The boy had walked outside and used one shot, before replacing the gun on the bar. Together they’d hauled the Duck into a dumpster where he’d lain with a perfect third eye until discovered by his soldiers.
Mac had been raised Catholic and he’d always used the church’s rule for his behaviour in the field. That yardstick said that while you could do good deeds knowing that there might be some bad consequences, you could never do a bad thing, hoping that good would come of it. He’d wrestled with his decision to give Ran the gun — had nightmares and internal debates about it for years. He’d decided, after becoming a father, that his initial argument was correct: that giving a weapon to a slave was a good thing which might have bad consequences; that it wasn’t just his ego that was happy when those people had wandered out of their cages, bowing pathetically to Mac like he was a god, holding their kids up to him and touching him on the forehead.
Knowing he was right didn’t stop him thinking about it, but he no longer pronounced himself guilty.
A static burst echoed in the cockpit and Luc pointed to a headset hooked to the bulkhead beside Mac’s right ear. He put it on and Sammy’s voice came through.
‘Orion Two, Orion Two, this is Orion One. Copy?’
‘I’m here, mate,’ said Mac.
‘We’re an hour away from destination. Any visuals yet, Orion Two?’
‘No, mate — we’re yet to fly over.’
‘Still on ETA?’
‘Affirmative, Orion One.’
Signing off, Mac kept his headset on as Luc spoke.
‘We twelve, thirteen minutes out,’ said Luc, a more confident man when sitting behind the controls of a plane. ‘You want fly over or loop around?’
‘Loop around,’ said Mac, thinking that Dozsa could easily have surface-to-air missiles defending his lair. ‘I’d like to plot it and then fly back down the roads, get an idea how we’re going to travel in here.’
‘Roads?’ said Luc, his mouth turning down at the corners.
‘Yes,’ said Mac.
‘Don’t know about no road, Mr Richard,’ said Luc. ‘That why Mr Smith fly here.’
Eleven minutes later the Friendship banked to the west and flattened out at about four thousand feet as it flew across the wide mouth of a valley.
‘There,’ said Luc, pointing in front of the engineer’s face. ‘That the airfield where we fly Mr Smith.’
Bringing binoculars to his eyes, Mac scanned the greenery and quickly found the stretch of tawny bare earth on the river flats. It was small and it was immediately evident why it wasn’t on any map: it was in the middle of a wilderness, not linked to any towns, not served by any roads that Mac could see.
‘What happens when you land there?’ said Mac, looking for activity at the airstrip.
‘Vehicles come down, they load onto the plane, we fly back to Phnom and Saigon.’
‘Where do the vehicles come from?’ said Mac.
‘Look up the hill from airfield,’ said Luc over the roar of the engines. ‘There are buildings, but they camouflage.’
Running the binos further up the sides of the valley from the airfield, Mac clocked a large complex of buildings among the trees, shaded by netting and painted in swirling designs of drab olive and lime green.
‘What’s in the buildings?’ said Mac, stunned by the size of the operation.
‘I not know,’ said Luc, shrugging. ‘We never allowed off the plane.’
‘Okay, Luc,’ said Mac, handing the pilot a USGS topographical map. ‘Mark this location and then let’s do a wide circle, around the back of the valley, see if there’s some kind of track to the river.’
Passing the map to the engineer, Luc banked the aircraft with a turn of the wheel and some rudder and they hooked north again, ducking behind a ridge.
Passing over the top of the river valley, Luc brought the F-27 to the level of the saddle hills, and Mac looked down the valley with the binos. The buildings could now be seen clearly, as could men milling around in the shade of the trees.
‘Seen enough,’ said Mac. ‘Let’s find a track.’
After thirty seconds of flying eastwards, away from the Israeli compound, Luc pointed down and Mac saw a narrow track, occasionally becoming clear when the forest was thin or as it forded a river.
‘Let’s follow it,’ said Mac. ‘Mark the route on the map.’
His confidence was evaporating by the second. If they were going to successfully infiltrate that compound, they’d need to surprise the occupants, and arriving via that track was not going to create a surprise.
After sixteen minutes of following the track, Mac saw a structure sitting slightly back from it, in the trees. Using the binos, he focused on it, his heart rate rising.
The track became more substantial and Mac could see farmers, carts and motorbikes moving both ways.
Looking up, he saw the Mekong and the town of Stung Treng on the other side — but no bridge.
‘Shit,’ said Mac, and asked Luc to patch him through to Sammy.
‘Mate, we’ll meet you in Kratie, okay?’ said Mac as the American answered.
‘We left there half an hour ago,’ said Sammy. ‘You okay, Orion Two?’
‘Yeah, we’re good — need to confab.’
‘Copy that, Orion Two,’ said Sammy. ‘Kratie it is.’
While the gear was secured at a small guest house in a secondary street of Kratie, Sammy grabbed Mac and they crossed a dusty street, through crowds of German backpackers and local hawkers, to a dark bar.
‘What’s up?’ said Sammy, as he returned to their table with a can of 333 in each hand.
‘I didn’t like Stung Treng for a base,’ said Mac.
‘Why not?’
‘It’s the only town near the Israeli compound, and it’s the town where the Mossad hit team was killed — Dozsa probably has informants working for him there. It’s poor, and the hotel owners and cops like a few US dollars thrown their way.’
‘Okay, so we base ourselves in Kratie,’ said Sammy. ‘Tell me about the compound.’
‘It’s in the middle of the jungle,’ said Mac, sipping at the cold beer.
‘Approaches?’
‘A track,’ said Mac. ‘And I mean a bloody goat track.’
‘I know what you’re thinking, McQueen, and it’s out of the question,’ said Sammy, watching from the corner of his eye a table of British tourists who were playing back their video footage of freshwater dolphins on the Mekong.
‘A small SF insertion, six-man unit, could drop in there with chutes and shut that place down very quickly,’ said Mac.
‘And it’s out of the question,’ said Sammy. ‘This operation only succeeds if the least number of people know what it’s about and even fewer know what’s in that compound.’
‘What’s in that compound?’ said Mac.
‘The gig is very simple, McQueen.’ Sammy ignored Mac’s question. ‘Get the memory card and retrieve the girl. We call in special forces and we’re up to our necks in Pentagon and Agency, and that brings media.’
‘Leaky?’
‘Like a sieve.’ Sammy lowered his voice. ‘Remember the hunt for Saddam?’
‘How could I forget?’ said Mac. ‘It was reality TV.’
‘Precisely. We let Defense or CIA into this gig and we’ll have every back-seat driver in DC appearing on Fox or CNN, surmising what the Chinese are up to and how the world economy is about to go down the toilet. The markets get nervous, the dollar slides and then the whole deal is in the shitter.’
‘Didn’t know it was that bad.’
‘So this compound can’t be impossible,’ said Sammy. ‘You haven’t spent your career behind a desk.’