Bamboo Dragon td-108

by Warren Murphy

  "There are no mining experts in the party," Sandakan reminded his superior.

  "None that we know of."

  "Sir?"

  "Who knows if anyone is what he claims to be these days? A passport can be forged, biographies concocted out of nothing. The Americans are skilled at fabrication."

  "You believe their government may be involved?" The very notion boggled Sibu's mind.

  "I am suggesting only possibilities," Germuk Sayur replied. "But then again, why not?"

  "They would be risking much embarrassment."

  "With much to gain, Sibu. A fortune for the taking."

  "Surely we would not permit them to invade our sovereignty?"

  "Americans are devious," the deputy reminded him. "They have been known to bribe officials, threaten economic sanctions when their will is thwarted, even sponsor revolutions to unseat a government if all else fails."

  "I will be vigilant," said Sibu Sandakan.

  "Is vigilance enough, I wonder?"

  "Sir?"

  "We must be ready to respond at the first sign of treachery, Sibu. You understand?"

  He nodded, more from force of habit than real understanding. Sibu Sandakan was troubled by the turn this little chat had taken. He was no spy, much less a soldier or policeman. Nothing in his background had prepared him for the kind of cloak-and-dagger games Germuk Sayur was evidently planning.

  "You will carry this." The deputy retrieved a plastic box, no larger than a cigarette pack, from an inside pocket of his coat and slid it toward Sibu across the desk. "It is a radio transmitter, specially designed for an emergency. You cannot send a message in the normal sense, by speaking into it, nor is it able to receive. Simplicity dictates a single button that, when pressed, transmits a nonstop signal for the next eight hours, on a special frequency. From noon tomorrow, until you return, the ministry will have an armed security detachment standing by with helicopters, waiting for your signal."

  Sibu Sandakan was even more uneasy now. "What sort of an emergency?" he asked.

  "You'll be the judge of that, Sibu. If the Americans should find uranium instead of dinosaurs, for instance, they will need immediate protection."

  House arrest would be more like it, Sandakan imagined. Someone in the capital could always sort the matter out with an apology, by which time the uranium would be secure in native hands. That much was only fair, but he resented being drafted into work for which he wasn't trained or temperamentally inclined. Still, he couldn't refuse an order from the ministry.

  The plastic box felt almost weightless in his hand. He stroked his thumb across the button, trying to imagine the reaction that a pound or two of pressure would evoke.

  "You will, of course, be circumspect about its use." It was an order, plain and simple.

  "Yes, sir. Certainly." Another thought was nagging at him now. "What if… ?"

  "Go on, Sibu."

  "What if the expedition is successful, sir?"

  "What if they find a prehistoric animal, you mean?"

  "Yes, sir."

  Germuk Sayur could only smile. "In that case, they will also need protection, Sibu, will they not?"

  "The Englishman—"

  "Must pose no threat to an endangered species. Not when its survival could prove beneficial to the state."

  "I'm not sure—"

  "Think of it, Sibu. The tourist trade we could attract. You've seen Jurassic Park?"

  "No, sir."

  "I recommend it highly. If museums can turn a profit from display of dusty bones, think what a modern and well-managed game preserve could do with living animals."

  It was beyond imagination, and Sibu let it go.

  "Yes, sir," he said.

  "You're clear on your instructions, then? A signal in the case of an emergency, but no hysterics. If the party finds uranium or giant lizards, you must let us know immediately. Otherwise… "

  "I understand."

  "In that case, you should get some rest. You have a great adventure waiting for you in the morning."

  "Yes, sir."

  As he closed the office door behind him, pocketing the little radio transmitter, Sibu Sandakan was wishing he could pass the whole assignment off to someone else. A city boy at heart, he had no wish to camp out in the jungle, sleep beneath mosquito nets and watch each step he took for fear of deadly snakes. The rest of it—the dinosaurs, uranium and geopolitics—was all too much to cope with. He would simply have to watch and wait, be ready with the panic button at the first sight of a monster or duplicity from the Americans, whichever surfaced first.

  With any luck at all, he told himself, the whole excursion would turn out to be a waste of time. He could endure the laughter of his friends around the office for a week or two, until they found some new amusement for themselves.

  But the alternative was frightening.

  Sibu Bintulu Sandakan was worried that he might turn out to be one more endangered species in the trackless jungle, and a flying squad of soldiers would be precious little good to him if they arrived too late.

  Pike Chalmers lit his last unfiltered cigarette and crumpled up the empty pack, discarding it with no attempt to find a litter can. The Malays lived like rodents in his estimation, crowded cheek by jowl, the best of them perhaps two generations from the bush. Surrendering the colony had been one of Her Majesty's mistakes—like India, Jamaica, Kenya and the rest—but it was no good crying over spilled milk now. That train had left the station, thank you very much, and it was never coming back.

  Pike Chalmers missed the glory days of empire, even though the bulk of it had been before his time. He had been eight years old the year his father died, a victim of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. There were lean times after that, in Manchester, despite a soldier's pension for the widow and her son. It had been only natural for Chalmers to enlist when he was seventeen, but there were no great wars remaining to be fought. Three tours in Northern Ireland were enough, and he had briefly gone the mercenary route in Africa, before discovering that he could make more money killing helpless animals than stalking men with guns who might shoot back. Safari guides were always in demand, and when the namby-pamby "greens" began to flex their legislative, muscles, curbing the majority of classic hunts, the flabby tourists with their cameras still required a man of courage and experience to take them out and bring them safely back again.

  But it was killing Chalmers loved. You could forget about the "metaphysics of the hunt," conserving nature with a harvest of the weak, all that manure sportsmen ladled on their game to make it more politically correct. Back in the old days, you went out to shoot a rhino or a tiger for the fun of it, a stylish trophy all the validation any man required. White hunters were admired for their abundant courage, knowledge of the wilderness, the number of their kills.

  It was a new world now, and Chalmers didn't like it much. Besides the hunting question, strident activists had poked their noses into everything from sex to smoking. A majority of Yanks had voted for a President who dodged the draft and promised higher taxes to protect them from themselves in any given situation, while at home the royals had fallen into scandal and disgrace.

  Pike Chalmers often thought that he was born too late, a man whose time had come and gone before he made his way onto the stage. It would have pleased him to reverse the flow of time, skip thirty-five or forty years back into history and take his rightful place among the men who built an empire girdling the globe.

  But why stop there?

  If he could work a miracle, why not go back a century, get in at the beginning of the action, killing Zulus, Boers, Afghans. It had been open season in those days. Britannia ruled the waves, and it was easier to pack the white man's burden in a simple hearse than listen to the wogs and kaffirs whine about their "rights."

  Of course, there were no time machines, no miracles, but men of daring still got lucky now and then, despite the odds against them. Chalmers reckoned he was overdue for some good luck, the way things had been going in his life
of late, and if a handful of his colleagues thought that he was balmy, signing on to join a dinosaur hunt, he knew that most of their remarks sprang out of envy. They were jealous bastards, seeing Chalmers land an easy job of work while they were left out in the cold.

  And what if it paid off?

  Suppose there was a bloody dinosaur waiting for them out there in the bush. Pike Chalmers couldn't keep from smiling as he thought about the possibilities. He could retire on profits from the book and movie rights, pick up a ghost to hammer out the manuscript for pocket change and relocate to Ireland, where the writers lived tax free. Do all the talk shows like a bloody rock-and-roll star. He could well afford to let the Yank professors write their textbooks filled with charts and diagrams, all kinds of Latin jawbreakers that only another scientist would ever read. The real loot came from exploitation in the media.

  Pike Chalmers thought he might be forced to hire an agent if the money started pouring in too fast for him to handle. Life was hard, but he would do his best to cope.

  And if he felt like keeping all the glory for himself, then he could see his way to being the expedition's sole survivor. There were a hundred easy ways to die in the Malaysian jungle, even when you didn't have a handy dinosaur around to gobble the remains. This lot were amateurs, babes in the woods. He could dispose of them as if they were nothing, never even break a sweat. Without the profs around, there would be no one to dispute Pike's version of events, whatever that turned out to be. Something heroic, certainly, to keep himself at center stage.

  He had begun to shop around for leading men to play his part in the inevitable movie when he caught himself. It was a grave mistake to count your eggs before they hatched, especially if they were dinosaur eggs. Pike Chalmers was no scholar, but he knew the odds were stacked against survival of a species thought to be extinct for umpteen billion years. Simple deductive thinking said the trip would be another paying job and nothing more.

  Or maybe not.

  They didn't have to find a bloody dinosaur for Chalmers to get something extra from the trip. That Audrey Moreland was a tasty dish, and no mistake. Oh, she was giving him the brush right now, the way her kind so often did, but that was in a posh hotel, when she could call downstairs for room service to fetch her up a glass of bubbly any time she chose.

  It was a different story in the jungle, when you said goodbye to feather beds, dry clothes and decent food. The only running water in the Tasek Bera would be rain and jungle streams; her next-door neighbors would be snakes and scorpions and hungry tigers.

  Not to mention Chalmers, most dangerous of all.

  Before their little trek was finished, Audrey Moreland would acquire a new appreciation of his talents, not just on the trail, but in the sleeping bag, as well. She might protest at first, but who was there to take her part against a real man when the chips were down?

  That brought his thoughts back to the new bloke, Dr. Renton Ward. A strange duck, that one. Didn't look like he could tear a piece of paper if he used both hands, but he had turned Pike's crushing grip around, and no mistake. The knuckles of his right hand still felt sore, as if he'd punched a concrete wall. Some kind of trick, no doubt, but Chalmers would be ready for him next time. Keep an eye on that one all the way, damned right, and fix a nasty accident first chance he got.

  Pike Chalmers thought of Audrey flirting with the little bastard when she'd only just been introduced a moment earlier. There was no accounting for taste, of course, but she would find her choices strictly limited in two or three days' time. The old fart she was traveling with would never cut the mustard, and their native chaperon… well, he was just another bloody wog.

  It was an article of faith with Chalmers that all women wanted sex from men who showed them who was boss. Some needed more persuasion, but he never missed… except, of course, with lesbians. And he had shown a few of those what they were missing, too.

  A real man had the right—make that the duty—to extend himself where women were concerned, and Chalmers was a man who always tried to do his duty.

  Yes, indeed, there would be some surprises waiting for his snooty clients on the trail. And it would be a pleasure watching as they tried to cope.

  Pike Chalmers found that he could hardly wait. In fact, why should he wait?

  The night was young, and he was feeling lucky.

  First, a stop to buy more cigarettes, then he would take a chance and roll the bloody dice.

  Chapter Six

  "None of your fellow travelers were startled to behold you in the flesh?" asked Chiun.

  "I couldn't tell. It didn't seem that way."

  The Master of Sinanju made a clucking noise. "White men neglect the art of observation," he suggested.

  "I observed them well enough," said Remo. "Maybe one of them was covering."

  "Then you did not observe," Chiun informed him. "There are always signals to betray a liar. Deviations in the normal pattern of respiration. Beads of perspiration at the hairline. Possibly a twitching of the eyebrows."

  "Nothing," Remo answered, having checked for all the normal signs. "I got the bad eye from their pet gorilla, but he doesn't strike me as a mastermind."

  "Did you reveal yourself to him?" asked Chiun.

  "Not really."

  "So you did."

  "A little squeeze when we shook hands is all, to put him in his place."

  "Put him on notice, you should say. He is a white man?"

  "British, right."

  "You may be fortunate in that case. White men, in their ignorance, are blinded by the perfect glory of Sinanju. He will probably suspect that you pump iron and do aerobics with the round-eyed girls on television."

  Remo finished packing, double-checked the bathroom and the closet for forgotten items, finally zipped his duffel bag. "You know," he said, "it's always possible that I was burned by someone else, outside the team."

  Chiun's shrug was lost inside the folds of his kimono. "Anything is possible," he said. "An ape may learn to sing someday. But is it logical?"

  "You're right."

  "Of course."

  It made no sense, when Remo thought about it, for an outside force to want him dead. He was unknown outside of CURE, and his appointed cover was innocuous in the extreme. How many people outside academia had ever heard of Dr. Renton Ward, and how many of those would try to kill him in Malaysia of all places? Even if the herpetologist was eyebrow deep in debt to the most vicious of New Orleans loan sharks, they would deal with him at home, where they controlled the playing field. And CURE would certainly have run a background check on Dr. Ward before they cut a deal to borrow his identity.

  No matter how he tried to skull it out, he kept returning to square one. The hit team in the central marketplace had been assigned to deal with Remo—or with "Renton Ward"—because someone was anxious to prevent his linking up with Dr. Stockwell's expedition. Motive was an unknown quantity, beyond deduction from the evidence in hand.

  What evidence? he asked himself. The thugs who tried to kill him were beyond confessing now. The only way for them to finger their employer would be through an Ouija board. That left four individuals Who might have motives for disposing of the new man on the team, with better than a dozen combinations possible if two or more of them were in cahoots. And so far, Remo didn't have a shred of proof connecting any one of them with the attempted hit.

  He gave up trying to divine why someone he had never met before should want him dead. The possibilities seemed endless, anything from academic jealousy to common greed. CURE'S background check had ruled out prior connection between Renton Ward and other members of the expedition. If there was an ancient grudge involved, one glimpse of Remo's face would be enough to tell the other party that they had a ringer on the team.

  Which brought him back to wondering how anyone, much less a desk-bound academic, could have blown his cover off this early in the game.

  "Where are you going?" asked Chiun.

  And Remo had to smile at that. He had b
een standing by his bed, immobile, staring at his duffel bag, but Chiun could tell that he was on the verge of going out. The old Korean never failed to keep him on his toes.

  "I thought I'd take a walk," said Remo.

  "White man's logic," said the Master of Sinanju. "When confronted with a long trek through the jungle, you prepare by walking aimlessly around a city."

  "It's a form of relaxation. As you know, I don't need lots of sleep."

  "You need more training," said Chiun. "A student who has barely scratched the surface of Sinanju should devote his every waking hour to the work."

  "First thing, when I get back from dinosaur hunting."

  "I accede to this because Emperor Harold Smith demands it," said Chiun, "but you are not prepared."

  "It's too bad you can't join us," Remo said.

  "This frail old specter, tramping through the jungle like a savage?" Chiun was visibly appalled by the idea.

  "You wouldn't pass inspection anyway. No Ph.D."

  "True wisdom does not come from scrambling the letters of the alphabet behind your name," said Chiun.

  "You got that right," said Remo.

  "Was there any doubt?"

  "HI be home soon."

  "Home is Sinanju. This is but a place to sleep and hang your clothes."

  "Don't watch the tube too late. You need your beauty sleep."

  "More slander. The Korean countenance, illuminated by Sinanju, is perfection multiplied."

  Chiun would always have the last word, even if he had to whisper in Korean. Remo let it go and closed the door behind him. Never mind the dead bolt. Any hotel burglar who might try to loot this room was in for a surprise.

  He took the stairs, ten flights, and practiced running down the banisters for exercise. It would have helped to take his shoes off, but he managed nicely just the same. A pause before he went out through the lobby, checking out his pulse and respiration. Normal on both counts, despite the moderate exertion.

  Kuala Lumpur waited for him, light and darkness intermingled with the smells of frangipani, curry and satay, the many Chinese-food stalls, here and there a hint of backed-up sewage. Remo drifted toward the smaller side streets, watching out behind him without seeming to. If he was being followed, the pursuers were too skillful for his senses to detect them. That was always possible, of course, and yet…