Cambodian Hellhole: M. I. A. Hunter, Book 2

by Stephen Mertz

  They had traveled half a dozen crowded blocks before Hog saw the tail and tipped Stone to it. Mark checked out his rearview mirror, readily identifying the black sedan that seemed to be de rigueur for “secret” agents in the Orient.

  No emphasis on originality there, he thought. The C.I.A. team stood out sharply in the crush; they might as well have come with flashing lights and sirens.

  “Lose them if you can,” he told Hog.

  Hog’s response was a muted growl—and sudden pressure on the truck’s accelerator. They surged forward, brushing past the lines of rickshaws and battered taxis that were abroad even at this hour of the morning in Bangkok. One of the rickshaw drivers shouted at them, a Thai curse, and others were shaking their fists ineffectually at the speeding half-ton.

  The chase wound on through Bangkok’s narrow labyrinth of streets, sometimes veering up onto the sidewalk, speeding up and down blind alleys. Hog was grinning through the flyspecked windshield, whistling to himself, but Stone clung to his armrest, bracing himself with each new twist and turn for what seemed to be the inevitable collision that would bring them grinding to a halt.

  In the rearview mirror, Stone could see one of the occupants of the chase car babbling excitedly into a radio mouthpiece, beaming out a message to other pursuers. They might be anywhere—ahead of the truck or behind it, perhaps running parallel, unseen, on other streets—but one thing was certain: Carruthers and his crew had not taken any chances this time on being surprised or outsmarted by Stone’s team.

  Still, there might be a way …

  The trap was closing then, before the thought had half a chance to run its course. From out of a narrow side street on their right, Stone’s side, a crash car gunned its engine, screeching out to cut them off. It was another of the identical dark sedans—They must get some kind of discount, Mark thought—and the face behind the wheel was instantly familiar to Stone.

  It was Carruthers, yes, his face a battered mosaic of bandages and bruises, growling silently behind the screen of safety glass. His hands were locked, white-knuckled, on the steering wheel, and Stone could almost read his lips as the gap between them dwindled down to nothing.

  He would cut them off, unless—

  “Hang on, Cap!” Wiley grated, and he held the half-ton steady, never even considering a change of course.

  They roared ahead—and struck the government sedan a crushing broadside. For an instant it appeared that they would not get through, but then their weight and hurtling momentum turned the trick. The dark sedan was swept aside—first running parallel to them and grating close along the half-ton’s side with a hellacious grinding sound—and then it spun away, smoke and steam pouring out from underneath the crumpled hood.

  In the moment while their vehicles were joined, Stone had glanced down out of his window and found himself eye to eye with Carruthers. The C.I.A. team leader was shouting at him, lips writhing silently behind the spider web of his shattered window glass, and he was clawing at the pane as if he thought he might break through and throttle Stone by sheer force of will.

  Stone did not have a lot of time—but there was enough of it for him to raise one mocking finger, waggling it just long enough for Carruthers to see and understand, to get the message before Hog took them on away from there and left the smoking sedan behind.

  The tail car was closing now, taking full advantage of the momentary holdup, and now someone was leaning from the window on the passenger’s side, trying to sight on their hastening truck with a handgun. In the mirror Stone could see the muzzle flash, and then the bullet slapped into the canvas covering in back.

  He turned in the direction of the glassless window, calling back to Loughlin.

  “Take ‘em out!”

  “I’m on it!”

  Yet another flash, another bullet singing past, this one impacting on the door beside him, taking paint and metal with it as it ricocheted. The gunner was improving, and he would be doing better yet—provided that he got the chance to practice on his moving target.

  It was up to Loughlin, now, to take that chance away from him before he hit a tire and rolled them.

  Terrance Loughlin freed a CAR-15 from its protective wrappings and selected a magazine at random from the nearest crate, aware that all of them were fully loaded. He rammed the clip home into the receiver, and racked the rifle’s bolt back, chambering a 5.56mm round.

  Another bullet hit the tarp above his head and sliced on through, this one striking the metal roof of the cab behind him, giving Stone and Wiley something to think about.

  “Will you hurry up, goddammit?” the driver shouted through the glassless window.

  “Working,” Loughlin told him simply, refusing to let this hairy Neanderthal rattle him when they were under fire.

  He reached the tailgate of the half-ton, ducking down and undercover as he used the rifle’s muzzle now to edge the tarp aside. The gunner back there was not bad, and there was no point in giving him a human target sooner than was absolutely necessary.

  Just a peek at first, and Loughlin knew that he could take them anytime he wanted to. The question was, could he take them out and leave the crew alive?

  It was not certain by any means; unloading at a moving car that way, with automatic fire—he might hit any one or all of them, explode the engine or the gas line, send them up in flames …

  But he was wasting time.

  Stone had told him to take them out. Not gently, not necessarily alive. Just out.

  Loughlin rose to a crouch, bracing himself against the wheel well of the truck as he brought the rifle to shoulder level, sighting quickly down the barrel, acquiring his target across a distance of no more than thirty yards.

  The driver and his shotgun rider saw it coming—and there was nothing they could do about it now. The gunner tried to duck beneath the dashboard, but even that option was denied his companion at the steering wheel.

  Loughlin was humane enough to sympathize—and human enough to chuckle quietly at their discomfort. Let them taste a sample of their own medicine now, and maybe they would think twice about drawing down on others anytime they felt like it.

  Provided that they lived, of course.

  He stroked the rifle’s trigger, riding out the recoil, watching a line of tidy holes appear across the sedan’s grille, marching up and across the hood at an oblique angle. The hood blew off, the engine block erupting into clouds of inky smoke, and suddenly the dark sedan was losing steam, coasting to a dead stop in the middle of the street, while Wiley took them out of there and out of range.

  Before they turned the corner, losing their pursuers from sight, Loughlin saw two of them scramble clear of the burning car, dashing off into the crowd, perhaps in search of fire extinguisher—or, more likely, seeking out a place of shelter and concealment.

  “Done,” he told the others, knowing both of them would have been following the action in their mirrors.

  “Fine. We’re clear,” Stone told him curtly.

  Clear.

  Unless the Company had other crash cars up ahead, other pursuers on their tail, keeping in touch by radio.

  And what if they were clear now, in Bangkok? What did that say about the mission they were facing later—tomorrow, the next day, the day after that?

  They were a long and bloody way from clear, the former S.A.S. commando realized. It would be naïve—worse, foolish—to assume that their problems had evaporated with the stalling of some clumsy C.I.A. men on a Bangkok street.

  The heat was just beginning for them, and the end was nowhere yet in sight. They might be killed on this block, or around the corner, or …

  Loughlin cut off the defeatist train of thought as unproductive. It was no good borrowing trouble on the eve of an engagement, he knew that much from grim experience.

  Whatever was going to happen would happen, and the best they could do was to be prepared for every logical eventuality, every conceivable deviation from the script.

  In jungle warfare, you
could always count upon the unexpected. Surprise was the one grim constant in a nightmare world where black and white did not exist with any certainty; everything was murky, shaded, gray.

  And surprises were predominantly fatal.

  Loughlin frowned and kept the smoking rifle close to him as they continued on in the direction of the city limits.

  The nightmare was not over, he knew. In fact, it was only beginning.

  Chapter Seven

  Cambodia had always been a problem.

  Throughout the war in Vietnam, the jungle neighbor had been used as a convenient sanctuary for the Vietcong, providing them with somewhere they could run when the fighting got too fierce around the Mekong Delta and Saigon. At the same time, Cambodia’s so-called pro-American government had turned out to be so repressive, verging on the genocidal, that it had inspired a Communist guerrilla movement of its own—the deadly Khmer Rouge.

  The Communists had been victorious in Cambodia, as they had in Vietnam, but that was not the end of it. As so often proved to be the case, the Reds could no more live with one another peacefully than they could coexist with capitalists. Vietnamese invaders pounced upon their fellow Reds in 1979, driving the Khmer Rouge government out of the capital at Phnom Penh, and since that time, Cambodia—alias Kampuchea—had been governed by a People’s Revolutionary Council under one Heng Samrin.

  Samrin and his top aides were defectors from the Khmer Rouge government, little quislings who had seen which way the wind was blowing and bailed out in time to save themselves by switching sides. The Samrin government was totally dependent on Vietnam and the Soviet bloc for military protection and technical assistance; it relied upon world aid and generosity to keep its failing economy afloat.

  As in Vietnam itself, the artificially imposed “people’s government” was not without some opposition from the people it professed to serve. Survivors of the old Khmer Rouge regime were still at large, along with several rightist factions who remembered the days before Red rule had been imposed at gunpoint.

  Cambodia’s five million people were scattered over some 70,000 square miles—the rough equivalent of Bangkok’s population sprinkled across an entire country. The little nation had experienced severe depopulation in the past two decades, losing millions of her people to war and starvation, the flight of refugees, and systematic genocide performed by whichever regime held power at the moment. Right or left, the ruling powers in Phnom Penh seemed to view their subjects as a group of human guinea pigs, fit only for abuse and experimentation, targets in the testing of new war machines and chemicals. Slowly, surely—and lethally—Cambodia was being stripped of her forests, her wildlife, and her people.

  And the jungle hid a host of grisly secrets, yes, but Stone and his commandos were interested in only one of them. One riddle this time out, and all the rest would have to wait for other missions, other warriors, to discover them and right the wrongs that had been ruthlessly inflicted in the name of brotherhood and people’s revolution.

  The penetration team consisted of eight soldiers altogether. Stone, Wiley, and Loughlin were the hard core of the operation, but they never ventured out to enemy territory without some support, if possible. This time their backup force consisted of four sturdy Hmong tribesmen, the same fierce “Meos” who had suffered so much at the hands of Vietcong and North Vietnamese alike. Their war was every bit as personal as Stone’s—and in the long run, every bit as futile.

  The last man on the team had been selected by An Khom for his experience in Cambodia and his knowledge of terrain in the northern part of the country. Stone did not question his ability to lead them to the target, but he still had grim, persistent doubts about the man’s dependability in combat.

  For the guide was a surviving member of the Khmer Rouge army—in his way, as dedicated to the cause of Communism as were the jailers who were holding the Americans in captivity around Indochina.

  There was a difference, of course: this man had been among the soldiers driven from his homeland by Vietnamese invaders. He had a score to settle with the enemy, but for a dozen years and more, Americans had been the enemy for him. It was asking much, risking everything, to put the mission in his hands this way.

  And Stone would never have engaged him if it had not been for old An Khom. This guerrilla had convinced the old man of his evident sincerity, and An Khom was not the easiest man to put one over on. Still …

  He would bear watching, definitely—all the way. Stone would not let himself relax until they had reached their destination, brought the P.O.W.‘s out, and were en route for home. And even then, he knew, he would not fully trust the Communist Cambodian named Lon Ky.

  Aside from the small force in arms, they had brought along a pack mule to transport the heavier equipment that might well be necessary for their mission: extra rations, clothes—in case the P.O.W.s’ uniforms had been reduced to tatters by the rigors of a decade in the jungle—medical supplies, extra ammunition, and explosives.

  Just in case.

  The mule bore it all with equanimity, unprotesting, letting himself be led along by one of the Hmong, bringing up the rear in case they met an ambush on the trail.

  The jungles of Cambodia were indistinguishable from those of Vietnam and Laos—which was fitting, since they all had been combined into a single country prior to 1954.

  That was the year the French had lost it all at Dien Bien Phu, but the Indochina war went back for generations, only the enemies changing like the walk-on villains in some cosmic soap opera. The French, Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans—the indigenous peoples of Indochina had fought them all, and beaten them all, at one time or another. Now, since final victory during 1972, with the ouster of the hated Americans, they had run out of foreign enemies to fight—and they were turning on each other with a vengeance.

  Stone was well acquainted with the jungle’s dangers: quicksand, poisonous snakes and insects, huge trees rotten to the core and ready to collapse upon unwary soldiers at the drop of a canteen. He had survived them all throughout three tours of duty in Vietnam with the Special Forces—and he had been surviving them ever since, in his private capacity as hunter of the missing, rescuer of the forgotten soldiers.

  As they marched, he wondered what they would find waiting for them when—if—they made it back to Thailand with the M.I.A.‘s. How long could he keep flouting the authority of several sovereign governments, humiliating agents in the field, and going on about his task as if he was a law unto himself?

  The answer came to him at once: as long as he kept bringing P.O.W.‘s home alive.

  And Stone did not want to blow this one. He could not blow it. For his own sake and the sakes of all the men still penned and caged by hostile forces in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.

  The jungle was an old familiar adversary, and sometimes a friend—but Stone had never seen it as it was here, in northern Cambodia. They had been marching for less than three hours when the countryside began to change, the verdant foliage withering, dying. It was as if a blight had fallen from the sky to curse the plant life and the animals below.

  Scorched earth. He had seen something like it in Vietnam, where Agent Orange and other chemical defoliants were used to clear vast fields of fire and strip a roving enemy of food stores. But this was something different, something vastly worse, and on a greater scale by far than anything he had seen in ‘Nam.

  Stone overtook their guide, Lon Ky, and asked, “What is all this?”

  The Khmer Rouge warrior looked around with anger in his eyes.

  “The yellow rain,” he said. “Vietnamese and Russians test their gases, chemicals, out in the countryside. Many die. Many more lose homes. Yellow rain.”

  Stone had heard the grim reports of chemical warfare and testing—both from Laos and Cambodia—but he had never seen the hideous results firsthand before. It was beyond anything he could have readily imagined, even after all his years of warfare in the field.

  It was approaching noon when they reached the
village, moving in from the southwest, approaching cautiously to keep from raising an alarm. There was always a chance that government regulars would be found in the villages, looking for guerrillas, living off the land—or simply seeking out some untried village women to warm the jungle nights in bivouac.

  But not this time.

  From far away they saw that the village was lifeless, devoid of human habitation. As they drew in closer, Stone could see that every bit of vegetation had been stripped for yards around, as if the lethal yellow rain had been dumped down directly on the village in some kind of aerial attack. But, occupied or not, the village posed a threat. They entered on alert, watching out for any booby traps that hostiles might have left behind—or that the villagers themselves, in their extremity, might have prepared for ground troops who would follow in the wake of the airborne death-dealers.

  It took a moment, no more, to realize that this village had been dead for some time. The jungle will strip corpses to the bone in relatively short order, but the polished skeletons they found in and around the little clutch of huts were bleached by sun and rain, testifying that it must have been some weeks, at least, since the occupants experienced hell from above.

  Among the human bones were those of animals—the poultry and livestock that had maintained life in the village, and had died with their masters as the lethal chemicals came drifting down from overhead. The village was surrounded by the standing trunks and stumps of trees—but there was not a shred of foliage left within a radius of a hundred yards.

  It was like something out of Dante, Stone imagined—a grim, surrealistic portrait of the other side. Of hell.

  Stone swallowed hard to get the taste of death and rot out of his throat. The other men in his patrol were fanning out, checking out the huts and any tunnels that might be underneath them for evidence of life or usable supplies.