And they had not been overheard—but they had certainly been seen.
One of the soldiers, laughingly known behind his back among the P.O.W.‘s as Needledick, was moving in, unslinging his AK-47 and taking a firmer grip on the weapon as he closed the gap behind Mark Stone.
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.
Lynch was looking forward to the break. He hoped his chance would come tonight. A chance at Ngu. At Needledick. At all the others who had beaten and starved him through eleven long years of living hell.
Suddenly he was afraid. Of freedom. Of a world outside which was no longer a part of him, no longer his. He wondered if he could exist with free men, totally at liberty to come and go, to buy and sell, to do whatever the hell might strike his fancy.
There were risks outside, so different from the known risks, the shared risks he had become used to in the prison camps. Out there a man would have to think for himself, decide what to eat—God, the food!—what to wear.
The women … Lynch felt a tightening in his groin that was more fear than lust. He had not experienced a full erection in nearly four years, and he wondered now, for the first time in months, if it was really only diet, as he told himself.
He was not afraid of having lost his manhood, of becoming homosexual. That would have shown itself before this, in his day-to-day existence.
Instead, he was afraid that he would not—could not—respond to either sex. He was suddenly terrified, where before he had been simply relieved, that a part of his life had been ripped away from him forever.
No wife, no children … Christ, that was a blessing. At least he would not have to rehash eleven years of war and prison stories, look into their eyes and wonder whether it was pity or simply curiosity he saw reflected there.
Lynch caught himself drifting on the endless stream of consciousness, and almost laughed aloud as he realized how far he had let his imagination transport him into the unknown future. He was standing in a goddamn gold mine in northern Cambodia, for Christ’s sake, guarded by a fucking platoon of armed Vietnamese … and he was wondering if he would fit in somewhere along Fifth Avenue.
It was hysterical. He had to stop himself from laughing right out loud and bringing half a dozen sentries on the run to club him down.
First things first. That was the ticket. See if you can get out of the frigging camp, then out of the frigging country … and when you’ve done all that, alive and in one piece, then you can start worrying about how well you’ll fit back home.
Right now, his home was here. In prison. He would have to work with Stone, with whoever else was waiting in the jungle, to prove that he was worthy of a one-way ticket stateside.
Time enough for all the other plans and worries later. If he lived through the night to come.
Chapter Fifteen
Terrance Loughlin shifted positions silently, brushing away an ant that had fallen from the canopy above onto the back of his hand. He watched it recover its balance on the ground and scuttle away through the carpet of fallen, rotting leaves.
He was crouched with Wiley on the hillside overlooking the river and the enemy compound beyond. They had been there since early morning, long enough to watch the prisoners marched out to work—Stone among them—and the escort patrol return within the hour, empty-handed.
So there were more guards at the mine. That meant more hostile guns to deal with when the firefight started. Even if the other troops were on permanent garrison duty at the mine for whatever reason, some of them would respond to an assault on the compound. It was inevitable. The sounds of gunfire would probably carry the mile or two it took to rouse them; the detonation of explosives certainly would.
And they would have a force of unknown size arriving at their flank as they were in the middle of their mop-up. Great.
It would be Loughlin’s task to see that the new arrivals never got inside the camp. Never got across the bridge. And he was just the man to make that guarantee.
He pointed through the screen of foliage, letting Hog Wiley follow his aiming index finger, careful not to let himself be seen by anyone across the narrow river.
“I can slip in and plant some charges there … and there. Electronic detonators. I can bring the bridge down on cue—with all hands, if need be.”
Hog nodded, smiling grimly.
“That oughta hold ‘em for a while, but we’re not looking at the Missis-fucking-sippi there. They’ll ford the river when the bridge goes, and we’ll have to fight ‘em anyway.”
“Better to catch them arse-deep in the water than to have them pouring through the open gate, though.”
“Yeah, it’s better,” Hog admitted grudgingly. “I just wish there was some way we could keep them all at the mines. Maybe get them inside and then blow the friggin’ hole down around their ears.”
Loughlin shrugged.
“I could go take a look, if you think we can spare the time.”
“That’s just it. We can’t. Or the explosives, either. We’ll have to do the bridge your way and hope it works.”
“All right.”
“I’ll take the Hmong in through the fence … there.”
He pointed to a spot along the fence not far from where Mark Stone had made his disastrous entry through the drainage pipe.
“They’ll be on guard.”
“You got some options for me?”
“No. I just want to play it safe.”
“There’s no such play in this game, slick.”
“Okay. In through the fence. It will be close.”
“You bet your ass it will. We’ll go in killing anything that moves and isn’t one of ours. No prisoners. A quick in-out, and with any kind of luck at all, we can be back across the river before the cavalry gets here.”
“You’re dreaming.”
“So don’t fucking wake me. You’re the powder man. Just blow ‘em all to shit the way you’re s’posed to.”
Loughlin grimaced and shook his head, but Wiley did not notice. He was busy staring at the compound, down below them.
Loughlin was the powder man, the demolitions
expert, yes. He had learned his trade in the British Army and gone on to serve in Her Majesty’s elite counterterrorist command, the Special Air Service. In the S.A.S. he had seen his share of killing, by both sides. He had planted some explosives, defused some others … and seen a number of his closest friends go up in smoke and flame when they got careless and started taking things for granted in the dirty, nameless war.
It had been war, no doubt on that score. There were no front lines or safe retreats, but otherwise it was war at the filthy worst. At one time or another, Loughlin had seen action against the I.R.A., the Japanese Red Army, Baader-Meinhoff terrorists, Basques, Moloccaris …
He got tired of running down the names and faces, the half-baked philosophies that were really nothing more than mock-sophisticated justifications for mayhem. Terrorists enjoyed the killing, and the feeling of power they got from creating fear. They got a kind of high out of the bloodshed and the notoriety they won through acts of cowardice.
It had taken Loughlin a year on the job to understand his enemy, to realize exactly what the hell was going on in minds so twisted that they slaughtered women and children in the name of freedom for a nation halfway around the world. It took him that long to comprehend a mind that would bomb churches in the heart of London to make a religious point, or machine-gun buses filled with children to make a statement about the starving hordes of Africa or Asia.
Sometime in his second year with the S.A.S., after he understood, he started hating. It was a weakness, Loughlin knew, but in the end it had been inescapable. He had fought long and hard to obtain the ideal objectivity of a trained counterterrorist fighter, knowing that emotional involvement was a one-way ticket to a graveyard … but in the end, heart won out over mind to some extent.
He had been sitting in the gutter, holding a khaki-clad leg in his arms … all that remained of an S.A.S. sergeant he had barely known. They had been speaking acquaintances, not even really friends … but Loughlin knew that the man had a wife and two children in school, that he was paying on a flat in Soho, that he had the same hopes and dreams for his life and his family as did any other man.
The sergeant had been killed by a car bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army outside a crowded department store. A spokesman for the I.R.A. was kind enough to call police and tell them where the hundred pounds of TNT were hidden—more or less. Loughlin had been part of the second group arriving at the scene, seconds behind the first wave, and he was just out of range when the car detonated, shattering windows for a mile and shredding seven people with its hail of shrapnel.
He was close enough to be knocked down by the concussion, close enough to catch the leg that landed in his lap like some grisly airborne trophy. If he had been twenty meters closer, with the rest of them, he might have been vaporized like the three other S.A.S. men who had accompanied the sergeant.
Loughlin did not swear a blood oath on his enemies; nothing so dramatic for this stolid Britisher … but he had made a quiet determination in his own mind that whenever possible, whenever he could justify eliminating terrorists by any stretch of the imagination, he would do so.
He found the car-bombers, led a squad sent out to take them into custody … and brought them home again in rubber body bags. A shootout, and all that—yes, regrettable—but at least they would not be planting any more bombs, would they?
He began to gain a reputation in the service for shooting first and asking questions later, an attitude that brought him on the carpet several times—and earned him the unqualified respect of the line of soldiers he served with.
When new men came on duty, they were almost invariably teamed with Loughlin their first time out. It was a tacit admission by the brass, however they might criticize him, that he got results, that he would keep the new recruits alive at least long enough to learn their jobs firsthand.
Then came Loughlin’s bad break.
A news camera caught the S.A.S. commando’s unmasked features when a terrorist tugged the Brit’s mask away during an embassy hostage rescue action, moments before Loughlin iced the terrorist, but by then it was too late, and with his face now in terrorist files, his undercover capability gone, Loughlin was mustered out of the S.A.S.
He did not protest it, nor did his melancholy side become any more pronounced than usual. He took it stoically, without question, and within two weeks he was fighting in Angola, against the Communist insurgents. Mercenary life had offered some of what the S.A.S. had failed to give him: clear-cut choices, do-or-die decisions without the tangle of red tape and bureaucratic bullshit to be chopped away before you had a chance to act to move. At the same time, though, there had been something missing …
And he found it with Mark Stone.
At first Loughlin did not realize what he was lacking, but with time and some careful thought he realized that it was a cause. Fighting, killing for the dollar sign, without regard to any ideology beyond blind anti-Communism, had its limitations. But with Stone …
The cause made sense, it beckoned him, and once inside its clutches, he could not break free. He did not want to break free.
Stone had shown him something he had been searching for and fighting for from the moment he joined the S.A.S., namely, a chance to count for something, to use his skills not only fighting evil, but achieving something for the cause of good.
If they could bring just one man home and reunite him with his family … if they could extricate one human soul from a living hell or captivity, it would be worth the risk, the effort.
And now, the soul and body on the line belonged to Stone himself. It had been careless of him to get caught, but Loughlin knew that it could happen to anyone, anytime. Like the sergeant in London, laughing and living one moment, and the next—
The bridge would be no problem, he decided, smiling to himself. There just might be a way to take the reinforcements with the bridge, if it came to that. Some close work, with precision timing—but it could be done.
As for the fence, some simple C-4 charges would do the trick. The problem there would not be getting in, but staying alive once entry was achieved.
They would be walking right into the middle of a hornet’s nest on this one … except that these hornets carried automatic rifles and bloody well knew how to use them. Loughlin smiled in the shadows, shrugging off a sense of apprehension. He was the powder man, and he would do his job on cue. What happened after that was out of his hands.
Chapter Sixteen
Captain Ngu crushed his cigarette beneath a boot heel, frowning as he watched the final members of the small patrol disappear through the bamboo gates. When the gates were closed and secured behind them, he turned away, moving back inside the command hut and closing the door behind him.
His patrol would find the enemy, be they Americans or natives. They were under orders to take the enemy alive, if at all possible, and to kill only in the last extremity. In practice, of course, this meant he would be fortunate to receive perhaps only one out of four intruders alive—but that should be more than ample for his purposes.
He needed to be certain that the threat had been contained. He needed someone from the intruder force, alive and talking—long enough, at any rate, to make sure that there were no more like themselves lurking in the jungle around the compound, waiting for a time to strike.
Ngu was getting paranoid. He had begun to see an enemy in every shadow, to detect the sound of hostile movement in every rustling movement of the forest. If they did not resolve the situation soon …
But it would be resolved, he told himself.
Today.
The patrol would find their man or men and bring back prisoners—or corpses. Either way, the threat would be eliminated, and life could return to normal in the compound.
With a twist.
Captain Ngu was getting out.
If his ploy succeeded, if there were more Americans or their lackeys prowling in the jungle just outside his defenses … and if he brought them in as evidence of an illegal bor
der crossing …
He smiled, then lit another cigarette, and immediately stubbed it out, aware that his nervousness had begun to manifest itself in chain-smoking. It was a sign of weakness, incompatible with Ngu’s image as a man of strength.
The image was important, yes. In fact, it was vital. The military brass would have no choice but to reward him for so great a coup, so marvelous an opportunity to embarrass the Americans.
He would be moving up. If he could pull it off.
The commandant had sent the American intruder out to work that morning with the others, certain that he would have the other members of the man’s patrol in custody before he returned from the mines.
There was an outside chance, of course, that the prisoner’s support troops would be foolhardy enough to try to break in daylight, thinking he was still safe inside the camp. In the unlikely event that they made such a move, Ngu wanted to ensure their disappointment—and their capture, by seeing that there were no extra inmates in the way.
Anyone breaking into his camp today or tonight would be annihilated like the sneaking scum they were. He would see to it personally.
There had been only one successful escape in his tenure as commander of the compound. The American named Ramsay. And Ngu had managed to conceal that one from his superiors, reporting Ramsay dead of snakebite, buried in the jungle in accordance with standing orders from headquarters in Ho Chi Minh City.
They had fallen for it, and his ass was covered. So far. But there would be no way he could cover another escape, or string of escapes.
The thought was not to be tolerated. He would not permit Americans to run roughshod over everything he had been trying to do at the camp. The salvation of his military career was at stake, and he did not plan to sacrifice his own future for the lives of a few worthless round-eyes.
If the patrol came back empty-handed, if it found nothing in the jungle, he would interrogate the American intruder again tonight. All night, if necessary. He would wring the truth out of that bastard if it killed him … and, he realized with a devilish smile, it would undoubtedly do exactly that.
Cambodian Hellhole: M. I. A. Hunter, Book 2 Page 10
