Assignmnt - Ceylon (19 page)

All that stuff about Sinn being a messenger of evil was crap, of course. The monster was insane. Mad, yes, but not stupid. He was like a dark malignancy sitting up there, back in his palace, ruling this island like some god—no, not a god, a devil.

Willie paused to drink sparingly from the canteen of water Sinn had allowed him to have. The rifle felt heavy, and one finger of his left hand was numb, tingling and prickling. He wondered what sort of poison had been injected in him. Something that affected the nervous system, maybe. He worked his left hand anxiously, rubbing the thumb, clenching and unclenching his fist. After a moment, the strange numbness went away.

He moved on. He was on slightly higher ground than the mangrove swamp into which Durell and the girl had vanished. Sooner or later, they would have to come out of there, or the insects would eat them alive. Nobody could stand it in there for very long. He guessed that Durell would try to make for the western coast of the little island, exploring the area for a place in which to hole up for the night. Probably he was planning to set a trap. That would be like Durell. He would offer bait, expect him to come in with another rush, and fall into some kind of snare. He had the rope, the blanket, the club. A pit, maybe. Like an animal trap. He’d have to watch where he put his feet with every step he took. That would slow things down. But he had time. Time was on his side, wasn’t it? Forty-eight hours, Sinn had said. No, two hours had already gone by, at least. He had no watch. It was one of Sinn’s malicious little tricks, to take the watch away from him. To balance the odds, the monster had said, giggling.

Suddenly he wished Durell dead with all his heart and mind. He felt defeated. It was hopeless. Durell was too good at this sort of thing, too quick and clever to be caught.

Good, Wells thought. Keep hating him. Maybe next time you get him in your sights, you won’t want to miss.

Durell looked at the small powerboat idling offshore. The two men in it were PFMs, Dr. Sinn’s men, and they carried their AK-47s with an expert ease. One of them spotted him and Aspara and nudged the other, and they laughed, the distant sound drifting over the heat on the water. They waved their weapons, urging Durell back from the end of the little plank walk. Plainly, Sinn had his eye on them and had encircled the little island with guards to prevent any possible chance of escape by sea. He turned back with Aspara, to a beach littered with broken, rotting palm fronds from a past typhoon.

The men in the powerboat roared off, presumably to report to Dr. Mouquerana Sinn.

“We’ll head south,” he said. “The land is just a bit higher there. If we could find a cave—”

“Wells would find us there,” Aspara said.

“I’d want him to, if I have a little free time before he shows up.”

“Will you set a trap?”

“It’s our only chance.”

“I don’t see any chance at all. Even if you win against your countryman, we are still caught on the island, we are still in Mouquerana Sinn’s hands. Would you agree to work for him, after all this?”

“He knows I won’t,” Durell said.

“Then what can be his purpose?”

“Amusement. Revenge. I don’t know.”

“You think he will execute you eventually?” “Eventually, yes. After he squeezes me dry of all I know about K Section operations.”

“And me? What do you think he will do about me?” Durell did not reply. He did not want to tell her what he thought she faced on this lonely little island with Sinn and his men. He had seen no other women here. Perhaps Sinn had no use for women himself, as he had said; but the other men, the PFM terrorists and the guards, would be hungry for girl-flesh, more eager than cautious, and especially hungry for a woman like Aspara. She would be used by them until she died, sooner or later. He said nothing to her question, but she was an intelligent woman, and she surely could anticipate what was planned for her.

They came to the forested southern end of the island shortly before the sun went down. From a tree-covered rise, Durell could look down on the small cove and dock where they had landed from Jaffna, what seemed years before. The junk was still tied up there. He could see part of the trail that wound up through the wooded slope toward the old palace on its knoll near the center of the island. Some armed men moved along the trail, carrying crates and bundles unloaded from the vessel; and more men were gathered along the dock and around the few palm-thatched stilt houses that comprised their barracks. Durell stared at the area for a long time, while Aspara looked backward for any sign of Willie Wells. The guns down there were tempting. Perhaps in the night, in the cover of darkness, there might be a chance to do something. Then he remembered it was a full moon, or just past full. The sky was cloudless and apt to remain so. Moreover, these were picked men, very alert, very capable.

He filed the thought away as a possibility and turned back to where Aspara stood guard behind him.

“He’s there,” she said quietly. “I just saw him.”

“Where?”

“Sitting down. His back against that tree. I don't want to point or look directly at him.” Her voice was soft and calm. “I don’t believe he thinks he can be seen.”

Wells was just an irregular shadow hunched down against the bole of the tree. The setting sun was almost at the horizon now. A long track of blood-red water led to the west. Durell saw the momentary glint of light on the steel barrel of Wells’ rifle.

“Why doesn’t he shoot now?” Aspara asked.

“Maybe this area near the dock and the junk has been ruled off limits,” Durell said. “We don’t know all the rules of this thing. Mouquerana Sinn may have just neglected to tell us the boundaries in which this game can be played.”

Aspara shuddered. “You said it’s not a game.”

“No.”

Durell was waiting for something. He wasn’t sure what it was, but it was there, ready to be found, if he knew when and where to look. He could not explain the feeling he had. He moved off to the left, where the thick boles of trees protected his back. He pulled Aspara with him into the shelter of the woods. The camp by the wharf consisted of one long, barrackslike building on stilts, with a thatched roof and several smaller houses under leaning palm trees. There was a small beach to the left of the cove, and a plank landing there, presumably for the power boat that kept circling the island as a guard. The faint smell of cooking fires drifted up through the dense tropical growth of wild bamboo, and it stimulated his stomach juices, making him aware of his hunger again. He counted at least twenty men, with two apparently rated as officers, and then gave it up and turned aside.

“Let’s go,” he told Aspara.

A second small stream ran toward the western shore of the island, midway back up the way they had come. He had missed it coming south, because they had chosen an inland path for cover against their pursuer, but by circling closer to the mangroves that lined the beach, using the tangled growth for new shelter, he came across the little tunnellike aperture where the fresh water flowed.

The moon was up, and everything around him made a phantasm of ebony and silver. In two hours, he built the trap. It was slow work, and he had to pause frequently to listen, rest, and listen again. Somewhere out there in the black pattern of shadows was Wells, patiently waiting, hunting him. Wells would be annoyed now, because of his first misses, but he would not let his impatience make him careless. Although the night made it easier to make an invisible approach, it also helped to shelter Durell and Aspara. Nothing made a good target in this strange pattern of dense blackness, with shafts of moonlight streaming down like spotlights through the mangrove branches overhead. He worked patiently, digging at the mucky soil with the pieces of wooden oar he had salvaged from the fishing village. It was hard, backbreaking work, exhausting, and he felt the need of food more strongly with each passing moment. Now and then Aspara spelled him while he went on a wide, circling sweep of the area. There was no sign of Wells nearby. Inland, the island lifted a few feet higher, and there was a dense tangle of broken branches, bleached bone-white, where past storms and tidal waves had tossed broken trees and wreckage in a long barrier line just at the inner edge of the mangrove swamp. The little stream issued from under this barrier, and at this point, it seemed impossible to climb above it without circling north along the shoreline to flank it. He found a kind of burrow here, a natural hole in the tangled tree trunks and branches, and explored it carefully. The ground inside was dry. It went back about eight feet, and was about three feet wide, and its entrance could easily be hidden by dragging a few of the looser limbs free of the barrier wall and covering the mouth of the entrance with them.

Refuge for the night, he thought. He drank lightly from the stream, although the water seemed a bit brackish. When he returned to the pit he was digging, he told Aspara to spread the blanket in the burrow and try to sleep.

“What will you do?” she asked.

“I’ll finish this.”

“But he won’t be so foolish or careless as to fall into it, Sam, will he?”

“No. He’ll be expecting it. He won’t be caught in this one. But I’ll dig another.”

“You can’t possibly, with just sticks and a broken paddle.”

“It has to be done.”

He used his knife to sharpen stakes and chose a sapling that had plenty of spring to it, then he lashed the netting he had salvaged to other spring branches, using the heavy coil of rope he had found aboard the wrecked boat. The moon lifted higher and higher in the night sky. Although the heat of the sun was gone, the air still felt heavy and humid, and there was little change in temperature and no relief. Aspara helped as much as she could, sharpening the stakes, lashing the trap-line when he brought his weight down on the limb to curve it downward.

The snare was arranged so that if it were tripped by anyone approaching their burrow, the sapling, net, and stakes would all come loose, snatching up the victim and carrying him aloft and helpless, tangled in the bag of the net. He needed to use only half of the net itself for this snare. When he was finished finally, bathed in sweat, he deliberately made only a halfhearted effort to hide his work.

Aspara said, “But he’s sure to spot it.”

“With a little effort, yes. I want him to.”

“But then, all this work is for nothing!”

“We’ll build another. The idea is that he’ll avoid this, think the path is safe from here on, and come on toward us. He’ll not be looking for a second booby trap. And if there’s time, I’ll build still a third.”

It was close to midnight, he judged, when the second snare was ready. He had used all of the net and most of the rope. At times, he had insisted that Aspara get some sleep, but she refused to leave his side. He felt dulled by fatigue, dirty and unwashed, and hungry, exhausted by the tension of constantly listening for Wells’ approach. Maybe Wells had been concealed nearby all this time, watching everything, anyway. The man was quite capable of playing that sort of game, amusing himself by letting Durell use up what energy remained to him. Aspara found it difficult to accept the brute strength that Durell exhibited during his steady toil. She shuddered at the last trap, another spring snare that would let loose two rude javelins cut from saplings, sharpened to a point with the knife and triggered to fly with venomous force when tripped. But at last it was over. He had done all he could.

“We’ll rest now,” he told the girl.

“I couldn’t.”

“You must. Tomorrow may be even worse. He’ll be getting impatient by then, really worried about the poison in his system. He’ll be anxious to gain some margin of safety by having a few hours to spare. You’ll need your rest.”

“And you?”

“We’ll take turns.”

The burrow was about a hundred feet upstream from where the little creek emptied into a spread of sand that bordered the quietly lapping sea. It felt warm and dry in the tiny enclosure. Now that the work was done, he felt the inevitable droop of weariness in all his muscles as he sat cross-legged near the entrance. Aspara sat on the blanket behind him. His ankle, where Wells’ bullet had nicked him, had begun to ache, although the slight wound was clotted and dry. He could not see Aspara, but he could feel her warmth and hear the light sound of her careful prana breathing. From where he sat near the burrow entrance, he could see the slight fall of the stream into the mangroves. It was like looking out through a tunnel of leaves. The barricade of dead broken branches and tree trunks above them made small creaking noises now and then, as animals and nocturnal lizards moved along their devious ways. It was a better place than he had hoped to find, hours ago, when this nightmare began.

He tried to think of anything he might have overlooked. He had disarmed Willie Wells once before, on the hillside above the
walauwa
near Kandy. Wells would not be taken by surprise that way again.

“Sam?”

“Try to sleep.”

“I cannot. I don’t want to.”

She moved to the burrow entrance and sat beside him. He felt her shiver suddenly and knew she was thinking of that strange malignancy in his tumble-down palace up on the knoll, half a mile away. He kept listening to the sounds of mice and snakes in the dead tangled brush of the storm-tossed barricade over his head. He watched the stream, running silver in the shafts of moonlight that pierced the overhead leaves. Wells had to come up that natural tunnel of foliage to get at him. He had the knife. Wells would have to get quite close, before he could use the rifle. Should he sit it out here for the next day and night? By then, the poison in Wells—if, indeed, there was poison in the man, and he saw no reason to doubt Dr. Sinn’s evil humor—would be peaking toward its lethal level. The man would be desperate. He would come in a rush, firing again and again, blindly. But in this cul-de-sac, such a rush might succeed.

“Sam?”

“It’s all right. We’re safe, for now.”

“The night seems endless.”

“It’s half over.”

“Sam, I’m sorry. About George, about the way I turned on you. About everything.” She paused. “No, not everything. I think of Negombo and our lovely nights together with—with much warmth.”