M.I.A. Hunter

by Mertz, Stephen

  An Ling was not his problem, Stone told himself, not beyond taking her back to her father, anyhow.

  But this lovely girl did matter to him, strangely, and he suddenly did care very much what happened to her.

  An Ling. Lovely name. But so young. And there was Carol, waiting for him, back home...

  She abruptly seemed to get very tired, and leaned her head on Stone's shoulder.

  Hog steered the limo into the driveway of An Khom's. The main house still burned; the whole top story was in flames.

  An Ling did not want to look, so she kept her almond eyes closed. The slim fingers of one graceful hand, surprisingly warm, found Stone's hand and entwined with his fingers for a passing moment of human comfort.

  Then Hog braked the limo to a stop halfway to the main house and courtyard.

  "We'd better approach on foot. Wouldn't want that damn Englishman to think some of those boys were coming back for another round. And it won't be long before this place is crawling with cops and firemen."

  They left the limo and approached the scene of carnage, which had barely changed except for an ancient Chevy pickup parked well away from the blazing house. The pickup was loaded with crates. Terrance Loughlin was securing a tarp to conceal the crates, which looked to contain weapons and explosives. Loughlin saw Stone, Hog, and An Ling, finished his work, and came to meet them.

  They came together naturally, by instinct, in the aftermath of battle, without need of shouted signals to each other in the smoky stillness of the night.

  Stone, Loughlin, and Wiley all carried captured automatic weapons. Each was ready to kill again, on a heartbeat's notice, if the mission should require it.

  But the killing was over, for the moment.

  Together, they and An Ling surveyed the scene.

  Stone ticked off a rapid body count with grim precision. A dozen guns had fallen in the raid. There might be more inside the house, but if there were, they would be finished now, so much roasted meat inside an oven.

  "We'd better pull out," Loughlin suggested. "What we came for is in that pickup. An Khom told me where to find it.

  "Where is my father now?" An Ling asked.

  In answer to her question, Wiley pointed off in the direction of the manor house.

  "There. Oh shit."

  Stone turned, along with Loughlin and the young woman, and they were in time to see An Khom emerge from hell itself, a bundle in his arms. After another moment they recognized his burden as a woman's body, thin, almost unbelievably frail, with much of the clothing burned away.

  They ran to meet him. Old An Khom was kneeling on the grass when they arrived, some fifty yards from the inferno that had been his home. He laid the woman out upon the grass with gentle hands and knelt beside her, cradling her head.

  An Ling cried out and ran to their side.

  The older woman was dying; Stone could see that much from where he stood. The combination of her age, her burns, and the rasping of her breathing told the story plainly. She had suffered too much damage, inhaled too much smoke. Her ancient body could not make a comeback. Not this time.

  An Khom was bending over her, his ear almost pressed against the withered lips, trying to catch words that were less than a whisper. One trembling hand came up to touch his wrinkled cheek, and when it fell away again, the fingertips were dampened by the old man's tears.

  The woman gave a final shudder, let her breath go in a whistling sigh, and she was gone. Whatever had imbued her with the life force seconds earlier had departed.

  An Ling held one of the woman's hands and wept softly without looking at those standing around her.

  An Khom took a second to compose himself, then, regained his footing with an effort. For the first time the old man seemed to show his age, to bow before the years as if they rested on his shoulders. With a flourish he shed his coat and draped it across the lifeless face of the woman on the lawn.

  "My wife," he told the men, a tremor in his voice. An Ling rose and he took her in his arms in a sorrowful embrace. Then the old man quickly recovered himself and released her.

  "So," An Khom said to Mark Stone, "I owe you a debt—my daughter's life."

  He clasped his daughter tightly to him, again. For long moments they were locked together, weeping softly.

  Wily was looking at the dead men sprawled around the courtyard.

  "Who are these hair bags, anyway?"

  The old man gave a stoic shrug, as if uninterested in the question of exactly who had wiped his family out.

  "Perhaps a group of terrorists I once did business with—or else refused to. Who can say?" He scanned the field with watery eyes. "I do not recognize this offal. Paid assassins from the slums and rural provinces, no doubt. They follow orders if their pay arrives on time."

  Stone knew the type, of course. He had encountered them in Vietnam, in Laos and Cambodia—everywhere that civil war or revolution had uprooted populations, casting them adrift while teaching them that life was cheap and killing easy and profitable.

  Terrance Loughlin cleared his throat. "If there is something we can do?"

  An Khom waved the unfinished offer away as if it were a fly buzzing around his face. "You have another job to do, and you have done enough here already. Ours is a business association. You now have what you paid for. Our business is done."

  In the distance they could hear the frantic braying of police claxons. Someone in the neighborhood had finally called about the shooting and explosions, summoning what passed for cavalry in Bangkok.

  Time was running out, and they could not afford to be discovered there, among a dozen corpses, with those automatic weapons in their hands. The mission would be over before it really started, and a lifelong prison term was definitely not in Mark Stone's plans.

  "You be all right?" he asked the weapons dealer, nodding curtly in the general direction of the approaching sirens.

  "Yes," An Khom replied, half smiling now. "I know the captain of police. We have . . . an understanding. I do not expect much trouble. Anyhow, they cannot think that one old man could kill so many well-armed gutter rats."

  Stone saw the logic of it, knew that old An Khom already had a fix of some kind working with the authorities. It would explain how he could stay in business, storing weapons at his home. And clearly, now, his only fear had been of those on the wrong side of the law—the sort of men they had surprised here tonight.

  Stone's heart went out to him, of course, and he could almost share the old man's sense of loss, but he had seen too much and felt too much throughout his wars to let each death affect him personally now. It was too late for that.

  Chapter Ten

  Three hours out from Bangkok's city limits they were in the jungle, the capital's crowded streets and lighted avenues a fading memory. The road they traveled was still reasonably broad, but now no longer paved, and with each passing mile it seemed to grow a little rougher in proportion to their distance from the maintenance workers on a civic payroll.

  Riding in the open Jeep beside the native driver, Stone gave his undivided attention to the rain forest around them, memorizing landmarks that an untrained eye would overlook in passing, noting the direction of each twist and turn along their path. They would not have to come this way alone if things worked out, but even so.

  A careful soldier lives to fight again another day. The warrior who ignores his trivia, who bypasses detail in a reckless search for shortcuts, can become a memory in no time.

  Stone knew that Hog and Terrance Loughlin, riding in the back with all their gear, would be every bit as wide awake as he was. These men were pros, and even though experience had led them to have faith in their Laotian contact, you could never be too careful in a combat zone.

  Stone smiled, aware that in these days of manufactured "peace" the combat zone was everywhere and included every man among the fighting conscripts. Some men hadn't heard the call yet, and some refused to answer, playing ostrich when the call came, but the time was coming soon for all
of them.

  And Stone preferred to choose his time and place, select the theater of action where he risked his life. No more, for him, the orders handed down from faceless men on high. No more the commendations written in blood—the blood of other soldiers who had gone before to pave the way with hallowed dead. If Mark Stone was fighting for his own cause, and if the world should choose to stand against him, then the world had best look out. Because Mark Stone was coming through.

  The Free Laotian driver was an agent they had used before, but at the end of their drive they would be meeting unfamiliar faces. Mercenaries who sold their services to the highest non-Communist bidder. Today it was Stone and his commandos. Tomorrow . . .

  He put tomorrow and the next day out of mind, and concentrated on the road ahead. On either side the jungle closed around them, treetops meeting overhead to form a natural tunnel, blotting out the sun in places, dappling its light when rays got through at all. Down here, it might be morning, afternoon, or early evening. Days inside the jungle seemed to last forever.

  Stone was home again, but he was not at ease. The jungle sights and sounds were all familiar to him, something he had lived through in another time, another war. But there was none of the relaxed sensation that other men experienced on coming home. For Stone, returning to the jungle was like entering a crucible, he had been forged here, tempered in the fire, and more than once he had almost lost his life.

  He had come back to risk it yet again, and he would go on coming back, time after time, because, in the final analysis, he had no choice. By profession he was a soldier, and by choice he was a hunter of the lost. Between the two vocations stretched a never-never land where everything ran together, merged, and came out changed somehow. In his younger days he might have blamed it on the jungle, but not now. He knew that every man must make his own killing ground and face the dangers that reside there, every day, in every walk of life.

  For Stone the choice was preordained—no choice at all, really. He fought because he could, and therefore had to.

  He breathed the forest in, savored every odor and remembered other days. Patrols, and slinking through rice paddies under cover of a velvet night. The days staked out in ambush, when each shadow had a sniper or machine-gun nest, each vine across the trail became a tripwire for explosive booby traps or flying pungi stakes.

  And he was going back again, this time to liberate some souls for whom the jungle had involuntarily become a way of life.

  The forest held no terrors for Stone or his companions. The disease and quicksand, snakes and lethal insects were acknowledged risks, but they were going in with both eyes open. In another lifetime he had been naïve, but that was long ago, before 'Nam. The first two years of full U.S. involvement in that other war had seen more soldiers killed by insect bites than by hostile fire, but- the survivors had learned to cope, to live within the new environment and adapt to it, if not befriend it, then at least declare a grudging truce.

  The jungle could consume a man, devour him completely. Or it might just chew him up a little and decide to spit him out again, a hollow shell, devoid of mind or substance. It had done its worst to Stone, and failed. He was the master now, or at the very least a seasoned equal.

  He was a survivor.

  Like the men he meant to rescue from the living hell of their captivity. For all these lonely years they had hung on, surviving where it was impossible to live. As one who had made it out alive, and was now free to live the good life, Mark Stone felt he owed them that, at least. The world outside, which had elected to forget, would owe a damned sight more.

  But first he had to bring them out alive, so they would be able to collect their debt.

  And that would prove no easy task, if their experience within the past two days was any indication.

  In the driver's seat beside him, their Laotian driver was as talkative as a cadaver, answering the rare remarks from Hog or Loughlin with disgruntled monosyllables. Stone tried to think whether he had ever seen the driver smile, and finally recalled a single rare occasion—the Laotian had just drawn his dripping bayonet from the intestines of a dead Vietnamese.

  Without a word of warning, they were off the beaten track and jouncing down a narrow, winding trail, with vines and palm fronds dipping low and whipping at the windshield, sometimes etching little lines of blood on sunburned cheeks. A curse came from Hog behind him, and a grunt from Loughlin, as they took the downslope without braking, full speed ahead.

  The driver wasn't taking any chances with a tail, but Stone would gladly have turned out to wait and watch the trail behind in lieu of plunging on at breakneck speed. He checked the Rolex on his wrist and held his tongue. They were ahead of schedule, and he wouldn't mind a chance to check out the terrain before they made their contact with the mercenaries.

  He had never worked with either of the men before, and knew them only by their reputations—which were mixed.

  They were Americans with Vietnam experience, who made a living now by running guns and willing bodies over hostile borders, sometimes stopping off to fight a war along the way, if there was money in it for their pains. They would not deal with Communists, at least not knowingly, but there were rumors of alliances with certain other shady elements who peddled opium and other contraband along with their munitions. In any case, Stone planned to play it safe and not take anything for granted.

  After something like three-quarters of an hour, the Laotian started slowing down, almost reluctantly relaxing his death grip on the accelerator. He was sitting at attention now, if such a thing was possible, and scanning the green foliage up ahead as it closed in around the Jeep. Stone realized that this was new to him, and he was doubly thankful that their speed had been reduced.

  The clearing came almost as a surprise, and while the driver had clearly been looking for it, there was just a hint of the same relief that Stone felt upon his Asian face as well. He coasted to a halt within a grassy area half the size of a standard football field, but left the engine idling loudly when he parked and set the brake.

  Across the clearing, thirty yards away, a Huey helicopter Waited for them like a brooding prehistoric insect, giant bubble eyes regarding them impassively, assessing their potential as an evening meal. It was not a comforting comparison, and Stone abandoned it at once, preferring to concentrate on the men grouped around the military surplus chopper.

  They were lounging off to either side, almost too casually, as if the automatic rifles slung across their shoulders were for decoration and would serve no deadly purpose. One, an Asian like their driver, leaned against the curving windshield of the cockpit, watching them without emotion on his face. His rifle was a new Kalashnikov, and he kept one hand near the pistol grip now, not taking any chances with the new arrivals.

  The other two men were Americans, and Stone recognized them both, although this was the first time they had met. He had researched the pair of them, including some photographs, and he knew enough to write a brief biography about each man at need.

  The tall one, lounging near the chopper's open loading bay with one arm draped across the barrel of a sleek M-60 light machine gun, was Deke Hopkins. Over by the chopper's tail, just lighting up a smoke, was Leo Meyers, his partner. Both of them had served in the Marines, with heavy action in 'Nam, and they had passed the test of grim survival. But they had failed, somehow, in peacetime, when it came to laying down their arms and giving up the causes they had fought and nearly died for. They had failed—if it was failure—to adjust within a society where they were vilified as baby-killers, questioned about how many atrocities they had performed or witnessed.

  Stone could not have vouched for either man from personal experience, but he had been that route himself, and knew exactly how much pressure had been heaped on returning veterans. Ignored on one hand, and accused on the other—it had been too much for some, and if a few had found release through drugs or aimless violent crime, some others had found a way to make their training pay.

  Mark St
one had tried his hand at it, before his personal commitment to a higher cause had led him to forsake monetary profit in pursuit of something higher, more abstract. Like freedom, maybe. Like justice.

  Stone dismounted from the Jeep, working out the kinks in his legs a moment before he started off across the clearing.

  He didn't have to look behind him to know that Hog and Loughlin would be covering his rear, discreetly. This was unfamiliar ground, and these were unfamiliar faces. If all hell broke loose he might go down, but he would not go down alone, by any means.

  Meyers seemed to be in charge, and he was ambling out to meet Stone now, his hand extended in a greeting. Stone received it, shook it warmly, held the mercenary's gray eyes with his own. Something sparked between them, and Stone let himself relax a fraction.

  It was still too early yet for total trust, but he was on the way. Accustomed to snap judgments, and experienced at gauging men on sight, he sensed that Meyers and Hopkins were all right, at least conditionally. They would not try to stab him in the back or leave him stranded in the middle of the jungle with his neck stuck out a mile.

  "You made it." Meyers grinned around his stogie, letting out a cloud of acrid smoke. "We're ready whenever you-all are."

  A touch of Georgia there, and that fit with the bio Stone had filed away upstairs. A Southern boy who fought for God and country first, and later for the money.

  "Take a minute to offload our gear," Stone told him.

  "Let us help you." Almost as an afterthought, Meyers gestured toward the Asian standing by the chopper's nose. "That there's your point man, Lan Yang. He's Free Lao all the way, A-number-one in the bush."

  Stone nodded to the Asian, and got a facial tic for an answer. Meyers was on his left as they doubled back to the waiting Jeep, Hopkins falling into step behind them, bringing up the rear. At the vehicle, a cautious Terrance Loughlin had begun unloading duffel bags of gear while Hog stood watch, one hand upon the holstered Trooper on his hip. Meyers took the bearded hulk in at a glance, and whistled softly to himself.