"How far?" Stone asked him simply, knowing there would be no need for more elaboration of his question.
"Close. Maybe two clicks . . . that way."
A thumb jerked up and backward, over his left shoulder, in a generally northerly direction:
"And you're sure it's still there?" Loughlin prodded. Lan Vang could only shrug and shake his head.
"All were there a week ago," he told the Brit. "I have not seen them since, but I think they do not move away so soon."
"You think," Hog Wiley grumbled, sitting down slowly, his back against a tree, with the CAR-15 upright between his knees.
The Laotian shrugged again, but did not answer. Stone knew that his information might be out of date, but there was nothing they could do about it now. There was no such thing as late-breaking news out of occupied Laos; a manhunter had to take the morsels he could get and use them to his best advantage, praying all the time that weather or some whim of the commanding officer would not remove his targets long before he reached them.
If the camp was gone, then they had come for nothing, wasting time and risking life in vain. But if the prisoners were there, then it would be worth anything to take them out alive and kicking, right from underneath the noses of their Vietnamese tormentors.
Stone sat down to wait for darkness, and made his mind a blank against the nagging doubts and questions that pressed in upon him in a rush. They would all be answered in due time, when darkness fell. Until that time, Stone nodded, dozed . . . and finally slept. His dreams were dark, and filled with blood.
Chapter Fourteen
Another jungle night, the crescent moon a fraction larger now, but still almost invisible among the looming trees and undergrowth. There would be little light to go by in the forest—and perhaps too much inside the prison camp itself.
Mark Stone was crouching in a clump of ferns, Hog Wiley close beside him in the humid darkness. Terrance Loughlin and Lan Vang would both be in position by this time, some fifty yards to either side and ready to provide covering fire at need. It was a crude encircling maneuver, and an incomplete one at that, but it was the best they could hope to accomplish under the circumstances.
Just ahead of them, across another thirty yards of obviously manmade clearing, lay the prison camp. A fire was burning in the center of the compound, giving them distorted shadow-views of everything that lay within, and there were several lights that Stone identified as running off a generator housed somewhere inside the camp.
The hour was approaching midnight, earlier than Stone liked, but they would need the darkness for their cloak as they retreated with the prisoners, and a raid at dawn would not allow them time to make a getaway: It would be now, or not until tomorrow night—and every extra day spent in the jungle near the camp increased the odds of their discovery and capture or their deaths.
Hog and Stone were scanning, memorizing details of the camp from where they crouched, invisible in darkness. Stone had marked the sentries—three of them, circling the long perimeter irregularly, sometimes doubling back upon their steps to cover a particular stretch of ground twice before moving on. It was an effective system, but still far from foolproof. Designed, from the look of it, to make sure no one got out of the camp, it might still allow one grim, determined warrior to get in.
The camp itself was typical of other villages and campsites that Stone recalled from his tours in Vietnam. Buildings carved out of the living jungle, built with lumber at a minimum, thatched roofs in place of shingles. Crude structures, certainly, but nothing new to the Vietnamese who spent their off-duty hours inside, away from the steamy jungle heat. They would be country boys, most of them—and that meant jungle dwellers, whether north or south, accustomed to the rustic way of life and all its hardships. They would be at home beneath the thatch, if not exactly comfortable.
There was nothing in the way of fencing to prevent his entry. They were counting on security inside the camp, and then relying on the jungle as a sort of natural obstacle course to slow the prisoners down in case of an escape. It was a workable plan, but it did not provide for any sort of outside interference. There were weaknesses, and Stone would have a use for each and every one of them before the night was done.
A quick count of the buildings showed him a lighted command hut, away to his left, or north. Two barracks buildings, long and low, each capable of housing twenty men, were close together near the CP, and three more were stationed on his right, in a sort of semicircle that reminded him of covered wagons positioned to ward off Indian attack. The generator hut was near the southern barracks grouping, and his target of the moment, the confinement cages, were dead-center in the compound, with some other shacks of undetermined use nearby.
He pondered the number of soldiers that the camp was clearly able to accommodate. From the number of crude bamboo cages in the camp, he would have thought the number of Viet troops excessive for the job they had to do. No matter, they were here, and he would have to work around them if he didn't want to go right through them. Given a choice, Stone would prefer to work within the darkness, slip his target personnel away before the enemy knew what he was doing. But if it came down to a fire-fight...
Well, the four of them would simply have to do the work of ten men each. No sweat.
Like hell.
"You sure about this?" Hog asked him in a whisper, close beside him on his left.
"No way around it," Stone replied. "It's what we're here for."
"Roger that. But watch your ass in there. I can't see everything at once."
Stone grinned at his burly friend in the jungle darkness. "I'll do that," he promised. "Just see to it that you stay awake back here, and keep in touch."
"You got it, man."
He waited for the nearest guard to make his pass, then double back upon his track, repeating twenty yards of scanning with a sluggish step before returning to his course and heading off behind the nearest barracks on the right. It was now or never, and Mark Stone was ready for it, primed to go.
Like all the others, he was decked out in a suit of jungle camouflage, face and hands blackened with combat cosmetic creams. He held the CAR-15 at the alert, but he was hoping that he wouldn't have to use it, for a single shot would bring the whole encampment down upon him at the double. This time, he had his silencer-equipped Beretta for the job.
It was to be a silent probe, reconnaissance in depth, with contact made among the target personnel if time and circumstances should permit. He would touch base, get the lay of the land from inside the camp, and then withdraw to plan the final thrust with Hog and Loughlin, leaving time to pull it off before dawn.
A simple plan, but then that kind always worked best, if you got the chance to execute it without interruption from the enemy. A damned big if, all right, and one that Stone knew he could never count on in a combat situation.
Moving like the night wind, making no sound, he left concealment, gliding with the shadows as he crossed the open ground in one concerted rush. He gained the shadow of the nearest barracks, and was within better viewing range of the confinement cages now, almost able to pick out the forms of the P.0W.'s huddled inside, apparently asleep. They were within his grasp, not twenty yards away, but if things went sour now, that twenty yards might as well be two hundred miles of bad country road. Those twenty yards could get him killed, and Stone did not need a reminder of just how quick and easy death could be, out here in the middle of godforsaken nowhere.
Another countdown, waiting while yet another sentry finished off his round and disappeared from sight. Could he have stopped, back there behind the generator hut, to lie in wait and watch for any movement in the camp? Stone saw no sign of him, but still ...
He shook the jitters off and made his move, trusting to experience, his combat sense, as he made the rush, sliding in beside the closest of the cages like a runner coming home with fractions of an inch to spare.
Inside the cage a human figure snapped awake, came upright with a little startled sou
nd. No spoken words, but there were bright eyes staring at him in the night, reflecting firelight from the bonfire in the middle of the barracks cluster, taking everything about him in at once and trying to digest it on the spot.
"A. . . American?"
The voice was like a croaking toad's; it seemed to come from miles away instead of inches, and Stone recognized the signs of dehydration—in the voice, and in the P.O.W.'s thin, emaciated face.
The guy was being starved . . . not quite to death, but damned sure close enough. And there were signs of other punishment as well, cuts and bruises, marks of beatings, old and new. Most of them new.
"Right. You Bradford?"
The scarecrow shook his head, and seemed almost exhausted by the effort as he raised a hand and hooked one thumb back and over a bony shoulder, toward the next cage in line.
"Over there. I'm Wilcox, Robert T. Serial number 570848351.15
"Well, hang on, Wilcox, Robert T. We're getting out of here tonight."
"No shit?"
The captive's voice was weak, but even so, the disbelief showed through. It was as if the man suspected he was speaking with a waking dream, a shadow without substance. He could carry on the conversation, but he wasn't buying it, not yet.
Stone hoped that his delirium had not progressed too far, that he could still be salvaged in the time allotted for their break and getaway. There would be no time for psychoanalysis along the trail, no time at all for cajoling and persuading the P.O.W.'s to come along of their own volition. It would be hit and run, the devil take the hindmost. And Stone had no intention of leaving anyone behind him in that living hell.
"Hang tight," he told the man inside the cage. "And just be ready when we spring you. It's a one-shot deal."
"I read you."
And he did. There was something in the voice that spoke to Stone of substance, as if the man were clawing his way up and out of an unpleasant trance, waking from the nightmare to recognize reality.
Stone moved along until he reached the second cage in line, and crouched there, melting into its irregular shadow as another sentry passed him at forty yards, circling the campsite's perimeter. If the guy glanced over, saw anything suspicious about the cages ...
But he didn't, and another moment saw him on his way. Stone turned his full attention to the man inside the wooden cell—and saw that he was not about to answer any questions.
If the first P.O.W. had been obviously mistreated, this one had been totaled. He was still alive, but barely, clinging to the thread of life by guts alone, without apparent reason. Beaten savagely about the face and naked abdomen, he was a mass of welts and bruises, scarcely recognizable. Nora Bradford would not know her husband in this shape, and she might not have the chance, judging from his condition.
Stone looked him over briefly in the filtered firelight, noting bloodstains on the tatters of his shirt and fatigue pants. It took another moment for him to see the bandaged stub of what had been his left hand, severed at the wrist in a crude amputation, obviously cauterized by fire.
Stone's gorge was rising, but he fought it down. His rage could be an enemy, making him careless, reckless in his urge to hit back at the enemy, and if there was one thing he could not afford right now, it was mistakes.
There was no time to ponder whether the amputation had been medical or strictly punitive. Either way, it was sloppy and probably infected, in spite of the cauterization. Bradford might be dying even now, and from the look of him, he might not mind the last release of death.
But Stone had not come here to make the last decision for him. He would take the wounded soldier out of there, if he could find a way. Any way, at all. If he could not... well, damn it, there would be some time to think about alternative solutions when they got-that far.
The voice beside him, almost at his elbow, startled Stone, made him jump.
"The bastards worked him over something fierce," a Georgia accent told him from the cage adjoining Bradford's. "Said the hand was the price of attempting to escape. Lousy fuckers."
"How long ago?"
"Four days . . . no, five, I think. It's getting kinda hard to keep track of the weeks, ya know?"
Stone nodded solemnly.
"They've got some calendars where we're going," he assured the prisoner. "Who am I talking to?"
"John Mandrell. But all my saviors call me Jack."
"All right, Jack. I've got some backup, and we mean to get you out of here—tonight. You just sit tight while I get back to them, and we'll be coming in for all of you before you know it."
"Sounds real good. Hey, listen—"
Stone hesitated, already half-turning to leave when the caged man called to him.
"Yeah?"
"You wouldn't kid a fella?"
"No damn way."
"All right. I reckon I'll be waitin' for you, then. No place to go, ya understan'?"
Stone flashed the gutsy P.O.W. another smile and doubled back along his former route, pausing beside Wilcox's cage long enough to pass another reassuring word, catch a terse monosyllable in return. Clearly, Mandrell would be their best bet of the three, but even he was in atrocious shape from hunger, dehydration, and torture. None of them would be setting any land-speed records on the getaway, and that meant a greater likelihood of a fighting withdrawal through the jungle.
Great. Exactly what Stone did not want to happen.
Well, they had all come this far, and they would see it through. He owed that much to the men inside the bamboo cages, any way it played. And if they all went down together in the jungle. . . well, at least they would have made the effort.
He was about to make his move, break for the jungle tree line and the point where big Hog Wiley would be crouching, waiting for him, when the scraping sound of feet on sod alerted him to danger at his back. The soldier pivoted, swinging his Beretta up to face the sentry, deviating from his normal rounds, who was approaching him from less than twenty feet away.
The enemy was startled, but it only reached his eyes, and didn't seem to interfere at all with the professional way he swung his AK-47 up and into combat position. The Vietnamese had a finger on the trigger, hesitating for a heartbeat and deciding whether he should kill at once or try to take another prisoner for their collection.
Stone never gave the bastard time to think about it. With a feral growl, he pressed the trigger of his silenced Beretta, and the man wailed as he fell.
It was in the fan, damn it, and they would all just have to buckle down and eat it now.
The raid was on.
Chapter Fifteen
It had taken maybe half a second to complete the kill, but the sentry's death cry was enough to raise the camp and bring the enemy against them. Long enough, perhaps, to seal their fate unless Stone acted very swiftly, with some backup from his troopers in the jungle fifty yards away.
Troops were already boiling out of the barracks to the north, and voices were raised among the others, letting him know that their compatriots would not be long in falling out themselves. A door banged open in the command hut, yellow light flooding out into the compound and competing with the flickering light from the bonfire. A male figure was briefly framed in the doorway, then someone remembered the rules of jungle warfare and ducked back out of sight, extinguishing the light at once.
No matter, Stone had seen them, and he knew they would be barking orders in another moment, marshaling the troops into a counterattack formation. He would quickly have a chance to find out just how many hostiles the compound contained, but the prospect wasn't one he looked forward to.
Stone caught another hint of movement in the now-dark doorway of the CP, and fanned a short burst from his carbine in their general direction, knowing as he squeezed the trigger that he would be wasting ammunition. Still, if he could keep their heads down for a moment longer, give them something to fear besides fear itself; he might just have a chance to pull it off.
He doubled back, forgetting the dead sentry and his all too-active co
mrades for the moment, concentrating on the prisoners inside their bamboo cages. Each cage had a single narrow door, each held in place by padlock and chain, but there was no time to attempt to pick the locks.
"Stand back!" Stone barked to Jack Mandrell, leveling his carbine as he spoke and squeezing off a burst that tore the lock and chain apart. Mandrell hit the door a second later, plowed on through, and executed a sloppy somersault before ending upright on his knees.
Stone was betting on Jack Mandrell, hoping his first impression had been accurate. The captive seemed more alert, stronger than either of his comrades, and there was a chance, however slim, that he could help them all get out of there alive.
Mandrell wasn't waiting around for instructions from his deliverer. Instead he leaped past Stone, stumbling, almost losing his control of his weakened legs, but he reached the fallen sentry's AK-47, and had it in his hands before the first reacting troops knew what was happening inside the compound.
Stone was satisfied, already turning toward the cage where Alex Bradford was confined. Two more to go, and even if they couldn't help him pull it off, he might have shaved the odds a fraction by taking Mandrell onto the combat team.
The captive's borrowed weapon opened up, and Stone responded with his own, aiming at the lock on Bradford's cell, silently praying that they would be granted time, luck, and breathing room.
Hog Wiley saw the sentry coming, but there was absolutely nothing he could do about it unless he chose to open fire from hiding, waste the guy, and let Stone take his chances in the open with the camp alerted. If he sat back and waited, there was still a chance the man might pass Stone by, overlook him somehow, or—
Except he didn't pass Stone by, didn't overlook a thing. The camp was blazing into life, spotlights coming on from over by the CP, others by the barracks on the south perimeter. They swept the jungle first, and Hog crouched lower in the undergrowth, instinctively, knowing even as he did it that they could not see him. Troopers were responding to the gunfire, turning out in assorted phases of undress, but none of them forgot their weapons in the scramble.
M.I.A. Hunter Page 10