Turn of the Cards
Page 32
She glanced then at Belew; the remark was a barb. If it found its target, he showed no sign. “Also,” she went on, missing the single beat, “we play into the hands of the government: we allow them to portray us as bandits.”
“The world media are accustomed to making excuses for communist regimes,” Belew said. “They’ve been doing it have a powerful inclination to treat us as bad guys. We might be wise not to make it any easier for them.”
Though his body language still bespoke tense anger, Colonel Nguyen made an airy wave. “What do we care for world opinion?”
“We wish to be recognized,” said Duong Linh. The assembly’s elder statesman, except for Belew himself, he sat at the far end of the table. He was a wispy man with a wispy gray beard and round eyeglasses, who closely resembled Ho Chi Minh. A leader of Vietnam’s sizable community of covert Catholics, he had been born in Hanoi. As a youth in the early 1960s he fled south to Hue. He attended seminary school for a time, then dropped out, married, and began to raise a family. His wife, three children, and mother were killed in the communist massacres during Tet, 1968. He himself escaped only by chance. He had spent five years in the dreaded trai cai tao — “camp/transform/recreate,” reeducation camps. Since 1987 he had been living underground.
It was perhaps not surprising that he appeared elderly, though he was only in his late forties or early fifties.
“That gives us an immediate interest in what the world thinks of us,” Duong said in his barely audible voice. His accent had more soft Hue drawl than Hanoi harshness.
Colonel Nguyen grunted. “Very well,” he said without grace. “Then certainly we must all agree our first priority is to engage the government’s forces in battle, secure a victory as quickly as possible to establish our credibility”
Before she could stop herself, Moonchild blurted, “No.”
“Your impertinence disgraces this council,” Nguyen said, turning to her. His posture was still sprawled and casual, but the words squeezed from him like toothpaste from a tube, betraying his anger. His left hand suddenly swept around in a backhand slap to Moonchild’s face.
Her own right hand snapped up and caught Nguyen’s hand an inch from her face.
He jumped to his feet, his wooden chair slamming over backward with a clatter that sent the lizards scrambling up the wall to the shadow-hidden rafters. Fury leached the color from his face. His American .45 appeared in his hand. Moonchild was already up. As the tendons stood out on the back of the colonel’s hand, drawing his forefinger tight on the trigger, she whipped around in a spinning back-scythe kick, blinding fast.
Her foot struck the pistol. The weapon shattered like a rubber ball dunked in liquid nitrogen and hit with a hammer.
Colonel Nguyen stood there, the skin practically slumping off his face in surprise, holding the grip that was all that remained of his pistol, pumping the now-flaccid trigger. He threw the ruined weapon down and stamped out of the ballroom.
After an interval of very silent silence, Chou, the Hoa leader, spoke: “He’ll be back.” An ethnic Chinese, Chou compensated for having been a law professor at Minh Mang, the university in Ho Chi Minh City, by affecting warlord drag: thinning hair drawn back in a queue, Fu Manchu mustache, and two revolvers with what Moonchild very much feared were real ivory grips belted below his capacious belly.
The farmer who represented the Annamese secessionists from central Vietnam laughed. “Small loss if he doesn’t.”
The conferees sat very quietly to hear Moonchild’s objections to engaging the People’s Army in direct battle. These amounted to the fact that, desertion-riddled and dispersed though it was, PAVN was still mighty big and mean and would smash them flat in open conflict unless weakened substantially. It was a cogent argument, even the self-effacing Isis had to admit. Of course, her articulate advocacy might not be the only reason for her listeners’ respectful attention.
The discussion moved to the particulars of indirect strategy. Moonchild gratefully let the cup of conversation pass from her. She was uncomfortable standing out. Besides, her hour was drawing to a close. She would have to leave shortly.
A couple of Suon San’s bandy-legged little gunslingers walked in escorting a man in a yellow American-style polo shirt and white slacks. He was taller than most of the attendees, more squarely built. Belew rose to greet him with a smile.
“This is Kim Giau Minh,” Belew said, shaking the new arrival’s hand. “He’s an expert in the very kind of warfare we’ve been discussing. He fought as a counterinsurgency commando in Cambodia. His father was a North Korean engineer, and during his hitch in the People’s Army, Kim here was sent to North Korea’s famed schools for aspiring terrorists, where he studied death and destruction alongside the best and the brightest of Provo, ETA—Militar, and Nur al-Allah henchmen.”
Shaking hands around the table, Kim smiled and bobbed his close-cropped head shyly, as if embarrassed by vast praise. He came to Moonchild and his eyes lit.
“I have heard much about you,” he said in English, vigorously shaking the hand she offered him, then, “Choum boepgetsumnida. Kim Giau Minh rago hamnida.”
She stood there staring at him with horror seeping down over her face and body like blood from a scalp cut. She did not understand a word.
He said something else. The words struck no sparks of meaning in her mind.
He took her hand in both of his. “Asimnikka?” he asked, frowning with concern.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She pulled her hand back, turned, and ran.
Blindly she stumbled out of the derelict villa, off the grand veranda, several steps across granite flagstones laid to keep expensive European shoes from contact with the red mud. She dropped to her knees, hands on thighs, weeping soundlessly.
The Khmer Rouge standing to the left of the doorway with his Kalashnikov slung started forward. From the other side of the door Lou Inmon cleared his throat, held out a warning claw, and shook his head. The Cambodian stopped.
Grandfather, that had to be Korean he was speaking to me. And I did not understand a word.
What am I?
She breathed deep, from the diaphragm, trying to find her center. She wasn’t sure she ever could again.
Isis.
She stopped breathing. She had thought her name without willing it.
Isis. Do you hear me?
It was as if a voice was speaking in her mind. A… familiar … voice.
“Eric?” she whispered.
“Yes, Isis. It’s me. Surprised?”
“Yes.”
“Limited telepathy is one of my gifts, hon. Very limited, I’m afraid. I think our — closeness — gives me better range with you. By the way, you don’t have to talk out loud. Just think at me and I’ll hear.”
Where are you?
“Not far, I think, though I can’t say for sure. Where are you?”
Why?
“We’ve been looking for you. We want you to come back. We want you to come home, Isis.”
Is — is that all?
“I won’t play games with you. Rumor has it that you — you in person — are having a confab with some of the Republic’s heaviest criminals and traitors. The Colonel would very much like to find out where this is all going down.”
You want me to inform?
“I want you to remember whose side you’re on: ours. The wild cards’. These people are dangerous to our hosts. That makes them dangerous to us — all of us, hon. You included.”
She forced her breathing to a regular rhythm. She glanced back at the porch. Inmon stood with his great raptor head averted. The Khmer watched her with undisguised interest.
“I — that is, one of us, one of Mark’s friends killed Spoiler.”
“Don’t sweat that. Spoiler was a hothead. Haskell told us he drew down on Jumpin’ Jack Flash. It wasn’t Flash’s fault… Haskell’s fine, by the way. We got the infection in his arms under control.”
I am pleased for him. J. J. intended him no harm.
Mark led a mutiny —
“No hay importa, babe. His hand was forced. The Colonel says it’s a non-issue. Come back. We want you. We need you.
And you?
A pause, then: “Sure, babe, I need you too. That goes without saying —”
“Isis?”
She jumped, came up on one knee, turning. Belew stood behind her.
“Are you all right? You left the meeting pretty precipitously.”
“Isis. Just tell us where you are. You don’t have to do anything; we’ll come find you.”
She stood unsteadily, hung her head. “I am sorry if I have caused shame.”
“You’ll be a hero —”
Belew was shaking his head. “No. Indeed, I’d say you knocked their socks off in there when you busted Nguyen’s popgun for him. I couldn’t have dreamed up a better demonstration of what you’re all about if I had a year and infinite beer.”
“Isis —”
Eric, I love you. But she felt the contact stretch, and snap, and fall away into a void within her. She reeled. Belew caught her arm, helped her keep her feet.
She would not show him her pain. “What — what of what I said?” she asked him, stepping away and holding up a hand to forestall further help. “Did I pass that test too?”
He grinned. “With flying colors.”
“And you agreed with me?” For some reason it was very important for her to know these things. She could not imagine why.
“Well, I think you’re a little bit of a bleeding heart, it’s true. On the other hand, if the colonel and that commie hard-case Nguyen Number Two had their way, we’d have half the country after our hides. Just as you pointed out.”
“But that which I said about the bombers — you were not offended? I — aimed it at you.”
He shrugged. “Sorry. But it missed me clean. Special Forces were the hearts-and-minds boys; we saw how the populace reacted when granny and little sister got turned into crispy critters.”
She made herself stand erect, head up, shoulders back. She wanted him to know she was back in control.
“What of strategy?”
“You were spot-on. We need to soften PAVN up big-time. Otherwise they steamroll us.”
“Oh.” She had been prepared for assault, carping criticism at the least. Agreement caught her off guard.
“By the way,” Belew said, “Kim is half-blind from worry over what he did to upset you.”
“I am sorry. I —”
“It’s okay. I calmed him down. I understand; it’s just the time”
“That is a sexist remark!”
“Not time of month, kid. Time of day. Your hour’s almost up.”
She looked at him. “How can you know so much?”
“I do my homework. Now, git.”
Ten minutes later Mark staggered back into the ballroom. Belew had requested that he return after he came back to himself. The conferees looked up at him, then bowed their heads.
“Hello?” he said tentatively.
Bert the Montagnard stood up and shook his hand. “Please permit me to be the first to congratulate you,” he said in flawless Oxonian English. He had a gold incisor.
Mark blinked at him. He hadn’t even though the ’Yard spoke Vietnamese.
“What’s going on?” he asked Belew.
“Big news. The Command Council here has just voted your friend Moonchild in as head of the resistance. You’re her deputy and official representative to the Council when she’s unavailable.”
He stood up and slapped Mark on the back. Mark thought his eyes would fall out and roll away across the floor and under the table.
“But I’m not —”
“Yes, you are,” J. Bob said. “Congratulations. You always said you wanted a revolution. Now you’ve got one.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
The Su-25 strike aircraft — what NATO called a Frogfoot — began to rock in the ground effect as Podpolkovnik Sharagin lowered his flaps for landing. The stubby little Sukhoi, with its two jet engines set on the wings just outboard the fuselage, was not exactly a pulsing mass of power like its sexy cousin the Su-27 Flanker, but it felt light and inclined to skate compared to how it had handled on takeoff, with its hard-points crammed with napalm canisters and rocket pods for delivery against supposed rebel positions in the rugged Giai Truong Son.
And supposed is just the word for it, Sharagin thought. The People’s Army had a worse Vietnam War complex than the Americans did. Vietnamese officers remembered how much they’d dreaded American air-strikes, and so every time their patrols got fired up, they shrieked for air support. Which meant the lieutenant colonel and the ground-attack air company he commanded were running up a lot of time on their engines.
The problem was the rebels were probably smart enough not to hang around for the air-strikes to come in on their heads. Sharagin would have been that smart. The Viet Cong were that smart, like the black-asses in Afghanistan, where Sharagin won a chestful of medals to wear on the breast of his walking-out dress when he went drinking — like every pathetic soak in Moscow — and the dubious honor of this command.
Of course the People’s Army had not been; they gathered in vast Warsaw Pact-emulating clumps where the Yank bombers could find them, pursuant to the vision of that nitwit Vo Nguyen Giap, who based his entire strategy on building for a one-two punch: a massive popular uprising in support of the heroic Liberation Forces — which never materialized — and a single great standup knockout battle with the enemy, which worked exactly once, at Dien Bien Phu, and consistently got the Viets’ yellow asses kicked every last time they ran it on the Americans.
Of course the Americans finally beat themselves, and everybody called that turtle-headed old quack Giap a genius. Then the Vietnamese went into Cambodia and spent the last twelve years proving the Americans weren’t the only ones who hadn’t learned a fucking thing from the Vietnam War. And today’s People’s Army savants thought their current crop of opponents would be just as idiotic as they had been and wait obligingly for their nice napalm showers. Nyekulturnyy assholes.
The runway had been scraped in the red clay of a Central Highlands plateau and surfaced with perforated steel plating. Western analysts always went into raptures about the ability of Soviet aircraft to land and take off under highly vile conditions. Sharagin was proud of his ship’s ruggedness, too, but it didn’t mean it was fun to land on an airfield this wretched. The way you bounced around when you set down, you just knew a wheel strut was going to come jamming through the bottom of the plane and straight up your bunghole…
“Be advised runway damaged is not yet repaired, Kulikovo Leader,” the tower informed him. Only his passion for radio as well as other species of discipline kept him from cursing the Vietnamese controller out loud. The rebels had dumped a half-dozen mortar rounds on the runway’s end before dawn. Of course the holes hadn’t yet been repaired. Sharagin was used to the standards of Soviet Army Frontal Aviation — which was to say he hadn’t exactly learned to regard efficiency as his birthright — but these slant-eyes were simply ridiculous.
He wasn’t even sure what he and his boys were doing flying their planes into harm’s way in support of a regime that even lowly strike jocks like him knew his own government was not going to stand behind if the rebellion truly caught. Rodina Mat’ had let Eastern Europe go without a peep. The Baltic republics looked as if they might make their self-proclaimed secession stick. What beyond a weird macho Evil Empire nostalgia made STAVKA think it was worth screwing around in this humid hellhole? It wasn’t as if the slope-heads were ever going to come close to paying the USSR what they owed her for their War of Liberation, let alone —
Frenzied Vietnamese blasted through his headphones like static. “Speak English, you yellow monkeys,” he snarled at the tower, discipline momentarily forgotten.
Then he heard the voice of his wingman, wh
o trailed him by half a kilometer, yelling something about the colonel’s left wing.
A glance at the board. No red lights. No pre-corded feminine voice. If something was wrong, the bloody plane didn’t know it. Were his circuits so screwed up that his port engine was on fire without any telltales lighting? He turned his helmeted head to look.
A man dressed in orange flew formation with Sharagin. He was just drawing even with the cockpit, barely beyond the wingtip. He smiled and waved.
The problem was he’d neglected to bring a plane.
“Yob tvoyu mat’!” the colonel yelled.
The flying man held out an open palm. Sharagin saw an orange flash.
An explosion rocked the airplane.
Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Esquire, glanced back over his right shoulder. The Froggie must’ve had a short run to its target; it blew up into a wonderfully gratifying yellow fireball before it splashed down on the runway and went hurtling down it like a flame tsunami. Above his head a green canopy with one red panel blossomed as the airplane’s zero-altitude ejection seat reached the top of its arc and popped its chute.
He clucked and shook his head. Clearly communists weren’t big on color sense.
Great big glowing green balls went whipping by to the right of him. That Frogfoot behind him was obviously trying out its 25mm Gatling. Ooo, I’m sooo scared, he thought. The stars on these boys’ tails were blood red, not Socialist Republic yellow. Soviet marksmanship didn’t impress him any more than the Vietnamese version did.
He dropped till the runway was whipping right below him and he could feel the morning sun heat off the metal warming his belly. He was pleased to see the cannon shells going off among the hangars. He wasn’t so jealous of his job that he hated to see the bad guys do it for him.
I’m so glad we wound up on the other side from these buttholes, Mark. I didn’t like the War either, but it never meant I loved the commies.