Cambodian Hellhole (19 page)

He struggled to his feet, lurching, staggering, and the gunner was well ahead of him now, already bending down to close one hand around the barrel of an automatic rifle. Stone took two shambling steps, then launched himself into a headlong tackle, his forehead and shoulder striking the human target low, in the small of his back, and driving him face-first against the wall.

They fell together, the guard more stunned and surprised than Stone for an instant. Blood was streaming down his face where his nose had smashed against the wall of the CP hut, and he was shaking his head to clear it, dabbing at the blood with one hand, groping with the other for his weapon.

And outside, more smoky thunder tore the night, this time from the south side. A section of the fence had been blown away.

Stone was behind his enemy, the taut rope between his wrists serving as an admirable garrote now, biting deep into the orderly's throat, closing off his airway, dragging his head back and chafing the flesh until more rivulets of crimson stained his khaki uniform. A final twist, the snap of separating vertebrae, and he was still.

Stone found a knife in the guard's pocket, opened it, and finally freed his hands with difficulty. Satisfied that they would serve him, he picked up the rifle that his late opponent had been scrambling for so desperately. He racked the cocking lever back, chambering a round, and eased the safety off.

A hurtling body cleared the doorway, skidding to a stop. It was the second orderly, returning for the rifle that he had forgotten in his haste to get outside.

Stone let him see the weapon in his hands, let him watch the muzzle tracking into target acquisition, and then he blew the scum away, putting a short, five-round burst dead center in his chest, propelling him backward through the open doorway and out into the smoky night.

H
og Wiley led his band of warriors through the smoking breach in the prison camp's bamboo fence, with Lon Ky hot on his heels. The other men were peeling off, each closing on his assigned target, nailing down the guards who posed the greatest threat to the P.O.W.'s, but Wiley hung back a moment, scanning the scene of orchestrated chaos with narrow eyes.

First and foremost, he was looking for Stone. Failing in that objective, he was trying to get a rough estimate of hostile strength, their general deployment, before he committed his tiny force to some action that might prove suicidal.

Before Hog had a chance to finish up his instant recon, a gunner in the western guard tower spotted him, swung his light machine gun around, and sent a lethal hailstorm in Hog's general direction. Slugs were eating up the ground around his feet, and Hog went into a diving shoulder roll, loosing a quick burst from his assault rifle as he made the move.

Coming up in a combat crouch, he stroked another burst into the tower, and saw his bullets harmlessly deflected by the heavier logs its builders had used to line the fortified, exposed position. Cursing, he quickly set the rifle down, unlimbering the LAW rocket launcher he wore slung across his back like a quiver full of arrows.

One deadly arrow, this one, ready to pierce the heart of his attacker's crude defenses.

Hog yanked the pin and primed the launcher, swinging it up onto his shoulder and sighting on the guard tower in one practiced motion born of long experience with martial tools. He hit the firing lever and watched the rustling firebird climb away from him, rattling toward its target on a comet-tail of flame.

The machine-gunner saw it coming, but there was no place left for him to go, and no damn time to get there. The tower detonated like an ammo dump on stilts, spewing chunks of burning logs and blackened flesh over the breadth of the compound.

Over by the cages, Hog could see the two Hmong troopers who had accompanied him already blasting locks off the bamboo cages, freeing some of the prisoners inside, using their automatic weapons to repulse a halfhearted counterattack by the camp's defenders.

It was early yet, and the Vietnamese required a little time to recover from the initial shock of the assault, to put their defense together and get it in good working order. It was Wiley's job to see that they never got the time they needed.

A pair of gunners in the east tower, on his right, were firing down into the compound now, indiscriminately, trying for anything and everything at once. Their wild rounds were impacting near the cages, scattering the Hmong, even driving their own troops back into cover for a moment.

Hog saw Lon Ky appear from nowhere, marching directly toward the guard tower, firing his AK-47 from the hip. He was peppering the target, spending his whole magazine—and getting no more positive results than Wiley had with tower number one.

The chief gunner stood up, standing his weapon almost on its nose to bring the Cambodian guerrilla under fire. The first long burst took off Lon Ky's head at the shoulders, vaporized them, leaving him standing like a headless mannequin before another burst of slugs cut him off at the knees and blew him backward, out of the action completely.

Cursing, Wiley ripped a thermite grenade from his web harness, jerked the pin free, and let it fly in a looping overhand. He was rewarded as the lethal egg dropped squarely on target, directly into the open lookout tower, slightly behind the machine-gun emplacement.

A heartbeat passed while the gunner tried to find him, and his loader tried to find out what had fallen in among them—then the night was turned to instant noontime by the detonation of the incendiary charge. Glowing coals of thermite fanned across the compound, setting fires wherever they touched down, enveloping the tower—or what was left of it—in dense white smoke.

Before the smoke obscured everything, Hog had a glimpse of the gunner, still at his weapon, hands fused to the metal now, screaming out his life as the coals ate into him and through him, unquenchable by blood or any other, human fluids.

Wiley left them to it, turning back into the compound proper, holding his assault rifle at the ready as he moved out, hunting. He would find Mark Stone, alive or dead. Without him, Wiley did not plan to leave. They went together or they stayed together. Simple.

J
ess Lynch stumbled out of his cage, followed closely by his cellmate, Page, and accepted the rifle that a grinning Hmong guerrilla thrust into his hands. It was an AK-47, and even now, after a dozen years, he could remember how it felt, how it operated, the kick it had.

Just like riding a bicycle
, he thought.
You really never do forget
.

The weapon had been primed and loaded by a previous owner, presumably no longer among the living. Lynch hefted it, turned to face Page, and found that someone had handed him a rifle too.

They stood there in the chaos of the firelit darkness for an instant, looking each other in the eye, exchanging a silent thought about what it felt like to be warriors in arms again, even for a fleeting moment. Something like a burst of pride welled up inside Jess Lynch, and he felt hot tears in the corners of his eyes, a lump in his throat that threatened to choke him.

And a sniper's bullet broke the mood before their hesitation got them killed. Lynch and Page were out of there instantly, taking advantage of the flickering shadows as they moved along the line of cages, helping the invaders free their fellow P.O.W.'s. A sudden thought occurred to Lynch, and he turned away, moving off toward an isolated group of cages on the southern perimeter, where the invalid inmates were kept in abject misery, separated from the other P.O.W.'s, barely fed, no longer even allowed to walk for themselves.

Stone's men might be unaware of their location, of their very existence. They could get caught and killed in the crossfire if he did not hurry, did not free them from their cages and help them find some hiding place until the battle burned itself out around them.

He cleared a rolling cloud of smoke and saw the cages. Three Vietnamese guards stood in front of the bamboo structures, rifles at their shoulders, poised to fire. A noncom stood beside them, a pistol in his hand, and even with the gunfire all around him, despite the grenades detonating like thunder on every side, Lynch could hear him give the order to open fire.

A furious burst of rifle fire tore through the cages, riddling the four men trapped inside, and Lynch was firing now, as well, from the hip, on the run, with tears streaming down his filthy cheeks and curses pouring from his lips.

The three riflemen died on their feet, bisected from behind by a deadly figure-eight burst that swept them all away into a bloody, tattered heap.

Tracking on with his shuddering weapon, Lynch cut the noncom's legs from under him, and blew his gun arm out of the socket with a final burst that left him lying on his back, alive—just barely—and staring at the smoky sky above him.

It was Needledick. Lynch had known it almost from the moment that he squeezed the AK's trigger and sent the bullets streaming into the slender form.

Needledick. The bastard who had made his life—every prisoner's life—a living hell inside the compound.

The noncom was still alive, sucking wind through skinny lips and moaning with pain. Lynch stood above him, letting him see the rifle in his hands, letting him know exactly who it was who had cut him down.

"M-mercy."

The word came out like the croaking of a tree frog. Weak, non-human somehow.

"Right. You slimy shit."

Lynch forced the heated muzzle of his AK-47 in between those skinny lips, his finger tightening on the trigger. He gave Needledick twenty rounds of mercy, shattering his skull and spewing bloody fragments of his brain in every direction. Lynch was soaked in blood, with chunks of flesh hanging off his uniform, clinging to his face and hands.

N
gu's worst nightmares were materializing, coming true before his very eyes.

The camp was in chaos, his soldiers running to and fro without direction, aimlessly, firing at the attackers, at shadows, at each other—all indiscriminately. If they wounded or killed any of the enemy, it would be blind luck. A miracle.

Ngu did not believe in miracles. He knew he would hate to solve this grim dilemma by himself, using his brain and the skills drilled into him through military training. He could rally his troops yet, bring order out of mass confusion . . . but he had to have a starting place.

A trio of Vietnamese political prisoners were running toward him, holding hands like children, babbling senselessly. Ngu raised his service pistol, sighting quickly, and fired a single round into each of them, tracking from left to right, watching their frail bodies jerk like puppets on a string under the impact of his slugs. They hit the ground still twitching, and he moved away from there, forgetting them immediately.

Shouting, cursing at his troops, he got a little clutch of them to follow him in the direction of the bamboo cages. Even from a distance he could see that all the cages had been opened, their occupants released. It would be his job now to track them down, inside the compound, if his luck was holding . . . and to bring them back or wipe them out.

He quickly dismissed the first alternative. There was no realistic way he could deal with prisoners now. His first responsibility would be to make sure that none of them got away, that nothing leaked into the outside world to confirm the existence of this or any other P.O.W. camp.

He could do that, at least, and salvage something from the ruins of his dreams.

A group of prisoners, some American and some Asian, were disappearing through a breach in the southern fence. Ngu herded his riflemen after them, barking orders to them to open fire immediately, before the final targets slipped out of sight and range.

A grenade detonated thirty feet away, and his little rifle squad fell apart, racing off in all directions, babbling like frightened children. Cursing, Ngu let them go, raising his pistol, sighting quickly, squeezing off a quick double-punch.

He saw a tall American stagger, falling to one knee, clutching at his shoulder—and then a hard fist struck him in the small of the back, lifting him completely off his feet and dumping him into the dirt. Ngu tried to rise, but found that his legs would not obey the mental commands to bend, to flex, to move.

Trying to sit up, he glanced down and saw the spreading crimson stain along his waistline, soaking through his urn-form. And he knew then, in an instant, what had happened. Knew that it was over.

The new American was standing over him, an AK-47 leveled from the waist. Ngu could see the smoke curling skyward from the muzzle of the weapon that had stood in a corner of his office moments earlier.

The American was saying something to him, but Ngu did not have the strength or presence of mind to translate. He was drifting, fading, wondering if he would die before the American emptied the rest of the clip into his face and chest.

The commandant closed his weary eyes, and said a prayer to long-forgotten gods.

M
ark Stone raised his weapon, turning away from the twitching corpse of the prison camp commandant, moving on in search of other targets. All around him the night was lit with flames and explosions and the muzzle flashes of a score of automatic weapons firing in unison. Bullets swept the compound, smacking into bamboo and thatch, toppling human figures here and there.