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A NOVEL
TROPIC FURY
Christopher Gale
WILDSIDE PRESS
TROPIC FURY
Copyright © 1961 by Christopher Gale
Cover Painting by Harry Schaare
one
JOE STARK was a man of many names.
It was part of his business.
Jacob Benz of Shanghai, LeRoy Adler, a Tokyo importer; Arthur Wells, a jade connoisseur traveling in Burma—those he had been and many others. But today he was himself. Officially he appeared on the rolls of the United States Navy as Joseph Edward Stark, age thirty-two, rank of lieutenant commander, together with a notation stating he was attached to the staff of Captain Milton Durling, Office of Naval Intelligence, 14th Naval District, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
On the second day of February, 1942, he sat hunched before a pile of documents when his phone rang briskly. He answered without removing his eyes from the papers:
“Commander Stark.”
“Captain Durling would like to see you immediately, Commander.” The voice of his superior’s pretty Wave yeoman brought the wisp of a smile to his lips and he injected a bit of honey into his answer.
“Why sure, sweetheart.”
“Thank you, Commander.” Formal, all very formal, but he caught a slight inflection in her voice that told him more than words ever could. Mary Wendell, Yeoman First Class and a redhead to boot. He liked redheads. Cupping the mouthpiece he lowered his voice.
“Tonight?”
A slight pause followed before the soft answer came: “That would be grand.”
“Have a seat, Joe.” Captain Durling threw a fast glance at Stark and as quickly returned his attention to an official-looking document he had been reading. A cigarette dangled from his lips.
“Thank you, sir,” Stark murmured, idly wondering what the Old Man wanted.
He considered Durling the Navy’s sharpest, if not highest-ranking spy master—if one could call him that. Gray and plump and fifty-two, he looked anything but a man whose whole adult life had been spent in the all-important but little understood command designated ONI: Office of Naval Intelligence.
Durling dropped the paper to his desk and looked up, studying him gravely before saying, “How would you like to go to Sumatra—Palembang?”
Sumatra! Wham—just like that, an island in the middle of the Japanese noose. The approach had been typical of Durling. He had the lightning thought that the Japs were poised to make a grab for the rich oil fields there. Suppressing his surprise, he asked quietly, “Lieutenant Driscoll?”
“Missing . . .” The hard, flat pronouncement gave the word an air of finality.
Exit Driscoll, Joe thought, feeling a momentary stab of remorse. Driscoll had shown promise, and Sumatra had been his first major assignment. He sighed deeply and leaned back. Admirals wrote off ships; ONI chiefs wrote off men, but neither did so without feeling. The hardness in his superior’s voice in reality reflected an expression of loss. So Driscoll hadn’t hacked it. The blue eyes were watching him as he answered. “Palembang sounds fine—something like a Chinese Fourth of July.”
Durling grunted and as he flicked his eyes toward a large wall map of the South Pacific, his own followed. Isolated markers had already reached Rabaul and Kavieng. Australia looked like a dead pigeon. So did the whole of the South Pacific.
Durling said conversationally, “There’s the problem of getting you in. The Japanese are expected to sweep over the Dutch East Indies within days. They need the oil—which they’d better not by a damned sight get,” he added crisply. Stark noted he didn’t say anything about getting out again, nor did he ask.
Durling laid his cigarette in an ash tray and added, “Here’s the problem. . . .”
Sumatra.
Behind Stark lay the long, circuitous jump by plane, surface ship and submarine. The stinking harbor built out of dredged mud and the ramshackle Dutch customhouse were fleeing to his rear. Ahead, deep in the jungles, lay Palembang, the center of a multimillion-dollar oil industry.
Clackety-clack, clackety-clack. The wheels of the ancient train rang harsh in the still, muggy air, its antiquated carriages swaying and groaning as it rounded the curves. He shifted on the hard seat to get more comfortable. Half a dozen Malays squatted on the floor around a chess board, seemingly unmindful of the jolting and noise, while a turbaned Moslem sat opposite him, eyes closed. He wore a native sarong with a dagger thrust into the waistband.
Clackety-clack, clackety-clack. The smoke from the locomotive swirled backward, stung Stark’s nostrils; in the oppressive heat his standard tropic whites clung to his lank body, already drenched. He pushed back his sun helmet and wiped the sweat from his brow, thinking it was worse than Rangoon.
Rangoon. His memory stirred. He had been sent there last year to find a man who had codes to sell. Japanese military codes. His contact had been Aspara, a native girl whose name meant Celestial Nymph—their coming together had been quite natural.
She had a body, small and brown, little breasts like russet apples, a slender, lovely face; to him she had revealed a passion never indicated by the innocence in her eyes. He remembered the first time. She had undressed, quite naturally, standing in profile, letting her clothes drop around her feet—had turned. Straight and lovely, her lips slightly parted, she had come straight into his arms, murmuring wants into his ear. Aspara—she had denied him nothing. Now Rangoon was far away. He sighed regretfully.
Dark, opaque forests flashed by on each side of the railroad tracks, growing out of brackish water—liana, palm, mangrove, fern and strange twisted trees for which he had no names. Off to one side meandered a tributary of the Musi River.
Clearings sped by where rows of women naked to the hips chanted, digging into the soil with long pointed stakes as they prepared for the next planting. Their voices came as a low dirge, rising and falling to the rhythm of the plunging spears. Behind them rose a mountain chain, appearing like the profile of some prehistoric lizard astride the earth. Bukit Barisan, the Parade of Mountains. The name came from some half-forgotten memory as he groped with his geography. The volcanic peaks that formed the lopsided backbone of Sumatra were part of a system that originated in Lower Burma, its peaks forming the island chain.
This was the land of the Malays—Gayos, Achinese, Bataks, Kerintjis, the fierce nomadic Kubus of the Djambi Mountains whose dark, dwarfish figures and frizzled hair revealed their Negrito forebears, and dozens more. Indians, Arabs, Chinese and Koreans were mixed in, as well as a handful of Whites—Dutch, German, English, American. The latter were the tuans, the masters—the gods of the earth. He smiled at the thought. The vast mass of slim brown bodies had begun to suspect that the white man was, somewhat less than a god, a belief espoused and spread by the little yellow conquerors now riding a flood tide out of the Land of the Rising Sun.
Saito the Shadow. He contemplated the name, fretful because he could
