She ignored me and looked at one of the messages. “It’s just a random mess; they started late last night and stopped early this morning.”
Vic leaned in, and I could smell her shampoo. “So it’s not automated.”
“No.”
I looked up at the wall clock and figured I’d better get going if I was going to make it to Powder Junction for our meet with the bartender. “Any word from Bee Bee over at Durant Realty or Ned in L.A.?”
Ruby’s big blues looked up at me in irritation. “It’s a quarter till eight.”
I glanced at the two of them and nodded. “Right.”
“Which means it’s a quarter till seven on the coast.”
I was about halfway down the stairs when Vic called after me in a singsong voice. “You come back soon soldier-boy, me so horneeeeeeee...!”
Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1968
“Fifty dollars?!”
Hollywood Hoang stood there on the tarmac in the late afternoon under a pan-fried, tropical sun as the big Kingbee warmed up. He was waiting for his money with his arms folded over his powder-blue flight suit. We were shouting at the top, bottom, and middle of our lungs even though our faces were only about six inches apart. “He with her all night. I like you, Lieutenant, and that why you get half discount rate!”
I looked past Hoang to where Henry was carrying Babysan Quang Sang into the cargo hold. “Fifty dollars is the discount?!”
He smiled. “It extra for girls to sleep with Montagnard tribesmen, so that remove discount! I happy to take greenbacks or MPC; no dong.”
I pulled out my wallet and gave him the five tens. “She sure didn’t seem to mind last night....”
“She world-class entertainer!” He slapped me on the shoulder and drew me toward the slow-moving rotors as he turned to where Baranski stood on the flight line. The inspector from CID and Mendoza had told me that this particular idea was a bad one but had relented when I’d remained obstinate. Baranski motioned for Hoang and gave him a messenger satchel. He waved one last time as the pilot followed me and we climbed in the cargo hold of the helicopter, the slight Vietnamese man carefully slipping the satchel behind the copilot seat.
It was dark in the Kingbee even with the cargo doors open. I pushed my steel pot further down on my head and waited for my eyes to adjust. There wasn’t much room with all the supplies that were going into Khe Sanh, so the flight personnel consisted of the Bear, Babysan Quang Sang, two navy corpsmen, and me. I pulled at my flak vest, stiff from nonuse, and felt it constricting my chest as the big machine began to rise; at least I hoped it was the flak jacket.
By chance, it was the same helicopter I’d flown in on, the one with the dead. I wasn’t sure if Hollywood Hoang had been the pilot, but we’d had a conversation about hauling them. He said that once the ma, or spirits of the dead, had ridden with you, they were always there, riding along. Flamboyant and dramatic, the flight crews were a superstitious lot who had tapped into that resonance, and they knew death, like suicide, was catching.
Babysan was propped up asleep against the bulkhead, with a cargo net partially wrapped around him and secured with some nylon webbing, just in case we were to make any unexpected turns. Henry was checking the magazines on his assortment of weaponry and looked over to see how I was doing. It was going to be a long flight, and he knew about my stomach’s stance on helicopters.
“How are you feeling?”
I nodded but kept my head straight, where I wouldn’t see the passing countryside as we sped north at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, willing it to grow darker so that I wouldn’t be able to see anything.
“Do not puke in here.”
“I won’t.”
“The one thing you must do...”
“Yep?”
“When this thing lands, you run like hell.”
I glanced at him but quickly averted my eyes so that I wouldn’t see any of the smoke from the lower hells we were flying over—the whispering gray smoke from the burned rice paddies of strike-free zones, the alabaster of the phosphorus smoke, and the smudged black smoke and gasoline smell of the napalm. I hoped I would see the purple landing zone smoke that would mean the ride was over.
The medics always offered you Dexies when you went out at night. I never took them, because I was so wired I was afraid that with the extra stimulant I’d fry my wiring and go stiff. I tried to hand the pills to the Bear, but he just shook his head and smiled, his teeth glowing like river stones in the gloom of the cargo hold. “I do not need them; you?”
I leaned over and felt his shoulder against mine. “Right now, you couldn’t pull a needle out of my ass with a tractor.”
He laughed, and as we flew, the light died.
No grunt ever called Khe Sanh the western anchor of our defense, but a lot of other people did. The heroic image of besieged Marines holding out against unimaginable odds had captured the imagination of the public, enough so that Lyndon Johnson called in the boys of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to sign a statement to “encourage public reassurance” that Khe Sanh would be held at all costs.
Khe Sanh was a group grope for the high command.
Within the rolling hills, astride an old French-built road that ran from the Vietnamese coast to the Mekong Delta’s Laotian market towns, Khe Sanh began as a Special Forces encampment built to recruit and train local tribesmen. Now, it was an uneasy fort with U.S. intelligence reports stating that four North Vietnamese infantry divisions, two artillery regiments, and assorted armored units were converging on that wide spot on Route 9.
It was Westmoreland’s capstone.
It was déjà vu and Dien Bien Phu all over again.
It was Masada.
I wasn’t sure what I thought I was going to do once I got there, but I figured something would turn up. More than eight thousand personnel were there, more than three times the size of my hometown, and I guess they had caught my attention, too. They were Marines in trouble, and I didn’t want to have had the chance to go and then have to say that I didn’t. I couldn’t say that my head was the clearest it’d ever been, but sitting at Tan Son Nhut and enjoying the sunsets was driving me crazy, and I knew I had to get out.
I studied the canvas webbing of the jump seat and then the black plastic surface of the M16A1 that seemed to absorb what light there was. In basic, they’d given us honest-to-God comic books to tell us how to operate and maintain the rifle—it made the M16 seem even more like a toy. There was even a shapely cartoon blonde who told you important things like you should never close the upper and lower receivers with the selector lever in the auto position, or how to apply LSA, which stood for Lube oil, Semifluid, Automatic weapons. I thought of another blonde, a night at the Absaroka County Fair and Rodeo, about a slow dance that had ended with a soft kiss. That was the thought I settled on for the remainder of the flight, until the buffet of air currents reminded me what I was doing and where I was going.
I glanced over at the navy corpsman and read his name patch, MORTON. When I glanced at his face, he was looking at me. “Quincy Morton, Detroit, Michigan.”
I took the hand. “Walt Longmire, Durant, Wyoming.”
He smiled. “The crazy Indian a friend of yours?”
“Yep.”
He nodded his head. “He’s got that shit right; when this thing touches Mother Earth, it’s di di mau, di di mother-fuckin’ mau.”
I nodded as we flew over the tortured ground and thought about a raw recruit that had asked about foxholes and remembered a sunny sergeant in basic telling us that Marines didn’t dig.
But they had at Khe Sanh.
As we approached in zero-zero, you could see that the fortifications were slapped together in a haphazard manner, with sandbags and tanglefoot wire stretching to the dusty, smoky hillsides and the mist of the night. The landing zone, only a short distance ahead, had circuitous roads and makeshift buildings; it looked like we were landing in a Southeast Asian junkyard.
The ground was shaking, the hills were shaking, and the air was shaking, which meant the chopper was shaking. I could see Henry leaning over the piles of cargo, holding on to a handset and screaming into it as Babysan Quang Sang’s lips puckered and his eyes focused into the darkness from under his pith helmet. The Bear fell back against the quilted bulkhead, turned his face to me, and smiled a stiff smile.
I shifted in the seat. “What?”
He took a breath and then expulsed the words as if he were eager to rid them from his body. “We are backed up. They are bringing in reinforcements, so we have been shuttled off to the garrison.”
“Where’s that?”
“Khesanville.” His eyes widened. “Outside the wire.” I nodded my head, or I thought I did. He leaned in again, and his voice was the most intense I’d ever heard. “Listen to me, when this thing hits the ground, you run. You run and you do not stop for anything, do you hear me?” This time I was sure I nodded. “They are going to be targeting this chopper like a tin bear in a shooting gallery, so you run like you have never run before. Run for the slit trenches, run for the sandbags, but make sure you run till you get to something far from this helicopter.”
“Di di
mau
?”
The Bear smiled, and Corpsman Morton gave me the thumbs-up.
After a moment, Henry leaned back and pulled the CAR-16 closer to his chest, along with the claymore with the detonating device. He pulled out the horse-head amulet and ran his thumb across the smooth surface of the bone.
I dropped the clip on my own Colt rifle and checked the safety. “What about the supplies?”
It took him a moment to respond and when he did, he wasn’t smiling. “We are not in the supplies business anymore.”
* * *
I poured him a cup from my thermos and looked around. There might’ve been more depressing places than the sheriff’s substation in Powder Junction, but I couldn’t think of any.
I’d been here back in the dark ages, when I’d first made the grade with Lucian. The standard used to be a trial period of duty in PJ before being transferred to Durant and the Sheriff’s Department proper. Santiago Saizarbitoria had sidestepped the process, and it appeared that he now realized how lucky he’d been. There was a metal desk, three chairs, a filing cabinet, a plastic clock, one phone, a collection of quad sheets encompassing the entirety of the county, an NOAA radio, and that was about it.
I poured myself a cup and sat in the chair in front of the desk, which allowed Sancho to sit in the command chair. He sipped his coffee but seemed dissatisfied. “Got any sugar?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Any objections if I go over to the mercantile and get some more supplies for the duration?”
“Nope.” I felt like I should be making some effort, so I tried to continue the conversation. “Did I tell you about James Dunnigan?”
“What about him?”
“He thinks his mother makes coffee for him in the mornings. ”
Sancho nodded, a little puzzled. “That’s nice.”
“She’s been dead for almost thirty years.” I sipped from my chrome cap-cup. “Den told me that he bought one of those coffeemakers with a timer and that he explains it to James every day, but every morning James thinks his dead mother makes the coffee.”
A moment passed. “You think he’s dangerous?”
I smiled at the Basquo; he was so serious. “No, I was just making conversation.”
“Oh.” He set his mug on the desk and leaned in. “After Maynard, we go over to the Hole in the Wall Motel and check out Tran Van Tuyen?”
“Yep.”
“I just got the skinny on the Utah receipt. I think you’re going to find this interesting.” I glanced up at the clock and figured we had an easy five minutes for more conversation before the bartender arrived, if he got here on time. “There’s no telephone number on the receipt, so I called up the Juab County Sheriff’s Department, faxed a copy, and got a deputy to run over there and see what she can find out. She called me back and reported that it’s not actually a repair shop, but more of a private junkyard alongside the highway. She said when she got there and found the mobile home in this maze of junk, after being chased around the place by assorted dogs, goats, and a mule ...”
“Okay.”
“... there’s a guy standing outside the trailer, and a woman throwing what appears to be all his stuff at him. The deputy asked him what was going on, and he said that he doesn’t know, that she’s just crazy. The deputy showed him the fax of the receipt, and he said he’d never seen it before. Now, along with most of this guy’s worldly possessions that have come flying out the door was a checkbook, which the deputy picked up and casually compared with the handwriting on the receipt. Dead match. She showed it to the guy as they’re dodging the next salvo, and he admitted that he might just remember the girl. He described our victim and said she rolled up to his gate with a busted water pump and that he fixed it and sent her on her way.
“Sounds plausible.”
“Now, I’d told the deputy about the quarters and that the girl probably didn’t have much money, so she asked him how the Vietnamese woman paid for the repair...”
“She had sex with him.”
The Basquo stopped and looked at me. “How did you know?”
“She used the same morally casual bartering system with the Dunnigan brothers.”
He studied me for a second more. “Well, that certainly establishes a pattern.”
There was the sound of a motorcycle and a knock at the glass pane, and Santiago got up to get it. He opened the door, Phillip Maynard came in, and Saizarbitoria gestured toward the empty seat to my left. The bartender sat, and he looked like he needed it. He looked like he had been up all night.
“How are you, Phillip?”
He sniffed and readjusted in his seat. “I’m good, a little tired. . . . What is all this about?”
“Phillip, I made some phone calls back to Chicago and got some information relating to some incidents that involved you on Maxwell Street, where you’re originally from?”