Free Assignment - Sulu Sea by Edward S. Aarons

innocent
bystanders. Let’s go.”
     
    She led him quickly through the crowd in the corridor. Two
uniformed police were pushing through the excited patients. and the girl’s fingers
tightened convulsively on his wrist Durell wondered why she was afraid of the cops.
On the lower floor they again had to buck a tide of excited visitors and
bomb victims. The girl finally ducked into what served as a linen closet.
She slammed the door behind her and turned on a very dim, ten-watt saffron
bulb. The closet was small and the quarters were crowded. The girl’s dark
slanted eyes glowed luminously in the dimness.
    “I must get out of this damaged uniform,“ she whispered.
    “My street clothes are hanging here. Do you mind? I will
change, and then we must find Tommy. You will help me, won‘t you?”
    “Is Tommy Lee mixed up in the bombing?”
    “I don’t know. Everything has been like a nightmare. Please
be patient with me, Mr. Durell.”
    “Tommy has a big mouth, telling you about consulate
business,” he said quietly.
    “I coaxed it out of him, because he’s been in such an odd
state of mind lately. With the consul gone to the SEATO meeting and Dr. McLeod
spending so much time on Tarakuta, it all fell on Tommy’s shoulders, as first
secretary. At first I thought it was wonderful for him, but he—I don‘t know,
I just feel he is in terrible trouble, and I know you will help him. Please
turn around.”
    “I can't,” he said. “There isn’t room."
    "All right.”
    She stripped out of the bloody nylon uniform with swift,
slithering sounds. Her dark hair, cut like a China doll’s, was perfumed, and
she was not as plump as he had thought, when he glimpsed a flash of her
narrow waist and flaring hips. She struggled into a Palembang sarong of
rare, dark blue silk with silver embroidery, rather than a Chinese chamseong.
She lost her balance and toppled against him as he stood squeezed against the
linen shelves, and he caught her and held her up.
    “I’m sorry. Please don’t think—”
    “Thinking is my only privilege at the moment.”
    “How can you joke at a time when bombs are killing—”
    “I'm not joking. Are you ready?”
    She shrugged the blue sarong in place, tossed back her
thick, straight black hair, and the change was remarkable. The anonymous and efficient
nurse was gone, replaced by an unusual flowerlike beauty. She leaned on his arm
as she stepped into high-heeled shoes. “We can go now. I don't think we will be
noticed like this.”
    “Why are you so anxious to avoid the police, Yoko?”
    She stared at him. “But aren’t you?”
    “I simply don’t want to be delayed. But you were a witness
to murder and kidnapping—”
    “Yes, and they may ask me things about Tommy Lee that I
don’t want to tell anyone except you.”
    She held her head high, walking with firm, quick steps
as they left the tiny closet and crossed the hospital lobby a moment later. The
local Pandakan militia had taken over the plaza, and a line of steel-helmeted
soldiers was posted in front of the Hotel des Indes. On the sparkling green
near the gingerbread, Victorian bandstand, a T-35 Russian Tank had clawed up
the lawn and waited with its long cannon tilted upward, pointed at the evening
sky. There was no one to fight, no visible enemy about. The terrorists
had gotten safely away into the tangle of alleys and canals of the island city.
A semblance of normalcy had even come back to the big square. A few of the
shops had opened their iron shutters and were ready for business again, and the
sidewalk sellers of ices and watermelon were back to hawk their wares. A boy
was hosing clown the blood-stained sidewalk in front of the bombed-out cafe.
    “My car is in the hospital lot,” the girl said.
    A siren wailed not far away. Durell wondered how soon
Colonel Mayubashur would start hunting for him. A number of people had seen him
in the hospital outside Simon Smith’s room, and the colonel would have lots of
time and many