Minefield

by Andy Maslen

  Had this been an SAS mission, the approach would have been straightforward. Like the one on N’Tolo’s compound was supposed to be, he reflected ruefully. Set up an observation post then sit there for a couple of weeks until you knew what time every single member of the gang took their daily shit and what they used for toilet paper. Draw up the target’s schedule. Send in the kill team when he’d be alone and unprotected. Do the business and get out.

  Gabriel didn’t have that luxury. This was a solo mission. And he didn’t have two weeks.

  But he did have a plan.

  He reached the edge of the compound, keeping low and right on the edge of the track, then skirted the perimeter anti-clockwise, heading for the rectangular hut housing the gang’s weapons. His pulse was elevated, but he let it run on, the muscles and the brain needed the extra oxygen. Besides, this was the rush of battle.

  All the time he was creeping through the trees and brush protecting the compound, he was straining to catch any sounds that could mean trouble. But the place was quiet. No, not quiet. Silent. Jesus, I hope they haven’t bugged out , he thought. We can’t screw it up twice . He steadied himself and took a couple of deep breaths, then a couple of shallower ones. No. They’ll be sleeping. Or stoned. Too hot for mucking about on base .

  The armoury hut was just twenty feet away and, Thank you, God backed directly onto the path. Gabriel drew the Böker and stalked nearer until the rough plank wall of the hut gave him cover from the rest of the buildings.

  He pried off an eight-inch-wide plank already practically hanging from the rusty nails securing it to the hut’s frame and laid it to one side. Peering in, he saw a rack of AK-47s, an assortment of other weapons including a Vietnam-era American M60 machinegun, and a rough shelf laden with a variety of mines, mortar shells and cluster munitions.

  The M60 was lying on the ground, easily within reach. Next to it sat an olive green metal ammunition box. Gabriel pulled both towards him. He removed another plank and dragged them out of the hut and back to the shelter of the trees, where he hid them beneath a fallen palm frond.

  Back at the armoury hut, he extracted from his daysack one of the extra items thoughtfully provided by the mission quartermaster, and delivered via Tran and Neil. An olive green, spherical, American M67 fragmentation grenade. He removed the safety clip, pulled the pin and let the spoon fly away, then rolled it into the centre of the hut. He turned and ran back fifty yards, finding cover behind a tree.

  The grenade exploded and almost immediately the volume of the bang multiplied thirtyfold as the stockpile of mines went up in a burst of detonations that made the air vibrate. The small arms ammunition started exploding next, adding their insane chatter to the ruckus. Fragments of burning wood and reed thatch filled the air, along with the smell of detonated TNT. Gabriel readied himself. Curled his finger round the M16’s trigger. Checked the fire selector was set to AUTO.

  He counted.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  And ran forward.

  Any stoned bandits out in the open would meet a hail of bullets. No quarter given.

  But only one man had rushed out into the centre of the compound.

  A man Gabriel recognised from photos.

  A man masterminding the Cambodian end of a complex drugs-for-cash-for-weapons smuggling route through Thailand and on into the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Syria.

  A man he was here to kill.

  He raised the M16 to his shoulder and fired.

  33

  M16

  Win Yah had never minded not having his men around him. He preferred it that way. It gave him time to think. Time to reflect on the future. In particular, how to find a way to make one, final, life-changing deal with the Thais and buy his way to the West.

  His men would be gone for at least another day. You could buy a lot of loyalty with a few hundred dollars in this part of the world. Not that he knew any other. A couple of days’ drinking, gambling, whoring and fighting, and when the money was gone, back they’d come, fired up and ready to follow his orders without question.

  In the early days he’d been happy to deliver punishment beatings, amputations or summary executions for disobedience. But like many leaders before him, he’d discovered – slower than most, admittedly – that often, carrots were more effective motivators than sticks. Even sticks with four-inch nails hammered through the business end.

  Just as he was musing on his good fortune in surviving for so long, a huge explosion shattered the calm. He rushed out of his hut to see what had until a few seconds ago been his armoury reduced to a blackened patch of ground below a roiling black cloud of smoke. But the sight of the devastation, and the random pops and whines of exploding ammunition, weren’t what attracted his attention.

  It was the lone figure, carrying an M16 assault rifle, standing in the centre of his compound.

  Win Yah hadn’t survived four years under Pol Pot’s murderous reign, the ensuing invasion by the Vietnamese, and years of bloody civil war without developing a finely tuned sense of self preservation. Even as his eyes locked onto the intruder’s, he was already turning away. He carried a pistol, more of a status symbol than the AK-47s, which any kid could get hold of if they wanted to, but he didn’t bother using it.

  Someone, probably a rival warlord, had sent someone to kill him. Well, they’d regret it very soon. But right now, he needed to get away and regroup before killing the assassin.

  The bullets from the assault rifle snapped past his ears like hornets, but he was small, lithe and very fast and as he reached a path winding through a group of small huts he knew he was safe.

  Beyond the huts was the forest. Without telling his men, Win Yah had cleared his own, personal escape route. Over the years, he had extended the track for half a mile until it met the metalled road. Buried in the bush was a second Toyota Hilux pickup, gassed up and ready to go, with the key resting on top of a rear tyre.

  He ran down the track now, rehearsing the sequence of movements that would get him safely inside the cab and cheating death once more.

  34

  The Fourth Mine

  Even though the M16 was set to fully automatic fire, Gabriel didn’t go crazy, spraying the whole magazine at the target in a couple of seconds. But the man was fast. He must have been ready for an attack at any time, so hadn’t wandered out into the compound, staring around him in shock and waiting to be gunned down. Instead he’d set off like a startled antelope, turning and twisting as he ran and evading Gabriel’s bullets. Gabriel, fearing his man would escape into the dense forest, stopped running, aimed more carefully and fired a short burst at Win Yah’s back.

  Win Yah screamed as the 5.56mm rounds tore into the soft flesh of his right buttock and thigh. Blood and tissue erupted from the impact points as the rounds blew up wound cavities inside his muscles. He stumbled and lurched leftwards off the path.

  What happened next seemed to happen in slow motion.

  He staggered a few steps and stuck his hand out to steady himself against a narrow tree trunk. Little more than a sapling, really.

  His right leg, now soaked with blood from hip to shin, was dragging but he came down hard on his left .

  Gabriel saw a small cloud of bluish-grey smoke and a yellow-white flash. He heard a sharp, percussive pop.

  Something green and cylindrical, the size of a tin of baked beans, jumped up in front of Win Yah.

  Gabriel dived to the ground, smacking hard into the hard-packed red earth.

  The cylinder reached the top of its ascent when it was level with Win Yah’s midriff.

  Then it exploded.

  Gabriel heard the fragments of metal whistle through the air above him. Heard Win Yah’s scream. And the thump as his body toppled to the ground.

  He jumped to his feet and ran towards the fallen warlord.

  The mine was a Russian-made OZM-3 “bounding” model, aka a “Bouncing Betty”. It had been designed to jump up to roughly waist-he
ight before the main charge detonated. Win Yah’s abdomen had been ripped open, and a slithering mass of viscera – purplish-silver, yellow, dark red – had tumbled onto the ground. Blood was jetting from the severed aorta and flowing from his mouth, nose and ears.

  The man would bleed out in under a minute, but Gabriel pulled the Sig from its holster and shot him between the eyes. Then he walked back the way he had come. Feeling nothing but a sense of accomplishment. Bringing death to those who deserved it was a hell of a lot different from being the unwitting fool who opened the door and let it in to the lives of those who didn’t.

  The task was complete; the mission wasn’t. The warlord was dead and his materiel destroyed. But the men who had terrorised and extorted the villagers in this part of Cambodia would simply elect a new leader and carry on as before. Gabriel had no intention of letting that happen.

  He reached the compound’s eastern fringe. The place was still deserted. Despite the recent destruction of the armoury, the forest was already filled with birdsong, monkey calls and the incessant chittering buzz of millions of insects.

  He walked to the tree behind which he’d hidden the M60 and lifted the machinegun by its carrying handle. With the metal box of ammunition belts in his other hand he trotted over to Win Yah’s hut. There, he set up the M60 on an upturned Angkor Beer crate, spreading the legs of the bipod wide and settling the feet on the soft wood. He fitted a 100-round ammunition belt through the feedway and released the safety lever. Ready to fire.

  Then he settled his back against the door post. And waited for the dead warlord’s gang to return to base for the last time. What would the politicians back in the UK say if they knew he was here, primed to kill a couple of dozen Cambodian bandits in cold blood? No prisoners taken. No warning shouted. What would the media say? The human rights organisations? It didn’t matter. They were there and he was here.

  Since joining The Department, Gabriel had seen too much of the evil that men – and women – did to care about the chatter around posh London dining tables. Let the journalists, the lawyers, the activists and the politicians condemn, call for greater supervision, start petitions, write open letters to the papers, and revel in the whole rigmarole of liberal handwringing. Out here, in a country still reeling from thirty years of war, where the men now in charge had once filled their days bashing babies’ brains out against trees and marching their parents off to the killing fields, the reality was simpler, starker, and, at times, more brutal.

  He thought of Lina Ly again. The journalist had shared a little of her background with him during his previous visit to Cambodia. The story of her escape from the genocide while the Khmer Rouge were marching her entire family off to be murdered had stirred something inside him.

  Every soldier knows of massacres. Some are taught at staff colleges as lessons on obeying the Law of War, like My Lai in Vietnam and Srebrenica in Bosnia. Others are perhaps witnessed and never spoken about. Only to rear their fearful heads in nightmares from which men wrench themselves, sweating and crying to be held, if they’re lucky, by their wives or girlfriends, or if not, in the soothing embrace of whatever alcohol they keep under the bed. But to meet someone, to share a bed with someone, who had come so close to extermination, to hear her dry-eyed recounting of the tale while trying to imagine a young girl’s raw terror ... that made the statistics of genocides past and present real.

  The men he was waiting for might have been pressed into service, or they might have joined the Khmer Rouge willingly. It didn’t matter. Not to Gabriel. Not now. They had become killers. Murderers. Now they were terrorising a new generation of Cambodians. And they would start to recruit them and pass on their trade. He had to break the chain.

  35

  M60

  He slept when the sun went down, briefly turning the sky a deep orange, and awoke at dawn. Leaving his post only for the minimum necessary, he waited on, constructing a makeshift shelter out of a section of thatch from the hut’s roof when the sun was at its height.

  At 2.25 p.m. a swell of competing male voices from the other side of the compound jerked him out of a daydream. Win Yah’s men were returning.

  Later ...

  ... when the last, spinning, 7.62mm cartridge case had plinked to the ground to join the hundreds of its fellows that lay scattered all around Gabriel ...

  ... when the M60’s snarling roar had fallen silent …

  … when the screams had ended …

  ... when the red-hot barrel had begun to cool .. .

  ... when the sharp tang of burnt propellant and hot brass had dispersed a little ...

  ... when the cloud of blue-grey gunsmoke had spread upwards into the tree canopy to create a cage of sunbeams around the compound’s central yard ...

  ... Gabriel got to his feet.

  His back was sore and his hands and wrists felt as though an electric current were running through them. His ears were ringing. His nose itched. And throughout his body, in every muscle, every organ, every bone, vein, artery and nerve fibre, the adrenaline ran like a drug.

  The compound reeked of blood. Two dozen bandits lay dead, their bodies torn apart by the destructive firepower of the M60. Gabriel stood for a while, surveying the charnel house he had created, wondering whether feelings of self-loathing, disgust or shame would come knocking at the rear doors of his consciousness.

  The doors remained undisturbed. He had done what he had come to do.

  Apart from a few new scratches and dings where pieces of the exploding armoury had hit it, Win Yah’s Hilux was in perfectly driveable condition. Thirty minutes later, Gabriel was driving back towards the guest house at a very law-abiding 50 mph. The truck bed housed an impressive collection of automatic and semi-automatic weapons beneath a pile of timber. Gabriel had a simple plan if he encountered any cops. Out with the wallet. Pay the saamnauk . No haggling.

  In the event, he reached the safety of the guest house without encountering anything more inconvenient than a farm trailer loaded with an entire family, plus two dogs and a scrawny white cow. He wanted desperately to see Eli, but the weapons were his first concern .

  He drove past the house and down the gravel track to the swimming hole. “Hole” was a poor term to describe the rectangular artificial lake the size of an Olympic swimming pool fed by an underground spring. Jorani had warned him and Eli on the first day about the swimming hole. The end near the thatched cabanas where guests could eat or swing in the hammocks was only three metres deep, but at the far end, where the track curved round the pump house, it dropped to seven.

  It was here that he pulled up. After unloading the timber, he took the weapons, the longs and the shorts in turn, and flung them out over the opaque green water, beginning with the M60. Forty times he repeated the sequence of moves until it attained an almost graceful rhythm. Forty times he rid Cambodia of another killing machine. Forty times a Kalashnikov, a Makarov or a Tokarev splashed into the water to sink for ever. Put beyond use, unless bottom-dwelling creatures could lay their eggs beneath them or inside their barrels.

  Back at the house, he pushed open the front door and entered the blissfully cool air-conditioned interior.

  “Eli? Jorani?” he called.

  36

  Honour is Mine

  The children came running. Grinning widely, they shouted “Hello, hello! How are you?” before taking his hands in theirs. Chattering away in a mixture of English and Khmer, they led him along the corridor and down a short flight of steps, to the conservatory at the rear of the house.

  And there, occupying two brass-bound teak steamer chairs, sat Eli and Jorani. Cream blinds shaded them from the late afternoon sun. A ceiling fan cooled them.

  The two women had tall glasses beside them on rattan tables. Glasses filled with a pale-green liquid and stuffed full of ice cubes and mint leaves. They both looked up as the children announced his arrival in excited voices. Jorani stood and embraced Gabriel. Then dipped her head and slid past him.

  Eli smiled at Gabrie
l, a thousand-watt expression that he knew he could never live without.

  He leant down and kissed her on the forehead. It was warm, not burning. He lingered there while he inhaled her scent: lemon, clean skin and something herbal from the burn salve.

  When he straightened, Eli spoke.

  “What took you so long? ”

  “Tidying up loose ends.”

  Eli grinned.

  “Paperwork, you mean? Filling in expenses forms?”

  “Something like that.”

  Gabriel and Eli met on the rear deck at 9.00 p.m. to find Jorani and Borey drinking Angkor beers. Together, the quartet looked out over the thousands of square miles of forest stretching before them, lit by a full moon that rendered the trees a pewter grey.

  Gabriel stared up at the moon. He closed his eyes and inhaled the fragrance of the forest, which mingled with the lemongrass, ginger and garlic aromas wafting out from the kitchen. What had Master Zhao said about how to live your life?

  “Live your life today. Do not look back, for the past is unchanging. Do not look forward, for the future is unknowable. Be here, now. Do good, now.”

  I hope I do, Master , he said silently. I hope you would be proud .

  And a voice whispered to him on the breeze from the east.

  Always, Wolfe Cub. Always.

  The End

  Copyright

  © 2018 Andy Maslen

  Published by

  Tyton Press, an imprint of

  Sunfish Ltd

  PO Box 2107

  Salisbury SP2 2BW

  T: 0844 502 2061

  www.andymaslen.com

  The right of Andy Maslen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.