Billy Death ran past the door of the saloon and started down the riverbank, running with his back to the pony- tailed man.
On the boat, Hatcher had the C-4 plastique wrapped around the prow. He armed a small black contact fuse and, reaching over the front of the boat with his head down, twisted it into the soft p1astic explosive. Bullets stitched a line down the rail of the snakeboat, inches from Hatcher’s ear. The barge was coming up fast.
Hatcher turned and crawled back to the thatched cabin.
‘Let’s go!’ he said to Cohen.
‘Go where?’
‘We got to get out of here. This thing’s going to blow sky-high any second!’
‘Why didn’t you tell me you were going to do something like this?’ Cohen yelled. Bullets tome into the rail near him. Cohen went berserk. He stood up let go of the tiller, and holding his gun hand straight out in front of him, started firing his .357 at Sam-Sam.
‘We’ve got to go now!’ Hatcher yelled and dived into Cohen’s stomach, driving the little man backward into the side of the thatched shed. The side collapsed. Hatcher and Cohen plunged through the flimsy cabin, out of the speeding boat and into the river. The snakeboat, driver- less, etched its crazy course toward the barge.
Hatcher and Cohen hit the water with such force that it momentarily knocked Hatcher’s wind out of him. He felt Cohen’s body wrench and then slip away from him. Hatcher tumbled once in the water, spread-eagled and stopped his motion. He lunged to the surface, took a deep breath and dived hard, his arms and hands sweeping the water around him.
Nothing.
He surfaced, took another deep gulp of air and dived again, taking powerful strokes and searching the dark water with his hands. Still nothing. Then as he surfaced he saw Cohen’s head bob up a few yards away. Cohen was half conscious, disoriented.
Hatcher took three hard strokes, reached out and grabbed Cohen’s arm by the sleeve. ‘I gotcha, pal, relax.’
Behind them, the snakeboat drove straight toward the barge. Batal looked at it and saw the gray cord of plastique around the bow. He screamed and dived overboard as the boat charged into the barge. Sam-Sam leaped to one side as the snakeboat hit and rose up out of the water, its prow several inches above the side of the barge. The hull of the snakeboat shattered and the prow tore into a stack of TV sets, smashing through tubes, scattering them like blocks. Tubes burst like firecrackers. The contact fuse smacked against the casing of one of the TV sets and the plastique exploded.
Sam-Sam was ten feet away when the barge erupted. He felt the sudden burst of hot air just before the concussion tossed him into the air like a broken twig. The force of the explosion ruptured his vitals and ripped his body apart. A moment later the explosion set off the gas tanks; the rear of the barge burst like a balloon. Fire and debris showered the air. Men and women on the barge were scattered like confetti.
The explosion lifted Batal out f the water, and blood spurted from ears, nose and mouth. He plopped back down into the river unconscious and sank slowly to the bottom as bits and pieces of the barge splashed into the water and sank with him.
‘Beautiful,’ said the ponytailed man with a smile.
‘Holy shit!’ was all Leatherneck John could muster.
A hundred yards away, the concussion of the explosion knocked both Hatcher and Cohen underwater. Hatcher lost his grip on the stunned Tsu Fi again. Cohen came up gasping, heard the chatter of submachine gun fire. Geysers of water sprouted from the river around him, shocked him into full consciousness. He splashed around like a hooked marlin, gulping air. The river erupted a few inches from Hatcher’s face as another burst ripped into the water. This time Hatcher saw where it was coming from. Billy Death stood near the river’s edge, fifty yards away, firing his AK-47.
Hatcher turned and zigzagged away from shore, yelling to Cohen to follow him. Another burst showered past him, bip, bip, bip, bip, bip.
A half-mile downstream, behind the barge, the Cigarette boat hugged the shore. The men in the boat had seen Sam-Sam return and had followed the barge upstream, hugging the shore to keep out of sight. Now all hell was breaking loose in front of them.
‘We go see,’ the leader of the three Chinese backup men said, pointing toward the barge.
The barge was tilting rapidly and the Ts’e K’ams aboard were too busy scrambling for safety and hauling their wounded to the shore to worry about Hatcher. Another explosion rent the barge, a gorge of flame roared out of the stacks of ammo boxes, followed by a wrenching explosion as the boxes exploded.
The explosion distracted Billy Death, who lowered his gun and walked uncertainly toward the barge.
Then the pop-pop of 9 mm. shells began as the heat cooked them off and they began ricocheting off the barge, ripping into the trees, and plopping harmlessly in the water. The barge was now fully ablaze.
Billy Death hesitated, then turned his attention back to Hatcher and Cohen. He raised the AK-47 to his shoulder and aimed at the two figures struggling in the river.
Behind him, seventy-five yards away, the ponytailed man stepped outside, and standing under the porch, he swung the heavy M-60 up, smacked the cartridge belt into the receiver and charged the first round into the chamber. He threw the rest of the belt over his shoulder and walked toward Billy Death.
‘Hey!’ he yelled. ‘You, the one they call Billy Death.’
The Haitian turned toward him. The man stood with legs spread Out at the edge of the river with the M-60 aimed squarely at the ex-Tonton assassin.
‘Drop the gun,’ the man ordered.
Billy Death stared uncertainly at him, then back out at Hatcher. He hesitated a moment to long before he swung the AK-47 around at the man with the M-60.
The heavy machine gun roared kicked, rippled the muscles of the ponytailed man. Half a dozen shots ripped into Billy Death’s chest. His own gun went off harmlessly into the air as he was spun around by the burst. His knees buckled. He floundered, staggered to the edge of the river and fell to his knees in the water. His arms went limp, the AK-47 fell into the water and his chin dropped to his chest. Billy Death fell sideways and rolled over on his face in the water.
The man walked back into Leatherneck John’s, unloading the heavy machine gun a s he strolled across to the bar. He put the M-60 back on the rack and dropped the ammo belt on the shelf below it.
‘You better be long gone when they get this mess under control,’ Leatherneck John said.
‘I was thinking the same thing,’ the ponytailed man said.
‘Why the hell’d you do such a crazy thing?’ the barman said.
‘I told you, I didn’t like the odds’
‘That’s it, you didn’t like the odds?’
‘You know what a HALO drop is?’ the ponytailed man asked.
‘Sure, high altitude, low open parachute jump,’ Leatherneck answered.
‘I did a HALO drop in the Delta back in ‘74. It was dark and the wind changed and I missed my zone by half a mile and came down in a bamboo thicket behind Gook lines. A bamboo shoot went right through my foot and came out my shin, right here.’
He pulled up his pants leg and pointed to an ugly scar near the middle of his shinbone.
‘I was pinned to the ground by this ten-foot shoot of bamboo and Charlie was all over the place. Then all of a sudden this guy appears from out of nowhere, breaks the shoot off and piggybacks me a half a mile back to the drop zone. Then he’s gone again, just like that. Never said a do-mommy word to me the whole time. Later on, somebody told me it was this guy Hatcher everybody calls Occhi di Sassi — Stone Eyes. Now, do you understand?’ He turned to Daphne. ‘Tell Hatcher Jonee Ansa says thanks — we’re even now. You might also tell him to check out a section called Tombstone in Patpong. Place called the Longhorn. A lot of the ex-GIs in Bangkok hang out there.’