Shadows of War (45 page)

Read Shadows of War Online

Authors: Larry Bond

The walls looked all of a piece, though, everything together, fifty or more years old, and worn. There was a rug on the floor, a woven bamboo rug, almost brand-new, beneath one of the plows.
Why use a new rug to protect a plow?
Josh pushed the mower and another plow out of the way. The plow holding the rug in place was heavy, close to a hundred pounds, he guessed. That might account for the rug—they needed something to make it easy to push across the floor.
But as Josh pulled it back, the plow blade hung up on the lip of something.
A trapdoor.
Josh pushed the plows and the mower out of the way, then carefully pulled back the rest of the rug to reveal a cutout. It was difficult to get a grip—there were holes where he thought a handle had been, but no handle. He started to use the machete to help pry it open, then realized he was likely to break the blade. A rusted hoe worked much better. He pried up the door and found a set of steps.
The door covered a large cellar storage area stuffed with crates. It was too dark to see much, even with the lamp, but there were dozens and dozens of boxes stacked down there, along with some clothes and tools.
He decided to go back and tell Mara what he had found. The idea of food pushed him to run—he was hungry beyond belief.
He'd taken a few steps across the compound when he heard the sound in the distance:
Helicopters.
 
 
Mara was tending to the rice
when Josh came running into the hut.
“Choppers!” he yelled. “The Chinese are coming!”
“We have to hide in the jungle,” she said, turning off the stove.
She grabbed the rice pot, using her shirttail as a pot holder. Then she realized that if any soldiers came inside, they'd see the stove was hot and know someone was hiding nearby. She grabbed the water jug, dousing the burner area. The water sizzled off. By the time they got here it would be cold.
“We gotta get out,” Josh told her, grabbing M
and leading her outside. “They're coming. Come on.”
The helicopters were still some distance off, not yet visible in the sky. Mara pulled the door closed behind her, then started after him.
They'd never make it to the jungle. The irrigation ditches were closer, but what then? There were several helicopters; she could tell from the sound. They'd leave one circling the area, looking.
“We have to find a place to hide,” Mara said. “The helicopters are too close.”
Josh's face went blank, as if he were having trouble processing the information. For a second, Mara thought he had frozen on her.
“This way then,” he said, darting toward the barns. “I know the perfect place.”
Northwestern Vietnam
Jing Yo pressed his hands together,
folding the tips of his fingers against each other and pulling outward. His biceps tightened; the muscles in his shoulders and neck went taut.
Balance is all. A man who is balanced stands at the center of the ever-changing swirl. A man balanced is unchanged by chaos. He does not know catastrophe. He is the eye of the storm.
“We're landing, Lieutenant,” said Wu, standing over him as the helicopter touched down. “We are at the village.”
Jing Yo got up from the bench. They had already searched an abandoned hamlet farther north, the Hmong settlement Colonel Sun had directed him to. As soon as he saw that it was empty, he had reboarded the helicopter and directed the bulk of his force here—back south of the creek, contrary to the colonel's orders. It was a gamble, but he thought it justified by the circumstances.
Or at least by his gut sense.
The settlement was a small farming commune, with cottages on either side of a central barn area. Jing Yo sent half of the regular army troops to watch the perimeter, then split the remainder in half, sending one group to search the huts at the north and tasking one group on the huts at the south. He and his commandos went to the barns.
“You seem tired,” said Sergeant Wu as they walked toward the first building.
“Just thinking.”
“You shouldn't do that.”
Jing Yo smiled, thinking it was a joke. Wu was serious.
“If you worry too much about losing men, you can't do your job,” he said.
Jing Yo nodded.
“They were good, those people,” said Wu.
“Very.”
“Mercenaries. Working for the Americans, I would bet. Or Americans themselves. They're a mongrel race. You can never tell where they come from.”
The man Jing Yo had wounded was probably back at the medical unit at the forward helicopter base by now. Jing Yo would talk to him eventually. Hopefully after they had apprehended the scientist.
The barn was empty. The commandos moved inside quickly, silently, securing it, then moving on.
“The peasants here make furniture,” said Wu dismissively, surveying the interior. “Cheap furniture for Americans, I bet.”
Jing Yo walked around the interior perimeter, rechecking the areas his men had already looked at. There were no hiding places; it was a plain, simple building without interior walls or a loft.
The next building was a twin of the first, except that it contained piles of rough wood rather than furniture.
If the scientist wasn't here, then most likely the colonel was right, Jing Yo realized as he surveyed the second barn. He was likely to be cowering in the jungle somewhere, hiding like a scared rabbit.
Overestimating an enemy could be nearly as bad as underestimating him. Because he was an American, Jing Yo was preconditioned to see him as almost a superman, when in reality he was no different from anyone else.
Jing Yo returned to the door. Stepping outside, he caught the scent of burning wood on the wind. He thought for a moment that the village wasn't abandoned after all, that someone was making dinner. Then he turned and saw that one of the cottages had been set on fire.
They've found someone and are smoking him out, he thought.
“This way, quickly,” he called to the others, who were just about to go into one of the smaller buildings nearby.
As they ran across the compound, Jing Yo signaled to them to spread out. Then he noticed that the soldiers nearby weren't watching the building, but searching the others.
A soldier lit a bundle of dried weeds and held it to the roof of the nearby cottage.
“What are you doing?” Jing Yo shouted. He ran over and grabbed the man's arm as he tried to light another part of the roof.
“Orders, Lieutenant.”
“What orders?”
“The captain's.”
“No more fires,” said Jing Yo.
The unit captain was surprised when Jing Yo confronted him. “My invasion orders said I was to fire any building that wasn't useful,” he said. “So that's what we're doing. What's the problem?”
“Where did those orders come from?”
“Division.”
“I don't want the house burned,” said Jing Yo. “Don't burn any more.”
“The order came from division,” said the captain. “That means the general, and your colonel, who's his chief of staff. If you want to ask them to rescind it, that's okay with me. But the general has a reputation, and I don't want to cross him. I'm sure you're on better terms, being a commando as well.”
Jing Yo knew he could get the order rescinded, but it would take talking to Sun. If he did that, inevitably he would have to say where he was. The colonel would not like the fact that he had disobeyed his orders on where to search.
What difference did it make if the buildings were burned? The people had already run away.
“My people will finish searching the houses,” said Jing Yo. “You take the barns. You can burn them after you've searched—but only when you're certain there's no one inside.”
“I'm not a barbarian,” said the captain, rounding up his men.
 
 
“We're next!” hissed Josh,
running over from the door where he'd been watching the troops search the barn buildings. He dodged the two plows Mara had placed near the opening and ducked onto the steps next to her, sliding the rug over the top of the trapdoor.
“Get down,” she told him. “One, two, three.”
On three, Mara ducked down next to him, closing the door over the space. At the same time, she pulled hard on the rope she had in her hand, dragging the mower over the trapdoor. She had tied a very loose knot, trusting that it would come free as she yanked. The idea was that
the mower would roll over the space, making it easy to overlook, just as they had originally.
Except the rope didn't untie. As Mara flattened herself on the stairs, it got hung up beneath the panel, keeping the door open a crack and practically drawing an arrow toward where they were.
“Jesus.”
Mara put her shoulder against the top of the door and pulled. The mower had rolled over the door, and was just heavy enough to make it impossible to move the rope.
“Here,” whispered Josh, stepping up to help lift the door.
“Easy. We don't want it to roll off.”
“It'll be better than what we've got,” he said, pushing with his back. The trapdoor went up an inch and a half. Mara pulled again and the rope came free. But now the rug had fallen into the crack.
“Hold the door up just a little,” said Mara, pushing at the rug with her fingers.
“Come on.”
“I'm trying.”
“Give it a good push,” said Josh.
Then he sneezed.
Mara managed to flip the rug out of the space. “Down,” she said.
Josh lowered the door into place, sending them into total darkness. Then he sneezed. Though most of the force was muffled by his arm, it was still loud enough to hear.
“This is a very bad time to sneeze,” she said.
“No shit.”
He sneezed again, then moved down the stairs.
The door to the shed crashed open a few seconds later. The soldiers shouted as they came in, screaming “Surrender or die” in Chinese. Then they went silent, apparently scanning the room.
Mara waited, her finger growing stiff as it hovered above the rifle trigger. The silence extended for ten seconds, twenty, thirty, a full minute. Then there was another shout—a brief, sharp command—and the floorboards vibrated as the soldiers fanned out around and across the room.
How close were they? Directly above?
She could kill the first one, and the second. If she was lucky, she could grab a weapon.
Still, they'd be overcome eventually. It would probably be more prudent to surrender.
That would just be another way to die. Better to have some say in it.
A heavy heel set down a few feet away, pushing the floor with a squeak. It pounded twice, tapping maybe to see if there was a hollow sound.
Now
, thought Mara, getting ready.
The heels moved away. Mara couldn't believe it—she thought for sure it was a trick of her hearing, her brain unconsciously guilty of wishful thinking.
There was more talk, muffled, indecipherable. And footsteps toward the door.
They'd missed them.
They'd missed them!
 
 
Josh felt as if he were suffocating.
He had his nose buried deep in the crook of his arm. He held his breath and bit his lip, doing everything imaginable to stifle his sneeze. But the urge overwhelmed him. He pushed farther into the darkness, past M
, hunkering against a crate and the wall and bowing down just as he lost the struggle.
His entire body shuddered with the sneeze. He sneezed again and again, curling his head as far down into his midsection as he could, pressing his arm against his face.
If the door opened now, he'd run up, he'd throw himself at them, he'd do everything he could to try and save the others.
He held his breath again, wiping his nose with his sleeve. He sniffled lightly. As quickly as it had come on, the fit was over.
M
brushed up against him, then curled herself around his side.
He held her for what seemed like a long while, then got up and went toward the front, looking for Mara.
“Ssshh,” she whispered. “I think they left.”
“How will we know it's safe to go out?” he asked.
“We won't. We'll just have to wait as long as we can.”
“Yes,” he started to say, but his nose suddenly began to tickle. He buried his face in his arm a second before sneezing again.
“Are you okay?” Mara asked.
“Smoke,” he said as another sneeze erupted. “I smell smoke.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—they're setting the building on fire!”

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