Assignment - Cong Hai Kill (20 page)

“We don’t leave without
Lantern. But come along.”

There was a small
surprise waiting below-decks. A gang of coolies had cleaned up the debris in
the engine room; the boilers had been scraped out, the pressure gauges wiped
and oiled, the rust removed to prove the metal reasonably sound. Firewood was
stacked and a small pilot flame lighted inside the black iron cavern. A group
of elderly men stripped to the waist stood aside respectfully as Durell came
down, followed by Danat and the woman.

One toothless old man
came forward, grinning and bobbing his shaved head. He spoke in English. “I am Tuc Kuwan.
It is good, sir? We have worked very hard. The pressure will be up in a bit
more than an hour."

“Who organized all
this?” Durell asked.

“Mr. Lantern, sir. He
was a—how do you say?-a dynamo. I am a mechanic, too, sir. I Worked in the
plantation power plant. I know machinery, Sir, but Mr. Lantern is a genius.”

“Where is he now?”

“He left us.”

“Did he say when he
would come back?”

“He said nothing, sir.”

Durell did not
understand it. He only knew that Lantern had broken parole, amused himself with
a useless engine, and then vanished with Anna-Marie. He saw that the broken
drive shaft had been removed, a difficult job because of the long rust that had
set in. The remaining metal shone with penetrating oil. But the engine was
still inoperative.

There was only one place
to go. He turned briefly to Papa Danat. “Take me to your plantation.”

It was more than five
miles along a steeply winding road up the terraced hillsides. The sun was low
in the west, and long shadows touched the opposite side of the river valley.
From the heights, Durell saw how the river became even more constricted toward
the coast. There was a gorge edged with steep cliffs, where a waterfall
glistened like a ribbon of silver. Atop a promontory that made the river curve
in an S—shape, there was a larger temple ruin that he hadn’t been able to see
from down below. The loom of the Chaine des Cardamomes beyond
the Cambodian frontier made a barrier to the east and the south.

Durell commandeered a
jeep from Muong’s men and drove it himself, taking Danat and Giralda with
him; he left the old villager, Tuc Kuwan, in charge of the boat. It
was a calculated risk, with Muong dead and no one else in command.
The menace of the jungle seemed deeper and more pressing.

As he drove along the
trail, he saw a bare-breasted peasant woman trying to manage a lumbering work
elephant; she looked at them with enmity and vanished. A little further on, a
wandering water buffalo with a small boy perched between the spreading horns
splashed into a deserted irrigation ditch. Durell knew he had to make a
decision before nightfall, perhaps the most difficult decision he had ever
faced. If he could find Lantern, and by some miracle get the 
Dong Xo
Lady
 moving, they might escape downriver. But what about Deirdre? In
other times and places, his course would have been clear. When you worked with
a team, you might have to sacrifice your fellows to get the job done.

But could he abandon
Deirdre?

She might be dead, but
he could not visualize this. He directed his bitter anger toward himself, for
allowing General McFee to pressure him into accepting her on this job. If he
could only have taken her place, wherever she was, he would have done so
gladly. . . .

They passed more
terraced rice paddies and empty huts and then a huge tea plantation that had
been burned to the ground Papa Danat explained that it was a neighbor
who had abandoned everything months ago, when the Cong Hai first
appeared. Perhaps he had been the smart one, Danat sighed. His own
plantation had not yet been touched, but the same fate surely awaited
everything he had spent his whole life building.

Durell suddenly slammed
on the brakes.

Fallen trees made a
roadblock across their path. The jeep could go no farther.

He switched off the
engine. In the silence, they felt the dense pressure of the heat that weighed
down the forest around them. Durell scanned the green wall of vegetation on
either side. Nothing stirred. Perhaps it was last night’s storm that had felled
the trees in their way. Perhaps. But he couldn’t be sure.

“We’ll walk from here,”
he announced.

Danat
 
nodded.
His round face was pale. “It is only a few minutes. We are almost there.”

Durell had given a rifle
to the Frenchman and taken one for himself from Muong’s soldiers.
They walked carefully around the fallen mass of tree trunks and vines. Nothing
happened. In a few moments they stepped onto an open hillside of neatly planted
tea shrubs, with a long row of corrugated tin buildings in the distance.

“I have a diesel power
plant,” Danat murmured. “The machinery for packaging and baling is
over there. The house is just beyond the rise of the hill, perhaps half a mile
on. There are bridle paths for my horses, you see. That is how we ride
inspection in the fields.”

A faint breeze stirred
the rows of tea plants.

“Someone came this
way," Giralda suddenly announced. She pointed to the path. The
earth was still soft from last night’s rain, and the prints of native sandals
were clear before them. “A man,” she said. “And a woman.”

“Anna-Marie and Yellow
Torch?” Danat groaned. “I should have paid more attention to the
girl. She was lonely, susceptible to any man who came along. . . .”

“Keep going,” Durell
said.

If it was a snare for
him, he disregarded the risk. Without Deirdre, it did not seem to matter. If
Lantern was playing a double game, then he had to be killed. . . .

As they approached the
long, narrow baling house, he saw two horses standing free at the edge of the
terraced tea fields. But Lantern, despite his wounded shoulder, had apparently
walked, coming another way. There was a dark haze in the hills as the sun settled
behind thin clouds to the west. The breeze died, and he heard the sudden cry of
a bird in the jungle behind him. The wide door to the shed was open, but he
could see nothing in the darkness inside. He dried his hand on his
thigh for a better grip on his gun, and jumped in.

A shot crashed with
deafening echoes from the darkness. The bullet tore splinters from the door to
Durell’s right. He saw a shadowy line of sorting tables, worn smooth by years
of use, and another long row of sorting bins. Machinery gleamed at the far end
of the shed. Shafts of sunlight came through ventilating louvers high in the
walls. He flattened beside the wall and heard Danat and the woman
outside, but they had not followed him in.

“Lantern!” he called.

The gun crashed again, and
the bullet tore out through the wide doorway beside him. He dove for the
sorting bins, then made his Way rapidly, in a crouch, behind their shelter
toward the open engine room at the far end of the shed. He moved with the
deadly speed and grace of a  killing machine. Anger possessed him,
but not to the point where he was careless. In a matter of seconds, he had
almost reached the dark bulk of the machinery.

“Lantern!” he called
again.

Metal clanked. A
footstep scraped. He heard a thin whimper, a hiss of tightly drawn breath.

“Wait.”

He did not want to wait.
If he squeezed the trigger, it would be to kill. And he wanted to kill.

“Cajun, you got to
listen.”

“Lantern?” he called.

“I know what you want to
do. Don’t do it. I got Anna-Marie here with me,” came the voice.

“Send her out here.”

“You gotta promise
to listen!”

“I promise nothing.”

“I know you expect to
kill me. Listen to me, first. I can’t trust you right now, see? You’re gonna
shoot first and think afterward.”

The words checked
Durell’s rage, and his anger evaporated. The killing instinct suddenly left
him. Something in Lantern’s words lifted a quick curiosity in him.

“Send Anna-Marie out,”
he said again.

There was a long
silence. Whispers came from behind the machinery, then a scrape of metal, rand
Durell saw a long bar of shining steel being pushed into his range of vision. .

“There’s your drive
shaft, Cajun. It’ll fit what we need for the boat. That’s what I came up here
for.”

It could be, Durell
thought. It might fit.

“You came up here for
this?” he called quietly.

“Yup”

“You were ordered to
stay on the boat.”

“Yup. And you wouldn’t
have let me come up here, no matter what I promised. Now I’m sending Anna-Marie
out, right?”

Durell waited. In a
moment, the French girl stepped from behind the power plant. Her long yellow
hair was in two braids that made her look small and childlike. Her face was
dead-white, her eyes enormous.

“Please believe him,
Sam. He hurt himself again, working on the machinery. He’s bleeding very badly.
He just—”

“Go outside. Your
father’s there,” he ordered.

“Yes. But please don’t
shoot him. He—”

“Never mind. Outside.”

She sidled fearfully
around him and moved back to the wide shed door. Durell kept his gun ready. For
a long time there was silence, and no further movement.

Then Orris Lantern
appeared from behind the power engines. His yellow hair was unkempt and lank,
plastered to his head with sweat. His bearded face was a pallid death mask. He
held his hands up, wincing with the effort, and showed greasy, empty palms.

“You saw them two horses
outside, Cajun?” he whispered. “We didn’t use ’em. Somebody else might be
around. I figured it was Paio, but we didn’t see anybody, and we ought to
move out fast, right?”

“Take it easy.”

“Just don’t shoot,
Cajun. I have a confession to make. If you get me back to the boat, I’ll do my
best to convince you that I’m really on your side.”

Before Durell had a
chance to wonder at the sudden lack of a hillbilly twang in the man’s words, or
in his changed demeanor, Orris Lantern’s knees suddenly buckled and
he pitched forward on his face in a dead faint.

                                  23

DURELL looked at his
watch. It was five minutes to five. Inexplicably, he heard a cock crow. It was
followed by the screeching of birds and the chattering of monkeys in the nearby
jungle. He put the wrench down and squeezed backward out of the narrow slot between
the boiler and the drive shaft in the 
Dong Xo Lady's
 engine
room. For more than an hour he had been lying on his back on the greasy plates,
adjusting and tightening the bolts on the drive shaft Lantern had supplied. The
fit was far from perfect. The starboard paddles might bind up and
freeze under the strain of propulsion. But the steel bar fitted with reasonable
snugness. Papa Danat explained, with an apology, that he had
cannibalized spare parts of the 
Lady’s
 engine years ago to
repair the power plant at his plantation. He had forgotten all about it, he
said, But Orris Lantern’s mechanic‘s eye had spotted the piece of
equipment and guessed at its original design. It was still possible to turn the
Lady
 into
a shallow-draft river gunboat.

Tuc
 
Kuwan,
the old villager he’d put in charge of the engine room, smiled toothlessly as
he emerged from behind the boilers. “We fire up now, sir?”

Durell nodded and wiped
his hands on a waste rag. “Fire up, Tuc. As quickly as you can.”

The old man grinned
cheerfully. “And if we blow up?”

“That’s the chance we
take.”

“You are boss, sir. We
do as you say. And the village people?”

“We take them all. Women
first. The men who want to stay and defend Dong Xo can keep what weapons they
have.”

“The men will stay. Only
the old and the sick, and the women and children. The boat is too small,
otherwise.”

Durell nodded and
climbed the ladder out of the hold as the small pilot fire was stoked by eager,
half-naked villagers. In an hour, they would know their chances of escaping.
Even if all went well, and the Lady moved under her own steam with the boilers
holding up, the difficulties ahead seemed incalculable. He would have to pilot
the boat, and he did not know the river. Papa Danat might help, but it
would be night, and unless there was a moon, the chance was that they would
snag On a mud bank before they got a mile downstream. And if there was a moon,
then they would be perfect targets for the Cong Hai waiting in ambush
along the river’s edge.

But he had done all he
could. The vessel was ready to go. The makeshift crew had been instructed in
their jobs. The refugees were already pouring aboard. And to port and starboard
were the machine guns from Muong’s jeeps, and the Thai soldiers to
man them. None had deserted after Muong’s death, and he was grateful
for their tough discipline.

He made his way slowly
down the corridor to the prison cabin where he had left Lantern. Anna-Marie and
Papa Danat were there, with one of Muong’s armed men.
Durell signed to the soldier to leave, and Lantern lifted himself on one elbow
and smiled.