A boatman stood bent over in the stern of his covered sampan, fiddling with a balky engine. The boat rocked zanily as Belew jumped in. The boatman looked at him. His lower jaw opened like the rear ramp of a C-130.
“Sorry Jack,” Belew said, “but my need is greater than thine.”
The man continued to stare at him. His mouth kept opening wider. If he kept that up, he was going to strain something.
Belew repeated the phrase in Vietnamese. No response. He pointed the 10mm at the man. The boater understood that fine: he turned and half dove, half fell into the greasy brown chop.
Shouts from downstream, then shots. Bullets raised quick geysers, not uncomfortably close. Belew holstered his sidearm. He reached out to the wharf for the other object that had caught his eye, which in concatenation with the stalled-out boat had drawn him.
“I hope this boy was bright enough that this thing’s not out of gas,” he said. He laid his left wrist on the gunwale, raised the U.S. Marine-issue machete that had been lying on the wharf, and brought it down with a thunk.
The lead pursuer was still a good fifty meters away. He stopped short, staring in astonishment as the American’s hand flew off and a stream of dark red arced into the Ben Nghe. He couldn’t handle that. He dropped his Kalashnikov and went running in the opposite direction, spewing vomit.
His comrades had stronger stomachs. Several knelt down on a wharf and opened fire. Three kept running after Belew.
He thrust the spurting stump against the sampan’s motor. A stinging instant as dirty metal met raw flesh, then a sense of contact and completion as Belew’s spirit entered the machine. A clog in the fuel line, he knew. I can handle that.
He concentrated, frowning slightly. The engine coughed twice and barked into life.
His arm temporarily welded to the engine, J. Bob steered the craft out into the flow. He headed downstream, as though making for the Delta himself. The Mekong Delta was traditionally fractious and at the moment in a state approaching open rebellion. It was a customary kind of place to blow to when you had to blow Saigon.
Three of his attackers were tripping over each other trying to get down to the wharf he had stolen the boat from. That left three standing by the river downstream. They all stood bolt upright and blazed away at him as the current and the small motor carried him by.
Very few people can hit a damn thing firing an assault rifle on full rock ’n’ roll, even a twenty-foot boat not thirty meters away. Near-miss mini-waterspouts showered Belew. A couple of copper-jacket 7.62x39-millimeter rounds did crash through the plank hull, but none close to J. Bob, who lay on his back in the stern. Bracing his right hand on the gunwale, he returned fire, and was gratified to see one gunman drop his rifle in the drink and go down in a heap. He might have been scared, instead of hit, but he didn’t seem to move as the sampan pulled slowly out of range. Belew holstered his pistol and rummaged one-hand in his pack.
The two surviving gunmen were joined by their three brethren. Two of them dodged back up to the street to run after Belew in futile pursuit. The rest got into a good old-fashioned shouting match, waving their rifles under each other’s noses.
Suddenly one pointed at the receding boat. Belew was aiming a fat black tube at them, something that looked highly reminiscent of a grenade launcher.
One dove off the wharf into the Ben Nghe. The rest scattered.
“‘The wicked flee when no man pursueth,’” J. Bob Belew said, and unscrewed the telephoto lens from his camera. I can sell those pictures to Rolling Stone, he thought, or Soldier of Fortune, depending. He was on the masthead of both publications as contributing editor. The superior man thought of righteousness before gain, but what the hell?
Running the gauntlet of fire had been a final act of calculated ballsiness. That hit squad would be damned sure he was heading down to the Delta.
But he wasn’t. Out of their sight, he was going to cut left at the Te and then again on the Saigon. North, toward where that Ozzie soak at Rick’s had told him Fort Venceremos was.
He laughed out loud. He never gambled for money; he thought that was a waste. But he loved to stake his life and win.
Chapter Twenty-six
“Village is deserted, Sarge,” Mario called back from the point, leading the squad out of the rice fields. He was a slight, intense kid with a Rambo rag tied around his temples. His skin was covered with pebble-like protrusions, which gave rise to the name Mark had briefly known him by back on the Rox, Rocky.
The sergeant stopped. Still strung out single file after coming off a paddy dike, the squad did an inchworm thing behind him.
“Is it, now?” Mario was shifty and smart and had seen some combat during the nightmare siege of Bloat’s stronghold. The sergeant thought he had potential to be a good troop, which was why he’d put him in the crucial — and, in an actual wartime situation, highly dangerous — point position.
The sergeant pointed at a pen where a heavy-horned water buffalo with a calf nuzzling her side eyed them with deep suspicion. “Think they’d leave their animals behind?”
He started walking again. Mario stood there slumped, with the consciousness of having fucked up just beating off him like heat off sun-warmed blacktop.
“Mario, my man. Walk with me.” The sergeant put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and urged him along into the village. He didn’t go by “Rocky” anymore; he had fallen under the influence of Lucius Gilbert, otherwise known as Luce, who held that joker names were bogus-slave names.
Moving with egg-walking care, Mark followed along with the others. Mark felt dumb; he’d thought the village was deserted too. He hadn’t noticed anything but these funky bamboo hootches, like he’d grown up seeing on the six o’clock news. They gave him a sense of déjà vu.
“Maybe they’re off working the paddies,” suggested Slick.
“With a big old pot of rice bubbling on the fire out front of one of their hootches like that?” the sergeant asked, pointing again.
The hair started to rise on the back of Mark’s neck. Where are they? Are they watching us? He felt like a trespasser.
“There!” Eraserhead screamed, so shrilly it made everybody jump. He flung out a hand to point, so fast his arm stretched to half again its normal length. “I saw somebody there in that hut!”
Mark snapped his head back and forth as if watching a tennis match on speed — him or the players, it didn’t make much difference. Yes, he saw them. Faces in the shadows. Some sullen, some openly hostile. Most of them wore a blank resignation he imagined a rape victim got when she knew she couldn’t fight back.
“Why are they doing this?” Spoiler demanded in a high-pitched voice. “Why the hick are they hiding from us?”
“They’re afraid of us,” the sergeant said. “They think we’re monsters — even Meadows, who looks about two feet taller’n any human they ever seen before. Also, we got these.”
He slapped the receiver of the M-16 he, like the rest of them, had been issued that morning. They were the reason Mark was being so hypercautious. He was afraid the thing would go off by itself.
The sergeant chuckled. “Got no way of knowing we got no bullets.”
“But we’re here to help them!” Mario said.