Turn of the Cards

by George R. R. Martin

  “And who else was in attendance?” Belew asked, in a tone that said he knew.

  “All right. Sobel was there too. But don’t you see? It was self-defense for him. For Vo, too, I guess. Here I was, new in-country and claiming to be an ace —”

  “Oh. So you practically forced them to beat you up.” Mark shut up. “You have a quick hand with excuses for people who do you dirt. Undoubtedly I’ll take advantage of that trait at some future date.”

  Mark sucked in a long breath. “What makes you think there’s going to be a future date, as far as you and me are concerned?”

  “What choice do you have?”

  Mark fluttered his hands. “Okay, man. What choices have I? Go ahead and tell me, dammit. You got me; I’m fresh out of ideas.”

  He felt the easing of confessional. It had twisted him for days. The men of Second Squad — and most of First, who bolted when Second radioed that they were going over the hill — the dozens of desperate men who had found their way to the little deserter band over the weeks. Even the villagers who a month ago had been their enemies. They all seemed to be looking at him for answers.

  And he didn’t have any.

  “Very well,” Belew said. “You can fight. You can give up. If you fight, you’ll probably die. I won’t try to dance around that. But if you give up —?”

  His voice rose into questioning silence. Mark nodded ponderously and supplied the answer: “The way things are in the Republic now, they’d probably just wipe us out to be done with us. Or — or hand us back over to the Brigade.”

  “And how would they treat you?”

  Mark shuddered. Inside him a voice cried, no! It’s wrong! Eric would never let something so terrible happen.

  “So we have to fight?” Mark shook his head. His pale-blue eyes blurred with tears. “But how, man? I’m a lover, not a fighter.”

  “You’ve got a warrior within you. Literally, as it happens, and more than one, on the evidence.”

  Mark looked at him, wondering again. “No legerdemain to my knowing that; I can watch television news with the best of them. That street-corner transformation to Jumpin’ Jack Flash raised quite a fuss.”

  And got Sprout stuck in Hell, Mark thought with a pang of guilt. Not to mention setting his feet on the long, strange path that had — for the moment — culminated in a mountain-village hootch in the Giai Truong Son.

  Belew held up his fully grown forefinger. “First, trust yourself. Since you went underground, you’ve pulled off a number of escapades that would do credit to a trained and seasoned operative — and just staying alive is a major accomplishment, my friend, when you have such heavy hounds on your trail. You busted your kid out of Reeves D&DC. You led the DEA on a ten-thousand-mile chase. You survived combat missions with a bunch of untrained kids and a handful of superannuated noncoms. You shot your way clear of Chuck Sobel’s personal heart of darkness, and you’ve weathered the best efforts of the NJB and the whole Socialist Republic to put you down for good.

  “In between there somewhere you dropped stone out of sight for a solid spell — coincidentally, about the same time one Blaise Andrieux, Dr. Tachyon’s jumped body, and the body Tachyon had been jumped into all vanished as well. Dr. Tachyon’s pet spaceship disappeared around about then, too, and there were some unusual sightings in the skies of the southwestern deserts shortly thereafter. I’d say you’ve had some most unusual adventures, Doctor. Don’t sell yourself short.”

  “What’s your next point?” Mark said after a moment. He didn’t look up.

  “I won’t say, ‘Trust me’; that would be an insult to your intelligence. But use me, Doctor. I’m in the business, and I’m very good at what I do.”

  “Yeah, your side did so well last time.”

  Belew laughed. “I did my part. Nixon puppied and pulled us out. I wasn’t consulted. The point is, I know the land, I know the people, I know the tricks.”

  “So what’s in it for us wild cards?” Mark challenged.

  “You mean, aside from the chance to keep breathing?”

  “I mean beyond just us, man, just me and my people. You say this, this conspiracy and the Socialist Republic have set us up for a fall. Fine. So what’s to keep us here? I mean, if survival is all that’s at stake, we can, like, make our way to Thailand or somewhere, blow off to the four corners of the Earth.”

  “Aren’t you tired of running?”

  “I’m tired of fighting too. Give me a reason, man. Something beyond just saving my ass.”

  Belew drew in a deep breath, let it blow out beneath his splendid mustache. “Very well. Why did you agree to join Sobel’s fight in the first place?” Though Moonchild’s memories of Eric turned the word to ash in his mouth, Mark said, “The dream. A — a sanctuary for wild cards. Somewhere we’d just be free to be, man.” He shook his head bitterly. “I guess that doesn’t sound like any major military goal or anything, man.”

  “It sounds like an eminently straightforward goal, Doctor,” Belew said, “and well worth fighting for. Why not keep fighting for it? Only — really fight for it, not for a sham. Not for the bullet in the back of your head, which is what’s waiting for you when Vo and the conspiracy are done with you?”

  The image bloomed in Mark’s head like one of Eric’s dream-visions: a place where wild cards need not live in fear of the nats. It was one of Eric’s dreams, it was the dream. But — for real, as Belew said.

  Belew leaned forward, gray eyes intent. “It’s yours to make happen. You hold it right” — he held forth his good hand, palms upward, fingers open; then he clenched the fingers into a fist — “here.”

  Mark was tempted. He couldn’t deny the appeal of Belew’s words. You weren’t able to deny the appeal in Sobel’s words, either, a cynical inner voice said. But this really was different; this was Mark taking command of his own destiny, his own path to the Dream, not following another man’s.

  But his experiences of the last couple of years, on Earth and Takis, had not run off his back like water from a duck’s back. He understood that there was Dream, and there was Reality. And the Reality was he and his merry men were in deep, and he didn’t know this man from the pope.

  Mark’s lips came off his teeth in a skeptical grimace. “I don’t know, man —”

  “I’ve already helped you, Dr. Meadows. Rather significantly, if I do say so myself”

  Mark raised a brow at him.

  “Consider the ease with which the villagers you encountered accepted you.”

  “We were working a new area, place we hadn’t patrolled before. The locals used to snipe us ’cause we were government, but they didn’t have much against us personally. Yet.”

  “Does that really explain how ready they were to take in jokers? Physical deformation is a serious matter in Asia. It doesn’t just turn people off, it indicates supernatural evil. But here” — he waved his good hand around the hootch — “they seem to’ve given you the keys to the city. How does that happen, I wonder?”

  “I suppose you think you know.”

  Belew grinned beneath his splendid mustache. “Of course. The only bets I ever make are sucker bets, my friend. Who was in charge of your band of merry pranksters when you reached that first village?”

  “I — no, Moonchild was.” When he’d returned to consciousness — fortuitously, right after the sun set — the first thing he had done was slam a silver-and-black vial. He feared the burns J. J. had sustained from the rain would become infected if they weren’t healed, and that had meant calling Moonchild.

  It had been a tough call. She was practically coming off the wall at the thought of what their defection would do to her relationship with Eric — even though they had not parted on the happiest of terms. She had been trying to talk the others into going back to plead their case before Sobel when they hit the ville.

  “Didn’t they seem unusually receptive?” Belew asked.

  “She’s Oriental too. That probably opened them up to her.”

  “But sh
e’s Korean, if I’m not mistaken. People hereabouts don’t have fond memories of the Koreans. The ROK army fought here during the War, and they didn’t make many distinctions between friendly Vietnamese and unfriendly ones. They were a bit more abrupt than we dared to be.”

  “Okay, man,” Mark said, “you tell me.”

  “Hai Ba Trung.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The legend of the Trung sisters. One was married to a Vietnamese lord who was executed by the Han Chinese, back in A.D. 39. The two of them led a revolt against greatly superior occupation forces. The Han finally defeated them two years later, and they drowned themselves in a lake in what’s now Hanoi. Female war leaders are a respected tradition around here, despite the fact that the Viets can be every bit as chauvinistic as the rest of Asia.”

  “They were reacting to Moonchild as a war leader?”

  “A resistance leader, more to the point.”

  “Wasn’t that, like, taking a lot on faith?”

  Belew’s grin cut way back into cheeks. “They did have help.”

  “Help?”

  “I split from Saigon a good six weeks before you parted company with the NJB. You don’t think I spent all that time sitting on my hands?”

  “You’re shitting me now, man. You couldn’t have known.”

  “Oh?” Belew tipped his head to the side. “Does the name ‘Dark Lady’ ring any bells?”

  Mark swallowed.

  “All right. You win. You’re so damned slippers I’ll never be able to prove you’re giving me a line.”

  Belew’s grin widened improbably. “See? We’re getting to know each other already.”

  “What do you want?”

  Belew leaned forward across his lotus-crossed legs. “You say you want a revolution? You joined the New Joker Brigade to change the world for the better. Okay, Doctor.” He held his right hand out, palm up. “Here’s your chance. Grab it. You have nothing to lose, and you know it.”

  “Grab it how?”

  “Take it to the max. Vietnam’s primed to explode. Light the fuse.”

  “I can’t decide for the others, man.”

  “Then don’t. You lead; they’ll follow.”

  “Why don’t you lead this revolution, if you’re so hot for it?”

  Belew shook his head. “Not my style. I’m a shadowboxer. A gray-eminence type. I don’t want a throne.”

  “But you’re looking to be the power behind one? I won’t be your puppet, man.”

  “I won’t do anything to you that you don’t let me.”

  “You’re a sneaky son of a gun.”

  “And you’re a charismatic naïf, who is also an incredibly powerful ace.” Belew’s face split again in a grin. ’And admit it: together we make one hell of a team, don’t we?”

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  “Weak sisters.” Colonel Nguyen said, sitting back in the chair to Moonchild’s left with his head arrogantly tipped, smoking an American cigarette in a black holder. He was tall for a Vietnamese, five-ten or eleven and lean, with a USAF mustache and khaki PAVN walking-out dress with all Vietnamese insignia carefully removed. He wore what Mark — buried currently beneath the expressed persona-recognized as American full-colonel eagles pinned to his lapels. His English was excellent, if occasionally archaic. He was almost as handsome as he obviously thought he was.

  He rolled his head to give a highly overt eye to Moonchild. She disliked him. She felt guilty for it.

  “Weak sisters are the greatest threat to our success.”

  The meeting was taking place in the lantern-lit ballroom of a brick French colonial villa outside a remote Highland hamlet. The hardwood floor was black-mottled with mildew, and lizards ran the walls between patches where the whitewash had peeled away in sheets. They made Moonchild nostalgic for the sleeping Croyd.

  The eleven resistance leaders and Moonchild were seated around a long table of imported oak. J. Robert Belew presided at its head. Though the shape and seating arrangements of tables had a history of being bones of contention at Vietnamese negotiations, Belew had handled the matter simply by pointing at the long oblong table and telling people where to sit. The attendees complied without demur, primarily perhaps because their hosts had the most powerful factions present, roughly a hundred New Joker Brigaders and a recently arrived company of one hundred seasoned irregulars from Cambodia, who had been — and as far as Mark knew might still be — members in good standing of the notorious Khmer Rouge.

  “So all that stuff about Khmer Rouge massacres was just imperialist propaganda, huh, man?” Mark had asked the previous afternoon when the Cambodian contingent rolled in.

  “Oh, no,” Belew said. “The stories are understated, if anything. They were exterminating angels in a way the Manson family could only dream about. Their main man, Pol Pot, is, demographically speaking, the top genocide in history. Stalin? A wimp. Hitler? A weenie. The KRs rubbed out a third of Cambo’s population.”

  Mark gaped at him. It felt as if all his blood was draining into a seething pool in the pit of his belly. “These people were involved in that?” His words ended in a strangled squeak.

  Belew shrugged. “I’m not sure. Probably. Lot of them are early-to-mid thirties now, which would’ve made them early-to-mid teens back in 1975. Golden age of the Khmer Rouge, those middle teens.”

  “What are they doing here?”

  “We fought the Vietnamese together, after they invaded and ran the KRs out in ’79.”

  “But — mass murderers — they’re your friends?”

  A shrug. “War, like its pallid reflection politics, makes strange bedfellows.”

  “And why are they here now?”

  “They’re combat vets. And we have history together. Blood is thicker than water; I can rely on them.”

  Mark ached to ask about the thickness of the blood they’d shed, and he also did not fail to notice Belew’s use of the singular first-person pronoun. But somehow he had lacked the stomach for further questions.

  Or, more accurately, further answers.

  Now Moonchild glanced uncertainly at the Khmer Rouge leader, a round-faced, innocuous little man in glasses named Suon San, who sat on the table’s far side next to Belew’s Montagnard buddies, who answered to the names Bert and Ernie, and across from Colonel Nguyen. He smiled at her and nodded politely, shyly almost. Colonel Nguyen slammed his hand on the table. “Anyone who collaborates with the enemy must pay the price!”

  The man on Moonchild’s left laughed softly. “A fine way to speak, for a man who stills wears the uniform of the People’s Army — complete with rank badges he was never entitled to, in any man’s army.”

  The colonel purpled. The speaker was even taller and more dapper than he, in his white linen suit and Panama hat. His name was Dong. He was an out-and-out crime-lord from Ho Chi Minh City, whose grandfather had been a chieftain in the Binh Xuyen criminal sect, wiped out by Ngo Dinh Diem.

  “We’ve all collaborated, in one way or another,” said the man to his left. Nguyen Cao Tri was quite young, his accent likewise Saigon. He represented his father, who was a power in Saigon giai phong’s more respectable resistance wing. Though his father’s followers were primarily thuong gia — “trading persons” (“yuppie wannabes,” was how Belew put it) — the younger Nguyen held himself like a soldier. He had made NCO during his compulsory military service, no easy task in the People’s Army.

  “I haven’t,” said the man who sat at J. Bob’s left hand, next to Colonel Nguyen. He was short but muscled almost like a Westerner, bulkily powerful, and his iron-gray hair was cropped close to his head. He was Nguyen Van Phu, the third Nguyen in the room, none of whom was related. He was an authentic by-God VC, who had spent his whole life as a resistance fighter. In his day he had fought the French, the Americans, the ARVN, and the victorious North Vietnamese — who had been more assiduous about wiping out their former VC allies than any other group in the country’s history. He had spent eight years in a communist “reeducation
” camp. He had entered the ballroom limping; he carried an American bullet in his left hip, a PAVN one in the thigh.

  “Perhaps you would care to cast the first stone,” said Ngo An Dong from across the table. The fiery young warlord of the southern Cao Dai sect, he wore oddments of military uniform and a red headband around his bushy dark hair. Belew described the Cao Dais as “zany but well motivated.” Ngo was another former PAVN noncom.

  “I won’t shrink from taking strong action,” the ex-VC replied, ignorant of or just ignoring the biblical reference,

  “You’re talking terrorism,” young Nguyen Cao Tri said.

  “The purpose of terror is to terrorize.”

  Colonel Nguyen laughed. “I’m glad there’s at least one other man here. Fools will be tempted to betray us to the government if they are not given adequate —” Pause for word. “— disincentives. Our first priority is to make sure the penalties of crossing us outweigh any benefits.”

  “I disagree,” Moonchild made herself say.

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “The woman speaks,” he said deliberately. “It is because you are nurturing that you speak that way, no? Your woman’s heart bleeds for the unfortunates whom we would discipline.”

  That was true, but she sensed that that line of argument would not get far with the exclusively male assemblage. She felt Belew’s gray eyes on her. He sat up at his end of the table serene and centered as an Occidental Buddha. He was testing her. She hated him for it.

  If only they had listened to me, gone back to Fort Venceremos to explain to the Colonel why J. J. killed Spoiler. The Brigade is still fighting for justice, no matter how far off the path some of its members have strayed.

  Yet how can I back out now?

  “I feel compassion, yes,” she said slowly. For some reason she could not bear to fail in front of Belew, and she hated him still more for that. “How can we help the people by doing them harm? But more crucial, from your male perspective, is that by resorting to terror against noncombatants, we defeat ourselves.”

  Nguyen puffed up as if to spit an interjection. Wondering at her lack of civility, she plunged on. “If we brutalize civilians, they will come to hate and fear us more than they do the government; they will come to see the government forces as the lesser of two evils. Just as villagers were driven to join the Viet Cong after they saw their homes and loved ones burned in napalm attacks.”