Return to Tomorrow

by Marisa Carroll

  “What are you doing back here so soon?” The speaker, a tall man, outlined by the bright January sunlight shining through the arched window, didn’t bother to turn around at Billy’s approach. He continued to stare out at the thatch-roofed dining area with its view of high rises and gilded temple roofs beyond the low, flower-bordered wall. Billy walked up beside him and observed his friend from behind the tinted lenses of his sunglasses. They were both tall men, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, in their early-to mid-forties. Americans. One white, one black, so in tune with each other’s thoughts and habits that their speech sometimes resembled a kind of verbal shorthand.

  “Take it easy, Tiger. I’ve got everything under control.” A former combat infantryman, Billy Todd had spent his last tour of duty with a secret search-and-destroy team in Laos. Tiger Jackson had been his commanding officer, only a captain then, but tough and disciplined, an ex-air force Raven who had logged too many hours in the air war. Billy pushed his hands into the back pockets of his worn and faded jeans and rocked back on the heels of his crocodile-skin cowboy boots.

  “Who’s watching the hotel?” Brett “Tiger” Jackson turned his head to meet his oldest friend and business partner’s gaze.

  “Lonnie’s there.”

  “Lonnie? He’s so strung out he can’t even watch over himself.” Thick, blond eyebrows met in a frown above eyes the same dark blue as a midnight sky.

  Billy shook his head but his expression was grave. “He’s tight. Someone scored for him last night. He’ll be okay until tomorrow.”

  “Dammit, Billy, I thought you were going to keep your eye on him. I don’t want him buying hits off the street. The stuff out there these days is too unstable. There’re too many amateurs and get-rich-quick thugs getting into the game. You swore you could keep him in line until I could arrange another buy.”

  “I did my best, man. He’s a big boy now.”

  “Yeah.” Brett’s tone was ironic. “He’s a big boy, all right.” He patted the pocket of his shirt, looking for the cigarettes he’d given up two years ago. Lonnie Smalley had been his company corpsman his last tour in Nam. A fresh-faced Ohio farm boy, with a smile a mile wide and everything in the world to go home for. Only he never had gone home. He’d become a casualty of war, as much as the young boys he’d tried to save and couldn’t. The burden of that failure had driven him to try to forget in the euphoria of first morphine, then heroin. He’d cut himself off from family and friends, never leaving Southeast Asia, living on the fringes, on the shady side of the law to support his habit. One day, a few years after the war ended, he’d appeared on Brett’s doorstep, a burned-out shell of a man, and he’d found a home. What had happened to Lonnie in Vietnam may not have been ex-lieutenant colonel Brett Jackson’s fault, but from that day on Brett considered his former corpsman his personal responsibility.

  “I tried. Sorry it happened, Tiger.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, man. He’s been slipping away from us more and more often lately. He’s just too damn good at disappearing these days.”

  The two men stood in silence for a long moment, each lost in his own thoughts. The war was long ago, if not so far away, but some days it seemed much closer than others.

  “I found out when the lady’s leaving for Father Dolph’s camp,” Billy said quietly, the soft drawl of his native Georgia still evident in his voice, even though he hadn’t set foot in the States in more years than he cared to remember.

  “When?” Brett’s voice was clipped. They spoke in English but in an undertone. Even here in the Lemongrass it wasn’t safe to assume the walls didn’t have ears. Caution was second nature to them now. Caution learned in the jungles of Laos and Vietnam in their youths and honed to a sixth sense by the life they’d led for nearly twenty years.

  “Day after tomorrow.”

  “Be ready.”

  “I always am, Colonel.” Billy gave his friend a side-long glance. Brett paid no attention to the use of his old military title.

  “Who is this woman I’m keepin’ track of, anyway?” Billy asked.

  Brett grinned and relaxed a little. “She’s Micah McKendrick’s sister, the one we should have helped get back to the States two years ago. I don’t want anything to go wrong this time.”

  “It won’t.” Billy chuckled. “Everything’s going great.”

  Brett wasn’t so sure of that. The last thing he needed in his life now was another complication, another responsibility. Sometimes he just wanted to dump it all, turn his back and head for the beach. He was forty-four years old. He deserved a little peace and quiet. This deal was definitely beginning to get to him.

  Until an hour ago he’d have said nothing or no one could have diverted him from the business at hand. Now he wasn’t so certain. That was before the woman at table sixteen had shown up at the Lemongrass.

  Sad, beautiful, no longer young, her face held all the character of her years, and something more. Something that reached out to him at a level below conscious thought, a part of him that was primitive and male, the hunter, the provider. Bangkok was a city of beautiful and desirable women. Brett Jackson had known many of them, he’d even loved one or two, but few of them had intrigued him so from the moment of first encounter. It wasn’t the way he operated; spontaneity was grounds for early and permanent retirement in his line of work. One-night stands were damned near as dangerous. Anyway, this lady had class. He’d bet a bundle one-night stands weren’t her style, any more than they were his.

  “Did you get a good look at her?” Brett asked, his own dark blue gaze still fixed on the woman at table sixteen. He was talking about Rachel Phillips but his attention was focused on the flesh and blood woman before him. Definitely not just another bored socialite on the make. Her clothes were too ordinary, although the red silk blouse and white full skirt fit her slender frame admirably. Her silver-threaded black hair was styled too simply and her makeup—she wasn’t wearing any—was a dead giveaway in his book.

  “I got a real good look at Mrs. Phillips.” Just a hint of wry amusement in Billy’s tone alerted Brett that something was up. He turned to face his old comrade-at-arms.

  “What’s up, man? You’re too damn laid-back about this whole business.” It wasn’t like Billy to have gone off and left Lonnie alone to watch for Rachel Phillips—especially someplace as busy as the Royal Orchid Sheraton, where it would be very easy, indeed, for a lone woman to slip past him.

  “I already sent Ponchoo back to pick up Lonnie,” Billy said, reading his mind. “We’ll have him tucked away in his own hooch by two.”

  “And what about Mrs. Phillips?” Brett didn’t try to soften the low growl of impatience in his words.

  “She’s right where I can keep an eye on her.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  Billy nodded toward the terrace. “That’s her. The black-haired woman in the red blouse. That’s Rachel Phillips. She’s a damn fine-lookin’ white woman.”

  “Damn fine.” Brett gave a snort of mirthless laughter as he shoved his hand through his thick blond hair, amused that his quarry had found her own way into his lair. “Who’s the gigolo she’s with?”

  “Some turkey from the U.S. embassy. One D. Harrison Bartley, by name. One of Alf Singleton’s flunkies. He’s harmless.”

  “That’s her escort? He’s going to be responsible for her safety up in the hills?” It also explained why she’d turned up at the restaurant. It was a favorite of the embassy crowd.

  “That’s the drill.” Billy looked a little uncertain, himself, as he sized up Harrison Bartley with shrewd brown eyes and found him wanting. “There shouldn’t be any problems. The border’s quiet, no shelling for over a week, and they won’t get that far north, anyway. Khen Sa’s been stayin’ close to home. Her Thai’s pretty good, by the way, at least according to what Buon just told me. She shouldn’t have too much trouble with the up-country dialect.”

  Brett cut short his recitation. “I don’t care how you do it,” he said gru
ffly. “Just make sure you don’t let her out of your sight.” He’d given Micah McKendrick his word that he’d see his sister arrived at her destination safely and was handed over to Father Dolph without any untoward incident. It was the least he could do for his old friend. Especially since he hadn’t been able to help him two years before. He didn’t intend for anything to go wrong this time around.

  THEY LEFT THE CROWDED business district of Chiang Mai with its busy shops and noisy street vendors behind, early on the second day of their journey. Bartley’s Land Rover climbed out of the valley at the foot of Mount Doi Sutep, heading north into the hills. Below them the gilded spires of the city’s two hundred temples reflected the fire of the morning sun.

  Tucked away in a cardboard cylinder in the back seat with Rachel’s other things was one of the brightly colored, beautifully painted paper parasols for which Chiang Mai was famous. It was a small token of welcome to northern Thailand, Bart had said with his charming smile. Rachel had accepted it readily in the spirit of goodwill in which it was given. But that had been five hours ago and her store of goodwill was very nearly used up.

  After stopping for lunch at a roadside park, they left the highway somewhere south of Chiang Rai, the last town of any size they were to pass through on their way to the border camp. The paved road ended an hour later, soon after they’d started climbing steeply into the mountainous jungle, heading toward an ancient wat, a Buddhist temple, that Bart insisted probably dated from the thirteenth century and was well worth the extra time it would take to find it. The sun had long since passed its zenith, the short January day was drawing to a close, and they were lost. At least in Rachel’s opinion. Harrison Bartley, so far, hadn’t admitted he no longer had any idea where they were.

  Above them the jungle canopy met across the narrow road, a green, mysterious archway, shutting out the sun, confusing the senses. Closer to the ground, pressing almost to the sides of the Land Rover, the understory of the forest made a living barrier, a claustrophobic tunnel-like path, the stuff of nightmares. Rachel’s nightmares. For years she’d wandered such a dream path, looking for a way home, trying to find her brothers and her parents, searching for the baby she’d lost….

  “How much farther is it to the temple?” she asked in what she hoped was a perfectly ordinary voice. She looked down at her hands clenched into fists on her thighs and made herself relax, stretching her fingers. She’d been planning this trip for nearly a year. A few more hours, one way or another, would make no difference. Taking a deep, steadying breath, she tried not to look at the living wall of bamboo and vines, orchids and nettles that made up much of the nearby growth.

  “We should be there within the next few minutes.” Bart wasn’t very good at hiding his emotions. His voice was edgy with uncertainty. Rachel picked up on it immediately.

  “Do you have any idea at all where we are?” She half turned on the seat to face him, realizing all at once just how young and very inexperienced he probably was. He didn’t look directly at her but kept his eyes on the trail—it could hardly be termed a road any longer.

  “Not since we made that last turn after crossing the river,” he admitted. “I haven’t recognized anything from the map for the last half hour.”

  “You have a map?”

  “Of sorts.” He shrugged. “A friend from the embassy gave it to me, but there is no telling how accurate it is.”

  Rachel felt her hands curl back into fists. Her nails bit into her flesh and the small pain made her angry. Anger, she’d learned long ago, was much easier to deal with than fear. Fear made you weak and prey to defeat. Anger made you strong, gave you the strength to keep on fighting. It was much better to be angry than afraid. And she was afraid, afraid of being lost once again in the uncharted jungles of Southeast Asia, the alien, hostile land where she’d spent nearly a third of her life against her will.

  “Turn around,” she said, and heard the harsh rasp of panic in her voice.

  Bart took his eyes off the road long enough to shoot her a questioning look. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, but more quietly, with more control. “Just turn around.”

  “I’m sure we’re going in the right direction.” To Rachel’s way of thinking, he didn’t sound certain at all.

  “I still think we should turn back. If we don’t waste any time we can make Chiang Rai by dark.”

  “Chiang Rai?” Bart sounded annoyed. “We don’t want to backtrack all the way to Chiang Rai. We should be twelve, fifteen kilometers east of there by now. According to the map, this road eventually leads back to the main route.”

  “But you can’t be sure of that. I don’t want to spend the night in this truck. Please turn around.”

  “I can’t,” Bart pointed out. “The road’s too narrow. Look, the next clearing we come to we’ll check our direction with the sun.”

  “You mean you don’t have a compass?” Rachel didn’t try to keep the disbelief out of her voice.

  “Sorry, they’re hardly standard issue at the embassy.”

  “I have one in my duffel.” It was beginning to look like a good thing she’d also packed some bottled water and dried fruit. They’d probably need it before they found their way out of the jungle. “Stop and I’ll get it out.”

  “No need.” Bart pointed ahead of them a few dozen yards. “We’re coming to a clearing.” The “clearing” was merely an elongated opening in the seemingly endless stretch of jungle. A narrow stream ran through it. The trail crossed it on a bridge of half-sunken, flattopped teak logs. The sun was disappearing behind the topmost branches of the trees. When Rachel saw it, the fear inside her grew stronger than ever. The sun was almost directly in front of them, not behind them and to their left, as it should have been if they were still traveling in a northeasterly direction.

  “We’re going the wrong way.” Panic beat inside her with dark, strong wings. How often had she heard herself say that to Father Pieter during the long weeks they’d struggled through just such undergrowth in their flight from their Vietnamese captors?

  Harrison Bartley stuck his head out of the window of the Land Rover and squinted up at the fast-dropping winter sun. “Damn, I think you’re right.”

  “Turn around,” Rachel said. “Now.”

  To his credit, Bart didn’t argue. He drove a short way onto the primitive bridge and began to back around onto the low bank of flat stones and red mud bordering the stream. The roadway was so narrow he simply couldn’t make the turn any other way. Rachel sat stiffly on the leather seat. She could smell the living jungle in the moist, hot breeze stirring the leaves along the stream edge. It was an earthy, damp smell, composed as much of the dead and dying as of the new and emerging. It was at once familiar and strange, exciting and terrifying.

  They had almost completed the turn when the back wheel of the Land Rover slipped off a stone and sank into the mud. Bart gunned the motor. It stalled and they sank deeper. With an oath Bart ground the starter. The engine caught, held, then sputtered into silence.

  “Flooded,” he said, making the word a curse.

  All the sounds of the jungle the motor had drowned out rushed in to fill the silence. Birds chattered and squawked. Somewhere not too far away something small and frightened squealed in terror. Tigers still roamed these mountain jungles, as did panthers and wild boars. Rachel had not forgotten that fact. Death—and ruthless men who could make life worse than death—stalked the pathways beyond the trail.

  She was going to be stranded here for the night with a man she hardly knew. Alone with him in the cramped confines of the Land Rover. That scared her almost as badly as the lengthening shadows creeping closer and closer, even as she willed them away. She had been alone with no man except her father and brothers since Father Pieter had passed away.

  Bart got out of the truck and walked around to the back, the thick mud of the stream bank sucking at his shoes. Rachel heard him muttering under his breath. He slammed his fist against the back window. An
y last hope she had of getting out of their predicament in a hurry died away.

  “Is there any way we can drive it out?” she asked, defying her own personal demons in leaving the cocooning safety of the Rover’s cab. “Is there a come-along in the toolbox, an ordinary rope, anything like that?”

  “Nothing heavy enough to get us free. She’s in up to the axle,” Bart reported in a clipped tone. He scrambled up the bank, trying to shake the red clinging mud from his shoes, scowling down at the streaks of dirt on the leg of his fashionable khaki slacks. “There’s no way in the world we’re going to get it out of here without help. I’d be grateful for any suggestions you have on the best way to accomplish that.”

  Rachel wanted to cry. Instead, she racked her brain for some means of getting them rescued, even if it meant walking out of the jungle on her own. One fact she did face with characteristic forthrightness: she was going to be spending the night in the jungle with Harrison Bartley whether she wanted to or not.

  “Listen,” Bart said, tilting his head. Rachel heard it, too. The sound of an engine, moving closer from the direction in which they’d just come. “Someone’s coming. We couldn’t ask for better timing. With any luck we’ll get a tow out of this swamp.”

  “With any luck,” Rachel said grimly, then added, “Do you have a gun?”

  “TIGER’S GOING TO HAVE US strung up by the thumbs if we don’t catch up with Rachel Phillips and her Ivy League embassy flunky pretty quick.”

  “I don’t know how the hell they got off the main road without us seeing them,” Lonnie said. He’d been dozing off and on for the past hour and didn’t even know it.

  “We must be slippin’, buddy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “They can’t be too far ahead now. I just wonder how they found the road leading to the wat in the first place.” He didn’t know if it was by luck or design, but he was damned sure going to find out.