Assignment - Cong Hai Kill (22 page)

It was stifling in the
narrow cabin, and the smell was sickening. Durell persisted. He knew he was
inflicting scars on himself that might never be erased. But he had to go on and
find out about Deirdre. It was his last chance.

And Lao defeated him.
There was not enough time.

The 
Dong Xo Lady
 listed
to starboard with the weight of the excited, panic-stricken refugees on the
main deck, who walled persistently in thin, high, frightened voices. Someone
tapped on the door and Durell paused and straightened, covered with sweat, and
answered it.

The old engineer, Tuc Kuwan,
smiled toothlessly.

“It is time, and we are
ready, sir. It grows dark and the channel to the river is narrow. You will be
captain?”

“In a moment.”

“It must be now, sir.”
The old man looked at Lao, sprawled on the cabin floor, and shot Durell a
puzzled glance. “This is one of the enemy?”

“Yes.”

“Then why do you not
simply kill him?”

“I need him for a few
more minutes.”

“Let my people have him.
They know what to do with his kind.” Tuc suddenly giggled and
advanced with strange, dancing steps toward the Chinese’s prone body. Lao
jerked around in sudden surprise and looked up at the scrawny old man. His eyes
widened. Tuc said something in a spitting dialect and Lao returned
it, briefly. Tuc spoke to Durell. “Let me give him to the women, to
the widows and mothers who lost their men through this filth of a person.”

Durell saw something
flicker in Lao’s eyes and said quietly: “All right, you can have him.”

Lao rolled over on his
back and stared blindly at the darkened overhead. He licked his lips. Tuc hunkered
down beside him and giggled and spoke again in his village dialect. Lao shook
his head from side to side. The old man touched his body with a stiff, probing
finger.

Lao suddenly screamed
and jerked upward and tried to escape. He came up short against the hog chain
that hound him. Tue grinned again.

Lao gasped: “I will
talk, but it will not help you, American spy. It is too late for your woman.
You have lost everything.”

Durell let out a long
breath and signaled the old man away. “We’ll see. Begin talking. And make it
fast.”

                                  25

DURELL stood at the
wheel in the pilothouse of the Lady. Everything aboard shook and trembled as if
the old steamer were about to come apart at the seams. Papa Danat sat
on a stool nearby, his fat legs spread, belly sagging between his thick knees.
Anna-Marie was still below with Lantern. Lao had been shackled again, to the
disappointment of old Tuc. Steam gushed through a dozen leaks in the
pressure pipes as he gave the signal to cast off. From the main deck came a
babble of voices, rising through the darkness like the sudden beat of wings
from a startled flock of birds. Durell took a deep breath and signaled for slow
ahead.

Now he would know.

For a moment, nothing
happened.

Then from the belly of
the little steamer came a slow grinding noise, a burst of extra steam. There
was a whistle in the engine room tube. A plume of sparks and a belch of smoke
came from the precariously leaning stacks. The vessel shook like an old dog
begging piteously to be let alone. Then came a splash of water, a slow,
groaning lift of the paddle wheels under their teak covers. A wire snapped with
a sound like a pistol shot. Papa Danat swore and stood up. Another
splash, and the paddles revolved again. The creak and squeak of protesting
metal and wood sounded enormous in the dark, quiet lagoon. The 
Dong Xo
Lady
 did not move.

Durell spoke quietly
into the tube.

“More steam, Tuc.”

The refugees on deck
were silent. Durell strained to see through the thickening gloom of the channel
to the river. It was more than two hundred yards, with little room beyond the
beam of the paddle-wheeler. The depth had been sounded by Tuc, and it
should be all right. But he was not sure of anything at this moment. The
boilers, shaking under the pressure in their rusty sections, could blow them
all sky-high at any instant.

The deck shook again.
The Lady moved with a sudden forward surge and a great splash of water from her
side paddles. At the same time, as she left the support of her ancient dock,
she took a heavy list to port, making a wave that sent a long surge of black
water sliding across the lagoon. Now the passengers screamed in sudden panic,
and one or two jumped overboard. Durell leaned forward and yelled through the
windowless pilothouse wall.

“Everyone to starboard!
Quickly!”

There were some who
understood him. Behind the pilothouse, the tall, bell-mouthed stacks that
towered above the Texas deck creaked and swayed; another guy wire snapped and
the end of the cable lashed viciously through the air. Painfully, the Lady
lighted herself as the passengers moved to starboard. The bow swung toward the
channel as Durell hauled on the wheel. The pulleys were reluctant to yield, and
it took all his strength.

But they were moving.

A yell of triumph came
from the people packed below. With alarming speed, the narrow channel entrance,
only a dark slot in the gloom, came toward them.

“Slow ahead,” Durell
called.

Like the cumbersome
splashing of some antediluvian monster, the steamer surged across the lagoon.
Durell forced the wheel slightly to starboard. The response was sluggish. Papa Danat lent
his weight to the steering mechanism and the bow turned slowly, heading into
the slot of the channel.

Vines and creepers
swept, crashed, slithered, and broke against the steamer’s bulwarks. Wild
orchids winked at them from branches covered with a million butterflies,
creating a host of pinpoint lights in the darkness. Durell kept his sight on
the faint glimmer of the river at the far end of the channel. More screams of
terror came from the passengers. Gently, he eased the thrashing paddlewheeler around
a slight bend to port. The gloom brightened. A tree crashed down on the stern,
and are vessel surged for the nearby bank. Again Papa Danat helped
him fight the bow into the proper direction. The vessel shuddered, and there
came a thick sucking sound as mud and giant, squashy vegetation pulled at her
flat bottom.

Then they were free
again and with a suddenness that surprised him, they were thrashing directly
across the river, popping out of the channel like a cork from a bottle.

“To port!” Danat cursed.
“Hard aport!”

~ The river current had
seized the little steamer and swung her stern downstream, pointing her in the
direction opposite to which they must go. The other bank, thick with the marsh
reeds where the herons nested, came up with appalling swiftness.

“Reverse engines,”
Durell ‘ordered.

Tuc
 
Kuwan,
the old engineer down below, called a response. The 
Dong Xo Lady
 shuddered
throughout her short length and the paddles screeched and groaned, halted, then
began a slow reversal. Their momentum was

checked as the bow nosed
into the reeds, then they backed, stern to the current.

As abruptly as a candle
being snuffed out, the last light fled, and darkness swooped into the river
valley.

But there was a moon,
which lit the channel ahead, a mixed blessing, since it also showed them up On
the surface of the river to the eyes of the enemy who must be following their
course with astonishment. A warm, fetid breeze that smelled of the jungle
followed astern. Ahead, the river widened for half a mile, and the 
Lady
 headed
for the open water like an eager, waddling old duck.

Papa Danat wiped
his face with a trembling hand. “I could use a cognac."

Durell relaxed a little.
“Sit down. I need you here. You know this river better than I.”

“I am not a pilot, m’sieu.
And this is madness.”

“Would you rather stay
and be massacred?”

Papa Danat subsided,
then said: “I cannot understand you. A man who loves a woman as you do—-oh, I
have eyes, I have a comprehension of love, and I have seen how you looked at
Mademoiselle Deirdre—”

“What of it?” Durell
asked harshly.

“How can you leave her
behind with the Congs? They do have her, you know. Their anger at our
escape will be enormous. They will turn it against her—"

“I’m not leaving her,”
Durell said.

“But how is that‘? We go
downriver.”

“Just listen, Papa,
because what I must do means that you will have charge of this old tub. And you
mustn’t Wreck her. You must do everything I say, and do it right, and without
the help of cognac. Without any pipes from Giralda.”

“You are 
formidable
,”
Papa murmured.

“Can I depend on you?”

“No. But I will promise
to try.”

“Then listen.” He told Danat exactly
what must be done. Time was growing short. Every surge of the groaning paddle
wheels took them closer to the critical point. In the dark pilothouse, Danat’s round
face sobered, and several times he started to object, but Durell shut him up
and made him repeat his instructions.

“But are you sure of
this?" Papa Danat asked.

“Lao talked. We can’t
trust him, but his fear of Tuc was genuine. Tuc convinced
Lao that it would be best to speak loud and clear. Now, can you do it, Papa?”

“I am a weak and foolish
old man who has ruined his life through vice and indulgence. It may be too late
for me. But as I said, I will try."

It still did not go
exactly as Durell had planned.

They had come to the end
of the wide area in the river by the time he finished talking to Danat. In
another mile, they would be at the confluence of the two rivers and headed
downstream toward the coast. But before they reached that point, there was the
gorge he had seen from the hillside of Papa Danat’s plantation.

He could see the sheer
cliffs now, outlined in the moonlight. The current quickened in its narrowing
channel, and the steamer steered more erratically. It was touch and go as to
whether the straining paddles would hold together. He kept his eyes on the
gorge ahead.

Now he could see the
Khmer temple ruins on the cliff-top, a dark, pinnacled mass touched by the
moon. That was the place, according to Lao’s confession.

But then everything
began to go wrong.

He had not
underestimated the fanatical Chinese. But even so, Lao proved unexpectedly
resourceful.

His first hint was a
sudden scream from below, in the passenger quarters where Lao was a prisoner.
The sound was sharp and brief, pregnant with danger, and it was followed by a
thud of running feet, a crash that sounded above the thump of the 
Lady’s
 engines. Danat lurched
up. “What is it?”

“Take the wheel,” Durell
snapped. “Remember what I told you.”

He jumped for the
ladder. There were no lights aboard, and the decks were in total darkness. He
heard the sound of someone breathing in the corridor, and plunged ahead. At the
stern exit, he glimpsed a flicker of movement against the dim moonlight that shone
in their wake.

“Lao!”

He knew with dismay that
somehow the Chinese had tricked his guard and broken free. He drove ahead,
careless of the fact that Lao might now be armed.

“Lao!” he called again.

The passengers who
crowded the afterdeck returned a sudden babble of confused shouts. Durell came
face to face with a milling Wall of frightened refugees.

“Where is he?”

Too many voices answered
him, none of them intelligible. Then he saw Lao poised momentarily on the rail,
tall and thin against the moonlit river. Durell raised his gun, but there were
too many people in the way. He tried to shoulder his way through them, but it
was impossible.

Lao turned his head for
a moment. He was grinning. Then, with a clean, smooth movement, he dived
overboard.

They were in the mouth
of the gorge now, and the current was swifter, filled with jungle debris
brought down from the high valley astern. Durell forced his way to the rail,
shrugging out of his shirt as he went. All sorts of dark objects bobbed in the
muddy flow of water. He could not identify Lao’s head in the turbulence astern
of the paddle wheels.

He pulled himself up on
the rail, paused to look into the churning, foaming river, and dived in after
him.

                                  26

DEIRDRE sat with her
back to the cool stone of her prison cell and studied the carvings on the
opposite wall. A single candle guttered on the floor, made of huge paving
blocks. In the uncertain light, the carved figures of gods, goddesses, and
demons disported with an abandon that would have shocked Westerners. The
eternal, fixed smiles on their everted lips came and went in the
candlelight.