"I'm sorry, sir. Regulations—"
"Regulations, hell!" Hog said, shaking his head and causing his long dark hair to wave from side to side. "You just forget about them damn regulations and have a seat."
"I'm really sorry, sir, but—"
"Don't mind him, miss," Terrance Loughlin said from the seat next to Hog. "He can be very bloody-minded when he wants to, but he doesn't mean to offend you. Just go about your work, and I'll take care of him."
The flight attendant beat a quick retreat, and Loughlin thought he caught a sigh of relief. Hog could be a bit overbearing at times.
"Damn," Hog said. "I was
gettin
' to know her right well, you stupid limey. I wish we'd got you a ticket back in the tourist section."
"It was full already."
"All the same, I was
makin
' some time till you put your two cents in. You watch. She'll be back. Don't you think so,
Sarge
?"
The question was addressed to the man across the aisle.
"Maybe."
Stone hadn't really been paying attention to the byplay in the opposite seats, and he hadn't been thinking about Hog's chances with the flight attendant. He was thinking instead of the phone call that was the reason for their being on the flight in the first place. It had come early the previous evening:
"Mark? Mark Stone?" It was a woman's voice, one that Stone almost recognized.
"Yes?" he said. It was a question more than an answer.
"Thank God," the woman said. "I thought this was your number, but I wasn't sure. Jack said—"
"Jack?" Stone still wasn't sure who was on the line.
"I'm sorry. My husband. Jack
Wofford
. This is
Kathi
."
Stone placed the voice then.
Wofford
had served with him in Vietnam, and they had met a couple of times since the war. Once,
Wofford
had been with his wife, on vacation in San Francisco, and they had all gone out to dinner in Chinatown.
"I remember you," Stone said. "Is there something wrong with Jack?"
"I don't know,"
Kathi
said. Her voice was shaky, and Stone wondered if there was a bad connection.
"You don't know?"
"I mean, I'm not sure. I . . . I don't know what's going on, to tell the truth."
"Maybe you'd better start at the beginning and try to tell me."
"All right. You know about Jack's work?"
"A little." Stone recalled that Jack had been pretty evasive, but he had gotten a general idea.
"Well, it was dangerous. He tried to play that part of it down, but we both knew it. Anyway, whenever he was undercover he would call me once a week at a prearranged time. He didn't say much, just let me know he was all right. This week, he didn't call."
Stone thought about it. "Have you talked to his . . . uh, employer?"
"Yes, I've been harassing them all day, getting passed around from one minor flunkey to another."
"What did they tell you?"
"Not much. But the last man I talked to, a man named Bass, seemed a little more sympathetic than the rest. He told me that they'd lost contact with Jack last night."
"That's all he said? 'Lost contact'?"
"I pushed him on that. I asked if he meant that Jack was hurt or . . . or dead. He didn't know, or I think he would have told me. But he says he doesn't think Jack would be dead. Not . . . yet."
"Why?"
"He thinks they'd want to . . . to question him. Find out what he knows and who else knows it. After that, they'll . . . they'll kill him." Her voice broke on the last words.
Stone didn't say a thing, simply held the phone, waiting.
Kathi
got control of her voice. "Jack told me once that if anything ever happened to him, to get hold of you. 'Get the
sarge
,' he said. 'He'll know what to do.'"
Stone was silent.
"Don't you see?"
Kathi
said. "He's just like the others you've looked for. He's M.I.A. . . . missing in action."
Stone had devoted his life to finding American M.I.A.'s in Vietnam. It was what gave meaning to his existence, and it was his way of proving to all those who had been M.I.A.'s or P.O.W's that their sacrifice had not been in vain. Things were a little bit different now, but
Kathi
had a point.
"All right," he growled. "Tell me everything you know."
After he had hung up the phone, it had taken only an hour or so to get things in motion. Hog and Loughlin understood his reasons and were ready to help him, even though they understood the difficulties as well.
"We've made a lot of unauthorized trips into Vietnam," Hog said. "But that's a hell of a lot different from an unauthorized trip into Miami."
"We have an obligation," Loughlin said.
"You don't," Stone told them. "I do."
"Hell, don't go
tryin
' to talk me out of it," Hog said. "I don't give a fart in a whirlwind what those D.E.A. pukes think."
"I'll try to clear it with them," Stone said, "but I don't think they'll be fond of the idea."
They weren't, but it didn't matter. Stone and his team were going in anyway.
Like Loughlin said, Stone had an obligation.
They all did. . . .
I
t had happened in the rice country.
After a half day of slogging across paddies and dikes, mud sucking at their boots, their fatigues soaked through with sweat and the humidity that seemed to drop from the air and cling all over them, they came to the village.
They had watched it for a mile, shimmering behind a haze of heat coming off the green paddies. Nothing moved there, but that was to be expected. They had been told that the village was deserted. Headquarters wanted to know why.
The "why" was very simple. The village was a trap, waiting to be sprung on whatever unit first wandered into it.
Stone suspected it, and he had warned the men.
"Hell. Looks as empty as an outhouse in an ice storm," Hog grunted.
"I'm not so sure,"
Wofford
said. He was one of Stone's top men, and Stone trusted his judgment. "Let me go in first."
Wofford
stepped ahead, as tired as the rest but willing to accept the risk. He entered the cleared area.
Nothing moved, not even the wind.
Wofford
went to the first hut, thrust his M-16 into the doorway, leaned quickly inside.
Nothing.
The same was true of the next two huts.
Wofford
walked back to the edge of the clearing, facing the men kneeling fifty yards away. He was about to wave them in when he felt, rather than heard, something behind him. He turned, the M-16 already throwing lead at seven hundred rounds a minute. He was firing at the place where the ground had raised up behind him, at the top of the head in the tunnel.
The head shattered, the tunnel mouth slammed shut, but others began to open all over the village.
The VC began to fire their weapons—French, American, whatever they had been able to "liberate" over the years.
The trap had been sprung, but it was too soon. Stone and his men were safely out of the village, if not out of range.
They came in firing, knowing now exactly what they had to face and ready for it.
The Cong came screaming out of the tunnels to meet the American fire.
The Americans obliged them, and lobbed grenades down the open holes.
Muffled explosions rocked the ground, smoke streamed from the tunnels, the ground cracked. Stone shot a VC twice in the chest, driving him back. Bullets clipped by him as he searched through the smoke for
Wofford
, who had gone down in the first volley.
Beside Stone was Hog Wiley, closing with three Cong, blasting one with his rifle, held in his right hand, and slitting another from navel to neck with the double-edged knife that he kept sheathed behind his pistol. The third Cong turned to run and Hog's bullets stitched him across the back.
It didn't last long; firefights like this seldom did. In only minutes the village was empty of the VC and filled with a strange, unearthly quiet, with drifting smoke, with the smell of cordite.
Stone found
Wofford
then, still lying where he had fallen, shot in the shoulder and the thigh.
"Nothing serious, right,
Sarge
?"
Wofford
said, trying to force a grin.
"Nothing we can't fix," Stone said. "Thanks, Jack."
"Anytime,"
Wofford
said.
I
t had been just another action in a war that most people were only too ready to forget.
But Stone didn't forget. Not when someone went into an empty village, volunteered for the job, knowing that it was probably going to turn to shit but ready to do it for his buddies, for the guys who counted.
Wofford's
wounds had gotten him shipped out, and Stone hadn't seen him again until after Vietnam, but when they had met in the States, Stone had reminded
Wofford
of the action.
"Anytime you need me, just give me a call," Stone said. At that time he was running an investigative agency, which supported him very well and allowed him to engage in his real work—hunting for M.I.A.'s.
"I don't think I'll ever need a private eye,
Sarge
,"
Wofford
had said. "I live a pretty clean life."
"All the same," Stone said.
Wofford
had turned suddenly serious. "I'll remember."
And now he had.
M
ark Stone's missions into Southeast Asia to find M.I.A.'s had for a while taken him increasingly outside the law, until his unsanctioned activities had at one time actually placed Stone, Wiley, and Loughlin on a C.I.A. hit list, thanks to a gaggle of desk pushers who had not been overly fond of their "outlaw" operations, no matter how effective.
Those days were in the past, now. The government, realizing Stone's potential as a covert resource, had eventually buried the hatchet—a presidential pardon, no less—and Stone and his team, supported by a beautiful assistant named Carol Jenner, who had been with Stone since the beginnings of his M.I.A. quest, functioned much as it did before; except now they were based out of Fort Bragg and their sphere of operations extended beyond reports of American servicemen still being held in Vietnam and Laos—though this remained Stone's primary concern.
Stone's team was now sent covertly to points all around the globe whenever vital military or civilian personnel were determined to be missing in action. When standard military or diplomatic resources failed to locate such personnel, it became another covert mission for Stone's M.I.A.-hunting unit. . . .
S
o now they were going in.
Stone wondered what the flight attendant thought of them. They certainly didn't look like businessmen.
Hog, with his black hair and beard, looked like just about what he was, a good old boy who knew more about automobile engines and stock-car races than high finance.
Loughlin, his hair as red as Hog's was black, looked like an aging rugby player, one who always came out of the scramble a little better off than the others.
And what do I look like?
Stone wondered.
An old linebacker for the Dolphins who's played a down or two without his helmet?
"Hey," Hog called across the aisle. "
Whatcha
lookin' so serious for,
Sarge
? You think those federal pussies are gonna pull anything on us at the airport?"
Actually, that was something Stone hadn't thought about. There wasn't much anyone could do about them, however. They were just honest citizens, traveling in a free country. Still . . .