by Gus Lee
“A WRITER TO WATCH.” —The Washington Post Book World
“An engaging journey into the mystical Far East, the unseemly corruption in the Army, and the mind of a complex man dogged by past tragedies. Lee has earned his stripes as a crafter of terrific thrillers.”
—Columbus Dispatch
“Gus Lee is a fascinating writer who keeps getting better and better.”
—Portland Oregonian
“Lee uses the thriller form to explore the human condition…. Through vigorous prose that writhes across the page, [Lee's] vision—daring, deep, and unflaggingly moral—comes to vibrant life as he takes Kan on a tense and moving journey toward redemption.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Compelling… Captivating.”
—Booklist
“A gripping, literate military thriller with appeal to genre fans and readers of serious fiction alike. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal
By Gus Lee:
CHINA BOY
HONOR AND DUTY*
TIGER'S TAIL*
*Published by Ivy Books
Books published by The Ballantine Publishing Group are available at quantity discounts on bulk purchases for premium, educational, fund-raising, and special sales use. For details, please call 1-800-733–3000.
To Diane
Hungry men hunt the tiger,
but brave men pull the tiger's tail.
In Asia, the tiger is America.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue: The Emptiness of Heaven
1. Girl
2. Bitter and Sweet
3. Gu-Gu
4. A Warmer Sea
5. Land of Morning Calm
6. Casey
7. Ice Palace
8. The Las Vegas
9. Captain Levine
10. Pig Breath and Ghoul
11. Dr. Death
12. Wizard Q
13. Little Tin Heroes
14. Better Than Most Waking Men
15. Colony of Lost Souls
16. Drumming of Cups
17. Patrick Treaty McCrail
18. A Cry to Heaven
19. Hogacide
20. No Deals
21. Song Sae Moon
22. Uncommon Deceits
23. Hwan Yongsa
24. Twelve Men
25. Mudang
26. Tiger's Tail
27. Southside
28. An Answer to Prayer
29. Fit for Womankind
30. Map
31. Naktong Blues
32. A Fine Sentiment
33. Happiness Cafe
34. A Matter of Thickness
35. A Fire in the Snow
36. Arabesque
37. Extraction
38. All You Can Be
39. Inmingun
40. You Sent Him to Me
41. Karma
42. A Day in the Sun
43. To Laugh Whenever You Can
44. Farewell
Epilogue
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Love to Jena, Eric and Jessica. Gratitude to my publishers, Sonny Mehta and Leona Nevler; my editors, Ash Green and Diane Elliot-Lee; my friend and agent, Jane Dystel, and her VP, Miriam Goderich. With special thanks to Amy Tan, whose magical, literary voice opened all doors and made my present efforts possible. Thanks to Kevin Bourke, Jennifer Bernstein, Suk Park, Celia and Terry Hong, LTC Chuck Buck and LTC Dan McCarthy, for invaluable technical assistance.
To the mad monks in the DMZ law firm of Armstrong, Meinhold, Majers, Ziegler, Resen, Resen, Wells, Gal-livan, Lewis, Barbee, Braga, Kirk & Zimmerman, with kudos to Don “Butt Kicker” Meinhold, USMA 1970, whose quiet presence in Korea inspired this tale; to the Big Boy, Colonel H. Jere Armstrong, who miraculously kept most of us out of jail; and to Steve Brown, who remembered more of this tale than I did, and taught me about structure, tension and event.
To the Senate Armed Services’ Connelly Investigation JAGCs and their legal counsel, COL Charlie Murray, USMA 62, who uncovered and resolved the largest recruiting malpractice conspiracies in the history of the U.S. Army. To Colonel Lawrence Bell, the USAREC IG, for waking me up every night and for standing tall alongside a puckering, whistle-blower lawyer named Captain Gus Lee.
Thanks to my mentor Charlie Murray who, by sending my Connelly team to cold Korea, provided me with the structure for this book. My salute for his stand for ethics and law, which cost him two stars.
With a prayer to Kim Jong-soon of Soya-san; to Herb Rosenthal, Diane Yu and Mark Harris, for keeping the flame.
As always, with deep gratitude to my covenant brothers, Rev. Paul Watermulder, Frank Ramirez, Barry Shiller, Paul Benchener, Ken Seeger and Phil Knight, who know, as I, where all the thanks are due.
PROLOGUE
THE EMPTINESS OF HEAVEN
The elephant grass cut my hand with a clean incision, bright blood following the grayish olive blade like ink flowing from a thick pen. I strained but heard nothing. I sensed echoes of guns, wet boots humping ancient green hills, tired lungs husking wet air, the slither of a fat black river snake. I felt the drumming of my broken heart. I had done everything right and had engineered myself into the worst day of my life.
She was a little girl, no more than ten. Her chest labored; her teeth chattered in the heat. Her eyes flared in childlike hope as she saw me. “Help, Ba,” she said. “Help me.” My Chinese face reflected her agony as her tiny fingers held mine and trembled with surging nerves. She had run out of the kill zone and I had shot her, and now she thought I was her father.
Her head was weightless, her hair fine and soft. Her eyes shaded as shock took her in the moment of a brave and uncertain smile. The dark gumbo muck stank and grass burned in the shadows of an unkind dawn. Sounds returned like thin smoke struggling through cotton. Flesh-eating insects dropped, making sharp clicks on broad leaves. Moms Bell, my RTO, called the medevac. We were on radio silence except for our own casualties, but he had seen my face and called for a dustoff.
The carrion bugs went to work and a brown leech touched her leg. I brushed them off, not wanting them to feed on my catastrophe. Moms's radio squelched; the medevac was far away.
God, I'm sorry, I tried to say, but no sound came from the hot summer gravel of my throat. “Doi sin loi, too sorry,” I managed in Vietnamese, and she looked at me, eyes glazing. Blood streamed from her ear to soak my hand, burning the razor cut of the elephant grass. “You are good and strong. God loves you. Please breathe.” I could think of no other words in any language. She had a kind face and reminded me of my mother when she was young. Her small hand touched her wounds.
The main body of the enemy lay smoldering in the abattoir of the kill zone. The jungle smoked tiredly with their deaths, like a fire that had lost interest after erupting savagely across a tender field. I had picked the place and the enemy had come, not in silent, well-intervaled file, but bunched, with muzzles down and loud feet in the false dawn, yakking in low swamp country where Americans did not venture. I despised their patrol leader for being blind to what was going to happen. But they were the enemy and very good at killing us. My job was to do them. I always did my job.
I clacked eight Claymore underbrush mines set in overlapping arcs, and five thousand steel balls raked them as grenades crumped. We bared teeth, grunting as we squeezed short, savage bursts of automatic fire, knocking down bodies, flaming the grass, the gunfire proclaiming its own government. An enemy trail party rushed us through the swamp on the right and I fired hot, searching rounds through the thick foliage, branches cracking and leaves floating like green, wounded snowflakes as we emptied magazines and grenade launchers into the fallen enemy and the lime mire with practiced mechanical madness.
&
nbsp; The jungle echoed with explosions, the birds long gone, the bugs organizing, the putridity of the swamp smoothed by the sweet acrid bite of cordite and the silence of death. Perimeter security went up; hand signals were affirmative. We entered the muck pools.
The rear party had been women and children. They had run from the fate we had cast for their men. I picked up the girl from the ooze. Beneath her was a dead baby, tiny arms up, slate eyes looking away.
“Jesus Christ.” Moms Bell stared at me. I was Magic Marker Man, a company commander who taught men of all colors to move silently like Chinese ghosts through bush, the man who never swore, who taught the frightened to breathe slow instead of curse hot.
We did not blow away dinks, gooks or zipperheads. As a family at war, we had no cherries, crapbirds, dipshits or slackers counting down days while walking trip-wired trails. My men constituted the largest job God had given me and the most remarkable assemblage of men I would ever know. We lived the resilient comedy of professional immigrants. I had laughed with bright teeth at hard rimes, but was not prepared for this.
She wasn't breathing. I pinched her nostrils, bent back her head, covered her mouth with mine and puffed air into her, my head filled with bad-luck screams, my helmet rocking emptily in green water, Moms Bell calling for Doc. I heard Doc cluck his tongue, issuing his sad, clinical assessment for body bag fill while I blew air, smoothing wrinkles and creases in her wet, black tunic.
“She's dead, Urchin,” said Law Man, Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Murray, the battalion commander with a law degree who humped with us. Her chest inflated. Murray had a hand on her neck, the other on my shoulder.
“They're dead. Lo siento, compadre. I canceled the bird.”
He had not shot her. I hated the wet heat of his hand on my shoulder, near the steel hilt of my knife, offering solace. I flicked it off, breathing harder into her, all my will at work, the taste of her death in my mouth.
You are good and strong. You will live. Please live. God, make this a bad dream. I prayed with all my soul to the One True God, using all that I had been or could be, leaving nothing for tomorrow, god or ghost, spending all my yuing chi, the world collapsing.
Blood came from her slack mouth and her last breath rattled into my throat, a glaring neon sign that illuminated the emptiness of Heaven. For a moment, I glanced at the stone vacancy of her tender face. I felt bitter truths: there was no god that heard a firstborn's gut prayers and cast light through breaks in the rain forest. My audience was a host of carapaced bugs and a brown leech. They were not interested in my soul or in the hopes of bloodied mortals; they sought the flesh of an innocent girl in a world ruled by heartless insects and helpless men.
I blew harder into her quiet lungs.
1
GIRL
It was number-one-best ding hao, good fortune, the magic of Chinese river fogs and BaBa's bright-red good luck, that made her eyes open. She was alive, and I'd take her to Disneyland to ride the teacups and tell knock-knock jokes. I would grow full on her happy laughter.
She was above me in a sky-blue kimono. “Anata, anata!” she cried—Sir, sir!—small hands trying to lift me. A stewardess. The Dong Nai had been six years ago. No snakes, no swamp, and the girl was dead. I blinked in a cold sweat, on the floor of the first-class cabin, holding a crushed can of Diet Pepsi.
A pillow, Ma's salted fish, a Korean dictionary and Frigault's Psychology of Nightmares lay like casualties. My head ached. I fought for air. I looked at my bloodless hand.
January 14, 1974. I was following the sun across the Pacific on Japan Air Lines Flight 001 to Tokyo. I had fallen asleep and entered the old nightmare like a lamb to slaughter.
“Yoroshides.” It's okay. I collected my gear and stood. The other passengers were Japanese, standing solemnly like honorable men watching the failing of a family bank. I bowed to atone my rudeness. They bowed lower. It was one thing to have a big, deranged Chinese with them. It was another if he was going to cry all the way to Japan, trying to resuscitate a pillow.
The copilot watched a stewardess place cold hand towels on my forehead as another gave me slippers, eye covers, nail clippers and playing cards and a doctor slid a stethoscope under my turtleneck. A small girl with a one-eared stuffed rabbit gazed at me and my missing ear. Tourist-class passengers gawked from the curtains. I laughed—I had been booked in first class on a foreign air carrier to allow me quiet and unnoticed entry into Asia.
I was returning to the Far East, the land of my birth and my error. I was going to rescue an old friend and investigate a fading memory of a prior self, hoping I wasn't too late for either cause.
I am Jackson Hu-chin Kan, the firstborn, accountable for the clan line. My veins run with the memory-rich blood and river silts of China. They bind me to Ma, to BaBa, to our jiay our household, across the sea.
From the Golden Gate, I speak to family graves on the Long River and our thousand generations of black-haired men.
I pay all debts. I perform honorable labor and will do so for all my days. I am son of a laoban, a sweaty, hard-faced Chinese junk captain. I am no stranger to hard work.
I obey the currents and accept the risks of the river. Beneath our hull and wind-chopped waters lurk slimy river demons who would hold us facedown for the price of a small fish.
The risks do not matter. I do my job, honor my parents and all elders, and remember the before-borns. I close all files.
Until he became Christian, BaBa was a drinking gambler, a cursing shamanist sailor who had me beat a gong to the fast pop of firecrackers each time we left the quay with good cargo.
“Hu-ah,” Ma had said, holding my face to keep my little boy's mind from wandering. “The gods promised you to me.
“You are Hu-chin. Hu means the tiger—and danger and courage.
“Aiya! Tiger! Bad name for my laughing son! Your father's father named you after drinking two black jugs of rice wine for your birth.
“Hu-chin-ah, you were born in war and named in his drunken happiness. Chin means ‘gold’ or ‘precious,’ names to protect the clan in sad times.” Ma later said this made finding a wife difficult.
Mrs. Wong, meet my firstborn son, Precious Danger.
Kan, my all-important clan name, means “to find the good, to cast out evil,” suggesting a perpetual opportunity for work.
I was seven when hard-boned BaBa brought us to America. BaBa talked to stars and loved America's familiar nautical skies. He had no fear of soldiers or bandits on foreign land; my two younger brothers had died in China, not in America.
Disliking my name's feral hostility and its American rendition—Urchin—he called me “Jack” after the comic Mr. Benny, adding the “son” as a good-luck bonus.
The sound of my American name gave my father pleasure.
My names described the objects of my character. It was my yeh, karma, to be the firstborn male on the river side of the Kan jia, to be educated by the U.S. government to become a soldier, to have a doting mother and a father who loved laughter, to be a man who was always a friend to danger.
I climbed the circular staircase to brush my teeth in the lavatory of the upper-deck piano lounge of the new 747 jumbo. A tony crowd of sophisticates in open-necked earth-brown shirts drank costly scotch and smoked thin cigarettes. I sat at the Yamaha piano and watched the endless blue expanse of the Pacific, en route to 180 degrees west and the Far East, the border between two worlds.
Immigrants feel a levitating happiness while sailing homeward. We remember all that is good. But arrival in Asia never matches that high expectation of return, while the backtrack to America reeks of survivor guilt and the musts of alien melancholy.
A square of cold, bright sunlight warmed my face. It was like the Vietnamese sun, full of hard copper and wet heat. The piano reminded me of Cara, filling me with painful longing and regret. Softly, I played Porter's “Night and Day” and the Bergmans’ “Like a Lover” for her, closing my eyes when women sat closer.
I was bound for an unknown
challenge, sent by Carlos Justicio Murray, a man loved by some and hated by others. I had been altered each time his life had crossed mine.
He had taught me law at West Point. “Law school,” he had said, “is to free thought as foxes are to hens.” He was a big-fisted, broken-nosed El Paso street fighter who had graduated from the Academy and Yale Law and had fought in Korea.
Murray had imprinted memories of his humorous charisma on our psyches with the adroitness of a Navy tattoo artist. He loathed tranquility and detested dishonesty. He inspired heretical thinking, occasional illogical acts and steady followings of the young and innocent.
His logical assaults on our presumptions of Perfect American Justice led some of my classmates to mistake his realism for communism. He had a rash, Irish streak of humor, an irresistibly contagious yang male laugh and the romantic grin of a Mexican knife fighter. He had made me think and he had made me laugh, and I had always hoped to see him again.
I was playing a piano at forty thousand feet because this idle hope had been realized in full.
Five hours ago, he had said, “Today, you go to the DMZ.”
BaBa's heart beats to the tune of the Yangtze's iron currents. We have sucked our own wounds and tasted China. Carlos Murray's will had been forged in the hot flats of West Texas to the tune of honeyed Mexican guitars and the cadence of angry Irish hearts.
He was a stout, muscular stick of human dynamite, amusingly insouciant with a homicidal bon vivant touch. He pulsed ethics with the fever that drove most men to common sins.
I played the piano for Cara. But all the chords led to Asia, where I had been born and where I had died.
In the spring of 1966, I was Bravo Company commander, 2nd of the 502nd Infantry, 101st Airborne, Vietnam. I believed in God, the rational use of force, the sanctity of the free world and the beauty of children. My yeh, karma, was good, and my battalion commander was my old professor Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Murray.