Assignment - Sulu Sea (2 page)

He began to weep, because he was dying.

“Simon?”

 
“My mate. I mean, for
the
Tarakuta
." She gestured
toward the lagoon. Holcomb looked and saw an old two-masted freighting schooner
at anchor offshore. A dinghy was drawn up on the beach. He saw that the
landscape had changed from the wilderness of the coast where he had awakened at
sunrise to a more hilly shore. The lagoon was enclosed by mangroves that dug
gnarled,
rooty
fingers into a milky sea. The
distant loom of Borneo’s mountain spines could not be seen now. “Didn’t Simon
pass you on the beach, mister?"

“I killed him,” Holcomb whispered, suddenly stricken. “He
swung at me with his machete. and I thought—I thought—”

“What? What are you saying? I sent him for some fresh
coconuts, that’s all. Listen, are you crazy? I can’t help you unless Simon . .
.”

“Please,” he wept.

“Have you got a name?”

“Lieutenant Commander Peter J. Holcomb, Office of Naval
Intelligence, on temporary duty aboard the U.S. Navy nuclear-powered Polaris
sub 727, the
Andrew Jackson
.
Understand?”

“No.” She looked down at him, frowning, and then knelt and
looked at his shoulder. She could not conceal her repugnance at his wound.
“Listen, you’re in a bad way. The sun’s got you, and you’ve been hurt like I’ve
never seen a man hurt before. Who broke all your fingers?”

“My fingers?” He had forgotten. His hand was numb.
“The Chinaman did it.”

“Commander, you don’t make sense.”

“Listen.” Holcomb felt as if something had suddenly torn
apart in his chest. “Listen, if you can’t get me to a doctor in time—can
you
 
hear me—?”

“Yes,” the girl said.

“You get in touch with-—a man named—a man—"

“Who?”

“Sam Durell. I saw him in Honolulu—three weeks ago. He‘s
still there. It’s urgent. Tell him about me—”

“Hey, it’s a small world,” the girl whispered. “Durell?”

“Yes. Please? It must be—quick. Couple of days, they'll all
be dead. Understand?”

“Who will be dead?”

“Whole crew. One by one. Ship, too. Gone. Not a trace.
Vanished. You understand?”

“No, but—”

Holcomb felt something else give way deep inside him, a
quiet release, a warm flood that he almost welcomed. He saw the sun
shining behind the girl’s thick, blonde hair. She had tied and pinned it up in
a knot at the nape of her neck and allowed the long‘, heavy, thick and luscious
strands of it to curl forward over her shoulders and lie between her firm
breasts. He was sorry he Was dying. He wondered if she understood his message
at all.

And just before he died, he wondered if it all hadn’t been
some kind of dream and delusion, a nightmare of sun and terror.

                                                                                               
chapter two

DURELL found her on the lanai of his apartment in the
Luakulani Palms that overlooked the dark sand beach and Makapuu Point. Against
a background of jacaranda and African tulip trees, through which the waters of
Kaiwi Channel glimmered, she took a seat in the big Bombay chair and poured
herself a gin and orange hitters. She turned to watch the professional,
brown-skinned beach boys giving the tourist girls a thrill with the surfboards,
out there where the Pacific combers came rolling in like the massive ticking
of some giant clock. He could hear the shrieks of delighted terror from the
beginners on their styrofoam boards and see their brave young shapes, glowing
with golden health, against the towering white clouds of the Pacific
horizon.

It was a Tuesday, and he was already half packed and ready
to return via this evening’s Pan Am flight to the mainland and then on
across to his apartment in Washington’s Northwest by Rock Creek Park, where he
would report to K Section and finish the routine job of organizational field
work he had done here. He knew that General McFee had assigned him to it as a
vacation of sorts, but he was not pleased with it, because desk work irritated
him, even when he could admit the importance of analysis and synthesis of every
item of knowledge that came through the pipeline and military installations and
divisional movements deep in the heart of Red China. Back at No. 20 Annapolis
Street in Washington, the computer would digest the coded information and
estimates of tomorrow’s potential trouble spot in a very troubled world.

He halted in the doorway and the girl on the lanai tilted
her gin and orange bitters and sipped at it through the straw and said, “Hi,”
and then regarded him with cool and speculative blue eyes that were distinctly
unfriendly. “So you are Sam Durell?”

“I am," he said quietly.

“It’s a cinch you’re no native.”

“Because I don’t wear my shirttail out?”

“And no Truman shirt. Just plain pima, button-down collar
knitted blue necktie, dark business suit. She spoke critically. “My, you look
stuffy to me. What kind of business are you in, Sam Durell?”

“My own. And you?”

“I’ve come a long way to see you.”

“How long a way?”

“Ever hear of Tarakuta?”

"All my life.” He looked at the golden-skinned girl.
“Did you ever hear of Bayou Peche Rouge?”

“I’m sick to death of the name,” she said.

She showed no sign of stirring from the Bombay chair, so he
ignored her and went through the Luakulani apartment with meticulous care.
Durell was a cautious man, both by training, reflex and instinct. He had
to be, in order to survive in his business He kept nothing to tie him to K
Section here in the apartment, but he knew too well how a bit from here and
there could be matched together to form a blueprint of a man or an operation.
He checked his suitcase, his clothes, and the Governor Winthrop secretary desk
that may have come over to Hawaii with one of the first missionaries to
the islands. The girl’s blue eyes watched him with silent amusement while she finished
her drink. He was not unaware of her magnificent golden legs, the curve
of her thigh and breast, the tilted pride and intelligence of her lovely face.
Her hair was piled high on her head in what seemed a haphazard fashion, and
then allowed to stream in thick, honeyed waves over her shoulders. She wore a
man’s blue denim shirt and a pair of very, very short shorts.

He knew that when she stood up, she would be only an inch or
two under his six feet plus. A lot of woman, he thought, angry with himself for
somehow finding her here, wondering if it could be true that she came from
Tarakuta, wondering why she was here after all these years. She was the sort of
myth you never expected to meet in reality.

Durell was a big man, heavily muscled, with thick black hair
touched with gray at the temples. He had dark blue eyes that could turn as
black as a thundercloud when angry. His temperament was quick and volatile,
rising from his Cajun ancestors in the bayous of lower Louisiana. It was his
one handicap. ‘He. had inherited from his old grandpa Jonathan all the
instincts of a Mississippi riverboat gambler, which old Jonathan had been, and
some of this was deplored by K Section, and some of it was quietly shelved and
obliterated in
 
dossier, because as a field
sub-chief for the Central Intelligence Agency, he was not supposed to have any
identifiable quirks or. foibles. There were a few, however, that he
refused to give up—good bourbon, and chicory-flavored Louisiana coffee, among
others.

The girl had not even touched anything in his rooms, and
this somehow irritated him even more, after fanning everything he could think
of. Her eyes mocked him.

“How did you get in?” he asked finally.

“The bellhop was cooperative.”

“He isn’t supposed to be.”

He liked my legs,“ she said. “Do you like them, Sam?”

He looked at them and approved of them and said: “I can't
believe it. Are you really Willi Panapura?”

“Sho ‘nuff. And you’re Samuel Durell, of Bayou Peche Rouge.
My granddaddy, Joseph Panapura, and your granddaddy, old Jonathan Durell, were
once the terrors of the Mississippi gambling halls, until old Joseph got
homesick for the South Seas and left the good paddle-wheeler
Three Belles
and shipped out on a tramp
steamer for home.”

"Your grandfather must be in his nineties by now.”

“He is. And Jonathan?”

“The same. They were a tough breed.”

“I’ve been hearing about you,” the girl said. “ever since
I’ve been knee-high to a sand crab, and I long ago got sick to death of your
name.”

Durell smiled thinly. “It’s a mutual feeling.”

“You mean you don’t like my legs?”

“I like them, all right. But I’m flying to Washington
tonight.

“No, you’re not,” Willi said. “You’re flying to Borneo
with me, this afternoon. Well, not Borneo, exactly. It’s Pandakan, capital city
of the Tarakuta Group, just off the east shore. I’ve got the tickets ’n all.”

“You seem pretty sure of all this.”

“I am. You’ll be aboard, if you’re what your grandpappy told
my grandpappy you really are.”

He asked carefully: “And what is that?”

“Oh,” she said, “you’re a man from the CIA.”

Bayou Peche Rouge was a long way back in Durell’s past. The
moss-draped old sidewheeler, the
Three
Belles
, safely lodged in the mud of the delta country, had been his home
ever since his parents died and old Jonathan took him in. And ever since he
could remember, he had heard about the wild and Woolly South Sea Islander,
Joseph Panapura, who had worked as a pilot for Jonathan in the heyday of their
Mississippi gambling careers. The two old men still kept up a correspondence, a
fragile thread across space and lengthening, inexorable time. Old Joseph had a
granddaughter, as old Jonathan had a grandson. Durell had heard about the
beautiful Willi ever since he had been twelve, when Willi was born.

She was a myth, a Polynesian legend, an idyll of a day long
gone and forgotten. His own work with K Section kept him in a shadow world of
danger and eternal suspicion, of sudden crisis and alarm, where men died
quietly in a silent war that ranged from the alleys of Bangkok to the utter
respectability of London’s West End, from the hovels of an Arab sheikdom on the
Indian Ocean to a crib in a coastal town of Panama. He had learned to live with
it. He could conceive of no other existence now, after all this time with K
Section. Somebody had to fight this battle of darkness, and live in this
world of anonymity, of eternal care and infinite suspicion. You never
turned a corner casually, you never opened a door without expecting enemies to
wait beyond. He had survived. The price he had paid made him unlike other men,
and sometimes he wondered if the cost was not too

high. But he had gone too far, for too many years. There was
no way out for him, ever, except one. And he preferred to postpone that
ultimate end as long as possible, as far as care and alert reflexes and
unending awareness could take him.

“My,” Willi Panapura said. She considered her empty glass.
“You’ve got a terrible look in your eyes, Sam.”

“Have I?"

“I'm sorry I’ve come to bring you such bad news.“

“Is it about your grandfather?”

“Oh, no. Joseph is fine. He's written airmail to your
granddaddy about
rny
coming here to find you.
We’ve laid up the Tarakuta—that’s our trading schooner—until you fly back
with me.”

He sighed. “All right, I can’t guess why you’re here or how
you found me. So tell me right out.”

She laughed softly. “Oh, you do like my legs, all right.

You like me all over, I think, the way you look at me.”

“Does that flatter you? Fine. I like you, Willi.”

“But I’m engaged to be married, you know."

“Congratulations.”

“And engagements have been broken before, haven’t they?”

“Don’t do anything rash on my account,” he said.

“Oh, I won’t. Not until I know you better, anyway.”

“Do you think you will?”

“Yes, on the flight to the Tarakuta Islands, and
perhaps later, I’ll get a better chance to size you up."

He said patiently: “But I’m not going anywhere with you,
Willi. I might like to, but it’s impossible.”

“You’ll come with me. Because a man named Peter Holcomb sent
me for you, and Peter Holcomb is dead.”

                                                                                               
chapter three

NOTHING changed in his face. He knew the girl was watching
curiously to see what
effect her
words had on him.
But that did not matter. He took her for what she said she was, since no one
else on earth could have known about their grandfathers. He lit one of his rare
cigarettes and lit another for her, but she said quietly: “I don’t smoke,
Samuel. I don‘t do lots of things. We can get that straight, right off.”

“Tell me again who sent you to me."

“You heard me. It was a man who said he was a lieutenant
commander in the Office of U.S. Naval Intelligence, off a Polaris submarine named
the Andrew Jackson." She paused and added quietly: “I’m sorry, I didn’t
know he was such a good friend of yours.”

“He wasn’t. We knew each other, that’s all. We’re in the
same line of business. I use the present tense, you see, because I don't believe
you when you say Pete Holcomb is dead, because it just isn’t possible.”

“But he is. I was there when he died, all alone and out of
his head on the beach, babbling about the boys being shot.”

“Come here,” Durell said.

She stood up obediently. Something in his voice was not to
be denied. She did not smile when she saw what was in his face. She moved with
smooth grace, her white shorts snug on her hips, her heavy hair swinging like
thickly braided, honey-colored silk over one shoulder. Durell’s eyes were almost
black, and he took her by the shoulders in a grip that hurt. She was not
teasing now, not about their grandfathers or the long years of growing up,
hearing of each other’s virtues until they were bound to be sick of the other’s
name.