The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,171

ways apart, the better to avoid the vulnerability of clustering in hostile territory. Only he traveled without a partner.

"Maguire," he radioed, quietly.

He never heard the response. What he heard, instead, was automatic rifle fire, the overlapping staccato bursts of several ComBloc carbines.

Then he heard the screaming of men - his men - and the barking commands of an enemy patrol party. He was reaching for his M16 when he felt a blow to the back of his head. And then he felt nothing at all.

He was at the bottom of a deep, black lake, drifting slowly along the silt like a carp, and he could stay there forever, swathed in the muddy blackness, cool and close to motionless, but something began to drag him toward the surface, away from his comforting and silent underwater world, and the light began to hurt his eyes, began to sear his skin, even, and he struggled to stay below, but the forces that drew him up were irresistible, buoyancy dragging him up like a grappling hook, and he opened his eyes only to see another pair of eyes upon him, eyes like bore holes. And he knew that his world of water had given way to a world of pain.

He tried to sit up, and failed - from weakness, he assumed. He tried again, and realized that he was tied, roped to a litter, rough canvas stretched between two poles. He was stripped of his trousers and tunic. His head swam and his focus wavered; he recognized the signs of a head injury, knew there was nothing he could do about it.

A harsh exchange in Vietnamese. The eyes belonged to an officer, either of the NVA or the Viet Cong. He was a captive American soldier, and there was clarity in that. From some distance came the static of a shortwave radio, like a section of tuneless violins: the volume waxed and waned until he realized that it was his perception, not the sound, that was shifting, that his consciousness was zoning in and out. A black-clad soldier brought him rice gruel and spooned it into his parched mouth. He felt, absurdly, grateful; at the same time, he realized that he was an asset to them, a potential source of information. To extract that information was their job; to prevent them from extracting it, while keeping himself alive, was his. Besides, he knew, amateur interrogators would sometimes reveal more information than they elicited. He told himself that he would have to use his powers of concentration ... when they returned. Assuming they ever did.

A bit of the rice gruel caught in his throat, and he realized it was a beetle that had fallen into the pasty substance. A half smile flickered on the face of the soldier who fed him - the indignity of feeding a Yank made up for by the indignity of what he was feeding him - but Janson was past caring.

"Xin loi," the soldier said, cruel as a jackknife. One of the few Vietnamese idioms Janson knew: Sorry about that.

Xin loi. Sorry about that: it was the war in a nutshell. Sorry we destroyed the village in order to save it. Sorry we napalmed your family. Sorry we tortured those POWs. Sorry about that - a phrase for every occasion. A phrase nobody ever meant. The world would be a better place if someone could say it and mean it.

Where was he? Some sort of Montagnard hut, was it? Abruptly, a greasy cloth was wrapped around his head, and he felt himself unroped and dragged down, dragged under - not to the bottom of the lake, as in his dream, but into a tunnel, burrowed around and beneath the shallow tree roots of the jungle soil. He was dragged until he started to crawl, simply to spare his flesh the abrasion. The tunnel veered one way and then another; it sloped upward and downward and intersected with others; voices grew muffled and close, then very distant; smells of tar and kerosene and rot alternated with the fetor of unwashed men. When he reemerged into the insect symphony of the jungle floor - for it was the sound of insects that told him he had left the network of tunnels - he was trussed up again and lifted onto a chair. The cloth around his head was removed, and he breathed deeply the clammy air. The rope was coarse, the sort of hemp twine used for tying river sloops to bamboo