Assignment - Cong Hai Kill (12 page)

Some of them were
bodies. Headless human trunks, mostly men, some women, some children. They were
twisted indiscriminately in the jungle trash that the river was taking to the
sea. He began to count the corpses, but when he passed twenty, he decided the
numbers were of no importance. There they were; and then they were gone. He
heard quick, padding footsteps on the bridge overhead, and he knew the captain
would be down soon to tell him what he, too, had seen.

They were too late.

Now it had begun, coming
out of the darkness of the jungle. Muong trembled with his outrage
and hatred.

“Lao?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you think Durell
knows about the Grass Basket?”

“His inquiry went
through. The merchant in Ho Bin Minh Road, the Portuguese Enrico Rey, will give
him an answer. We know Enrico Rey works for K Section.”

"True."

“One cannot hide the
past forever, Major.”

“Better if it could be
buried or burned or torn from  the pages of the cycles of these
times.”

“You did what you
could.”

“It was not enough.”

He knew that Lao, the
young Chinese, would gladly die for him. Death was not important, for Lao had
been there with his brothers and sisters, his father and his mother, and they
were all gone but Lao, their graves unknown, their bodies mingled with the slime
of all the other slaughtered bodies in the eastern jungles. Muong had
picked him up, a frightened boy, dying, and had carried him on his back along
the forest trails, far up in the highlands, and nursed him and fed him and
tended the savage wound on Lao’s chest that had convinced the Cong executioners
that the boy was dead with the others. It was a long time ago, in Lao’s life;
but only a short time for Muong. The larger part of Muong’s life
had been spent in the Grass Basket at Peiping.

He was released as a
Communist, an infiltrator, a member of the cadre to teach, train, and
indoctrinate others. It had not been easy to fool them. They were so clever. So
persistent. So ruthless.

But they had turned him
loose, in his native land, a year ago, and the government had put him back in
his old job with internal security.

How easy it really was
to subvert, terrorize, and confuse, to shout slogans and manipulate mobs!

An intricate history had
been created for him, some in Peiping, the rest in Hanoi. There were people in
Hong Kong and Manila who would swear that T.M.K. Muong had lived with
them all those years. His dossiers were impeccable, on both sides. And it was a
fact that neither side knew his true and secret thoughts. None knew of his
hatred.

Except Orris Lantern,
the American renegade.

Yellow Torch would know
him when they met. And everything would end, then.

Muong
 
knew
that Durell would obey orders and try to keep Lantern alive.

It must not happen.
Whatever Lantern’s motives or usefulness, the renegade must die.

Lao would see to it.

Durell saw the bodies
floating in the river, like smooth brown logs twisted in the brush that drifted
with them. He, too, began to count them, and then gave up. He heard the captain
descend to Muong’s cabin soon afterward. But no one came to tell him
about it.

No matter.

On the morning they
started upriver, the reply came to his request for a more complete dossier on
Major Muong. It confirmed his suspicions. In his business, you often did
better with a team than alone; it was General McFee’s despair that
Durell preferred to depend on himself rather than on the mixed decisions of a
team. He felt safer that way. He trusted his own judgment. Even his own
hunches.

He had known from the
start that Muong was a real problem. But he hadn‘t expected Muong to
turn out to have been a cell-mate of Orris Lantern’s, up there in
Peiping.

The convoluted pattern
still wasn’t clear. He only knew he was alone now, except for Deirdre. He
hadn’t slept much this last night on the river steamer. He could not and must
not devote his time and energy to worrying over Deirdre’s safety. She was his
working partner here, and nothing more.

But he could not
convince himself of this.

The riverboat was the
same that had come downstream with the body of Uncle Chang. The diesel engine
thumped and its cabins shook. The decks teemed with goods for the up-country
villages and plantations and the ordinary passengers, Thais and Malays with
straw, conical hats and bundles of possessions on bamboo poles, sleeping in an untidy
sprawl of thin brown bodies in the open of the decks. They looked like the
victims of a machine-gun attack. If anyone among them saw the mutilated bodies
float by, no one gave the alarm. Only one old woman in black pajamas, starting
a charcoal breakfast fire on a tin’ pan, looked at the lumpy objects in the
dawn light and turned away.

Durell had insisted that
Deirdre and Anna-Marie keep their stateroom door open across the corridor. He
could see the girls asleep on their pallets in the cool air of dawn. As the sun
lifted in a few minutes and struck the boat’s timbers, it would be unbearable
in there. Let them sleep, he thought But he would have to tell Dee about the
bodies.

The steamer began to
turn in at a river town at the confluence of the river and another stream that
swept down from the distant Cardamomes. The mountains were well over the
border into Cambodia. From this valley junction, the steamer’s route went for
another twenty miles to Dong Xo.

Durell went up on deck.
The jungle looked like fields of steaming cauliflower. There were winding
valleys of thong trees, with their bushy tops, and endless ridges, and the sky
blazed green and copper. You could feel the rise of breathless heat and the
damp of wet moss and creepers, and smell the mud and rotting vegetation. The
sun became a hanging, palpitating brightness, a dizzy disc of white-hot energy,
which burned in an ecstasy of exalted fervor and stunning force that would soon
demand complete surrender or death.

Durell turned to
consider the river junction. He saw some Thai troopers on the dock, waiting for
them, and a few jeeps. The waterfront was ominously quiet. Instead of the usual
confusion of sampans piled high with fruit and merchandise, there was utter
stillness. The soldiers were staring across the wide river at a high red stone
cliff beyond the junction where the second stream tumbled into the main river.
Jungle masked the top of the cliff, but Durell thought he saw metal glint
briefly as the steamer swung toward the landing.

A Buddhist monk was
arguing with two soldiers on the dock, pointing first across the river, then at
the steamer.

Durell felt a quick
alarm.

They were almost at the
dock when the mortars fired.

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.