Assignment - Manchurian Doll (17 page)

She frowned slightly. Her gray eyes were clouded. “I think so. I remember seeing a light, once, when dusk came.”

“All right,” he said. He stood up. “Well know very soon. In an hour, perhaps, Nadja.”

“My name is Natalie,” she said.

Tagashi was satisfied that everything that could be done was completed. The crewmen, each a picked expert in his line, had heightened the two steel masts that supported the trawl gear over the ice hatches by twelve feet, with the simple addition of prefabricated spars. A bright yellow stripe had been painted along the
Okiku's
sides during the day, from the sharp bow to the rakish stem. The vessel’s painted name and home port were hidden by new plates bolted into place in holes that had been covered by false rivet heads. Now the
Okiku
looked like a vessel of Siberian design, working out of Vladivostok. Nothing could be done to change the sleek lines of her Japanese bow, but the Russian trawlers were not too different. A small cabin was rigged from prefabricated sides hauled up out of the hold and placed on the foredeck, further altering her silhouette. It would take a close examination to identify her as the dragger that had left Miyako over 24 hours ago.

The first strong blast of wind came as complete darkness fell.

Tagashi did not like the sea. His brother Yugi, a colonel in the Imperial Army, had sailed away on a transport to campaign in Burma, and had never returned. Tagashi had searched the records, using the privileges of his wartime position, for a hint of his brother’s fate; but Yugi, a philosopher more than a soldier, was simply listed as missing. He wondered often if his brother were still alive somewhere in the jungles down there.

Tides of change swept the world, and the enemy of yesterday was today’s ally. It was not Tagashi’s business to question the policies of the new government. Nippon could never go back to the rigid caste system of authority of the old days. The aristocracy was dead, reduced to mercantile enterprises; the way of the warrior was equally dead.

Tagashi expected to die. He did not know how Durell, the

American, felt about this operation. For himself, he could not see how he could survive.

He was familiar with death; he had been an intimate of death throughout his professional career in the kempei-tei, and he was not afraid. He had done all that could be done. But the sea, with its rise and fall, its turbulence, and the hot wind all reminded him of the day Japan lost the war.

He had a dream that plagued him, and the sea always brought back to reality that day aboard the police cutter, when he went with his fellow members of the
kempei-tei
unit to bum their records. Heaven itself, that day, had fallen in wrath to erase the foundations by which all men governed their lives. The sea and sky were peculiarly white, matching the white ceremonial robes of his friends. They faced each other in two silent rows that night, drinking tea, their shaved heads bowed in submission to their inevitable decision. The war was over. They had vowed not to survive it. The new world ahead was intolerable, without honor, without duty to the Emperor and the Empire. Nippon was defeated, and guilt lay upon that double row of men who faced each other with their ceremonial knives glittering on the mat between them.

The whiteness of their robes was like the unnatural whiteness of sea and sky on their small boat, blending with the foam of the sea, and the sounds—ah, the sounds, Tagashi thought, the hiss of foam and the hiss of the knives cutting through skin and muscle, flesh and intestine, in the approved ritual arc. . . .

He alone had not killed himself with the others.

His orders had been to survive, to direct the rebuilding of a new police organization, to cooperate with the conquerors and to live for the new Japan.

It had not been easy.

Not since that day had he been at sea, and there lingered in him a certain dread, a certainty that the ghosts of his companions who had died in honor would wait for just such a moment as this, to rise up from the sea and claim him a second time, as he had sworn to join them at first—

He awoke in his cabin, shuddering, covered with sweat. Durell sat on the other bunk of the tiny compartment, watching him. The curtains were blacked out, and Durell’s face was harsh and lean in the yellow lamplight.

“You were dreaming, Tagashi-san,” he said quietly.

Tagashi wiped a hand over his mouth; his mustache felt prickly and there was sweat on his chin. “Yes.”

“Not a pleasant dream,” Durell said.

“It happens now and then. Memories from the war—”

“I understand.”

“Did I disturb you?”

“No. It’s all right, Tagashi.”

“One did many things during the war that were not to one’s taste. But we obeyed. We wished to obey. All my friends of those days are dead now. They died just after the war. They killed themselves.”

“And you did not,” Durell said flatly.

“I had my honor, but I had my orders, too. Even in the ashes of the old way, orders had to be obeyed. I saw them all die, and then I left them on the boat and came back ashore to meet your soldiers and sailors who were landing. All Japan was obedient that day, according to what each man and woman was told to do.”

“I understand. It’s all right, Tagashi.”

Tagashi said: “It will never be all right for me.”

Durell stood up.

“We are near the shore.”

The smell of land was in the dark, windy air. The night felt close and heavy and thick. The big trawler lifted and fell as it slowed and became more restless in the huge, silent swells that pushed rhythmically northward from the center of cyclonic disturbance. A few drops of rain fell. From off the port bow came the sudden blinking of a signal light, bright in the darkness.

A stabbing beam of light stabbed toward them and Durell looked beyond the glare to the sleek hunting shape of a coastal patrol cutter. A signal light blinked and winked. One of Tagashi’s men replied, using Omaru’s code book. Above the sound of the sea and the wind came the growl of the patrol boat as it came closer. The signals blinked again. Again the
Okiku
replied. Rain blotted out the shape of the other boat.

They could not see the land, but they could feel the pressure of its mass through the stormy night. They went on, probingly, and the patrol boat fell astern and disappeared. Now a few land lights appeared through the tattered curtains of rain, some steady, some winking and uncertain. There was a mine field at the mouth of the river where the village of Ospesko huddled between sea and mountain. For long minutes they sweated over the charts taken from Omaru. The mines might or might not have been there. None were sighted.

The rain came and went. Now the village lights were bright and distinct, pinpoints through the dark night, and the loom of the land was a blacker cloud on the night horizon. Durell stood with Nadja beside the little rubber boat. He thought he heard the growl of the patrol boat following in their wake toward the harbor, but the wind made all sounds uncertain.

The weather favored them, he thought, by obscuring them, and at the same time exposed them to more intent scrutiny in any radar screens that might have picked them up, since few small boats would venture out in the face of the storm warnings. They were all the more conspicuous for it.

Tagashi chose a sudden squall that struck at them from the south in which to change course and head for the beach Nadja had described. The squall would obscure the radar-scopes that might have picked them up and perhaps permit them to lose themselves entirely under the height of the land.

The deck heaved and pitched underfoot, and seas began to break over the prow. The rubber boat was lowered in absolute darkness, held by a line in Tagashi’s taut hand. Nadja hesitated at the rail beside Durell, then dropped over the side into the rubber dinghy at his nod. He followed a moment afterward.

Rain slashed at his face as he looked up at the trawler’s hull. Tagashi and the other crew-members were dim blurs above them. The rubber boat heaved and bounced in the unruly water. Tagashi made a signal and Durell shoved away with the oar and they were free, swinging and bobbing toward the blackness of the shore.

It was not completely black. Between the momentary deluges of warm rain, he could see the dim shape of the river mouth, a low slash in the high ridge of barren mountains running north and south along the coast. The lights of Ospesko glittered fitfully in that direction. He dug the paddle in hard, fighting the pull of uncertain tides and currents. In less than a minute, the
Okiku
was blotted from sight.

Rain fell from the night sky in a warm trickle as Durell hauled the rubber boat up on the beach. The waters of the little cove were calm, but surf thundered at each rocky arm that sheltered it. He had paddled for half an hour, fighting unfamiliar tides and the current of the river. For part of the time he had been able to guide himself by the village lights on the river bank. Then a further light to the south served as a beacon for him. Nadja had taken the paddle a few times, to adjust their course. Behind them, the
Okiku
was almost immediately blotted from sight.

There were tumbled boulders on the beach, and Durell dragged the rubber dinghy behind one and paused to rest. There was little to be seen in the darkness. Towering cliffs loomed ahead, and they seemed to be at the bottom of a deep pit scooped out of the shore. The wind thrashed against the scrubby brush that grew at the inland edge of the sand.

But he did not feel as if they were alone.

Nadja stood beside him, alert and watchful.

“It
smells
familiar,” she murmured.

“Is this where you used to swim?”

“I think so. But it is too dark to be certain. Yet it must be the same place. Papa and I used to fish in the river—” she gestured northward—“where there are marshes and salt ponds. It’s the same smell, even here.”

“We’re only a mile or so from the river mouth,” Durell said.

The girl shivered. “It feels lonely.”

“Not lonely enough, I’m afraid,” he said grimly.

She turned her head, and her face was a pale oval, questioning him. “What is it?”

“We must assume we’re being watched,” he said.

“Do you think Omaru—?”

“We must assume the worst.” He shrugged. “We’ll go on as if we think we’re safe and unexpected.”

“I don’t like that.”

“Neither do I,” he said, and grinned.

She led the way. There was a path that twisted up the cliffside above the beach. The path was in good condition, packed hard and buttressed by sunken logs to prevent washouts. Nadja held his hand as they climbed upward. In a matter of minutes, they stood on a flat, wooded area where the path became a wagon track, the deep ruts cutting across a stubbly field toward a woods. Nadja did not hesitate. She followed the wagon tracks and presently he saw a coolie farmer’s hut at the edge of the trees. A dim oil lamp inside seemed very bright in the window, in contrast to the rainy night.

“Be careful,” Nadja whispered. “There used to be dogs.” Durell had a knife as well as his gun. He took the blade out and held it ready as they passed the small hut. But no dogs came yelping after them to arouse the night. They followed the path for several hurried, anxious moments. “Wait,” Durell said.

The girl stopped immediately. Barbed wire glinted across their path, strung along the shoulders of a military road that paralleled the shore. There was a gateway of wire barring the wagon road where it joined the asphalt highway, and beyond it stretched long, glinting rice paddies. The wind made dark ripples on the watered fields. The rain stopped at that moment, lifting the visibility.

“There was no fence here before,” Nadja whispered. “Of course, it was ten years ago, and the fields are bigger. It’s changed. The town is to our right. You can see the glow of lights. Papa and I came here in the truck, from the other way. I’d forgotten how it was. But seeing it again is bringing it back. We always came from the south, though.”

“How long a trip was it from the mission?”

“Not long. Fifteen minutes, perhaps.”

“Is it too far to walk?”

“I think not.”

The fence was not electrified, and he held the barbed strands apart as she slipped through, and then she did the same for him. Her movements were quick and silent. She was well trained, he thought, but he sensed an unnatural tension in her that might prove calamitous if it built up much more.

They were in the middle of the road when the truck came around the bend.

The wind covered the sound of its engine until the last moment, and Durell’s first warning was the sudden, lifting glare of its headlights. Afterward, he wondered if the vehicle had been coasting silently down the slight grade, and if the lights had just been snapped on. But there was no time to think about it. He shoved Nadja hard, and dived for the ditch on the opposite side of the road. The roar of the truck engine shook the air, but it was not going fast. It seemed to slow down as it passed the gateway in the barbed wire fence. The headlights flooded the rice paddies with their glare. He heard the sound of singing, and glimpsed the packed figures of uniformed Chinese troops in the open, stake-bodied vehicle. There were at least twenty of them, all armed with automatic rifles. Durell hugged the wet, rank earth. Nadja huddled beside him in the irrigation ditch, which fortunately contained little water at the moment.

The truck passed.

Durell stood up. The girl moved more slowly.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go on.”

They followed the military road on an upgrade for thirty minutes. Twice they had to dive for the ditches as other military vehicles roared by. One was a motorcycle, another an armored car. Durell could not shake off the feeling they were being carefully watched. Yet he could not pinpoint anything specific. In the darkness, he did not think they could be seen. Both he and Nadja wore dark clothing, and kept well to the shadows. By ten o’clock, they came in sight of the ruins.

First there was a small cluster of farmers’ huts, most of them dark. Dogs barked at them, but none came near— apparently there was enough military traffic on the road to dull their alarm at passersby. They circled the tiny hamlet by crossing the rice paddies on the dikes, and then followed an old stone wall that was higher than Durell’s head, climbing uphill to the summit where the ruins brooded. There were terraced orchards here, thick with fallen, wet leaves. The rain did not start again, but the warm wind blew harder.