A fighter jet taking off nearby hit its afterburners, engines howling.
“You should ask Terwilliger,” the other leatherneck shouted.
Captain Terwilliger was the US Psy Ops officer who’d brought Tam in and filed the initial report on what the hoi chanh had to say about our Saigon assassin. My call woke the captain from his afternoon nap.
“The Slop Chute in twenty,” the dai uy said.
“The what, sir?”
“Officers’ Club.”
As head honcho of the Psy Ops shop in Da Nang, Captain Terwilliger advised the Viets on how to psych out their enemy. The man looked the part: black hair, black glasses, black stateside boots, black captain’s bars on the lapel of his fatigue shirt and on his baseball cap. His call sign was Head Case.
“How did Tam end up here, sir?” Robeson asked.
“I was testing the detachment’s thousand-watt loudspeakers one evening around dusk, beaming this out over the perimeter wire.”
He pressed play on a portable recorder the size of a brick and loosed a terrifying otherworldly howl, followed by the voice of a kid pleading for papa-san to come home, and finally a weird-sounding dude reciting something the captain translated from memory: “Disgrace and sorrow await your families. Come home. Come home before you die. Rally to the government and live a happy life forever.”
The message was grim but Terwilliger sounded chipper. “What do you think?”
Robeson did his best down-home wail. “Whooeee. That is some bad shit, dai uy.”
Captain Terwilliger was pleased. “We play it on the radio, too, along with the names and dates of their casualties when we have them. The North doesn’t notify relatives. Bad for morale. So we try to inform their families whenever possible.” He grinned. “Anyway, I was testing this tape at the perimeter, really blasting it, and this lone VC rises up out of the weeds on the other side, holding an Open Arms safe-conduct pass way over his head. Surrenders himself—to me.”
“How would you describe him?”
“Nervous, thin as a rail, totally worn out. But personable. I liked him. We all did. I got him fed, took him for a physical. He had a tapeworm. We got him medicated and put him up in our compound. See for yourself.” He passed over a Polaroid of him and Tam smiling over a meal. The bony Vietnamese looked like a possum caught in the headlights.
I asked if Tam had turned in his rifle. Defectors got serious bonus money for bringing in their weapons. The Viet Cong could forgive those who’d broken faith as long as they eventually returned to their comrades, but not if they’d surrendered their weapon when they defected. Terwilliger shook his head. Tam had not brought in his rifle. Meaning he knew he could go back.
“Made me wonder,” Terwilliger said, “but he made up for any doubts with information and a cooperative attitude. Tam got nervous at any mention of the South Vietnamese eventually housing him, which of course was inevitable. When he sensed the end of his stay with us was approaching, he bought himself a little extra time by mentioning the Saigon lady assassin.”
“And it worked,” Robeson said.
“It did. He wasn’t even being formally interviewed at the time. We were just having tea when Armed Forces Radio reported she had gunned down a second American officer.”
“He understood the English?”
“Enough, yes.”
“So this must’ve been last week?” I said.
“Exactly right. Given the importance of the intel,” the captain said, “I was happy to let Tam stick around a day or two longer. After which I managed to talk the security detachment at the airfield into sheltering our guest until the Chieu Hoi Open Arms program was able to collect him.”
“Did he say anything about the assassin’s history?” I asked. “Like where she learned to shoot like that?”
“He’d been told she made her bones in Tay Ninh province, up by the Cambodian border. She’d stand on the side of the road in civilian clothes next to a smashed-up bicycle, and wave down lone ARVN trucks. The minute one stopped to help her, she’d shoot the driver dead—and anyone else in the cab. Her squad would take out anybody riding in the truck bed. She and her cadre did their thing in seconds. Stripped the vehicle. Twice made off with the entire rig.”
“No prisoners,” Robeson said with concern.
Terwilliger shook his head. “In recognition of her heroism, Tam said, the Capital Liberation Regiment sent her to Saigon to take over Unit Eight, the unit he was supposed to join.”
“Any chance he gave you a current schematic of the unit? Any of their names or aliases?”
“No schematic. No names.”
“Did you interrogate him in English or Vietnamese?”
“I mostly used our interpreter. But our last big conversation was in his broken English and my Simple-Simon Vietnamese.”
“What did he know about her latest orders?”
“Said she was ordered to eliminate ‘Mỹ cáo già.’”
“His exact words?”
“We were mixing pidgin with Vietnamese. I asked him what Mỹ cáo già meant. He struggled to translate and finally said, ‘old fox.’”
Robeson and I exchanged glances. In Vietnamese Mỹ meant American, as in the ever-popular Buddhist chant Đả Đảo Mỹ Diệm —Down with American Diem. Had Tam meant the Americans’ old fox—Diem? Or did he mean an old American fox? Another attempt on McNamara? General Harkins? Ambassador Lodge?
“We need to have a conversation with Mr. Tam,” I said.
Terwilliger looked from me to Robeson and back to me.
“I’m sorry I let him go,” he said. “He was a hoi chanh. I thought he’d be safe.”
We checked in to the Grand Hotel de Tourane, a whitewashed colonial relic, flaking a bit on the outside but elegant on the inside. And we could sleep easy: a trio of off-duty Vietnamese soldiers from the military compound next door guarded the place at night in return for room and board for their families.
The rain had stopped so we strolled along the strand, past Mediterranean-style residences with pastel walls and fenced-in yards. Young American Air Force and Navy officers promenaded with nurses or huddled over drinks in cafés along the riverfront. The odor of wet mortar and mown grass mixed with the aroma of strong French coffee. It smelled like lazy afternoons everywhere, like peace.
The evening breeze off the water felt almost cool. Patrol boats motored up the river past skiffs and sampans. Every so often the Vietnamese infantrymen guarding the bridge shot at a floating object in case it was a buoy mine or a sapper using French underwater breathing apparatus to plant charges. Across the river, visible through a line of trees, bathers on China Beach were enjoying the glassy blue water of the open sea. An artillery shell struck the slope of Monkey Mountain, sending up a cloud of dirt and smoke. Nobody flinched.
We ate dinner on the hotel’s terrace, and hashed the odds of finding Tam wherever he was being held. After a couple of bottles of wine, we decided to try flashing our credentials at the National Police headquarters, demanding the whereabouts of the man the field police had taken from the American detention cage. We got lucky. Nearly hysterical with fear, the ARVN captain on duty claimed total ignorance and pulled out a ream of paperwork, probably hoping we couldn’t read Vietnamese and learn anything that might get him in trouble. Robeson missed the fine points but got the basic idea: Rallier 57412 had become Prisoner 94711, transported under guard to Con Son, a hundred-year-old French penal colony on an island five hundred miles to the south and fifty miles out to sea.
“Oh, that’s fuckin’ great,” Robeson said. “They’ve hauled him off to Devil’s Island.”
Chapter Eight
From the air, Con Son looked like a caveman’s idea of a moose. Contorted antlers bulged from the large head and mountainous ridges with two dramatic peaks rose along its back. The airstrip cut across its neck like a collar. A single road loope
d down its western flank and along the curve of its underbelly, where the town nested: all of two dozen houses in four rows. The lone road reappeared on the other side, leading to the large penal colony made up of five separate compounds, over a hundred buildings in all. At its heart squatted an ancient French fort right out of Beau Geste, circled by stone walls and parapets and facing a jetty. We banked, passing over a huge cemetery with so many markers it looked like a plague had hit the island.
We dropped down over coconut trees, skimming palms eighty feet high, and flew a half circle over the clearest water. A Pacific paradise.
A short, jaunty Vietnamese met us at the airstrip and attempted to engage us in French. Robeson smiled and nodded but the man saw I didn’t understand and switched instantly to bad English. He was the warden, come personally to drive us to his office.
“Who lives there?” Robeson asked as we drove past the hamlet abutting the town.
“Several hundred civil servant. Seventy-six guard. All work in prison. Six hundred militia defend Con Son from attack. One dozen army officer command mens.”
The warden was in no hurry. He asked if we wished to stop at the gift shop in the miniature town to see the swagger sticks and other souvenirs the prisoners made in their carpentry workshop. We declined. Apparently quite proud of his slammer, he offered us a tour of its vegetable gardens and Catholic chapel. We declined those, too.
No weapons were permitted in the prison. Guards and administrative personnel went unarmed. As we surrendered our sidearms, Robeson grew visibly edgy. He peppered the warden with questions: What crimes had the inmates committed? How many were hardcore Communists?
“Over four thousand guest,” the warden said. “Few make crime, many politic detainee. No worry. Not manys here do . . .” he pantomimed a weapon against his shoulder, trigger finger cocked.
“Understood,” I said. “Only a few of your prisoners ever bore arms.”
“Even so,” Robeson said, “seventy-six guards? Man, that’s an awful small detachment to cope with over four thousand inmates.”
The warden shrugged. “Where is possible to go?” he said, adding something in French.
“It’s eighty klicks to the mainland,” Robeson translated. Meaning, the whole island was a prison. Geography made a larger force unnecessary.
The warden offered us a café filtre while his clerk began to pull out their records. Robeson puffed his cheeks at the height of the stack of ledgers filled with elegant penmanship, tens of thousands of names, probably going back to the days of the French. But when we described the circumstances of Prisoner 94711, the warden instantly knew who we had come for. Robeson translated the warden’s explanation that all prisoners were given a classification of “easy,” “questionable,” or “stubborn,” and that Tam had been classified as “stubborn.” His orders had been to isolate the man in Compound Four, where the most uncooperative inmates were housed in a cellblock of what he called cages à tigre—tiger cages—punishment cells whose guards kept close watch from overhead through barred ceilings.
“Compound Four? So that’s where we need to go to talk to him?” Robeson said. “Can you give us the map?”
The warden smiled. “We cannot make map. Communist obtain map, come liberate comrades.”
“So you’ll show us the way?”
He shook his head. “Not.”
“Why not? You’re not holding him in Compound Four? You housed him somewhere else? Against orders?” I asked.
“Mais non.” The warden raised both hands toward heaven. “Il est mort.” The prisoner had died before arriving, he explained, while attempting to escape from his escort.
“He was arriving by ship?” Robeson said.
“Aeroplane.” The warden skimmed the air with his hand. “Die two kilometer from island, so to say.”
Two klicks out from the island? No, two over Con Son—above. Up. He demonstrated.
“Vietnamese Air Force plane?” I said. “USA?”
“Américain. Oui.”
“Military aircraft? Civilian?”
“Civil.”
“Vietnamese soldiers brought him?”
“No, no.” The warden stood with arms crossed. “Police in cloth of the street.”
Vietnamese plainclothesmen in an American civilian aircraft were bringing Tam to the island when he tried to escape . . . from the plane, at altitude. Right.
Robeson asked if they had retrieved the body.
“Oui, oui. Bien sûr. I show.”
The warden drove us to the enormous cemetery we’d seen from the air, thousands of markers crowding a long sloping hill overlooking the sea. He pointed to a fresh mound at the foot and stayed with his jeep while we hiked down. We found Tam’s prisoner number on a slip of paper tacked to a white stick protruding from the ground.
Robeson gazed out to sea. “If they just wanted him dead, they could’ve taken care of that back in Da Nang.” He gestured at the size of the cemetery. “The Vietnamese must like doin’ it out here. You suppose it was an Air America plane that brought him?”
“What else? You figure the cops were questioning him at six thousand feet?”
“Air America pilots ain’t likely to tell us, or talk about somebody deplaning early.”
I agreed. The CIA had bought the Air America operation a bunch of years ago and manned it with soldiers of fortune from half a dozen countries. Whatever happened in the back of the aircraft was no concern of theirs. Just shut the door as you leave. Robeson called up to the warden: “You’re sure this prisoner was Mr. Tam?”
“Oui, oui. Sans aucun doute.” No doubt about it, Robeson said.
We climbed back up to the car. “What did he look like, this Tam?” I asked the warden.
“Homme de constitution ordinaire.”
“A man of average build,” Robeson translated. “An ordinary joe.”
“When I see him,” the warden went on, “he broken. Fall many far,” he added, mournfully.
“Shit.” I ran a hand down my face. We’d gone to a lot of trouble to interrogate a corpse.
The warden dropped us at the airport to get ourselves on the next outbound flight, which wouldn’t be until sometime the day after tomorrow—maybe. It took nearly an hour on the Air Force radiophone to reach Vung Tau on the coast and get relayed from there to Saigon so I could bring Captain Deckle up to speed.
Deckle paused. “What’s your read? You think they’ve still got the guy and are deliberately hiding him from you?”
“Could well be, yes sir. We could be getting shammed while he disappears deeper.”
“Well, either way, the scrot is not available to question.”
Deckle agreed to do some digging at his end, and we’d do some on ours. With luck we’d be back at CID in forty-eight hours. By which time he or we might know more.
Robeson and I passed on the hostel in town and went for the more isolated of the two inns on the beach. I talked Robeson into a deluxe cottage at the water’s edge: a thatched shelter on a platform, with mats for beds and no plumbing or mosquito nets. But it did come with stubby US Army entrenching tools to manage the shallow cooking pit, and an incredible ocean view.
“Not so much as a rubber lady to bed down on,” Robeson complained.
“You’ve been at the Majestic too long. You’re getting soft, soldier.”
We dropped our gear and walked toward the surf. A few Americans—officers by the look of them—lay on the perfectly white sand, slathered with baby oil, toasting themselves. Parents busily herded their blond kids along the water’s edge or helped them build sandcastles. A very pregnant woman with a toddler holding on to her finger waded in the ankle-deep water, seemingly unaware she was sharing the island with a notorious prison.
Robeson had never learned how to swim, but he kicked off his shoes, rolled up his pant legs, and let the waves lap at his feet.
I walked out until the water was chest high, but didn’t go any farther. Before Korea I had loved to swim. Now being under water spooked me. Sounds falling away, muted. The silence thick in your ears. It was haunted, a dead place where the ones I had wasted waited for me. I couldn’t go there anymore.
I returned to the beach and found Robeson in conversation with Rafe, an airman who’d lucked out and pulled Con Son as his duty station. He was reading a paperback and wasn’t due on duty until evening.
Robeson said, “VC ever attack the island?”
“Con Son?” Rafe’s eyebrows arched in disbelief. “Never. There’s no war here. Worst we see is when new prisoners arrive. They push ’em over the side manacled. They struggle like hell not to drown getting ashore. Not all of ’em make it. Wherever they’ve been, they can hardly walk. Knees the size of melons, some of ’em. They’ll carry each other, or drag themselves out of the water on their backsides, like crabs.” He dabbed zinc ointment on his nose. “Once they finally crawl up the beach they get the choice of chanh dao, the right path—the Diem way—or the bad-news Ho Chi Minh path through two lines of guards who beat them something awful. The prison guards are real liberal when it comes to applying their truncheons and real chary when it comes to supplying food. They’d much sooner beat ’em than feed ’em. Weak inmates are easier to control.”
We told Rafe that we’d come to find a prisoner who died before getting the choice of the Diem way or the Ho Chi Minh way.
“From what I’ve seen, he’s probably lucky.”
I noticed colored patches on the uniforms of the prisoners who stood hip-deep in the surf, hauling in a fishing net. A lot of them seemed to have yellow badges with orange stripes. I asked Rafe if he knew what they meant.
Rafe pushed up his sunglasses. “Prisoners detained without trial. Red badges are politicals. VC, sympathizers, independent thinkers who criticized the regime. Sometimes a political’s just a guy who dared to run against the ‘approved’ candidate or whose business got too successful and started eating into the profits of the province chief or his relatives.”
Play the Red Queen Page 6