“I think we're on them now,” Durell said. He stamped his foot on the earth. “We’ve been walking on spongy stuff all the way, and this is the first time the ground feels solid.”
Willi was startled. “But the blow-down—”
“I think we just hacked our way through it.”
It turned out that Durell was right. The undergrowth thinned quickly with the next few steps, and the machetes were no longer necessary. A sense of freedom, of escape from the hot oppression of the jungle, enlivened everyone’s step for the next twenty minutes.
But the swamp began again.
The going was downhill, indicating that they had truly crossed Bangka’s height. But it was here that they lost three of their men. One was bitten by a snake that dropped from a vine overhead, and despite Malachy’s frantic efforts with a crude scalpel, fashioned from a jungle knife, the Chinese went rigid and died in less than five minutes. The others would not abandon the body, and there was a parley until it was arranged that the dead man would be carried with them. The two other lost Hakka men were not missed in the silent, dripping swamp until it was too late to recover them. The group halted and called and called. Fong sweated, his face anxious, worrying about the families of the men, swearing at their stupidity at the same time that he yielded to his concern for them. His voice Went crashing through the swamp, only to fall, muffled, against the oppressive drip of sap and resin and gummy water that fell from above. It was like throwing a ball into a blanket. The only answer was a single, sharp shriek of a disturbed parakeet.
In the darkness, the danger of others straying and becoming lost became the greatest hazard. Even in daylight, within the thick, enveloping heat and oppressive growth, it would have been difficult to maintain contact. Each man was told to hang on to the man ahead. Bodily contact was the only way to avoid further disaster. And even this did not prevent one more man from mysteriously vanishing before they found the stream Willi was looking for.
It was more like a mucky, stagnant pond, a thing that smelled so foul and evil that they all recoiled from it. But Willi insisted it had to be followed or they would never find their way free again.
“Grandpa Joseph called this the ‘Path of Stepping-Stones,’ ” she said. “You must follow the right-hand bank of the stream, going down. Otherwise, the mud will swallow us all; it’s twenty and thirty feet deep, he said. But on this side there are submerged rocks that we have to probe for, one for every step of the way. No one must slip or fall. It would be best if the men tied themselves together, and each one must put his feet exactly in the place where the man before him stepped. Please make it clear to everyone, Fong.”
The Chinese looked uncertain, then bobbed his round head, and spoke to the men gathered behind them. Again there were murmurs, but Malachy spoke in quick Cantonese to back up Fong’s authority, and there were reluctant nods.
Fong cut a score of strong bamboo poles for probes, and Willi led the way, testing each step with awesome precision while Durell and Malachy held torches for her. Progress was agonizing. Because of their inability to move quickly, the insects found them a helpless quarry, and proceeded to feast by biting, stinging, chewing and gnawing upon any exposed skin. Now and then great, foul gaseous bubbles broke in slow motion upon the surface of the mud. It seemed impossible to find solid footing through the stinking ooze and debris that lined the bank of the stream. What creatures watched their progress was anyone’s guess, Durell thought. He did not want to think about it. All his attention was centered on the girl, fearful that she might slip and fail to find the stepping-stones under the mud.
Somehow, the time passed.
The land sloped gradually downward, and for a short time, the foliage turned oddly stunted and yellow in the light of their torches. It was with a sudden burst of relief that Durell realized they had come out from under the shadow of the perpetual rain-cloud that clung to the summit of Bangka, and he could see the ocean again and the stars overhead.
It was like waking from a nightmare. The men recovered as if wakened from a deadly trance, slowly at first, and then with quickening spirits as their feet found firm soil, as their eyes caught the brilliance of the Southern Cross and the vast panoply of stars overhead. It was like a reprieve from hell.
Far below was a cluster of lights, arranged along a rectangular pier where a rusty merchantman of about 7,000 tons was moored. From this height and distance, the ship and endless bucket-chain of tin ore looked like a child’s toy. The floodlights, however, like those of a prison compound, picked out everything with merciless clarity. Durell saw Hakka workmen moving down there like motes, and trucks came regularly from what appeared to be a thick, jungly growth to the left of the tin-roofed warehouses of the little port. The contents of the trucks could not be identified.
Fong‘s men straightened their shoulders, lit cigarettes, and chattered with new animation. A sharp whistle from Fong brought them back into military’ discipline. They rested, squatting on their haunches, and waited as Fong joined Durell and Malachy.
Directly below was a coconut plantation, the trees arranged in neat, orderly rows that would give quick access to the road beyond. A dog barked at them and then ran away.
Durell pointed to the distant pier. “Ch’ing has been alerted. You can see the guards there, and they look like more than he’d ordinarily have.”
“It is true,” Fong nodded. He smiled at Willi. “You swim through jungle like you swim in lagoon, Miss Wilhelmina. We thank you for our lives.”
“We’re not finished yet,” Durell said. “Ch’ing has more on his mind than us. He knows about the raiding boats in the channel tonight that sank one of the Malay fishermen. He can’t know for certain where they are now. So we’re up against a double alert and have to be doubly careful. I assume Ch’ing holes up in that old Portuguese fortress down there. It looks as tough as it was three hundred years ago.”
From what Durell could see of it, Prince Ch’ing had renewed the old fort built by the first European merchants to reach these fabled spice islands. It loomed on a promontory across the harbor, surrounded, as it must have been in the old days of the Sultanate, by the nipa huts of the Dusuns and Malays, kept at a clear distance, however, from the solid coral walls.
Durell hadn’t expected to see the whale-shaped hull of the Jackson in this hidden little port. But he had hoped for a glimpse of something to verify his decision to come here, to justify all they had endured.
He searched the harbor again. As the Hakka men shouldered their weapons and started downhill through the coconut plantation at a jog trot, he became aware of a blotting darkness in the sky, a swift devouring of the brilliant stars. It was as if a giant mouth had opened from over the horizon to swallow up the light of the heavens.
There was a brief moment of utter stillness, of heat and oppressive electric tension, before the wind struck again.
Before they had to duck before the onslaught, he finished his hard, slow inspection of the harbor.
There was no sign of a submarine down there.
chapter nineteen
THE STORM was a solid wall of black, howling fury, a screaming, lashing, explosive force that tore off the treetops and made the supple coco palms creak and bend like giant bows. Dust, sand, sea spume, leaves, vines, small squealing things, fluttering and helpless birds, bits of human debris from smashed huts, bits of coral and rain that felt like a cold whip—all the accumulated violence of the elements struck the little party with Durell with the solid force of a battering ram.
The men fell fiat and clung to roots and rocks and to each other for several terrifying seconds.
Then the blast passed over them and it was calm again, except for an ominously pelting rain.
“Get up!” Durell called. “Run for it, and get ready to drop for the next one!”
It was almost a mile downhill, most of it through open plantation, some of it through the muddy streets of the village. Although the sky was a black churning obscurity, there was a strange, wh
ite luminosity on the sea that Durell finally identified as a solid layer of flying spume and foam. He ran beside Willi and Malachy and shouted above the hiss of the rain.
“How much high water can we expect?”
“Plenty,” Willi gasped. “If the Tarakuta isn’t out of the Bangka Passage, she’ll be driven half a mile inland when the big waves come. But maybe it will miss this port. This kind of storm has a small cyclonic center that’s unpredictable. You can’t tell where it will hit.”
She pushed impatiently at her wet, heavy hair while Durell studied the confusion in the port below. Whatever the danger, the storm was a help. The loading operations at the freighter dock had stopped. Some of the light standards on the pier were twisted so that the floodlight beams shot futilely skyward instead of on the winches. Men ran about in the panic of a disturbed anthill. Durell spoke to the girl and Malachy.
“Take a hard look down there. Does anything look different to you, at all? You’ve seen this place once or twice before, haven’t you?”
A long file of the Hakka guerillas trotted by while the girl frowned and bit her lip. At last she said: “The port seems—smaller, somehow. Its shape seems changed.”
“How?” he asked sharply. “Can you make out any camouflage nets? That might explain the difference.”
The rain halted at this moment and gave them all a clear view of the harbor and its loading facilities, as far as the grim, ancient battlements of the Portuguese fortress.
Willi looked at Durell with round eyes. “That’s it, of course. Camouflage. There must be an acre of it over there, just below Ch’ing’s castle.”
Durell nodded to Malachy. “I think we’ll find what’s left of the Jackson and her crew under that netting. Let’s go.”
The storm helped again. Between the wild, irrational blasts of wind, they made rapid progress into the outskirts of the little town. The power went out in the station at the mouth of the river, and the big floodlights on the pier went black for some moments before an auxiliary diesel plant went into operation. The chugging beat of the generating engine filled the air in the silences between the wind. The floodlights were not as bright as before; their lenses flickered, and there were shadows along the tin-roofed sheds that had not been there before.
The freighter flew no flag, but she looked low and clumsy, an old Clyde-side merchantman half a century old. She was fitted with big holds, and the hatches were open to receive buckets of tin ore that streamed from the swinging booms. There was time, too, to glimpse the crates of cargo being trucked with desperate haste onto the pier. Then the wind struck again, and everyone in the raiding party clung to the earth and anything solid they could grasp.
Once more the air was filled with sound, and the hot wind was like a giant scoop that tried to pluck them from the ground. Out of the black night came whirling branches, mats, small animals, chickens. Willi lay between Durell and Malachy, and both men helped to pin her down from the reach of the storm. It was as if some giant, frustrated monster smashed and thrashed about, seeking them as victims. A few thin screams from the town reached Durell. The work on the pier halted when a long, high swell surged in past the little harbor mole and lifted the freighter a full eight feet up and then dropped her into the mud of the bottom. The wave battered its way on through the village, piling up a solid wall of smashed huts, shattered trees and lumber and broken furniture, with here and there a human body.
Then there was another respite, and a hot maw of dark silence swallowed everything. The quiet lasted only a few moments, and then the feeble shouts of the overseers on the splintered pier could be heard, urging the Hakka workers back to their labor.
The crates on the dock interested Durell. He guessed they contained some vital ingredients off the Andrew Jackson, but he had to leave them for the moment. The sub’s crew had to be released, and he decided the prison compound must be under the camouflage netting, too. It explained why none of the installations had ever been spotted from the air. He told Malachy his plan.
“But Ch’ing won‘t just let us walk in, Samuel.”
“Ch’ing has other troubles, at the moment.”
The next gust and tidal wave, with the thrashing clatter of debris flying through the night, covered their advance. None of the kampong people, seeing Fong and his armed men, gave an alarm. A graded road led around the littered harbor, away from the floodlighted pier. The loading operation was suspended again. Some of the freighter’s officers had run down onto the pier, and a. bull-horn bellowed orders in Chinese from the bridge. Normal seamanship demanded that the ship leave her berth at once to get sea room in which to ride out the storm. But the crew knew it was already too late for that, Durell supposed. The storm would reach its height before the ship could clear the island channels. They could only hope her hawsers would hold and that no sea high enough to break her up by pounding her on shore would come again. Certainly, they had lost any hope of running for it through the howling, tortuous blackness of reef and island out there.
The wind lifted steadily, in a distinct change from the first wild efforts of the storm. The pressure was no longer erratic but persistent, and they ‘had to lean hard against it as if into a resistant netting, in order to progress. They came to an overturned jeep and Durell ordered Fong to detach the .50-millimeter machine-gun from its bracket. Ahead, through the dark wind and rain, the old Portuguese fort loomed like an eagle’s nest above the lagoon. Beyond a wild froth of water was the loading dock and the freighter. Work had stopped completely there. Confusion ruled the workers and the ship’s crew.
As Fong‘s men hesitated, Durell shouted for them to keep going. There was a checkpoint ahead, and if his guess about the camouflage netting was correct, they should be under it and next to the prison compound in the next few moments.
He spoke to Malachy. “Tell Fong to use a grenade and the jeep’s machine-gun on that roadblock up there.”
There was a brief, sharp struggle. The dull crump of the grenade was a feeble sound against the howl of the wind. The air, filled with spume, tasted sharply of the salt sea. They ran forward at Fong’s signal and passed what had been, twenty years ago, an old Japanese pillbox and gun emplacement. And then the wind lifted and finished their work for them.
It came with a long, keening blast out of the southeast that stopped them all in their tracks. There was a terror in its violence beyond anything man could inspire. It was an outrage against the senses, a defiance of all that was natural. The air was filled with breaking sounds, followed by a long ripping noise that made Durell think the very fabric of reality was being torn apart. It stunned the mind and overpowered the body, stopped the heart and filled the lungs. All thought ceased. He clung to the mud, helping to pin Willi down beside him. Along with the wind came a solid wall of rain that smashed them down, and there was a sensation of earth, air and sea all churning to form a new and deadly element that blinded and deafened anything alive in its path.
But the wind was not entirely against them. There was a vast flapping overhead, as if some giant, prehistoric monster on leathery wings went crying above them.
“The netting!” Willi cried. "It’s torn free!"
It was true. The huge camouflage apparatus, anchored to trees and tall poles on floating buoys in the lagoon, had not been able to survive the raging elements. All in one instant, everything broke free and was blown inland to expose the white froth of water in the anchorage and the beach under the gloomy battlements of the old Portuguese fort . . . .
The Andrew Jackson was moored to a makeshift dock there. And on the beach, visible as if a curtain had been lifted on stage, were the huts of a prison compound behind barbed-wire fencing.
chapter twenty
AS IF satisfied at last with its work, the wind passed over them and roared inland with the diminishing sound of a hundred departing locomotives. Durell raised himself to his knees, then stood up in the village street and drew a deep breath.
For the moment, there was only the heavy, sodden pl
ash of the tropical rain.
He stared for a long time at the rounded whaleback hull of the submarine, at the Jackson’s slim, tall sail and the open hatches around her tower, evidence of work begun to dismantle her and get the A-3 warheads out of her belly. A steam crane had been blown over by the wind and lay across the boat’s forward deck in a twisted tangle of steel girder and cables. Some dead dockworkers, crushed by the wreckage, floated in the lagoon like dark curds on a milky froth churned up by the heavy rain.
A road circled the beach of the lagoon, and there was a heaped-up tangle of native outrigger fishing boats, brightly painted, tossed as if by a child’s hand high above the tidal mark. The village around them lay in stunned darkness. A dog yelped, a baby wailed, a woman began to lament in a thin, keening voice. Malachy stood up beside Durell.
“What now? It’s hard to believe my eyes. The Jackson is really here, Sam.”
“Yes. Will you get Pong for me, Mal?”
“We’ll have to strike fast. Ch’ing will know we're here—”
“Get Fong.”
Headlights made a slanting, yellow slice of reflected light through the teeming curtains of rain. The sound of a jeep churning along the muck and debris of the lagoon road sounded above the hiss and splatter and gurgling of the downpour. The lights swayed over broken houses, over a man and a woman standing in stupefied dismay in their wrecked shop. The spatter of rifle bullets hit them as the headlights found the little force.
“Down!” Durell shouted.
Fong, coming up as Malachy directed, pulled the pin of a grenade in his teeth and threw it. The dark blob arched over the road toward the oncoming glare of the auto headlights. A machine-gun stuttered, and there was more rifle firing. Then the grenade exploded and the jeep fell over on its side, one wheel spinning, another torn off and rolling into the milky surf of the lagoon. Men tumbled out of the vehicle, which began to burn. One of the men was on fire, drenched with gasoline, and his screams echoed until he threw himself into the water. Even then, the flames did not go out. Durell and the Hakka guerillas went forward and yanked and tore at the survivors of the jeep. Two of them were Ch’ing’s armed gangsters. One of them was a bald, slim young Chinese in civilian clothes, except for a third officer’s cap. The young Chinese looked stunned and kept putting on and taking off his muddied cap.
Assignment - Sulu Sea Page 17