Assignment - Cong Hai Kill

by Edward S. Aarons

  The first shell landed with a dull crump, fifty yards to starboard, on the dock. Splinters of teak and thatch hurtled high in the air from the go down that was hit.

  A second shell sent up a geyser of muddy water directly under the steamer’s bow.

  A third landed astern.

  The mortar atop the cliff across the river was being handled with quick, military precision.

  The hot morning was shattered by confusion. Screams and shouts came across the rapidly closing gap of water between the steamer and the dock. The Thai soldiers ran for their jeeps, which mounted .50-caliber machine guns. A fourth mortar shell hit directly on the first jeep and blew metal and bodies into the river. The Buddhist priest fell flat, a saffron flower cut off at the stem. From the town came a shocked wail of terror.

  Durell jumped for the ladder to the pilothouse. Major Muong ran for the same objective.

  “It is an ambush,” Muong said thinly. Sergeant Lao stood behind him, a gun in hand. “We must go back.”

  “It’s too late for that. Order the captain to make for the landing.”

  “But it is an eighty-millimeter mortar—”

  “They expect us to retreat. Our only chance is to get ashore quickly.”

  The bridge was a confusion of shouting between the captain and his crew. Muong slid to the wheel, where the captain, a tiny Thai with gray hair and immaculate white shorts and shirt, was trying to wrest the spokes from a burly stoker who had run up from below. Muong drew his gun and shot the stoker in the chest. The man fell back, astonished at the blood that burst through his filthy singlet. The shot was a. thunderclap that froze everyone where they were.

  “Tell them to proceed to the dock,” Durell said.

  “It will cost many lives.”

  “We’re sitting ducks here, anyway.”

  The mortar fired again, a bracket of four shells. A machine gun stuttered in futile response from the Thai troops who had hidden among the godowns. A fire started on the dock, and thick smoke from oil barrels gushed like dark, curling intestines flowing across the water. It was a break, Durell thought. It might screen them long enough to get the panic-stricken, screaming passengers ashore.

  Deirdre and Anna-Marie appeared on deck below the pilothouse. Durell shouted to them to take cover, and Deirdre looked up and nodded calmly. They vanished into the cabins again.

  The steamer hit the landing with a crash that knocked them all off their feet. They were hidden by the gushing, oily smoke now. The mortar fire went on, and the shells landed in the river and the town. Durell watched the passengers scramble ashore, grabbing their pitiful belongings. Several people were trampled, and some fell between the ship’s side and the dock and vanished in the river.

  His eyes were bleak. It was a cruel trap, an act of wanton terror against helpless civilians. He felt a jolt underfoot and knew the steamer had been hit at last. A smell of burning wood mingled with the acrid stench of oil fires. He caught Muong’s signal and quit the confusion on the bridge. The girls were waiting below. Sergeant Lao had picked up an automatic rifle from somewhere and stood guard over them. Lao spoke in a rapid, spitting stream of defiant invective.

  Muong was calm. “We will go ashore from the stern. But this place is far from our objective, Mr. Durell.”

  “One step at a time,” Durell told him. “We’ll have to find out what’s been happening upstream.”

  “Nothing good, I fear.”

  It took ten minutes to reach the dubious shelter of the burning town. The platoon of Thai garrison troops were still returning fire across the river. The mortar over there fired a few more rounds, and then as a launch started across, filled with soldiers, the weapon went silent.

  Durell knew that the Cong Hai would melt into the green sea of the jungle as if they had never existed.

  Moments later, he stood with Muong beside a jeep. Lao sat behind the wheels, the girls in the back seat Durell asked: “Have you heard about the road to the east?”

  “Some refugees came down from Dong Xo. They say the terrorists burned several villages and plantations.” Muong’s face was expressionless. “It is more serious than Bangkok expected. Perhaps our friend, Yellow Torch, has changed his mind about surrendering to us.”

  “We don’t know that yet. How long will it take to get to Dong Xo?”

  “Four hours. The road is not bad, but it may be ambushed or booby-trapped. We cannot move until nightfall. It is suicide, Mr. Durell.”

  “Maybe we can move fast enough to beat them to it,” Durell said. “If all this was a trap aimed for us, their timing was off. They should have started shelling while the captain had a chance to reverse engines and back of. Now there’s nowhere to go but straight ahead.”

  Muong was silent, then gave a quick nod of his round, close—cropped head. “You may be right. One has no choice. Either we find Lantern at Dong Xo, or we lose, anyway.

  “Let’s go, then.”

  The convoy consisted of three jeeps and a dozen Thai soldiers. It was a small enough force to probe the green Jungle, where the eye was constantly betrayed by distance, where the light was like something undersea, and where each bend in the trail could bring upon them a burst of fire from a Cong Hai ambush.

  The road swung east and south along the secondary river toward the Cambodian border. Muong had found Jungle clothing for them in one of the godowns. The Chinese proprietor had a patriarchal manner that did not inhibit his hard bargaining. They wore low boots, which Durell insisted on paying for, and tightly woven trousers and porous shirts. Salt tablets were added to their kits.

  The road was a. tunnel boring under the leafy roof overhead, where the trees soared with bare trunks until they burst into foliage high above to block out the sun. There were potholes and swampy places where the jeeps had to be pried loose from clinging mud, open savannahs where the fringe of jungle was like the jaws of a trap; and Durell felt as if a hundred eyes watched their every move.

  The heat was the worst of it, aside from insects and leeches. When they stopped in a tiny glade where the river glinted like dull steel through the foliage, Durell helped Deirdre and Anna-Marie down. The Thai soldiers, small stocky men, were ordinarily voluble and cheerful; but now their eyes slid right and left to cover the jungle, and they ate their meal of cold rice and beans in silence.

  Anna-Marie said thinly: “I have never seen things like this here, before. The whole countryside is so silent. No buffalo carts, no work elephants, no people. There will be war here soon?”

  “It’s begun already,” Durell said grimly. “But maybe we can stop it before it really gets started.”

  “Yes. Yes, I see. That is your true job.” She was silent a moment. “And if Orris comes and surrenders to you—”

  “Then he’ll be all right. Provided this whole thing hasn’t been a cute trick he’s playing on us.”

  “No,” she said quickly. “Orris wants to surrender. He feels very deeply to go home, but he expects to be treated with—with contempt. But he is willing to pay such a price.”

  “I wonder why?” Durell asked softly.

  She did not reply. And after ten minutes, the little column of soldiers and jeeps pressed on again.

  At a second halt late that afternoon, Muong squatted beside Durell and drew a sketchy map of the terrain ahead. White ants began to march toward them across the forest floor.

  “The river bends here, like this.” He drew a loop with his finger. “The road divides ahead. The left fork serves the riverbank villages, but we will find no people there now. We should have met many people by now. But we see no one.” Muong shrugged. “They hide in the jungle. The terror has come, and they leave their homes and shops and paddies. We will take the right fork. It saves six miles, but it goes through a most difficult swamp. I do not think the Cong Hai expects us to go into this swamp, so we should take it. But the road is not good.”

  “The sooner we get on, the better.”

  “When we come to the river again, we will be at Dong Xo,”
Muong went on. “Pierre Danat has run things there commercially for thirty years. If Yellow Torch hides anywhere, hoping we come for him, this will be the place. But we may be too late. Surely you must have considered that his intention to re-defect may have been discovered by the Cong Hai.”

  “It’s been in my mind. It could be the reason for Uncle Chang’s death.”

  “Yes, And perhaps they have killed Lantern, too.”

  Durell said: “Don’t tell that to Anna-Marie.”

  The trail vanished.

  It had not been used for some time, as Durell discovered when he went ahead with two Thai trackers. Jungle creepers and vines had seized the chance to reclaim the slender path hacked through the viscera of the swamp, and only a few felled logs marked where the track had been.

  Muong halted an hour before dusk. The light was still the same undersea green.

  “The men are afraid to go on,” Muong said impassively.

  “They are not cowards, but they have superstitions. They say we enter a land of the dead. We have seen no living thing for the past hour.”

  “Can we follow the trail?”

  “We must build a bridge. The swamp has washed out the embankment. It will use up the rest of the daylight.”

  “Major, you know we can’t retreat now.”

  “It is your responsibility, Mr. Durell. The ladies—”

  “We got ahead.”

  “But there is nothing ahead.”

  “If we determine that, then we’ll turn back.”

  They had to burn off leeches from their legs and waists. It was not easy for the two girls. They had not complained of heat, mud, insects, or the miasmic silence. But Deirdre was pale as Durell loosened her shirt and revealed the girdle of loathsome parasites attached to her smooth skin. He lit a cigarette and began burning them off.

  “Sam, I can’t—”

  “Be still.” '

  “How can you be so calm and sure of everything?”

  “I have to be. And keep your voice down. The Cong Hai know how to Live in this environment. If we’re to stop them, it has to be here. They’ve built up a chain of fortress areas in these swamps, and we’ve got to give the Thai military the locations so they can be cleaned out—burned out like these leeches. And Orris Lantern has those maps for us.”

  “It will take an army . . .” she whispered.

  He was silent, and she checked herself and bit her lip as he finished with the leeches. “I’m sorry, Sam. But aren’t you afraid, at all?”

  He grinned. “I’m scared witless. And when you’re like that, there’s nothing to do but go ahead.”

  Anna-Marie Danat was better acquainted with leeches than Deirdre. Her manner was contained as Durell checked the growth of slugs attached to the swell of her hips and burned the odious creatures off with a second cigarette. She did not speak to him.

  The soldiers finished their rough log bridge and the three jeeps forged ahead. The laboring engines wakened extraordinary echoes in the silent, graying jungle. But the road was better now. They passed several rice paddies, and a few native houses built of pluang leaves. No one answered their calls. Cooking fires still burned in The iron stoves in the huts. A few chickens scratched under the houses; a pig rooted in a tiny garden. But there was no one in sight.

  “There is the river,” Muong said at last. “And there is what is left of Dong Xo.”

  15

  THE DUSKY air smelled of death.

  They came out of the swamp abruptly, as if a curtain were raised before their eyes. It took a moment to focus on the open sweep of river, the narrow gash of a dark green valley, the terraced hills, the glimmer of a temple ruin catching the last rays of the venomous sun.

  Dong Xo was like the other river towns, a series of houses built on stilts, several teak godowns, one large warehouse with a corrugated tin roof and open sides. Muong signaled the patrol to halt a hundred yards from the first dirt street. Nothing stirred. There was no wind. Overhead, the green sky turned briefly copper, then began to fade to velvety purple. Major Muong looked for a long time, squatting on the mulch beside the first jeep. He turned his round head toward Durell.

  “They were here. They fired the government rest house.” He pointed to a cinderblock, graceless structure by the river’s edge, blackened and roofless. “They may still be here, waiting for us.”

  “And the people?”

  “Dead. Or hiding in the jungle.”

  But as Muong spoke, they heard a baby cry. Then a dog barked, a sound quickly stifled. But the baby still one .

  Deirdre said: “There he is. A little boy, sitting in the street. Up there.”

  She started forward, and Durell caught her arm angrily.

  “Stay with the jeep.”

  “But he’s been hurt—his arm is broken—”

  “It could be a lure. Stay with Anna-Marie.”

  Muong nodded and they eased forward. Muong called out in Thai as he advanced, his pistol raised. Durell wondered at the man’s bravery. Was he really without fear, or did he know he would be recognized by the Cong Hai and allowed to proceed, to lead the others to slaughter? He could not suppress his suspicions.

  The town of Dong Xo had been shelled and gutted with the torch. Fishing boats had been burned and smashed along the water’s edge. Houses had been fired all along the outer fringe of the community. But now Durell watched three blue herons sweep low over the river, over the narrow valley between the darkening hills. He overtook Major Muong and walked quietly beside the Thai.

  When they were fifty yards from the baby who cried in the empty street, a woman suddenly darted from a nearby shop and snatched up the child with a swift gesture and tried to Vanish again. Muong called to her and she turned her head, and looked for a long moment at the jeeps and the muddy soldiers. Her brown face worked pathetically as she clutched the injured baby in her arms. Muong called to her again. She turned to the shop and spoke to someone inside, and an old, old man stepped into view from the shattered doorway. He wore the usual black pajamas and a coolie hat. His face was aged but smooth, and his thick white beard was handsome. He spoke to the woman and then waited for Muong.

  “If he speaks French,” Durell suggested, “ask him where everyone is. Ask him what happened here.”

  Slowly, like stunned animals crawling from their holes, people appeared in the wreckage of the village. Their eyes were black with tragedy. Some of the houses still smoldered from the fires. The smell of burning and death was rancid in the evening air.

  Durell watched the three herons fly back and land in the shallow reeds across the river. He did not think any of the Cong Hai were hidden there.

  While he listened to the old man, he kept watch on the houses and the wreckage along the riverbank. He could not see the other end of the town, which stretched in a long string of houses between the riverbank and the steep jungle hills that closed in the river valley.

  The old man led them to the village square while he identified himself as the father of the village headman. In the square they found his son. He had been tied up by the thumbs and disemboweled; his head was thrown back, his eyes were open, and lines of agony were etched on his dead face. His tongue was bitten through and his open mouth was alive with black flies. Next to him, his wife hung jaggedly, tied between two upright stakes, with every bone in her body methodically broken. Four other men, in grotesque caricatures, were impaled on stakes at each corner of the square.

  The Cong Hai, said the old man, came in launches down from the mountains at the head of the river.

  “Then they came from Cambodia,” Durell said grimly.

  “The villagers are certain of that.” Muong shrugged. “But no man here is sure of where the border is. The trails are few and faint. If the Viet Cong can move troops from Hanoi down the Laos trails into the Mekong Delta, surely the Cong Hai can cross the peninsula in the same Way. We must not drag Cambodia into this affair—just yet.”

  “All right. Tell the old man to go on.”

&nbs
p; It was a tale told too many times in South Vietnam, of villages suddenly surrounded by well-disciplined Communist troops, led by political commissars and Chinese advisors and officers from General Giap’s training center near Hanoi. The guerrillas had asked for the headman and then taken him to the government house for questioning. No one knew what the Cong Hai wanted. They heard the headman scream and then the executions began. All the young men of military age were rounded up and led away for service with the Cong Hai. Some of the young women were taken, too. All weapons had been seized. Rice was confiscated and taken into the launches. Then the village was fired with gasoline bombs and the Cong Hai got on their rafts and boats with their unwilling recruits and went downstream. It had all happened about noon of that day.

  “Did the Cong Hai raid the planters up in the hills?” Durell asked. “Are any tea farms burned out?”

  The old man tugged at his white beard. “No. They spoke against the Frenchman, as they always do, trying to pit color against color. They make it a holy war of race, as well as of communism against capitalist imperialism.” The old man paused. “Wait. I will show you.”

  He turned back into his gutted shop, which had once sold fish and river eels, and handed Durell cartoon books filled with venomous ideology. “They leave this for us to read and memorize, and say they will come back to see if we have learned our lessons properly so we can help the People’s Republic Liberation Army.”

  “Have you heard anything about Pierre Danat‘?”

  The old man nodded and was nervously silent for a moment. Something had changed in his black eyes. “M’sieu Danat is in his house, at the end of that street.” He pointed toward the riverfront. “No one harmed him.”

  Durell told Deirdre to keep Anna-Marie with the Thai troopers. He suspected it might be a trap for himself, and went alone toward the house on the riverbank.

  The villagers were emerging from their hiding places now, with the quiet, stunned look of all civilian bystanders caught up in the brutality of war. A few kerosene lamps were lighted against the murky evening. The sky was filled with brilliant lemon that faded quickly, yielding to a steamy darkness that lifted from the sluggish river. In the dim light, Durell could still see the tall-legged herons in the marsh grass across the stream. It seemed to be all right.