It had taken Loughlin a year on the job to understand his enemy, to realize exactly what the hell was going on in minds so twisted that they slaughtered women and children in the name of freedom for a nation halfway around the world. It took him that long to comprehend a mind that would bomb churches in the heart of London to make a religious point, or machine-gun buses filled with children to make a statement about the starving hordes of Africa or Asia.
Sometime in his second year with the S.A.S., after he understood, he started hating. It was a weakness, Loughlin knew, but in the end it had been inescapable. He had fought long and hard to obtain the ideal objectivity of a trained counterterrorist fighter, knowing that emotional involvement was a one-way ticket to a graveyard . . . but in the end, heart won out over mind to some extent.
He had been sitting in the gutter, holding a khaki-clad leg in his arms . . . all that remained of an S.A.S. sergeant he had barely known. They had been speaking acquaintances, not even really friends . . . but Loughlin knew that the man had a wife and two children in school, that he was paying on a flat in Soho, that he had the same hopes and dreams for his life and his family as did any other man.
The sergeant had been killed by a car bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army outside a crowded department store. A spokesman for the I.R.A. was kind enough to call police and tell them where the hundred pounds of TNT were hiddenâmore or less. Loughlin had been part of the second group arriving at the scene, seconds behind the first wave, and he was just out of range when the car detonated, shattering windows for a mile and shredding seven people with its hail of shrapnel.
He was close enough to be knocked down by the concussion, close enough to catch the leg that landed in his lap like some grisly airborne trophy. If he had been twenty meters closer, with the rest of them, he might have been vaporized like the three other S.A.S. men who had accompanied the sergeant.
Loughlin did not swear a blood oath on his enemies; nothing so dramatic for this stolid Britisher . . . but he had made a quiet determination in his own mind that whenever possible, whenever he could justify eliminating terrorists by any stretch of the imagination, he would do so.
He found the car-bombers, led a squad sent out to take them into custody . . . and brought them home again in rubber body bags. A shootout, and all thatâyes, regrettableâbut at least they would not be planting any more bombs, would they?
He began to gain a reputation in the service for shooting first and asking questions later, an attitude that brought him on the carpet several timesâand earned him the unqualified respect of the line of soldiers he served with.
When new men came on duty, they were almost invariably teamed with Loughlin their first time out. It was a tacit admission by the brass, however they might criticize him, that he got results, that he would keep the new recruits alive at least long enough to learn their jobs firsthand.
Then came Loughlin's bad break.
A news camera caught the S.A.S. commando's unmasked features when a terrorist tugged the Brit's mask away during an embassy hostage rescue action, moments before Loughlin iced the terrorist, but by then it was too late, and with his face now in terrorist files, his undercover capability gone, Loughlin was mustered out of the S.A.S.
He did not protest it, nor did his melancholy side become any more pronounced than usual. He took it stoically, without question, and within two weeks he was fighting in Angola, against the Communist insurgents. Mercenary life had offered some of what the S.A.S. had failed to give him: clear-cut choices, do-or-die decisions without the tangle of red tape and bureaucratic bullshit to be chopped away before you had a chance to act to move. At the same time, though, there had been something missing . . .
And he found it with Mark Stone.
At first Loughlin did not realize what he was lacking, but with time and some careful thought he realized that it was a cause. Fighting, killing for the dollar sign, without regard to any ideology beyond blind anti-Communism, had its limitations. But with Stone . . .
The cause made sense, it beckoned him, and once inside its clutches, he could not break free. He did not want to break free.
Stone had shown him something he had been searching for and fighting for from the moment he joined the S.A.S., namely, a chance to count for something, to use his skills not only fighting evil, but achieving something for the cause of good.
If they could bring just one man home and reunite him with his family . . . if they could extricate one human soul from a living hell or captivity, it would be worth the risk, the effort.
And now, the soul and body on the line belonged to Stone himself. It had been careless of him to get caught, but Loughlin knew that it could happen to anyone, anytime. Like the sergeant in London, laughing and living one moment, and the nextâ
The bridge would be no problem, he decided, smiling to himself. There just might be a way to take the reinforcements with the bridge, if it came to that. Some close work, with precision timingâbut it could be done.
As for the fence, some simple C-4 charges would do the trick. The problem there would not be getting in, but staying alive once entry was achieved.
They would be walking right into the middle of a hornet's nest on this one . . . except that these hornets carried automatic rifles and bloody well knew how to use them. Loughlin smiled in the shadows, shrugging off a sense of apprehension. He was the powder man, and he would do his job on cue. What happened after that was out of his hands.
C
aptain Ngu crushed his cigarette beneath a boot heel, frowning as he watched the final members of the small patrol disappear through the bamboo gates. When the gates were closed and secured behind them, he turned away, moving back inside the command hut and closing the door behind him.
His patrol would find the enemy, be they Americans or natives. They were under orders to take the enemy alive, if at all possible, and to kill only in the last extremity. In practice, of course, this meant he would be fortunate to receive perhaps only one out of four intruders aliveâbut that should be more than ample for his purposes.
He needed to be certain that the threat had been contained. He needed someone from the intruder force, alive and talkingâlong enough, at any rate, to make sure that there were no more like themselves lurking in the jungle around the compound, waiting for a time to strike.
Ngu was getting paranoid. He had begun to see an enemy in every shadow, to detect the sound of hostile movement in every rustling movement of the forest. If they did not resolve the situation soon . . .
But it would be resolved, he told himself.
Today.
The patrol would find their man or men and bring back prisonersâor corpses. Either way, the threat would be eliminated, and life could return to normal in the compound.
With a twist.
Captain Ngu was getting out.
If his ploy succeeded, if there were more Americans or their lackeys prowling in the jungle just outside his defenses . . . and if he brought them in as evidence of an illegal border crossing . . .
He smiled, then lit another cigarette, and immediately stubbed it out, aware that his nervousness had begun to manifest itself in chain-smoking. It was a sign of weakness, incompatible with Ngu's image as a man of strength.
The image was important, yes. In fact, it was vital. The military brass would have no choice but to reward him for so great a coup, so marvelous an opportunity to embarrass the Americans.
He would be moving up. If he could pull it off.
The commandant had sent the American intruder out to work that morning with the others, certain that he would have the other members of the man's patrol in custody before he returned from the mines.
There was an outside chance, of course, that the prisoner's support troops would be foolhardy enough to try to break in daylight, thinking he was still safe inside the camp. In the unlikely event that they made such a move, Ngu wanted to ensure their disappointmentâand their capture, by seeing that there were no extra inmates in the way.
Anyone breaking into his camp today or tonight would be annihilated like the sneaking scum they were. He would see to it personally.
There had been only one successful escape in his tenure as commander of the compound. The American named Ramsay. And Ngu had managed to conceal that one from his superiors, reporting Ramsay dead of snakebite, buried in the jungle in accordance with standing orders from headquarters in Ho Chi Minh City.
They had fallen for it, and his ass was covered. So far. But there would be no way he could cover another escape, or string of escapes.
The thought was not to be tolerated. He would not permit Americans to run roughshod over everything he had been trying to do at the camp. The salvation of his military career was at stake, and he did not plan to sacrifice his own future for the lives of a few worthless round-eyes.
If the patrol came back empty-handed, if it found nothing in the jungle, he would interrogate the American intruder again tonight. All night, if necessary. He would wring the truth out of that bastard if it killed him . . . and, he realized with a devilish smile, it would undoubtedly do exactly that.
He had been easy on the man last night, almost giving him the kid-glove treatment. Tonight he would pull out all the stops and teach his captive the meaning of hell on earth.
If the patrol did not bring back his backup troops.
And if they did . . .
Then he would have no end of subjects to interrogate before he executed them. Or perhaps some of them would be wanted by headquarters for display before an international tribunal. Living, breathing evidence of border violations by the United States.
It was perfect.
All he had to do was find his subjects now, and that was virtually taken care of already.
He would delay the report to his superiors until tomorrow morning, making sure that he had good news for them when he made the call by field telephone. They would be happy when they heard that he had captured Americans and/or their mercenary sidekicks. They would be ecstatic when they learned that there was something they could use against the Americans . . . perhaps even in front of the United Nations.
It would be easy to conceal the P.O.W.'s from anyone who should try to back-check the reports, of course. Relocate or kill themâeither way, it scarcely mattered.
Live border-violators were worth more for propaganda's sake than a handful of dying prisoners would ever be worth in the endless negotiations for wartime reparations.
It had been more than ten years, and the Americans were clearly not concerned enough about their missing men to ante up the paltry millions that would bring them home again.
Or bring most of them home, at any rate.
A few could always be misplaced, misfiled, ready for the next set of reparation talks . . .
He viewed all Westerners with deep contempt, but he reserved a special hatred for Americans. They had killed members of his family, almost killed Ngu himself, during the war. He could not forget and would not forgive the debt they owed him.
And tomorrow, at the latest, they would begin paying off.
He lit another cigarette, never mind that he was chain-smoking now. It calmed him and helped him organize his thoughts, thoughts of what he would do with his new rank, when he was back safe and sound in the capital, working his way into the upper echelons.
He was hungry for power, thirsty for the pleasures that accompanied it. And he would have them all now, sooner than he would ever had deemed possible.
A sudden worm of fear turned over in his bowels, burrowing deeper, gnawing into his vitals. What if he could not pull it off? What if his patrol missed the others out there, in the jungle vastness . . . and the American he had in custody never talked?
Ngu took a deeper drag on his cigarette, almost burning his fingers on the glowing tip.
There would be no mistakes, no disasters to ruin his plan, his dream.
Everything would go according to schedule.
It was preordained.
T
errance Loughlin crouched beside the game trail, carefully threading the silencer onto the muzzle of his .22 caliber semiautomatic target pistol. His eyes never strayed from the narrow footpath, never glanced in the direction of the weapon as he performed the delicate task by touch alone. He was waiting for the point men, counting on them, from their noise and previously known position, to reveal themselves within a minute, perhaps less. His thighs were starting to ache from the awkwardness of his position, but he dared not change it now, knowing that they could be literally just around the corner.
They had been charting the course of the hostile patrol now for more than an hour, since the nine armed men issued forth from the compound, crossing the narrow footbridge in a ragged formation, bearing off into the trees, heading east. The patrol had tried to pull a fast one, quickly coming back around and circling toward the riverbank opposite the drainage pipe, where Stone had entered the camp, but they were taking their time along the way, checking out side trails and caves, trying to be silent but not quite making a go of it.