“I’m sure it’s occurred to many of them, sir,” Chant said dryly.
“No it hasn’t, Sinclair. Those who aren’t too stupid to realize it are Communists themselves.”
“An intriguing opinion, sir.”
Maheu turned from the desk to face Chant, studying him intently. “Would you consider obeying an illegal order, Sinclair?”
“Yes.”
Maheu’s hooded eyes registered surprise. “Under what circumstances?”
“If my action served a good purpose.”
“You mean the end sometimes justifies the means?”
“That’s a way of framing it. The Company’s advisory and combat role in Laos is illegal; I participate because I want to help the Hmong.”
“You arrogant son of a bitch, you’d disobey a legal command if you thought your action served a wrong purpose, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” Chant replied simply.
“Jesus Christ, do your army superiors know the way you think?”
“I don’t know, sir Nobody else has ever asked me those questions, and I’ve never been in a situation where I had to make a choice they wouldn’t like.”
“All right, Sinclair,” Maheu said with a curt nod. “That’s all.”
“Sir?”
Maheu raised his eyebrows, motioned toward the door “That’s all. Get lost Go back and play with your Hmong.”
Chant rose to his feet “Sir, may I ask the purpose of this interview?”
“No. It’s a real shame and waste, you know. Somebody, somewhere, thinks you’re a real hotshot who could make all the difference—”
“All the difference to what, sir?”
“Never mind. They insisted I talk to you, so I talked to you. I didn’t find out anything I didn’t already know, and the final decision is mine. You don’t have your head on straight. Wherever you are, and whatever you’re doing, you’ll always be a loose cannon.”
“You never wanted to even approach me, did you, sir?”
“Don’t try to interrogate me, Sinclair. The fact that you are a loose cannon who can’t be trusted to act in the best interests of your country makes you a traitor, at least in my eyes.”
“Sir, there’s something wrong. It’s obvious that some kind of very big and covert operation is being planned, and that you’re vetting selected personnel to carry it off. Now, you neither like nor trust me, and you certainly didn’t want to even contact me. You were forced to, even though you knew from the beginning that you couldn’t use me.”
“Sinclair,” Maheu said in a soft, flat voice, “if I were you, I’d close my mouth right now and forget all the things you just said. You’re putting yourself in a very bad situation.”
“I’m already in a very bad situation. It’s important that you tell me what special assignment I would have been offered if I’d given you the right answers. If I’m right, you and the people at Langley are being manipulated by an extremely clever and unbelievably powerful man who is my personal enemy. He could destroy us all, unless I know what he’s up to so that I can plan countermoves.”
“Good-bye, Sinclair. I hope you get yourself killed.”
SIX
“Here,” Chant whispered in Hmong into the darkness.
Both barrels of a shotgun went off, the twin explosions appearing like great bloodshot eyes in the night, but Chant was already twenty feet away from the spot where the slugs tore through the air and demolished a shelf of canned goods.
“Still here.”
With his heightened senses, Chant heard, as if on a soundtrack being played at half speed, the two shuriken whistling through the air—one aimed at his head, the other at his chest. He spun away, and the star-shaped blades buried themselves with a thunk-thunk in the wall behind him.
The moonlight falling in through the windows of the store provided Chant with sufficient illumination to see, and he left his infrared goggles draped around his neck as he dashed across the store, one step ahead of the Hmong.
“For four years you’ve lived in darkness,” Chant said as he slapped the man’s hand away from the light switch. “Can’t you fight in it?”
Then Chant hit the man in the chest with the heel of his hand so hard that the man flew back across the room, flipped over a counter, and landed hard against a shelf filled with muslin sacks of cheap rice.
Instantly the Hmong was up. He vaulted back over the counter, landed like a cat on the balls of his feet, and lithely bounced into a pool of moonlight. He was starting to reach behind his back for something in his belt when Chant turned on the lights.
“You!” the muscular Hmong gasped as he stared at the black-clad man with the iron-colored eyes and hair standing across the room from him.
“You know me?”
The Hmong pressed his lips tightly together and nodded. “The war. We called you ‘Chant’.”
“I don’t remember you. Why have you been doing what you’ve been doing?”
“No choice,” the man said in a barely audible whisper.
“There are always choices. You made a bad one. Yield or die.”
“You killed the sheriff.” It was not a question.
“Yes.”
Now the Hmong drew his hand from behind his back—and suddenly the air was filled with the deadly, whirring whisper of nunchaku.
The man was good with the sticks and chain, Chant thought, skilled and patient. The man obviously respected Chant’s resources, for there was no sudden rush. Still, the Hmong seemed relaxed and confident as he shuffled forward, whipping the nunchaku in a series of standard kata, using both hands, as he waited for the one, best moment when he could strike a blow that would erase Chant’s face or split his head open like a melon.
Chant slowly backed away, letting his eyes go slightly out of focus as he stared through the blurred spin of the nunchaku at his opponent’s chest. He ducked under a cross-body sweep, spun away from an overhead strike. He feinted a high, roundhouse kick to the head, and leaped instead over a sweeping blow that would have splintered his kneecap.
Chant bounced on the balls of his feet, clapping his hands together once, sharply, as if urging the Hmong on to greater effort.
Sweat had begun to glisten on the Hmong’s face, and his moves became more tentative, less confident. Still, the spin of the nunchaku remained a deadly blur; the man showed no signs of tiring.
Other Hmong, awakened by the explosion of the shotgun, were beginning to gather on the sidewalk outside the hated Baldauf Grocery Mart. Bundled in coats and scarves over nightclothes, shivering in bitter night cold, they nevertheless stood transfixed in the moonlight, staring in awe at the duel of death being waged on the other side of the garishly painted plate glass.
Now the Hmong began to press; reaching out more to widen the radius of his swing, he attempted to back Chant into a corner. Chant ducked under a blow, wheeled away; when he came out of the spin he was holding a black silk scarf in his right hand.
The Hmong hesitated for a moment, temporarily losing the rhythm of his kata as he watched Chant wet one corner of the scarf with his mouth, then twirl the scarf into a kind of rope. The Hmong frowned, built up the momentum of his kata, then lunged forward with a blow intended to shatter Chant’s left collarbone.
Pop!
The Hmong screamed in pain and surprise, quickly backing away. Blood welled in his left eye and dribbled down his cheek. There had been no warning; he had not seen the black-clad man prepare for the move, had never seen the flick of the wrist that had whipped the length of silk through the air, snapped it, and lacerated his eyeball.
Reflexively, the man stopped his and reached with his free hand to cup his damaged eye. In that moment he was vulnerable—yet the man with the iron-colored eyes and hair simply stood still, hands at his sides, waiting, a thin smile on his face.
It was now that the Hmong felt the first stirrings of terror in his heart, belly, and groin. This man Chant, the soldier who had been able to appear as no more than a shadow in the jung
le, could see in the dark. Armed with nunchaku, he had just been half-blinded by a man wielding only a scarf. And now, when that man could have dealt a killing blow, he chose to wait, as if, scarf against hardwood and steel, he were merely … practicing.
The knowledge that he had lost his left eye and was likely to lose his life lent the Hmong new reserves of energy born of desperation. He could feel the eyes of his victims out in the night, watching.…
Ignoring the pain in his eye, the Hmong whirled his nunchaku, then rushed forward. Swinging the sticks in a crisscross kata in front of his body, the Hmong struck twice at the space where the black-clad man had been standing. Then, suddenly, he found the sticks and chain tangled in the silk scarf, yanked out of his hand. Fingers as hard as steel jabbed deep into his solar plexus, and a forearm that felt as solid as the mahogany of his nunchaku struck him across the mouth, shattering his jaw and sending his teeth flying out of his head.
“Yield or die,” Chant said.
“Yield,” the Hmong mumbled through his broken mouth.
Chant picked up the nunchaku, whipped the sticks once over his head, then casually released them, letting them fly through the air. The huge plate glass window at the front of the store shattered in an explosion of glass shards and splinters that fell to the sidewalk like shimmering ice crystals. Cold air blew into the room, ruffling Chant’s hair.
“Did you fight the Pathet Lao?” Chant asked.
The Hmong nodded.
“There was honor in what you did during the war,” Chant said quietly as the Hmong slowly got to his feet. “There is no honor in what you’ve done here. Once, you fought the enemy of your people; now, you aid the enemy. You are the enemy.”
The Hmong staggered backward, came up hard against a table displaying tools. “What will you do?”
Chant nodded in the direction of the faces staring in at them from outside in the darkness. “They’re the ones you’ve broken and killed. We’ll let them decide what to do with you.”
Fear moved in the Hmong’s eyes. He turned his back on Chant. When he turned around again, he held two gleaming hatchets he had taken from the table. Raising the hatchets over his head, he shrieked and charged at Chant.
“Fox!”
Chant looked up from the desk at Baldauf, who was standing in the open doorway. Nervous sweat glistened on the man’s unshaven face, and it appeared as if he’d put his robe on backwards. “Good morning, Baldauf. What is it?”
“Sinclair blew up my fucking store over at the complex!”
Chant rose, then went to the window and drew back the curtain. The first rays of dawn slanted into the room. He stared out into the morning for a few moments, stroking his mustache, then turned back to Baldauf. “About two hours ago, right?”
The fat man frowned. “I don’t know; I just heard about it. A patrol car drove down there, and the deputy called in when he saw the rubble. Rubble, where my store used to be! Jesus Christ, my store gets blown up and nobody bothers to tell me!”
“The Hmong complex is isolated—you planned it that way. There are only a few Hmong who speak English, and it shouldn’t surprise you that they didn’t call. When they’re questioned, I’m betting that not one of them will have seen or heard a thing.”
“Damn it!” Baldauf shouted, slamming his fist into the door. “I had one of my best men standing guard in that store!”
“Oh, did you? One man? Obviously, you didn’t take seriously what I told you about Sinclair’s abilities. I warned you that the store could be a target, and I told you to guard it well. Your man’s dead. You’ll probably find him hanging from the same tree as your son.”
“How the hell do you know what time the explosion went off?”
“I think I may have heard it. I’m not sure.”
“How come I didn’t hear it?”
“You were probably asleep. I told you I keep odd hours, because Sinclair doesn’t exactly work nine to five. In any case, what’s more important to me than your store is the fact that he’s armed with dynamite. That doesn’t bode well. If he’d wanted to, he could have blown up this house.”
Baldauf’s eyes glittered with rage and fear, and he used both hands to wipe the sweat from his face. “When I get that bastard … What now, Fox?”
Chant shook his head. “There’s nothing we can do right now; he’s gone. It’s not too late to call in—”
“No! No outsiders, Fox. You’d need a hundred snipers to cover every possible target in the county, and that many men might be just a bit conspicuous—not only to Sinclair, but to anyone else who might get curious and want to stick their nose in my business.”
Chant shrugged. “I was about to say that we could use an explosives expert to determine where that dynamite came from, but I think I already know. Sinclair travels light, and he likes to use whatever resources he finds in his victim’s territory. Do you use dynamite?”
Baldauf nodded absently. His eyes were still very bright. “In the logging operation.”
Chant grunted, limped back to the desk. “Now we know where he got the dynamite. Come here, Baldauf.”
Wilbur Baldauf, slightly dazed, walked to the desk and stared down at the black circles Chant had drawn on a map of Mordan County.
“For us, time is definitely a luxury,” Chant said, “so I’ve been up all night trying to figure out Sinclair’s most likely targets, going over the maps and the lists you gave me. I already warned you about the store; it’s a very small cog in the Baldauf empire, but it had considerable symbolic value to the Hmong. They hated it, and now it’s gone. How many men can you count on?”
“As many as we need,” Baldauf growled. Color was returning to his face.
“Give me a number.”
“A hundred.”
“From where?”
“You let me worry about that, Fox.”
“Sorry, but you may recall that I have an interest in this, too. Numbers are good when it comes to covering territory, but are almost irrelevant to the problem of trapping Sinclair—which is precisely what we have to do How good are your men?”
“My Hmong are the best.”
“One of whom is missing and may, I assure you, be presumed dead. What about the rest of your forces?”
“There are the county and local police forces. The rest are employees who’ll—”
“Jesus Christ,” Chant said with disgust. “Sometimes two or three good men are better than a hundred not-so-good men. We don’t want them shooting each other.” Chant shook his head, putting his hand on the map. “I’ve picked out the nine operations that are most valuable to you; you tell me which one is most vulnerable to sabotage.”
“The paper mill,” Baldauf replied absently.
“Fox!”
Chant glanced up from the topological map of the Baldaufs’ timberland acreage. Forty-five minutes had passed since his last talk with Wilbur Baldauf, who was now dressed in a navy blue business suit. The color of his face almost matched that of his white shirt.
“What is it, Baldauf?”
“The Hmong who was guarding my store … My brother found the bloody corpse in the front seat of his car this morning. It had a … a …”
Suddenly Baldauf turned green. He hiccupped, put a hand to his mouth, and dashed past Chant into the bathroom in the adjoining bedroom. Chant followed, watched as Baldauf retched into the toilet bowl. Finally Baldauf flushed the toilet, walked unsteadily to the sink and began to wash his face.
“The corpse had a hatchet buried in its skull,” Baldauf said, his voice partially muffled by a thick towel.
Chant winced. “Gruesome.”
Baldauf dropped the towel on the floor, turned, and stared at Chant for some time. “Is that all you have to say?” he finally asked.
“What do you expect me to say? I told you Sinclair was a bloodthirsty son of a bitch, and I told you the Hmong was dead. I just didn’t know the bloodthirsty son of a bitch would put the dead Hmong in your brother’s car.”
“You’r
e a cold fish, mister. My brother damn near had a heart attack. Can you imagine the shock that went through my brother when he opened the car door and found that?”
“Not as big a shock, I presume, as the Hmong who got the hatchet stuck in his skull.”
“My brother has a wife and three children, Fox. What if one of them had gone to the car first?”
“Sinclair may have been thinking of all the Hmong women and children the Baldaufs have used as whores, or dragged up and used as subjects for pornographic films and magazines,” Chant replied evenly.
Baldauf wiped his mouth, flushed, then turned away. “My brother didn’t have anything to do with that end of the operation.”
“Whatever,” Chant said casually. “The point is that Sinclair may hold all the Baldaufs responsible. I warned you that might happen.”
“Whose fucking side are you on?!”
“Certainly not yours. I told you that the U.S. Army has its own reasons for wanting to see John Sinclair dead. That doesn’t mean we have to approve of what you people have been doing. I thought I’d made that clear. You get my help, because we want Sinclair dead; you get my silence, because we don’t want publicity any more than you do. You don’t get my approval; I think you’re disgusting.”
“I may kill you yet, Fox,” Baldauf said in a strained whisper.
“And I told you what would happen if you did. If Sinclair doesn’t get you, my people will.”
Baldauf was silent for some time, staring absently at the vomit-stained towel on the floor. “He left an extortion note,” the fat man said at last.
“Ah! Now we have something useful to talk about. What does he want?”
“The fucking world,” Baldauf answered in a distant, haunted voice.
“Come on, Baldauf. What does he want?”
Baldauf hawked, spat into the toilet, and flushed it. “He wants Baldauf Industries—all of Baldauf Industries—given to the fucking gooks. He’ll be generous enough to allow each Baldauf family to keep two hundred thousand dollars in cash and whatever we can get from the sale of our personal property before we move out of the state. That was the first page of the note; there were two more pages describing, in detail, how this transfer was to take place.”
Chant Page 5
