Assignment - Sulu Sea (7 page)

“No?” The amber eyes were like a jungle cat’s. “Then perhaps
you will explain why a man in the K Section of the United States Central
Intelligence Agency honors our disturbed little islands with his presence. You
have a saying, do you not, about fishing in troubled waters?”

Durell started to reply and then someone knocked and he went
to open the door. It was the Malay bellhop With a tray of bourbon and soda and
a bucket of ice. The bellboy pretended Colonel Mayubashur did not exist; he
grinned and bowed to Durell, and departed, round-eyed. Durell poured the
bourbon, which was a good Kentucky vintage, and offered a drink to Mayubashur.

“Thank you, no, Mr. Durell. No alcohol for me.”

“You are a Moslem?”

"Forty percent of Pandakan’s people are Moslem, twelve
percent are Hindu, thirty me Buddhist, six percent Christian. and the rest
devote their prayers to the twin gods of materialism: Marx and Lenin.”

“Nicely put.”

“But an extremely ticklish balance, however nice.”

Colonel Mayubashur had recovered quickly. He put a cigarette
in an ornately carved ivory holder and lit it with a gold Zippo and regarded
Durell with cool, amused eyes. Durell liked the irony he saw, and felt a
rapport he could understand and appreciate. Mayubashur spoke in quiet, perfect
English.

“Will you explain your presence here, Mr. Durell? You are
not a tourist, come to admire the exquisite Javanese silver filigree work
of our Snake Temple. I should not like to arrest you."

“I would not advise it,” Durell said. “I can assure you I’m
not a political agitator and have no interest in the outcome of your plebiscite
next week."

The colonel’s almond eyes were not amused. “Then why have
search planes from the famous U.S. Seventh Fleet been seen flying at
extraordinarily low levels recently, over the Borneo coast and our little
islands?”

“I can’t say.”

Mayubashur sighed and sat down, crossing elegantly booted
legs. The boots were English. “I do not object to cooperation with America.
Since the Sultan’s assassination, I am thrust into a position of power I do not
enjoy. The days ahead are dangerous, filled with stubborn nationalism, a
threat of internal revolt, and a shaky political leadership based on a bumbling
and mismanaged bureaucracy left to us by the departed Sultan of Pandakan. If
your visit is innocent, Mr. Durell, I trust you will enlist my services. I
could be useful to you, if you wish.”

“You might, at that.”

“Let us see. You arrive with Miss Panapura, in her private
plane. She is a remarkable young lady of extraordinary talents. She has flown
off to see her beloved grandfather, who is ailing since his schoonerman, Simon,
was put on the critical list over there.” The colonel nodded across the
padang
to the
hospital flanked by crowded sidewalk cafes. The late sunlight struck slantwise
into the square, and traffic had slowed a bit, though there was still a
steady stream of trishaws and bicycles and buses, with here and there a
European car nosing around the green. “I am waiting,” Mayubashur added, “for
Simon to recover his senses to tell me what happened to him—just as you seem to
be.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But it is true, yes? Mr. Durell, if it is a question of
smuggling arms to guerillas who refuse to recognize the United Nations
plebiscite, or to others who claim one national loyalty against another, I must
warn you—”

“I’m not smuggling arms,“ Durell said shortly.

“If you cannot speak truly as to your mission here, then it
is regrettable, and I must—”

Colonel Mayubashur never finished his words. Durell,
from his hotel window, saw it all happen before any sound reached them. A
battered, closed sedan, painted a bright blue with a yellow hood, screeched out
of Government Road into the square on smoking tires, at a speed that made the
bicycles and pedicabs scatter like a flock of frightened chickens. There
was no time to react before the careening car mounted the broad sidewalk where
the tables and chairs of the outdoor cafes were filled with people
sheltering under awnings from the evening sun. The uniformed cop on his wooden
platform had a hand lifted to loosen his tommy gun when the first grenade
exploded.

The flat
cramp!
lay a pail of black smoke on those enjoying their ices and drinks. The striped
awning billowed up like a balloon and then collapsed in wavering rags. A man flew
backward into the gutter like a limp doll. A woman ran three steps on legs from
which her right foot was missing. There were screams and shrieks and then, in
rapid succession, three more grenades exploded as the gaily painted car roared
by.

It was simple mass murder.

Where a moment before the sidewalk had been blight and
colorful and animated, filled with chattering, innocent people, there was
now a bloody, tortured confusion, with flames crackling from a shop front
and the shrieks and screams of the wounded and the incredible heaps of rags
that represented the dead.

It all happened in less than five seconds.

Durell heard Colonel Mayubashur race for the door. By the
time he turned back, the car had Whirled around the square and was heading back
the way it came. There was no chance to see the occupants or even guess how
many of them there were. But because of Durell’s vantage point on his balcony,
he noted a peculiar thing. He could see the side entrance to the Pandakan
Hospital, Where the emergency doors stood open. An ambulance was already
starting out when the blue and yellow sedan shot up the alley from the back
way, having doubled back upon itself to a spot directly opposite the bombed
cafes.

And all at once Durell knew what was happening.

He loosened the gun in his underarm holster as he ran from
the room.

                                                                                                         
chapter
six

THE odds were against his making it on time. People ran in
panic down the hotel corridor beyond his door, and the colonel had vanished.
Durell skipped the elevators, since their open cages were too slow and too
vulnerable, and hit the marble stairs three and four at a time. The lobby was a
turmoil of frightened people, all shouting at once. Two stretchers with
European victims of the bombing were being carried through one set of hotel
doors as Durell slammed out through the other. He had to buck the tide of
people running for shelter against an expected second bombing.

Traffic bad vanished as if by magic, along with the colorful
crowds in the shops and stalls, except for those lying at the scene of the
blasts. The squatter merchants with their batik cloth and bananas and carved
teak, shells and combs, had been erased as if by a sweep of a giant‘s hand.
Only the scent of braised beef, a dish known as
satay
cooked on bamboo skewers over charcoal braziers, remained in
the air—and the scent of cordite and of something much worse, from the wrecked
cafe.

Steel shutters clanged shut vibrantly as the shopkeepers
decided on discretion. Durell swung right, ran across the wide, hot pavement,
and heard the whistle of a military policeman shrilling after him. He paid no
attention. Since he did not head for the scene of the bombing, no one pursued
The main entrance to the hospital was crowded with those who were superficially
wounded and others searching for friends and relatives. A steady hubbub, with
an occasional shout of anger or despair, filled the hot evening air.
Durell ran across the central mall and swung around the ornately carved
bandstand to the emergency drive in the back of the hospital. He was halted by
a slim Malay nurse who tried to bar his way. "Sorry, sir, but only
patients are admitted through here—”

“I’m looking for a patient here, a Simon Smith—’”

“Please join the others, sir, in the lobby, and do not
disrupt our‘ routine. We have much to do.”

“This isn’t a new patient,” he said quickly. “He’s a sailor,
brought in about four days ago, a Papuan—”

“Oh, yes, Simon is on the third floor." The Malay
girl’s smile was without meaning. “But you really can’t go up—”

He swung around her protests and took to the steps, and iron
and concrete stairwell, and he could hear other running feet clattering on the flight
above. He knew he was too late, even before he swung through the doors and came
out on the topmost, third-floor corridor.

There were three shots, careful and deliberate and horribly
efficient. The door to the patient’s room did little to muffle the
explosive noises.

Two men burst from the room. One carried a big black man in
a patient’s gown, slung over his shoulder. They started running toward Durell,
saw him, and halted. Both had automatic machine-pistols in their hands, and
both were big, blank-faced Chinese with tiny black eyes. They wore dungarees
and sport shirts flapping over their belts, and the gay rayon patterns
were in startling contrast to the blood spattered over them.

“Hold it!" Durell shouted.

The one with the black man slung over his shoulder spoke in
rapid Chinese and his companion lifted his automatic without hesitation and
spattered the corridor with shots like a riveting machine. Durell had only the
warning of the man‘s hand jerking up as he triggered his weapon. He threw
himself headlong on the waxed corridor floor and squeezed off two shots as he
went down. Bullets powdered the concrete walls and showered the place with flying
dust and debris. The big Chinese staggered as a slug took him, but the man was
too insensitive to pain or more terrified of retreat than of immediate
death. The explosive roar of his machine-pistol went on for another eternity
for Durell. He felt like a fly on a wall. He fired again at the
huge figure, and this time the slug went home. The machine-pistol kept
clattering, but the shots stitched huge holes in the ceiling plaster and
smashed a light globe and then ended as the man fell against the wall.

Durell got up with care. The Chinese gunman was dead. He
kicked the machine-pistol away, down the hall, just to be safe, and ran after
the second man who had carried off Simon Smith. But by the time he reached the
stairwell, the kidnapper had already gained the street level. A car started up
and he
wen
! to a window and saw the big Chinese
tumble his burden into the rear seat and leap aboard as the sedan lurched
forward. Durell raised his gun, then lowered it. Pursuit was hopeless.

Thin, frightened cries came from other patients on the floor,
and from below came the pounding of angry feet. He turned back to the room
where Simon had been a patient, remembering the three executioner’s shots he’d
heard. The hospital cot was empty, but sprawled at the foot of the bed was a
white-coated Indonesian intern, his young brown face fixed in perpetual
astonishment at death. Durell felt a cool warning prickle on the nape of his
neck. Whoever had planned the careful misdirection of attention away from the
hospital by bombing the cafe--whoever had executed the split-second kidnapping
of a Papuan sailor who should have been of no importance to anyone—was an
adversary to be respected. There was a cold-blooded efficiency about it
that checked his anger, and he started to back out of the shattered room.

A whimper and a moan halted him.

His impulse was to continue his retreat. He could guess at
the reasons for Simon Smith’s kidnapping, and he could do nothing more here. In
a moment, the corridor would be filled with angry hospital personnel, and
perhaps Colonel Mayubashur. He had no intention of spending his time in the old
Portuguese dungeons on the harbor front, listening to questions he could not
answer.

The moan was repeated, thin and high and feminine. He
located it behind the metal door of a closet in the patient’s room. Durell
stepped over the intern’s body and looked
in side
.
The girl in the closet was a nurse, but her white nylon uniform was
blood-spattered and her straight, short black hair in Chinese style was awry,
like the shape of her terrified mouth and the glow of fear in her
almond-shaped eyes. Her pink mouth opened and closed and opened again.

“Please . . “ she whispered in English. “Dr. Jaiga—”

“The doctor is dead. They shot him. They took your patient,
Simon Smith, away with them.”

He watched her swallow, a small choking sound in her throat.
There was a dark bruise on her broad cheekbone. She started to slip past him,
but he touched her arm and she halted at once, afraid of his gun. She was short,
somewhat plump under her nurse’s uniform, with a mixture of Asian races
somewhere between Malay and Chinese, but with Chinese predominating. She had
lost one of her white shoes and stood with her hip askew, staring in dumb
astonishment at the bloody shambles of the room. From outside came sounds of
alarm, of running feet, of someone weeping. He wondered if she had been part of
the plot.

“How come they let you go?” he asked harshly.

“Dr. Jaiga shoved me—-into the closet—when we heard them
coming. He seemed to know—what would happen—”

“Didn’t you?"

She was silent. Her skin was tinged with a delicate, pink
bloom, and her eyes were in contrast with the full-lipped carved shape of her
Malay mouth. The name-pin on her uniform breast read Yoko Hanamutra. So there
was some Hindu blood in her, too, but the mixture in this girl was a
combination of all the best of her polyglot ancestry. She regarded him for a
moment‘s silence and then visibly pulled herself together.

“Please, Mr. Durell, it is dangerous here for you. The
police will come, and you must not be found, or delayed.”

He stared at her. “How do you know my name?”

“Tommy Lee told me. He said you would be here today.”

"And how did young Mr. Lee know that?"

“It was on one of the stateside messages to the consulate.
He spoke of it at lunch today and said he was meeting you at the airport and
that you undoubtedly would visit the hospital. You are Mr. Durell, are you
not?”