“So you’ve told me,” I said, and I let my face begin to show fear and indecision. “Listen, Van Rijk, maybe we can make a deal.”
“You have lost the opportunity to bargain.”
“You want the figurine, don’t you?”
Greed made his eyes shine wetly. “You do have it, then.”
“All right, I’ve got it. There’s no point in playing games any more, I can see that. I killed the others for it, sure, and I’ve got it cached in a safe location on the island. I didn’t want to take it to Sumatra with me because of the risk; there are too many men like Wong Sot in Southeast Asia, men who’d cut your throat for a few dollars, and if anyone found out I was carrying something as valuable as the Burong Chabak, I would have been a dead man two minutes later. I figured to get clear in Sumatra or one of the Malayan states, and then shop around for a buyer; I thought I could sell the location of the figurine as easily as the figurine itself, if the buyer wanted it badly enough.”
I watched Van Rijk’s eyes as I spoke, and he was buying it; it was exactly what he wanted to hear. He took a step forward, working his tongue over fat, red lips. “Where is it, Mr. Connell?”
“Do we deal?”
“Under the present circumstances, bargaining seems unnecessary.”
“Does it? Suppose I’m one of those men who can withstand torture? Suppose I die before revealing the location of the figurine? Where would you be then, Van Rijk?”
The room was silent while he thought that over. At length he said, “Perhaps I should listen to this deal of yours.”
“Perhaps you should.”
“Well then?”
“I’ll take you to the Burong Chabak in exchange for twenty thousand Straits dollars and safe passage out of Singapore.”
“No more?”
“No more.”
“And why not?”
I smiled tightly. “I figure it this way, Van Rijk: the odds are stacked against me, all the way down the line; you’ve got me, and there’s nothing to stop you from killing me once I put the figurine in your hands. If I ask for half or even a quarter of the value of the Burong Chabak, it’s a certainty that you’ll kill me. I know the kind of man you are, Van Rijk. But twenty thousand Straits dollars and safe passage isn’t much, and maybe you’ll honor a bargain for those stakes. I don’t want to die, and this is the only way I can see to beg off my life.”
His lips curved in an unctuous smile; he was his old self again. “I accept your offer, Mr. Connell,” he said.
“I thought you would.”
“Where is the Burong Chabak?”
“Mikko Field.”
“The abandoned airstrip on the west coast?”
“Yes.”
“Exactly where at Mikko Field?”
“I’ll show you where when we get there.”
“It isn’t necessary for you to be along when we pick it up.”
“Oh but it is. You’ll never find the hiding place without me, even with directions.”
Van Rijk studied me for a long moment. Trap? he was thinking. But there was no way I could have set one up. He decided I was playing clean with him-just as I had known he would. “Very well, Mr. Connell,” he said. “We will all go to Mikko Field, and if you can produce the Burong Chabak, we will return here and I will give you twenty thousand Straits dollars. The passage will be arranged for tomorrow, to any destination within reason.”
In a pig’s ass, I thought. But I said, “Let’s go then.”
And we went.
Chapter Nineteen
The west coast of Singapore island contains stretches of still-undeveloped mangrove swamps, a few Malay fishing kampongs, and little else. Mikko Field had been carved out of the swamps by the Japanese during their occupation in the Second World War, mainly for use as a supply dump; when they were driven out, the strip had been taken over by a private aviation company which had operated there until five years ago. They had gone into bankruptcy then, and the field had ostensibly been abandoned. But there were a few pilots-mysetf among them-who had made use of the strip, in spite of the deteriorating condition of its runway, for contraband drops and pickups.
It took less than a half-hour for the ride out there from Van Rijk’s villa. The Eurasian did the driving, and the Malay sat in back with me, holding his Mauser a couple of inches from my belly. Van Rijk sat tensely on the passenger seat in front, staring with an almost childlike eagerness through the windshield. The moon was flushed bright orange in the black sky, and its shine illuminated the road enough so that you could have driven it without headlights. We met only two cars on Kelang Bahru Road, both heading into the city.
The access road leading in to Mikko Field was badly scarred with chuckholes and heavily grown with tall lalang grass and tangled vines and creepers encroaching from the swampland on both sides. We crawled along for a quarter of a mile, and in the moonlight the stilt and prop roots of the mangrove trees looked like exposed networks of ugly brown veins extending into the muddy earth. A few thousand yards from the field, the road became impassable. The lalang grass was very tall and thick, and parasitic vines and grotesque thorn bushes braided together to form a barrier that was more effective than any man-made obstruction.
The Eurasian braked to a stop and shut off the Ford’s headlamps. In the bright moonshine I could see the long, slightly pitted concrete runway, raised some ten feet on steep earth mounds from the mangrove jungle on both sides. At its upper end, to our left, were the rotting wooden outbuildings, and farther behind them the huge, broken-domed hangar.
Van Rijk got out of the car first, backing away to watch the hirelings perform their professional ritual in getting me out. The night was alive with the buzzing hum of tiger mosquitoes and midges, and with the throaty music of the Malayan cicadas. There was the smell of decaying vegetation, of fetid swamp water, and, oddly, of wild gardenia blossoms.
Van Rijk said, “Well, Mr. Connell?”
“We follow the road to the outbuildings on foot.”
He peered into the morass distastefully. “Very well, then.”
The Malay put the Mauser into the small of my back and prodded me forward into the thick vegetation choking what was left of the access road at this point. The Eurasian hung back a couple of steps, and Van Rijk brought up the rear. We had gone just a few feet when Van Rijk said sharply, “Wait!”
We stopped in single file. “Cars coming,” the Eurasian said, and in the ensuing silence I could hear the distant drone of automobile engines. There were no lights visible through the mangrove jungle; whoever it was had to be proceeding without headlamps.
The Malay said, “Polis, tuan?”
“How could the-?”
Van Rijk had no chance to finish the sentence. As soon as the Malay had spoken-at soon as I knew at least part of his attention was drawn from me-I had pivoted around and up, right arm extended into a plane, fingers as rigid as the stiffened musculature would allow. I brought the bottom edge of the hand down on the Malay’s wrist, at the same time coming up with my left hand under the gun. Bright agony slashed the length of my arm, into my armpit, but I had sufficient force in the blow to drive the Malay’s arm violently downward. My grip on the Mauser gave me possession of it. His finger jerked on the trigger, and the gun discharged against my palm, burning; but the bullet traced in a harmless diagonal into the night sky. I drove the weapon upward into the Malay’s face, and the butt took him high on the forehead, snapping his head back. He staggered into the Eurasian, bawling, and I reversed the gun in my hand and plunged into the mangroves to the right.
The Eurasian fired after me, missing high, and I heard Van Rijk scream, “Don’t kill him, not yet, not yet!”-still thinking of the Burong Chabak. I ran deeper into the swamp, dodging trees and bushes and shrubs; there was some five hundred yards of it between the access road and the runway, which paralleled each other at this point. The road itself, I knew, widened into a large cleared space roughly three hundred yards from the outbuildings-a thousand yards from where we were now. Even with the lalang grass, that area would be open all the way to the buildings. But the structures themselves were positioned so that I would have a shorter run along the airstrip than across the cleared space. I had to get to them, and in the bright moonlight I couldn’t afford prolonged exposure.