Quiller's Run

by Adam Hall

  ‘I mean by night. A moon drop.’

  ‘By parachute?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He shifted his position, letting his long thin legs rest on the floor, his flying-boots angled. ‘Fuck, I just don’t know why you won’t listen.’

  It was dark inside the van, almost dark. Chen had hired it for the day and bought some gear for me, a backpack with things I might need: sleeping-bag, torches, flares, first-aid, insect-repellent, snake-bite kit, a machete.

  ‘Look,’ he’d said, ‘you’re going to have to walk up to the goddamned place even if I drop you from the air, so why not walk up to it by the track? He can’t see in the dark.’

  ‘He won’t expect anyone to approach from the other side. Nor will the dogs.’

  He’d settled for a thousand US dollars.

  We parked the van on the tarmac near his Windecker AC-7 and checked out at the crew station. He’d found me a pilot’s uniform and sunglasses, but I wasn’t worried about the environment; the van hadn’t picked anyone up, and the only people we went anywhere near were the airport officials. And I was here in my dead man’s shoes.

  ‘You been in deep jungle before, Jordan?’

  ‘In training.’

  ‘Training. How real?’

  ‘Real.’

  ‘Commando type?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He’d been putting questions like that all the way to the airport, a man with a sense of responsibility. ‘I don’t need a thousand lousy bucks that bad, and what I don’t like about this whole thing is I’m offering myself as a party to suicide before the fact.’

  Dropping through the dark.

  The lines hissed in the air-rush, and somewhere high in the canopy a tag of fabric fluttered, sometimes so fast that it produced a musical note, a low whining. The canopy was grey, because the moon was almost full; otherwise we couldn’t have done it. The sky was clear of cloud or haze, the colour of white eggshell, with the moon’s brightness blanking out most of the stars. He’d dropped me from three thousand feet and there was no wind; his computer had done a fairly accurate job: I could see the shape of the radio station almost directly below, and I still had a minimal drift from the aircraft’s one hundred knots at the dropping-point.

  The lines hissed.

  There’d been doubts and I’d expected them. I still didn’t know what resources Pepperidge could tap, what kind of information he could get at that distance. He could pick things up in the pubs and they’d be from the communications mast; but the raw intelligence going through it nonstop was massive before it hit the computers and was broken into streams for analysis. But he’d just got back from London, and that was probably where he’d been working on the Colonel Cho lead. The only thing I had to rely on was that he knew that whatever move I made would be dangerous, and he wouldn’t willingly expose me without good reason.

  Signal me at any time on any subject and I’ll get to work immediately. I really am on the ball you know.

  Or I wouldn’t be here now.

  The jungle was coming up. Moonlight, shadow, a spread of dense leaves like a dark sea rising.

  I’d told Chen that if Katie asked about me he wasn’t to tell her how difficult it would be to talk to Cho.

  The sound of his plane faded to silence, southwards in the direction of the village. ‘Cho won’t take any notice if he hears us at the drop altitude; planes run in to the strip most nights.’ He’d told me I was crazy not to bring a gun, and offered me his. ‘Or are you one of those nuts that get their kicks making things tough for themselves?’

  ‘The last thing I want to do is make a noise.”

  ‘Shit, even if it’s to save your life?’

  ‘The first shot would bring the dogs, Johnny.’

  He had certain blind spots. The night-glasses, for instance. He’d finally put a pair in the bag for me but I wouldn’t be using them, even though it was a strong temptation. They’d reflect.

  Dark sea rising, the light and shadow of the leaves taking on the semblance of waves running below me. All I could see was the rough shape of a building half-buried in the undergrowth, with a thin stem of a mast leaning at an angle. There was no flat ground, no clearing; the place looked like . a wrecked ship lying on the sea-bed, smothered in weeds.

  Stink of the insect-repellent on my face and hands. I wore no gloves; I wanted to feel things; the lines, the handle of the machete, a dog’s throat, perhaps; I didn’t know, it could go anyway, an easy fall among the leaves or an errant movement in the air and my legs smashed against the mast or a hot death with my own throat ripped by their teeth.

  I never have liked dogs.

  Though they weren’t the worst. ‘I guess you’ve got everything, Jordan.’ Stuffing the gear into the bag for me. ‘Couple of tilings I should tell you. If you sleep on the ground, check for ants; they’re this size. And in that region there are black mambas and they hunt by night; if you get unlucky, don’t bother with the snake-bite kit: their venom takes less than a minute to knock out the heart muscles.’ Zipped the bag shut. ‘Have fun.’

  Dark sea rising fast now with the mast leaning away from me, its shadow lying across the broad leaves, silver under the moon. I held the machete behind me, its bright blade hidden from the light. I couldn’t hear any dogs, but it didn’t mean they were sleeping. If they’d been well-trained they wouldn’t bark, even when they attacked; but they could be jungle happy by now, undisciplined, half-starved, voracious.

  Air spilled from the canopy on the left side and I tensioned a line and straightened the drop, watching the spread of leaves and their shadowed gaps. The radio station was half a mile away and the distance was closing but I was almost down and I drew my legs up and brought them together and became aware of the real speed of the drop as the jungle rose fast and the shadow of the canopy spread suddenly black on silver to my right and grew in size and swept in a dark wave as the leaves leapt to meet me and I was among them with the machete out of its sheath and its thong tight round my wrist and we were down and I shielded my face with the other arm and felt the tugging of the lines and the whiplash effect of stems straightening as I plunged between them and found nothing under my feet, nothing but the air and then the rush of undergrowth and then the ground, impact, my legs doubling as I leaned into a roll and dragged on the lines and started work with the machete at once because I might need the ability to move at any given second, move fast.

  Cut myself free and waited.

  Damp smell rising; my flying-boots had churned the fibres of the jungle floor; a smell of fungus. Silence overall, with small sounds coming into it and breaking off, fading. I stood still, waiting for the retinae to accommodate. Vines hung overhead, festooning the patch of sky, lacework against the moon’s light; something was moving not far away, making a rhythmic whispering, sometimes fading, coming back - then a sudden rush of sound as a bent stem freed itself and straightened like a whip, tearing leaves away.

  It wasn’t dark here; it was worse than darkness: the moonlight spilled through the gaps overhead and dappled the undergrowth, creating a mosaic of black and white with nothing defined except the edges of shadow. I knew where the building was, and that was all; if there were trip-wires I wouldn’t see them; if the dogs came I would only hear them.

  The rhythmic whispering had stopped, not far away. A snake wouldn’t attack unless I seemed threatening or was near its nest; if that sound had been a snake it would have come for me by now. But the thought of it persisted, its sinuous length, contracting, forming coils, the flat head held still as it heat-sensed me. A trickle of sweat gathered and ran; I breathed tidally, the better to listen. There were no distant sounds, only near ones, small and subtle, and once a creature voicing, a swift kill in progress, it sounded like, because of a cry cut off, and then scuffling.

  I waited another few minutes and then unbuckled the harness and lowered it to the ground, stepping away, tripping on a tendril and getting my balance again. There was no accurate measurement possible, but if the
jungle were this dense as far as the building it could take me the rest of the night to go half a mile, given the need for silence. It was now 01:09, and in four hours the moon would be down and there’d be total darkness here under the leaves, with only the glow from Sirius through the gaps overhead. I could stay here and sleep and acclimatise during the coming day, but there’d be heat, moist and enervating; and by daylight the dogs might roam, hunting, and if a wind rose in the wrong direction they’d pick up my scent at once. Or I could move now, and try to reach the building before first light, and deal with whatever I had to deal with in the dark. I thought that was the best way.

  It was just before three o’clock when I saw the top of the radio mast leaning across the gaps in the leaves, and I put the distance now at three or four hundred yards. The silence was still not absolute, though there was no sound from inside the building; all I could hear was the nocturnal life of the jungle around me. Some kind of big cat had voiced an hour ago, perhaps a tiger, a low wickering in the distance, two miles away, maybe three. I’d heard a dozen more kills, one close, the scream of fright piercing the night and bringing the sweat out on my sides; there’d come the smell of blood raw and intimate, then the swishing of leaves as the predator had carried the prey into the deeper reaches.

  And then towards dawn there was another sound, of a snout rooting, scenting, and in the mottled light I caught the shape of the dog as it froze for an instant and then came leaping for me with its ears flattened and its jaws bright.

  CHAPTER 19

  COLONEL CHO

  Bassai. The jungle was in here, creeping through cracks. Migi gedan barai and then hidari, the triple blocks, very fast.

  A rat ran along the far wall in perfect silence.

  I was kneeling.

  Migi shuto chudan uke, a whipping sword-hand.

  His breathing was steady, then explosive.

  The final sword-hand, hidari.

  Kiai.

  He bowed, and in bowing, saw me.

  Stillness.

  From my kneeling position I returned the rei, not only out of respect for his obvious rank but also to emulate the male wolf that arches its neck to the side, offering its death to the adversary in the hope of life.

  ‘Os.’

  When I looked up again he hadn’t moved.

  He was in the centre of the room, a big room, almost bare, its floor earthen, its walls fissured, with leaves and whole branches of the undergrowth thrusting inside; the jungle was slowly devouring the place, though I could see where he’d been hacking at it regularly, working his way round.

  He was above average height but not tall; his gi was worn, patched, but clean; his feet of course were bare. His one eye watched me. The other eye had been buried in the hideous cleft, made by a blade of some sort, that crossed his face diagonally, cruelly distorting it. His mouth had escaped the blow, but it was no more than a thin line, set in an expression of total cynicism - or hatred or hostility; the mouth can only express so much, unlike the eyes.

  His eye watched me with the look of a wild creature assessing the presence of another, of a smaller creature who could offer no threat but might be considered prey. The ice along my spine was because of this look he was giving me, robbing me of my identity. I was nothing, his look told me, human. There was also the similarity between this man’s head and the dog’s, because as the dog had leapt for me I had buried the machete in it, splitting open the skull.

  Sunlight, pale and slanting, was coming through one of the gaps in the wall, and around the man’s feet were motes of fibre drifting, still airborne from the final movements of the kata, of Bassai. The place smelled of damp, of fungus, of the jungle, a raw blend of animal droppings, fresh blood and chlorophyll. The shadow of Colonel Cho leaned right across the earthen floor, thrown by the low-angled light, its head against the whitewashed wall.

  I waited, still in the kneeling position. There was nothing else I could do.

  The bombs must have blown the rest of the building down, and there’d been fire afterwards. One wall was missing altogether, and on that side the room was criss-crossed with fallen girders, plaster and timber-work, festooned with creeper. The flooring in here must have been burned away, and he’d cleared the ashes, dumping them into the jungle, taking great care: there was no trace of them. He’d also found some whitewash, and covered most of the blackening the fire had left on the walls. The roof was still in place, a tilted expanse of corrugated iron, almost intact. The door I’d entered by was behind me; it had been open, and ‘Qui etes vous?’

  Flicker along the nerves.

  ‘Un ami, Sempai.’

  Acknowledging his rank. I would have said go-dan.

  ‘ Veus etes arrive comment?

  ‘By air,’ I told him.

  ‘En francais.’

  So I went back to French; it was the tongue we were going to use, obviously. ‘We made a moon drop,’ I added.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Just before midnight, Colonel.’

  He hadn’t moved yet. I wasn’t looking forward to that. His movements in the kata had been swift and powerful, and underneath his chilling calm he must have been enraged to find me here. This place was more than just his territory; it was his refuge, his only haven in a world where he was an outcast, because out there he would have had to see people flinch when they looked at him. In coming here I had violated his very soul.

  ‘How did you get past the door?’

  His French had the over-correctness of those who speak a foreign language learned formally and not through usage.

  I could have lied, but he would have known. And on the wall was a faded picture of Funakoshi, and there was the ingrained principle in me that disallowed my lying to a sempai. But by God it was a risk.

  ‘I had to kill one of them.’

  He was silent for so long that I didn’t think that any kind of change was taking place; he was standing perfectly still, as before. Then I saw that something was happening to his face; it was altering its shape, moment after moment, in a way I didn’t immediately understand, until I saw that his eye was now almost hidden by his nose and the raised flesh of the scar. He’d been turning his head, and by such infinitesimal degrees that I hadn’t noticed. He was now sighting me, rather than watching me, and the impression I had was that he’d withdrawn behind himself, to observe me from concealment.

  This was my first intimation.

  ‘Why?’

  It was a whisper.

  ‘It would have killed me.’

  Silence. At the edge of my vision I saw another rat on the move, and heard its faint squeaking.

  ‘Then I shall throw you to the others. But not yet.’

  There was something coming into his voice, too, a different tone that I couldn’t quite identify; but it reminded me of the way Fosdick had spoken to us when he’d got back from Marx-Stadt.

  One of the dogs barked outside, the sound coining a deep chest, resonating; others took it up, excited by something, an animal they’d sighted. I showed nothing.

  ‘Who is your sensei?’

  ‘Yamada.’

  ‘In London.’

  ‘Yes, Sempai.’

  He was still sighting me in that strange way, as if hiding behind himself - this impression was quite clear; it wasn’t my imagination. It was bringing a chill to the nerves: they were vulnerable at the moment because I hadn’t law whether I was going to come down the wrong way and smash my legs on the building and then there’d been the Doberman with its jaws wide open and then the sickening business stopping the thing short and now there was Cho standing there and I was perfectly sure he meant what he’d said about throwing me to those bloody hounds.

  ‘You may rise.’

  ‘Os.’ I made the ret and got to my feet, and then something screamed outside and the sound of the dogs took on a different note: it was a kill. He was listening to it, Cho. His maimed head lifting a fraction. But his eye was still sighting me.

  ‘How many are there?’


  I hesitated. ‘Dogs?’

  ‘No. There are seven dogs.’ His eye disappeared as his head was turned, and then sighted me again with an expression of exaggerated cunning, aided by the set of L mouth. ‘Six, now.’ A flash of revelation came to me, then vanished before I could grasp it. ‘How many men?

  ‘Where, Colonel?’

  ‘Out there. How big an army?’

  Mother of God.

  Yes, the same tone that had been in Fosdick’s voice when he’d got back from Marx-Stadt with the burns from the electrodes still on him and that strange light in his eyes - the East Germans had put him through implemented interrogation for three weeks and it had driven him mad.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said carefully.

  Because what could I say?’

  I didn’t know what they’d done to this man before they’d tried to kill him but it could have been that massive head injury alone that had affected his brain. He was probably as big a danger to me as anything out there in the jungle and if his mind were damaged he could blow up at any minute and come for me or call the dogs in. The only chance I might have could be in humouring him.

  ‘But you must have seen it,’ he said.

  The army.

  ‘I came down in moonlight, Colonel. All I could see was jungle.’

  His face was changing again as he brought his head back by infinite degrees, and I noted this. The movement could be significant: his way of ‘sighting’, of seeming to hide behind himself, might indicate the times when his brain went out of phase. He was facing me now and asking normal questions again.

  ‘Why did you come here by air?’

  ‘I was told you like your privacy.’

  ‘Yet you still came.’

  ‘Yes. I-‘

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I think we can help each other.’

  His head began turning again, and the hairs on my neck rose in reaction. He said nothing, and I waited. This time the phase didn’t last long, and his head moved back.