Assignment Burma Girl

  One

  On April 12th, Paul Hartford disappeared somewhere in the Kachin Hills of North Burma.

  On the second day after his scheduled return, his wife, Eva, who had chosen to stay in Rangoon while Paul revisited old Marauder battlefields during the course of their round-the-world tour, reported his failure to return to the United States Embassy in Rangoon.

  There was a quick response to her imperious—and usually effective—demands for action. Not because she was beautiful, which she was. Or because she was one of the richest women in the States. She was accustomed to getting what she wanted—although her status in life had not always been so enviable.

  The quick reaction came because a man named Chet Lowbridge, who ostensibly was attached to the U.S. Embassy as an economic advisor, had had a little talk with Paul before he began his romantic and nostalgic excursion.

  Lowbridge sent a cable to an address in Washington known as No. 20 Annapolis Street, keyed to a “For Your Eyes Only” code, which was deciphered with priority speed and presented to General Dickinson McFee, of K Section, of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  After that, Sam Durell came into it.

  There was urgency in the guarded phone call that woke Durell in his apartment at two o’clock in the morning. Urgency and an unusual demand for top security. He was awake at once, listening to the quiet voice that instructed him, and then he dressed in the dark. While he dressed he looked from his apartment window at the quiet, Washington street below, and wondered if anyone was watching his apartment now.

  He did not think so; but kept his rooms dark just in case there were eyes outside to notice that he was up and awake at two o’clock in a springtime morning.

  He did not need the light to get around, anyway. He knew every inch of the apartment intimately, and could move through it like a cat. If anything had been changed, even fractionally, he would have known this, too, at once.

  But nothing was changed.

  He dressed efficiently, in less than ten minutes. An errant breeze from Rock Creek Park stirred the window curtains; and the night air was cool, scented with green spring. It was the best time of the year in Washington, he thought. There was the smell of damp earth and new buds on the trees; and a panoply of stars reeled in the sky. He put on a dark blue suit and a fresh white shirt with a button-down collar and a knitted blue tie, stowed in his suit pocket keys, wallet and an I.D. card (for Alex, who ran the elevator at No. 20 Annapolis, and who never failed to ask for the card, even though Durell was there almost every day when he was in Washington). Lastly, he fitted his snubby-barreled .38 into his tailored coat and carefully checked the magazine to make certain it was ready and lethal. A gun, to Durell, was something to be used in earnest, if it was to be used at all. He was always careful. Durell lived with danger, in a world of peril, and this had made him careful. He had known several men who had not always been careful, who had relaxed briefly, and who had died because of it.

  Durell was a tall man, hard-muscled, mature, with thick black hair raked with gray at the temples. He had a gambler’s face, alert and lonely; and his eyes were dark blue that turned to black when quick anger betrayed him. He had the temperament of a Cajun, and his roots were sunk deep in the earthy philosophies of Bayou Peche Rouge, in Louisiana, where he had lived as a boy. And now he knew many uncommon comers of the world where his particular war was fought, a silent, defensive war, an ugly war. Death was always at his shoulder. It could come from behind the closed door of the next room he entered, or around the next corner; it could come from behind a friend’s smile. And it could slip up on you anywhere—in a Hong Kong alley, or the platform of a London Underground station, or in a souk of an Arab town in the Algerian desert.

  Your survival factor lasted just so long, Durell thought. After that, you played it for luck, using the instincts of a gambler that old Grandpa Jonathan instilled in you, back on the old hulk of the Mississippi side-wheeler you called home, as a boy.

  He knotted his tie carefully, touched his thin dark moustache, and listened to the telephone ring in the darkened living room. The sound was treacherous, unexpected. He let it ring three times and then moved silently through the dark apartment and picked it up.

  He said nothing. He just listened.

  “Sam?”

  Then he said, “I’m here.”

  “Checking back. Ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Pack an extra shirt.”

  “I’ll pick one up on the way.”

  “Your papers will be ready when he sees you.”

  He was not sure of the voice. He said “Diamond?”

  “Jim. It’s okay.”

  “Ten minutes, then,” Durell said.

  The voice was very earnest. “Who you see tonight and what you see, Sam, are important. Please don’t recognize anybody, except McFee.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good luck. Happy hunting.”

  He hung up.

  The Apartment seemed abnormally still. Then he heard the breeze in the sycamore trees below the apartment windows. He thought if he were going to be away for a time he should close the windows. But decided not to; someone might be watching after all.

  Durell left the apartment quietly, went down the back stairs and out of the building.

  Four blocks away he picked the third cab from a stand in front of the Allandale Hotel on the edge of the park.

  The driver did not bother to drop the flag, and Durell told him to.

  “Sorry,” the driver said as he did so.

  “Don’t make any mistakes like that,” Durell said. “Do you know where to go?”

  “Up to a point. It’s not my baby.”

  “Step on it, then.”

  He changed cabs on Massachusetts Avenue. The second driver turned back into the city. On Fourteenth Street he stopped; Durell got out and stood on the sidewalk, listening for footfalls, watching a couple stroll down the block. Presently a sedan came down the street and the door opened. Durell got in and saw General Dickinson McFee on the back seat.

  “Don’t ask me anything, Cajun,” McFee said. “I don’t know much of anything.”

  “You’re supposed to have papers for me.”

  “There is no cover involved. Just passport and six thousand dollars in cash, for expenses.” McFee grunted. “Your entry visa has been arranged.”

  “To where?”

  “Union of Burma. Rangoon. You leave after you meet these people, flying West, about six this morning.”

  “What’s in Rangoon?” Durell asked.

  “Trouble,” McFee sighed.

  The meeting was set in Maryland, thirty miles out of the District, along the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. It was past three in the morning, and Durell wished he had taken time for a cup of the strong New Orleans coffee he favored, back in his own kitchen. The rendezvous was on the broad, graveled towpath alongside the canal, under a tunnel of ancient trees that made dense shadows on the walk. They reached the towpath by a series of steps down through birch woods from the driveway of a big Colonial house perched on a bluff overlooking the canal and beyond, the rocky banks of the Potomac. A half-moon sailed in the April sky, making a bright sheen on the placid canal water and the stony river bed.

  Durell nodded at the big house above them.

  “Who lives back there?”

  “Senator Ira Wheaton. The voice of the West.”

  “He’s the one on the Foreign Relations Committee?”

  McFee nodded. “They say he’s also on the National Security Agency, too. But the NSA people are even more secretive than K Section-—they don’t admit even among themselves that they work for it. Come on, Sam—this way.” From the steep path through the birches they crossed a wooden bridge
to the towpath and turned right. Early peepers chorused their ululating song to the spring moon; and the fresh night wind rattled the tree limbs overhead.

  “I don’t like this,” McFee said shortly. “They’ve got their own men, but they claim to be short-handed, and they specifically asked for you.”

  “I did a job for them before,” Durell reminded him. “Yes, but I wish they’d leave you alone, Cajun.”

  “I haven’t retired yet.”

  McFee said, “And you never will.”

  Three men waited for them on the broad, graveled towpath. The smell of cigar smoke touched the air, and from here the lights of Senator Ira Wheaton’s house on the bluff above looked warm and friendly, if a little aloof.

  Durell recognized the heavy-set Senator with his silver mane of hair, but he did not know the other two. One was in his fifties, tall, vigorous, bald. The other was small and shriveled and old, perhaps close to eighty, wearing a white suit that looked too big for his shrunken frame. There were quiet greetings, but no introductions. The Senator suggested they stroll along the towpath, and then the bald man said abruptly, “Mr. Durell, have you ever heard the name Paul Hartford?”

  “If it’s the same I’m familiar with, yes. He married money. He was a Texas lawyer, I believe, who married the so-called Cinderella girl from that coal town in Pennsylvania. Eva Claye.”

  “Good, good. Anything else?”

  Durell said patiently, “They left on a round-the-world tour about a month ago. Having a ball in Tokyo, the last I read.”

  “You sound as if you don’t like Paul Hartford,” the octogenarian suddenly put in. His voice was harsh and shrill.

  “I don’t know him. I neither like nor dislike him.” “But you sound as if you disapprove,” the old man insisted.

  “Paul Hartford and his wife mean nothing to me. I’m only aware of what I’ve read about them in the newspapers.”

  The bald man said, “Do you believe all that, about his marrying the Cinderella girl? I mean, his being a fortune-hunter, and that sort of thing.”

  “Is it important?” Durell asked.

  “It could be,” the old man said snappishly. “It is important in the sense that we are going to ask you to risk your life for Paul Hartford, Mr. Durell; and if you don’t like him—”

  “That doesn’t enter into it,” Durell said flatly. “I told you, I never met him.”

  The bald man sensed his irritation and spoke soothingly. “Naturally, it isn’t for the man himself that we ask you to take risks, Mr. Durell. It is what he represents, and what could be lost for all of us if he is not helped.”

  Durell waited in silence. He knew how to wait. He felt the old man’s antagonism and wondered about it, but asked no questions. Then Senator Ira Wheaton spoke in his Western twang, complaining, “There has been a lot of pressure on me about Paul Hartford. His wife is an extraordinarily influential woman, you know—”

  “She has three hundred million dollars’ worth of influence,” Durell said bluntly.

  “I told you,” the old man said. “Durell isn’t our man.”

  “Now, wait, John. Wait.” The bald man held up a deprecatory hand. “Don’t get excited.”

  “I’m not,” the octogenarian snapped. “But Durell’s attitude is important. He has to be willing to die to get Paul out of there.”

  Durell was silent again. Their measured footsteps grated on the gravel towpath. The moonlight followed them across the canal, pointing them out with a rippled, silvery finger that lay on the surface of the quiet water. Durell listened to the sound of their footsteps and said, “There’s a man about forty yards ahead of us. And another, behind.”

  “It’s all right,” the bald man said. “We know.”

  “Is all this necessary?” Durell asked.

  “It is important that we are not identified with this,” the bald man said. “It is a sensitive situation. We want Paul Hartford out of Burma. You know, he was one of Merrill’s Marauders, Mr. Durell—a captain in the 2nd Battalion in the Myitkyina campaign. Before that, he was dropped into the jungle by the OSS to organize effective guerilla squads among the friendly Kachins there. He was a brave man, an unusual fighter. His knowledge of those hills is valuable to us. The terrain does not change with the years, although men sometimes do.”

  “Was he working with you on this trip?”

  “In a sense. He was invited to do something for us— with the agreement of the Burmese security people, of course.”

  “And he got himself lost,” Durell suggested.

  “Well, we don’t know exactly what happened. He left his wife in Rangoon, under cover of revisiting old battlegrounds in the autonomous northern provinces. He was to be gone two weeks and supposed to return three days ago, but he is missing. Before he left, our man in Rangoon, Chet Lowbridge, asked him to.do something for us.” The old man made an impatient sound, hushed by his friend.

  “There is a new movement up there,” the bald man said, “called the Lahpet Hao, headed by a new general of a so-called Peoples’ Army—bandits, really—but it threatens to connect up Chinese Yunnan with Laos and open a new route for subversion and arms traffic into Laos and Cambodia. The whole area could be lost to us very soon, Mr. Durell. The Burmese central government is not trusted up on the border and they have difficulty getting people in. It was thought that Paul Hartford would be remembered in the villages, might be trusted and could glean information—or perhaps arrange for the whole job then and there.”

  “What job?” Durell asked.

  “This new organizer up there, or General—he calls himself Major Mong—is a new factor. He is reported planning a liaison meeting with other guerilla rebels in a provincial hill town named Nambum Ga. Mong is due there a week from today. Paul was to set things up to eliminate him.”

  “How?”

  “Paul was to call on old OSS guerilla people and get them to set up a new group for an ambush.”

  “For Major Mong?”

  “Yes. Paul Hartford was to capture him for the Burmese, if possible. Or kill him.” “And Paul hasn’t come back,” Durell said.

  “Correct. We want you to go in and find him.”

  Durell paused. “There are several alternatives.”

  The bald man nodded. “Yes, Paul may be dead by now. If so, we want to be certain of that.”

  “Or he may be a prisoner up there,” Durell added. “If so, and if you can get him free and back to Rangoon, do so.”

  “And if I can’t?”

  The old man drew a quavering breath. His face looked like a death’s-head in the moonlight.

  “Then, Mr. Durell,” he said, coughing delicately, “all I can say is that it could be a tragic loss of prestige, face, what have you, if Paul were to be left to talk about his mission or about us and thus grant the enemy a propaganda victory.”

  The bald man coughed again. “The third alternative—”

  “I understand,” Durell said, his Cajun eyes slitted.

  Durell rode back with McFee. McFee’s anger was evident by his long silence, by the way the General kept his small, erect figure taut while Durell drove. When they reached the outskirts of the District, McFee said: “You fly West in two hours, Sam. I’ll have some dossiers on Paul Hartford and Eva, his wife, drawn up for you. But I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t like it, either.”

  “They’ve no right to take you,” McFee said. “And when the Senator mixes into security problems, it means trouble. There will be a lot of pressure on you, one way or another. But you don’t have to take this job, you know.”

  “I’ll take it,” Durell said.

  “Do you think Paul Hartford was betrayed?”

  “Opinions are a luxury in this business,” Durell said. “What I need are some facts.”

  “Do you want to use their people?”

  “No,” Durell said quickly. “I remember a man we had out there—Simon Locke—running a shoestring airline called BAT—Burma Air Transport. Is he still on the payroll
?”

  “Off and on.”

  “I’ll contact Simon, then.”

  “What about Lowbridge, the NSA man in Rangoon?”

  Durell shook his head. “Paul Hartford is missing, dead, or a prisoner, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then I’ll work with Simon.”

  “You’ll have to be careful of the woman, Eva Claye Hartford. She swings a lot of political weight.” McFee smiled mirthlessly. “But I don’t have to tell you how to handle women, Cajun.” He watched Durell light a cigarette. “You’ll have to play it by ear, of course. But if you want a cover identity, I can fix it up—”

  “No,” Durell said. “I’ll just let everyone know I’m a friend of Paul’s, anxious to find him.”

  McFee said, “But if Paul was betrayed somehow, that will only make you a target, too, Sam. A target for murder.”

  “I’ll move fast. If I move fast enough. I’ll be hard to hit.”

  “All right,” McFee agreed. “I’ll set it up with Simon Locke. And throw a roadblock in Lowbridge’s way. But I can’t guarantee the old man you met tonight won’t interfere. He has the Senator in his pocket, and Eva Hartford practically elected Ira Wheaton singlehanded. A remarkable woman. The Cinderella girl—from rags to riches in one easy inheritance. You’re going to have to watch your back for knives, Sam, if you say or do the wrong thing with her.”

  “Do you think Paul Hartford is still alive?” Durell asked.

  McFee shrugged. “You heard the choices, Cajun.”

  Two

  Paul Hartford was alive.

  He awoke and wished he was dead when he heard his own voice crying out against the foggy darkness of the dawn.

  He forgot himself and tried to stand up when the shrill chattering of monkeys and the snort of a gray-backed water buffalo shook his heart and limbs and brought his fatigued body up out of the cool, blessed unconsciousness into awareness of another day in the cage.

  He struck his head and shoulders against the bamboo and fell to his hands and knees, staying that way, swaying, feeling the light of dawn and the mist and the life of the bamboo forest jeering and chittering and snorting and chuckling at him.