French Kiss, page 36
Dominic shakes his head. “I don’t know…”
“He doesn’t know,” the Magician mimics. “Listen, buddy, you better own up to one of life’s bitter truths: if we can’t be happy being powerful, if we can’t be happy preying on others, then we invent conscience and prey on ourselves. There’s your choice.”
But before Dominic can take this further, Seve says, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of him.”
“Maybe he doesn’t belong here,” the Butcher says. “I’ve got the entire unit to think of.”
“No, no,” Seve says, thinking anxiously that Dom will be safer here, where the Magician in protecting himself will keep them all safe from harm. “I said I’d take care of it.”
From Trangh’s directions, villages rise up like boils out of the jungle. The team sometimes uses high firepower to blast smoking holes in Charlie’s defenses. They brace themselves against the chopper’s metal struts and, as it takes them in low, they fire in unison, breaking resistance in an instant, as the chopper looses its payload of rockets.
Alighting on the scorched, burning earth, they continue with short bursts from their AK-47s, “liberated” from former victims, until, surrounded by death, they bend like peasants in the paddies to perform the Butcher’s bloody work.
Other times, heading west, following a line traced by Trangh’s finger on the topo map, taking lightning “stealth” flights, using no firepower at all, never a shot fired. They creep from hut to hut, slitting throats, severing heads, leaving the grotesque remains for Charlie to see and to fear.
Taking his cue from Trangh’s tattooed flesh, the Butcher takes to drawing before they leave a mission site a stylized phung hoeing in Charlie’s blood.
Once, Seve catches Trangh staring at the crude but powerful drawing and, for an instant, sees a splinter of emotion flicker across his face. What, Seve wonders, does he think of the Butcher’s invention? Is it inspiration or insult?
Why does he care what Trangh thinks? Is it just because this is his country, and what he thinks, no matter what the American administration believes, does matter?
Seve, already the detective in his heart, wishes to unravel Terry and Trangh’s essential secret. He believes that when he understands them, he will be able to make some kind of sense of this maelstrom of insanity in which he finds himself.
Most of the boys incountry want nothing more than to go home, get back to school, to forget they were ever here, that this ever happened. Not Seve. He knows that for him at least an elemental truth lurks in the stinking jungles, the dangerous rice paddies of Vietnam. Now he believes that, like the phung hoang, Trangh holds the key to that truth.
On a strike far to the north he watches Trangh guide the Huey helicopter above the tangled mass of jungle. Virgil, at his side, whispering, “Just tell us where Charlie’s hidden like you always do. No fuss, no muss.”
Trangh points, and the Huey banks to the left. A clearing comes into view. A village. “There.”
They come in low and fast, guns chattering, rockets whooshing! The tree line going down amid a roar, a violent, oily blossoming of death.
Out of the corner of his eye Seve sees Trangh pressing his ear to the floor of the chopper. His eyes are wide and staring, his thick lips moving, as if the noise their weapons are making is erupting like gas from inside him.
As the Huey settles, Seve follows Trangh out. Bent over like old men, crippled by life, they sprint across the blackened clearing, swept of debris by the churning rotors.
Answering fire, bright tracers in the night, makes them dodge this way and that. Seve follows Trangh’s hunched back all the way to safety. Crouched, panting, their backs against a pile of rubble still warm and smoking, he is dismayed to realize that he has unconsciously used Trangh as a shield.
Trangh has a haunted look in his eyes, so hollow and devoid of life that Seve is forced to touch him to reassure himself. Trangh’s head whips around as he feels the touch and, all at once, Seve is face-to-face with the working end of Trangh’s AK-47.
“I was frightened for you,” Seve whispers between parched lips. “I thought you had been hit.”
The weapon disappears into the darkness. All around them flames leap and dance, crackling and sparking. They remind Seve of himself, the darkness in which they burn, Trangh. They are so close, and so different. And yet, one without the other becomes enervated.
Trangh, his eyes like chips of obsidian, jerks his head. “This way.”
They emerge from their sanctuary and, seeing the others pinned down by North Vietnamese fire, make their way in halting, zigzag fashion along the perimeter of the devastation.
Trangh begins to fire and Seve, coming up behind him, follows suit. Together, they rush the last stronghold of resistance. Seve pulls the pin, lofts a grenade behind a hasty barricade of wooden beams and smoldering thatch.
They hit the ground a moment before the darkness turns white with sound and vibration. Then they are up and running, firing still past what is left of the barricade.
They poke through the remains, and Trangh kneels, obediently beginning in expert fashion to slit the throats of those corpses still in one piece.
The others come up, unscathed. The village looks like the dark side of the moon, except flames would not burn on the moon. They begin to mop up, ghostly figures going about their ghastly work like a precision drill team.
Silence, save for the fire feeding itself. Then Seve’s head comes up. He stands. He hears the sound again, and the hairs at the back of his neck stand up.
Through the pall of ashy smoke he can make out a figure, stumbling and dazed, coming toward them. Even before his brain identifies the shape, he sees Dom running out to meet it.
“Stop!” the Magician shouts. “Come back here!”
Dom either does not hear him or chooses not to. He continues to run toward the dazed, charcoal-streaked child. It is a girl of no more than five or six. Her long hair lies lank on her head. Her eyes are wide and staring; she is clearly terrified.
Her wailing cries echo through the ruined clearing, tearing at their already raw nerves. She is alternately revealed and obscured by waves of smoke and flame as she wanders amid the rubble of what was once her village. She stumbles, going down on her knees in the ashes, and when she rises, he can see that she is bleeding from a spray of lacerations. The pitiable child seems, to Seve, to symbolize the pernicious amorality that is the direct consequence of war. His heart goes out to her.
As if in slow motion, he watches his brother nearing the apocalyptic vision of a world gone mad. Until the scene becomes something that transcends reality, the charitable hand of a newly resurrected God, reaching out to heal the generation that, in all cultures, is universally innocent.
“Goddammit!” the Magician shouts, and lifting his rifle, aims it at the child.
“No!” Seve screams, lunging for the weapon. But Trangh intercepts him. It seems that the Vietnamese moves only fractionally, but Seve’s nerveless arm falls like dead wood to his side.
He watches, helplessly, in horror, as the Magician fires a quick burst into the child’s chest. The small figure is thrown violently backward. In midair it bursts apart with a thunderous roar. Dom, near enough to be at its fringes, is lifted bodily.
Trangh releases Seve, who runs to his brother, kneels at his side.
“Jesus,” Dom whispers. He is in shock, but otherwise unhurt. “Oh, my God.”
“Wired,” Terry says, coming up beside them. “It’s a common trick. Tape a grenade under a child’s armpit, wire it so that when the child is touched…” Trangh, looking on, says nothing.
Dom with his head in his hands, shaking as if with a high fever. He begins to vomit. Seve puts his arms around him.
Trangh, a heartbeat away, watches them with eyes that reflect the nearing flames. He drinks in their embrace with an avidity Seve can feel.
“You cannot protect him,” Trangh says, “no matter how much you try. This place will take him or leave him as it sees fit. There is nothing you can do.”
Seve, his cheek pressed to Dom’s wet hair, stares at him. “But there is something I can do,” he says. “I can love him.”
He sees the incomprehension on Trangh’s face, and he wonders how it was that he ever wanted to belong here, to be friends with the Butcher and Trangh. The Butcher kills with appalling ease. And Trangh is as alien, as ultimately unknowable as the beautiful young girls in their ao dais swinging under pressed Coca-Cola-can roofs to American rock ‘n’ roll.
“Now you can see it. Why the war will never end.” Trangh gestures to take in the burnt ground, littered with mutilated corpses—including what is left of the little girl. “And I am among the lucky ones. Look at the alternative.”
But this revelation comes too late; Seve is no longer listening. “Go away,” he whispers. “Go away now.” But Trangh does not move. He has become a mute observer of their pain and terror, drinking it in as if it gives him as much sustenance as his fish heads and rice.
Dom’s racking convulsions have subsided. “Dear Lord,” Seve hears him pray, “grant me the strength to get home.”
The war grinds excruciatingly on, but not for those in the SLAM unit. Each day, according to Virgil, Nixon brings America closer to ignominious defeat in a land it never bothered to understand.
In Ban Me Thuot, the unit, now seasoned, cohesive, even familial, is on a three-day leave before what the Butcher hints will be its most arduous mission. There are eight of them: Terry, Virgil, Seve, Dominic, and a whip-smart Kansas farmboy named Jawbone, Trangh, Mun, and a Khmer Serei named Chey. They are resupplied, but from where? Seve knows that the Butcher never makes out requisition forms. In fact, he has never seen paperwork of any kind on SLAM.
Curious, he visits Special Forces HQ. Not only have they never heard of a Virgil, major, captain, or otherwise, but they have no record of him, either. No one appears concerned or even interested. Trivia such as this in the face of the war’s overwhelming chaos is instantly forgettable.
But it makes Seve think. Who is Virgil if he isn’t Special Forces? Maybe he’s attachéd in some way to MACV, General Abrams’s Command HQ. From Special Forces HQ in Ban Me Thuot he makes a call to Saigon, and finds, to his dismay, that no one in MACV knows—or will admit to knowing—a CO named Virgil.
Seve is still searching for the answer to his question when SLAM
moves out. They are no longer wearing military fatigues but, rather, the black cotton pajamas favored by the Khmer Rouge. They carry Soviet-made AK-47 machine rifles. They have left their dog tags back in Ban Me Thuot.
A matte-black helicopter without insignia of any kind airlifts them northwest, out of the highlands. There has been no briefing, not even a sense of what their mission will entail.
The Magician materializes out of a darkness lit only by the pilot’s glowing green instrument panel. “I hear,” he says over the yammering of the rotors, “you’ve been asking around about me. You’re a real little detective.”
Seve shrugs, trying not to betray the dryness of his throat. “Just trying to get my bearings.”
The Magician stares at him for a long time. Seve, feeling a line of sweat rolling down his forehead, prays that it will not go into his eye. If he blinks, he feels, Virgil will think he is lying.
“As long as that’s what it is,” the Magician says. “As long as we understand one another.” Despite the heavy noise in the cabin, there is a silence between them, as uncomfortable and unwanted as an air pocket over the Rockies.
“I don’t know about you,” Seve says, “but ever since I got here, I haven’t known shit about anything.”
The Magician laughs. “Yeah, well, I can understand that. It took me some time to find out what was really going on here. That was the hard part.” The Huey hits some turbulence and, for a moment, the two men are thrown together. Seve grabs for a strap.
“See,” the Magician says, “I don’t need to hold on. I’m not gonna die here; I know that. Once you know that about yourself, you’ll be okay, Dancer.”
The pilot shouts for him, and for a moment he squats down in the lurid light of the instruments. His forefinger stabs out, continuing a route he holds in his head. The pilot nods, the Huey banks, heading due west now, and he turns back to Seve.
“Want to know the single most debilitating thing about this war? Everybody’s so busy making sure their ass isn’t blown off by Charlie they got no time for anything else.
“Me? I’m stuck incountry for the duration so I know I got to make the best of it. When you step in shit, don’t try to scrape it off, go find a sucker you can sell it to.”
He leans toward the open door, spits into the wind. “What do
I care? Won’t hit me in the face.” He grins. “My orders are to kick Charlie’s ass, and that’s just what we’re gonna do. But if I’m gonna risk my life for Uncle Sam, I figure he owes me.” He hooks a thumb in the direction they are flying. “We’re gonna make our fortunes out there, Dancer, you can make book on it.”
His face, distorted by odd, angular shadows cast by the low-level green glow, has taken on the macabre aspect of a Halloween mask.
“I’ll tell you what no one at HQ could or would. You’re now part of the Daniel Boone ops. This mission—like those of all the Daniel Boone teams—is classified, strictly Eyes Only. That’s why no briefing in Ban Me Thuot, that’s why we’re sterile—no ID of any kind. Even this chopper flyboy has no idea where we’re headed. I guide him as we go along. Our orders come direct from Major Michael Eiland. That clear the air for you?”
Seve nods. “Like I said, I wasn’t prying.”
Virgil turns away, hunkering down beside the pilot. Seve strains to see the portion of the map they are discussing, but the Magician’s formidable bulk is in the way.
They go in low, moving very fast, so that the blurred treetops become a black sea over which they sail like, perhaps, Trangh’s phung hoang.
Seve, sitting next to his brother, wonders whether it is his teeth chattering or the chopper’s vibration that is making him sick to his stomach. He looks at Dominic’s face in the almost lightless cabin and curses himself for bringing him into the SLAM unit. He would be far safer back in Ban Me Thuot, Seve thinks. At least there he is an American soldier. Here, in the airless dark, he is nothing, not American, merely a mote in God’s eye traveling without identification from point A to point B. If we die on this mission, no one will ever know what happened to us. Which is, he suspects, the idea.
For a while he watches Jawbone telling Mun and Chey one of the long, funny true stories for which he has been named. They sit spellbound by the kid. He wonders how someone nineteen years old has stored up such a seemingly endless supply of tales. He is like a modern-day Scheherazade, keeping the death and the horror at bay by entertaining the others and, Seve supposes, himself.
Sound and vibration, picking up. Seve turns to look out the open door. Overhead, a trio of B-52s pierces the amber cloud cover, overtaking the Huey, then heading on due west. Ten minutes later the first of the explosions blossoms like garish paper lanterns.
Seve cranes his neck, seeing by the illumination of the flowers of evil, the jungle and rice paddies below. And the river, so close, the phosphors are dazzling in reflection, shining like the scales on a serpent’s body.
And at last he knows where they are headed. Cambodia.
Low, threatening clouds burst across the Cardamom Mountains far to the west, and the air is so full of moisture that nothing can stay dry. It is the time of the monsoons. In this weather even a minor injury can fester and become gangrenous. A leg wound is a certain death sentence.
Terry Haye watches as Virgil, bringing up the unit’s rear, climbs out of the skull-filled river. He wonders whether, just around the bend, Charon lies in wait on his rocking boat. He wonders whether, having crossed the river, the border into Cambodia, they have entered the precincts of hell.
For a moment he feels a twinge of uncertainty at this enterprise. Death waits for them like a panting animal out there in the Cambodian jungles. But the promise of power and riches beyond comprehension draws him onward like a magnet.
They will be a week, perhaps as much as ten days, on their own in enemy territory until, just outside of Angkor Wat, they will be met. In that time they must also hit Charlie, who sits like a grinning ghoul, encamped within the relative safety of Cambodia’s neutral territory.
“There’s a guy we have to see in Angkor,” Virgil told Terry at their private briefing the night before lift-off. “A real important guy. A real fucker.” Virgil laughed, downing his Scotch.
“He’s a Frenchman. Been incountry a long time, longer than any American.” Virgil emptied the bottle. “Thing is,” he said, “we can’t get what we want by going around him. I want what he’s got. I want it real bad. I’ve lined up some bastards on our side, but he’s got his, too. They’re all Asians so even if we do the deal who the fuck knows whether they can be trusted. I need some way to tell, see. You’re good at this, as good as me, maybe, though you do everything ass backward. The Asians trust you; they’re scared shitless of me. I got a feeling this’s gonna need some finesse.”
“I’ll give it some thought,” Terry said.
“Yeah. Do that.” Virgil lifted his glass. “Only make sure you don’t discuss this with your new bosom buddy.” Terry knew he was talking about Mun. “You may trust that sonuvabitch, but I sure don’t.”
Terry is thinking about this conversation as the Magician climbs up beside him on this far shore and says, “Hold on to your hat, buddy. Now it begins.”
They hit Charlie at night. The sky is moonless, the countryside utterly devoid of light. It is, at times, as if they are advancing in their sleep or with their eyes closed. The danger is everywhere, as palpable as their heartbeats.
The land unfolds before them, giving grudging way. Now it is Chey, not Trangh, who guides them. He uses a machete, clearing a narrow path for them only when absolutely necessary. “Sound travels in the jungle,” he tells them, “as well as in water.”
