“And shit loads of money and a pretty wife,” Peach contributed. She was losing control. It was time for Civilai to go on the offensive.
“So, you were a senior administrator at the embassy…?”
“I was dealing mostly with the movement of personnel.” The senator remembered his watch. It was barely eight.
“Of course, Saigon.” Civilai nodded knowingly. “I imagine everything was open and above board there. No shady dealings whatsoever.”
“We did our best to maintain a certain transparency, it’s true.”
“Not like in Laos then.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m afraid you Americans weren’t quite as transparent over here. In fact, I’m tempted to say your money was responsible for buying and selling several coalition governments that didn’t suit your fancy.”
A US Republican senator in a locked room. Civilai felt a warm glow. The senator’s smile was as fake as a Giaconda with blonde highlights. He took up a tone of syrupy condescension.
“Oh, Mr. Civilai,” he said. “You have to remember that you were in an information cocoon here in the wilds of Laos. You couldn’t possibly know just how much good the US was doing for your country. It’s common knowledge to anyone outside of Red Indochina that the vast majority of our budget for Laos was spent on aid.”
Civilai laughed, which caused the senator’s brow to rise and his wispy comb-over to flop across his field of vision.
“The vast majority of your budget went on B-52s and ordnance,” said Civilai.
“A common misapprehension,” said Vogal without missing a beat. “But with all due respect, Mr. Civilai, you can’t honestly believe your own propaganda machine.”
“Then let’s look at the statistics. Perhaps we can believe the US embassy budget release for the fiscal year 1970, just as an example. I have a copy in my room if you’d care to see it.”
“How could…?”
“Your total expenditure in Laos for that year was $284 million….”
“It—”
“… $162 million of which was tagged as military assistance. Only $50 million—which a cursory calculation tells me is around eighteen per cent of your total budget—was assigned to aid.”
The senator cast a desultory gaze at Ethel Chin who returned to her novel.
“That’s still a considerable humanitarian effort in anybody’s book, sir,” he said.
“Except in your book,” Civilai continued. “Humanitarian aid included feeding the Royal Lao Army and several thousand irregulars. What little remained was pumped into a refugee program that wouldn’t have been necessary if you hadn’t bombed a third of the population out of their homes.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. The refugees in Laos were fleeing communism. They were escaping the atrocities that you people inflicted upon them.”
“There are members of the US senate who’d disagree with that view.”
“What are you talking about?”
“In 1969, the findings of a US subcommittee headed by Senator Edward Kennedy were that some four-hundred-thousand refugees in Laos were dispossessed as a direct result of US bombing.”
“Sir, Kennedy is a Democrat with undisguised communist leanings. He couldn’t … and besides….” The senator had found himself backed into a broom closet of an argument but he didn’t get where he was today by conceding defeat. “Look, my wound is causing me some concern here,” he said with a wince. “I need to take my medication and get some sleep. I do honestly hope we have an opportunity to continue this fascinating discussion at some future date. It’s been a delight, sir, an absolute delight.”
“You were amazing,” said Peach.
“Yes, I get that a lot,” Civilai replied. They were walking along the corridor in the direction of the dining room. One of the new guards from in front of Vogal’s door was marching along behind them.
“How do you remember all those facts and figures?”
“I don’t.”
“But you … you made them up?”
“I think I hit the general ballpark, as you folks say. But the nice thing about facts is that you can toss them in here and there merely to win arguments. It doesn’t matter if they’re accurate. Just look confident and hope your opponent doesn’t have a photographic memory for figures. I didn’t lie exactly. The Kennedy thing was true.”
“See why I want to be on your side?”
“Even in our information cocoon?”
“Sure. It feels a lot warmer in here.”
19
SUPER NAPALM
You could taste the soot. It was so thick in the air it was like waking up in a house fire—a bitterly cold house fire. Siri sat on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands, wheezing for breath. The room was blacker than the soot it contained, as black as the inside of a sarcophagus. And all felt odd. His instincts told him that everything was in the wrong place—a mirror image of his actual room. The window was open but he was certain they’d shut it before retiring. There was no breeze or light through the loosely pulled curtains, just a mellower shade of black that showed the general shape of the window and drew very faint outlines here and there around the room. He kicked something with his heel. Between his legs an object protruded from beneath the bed. He reached down. A crate.
His heart raced. He looked behind him at the figure sleeping there. A black shape, of course. Not Madame Daeng, of course. Not his own rightful place or dimension—of course. Why, in his own dimension, would he be sharing a bed with a dead major?
And there was another shadow almost as out-of-focus as himself. On its hands and knees it was, searching for something across the room. All Siri got was a grand view of its backside, or perhaps a front view of its headless shoulders. Black against black. How could he know for sure? His heart gently fluttered back to its rightful place as he recognized his role in another nightmare. It had been a while. He knew whatever happened here would not affect his physical being. Not unless his subconscious became so wracked in horror that it caused its live self to hold its breath. Not unless his heart burst in shock. He’d seen the results of both. So he sat calmly and waited.
The figure on the ground edged its way across the parquet. And the shadow slowly gathered into contours and the figure achieved a shape. It was an elderly man. Stocky. Well dressed. There was something familiar about him. He was moving away so there was no sight of his face. His fingers seemed to be clawing at the ground as if he were peeling old varnish from the wooden tiles. Siri called, “Do I know you?”
And just as the figure began to turn, to show its face, a cold hand grabbed Siri by the back of his neck. His heart felt like it had been kicked off a steep ledge. He let out a squeal so shrill he doubted it could have come from his own lips. He slapped away the hand and leapt to his feet. The figure on the ground melted into the shadows. The doctor couldn’t catch his breath. He paced back and forth looking for a rhythm that might start up his lungs.
The major said, “Siri?”
Then spoke again with a different voice.
“Siri?”
“Daeng?”
Madame Daeng climbed from the bed and felt for her husband in the darkness. When she found him she massaged his stalled lungs and calmed him with her words.
“Shh. Shh. It’s a dream, my love.”
He found a breath. He gulped it greedily. He could taste the soot. It was so thick in the air it was like waking up in a house fire—a bitterly cold house fire.
There was a good deal of throat clearing over breakfast. Officially, it was the day they were due to go home—the fifth day. The morning meal today was the last meal on the agenda. From here on the US pantry was bare. They still had no evidence that Boyd was dead or alive. With no team leader, a general who was confined to his bed to conserve oxygen, and a senator who had armed guards stationed at his front door and rear window and daren’t leave his room, nobody really knew who was in charge. Of course, Judge Haeng thought it was himself. He decided there w
as little point in going outside into the smoke. Instead, he announced that this would be a good day to bag and label all the souvenirs they’d brought back from the crash site. He also insisted the Lao team members begin work on their individual reports. They should be careful to comment on their American counterparts, including any personal knowledge that may have been gleaned during social moments. Siri and his team had about as much intention of writing spy reports as tying themselves by the bootlaces to the rockets at the fertility festival. But they did grab several sacks of wreckage and set up a “by appointment only” group in Siri’s room.
With the addition of Sergeant Johnson, Madame Daeng and Comrade Civilai, the insiders now outnumbered the outsiders at a ratio of five to four. The odds were getting a little ridiculous. The newcomers were briefed in their respective languages. The expanded group discussed matters sitting cross-legged on the floor, all but Secretary Gordon who had trouble getting and remaining in that position. He was allowed a chair. Mr. Geung was stationed behind the curtain. Sergeant Johnson was the star turn, accompanied by Auntie Bpoo on the translation. They wanted to know what circumstances might prompt gaps in a pilot’s flight record. Unnerved by the size of the group, Johnson was reluctant at first to give away what might be considered state secrets. It was only when Civilai assured him that everything the Americans believed to be secret was documented in great detail at the ministry of defence that he relented.
“I wasn’t ever with Air America,” he said. “But you hear things. There was a lot of crossover between different departments. A lot of people passing through town and the military aren’t renowned for keeping its collective mouth shut. Give a guy in uniform a couple of shots of bourbon and he’s your best pal. We heard about one base up at Tahkli in Thailand. It’s a fenced-off compound inside a regular military base. It’s where they parked the U2 spy plane. It’s also the home of a lot of clandestine ops. All the customers up there wear civilian clothes. Now, when I say clandestine, I don’t mean one small secret part of a big CIA master plan. I mean a hell of a lot of little secrets instigated by this ambassador or that general or one or other of the section heads—none of whom have the first idea what the guy in the next office is up to. Hell, I’ve heard about two identical operations set up by different departments run on the same day. Guys were tripping over each other.”
“Now, the reason this place comes to mind, is that some of the pilots I have in mind had that same odd thing going with their time records. They’d put in their sheets at the end of the month and there’d be four days unmarked here, a week there. But they never claimed holidays or sick days. None of the brass ever queried it. One of our fighter pilots called it the Tahkli lottery. If you got lucky and didn’t get yourself killed, you’d come back with a whole heap of money in your pocket.”
“And some didn’t come back?” asked Auntie Bpoo.
“You’d never know,” Johnson told her. “If anyone was MIA it was always swung around somehow to look like a regular mission gone wrong. You won’t find the name of any active US military personnel MIA in Laos unless they got lost. There was a lot of clumsy border misidentification, if you know what I mean. Guess you can’t always trust all that expensive cockpit equipment.”
“So, do you think Boyd might have been deployed on special ops by Air America?” Phosy asked.
“Why not? Air America was CIA.”
“But how would we ever be able to find out what he was involved in?” Dtui asked.
“Ask him,” said Civilai, ever hopeful.
“All right,” said Yamaguchi. “It’s the thing about the flight mechanic that worries me. Boyd returns quite unexpectedly from the grave and within a month his mechanic meets a mysterious end.”
“Not to mention the chief mechanic from Long Cheng,” Siri added. “He died within days of Sebastian. Then there was the pilot Wolff who’d drunk with them on their last night together. Odd that all the American witnesses to that last flight are now out of the reckoning.”
“Except for Boyd,” Civilai smiled.
“You think your pilot’s running around killing everyone, Civilai?” Siri asked.
“Why not? Revenge for getting him addicted to drugs. He’s probably been in an opium den for the last ten years.”
“See, this is something I’ve never really understood about the transfer of Leon from Saigon to Long Cheng,” said Johnson. “If he was involved in ‘inappropriate behavior’ serious enough to have his flying license pulled, what was he still doing in the service? I remember he was using drugs back then, he wasn’t the only one. He got a couple of warnings. So inappropriate behaviour could have been a euphemism for losing control of his habit, or dealing. But if you’re caught at either it’s a dishonorable discharge. You’re out. You don’t get transferred to an inactive post somewhere else in the war. Not even Air America would take you on.”
“So how do you think he got here?” Gordon asked.
“Well, either he didn’t actually do anything wrong and it was just a ruse to get him out of Nam and into this specific role in Laos for some reason, or he did do it and he had mighty big friends in high places who found him an easy well-paid job up here.”
“Which makes you wonder whether all this is about drugs,” said Dtui.
“Oh, I very much doubt they’d need clandestine operations for drug dealing,” said Civilai. “It was hardly a secret the CIA were buying up all the Hmong opium and selling it as heroin on the streets of Saigon. They had regular scheduled flights from Long Cheng to Vietnam full of the stuff. The pilots used to land upside down just from the fumes.”
“All right, so not drugs,” said Yamaguchi. “What else could he have been involved in?”
“I’m afraid war gives you a lot of scope for profiteering,” said Madame Daeng. “There’s no end to the possibilities.”
“Then let’s start with something we know,” said Gordon. “Boyd was carrying something he shouldn’t have been that night.”
He held up a sheet of typed foolscap.
“This is the official manifest for Boyd’s cargo when he left Udon,” he said. “Pretty standard stuff for those milk runs: rice, blankets, nails, canned food. But here, tucked away at the end is twenty tengallon containers of cooking oil. It was all destined for the refugee camp at Sam Tong.”
“You think there’s something suspicious about it?” Siri asked.
“I do. Air America flights stopped doing overnights in Long Cheng in sixty-seven. They had their own dorm in Sam Tong right next to the refugee camp. If all he had on board was refugee supplies, what was he doing parked at Spook City drinking with his buddies with a full aircraft?”
“And I can’t recall anyone mentioning cooking oil in any of the in-service courses I took on incendiaries,” said Johnson. “And I can’t see two hundred gallons of Crisco permanently destroying two acres of jungle, nor lighting up the night sky with fireworks.”
“Then what did they talk about on that course of yours?” Siri asked.
“A lot of stuff. Magnesium can be nasty,” said Johnson. “I’ve seen a whole village burned down with one canister. I guess most commonly used would be the defoliants: Agent Orange, napalm. They can both do untold damage.”
“Aren’t there any rules for … I don’t know, fair war?” Dtui asked.
“Not for this kind,” Johnson told her. “You can put together any cocktail of benzene, polystyrene and gasoline and rain it down wherever you please and you haven’t broken any international regulations. Nobody cares, except maybe the kids that took shelter under the trees when they saw the bombers pass over. I thought I’d seen it all. But I haven’t ever witnessed anything that leaves a permanent scar on the landscape like that no-man’s-land at Ban Hoong. Napalm just burns the leaves off. Whatever Boyd was carrying destroyed the trees, permanently.”
“How would you send down something like napalm?” Daeng asked. “I mean, I doubt you’d just fly over in a helicopter, take off the caps and sprinkle it.”
20
COLLECTING OLD FOOTSTEPS
There was a legend that extended far back beyond the Lan Xang era six hundred years before. One that could be read of in palm-leaf documents as far away as Lanna in Siam. It was the belief that the spirits of the dead may make a plea before passing on to whatever lay beyond. The spirit had the right, so it was told, to return to places once treasured in life, there to collect old footsteps. Once gathered, those footsteps became a memorial of all the happier times on earth. But the Party made it quite clear that such legends were ridiculous. Like the stories of religion and the fables of the ancient tribes it was all balderdash. No self-respecting socialist would be gullible enough to fall for any of them. But where did that leave a man who has seen the spirits of the dead and traveled to the Otherworld of the Hmong?
Siri sat on the major’s bed looking at the weathered parquet. He knew now why he’d come to this room on the night of the major’s death. The spirit of the king had summoned him here. They’d met, briefly, in life and as far as a man of royal blood and a bloody communist could ever find common ground, they’d developed a mutual respect. They’d shared two bottles of home-brewed rice whiskey and discussed issues as only two wise old men can through to the early morning. Siri had liked the man and, if this invitation to a late night séance was any proof, the king had found a fondness for the doctor. Siri knew the old man would find many a pleasurable footstep in his old fruit orchard in Luang Prabang.
If they’d talked while the king collected his footsteps from this room, Siri had no recollection. He didn’t know how he’d died or why he’d chosen to pass through this inn. Perhaps it was the last place he’d been shown respect. Perhaps he’d come to leave a message for the doctor. It was all a mystery. But the only thing for certain was that the last regent of the Kingdom of Laos was gone. Siri was no stranger to death, nor to the afterlife, but his feelings as he looked around the musty room were mixed. He felt sorrow for a friend. But he could not deny a sense of relief, perhaps even elation. In his own mind, this vindicated him from any and all involvement in Potter’s murder. He doubted the “locked in conversation with a dead king” alibi would gain him much ground in a court of law, but in his soul he knew he was innocent. A great weight was lifted from his shoulders. Despite the fact they hadn’t seen the sun in all its glory for three days, the room seemed brighter. The world offered up new opportunities. This, he decided, was a cause for a toast and a celebration.
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