A Knife Edge

FIFTY-THREE

I stood panting and sweating, the Koreans and Rossi all tangled at my feet. Rossi was beginning to stir. She rolled slowly onto her back with a groan. Her left eye was bruised and swollen and there were two rivulets of blood flowing from both nostrils. The asswipes had busted her nose. She spat blood. Said asswipes also began to move, and that was a surprise. After the clout I'd given them, I fully expected them to be counting stars for another half hour at least. I figured they were either a couple of tough hombres, or stupid. I tossed a mental coin on the question and, based on the theory of no-pain-no-brain, came up with stupid.

Situation awareness dawned on Rossi slowly at first, and then with a rush when she saw the Korean's naked, spotty, twig-plastered butt and her pants sliced up. She stood uneasily, trying to find her balance, her fists clenched into tight balls, the skin on her knuckles white with the pressure.

“Rossi,” I said, hoping for some acknowledgment. I got none. My instinct was to ask her whether she was OK, but I knew she was OK so that would have been trite. I'd come to the conclusion that Rossi only looked like a woman, a handy disguise in her line of work. A millimeter below that feminine exterior I believed she had all the warmth of a razor strop. “The keys. Where are they?” I asked her instead, holding my cuffed wrists toward her.

I didn't need to be a clairvoyant to see Rossi wanted to kill someone, maybe even me. Her eyes were flat, and it wasn't with shock. I didn't even think she'd heard my question. Her small pack was at my feet, so I picked it up, undid the zip, and shook out the contents: underpants, toiletries, a little makeup, and a couple of keys attached to a familiar Michelin Man key ring. My keys for the S&Ws. I unlocked the cuffs and transferred them to the Koreans' wrists. One of the men was attempting to sit up. He was groggy and spitting bits of tooth, gum, clotted blood, and mucus onto the ground between his legs. He was still a long way from giving trouble. I patted him and his buddy down. Both had binoculars, walkie-talkies, Colt. 45s — my personal favorite — and a couple of spare magazines to go with them. I examined the pistols quickly. Their front sights were ground off and the magazines for both were full. I stuffed one of the weapons in the back of my pants and the other in a pocket with the spare magazines. Stupid they may have been, but I had no doubt these guys were professional enough to have radioed their observations back to base before approaching Rossi's hide too closely. I stomped on the walkie-talkies. The sets were no more than kids' toys and they shattered into chunks of plastic and printed circuit board.

“Borrow these? Thanks,” I said, taking a pair of binoculars and not waiting for permission to be granted. I brought the lenses into focus on the villa. The image of Sean Boyle danced and shook with my adrenaline-charged breathing. I caught the last moments of my target being stuffed into the back of a black Lexus 4−4 by a clone of the two boys by my feet who, I noted absently, were now easily distinguished from him by the orthodontic work I'd just performed with what turned out to be a hundred-and-twenty-pound tuning fork. “They've made us,” I told Rossi. “Boyle is on the move.” I wasn't too concerned. There was only one road out. Colonel Ratipakorn would head them off at the pass, access blocked by a couple of Humvees topped with Mr. Browning's gift to the world — big, black fifty-caliber machine guns. Through the binoculars, I followed the vehicle as it bounced and rocked over the rough dirt road hacked through the bush on the valley floor. But where the ribbon of gray dirt cut through the green scrub and turned left, the 4−4 went straight ahead, cutting its own path. No. More likely, it was following a private road that wasn't on any map. “Shit,” I said.

Behind me, I heard Rossi shout something I didn't recognize as being English. I turned in time to see her point the rifle at one of the Koreans' feet. I saw the barrel recoil and heard the bang and a couple of the guy's toes disappeared in a spray of atomized red mist that drifted across his buddy. The big man screamed. Rossi slid back the bolt like she had all the time in the world and then moved it forward, chambering another round. The injured guy rocked back, screaming in an animal kind of way, holding his shattered foot in the air. His tracksuit pants slid down his leg, revealing skin that had gone white with shock, the black hairs raised. His foot didn't start bleeding right away. The muscle fibers in the exposed flesh quivered.

Rossi altered her aim, burying the suppressor on the end of the long barrel in the pubic hair of the man's crotch, at the base of his now shrunken turnip. She asked whatever she'd asked before, only politely this time, confident of getting the right answer.

The man blubbered something, his formerly narrow almond eyes now as wide as any I'd ever seen.

“The airport,” said Rossi, translating. “That's where they're going.”

“You see how far a little politeness will get you?” I replied.

Rossi shrugged. I doubt her pulse cracked sixty. She could've been buttering bread for all the emotion she exhibited. “Now, before I blow off this guy's dick, did he touch me with it?” She nudged his penis with the steel finger of the suppressor. He whimpered.

I shook my head. “No.”

I saw the slightest movement in her trigger finger. The guy saw it too and cried out. Rossi hesitated. She could pull the trigger. She could turn the weapon on me. She could start singing “Rhinestone Cowboy.” She could also remove the suppressor from the Korean's crotch, which was in fact what she chose to do. The movement was reluctant, like it took considerable willpower. If I hadn't have been a witness, she might well have taken another option, and it wouldn't have been the karaoke one.

“We can leave these guys here — they're not going anywhere.” I recuffed them after feeding one end of the S&Ws through the bars of the headboard. Between its bulk and the fact that they only had eighteen and a half toes between them, I was reasonably sure on that point.

I turned my back on Rossi and the Koreans and jogged back into the bush, heading to the stakeout hut. I wondered where Boyle and Butler were really going. The airport was crawling with Royal Thai Airborne troops. Their most likely destination had to be toward the soft mud banks of the Moei River, which weren't more than a thousand feet from the villa they'd been occupying. It'd be easy for them to have planned for a back-door exit, take a boat across to Burma, and vanish into the teak forests. Smugglers had supposedly beaten that very same path to bare earth.

The going on the way down was much easier than climbing up. Through my own footfalls and a cloud of mosquitoes humming furiously around my head, I could hear Rossi close behind. The sun was up, which meant there was plenty of light to see. I stopped to get bearings. And then I heard something else, something familiar, but I had no idea where it was coming from. Suddenly, a Humvee burst from the bush not fifty feet away. The driver swerved to avoid me. Another followed close behind. It was a posse of Colonel Ratipakorn's people joining the chase. So much for keeping station behind the ridge. Despite what they told us, the Thais must have had their own forward observers keeping an eye on developments.

Rossi overtook me on the trail, trotting effortlessly along, holding her rifle by its handle. She disappeared around a bend. Our hut was maybe two hundred feet away. I stood and listened to the Humvees as they smashed their way through the foliage, until the sound faded into the background. I was pretty stiff and sore. I'd walk the rest of the way. And then I heard the gunshots up ahead.