Cambodian Hellhole (17 page)

A cigarette butt struck the surface of the water ten feet from his face, hissed briefly, and went out. Another moment, then the sentry turned, retreating toward the gate. But Loughlin did not release his pent-up breath from straining lungs until he heard the gate close again behind the man, the latch bar falling soundly into place.

It had been close. Too bloody close for comfort, certainly. But he had pulled it off.

Finished now, Loughlin began working his way back along the shore of the little island, to the point where he would cross and regroup with Wiley and the others. They would be waiting for him, counting on him to play his part in the night's festivities. And Loughlin would be there with bells on.

H
og Wiley sat in jungle undergrowth, scanning the enemy camp through his binoculars for perhaps the thousandth time that day. This time, however, his attention was concentrated more on the water's edge and underneath the bridge than it was on the fence and buildings inside the compound.

He was watching out for Loughlin, counting the charges as the Britisher set them, marking their positions in his mind.

If anything happened to the powder man, Hog wanted to be able to go on without him. That meant detonating the explosives on his own . . . which would require a working knowledge of their number and location.

More than that, Wiley was keeping an eye on Loughlin for safety's sake. He liked the Britisher, for all of their good-natured bickering—and their occasional really heated disagreements—and he did not want anything to happen down there. Not now. Not yet.

The mission was literally riding on Loughlin's shoulders. If he should be picked off by a sentry, or even seen, whether he escaped or not, the charges would be neutralized, their only means of entry to the camp wiped out at a single stroke.

Hog was determined that they would not fail. Their slim advantage of surprise would be maintained, no matter what risks he personally had to take.

Wiley would expose himself to sniper fire, if need be, or bring down fire of his own on the camp to distract the defenders . . . anything to make sure that the charges went unnoticed and undisturbed.

They would be getting antsy down there as it was, what with their patrol now overdue and nowhere in sight. It would give the commandant something to think about, and Wiley knew that every little bit of tension or confusion he could heap upon the enemy would work to their advantage later, when the final showdown came that night.

Let the commandant sweat it out. It was good for him. Let him feel a little of what his prisoners had been feeling all this goddamned time, locked up in their sweatboxes with nowhere to go but the mines and the stinking latrine.

The gate was opening, and Hog immediately dropped his field glasses, picking up the CAR-15 that lay beside him on the ground. He brought it to his shoulder and flicked the safety lever off in a single fluid motion, setting it on semiautomatic fire and sighting down the barrel across the sixty yards or more of intervening distance.

Almost point-blank range, yes, for a marksman of his capabilities—but the close range could work as well to his disadvantage if the enemy began responding with their big guns.

He watched tensely as a single soldier exited the gate, moving out perhaps fifteen feet along the bridge. His AK was slung muzzle-down across his off-hand shoulder, casually, but Hog did not relax. He knew that some of these birds could swing their blasters up and into action in the time it took to fart.

The guard stopped in the center of the bridge, then turned his back and ambled over to the far side, with his back toward Wiley, taking his time and apparently not looking for anything in particular. He was smoking a cigarette, and the smoke curled around both sides of his head as he moved away, making it look as if his face was burning.

Hog centered the rifle's sights on his shoulder blades, ready to crack the man's spine with a round at a second's notice. When the guy turned and moved back toward the near side of the bridge, the sights were automatically dead-center on his scrawny chest.

From here, Hog could clip him easily, blow him backward off the bridge with a sustained burst of fire, if it came to that.

And what then?

Soldiers, pouring out of the camp, through the gate, firing at anything and everything in their desperation to find a target—any target at all. Others would be banked along the fence, their weapons poking out through slits in the bamboo barricade.

It was an option Wiley wished to avoid, provided that he got the choice.

The guard was standing almost directly over Loughlin now, rocking back and forth on his heels, taking deep drags on his smoke. Finished with it, he flicked the butt into the water, ten feet below his boots. It sizzled and died, almost audible even from where Hog sat and watched.

Another moment, and the sentry was retreating through the gate, closing it behind him, securing it from the inside. Wiley waited another moment and finally lowered his rifle, leaving it across his knees, the safety off, and raised his field glasses once again.

Loughlin was giving the guard a long count, in case he doubled back and tried to run a fast one past them . . . and then he was moving, back in the direction of the island and the bank, circling toward his original crossing place.

Wiley went back to watching the long line of bamboo fence, alert to any sign of roving sentries who were interested in what went on outside their little compound. No one seemed to be on duty there, but he kept watching, just in case.

The soldier on the bridge had come closer to death than he would ever know. And soon, within a matter of hours at most, he would come closer yet. All the way through death's door, perhaps . . . and straight on to a hell the likes of that which he had helped build here on earth for others.

Soon.

Tonight.

They dared not put the breakout off another day.

If Stone had some plan worked out in his mind to help them from the inside, that was fine. If not, Wiley and the others would be prepared to go ahead without him.

And Hog wondered, once again, if they would pull it off.

He knew that Stone had been alive that morning, when they marched him off to work the mines along with all the other P.O.W.'s. Barring some incident on the job, some trigger-happy sentry, Stone should be alive right now, perhaps already on the way back to his cage.

It was important to Wiley that Stone come out of this alive and in one piece. But if he could not . . . if, by some chance, he was wasted on the way . . . Hog swore a silent oath that he would carry out the mission in Stone's name, the way he would have seen it done if he had made it to the end.

No prisoner would be left behind, alive and in captivity. No hostile would be left alive to tell the tale, not if Wiley had anything to say about it.

In and out.

A classic hit-and-run.

Except that five men would be punching in, and roughly thirty would be coming out.

The odds were different from those they had encountered on any other mission. Wiley wished they had made some provision for backup air support. There would be hell to pay if a message was flashed out of camp to some larger garrison force. They might respond with heliborne troops, air drops, any damned thing at all.

Enough!

Wiley cut off the defeatist train of thought, refusing to entertain the idea of anything less than total victory. If they went in as planned, and pinned down the field telephones and any walkie-talkies, there was no reason on earth why anyone outside the compound should even be aware the raid had taken place. Not until the next supply delivery, days or weeks away.

It could still work.

It had to work.

Their lives were riding on it now, and there could be no turning back.

C
aptain Ngu checked his watch and scowled, cursing underneath his breath. The search patrol was hours overdue, and no matter how he tried, it seemed impossible to come up with any sort of encouraging explanation for their tardiness.

They should have been back by the time the work detail returned from the mines, no later. Easily in time for the evening meal, which was already being consumed by prisoners in the courtyard of the camp.

He stood up, pacing back and forth across the small interior of his command hut, finally pausing in front of the narrow window, staring out at the uniformed inmates assembled there. His eyes picked out the new arrival, off to one side, eating, and they narrowed, growing cold and hard.

It was his fault, whatever had happened out there. He had brought this plague upon Ngu and upon his small command.

Again he ran through the conceivable explanations for the failure of his patrol to return on time, or at least to report in on the walkie-talkie they carried with them as standard field equipment.

The men might have deserted, run away into the jungle. It would not be the first time that the Army of Vietnam had lost soldiers in the field. Conscription methods were arbitrary, harsh, often used as punishment for some minor civil or criminal infraction. If the men had put their heads together, plotted their escape . . .

Ngu shook his head and dismissed the idea from his thoughts. Those nine were not the best of friends; two or three of them had actively disliked the others he selected for the mission. They would never have agreed on something so momentous as desertion and a life in hiding. If they had the initiative at all, those who were inclined to leave without permission would have taken advantage of their alternating night watch long before now.

They might be lost somewhere in the jungle, wandering around in aimless circles, too frightened and embarrassed to call for help on their walkie-talkie. It was not unusual for his troops, ill-trained and unfamiliar with the Cambodian countryside, to take a wrong turn and lose their way completely.

But no. They were not lost. At least not in that way. Ngu could feel it in his bones, where a chill had settled in, refusing to be shaken out by liberal doses of the rice wine he had drunk throughout the afternoon.

They could be wasting time deliberately, what the Americans called "goldbricking." It was possible that they had happened on a native woman and persuaded her, through force or favors, to have sex with them.

Rape was commonplace wherever Vietnamese troops were bivouacked, and prostitution was considered an acceptable alternative to subsistence farming in Cambodia. No shame attached to the sale of a daughter—or even a wife, if the price was adequate.

Ngu considered it, and again dismissed the thought as a sterile rationalization. His camp had been constructed with isolation in mind. The chances of finding a woman—or any other native—in the immediate vicinity were small indeed. The searchers would have to go far before they found a human female to amuse them.

And he knew, without really acknowledging it to himself at any conscious level, without having to, that they were dead.

All dead.

Long dead.

As he stood there, looking out over the compound, their bodies, in all probability, had been stiff and cold for several hours now.

The enemy would be close by, reluctant to desert their comrade in captivity, keeping close by so that they would not have to travel far to launch the night attack.

And they would come by night—this night. Ngu was as certain of it as he had ever been certain of anything.

There was no time to waste, for it was dusk already. He would have to get some answers from the one American clumsy enough to let himself be captured inside the camp. He would have to get the answers now, before the day got any older and twilight turned into blackest night, bringing down the wrath of whoever waited for him, out beyond the thin bamboo perimeter of the compound.

He knew he could hold them off, blunt the attack and turn them around in defeat—if he knew how many troops he had to deal with, their offensive capabilities, their motives.

No. Scratch that. The motives were already plain to him. They meant to kill him, wipe out his command, and carry off the scum he held captive here.

They would not succeed. His career, his very life itself, depended on Ngu's ability to hold the compound through the coming night. And to succeed in that, he would have to wring some answers out of the American infiltrator.

Starting immediately.

M
ark Stone sat with Lynch and Page to eat his evening meal. It was rice again, still soggy, still in wooden bowls, but now in slightly larger portions, as if the day's supply had to be used or thrown away.

For all the nutritional value it gave the prisoners, Stone thought, it could have been thrown out to begin with.

He sat with his back against the bamboo fence, forking the rice from his bowl to his mouth with dirty fingers. There had been no opportunity and no place to wash. Their single stop at the latrine, reeking and surrounded by a swarm of biting flies, had been for purposes other than cleaning up.

No matter. With any luck at all, this would be his last meal in the prison camp, and he could sweat it out. He might have ignored the soggy rice, but they had not eaten since breakfast, and any fuel at all was better than none for the energetic evening that he had in mind.