Indiana Jones and the Secretof the Sphinx (8 page)

The craft, small and large, that came to the aid of the refugees appeared seemingly from nowhere, summoned by the unwritten law of the sea and the fireworks over the grave of the
Divine Wind.
The crew accepted passage on a whaling vessel back to Japan, while Snark boarded a steam packet bound for the mainland.

"Good-bye, Faye!" Snark called theatrically as the packet chugged away, waving his hat and leaning dangerously far over the rail. "Until destiny brings us together again!"

"He certainly seems devoted," Indy said as he grasped hold of a rope net the crew of a junk had lowered over the side.

"Oh, he's just full of it," Faye said dismissively, although she blushed a bit.

Mystery was first up the net and onto the deck of the junk, then she extended a hand and helped pull Bryce over the rail. Indy was halfway up when Faye called to him.

"What do we do about her?"

Musashi was still in the lifeboat, looking sullen, her hands tied in front of her.

"Leave her," Indy said.

"We can't," Faye protested.

"Yes we can," called Mystery. "She tried to kill us, Mother. Listen to Dr. Jones. He's right."

"Being practical isn't the same as being right, Mysti," Faye said tiredly. "She's a human being. We can't leave her in the bottom of a lifeboat."

"Who's going to babysit her?" Indy asked.

"Not me," Mystery said.

Although Musashi was trying to control herself, her wide eyes betrayed her fear.

"I'm not leaving without her," Faye said.

"Then we'll give her a choice," Indy shot back. "She can come with us and behave herself, or we will drop her into the sea at the first sign of trouble."

"Do you understand?" Faye asked.

"Yes," Musashi said.

"Dr. Jones is quite serious," Faye said.

"I understand," Musashi said quietly. "But all of you are still under arrest."

"See what I mean, Mother?" Mystery asked. "She's impossible!"

"Then we'll just have to treat her like cargo," Bryce said as he tossed a rope down to the lifeboat. "Make her fast and we'll winch her up."

Faye hitched the rope beneath Musashi's arms, and Bryce hauled her aboard the junk. She was still struggling as her feet touched the deck.

"This is going to be nothing but trouble," Indy predicted as Faye climbed up onto the deck.

The captain of the junk, a leathery old man who smoked a long-stemmed clay pipe, had been watching the display from the quarterdeck. He laughed aloud at Musashi's antics.

"I'm glad somebody's amused," Indy said.

"He seems to think that she's your girlfriend, old boy," Bryce said as he cast the lifeboat adrift. "He also thinks you have your hands full. And I must say, I quite agree."

"The Imperial Army won't be satisfied with an empty lifeboat," Indy said, attempting to ignore Bryce's enjoyment of the situation. "When they find it, I'd like them to think we drowned."

Indy pulled the Webley from its holster, leaned over the rail, and put five rounds into the lifeboat as it drifted past. The boat sank slowly to its gunwales as it swirled in the wake behind them.

"That will not fool Sokai Sensei," Musashi said.

"No," Indy said as he reloaded the Webley, "but it might just buy us some time. Mr. Bryce, let's have a chat with the captain, shall we?"

After a long and somewhat heated discussion, a deal was finally struck.

"The old Malay pirate who is running this junk wanted a hundred dollars American to run us to port," Indy reported as he rejoined the Maskelynes on the forward deck. "I gave him everything I had, which was thirty-five dollars and some change."

"Was it enough?"

"It'll have to be," Indy said.

"Where exactly are we headed?"

"Shanghai," Indy said. "Which is good, because I have friends there. We should arrive sometime tomorrow night. Until then, we just need to take it easy and lie low. "

Faye nodded.

"And we can get you passage back to England."

"I beg your pardon?" Faye asked.

"We're American, Dr. Jones," Mystery said. "Mom uses the English accent onstage because people expect it, because Daddy is English. But Mother was born in Oklahoma."

"Okay," Indy said. "We'll get you back to the States, then."

"We're not going back," Faye said. "We're going to stay here until we find Mystery's father."

"But you have no business in this part of the world," Indy said. "It's dangerous, if you haven't noticed. You and your escape artist of an assistant are going to get yourselves killed."

"We were doing quite well," Faye said, "until you happened to crash the show. It wasn't the Imperial Army searching for
us.
And, if I recall, we were the ones who saved your hide, not the other way around."

"I was doing all right," Indy said.

Faye laughed.

"You were not," she said. "You were three steps away from being back in prison. And now that we're on the subject, what were you locked up for, anyway? You never told us."

"It's a long story," Indy said.

"I'll bet," Faye said. "And that alias of yours. Couldn't you think of something better than Jones? It shows a distinct lack of imagination."

"It's my name," Indy protested.

"But only on the days it isn't Smith, eh?"

"Mother," Mystery pleaded. "Please don't fight."

"He started it," Faye said. "I just want him to know that we're going to continue our search for Kaspar, and that we expect him to repay us for the losses we've suffered because of him."

"You mean all of that was true?" Indy asked.

"Of course it's true," Faye said. "Do you think we would make all of that up?"

"It was such a good story," Indy said, "I figured it was just part of the act. Forgive me, but in my experience stage magicians haven't exactly been the most reliable of sources. But if what you say is true...
that
could lead to some interesting possibilities. I might even be inclined to stick around."

"How's your shoulder, Dr. Jones?" Mystery asked.

She was doing her best to change the subject.

"It hurts," Indy said as he stretched out on a mound of burlap and pulled the brim of his hat down over his eyes. He was silent for a moment, then asked: "Do you mean to say that your Kaspar really
was
searching for the Staff of Aaron?"

But before Faye could answer him, Indy was snoring.

As the junk continued her leisurely, dreamlike journey to the southwest, Indy allowed himself to sleep in order to cope with the pain from his aching shoulder. Driven by the wind and attended only by the sound of the water and the sails, the junk made for a timeless scene that could have taken place during any of a thousand previous Septembers. Shrouded in mystery and tradition, the castlelike junk made her way down the channel that separated Japan from occupied Korea.

By that afternoon the junk was crossing the East China Sea, bound for Shanghai. Although high storm clouds were building in the east, the day was balmy, the sea was calm, and the wind was moderate. The air had taken on that particular luminous quality that Indy had only seen in the East; the day seemed to shimmer in green and gold.

Then, early in the evening, a shadow crossed the sea.

The eastern storm clouds had been pushing a cold front before them, and it had finally overtaken the junk. The sunlight turned dull and the temperature dropped fifteen degrees in as many minutes, chilling the passengers and causing Indy to rouse from his sleep when he heard the words whispered on the lips of the crew:
ty fung.

"Where are we?" Indy asked, coming to the rail.

"About a hundred miles off the Chinese coast, near Shanghai," Faye said. The wind was beginning to pick up, although it was not yet raining, and it blew her robes out behind her like a pennant. She was holding on to the rigging, looking over the choppy water to the battlement of dark clouds approaching from the east. Lightning bursts of pink and blue played at the base of the wall cloud, while beneath it poured the telltale streaks of wind and rain.

"What's that word they keep repeating?" Faye asked.

"Ty fung,"
Indy said.

"What's it mean?"

"It's not good," Indy said.

"I'm afraid not," Bryce agreed as he struck a match, cupped his hands around it, and lit a cigarette. "It means typhoon. And considering how much the barometer has dropped in the last hour, and the time of year, I'd say they are bloody well right."

"A hurricane?" Mystery asked.

"They're called typhoons in these parts," Bryce said. "Willie-willies in Australia,
el baguio
in the Philippines, hurricanes in the Atlantic. But they're all basically tropical cyclones."

"Terrific," Mystery said.

"Too bad we don't have a radio," Bryce said. "I wonder what my old friend Clement Wragge will name this one. Clever, that Wragge. He's an Aussie weatherman who has taken to naming storms after women he admires or politicians he dislikes."

"Whoever heard of naming a storm after a woman?" Faye asked.

"Seems perfectly logical to me," Indy muttered.

"Can we outrun it?" Mystery asked.

"The storm is probably four hundred miles wide," Bryce said. "And they generally blow to the southwest, until they hit the coast. We're running dead ahead of it, and we don't have a prayer of making the mainland before it hits."

Musashi, who was sitting cross-legged on the deck with her hands tied in front of her, began to laugh.

"What's so funny?" Indy demanded.

"Even the weather is against you," she said.

"She really has a sick sense of humor," Mystery said.

"What can we do?" Faye asked.

"Nothing, I'm afraid," Bryce said. "Wait and watch, and hope we can make it to an island cove or some other shelter before the storm overtakes us."

Then Bryce took the pint of gin from his jacket pocket, drained it, and threw the empty bottle into the sea.

Sokai wore a black robe. His feet were tucked beneath him, with the big toes crossed, and his hands rested palm-down on his thighs. He lowered his bandaged forehead until it touched the hardwood floor, then held the position for a respectful three seconds.

When he returned to
sezen,
the sitting form, the candles on either side of the dark altar flickered. The flicker was reflected from the black-lacquered sheath of the samurai sword, which lay within hand's reach on the floor in front of him, and from the glass-framed likenesses of his dead masters that lined the walls of the dojo. The flicker was reflected also in the almond-colored iris of Sokai's right eye.

The other eye, still beneath seeping bandages, was useless now. The spikes of the nutcracker had also gouged out hunks of his left ear and cheek. Together with the clumsy stitches the village doctor at Luchow had used to close the wounds, the damage had turned Sokai's matinee idol good looks into something more Karloffian.

Sokai had been sitting motionless before the altar in the darkened training hall for hours, searching for the
boon ki
—the reason, the essence, the true meaning—of the thing that had happened. He had scanned the visages of the masters of Bushido that lined the walls, from his own Okinawan master all the way back to the fierce and gap-toothed countenance of Dharuma, the sixth-century founder of Zen Buddhism who also brought martial arts to the monks of the Songshan Shaolin Monastery. After reaching the monastery, Dharuma was said to have spent nine years in silent contemplation of a cave wall, listening to the sound of ants screaming.

One of the monks watching this feat of self-control was so moved that he cut off one of his own hands and offered it to Dharuma in sympathy.

The story, some felt, was meant to defy interpretation, another Zen koan that one is to reflect upon but never really to grasp. Intellectual understanding was an impossibility; the best to be hoped for was a sort of contemplative emotional acceptance.

But as Sokai allowed his fingertips to touch the bandages over his blinded eye, he believed he understood the message. The dark night of his life had been illuminated in the way that lightning reveals the secrets of a summer's night.

The sound of ants screaming had a name.

"Jones," Sokai growled.

And the name had become a curse.

The typhoon overtook the junk in a dark wall of wind and water that blotted out the sky. The hull of the junk was driven relentlessly forward on the storm surge, like a surfboard riding the crest of a wave. The captain and the crew had vanished at the first sign of the approaching storm, escaping in the small boats that trailed the junk like pilot fish on the belly of shark. They would weather the storm in whatever island shelter they could find; then, if the junk survived, they would return. If not, another ship always came along in time.

Indy and the others had fewer choices.

They had made themselves fast to a cargo hatch in the waist of the ship, with their backs against one another. Before the storm hit, Bryce had cut the rope binding Musashi's wrists. Indy had placed his fedora inside his jacket and zipped it up. Then he had intertwined hands with Faye on his left and Mystery on his right.

They could hear the storm approaching, and it sounded like a hundred steam locomotives rushing over the water toward them.

"Dr. Jones," Mystery shouted.

"What?"

"I'm scared."

"So am I," Indy replied. "But just hold on to my hand, no matter what."

The masts of the junk were carried away like twigs in the first great rush of water over the deck. The hull rolled completely over. For nearly a minute Indy and the others were beneath the water, holding their breath and holding tight, until the hull finally righted itself.

Pounded by ninety-foot waves and scourged by winds that sometimes reached two hundred miles an hour, the castle sections at the bow and stern were quickly broken away. The timbers of the hull poked up like skeletal ribs in the open places, and seawater foamed through, in and out of the cargo hatch, but the waist section of the hull held together.

Then another wave tossed the hull in the opposite direction, and the hull rode the crest until it was suspended over a canyon of surging water.