Assignment Bangkok by Unknown Author Page A

a pause in the kitchen, while he smelled rice and pork and sauce bubbling away, and when she returned, her face was scrubbed clean and her eyes shone and her hair was pulled back in a neat bun. He said nothing about it.
    “Can you do it? Can you reach Mike?”
    “If he’s listening. Can you trust Nam?”
    She said, “Like you, Sam, I don’t trust anyone.”
    The radio hummed and crackled. Energy came from the camp generator that powered donkey engines and logging machinery at the other end of the village. Durell put on the earphones, and once again heard the ghost voices, the uncertain music, the ranting across the misty lost mountains of the Golden Triangle between Thailand, Burma and Laos.
    But he did not hear Mike Slocum’s voice.
    Durell knew he was late making the rendezvous, but it couldn’t be helped. He hadn’t known about General Savag when he spoke to Mike last night. And Xo Dong was still over a hundred-mile flight east into the primitive border area.
    “Sam, do you think Mike is still all right?”
    He looked up from the radio. Her face was flushed. “Mike was okay, last night.”
    “Are you out to save him—or kill him?”
    He listened to the sighing of electronic waves from the radio, heard nothing but a dim surf of discordant Asian music, and said, “It all has to do with the poppy fields out there, the ones you let your logger families grow.”
    “Oh, that. I can’t stop them. Every village around here, all the way up into Burma and over into Laos, grows poppy. Do you think . . . ?” She paused, her fists clenched at her sides. Her green eyes went angry. “You don’t really think we’re part of the Muc Tong, do you? You can’t think..
    “Is the Muc Tong the smuggling syndicate?”
    “Oh, you bastard,” she whispered. “You cold, mean, cruel man. You kissed me, and yet you think I—”
    “Answer me.”
    “No, Sam.”
    “You have the transport, the men, the whole system.” “No, Sam.”
    “You, or Mike.”
    “No!”
    “But you know something about it.”
    Her face was white. “Just the local stuff. What’s happening around here. They put some pressure on us, about a month ago, to use our logging rafts going down the Ping River toward Bangkok. They wanted us to take on their men—hoodlums, mountain riffraff, some Chinese overseers, to transport heroin from a refinery about twenty miles northeast of this valley. It’s a big set-up, sure. But you can’t believe that I’d lend the Thai Star business facilities. . . .?”
    “Why not?” he asked. “And if not you, why not Mike?” “But you’re his friend!” she cried.
    He shook his head. “Not if he’s, guilty. Not if he uses your business to take money from the Muc Tong to line his own pockets. Maybe you’re innocent, but maybe Mike is not. He could be calling me into a trap, because I’ve got a thread or two of the network in my hands. To him, if he’s in it, I’m an immediate and obvious danger.”
    “Call him,” she said desperately. “I want to talk to him.”
    “Xo Dong doesn’t answer.”
    “I’ll prove to you—”
    “We’ll prove it together. I need you, Benjie, and I need Kem to get me into the mountains without every tribesman trying to cut off my head. Since Mike doesn’t answer, he might be dead. I’m trying to be honest with you.” He turned off the radio. “When the Muc Tong came to you, did they just want your rafts, or did they want the planes, too?”
    “The whole thing—and my ships, too. I told them to go to hell.”
    “Who approached you?”
    “A very slick, smooth character, at the sawmill.”
    “One of Chuk’s men?”
    “I don’t know. No, not Chuk’s hoodlums. Somebody above Chuk. Not the Chinese who led the sawyers last night, either. But someone like him.” She shook her head, her eyes still appalled. “When I refused to have anything to do with them, I was threatened with strikes, fire, and sabotage.”
    “You think last night was part of it?”
    “Oh, sure,” she