Assignment - Cong Hai Kill (24 page)

The crumbli.ng arcade
opened into a room wider than she had expected. It was lighted by oil lamps,
and stretched away into gloom to right and left. The floor was clear except for
a stack of ammunition boxes, where four men sorted mortar shells and grenades
and passed out equipment to a ragged file of guerrillas who trotted out of the
shadows to receive their allotment of arms. Even now, Deirdre almost gasped at
the beauty of this long-forgotten temple. The high walls were carved and
painted in fading colors, with fantastic figures, half human and half animal.
The Walls seemed luminous and alive even after a thousand years in this
forgotten corner of the jungle. Empires had come and gone, and their long,
exotic histories were now forgotten, and nothing was left of them but the glory
of their art. There was a pedestal at the far end, and a huge stone figure
loomed there, cross-legged in the lotus position, with a towering, intricately
fashioned cap over the oddly menacing face. There were many arms, like snakes,
emanating from the shoulders, and the image seemed half man, half woman, with
provocative breasts and the musculature of a demi-god. Once the eye sockets had
been jeweled and the cap crowned with a diadem of precious gems. But robbers
long ago had despoiled this place and forgotten it.

Deirdre did not dare
give the place more than a swift glance before she urged Paio forward
to the table.

“Quickly,” she said in a
quiet voice.

The man nodded and
scooped up the papers and maps that littered his desk. The men sorting
ammunition looked up curiously and one of them said something in local dialect.
Her finger tightened on the trigger. But Paio, the nape of his fat neck
glistening with sweat, merely grunted and finished gathering up the maps. Then
he stood still.

“Back the way we came,”
Deirdre murmured. “And take it easily.”

The ammunition-sorter
said something again, and this time Paio Chu had to answer. The sound
of his words was angry and impatient. Then he backed up, and Deirdre moved into
the shadows to return to her cell again. Once out of sight of the others, Paio halted.
“What can you hope for now?”

“There’s another way
out, We’ll take it.”

“Into the jungle? You
could not survive a day."

“We'll see. Quickly,
now.”

She wondered how much
time was left. Perhaps five minutes. Anxiously, she prodded the fat man ahead
of her down the narrow corridor to the left. It led at right angles to her
cell, paralleling the main temple chamber. She saw a long row of monastic cells
where shaven monks of other centuries had lived and died. Darkness waited
ahead. Paio stumbled and almost fell.

“Don’t make any
mistakes,” Deirdre murmured.

Abruptly, they came out
into the night.

Moonlight flooded the
river gorge. There were ruined gardens here, low and crumbling walls, a path
that led through rank elephant grass toward the edge of the cliff. But the
guerrillas had cleared all the underbrush for some distance in a perimeter
around the temple, leaving the treetops intact as a camouflage against any
passing planes that might fly up the valley from the coast. Most of Paio’s men
were crouching shadows, fifty yards to the right, at their mortar emplacements.

There came the distant
puff and chug and thrashing of the 
Dong Xo Lady’s
 progress,
sounded through the murmur of the quickened river current. She paused. Where
now? She thrust Paio’s roll of maps into her shirt. Paio seemed
to regain some of his confidence in the open night air. “You are lost, dear
lady. The game is mine, not yours, whatever you do.”

“Go ahead,” she said,
urging him with the gun.

“To what purpose? I will
promise to be merciful. After all, you may be an important prisoner. Not for
what you know, but for propaganda purposes. It would startle the world to learn
we had captured an American woman such as yourself. But I promise you will be
exchanged for one of our people we wish returned from Saigon.”

“No deal,” Deirdre said
shortly. “Keep walking.”

Paio
 
Chu
said angrily: “I will not repeat my offer."

“Good. You’ll be saving
your breath.”

She urged him on through
the desolate gardens. A small wind blew across the cliff top; it smelled of
sweat from the men at their mortars. One edge of the cliff had crumbled and a
trail led from the fortress area to this place beyond the perimeter. A man in
the black pajama uniform, with machine-pistol clips on his muscular chest,
stood up and challenged Paio. Paio replied briefly. The man
looked uncertainly at Deirdre. His head was shaven, glistening with sweat in
the moonlight. Paio spoke again, and he sat down at his post once
more.

They were in the clear.

But now the sound of the
approaching steamer was echoing loudly with creaks and groans as it thrashed
through the tumultuous current. Deirdre urged Paio on, and when they
came to the point in the trail where it descended to a tiny beach below, on the
river’s edge, she could see the little paddle-wheeler like a toy in the
distance. Sparks belched from her tall stacks, which leaned precariously to
port. Surprisingly, her paddles were in reverse, fighting the current that
pushed her into the trap. It was as if those aboard knew of the mortars that
waited for them at this point. But the steamer’s efforts were failing. Her
stern turned this way and that, she yielded to the current and drifted
downstream into the gorge where the temple commanded the river.

Durell was down there
somewhere, she thought. And she felt a despair that almost burst her heart.

“Go on, Paio,"
she said. “Climb down.”

“But someone is coming!” Paio said
in surprise.

Deirdre saw the dim
shadow climbing desperately up the trail from the liver. In the moonlight, she
could not make out the man’s face. But there was an urgency in his climb and
his indifference to obstacles as he stumbled and clambered up in his sodden clothes.

Then he paused and
stared up at them and she saw his face.

It was Lao.

                                  27

DURELL halted when he
saw Deirdre confronted by Lao. He had reached shore only a moment before, and
by luck had glimpsed Lao’s wet figure clambering up the trail. The range was
too far to use his gun, and, at any rate, he did not want to alarm the Congs with
the sound of the shot. He poured ‘all his energy into overtaking Lao. Lao was
intent only on his escape. Twice, the Chinese looked backward; but then Durell
froze in the shadows, and he did not think Lao spotted him.

Glancing over his
shoulder, he saw that Papa Danat had checked the progress of
the 
Lady
. Her stern fish-tailed and she tended to slip sidewise
down the current. But there was some time to spare. Papa was doing a good job.

When he saw Deirdre and Paio,
he wanted to yell a warning that Lao was coming. But he only redoubled his
efforts to overtake the Cong assassin. Once his foot slipped and sent a small
avalanche of stones into the gorge below. The sound seemed enormous as he froze
again. But Lao had now seen Deirdre and all his attention was focused on the
pair coming down toward him. After a moment, Durell resumed his climb.

Deirdre was very close
to death. He saw that she was in control of Paio, but he knew that Lao
would show her no mercy. His heart hammered in his throat when he saw Lao raise
a gun he must have taken from the guard he killed aboard the boat, and he
shouted: “Dee! Look out!”

Deirdre had spotted Lao
a moment before, and she fired over Paio Chu’s shoulder. The shot
raised harsh echoes that bounced back and forth from the cliffs frowning over
the river. Paio screamed a Warning in Chinese, but Lao fired back,
scrambling upward as he did so. His eagerness made him miss. And with a last
rush, Durell was upon him.

Lao heard him coming. He
turned, lips skinned back in a malevolent grimace. Paio Chu screamed
again, his voice shrill with terror, and there was a commotion at the temple
that glowered above them. A few lights shone against the wink of fireflies in
the jungle beyond. A machine gun rattled as one of the Cong Hal panicked and
fired a vicious burst at nothing at all.

Lao’s gun was turned to
Deirdre in a bitter effort to kill her. He fired twice, and then again. Paio Chu
gave grunt and a gurgle of pain and sagged to the ground, a victim of his own
creature’s bullets. But it left Deirdre without a shield now. From the trail
below, Durell lunged and caught Lao’s ankle. Lao had to stop shooting and grab
at a bush to keep from being tumbled into the gorge. The man’s naked ankle was
slippery with sweat. Durell could not pull hard enough. He felt a naked foot
crack him in the jaw and a wave of dizziness halted him. But he did not slacken
his grip. He yanked harder.

Deirdre’s gun made a
smashing sound and Lao grunted and tried to kick Durell into space again. His
free foot slipped. He yelled and threw up both arms and gyrated dizzily on the
narrow path over the abyss.

Then he fell,
cartwheeling out and beyond Durell.

His scream echoed for a
long time between the walls of the gorge.

Durell turned and
watched the body hit the tiny beach far below, bouncing like a rag doll.

The ancient whistle of
the 
Dong Xo Lady
 tooted. Then the paddle-wheeler chuffed and
creaked and a dark bow wave appeared as she began her run through the defile,
as Durell had ordered. He did not watch it after that. He scrambled up the path
to where Deirdre stood.

“Are you all right,
Dee?”

“Yes . . . good enough,
I think.”

“They didn’t—”

“No, Sam. There wasn’t
time. Let’s get out of here, before I shake to pieces.”

“We’re not through yet,”
he said.

He wanted to hold her
tight and never let her go. He prodded Paio Chu’s fat body. “He was
in command?”

“Pain was a colonel in
their alleged army.” Deirdre’s voice trembled. “Saul, the others are coming.”

“How many?”

“Fifty, perhaps. Maybe
more. They have mortars.”

“Then they’ll clobber
the 
Lady
. We have over a hundred people aboard her. Where is their
ammo?”

“Back there, beyond the
garden—”

He managed a grin. “Dee,
you’re a wonderful idiot.”

“And I love you,” she
said simply.

She led him back through
the dark, weed-grown gardens behind the temple. Men ran here and there in
confusion. Lights flickered. A mortar on the terrace overlooking the river
coughed and there came the dull crump of a shell landing far across the gorge
on the opposite cliff. But it would not take them long to zero in on the boat.

One of the Cong perimeter
guards suddenly lurched up from his emplacement with a cry of challenge as they
raced toward him in the darkness. Durell called something unintelligible to
check him. The man hesitated. And Durell was on him, slamming his gun against
the other’s round, shaven head. The man collapsed with a groan. Durell knelt
over him and tore eight anti-personnel grenades from the man’s bandolier.

“These will do nicely,”
he told Deirdre. “Do you know how to use these?”

“I think so.”

“Throw them anywhere, to
distract the Congs from firing on the boat.”

The mortar on the temple
terrace coughed again. This time the shell landed in the middle of the river.
He threw his first grenade at the mortar, lobbing it past the dark pinnacle of
a temple 
chedi
, and it exploded at the same time as Deirdre’s first
throw burst some distance ahead of them. Lights flared; there were startled
shouts, some screams. Someone spotted them and fired a burp gun that stitched
long patterns through the tangled garden and chipped stone from a low wall to
their right. Durell threw his second grenade, then a third.

He was lucky. The last
grenade hit an ammo box and there was a great crash, and a sheet of flame
leaped high in the sky over the gorge.

“Save your last one,” he
told Deirdre. He grabbed her hand. “Come on, it’s time to go.”

He pulled her out of
the  garden, into the jungle, away from the flames and explosions
that engulfed the ancient ruins.

Their legs ached and
their lungs burned. Their progress was a nightmare, as they circled wide above
the river’s edge. There was no trail and no moonlight now, under the umbrella
of leaves high above in the forest. But they could guide themselves by the
distant flares and explosions that still came from the Cong fortress.

Durell tried to identify
the sound of mortars among the other explosions. He thought they had stopped,
but he couldn’t be sure. He held Deirdre’s hand and pulled her on. Once they
slipped and fell into the mud of a small swamp. But he drew back in time and
held Deirdre close for a second longer than necessary.

“Sam, I can’t keep it
up.”

“You must, Dee.”

“Where are we going?”

“We’ll know in a
minute.”