The dog sprinted forward in a black-and-tan blur. They saw him race into the black of the compound, saw his shadowy form leap as if at a victim’s throat. But there was nothing there.

Except the dog suddenly flipped over in the air and came down on its back so hard the two sentries heard the air burst out of its lungs. The shepherd rolled over and ran away with its tail between its legs, casting fearful looks over its shoulder.

The sentries looked at each other and began to unsung their assault rifles.

A woman appeared out of the darkness. Literally; it seemed she came into existence at the edge of the light – neither sentry saw a flicker of motion before she was abruptly there, running right at them. She wore tight-fitting black. Half her face was obscured by a black mask.

The dog handler’s hands were numb from holding the leash. He almost dropped his Kalashnikov. His partner got his weapon free first, started to raise it.

The woman ran up to them, jumped, sent both rifles flying away with a double kick. She burst between them, sprinting right for the three-meter fence.

She leapt into the air. Incredibly she soared up and over the high fence, tucking into a ball to spin over the razor-wire coils that topped it. As the sentries watched, jaws dropping, she hit the ground running. When she reached the far edge of the light-spill, it was as if she simply winked out of existence.

Behind the two sentries the ammo dump erupted in a cataclysm of light and noise.

The village security officer made his way home along the nighttime trail with the wobble-legged swagger of a man returning from a whorehouse. Which was just what he was doing.

To the last man who saw him alive he looked distinctly green. That was because he was being watched through an AN/PVS-2 – a so-called starlight scope.

J. Robert Belew tightened his index finger on the trigger. The American-made M21 sniper’s rifle roared and slammed his shoulder. The security officer dropped into the short grass with the pratfall abruptness of a man who isn’t rising again this side of judgment Day.

Leaving the rifle resting on its bipod, Belew rose and stole forward. He had two Khmer Rouge with him for security. They were small, watchful men, men from whom the youthful fire that had led them to drive the sick and old and crippled from hospital wards before their guns into the streets of Phnom Pen – hand to shoot, laughing, those who had not the strength to stagger – had long since died away, leaving them cynical, alert, attuned to survival for its own sake. Perhaps because it was all that was left them.

Though the Red Khmers as a movement were still as fanatically committed to their zany Maoist brand of revolutionary socialism as ever, few of the men who had taken part in the gang rape and murder of a nation still believed. They had seen too much. Now they were warriors, pure and simple, with no values and no past to fall back upon. Their ethics were those of the primal warrior through all human history: loyalty to buddies, qualified loyalty to a leader, if he had luck. Beyond that it was them against all humankind.

In their eyes Belew was both a comrade and an extremely lucky leader. To him they were useful, which made their moral failings irrelevant. He felt safe with them watching his back.

Belew dew his Para Ordnance sidearm in case he had misjudged and his quarry had friends following along behind. He paused, knelt beside the body. He felt the throat, held the back of his hand before the man’s nose and mouth. No pulse, no breath. No sounds came out of the wall of elephant grass from which the late security officer had emerged.

Voices were calling from the other direction, inside the bamboo fence of the village a couple of hundred meters away. Belew took a piece of paper from his pocket, thrust it into a pocket of the man’s blood-blackened tunic, and ran lithely back to where his rifle lay.

He picked up the weapon, folded the bipod, and slung it. Slinging a piece was usually the mark of a slovenly troop, something no self-respecting Special Forces soldier would dream of doing in the field. Except if Belew ran into real trouble there was no way he was going to fight with the cumbrous, slow-firing M21. His sidearm would serve better.

There were torches bobbing his way from the village now. “’Paranoia strikes deep,’” he murmured softly. Not all his aphorisms were classical.

The villagers would find a list of government informers on their late security officer. This would, with luck, have Ramifications.

For instance, the villagers would probably assume the security officer was trying to defect to the rebels and that the government had burned him. The official’s family would blame the government. The government would grill everyone in the area to find out who else might be disloyal, while going nuts trying to figure out who actually popped the poor son of a gun, since they knew they didn’t do it.

Meanwhile officials in nearby villages would be thinking furiously. The fact that one of their own had bitten it would remind them of their own mortality. Even if the rebels weren’t responsible for this killing, it might give them unhealthy ideas. And say the government really had rubbed this guy out: what if the government suddenly took the notion they were disloyal?

Finally, life was not going to be too comfortable for the people whose names were on the list, either.

The assassination, then, was not merely a random act of midnight murder; it was a cunningly planned act of midnight murder. An engine for generating maximum paranoia and ill will, it would put a lot of people seriously uptight and cause them to do much soul-searching about where their loyalties lay. He didn’t think many would come down foursquare for the Socialist Republic after this one. And even though most people wouldn’t do anything, he was planting seeds, planting seeds.

Best of all, he thought, as he slipped back to his quondam Young Genocides, to give them a thumb’s-up and be answered with flashes of teeth and eyes, Mark will never connect the act to Major J. Robert Belew, USSF retired. Belew genuinely liked and respected the boy, but he was in ways too good for this world.

What he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.

Moonchild flinched as the TV spots hit her. She felt the exposed skin of her face redden under their assault. She could not endure them long, she knew. She would make herself stand them long enough.

“We, the Revolutionary Oversight Council for Free Vietnam, have agreed upon a platform of goals. We seek to secure freedom for the people of Vietnam, freedom in its many forms. These include first and foremost the freedom of conscience, the freedom of expression, the freedom to enjoy the fruits of one’s own labors…

She could feel the skepticism of the small but dedicated band of reporters on the other sides of the lights and glass camera eyes. Crews from CNN, CBS, RTL, and the French national news agency had all made their way to this former mining camp in the jagged spine of the Chaоne Annamitique, plus some print media. J. Bob had set it up, of course; he had contacts everywhere.

Belew sets so much up, she thought as her mouth transferred words from paper to sound. Maybe it is too much.

The statement was brief, indicating nothing of the hours of violent wrangling that had gone into its composition. It was tough enough to keep the ethnic-Vietnamese factions, such as the Cao Dai and the Annamese separatists, the Hoa, and the Montagnards, from trying to cut one another’s throats, let alone agree on anything. The minorities were no more tractable than the haughty Vietnamese. Even though FULRO, the Unified Fighting Front of the Oppressed Races – represented by Belew’s friends Bert and Ernie – had existed since the sixties, when it fought both the VC and the South Vietnamese government, its Cambodian and Montagnard members feuded incessantly with each other. They only gave it a rest when they combined to beat up on the Muslim Cham of the coastal region.