The Kaisho, page 22
Rock, naked, was beating her with a length of bamboo. His erection stood out before him, red and quivering.
Do Duc, watching, flashed on the abattoir they had created in the jungle. He stood so still he could hear the sound of his pumping blood over the rhythmic beat of bamboo against flesh.
“What happened?” Do Duc’s girl said in Vietnamese from just behind him.
“Look at all this blood,” he said.
“So? It happens all the time.” She reached her hand around his thigh, took hold of him. “Ooo, your weapon is so hard. Why are you still standing here? Come back; it’s fuck time.”
Do Duc, with his girl leaning on him, had taken one last look at Rock and the bleeding girl as if they were some tableau painted on a pagan-temple wall that had survived the ravages of the ages. He was aware of a sensation in his mind that was akin to the ache one felt from a wound, very deep but so old it had long been forgotten.
Many years later, Do Duc would have cause to think again of that violent scene, the scent of blood, and the lost child’s phrase reverberating in his mind, It’s fuck time.
Two days after leaving their base camp, which was then approximately five hours by gunboat from Ban Me Thuot, the company was drenched in sweat, mud, and rice leaves.
There were six of them: Do Duc, Rock, a tattooed black giant named Riggs, a tightly wound explosives and ordnance specialist named Donaldson so young the “Dr. Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts” comic he read over and over seemed the perfect medium for him, and a pair of CIDGs. This was an acronym for Civil Irregular Defense Group, Science Fiction-trained soldiers selected from various indigenous tribes who knew the local terrain. These particular CIDGs were anticommunist Nungs who knew the target area inside out. The Nungs were among the men selected from the mountain tribes of North Vietnam, who often provided Science Fiction with troops and intelligence to fight Charlie.
The Nungs were rail-thin, sunken-eyed creatures who looked to Do Duc like the wretched semihuman denizens of The Island of Lost Souls, but the only experiment being worked here was the discharge of ordnance that was systematically dismantling their country. They did not seem familiar to him, but rather, stripped from their environment, appeared to Do Duc as helpless as many of the Americans. How he pitied them.
Do Duc piloted a U-8F Seminole, a troop transport plane without weaponry of any kind, which Bowel had somehow procured. It arrived specially outfitted with a SLAR, a side-looking airborne radar unit.
Do Duc wondered why a defenseless aircraft had been requisitioned instead of a heavily armed gunship. Bowel had provided some clue.
“This is a God mission.” That was a Werewolf joke. God mission meant, it does not exist. “I don’t want any bushwhacking cowboys from Air Cav in on our dinner, get me?”
“I sure do,” Do Duc had said.
Bowel had squinted at him. “That’s what I like about you, Do Duc, you know when it’s time to go to work for Uncle Sam.” He took out the sad remnant of a cigar that had been chewed over for months. It was slimy and about to fall apart, but Bowel stuck it between his lips just the same.
“Okay,” he said, “besides being a God mission, it’s a ten-thou.” That meant it was the worst. “It concerns the fate of one man. He’s officially listed as MIA. Either he’s dead or he’s been captured by Charlie, we don’t know which.” Bowel chomped on his disgusting stogie, waiting for a comment. When Do Duc made none, he nodded, went on, “Sounds fucked ten ways from every Sunday in the calendar, but that’s the shit-stick hand we’ve been dealt.”
“We’ve been dealt worse.”
“Yeah? Wait’ll you get a load of what’s out there. You’re putting down into dead space.” That was very bad. Dead space was an area where covering fire and observation by backup was impossible. Because of the Nungs, Do Duc assumed it was somewhere in North Vietnam.
“Your objective’s name is Michael Leonforte.” Bowel paused as if expecting a response. Not getting one, he continued, “This guy’s on another plane of existence. He’s a veteran of Poison Ivy.” The Fourth Infantry Division. “He’s a helluva soldier, commendations up the yin-yang, but he’s also been in the LBJ Ranch twice, once for beating an indigenous civilian into a coma, a second time for knifing a girl he swears was VC.”
“They check that one out?”
Bowel’s mouth twisted. “They would’ve liked to, only the girl was already cold.”
“Mick sounds interesting. How come they let him out of Long Binh Jail?”
“ ’Cause he’s a VIP as far as certain elements of Pentagon East are concerned. They put him in the field—in charge of his own unit, no less. The group was inserted behind enemy lines—you’ll find out where soon enough. They kept strict radio contact for five days; then the transmissions ceased and all attempts to raise them proved fruitless.”
Bowel’s eyed flicked down to the Eyes Only onion-skin sheet he held. “That was approximately three months ago. When he was reported MIA, Pentagon East freaked. They rolled out a shitload of special pattern activity just for him.” Bowel meant detailed observations of enemy activity within certain sectors. “They mobilized a goddamned division, for Christ’s sake.”
“Just to find one Michael Leonforte.”
Bowel grunted, handed over a black-and-white photo. Do Duc was looking at a charismatic young lieutenant with a long face, wide-set black eyes, and a scowl as deep as the Grand Canyon. Even in the picture Do Duc could discern the power emanating from that face.
“Heavy,” he said.
“Yeah.” Bowel took the photo back. “That about sums up young Mick.”
“He should have had a CO at Pentagon East,” Do Duc said. “Why didn’t he lead a team in to find Mick?”
“Did just that,” Bowel said dryly. “The team never came back out. It vanished just like Mick’s.”
Do Duc mulled that over for a time. “You know why Pentagon East has gone batshit over his disappearance? He have possession of classified intelligence?”
“Maybe. Maybe they have plans for him,” Bowel said, deadpan. “But then again maybe it has to do with the fact that he’s the son of Frank Leonforte, the hot-shit Mafia godfather.”
Do Duc was silent for some time. This guy’s on another plane of existence. He was watching Bowel’s smirk and wondering how much more he knew about Mick Leonforte he wasn’t giving up.
“What do we do when we locate this motherfucker?”
“If he’s dead, you bring back the body. If he’s alive, you are instructed to extract him from his hostile environment and—”
“Jesus, sir!”
“That’s the language they used to tell me, son, so I’m only passing it on. I want to be precise about this. Quite naturally there’s no paperwork associated with this God mission. None whatsoever.”
“Okay, let’s say he is alive,” Do Duc said. “I find him and hotel alpha.” That meant “haul ass.” “Then what?”
“You bring him to me,” Bowel said, “that’s what.”
Maybe it was then that Do Duc began to smell a rat. In any case, he said nothing.
Bowel had looked at him. “I want him alive, alive-o, get me?” Do Duc said he did. “I’m assigning you a complement of CIDGs. Where you’re going, you’ll need their expertise. My advice is to use these CIDGs whenever practical. By the way, you won’t be issued a prick. We don’t want anyone eavesdropping on unauthorized transmissions.” A prick was a PRC-25, the lightweight field radio that was the Werewolves’ standard issue.
Bowel stared at Do Duc. “Like I said, it’s a ten-thou.” He cleared his throat. “That’s it then. And, Do Duc, for Christ’s sake don’t crash the damned Seminole. What we don’t need is hard evidence that we’ve been where you’re going.” That was classic Nam doublethink, and it didn’t pay to dwell on the irony of it. That kind of oxymoron wore thin pretty quick over here.
“One last thing, sir,” Do Duc said with his hand on the door. “What if the objective resists extraction?”
For a long time Bowel said nothing. He stared through Do Duc as if he did not exist.
“In that event,” Bowel said slowly, “you are free to use your own judgment.”
“Sir.”
Bowel’s eyes snapped into focus, raked Do Duc’s face. “You bring this motherfucker back to me, soldier, one fucking way or another.”
They took off at night without Do Duc knowing where he was going, save for the initial heading Bowel had given him verbally at the final briefing. In the air, Donaldson, looking more tense than usual, worked the SLAR as if he had been born to it. Rock was right over his shoulder. Do Duc had given him the sealed envelope with their instructions on a kind of paper that melted in your mouth. It helped when you needed to eat the stuff after memorizing the information. Every few minutes Rock called out course corrections to Do Duc as if the SLAR itself were providing them. Riggs stared at the back of Donaldson’s head as if he expected a psychic attack from Dr. Strange. The two Nungs slept the entire way.
There was no armament aboard the aircraft, so it was clear they had been targeted for insertion in an area where there was little or no enemy air traffic or ground radar. That had sounded suspiciously like Cambodia, where Charlie had bunkered himself in and was rearming and resupplying before venturing back across the border to engage the U.S. Armed Forces.
Despite being provided with directions piecemeal, Do Duc had a general idea where they were headed, and it was no surprise to him when they set down in a green LZ—a landing area free from enemy observation. It was the distance that threw him, and now he knew why he had been given the longer-range Seminole instead of a gunboat: as far as he could tell they were in the middle of nowhere; the map he had memorized and then eaten had given only one landmark besides the Mekong: a nothing village named Sre Sambor three klicks northwest of the landing site.
“We’ve flown halfway across Cambodia,” Rock said with some astonishment. “What the fuck was Michael Leonforte doing here?”
Do Duc looked at him. “The question to ask is: What was Pentagon East up to sending him in here?”
Cambodia, Do Duc knew, was an ostensibly neutral country in the war, but long-standing political problems with the more powerful Vietnamese caused Cambodia’s leader, Lon Nol, to turn a blind eye to the Viet Cong incursions into his sovereign territory. As Do Duc suspected, they were headed straight for a hot zone, and prickless, they were working without a net.
Ten-thou, as advertised.
It was the wet season and there had been a great deal of rain—twelve straight days of it—before they had launched the mission. The wet season was not the best time to effect any kind of offensive action, Do Duc knew, and the fact that they were moving in now testified both to the significance and the urgency of what they had to accomplish.
The strip where he had been ordered to put down did not even have a shed attached to it. God alone knew how anyone had discovered its existence. Do Duc had no sense that there was anything remotely military about the strip, which was nevertheless well maintained. By whom? he found himself wondering.
The strip was at the extreme edge of a vast area of terraced rice paddies to the east, into which they plunged directly after they had unloaded their equipment from the aircraft, heading north toward the Mekong River. Looking back from the unprotected morass of the flooded paddies, Do Duc was not happy to see the Seminole disappear into the hazy distance.
The physical effort to get across the rice paddies was enormous. They saw no Viet Cong patrols. Indeed, to Do Duc’s amazement, they saw no one at all. They remained alone, traveling on a flat, viscid landscape that dwarfed them no matter in which direction they looked.
The leader of the Nungs was an emaciated young man named Jin. On the ground, in the midsection of Cambodia, it was Jin with whom Do Duc consulted most often and to whom Do Duc deferred when there was a difference of opinion. Rock disagreed with this action, and it became a source of friction between the two.
“What the fuck’re you doing?” Rock had said the first time Do Duc asked for Jin’s advice and followed it.
“For Christ’s sake, keep your voice down,” Do Duc said. “The jungle can act like a cathedral, bouncing sound for yards in every direction.”
Rock glowered evilly at the Nungs, but he lowered his voice. “Maybe they’re doubtfuls. If they’ve sold us out, Charlie already knows we’re here.”
“Calm down. You forget even we didn’t know where we were headed until we were in transit.”
“Yeah, maybe, but these sorry bastards would probably as soon have you for lunch as look at you.”
“You’re misinformed,” Do Duc said. “They’re not barbarians.”
“The hell they aren’t. Just look at them!”
“Their civilization’s a lot older than yours or even mine.”
Rock snorted. “What civilization? All these shits’ve been doing for centuries is killing each other.”
“And what’ve your civilized countries been doing?”
Rock gave him hard look. “You’re a good one to talk. You were brought up where? In the middle of this fucking jungle, right? Sort of a Stone Age kind of thing, huh? Maybe that’s why you can relate to them real well.”
Do Duc had bared his teeth at Rock.
Rock grinned. “Shit! Look at you! You’re a fuckin’ tribesman just like them! Hell, you even speak their dialect.” He laughed. “So, okay, maybe you understand these shits better than I do.”
“Do you good to figure that out, ace.”
Behind them, in the far distance, beyond even the southern horizon, the continuing flush of war could be seen if not, at this distance, heard. Man-made lightning in the form of aerial bombardment lit the underside of the clouds with the bitter rain of napalm, and in the fuliginous aftermath, dawn came unnaturally early in the kingdom of the damned.
Before the real dawn arrived they had pitched camp.
Rock did the work of three men, but he had a haunted look in his eye. As they took their horse pills to stave off malaria and ate their Charlie rats, what they called C rations, he said to Do Duc, “Where the fuck is Mr. Charles?” He patted his LAW rocket launcher, slung at his hip like a six-gun of the gods. “I can’t wait to blow him away.”
“Patience,” Do Duc said. “I got a nasty feeling we’re going right down his throat. You’ll get your chance.”
“Yeah, when? It’s quiet enough to hear a lung collapse.” Rock spat, shook his head. “There’s a weird kind of isolation here, like we’re dead and don’t yet realize it.”
In a way, Do Duc thought he was right. “Jin says we’re in a hot zone, but I don’t understand it and there’s just so much he’s willing to say. Is Charlie really this far north in Cambodia?” He shrugged. “We’ll find out soon enough. At dusk we’ll begin to move.”
“I’ll tell you it won’t come fast enough to suit me,” Rock said, spewing out a mouthful of his Charlie rats. “Christ, I’d rather eat my enemy’s arm.”
They slept the first day beneath a clump of dank foliage set on a knoll just above the water level of the paddies. Rock, who took the first watch, did not sleep well. There was not a dry spot on his body, and he had begun to itch in the most unfortunate places. Where are you, Mr. Charles?
They broke camp at dusk. At this point, a visual sense of distance had to be abandoned. Jin advised them not to look at the horizon, but to concentrate on the immediate environment, which had become so monotonous that Rock found himself dozing off as he slogged on through the unending morass.
Toward midnight they stopped to eat a light meal. The sky was completely clear; starlight and the watery illumination from a half-moon fell upon them like fistfuls of diamonds. Rock went to relieve himself and, crouching down, stared into the muddy water. Slowly, the patchwork of light and dark ceased to swirl from the movement of his approach and a pattern began to coalesce.
Good Christ!
“Would you look at this!”
Do Duc and Jin, who were closest, came over. They stared down into the water.
Skulls.
Rock waded around in a circle, crunching human skulls as he went. Thousands upon thousands of skulls made up the floor of this flooded paddy. And here were bones: femurs, ulnae, sacra, ribs, scapulae—he was standing in a veritable graveyard.
Now Do Duc knew that Jin hadn’t lied: they were in a hot zone.
“Ask the Nungs what the fuck happened here,” Rock said as he danced a jig on a rib cage and a shattered pelvis. The proximity to so much death was like being shot up with adrenaline.
“You should learn to speak their language,” Do Duc told him bluntly before turning to speak to Jin.
Jin’s face was unreadable. “The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong are massacring the Cambodians in the same way they are killing my people,” he said in his peculiar dialect. His voice was very controlled so that it took Do Duc a moment to discern the choler hidden there. “Here is our history. This is what will be left for our children—the ones who survive this war. And I ask myself whether they will be the lucky ones.”
Do Duc translated for Rock, who, for once, was silent, his little jig at an abrupt end.
“Then Mr. Charles is here and he must be close,” Rock said, fingering the firing mechanism of his LAW.
They pushed on, spurred now, Do Duc was sure, by the thought of the skeletons over which they were traversing, though no one spoke of the sea of horror they cracked beneath their boot soles with every step they took.
It was almost dawn by the time they could see an ending to the paddies. It had begun to pour again, as it had done off and on during the last part of their trek. The wind drove the warm rain into their faces, cutting visibility to several hundred feet.
The water level had lowered considerably. They trudged through the miserable rainswept landscape. Do Duc, on point, could make out a dark smudge on the bank of the last paddy. Beyond it should be the Mekong River, up which they had to make their way. They had been heading steadily east, and the river would take them almost due north, straight for the border of Laos. Laos lay like a concubine curled up against the back of Vietnam, arching from the southern end where they were headed in a northwesterly direction until it hit the borders of Yunnan in southern China and the Shan States in Burma, the area known as the Golden Triangle because of its production from the vast poppy fields covering its rugged mountain plateaus.
