Assignment - Cong Hai Kill Read online

  “And Orris Lantern?”

  “As Yellow Torch, his name is a sound of terror to the upland villagers. He has built up the Cong Hai to spread guerrilla warfare along the borders of Vietnam and Cambodia. My government takes a most serious view of this, naturally. We are anxious to capture and question him. When we find him, he must come back to Bangkok with me, you understand.”

  “We can decide that when we capture our game,” Durell said. “Until then, We have, each of us, orders to cooperate, even if it isn’t a happy alliance.”

  “I have no suspicions about you, Mr. Durell.”

  Durell said: “No. Just enough to bug my room.”

  “Routine procedure.” Muong smiled. “If you are offended, I apologize.”

  The fleeing Renault had vanished, and they were delayed by an overturned vegetable cart and water buffalo in the lane leading to the Menam Phao bridge. Now the jeep skidded with screaming tires into the last alley, and bicycles and people scattered from their path like frightened chickens.

  Along the canal banks were sampans, fishing huts made of pluang leaves, and raft houses. In the gardens were tiny Thai temples, like birdhouses. To the right were Hindu shops and a fish market with glittering, silvery fish laid out on bamboo tables, covered with palm fronds. Durell glimpsed a wedding ceremony, frozen into immobility as they screeched by. There was also a Javanese puppet show, and beyond, the Chinese quarter with noisy tearooms and old men playing Mah-Jongg under shaded awnings.

  Muong‘s white teeth gleamed as he tapped the driver’s shoulder. “To the right, Lao.”

  The bridge was of Wood, flanked by a temple of incredible age, with a central chedi of gold leaf and towering prangs and a mother-of-pearl door. Bells tinkled from the eaves. The jeep rocked to a halt Where the bridge spanned the green water. Dust boiled from their locked brakes. The car ahead had found the bridge blocked by several carts and a stubborn buffalo with enormous horns. Two men jumped out of the Renault and ran along the ragged grass before the temple.

  The driver, Lao, said, “We can go no farther, Major.” He was a young Chinese sergeant, Durell noted, with a blank, obedient face. Muong got out and shouted to the two running men to halt. One of them turned his head. He looked like a Thai tribesman, in a ragged shirt and dungarees and a coolie hat that fell off and rolled across the dusty green weeds. The other man, Doko Dagan, kept running.

  Muong shouted again.

  Then there came sharp, methodical gunshots from behind Durell. The driver, Lao, was taking new aim at the fugitives. The hillman sprinted ahead of Doko Dagan, who was hampered by the straw suitcase he refused to abandon. The first man stumbled and fell on his face and slid down the steep canal bank into the scummy water. Dogs and children scattered from the scene. A woman screamed and ran into the line of fire.

  “Don’t shoot!” Durell shouted.

  He was ignored. Muong had a Colt .45 out and was shooting, too; the heavy shots slammed and shattered the sultry, brazen air. The first man, who had driven the Renault, floated face down in the canal. Doko Dagan put down his straw suitcase and faced them. He looked confused, as if about to burst into tears.

  Muong’s next shot dropped him as if he had been felled by an axe.

  Durell swore and ran past the bridge. The man in the canal was dead, the back of his head blown off by Lao’s shot. It was good marksmanship. Perhaps too good.

  Doko Dagan lay on his back, his knees drawn up, his brown face upturned to the cobalt sky. His chest heaved under his dirty, striped silk shirt. His dark string tie was twisted under his left ear. Sweat plastered his black hair to his skull and ran trickling into the dirty creases of his neck. He wore torn sneakers that had seen better days.

  “Dagan?” Durell said softly.

  The man’s eyes were blind. His breath bubbled. A wide patch of blood stained his belly and his groin.

  Muong and Sergeant Lao came up. Muong put a thin, fresh cigar between his teeth. His face might have been one of the carvings on the ancient temple nearby.

  “It is Doko Dagan, yes,” Muong said. He knelt with meticulous care in the dust and spoke in English to the wounded man. “Doko, can you hear me?”

  The man’s lips moved without sound.

  Muong said: “Doko, We have been enemies for a long time. What did you do with all the poppy you were running for Yellow Torch? You knew I was waiting for you here. Why did you run, eh? You made me sin, to kill you.”

  The man murmured something in Hindi. His eyes were glazed like those of a dying bird. He brought his flexed knees tightly together, then parted them. His groin was wet.

  “Where is Yellow Torch?” Durell put in quietly. “Who killed Chang? ‘Did you do it for the Cong Hai, Doko? Did you enjoy cutting him up like that? Or did Yellow Torch do it himself? We will help you, if we can.”

  The man’s head rolled from side to side in the brittle, yellow grass. He had stopped sweating. His open mouth was an empty hole in his tormented face. No sound came from it, except for the uneven surge of his breathing. He stretched his lips in what might have been a grin of irony and triumph.

  Then he died.

  10

  FAT thunderheads loomed over the muddy sweep of the harbor and the swampy coastline. The air was heavy with the smell of the sea, which had taken on the color of pansies, while the river looked like polished brass, streaked with lettuce green and maroon. The tides of bicycle riders in mixed Oriental and Western costumes were like tumbled jewels tossed helter-skelter on a shopkeeper’s velvet pad. The big freighter was gone from the harbor. Heat shimmered over the waterfront, insufferably oppressive. Durell thought that paradise might look good from afar, but close up, it consisted of mud and blood and ooze and slime. Someone had repaired the power, and the wooden fan in his hotel room ceiling pushed at the overheated air as if it were taffy candy.

  Durell insisted that Deirdre and Anna-Marie stay in his room for now. The French girl had been sedated and slept in his bed, her face feverish in her nightmare-ridden sleep.

  Deirdre was calm and remote when Durell returned. “I don’t like being shunted aside, darling. I have my own job to do, and you didn‘t make it easier by turning Anna-Marie against us with your opinion of the man she loves. Whatever you think of Orris Lantern, you should have hidden it better from her. Except for her school years with me, she’s really a simple child. She’s spent all her life alone on her father’s tea plantation.”

  “She knows the difference between men and women,” Durell said dryly. He took off his shirt, ready for a shower.

  “She learned the hard, ugly way, Sam. Her papa likes women—native or European, whatever is available. He’s lived like a feudal lord ever since he came here as a boy from Dijon, in France. His boredom led him to indulge himself—”

  “And Anna-Marie learned about his amorality?”

  “She’s a fine girl, Sam.”

  “She’s in love with a renegade killer, a guerrilla murderer and terrorist—”

  “Hush.” Deirdre looked quickly at the sleeping girl.

  Deirdre managed to look cool and serene, as always; but she was still a stranger to Durell, who could not accommodate himself to the fact that she was Working this mission with him. “Surely, darling, you’ve been cruel enough to her?”

  “Dee, you don’t know the man we’re dealing with. Muong knows. If what happened this morning is any hint, Orris Lantern will be shot down like a mad dog, the moment we get to him. If we get to him.”

  “Our job is to bring Lantern and his information safely to Washington. You may find it disagreeable, Sam, but those are our orders.”

  “But Muong won’t help, after a certain point.”

  “Then you’ll have to take care of him, somehow,” Deirdre said serenely. “Now take your shower, darling. You really look a mess.”

  “So did Chang,” he said bluntly.

  He ordered lunch brought up while he cleaned up. He couldn’t help it if Muong’s bug had recorded their conversation. He and Muong were p
rofessionals and had each other’s measure now.

  In the huge bath he stood under tepid water and then shaved and wrapped himself in a towel and returned to the bedroom overlooking the embankment. Deirdre sat beside the bed where Anna-Marie tossed in her feverish nightmare. He opened his suitcase. It hadn’t been tampered with. The Cong Hai surely knew of him and might prepare a booby trap to blow him to bloody bits. But there was nothing suspicious. He took a fresh shirt and linen and drank a bottle of Singha beer from Bangkok. It washed away some of the bitter dust in his throat. He looked big and brawny in the hot shadows.

  “Sam,” Deirdre said quietly, “We don’t really have to be like this, do we?” Her eyes were dark. “Must we quarrel? We’ve never been like this before.”

  “We’ve never worked together before,” he said. “It would be easier if I knew you were in the Embassy on Wireless Road in Bangkok, on your way home.”

  “Is any place safe, in this world today?”

  “Some are better than others.”

  “But you’re here, and I want to be with you. Is that a crime?”

  “It makes things tougher.”

  “Because you worry about me? And love me?”

  “Yes,” he said flatly.

  She smiled sadly. “We’re like a married couple in their first serious quarrel. But you always refused to marry me, to avoid the emotional burden of worrying about me. But is it really so bad? I was trained at the Farm to take care of myself. Why can’t you accept that?”

  “Because you don’t know what this business is like. You didn’t see what they did to ‘Uncle Chang.’ ”

  “Anna-Marie told me. He was a tine old Chinese gentleman. Chang and his brother Paio often took care of her when her papa was drunk or with a native woman. Paio is still at the plantation, you know, working as manager for Pierre Danat, her father. But Chang was the special one in her life.”

  “Does she realize that Orris might have killed him?”

  “She refuses to consider it. And she’s not a stupid girl. Do you think he could have fooled her so completely? And why should he pretend to come back to our side? She’s only afraid that something happened to Orris, too. Why didn’t he show up? Maybe he doesn’t trust us because he knows Muong is with us, and Muong hates him even more than you. Why should he risk being shot down, as this Doko Dagan was shot down?”

  Durell shrugged. He had no answers yet. He felt boxed in, forced to obey orders that went against his intuition and common sense. He had no tolerance for traitors, and Orris Lantern was one of the worst. Yet when he looked at the French girl, sleeping with her blonde hair tumbled on the pillow about her piquant, vulnerable face, he wondered if Deirdre could be right. Deirdre did not proceed so much from logic as from faith. Maybe he had gone too far in this lonely business and had missed something that Deirdre could provide. He felt lonely, and knew he needed her as never before.

  Yet he still felt right in trying to shelter her from the ugly dangers of the world in which he worked. As long as desperate men fought and died to keep some rational balance, some order in existence, he felt needed, and he could never go back to the world Deirdre had now deserted, and to which he wished she would return. He wondered how long it would be before it was too late for her, too.

  Lunch consisted of kuo pat, made up of crabmeat, chicken, pork, onion, and egg, served with slices of cucumber, soy sauce, and chopped chilis. Durell ordered more Singha beer with it. Anna-Marie, still sedated by the French hotel doctor, tossed and moaned in her sleep.

  Durell moved the table away from the window, where they could be targets for someone on the crowded embankment below. He regarded Deirdre with dark, irritated eyes.

  “How long will you keep up your game?” he asked.

  Her eyes were innocent. “What game?”

  “You know what I’m talking about, Dee.”

  “Sam, darling.” She wrinkled her nose slightly in amusement. “Let’s not mix business with pleasure.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since you showed how low a regard you have for me as a fellow—member of K Section.”

  “Deirdre, it’s silly to keep that between us.”

  “Do you think so? It’s not my mind that wanders off business,” she reported. “You ought to be thinking about Major Muong. From What you tell me, he shot Dagan deliberately.”

  He lowered his voice and signaled her to do the same. He didn’t want Muong’s listening post to hear their plans.

  “It certainly looked that way.”

  “To keep Dagan from talking?”

  “Possibly. And I haven’t been merely brooding on your lovely body, either, Deirdre, You’re going to code a cable to Saigon Central for me, to relay to Washington. I want a more detailed dossier on our friend Muong. Crash priority.”

  “Will do. And then?”

  “Then you go and flirt with the major”—he grinned at her flash of anger—“and keep him out of my way While I check out his quarters.”

  She was dubious. “Sam, do you think you should?”

  “Not only should, but must.”

  “How much time will you need?”

  “Half an hour, at least.”

  Her eyes were cold. “I’ll flirt with him, if I must; but I won’t like it. And afterward? It doesn’t settle anything about how we’re to contact Yellow Torch now.”

  Durell spoke flatly. “We’ll go upriver after him. Tonight, if necessary. If the mountain won’t come to Mahomet, we’ll damned well go to the mountain.”

  “Sam, he may be dead.”

  “If so,” said Durell, “good riddance.”

  He looked at Anna-Marie, sleeping on his bed, and went to work.

  11

  THE Thai government building was on the river, cheek-by-jowl with the Hong Chow, a Chinese theater. A sign in Thai, English, and French read Sampeng Road, and the street, following the crowded riverbank, was a bedlam of bicycles, samlors, and a noisy parade of Thais, Burmans, Cambodians, Javanese, and East Indians. The Buddhist monks were everywhere, with their shaved heads and yellow robes, since all Thai men entered the priesthood for at least three months of their lives as good Buddhists.

  There was a plot of grass and drooping flower beds before the concrete Government House. The afternoon heat smashed down from a sky of pure brass.

  He waited in a tearoom nearby, watching the river traffic, until he saw Deirdre and the tall, thin Major Muong leave the building. Deirdre looked cool in white linen and white gloves, outstanding in the sweep of colors around her. He waited five minutes, then crossed the garden where dragonflies made flickering sword-sweeps across the flower beds. He had checked in here before, and the Thai police clerk knew him. When he was told that the major had just left, he was given permission to wait in Muong’s temporary office. .

  This was a corner room overlooking the klongs that branched off the river. The view faced inland toward the green carpet of coastal plain running north and south along the emerald Gulf of Siam. There was no visible line between the Thai and Cambodian border, but far off could be seen the violet haze of the uplands that reached into the heights of the Cardamomes, in Cambodian territory. Beyond was the fabled Angkor Wat and the ancient seat of the mighty Khmer Empire.

  The sky changed from brass to lime green. Durell lit a cigarette as the police clerk bowed his way out of the small, severe office. In one corner stood a small jasper Buddha on an ornate bronze pedestal. He looked at Muong’s clean desk and the row of wooden filing cabinets inherited from an earlier administrator. The fan in the ceiling was no more help here than elsewhere. Incongruously, a modern air-conditioner was fitted into a window, but it wasn’t working, of course.

  Muong’s simple living quarters were behind the office, provided expressly for his temporary duty here. The door was a carved double panel with a brass lock. Originally, the building had been a hotel built by French speculators forty years ago, and some of the rococo furnishings still persisted. He tried the brass handle. It was firmly loc
ked. From a pocket, he took what looked like a switchblade, pressed a button on the handle, and brought forth a series of picklocks that he tried rapidly in the ornate door. The third prong found its target and the double leaf swung inward to Muong’s quarters.

  The Thai’s asceticism was evident in the lack of personal equipment in the room. There was a low bed with iron head and feet, an old-fashioned dresser and wardrobe cabinet, and a washbasin with a flowered bowl and pitcher, although running water existed, too.

  Durell’s search was swift and efficient. His first discovery was the straw suitcase that Doko Dagan had tried so hard to keep with him this morning, at the cost of his life. Durell found it on the floor of the wardrobe. He lifted it to the bed, surprised by its weight, and in a few moments opened the simple lock. Major Muong had not offered the results of his search, but Durell was not too surprised.

  The cheap suitcase was crammed to the top with poorly printed leaflets on cheap pulp paper. The messages printed thereon were in English and Chinese. It was poisonous, an incantation of hate against “American imperialists” and a demand for a “people‘s revolution” and the establishment of a “Democratic People’s Republic of Thailand,” under the guidance of the Cong Hai. Ho Chi Minh’s hand was evident in every word and crude cartoon in the bundled leaflets.

  Durell closed the suitcase with a frown. At first glance, it seemed hardly worth the effort Doko had made to keep the suitcase, even when fleeing for his life.

  He searched further, examining Muong’s uniforms, the bath, and glanced under the bed and pillow and into a small portable filing cabinet that had been wheeled into one corner. As he searched, he kept one ear tuned to the noises from the klongs below. Thinking of the leaflets, he reflected that there must be millions upon millions of similar printings all over the world, in dozens of languages and dialects, pouring from the presses of Hanoi and Peiping.

  There were two other items of interest in Muong’s room. On a bed table, as if to show his impartiality, Muong had a collection of recent Chinese Communist newspapers. He had underlined in blue pencil a long article in Jenmin Jih Pao, the organ of the Chinese Communist party, assailing “Moscow revisionists who conspire with American imperialism for peace talks in Vietnam.” There was also a copy of Hoc Tap, the journal of the Lao Dong Communist party in North Vietnam. In it, the First Secretary, Le Duan, complained that not enough sacrifices were being made to help their “brothers in the Viet Cong.” This article had also been underlined in Muong’s careful blue pencil. Then there was an old edition of The New York Times dealing with the movement of Cambodians across the ill-defined borders into Thailand and Vietnam, and the capture of some of them by the Vietnamese Ninth Infantry Division.