"Two hundred rifles."
"How are they coming, on foot?"
"Yes, on foot."
"Any other armament?"
"Grenades and flamethrowers."
"What about us, what do we have in the way of armament?"
"Crossbows, muskets, and thirteen rifles."
"Thirteen?" Bolan exclaimed. "We captured over forty in the raid on the pagoda!"
Vang Ky sucked on his teeth and looked down at the space between his feet. Seconds ticked by.
"He sold them," volunteered one of the other headmen.
"You what?" Bolan exploded.
"On our way back," Vang Ky began, looking at everything and nothing in particular but making sure he avoided Bolan's stare, "on our way back we met the Yao. They were paying good money." Vang Ky's eyes traveled from the fire to the jars of upas tree poison, to the spot between his feet, and back to the fire. "Since we were going to receive a lot of weapons tonight anyway..."
"Ky thought it was his opportunity to make a killing," another man finished.
A long silence followed. It was broken by the man called Ly. "There you have it, Mr. White Man," he said. "We have thirteen rifles, and they have two hundred. We cannot save our homes by fighting. Our only chance is to negotiate." He added knowingly, "And as you said, politics is a dirty business."
Bolan got his drift, all right. He and Nark were to be the sacrificial lambs with which the Meo would appease Tiger. And judging from the reaction or lack of reaction the conference found Ly's proposition a good one. Only Vang Ky had spoken against it.
"What makes you so certain the Chinese will go for your proposal?" Bolan asked Ly. "If I know them, they'll take us and attack the villages anyway."
It was hardly an argument, but that was not the point. The point was to stretch the conversation to give himself time to come up with a solution. He had to find a way of destroying that column. It was the only way of keeping Galloping Horse alive. They could not scrub the mission, not now, not after the work that had gone into it, the effort of hundreds of good people who had been working on it for months, the ships, the planes that were waiting for the signal to swing into action.
He could not let them down.
"The Chinese are shrewd people," the headman Ly said. "They know if they burn the villages, there will be no one to harvest the opium."
To which Bolan replied, "Tiger can afford to lose a few kilos of opium. They'll make it up from their stockpile. But what they cannot afford is to let a rebellion go unpunished."
"There are many ways the strong can punish the weak," Ly said. "A fine, for example. A fine would be much more lucrative."
"I disagree," Bolan replied. "A fine is not a strong enough punishment. The punishment must be strong enough to deter the other Montagnard nations from following your example. The Chinese..."
Eureka! He found it! The solution was staring him in the face, stacked against the opposite wall, jars and jars of it. The upas tree poison!
He would destroy the Tiger column with poison.
Bolan turned to Vang Ky. "Can I borrow your elephant?"
Atop the elephant, Bolan waited for the coming of Tiger. It was night and the moon was shining. The elephant stood hidden by trees a couple of hundred yards from the Nam Tha trail. Everything was ready for the ambush, the entire village having lent a hand. Six thousand bamboo poles had been cut, women had sharpened them into spikes, children had dipped them in upas tree poison, and the men had planted them in the kill zone. Now, the rest was up to Bolan.
He sat in a howdah, an Armalite in his lap, an ammunition belt around his waist. From under the belt protruded a poppy red sash. A black Montagnard pajama suit replaced his tattered fighter suit. To make him look like a real Meo, the headman had given him a broad Montagnard silver collar, which Bolan also wore. The fighter was ready to defend the village.
While waiting, he smoked and the elephant ate. The animal was a nine-ton bull. It stood ten feet high and tore at the trees with its trunk, stuffing huge quantities of twigs and leaves into its mouth.
A birdcall sounded, the mahout announcing himself. The elephant driver came out of the trees, a bucket of rice beer in each hand. He set them in front of the elephant, there were two loud slurps, and the buckets were empty. The mahout put the buckets aside and whispered some words to the elephant. In answer, the beast curled its trunk and raised a foreleg. With the aid of these two steps the mahout climbed on its back and came to the howdah.
"Tiger coming soon," said the mahout. He brought out a cigarette and Bolan lit it for him with the end of his.
"Where is the headman?" asked Bolan.
"Coming," replied the mahout.
They fell silent, listening to the sounds of the elephant eating and to the noises of the forest.
An owl hooted. The mahout replied with a birdcall. At that the headman appeared, barefoot, rifle in hand. Montagnards often took off their footwear so they could move faster, more quietly. The mahout motioned him to come around the back. Big Bottom might get annoyed if he had to interrupt his meal to make steps. This time the mahout had it raise its hind leg. The headman climbed on it and pulled himself the rest of the way by the tail. He joined Bolan by the howdah.
"Tiger be here soon," Vang Ky announced, lighting a cigarette.
"Nark left?" asked Bolan.
"Yes."
Bolan glanced at the sky. "We should have no problems." The moon shone in a cloudless sky, and there was hardly any wind. Perfect weather for an air drop.
The headman smoked pensively. "What if we capture the white men?" he asked.
"You pass them to me and I will kill them," Bolan answered simply.
Just before sundown one of the shadowing riders had reported that a Tiger helicopter had landed near the column depositing three white men. The whites had evidently joined the punitive expedition to distract themselves with a little man hunting...
"Thanks for helping me at the meeting," Bolan said to Vang Ky.
The other shrugged. "An agreement is an agreement. And Ly and Pao are hypocritical crocodiles. They made money from the Vietnam War and now they spit on Americans."
"All the same, I appreciate it," Bolan added.
It was Vang Ky who convinced the other headmen to proceed with the Tiger War. The others were skeptical that Bolan could pull off the ambush. Whoever heard of one man single-handedly destroying two hundred? No matter how clever the plan, no matter how brave and lucky the fighter. Only when Vang Ky announced that his village would go to war regardless, did they relent, fearful of missing out on the booty. There was more than opium in the Tiger hardsite; there was gold, too.
"We should go see," said the headman, glancing at his digital watch.
"I'd like to borrow that," said Bolan. He needed a watch to calculate the column's speed. His own watch had been taken when he and Nark were captured.
They slid down from the elephant and walked to the trail. A shape materialized; one of the men left behind to supervise the collecting of the enemy arms by village women. He led them to a spot where they could observe the column comfortably and from where they could retreat without making noise.
Bolan measured the distance between two trees. By timing how quickly men covered it he would be able to calculate the speed of the column, then he would know how soon they would be in the kill zone. He returned to the hiding spot and crouched.
In moonlit silence they waited for the enemy. No birds were calling, no cicadas rasped, no mosquitos buzzed. It had not rained for two days and the jungle was dry.
A barely audible metallic sound alerted them. A sling buckle hitting the stock. Three Tiger soldiers went by noiselessly, shotguns at the ready. In Nam the pointman always carried a shotgun. For close-range work in the jungle, a shotgun was best.
The main body of the column came. They heard it before they saw it, boots hitting the dry ground, cloth brushing cloth, straps straining. First came two men with M-79s, then some riflemen, then an officer, judging by the map case at his side. Behind the officer came a radioman looking like an insect with the bent aerial at his back. A machine gunner followed, holding his weapon straight up like a priest with a cross at a procession, then a man with a flamethrower, then the commander, binoculars on his chest.