Cambodian Hellhole
Page 9
After another moment he found the strength at least to roll over on his left side, so he would be facing in the general direction of his cagemate. Both eyes open now and swimming into hazy focus, blinking back the drying blood that had run down across his forehead from a lacerated scalp, he saw not one, but two men crouching close by, watching him intently.
They were human scarecrows, neither of them weighing more than a hundred pounds, although they seemed to be approximately the same height as Stone. Clearly they had been on a starvation diet for a long time, wasting away to skin and bone. They would be able to walk, with effort, and to work, with even more difficulty. But they were hardly in any shape for rough-and-tumble combat.
Stone felt his initial hopes begin to fade, waning as he scrutinized the human skeletons before him. He wondered what he must look like to them; well-fed, but bloody, battered.
For the first time, Stone became conscious that he had his shirt on. Someone had taken time to half-dress him after he lost consciousness during the marathon beating. He also had his boots on, although they were not laced. He decided that could wait until he found the energy to sit upright, the strength and tolerance for pain that he would need to bend over and reach his feet.
The nearest P.O.W. shifted his position, staring more closely at Stone, his brow furrowed, puzzling over something. He seemed about, to ask a question, then thought better of it, rocking back on his haunches again, keeping silent. One skeletal hand came up to scratch at his stubbled chin, then dropped limply again to his side, knuckles rapping on the floorboard.
Stone studied that face, the sunken eyes, the missing teeth and scabrous cheeks. Mentally he added a hundred pounds, a shave, more hair where this man’s had been thinning out on top …
And recognition hit him like a boot in the stomach, driving the wind out of him as surely as the interrogators had with their slashing, pounding canes.
The skeleton crouching there in front of him, no more than three yards away, was Jess Lynch. The very man he had come so far and risked so much to extricate!
“Jess?”
Stone kept it low, a question rather than a statement. He was certain in his heart, but in his mind …
The scarecrow frowned again, the whole face sagging as if someone had pulled sharply on the pointed chin.
“Do I know you?” he asked. The voice was like a draft from the grave.
“It’s me,” Stone hissed. “Stoney.”
“Stoney.”
The nickname, on Lynch’s lips, had a wistful and faraway sound to it, like something blown in by the night wind. The prisoner was thinking hard, remembering, and there was a warm light growing there, behind the haunted, hunted eyes.
“Stoney.”
“I came to get you out of here. To get all of you out.” Lynch almost smiled, but he did not quite achieve the long-unaccustomed expression.
“How you gonna do that, Stoney? You’re in here with us.”
Stone managed to sit up, groaning with the pain the effort cost him, and scooted over next to Lynch, keeping it down to a whisper. The cages would not be bugged, he knew, but there was no telling when or where a guard might materialize—no way of telling which ones spoke English well enough to understand his words.
He glanced at Lynch’s companion, and the wraithlike man followed the direction of his eyes, nodding toward the other prisoner.
“That’s Page. Been in here thirteen years.”
A bony hand was offered; Stone shook it gently, sickened by the soft consistency of flesh condemned to jungle rot, the sharp feel of bone beneath tightly stretched skin.
“Pleasure.”
“Yeah.”
“How are you gonna do it, Stoney?” Lynch asked again.
“I’m not alone. I’ve got some men outside.”
Lynch did manage the smile then, a ghostly trace of a grin.
“I heard about you guys. You wouldn’t think we’d hear, but the word gets around. Somebody transfers, and like that. I heard about you.”
“Well, I’m here.”
“Inside.”
“No matter. They’ll be coming for me. For everybody. Soon.”
“Okay.”
Lynch did not question Stone, did not appear to doubt him … but clearly the prisoner had become used to disappointments, letdowns, and betrayals.
“Ramsay made it through,” Stone told him.
“Yeah? The kid had balls.”
“I never thought he’d make it,” Page said listlessly, but there was a sense of growing wonder in his voice. “He gave me your coordinates.”
“Real balls. I like that kid.”
“I thought you were dead, Jess—till I talked to him. I swear to God.”
“Don’t sweat it, Stoney. There were times I thought the same myself.”
Stone felt a burning in his chest, rising up and into his throat, threatening to choke him, making it hard for him to speak.
“What happened?”
“We were at the Bien Hoa outpost when a force of VC and N.V.A. regulars hit us in strength. We held out for two days, but without air support …”
In his mind, Lynch was clearly reliving his last battle as a member of the Special Forces. Stone let him work through the story in his own way and time.
“It was somethin’ to see, man. You shoulda been there. Shoulda … It was three damned weeks before the pullout, Stoney. Three fucking weeks to go.”
Mark Stone was silent in the darkness. He could think of nothing to say.
“The bastards hit us with everything except the kitchen sink, and they were bringing that up when we finally got our air.” Lynch hesitated, and the smile was bitter. “Evac choppers. How about that? We were beggin’ them for gunships two days running, and then they send us evac choppers. Gave the outpost up without even tryin’ to save it for us.”
Lynch was no longer with them now. He was far away, in miles and years, refighting that futile engagement somewhere to the north.
“Most of the guys made it to the choppers, the ones who could. And the ARVNs. I was fighting a rearguard with Jackie Donato—you never knew him, Stoney—and we were holdin’ ‘em off pretty well until the mortars got us zeroed in.”
Another hesitation. Lynch’s voice was almost cracking as he continued moments later.
“Donato caught an AK round in the throat. Tore right through and left him in a hell of a mess. He was suckin’ wind, drowning in his own blood, for Christ’s sake, and I was tryin’ to plug up the hole with a compress. I never heard the mortar shell coming in. I never knew what hit me, till I woke up with a bunch of goddamned slopes all around me, jabbering a mile a minute.”
You never hear the shot that kills you.
And sometimes it is the lucky ones who die.
Stop that! Nobody is dying here!
Not yet.
“You’ve been here all that time? Since then?”
“Hell no. I’ve been in half a dozen camps since I was taken. Thought I might get out there, for a while, around ‘75. Only been here the last four years. Or is it five now? Shit, I can’t remember anything anymore.”
“Don’t worry about it. You’ll be going home before you know it.”
“How much backup did you bring, Stoney?”
“Should be plenty, once they get their plans worked out. I sort of bitched things up by getting caught here with my pants down.”
Lynch grinned sardonically. “Don’t let the guards hear you say that, man. Biggest bunch of friggin’ queens you’ve ever seen.”
The sense of humor was still intact, even if it might be hanging by a slender thread.
“How many Americans are here?” Stone asked.
“I figure twenty-six.” Lynch glanced at Page for confirmation and repeated it. “Yeah, twenty-six.”
“All of them work the mines?”
“All but four. Poor bastards can’t even walk anymore. Beside them, I look like a flicking Adonis.”
“How many of the men are fit to fig
ht?”
Lynch frowned. “None of them are really fit. But of the twenty-two, I’d say that twelve or so could hold their own in the short run.”
Stone frowned. Against the odds, he had been hoping for a stronger force among the prisoners themselves. Lynch saw his disappointment and laid a bony hand on his shoulder.
“Hey … don’t write them off yet, Stoney. There’s not a man in the camp who wouldn’t rather die standing up than live another hour like we are. You give ‘em something they can fight with—anything at all—and they’ll give it everything they’ve got.”
“I’ll have to talk it over with them on my own, as soon as I get the chance. Tomorrow, if they send me out to work with the rest of you. If not …”
“Just tell me what I have to do,” Lynch hissed in the darkness.
Stone told him. He spent half the night telling both of them his rudimentary plan, formulated while he was suspended from the parrot’s perch in the camp commander’s office. When he finished speaking, it was nearly dawn, but none of them were sleepy.
It was going to be a long day, yes, and an eventful one.
Before it ended, Stone and his companions would know exactly what fate had in store for all of them. Life or death, success or failure, victory or defeat.
Whichever way it came down, Stone was certain of one thing: The prisoners—or most of them—would give him everything they had. He could only hope that with a little help from Loughlin, Wiley, and the others, it would turn out to be enough.
Chapter Fourteen
The guards came around at sunup, rattling the cages, waking everyone from restless steep, unlocking the hasps and padlocks that held the bamboo cages closed. The prisoners were herded into the compound, forced to stand in ragged ranks for the morning count. Stone took a place between Lynch and Page, and was counted along with the rest.
They were marched to breakfast in the first light of dawn, forming a single line and trooping past a giant kettle where quantities of rice were being boiled to the consistency of paste. Stone received a wooden bowl, with maybe enough rice inside it to satisfy an anorexic squirrel. His silverware would be his fingers.
They sat together in a cluster, some fifty men all told, the Americans apart from the captive Vietnamese political prisoners and Montagnard freedom fighters who were also doing time inside the jungle compound. Stone and his companions found a place on the perimeter of the closely guarded group.
“You live on this?” Stone asked Lynch, lifting the bowl with its meager portion of soggy rice for emphasis.
“You call this livin’?”
A guard materialized behind them and aimed a kick at Lynch’s kidneys.
“Motherfuckers shut up!” he snapped. “No talk at breakfast.”
“Sorry, fuckface. Won’t happen again.”
Another kick, this time on target, and Lynch dropped his rice bowl, spilling his tiny breakfast onto the ground. The guard stepped across in front of him and ground the paste into the mud with his boot heel.
“Smart motherfucker no need food to work,” he sneered, moving away down the line, looking for someone else to abuse.
“Someday I’m going to kill that sonofabitch,” Lynch said, rubbing his injured back.
“Your chance is coming,” Stone promised his friend earnestly.
After a fifteen-minute breakfast period, the men were marched to the latrine trench, where they relieved themselves by threes. That done, they were formed into ranks, two abreast, and the front gates of the compound were opened to let them out. With guards on either side, pacing the column and lashing out at potential stragglers with their AK-47s, the prisoners were marched out of the camp, along the bridge and down the winding road that Stone had earlier observed from the opposite riverbank.
The mines were approximately two miles from the prison compound. It was all uphill, and what with the lame condition of the work party, it required over an hour for them all to reach their destination. When they got there, another complement of guards was waiting for them at the entrance to the mine, having made the journey earlier by truck. The commander of the work detail took custody of his slaves, and the soldiers who had marched them from the camp doubled back, returning the way they had come.
It was typical of the Vietnamese, Stone knew, to double the shifts on everything, creating make-work positions to justify their existence here. A Cambodian prison camp might not be the best of duties, but it had to be preferable to staking out the northern border of Vietnam, waiting for a hundred thousand screaming Chinese to pour across the border in an endless human torrent. On the other hand … There just might be another reason for the double shift of guards, a reason for sentries to be on duty at the mine around the clock.
“What are we digging for?” Stone asked, embarrassed that the question had not occurred to him sooner.
“Gold,” Lynch answered from the corner of his mouth. “The fucking mother lode.”
It added up, of course. Made perfect sense. Slave laborers, literally worth their weight in gold to their captors. Laborers who could never tell anyone precisely what they had been mining, or where.
Stone saw an opportunity to get an extra lick in at the Vietnamese and their Cambodian lackeys.
They entered the mine, Stone following the more experienced workers and the wordless gestures of his captors. He was given a pick, then had it taken away from him again as the guard in charge remembered his directions from the camp commandant. The Vietnamese finally led Stone to an ore cart of ancient wood-and-iron construction, its small wheels bent and almost off their axles. The guard indicated to him in broken English and through signs that it would be his task to move along the line, letting the miners fill his cart, and then to haul it—full—into the outer world.
Stone wondered how many such trips he could survive. The cart was heavy, and once it had been filled with chunks of rock and ore …
He set out, dragging the cart along behind him, sometimes shifting to push it like a ghetto vendor moving through the streets with fish to sell. The image almost made him laugh … almost.
At each stop along the line, once the men had seriously begun to work, and the sounds of digging masked his whispered conversation, Stone began recruiting members for his freedom brigade. At each stop he picked up a new enlistee, taking longer with some than with others, meeting occasional resistance from the long-timers, those who had been broken—or almost broken—by their jailers.
But in the end, no man refused him. Lynch had been correct. They would stand and fight upon his signal—perhaps not long or well, but they would fight.
And die, if need be, with the hope of freedom in their hearts and minds.
Jess Lynch watched Stone moving along the line of miners in the lamplit darkness of the shaft, now pushing, now dragging his ungodly burden. At times he seemed about to crumble, but each pickup stop allowed him time enough to catch his breath, time enough to pass a word or two with each of the P.O.W.‘s in turn.
Stone skipped the Vietnamese, and spoke to only those Montagnards who could understand and respond to him in English, but from the nodding heads and the fleeting, unaccustomed smiles, Lynch knew that what he said was striking home, paying off.
Laboring in the foul darkness underground, the captive wondered what their final payoff would be.
Death, most likely—but he had been expecting that for eleven years now. It would almost be a welcome relief from the daily abuse, slave labor, and humiliation he experienced at the hands of his Vietnamese captors.
Anything was better than the so-called life he had. Literally anything, barring only more of the same.
Stone was halfway back along his return route, dragging an empty cart this time and working his way to the head of the line, starting over, when one of the P.O.W.‘s turned to whisper something. Stone was nodding, glancing around to make certain that they were not overheard by any of the guards nearby.
And they had not been overheard—but they had certainly been seen.
When he was within arm’s reach, Needledick swung the wooden butt of his assault rifle hard around and drove it cruelly into the small of Stone’s back. Lynch dropped his pick, about to come to his friend’s assistance, and then eleven years of instinct took over, forcing him to look away, to fumble for the tool as if he had simply dropped it by accident.
He could not—would not—interfere. When the time was right, when Stone gave the signal, he would find the courage to respond, to fight. But not here, underground, where they were so many ducks in a shooting gallery.
They would be slaughtered here, he told himself … and if the guards did not mow them down on the spot, one blast from an AK-47, one stray bullet striking ancient timber, and they would all be buried forever underground, the living and the dead.
Stone fell to one knee, cursing bitterly, and Needledick kicked him roughly in the buttocks, keeping it up until Stone was back on his feet again. Needledick moved around to face Stone, pushing his flat Oriental face into the soldier’s, kissing-close.
“No talking! Work!” he shouted, kicking Stone once more for emphasis, this time in the shin.
Lynch’s hands were white-knuckled on the wooden handle of his pickaxe. He imagined the face of Needledick and Ngu, the camp’s sadistic warden, on the rough wall of rock in front of him … and suddenly he found the strength to attack the wall again, driving the blunt, rusty tip of the pick home repeatedly.
“Slow down,” a voice hissed from somewhere to his left. “You’ll wear yourself out, for Chrissakes. Make the rest of us look bad.”
Lynch nodded, panting, his face and shoulders slick with cold perspiration. He hesitated, slowing his strokes, once again keeping pace with the skeletal workers on either side of him.
No point in showing Charlie that you still had any strength left. Let it be a sweet surprise, when your fingers closed around his fucking throat and cut off the air that he needed to breathe, to live.