“Maybe later,” Pitts answered, still keeping his eyes closed.
“So what you thinkin’ ’bout?” Harris asked, frowning.
“Our money and our dope, man,” Pitts said, and sat up and looked at Harris. “You’re having the time of your life, lord of the cell block. Meanwhile, I’m thinking about Huong and Bao sitting on two million dollars of our cash, and a million dollars’ worth of dope that I can turn into fifty million in two weeks flat.”
“Now, how you done that?” Harris asked, and sat on the bunk by Pitts. “I know you sellin’ shit in Da Nang, but three million dollars is a lot of cash to just scarf off some dope-smokin’ doggies and Marines in I Corps.”
“What we sold here didn’t amount to jack shit, man,” Pitts said, and lay back on his bunk. “The big cash came from the major hauls of heroin and Buddha I put in contractor containers and got loaded on ships that carried it back to San Francisco.”
“See, I figure somethin’ like that, but you ain’t tellin’ me shit,” Harris said and then frowned. “Why ain’t you trust me, man? I thought we bros.”
“You didn’t need to know,” Pitts shrugged. “If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t tell Huong, either. He knew what I shipped, because he set it up with the Viet Cong to supply what I needed. He didn’t know my contractors or my buyers. Only me. Huong arranged for the deliveries to get trucked down to the port at China Beach, but who brought the money and who made the deals were always a mystery to him. Of course, he didn’t really care, because he was living well and getting rich, too.”
“For sure, man,” Harris smiled. “That little time at the ranch, that’s the best I ever live in my life. Man, like millionaires.”
“We
are
millionaires, man,” Pitts said, and then blew out a deep breath. “We just need to get out of here and get to Saigon.”
“So let’s slip out now, while everybody sleepin’,” Harris said, and then looked around to see if anyone lurked outside who might hear their conversation.
“You didn’t see that company of Marines set up outside the wire?” Pitts said, closing his eyes. “We get shot the second we cut through that fence. No way anybody leaving here now. Not unless he can slip through the crowd in the blockhouse.”
“How he do that, man?” Harris asked, bewildered at the suggestion of simply walking out the brig’s front door.
“They’re going to want to segregate the prisoners who aren’t part of the riot from the rest of us guilty bastards,” Pitts said, now sitting up and whispering to Mau Mau. “Our brother Bobby Matthews, you haven’t seen him lately, have you.”
“No, I ain’t seen the boy since we all took cover under that picnic table, while those bastards was still shootin’ up in the towers,” Harris said, scratching his head.
“Well, while you were having your heyday as King Run Amuck,” Pitts whispered, smiling, “and don’t get me wrong, that’s okay, it’s not hurting a fucking thing for you to have your fun. Anyway, while you raised hell, Bobby and I had a nice talk. I told him to play it cool and stay low. Buddy up with the guys not causing trouble, and when the guards let them out, which they will do, you can count on it, slip out with those boys. Nobody saw him do shit. I don’t think they’ll recognize any of us from the fence, so I think Bobby’s cool.”
“So they take him over to them hooches across the road and he just slip off in the trees?” Harris said, spreading a big smile, feeling smart for coming to that conclusion without help.
“No,” Pitts said, wrinkling his mouth as he spoke. “I told Bobby to do his time and be the model prisoner. All they got on him is desertion. He surrendered as soon as the shooting started at Saigon, and never fired a gun at anyone, so I think he’s okay with that issue. Only thing he’s got to deal with is his desertion. Like I said, six-six and a kick, and he’s out.”
“So he do his time and he get discharged, and then how the fuck you expect that poor, dumb son of a bitch to get to Saigon?” Harris said out loud.
“Bobby may be quiet, and he’s not the strongest or the toughest dude on the block, but he’s smart,” Pitts said, and then added, “he’s loyal to a fault, too. Never told me a lie, and never tried any smart-ass shit with me either, like a certain Mau Mau I know.”
“Hey, man, I always be true blue, bro,” Harris said, puffing his cheeks, feeling hurt.
“Brother, you
are
true blue, absolute,” Pitts said and put his hand on Harris’s shoulder. “So is Bobby. He’s a good guy.”
“So how he gonna get to Saigon?” Harris asked, still puzzled. “You know they can him out at Pendleton.”
“Exactly,” Pitts said and smiled. “My contractor, from Da Nang, he’s up in San Francisco. This guy floats back and forth from Da Nang and Saigon to the Bay Area, and Seattle. He’s a construction contractor, all the time going and coming. Bobby will catch a bus up to Seattle and make a phone call to my man in Frisco.”
“Oh, so the fat man in Da Nang, he your connection to shipping the dope,” Harris said, smiling. “Now I know.”
“He’s one of three, but he’s a key man in the operation,” Pitts whispered, and sat up to speak close to Mau Mau’s ears. “Bobby will let him know about our stash in Saigon. And that I want this guy to put him on the company payroll, and that we will pay him ten cents on every dollar we make shipping the dope.”
“Damn, bro!” Harris whispered, opening his eyes wide. “Bet that get his attention. What like five million if we do fifty million?”
“Hey, you’re quick,” Pitts whispered, and then lay back on his bunk.
“So, Bobby, he know where the dope hid?” Harris asked, kneeling by the bunk and whispering.
“Generally,” Pitts said, closing his eyes. “He knows Huong and his people out west of Saigon. They also like him, because he is quiet, does not lie, and he’s totally loyal. A lot like Huong. Like I said, Huong and Bao are sitting on our cash and our stash. They have it tucked in a good spot. The Viet Cong, they cool with us, too. They want to do business because the money’s good, and they got an endless wholesale supply coming out of China. Everything’s gonna be cool. We just got to be patient and work things out with this brig nonsense.”
“So what we do? We just go do time, too?” Harris asked, standing up and frowning at the Snowman.
“We’ll do what we do,” Pitts answered, still keeping his eyes closed. “Once Bobby gets out, and has all the connections made, he’s gonna use some of our cash to hire us a no-shit law firm that will get our young asses out of jail.”
“What’s gonna stop that boy from just gettin’ all of a sudden greedy like a motherfucker, and leave our young asses in the can?” Harris asked, sticking out his lower lip like a pouting kid.
“Huong and Bao will stop him,” Pitts said, opening one eye.
“What we supposed to do now?” Harris asked, walking toward the cell door, his head jammed with confusing thoughts.
“Mau Mau, why don’t you and Ax Man and the Hippie, and all our Black Stone Rangers brotherhood, just do your thing and enjoy the moment,” Pitts said, rolling on his side, trying to sleep. “If it looks interesting, I might jump in, too. None of us sure as hell are going anywhere very soon. So we might as well live it up.”
“What about that rat’s ass Elmore?” Harris said, walking into the passageway.
“Good question,” Pitts said and sat up. “We probably ought to get rid of him. After today, he’ll probably want to talk about everything, including what all he saw go down in here, or maybe overheard.”
Harris smiled a wide grin and took the baseball bat and slapped his palm with a loud smack.
“I find that motherfucker, I’m gonna lay the wood to him,” Mau Mau said, and took a full swing through the air.
“Everyone is watching us,” Pitts said, and thought for a moment. “While you might enjoy laying the wood to the motherfucker, I think we need to let Ax Man do it. Out in the yard. And we do not want to be anywhere near it when it goes down.”
“Shit, man, that ain’t no fun,” Harris frowned.
“Swinging on a rope ain’t no fun, and you sure as hell can’t get rich doing it,” Pitts reminded his pal.
“WHAT’S THAT CLOWN got in his hands?” Staff Sergeant Orlando Abduleses asked the spotter from one of three scout sniper teams from Seventh Marine Regiment that Major Danger had brought as part of the reaction force. The sniper had set up his rifle on the sandbagged parapet that surrounded a twelve-foot-square room built atop the blockhouse with expansive windows on all four sides so that sentries stationed there could observe the prison yard and its surroundings. Doors opened from each side of the blockhouse observatory, and led to a catwalk that ran the entire length of the administration building’s roof. At each end of the gantry that overlooked the prison yard, the guards had set up sandbagged emplacements and manned an M60 machine gun in each of them. The towers at the two back corners of the prison also had similar machine-gun positions.
Terry O’Connor and Wayne Ebberhardt had followed the staff sergeant up the concrete stairs inside the blockhouse that led to the rooftop observation station. They had tried to persuade Michael Carter to come with them, but he refused and seemed frozen in front of a window, looking out into the prison yard. His lips moved rapidly as he whispered to himself, and every so often he made the sign of the cross by pointing the fingers of his right hand from his forehead to the center of his chest, then to his left shoulder and last to his right.
Major Dudley L. Dickinson hovered near the chief of staff, Major Hembee, Lieutenant Schuller, and Colonel Webster who talked with Jon Kirkwood and his client Donald T. Wilson. Since O’Connor and Ebberhardt had nothing to do, they trailed after the staff sergeant when he jogged upstairs.
“Wow, much better view up here,” Ebberhardt said as he and O’Connor stepped behind Abduleses, the two snipers, another prison guard, and a photographer from the joint wing and division photo lab who stooped behind a huge gray lens mounted on a tripod with a thirty-five-millimeter single-lens-reflex camera attached to the rear of the foot-and-a-half-long optic.
“That’s a fire extinguisher, Sergeant,” the photographer said, and clicked a picture of an inmate who had just run out of the back door to the kitchen, which sat at the rear of the chow hall in the lower part of the cell block. “Looks like he’s carrying a bucket in the other hand.”
“Yeah, that’s what he’s got,” the sniper’s partner said as he peered at the man with an M40, twenty-power spotting scope. “What the hell does he want with a bucket and a fire extinguisher?”
Suddenly a loud boom echoed across the prison yard and balls of fire leaped out of the kitchen windows and blew the steel back door off its hinges. Another explosion followed, sending a massive fireball skyward with thick, black smoke. A second prisoner ran from behind the kitchen, carrying a bucket in each hand, and joined the man with the fire extinguisher. As flames roared from the chow hall, the latter inmate took one of his buckets and threw it at one of the chow hall’s side windows. Immediately, fire exploded from where he had hurled the bucket.
“Kerosene, I should have guessed,” Abdul said, looking back at the two lawyers. “All the cooking and heating equipment in the kitchen runs on kerosene. That must have been the five-hundred-gallon tank out back that they blew up. You wouldn’t happen to know either of those two outstanding citizens, would you?”
“The tall guy that had the two buckets and tossed one, that’s Sergeant Randal Carnegie, better known among the I Corps herbal society as the Chu Lai Hippie,” O’Connor said, immediately recognizing the man as soon as he saw him. “I’d know that bum anywhere.”
“Kevin Watts,” the prison guard standing on the other side of the sniper team said. “The prisoner with the fire extinguisher. He and Carnegie are tight. Watts is doing three years for a whole host of petty crimes, along with trying to hijack an Air America gooney bird down at Chu Lai and have the pilots fly him out of Vietnam. The crew disarmed him as soon as he pulled the gun, and then he tried to claim that the pilots had framed him, and that he had never had a gun or had even gotten on their plane. He’s a real piece of work, Sergeant. I think the man even lies in his dreams. You never get a straight answer out of him, even for the time of day.”
“You know this guy pretty well then,” Ebberhardt said to the guard.
“He’s one of the men in the two hooches that I supervise, sir,” the guard answered.
“What the shit is he doing with that fire extinguisher?” O’Connor asked, seeing both Carnegie and Watts pumping the handle up and down in the top of the long cylinder.
“They’ve filled it with kerosene, sir,” Abduleses said, looking at the two men through binoculars. “They probably dumped the soda mixture out of the can, washed it out, and refilled it with kerosene from that big tank we used to have behind the chow hall. You know, the big boom we heard. Those fire extinguishers work just like a garden sprayer. Pressure it up, and it will squirt thirty feet or more. We used to have water fights in the barracks with them all the time. That was fun. I’m afraid this might get ugly. Hot kerosene, lots of fire.”
Randy Carnegie had set his bucket down next to the one Kevin Watts had carried out of the kitchen, and ran back toward the picnic tables. Then Watts took the hose off the side of the fire extinguisher, pointed it toward the cell block roof, and opened the valve, sending a geyser of kerosene more than twenty feet in the air. He lowered the spray toward the fire leaping from a nearby kitchen window and then raised it back toward the roof. After he did this several times, the stream caught fire and sent a string of flames onto the roof, igniting the kerosene he had already sprayed there as well as the line of liquid shooting from the fire extinguisher hose.
“Just like a fucking flamethrower!” Watts shouted, looking over his shoulder and laughing at Randy Carnegie.
“Oh, shit, Kev, it has the roof going good now!” Carnegie shouted back, jumping up and down with excitement.
Then Watts swung the flaming stream around and shot it toward the Chu Lai Hippie, who dodged out of the way. The jet of burning fuel splashed fire across the picnic table behind Carnegie, sending prisoners running in every direction.