Betrayal

Chapter 23

A cruel wind blew sheets of rain across the clearing, lashing the treetops with a sullen fury. The brooding clouds denied the twilight glow of the hunter’s moon to the huddle of guards, on alert after their compatriots failed to check in or return from their ambush at the abandoned temple high on the distant mountain.

“Take two men and do a patrol. Come on. I have a bad feeling about this,” Thet, the leader of the tribesmen, ordered the guard sitting by the struggling flames of the fire, which had a piece of sheet metal suspended over it to deflect the rain.

“Come on. It’s pouring. Don’t make me go out in this,” the younger man whined, clutching a tarp over his head in an effort to stay dry, as he eyed the older man with cautious fear mixed with annoyance.

“It’s not a request. Do it. Now. Take Maung and Htet and check the perimeter.” Thet’s voice had an edge. He wasn’t used to having his instructions questioned.

“Fine. I’ll go get them. But everything’s probably okay. What do you want to bet that their radio got soaked in this, and that’s why they didn’t check in? It’s happened before…”

“Thanks for the theories. I’ll have to remember that when I’m getting ready to retire to Bangkok with a harem of bar girls. You’re a deep thinker, wasted on this kind of duty.” Thet cuffed him gruffly. “Now get your ass on patrol. I don’t want to say it again.”

The young man stood and tried to take the tarp, but Thet shook his head. “Grab slickers. That’s why the boss brought them for us.”

The guards had yet to become accustomed to some of the technological advances that the crazy farang had introduced into their simple lives. Rain gear, flashlights, solar panels, all unimaginable luxuries that had been foreign to them until he’d arrived and assembled a small private army. Every man had grown up in the surrounding hill villages and had earned their livings in the harsh environment, either farming or working for the drug syndicates that effectively ruled the region.

They had all learned to field strip a Kalashnikov before they’d hit puberty, and had killed before their voices had changed. It was a brutal life in Myanmar: a poor country with a totalitarian military dictatorship that treated its population like subjects, and in which meager hierarchy the Shan hill tribes comprised the bottom rung — lower than human. There were no schools, no hospitals, no power plants or telephone lines. Only the hills and whatever they could coax from the ground — usually opium or food crops.

Before the white devil had arrived, Thet had made thirty dollars a month working as protection for a drug trafficking group. Now he made a hundred and fifty. The prospect of a wild increase in fortune made it easy to recruit the most aggressive and deadly of his brethren, who had literally fought over the right to work the security detail for a hundred dollars a month. He’d limited the group to twenty hardened fellow Shan fighters, and whenever they lost one to disease or a skirmish with one of the roaming groups of traffickers, he had ten begging to take the fallen man’s place.

The seven men he had sent to Bangkok to help the sex slaver with his problem had been his best, and he would miss them. Pu had brought news of their passing along with a warning to expect another attack — the third in the last month and a half. Thet had lost a total of twelve fighters since he had started working for the farang, but didn’t question it. Life was uncertain at the best of times, and a big payday carried with it certain risks. The average male lived sixty-seven years in Myanmar, but in the Shan region it dropped to fifty-five, and that didn’t take into account the far lower expectancy of those working for the drug runners. But as a farmer, he might make fifteen dollars a month, twenty if he was lucky, and the syndicates paid thirty for a much easier day’s work. When he’d been offered the princely sum by the round eye, he’d thought the man insane, but he had come to appreciate that he was not only shrewd, but also skilled in the ways of the world.

Thet watched as the bedraggled patrol trudged to the edge of the clearing and entered the jungle, a flashlight illuminating their way. This was only one of the white man’s camps, and they moved every two weeks, melting into the jungle only to reappear elsewhere the next day. Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia…the geography made no difference to him. It was all jungle and hills. But he was becoming a rich man as the farang’s security chief, so he was fiercely loyal to him, lest his meal ticket disappear, forcing him to go back to risking his life every day with a drug network, or have to be a protection worker for the slavers that routinely bought the more attractive children from the impoverished locals.

Whatever his benefactor had done to require this level of protection didn’t matter to Thet, nor to his men. Nobody knew, although there were constant rumors and speculation — that he had murdered his family, or was running from a rival criminal syndicate, or had deserted from some army and was a wanted man. Whatever the case, he was Pu’s friend, and Pu had been doing business in the region forever. That was good enough for Thet.

He hugged his rifle closer as he eyed the rain distrustfully.

There was evil afoot in the night. He could feel it.

The men swept the jungle in front of them with their weapons, the bravado they had displayed back in the camp now faded into a dull acceptance of getting soaked while their peers slept. But they weren’t paid to be comfortable. They collected their money to keep the white man safe, and that is what they would do, even in the middle of a torrential downpour. The rain pelted their unfamiliar rain gear with wet thwacks as they edged along the trail that ran in a rough oval around the clearing.

“Ack-”

The man bringing up the rear pitched forward face-first into the mud, a bloody shaft protruding from his chest. By the time the other two had registered that he hadn’t tripped, the guard in front of him had been similarly impaled and dropped his rifle, clawing at the razor-sharp point that had appeared as if by magic from his sternum. The third man was raising his rifle defensively when an arrow skewered him through his left eye, and he collapsed without getting a single shot off, having never seen his killer or heard anything besides the briefest of whistling as the arrow sliced the air on its trajectory to his brain.

Jet stepped cautiously towards the corpses, another arrow notched, and kicked the flashlight into the underbrush before melting back into the brush, her night vision goggles and black face paint lending her the appearance of a nightmare demon with attitude.

Three down. That left seven or so to go.

She had considered letting the rest of the gunmen come to her and picking them off in the jungle, but didn’t want to alert the target that he was under attack. If he disappeared, she might never find him again. This was her only chance, so she had decided to bring the battle into the camp before the remainder of his entourage knew what hit them.

She adjusted the black leather quiver, still full of arrows, so that it wouldn’t impair her ability to get the P90 into play and then turned towards the camp, the sleeping men’s fates all but sealed.

Thet was restless. The men had been gone for too long. The buzz of anxiety that roiled in his gut was growing, and his survival instinct was warning him to wake the men.

He was preparing to rise and walk to the first hut when a blinding shriek of pain shot through his right lung, and he found himself gasping for breath as he fumbled with his rifle. A second silver shaft caught a stray bit of light from the flickering fire before slicing through his throat. Thet keeled backwards off the rock he was seated on, dead before he hit the ground.

Jet crept towards the dark buildings, their outlines glowing in her goggles, and then froze when she heard the tarp draped across one of the doorways crackle and an arm emerged. She pulled the bowstring back to her ear and waited for the man to show himself, and watched as a guard exited, scratching himself, and then darted through the rain for the latrine.

The arrow caught him mid-stride ten feet from the building, and he gurgled as he fell, then moaned before laying still. She hoped that nobody had heard him, but then saw the tarp pull back again, and another figure exited, holding a rifle.

In a fluid motion she pulled another arrow from the quiver, notched it, and sent it whistling towards his head. The arrow caught him in the jaw and stabbed through his mouth, protruding through the back of his head and imbedding itself in the wooden wall behind him. He screamed, a jarring, raw sound, prompting Jet to launch another