Assignment - Sulu Sea (23 page)

Willi looked at Durell with round eyes. “That’s it, of
course. Camouflage. There must be an acre of it over there, just below Ch’ing’s
castle.”

Durell nodded to Malachy. “I think we’ll find what’s
left of the Jackson and her crew under that netting. Let’s go.”

The storm helped again. Between the wild, irrational blasts of
wind, they made rapid progress into the outskirts of the little town. The power
went out in the station at the mouth of the river, and the big floodlights on
the pier went black for some moments before an auxiliary diesel plant went into
operation. The chugging beat of the generating engine filled the air in
the silences between the wind. The floodlights were not as bright as before;
their lenses flickered, and there were shadows along the tin-roofed sheds
that had not been there before.

The freighter flew no flag, but she looked low
and clumsy, an old Clyde-side merchantman half a century old. She was fitted
with big holds, and the hatches were open to receive buckets of tin ore that
streamed from the swinging booms. There was time, too, to glimpse the crates of
cargo being trucked with desperate haste onto the pier. Then the wind struck
again, and everyone in the raiding party clung to the earth and anything solid
they could grasp.

Once more the air was filled with sound, and the hot wind
was like a giant scoop that tried to pluck them from the ground. Out of the
black night came whirling branches, mats, small animals, chickens. Willi lay
between Durell and Malachy, and both men helped to pin her down from the reach
of the storm. It was as if some giant, frustrated monster smashed and thrashed
about, seeking them as victims. A few thin screams from the town reached
Durell. The work on the pier halted when a long, high swell surged in past the
little harbor mole and lifted the freighter a full eight feet up and then
dropped her into the mud of the bottom. The wave battered its way on through
the village, piling up a solid wall of smashed huts, shattered trees and lumber
and broken furniture, with here and there a human body.

Then there was another respite, and a hot maw of dark silence
swallowed everything. The quiet lasted only a few moments, and then the feeble
shouts of the overseers on the splintered pier could be heard, urging the Hakka
workers back to their labor.

The crates on the dock interested Durell. He guessed they contained
some vital ingredients off the
Andrew
Jackson
, but he had to leave them for the moment. The sub’s crew had to be
released, and he decided the prison compound must be under the camouflage
netting, too. It explained why none of the installations had ever been spotted
from the air. He told Malachy his plan.

“But Ch’ing won‘t just let us walk in, Samuel.”

“Ch’ing has other troubles, at the moment.”

The next gust and tidal wave, with the thrashing clatter of
debris flying through the night, covered their advance. None of the
kampong
people, seeing Fong and his
armed men, gave an alarm. A graded road led around the littered harbor, away
from the floodlighted pier. The loading operation was suspended again.
Some of the freighter’s officers had run down onto the pier, and a.
bull-horn bellowed orders in Chinese from the bridge. Normal seamanship
demanded that the ship leave her berth at once to get sea room in which to ride
out the storm. But the crew knew it was already too late for that, Durell
supposed. The storm would reach its height before the ship could clear the
island channels. They could only hope her hawsers would hold and that no sea
high enough to break her up by pounding her on shore would come again.
Certainly, they had lost any hope of running for it through the howling,
tortuous blackness of reef and island out there.

The wind lifted steadily, in a distinct change from the first
wild efforts of the storm. The pressure was no longer erratic but persistent,
and they ‘had to lean hard against it as if into a resistant netting, in order
to progress. They came to an overturned jeep and Durell ordered Fong to detach
the .50-millimeter machine-gun from its bracket. Ahead, through the dark wind
and rain, the old Portuguese fort loomed like an eagle’s nest above the lagoon.
Beyond a wild froth of water was the loading dock and the freighter. Work had
stopped completely there. Confusion ruled the workers and the ship’s crew.
 

As Fong‘s men hesitated, Durell shouted for them to keep going.
There was a checkpoint ahead, and if his guess about the camouflage
netting was correct, they should be under it and next to the prison compound in
the next few moments.

He spoke to Malachy. “Tell Fong to use a grenade and the
jeep’s machine-gun on that roadblock up there.”

There was a brief, sharp struggle. The dull crump of the grenade
was a feeble sound against the howl of the wind. The air, filled with
spume, tasted sharply of the salt sea. They ran forward at Fong’s signal and
passed what had been, twenty years ago, an old Japanese pillbox and gun emplacement.
And then the wind lifted and finished their work for them.

It came with a long, keening blast out of the southeast that
stopped them all in their tracks. There was a terror in its violence beyond
anything man could inspire. It was an outrage against the senses, a
defiance of all that was natural. The air was filled with breaking
sounds, followed by a long ripping noise that made Durell think the very fabric
of reality was being torn apart. It stunned the mind and overpowered the body,
stopped the heart and filled the lungs. All thought ceased. He clung to
the mud, helping to pin Willi down beside him. Along with the wind came a solid
wall of rain that smashed them down, and there was a sensation of earth, air
and sea all churning to form a new and deadly element that blinded and deafened
anything alive in its path.

But the wind was not entirely against them. There was a vast
flapping overhead, as if some giant, prehistoric monster on leathery
wings went crying above them.

“The netting!” Willi cried. "It’s torn free!"

It was true. The huge camouflage apparatus, anchored
to trees and tall poles on floating buoys in the lagoon, had not been
able to survive the raging elements. All in one instant, everything broke free
and was blown inland to expose the white froth of water in the anchorage and
the beach under the gloomy battlements of the old Portuguese fort . . . .

The
Andrew Jackson
was moored to a makeshift dock there. And on the beach, visible as if a curtain
had been lifted on stage, were the huts of a prison compound behind barbed-wire
fencing.

                                                                                               
chapter
twenty

AS IF satisfied at last with its work, the wind passed
over them and roared inland with the diminishing sound of a hundred departing
locomotives. Durell raised himself to his knees, then stood up in the village
street and drew a deep breath.

For the moment, there was only the heavy, sodden plash of
the tropical rain.

He stared for a long time at the rounded whaleback hull of
the submarine, at the
Jackson’s
slim,
tall sail and the open hatches around her tower, evidence of work begun to dismantle
her and get the A-3 warheads out of her belly. A steam crane had been blown
over by the wind and lay across the boat’s forward deck in a twisted tangle of
steel girder and cables. Some dead dockworkers, crushed by the wreckage,
floated in the lagoon like dark curds on a milky froth churned up by the
heavy rain.

A road circled the beach of the lagoon, and there was a heaped-up
tangle of native outrigger fishing boats, brightly painted, tossed as if
by a child’s hand high above the tidal mark. The village around them lay in
stunned darkness. A dog yelped, a baby wailed, a woman began to lament in a thin,
keening voice. Malachy stood up beside Durell.

“What now? It’s hard to believe my eyes. The
Jackson
is really here, Sam.”

“Yes. Will you get Pong for me, Mal?”

“We’ll have to strike fast. Ch’ing will know we're here—”

“Get Fong.”

Headlights made a slanting, yellow slice of reflected
light through the teeming curtains of rain. The sound of a jeep churning along
the muck and debris of the lagoon road sounded above the hiss and splatter and
gurgling of the downpour. The lights swayed over broken houses, over a man and
a woman standing in stupefied dismay in their wrecked shop. The spatter
of rifle bullets hit them as the headlights found the little force.

“Down!” Durell shouted.

Fong, coming up as Malachy directed, pulled the pin of a
grenade in his teeth and threw it. The dark blob arched over the road toward
the oncoming glare of the auto headlights. A machine-gun stuttered, and there
was more rifle firing. Then the grenade exploded and the jeep fell
over on its side, one wheel spinning, another torn off and rolling into the
milky surf of the lagoon. Men tumbled out of the vehicle, which began to burn.
One of the men was on fire, drenched with gasoline, and his screams
echoed until he threw himself into the water. Even then, the flames did
not go out. Durell and the Hakka guerillas went forward and yanked and tore at
the survivors of the jeep. Two of them were Ch’ing’s armed gangsters. One of
them was a bald, slim young Chinese in civilian clothes, except for a third officer’s
cap. The young Chinese looked stunned and kept putting on and taking off his
muddied cap.

“Ask him where he’s going, Fong,” Durell asked.

There was a chatter of Chinese. The civilian said something
and pointed to the moored sub, then at the gloomy walls of the more distant
Portuguese fort. Fong slapped him, and the man fell down and cried out
something. and Fong threw him into the rough arms of two of his men. Fong’s eyes
glistened. “This person is a technician, and he has been summoned by Prince
Ch‘ing to verify the proper arming of a missile, an atomic missile, he says,
taken from the American boat.”

Malachy said: “That doesn’t make sense. It’s suicide.”

Durell shifted the weight of his Sten gun. “Malachy, you take
Fong’s men and get the
Jackson’s
crew
free, as fast as you can. We’ve lost too much time already.”

“Sam, didn’t you hear that technician? It means that Ch’ing
figures he’s lost and is going to blow us all off the map.”

“I’ve been worried about that for some time. Keep an eye on
Willi, Malachy. I’ll take three or four of Fong’s men, and Fong himself, as a
guide, and go in there alone.”

“Why not all of us?"

“Ch’ing knows we’re here. But if you divert his eye by attacking
to free the sub’s crew in the compound, Fong and I and a few others might reach
him. Go on, we’re wasting time ”

Durell started away. The rain felt like a warm, wet blanket weighting
his shoulders. Fong picked out four men and trotted after him with them. Durell
heard a last set of footsteps running after him as he moved around the wrecked
fishing boats toward the Portuguese fort. He turned and saw Willi.

“Please, Sam. Take me with you.”

“You belong with Malachy,” he said.

She stood tall and straight, her sarong plastered by the
rain to the long lines of her body. In the dim light that came across the
lagoon from the dock and the freighter, he saw her eyes search his face; her
white teeth bit down in frustration on her lip; and she pushed at her heavy,
wet hair with impatience.

“I don’t know where I belong, Sam. Not anymore. I don’t want
anything to happen to you . . .”

“There’s no time to discuss it. Stay with Malachy.”

“Please, Sam—”

He turned away, signed to Fong, and they began to run along
the littered road toward the looming outlines of the old fort. Willi did not
follow them. He looked over his shoulder once, against his better judgment, and
saw her walking back to Malachy. A whistle blew somewhere, and Malachy’s Hakka
rebels got to their feet and surged toward the stunned guards at the gates to
the prison compound.

There were scattered shots from the barbed-wire fence and a floodlight
went on suddenly and filled the area of huts with a dazzling brightness.
The Hakka guerillas were taking full advantage of the stunning effect of the
storm and their own surprise raid. There were a few more stuttering shots, a
series of screams and shouts, and the gate to the compound was broken inward
and the Hakka men poured inside, led by Malachy. Durell, on the road, saw
Malachy suddenly slip and fall, and he halted and waited for a moment, but Malachy
did not get up and he could not see him again in the surge of men who poured
into the compound around him. Out of the huts came the dazed, uncomprehending crew
of the
Jackson
to greet the Hakka
rescuers.

Fong pulled at his arm. “Durell, please, we must hurry—”

He still did not see the red-bearded Irishman rise. He did
not see Willi, either. He felt a pang of despair, as if someone had hit him in
the belly. There was a last flare-up of shooting at the other end of the
compound. Fong spoke to him urgently again, and Durell wiped the rain from his face
with the flat of his hand and nodded and went on.

Together with the Hakka, he ran up the wet slope of mud and
debris toward the dark walls of the old fort. No one got in their way. The rain
came down in straight, hissing torrents, turning the earth to a slickness that
made speed impossible. At Fong’s signal, they scrambled over a low wall of
coral blocks and found themselves in the leafy debris of a shattered garden.
Small specimen trees had been uprooted and bushes plucked from the soil and
blown away. The only things left standing were two heavy stone lanterns, in
each of which a small flame flickered. The lanterns were carved with
dragons’ faces, and these alone seemed serene in a view of nature’s madness.