Hour of the Assassins by Andrew Kaplan Read Free Book Online Page A

assignment is to advise Dao. He’s got about three thousand tribesmen attached to the Royal Lao Army and paid by us. They operate in Sector Five against twenty thousand Pathet Lao guerrillas and one, maybe two, NVA regiments in the area.”
    â€œThen I’d advise him to surrender,” Caine snapped. “What’s my real assignment?”
    Cunningham smiled briefly with approval, gulped down his Coke, and let out a loud belch.
    â€œTo keep the roof from caving in. Dao may not be much, but he’s the only thing keeping Charley from moving down into the Plain of Jars. It’s going to be damn tricky, Caine. The Meo are brutal and superstitious. If you offend a tlan spirit, they might kill you five minutes after you walk into camp. And Dao has his own ambitions. We’re using each other right now, but don’t put any bets down on this marriage. Come on, I’ll walk you to the chopper.”
    They walked out to the chopper, eyes squinting against the intense glare of the tarmac. As Caine slung his pack and M-16 aboard, Cunningham shouted: “You’ll be on your own, Caine, so watch your back. And one more thing”—his voice almost lost in the scream of the rotor—“whatever you do, don’t let them take you alive.”
    They’d taken Chong alive, Caine thought. That had been his fault. So many things were his fault: Lim, the child—No, he didn’t want to go on any more guilt trips. Emotion is wasted energy, Dao would say. He remembered Dao laughing, sitting around the fire and all of them drunk on the potent com liquor passed around by the spirit doctor, the tu-ua-neng . Chong was playing those strange plaintive sounds on his khene and then all of them were laughing, because Caine had suggested taking a prisoner and getting information.
    â€œPrisoners,” Dao laughed. “There are no prisoners in this war.”
    Christ, how do you turn it off, he wondered. C.J. lay quietly beside him, her breathing deep and regular. He got up and, still naked, walked into the living room and took some brandy from the bottle left on the coffee table. Then he went out on the balcony and stared out at the pale froth of surf crashing against the deserted beach. Far to the south, he could just make out the lights of the Palos Verdes shore. He drank the brandy with a sudden gasp, shivering in the cool sea breeze.
    We just don’t fit, he thought. Like the kiwi that belongs to the sky yet is born without wings. L.A. is filled with refugees caught at land’s end. The reason the pioneers stopped in California wasn’t because they had found what they were seeking, but because they ran out of land. They simply couldn’t go any farther. Well, what happens when you come to the end of yourself? Do you just stop? he wondered. We lost our cherry in Asia. We thought we were going to defeat the enemy. Nobody told us we were the enemy.
    He was really cold now and he stepped back inside, closing the glass balcony door against the chill and the tireless pounding of the surf. C.J. was sleeping on her side, her long hair tangled on the pillow. He looked down at her and gently stroked her hair away from her face. Her skin tan, almost the same color as Lim’s and her body delicately made, like Lim. But how could you explain C.J. to Lim or Lim to C.J.? Poor C.J., he smiled. Trying so hard to be a liberated lady. And Lim, for whom the concept didn’t even exist. Christ, why don’t you just drop it and get some sleep, he thought.
    He got back into bed and put his arm around C.J. She lay curled away from him, her hair tickling his lips. It would be easy to fall in love with someone as bright and beautiful as C.J., but who could afford it, he thought. We give our heart away for free, but it costs us so much to get it back. Like Lim. Was it really love with Lim, or pity? From the beginning the two emotions had been part of each other. Even that afternoon when she came to