Slash and Burn

by Colin Cotterill

  Peach nodded and walked casually to the hatch of the helicopter. She passed on the message with a Lao smile. The onlookers could see the senator’s reaction over her shoulder. It was loud and heated and certainly impolite. Peach stood her ground with her arms folded. But even before the tirade had run its course she turned her back and walked away from the helicopter. The senator yelled. She ignored him.

  “Five dollars says she quits,” said Civilai.

  “You haven’t got five dollars,” Siri reminded him.

  The old pair were at the back of the crowd of onlookers with pre-breakfast coffees in their hands and post-whisky-night hangovers in their heads. They’d deliberately missed the photo session and planned to miss the take-off, but the helicopter remained. The senator seemed suddenly aware that he was being watched and climbed down the steps of the chopper. He performed what some later speculated might have been a polite Lao nop to the onlookers, although others suggested he’d merely been catching mosquitoes. He then walked to Peach who was leaning against a tree. He talked more quietly to her now. His head was bowed and his right hand rested upon his heart. Peach shrugged and the senator enveloped her in a hug the major would have been proud of.

  “They’re doing it,” said Mr. Geung with a look of horror on his face. This unintentionally raised a laugh from the viewers.

  “In a way,” Dtui told him. “It’s called a hug.”

  “It’s love.”

  “I very much doubt that,” Dtui smiled. “But don’t let that stop you hugging your friend Tukda.”

  Geung turned the colour of a retired United States army major.

  “I … I don’t. I….”

  “It’s OK, hon. You don’t have to discuss it if you don’t want to. I won’t pry.” She lowered her voice. “But you know if you need to talk about anything—I mean anything at all—you can trust me.”

  “Nnnnnothing to say.”

  “Right. No problem.”

  The crash site was due south of the Friendship Hotel but they would have to carve a large arc east or west to avoid the military assault. Either course would have flown them directly into the smog. PL air force regulations prohibited flying even short distances in smoky conditions so both helicopters were grounded. The pilots were billeted in the headman’s house in Phonsavan until further notice. But all was not lost. Toua, the friendly hotel manager, rode his pony into town and returned ahead of two trucks, each with its own driver and porter. There was a dirt road which would transport the teams to within a kilometer of Ban Hoong. From there they could trek across the hills. Toua trusted the Americans would be able to make a small donation for petrol and something for the hard-working porters and drivers who had very little work to feed their families. Potter assured them it wouldn’t be a problem.

  The senator, already exhausted from the physical and emotional efforts of the morning, and wallowing in the trauma of being trapped in a disadvantaged area, opted not to travel to the search site with the MIA teams. He and Ethel Chin would, he said, wait at the Friendship until the smoke cleared. As there was no wind at all, the likelihood of such an event was remote. Out of what he called courtesy, General Suvan said he’d remain at the hotel also. Although Judge Haeng volunteered to stay behind to keep them company, the general insisted he’d be needed at the crash site.

  The further the trucks drove into the hills, the more the teams began to taste the smoke in the air. Now and then black flakes fluttered past them like charred snow and Siri could feel a growl deep in his throat that he knew would soon turn into a cough. The twenty-minute helicopter ride translated to over an hour on the old trucks. As they climbed into the mountains, deep ruts left over from the heavy rains were gouged along the clay road but the wet season landslides had been cleared. Sawn logs from fallen giants lay to either side of them, awaiting collection. As none of the team members knew the terrain, they had to put their faith in the local knowledge of the truck drivers. When they pulled off the road in the middle of nowhere and announced that this was the starting point of the walk to Ban Hoong, the passengers weren’t in a position to argue.

  “Are you sure you’re up for this?” Siri asked Daeng.

  “I swear if you ask me that one more time, Siri, I’ll file for divorce,” she said. “Every day I walk a hundred kilometers from the noodle pot to the tables and back and you say nothing. What’s so different here?”

  “Oh, nothing much,” Siri nodded, “unless you count the fast flowing rivers, cliffs, jagged rocks, poisonous spiders, tigers, enemy snipers and unexploded bombs, none of which I noticed last time I was in the noodle shop. And, Daeng, I tell you, I’ve seen it too many times in movies. The injured member of the group lags behind. ‘You go ahead,’ he cries. ‘I’ll catch up with you later.’ But he knows he’s doomed so he uses three of his last four bullets to slow down the pursuing Indians and saves the last one for himself. But they overpower him and cut him to ribbons with hatchets before he has a chance to end his own misery.”

  “And you see this happening to me?” Daeng asked, unloading the packs from the truck.

  “If it can happen to John Wayne….”

  “And he had rheumatism in this film of yours?”

  “Rheumatism, arrow wound, it all amounts to the same thing.”

  “Have you and Civilai ever calculated how many years of your lives you’ve wasted watching films?”

  Siri reached for his broken heart.

  “Civilai!” he called to his friend on the next truck. “Daeng thinks we’ve wasted our lives watching films. What should I do?”

  “You’re in good shape for an old man,” Civilai shouted. “You’ll always be able to find a new wife.”

  “Watch your back, comrade,” Daeng shouted. “We’ll be passing along narrow mountain ledges with sheer drops. I wouldn’t want you to have an accident.”

  “Oh, did I hear a threat?” Civilai laughed. “You’ll have to get up very early in the morning to get the better of me, comrade noodle-seller.”

  “We’ll see, old man.”

  Despite Siri’s warnings and his unspoken concerns about his own health, the hike was comparatively easy. The path was well used and it wound over gentle hills, avoiding some of the higher peaks. Even so, Civilai maintained a safe distance from Madame Daeng. The teams walked in a long single conga line along the narrow trail. Ugly walked at heel beside Siri like a pedigree show dog. The porters carried the heavier bags and the pace was that of a nature hike for elderly ladies rather than a route march. The only sound, apart from the footfalls of heavy boots, came from Judge Haeng who had remembered his fictitious leg injury and now grunted and grumbled and leaned heavily on a tree branch. Siri pointed out to Daeng that a month earlier it had been the other leg causing so much grief. The whole expedition was tired of hearing the judge’s jungle survival story, even as translated by a very sarcastic Auntie Bpoo, today glamorous in a yellow pant suit.

  “Can’t we shut him up somehow?” Siri asked.

  They were walking through a narrow valley full of odd-looking trees with thick foliage.

  “Judge Haeng,” Daeng called from the back of the procession. “Excuse me. Sorry to interrupt.”

  The judge looked back over his shoulder.

  “What is it, Madame Daeng?” he said. The voices echoed against the karst cliff walls on either side of them.

  “You have a reputation of being a man with extensive knowledge of the jungles up here in the north.”

  “There are those who would say that I am something of an expert,” he smiled. “A good communist is like a tree. He stands firm but knows how to bend in a strong wind. He is fertile but gladly gives up his nuts to less fortunate creatures. Why do you ask?”

  “We were just wondering about these trees we’re passing under right now,” she said. “I haven’t spent much time in the north but I do believe we have something similar in the south. There we call them ngoo dtok.”

  Siri noticed that as she spoke his wife was surreptitiously unbuckli
ng her leather belt and sliding it from the lugs of her canvas army trousers. “Would you happen to know if these are the same?” she continued.

  “I have heard them called that,” the judge lied. “I won’t bore you with their Latin names or the names attributed by local botanists, but, yes, I believe these are ngoo dtok.”

  “Then it’s just as well we aren’t in the south,” said Daeng, who had just plucked the tree’s name from the air. “Because down in Champasak the ngoo dtok is the home of the infamous drop adder. I hope that isn’t the case here.”

  “The what, comrade?”

  “The drop adder, Judge. The trees are full of them. They’re deadly venomous snakes camouflaged the colour of branches.” The local porters began to look up at the overhanging foliage with trepidation. “There is no known antidote to their venom. One bite from a drop adder and it’s all over, a long, slow, excruciatingly painful death.”

  She had her belt rolled in her hand and was taking aim at Civilai four bodies ahead of her.

  “They wait for their prey to walk beneath the tree,” she continued, “and they focus on a vulnerable spot, a neck, a wrist … a bald head. They are remarkably accurate. You step beneath their branch and … hiss!”

  She launched her belt into the air where it began to uncurl and came down square on Civilai’s left shoulder—writhing. He shouted his surprise and beat off the fake drop adder, but the porter directly behind him screamed the heavens down. He ran in a blind panic away from the trees and rid himself of the cumbersome packs by tossing them to one side.

  The sound of the explosion was amplified in the gully and the force of it blew the escaping porter clean off his feet and into the rocks. Several of those nearest to the blast were knocked backward. Siri and Daeng felt a whoosh of air and, like the others, hung there in a void of shocked silence. Everyone looked around wondering what had happened. All they could see was a charred nest of a crater gouged out of the grass where one pack had hit the ground. The porter, bleeding from the forehead, rolled on to his back and coughed. Dr. Yamaguchi and Dtui went to attend to him. Siri turned to his wife.

  “Well done, old girl,” he said.

  “It’s never quite had that effect before,” she admitted.

  “Will somebody tell me what the hell just happened?” Major Potter called out. Peach’s translation arrived a few seconds later.

  “Any idea whose pack that was?” Siri asked.

  The porters had merely grabbed all the heavier bags from the trucks to justify a wage so nobody had an immediate answer. The team members looked around for their own bags in order to eliminate whose was missing. It was the major himself who came up empty. He stood with his hands on his head.

  “It looks like it was Potter’s bag,” Peach told them.

  There was a crowd gathered now around the smoldering hole in the ground. Not a trace remained of whatever had exploded there.

  “Does the major remember what was in his pack?” Phosy asked Peach.

  The old soldier was standing in the shade of one of the drop-adder trees looking crestfallen. Peach walked over to join him. Civilai returned Daeng’s belt with an ironic smile.

  “Victory to me, I’d say,” he told her.

  Daeng wasn’t inclined to disagree, especially with Judge Haeng marching angrily in their direction, once more forgetting his limp.

  “Do you see? Do you see?” he said. “More evidence that age does not necessarily equal maturity. Have I not told you on numerous occasions that these childish practical jokes will ultimately lead to disaster?”

  “On this occasion it might just have saved a life,” Phosy interrupted. “If the porter hadn’t thrown off the pack he’d be headless by now. There was something in it that could have blown at any minute.”

  Peach stood beside Potter who was unconsciously running his hand through his short white hair. There was an unmistakably guilty look on his face.

  “Major,” she said. “What was that?”

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “There’s no way. I made sure like I always do. Double checked.”

  “Was there something explosive in your pack?”

  “Technically, no.”

  “But in reality?”

  “It couldn’t have been the dynamite.”

  “Major Potter. There was dynamite in your backpack?”

  “Well, yeah. But it was completely harmless.”

  12

  THE DEAD MAN’S FIELD

  It was morning break and the smoky air felt more unsociable with every hour that passed. They’d set up a tarpaulin shelter between the trees, more from habit than necessity. They hadn’t yet seen the sun that day. Patches of smog wafted past like wispy black hearses. In the distance the morning mist was trapped beneath one endless bank of clouds. The team felt like the filling in a dirty soufflé. The Lao contingent, minus Judge Haeng and Cousin Vinai, sat in a circle drinking coffee from a thermos and eating some version of NASA space rations wrapped in plastic. They were sure that whatever the snack lacked in taste would be more than made up for if they ever needed to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere in a hurry.

  “So,” Civilai asked. “Have I got this straight? The major had five sticks of dynamite in his pack and was surprised that they blew up?”

  “He swears they weren’t wearing their detonation caps,” Auntie Bpoo told him. “Says they were as safe as celery sticks.”

  “Except celery doesn’t blow people’s heads off,” said Dtui.

  “He was in the ordnance corps for the first five years of his career,” Phosy told her. “You’d think he’d know how to make a stick of dynamite safe.”

  “He’s a drunk,” Daeng reminded him. “He knocks back half a bottle of whiskey at dinner then goes back to his room and swigs the other half. Then he sits on his bed and disarms explosives for half an hour before collapsing on the bed. Does that scenario make anyone else here feel nervous?”

  “I don’t know.” Siri shook his head. “He’s a professional. Wouldn’t he have double-checked everything when he woke up this morning?”

  “He’s a professional who was drummed out of the service before retirement age,” said Commander Lit.

  “What?”

  “It’s true,” Lit nodded. “We did a background check on him. He’s only fifty-seven. He had several years ahead of him. The Americans don’t exactly fire their ranking officers. They urge them to step away from the career. It appears his superiors were a little upset about his alcohol and sex addictions. He had the choice of leaving for undisclosed health reasons or facing a dishonorable discharge.”

  “He’s only fifty-seven?” Dtui was shocked. “I was sure he was older than you, Dr. Siri.”

  “Ah, but I’m not a slave to sex and alcohol,” Siri told her.

  “That’s right,” Madame Daeng agreed. “The doctor could give up alcohol any time he wanted.” She noticed everyone staring at her. “What? He could.”

  “Meanwhile, back to the major,” said Civilai with a timely intervention. “If the man’s such a liability, what’s he doing handling explosives?”

  “And what’s he doing heading this mission?” Dtui added.

  “Probably they have the same system as us,” Phosy suggested.

  “A reward for thirty years’ faithful service. An all-expenses-paid trip. The name of a senior officer on the list of personnel?”

  “Plus he’s had experience in the region,” Lit added. “He spent six years in Vietnam. They knew him at the US consulate here. I believe he’d worked with the chargé in Ho Chi Minh City.”

  “Perhaps they didn’t expect him to be this hands-on,” Civilai suggested. “They imagined him and General Suvan stretched out on beach chairs together waiting for us to come back from the dig with parts.”

  “I don’t believe that for one minute,” said Siri. “The consulate people have been stuck in Vientiane for three years. This is their first chance to get up-country and see what’s happening. I think they’d choose their personnel ve
ry carefully. There has to be a good reason for Potter being here.”

  “To blow us all to hell, by the looks of it,” said Bpoo. And with no invitation, she launched into a poem.

  The bomb on wheels

  Congeals above the road, the street

  His gases sweet

  Rise up and rot the shield

  A deadly leak

  Bergs creak and roll

  And never healed

  Our houses drowned

  Profound too late

  “Interesting,” said Civilai.

  Unable to comment further, everyone else washed out their mugs, collected their plastic wrappers and headed back to join the Americans. They’d spent the first hour marking out fifty-meter grids across the supposed crash site with pink nylon string. They only had the second-hand word from a sorceress that this was where the craft had crashed. Even though the villagers had led them confidently to this valley just to the east of the village, they’d encountered no debris. Still they persevered.

  Mr. Geung was walking a little too close to Dtui as they reached their allotted square.

  “What is it, pal?” she said, turning to him.

  “I….”

  “Yes?”

  “I … wrote a letter. I wwwwant you to check it.”

  Dtui was surprised, given the fact that just a month before, Mr. Geung couldn’t write. Or perhaps it was fairer to say he could write little more than his name, the names of Dtui and Siri, Daeng, Malee and Foremost ice cream which he was particularly fond of. Hardly enough material with which to compose a letter. Despite the fact that they’d been teaching him for three years, his reading was marginally better.

  “Who’s it to?” she asked.

  “A friend.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “Yes.” He smiled, reached into his back pocket and produced a wad of lined pages rolled into a cone. He handed it to her with some hesitation. Dtui unrolled the cone. The pages were all full. On the first line of the first sheet was the word “Tukda.” He’d obviously been practicing. This was followed by what looked like line after line of suet balls. He’d filled every page with them, every space. On the very last page was his name, beautifully written.