Bill Pronzini: The Jade Figurine

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.

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.

Thorns ripped at my bare arms as I ran; unseen creepers tugged at my clothing; something brushed my face, whispering, cold. Throbbing in my head, in my right arm. The sweat of weakness on my body again. But the urge for survival-the thought of what lay ahead and what lay behind-summoned reserves of strength that enabled me to function, to maneuver, to run.

I could hear movement behind me, muffled shouts; and I could hear the sound of the approaching automobiles, louder now, coming faster. The police, I thought; it can’t be anybody else. Tiong. Somehow, some way-Tiong.

The ground was soft and sucking beneath my shoes, and the tangled mangrove roots were everywhere. I veered around one of the thick-trunked trees, and a snarled root trapped my trailing right foot. I stumbled and fell sprawling. The Malay’s gun jarred loose from my hand, and I heard it fall in the darkness. Damn, damn! It wasn’t over yet, not even with the police here; Van Rijk and his hirelings were close behind, running away from the oncoming vehicles as much as they were chasing me. But I couldn’t take the time to look for the Mauser. I struggled to my feet again, hurting, hurting, and ran on.

The mangroves thinned, and I could see the runway a few yards on my right. I pushed my way through a clump of wild chekor shrubs to the base of the embankment. The mounded earth was a quagmire from the evening rain. I started up, digging the heels of my shoes into the mud, clawing at the mire with my left hand, fingers splayed, to keep my body from slipping backward. The cicadas were no longer singing now, and even the humming of the midges and the mosquitoes seemed to have abated; the heavy, ragged sound of my breathing was overloud on the still night air.