by Eric Meyer
We completed the rest of the journey without Ho Chi Minh’s pals trying to shoot us out of the sky and landed at Da Nang. It was much like Tan Son Nhut, aircraft, noise, the fumes of burned aviation fuel, and soldiers. Hundreds, thousands of soldiers, and we waited outside the Caribou for someone to meet us. A jeep rolled up, a Ford M151 much like the Willys. A lieutenant leaped out before it had stopped and promptly fell in a pool of oil. He got to his feet, brushed down his uniform, and looked at his hands. They were black, and he grimaced. “Shit.”
“Just oil, Lieutenant. It’s not shit.”
“Right.” He looked at Le and made no comment. “You’re Warrant Officer Yeager?” He didn’t wait for a reply, “Lieutenant Johnson, I have your orders. Uh, damn.”
He handed me a manila folder, and I took out a rag I used to wipe the mud off my boots, wiped it over, and handed him the rag. “Keep it, Lieutenant. You look like you could use it.”
I opened the folder and didn’t get any further. Close to us a helicopter was spooling up, and the downwash from the rotor blades threatened to spread the papers all over Da Nang, as well as all points north, south, east, and west.
“I’ll wait until he’s gone.”
Lieutenant Johnson gave me a puzzled look. “Mr. Yeager, don’t you know? That’s your ride.”
A huge Marine Corps Sikorsky CH-53 Sea Stallion, and when we reached the cabin, it looked like there was room for a battalion of troops, although I afterward found out was nearer forty. More like a reinforced platoon. The crew chief gave us a silent nod as we climbed aboard, and before we could take our seats the floor lurched upward, tilted at a steep angle, and we were on our way to the DMZ. We managed to strap in, and I glanced at the crew chief. “Where are we headed?”
“It’s a patch of jungle west of Con Thien, midway between the coast and Khe Sanh Combat Base. There’s been a lot of fighting up there, and they say the jungle is still infested with North Vietnamese regulars and a few VC. You ever been to Khe Sanh?”
“Sure, I went there once. Afterward I decided to take my next vacation in Hawaii.”
He gave me a look, and I guessed he thought I was being a wise guy and spinning him a line. I wasn’t spinning a line. I’d spent several days at Khe Sanh Combat Base during the height of the battle, and it was not an experience I’d like to repeat. Not in a hundred lifetimes. I’d just signed up for my second tour of Vietnam, against my better judgment. It was one of those things where fate took a hand. My wife insisted on coming up to Saigon to look around before I finally went home, and she fell victim to a Vietcong satchel bomb.
Khe Sanh was one of those battles that put you in awe of the men doing the fighting. Men of steel, men with guts and courage beyond belief fought off waves of attacks from the North Vietnamese regulars, attacks which often reached the perimeter wire with hate-filled Communist soldiers firing burst after burst into the Base. Mortar shells landing with monotonous regularity, and long-range artillery sited inside Laos, a nightmare, a testament to the destructive ability of man, and to the iron resolve of the American Marine. An experience I wouldn’t want to repeat in a hurry.
“Whatever, the site of the air crash is about forty klicks west of Con Thien and ten klicks south of the DMZ. It’s remote, and we had to land the aircraft investigators some distance away, and they hiked in. They weren’t too impressed when we picked them up.”
“Picked them up?” I looked at Le and back at the crew chief, “How long were they on-site?”
“They were there for the day, from first light until just before dark.”
“It doesn’t sound like a thorough investigation.”
“Me and the boys said that when they came back, but they seemed happy enough with the result. Said it was a North Vietnamese missile.”
I glanced again to Le. “So they’ve made up their mind.”
“That’s what it looked like.”
Which begs the question, why are we here?
Trying to ignore the hammering noise of the Sea Stallion, the roar of the two turbo shaft engines, and the beat of the massive rotors overhead, I went through what I knew so far, and it wasn’t much. Colonel Bader had heard my reputation and wanted me out of his hair in Saigon, I got that much. It was true I could be a pain in the ass, particularly when I was trying to do the job the Army paid me for, to investigate crime within the military. Evidently Sub-Inspector Van enjoyed the same reputation within the National Police Field Force, and her boss, this General Phan Trong Kim, wanted her out of the way for similar reasons. Especially inside the Republic of Vietnam police force, where graft and corruption were part of the monthly pay packet.
On the other hand, someone wasn’t satisfied with the simple answer of a North Vietnamese missile. That someone had to be the President, Nguyen Van Thieu, who was pissed because of the death of his nephew. Probably prompted by his wife, who resented the thought of the death of a close relative. Then again, in the heated atmosphere of politics inside the Republic of South Vietnam, she probably saw the death as too close to home. If it had been deliberate, a murder, she and the President would want answers. They’d want to name names, and then lynch the culprits from the nearest tree.
I glanced at Le, and I had to shout over the racket. “You know what this means? Politics. We’re in the middle of something here, and one side wants us to sign off on a North Vietnamese missile, and the other side wants to know the truth.”
She grimaced. “I’m member of the National Police, Mr. Yeager. My job is to find out the truth, regardless of where it takes me.”
“It could take you into a shallow grave if someone is trying to cover up a murder. Not one murder, but sixteen murders, all cops, as well as the crew of the aircraft.”
“That’s what we need to find out.”
“How about General Phan Trong Kim, where does he stand?”
“He wants me to sign off on the missile theory.”
I wondered then about Colonel Bader.
A connection with General Phan, or just a coincidence, do I believe in coincidences? Or are they as rare as the horns of unicorns?
We clattered toward our destination and LZ in some remote part of the jungle, known to be Ho Chi Minh’s backyard. Passed over Con Thien, and we were flying low in an effort to avoid detection by enemy missiles. The crew chief, a Marine with the name ‘Wilkins’ on his chest and Master Sergeant’s strips on his sleeves, pointed through the open door. “That’s it, the DMZ. The Communists agreed to partition the country as part of the Geneva Conference of July 1954. Problem is, someone forgot to tell their troops, and so they cross over like they’re crossing the street to go to the local mall.”
“What do you think about the missile theory for downing this aircraft?”
He thought for a few moments. “It’s possible. But so are a whole lot of other reasons. The NVs have heavy machine guns, anti-aircraft stuff that could’ve brought it down, and the North Vietnamese Air Force has MiG-17s, maybe it was one of those strayed over into the South.”
“So it could have been a fighter jet.”
“Uh, huh, although we didn’t pick anything up on radar.”
“Any other possibilities?”
“Yeah, there is one. A bomb.”
“Sabotage. But who would want to put a bomb on an aircraft filled with military cops?”
He gave me a faint grin. “Anyone who didn’t want them to investigate whatever it was they came here to look into.”
“Right.”
I recalled the oil-stained folder, and I opened it. Inside it was empty, apart from a few blank Army forms and a map of the Saigon area.
I showed it to Le. “This is what they gave us at Da Nang.”
“But, it’s no use to us.”
“Wrong, it’s very useful. It tells us someone was covering up something important. It’s a start. When we reach the wreckage, maybe we’ll know something more.”
The Sikorsky landed in a clearing, and the pilot kept the engine running and the rotor bla
des turning. We stepped out, and the crew chief shouted, “We’ll be back at 19.00. If you’re not here, we’ll leave without you.”
I nodded an acknowledgement. “If we miss you, when will you be back?”
“Back? No idea. Keep checking in, and maybe we’ll drop in when we’re passing in the next few days.”
“How else do we get out of here?”
He reached in the cabin, and his hand came out clutching a rifle, an M-16. He tossed it to me. “You may need this, and I’ll rummage around for some spare magazines. Just in case you run into any trouble.”
The co-pilot appeared, and he gestured to the crew chief. “Hey, the Skipper wants to take off, you know we’re in bandit country.”
“I’m nearly done.” He tossed me a belt with magazine pouches. “That’s all we can spare. If you need to walk out, Quang Tri Combat Base is thattaway,” he gestured with his thumb.
“How far?”
“Around fifty klicks.”
“Hey, where’s the crash site?”
He gestured in the opposite direction to Quang Tri. “Over there, about five clicks. Good luck.”
I thought I heard him say, “You’ll need it,” but I may have been wrong because the roar of the engines drowned out his last words, and the Sea Stallion took off into the sky. I glanced at Le, she shrugged, and we started walking. It wasn’t difficult to work out the direction. The air accident investigators had trampled a path through the jungle that would remain until the foliage recovered, which in this country would be a matter of days. We made good time, and the first indication we were getting close was when we smelled the wreckage, an odor of burnt rubber and aviation fuel that hung in the air.
The second indication was when we discovered the gouge in the earth where the aircraft had crash-landed and skidded through the trees and vines, digging a deep, wide trench. We followed the gouge for a few hundred meters, passing chunks of wreckage, pieces of aluminum tangled with wires, and personal possessions, mainly clothing and boots. There were no documents. The third indication was when I saw movement about half a klick ahead of us.
“I thought the air accident people had left?”
She stopped, stared into the distance, and touched my hand. In the hot humidity her skin was cool and soft. “Hold it, they’re not air accident investigators.”
“They’re not?”
“No. They’re North Vietnamese soldiers. Get down before they see us.”
What the hell?
I dropped flat and took out my binoculars. She had better eyesight than me, which had saved us blundering into them. They swam into focus, a platoon of men wearing the uniforms of the People’s Army of Vietnam. Drab green, with the distinctive pith helmets on their heads, and slung on their shoulders the inevitable AK-47s. We lay there and watched for an hour, and they were up to something strange. Men dragged large canvas bags to where the wreckage lay in hundreds of pieces. Some were large, like the rear of the fuselage and the front of the cockpit, and the rest small pieces of aluminum and Perspex.
Van took out a compact Leica camera and began taking pictures, and the shutter clicked endlessly until she ran out of film. She recorded all of it, and it was strange. They tipped out the contents of the canvas bags into the middle of the pieces of wreckage. An officer watched them closely, gesturing where he wanted them to empty the bags, and when they were done, he inspected the results, took out his own camera, bulkier and cruder-looking than Van’s, and began snapping pictures. Finally, he barked an order, the men formed up into line, and he led the way north. Presumably they were going home, across the DMZ.
We gave them another hour before we decided they weren’t coming back, and we walked forward to the wreckage. A tragic sight, like the scene of a bloody battle, and I was surprised the bodies still lay on the ground where they’d fallen from the destroyed aircraft. I went from one to the other, checking each one with the intention of removing the dog tags, but someone had been there before me, and they were all missing.
The big puzzle was the scrap metal the North Vietnamese had dumped amidst the wreckage. I picked up what appeared to be the tailfin of an anti-aircraft missile, and it still bore the emblem of the Communist red star. There were other components that looked to me like they must have come from a missile, and I looked at Van.
“They went to a lot of trouble to make us believe the aircraft was hit by one of their missiles.”
She looked confused. “What does that mean?”
“It means whatever destroyed this aircraft, it wasn’t a North Vietnamese missile. If it was, they wouldn’t need to fake the evidence. So now we need to know exactly what did bring down the aircraft.”
“We know nothing about air crashes.”
I gave her a look. “I know a stink when I smell it. I smelled it when Colonel Bader ordered me to come up here, and I can smell it now, much stronger.”
We spent two hours inspecting as much as we could. I looked at the bodies, I looked at the chunks of aluminum, and I looked at the cockpit. What drew my attention more than anything was the rear part of the fuselage that had survived partly intact. The ramp was missing, and part of a large aluminum panel had a jagged hole in it. Closer inspection showed burning around the edge of the hole, and it was good enough for me.
“It was a bomb.”
She was looking down at a body, a Vietnamese cop, and I assumed it was the nephew of the President. Her head swiveled toward me. “How can you tell?”
I showed her what I’d found, and maybe we’d never done this before, but it was either a bomb or the aircraft had been struck by lightning from the inside, which didn’t seem credible.
She looked at me. “You know what this means? It was our own people, American or South Vietnamese who did this. I find it hard to believe.”
I didn’t find it hard to believe. The war in Vietnam was complicated and confused, and the U.S.A. was throwing millions of dollars into the effort to achieve victory. When that amount of money was involved, people became greedy, and a few million dollars more than enough incentive to commit murder. A line of thinking that led me to believe these cops were on their way to investigate some large-scale theft. It could be money transferred to shady Swiss bank accounts, selling military equipment, or even selling promotions, common in the ARVN. During a war what else could a man sell in return for large sums of money? I worked out one possible answer, and it was ugly. Intelligence, military secrets.
Either way, someone had been keen to make sure these investigators never arrived. The answer would have been in the manila folder handed to me at Da Nang. Except someone had got there before me.
I looked at Le. “There’s nothing more we can do here. We should get back to the LZ. The helicopter is due back at 19.00, and if we miss it, it’s a long walk to Quang Tri.”
We hiked back through the jungle, and all the way to the LZ I had the strange feeling we were being followed. Twice I murmured to Le to keep walking while I dropped behind a bush to check our back trail, but each time there was nothing. We reached the landing zone, and we had an hour to spare. She produced some food, wrapped Vietnamese savory rice balls that tasted delicious, and I was sipping water to wash mine down when I became aware of movement. A shadow that shouldn’t have been there, and I murmured to her to keep talking.
Dropping flat, I snaked through the grass and bushes to where I’d seen the movement, and I emerged on the edge of a tiny clearing. There was no one there, and I got to my feet to go back when I felt something hard pressed into the side of my head. Followed by the sound of the gun being cocked, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it, except wait for the bullet that would end my life.
Chapter Two
“Who are you?”
I relaxed just a fraction. The gun was still pressed to my head, and it’s hard to relax in that situation. “Carl Yeager, Army CID.”
“Take out your ID, slowly.”
I reached inside my pocket, extracted my ID document, and held it up. A han
d reached over and grabbed it, and a moment later another voice intruded, a female voice.
“Drop the gun. Mr. Yeager, don’t make any sudden move, I have this.” I don’t know what made her think I was about to make a sudden move, but a gun pointed at your head tends to inhibit that kind of activity. A moment later, she said, “You can turn around now.”
I turned, and she was pointing her AR-15 at a ragged, thin emaciated man who by all accounts should have been dead. His ragged uniform was filthy and covered in dried blood. His head was dominated by a huge gash that had cut across from one ear, through the left eye, which was a bloody, pulpy mess, and up into the scalp.
“You’re American?”
“I’m American, Captain David Trevelyan, U.S. Army. You’ve seen the wreck?”
“We’ve seen it, sure. Are you telling us you were in that aircraft when it went down?”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you. I don’t know how I survived. I was thrown clear when the fuselage hit, and I got this on the way out.” He pointed to the gash in his head and the missing eye, “There’s something you need to know. The reason for the crash, it was…”
He wavered and almost fell. I got the impression he’d been hanging in there waiting for someone to turn up, for someone to whom he could tell his story.
“We’re listening, but don’t worry about a thing. We have a helicopter due to pick us up in less than an hour. We’ll get you back to Da Nang, and they’ll take you into the base hospital. Just a bit longer and you’ll be fine.”
He managed to steady himself, and I looked into him over. The pain he was in showed as clearly as if it had been spelled-out in foot high letters. His cracked lips parted, and he grimaced. “I don’t think so. Listen to me. There’s a manila folder the Intelligence Officer at Da Nang is holding for us. You have to get that folder. It’s all in there.”