Cambodian Hellhole

by Stephen Mertz

  It was his fault, whatever had happened out there. He had brought this plague upon Ngu and upon his small command.

  Again he ran through the conceivable explanations for the failure of his patrol to return on time, or at least to report in on the walkie-talkie they carried with them as standard field equipment.

  The men might have deserted, run away into the jungle. It would not be the first time that the Army of Vietnam had lost soldiers in the field. Conscription methods were arbitrary, harsh, often used as punishment for some minor civil or criminal infraction. If the men had put their heads together, plotted their escape …

  Ngu shook his head and dismissed the idea from his thoughts. Those nine were not the best of friends; two or three of them had actively disliked the others he selected for the mission. They would never have agreed on something so momentous as desertion and a life in hiding. If they had the initiative at all, those who were inclined to leave without permission would have taken advantage of their alternating night watch long before now.

  They might be lost somewhere in the jungle, wandering around in aimless circles, too frightened and embarrassed to call for help on their walkie-talkie. It was not unusual for his troops, ill-trained and unfamiliar with the Cambodian countryside, to take a wrong turn and lose their way completely.

  But no. They were not lost. At least not in that way. Ngu could feel it in his bones, where a chill had settled in, refusing to be shaken out by liberal doses of the rice wine he had drunk throughout the afternoon.

  They could be wasting time deliberately, what the Americans called “goldbricking.” It was possible that they had happened on a native woman and persuaded her, through force or favors, to have sex with them.

  Rape was commonplace wherever Vietnamese troops were bivouacked, and prostitution was considered an acceptable alternative to subsistence farming in Cambodia. No shame attached to the sale of a daughter—or even a wife, if the price was adequate.

  Ngu considered it, and again dismissed the thought as a sterile rationalization. His camp had been constructed with isolation in mind. The chances of finding a woman—or any other native—in the immediate vicinity were small indeed. The searchers would have to go far before they found a human female to amuse them.

  And he knew, without really acknowledging it to himself at any conscious level, without having to, that they were dead.

  All dead.

  Long dead.

  As he stood there, looking out over the compound, their bodies, in all probability, had been stiff and cold for several hours now.

  The enemy would be close by, reluctant to desert their comrade in captivity, keeping close by so that they would not have to travel far to launch the night attack.

  And they would come by night—this night. Ngu was as certain of it as he had ever been certain of anything.

  There was no time to waste, for it was dusk already. He would have to get some answers from the one American clumsy enough to let himself be captured inside the camp. He would have to get the answers now, before the day got any older and twilight turned into blackest night, bringing down the wrath of whoever waited for him, out beyond the thin bamboo perimeter of the compound.

  He knew he could hold them off, blunt the attack and turn them around in defeat—if he knew how many troops he had to deal with, their offensive capabilities, their motives.

  No. Scratch that. The motives were already plain to him. They meant to kill him, wipe out his command, and carry off the scum he held captive here.

  They would not succeed. His career, his very life itself, depended on Ngu’s ability to hold the compound through the coming night. And to succeed in that, he would have to wring some answers out of the American infiltrator.

  Starting immediately.

  Mark Stone sat with Lynch and Page to eat his evening meal. It was rice again, still soggy, still in wooden bowls, but now in slightly larger portions, as if the day’s supply had to be used or thrown away.

  For all the nutritional value it gave the prisoners, Stone thought, it could have been thrown out to begin with.

  He sat with his back against the bamboo fence, forking the rice from his bowl to his mouth with dirty fingers. There had been no opportunity and no place to wash. Their single stop at the latrine, reeking and surrounded by a swarm of biting flies, had been for purposes other than cleaning up.

  No matter. With any luck at all, this would be his last meal in the prison camp, and he could sweat it out. He might have ignored the soggy rice, but they had not eaten since breakfast, and any fuel at all was better than none for the energetic evening that he had in mind.

  There would be fighting and killing to be done before the night was out; exhausted as he was, Stone knew that he would need every ounce of energy available.

  Already the sun was sinking beyond the western treetops, setting the jungle on fire there, spreading purple shadows in the east. Night was closing swiftly in upon them, settling down across the jungle and their little prison island like a silent cloak.

  It would bring Loughlin and Wiley moving in to blast them out of their confinement, bringing fire and steel into the compound like a hailstorm out of hell. Stone was looking forward to the break, anticipating the feel of an assault rifle in his hands, its buck and tremor as he hosed the enemy with unforgiving lead.

  Soon.

  From where he sat, Stone had a clear view of the CP hut. He could see the camp commandant watching through his narrow window there, and guessed the man was probably wondering, worrying about the failing darkness. He had to know that any raid would come with nightfall, and from the looks of the compound, he was going out of his way to be ready when it came.

  Guards were doubled all along the fence, a pair of men located every twenty feet or so with AK-47s. The dual lookout towers, east and west, that had been unmanned throughout Stone’s reconnaissance, now boasted pairs of soldiers, and a light machine gun each.

  Around the barracks, where the morning shift would normally be turning in by now, no one had gone to bed yet.

  They were staying up, standing or sitting around in groups, looking casual on the surface, but keeping their rifles close at hand.

  Stone felt a rising sense of apprehension. Even knowing that Wiley and Loughlin would have seen the reinforcements moving in when the work detail returned from the mines, he knew there was only so much that six men could do against a small army. The element of surprise, now considerably lessened, if not lost altogether, could only carry them so far.

  He was still wondering if Hog and the Britisher could pull it off when he saw the camp commandant emerge from his little thatched CP hut and move restlessly across the porch. Like all the buildings in the compound, the CP hut was elevated, built on posts to keep water and snakes from getting in, and the commandant’s footsteps echoed, reverberating through the floorboards of the little covered porch.

  He was looking for something, someone, and Stone felt a grim premonition as to the identity of his target. As if to prove him right, the camp commandant turned, making a slow, almost graceful pirouette, and stared directly at Mark Stone across the open compound. Their eyes met for an instant, held across the intervening space … and then the Vietnamese officer was scanning for a trooper, snapping his fingers at the closest uniform, beckoning him over.

  They conversed briefly, the soldier nodding rapidly in response to whatever the commandant was saying, flicking an occasional glance toward the section of fence where Stone sat with Page and Lynch. When the commandant finished speaking, the trooper saluted sloppily and turned on his heel, moving out across the compound on a beeline for Stone’s position.

  Stone saw him coming and grunted a warning to Lynch and Page, who had been deep in a whispered discussion of the coming break. They shut up instantly and were all silent, watching the guard with expectant eyes, when he reached them.

  Towering over them where they sat, in spite of his relatively small stature, he crooked a finger at Stone and grimaced, trying t
o look authoritative.

  “You come with me,” he snapped, backing off a pace and giving Stone room to stand.

  Mark Stone made up the difference in their heights when he got up, glaring down at the guard with such intensity that the rumpled little Commie backed away another pace and took a tighter grip on his assault rifle, just in case. He jerked a thumb in the direction of the CP hut, working on bravado and not quite reaching it, and Stone moved out in front of him, letting the guard bring up the rear.

  He had wondered about the abbreviated nature of his interrogation the previous night, and now he had his answer. As brutal and seemingly endless as the first session had been, it had been relatively short by the standards of any determined torturer.

  And yes, he had the answer, now. They were not through with him, after all. Instead, they had a day’s work out of him, adding another pair of able hands to the duty roster … and now they would be free to work him over at their leisure, through the night.

  Depending, of course, on how much night anyone inside the compound still had left.

  Stone gritted his teeth as he mounted the steps to the CP hut, brushing past the commandant on his way inside. The best he could hope for now was to hold out, hang tough until the cavalry arrived.

  He could not, would not tell them anything to jeopardize the mission. If they came up with something new, which they had not already tried but which appeared to be effective, he would die before he let them wring the answers out of him. He would not risk the mission they all had come so far and dared so much to accomplish.

  He owed it to the prisoners to succeed, even if he spent his life in the attempt. He owed it, yes, to all those others he had failed, and those that he would never get a chance to help.

  Stone owed it, finally, to himself. And he was grimly, finally determined to pay off that debt. In blood, if necessary.

  He would be paying it tonight, one way or another, and he would let the devil keep the change.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Terrance Loughlin waited in the darkness, alone, watching the compound below him, counting down the heartbeats to oblivion.

  They were still on schedule, from what he could see, and true night was only ninety minutes old. Plenty of time left yet to accomplish the mission and get back out again before the first light of dawn burned off the morning fog and left them vulnerable.

  He scanned the dark line of the river, taking several seconds to pick out the form of Hog Wiley, knowing even as he did so, exactly where the giant of a man should be. Lon Ky and two of the Hmong warriors were accompanying him, clinging tightly against the shoreline, taking full advantage of the darkness and the undergrowth. They were in position now, almost opposite the drainage pipe where Stone had made his own ill-fated entry to the compound more than twenty-four hours earlier.

  Loughlin had warned them about the sentries in the drainpipe, and about the charge he had planted especially for their amusement. He saw now that Hog and the others were giving the pipe a wide enough berth; when it went up, they should not be caught in the backblast, unless they strayed from their present places of concealment.

  One Hmong was missing, and Loughlin glanced away to the west, knowing he could never pick the man out in the stygian darkness of the rain forest. He would be in place by now, armed and ready to create the diversion they were all counting on him for. Another moment now, perhaps less …

  As if on cue, an automatic rifle opened up across the wide part of the river, near the landward end of the bridge. Bullets started thunking into the gate of the compound, drilling neat lines of holes through the bamboo fencing. Voices inside were beginning to shout, some of them seeking information, others clearly barking orders, as the defenders tried to think of some acceptable response to the challenge.

  A rifle was thrust through a slit in the bamboo fence, followed immediately by another, and they began stroking off wild bursts in the direction of the treeline. It would have been a miracle if they hit anything but empty air.

  Another moment, and the front gate was opening, exactly as Loughlin had hoped it might, and a squad of perhaps a dozen uniformed men came pounding out, led by a noncom who brandished a sidearm and fired it every third step or so, aiming toward the Hmong troopers’ moving, twinkling muzzle flashes. They were closing fast. Loughlin let them make it to the midpoint of the bridge before he raised his little radio-remote detonator box, fingering the fire control button.

  Below him, at river level, things began going to hell in a hurry.

  The bridge supports blew out with half a dozen smoky thunderclaps, and then the whole bridge turned into a crumbling, rolling lane of fire. Soldiers—and parts of them—were airborne, some of them screaming out the last fractured seconds of their worthless lives, the rest already far beyond the spoken word. Bits and pieces of the bridge and its occupants were thudding down along the bank, or splashing in the stream and raising little frothy geysers.

  Loughlin did not wait for the shock of that initial blast to wear off. Swiveling where he sat, he keyed another button on the detonator’s master panel, touching off the secondary charges.

  The drainpipe went first, instantly consumed in fire that devoured its squatting sentries in their tunnel, before they had a chance to register the shaking of the earth beneath their feet. One instant they were there; the next, they might never have existed.

  Finally the charges he had set against the southern fenced perimeter went off in unison, blasting through the stand of bamboo, clearing Hog and the Hmong an entry the size of a double doorway at a posh hotel. He saw them up and at it, moving before the smoke and falling debris had a chance to clear away.

  And Loughlin was on the move himself now, dropping the exhausted detonator where he was and picking up the CAR-15 assault rifle that had been lying on the damp earth beside him. He slithered down the slope, fairly crashing through the underbrush, no longer taking care to keep his movements silent. The defenders over there had plenty on their minds and on their hands, without worrying about some twigs cracking in the forest now, some sixty yards away. They could not see him, could not hear him—but the Britisher meant to change all that, and very soon.

  He was closing in for the kill, determined to be a part of the final confrontation with the camp’s defense. Loughlin had already done his part by closing off the bridge and opening the camp, by wiping out a dozen of the soldiers who would otherwise oppose them now, but he did not intend to be left out of the action after coming so far and risking so much to be a part of it.

  He reached the river and waded out into the frigid water, holding his rifle overhead to keep it dry. It was difficult to move quickly, but he did his best, forsaking the avenue of entry used by Wiley and the Hmong. The open gate was closer, and he moved toward it obliquely, passing bits of floating rubble from the bridge, and bits of bodies, torn and blackened, floating on the surface.

  Another hundred feet now … seventy-five …

  He braced himself for the assault and redoubled his pace, already smelling battle smoke and blood, hearing gunshots and the cries of the wounded and dying. Loughlin was home at last.

  After the sudden burst of automatic fire somewhere outside the camp, Stone’s three torturers backed off in an instant, poised and listening.

  It was beginning.

  Another burst, more sustained, and now, before the commandant could issue any orders, weapons from inside the camp were answering, firing blindly into the outer darkness.

  The captain looked down at him hatefully, seemed about to kick him in the stomach, then decided that there was no time to waste on entertainment. He moved toward the door, one of his orderlies falling into step behind him, peering through the window before he went outside, as if to make sure the attackers were not already waiting for him on his doorstep.

  Finally satisfied, he went out on the covered porch, calling to his men in the yard, getting responses, issuing more orders in a singsong, cracking voice. Within a minute he was back inside the CP hut,
leaving the door open at his back, revealing a wedge-shaped slice of darkness, prison cages in the background.

  “A feeble attempt,” he told Stone, trying to gloat and not quite achieving his goal. “My men will deal with yours in short order, now that we know their position.”

  Riflemen? What the hell?

  Before the grim interrogation could resume, Stone heard the telltale sounds of a small patrol racing out of the camp, their voices growing marginally smaller in the direction of the footbridge.

  And suddenly their voices, and everything else, were swallowed by the roar of rapid-fire explosions, ripping the night apart, sending tremors through the ground on which the stilted CP shack was standing.

  The camp commandant paled, losing all of his color in the space of a heartbeat, looking for all the world like a man instantly drained of blood. He glared at Stone, then raced in the direction of the doorway, his orderly hot on his heels. Over his shoulder he barked a single order to the trooper who remained behind.

  Stone had learned enough Vietnamese in his tours of Asian duty to translate an order for his own death. The soldier was moving briskly, turning away from him, heading for the corner of the shack where two AK-47s stood, propped together carelessly.

  It was now or never, and to hell with all the aches and pains that wracked his body. Stone would find his feet and move, or he would die almost immediately. It was that simple.

  He rolled over onto his back, clenching his teeth and biting off the groan that forced itself into his tortured throat. Curling himself into yet a tighter ball, he bent his legs at the knees, ankles tight together, sitting up until he could reach his heels with his hands. That accomplished, it took perhaps another second for him to slip his feet through the loop of rope that bound his hands together, bringing his hands around in front of him again, where they would be of some use for fighting.