chapter

one
HOLCOMB did not know how long he had been running or
when the sun came up, or when he fell at last in the sandy
debris of coconut husks and rotting palm fronds. He was
afraid of the light. The screeching of the birds and the
grunting of a wild pig somewhere in the vine-shrouded
wilderness beyond the beach terrified him. He knew he was
being followed. The sounds of the birds and monkeys and
pigs mingled with the sigh and crash of the surf of the
Celebes Sea on the beach. There was a kind of madness in the
noise that balanced the gibbering in the lurking shadows of
his brain.
He made himself roll over and stared at the morning sky
through the palm fronds overhead. The sun was massive, red,
swollen, as if it had gorged on something. Like the red ball of
the Jap battle flags on a beach like this, Holcomb thought, on
an island like this, in this same Pacific so very long ago.
Maybe everything was a dream, a reflection of the barrage
and the Jap kamikazes screaming down over the beach.
Maybe he had dreamed the twenty years in between, and
here he was, back again in the reality of war. But he knew it
was no dream. The war was long over. There were no
Japanese hiding just inside the line of trees that leaned out
over the littered beach. All that was twenty years ago. And yet
—
“Get up,” he said aloud. “Get up, stupid.”
His voice frightened him. It seemed louder than the crazy
screeching of the birds, the chattering of the monkeys. A
smell of ozone filled the air. There were huge combers, long,
white, regular, rolling out of that shallow tropic sea, out of
that giant, swollen red crab of a sun. The light blinded him.
He wanted to weep. He got to his feet and reeled and fell and
looked back along the beach.
“Oh, you stupid bastard,” he said.
He had left his footprints there in the virgin sand, reaching
back as far as he could see in the misty dawn light. Back to
where the row of dead men lay, those fresh young men, those
surprised faces, all laid out so neatly, each one with a bullet
in the nape of the neck, tearing away vertebra and spinal cord
and snapping, with a single blow, the slender, precious
thread of life. All those innocent faces, in such a neat row—!
“Move, stupid,” he told himself.
He could not remember when he had eaten last, and he
looked around for a fallen coconut, but when he found one he
did not know how to crack the massive husk that hid the
meat, and after he spent some precious minutes smashing it,
with little effect, against the bole of a palm tree, he heaved it
away with a curse and gave up all thought of breakfast.
He ran a little and walked a little. He went through the very
edge of the surf, feeling clever now, letting the sea Wash away
his footprints. The ocean was tepid. The heat was building up
fast. Of course, they would know he hadn’t struck inland, into
that tangle of jungle and mountain. They‘d dog him along the
beach, coming in a jeep, perhaps, or in a boat along the outer
reef, watching for him with binoculars as he reeled and
staggered and flapped his arms like a crazy scarecrow on a
crazy beach, drowned in the heat of a crazy Pacific island.
He had no idea of the name of the place, but he knew those
mountains, floating in violet haze far, far over the horizon,
were on the mainland of Borneo. Sabah? Brunei? The skipper
had been surprised, sure enough. Had they gone ten miles or
fifty, off course? He knew this was the Tarakuta Group, half
submerged in the shallows between the Sulu and the Celebes
Seas, a forgotten cluster of tropical mud heaps off the Borneo
coast, beloved only by the Dyak aborigines in the mountains,
the Hakka Chinese who worked the tin sluice mines, and the
Dutch and English colonists who had taken over the old
Sultanate of Pandakan, capital city of the Tarakutas. All right.
So he had to be on one of the Tarakuta Islands, somewhere
off that distant, troubled coast of Borneo. But there were
hundreds, maybe a thousand of them. No one really knew.
They came and went, some of them, in the leaden sea.
Come on, keep walking, keep—
He was suddenly tumbled over by a comber, because he had
strayed too far from the foamy edge of the surf where little
crabs scuttled out of his way, and this comber had smashed
at him out of the blue. It grabbed his legs and tried to suck
him out where the water was deep and he would quietly
drown.
Well, what was so bad about drowning?
For that matter, What was so bad about a quiet execution, a
single shot in the back of the neck to blow all your years into
darkness? But they were only boys, Holcomb, and you were
only a boy when you were a Marine and fought the laps
around here, pushing them off? Borneo. You’re middle-aged
now, you’re partly bald and in your middle forties, and you
just don’t have it any more. If you try to run too long,
something is just going to snap and break in your chest, and
that will be the end of it.
Well, he wouldn’t mind that, either. He began to giggle,
thinking that if they ever found him, they’d call him the
original wild man of Borneo.
There was just one thing about it all.
Somebody had to know the truth. Somebody had to be told
what had happened to those young boys and the skipper and
that beautiful prize package of a boat, the new 727.
Somebody had to be warned.
“What happened?” Holcomb asked aloud. “How did they do
it?”
He didn’t know. None of them had known. Before they knew
what it was all about, what kind of jam they were in, it was
too late. And the boys went down like a row of dominoes, ka-
pow! ka-pow! ka-pow! as fast as the executioner could walk
along behind them as they stood with their ankles and wrists
tied, and wondered if it could really be happening to them.
He felt exhausted. The sun was hot now. He was surprised to
see how high it had climbed in the sky. Ah, the South Sea
idyll, the rows of coconuts, the gentle breeze, the surf, the
blue Pacific! It stank. The vegetation was rotten and the sea
threw up, lite vomit, the dead bits and pieces of fish and crab
flat the sea scavengers had missed. And they never told you
about the noise of the birds and the monkeys and the crash,
crash, crash of the surf. Enough to drive a man crazy.
He fell down and lay with his face in the wet sand. The sea
washed o\'el' his leg, sighed away, washed in again. He
wanted to sleep. But every time he thought of the neat row of
dead boys’ faces, he wanted to cry. Boys from Iowa, or Philly;
boys from Boston and Atlanta. Kids, all of them. They had
regarded him as an old man. But he was only forty-seven. He
didn’t wear a uniform, either. Maybe that’s why he had felt a
little apart from them. They knew he was O.N.I. Maybe they
snickered about it. What, they must have asked, was he
looking for? Spies and Reds in the torpedo tubes? In the
nuclear engine room? Uncle Sam didn’t mind Wasting
money, sending all those technicians around the world on a
joy ride.
Except that they hadn’t gotten around the world. From San
Diego they had gone to Honolulu and then come arching
down across the big, wide, beautiful blue Pacific, and then
they had headed through the little independent sultanate of
the Tarakuta Archipelago, off Borneo. Yesterday they
surfaced and—and—
“Get up, Pete,” he told himself. “Please get up, or they’ll catch
you. They know you’re missing now. They’ll come after you
like bats out of hell.”
If this had been left to some Beverly Hills scenarist, Holcomb
thought. he’d have been rescued by now by a bevy of smiling,
pearly-toothed, gorgeous-breasted and scantily clad
Polynesian beauties, all just dying to slip into the bush with
the great white stranger and heal his wounds with love.
But he hadn’t even seen the proverbial Borneo wild man;
since ten o’clock last night, he hadn’t seen a soul. Nothing but
these damned birds and monkeys and pigs grunting and gulls
screaming and the surf hammering . . .
A shadow fell upon him.
He had known fear at times, in his life, but never anything
like the terror that seized his heart and squeezed the breath
out of him with one giant Wallop. He wanted to burrow into
the sand and vanish. He wanted to snap his fingers and
suddenly just not be here. But this was not the place or the
age for miracles.
A toe prodded him, and it touched him just where his rib had
been cracked or broken—he didn’t know which—when he
climbed over the palisade to escape last night. He heard a
scream of pain and knew it came from his throat and could
not believe it. When he rolled over, his hand closed
convulsively on a smooth piece of driftwood. He felt its
weight and licked his lips in cunning.
All right, he thought.
He looked up.
This was no man Friday for a castaway Robinson Crusoe, he
decided. The shadow of the man blotted out the hot morning
sun. It even blotted out the screeching of the birds and the
thunder of the surf. It looked black and enormous against the
cobalt blue of the Celebes sky.
“You hurt, man?”
English, yet, Holcomb thought. He digs me, man.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m hurt.”
“You look funny. Where you from, man?”
“The Jackson.”
“What?”
“The United States nuclear submarine Andrew Jackson, you
dig?‘ Holcomb And with a great effort and a lurch, he lunged
to his feet and swung the driftwood club at the black shadow
looming over him.
At the moment, he saw the look of utter surprise and
consternation on the black man’s face, under the broad brim
of woven straw hat. The man wore old blue denims, faded
white salt and sun, straw sandals, and a dazzling whlte, clean
skivvy shirt. He saw with horror that there was standard
U.S.N. stenciling on the skivvy shirt, Somebody J,K. MM2/c
— and then his club crunched down on the man’s skull while,
at the same moment in complete reflex, the stranger swung
his machete.
Holcomb hadn’t seen the knife at all.
He felt the Jolt on his wrist and arm as the heavy driftwood
smashed through flesh and bone and cartilage; and at the
same moment, as if it happened to someone else, he felt the
thunk! of the razor-sharp coconut knife cut his flesh, cut
through his shoulder and muscle, hissing like a butcher’s
blade. He staggered, fell to one knee, saw blood gout to the
sand in a great, rich splash, soaking in and turning black
almost at once. The world reeled and tumbled around inside
head. He heard a groan and a great screeching of the birds in
the nearby jungle and the man in blue denims began to cry
out something in a language he could not understand. Maybe
nobody would understand it, ever, because he was bleeding
from nose and ear and mouth, thick, viscous blood that
looked mortal, and there were funny little spasmodic kicks
and twitches to his legs as he lay on his back on the sand.
Holcomb forced himself to stand erect. The beach swayed
and reeled under him. He staggered, caught himself.
“Any more of you out there?” he shouted. "Come on, come
on, let’s have it now!”
His voice was a hysterical cry in the wilderness of sun and
sea. He looked down at the big black man. The machete was
bloody on the sand. He picked it up. He looked at his left
shoulder and shuddered. He could see where the blade had
sliced right through the meat of muscle and tendon to the
white, shiny, gristly bone. It was hard to believe he was
looking at his own tender, precious flesh. He was bleeding
badly, and he became frightened by it, wondering how much
blood he could lose before he fainted.
“Hey, man,” he said to the stranger he had felled.
The black man groaned and muttered in his own language.
“Hey, man, didn’t they send you after me?" Holcomb asked.
The other's legs twitched and were still.
“You dead?” Holcomb asked.
The black man said, very clearly and distinctly: “Yes, you
killed me, stupid, and I only stopped by to help you.”
But his mouth didn’t move when he said it.
Terror seized Holcomb and he ran down the beach. Help me,
help me, God help us all, he thought. He flung away the
driftwood club. He thought of going back to get the machete,
but he was afraid the dead man might talk to him again, and
he couldn’t stand that, because he knew he had made another
error, and he might have had help and spread alarm and
rescued those who weren’t already lying back there with their
surprised young faces upturned like flowers to the tropical
sun. And the ship—yes, the ship—how could it have
happened? Trapped there, incredibly, even Captain
Hardnose Johnson, that tough old sea eagle, couldn’t believe
it, couldn’t believe it had happened even when that fat
Chinese put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger—
Holcomb tripped and sprawled and landed on his wounded
shoulder and gave a screech of utter, mortal pain that echoed
louder than the surf and the birds. He fell in water, and
choked and floundered and knew he was drowning. He
hadn’t even noticed the water ahead of him as he ran.
Strong hands caught his ankle and hauled him without
ceremony out of the warm, salt lagoon. Holcomb wasn’t sure
if he were dreaming or not.
A tall blonde girl, naked to her rich, creamy golden skin, with
eyes as blue as the Pacific sky, stood over him.
She was silent, and he saw by her face that he was dying.
He tried to speak. but nothing happened.
“Are you American?" the girl asked in English.
He tried to nod. He coughed and choked on salt water. He
saw that the girl wasn’t really naked. She wore the most
vestigial bikini he had ever seen, of a pale flesh color that was
lost against the rich Polynesian gold of her skin. She swung
an oxygen tank and skin-diving flippers in one long, delicate
hand. She was the most beautiful, the most unbelievable
creature he had ever seen.
He began to weep, because he was dying.
“Simon?”
 “My mate. I mean, for the Tarakuta." She gestured toward
the lagoon. Holcomb looked and saw an old two-masted
freighting schooner at anchor offshore. A dinghy was drawn
up on the beach. He saw that the landscape had changed
from the wilderness of the coast where he had awakened at
sunrise to a more hilly shore. The lagoon was enclosed by
mangroves that dug gnarled, rooty fingers into a milky sea.
The distant loom of Borneo’s mountain spines could not be
seen now. “Didn’t Simon pass you on the beach, mister?"
“I killed him,” Holcomb whispered, suddenly stricken. “He
swung at me with his machete. and I thought—I thought—”
“What? What are you saying? I sent him for some fresh
coconuts, that’s all. Listen, are you crazy? I can’t help you
unless Simon . . .”
“Please,” he wept.
“Have you got a name?”
“Lieutenant Commander Peter J. Holcomb, Office of Naval
Intelligence, on temporary duty aboard the U.S. Navy
nuclear-powered Polaris sub 727, the Andrew Jackson.
Understand?”
“No.” She looked down at him, frowning, and then knelt and
looked at his shoulder. She could not conceal her repugnance
at his wound. “Listen, you’re in a bad way. The sun’s got you,
and you’ve been hurt like I’ve never seen a man hurt before.
Who broke all your fingers?”
“My fingers?” He had forgotten. His hand was numb. “The
Chinaman did it.”
“Commander, you don’t make sense.”
“Listen.” Holcomb felt as if something had suddenly torn
apart in his chest. “Listen, if you can’t get me to a doctor in
time—can you hear me—?”
“Yes,” the girl said.
“You get in touch with-—a man named—a man—"
“Who?”
“Sam Durell. I saw him in Honolulu—three weeks ago. He‘s
still there. It’s urgent. Tell him about me—”
“Hey, it’s a small world,” the girl whispered. “Durell?”
“Yes. Please? It must be—quick. Couple of days, they'll all be
dead. Understand?”
“Who will be dead?”
“Whole crew. One by one. Ship, too. Gone. Not a trace.
Vanished. You understand?”
“No, but—”
Holcomb felt something else give way deep inside him, a
quiet release, a warm flood that he almost welcomed. He saw
the sun shining behind the girl’s thick, blonde hair. She had
tied and pinned it up in a knot at the nape of her neck and
allowed the long‘, heavy, thick and luscious strands of it to
curl forward over her shoulders and lie between her firm
breasts. He was sorry he Was dying. He wondered if she
understood his message at all.
And just before he died, he wondered if it all hadn’t been
some kind of dream and delusion, a nightmare of sun and
terror.
 chapter
two
DURELL found her on the lanai of his apartment in the
Luakulani Palms that overlooked the dark sand beach and
Makapuu Point. Against a background of jacaranda and
African tulip trees, through which the waters of Kaiwi
Channel glimmered, she took a seat in the big Bombay chair
and poured herself a gin and orange hitters. She turned to
watch the professional, brown-skinned beach boys giving the
tourist girls a thrill with the surfboards, out there where the
Pacific combers came rolling in like the massive ticking of
some giant clock. He could hear the shrieks of delighted
terror from the beginners on their styrofoam boards and see
their brave young shapes, glowing with golden health, against
the towering white clouds of the Pacific horizon.
It was a Tuesday, and he was already half packed and ready
to return via this evening’s Pan Am flight to the mainland
and then on across to his apartment in Washington’s
Northwest by Rock Creek Park, where he would report to K
Section and finish the routine job of organizational field work
he had done here. He knew that General McFee had assigned
him to it as a vacation of sorts, but he was not pleased with it,
because desk work irritated him, even when he could admit
the importance of analysis and synthesis of every item of
knowledge that came through the pipeline and military
installations and divisional movements deep in the heart of
Red China. Back at No. 20 Annapolis Street in Washington,
the computer would digest the coded information and
estimates of tomorrow’s potential trouble spot in a very
troubled world.
He halted in the doorway and the girl on the lanai tilted her
gin and orange bitters and sipped at it through the straw and
said, “Hi,” and then regarded him with cool and speculative
blue eyes that were distinctly unfriendly. “So you are Sam
Durell?”
“I am," he said quietly.
“It’s a cinch you’re no native.”
“Because I don’t wear my shirttail out?”
“And no Truman shirt. Just plain pima, button-down collar
knitted blue necktie, dark business suit. She spoke critically.
“My, you look stuffy to me. What kind of business are you in,
Sam Durell?”
“My own. And you?”
“I’ve come a long way to see you.”
“How long a way?”
“Ever hear of Tarakuta?”
"All my life.” He looked at the golden-skinned girl. “Did you
ever hear of Bayou Peche Rouge?”
“I’m sick to death of the name,” she said.
She showed no sign of stirring from the Bombay chair, so he
ignored her and went through the Luakulani apartment with
meticulous care. Durell was a cautious man, both by training,
reflex and instinct. He had to be, in order to survive in his
business He kept nothing to tie him to K Section here in the
apartment, but he knew too well how a bit from here and
there could be matched together to form a blueprint of a man
or an operation. He checked his suitcase, his clothes, and the
Governor Winthrop secretary desk that may have come over
to Hawaii with one of the first missionaries to the islands.
The girl’s blue eyes watched him with silent amusement
while she finished her drink. He was not unaware of her
magnificent golden legs, the curve of her thigh and breast,
the tilted pride and intelligence of her lovely face. Her hair
was piled high on her head in what seemed a haphazard
fashion, and then allowed to stream in thick, honeyed waves
over her shoulders. She wore a man’s blue denim shirt and a
pair of very, very short shorts.
He knew that when she stood up, she would be only an inch
or two under his six feet plus. A lot of woman, he thought,
angry with himself for somehow finding her here, wondering
if it could be true that she came from Tarakuta, wondering
why she was here after all these years. She was the sort of
myth you never expected to meet in reality.
Durell was a big man, heavily muscled, with thick black hair
touched with gray at the temples. He had dark blue eyes that
could turn as black as a thundercloud when angry. His
temperament was quick and volatile, rising from his Cajun
ancestors in the bayous of lower Louisiana. It was his one
handicap. ‘He. had inherited from his old grandpa Jonathan
all the instincts of a Mississippi riverboat gambler, which old
Jonathan had been, and some of this was deplored by K
Section, and some of it was quietly shelved and obliterated in
dossier, because as a field sub-chief for the Central
Intelligence Agency, he was not supposed to have any
identifiable quirks or. foibles. There were a few, however,
that he refused to give up—good bourbon, and chicory-
flavored Louisiana coffee, among others.
The girl had not even touched anything in his rooms, and this
somehow irritated him even more, after fanning everything
he could think of. Her eyes mocked him.
“How did you get in?” he asked finally.
“The bellhop was cooperative.”
“He isn’t supposed to be.”
He liked my legs,“ she said. “Do you like them, Sam?”
He looked at them and approved of them and said: “I can't
believe it. Are you really Willi Panapura?”
“Sho ‘nuff. And you’re Samuel Durell, of Bayou Peche Rouge.
My granddaddy, Joseph Panapura, and your granddaddy, old
Jonathan Durell, were once the terrors of the Mississippi
gambling halls, until old Joseph got homesick for the South
Seas and left the good paddle-wheeler Three Belles and
shipped out on a tramp steamer for home.”
"Your grandfather must be in his nineties by now.”
“He is. And Jonathan?”
“The same. They were a tough breed.”
“I’ve been hearing about you,” the girl said. “ever since I’ve
been knee-high to a sand crab, and I long ago got sick to
death of your name.”
Durell smiled thinly. “It’s a mutual feeling.”
“You mean you don’t like my legs?”
“I like them, all right. But I’m flying to Washington tonight.
“No, you’re not,” Willi said. “You’re flying to Borneo with me,
this afternoon. Well, not Borneo, exactly. It’s Pandakan,
capital city of the Tarakuta Group, just off the east shore. I’ve
got the tickets ’n all.”
“You seem pretty sure of all this.”
“I am. You’ll be aboard, if you’re what your grandpappy told
my grandpappy you really are.”
He asked carefully: “And what is that?”
“Oh,” she said, “you’re a man from the CIA.”
Bayou Peche Rouge was a long way back in Durell’s past. The
moss-draped old sidewheeler, the Three Belles, safely lodged
in the mud of the delta country, had been his home ever since
his parents died and old Jonathan took him in. And ever
since he could remember, he had heard about the wild and
Woolly South Sea Islander, Joseph Panapura, who had
worked as a pilot for Jonathan in the heyday of their
Mississippi gambling careers. The two old men still kept up a
correspondence, a fragile thread across space and
lengthening, inexorable time. Old Joseph had a
granddaughter, as old Jonathan had a grandson. Durell had
heard about the beautiful Willi ever since he had been twelve,
when Willi was born.
She was a myth, a Polynesian legend, an idyll of a day long
gone and forgotten. His own work with K Section kept him in
a shadow world of danger and eternal suspicion, of sudden
crisis and alarm, where men died quietly in a silent war that
ranged from the alleys of Bangkok to the utter respectability
of London’s West End, from the hovels of an Arab sheikdom
on the Indian Ocean to a crib in a coastal town of Panama.
He had learned to live with it. He could conceive of no other
existence now, after all this time with K Section. Somebody
had to fight this battle of darkness, and live in this world of
anonymity, of eternal care and infinite suspicion. You never
turned a corner casually, you never opened a door without
expecting enemies to wait beyond. He had survived. The
price he had paid made him unlike other men, and
sometimes he wondered if the cost was not too
high. But he had gone too far, for too many years. There was
no way out for him, ever, except one. And he preferred to
postpone that ultimate end as long as possible, as far as care
and alert reflexes and unending awareness could take him.
“My,” Willi Panapura said. She considered her empty glass.
“You’ve got a terrible look in your eyes, Sam.”
“Have I?"
“I'm sorry I’ve come to bring you such bad news.“
“Is it about your grandfather?”
“Oh, no. Joseph is fine. He's written airmail to your
granddaddy about rny coming here to find you. We’ve laid up
the Tarakuta—that’s our trading schooner—until you fly back
with me.”
He sighed. “All right, I can’t guess why you’re here or how
you found me. So tell me right out.”
She laughed softly. “Oh, you do like my legs, all right.
You like me all over, I think, the way you look at me.”
“Does that flatter you? Fine. I like you, Willi.”
“But I’m engaged to be married, you know."
“Congratulations.”
“And engagements have been broken before, haven’t they?”
“Don’t do anything rash on my account,” he said.
“Oh, I won’t. Not until I know you better, anyway.”
“Do you think you will?”
“Yes, on the flight to the Tarakuta Islands, and perhaps later,
I’ll get a better chance to size you up."
He said patiently: “But I’m not going anywhere with you,
Willi. I might like to, but it’s impossible.”
“You’ll come with me. Because a man named Peter Holcomb
sent me for you, and Peter Holcomb is dead.”

chapter
three
NOTHING changed in his face. He knew the girl was
watching curiously to see what effect her words had on him.
But that did not matter. He took her for what she said she
was, since no one else on earth could have known about their
grandfathers. He lit one of his rare cigarettes and lit another
for her, but she said quietly: “I don’t smoke, Samuel. I don‘t
do lots of things. We can get that straight, right off.”
“Tell me again who sent you to me."
“You heard me. It was a man who said he was a lieutenant
commander in the Office of U.S. Naval Intelligence, off a
Polaris submarine named the Andrew Jackson." She paused
and added quietly: “I’m sorry, I didn’t know he was such a
good friend of yours.”
“He wasn’t. We knew each other, that’s all. We’re in the same
line of business. I use the present tense, you see, because I
don't believe you when you say Pete Holcomb is dead,
because it just isn’t possible.”
“But he is. I was there when he died, all alone and out of his
head on the beach, babbling about the boys being shot.”
“Come here,” Durell said.
She stood up obediently. Something in his voice was not to be
denied. She did not smile when she saw what was in his face.
She moved with smooth grace, her white shorts snug on her
hips, her heavy hair swinging like thickly braided, honey-
colored silk over one shoulder. Durell’s eyes were almost
black, and he took her by the shoulders in a grip that hurt.
She was not teasing now, not about their grandfathers or the
long years of growing up, hearing of each other’s virtues until
they were bound to be sick of the other’s name.
She felt one of her rare moments of fear. He looked
dangerous and cruel and implacable, like a furnace whose
fire has only been banked, but you know the glowing, stormy
heat is there, needing only a breath of wind to make it flare
and blast everything within reach. She shivered suddenly.
The beach behind her, with the girls on the surfboards and
the beach burns catering to the tourists, the gay sail of the
catamaran against the loom of Makapuu Point, the distant
island music from the orchestra in the nearby Queen’s Lanai
restaurant—all of it seemed hollow and stupid and even
frightening, the Way this tall, angry man looked at her face
and body and made up his mind about her. His fingers were
hard and cruel, holding her shoulders.
“You’re hurting me,” she whispered.
“I know that."
“Why do you do it?“
“Because I want the truth. Pete Holcomb can’t be dead. He’s
assigned to one of our latest nuclear attack subs, just now
engaged in a nonstop cruise around the world. How could
you have found him on one of your isolated Celebes
beaches?“
“Well, I did, and he almost killed Simon, he was so out of his
head,” Willi snapped. “Now let me go, huh?"
She moved with deceptive skill, an amber slide of silken skin
that hid a quick coordination of nerve and muscle. Durell was
not often surprised; but Willi Panapura managed to do it. His
hands were thrust from her shoulders and one wrist caught
and turned to trip him toward his big double bed, her ankle
deftly thrust between his. He caught himself swiftly—much
too quickly for her to accept. Her quick, lopsided grin of
triumph told him she thought she had truly thrown him off
balance. But he let her own weight take her, as she leaped
after him with a gleeful, tigerish ferocity, and her long, lithe
body rolled over his shoulder as he caught her upper arm and
spun her golden figure up and over and slammed her down
across the bed. She landed with a thump hard enough to
make the Japanese silk screens jump on the walls. Her arms
and legs were splayed and a look of utter dismay was
stamped on her face. Durell caught the thick rope of her
honey hair and wound it around her throat and across her
open, startled mouth, effectively gagging and throttling her at
once.
She made desperate, angry noises. She heaved and writhed
under him, and he merely grinned down into her flushed
face. Then all at once a blush of color started on her cheeks
and moved down under her denim shirt. Something like fear
moved into her eyes. He spoke quietly, to reassure her.
“Don’t worry, Willi. Just behave. I’m just as sick of hearing
about your virtues as you must be about mine. But you
shouldn’t have tried to throw me. You could have been
killed.”
She made muffled sounds through her hair. He took the thick
braid from her mouth and she said; “Oh, you really are a son
of a bitch!” .
“Now, now . . .”
“You’re not a gentleman, and I was told—”
“Willi, I’m in a rough business, and you’re talking about a
man you say is dead. But he can‘t be dead, understand? And
even if he were alive, and you were wrong, it’s just as
impossible for him to be on some remote island beach off
Borneo. Now tell me the whole story quietly, and no more
fireworks, please. Or you’ll regret it.”
“Tarakuta isn’t that remote. And it’s independent of Borneo.”
She regarded him for a long, thoughtful moment. “You know,
I thought you really were going to kill me, for a minute.”
He rolled away and stood up, but he was still wary of another
surprise attack from this unpredictable and astonishing girl.
“I want the whole story about Holcomb, Willi. But listen
carefully, first: there are certain people in security who’d
crawl up the walls because of what I tell you. Pete Holcomb
sailed out of Pearl Harbor on orders from CINCPAC on the
Polaris submarine Andrew Jackson, one of the latest of our
nuclear boats, with sixteen armed missiles aboard her 4-25-
foot hull. She’s also got a smaller, newly designed atomic
engine that‘s twenty-two percent more efficient than the
others. She’s sailing nonstop around the world on a speed
run, understand? And Commander Holcomb was aboard.
Now, if the man you say called himself Pete Holcomb was
found on this island of yours—”
“It’s not my island. But it was in the Tarakuta Group."
“Well, if Holcomb is dead on this island—”
“Not if. We buried him,” she said angrily.
“Then where is the Jackson?”
“How should I know?”
“You haven't seen it?”
“Listen, Samuel, from the time I understood the English
language, I was told how smart a Cajun you are. But it seems
to me that anybody could recognize one of those boats if they
saw one. I haven’t seen anything remotely resembling a sub
in years. But thirty hours ago, this man with Holcomb’s
identity papers came raving down the beach like a crazy man,
and he died. And don’t worry, I‘ve got his papers, so don”:
look at me like that.”
“Where are they?”
“In my souvenir handbag, on your lanai.”
He went out on the porch and picked up her big Luahala bag
made of pandanus leaves with its plastic clasp and stood near
the Bombay chair to open it. The girl rubbed her arm
thoughtfully. In the bag was a U.S. passport in the name of
Wilhelmina Panapura, and an envelope with about three
hundred dollars American and a sheaf of Singhalese lakhs
totaling about three thousand, which came to another
hundred, and another bundle of Indonesian rupiahs. She
carried a pilot’s license for twin-engine aircraft, a ham radio
license, and a number of other identity cards. He turned the
Luahala bag over and dropped her keys and a wallet into his
hand. The wallet was made of crocodile skin, manufactured
in Florence, Italy, and he recognized it at once, remembering
it in Pete Holcomb’s hand when they toured the Bora Bora
and Kamaaina bars a few weeks ago near Waikiki. The wallet
was Holcomb’s, without doubt. Yet it couldn’t be, unless—
He looked at Willi and dropped the handbag to the bed
beside her, and his voice was very quiet.
“Now tell me everything about Holcomb. Don’t lie and don’t
embroider it. Just tell me when and where and how you
found him and why he’s dead.”
“Well.” She rubbed her arm again and told him about the
beach in the Tarakuta Islands. “Grandpa and I and Simon
were just scouting around, looking for specimens. You
know."
“No, I don’t know.”
“I got my master‘s in marine biology at Berkeley, in
California, and I did graduate work at Yale-—your alma
mater, Samuel. And I spent a year with the Oceanographic
Institute at Woods Hole, on Cape Cod. I’m an American
citizen, even if I am a resident of that certain People’s
Republic that’s grabbing everything from Ceylon to Sabah, in
Borneo, in the name of anti-colonialism, ha-ha. Right now,
the Tarakutas are in a kind of never-never land waiting for a
U.N. decision, and it’s like hanging by your thumbs while
Indonesian guerillas raid and chase off the Malaysians. The
island people just want to be left alone, but what with
agitators from Right and Left, from Peiping and Djakarta and
even the Philippines, plus old Dutch oil and tin interests and
American CIA pinheads kicking things up, we’re kind of
confuddled down there. By actual count, there are some three
hundred and eighty-eight islands in the Tarakuta Group, in
the shallows between the Celehes and Sulu Seas, and the
main town is Pandakan, but if you tried to pinpoint any
certain one of those blobs of jungle mud—”
“You’re off the track,” Durell said. “Get hack to Pete
Holcomb. Where did you find him?”
“Well, we had the schooner at this cove on Poelau Bangka —
poelau means ‘island’——just north of Poelau Lia.t—which
means ‘middle island,’ and about five miles south-southeast
of Tandjoeng Petak— ‘tandjoeng’ means ‘cape’. The mean
water depth there runs from five feet to forty, and then
shelves off to the south to over two thousand, and it’s pretty
tricky navigating, what with a thousand or so mangrove
clumps that come and go each year. Am I getting through to
you in enough detail?”
“You’re doing fine. Can you find this place again?”
“Sure. Anyway, Holcomb came down the beach like a raving
maniac and clobbered the best schooner man in the islands,
Simon, and thought he’d killed him; and although Simon has
a head like a coconut, Doc says it’s touch and go for him at
the Pandakan Hospital. That’s Dr. Malachy McLeod. He
wants to marry me. He’s a big idiot with a beard and he says
he loves me to distraction.”
“I know Malachy McLeod," Durell said.
She was wide of eye. “You do?”
“Go on.”
“There‘s not much more. We found Holcomb dying and
buried him and got away quick, because Simon was hurt so
badly. But before Holcomb died he gave us his name and
Gum, and aid he'd seen you here in Hawaii and we should get
you and tell you about it, and that it was very urgent.”
"Tell me about what?”
“He didn’t say. He died too soon.”
Durell contemplated the girl's long golden legs as she sat on
the edge of his bed and went to the telephone. “Stay where
you are for a moment, please.”
“I will. I saw that gun under your coat. It kind of hurt me
when you fell on me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re not sorry at all. For a minute, I was worried that
maybe all these years of listening to Grandpa Joseph praise
you and relay all the wonders your grandpappy claimed for
you, until I was sick to death of hearing your name, Samuel, I
—well, for a minute I thought maybe I’d been wrong. All that
time when I loathed you, without ever having met you. But I
wasn’t wrong. I don’t like you at all.”
“Good,” he said. “Keep it that way.”
He dialed a number in Honolulu. Downtown, there were
offices devoted ostensibly to publishing a trade journal
entitled Pearl of the Pacific, which was meant to lure
investments in the natural resources and markets of the
Island State. A few copies of the magazine were actually in
evidence in the anteroom, and there was even a wispy little
man with the title of editor. But behind these offices, beyond
double-locked doors, were others equipped with radio
transmitters, scrambler phones with direct wires to
Washington, and teletype machines connected across the
Pacific and the continental U.S. to K Section‘s Pacific Island
department at No. 20 Annapolis Street. Durell used the
private number at the magazine office and got a. man named
Jones and gave him Peter Holcomb’s name and asked to be
connected on scrambler to General McFee, in Washington.
It took surprisingly little time. He considered Willi
Panapura’s remark about CIA “pinhead capers” in Tarakuta
and Pandakan, and reflected that there was a certain
advantage in promoting a world image of a vastly inept,
bungling organization that was more to be berated than
applauded. It might disarm the enemy. Central Intelligence
had become a favorite whipping boy for anything that went
Wrong anywhere on the globe, and no official objections were
raised except for mild protests of innocence from RR. men
back home. Any kind of edge, Durell thought, might tip the
scale in the right direction. To be held in contempt by the
enemy was a definite advantage—except that his real enemies
had no illusions about K Section or the field men working in
it. Mistakes took a high price in his business. They usually
killed you.
If Dickinson McFee, chief of K Section, had not known Durell
as well as he did, he might not have reacted as quickly,
although the small gray man who commanded the
troubleshooting activities of Durell’s special branch was a
cold and calculating presence who never once, in the years
Durell had known him, made an error. His voice was crisp
and final.
“I’ll check Navy, Cajun. Can you hang on?”
“I’m calling from Luakulani Palms apartment. It’s got a nice
view and a switchboard in the lobby. I’m scrambled only
from the drop in Honolulu.”
“Can’t be helped. Give me ten minutes. Hang up.”
Durell’s apartment was one huge room with a bath and a
kitchenette off it on the north side, and a vast window wall
opening on the lanai. Beyond was a brief lawn with jacaranda
and hibiscus, pitching sharply down so you could see over the
top of a ten-foot wall to the beach and the surfers out there,
dark against the Makapuu headland. But the wall was ten feet
high and he had locked his door and there was only a gate in
the wall that was also locked; he could see all that from here.
He turned to regard the girl.
“How did you get into this place, Willi?”
“You’re just looking at it. I climbed the wall.”
“Just like that?”
“I’ve lived all my live on a tramp South Seas schooner,
Samuel. I’m not exactly a Dresden doll."
“No, you’re not, Willi. How did you know where to find me’!
Did Holcomb give you this address?"
“No. But it Wasn’t hard.”
“Hawaii isn't enormous, but it’s big enough to give you a little
trouble. But you don‘t seem to have had any.”
She shrugged and put the end of her thick, braided hair
between her teeth and looked up at him through dark lashes.
“I knew what you looked like,” she said. “Big, brutal,
handsome, and a quiet dresser. Only mistake I made was
saying you had a Cajun accent. You must have lost that at
Yale."
He remembered the agonizing language drills at K Section’s
Farm, in Maryland, to shake off his bayou identity.
“Anyway,” the girl added, “I checked into a hotel and got into
some comfortable clothes—”
"I’m glad you brought a dress along. I wondered if you flew
the Pacific in those shorts.”
She smiled. “I just don’t like clothes, Samuel."
“All right. And then?”
“I went to the Ale Ale Kai Room where the rich, lonely gals
look for cute beach boys, and I struck up some conversation
and some of them had noticed you. Then I called the U.S.
Navy and a cute lieutenant there kind of recognized Peter
Holcomb’s name, though he didn’t really mean to, and
checked some papers and said yes, he knew Pete’s friend, Mr.
Durell, the address was the Luakulani Palms, and here I am.”
Durell swore softly. “And did you tell this cute naval officer
that Holcomb was dead?”
“Oh, no. I figured they might put me in jail and hold me up
with a. bunch of dumb questions, and I can’t waste that much
time here. Grandpa Joseph can’t run the schooner without
Simon and me, but he’s apt to try to, anyway, so I’ve got to
get back just as soon as ever.”
“Why didn’t you go to the American consulate in Pandakan to
report all this? Why fly one-third of the way around the world
to me?”
“Because,” she said patiently, “Holcomb asked me to tell you,
and nobody else; and in the second place, Pandakan isn’t
much these days, with the plebiscite coming on and Mr.
Kiehle, the U.S. consul, in Singapore, anyway, and nobody
else there except the first secretary, a nice Chinese boy
named Tommy Lee; but I don’t trust him. Anyway, Malachy -
—Dr. McLeod—was named acting consul by Mr. Kiehle so I
went to Malachy and he said to fly here as fast as ever, so
here I am. But I must tell you that now I’ve done my duty, I’m
going right back.”
“Maybe,” Durell said.
Her eyes flashed dangerously. “Don't fool me, Samuel. The
brass would like to grill me here till kingdom come, but I
won’t stand for it. If you try it, I’ll clam up and you’ll Never
find that island where we buried Pete Holcomb, understand?
Either you let me go and come down, any way you please, or
else. Do I make it plain? I left the amphibian at the Palang-
Dragh strip—"
“What amphibian?"
“My own plane. And I took commercial jets the rest of the
way. And that’s how I go back. It‘s fastest, and I don’t think it
would be politically wise, anyway, to have a fancy jet
touching down at Pandakan these days. It’s pretty touchy
right now, Malachy says we can’t even put a dinghy in the
harbor flying the American flag, without all the ex-colonials
screaming bloody imperialism. So if you come back with me
at all, you do it quietly, Malachy says, without a big fuss.”
He nodded. “You may be right.”
“I tell you, Samuel, I’ve heard your praises sung all my life,
but I only tool: one thing seriously. when our grandpas both
agreed in their letters that you were one smart man. If those
two rascals respected you like that, I figured I’d better take
their opinion at face value. So I came here. It’s costing ‘me
time and money, so don’t make me regret it, and don’t try to
keep me here longer than this afternoon.”
The telephone rang. It was Washington, via the magazine
offices of Pearl of the Pacific. General McFee’s voice held a
strange note.
“Cajun, have you still got that girl who claims she buried
Lieutenant Commander Peter S. Holcomb?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I went to the top for you, and she may be telling the truth.
This comes straight from Joint Chiefs. There‘s a quiet but
desperate flap in BuOp at Navy that’s gone through Defense
right to the President. Your friend Holcomb was aboard the
new nuclear attack sub Andrew Jackson as security officer.
He ought to be aboard that boat right now somewhere down
there. If he isn’t, something is desperately wrong.” General
Dickinson McFee paused. “You might say it’s impossible, but
ONI thinks the missing nuclear sub might have been
pirated.”
 chapter
four
IN DURELL’s world, the impossible happened often enough
to seem commonplace. Although forty-eight hours had
passed since the Jackson last reported her position, there had
not been a press release yet. This was not a Thresher
incident, opened at once to world communications. There
was no chance that the Jackson had met such a fate.
Whatever had happened, it had happened deliberately—and
with malice aforethought.
Durell left Willi Panapura in the Luakulani Palms on Her
promise to wait for him and took a taxi past the Ala Moana
Park along the sea, with its tennis courts and Hawaiian
Village, into downtown Honolulu. The CIA offices behind the
Pearl of the Pacific magazine front were not far from the
Iolani Palace. A restaurant on the lower floor sold coral
jewelry and fried octopus. From the elevator, he was passed
through the double-locked rear doors into the interior rooms
where teletypes chattered and several harassed men Worked
on scrambler phones. Beyond, there was an office crowded
with grim Navy brass from Pearl Harbor. Durell entered,
expecting a storm, and got one.
The highest echelons of the Navy had held in utmost secrecy
that unaccountable silence from the Andrew Jackson since
its last report from the Sulu Sea, when it was cruising toward
the Tarakuta Group. Every radio effort since then had failed.
There was no reply to an urgent Code Red call. Seventh Fleet
jets had scoured the shallow seas looking for telltale distress
buoys, signals, sea dye or wreckage. Nothing had shown up.
Absolutely nothing. No dim shadows were sighted on the
ocean bottom, no signals, no survivors. The Andrew Jackson
had simply vanished. She was gone. Disappeared.
The Navy was further disturbed because no one was
supposed to know about it—yet. And Durell was aware of the
suspicion and hostility with which the CINCPAC officers
regarded him. A vice-admiral with the nose of a hawk and the
cold eyes of a long-dead fish spoke sharply.
“We must insist on knowing how you learned of the missing
sub, Mr. Durell. It seems impossible for you to have heard
about it in any casual manner.”
Durell thought of Willi in her shorts. “It was casual,
gentlemen, but I cannot tell you more about it.”
“One of these days,” the admiral said icily, “you gumshoe
boys will go too far with us and—”
“I’m sorry, sir. I’ve been directed to cooperate with you in
every way. In fact, I‘ve been ordered to find your missing
submarine as soon as possible."
The scrambled eggs on the admiral’s cap sizzled. “Find our
sub for us? Of all the impudence—!”
“It’s missing and you can’t locate her, right?”
“If you fellows don’t make your usual mess out of the affair,
we’ll find her, all right.” An aide touched the admiral’s elbow
and whispered urgently to him, his eyes suspiciously
watching Durell’s tall, quiet figure all the time. The admiral
started to protest, and then his angry color faded and s look
of resigned desperation took its place. He shook off the aide
and turned back to Durell.
“We understand the political balance in Borneo is extremely
delicate just now. And in the independent Sultanate of
Pandakan, capital of the Tarakutas and Borneo, it’s even
more critical. There is to be a plebiscite for the natives to
decide whether they’re to join Indonesia or Malaysia or form
an autonomous Republic of Tarakuta. All U.N. members are
warned not to interfere, and our Seventh Fleet units are
forbidden by Washington to enter the waters off Indonesian
Borneo, Sabah or Sarawak.”
“Yes, sir, that is correct,” Durell said.
For one of the rare moments in his life, the admiral was
helpless. “I protest, of course. If one of my ships is in trouble,
I demand the right, by all the laws of decency and common
sense, to find that missing ship." The admiral’s aide
whispered to him for a moment, his manner urgent. The
other officers looked with hostility at Durell, as if their
problem were his fault. The admiral grunted. “It will be a day
or two before we announce a routine ‘maneuver’ on the
fringes of that area, and even that will excite the world press.
But it can’t be helped. We cannot sit on our hands when the
727 is missing. And we will send our own people into the
Borneo area. So you can cable your boss in Washington that
your help is declined, with thanks.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t do that.”
“Eh? Why not?”
“I've already been given the job. I can go into the offshore
waters of Borneo without attracting quite as much attention
as a Seventh Fleet search flotilla. I understand I have three
days to find the 727. After that, a public statement must be
issued about her disappearance. But I must say that whether
you cooperate or not, gentlemen,” Durell said quietly, “I
mean to go ahead with my own assignment.”

Willi Panapura was not in his apartment when he went back

there. But he was not alarmed. He put through a long-
distance call to Bayou Peche Rouge, in Louisiana, and while
he waited for the mainland connection, he watched the beach
and the surfers and marveled at the energy of the half-naked
boys and girls battling the Pacific rollers in the sparkling sun.
Then, before his connection was made, Willi Panapura
returned and he forgot all about the scanty bikinis and the
tumbling torsos out there on the beach.
Willi was not wearing her short shorts now; she was dressed
for traveling, and her long. thick hair was coiled in a tight,
smart French swirl atop her proud and beautiful head. She
wore a white sharkskin traveling suit and French heels that
brought her eyes almost to a level with Durell’s.
Her golden Polynesian skin and blue, wide gaze was effective
and dramatic. He thought, with some dismay, that she was
the roost beautiful and most unpredictable girl he had ever
met.
His grandfather, Jonathan, lived on the hulk of the old
sidewheeler Three Belles, which Durell had called home as a
boy, and it took some time to bring the old gentleman to the
nearest telephone in town. The old man sounded grave and
happy to hear Durell’s voice, and he spoke with the epitome
of Southern courtesy, with only a slight quiver to betray his
affection.
“It is good to hear from you, Samuel.”
“I wouldn’t trouble you, Grandpa," Durell said, “but it’s
urgent. I’ve heard from your pal, Joseph Panapura—from his
granddaughter, rather.”
“I expect you have,” old Jonathan said gravely. “I received a
cable from Joseph this morning, saying he had sent his lovely
granddaughter to meet you. Isn‘t she all I said she was.”
“And more,” Durell said, eyeing Willi’s tall beauty with
appreciation. “What I want to know is whether you can give
me anything to identify Joseph Panapura without question or
doubt.”
“I can, Samuel. I assume you are going to Pandakan. Will you
give Joseph my warmest personal regards?” The old
gentleman proceeded to describe an old knife scar engraved
on Joseph Panapura’s hide during a riot aboard the Three
Belles after an unusual poker game in ’07. The scar was
unusual enough so it could not be duplicated. Durell would
have no doubt of old Joseph’s identity if he found it.
Jonathan went on: “Take care of yourself, Samuel. I trust you
and Wilhelmina get on well.”
“I’ll let you know, Grandpa,” he said.

They flew from Honolulu to Manila, via Pan Am jet, and from
Manila they took a wildcat airline that ran DC-3’s south over
the myriad green islands of the archipelago, above Panay and
Iloilo, island hopping with cargos that varied from people to
chickens, from plastic pipe to fishhooks. Their goal was a
small airstrip on the southernmost tip of Mindanao of the
Moro Gulf at Palang-Dragh. It was a long, hot, tiring flight,
but Willi Panapura had the knack of sleeping like a lithe,
sleek cat, and for many tedious hours she simply ignored
Durell and allowed the time to pass with a kind of South Seas
fatalism. She was beautiful, he thought, awake or asleep,
hostile or friendly. She seemed undecided between the two
attitudes. Long irritation from childhood tales about Durell
had given her thought-habits about him that were difficult to
break. For his part, he thought wryly, he should have listened
to old Jonathan long ago, instead of avoiding this long-
legged, incredible flower of the Southern Pacific. He hadn’t
believed that Wilhelmina Panapura could be all that the old
gentleman claimed for her; but she was. And more.
During the flight, she said: “My mother was Flemish, you
know, from Antwerp, and she married old Joseph’s son
during the heyday of Dutch colonial power down here. I
guess that’s where my blonde hair came from. Anyway, I was
named Wilhelmina, but I’m just Willi to everybody in the
Tarakuta Islands.”
“That must cover a lot of territory,” he said.
She was defensive. “That sounds like a nasty remark.”
“Not at all. You cover a lot of islands in your grandfather’s
trading schooner, don’t you?”
“Yes, I go along to collect my specimens, and I’ve got a good
business going there, with clients over the world, including
some big Swiss research laboratories. Malachy McLeod put
me onto them through his medical connections. She regarded
him with grave blue eyes. “You said you know Malachy, but
it’s funny, he never mentioned you.”
“No reason why he should. We never met in person. We just
communicated, on occasion, one way or another.”
“How?” she asked suspiciously. “And why?”
“He’s done a few errands for us, now and then.”
She was indignant. “But Malachy never told me he did
espionage work for you people.”
“Do you think he should have?” Durell asked drily.
“Well, for a man who claims to be dying of love for me, how
could he keep such a secret from me?”
Durell felt the oddest twinge of jealousy. “It wasn’t that
important. Are you going to marry Malachy McLeod?”
She settled back sulkily. “I don’t know. I thought so.”
“Have you changed your mind?”
"Yes? Just lately.” Then she looked him in the eye and said:
“For the past hour, Samuel, I’ve been thinking of marrying
you.”

The DC-3 from Manila had a bumpy flight, dodging towering

cumulus that hovered over the green, jungly islands of the
southern Philippines. During the trip of over sic! hundred
miles, they took on half a dozen passengers who included
planters and businessmen and two elderly Chinese
gentlemen who did not exchange one word with each other,
although they sat together in the uncomfortable bucket seats
of the rickety plane. Willi seemed absorbed in her own
thoughts when the pilot suddenly put the ship into a steep
dive, swooped under a thunderhead shot through with the
livid colors of a rainbow, and seemed to pluck a landing field
out of nowhere from among the patterns of plantation and
teak forest and pale green seacoast below. The wheels
touched down as lightly as a pair of feathers.
“One more leg to this trip,” Willi said, as they disembarked.
“We‘ll be more comfortable in my own plane, right there.
Another three hours, and we’re home safe.”
The commercial flights to Pandakan, since guerilla war in
Borneo between Indonesia and Malaysia had erupted, were
erratic and dangerous these days. At best, Garuda and Qantas
Airways made only two scheduled stops in the Tarakuta
Islands, and even these had been discontinued by the
uncertain status of the sultanate being sought for
nationalization by the two quarreling republics.
"The Tarakutans want nothing much to do with either side,”
Willi said bitterly. “The people of Pandakan are a mixed lot—
Dyaks and Dusuns, Malays, of course, some Hindus and
quite a few Chinese. The Oceanic Chinese aren’t sure which
Way to go—to Peiping’s new imperialism, or to be
noncommittal. They just look vague and obscure if you ask
them a political question. But these days the tables are
turned, Samuel, and the former colonial powers raise hell
trying to thrust other people under their thumbs now.
It would be a lot better for Pandakan if the world just let us
be.”
“That’s not likely to happen."
“I know, and it burns me, the brazen greed with which the
former colonial powers claim the Tarakutans. I hate to think
what Will happen if the wrong parties get control next week.”
The heat was stunning, stupefying, as they walked across the
strip to a rickety dock Where her twin-engined amphibian
plane was tied. The nipa huts of the village at the edge of the
airstrip made a familiar pattern: there was the tin roof of a
Chinese trader‘s hut, a whitewashed school where children
played, and dogs panting in the dusty shade of the single
street. Offshore, the striped, triangular sails of Moro fishing
boats shimmered against the hot leaden color of the Sulu Sea.
The horizon was lost in the haze of unbelievable eat.
The airport Filipinos greeted Willi by name and with cheerful
grins. The plane was fueled, and from the way the local
mechanics scurried about to help, Durell realized that Willi
commanded special service wherever she went in this corner
of the world-—which might be useful, he thought, in the next
two days.
The amphibian’s cabin was oddly equipped. There were two
comfortable seats with twin controls in the nose, but the rest
of the ship was stripped of its plush interior to accommodate
an assortment of fish tanks, animal cages, and miscellaneous
cages stuffed with cotton to hold, presumably, rare shell
specimens.
Durell gave her a small smile. “Ever since I was a boy, I’ve
heard what a bright girl you are, Willi.”
“Which galled you, huh?”
“Beauty and brains is a rare combination. Do you think
anything as big as a nuclear sub could get lost in the
Tarakutas?"
“You could lose anything, in or off Borneo.” She frowned. “I
see what bothers you, though, I flew over Poelau Bangka, the
island where we found Pete Holcomb, so low that I knocked
some coconuts off the trees. I saw no sign of a sub. But you
must realize what these islands are like. They float in a sea of
milky channels, and the water is pretty shallow all around,
with only a few navigable channels between coral reefs and
mangrove swamp. Believe me, you need everything:
fathometers, radar, radio-beacon equipment, to keep a boat
from going aground. It can get pretty Weird, even to me, and
I’ve spent my life in Borneo. Of course, old Joseph knows
every little channel like the back of his hand, and nobody
alive, not even poor Simon, can navigate the passages as he
does. But just how a boat like the Jackson could disappear—
well, I just don’t know. Most of the sea is so shallow that
when you fly over it, it's hard to distinguish land from water.
If your sub was heading toward Pandakan through the
Bandjang Passage, though, she shouldn’t have had any
trouble at all. But the Bandjang freighter routes are forty
miles from Bangka, where I found Holcomb."
Durell frowned “It doesn't make sense. The Polaris boats are
equipped with the most advanced navigational and internal
guidance systems possible. It couldn't go off-course by
accident"
“Pete Holcomb didn’t die of torture by accident, either," “mi
said. “Some pretty crude things were done to him, and that's
why he was half out of his mind when poor Simon met him
on the beach. Simon had to use his machete to keep him off,
and thought he was the cause of Holcomb’s death. But when
Malachy examined the body, he said the only case like it was
when he did a post-mortem on a Chinese gambler, last year,
in Fishtown.”
“Fishtown?”
“It's really named Dendang, a part of Pandakan. The place
was originally settled by Dyaks from the Borneo mainland,
not far off, but now it’s practically autonomous, run by Prince
Ch’ing—the richest and most loathsome man in the islands.
The prince claims descent from a claimant to the throne of
the dowager empress Tzu H’si, of China, but whose great-
grandfather was born ‘on the wrong side of the blanket,’ as
our Victorian ancestors used to say. In any case, besides
holding a monopoly on the local tin sluice mines, he’s the
head of the neighborhood Mafia, or whatever the Chinese
opium-cum-gambling rings call themselves.”
Durell settled back thoughtfully. “I’m afraid our own
grandfathers were right. You’re both beautiful and bright,
Willi.”
“You don‘t like it?”
“I’ll reserve judgment."
With that, Willi gunned the plane away from the dock and
across the shallow waters of the bay as if they were jet-
assisted. He decided not to irritate her again until they were
safely on the ground once more.
The flight to Pandakan took up most of the remaining
daylight hours. There Were sandwiches, with coffee and
bourbon, in a tiny refrigerator located in the tail of the plane,
and Durell served them while Willi flew over the seemingly
endless expanse of Water and island of the Sulu Archipelago.
He noticed that she had the latest World Aeronautical Charts
put out by the U.S. Air Force. and now and then, over an
obscure light or radio beacon, she waggled her wings briefly.
Now and then an oil tanker or ore carrier was visible on the
glittering ocean surface. But he was surprised by the number
of islands that lifted and fell over the horizon. They put down
to refuel before dusk at Balabuco, taking off without delay.
Now and then the girl spoke briefly into her throat mike and
listened to radio direction signals, and then, slanting in a
more southerly direction to parallel the looming purple
mountains of what had once been Dutch Borneo, she set the
automatic pilot and dozed, ignoring Durell and leaving him
to his thoughts.
He tried to imagine what could have happened to a nuclear
submarine in these waters. He thought of a number of
disastrous things, but all of them were noisy and certain to
have been noticed by somebody, somewhere. He gave it up
and decided to wait until he could ask a few questions at
Pandakan.

chapter
five
PANDAKAN was hot, dirty and decaying. Its streets were
pitted with holes and the canals clotted with refuse. Under
the old colonial administration, the waterfront had been kept
reasonably clean and efficient, with white government
buildings and warehouses bulging with tin ore, rubber and
copra. The boulevards radiating toward the low hills
surrounding the harbor had been well maintained, adorned
with royal palms and decorated with a central mall of green
lawns and flower beds. The main streets of the European
section had boasted fine old Victorian structures, all painted
white, with government missions and business offices of
trading companies in neat, well-tended rows.
The buildings and boulevards were still there, with the palm
trees and flower beds, but everything had wilted slightly
around the edges since the colonial administration had been
given forty-eight hours recently to pack up and get out; There
were chuckholes in the street that nobody bothered to fill,
some cornices of masonry had fallen from some of the
Victorian facades and allowed to remain there, the grass in
the central malls had gone to jungle weeds, and where white-
gloved Malay policemen had stood on their little wooden
platforms under umbrellas to direct the tonga, bicycle and
auto traffic, there were now battle-helmeted, uniformed
soldiers with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders,
patrolling the crowded sidewalks in pairs and cautiously
considering the sidewalk cafes that seemed to have lost
considerable clientele since the most recent wave of Red and
Indonesian terrorist bombing.
But no city and harbor could have had a lovelier setting,
Durell thought. A narrow river bisected the town, flowing
from the green jungly uplands of the island. There was a
green promontory capped by a hotel and several gleaming
consulates to the north. On the other arm enfolding the
harbor was a native quarter built out over the placid waters, a
vast, tangled jumble of reed and thatch-roofed huts, nipa
shacks, Dyak houses and shanties built on piers in a
labyrinthine maze of waterways crowded with native canoes
and fishing praus and of plank walks that swayed and twisted
precariously over the harbor water, without plan or rhyme or
reason.
“Dendang, otherwise known as Fishtown,” Willi said briefly
as she circled toward the airport landing strip and let down
the amphibian’s wheels. There was a high radio tower to be
avoided, several more beacon towers whose lights blinked in
the last rays of daylight-apparently the local technicians left
them on all day—and then a bumpy landing on the plane’s fat
rubber tires, not because of any clumsiness on Willi’s part,
but because there were mortar potholes from recent fighting
in the center of the main runway. “Most of the local Chinese,”
Willi went on casually, “live out over the water. The Malays
live in town, and the European whites, who get fewer every
day, live on the South Point. In between are the indigenous
natives who never seem to have a say in what's going to
happen to them, one way or another.”
She paused and taxied the amphibian in front of the tin
hangar sheds and leaned across him to open his door. “If you
don’t mind, I’ll drop you off here and fly on down to see
Grandpa Joseph. I’m worried about him. A man in his
nineties—well, you never know. I’ll be back in Pandakan
before morning, if you trust me. And I used the radio to
reserve a room for you at the Hotel des Indes. It’s still got
running water, but I suggest you stick to tonic or Evian
water-—which you can still get here, oddly enough, all the
way from Paris.”
“Thanks,” he said drily. “And what did you tell the local radio
people I Was? A spy?"
“I said you were an oil salesman from New Orleans."
“Fair enough.”
“So you do trust me?”
"Have I a choice?" he smiled.
She grinned in return. “Not much, really. All I need to do is
say one word, and the local commandos would pop you into
the old Dutch dungeons, across town.”
“Don’t say it then. I’m on your side.”
“Good luck,” she called.
Before he reached the knot of customs men outside the
terminal, she had gunned her plane, which was obviously
familiar enough to the local people to cause no interest, and
had taken off into the clear evening sky again.
A car waited for him from the consulate, and he was given
diplomatic clearance for his single piece of luggage. The local
officials, small brown-skinned men backed up by inevitable
khaki-uniformed soldiers with sub-machine guns, seemed
disappointed when he was waved through. The man from the
consulate was Chinese.
“Mr. Durell? Please, come this way.”
The heat here was worse, if possible, than at the landing strip
at Balabuco, since they were only a few degrees above the
equator. It was the humidity, Durell told himself, and he
wished he could stop at the airport bar for a cool drink. But
this obviously was not on the agenda. The air-conditioning in
the terminal had broken down, and the modem glass
windows made to be kept sealed had been forced open to
admit the dust and heat of the landing field, and nobody
seemed surprised.
The Chinese from the consulate was tall, broad of face, a
smiling young man in an impeccable gray suit with an Ivy
League necktie, thick black hair that glistened with vitality,
and an easy, bouncy, athletic stride. His handshake was quick
and strong. His teeth gleamed.
“This way, Mr. Durell. I have a car waiting to take you to the
consulate.”
“Thank you. Is Mr. Kiehle, the consul, back from Singapore?"
“He is not expected until next week—until after the plebiscite,
that is—if there is a plebiscite.” Mr. Lee showed his white
teeth. “One never knows from day to day the future course of
these islands.”
“Then is the vice-consul, Dr. McLeod, in Pandakan?”
“No, sir, he has gone to Tarakuta Island. He will be back
tomorrow or the next day. It is uncertain.”
“Then who is minding the store?" Durell asked,
Young Mr. Lee’s intelligent sloe eyes blinked. "It seems that I
am, as first secretary in the consulate."
“I see. Well, I’ll accept a lift to the Hotel des Indes, since I've
got a room reserved there. I’m not staying at the consulate
here."
“But I understood, sir—the guest room is prepared—”
“Do oil salesmen get such preferential treatment?” Durell
asked. “We’ll make it the Hotel des Indes."
Mr. Tommy Lee bit his lip and seemed frustrated, but his
expression passed as quickly as the shadow of a vulture over
the baking airport. “As you wish, Mr. Durell. It may be a bit
dangerous, since two bombs have already gone off in
Salangapur Square. That’s in the center of town. Several
women were killed by the terrorists at a sidewalk cafe, and
there have been rumors of guerilla invasions at any moment.”
“From where, Mr. Lee?"
The young man shrugged. “One never knows. Indonesia and
the Malaysians would both prefer the plebiscite to be
forgotten. And this may well happen. A U.N. commission
member was wounded yesterday by a grenade thrown into
the Europa Hotel bar, and some Indian shops, including the
Mekassar Silver Shop, were bombed out. Hence I suggest you
stay at the consulate, with us.”
“Thanks,” Durell said, “but the Hotel des Indes sounds just
right for me.”

Although the airport had no obvious traffic, it was crowded

and busy. The GIA Airways—Garuda Indonesia Line—had
offices cheek by jowl with the Lembaga Kebudajaan
Indonesia—the Indonesian Cultural Institute, an open center
for propaganda from Djakarta. Across the field, the Qantas
Empire Airline hangar was empty and deserted. There was a
row of shops along the road immediately beyond the hangars,
predominantly Chinese, such as Lee Cheong’s, for jade; Mui
Fong’s restaurant; and next to them, an Indian store selling
batik, a shop specializing in wood-carvings with a Dutch
name above the door, Vos & VanKamp, but with a smiling
Indonesian in charge. The air was filled with the chatter of a
dozen animated tongues, dominated by Bahasa, a refined
Malay, but Durell also identified Dutch, Sudanese, Madurese
and even some English. Despite the heat, the crowds along
the road were animated, in brightly colored clothing, and
apparently untroubled by the political tensions that loomed
like thunderheads over the jewel-like island.
Pandakan was not the largest of the Tarakuta Group, but was
certainly the loveliest, not more than ten miles long and five
in breadth. The slopes of the interior highland were devoted
to neat rice fields, chinchona and tea plantations, and
teakwood forests. Young Mr. Lee was polite and instructive
on the swift drive through the city from the airport. He
handled the car himself, with Durell beside him in the front
seat, and he did not linger at traffic signals that seemed to
work with a peculiarly sporadic timing, since terrorists
enjoyed hurling grenades at cars halted at intersections; and
he managed to avoid the potholes in what had once been a
broad, smooth boulevard.
Pandakan’s architecture reflected the island’s history for
three centuries. There was a ruined and picturesque fortress
on the harbor front built by the Portuguese in the
seventeenth century; there were Dutch and British
administrative buildings from the Victorian era, mingled
with native Malay, Moslem mosques and Catholic churches
and Buddhist temples, and a great sprawling mass of a palace
owned by the former Sultan of Pandakan, when the East
India Company dominated the islands. Along the seawall
flanking the harbor were dozens of sidewalk cafes under
brightly colored, slightly dilapidated awnings that sheltered
wire chairs and metal tables. Traffic was mainly bicycles that
flowed in tidal waves around corners and down the main
arteries of the city. Here and there were trishaws, a three-
wheeled bicycle taxi, and an occasional dokar, or carriage.
There were double-decker buses that reminded Durell of
London and New York’s old Fifth Avenue line, but painted a
brilliant orange and green, the newly proposed national
colors. Chinese tea shops, Moslem coffee houses and
European cafes shared the waterfront boulevard. Here and
there a building showed the black scars of a bombing. But the
life of the city surged and flowed brightly in the streets, and
despite the number of posters, banners and signs exhorting
the populace to vote for one new expansionist Asian power in
Borneo or another, there seemed no overt hysteria.
But hysteria was here, Durell thought, manifested in the
hatreds expressed by bomb scars and bullet-pitted walls.
Some of the Hindu shops were shuttered with steel, and the
local policemen at the intersections, standing on high
wooden pedestals under bright umbrellas, wore white
gauntlets and stubby, Russian-made automatic rifles slung
over their shoulders. There Was the usual contradiction of
tin-shack and mat-walled slum houses next to impressive
public buildings, of natives cooking noodles, shrimp or curry
on the sidewalks, of canals where people bathed and did
laundry and brushed their teeth in water used as a lavatory.
Tommy Lee pointed out the sprawl of the Sultan’s former
palace, a building with clean, fat white columns supporting
carved eaves overhanging wide verandahs and interior
courts. The palace was now used as a government house,
where Colonel Mayubashur, head of the militia, was the
highest resident official, ruling by military fiat until the U.N.
commission, its presence indicated by a limp blue and white
flag at the palace masthead, decided to which new
imperialism the island population should belong.
Tommy Lee slowed the car to allow yellow-robed Buddhist
priests with shaven heads cross the boulevard. “The situation
is most explosive, both literally and politically,” Tommy Lee
said glibly. “The Europeans still here are detached, and
although colonialism was never an issue here, it is used to
trigger a few atrocities, Mr. Durell, in the name of merdeka—
freedom. Most of the Western consulates are run these days
by a skeleton force only, and European and American branch
business offices are all practically deserted, since most of
their personnel have left for ‘extended vacations’ until the
dust settles.”
“You’re well-informed, Tommy.”
“It is my business to be, sir. And I still think it would be
wisest if you stayed at the consulate."
“No, I’ve chosen my bed, and I’ll sleep in it.”
“Peacefully, I trust,” the Chinese murmured.
Durell found only one wrong note on the drive, and that dealt
with a remark about Dendang, or Fishtown. They were halted
for a troop-carrier convoy, burdened with solemn brown men
under big helmets. Dusk was imminent. At the same
moment, grenades exploded with a muffled crumping noise a
few blocks away, but the site was invisible under the old
banyan trees that lined the road. The people at the sidewalk
stalls, selling or buying egg noodles, bananas, batik,
hammered brass from India and carved sawo wood images
from Bali, seemed undisturbed either by the troops or the
explosions. Traffic waited patiently for the convoy to pass. A
crowd of Malays gathered around a cockfight in a dusty alley
nearby never paused in their heated gambling.
Against the loom of the ancient Portuguese fortress on the
waterfront, Durell glimpsed a maze of waterfront alleys, mat
huts, sampans, Dyak long houses, Chinese tearooms and
Moslem prayer houses all built in a rickety nightmare of
alleys and canals over the fetid harbor water. He asked Lee if
that was Fishtown, run by Prince Ch’ing, and Tommy Lee's
smile was quick and nervous.
“Oh, you have heard of our local ogre? Ch’ing is the favorite
whipping boy for every bad thing that happens in this part of
Borneo.”
The big, pleasant young Chinese seemed defensive and
embarrassed, and Durell thought it odd. He filed the item
away for future reference as the car swung ahead and they
sped up a wide boulevard lined with pleasant, stuccoed villas
smothered with oleanders, frangipani, palms and bamboo
hedges. Some of these houses were privately guarded by
armed men. There was a padang, or square, on this headland
forming the north shore of Pandakan Bay, lined with some
public buildings—the Indian-style Hotel des Indes, with its
ornate fretwork and towers, opposite a mosque and a
sidewalk café and a modern sugar cube of a hospital—all
fronting on the green padang that was equipped with a
Victorian, gingerbread bandstand under a gilded Moorish
cupola.
“Drop me off at the hotel, quietly,” Durell said. “Is that the
Pandakan Hospital, by the way?”
“Yes, sir. I understand you may wish to visit the Papuan
schoonerman named Simon." Tommy’s smile flashed big,
white teeth. "Dr. Malachy McLeod mentioned it before he left
for Tarakuta.”
“I see. How is Simon doing?”
“He is on the critical list, sir. If I can assist you—”
“Don’t worry, Tommy, I’ll be calling on you.”
There was no sign of tension in this Western oasis perched on
the breezy hill overlooking the bay. The cafes were crowded
and the height of land yielded a relatively cool breeze that
rang melodiously with the scores of bicycle bells and betjas
sweeping around the padang. A Malay boy took Durell’s grip
and vanished with it into the high, cool fret-work of the
enormous lobby of the Hotel des Indes. Durell felt hot and
gritty from the long trip, as if he had been traveling forever;
and it had not been a restful flight shared with Willi
Panapura. He longed for a cool tub, a tall bourbon, and a.
good meal, if one was available.
He sent Tommy Lee on with instructions to notify Dr.
McLeod he had arrived, if contact with Tarakuta was
possible, and then followed the boy from the desk to his room
on the third floor. There were wooden shutter doors for
ventilation on all the rooms to catch and circulate the vagrant
breeze from over the harbor. Willi had reserved a corner
room for him that yielded a magnificent view of sea and
shore, of the myriad islands like greenish curd in a milky
ocean all the way to the horizon. The harbor docks and quays
looked abnormally empty of shipping. Smoke lifted like a
thick black serpent from a distant quarter of the town, and he
saw with some surprise how narrow a crescent of civilization
existed here. The island’s jungle pressed hard like another
dark green ocean against the glimmering river and canals,
the tea and chinchona plantations on the mountain range
that formed the spine of the island like the armor of some
prehistoric reptile. But directly below his balcony was the
calm and order of this European quarter, with its hospital,
churches, cafes, shops and green land and bandstand.
“Will there be anything more, sir?” the Malay boy asked.
“A bourbon and soda, with ice, if you have any.”
The boy grinned. “Yes, sir. It is already ordered.”
“And who ordered it?”
“I cannot say, sir. It was on the chit for this reservation, Mr.
Durell.”
His room was huge and airy, with high ceilings and stuffy
plush furniture that might hide anything in the way of insect
life or security microphones. The bed was enormous and
canopied with blue mosquito netting. The bathroom could
have doubled for the pool at the Taj Mahal, with gold-washed
faucets, a huge marble basin, and a tub that stood on legs
shaped out of cast-iron winged griffins. The sounds of traffic
drifted pleasantly through the windows as Durell tossed his
bag on the bed and gave the room a routine fanning. He did
not know how much of his visit might interest the caretaker
police regime here in Pandakan, but a certain amount of
efficiency was obvious at once. In two minutes he uncovered
a mike in a tall lamp made out of a many-limbed Hindu
goddess with an inappropriate number of breasts on her
abdomen, and another behind a batik hanging on the wall.
Next to the tapestry-like cloth was a photograph of the last
Sultan, a fat, smiling man whose face did not resemble the
way he had looked when an assassin’s bullet had smashed the
back of his skull a month ago. The microphone bugs were
attached by tape to a hole in the plaster wall. He did not
disturb them, but his reflection in the large mirror on the
opposite wall turned dark and saturnine.
A pair of double-leafed, carved doors of jackwood apparently
opened into the next room to form a suite, if desired. They
were locked, but did not stay locked. He turned the bronze
handle downward and had them in his hands when he felt a
movement in them and they clicked open.
He found himself face to face with a plump, tall, brown-
skinned stranger with pale amber eyes and a smiling mouth
and a totally unpleasant Webley pointed at the pit of his
stomach.
He remembered thinking with dismay that to be surprised
this way usually happened only once to someone in his
business. His reaction was swift and savage. His right hand
knocked at the other’s gun while his left stabbed with stiff
fingers at the brown throat above the braided uniform collar.
Before he saw the military tabs indicating a full colonel, it
was too late to check his attack, but he prevented it from
being lethal.
Fortunately, the gun did not go off. It went spinning across
the polished floor to the bed, while the other man drove his
left fist into Durell’s stomach. By then Durell’s karate attack
found its mark and the man stumbled back, clutching and
strangling, all interest lost in anything except getting the next
breath of air into his lungs.
Durell picked up the Webley and emptied it, noticed the
safety was on, and felt a bit worried. On the other hand, he
owed no apology for reacting to the colonel’s sudden
appearance. He helped the plump brown man to his feet. The
adjoining room was empty except for a very efficient
Japanese tape recorder that was turning slowly with a two-
hour reel on it, connected by wires to the microphone bugs in
Durell’s room.
He snapped off the tape recorder before he spoke, and the
colonel’s yellowish eyes followed him and he gave a short,
choppy nod of his cropped bullet head and spoke
uncomfortably. “Perfectly correct. I apologize, Mr. Durell.”
“You surprised rne, and you have my apologies, too, Colonel
Mayubashur."
“You know me? I am head of the local police.”
“Ruler pro tern of these islands, too, I understand.” Durell
smiled. “Do you personally bug every visitor’s room, sir?"
“You are not an ordinary visitor, Mr. Durell. We are not
stupid or ignorant, sir. Surely you must realize from your
briefing that the political climate here is most explosive, and
any outside interference is most unwelcome.”
“I am not here to interfere.”
“No?” The amber eyes were like a jungle cat’s. “Then perhaps
you will explain why a man in the K Section of the United
States Central Intelligence Agency honors our disturbed little
islands with his presence. You have a saying, do you not,
about fishing in troubled waters?”
Durell started to reply and then someone knocked and he
went to open the door. It was the Malay bellhop With a tray
of bourbon and soda and a bucket of ice. The bellboy
pretended Colonel Mayubashur did not exist; he grinned and
bowed to Durell, and departed, round-eyed. Durell poured
the bourbon, which was a good Kentucky vintage, and offered
a drink to Mayubashur.
“Thank you, no, Mr. Durell. No alcohol for me.”
“You are a Moslem?”
"Forty percent of Pandakan’s people are Moslem, twelve
percent are Hindu, thirty me Buddhist, six percent Christian.
and the rest devote their prayers to the twin gods of
materialism: Marx and Lenin.”
“Nicely put.”
“But an extremely ticklish balance, however nice.”
Colonel Mayubashur had recovered quickly. He put a
cigarette in an ornately carved ivory holder and lit it with a
gold Zippo and regarded Durell with cool, amused eyes.
Durell liked the irony he saw, and felt a rapport he could
understand and appreciate. Mayubashur spoke in quiet,
perfect English.
“Will you explain your presence here, Mr. Durell? You are not
a tourist, come to admire the exquisite Javanese silver filigree
work of our Snake Temple. I should not like to arrest you."
“I would not advise it,” Durell said. “I can assure you I’m not
a political agitator and have no interest in the outcome of
your plebiscite next week."
The colonel’s almond eyes were not amused. “Then why have
search planes from the famous U.S. Seventh Fleet been seen
flying at extraordinarily low levels recently, over the Borneo
coast and our little islands?”
“I can’t say.”
Mayubashur sighed and sat down, crossing elegantly booted
legs. The boots were English. “I do not object to cooperation
with America. Since the Sultan’s assassination, I am thrust
into a position of power I do not enjoy. The days ahead are
dangerous, filled with stubborn nationalism, a threat of
internal revolt, and a shaky political leadership based on a
bumbling and mismanaged bureaucracy left to us by the
departed Sultan of Pandakan. If your visit is innocent, Mr.
Durell, I trust you will enlist my services. I could be useful to
you, if you wish.”
“You might, at that.”
“Let us see. You arrive with Miss Panapura, in her private
plane. She is a remarkable young lady of extraordinary
talents. She has flown off to see her beloved grandfather, who
is ailing since his schoonerman, Simon, was put on the
critical list over there.” The colonel nodded across the
padang to the hospital flanked by crowded sidewalk cafes.
The late sunlight struck slantwise into the square, and traffic
had slowed a bit, though there was still a steady stream of
trishaws and bicycles and buses, with here and there a
European car nosing around the green. “I am waiting,”
Mayubashur added, “for Simon to recover his senses to tell
me what happened to him—just as you seem to be.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But it is true, yes? Mr. Durell, if it is a question of smuggling
arms to guerillas who refuse to recognize the United Nations
plebiscite, or to others who claim one national loyalty against
another, I must warn you—”
“I’m not smuggling arms,“ Durell said shortly.
“If you cannot speak truly as to your mission here, then it is
regrettable, and I must—”
Colonel Mayubashur never finished his words. Durell, from
his hotel window, saw it all happen before any sound reached
them. A battered, closed sedan, painted a bright blue with a
yellow hood, screeched out of Government Road into the
square on smoking tires, at a speed that made the bicycles
and pedicabs scatter like a flock of frightened chickens. There
was no time to react before the careening car mounted the
broad sidewalk where the tables and chairs of the outdoor
cafes were filled with people sheltering under awnings from
the evening sun. The uniformed cop on his wooden platform
had a hand lifted to loosen his tommy gun when the first
grenade exploded.
The flat cramp! lay a pail of black smoke on those enjoying
their ices and drinks. The striped awning billowed up like a
balloon and then collapsed in wavering rags. A man flew
backward into the gutter like a limp doll. A woman ran three
steps on legs from which her right foot was missing. There
were screams and shrieks and then, in rapid succession,
three more grenades exploded as the gaily painted car roared
by.
It was simple mass murder.
Where a moment before the sidewalk had been blight and
colorful and animated, filled with chattering, innocent
people, there was now a bloody, tortured confusion, with
flames crackling from a shop front and the shrieks and
screams of the wounded and the incredible heaps of rags that
represented the dead.
It all happened in less than five seconds.
Durell heard Colonel Mayubashur race for the door. By the
time he turned back, the car had Whirled around the square
and was heading back the way it came. There was no chance
to see the occupants or even guess how many of them there
were. But because of Durell’s vantage point on his balcony, he
noted a peculiar thing. He could see the side entrance to the
Pandakan Hospital, Where the emergency doors stood open.
An ambulance was already starting out when the blue and
yellow sedan shot up the alley from the back way, having
doubled back upon itself to a spot directly opposite the
bombed cafes.
And all at once Durell knew what was happening.
He loosened the gun in his underarm holster as he ran from
the room.

chapter six
THE odds were against his making it on time. People ran in
panic down the hotel corridor beyond his door, and the
colonel had vanished. Durell skipped the elevators, since
their open cages were too slow and too vulnerable, and hit
the marble stairs three and four at a time. The lobby was a
turmoil of frightened people, all shouting at once. Two
stretchers with European victims of the bombing were being
carried through one set of hotel doors as Durell slammed out
through the other. He had to buck the tide of people running
for shelter against an expected second bombing.
Traffic bad vanished as if by magic, along with the colorful
crowds in the shops and stalls, except for those lying at the
scene of the blasts. The squatter merchants with their batik
cloth and bananas and carved teak, shells and combs, had
been erased as if by a sweep of a giant‘s hand. Only the scent
of braised beef, a dish known as satay cooked on bamboo
skewers over charcoal braziers, remained in the air—and the
scent of cordite and of something much worse, from the
wrecked cafe.
Steel shutters clanged shut vibrantly as the shopkeepers
decided on discretion. Durell swung right, ran across the
wide, hot pavement, and heard the whistle of a military
policeman shrilling after him. He paid no attention. Since he
did not head for the scene of the bombing, no one pursued
The main entrance to the hospital was crowded with those
who were superficially wounded and others searching for
friends and relatives. A steady hubbub, with an occasional
shout of anger or despair, filled the hot evening air. Durell
ran across the central mall and swung around the ornately
carved bandstand to the emergency drive in the back of the
hospital. He was halted by a slim Malay nurse who tried to
bar his way. "Sorry, sir, but only patients are admitted
through here—”
“I’m looking for a patient here, a Simon Smith—’”
“Please join the others, sir, in the lobby, and do not disrupt
our‘ routine. We have much to do.”
“This isn’t a new patient,” he said quickly. “He’s a sailor,
brought in about four days ago, a Papuan—”
“Oh, yes, Simon is on the third floor." The Malay girl’s smile
was without meaning. “But you really can’t go up—”
He swung around her protests and took to the steps, and iron
and concrete stairwell, and he could hear other running feet
clattering on the flight above. He knew he was too late, even
before he swung through the doors and came out on the
topmost, third-floor corridor.
There were three shots, careful and deliberate and horribly
efficient. The door to the patient’s room did little to muffle
the explosive noises.
Two men burst from the room. One carried a big black man
in a patient’s gown, slung over his shoulder. They started
running toward Durell, saw him, and halted. Both had
automatic machine-pistols in their hands, and both were big,
blank-faced Chinese with tiny black eyes. They wore
dungarees and sport shirts flapping over their belts, and the
gay rayon patterns were in startling contrast to the blood
spattered over them.
“Hold it!" Durell shouted.
The one with the black man slung over his shoulder spoke in
rapid Chinese and his companion lifted his automatic
without hesitation and spattered the corridor with shots like
a riveting machine. Durell had only the warning of the man‘s
hand jerking up as he triggered his weapon. He threw himself
headlong on the waxed corridor floor and squeezed off two
shots as he went down. Bullets powdered the concrete walls
and showered the place with flying dust and debris. The big
Chinese staggered as a slug took him, but the man was too
insensitive to pain or more terrified of retreat than of
immediate death. The explosive roar of his machine-pistol
went on for another eternity for Durell. He felt like a fly on a
wall. He fired again at the huge figure, and this time the slug
went home. The machine-pistol kept clattering, but the shots
stitched huge holes in the ceiling plaster and smashed a light
globe and then ended as the man fell against the wall.
Durell got up with care. The Chinese gunman was dead. He
kicked the machine-pistol away, down the hall, just to be
safe, and ran after the second man who had carried off Simon
Smith. But by the time he reached the stairwell, the
kidnapper had already gained the street level. A car started
up and he wen! to a window and saw the big Chinese tumble
his burden into the rear seat and leap aboard as the sedan
lurched forward. Durell raised his gun, then lowered it.
Pursuit was hopeless.
Thin, frightened cries came from other patients on the floor,
and from below came the pounding of angry feet. He turned
back to the room where Simon had been a patient,
remembering the three executioner’s shots he’d heard. The
hospital cot was empty, but sprawled at the foot of the bed
was a white-coated Indonesian intern, his young brown face
fixed in perpetual astonishment at death. Durell felt a cool
warning prickle on the nape of his neck. Whoever had
planned the careful misdirection of attention away from the
hospital by bombing the cafe--whoever had executed the
split-second kidnapping of a Papuan sailor who should have
been of no importance to anyone—was an adversary to be
respected. There was a cold-blooded efficiency about it that
checked his anger, and he started to back out of the shattered
room.
A whimper and a moan halted him.
His impulse was to continue his retreat. He could guess at the
reasons for Simon Smith’s kidnapping, and he could do
nothing more here. In a moment, the corridor would be filled
with angry hospital personnel, and perhaps Colonel
Mayubashur. He had no intention of spending his time in the
old Portuguese dungeons on the harbor front, listening to
questions he could not answer.
The moan was repeated, thin and high and feminine. He
located it behind the metal door of a closet in the patient’s
room. Durell stepped over the intern’s body and looked in
side. The girl in the closet was a nurse, but her white nylon
uniform was blood-spattered and her straight, short black
hair in Chinese style was awry, like the shape of her terrified
mouth and the glow of fear in her almond-shaped eyes. Her
pink mouth opened and closed and opened again.
“Please . . “ she whispered in English. “Dr. Jaiga—”
“The doctor is dead. They shot him. They took your patient,
Simon Smith, away with them.”
He watched her swallow, a small choking sound in her throat.
There was a dark bruise on her broad cheekbone. She started
to slip past him, but he touched her arm and she halted at
once, afraid of his gun. She was short, somewhat plump
under her nurse’s uniform, with a mixture of Asian races
somewhere between Malay and Chinese, but with Chinese
predominating. She had lost one of her white shoes and stood
with her hip askew, staring in dumb astonishment at the
bloody shambles of the room. From outside came sounds of
alarm, of running feet, of someone weeping. He wondered if
she had been part of the plot.
“How come they let you go?” he asked harshly.
“Dr. Jaiga shoved me—-into the closet—when we heard them
coming. He seemed to know—what would happen—”
“Didn’t you?"
She was silent. Her skin was tinged with a delicate, pink
bloom, and her eyes were in contrast with the full-lipped
carved shape of her Malay mouth. The name-pin on her
uniform breast read Yoko Hanamutra. So there was some
Hindu blood in her, too, but the mixture in this girl was a
combination of all the best of her polyglot ancestry. She
regarded him for a moment‘s silence and then visibly pulled
herself together.
“Please, Mr. Durell, it is dangerous here for you. The police
will come, and you must not be found, or delayed.”
He stared at her. “How do you know my name?”
“Tommy Lee told me. He said you would be here today.”
"And how did young Mr. Lee know that?"
“It was on one of the stateside messages to the consulate. He
spoke of it at lunch today and said he was meeting you at the
airport and that you undoubtedly would visit the hospital.
You are Mr. Durell, are you not?”
“Yes. And how well do you know Mr. Tommy Lee?”
“We are to be married,” the nurse said quietly.
A shouting in the corridor reminded him he had only
moments to spare if he expected to stay out of Colonel
Mayubashur’s hands. He caught the nurse’s arm and said,
“Lead the way, and hurry,” and opened the hall door. He was
pleased to see that everything was in confusion, with a crowd
of doctors. nurses and patients gathered around the Chinese
whom Durell had shot, and others who stared in awe at the
chipped plaster where the gunman’s bullets had smashed all
about the corridor.
“This way," said Yoko Hanamutra. “Quickly.”
“Your uniform is bloody.”
“I’ll change it. I must talk with you. I wanted to see you,
anyway, but not like this, of course. And poor Dr. Jaiga-”
Durell said harshly: “The world is full of innocent bystanders.
Let’s go.”

She led him quickly through the crowd in the corridor. Two
uniformed police were pushing through the excited patients.
and the girl’s fingers tightened convulsively on his wrist
Durell wondered why she was afraid of the cops. On the
lower floor they again had to buck a tide of excited visitors
and bomb victims. The girl finally ducked into what served as
a linen closet. She slammed the door behind her and turned
on a very dim, ten-watt saffron bulb. The closet was small
and the quarters were crowded. The girl’s dark slanted eyes
glowed luminously in the dimness.
“I must get out of this damaged uniform,“ she whispered.
“My street clothes are hanging here. Do you mind? I will
change, and then we must find Tommy. You will help me,
won‘t you?”
“Is Tommy Lee mixed up in the bombing?”
“I don’t know. Everything has been like a nightmare. Please
be patient with me, Mr. Durell.”
“Tommy has a big mouth, telling you about consulate
business,” he said quietly.
“I coaxed it out of him, because he’s been in such an odd state
of mind lately. With the consul gone to the SEATO meeting
and Dr. McLeod spending so much time on Tarakuta, it all
fell on Tommy’s shoulders, as first secretary. At first I
thought it was wonderful for him, but he—I don‘t know, I just
feel he is in terrible trouble, and I know you will help him.
Please turn around.”
“I can't,” he said. “There isn’t room."
"All right.”
She stripped out of the bloody nylon uniform with swift,
slithering sounds. Her dark hair, cut like a China doll’s, was
perfumed, and she was not as plump as he had thought,
when he glimpsed a flash of her narrow waist and flaring
hips. She struggled into a Palembang sarong of rare, dark
blue silk with silver embroidery, rather than a Chinese
chamseong. She lost her balance and toppled against him as
he stood squeezed against the linen shelves, and he caught
her and held her up.
“I’m sorry. Please don’t think—”
“Thinking is my only privilege at the moment.”
“How can you joke at a time when bombs are killing—”
“I'm not joking. Are you ready?”
She shrugged the blue sarong in place, tossed back her thick,
straight black hair, and the change was remarkable. The
anonymous and efficient nurse was gone, replaced by an
unusual flowerlike beauty. She leaned on his arm as she
stepped into high-heeled shoes. “We can go now. I don't
think we will be noticed like this.”
“Why are you so anxious to avoid the police, Yoko?”
She stared at him. “But aren’t you?”
“I simply don’t want to be delayed. But you were a witness to
murder and kidnapping—”
“Yes, and they may ask me things about Tommy Lee that I
don’t want to tell anyone except you.”
She held her head high, walking with firm, quick steps as
they left the tiny closet and crossed the hospital lobby a
moment later. The local Pandakan militia had taken over the
plaza, and a line of steel-helmeted soldiers was posted in
front of the Hotel des Indes. On the sparkling green near the
gingerbread, Victorian bandstand, a T-35 Russian Tank had
clawed up the lawn and waited with its long cannon tilted
upward, pointed at the evening sky. There was no one to
fight, no visible enemy about. The terrorists had gotten safely
away into the tangle of alleys and canals of the island city. A
semblance of normalcy had even come back to the big square.
A few of the shops had opened their iron shutters and were
ready for business again, and the sidewalk sellers of ices and
watermelon were back to hawk their wares. A boy was hosing
clown the blood-stained sidewalk in front of the bombed-out
cafe.
“My car is in the hospital lot,” the girl said.
A siren wailed not far away. Durell wondered how soon
Colonel Mayubashur would start hunting for him. A number
of people had seen him in the hospital outside Simon Smith’s
room, and the colonel would have lots of time and many
questions to put to him. Durell wished he had the answers
himself. But at the moment, he lacked both the time and the
information.
Yoko Hanamutra’s car was an expensive blue Renault
Floride, a rarity in this island corner of the world. She slid
familiarly behind the wheel, the silk of her blue sarong
slipping smoothly across her hips and thighs. He got in
beside her.
“Is this your car?"
“Yes. But I could not afford it on my nurse’s salary.
Tommy bought it for me, as an engagement gift.”
“On his salary as first secretary?”
“Please, I don‘t know how much he earns.”
“That’s not very practical, Yoko, for a girl with her mind on
matrimony.”
She bit her lip. “I doubt if he will ever marry me now.”
She eased the little French sports car smoothly into the steam
of bicycle and trishaw and bus traffic. The life of had hem
diverted only momentarily by the terrorist growing dark now,
but the tropical heat had not anything, the humidity was even
worse, but the momentum of the car as the girl drove along
the Peninsular Heights was pleasant.
He let her take him where she pleased.

chapter
seven
THE American consulate occupied a select site on the
promontory above Pandakan. Unlike the European
residencies, which dated back to the previous century in
Georgian and Victorian design, the United States had
recently built——with foreign-aid blocked funds-—a
sparkling modern cube behind a high concrete wall and a
severe, diamond-patterned steel gate opening onto the main
drive. The marine guard knew the girl and nodded a good
evening and opened the gate with only a casual glance at
Durell. The sweeping drive brought the bright blue car to a
quick, dusty halt in front of the vaultlike entrance.
The westward sky over the sea was a spray of surrealist
colors, making sharp, deep shadows on the consulate lawn
among the massed oleander, frangipani and palms that failed
to offset the severity of the modern building. A boy in a green
Malay head-cloth was taking down the hag from its high pole
on the lawn. No ceremony attended its lowering.
Miss Hanamutra led the way with familiar, clicking high
heels across the circular lobby, and an Indian clerk in a
seersucker suit jumped to his feet as they passed an office
doorway.
“Oh, Miss Hanamutra, a message for you, please!”
She halted. “Yes?”
“Mr. Thomas Lee asked that if you come here, you are to wait
for him. He had a most urgent message to run.”
Durell said: “Do you know where Mr. Lee went?”
“You are Mr. Durell? But of course. We were advised of your
arrival. No other American national is reported visiting
Pandakan in these troubled times. We have discouraged
tourists and managed to evacuate all except a few stubborn
businessmen. So—” The Hindu smiled and bowed. “You are a
new face and I deduce you are Mr. Samuel Durell, the oil
technician from New Orleans mentioned in our advisory
cables.”
The consulate was air-conditioned to a point where it felt
chilly in contrast to the torpid heat outside. Durell asked:
“Where is Mr. Lee’s office, please?”
“The last down the corridor, sir. Mr. Kiehle’s suite is locked,
and Dr. McLeod uses Mr. Lee’s office when he is here.”
“Which isn‘t often, is it?”
"That is not for me to comment upon, sir.”
The girl hesitated, and Durell guided her firmly down the
hall. He had the feeling that, not having found her fiancé, she
was regretting the impulse that had led her to bring him here.
But he did not mean to release her easily.
The office was lighted, and Durell went directly to the corner
windows and closed the Wooden inner shutters against the
black shrubbery of the lawn outside. The girl stood uneasily,
biting her full underlip, and he asked quietly:
“Do you know where Tommy Lee might have gone?“
“No, I don’t. Perhaps I was too hasty. The bombing, and all—
he might he at the Hotel des Indes, looking for you.”
“Or perhaps he's looking for Simon Smith’s kidnappers?”
“Why should he do that?” she asked defensively.
“I thought you might be able to answer that one.”
“No, it’s nothing so tangible—nothing I can put my finger on
so easily, Mr. Durell. I’m sorry, I am afraid of you, I think.
You are not what I expected. Mr. Kiehle is rather kind and
bumbling, and Dr. McLeod is rather erratic, and not a
diplomat, by any means.”
“But I’m different?”
Frightening, I should say."
You have no reason to be afraid,” he said, “as long as “you
make an even swap—my help for yours."
But I don’t want Tommy hurt, you see.”
“If he’s in trouble, he’s already been hurt, and if you back out
now, Miss Hanamutra, it‘s possible he might be hurt worse
than Simon Smith.” He watched her with dark, hard eyes. A
muscle twitched at the comer of her mouth and she looked
away. He said: “You’ve been in this office many times before,
right?”
‘Yes, but there was never any problem of security—"
‘Then tell me about Tommy and your plans to marry him and
Why you think he’s in trouble and what it has to do with
Simon’s abduction from the hospital where you work. While
you talk, I'm going to look around, so don’t mind my
movements."
“What will you look for?”
“I'll know it.” he said, “if I find it."
He put on more lamps, which shed a soft but efficient light
over the shining desk used by Thomas C. Lee. There Was a
polished brass name-plate on the desk, and Yoko Hanamutra
offered the information that she had given it to her fiancé on
his last birthday. Durell nodded and went through the desk
files. Several native consulate employees came curiously to
the door, and Durell went to the Indian clerk outside and
showed his I.D. card to dispel them and went on with his
work.
He could find nothing incriminating in the desk until he
came across a small slip of red tissue notepaper with Chinese
ideographs on it, tucked between the pages of a Day Book
which itemized the comings and goings of the absent Mr.
Kiehle and the wandering Dr. Malachy McLeod, Durell held
the bit of red paper up between his fingers. “What is this,
Yoko?”
She considered it with round eyes. “A gambling chit, I think.
But Tommy doesn’t gamble."
“According to his initials here, he owes somebody some
money, doesn’t he? About eight hundred dollars, American?”
She walked quickly toward the desk. She had a nice walk,
nice hips and nice legs, and very black, dangerous eyes.
I asked you for help, Mr. Durell, and I aided you to escape
embarrassing questions by police, did I not? But you only
suspect my Tommy, in exchange!” She snatched the scrap of
red paper from his fingers. “Yes, it is a promissory note, a
gambling chit, to Prince Ch’ing.”
“I’ve heard of him,” Durell said drily.
“He’s the boss—in Dendang, anyway. Maybe through all the
islands. The plebiscite will tell the truth, but he owns tin
mines as well as gambling dens and some say he owns the
opium trade and palaces in Fishtown and even some houses
of women.” She paused and flushed. “I am not very well
advised of these things. All I know is that people say Prince
Ch’ing is very rich, very powerful, and a terrible man.”
“You‘ve never met him yourself?”
“Oh, no. Very few people have ever seen him.”
“Has Tommy Lee?”
“I don’t know. He never said so.”
“But your Tommy owes him eight hundred dollars and is
missing tonight. Does that make sense to you?”
She looked tearful. “No more sense than other things
happening in Pandakan lately. Tommy is changed—everyone
has changed. It is a madness that seized us all at once, and it
is not just the plebiscite. Most of the people don’t care about
politics. They just want to be left alone. ”
"If it isn't the vote, what’s bugging everybody?”
“They are afraid,” she whispered.
“Of what?”
“Something has changed,” she repeated. There are whispers
and fear in the air, but no one talks about it.”
“But your friend, Tommy Lee, is involved in it?”
“Tommy is a loyal American, Mr. Durell!"
“You protest too much,” Durell guessed. “How do you
suppose a security check on his family might work out?”
She stared with eyes suddenly white with terror, then looked
down, her dark lashes fanning her apricot cheeks. But she
could not hide the fact that he had hit something vulnerable.
“Do you know his family, Yoko?” he asked gently,
“Yes, they live here in Pandakan.”
“Both parents?”
She was silent.
“Both?”
She drew a deep, shaken breath. “Mr. Durell, I am both glad
and frightened that you are here. It has not been easy to help
and be cheerful when the one you love refuses such help and
is in despair. I warned Tommy that someone like you would
come here some day and find his secret and make trouble for
him. I begged him to tell the truth on his records. But he was
afraid. He is a naturalized American, Mr. Durell, and loyal, as
I said. But the air is poisoned with suspicion these days, and
he was sure he would lose his job.”
“Because of his parents here in Pandakan?”
She bit her lip, shook her head, said nothing.
Durell said: “You can’t back away now, Yoko. You'll have to
trust me. I’ll help Tommy, if I can. If it isn’t too late.” He
paused. “What’s wrong with Tommy’s family?”
“You will find out now,” she whispered. “Oh, I am a fool!
Tommy Warned me to stay away from here. But I begged him
to free himself of whatever it is that—that frightens and
worries him so. You see, the people Tommy calls his parents
are not his true father and mother. They are his uncle and
aunt. His real parents live in a commune, near Shanghai, in
Red China.”
Durell was silent.
A bird cried outside in the night, and the surf crashed on the
rocks below Promontory Heights. Somewhere in the
consulate a typewriter clicked briefly. The girl considered her
hands, folded lotus-fashion in her lap. Her hair looked glossy
black in the lamplight. Durell said gently:
“Yoko, you must love Tommy very much, to tell me such a
thing as this. You know what it could mean to his career?”
“Of course I know!" she cried. “And I know you are
not here on some economic mission, Mr. Durell. I know you
are here for some security reason, and it must have to do with
Tommy. Tommy was very upset when he decoded the cable
saying you were coming. He’s communications officer here,
too, and he knew who you were. He was afraid of you and
told me he might be in trouble if you found out certain
things. I begged him to tell you the truth, even if he did not
tell me about it. I begged and begged, Mr. Durell, so he would
be free of this fear he has. Tommy is a good man, and what
he does is because of pressure applied—”
“Blackmail? Because his parents are in Shanghai?"
She nodded. “He is not alone in this problem. Many of ‘he
Oceanic Chinese here have relatives in Red China. They need
help, but, like Tommy, will not admit it. Will you help him?”
“That depends,” Durell said.
Her eyes were fearful. “On what?”
“Tommy Lee, first secretary and communications officer of
this consulate, knew that Simon Smith, an obscure sailor on
an obscure trading schooner, was going to be snatched from
the hospital this afternoon. He did his best to keep me from
the Hotel des Indes, where I might see what happened. If
Simon was kidnapped by, let us say: Prince Ch’ing’s men then
Simon has something important to tell me. Do you know
what it might be?”
She shook her head. “I cannot even guess.”
“You were assigned as Simon's nurse, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “And you are right in your guesses.
Tommy was interested in Simon. He asked me to arrange to
be assigned to his floor, and to pay special attention to him."
“In what way?”
“He wanted me to listen to anything that Simon might say in
his delirium. But I could not hear anything intelligible. He
spoke in his island tongue, in Papuan. No one could
understand him.”
“Did Dr. McLeod visit him?”
“Once.”
He said: “We can make a deal. The first thing you can do is
take me to Dendang, to the house where Tommy’s uncle and
aunt—his alleged parents-—live. Maybe he’s there. If Simon
was snatched, as I say, it’s because he had something that
somebody wanted to know about. Tommy seemed to know
the snatch was coming. Therefore we’ll go to Fishtown and
try to find Simon by finding Tommy 'first. If you help me, I’ll
help Tommy Lee, when the right time comes.”
She said: "I don‘t know. You frighten me.”
“How?”
“You look so cruel,” she said.
“One of the first laws of survival is that you must adapt,” he
told her. “Sometimes you have to be cruel.”

chapter eight
MISS HANAMUTRA might have no idea of his real mission,
but he could not be sure, and he knew better than to jump to
conclusions where a pretty face was involved. His coded
briefing back in Hawaii, from General McFee, had not
mentioned her relationship with Lee, the communications
officer for the Pandakan office. He had only her word for it,
and she had admitted some damning evidence against a man
she claimed to love.
He asked her to wait, and went out to speak to the Hindu
typist in the outer office. The woman clerk said the code
books were kept in Mr. Kiehle’s safe, and only the consul and
Dr. McLeod and Mr. Lee had access to them. Her eyes were
big when she spoke to Durell. None of the three was here to
tell him the combination. Given time, he could cable
Washington for it. He rubbed his teeth with his finger,
annoyed. Every consulate and embassy of the United States
carried a small red book with a Top Priority Code—usually
referred to as Teepee—evolved by the Whirlwind Computer
in the National Security Agency’s headquarters in Maryland.
The NSA machines encoded the emergency signals on a
monthly basis, changing them regularly and at random. The
ciphers could not be broken, even if a team of
mathematicians worked on it for a score of years. But the
computers in NSA’s basement clicked out new Teepee Alert
Codes in less than five minutes, every first of each new
month.
Durell would have given a lot to know if Tommy Lee had
been privileged to look at this month’s Teepee Alert signal.
He went back into Lee’s office and took off his jacket and sat
down at the desk to frame cabled messages to the consul,
attending the SEATO meeting, and another back to
Washington. Miss Hanamutra sat quietly watching him, her
dark eyes enigmatic. The office staff of the consulate was
quick, quiet and efficient. While he worked, he asked Yoko
Hanamutra what she knew about the missing
communications officer’s duties, and listened to her soft,
somewhat timid voice While he worded his queries to Kiehle
and to the home office in Washington.
“Tommy handled all cables and radio messages, of course,”
she said. “And he was in charge of the USIS—the Information
Service programs—over the local radio station in Pandakan
before it was bombed out. That happened just two or three
days ago. The terrorists did it. Tommy and I had been there
just a few minutes before they seized the station. But they
didn’t have good technicians, and the damage they did was
repaired in twenty-four hours.”
“Did you help Tommy with his information programs?"
“Sometimes. It was fun. And useful work.”
“He didn’t pay you for it, though?”
“Oh, no. It was just something we did together."
Durell wondered how much more of Tommy Lee’s work was
shared with Miss Hanamutra. Her face was blank, naive. But
you couldn't ever tell. He said: "Did Lee ever broadcast
himself? Use the mike, I mean?”
“Oh, yes. Now and then. He was-—what do you call it? —a
ham, really very expert at it.”
“He knew the technical end of radio, too?”
“Yes, he enjoyed being communications officer.”
“Did he operate the consulates station himself?” he asked
casually.
“Most often,” the girl said proudly. Then she became aware of
his quiet gaze and bit her lip. “Did I say anything in error,
Mr. Durell?”
“Not exactly. Have you been in the consulate’s radio room,
ever? Don’t lie to me, now. There’s nothing to worry about, if
Tommy took you in there.”
“I was a guest, once or twice. Mr. Kiehle knew about it,” she
said defensively. “He did not object when Tommy took me
with him, when it was late and he had a few routine messages
to encode and send off."
He stood up again and said: “Come with me, please.”
The radio room in the consulate was on the second floor, The
native clerks fluttered and hesitated, not knowing how far
this tall stranger’s authority went. No one seemed to know
where the key to the room might he. Durell sent them all
away, down the hushed corridor and pattering down the
stairs to their desks below, and then he took a small
instrument from his pocket that resembled a fountain pen,
but which came apart into a complex little tool at a twist of
his finger. It was a highly professional picklock, among other
things, and he used it in the radio door lock for less than ten
seconds before he got the door open.
Miss Hanamutra watched him with big eyes. He stood aside.
“After you, please.”
The radio room was gray, cluttered, but efficient, with a
single window overlooking the dark harbor. The light switch
at the door turned on fluorescent lamps over the small,
compact transmitter and receiving station of the Pandakan
consulate. He went to the window and looked out over the
city before closing the blind against the dark garden below.
Pandakan‘s power system was erratic, and many of the
streets were blacked out. Yet even from this distance he could
see they were crowded, lighted by thousands of small
kerosene lamps, swarming with the mixed Malay, Chinese
and Indonesian population.
He closed the blind. The radio room seemed normal. There
was nothing out of place except a tightly rolled
Oceanographic chart on a gum-metal table near the
transmitter. Durell unrolled the chart and saw it depicted the
Borneo coast and the Tarakuta Islands. The navigable
channels extending through the shallow seas of the Sunda
Shelf were marked in soft red grease pencil. Some of the red
wax came off under his thumbnail.
“Was this Tommy’s chart?" he asked the nurse.
Miss Hanamutra looked uncertain. “I don’t know. It might
have been Dr. McLeod’s.”
“Bur Dr. McLeod was not communications officer. He
wouldn’t come in here, would he? Have you ever seen him
here?”
“Oh. yes. Many times. I mean—I don’t mean to imply I was
here often. But Tommy said Dr. McLeod often used the
consulate radio to call Miss Wilhelmina, on Tarakuta.”
“I see. Do you know the call letters there?”
She pointed to the black leather notebook Durell had already
seen. "In there, I think.“
“Thank you.”
Durell sat in the swivel chair and snapped on the power. He
had no trouble finding the Tarakuta’s call letters in the
leather-bound book. It fell open at the proper page from
frequent usage. A moment later he had the signal going out
over the air.
Miss Hanamutra stirred uneasily. “Mr. Durell—”
“In a moment, please.”
“If you’ll just help me find Tommy, I’m sure—”
“I intend to find Mr. Lee,” he said. “And through Mr. Lee, I
also hope to find a sailor named Simon, out of your hospital.”
“But Tommy had nothing to do with Simon—!”
“We’ll see."
The key began to clatter in response to his open signal. He
made no attempt to encode his conversation with Malachy
McLeod. His identification Was quick and businesslike, and
after a brief pause, Dr. McLeod answered in like fashion.
Durell did not know if the listening girl could read the rapid-
fire clicking of the key, but it did not matter. He asked
McLeod to return to Pandakan Harbor at once, with Willi,
aboard the schooner. He repeated the message and added a
single key code word for urgent emphasis. There was no
argument. The replying Morse announced that the Tarakuta
would be back in Pandakan in a matter of hours.
Durell turned off the power then and stood up. Miss
Hanamutra got nervously to her feet, also.
“Let’s find Tommy Lee, if we can. And Simon,” he said.
He walked with the trim nurse to her little blue Floride and
let her do the driving. The descent from the cool heights of
the promontory to the waterfront boulevard added fifteen
degrees to the heat and sent the temperature soaring.
Occasional thunder rumbled over the mountainous spine of
the island, but no one on the sidewalks, teahouses, stalls or
gaudy cinemas where Sinatra's latest was being exhibited,
along with Indian art films, seemed perturbed by the
chanting students in a snake dance, carrying paper dragons
and signs that screamed for merdeka! Freedom! Most of the
posters spoke for Djakarta’s claims in the name of racial,
economic and ancient feudal ties for national hegemony over
all of Borneo, including the Tarakuta Islands—a commonality
that had never existed except in the new imperialists’ avid
imagination. Durell could feel the forces of ferment ready to
boil over into bloody violence long before a decision might he
made at the U.N. polls.
Dendang looked quite different at night. He‘d had only a
glimpse of its tangled huts and plank walks and crowded
canals crammed with sampans, its maze of structures built
out over me harbor. At night, the flickering glow of yellow
lanterns softened the harsh outlines of poverty and added to
the mystery of its byways and lanes. Yoko halted her little car
near the somber ruins of a seventeenth-century Portuguese
fortress on the waterfront.
“We must walk from this point,” she said. “But are you sure
you wish to proceed? Not many Europeans or Americans go
into Dendang after sunset. I warn you, it may be dangerous.”
“Everything is dangerous today,” he said.
The hot night was filled with indescribable odors that moved
on the slight Wind from the harbor. Only a few ships were in
sight, where once there would have been a P & O liner,
tankers, freighters, thick clusters of native fishermen and
junks. Now only sampans and a few rusty, seagoing tugs of
Dutch design remained. There was no sign as yet of Willi or
her schooner or Malachy McLeod.
The girl led him across a plank bridge above a canal crowded
with moored barges and houseboats with thatched huts
astern. Charcoal cookfires made the air a bit more aromatic,
but under the cooking smells was the pungency of poor
sanitation and the accumulated odors of hundreds of families
crowded into tiny one-room dwellings built of gasoline cans,
packing crates and rotten palm matting.
As they crossed the bridge, they seemed to step backward
several centuries, into a community built on a quaking maze
of plank runways, shops, godowns, and the intricate
connections of one structure supporting another. Kerosene
lanterns shed a yellow glow over the tiny bridges and small
windows of the native houses. Noise was everywhere: the
music of samisens, the talk of old Chinamen playing mah-
jongg on reed balconies, the tinkle of wind bells over
teahouses, the calls of hawkers. Yoko Hanamutra walked
with swift familiarity through the teeming crowds. If Durell’s
presence caused a stir, he could not detect it. An old Chinese
with a wrinkled face and wispy beard called to Yoko, and the
nurse paused and bowed slightly and replied in quick
Cantonese before she moved on. She spoke in English to
Durell.
“He was a patient of mine five years ago, and he never
forgets. A very nice old man. He sells opium for a living—but
it is controlled, and not against the law here. On my birthday,
he always sends me tea-cakes."
Durell made a mental map of the twists and turns they took
through the maze of alleys, bridges and broadwalks. The
route was intricate, and he Wondered if the girl was
deliberately trying to mislead him. She would have to do
better, even in this nightmarish community, to succeed.
Other men might have been quickly lost here; but his training
in mnemonics made the route routine. He noted a line of
wash here, a peculiarly twisted pole there, a bridge with a
carved Chinese lion’s head in gnarled wood, a teahouse with
yellow banners hanging over the roof.
“Do the police ever venture in here?” he asked.
The girl smiled ironically. “Hardly ever. The Chinese are very
law-abiding, though. They run their own affairs pretty much
as they please.”
“Or as Prince Ch’ing pleases?” he suggested.
She bit her soft lip. “I suppose so. This way now.”
There came a faraway explosion from the European quarter
of the city. Nobody here in Dendang paid attention to it. Yoko
paused and called familiarly to a family settled around a
charcoal cookfire on their sampan, leaning over a bamboo
bridge rail to see them. A man in blue denims and tattered
shirt pointed down the canal. His eyes touched Durell’s in the
dim light of oil lamps, and there was momentary hostility in
his gaze. Durell touched Yoko’s arm.
“Let’s go. I gather we’re almost there."
Another bridge brought them to a cluster of larger thatched
houses. Through the maze of byways he glimpsed the harbor
again. Still no sign of Willi and her schooner, the Tarakuta.
He hoped it showed up soon. Somewhere a gong
reverberated softly. A radio erupted passionate propaganda
from Djakarta, directed against Malaysia. The vituperative
tone was clear, if the words were not. Then Miss Hanamutra
halted.
“The house is dark. It was never so before.”
Durell pointed ahead. “That one? Rather elegant, for this
neighborhood.”
“You must know that Tommy’s American salary permitted
his uncle and aunt to live like—like millionaires, here.”
“Did they pay tribute to your local Mafia, too?”
She smiled tightly. “To Prince Ch‘ing? I don’t know. The man
in the sampan said they were here, that many people had
been here, and now it is too silent, too dark, do you
understand?”
He felt the danger, too. The house stood apart from its
neighbors, built of woven reed siding behind a low palisade
of bamboo. The sluggish equatorial tide made a dim
chuckling against the pilings that supported the structure. A
lantern swung gently on a long pole over the open gate. No
one was in sight.
The girl shivered beside Durell. “I don’t like it. Perhaps it was
a mistake to look for Tommy here.”
“I think not. You admitted that Tommy knew about the
snatch plan for Simon. And we can’t go back now, in any
case. Look behind you, honey, but take it easy.”
She turned too quickly. Durell had been aware of the dogged
footsteps behind them. Yoko drew in a soft hissing breath.
“Don’t look again,” he warned. “Do you know them?”
“One, I saw’-took Simon from the hospital.”
“Good.” He was pleased. Whoever took Simon didn’t want
him found, and was adamant enough to have Durell and the
nurse openly tailed. He said: “Let’s call on your Tommy’s
phony parents.”
He urged her through the bamboo gate. A paper fish totem
for fertility blessings hung from a bobbing pole on the roof.
The plank door was open. There was no light inside.
The girl halted. “I am afraid—" She looked back a second
time. “They must be Ch’ing’s men. We can’t go that way. And
there is no other way out of here, unless we swim.”
Durell said grimly: “We may do that, yet, before this
delightful evening is over. Since there is no retreat, let‘s go
inside."
He led the way. As he stepped over the threshold, he turned
slightly to look back down the alley without seeming to watch
for the men behind them. Shadows moved briefly on the
plank walk between the neighboring houses. As the girl
moved by, he caught the fresh scent of her perfume. The
persistence of Ch‘ing, the local boss, in the picture ever since
his arrival in Pandakan was intriguing. He followed the girl
into the house.
He felt the emptiness at once. He could see nothing at first,
but then, through the small windows facing the harbor —Mr.
Tommy Lee‘s “parents” had a remarkable view of all the
shipping in Pandakan—he saw the navigation lights and
blinking channel buoys and the red winks atop the distant
radio tower. A boat was moving in slowly past the
breakwater; there were two masthead lights, the dim shape of
a schooner. He hoped it was Willi and Malachy McLeod,
obeying his radioed instructions to stand by in the harbor.
A smell of burning refuse, of charred buildings. Drifted
across the dark water. Smoke hid the schooner’s lights. When
his eyes adjusted to the dimness inside the house, he made
out comfortable furniture in a pleasant mélange of Western
and Chinese styles, with straw mats on the polished teak
floor. There were three rooms, with a narrow balcony
overlooking the harbor side. Durell moved through them
quickly, and in the second room he paused before a fine
amateur radio transmitting outfit.
“Is this new?" he asked the girl.
She drew in a small breath. “I have not seen it before.”
“Tommy was a radio ham. And he visited here regularly?”
“Yes, he was devoted to his uncle and aunt—"
“He was communications officer at the consulate; he had a
radio there. What did he use this one for?”
“I don‘t know!" The girl’s round face seemed to crumple in
dismay. “Oh, I’m sorry I trusted you! I thought Tommy was
only in a little trouble, but now—it seems so much worse.
when you look at it and speak of it—”
"Keep it down.” he warned. “We have company outside,
remember?" He started into the next room and checked the
girl in the doorway. He said softly: “I don’t think we need
Tommy for one thing anymore, Yoko. We’ve found Simon.”
"Simon? Is he—?"
“Yes,” Durell said. “What did you expect? He’s very dead.”

chapter
nine
WHATEVER Simon's injuries and the damage done by his
abduction from a hospital bed, he had put up a good fight
before he was killed. He was stark naked, his hospital gown
ripped off, and his powerful torso glistened with blood and
sweat. He lay on his back, big teeth shining in the rictus of
death. The bed, chairs, a smashed mirror, a huge rip in the
woven mat walls, all testified to his last struggle. Durell said
softly:
“Just for the record, is this Simon Smith, first mate of the
Tarakuta, who was your patient at the hospital?"
Yoko nodded. “A very nice man. Very strong. And very
gentle."
This was not an age of survival for those who were too gentle
in spirit, Durell thought. Simon obviously had been killed in
a search by someone for information. As a simple sailor, he
could not know anything special about the conditions of
terror and blackmail in Dendang. There was only Simon’s
participation, with Willi Panapura, in an accidental meeting
with Pete Holcomb on an island beach, and whatever Simon
may have heard of Holcomb’s babbled tale of horror.
He watched the dark harbor, the blinking navigation lights,
the smoky red flare of a fire burning in the hills. The
schooner was well inside the breakwater now, swinging
toward the promontory. He did not like the thought that
Simon’s knowledge had merited death. If death was ordained
for the Papuan, it would also be ordered for Willi.
He would have liked to join Willi and Malachy at once; but
there was Simon’s body, and the problem of the
disappearance of Tommy Lee, the consulate’s
communications officer. Yoko was talking softly, half to
herself, half to the darkness.
“Tommy was frightened by the same terror that visited here.
In Dendang, the terror is something you can smell and touch.
It came as softly as a tiger walking through the jungle, and it
touched this one and that one, and everything changed here.
But none of the Europeans in Pandakan suspected anything.”
“Tommy was blackmailed as part of this terror, right?“ he
asked. “Because of his old uncle and aunt? He’d have been
fired from the consulate and his citizenship questioned, if it
were known his real parents were still living in China?"
“Yes, I think so. He was forced to use this radio, too; I must
admit it; he told me so. But nothing was the same between
us. He Was nervous and afraid, and I could not understand
him, I love him, Mr. Durell, and I want to help him, even if it
must hurt him. Can you believe that? I suppose I resented, at
first, the amount of time he spent here, instead of with me.
We quarreled, but then I realized he could not help himself.
The tiger had him in his claws. He became Prince Ch’ing’s
creature.”
“I’d like to meet this prince, this pretender to the throne of
the Manchus."
“Oh, but he sees no Western people. He is well-known for
this.”
"He’ll see me,“ Durell said. He took from his pocket the red
tissue gambling chit. “Where would I get another one of these
bits of paper, Yoko?”
“Oh, I am told they are gambling notes one receives at the
tables in the House of a Thousand Pleasures."
“Sounds intriguing. What is it?”
“It is a gambling place, of course—and there are rooms for
opium smokers-and many girls —”
“Did Tommy go there?”
“Yes. To gamble. It began his troubles.”
“Is it far from here?"
“No, it is in Dendang."
“Does Prince Ch’ing ever spend time there?”
“Yes, it is his establishment. He is there whenever he is in
Pandakan.”
Once you step into the jungle in pursuit of a tiger, Durell
thought, you cannot turn back. He could not be at all sure
that Ch’ing was involved in what had happened to the
Jackson. But it made a certain pattern that pointed in such a
direction Tommy Lee’s disappearance, his indebtedness to
the Manchu prince, the terror the girl spoke of, here in the
local Chinatown—it could not be ignored, however anxious
he was to see to it that Willi was safe, and not subject to what
had happened to Simon.
He glanced through the window at the harbor lights again,
and thought the newly arrived schooner had swung this way
now. Bur over half a mile of water separated him from the
vessel. He turned to the girl.
“Yoko, don’t worry about Tommy. I think he’s taken care of
himself and his uncle and aunt, too. l don’t want to frighten
you, but with those men following us, the only safe way out of
here is to swim. Think you can do it?”
“I will try,” she whispered.
“Then let’s go, before those bandits outside get nervous and
try to barge in on us.”

It was almost too late. Heavy feet thudded on the plank walk,
halted, and then a fist pounded on the door, shaking the mat
walls of the house. The girl’s eyes widened with quick terror,
and at Durell’s nod, she kicked off her shoes and poised for a
moment, obviously reluctant to commit herself to the
noisome canal. Then she dived, cleanly and neatly. The
hammering on the door grew violent. Durell watched until he
was sure that Yoko had surfaced, and then shrugged off his
coat, pocketed his gun in his trousers, and jumped after her.
The water was tepid and filled with flotsam he did not care to
identify. For a moment he was confused by the maze of
tangled pilings braced and cross-braced by generations of
dwellers in this waterfront community of house and sampan.
Then the girl called softly from the shadows and he started
swimming toward her. From the house where Simon lay dead
came a final crash as the door yielded and then three men
appeared in a rush on the open balcony behind them. A soft
phat! and a flash of flame indicated a silenced shot sent after
him. The slug splashed uncomfortably close in the mucky
water. Durell dived, and swam for a dozen feet toward the
girl.
When he surfaced, he was under another house. The tide
lapped around the pilings with soft sucking sounds. On the
floor hoard above him he heard the quick slap of a bare foot
and a spate of angry Chinese. A woman replied. Then there
was silence.
He turned his head, looking for Yoko Hanamutra. But he
could not find her.
“Yoko?” he called softly.
There was no answer.
“Yoko?” he called again.
Something brushed against him and he glimpsed a pale white
jelly-like substance that made him recoil instinctively. He did
not know if it was a live thing or not, and he did not care to
find out. He swam again toward the place where he had last
seen the girl. He thought he heard her swimming ahead, and
followed with quick, long strokes, moving always under the
plank walks and under houses, listening to the constant
sounds of teeming humanity above in the world of light, the
peddlers of rice and chicken, the drinkers of tea, the lovers,
those who were eating and conversing and playing mah-
jongg. Down here he felt as if he had entered some kind of
dark, dank netherworld. And he could not find the girl.
There were no other shots. The men in the Lee house could
not possibly spot him in this labyrinth of twisted pilings,
boards, sampans and fishing boats tangled in shadows thick
with the effluvium of waste and unpredictable sea things. He
tried not to think about it, and swam on.
He had to assume that Yoko had lost him and gone off to
swim to safety on her own. He could not worry about her
now. He had his own strategy to think about.
Strategy was something that Grandpa Jonathan, back in
Bayou Peche Rouge, had often lectured to him about in his
boyhood, regarding the psychology of hunting and being
hunted. Those days in the bayous, under the dim green
shadows of the gum trees hung with Spanish moss, seemed a
lifetime ago, in another world. But old Jonathan was still
there, and his dry comments on the ways of men and women
and the world had made a lasting impression on Durell when
he was a boy.
“The trouble with being hunted, Samuel,” the old man would
say, “is that you start running and keep right on in a straight
line, and let panic ride you like the old man on Sindbad’s
shoulders. You go on and on and try to make good on
strength alone, forgetting you'd never be hunted in the first
place if the other fellow wasn’t stronger and faster than you.
And with sharper teeth, so to speak. So don’t ever try to
outrun the enemy. You got to shake the weight of panic off
your back and be smart. The race ain‘t to the swift, it‘s to the
clever.”
“And what do the clever ones do, Grandpa?” he’d asked.
“The same as the fox, maybe. Double back. Do the
unexpected, mainly.” The old man’s eyes twinkled cannily.
“But is that enough for you, Samuel?"
“I think not. It’s not enough just to run and escape.”
“Right, son. If you want to win for good, you can’t make it by
pumping your legs and getting out of breath and duckin’
down some dark hole and hidin’ like a rabbit or a fox. You've
got to hit back. So you double on him and get on the other
feller’s trail and While he’s looking for you in one direction,
you hit him from the other. If that sounds like unfair play,
just remember it’s one of the rules of survival. The feller who
wins is the one who says which law is right and which is
wrong.”
There was some doubt in Durell’s mind about the validity of
the old man’s philosophy today, but he could not question the
fact that old Jonathan had been a fine tactician then, one of
the shrewdest hunters of animals and men in the delta bayou
country. He could double back, however, and hit ‘em while
they were looking the other way. While Prince Ch‘ing’s men
hunted for him along canals and houses, he would drop in to
pay a call on the Manchu pretender himself, at the House of a
Thousand Pleasures.
He did not doubt that the visit would be interesting.

He swam quietly through the dark, tangled shadows,

avoiding the open canals and klongs where crowded
sampans, junks and brightly painted outrigger fishing boats
were moored in a miasma of charcoal smoke, cooking odors,
the smells of fish and crowded unwashed humanity.
Eventually he came to a clear area, a sort of open, watery
square he had not seen on the route he had taken with Yoko
Hanamutra. From the safe obscurity between two thick piers,
he could see across the expanse of water in the long-fingered
yellow light of a hundred lanterns to a brilliantly outlined
entrance of what could only be an enormous dance hall or
teahouse. This could be nothing less than the prince’s House
of a Thousand Pleasures, the main milking station, so to
speak, for picking up the thousands of coins from the
impoverished and Quietly desperate inhabitants of Dendang.
As he watched, immersed to his neck in the tepid, oily water,
he saw two big Chinese make their way along the plank walk
to the entrance. Pie was quite sure they were the ones who
had followed him, and the first was definitely one of those
from the hospital. He was relieved to note that they did not
have Yoko Hanamutra with them.
Quickly, he found a ladder and climbed to a small dark
boardwalk behind some shanty tin houses. The slimy feel of
the canals clung to him, but nothing short of a long soak in a
tub could fix that. Luck, however, touched him when he
spotted a line of flapping clothes behind the nearest tin
shack. There was a coolie’s jacket, newly washed and dried,
together with worn dungarees, The jacket was large in the
middle and tight in the shoulders, but he was happy to
exchange it for his muddy shirt. His wet gun troubled him,
and he took a few moments to dry it as well as he could,
standing in the darkness to face the open square of water and
Prince Ch’ing’s establishment. He decided he would have to
gamble or pray it would fire if needed.
Fortunately, he was not the only white man who sought the
favors of Prince Ch’ing’s enticements. A gleaming mahogany
launch was moored before the big pavilion, and several of
Pandakan’s European merchants were going in, either to
enjoy the gambling or the women that the prince made
available to his more select clientele. Durell walked quickly
through the crowded stalls that sold spiced meats, tiny
broiled shrimp, cookies and ices. No one paid much attention
to him in this part of Fishtown. He could have been a sailor, a
beachcomber, anything, in his coolie jacket and the straw
sandals that had come from the same source as his dry
clothes. Most of the local patrons used an entrance other
than the one where the launch was tied up, and he headed for
the smaller and less pretentious way in.
The smells of incense, cooking, human sweat and tension
struck him like a tangible blow as he went inside the House of
a Thousand Pleasures. The place was an immense, sprawling
complex that surely covered several acres built out over the
harbor water. But it Prince Ch’ing were here, squatting like a
fat spider in the center of his web, he would find his quarry.
He was leaning more on instinct than logic to hunt here for
an answer to the riddle of the missing submarine. But
considering the factors that had formed a pattern in his
mind, once he’d learned of Tommy Lee’s troubles, he did not
consider it unreasonable.
“You English stranger here? You American?”
The voice was a soft, birdlike singsong, spoken by a young
Chinese girl in a blue silk quilted jacket and black silk
trousers, who smiled at him from behind the bars of a huge
birdcage of bamboo. The bars, Durell noted, were reinforced
with steel rods, and the gate in the birdcage, which was
duplicated by another behind the girl, was also of steel and
merely painted to look like bamboo. Thus there was a double
barrier to this entrance to Prince Ch’ing’s pleasure house.
“I’m both an American and a stranger, too,” Durell said,
smiling. “Is that so terrible?”
“All men are welcome here. You come from ship?“ the
Chinese girl asked. Her eyes smiled, but her young smile was
nervous. Beyond her cage, he saw a row of garish electric
bulbs lighting a wide corridor to a big dance hall, from which
a weird concoction of Orientalized twist music emanated.
“You know no ships have stopped at Pandakan for a week,
honey,” he said. “I‘m off the beach, is all. It’s been a long trip
and I‘m hot, tired, thirsty and lonely.”
“We can take care of all your needs,” the girl piped, “provided
you have money. We want no trouble with Americans here.”
“I’ve got money—all I need for this place.”
He made his voice rough, and showed her the clip of loose
bills he had removed, along with his gun, from his wet
clothes behind the shack. The money was wet, but he hoped
she wouldn’t notice, and it didn’t seem as if she did. Her
smile grew Wider, showing small white teeth.
“Oh, you very rich American gentleman, indeed! Please to
enter and be made welcome."
He did not see her touch anything, but the birdcage door slid
aside on noiseless tracks. Obviously someone else, observing
him from somewhere, had passed him on. He noted,
however, that the opposite door in the cage did not open at
the same time. It could be a trap. It could be that Prince
Ch’ing had even anticipated his doubling back to attack him
here. But there was no help for it. If he retreated now, he
would gain nothing and probably lose everything.
He stepped into the birdcage with the little Chinese girl, and
the gate slid silently shut behind him.
“What pleasures you like?” she Whispered. “You like gamble,
special foods, you like to buy dreams, maybe? We have
everything, all pleasures, for all men. You like a girl, you tell
me what kind, what color and shape. You like more than one?
You look very strong man, sir. What you like first?”
“A little food and a little gambling, maybe. I feel lucky,
tonight.”
“Yes, sir. Then you take the stairs to the right.”
The back gate of the bamboo birdcage with the steel doors
slid silently open and admitted him to the House of a
Thousand Pleasures.

chapter
ten
HIS IMMEDIATE objective was to lose himself in the
crowded public areas of Prince Ch’ing’s Wide-open
emporium of vice, lust, pleasure and greed. There might be
dedicated terrorists operating elsewhere in Pandakan, men
who schemed and plotted for this ideology or that, or
disillusioned colonists who saw four generations of labor and
property seized, burned or abandoned. But here in Ch’ing’s
establishment, nothing was changed from the days of old,
and vice operated at its normal lucrative pace.
It was difficult to believe that this vast, glittery, tawdry palace
of pleasure was built on piers over the slow tidal rise and fall
of the harbor, in the center of the tangled squalor of
Dendang. The gambling rooms were decorated with
streamers and lanterns and mirrors that reflected distorted
views of the roulette and fan-tan tables. From the top of the
wide stairway Durell stepped down onto a balcony that went
around all four walls above the gambling pit. There was even
a cockfighting arena at one end, patronized mostly by small
brown Malays. Another section was devoted to mah-jongg
players, dice, and the spinning wheels of fortune common to
any county carnival. Slot machines added to the clatter, and
the air was filled with the bright murmur of a dozen
languages, as brilliant as the varied batik clothing on men
and Women alike—white Indian dhotis, Malay sarongs and
bajus, Chinese slacks and jackets for the men, with Malay
kabaya, Chinese samfoo and cheongsam and Indian saris for
the women. Here and there, too, were youngsters in Western-
style blue jeans and shirttails. The hubbub of voices ranged
from Mandarin and Cantonese to Madurese and Bahasa.
Durell moved around the balcony, which was decorated with
small tables and an occasional private booth screened with
bamboo. On the walls were cages filled With monkeys,
lizards, parrots and an occasional bird of paradise, and the
food was as varied as the patrons—satay, meat grilled on
bamboo skewers, steaks of sea turtles that unluckily had
swum down from the South China Sea, spicy Indian chicken
and mutton curries. The waitresses were Malay or Chinese
girls in pert, provocative costumes. Durell moved to the next
balcony, watching in the occasional wall mirror that reflected
the teeming activity and noise on the floor below; but he
could not see that he was being followed. Ten minutes was all
the time he allotted, then he moved into a wide corridor
where customer traffic surged toward the dance hall where
couples pressed thickly together in the dim, rotating lights.
A voice spoke at his elbow.
“Have you not yet found what you seek, sir?”
It was the girl from the birdcage. She had exchanged her
simple costume for a shimmering blue silk sheath
embroidered with a golden Imperial Dragon of old Peking, a
symbol of the Manchus. Her young smile was warm, her lips
soft and moist-looking.
“Not yet," Durell said.
“You did not seem like a man seeking obvious pleasures.
Dancing, food, gambling—these are not for you. Something
more must be available to please you.”
“What do you suggest? And have you a name?”
“I am called Paradise,” she said gently. When he refrained
from making an obvious remark, she said, “Perhaps it is the
House of Dreams that you Wish? We could give you privacy,
very nice, very comfortable, a girl to prepare your pipe and
recite poetry to you—”
“Prince Ch’ing seems to think of everything. Does he manage
this by himself?"
“The prince is the master of all you see,” she murmured.
“Including yourself?"
“He is my employer, sir. Have you decided what you wish?”
“Do you think I could see him?” he asked bluntly. When she
looked blank, he said: “Prince Ch’ing—I would like to meet
him.”
“But why?”
“Let‘s just call it a business deal."
“You would have to go through—how you say?—official
channels?" She smiled brightly and meaninglessly. “He is
very busy, important man. Very few people see him.”
“Is Prince Ch’ing here now?”
“I cannot say. If you cannot find what you seek in his House,
however, he will be most disappointed. He prides himself on
providing all that man can dream of or desire."
“I’m sure of it,” Durell said grimly. “Every vice and rotten lust
in the human soul, at reasonable and even cut-rate prices.
Maybe even on the credit plan, right, Paradise?“
“I do not understand. sir,” she murmured.
He patted her cheek. “You don’t have to, maiden of the
Flowery Kingdom. Is the prince with the girls?”
“Usually, sir."
“Let's go there, then. Just point the way.”
She looked puzzled and worried. He was sure he had been
spotted when he entered the House of a Thousand Pleasures.
and he was equally certain she was assigned to bird-dog his
moves. But if anything was known about him, Prince Ch’ing
would know it, and pretty girls and a weakness for them was
not in his dossier. He had the feeling that from somewhere in
this vast, noisy palace of entertainment, Prince Ch’ing
watched and was amused by him.
Paradise led him to a flight of stairs where another girl, also
wearing the Imperial Dragon, gently guided him away from
the public corridors to a quiet, carpeted stairway and wide
corridor decorated with old Chinese porcelains and scrolls.
He did not feel flattered by being rated a better-paying client.
The upper corridor was illuminated by soft oil lamps behind
traditional ruby-red glass. Cloying incense filled the air. A
girl in a red and gold sarong smiled from a doorway of carved
teakwood; and from behind another doorway he heard a
small, muffled scream. No one seemed concerned, and he
decided it was one of Prince Ch’ing’s thousand pleasures.
A dim lobby, Chinese in decor but with an Arabian Nights’
heaping of pillows and silk and tapestry, suitably adorned
with women of all sizes, shapes, colors and ages, met him
when he paused on the next threshold. Here Paradise waited
for him again, and he wondered how she had gotten ahead of
him. Her face was pale under masklike makeup, and her eyes
avoided his. From among the groups of calm, nude women, a
very ancient, incredibly wrinkled old woman in heavy silken
robes arose to survey him with eyes like dark raisins in a face
of spoiled suet. Incense coiled from a brass brazier set before
a many-armed, many-breasted, lewdly smiling image set
prominently in a niche behind the old woman. The walls were
painted with murals that depicted an astonishing variety of
Prince Ch’ing’s alleged pleasures.
The old woman spoke in a breathless English. “Mr. Durell,
surely you cannot he the fool you pretend to be.”
“I don‘! remember giving my name at the door,” he said, and
smiled.
“Was it necessary? You come here voluntarily where we
would have tried to persuade you to go. Why do you do it?
Why have you visited us so quickly?”
“So quickly?”
“You arrived in Pandakan only short hours ago,” the old
Witch breathed. “Miss Panapura flew off to her grandfather’s
schooner. You spent little time reaching this place. It is truly
remarkable. You are either very clever, very lucky, or very
stupid.”
“That’s quite a choice. Perhaps I can add two and two, and
come up with this place. Where did you learn English,
venerable grandmother?”
The old Chinese hag regarded him with malevolence. “I am
not your grandmother, and while I should be empress over
all China, in the name of the Manchu family, I find myself
mistress of a hundred and twenty girls, each different, and
they provide pleasure to men as I direct them. This may
not be considered honorable in your country, and it is
degrading to heavenly blood, blessed by tradition, but what
Prince Ch’ing says is good, is good; and what he says is bad,
is bad. He says you are very, very bad, Mr. Durell.”
“Well, it’s a topsy-turvy world, madam.” He smiled. “And
may I see the prince?“
“No. You are to be disposed of.”
“I see. Dropped down a chute to the lions?”
She smiled. “Perhaps. It depends on your degree of co-
operation. The speed of your action is disturbing. You are to
be questioned. If your answers are satisfactory, perhaps
nothing at all of consequence will happen to you. You may
even be persuaded to enjoy the pleasures of our girls. But if
we are not satisfied, Mr. Durell, I fear you know what must
be done with you.”
“I’ll speak to Prince Ch‘ing," Durell conceded.
“He is too busy to see you. You will speak with one of his
managers.”
“It‘s Prince Ch’ing, or nobody.”
“Are you in a position to argue, Mr. Durell? Please to look
about you," the old woman said.
He heard the swift, heavy footsteps of men threading their
Way among the heaped-up cushions and dimly gleaming
ivory, brown and black hips and thighs and breasts of the
silently watching girls.
He was expected, he supposed, to yield in despair to the
overwhelming odds. But the only hope for success was to do
just the opposite. He was certain that the old harridan before
him was someone of importance; perhaps she managed all
this, and she might even be the brains behind Prince Ch’ing.
But she was important, no doubt of it, and she carried herself
with an air of accustomed command.
He did not turn as the footsteps rushed up behind him.
The old woman stepped back, but not quickly enough. He
had no time for courtesy or gentility. He caught her pipe-
stem arm under the heavy brocaded silk and swung her about
with enough violence to lift her literally from her feet and
place her abruptly between the three ugly brutes who
approached and himself.
They skidded to a halt.
“Tell them to stop, grandmother,” Durell said softly. “Unless
they care to stick their knives through you.”
The three men were big and square-shouldered, with shaved
skulls and slanted, glittering eyes in brutal faces. Steel
flickered in their hands. Durell felt the old woman writhe like
an animated skeleton in his grip, but he did not relent.
“Hold still,” he said. “You seem rather brittle.”
“Monster!” she hissed. “How dare you touch me!”
“Send your children away, or your arm might be broken. At
your age, grandmother, it takes a while to knit bones.”
She spat out a clicking, nasal stream of vituperative
Mandarin, but he guessed she was assailing the three
chagrined musclemen for their slowness rather than wasting
her breath on Durell. He backed away with her slowly until
he felt the wall at his back. In this dim, rosy light that might
have served for a sultan’s palace of concubines, he noted
again the erotic tapestries and murals, the astonishing
postures of male and female nudes in bronze and paint, and
the quiet eyes of the score or more of women lounging in the
room as so much decoration.
“Send your playboys away, grandma,” he said harshly.
“I cannot,” the old woman gasped. “They do not obey me.”
“Don’t lie now. It’s a bad time for it.”
“Imperialist spy! American fool! They only wish to escort you
to Prince Ch’ing. You saboteur, you pif of a Western agent of
colonialism, you agitator-”
He squeezed her arm and she hissed with pain. “I’ve heard
that recording before, and it’s a bit worn. Even the Soviets
don’t waste their breath using such old-fashioned terms
today. But Peiping is like a kid stumbling on a chest of new
toys, right? Forget ‘em, grandmother. I’ll give you a count of
three to get your playboys away from the bunnies and out of
here.”
“I do not understand your speech. I cannot —”
He started to count, and suddenly knew the old woman was
terrified; she might be telling the truth. The three knifemen
were circling Warily, their blades in plain sight, their broad
yellow faces blank, their eyes opaque. There was a rustling as
the staring, silent girls drew away. And at that moment a
door opened to his left and three more girls in thin, silken
robes that concealed nothing and exaggerated everything,
entered the room, chattering with animation. Durell took
quick advantage of the interruption.
He thrust the old beldame abruptly into the arms of the
nearest thug and leaped over a banquette of plum-colored
satin directly into a mass of naked girls. Their shrieks and
cries mingled with the scream of the old woman and the
bellows of the three men. The door behind the three
newcomers was still open. He swung through it into a long
corridor lined with red carpeting and more pornographic wall
paintings. The doors on either hand were closed, but there
was dim, atonal music from somewhere, and a man’s voice,
thickened with pleasure, touched him. He ran to the end of
the corridor.
A flight of steps went up and down, and ahead was a small
balcony open to the night air. There was a wide central court,
one flight down, a small formal garden lit by glowing stone
lanterns, with formalized Chinese shrubbery. In the center of
the garden was a tall, needlelike pagoda, the obvious center
of Prince Ch’ing’s astonishing complex of pleasure houses.
The thud of running footsteps behind Durell alerted him. He
slashed at a heavy curtain, set it to swinging as if he brushed
it going up the stairs, and turned in the opposite direction,
dropping quickly down to the level of the garden courtyard.
For the moment, he had divided his pursuers. Two had been
misled and run up the stairs. But one of them chose to
descend to the garden.
Durell waited in the shadows behind a tall stone lantern. The
man was fast and reckless, a kris gleaming in his fist. Durell
chopped at the back of a thick, fatty neck, striking to paralyze
the neural center. The man dropped head-first into the
sunken lily pool, making the big golden carp thrash in alarm.
The noise seemed loud, but there was no alarm, and Durell
pulled the man‘s face out of the water and ran for the pagoda
entrance, assuming that this must surely be the central
control area of the place. If Prince Ch’ing could be found
anywhere, it would be here.
There were outside stairs winding up the exterior walls, with
open windows and doors. Thick glass partitions revealed a
series of interior tableaux, of men and women in dimly
lighted, silken webs of tangled arms and legs in incredible
posturings. He reflected briefly that there was no accounting
for taste, and came abruptly to the top of the outer stairs.
From the garden below came shouts of anger as men poured
in from all directions, He had to get out of sight. He chose the
first door, tried the handle, found it unlocked, and stepped
in.
Two girls, one golden and one ebony, turned on their
cushions to glare at him. They had been attending to a stout,
matronly woman. Durell put a cautionary finger to his lips,
surprising them with his conspiratorial request for silence,
and ran across to the opposite door.
He found himself facing an elevator shaft that yawned open
behind a flimsy sliding gate. He looked down. Five floors
below was a glimmer of black harbor water. Above was the
bottom side of the elevator cage itself.
If Prince Ch’ing were here, he must be one flight up, where
the elevator had been halted. Durell found a flight of steps
and took them three at a time.
The Manchu pretender waited for him at the top.

chapter
eleven
THERE was only this one chamber at the top of the elaborate
pagoda spire, which Durell could see now had been
constructed as one vast symbol of erotic intent. This room
was obviously an office, a central command post for each of
the thousand pleasures dispensed in Prince Ch’ing‘s house.
Astonishingly, the prince was alone.
He was bigger than any man Durell had ever seen before. His
Chinese skin was the color of old ivory, and just as bloodless.
He wore a vast, golden-embroidered mandarin’s coat, but he
did not adorn his head with the traditional cap and peacock
feather. His skull looked small, abnormally tiny on his
monstrous and massive shoulders, his pendulous chest and
enormous, bulging belly. His feet were invisible under the
cloak. So were his hands, lost in the voluminous sleeves. His
face was shaven except for a long, thin mandarin’s
moustache, a jet-black that matched the heavy, furry
caterpillars of brows above his eyes. His bald scalp gleamed
with scented oil.
“Come in, come in, Mr. Durell,” Ch’ing said in Oxford
accents. “Truly, you are an impetuous man."
There was the hammering of pursuing feet behind him.
“Call off your dogs first.” Durell took his gun and thrust it at
Ch’ing’s huge belly. He did not know if it would fire, after his
swim, but Ch’ing didn’t know that, either. “Call them off
quickly, please.”
“Naturally. No need for us to be antagonists, sir.” The huge
man turned his head slowly. “Paradise, my dear?“
From the shadowed corner of the ornate tower room stepped
the girl he had first met in the birdcage. Again she had
changed her costume, this time to something silk and
transparent to exhibit the tempting roundness of her body.
She tapped a felt-headed stick to a golden gong. The note
reverberated softly and the rushing footsteps halted. A man
called querulously. Prince Ch’ing nodded to the girl again and
Paradise struck the gong a second time.
“Now we will not be disturbed, Mr. Durell. Please make
yourself comfortable. Paradise will bring you tea, food,
anything you may desire.”
“She can't make Simon Smith live again, can she?”
“Alas, no. But we are not immediately responsible for his
death. The injuries that hospitalized him in the first place are
the cause of his dying.”
“After your‘ hatchet men snatched him.”
“That was indeed unfortunate.”
“What did you want from a simple sailor, Prince Ch’ing?"
The enormous, fat man smiled silently. Paradise came and
knelt and took off one of his silken slippers and exposed a
tiny, almost feminine foot, soft and pink and ironically
delicate in view of the huge weight it must support. She
began to apply a creamy salve to the instep With the
practiced gestures of a masseuse.
“Forgive me, Mr. Durell. I suffer from certain decrepitudes.
One may be rich, but as every man knows, riches rarely buy
health. Such sayings are common to all men and all nations.
And why not? They are true. Ever since my imperial ancestor,
a prince of the Ch’ing house, came to the Spice Islands
centuries ago, there has been one of us here in Dendang, to
rule and help our people. You look skeptical of my title, you
see, and it may be well to clarify its validity for our future
negotiations. There was a Ch’ing here when the first
Portuguese sailors ventured dangerously on these seas in the
sixteenth century. Then there grew a powerful Sultanate of
Pandakan, aided by the old Sundanese Empire, and finally
the British East India Company came to these islands in
1787, and in a faraway city of Europe, traded them to the
Dutch for other concessions. Now the Hollanders are gone,
and the little Republic that ousted them is also shattered, and
we suffer military rule, under the estimable Colonel
Mayubashur. And the crowds in the street chant, ‘Merdekal
Merdekaf Freedom! Freedom!’ Freedom from what, Mr.
Durell?”
The Chinese prince smiled blandly. “Nothing will change.
The Ch’ings will remain. We are over three hundred islands
floating on the Sunda Shelf, surrounded by Pacific deeps
more deadly than the tides of politics that sweep the world.
The islands shall remain, however. And I, too. They may
change the name of our huge neighbor, Borneo, to
Kalimanten; but the jungles will stay there, the umbrella
trees and the malarial swamps and the Dyak and Dusan
peoples, simple and primitive souls, who need a father to
look after them.”
“And you are their self-appointed father, Prince Ch’ing?”
“They need me. And although I suffer, I serve them.”
“In the name of merdeka, of freedom?“ Durell asked. “I find
it difficult to feel pity for you. Nor have you answered my
question. Why did Simon Smith concern you at all?”
“You Americans are so direct! Ah, you spoil the pleasures of
bargaining. Obviously, Simon knew something of interest
and of use to me.”
“And what was that?”
“Alas, he did not live to tell me.”
“Why so anxious to question him at all?”
“Mr. Durell, you are an enigma here. I know who you are, you
see. But I am not quite sure why you are here. Let us he frank
with each other. My enterprises are imperiled by the quarrel
for sovereignty over the Tarakuta Islands. I am rich and
powerful, and although you may not approve of my means or
my source of wealth. this has been accomplished and is of no
further importance. We have embarked upon perilous times,
and the typhoon threatens us. I bragged a moment ago, when
I spoke of the timelessness of Tarakuta and Pandakan. I may
be in personal peril, you see. But it is not the kind of peril
that threatens you at this very moment.”
Ch’ing smiled at Durell’s gun, and spoke very softly. “What
would happen if it became known that an important agent of
the American CIA had arrived here in Pandakan at this
critical time? The news would echo around the world like a
thunderclap and bring charges of interference. Such charges
have been made before, and may be made again, eh? This
time, however, you may lose all the trust and respect you may
have won in this part of the globe. Do you understand me?”
“You know a great deal about me.”
“I have my sources of information,” Ch’ing said.
“Is Tommy Lee one of them?”
“Yes, but only one.” The grotesque, shaven head bobbed back
and forth briefly. “And it is well known that units of your
famous Seventh Fleet are venturing quite close to our island
waters. It makes the United Nations commissioners uneasy.
It makes those who claim hegemony over these islands even
more uneasy. Now you are here. If you should be found in
incriminating circumstances, seeking to agitate for one side
or another, it would create quite an international scandal,
one would think.”
“As you well know," Durell said, “I am not here for any
political purposes.”
“I know nothing,” Ch’ing smiled. “I do not know if you are a
fool or a brave man, to come here.”
“Must I be one or the other?”
“I think so. How many of your associates are within call, Mr.
Durell? Do you intend a raid upon my establishment as your
prohibition agents once raided speakeasies in your country?
Surely you did not come here alone, so brashly, to ask about a
Papuan sailor who owed me something
for gambling debts and needed to be exposed as an example
to others who fail to pay up.”
“Simon did not gamble here,” Durell ventured.
“Did you know him?"
“I know that isn’t the reason you snatched him."
“Can you suggest any other reason, sir?”
Durell said coldly: “That's why I am here. I also want to know
how you managed to kill Commander Holcomb, off the
Andrew Jackson.”
He let the names drop into a silence so vast, so vibrant, so
filled with venom as to seem like a pit of snakes. He knew he
breached security to mention either Holcomb or the
submarine. But the risk proved worth it.
Durell had never subscribed to the myth of Oriental
inscrutability. Chinese betrayed shock, surprise, pain or
alarm the same as anyone else. Prince Ch’ing had an
advantage in the thick folds, pads and layers of fat that
enveloped his carcass. But the stillness with which he looked
at Durell was eloquent enough. He knew he had managed to
slice through the suet to something vital.
The plump, bejeweled hand that absently caressed the black
silken hair of Paradise as she knelt at his feet was abruptly
still. Then the fat fingers coiled and twisted thickly in the
girl’s coiffure. She made a quick whimpering sound of pain
and the huge fat man kicked at her and sent her rolling over
and over across the floor.
“Clumsy child!” he screamed. “Out of my sight!”
“B-but sir, I did nothing—”
“Get out!”
Paradise went white with terror and regret. Durell wondered
in passing what punishment Ch’ing usually meted out to the
victims of his temper. But he did not take his eyes from that
vast moon face and the two raisin eyes in the suety flesh.
Light slid along the bald, glistening scalp. The massive
shoulders shrugged under the thick brocaded silk robe.
“Your pardon, Mr. Durell. You have bewildered me, and I am
not accustomed to it. Perhaps you may elaborate. It would be
most appreciated.”
A voice spoke from nowhere, seemingly, in swift Mandarin
that was incomprehensible to Durell. The words had an
electronic timbre that indicated a modern intercom wired
under Prince Ch’ing’s trappings of incense. bronze Buddhas
and silken mysteries. The speaker, he decided, was behind a
glass case across the room that held a collection of old
Chinese porcelains, jades, and Javanese woodcarvings of
sawo, teak and jackwood, against a background of silk scrolls.
Prince Ch’ing’s head was cocked to one side, his shaggy
caterpillar brows lifting as his mouth drooped and he drew in
a long, slow, decisive breath. Ch’ing barked a single word at
the end of the report. The girl, Paradise, cowered in a corner
with a hand to her mouth.
Prince Ch’ing looked slowly at Durell. “Sir, you placed your
hands on my mother, it is said.”
“If the old lady downstairs is your mother, yes, I did.”
“You treated her with rudeness and discourtesy.”
“Well, she runs the women‘s end of this establishment.“
Durell laughed with deliberate insolence. “And it seems quite
fitting.”
“What is fitting, Mr. Durell, is that you will now die, whatever
the consequences.”
“Tell me about Holcomb, first," Durell said easily.
But Prince Ch’ing had changed. Somewhere a raw nerve had
been exposed and hung, quivering and crawling, twisting the
fat man’s face. He stood up with remarkable speed and spoke
aloud to the hidden intercom system. The lights flicked out.
Durell found himself in sudden, complete darkness.
Paradise screamed.
He could not tell if her scream was one of pain or simple
surprise. But he was aware of swift movement ahead and to
his right. He jumped for Prince Ch’ing, knowing his only
safety lay in being close to this massive man. But where
Ch’ing had stood, there was nothing. He swung left, toward
Paradise. He could see nothing in the absolute blackness,
Something hissed through the air and thudded into a pillow.
It had to be a knife. Which meant that Ch‘ing was already
gone, out of danger, and he was trapped here, like a mouse in
a bottle, with no way out and no hope of eluding the attack.
In another moment the lights would come on and his
situation would be hopeless.
He slammed into Paradise, knowing instantly it was she from
the silken contact of her body. She stifled a scream. He
hauled her aside in the darkness and a knife thudded into the
teak paneling. The girl writhed frantically in his grip.
“Paradise, you’ve heard too much, he’ll kill you, too, don‘t
you see? You’ve got to help me!”
She trembled in his arms. He could see nothing of her. A
voice echoed like a rolling wave through the dark room.
“Durell!” It was Prince Ch’ing, on the intercom. “Give it up
and answer my questions, and you may live. Otherwise —”
The girl breathed: “He lies. This way.”
She pulled him to the right. He stumbled over a fat pillow,
and the girl also fell. A shot exploded, the muzzle flame
splitting their inky, luxurious prison with a brief glimpse of
the room. Shadows jumped and slid around them. Durell
fired at the other muzzle flare. But the hammer clicked
uselessly; his gun was still wet from his swim in the canals.
“Hurry!” Paradise whimpered.
But then she halted and he bumped into her yielding body. A
panel slid aside and a gleam of light shone briefly. It was the
stairs to the lower level. A blind shot screamed after them.
Curtains hissed as Paradise pulled him through the archway.
He started down the stairs, but from below came the solemn
boom of a gong, and a rush of sandals coming up toward
them. He halted with the girl before the elevator pit. The cage
was above them, since they had descended one level. The
barrier gate was of ornate, but flimsy, bamboo. Obviously,
they couldn't get out by way of the stairs. Nor could they use
the elevator. But—
“We can swim, or take our chances with Ch’ing,” he decided,
watching the girl. “Ch’ing Will kill you, too, because he forgot
you were in the room, Paradise.” He looked over the bamboo
elevator gate into the deep pit. “So we have to jump.
Far down the shaft, he saw the murky harbor water, on which
these houses and entire complex palace had been built. The
elevator cables were motionless. It would be tricky to avoid
their loops in the jump. He tore the bamboo gate loose. From
below came shouts, above the repeated reverberations of the
gong. The girl drew back from the shaft in pale fright.
“Do you know how deep the water is?” he asked.
“I have no idea. It is so far down. . . .”
“Well, we can’t stay here. Jump, Paradise.”
She looked at him dubiously, trustingly, then leaped feet first
down the dark shaft. He watched her silken clothing balloon
up above her head, glimpsed her legs bared by the rush of
wind in her fall, saw her graze one of the cables for a heart-
stopping instant. Then there was a small, forlorn splash as
she hit the water four levels below.
He waited and watched.
She did not come up.
A man shouted. A dozen of Ch’ing‘s tong hatchet men
stumbled up the landing. There was no time to wait or
ponder.
Durell went through the bamboo gate and jumped as the girl
had done, feet first, down to the black, glimmering water far
below.

chapter
twelve
HE HAD known few moments in his life when he was so sure
of impending death. In the seconds of his fall, he counted his
chances and felt that every fraction of his survival factor had
abruptly swung to zero. He could be impaled hideously on
hidden pilings just under the water's surface. He could strike
one of the elevator cables and be snared and hung up, with
an arm or leg wrenched from its socket, or, if lucky, have his
neck broken instantly. The water might be clear, but too
shallow; he could plummet so deeply into the ooze of the
bottom that he might stick there, like a fly caught on gooey
paper, with no time to free himself before his lungs burst for
lack of air.
Yet there was also in that moment of death a sense of clarity,
of freezing calm, that had helped him on other occasions. He
could not explain the sensation. It had come to him before,
when he gambled, or found himself in an impossible corner.
It was a feeling that a cold assessment of his survival factors
would show him a way out. And it usually did.
He smashed through the oily surface of black water cleanly,
without a flaw. There was no shock, for the harbor water was
warm, scarcely less so than the air. He went down and down
and felt something snatch at his shoulder and tear at the
fabric of the coolie jacket he wore. Barnacles, perhaps, on the
stilts that supported Prince Ch’ing’s pleasure palaces. The
instant his feet struck the yielding ooze of bottom mud, he
struggled sidewise, careful that in his momentum he didn‘t
smash his brains out against a pier. For a panicky moment he
felt something pluck and seize at his trouser leg; it was a
piece of flotsam, as sharp and smooth as a spear point. He
doubled over and tore the trouser leg open, underwater. His
leg was bleeding. It did not matter. He was only concerned
with the bursting in his chest as his lungs began to scream for
air.
He surfaced in the unreal, familiar gloom below the stilts and
pilings of Dendang, a gloom streaked yellow with distant
light glimmers, lapping softly about him, filled with the odors
of decay and soft white growing things he did not identify.
Close overhead was a tangle of timbers cross-hatched and
strutted to support a solid floor from which streamed many
long, mossy growths, like the beards of ten thousand Taoist
monks, some of which reached into the oily water. He heard a
distant, echoing splash. Light came and went. A dull
pounding shook the air briefly. He turned and twisted,
treading water.
“Paradise?” he called softly.
There was no reply.
Neither was there any pursuit. He saw the square of light
glimmering on the water where the elevator shaft Ended a bit
to his left, and a coil of the cable was moving as if the cage
were being used. Prince Ch’ing, no doubt. A clattering of
Cantonese reached him curiously garbled, echoing.
“Paradise?” he called again.
Something splashed behind a barricade of pilings. He swam
carefully toward it, pulling himself along by cross-struts
stints between the piers, sometimes swimming across brief
open areas. Light glimmered from a klong ahead, crowded
with sampans, and the familiar odor of charcoal cooking and
rice pots touched him. Water suddenly gurgled and splashed
heavily nearby. Something flopped and gasped like a pale fish
on the planks that formed a walk under the floor of the
buildings overhead.
“Paradise?” he called softly.
“I am here, Mr. Durell."
‘He reached her with several swift strokes and hauled himself
out upon the plank beside her. The yellow lantern light from
the canal filtered in with long, irregular fingers to touch her
wet body, the clinging strands of green moss wound between
her breasts and thighs. She was struggling to free herself
from these unnatural bonds, her face ghostly in the pale light.
“I’m glad you’re safe,” he whispered.
She shrugged, her smile bland. “Oh, I hated Prince Ch’ing. All
his girls hate him. He would have killed me, for amusement,
for strange moment of pleasure to self.” Her round, flower
face was concerned. “But you bleed from your leg—”
It’s just a scratch. I grant you, this looks like a poisonous
world down here. I’ll attend to it after we get out of here.”
But I cannot help, she said. “We call this the land of evil
tigers. Many people live down there—those who have no
house, no sleeping mat on a sampan, or who hide from the
police. Such people live here under the houses and they are
like wild animals, who kill for a bite of food or a copper coin.”
She shuddered, leaning wetly against him. He said: “What
will you do, though, if we escape from here?”
“Oh, I have relatives who will send me to Manila, out of
Ch’ing‘s reach. It will be all right. You owe me nothing.”
Her eyes looked luminous, with a childlike innocence. There
was a phosphorescence in the water that created eerie
illusions, he saw. The girl clung to him for a moment,
shivering, then drew back and said: “You must lead us out of
this evil place. The thought of the white tigers frightens me as
much as Prince Ch’ing.”
It was not easy to orient himself. Voices called, echoing with
subtle distortions in this world of half water, half air, roofed
with a sky of scabrous moss and barnacled under-floors.
Among the people who lived and ate and slept and made love
down here, nothing could be normal. The shouting came
nearer, preceded by a bobbing lamp that approached with
appalling speed. This whole area was webbed with plank
walks almost submerged at the water level under the sea
village. Whether the men approaching were Ch’ing’s men or
not, they would be ready to rob and kill.
Durell took the girl’s hand and they ran along the slippery
planks, ducking their heads to clear the supporting timbers
above, clambering over struts and props, stumbling and
sometimes losing the direct way to find themselves in sudden
cul-de-sacs. The pursuit was relentless, led by a growing
number of bobbing flares, with a vanguard of threatening
shouts and ululating cries. The girl slid and fell from the
slimy walk with a cry of distress, splashing into the water.
Durell hauled her out swiftly. She trembled with fatigue, and
obviously could not go on much longer. Equally
obvious, their pursuers knew their way through this watery,
ghoulish labyrinth so expertly that in another few moments
they would be surrounded by gleaming, murderous faces
above equally gleaming, murderous knives.
His only hope was to locate and reach the Tarakuta, out in
the harbor somewhere. Which meant they had to come to the
surface, to the crowded world of canals, walks and houses,
whatever the risk from Ch‘ing‘s men.
“Just a little longer, Paradise,” he promised.
He half carried her toward an area of saffron light that
filtered down between the buildings ahead. If they could
mingle with the crowds in the canals, in the marketplaces
and teahouses and street stalls, until he reached the harbor
edge and perhaps signaled to the schooner—
He found a ladder, and beyond it an open canal, and at once
he knew his sense of direction had not failed him. No boats
were visible except a modern dinghy with an outboard motor
on it. There was no name on the dinghy, but the little boat
gave him both hope and suspicion. They had reached the
outskirts of Fishtown to face the open harbor. He felt a quick
satisfaction in viewing the darkness beyond, the distant
flicker and flare of colored boat lights. One of them was the
Tarakuta, which he had sent for, offering help and safety.
If he could reach it in time.
He spared a hasty moment to search the dinghy and came up
with a three-cell flashlight from under the stem thwart. The
air felt clean and fresh here. He helped Paradise up the crude
ladder of bamboo slats and followed quickly. Their pursuers
were close behind—too close for comfort. He scrambled up
hastily, searching beyond a rickety platform above the dinghy
for a sign of the schooner which must, by now, be moored
somewhere nearby.
He spotted it after a moment, her sleek white hull a few
hundred yards to the south of the canal end where he stood
with the girl. He squeezed the flashlight button rapidly in a
Morse signal for Malachy McLeod or Willi, praying one or
both might still be aboard.
There was no reply.
He wondered if his beam could be seen easily, and in his
haste to move farther along the rickety platform, he ignored
his habitual caution and did not pause before turning the
proverbial corner.
It was a moment of dismay and disaster.
He heard Paradise scream, a quick, shrill yip of fear, and he
heard the quick step behind him and then the whistle of a sap
descending on the back of his head. Pain was expertly
detonated behind his red ear, and red flares filled the
universe and then faded to soft darkness as he pitched
forward into emptiness.

chapter
thirteen
THE sea whispered seductively, and there was the brightness
of an intolerable, tropic dawn in his eyes. The world lifted
and fell, carrying him forward on the surges of global tides,
with soft susurrations of sound and a clear whimpering of
wind and the occasional slap and rattle of canvas and blocks.
He gritted his teeth to hold on to his stomach, thanks to a
pulsing headache and the queasy movement under him. He
felt about cautiously. He was in a narrow hammock, and only
inches below his swinging rump was a polished plank deck,
already hot to the touch. He opened his eyes and stared
straight into an enormous, blazing white sun, and shut them
again.
“You crazy Cajun,” someone said.
The world tilted far over and someone called a soft order and
blocks and sails rattled and slatted and he knew he was on a
boat, and a sailing boat at that, under full way, racing the
dawn breeze. He opened his eyes and turned his head aside
and looked up, into Malachy McLeod’s red beard.
“Nice to have you return from the land of Nod, Sam’l me
boy,” said Malachy. “Are you surprised at seeing it is me?”
“Was it you who slugged me?”
“It was. A regrettable error."
“And the girl? Is she—?"
“Safe and sound, and as pretty a piece as I’ve seen in a long
time. You have a sure affinity for lovely females, Samuel, that
never seems to desert you.”
“Shut the blathering,” Durell said.
“ 'Tis deserving you are of every ache and pain you suffer, for
trying what you did last night. But I take off me hat,
figuratively speaking, for that in which you succeeded.”
“I succeeded in little, Malachy.” '
“You may decide differently. A bit of coffee, with rum in it?”
“Yes, please."
He could see clearly now. First there was the boat, a lovely,
clean-lined, clipper-bowed schooner that seemed to belong to
the Maine coast, in another age. The taut, gaff-rigged canvas
was bleached a blinding white by the equatorial suns and
rains of fifty years, and her tall pine masts towered skyward
against a heathenish heaven of brass. The scrubbed deck was
as white as her canvas, and the teak railings were polished
the color of very old honey. He turned his head, and pain
thrust at the back of his skull. An old man who looked much
like his grandpa Jonathan, except for the unmistakable
Polynesian cocoa of his skin, held the wheel, serenely guiding
the ship as she heeled through greenish, milky seas. Several
Malay boys served as crew, on deck and in the rigging. The
wind blew with a hard freshness, considering the white
clarity of the sky and the enormous heat of the morning sun.
Beyond the port rails were a hundred islands of mangrove
and swamp, slowly gliding by. The channel looked narrow
and devious. No other vessels or humans were in sight,
ashore or on the empty sea.
He returned his gaze to Dr. Malachy McLeod.
The bearded Malachy had a vast mane of red hair blowing in
tangles in the dawn wind. He had a chest as solid as a keg of
Irish whiskey, and a face that, bewhiskered or not, was as
taut as a poet's and as competent as the ship. Malachy spoke
with a deliberately exaggerated brogue.
“Sure, and you can guess this is the Tarakuta, Samuel —the
finest trading schooner in the Celebes and Sulu Seas. ’Twas I
who coshed you, thinkin’ you was some heathen devil chasm‘
after the poor girl named Paradise. We were lookin’ for you,
having received your message from the consulate, and
figurin’ you wanted the ship in the harbor. Where? says I. Off
Dendang, says Willi. So then we saw the Morse code, and we
were already ashore, worryin’ for fear you were foolhardy
enough to seek to slay the monster, our own Prince Ch’ing, in
the very heart of his evil den. ‘Twas sore worried Willi was,
indeed, and I admit to instant jealousy, me Cajun boy. Willi
herself interpreted your message as to where you might be
needin’ us.”
“And where is Willi now?" Durell smiled.
“Behind ye, lad, and don’t stare too hard.”
She came carrying coffee like an island goddess risen from
the sea, bearing in her hands an amphora of sacred oils. Willi
Panapura in her shorts, in the Luakulani Palms on Oahu, had
been something to study. Here on the White, scrubbed deck
of the Tarakuta, in the swaying shadows of the sun-bleached
sails, and wearing her diving bikini and an air of feminine
pride and mystery, and little else, Willi was beyond words.
She smiled and knelt gracefully beside Durell’s hammock and
handed him the coffee mug like an offering made by a
Polynesian goddess. Her eyes locked with his, then
disengaged and searched upward for Dr. McLeod. “Has
Malachy been using the brogue he learned when he played in
The Informer at the Yale Drama School, ages ago? And is he
still playing at being a spy?”
Durell said: “In self-defense, it wasn’t so long ago. We were
doing postgraduate work then. The critics ignored him, but
he himself decided he was grand. And still thinks so.”
“Malachy, I apologize," Willi said contritely. “But please drop
the phony brogue instantly. The Irishisms affect my stomach
like a following sea.“
McLeod laughed and spoke in a normal American accent.
“Sorry, darling. Being an extracurricular agent involves some
histrionics, as I see it. I get carried away.”
The way Malachy’s eyes dwelt on Willi's golden image made
it plain he was hopelessly in love with her. But Durell was not
sure that Willi responded. He could sense that Willi was
intrigued by his own appearance, after all the years of their
childhood antagonisms. All the flattering little signs were
there. But he was not happy about it. His work was lonely
and dangerous, most often performed in squalor, with too
many moments of despair and terror. Willi did not belong in
that world. Nor could she ever belong to him. Yet he was
aware of temptation. Did his work demand that he give up all
hope of someone like Willi? He did not approve of emotion
mixed with his work. It slowed the reflexes, distracted the eye
from the shadow that might be fatal, the hinted image of a
lurking assassin. Love was a luxury he had been forced to
deny too long. Was it too late to turn back, to ask for what
Willi might offer? Durell would have shrugged off any
suggestion that he was a patriot, totally dedicated to his
work. But each time his annual contract with K Section came
up for appraisal and evaluation, he knew an agony that was
eased only when the issue was settled for another year. His
work was more than his business, simply. It demanded a
complete integration of what he was and what he must make
of himself in order to survive and function usefully.
He pushed aside the thought of any romantic idylls with
Willi. It was too late for that, yes. He even regretted the
tension that existed already, this triangular tautness between
himself, Malachy and the girl, that could be so dangerous to
their success, to their continued lives. Malachy had become
moodily withdrawn as Willi knelt beside the hammock and
handed him the rum-laced coffee.
“Does your head still hurt?” she asked.
“Malachy is enthusiastic and accurate.” Durell winced and
gasped at the sixty percent rum in the coffee. He stood up,
and the deck tilted one Way and he tilted another. He sat
down and then tried again. This time he managed to keep on
his feet while the horizon swam about. The sky was cobalt,
the sea a lime green, the islands a darker, ominous green,
implying fetid swamps and desperate shadows. He steadied
his gaze on the horizon. After a time the coffee and rum
stopped sloshing about and performed its designed function.
He felt better. He said: “Are we sailing anywhere in
particular?”
“I thought we should wait for you,” Malachy said. He spoke
tersely. “You're in charge of the apparatus and the operation
—such as it is.”
“I’d like to see where Willi found Commander Holcomb’s
body," Durell said.
Willi suggested: “That was on the east shore of Bangka, as I
told you. About two hours’ sail from here."
“Good enough.” He waited while she called to the man at the
schooner’s wheel and the course was changed. Then he
waved toward the mangrove islets. “Who lives over there?”
“Just some Dusuns who work at lumbering. We just passed
one of their logging ponds. Very decent people, really.”
Durell looked at Malachy. “But no sign of the Jackson?”
“Nothing. No wreckage, no rumors of survivors."
“Did you check the kampongs?”
“Everything, Sam. Nobody has heard a thing.”
As if to mock Malachy, a dim howling came from the cobalt
sky. It was an unnatural interruption to the sounds of wind
and sail and sea, and it wove like a surgeon’s scalpel through
the hiss of the bow wave. Durell looked at the faint vapor trail
in the sky to the north. The howling grew louder
momentarily, then faded.
“One of ours?” Malachy asked.
Durell shook his head. He knew the sound of the new Soviet
MIGs, and this was one of them. The Seventh Fleet units
outside Tarakuta territorial waters would he out searching,
too, but the howl of evil up there had come either from
Indonesia or from the Malaysia Federation. They were all
involved in a giant chess game, he thought, in which pieces
were released to control certain areas of the global
chessboard. Neither side dared to begin an exchange, since
the end result was beyond calculation. No one could foresee
which might be the deciding, surviving piece of artillery. That
howling plane up there might be one of Sukarno’s, or from
Malaya, and it might meet with one from the Seventh Fleet.
He shook his head slightly.
“What is it?” Malachy asked.
“It seems to me that the former colonies here are infected
with a neo-imperialism of their own, now that they are
independent. The world is full of ironies.” He looked at the
bearded man. “And plenty full of sad, Irish philosophers,
Malachy.”
Somewhere in this tangle of sea and island, Durell thought,
there was one reality, and that was a submarine, huge and
black, the most modern, lethal fighting engine yet devised,
with a crew of brave men, a nuclear engine of the latest
design, and sixteen A-3 Polaris missiles that packed a
devastating wallop. The A-3 was a ninety percent new missile
ranking with the best of the land-based rockets, its payload a
one megaton-warhead that could fly 2,875 miles from sub to
target. Unlike the early “mud-sucker” Polaris subs that had to
operate close to shore because their A-1 missile range was
only 1,300 miles, the Jackson’s flexibility was enormous. Her
submerged displacement of 8,000 tons compared to that of a
pocket battleship, and from hundreds of miles offshore, she
could strike Peiping from the Arctic or wipe out the Siberian
industrial complex of Irkutsk while submerged in the China
Sea off Shanghai.
Communications with this class of ship were considered —
and had to be—tamper-proof. Each of her city-busting A-3’s
was always electronically zeroed in on selected targets.
How could the Jackson simply disappear?
She might be on the bottom, crushed to rubbish by the awful
pressures of the Pacific deeps, due to some natural calamity.
But he did not think so. He felt sure the Jackson was here,
within reach, somewhere in this empty, drowned sea of
molten lead and patchy green, labyrinthine island channels.
He had to find the Jackson, and it had to be done soon.

Willi changed the bandage on the back of his head and took a
breakfast tray from the Malay cook. The eggs were small, the
bacon canned, the coffee flavored with chicory. She looked as
if she would have liked to spoon-feed him, and Malachy
glowered in his beard and stared at the horizon.
“You gave us such a fright, Samuel,” Willi murmured. “We
received your message to come into Pandakan Harbor, but
then we did not know what to do. If not for your signal, and a
bit of luck, being on hand—” She paused. “We’ve learned the
nurse, Yoko Hanamutra, got safely out of Dendang, by the
way. Malachy used the radio-phone to make inquiries. What I
don’t understand is why you went up against Ch’ing all alone.
Not even the police, or Colonel Mayubashur, challenge that
monster’s control over Dendang.”
“Well, someone should. Prince Ch’ing interests me,” Durell
said. He considered the girl and saw no point to keeping his
thoughts to himself. “I have to operate on the assumption
that whatever happened to the missing sub was not a natural
accident. Everything points to human interference—
otherwise, how did Pete Holcomb get ashore, and how did he
receive his injuries? He was tortured, you said, and hurt
deliberately, by men, not in an accident. And he asked for
me, which meant it fell within the scope of my business.
Otherwise, he simply would have asked for maritime aid,
shipping assistance—that sort of thing.” He paused. “No, we
have to assume a human agent in what happened to the
submarine.”
“But I still don’t see—” Willi began.
“Why I’m interested in Prince Ch’ing? To hijack an item like a
Polaris sub isn’t a picayune job, Willi. It takes organization
and a lot of men. And Ch‘ing has both. We haven’t really
‘been able to appraise the political orientation of the Oceanic
Chinese people in this area; they might be loyal to local
government, and they might obey Peiping, either out of
conviction or blackmail pressure because of relatives at
home. I won’t be satisfied until we've turned our fat prince
inside out and have seen what makes him tick." Durell
finished his coffee. “The girl last night—Paradise—was a big
help. You did say she got safely away? She’s a nice
youngster.”
“Nice? Working for Ch‘ing?” Willi sniffed.
“Your prudery is showing. She saved my life.”
Willi‘s voice had cooled some twenty degrees. “She and Yoko
are both safe, we think. Yoko is still looking for Tommy Lee,
who seems to have vanished completely.”
“I’d like to get my hands on Lee,” Malachy grunted. “Do you
think he sold out, Cajun?"
“It’s a question. He could have been tempted by Colonel
Mayubashur, who seems to want independence for the whole
island group. Any of the other interested parties may have
offered him something substantial—Malaysia, or Big Brother
Sukarno, or the Red Chinese. Yes, I think cur Tommy Lee is
playing a double game.”
Malachy tugged at his beard. “Peiping is a long way from
here, though. We’ve got lots of Hakka people in the
archipelago—Chinese from Southwest China, originally—but
they’re good, loyal folk, here for generations. Still, some of
their labor trade unions might contain Communist cells. As
for Prince Ch’ing—well, he makes me nervous, Cajun, I must
admit. Too rich and too fat and too immoral, a millionaire
gangster Who plays Big Daddy to the locals, like an old-time
ward heeler handing out food baskets to the needy voters. He
owns the House of Pleasure, which you seem to have
explored thoroughly.” McLeod paused and Willi bit her lip.
“Ch’ing‘s pretensions as a prince of the Manchus may be just
a vanity, sure, but he owns one of the major islands here,
with tin sluice mines, and has a thousand Hakkas working
there in a kampong all his own. When he isn‘t in that damned
pagoda in Dendang, you'll find him watching the tin ore
getting loaded aboard one of the tramp freighters that come
by now and then."
“You make interesting noises, Malachy. So Prince Ch‘ing
owns and operates a loading port?”
“Right. But the sub isn’t there. We flew over it, Willi and I,
and looked. So did the Seventh Fleet jets. There’s only a small
merchantman there now, loading. Nothing else.”
Durell’s face was suddenly quiet, attentive. “Let me guess,
Malachy. This island that Ch’ing owns, where this tin-loading
port is-it’s the same island where you found and buried
Commander Pete Holcomb, right?”
Malachy McLeod nodded shortly. “Aye, it is.”

The old man at the schooner’s wheel was like an antique

stone image carved on a lost Pacific atoll. His face, burned a
dark mahogany, was shaped geometrically into rugged, hewn
lines. Durell was not surprised that this aged whip of a man,
with his snowy hair blowing in the sea wind, reminded him
strongly of the courtesy and strength of his own grandpa
Jonathan. Those two old men had remained friends even
when half the world and half a century separated them. He
felt like a boy again, standing cap in hand before this gaunt
old islander.
Joseph Panapura spoke quietly. “You look like he once was,
son.”
“I could ask for no more.”
“Remains to be seen if you’re even part the man Jonathan
was, and is.” Old Joseph’s voice could carry easily above the
sough of the wind and the murmur of the sea. His long white
hair blew across craggy brows and jutting cheekbones. “You
were reckless, Samuel, even if you don’t complain of an
aching head. Prince Ch’ing really runs these islands.”
“Getting a few lumps made what I learned cheap at the
price.” Durell smiled. “I wasn’t killed. The dice fell right.”
The mahogany mouth twitched. Durell felt as if he were
addressing some pagan island deity. The old man was part of
the vessel, joined to it by big gnarled hands on the wheel, his
feet planted on the canted deck, by his eyes flicking to the
taut curve of the sail and the shifting colors of the sea.
Another jet chased its thunder along the ocean’s horizon. The
absence of other shipping in this shallow ocean was startling.
No native junks, outriggers, fishing sampans or rusty
freighters. One would not guess this was the wide Pacific,
considering the countless green islands that floated like
uncertain mirages on every quarter. The violence of the sun
made the colors of the sea change from moment to moment.
Obviously, no one but old Joseph could be trusted to guide
the hissing keel of the Tarakuta through these shoal
channels; and even his skill was more mystical than
scientific. This was a world of tortuous inlets and seaways
bounded by volcanic rock, coral, and shifting mangrove
swamps and shoals. Now and then, when it seemed the
schooner must surely go aground, the old man touched the
wheel and the sharp clipper bow swerved to find a new
opening in the channel, glimmering a green-black or perhaps
a pale, churned milk. The Malay crew responded alertly to
invisible signals from the old man at the wheel.
“We’ll help you do your job,” Joseph said bluntly. “Maybe
we’re the only people who can help, politics here being What
they are. Maybe the Tarakuta is all you can count on. You
understand me? I hate to think of all those fine men and
young boys lost somewhere in these islands.”
“Then you agree the submarine is here, somewhere? Do you
think we can find it?”
“We’ll need some luck. But every gambler needs luck. Only
thing, you must never count on it.” The old man’s carved,
mahogany face was still. “I am concerned about Wilhelmina,
however. Have you lost your sight, Samuel?"
“Hardly, but—"
“Or your masculine instincts? She grew up impatient at the
sound of your name. Now she has met you, and she has
changed. It worries me. It troubles me, because you will be
here only a short time, and then you will go away again,
Samuel.”
“Yes, that’s so,” Durell said.
“And will you take Willi with you?"
“No. I couldn’t."
“She belongs here. She is happy here. She is smart and quick
at her work. The islands are her home, and I’m old and won’t
last forever. She thinks I will, but I won’t. When she is alone,
she‘ll have my house and the copra plantation and the boat.
And all I could teach her. She’s quite a woman, Samuel.”
“Yes, I can see that.” .
“Malachy loves her and would keep her safe and happy.”
“But does Willi love him?” Durell asked.
“She is confused, now she has met you. I must ask you not to
encourage her, Samuel." The old man’s face seemed hewn
from darkness. “Once, Jonathan and I dreamed our children
might marry, but it didn’t come to pass. Then we dreamed of
Willi and you. Now I’ve seen you, I know it was not a foolish
dream. You may be worthy of her. But don’t thank me,
because you will not have her.”
“I still don’t see—”
“You will not have her.”
Durell let silence end it.

chapter
fourteen
THE Tarakuta slipped her sharp, proud bow through pale
green waters where palm fronds floated in tideless channels
and vegetable debris ran hissing along her painted white
sides. At times it seemed she must surely go aground, or
tangle her rigging in the ugly, twisted limbs of mangrove
swamps that hemmed her in. Then she was in open water for
a spell, and Joseph turned the wheel over to his Malay mate.
The sun was bright, violent, unnatural. The wind died within
half an hour, and the big bleached mainsail was hauled down
and the diesel started. Thereafter, the steady thump and thud
of the cylinders made a hot rhythm in the emptiness of
brazen sky and sea.
Twice more they heard jets screaming over the horizon. One
time, traveling faster than the blast of thunder clapping after
it, a MIG With the insigne of Indonesia buzzed the Tarakuta.
It came like a sudden explosion and screamed away to the
south. The calm grew heavier, and seemed more oppressive
afterward.
Durell walked to the bow with Malachy, and watched with
the red-bearded Irishman as the mountainous spine of
Bangka lifted around a bend of small reefs. Malachy had
examined Durell’s assorted cuts and bruises with
professional interest and expressed some awe at the scars on
Durell’s body.
Durell admitted it was time to get some plastic work done.
He had too many identifying items, if he were picked up by
the wrong people somewhere.
“Such as Colonel Mayubashur?” Malachy asked wryly.
Durell silently and briefly reviewed what he knew of the
colonel. It was part of his job to keep a file of mental dossiers
on people likely to dominate the world’s trouble spots, and
what he knew of Mayubashur reminded him that the colonel
was basically just a good cop. It was a matter of debate, back
in Washington, whether Mayubashur enjoyed commanding
from the old Sultan’s palace in Pandakan. At a policy meeting
of K Section’s field chiefs, Durell had maintained, against
other arguments, that Mayubashur would seek to stay in
power, it being the nature of such men to continue in control,
once given possession of political as well as military power.
McFee had agreed. But at that time, the matter had not
seemed very pressing.
On the other hand, he knew that Mayubashur would pursue a
criminal case honestly and clap the villain in the local
Portuguese dungeons. The colonel would be walking on eggs
now, however, since he might find himself arresting the next
premier of Tarakuta, if he guessed wrong.
Durell frowned, annoyed at Malachy’s continued silence. Was
McLeod going to carry a chip on his shoulder throughout the
operation, because of jealousy over Willi? It was something
Durell wished to be spared. The makeshift apparatus already
had one potential defector in Tommy Lee. He did not think
Dr. McLeod would deliberately betray the mission; but
emotion could cloud judgment at a critical moment, bringing
about a split-second delay that could make the hairsbreadth
difference between success and failure, life and death.
He went on speaking about Colonel Mayubashur.
“The colonel surely knows about every Seventh Fleet jet that’s
crossed the periphery of his precious island territory,
Malachy. Djakarta and the Malay government in Kuala
Lumpur know about them, too, by now. Nobody likes it. And
we have reports of guerilla clashes between Indonesian
‘freedom fighters’ and Malay regulars on the outlying islands
off Sabah.“ He paused as Malachy nodded briefly, curtly, and
added: “Everybody shouts ‘Merdeka!’ and wants freedom, so
long as the freedom means that Tarakuta belongs to him. But
we’re not concerned with local politics. Our job is to find that
submarine.”
“How can something as big as that get lost?” Malachy sucked
on an empty brier pipe. His bearded face was burned dark by
the tropic sun, which made his pale eyes all the more
startling under his bushy red brows. “The Jackson might
have taken a tragic dive, Sam, like the Thresher. The currents
here are tricky. The sea may seem to be utterly calm, but this
whole body of water is actually moving along at four to six
knots. No one but old Joseph and poor Simon, for instance,
could navigate this channel in order to sneak up on Bangka,
over there."
“As far as we know, though, the Jackson used regular
shipping lanes,” Durell objected. “She was due in through the
Bandjang Passage, and your consulate was notified of that
just before Kiehle Went off to his SEATO meeting. Were you
there, then?”
Malachy said; “Yes, Tommy Lee decoded the warning of her
arrival. I hated to be left in charge just then—I’d planned a
field trip with Willi for some rare marine specimens."
Durell watched the horizon. “Do you trust Tommy Lee?”
“Why not? He’s been first secretary for seven years.”
“Ever check out his alleged family in Dendang?”
“His papers were handled routinely. Nobody foresaw
pressure on half the local Chinese from Peiping.“
“Why should this pressure have come just now?" Durell
wondered. “There must be a connection. They must have
snatched the sub, and whatever their method, it worked, or
else how did Holcomb wind up raving and dying on the
beach?” He turned to study the rake of the Tarakuta’s masts.
His boyhood had been spent at sailing, from shrimp boats in
the Gulf to racing sleek New York sloops on Long Island
Sound while at Yale. He did not like the look of this sky. But
then, he didn’t know these waters as a sailor, although his
instinct warned him of Weather trouble nearby. He turned
back to Malachy. “The Jackson may seem like a big fish to
hide in these waters, but she never came out of the Bandjang
Passage, Malachy. And no one has heard her radio, or sonar,
since the day she vanished. Or was it at night?”
“Night, at 2210 hours, Tuesday, the twelfth,” McLeod said
briefly. “It was a routine check, planned when her cruise was
first charted. She was to call the Pandakan consulate by code
to report her entry into the shipping channel and the ETA off
Pandakan Harbor. She wasn’t making port, of course.
Officially she was not in these waters, considering the local
political crisis. It would have iced the cake for our grabby
new colonial powers down here, to announce the arrival of a
U.S. nuclear sub.”
Durell studied the sky again. “Was that the night the local
terrorists bombed out the Pandakan radio station?”
“Why, yes.”
“Was the Jackson using the station as a homing beacon?”
“I don’t know. Her inertial guidance system—”
“In these waters?" Durell indicated the shallow green
channels approaching the shores of Bangka. The horizon was
harsh and hot. “Old-fashioned dead reckoning with radar on
the bridge would be safer. Maybe the sub‘s captain thought
so, anyway. He‘d be running on the surface at night, in these
shoals. And it’s odds on he used the Pandakan beacon as a
direction-finder—until it was bombed out, by happy
coincidence.”
Malachy was aggressive. “What are you driving at?”
“I don’t believe in coincidence, that’s all. Was another radio
on the air that night? The local terrorists, perhaps?”
“Sure, the clandestine guerilla station began blabbing
propaganda the minute the civil radio tower went out.”
“And where is this guerilla station?”
“Anywhere on any one of these three hundred islands. I begin
to see what you mean, Cajun.”
“Right. Let’s look at some charts.”

There were U.S. Navy and Royal Admiralty charts in the big
cabin amidships of the schooner. As expected, below-decks
was maintained with the spit-and-polish of the rigging and
gear above. Durell sat on a cushioned bench before a
mahogany chart table and shook out a cigarette and unrolled
the chart Malachy brought from the rack. Willi came in and
sat silently, watching. Her eyes looked abnormally bright in
the shadowed cabin. Away from the breeze on deck, the heat
was suffocating; the little fans did little to dispel it. Durell
found himself sweating in places he had never sweated
before, and his waistband rapidly became sodden where the
moisture collected at his belt. The deck underfoot vibrated
with the thud of the diesel cylinders. Now and then the Malay
boy in the bow called out the depth of water in a soft, amused
voice, and the schooner began to weave and twist as they
entered new and sinuous channels.
The charts only proved what he had seen with his own eyes.
He had sailed many waters of the world, from the Gulf of
Mexico to the North Sea waters off Holland, but this area of
drowned sea and mangrove islet, of coral reef and brackish
swamp, presented unfamiliar problems. All the depths on the
chart were questionable; the channels had no navigation aids
such as buoys or lights. And many of the channels were
marked as obsolete or nonexistent or of unknown depth of
water and bottom.
There came a hail from above, and a Malay pattered down on
bare feet and spoke in rapid dialect to Malachy, who
immediately arose and left. “Excuse me, Cajun. I’m wanted
above.”
“Is it trouble?"
Willi answered for the red-bearded man, who was gone
instantly. “Bangka Island where we buried your friend
Holcomb is ten minutes off. We‘re on the shore opposite
Ch‘ing’s tin port. But he’s touchy about trespassers—like with
guns."
“Ch’ing gets more interesting by the moment.”
“We have digging tools," Willi went on, “and I’ve a face mask,
fins and tanks for you. Can you skin-dive?”
“I’ve had a little practice, here and there.”
“But you've never gone ashore on a Pacific island like Bangka.
You’ll find it interesting; maybe unnerving.” Her big eyes
appraised him. Her flimsy bikini emphasized the long, firm
taper of her legs. Sunlight bounced off the water through the
cabin ports and made the fine down of hair on her limbs
gleam with soft gold. She got up with a free, easy swing of hip
and thigh. “Change in the cabin aft. Be ready in five minutes.”
He halted her. “Willi, you're angry about something."
Her smile failed miserably. “It’s old Joseph. He’s never done
anything like this to me, before.”
“What’s he done?”
“He spoke to you about me, didn’t he?”
He said carefully: “Yes, and you resent being treated as a
child. You‘re not a child, Willi. I can see that.”
Her direct gaze made a cool shiver go down his spine. Her
eyes changed color and reflected the lime green of the sea. A
man could happily drown in them, he decided. She said:
“Well, let’s not complicate it with silly words. Hurry, get your
diving gear and swim suit.”
The cove lay beyond a long coral barrier reef, and past where
the mangroves sank their many claw-like roots into clods of
mud, there was a long, curving stretch of aching white beach,
with an arc of coco palms just above the pelagic litter. It
seemed idyllic. He could hear birds and monkeys from the
jungle inland. There was a high spine to the island, the cone
of a small, old volcano, and a permanent cloud hung
motionless there, attached to the dark peak by a thin
streamer. He knew the cloud would never change its shape or
size as long as the seasonal trade winds blew; it would tower
huge and blinding, day after day, and under it would be rain
forest, damp and steamy and incredibly hot. One step out of
the cloud shadow might move you from its gray inferno into
harsh desert.
Again there was a distant bombardment of jets from the
cobalt sky. The admiral apparently had set off firecrackers
under the search teams’ tails, or Mr. Sukarno was getting
bolder. The sun was a venomous, glowing ball of yellow
incandescence now, glimmering, overheated, making a haze
on the uncertain horizons. The anchor rattled and hooked on
the bottom and the Tarakuta swung to a halt, her engine
silent. A murky white roil mixed with gassy bubbles came up
from the bottom.
Outside the cabin, Willi met him, wearing gear and her
vestigial bikini. She moved with soft grace, and with only a
curt nod and a wave of her tanned arm, she dropped
overboard with scarcely a splash.
“I hate to see her go like this,” Malachy murmured. “I’d go
along, except for a punctured eardrum. When you dig up
Holcomb, make Willi keep away. The crabs might have
worked on him.”
“Does she usually swim instead of using the dinghy?”
“She’s found some nice shell specimens along here. But
Ch’ing doesn’t like her prowling and ordered her away twice,
and last time he took a potshot at the boat. So Willi swims in
now to keep from being spotted. Go on, Cajun. She moves
fast.”
Durell nodded and let himself fall overboard.

This pale green mist of wavering shapes, beautiful and

terrifying, was Willi Panapura’s world. He swam slowly after
her along the coral reef, through clouds of angelfish,
groupers, a small squadron of sharks, an eel, lizard fish,
threadfish and Moorish idols, flickering like rainbows around
his face plate. The pure blues of the water ranged from azure
to a smoke-gray. The sea life along the phantasmagorical
coral Walls ranged from gorgonians and starfish to sea
urchins and crabs, while outside the lagoon he spotted the
torpedo greys of barracuda, an albacore, a flick of a wahoo’s
tail and, among the coral caves, a rich yield of squid, sea
slugs, a giant clam, an army of crabs—all in a delicate natural
balance with the streamers of seaweed and algae floating in
the pellucid water. Willi swam on, at home among the
flashing, savage life about them. It was like a twilight-green
Fourth of July fireworks. Once through the opening in the
reef to the cove, the bottom shelved rapidly upward to the
shore. Sunlight made a smooth blanket of the water surface
above them. Willi turned and beckoned him on. Entering the
cove was like floating into a secret grotto, a place for love. It
was too bad, he thought grimly, they were going to dig up a
dead man.
They stood up side by side in brackish salt water that was
hip-deep and considered the littered white beach, the long,
fuming line of thundering combers, the suggestive curve of
the coconut palms. The girl was like a pagan sea goddess,
hugged and caressed about the waist by the milky sea. But
her eyes were hard and calm and careful. She kicked off her
flippers, unslung her oxygen tank, and slung the gear in the
crook of her left arm. Durell carried the small folding shovel.
“It was just under that double palm,” the girl said. “We were
hasty, burying him. There was Simon to consider, you see; he
was so badly hurt by Holcomb, who was really amok with his
fear and his own injuries—”
“Don’t think about that,” Durell ordered.
He was struck forcibly by the odors of the beach. It was
nothing soft or muted, but a violent clash of sea and jungle, a
rich and pungent iodine, the reek of tidal life from rotting
vegetation and crabs and palm rats, or the gas from a
Portuguese man-o’-war. Woven mercifully through it was the
sea’s ozone and the gentle sweetness of copra. Willi seemed
reluctant to go on up the beach. He led the way out of the
water. The heat was stunning. Beyond the sand, in the fringe
of palms, he heard monkeys chattering and the calls of
strange birds, all undertoned by the endless, thunderous
monotone of the sea. A misty spray enveloped everything in
an unreal, steamy haze. There was no sign of humans, except
for a single set of jeep tracks that circled the cove from the
east. Durell studied them to see if the jeep had halted near
Holcomb’s grave, but it was impossible to tell.
“If this is where you buried him," be told Willi, “stay away a
bit, while I dig. I think Holcomb’s body has been moved. But
if so, then we’ll know somebody thought it important enough
to move his remains, and that will merit consideration.”
She spoke coldly. “How can you be so callous? He was your
friend. When he died, he appealed to you for help.”
"It’s a tough world for the losers,” he said flatly. “There’s no
room for sentiment in my business, Willi.”
She drew a deep breath. “Are you trying to make me hate
you, to believe you are truly cruel?"
Her scanty swim suit emphasized the deep cleavage of her
breasts, her narrow waist and flare of soft hips held by a wisp
of blue cloth. She looked angry, and stubbornly pinned up
her hair, loosened by the swim. She was like a goddess
charging him with some ancient, primeval crime.
He began to dig with anger and vehemence. How could he
tell this golden girl who belonged to sunlight and the sea
what his life was like? His world was dark and shadowy, a
place of sudden death and terrible treachery. It demanded
infinite patience, loneliness, and a readiness for terror, all to
procure a bit of information here, a. statistic there, for the
computers and analyzers in Washington to synthesize into a
balance of weight and counter-weight in a world tenderly
poised on the brink of self-destruction.
Someone had to do the work, but why did he stay with it? No
bugles rang for victory, no trumpets blew for battle. There
was no sound for victory except the hiss of a knife, or a sigh
of relief at danger averted. He had been in this world long
enough to know it set him apart from the sun and sea in
which this girl lived.
The dream of two old men could never come to pass. This
was a century of technical miracles, not victories of the spirit.
His shovel grated on coral. He had been very careful as he
dug. The enormous, blinding sun brought out a trembling
sweat. He looked up and saw a signal flashing from the
Tarakuta, the quick, imperative blink of a mirror reflecting
the sunlight. The girl followed his gaze and frowned, drew in
an alarmed breath.
“We have to go back. It means somebody is coming—a party
of Ch’ing’s men, probably. They‘ve chased me before. That’s
Malachy’s signal that they can see someone.”
Durell said: “Holcomb’s body isn’t here. Are you sure this is
where you buried him?”
“It’s the spot. Maybe a bit to the left, but—we’ve got to run for
it, Samuel.”
“Not yet.” He kept digging. “Better swim now, Willi.”
The Tarakuta was moving, her anchor up again, sailing
slowly east just ofi the barrier reef. The girl stood beside him,
swinging her mask impatiently, nervously.
“Samuel, please. I’m not going to leave you here alone."
“I'm not going back to the schooner, Willi. But you’d better,
if there’s trouble coming, as you say.”
“I won’t leave you,” she said stubbornly.

He was sure now that the jeep tracks had been made by a
disinterment party, and Pete Holcomb‘s remains were
removed forever from the sight of men. But you don’t shed
tears over the dead, he thought grimly, since the losers were
usually the careless or the weak. Sometimes a man was lost
by treachery, or because the enemy was smarter and more
professional. Even so, you did not stop to mourn the fallen,
and he did not mourn for Peter Holcomb. But he meant to
learn why and how he died.
The girl‘s shadow fell from behind him upon the empty grave.
The monkeys in the jungle screeched in derision. From far
down the white beach came the sound of a laboring engine.
“Sam, someone is coming.”
He had only the entrenching tool as a weapon. The Tarakuta
was still lingering in the channel, mirror signal flashing.
Willi’s mouth tightened when he urged her toward the water.
“I won’t go back to the schooner without you."
“I’m not going back just yet,” Durell said. “Has the Tarakuta
ever been allowed in Ch‘ing’s tin port?”
“No, but—”
"The only way in is by crossing the island?”
“Or going along the shore. But—”
“Then we’ll decide which route to take later. Let old Joseph
sail off. He won’t go far,” Durell said. “It will make them
think he’s just passing by.”
The girl looked askance at their tracks on the sand. “But
they’ll see our trail, Sam.”
“Can’t be helped. If you won’t swim back, come along with
me. There’s no other place to go.”
He took her hand and they ran for the wall of brilliant,
oppressive green that fought for possession of the beach. The
whining of the jeep grew louder, woven through the surf’s
thunder and the endless screeches of birds and monkeys. It
was like diving into another kind of sea as they plunged past
the line of coco palms into this World of clinging, rank
growth. If he thought the beach had been hot, he found here
a breathless, steamy weight that was like a viscous curtain
impossible to shred and throw off. Their pace slowed at once.
The girl ran beside him, carrying their flippers, masks and
tanks. They were useless burdens, however. He could been
here before. And I’m better off with you than hiding in the
swamps.”
A rifle shot ended the conversation of the birds overhead. The
monkeys screamed and turned into small brown streaks
heading inland along the branched avenues above. Fine
pollen dust, a stray orchid, and butterflies made a tangle of
disorienting, blinding color. The shot came again. The girl
moved nearer and her warm, naked thigh pressed against his.
“They’re shooting at shadows,” he said. “But they know we’re
here.”
She nodded. “They can find us, too. Some of the Hakka mine
workers are good trackers. They’re nothing more than
indentured servants, and some of them run off and have to be
caught again.”
“Shades of the Old South,” Durell murmured.
“It isn’t funny.”
“It never was. Do you know your way around here?”
Her eyes were angry. “Did you get me ashore just to use me
as a guide? If I’d known you meant to stay—”
“We’re here, and We might as Well try to survive,” he
suggested. “I didn’t think the patrol would come along as
soon as it did, but in any case, We’re stuck. I’d prefer not to
have to worry about you, Willi, but since you passed up the
chance to swim back to the schooner, let’s try to get along,
shall we?”
She drew a. deep breath. “All right. I’m not much of a guide,
though. Old Joseph knows Bangka best. He was a coast
watcher here during World War II, against the Japanese. He
spoke pidgin to the sons of the samurai, and they simply
thought he was a misplaced Polynesian ignoramus. But they
caught Mother and Dad." She shivered suddenly. “Father was
beheaded, on the beach. Mother died that night, in their
camp. But they didn’t connect old Joseph, and let him stay
on. He helped the U.S. Marines when they landed here from
the Celebes. Before that, Joseph helped downed flyers to hide
in the rain forest. To get to Ch’ing’s port, as I said, you either
have to go by the beach perimeter, or across the mountain
and through the rain jungle. Both are equally dangerous.”
She spoke with sudden violence. “Don’t be sympathetic,
please! I couldn’t bear it. The Japanese are gone and the
coast watchers are forgotten. Today the Chinese are here, and
most of them are decent people, but they send their dead
back to China for burial in enormous mahogany coffins, and
they still buy their wives from among young Chinese not have
concealed in time the disturbance he’d made hunting for
Holcomb’s grave. The people in the jeep would know at a
glance that someone was ashore, not yesterday or the day
before, but right now. He smelled danger, and did not like it.
Neither did he like the responsibility he now had for Willi
Panapura‘s safety. It was not as if she were in his business
and knew the risks and chances to be taken. She was an
innocent bystander in this, and he could not help but feel that
her safety must he considered above his own.
They ran for several minutes, then he checked her and they
sank to their knees behind a vine of thick, spotted leaves,
with a rank windfall of blown sago palms beyond them.
Water trickled slowly somewhere. The light was bilious,
filtering from an enormous, violently yellow sun beyond the
tall, towering vegetation. The heat clamped iron hands on his
throat and he breathed quickly and lightly, as if strangled.
Sweat made his torso slick. The girl’s body glistened and
wavered as she shifted her weight on her near-naked
haunches.
“Listen,” he said.
The jeep had stopped. They could not see it, but voices
chattered as high and unintelligibly as the invisible monkeys,
excited and disputatious. Then a deeper voice spoke out
sharply and there was silence.
“That’s Cantonese, so they’re Hakka people—Prince Ch’ing’s
men. He patrols the beaches regularly,” Willi said.
“Has he ever explained such passion for privacy?”
“Well, he owns most of Bangka—this beach and the tin mines
and the port over the mountains.”
“I wish I could fly with you in the amphib over this precious
piece of real estate,” Durell said.
“I did that yesterday, when I left you at Pandakan.”
Willi’s long, golden hair had come loose again, and swung
like cables of honey. She found a pin in it and piled it up once
more to keep her neck cool. The gesture was pure and
beautiful, an utterly feminine maneuver. "I saw nothing
unusual. I went up and down the beaches and around the
whole island perimeter. I certainly didn’t spot a Polaris sub.
There’s only the old tramp freighter loading tin ore at Prince
Ch’ing‘s private little port.”
“I’d like to have a look at it. But I’d like to find a safe place to
put you, Willi, while I do so.”
She sniffed. “I don‘t see how the sub can be here, and if you'd
hinted to Joseph you meant to stay ashore, he'd never have
agreed. But you don’t have to worry about me. I’ve girls back
in the home village. Except for the Hakka laborers, most of
them are small merchants in tin shacks among the Malays,
and they’re friendly and dependable, mostly, except here on
Bangka. If you want to know if I can navigate here, yes, I can.
I’ve seen old Joseph’s maps made when he was a coast
watcher, since I was knee-high to a crocodile. Parts of this
island are deadly, but we can get to this port that interests
you so much. But I just don‘t like going around undressed
like this.”
“Let’s worry about our skins literally, Willi. Joseph won’t
abandon us. The schooner will never be far off.”
“I suppose you counted on that, too, when you decided to
stay ashore!” She bit her lip. “The poor old man will be wild
with worry. And Malachy—oh, everything is such a mess!”
He was concerned about her nerves, but his own worry was
like a toothache as they trotted away from the beach. He had
no weapon, but he could fashion one, when needed. And he
guessed the need would come sooner than anticipated.
They left their useless tanks and flippers hidden in the
undergrowth and went barefoot across the rough husks of
fallen coconut fibers. He thought of snakes, of scorpions, of
all manner of stinging, venomous things. But the tall golden
girl led the way with quick assurance, along a path he could
not see. From behind them came thrashing noises of clumsy
pursuit. A rifle cracked again, and he wondered if one of the
little monkeys was the victim. He could see nothing beyond a
few feet of the wall of green vegetation that, humid and
dripping, closed around them.
The wildness was deceptive, however. The island was not as
pagan or wild as it seemed. They came upon a rutted wagon
road before they put another hundred yards between them
and the distantly muttering surf, turned, and followed it. The
primitive plant life of the beach yielded to savannah grass for
a short time; the palms, pandanus and mangroves
disappeared. Then there was forest again, but with a rich
insanity of orchids, insects, and mutated shrubs that defied
the imagination. The trees were huge, draped with vines,
brilliantly flowered. The road cut through a coconut
plantation, heavy with silent heat, and then came to an open
field and a paddy irrigated from a system of neat trenches.
Beyond the field was a mat hut built on crazily leaning stilts
above the soft, uncertain matting of rotted vegetation on the
ground. The thatched roof was shaded by tall teak trees
wreathed in tough wakurikuri vines. Wild banana trees stood
in a thick grove on a slope of land beyond the rice paddy, and
the fallen fruit, many inches deep on the soil, gave off a rich,
aromatic pungency. The only sound was a single, sudden,
sharp shriek of a parakeet.
It was the first open glimpse of the island Durell had seen
since his view of Bangka from the sea. The interior peak
towered black against the white-hot sky, with only the
perpetual trade-wind cloud clinging to the top of the extinct
volcanic cone. The moment he stopped to consider the rice
paddy, insects collected in stinging, biting, chewing, crawling
swarms.
Then Willi clutched his hand and he heard the creaking of a
bullock cart coming along the road. Thrashing sounds from
the pursuit party heading inland were suddenly louder. If
they ran across the field, the sight of two nearly naked
Westerners would surprise the bullock driver out of his wits,
and certainly bring the chase party hot on their heels. He felt
trapped. Then he nodded briefly to the tall girl beside him.
“Stay here, Willi.”
“Please, Sam—”
“I’ll be careful.”
The cart came into sight, the heavy beasts slow and plodding,
their hoofs peculiarly light in the track. A scowling young
Chinese in a blue jumper spattered with mud and dung drove
the cart. His broad face was irritated and angry under a wide
coolie hat of woven pandanus. At the sound of another
random shot, he looked toward the jungle growth near the
beach, but not where Durell and Willi crouched in hiding. He
flicked a long whip over the bullocks’ haunches and the huge
animals lumbered on at an infinitesimally faster pace.
Durell ran at a crouch behind a screen of vines, came out on
the road six feet behind the cart, and jumped for the hulking
young Chinese. The man’s squawk of alarm was cut off by a
hard jab in his throat by Durell’s stiffened fingers; his black
eyes were wide for an instant at the sight of Durell, nearly
naked in his skin-diving suit, and then they glazed over and
he toppled unconscious from the cart seat. Durell leaped
down after him, not wasting a single motion, and dragged
him out of sight into the brush. He could only hope that luck
would keep the coolie out of the enemy‘s way. Then he yelled
at the bollocks and as they lumbered forward toward the
house on its stilts at the other end of the field, Willi came
streaking from the jungle and landed on the seat beside him.
The cart’s contents of fertilizer were not the most fragrant
cargo they might have carried. The lumbering bullocks, their
dim senses stirred to vague alarm, moved at a faster pace
toward the hut. Durell urged them on, and when they turned
automatically into a lean-to shed, he jumped off, grabbed
Willi and swung her clear and into the doorway of the
farmer‘s hut just as a party of excited, armed men burst into
the clearing across from them.

chapter fifteen
BY GOOD chance, the Chinese farmer had no wife, or if he
had, she was working elsewhere. The hut was empty. A
bamboo ladder led them at breakneck pace onto a tiny
verandah and into the hot, shadowed interior. The floor was
of polished teak planks. There was a kerosene stove, a
pandanus sleeping mat in one corner, and a rough wooden
table in another. The hut smelled of cooking, human sweat,
and coconut oil. Durell hunted about for Weapons first. The
best he could find was a machete about two feet long. The
wooden handle was small for his grip, but its broad, weighted
blade felt good. In the shadows of the hut, Willi moved about
looking for clothes, her feminine instinct somehow appalled
by her half-naked state, now that she was no longer near the
sea.
She found a blue smock that she slid over her head with a
quick, graceful gesture. Its folds of bleached cotton came only
to a few inches below her hips, and made her look even more
desirable than before. But her morale was improved. She
managed a tremulous smile.
“Are they coming?”
“They’re certain to search here. ‘Wait a minute.”
He was reminded of long afternoons in the green light of the
Louisiana bayous, hunting coon with Grandpa Jonathan’s
dogs, occasionally rousing a tricky swamp fox. The wild chase
often ended up with the quarry doubling back and hiding on
their back trail, while long hours of exhausted effort went in
stumbling through muddy swamp, stung and harassed by
insects, in a useless chase for a trail that no longer existed.
He tore a leaf from his memory and applied it to the present.
A loft in the back of the mat hut was stuffed with straw and
rice stalks, above coops of chickens and rabbits. A bamboo
ladder led up to it, and Willi started climbing as a shout
came, shockingly loud, halfway across the clearing. Durell
gave the girl an unceremonious boost and fell, panting, into
the straw of the loft beside her. He clamped a firm hand over
her mouth, demanding silence, as men burst through the
door below.
Willie’s long body shivered beside him.
From their vantage point, he watched the door burst inward
and a man in a military uniform, carrying a Russian
automatic rifle slung from a shoulder strap, stepped warily
into the gloom within. He was Chinese. He wore a baseball
cap with a long visor, rather like a Block Island fisherman’s
cap, with a Chinese ideograph stenciled on it. Some half-
dozen others crowded in after him. The jeep splashed across
the paddy. The farmer that Durell had clobbered ran after
them, shouting and weeping. The man in the cap turned
angrily and impatiently slashed at the farmer’s head with his
gun butt. The coolie pitched forward on his face, not badly
hurt, but crying and weeping his complaints.
“Oh, God!” Willi whispered. “It’s Fong!”
“Do you know the farmer?”
“I didn’t see him clearly before. He helps me find shells in the
lagoon. He doesn’t work for Ch’ing, but now—”
“Impatience in the enemy,” he said through stiff lips, “is a
virtue for our side. That’s not a saying of Confucius. It's an
old Durell axiom."
She was silent. Her body felt hot and sweat-slippery beside
him in the tickling straw of the loft. He put it out of his mind
and tightened his grip on the machete. Below, a methodical,
spiteful wrecking look place among the farmer Fong’s few
possessions. The man with the gun blasted sleeping mat and
chest, and the shattering uproar made the chickens squawk
and the rabbits hop about in fear in their cages. Durell pulled
back a little deeper in the straw. It was dark and hot and
shadowed up here, close under the thatched roof and the
pegged teak rafters, Something began to crawl along his leg,
but he did not dare look to see what it might be. Tiny clawlets
tickled and scratched at his thigh and began to explore his
groin. His sweat turned cold. He did not move. Two of the
armed men below were staring fixedly at the loft, talking in
Cantonese. One of them lit a cigarette and called to the
leader, who came and ordered them to ascend, gesturing to
the bamboo ladder.
But the cigarette smoker tossed away his lighted match and,
astonishingly, a quick crackle of flame came from a pile of
straw at the foot of the ladder. There were shouts of surprise,
alarm, curses. The exploration of the loft was forgotten. The
armed leader called a retreat, his grin cruel. Willi stirred
beside Durell and again he clamped a warning hand over her
mouth.
For a long moment they lay absolutely still, while the flames
leaped and took a firm hold on the hut. The Chinese patrol
tumbled out, shouting and laughing.
Willi’s lips moved and, shockingly, kissed his palm over her
mouth. Smoke coiled between them. Her eyes were
enormous, luminous, filled with an expectation of death.
The fire exploded under them. Durell reached back with his
free hand and killed the insect that was happily making itself
at home between his legs. The girl’s eyes were red from the
smoke. He rose to his knees as sparks filled the air. A few bits
of straw nearby suddenly flamed. Durell beat them out,
gaining a few seconds’ respite.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
He moved to the back of the loft. The mat walls were hot,
ready to ignite like a bomb in a few seconds. He had to risk it
that there were no armed men on this side of the farmer’s
hut. He kicked at the wall, felt the woven pandanus yield and
bounce back. He kicked again, and part of it gave way. Willi
was coughing, with great racking sounds of suffocation. He
tore at the wall and saw daylight.
But the fresh air that poured in provided oxygen for the
flames inside. There was a great roar, and he picked Willi up
and threw her bodily outside. It was ten feet to the mucky
ground below. He jumped after her, rolled over twice, caught
her arm, and hauled her to her feet.
The jeep was driving away, crowded with its armed Hakkas
led by the man in the Block island cap. Luckily, none of them
looked back. Durell led the girl, coughing and gasping, into
an irrigation channel of the rice paddy behind the hut. They
fell into the tepid, muddy water, heedless of their scratches,
burns and bruises, and did not move until the jeep was gone.
The hut went up with one grand explosion that sent sparks
sky-larking above the jungle. A black mushroom cloud
followed. Then the structure collapsed in a heap of smoking
embers.
Fong, the Chinese owner of the hut, had been taken away in
the jeep. For the moment they were safe, Durell decided.
Willi said gloomily: “I must look awful.” Then she laughed
softly. “So do you, Samuel. Mud, salt, soot, from head to foot.
But we’re alive, anyway—and I’m grateful." Her great eyes
sobered and she touched a finger to his lips. “The old
gentlemen were right, you know. Our esteemed grandfathers
said we belonged together, and I begin to think we do.”
“You’re forgetting about Malachy,” he said bluntly.
“He’s on the boat. You and I are here. Do you really think
we’ll escape? They know we‘re ashore now, and they’ll come
back after us.”
“We’ll go to them, instead,” Durell decided. “I came here to
look over Ch’ing’s operation, and that’s what we‘ll do.”
“That tactic worked in Dendang, Samuel, but it’s a long way
around by the beaches. Crossing inland means going through
the rain forest, and nobody ever goes there.”
“Then that’s the route we‘ll take.”
She shuddered slightly. “You don’t know what the rain forest
is like. It's dangerous in ways that might make Ch‘ing’s boys
seem the lesser of two evils. Fong could have helped us. He
hates Prince Ch’ing, and he’s been useful before, when I came
to the beach for specimens. He’s one of the few rebellious
souls permitted to stay on Bangka—mainly because he’s a
sort of hermit-philosopher, I guess. I hope they don’t hurt
him.” The girl paused. “Samuel, just don’t try to leave me
somewhere while we’re here. I don’t want to be safe. I want to
be right beside you, whatever you plan to do.”
He smiled and stood up and held out his hand to her.

They walked west to the beach. There was no sign of the

Tarakuta. A dozen islands loomed offshore, making a
shallow channel that insinuated itself tortuously between the
clumps of green land on the stagnant surface of the sea. He
knew this passage paralleled the main shipping lane to
Pandakan. Probably it looked the same, in width and length,
as the one the regular freighters used. If he were Ch’ing, and
wanted to discourage visitors, it would be a simple matter to
shift about navigational buoys to ward off all boats except his
own in these waters.
He was silent, while the birds called and the sea thundered
on the wide beach. When they came to a curve in the shore
where a fishing kampang blocked their way, and a road
showed traffic in the form of trucks crammed with coolie
workmen, Durell halted. It would soon be dark but the
enormous heat was persistent. He could not see the swollen
sun through the high trees, and the faint wind from the sea
did not touch them.
He drew Willi down behind a tangle of vines, out of sight of
the villagers.
“How much farther to the deep-water port?"
“Perhaps four miles. I didn’t think we’d get this far." She was
frowning. “Something is different. I’ve been here twice
before, on the beach, before Ch’ing closed this area to
outsiders.”
He watched her carefully. She lifted a hand to point to the
curving shore ahead, then dropped it, frowning with
uncertainty. She looked beautiful whether she smiled or was
troubled, and this disturbed Durell, because he could not
afford to lose his detachment. Yet he could not ignore the
essential femaleness of her body in the brief smock as she
clung to him. He could have wished her safely aboard the
Tarakuta, and he knew he was guilty of deliberately
manipulating the situation so he could use her knowledge of
this isolated island. It wasn’t quite fair. She was not a
professional and she did not know the risks of his business.
He did not doubt she would willingly accept them, if he told
her what might come; yet the fact remained that he was here
because it was his job to be here, and she was, in a sense, only
an innocent, but very useful bystander. You used any tool,
any weapon that came to hand, in Durell’s business. He knew
this, and yet he could not completely rid himself of the
overburden of guilt and responsibility for the girl, He
watched her bite her lip and sigh.
“What is it?” he asked again.
“I’m not sure. I Wish I knew where the Tarakuta was. Poor
Joseph forgets his age and thinks he’s still a young man,
sometimes, with your grandfather—”
“I thought the kampong disturbed you.”
“Yes. It looked different for a moment. But I can't tell what it
is. Maybe I’m just worried about Joseph.”
“Aren‘t you at all concerned about Malachy?”
She was silent, her eyes brooding, “I’m all mixed up, aren’t I?
. . . How long do we stay here?”
“Until dark, Half an hour, perhaps. Then we can get around
that fishing village and see what’s up the coast.”
“I wish I had some more clothes. I feel kind of funny running
around like this with you.”
He grinned. “I haven’t complained.”
Her smile was slow to come, but it grew like a secret blossom,
unsuspected, entirely different from any other expression he
had seen before. She sat with her back against the horizontal
bole of a fallen sago palm, and her long hair half hid the smile
and made it something more mysterious than before, He felt
as if she had come to a decision about him.
They waited for darkness.
Some quirk of the wind kept the insects from them in their
hiding place near the fishing village. There was a last howling
tumult in the sky, where a final sweep was made by three jets
of the Seventh Fleet. One plane peeled off and made a low
pass over the island and vanished. The land seemed to shake
with the impact of its power, and then it was gone, and with it
the sunlight, as if a curtain had been dropped over the green
of the Celebes Sea.
“Sam?” Willi whispered.
“Yes?”
“Aren’t you thinking of ways to get off this island?”
“Not yet. Not until I’ve found what I came to find.”
“How can the submarine be here?”
“It’s here," he said. “It must be.”
“That jet fighter--it had a message for me, you know.” Her
voice was quiet, sad. The evening darkness hid her face,
except for the wide luminosity of her eyes. “It seemed to
speak of the end of one time and the beginning of another,
like the cycle of life the Buddhists believe in, where
everything changes and yet is the same. Poor old Joseph,
though—for him the change will be permanent. The
Indonesians are going to move in, and these people will live
different lives. The simple ways of fishing and farming and
growing rice and coconut palm oil will be gone. The Malays
won’t be able to live their bright, happy-go-lucky patterns any
more, will they? And the Tarakuta will be replaced by fast,
shallow-draft diesel vessels to do the trading. There won’t be
a place in this world any more for poor old Joseph—or for
me.”
“It may not end that way.”
She went on: “It will come with pain, like every new thing
born, but the pain will go and there will be a new life in its
place.”
“But not necessarily a better life, is that it?”
“Who can say?” She turned suddenly to him. “How much
time do we have before we move on?”
“Half an hour."
Her eyes were enormous in the tropic gloom. “Haven’t you
thought how strange it all is, after all these years, when you
were just a bloody name I hated, because you were held up as
the embodiment of all the ideal virtues I should emulate, how
we’ve met? And you hated me, too, because those two dear
old men thought we should get together, somehow.”
“I don’t hate or resent you now, Willi."
“I know you don’t. I could tell when you changed. But you
haven’t tried to kiss me or make love to me, either."
“You belong to Malachy McLeod,” he said harshly.
“Not yet.”
“But you will. You’ll marry him.”
“Maybe. But for now . . . we may never get away from here
alive, isn’t that true?” she whispered.
He hesitated, then nodded. “It’s possible.”
“Doesn’t it trouble you, Samuel?”
“Of course.” He was about to say that he had lived in close
proximity with death and danger longer than he cared to
think about. He was not accustomed to it. If you grew used to
it, then you were no longer of much value in the business.
“What troubles me more, Willi, is that you’re in danger here,
too, and the job is mine, not yours.”
“I don’t mind sharing the risk, since it’s important.”
He nodded. She touched the palm of her hand to his face and
looked deeply into his dark blue eyes. “How many times have
I wondered what you looked like, Sam! How many times did I
dream what manner of man you might be!”
“I did the same about you,“ he admitted. “But that was when
I was younger, by a good bit.”
“Must we always lose our dreams when we grow up?”
“It’s usually best, these days.”
“But you’re not disappointed in me, are you?”
“Not at all. You’re very beautiful and desirable, Willi. Perhaps
too beautiful, too desirable.”
She kissed him. Her long hair came undone with a shake of
her head, and its honeyed fragrance brushed his face and
served as a curtain to hide them from the swooping darkness
in their jungle lair. If you believed in the immutability of
man’s fate, he thought, then this was all predestined, written
long ago in the shining stars over the Pacific. She was an idyll
of his youth. But long ago he had put dreams aside, when he
agreed to live apart from other men in his world of shadow
war. He wondered if he had gone too far down that road to
find his way back. He was aware of the promise and sliding
warmth of her body. The sea thundered on the reef like his
pulse beat. The sigh and movement of the night air was an
electrical anguish, a reflection of the storm just over the
horizon, absorbing them totally. . . .
But he could not take Willi into his world; he had to let her
go. She belonged to the sun, the sea, the cobalt sky of the
Pacific. Nothing was inevitable. It was only a dream of two
old gentlemen-pirates, who lived in a world that would never
be seen again.
“Willi . . .”
She drew back. Her breath was a rueful whisper. “You don’t
have to say it. It doesn’t work with you, does it? You’re
wrong, there is something between us, but you don‘t feel it.”
He sat up. His voice was fiat. “We can know nothing about
ourselves now, at this moment and in this place.”
A dull explosion in the channel made the darkening sky
tremble.

chapter
sixteen
SOMETHING sleek and dangerous moved out there in the
gathering twilight.
There came another dull crump, a flash of fire, a dim,
ululating scream from far across the green-black water. Willi
started to rise, and Durell. pushed her back. The fiat throb of
powerful engines echoed back from the mangrove banks of
the islets opposite them. The thing that slid out there, as
voracious and predatory as a shark, was an armed, black
speedboat of the World War II PT type. It showed no flag. Its
victim, devoured by sudden bursting flames, was a belated
fishing boat that had been heading back for the Malay
kampong. The gay sail vanished in a puff of smoke and fire,
and small figures could be seen diving into the dangerous
waters. With a growling throb, the armed speedboat
suddenly picked up speed and curved away, leaving a white
wake and a burning prau behind it, as anonymous as a
highwayman, as vicious as a pirate.
“What was it?” Willi whispered. “Those poor men—”
“Merdeka,” Durell said.
“Freedom?”
“As Sukarno sees it.”
The last time he had been briefed on the situation in this
troubled corner of the world, he had learned of the
“volunteers” from the Indonesian army drifting across the
border in North Borneo to establish small, vital pockets of
guerilla activity in the jungles. In the Malacca Straits, by the
last intelligence count, Indonesian speedboats had seized and
fired two-score Malaysian fishing boats. Potent terror sailed
the fishing areas with the innocent natives in these waters.
Ashore, there were reports of highly trained and expert
sabotage teams smuggling arms and explosives into Malaya
and Singapore, and terrorist attacks had been noted all
through the area, aimed at vital economic targets.
Durell’s job was not to make political judgments. But twenty
years ago, such blackmail between nations would not have
been tolerated. Aggression, overt and hidden, was met by
teams of negotiators to make legal what had been seized by
force. In Washington, it was always a delicate balance as to
whether a small war might be escalated into a larger conflict.
The overall global problems required remote and puzzling
decisions sometimes.
He shook his head angrily. Some of the fishermen who had
jumped from their burning boat were not going to make the
shore. The village down the beach was alive with lights, dim
shoutings, the barking of dogs, the screaming of a woman.
He settled back with Willi to wait for darkness, a coldness in
him that defied the stifling and oppressive heat of the tropical
night.

When the enormous, reddish moon lifted over the rim of the
Celebes Sea, Durell picked up the machete and got to his feet.
Willi was instantly beside him. Starlight glimmered on a
beach as white as old bone. Paper lanterns shone in the
kampong, which had settled down again. Indeed, a few
gaudily painted, ornately bowed outriggers with off-balance
square sails had moved out into the shallow channel, first
searching for survivors of their ill-fated companion, then
searching for octopus, apparently deciding the danger for the
night was ended. They hunted by the light of oil torches that
flared red and yellow in long, smoky ripples over the calm
lagoon.
Thunder shook the sky. This time it was genuine. Willi said
quietly: “There were weather warnings from New Guinea this
morning. Not a typhoon yet, but it could be bad. Can you feel
it? It’s like electricity crawling over your skin."
The air held a breathless quality. The stillness was unnatural.
When he looked at the village again, he saw a car’s headlights
bouncing along the beach road. The lights halted on a pier
where the fishermen were setting out. The earthy smells of
village and sea crawled through the darkness, an odor of
ancient vegetation, human debris, mussels and mud and
half-digested bits of odorous dead crabs beyond the tidal
limit. There was a smell of charcoal fires and, oddly, the
fragrance of tea.
Durell turned to the silent girl. “Stay here, Willi. I’ll get some
shoes and clothes, and a gun, if I can find one."
“Ch’ing doesn’t allow any weapons in the kampongs,” she
said. “I won’t hide here without you, either. I understand
what happened earlier between us. Even without that raiding
boat, you wouldn’t have taken me. Maybe I should be
outraged; but I’m grateful. I thought I loved Malachy, and
then I thought I was the girl for you, when you came along,
the one who waited for you to come to her from over the sea,
like in the old Polynesian legends. We don‘t know if it’s a
dream or not; but you’re right to wait. But no matter about
that. I’m staying with you, for now.”
He nodded and they set off down the beach. The kampong
was built of pandanus mat huts, the thatched roofs closely
laid together to resist wind, water and beach rats. Papaya and
frangipani trees flowered above the houses high on their
stilts. There were two wooden Chinese merchant shops with
tin roofs, and a teahouse serving as a focal point near the pier
and the beach where the outrigger native boats unloaded.
The survivors of the burned fisherman had long reached
shore. A dog barked, a child cried. The car Durell had seen
was parked openly on the beach. Sheet lightning flickered
like lavender curtains on the dark horizon of the sea.
When they were a hundred yards from the village, he signed
Willi to remain where she was, and brooked no protest. Then
he went quickly toward the parked car.
It was only a rusted Chevrolet, and it was empty. His machete
felt heavy in his grip. He hoped he would not have to use it.
From the village came the sound of soft Malay laughter,
except for the persistent weeping of one woman; the Malays
were quick to laugh and quick to die, sometimes, he thought.
He heard a few atonal notes of Chinese music from the
teahouse, the squawk of a Malay rooster. Then the harsh
blare of a propaganda broadcast from far-off Djakarta,
vilifying Malaysia, the British, the Americans, the Dusuns
who favored Malaysia, all lumped together as “imperialists,”
shattered the dark night. The voice, speaking in Bahasa,
demanded the “return” of Tarakuta to the “motherland” and
drowned out all sounds except for a quick rap of footsteps on
the plank pier returning to the car.
The man who came hurrying from the dock was oddly
familiar in outline against the glare of the octopus hunters’
torches. Durell drew a slow breath. Now and then, however
risks and chances were calculated, computed and analyzed,
Lady Luck came along to tip the applecart, one way or
another, without rhyme or reason. Old Jonathan had taught
him this long ago, and he had learned not to let it surprise
him. And now it had happened again.
The man who walked quickly back to the car was Tommy Lee,
the double agent from the Pandakan consulate.

The young Chinese loomed big and solid against the red
flares of the octopus hunters. He walked with his hands
clenched at his sides, his city shoes rapping hard on the
planks as he neared the car in the shadows. From the radio in
the kampong came another braying denunciation of Western
imperialism and the announcement that fighters for
“merdeka” had landed in the Tarakuta Group to take up the
torch for “liberty.” Durell did not know how much truth was
in the report and for the moment, did not care.
Tommy Lee reached the car, and the propaganda from the
Djakarta radio proved useful, after all. It covered the soft
movement Durell made as he came around the car and
placed the edge of his machete against the Chinese
diplomat’s throat.
“Hold still, Tommy,” Durell whispered.
Lee froze with his hand on the car door. He wore a pale
sharkskin suit and a white shirt and a dark tie, and he must
have been sweltering in the heavy humidity that flowed like
an invisible blanket from the storm gathering over the sea.
He was sensible enough not to turn his head. But his breath
hissed in surprise and he could not prevent a lurch and
tremor of his body.
“Who—what is it?”
“Sam Durell. Surprised?”
“Durell? But how—what are you doing here—?”
“Looking for you, in a way--and for your boss."
‘I don’t understand. Please, remove the knife.”
“Get in the car.”
“Surely. But force is unnecessary. I’m an American citizen, I
can explain what I am doing here—”
“I’m sure you can. I’ll listen with interest. Get in the car and
back it up about a hundred yards and then stop. Leave the
headlights on, but blink them twice, understand? And don’t
do anything foolish.”
“As you say, sir.”
Durell looked at the nearest Malay house on its stilts above
the beach. There were some limp clothes hanging from a line
strung from two poles. Voices came from inside, and the
smell of charcoal and fish. But it was dark and shadowed
where the clothing hung. Durell said: “Hold it, Tommy. We
need to repair our wardrobe first."
He urged the young Chinese to the clothes line and pulled
down a pair of dungarees and a woman’s batik dress and
found some straw sandals of various sizes. In the blue flicker
of sheet-lightning, Lee’s face shone with sweat and fright.
Durell frisked him briefly, found no weapons, and urged him
back to the car.
“All right. Back up a hundred yards, as I said.”
Willi was looking for the signal. She came running on silent
feet as the car halted just inside the line of jungle. There had
been no alarm from the village. Out in the shallow channel,
the fishermen were beginning their night’s work with
harpoon and flare and net. The heat was stifling. But there
was not the slightest stir of wind to relieve the oppression. It
Was as if all the forces of nature were astir.
Tommy Lee was tough and frightened. He thought he saw his
chance when Willi ran up out of the steamy darkness, and he
moved fast, dropping his left shoulder, his head still turned
as if watching Willi’s approach, his right hand on the car
door. At the same time his right foot came up to smash at the
blade in Durell’s grip, intending to gain a running start for
the dark jungle growth beside the road.
He was good, but not that good; he was tough, but not that
tough.
Durell caught his ankle with a quick, twisting grip that would
have heaved most men from their feet. But Lee’s grip on the
car door saved him from that disaster. Lee staggered, missed
his stroke at the machete, and terror froze on his broad
yellow face. He opened his mouth to cry an alarm and Durell
hit him with the hilt of the knife high on the cheekbone. Lee’s
fingers were torn from the car door, and he went down to one
knee in the dark path.
“I owe you something," Durell said quietly. “It’s for Simon
and some good men off the Jackson who are dead.”
“But I couldn’t help—”
“It’s time to collect, Tommy. I owe you something for your
girl-friend, too, who tried to keep you straight.”
“Yoko Hanamutra?”
“Stand up.”
But Lee had not given up hope yet. Enough dim light came
from the flickering torches of the fishermen to see Durell’s
implacable face. Terror spasmed and twisted Lee’s mouth,
but it was a controlled fear, giving him speed and strength to
try for escape. His chunky shoulder came up and smashed at
Durell’s belly and the driving force of his tough, sturdy legs
carried him up and over as Durell fell back. Durell rarely
permitted himself the luxury of hate or a desire for revenge.
His work was too demanding for that. But traitors were an
exception. It was difficult enough to walk knowingly into the
threats from the other side, to maneuver with all the power of
a team of skilled and loyal operatives beside you. To have to
face the added hazard of the double agent, the weakling who
yielded up lives for money or through fear, was beyond his
tolerance. He worked on Tommy Lee with brutal efficiency.
It was not easy. His opponent was young and trained in the
ways of killing with bare hands. And he was desperate.
Durell’s main concern was to raise no alarm in the nearby
kampong. Silence and speed were imperative.
He achieved both. The loudest sound was a strangled cough
from his antagonist when Durell chopped the side of his
throat. He did not strike to kill. As Lee staggered and tried to
kick again, Durell threw him with a thud, and as the man,
coughing, made an effort to escape, Durell hauled him to the
feet by his shirt front and slapped him again and again until
Lee’s eyes glazed and his weight sagged down.
Willi looked shocked. “Sam, don’t ., .. . he can’t defend
himself. . . .”
“Lucky for us,” Durell breathed harshly. “I may not kill him.
It depends on what he has to say. Do you hear me, Tommy?"
Willi subsided. He glimpsed her face, and her beauty was
carved of stone. He could not read the expression in her eyes.
He slammed Tommy Lee against the side of the car, picked
up the machete, and held its razor-sharp edge against the
bubbling throat of the Chinese.
“Which will it be, Tommy? Talk—or die?"
"I—I’m afraid! I couldn’t help myself—”
“You could, but you got greedy, didn’t you? Did Prince Ch’ing
pay you much?”
“No, no, he paid nothing!” Lee’: voice rasped in pain with
each Word forced through his injured throat. He coughed
and said: “I’ll tell you what I can. But if they find out—”
“Are any of Ch’ing’s men around?”
“Four, in the village. I brought them, for patrol work. It
pleases Ch’ing to make me an errand boy. They will come
along soon, and the car should be moved.”
Plainly, Lee’s fear of Ch’ing equaled his fear of Durell. Durell
shoved him into the car. He asked Willi to drive, and handed
her the sarong and sandals he had stolen from behind the
fisherman’s hut. Doffing the smock, she wrapped herself
deftly in the garment, and with the graceful movement it
seemed as if she transformed herself into an island woman,
tall, proud, ineffably beautiful, and no longer Western. Her
alien magnificence settled on her with the Malay dress. She
looked pagan. He could tell nothing from her face as she slid
behind the wheel and started the car.
“Is Prince Ch’ing on the island?” Durell asked Lee.
“Yes, but you can‘t drive on the beaches. They are all
patrolled. You couldn’t reach him alive this way.”
Durell drew a deep breath. “Tommy, have you seen the
submarine, the Andrew Jackson?”
Lee shivered and was silent.
“All right,” Durell said. “I’ll find her myself.”
At that moment a sound came to them, as if something giant
and primeval were rushing at them from out of the dark
night.

chapter
seventeen
IT WAS a wind. It blew across the Celebes Sea and the
Macassar Strait with a peculiar, rancid odor, a smell of brine
and stagnation. The gust came suddenly, leaping upon the
palms and jungle growth to make a great rattling of dust and
dark sand and spray that rode inland like a curtain before a
charging host of invisible horsemen.
Then it died, and the night was hot and black again. An
overcast hid the glittery stars. A hush fell over the beach.
From the sea came a long groaning, a rush of water going out
and then coming in. The land shook under the impact of one
giant comber that smashed out of the pelagic darkness. The
flares of the octopus hunters lifted wildly up and then down,
along with the screams of terrified men. The water rushed,
seething, to carry the debris of vegetation and animal and sea
life with it, far into the jungle. Then it went back and
everything was almost as it had been before.
“What was that?” Tommy Lee whispered, shaken.
“A storm is coming.” Willi’s calm was the same calm that had
followed the first raging breath from out of the dark night. “I
think it will be very bad.”
Durell thought of his plans. “How much time do we have?”
She spoke coldly. “An hour, perhaps. Or two.”
“Are you worried about the schooner?”
“The boat is my affair."
She was changed, remote and alien, like the sarong she wore,
and he knew he had changed her. But it was not the time to
consider it. He needed all his attention for Tommy Lee.
The road had turned into a solid macadam highway that cut
through the coastal jungle. Lights glowed from a. settlement
farther up the coast, and a radio tower on the mountainous
spine of the island winked with red, yellow and green lights.
The jungle was thicker here, and Durell heard the swift rush
of a stream tumbling from the upper heights. He ‘told Willi to
stop the car and pull off the road and signed to Tommy Lee to
get out. The Chinese did so, dabbing at a trickle of blood from
a corner of his mouth. In the dim light, his round face looked
anxious, and his voice reflected an eagerness to be rid of his
guilt.
Mr. Durell, I know I can’t escape my punishment for what
I’ve done. But you must believe me that it seemed harmless
enough, at first. It was all for my uncle and aunt, in
Dendang.”
Durell said grimly: ‘They were gone when I called.”
“Yes, they are hiding now. But I saw my whole life destroyed,
my citizenship, my job—I have always worked hard at the
consulate. Someday there might be an investigation, but I
thought I was safe. I never intended to be a spy, you see. The
consul trusted me, I hoped someday I could establish myself
honestly, but my parents were in Wei-pei, near Shanghai—
my true parents, I mean—and Ch’ing learned about them, as
he made it his business to get blackmail evidence on all
Chinese in Dendang. I was one of the biggest fish caught in
his net.”
“Does Prince Ch‘ing work for Red China?”
“There can be no question of this, although he believes in
personal free enterprise, as your visit to Dendang must have
shown you.” Lee smiled wryly, timidly. “He had orders
recently to put pressure on all the Hakka people here and in
Dendang.”
“Was it to vote a certain way in the plebiscite next week?”
Durell asked sharply.
“Yes, but I do not know whether it was to be for Indonesia or
Malaysia. Mr. Durell, I am trained in the old Chinese virtues.
I honor my parents and my duty to them must come first.
Perhaps by your standards this is wrong, and I struggled with
it long and hard myself. Yoko tried to help, but I could not
tell her the truth. You do not know how terrifying Ch’ing can
be. He smells of evil like something rotting in the sun.”
It was an old Communist trick, Durell thought, to pick up
agents, create turncoats and traitors, by the pressure of
blackmail. He spoke harshly.
“Ch’ing wanted to know about the Andrew Jackson, right?
You had cables about her passage through the Bandjang
Channel and the time she was to sail past Pandakan. You
knew her passage was nonpolitical, and Mr. Kiehle, at the
SEATO meeting now, gave you orders to keep her presence
secret until after the plebiscite, right? Otherwise, the enemy
propaganda would have a field day, charging American
imperialist interference and all the usual nonsense that helps
persuade the innocent and fatten the greedy."
“Yes,” Lee whispered. “Ch‘ing Wanted to know about the
submarine—her course, her estimated time of passage.”
Durell said flatly: “And you gave it to him.”
Lee nodded. “He threatened terrible things to my parents in
Wei-pei. He said Peiping would execute them.”
"All right. One more thing. You actually saw that Jackson
here, didn’t you? The sub must be here. Otherwise, there can
he no reason for his acts. Is it near the tin-loading docks?”
Lee was startled. “But how do you know?”
“It had to be captured, for Holcomb to be found ashore here.
It must be on this island that he was first kept prisoner. The
only place, according to the charts, where a. boat the size of a
Polaris sub could be hidden is in Ch’ing’s private little port. I
know it hasn’t been spotted by the search planes, but the
answer to that is easy, too. It’s been camouflaged, hasn’t it?
It’s at dock under big nettings?”
Again Lee nodded and swallowed noisily. “Everything you
say is true.”
“What about the sub’s people?”
“Some are dead,” Lee whispered.
“And the others are still prisoners?” Durell paused. His mind
leaped ahead, putting the pieces of the puzzle together with
trained accuracy. “Of course, Ch’ing had to keep some of the
Jackson’s people alive. They‘d know how to dismantle her."
Lee was startled. “Dismantle—?”
“Peiping couldn’t hope to get a crew capable of running her
north, through the Seventh Fleet. The only way to get her to
the Chinese mainland would he to take her apart and load the
parts, especially the nuclear warheads and the A-3 missiles,
on the fake ore-carrying freighter in Ch’ing’s port.”
“Believe me,” Lee whispered, “I did not dream, when I made
my first error and yielded to fear, it would lead to such a
monstrous thing. But what I gave to Ch’ing was merely pilot
information. How could the sub be captured?”
”I don't know," Durell said, “but I mean to see it with my own
eyes.”

The road curved sharply inward and swung through the

single dusty streets of two Malay kampongs, where the oil
lanterns shone first on a crowd of Malay men, with their high
cheekbones and short noses and round eyes, short and
compact, surrounding a cockfight pit. In the second village,
the main attraction was a shadow play. Beyond, there was a
Hakka labor compound for the tin mines, and a new clearing
of rice paddles hacked out of the lowland growth. In the glare
of the car’s headlights, orchids glistened, shrouding trees and
vines, and now and then the bright, eerie eyes of small
animals shone back at them. Willi drove the car with care.
Tommy Lee told Durell how he had come to Bangka from
Pandakan in a fast launch.
“It was strange,” he added. “Some very fast boats went by us,
like your PT types, but they flew no flag. They were headed
this way, but did not bother us. I don’t think they even saw
us. But I’m sure they were not American Navy boats.”
"Have you heard of any guerilla raids, any 'freedom fighter'
maneuvers, designed for Bangka?” Durell asked.
“Everything is possible. The islands are like tinder, waiting
for a spark. You saw how it was in Pandakan, with the
terrorist bombings. On the other islands, they raid the
kampongs and try to terrorize the people into voting one way
or another. . .. , We can go no further, Mr. Durell, on this
road.”
They had come to a fork, and to the right the jeep trail turned
downstream, back toward the coast, following the little river
that appeared before them. To the left, the trail was little
more than a trace between high, vine-twisted trees. No
guards were in sight.
Tommy Lee explained the dilemma. The road to the right
went back to the coast to circle the island to Bangka’s port
and Prince Ch’ing’s stronghold. The submarine was there.
But the road was guarded, mined, patrolled. It was
impossible to hope they could get through. Durell looked at
Willi Panapura, who nodded and moistened her pale mouth.
“It’s true, Sam. They’ll be on guard that way.”
“And the other road?”
“It goes across the mountain, through the rain forest.”
“Then we’ll take it.”
“But you don’t know the rain forest, Sam—the swamps,
snakes, heat and mud. No one goes there, ever.”
“But you said old Joseph practically lived there when he was
a coast watcher against the Japanese, long ago. You learned
how to walk through it yourself, from listening to his stories.
If it’s the only way to get to Ch’ing and see if the sub is hidden
there, as I think it is, then we go through it.”
She was silent and pale. “I’ve never been in the rain forest
here myself. I couldn’t be sure. If We failed, it would be my
fault, and I couldn’t bear that.”
Tommy Lee coughed. “I know I can expect nothing from you,
Mr. Durell, but even if you got through, what can you hope to
do against Ch’ing’s private army? How could you get to the
submarine? Ch’ing lives in a fortress—literally. You’ve Seen
the old Portuguese castle in Pandakan Harbor? This one on
Bangka is like it, built on the deep-water lagoon. I don’t know
if the sub is there, but I know there is a barbed wire
compound nearby, and armed guards. It is useless—”
“Shut up,” Durell said. He watched the girl. “Willi?”
“All right, Sam. We’ll try it,” she whispered.

The trail worsened at once. The little river ran between high
banks of red soil that glowed with sandy, gristly reflections in
the headlights. The sound of the river was a steady muttering
as it fell to the sea, compounded with the ever-present,
distant booming of the surf that seemed audible everywhere
on the island. The car bounced and skidded treacherously.
The heat was unbelievable, and the small stir of air made by
their movement was like the slow waving of a branding iron
before their faces. Durell looked at the sky. One part was
clear, and the Magellanic Clouds and Southern Triangle had
a. wild, unnatural, blue-white brilliance. Beyond, like a dark
shadow creeping to devour the world, was a black emptiness
that was not empty at all, but filled with the whirling torrents
and threshing power of lightning, rain and incredible winds.
He felt the fine hairs on his forearms lift with the electric
tension.
“We cannot go much farther,” Lee muttered. “The road ends
at a footbridge. There was once a teak lumbering operation
here, but it no longer exists. . . .”
As he predicted, the thread of trail rapidly gave out. The car
jolted dangerously. Then the road lifted at a forty-degree
angle that made the wheels spin helplessly in the soft jungle
debris, tilting them in one place. The headlights shone at a
crazy angle into the high, leafy tops of umbrella trees,
wakening a wild storm of huge moths that came fluttering
softly toward them on darting, iridescent wings.
“Douse the lights," Durell ordered. He looked at Willi. “Can
you take us across the island from here?”
“I don’t know. It’s eleven miles or more. I’ve never done it,
you understand; I can only try to remember Grandpa
Joseph's stories—”
“Let’s start then," Durell said.
There was a three-cell flashlight in the car. Durell pushed
Tommy Lee ahead, up the slippery path to the lip of the river
gorge. The ravine was deep and narrow, and the water looked
like thin blue silk in the glimmering starlight. They walked
for some moments atop the ridge, through sudden clouds of
gnats and giant moths, and then they saw the bridge.
It was just what Lee had described—a narrow footway of vine
cables swaying over the deep gorge that blocked their way—a
bridge of shaky slats and a rope handrail anchored to trees on
both lips of the ravine. Durell shone the flashlight on the
white water below and then probed across the bridge.
It seemed as if the night exploded with light.
A sharp command in Chinese cracked from the jungle beside
them. A warning shot woke screaming echoes in the hot
tension of the tropic forest. Tommy Lee made a small sound
of fear in his throat. And then, on every hand, on both sides
of the river and the footbridge, there stepped ragged-looking,
armed coolies in wide hats of woven pandanus.
“Why, these are Hakka people,” Willi whispered.
A thickset Chinese in a stained khaki uniform, with British
shorts, socks and low jungle boots, came toward them. He
wore lieutenant’s pips on his shoulder straps, and he carried
a Sten gun with familiarity in his square hands. The other
Hakka were also armed with Stens. They looked tense and
desperate.
“Ch’ing’s men?” Durell asked Lee softly. He looked at the
other’s panic-stricken face. “It this is a trap you set for us,
you die first.”
“No, I didn’t! I swear—!”
Lee’s panic brought disaster. He cried out as the Hakka
closed in from the dark jungle, then abruptly he turned and
ran back toward the car. The man in command called out in a
thin voice, but Lee kept running. There came a single burst
from a Sten and the Chinese stumbled and flew headlong
through the air. The automatic burped again in short,
efficient bursts, and Lee’s body jerked and jumped with the
impact of a dozen more slugs. He jackknifed and rolled over
and was still.
The guerilla leader walked toward Durell. His thin voice was
as cold as a polar night.
“Drop your machete, or you will go next.”

chapter
eighteen
ARGUMENT burst out in emotional Cantonese as the Hakka
gathered about their commander. Durell eyed them with care
in the lantern light. These were not the armed men who had
first driven Willi and himself off the beach; they were more
like the peasant hermit Willi knew as Fong, whose hut had
been burned out. He felt a quick stir of hope.
“Lee is dead, Willi,” he said quietly. “Don’t look hack at him.
Can you speak Cantonese?”
“Are you sure Lee is dead?” she asked tightly.
“He was a fool to sell our security at Pandakan in the first
place, and then he was stupid to fall into Ch’ing’s hands. He
had no place to go. It was too late for him. He knew it and I
knew it. So forget about Tommy Lee.”
She shivered and looked back at Lee’s twisted body anyway.
He could not tell her that the Chinese had really been a dead
man from the moment he first betrayed to Ch’ing the route of
the Jackson in these waters. Treason was punished quickly
and unofficially these days. Lee must have welcomed the
bullets that cut him down; but Willi couldn‘t understand this.
Her world of sunny, tropic seas still clung to the old normal
values of morality—values that often had to be jettisoned in
his work.
Before she could reply, one of the guerillas came forward,
shouting in enraged Cantonese, and smashed at Durell with
the butt of his Sten gun. Durell ducked the blow, but some of
its force caught his shoulder. The Hakka screamed again and
pointed the gun at him, and Willi cried out. Then someone
ran across the swaying footbridge, shouting an order. It was
Fong.
“Fong, tell them we’re friends!” Durell snapped.
There were angry recriminations, and the coolie with the
British Sten gun retreated, wiping his nose. Most of these
men were armed with Stens. Fong, the hermit-farmer, spoke
to the Chinese in the faded British uniform and pointed to
Durell and the girl, then back to the bridge. The big peasant
was a changed man from the cringing farmer who had
watched his house wantonly burned only hours ago. His
deference was gone. He was armed with a sharp kris, a
Walther‘s P-38, and a Sten; he looked hard, tough and
assured. He snapped an order and one of the Hakka tossed
an automatic to Durell, who caught it, nodded thanks, and
hooked the strap over his shoulder. Now and then he heard,
among the high Cantonese inflections, the name of Dr.
McLeod.
“Is Fong saying that Malachy is here with these men?” he
asked Willi.
The girl nodded. “Malachy is across the river. Fong says he
came ashore to look for me and met these men. It‘s all right.
Fong has helped me when I hunted in the lagoon for some
specimens. I gave him gifts now and then, but he—he looks
so bloodthirsty right at the moment—”
“He should be,” Durell said dryly. “I think we’ve walked into
a budding rebellion against Ch’ing, on this island.”
Fong snapped an order and they were hurried across the
dark, swaying bridge. The men seemed under sharp pressure.
Fong spoke to Willi and she shook her head and pointed hack
to Tommy Lee’s riddled body. Fong shrugged and spoke in
Malay to one of the men, who brought sneakers for Durell
and the girl to replace their flimsy sandals. Then they heard
Malachy’s cry.
“Willi, me own darlin’ girl!”
Malachy loomed huge and keg-chested out of the stilling
night across the river. He hugged Willi and lifted her off her
feet in his enthusiasm, ignoring the grinning Hakka men.
Then he set her down abruptly and glared at Durell.
“Are ye both all right?" At Durell’s nod, Malachy added: “I
came ashore in the dinghy off Tandjoeng Petak, and scarce
got across the beach, it’s so thick with Ch’ing’s hoodlums.
Found your trail at Fong‘s burned-out farm—saw the smoke
and headed for it, figuring it might have to do with you,
Samuel—and ran into Fong. He’d jumped off the jeep and got
away from those takin’ him to Ch’ing. I must admit I’ve been
cultivating this lad as carefully as he tends his rice paddy.
Some of our home politicians might be timid of such
interference in domestic politics, such as encouraging Fong’s
insurrection, but I see it as potentially good for our side, and
I say he damned to the scarebellies back home.”
Durell cut off the wild-bearded man’s flow of words. “How
many men do we have? I see about eighty, at a guess.”
“Close enough. It‘s a sort of local Minute Man outfit aimed to
keep off raiding guerillas and alleged ‘freedom fighters’ from
down Indonesia way. Fong thinks his islands ought to run
their own affairs. I don’t blame him.” Malachy’s grin faded as
he studied Willi. “You’re awful quiet, me girl.” He looked
suspiciously at Durell. “Anything happen between you two?”
“Willi is a little shaken because we saw Tommy Lee shot and
I did nothing to stop it. I think she’d rather be like you,
Malachy, and help the sick and wounded.”
“You didn’t even go back to see if he was still alive, Samuel,”
she whispered. “It seemed so—so—”
“Here, here,” Malachy said. He seemed suddenly very
cheerful. “Don’t you two start quarrelin’ now. We’ve got
enough quarrelin’ to do tonight with Ch’ing and his bully
boys.”

Durell called in Fong and discussed the situation with

Malachy. It was ten o’clock in the evening, and the night
waited for them. The dark heat seemed more oppressive than
the baleful violence of the day. Some of Fong’s men cut the
rope bridge, at Durell's order, to hinder possible pursuit
across the gorge by the enemy. Durell suggested then that
Willi could guide them across the island through the rain
forest.
“True, the beaches are like armed camps tonight," Malachy
admitted. “But have you ever been in a rain forest? And at
night? Most of these men have lived on Bangka all their lives
and never set foot in it. Malachy looked at the girl. “Do you
think you can lead us through, honey?”
“Grandpa described the trails he used often enough.”
Aye, but it’s night, and twenty years later!”
Durell said. I think we must do it, Malachy.”
McLeod shrugged. “So be it, then. But ’twill give us
nightmares for years to come, I’m thinking.”
There was dismay on some of the Hakka faces when the plan
for the march was described to them. Fong did the talking,
now and then jabbing a thumb at Willi’s tall figure. The men
shifted their feet and muttered uneasily. But eventually they
agreed, their broad faces displaying obvious reluctance.
No time was wasted in starting off.
Willi walked between Durell and Malachy. An odd tension
existed between them. Two flankers went ahead on the trail
that led upland from the coastal plain to the mountain spine.
They passed one deserted paddy, a tin-roofed shack, and an
abandoned coconut plantation. Every step brought a fresh
outpouring of sweat from their bodies as they began to climb.
In twenty minutes, the trail ended and they reached the base
of a dark, basaltic cliff. Erosion had crumbled the bleak rock
and left an easy path by which they could reach the top.
The rain forest, caused by the perpetual trade-wind cloud,
began here. It was like stepping onto another planet.
Beyond the cliff was a spongy swamp a morass of decay and
sour, waterlogged muck that exuded an odor that clung to
their skin, hair and nostrils. Willi did not flinch. Malachy’s
torch pointed the way ahead, and there was a murmur from
the Hakka behind them. Then they marched on.
Mangroves grew here, in brackish water, the trees anchored
by thick, knobby roots that pretended to offer solid footing,
only to prove slippery with a slime that twisted the ankle and
curved off into the wet muck so that the men began to fall
and splash into the evil-smelling earth. At the same time, the
air developed an oppressive heaviness that filled the lungs
with sour moisture and the spirit with a sense of unnatural
danger.
Willi did not hesitate. She led the way forward, her tall figure
now and then illuminated in the flashes of light from the men
floundering behind. She did not speak or explain how far the
swamp extended, and Durell began to think that the
mangroves, surprisingly situated so far inland, would go on
forever. Within five minutes every man was covered with the
slick slime, from having fallen at least once from what
seemed a purchase.
Not even a sudden raucous shriek from directly overhead
made Willi pause, although Durell’s sweat turned chill with
the strangling sound. The column halted. A dozen flashlights
searched the foliage. The night sky could not be seen, since
they were under the perpetual cloud cover near the island’s
peak, But in its place, a million opalescent, dusted wings
winked and glittered and darted and fluttered in disturbance
at the light. Round, primitive eyes stared from small furry
creatures that seemed transfixed by the presence of men in
this place.
The outlandish shriek was repeated.
This time Durell’s flashlight found its source. It was a rust-
red bird of paradise, disturbed in its roost by their passage, as
gaudy and as coarse as one of Ch’ing’s pleasure-women.
There was a collective sigh of relief and the party moved on.
The trip would take most of the night. There was no help for
it, Willi said, since only roundabout trails could be used to
cross the rain jungle. There were swamps where snakes and
crocodiles made it too dangerous to attempt a passage.
No one argued with her.
After a time, when they left the swamp and came to an area
with firmer footing but denser foliage, it began to rain. It was
like no rainstorm Durell had ever experienced. It did not rain
in separate drops, but in solid sheets of tepid water that
gushed, poured, pounded, pelted and tumbled from the high
trees. All in an instant, they were soaked to the skin, but
there was no relief in it. Their sweat mixed with the rain and
provided a slickness that seemed beyond endurance for
another minute. But they marched on, each man following in
the footsteps of the man ahead, unknowing and no longer
caring where they went, as long as the noise and incredible
weight of falling water struck them. They were stunned by
the downfall.
The rain ended as suddenly as it began, except that vagrant
Winds, unfelt at ground level, shook the huge leaves above,
and they kept walking through slow, slimy drippings for the
next hour. It was Durell who called a rest halt when he saw
the Hakka men begin to stagger and fall.
He sat beside Willi, his back against the hole of a broad,
spongy tree. Bamboo thickets soared high out of range of
their strongest flashlights, and a hundred thousand orchids
glowed in the light of their lanterns. They had climbed, he
estimated, almost to the top of the island, and now, directly
ahead, there was a solid Wall of vegetation that would take
hours of hacking with knives and machetes to get through.
“Are you all right, Willi?” he asked quietly.
Her eyes searched the small gathering of men around them.
“Where is Malachy?”
“He‘s tending to one of the men who fell and cut himself.
Answer me, Willi. You look strange.”
“I’m as right as Malachy, and as wrong as you are."
“That doesn’t make sense.”
She hugged her knees and looked away. Her cheek was
scratched by a thorn, and there was mud on her chin. It made
her seem more desirable. She said: “You’ve worked with
death so long, Sam, it doesn’t touch you anymore. Or doesn’t
seem to. If Lee was a traitor, he was unable to help himself, I
think. Lots of us are like that. He didn’t know which way to
turn, and he chose the wrong way. Can‘t you feel sorry for
him?"
Durell said harshly: “He wanted to die, Willi. He knew there
was nothing left for him.”
“Couldn’t you have helped him?”
“I’d have testified against him on charges of treason. If he
were lucky, he’d have spent the rest of his life in Leavenworth
for betraying our codes to Ch’ing and the Reds. Lee became
an enemy when he sided with Peiping and the Red ideology
of building Communism on the atomic ashes of millions of
innocent people. How does that weigh against mercy for
Tommy? You think Lee’s crime was small in itself, justified
by his need to protect his parents back in China. But if Ch‘ing
wins here, Tommy gave away sixteen A-3 missiles, each with
a one-megaton warhead, each able to turn a large city to
useless cinders. Is that a small crime, Willi?"
She shook her head. “I can’t weigh things the way you do, or
see it through your eyes.”
“I’m glad you can’t, Willi.”
She looked at him for a long, sober moment. “I’m so sorry I
could die, Sam, because for a little time I had a dream about
us . . . and now I know it wouldn’t work.”
“No, it wouldn’t,” he said.
“Malachy helps people, easing their hurts and pains. And
that’s the way I want it. I don’t want to think about atomic
clouds poisoning the earth. I want to sail the Tarakuta and do
a little trading and watch the wind clouds and—be with
Malachy.”
He said: “Then you should tell him this.”

They gained a mile in the next hour, hacking through the

jungle. The heat grew thicker, and the Chinese muttered and
Wanted to turn back. Fong urged them on, his gestures
desperate. They came upon a giant tangle of vines and
parasitic growths, great mushroom blooms that reflected a
look of evil whenever the lanterns touched them. Other
parasites were huge, spongy masses ten feet across, hanging
in gray sacs on trees they shared in a symbiotic life. There
were vines covered with what seemed like a fine down, but
when a Hakka pulled one aside, the down turned out to be
fine, sawtoothed needles that ripped his flesh through to the
bone. There were seed pods that, shaken loose, stung and
tormented the skin wherever they landed, and fruitlike things
that changed color when the flashlights touched them and
moved and swayed, grasping at the uncountable insects that
hummed and sang every moment of the way. There were
great gray leeches the size of a man’s fist that softly, silently
attached themselves to a passing man's arm or leg, so gently
that the victim was unaware of his passenger until the next
man noticed it and had to make the thing withdraw from the
flesh by burning it with the tip of a cigarette. But there was
no halt for another hour, until Durell estimated it was
midnight. They had gained less than four miles across the
width of the island.
There was a constant pelting of ‘not raindrops from the
stifling canopy of leaves above. Once one of the Hakka began
to scream, on the high ululating note of hysteria. Fong was
instantly upon the man, smashing at him with his gun to
knock him insensible. He signaled the two nearest guerillas
to carry the unconscious man thereafter.
Willi kept steadily in the lead. Now and then she paused to
search the darkness as if she could see through the
impenetrable foliage for a landmark. It seemed to Durell that
no one could tell if they were traveling in circles or not. It was
like stumbling blindfolded through a black nightmare.
They had come to a high, level plateau, but there was no
chance to glimpse the sea and the port of Bangka which was
their goal. Willi halted again. She moved uneasily a few paces
to the right and left, and came back to Durell, biting her lip.
“Things have changed from the way Grandpa described it,”
she said. “There was a big blow-down here, and when the
Japanese chased Grandpa this far into the rain forest one
time, he saved himself by burrowing into it like a rabbit
diving into a briar patch. In twenty years, perhaps it all rotted
away, but if not—well, then we’ve gone wrong somewhere.”
Fong said mildly: “We are lost, Miss Wilhelmina?” In the Soft
lantern glow, Willi’s face was pale. She had tied up her long
hair, but thick strands had been plucked loose by vines and
thorns. She said: “If it were daylight, we might be able to take
our bearings, but it’s as dark as a pocket, right now. I doubt if
one could ever see the sun in this forsaken place, anyway."
“What came after the blow-down?” Durell asked.
"Oh, there were some cliffs and caves where pygmy
aborigines lived, but the Japanese killed them all. Then some
rock ledges under mud. And another swamp. But I think
there is a stream there, and we can follow it all the way down
to the coast. The trouble is to get across the spine and find
the ledges.”
“I think we're on them now,” Durell said. He stamped his foot
on the earth. “We’ve been walking on spongy stuff all the
way, and this is the first time the ground feels solid.”
Willi was startled. “But the blow-down—”
“I think we just hacked our way through it.”
It turned out that Durell was right. The undergrowth thinned
quickly with the next few steps, and the machetes were no
longer necessary. A sense of freedom, of escape from the hot
oppression of the jungle, enlivened everyone’s step for the
next twenty minutes.
But the swamp began again.
The going was downhill, indicating that they had truly
crossed Bangka’s height. But it was here that they lost three
of their men. One was bitten by a snake that dropped from a
vine overhead, and despite Malachy’s frantic efforts with a
crude scalpel, fashioned from a jungle knife, the Chinese
went rigid and died in less than five minutes. The others
would not abandon the body, and there was a parley until it
was arranged that the dead man would be carried with them.
The two other lost Hakka men were not missed in the silent,
dripping swamp until it was too late to recover them. The
group halted and called and called. Fong sweated, his face
anxious, worrying about the families of the men, swearing at
their stupidity at the same time that he yielded to his concern
for them. His voice Went crashing through the swamp, only
to fall, muffled, against the oppressive drip of sap and resin
and gummy water that fell from above. It was like throwing a
ball into a blanket. The only answer was a single, sharp
shriek of a disturbed parakeet.
In the darkness, the danger of others straying and becoming
lost became the greatest hazard. Even in daylight, within the
thick, enveloping heat and oppressive growth, it would have
been difficult to maintain contact. Each man was told to hang
on to the man ahead. Bodily contact was the only way to
avoid further disaster. And even this did not prevent one
more man from mysteriously vanishing before they found the
stream Willi was looking for.
It was more like a mucky, stagnant pond, a thing that smelled
so foul and evil that they all recoiled from it. But Willi
insisted it had to be followed or they would never find their
way free again.
“Grandpa Joseph called this the ‘Path of Stepping-Stones,’ ”
she said. “You must follow the right-hand bank of the stream,
going down. Otherwise, the mud will swallow us all; it’s
twenty and thirty feet deep, he said. But on this side there are
submerged rocks that we have to probe for, one for every step
of the way. No one must slip or fall. It would be best if the
men tied themselves together, and each one must put his feet
exactly in the place where the man before him stepped.
Please make it clear to everyone, Fong.”
The Chinese looked uncertain, then bobbed his round head,
and spoke to the men gathered behind them. Again there
were murmurs, but Malachy spoke in quick Cantonese to
back up Fong’s authority, and there were reluctant nods.
Fong cut a score of strong bamboo poles for probes, and Willi
led the way, testing each step with awesome precision while
Durell and Malachy held torches for her. Progress was
agonizing. Because of their inability to move quickly, the
insects found them a helpless quarry, and proceeded to feast
by biting, stinging, chewing and gnawing upon any exposed
skin. Now and then great, foul gaseous bubbles broke in slow
motion upon the surface of the mud. It seemed impossible to
find solid footing through the stinking ooze and debris that
lined the bank of the stream. What creatures watched their
progress was anyone’s guess, Durell thought. He did not want
to think about it. All his attention was centered on the girl,
fearful that she might slip and fail to find the stepping-stones
under the mud.
Somehow, the time passed.
The land sloped gradually downward, and for a short time,
the foliage turned oddly stunted and yellow in the light of
their torches. It was with a sudden burst of relief that Durell
realized they had come out from under the shadow of the
perpetual rain-cloud that clung to the summit of Bangka, and
he could see the ocean again and the stars overhead.
It was like waking from a nightmare. The men recovered as if
wakened from a deadly trance, slowly at first, and then with
quickening spirits as their feet found firm soil, as their eyes
caught the brilliance of the Southern Cross and the vast
panoply of stars overhead. It was like a reprieve from hell.
Far below was a cluster of lights, arranged along a
rectangular pier where a rusty merchantman of about 7,000
tons was moored. From this height and distance, the ship and
endless bucket-chain of tin ore looked like a child’s toy. The
floodlights, however, like those of a prison compound, picked
out everything with merciless clarity. Durell saw Hakka
workmen moving down there like motes, and trucks came
regularly from what appeared to be a thick, jungly growth to
the left of the tin-roofed warehouses of the little port. The
contents of the trucks could not be identified.
Fong‘s men straightened their shoulders, lit cigarettes, and
chattered with new animation. A sharp whistle from Fong
brought them back into military’ discipline. They rested,
squatting on their haunches, and waited as Fong joined
Durell and Malachy.
Directly below was a coconut plantation, the trees arranged
in neat, orderly rows that would give quick access to the road
beyond. A dog barked at them and then ran away.
Durell pointed to the distant pier. “Ch’ing has been alerted.
You can see the guards there, and they look like more than
he’d ordinarily have.”
“It is true,” Fong nodded. He smiled at Willi. “You swim
through jungle like you swim in lagoon, Miss Wilhelmina. We
thank you for our lives.”
“We’re not finished yet,” Durell said. “Ch’ing has more on his
mind than us. He knows about the raiding boats in the
channel tonight that sank one of the Malay fishermen. He
can’t know for certain where they are now. So we’re up
against a double alert and have to be doubly careful. I assume
Ch’ing holes up in that old Portuguese fortress down there. It
looks as tough as it was three hundred years ago.”
From what Durell could see of it, Prince Ch’ing had renewed
the old fort built by the first European merchants to reach
these fabled spice islands. It loomed on a promontory across
the harbor, surrounded, as it must have been in the old days
of the Sultanate, by the nipa huts of the Dusuns and Malays,
kept at a clear distance, however, from the solid coral walls.
Durell hadn’t expected to see the whale-shaped hull of the
Jackson in this hidden little port. But he had hoped for a
glimpse of something to verify his decision to come here, to
justify all they had endured.
He searched the harbor again. As the Hakka men shouldered
their weapons and started downhill through the coconut
plantation at a jog trot, he became aware of a blotting
darkness in the sky, a swift devouring of the brilliant stars. It
was as if a giant mouth had opened from over the horizon to
swallow up the light of the heavens.
There was a brief moment of utter stillness, of heat and
oppressive electric tension, before the wind struck again.
Before they had to duck before the onslaught, he finished his
hard, slow inspection of the harbor.
There was no sign of a submarine down there.

chapter
nineteen
THE STORM was a solid wall of black, howling fury, a
screaming, lashing, explosive force that tore off the treetops
and made the supple coco palms creak and bend like giant
bows. Dust, sand, sea spume, leaves, vines, small squealing
things, fluttering and helpless birds, bits of human debris
from smashed huts, bits of coral and rain that felt like a cold
whip—all the accumulated violence of the elements struck the
little party with Durell with the solid force of a battering ram.
The men fell fiat and clung to roots and rocks and to each
other for several terrifying seconds.
Then the blast passed over them and it was calm again,
except for an ominously pelting rain.
“Get up!” Durell called. “Run for it, and get ready to drop for
the next one!”
It was almost a mile downhill, most of it through open
plantation, some of it through the muddy streets of the
village. Although the sky was a black churning obscurity,
there was a strange, white luminosity on the sea that Durell
finally identified as a solid layer of flying spume and foam.
He ran beside Willi and Malachy and shouted above the hiss
of the rain.
“How much high water can we expect?”
“Plenty,” Willi gasped. “If the Tarakuta isn’t out of the
Bangka Passage, she’ll be driven half a mile inland when the
big waves come. But maybe it will miss this port. This kind of
storm has a small cyclonic center that’s unpredictable. You
can’t tell where it will hit.”
She pushed impatiently at her wet, heavy hair while Durell
studied the confusion in the port below. Whatever the
danger, the storm was a help. The loading operations at the
freighter dock had stopped. Some of the light standards on
the pier were twisted so that the floodlight beams shot
futilely skyward instead of on the winches. Men ran about in
the panic of a disturbed anthill. Durell spoke to the girl and
Malachy.
“Take a hard look down there. Does anything look different
to you, at all? You’ve seen this place once or twice before,
haven’t you?”
A long file of the Hakka guerillas trotted by while the girl
frowned and bit her lip. At last she said: “The port seems—
smaller, somehow. Its shape seems changed.”
“How?” he asked sharply. “Can you make out any camouflage
nets? That might explain the difference.”
The rain halted at this moment and gave them all a clear view
of the harbor and its loading facilities, as far as the grim,
ancient battlements of the Portuguese fortress.
Willi looked at Durell with round eyes. “That’s it, of course.
Camouflage. There must be an acre of it over there, just
below Ch’ing’s castle.”
Durell nodded to Malachy. “I think we’ll find what’s left of
the Jackson and her crew under that netting. Let’s go.”
The storm helped again. Between the wild, irrational blasts of
wind, they made rapid progress into the outskirts of the little
town. The power went out in the station at the mouth of the
river, and the big floodlights on the pier went black for some
moments before an auxiliary diesel plant went into
operation. The chugging beat of the generating engine filled
the air in the silences between the wind. The floodlights were
not as bright as before; their lenses flickered, and there were
shadows along the tin-roofed sheds that had not been there
before.
The freighter flew no flag, but she looked low and clumsy, an
old Clyde-side merchantman half a century old. She was
fitted with big holds, and the hatches were open to receive
buckets of tin ore that streamed from the swinging booms.
There was time, too, to glimpse the crates of cargo being
trucked with desperate haste onto the pier. Then the wind
struck again, and everyone in the raiding party clung to the
earth and anything solid they could grasp.
Once more the air was filled with sound, and the hot wind
was like a giant scoop that tried to pluck them from the
ground. Out of the black night came whirling branches, mats,
small animals, chickens. Willi lay between Durell and
Malachy, and both men helped to pin her down from the
reach of the storm. It was as if some giant, frustrated monster
smashed and thrashed about, seeking them as victims. A few
thin screams from the town reached Durell. The work on the
pier halted when a long, high swell surged in past the little
harbor mole and lifted the freighter a full eight feet up and
then dropped her into the mud of the bottom. The wave
battered its way on through the village, piling up a solid wall
of smashed huts, shattered trees and lumber and broken
furniture, with here and there a human body.
Then there was another respite, and a hot maw of dark
silence swallowed everything. The quiet lasted only a few
moments, and then the feeble shouts of the overseers on the
splintered pier could be heard, urging the Hakka workers
back to their labor.
The crates on the dock interested Durell. He guessed they
contained some vital ingredients off the Andrew Jackson, but
he had to leave them for the moment. The sub’s crew had to
be released, and he decided the prison compound must be
under the camouflage netting, too. It explained why none of
the installations had ever been spotted from the air. He told
Malachy his plan.
“But Ch’ing won‘t just let us walk in, Samuel.”
“Ch’ing has other troubles, at the moment.”
The next gust and tidal wave, with the thrashing clatter of
debris flying through the night, covered their advance. None
of the kampong people, seeing Fong and his armed men,
gave an alarm. A graded road led around the littered harbor,
away from the floodlighted pier. The loading operation was
suspended again. Some of the freighter’s officers had run
down onto the pier, and a. bull-horn bellowed orders in
Chinese from the bridge. Normal seamanship demanded that
the ship leave her berth at once to get sea room in which to
ride out the storm. But the crew knew it was already too late
for that, Durell supposed. The storm would reach its height
before the ship could clear the island channels. They could
only hope her hawsers would hold and that no sea high
enough to break her up by pounding her on shore would
come again. Certainly, they had lost any hope of running for
it through the howling, tortuous blackness of reef and island
out there.
The wind lifted steadily, in a distinct change from the first
wild efforts of the storm. The pressure was no longer erratic
but persistent, and they ‘had to lean hard against it as if into
a resistant netting, in order to progress. They came to an
overturned jeep and Durell ordered Fong to detach the .50-
millimeter machine-gun from its bracket. Ahead, through the
dark wind and rain, the old Portuguese fort loomed like an
eagle’s nest above the lagoon. Beyond a wild froth of water
was the loading dock and the freighter. Work had stopped
completely there. Confusion ruled the workers and the ship’s
crew.
As Fong‘s men hesitated, Durell shouted for them to keep
going. There was a checkpoint ahead, and if his guess about
the camouflage netting was correct, they should be under it
and next to the prison compound in the next few moments.
He spoke to Malachy. “Tell Fong to use a grenade and the
jeep’s machine-gun on that roadblock up there.”
There was a brief, sharp struggle. The dull crump of the
grenade was a feeble sound against the howl of the wind. The
air, filled with spume, tasted sharply of the salt sea. They ran
forward at Fong’s signal and passed what had been, twenty
years ago, an old Japanese pillbox and gun emplacement.
And then the wind lifted and finished their work for them.
It came with a long, keening blast out of the southeast that
stopped them all in their tracks. There was a terror in its
violence beyond anything man could inspire. It was an
outrage against the senses, a defiance of all that was natural.
The air was filled with breaking sounds, followed by a long
ripping noise that made Durell think the very fabric of reality
was being torn apart. It stunned the mind and overpowered
the body, stopped the heart and filled the lungs. All thought
ceased. He clung to the mud, helping to pin Willi down
beside him. Along with the wind came a solid wall of rain that
smashed them down, and there was a sensation of earth, air
and sea all churning to form a new and deadly element that
blinded and deafened anything alive in its path.
But the wind was not entirely against them. There was a vast
flapping overhead, as if some giant, prehistoric monster on
leathery wings went crying above them.
“The netting!” Willi cried. "It’s torn free!"
It was true. The huge camouflage apparatus, anchored to
trees and tall poles on floating buoys in the lagoon, had not
been able to survive the raging elements. All in one instant,
everything broke free and was blown inland to expose the
white froth of water in the anchorage and the beach under
the gloomy battlements of the old Portuguese fort . . . .
The Andrew Jackson was moored to a makeshift dock there.
And on the beach, visible as if a curtain had been lifted on
stage, were the huts of a prison compound behind barbed-
wire fencing.

chapter twenty
AS IF satisfied at last with its work, the wind passed over
them and roared inland with the diminishing sound of a
hundred departing locomotives. Durell raised himself to his
knees, then stood up in the village street and drew a deep
breath.
For the moment, there was only the heavy, sodden plash of
the tropical rain.
He stared for a long time at the rounded whaleback hull of
the submarine, at the Jackson’s slim, tall sail and the open
hatches around her tower, evidence of work begun to
dismantle her and get the A-3 warheads out of her belly. A
steam crane had been blown over by the wind and lay across
the boat’s forward deck in a twisted tangle of steel girder and
cables. Some dead dockworkers, crushed by the wreckage,
floated in the lagoon like dark curds on a milky froth churned
up by the heavy rain.
A road circled the beach of the lagoon, and there was a
heaped-up tangle of native outrigger fishing boats, brightly
painted, tossed as if by a child’s hand high above the tidal
mark. The village around them lay in stunned darkness. A
dog yelped, a baby wailed, a woman began to lament in a
thin, keening voice. Malachy stood up beside Durell.
“What now? It’s hard to believe my eyes. The Jackson is
really here, Sam.”
“Yes. Will you get Pong for me, Mal?”
“We’ll have to strike fast. Ch’ing will know we're here—”
“Get Fong.”
Headlights made a slanting, yellow slice of reflected light
through the teeming curtains of rain. The sound of a jeep
churning along the muck and debris of the lagoon road
sounded above the hiss and splatter and gurgling of the
downpour. The lights swayed over broken houses, over a man
and a woman standing in stupefied dismay in their wrecked
shop. The spatter of rifle bullets hit them as the headlights
found the little force.
“Down!” Durell shouted.
Fong, coming up as Malachy directed, pulled the pin of a
grenade in his teeth and threw it. The dark blob arched over
the road toward the oncoming glare of the auto headlights. A
machine-gun stuttered, and there was more rifle firing. Then
the grenade exploded and the jeep fell over on its side, one
wheel spinning, another torn off and rolling into the milky
surf of the lagoon. Men tumbled out of the vehicle, which
began to burn. One of the men was on fire, drenched with
gasoline, and his screams echoed until he threw himself into
the water. Even then, the flames did not go out. Durell and
the Hakka guerillas went forward and yanked and tore at the
survivors of the jeep. Two of them were Ch’ing’s armed
gangsters. One of them was a bald, slim young Chinese in
civilian clothes, except for a third officer’s cap. The young
Chinese looked stunned and kept putting on and taking off
his muddied cap.
“Ask him where he’s going, Fong,” Durell asked.
There was a chatter of Chinese. The civilian said something
and pointed to the moored sub, then at the gloomy walls of
the more distant Portuguese fort. Fong slapped him, and the
man fell down and cried out something. and Fong threw him
into the rough arms of two of his men. Fong’s eyes glistened.
“This person is a technician, and he has been summoned by
Prince Ch‘ing to verify the proper arming of a missile, an
atomic missile, he says, taken from the American boat.”
Malachy said: “That doesn’t make sense. It’s suicide.”
Durell shifted the weight of his Sten gun. “Malachy, you take
Fong’s men and get the Jackson’s crew free, as fast as you
can. We’ve lost too much time already.”
“Sam, didn’t you hear that technician? It means that Ch’ing
figures he’s lost and is going to blow us all off the map.”
“I’ve been worried about that for some time. Keep an eye on
Willi, Malachy. I’ll take three or four of Fong’s men, and Fong
himself, as a guide, and go in there alone.”
“Why not all of us?"
“Ch’ing knows we’re here. But if you divert his eye by
attacking to free the sub’s crew in the compound, Fong and I
and a few others might reach him. Go on, we’re wasting time
”
Durell started away. The rain felt like a warm, wet blanket
weighting his shoulders. Fong picked out four men and
trotted after him with them. Durell heard a last set of
footsteps running after him as he moved around the wrecked
fishing boats toward the Portuguese fort. He turned and saw
Willi.
“Please, Sam. Take me with you.”
“You belong with Malachy,” he said.
She stood tall and straight, her sarong plastered by the rain
to the long lines of her body. In the dim light that came
across the lagoon from the dock and the freighter, he saw her
eyes search his face; her white teeth bit down in frustration
on her lip; and she pushed at her heavy, wet hair with
impatience.
“I don’t know where I belong, Sam. Not anymore. I don’t
want anything to happen to you . . .”
“There’s no time to discuss it. Stay with Malachy.”
“Please, Sam—”
He turned away, signed to Fong, and they began to run along
the littered road toward the looming outlines of the old fort.
Willi did not follow them. He looked over his shoulder once,
against his better judgment, and saw her walking back to
Malachy. A whistle blew somewhere, and Malachy’s Hakka
rebels got to their feet and surged toward the stunned guards
at the gates to the prison compound.
There were scattered shots from the barbed-wire fence and a
floodlight went on suddenly and filled the area of huts with a
dazzling brightness. The Hakka guerillas were taking full
advantage of the stunning effect of the storm and their own
surprise raid. There were a few more stuttering shots, a series
of screams and shouts, and the gate to the compound was
broken inward and the Hakka men poured inside, led by
Malachy. Durell, on the road, saw Malachy suddenly slip and
fall, and he halted and waited for a moment, but Malachy did
not get up and he could not see him again in the surge of men
who poured into the compound around him. Out of the huts
came the dazed, uncomprehending crew of the Jackson to
greet the Hakka rescuers.
Fong pulled at his arm. “Durell, please, we must hurry—”
He still did not see the red-bearded Irishman rise. He did not
see Willi, either. He felt a pang of despair, as if someone had
hit him in the belly. There was a last flare-up of shooting at
the other end of the compound. Fong spoke to him urgently
again, and Durell wiped the rain from his face with the flat of
his hand and nodded and went on.
Together with the Hakka, he ran up the wet slope of mud and
debris toward the dark walls of the old fort. No one got in
their way. The rain came down in straight, hissing torrents,
turning the earth to a slickness that made speed impossible.
At Fong’s signal, they scrambled over a low wall of coral
blocks and found themselves in the leafy debris of a shattered
garden. Small specimen trees had been uprooted and bushes
plucked from the soil and blown away. The only things left
standing were two heavy stone lanterns, in each of which a
small flame flickered. The lanterns were carved with dragons’
faces, and these alone seemed serene in a view of nature’s
madness.
He felt a fear in him he had not known before. He knew the
full meaning of the words of the Chinese technician off the
freighter. Peiping would have sent men who knew how to
handle the A-3 missiles, young scientists who had been
trained in Moscow before the split between the two empires.
He could understand the desperate choice faced by Prince
Ch’ing. Failure could not be tolerated. Out of defeat, some
form of victory had to be snatched. He felt a twist of sweaty
fear go through him again. Somewhere in this place there was
a warhead taken from the Jackson. If Ch’ing had his way, the
warhead would be armed and in seconds, there would be
nothing left of this place, nothing left of the island but a vast,
mushrooming cloud. . . .
Fong and his four men worked their way silently through the
wrecked garden with Durell. Under Fong’s wide coolie hat,
the Hakka’s face was grim. His Sten was held on a taut
shoulder strap. His wet face glistened in the faint glow of the
stone lanterns, and he whispered an order to his men. The
wind had died. There was only the sodden hiss of the rain
and the distant, eerie boom of the island surf, breaking over
reefs in smothering foam.
Fong pointed ahead, spoke again to his four men, and spoke
to Durell. “You see the—how you say it?—the moat? It is
usually dry, but tonight it is filled with water. And this is
good.” He touched one of the Hakka. “Hui Chi says we can
cross without sound, because otherwise branches in the moat
make much crackling noise to. warn guards on the wall. They
already know something bad happens at the compound, they
see the fighting and hear the guns. They will he very nervous,
ready to shoot.”
“Then how do we get in?”
“Hui Chi knows a way.”
A torch flickered overhead. The ripping sounds of Sten guns
still came from the prison compound below. Durell held in
his mind an image of Malachy, falling as he ran through the
wire gate. He could not find Willi anywhere in his mental
picture of the scene. He looked back through the rain at the
lagoon. The Andrew Jackson, with the big 727 on her sleek
sail, seemed unharmed. And now he could hear dim shouts of
jubilation and saw the movement of men dancing with wild
relief at their rescue from the compound. amid still he could
not pick out the figures of Malachy or Willi.
Now Ch’ing would know that his attempt to hijack the
submarine had failed. The alternative would be considered,
even at this moment. He felt it was hopeless. He could not get
into the fort in time.

The water flooding the moat was filled with broken tree
limbs, a thick layer of torn foliage, and a dead man who had
somehow slipped from the top of the wall above and broken
his neck. Fong went into the moat first, wading with his
snubby gun held high. The water only reached to the Hakka’s
chest. There was little to be seen for a few moments as Fong,
muttering softly to himself, felt his way along the moss-
grown coral base of the wall. Durell checked his impatience.
Three centuries of tropical weather had deposited a matting
of vines that defied all attempts to cut and destroy it. Fong
meant to make good use of it.
Afterward, Durell thought he could not have gotten far
without the Hakka. They climbed up side by side, clinging to
the rough vines, and just as Durell reached the top, one of
Ch’ing’s thugs appeared and yelled and slammed down at his
head with a rifle butt. At that moment, Durell could only try
to duck out of range. But Fong managed to free one hand to
grab the sweeping thrust of the gun butt, and then the Hakka
yanked hard and the enemy lost his balance. The man
pitched headlong into the moat below, with a long, wailing
scream.
Fong grinned and scrambled over the top of the wall with
Durell. “This way now, very quickly, please. I know where the
fat monster is hiding.”
They ran down a flight of old steps. ‘Durell wished fleetingly
he could have glimpsed Malachy’s figure rising from the
tumble of fighting in the prison compound behind them; and
he wished, too, he could have kept Willi free of the danger
zone. He was filled with a raging anger that was like the
storm sweeping the islands. When half a dozen armed men
trotted across a courtyard, he was only just able to check his
trigger finger on the Sten and throw up a hand to halt Fong’s
men. They ducked into a stone archway, heavy with age, and
Pong opened a door to lead the way into the central building.
Stepping from the weight of the warm rain and threat of Wild
new Winds into the luxurious rooms beyond was uncanny. It
was like moving through a movie dissolve, an unreal curtain
that divided violence and tumult with soft silks and gray
curling incense and the rich opulence of very ancient
treasures. Ch’ing had a taste for art that was reflected in the
quiet jade pieces, the silken wall paintings, the carpets and
Tang furniture, the priceless porcelains from the time of the
Mings, the ancient scrolls in glass cases. Perfume cloyed the
air from old bronze censers on heavy, black teak stands.
Durell was driven forward by his urgency. With Fong and his
men, they looked like ragged creatures lost in a palace of
luxury, dripping rain from their clothes, their snubby Stens
weaving this way and that like the heads of angry cobras.
Fong gestured and they ran across the entry room and up a
wide flight of carpeted stone steps toward the sound of
anxious voices above. Within the solid walls built three
centuries ago by Portuguese adventurers, the storm might as
well not exist, Durell thought. No wind or rain could touch
this place or disturb the Oriental peace of these rooms.
Ch’ing must have reveled in his security here, in his mastery
over the Hakka workers who labored in his sluice mines and
loaded his ships. . . .
A girl’s sudden shriek of pain echoed from all directions as
Durell and Fong, with the other Hakka men behind them,
came to the head of the stairs. Footsteps ran down a hidden
corridor nearby. The place was as much of a labyrinth as the
pleasure houses in Dendang.
A thin voice spoke in Mandarin, a woman‘s voice, old and
quavering, but filled with a dripping malice and anger that
reminded Durell of the old harridan he had encountered in
Fishtown. He touched Fong lightly on the shoulder, asked a
question.
Fong shook his head under his wet coolie hat. “I do not
understand them. They speak of destroying everything—the
island itself. The old woman-—Ch’ing’s mother—loves life too
much. She argues against it and says the girl will speak. The
girl knows something of you, and they question her. Her
name is Paradise, I think.”
It was not beyond Ch’ing, Durell thought, to use the A-3
warheads to blow Bangka off the map. His hunch had been
right about the technician they had intercepted from the
Peiping freighter. But there were others already here,
apparently. Footsteps hammered away in response to a
command from beyond the next doorway. The stairway
where he crouched with Fong and his ragged men was dimly
lighted. No one came their way. Yet a trick of acoustics made
the voices beyond seem louder than normal, even though a
heavy door, black with age, barred their way. He pressed his
fingers lightly against the barrier. It did not move. There was
an old iron handle, pitted with rust, and he tested the lock,
and then Fong touched his shoulder carefully. The Hakka’s
face glistened with sweat.
“They question the girl, Paradise, about you. The old woman
—the one Who claims royalty in her blood-—she knows how
to hurt girls. I will kill them both.”
“No, I want Ch’ing alive." Durell rubbed a hand over his
mouth. “We'll need Ch‘ing later. He mustn’t be killed.”
He knew that without Prince Ch’ing nothing could be proved
in the eyes of the world. Americans had been killed and
tortured, outright piracy had to be aired, and there had been
interference with the Pandakan plebiscite. Without Ch’ing,
the balance of propaganda could be twisted any way, even to
charge American intrusion.
Fong could not whisper translations of Ch’ing’s words.
Apparently there were technicians in the next room who were
able to discuss the complexities of arming an A-3 warhead.
But one of the missiles, Fong whispered, was in a back
courtyard.
There was no time left, then. When the girl named Paradise
screamed again, Durell turned the door handle and the heavy
panel creaked inward. He ran forward with Fong.
A pistol cracked, an automatic rifle ripped the fabric of the
air. Fong sucked in air with a hiss of confusion. They had not
burst into a room, as expected, but found themselves on a
high stone gallery overlooking what had once served the old
fort as a central council chamber. Below, on the flagstone
floor, was a long teak table inlaid with fruitwood and ivory,
with high, carved chairs neatly ranged around it. A huge
photograph of Mao hung like a red and yellow banner over
the president’s chair. There was a massive cabinet behind
this that dated back to the old Portuguese merchant-
adventurers. On a dais before the cabinet was a thronelike
affair, with the massive, enormous figure of Prince Ch’ing
seated before a small, angry, and anxious group of Chinese in
civilian clothes. They were not Oceanic Chinese, to judge by
their Peiping-style suits.
On the floor at Ch’ing’s feet was the girl, Paradise, stripped to
her skin, her back a series of clawed welts. The old woman,
grotesque in a gorgeous blue and gold brocaded gown of
heavy silk, stood over the tormented girl like a vicious crone.
And there were a dozen or more armed men alerted and
ranged against the walls of the big room. One of these, more
ready to react than the others, had been staring directly up at
the gallery where Durell and Fong and the other Hakka
erupted. The man’s trigger finger tightened in spasmodic
reflex.
The racket and clamor of the shots and ricocheting slugs
stunned the senses. There was a thin shriek from the old
woman, and a hoarse order from Ch’ing as his vast weight
lurched upward in surprise. Fong grunted and staggered and
caught the iron rail of the gallery and squeezed off a long,
raking burst with his Sten. The other Hakka men triggered
their guns with him, spraying the scene below. Men shouted,
fell, turned awkwardly, faces upward. Durell called to Fong to
follow and swung along the balcony at a running crouch and
started down a flight of narrow stone steps built into the wall.
There was no railing. There were crashings and shrieks and
splintering sounds and another burst of fire in reply from
below. The old woman fell away from the naked body of the
girl as if kicked. She skittered awkwardly, her silk gown
jumping and jerking as if self-animated, a horrible puppet
dragged and punched across the floor. She was dead long
before the bullets finished hitting her.
“Fong, this way!” Durell shouted.
But there was only a falling body, a toppling bundle of arms
and legs, spilling blood and brains from under a head
shattered by a dozen slugs. The wide-brimmed straw hat of
the coolie fluttered like a broken bird to the floor below.
Fong's body made an ugly sound as it struck the stone. At the
same moment, Ch’ing turned with a sign to two of the
Peiping men and vanished through a doorway beside the
mahogany cabinet. Durell hit the bottom of the stairway and
jumped for the dais. Something tapped his shoulder and
spun him off balance. There was more shooting from the
gallery, a deadly fire fight that was suicidal between Ch’ing’s
men and the survivors of Fong’s little platoon. Durell
slammed through the doorway after Ch‘ing. Only two of
Fong’s men survived to follow him.

It was still raining. The dark downpour was heavy and

endless, filling the night with its hissings and chucklings.
Floodlights turned the rain into vertical silver curtains. A
gate in the courtyard wall yawned blackly, but closer to hand
was a long, stake-body truck, a dual-trailer affair originally
designed to haul supplies for the tin sluice mines and
Bangka’s docks. Its load tonight was quite different.
The A-3 Polaris looked monstrously sleek and deadly,
secured under canvas to the fiat truck body. Several side
plates had been removed, and two civilian Chinese were busy
delving into the missile’s interior. Their faces looked
unnaturally tight, their eyes agleam with a suppressed
hysteria that implied a knowledge of impending suicide.
Ch’ng stood with them, heedless of the rain, speaking with
rapid urgency in his round face.
As he recognized the meaning of what he saw, Durell
wondered how many times recently the world had balanced
on such a fine edge of madness. If the wrong word were
spoken, if the wrong man were in the wrong place, humanity
faced a holocaust. And there it was—the missile, the
imperialist enemy, the new dynasty of emperors in Peiping.
Missile and madman were together, willing to fire the earth’s
atmosphere with terrible death. Durell could not wish the
missile out of existence; it was a fact, woven into the fabric of
his life for too long, and his dedication to divert its awful
power over the minds of evil men had taken him out of the
normal way of life long ago.
He felt heavy-minded, reluctant to do anything. What
happened was inevitable. He felt a hypnotic fascination with
this headlong rush toward self-destruction, overcome by a
desire to stop and let these men do what they were doing
until it was ended, until the circuits clicked shut, the warhead
was armed, and the inevitable surge of current triggered the
explosion. He told himself to move. But he could not move.
He began to sweat, standing there in the dark silvery rain; the
weight of the Sten gun on its shoulder strap pulled at his
bleeding wound. He had forgotten the injury taken in the
room above. It did not hurt. The enormity of that sleek
monster on the truck filled his mind, and he saw that the
men were working desperately on it, changing its inert
darkness into incredible force. They were ready and willing to
die and be transmitted into flaming, whirling atoms, to dance
in the mushroom cloud, entwined with it like lovers at the
height of their desire. . . .
But he could not be like them. He groaned and he knew he
had never felt like this before, and he was afraid of himself.
“Ch’ing!" he shouted.
The rain wiped out his harsh voice. He called again.
“Ch’ing, get them out of there!”
The fat man turned his round face toward him. The wide
flesh rippled, the mouth smiled insanely. He spoke to the
technicians and they looked at Durell and went back to their
work, dedicated to death. Durell wondered at their discipline.
But was he different from them? Then he lifted the Sten gun.
Shots clattered dimly through the rain. There was a noise to
his left, and something hit him, and hit him again, and one
leg was knocked out from under him. He tumbled down in a
fiery anguish. Ch’ing loomed over him and he squeezed the
Sten’s trigger and kept the hammering, yammering gun
pointed at Ch’ing’s falling, enormous weight and then at the
two men on the truck. . . .
There were other shots. He heard American voices. Someone
called his name. Durell rolled over and got one knee doubled
under to crouch in the wet puddle of the courtyard. He fell
over. He got up again. Ch’ing was dead, slumped against the
heavy wheels of the truck. Rain washed the blood that
stained his silken robe. The two technicians also sprawled in
awkward death below the sleek implacability of their stolen
missile. . . .
Durell sighed. Men ran through the gate, and they wore blue
U.S. Navy dungarees, and they came with the Hakka Chinese
who had freed them from their prison compound.
Durell tried to walk toward them, and instead, he fell forward
into the dark rain, into deeper darkness.

chapter
twenty-one
THE sun was a laughing mockery of the wild night. The wind
was a gentle chuckling, and the sea whispered intimacies that
seemed incredible after the wild savagery of the dark hours.
He felt the free heave and lift and proud surge of the
Tarakuta’s deck. He enjoyed it with an inner silence,
motionless, rolling with the roll of the sea but without motion
of himself. He was aware of the sun beyond his closed
eyelids, grateful for the warmth on his face, of the hundred
little normal sounds of the schooner in motion.
“Sam? Cajun?”
He opened his eyes and looked at her, and everything was the
Way it had been before. He thought of several inanities and
said: “It’s getting to be a habit.”
“I don’t think there will be another time.”
“Let’s hope not," he said.
“Does anything hurt?”
“Everything.”
“It’s nothing serious. Some bruises—oh, a lot of them, and a
flesh wound in the shoulder and a bullet through the calf
muscle of your left leg. Some skin abraded off the left side of
your jaw, too." She paused. “Did you know that your face
looks very nice when you’re asleep, Sam?”
“No.” He smiled. “Nobody ever told me."
“Well, it looks different. Troubled, but nice. But now that
you’re awake, you seem to be somebody else again.”
“Listen,” he said. He sat up. “Where is Malachy?“
Her hands went fiat against his chest. “He’s hobbling along.
He got a bullet in the leg, too. He’s making out his report for
the consulate. We’ll be in Pandakan in half an hour. There
will be an ambulance to take you to the hospital there.”
“I thought you said it wasn’t anything serious.”
“Malachy thinks you should be checked over for a day.”
“I won’t stay.”
Her smile was mischievous, triumphant, like a lovely child’s.
“I told him you wouldn’t, Sam.”
“. . . Willi?”
‘It's all right.” She spoke too quickly. “I’ve thought about it all
night. It’s all right now, Sam."
“No, it isn’t.”
But she put her hands on his face and knelt beside him and
spoke quietly of the hours while he had been sleeping off an
injection of morphine sulphate stuck in his arm by Dr.
Malachy McLeod, and so he learned of what had happened.
She wore white shorts and dirty, scuffed sneakers, and a
man’s faded blue shirt. Her heavy, honeyed hair was braided
like taffy from a candy-making machine; it lay across her left
shoulder and down across the cotton breast of her shirt. Her
eyes never left him. She sat, long-limbed and tanned, in the
shade of an old awning of canvas, stretched above the
schooner’s deck, and it was as if the wet horror of last night,
of the rain jungle and the beaches and the fighting, had never
been.
Most of the Jackson’s crew, she told him, had been rescued,
armed with weapons seized from Ch’ing’s guards, and they
were back aboard the sub, putting things together again But
the captain had been executed on the first day of captivity.
No trace of Pete Holcomb’s body was found. Presumably
when his hasty grave was discovered by Ch’ing, his remains
had been thrown in o the lagoon for barracuda and shark to
remove all traces.
All three missiles taken from the sub had been recovered.
When Willi mentioned these, her mouth shook and her eyes
went wide. “You stopped them from exploding one of them,
didn’t you?”
Durell’s teeth began to ache. “Go on, Willi."
“Well, some Seventh Fleet tugs are on the way, with a new
crew or the sub. She can sail by tomorrow morning, they
say.”
“And what’s the reaction in Pandakan?”
“The Seventh Fleet is coming in no matter what.”
Durell rubbed a finger across his lower lip “It will stir up a lot
of fleas on the body politic. But that ends my job here, Willi.
I’ll be going home."
Her eyes were big. “And where is home for you, Sam?”
“Wherever I’m sent. A Geneva hotel, my apartment in
Washington, a tent in the Sahara. I never know."
“Must you really go on with it?”
Someone had to, he thought. But he remembered his feeling
as he stood in the rain near the monstrous A-3 missile and
waited for its thunderclap. He remembered the sensation of
those moments, when he had felt sucked under by a tide of
suicidal despair and was tempted to let the Peiping
imperialists do what, in their desperation, they felt they had
to do. Men often suffer a death-wish, he told himself. It was
not important. There is a fascination with heights, a morbid
desire to throw yourself into an abyss, a toying torment of
wishful yearning to find the other side, to make an end and,
perhaps, a beginning. It was nothing to brood about, and he
should forget those moments when he had felt sucked up into
an incipient maelstrom of bursting atoms, when he had
hesitated and stood, shaken with desire and yet a loathing, a
love and a hate, an exhaustion and an exhilaration he had not
known before.
It was nothing, he told himself silently.
But it was also everything.
He looked at the waiting girl. “Willi, you belong to Malachy.
If I hadn’t come along, you would marry him. Right now,
you’re in love with a dream that was told to you when you
were just a little girl. But the dream doesn’t exist, and you
must not let it beguile you.”
“You were not a dream yesterday," she said. “You’re not a
dream now.”
“I must go away,” he said.
“Perhaps not.”

The Tarakuta rounded the harbor mole and the distant

beauties of Pandakan were unrolled as if painted on a silk
screen, the city white and gold against the deep green of tea
terraces and palm plantations on the hills. Astern, far across
the shimmering lime of the sea, a distant line of fairy
mountaintops floated, detached /and serene, above the
invisible mainland shore of Borneo. He watched the brightly
painted fishing boats move in the harbor and saw a dark scar
in the mat roofings of Dendang, and Malachy saw him
consider it and tugged at his wild red beard.
“They had a fire there last night. Ch’ing‘s private little empire
of lust was totally burned out.”
“An accident?” Durell asked.
Malachy shrugged. “Colonel Mayubashur is proud of his
efficient fire department. They’re usually pretty good—but
they weren’t very quick about it, last night.”
“Is the colonel a friend?”
“He’s not an enemy.” Malachy’s voice was studied and
normal but part of him was absent, or guarded deeply behind
the facade of his talk. He looked big and tough, his red beard
afire in the pressing afternoon heat; his red hair blew in the
hot breeze. There might never have been a storm last night.
He walked awkwardly, because of his wounds, and a pallor
around his mouth bespoke several kinds of pain. Now and
then he looked at Willi, behind the schooner’s wheel. There
was nothing in Malachy’s eyes except the usual mixture of
Gaelic wryness and bittersweet love as he said absently:
“How did Ch’ing do it? About the Jackson, I mean.”
Durell pulled his thoughts together. “He got the codes from
Tommy Lee, of course. I’ll have to put that in my report to
Washington when I file from your office in Pandakan. Ch’ing
blackmailed Lee through his parents, and got the special
cipher for the Jackson, the red code for emergency
operations and alerts. And Ch’ing used it to lure the sub into
the booby-trapped lagoon. The Chinese freighter, I suppose,
was used as part of the lure, putting their radio on the code
line that meant a world emergency. That was the night, you
remember, the Pandakan radio was knocked out by a
terrorist bomb. No bearings or confirmation could be made.
The Jackson’s captain can’t be blamed. That code shouldn’t
have been out of our hands for an instant.”
Malachy nodded. “I suppose Washington will lop my head
off,” he said gloomily. “We were all too complacent about it.”
“You live with disaster so long,” Durell said quietly, “with
threats from Big Daddy Bear in Moscow and the Chinese in
Peiping, you don"! see it any more. You accept the Tommy
Lees as part of a normal pattern and stop worrying. But it’s
the Tommy Lees who can give us the biggest headaches. . . .
What will you do if they can you, Malachy?"
“I’ve got plenty of medical work to do here in the islands,”
McLeod said. “If they’ll let me. Let’s get back to the Jackson,
Cajun.”
“Well, by the time the skipper knew treason was afoot, it was
too late. The boat was boarded and taken over. When the
crew was marched ashore and some of the boys tried to fight,
Ch’ing picked every tenth man out of line, I understand, and
lined them up for execution. That must be what Pete
Holcomb babbled about when Willi first found him. Pete
must have escaped in the dark when everybody was watching
the executions, even though he’d been badly hurt, probably in
the early fighting when the sub was first boarded. We’ll never
know, I suppose. But we know he was dying of wounds and
shock when Willi found him. If that hadn’t happened, the
Jackson might well have simply vanished, taken apart piece
by piece under that camouflage net, and nobody would be the
wiser until Peiping copied enough A-3’s to announce it to the
world. Too bad for us all, by then."
Malachy was silent, watching the harbor vista swing open
beyond the schooner’s bow. He did not look much like a
respectable member of the medical profession. He wore
hacked-off dungarees with a rope belt and a white singlet.
His naked feet gripped the deck with a slight curling motion.
He looked over the rail and said: “What will you do about
Willi, Cajun? You can’t leave it at nothing. She‘s in love with
you.”
“No, she’s not. She’ll marry you, Malachy. Last night she
made up her mind, and she chose yon.”
Malachy’s eyes widened. “Listen, Cajun, I’ve loved that girl
since she was ten years old, and if you’ve hurt her, as I think
you might have, last night, and then if you don’t—”
“Don’t be an ass. You give up too easily.”
“‘It’s hard to keep fighting when you’re hurt,” Malachy said
quietly.

Miss Hanamutra was hack in the antiseptic, cool corridors of

the Pandakan Hospital, wearing her nurse’s cap on her dark,
rich hair. Except for a pinkness at the corners of her almond
eyes, she seemed self-contained. Her smile for Durell was
professional, as if their evening of terror shared in the alleys
and canals of Dendang had never happened. She cranked up
the bed, adjusted the sheet, closed the blind against the hot
sun. She smelled of lavender and isopropyl alcohol.
“There are policemen in the corridor, Mr. Durell,” she said
quietly. “But they are only here to guard you.”
“Do I look frightened?”
Her smile was the flight of a bird. “Did you not expect to see
me here? Where else would I go? The whole city knows
Prince Ch’ing is dead, and all the Chinese talk rumors of
piracy and an American atomic submarine damaged by some
trick of the Peiping government. The air shakes with the
thunder of jets, but they do not come from Indonesia or the
Malaysian airstrips in Borneo. They come from your Seventh
Fleet.”
Durell nodded. “I’m sorry about Tommy. We might as well
talk about him, Yoko. He was a traitor; he fell into debt and
he betrayed his country. He caused the deaths of many men.
He began it all. And he paid for it.”
“Did he die--easily?”
“No man dies easily.”
“Oh, you are cruel,” she whispered.
“I was not the one who killed him.”
“I know. But you are so hard about it.”
“When a man betrays his country, and proves weak in the
face of temptation, and when that temptation involves
perhaps the fate of many, many others, then I am hard about
it, yes. I am sorry for you, Yoko. Did you love him very
much?”
“Very much, yes. We were lovers.”
“I am sorry,” he said.
She looked at him with dark, opaque, sloe eyes. “No, you are
not sorry. It does not matter to you at all.”

On the third day he moved across the padang, the green, into
his former room at the Hotel des Indes. He walked with a
slight limp. The heat was oppressive, the sky was a bowl of
bronze rimmed with intense cobalt. The sidewalk sellers of
rice and noodles and shrimp, of little ivory carvings and
batik, were all busy again. The cafes were crowded. He had
not heard a single grenade go off for the past forty-eight
hours.
Old Joseph Panapura was waiting for him beside a tray of
bourbon and soda and a bucket of ice on a finely carved Tang
table, placed between the tall windows overlooking the
padang. The old man wore a seersucker suit and black shoes
and a black string tie over a silk shirt; on his knee was a salty
visored marine cap; his gaunt height and cloud of silvery hair
made him look very fragile. But his brown eyes were alert and
quite wary.
“Samuel, will you soon be leaving Pandakan?”
“Tomorrow, I think. A MATS plane has been given
permission by the provisional government to pick me up at
the airport.” He smiled at the old man. “I shall give your
respects to my grandfather, sir, when I see him again.”
“That would please me. Tell him I am well, and that you are
all he said you were in his letters. I am well pleased with you,
Samuel, except for one disappointing matter.” The old man
poured his bourbon neat. His hand was not very steady. “I
am worried about Willi, of course. Have you seen her?”
"Not since I came ashore.”
“Will you see her?”
“I don’t think it would be wise.”
"Samuel, I think you must. All women cherish an ideal, a
vision of a Galahad on a white horse, and I aided and abetted
such a dream for Wilhelmina, in you. But your life is not for
her."
“I agree.”
“Do you love her, Samuel?"
He did not know how to reply. He felt many things, a conflict
of tides that pulled him this way and that. It was warm in the
room. He heard a fair imitation of an American band down in
the lobby of the Hotel des Indes, a form of twist played by a
smiling Malay orchestra, a combo wearing tight pants and
loose shirts and playing island instruments. He remembered
an island saying he had once read. “The Chinese travels for
business and gain, the Japanese marches as a conqueror, and
the Malay runs to a cockfight—but always the Malay wins the
Chinese gold and takes the Japanese sword.”
Durell said: “I must leave Tarakuta, sir. And Willi will stay
here.”
The old man watched him for a long, grave moment. If he
sighed, it was the merest breath of disappointment. “You
know what is best for you, Samuel.”

Colonel Mayubashur was at the Sultan’s palace. His rather

plump figure looked natty in a uniform emblazoned with
ribbons that read like a directory of American and British
military decorations. Durell had no doubt they were all
deserved and given with grateful thanks. The colonel looked
amused, and he showed more self-confidence here in his
palace quarters, when Durell answered his summons, than he
had shown at the Hotel des Indes only four days ago.
“I am happy for your recovery, Mr. Durell. And you will be
happy to hear the political news—from the horse’s mouth, as
I believe you say.” Mayubashur laughed lightly. “By the right
of a Preservation of Public Security Ordinance, passed by the
provisional government of the former Sultanate of Tarakuta,
we have been able to define and detain subversives,
Communists, racial agitators and the like——and expel as
undesirable any and all Western imperialist agents.” The
smile came and went, quickly. “The plebiscite has been
postponed indefinitely, by my order under the Public
Security Ordinance. The U.N. commission agreed to this, in
view of the extraordinary circumstances. No date has been
set for a new vote. I shall remain in office here at the palace
for some time. It is a burden I accept in the interests of the
people.”
There was wry irony in Mayubashur’s voice. Durell met his
smile with one of his own. It was not his business, he
thought, if a new dictatorship had just blossomed here on the
islands off Borneo. It would not last long. The colonel was too
intelligent to expect that. One or another of the new
imperialist powers of Southeast Asia was sure to swallow up
Tarakuta in the next few months. Mayubashur might be a
very brave man, or a fool. Either way, whichever expansionist
nation seized the islands, the colonel stood a good chance of
being shot against the nearest wall.
“I am ready to go whenever you say, Colonel," Durell
murmured. “I hope the expulsion, however, is not a public
one.”
"No, you have rendered Pandakan a service. Incidentally, the
U.S. Polaris submarine 727, the Andrew Jackson, has been
refitted most speedily. Your Navy’s tugs have taken her from
our territorial Waters, and there should be no further
problems. A number of crew replacements are being flown
from Hawaii’s CINCPAC headquarters. And peace is restored
on Bangka Island. The Red Crescent is at work helping the
victims of the typhoon.”
“When do you want me to leave?"
Colonel Mayubashur stood up. “Now. I will escort you to the
airport personally, Mr. Durell.”

She was waiting there. He had not sent for her, and he knew
he might be wrong in avoiding a last meeting with her, and
yet he had known, too, he would have a last word with her
before he left. The MATS plane was Waiting on the airfield,
but the colonel and his smart military escort were patient.
In the heat and noise of the airport shed, she looked
immaculate and cool, totally different from the way he had
grown to know her. Instead of shorts, sneakers and a man’s
faded shirt, she wore a smart white frock and a wide-
brimmed hat of leghorn straw with a blue ribbon around it
that matched the blue of her eyes. The white linen dress set
off the tan of her face and long, graceful throat. Her bared
shoulders were golden with the gold of old Polynesia and the
long, Pacific sunlight. Her hair was done in a tight braid,
thick, translucent, heavy and glorious. Her walk as she came
toward him was the total evocation of her womanhood, her
hips moving with that indefinable essence of femininity. He
knew the effect was designed for him. He knew she was
saying, Sam, darling, all I am is yours, if only you ask for
me.
She left the bearded, unhappy figure of Malachy McLeod on a
bar stool across the echoing, crowded airport shed. Beyond
the Chinese merchants, the Malay craftsmen, the occasional
idling Dusun or Dyak from Borneo’s mainland, and all those
who ate or bargained in the airport shops, he could see only
her, and the image she made of everything that belonged in a
place, a time forever behind him.
She was smiling. “Are you really going, Samuel?”
“It seems I must. Colonel Mayubashur insists.”
“I’ve gotten permission to fly you back to Manila in my
amphib, if you prefer.”
He was dismayed. “Is your plane here?”
"It wouldn’t take five minutes to be airborne, just the two of
us. I’m ready to travel, Sam.” Something flickered in her eyes,
and she stopped smiling and her voice became almost
inaudible. “I know I‘m being cruel to Malachy; he told me to
go to you. I’m totally shameless, Sam. Take me with you.”
He felt a check to his breathing. “I can’t, Willi."
“You could make it possible. It’s not too late.”
“It’s too late for me, and it’s my fault, Willi, not yours. I
should have listened to my grandfather long ago, and come
here to find you years ago. It wasn't too late, then.”
“Sam, I don’t know how I feel about Malachy.”
“You’ll be certain, after I'm gone for a time.”
“How can I ever forget you?”
“I’d be happy if you didn’t,” he said. “I won’t ever forget you,
either, Willi.”
She looked up at him with her blue eyes clouded in her
golden face. “Something happened to you in those last
minutes on Bangka, didn’t it?”
“No, it happened to me long before then," he said.
He would have to settle the matter of his moment of frozen
hypnosis as he looked at the A-3 missile, of his wish to let the
Chinese technicians throw the last switch. He remembered
how he had felt sucked into a darkness and ashen doom.
Maybe the feeling was something like combat fatigue, and
General Dickinson McFee, back in K Section’s Washington
headquarters, would know all about it. But it made, for now,
a thing that kept him forever from Willi Panapura’s
innocence.
He took her arm and walked her back to Malachy, who
looked stunned and then was blustery behind his wild red
beard. They shook hands and said goodbye. Willi was silent,
and then she slid her hand in the crook of Malachy‘s elbow.
The Irishman reached across his chest and touched her
fingers and let them curl lightly in his own for just a moment.
Durell said goodbye again and kissed Willi, a quiet kiss on
her lips, and then he turned and walked out of the airport
shed into the stunning heat and bright sunlight on the
airfield.
Colonel Mayubashur fell in step with him and went with him
as far as the big, silvery MATS plane that stood waiting on
the strip to take him home.