“It was just a snag, Linh,” the warrant officer said. ’A sunken branch caught on a bar. All kinds of things get in the river in the monsoon. Go back to sleep.”
Thump. The fifty-foot craft rocked perceptibly. The warrant officer lurched, had to grab at the hatchway for support.
“What in the name of all hell’s is going on?”
The impact seemed to have come on the starboard bow. A rating ran from the armor-plated cabin to peer down into the heavy water.
“Look!” he shouted, pointing. “I see something down there. Something gray, going away fast.”
Linh pointed his guns that way. “Shall I shoot? Shall I shoot?”
“If you do, you’ll blow To into tiny pieces, you cretin!” the warrant shouted. “Helm, cut the throttle. We need to find out what’s happening —”
“It’s coming back!” To screamed.
The engine sounds died. The boat slowed perceptibly as it coasted into the current, wallowing from side to side. And suddenly it rocked sharply.
To went headfirst over the rail.
At once he began thrashing, splashing, and screaming. If he could swim, he was keeping the fact well hidden.
“Nguyen, throw him a line. Linh, keep a lookout. If you see anything, shoot it.”
To’s shrieks rose an octave, and he actually came halfway out of the water. “Oh, Buddha, oh, Jesus, it’s got me, help, help, help!”
The warrant officer ran to the side — not as near as To had been. The rating was bobbing hysterically up and down, waving his arms. “Shoot!” the warrant officer yelled, dancing back. Then: “No! Don’t shoot!”
Linh, who was tightening his thumbs on the butterfly trigger, cranked up the barrels of his heavy machine guns in time to chew up the tall weeds on the bank instead of To.
And then To was staggering in the shallows, pushed to relative safety by some unseen force. “AHH! Ahh. Ah?” he said. He scrabbled up the bank on all fours, then sat down and covered his face with his hands.
“Now, shoot!” the warrant officer commanded. Linh dutifully began to rake the murky river just shy of the bank, throwing great brown sheets of water over To. To screamed and ran off into the weeds.
Linh stopped shooting. There was a terrific bang, so loud that the warrant officer thought for a moment a round might have cooked off in the chamber. The little boat rocked back.
When it fell forward again, it just kept going. Slowly but unmistakably.
A rating ran from below-decks. “The hull’s all caved in!” he screamed. “We’re sinking!”
“Ridiculous!” the warrant said. A big air bubble rolled to the surface, right in front of the bow.
A metal ammo box came sliding forward down the deck. The boat was settling heavily by the bows now. The warrant officer slammed his pith helmet on the deck.
“Why couldn’t the filthy Americans-without-money have sold us a boat with a metal hull?”
A shape burst from the water, big and sleek and streamlined and silver-gray. It hung in the air a heartbeat, grinning all over its rostrum at them. Then it fell back into the river with a splash that swamped the deck clear to the gun mount.
Linh turned and fled, screaming, “Sea monster! Sea monster!” The warrant officer grabbed him and started punching him.
“It’s just a dolphin, you coward!”
“Dolphins don’t sink ships,” Linh sobbed.
The beast broke the surface again fifty meters away, streaking off in a racing jump. Cursing, the warrant officer released Linh and jumped to the twin machine guns. The dolphin was moving away incredibly fast, shooting up out of the water at regular intervals.
The warrant officer fired the ammo cans dry. He never came close to hitting the dolphin. It vanished around a bend in the river.
He had to wade through ankle-deep water to abandon ship.
“What’s bothering that damned dog?” the sentry demanded.
His partner had his heels dug in and was holding the leash with both hands in an effort to keep the straining, snarling German shepherd from pulling him off his feet and dragging him out of the white high-noon glare of the floodlights that illuminated the ammo dump’s perimeter.
“I don’t know,” he said between panting breaths. “He’s never acted like this before.”
“Stupid animal. I should put a bullet between his ears. That would calm him down.”
“No! He must sense something. He’s a good dog.” The handler sounded wounded. He’d been through training with the dog; his fellow sentry was just somebody he’d been assigned to walk the wire with tonight. The dog was his buddy.
“I don’t believe it.”
“Here. I’ll let him go. He’ll show you.” He released the animal.
The dog sprinted forward in a black-and-tan blur. They saw him race into the black of the compound, saw his shadowy form leap as if at a victim’s throat. But there was nothing there.
Except the dog suddenly flipped over in the air and came down on its back so hard the two sentries heard the air burst out of its lungs. The shepherd rolled over and ran away with its tail between its legs, casting fearful looks over its shoulder.
The sentries looked at each other and began to unsung their assault rifles.
A woman appeared out of the darkness. Literally; it seemed she came into existence at the edge of the light — neither sentry saw a flicker of motion before she was abruptly there, running right at them. She wore tight-fitting black. Half her face was obscured by a black mask.
The dog handler’s hands were numb from holding the leash. He almost dropped his Kalashnikov. His partner got his weapon free first, started to raise it.
The woman ran up to them, jumped, sent both rifles flying away with a double kick. She burst between them, sprinting right for the three-meter fence.
She leapt into the air. Incredibly she soared up and over the high fence, tucking into a ball to spin over the razor-wire coils that topped it. As the sentries watched, jaws dropping, she hit the ground running. When she reached the far edge of the light-spill, it was as if she simply winked out of existence.
Behind the two sentries the ammo dump erupted in a cataclysm of light and noise.
The village security officer made his way home along the nighttime trail with the wobble-legged swagger of a man returning from a whorehouse. Which was just what he was doing.
To the last man who saw him alive he looked distinctly green. That was because he was being watched through an AN/PVS-2 — a so-called starlight scope.
J. Robert Belew tightened his index finger on the trigger. The American-made M21 sniper’s rifle roared and slammed his shoulder. The security officer dropped into the short grass with the pratfall abruptness of a man who isn’t rising again this side of judgment Day.
Leaving the rifle resting on its bipod, Belew rose and stole forward. He had two Khmer Rouge with him for security. They were small, watchful men, men from whom the youthful fire that had led them to drive the sick and old and crippled from hospital wards before their guns into the streets of Phnom Pen — hand to shoot, laughing, those who had not the strength to stagger — had long since died away, leaving them cynical, alert, attuned to survival for its own sake. Perhaps because it was all that was left them.
Though the Red Khmers as a movement were still as fanatically committed to their zany Maoist brand of revolutionary socialism as ever, few of the men who had taken part in the gang rape and murder of a nation still believed. They had seen too much. Now they were warriors, pure and simple, with no values and no past to fall back upon. Their ethics were those of the primal warrior through all human history: loyalty to buddies, qualified loyalty to a leader, if he had luck. Beyond that it was them against all humankind.
In their eyes Belew was both a comrade and an extremely lucky leader. To him they were useful, which made their moral failings irrelevant. He felt safe with them watching his back.