Assignment - Cong Hai Kill

by Edward S. Aarons

  “Dee, you know it’s just a job—”

  “Nothing is ‘just a job’ to you, Sam.”

  And the spell was broken.

  He was not sure what he had done wrong. But she drew away abruptly, a tall and lovely woman in the shadowed room. When he reached for her again, she evaded him gracefully. Her big eyes were luminous in the dusky light.

  “Go on. Go ahead and see her.”

  “She’s your friend, Dee.”

  “I know. Go.”

  He was aware of his quick temper, inherited from his Cajun ancestors. It was a fault noted on his dossier in Washington--and probably in Moscow and Peiping, too. Usually he could channel it to good purposes. But he could not fathom Deirdre at the moment, and he reacted to her abrupt withdrawal with a harsh coolness of his own.

  “All right.”

  She stood at the window, looking at the lights that had returned to the port. At another time, the romance of this place could have heightened their union here. Now he was abruptly returned to his world of shadow war, and his anger spilled over with memories of an old Chinaman’s butchered body and the murder of a frightened little Hindu dope peddler.

  Death often seemed to serve no purpose in his world. In his convoluted environment of suspicion, of mask and counter-mask, of self-identity buried deeply under one cover personality after another, you could lose yourself forever in the images you created of what you had been and would be. But this was Durell’s reality, and he could not return to the workaday world of business and domesticity. He could never return, however much he and Deirdre wished for it. His habits of reflex, caution, and violent reaction could only bring regret to anyone he loved.

  He looked at Deirdre’s back and said quietly, “Stay away from the window, hon,” and went into the next room.

  Anna-Marie stood with her back to the wall just beside the door as he went through. Moonlight flooded through the tall doors open on her balcony, turning her pale golden hair to silver. She wore black coolie trousers, sausage-tight on her hips, and a silk Thai blouse through which her full, deep breasts were more than evident. Her eyes were wide, and the whites showed all around them. She had put on too much makeup, and when he paused to look at her, he felt as if a centipede were crawling on the nape of his neck.

  She whispered in French. “Close the door, please.”

  “But Deirdre—”

  “I know. Close it. I want to be alone with you.”

  He closed the door. It couldn’t be helped. Then he went to the balcony windows and closed the shutters there. The scene from the hotel was extraordinarily beautiful now. The curve of the bay, the lanterns of sampans and barges, the exotic shape of a junk’s sail coming down the coast, the pinnacles and towers of temples and Malay mosques were all touched by the huge Oriental moon rising over the river. Distant bells and strange scents and a warm breath of humid jungle air touched him for a moment; and then he turned back.

  He bumped into Anna-Marie, who had moved on soundless black coolie slippers directly behind him. Her body was soft and yielding.

  “Please, will you help me now?”

  “What is it?”

  “I had a telephone call-yes, the telephone is working, isn’t it odd?—from Papa.”

  He looked at the old-fashioned French phone that had been useless here since their arrival. It was on her bed, the receiver off the pedestal. He went to it, more to get away from the nearness of her body than anything else. There was no hum or click in the receiver, He put it back and picked it up again. Nothing.

  “It is not working now,” Anna-Marie said. She had drifted after him again and stood very close. “It happened in the middle of Papa’s call from Dong Xo. That is the river town at the plantation, near the border.

  Where Papa sends his tea by steamer and gets his supplies.”

  “And what did your father want?” he asked gravely, to humor her.

  “I don’t really know. He had time to tell me several things, but then we were cut off before he finished.”

  “And what did he tell you?” he asked patiently.

  “There is trouble in Dong Xo. Some Buddhist monks were killed. Terribly. Li.ke--like-”

  “Like your ‘Uncle Chang’?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “And then?”

  “The Cong Hai have been terrorizing the villages. Some plantations were burned, some of Papa’s old friends, Frenchmen and their wives, were murdered. And there is fighting now in Dong Xo.” She began to tremble.

  “Are you sure of all this?” Durell asked.

  “It is serious. Papa said it, and then he said that Orris did not get on the riverboat at all. He was supposed to go aboard with Uncle Chang, to give himself up to you here, today. But he never went. I do not know why. Papa had no chance to say.”

  “What happened?”

  “The telephone went strange. All sorts of noises. And then I heard Major Muong‘s voice.”

  “On the phone?”

  “Yes. He told me to be quiet and hang up.”

  “And you did?”

  “The telephone went dead, anyway.”

  Durell stared at the blonde girl. “Why didn’t you mention any of this to Deirdre?”

  “I wanted to tell only you. And to ask you—” She paused. “You must tell me what you want,” she whispered. “You must tell me your price.”

  “My price?”

  “For Orris’ life. Not to kill him. To obey your orders and keep him safe.”

  “I won’t kill him,” Durell said.

  “But you want to. It is in your eyes. You are a cruel man and a dangerous man and you frighten me. But if I can do anything to make you promise to save Orris—”

  She leaned toward him. She was a child in a world she did not know. She put her hands on the back of his neck and pressed herself against him in a silent offering. But he felt the shiver that went through her body with her amateur attempt to seduce him. She could not put it into words, but her awkward promise was plain. She would give herself to him, if he would promise in return not to hunt down her Orris Lantern like the dog he was.

  “Anna-Marie—”

  “Hurry. Please. It is difficult for me.”

  “You know I love Deirdre.”

  “Yes. But men are like Papa—with any woman.”

  “And Orris?”

  “He is different.”

  “How well do you know him?”

  “Well enough to love him.”

  “How can you be so sure of what he is?” I “I am sure. No one knows him as I know him.”

  “How much time did you spend with him?”

  She whispered: “We met by accident. I was riding—Papa keeps some wonderful horses—-and I went over to the ruins of Gyur Wat, because it is peaceful there and the monks are always pleasant. Orris was waiting there. He had been watching me for many days, he said. He knew I would be there that day. We talked. I was afraid of him, of course. I heard he was the leader of the Cong Hai terrorists. A murderer, a rapist, an enemy of the peasants and the people, a tool of Hanoi and Peiping, an American renegade.”

  “And—?” Durell asked urgently.

  “And he was afraid,” Anna-Marie whispered. “And tired. So tired! Dirty. He smelled of the jungle and the swamps. He had a gun and grenades and he needed a shave and his eyes were red from lack of sleep.”

  “What about the monks? Did they see him?”

  “Yes. But they ignore politics here."

  “They ignore murders and terrorism?”

  “Gyur Wat is remote from the world.”

  He turned the talk back to Orris Lantern. “He frightened you, that first time? What did he Want of you?”

  “To talk, to see if I could help him. He Wanted to contact the Americans here, ‘to arrange a safe-conduct for himself. Durell, he Wants to go home.”

  “He was lying,” Durell said harshly. “His home was a poor mountain shack, and he was kicked around from the day he was born to the day he defected. Maybe, in his mind
, he had good reasons; I don’t know. But he had nothing to go home to. So he was lying.”

  “Could he not simply have wanted to be with Americans again? How can you judge loneliness for your countrymen?”

  “We think he’s killed a few with his own hands.”

  “Please. Please. I don’t know how I know it, but Orris is a good man. I know it! And I love him. And you must not kill him. You can have what you want, you can have me—“

  “Anna-Marie—”

  He Wanted to ask her What else Major Muong had said when he interrupted her phone call from her father. Maybe it was a lie, or a fevered nightmare. Deirdre had known nothing about it. Maybe it was all talk, to get him in here so she could buy him, as she hoped, with a few moments of what might pass for love.

  She stood on tiptoe to kiss him. Her mouth was vulnerable. That was when Deirdre opened the connecting door between their rooms. Durell pushed Anna-Marie’s hands from him and tried to hold her away. Deidre’s voice was as cool as a Vermont mountain stream.

  “You do enjoy your work,” she murmured. “Don’t you, darling?”

  14

  MAJOR T.M.K. MUONG sat in the lotus position and watched the eastern sky over the river fill with a lime-green glow that pulsed with a secret, universal life. Herons flew up from the mangroves and thong trees along the riverbanks that slid by. Mist clung to the bushy tops of the trees. In the night, the river steamer had passed a few lighted villages, but not many. They had been delayed at Don Thap, and again at the fork in the river, where the Guan Trac came down from the Cardamomes. The day and the night had been filled with the whining of insects, the screech of monkeys, the occasional cough of a leopard stalking along the riverbank. Civilization, as Muong knew it, was left behind within minutes after they pushed upstream from the coast. Yet he did not feel alien to the hot, steamy land, the lazy, warm-eyed buffalo, the peasant women in black pajamas with bare breasts, the fishing shacks on stilts, the lush, overpowering green of the river and the jungle.

  “Lao,” he said quietly.

  The young Chinese appeared at his side. “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you think they are all dead up there?”

  “We will find out tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow may be too late.”

  “It is as it is, Major.”

  “Lao?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You truly meant to kill Dagan, did you not?”

  “Yes. You said—”

  “Very well. I know what I said.”

  Muong wore a plain white robe around his spare frame. His face, partly Thai and only a little Chinese, was as impassive as the jasper Buddha in the corner of his little steamer compartment. But his eyes were filmed with a sorrow that had been with him, it seemed, ever since his youth. One lived with it, and grieved, and regretted. Perhaps, if one had not gone into the Western world, one could better accept the way the world was. He felt contaminated by worthless emotions. But hatred nourished him and kept him strong. It was unworthy, but he could not live without it. He felt suspended between these two worlds, having lost the serenity of his father’s faith, and having failed to learn the pragmatism of a man like Durell.

  The river steamer slowed and the side paddles checked the vessel against the wide sweep of the current. The deck vibrated. Through the window, he saw the driftwood that had made the pilot cautious. The logs rolled slowly over and over on their way to the sea, far behind them now. Then his black eyes took on a quickened interest. The lime of the dawn sky gave him enough light to see the logs quite clearly.

  Some of them were bodies. Headless human trunks, mostly men, some women, some children. They were twisted indiscriminately in the jungle trash that the river was taking to the sea. He began to count the corpses, but when he passed twenty, he decided the numbers were of no importance. There they were; and then they were gone. He heard quick, padding footsteps on the bridge overhead, and he knew the captain would be down soon to tell him what he, too, had seen.

  They were too late.

  Now it had begun, coming out of the darkness of the jungle. Muong trembled with his outrage and hatred.

  “Lao?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you think Durell knows about the Grass Basket?”

  “His inquiry went through. The merchant in Ho Bin Minh Road, the Portuguese Enrico Rey, will give him an answer. We know Enrico Rey works for K Section.”

  "True."

  “One cannot hide the past forever, Major.”

  “Better if it could be buried or burned or torn from the pages of the cycles of these times.”

  “You did what you could.”

  “It was not enough.”

  He knew that Lao, the young Chinese, would gladly die for him. Death was not important, for Lao had been there with his brothers and sisters, his father and his mother, and they were all gone but Lao, their graves unknown, their bodies mingled with the slime of all the other slaughtered bodies in the eastern jungles. Muong had picked him up, a frightened boy, dying, and had carried him on his back along the forest trails, far up in the highlands, and nursed him and fed him and tended the savage wound on Lao’s chest that had convinced the Cong executioners that the boy was dead with the others. It was a long time ago, in Lao’s life; but only a short time for Muong. The larger part of Muong’s life had been spent in the Grass Basket at Peiping.

  He was released as a Communist, an infiltrator, a member of the cadre to teach, train, and indoctrinate others. It had not been easy to fool them. They were so clever. So persistent. So ruthless.

  But they had turned him loose, in his native land, a year ago, and the government had put him back in his old job with internal security.

  How easy it really was to subvert, terrorize, and confuse, to shout slogans and manipulate mobs!

  An intricate history had been created for him, some in Peiping, the rest in Hanoi. There were people in Hong Kong and Manila who would swear that T.M.K. Muong had lived with them all those years. His dossiers were impeccable, on both sides. And it was a fact that neither side knew his true and secret thoughts. None knew of his hatred.

  Except Orris Lantern, the American renegade.

  Yellow Torch would know him when they met. And everything would end, then.

  Muong knew that Durell would obey orders and try to keep Lantern alive.

  It must not happen. Whatever Lantern’s motives or usefulness, the renegade must die.

  Lao would see to it.

  Durell saw the bodies floating in the river, like smooth brown logs twisted in the brush that drifted with them. He, too, began to count them, and then gave up. He heard the captain descend to Muong’s cabin soon afterward. But no one came to tell him about it.

  No matter.

  On the morning they started upriver, the reply came to his request for a more complete dossier on Major Muong. It confirmed his suspicions. In his business, you often did better with a team than alone; it was General McFee’s despair that Durell preferred to depend on himself rather than on the mixed decisions of a team. He felt safer that way. He trusted his own judgment. Even his own hunches.

  He had known from the start that Muong was a real problem. But he hadn‘t expected Muong to turn out to have been a cell-mate of Orris Lantern’s, up there in Peiping.

  The convoluted pattern still wasn’t clear. He only knew he was alone now, except for Deirdre. He hadn’t slept much this last night on the river steamer. He could not and must not devote his time and energy to worrying over Deirdre’s safety. She was his working partner here, and nothing more.

  But he could not convince himself of this.

  The riverboat was the same that had come downstream with the body of Uncle Chang. The diesel engine thumped and its cabins shook. The decks teemed with goods for the up-country villages and plantations and the ordinary passengers, Thais and Malays with straw, conical hats and bundles of possessions on bamboo poles, sleeping in an untidy sprawl of thin brown bodies in the open of the decks. They lo
oked like the victims of a machine-gun attack. If anyone among them saw the mutilated bodies float by, no one gave the alarm. Only one old woman in black pajamas, starting a charcoal breakfast fire on a tin’ pan, looked at the lumpy objects in the dawn light and turned away.

  Durell had insisted that Deirdre and Anna-Marie keep their stateroom door open across the corridor. He could see the girls asleep on their pallets in the cool air of dawn. As the sun lifted in a few minutes and struck the boat’s timbers, it would be unbearable in there. Let them sleep, he thought But he would have to tell Dee about the bodies.

  The steamer began to turn in at a river town at the confluence of the river and another stream that swept down from the distant Cardamomes. The mountains were well over the border into Cambodia. From this valley junction, the steamer’s route went for another twenty miles to Dong Xo.

  Durell went up on deck. The jungle looked like fields of steaming cauliflower. There were winding valleys of thong trees, with their bushy tops, and endless ridges, and the sky blazed green and copper. You could feel the rise of breathless heat and the damp of wet moss and creepers, and smell the mud and rotting vegetation. The sun became a hanging, palpitating brightness, a dizzy disc of white-hot energy, which burned in an ecstasy of exalted fervor and stunning force that would soon demand complete surrender or death.

  Durell turned to consider the river junction. He saw some Thai troopers on the dock, waiting for them, and a few jeeps. The waterfront was ominously quiet. Instead of the usual confusion of sampans piled high with fruit and merchandise, there was utter stillness. The soldiers were staring across the wide river at a high red stone cliff beyond the junction where the second stream tumbled into the main river. Jungle masked the top of the cliff, but Durell thought he saw metal glint briefly as the steamer swung toward the landing.

  A Buddhist monk was arguing with two soldiers on the dock, pointing first across the river, then at the steamer.

  Durell felt a quick alarm.

  They were almost at the dock when the mortars fired.