Turn of the Cards

by George R. R. Martin

  And then To was staggering in the shallows, pushed to relative safety by some unseen force. “AHH! Ahh. Ah?” he said. He scrabbled up the bank on all fours, then sat down and covered his face with his hands.

  “Now, shoot!” the warrant officer commanded. Linh dutifully began to rake the murky river just shy of the bank, throwing great brown sheets of water over To. To screamed and ran off into the weeds.

  Linh stopped shooting. There was a terrific bang, so loud that the warrant officer thought for a moment a round might have cooked off in the chamber. The little boat rocked back.

  When it fell forward again, it just kept going. Slowly but unmistakably.

  A rating ran from below-decks. “The hull’s all caved in!” he screamed. “We’re sinking!”

  “Ridiculous!” the warrant said. A big air bubble rolled to the surface, right in front of the bow.

  A metal ammo box came sliding forward down the deck. The boat was settling heavily by the bows now. The warrant officer slammed his pith helmet on the deck.

  “Why couldn’t the filthy Americans-without-money have sold us a boat with a metal hull?”

  A shape burst from the water, big and sleek and streamlined and silver-gray. It hung in the air a heartbeat, grinning all over its rostrum at them. Then it fell back into the river with a splash that swamped the deck clear to the gun mount.

  Linh turned and fled, screaming, “Sea monster! Sea monster!” The warrant officer grabbed him and started punching him.

  “It’s just a dolphin, you coward!”

  “Dolphins don’t sink ships,” Linh sobbed.

  The beast broke the surface again fifty meters away, streaking off in a racing jump. Cursing, the warrant officer released Linh and jumped to the twin machine guns. The dolphin was moving away incredibly fast, shooting up out of the water at regular intervals.

  The warrant officer fired the ammo cans dry. He never came close to hitting the dolphin. It vanished around a bend in the river.

  He had to wade through ankle-deep water to abandon ship.

  “What’s bothering that damned dog?” the sentry demanded.

  His partner had his heels dug in and was holding the leash with both hands in an effort to keep the straining, snarling German shepherd from pulling him off his feet and dragging him out of the white high-noon glare of the floodlights that illuminated the ammo dump’s perimeter.

  “I don’t know,” he said between panting breaths. “He’s never acted like this before.”

  “Stupid animal. I should put a bullet between his ears. That would calm him down.”

  “No! He must sense something. He’s a good dog.” The handler sounded wounded. He’d been through training with the dog; his fellow sentry was just somebody he’d been assigned to walk the wire with tonight. The dog was his buddy.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Here. I’ll let him go. He’ll show you.” He released the animal.

  The dog sprinted forward in a black-and-tan blur. They saw him race into the black of the compound, saw his shadowy form leap as if at a victim’s throat. But there was nothing there.

  Except the dog suddenly flipped over in the air and came down on its back so hard the two sentries heard the air burst out of its lungs. The shepherd rolled over and ran away with its tail between its legs, casting fearful looks over its shoulder.

  The sentries looked at each other and began to unsung their assault rifles.

  A woman appeared out of the darkness. Literally; it seemed she came into existence at the edge of the light — neither sentry saw a flicker of motion before she was abruptly there, running right at them. She wore tight-fitting black. Half her face was obscured by a black mask.

  The dog handler’s hands were numb from holding the leash. He almost dropped his Kalashnikov. His partner got his weapon free first, started to raise it.

  The woman ran up to them, jumped, sent both rifles flying away with a double kick. She burst between them, sprinting right for the three-meter fence.

  She leapt into the air. Incredibly she soared up and over the high fence, tucking into a ball to spin over the razor-wire coils that topped it. As the sentries watched, jaws dropping, she hit the ground running. When she reached the far edge of the light-spill, it was as if she simply winked out of existence.

  Behind the two sentries the ammo dump erupted in a cataclysm of light and noise.

  The village security officer made his way home along the nighttime trail with the wobble-legged swagger of a man returning from a whorehouse. Which was just what he was doing.

  To the last man who saw him alive he looked distinctly green. That was because he was being watched through an AN/PVS-2 — a so-called starlight scope.

  J. Robert Belew tightened his index finger on the trigger. The American-made M21 sniper’s rifle roared and slammed his shoulder. The security officer dropped into the short grass with the pratfall abruptness of a man who isn’t rising again this side of judgment Day.

  Leaving the rifle resting on its bipod, Belew rose and stole forward. He had two Khmer Rouge with him for security. They were small, watchful men, men from whom the youthful fire that had led them to drive the sick and old and crippled from hospital wards before their guns into the streets of Phnom Pen — hand to shoot, laughing, those who had not the strength to stagger — had long since died away, leaving them cynical, alert, attuned to survival for its own sake. Perhaps because it was all that was left them.

  Though the Red Khmers as a movement were still as fanatically committed to their zany Maoist brand of revolutionary socialism as ever, few of the men who had taken part in the gang rape and murder of a nation still believed. They had seen too much. Now they were warriors, pure and simple, with no values and no past to fall back upon. Their ethics were those of the primal warrior through all human history: loyalty to buddies, qualified loyalty to a leader, if he had luck. Beyond that it was them against all humankind.

  In their eyes Belew was both a comrade and an extremely lucky leader. To him they were useful, which made their moral failings irrelevant. He felt safe with them watching his back.

  Belew dew his Para Ordnance sidearm in case he had misjudged and his quarry had friends following along behind. He paused, knelt beside the body. He felt the throat, held the back of his hand before the man’s nose and mouth. No pulse, no breath. No sounds came out of the wall of elephant grass from which the late security officer had emerged.

  Voices were calling from the other direction, inside the bamboo fence of the village a couple of hundred meters away. Belew took a piece of paper from his pocket, thrust it into a pocket of the man’s blood-blackened tunic, and ran lithely back to where his rifle lay.

  He picked up the weapon, folded the bipod, and slung it. Slinging a piece was usually the mark of a slovenly troop, something no self-respecting Special Forces soldier would dream of doing in the field. Except if Belew ran into real trouble there was no way he was going to fight with the cumbrous, slow-firing M21. His sidearm would serve better.

  There were torches bobbing his way from the village now. “’Paranoia strikes deep,’” he murmured softly. Not all his aphorisms were classical.

  The villagers would find a list of government informers on their late security officer. This would, with luck, have Ramifications.

  For instance, the villagers would probably assume the security officer was trying to defect to the rebels and that the government had burned him. The official’s family would blame the government. The government would grill everyone in the area to find out who else might be disloyal, while going nuts trying to figure out who actually popped the poor son of a gun, since they knew they didn’t do it.

  Meanwhile officials in nearby villages would be thinking furiously. The fact that one of their own had bitten it would remind them of their own mortality. Even if the rebels weren’t responsible for this killing, it might give them unhealthy ideas. And say the government really had rubbed this guy out: what if the government suddenly
took the notion they were disloyal?

  Finally, life was not going to be too comfortable for the people whose names were on the list, either.

  The assassination, then, was not merely a random act of midnight murder; it was a cunningly planned act of midnight murder. An engine for generating maximum paranoia and ill will, it would put a lot of people seriously uptight and cause them to do much soul-searching about where their loyalties lay. He didn’t think many would come down foursquare for the Socialist Republic after this one. And even though most people wouldn’t do anything, he was planting seeds, planting seeds.

  Best of all, he thought, as he slipped back to his quondam Young Genocides, to give them a thumb’s-up and be answered with flashes of teeth and eyes, Mark will never connect the act to Major J. Robert Belew, USSF retired. Belew genuinely liked and respected the boy, but he was in ways too good for this world.

  What he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Moonchild flinched as the TV spots hit her. She felt the exposed skin of her face redden under their assault. She could not endure them long, she knew. She would make herself stand them long enough.

  “We, the Revolutionary Oversight Council for Free Vietnam, have agreed upon a platform of goals. We seek to secure freedom for the people of Vietnam, freedom in its many forms. These include first and foremost the freedom of conscience, the freedom of expression, the freedom to enjoy the fruits of one’s own labors…

  She could feel the skepticism of the small but dedicated band of reporters on the other sides of the lights and glass camera eyes. Crews from CNN, CBS, RTL, and the French national news agency had all made their way to this former mining camp in the jagged spine of the Chaîne Annamitique, plus some print media. J. Bob had set it up, of course; he had contacts everywhere.

  Belew sets so much up, she thought as her mouth transferred words from paper to sound. Maybe it is too much.

  The statement was brief, indicating nothing of the hours of violent wrangling that had gone into its composition. It was tough enough to keep the ethnic-Vietnamese factions, such as the Cao Dai and the Annamese separatists, the Hoa, and the Montagnards, from trying to cut one another’s throats, let alone agree on anything. The minorities were no more tractable than the haughty Vietnamese. Even though FULRO, the Unified Fighting Front of the Oppressed Races — represented by Belew’s friends Bert and Ernie — had existed since the sixties, when it fought both the VC and the South Vietnamese government, its Cambodian and Montagnard members feuded incessantly with each other. They only gave it a rest when they combined to beat up on the Muslim Cham of the coastal region.

  The coalition’s continuance required Moonchild’s all-but-constant presence as peacekeeper. In the early days she repeatedly found it necessary to wade in physically to break up fights or keep an overly aggressive debater under control — as she had done with Colonel Nguyen, now one of her most vehement supporters. There was less of the physical stuff now — the ability to take on an opponent who had the drop on you with a gun and win deeply impressed the Vietnamese, who had enough intimate acquaintance with deadly force to know that sort of thing belonged normally in the movies. But she was still an all-but-indispensable control rod, whose presence was necessary to keep all those hot rebel heads from achieving critical mass.

  It meant that Revolutionary Council meetings had to take place at night for the highly UV-sensitive Moonchild to be able to attend. Fortunately night is the natural medium of conspirators and rebels; no one thought twice about it. Her playing the part of sulsa, a ninja-esque Knight of the Night, only enhanced her status among the rebels. It only built the legend, the mystique — with, inevitably, more than a little help from J. Bob Belew.

  But it also meant that Mark often had to take his Moonchild powder more than once a night. Playing the sporadic presence, who appeared mainly when and as she was needed and was otherwise not seen, added fabric to Moonchild’s cloak of mystery. Sometimes, though, she had to come and stay for more than an hour, to maintain her credibility and prevent internecine bloodshed.

  Mark had long ago learned that doing one of his personae even twice in a twenty-four-hour period had savage aftershocks, mentally and physically. His island-hopping passage of the Aegean as Aquarius had left him weak and sick and talking in voices other than his own for several days. The time Isis Moon was spending expressed was taking a toll on Mark and all his friends. Not even Moonchild’s healing powers could make up the costs.

  And he was far, far away from reliable sources of the drugs that made up his powders. He had Belew funneling stuff to him from old connections in the Golden Triangle drug trade. J. Bob would not vouch for their purity. That made Mark happy, yes indeed.

  Moonchild finished, looked up for questions. As Belew had warned her, they weren’t friendly.

  “What about the environment?” a reporter asked. “How can a supposedly free regime protect the environment from pollution and exploitation?”

  She smiled slightly. She feared Belew was a devil, but he was a cunning devil, she had to admit. Remoteness, and the consequent difficulty to government forces seeking to decapitate the rebellion, was only one of the reasons for selecting this site for the press conference.

  “Did you look around yourselves on your way in, please?” she asked. “You must have seen the great scar gouged out of the side of the mountain. This was a strip-mining camp. There are many such across Vietnam, just as there are horribly polluted factory sites and clear-cut forests. To the Socialist Republic, Nature is something to be subjugated and exploited with a ruthlessness unknown to even the most rapacious capitalists of the West. Everyone has seen the terrible environmental costs this philosophy exacted in the former East Germany. The same heedless forces are at work here.”

  “What about the homeless?” another reporter asked quickly, eager to drop that subject.

  “The government of the Socialist Republic has created homelessness, not combated it. Its housing policies have fallen greatly short of meeting the needs of its urban populations. Its solution has been to try to herd unhoused masses into khu nha moi, New Economic Zones, which are no more than the old New Life Hamlets that were such a shame of the former South Vietnamese regime. You would call them concentration camps. And to create these New Economic Zones, the Socialist Republic has forcibly displaced minority populations such as the Hmong, the Nung, the Muong, and the Khmer. Such displacement, by the way, has been defined as genocide by the United Nations.

  “Understand, also, that as in the USSR, in the Socialist Republic indigence is a crime. People you would see living on the streets in the West are here arrested and shipped to trai cai tao, reeducation camps. As with the environment, Free Vietnam cannot offer magical solutions. We can promise to be less brutal and ineffectual than the current regime.”

  The journalists shifted and rumbled. Moonchild felt stirrings of contempt for them, and put the feelings down with shocked surprise and self-reproach. But while the facts she had recounted were news to her and Mark, these people had to have seen their truth before, have known them. But they chose to act as if they were untrue, and to present that pretense to the public as fact.

  She was beginning to understand Belew’s virulent contempt for the media. It made her uncomfortable, as agreeing with the ultraconservative spook always did.

  She moistened her lips, which felt not just dry but strange, as if they were developing cold sores. She hated the lights.

  “Are there any more questions?”

  “Why do they want me for their spokesperson?” Moonchild asked, picking her way down the steep slope. She saw better at night, by moon or starlight, than she did in artificial illumination. But the mountainside was brushy, the footing unreliable.

  “Let me count the ways,” Belew said. He was actually moving with more confidence than she. It did not occur to her that for all her intrinsically superior physical abilities, he was the one with experience of the land. She just took the fact as a r
eproach. “You’re an ace. You’re beautiful. You’re charismatic. You’re photogenic. And you’re not Vietnamese. The Viets are adept at not taking the rap for their mistakes — look at what they did to us Americans. If the rebellion pulls a rock, they can point their finger at a foreigner and say, ’It’s all her fault.’”

  “Oh.” She misstepped, slipped, caught herself on her hands as gravel slid rattling away from beneath her feet. “I am sorry. I am so clumsy.”

  “A gentleman never disagrees with a lady,” Belew said, extending a helping hand, which she declined. “Fortunately I know when not to be a gentleman. Nonsense, dear child. You are far more coordinated than any nat or most aces. You’re simply upset and fighting yourself.”

  She stood upright again, came close to him. “If you know so much, tell me what I am!” she whispered fiercely.

  “You’re what would be called, in the current vernacular, a babe.”

  She clenched her fists. “No! You know what I mean. Why could I not speak Korean when Kim addressed me?”

  “Maybe because you’re not Korean.”

  She felt her knees lose all cohesion, as if the collagens binding her sinews had dissolved. Even the stars, stabbing down hard as needles through clear thin mountain air, could not heal her with their ancient light. She felt a stab of Mark’s remnant dread of them.

  “What am I?” she whispered. The escort of jokers and Khmers Rouges slipped and slid past them down the trail, eager to put as much mountain up-and-down between themselves and the press-conference site as they quickly could.

  “What am I?” she asked, tears running down her cheeks.

  “I don’t know, darlin’. What do you think you are? How do you account for being trapped inside the six-four male body of the world’s Last Hippie?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. Something must have happened. To me and the others. We were … lost. Somehow we found — shelter — in Mark’s psyche.”