Colonel Mayubashur stood up. “Now. I will escort you to the airport personally, Mr. Durell.”
She was waiting there. He had not sent for her, and he knew he might be wrong in avoiding a last meeting with her, and yet he had known, too, he would have a last word with her before he left. The MATS plane was Waiting on the airfield, but the colonel and his smart military escort were patient.
In the heat and noise of the airport shed, she looked immaculate and cool, totally different from the way he had grown to know her. Instead of shorts, sneakers and a man’s faded shirt, she wore a smart white frock and a wide-brimmed hat of leghorn straw with a blue ribbon around it that matched the blue of her eyes. The white linen dress set off the tan of her face and long, graceful throat. Her bared shoulders were golden with the gold of old Polynesia and the long, Pacific sunlight. Her hair was done in a tight braid, thick, translucent, heavy and glorious. Her walk as she came toward him was the total evocation of her womanhood, her hips moving with that indefinable essence of femininity. He knew the effect was designed for him. He knew she was saying, Sam, darling, all I am is yours, if only you ask for me.
She left the bearded, unhappy figure of Malachy McLeod on a bar stool across the echoing, crowded airport shed. Beyond the Chinese merchants, the Malay craftsmen, the occasional idling Dusun or Dyak from Borneo’s mainland, and all those who ate or bargained in the airport shops, he could see only her, and the image she made of everything that belonged in a place, a time forever behind him.
She was smiling. “Are you really going, Samuel?”
“It seems I must. Colonel Mayubashur insists.”
“I’ve gotten permission to fly you back to Manila in my amphib, if you prefer.”
He was dismayed. “Is your plane here?”
"It wouldn’t take five minutes to be airborne, just the two of us. I’m ready to travel, Sam.” Something flickered in her eyes, and she stopped smiling and her voice became almost inaudible. “I know I‘m being cruel to Malachy; he told me to go to you. I’m totally shameless, Sam. Take me with you.”
He felt a check to his breathing. “I can’t, Willi."
“You could make it possible. It’s not too late.”
“It’s too late for me, and it’s my fault, Willi, not yours. I should have listened to my grandfather long ago, and come here to find you years ago. It wasn't too late, then.”
“Sam, I don’t know how I feel about Malachy.”
“You’ll be certain, after I'm gone for a time.”
“How can I ever forget you?”
“I’d be happy if you didn’t,” he said. “I won’t ever forget you, either, Willi.”
She looked up at him with her blue eyes clouded in her golden face. “Something happened to you in those last minutes on Bangka, didn’t it?”
“No, it happened to me long before then," he said.
He would have to settle the matter of his moment of frozen hypnosis as he looked at the A-3 missile, of his wish to let the Chinese technicians throw the last switch. He remembered how he had felt sucked into a darkness and ashen doom. Maybe the feeling was something like combat fatigue, and General Dickinson McFee, back in K Section’s Washington headquarters, would know all about it. But it made, for now, a thing that kept him forever from Willi Panapura’s innocence.
He took her arm and walked her back to Malachy, who looked stunned and then was blustery behind his wild red beard. They shook hands and said goodbye. Willi was silent, and then she slid her hand in the crook of Malachy‘s elbow. The Irishman reached across his chest and touched her fingers and let them curl lightly in his own for just a moment.
Durell said goodbye again and kissed Willi, a quiet kiss on her lips, and then he turned and walked out of the airport shed into the stunning heat and bright sunlight on the airfield.
Colonel Mayubashur fell in step with him and went with him as far as the big, silvery MATS plane that stood waiting on the strip to take him home.
Assignment - Sulu Sea Page 20