Peacekeepers (1988) (8 page)

The largest building, in the center of the village, was obviously where the meeting was taking place. Alexander clicked on the sub-miniaturized video camera built into the binoculars as he watched the men gathering around Shamar, bowing to him or shaking his hand. They all seemed so subservient to this mass murderer. The men from Jakarta wore lightweight, light-colored Westernized business suits; bureaucrats through and through, dressed almost identically to their brethren around the world. The guerrillas wore rags and tatters of old army uniforms they had decorated with bright head scarves and armbands.

Alexander videoed it all as he watched, waiting impatiently for sunset.

The shadows lengthened. Spires of smoke began to rise from the roof holes in several of the cinder-block huts inside the village. Alexander could smell vegetables boiling and fresh fish sizzling on the fire.

McPherson checked by radio with his men. No sign of enemy patrols. No hint that they had been detected.

Shamar was in council with the rebel leaders and the traitors within the government who were in league with the rebels.

He touched Alexander on the shoulder. Cole jerked as if a hot ember had seared his skin.

"It's time," McPherson said.

Alexander nodded, his lips pressed to a bloodless tight line. "Okay," he said, with a firmness he did not feel. "Let's get it done."

McPherson thumbed his palm-sized radio again. "All units—attack!"

And they were up and running toward the village. It was not walled; it was nothing more than a roughly circular collection of the cinder-block buildings, none of them more than a single story high. Alexander held his submachine gun in both hands, felt the weight of the grenades on his chest, the pistol flopping in its holster at his hip, the bulky electronic binoculars pressing against the small of his back.

On both sides of them other men in jungle green and floppy hats, guns held level, were racing across the clearing between the forest and the outer ring of huts.

McPherson sprinted a few steps ahead of Alexander and dashed in between the two nearest huts. No one else was in sight except his own mercenary soldiers.

But then a burst of gunfire off to his right. Alexander saw McPherson skid to a stop on the dusty bare ground and flatten out along a cinder-block wall. He did the same.

A soldier in a dirt-caked steel helmet popped out of a doorway and squirted a burst of semiautomatic fire at them. McPherson threw himself to the ground and fired back in one motion. The soldier screamed and fell back into the hut.

"Come on!" McPherson yelled. Alexander followed him on legs suddenly gone rubbery as the New Zealander raced to the hut and threw a grenade into the doorway.

It exploded almost immediately. Smoke and screams billowed out the doorway.

"Squirt 'em!" McPherson commanded, already heading for the next hut.

Alexander ducked into the smoky doorway, coughing as he pointed his gun inside the hut. Squinting, he saw a tangle of bodies huddled next to a small table splintered by the grenade's blast. He knew what he was supposed to do: spray the bodies with bullets, make certain no one would stagger out of that hut to shoot them in the back.

His finger froze on the trigger. They're all dead. Have to be.

One of the bodies moaned and writhed in pain. A woman, her colorful skirt smeared with blood.

Alexander doubled over, fighting down the bile that was surging into his mouth. He backed out of the doorway, took a gulp of fresh air, and saw that he was alone.

Gunfire deeper in the village. The crump of a grenade.

Men's deep voices shouting and cursing. Screams, high-pitched with terror and agony.

He ran down the crooked lane between huts and saw several of the green-clad mercenaries blazing away at the rooftops. Chunks of cinder block flew in all directions, but no one seemed to be up there. Then the black oval shape of a grenade arced against the flaming sunset sky and exploded between the men. Their bodies were flung like rag dolls, smashed against the cinder blocks.

A fragment caught Alexander, nicked his shoulder and spun him halfway around.

He saw three men with assault rifles coming up toward him. No, two men and a woman. Ragged clothes, but the rifles looked polished and new.

He could not fire at them. He knew he had to kill them or they would kill him. He commanded his finger to squeeze the trigger. He silently raged at his hand to do what it had to do. Yet his finger would not move a millimeter.

The woman shot him, a single round, straight at his chest. Alexander felt a tremendous hammer blow slam him down into the ground. The blood-red sky went dark. The last thing he heard was a man's voice bellowing angrily over the sound of more gunfire. It sounded like McPherson.

He woke to McPherson's voice.

"I expect you to allow me to evacuate my wounded and what's left of my men," the Kiwi was saying.

"You are a professional soldier," replied a harsh, guttural voice in heavily accented English. "You expect all the niceties of polite professional conduct to be extended to you."

Alexander tried to open his eyes. They seemed glued shut.

"You've beaten us," McPherson said, his voice sounding more exasperated than fearful. "What more do you want?"

"Why should I allow you to go? You might come against me again, some other day. Why not kill you all now and be done with it?"

In the silence that followed, Alexander tried to rub the blurriness out of his eyes. His chest flared with pain.

Broken rib, he knew. More than one, most likely. The armor vest stopped the bullet, but not its impact.

He focused on the shadowy ceiling, then carefully turned his head toward the voices he had heard.

He was lying on a straw pallet on the floor of a tiny room.

The only light came from the doorway from which the voices emanated. The room stank of blood and excrement.

Flies buzzed annoyingly, but Alexander's chest hurt too much to try to wave them away. Two other bodies were stretched out next to him. They both were unmoving, eyes staring—the flies and other insects were crawling over them.

Alexander barely held down his gorge. He looked past them, toward the lighted doorway.

"As you said, I'm a professional soldier," McPherson replied at last. "If you allow us to leave here, I'll give you my word that neither I nor my men will ever hire on against you. Never, no matter who approaches us or what he offers."

Another long silence. Then the other voice—it had to be Shamar's, Alexander reasoned—finally said, "Ah, you English and your honor. Very well, I will allow you to go."

"I'm New Zealand," said McPherson stiffly. "But I thank you anyways."

"All but your employer," said Shamar.

"Hold on now ..."

"That man will remain here. He is my enemy and I have no intention of allowing him to go free."

He's talking about me! Alexander realized with a pang of shock.

"I can't allow that," said McPherson.

Shamar laughed, a mocking grating sound. "If you wish to stay with him and share his fate, I will accommodate you." His voice suddenly went iron-hard. "You, and what's left of your men."

"That's not fair," McPherson whispered.

Shamar laughed again. "I thought you English had a saying, 'All's fair in love and war.'"

"He's just a silly rich man."

"A stupid rich man," Shamar corrected, 'Vho swallowed the information that my people sold to him. An ignorant Yankee who led you and your men into this trap like a Judas goat leading sheep."

"I still can't . . ."

"You had better take your men and leave while you can."

Shamar's voice was flat and cold. The discussion was at an end.

McPherson said, "I'm doing this only for the sake of my men."

"Of course. And don't trouble yourself about this American fool. He isn't worth troubling your conscience over."

Alexander heard McPherson's booted feet clump across the wooden floorboards. A door squeaked open, then banged shut.

It's my fault, he realized. I led McPherson and his men into this mess. I let Shamar bait the trap and I walked right into it. I couldn't even fight, when the chips were down.

Worse than a fool. I'm a coward. A gutless coward who can't pull a trigger even to save his own life.

The realization burned him with a searing pain worse than his wound. I'm a coward. A coward.

A lilting Indonesian voice, in tones almost like a flute, asked, "Is it wise to allow the mercenaries to go free?"

Shamar made a coughing, almost barking sound that might have been a single burst of laughter. "No, it is not wise. And they will not leave this village alive."

"But you told him . . ."

"What I told that Englishman I said to make him and his men easier to handle. They will be marched back toward the forest, toward the vans that carried them here from the coast. Before they reach the vans they will be shot. All of them."

Without consciously willing it, Alexander struggled up to a sitting position. The pain made his head swim, but he still heard Shamar's grating voice.

"In a few weeks' time the jungle will have obliterated their bodies. There will be no trace of them."

I can't let him murder Mac and his men. I've killed enough of them. I can't let him slaughter the rest.

Every breath was an agony. Alexander checked his clothes. They had removed everything: vest, webbing, weapons, even his boots. Nothing remained except his fatigues, and the pockets had been thoroughly emptied.

Glancing at the corpses lying next to him, he saw that they had been similarly stripped.

He crawled painfully, slithering along the splintery boards on the side that hurt less, toward the lighted doorway. It took all his willpower not to cry out from the pain. Staying back in the shadows, flat on his stomach and flaming chest, Alexander surveyed the other room.

Shamar was sitting at a warped, swaybacked table, packing wads of paper money into an aluminum case.

There was a stack of bills on the table, neatly bundled in bank wrappers. Two of the men from Jakarta, in their lily-white business suits, stood with their backs to Alexander, watching their money disappear into Shamar's case.

Also on the table were some of Alexander's belongings: he recognized his electronic binoculars, his never-used automatic pistol, and the six grenades he had carried into the battle.

There was a guerrilla soldier at the door that led outside, standing nonchalantly with a Kalishnikov assault rifle slung over one shoulder, smoking a crooked brown cigarette, staring at more money than he and his ancestors had ever seen in their combined lifetimes.

Biting his lips to keep from whimpering, Alexander slowly clawed up the wall and inched to his feet. He stood there for a long dizzying moment, swaying, forcing himself to remain conscious and not give in to the soft yielding darkness that tempted him.

Leaning his back against the flimsy wall, listening to Shamar and the Jakarta traitors bantering about money and taxpayers and bank accounts in Singapore, Alexander felt the sweat pouring from every inch of his body. It was not merely the heat, not only the pain that made him perspire.

It was fear. He knew what he had to do. He knew that he had to do it now. Ten seconds from now might be too late.

They'll kill me, a voice said inside his head.

Sure, he answered himself. But they're going to kill you anyway. At least you've got to try.

Abruptly he pushed himself away from the wall, barged into the lighted room, lurched between the two Indonesians and grabbed for the pistol on the table.

Shamar was faster. His face showed surprise, but his hands moved swiftly and surely. He dropped the wad of money he had been holding, even as the Indonesians staggered away from Alexander and the young guerrilla by the outer doorway dropped his cigarette in shock.

Shamar swept up the pistol in his right hand and with practiced smoothness brought up his left to slide the action back and cock it.

As he did so, Alexander did the only thing he could think of. He grabbed one of the fragmentation grenades and yanked its pin out.

He distinctly heard the pin clatter on the tabletop, and before the sound was gone, the snick-clack of the pistol's action.

The two Indonesians started to babble and the guerrilla whipped his rifle from his shoulder.

"No!" Shamar bellowed, holding out his left hand toward the young guerrilla.

He pointed the pistol at Alexander's gut. But he did not fire. Alexander held the grenade tightly in his right hand, woozy with the agony that his effort had caused, sagging back against the cinder-block wall.

"If I let go," he said, his voice thick with pain, "this grenade goes off. We'll all die."

He could see Shamar's eyes, pale blue and calculating.

"It's a three-second fuse," Alexander added. "For house-to-house fighting. You won't have time to pick it up and throw it away."

Shamar eased his tensed body. He even smiled slightly.

But the gun stayed pointed at Alexander.

"You are more resourceful than I thought."

"And you," Alexander panted, gasping from the pain of talking, "are just as much a murdering son of a bitch as I thought."

The Indonesians seemed petrified with fear. The youngster had lowered his rifle, but kept his hand on the pistol grip; he could swing the muzzle up and fire in an instant.

"We have a stalemate," Shamar said. The scar along his jaw seemed unusually white, almost pulsating.

"Give the order to bring McPherson and his men back here."

"The mercenaries?"

"Bring them back here," Alexander repeated. "Unharmed."

With a shrug that was half amused, half contemptuous, Shamar reached into a chest pocket of his fatigues and brought out a small black radio, the same miniature size that McPherson had used. He spoke into it in Arabic.

"They will be back here in ten minutes," he said to Alexander.

"Tell 'em to make it faster. My hand's getting sweaty. I might drop this egg."

Shamar spoke into the radio again. Alexander knew that they were waiting for him to pass out, to slump down into unconsciousness from the pain. He'll try to grab the grenade before it goes off, it's his only chance. I've got to stay awake. Alert. Got to!