Fan stopped talking as ordered, but his heavy labored breathing told the American holding him by the arm that this kid wasn’t going to jog all the way into Cambodia.
Within a minute Fan confirmed this. “I can’t keep moving like this! I’m tired!”
“Sure you can. You have no idea all the amazing things you are going to do tonight!”
“Amazing things? What amazing things?”
Court thought he heard a helicopter in the distance now. He couldn’t see it, and by the faint thump of the rotors it was still a couple of minutes away, but he had no doubt it was heading in this direction.
“Like not getting shot,” Court said. He pulled the man harder now. “That would be amazing.”
Fan said nothing else as the two men struggled through the vines and bushes along the edge of the rice paddy. After reaching the northern tree line, they stayed deep within that cover, Court stopping occasionally so he could listen for the approaching helo.
When the Russians crossed through the first tree line they found themselves looking over a rice paddy that must have been half a square mile in size. Zoya scanned with her night vision, and then again with her thermal optic.
She said, “Nothing.”
Pyotr said, “They entered these trees three minutes before us. How the hell did they cross this paddy so fast?”
Zoya looked around, again through her NVGs. “Impossible. They are either under the water or they stayed in the tree line. The canal is south. Maybe they went north.”
Vasily said, “We aren’t hanging out here, Koshka.”
Zoya turned to him, but before she could speak the copilot of the Mi-8 came over the radio and announced he would be overhead in two minutes. Vasily ordered the helo to pick them up in a dry clearing at the edge of the paddy, and then Yevgeni flipped on an infrared beacon and threw it overhand to the middle of the landing zone.
While they waited on the helicopter, most of the team pulled security, keeping their guns and their attention back to the east in case they were being pursued by the Vietnamese. Fortunately for both parties, the PAVN officers who hadn’t been killed inside the villa in the opening moments of the raid had the good sense to load their men into their trucks and bug out to the south, vowing to return with a company-sized force at first light to collect the dead. This would also give them time to come up with a story. The commander of the Ninth Military Region in Can Tho was on the payroll of the Wild Tigers, and this was his sector, but everyone here knew that if Hanoi found out the truth of what happened here — that a dozen uniformed military working security for a criminal organization had been killed or wounded at the hands of some foreign force — the implications, both foreign and domestic, would be massive.
Court could hear the approaching helicopter now, but he couldn’t see it through the impossibly thick strip of jungle here north of the big rice paddy. It sounded like it was coming in for a landing somewhere just a hundred yards or so southeast of his position, and Court hoped like hell it would load up with those tier-one shooters and just fly away.
Fan had been compliant as they humped through the trees, and other than his heavy breathing and grunts of pain when he cracked his shins against roots or bumped his forehead on branches, he’d been relatively quiet. That all ended suddenly when he pulled to a halt and leaned over to put his hands on his knees. “This is impossible. Are we continuing in the jungle the entire way to Cambodia?”
“Negative. We’ll have to get into the flooded paddies that lie between here and there. Trust me, you’ll miss walking in the jungle about two minutes after you start sloshing through that shit.”
Fan said, “We can’t just walk through the rice paddies.”
“Sure we can. I did it once tonight already.”
“But… will there be swamp rats? I heard rats in the basement of the villa.”
“Not too many in the paddies. The snakes killed them all.”
“Snakes!” Fan said it so loud Court put the young man in a headlock.
“Shhhh,” he said, holding the man in a vise grip. “Listen, Fan. I’m here to protect you, and I promise I won’t let you get killed by a snake. But I can’t promise you a Russian sniper or a Vietnamese mortar round won’t kill you if you make too much noise.”
Still in the headlock, Fan’s head rotated up. “Russians?”
“Those guys at the villa that tried to grab you tonight were Russian. I’m positive.”
“I don’t understand. I thought that was you.”
“No. We both came for you at the same time. I got lucky, and I got to you first.”
“Are you going to tell me you saved my life?”
“Not really. Those other guys wanted you alive, too.”
“If those people wanted me alive, it would be bad if they wanted me dead.”
Court conceded the point with a nod, and the men started walking again.
Fan said, “But… you are a killer, like them. You shot Tu and Cao like they were nothing.”
Court said, “If they were nothing, I wouldn’t have shot them. They were a threat to my operation.”
“It is so simple to kill?”
Court regarded the question while pushing through a thick portion of vines. “I don’t kill people who aren’t asking for it. Those guys were drug smugglers, and they were hiding one of the most powerful computer hackers to ever work against the interests of the United States.”
Fan stopped walking again, and he looked up in the darkness. “Really? Who?”
Court just grabbed him by the arm and pulled him on. “You, asshole.”
“You captured me because you think I have hurt the U.S.?”
“It’s not a capture. It’s a rescue.”
“This doesn’t feel like a rescue.”
“You think the Wild Tigers were going to just say, ‘Thanks for the help, and thanks for getting half our guys killed. You can go now’? No, that’s not how criminal organizations work. They would have used you as long as you could be used, and then they would have killed you because you knew too much.”
“I had to work with them. The PLA is looking for me.”
“You’re damn right he is. Colonel Dai sent a dozen men into the building in Ho Chi Minh City this afternoon.”
“Dai? No… he is a lieutenant colonel. He is the deputy director of the security of Unit 61398. The colonel in charge is named—”
Court said, “Dai got a promotion, because the other guy was put in front of a firing squad after you ran.” Court didn’t know why he said that. It wasn’t going to help this kid’s morale to know he was getting people killed for his actions, although to Court it seemed perfectly obvious.
But clearly Fan was under no illusions about the trouble he’d started by running. “A lot of people are dead now. All because of me.”
“Yeah,” Court agreed. “And the night is still young.”
The crew of the Russian Mi-8 racing in from Cambodia wore night vision gear, so they flew their helo straight to the LZ without lights, and they touched down without shutting off their engines. All members of the task force — save for Sasha, of course — quickly boarded the helo.
Just as the pilot lifted off and turned the aircraft back to Cambodia, Zoya Zakharova put a cabin headset on, and she spoke into the microphone. She ordered the pilot to run racetrack patterns over the massive rice paddy and trees that rimmed it.
Vasily put on a headset of his own.
“Three minutes! You have three minutes to look for the target, and then we are out of here.”
The helo crossed back and forth once over the huge paddy, then flew lower, closer to the tree line on the north. Here it began slowly following along the length of the trees, just twenty meters above the ground, while Zoya, the pilot, and the machine gunner all used their night vision and thermal gear to try to find any hint of two men hiding there.