The Kaisho (28 page)

Rock proved utterly fearless. If he hadn’t known better, Do Duc would have assumed that he was merely too dim to feel fear. But there was nothing remotely dim about Rock. Do Duc quickly saw that Rock was intuitive about learning; he had an uncanny knack of sizing up a situation and making the best tactical advance into it.

The truth was that Rock was like those big-city cockroaches at home that could live for a month on the residual protein in a human fingerprint. He subsisted on fear; the killing—which was the motivating factor for most of the Werewolves—was almost incidental. Bowel had been right in assigning him to this mission.

Afterward, of course, they were obliged to save themselves—from going mad or, perhaps, from savoring too intensely what they had done. Alcohol took care of that, for forty-eight hours, at least. By that time, they were horny as toads. Executing the release from life precipitated the need for that other release.

Do Duc had been with his girl, a sinuous Vietnamese who might have been as young as fourteen. Softly he stroked her thick night-black hair, ran his callused hands over her velvet flesh with such tenderness that she rose off the straw pallet to kiss the hollow of his throat in gratitude.

Do Duc heard a howl from the next room where Rock was with his girl. Thinking,
Charlie,
Do Duc had grabbed his Marine combat knife and run to his buddy. What he saw in the next room turned his blood to ice. Rock had tied his girl with flex so tightly that her flesh bulged obscenely between the strips. Here and there, where the metal had bitten most cruelly into her, she had begun to bleed.

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 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.”