Assignment Sumatra, page 2
part #38 of Sam Durell Series
“Now what?” she asked.
“There are a bridge and a village a few hundred yards ahead, according to your map,” Durell said. “It might happen there. Get out of the car, please.”
“Why?”
“You haven’t really tapped me in. I don’t know what’s happening.”
“I told you, Eli will brief you.”
“I want to know what you know, and I want to know it now.”
“Must I get out of the car to do it?”
“Yes.”
She turned her head and looked back at their passenger. Tu Fu promptly smiled. His close-cropped head made him look like a cheerful criminal. The girl said, “What about him?”
“He won’t run away. The original Tu Fu in the eighth century lived in a grass hut outside of Ch’eng Tu in Szechwan, and rarely left it after he was kicked out of the patrician court of Emperor Su-tsung. This Tu Fu isn’t apt to run far, either. He’ll want more money from us.”
“He isn’t armed.”
“He has two hands, two feet. I don’t like him sitting behind us.”
“He doesn’t know what it’s all about.”
“Neither do I,” Durell said. “And that worries me. Get out.”
She looked at him, hesitant for a moment, and then complied. Durell got out of the car with her. Tu Fu watched them with an objective curiosity in his almond eyes. The girl was almost as tall as Durell. She carried herself with the same stiff, prim hostility she had shown him before. You have to have been there, Durell thought, to know the way back. She had come too far back, however, from the items noted in her dossier, and he felt a momentary sorrow for her.
“Over there,” he said.
They walked a short distance to a tall brake of giant bamboo on the river’s edge. Wild ginger and rhododendron edged the bamboo, mixed with tall ferns. The bamboo grew over thirty feet tall. The smell of the sea came from the river. The tide was coming in, and the estuary would soon be flooded by the shallow inflow from the strait. He heard something scuttle away into the bamboo and followed the sound. There was no sign of human life except for a single board nailed to a nipa palm beside the road, advertising Tiger Balm, the all-purpose Indonesian salve that was claimed to cure a hundred ailments.
Lydia stopped. “What is it? What do you want?”
“You work for Mr. Eli Plowman, and you work for Q, right?”
“Yes. You know that.”
“I haven’t seen your weapons. If we’re baiting a trap with poor old Tu Fu back there, I want to know what you can do to help if we’re hit on that bridge, or in the village up ahead.”
“I can handle myself,” she said tightly. Her anger made her eyes gleam in the dim moonlight. He heard what sounded like a tjitjak, the omnipresent little lizard with a distinctive chattering sound. He didn’t think it was a tjitjak.
“Take off your blouse, Lydia,” he said.
“What?”
“I can’t see a gun under your clothes. You wear your outfit well. I don’t see where you’ve hidden your weapons. I want to know.”
“To hell with you,” she said briefly.
“You’re not really a prude. Let’s see the gun. It’s between your breasts, I know that. If it’s a toy, you’re staying out of it.”
He heard the little lizard again. A bit farther up the river, toward the bridge. He felt impatient. He felt worried.
The girl smiled crookedly. “You’re a voyeur? One last look before you possibly die?”
“Take it off.”
Her hand lifted slightly, and for a moment he thought she was going to fight him about it. Then she laughed, a richly amused sound in her long throat. She was a beautiful girl. There were buttons on her blouse, but they were false, and the,seam came apart with the swift rip of a zipper. Her bra was something very special. She looked at the river when a fish splashed out there, then turned and faced him. The bra was really unnecessary to support her full proud breasts. Her shoulders were squared. Her eyes were cold. From the ribbed-elastic fabric between her breasts, she took out a weapon that looked like a narrow, old-fashioned, double-barreled derringer. Her fingers were cold when she handed it to him.
“It’s hand-made. I made it myself, to fit where it belongs. Daddy carried guns in the store, and I became his gunsmith when I was fourteen, working in his sporting-goods shop in Milwaukee.”
“Cold steel where your heart should be?”
“The knife is between my legs, friend. I made that, too. The gun is the equivalent of a .357 Magnum. Two shots, obviously. One is all I usually need. I make my own cartridges, too.”
Durell weighed the odd weapon. “You’re really good with this?”
“You’ll find out, I think.”
She pulled up a zipper in her skirt, reached across her stomach, then down, and came up with the knife. It, too, was specially fashioned to lie flat against her flesh, almost a part of her. The blade came to a needle point, the handle was artfully weighted. He returned the gun and the knife to her. She trembled a little, out of distaste for what he had made her do. He thought perhaps he was lucky that she hadn’t made him force the weapons from her.
“Give me your hand,” he said.
She nodded. He felt the hard ridge of calluses on the edge of her palm. Properly used, her hands could be even more lethal as weapons than either the gun or the knife. Her fingers were very cold, vibrating with her suppressed rage.
“I don’t like you, Sam Durell,” she whispered.
“It’s mutual. But someone or something turned you off, is that it? All those boys, the young men, the communal living, the Wind River episode—which one turned you into Miss Prude?” he asked quietly.
“That’s not your concern.”
“Everything about you is my concern, until I learn what this job is all about.”
She smiled. It was not a nice smile. He still thought, however, that she was something special, with her tall body and long legs, her smooth hips and the classic face of a Greek goddess.
They walked back to the car. Tu Fu, who had been sitting forward on the rear seat to spot their return from the bamboo, sat back and grinned at them like a village idiot.
The road under the feeble moon twisted up-river through the tidal flats and passed a diked area of rice fields. Fresh water, coming from higher ground, flowed in narrow ditches where tall bamboo poles, neatly balanced, knocked rhythmically against stones to make music notes that let the local farmers know the fresh water was still running in the paddies. Beyond the fields was the wooden bridge, and on the opposite bank of the river was a village, mostly Batak houses with triangular roofs and tumpal motifs, intricately ornamental.
They were hit in the shadows of nodding coconut trees, just as Lydia made the turn for the narrow bridge.
There were two single sharpshooter shots, then a blaze of automatic-rifle fire from either side of the road. Durell was ready for it. He left the car in a long dive for the muddy drainage ditch on his side of the road, came up with the .38 S&W in his hand, and fired back at the spurts of flame from the automatic rifle. The hot and peaceful . night was split with noise that racketed on both hands. Above it, he thought he heard the startled chatter of monkeys in the nearby trees. He raised his head carefully. The Toyota was empty. Even Tu Fu had managed to get out of the car.
“Lydia?” he called softly.
Her voice came from across the road, in the opposite ditch. “Here. They’re pretty poor shots.”
“They weren’t aiming at the front seat. Tu Fu?”
“He’s with me.”
“All right. Wait.”
There was a long silence. Then crickets began to sing in the bamboo and the tropical grasses along the sluggish riverbed. Nothing happened in the village beyond the bridge. Durell scanned the dark, jungled growth in every direction. He could see no movement, hear no human sounds. He was puzzled. The ambush was an amateur job, at best; but they were isolated here, and he did not know how many of the ambushers were about. Then he heard the quick drumming of booted footsteps on the bridge. One man. Two. Another. Something small and dark came lobbing through the night air toward the car. Durell ducked his head. The grenade fell short by twenty feet, bursting in the mud with a tremendous crash. The echoes rolled away like distant thunder. He came up out of the ditch at the sound of approaching footsteps. They were coming in close now, to make sure of the kill. He saw a man, a Malay face, and fired once through the bamboo, saw a ragged white turban jerk backward, the face vanishing in a mass of splintered bone and flesh. There were others, still across the road. He ducked low and ran across the road to dive into the ditch with Lydia.
Neither Lydia nor the Hakka Chinese were there. Beyond was some dense mangrove, a gleam of black water, a shadow of movement. He could not tell who or what it was. He moved sidewise along the ditch toward the bridge, the warm, humid wind on his face. The bamboo rattled along the river’s edge. Then something plodded ponderously through the mangrove and sago palms, with a heavy splashing. Eyes suddenly gleamed in the dim moonlight, and he heard the swish of a tail, saw the great shaggy, horned head. A kerbau. A water buffalo. A broken tether-rope trailed from its heavy neck.
The beast struggled across the ditch to reach the road. It had obviously escaped from one of the vanished peasants in the deserted village. Just as it reached the road, everything broke loose.
There came a wild, strangled scream from a man’s throat. Into a patch of moonlight came Lydia, with Tu Fu behind her. Her back was toward him. There were three other men crowding close to her, heavy parang blades in their hands. They were trying to get at a startled and utterly dismayed Tu Fu.
Durell started to fire, then checked his finger on the trigger. Lydia had sliced open one of the attackers with her razor-sharp stilletto. As the second man grabbed for her, the strange derringer came from between her breasts and her shot seemed to coincide with the movement. The heavy boom of the gun broke the night open again. The man who had grabbed for her had his skull blown away by the heavy cartridge. The third man yelled in fear and tried to run, and Lydia moved almost too fast to observe, her hand coming up in a deft, murderous chop. Durell, from a distance of about fifteen yards, heard the am-busher’s neck break under the impact of the girl’s blow.
Lydia and the Hakka vanished, dropping into the ditch. Durell moved toward the girl with extreme care, and called softly. Tu Fu scuttled away to one side.
“Miss Morgan?”
“Yes.”
“Are you all right?”
“Nobody is hurt, except them.”
She was not even breathing heavily. There was a small scratch on her cheek; no other signs of damage. Her eyes gleamed coldly. Her lips were slightly parted, and there was a glisten of white teeth between them. She licked at the corner of her mouth where a trickle of blood from the scratch on her cheek settled.
“Where is Tu Fu?” she whispered.
“Hiding like Moses in the bulrushes,” Durell flipped a hand. “Over there, in the bamboo.”
She watched the plodding water buffalo move away like a dark behemoth, horns gleaming in the moonlight, toward the wooden bridge. “Any more of them?”
“I think not.”
“It was a crude job.”
“Too crude,” Durell said. “I think we’re supposed to relax now. Let’s get Tu Fu.”
“Right.”
She still carried the heavy, slender derringer, her finger crooked on the trigger of the second barrel. As she moved, the muzzle swung across Durell’s chest. “You were not much help, Cajun.”
“You didn’t need any help, did you?”
“No, but—”
“I wanted to see how much you enjoyed it.”
She started a retort, then checked herself and climbed out of the ditch and began softly calling Tu Fu’s name. Durell went over the dead bodies of their attackers. The one she had shot was utterly beyond recognition. The heavy slug had blown away most of his face. The man she had knifed lay on his side, knees drawn up to his chest, a look of surprise in his staring, almond eyes. The knife had gone deep between his ribs. The scream that had come from him must have emerged when he was already dead, a spasmodic reflex from a brain at the instant of obliteration. He was Chinese, a southern type, one of millions scattered through the complex of islands that made up Indonesia’s archipelago. The third man, with the broken neck, was also Chinese. All of them wore what amounted to a uniform of anonymity—dark slacks, worn sneakers, dark, flowered batik shirts hanging loose over their hips. Durell flipped open their pockets, seeking identification. None of them carried any papers. He hadn’t expected they would.
Lydia came back as he straightened up. The slight figure of Tu Fu hung near the stopped car. The girl went to the man she had stabbed and knelt, calmly pulling out the needle-like blade; she wiped it on the mossy ground, lifted her skirt and replaced the weapon in a flat leather-sheath strapped between her legs. She stood up with a sigh.
“I don’t like it. It wasn’t enough.”
“Do you want to kill anyone else?” Durell asked.
“Don’t put me on,” she said tightly. “I know you don’t like me. I don’t really want you to, you understand. But Eli said we could expect them to make every effort to kill Tu Fu. They didn’t really try hard enough.”
Three men dead. Durell thought, was a high price to pay for what she termed a half-hearted effort.
“I’ll drive,” he said.
To his minor surprise, she did not object.
The Hakka did not want to get back into the car. He gibbered at them in a spate of Cantonese that Durell found difficult to understand. Finally, the girl got out and took the round-faced little man by the arm and spoke soothingly to him in Dutch, which he now seemed to grasp, and finally Tu Fu nodded and returned to the back seat, his eyes rolling to right and left along the dark edges of the road. He was shivering, despite the moist, oppressive heat of the night.
“Mr. Tu doesn’t look much like an eighth-century poet,” Durell said quietly to the girl.
“No.”
“He’s beginning to get the idea that he’s the pigeon for something.”
“Maybe,” she said tersely.
“Was this Eli’s idea? Tu Fu looks quite a bit like a certain Chinese from Salangap, a very clever little man I knew once, as I said. His Excellency, Premier Hueng Ti Ch’ang. He worked his way up through the Communist, party hierarchy there and was chosen by the Central Committee to be premier.” Durell’s voice was harsh but low. “He’s one of a duo, along with his rival, the deputy premier, a certain K’ang. They don’t get along, but they’re here in Sumatra to attend the SEACROP meeting at Lake Toba. All right. K’ang and His Excellency Hueng have been feuding with each other in their private little Politburo in Salangap for some time, as you know. Hueng isn’t a bad little fellow. A minor Tito in Southeast Asia. But Deputy K’ang is an activist for revolution, racism, and military takeover of all the surrounding states. Hueng has been walking on eggs lately.”
“Right,” Lydia Morgan said.
“K’ang probably doesn’t want his coruler, our little Mr. Hueng, your friend and mine, to attend and moderate the SEACROP conference. Probably doesn’t want him ever to get to Lake Toba.”
“True enough,” the girl said.
“And K’ang controls the security police, so His Excellency is defenseless. He needs help to get here alive. So he remembered me, the capitalist, imperialist, colonialist spy, and asked State for my help. I’m sent here. And the man who is not my friend or yours. Mr. George Tolliver III, from State, rang the register and called Eli Plowman in over my head. Tolliver can be dangerous. To us I mean.”
“Tolliver is a social butterfly,” said Lydia.
“Wrong again. He’s pure-bred, one hundred percent WASP, with a hell of a sting in his rear end.”
The girl was silent.
Durell went on, as if lecturing. “Hueng can’t count on his own security people to protect him from K’ang, so he asked for our help. He asked for me. I can’t very well appear at his side in public, being the imperialist dog I mentioned. He’d be labeled a traitor and collaborator with capitalist agents. So we have a problem. He has to be helped, but not overtly. Now, our little tin-miner here from Banka looks a lot like His Excellency. Eli and Tolliver aren’t sure that K’ang means to knock off his boss so he can run SEACROP his way. So Eli wants to nail things down and know about it for certain; and you picked up little Tu Fu to be the nanny goat tethered in the bush for the tiger. Are you sure Mr. Tu knows what he’s doing?”
“He does not.” Lydia drew a deep breath. “He knows nothing. He knows there might be trouble, but not that we’re using him as a target. He’s doing it for money, that’s all.”
“How much will you pay him, if he survives?”
“He won’t make it,” she said coldly. “Anyway, he was due to be executed tomorrow. He ran amok on something they call trijalla here—a hallucinogenic drug that acts something like LSD. He broke out of the tin-mines and ran to his shack and chopped up his wife and three kids and two policemen. Eli broke him out of his cell and handed him over to me for this trip, after seeing his photo in the newspapers and noting the resemblance to Mr. Hueng. Eli is anxious to keep Comrade Hueng alive as a moderate influence at SEACROP.”
“His wife, three children, two policemen?”
“Yes.”
Durell turned his head and looked at Tu Fu, seated on the edge of the back seat of the Toyota. Tu Fu smiled back at him, his face bland, innocent, and trusting.
Chapter Two
THE bridge trembled and shook under the weight of the car. The wooden planks rattled, creaked, and groaned. Durell drove slowly, looking ahead and to either side of the road. There were some flat-bottomed fishing boats drawn up on the mud on the other side of the river, another sign advertising Tiger Balm, and not a soul in sight. There was a sandy beach nearby, and in the gloom, to the right, he saw a dense grove of coconut palms bending gracefully over the peaked, ornate village roofs. Somewhere a dog barked: Bats swooped above some of the houses. There were no lights, no people. Beside the nearest house, which stood on stilts near a wooden landing, was a large bamboo cage suspended from a bent pole, and some small gray doves called perkututs trilled sleepily as the car drove by.
