Assignment - Cong Hai Kill (17 page)

He felt as if he knew
this boat, here in the Thai jungle. It was like coming home again. His first lovemaking
had been with Thea, a Peche Rouge girl, who had lured him into the dark
boiler room and then stripped herself and then him in a long hour of passionate
exploration.

Those were years of
innocence, never to be repeated. . . .

And yet—

“Who owns this boat?” he
asked Papa Danat.

“I do. I once operated
it. But as I say, it was impossible to fix when she finally broke down. In any
case; it was merely a vanity, to own my own river steamer.”

“Is she beyond repair,
do you think?”

“I know nothing about
machinery,” Danat said.

Lantern had climbed
laboriously over the rail. “But I do, Papa. When it’s morning, I’ll have a
look.”

Durell met the man's
yellow stare. They were thinking along the same lines. If the road through the
swamp was impassable for the jeeps now, there remained only the river. The
enemy perhaps did not even suspect that the old boat existed. If they could
make a few quick repairs, load some log chips and cordwood for fuel, and make a
surprise descent down the river . . .

No, it was too wild a
hope. They would need a pilot, even if the old boilers didn’t blow up with the
first pounds of pressure in them. They needed stokers, laborers, tools. And it
had to be done quickly, too quickly for safety. There were surely traitors in
Dong Xo who would hurry into the jungle to tell the Cong Hai what the
Americans were doing. Muong’s small platoon could hardly hold off a
determined guerrilla raid.

Looking at Orris Lantern
limp down the vine-grown deck, he knew that the enemy would pay any price to
kill the renegade.

The whole scheme to use
this old boat was futile, impossible. But there was no other way out.

So the impossible would
have to be done.

                                  19

HE BEGAN reliving his
boyhood, and went over the machinery of the 
Trois
 
Belles
 inch
by inch, recalling the long hours of polishing the gleaming brass and nickel
parts. He felt he could not remember enough to help with Papa Danat’s boat.
He did not even know what was wrong, yet. It was too risky to use lights during
the night, so he had left Danat and Anna—Marie with Lantern, whose
face looked haggard with the pain of his wound and the knowledge of how he was
hunted.

Deirdre was waiting at
the government house where Muong had quartered them, and she, too,
looked strained and tense.

“Sam, darling, I feel so
useless here. Maybe you were right. Maybe I should have remained at the hotel,
down the river. Now you’ve even taken Anna-Marie from me, and I felt I was
being helpful there, anyway. What can I do now?”

He kissed her briefly.
“Nothing, for the moment.”

He felt a bone-weariness
that stunned his senses. Deirdre helped him off with his shirt and produced a
cool, wet cloth and sponged his head and chest. Her face was pale and calm, and
she had braided her rich, long black hair into a tight coronet to keep it out
of the way. But the day just passed showed its effect in tiny ways. Her inner
serenity was severely shaken, something he had never witnessed before.

“Sam, you’re perfectly
free to say, ‘I told you so,” she murmured. “I’m only in your way now, aren’t
I?”

“We still have a long
journey to make, Dee.”

“And you can’t think of
any way I can help?”

“You’re helping right
now, Dee.”

“Anyone could do this.
You’re tired, but—”

“Look,” he said. “We’re
boxed in badly here. It takes patience, and patience isn’t easy when you’re
looking at the jungle and wondering when they’ll come out after you. Because
they’ll be here, Dee, if We give them enough time.”

“Yes, Muong is
worried. Two of his men are gone. He doesn’t know if they were ambushed or if
they slipped into the jungle to go to the Congs.”

Durell frowned. “Nothing
will happen tonight, after the storm. And I don’t think they expected us to make
it here so soon. Maybe we’ll be all right through tomorrow.”

“But you‘re not sure?”

“I’m not sure of
anything in our business, Dee.”

“I know. I hate it. And
I know I asked for it, and I’m sorry, Sam, truly. I just want to do something
to help?”

She slept beside him,
and the humid heat made her toss restlessly on the makeshift pallet in the
fire-gutted room. Muong’s men patrolled the river and the village
perimeter. And some time toward dawn, when the roosters began to crow, Durell
finally slept, too. . . .

The jungle was quiet.

A morning mist veiled
the river and the marsh reeds where the herons rested on the far shore. Durell
found Muong hunkered down beside the jeep trail that led across the
swamp. The jeep had mired down a few feet behind him. The Thai’s eyes swept
slowly back and forth along the green curtain of vines. Muong was a
city man, and Bangkok, with its uproar and teeming millions, was home to him.
But Durell knew that Muong had trained himself to live in the
wilderness with the hill tribes. He wore shorts and no shirt, and his cropped
head was bare to the sunlight that filtered through the leafy forest roof with
green luminescence.

Sergeant Lao stood at Muong’s side.
The young Chinese was well-muscled, with the flat face and cheekbones of northern
Mongol people. His bland, almond eyes told Durell nothing when Durell asked:
“What do you think, Lao?”

“We cannot go this way,
sir.”

“And your radio?”

“The coast does not
reply. There is static.”

“Any suggestions, Muong?”
Durell asked.

Muong
 
sighed.
His chat, roped with surprising muscles, lifted evenly with his controlled
breathing. A bird cried somewhere in the swamp. He spoke with apparent
irrelevance.

“Did you know, Mr.
Durell, that when I was a boy in Bangkok, I wanted to be a professional boxer?”
He paused. “I trained in our Thai style, hand-and-foot, and became a good
boxer, Mr. Durell. My legs are still good.”

Durell was silent,
waiting.

“After my boxing career,
I went into a monastery for Buddhist studies. I wore the robe of a monk and
shaved my head and carried a beggar’s bowl for my food. I remember that year
with fondness.”

“And afterward?” Durell
asked, wondering what the Thai was leading up to.

“Yes, afterward, as I am
sure you know, the war came here, and the Japanese Imperial Army. I escaped
them and went to North China, where I listened to Mao Tse-tung’s lectures.
I thought of him as a great man. But they treated me with much contempt and put
me in prison.”

“But they let you go.”

Muong
 
might
have smiled. His eyes were dreamy, lost in the past. “True. They considered me
a safe convert.”

“And were you?”

“Perhaps. Even after I
married. Until I learned about my wife.”

“I didn’t know you were
married,” Durell said carefully.

“She was a doctor,
educated in England, and she preferred Western customs. She gave me peace. Our
children were small, golden miracles. But she went up-country some months ago,
to work in a village clinic in a town much like Dong Xo, here on the river. The
Cong Hai were just beginning then, filtering down the long, hot
jungle trails, down through Laos and along the Cambodian border nearby. They
did not spare my wife. They burned and killed and raped, and shouted the name
of their American leader, Yellow Torch. . . .”

Again Muong paused.
His eyes looked blind. “She was a gentle woman, a lovely creature. She died
horribly, in excruciating torment and violence.” He shivered, although the
morning air was already sultry and breathless. He turned his head slowly and
looked up at Durell. “I tell you this in the hope you will understand how I
feel about your renegade.”

“We made a deal,” Durell
said.

“Yes. And I will try to
keep the bargain.”

With the quiet
resilience of peasants everywhere, the villagers of Dong Xo came back to life.
Chickens ran under the stilted houses, a few pigs rooted in the mud along the
riverbank, the women gathered what rice had been left by the raiders, and the
morning meal was over. A few shops that still had supplies were open, but the
Chinese merchants stayed in the shadows. A new headman, the son of the murdered
chief, was chosen, and he distributed arms to whatever middle-aged men had
escaped the guerrilla conscription. They augmented Muong’s thin
patrol around the village limits.

In the lagoon, the heat
gathered as if in a cooking bowl, concentrating on the fetid water and the
green growth that wreathed the 
Dong Xo Lady
. Durell set some of the
women to work with knives and axes, cutting away the tough vines that had grown
up along the rails and cabins of the litfle steamer. Smoke rose in
the hills that soared on either side of the valley, and Papa Danat wanted
to go back to his plantation when he saw it.

“You can’t leave,”
Durell told him. “The Congs just want to lure you back.”

“But I-they have no
quarrel with me."

“You think not? You’re
white and French, so you’re a Western imperialist exploiter. Don’t you read
their comic-book propaganda?”

“But all my life I have
been friends with everyone here. And I see my life going up in flames there.”

Durell
wondered it the Frenchman was being deliberately ingenuous. You know
the Cong Hai aren‘t locals. They’d like to treat you as they treated
Uncle Chang.”

“Speaking of Chang—if
you do not permit me to go, may I send Paio up there?”

“They’d do the same to Paio,
wouldn’t they?”

“I suppose.”

Durell smiled thinly.
“In any case, I doubt it Paio is is to go. Where is he, by
the way?”

“He is helping the
villagers to clean up.”

"Good. Leave him to
it. You stay here and keep the old men at work.”

He had gathered a dozen
villagers into wood-cutting squads, and had them chopping deadfall branches
into cordwood for fuel, working in a thin, sweaty line of burdened men.
Watching them, he wondered if he were being too optimistic.

He had spent two hours
crawling over the 
Dong Xo Lady
, and he still did not know if her
engines could be made to turn over, or even if she would stay afloat, once
subjected to the stresses of the river current. He had waded knee-deep in mud,
hacking at vines in the narrow channel to the river, ordering the old men to
clear a path to the main stream. It was not easy work. The heat was staggering.
But he led the way and showed what had to be done, and by noon he returned to
the old stone platform of the ruined temple beside the boat. Deirdre met him
there.

“Oh, Sam.” She could not
hide her dismay at the mud on his torn clothing and the scratches on his face.
There was a darkness in his eyes she had never seen before.

“Sam, you’ll kill
yourself. This old wreck won’t even float.”

“She’s our only chance
to get out of here. And if we have to pole her downstream, we will.”

“And suppose the Congs are
waiting for us down there?”

“I’ve told Muong to
take his .50-calibers off the jeeps and mount them on the boiler deck.”

She knelt to scrape the
mud from his thighs and used a cigarette on the leeches at his ankles. There
was mud on her cheek, and she wore a straw coolie hat. Beside them, the
caryatids of monkeys on the temple wall grinned at the world.

“You ought to rest a
bit, darling. It’s cooler inside the ruin.”

“There’s no time. The
Cong Hai won’t wait. They must know we’re here now, and that we’ve
got Yellow Torch. Where is Orris?”

“In the engine room.”

Anger touched him. “He
was told to stay out of sight, in his cabin. He’ll be recognized.”

“But he insisted he
could help.”

Durell swore and ran to
where the old steamer was docked. The villagers made way for him, watching with
round eyes as he swung aboard and made his way below.

Again he was struck by a
sense of 
déja
 
vu
. In design of main, boiler, and
hurricane decks, the 
Lady
 was a miniature edition of the 
Trois
 
Belles
.
She might have been designed for some Thai prince as an amusing model of a
Mississippi paddlewheeler. He felt carried back to those days in the hot
bayous and his chores at dusting the elaborate Victorian salons and polishing
brass and the great twin drive shafts of the old vessel. The 
Dong Xo
Lady
 had lost her former opulence, but he knew his way blindfolded
around the aft engine room and boilers and down to the shallow hold.

Two peasant boys who had
escaped the Congs were working in the indescribable heat and gloom,
stripped to simple loincloths. As Durell dropped down the rusted ladder into
the darkened pit, Anna—Marie stepped in his way.