Assignment - Cong Hai Kill

by Edward S. Aarons

  “Y’all seem more Worried about the Congs than me. But you know what they’ll do to me if they ketch me, hey?”

  “My job is to see that they don’t catch you.”

  “And you hate it,” Orris grinned. “A guy like you, you take your job too seriously.”

  “Shut up,” Durell said again.

  “You got to take care of me, boy. You got to take anything I throw at you, ‘cause they want me safe and sound for that question box in Washington, right?”

  “I’m only human, Orris. Don’t push it.”

  “But you know what Peiping says about you? You got quite a reputation. They’d love to hang your pelt on the quite a reputation. They’d love to hang your pelt on the Temple of Heaven gate, boy. It’d be a great thing, for them. Better pray they don’t get the chance, huh?”

  “Get aboard,” Durell said. “Papa, lead the way.”

  The fat Frenchman was puffing. “But certainly. There are some cabins still useful, I think.”

  But as he stood on the rotting deck of the old sidewheeler, Durell felt a strange disorientation, as if he were a boy again in the Louisiana bayous, living on the Trois Belles in her berth at Bayou Peche Rouge. Old Grandpa Jonathan had made the Mississippi sidewheeler a home for the two of them, and Durell’s earliest memories were of the old gentleman polishing brass in the antique pilothouse, or wandering through the dim, plush paneling and furnishings of the riverboat’s gambling salon; or scrambling down into the engine room, where the great drive shafts cranked the paddle wheels that had driven the gambling ship up and down the mighty river from New Orleans to St. Louis half a century before the old, man won ownership of her on the turn of a single card.

  He felt as if he knew this boat, here in the Thai jungle. It was like coming home again. His first lovemaking had been with Thea, a Peche Rouge girl, who had lured him into the dark boiler room and then stripped herself and then him in a long hour of passionate exploration.

  Those were years of innocence, never to be repeated. . . .

  And yet—

  “Who owns this boat?” he asked Papa Danat.

  “I do. I once operated it. But as I say, it was impossible to fix when she finally broke down. In any case; it was merely a vanity, to own my own river steamer.”

  “Is she beyond repair, do you think?”

  “I know nothing about machinery,” Danat said.

  Lantern had climbed laboriously over the rail. “But I do, Papa. When it’s morning, I’ll have a look.”

  Durell met the man's yellow stare. They were thinking along the same lines. If the road through the swamp was impassable for the jeeps now, there remained only the river. The enemy perhaps did not even suspect that the old boat existed. If they could make a few quick repairs, load some log chips and cordwood for fuel, and make a surprise descent down the river . . .

  No, it was too wild a hope. They would need a pilot, even if the old boilers didn’t blow up with the first pounds of pressure in them. They needed stokers, laborers, tools. And it had to be done quickly, too quickly for safety. There were surely traitors in Dong Xo who would hurry into the jungle to tell the Cong Hai what the Americans were doing. Muong’s small platoon could hardly hold off a determined guerrilla raid.

  Looking at Orris Lantern limp down the vine-grown deck, he knew that the enemy would pay any price to kill the renegade.

  The whole scheme to use this old boat was futile, impossible. But there was no other way out.

  So the impossible would have to be done.

  19

  HE BEGAN reliving his boyhood, and went over the machinery of the Trois Belles inch by inch, recalling the long hours of polishing the gleaming brass and nickel parts. He felt he could not remember enough to help with Papa Danat’s boat. He did not even know what was wrong, yet. It was too risky to use lights during the night, so he had left Danat and Anna—Marie with Lantern, whose face looked haggard with the pain of his wound and the knowledge of how he was hunted.

  Deirdre was waiting at the government house where Muong had quartered them, and she, too, looked strained and tense.

  “Sam, darling, I feel so useless here. Maybe you were right. Maybe I should have remained at the hotel, down the river. Now you’ve even taken Anna-Marie from me, and I felt I was being helpful there, anyway. What can I do now?”

  He kissed her briefly. “Nothing, for the moment.”

  He felt a bone-weariness that stunned his senses. Deirdre helped him off with his shirt and produced a cool, wet cloth and sponged his head and chest. Her face was pale and calm, and she had braided her rich, long black hair into a tight coronet to keep it out of the way. But the day just passed showed its effect in tiny ways. Her inner serenity was severely shaken, something he had never witnessed before.

  “Sam, you’re perfectly free to say, ‘I told you so,” she murmured. “I’m only in your way now, aren’t I?”

  “We still have a long journey to make, Dee.”

  “And you can’t think of any way I can help?”

  “You’re helping right now, Dee.”

  “Anyone could do this. You’re tired, but—”

  “Look,” he said. “We’re boxed in badly here. It takes patience, and patience isn’t easy when you’re looking at the jungle and wondering when they’ll come out after you. Because they’ll be here, Dee, if We give them enough time.”

  “Yes, Muong is worried. Two of his men are gone. He doesn’t know if they were ambushed or if they slipped into the jungle to go to the Congs.”

  Durell frowned. “Nothing will happen tonight, after the storm. And I don’t think they expected us to make it here so soon. Maybe we’ll be all right through tomorrow.”

  “But you‘re not sure?”

  “I’m not sure of anything in our business, Dee.”

  “I know. I hate it. And I know I asked for it, and I’m sorry, Sam, truly. I just want to do something to help?”

  She slept beside him, and the humid heat made her toss restlessly on the makeshift pallet in the fire-gutted room. Muong’s men patrolled the river and the village perimeter. And some time toward dawn, when the roosters began to crow, Durell finally slept, too. . . .

  The jungle was quiet.

  A morning mist veiled the river and the marsh reeds where the herons rested on the far shore. Durell found Muong hunkered down beside the jeep trail that led across the swamp. The jeep had mired down a few feet behind him. The Thai’s eyes swept slowly back and forth along the green curtain of vines. Muong was a city man, and Bangkok, with its uproar and teeming millions, was home to him. But Durell knew that Muong had trained himself to live in the wilderness with the hill tribes. He wore shorts and no shirt, and his cropped head was bare to the sunlight that filtered through the leafy forest roof with green luminescence.

  Sergeant Lao stood at Muong’s side. The young Chinese was well-muscled, with the flat face and cheekbones of northern Mongol people. His bland, almond eyes told Durell nothing when Durell asked: “What do you think, Lao?”

  “We cannot go this way, sir.”

  “And your radio?”

  “The coast does not reply. There is static.”

  “Any suggestions, Muong?” Durell asked.

  Muong sighed. His chat, roped with surprising muscles, lifted evenly with his controlled breathing. A bird cried somewhere in the swamp. He spoke with apparent irrelevance.

  “Did you know, Mr. Durell, that when I was a boy in Bangkok, I wanted to be a professional boxer?” He paused. “I trained in our Thai style, hand-and-foot, and became a good boxer, Mr. Durell. My legs are still good.”

  Durell was silent, waiting.

  “After my boxing career, I went into a monastery for Buddhist studies. I wore the robe of a monk and shaved my head and carried a beggar’s bowl for my food. I remember that year with fondness.”

  “And afterward?” Durell asked, wondering what the Thai was leading up to.

  “Yes, afterward, as I am sure you know, the war came here, and th
e Japanese Imperial Army. I escaped them and went to North China, where I listened to Mao Tse-tung’s lectures. I thought of him as a great man. But they treated me with much contempt and put me in prison.”

  “But they let you go.”

  Muong might have smiled. His eyes were dreamy, lost in the past. “True. They considered me a safe convert.”

  “And were you?”

  “Perhaps. Even after I married. Until I learned about my wife.”

  “I didn’t know you were married,” Durell said carefully.

  “She was a doctor, educated in England, and she preferred Western customs. She gave me peace. Our children were small, golden miracles. But she went up-country some months ago, to work in a village clinic in a town much like Dong Xo, here on the river. The Cong Hai were just beginning then, filtering down the long, hot jungle trails, down through Laos and along the Cambodian border nearby. They did not spare my wife. They burned and killed and raped, and shouted the name of their American leader, Yellow Torch. . . .”

  Again Muong paused. His eyes looked blind. “She was a gentle woman, a lovely creature. She died horribly, in excruciating torment and violence.” He shivered, although the morning air was already sultry and breathless. He turned his head slowly and looked up at Durell. “I tell you this in the hope you will understand how I feel about your renegade.”

  “We made a deal,” Durell said.

  “Yes. And I will try to keep the bargain.”

  With the quiet resilience of peasants everywhere, the villagers of Dong Xo came back to life. Chickens ran under the stilted houses, a few pigs rooted in the mud along the riverbank, the women gathered what rice had been left by the raiders, and the morning meal was over. A few shops that still had supplies were open, but the Chinese merchants stayed in the shadows. A new headman, the son of the murdered chief, was chosen, and he distributed arms to whatever middle-aged men had escaped the guerrilla conscription. They augmented Muong’s thin patrol around the village limits.

  In the lagoon, the heat gathered as if in a cooking bowl, concentrating on the fetid water and the green growth that wreathed the Dong Xo Lady. Durell set some of the women to work with knives and axes, cutting away the tough vines that had grown up along the rails and cabins of the litfle steamer. Smoke rose in the hills that soared on either side of the valley, and Papa Danat wanted to go back to his plantation when he saw it.

  “You can’t leave,” Durell told him. “The Congs just want to lure you back.”

  “But I-they have no quarrel with me."

  “You think not? You’re white and French, so you’re a Western imperialist exploiter. Don’t you read their comic-book propaganda?”

  “But all my life I have been friends with everyone here. And I see my life going up in flames there.”

  Durell wondered it the Frenchman was being deliberately ingenuous. You know the Cong Hai aren‘t locals. They’d like to treat you as they treated Uncle Chang.”

  “Speaking of Chang—if you do not permit me to go, may I send Paio up there?”

  “They’d do the same to Paio, wouldn’t they?”

  “I suppose.”

  Durell smiled thinly. “In any case, I doubt it Paio is is to go. Where is he, by the way?”

  “He is helping the villagers to clean up.”

  "Good. Leave him to it. You stay here and keep the old men at work.”

  He had gathered a dozen villagers into wood-cutting squads, and had them chopping deadfall branches into cordwood for fuel, working in a thin, sweaty line of burdened men. Watching them, he wondered if he were being too optimistic.

  He had spent two hours crawling over the Dong Xo Lady, and he still did not know if her engines could be made to turn over, or even if she would stay afloat, once subjected to the stresses of the river current. He had waded knee-deep in mud, hacking at vines in the narrow channel to the river, ordering the old men to clear a path to the main stream. It was not easy work. The heat was staggering. But he led the way and showed what had to be done, and by noon he returned to the old stone platform of the ruined temple beside the boat. Deirdre met him there.

  “Oh, Sam.” She could not hide her dismay at the mud on his torn clothing and the scratches on his face. There was a darkness in his eyes she had never seen before.

  “Sam, you’ll kill yourself. This old wreck won’t even float.”

  “She’s our only chance to get out of here. And if we have to pole her downstream, we will.”

  “And suppose the Congs are waiting for us down there?”

  “I’ve told Muong to take his .50-calibers off the jeeps and mount them on the boiler deck.”

  She knelt to scrape the mud from his thighs and used a cigarette on the leeches at his ankles. There was mud on her cheek, and she wore a straw coolie hat. Beside them, the caryatids of monkeys on the temple wall grinned at the world.

  “You ought to rest a bit, darling. It’s cooler inside the ruin.”

  “There’s no time. The Cong Hai won’t wait. They must know we’re here now, and that we’ve got Yellow Torch. Where is Orris?”

  “In the engine room.”

  Anger touched him. “He was told to stay out of sight, in his cabin. He’ll be recognized.”

  “But he insisted he could help.”

  Durell swore and ran to where the old steamer was docked. The villagers made way for him, watching with round eyes as he swung aboard and made his way below.

  Again he was struck by a sense of déja vu. In design of main, boiler, and hurricane decks, the Lady was a miniature edition of the Trois Belles. She might have been designed for some Thai prince as an amusing model of a Mississippi paddlewheeler. He felt carried back to those days in the hot bayous and his chores at dusting the elaborate Victorian salons and polishing brass and the great twin drive shafts of the old vessel. The Dong Xo Lady had lost her former opulence, but he knew his way blindfolded around the aft engine room and boilers and down to the shallow hold.

  Two peasant boys who had escaped the Congs were working in the indescribable heat and gloom, stripped to simple loincloths. As Durell dropped down the rusted ladder into the darkened pit, Anna—Marie stepped in his way.

  She wore shorts and a bandanna in place of a bra, and there was grease on her hands and in her blonde hair. But there was also a radiance in her eyes that died quickly as she saw the gun Durell carried and recognized anger on his face.

  “What. is it? What’s the matter?”

  “Where is Orris?”

  The familiar, insolent drawl came from behind the boilers. “Right here, Cajun.”

  “Get out of there,” Durell snapped.

  “I’m workin’, old buddy.”

  “We’re not buddies. Come out. And hands up.”

  Lantern crawled out of the narrow slot behind the boiler. He carried a heavy spanner in a greasy fist. His eyes were baleful, like a cat's, belying his easy smile.

  “You gonna shoot me now, Cajun?”

  “Drop the wrench.”

  “I’m workin’ with it.”

  “Drop it.”

  The heavy tool clattered to the steel deck. “You know what, Cajun? The way you hate my guts is makin’ you blind.”

  “You were supposed to stay out of sight. How long do you think it will be before some rat in the village runs off to tell the Cong Hai about you?”

  “Won’t make no difference nohow, if they come to kill me and we’re still here. Our only chance is to get t’hell out, and fast.” The bearded man moved‘ Anna-Marie gently aside. “You stay out of the way, sweetheart. This is between him and me, and I got a feelin’ one of us ain’t gonna make it home.”

  “You may be right,” Durell said.

  “You know the trouble with you, CIA man? You used to be real people, down in the bayous; but then you went to Yale and got cultured up and become a lawyer and all, and then you got this big job for the government and you forgot how us ordinary garage mechanics live.” Orris laughed harshly. “Yeah, I’m a mechanic.
Or I was, back home in the hills. I can take this ol’ engine apart and put it together blindfolded, see?”

  “I don’t want your help,” Durell said grimly.

  “Well, you’re gonna need it. You need a new camshaft that helps drive the port paddlewheel. That’s all that’s wrong with this little ol’ tub. The shaft snapped in two, from metal stress and rust. We need a new one before we move this boat under its own power.”

  Durell felt his anger ebb and change to dismay. He didn’t trust Lantern. He couldn’t afford to. But he saw where the man had wrenched his wounded shoulder and started the blood oozing through the new bandages Anna-Marie had applied. Pain and fever shone in Lantern’s yellow eyes, but his grin was still as defiant and insolent as ever. He told himself not to let the renegade rub him the wrong way. Lantern was playing his own game, and his goal was still not clear.

  But when he examined the damage Lantern had been working on, behind the rusted boilers, his chagrin deepened. Lantern was right. The engine was a Fairley-Smith, a two-cylinder affair with a six-foot stroke. Durell was familiar with its workings. The rusted boilers alone presented a dangerous problem. Fired up with the wood the villagers were stacking on deck, and brought to proper pressure, they might all be blown sky-high. Even if that worked, the paddles might quietly come apart at the first revolution, even though the heavy teak blades and struts were more durable than iron in this climate. But the worst of it was the damage Orris had described. Nothing less than a new linking drive shaft would ever get the Dong Xo Lady to move again.

  In the darkened pit of the engine room, he saw Lantern wince with pain when Anna-Marie touched him. But the moment he saw he was watched, the man’s face became mocking and defiant again.

  “I’m right, huh?” Lantern said softly.

  “Yes.” Durell was short with him. “All that work topside is for nothing.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe I can fix it.”