The scarf that she had worn around her neck.
He grabbed a trailing vine and waded in, his free arm plunging deep into the mire, but he felt nothing underfoot, quicksand slithering around him like a vat of lukewarm oatmeal. There was no firm bottom to it, and suction dragged at his legs and buttocks, threatening to pull him down.
He gave it up before the stagnant water reached his chin, clung to the vine and dragged himself hand over hand until he cleared the quicksand, settling back on solid ground.
Sweet Jesus!
She was gone.
It took a moment for him to recover from the shock. He was accustomed to all forms of violent death, but Remo wasn't made of stone. Whatever he had felt for Audrey Moreland, simple lust or something more, it would demand a decent grieving period.
Okay, time's up.
He scrambled to his feet and turned back toward the clearing, suddenly aware that the Kalashnikovs had fallen silent. One more shot from Chalmers split the night, an exclamation point for the proceedings, telling Remo that at least one member of the party was alive.
In fact, they all were.
When he reached the clearing, Dr. Stockwell stood beside Pike Chalmers near the fire, and Sibu Sandakan was crawling from his tent. It took another moment for their guide to reappear from his concealment in the jungle, but he seemed to be unharmed.
"Is everyone… ?"
The question died on Stockwell's lips as he saw Audrey's pup tent, torn by bullets. Dropping to his hands and knees, he peered inside and found it empty.
"Audrey? Audrey!" he called out to her but got no response. "Where is she?"
"Where's the lizard man?" asked Chalmers, peering briefly into Remo's empty tent.
"Who? Dr. Ward? You mean he's gone, as well?"
"Seems so."
"For God's sake, where? Will someone tell me what is happening?"
Instead of stepping forward with an answer, Remo faded back into the darkness, silent as a falling leaf. A hasty body count informed him that a number of the enemy had managed to escape unharmed, and he wasn't content to let them go. It would be relatively simple to pick up their trail, despite the darkness, and pursue them till they stopped for rest.
And then he would have answers—or at least a taste of vengeance. Either way, this gaggle of guerrillas had performed their last night ambush in the Tasek Bera.
Remo left his traveling companions huddled near the fire, with Chalmers standing guard. As far as he could tell, from scouting out the area, they were at no risk of a new attack. The enemy had fled, perhaps to lick his wounds, but he would never get the chance.
Chapter Twelve
Lai Man Yau was physically exhausted when he called a halt for his surviving troops to rest. A forced march in the jungle could be difficult, but running through the jungle in the dark was something else entirely. When he counted heads by moonlight, Yau discovered he had lost eight men. Precisely half his fighting force.
The worst part of it was, he still had no clear fix on what had happened, why his plan had come apart like tissue paper in a weeping woman's hands.
The plan itself was simple and direct, foolproof from all appearances. He had examined it from every angle he could think of in advance, deciding that it didn't matter if a couple of the Malays missed their cue or moved in prematurely. There were only four round-eyes to deal with, after all, and only one of them was armed with anything besides a knife. If he resisted, it would be no challenge for a force of seventeen trained soldiers to subdue him with a minimum of force.
Yau sat and thought about the raid in detail, trying to pinpoint the moment when it fell apart, unraveling before his very eyes. It was impossible to say, of course, because he couldn't be with each one of his men every moment. Still, there had been no alarm before he gave the signal to attack, move in and seize the round-eyes while their minds were fogged with sleep.
The big one with the gun had been a rude surprise; Yau could admit that to himself. The round-eyed bastard came out shooting, not at all the groggy fool they hoped for. Yau had seen him drop one member of the strike force, and he had fired several other rounds before the raiders turned and ran. With eight men missing, who could say how many he had killed or wounded in the brief engagement?
Wounded?
Lai Man Yau felt tension coiling in his stomach like a viper poised to strike. Suppose that one or more of his commandos had been captured, still alive? If they began to spill their guts—
No, he wouldn't give in to that line of thought. They had all been trained, albeit briefly, to resist interrogation, and anyways, it really didn't matter if they cracked or not. Yau had been careful not to share the substance of their mission with the troops, withholding all the major details for himself and Sun Leo Ma, his second-in-command.
Sun Ma was lost now, almost certainly among the dead, and Yau felt his loss most acutely. He couldn't relate to Malays in the same way that he did a fellow countryman. They were all right as cannon fodder, handling the dirty work, but when the revolution came at last, a Chinaman—perhaps Lai Yau himself—would lead it, marshaling the people's army for a rousing victory.
Before that happened, though, he had to try to do a "simple" job with the survivors he had left, attempt to salvage something from the rubble of his master plan.
Beijing would not be understanding or forgiving if he failed. His contact had been crystal clear on the importance of this mission, and a disappointment could have painful—even fatal—consequences. Lai Man Yau had pledged himself to die, if necessary, to promote the people's revolution, but he didn't plan to be rubbed out because he'd let that revolution down.
Yau sat and thought some more, remembering a sound that had briefly distracted him in the midst of the battle, when everyone was firing. He recalled a scream. A woman's scream that emanated from outside the camp.
It had to be the round-eyed woman, screaming from the jungle. Why? What was she doing out there in the dark? Yau took the simplest answer and decided she was probably responding to a call of nature. Westerners liked privacy when they relieved themselves, as if their shit were something sacred, to be envied by the world. Perhaps this round-eyed bitch had left the camp before his troops took their positions, and no one saw her go.
But why was she screaming?
She had started only after shots were fired, Yau thought. Perhaps the sound had frightened her. And she had stopped almost immediately after that. Did she have sense enough to know the screams would give away her hiding place? Or had some member of his strike team found the woman, silenced her forever with a bullet or a blade?
Yau hissed for quiet in the ranks and waited till he had their full attention, asked the question to their faces. None of them admitted contact with a woman, and judging by their blank expressions, he had no reason to believe that they were lying. Furtive glances would be one thing, pointing to a guilty conscience, knowledge of a critical mistake, but Yau saw nothing of the kind.
If she was dead, then, it meant one of Lai Yau's missing troops had done the job. It would hardly matter, except he still had no idea which member of the expedition was supposed to be his contact, and it suddenly occurred to him that he might never know. If he was forced to stalk and kill the others, it would be a total failure, and Beijing's reaction would be inescapable.
The raid had sprung from an impulsive notion.
Yau was tired of tramping through the jungle on a mission that could last for weeks without result, if the round-eyes found nothing. On his own, he had decided it was better to corral the foreigners, interrogate them and discover which one was supposed to be his ally. Once that information was obtained, the round-eyes could continue with their expedition, more or less—but under guard and with a very different goal in mind. Forget about the fairy tales of giant lizards tramping through the forest. Yau would let them hunt uranium instead, and he would also let them dig for it, relieve his troops of one unpleasant task.
Before he sent them on to meet their round-eyed god.
Now he had botched it, and the fault was his alone. He had considered laying off the blame on Sun Leo Ma, but that was unacceptable. Friendship aside, Beijing would never understand why Yau, the officer in charge, had delegated such authority to a subordinate, with such disastrous results.
The only way to save himself, he realized, was to retrieve the situation somehow. He would have to do it soon, and he couldn't be subtle, given the present circumstances. There could be no question of negotiating with the round-eyes, making friends or "burying the hatchet," as they liked to say in the United States. It would be force or nothing, and his troop had already been cut in half. Their three-to-one advantage had been whittled down to something closer to two to one, and the Americans had shown a startling talent when it came to self-defense.
Surprise was critical, he understood, but it wouldn't be easy to achieve a second time.
"Be quiet," Yau snapped at his men, "and listen while I tell you what we have to do."
The tracking part was easy. In their haste, his enemies had made no effort to disguise their trail. He could have followed them on nothing but the fear smell in a pinch, but they had also left him footprints, trampled ferns and broken tree limbs—someone in the raiding party even dropped an empty AK-47 magazine and left it on the trail as he reloaded on the run.
It was no challenge, hunting clumsy amateurs.
The raiders had a six-or seven-minute lead when Remo started after them. Although they knew the territory better, they weren't all that adept at running for their lives in almost total darkness. Pushing it, with all the skills Chiun had taught him, Remo started picking up their panicked scurry-noises after just two minutes on the trail. Then he had to slow down to keep from overtaking them while they were on the move, and forcing a chaotic confrontation in the dark.
There was no question in Remo's mind of the outcome, but he wanted information first. He had no qualms about a battle on the trail, but Remo knew that it might be impossible for him to single out the leader, spare his life and save him for interrogation once the others were eliminated. He decided to follow them until they stopped to rest, as they were sure to do within the next half hour or so, and then to pursue the matter with a more coherent strategy.