Bamboo Dragon td-108

by Warren Murphy

  There was a moment when Chiun believed that Remo would detect him, watching from the darkness, but the woman managed to divert him with her supple body. She was handsome for a white, of course, but there was something in the pallid skin and too-abundant curves that put Chiun off.

  Korean women were the best.

  Next morning, after dining on a handful of cold rice, Chiun had checked on the guerrillas, found them breaking camp, before he hurried back to join the Stockwell expedition. If the enemy had plans to strike, he knew they would most likely wait for darkness, but it wouldn't hurt for him to scout the trail ahead. He would take care to leave the forest undisturbed and give the scientific party's Malay guide no reason to suspect another human being in the neighborhood.

  When the attack came, if it came, Chiun would not be far away.

  The stinking jungle had begun to wear on Lai Man Yau. Two days he had been waiting with his soldiers for the Yankee expedition to arrive, and now he had to track them at a snail's pace while they trekked into the Tasek Bera no-man's-land. It would have pleased him to attack the party and destroy them all—except, perhaps, the woman, who could entertain his men for several days before she died. Still, this was war, and Lai Man Yau was under orders. He would have to wait a bit, until the round-eyes found what they were looking for.

  Beijing had been explicit on that point. A premature attack would ruin everything, and it would be considered treachery, deserving of a traitor's fate.

  He could live on fish and rice, dried beef and fruit, for weeks if necessary. Long before that time, his enemies would either make their find or give up in disgust, and he would get approval for their execution either way.

  It would be better, though, if they could simply find what they were looking for, deliver it to Lai Man Yau before they died.

  Yes, that was how it ought to be.

  Lai Yau was one of some six million ethnic Chinese living in Malaysia. He could trace his roots back thirteen generations, but he never saw himself as Malay. He would always be Chinese, and as a faithful son of China, he took orders from Beijing.

  Six years ago, those orders had commanded him to organize a small guerrilla cadre, granting native Malays equal partnership, and to inaugurate a people's war of liberation that would ultimately doom the nation's constitutional monarchy, paving the way for a socialist regime patterned on the Chinese model. Everywhere throughout Malaysia, there were cadres much like his, intent on toppling the corrupt, outdated government in favor of a Beijing-type replacement. Communism might be dead in Russia and the mongrel states of Eastern Europe, but it was alive and well in Asia, with a program that demanded suitable respect.

  The job at hand, as with so many missions ordered from Beijing, was long on orders, short on explanations. Lai Man Yau had been instructed to await the Yankee expedition, follow it and safeguard certain information that a spy within the party would provide when it was time. The information would be furnished to Beijing, the round-eyes executed. No provision had been made to spare the mercenary agent, once his work was done. Expecting Chinese gold, he would be paid in lead.

  The ruthless plan appealed to Lai Man Yau. He only wished that it were possible to get the waiting over with, put it behind him and get on with killing round-eyes. That was still, would always be, his favorite sport.

  It would have been so easy to surround their camp last night, move in with AK-47s blazing, rip the pup tents and their occupants to shreds before the round-eyes woke to recognize their fate. Or he could just as easily have taken them alive, interrogated each of them in turn until he found out what they meant by tramping through the Tasek Bera with their pitiful safari.

  The Americans were crazy; everyone knew that. But they were also clever, crafty. Lai Man Yau dismissed the media reports of living dinosaurs as a pathetic, simpleminded cover for the expedition's true pursuit—whatever that might be. His masters didn't share their knowledge with a simple soldier in the field. It was enough for them that he showed up on time and did the job he was assigned to do, without complaints or questions. If he failed, there would be punishment in store. If he succeeded, then success would be its own reward.

  Sometimes, before he fell asleep at night, Lai Yau thought he could understand the Western profit motive, as corrupt as it might be. Material possessions were an opiate, much like religion, but he understood why they were so addictive. Money, houses, fancy cars and women would appeal to most men if they were not educated in the dialectic that explained how such things spoiled man's days on earth. Lai Yau knew all the arguments by heart, and even he wasn't immune to cravings of the flesh.

  Suppose he managed to obtain the information that Beijing desired so urgently, then went in business for himself. What then? His masters would be furious, of course, but how much could they really do to punish him? Assassins could be sent from China, but they would be strangers in Pahang, while Lai Man Yau was perfectly at home. He could evade them or destroy them as he chose. With cash enough behind him, he could hold his enemies at bay forever if he so desired.

  Of course, defying Beijing would be treason to the people's revolution. Lai Man Yau had spent the past six years, one-quarter of his life, attempting to advance the cause of communism in Malaysia. What would he be if he reversed himself, belatedly rejected Chairman Mao and his disciples?

  Rich.

  His troops would never have to know. They followed orders to the letter, trusted Lai Man Yau as he himself had always trusted his superiors. His men were peasants—broken fanners, onetime beggars off the streets—who saw themselves as soldiers now, content to take direction from the man who had supplied them with a second chance in life. They wouldn't question his commands or fail him short of death. To them, Lai Yau was nothing short of God on earth. The masters in Beijing, by contrast, were a group of men too far away to merit real concern.

  At that, Lai Yau knew his superiors had solid reasons for the things they did. He might not understand why a particular Chinese or Malay was selected for assassination, why a certain public building should be bombed or burned, but reasons still existed. This time, when he got the information Beijing wanted, Lai Man Yau would have to find out what it meant and weigh the risk of going private, opening an auction for the highest bidders from around the world.

  He had connections in K.L. who could arrange the details, businessmen unscrupulous enough to take a chance where money was concerned. The trick would be establishing a price that made him rich, while covering his necessary partners, but without discouraging potential customers. For that, he had to know exactly what the product was, its open-market cost and the black-market value that would double, maybe triple the established asking price.

  His first step, obviously, was to get the information in his hands, eliminate the middleman and find a place to hide while Beijing went berserk. What happened to his men once they had done their job was of no concern to Lai Man Yau. If some of them fell prey to Chinese execution squads, so much the better. He might even find a way to stage his own death, throw pursuers off his track so that he wouldn't have to waste a moment of the good life glancing nervously over his shoulder.

  Foresight. Patience. Courage. Lai Man Yau had all these attributes and more. He hadn't failed thus far in anything he'd set out to accomplish for himself or for his masters in Beijing.

  And he wouldn't fail this time.

  He would be rich, no matter what it cost. And if he had to come back from the dead to spend his money, he would find a way to do that, too.

  By noon, the jungle atmosphere had thickened, grown more humid and oppressive than the day before. Was it a simple change of weather, Remo wondered, or some constant aspect of the territory they had entered, making it the worst uncharted wilderness Malaysia had to offer?

  He had seen more snakes and lizards in the past five hours than on any single day before, outside a zoo. Most of them went unnoticed by the other members of his party, dangling from the branches overhead or wriggling out of sight amid the undergrowth bes
ide the path. But there had been a brief, unscheduled interruption of their march an hour previously, when their guide came face-to-face with a reticulated python on the trail. Pike Chalmers had his rifle shouldered in a flash, but Dr. Stockwell and Kuching Kangar dissuaded him from firing at the snake. Instead, the little Malay cut a six-foot walking stick and prodded at the sleek, fat reptile, irritating it enough that it was driven to retreat and clear the way.

  "Now, that's a snake," said Audrey Moreland as the python slid from view, a gliding monster all of twenty feet in length.

  "With any luck," said Remo, "that's the biggest thing we'll see."

  "Bad luck, you mean," said Audrey, putting on an impish smile for Remo. "Don't you want to take a baby brontosaurus home?"

  "I'd never make it back through customs," Remo answered. "Anyway, no pets allowed in my apartment building."

  "That's a shame. No little pussycats?"

  "If I get lonely," Remo said, "I stop off at the petting zoo."

  "You don't know what you're missing," Audrey said.

  "You may be right."

  Their trek resumed from there, the python pit stop being counted as a rest break by Kuching Kangar. By Remo's estimate, the heat had gone up twenty-two degrees since they broke camp, and coupled with the increased humidity, any physical activity was a challenge, bathing them in sweat, while simply breathing called for conscious effort. Remo took the necessary steps to regulate his body temperature and respiration, let himself perspire without becoming drained of vital energy. In front of him, the others labored underneath their heavy loads like beasts of burden, pack mules hauling freight across a trackless wilderness.

  Remo barely felt his own pack. He moved with the weight instead of fighting it, one foot in front of the other as he kept up with the expedition's steady pace. They weren't breaking any land-speed records, but there seemed to be no desperate hurry, either. If their guide was equal to his billing in Dampar, he knew exactly how much farther they would have to travel in relation to supplies on hand and the anticipated personal endurance of his team. As for the dinosaur, thought Remo, it would either be there waiting for them or it wouldn't. Either way, the game that held his full attention was about uranium, not prehistoric reptiles.

  It would help, he realized, if he could find out something about the people who were trailing them. He had discounted the idea that they were being followed by a jungle predator; no animal he knew of would be interested enough in human beings to pursue them for a second day, when it had passed a chance to raid their sleeping camp last night. On top of that, it felt like people, sticking with the single-mindedness that indicated some specific purpose.

  Waiting to find out if we get lucky, Remo thought.

  In which regard? He tried to picture jealous dinosaur enthusiasts pursuing them for miles upriver, through the jungle, but it didn't play. A rival expedition would have gone out for the fanfare of publicity to scoop the competition.

  No, he reckoned as he felt the earth grow softer, spongy, underneath his feet, they would be looking for uranium. And that, in turn, left him with either one of two distinct and inescapable conclusions. On the one hand, it was possible that their pursuers simply had suspicions that Professor Stockwell's team was looking for uranium. The flip side, much more ominous from Remo's point of view, would mean they knew the team—or part of it, at any rate—was searching for the mother lode and using Stockwell's dino hunt for camouflage.

  And how could anyone be sure, unless he or she was associated with the ringer? Standing by as back up, perhaps, if something necessitated getting rid of pesky witnesses.

  Remo could have checked the stalkers out last night, but Audrey had distracted him. A nice distraction, he admitted to himself, but Remo knew that he would have to keep his mind on business in the future.

  Which was not to say that Audrey would be wholly out of luck. He might be forced to skip a few more steps in the Sinanju love technique, speed matters up a little and make time for prowling in the jungle after she was tucked in for the night.

  An ugly job, he thought, half smiling to himself, but someone has to do it.

  He would think of it as one more sacrifice for duty and Emperor Smith.

  He checked his watch against the sun, deciding they could march for several hours yet before they had to pitch camp for the night. There was no way of knowing if their guide had picked another campsite in advance, or whether he was playing it by ear. In any case, the trackers would be somewhere fairly close at hand.

  He knew their general direction—south and west of Stockwell's team right now—and had no doubt that he could find them in the dark. They might be smart enough to camp without a fire, but men still gave off a distinctive odor, still made conversation and a host of other noises that would serve as well as any beacon in the night.

  The only question left in Remo's mind was what to do with them once he made contact, whether he should kill them on the spot or let the waiting game continue for a while, find out exactly what they had in mind.

  With any luck, the faceless enemy might help identify the ringer on his own team. He would have to ask around before he killed them if it came to that.

  "Are you okay back there?" asked Audrey, sounding winded.

  "Hanging on," said Remo, hoping that he sounded tired.

  "Don't overtax yourself," she told him, winking on the sly. "You'll need your strength tonight."

  "My thoughts exactly," the Destroyer said.

  Chapter Eleven

  They pitched camp in another clearing, smaller than the first one, with the jungle pressing closer on all sides. The nearby stream was smaller, too, and somewhat farther from the camp than last night's stop. Their guide went out first thing, with his machete, and spent half an hour hacking out a narrow path between the clearing and their only source of water. By the time he finished, everyone but Audrey Moreland had their tents assembled. Remo helped her out again, despite his firm conviction that she could have managed this time on her own.

  "I don't know what I'd do without you," Audrey whispered.

  "Something tells me you'd survive," he said.

  "Oh, I imagine so," she told him, smiling. "But it wouldn't be much fun."

  Kuching Kangar went out to scout around before the sun went down, while the others settled in to rest a bit before they started on the evening meal. Pike Chalmers made a show of wiping down his big-game rifle with a chamois, maintaining a deliberate distance from the scientific members of the team.

  "We should be close now," Dr. Stockwell said, considering his map. "A few more miles will bring us to the western finger of the lake."

  "So, what about the Tasek Bera?" Audrey asked him.

  "Technically, we're in the region now," said Stockwell, "but the sightings all originate from farther east. We'll look around the lake for tracks and so forth, but I don't expect the great Nagaq to make himself so readily available for photo opportunities."

  "I shouldn't think so," Chalmers said with no real effort to conceal his mocking tone.

  Professor Stockwell turned to face him. "You're the expert hunter, Mr. Chalmers. How would you proceed from this point on?"

  "Depends on what I'm hunting," Chalmers said. "On normal hunts, you've got three options. If you're stalking a specific animal—a local man-eater, let's say—you may get lucky with a fresh spoor from the latest sighting, and go on from there to track the bugger down. Another way is bait, o' course. Fix up a blind or tree stand, stake your bait out in a clearing and be ready with your hardware when some hungry bastard comes along."

  "If all else fails, you watch the nearest water source around the clock. No matter what you're hunting for, it has to drink."

  "Which method would you recommend in this case?" Stockwell asked.

  The hunter thought about it, finally shrugged. "There's been no recent sighting that we know of, and we can't track anything without finding its spoor to start from."

  "What if we could find the former expedition's camp?" a
sked Stockwell.

  Chalmers frowned. "We'd have to be damned lucky. If we find the camp, and if there's any tracks remaining, they'd be old by now. As far as picking up a trail that old and making something of it… well, it's not impossible, you understand, but damned unlikely."

  "And the other methods you suggested?"

  "What I understand," said Chalmers, "you've got no clear fix on what this bloody creature is or might be, other than some kind of prehistoric honker. Am I right?"

  "Well—"

  "And you've no idea what sort of menu it prefers, except for ravings from a dead man and the disappearing-granddad story, eh?"

  "The evidence would seem to indicate a carnivore," said Stockwell stiffly. A tinge of angry color marked his cheeks.

  Chalmers snorted in controlled disdain. "You've got no bloody evidence. Native superstition and the last words of a crazy man don't tell me anything. If there's a monster waddling around this patch, I need to see it for myself."

  "And that's precisely why we're here," Stockwell reminded him. "We're paying you—and rather handsomely, I think—for your advice on how to make that sighting a reality."

  "All right, then, here it is. We can't use bait without knowing what our intended likes to snack on, see? In fact, if it's a bloody carnivore we're after, I'll remind you that the only bait I've seen the past two days is us."

  "In which case… ?"

  "We can either get damned lucky with a set of tracks," said Chalmers, "or we find a likely place to sit and wait."

  "Why can't we simply search the forest?" Stockwell asked.

  "You mean go out and beat the bushes?"

  "Well… in essence, yes."

  "You're not a hunter, are you, Doctor?"

  "Well, no, but in theory it should work… "

  "I thought not," Chalmers said with thinly veiled contempt.

  "Enlighten me, by all means, Mr. Chalmers."

  "Beating works all right for birds and other small game," Chalmers said. "You scare 'em up and shoot 'em as they fly or run away. It sometimes works with larger game, as well, if you can place your quarry in a given area and pick your stand, have the beaters run him toward the guns. All clear so far?"