Assignment - Cong Hai Kill (13 page)

The heat was the worst
of it, aside from insects and leeches. When they stopped in a tiny glade where
the river glinted like dull steel through the foliage, Durell helped Deirdre
and Anna-Marie down. The Thai soldiers, small stocky men, were ordinarily
voluble and cheerful; but now their eyes slid right and left to cover the
jungle, and they ate their meal of cold rice and beans in silence.

Anna-Marie said thinly:
“I have never seen things like this here, before. The whole countryside is so
silent. No buffalo carts, no work elephants, no people. There will be war here
soon?”

“It’s begun already,”
Durell said grimly. “But maybe we can stop it before it really gets started.”

“Yes. Yes, I see. That
is your true job.” She was silent a moment. “And if Orris comes and
surrenders to you—”

“Then he’ll be all
right. Provided this whole thing hasn’t been a cute trick he’s playing on us.”

“No,” she said quickly.
“Orris wants to surrender. He feels very deeply to go home, but he expects
to be treated with—with contempt. But he is willing to pay such a price.”

“I wonder why?” Durell
asked softly.

She did not reply. And
after ten minutes, the little column of soldiers and jeeps pressed on again.

At a second halt late
that afternoon, Muong squatted beside Durell and drew a sketchy map
of the terrain ahead. White ants began to march toward them across the forest
floor.

“The river bends here,
like this.” He drew a loop with his finger. “The road divides ahead. The left
fork serves the riverbank villages, but we will find no people there now. We
should have met many people by now. But we see no one.” Muong shrugged.
“They hide in the jungle. The terror has come, and they leave their homes and
shops and paddies. We will take the right fork. It saves six miles, but it goes
through a most difficult swamp. I do not think the Cong Hai expects
us to go into this swamp, so we should take it. But the road is not good.”

“The sooner we get on,
the better.”

“When we come to the
river again, we will be at Dong Xo,” Muong went on. “Pierre Danat has
run things there commercially for thirty years. If Yellow Torch hides anywhere,
hoping we come for him, this will be the place. But we may be too late. Surely
you must have considered that his intention to re-defect may have been
discovered by the Cong Hai.”

“It’s been in my mind.
It could be the reason for Uncle Chang’s death.”

“Yes, And perhaps they
have killed Lantern, too.”

Durell said: “Don’t tell
that to Anna-Marie.”

The trail vanished.

It had not been used for
some time, as Durell discovered when he went ahead with two Thai trackers.
Jungle creepers and vines had seized the chance to reclaim the slender path
hacked through the viscera of the swamp, and only a few felled logs marked
where the track had been.

Muong
 
halted
an hour before dusk. The light was still the same undersea green.

“The men are afraid to
go on,” Muong said impassively.

“They are not cowards,
but they have superstitions. They say we enter a land of the dead. We have seen
no living thing for the past hour.”

“Can we follow the
trail?”

“We must build a bridge.
The swamp has washed out the embankment. It will use up the rest of the
daylight.”

“Major, you know we
can’t retreat now.”

“It is your
responsibility, Mr. Durell. The ladies—”

“We got ahead.”

“But there is nothing
ahead.”

“If we determine that,
then we’ll turn back.”

They had to burn off
leeches from their legs and waists. It was not easy for the two girls. They had
not complained of heat, mud, insects, or the miasmic silence. But Deirdre was
pale as Durell loosened her shirt and revealed the girdle of loathsome
parasites attached to her smooth skin. He lit a cigarette and began burning
them off.

“Sam, I can’t—”

“Be still.” '

“How can you be so calm
and sure of everything?”

“I have to be. And keep
your voice down. The Cong Hai know how to Live in this environment.
If we’re to stop them, it has to be here. They’ve built up a chain of fortress
areas in these swamps, and we’ve got to give the Thai military the locations so
they can be cleaned out—burned out like these leeches. And Orris Lantern
has those maps for us.”

“It will take an army .
. .” she whispered.

He was silent, and she
checked herself and bit her lip as he finished with the leeches. “I’m sorry,
Sam. But aren’t you afraid, at all?”

He grinned. “I’m scared
witless. And when you’re like that, there’s nothing to do but go ahead.”

Anna-Marie Danat was
better acquainted with leeches than Deirdre. Her manner was contained as Durell
checked the growth of slugs attached to the swell of her hips and burned the
odious creatures off with a second cigarette. She did not speak to him.

The soldiers finished
their rough log bridge and the three jeeps forged ahead. The laboring engines wakened
extraordinary echoes in the silent, graying jungle. But the road was better
now. They passed several rice paddies, and a few native houses built of 
pluang
 leaves.
No one answered their calls. Cooking fires still burned in The iron stoves in
the huts. A few chickens scratched under the houses; a pig rooted in a tiny
garden. But there was no one in sight.

“There is the river,” Muong said
at last. “And there is what is left of Dong Xo.”

                                  15

THE DUSKY air smelled of
death.

They came out of the
swamp abruptly, as if a curtain were raised before their eyes. It took a moment
to focus on the open sweep of river, the narrow gash of a dark green valley,
the terraced hills, the glimmer of a temple ruin catching the last rays of the
venomous sun.

Dong Xo was like the
other river towns, a series of houses built on stilts, several teak godowns,
one large warehouse with a corrugated tin roof and open sides. Muong signaled
the patrol to halt a hundred yards from the first dirt street. Nothing stirred.
There was no wind. Overhead, the green sky turned briefly copper, then began to
fade to velvety purple. Major Muong looked for a long time, squatting
on the mulch beside the first jeep. He turned his round head toward Durell.

“They were here. They
fired the government rest house.” He pointed to a cinderblock, graceless
structure by the river’s edge, blackened and roofless. “They may still be here,
waiting for us.”

“And the people?”

“Dead. Or hiding in the
jungle.”

But as Muong spoke,
they heard a baby cry. Then a dog barked, a sound quickly stifled. But the baby
still one .

Deirdre said: “There he
is. A little boy, sitting in the street. Up there.”

She started forward, and
Durell caught her arm angrily.

“Stay with the jeep.”

“But he’s been hurt—his
arm is broken—”

“It could be a lure.
Stay with Anna-Marie.”

Muong
 
nodded
and they eased forward. Muong called out in Thai as he advanced, his
pistol raised. Durell wondered at the man’s bravery. Was he really without
fear, or did he know he would be recognized by the Cong Hai and
allowed to proceed, to lead the others to slaughter? He could not suppress his
suspicions.

The town of Dong Xo had
been shelled and gutted with the torch. Fishing boats had been burned and
smashed along the water’s edge. Houses had been fired all along the outer
fringe of the community. But now Durell watched three blue herons sweep low
over the river, over the narrow valley between the darkening hills. He overtook
Major Muong and walked quietly beside the Thai.

When they were fifty
yards from the baby who cried in the empty street, a woman suddenly darted from
a nearby shop and snatched up the child with a swift gesture and tried to
Vanish again. Muong called to her and she turned her head, and looked
for a long moment at the jeeps and the muddy soldiers. Her brown face worked
pathetically as she clutched the injured baby in her arms. Muong called
to her again. She turned to the shop and spoke to someone inside, and an old,
old man stepped into view from the shattered doorway. He wore the usual black
pajamas and a coolie hat. His face was aged but smooth, and his thick white
beard was handsome. He spoke to the woman and then waited for Muong.

“If he speaks French,”
Durell suggested, “ask him where everyone is. Ask him what happened here.”

Slowly, like stunned
animals crawling from their holes, people appeared in the wreckage of the village.
Their eyes were black with tragedy. Some of the houses still smoldered from the
fires. The smell of burning and death was rancid in the evening air.

Durell watched the three
herons fly back and land in the shallow reeds across the river. He did not think
any of the Cong Hai were hidden there.

While he listened to the
old man, he kept watch on the houses and the wreckage along the riverbank. He
could not see the other end of the town, which stretched in a long string of
houses between the riverbank and the steep jungle hills that closed in the river
valley.

The old man led them to
the village square while he identified himself as the father of the village
headman. In the square they found his son. He had been tied up by the thumbs
and disemboweled; his head was thrown back, his eyes were open, and lines of
agony were etched on his dead face. His tongue was bitten through and his open
mouth was alive with black flies. Next to him, his wife hung jaggedly, tied
between two upright stakes, with every bone in her body methodically broken.
Four other men, in grotesque caricatures, were impaled on stakes at each corner
of the square.

The Cong Hai, said
the old man, came in launches down from the mountains at the head of the river.

“Then they came from
Cambodia,” Durell said grimly.

“The villagers are certain
of that.” Muong shrugged. “But no man here is sure of where the
border is. The trails are few and faint. If the Viet Cong can move troops from
Hanoi down the Laos trails into the Mekong Delta, surely the Cong Hai can
cross the peninsula in the same Way. We must not drag Cambodia into this
affair—just yet.”

“All right. Tell the old
man to go on.”

It was a tale told too
many times in South Vietnam, of villages suddenly surrounded by
well-disciplined Communist troops, led by political commissars and Chinese
advisors and officers from General Giap’s training center near Hanoi.
The guerrillas had asked for the headman and then taken him to the government
house for questioning. No one knew what the Cong Hai wanted. They
heard the headman scream and then the executions began. All the young men of
military age were rounded up and led away for service with the Cong Hai.
Some of the young women were taken, too. All weapons had been seized. Rice was
confiscated and taken into the launches. Then the village was fired with
gasoline bombs and the Cong Hai got on their rafts and boats with
their unwilling recruits and went downstream. It had all happened about noon of
that day.

“Did the Cong Hai raid
the planters up in the hills?” Durell asked. “Are any tea farms burned out?”

The old man tugged at
his white beard. “No. They spoke against the Frenchman, as they always do,
trying to pit color against color. They make it a holy war of race, as well as
of communism against capitalist imperialism.” The old man paused. “Wait. I will
show you.”

He turned back into his
gutted shop, which had once sold fish and river eels, and handed Durell cartoon
books filled with venomous ideology. “They leave this for us to read and
memorize, and say they will come back to see if we have learned our lessons
properly so we can help the People’s Republic Liberation Army.”

“Have you heard anything
about Pierre Danat‘?”

The old man nodded and
was nervously silent for a moment. Something had changed in his black eyes.
“M’sieu Danat is in his house, at the end of that street.” He pointed
toward the riverfront. “No one harmed him.”

Durell told Deirdre to
keep Anna-Marie with the Thai troopers. He suspected it might be a trap for
himself, and went alone toward the house on the riverbank.

The villagers were
emerging from their hiding places now, with the quiet, stunned look of all
civilian bystanders caught up in the brutality of war. A few kerosene lamps
were lighted against the murky evening. The sky was filled with brilliant lemon
that faded quickly, yielding to a steamy darkness that lifted from the sluggish
river. In the dim light, Durell could still see the tall-legged herons in the
marsh grass across the stream. It seemed to be all right.

The house the old man
pointed out was larger than most, beyond a row of wooden godowns along the
steamer dock. Durell wondered if any boats would come up here again soon. He
doubted it. And he wondered how, even if he were successful, he could get back
to the coast. It would not be the same as getting here—and that had not been
easy.