The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,262

a lie! It's a goddamn lie!"

"Are you sure?" Demarest's question was an electric probe. "No, you're not sure. You're not sure at all." A beat. "It's as if part of you never left, because you're haunted by memories, aren't you? Recurrent nightmares, right?"

Janson nodded; he could not stop himself.

"All these decades later and your sleep is still troubled. Yet what makes those memories so adhesive?"

"What do you care?"

"Could it be guilt? Reach down, Paul - reach down inside you and bring it up, bring it back to the surface."

"Shut up, you bastard."

"What do your memories leave out, Paul?"

"Stop it!" Janson yelled, and yet there was a tremor in his voice. "I'm not going to listen to this."

Demarest repeated the question more quietly. "What do your memories leave out?"

The images came to him now in frozen moments of time, not with the fluidity of remembered movement but one frame after another. They had a ghostly surreality that was superimposed over what he saw in front of his face.

Humping another mile. And another. And another. Knifing through the jungle, taking care to avoid the hamlets and villages where VC sympathizers might make all his struggles for naught.

And forcing himself through an especially dense intertwining of vines and trees one morning, where he happened upon a vast oval of burn.

The smells told him what had happened - not so much the mingled smells of fish sauce, cooking fires, the fertilizing excrement of humans and water buffalo and chickens as something that overpowered even those smells: the tangy petrochemical odor of napalm.

The air was heavy with it. And everywhere was ash, and soot, and the lumpy remains of a fast-burning chemical fire. He trudged through the burned-out oval and his feet became black with charcoal. It was as if God had held a giant magnifying glass over this spot and burned it with the sun's own rays. And when he adjusted to the napalm fumes, another smell caught his nostrils, that of charred human flesh. When it cooled it would be food for birds and vermin and insects. It had not yet cooled.

From the caved-in, blackened wrecks he could see that there had once been twelve thatch-covered houses in a clearing here. And just outside the hamlet, miraculously untouched by the flames, was a cooking shack framed with coconut leaves, and a meal that had been freshly prepared, no more than thirty minutes earlier. A heap of rice. A stew of prawns and glass noodles. Bananas that had been sliced, fried, and curried. A bowl of peeled litchi and durian fruit. Not an ordinary meal. After a few moments, he recognized what this was.

A wedding feast.

A few yards away, the bodies of the newlyweds lay smoldering, along with their families. Yet, by some fluke, the peasant banquet had been saved from destruction. Now he put aside his AK-47 and ate greedily, shoveling rice and prawns into his mouth with his hands, drinking from a warm cauldron of water that had once awaited another sack of rice. He ate and was sick and ate more, and then he rested, lying heavily on the ground. How odd that was - so little remained of him, and yet it could seem so heavy!

When some of his strength had been replenished, he pushed on through uninhabited jungle, pushed on, pushed on. One foot in front of the other.

That was what would save him: movement without thought, action without reflection.

And when he had his next conscious thought, it, too, came with the wind. The sea!

He could smell the sea!

Over the next ridgeline was the coast. And thus freedom. For U.S. Navy gunboats patrolled this very segment of the shoreline, patrolled it closely: he knew this. And along the coast, somewhere not far from his latitude, a small U.S. navy base had been established: he knew this, too. When he made his way to the shore, he would be free, welcomed by his Navy brethren, taken away, taken home, taking to a place of healing.

Free!

I think so, Phan Nguyen, I think so.

Was he hallucinating? It had been a long time, too long a time, since he had been able to find any water to drink. His vision was often odd and unstable, a common symptom of niacin deficiency. His malnutrition surely had brought other cognitive impairments as well. But he inhaled deeply, filled his lungs with the air, and he knew that there was salt in it, the scent of seaweed and sun; he knew it. Liberation lay just over