A gunshot echoed through the trees, and she pirouetted to face the temple just in time to see another tribesman collapse twenty yards from the front entrance.
She waited, listening, but the jungle had fallen silent except for the soft sibilance of rainfall.
~ ~ ~
“Do you think we got them all?” Rob’s voice was weak and cracked at the end of the question.
“I’m pretty sure of it,” she replied, swabbing Rob’s wound before applying the pressure dressing. There was a lot of blood pooled around him. An awful lot of blood, and his shirt was soaked. She bound the dressing in place with gauze, then stood, inspecting him.
“You going to make it?”
He nodded, but his normally tanned skin looked peaked.
“We’re going to have to get you out of here. Can you walk?”
“Sure. At least for a while. But I’m not going to be much help with Pu or the target.”
“That’s okay. You were just slowing me down, anyway. Now I can get something done.”
“Ten to one is hardly a fair fight.”
“I’ll say. Poor bastards.”
“You really think you can take them?”
She smiled, the black smeared across her face making her profile appear ghoulish in the darkening temple. He could hardly make her out, but she was wearing her night vision goggles to attend to him, so she could see everything. Which is why she thought his chances of living another twenty-four hours were slim, based on the amount of blood on the temple floor.
“I can let you in on a little secret, since we’re such good friends now. I’ve done far more difficult jobs with way tougher adversaries than a bunch of natives with pea shooters. This will be a cakewalk. I just hope that Hawker’s still there. Even ten miles away, they might have heard the gunshots.”
“The rain would muffle a lot of it. That’s a fair distance.”
“Yeah, but luck hasn’t exactly been on our side today, has it?”
She reached out a hand and helped him up, then supported him with her shoulder as they limped to the temple door.
“What happened to the tracking chip?” Rob asked.
“It shows as being here. So one of the gunmen had it. This was a setup. They were on to us.”
“Which points to someone in the agency helping Hawker.”
“Yes. But that’s not my problem. I’m sure Edgar can sort it out. Right now I need to concentrate on getting across the finish line.”
Shots thudded into Rob’s torso as they negotiated the four stairs from the temple entrance. Jet dropped to the ground, clawing her Beretta free of its holster as his body absorbed round after round. She could see the shooter with her night vision goggles, but sighting the pistol with them on was a more difficult proposition. She erred on the side of caution and fired six shots, four of which missed their mark.
The final two punched into the gunman’s chest, and he spun giddily in a spray of crimson before slumping into a heap. Jet rolled away from Rob and reached over to check for a pulse. Nothing. She closed his sightless eyes with a steady hand and then bolted up, racing for her horse’s inert form, where she’d left the P90 when she’d gotten the first aid kit.
When she reached the dead animal, she emptied out the saddlebag, then slapped a new clip into the weapon, slid the other magazine into the pocket of her cargo pants, and shouldered her backpack and the rectangular nylon case before running into the night, her boots thumping against the wet clay as the rain slanted into her.
Chapter 23
A cruel wind blew sheets of rain across the clearing, lashing the treetops with a sullen fury. The brooding clouds denied the twilight glow of the hunter’s moon to the huddle of guards, on alert after their compatriots failed to check in or return from their ambush at the abandoned temple high on the distant mountain.
“Take two men and do a patrol. Come on. I have a bad feeling about this,” Thet, the leader of the tribesmen, ordered the guard sitting by the struggling flames of the fire, which had a piece of sheet metal suspended over it to deflect the rain.
“Come on. It’s pouring. Don’t make me go out in this,” the younger man whined, clutching a tarp over his head in an effort to stay dry, as he eyed the older man with cautious fear mixed with annoyance.
“It’s not a request. Do it. Now. Take Maung and Htet and check the perimeter.” Thet’s voice had an edge. He wasn’t used to having his instructions questioned.
“Fine. I’ll go get them. But everything’s probably okay. What do you want to bet that their radio got soaked in this, and that’s why they didn’t check in? It’s happened before…”
“Thanks for the theories. I’ll have to remember that when I’m getting ready to retire to Bangkok with a harem of bar girls. You’re a deep thinker, wasted on this kind of duty.” Thet cuffed him gruffly. “Now get your ass on patrol. I don’t want to say it again.”
The young man stood and tried to take the tarp, but Thet shook his head. “Grab slickers. That’s why the boss brought them for us.”
The guards had yet to become accustomed to some of the technological advances that the crazy farang had introduced into their simple lives. Rain gear, flashlights, solar panels, all unimaginable luxuries that had been foreign to them until he’d arrived and assembled a small private army. Every man had grown up in the surrounding hill villages and had earned their livings in the harsh environment, either farming or working for the drug syndicates that effectively ruled the region.
They had all learned to field strip a Kalashnikov before they’d hit puberty, and had killed before their voices had changed. It was a brutal life in Myanmar: a poor country with a totalitarian military dictatorship that treated its population like subjects, and in which meager hierarchy the Shan hill tribes comprised the bottom rung — lower than human. There were no schools, no hospitals, no power plants or telephone lines. Only the hills and whatever they could coax from the ground — usually opium or food crops.
Before the white devil had arrived, Thet had made thirty dollars a month working as protection for a drug trafficking group. Now he made a hundred and fifty. The prospect of a wild increase in fortune made it easy to recruit the most aggressive and deadly of his brethren, who had literally fought over the right to work the security detail for a hundred dollars a month. He’d limited the group to twenty hardened fellow Shan fighters, and whenever they lost one to disease or a skirmish with one of the roaming groups of traffickers, he had ten begging to take the fallen man’s place.
The seven men he had sent to Bangkok to help the sex slaver with his problem had been his best, and he would miss them. Pu had brought news of their passing along with a warning to expect another attack — the third in the last month and a half. Thet had lost a total of twelve fighters since he had started working for the farang, but didn’t question it. Life was uncertain at the best of times, and a big payday carried with it certain risks. The average male lived sixty-seven years in Myanmar, but in the Shan region it dropped to fifty-five, and that didn’t take into account the far lower expectancy of those working for the drug runners. But as a farmer, he might make fifteen dollars a month, twenty if he was lucky, and the syndicates paid thirty for a much easier day’s work. When he’d been offered the princely sum by the round eye, he’d thought the man insane, but he had come to appreciate that he was not only shrewd, but also skilled in the ways of the world.
Thet watched as the bedraggled patrol trudged to the edge of the clearing and entered the jungle, a flashlight illuminating their way. This was only one of the white man’s camps, and they moved every two weeks, melting into the jungle only to reappear elsewhere the next day. Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia…the geography made no difference to him. It was all jungle and hills. But he was becoming a rich man as the farang’s security chief, so he was fiercely loyal to him, lest his meal ticket disappear, forcing him to go back to risking his life every day with a drug network, or have to be a protection worker for the slavers that routinely bought the more attractive children from the impoverished locals.