Not anymore than we do, Kiera thought.
A searchlight on one of the chasing crafts snapped on and stabbed at them as the boat quickly closed in.
This was followed seconds later by a burst of automatic weapon fire from the lead boat still hundreds of yards away but closing fast.
Kiera ducked behind the boathouse as Narith drove straight into the tops of the nearly submerged mangrove trees of the monsoon-flooded banks of the swamp.
“Get ready to bail,” Porter yelled.
Kiera dipped her arms into the straps of her backpack just as their boat knifed into a tangle of partially submerged fronds and tree limbs, lurched violently sideways, slamming her against the boat’s small cabin, knocking her breath out for a moment.
They came to an abrupt stop, knocking them all to the deck as the boat wedged in the limbs of a tree. Narith scrambled back to get his flute case.
“Go go go!” Porter yelled.
They jumped overboard into the dark mass of half-submerged foliage.
Kiera slipped off a limb as she struggled to find footing. She sank in the water to her chin, reached up and grabbed the limb and began pulling herself toward the shoreline.
Her legs took a beating from the branches and roots, the jungle grabbing at her every move. Her backpack snagged several times as she tried to keep up with Porter.
They swam, waded and clawed their way deeper into the swamp until they were able to find the bottom under the waist high water, reaching slightly higher ground.
The speedboats had reached their boat and the searchlight slashed through the foliage, tracking back and forth, but restrained from getting any closer by the heavy, partially submerged foliage.
Porter and Kiera huddled behind tree trunks. She couldn’t see Narith.
When automatic gunfire raked the trees, she plastered herself against the slimy surface of the tree trunk. “I’ve never been shot at before. I don’t think I like it much.”
“Some things get easier with repetition,” Porter said, “but getting shot at isn’t one of them.”
Above them the chopper circled, a powerful searchlight like a white hot sword flailed at the tops of the swamp trees, but was unable to cut through.
***
Two hundred feet over the river, as the chopper dipped and bucked in the wind, Cole yelled, “What the hell is going on down there? I don’t want her dead. Goddamnit, she’s no good to me dead.”
Cole listened to the radio traffic as he searched through the dark using night binoculars. The yellow-tongued bursts of machine gun fire from the river boat sent him into a rage.
Christ, those morons. He couldn’t believe how undisciplined Besson’s guys were.
“Get men in there,” Cole said. “They better not be dead. If that woman is dead…”
Cole choked back his anger, his blood pressure pushing on every artery in his body and brain, thinking he’d never dealt with such incompetence. The Loa commander was getting well paid to handle this and so far he wasn’t doing a very good job. If he had acted like they were passing, left one boat further behind, they could have nabbed them in open water. Damn communist idiots.
Cole took some deep breaths to get himself back under control. He had blood pressure issues and stints in two arteries. But this situation was unacceptable. And it could end up causing some sort of incident that could metastasize into some international incident, as well as give him a fucking stroke.
“You need to widen the net now.” Cole, pulling his headphones back, yelled over the roar of the chopper, “I thought you had boots on the ground to cut off escape routes!”
“This is Laos and that’s a swamp,” Besson shot back with a flare of anger as the chopper bumped through the gusts.
After some conversation with the men in the boats on the river, Besson said, “One of the boats is moving on ahead and will drop some men to cut into the swamp and head them off.”
The chopper’s searchlight raked the jungle, but no light was powerful enough to penetrate the thick skin of the swamp’s canopy.
23
“Narith,” Porter whispered harshly, “where are you?”
Narith muttered something and they knew he was close by.
“He’s lost his flute, or it’s caught up in the branches,” Porter said, heading toward the sound of the voice. “We need to get him and get out of here.”
Kiera let go of the branch she was holding onto and followed, working through the tangle.
They found the monk struggling to get his flute case loose. Porter pulled up the tangles of branches and Narith freed the case.
Narith, his robe wrapped and tucked around him, led the way. They clawed and kicked and pulled their way through the tangle and back to where they could stand and walk deeper into swamp.
Kiera stumbled with them into the utter blackness of the swamp, tripping over roots in the water, hanging vines slapping at her like angry snakes. No other environment bothered her the way swamps did and mangroves were as bad as they come. She began to worry more about what creatures she might encounter than she worried about the gunmen hunting them.
When she felt something brush against her lower leg as they now waded up to their waists in water she jumped, thinking it might be a gator or a giant python.
Porter grabbed her. “Keep moving.”
“Something—”
“Just keep moving. If anything grabs you, I’ll kill it. Don’t worry about the crocs in here. They’re Siamese. They’re actually gentle creatures.”
“Bullshit. No such thing as a gentle croc.”
“There are,” Porter insisted in a hushed voice. “They are not nearly as aggressive as others in their species. They do a big service by actually creating the waterways between the rivers and lakes and the paddy fields.”
Gentle my ass, she thought. No creature with a two-foot-long jaw filled with nasty teeth is gentle. Porter’s attitude of nonchalance didn’t persuade her to relax.
It soon became clear they weren’t just going to walk out to high ground and find a nice path to run on. They were in a huge swamp and it looked like they’d be there awhile.
The heavy air reeked of decay and death and she heard sounds everywhere. And the mosquitoes hit in swarms and some were so big they screamed around her ears like fucking bats. The only light source came from some decaying vegetation that had a muted, greenish glow like it was from another planet.
If Dante didn’t have a rung that looked like this, she thought, he hadn’t gotten around enough. The bugs, snakes, gators, heat, dark, and nauseating stink from rotting vegetation, the muck, hidden roots, slapping vines…
She shoved away the dark thoughts, concentrating on making her way around a massive tree, climbing over its slimy gigantic roots. When she was clear of it she stopped. “Porter?”
She felt a little tinge of panic.
A hand clamped over her mouth. Porter pushed her down lower into the water and pulled her behind a tree base. Then she saw the reason. Flashlights probed the swamp well ahead of them.
She sank to her shoulders in the water, her feet sinking into the muck.
Porter, lips on her ear, whispered, “Just stay put. I’ll deal with this.”
He had his ever present Glock in his other hand. He gave her a little pat on the shoulder, like that was supposed to calm her down, and then slipped off into the darkness.
She swore softly, not knowing which was the worst scenario, going forward and risk getting shot, or staying were she was and risk getting eaten.
It seemed like forever. Then she heard the muffled shots. Silence. More firing. Then silence again.
She waited. It flitted through her mind that Porter might be dead. Then what?
And where was Narith?
The idea that she stood defenseless in a reptilian-filled swamp in a communist country being hunted by killers was an absurd reality that she couldn’t process. It had all happened so fast. One minute she’s boarding a flight out of Chicago all excited ab
out going on the search for her grandfather’s plane and the next she’s the most hunted woman in Southeast Asia.
The situation topped anything she’d been through in the Middle East. My life isn’t normal, she thought grimly.
She waited. And when the answer came it was Porter, then Narith, and she found herself able to breathe normally.
Porter emerged like a phantom.
Her opinion of him, already climbing, made some dramatic moves up the scale. It was nice enough that he saved dolphins and liked crocs, but that he could kill when necessary, and in a place like this—the man was in a category she couldn’t help but appreciate at the moment.
Whoever he was, whatever he and guys like Narith were involved in, she was very happy to have him as her guide. He wasn’t just some soldier, he was a goddamn warrior.
“Kiera, Narith, let’s move,” Porter whispered.
They followed him through the water and muck.
When they’d gone about twenty yards or so she saw one of the flashlights still burning under water, and in its dull glow floated a body.
Above them beyond the canopy the chopper, like some angry bird of prey, circled looking for a kill.
They trudged for what seemed like an hour before they no longer heard the chopper. The world around them grew quiet.
Finally, mercifully, they emerged filthy and stinking from the swamp and headed across a grassy field and into some bamboo.
Better air. More light from a partial moon behind a thin gauze of cloud.
Porter stopped for a moment and looked across the jungle toward the dark, odd shaped mountain peaks in the distance.
She felt a stab of excitement about getting up there and finding that plane, telling herself it would all be worth it.
“They’ll hire every mercenary they can find,” Porter said. “We need to get up there and out of the lowlands as fast as we can.” He turned to Kiera. “You ready for a serious endurance challenge.”
“I think I can keep up.”
Porter smiled at her and she felt his respect for her. Her ability to deal with seemingly any level of threat and misery clearly impressed him.
That’s right, this chick’s got the right DNA.
24
After the futile hunt and disappearance of two of his men somewhere in the swamp, Luc Besson’s chopper settled down to a small, desolate compound consisting of four cement buildings in a town that was now little more than a dilapidated outpost.
Cole ducked under the swirling blades of the chopper. They were greeted by the Loa district commander.
The main building, yellow in the moonlight, sported freshly painted balustrades, plus several military vehicles, a car and a lone chopper. It looked like a thousand such outposts in Indochina that Cole had visited over the years. There they could buy fuel and prepare for the mountains.
“Comment allez vous, general,” Besson said.
The general was full of vapid enthusiasm. He had a dense look to him and Cole figured he was ruthless but not overly bright. The perfect pit bull to handle Vientiane’s dirty work in this pitiful outback wasteland.
“The general wants to know if we have any idea where the people we’re after are right now?”
“If we knew, we’d have them. They’re headed into the mountains somewhere,” Cole said with disgust. That nasty little reality changed everything. They had no choice but to involve elements Cole wasn’t happy working with. Such as this guy. The Laotians couldn’t be trusted on any level. Besson may have his arrangements with a powerful apparatchik in Vientiane who, for a price, would let them do what they needed to do, but that price was growing. And it now included finding the exact location of the rebel Hmong, something those fools couldn’t do on their own in their own country.
They didn’t get the Hunter woman in the next twenty-four hours, Cole thought, this was going to become a full-scale nightmare. It could easily become a real nasty situation. Maybe even an international incident.
They were now the guests of a Laotian Communist commander’s hospitality. An irony that grew more interesting when the general started to wax on about how Laos was opening up to the West and would be building resort hotels very soon, like the ones Cole and Besson were invested in, and he intended to get in on the coming economic explosion.
It turned out he was thinking of a future potential partnership with Besson and Cole. A man ahead of his time and maybe a little shrewder than Cole had first given him credit for.
Apparently, Cole mused, in the soul of every communist lurked a greedy little capitalist trying to get out.
“Let him know how happy we’ll be to work with him later. Right now we’re going to need everything your friends can come up with.”
If this guy wanted to be a future partner, now was the time to start.
Negotiations in the pathetic outpost went on over tea, and the general either couldn’t speak English or, if he could, refused.
At one point the general went outside to take a call.
“How fast can you get the money for this bastard?” Cole asked.
“Not till morning.”
The general returned. He assured them that the fugitives would not escape his net. He had some good American Johnny Walker to share. He was very proud that he’d gotten a supply. He also had young girls from the village he offered for their satisfaction. Cole turned him down. “I have only one girl I want to get my hands on. But the Johnny Walker I can do.”
Cole needed a drink. He wasn’t feeling optimistic about any of this now. “Those triple canopy jungles swallowed up armies. They’re impenetrable. How the hell are we going to track them down if we wait around until they are up there?”
Besson spoke with their new associate and future partner for a minute, then turned to Cole. “The general assures that for the right price as bounty, every drug lord, bandit and elephant tusk poacher in Southeast Laos will stay on the hunt. They are already moving into the general area. These are people who really know the mountains and nobody can hide from them very long.”
The general, very happy with himself and a little drunk, left them for the night.
Besson poured another drink. “You know how things are in this country. We have no choice. They want something, we want something. To get what we want we have to give them what they want. Quid pro quo, my friend.”
Cole shook his head and picked up his drink. He mused darkly on his circumstance, thinking: I’m dealing with a fucking communist, an unreconstructed colonialist and chasing the granddaughter of one of the best operatives the world has ever seen on the worst possible piece of land on earth, the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And I’m now dependent on poachers and drug runners.
Cole poured himself a strong double.
25
Kiera, thankful for all her conditioning, got a second wind as they trudged relentlessly hour after hour through the night, eventually rising in elevation now.
The walking became a little easier for a short time on the gradual incline, but grew steadily more difficult as they climbed into the low foothills and slogged across quick streams and pushed through thickets of bamboo without the help of machetes or flashlights.
Several times they stopped to get their bearings and look at her GPS and rest.
Finally, in the graying mist near dawn, they emerged at the base of a steep mountain rising hundreds of feet, waterfalls coming down in long vertical drops.
There they came on the remains of a long ago abandoned temple.
In the ruins of the roofless building were pools of water that shone in the predawn like broken glass. And behind the building a larger pool and two fast, narrow waterfalls in a beautiful little alcove of rock walls.
Porter had water purification pills in his pack and an empty plastic water bag. He filled it from one of the thin waterfalls coming off the hill.
While Porter and Narith sat on a broken piece of wall talking, Kiera went off and stripped down to bra and panties and went into the water to wash and check for fo
reign creatures that might have attached themselves in the swamp.
She’d spent two weeks going up the Amazon and her greatest fear then wasn’t piranha, snakes or jaguars. It was those tiny worms that burrow into the skin, into the veins, circulate around the body to the intestines and lay thousands of eggs a day.
When she was convinced there were no bugs, worms or leeches, she washed and wrung out her clothes and put them on again before joining the men. As she approached she saw Narith slipping off into the jungle.
“Where’s Narith going?”
“He took off for a village to find us a guide.”
“He knows people there?”
“No. But going up into the mountains without a local isn’t going to be a good idea.”
“What if he doesn’t come back? How long do we wait?”
“Couple hours. If he’s not back we’ll have to assume he ran into a patrol and is being detained.”
“Then what?”
“We’ll deal with that when it happens. We’re committed now. One way or another we don’t have a choice. We need to get up there and find the Hmong, then the crash site and see if there is in fact anything there.”
She watched Porter swat at mosquitoes. “Aggressive bastards.”
“You have any Deet in your pack?” she asked.
“Deet’s crack to these mosquitoes,” Porter said as he searched among some dead tree stumps. “Squashed termites work really good. But finding a nest—”
“I’m not rubbing termite mash all over my now clean body. I’ll take my chances.”
Kiera took a good look at the ruins as some light emerged in the predawn sky, seeping down through the rising mists. She thought it must have once been majestic. Some of the still standing granite around the pool had chiseled in them multi-faced Buddha looking with philosophical solemnity in several directions.
Many Hindu figurines in bas-relief adorned the walls.
“Did the Hindus precede the Buddhists? I can’t remember which religion is the oldest.”
Lethal Redemption Page 10