Turn of the Cards w-12

by George R. R. Martin

  Don’t let it go to your head, he cautioned himself. He was not bulletproof, and if, say, an exploding 57mm shell hit him, not even Moonchild’s regenerative capabilities would put Jumpin’ Jack back together again.

  As he began his triumphant return engagement, he noticed the pilots had hopped out of their waiting Sukhois and were racing away across the plateau in their flight suits, trailing assorted hoses behind. “Smart boys,” he said, and gave their abandoned planes the for-true torch.

  He was halfway back down the runway, spreading hot mischief, when he noticed the Frogfoot that had waved off its landing approach banking around as if to come back.

  “Oh ho,” he said aloud. He’d always wanted to play chicken with a fighter jet.

  No! You irresponsible buffoon! You can’t be serious

  J. J. Flash grinned. Cosmic Traveler seldom managed to get his oar in when Flash was expressed; different personality types, to say the least. He must think I’m about to get up to something majestically ignorant.

  And of course I am.

  He broke off his strafing run, banking toward the aircraft. Making sure he didn’t stray out over the flak pits, he flew above the buildings lined up along the runway, out past the revetments. As he did so, he cut in some serious flame. He surrounded himself with a roaring, brilliant nimbus of fire till he was blazing along like a meteor on terminal guidance. People on the ground stopped screaming and shooting to point.

  The Frogfoot had its nose aimed at him and was blitzing back. Time to move. Risking the ground guns, he streaked straight toward the inbound strike plane, flaming like a dozen Buddhist priests.

  White smoke blossomed from under the Frogfoot’s starboard wing. Missile launch, Flash knew. The only kind of missile that would lock onto him and permit itself to be fired was a heat-seeker. And he was giving the IR-sensing head a mother of a picture to look at.

  He whipped a one-eighty and flew right back at the tower.

  He didn’t have too big a clue as to the flight time of the missile. He knew the damned things were fast, faster than a fighter could go full-throttle — and he’d been straining to keep up with a porky Frogfoot, slowed way down for landing approach. He flew in a straight line toward the tower for two full seconds, feeling his scrotum retracting into his belly, expecting the missile to nail him. The Traveler was yowling in his head like a cat in heat.

  He saw startled faces through the polarized glass of the tower. He saw open mouths, then assholes and elbows as the crew realized they’d been had and rushed for the exits. He cut the flame F/X slam, pulled up vertical, shot a hundred feet in the air, and hovered.

  The heat-seeker, suddenly deprived of prey, went ballistic. Inertia kept it rushing down the path its target had been taking when it suddenly went out.

  It hit the tower in a shower of glass and flame.

  J. J. Flash pumped his fist. “Yeah! It’s a gas-gas-gas!”

  The strike pilot banked his plane and accelerated away from the airfield, east toward the coast, as if embarrassed to hang around the scene of his missile faux pas.

  It was likewise time for Jumpin’ Jack to make like a hockey team and get the puck out of here. The Viets were pitching sufficient lead-particulate pollution into the air that somebody might get luck) after all. Somebody might also get smart, and send out for attack choppers, and he knew he couldn’t handle them.

  He went low, seriously low, so far down he could reach his hand and scrape all the skin off his palms on red clay if he wanted. Between the buildings he flew, accelerating to his maximum thrust, which, while not much by the standards of jet aircraft, looked awesome to the man on the ground. It also reduced Cosmic Traveler to a mewling wreck inside him as the walls of the hangars flashed past.

  There were armed dudes in front of him. He kicked his flame-aura back in. They threw away their guns and ran like bunnies.

  He whipped between two flak pits, extending his arms to give each a flying finger in passing, as they stared openmouthed at a target they couldn’t depress their guns to track.

  He had cost the Socialist Republic and their Soviet butt-brothers some heavy change, but nothing on the scale of even a pissant little war like this one. A blip on the scope. PAVN had other strike planes, other airfields, other air-traffic towers.

  But nobody was going to feel quite as safe in any of them from here on in. That was the win that had him laughing out loud as he hit the plateau’s rim and let every bit of the wild, exhilarant energy blasting through him go in a blinding supernova flash, so that as he dove over the edge out of sight, he seemed simply to vanish.

  If there was one thing Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Esquire, knew, it was how to make an exit.

  Chapter Forty

  Propelled by an arm the size of an elephant’s trunk, a fist slammed against the side of Ngo An Dong’s head and snapped it around. Sheet lightning went off in his brain. His red Rambo head-rag got loose and slipped into his eyes.

  The spectating trio of PASF officers looked at one another in amazed approval as Rhino stepped back, rubbing his horny fist. “These monsters really are good for something,” said one.

  “Yes,” agreed a second. “But we should tell him to go easy. We don’t want him killing the dog.”

  “Yet,” added the third.

  Through red-and-black haze that filled young Ngo’s skull limped the realization that you could, too, be too brave it wasn’t like rich or thin. Getting caught in a piddling little raid on a supply depot near the coast proved that. Now the dashing young warlord could only hope that he could find some way to die before he broke. Even the spirit of Woodrow Wilson — venerated by his sect — could not help him now. The fog crowded awareness from his brain.

  “How many aces are working with you traitors?” the first officer asked. Ngo tried to spit defiance, but all that came out was blood and part of a tooth, and they slopped down his hanging lower lip.

  “Khong?” the interrogator said: No? Then he turned to the squat American joker and said, in that English every People’s Armed Security Force officer assiduously studied against that happy day when the Americans woke up to their responsibility and started shipping major loot to the Socialist Republic so that its hardworking cops could fight crime like Miami Vice, he said, “Hit him again. Only this time not so hard.”

  The door opened. Colonel Vo Van Song of the PPSF stalked in, smoking a cigarette and gazing around with slit-eyed disapproval.

  The interrogating officers went rigid. Though none had had the pleasure of meeting him before, they recognized him at once. Colonel Vo had a Reputation. He was one of those delightful chaps who feel it is better to be feared than loved, by your own side as well as by the enemy.

  “What have we here?” he hissed in English, for the evident benefit of the guest torturer. His words were slurred and slouched and misshapen, like jokers. “Is this what passes for modern police techniques with People’s Armed Security?”

  The third officer stepped to a rickety wooden table and held up a pair of big alligator clips, dangling from thick red-and-black cables. “We were simply softening him up before we put these on, sir,” he said brightly.

  “Oh, so? And perhaps even as we speak you are having an iron maiden brought up from the basement? A rack, maybe?”

  He plucked the cables from the PASF man’s limp fingers. “The first important rebel leader to fall into our hands, and you interrogate him with this?”

  The trio wilted into the collars of their summer-weight tan uniforms. They knew what was coming. In the complicated food chain of the Vietnamese internal-security apparatus, the People’s Public Security Force occupied a much higher niche than PASF And PPSF was a noted credit-jumper.

  The colonel signaled. A pair of basic leg-breakers in PPSF khaki lumbered in. They undid the heavy leather straps that bound the now-unconscious Cao Dai leader to the chair, put hard hands under his armpits, hoisted him up, and hauled him out with his bare toes scraping on the cement floor.

  “The Socialist
Republic is grateful for your efforts on her behalf,” Vo said in his horrible voice, taking another drag on his cigarette. “She is also grateful your clumsiness did not deprive her of such a valuable prize. Good day.”

  He threw the cigarette down beside the green-patinated drain grating in the middle of the floor and walked out.

  “Have a nice day,” the squat joker said to his back. The door slammed shut.

  “Tight-assed Northern cocksucker,” the second officer hissed. The PASF men were all Annamese, local boys.

  “Did you hear his voice?” the third one asked. “He spoke as if he had a cleft palate. Chilling.”

  The first nodded sagely. “It’s true, what they say of him.”

  “Arrogant Tonkinese piece of shit,” the second said.

  “One of those men he had with him didn’t even look Vietnamese,” the third officer said indignantly. “He looked … Korean.” He practically spat the last word.

  “Indeed.” The first officer stood staring at the door. “A wise man might wonder why loyal officers of the state such as ourselves should run like dogs to the summons of a Northerner with a broomstick up his rectum,” he said at length.

  “That’s true!”

  “Injustice, that’s all it is.”

  “Has it ever been different, since the Tonkinese won their Short Victorious War?” the first officer went on quietly.

  “Not for one day!” agreed the second quickly. He wasn’t a weatherman, but he knew which way the wind blew.

  “That’s right!” said the third, who didn’t, yet, but was determined to let it carry him along withal.

  “War of Liberation, they called it,” the first officer said, his spine uncurling from the beaten slump Vo had put into it. “War of conquest is more like it, wouldn’t you say?”

  The third jumped as if the alligator clips had leapt off the table and bit him. “But that’s —”

  “Loyalty,” the first officer said, clearly and firmly. “Loyalty to our homeland — Annam. It is time to recognize invasion for what it is, violation for what it is.”

  “We must be men,” the second officer said. “We must refuse to be victimized.” He’d been reading American self-help texts as part of his study plan.

  “Absolutely!” the third man almost yelled. He’d finally gotten the drift and hoped the others wouldn’t interpret plain slow-wittedness as dissent. “Men! Not, uh, not dogs.”

  “There is,” the first officer said, “but one thing to do.”

  And they all three turned as one to the horrid Lien Xo joker, who had stood there throughout it all not understanding a word that was said, and smiled. He smiled back with his grotesque leathery lips.

  “Thank you,” the first officer said, in English again. “You have been of great help. Return to your unit now and tell your colonel to await our report.”

  “In Hell,” the second officer said in Vietnamese, as the being shambled out.

  Because the three shared a single thought with total clarity: that night they were going to slip away across the paddies and join the rebels. The answer was blowing in the wind.

  Ngo An Dong was unfortunate enough to come partially back to himself as the Soviet-made GAZ jeep pulled away from the police station and its bad suspension began to jolt his tailbone. He had osmotically absorbed the fact that he had fallen from the rice pot into the cook-fire.

  The two who had hauled him from the interrogation room were sitting up front. There was something vaguely familiar about the back of the driver’s head; it seemed kind of square for a Vietnamese head, somehow. Ngo had gone to Saigon University after he got out of the Army, and was fairly sophisticated; he assumed the blow to his head had broken something and he was hallucinating. He hoped a subdural hematoma would finish him before the legendary Colonel Vo got him to wherever he was taking him.

  The colonel sat beside him, which struck him odd somehow. He made himself turn to look his future tormentor squarely in the eye.

  And screamed.

  There was no Vo. Instead a man sat beside him wrapped in a black cape, grinning at him from the depths of a cowl. His face was hairless. It was also blue.

  “Those assholes swallowed my act hook, line, and sinker. Did you see that, Kim?” He reached forward to grab the driver’s shoulder.

  Kim Giau Minh, playing the driver, nodded his head. The cowled man settled back in the rear seat. Ngo caught a glimpse of what seemed millions of tiny lights in his cape. Lights like … stars.

  “I’m slick,” he said, rubbing blue hands together, “so slick. I don’t see why Mark doesn’t choose me more. I’m really a lot more useful than the others. Much more versatile. Don’t you agree?”

  Ngo nodded, though it made his head ring like a temple bell. The apparent fact of his escape from torture, degradation, betrayal, and death was beginning to penetrate the fog. If the blue man had asked him to confirm that he was Queen Victoria — another celestial personage for the Cao Dai — he would have nodded too.

  The blue man looked at him closely. “Say, you wouldn’t have a sister, would you? I don’t get out too often.”

  Dawn was graying-out the clouds over distant jungle. The patrol boat prowled between banks covered in grass grown thick and high from the summer monsoon. The crew kept their thumbs on the firing-switches despite the fatigue of a night’s patrol. The half hour before the sun actually popped the horizon was prime time for ambushers.

  The boat was a Soviet copy of an old American RAG — River Assault Group — design, made especially for the Border Guards Directorate of the KGB. With the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan it had been retired from service on Central Asia’s Amu Dar’ya, where it and others of its class had been engaged in trying to prevent arms from being smuggled south cross river to the ’Stan, and dope from coming north. The boats had not been a conspicuous success in either endeavor. But the Vietnamese armed forces were intent on resembling the Americans they had outlasted a decade and a half before as closely as possible, so they just had to have the craft when they hit the market.

  The rating drowsing upright in the forward twin 12.7 mount jerked fully awake. “Did you feel that? Did you?” he demanded in a shrill voice, tracking the gun barrels left and right at the mist rising off the river.

  The warrant officer in command stuck his head out of the armored cabin. “What’s going on?” he yelled over the engine throb.

  “I felt something hit us! Didn’t you feel it?”

  “Vang!” yelled the man from the after-machinegun mount. “Yes! I felt it too.”

  “It was just a snag, Linh,” the warrant officer said. ’A sunken branch caught on a bar. All kinds of things get in the river in the monsoon. Go back to sleep.”

  Thump. The fifty-foot craft rocked perceptibly. The warrant officer lurched, had to grab at the hatchway for support.

  “What in the name of all hell’s is going on?”

  The impact seemed to have come on the starboard bow. A rating ran from the armor-plated cabin to peer down into the heavy water.

  “Look!” he shouted, pointing. “I see something down there. Something gray, going away fast.”

  Linh pointed his guns that way. “Shall I shoot? Shall I shoot?”

  “If you do, you’ll blow To into tiny pieces, you cretin!” the warrant shouted. “Helm, cut the throttle. We need to find out what’s happening —”

  “It’s coming back!” To screamed.

  The engine sounds died. The boat slowed perceptibly as it coasted into the current, wallowing from side to side. And suddenly it rocked sharply.

  To went headfirst over the rail.

  At once he began thrashing, splashing, and screaming. If he could swim, he was keeping the fact well hidden.

  “Nguyen, throw him a line. Linh, keep a lookout. If you see anything, shoot it.”

  To’s shrieks rose an octave, and he actually came halfway out of the water. “Oh, Buddha, oh, Jesus, it’s got me, help, help, help!”

  The warrant officer r
an to the side — not as near as To had been. The rating was bobbing hysterically up and down, waving his arms. “Shoot!” the warrant officer yelled, dancing back. Then: “No! Don’t shoot!”

  Linh, who was tightening his thumbs on the butterfly trigger, cranked up the barrels of his heavy machine guns in time to chew up the tall weeds on the bank instead of To.

  And then To was staggering in the shallows, pushed to relative safety by some unseen force. “AHH! Ahh. Ah?” he said. He scrabbled up the bank on all fours, then sat down and covered his face with his hands.

  “Now, shoot!” the warrant officer commanded. Linh dutifully began to rake the murky river just shy of the bank, throwing great brown sheets of water over To. To screamed and ran off into the weeds.

  Linh stopped shooting. There was a terrific bang, so loud that the warrant officer thought for a moment a round might have cooked off in the chamber. The little boat rocked back.

  When it fell forward again, it just kept going. Slowly but unmistakably.

  A rating ran from below-decks. “The hull’s all caved in!” he screamed. “We’re sinking!”

  “Ridiculous!” the warrant said. A big air bubble rolled to the surface, right in front of the bow.

  A metal ammo box came sliding forward down the deck. The boat was settling heavily by the bows now. The warrant officer slammed his pith helmet on the deck.

  “Why couldn’t the filthy Americans-without-money have sold us a boat with a metal hull?”

  A shape burst from the water, big and sleek and streamlined and silver-gray. It hung in the air a heartbeat, grinning all over its rostrum at them. Then it fell back into the river with a splash that swamped the deck clear to the gun mount.