When the nightly monsoon rains came they were caught out on a steep slope, but managed to reach shelter under a granite overhang. The blind drop-offs, fallen limbs and trees made movement all but impossible.
They decided it was as good as any place to wait out the rains. “I think we’ve left the boys with the AKs well behind,” Porter said.
She sat beside him under the limestone overhang and asked, “How can you tell what kind of rifles they had? From just the sound?”
“The sound and the glint from the barrels. It’s a signature of the AK, one of the few drawbacks of the world’s most popular assault rifle. It’s favored by armies, terrorists, revolutionaries, pirates and drug runners.”
“They’re that good?”
Porter took off his right hiking shoe and rubbed his foot. “They’re durable and cheap to manufacture. But that glint can be hazardous in the sunlight. Gives you away.”
He put the shoe back on. “The weapons were developed by the Russian Kalashnikov. If it had been his own corporation, he’d have made a billion from them. If he’d been allowed to issue stock, he’d be the world’s richest man.”
“He’s still alive?”
“Last I heard, a couple years ago, the guy was, like, ninety-some and still hanging around enjoying the fame of his labors, if not the fruits. If he’s still above ground he lives in the town where the guns are manufactured.”
“He must be very proud,” Kiera said sarcastically.
“You can’t fault him for providing a durable, high demand product to a world perpetually at war,” Porter said.
The four of them huddled and stayed quiet for a time under the overhang as the storm raged over the valley. Kiera dozed off and on.
Finally, after the pounding rain, the storm passed and the clouds opened up so they were able to see some sky.
Kiera stared across the valley at the jagged mountains that were like granite knuckles of a fist. “I think I didn’t take the rainy season seriously enough.”
Porter grunted, pinched her knee.
The guide and Narith talked quietly. Then the guide got up and left them.
“He’s going ahead to see the best way to go,” Narith said. “We need to get out of here before daylight. We’re too exposed here.”
When the storm passed, in the faint light from the moon and stars, Kiera saw something poking up from the weeds near them.
She pointed. “What’s that?”
Porter looked where she was pointing. He got up and investigated. “That’s an old Russian surface-to-air missile launch tube. I’m sure your grandfather saw a few coming up to meet him from time to time and probably brought down a few. Nice place for it. You have a commanding view of the valley. Most of the war scrap in the lower elevations has been taken or turned into war memorials, but up here you can still find stuff.”
He sat back down. Kiera leaned against Porter for some body heat. She ached in places she didn’t think she’d ever felt aches before.
She thought about the past, the war. So many had died here in these mountains and were never returned, and now she was here surrounded by the ghosts of the secret war.
After another light doze she opened her eyes and thought she was having hallucinations, actually seeing ghosts. But they weren’t ghosts.
The figures wore a mish mash of clothes. All of them had scarves around their heads. Boys really. Young boys and one older man. They carried their AK-47s at ready, ammo across their chests in Mexican bandito style. And they had the guide with them and for a moment she hoped they were friendly. Until she saw the guide’s face and knew that wasn’t the case.
“Just be cool,” Porter said. “We have a price on our heads. They wanted to kill us, we’d already be dead.”
That wasn’t comforting to her at all.
The one giving orders, the apparent leader, never took his eyes off Porter. He seemed to know where any problem would come from. The leader sent two men over to Porter and they stripped him of his weapon and pack.
Then they searched her. Thoroughly. One made some comments and elicited a few chuckles from his comrades.
Porter’s weapon was handed to the leader. He looked at it and then put it in his belt.
The leader picked up Narith’s flute, pulled it from its case and looked at it and seemed intrigued.
She thought he would break it, but instead he handled it carefully, acting like it was delicate and very important. He put it back in the case and handed it to one of his boys.
The leader then pushed the guide forward. The guide stumbled, his face tight with fear.
They’re going to kill him and he knows it, she thought. He was of no value to them.
The leader spoke in whatever his language was.
The leader fired questions at the guide and kept pushing him back with the rifle barrel. There was only so far the man could go before stepping off into space.
Kiera’s stomach knotted with a sinking, helpless feeling. She’d seen plenty of young killers before. She knew their thirst for violence.
The leader looked at her as if he sensed her fear for the guide and it pleased him. He struggled with words. “English…no good. Where learn. You…good teacher me. Yes?” He beamed.
“He’s valuable,” she said.
The leader’s eyes tightened as he looked at her, fixed on her and then he nodded and smiled, the vein in his neck pulsed like a trapped snake.
He turned, raised his gun to the young guide and shot him through the head and then, before the young man could fall, he gave him a short, hard front kick and sent him off the mountain.
So sudden, so fast, nobody could react.
Kiera’s breathing stopped for a moment; she felt sick.
The shooter said something and the others laughed. It was as if the guide was nothing more than a rodent to them.
Then the killer’s hard eyes focused on Porter and Narith. He said something and the men laughed again.
Kiera said angrily, desperately, “These men are worth a lot of money alive. You kill them, they are worth nothing.”
The leader shifted to her. She repeated what she had said and this time Narith translated.
The gang leader studied her for a long, intense moment. She gave no ground, staring back, hiding her fear. She had no intention of being cowed by this little sociopath, no matter the consequence.
He made another joke, then gave a sharp order and she thought they’d commence killing, but instead one of the men pulled what looked like nylon rope from his pack.
While his men tied their hands the leader walked off a ways and made a call on a SAT phone.
When he finished he came back and gave another order, and they began moving, she and Porter with their hands tied behind their backs and tethered together at their necks.
She glanced at Porter. He gave her a slight nod as if to say so far, so good. But maybe for the first time she sensed something different in him. He was tense and she sensed he was going to take any opportunity to do something.
Kiera whispered, “We’re what they have to trade. They won’t kill us.” She didn’t know if Porter was listening or not.
31
When the good news came Cole and Besson had been drinking, smoking and talking long into the night about the usual grim subjects: the disintegration of philosophy, politics, the end of American global power and the miserable state of the world.
And, as usual, he and Besson eventually went back to Vietnam, Dien Bien Phu, Tet, the collapse and then the loss of Hunter’s plane.
That’s when the outpost commander and Besson’s security chief came in out of the gloom looking excited.
“Monsieur Besson,” the colonel said, “Very good news.”
Besson ignored the colonel and spoke to the general in rapid fire Lao, which was a lot like Thai, but a language Cole had never had much interest in learning. The ax-faced man reminded Cole of a cartoon rat, one that seemed highly satisfied with himself.
Besson turned to Col
e and said, “A poacher gang grabbed Hunter, Vale and the radical monk, Narith, in the mountains north of here.”
“About damn time some good news,” Cole said, feeling a powerful sense of relief. He rapped the table. “How far?” He couldn’t believe it. He was overjoyed. They were finally going to know where that plane went down.
Besson spoke with his security chief who took out and unfolded a topo map on the table.
“It’s about thirty klicks southeast of the outpost. Very heavy mountain jungle. The general here commands that area as well. It’s in his district.”
The commander stood watching and not saying anything. Then he had a conversation with Besson, then relayed it to Cole. It seemed the gang leader wanted a bigger reward. And he suggested that went for him as well.
Cole nodded. “Pay whatever they want. If it’s too much, we’ll settle with the bastards later.”
The commander, revealing his ability with butchered English, in what Cole thought of as a caricature of Asian speak, “Errryone wary happy. We go morning.”
Cole, in spite of feeling an enormous sense of release, was sick of dealing with these people. And he wanted to shut it down fast. He’d been chasing this damn woman long enough.
“Why wait?” Cole asked. “We go now.”
Besson had a short conversation with the commander in Lao, before informing Cole, “Nothing much gets done at night. A few more hours isn’t much when you’ve been waiting decades. And the gang has to take them to a place where a chopper can land.”
Cole considered pushing the issue, but knew they weren’t going to budge and he needed this guy to give them clearance.
“The Hunter girl’s alive for certain?”
The commander assured them the girl was alive.
Cole tried to keep his excited anticipation under control. He knew the kind of people he was dealing with. But he couldn’t help feel a little bit of hope that this was finally going come to a very good end.
32
With her hands tied behind her and a neck rope linking her and Porter, Kiera moved carefully along the mountain, knowing even a stumble would be painful and disastrous as the rope wasn’t long enough—if either went down, they would yank the other’s neck hard. Both would be doomed if one went over the drop-off.
But when she slowed too much, the thug behind her would prod her with his rifle.
The bandit gang finally stopped.
This time it looked like they’d settled on a spot to spend the remainder of the night. There was a partial opening of flat ground just below them.
Kiera and Porter were tied to a tree at the edge of the encampment. Narith, for some reason, was not tied up. That worried her.
“What are they going to do with Narith?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” Porter said.
She watched the bandits build a fire and cook food like they were Boy Scouts on an outing.
The lingering image of their guide being murdered told her all she wanted to know about these men. They were bloodless killers and she feared Narith would be next. Killing a kid, poaching an endanger species, it was all the same to these hardened kids.
They squatted around the small fire eating and talking while Narith sat on a log nearby. They offered him food, but he declined. He sat stoically, the light from the fire flickering off his immobile face.
The leader again pulled out his satellite phone, then walked off speaking loudly to someone. When he came back to the fire he mumbled incoherently. He lit a cigarette. He said something and the others nodded.
Porter informed her, looking down to disguise the movement of his mouth, that it was a discussion over the ransom. A chopper would be coming at first light to get them and pay these guys.
The young men huddled on their haunches, resembling a troop of baboons.
They glanced at her from time to time and made remarks and laughed. She wondered if they were going to rape her. It seemed like a possibility.
The leader then motioned to Narith.
“What is he doing?” Kiera asked, turning to Porter. “Tell them I can get them a lot of money for Narith alive. Dead, he’s worth nothing.”
Her voice had carried. For an intense moment the leader of these boy killers just stared at her with a reptilian’s fixed gaze.
Porter said, “I think they want him to play something for them.”
The absurdity of it turned out to be the case as Narith was given his flute case. The leader ordered the monk to sit on a log by the fire and play his flute as the flames licking angrily at the night, sparks rising and dying in the wet trees.
Narith removed the flute from the case. He wiped it down with part of his robe. Then he began to play.
The madness of the moment, of this gang, these brutal young men in this forsaken place, with rapt looks on their faces, listening to a flute player—it really might have been a Boy Scout Troop camping out in the wild and having a great time.
The leader of the group rocked gently to the soulful melody of the floating music that followed, fading away with the fire sparks into the trees.
Some of the killer boys sat agape, as if stunned by the beauty of the music, momentarily pulled out of their predatory existence.
Narith played with his eyes closed. He played for a long time to these music-starved killers, their expressions softening, their eyes glowing in the fire’s light. Music so beautiful it subdued the violent audience.
It made her infinitely sad that their world produced ruthless predators out of its young boys. Yet she had no pity for them. She’d seen their savagery. They had lost whatever humanity they might have once possessed.
She thought of the Khmer Rouge and how they attempted to stamp out music by killing all musicians. The most frightening thing to Kiera was just how easy children could be turned into ruthless killers.
Porter snapped her out of her spell with a light touch of his knee to hers.
She glanced at him. He gave her a concerned look she didn’t understand. Then, picking up a clue, she realized something was going on beyond the fire, beyond the madness of the moment. She tried to follow the direction of his focus.
The camp, encased in total darkness, seemed as isolated as though they were on an island in a black sea.
She glanced at Porter again. He made no gesture, only a clench of his jaw, a tightness of his neck.
Again she tried to find what he was looking at. At first she saw nothing. But after a short time something touched the corner of her peripheral vision.
In the trees, past the men, past the glow of the fire, emerging from the Rorschach inkblot of the night, there was a suggestion of movement.
She felt a chill. She knew something terrible was about to descend upon the camp. Maybe a rival gang was looking to be the ones to collect the reward.
33
When it came, it came with stunning abruptness and Kiera was momentarily immobilized by the eruption of violence.
It happened in the middle of an incredible flute riff, at a point where Narith was doing his magic, the notes rising to an emotive crescendo, at that moment, right at the peak of the beauty was when the jungle erupted in molten dots, like bursting fireflies accompanied by the numbing staccato howl of automatic weapons.
She and Porter went down to the ground as best they could, but she never lost her sight of the campfire, the gang of bandits, what happened even as the rope around her neck cut off her air for a moment.
The precision of orchestrated brutality—visited within a matter of seconds of shocking horror—ended as suddenly as it had begun.
Those around the fire never had time to react to the ambush. Never had a moment to know what was coming at them. They died almost before the music went silent. They died before they knew who killed them, before they could bring their weapons to bear. It was a perfectly executed annihilation at exactly the perfect moment.
The one who did make it to his feet before the bullets took him down, fell into the fire.
; Kiera saw Narith alone sitting upright and she waited for him to topple over, but it now appeared, by some miracle, no bullet had touched him.
The ambushers then emerged from the forest, faces blackened, some wearing ragged jungle-style fatigue pants, others in tan khaki.
They pulled the body out of the fire and two of them beat the clothing to extinguish any flames.
It quickly became apparent they weren’t interested in saving lives, or preventing the stench of burning flesh, but saving clothes and boots and ammo and weapons.
With all that gunfire why are we alive? she wondered. She took this as another group looking to take the ransom away from the ones they’d killed. They had been careful. They wanted to be paid.
Porter pushed himself up and helped Kiera to a sitting position against the tree. Had the attackers wanted them dead, they’d be dead.
One of the men, a gleeful looking older guy, short, lean, almost lost in ragged fatigue pants and a black shirt and floppy jungle hat, but a man with the eyes of a cougar on the hunt, walked toward her with some kind of intent.
Kiera tightened.
“Koj tuaj los!” the man said, smiling, like he was coming to a friend’s house.
She choked back her apprehension.
This apparent leader of this new gang, ignoring Porter, gave her a manic look, full of strange glee, as he pulled a knife from a sheath on his belt, mumbling in a strange language, the blade flashing in the light of the fire.
I’m dead, she thought.
“It’s okay,” Porter said.
The man grabbed Kiera by the back of her head, not hard, but just enough to pull her to an angle where he could place the blade of the knife against her neck.
And he cut quick and sure.
Kiera closed her eyes, not wanting to see her own blood, waited to feel the warm life fluid drain down her neck. She felt the warmth and thought the worst, her life running out, death had come.
It took a moment to realize it was the false assumption that tricked her into thinking she’d been cut and faced impending death. The cut she’d assumed would sever her windpipe had gone instead in the opposite direction, not her jugular, or her carotid artery, but the rope around her neck, freeing her.
Lethal Redemption Page 13