Assignment - Cong Hai Kill Read online

  1

  DROWNING, Durell felt an inner rage because he had been careless. Just a little careless, but when you walk the edge of a knife, every step must be calculated. He had been watching for the girl when the mistake was made. But you only made one, in Durell’s business. You rarely had another chance.

  The water was warm and smelled of rotting things, of vegetable scum and human excrement, of oil and mud that gave oft foul, gaseous bubbles. He could at least have chosen some clean water to drown in, he thought. And because the water was so foul, it gave him a little extra determination not to open his mouth and breathe it in.

  The pain in the back of his head was not so bad. It had been a glancing blow. He wondered if the girl had planned it, because he never saw the thug who’d come up behind him on the plank walk across the klong.

  His feet touched bottom. The mud clutched like warm, licentious hands all the way up to his ankles, pulling at him. Through his dazed pain, he felt revolted, and he wanted to laugh, because his death was happening in such a ridiculous way, and he’d had so many other smarter enemies who had tried to kill him. Now some half-wild jungle villager had managed to do it. But it had happened like that to Fred Harrison, who was pushed under the wheels of a London Underground; and Joel Marley, hit by a taxi in Athens. Or Danny Vane, with that girl in Hong Kong. Durell had worked with them all, at one time or another. They had been good men, and no doubt all of them had been surprised, in that instant of dying.

  He opened his eyes underwater and saw wavering shafts of red and yellow light from the paper lanterns of the Chinese quarter all around the canal, and it seemed as if he had already departed this world, or was on his way, and everything was growing dim.

  Something raw and screamingly painful cut across his cheek with a shock that almost made him open his mouth to breathe in the water for that final lungful. His head had scraped against a piling encrusted with thick river barnacles, and the tiny shells, open in the night hours, presented so many serrated razors to his passing flesh. He pushed away, a dim sense of survival returning to him. He did not have to die. His mind was clearing. But he would have to surface fast, to drink in air and not water. . . .

  He pushed against the muddy bottom and felt the muck release his ankles from its obscene clasp. He drifted up toward the red, yellow, and green worms of light that lay on the surface of the klong.

  Too far to go.

  You can’t make it.

  Besides, he’s still waiting up there.

  Crouching, the other man was a long shadow against the shadows of night, kneeling on the plank walk, the club in his hand, waiting to smash his skull and let his brains float away in the water like the pulp of an overripe fruit.

  The shadow was monstrous, inexorably blocking the way to precious air and life.

  Wait.

  But he couldn’t wait.

  His lungs screamed for air now and gave him no choice. He slid up through the murky, warm water. The shadow of the waiting man blotted out the colored worms from the lanterns around the places where the old Chinese men were sitting, drinking tea and playing eternal Mah-Jongg. No one had seen the swift attack. Even if anyone had seen it, would he have cared? There had been no alarm. Durell was alone, dying, and his murderer knelt up there just above the surface of the water, in case he came up again. Instinct lent him cunning, and cunning gave him a last resentment against the death that hungered for him. His head came above the water with a small splash.

  The man waiting above struck at once—and missed. And pulled back to strike again.

  Dimly, through his pain and fear, Durell was aware of instinctive reactions. He had another moment to live. The reflexes drilled into him so painfully made him act almost without volition, when part of him told himself to let it go and finish it in the warm, viscous mud at the bottom of the canal. It was like standing aside to watch himself challenge the thug crouching above. He could see his own bloody head and the soggy white linen suit that hampered him. But in that instant he got a good gulp of air into his tormented lungs. It was a small victory. But it gave him another chance.

  He let himself drift down again, and now, slowly at first, he began to think and let his mind overcome the shock and dismay he had felt when that first blow crashed down on the back of his head. He remembered following the girl, Anna-Marie Danat, from the riverfront hotel, through the hot and humid night of the coastal town that sprawled almost within sight of the Cambodian border. They had crossed a few paved streets, then some bridges over the klongs, where sampans and barges made a solid surface over the dark, turgid water. There had been a garden gate, oleanders, the scent of night-blooming flowers, and then the crash and din of the Chinese quarter of the Thai town of Giap Pnom. Here there had been a vitality of sights, sounds, and smells—dragon lanterns and snake shops and old men sitting at their games, the noise of barking dogs and wailing children, the odors of fish and food and opium smoke.

  Where had he gone wrong?

  Anna-Marie had turned left into an alley, then along a brick-paved walk beside the canal. She headed for a Chinese house a little larger than most. Now and then she had turned about to see if she were being followed. But it had been easy to stay invisible. He’d been angry with her, because her orders were to stay at the hotel; but everything she did was suspicious, and he wanted to know where she was going before he stopped her. If he halted her too soon, she would only lie to him.

  Better lie than die, he thought.

  In seconds, he would have to surface again. He touched the barnacled piling again and remembered the small bridge, the stone garden lantern beside the klong. Anna-Marie had paused at a wooden gate and he was caught out in the open on the bridge. The moon was full, like a searchlight out of the Southeast Asian sky, aimed right at him.

  Then, just when he saw her pert French features change into alarm, he felt the pain and thrust into the fetid Waters below the bridge. Someone had been hiding behind that big stone Chinese lantern.

  Had the girl known?

  Was she smarter—or more treacherous—than he’d expected?

  No matter now. It was time to go up again. This time, your pal waiting up there won’t miss when he tries to bash your brains out.

  His head broke the surface of the water again.

  The shadow waited, tense and lustful for his death. The club swished down with a swift, ugly sound in the air. Durell saw a skeletal face, a mélange of racial strains in almond eyes, brown skin, a round shaven head. He ducked and thrust up a hand to catch the impact of the club in his palm. His fingers closed around the shaft and he yanked back with all his remaining strength, setting up a great splashing in the dirty water as he fell backward, hauling on the club. He pulled his assailant in after him. There was a brief squawk of anger and surprise. The man was like a water snake in the klong.

  Durell released the club. Water resistance made it a poor weapon. But the other man thought he had wrenched it free and tried to smash it at Durell’s head again. Durell lunged forward in the water and locked his fingers on the man’s throat.

  For one long moment, in the shadows under the bridge, with the lights and noise of the Chinese quarter all around them, Durell looked into the other man's eyes.

  They were wild, feral, drugged.

  “Cong Hai?” he gasped.

  The man said: “You die, you die, you die.”

  “Maybe.”

  He made a knot of bone out of his middle knuckle and used his other hand to squeeze it into the Cong Hai’s larynx. The man smashed at his shoulder with the club; but the few inches of water it had to penetrate weakened the blow. Durell did not relent; he squeezed harder. His knuckle was like the knot of a garrote. He saw a recognition of death in
the other’s eyes. He heard, above the sound of a Chinese orchestra in the distance, a wail and a plea for mercy.

  He had no mercy.

  “You die, you die, you die,” Durell said.

  It took half a minute to kill the man.

  2

  HE LET the body drift down and away, into the mud at the bottom of the klong. He could do nothing about it. It took all his strength to cling to a strut of the small bridge overhead, and then, when his breath came back,

  he pulled himself, dripping wet, out of the canal and fell on his back. He watched the hot Asian sky reel and dance above him in the humid night.

  You came close to it, Samuel, he told himself. Not a very auspicious beginning for the job. Maybe you’ve been at a desk too long, back in Washington.

  Durell was a big man, with a heavy musculature, controlled by a lithe and easy way of moving. To a trained observer who watched him cross a room or a street, he would be marked as dangerous, as one might mark a prowling jungle cat. Yet he could lose himself in a crowd, except in a town like this, half Thai and the rest Cambodian, Malay, Chinese, Indonesian; here his American height made him stand out. The trick then was to twist his uniqueness into something ordinary; he was an American businessman, according to his identity papers, in search of contacts among the tea planters in the distant loom of the mountainous Chaines des Cardarnomes. You played it with awkwardness, eager to please, with just a touch of condescension for the “natives.” You smiled a lot and pretended not to understand the swift, wry asides in Annamese or Canton dialects. He had never mastered Thai very well, although he had a gift for languages and could maneuver reasonably well in a dozen major and a score of minor dialects. Not knowing Thai made his pose easier to maintain.

  But someone now knew his real identity.

  And this troubled him.

  It could get him killed. Next time, he might meet a more expert and professional assassin.

  Durell rolled over and pushed up and felt water drain from his soaked linen suit, his shirt and shoes. The night was hot, but he shivered a moment, seeing his image waver indistinctly in the black waters of the canal. The high keening of a Chinese song came from a sampan not far of. He saw the dead man briefly, floating in the water, and something else. With his foot, he hooked onto the long ribbon and took it up in his hand. It was the dead man’s headband, a peculiar cap fashioned of Thai silk and ornamented with a band of snakeskin.

  Snakes were the symbol, the method of life, of the Cong Hai. Silent, secret, and venomous, they were cousins to the V.C. across the peninsula in Vietnam, infiltrating the jungles and rivers and mountains here on the Gulf of Siam as sinuously, as the snakes that were their totems.

  Durell shoved the headband into his wet pocket and stood up. The starry sky reeled around him. The Chinese lanterns up and down the canal stabbed and winked and jiggled. Music brayed from the radio, the impossible wail of one of West Europe's hermaphroditic boy singers. The inane melody fought with the wind bells and Chinese notes as oil fights with water. Never would the twain meet.

  It was a long walk across the bridge—all of a dozen steps. He staggered like a drunken man. His head throbbed where the thug had landed his first blow; he had bled a little, and he wondered about the possibilities of infection from the filthy waters of the canal. He pushed hard fingers through his thick black hair, touched the small moustache he had grown for this assignment, tried to adjust his dark knitted tie into the soggy collar of his drip-dry shirt. His shoes squelched with each step. A band of running Chinese boys broke around him like a sudden torrent breaking around a rock; they came and went with a bubble and spray of Cantonese, laughing at the drunken white man. Good enough. If he met a cop, he could always Say he’d had too much rice wine at Mama Foo’s and fallen into the canal.

  Until they found the dead man.

  Major Muong, of the Thai Security people, wouldn’t like that at all.

  But first things first. He’d come here after Anna-Marie Danat, and the last he’d seen of her was when she went through the red gateway of that big house ahead. To judge from the expansive compound walls, the solid tiles of the roof, the fish fertility symbols, it seemed to be the house of a reasonably wealthy Chinese merchant.

  The dead man might have had some friends nearby, and Durell, heading for the house, exercised caution and kept his hand on the snubby-barreled .38 S&W in its underarm holster. He looked as if he were scratching his chest. But anger and chagrin at losing Anna-Marie—and almost losing his life-—-made him a walking time bomb.

  But no one triggered an explosion.

  From the sidewalk at the gate, he could see the end of the klong where it entered from the river, which in turn opened into a harbor protected by a low mole. Giap Pnom was not much of a town, and less of a harbor; only one tramp freighter, rusty and riding high, occupied the wharf. Beyond was a paradise of white sandy beach, leaning palm trees, and a dark mangrove swamp, pierced by the single-line railway coming south from Bangkok. Beyond the corrugated tin-roofed warehouses and the white government buildings for Thai customs and police, the town was a sprawl of native houses and twisting lanes that followed the river inland.

  It was the sort of place, Durell reflected, that Joseph Conrad might have described, and it hadn’t changed much since Conrad’s day. Thailand was still known as Muang Thai, the Land of the Free.

  The problem was to keep it that way.

  And Anna-Marie Danat was the key to that problem.

  The red wooden gate in the wall ahead was not locked; it yielded when he touched it with a careful fingertip. He looked back at the canal with its distant shops and crowded sampans, with the glow of charcoal fires cooking the evening meals. It was eight o’clock in the evening. It seemed to Durell as if half a lifetime had passed since he was thrown into the klong. He heard the bell of a trishaw go by, down the narrow lane, but nothing was suspicious except the unlocked gate in the wall. There was no help for it. He pushed the door all the way open and slipped inside.

  There was a garden, dreaming in early moonlight and shadow, with oleanders and orchids, shell walks and formal flower beds, a carp pond and a small stone shrine and the soft glow of more stone lanterns along the walks. The house loomed in rich privacy within the compound. It looked deserted.

  No one greeted him. And no one followed him in.

  He thought he heard a small sound to his right, and he took his gun out and held it in his hand again.

  “Anna-Marie?” he called softly.

  A warm wind that smelled of cooking and fish and tidal mud from the harbor made a wind bell tinkle. He received no other answer, and called in French, this time:

  “Anna-Marie, is it you? This is Sam Durell.”

  He felt a worm of worry wriggle in his belly. He was angry with her because she had disobeyed all orders in coming here. He did not know this house or who she was trying to see. But Anna-Marie Danat did not belong down in the mud of the canal, with her slender throat cut, and her rich body for the crawling things under the water.

  “Honey, come out here!” he called again.

  This time there was a response, but not what he expected. From the shadows of an oleander against the compound wall, a slender figure broke and ran—away from him.

  He was after her in an instant. The bloated moon showed her frightened, somehow innocent face, her dark and troubled eyes. Her skirts flew. She ran noiselessly, having kicked off her high European heels. She was trying to get around the dark, brooding house to the other side.

  He caught up with her at the carp pond and seized at a flung arm, checked her, and whipped her about toward him. She tried to claw free, scratching at his face. She cursed him, panting, half her words Thai and half French, none of them printable and all of them shocking, coming unexpectedly from her blonde, angelic face.

  He slapped her. Hard.

  “I’ve had enough, honey. Behave yourself.”

  “Murderer!” she gasped. “Let me go!”

  She wrenched away. He
tripped her deliberately and made her fall into the carp pond.

  The splash sounded enormous in the still compound. He didn’t care. In his frustrated mood, he was ready to take on any and all interference.

  The French girl sputtered and wailed and splashed furiously. He felt sorry for the carp that shot in panic across the pool, like silver reflections of the moon, trying to avoid her. When he pulled her out, her silk frock clung satisfactorily to her rich body. Her long hair was bleached almost white by the Thai sun, and her arms had a tan that could only have been acquired by a lifetime on the tea plantations that terraced the distant highlands.

  He grinned at her fury and dishevelment. “Take it easy, sweetheart.”

  “You—you monster!”

  “But I won’t hurt you. Promise to stand still, will you?” He turned sober then. “Don’t run away again.”

  “I was not running!”

  “You left the hotel without permission. You promised to stay in your room and keep out of sight of any Cong Hai who might be looking for you. I don’t have to tell you how dangerous this way you just took could have been. As it was, it almost killed me.”

  She showed no sympathy, even when her eyes touched the bruises on his face and the streak of blood on the back of his neck. “It is my prerogative to change my mind,” she said tightly. “I will no longer go along with you and Deirdre.”

  “And what caused the change of heart? Who lives here? Who did you hope to see and what did you hope to do?”

  “Oh, you are always the policeman, aren’t you!” Her voice was scornful. Standing before him, dripping water, diminutive but extraordinarily feminine, she looked like a child; but Durell knew that Anna-Marie Danat had gone to finishing school with Deirdre Padgett, and was in her late twenties. She said bitterly: “With you it is always the questions, always the demand for blunt and brutal answers.”

  “I don’t always get the answers, Anna-Marie.”

  “I came here to see Uncle Chang." She lifted her small chin defiantly and slashed angrily at her wet, almost white hair. “I’ve known Uncle Chang since I was a little girl. He was always kind to me when Papa—when Papa was busy away from the plantation. I thought I could slip out of the hotel and get his advice tonight.”