Captain Ngu checked his watch and scowled, cursing underneath his breath. The search patrol was hours overdue, and no matter how he tried, it seemed impossible to come up with any sort of encouraging explanation for their tardiness.
They should have been back by the time the work detail returned from the mines, no later. Easily in time for the evening meal, which was already being consumed by prisoners in the courtyard of the camp.
He stood up, pacing back and forth across the small interior of his command hut, finally pausing in front of the narrow window, staring out at the uniformed inmates assembled there. His eyes picked out the new arrival, off to one side, eating, and they narrowed, growing cold and hard.
It was his fault, whatever had happened out there. He had brought this plague upon Ngu and upon his small command.
Again he ran through the conceivable explanations for the failure of his patrol to return on time, or at least to report in on the walkie-talkie they carried with them as standard field equipment.
The men might have deserted, run away into the jungle. It would not be the first time that the Army of Vietnam had lost soldiers in the field. Conscription methods were arbitrary, harsh, often used as punishment for some minor civil or criminal infraction. If the men had put their heads together, plotted their escape . . .
Ngu shook his head and dismissed the idea from his thoughts. Those nine were not the best of friends; two or three of them had actively disliked the others he selected for the mission. They would never have agreed on something so momentous as desertion and a life in hiding. If they had the initiative at all, those who were inclined to leave without permission would have taken advantage of their alternating night watch long before now.
They might be lost somewhere in the jungle, wandering around in aimless circles, too frightened and embarrassed to call for help on their walkie-talkie. It was not unusual for his troops, ill-trained and unfamiliar with the Cambodian countryside, to take a wrong turn and lose their way completely.
But no. They were not lost. At least not in that way. Ngu could feel it in his bones, where a chill had settled in, refusing to be shaken out by liberal doses of the rice wine he had drunk throughout the afternoon.
They could be wasting time deliberately, what the Americans called "goldbricking." It was possible that they had happened on a native woman and persuaded her, through force or favors, to have sex with them.
Rape was commonplace wherever Vietnamese troops were bivouacked, and prostitution was considered an acceptable alternative to subsistence farming in Cambodia. No shame attached to the sale of a daughter—or even a wife, if the price was adequate.
Ngu considered it, and again dismissed the thought as a sterile rationalization. His camp had been constructed with isolation in mind. The chances of finding a woman—or any other native—in the immediate vicinity were small indeed. The searchers would have to go far before they found a human female to amuse them.
And he knew, without really acknowledging it to himself at any conscious level, without having to, that they were dead.
All dead.
Long dead.
As he stood there, looking out over the compound, their bodies, in all probability, had been stiff and cold for several hours now.
The enemy would be close by, reluctant to desert their comrade in captivity, keeping close by so that they would not have to travel far to launch the night attack.
And they would come by night—this night. Ngu was as certain of it as he had ever been certain of anything.
There was no time to waste, for it was dusk already. He would have to get some answers from the one American clumsy enough to let himself be captured inside the camp. He would have to get the answers now, before the day got any older and twilight turned into blackest night, bringing down the wrath of whoever waited for him, out beyond the thin bamboo perimeter of the compound.
He knew he could hold them off, blunt the attack and turn them around in defeat—if he knew how many troops he had to deal with, their offensive capabilities, their motives.
No. Scratch that. The motives were already plain to him. They meant to kill him, wipe out his command, and carry off the scum he held captive here.
They would not succeed. His career, his very life itself, depended on Ngu's ability to hold the compound through the coming night. And to succeed in that, he would have to wring some answers out of the American infiltrator.
Starting immediately.
Mark Stone sat with Lynch and Page to eat his evening meal. It was rice again, still soggy, still in wooden bowls, but now in slightly larger portions, as if the day's supply had to be used or thrown away.
For all the nutritional value it gave the prisoners, Stone thought, it could have been thrown out to begin with.
He sat with his back against the bamboo fence, forking the rice from his bowl to his mouth with dirty fingers. There had been no opportunity and no place to wash. Their single stop at the latrine, reeking and surrounded by a swarm of biting flies, had been for purposes other than cleaning up.
No matter. With any luck at all, this would be his last meal in the prison camp, and he could sweat it out. He might have ignored the soggy rice, but they had not eaten since breakfast, and any fuel at all was better than none for the energetic evening that he had in mind.
There would be fighting and killing to be done before the night was out; exhausted as he was, Stone knew that he would need every ounce of energy available.
Already the sun was sinking beyond the western treetops, setting the jungle on fire there, spreading purple shadows in the east. Night was closing swiftly in upon them, settling down across the jungle and their little prison island like a silent cloak.
It would bring Loughlin and Wiley moving in to blast them out of their confinement, bringing fire and steel into the compound like a hailstorm out of hell. Stone was looking forward to the break, anticipating the feel of an assault rifle in his hands, its buck and tremor as he hosed the enemy with unforgiving lead.
Soon.
From where he sat, Stone had a clear view of the CP hut. He could see the camp commandant watching through his narrow window there, and guessed the man was probably wondering, worrying about the failing darkness. He had to know that any raid would come with nightfall, and from the looks of the compound, he was going out of his way to be ready when it came.
Guards were doubled all along the fence, a pair of men located every twenty feet or so with AK-47s. The dual lookout towers, east and west, that had been unmanned throughout Stone's reconnaissance, now boasted pairs of soldiers, and a light machine gun each.
Around the barracks, where the morning shift would normally be turning in by now, no one had gone to bed yet.
They were staying up, standing or sitting around in groups, looking casual on the surface, but keeping their rifles close at hand.
Stone felt a rising sense of apprehension. Even knowing that Wiley and Loughlin would have seen the reinforcements moving in when the work detail returned from the mines, he knew there was only so much that six men could do against a small army. The element of surprise, now considerably lessened, if not lost altogether, could only carry them so far.
He was still wondering if Hog and the Britisher could pull it off when he saw the camp commandant emerge from his little thatched CP hut and move restlessly across the porch. Like all the buildings in the compound, the CP hut was elevated, built on posts to keep water and snakes from getting in, and the commandant's footsteps echoed, reverberating through the floorboards of the little covered porch.
He was looking for something, someone, and Stone felt a grim premonition as to the identity of his target. As if to prove him right, the camp commandant turned, making a slow, almost graceful pirouette, and stared directly at Mark Stone across the open compound. Their eyes met for an instant, held across the intervening space . . . and then the Vietnamese officer was scanning for a trooper, snapping his fingers at the closest uniform, beckoning him over.
They conversed briefly, the soldier nodding rapidly in response to whatever the commandant was saying, flicking an occasional glance toward the section of fence where Stone sat with Page and Lynch. When the commandant finished speaking, the trooper saluted sloppily and turned on his heel, moving out across the compound on a beeline for Stone's position.
Stone saw him coming and grunted a warning to Lynch and Page, who had been deep in a whispered discussion of the coming break. They shut up instantly and were all silent, watching the guard with expectant eyes, when he reached them.
Towering over them where they sat, in spite of his relatively small stature, he crooked a finger at Stone and grimaced, trying to look authoritative.
"You come with me," he snapped, backing off a pace and giving Stone room to stand.
Mark Stone made up the difference in their heights when he got up, glaring down at the guard with such intensity that the rumpled little Commie backed away another pace and took a tighter grip on his assault rifle, just in case. He jerked a thumb in the direction of the CP hut, working on bravado and not quite reaching it, and Stone moved out in front of him, letting the guard bring up the rear.
He had wondered about the abbreviated nature of his interrogation the previous night, and now he had his answer. As brutal and seemingly endless as the first session had been, it had been relatively short by the standards of any determined torturer.
And yes, he had the answer, now. They were not through with him, after all. Instead, they had a day's work out of him, adding another pair of able hands to the duty roster . . . and now they would be free to work him over at their leisure, through the night.
Depending, of course, on how much night anyone inside the compound still had left.
Stone gritted his teeth as he mounted the steps to the CP hut, brushing past the commandant on his way inside. The best he could hope for now was to hold out, hang tough until the cavalry arrived.
He could not, would not tell them anything to jeopardize the mission. If they came up with something new, which they had not already tried but which appeared to be effective, he would die before he let them wring the answers out of him. He would not risk the mission they all had come so far and dared so much to accomplish.
He owed it to the prisoners to succeed, even if he spent his life in the attempt. He owed it, yes, to all those others he had failed, and those that he would never get a chance to help.
Stone owed it, finally, to himself. And he was grimly, finally determined to pay off that debt. In blood, if necessary.
He would be paying it tonight, one way or another, and he would let the devil keep the change.