Assignment - Cong Hai Kill

by Edward S. Aarons

  * * * * *

  Item: Classified AA Priority.

  Via: Cable Scrambler J

  From: Major T.M.K. Muong, Bangkok Security

  To: General Dickinson McFee, Urgent Attention.

  Subject: Operation Yellow Torch

  Yellow Torch positive identify Orris Lantern, ex-sergeant USMC, Special Forces A Group BORAD, ex-prisoner-defector to Communist China via Hanoi, ' record confirmed eleven months Tsao Lan-Tse Prison, Peiping. First operation suspected Mekong Delta ambush Din Din. Military advisor chief Cong dissident mountain tribes related Montagnards Vietnam-Laos border areas. Fomented riots, burned village rice depots, vanished along Cambodian-Thai border. Yellow Torch positively heads terrorist Cong Hai infiltrating from Chaine des Cardamomes and interior rivers. Raided villages Gon Xup, Chin Ku, Im Bhong, casualties seventy males, forty females, nine children. All property burned, stolen. Recruitment of two hundred twenty-seven tribal males into fighting cadres of Cong Hai. Tea plantations destroyed: three. Four others out of communication, all French-owned. Upland river routesblacked out.

  It is rumored that difficulties in command have caused Yellow Torch to consider a re-defection to the West. If so, he is wanted as a criminal against the Thai people. If he surrenders, he must be remanded to the Thai government at Bangkok for immediate trial and punishment.

  Item: Memo to ComSEAT, NSA HQ, Ft. Meade.

  From: General Dickinson McFee, K Section

  To: Supervisor 10

  Subject: Yellow Torch.

  It is requested further details and File Code K/A 105 in toto be transmitted my office no delay.

  Item Stamped:

  REQUEST DENIED

  6

  DURELL returned the dossiers by special messenger before turning in that night. He was awake a long time, thinking of Deirdre. If she were a true professional in the business, he Would have slept soundly and not worried about it. As a pro, you accepted the risks and you expected no help, comfort, or aid from your teammate if you faltered at a point that might jeopardize the job. You knew you could be abandoned at any time, without apology or excuses. The assignment always came first.

  But if anything happened to Deirdre, and he had to make such a choice . . .

  In the darkness of that morning he crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed; but he did not touch her. He knew she was awake from the quickening of her breath, although she did not move.

  “Deirdre, please check out with McFee in time to quit. Before we must leave. Do it for me.”

  She spoke in a whisper. “I’m sorry, Sam. I feel the same about this job as you do. But I’m needed, because Anna-Marie Danat won’t trust anyone but me to negotiate Orris Lantern’s surrender. I have to convince her that we’ll treat him decently.”

  “That may not be easy—with Major T.M.K. Muong waiting to string him up.”

  “And you to help hang him up,” she added quietly.

  “If it’s possible, I’ll bring him back alive.” He touched her and bent over her.

  “Sam, don’t.”

  “You can’t be serious, after all the times—”

  “I am serious. I must prove this to you, don’t you see?”

  “No. I don’t understand.”

  “Well, you will.” He thought she laughed, but he wasn’t sure, and anger and rejection took him back to his uncomfortable couch across the room.

  In the morning they flew Pan Am Flight N0. 1 Westbound. Diplomatic and business identity papers waited for them at Dulles International. No bands played to see them off. Deirdre was quiet and remote during the long hours of their flight after the sun.

  At the Bangkok Airport, Major Muong met them in an official car and eased their way through immigration registration on Surisak Road. From the reception, Durell wondered why they hadn’t been met by a brass band and signs to announce their identity. Deirdre was enchanted by the flat, sprawling city with its endless temples, its streets of bedlam crammed with buses and samlors, the canals with their sampans and the houses rooted with thatch or red tile. Durell went through the necessary business of changing their dollars to bahts and satangs, then checked in at the Embassy. When Deirdre later requested separate quarters in their future hotel reservations, Major T.M.K. Muong, a tall, thin, brown Thai with reserved dark eyes, bowed politely and agreed it might be possible to arrange.

  Anna-Marie Danat was waiting for them at the Palace Hotel in Giap Pnom when they arrived by means of an antiquated DC-3 that served the distant coastal town twice weekly. The heat struck them like the fiat of an axe across the back of the neck, but Deirdre remained cool and distant. She promptly engaged in a long and girlish chat of reminiscences with the French girl, recalling their school days in Maryland, and after dinner,

  Durell had talked with Anna-Marie about the arrangements Orris Lantern had made to return to United States jurisdiction.

  In view of the dossiers he had read, he found it difficult to believe in Lantern’s change of heart. He suspected deception, danger, a trap somewhere. It did not add up otherwise, to his professional point of view, and he did not hide his hard suspicion from the blonde French girl.

  That was when Anna-Marie fled the hotel and almost got him killed.

  7

  WHEN the telephone rang, Durell was still checking the balcony of the hotel room to which he had returned With Anna-Marie. There was nothing to see outside but the embankment road, which was called Suriwong Street. Beyond was the tropical sea and the lights of the single rusted tramp freighter, and a few shadows under the Mauritius palms that flanked the hotel’s entrance. He thought his window was being watched by a coolie with a samlor who did not seem terribly eager for passengers; but he couldn’t be sure.

  The telephone continued to ring, and Anna-Marie said in a small, subdued voice: “Aren’t you going to answer it?”

  “In a moment.”

  “It might be Deirdre—”

  “She’ll wait.”

  “Or the police. You killed a man-”

  He looked at her, and she shuddered. She still wore the sodden white dress she’d had on When she fell, with an assist from him, into the carp pond of her “Uncle Chang‘s” house. Durell regarded her with some perplexity. He had tried to win her confidence, but right from the start there was something about her that rang little warning bells in the back of his mind. Perhaps he’d been annoyed by her gush of talk with Deirdre, the way she’d

  ignored his impatient questions, and then replied to them grudgingly. Although she was small and petite, she was full and ripe and woman enough to play Delilah to Orris Lantern’s Samson. But he wasn’t sure of anything except that the whole affair had begun with trouble and the unnecessary complication of Deirdre-at least, he told himself, he thought she was far better off at home, even if McFee didn’t—and now he had an emotional and disturbed young Frenchwoman on his hands who gave every evidence of turning hostile, of becoming a handicap instead of an asset.

  “It’s my fault,” Anna-Marie blurted suddenly.

  “What is?”

  “That the poor man is dead. The one you drowned. It seemed so—so ruthless—”

  “He tried his best to kill me,” Durell said.

  “And how many others have you killed, Mr. Durell?”

  “I don’t know,” he said honestly.

  “But always for your ‘business"?”

  “Yes.”

  “Killing is your business?”

  “Only when necessary.”

  “And you will kill my Orris. I know it. I see it in your eyes. You are cruel, and you will hunt him down like an animal.” All at once she covered her face and began to weep. “I should never have listened to him or encouraged him to trust me.”

  He watched her cry and looked at the motionless wooden fan in the ceiling and wished the power people in the town would get their plant running again. The telephone rang again; he walked over to it and was about to pick it up when he saw the microphone bug under the table.

  It was cru
de work, and any pro would have spotted it easily, with any kind of search. The mike was tacked just behind the ornate carving along the rim of the pie-crust table where the telephone rested—a period piece of French antique style—and a bit of metal from the bug had caught the oil lamplight and shone enough to attract his eye.

  It had not been there before.

  The phone rang twice more while he traced the wires into the wall, wrapped like a Virginia creeper around the telephone cord. Then he picked up the instrument.

  “Durell here,” he said in French.

  “Major Muong, sir.”

  “Yes, Major?”

  “Have you been in your room all night, sir?”

  “No. You know I haven’t.”

  “Correct. I am sorry, but there was some disturbance in the Chinese quarter and a dead man was reported to us, with a description of yourself—”

  “That’s right. I killed him.”

  Major Muong was silent.

  “Where are you, Major?”

  “In the lobby. May I come up?”

  “I’ll come down. In ten minutes.”

  “Mr. Durell,” the Thai said in precise English, “you understand my orders are to cooperate with you, and I do so willingly, but you must also cooperate in return.”

  “I’ll be down in ten minutes.”

  “Very well. But no longer.”

  Durell hung up and blew air angrily through his nostrils and wondered if he should make an issue out of the bugged room. He decided not to. He’d have done the same, and more, in Muong’s place.

  He took Anna-Marie with him, to see Deirdre in her room down the hall.

  He preferred the old tiled corridors of the Palace here to the gleaming new establishments built all over the world these days. They were too scented and sanitized to own any distinct personality, and he preferred to know exactly where he was. He could remember when each bed he slept in was distinctive, Whether in London or Karachi. He had no wish to be sheltered from the realities of roaches, fleas, snakes, centipedes, and the crude urinal stinks of overcrowded tropical cities. Everything was new and changing, he thought; but everything in his business was the same-dirty and frustrating and dangerous, never according to plan. Hence, he preferred to be stimulated by sounds and smells that smote the senses, rather than to be disarmed by the seductive cocoons of the glittering new hotels.

  Deirdre had finished dressing for dinner, and appeared in a white brocaded sheath which defined and accented all the fine articulations of her body beneath the Thai garment. She wore a small string of pearls she had purchased in Bangkok the previous day, much to his annoyance at this fernini.ne lapse; but he had to admit that her appearance justified the effort. He felt his heart lurch a little, but he kept his face blunt as he guided Anna-Marie into Deirdre’s room, adjacent to his own.

  “Dee, see if you can clean her up and talk a little sense into her, will you? She’s your friend, and obviously not mine.”

  Deirdre looked at the French girl with dismay. “What happened to you?”

  Anna-Marie was like a sulky blonde doll. “Perhaps I was foolish. I wanted advice, and not from either of you.

  Nothing works out the way I hoped it would.”

  Deirdre was all attentive solicitude. Durell, watching the two girls, felt oddly like a bull in a china shop, as if they were in league against him, sharing a certain invisible bond that excluded him ‘from their private communion.

  “She doesn’t trust me,” he said. “She thinks I’m going to hurt her precious Orris. I don’t deny I’d like to kill the son of a bitch, for all the damage he’s done our side.

  But I told her, and you told her—”

  “Poor Anna-Marie.” Deirdre’s marvelous gray eyes were hostile as she petted and soothed the bedraggled blonde girl. “No wonder she ran away, the way you talk about the man she loves.”

  Durell was silent, biting his tongue, and Deirdre said to the French girl: “But you must trust us, darling. It’s too late for anything else now. I’ll keep Sam in hand, don’t worry. . . . Just tell me what you were really trying to do when you ran away from the hotel.”

  “I only wanted advice,” Anna-Marie whispered, rolling her blue eyes in animosity toward Durell.

  “From a Chinese named Chang,” Durell said.

  “Uncle Chang is an old family friend,” Deirdre returned. “Anna-Marie told me about him years ago, when we were in school together. A very dear old man whom she can trust.”

  “Well, he wasn’t at home,” Durell said. “Nobody was there except a thug who tried to drown me. And Major Muong is now waiting downstairs for an explanation of a dead man floating in one of his klongs.”

  Deirdre shrugged this off and asked him to leave Anna-Marie to her. “She’ll be all right. She won’t do anything so foolish again.”

  Durell snapped: “She still hasn’t told us where we rendezvous with Lantern. We’ve got to know first. Muong wants him, too, and we’re going to need some fancy footwork to keep Muong from tearing Orris apart when we get him.”

  “That’s your department," Deirdre said aloofly. “Anna-Marie trusts me. She’ll behave herself now.”

  He had to swallow his frustration. If Deirdre was trying to tell him anything with her attitude, he could read little of it in her face. He checked her room and found a bug under her telephone similar to the one in his own room; he showed it to her and suggested she lock the door to keep Anna-Marie there, then went down to soothe Major T.M.K. Muong’s ruffled feelings.

  Major Muong had bland brown eyes and thin black hair plastered close to a round, intelligent head. He was taller than the average Thai, with clear brown skin and the prideful eyes of a race that had gained freedom in the thirteenth century, the “Dawn of Happiness” under the kingdom of Sukhothai and then, having fought the mighty Khmer kings who had established vassal principates in the territory, adopted the Khmer alphabet, introduced Hinayana Buddhism under King Ramakamhaeng, and codified laws under the Ayudhya emperors and Prince Ramatibodi. The ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia testified to die despotism that the Thai people had overthrown to gain their precious freedom. In Major Muong’s eyes was a reflection of that stubborn spirit that had kept Thailand independent in an Eastern world of vassals and slaves.

  Muong did not look particularly dangerous. He wore a white suit and a silk necktie somewhat askew under his thin neck, and his shoes were badly scuffed. His Panama hat was of fine straw, but it had seen better days. Still, it was not hard to reconcile an innocuous appearance with a tough reputation. He had some doubts about Major Muong. But then, it was necessary to doubt everything in his business.

  When the Thai shook hands, his fingers were as smooth and strong as a jungle vine. “You have been exceedingly busy tonight, Mr. Durell.”

  “We almost lost our little pigeon,” Durell said.

  “Yes. Forgive me, I had men following you. I thought it necessary. But they were too slow to help.”

  “Slow, yes.” Durell’s smile matched that of the Thai. “I could have been killed. I assume you found the dead man? He looked like a hill man, to me. A Cong Hai, to judge from the snake emblem he wore in his headband.”

  “Just so." Muong lit a thin black Philippine cigar. “It depends. There should be no trouble about the one you killed.” He took Durell’s arm and led him across the lamp-lit lobby of the hotel. There were Chinese businessmen, two Englishmen, and an astonishing tourist couple, both stout and perspiring, from West Germany. At the hotel bar were two lean, whipcord, suntanned Frenchmen from the plantations. Muong Watched Durell order imported bourbon. The label looked fake. Muong said: “Everything depends on your cooperation, sir. We both work for the same objective, yes? We must destroy the Cong Hai before they gain a foothold in Thailand as their revolutionary brothers have done in Vietnam and Laos. One destroys a snake by cutting off the head, is it not so? But the crimes the American renegade, Lantern, committed were crimes against the Thai people, and as such, will be punished by Thai justice.”
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  “We can leave that to the authorities in Bangkok."

  “But I know your orders, Mr. Durell. You are to return your prisoner to Washington at once.”

  Durell smiled. “Your service is most efficient.”

  “Better than you know.” Muong’s brown eyes were without satisfaction. “You see, Mademoiselle Danat has not yet revealed where Orris Lantern will surrender to you, but we can guess now. The girl’s flight to Chang, a respectable businessman, suggests the answer. We know that Chang went upland to the Danat tea plantation and is due back on the riverboat tomorrow morning. I have checked the steamer’s position by radio. It is a two-day trip, and there was some trouble. The boat ran aground on a shoal, thanks to a pilot who jumped overboard to escape the captain’s wrath. You understand, the steamer often goes aground. But I do not like it that it went aground on this trip.”

  “How much is the boat delayed?”

  “It will arrive tomorrow morning, it there are no troubles with the Cong Hai. When it does, I expect to find Mademoiselle Danat’s ‘Uncle Chang’ aboard. And with him—the head of our snake, Orris Lantern.”

  “I’m impressed.” Durell smiled. “I was told you were a very good cop, Major.”

  “Thank you. If that is in my Washington dossier, I am flattered”

  “Don’t be.” Durell’s voice hardened. “There are some questions about you for the years of the Japanese occupation during World War II. We understand you spent a lot of time in China then.”

  The brown eyes were like marbles. “I was there on my country’s business. What are you trying to say?”

  “What you were doing is your affair, but it leaves a few raw ends sticking out of the package, you see. If Orris Lantern is on that riverboat, and you’ve known of it for some time, he had better arrive in one piece, and alive.”