“What are they going to do with Narith?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” Porter said.
She watched the bandits build a fire and cook food like they were Boy Scouts on an outing.
The lingering image of their guide being murdered told her all she wanted to know about these men. They were bloodless killers and she feared Narith would be next. Killing a kid, poaching an endanger species, it was all the same to these hardened kids.
They squatted around the small fire eating and talking while Narith sat on a log nearby. They offered him food, but he declined. He sat stoically, the light from the fire flickering off his immobile face.
The leader again pulled out his satellite phone, then walked off speaking loudly to someone. When he came back to the fire he mumbled incoherently. He lit a cigarette. He said something and the others nodded.
Porter informed her, looking down to disguise the movement of his mouth, that it was a discussion over the ransom. A chopper would be coming at first light to get them and pay these guys.
The young men huddled on their haunches, resembling a troop of baboons.
They glanced at her from time to time and made remarks and laughed. She wondered if they were going to rape her. It seemed like a possibility.
The leader then motioned to Narith.
“What is he doing?” Kiera asked, turning to Porter. “Tell them I can get them a lot of money for Narith alive. Dead, he’s worth nothing.”
Her voice had carried. For an intense moment the leader of these boy killers just stared at her with a reptilian’s fixed gaze.
Porter said, “I think they want him to play something for them.”
The absurdity of it turned out to be the case as Narith was given his flute case. The leader ordered the monk to sit on a log by the fire and play his flute as the flames licking angrily at the night, sparks rising and dying in the wet trees.
Narith removed the flute from the case. He wiped it down with part of his robe. Then he began to play.
The madness of the moment, of this gang, these brutal young men in this forsaken place, with rapt looks on their faces, listening to a flute player—it really might have been a Boy Scout Troop camping out in the wild and having a great time.
The leader of the group rocked gently to the soulful melody of the floating music that followed, fading away with the fire sparks into the trees.
Some of the killer boys sat agape, as if stunned by the beauty of the music, momentarily pulled out of their predatory existence.
Narith played with his eyes closed. He played for a long time to these music-starved killers, their expressions softening, their eyes glowing in the fire’s light. Music so beautiful it subdued the violent audience.
It made her infinitely sad that their world produced ruthless predators out of its young boys. Yet she had no pity for them. She’d seen their savagery. They had lost whatever humanity they might have once possessed.
She thought of the Khmer Rouge and how they attempted to stamp out music by killing all musicians. The most frightening thing to Kiera was just how easy children could be turned into ruthless killers.
Porter snapped her out of her spell with a light touch of his knee to hers.
She glanced at him. He gave her a concerned look she didn’t understand. Then, picking up a clue, she realized something was going on beyond the fire, beyond the madness of the moment. She tried to follow the direction of his focus.
The camp, encased in total darkness, seemed as isolated as though they were on an island in a black sea.
She glanced at Porter again. He made no gesture, only a clench of his jaw, a tightness of his neck.
Again she tried to find what he was looking at. At first she saw nothing. But after a short time something touched the corner of her peripheral vision.
In the trees, past the men, past the glow of the fire, emerging from the Rorschach inkblot of the night, there was a suggestion of movement.
She felt a chill. She knew something terrible was about to descend upon the camp. Maybe a rival gang was looking to be the ones to collect the reward.
33
When it came, it came with stunning abruptness and Kiera was momentarily immobilized by the eruption of violence.
It happened in the middle of an incredible flute riff, at a point where Narith was doing his magic, the notes rising to an emotive crescendo, at that moment, right at the peak of the beauty was when the jungle erupted in molten dots, like bursting fireflies accompanied by the numbing staccato howl of automatic weapons.
She and Porter went down to the ground as best they could, but she never lost her sight of the campfire, the gang of bandits, what happened even as the rope around her neck cut off her air for a moment.
The precision of orchestrated brutality—visited within a matter of seconds of shocking horror—ended as suddenly as it had begun.
Those around the fire never had time to react to the ambush. Never had a moment to know what was coming at them. They died almost before the music went silent. They died before they knew who killed them, before they could bring their weapons to bear. It was a perfectly executed annihilation at exactly the perfect moment.
The one who did make it to his feet before the bullets took him down, fell into the fire.
Kiera saw Narith alone sitting upright and she waited for him to topple over, but it now appeared, by some miracle, no bullet had touched him.
The ambushers then emerged from the forest, faces blackened, some wearing ragged jungle-style fatigue pants, others in tan khaki.
They pulled the body out of the fire and two of them beat the clothing to extinguish any flames.
It quickly became apparent they weren’t interested in saving lives, or preventing the stench of burning flesh, but saving clothes and boots and ammo and weapons.
With all that gunfire why are we alive? she wondered. She took this as another group looking to take the ransom away from the ones they’d killed. They had been careful. They wanted to be paid.
Porter pushed himself up and helped Kiera to a sitting position against the tree. Had the attackers wanted them dead, they’d be dead.
One of the men, a gleeful looking older guy, short, lean, almost lost in ragged fatigue pants and a black shirt and floppy jungle hat, but a man with the eyes of a cougar on the hunt, walked toward her with some kind of intent.
Kiera tightened.
“Koj tuaj los!”
the man said, smiling, like he was coming to a friend’s house.
She choked back her apprehension.
This apparent leader of this new gang, ignoring Porter, gave her a manic look, full of strange glee, as he pulled a knife from a sheath on his belt, mumbling in a strange language, the blade flashing in the light of the fire.
I’m dead, she thought.
“It’s okay,” Porter said.
The man grabbed Kiera by the back of her head, not hard, but just enough to pull her to an angle where he could place the blade of the knife against her neck.
And he cut quick and sure.
Kiera closed her eyes, not wanting to see her own blood, waited to feel the warm life fluid drain down her neck. She felt the warmth and thought the worst, her life running out, death had come.
It took a moment to realize it was the false assumption that tricked her into thinking she’d been cut and faced impending death. The cut she’d assumed would sever her windpipe had gone instead in the opposite direction, not her jugular, or her carotid artery, but the rope around her neck, freeing her.
As the rope fell away she opened her eyes to a smiling face with two missing teeth on the left side of his mouth. Her rescuer had a wide nose and intelligent eyes.
“Yes, okay good. Granddaughter, Captain Hard Rice. I Tang, son Phommasanh. Very happy meet you.”
She couldn’t react to the new reality. He’d just helped his men kill the entire group of bandits. And here he was looking happy and triumphant, thrilled to see her.
Kiera, felt lightheaded, disoriented.
“They are Hmong,” Porter said.
Tang cut the rope from her wrists then helped her up. He looked almost sheepish.
He bowed. “Yes, okay,” he said, nodding vigorously like this was a very great moment in his life.
“Hmong,” she said, still in shock.
“Very good. Very good. Yes, Captain Hard Rice granddaughter.” Tang articulated the words slowly, as if he was proud of his English, but careful with it as well.
She remembered that Charles McKean was in contact with these people and so was Narith. She just hadn’t expected to make their acquaintance this soon, or in this fashion. But she was very happy now to have been saved by them, brutal as it was.
Tang and Narith spoke in what she assumed was Hmong, or some common mountain language. They shook hands, like men with some kind of bond, two soldiers making an arrangement.
Porter said, “Phommasanh, Tang’s father, and leader of the Hmong, will be very happy to meet you. He is coming back with some Vietnamese monks and should be at the caves where they live.”
Tang, who was probably in his fifties, bowed slightly to Kiera, before turning, shoulders stiff, and marched back to the fire pit, giving orders as he went.
She stared at the man and his comrades as they went about their business of stripping the dead, acting like they were in a mall at Old Navy, picking and choosing shirts, pants, boots, discussing their choices, holding things up, trading in what little light the dying fire still gave off.
Porter’s gun and their backpacks were retrieved and given back to them. The rebel soldiers graciously bowed, sometimes staring at her with wonder, like she’d dropped out of a space ship.
In spite of all the carnage, bodies lying around, she felt no remorse for the dead.
Tang came back to them and said, “Bad men. Kill many tiger, elephant. Sell to China. No good.”
“Yes,” Kiera said. “Kill tiger and elephant no good.”
He smiled. “We go.”
“I’m happy to meet your father,” Kiera said.
This hardened, tough man nodded vigorously, glancing at Porter, “Very good.” Then he went back to instructing his men.
“Crazy, is it not?” Porter said, as if reading her thoughts. “They probably could have gone to the states or Thailand or Burma, but they chose to stay in their ancestral lands.”
Kiera put a hand on Porter’s arm and they exchanged looks. There was nothing else that could be said.
34
Former captives, now honored guests, Kiera, Porter and Narith joined the exodus from the camp this time without ropes around their wrists and necks.
The fire had been put out and the bodies, left where they had fallen, had been stripped of anything useful.
After some steady climbing in the dark up through a tight channel of rock and brush, and then up along a narrow terrace just below the sandstone ridges, they eventually came to where they were met in the predawn by men with four elephants.
The elephant handler—Porter called him a
mahout—
had the huge female in his charge. She and Porter were directed to her.
After speaking with the Burmese handler, Porter said, “This female is the lead elephant. Her name is Bo. That’s an honorific name for a commander and you are given the honor of riding her.”
The handler had the elephant bend a knee for Kiera. She stepped up and grabbed the flap of the animal’s ear and hoisted herself up on the neck. Then she moved back to the bamboo chair. Porter followed.
Narith rode on a tusker. Porter informed her that male elephants were rare and not used for leading the group.
“Why is that?”
“Because they seem to know they are the hunted ones. Poachers kill the tuskers. So they are skittish and very difficult to handle. Asian elephants aren’t as big as African elephants, but they are considered to be smarter and on par with dolphins, whales and chimpanzees. And once any elephant knows you, it never forgets. So be nice.”
Kiera reached over the side of the basket and gave Bo a pat and maybe it was an illusion, but she felt a nod of the big animal’s head as if to acknowledge and accept her.
With their elephant mahout straddling the neck of Bo, they headed up the mountain through the heavy rainforest.
Finally, after hours of climbing, early morning light blossomed over the mountain range across the twisting ravines and deep-cut valleys.
Those mountains had some of the oddest shapes Kiera had ever seen. Several were flat tops, others were like jagged fangs. There was an atavistic beauty to the place and it gave her the feeling of what it must have been like to be the first humans to come to a place like this.
Porter spoke to the mahout from time to time, and then told her the mahout was from a sister Hmong tribe in Burma.
“The Hmong are spread all over—they’re diaspora. He says he’s here to train elephants and to look for a wife. He wants to know if you’re available?”
“I might just well be,” Kiera said with a smile.
Porter said, “You mean I have competition?”
“Guy’s like you always need competition to keep you in line.” His return of playful bantering served to soothe her even more than the rocking of the giant animal beneath her. For the first time in what felt like days, she felt herself relax.
When they arrived at their destination it took a moment for her to see where the caves were. They were well hidden, virtually invisible until you were close to them.
Their arrival caused a lot of excitement. They were soon surrounded by a swarm of children, women and men.
“Are they all Hmong?”
Porter shook his head. “The majority. There are over thirty mountain tribes living along the mountain chain in Laos. These people are what the French called Montagnards. They used to be mostly further north around the Plain of Jars, but were forced to seek refuge here.”
The gathering that she could see numbered about a hundred, including the children. The men all appeared to be armed.
When she dismounted from the elephant she was immediately surrounded by curious children.
Tang spoke with one of a group of armed men, then disappeared into one of the cave mouths.