As dusk came on, he began to wonder whether Milligrew was intentionally making him wait. Most of the men headed into one of the larger huts, from which Danny could detect the smell of cooking food. He heard the rumbling of Gooch’s stomach, and pretended not to notice the spiteful looks the man was giving him for delaying mealtime. At last Milligrew returned. “Come on,” he said brusquely, and Danny followed him some distance away to a small bamboo structure that stood apart from the rest. Looking over his shoulder, he saw Gooch hurrying over to the mess hall.
Danny entered the little hut. Milligrew went in behind him and closed the door. It was hot inside. The interior of the hut was pleasantly lit by a yellow lantern on a table, and there was a strong smell of pipe smoke. Danny’s eyes took a moment to adjust.
A man sat in a folding chair beside the table, reading a paperback novel. He took his time finishing the page he was on, dog-eared the corner to mark his place, and closed the book. He was older than the other men in the camp, perhaps fifty, with a full head of thick brown hair and sideburns that were almost long enough to be called mutton-chops. His eyes were blue and penetrating. His build was lean—not heavily muscled like Milligrew, but strong in a different way.
“There you are, you devil,” he said with a grin. “I’ve had my people trying to bring you in for over a month now. You do nice work.”
Danny felt himself blushing. “Thanks,” he said.
“And this”—Mallick held out his hands in a gesture that encompassed the whole village around them—“is COSVN.”
19
The Doctor
Danny had heard of COSVN, the Central Office for South Vietnam. His superiors in the Army had always referred to it as if it was a legend—something that might or might not exist. COSVN was supposed to be the southern headquarters for the forces of the North, a central command post from which the Communist government could direct the war from a safe position behind the Cambodian border. At the time Danny had lost contact with civilization, American forces had just begun pushing past the border to search for COSVN and destroy it.
“So we found it, then,” Danny said. “Is the war over?”
Mallick puffed on his pipe. “No. The war is not over. The war is going to go on for a very long time.”
“But if we’ve taken their headquarters, it’s only a matter of time.”
“If we wanted to end the war, then you’d be right. But the Army pulled out of Cambodia back in June. Nixon told the world that we had given up on finding COSVN. In fact, there’s a new COSVN already operating about ten miles to the west—we know exactly where it is—and nobody’s attacking it. What does that tell you?” He watched Danny’s face thoughtfully.
“That our goal isn’t to end the war,” Danny said after a moment’s thought.
“What are we trying to accomplish, then?”
Danny shrugged. “I just want to get out of here and see my family again.”
Mallick nodded and leaned back in his chair. “I can’t help you with that. Maybe the Doctor can help you. What I can do is get you some dinner. What do you feel like?”
“Hamburger.”
“We’re all out of hamburgers. You can have a rice-burger with a side of rice.”
Danny allowed himself to smile, just a little. “How long have I been out there? What’s the date?”
“August 24. I have no idea how long you’ve been out there. Vince, would you go get this kid something to eat? He’s a skeleton.” Milligrew, who had been standing silently behind Danny this whole time, went out. “What did you say your name was? Dan?”
“Danny.”
Mallick made a face. “You’re a grownup. You should go by Dan.” He spoke gruffly, but didn’t seem to mean any harm.
“I like Danny better.”
“Dan, in this hemisphere, things are complicated. You understand that, don’t you? There are people in Washington who want to end this war. The idiots in Congress want to end it more than anything. Then there’s Nixon. He wants it to end, too, except he wants to win. That’s the difference between him and the others. And he could win it tomorrow if it was up to him.” Mallick fell silent, still watching Danny for a reaction.
“Who’s it up to, then?” Danny said after a while, when it became clear that Mallick was not going to say more.
“The Doctor.” Mallick finished his pipe and tapped out the remains onto the dirt floor.
“Milligrew mentioned a doctor,” said Danny. “Who is he?”
“He’s in charge of us Monkeys. I can’t tell you about the Doctor. You’ll be meeting him in a couple days. Ask him whatever you want when he gets here.”
“And who are―”
“Don’t ask me about the Monkeys, either. I can’t tell you anything yet. And stop doing that.”
Danny had been following Mallick’s thoughts as they’d been speaking. An image of a bespectacled man kept appearing, a face that Danny thought he almost recognized. He blinked in confusion at Mallick’s sudden request. “Stop doing what?”
“You know what you’re doing, Dan. My thoughts are my business.”
“Sorry.” So Mallick, at least, could tell that Danny was reading him. Danny had no idea what to make of that.
Then Mallick leaned forward abruptly. “Did you have any help getting here?”
“Well, sure,” Danny replied. “That guy Milligrew―”
“No, no,” said the other man, exasperated. “Did you have help finding this place? Milligrew said you were headed directly here.”
“I was just trying to stay alive.”
“By heading deep into Cambodia,” said Mallick, still regarding him closely. “Away from all the American bases, straight toward us.”
Danny shrugged. Mallick might already know about Lester, for all Danny knew, but it didn’t seem sensible to go around telling people that he’d spent weeks talking to a broken radio. For a moment he wondered whether Mallick might actually be Les, but the voice was all wrong.
“All right. You’ll tell me later, if you feel like it. I won’t pry. I expect the same courtesy while you’re here.” He stood up. “Milligrew will be back soon,” he said, and Danny found that he could indeed sense Milligrew’s thought-sparks coming closer from the direction of the mess hall. “You can eat your dinner here tonight. I’ll have the men clear out a corner in a hut for you to sleep in.”
“Am I a guest?” Danny asked him. “Or a prisoner?”
Mallick sighed. “Hell, I don’t know. The Doctor wants me to hang onto you, but he didn’t say why. You’ll need to sit tight till we figure out what’s going on. That means you’ll be under guard, and it means you don’t go anywhere or talk to anybody without my permission. And no tricks.”
“Prisoner, then.”
Mallick held out his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “What do you expect? I don’t know you.”
Vince Milligrew entered, carrying a tray of steaming food. As Mallick had promised, the meal was primarily rice with a few vegetables and some kind of gamey meat. Danny accepted it gratefully and began to eat.
* * *
He was provided a private hut to sleep in, as promised, and they let him move about freely the next morning. He wrote a note to his mother and sister, keeping it brief because he doubted anyone would ever read it. Emmett Miller was assigned to guard him. Emmett stayed close at all times, but proved to be an easygoing guard. He chatted amiably about his family back home, about how much he missed American food, about the many interesting bugs he’d seen in the Cambodian wilderness. But he never said a word about the things Danny really wanted to know about. Any time Danny tried bringing the conversation around to what they were doing there, or why the men were tattooed with monkeys on their arms, the man deftly changed the subject to something harmless.
Men were still loading up the trucks with crates of materiel. Two trucks left the camp in the morning, and two more empty ones pulled up. Danny offered to help with the carrying, but Emmett assured him that his help was not neede
d.
At lunchtime Emmett was replaced by Travis Gooch, who said little. Gooch communicated primarily through grunting, and Danny didn’t even try starting up a conversation with him. He accompanied Danny to the mess hall to get a tray of food, then brought him to a spot at the edge of the cluster of buildings where they sat and ate in silence.
His stay in the little village went on like this for several days. Mallick’s attention was taken up entirely by the loading of supplies and the dismantling of the facilities, so Danny seldom saw him. The other men kept their distance from him, and when they did talk, they didn’t have much to say.
Mallick had a small collection of cheap novels, most of them raunchy. Danny borrowed a few of these and spent his afternoons reading them in the shade. Most were simply trash, but one caught his interest. It was called Candy; he remembered seeing a movie adaptation that had Ringo Starr in it. The book occupied his mind for a while, but he was growing anxious about what would happen when this Doctor arrived. He kept reading the same page over and over.
A week went by in this way. The weather was heavily overcast most of the time, but late one afternoon the clouds parted and a thin beam of sunlight peeked through. Danny had given up on his book by this time. He wandered through the camp, trying to stay out of the way as Mallick’s men bustled about. Gradually he became aware of a deep sound, somewhere to the east, that resolved into a low, rhythmic whumping.
In a few minutes the helicopter came into sight over the treetops, a UH-1 Huey flying at extremely low altitude. It set down to the south of the main village, where an LZ had been cleared. Three men stepped out as the rotor still spun above them; they did not duck their heads as many people did when disembarking from helicopters. They went straight to Mallick’s office and shut the door.
Mallick approached Danny a little while later. “It’s time to see the Doctor,” he said, sounding like a nurse in a waiting room.
Danny got up and followed him to the office hut, where the door was open and one of the men from the helicopter waited just outside. He was tall, with thinning brown hair and no spectacles. Danny had been sure that this Doctor would be the man in the glasses everyone kept thinking about; seeing this person was a bit of a disappointment.
But the man outside the hut did not come in with them. As Mallick and Danny stepped into the little building, he closed the door and remained outside. Someone had brought in two additional folding chairs. Mallick sat in one of these just inside the door. He motioned to the other one and Danny sat slowly, watching the man who was already seated at Mallick’s little table.
He was a sophisticated gentleman with a very large head and wiry hair, and he wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. He spoke in a very deep voice with a German accent. “I am supposed to be in Peking tomorrow,” he said, “but there was time for a detour. I feared the weather would prevent my coming. So much rain this time of year. And after the rain you get the mosquitos. You are Private Chan?”
Danny nodded, conscious of the fact that his mouth was hanging open. He had seen this man on the news.
“Dan,” said Mallick, “This is Dr. Kissinger.”
“It’s good to meet you,” the Doctor said. “Mr. Mallick says you’ve been up to some interesting antics out in the jungle. Eh?” He smiled amiably. “A lot of people are talking about you in Washington. Our secret ally. They want to know if you’re really on our side.” He paused, waiting for Danny to respond.
“I’m an American soldier,” was all Danny could think of to say.
Kissinger gazed at Danny without blinking. “That much is clear. Still, Mr. Mallick does not trust you.” Danny noted that the Doctor did not say whether he agreed with Mallick’s position. “Tea?” He poured a cup from a teapot on the table, and Danny accepted it.
“You never explained why you were on your way toward this place,” Mallick said. “Who helped you?” He had been courteous to Danny up to this point, but there was a harshness to his tone now that was alarming.
“I… I don’t know how to answer that,” Danny said.
“How can you not know?”
Danny looked from Mallick to Kissinger. “I don’t think you’ll believe me,” he said.
“You would be surprised at what I believe,” Kissinger replied.
There was only one way to find out what would surprise the Doctor. Danny told them his whole story, from Lieutenant Lonnie’s platoon to the oubliette. He did not mention his X-Ray Vision; without knowing how much Mallick knew about it, he didn’t want to provide more information than he had to. He told them about getting directions from a stranger on the radio, but didn’t mention Lester’s name, and he left out the fact that his radio had been broken the whole time. He was afraid Mallick would accuse him of lying and subject him to some sort of unpleasant treatment.
“Your memory loss,” said the Doctor. “You remember nothing about why you came to Vietnam? Or who sent you?”
“Nothing. Except that I was supposed to find a green monkey.”
“And you have no idea who the man on the radio was?” Mallick said, clearly not convinced.
“He never told me his name.”
The other two men exchanged an odd look. It was the Doctor who spoke next. “Mr. Chan, how long have you been able to read minds?”
Both men were watching him intently. He felt sweat dripping down the middle of his back. “Since I was a kid.”
“Who else knows about this?”
“My mother and sister. Couple other people.” In truth, probably everyone in Chinatown knew that there was something unusual about Danny. But he didn’t feel a need to bring that up.
Kissinger abruptly changed the subject. “How much have you figured out about what’s happening here?”
“Mallick told me a little. Whoever’s in charge is not trying to win the war. They just want to prolong it.” It reminded Danny of the games the Chinatown mobsters had played with one another. They fought for turf, but never put their rivals in a desperate position. The bosses seldom got involved directly, but used impoverished teenagers as their expendable forces. Here, Danny was one of the expendable ones, fighting a war that made no difference to him. The thought was a bitter one.
Kissinger interlaced his fingers and pursed his lips thoughtfully. “I have always believed in a policy of balance. You cannot always defeat your enemy, and sometimes it is best not to. In a fairy tale, you kill the monster and make him stop doing awful things. In the real world, the best you can do is to find a point of stability, where you exert pressure and get the results you want without threatening your enemy with extinction. A desperate enemy is a most dangerous thing.”
Mallick took out his pipe and began to fill it.
“Which is why,” Kissinger continued, “I am troubled by recent developments back in our country. Someone inside our government is playing a game that I don’t yet understand. Someone is trying to upset the balance.”
“Who?” Danny asked.
“I wish I knew who. A dark player with many contacts and great leverage, the two indispensable tools of politics. He keeps himself very well hidden. And yet I see his work every day. Earlier this year I met several times with Le Duc Tho from the Politburo in Hanoi, attempting to come to a peace agreement. President Nixon wanted to end this war honorably, that is without leaving Saigon to the wolves, and I went to those meetings in Paris with the thought that we could succeed. But someone else had been speaking to Tho before I got to him, and he refused to make a single concession. The talks went nowhere.”
“What else would you expect from the goddamn gooks?” said Mallick. Kissinger frowned at him and he mumbled a quiet apology.
“Since those meetings,” the Doctor continued, “I have felt that this dark player has been opposing my every move. I had been trying to work with the Cambodian Prince, Sihanouk, to keep Cambodia from falling apart. He is not a gentleman by any means, but we could work with him. The Prince was overthrown and I was forced to deal with a new leader instead. Let me tell
you, that coup did not come about without help! The rebels had assistance, and I suspect the help came from our very own government. Now the new leader, Lon Nol, has declared himself president of what he calls the Khmer Republic, and Prince Sihanouk is plotting to take his country back. There will be civil war, and as in most wars, there will be no winners.”
The smell of burning pipe tobacco filled the air as Mallick lit his pipe. Danny had always liked that smell.
“The Khmer Rouge are the ones I’m most worried about now,” said Kissinger. “They are Sihanouk’s allies, and if they gain power in Cambodia there will be death as far as the eye can see. This country and Vietnam will both fall to the Communists. Two more dominoes.”
Mallick had been nodding solemnly as the Doctor spoke. “Then there’s China,” he said.
Kissinger took a sip of his tea. “Yes indeed, that would embolden China in a way we cannot afford. You see, Mr. Chan, whoever is playing this game has a very big plan in mind. The dark player convinced Mr. Nixon to pull American troops out of Cambodia, even as he was arranging to ignite a war in Cambodia that will enable the Communists to seize control. This man has been working to keep things off balance in a way that threatens to throw all of Asia into chaos. And that, in turn, will affect the balance we have worked so hard to strike with the Soviets. This is why I have taken it upon myself to find this dark player and remove him from the game.”
Danny was still holding the warm cup of tea. He turned it around and around in his hands as he thought. “But who is this player you keep talking about?”
“You won’t believe me,” said the Doctor.
“You’d be surprised at what I believe,” Danny replied.
“He is a demon.”
Danny stood up suddenly, spilling tea all over the table. “A demon!” he said, a little too loud. “You remind me of…” He tried to remember, but it hurt his head to think about it. “I used to know somebody who talked about demons. He sent me here to find a green monkey. But I can’t remember who he was.”
The Music of the Machine (The Book of Terwilliger 2) Page 28