Assignment Sumatra Read online

  Chapter One

  “DON’T touch me,” Lydia said.

  “I was not about to.”

  “You’re not going to make it with me, you know.”

  “Farthest thing from my mind,” Durell said.

  “Well, I’ve heard a lot about you, Sam.”

  “I know a lot about you, too, Miss Morgan.”

  “Don’t count on it,” she said.

  The girl drove the Toyota Land Cruiser with deft efficiency. The road was dark and bumpy, marked by potholes and occasional boggy spots where the swamp water penetrated far inland and eroded the tentative causeway leading north from Medan. Great moths swooped into the glare of the headlights, and, now and then, a brightly colored bird fluttered across their noisy path, startled from sleep. On either hand were dreary vistas of abandoned coconut plantations, marked here and there by signs printed in Indonesian, English, or Dutch. A few beer cans gleamed in their headlights, even here on the Sumatran east coast alluvial lowland that reached from Tandjoenbalai southward. It was still hot, although the sun had gone down three hours ago. The girl pulled at the wheel, her strength deceptive, as they were caught for a moment in the deep ruts left by an oil-rigger’s truck.

  Durell jerked a thumb toward the man in the back seat. “He doesn’t say much, does he?”

  “He’s a Hakka Chinese from the tin-mines on Banka Island. He doesn’t speak much English, if any.”

  “Does he have a name, this tethered goat?”

  “He calls himself Tu Fu.”

  “Tu Fu? A Chinese poet of the T’ang dynasty, about the eighth century a.d. A rather obstreperous court-poet to the Emperor Su-tsung, given to lecturing the emperor a bit too much on Confucian morality. He was kicked out. An exile, he wrote about the north wind, the torn poppies, and so forth.”

  “Tu Fu is an exile, in a sense,” Lydia said.

  “He is a lamb being led to the slaughter. A sitting duck. Does he know it?”

  “He doesn’t know anything.”

  Durell turned his head and looked backward in the jouncing Toyota. The passenger, Tu Fu, grinned back at him, clinging to the iron bars to keep from being thrown from his seat. Lydia was driving too fast, Durell thought, perhaps expressing her own hangups. Tu Fu was a Hakka who looked about forty, but his prematurely grizzled short hair and the deep erosion-lines in his round face could have come from a lifetime of killing labor in the tin-mines. He might have been only in his late twenties. He was wiry, skinny, and he looked very uncomfortable in the new, stiff, white Western clothes that Lydia had provided him with in Medan.

  “Tu Fu?”

  The man bobbed his head and grinned. He was missing several front teeth.

  “Tu Fu, do you speak Dutch?”

  The smile was without meaning.

  Durell tried him in Cantonese. “Do you know what you are doing, Tu Fu? Comrade, do you know why you are being paid a year’s salary for this one night’s ride to Port Kulang?”

  “My family, those who survive, have been paid in gold and silver, Bung Durell.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “I am to pose as someone else, I believe.”

  “Do you know who?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Or for what purpose?”

  “It is said in this place, sir, that he who runs from the tiger often falls into the jaws of the crocodile.”

  “Do you think the white lady is a crocodile?”

  “She is very beautiful,” Tu Fu said.

  Lydia Morgan said, “Durell, you are a bastard.”

  “I agree with Tu Fu. You’re beautiful.”

  Her profile was cold and classic, her wide eyes a pale gray, the color of dawn light on a sharp steel blade. She drove the Toyota with her back held stiffly, her shoulders straight, a sense of defensive tension in her long legs and proud breasts. She wore a lipstick that was a shade too dark to be fashionable. There were thin sun-wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, and her mouth drooped as if she had reached, at the ancient age of twenty-six or -seven, a sense of despair and discontent with life and the world in general. Her dark slacks were tight around long, well-fleshed thighs, her shirt was a blue denim, primly buttoned at the throat, although the heat of the Sumatran night surely made her uncomfortable.

  She had Q clearance, and she never let her right hand on the wheel stray more than a few inches from the long-barreled, World War II Luger clipped to the dashboard. Under the roof of the Land Cruiser was a Remington .30-30 rifle and a shotgun, and in two canvas pockets swinging in loops from the door at her left hand were a couple of knobby grenades. Durell had the feeling, however, that she would be competent in defense even without these weapons. He knew she had killed three men so far, under orders from Eli Plowman, and perhaps more. She made him a bit nervous.

  The road turned inland, following the left bank of a sluggish, muddy stream that meandered between clumps of giant fern, wild sugar cane, and occasional clearing covered with tough, tropical grasses. Nipa palms, screw pines, and casuarina from Australia grew on the opposite bank. Handling the car on this narrow back road was a back-wrenching, muscle-tormenting job. But Lydia gave no sign of being troubled by it.

  She frowned slightly. “We’re only half an hour from Port Kulang and Alyce’s place.”

  “Disappointed?”

  “It will happen soon. They want to kill him.”

  “You’re talking about Tu Fu?”

  “The man he looks like. Tu Fu is only a decoy.”

  “Don’t you feel sorry for our passenger?”

  “He’s being paid for the job. If we can tempt them into making a try at him—”

  “Does he know he’s up for assassination?”

  “I’ll give you another local quote to answer that,” Lydia said. “ ‘We’re running like fish in front of a net.’ ”

  Durell said, “Tu Fu—the real Tu Fu, the poet of olden days, wrote, ‘The fate of the dove is to fly, the prize of its search is the soul.’ ”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” the girl asked.

  “I’m wondering if you have a soul, Lydia.”

  “Shit,” she said.

  Durell had studied the sketchy road map she had drawn for him, back at the Dirga Surga Hotel in booming oil-mad Medan near Malucca Straits. He held the chart on his knees under the glow of the dash lights and traced the penciled road with his finger. There was a village up ahead, where a bridge apparently crossed the winding river to their right. He drew a deep breath. It had to happen there, he thought. He felt sorry for their passenger. He didn’t doubt that Lydia Morgan would come out of it all right.

  He settled back and waited, while she drove on. Behind him, the Hakka tried to light a hand-rolled cigarette, the match in his long-fingered, callused hand flickering in the hot wind of their passage.

  The headlights showed an abrupt turn in the rutted road ahead. Durell sat forward again and took out his gun.

  “Hold it,” he said.

  Lydia obeyed instantly, tramping on the brakes. Her reaction was fine, but it didn’t make him care for her any more than before.

  2.

  He had flown from Tokyo to Singapore two days ago. There he had caught a Garuda jet to Kemayoran Airport in Djakarta. She had met him among the ramshackle concrete and wooden buildings, in the blazing heat of noon, and his first impression of her was that of a pretty, prim, Victorian school-teacher type, cold-eyed and hostile, perhaps resentful of his maturity.

  “Cajun?”

  “Yo,” he had said.

  “This way.”

  She did not offer to shake hands. Her rather beaten-up car had an insignia painted on the driver’s door that indicated it came from NITOUR, the Indonesian government tourist agency with its offices at Djalan Madjahapit 2. She did not head that way. He knew from his call to K Section headquarters in Washington—an angry and rebellious and expensive one, from Hong Kong—that this was her cover job while working for Eli Plowman. She wore a high-necked blouse and a flowery batik skirt that gave no indication of her figure, except that she was high-waisted and long-legged. She wore her pale, taffy-colored hair- in a tight bun at the nape of her neck, like a Victorian schoolmarm. She did not perspire. She looked as cool and virginal as if she were a chef’s masterpiece carved in ice.

  “You’ve been before? You’re eight hours late,” she said.

  “Yes. Garuda’s 404 was delayed at Singapore. Thunderstorms, or something.”

  “You saw some friends there.” She made it an accusation.

  “Ah,” said Durell. “A crime?”

  “You drank more than a bottle of bourbon, visited an old Chinese woman, spoke to a Russian oil engineer, a guest spectator at SEACROP. You made one call to Djakarta, not identified, another to Alyce Remplemeyer at her hotel in Port Kulang. You made a call to Salangap, from a public phone; we couldn’t trace it. A busy man, Cajun.”

  “All old friends.” He waved a hand. “Including the bourbon. You’ve been snooping, I see.”

  “You resent us in this job?”

  “I’m a big boy now, I’m not accustomed to a nursemaid. His Excellency, Premier Hueng of Salangap, asked for me. Personally. Not you. Not Eli Plowman. Me.”

  “You sound pissed off, all right,” she said.

  “Yes. I don’t like Plowman, or his people.”

  “State thought it best,” the girl said. “They got Sugar Cube’s top aide to agree. George Tolliver is in Sumatra, and he picked Eli Plowman and me to work with you. Satisfied?”

  “Must I be?”
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  “The Plowman Group is pretty good. We’re all pretty good,” she said.

  “At killing. Not at saving lives. I’d like to keep little Mr. Hueng, His Excellency, alive. I like him.”

  “We’ll help you do that.”

  “We’ll see.”

  The girl drew a deep breath. “Eli called me from Medan to fill me in. I did the best I could. I like to know who and what I’m working with, too. George Llewellyn Tolliver III is a first-class asshole.”

  “Your language doesn’t fit your looks,” Durell said. “Do you young people always insist on making a garbage-dump of wherever you happen to be?”

  “Oh. You’re prissy?”

  He sighed. “Eli hasn’t filled me in at all.”

  “Well, you’ll hear all about it in Sumatra.”

  “But it’s to do with the new SEACROP conference at Lake Toba?” Durell insisted.

  “Something like that.”

  “I wasn’t given credentials for it.”

  “You’re hardly invited. But adequate papers will be provided. Are you hungry?”

  “Thirsty.”

  “No drinking,” she said.

  “I’m not much of a drinker,” he said. He smiled. “I like women, though. I don’t mind, when it’s in the line of duty. Was your description of George Tolliver your own, or Eli’s?”

  “Eli’s.”

  Durell sighed. “It takes one to know one.”

  The girl said nothing, driving the little car quickly through the Nusantara shopping center of Djakarta, near the big canal. Nothing much had changed, really, since his last visit to Indonesia, Durell thought. The heat remained, and the unfinished megalomaniacal efforts, made years ago by Bung Sukarno to glorify himself and—as a side issue—his new nation, had crumbled a bit more. The crush of betjaks, the ever-present bicycle rickshaws with the drivers on the rear seat, were now giving way to bemos, the motorized types, along with Japanese Datsun taxis, Honda and Kawasaki motorcycles that all added to an uproar almost intolerable in the heat and fumes of the afternoon.

  “I’ll need a gun,” he said. “An S&W .38 is what I prefer. Couldn’t carry it aboard with me.” He smiled at her again. “I might have been mistaken for a hijacker, which would have been awkward.”

  “I have one for you,” Lydia said coldly. “Look in the glove compartment.”

  He took out the weapon, weighed it in his hand, added a box of cartridges that were provided beside it, and wondered if he’d have a chance to sight it in. Things were moving a bit too fast, he thought. He didn’t give the girl the satisfaction of asking where she was taking him. He was aware that there had sprung up between them, almost immediately, a mutual dislike, stemming mainly from her defensive hostility. He loaded the gun, added a handful of loose cartridges from his pocket. In the glove compartment there was also a thick wad of currency, rupiahs in all denominations, banded and stamped by the Bank Negara Indonesia. At least it wasn’t counterfeit. He sighed and pocketed the money, too, and closed the little compartment. They had stopped for a traffic light. A peasant’s ox-cart plodded across their path, the sides of the cart made high with woven matting, ornamented with brightly painted motifs.

  They went past the U.S. Embassy on Medan Merdeka Selatan, No. 5, and the girl turned right, driving faster now, through an area of slum shacks, tin- and thatched-roof huts, along the miles of filthy, sluggish canals that were a hallmark of this sprawling, dusty city. Durell put on his sunglasses and settled back on the seat. He asked no more questions.

  He was a tall man, conservatively dressed in a light gray double-knit jacket, a white shirt open at the collar, dark-blue slacks, and fine English-leather boots tucked under the slacks. There were streaks of gray in his thick, black hair, at the temples. He could move lightly and smoothly, for all his weight, and there was an air about him of a predator, a hunter, who knew what to look for in a man. He had been with K Section, the trouble-shooting branch of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, for more years than he cared to remember, and those years had made him conscious of the survival factor and of the glum extrapolations that chattered out of the computers in the basement of K Section’s headquarters at No. 20 Annapolis Street in Washington.

  As a chief field agent for K Section, he knew the world’s jungles and cities, the deserts and the mountains, as few men knew them. He spoke a dozen languages and could get along in a score of dialects. There was danger for him everywhere, among rivals in the business who still nurtured long memories of the Cold War. The world was changing, perhaps for the better. He hoped so. But the work in his profession, and the danger inherent in it, still went on. Information was the prize commodity, still commanding its price in men and death.

  He knew of the files on him in the headquarters of the Foreign Directorate of Soviet State Security, the KGB; in the BND, the West German Intelligence; the British M. I. 5, the Black House in Peking, even in the Mossad Bureau of the Israeli Shin Bet. He had learned to walk with care, to accept loneliness as a life style that had certain compensations. He had learned to watch open doors with suspicion, to accept nothing and no one at face value, to regard subways, taxis, and street corners with care. He survived. He was an expert in his business. Aside from his command of language, he had made history and geopolitics and music abiding interests in a world of shifting relationships and kaleidoscopic patterns.

  As a boy in Louisiana’s Bayou Peche Rouge, raised by his old grandfather, he had learned how to hunt and he had been taught the ways of the hunted. He would not like to be called a patriot, but he had dedicated himself to the earnest need to keep an unstable world from blowing itself apart. And to that end, he accepted his lonely danger in the business.

  The girl seemed capable enough, and he tried to be objective about the work she did as a hired killer for Eli Plowman. Eli was a professional assassin, and Durell

  disliked him and wasn’t sure but that he feared him, too. The intricacies of interdepartmental rivalry were many and varied, and no one ever knew which shifting wind cOuld blow you away. Eli Plowman was rumored never to have made an error. His Q Department was available to CIA, DIA, the NDC, and it had direct communications to shadowy figures who operated in and out Of Sugar Cube, the highest authority of all.

  He had memorized a dossier on the girl. In the middle of traffic leading through and out of the slums of Djakarta, he could quote it verbatim:

  KAPPA SIGMA 7F/2242 Rating AAA DELTA Q

  Subject: MORGAN, Lydia Bryan Lee

  Marital Status: Single

  Age: 27

  Born: Milwaukee, parents shop-owners, hardware

  and sporting goods, now deceased. No other known

  siblings or relatives.

  Education: B.S. Ithaca U., M.A., U. of P., L.L.D.

  Harvard, unfinished doctorate in Soc.

  Hobbies: None

  Male Friends: None

  Female Friends: None

  Miscellaneous: Associated with State and Sugar

  Cube through Congressman Elmer Chance DeVoe,

  former friend of family. No known personal or

  intimate relationship.

  Comment: Subject spent two years (1971-72) in

  traveling domestically and abroad (Paris, Stockholm, Moscow,

  Cairo) involved in social unrest and

  espousing a wide variety of revolutionary causes.

  Adopted a “hippie” counter-culture life style, lived

  for one year in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming

  with two young men in a “survival” experiment.

  One male companion. died in the winter. Other male

  companion in arranged domicile permanently crippled

  by fall while mountain climbing, subsequent suicide,

  alleging subject guilty of murder. Following year,

  subject was arrested three times on narcotics

  charges, four times on morals charges and public

  obscenity. Served one year minimum term Federal

  Penitentiary, Danbury, Connecticut, released on

  recognizance and parole to Mr. Eli Plowman, then a

  member of Sugar Cube staff, since publicly fired for

  offensive and illegitimate activities. Subject dropped

  out of sight. Present whereabouts unknown.

  Durell looked at the prim, hostile girl driving the NITOUR Datsun beside him, and found it all hard to accept.

  3.

  A warm, wet wind blew from across the muddy, shallow river, the jungled coconut and bamboo groves, and carried with it the distant salt smell of the Malucca Straits. The Toyota stood in the center of the roadway, giving off an occasional sharp ting as its metal tried to cool. There was only a quarter moon, low on the western horizon above the darkly massed trees on the opposite bank of the river. The girl turned her face toward Durell, but made no move to take her hands from the wheel.