“Wow, where’d you come from, Marine?” Olsen said, seeing the trim cut of the blond man with the clean smile and definite look of one of Uncle Sam’s misguided children.
“How did you know I’m a Marine?” Brian Pitts said, taking a stool next to Olsen and pointing to a beer tap that said San Miguel on the plastic handle.
“I knew you weren’t a SEAL,” Olsen said, and laughed. “We know each other personally, here in ’Nam. You don’t have a dog face, and your hair does not say ‘wild blue yonder’ or ‘anchors aweigh,’ so that just leaves Marines.”
“You’re good, man,” Pitts said, grabbing a book of matches off the bar and lighting his cigarette. “I take it you don’t smoke, then.”
“No, sorry,” Olsen said, finishing his drink and pointing to the bartender named Tam to bring him another.
Sam Madison, a CIA field supervisor close to ICEX director Evan Parker, sat at the other end of the bar with a colleague of Olsen’s named Bart Johnson, a SEAL, too, and a Phoenix man as well. A third associate, Mike Hammond, a Force Recon Marine, made up their close-knit, handpicked team. Sam and Bart watched Bruce and the stranger with short glances in the mirror behind the bar.
They, too, saw the short haircut, and knew all the military operators in the Saigon area. He looked the part but did not have a face that matched a known commodity.
“Hey, I just checked in down here, and tonight got my first chance to scope out the ville,” Pitts offered, since the American who was obviously a serviceman said nothing. “Say, you’re not an officer, are you?”
“Aw, no,” Olsen said and shrugged. “I’m a regular navy enlisted guy— you know, the Donald Duck suit and ‘ships ahoy.’ ”
“Same here, only Marines. Sergeant Franklin’s the name, Jesse Franklin,” Pitts lied, even though the identification card in his wallet read First Lieutenant Joseph A. Russell, matching the dog tags around his neck. The real Jesse Franklin, an old black man, swept the floors and shined shoes in Robbie’s Pool Hall back in Kansas City, and had given Brian his street name, Small Change. Next to his Uncle Joe Russell, he liked Jesse best.
“Bruce Olsen, petty officer second class,” the Phoenix hit man said, and shook Brian Pitts’s outstretched hand. “Glad to know you, Sergeant Franklin.”
Pitts smiled at the stranger as they exchanged introductions, curious to know if this guy was really a deserter in disguise, like himself. When he first ventured into the city of Saigon, just getting his legs back on the ground, he had encountered others such as himself, deserters on the run, mingling in bars along Tudo Street, in the city’s tenderloin, wearing civilian clothes, trying to blend with scores of others who looked like them. With their stoic, out-of-place faces, though, they often presented easy targets for the CID rat dogs who scouted the watering holes now and then, looking for deserters gone native, trying to get lost in the crowds of round-eyed, Western contractors and civilian adventurers who migrated to Saigon from Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S.A. for big money made easy.
Pitts envisioned developing a small circle of American-born confidants to work with him in his Asian empire, operating throughout the Indochina region with home base in Bangkok, where he planned to live like a sultan. However, he needed trusted people in South Vietnam both in the northern provinces as well as in Saigon and its lucrative surroundings. He concluded that deserters on the run would be more than glad to find a fellow countryman who would lend them a hand. They would naturally cooperate and keep their mouths shut.
That’s how he had recruited his two colleagues, Tommy Joyner and Robert Matthews, a pair of division Marines from northern I Corps who stowed away on a C-130 Hercules cargo plane that landed at Tan Son Nhut Airport in Saigon instead of the Marines’ El Toro air station in California. The pair looked worse than Mau Mau Harris when Chung and Bao found them and took the two men to their big brother Huong to either shoot or present to the Snowman for disposition. Talking to the anxious duo who only wanted to go home from the war, Brian Pitts devised his brainstorm for an Asian empire with American deserters as his most trusted associates.
In the few months that he had lain low, clothing, feeding, and educating Matthews and Joyner to the ways and opportunities of the Snowman and his well-paying business, he also had made fresh contacts with Viet Cong and North Vietnamese agents who supplied him with pure heroin and Buddha at cut-rate prices. He had taken a million dollars and invested it in a massive dope inventory, and now looked to move product not only in South Vietnam, but also ship truckloads of it back to America. He needed trusted hands to do the work. Deserters had everything to gain, and if they failed him he could kill them with no questions or concerns coming from anyone. Deserters were disposable.
Tonight, while the Snowman went looking for potential recruits, and took the opportunity to wet his whistle in a setting more sociable than the stucco plantation house with the red tile roof that he and his cowboys had procured in the countryside west of Saigon, just off the highway that led to Cu Chi, Chung, Joyner, Matthews, and Turd held down the fort.
“So, what do you do here in Saigon?” Pitts asked, sipping the suds off the top of his beer.
Bruce Olsen looked at the Marine, who wore an expensive white-on-white brocaded silk shirt and black silk pants with canvas deck shoes.
“Stuff,” he shrugged, and then thought about the prying question and decided to put the dog off his scent. “Logistics, you know, supply stuff.”
“Oh!” Pitts smiled, and then sipped more beer. He could use a man who knew how to get stuff shipped.
“What’s your story?” Olsen smiled at the newfound friend.
“I got reassigned down here to work for, let’s just say part of the embassy,” Pitts lied, feeling like making himself sound exotic and mysterious to the potential recruit.
“CIA?” Olsen shrugged, taking a sip of his whiskey cocktail. “I know guys who got assigned there. Marine Recon guys, SEALs, green beanies. They got special operations, you know. At least that’s what I heard from the guy on the second shitter.”
Pitts laughed at the term for scuttlebutt, unfounded rumor.
“If I told you I’d have to kill you,” Pitts smiled and took a long drag off his smoke.
“I’m not asking what you do now,” Olsen said, putting up his hands, pretending to fend off any sense from Pitts that he wanted to pry into anything he had no business knowing. “What did you do up north?”
“Sniper,” Pitts lied, and took a big drink of his beer. His ego had led him over a line that he knew better than crossing. His subconscious haughtiness and need to inflate his esteem wanted this no-name stranger, who worked some dead-end job on a supply barge trapped in the doldrums, to be impressed with him. To admire his heroic masculinity and dash.
“Oh, wow, Murder, Incorporated!” Olsen beamed, and smiled at his boss, who watched him with increased interest.
“Hey, man, not so loud,” Pitts said, and looked at the two men huddled at the end of the bar who apparently paid him no mind.
“I heard of those scout/snipers up there in I Corps. Who’s that sergeant that’s got all those kills? What’s his name, Hathcock? Yeah, that’s the guy. I read about him in the Sea Tiger. You work with him at all?”
“Sure, Hathcock. Yeah, I’ve done a turn or two with the guy. He’s back at Da Nang last I saw,” Pitts said, taking another drink of beer and now breaking a sweat. He had no idea about this sergeant named Hathcock. Then he thought about something that this sailor said early in their conversation. “I thought you said you were a SEAL when I sat down.”
“Oh, no. Sorry if I misled you,” Olsen shrugged, and offered a sheepish smile while in the back of his mind he pondered the Hathcock answer, and knew for sure that his new friend was a phony. Olsen had worked with Carlos Hathcock and a corporal named John Burke back when he first began the Phoenix program in early 1967. Hathcock had rotated home after that, about a year ago, and Burke had died this spring at Khe Sanh. No way this clown was a sniper and didn’t kn
ow that common scoop among the close-knit special operations crowd.
“I work at supply with the SEAL teams,” Olsen finally said, lowering his head as though embarrassed, “so I guess I was vague about my job. I make that mistake sometimes. I’m not a SEAL. I guess just wishful thinking on my part. I’m a storekeeper. Sounds dull when you put it up against a SEAL, so I’m sometimes a little misleading about it, maybe subconsciously trying to impress people. That’s a bad thing to do, considering my friends and what they went through to earn the right to call themselves SEALs. A supply clerk just doesn’t excite anyone, so I’m sometimes vague about it.”
Brian Pitts patted Bruce Olsen on the shoulder.
“Everybody’s job is important,” Pitts said, consoling the storekeeper caught exaggerating about being a SEAL. “You work with the SEAL teams, so that’s pretty cool. They’re your buddies, too. You work inside their circle.”
“Yeah, that’s true. I guess it’s pretty cool what I do,” Olsen said, and smiled. “So, what unit you work with up north?”
“I started with Seventh Marines, then got shipped up to Ninth Marines,” Pitts said, waving to Tam to bring him a fresh beer. “Then I got orders here.”
“You’re not one of those Phoenix guys, are you?” Olsen whispered, widening his eyes, showing his enthusiasm toward the exciting unit that American servicemen mostly knew only by way of rumor and sea story.
“Like I said, I can’t really say,” Pitts said in a hushed voice, and then smiled and gave the man a wink as if to confirm the suspicion.
“Yeah, I knew it,” Olsen said, and drank more seven-and-seven. “Shit, I bet that’s wild-ass work. Damn!”
“How long you been in the navy?” Pitts asked the new admirer, gloating with his phony nonchalance.
“Six years come September,” Olsen said, telling the truth. He had learned in his training to tell as much truth with lies as possible, making the whole story more believable.
“You’re not a deserter, are you?” Pitts then asked, and his face flushed as he asked the hard question. He had to finally ask, though, to get down to business. “I mean, most military guys don’t hang in a fancy bar like this, and dress in nice civilian clothes. It’s cool if you are. I’m no cop or anything. Like I said, I have my own kettle of fish to cook.”
Olsen looked down both directions of the bar and then leaned close to Brian Pitts and whispered, “What if I am?”
“It’s cool,” Pitts whispered back. “If you are, I have a good-paying job. If you’re not, and you do supply like you say, I still have a good-paying job. Maybe.”
“Doing what?” Olsen asked, looking both ways down the bar.
“Stuff,” Pitts said, sipping his beer and then lighting a cigarette.
“I got to take a piss,” Olsen said, and got off his stool and walked to the back of the bar.
Brian Pitts watched him disappear behind the restroom door. When the older of the two men sitting at the bar also got up and went to the toilet, the Snowman got nervous. He left a twenty-dollar bill on the bar, gave Tam a nod to keep the change, and ducked out the main doorway.
As he left the Continental Hotel bar, a middle-aged Vietnamese woman wearing a black cocktail dress walked out the door behind him after the bartender gave her a nod.
“I told Tam to have him followed, just in case,” Sam Madison said to Bruce Olsen in the bathroom as they stood over the urinals.
“If he’s still there when I walk back to the bar, he may be just another jarhead out shooting off his lying mouth,” Olsen said with a laugh, zipping his pants. “He’s got something definitely dirty going on, though, asking me if I was a deserter, and then offering me a well-paying job because of my supply connections. Ten to one the guy’s tied to dope.”
“Dope’s tied to the Viet Cong,” Madison said, washing his hands. “Effective weapon. We have more and more of our guys using it. We’ll find out what this cat’s all about. Tam put his hit team on this guy. Their people will tie a can on his tail he can’t shake. We’ll pass the lowdown on this bum to DIA, or kick it over to General Cushman. Let his folks sort it out. If he’s tied to the Cong, which is a good bet, if he’s dealing serious dope, we might just whack this turd.”
Olsen laughed and dried his hands.
“Man, if this idiot only knew who sat at the same bar with him tonight when he breezed out his line of bullshit,” the SEAL said, shaking his head. “He wore expensive threads, a Rolex watch—not standard Marine Corps issue, my friend. His look spoke of dope loud and clear.”
Brian Pitts kept looking over his shoulder, and the woman in the black cocktail dress finally disappeared in a hotel door. He stopped and turned, and saw no one on the street, so he doubled back up the block and made a right, where Huong and Bao waited for him in the black Mercedes-Benz.
As he settled in the backseat he lit a cigarette and then pounded his fist on his knee, blowing out a big sigh. He had stepped way over the line tonight, and felt sick at knowing how badly he had allowed his ego to brag and jeopardize everything. That so-called SEAL supply guy could easily have been CID stalking a bar, looking for deserters or dope peddlers. He felt stupid for allowing his vanity, greed, and anxiousness to hurry the job of recruiting soldiers for his new army overwhelm his more characteristic good sense of caution and attention to detail.
Sometimes his vision got to pushing too hard, and he knew he had to keep that drive under control, working more methodically and carefully.
“No more fuckups like tonight,” he told himself as he sucked on his cigarette. He watched Huong and Bao both checking the mirrors and glancing in every direction, looking for anyone who might follow them.
“See anyone back there?” Pitts asked his senior cowboy as he steered the car westward toward the edge of the city.
“No, sir, just Vespa, but it turn left back by that last hotel,” Huong said. “One car come now, but it just pull from curb. No follow.”
“Good,” Pitts sighed, and took a relaxing drag off the smoke. “Let’s go home.”
Chapter 15
THE CHU LAI HIPPIE
CHOPPER CREPT FROM the hole in the wall where the water pipe came through and ran overhead in the mojo’s office, across the hall, into the prosecution section, where it bent ninety degrees to the right, and then branched off to feed a deep sink in the utility room and traveled next door to supply water in the all-hands head. The roach flicked his antennae and then pulled them down, one at a time, using his front feet, and ran the wirelike appendages along his mouth, cleaning the dust particles from them. Then he tilted his knobby brown head and caught sight of the dry coffee creamer that Charlie Heyster had spilled on the black lacquer tray that held the jars of sugar, Carnation Coffeemate, and a stack of clean, white ceramic mugs next to the officers’ coffeepot.
The giant, northern Florida variety palmetto bug opened his wings, ready to fly down to partake of the inviting meal, but then caught sight of the man sitting at the desk below him. Chopper recognized the all-too-familiar bald spot on the back of the human’s head. Instead of just watching him eat the dry creamer and sugar, as the others always did, the ones who came in and cleaned the office, dumped the trash, and made the coffee, and talked to him like a house pet as he ate, this man and the fat fellow with the black and silver hair from the office next to this one, would scream and swat at him with manila folders or a rolled-up magazine. So the big roach eased back inside the hole, leaving his head poking out so he could watch, and waited for the obnoxious creature below him to leave. Then he could fly down to the tray and eat at his leisure.
Three years ago, the insect’s great-great-great-great-great grandmother, along with several of her closest friends and relatives, had set up housekeeping in the bottom of a case of toilet paper in a Jacksonville, Florida, warehouse. Someone had knocked a small hole through the cardboard near a bottom corner, giving the roaches free run in and out of the container, allowing them access to forage for grub outside the box while developing their colony
among the rolls of soft paper. Then one day the case got trucked up to Warner Robins Air Force Base in Georgia, where a C-141 Starlifter carried the box of toilet tissue and the nest of North Florida palmetto bugs to Da Nang Air Force Base in South Vietnam.
After a few days in this new country, where night and day seemed backward to the bugs, a small man put the big box in the back of a panel truck and drove it to the enlisted men’s head next to the First Marine Aircraft Wing legal office, and stacked the box with some others in a storage room lighted by the glow from the gas burner beneath a water heater. Chopper’s great-grandmother and her growing family ventured out and made their home inside the walls of this damp building. They found food plentiful and the climate ideal for their species, so they proliferated.
When Chopper hatched from his egg case, his great-grandmother had long since disappeared from the transplanted community of palmetto bugs. However, her hearty genetics in such a supportive and welcome environment produced a roach race that dwarfed any of their two-inch kin that remained in Florida. While among most communities of cockroaches, a three-inch-long male might seem rare, such size was now common among Chopper’s South Vietnamese kin.
The big roach watched as this man took a package wrapped in brown paper from inside a white laundry bag. He shook it and listened to its side, then he sniffed it like he might take a bite from the bread-loaf-size item. Seeing the human now absorbed with the object he held in his hands and shook again and smelled, Chopper eased himself out of the pipe hole and spread his wings, launching in a low, fluttering buzz a few feet above the desk, and then landed with a thud on the black lacquer tray. He managed to swallow three good mouthfuls of the dry creamer before the man leaped from his chair, shoved the paper-wrapped package back in the white cotton bag, and bellowed while grabbing a manila folder and running to the side table, where the cockroach dined on Coffeemate and sugar spillage.
As the shouting human swung the file folder, Chopper launched himself skyward, lit on the wall, took one look back, and flew to his pipe-hole nest.
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