Cambodian Hellhole (13 page)

The mines were approximately two miles from the prison compound. It was all uphill, and what with the lame condition of the work party, it required over an hour for them all to reach their destination. When they got there, another complement of guards was waiting for them at the entrance to the mine, having made the journey earlier by truck. The commander of the work detail took custody of his slaves, and the soldiers who had marched them from the camp doubled back, returning the way they had come.

It was typical of the Vietnamese, Stone knew, to double the shifts on everything, creating make-work positions to justify their existence here. A Cambodian prison camp might not be the best of duties, but it had to be preferable to staking out the northern border of Vietnam, waiting for a hundred thousand screaming Chinese to pour across the border in an endless human torrent. On the other hand . . . There just might be another reason for the double shift of guards, a reason for sentries to be on duty at the mine around the clock.

"What are we digging for?" Stone asked, embarrassed that the question had not occurred to him sooner.

"Gold," Lynch answered from the corner of his mouth. "The fucking mother lode."

It added up, of course. Made perfect sense. Slave laborers, literally worth their weight in gold to their captors. Laborers who could never tell anyone precisely what they had been mining, or where.

Stone saw an opportunity to get an extra lick in at the Vietnamese and their Cambodian lackeys.

They entered the mine, Stone following the more experienced workers and the wordless gestures of his captors. He was given a pick, then had it taken away from him again as the guard in charge remembered his directions from the camp commandant. The Vietnamese finally led Stone to an ore cart of ancient wood-and-iron construction, its small wheels bent and almost off their axles. The guard indicated to him in broken English and through signs that it would be his task to move along the line, letting the miners fill his cart, and then to haul it—full—into the outer world.

Stone wondered how many such trips he could survive. The cart was heavy, and once it had been filled with chunks of rock and ore . . .

He set out, dragging the cart along behind him, sometimes shifting to push it like a ghetto vendor moving through the streets with fish to sell. The image almost made him laugh . . . almost.

At each stop along the line, once the men had seriously begun to work, and the sounds of digging masked his whispered conversation, Stone began recruiting members for his freedom brigade. At each stop he picked up a new enlistee, taking longer with some than with others, meeting occasional resistance from the long-timers, those who had been broken—or almost broken—by their jailers.

But in the end, no man refused him. Lynch had been correct. They would stand and fight upon his signal—perhaps not long or well, but they would fight.

And die, if need be, with the hope of freedom in their hearts and minds.

J
ess Lynch watched Stone moving along the line of miners in the lamplit darkness of the shaft, now pushing, now dragging his ungodly burden. At times he seemed about to crumble, but each pickup stop allowed him time enough to catch his breath, time enough to pass a word or two with each of the P.O.W.'s in turn.

Stone skipped the Vietnamese, and spoke to only those Montagnards who could understand and respond to him in English, but from the nodding heads and the fleeting, unaccustomed smiles, Lynch knew that what he said was striking home, paying off.

Laboring in the foul darkness underground, the captive wondered what their final payoff would be.

Death, most likely—but he had been expecting that for eleven years now. It would almost be a welcome relief from the daily abuse, slave labor, and humiliation he experienced at the hands of his Vietnamese captors.

Anything was better than the so-called life he had. Literally anything, barring only more of the same.

Stone was halfway back along his return route, dragging an empty cart this time and working his way to the head of the line, starting over, when one of the P.O.W.'s turned to whisper something. Stone was nodding, glancing around to make certain that they were not overheard by any of the guards nearby.

And they had not been overheard—but they had certainly been seen.

One of the soldiers, laughingly known behind his back among the P.O.W.'s as Needledick, was moving in, unslinging his AK-47 and taking a firmer grip on the weapon as he closed the gap behind Mark Stone.

When he was within arm's reach, Needledick swung the wooden butt of his assault rifle hard around and drove it cruelly into the small of Stone's back. Lynch dropped his pick, about to come to his friend's assistance, and then eleven years of instinct took over, forcing him to look away, to fumble for the tool as if he had simply dropped it by accident.

He could not—would not—interfere. When the time was right, when Stone gave the signal, he would find the courage to respond, to fight. But not here, underground, where they were so many ducks in a shooting gallery.

They would be slaughtered here, he told himself . . . and if the guards did not mow them down on the spot, one blast from an AK-47, one stray bullet striking ancient timber, and they would all be buried forever underground, the living and the dead.

Stone fell to one knee, cursing bitterly, and Needledick kicked him roughly in the buttocks, keeping it up until Stone was back on his feet again. Needledick moved around to face Stone, pushing his flat Oriental face into the soldier's, kissing-close.

"No talking! Work!" he shouted, kicking Stone once more for emphasis, this time in the shin.

Lynch's hands were white-knuckled on the wooden handle of his pickaxe. He imagined the face of Needledick and Ngu, the camp's sadistic warden, on the rough wall of rock in front of him . . . and suddenly he found the strength to attack the wall again, driving the blunt, rusty tip of the pick home repeatedly.

"Slow down," a voice hissed from somewhere to his left. "You'll wear yourself out, for Chrissakes. Make the rest of us look bad."

Lynch nodded, panting, his face and shoulders slick with cold perspiration. He hesitated, slowing his strokes, once again keeping pace with the skeletal workers on either side of him.

No point in showing Charlie that you still had any strength left. Let it be a sweet surprise, when your fingers closed around his fucking throat and cut off the air that he needed to breathe, to live.

Lynch was looking forward to the break. He hoped his chance would come tonight. A chance at Ngu. At Needledick. At all the others who had beaten and starved him through eleven long years of living hell.

Suddenly he was afraid. Of freedom. Of a world outside which was no longer a part of him, no longer his. He wondered if he could exist with free men, totally at liberty to come and go, to buy and sell, to do whatever the hell might strike his fancy.

There were risks outside, so different from the known risks, the shared risks he had become used to in the prison camps. Out there a man would have to think for himself, decide what to eat—God, the food!—what to wear.

The women . . . Lynch felt a tightening in his groin that was more fear than lust. He had not experienced a full erection in nearly four years, and he wondered now, for the first time in months, if it was really only diet, as he told himself.

He was not afraid of having lost his manhood, of becoming homosexual. That would have shown itself before this, in his day-to-day existence.

Instead, he was afraid that he would not—could not—respond to either sex. He was suddenly terrified, where before he had been simply relieved, that a part of his life had been ripped away from him forever.

No wife, no children . . . Christ, that was a blessing. At least he would not have to rehash eleven years of war and prison stories, look into their eyes and wonder whether it was pity or simply curiosity he saw reflected there.

Lynch caught himself drifting on the endless stream of consciousness, and almost laughed aloud as he realized how far he had let his imagination transport him into the unknown future. He was standing in a goddamn gold mine in northern Cambodia, for Christ's sake, guarded by a fucking platoon of armed Vietnamese . . . and he was wondering if he would fit in somewhere along Fifth Avenue.

It was hysterical. He had to stop himself from laughing right out loud and bringing half a dozen sentries on the run to club him down.

First things first. That was the ticket. See if you can get out of the frigging camp, then out of the frigging country . . . and when you've done all that, alive and in one piece, then you can start worrying about how well you'll fit back home.

Right now, his home was here. In prison. He would have to work with Stone, with whoever else was waiting in the jungle, to prove that he was worthy of a one-way ticket stateside.

Time enough for all the other plans and worries later. If he lived through the night to come.

T
errance Loughlin shifted positions silently, brushing away an ant that had fallen from the canopy above onto the back of his hand. He watched it recover its balance on the ground and scuttle away through the carpet of fallen, rotting leaves.

He was crouched with Wiley on the hillside overlooking the river and the enemy compound beyond. They had been there since early morning, long enough to watch the prisoners marched out to work—Stone among them—and the escort patrol return within the hour, empty-handed.

So there were more guards at the mine. That meant more hostile guns to deal with when the firefight started. Even if the other troops were on permanent garrison duty at the mine for whatever reason, some of them would respond to an assault on the compound. It was inevitable. The sounds of gunfire would probably carry the mile or two it took to rouse them; the detonation of explosives certainly would.

And they would have a force of unknown size arriving at their flank as they were in the middle of their mop-up. Great.

It would be Loughlin's task to see that the new arrivals never got inside the camp. Never got across the bridge. And he was just the man to make that guarantee.

He pointed through the screen of foliage, letting Hog Wiley follow his aiming index finger, careful not to let himself be seen by anyone across the narrow river.

"I can slip in and plant some charges there . . . and there. Electronic detonators. I can bring the bridge down on cue—with all hands, if need be."

Hog nodded, smiling grimly.

"That oughta hold 'em for a while, but we're not looking at the Missis-fucking-sippi there. They'll ford the river when the bridge goes, and we'll have to fight 'em anyway."

"Better to catch them arse-deep in the water than to have them pouring through the open gate, though."

"Yeah, it's better," Hog admitted grudgingly. "I just wish there was some way we could keep them all at the mines. Maybe get them inside and then blow the friggin' hole down around their ears."

Loughlin shrugged.

"I could go take a look, if you think we can spare the time."

"That's just it. We can't. Or the explosives, either. We'll have to do the bridge your way and hope it works."

"All right."

"I'll take the Hmong in through the fence . . . there."

He pointed to a spot along the fence not far from where Mark Stone had made his disastrous entry through the drainage pipe.

"They'll be on guard."

"You got some options for me?"

"No. I just want to play it safe."

"There's no such play in this game, slick."

"Okay. In through the fence. It will be close."

"You bet your ass it will. We'll go in killing anything that moves and isn't one of ours. No prisoners. A quick in-out, and with any kind of luck at all, we can be back across the river before the cavalry gets here."

"You're dreaming."

"So don't fucking wake me. You're the powder man. Just blow 'em all to shit the way you're s'posed to."

Loughlin grimaced and shook his head, but Wiley did not notice. He was busy staring at the compound, down below them.

Loughlin was the powder man, the demolitions expert, yes. He had learned his trade in the British Army and gone on to serve in Her Majesty's elite counterterrorist command, the Special Air Service. In the S.A.S. he had seen his share of killing, by both sides. He had planted some explosives, defused some others . . . and seen a number of his closest friends go up in smoke and flame when they got careless and started taking things for granted in the dirty, nameless war.

It had been war, no doubt on that score. There were no front lines or safe retreats, but otherwise it was war at the filthy worst. At one time or another, Loughlin had seen action against the I.R.A., the Japanese Red Army, Baader-Meinhoff terrorists, Basques, Moloccaris . . .

He got tired of running down the names and faces, the half-baked philosophies that were really nothing more than mock-sophisticated justifications for mayhem. Terrorists enjoyed the killing, and the feeling of power they got from creating fear. They got a kind of high out of the bloodshed and the notoriety they won through acts of cowardice.