Cambodian Hellhole (7 page)

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.

C
ambodia 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.

In his initial preoccupation with the evidence of genocide around him, Mark Stone almost missed the movement up above them, on a ridge that overlooked the village.

Almost.

From the corner of his eye he caught a fleeting shadow, moving left to right, and then another following it—another, and another . . .

Stone swiveled where he stood, one hand dropping instinctively to the pistol grip of his CAR-15 assault rifle, slung muzzle-down across his shoulder.

Half a dozen men in uniform were watching them from the high ground, more of them showing themselves by the moment. All of them were armed, and all were obviously on full alert, their weapons ready at hand. Although the ridge had been defoliated like everything else within sight, it was lined with the bare trunks of trees, and the roving patrol was using these to good advantage for their cover.

It took a moment for Stone to recognize the camouflaged and jungle-stained uniforms they wore. Lon Ky moved up beside him, saving him the trouble.

"Cambodian regulars," the guide said, his voice flat, devoid of emotion. "They kill us now, I think."

"W
e need some time," Stone told the guide. "Try talking to them. Stall them if you can."

Lon Ky gave him a solemn nod and moved forward, taking several paces out into the open, careful to keep both hands in plain sight and clear of the AK-47 that hung off his shoulder. His narrow eyes never left the line of uniformed figures stationed on the denuded ridge.

The guide said something in the native language, got an answer, responded in kind. Stone listened to the exchange for several moments, taking the opportunity to fade back by degrees, placing himself a few strides closer to the open doorway of a long-abandoned hut. Around him he could see the others taking similar precautions, seeking places of retreat in case a firefight should erupt now, without further warning.

He could not make out what Lon Ky and the leader of the uniformed patrol were saying to each other, but he did not have long to wait. After a moment the Khmer Rouge guide turned toward him, frowning, translating the patrol leader's comments into English.

"He believes that we have drugs," Lon Ky explained, "or else that we intend to purchase them from someone nearby. I try to tell him we are simple traders, but he is suspicious."

And rightly so
, Stone thought. Ironically, though, the team leader had tagged them for the wrong offense. Stone wondered why he had not opened fire immediately.

"Will he take a bribe?"

Lon Ky shrugged casually. Too casually.

"It is difficult to say. If I ask now, in front of all his men, he may feel obligated to reject it. Or . . ."

Stone did not have to hear the alternative. If the offer struck the leader wrong, if it angered him in any way, he would not hesitate to open fire upon them.