Russell Blake - Betrayal

Gordon nudged his sleeping companion. “Doug. Wake up.”

Doug’s chin was drooping onto his stained military green T-shirt, sweat-soaked in the muggy night heat.

Gordon elbowed him again.

Doug shuddered, raised his head, and cracked open a bleary eye.

“What?”

“Shhh. Keep it down,” Gordon hissed. “We don’t want to alert the guards.”

He shifted his camouflage-clad legs in the mud and rotting vegetation then glanced at his partner’s calf, where a filthy bandage was wrapped around a festering bullet wound, the pants cut off at the knee. The rusty stain of dried blood on the dressing was alive with ants exploring the once-white gauze.

Doug was pale, his body battling infection and fever. It hadn’t helped that neither of them had been fed for two days, or that they only got water every four hours. The jungle in the southern hills of Myanmar was brutal at the best of times — if their captors didn’t kill them, nature soon would.

“I got my hands almost free,” Gordon whispered. “Slide over here so I can work on yours.”

Both men were tied to a stake hammered into the ground at the edge of a clearing, their wrists bound behind them with rope. A crude-yet-effective form of imprisonment — and it wasn’t as if there were a lot of places to go. The Golden Triangle was a lawless area that ran from Myanmar to Vietnam, encompassing a swatch of Laos and northern Thailand. Other than occasional villages, where the natives lived in abject poverty, it was a sprawling patchwork of jungle and opium poppy fields.

“How?” Doug slurred, too loud for Gordon’s liking.

“Shut up. Just edge over a little. And stay quiet.”

Doug complied, inching his body to where Gordon could reach his wrists.

The night was dark, but a sliver of moon shining through the trees overhead provided enough light to reveal Doug’s haggard features. Glancing to the right, Gordon could make out the main encampment’s tents in the clearing and the few rough-hewn shacks near the tree line, close to one of the countless streams in the hills of the Shan state that bordered Laos and Thailand.

Gordon sawed at the rope with a sharp shard of bamboo he’d broken from the base of the stake. His hands were bleeding from where the jagged edge had sliced the skin — not that he cared. If they didn’t escape, they would die. It was that simple.

He guessed that it was around one in the morning. The sun had set at least five hours ago, although his sense of time had become warped, he knew, from the dehydration, hunger and exposure. They’d been left out through the inevitable periodic downpours, the mountain air drying the moisture from their skin over time, bringing with it the mosquitoes that swarmed around them. He’d been bitten so often that every area of exposed skin was swollen and red, as was Doug’s.

He didn’t even want to think about the mosquito-borne diseases that were endemic to the area. Dengue fever, malaria, yellow fever, chikungunya…and there was typhoid, hepatitis, the plague, hemorrhagic fever and a host of other delights that could be had from drinking the water or coming into contact with the jungle denizens.

But they had bigger problems right now.

Gordon strained to hear anything from the camp. All was quiet, but that could be illusory because, day and night, random patrols of two or three men moved soundlessly into the jungle from the shelters, assault rifles slung over their shoulders. These were Shan: area tribesmen who knew the region like their own backyard — hired guns, paid to live like fugitives and act as security for the man who was a kind of God to them.

A white man.

A round eye — with incredible riches and a desire for extreme privacy, who ruled his domain like a warlord.

Gordon hadn’t spotted their elusive target: the farang that the natives were protecting, in whose camp they were now involuntary guests. From what he could make out of the guards’ hushed discussions, the man wasn’t there. So even if their mission had gone to plan and they’d been able to sneak up on the camp without being captured, it would have been in vain.

He felt Doug’s rope fraying from his efforts with the bamboo and kept sawing methodically. Doug slumped into unconsciousness again at some point over the next hour, and Gordon let him be. He’d need any energy he could muster soon enough.

A noise disrupted the gloom’s tranquility, branches snapping, as two armed men entered the clearing from the periphery, chatting in the local dialect — the night sentries had arrived. The camp seemed calm even during the day, the men lounging around lazily with nothing much to do but cook, patrol and gamble amongst themselves. With their patron absent, there was nothing to guard. Nobody would be interested in taking on a heavily-armed group in order to confiscate their tents or guns. This slice of the world had plenty of weapons — they were more common than shoes in the rural hills.

Gordon watched through shuttered eyes as the new arrivals headed to a small fire, where another man sat nursing a Kalashnikov rifle. They gestured in unison for him to pass his bottle. He protested half-heartedly, then laughed as he handed it over. Cigarettes came out, followed by the inevitable cards, which were shuffled in preparation for another late-night redistribution of wealth.

There would be none of this kind of sloppiness once their target was back. They’d both read his dossier. It was just lucky that Gordon had gotten the rope loose on a night when security was lax. That might be the edge that kept them alive.

Although Doug’s odds weren’t good.

The gunshot wound in his calf had missed the bone, but infection had set in and would hobble his ability to get far. Gordon had debated slipping off without him, but he didn’t have the heart. If he had been wounded, he knew Doug would have stayed with him. After all they’d been through together, Gordon owed Doug at least that much in return.

But that didn’t mean his chances were favorable.

If the guards kept drinking, Gordon hoped that in an hour they could make their move and disappear into the jungle. But then what? They were days from anything remotely resembling civilization. And this wasn’t the only armed group in the region. Drug smugglers, bandits, human traffickers, poachers: all flourished in the no man’s land that was the Triangle, and any one of them would kill without a second’s hesitation.

Not the greatest scenario, but one they wouldn’t have to worry about if Gordon couldn’t get their arms loose.

Twenty minutes later, he felt the final frayed edges of the bindings separate with a quiet snap and nudged Doug again.

“Hey. You’re free. Cut the rest of my rope the same way I cut yours.”

Doug jolted and looked at him with uncomprehending eyes.

Maybe it had been a mistake to wait after all. He was out of it. The delirium brought about by the infection had progressed too far.

“Doug. Grab this piece of bamboo. Keep your hands behind you. Don’t make any sudden movements. Saw until I’m free.”

Awareness flickered, and Gordon felt Doug’s fingers grasping for the shard.

When the bindings finally separated and his wrists pulled apart, circulation returned to his numb hands with a harsh rush of feeling. He peered through slits at the gunmen, who had finished the bottle and were slapping down cards, cheating each other with tired familiarity, their vigil punctuated by an occasional burp or hacking cough. The guards were seventy-five yards away, and Gordon’s hope was that if they crawled into the underbrush it could be hours before anyone noticed they were missing. It wasn’t as though anyone had checked on them since the sun had set, and he knew from his experience over the last two nights that nobody would be by to look at them until dawn, at the earliest.