"Have you remarried?" asked Stone.
It was not an idle question. Mark had learned early in his M.I.A. work that to understand the emotional backgrounds of the people with whom he became involved on these missions was often the most valuable element.
"I never fell in love . . . after Alex," said Mrs. Bradford. "I don't know why. No, I never remarried. I guess it's because I've always hoped and prayed deep in my heart that Alex was alive somewhere. That he'd be found . . . and brought home to me."
"What have you learned that makes you think your husband is alive?"
"This civilian M.I.A. organization I mentioned got in touch with me," she said. "They have ways of intercepting some government agency field reports regarding reported sightings of American P.O.W.'s in Indochina." With an expression of real pain and uncertainty, Nora Bradford halfway turned to face the man who sat beside her. "I don't understand, Mr. Stone. How can our government be aware of these sightings—there've been so many!—and not take some kind of action on the matter?"
"We're afraid to wield the power we hold," growled Mark. "This country hasn't lost its guts; we've just been turning the other cheek."
"Sylvia Shumway told me that you . . . help people with loved ones in those P.O.W. camps."
"You haven't told me why you think Alex is still alive," he reminded her.
"I've received word through the M.I.A. organization that a group of anti-Communist Free Lao guerrillas encountered an American P.O.W. in the Xieng Khouang province of Laos. The circumstances aren't clear. The report was very sketchy. The American had escaped from a P.O.W. camp in the mountains. He apparently encountered the guerrillas just as troops from the camp, Viet soldiers, caught up with him.
"Most of the guerrillas were killed in an exchange with the troops. Only one of the Free Lao fighters escaped. It was another ten days or so before he could pass on the account to a C.I.A. contact in Vientiane. The guerrilla only knew the American's last name—Bradford.
"That is good enough for me, Mr. Stone. I'm willing to bet that my husband is alive. I want to do everything in my power to see that Alex is brought home before his suffering grows even worse."
Mark could appreciate that, perhaps more than Nora Bradford would ever know. Mark's last stop in Vietnam before the end of the war had been a North Viet P.O.W. camp, where he had been imprisoned in a living nightmare that would haunt him forever.
Stone's captivity had been listed on "official records" by Hanoi, and he was released after the signing of treaties in a widely publicized media event orchestrated to show the humanitarianism of the North Vietnamese.
When Stone got back to the States, he was offered a commission. But he turned it down. He was disillusioned with an army and a government that would not commit action to rescuing those of his comrades who had fought for that army and government; yet were still being held prisoner in Southeast Asia long after an unpopular war that no one wanted to remember.
Mark made no profit whatever from his M.I.A. hunting operations. His fees covered only expenses and personnel. Stone's motivation arose from his intimate knowledge of what it was like to starve in a bamboo cage in 105-degree heat, to be tortured by a barbaric camp commandant or sadistic guards.
Mark could not shake the nagging feeling of guilt that gnawed at his soul ever since he had been paraded in front of cameras as a freed P.O.W., knowing that other, unaccounted-for American prisoners were still being detained by the Viets.
"Your intel is good enough for me, too," he told Nora Bradford. "I took the liberty of tracing your name and verifying your story before we met."
"Then you know that I have money," she told him. "I can afford whatever expenses you incur."
"You'll be billed if and when I return with your husband, or proof of what happened to him," said Mark. "I've already sent for the men who will accompany me on this mission. We'll be flying out tomorrow."
When he began his career as an M.I.A. hunter, Stone had been realistic enough to know he could never tackle such work alone. He was already well connected in the international community of soldiers of fortune, and had at his disposal a roster of twenty-seven men with whom he'd served at one time or another in 'Nam—men he trusted, with whom he had maintained casual friendships right up until the present. Mark called this roster his Green List, a network of mercs handpicked to assure that no opportunistic, trigger-happy hotshots would accompany him into battle.
Stone's team were not men out to make .a quick buck, but men who shared his background and opinions, who knew exactly what they were doing in life and in combat, which are often the same thing. Stone's allies in these M.I.A. missions were assisting him in the rescue of P.0W.'s for their own personal reasons.
Mark only hired men who cared. Men like Terrance Loughlin and Hog Wiley, whom he had sent for a day ago, after having verified who Nora Bradford was and that in all likelihood he would accept the assignment she offered him.
He realized that Mrs. Bradford was studying him intently in the moonlight that filtered into the car. It was not a romantic appraisal, but more as if the lady were trying somehow to better understand this man, the likes of whom she had probably not encountered since beginning her recent odyssey through bureaucratic red tape and no-can-do.
"You're offering to go over to that godforsaken country and risk your life for a man you never met, and you're not worried about being paid for it. What makes you tick, Mr. Stone?"
"I don't really think about it." Stone was already getting out of her vehicle when he added, "I'll just try my best to bring your husband home, Mrs. Bradford."
Chapter Three
Stone spent much of the long flight trying to sleep, to store away energy for the rigors he knew were ahead for him and his men. After they landed in Bangkok, there was no telling when the next slowdown point would come.
Stone wanted to be rested for the total immersion in a foreign culture that would occur when he and his men stepped off their flight.
When time for sleep did come, it would be under tense, taut-nerved conditions where anything more than a one-eyed catnap could get you killed. The waking hours in the oppressive mugginess would dull the senses and, combined with lack of sleep, could also be fatal.
A man had to be in top physical shape, the way Stone and his men were, even to begin, much less survive, the strenuous path through hell that he knew lay ahead.
But deep sleep was elusive, and what he experienced was a fitful on-again-off-again half-sleep, deep enough only for dreams fueled by conscious memory.
There are few things a man can experience that will stick with him like the impressions of war gained first-hand. Stone considered his memories of his days as a P.O.W. to be the prime motivator of his life and M.I.A. work. Memories of that living nightmare tremored through his conscious thoughts at least once a day; they were seared into his soul.
On the flight to Bangkok, Stone dreamed. His dreams were of those days. . .
Mark had been with Special Forces in a fortified jungle hamlet. The hamlet had been low on the U.S. command's priority list, but all that changed in the closing days of the war. By the time Stone got there, it was too damn late, but he did his best, which in this case had proved to be not enough.
The night the dozens of N.V.A. regulars came blazing out of the jungle tree line was a night of massacre that Mark had been unable to avert. He blazed away with his M-16, joining the militiamen who stayed to fight.
Death was all around them that night. Stone saw the enemy stumble and fall beneath the steady hammering of his M-16, and he saw the Cong open fire on women and children in the village who tried to scurry to safety, as well as on the militiamen who were overrun by the first wave of the attack.
A concussion grenade blew Mark out from his cover behind some lumber and tossed him into unconsciousness amid the sounds of battle and the screams of the slaughtered fading into a chilled black hole of nothing...
When he came to, Stone knew immediately that they must have transported him
across the border into Cambodia. The terrain was forest instead of jungle.
He awoke to pain hammering between his temples and sweat stinging his eyes, glazing his vision, the buzzing of flies everywhere, and shrill, almost womanlike shrieks of pain from someone very close by.
Stone tried to move, and realized that he was chained to a coarse brick wall—chained with arms and legs outstretched, tugging uncomfortably.
The screams were those of a Vietnamese, also chained up, being interrogated and slowly castrated by men who paid no attention to Mark Stone.
Another squad of N.V.A. marched into the dank dungeon that smelled of feces and blood. They unshackled Stone and nudged him along with their AK-47s past the now unconscious man shackled to the wall, whose "interrogators" were attempting to revive the wretch so the "questioning" could continue.
The stench and the flies were worse outside. The prisoner-of-war camp was a loose circle of concrete blockhouses painted a muddy green to blend in with the foliage.
Stone saw a five-deep pile of dead, stripped human bodies stacked like cordwood behind the building he had just been taken from. The dead all looked Asian, most probably Vietnamese, and the victim who had been shackled alongside Mark would be stacked atop that pile as soon as he died. They were "interrogating" these poor devils to get a better stranglehold on South Vietnam's many anti-Communist factions.
A captured American was a different story.
Stone was led into a stuffy, bare, windowless office occupied by a desk and an N.V.A. officer, who did not stand but coolly observed as the four regulars herded Stone to a stop so that he faced the officer.
"I am Lieutenant Trang," the officer snapped in French-accented English. "What unit are you with, soldier?"
Stone gave his name, rank, and serial number.
"That will not do," Trang snapped. "You have seen what goes on here. Not pleasant, but necessary. And considerably more unpleasant for you than for us. We have a letter you will sign."
"Stuff your letter," Stone snarled, "where the sun don't shine. You won't kill me, Trang. You think you've got too many uses for me, but you won't get even one. You won't kill me either, because a captured American is always good to negotiate with."
"Perhaps we will not kill you," Trang conceded. "But I think we can make existence here unbearable enough for you that you will see things our way." Trang glanced at his soldiers. "Take him. I want the letter signed."
Stone's "interrogators" were human animals who specialized in torture. They used matches on him. They strung him up and beat him. One of them was expert in the use of metal bars and straps, skilled at twisting a man into all sorts of distorted positions to induce pain, knowing just how far to bend arms and legs without breaking limbs.
Stone did not sign the letter.
More prisoners continued to arrive during the time Mark was held there, more Vietnamese men and women, for "interrogation" in the Cambodian death camp that could have sprung from a Dante nightmare, except that nothing this hellish could be truly imagined without the real horror of having experienced it. Stone thought at one point that he could wish this on no man . . . except those who now held him prisoner along with the handful of other American P.O.W.'s.
These men Stone came to know. Wilcox. Mandrell. A few others were too near death to communicate through the bars of the cells in which they were imprisoned.
There was not enough room in a cell to stand with arms extended, not enough space to sleep stretched out. No toilet, no bed. Just the flies and the nerve-scraping screams from the building next door.
The hardest part in this hellhole, though, the four of them had agreed, even worse than the physical punishment, was the sense of being so completely cut off from civilization. The world these men came from could have been another planet; they were so isolated here in the Cambodian frontier. The isolation could warp the soul and twist the mind, and the ultimate fear—even worse than dying, because death was all around and you became numb even to that—the real fear was that you had been forgotten by the very ones you had fought for, that they wanted nothing to do with you, now that fate had tossed you a bum roll of the dice.
The fear of being forgotten, of being as adrift in this alien world as an astronaut cut adrift in deep space, was what drove one guy to the point of committing suicide by smashing his head repeatedly into the stone wall of his cell until he died.
Those prisoners strong enough to walk or talk, including Mark, were taken from their cells several times a month to be further "interrogated." Schweiker died of a heart attack when they went to work on him with the metal bars and straps one day. Newton, Stevens, and Stone were soon the only American P.O.W.'s left, and each of them had been pushed almost too many times to the edge of endurance. But the fight never left them. They were American servicemen sworn not to cooperate with their captors and to attempt every means of escape possible. The only trouble was no means of escape ever appeared. There were no exercise periods, nothing like that. There was life in the cell, and meals of cold rice and water, and the only time the Americans were taken from their cells was under heavy guard for further "questioning" by the sadistic Trang, who always made a point of being present when there was torture to be done.
The American P.O.W.'s did get their chance, though, thanks to Mark Stone.
It happened late one night when most of the camp was asleep.
Except for Lieutenant Trang.
Trang was awake—blind drunk but awake—and the sadistic streak in the bastard flared to the surface. The camp officer strutted into the stinking cell block right past the sentry. Trang stood outside the row of cells of Stevens, Newton, and Stone. Trang woke them from their fitful slumber, railed at them in his native tongue, spat at them, called them names they could not understand though the general idea came across clearly enough.
Then the taunting drunk made a mistake and came too close to Stone's cell, and suddenly, in a blinding moment of clarity, nothing mattered to Stone except stretching his hands out lightning-fast between the bars of his cell. His hands clasped around Trang's throat and he pulled and twisted brutally, sharply. The officer had time only to gurgle out a gasp of surprise. His eyes popped, then Stone snapped his neck and Trang's face turned purple and he stopped gasping, his tongue out of his mouth like a rotting sausage and his knees buckling. The dead officer collapsed sideways to lie an equal distance from each of the three cells.
The body of Trang was found in the morning, and then the real interrogation almost began—except for the word that spread like wildfire throughout the camp that same morning Trang's body was found.
The war was over.
As abruptly as that, it did not seem to matter anymore which of the three American prisoners had slain the officer.
Stone and his buddies were shipped out that same day to be used as human poker chips, with which the powers that be could negotiate compromise and concession.
The hell of that prison compound had never left Mark Stone's conscious or subconscious mind. The driving wheel, clearer, more painful than ever, priming Stone for action, aboard a present-day flight to Bangkok...
Chapter Four
"I don't believe this frigging rush hour."
Hog Wiley pushed the rental car along a Bangkok street that seemed to be awash in traffic, packed from curb to curb with every conceivable mode of transportation known to man. Cars like theirs were in the clear minority. Most of the traffic was made up, it seemed, of jostling pedestrians, motorcycles, and bicycles—some of them attached to carts and made to serve as rickshaws.
The crowded street was typical, and it was always rush hour in the capital city of Thailand. Five million people lived inside the city limits—ten percent of the little jungle nation's population crowded into one place, struggling for the right to make a living, seeking room to breathe.
The human stew of faces, Oriental faces with a sprinkling of Anglos, reminded Mark Stone of Saigon before the Fall; before it was rechristened Ho Chi Minh City. The sc
enes were similar, as every major city of the East was similar, but they were not identical. In Bangkok there was nothing of the military presence that had been so omnipresent in Saigon at war. The uniforms were there, all right, if you took time to look for them, but they did not intrude upon and dominate the scene.
The capital had become almost a Western outpost in a sea of creeping red. The agents of a dozen different governments convened here, sharp ears tuned and listening to eastward for the slightest hint of new intelligence from inside the hostile camp.. And as for the Communists, they had their agents handy too, prepared to pass out their disinformation on demand, to sabotage and even murder in pursuit of leaks that threatened their security.
Any agent who had ever done a tour in Berlin would recognize Bangkok without a second glance. The atmosphere of danger and intrigue, a heady incense of deceit and peril, hung above the city like a pall. It could reach out and suffocate the uninitiated, the unwary—or it could provide a seasoned warrior with the scent he needed to pursue his cause.
Hog knew the town well enough to locate the riverfront district without directions from Stone, and within twenty minutes they were cruising slowly on the long streets.
The three of them were on their way to keep a date with one An Khom, a dealer in the instruments of war. He was not listed in the telephone directories, or registered with any local chamber of commerce, but in his way the weapons specialist was every bit as famous in the Asian underworld as John D. Rockefeller had been in old New York. He was the top of the line, the best, and he could do the impossible—for a price.
Their meetings in the past had been infrequent, brief, but Stone had trusted old An Khom enough to place the order with him for the hardware they would need this time. If nothing else, he knew the old man could produce the needed weapons, and keep his mouth shut about it in the process.
M.I.A. Hunter Page 3
