . . .”

  She drew back. Her breath was a rueful whisper. “You don’t have to say it. It doesn’t work with you, does it? You’re wrong, there is something between us, but you don‘t feel it.”

  He sat up. His voice was fiat. “We can know nothing about ourselves now, at this moment and in this place.”

  A dull explosion in the channel made the darkening sky tremble.

  chapter sixteen

  SOMETHING sleek and dangerous moved out there in the gathering twilight.

  There came another dull crump, a flash of fire, a dim, ululating scream from far across the green-black water. Willi started to rise, and Durell. pushed her back. The fiat throb of powerful engines echoed back from the mangrove banks of the islets opposite them. The thing that slid out there, as voracious and predatory as a shark, was an armed, black speedboat of the World War II PT type. It showed no flag. Its victim, devoured by sudden bursting flames, was a belated fishing boat that had been heading back for the Malay kampong. The gay sail vanished in a puff of smoke and fire, and small figures could be seen diving into the dangerous waters. With a growling throb, the armed speedboat suddenly picked up speed and curved away, leaving a white wake and a burning prau behind it, as anonymous as a highwayman, as vicious as a pirate.

  “What was it?” Willi whispered. “Those poor men—”

  “Merdeka,” Durell said.

  “Freedom?”

  “As Sukarno sees it.”

  The last time he had been briefed on the situation in this troubled corner of the world, he had learned of the “volunteers” from the Indonesian army drifting across the border in North Borneo to establish small, vital pockets of guerilla activity in the jungles. In the Malacca Straits, by the last intelligence count, Indonesian speedboats had seized and fired two-score Malaysian fishing boats. Potent terror sailed the fishing areas with the innocent natives in these waters. Ashore, there were reports of highly trained and expert sabotage teams smuggling arms and explosives into Malaya and Singapore, and terrorist attacks had been noted all through the area, aimed at vital economic targets.

  Durell’s job was not to make political judgments. But twenty years ago, such blackmail between nations would not have been tolerated. Aggression, overt and hidden, was met by teams of negotiators to make legal what had been seized by force. In Washington, it was always a delicate balance as to whether a small war might be escalated into a larger conflict. The overall global problems required remote and puzzling decisions sometimes.

  He shook his head angrily. Some of the fishermen who had jumped from their burning boat were not going to make the shore. The village down the beach was alive with lights, dim shoutings, the barking of dogs, the screaming of a woman.

  He settled back with Willi to wait for darkness, a coldness in him that defied the stifling and oppressive heat of the tropical night.

  When the enormous, reddish moon lifted over the rim of the Celebes Sea, Durell picked up the machete and got to his feet. Willi was instantly beside him. Starlight glimmered on a beach as white as old bone. Paper lanterns shone in the kampong, which had settled down again. Indeed, a few gaudily painted, ornately bowed outriggers with off-balance square sails had moved out into the shallow channel, first searching for survivors of their ill-fated companion, then searching for octopus, apparently deciding the danger for the night was ended. They hunted by the light of oil torches that flared red and yellow in long, smoky ripples over the calm lagoon.

  Thunder shook the sky. This time it was genuine. Willi said quietly: “There were weather warnings from New Guinea this morning. Not a typhoon yet, but it could be bad. Can you feel it? It’s like electricity crawling over your skin."

  The air held a breathless quality. The stillness was unnatural. When he looked at the village again, he saw a car’s headlights bouncing along the beach road. The lights halted on a pier where the fishermen were setting out. The earthy smells of village and sea crawled through the darkness, an odor of ancient vegetation, human debris, mussels and mud and half-digested bits of odorous dead crabs beyond the tidal limit. There was a smell of charcoal fires and, oddly, the fragrance of tea.

  Durell turned to the silent girl. “Stay here, Willi. I’ll get some shoes and clothes, and a gun, if I can find one."

  “Ch’ing doesn’t allow any weapons in the kampongs,” she said. “I won’t hide here without you, either. I understand what happened earlier between us. Even without that raiding boat, you wouldn’t have taken me. Maybe I should be outraged; but I’m grateful. I thought I loved Malachy, and then I thought I was the girl for you, when you came along, the one who waited for you to come to her from over the sea, like in the old Polynesian legends. We don‘t know if it’s a dream or not; but you’re right to wait. But no matter about that. I’m staying with you, for now.”

  He nodded and they set off down the beach. The kampong was built of pandanus mat huts, the thatched roofs closely laid together to resist wind, water and beach rats. Papaya and frangipani trees flowered above the houses high on their stilts. There were two wooden Chinese merchant shops with tin roofs, and a teahouse serving as a focal point near the pier and the beach where the outrigger native boats unloaded. The survivors of the burned fisherman had long reached shore. A dog barked, a child cried. The car Durell had seen was parked openly on the beach. Sheet lightning flick
ered like lavender curtains on the dark horizon of the sea.

  When they were a hundred yards from the village, he signed Willi to remain where she was, and brooked no protest. Then he went quickly toward the parked car.

  It was only a rusted Chevrolet, and it was empty. His machete felt heavy in his grip. He hoped he would not have to use it. From the village came the sound of soft Malay laughter, except for the persistent weeping of one woman; the Malays were quick to laugh and quick to die, sometimes, he thought. He heard a few atonal notes of Chinese music from the teahouse, the squawk of a Malay rooster. Then the harsh blare of a propaganda broadcast from far-off Djakarta, vilifying Malaysia, the British, the Americans, the Dusuns who favored Malaysia, all lumped together as “imperialists,” shattered the dark night. The voice, speaking in Bahasa, demanded the “return” of Tarakuta to the “motherland” and drowned out all sounds except for a quick rap of footsteps on the plank pier returning to the car.

  The man who came hurrying from the dock was oddly familiar in outline against the glare of the octopus hunters’ torches. Durell drew a slow breath. Now and then, however risks and chances were calculated, computed and analyzed, Lady Luck came along to tip the applecart, one way or another, without rhyme or reason. Old Jonathan had taught him this long ago, and he had learned not to let it surprise him. And now it had happened again.

  The man who walked quickly back to the car was Tommy Lee, the double agent from the Pandakan consulate.

  The young Chinese loomed big and solid against the red flares of the octopus hunters. He walked with his hands clenched at his sides, his city shoes rapping hard on the planks as he neared the car in the shadows. From the radio in the kampong came another braying denunciation of Western imperialism and the announcement that fighters for “merdeka” had landed in the Tarakuta Group to take up the torch for “liberty.” Durell did not know how much truth was in the report and for the moment, did not care.