"Is that all of it?" Stone asked.
Terrance Loughlin crouched down on the tailgate of the half-ton truck, consulting the checklist in his hand.
"It's the lot," he answered finally. "Rifles, ammunition, C-4, and grenades . . ."
Stone listened through the list and nodded when the Britisher had finished. He raised the tailgate, leaving Loughlin back there with the crated arms and rations that would see them through their penetration of the Cambodian interior.
When Loughlin had the tailgate latched, Stone turned to face An Khom. The old man had been watching from the streetside loading dock of his riverfront warehouse, personally supervising the transfer of equipment as he often did. It paid, in his illegal business, to be well aware of what was going on at every moment.
But there was more to it than that, Stone knew. Their friendship had compelled the old man to attend this loading; nothing could have kept him from it. Stone was going into danger, there was every chance they would not meet again in this life, and An Khom was not a man to let his friends depart for hell without a sendoff.
"Guess we're ready," Stone said needlessly. He wondered why An Ling had not come down to see them off, and at the same time he was thankful she had not. A warrior did not need entanglements of that kind on the eve of combat
"May fortune smile on your endeavor," An Khom said, the stiff formality of his words softened by his tone and the expression on his weathered face.
"And on your house," Stone answered, completing the little ritual, accepting the hand the old man offered to him, wringing it warmly as they parted.
Fortune would have damned little to do with their mission, he knew, whatever An Khom might believe. A soldier made his own luck in the field—or most of it, at any rate.
Stone climbed into the truck's cab, nodding to Hog Wiley in the driver's seat. Hog fired the heavy engine up and took them out of there without a backward glance. No ties, and no regrets. Not this time.
The window that connected the cab with the covered bed of the truck had been cleared of glass, allowing them to keep in constant voice communication with Loughlin. It was a simple enough precaution—and one that Stone had viewed as absolutely necessary in the circumstances.
He had briefed them both on his encounter with the C.I.A. team under Carruthers, about the nature of their mission and the likelihood that U.S. agents would attempt to interfere at some point prior to jump off at the border. Stone was hoping he was wrong, but at the same time, he had rubbed Carruthers's nose in shit last night, and the C.I.A. man would be aching—literally—for revenge. If nothing else, his ego might compel him to get even; if there were really orders coming down, "straight from the top" as he had said, then the pursuit would be that much more compelling.
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.