Assignment - Sulu Sea

by Edward S. Aarons

  “Ch’ing!" he shouted.

  The rain wiped out his harsh voice. He called again.

  “Ch’ing, get them out of there!”

  The fat man turned his round face toward him. The wide flesh rippled, the mouth smiled insanely. He spoke to the technicians and they looked at Durell and went back to their work, dedicated to death. Durell wondered at their discipline. But was he different from them? Then he lifted the Sten gun.

  Shots clattered dimly through the rain. There was a noise to his left, and something hit him, and hit him again, and one leg was knocked out from under him. He tumbled down in a fiery anguish. Ch’ing loomed over him and he squeezed the Sten’s trigger and kept the hammering, yammering gun pointed at Ch’ing’s falling, enormous weight and then at the two men on the truck. . . .

  There were other shots. He heard American voices. Someone called his name. Durell rolled over and got one knee doubled under to crouch in the wet puddle of the courtyard. He fell over. He got up again. Ch’ing was dead, slumped against the heavy wheels of the truck. Rain washed the blood that stained his silken robe. The two technicians also sprawled in awkward death below the sleek implacability of their stolen missile. . . .

  Durell sighed. Men ran through the gate, and they wore blue U.S. Navy dungarees, and they came with the Hakka Chinese who had freed them from their prison compound.

  Durell tried to walk toward them, and instead, he fell forward into the dark rain, into deeper darkness.

  chapter twenty-one

  THE sun was a laughing mockery of the wild night. The wind was a gentle chuckling, and the sea whispered intimacies that seemed incredible after the wild savagery of the dark hours. He felt the free heave and lift and proud surge of the Tarakuta’s deck. He enjoyed it with an inner silence, motionless, rolling with the roll of the sea but without motion of himself. He was aware of the sun beyond his closed eyelids, grateful for the warmth on his face, of the hundred little normal sounds of the schooner in motion.

  “Sam? Cajun?”

  He opened his eyes and looked at her, and everything was the Way it had been before. He thought of several inanities and said: “It’s getting to be a habit.”

  “I don’t think there will be another time.”

  “Let’s hope not," he said.

  “Does anything hurt?”

  “Everything.”

  “It’s nothing serious. Some bruises—oh, a lot of them, and a flesh wound in the shoulder and a bullet through the calf muscle of your left leg. Some skin abraded off the left side of your jaw, too." She paused. “Did you know that your face looks very nice when you’re asleep, Sam?”

  “No.” He smiled. “Nobody ever told me."

  “Well, it looks different. Troubled, but nice. But now that you’re awake, you seem to be somebody else again.”

  “Listen,” he said. He sat up. “Where is Malachy?“

  Her hands went fiat against his chest. “He’s hobbling along. He got a bullet in the leg, too. He’s making out his report for the consulate. We’ll be in Pandakan in half an hour. There will be an ambulance to take you to the hospital there.”

  “I thought you said it wasn’t anything serious.”

  “Malachy thinks you should be checked over for a day.”

  “I won’t stay.”

  Her smile was mischievous, triumphant, like a lovely child’s. “I told him you wouldn’t, Sam.”

  “. . . Willi?”

  ‘It's all right.” She spoke too quickly. “I’ve thought about it all night. It’s all right now, Sam."

  “No, it isn’t.”

  But she put her hands on his face and knelt beside him and spoke quietly of the hours while he had been sleeping off an injection of morphine sulphate stuck in his arm by Dr. Malachy McLeod, and so he learned of what had happened. She wore white shorts and dirty, scuffed sneakers, and a man’s faded blue shirt. Her heavy, honeyed hair was braided like taffy from a candy-making machine; it lay across her left shoulder and down across the cotton breast of her shirt. Her eyes never left him. She sat, long-limbed and tanned, in the shade of an old awning of canvas, stretched above the schooner’s deck, and it was as if the wet horror of last night, of the rain jungle and the beaches and the fighting, had never been.

  Most of the Jackson’s crew, she told him, had been rescued, armed with weapons seized from Ch’ing’s guards, and they were back aboard the sub, putting things together again But the captain had been executed on the first day of captivity. No trace of Pete Holcomb’s body was found. Presumably when his hasty grave was discovered by Ch’ing, his remains had been thrown in o the lagoon for barracuda and shark to remove all traces.

  All three missiles taken from the sub had been recovered. When Willi mentioned these, her mouth shook and her eyes went wide. “You stopped them from exploding one of them, didn’t you?”

  Durell’s teeth began to ache. “Go on, Willi."

  “Well, some Seventh Fleet tugs are on the way, with a new crew or the sub. She can sail by tomorrow morning, they say.”

  “And what’s the reaction in Pandakan?”

  “The Seventh Fleet is coming in no matter what.”

  Durell rubbed a finger across his lower lip “It will stir up a lot of fleas on the body politic. But that ends my job here, Willi. I’ll be going home."

  Her eyes were big. “And where is home for you, Sam?”

  “Wherever I’m sent. A Geneva hotel, my apartment in Washington, a tent in the Sahara. I never know."

  “Must you really go on with it?”

  Someone had to, he thought. But he remembered his feeling as he stood in the rain near the monstrous A-3 missile and waited for its thunderclap. He remembered the sensation of those moments, when he had felt sucked under by a tide of suicidal despair and was tempted to let the Peiping imperialists do what, in their desperation, they felt they had to do. Men often suffer a death-wish, he told himself. It was not important. There is a fascination with heights, a morbid desire to throw yourself into an abyss, a toying torment of wishful yearning to find the other side, to make an end and, perhaps, a beginning. It was nothing to brood about, and he should forget those moments when he had felt sucked up into an incipient maelstrom of bursting atoms, when he had hesitated and stood, shaken with desire and yet a loathing, a love and a hate, an exhaustion and an exhilaration he had not known before.

  It was nothing, he told himself silently.

  But it was also everything.

  He looked at the waiting girl. “Willi, you belong to Malachy. If I hadn’t come along, you would marry him. Right now, you’re in love with a dream that was told to you when you were just a little girl. But the dream doesn’t exist, and you must not let it beguile you.”

  “You were not a dream yesterday," she said. “You’re not a dream now.”

  “I must go away,” he said.

  “Perhaps not.”

  The Tarakuta rounded the harbor mole and the distant beauties of Pandakan were unrolled as if painted on a silk screen, the city white and gold against the deep green of tea terraces and palm plantations on the hills. Astern, far across the shimmering lime of the sea, a distant line of fairy mountaintops floated, detached /and serene, above the invisible mainland shore of Borneo. He watched the brightly painted fishing boats move in the harbor and saw a dark scar in the mat roofings of Dendang, and Malachy saw him consider it and tugged at his wild red beard.

  “They had a fire there last night. Ch’ing‘s private little empire of lust was totally burned out.”

  “An accident?” Durell asked.

  Malachy shrugged. “Colonel Mayubashur is proud of his efficient fire department. They’re usually pretty good—but they weren’t very quick about it, last night.”

  “Is the colonel a friend?”

  “He’s not an enemy.” Malachy’s voice was studied and normal but part of him was absent, or guarded deeply behind the facade of his talk. He looked big and tough, his red beard afire in the pressing afternoon heat; his red hair bl
ew in the hot breeze. There might never have been a storm last night. He walked awkwardly, because of his wounds, and a pallor around his mouth bespoke several kinds of pain. Now and then he looked at Willi, behind the schooner’s wheel. There was nothing in Malachy’s eyes except the usual mixture of Gaelic wryness and bittersweet love as he said absently: “How did Ch’ing do it? About the Jackson, I mean.”

  Durell pulled his thoughts together. “He got the codes from Tommy Lee, of course. I’ll have to put that in my report to Washington when I file from your office in Pandakan. Ch’ing blackmailed Lee through his parents, and got the special cipher for the Jackson, the red code for emergency operations and alerts. And Ch’ing used it to lure the sub into the booby-trapped lagoon. The Chinese freighter, I suppose, was used as part of the lure, putting their radio on the code line that meant a world emergency. That was the night, you remember, the Pandakan radio was knocked out by a terrorist bomb. No bearings or confirmation could be made. The Jackson’s captain can’t be blamed. That code shouldn’t have been out of our hands for an instant.”

  Malachy nodded. “I suppose Washington will lop my head off,” he said gloomily. “We were all too complacent about it.”

  “You live with disaster so long,” Durell said quietly, “with threats from Big Daddy Bear in Moscow and the Chinese in Peiping, you don"! see it any more. You accept the Tommy Lees as part of a normal pattern and stop worrying. But it’s the Tommy Lees who can give us the biggest headaches. . . . What will you do if they can you, Malachy?"

  “I’ve got plenty of medical work to do here in the islands,” McLeod said. “If they’ll let me. Let’s get back to the Jackson, Cajun.”

  “Well, by the time the skipper knew treason was afoot, it was too late. The boat was boarded and taken over. When the crew was marched ashore and some of the boys tried to fight, Ch’ing picked every tenth man out of line, I understand, and lined them up for execution. That must be what Pete Holcomb babbled about when Willi first found him. Pete must have escaped in the dark when everybody was watching the executions, even though he’d been badly hurt, probably in the early fighting when the sub was first boarded. We’ll never know, I suppose. But we know he was dying of wounds and shock when Willi found him. If that hadn’t happened, the Jackson might well have simply vanished, taken apart piece by piece under that camouflage net, and nobody would be the wiser until Peiping copied enough A-3’s to announce it to the world. Too bad for us all, by then."

  Malachy was silent, watching the harbor vista swing open beyond the schooner’s bow. He did not look much like a respectable member of the medical profession. He wore hacked-off dungarees with a rope belt and a white singlet. His naked feet gripped the deck with a slight curling motion. He looked over the rail and said: “What will you do about Willi, Cajun? You can’t leave it at nothing. She‘s in love with you.”

  “No, she’s not. She’ll marry you, Malachy. Last night she made up her mind, and she chose yon.”

  Malachy’s eyes widened. “Listen, Cajun, I’ve loved that girl since she was ten years old, and if you’ve hurt her, as I think you might have, last night, and then if you don’t—”

  “Don’t be an ass. You give up too easily.”

  “‘It’s hard to keep fighting when you’re hurt,” Malachy said quietly.

  Miss Hanamutra was hack in the antiseptic, cool corridors of the Pandakan Hospital, wearing her nurse’s cap on her dark, rich hair. Except for a pinkness at the corners of her almond eyes, she seemed self-contained. Her smile for Durell was professional, as if their evening of terror shared in the alleys and canals of Dendang had never happened. She cranked up the bed, adjusted the sheet, closed the blind against the hot sun. She smelled of lavender and isopropyl alcohol.

  “There are policemen in the corridor, Mr. Durell,” she said quietly. “But they are only here to guard you.”

  “Do I look frightened?”

  Her smile was the flight of a bird. “Did you not expect to see me here? Where else would I go? The whole city knows Prince Ch’ing is dead, and all the Chinese talk rumors of piracy and an American atomic submarine damaged by some trick of the Peiping government. The air shakes with the thunder of jets, but they do not come from Indonesia or the Malaysian airstrips in Borneo. They come from your Seventh Fleet.”

  Durell nodded. “I’m sorry about Tommy. We might as well talk about him, Yoko. He was a traitor; he fell into debt and he betrayed his country. He caused the deaths of many men. He began it all. And he paid for it.”

  “Did he die--easily?”

  “No man dies easily.”

  “Oh, you are cruel,” she whispered.

  “I was not the one who killed him.”

  “I know. But you are so hard about it.”

  “When a man betrays his country, and proves weak in the face of temptation, and when that temptation involves perhaps the fate of many, many others, then I am hard about it, yes. I am sorry for you, Yoko. Did you love him very much?”

  “Very much, yes. We were lovers.”

  “I am sorry,” he said.

  She looked at him with dark, opaque, sloe eyes. “No, you are not sorry. It does not matter to you at all.”

  On the third day he moved across the padang, the green, into his former room at the Hotel des Indes. He walked with a slight limp. The heat was oppressive, the sky was a bowl of bronze rimmed with intense cobalt. The sidewalk sellers of rice and noodles and shrimp, of little ivory carvings and batik, were all busy again. The cafes were crowded. He had not heard a single grenade go off for the past forty-eight hours.

  Old Joseph Panapura was waiting for him beside a tray of bourbon and soda and a bucket of ice on a finely carved Tang table, placed between the tall windows overlooking the padang. The old man wore a seersucker suit and black shoes and a black string tie over a silk shirt; on his knee was a salty visored marine cap; his gaunt height and cloud of silvery hair made him look very fragile. But his brown eyes were alert and quite wary.

  “Samuel, will you soon be leaving Pandakan?”

  “Tomorrow, I think. A MATS plane has been given permission by the provisional government to pick me up at the airport.” He smiled at the old man. “I shall give your respects to my grandfather, sir, when I see him again.”

  “That would please me. Tell him I am well, and that you are all he said you were in his letters. I am well pleased with you, Samuel, except for one disappointing matter.” The old man poured his bourbon neat. His hand was not very steady. “I am worried about Willi, of course. Have you seen her?”

  "Not since I came ashore.”

  “Will you see her?”

  “I don’t think it would be wise.”

  "Samuel, I think you must. All women cherish an ideal, a vision of a Galahad on a white horse, and I aided and abetted such a dream for Wilhelmina, in you. But your life is not for her."

  “I agree.”

  “Do you love her, Samuel?"

  He did not know how to reply. He felt many things, a conflict of tides that pulled him this way and that. It was warm in the room. He heard a fair imitation of an American band down in the lobby of the Hotel des Indes, a form of twist played by a smiling Malay orchestra, a combo wearing tight pants and loose shirts and playing island instruments. He remembered an island saying he had once read. “The Chinese travels for business and gain, the Japanese marches as a conqueror, and the Malay runs to a cockfight—but always the Malay wins the Chinese gold and takes the Japanese sword.”

  Durell said: “I must leave Tarakuta, sir. And Willi will stay here.”

  The old man watched him for a long, grave moment. If he sighed, it was the merest breath of disappointment. “You know what is best for you, Samuel.”

  Colonel Mayubashur was at the Sultan’s palace. His rather plump figure looked natty in a uniform emblazoned with ribbons that read like a directory of American and British military decorations. Durell had no doubt they were all deserved and given with grateful thanks. The colonel looked amused, and h
e showed more self-confidence here in his palace quarters, when Durell answered his summons, than he had shown at the Hotel des Indes only four days ago.

  “I am happy for your recovery, Mr. Durell. And you will be happy to hear the political news—from the horse’s mouth, as I believe you say.” Mayubashur laughed lightly. “By the right of a Preservation of Public Security Ordinance, passed by the provisional government of the former Sultanate of Tarakuta, we have been able to define and detain subversives, Communists, racial agitators and the like——and expel as undesirable any and all Western imperialist agents.” The smile came and went, quickly. “The plebiscite has been postponed indefinitely, by my order under the Public Security Ordinance. The U.N. commission agreed to this, in view of the extraordinary circumstances. No date has been set for a new vote. I shall remain in office here at the palace for some time. It is a burden I accept in the interests of the people.”

  There was wry irony in Mayubashur’s voice. Durell met his smile with one of his own. It was not his business, he thought, if a new dictatorship had just blossomed here on the islands off Borneo. It would not last long. The colonel was too intelligent to expect that. One or another of the new imperialist powers of Southeast Asia was sure to swallow up Tarakuta in the next few months. Mayubashur might be a very brave man, or a fool. Either way, whichever expansionist nation seized the islands, the colonel stood a good chance of being shot against the nearest wall.

  “I am ready to go whenever you say, Colonel," Durell murmured. “I hope the expulsion, however, is not a public one.”

  "No, you have rendered Pandakan a service. Incidentally, the U.S. Polaris submarine 727, the Andrew Jackson, has been refitted most speedily. Your Navy’s tugs have taken her from our territorial Waters, and there should be no further problems. A number of crew replacements are being flown from Hawaii’s CINCPAC headquarters. And peace is restored on Bangka Island. The Red Crescent is at work helping the victims of the typhoon.”

  “When do you want me to leave?"