Quiller's Run

19 Colonel Cho

Bassai. The jungle was in here, creeping through cracks. Migi gedan barai and then hidari, the triple blocks, very fast.

A rat ran along the far wall in perfect silence.

I was kneeling.

Migi shuto chudan uke, a whipping sword-hand.

His breathing was steady, then explosive.

The final sword-hand, hidari.

Kiai.

He bowed, and in bowing, saw me.

Stillness.

From my kneeling position I returned the rei, not only out of respect for his obvious rank but also to emulate the male woolf that arches its neck to the side, offering its death to the adversary in the hope of life.

'Os.'

When I looked up again he hadn't moved.

He was in the centre of the room, a big room, almost bare, its floor earthen, its walls fissured, with leaves and whole branches of the undergrowth thrusting inside; the jungle was slowly devouring the place, though I could see where he'd been hacking at it regularly, working his way round.

He was above average height but not tall; his gi was worn, patched, but clean; his feet of course were bare. His one eye watched me. The other eye had been buried in the hideous cleft, made by a blade of some sort, that crossed his face diagonally, cruelly distorting it. His mouth had escaped the blow, but it was no more than a thin line, set in an expression of total cynicism – or hatred or hostility; the mouth can only express so much, unlike the eyes.

His eye watched me with the look of a wild creature assessing the presence of another, of a smaller creature who could offer no threat but might be considered prey. The ice along my spine was because of this look he was giving me, robbing me of my identity. I was nothing, his look told me, human. There was also the similarity between this man's head and the dog's, because as the dog had leapt for me I had buried the machete in it, splitting open the skull.

Sunlight, pale and slanting, was coming through one of the gaps in the wall, and around the man's feet were motes of fibre drifting, still airborne from the final movements of the kata, of Bassai. The place smelled of damp, of fungus, of the jungle, a raw blend of animal droppings, fresh blood and chlorophyl. The shadow of Colonel Cho leaned right across the earthen floor, thrown by the low-angled light, its head against the whitewashed wall.

I waited, still in the kneeling position. There was nothing else I could do.

The bombs must have blown the rest of the building down, and there'd been fire afterwards. One wall was missing altogether, and on that side the room was criss-crossed with fallen girders, plaster and timber-work, festooned with creeper. The flooring in here must have been burned away, and he'd cleared the ashes, dumping them into the jungle, taking great care: there was no trace of them. He'd also found some whitewash, and covered most of the blackening the fire had left on the walls. The roof was still in place, a tilted expanse of corrugated iron, almost intact. The door I'd entered by was behind me; it had been open, and 'Qui etes vous?'

Flicker along the nerves.

'Un ami, Sempai.'

Acknowledging his rank. I would have said go-dan.

' Veus etes arrive comment?

'By air,' I told him.

'En francais.'

So I went back to French; it was the tongue we were going to use, obviously. 'We made a moon drop,' I added.

'When?'

'Just before midnight, Colonel.'

He hadn't moved yet. I wasn't looking forward to that. His movements in the kata had been swift and powerful, and underneath his chilling calm he must have been enraged to find me here. This place was more than just his territory; it was his refuge, his only haven in a world where he was an outcast, because out there he would have had to see people flinch when they looked at him. In coming here I had violated his very soul.

'How did you get past the door?'

His French had the over-correctness of those who speak a foreign language learned formally and not through usage.

I could have lied, but he would have known. And on the wall was a faded picture of Funakoshi, and there was the ingrained principle in me that disallowed my lying to a sempai. But by God it was a risk.

'I had to kill one of them.'

He was silent for so long that I didn't think that any kind of change was taking place; he was standing perfectly still, as before. Then I saw that something was happening to his face; it was altering its shape, moment after moment, in a way I didn't immediately understand, until I saw that his eye was now almost hidden by his nose and the raised flesh of the scar. He'd been turning his head, and by such infinitesimal degrees that I hadn't noticed. He was now sighting me, rather than watching me, and the impression I had was that he'd withdrawn behind himself, to observe me from concealment.

This was my first intimation.

'Why?'

It was a whisper.

'It would have killed me.'

Silence. At the edge of my vision I saw another rat on the move, and heard its faint squeaking.

'Then I shall throw you to the others. But not yet.'

There was something coming into his voice, too, a different tone that I couldn't quite identify; but it reminded me of the way Fosdick had spoken to us when he'd got back from Marx-Stadt.

One of the dogs barked outside, the sound coining a deep chest, resonating; others took it up, excited by some-thing, an animal they'd sighted. I showed nothing.

'Who is your sensei?'

'Yamada.'

'In London.'

'Yes, Sempai.'

He was still sighting me in that strange way, as if hiding behind himself – this impression was quite clear; it wasn't my imagination. It was bringing a chill to the nerves: they were vulnerable at the moment because I hadn't law whether I was going to come down the wrong way and smash my legs on the building and then there'd been the Doberman with its jaws wide open and then the sickening business stopping the thing short and now there was Cho standing there and I was perfectly sure he meant what he'd said about throwing me to those bloody hounds.

'You may rise.'

'Os.' I made the ret and got to my feet, and then something screamed outside and the sound of the dogs took on a different note: it was a kill. He was listening to it, Cho. His maimed head lifting a fraction. But his eye was still sighting me.

'How many are there?'

I hesitated. 'Dogs?'

'No. There are seven dogs.' His eye disappeared as his head was turned, and then sighted me again with an expression of exaggerated cunning, aided by the set of L mouth. 'Six, now.' A flash of revelation came to me, then vanished before I could grasp it. 'How many men?

'Where, Colonel?'

'Out there. How big an army?'

Mother of God.

Yes, the same tone that had been in Fosdick's voice when he'd got back from Marx-Stadt with the burns from the electrodes still on him and that strange light in his eyes – the East Germans had put him through implemented interrogation for three weeks and it had driven him mad.

'I don't know,' I said carefully.

Because what could I say?'

I didn't know what they'd done to this man before they'd tried to kill him but it could have been that massive head injury alone that had affected his brain. He was probably as big a danger to me as anything out there in the jungle and if his mind were damaged he could blow up at any minute and come for me or call the dogs in. The only chance I might have could be in humouring him.

'But you must have seen it,' he said.

The army.

'I came down in moonlight, Colonel. All I could see was jungle.'

His face was changing again as he brought his head back by infinite degrees, and I noted this. The movement could be significant: his way of 'sighting', of seeming to hide behind himself, might indicate the times when his brain went out of phase. He was facing me now and asking normal questions again.

'Why did you come here by air?'

'I was told you like your privacy.'

'Yet you still came.'

'Yes. I-'

'Why?'

'I think we can help each other.'

His head began turning again, and the hairs on my neck rose in reaction. He said nothing, and I waited. This time the phase didn't last long, and his head moved back.

'To do what?'

'To destroy Shoda.'

You must have seen a cat facing a dog – the eyes narrowing and the ears flattening and a hiss coming from the open jaws. It was like that. It's not enough to say that he recoiled. He tensed, drew back, threw up his guard, all those things, without making much movement or much sound, and somehow it looked worse for that: it was an expression of total hate, total menace, barely contained, about to detonate.

If Shoda had been here now she would have been ripped into pieces. This man didn't need those dogs.

It took time for him to recover, and the aftermath was a grimace of pain, not of physical pain now, but the pain he had felt when that monstrous blow was struck, cleaving his face, and the pain he'd been feeling ever since, day after day, remembering what he looked like and what people -especially women – would think if they ever looked on him again. He was still young, say forty, and that must be his photograph I'd seen on the wall near Funakoshi's, the picture of a handsome Asian, high cheekboned in the Yul Brynner mould, large-eyed, sensual. Colonel Cho would have loved many women; now he was a creature, a Caliban, self-imprisoned in a hermit's cave.

A whisper came. ''Shoda…'

Something was moving in the background behind him, and I noted it, even though it wasn't defined. Cho was watching me intently, as if I'd offered some kind of revelation. His expression was perfectly sane now, and it occurred to me that in simply mentioning Shoda's name I'd recalled memories he'd been keeping forced down under his need to forget; but I couldn't tell what this would do to him, bring him increased sanity through release, or drive him deeper into madness. I had the feeling of stepping through a minefield in the dark.

Snake.

That was the movement behind him, high among the creeper that itself was winding its way through the beams and girders of the fourth wall. The bloody thing was hanging from the leaves by the tail, its head down and moving from side to side, heat-sensing the earthen floor.

Still in a whisper, 'You said, destroy?

'Yes. The whole of her organisation.'

He was chief of intelligence in an insurgent group, Chen had told me, affiliated with Shoda's organisation. He was clever, but he wanted to handle things his way, and she didn't like that. She had him arrested and slated for execution, but he got away with it mehow, with a head wound you'd never believe.

'Come.'

He led me across to a corner, and that was when the snake dropped and the rat squealed and my skin crawled, though he took not the slightest notice. He shared the life of the jungle here and was used to it; but it came to my mind that if he were ever struck down with a fever or couldn't move around he'd the with the jungle too, or the dogs would scent easy meat and pick him clean. 'Tell me," he said, 'why you wish to destroy Shoda.'

I was his guest at table, towards noon; we sat on the floor, Japanese-style, on each side of a slab of redwood with a great crack in it; he'd lashed thin cord across and across to keep it together.

'You know, of course, that there have been many attempts to kill her?'

'Yes.'

We ate some kind of root, peeled and sliced, with dried fruit and a bowl of mashed turnip, by its taste.

'And you are confident that you can achieve what so many others have failed to achieve?'

'No. But I shall try. It's a matter of intelligence, Colonel – the gathering of intelligence. Information. That was your own field, I believe.'

He didn't answer that. 'Who told you that I might have such information?'

'One of the pilots who flies into the village here told me you'd once been involved with Mariko Shoda's military forces.'

He didn't ask Chen's name. I wouldn't have given it.

God knew how many rats were in this place. One of them was moving close to the table, smelling the food.

'I doubt,' Cho said carefully, 'if I would have any information that would be useful to you.' But the problem was that his head was moving again, turning, his one eye sighting me. It was like having to learn a language: he was distrusting me, so whatever he said could be almost the opposite of the truth. I knew perfectly well that he'd got information for me, or Pepperidge and Katie wouldn't have told me to see him.

'Then I was misinformed,' I told him. Go with whatever he said, don't contradict.

The sleek brown rat jumped onto the table; not much of a feat; it was only about a foot and a half from the ground. It looked rather pretty, but presumably had rabies.

Colonel Cho's eye was still sighting; I didn't look at him directly, but watched him at the edge of my vision.

'What else have you heard about me?' The tone silky.

'Very little, Colonel. Only that you were an exceptionally gifted intelligence chief and a loss to the rebel forces."

He didn't answer for so long that I looked at him directly. The mood-phase was over: his head was turning back and now he was looking at the rat.

'But how flattering. And of course true.'

His movements in the kata had been very swift and it was over before I actually saw what was happening — he brought a sword-hand down with great speed and perfect control and the neck of the rat gave a delicate sound as it snapped.

'So we have meat today,' Cho said, and took his knife and skinned the rat and sliced into the small bright body and worked there, bringing out the liver, offering it to me.

There's always some kind of joke we can take back to London if we get through the mission, and pass around in the Caff.

'Thank you, Colonel, but I'm a vegetarian.'

They'd love that one.

'Then I shall profit from your preferences.' He put the tiny liver into his mouth and broke one of the delicate bones in the rat's neck, slicing it into short lengths and eating it slowly. 'I feed as the tiger feeds, first the Vitamin A and then some calcium. They are synergistic.'

I don't know why the hell I wasn't sick. The thing's skin looked strange, lying there empty on the table.

'And how am I to know,' he asked me, 'that you are not here in order to spy on me for Mariko Shoda?'

'Should I lie to my sempai?

That got through. He looked down, considering, wiping the rat's blood from the corner of his mouth. I followed up without waiting. 'I've told you the name of the company I represent in England, and you could verify that.' I left it to him to find out how, from the depths of the jungle. 'Shoda has already tried to have me killed – she set some of her women on me in Singapore, with their knives.'

He watched me closely, his eye calm now, intelligent. 'And who came to your aid?'

'No one. I killed four of them.'

'Indeed. You did well.'

'Shoda didn't think so.'

He was watching me intently. 'I can well imagine. Such a thing would have incensed her, as a personal affront. What action did she take?'

'She put her top hit-man onto me.'

He put his bloodied knife onto the table, carefully, without taking his eyes off me. 'Kishnar?'

'Yes.'

'When?'

'Three or four days ago.'

Short silence. 'Yet you are still alive. Do you know that is remarkable?'

'He didn't get a chance to close in.'

'But he will.'

'He'll try.'

He looked away at last and slipped into one of his contemplative phases; I was beginning to know him. We had some fruit and he cleared the table and told me to sit with him in the corner where the rugs were, and some half-wrecked chairs.

'I begin to see why you expect to succeed in your mission,' he said quietly, 'where others have failed. A mission of this order is not new to you.'

'Not really.'

'You make a formidable antagonist.'

'I've upset a few people in my time.'

'And you would make a formidable ally, if I decided to take you into my confidence. An ally against Shoda.'

'As I told you, Colonel, that's why I came.'

'Quite so.'

Making a bit of progress, but oh, Christ, I wasn't at all sure of that because his head was turning again and all I could see was that one eye sighting me from behind what he believed was cover, and I thought I knew what was happening: these relapses of his into psychosis weren't haphazard; they happened when he was suddenly afraid he'd made himself vulnerable. It didn't seem to make sense that he'd just offered, virtually, to let me become an ally, and then suddenly retreated; but in fact it did. He felt he'd put too much trust in me, and it could be dangerous.

I waited, because I couldn't do anything else. If I said a wrong word it could make him enraged, violent, and in this place I wouldn't stand a chance.

His head came back to face me, and my nerves felt a chill. He was two people, this man, and one of them potentially deadly.

'We shall see,' he said, and got up from the frayed rug where he'd been sitting and left me, his bare feet padding across the earth.

He didn't talk to me for the rest of the day, except for an occasional word in passing. He spent his time hacking at the creepers that were threatening to smother the doorways and a window, and I helped him, getting the machete that I'd left outside with the gear I'd dropped with. In the late afternoon he wrote at the long redwood table; it looked like a journal: the book was as big as a telephone directory and leather-bound. Two or three times I turned to find him sighting me, even though we hadn't been speaking; it was obvious that he was giving me a lot of thought, and that some of his thoughts led him to distrust me. I didn't find it easy to turn my back on him; his bare feet wouldn't make a sound on the earth.

What I had to think about before anything else wasn't to find a way of getting information out of him, information on Shoda, but to find a way of leaving this place alive. I had absolutely no protection here. Cho had kept himself in regular training and from the kata I'd seen was totally capable of killing me, and not by stealth; and even if I managed to placate him the whole time and not let a wrong word slip out, the dark side of his personality could suddenly decide that I was here to betray him, and then he'd come for me.

And even if I could kill him in self-defence, if he came for me, there were the dogs: they'd smell death, and seek the carrion, and find me here.

When night came he lit oil lamps and we had supper, but he said nothing about Shoda. It was as if she'd never been mentioned, and it occurred to me that as well as his intense bouts of paranoia he might experience lapses in memory, and lose its content, wholly or partially. I wanted to test this out, but it was too dangerous. The first time I'd spoken Shoda's name he'd reacted violently. For all I knew, he might have completely lost the conversation we'd had earlier in the day.

In the end I decided to sleep on it. He was behaving now as a dutiful host, showing me where the running water was to be had, and explaining the system he had of catching it from the heavy rains and directing it into a reservoir. There was no bed here, he apologised, but he himself slept on a straw mattress, and gave me one to use. When he doused the lamps I curled up in a corner of the room with the machete underneath the edge of a rug and within easy reach.

'We shall talk tomorrow,' was all he said, and this confirmed my assumption that he'd spent a lot of his time thinking about me and what I'd told him. He'd got the data, and needed time to assess it.

That was fair enough, but I had no way of knowing that he might not decide at some time in the dark hours that I was too much of a danger to him and slaughter me out of hand, as he'd done with the rat.

Not easy to lie there, uncertain; not easy to sleep. It was the same out there in the jungle; its creatures slept always at the brink of death, and knew it, and knew what it meant when a scream came suddenly, close or distant: the remorseless cycle of life was going on, red in tooth and claw under the rising moon.

I didn't know what time it was when I woke, disturbed by sounds. I'd chosen this corner of the enormous room because it was on the opposite side from the wall of creepers where the snake had hung, and dropped. A rat had moved across my legs, earlier, and I'd jerked them and it had gone. There'd been a cry of a night bird soon afterwards, and I'd been brought awake with my skin crawling, coming out of a dream that I didn't remember except for a lingering visual trace of coils and shadows. Now it was different, the sounds coming to me from across the room; they were human.

Voices, I believed. They were faint, but I could hear their rhythm changing, and their tone. There was more than one person speaking; it had the sound of dialogue.

Or it was a dream and I waited for some kind of data to come in, lying so still that my own breathing was inaudible. Moonlight was striking softly across the earth floor; it came in rays, filtering through the creepers on the far wall; in it I saw something on the move, small, longer than a rat, some sort of stoat, a predator, its thin tail held stiffly behind as it darted suddenly and made its kill, with nothing more this time than a scuffling, the teeth going into the throat before the cry could come.

The voices didn't stop, and for a time I lay listening to them and at last surfaced through the twilight zone and knew for certain I was now awake and that the voices were still going on.

Cho had lain down in the corner where he slept, beneath the picture of Funakoshi; he wasn't there now. I got up and moved to the centre of the room and turned slowly until I got the direction of the sound; then I went over there, to the door in the south wall that I'd never seen open. The voices were louder here, and the words audible.

Radio.

No. There was no consistency: it wasn't a programme.

…But I told him there was absolutely no certainty of that. So what was his reaction? He simply said we would be going ahead in any case, since the ambassador wanted to.

Yes, radio, then, but taped. These were tapes I was listening to, being played over to check the contents.But I'm damned if I'm going to give in to him. The prime minister's quite adamant on that score – we dig our heels in, she told me, and tell them -we're not going to budge. All right, sir, what it I tell Blakeney? Tell him to go to hell. The real issue Et je vous assure, M'sieur le Consul, que nous aliens faire tout le necessaire pour produire le resultat que nous cherchons. C'est tout a fait impossible de faire autrement, en consideration des nouvelles de Paris, surtout – As I guess you know. But if there's anything that sounds urgent, call me. Will do. When did you eat? God knows. Let's have a snort!