Stone was a big man outfitted in jungle camo fatigues webbed in full combat rig. He toted a CAR-15 and kept low.
Reports had placed a dozen M.I.A.'s inside this little compound, guarded by a force of twice as many North Vietnamese regulars. The overkill in personnel was customary, typical of Asian operations. Officers who were not needed elsewhere, or who might have made themselves some enemies along the way, were garrisoned to watch the P.O.W.'s, to keep them hidden until such time as they might be of use.
The M.I.A.'s were pawns, without official recognition, and if some or all of them should die before their captors found a use for them . . . well, in the eyes of their own nation, they were dead already.
Scanning the perimeter, Stone picked out the positions of his allies. To his left, Hog Wiley was a bulky shadow in the undergrowth, unmoving and invisible to any but the keenest eye. Beyond him, three of the Hmong commandos were positioned on the firing line and ready to push off at Stone's signal.
Jungle growth prevented him from spotting Loughlin, but Stone knew he was in position, with the other tribesmen backing him. They were professionals; they would not let him down.
He checked the action on his CAR-15 assault rifle, glancing at his watch and counting down the seconds in his mind. After another half-minute he felt the tension mounting in him, but suppressed it with an effort of sheer will.
Overanxiousness could get you killed in jungle combat. Patience was a virtue and a necessity for any soldier planning on survival to a ripe old age.
He finished counting down the numbers, swallowed hard to break the sudden log jam in his throat, and pushed out of the covering undergrowth. Ahead of him, a youthful sentry was lighting a cigarette, blissfully unaware of grim death gliding up behind him.
Stone announced himself with a vicious blow that slammed the butt of his rifle into the base of the young sentry's skull. He heard the snap of separating vertebrae and recognized the boneless, rag-doll sprawl.
One down.
On either flank, the others were advancing in cautious pincers, closing on the camp perimeter. They had not yet been seen, but any moment now . . .
A warning shout, the crackle of an AK-47, and the element of surprise evaporated like a morning mist upon the wind. At once the camp was on alert, its score of armed defenders boiling out of barracks and latrine to face their challengers.
A scattered, probing fire was reaching from the camp and peppering the trees, the riflemen still seeking targets, some of them too groggy for an organized response. Their officers were shouting orders in there, driving their enlisted men into a ragged firing line, but now Stone's men were at the fence and plowing through it, blowing tunnels with grenades and homemade bangalore torpedoes, clearing channels through the coils of concertina wire.
One of the Hmong was toppled on Stone's right, beyond Hog Wiley. He was sprinting for the wire, and then he seemed to stumble, sprawling in the waist-high grass without a sound. He did not rise again.
Stone fired a burst in the direction of the barracks building, and was rewarded by the sight of two defenders reeling, tumbling to the ground. He raked across the squat communications hut, advancing in a crouch and under fire, refusing to be driven back or pinned down by the probing, whistling rounds that sought to find him in the morning mist.
White phosphorous exploded to his left front, livid coals igniting men and thatch alike, the smoke obscuring half the compound. Moving under cover of the rolling cloud, he cleared the final strands of concertina wire and breached the camp perimeter, advancing on the compound proper with his team in tow.
Their target of the morning was a ring of bamboo cages in the center of the camp. These would contain the P.O.W.'s, if in fact the men were here at all, and Stone's commandos were especially careful not to fire in the direction of the makeshift prison cells. A handful of defenders had observed this and were taking shelter near the cages, sniping from behind what they perceived to be protective cover.
Moving silently, communicating through a practiced system of hand signals, Stone and his men closed in upon their prime objective, circling the bamboo cages, taking time to snipe the guards with grim precision fire. One down, another, and a third. Another moment, and the area of the cages had been cleared.
Peripheral movement drew Stone's attention through the drifting smoke, and he spun around in the direction of the CP hut. An officer was framed within the doorway, watching him from maybe fifty feet away, and in a heartbeat Stone knew he was looking at the honcho of this hellhole operation.
Something churned inside him, lit a sputtering fuse of anger, and he turned away from his objective long enough to loose a burst in the direction of the camp commander. Half a dozen 5.56mm manglers swept the doorway of the CP hut, gnawing thatch and clapboardâbut the target was no longer there. He had ducked back and under cover with an instinct for survival that had bested Stone's desire to kill.
But he was coming back.
Incredibly, the guy was moving back into the line of fire, as if to challenge the intruders, daring them to strike him down. And there was something in his hand.
Stone recognized it, felt the chill race up his spine and settle like a vise around the base of his skull. He knew at once that they had overlooked the obvious, allowing themselves to be sucked in like amateurs. Their recon should have been more detailed, more precise.
The camp commander held a radio-remote detonator in his hand, brandishing it like a band conductor waving a baton. The smile upon his face was mocking, hateful.
Stone recoiled, already turning toward his men with a shouted warning on his lips, when hell descended on the compound, ripping it apart. A string of charges detonated underneath the bamboo holding cages, spewing shattered earth, bamboo, and flesh across the enemy encampment. Flames leaped skyward, burning off the thready morning mist, their rushing sound devouring a strangled scream from somewhere in the heart of the inferno.
The shockwave picked Stone up and hurled him backward, dumping him on his backside in the dust. Through bleary eyes he saw another of the Hmong commandos airborne, tumbling through an awkward somersault, impacting on his head, and folding up like an accordion. Hog Wiley and Terrance Loughlin were farther from the blast, but both of them were flattened by the strong concussion.
Something struck the earth a yard in front of Stone and wobbled toward him like a squat, misshapen bowling ball. It took an instant for Stone to focus on it, to make the recognition, and then he felt his stomach turning over, his meager breakfast rising in his throat.
It was a human head, the hair singed off, one ear reduced to nothing but a bloody flap of skinâbut it was obviously Caucasian. Lidless eyes were staring at him with a dazed expression, almost questioning, as if to ask him what had happened.
Stone was snarling as he found his feet and spun in the direction of the CP hut. His target was no longer standing in the doorway, but through one small window he could pick out moving shadows, human silhouettes.
It was enough.
He rushed the hut, one finger clamped around the trigger of his CAR-15 and holding it down in full-auto mode.
He emptied out the magazine in two seconds and ditched the rifle, clawing an incendiary grenade from his pistol belt on the run. Stone yanked the pin and let the lethal can go without aiming, trusting rage and instinct this time, watching it sail through the tiny window, out of sight.
The hut erupted into roiling flames, the thatched roof rising on a fiery mushroom, then settling back again to trap the occupants inside and hold them there.
Except for one.
A nimble figure, wreathed in flame and screaming like a lost soul, stumbled free of the inferno, dancing on the threshold, vainly beating at the flames with burning hands.
Stone recognized the figure of the camp commander, and drew his Uzi reluctantly from its belt holster as the burning scarecrow staggered toward him.
He deliberately held his fire until the human torch was almost close enough to rush him, then thumbed the hammer back and sighted down the barrel, squeezing off a rapid double-punch that kicked his target over backward in a lifeless sprawl. The manic screaming ceased, and silence settled down across the prison compound like a shroud. Stone heard footsteps closing on his flank and pivoted, the Uzi pistol held out in front of him at full arm's length to meet the challengers. Wiley and Loughlin were standing there, regarding him with hollow eyes set deep in smoky faces.
And behind them, near the ruin of the cages, the surviving Hmong commandos were attempting to pick through the wreckage, looking for survivors, all in vain. There would be nothing left to salvage there, Stone knew, except scorched earth.
"We bitched it," he told no one in particular.
The others nodded silently and did not attempt to argue with him. Scanning back across the smoking wreckage of the compound, Stone experienced a feeling of despair that was entirely alien to his disposition. Guilt and anger mingled with the strange sensation, bringing tears of rage into his eyes as he surveyed the carnage.
Ten lost souls. Perhaps a dozen.
Blown to shit because his recon had been faulty. Dead as hell because he had not followed through and carried each hypothesis out to a logical conclusion.
His fault, yes, as if his own hand had depressed the button on that detonator, sent the silent message streaking over empty space to kindle hellfire in the cages.
The big man, Wiley, put a big hand on his shoulder. "Time to go, Cap."
"Right."
And there was nothing here to hold them, nothing that required their presence in the smoking graveyard. Everyone was dead, friend and foe alike. The best they could hope for now was to effect an exit, pass through roving border guards, and make it home.
They would be going out the way they came in this time, empty-handed.
The worst of it was that instead of going on a wild-goose chase, they had located prisoners of war exactly as predicted . . . and then got them slaughtered to the last man.
It was Mark Stone's burden now, and he would have to live with it awhile. Until he had a chance to compensate for failure with another victory. Until he had the opportunity to vent his rage on those who held his countrymen in grim captivity.
"Let's go."
There was a lifetime left for making payments on the debt he had incurred this day. Before be finished, Stone would see it paid in full.
The jungle closed around them, swallowed them, and they were gone. By slow degrees, the natural predators revealed themselves, no longer frightened, and began to feed.
"Y
ou must not blame yourself."
Stone pushed the dinner plate away and frowned.
"There's no one else. I was in charge. I blew it."
Across the hand-carved table, old An Khom regarded him with almost fatherly concern. The eyes set in his wrinkled face were bright, alive, entirely aware of Stone's internal turmoil.
"There are limits to a man's responsibility. Some things are meant to be. You cannot change fate."
Stone shook his head. He knew the old man's argument by heart, and none of it rang true. It would have made things easier if he could simply shrug it off and put the blame on fate or karma, but the gap between their points of view was generations wide, ingrained in each of them beyond eradication.
And while Stone knew that he had blown it, he could still appreciate the old man's efforts to put his mind at ease, to lift the burden of responsibility from his shoulders.
He had known An Khom long enough to realize that there was no point in arguing philosophy across the dinner table. Politics was one thing, business something else again . . . but when it came to matters mystical and pre-ordained, the old man lapsed into the archaic ancestral mold. It was part of his charm, the inscrutability of the East coupled with a Western instinct to aim for the jugular when it came down to money.
The old man was a weapons dealer, operating out of Bangkok, and he had grown wealthy in the martial trade. Stone had used his services on more than one occasion, when he had had a mission to conduct and needed some reliable equipment off the record, but their personal relationship was more than strictly business.
Stone had risked his life to rescue An Khom's daughter, An Ling, from the clutches of a rival arms dealer, and he had avenged the murder of the old man's wife in the process. Friendship had been sworn between them, forging ties that went beyond the mere material concerns and mutual interests of their two professions. An Khom felt a debt to Stone which he could never fully pay, and while Stone never pushed that sense of obligation, he accepted An Khom's friendship gladly.
"You must rest," the old man told him, rising from the dinner table, motioning for him to follow. "Let the war go on without you for a time, and seek yourself within."
Stone trailed him through an exit leading to a garden behind the house. From where they were, he could look out across the lights of Bangkok, which seemed small and far away with the illusion of distance. Five million people lived down there, jammed together in varying degrees of poverty and affluence, an easy quarter of them more or less continuously involved with the intrigue that had been spawned by Vietnam. Among them, An Khom was a minor legend, with his contacts reaching into both the public and the private sectors, assuring him a margin of protection which the less successful operators could only hope to emulate in time.