Assignment - Sulu Sea

by Edward S. Aarons

  “Douse the lights," Durell ordered. He looked at Willi. “Can you take us across the island from here?”

  “I don’t know. It’s eleven miles or more. I’ve never done it, you understand; I can only try to remember Grandpa Joseph's stories—”

  “Let’s start then," Durell said.

  There was a three-cell flashlight in the car. Durell pushed Tommy Lee ahead, up the slippery path to the lip of the river gorge. The ravine was deep and narrow, and the water looked like thin blue silk in the glimmering starlight. They walked for some moments atop the ridge, through sudden clouds of gnats and giant moths, and then they saw the bridge.

  It was just what Lee had described—a narrow footway of vine cables swaying over the deep gorge that blocked their way—a bridge of shaky slats and a rope handrail anchored to trees on both lips of the ravine. Durell shone the flashlight on the white water below and then probed across the bridge.

  It seemed as if the night exploded with light.

  A sharp command in Chinese cracked from the jungle beside them. A warning shot woke screaming echoes in the hot tension of the tropic forest. Tommy Lee made a small sound of fear in his throat. And then, on every hand, on both sides of the river and the footbridge, there stepped ragged-looking, armed coolies in wide hats of woven pandanus.

  “Why, these are Hakka people,” Willi whispered.

  A thickset Chinese in a stained khaki uniform, with British shorts, socks and low jungle boots, came toward them. He wore lieutenant’s pips on his shoulder straps, and he carried a Sten gun with familiarity in his square hands. The other Hakka were also armed with Stens. They looked tense and desperate.

  “Ch’ing’s men?” Durell asked Lee softly. He looked at the other’s panic-stricken face. “It this is a trap you set for us, you die first.”

  “No, I didn’t! I swear—!”

  Lee’s panic brought disaster. He cried out as the Hakka closed in from the dark jungle, then abruptly he turned and ran back toward the car. The man in command called out in a thin voice, but Lee kept running. There came a single burst from a Sten and the Chinese stumbled and flew headlong through the air. The automatic burped again in short, efficient bursts, and Lee’s body jerked and jumped with the impact of a dozen more slugs. He jackknifed and rolled over and was still.

  The guerilla leader walked toward Durell. His thin voice was as cold as a polar night.

  “Drop your machete, or you will go next.”

  chapter eighteen

  ARGUMENT burst out in emotional Cantonese as the Hakka gathered about their commander. Durell eyed them with care in the lantern light. These were not the armed men who had first driven Willi and himself off the beach; they were more like the peasant hermit Willi knew as Fong, whose hut had been burned out. He felt a quick stir of hope.

  “Lee is dead, Willi,” he said quietly. “Don’t look hack at him. Can you speak Cantonese?”

  “Are you sure Lee is dead?” she asked tightly.

  “He was a fool to sell our security at Pandakan in the first place, and then he was stupid to fall into Ch’ing’s hands. He had no place to go. It was too late for him. He knew it and I knew it. So forget about Tommy Lee.”

  She shivered and looked back at Lee’s twisted body anyway. He could not tell her that the Chinese had really been a dead man from the moment he first betrayed to Ch’ing the route of the Jackson in these waters. Treason was punished quickly and unofficially these days. Lee must have welcomed the bullets that cut him down; but Willi couldn‘t understand this. Her world of sunny, tropic seas still clung to the old normal values of morality—values that often had to be jettisoned in his work.

  Before she could reply, one of the guerillas came forward, shouting in enraged Cantonese, and smashed at Durell with the butt of his Sten gun. Durell ducked the blow, but some of its force caught his shoulder. The Hakka screamed again and pointed the gun at him, and Willi cried out. Then someone ran across the swaying footbridge, shouting an order. It was Fong.

  “Fong, tell them we’re friends!” Durell snapped.

  There were angry recriminations, and the coolie with the British Sten gun retreated, wiping his nose. Most of these men were armed with Stens. Fong, the hermit-farmer, spoke to the Chinese in the faded British uniform and pointed to Durell and the girl, then back to the bridge. The big peasant was a changed man from the cringing farmer who had watched his house wantonly burned only hours ago. His deference was gone. He was armed with a sharp kris, a Walther‘s P-38, and a Sten; he looked hard, tough and assured. He snapped an order and one of the Hakka tossed an automatic to Durell, who caught it, nodded thanks, and hooked the strap over his shoulder. Now and then he heard, among the high Cantonese inflections, the name of Dr. McLeod.

  “Is Fong saying that Malachy is here with these men?” he asked Willi.

  The girl nodded. “Malachy is across the river. Fong says he came ashore to look for me and met these men. It‘s all right. Fong has helped me when I hunted in the lagoon for some specimens. I gave him gifts now and then, but he—he looks so bloodthirsty right at the moment—”

  “He should be,” Durell said dryly. “I think we’ve walked into a budding rebellion against Ch’ing, on this island.”

  Fong snapped an order and they were hurried across the dark, swaying bridge. The men seemed under sharp pressure.

  Fong spoke to Willi and she shook her head and pointed hack to Tommy Lee’s riddled body. Fong shrugged and spoke in Malay to one of the men, who brought sneakers for Durell and the girl to replace their flimsy sandals. Then they heard Malachy’s cry.

  “Willi, me own darlin’ girl!”

  Malachy loomed huge and keg-chested out of the stilling night across the river. He hugged Willi and lifted her off her feet in his enthusiasm, ignoring the grinning Hakka men. Then he set her down abruptly and glared at Durell.

  “Are ye both all right?" At Durell’s nod, Malachy added: “I came ashore in the dinghy off Tandjoeng Petak, and scarce got across the beach, it’s so thick with Ch’ing’s hoodlums. Found your trail at Fong‘s burned-out farm—saw the smoke and headed for it, figuring it might have to do with you, Samuel—and ran into Fong. He’d jumped off the jeep and got away from those takin’ him to Ch’ing. I must admit I’ve been cultivating this lad as carefully as he tends his rice paddy. Some of our home politicians might be timid of such interference in domestic politics, such as encouraging Fong’s insurrection, but I see it as potentially good for our side, and I say he damned to the scarebellies back home.”

  Durell cut off the wild-bearded man’s flow of words. “How many men do we have? I see about eighty, at a guess.”

  “Close enough. It‘s a sort of local Minute Man outfit aimed to keep off raiding guerillas and alleged ‘freedom fighters’ from down Indonesia way. Fong thinks his islands ought to run their own affairs. I don’t blame him.” Malachy’s grin faded as he studied Willi. “You’re awful quiet, me girl.” He looked suspiciously at Durell. “Anything happen between you two?”

  “Willi is a little shaken because we saw Tommy Lee shot and I did nothing to stop it. I think she’d rather be like you, Malachy, and help the sick and wounded.”

  “You didn’t even go back to see if he was still alive, Samuel,” she whispered. “It seemed so—so—”

  “Here, here,” Malachy said. He seemed suddenly very cheerful. “Don’t you two start quarrelin’ now. We’ve got enough quarrelin’ to do tonight with Ch’ing and his bully boys.”

  Durell called in Fong and discussed the situation with Malachy. It was ten o’clock in the evening, and the night waited for them. The dark heat seemed more oppressive than the baleful violence of the day. Some of Fong’s men cut the rope bridge, at Durell's order, to hinder possible pursuit across the gorge by the enemy. Durell suggested then that Willi could guide them across the island through the rain forest.

  “True, the beaches are like armed camps tonight," Malachy admitted. “But have you ever been in a rain forest? And at night? Most of
these men have lived on Bangka all their lives and never set foot in it. Malachy looked at the girl. “Do you think you can lead us through, honey?”

  “Grandpa described the trails he used often enough.”

  Aye, but it’s night, and twenty years later!”

  Durell said. I think we must do it, Malachy.”

  McLeod shrugged. “So be it, then. But ’twill give us nightmares for years to come, I’m thinking.”

  There was dismay on some of the Hakka faces when the plan for the march was described to them. Fong did the talking, now and then jabbing a thumb at Willi’s tall figure. The men shifted their feet and muttered uneasily. But eventually they agreed, their broad faces displaying obvious reluctance.

  No time was wasted in starting off.

  Willi walked between Durell and Malachy. An odd tension existed between them. Two flankers went ahead on the trail that led upland from the coastal plain to the mountain spine. They passed one deserted paddy, a tin-roofed shack, and an abandoned coconut plantation. Every step brought a fresh outpouring of sweat from their bodies as they began to climb. In twenty minutes, the trail ended and they reached the base of a dark, basaltic cliff. Erosion had crumbled the bleak rock and left an easy path by which they could reach the top.

  The rain forest, caused by the perpetual trade-wind cloud, began here. It was like stepping onto another planet.

  Beyond the cliff was a spongy swamp a morass of decay and sour, waterlogged muck that exuded an odor that clung to their skin, hair and nostrils. Willi did not flinch. Malachy’s torch pointed the way ahead, and there was a murmur from the Hakka behind them. Then they marched on.

  Mangroves grew here, in brackish water, the trees anchored by thick, knobby roots that pretended to offer solid footing, only to prove slippery with a slime that twisted the ankle and curved off into the wet muck so that the men began to fall and splash into the evil-smelling earth. At the same time, the air developed an oppressive heaviness that filled the lungs with sour moisture and the spirit with a sense of unnatural danger.

  Willi did not hesitate. She led the way forward, her tall figure now and then illuminated in the flashes of light from the men floundering behind. She did not speak or explain how far the swamp extended, and Durell began to think that the mangroves, surprisingly situated so far inland, would go on forever. Within five minutes every man was covered with the slick slime, from having fallen at least once from what seemed a purchase.

  Not even a sudden raucous shriek from directly overhead made Willi pause, although Durell’s sweat turned chill with the strangling sound. The column halted. A dozen flashlights searched the foliage. The night sky could not be seen, since they were under the perpetual cloud cover near the island’s peak, But in its place, a million opalescent, dusted wings winked and glittered and darted and fluttered in disturbance at the light. Round, primitive eyes stared from small furry creatures that seemed transfixed by the presence of men in this place.

  The outlandish shriek was repeated.

  This time Durell’s flashlight found its source. It was a rust-red bird of paradise, disturbed in its roost by their passage, as gaudy and as coarse as one of Ch’ing’s pleasure-women. There was a collective sigh of relief and the party moved on.

  The trip would take most of the night. There was no help for it, Willi said, since only roundabout trails could be used to cross the rain jungle. There were swamps where snakes and crocodiles made it too dangerous to attempt a passage.

  No one argued with her.

  After a time, when they left the swamp and came to an area with firmer footing but denser foliage, it began to rain. It was like no rainstorm Durell had ever experienced. It did not rain in separate drops, but in solid sheets of tepid water that gushed, poured, pounded, pelted and tumbled from the high trees. All in an instant, they were soaked to the skin, but there was no relief in it. Their sweat mixed with the rain and provided a slickness that seemed beyond endurance for another minute. But they marched on, each man following in the footsteps of the man ahead, unknowing and no longer caring where they went, as long as the noise and incredible weight of falling water struck them. They were stunned by the downfall.

  The rain ended as suddenly as it began, except that vagrant Winds, unfelt at ground level, shook the huge leaves above, and they kept walking through slow, slimy drippings for the next hour. It was Durell who called a rest halt when he saw the Hakka men begin to stagger and fall.

  He sat beside Willi, his back against the hole of a broad, spongy tree. Bamboo thickets soared high out of range of their strongest flashlights, and a hundred thousand orchids glowed in the light of their lanterns. They had climbed, he estimated, almost to the top of the island, and now, directly ahead, there was a solid Wall of vegetation that would take hours of hacking with knives and machetes to get through.

  “Are you all right, Willi?” he asked quietly.

  Her eyes searched the small gathering of men around them. “Where is Malachy?”

  “He‘s tending to one of the men who fell and cut himself. Answer me, Willi. You look strange.”

  “I’m as right as Malachy, and as wrong as you are."

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  She hugged her knees and looked away. Her cheek was scratched by a thorn, and there was mud on her chin. It made her seem more desirable. She said: “You’ve worked with death so long, Sam, it doesn’t touch you anymore. Or doesn’t seem to. If Lee was a traitor, he was unable to help himself, I think. Lots of us are like that. He didn’t know which way to turn, and he chose the wrong way. Can‘t you feel sorry for him?"

  Durell said harshly: “He wanted to die, Willi. He knew there was nothing left for him.”

  “Couldn’t you have helped him?”

  “I’d have testified against him on charges of treason. If he were lucky, he’d have spent the rest of his life in Leavenworth for betraying our codes to Ch’ing and the Reds. Lee became an enemy when he sided with Peiping and the Red ideology of building Communism on the atomic ashes of millions of innocent people. How does that weigh against mercy for Tommy? You think Lee’s crime was small in itself, justified by his need to protect his parents back in China. But if Ch‘ing wins here, Tommy gave away sixteen A-3 missiles, each with a one-megaton warhead, each able to turn a large city to useless cinders. Is that a small crime, Willi?"

  She shook her head. “I can’t weigh things the way you do, or see it through your eyes.”

  “I’m glad you can’t, Willi.”

  She looked at him for a long, sober moment. “I’m so sorry I could die, Sam, because for a little time I had a dream about us . . . and now I know it wouldn’t work.”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” he said.

  “Malachy helps people, easing their hurts and pains. And that’s the way I want it. I don’t want to think about atomic clouds poisoning the earth. I want to sail the Tarakuta and do a little trading and watch the wind clouds and—be with Malachy.”

  He said: “Then you should tell him this.”

  They gained a mile in the next hour, hacking through the jungle. The heat grew thicker, and the Chinese muttered and Wanted to turn back. Fong urged them on, his gestures desperate. They came upon a giant tangle of vines and parasitic growths, great mushroom blooms that reflected a look of evil whenever the lanterns touched them. Other parasites were huge, spongy masses ten feet across, hanging in gray sacs on trees they shared in a symbiotic life. There were vines covered with what seemed like a fine down, but when a Hakka pulled one aside, the down turned out to be fine, sawtoothed needles that ripped his flesh through to the bone. There were seed pods that, shaken loose, stung and tormented the skin wherever they landed, and fruitlike things that changed color when the flashlights touched them and moved and swayed, grasping at the uncountable insects that hummed and sang every moment of the way. There were great gray leeches the size of a man’s fist that softly, silently attached themselves to a passing man's arm or leg, so gently that the victim was unaware of his
passenger until the next man noticed it and had to make the thing withdraw from the flesh by burning it with the tip of a cigarette. But there was no halt for another hour, until Durell estimated it was midnight. They had gained less than four miles across the width of the island.

  There was a constant pelting of ‘not raindrops from the stifling canopy of leaves above. Once one of the Hakka began to scream, on the high ululating note of hysteria. Fong was instantly upon the man, smashing at him with his gun to knock him insensible. He signaled the two nearest guerillas to carry the unconscious man thereafter.

  Willi kept steadily in the lead. Now and then she paused to search the darkness as if she could see through the impenetrable foliage for a landmark. It seemed to Durell that no one could tell if they were traveling in circles or not. It was like stumbling blindfolded through a black nightmare.

  They had come to a high, level plateau, but there was no chance to glimpse the sea and the port of Bangka which was their goal. Willi halted again. She moved uneasily a few paces to the right and left, and came back to Durell, biting her lip.

  “Things have changed from the way Grandpa described it,” she said. “There was a big blow-down here, and when the Japanese chased Grandpa this far into the rain forest one time, he saved himself by burrowing into it like a rabbit diving into a briar patch. In twenty years, perhaps it all rotted away, but if not—well, then we’ve gone wrong somewhere.”

  Fong said mildly: “We are lost, Miss Wilhelmina?” In the Soft lantern glow, Willi’s face was pale. She had tied up her long hair, but thick strands had been plucked loose by vines and thorns. She said: “If it were daylight, we might be able to take our bearings, but it’s as dark as a pocket, right now. I doubt if one could ever see the sun in this forsaken place, anyway."

  “What came after the blow-down?” Durell asked.

  "Oh, there were some cliffs and caves where pygmy aborigines lived, but the Japanese killed them all. Then some rock ledges under mud. And another swamp. But I think there is a stream there, and we can follow it all the way down to the coast. The trouble is to get across the spine and find the ledges.”