Bamboo Dragon td-108

by Warren Murphy

  "Only one more shot," Kuching Kangar replied. "The others killed by hand. Find one, back there, up on a tree, with his own rifle sticking through."

  "What does it mean?" asked Sibu Sandakan.

  "It's rubbish," Chalmers said. "If they were killed that way, it means the bloody wogs were killing one another. Can you make sense out of that?"

  "But if he says they were not shot—"

  "So, what the hell does he know, looking at a lot of bodies in the dark? He's not a bloody coroner, for Christ's sake."

  "Well, there can't be much mistake about a rifle sticking through a man," said Dr. Stockwell.

  "I'll believe it when I see it for myself."

  "Eight dead men altogether," the professor said. "How many bullets does your rifle hold?"

  Chalmers scowled as he said, "I have the Colt, as well."

  "Did you fire it?"

  Angry color rushed into the big man's cheeks. "All right by me, if you prefer to take this bloody wog's word over mine," he said. "But don't come asking my advice on anything, while you've got Mr. Answers over there."

  "Now, see here, Chalmers—"

  "We must certainly turn back," said Sibu Sandakan, his firm voice breaking Stockwell's train of thought.

  "Turn back?" The very notion seemed to boggle Stockwell's mind. "But why? We're almost there!"

  "We've been attacked by rebels, Doctor, and they may come back at any time. Two of our group are missing, one of them apparently without hope of return. It is enough."

  "For you, perhaps!" It was the first time Stockwell's tone had risen to this pitch or taken on such grim determination. "I, for one, have not come to this godforsaken place and sacrificed so much to simply turn around and slink home with my tail between my legs. If there is something to be found here, I intend to find it. Audrey would expect no less."

  "But surely, Doctor—"

  "Mr. Chalmers, if you will continue with the expedition, I can promise you a fee of half again what we agreed."

  "You'll double it, or there's no deal," said Chalmers.

  Stockwell didn't even have to think about it. "Done," he said, and turned to face Kuching Kangar. "Will you continue as our guide?"

  "I paid to find Nagaq," the little Malay said. "Not finished yet, unless you say go back."

  "It's settled, then. We're pressing on."

  "I really can't allow—"

  "Excuse me, Mr. Deputy," Professor Stockwell said, "but if you feel like turning back, it seems you'll have to go alone. You're free to take a fair share of the food, of course. We're not barbarians."

  "My duty is to stay with you and guarantee your safety."

  "I suppose you'd better get some sleep, then," Stockwell told him, hollow eyed and grim. "It's morning now, and we'll be moving out at dawn."

  Chapter Thirteen

  Remo was in no great hurry to rejoin the expedition once he reached the clearing where the tents were pitched. Pike Chalmers was pulling sentry duty with his growing stash of weapons. Like Tom Sawyer at his funeral, in the Mark Twain novel, Remo understood that there were certain definite advantages to being dead.

  The first time he had "died," in the New Jersey State electric chair, it opened up a whole new life for Remo. There was Dr. Harold Smith. His work with CURE. Chiun, of course, and the endless hours of his instruction in Sinanju. There had been understandable resistance on Remo's part in the beginning, but today, all things considered, Remo knew that he wouldn't have turned the clock back and resumed his first life for a million dollars in cold, hard cash.

  This time across the River Styx, he calculated that the gains would be more modest. Still, it never hurt to learn what people said about you when you left the room, especially when they reckoned you were gone forever. Failing a disclosure from loose lips, he was content to watch and wait, convinced the ringer would be revealed before much longer, now that they had voted to proceed with the expedition despite the apparent losses sustained.

  The vote surprised him in a way. He understood that Dr. Stockwell was a focused man, where old bones were concerned, but Remo had suspected that his grief for Audrey Moreland and the lurking threat of danger in the jungle would persuade him to retreat. Instead, he showed amazing—even foolish—courage, seasoned, Remo told himself, with just a dash of stubborn pride. The way he found the key to Chalmers's heart with cash, then silenced Sibu Sandakan, had been impressive for a man of Stockwell's seeming Milquetoast disposition. There was still the guide, though, and his bland acceptance of continued danger troubled Remo most of all.

  "I paid to find Nagaq," Kuching Kangar had said, as if that answered everything. In fact, from Remo's personal experience, the hired help was the first to bail when things got dicey—locals in particular, because they knew the countryside, its dangers and the glaring limitations of the men they had been paid to chaperon. This guide, however, was not only willing to resume the hunt, despite a band of armed guerrillas breathing down his neck, but Remo would have almost called him anxious to proceed.

  It didn't fit the profile, but he couldn't get a handle on the problem. Was their guide the ringer? That made even less sense, when he could have gone out searching on his own, made better time without a bunch of round-eyes straggling out behind him.

  No. It made no sense at all. Whatever drove Kuching Kangar, hard logic said that it wasn't uranium—perhaps not even cash. The little Malay needed watching, then, but so did Chalmers, Stockwell, even Sibu Sandakan.

  Four suspects, Remo thought. And while he hoped that it was Chalmers—anything to give him one more crack at the conceited Brit—it struck him that the odds were fairly level, all around.

  He sat and watched their small camp as the night wore on and dawn's first light broke in the sky. Pike Chalmers nodded twice, but caught himself before he dropped the captured AK-47. With the sunrise, Chalmers roused the others from their tents, and they began the desultory task of boiling breakfast in a plastic bag.

  It smelled like shit and looked a bit like corned-beef hash.

  The long night watch had given Remo time to think. He had already come to terms with Audrey Moreland's death, accepting it as one of those events no man can truly guard against, and none can change. He had been fond of Audrey, in a piggy sort of way, but there had been no prospect for an ongoing relationship, once Remo's mission was completed. And although Jean Rice and he clicked in a nice way, deep down he knew that a settled life was not for him—especially given his role in life that the fates threw his way. When he thought about it, Remo realized that he was something of a hermit, but he liked it that way.

  It was better than his first life, by a country mile.

  He would miss Audrey Moreland, in the sense that he had taken pleasure from her luscious body, giving pleasure in return, but that was transitory, like an itch, a sneeze. Their conversation had been limited, confined primarily to subjects that meant nothing to him outside the parameters of his assignment. Once the job was finished, Remo knew that it would be a rare occasion when he thought of her at all.

  That sounded cold, and so it was. It wasn't just because he was a professional assassin, part of a highly focused breed. As a matter of fact, Remo had his problems with that fact, problems that were ameliorated somewhat by the very cause CURE served—his native country, the home of the free. Beyond this, he knew his past life was gone, never to be resumed again. Then there was Sinanju, a way of life that had become his recipe for life, not something he could abandon for the comforts of a hearth—and the unthinkable, an ordinary job.

  Sinanju was the work, the work was all, and God help the idiot who tried to take that work away.

  He watched the shrunken team break camp, and noticed that they left two tents behind. His own and Audrey's.

  "We can pick them up on the way back," Pike Chalmers said. "Enough to carry as it is."

  "You're right, of course," Professor Stockwell said, despite a wistful parting glance at Audrey's pup tent.

  They were on the trail by half-past
seven, pushing hard. Kuching Kangar was still on point, with Chalmers next in line. The Brit had slung his Weatherby and kept the AK-47 in his hands, a liberated bandolier of extra magazines contributing more weight to his selected gear. Professor Stockwell was the third in line, and Sibu Sandakan had landed Remo's tail position by default. He seemed unhappy with the ranking, glancing frequently and fearfully over his shoulder, but he held a steady pace and didn't slow the party down.

  They had been marching for an hour, Remo hanging back some twenty yards, when he discovered they were being followed once again.

  He stopped dead in his tracks and closed his eyes, the other senses reaching out for any information they could gather. It was nil on the aroma, but his ears picked up a sound of someone moving through the jungle thirty-five or forty yards to Remo's right, due south. One person, by the sound of it, and he was taking care to limit the unnecessary noise.

  The stranger's path ran parallel to Stockwell's, eastbound, and there could be no coincidence in that. With all the jungle territory of Malaysia to go hiking in, the odds against an honest chance encounter in the Tasek Bera had to be immense. No, make that astronomical.

  He tried to guess who it might be—a lone guerrilla he had missed last night, perhaps, or someone who had picked up rumors of their mission in Dampar and trailed them out of curiosity… or greed. In fact, he knew that there was only one way to find out.

  He homed in on the sounds, still meager and sporadic but enough to put him on the stranger's track. Five minutes later, he was standing on another game trail, where his quarry must have been just seconds earlier.

  The man was gone.

  A tiny rustling in the undergrowth ahead, and Remo braced himself, prepared to spring. The momentary tension drained out through his feet, as something like a giant guinea pig broke cover and ran squeaking down the trail, away from him.

  The blow came out of nowhere, struck him square between the shoulder blades, and slammed him to the earth, facedown.

  Somewhere behind him, to his left, a dry voice said, "You must not let your guard down, even for a moment, if you wish to stay alive."

  It troubled Sibu Sandakan, the way that everything had suddenly gone wrong. He hadn't taken to this job from the beginning, didn't feel himself cut out for slogging through the jungle, but the past few hours had been a waking nightmare. The guerrillas bent on killing them, apparently succeeding with two members of the team, were bad enough. And now the old American, this "doctor" of old bones, insisted that they must go on with the charade. Pursuing dinosaurs, of all things, when their lives were certainly at risk!

  The others had predictably agreed with Dr. Stockwell, since he held the purse strings for the expedition and could seemingly increase their salaries at will. Pike Chalmers was a racist mercenary who, in Sandakan's opinion, would do anything for money, while the guide was just a simple peasant. He might earn a whole year's salary for this one expedition if he went along with Dr. Stockwell and pretended to believe in giant prehistoric lizards plodding through the jungle.

  Sibu Sandakan considered pulling rank and ordering the guide to turn around. He was a representative of the Ministry of the Interior, second deputy to the appointed minister, and as such he deserved respect. Unfortunately, peasants in the countryside were known for their indifference to authority. They failed to pay their taxes promptly—sometimes altogether—and were prone to settle arguments with violence. The last thing Sandakan desired, right now, was for an unwashed peasant to defy him while the Brit and the American looked on, amused by his discomfiture.

  In fact, he had already tried to summon help and scrub the expedition, last night when the bullets started flying. Huddled in his pup tent, braced for death at any moment, Sibu Sandakan had searched his pockets for the small transmitter that First Deputy Germuk Sayur had provided on the night before their party left K.L.—but it was gone.

  In panic, he had dumped the contents of his backpack, fingered each in turn and came up empty. There was simply no sign of the plastic box that was supposed to summon troops to his defense in an emergency.

  Where had it gone? He thought about the past three days, couldn't remember any single incident where he had fallen, dropped his gear or anything of that sort. Still, the small transmitter had been in the pocket of his trousers, close at hand. It could have fallen out when he withdrew a handkerchief to mop his sweaty face or wriggled free when they sat down to rest at some point on the trail. Its bulk and weight were insubstantial; he had barely noticed it five minutes after they were on the plane to Temerloh.

  The damned thing could be anywhere by now.

  Which meant that he was trapped with Stockwell, Chalmers and the guide. He could start back alone, as the professor mockingly suggested, but it would be suicide for him to strike off through the jungle on his own. He had no compass, and it would have made no difference if he did. A city boy at heart, he looked for landmarks in the form of street signs and familiar buildings. Sibu Sandakan could no more chart a safe course through the wilderness than he could build a rocket ship from scratch and fly it to the moon.

  Thus far, he thought he had concealed his mounting panic from the others fairly well. The argument in camp had been a test for him, and Sandakan had passed, not shouting once, and swallowing the tremor in his voice before the others could detect it They already thought of him as weak, but if they knew that he was terrified, it could become a different game entirely. Chalmers was a bully, and Sandakan would have no peace for the remainder of their journey.

  Which, if the guerrillas struck again, would not be long.

  He didn't grieve for the dead Americans, although the news would be embarrassing when it got back to the United States. His first consideration was potential damage to his own career resulting from his loss of the transmitter and whatever followed as a proximate result. Germuk Sayur and the men above him were expecting an alert if any member of the party found uranium, a dinosaur or any other object that the sitting government could seize and turn to profit for the state. Sandakan's own negligence had let them down—or would if there was anything to find in this forsaken hell on earth—and he couldn't expect the lapse to go unpunished.

  He would be disciplined, of course, but there were varying degrees of punishment in civil service. Flat dismissal was among the worst, accompanied by the humiliation of explaining to his friends and family why he was fired. Sandakan knew men who had committed suicide with lesser provocation, but he wouldn't feel like dying for a job already lost. With any luck, he might get off with a demotion, possibly a reprimand. It would depend on what came next, the expedition's course from that point on, and whether they actually found anything of interest.

  Before Germuk Sayur had a chance to punish him, however, Sandakan would have to make it back alive. And at the moment, he had no great confidence in his ability to manage that. No confidence at all.

  He knew that he must watch the others—Chalmers in particular—and be prepared to save himself at any cost. Guerrillas might turn out to be the least of it where they were going. Sibu Sandakan didn't believe the legends of Nagaq, but there were hungry predators aplenty in the wilderness, and any one of them might prize a second deputy for dinner.

  It would be different, he considered, if he were armed. Pike Chalmers held their only firearms, though, and he wasn't the sort to share his toys with "bloody wogs."

  If I get out of this alive, thought Sibu Sandakan, I'll see the bastard's visa canceled. Yes, indeed.

  But getting out alive would have to be the first priority.

  And it would take up every bit of concentration he could muster in the next few days.

  "You didn't have to hit me," Remo told Chiun as he was dusting off his clothes.

  "A simple touch," the Master of Sinanju said. "If you were properly alert, I could not have surprised you."

  "Some surprise," said Remo, blustering. "I heard you tramping through the forest like a water buffalo. You must be getting old."

  "I
let you hear me," Chiun responded, "and your impudence is unbecoming, even for a white man."

  "Impudence? You knocked me on my ass."

  "You fell upon your face," Chiun corrected him, "although I must admit the two are easily confused."

  "Oh, that's hilarious. I see you're doing stand-up comedy these days."

  "At least I manage to stand up."

  "So, what's the story? Did you travel all this way to get a few digs in?"

  "I am the Master of Sinanju, not a common miner. Is there something precious here that I should dig for it?"

  "Could be," said Remo, frowning as he flexed his shoulders, working out the pain that lingered from Chiun's "simple touch."

  "It is appropriate for an instructor to observe his student," Chiun remarked. "Your style leaves much to be desired."

  "You ought to see the other guys."

  "I have," Chiun replied. "Did you have difficulty killing them?"

  "Get real."

  "Then you have set yourself no challenge. In the early days of training, students learn from repetition of the simplest moves. A more advanced practitioner must test himself, seek new plateaus of knowledge and achievement, always learning."

  "You've been watching Sally Struthers."

  "Who?"

  "You want to learn a new trade? Sure, we all do."

  "You speak gibberish."

  "Forget it," Remo said. "What brings you all this way?"

  "A wish to supervise your mission. It occurred to me that you might not be totally prepared."

  "I couldn't have a better teacher than the Master of Sinanju," Remo said.

  "That much is obvious. The doubts lie not in my ability, but yours."

  "Oh, thank you very much."

  "Don't mention it. A master is expected to correct his pupil as the situation merits."

  "Besides, I already earned the right to be a future Reigning Master, remember? So what exactly have I done to make you doubt me, Little Father?"

  "Aside from simple negligence, there's nothing—yet." Chiun considered what he had to say for several seconds more before continuing. "I'm not convinced that you are ready to confront a dragon."