Assignment Bangkok (19 page)

Assignment—Bangkok 153 they had occupied through the night. They looked uncertain as Durell and the Thai officer ran up the last ascent.

More and more of the caravan crowded onto the trail in the gorge. There were only moments left before they would start rolling for the security of the nearby border. Durell began to limp as his knee acted up again, and he swore softly at the doctor who had assured him that the torn ligament had mended as good as new. For a moment he could not find the detonator, and when he located it, he discovered that the wires he had trailed up the face of the cliff had slipped away and were dangling ten feet below the ledge. The sound of the truck motors made a rising thunder that rolled up from below.

“I’ll get it,” Major Luk said.

He lowered himself quickly, not careful now, and swung from a grip on some scraggly shrubs that grew out of a crevice in the rock. He could not reach the wires. His small, lithe figure swung back and forth. The first trucks were now almost directly under them. Durell heard a dim chanting and saw the eight old
bhikkhus
, led by Kem, coming up the trail.

“Major!” he called.

“I can get them.”

“Go slow. Go steady.”

“Yes.”

The Thai’s face was upturned for a moment. His hold on the shrub was precarious, his legs dangled out over a thousand feet of black space. He jerked as he urged himself into another swing. His arm came out, his fingers closed on one of the wires, caught it, then lost it. He swung again. The shrub cracked, protesting, came partly loose. This time the Thai’s fingers caught both wires and pulled and held them. Major Luk looped the strands around his wrist, tying them in a loose knot with his teeth. His brown face turned up toward Durell.

“I am afraid—”

“Take it easy, now.”

“—I cannot climb up.”

Durell turned. “Kem!”

“I am here. Buddha smiles on us all.”

“Hold on to my ankles. I’m going over for Luk.”

“Let me try to do it.”

“No. It’s my job.”

Durell slid on his belly over the lip of the ledge. None of the Missa tribesmen offered to help. Mike and Benjie had not yet reached the cave. The trucks of the caravan were now bunching up below, and the headlights shone with glinting reflections off the rock face on the other side of the gorge. Durell dangled head down on the surface of the cliff. He felt Kem’s hands holding his ankles in a tight, numbing grip. He hoped the monk was well braced against his weight. It was dizzying, looking upside-down into the gorge and the river. Major Luk tossed the wires up to him. He caught them, twisted, and passed them back and up to the monk.

“I’ve got them,” Kem said briefly. He added, “I seem to have gotten out of condition.”

“Save your breath. Major?”

“Yes?”

“Reach up. Grab my hand.”

“The
bhikkhu
cannot support us both.”

“He won’t have to. There’s a grip, just over there. All you need is a lift of twelve inches. I’ll do it fast, then let you go. Don’t fall.”

“I hope not.”

Durell pulled on the Thai’s extended wrist. Major Luk surged up, one hand grabbing desperately for the outcrop of rock that could hold him. When Durell felt his ankles slipping through Kem’s fingers above him, he let go of the Thai. Major Luk caught at the rock, held it; he swung, got one leg up, stood flat with his body pressed against the face of the cliff.

“Pull me up,” Durell told Kem.

“Is he safe?”

“Yes. Safe.”

“A very brave man,” the young monk said.

In another moment, Durell and the major stood safely on the ledge outside the cave. The eight old
bhikkhus
now sat all in a row, looking downward at the caravan in the gorge. Their faces were serene, but there were glints of pleasure in their old, wise eyes. Durell knelt and fixed the wires to the detonator. His fingers trembled. He did not want to admit to himself how tired he was, or how close he had come to the end.

Major Luk knelt beside him, breathing quickly and lightly. “I want to thank you.”

Durell turned the detonator over to the Thai. “You can blow it, yourself. It’s your country, after all.”

The Thai grinned. “A pleasure. Now?”

“Now,” Durell said.

Major Luk slammed down on the plunger.

It began slowly at first. The earth trembled slightly, then the blast hit them, a tremendous thunderclap that echoed deafeningly back and forth between the walls of the gorge. A great spray of rock, earth, and debris shot out from under the heavy bulge of granite midway down the cliff, overhanging the road. The trail was crowded with trucks, jeeps, and men while great boulders shot out into space and hung over them. For just an instant, the scene seemed to be frozen. Then the earth shook again, like some monster slowly coming alive, and a heavy rumbling began and grew louder and heavier as the rockslide started down. The noise was overwhelming. Dust boiled up across the pass, and blocked the view. Durell could barely see the caravan lights through it, and then all the fights were obscured by the grinding, churning, roaring mass of the landslide. It seemed to go on forever. The Missa tribesmen on the ledge outside the cave cowered back with shouts of fear. The eight old
bhikkhus
did not move. It seemed to Durell that he could hear their chanting through the tumult, but he could not be sure. He saw that Kem had joined them, and the line had now become nine men.

The taste and smell of dust and grit touched Durell. The earth continued to shake. For a few moments, he did not know if the whole cliff would go down, taking them all with it. He could see nothing of the river below. Then, very slowly, the landslide died away and ended.

Someone took his hand and stood beside him. It was Benjie. “Sam . . .”

“It’s over.”

“Are they all dead?”

“I think most of them got away. But the trail is blocked, and most of their trucks are buried. And the river is dammed up. Look.”

There was a faint gray light in the sky now. It would soon be dawn. Down below, clouds of dust slowly drifted away in the morning breeze. Where the trail had been beside the river there was now a huge mass of jumbled rock and earth and broken trees. The road was gone. The river swirled muddily behind the great barrier, slowly forming a large pond, and then a lake. It would overflow the dam in a day or two, but by then it would not matter. The caravan was destroyed.

Major Luk drew a deep breath and sat down beside him. The Thai’s face was drawn and haggard, but he looked happy.

“It is done. The smugglers have been dealt a blow from which they cannot recover for at least a year. All the money they would have collected—which would have gone mostly to finance the insurgent army—is lost. Next year the hill people might have another crop of poppies for them, but by then, we hope, the entire organization should be in our net.” He paused and looked at Durell. “You have done your job well, sir.”

Durell said, “It’s not finished yet.”

Durell said, “You’re shivering, Benjie.”

“I can’t help it.”

“We have lots of time yet.”

“Yes. It’s good to be alone with you again. I’m grateful to you. I don’t know how I could have stood it, if you—if we—had found that Mike was guilty. I couldn’t bear the thought that he’d gone so bad that he was a traitor, selling out to the Muc Tong.”

“Mike’s all right. He just has to be allowed to be his own man. The Missa people will bring him along soon.”

She was silent for a moment, then said, “Sam, did it mean anything?”

“I don’t know. We just have to do what we can.”

“I mean, about you and me . . .”

“I don’t know about that, either.”

Benjie said, “You say it isn’t over for you yet. What do you mean by that?”

“Unfinished business.”

“I’m worried about it. I’m worried about you. I don’t think I could stand it, always wondering where you were, what you were doing, who was trying to kill you, or—” “Don’t,” he said.

“It’s an old story with you, isn’t it? No permanent entanglements. No involvements. Like for the moment.” “Perhaps.”

“Do you like it that way?” “No. But I chose it, and it’s now the only way I know. It’s too late to go back.”

“You can’t get out of the spook business?”

“No.”

“You mean you don’t want to.”

“That’s right.”

They were waiting in the tumbledown drying shed of the abandoned tea plantation, next to Benjie’s Apache plane. It was almost noon, and the air was hot and still and lifeless. Birds and insects made the only sounds to be heard. It had taken most of the morning to make their way through a hostile, confused countryside, past the ruins of Xo Dong and up over the mountain to the terraced slopes of the tea farm. Mike and Major Luk were not far behind them, but they had separated for safety, the easier to make their way around the wiengs that were beehives of angry activity since the explosion and the landslide. The caravan men who survived were on the hunt, too, and they had to be avoided. Their thirst for vengeance made the prospect of a quick death a certainty, if they were caught.

“Sam?”

“We’ll wait until noon,” he said.

“I couldn’t leave Mike here.”

“He’ll be along by then.”

“And if he isn’t?”

“I told you. Unfinished business in Bangkok.”

She rolled over on the straw, her body close to him, and stretched, touching the length of him with her hand. “Sam, we may never be alone like this again.”

“That’s probably true.”

“It was beautiful, before. Wonderful, the first time.” “Benjie, don’t just feel grateful—”

“It isn’t only that. You changed me.”

Insects hummed in the quiet, fragrant shadows of the tea shed. Beyond the open side, past the plane, he could see the landing strip and the trail that led away over the mountain, away from the plantation back to Xo Dong. A bird whipped across the terraces, bright red and green, long tail streaming behind its darting flight. Benjie’s mouth was soft and warm and yielding. She shivered again, but she was not cold. She held him tightly, pulling him toward her, demanding him.

“Sam, make love to me. Please.”

“Yes.”

They waited until ten minutes after noon, and then he saw Major Luk and his troopers, and Kem and Mike coming up the trail. Mike had to be supported with an arm around the monk’s shoulders. His face was haggard, bearded and grim. But a flash of his irrepressible spirit showed in his quick laugh as he sagged against the plane. “Good. Oh, very good. Benjie, you’re a wonder.”

“That’s the first nice thing you’ve said to me in years,” Benjie told him.

“Maybe I never appreciated you before. Or saw you like this.”

“Have I changed? I haven’t changed,” she said.

“I think you have. And so have I.”

Ken coughed softly. The
bhikkhu
looked more bedraggled than ever, but his black eyes were shy. “Sam, we have been talking. Major Luk will report to his station, at the military security post near here. I know there is a place in the plane for me, and for Mike, too. But I do not wish to go back with you to Bangkok. Have I fulfilled my end of our bargain, the one we made so long ago?”

“I think so.”

“Then I am free of my promise?”

“If you wish,” Durell said. “Washington would like to keep you with us, though.”

The monk shook his shaven head and smiled. “I have made much merit for my soul these two days with you. I am free again. My vows are completed. And I would make more merit for my spirit’s future, by staying here.”

Durell guessed what Kem had in mind. “With your eight old men? You said they were ready to choose another for this year.”

“That is correct. I would like to stay with them, if I may, and meditate and pray with them.”

“If that’s what you want, Fliwer.”

“My name is Kem Pas ah Borovit, of the Sangha.”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“Then,” said the monk quietly, “I will help you roll out the plane and see you off safely for Bangkok.”

The tub was long and wide, built of imported Italian marble; the water was hot and steamy and fragrant with scented oil that the hotel attendant had sprinkled in it. Durell had had several bourbons on the rocks sent up from the bar, had eaten a dinner of spiced and curried Indonesian rijstaffel, and the hotel doctor had daubed ointments and antiseptic on the various nicks and bruises he had suffered all over his body. He had been shaved by the barber sent up from the lobby, while he sipped the cold bourbon and thought about the rest of the matters he had to attend to in Bangkok.

He had a plane ticket back to Washington in the morning. It was now eight o’clock in the evening, and he felt there was no hurry about anything. She would come to him. She had to come to him. He had chosen the new hotel in the heart of the city, and then gone to the Embassy and showed his card and had been taken to the communications room where he spent half an hour encoding his report to General Dickinson McFee, the boss of K Section.

He remembered her eyes, the soft and feminine texture of her face, the slim, lithe body, the way she moved and spoke. She would be here. He had left the hotel door unlocked. There was nothing to do but wait. It was something he had to do, and this time he didn’t mind the waiting.

He was a little worried about Jimmy James. He had telephoned the K Section Control man’s house, remembering the plush appointments of his home, and his elegant manner of living. There had been no answer. He had tried several times, listening to the telephone ring, and the hotel had cooperated by sending around a messenger with a note. The messenger reported the door locked and the windows dark and the cats in their cages. But no one was in the house. He had left Durell’s note tacked to the front door, as instructed.

In the tub, feeling the balm of the hot water soak into his bruised ribs, sensing the warmth of the bourbon in his belly, Durell did not worry too much about the elegant James D. James. Benjie and Mike Slocum had left him in a taxi at the hotel and gone to their house on the riverfront that Benjie had built some years ago. Durell had never seen it. Their parting had been brief, hurried by weariness after the flight down from Xo Dong, a bit strained by the let-down of the task being done and over with, the thing now relegated to the past, to the dossiers and the files. Mike had blathered on a bit about another job for K Section, but his eyes admitted to Durell that he was finished with such work for Durell, and he would have to look elsewhere for the risks and excitement he seemed to need. He was more than a little drunk when they had landed, having hit another of his bottles of Mekong whiskey pretty hard, all during the flight back.