Black Tiger (35 page)

‘So what would be your solution?’ I asked evenly. I was now sure he was deliberately needling me. I adopted an unconcerned, rather quizzical expression, which, I was pleased to see, irritated him. But he was off again.

‘Stop them marrying Thai women. A Thai girl who marries a Jek—a Chink—vanishes, swallowed up by the family. A breeding machine for another generation of Jeks to suck our blood. We should marry their women ourselves, and get Thai sons on them. Trouble is, they’re so damn ugly—Cantonese girls look like pugs, Taechew girls have rat’s teeth. A man’d need more that this cat’s pee to fire himself up to do his duty!’ He tapped the tall golden glass mockingly, threw his head back, and drained it, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. I’d never seen him so relaxed, so expansive. It made me uneasy. I was heartily sick of these warnings.

‘Yet you told me you were no Thai, but a foreigner, like me,’ I said slyly.

But Sya only laughed, even more uproariously. Sobering, he looked at his watch. ‘Nearly showtime,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

Sergeant Seamus McCluskey was trained to do and die, or at least see that other men did and died, without question.

‘Now hear this, men,’ he bawled hoarsely in a
sotto voce
roar, his best approximation of a whisper. ‘We gotta boatload of Gooks gonna be coming up this stream all bright and sexy and unsuspecting, in a matter of…’ He consulted his timepiece, scowling. ‘…five minutes flat. We’re going to give them a welcome. We may get support from the locals, and then again, maybe not. No matter. If local support is a no-show, we start the party without ‘em.’

The youngest man, an overgrown hobbledehoy farm boy, large-lobed ears pinned back to hear the winds of the great plains, peered through field glasses and turned puzzled blue eyes on the sergeant. ‘But, Sarge, those guys in the boats, right—they’re not real Gooks, not terrorists, not Cong. For Chrissakes, Sarge, they’re just Thais! Friendlies!’ His hand was sticky with nerves. The sergeant gave him the old nose-to-nose glare.

‘You aiming to give me an argument, soldier? Now get your ass the fuck behind that bush, and when I say the word, you give them Gooks hell, or you’re going to be worth less than an ol’ rubber boot fulla pig shit. Boy, I’m gonna make you feel like your nuts was cotton candy chomped by a kid wearing braces!’

Right on cue, to the sergeant’s satisfaction, he saw movement through his field glasses. Across the stream, Vichai’s convoy of small rivercraft hove into view. The men aboard them were in evident holiday mood. The small vessels were laden with the ingredients necessary for a real old-style feast, meat and drink, gifts and fireworks. One boat was crammed to the gunwales with sumptuous presents for Salikaa, the leader’s adopted daughter—bolts of silk, garnets, and sapphires exacted in tribute from local merchants and mine owners for the pirate princess.

‘Miss,’ they called her now, with pride, for they had known her before she was a Miss, known her before the world did. She was Miss Thailand, now—she was Somebody! The reports of her engagement to a royal prince impressed them less. ‘Going respectable’ was hardly admirable, but females liked security; it was another of their incomprehensible instincts, like nesting and suckling, gossiping, and laying out the dead.

The women were left behind, of course, but they had prepared a roast pig. It reposed on a bed of palm leaves in the third boat. Vichai’s own boat carried a whole crate of whisky—the good stuff, not Mekhong rotgut. The men had watched, wide-eyed, at its loading.

Vichai, flushed and eager as a schoolboy, stood in the prow of his own boat. ‘Can’t you get more than two knots out of this old can, Grandpa?’ he chaffed the boatman. He was in chortling good humour.

‘All right, men! There’s your Gooks!’ bawled Sergeant McCluskey with a war whoop. ‘Now, blow ‘em to hell!’

Vichai was still laughing when the hail of bullets struck.

‘Ambush! Turn back!’ His second-in-command leapt boldly to the thwart beside the chieftain to cover him with his own fire.

‘Yellow dogs!’ grunted Vichai, tugging his weapon free from the waistband of his pants, cursing his plump belly. The next volley took Vichai’s lieutenant in the throat. He lay at Vichai’s feet on the bottom boards where the impact had thrown him, his eyes clouded with surprise as he died. This sight so inflamed Vichai that he began cursing, striking savagely at the elderly boatman, a man as old as himself, who attempted to steer the boat around and head back down river. His nostrils distended by the stench of cordite, Vichai fought like a man possessed, blazing in all directions. When every bullet was expended, he seized the firearms from the hands of those who fell around him—choking, groaning, coughing blood, gripping their exploded bellies. Vichai fought with the desperation of an old wounded tiger, his eyes wild, his face greased with grime and sweat.

‘Doesn’t he know when he’s beat?’ grunted the sergeant in grudging admiration.

‘Whassee keep hollerin’?’ the youngest soldier muttered to his companion, a wild black boy who liked Thai grass and Thai ass, even though only the oldest and ugliest of the Bangkok ladies of the night would go with black men, and even then it cost him plenty.

‘Why, man, thass some heathen charm, maybe,’ the black soldier drawled, taking aim. He had a whole load of grief to dump. He rose incautiously from his cover, spraying bullets in a wasteful arc, at whose centre was the baleful, maddened figure of Vichai.

‘Salikaa!’ Vichai yelled, struggling single-handed to push out of range the sole vessel left intact, his own cherished speedboat. Caught in the storm of bullets, he spun around, stumbling blindly over the dead and the dying as he fell. He choked on her name in the spreading pool of his own blood. His last thought was that the girl had betrayed him. She was a cop’s get, after all. She’d sold him out. The bitterness of that thought was worse than dying—the worst pain of all.

The Americans gathered around their own casualties with urgent instructions, followed by muttered groans and imprecations. The operation had been unexpectedly costly. Some men turned away into the bushes. There was the sound of retching, and elsewhere the words of prayer.

Down at the riverside, after the explosion of violence and noise, everything was calm. The river lapped the bank. A snowy egret stalked the brown water. The sunlight gilded the ripples.

The Americans, with heavy hearts, now waded into the water at the sergeant’s command and dragged the boats to the shore.

McCluskey went down to the speedboat, holed below the water line and rapidly sinking. It had been beached just in time. The water stirred Vichai’s hair and gave the illusion of life. The red stain spread like a cloud in the water. McCluskey turned Vichai’s body over—not gently, but not disrespectfully either. His mouth was full of phlegm. He turned his head to one side and spat.

‘More blood ‘n a fucking plasma bank, and for what?’ He was upset. A poxy routine mop-up operation, and now two of his boys were going home in boxes.

The black soldier dragged another of the crippled boats to the bank. Blood was pouring from his arm, but he appeared unaware of it.

‘Will you look at this stuff?’ he cried, discovering the crate of whisky, then ripped open a bolt of rose brocade and draped it about his athletic frame, strutting. ‘Reminds me of a suit I bought me back in Tallahassee!’ He grinned, posturing outrageously.

‘And next time you break cover without orders, I’ll nail your sorry ass!’ McCluskey glared at him with a sudden fierce rage. He growled. ‘Now, load that junk in the vehicles and hustle your ass, no shit. God knows what today was all about. It has to be more than just a crate of whisky…’

‘Jeez, Sarge, ain’t that enough? A whole crate of whisky?’

‘No,’ McCluskey grunted softly, looking at his two canvas-wrapped casualties. ‘I guess it ain’t enough, at that.
Way
not enough.’

Sya tapped the helicopter pilot on the shoulder, indicating to him to put down on a treeless plain just below the forestation line, and then to wait. The pilot obeyed, and watched as the tall
farang
and the colonel climbed out of his craft. The pilot was an expert at killing time. He would snooze, smoke, squash a few bugs, thread a few field flowers on a straw to garland some part of the helicopter. He had already painted an eye for it, as the fishermen did on junks, so it could see where it was going. Somewhere, in some obscure paragraph, it was forbidden to ornament or otherwise deface military material. Exceptionally, Colonel Sya did not appear to attach undue importance to this regulation. He had noted the eye and the garlands without comment.

‘You may find this interesting,’ Sya said to Dr Raven. ‘We shall make a brief reconnaissance. Then we fly back to Hua Hin. Okay?’

Raven nodded. Clutching his field glasses, Sya scrambled up the scree in his heavy boots. It was a tough climb to the top of the rocky outcrop just above the famous caves, but the vantage point commanded a view of the whole valley and the river that ran through it, its steely surface flecked by a series of small splashes. Sya crouched over the field glasses, his eyes and hands steady as stones. The riverbank scrub sweltered, still as death beneath the baking sun. Raven, too, remained silent in the makeshift observation post. The first boat approached the beach. On the boats men looking like dark ants moved about, preparing for the landing. Without warning, puffs of smoke arose from a bush. Then another. Then a series of dull thuds reached his ears. They were too far away to catch the deadly rattle of the submachine guns, but he recognized their presence. From this distance, the reaction of the ants was almost comical. Some jerked in the air and fell; others scattered and scrambled for the boats. Some ducked between the hulls. Raven and Sya saw the flashes as they returned fire. A tubby figure in black pangolin pants attempted to relaunch a boat with one hand while firing with the other. Eventually he too lay still. Sya handed his field glasses to Raven without speaking. Raven saw other figures, in the dung-coloured uniforms of the Special Detail, tropical duty camouflage colour No. 317, stepping out of the bushes. Raven supposed that somewhere children still played games like that—one side shouted ‘Pax!’ and those who had been playing dead all got up again. But the toppled figures stayed still. The dung soldiers clustered together. Later, they broke up and went down to the water, at first with caution, then boldly. They waded out and pulled the boats to the bank and began rummaging around in them. A Willys jeep detached itself from its place of concealment in a cloud of red dust. The uniforms loaded bodies into it, first those that had fallen out of the bushes, and then, less tenderly, the others from the boats. As a final gesture, one man ran back to the boats and stove in their bottom boards with a vicious thrust of his weapon stock. Raven had seen enough. He handed the glasses back. The jeep bucketed off up the track. The boats quickly filled with water, and the river closed over them.

Sya watched to the end, then dropped his field glasses with a sigh of satisfaction. He turned to Raven, grinning.

Sergeant McCluskey twiddled the dial on his radio and listened, pausing to curse the static on the CB. A voice crackled:

‘Sea-breeze to Zorro, Sea-breeze to Zorro, do you copy?’

‘Zorro to Sea-breeze.’ As he made his report, McCluskey tried hard to hide the elation in his voice, deeply conscious of the heavy presence of those two silent, blanketed figures.

‘Local supporting force?’

‘Negative. Bastards never showed,’ McCluskey growled.

The weird disembodied voice became suddenly human. ‘Never showed! What the fuck is that supposed to mean, McCluskey?’ it rapped.

‘What it sounds like it means, sir. The mothers never showed.’

There was a pause, broken only by static. Then the voice demanded sharply, ‘I will be a monkey’s flunkey! The Thai forces suffered no casualties—no fatalities?’

McCluskey had had a long day, and it was only noon. He said, very distinctly: ‘Like I just told you, sir. They didn’t take casualties because they weren’t there. To win it you gotta be in it. We never saw the Thais. Only the hostiles.’

Another silence. Then the voice said, ponderously, deeply shocked: ‘I’ll be damned.’

The communication ended. McCluskey attacked his dials again. Finally he socked the radio with his fist. It remained stubbornly silent.

‘Fucking brass!’ rumbled McCluskey, without malice. He loosened his belt, fumbled for a Camel pack and lit up. Off Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok’s high-rent quarter, they sold smokes in original Camel packs for the same price as regular tobacco. The characteristic scent of new-mown hay made his head spin a little. He sighed. He shoved the half-smoked weed between the purple bee-stung lips of the black soldier, who had shot the bandit chieftain and had taken a slug in the left arm. The man inhaled deeply, his dark eyes signalling their thanks.

‘Fucking Thais!’ McCluskey shut his eyes. ‘Who needs ‘em? Who cares if they don’t show?’ He braced himself against the jolting. He was ticked off to have lost a couple of good men in such a pissant, piddling mop-up operation. He retrieved his joint from the wounded man and gratefully drew fragrant happiness into his lungs.

‘When Irish eyes are smilin’,’ he warbled in a passable tenor—muted, out of respect for the dead.

Van Hooten’s adjutant sat staring unhappily at the silent CB. He wondered how he was going to tell the general that the operation had been successful, but that, unfortunately, the patient had not died. The little fish were netted, the big one got away.
How the hell did that happen
, he demanded helplessly of the silent radio. ‘Now it’s all going to hit the turbo.’

Sya and Raven scrambled back down the scree. As they walked back to the helicopter, Sya said casually, ‘This Vichai. Once he was an honest bandit. Extortion, occasional murder, blackmail. But he became the running dog of hostile external powers. So…’ He made a chopping movement in the air with the edge of his hand. ‘He has to be stopped. Dead. In his tracks.’ He chuckled conspiratorially.

‘How do you know he was a—what did you call him? A running dog?’