Bolan dropped over and fell behind a stack of steel drums. Slugs cut through the metal.
Bolan waited for his pursuers to get closer.
With deep slow breaths he cut the pounding of his blood to a roar, and took aim. He saw that the gunmen wore suits. He selected a face and blew it apart. The second gunman dropped to the ground, bringing up an AR.
But Bolan had gone.
Splashes in the river were all that could be heard. The sounds retreated downriver.
Bolan heard voices in the brightness. He woke and jumped up simultaneously, grabbing for his gun even before he knew where he was. The Colt was in his grasp as he blinked, trying to see who to kill. It was only children playing on the riverbank. God, one day a Nam vet was going to jump out of his sleep and kill his own kid before he realized he was no longer in Nam.
The sun was well above the horizon, the day already hot and oppressive.
Bolan was coated in sweat as he crouched under a railway bridge. Twenty yards down the riverbank, a cluster of Vietnamese children were throwing rocks into the river. Bolan wiped sweat from his face and thought of the countless stones he had skipped into rivers as a child.
Some things were universal for children, even in war.
Pleasure came unexpectedly in this place.
The children were excitedly picking up stones from the bank, competing for some target that floated just at the surface of the water. Bolan watched as it drifted closer. The stones splashed into the water around it. The children were following it down with the current toward Bolan.
When it was fifteen yards away, Bolan saw what it was. The corpse floated feet first, puffy and discolored, stripped naked.
The face was gone, blown away by a slug, but Bolan could tell the body was a Westerner's and not a Vietnamese's. A rock from one of the kids hit the chest with a hollow thump and bounced into the water. The child laughed; another threw up his arms in triumph. The rest went back upriver, throwing at a second body.
Bolan grabbed the kid by the arm. The kid practically jumped from his skin at the big guy's touch. He looked up in fear. Bolan addressed him in Vietnamese, asked him if he wanted to make some money for his family.
The kid agreed cautiously. Bolan wrote out a Vietnamese name and an address in Saigon and handed the paper to him, along with some money. The young boy handed back the paper. He was illiterate. Bolan told him the name and address and had him repeat it to him. If he brought the man back with him there would be more money, but he must hurry and he must tell no one.
The child raced off. His friends were excited more corpses were coming down. Bolan heard another thump.
The first corpse came closer to shore as it drifted under the bridge.
Bolan waded in. The corpse passed from sunlight to shadow and its color emerged better: greenish-gray skin, purple on the underside where the blood had settled. Red hair — that would be important. Bolan pulled it into an eddy under the bridge. The face was unrecognizable.
The second corpse drifted headfirst. Bolan had to chase a buzzard off the face before it would give up its meal. Another head shot. Chestnut hair.
The third corpse was Vietnamese — shot in the chest, but the face had been hit and was swollen and distorted.
Naiman didn't come down the river. Bolan waited as the day grew hotter.
The corpses swirled in the slow eddy, around and around like a kindergarten game. The sun was advancing across the eddy, and they would be well on their way to rotting in a few more hours. Bolan watched them go around and around, bobbing in the heat.
An hour later the boy returned with a Vietnamese man dressed in a white suit. Bolan gave the boy his money and sent him off.
"Vu Quoc Thanh. Thanks for coming."
"What do you want from me, Sergeant Bolan? I cannot help you in your position."
"What position is that?"
"You murdered Jim Naiman last night. They know you work for the VC. Every police force and intelligence force is looking for you."
"Do you really believe that I killed him, Thanh, after the work we have done together?"
"In this war I can believe anything."
Bolan motioned to the corpses turning in the eddy.
"Do you know any of them?"
The Vietnamese walked over and watched them go around.
"The Vietnamese I don't know. I think he is a tribesman. Meo, or Laotian."
"And the others?"
"We have seen them before. They are the foreigners." Thanh looked back at Bolan, his sunglasses reflecting the river and the sampans. It was a long look. Someone was going to have to kill Thanh very soon.
Bolan was pushing the bodies out into the current, when he heard Thanh's voice come from the bridge above.
"You want a reason, Sergeant? History repeats itself. The Council of Kings."
Bolan looked at tiny room through the slatted vent of the locker. The coroners worked at an enamel table in the center of the white-tiled room. He breathed slowly, calmly, so that he remained perfectly still and could not be heard. The place was cool, even in his hiding place. Indeed, it was chilling.
They unzipped the bag and turned their heads away as the odor escaped.
Bolan saw a young man's face. The kid was maybe eighteen or nineteen years old, the tendons tightened into a grimace. They pulled the bag off him and began stripping away his tattered fatigues.
"Jesus Christ," said one of the coroners. "Here I was looking for a bullet wound and he doesn't have any."
"Bled to death," said Morgan.
They stripped him naked and dead.
"I've seen this before," Morgan told the other coroner. "Every time they do one of these pacification programs we get the weirdest sights. This guy was reckoning on slipping it to a slope, okay? But she's the enemy. She gets a tube, or a toilet roll or whatever, and lines it with razor blades. Bob from Nebraska here gives her one in the hut and bang. The way blood pumps into erectile tissue, I'd say he was dead in fifteen seconds."
The other man was slitting the body open down the belly and letting the guts drop through the well in the table into a sealed bin below. Bolan heard the slick plop as the intestinal matter hit bottom.
"What are they going to tell this kid's mother?"
"Maybe they'll give him the Purple Heart."
They worked, cleaning the cavity and stuffing it with the cotton and formaldehyde. The man across from Morgan broke the silence.
"Shouldn't we lay low for a while?" he said softly.
"No problem," Morgan replied. "They're going to put that crazy young sergeant in the slammer for good."
The odor from the corpse drifted over to Bolan.
It invaded the locker, filling his nostrils with the stench of putrefaction.
The coroner brought over a cardboard box and began placing bags of white powder among the cotton in the GI's gut space. Dr. Morgan walked over to his desk and unlocked a drawer. He took out some papers and a pencil.
"What's the serial number on this one?"
The other man read the number and Morgan copied it down.
"What does Putnam say about all this?" asked Morgan's partner.
"Don't mention his name again. Especially to any of the others. We're all better off if Putnam's name is kept out of it."
"I see he's really keeping his nose clean."
"You could say that. You going to sew that one up"
"Soon as I finish packing him. Jesus, this guy has enough dope in him to supply New York for a month."
Morgan finished writing and put the papers back in the drawer and locked it. Then he took off his coat and walked toward the locker. Bolan watched as his face grew nearer.