Cambodian Hellhole (16 page)

It was time, and past time. They would wait for darkness, certainly, and that meant two more hours at least, but Stone could wait. He had been waiting for one thing or another all his military life, and patience was ingrained in him.

At least until the time came for violent action. Then patience would evaporate, and his instinctive fury would take over, to vent itself upon the inhuman animals in charge of this Cambodian hellhole.

He was looking forward to another meeting with the camp commandant, yes. It was something to anticipate. If there was time, he just might let the captain feel a taste of his own medicine. If there was not . . .

Well, a quick kill was as good as a slow one, in the long run. As long as the enemy came out of it dead meat on the other end of the process.

They had progressed about a hundred yards when Stone noticed that the guards from the mine were accompanying them back to camp. Risking a glance back over his shoulder, he saw a lonesome pair of gunners left on duty at the entrance to the mine, watching their comrades recede in the distance and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes.

This was unusual, he knew. The escort detail from the compound should have come back for them at the end of the shift, leaving the full detail in place to guard the gold mine. Something had happened.

At once, a dozen fears and possibilities came crowding in upon his mind, jostling for space, each one demanding immediate attention. Stone tried to sort them out as he marched, keeping his eyes focused on the back of Lynch's head, following him with the movements of a zombie.

Loughlin and Wiley might have made their move already, in the daylight, thinking Stone would not be moved with the others.

And as soon as the thought materialized, he dismissed it, knowing his men would not take a chance on missing the other P.O.W.'s just to rescue him. It had to be everyone at once—or no one at all. There would be no second chance, once the camp had been penetrated. They would have an all-out battle on their hands, and no one life was worth the risk with so many others at stake, all hanging in the balance.

Something else, then.

Perhaps the commandant had sent out a patrol in force, and they had killed or captured some or all of Stone's backup group.

It was a possibility, but one he did not dare to contemplate at length before he saw the evidence before his eyes. It would be the end of everything—the escape attempt and any hope of getting out alive.

Stone refused to contemplate defeat. Not yet. There would be time enough for that when it became absolutely inevitable.

But why the sudden change in routine?

Something had happened, something that had upset the balance at the compound and moved the commandant to alter his usual procedure, keeping his escort force at home . . . in case they were needed.

Stone dismissed the insoluble puzzle, moving on to the real and obvious problems that the change presented for him. With the sentry force returning to the camp, there would be at least fifteen soldiers more to deal with when the final push came down. Fifteen more guns and men to be neutralized before they could escape.

That meant fifteen more chances that some or all of the prisoners—including Stone—would be shot at the first sign of trouble.

Fifteen more weapons to face Wiley, Loughlin, and the four backup gunners.

Small odds, in a normal battle setting, but they could be awesome in the type of precision-planned infighting Stone and company were used to.

Fifteen men could blow the whole equation out of balance, make the camp impossible to breach if they performed even adequately. By simply firing blind in the event of an assault, they made the chance of friendly casualties that much more likely.

At least, he told himself, Hog and Loughlin would have a preview of coming events when they cleared the jungle, marching toward the bridge. His men would have a chance to see and count the odds against them, and make some last-minute adjustments in their strategy to compensate.

What they could not do was find another backup force to fight beside them, more guns and ammunition to compensate for the larger hostile force. When all was said and done, they would have to make do with what they had . . . for good or ill.

So be it. They would go ahead because they had to. Because there was no other frigging choice, and they were all committed to the common goal.

And Stone would help, as best he could, from the inside.

He had spent the day recruiting volunteers for the break. It would be shaky at best, and getting out of the cages could itself be a problem . . . but if any of them were able to get their hands on automatic weapons in the confusion that would follow the break-in . . .

Some of the P.O.W.'s had been reluctant at first, one or two of them downright hostile, suspecting him as a collaborator dropped among them to ferret out potential escapees. Those few had come around after he took a clubbing, but he could still read hesitation in their eyes, their shaky nods of assent.

Some of them would predictably fold once the action started, Stone knew. It was to be anticipated, and he did not hold it against them in the least. A few of these poor bastards had been caged for almost twenty years now, going back to the early days of the war, and their will to fight, if not completely broken, was certainly showing the cracks of age and long abuse.

They might follow when the tide began to turn—if it turned in their favor—and then again, they might be unable to move, unable to act. At least, he hoped, they would not mill aimlessly about, charging into the line of fire and getting themselves or others killed by careless movement.

Stone cut off the defeatist line of thought in midstream. There was no damned way to predict what would happen that night—or whether anything would happen at all.

If Loughlin and Wiley were alive, they would be coming for him. If and when they came, Stone would rally any P.O.W.'s fit to fight, and he would try to help them out.

If they could get out of their cages.

If they could get their hands on working weapons.

If the cages were not wired to detonate immediately, as they had been at that other camp.

If . . .

Stone knew that he could talk himself in circles all night long and end up where he started. Nothing counted now but action, and he was waiting for it, looking forward to it, anticipating the hot taste of gunsmoke in his throat, the adrenaline rush that came with every life-and-death confrontation.

It was up to Loughlin and Hog now. There was nothing Stone could do from here, inside, without their help.

Another mile, perhaps another forty minutes, and they would be back at camp. He tried to spot some movement in the jungle, off to either side, that might betray the presence of a friendly lookout, someone to reassure him that plans were being made, steps being taken to effect the breakout.

But there was nothing.

So be it.

Stone took comfort from the fact that if he, in his exhausted state, had been able to pick out members of the patrol, then the guards, fed and rested, would almost certainly have seen them. It was good that there was no sign of Hog or the Britisher. It was downright reassuring.

But Stone did not feel the least bit reassured.

T
he water was colder than Loughlin had anticipated, and it momentarily took his breath away. He kept moving, refusing to let the cold settle in and take a grip on his bones, paralyzing him at the water's edge. He had a job to do, and there was no time to waste now.

They were running out of daylight, and the charges had to be in place by sundown at the latest. Hog was shooting for an early crash-in, and the charges were essential to any kind of marginal success.

Beneath the footbridge, in the shade, the temperature seemed to drop another ten degrees, and Loughlin was shivering in spite of himself. It was ironic, he thought, that anyone could feel so bone-cold here, of all places, in the middle of a steaming jungle.

But the temperature would fall like a plummeting stone with nightfall, and in the river, where he stood, armpit-deep in moving water, it was already cold. He did not want to think what the combination of wet clothing and the night chill would be like upon his flesh.

The charges that he carried were all waterproof, and otherwise, beyond the Ka-Bar knife strapped on the shoulder of his field harness, Loughlin was unarmed. It did not matter in the long run; if sentries found him down here, they would kill him or take him prisoner, no matter what sort of weapons he was carrying. There would be no way he could outshoot the entire garrison force by himself, so he opted for traveling light, keeping his assault rifle and the silenced pistol high and dry, free from rust and ready to perform at need, without hesitation.

He had set his charges first along the bamboo fence, not far from the drainage pipe where Stone had made his first, ill-fated entry to the compound. They would detonate upon a signal from his radio remote-control box—also high and dry on shore—giving Hog and the Hmong an entryway that would accommodate them nicely.

Passing by the pipe, with nothing but his head above the surface of the water, he picked up whispered voices, speaking in Vietnamese, and he knew they were waiting in the pipe for him, for anyone. He doubled back, pried off a small chunk of the extra C-4 plastique that he carried, and tamped it down silently against the corrugated metal, shaping it so that the blast would be directed inward, carrying along the channel of the pipe like a whirlwind from hell.

He would let them be the first to know exactly what was going on. And at the same time he would make damned certain that they were not waiting to ambush Wiley's force at either end of the pipe, going in or coming out.

That done, Loughlin proceeded on to the bridge, hugging the shore and keeping well in, well down, in case a sentry prowling along the fence should glance into the water. There were no catwalks on the eight-foot fence, he knew, but the construction of bamboo allowed men to look out between some of the poles, and he did not want any premature alarms to spoil their master plan.

Everything hinged on surprise, and it was still possible to achieve that, even with Stone in custody, even with the commandant inside there, no doubt biting his nails to the quick by now, wondering what in bloody hell had become of his patrol.

They could still take advantage of the surprise element, even when the enemy knew—or strongly suspected—that they would be coming in to get him. The defenders could never know precisely where or when the invaders would strike, and that uncertainty, that tension, was enough to make them jumpy, ready to fire at moving shadows instead of skulking commandos. With any luck at all, the sentries would be firing at each other when the final showdown came.

Loughlin finished packing his charge against one of the bridge-support timbers, set the radio-remote detonator in place securely, and moved on. He traversed the length of the bridge, stopping at each support in turn, working his way back from the landward end toward the camp, wiring each upright timber as he went along.

No sense in taking any chances, and he meant to be damned certain that the bridge went up on cue. He had to close that back door, keep the support troops from the mine from getting in too easily, ahead of schedule.

He would blow the fence and bridge together, on Wiley's signal, when the assault force was ready in position to attack. That would be a short time after sundown, when the prisoners were back inside their cages, more or less removed from the immediate line of fire.

There was no sense in complicating things, after all, no point in risking lives that were enough at risk already. If they could make it in and out without getting any of the P.O.W.'s killed, so much the better.

Loughlin could remember the last time, and he knew the way it ate at Stone—at all of them. But Stone had taken it most personally, as if he should somehow have seen the hidden charges, or read the crazy camp commandant's mind in those last seconds before he hit the plunger and sent everything sky-high.

Something wet and slippery wound around Loughlin's ankle, sinuous and serpentine, gliding in and out between his legs. A fish? Some kind of water snake? And if so, was it poisonous?

He froze, sweating now in spite of the icy water, unmoving until the thing—whatever it was—passed on. Even then, he gave it another long hundred-count, knowing he was behind now, preferring to hurry and make up the time on the other end, rather than risk an incapacitating and possibly fatal bite.

Finally free to move, he finished strapping a charge to the last of the pylons, snugging it in place and setting the detonator deeply, firmly. He was close in to the bank now, almost kneeling in the shallower water, and he heard the gate swing open, somewhere above him and to his immediate left, creaking as it moved.

Heavy footsteps—boots—moved out along the bridge, and paused almost directly overhead. They crossed behind him, moving toward the far side of the bridge, and then immediately doubled back. The man was right above him now, rocking back and forth on his heels, by the sound of it, and Loughlin held his breath, unwilling to make any sound or movement that might inadvertently betray his presence, jeopardize their mission.