Assignment - Cong Hai Kill

by Edward S. Aarons

  All at once, silence returned.

  Durell drew a deep, slow breath. A tremor went all through him. Slowly, with great care, he raised himself from Lao’s inert form and stood up. The deck seemed to heave and sway under his feet. He looked down at Muong. The man was almost decapitated by the frantic slash and thrust of Lao’s knife. The blood that had gushed made the place look like a madman’s slaughterhouse.

  Giralda was whimpering. He paid no attention to her. He was reluctant to go into the cabin where Orris Lantern had been imprisoned. The grenade had done its work too well, he supposed. And everything in the job had come apart at the seams. He was supposed to have kept Lantern alive. And Muong had paid with his life to stop Lao. But it had all been too late. He looked at Giralda and saw the ruin of her face and battered body and wondered briefly about Deirdre. He shuddered.

  Then he went into the shattered cabin.

  The wreckage done by the grenade was complete. But it had all been for nothing.

  There was no body.

  Orris Lantern wasn’t there.

  22

  PAPA DANAT applied a dirty rag to his head and groaned gratefully as Durell lit a cigarette and put it between his puffed, battered lips. The Frenchman sucked at it greedily. The jollity was gone from his eyes, suddenly sunk deep into his facial fat. He shook his head, with its tonsure surrounded by gray hair, in dark bitterness.

  “It is all my fault. I have been a bad father, a weak and self-indulgent old fool.”

  “Listen to me,” Durell said. “Can you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I understand nothing. I do not know what has been happening.”

  “Muong is dead. Someone must be in charge now. The soldiers may not obey me. They’ll probably vanish, take off into the jungle, to escape the Congs. And the Cong Hai will only wait now until nightfall. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  “For the last time, do you know where Deirdre is?”

  “No.”

  “And your daughter? Where is Anna-Marie?”

  “I do not know.”

  “And Yellow Torch?”

  Papa Danat held up a fat, shaking hand. “Please. How can I know these things? I am sick, Lao cracked my head, I am filled with pain—”

  “Aren’t you worried about your daughter?”

  “She must be with Lantern.”

  “And you think she is Safe?”

  “He loves her.”

  Durell snapped: “You are a fool.”

  A fury seized him, and he knew this was bad, since it obscured his judgment. He pulled Danat to his feet. The man swayed and would have fallen, but Giralda supported She had, after all, escaped with only light injuries.

  “Let him be,” she whispered. “I will take care of him.”

  “He must be made to understand. We’re all dead if we wait here for the Cong Hai to take us.”

  “You would leave without your woman?”

  “If I can find Lantern—yes.”

  “It was all a trick, I think. Lantern has gone back into the jungle to his terrorist friends. He led them for months, so why should he desert them now? I do not know many things. It is very puzzling. I do not know why Lao made me come with him to try to kill Lantern. But Lantern must have taken the two ladies with him.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know nothing. But it is a sensible explanation.”

  Durell had no answers. He told Danat to come with him to the engine room. Danat protested he was in too much pain, but Giralda murmured to him and he got grumblingly to his feet. The woman spoke with a small, pained smile. “We do wish to help, Mr. Durell. After all, they will kill every one of us now, if we stay.”

  “We don’t leave without Lantern. But come along.”

  There was a small surprise waiting below-decks. A gang of coolies had cleaned up the debris in the engine room; the boilers had been scraped out, the pressure gauges wiped and oiled, the rust removed to prove the metal reasonably sound. Firewood was stacked and a small pilot flame lighted inside the black iron cavern. A group of elderly men stripped to the waist stood aside respectfully as Durell came down, followed by Danat and the woman.

  One toothless old man came forward, grinning and bobbing his shaved head. He spoke in English. “I am Tuc Kuwan. It is good, sir? We have worked very hard. The pressure will be up in a bit more than an hour."

  “Who organized all this?” Durell asked.

  “Mr. Lantern, sir. He was a—how do you say?-a dynamo. I am a mechanic, too, sir. I Worked in the plantation power plant. I know machinery, Sir, but Mr. Lantern is a genius.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He left us.”

  “Did he say when he would come back?”

  “He said nothing, sir.”

  Durell did not understand it. He only knew that Lantern had broken parole, amused himself with a useless engine, and then vanished with Anna-Marie. He saw that the broken drive shaft had been removed, a difficult job because of the long rust that had set in. The remaining metal shone with penetrating oil. But the engine was still inoperative.

  There was only one place to go. He turned briefly to Papa Danat. “Take me to your plantation.”

  It was more than five miles along a steeply winding road up the terraced hillsides. The sun was low in the west, and long shadows touched the opposite side of the river valley. From the heights, Durell saw how the river became even more constricted toward the coast. There was a gorge edged with steep cliffs, where a waterfall glistened like a ribbon of silver. Atop a promontory that made the river curve in an S—shape, there was a larger temple ruin that he hadn’t been able to see from down below. The loom of the Chaine des Cardamomes beyond the Cambodian frontier made a barrier to the east and the south.

  Durell commandeered a jeep from Muong’s men and drove it himself, taking Danat and Giralda with him; he left the old villager, Tuc Kuwan, in charge of the boat. It was a calculated risk, with Muong dead and no one else in command. The menace of the jungle seemed deeper and more pressing.

  As he drove along the trail, he saw a bare-breasted peasant woman trying to manage a lumbering work elephant; she looked at them with enmity and vanished. A little further on, a wandering water buffalo with a small boy perched between the spreading horns splashed into a deserted irrigation ditch. Durell knew he had to make a decision before nightfall, perhaps the most difficult decision he had ever faced. If he could find Lantern, and by some miracle get the Dong Xo Lady moving, they might escape downriver. But what about Deirdre? In other times and places, his course would have been clear. When you worked with a team, you might have to sacrifice your fellows to get the job done.

  But could he abandon Deirdre?

  She might be dead, but he could not visualize this. He directed his bitter anger toward himself, for allowing General McFee to pressure him into accepting her on this job. If he could only have taken her place, wherever she was, he would have done so gladly. . . .

  They passed more terraced rice paddies and empty huts and then a huge tea plantation that had been burned to the ground Papa Danat explained that it was a neighbor who had abandoned everything months ago, when the Cong Hai first appeared. Perhaps he had been the smart one, Danat sighed. His own plantation had not yet been touched, but the same fate surely awaited everything he had spent his whole life building.

  Durell suddenly slammed on the brakes.

  Fallen trees made a roadblock across their path. The jeep could go no farther.

  He switched off the engine. In the silence, they felt the dense pressure of the heat that weighed down the forest around them. Durell scanned the green wall of vegetation on either side. Nothing stirred. Perhaps it was last night’s storm that had felled the trees in their way. Perhaps. But he couldn’t be sure.

  “We’ll walk from here,” he announced.

  Danat nodded. His round face was pale. “It is only a few minutes. We are almost there.”

  Durell had given a rifle
to the Frenchman and taken one for himself from Muong’s soldiers. They walked carefully around the fallen mass of tree trunks and vines. Nothing happened. In a few moments they stepped onto an open hillside of neatly planted tea shrubs, with a long row of corrugated tin buildings in the distance.

  “I have a diesel power plant,” Danat murmured. “The machinery for packaging and baling is over there. The house is just beyond the rise of the hill, perhaps half a mile on. There are bridle paths for my horses, you see. That is how we ride inspection in the fields.”

  A faint breeze stirred the rows of tea plants.

  “Someone came this way," Giralda suddenly announced. She pointed to the path. The earth was still soft from last night’s rain, and the prints of native sandals were clear before them. “A man,” she said. “And a woman.”

  “Anna-Marie and Yellow Torch?” Danat groaned. “I should have paid more attention to the girl. She was lonely, susceptible to any man who came along. . . .”

  “Keep going,” Durell said.

  If it was a snare for him, he disregarded the risk. Without Deirdre, it did not seem to matter. If Lantern was playing a double game, then he had to be killed. . . .

  As they approached the long, narrow baling house, he saw two horses standing free at the edge of the terraced tea fields. But Lantern, despite his wounded shoulder, had apparently walked, coming another way. There was a dark haze in the hills as the sun settled behind thin clouds to the west. The breeze died, and he heard the sudden cry of a bird in the jungle behind him. The wide door to the shed was open, but he could see nothing in the darkness inside. He dried his hand on his thigh for a better grip on his gun, and jumped in.

  A shot crashed with deafening echoes from the darkness. The bullet tore splinters from the door to Durell’s right. He saw a shadowy line of sorting tables, worn smooth by years of use, and another long row of sorting bins. Machinery gleamed at the far end of the shed. Shafts of sunlight came through ventilating louvers high in the walls. He flattened beside the wall and heard Danat and the woman outside, but they had not followed him in.

  “Lantern!” he called.

  The gun crashed again, and the bullet tore out through the wide doorway beside him. He dove for the sorting bins, then made his Way rapidly, in a crouch, behind their shelter toward the open engine room at the far end of the shed. He moved with the deadly speed and grace of a killing machine. Anger possessed him, but not to the point where he was careless. In a matter of seconds, he had almost reached the dark bulk of the machinery.

  “Lantern!” he called again.

  Metal clanked. A footstep scraped. He heard a thin whimper, a hiss of tightly drawn breath.

  “Wait.”

  He did not want to wait. If he squeezed the trigger, it would be to kill. And he wanted to kill.

  “Cajun, you got to listen.”

  “Lantern?” he called.

  “I know what you want to do. Don’t do it. I got Anna-Marie here with me,” came the voice.

  “Send her out here.”

  “You gotta promise to listen!”

  “I promise nothing.”

  “I know you expect to kill me. Listen to me, first. I can’t trust you right now, see? You’re gonna shoot first and think afterward.”

  The words checked Durell’s rage, and his anger evaporated. The killing instinct suddenly left him. Something in Lantern’s words lifted a quick curiosity in him.

  “Send Anna-Marie out,” he said again.

  There was a long silence. Whispers came from behind the machinery, then a scrape of metal, rand Durell saw a long bar of shining steel being pushed into his range of vision. .

  “There’s your drive shaft, Cajun. It’ll fit what we need for the boat. That’s what I came up here for.”

  It could be, Durell thought. It might fit.

  “You came up here for this?” he called quietly.

  “Yup”

  “You were ordered to stay on the boat.”

  “Yup. And you wouldn’t have let me come up here, no matter what I promised. Now I’m sending Anna-Marie out, right?”

  Durell waited. In a moment, the French girl stepped from behind the power plant. Her long yellow hair was in two braids that made her look small and childlike. Her face was dead-white, her eyes enormous.

  “Please believe him, Sam. He hurt himself again, working on the machinery. He’s bleeding very badly. He just—”

  “Go outside. Your father’s there,” he ordered.

  “Yes. But please don’t shoot him. He—”

  “Never mind. Outside.”

  She sidled fearfully around him and moved back to the wide shed door. Durell kept his gun ready. For a long time there was silence, and no further movement.

  Then Orris Lantern appeared from behind the power engines. His yellow hair was unkempt and lank, plastered to his head with sweat. His bearded face was a pallid death mask. He held his hands up, wincing with the effort, and showed greasy, empty palms.

  “You saw them two horses outside, Cajun?” he whispered. “We didn’t use ’em. Somebody else might be around. I figured it was Paio, but we didn’t see anybody, and we ought to move out fast, right?”

  “Take it easy.”

  “Just don’t shoot, Cajun. I have a confession to make. If you get me back to the boat, I’ll do my best to convince you that I’m really on your side.”

  Before Durell had a chance to wonder at the sudden lack of a hillbilly twang in the man’s words, or in his changed demeanor, Orris Lantern’s knees suddenly buckled and he pitched forward on his face in a dead faint.

  23

  DURELL looked at his watch. It was five minutes to five. Inexplicably, he heard a cock crow. It was followed by the screeching of birds and the chattering of monkeys in the nearby jungle. He put the wrench down and squeezed backward out of the narrow slot between the boiler and the drive shaft in the Dong Xo Lady's engine room. For more than an hour he had been lying on his back on the greasy plates, adjusting and tightening the bolts on the drive shaft Lantern had supplied. The fit was far from perfect. The starboard paddles might bind up and freeze under the strain of propulsion. But the steel bar fitted with reasonable snugness. Papa Danat explained, with an apology, that he had cannibalized spare parts of the Lady’s engine years ago to repair the power plant at his plantation. He had forgotten all about it, he said, But Orris Lantern’s mechanic‘s eye had spotted the piece of equipment and guessed at its original design. It was still possible to turn theLady into a shallow-draft river gunboat.

  Tuc Kuwan, the old villager he’d put in charge of the engine room, smiled toothlessly as he emerged from behind the boilers. “We fire up now, sir?”

  Durell nodded and wiped his hands on a waste rag. “Fire up, Tuc. As quickly as you can.”

  The old man grinned cheerfully. “And if we blow up?”

  “That’s the chance we take.”

  “You are boss, sir. We do as you say. And the village people?”

  “We take them all. Women first. The men who want to stay and defend Dong Xo can keep what weapons they have.”

  “The men will stay. Only the old and the sick, and the women and children. The boat is too small, otherwise.”

  Durell nodded and climbed the ladder out of the hold as the small pilot fire was stoked by eager, half-naked villagers. In an hour, they would know their chances of escaping. Even if all went well, and the Lady moved under her own steam with the boilers holding up, the difficulties ahead seemed incalculable. He would have to pilot the boat, and he did not know the river. Papa Danat might help, but it would be night, and unless there was a moon, the chance was that they would snag On a mud bank before they got a mile downstream. And if there was a moon, then they would be perfect targets for the Cong Hai waiting in ambush along the river’s edge.

  But he had done all he could. The vessel was ready to go. The makeshift crew had been instructed in their jobs. The refugees were already pouring aboard. And to port and starboard were the machi
ne guns from Muong’s jeeps, and the Thai soldiers to man them. None had deserted after Muong’s death, and he was grateful for their tough discipline.

  He made his way slowly down the corridor to the prison cabin where he had left Lantern. Anna-Marie and Papa Danat were there, with one of Muong’s armed men. Durell signed to the soldier to leave, and Lantern lifted himself on one elbow and smiled.

  “Time for a showdown, Cajun?”

  Anna-Marie had redressed his wound, but under his dark jungle tan, which made his blond beard look almost white, there was an exhausted pallor to his skin, and there were violet shadows under the shrewd blue eyes.

  “It’s time,” Durell admitted. “You have a lot of talking to do. And you’re going to do it now.”

  “Did they train you in memory tricks?”

  Durell nodded. “I’ll be able to repeat verbatim‘ everything you have to say. Everything I’ve come here to learn.”

  “And your girl? Deirdre? No sign of her?”

  “No."

  “You’ll leave her here?”

  “If I must.”

  Lantern shook his head slowly. “You’re a bit scary, Cajun. That’s what Anna-Marie said about you, and I begin to see what she means.”

  Durell’s face was hard, without expression. The other man sighed and hitched himself up on one elbow on his cabin pallet. The lowering sun sent a single bar of hot light into the stateroom. Through the square window—the glass was long broken or removed—Durell saw deepening shadows on the shore and through the channel to the river.

  Lantern said: “All right. Anna-Marie—and Papa—you’ll have to leave me alone with him. Don’t worry, honey. He won’t kill me. He doesn’t know it yet, but we both work on the same team.”

  They were alone.

  Durell said: “Explain it.”

  “About the team?”

  “All of it.”

  “You won’t want to believe me. You think they’d tell you about me and trust you to handle it right, because you've got triple-A clearance. But your orders were explicit, weren’t they? General McFee knows you’d prefer to zap me, so he gave you strict instructions: no killing. Bring me back alive, like an animal for the zoo.”