“Run” I said to Tina. “Off to the left!”
We ran. Our muddied boots slapped wetly on the rough concrete. There was another shout, another pistol crack. I glanced back. Two men were scrambling up the embankment. A third stood in the headlamp beams of a small car slewed on the road where the taxi had let us off. He was doing the shouting. I couldn’t see his face clearly, but I knew it was Van Rijk.
I turned my head, just in time to avoid stepping into a pothole and maybe breaking a leg. We were almost to the first of the outbuildings now. There were no more shots. They’d finally figured out that you can’t shoot accurately while you’re on the run.
The closest building was a long, low-roofed affair that had been used to quarter duty personnel. All the glass had been broken out of its windows years ago, and some of the side boarding had rotted or pulled away, leaving shadowed gaps like missing teeth. Off to one side was a smaller, ramshackle shed of some kind.
I steered Tina that way. We ran around the corner of the low-roofed building, along the side of the shed. At its rear, a jagged-edged hole above the foundation yawned black, like a small cave opening.
I pulled up, fighting breath into my lungs. “Through there!”
She obeyed instantly, dropping to her knees and scuttling through the hole. I followed close behind her.
Thin shafts of moonlight made a pale, irregular pattern on the debris-ridden floor inside. The shed was empty. It was close, humid in there — a pervasive heat like that in an orchid hothouse.
Tina’s breath came in thick gasps. She crouched on her knees with her head lowered. I left her and crawled to the front of the shed. When I peered through one of the smaller gaps there, I had a full view of the airstrip and part of the access road beyond.
Two sets of headlights, one tight behind the other, were coming fast along the road. Seeing them eased a little of the tension in me. I could not see the portion of the road where Van Rijk and his car were, but the two orang séwaan-séwaan, on the runway and pounding toward the low-roofed building, had a good sidewise look at both Van Rijk and the oncoming cars. They pulled up and danced around some, then began running back the way they’d come.
“What is it?” Tina asked. She was beside me now, trying to peer out. “What’s happening?”
The sounds of jamming brakes, doors slamming, men shouting carried to us on the still night air. I said, “The polis are here.”
“The polis?”
Van Rijk’s men were dancing around again, over at the edge of the strip. One of them went into a crouch and fired a round toward the glaring headlights. In response I heard a short, sharp burst from an automatic weapon. The man fell sprawling. The other one veered to his right and disappeared onto the embankment. A few seconds later there was another chattering burst, two pistol shots, a third burst. After that, silence.
I turned away from the opening. “It’s all over now,” I said.
Tina’s fingers bit into my arm. “The plane!” she breathed. “There might still be time to reach the plane, get away...”
“There isn’t any plane.”
“What? I... I don’t understand...”
“There’s no plane here. Hasn’t been one here in a long time.”
She stared at me. Her face was shadowed and I couldn’t see her eyes. I didn’t see the movement of her hand, either, until it was too late to stop her from reaching under her bush jacket and drawing the automatic she’d had tucked into her belt. A shaft of pale moonlight glinted off the surface of its barrel. Small caliber automatic aimed right at my belly.
I said, “Is that the gun you shot La Croix with? After you tortured him?”
She leaned forward slightly, and I could see her face then. It was as cold and hard as white jade. “All right,” she said. “So you know.”
“I’ve known since this afternoon,” I said. “It was a nice little act you put on, but I didn’t believe it last night and I saw all the way through it at the godown. You said your mythical informant told you I keep a DC-3 out here. But damn few people knew it when I did keep one, for obvious reasons. My former partner was one and he’s dead. Another is a German named Heinrich and he’s serving ten years in a Djakarta prison. The only man you could’ve gotten the information from was La Croix.”
Nothing from her. The gun was steady in her hand.
“After I finished work this afternoon, I went down to the government precinct and talked to a polis inspector Tiong. He did some checking with the Canadian consulate. They never heard of a Luzon import-export dealer named Kellogg, or a Tina Kellogg. But the American consulate has a record of one Tanya Kasten. So does Interpol, because of the art theft you were implicated in last year in Amsterdam. Is that where you met or got put in touch with Van Rijk, Tanya?”
“A trap. All a damn trap.”
“That’s right. To catch you with the Burong Chabak. Tiong figured you were in on the theft, found La Croix before Van Rijk did, and got it from him. But I don’t think you did get it. No luggage, no figurine. What happened? You lose your temper and kill him too soon?”
“Shut up,” she spat at me.
“I think La Croix hid the figurine out here. You think so, too. And you think I know where. If Van Rijk hadn’t been trailing me tonight and started his boys shooting at us, you’d have thrown down on me as soon as we reached the hangar.”
“You do know where he hid it, don’t you? All right. You’re going to take me to it, right now.”
“Don’t be a fool. Tiong and his men will be here pretty quick. You can’t get past them.”
“We’ll get past them,” she said. “With the figurine.”
“If you’re thinking about using me as a hostage, you can forget it. The law doesn’t give a damn about me.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“No,” I said, “we won’t.”
She made an impatient gesture with the gun — just what I wanted her to do. I swept my left hand out and up, palm open and driving against her hand and the automatic’s barrel, knocking them upward. There was a crack and a flash as the gun went off; I felt heat along my forearm, but the bullet thudded somewhere into the shed’s roof. I caught her wrist with my right hand, pressured it until she cried out in pain. The weapon fell thudding to the floor.
I picked it up, sliding back away from her. She stayed put, holding her wrist and cursing me steadily and bitterly. I tucked the automatic into my belt, moved to the jagged wall opening, and squeezed through it backward. Outside I stood and went to where I could see the airstrip.
Half a dozen men were fanned out and closing in on the runway, one of them brandishing an automatic weapon, the others with drawn pistols. Inspector Kok Chin Tiong was in the lead. I stepped out of the shadows into the moonlight, my hands up in plain sight.
Tiong was out of breath as he came running up. “You are all right, Mr. Connell?”
“Yeah.”
“The woman?”
“In the shed. I don’t think she’ll give you any trouble.”
Tiong said something in Malay and two of his officers went to take Tanya Kasten into custody.
I asked, “What about Van Rijk?”
“Shackled and under guard,” Tiong said. “The other two are dead.”
“You could’ve been saying the same about me. You took your sweet time getting here.”