Assignment Bangkok (17 page)

“Even to being a traitor?”

“She wouldn’t look at it that way.”

“Why would she want to make you look suspicious?” Mike said, “To cover herself. She’s afraid of you.”

Durell suddenly remembered the girl as she had been in the pool. He shook his head. “But you can’t remember where the money came from, or how it got in your pack?” “Listen,” Mike said, “would I be working here to knock off the caravan with a landslide, if I’d taken their cash to lay off? It doesn’t make sense.”

“It could make sense, if you radiophoned me to get me up here into the hands of the Muc Tong,” Durell said.

Mike stared. “Oh, brother.” His voice hardened with anger. “You want the pack? You want the money?” He shifted about, dug furiously into his battered canvas kit, and dumped the contents, soap, razor, a few cans of food,

a Colt .45, some cartridge clips, an empty wallet, two pens and a compass on the dirt floor of the cave.

“Jesus,” he said. “It’s gone.”

Durell said nothing.

Mike looked at him. “Benjie must have taken it.”

Durell got up and walked through the cave toward the entrance, circling the monks who still chanted softly in a tight little group nearby. The men from Xo Dong sat apart near the cave mouth, watching the black rain pour down. They looked at him curiously. Kem came in off the ledge outside. His robe was sopping wet, clinging to his lean frame. His bald head gleamed with rain water.

“She is out there somewhere, Sam.”

“Benjie?”

“She walked out into the rain, out on the trail. I just happened to look up and saw her go. So I went after her. But it’s too black, too dangerous in the rain. I couldn’t see her. I called to her, but she didn’t answer.”

Durell said, “Are you sure it was Benjie?”

“I haven’t forgotten what a woman looks like,” the
bhikkhu
said.

“Was she carrying anything?”

“Her haversack, yes.” The monk looked worried. “Perhaps she will soon come back.”

But Benjie didn’t come back. She was gone.

The rain ended at two in the morning. Thunder rolled away to the north, and lightning still flashed there, but a warm wind cleared the night sky and presently there was the welcome glow of the moon rising over the deep chasm. Its light showed the road below, under the heavy overhang of the cliff. From outside the cave, Durell could still see a few lights in the caravan camp. A truck motor was started up and revved, as someone tested the engine. The distant sound soon died away.

There was no sign of Benjie. The trail led to the top of the cliff, and he followed it with Kem, and presently they came to bamboo thickets and trees and the trail forked both east and west. There was no way to tell which way Benjie had taken. Major Luk appeared at his heels, with one of his men.

“I have sent my other troopers to look in the valley for Miss Slocum,” the Thai said. “Possibly she went out for privacy, and sheltered from the storm in another cave.”

Durell was carrying the dynamite, wires and detonator. He looked at the sky and estimated they had about three hours before dawn. Some time before that, the caravan would start up and head east, through the pass. Give it two hours, he thought. Allow for error. He turned back to the cliff.

“My man is a demolition expert,” Luk said tentatively.

“So am I,” Durell told him.

They worked their way below the cave, clinging to wet and precarious handholds on the cliff. The dynamite pack dragged heavily on Durell’s back. There were no tracks below the cave, and they had to pick and choose each grip with care, in the uncertain light of the moon. At the same time, they were visible from the caravan camp, half a mile away, if any of the smugglers were watchful at this hour. The bulk of the cliff was limestone, with occasional outcrops of granite. Durell went first, with Luk and his soldier coming after, a bit more slowly. His first survey found no convenient cranny that might loosen a rockslide onto the road below. He moved to the right, following a fine of scrub, and presently saw a bulging overhang that looked like a possibility. There seemed to be no way to get to the underside. He quartered back and up, motioning Luk to follow, and then worked his way down a chute formed by rainwater. It was still wet and slippery, and the going was treacherous. There would be no way to save himself if he fell. Once, the pack of explosives on his back snagged on a ragged bush, and he had to pause, frozen, and work his arm up and back until he found the strap and broke off the twig that held him momentarily a prisoner.

“My man says to the left,” Major Luk whispered. “Over there.”

“I see it.”

The soldier behind Luk was breathing heavily with fright. His eyes gleamed white in the moonlight as they clung to the face of the cliff. All at once his face disappeared and he gave a low, strangled cry. Durell moved to the left and peered down in the faint light. The Thai’s brown face was upturned, alarm struggling with a grin, only ten feet below the great bulge of rock that overhung the road.

“I am all right,” the man said.

He stood on a ledge under the rock outcrop, breathing hard, but quite safe. Durell carefully lowered himself to join the soldier. The place was a natural.

“Let’s get to work,” he said.

There were crannies and cracks for planting the explosive in abundance. If everything worked, the charge could drop half the cliff down on the road, blocking the pass. Luk and his man were efficient, but it was Durell who placed the charges and did the wiring. The work took less than fifteen minutes, now that they had found the proper spot. The moon began to set over the dark mountains to the west, as they climbed back up, unreeling the wire behind them. On the ledge outside their cave, Durell checked the batteries, but left the wires unconnected to the detonator. His left leg ached again from the long, dangerous climb, and he accepted a cup of tea from Kem gratefully.

“I have been talking to the
bhikkhus
,” Kem said quietly. The eight men now sat in a row, their backs to the wall of the cave, watching Durell as he drank the tea. Their faces all looked alike; they were equally poor and ascetic looking. “The holy men,” said Kem, “have decided to help us in any way they can.”

“Benjie hasn’t come back?”

“I have learned where she is. And the matter of the money—it was all a mistake. Both of the Slocums seem to be innocent.”

Mike came hobbling from the back of the cave. His round face was sunken in the two hours Durell had been out on the cliff, and there were red lights far back behind his eyes. Hostility made an electric aura around him, thick enough to touch and taste.

“Are the charges set, Cajun?”

“All set, Mike.”

“I hope we mash every one of those bastards.”

“We’ll do the best we can.”

“You didn’t look for Benjie?”

“I’m going to, now.”

“You have a hell of a set of priorities, Cajun. The job always comes first, doesn’t it? You don’t give a damn what might have happened to my sister, do you?”

“Do
you?
"

“I owe her plenty. I owe her an effort to get her away from Uva Savag, that’s for sure.”

Durell looked at Kem. The monk nodded, his eyes obscure with thoughts of his own. Durell said, “Tell me about it, Flivver.”

The monk pointed out and below. “She is down there.”

A Missa man, Kem said, a refugee from Xo Dong, had come up to the cave while Durell and Major Luk were out on the cliff with the explosives. He was the son of Gujiwandara, the headman, and he had come for the money. “He knew about it?” Durell asked.

“It is just as Mike said,”,the monk replied. He smiled at Slocum. “It was the squeeze money collected from the villagers for the Muc Tong. And then the head man decided not to pay it. When the Muc Tong came to the village, he knew Mike would get out, and he hid the money in Mike’s pack. Now he wants it back, in his father’s name.”

“But why did Benjie take it?” Mike asked angrily. “And where is she?”

The Missa said he had seen the fahrang woman in the caravan camp. Mike drew a long, angry breath and started to charge the man with lying, then he looked at Durell.

“Okay, so they caught her. She’s been turned inside out by all this, Cajun. By you, Sam. It’s your fault, if they got her. If it wasn’t for my stupid ankle, I’d go down there after her. I hate to think of what those people may do to her.”

“Take it easy, Mike.”

The Missa man again asked for his money. Kem spoke to him quietly, promising to get it back. Then he looked at Durell. “It is up to you, Sam. But perhaps I can help.” “With your eight old men? Against three hundred?” “They are 
bhikkhus. 
They are holy men. They are not afraid. And the caravan men are mostly Buddhist, or superstitious, at any rate.”. 

Mike said, “If we don’t get her back, and they take her with them through the pass when they move at dawn, she’ll be killed with the rest of the smugglers. Which means you can’t set off the charges, Cajun. You’d be murdering her.”

“I must,” Durell said.

“You’d kill her, too?”

Durell said, “We’ll get her out.”

“And if you can’t?”

“Major Luk will detonate the charges, whether we come back or not.”

Mike said, “You’re going down there, too?”

“I have to,” Durell said.

There was still an hour before dawn when they came to the river bank across from the enemy camp. Durell was grateful for the long watch he had kept on the place that afternoon, spotting the trucks and jeeps and donkey corral, the guard tents and the bunker. The river was shallow here, filled with flat rocks that made easy stepping-stones. The camp slept. The cooking fires had died down, making only dull red embers in the dark hour before sunrise. The moon was down, the skies had cleared, and only starlight glimmered on the surface of the river.

Durell carried the AK-47 he had taken from the guard up the river at the ford. Kem and his eight old men refused to carry any guns at all, except for long staves cut from tree limbs on their way down from the cliff. For some moments, they stood behind tall bamboo that screened them from anyone who might be awake across the river. The caravaneers were secure in their sense of immunity. A few lamps glowed in tents about two hundred yards downstream, and the shadow of a picket moved near the animal corral. A man in a Pathet Lao outfit stood in front of the hidden bunker, beyond the leaning, rickety houses on the river bank. To the left, the glow of a cigarette showed where a mechanic tinkered with a truck engine. The click of his wrench on metal, the sleepy grunt of a donkey, were the only sounds above the quiet purling of the river moving on its rocky bed.

“Your
bhikkhus
know what to do?” Durell asked.

Kem nodded. His dark eyes gleamed with excitement. “They say it is their duty to wipe out evil. They say that meditation may be good for their souls, but what of the souls of the unfortunate criminals over there, who should be assisted in making merit for their next incarnation?

Otherwise they may live again only as pigs and dogs and spiders, or worse.”

The eight old men began a low, humming chant as Kem spoke, and several of them began clicking beads and prayer wheels as they tucked up their tattered robes and waded out into the stream, brandishing their sticks. For long seconds, nothing happened. No one noticed them.

“Go on, Kem,” Durell said.

“I will stay with you. I may be more helpful.”

“But those old fellows may be killed.”

“They will not be harmed.”

The oldest monk began a ululating cry that pierced sharply through the darkness. He was halfway across the river before someone shouted querulously in the caravan camp. The shout was taken up by others, and fights began to bloom here and there among the tents and leaning houses on the opposite bank. Kem started forward, and Durell caught his arm.

“Wait. Let them get into the camp.”

An uproar began like the slow, seething chum of a giant sea coming in to shore. More fights flashed on, and a warning shot was fired, and men began tumbling sleepily from wherever they happened to be. The old
bhikkhus
did not pause or hesitate. Their chanting became shouts of rage, and as the first caravaneers ran toward them, yelling warnings, they laid about them sturdily with their staves, whacking and thrusting and cracking the smugglers across their heads and shoulders.

Kem chuckled. “Watch.”

In the first fury of the monk’s sudden onslaught, the caravan men fell back, astonished. There were some shouted orders from their leaders, and more lights came on, in one of the houses directly in front of the bunker that Durell watched. The smugglers grew in numbers as more and more woke up, but no shots were fired. The old men continued their chanting and shrieking progress up the main camp street, heading away from the bunker, where several men, two in Pathet Lao outfits and another in a Thai uniform, came out and shouted angrily. A lamp was smashed by one of the monks’ sticks, a smuggler howled as a second stave cracked him across the scalp. Durell could not guess what the
bhikkhus
were shouting, but their tones were those of sharp reprimand and anger. In less than a minute, they seemed to be swallowed up by a growing circle of the caravan men, none of whom dared to touch the old men; nor did they try to stop their progress. Like a flood, the men of the camp moved away from the bunker area across the river from Durell and Kem.

“Now we can go, Flivver.”

Durell stood up and ran, crouching, into the stream. Most of the lights in the camp were to the left, surrounding the onslaught of the angry old men. No one stood on guard across the river. Durell dashed through the cold water with all his speed, and threw himself to the bank under the dark shelter of a stilted house. Kem splashed down after him, laughing softly.

“Ah, this is something these old men will always remember. A joy to their waning years.”

“If they’re not murdered.”

“Buddha will watch over them.”

Durell crawled under the house, through mud and weeds, holding the AK-47 out of the wetness. So far, he saw no hint that Benjie Slocum was anywhere in the camp, captive or otherwise. Kem breathed lightly beside him. The shadows under the house were filled with debris, odorous and malignant, which Durell did not care to identify. He crawled forward until he could see the main street of the camp. He was about thirty yards from the bunker. He did not know how deep or elaborate its construction might be, or how many men might be posted inside. He wondered if there might be another exit. There often was an escape hole from these places, when the enemy had time to construct them. But the dark line of foliage across the dusty trail hid any hope of finding it. He would have to go in the front way.