Slave Ship (15 page)

"For
ultimate
peace!" Winnington flared. "You think we
like
killing people, we peace men? You're an idiot; you think that peace means sitting quiet and taking punishment, eh?" He was flushed and excised, taking a queer pleasure in the fact that we were all of us near death. "No!" he almost screamed. "That is not pacifism, that's stupidity! We must
fight
for peace, we must
destroy
the enemy. Kill everybody who might kill us—then, only then, we'll have peace!"

We finally hushed him.

At last, very cautiously, we rocked the whaleboat free of the mud and crept quietly to the thermoplane. We were no longer getting sounds of battle in the audic apparatus. Either the battle was over or out of range—or it was perhaps fairly close, but masked by the interface between the bottom water and the warmer waters above.

The thermographs showed us when we breached the interface. I cut the drive, cut the ventilator switches, cut every motor that could give out a sound, and we listened as hard as we could. The little torp began instantly to settle, but we had plenty of water under us, and the important thing was to be all ears, no sound, until we found out what was going on around us.

As the whaleboat lost forward speed the diving vanes ceased to bear us up and we slid downward, closer to the thermoplane we had just crossed. The auto-pilot began frantically manufacturing course corrections; it flipped the diving vanes and the rudders like a panicked barnyard hen, and when that produced no effect it began to beep complainingly. I snapped its cutoff switch and it was silent again; and we listened.

Nothing.

Nina said: "Do you think we ought to try the sonars?"

I shook my head and started the motors as we sank under the thermoplane again. "No sense looking for trouble. If somebody's playing possum close by, they'll hear us on their audic all right—but if we ping them, they won't even have to be close by." I locked in the autopilot. "Now what?" I asked.

It was a pregnant question. We had a long debate over what to do next.

But it could only have been decided one way, after all. Duty called. There was a Caodai installation on Madagascar, little more than three hundred miles away. Our mission was to survey it, if necessary to attempt to destroy it. We would carry out our mission—or die in the attempt.

Surprisingly, even Winnington agreed. "Very patriotic," he sneered. "But I'll go along. The sooner we wipe out those rats, the sooner the Peace Party can rule America."

"Very patriotic," Semyon agreed moodily. "Also quite wise, I think. Because—am I wrong, Logan?—we do not after all have a choice; we are ten thousand miles from home. And this little boat they gave us, its range is not more than a thousand . . ."

Madagascar was only three hundred miles away—but the island was almost a thousand miles long. It was touch-and-go whether we would make it.

Semyon swore, gloomily, coaxing the power reserve along; we crept along the bottom, taking our position from sonar soundings and one daring midnight surfacing for a star fix. We made it.

We hovered in a muddy little estuary while Semyon talked lengthily to one of the seals. Then we coaxed the seal into the aft ejection tube. It wasn't necessary to blast him out with compressed air; he could swim free. He pilot-fished us up the little river as far as we dared go in the whaleboat, coming back to report and going forth to scout again. It was tedious, but reasonably safe.

We sent Semyon and Josie out to scout; it was night time, we were in a little cover, hidden by tangled growth. They were gone forever, and came back covered with mud.

"Is a terrible place, Logan," Semyon groaned. "I thought we would be captured many times. But—it is there."

"Target Gamma?"

"One presumes so." He sighed. "There is a small town, on this bank of the river; and perhaps two miles past it is a ring of labor camps. And in the center of the ring, something which is guarded. I did not myself see it, you understand; but Josie says it smells secret."

It was nearly dawn. Semyon was worn out, but Josie was frisky as a puppy. She tended her brood while we were talking, and demanded to be included in the party when we were through.

We left Semyon to watch over Winnington and the other animals; Nina, Josie and I made up the party that proposed to knock out the Caodai's secret weapon base.

A girl, a dog—and me. Nina, struggling into her Madagascan coolie outfit—slacks, sweater, floppy hat—saw my expression and laughed. "Cheer up, Miller," she said, "there's only about five million Caodais on the island—not bad odds."

I found myself grinning back at her. It was an odd thing; I couldn't help thinking about it, even with the approaching raid on my mind. Nina was an easy girl to get along with. It had been a long time since I had paid much attention to other girls. Why was it that now, with Elsie, comparatively speaking, almost within reach, I was suddenly noticing how pleasant and sweet and—and charming, I had to confess it, another girl was?

It wasn't a line of speculation I really wanted to follow . to its end. I was glad when we slipped out of the upper hatch and climbed ashore to get started.

"
Alte-la
,
alte-la
," grumbled the man in the yellow robe. "
Vous
êtes
bien
pressée
?"

"Idiot," Nina muttered to me in English. "I
told
you to take it easy." She smiled appealingly at the priest and spoke to him in rapid-fire French. I could make out only part of it; we were freshly arrived from Tananarive and looking for work; could he direct us to a rooming house?

The Caodai shook his head. Without much interest he yawned and stretched and demanded our passports. That presented a problem, because Nina didn't have one. Semyon and I had been issued the best set of forged credentials Naval Intelligence could cook up; but no one had planned for Nina to be along. However, Nina's French could get by and mine couldn't; we were in trouble either way; we had decided to pass as man and wife and hope that one passport would do for both.

It did. Nina kept up a clamor of questions and comments while the priest was looking over the yellow card that identified me as an agricultural worker of French origin. There were plenty of them on Madagascar, hangovers from the colonial days and the overthrow that followed. The priest had evidently been up all night, and all he really wanted to do was collect a toll for crossing the footbridge; he tossed the document back at me and growled: "
Foutez
le
camp,
tous
les
deux.
" We paid him and got along.

As soon as we were across the bridge into the town itself Nina turned on me: "Miller," she snapped, "if you can't relax we'll never get through. Walk
slowly
. You've been walking a long way; you're tired; you don't want to hop like a grasshopper and attract attention."

I transferred the cord tied to Josie's collar to my other hand. "Sure," I said. "What do we do, walk right through the town?"

"What else?" It was early morning, but already the streets were crowded. Most of the people moving about the narrow streets were Arab-African mixtures of one hue or another; but there was an admixture of Orientals and a handful of Europeans. More than half of the Orientals wore the yellow robes, blouse or shorts of the Caodais. But they were not alone; several priests we passed were obviously nearly pure African. Caodaism, like the Mohammedans before them, practiced a rigid sort of tolerance; there was no distinction in skin color or creed for them—if the man whose skin was in question was willing to embrace the Caodai revelations and, if necessary, join the Caodai armed forces.

And hundreds of millions throughout the Asian and African world had been more than willing.

The streets were not only narrow, they wound like worm holes in an apple. I had to consult Jose's superior sense of direction—bending and talking to her under pretense of loosening her collar—to keep us heading straight through the town. She was almost the only leashed dog in sight, and therefore attracted a little more attention than I liked. The Madagascan custom appeared to be to let dogs roam the streets, as unhampered and as privileged as a Benares bull.

Everyone, it appeared, spoke French. I remembered that the Caodais themselves had come from a section of the Indonesian peninsula once under French rule, and of course Madagascar had been French for nearly a century; but all the same it seemed odd to hear brown, black, tan and yellow faces conversing in the language I associated with bombed-out cities and Eastern finishing schools. . . .

"Softly," said Nina. "Keep your eyes on your lunch."

We were squatted beside the road as a company of Caodai infantry swung past. There was a sort of clearing in the vegetation, on the outskirts of the little town we had crossed; there were Oriental vendors of foods, and we were not the only ones who had paused there for a bite to eat. The Caodai soldiers paid no attention to any of us, being disciplined, eyes-front troops.

They passed. Nina left me for a moment with the dog, and talked briefly to one of the vendors. She came back with a handful of dried dates and two Coca-Colas and said;

"Security troops, I think. There are slave labor camps ahead. Does Josie recognize this road?"

I spoke to the dog; she growled back dubiously. "It smelled altogether different," I translated for Nina, "but she thinks it's the same place. It has something to do with daytime smells and nighttime smells."

Nina nodded. "It checks. Labor camps beyond the bend in the road, something big on the other side of them. According to the Coke man there's nothing to stop us going right along the road—all the Caodai installations are off to one side, on the bank of the river."

It was high noon, or nearly, and most of the other pedestrians were disappearing down side roads and into shops and cafes. Nina and I conferred briefly, and followed their example. We struck out boldly down one of the little dirt paths toward the river, looking for a place to use as a base of operations. No one stopped us, no one paid any attention. I was expecting Caodai infantrymen to pounce out at us from behind every tree; I must have shown it, because Nina snapped: "I told you, Logan, relax. Nobody's going to bother us."

I suppose she was right. After all, we were not a platoon of commandoing marines, antiflash-painted, Tommy-gun-carrying, camouflage-helmeted. We were only a man and a woman and a dog; and if I had seen a party like ours anywhere in the United States I would scarcely have noticed the image that flashed on the retina of my eye. Except—

Come to think of it, I would have noticed such a party. I said curiously to Nina: "Notice anything about these people? Civilians! Outside of the Caodai priests, and the troops that marched by in the road—how many have you seen in uniform?"

She nodded thoughtfully. "Funny," she said. "A peculiar way to fight a war, I guess. You'd think they'd be as deep in this thing as we are, wouldn't you? Now look," she said, dismissing it, "how about holing up here and sending Josie in for a look?"

It was a good enough place, on the shore of the river, where we might appear to be resting and enjoying the view if anyone should come along, I talked to Josie long enough to make sure she understood. Josie was a patient dog, but she had very little comprehension of just what we superior humans were about, there on the banks of the Madagascan creek. She wasn't a stray mutt, and she didn't want to act like one; she complained that she had been told many times that it was impolite and inexcusable to eat out of garbage cans on nuzzle refuse piles for stray morsels—and yet that was what we were asking her to do now, to justify her wanderings. She was a well-brought-up bitch who had been taught to stay close to her home and master and I finally snarled loud enough to convince her; she rolled over on her back, and I had to pat her stomach to let her know we were still friends. With the canine equivalent of a shrug she started out.

She was gone for nearly ten hours.

"Dogs have no sense of time," I explained to Nina—possibly for the hundredth time.

She said reluctantly, "I know. I'm sorry if I'm pestering you. But I'm getting worried."

We had something to worry about, I agreed—but not out loud. I was the junior member of our expedition, and though we had never articulated a command relationship I was perfectly willing to treat Nina's "suggestions" as orders. Spying was her line of work, not mine. But it was dark. We were in enemy territory, and a good bet to be shot out of hand in case someone asked us questions. Our scout was overdue reporting back; and Nina was getting worried. And without any fuss, our relative positions changed; we were no longer commander and j.g., we were worried woman and—howsoever falsely—reassuring man. I liked it much better that way.

"Stay here. I'll take a look around," said the man to the woman.

"The devil you will," said the commander to the j.g. "Use your fat head for something, Logan. How do you expect to find the dog—whistle and clap your hands, all the way from here to the Caodai installation?"

I said reasonably: "Of course not. I just want to take a look around—"

"You said that. No."

So that was that—for the time being.

But time passed, and Josie stayed away; and what it came down to in the long run was the choice of which of us should go looking. And I won, if you can call it that.

Madagascar was an unfriendly place, after dark of a night; I could hear vehicles on the paved road—but I stayed off it; I could hear voices, now and again, around the houses that fronted on the river—but I gave them a wide berth. I felt something like a fawn somehow driven to slink through Central Park from end to end, avoiding the worrisome human smell from all about. Only I was more purposeful than a fawn, of course; closer perhaps to a beast of prey—say a fox, trying to raid a henhouse.

And unaware (or all too frighteningly aware) that the henhouse was guarded by mastiffs.

We had just about given up on Josie; I wasn't so much looking for the dog as trying to accomplish the dog's job. If Josie turned up where Nina waited in the clearing, good; Nina would hold her there until I returned. But if not, we could not stay there forever; it would then be my spied-out information we would go back to the whaleboat with, not Josie's. All I wanted was one clear look at the secret installation up ahead. Much more than that I couldn't hope for; but from whatever I could find out then, we could plan.