Minefield

by Andy Maslen

  From outside he could hear the two bandits shouting to each other. In his mind, the dialogue went:

  “Have you found him yet?”

  “No! He’s not here.”

  “Well, keep looking. He can’t have got far.”

  Gabriel drew the Böker from its sheath. He reversed his grip so the point was uppermost. No stranger to knife-fighting, he relaxed a little as he gripped the hilt tight in his fist. Not so long ago he’d been engaged in a fight to the death with a rogue CIA agent in one of Cambodia’s killing fields. He was ready to add a couple more kills to his tally.

  He bent at the hip and felt on the ground by his left boot. His fingers closed on a pebble. Squatting, he drew his left arm back and tossed the pebble out of the tunnel entrance. It landed on the stones outside and bounced along with a series of clicks.

  The ruse worked. Gabriel heard a shout. Then the sound of booted feet coming closer, and the charging lever on an AK-47 being pulled back and let fly with a loud clack . He flattened himself against the rear wall of the alcove in a crouch, gripped the Böker a little tighter and waited.

  The light at the entrance dimmed, then darkened, as a human form blocked the rectangular opening. Outlined as a stark silhouette, it was clearly one of Win Yah’s men. The distinctive shape of the AK’s barrel and front sight made that abundantly clear. The man lowered his rifle into a ready to fire position, holding the hand guard and pistol grip.

  Gabriel slowed his breathing and allowed his pulse to settle. No sense in missing your mark because there’s too much adrenaline in your system. He felt a familiar calm settle over him. At times, after the wetwork was done and he was relaxing with a drink, he’d ponder the meaning of this state of mind. How had he got to this ... ease, with killing? But now? Contacted by the enemy? No. Philosophy was as much use as a rubber bayonet.

  Gabriel waited in his crouch. His vision had improved just enough in the dark space to make out the shape of the approaching bandit. His man, on the other hand, would have pupils the size of pinheads after the bright sunshine outside. They’d be struggling to widen fast enough to let in precious photons. And the bright, white rectangle at the far end of the tunnel wouldn’t be helping either.

  The air smelled of damp stone, earth and the approaching man’s body odour. Gabriel sank even further into himself as the man passed in front of his hiding place. Gabriel straightened, moved on silent feet out of the alcove, and pounced.

  He yanked the man’s head over with his left hand and brought the knife forward in a vicious, upwards thrust that penetrated the man’s side, just below his ribcage. Gabriel turned into the thrust, using his hip to develop extra power, and drove the tip of the knife into the visceral organs. He pulled it free and stabbed again, this time around the front, and into the heart. The man’s struggles subsided in seconds as the damaged heart pumped his lifeblood outwards over Gabriel’s right hand and forearm; and inwards, filling his body cavity. He sagged, and Gabriel withdrew his blade, letting the man crumple at his feet.

  Gabriel wiped the knife clean on the fallen man’s shirt and sheathed it. He collected the AK and a belt-mounted pistol and retraced his steps to the tunnel entrance. Blinking in the sunshine, he removed the AK’s magazine and pocketed it, then dropped the now useless rifle into a water-filled stone basin about seven feet to a side. The rifle made a loud splash as it landed then sank below the surface. He stuck the pistol, a Makarov, into the back of his waistband. One down , he thought. But how many to go?

  14

  M203

  A yell and a burst of automatic fire provided an answer. At least one . He dived behind a huge carved cylinder as bullets whined past his ears and chips of stone flew out from its curved surface.

  The man was undisciplined. He was firing indiscriminately instead of waiting for his target to reappear. Gabriel unshouldered his M16 and set the fire selector switch to BURST. Seeing as you already know I’m here . He loaded a high explosive grenade into the M203 then held the rifle up over his head and pulled the launcher’s trigger. The recoil pushed the rifle back against Gabriel’s extended arms, but that was fine. He wasn’t going for pinpoint accuracy.

  With a loud bang, the grenade exploded. Gabriel didn’t hesitate. Pulling the stock into his shoulder, he swung the barrel up and over the top of the cylinder and fired two bursts in quick succession. He saw the bandit scurrying for cover, firing from the hip as he ran. Leading his man by a couple of feet, Gabriel fired a third burst, hitting the bandit in the chest. The man screamed and pitched forward, rolling onto his side and losing his grip on the AK .

  Gabriel vaulted over the stone cylinder and strode over to the fallen bandit. He was struggling to release a pistol from a holster on his belt, but the blood soaking the front of his shirt told Gabriel he was never going to drag it free. Five feet from his man, he brought the M16 up to his shoulder, took aim, and killed him with a double tap to the head. Another AK, another magazine. Gabriel retraced his steps and dropped the rifle into the basin and added the magazine to his already bulging pocket.

  Something salty stung his eye. More sweat, he thought, bringing his hand up to wipe his forehead. His palm came away wet, but with blood not sweat. Maybe one of the stone chips from the fallen column had cut him as it spun out under the impact of the AK round. It wasn’t sheeting down, so just a scratch. Gabriel willed himself to breathe steadily and closed his eyes.

  He strained to catch a sound other than the symphony of shrill cries, metallic buzzes and birdsong. No voices, this time. No giggles, shouts or screams. No gunfire. So they hadn’t found Eli yet. He needed to hurry. The Israeli was a good shot but she was fighting an infection and her leg wound would hamper any attempt to run or find a better hiding place. He needed to hurry.

  Climbing back up to the rampart, he heard the cough-grunt that had punctuated the afternoon. The leopard was back.

  He flattened himself onto the paved walkway and used the M16’s scope to survey the area in front of him. He saw only tumbled stones, leaning trees and the thick, scrubby vegetation that lay between him and Eli. No lithe quadruped with tawny mottled flanks and three-inch long canines. No skinny bipeds with khaki battledress and yard-long AK-47s. He climbed down on the far side of the wall and, keeping to the perimeter of the roughly square arena bounded by the ramparts, made his way as quickly as he dared back towards Eli.

  The distinctive sound of a Sig Sauer pistol being fired sent his heart into overdrive.

  Three shots in quick succession.

  A gap, then a single shot .

  A burst of automatic fire easily recognisable as a AK-47.

  A double-tap.

  Gabriel’s mind locked up for a second.

  Eli!

  15

  P226

  From her makeshift shelter, Eli listened to the sounds of a firefight, desperate to support Gabriel. She tried rolling onto her side in preparation for standing and had to bite back a scream as the agony of her swollen and infected knee made her topple sideways. Fuck it, Eli Schochat. You’re no use to him down here. Think!

  She didn’t have time to formulate anything beyond that initial instruction to her clouded brain. Strolling down a stone-flagged path, an AK-47 held across his body, was a man in combat gear. He was darker-skinned than other Cambodians, taller too.

  OK. Let’s even up the odds , Eli thought, not knowing what they’d been originally, nor that Gabriel had already made them two to two. The man was sixty yards away. Too far for a kill shot even for a pistol markswoman without a raging fever. But for Eli, he might as well have been a mile distant. Gritting her teeth, she waited for him to draw closer, praying that he wouldn’t see her beneath her covering of palm fronds.

  Fifty yards .

  Eli raises the Sig in a two-handed shooter’s grip.

  Forty five.

  She brings the barrel up until she can sight along it, aligning the iron sights on the man’s head.

  Forty.

  She takes up first pressure on the
trigger.

  Her arm wobbles. Her vision blurs.

  She shakes her head, which sends it spinning.

  “Come on, Eliya,” she hears Papa saying. “You can do it.”

  She aims centre-mass and squeezes off three shots.

  BANG-BANG-BANG

  The sharp tang of the gunsmoke clears her head for a moment. Did I hit him? Yes! He’s on the ground. Prone. No! He’s rolling to one side. Her perception of time has been knocked for a loop by whatever Gabriel injected into her muscle. He’s moving in slow motion.

  She aims again and fires. A single shot this time. Hopeless! The bullet ricochets off the stonework miles to the man’s right with a screaming whine and disappears into the trees.

  Now Win Yah’s man is shooting back. One burst after another. His 7.62mm rounds are slamming into the walls and the columns around her. He’s spraying the bullets like a kid with a hosepipe , she has time to think. Maybe he’s never fired an AK before. He must have done. But he looks kind of young. Child soldier? Eli finds she is conducting this internal conversation with herself while preparing to put her man down. By an immense effort of will, she throws off the muzzy feeling and doubled imagery in front of her and raises her pistol once more.

  She feels tired. Exhausted. The noise from the AK is deafening but it helps her focus. She sights on his head and pulls the trigger. A double-tap. She misses. Squeezes the trigger again. The gun jams. Oh fuck, please! Not now. Her fingers struggle to perform the simple routine to clear a jam, drummed into her by her IDF firearms instructors so many years before. But they are fat and rubbery and refuse to obey her .

  She looks up. The man is standing. Grinning. He has gold teeth. They glint in the sun. He has dropped out the magazine from his AK and casually brings out a new one from a pouch at his belt and slams it home.

  He stands ten feet away and says something to her in Khmer. She’s learnt a few words. The usual social lubricants: please – som ; thank you – ah-koon ; hello – sus’aday ; goodbye – leah hi . But no more than that. It’s a hard language. The alphabet is no help. A bit like Hebrew. Squiggles and dots. She imagines he’s giving her a speech about how she shouldn’t have ventured into Win Yah’s kingdom. How she’s about to meet her ancestors. Or maybe, given the leering expression, how he’s going to fuck her before he kills her.

  Suddenly she’s tired. The gun, fucking useless gun , won’t clear. She tries to throw it at him but her arm is made of lead and it falls a couple of feet from her right boot. He laughs. Points his AK at her midriff.

  And then he flies sideways in a blur of yellow and black.

  He is screaming as the leopard fastens its long fangs into the soft flesh of his throat. As it bites down, the scream is choked off as if someone has hit a mute button. The AK flies from his hands as the big cat attacks and now his empty hands are scrabbling at the beast’s mottled flanks. The leopard shakes its head, once. Eli hears, quite clearly, the snap as the man’s cervical vertebrae part company, severing his spinal cord. Her heart is racing. The leopard turns its head to regard her with eyes the colour of liquid gold. At no point does it loosen its grip on the man’s throat. Bright, arterial blood is spurting out from the deep wounds in his neck and staining the greyish-white fur of the cat’s throat red.

  Holding its head to one side, the leopard walks away, dragging the dead man beside it, as if he weighed no more than a, than a ... What? she asks herself. Then supplies the answer. Than half a hindquarter of a scrawny white cow .

  Her vision is blurring again. But before the black curtains swing shut, she has a hallucinatory vision of the leopard gathering itself, squatting back on its powerfully muscled haunches, then leaping fifteen feet vertically into a tree with the corpse swinging from its clamped jaws like a rag doll.

  And a bird calls. Ku-ku-kuu ... ku-ku-kuu ...

  16

  The Temple Leopard

  M16 held diagonally across his body, Gabriel reached the courtyard where he’d left Eli. He checked all four sides, then looked up at the trees. No bandits. They hadn’t struck him as snipers, so he ran in a straight line towards Eli’s hiding place. He could see her, but she was slumped over with her neck at an unnatural angle. Oh, Jesus, don’t be dead!

  Just as he reached her, he spotted another AK-47 on the ground. Clearly discarded, but by whom? He reached her a second later and gently lifted her head onto his lap, panting from the exertion in the fierce heat, yet far more concerned with his partner. She was breathing — shallow puffs of air that warmed the back of his hand. He checked her for bullet wounds and relaxed as he found none. He pressed his lips to her forehead, which was burning hot.

  Lying her flat, he crawled into the space behind her and retrieved the canteen and his medical kit. He moistened her lips and, when they opened, placed the neck of the canteen against them. Gratifyingly, she sipped some water down. But her eyes remained closed .

  “Hey,” he said. “Eli. Can you hear me? Come on, Eli. You need to wake up. We have to go.”

  Her eyes were moving under the lids. As if she were dreaming. Then they fluttered open. He gazed into her grey-green irises as if he could bring her round by sheer will power.

  “What are you looking at?” she whispered.

  “Thank God. Are you hurt?”

  “No. I mean, my knee feels like someone set it on fire, but that’s it. He didn’t hit me.”

  “I can give you another shot of morphine.”

  She shook her head.

  “Just some water, please.”

  Gabriel pressed the neck of the canteen to her lips again and she swallowed greedily.

  “Who didn’t hit you? I saw an AK, but no body.”

  “One of Win Yah’s men. My gun jammed and he was about to shoot me. Then the leopard just, it came from nowhere. It killed him and jumped into a tree. With him, I mean.”

  She jerked her chin in the direction of a tall tree, smothered with small, yellow fruits that Gabriel supposed might be unripelimes. He looked up into the branches. At first he saw only the dappled greens and shadows of the leaves. But as his gaze attuned to the patterns of the foliage, he saw it. A patch of dusty yellow-and-black mottling. He followed the curve of the spine and found himself looking into the yellow-gold eyes of the leopard.

  The big cat seemed utterly unconcerned at his noticing its lair and blinked slowly without moving. No hissing, no raised hackles, no twitching muscles: it just lay there, one paw dangling over the edge of the thick branch, the other resting proprietorially on the carcass of the dead bandit. Then it bent its head and licked the back of the dead man’s neck as if to say, “he’s mine now”.

  “We need to go,” Gabriel said. “Can you stand if I help you?”

  17

  Fire in the Hole

  Win Yah may have been a killer, but he wasn’t a stupid killer. He heard gunfire coming from a point somewhere to his right. Then directly in front of him. He recognised both the AKs of his own men and the distinctive chatter of the American M16. Using a prearranged signal, a birdcall, he tried to contact his three subordinates.

  “Ku-ku-kuu ... ku-ku-kuu ...”

  Had they been alive, they would have responded with a modified version of the same call. Two longs and a short. He waited. Heard nothing. Concluded with regret that they were all dead.

  Whoever the woman had brought in to fight alongside her was deadly. And Win Yah knew plenty about deadly fighters. He had lost count of the number of people he himself had sent to their ancestors, both in the service of Pol Pot and on his own account. He’d used guns, machetes, lengths of wood, axes. He’d tortured, beaten and mutilated. Bashed brains out on tree trunks when no weapon was available, or simply to terrify the next person in line. Now he sensed an enemy at least as skilled as he was at cutting the thread that tethered people to their earthly life. And he mumbled one of the few English phrases he knew.

  “He who fight and run away, live to fight another day.”

  Then, not running, but not ambling either, Wi
n Yah quit the Field of Mars.

  * * *

  Gabriel looked down at the mine he’d retrieved. He didn’t want to leave it behind, but carrying it back with him while also helping Eli to walk would be foolish at best, suicidal at worst.

  “We need to do something with that. Any bright ideas.”

  Eli turned sideways and looked at the green-and-black disc. Then back at Gabriel.

  “Only the obvious.”

  Gabriel picked up the mine by its sides and walked away. After a hundred yards, he saw what he needed: a gigantic block of masonry almost as tall as he was. He knelt and laid the mine against the cool grey stone like a plate on display on a dresser. Looking right and left he saw a couple of brick-sized stones and fetched them, wedging them on each side of the mine.

  Back with Eli, he retrieved the M16 and set the fire selector to SEMI. He lay on his belly and wriggled into a comfortable shooting position: left arm crooked with the hand cupping the perforated fore end, right hand around the pistol grip, left leg bent at the knee, right straight out behind him. Eli shuffled away from him, pushing herself backwards using her good leg and both elbows.

  He settled his cheek against the stock and sighted on the mine’s black plastic detonator through the telescopic sight. It was a rookie’s target. Solid, stable, face-on. No crosswind. No real possibility of the heat coming off the ground causing the bullet to deviate in flight. No need to worry about its dropping either. Not over so short a range. He closed his left eye and centred the cross-hairs on the detonator. Tightened his finger on the trigger. Inhaled once, and let it out in a hiss.