Camouflage Heart by Dana Marton Page A

take him out. He would have been in plain sight of everyone inside. Then someone in the hut swore, complaining about the rain blowing in, and the door slammed shut.
    He was there in seconds. He held the man so hewouldn’t make a noise when he fell, dragged the body into the bushes in the back.
    He risked a peek through the window that was partially obscured by vines. Two people remained inside. He could handle that. He left the rifles outside, put on the dead man’s hat and shirt, stepped into the hut with his head down, one hand clutching the front of the blood-soaked shirtfront. The men came to their feet at once and stepped toward him, talking over each other. Both hands moving simultaneously, he cut the one on the right, and had his fingers wound around the throat of the one on the left. A minute passed before the guy stopped kicking.
    Brian blew out the light, not wanting anyone to see the three dead bodies on the floor should they walk by outside. He discarded the bloody shirt, grabbed whatever weapons he could find, then moved on to the next hut.
    Empty. He filled his pockets from the crate of hand grenades he found. He moved from hut to hut and did his job methodically. Search and destroy. The fighters that came at him ceased to be people. They were enemy combatants.
    He pushed on until everything that he could do in silence had been done, then dumped his loot of weapons into the bushes, keeping one rifle and one handgun. Only four of the huts had guerillas in them now,each having more men inside than he could have handled without breaking the silence—nineteen altogether. He would worry about them on the way out.
    Time to find the hostages.
    He moved toward the main building that at one point must have been the entrance to the mine. There were a number of abandoned mines on Borneo; the island used to be rich in both tin and gold. He’d been in three of them within the first days his team had been dropped into the jungle—before he’d gotten blown up and captured.
    Brian reached the corner of the tattered building and crawled under the raised floor, on his back in the mud, ignoring the insects that crawled over him, hoping none of them was fatally poisonous, praying he wasn’t crawling into a nest of snakes. He pushed forward slowly, inch by inch, giving whatever lived under there time to get out of his way.
    He could see the space above through the cracks in the bamboo floor. Six men—two sleeping, the rest talking. They were complaining about the weather. There were plenty of weapons in sight, each man’s rifle within easy reach. He scanned the room, his attention settling on the table, on the pot of rice and pile of bones. His stomach growled, and he tensed, but nobody seemed to have heard him. He turned his head, spotted an opening that looked like it led to atunnel at the back of the building. There we go. The way to get into the mine.
    He crawled from under the building with the same careful deliberation as when he’d gotten in, brushed the bugs off and crept to the hut with the most guerillas in it. The five men were still up, arguing, cleaning weapons. Brian pulled the ring from one of the grenades and shoved it under the raised floor, dashed toward the bushes by the main building.
    The explosion shook the hillside and brought plenty of men running, those who were still alive in the other huts and the six from the main building. He ducked inside, noted the large case of explosives by the door, hid behind a bed as he heard boots on stone—more men running up from the mine. He counted eight of them. When they were gone, he grabbed a flashlight and entered the shaft.
    The floor was steep. He ran, putting his weight on the front of his feet to make as little noise as possible. Then he heard sounds ahead, nearing, and he ducked into a side passage and let another group of men pass. He didn’t want to get into a gunfight yet, didn’t want to alert those who guarded