Rambo, page 10
The bow he’d been given had special modifications. Like his knife, it was black (electrostatically painted, so the dark finish would not scrape off) to prevent a glint from attracting an enemy’s attention. Its handle was magnesium, as strong as aluminum alloy but with much less weight. Its limbs were carbonized fiberglass with maple sandwiched at the core.
Because the handle was only twenty-one inches long, the limbs even shorter, eighteen inches, this compound bow when disassembled could fit into one of the twenty-two-inch quivers he’d strapped to each leg before he’d bailed out of the Peregrine jet.
As he watched Co’s confused reaction, he used the straight-edged screwdriver on the guard of his knife to attach the bow’s limbs to its handle. He screwed the top and bottom evenly, switching back and forth, and then it was assembled.
Even in the night, black against black, it looked magnificent.
And in the second quiver? His arrows. They could be taken apart as well, their full thirty inches unscrewed at the middle and reduced by half, thus allowing them to be completely contained within the second quiver, along with other equipment that he needed for them.
As he assembled them, concentrating on their considerable other features, he couldn’t ignore Co’s mystified blinking.
He finally found it necessary to speak, simplifying. “Better than a rifle. No sound.”
“But…” Co stopped blinking and stared now. In shock. “That all you have?”
He turned abruptly, sensing movement down there. As if a time-lapse photograph had sped to normal, a tower guard appeared in the box in the tree on the right, talking to another guard who paced under him. A third guard stepped from the hut in the middle of the compound, scratching his groin suggestively as the whore on the cycle sputtered up to him.
Stooping, Rambo crawled over the trip wire leading to the Claymore mine.
Alarmed, Co whispered behind him, “You not going in there?”
Rambo turned, puzzled.
“Where your camera?”
“Lost it.”
“But my orders…I thought… You not supposed to go in. Supposed to take pictures only.”
“Can’t.”
“Then watch. You tell. Spooks believe you.”
Rambo shook his head. “I need to be sure.”
“But what about orders?”
Orders. Rambo’s training insisted.
The basis of that training was, no matter what, you did what you were told.
Without obedience and discipline, a mission couldn’t be successful.
Trautman’s voice barked through his consciousness. “Yes, the mind’s the best weapon. Always rely on it. But obedience is mandatory. We don’t need any hot-doggers in our outfit. No super surfers. No hot-rodders. Gentlemen, when I tell you to shit, you do it. On the spot. And if you drop your drawers first, I’ll give you ten miles of laps until you get the idea that I didn’t tell you to drop your drawers. I told you to shit. We base our operations on precision. You’re a piece of machinery. Granted, machinery who can think. But you’re still machinery. And within the parameters of the assignment, with allowance for invention, you do what the hell you’re told. Because a lot of other talented machines depend on you for their lives.”
Rambo’s heart shrank with the fear (the single fear he allowed himself to feel) that he might be letting down the man he thought of as his true father. Born from him out of Bragg and horrendous tests under fire.
But under the circumstances…?
Would Trautman give him ten extra miles of laps if…?
Would the person he loved most, the only person he loved, disapprove of what he meant to do?
The prisoners! Rambo’s mind kept screaming. For me, six months here was an eternity.
And they’ve been here even longer.
“When I lost the camera…” he whispered to Co.
Now it was her turn to wait.
Sweat beaded on his forehead. “…orders stopped.”
His guts felt wrenched. “People began.”
Determined——feeling that he’d done the unthinkable, that he’d invited his father’s hate—he clutched his bow and quiver of arrows and slipped through the undergrowth.
8
Feeling Co behind him, he moved down the densely forested slope, checking for other booby traps.
Slow. Take it slow and careful.
On level ground again, he sank to his chest and crawled. At once, a scream from the camp made him pause, its echo fierce. His stomach tightened. Through a clump of ferns, Co next to him, he tensely scanned the camp. Sweat rolled past his eyes.
Had the scream come from a prisoner? He couldn’t tell. A scream was the true international language, sounding the same no matter who made it, American and Vietnamese alike.
But the four guards he saw didn’t seem to think it unusual. They were even amused. The guard in the tower to Rambo’s right glanced down at the sentry pacing beneath him and chuckled. “He offered me some of that wine he made. I’m glad I didn’t drink it,” the guard said in Vietnamese.
“Me, too.” The other laughed. “The last time, it gave me gas. Both ends.”
They thought this was hilarious.
“And him. It gives him bad dreams. He probably thinks he’s seeing those giant spiders again.”
“We ought to find one and dump it on his bunk.”
They doubled over, laughing.
From the barracks on the right, the scream was repeated, even more strident, diminishing to a moan.
Rambo gestured to Co to stay where she was. Staring toward the tower on the left, he saw the shadow of a guard up there sitting tilted back, probably on a bamboo bench, with his boots on the waist-high wall of the box.
He shifted in that direction, squirming through ferns and bushes, reaching the corner where the barbed wire veered back toward the cliff. Moving parallel to that section of wire but well concealed in the undergrowth, he passed the guard tower. One thing in his favor was that the camp had been designed with the towers facing inward—to keep prisoners from escaping rather than to look for someone breaking in.
Where the shadow of a massive tree blocked the moonlight, he crept to the wire, drew his knife, and levered it between the post and the rusted wire, using the saw-edge on the back of the knife to slice the metal. He slipped through the opening, sank to his stomach again, and crawled to the next row of wire. But here, because the wire wasn’t secured to posts but only unrolled and allowed to spring up at random, he was able to squeeze through one of the loops, careful not to get snagged on the barbs.
When he’d been held captive, the prisoners’ barracks had been on the left. Clutching his bow, he shifted through the darkness toward it. But he knew that something was wrong even before he got there. The building looked dilapidated. Vines covered the walls. Shutters dangled. Several sections of bamboo had fallen away, leaving gaps.
And the building was deathly quiet. Even if prisoners were sleeping in there, he should have heard something. A snore. A cot squeaking. A murmur in response to a dream or, rather, a never-ending nightmare.
He reached a gap in the wall, stared in, and clenched his teeth. The building was filled with nothing but spider webs and vegetation that had grown up between the slats in the floor. An unseen animal skittered in the farthest darkest corner.
Co had been right. This building was in such bad shape that the camp must have been abandoned for quite a while. The soldiers must have only recently come back.
But why?
And if there were prisoners, where were they being kept?
He crouched at the side of the barracks, waited for a guard to go past, and gave him lots of time to leave the area. Then he crept toward the barracks in the middle of the camp. At the rear, hugging the wall, he slowly stood, showing only one eye as he peered above a window ledge.
The room was dark. Several guards slept on cots shielded by mosquito netting, their rifles stacked near the door in the opposite wall. One guard snored raucously, suddenly stopped, and slapped at something on his cheek. With a grunt, he turned onto his side and started snoring again.
Outside, Rambo lowered himself to a crouch and swung in surprise, hearing music from the next window. A scratchy phonograph record—a Vietnamese rock-and-roll band banging at out-of-tune guitars, singing a translated version of “Twist and Shout.” A light came on, streaming from that window.
He didn’t dare show himself to look in. Instead, he sank all the way to the ground and squirmed toward the two-foot opening under the barracks, crawling through mud and spider webs, wary of snakes. The light from the room filtered down past the slats in the floor. He lay on his back and squinted up through a crack.
Although he couldn’t see the whole room, he saw enough. Above him, a Vietnamese soldier, a sergeant, had his back turned while he opened a tiny ancient refrigerator and took out a can of…
Coke, Rambo saw. Although the label had Chinese characters, the design of the logo on the can was unmistakable. Cold moisture beaded on it.
Something else was unmistakable. The face of the soldier. Rambo clutched his bow so hard that his knuckles ached. Rage scorched his stomach, hate making him hold his breath. The tall thin sergeant—his face gaunt, his lips and nostrils perpetually sneering, his narrow eyes profoundly cruel—was Tay, the soldier who’d most loved to torture him, who indeed had tried to flay him alive, who’d given him the scars on his chest and back.
Rambo knew he couldn’t possibly be wrong. He’d seen that face, with its bad breath and its scummy teeth, too close to his own too often. He’d seen it leering grotesquely before him too many times in his sleep. On occasion, when Rambo’s strength of will had not been great enough to maintain the mental discipline, the blessed escape, of Zen, he’d distracted himself—here, and in the town back in America, and in the rock quarry—with ways to get even with this man.
But after all this time, shouldn’t Tay have been transferred? Shouldn’t he have been stationed somewhere else?
When Rambo figured out the answer, it gave him satisfaction. Tay, you must have screwed up, huh? Whatever you did, it must have been so disgraceful that your punishment was to stay here in hell.
And if I get the chance, buddy, I’ll add to it.
Tay rolled the cold can across his sweaty forehead, popped it open, and drank greedily. Foam ran from his lips and down the can, dripping toward the floor.
Between the cracks.
Past Rambo’s eyes.
A woman spoke angrily, stepping into view. The whore from the village who’d arrived on the cycle. In Vietnamese, she said, “Hey, save some for me.”
Tay tilted the can above his lips, stopped swallowing, burped, and tossed her the hollow-sounding can. “Here, take what’s left.”
He shoved her onto a cot, stalked toward her, unbuckled his belt, and snapped off the light. The scratchy record kept blaring. Twist and shout.
9
The barracks on the right contained no prisoners either, only other sleeping soldiers, and in one compartment, a solitary man—the commander, Rambo assumed.
But if there aren’t any prisoners, why the hell are all these soldiers…?
His attention focused on the cliff at the rear of the camp, on the deeper blackness of a cave.
And he understood.
Cautious, reaching it, he found bamboo bars across the entrance. And beyond, in the moldy wet recess…
He swallowed sickly.
Five Americans. But, Jesus, they looked like…
Rotting zombies. Living corpses. Gaunt, covered with scabs and running sores. The flesh on their chins and cheeks had shrunk until their faces looked like skulls. By contrast, their eyes seemed enlarged, bulging pathetically from bony sockets. But their clothes didn’t hang on them. Exactly the reverse. Their ragged peasant clothes, too small, clung tightly, hitched grotesquely high on their arms and legs.
One of them, bathed in sweat, moaned, rolling on the rock floor, wracked by malarial spasms. Another had wrapped himself into a fetal position, his face between his knees.
Rats moved among them.
No, Rambo thought. I knew they’d look bad. But I never guessed—
Even after his escape, after his six-week ordeal of trudging through the rain forest struggling to get below the DMZ, he’d never looked that bad.
His shock abruptly changed, becoming triumph. POWs. He could prove they existed. He’d found them.
Instinctively, he raised his knife to cut the ropes that held the bamboo bars in place. Hurry! he thought. Come on! I’ll get you out of here!
But although their delirious eyes were angled in his direction, they didn’t see him.
Or, worse, for all he knew, their blurred consciousness told them that he was just another guard, perhaps come to torture them again, and even that possibility they accepted passively.
He couldn’t risk trying to get them out. One was sure to start babbling. Or another to moan. Or a third to stumble and fall.
That would get us all killed, Rambo thought.
Or put me back in here.
And that he could not endure.
But he had to do something.
Yes. What I was told to do. Find out where the prisoners are being held. Get my ass back to the pickup site. And report to Murdock.
Delta Force will get these men out.
Because the POWs exist! I’ve seen them! I can prove it!
Prove it? he suddenly wondered, frowning. How? I don’t have the camera.
Then I’ll describe what I’ve seen.
And will they believe you? Trautman will, of course.
But Murdock? Or the committee who ordered this mission?
They think my wrapper’s loose to start with. No, they’ll say my word—the word of a convict, of someone who shot up that town—isn’t good enough.
I need to do something. I need to bring back some kind of proof.
And then he heard it.
A moan.
Beside him.
Close.
In the dark outside the cave.
10
Rambo pivoted defensively, his knife raised. But what he saw made him lower it. Near a pigsty, a prisoner hung from a bamboo cross, his arms tied in a V above his head. The angle was deliberate, calculated. If his arms had been tied to the right and left in the form of a cross, the position of his muscles combined with the weight of his body would not have allowed him to breathe. A few hours after being hung up, he’d have suffocated.
But this other position, his arms up in a V, reduced the pressure on his chest.
He would suffer.
But not die easily.
The suspended man was ghostly white, a living skeleton. The leather that bound his wrists above him had abraded his skin, blood flowing down his arms. The cuts would leave scars. Rambo knew that—because his own wrists bore the scars from being hung in this position.
Another reason to pay back Sergeant Tay.
The man wasn’t moving. But as Rambo touched the broomstick bones of his neck, feeling for a pulse, the prisoner’s eyes fluttered open.
Flickering. Focusing. His lips were cracked. A horrible bruise swelled around his left eye. “What…?” His voice was raspy, guttural, faint.
Rambo clamped a hand across his mouth as he cut the lashings on the bamboo cross. The man fell into his arms. To grab him, Rambo had to take his hand from the prisoner’s mouth.
“You…?” The voice was barely audible, even close to Rambo’s ear. “American?”
“Shh!” Rambo risked two further sounds. “Don’t talk.”
He hoisted the prisoner over his shoulder—it wasn’t difficult; the man weighed almost nothing—and moved off in a crouching run.
“There are…others,” the faint voice murmured, less than a whisper.
Don’t worry, Rambo thought as he crept past the ruin of what used to be the prisoners’ barracks. I give you my word. They’ll be rescued.
Rambo’s scrotum shrank as a searchlight came on, sweeping across the compound, heading his way. Caught in the open, he had no other choice. His heart pounding, he set down the prisoner, hurriedly slipped an arrow onto his bow, and drew the string back.
The arrow was as sophisticated as his bow. Its shaft was made not from wood, which would warp in the damp of this forest, and not from fiberglass, which could shatter, but from space-age aluminum, strong yet not heavy, anodized black like the bow so there wouldn’t be a reflection. It had a four-bladed, razor-sharp, saw-edged blade, one inch wide, two and a half inches long, anodized black like his bow and shafts. The serrations on the blades were designed to stop the broadhead from glancing off bone. Called a Copperhead Ripper, this head would imbed itself into almost anything. It had the penetrating capabilities of a copper-jacketed bullet.
He set the arrow against the soundless rubber rest on the compound bow’s handle.
In Zen, the most powerful, disturbing, complicated figure is the archer. A bow that even the strongest man cannot pull back is easily worked by the frailest, most seemingly ineffectual monk. With the discipline of meditation, with the strength of mind over matter, and the solace of knowing that nothing is real—including the bow—the monk draws back the string, concentrating his intense imagination on the target that doesn’t exist. He releases the arrow, and with a spine-chilling thrum, hiss, thunk, the shaft strikes home, always precise, always with the same religious meaning. Nothing—even violence—is real.
The guard in the box in the tree took the fiercely barbed arrow through his chest. The shaft stopped at the soft black nylon fletches (unlike feathers, they wouldn’t wilt and lose their accuracy in this humidity), the impact so shocking that the guard never had the chance—even reflexively—to scream. He lurched back, disappearing.
The searchlight stopped, frozen on an insect on a fern.
