by Rex Miller
— and then that scratched out and “You grab him by the cock.”
— and below that
“Grab Me by the cock, you fag!”
— and that scratched out and in big letters
“I eat pussy, you cheezdix.”
— Spec 4 Don 3/4
— and finally
“Don lick dick.”
— Dick, 1st NVA Regiment
We are at Chi’s place, little more than a large walk-in closet, but hers. Beyond and above and just out of handgun range of the bar called Crazy Horse.
I look at my sweet lady. She looks at me and smiles.
“Hi,” she says in her softest whisper.
But I cannot pass a straight line and I reply, “Not quite yet.” I will remedy that immediately per Southeast Asian Unit/Covert Operation Group standing operating procedure for the pleasure of the Commander, U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, your basic SAUCOG(SOP)ComUSMACV. The smoking lamp is lit, and I tell her so.
“Fire ’em up if you got ’em.”
I feel like I’m stoned by osmosis, from proximity to the poisons of the hooded cobra, that somehow I’ve signed away my soul. Somewhere between “the farm” in Virginia, and the sand dunes of Cam Ranh Bay and here . . . I lost it. Maybe it left in the body bags, old meat going out — new meat coming in. Maybe it got up and booked the first time I heard a single-digit midget yell at a newby, “You only got three-six-fiver and a wake-up. Harrrrr har harrrrrrrrrrr.” What the hell have I gone and done. My reveries are interrupted by a clump of boots on the rickety stairs.
“Mus’ be Jon,” she says.
“Come!” I say as he knocks loudly.
“If you say so, then it is,” D’Allesandro comes in and immediately lifts her up for a big smooch.
“You make some rady numbah one husban’, Jon. You debbil!”
“All us horny GIs are just alike, Chi.” They have this sex number they both like to run on me all the time.
“What’s to it, mano.”
“Nuttin’ to it.” He looks up at me with eyes like midnight gravestones. I flash on the stare contest D’Allesandro and the colonel must have had, the cobra and the black mamba.
“Ugly guinea bastard,” I say.
“Dickeye fuck, ya.”
“Bammy-bam, si’l vouz plait, my cherry,” I request, using the familiar corruption of Ba Muoi Ba, and Chi goes off to fetch more bottles of poisonous Vietnamese beer.
“Ahhh-so.”
“I love it. Fuckin’ thirty-seven guard dogs runnin’ around shittin’ all over themselves. Fuckin’ slope bodyguards. Colonel’s a fuckin’ piece of work, ain’t he? Shit. I always come away from him ready to fall down a fucking hole and find Judy Garland and the Tin Man down there.”
“Shit. You high already, ya fuck?”
“Not yet, but I’m fixin’ to git thataway.”
D’Allesandro is another of those who strikes me as totally fearless. How the fuck can they be like that? Some of them, for all their tough guy airs, you figure their foolhardiness is simple stupidity. But others — Jon, for example — are intelligent, ostensibly sensible men who have just given themselves over to it.
Brave beyond any description in the field. Loving contact, whether they admit it or not. Not necessarily heroic — heroes get dead fast — but one of the rare breed that genuinely gets off on it. They evince a combination of talent and perilous self-assurance that typifies this brand of lithe, tough, uninjured youth. They usually burn out after a few firefights.
Jon affected the hero’s sensibilities. Small-unit tactics and strategy. Fortifications and fields of fire. Camouflage and concealment. Escape and evasion. The gospels according to the mercenary testament. Their vital signs hummed and ticked and glowed. Mere work was their thrust. And the coldness was there, even in the youngest among them.
I can still see Jon D. all these years later, see him back there with Shooter Price and the others, guns up, barrels hot, surrounded by warm brass and death stink, and never a moment of fear showing. They would just look at each other and sort of go, “Well, smack it. Good fuckin’ luck, eh? Next case.” They could just breathe deeply and step back from it and be right where they were before. Not me. I was fucking paralyzed. Scared shitless doesn’t describe it.
“Merci, mon amour,” I tell her as Chi laughs, setting the bottles of Luke-the-Gook “33” down on our scarred, chipped table.
“Here’s looking up your address,” he says, taking a long pull at the beer. I do likewise. “Aaaaaaahhhh. Now that’s formaldehyde.”
“You ’bout half wrecked already, right?”
“No.”
“Bullshit.”
“Really. I did a little hash with the magic man downstairs. I was waitin’ on you, asshole.”
“Well. What the fuck are you waitin’ on now, asshole?” We laugh. I get up.
“You get any of that good righteous dew?”
“Is piss yella?”
“Hey.”
“Say?”
“How’s it feel to be drinkin’ and smokin’ witcher big-time, freelance gunman. Huh? Pretty exciting or what?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. Shit. Golly. Gee. It’s hard to put into words.”
“Uh-huh.”
“How about, lower than shark shit and it’s on the bottom of the fuckin’ ocean.”
“That’s the way you feel too, eh?”
“I feel lower than a snake’s dick.”
“That’s pretty fuckin’ low.”
“We got this big ugly motherfuck of a war goin’ on, and here we’re supposed to waste a fucking radio station? This is a mission? This is a hand job.”
“‘This is no mission, it’s a fuckin’ sentence.”
“‘Shit.” I pinch the twist off.
I flashed on the Mission Profile Acceptance. We had to sign a fuckin’ contract, like we had some kind of fuckin’ choice. What would they have done if we’d refused to sign the son of a buck, send us to fucking Vietnam? I barely glanced at the shit. My impression was that it was one of those contracts where the big print said you were forbidden to read the little print.
“I know how I feel.”
“’Zat right?”
“I feel like somebody butt-stroked me right between the running lights.”
“Fuckin’ weird lash-up.” I ask him about the contract. “Is that some shit? Sign a contract for a mission. I’ve already signed every goddamn thing from an agreement that I never belonged to the Sons of Italy or the AFL-CIO or the German Dickbinders Club or whatever, to a fuckin’ hazard waiver, what the fuck more is there to sign? They own our balls for the tour, man.”
“I didn’t even read that mother raper. I’ll sign anything. I don’t give a rat fuck.” We down the last of the warm formaldehyde and I light up.
“Be with this — some good gangster.” He takes a big hit.
“Ummmmmmf.”
“Unnnnnnnn. I love that routine where he lays the ole eyeballs on ya and doesn’t say anything for about a minute and a half. Whatever works for ya.”
“Som’bitch stared me right down,” I tell him. “I just said fuck it and looked around at the maps. Evil-eye motherfuck.”
“Whooofffff. Shit’s all fucking right.”
“Ummmmm.” Room is starting to smell pretty damn fine.
“Win some hearts and behinds with this shit.”
D’Allesandro twirls his empty in a tabletop puddle, slowly letting out potent gangster in a stream of gray-green smoke. I pictured him and the cobra eyeballing each other. Paper covers rock. The old man was a tough, hardass spook who’d come from up around the Citadel, where he’d supposedly been running a secret cadre of headhunters near the big CIA station. He had these real hairy South Viets for bodyguards. Not the Marvin the Arvin pussies you hear about. Hard-core.
The colonel was a genuine field spook and not about to come in from the cold as mythologized in Cornwellian song and story. He was the kind of hardbark-connected fucker who could get you your own personal body bag without much trouble at all.
“Ummmmmm, goddamn.”
“Whatdya think.”
“I think this is some righteous shit,” D’Allesandro says, exhaling eighty-dollar Columbian. “Where the fuck you get this shit, roll a supply sergeant?”
“So goddamn it, what do ya think, man? I mean, are we gonna take some names or what? You see those grave makers. Motherfucker.”
“Couple them shines are goddamn big enough, that’s for fuckin’ sure. You check out that goddamn skinny boy? Where’d that ugly fucker come from? Look like they hauled his ass outta some damn garbage heap.”
“I hope you ain’t talkin’ bout my new bes’ friend, Harold Grein. Don’t fuck with me ’n’ Harold, dude.” We laugh.
“Hey,” I say, “Howja like the li’l southern boy. Howdja like to kick some of his little booty?”
“He didn’t took so bad to me, man. I just walked up to his ass and said, umm, let me uh introduce myself, dude. I’m a man of wealth and taste. If you want to live, you be sure not to get in my way, you punk cracker. My name is Jon D’Allesandro.” D’Allesandro laughs.
He had the mercenary’s obsession with and love for weaponry. He was the type called a “rock ’n’ roll freak,” meaning that some deep inner compulsion, some Fourth of July kind of smoldering firecracker of a lust tucked away down in there really got off on it.
Just since I’d known him, I’d seen him with a 14, an Uzi, a 16, and his latest close-range pride and joy: a Military Armaments Corporation Model 10 in full auto. This was the original, real McCoy, and Lord knows what goods or services he’d fragged to some company gunrunner for this baby. She was gunsmith-blueprinted, dead bang on, silenced with a Sionics type supressor/silencer, and capable of spitting out a stream of .45-caliber justice with the touch of a trigger finger. In D’Allesandro’s expert hands the MAC/10 was one lethal, motherfucking hose of instant death up close and personal.
In Jon’s hands, weapons of any kind took on another dimension. Like any craftsman, he always made it look so easy. He had none of the — what’s the word, aversion? — to a tool that dispenses death and destruction that is natural for most men. Even that doesn’t quite nail it down. You had the feeling that he was instantly at home with a slingshot, a .44 Mag, an over-and-under, a LAW, any damn thing from a crossbow to a surface-to-air missile. If you could put your hands on it and fire it, D’Allesandro was in harmony with it.
But it was one thing to be good with guns, and something else again to watch D’Allesandro with an Ingram. I’d heard he’d taken off two boatloads of Viet Cong with an improbable — hell no, call it miraculous — sequence of fast bursts, advanced algorithmic triggernometry, and watching him perform gave you a tingling feel that was akin to watching an artist at work. I would see him burn the Ingram out at an A Camp up in boonierat land, playing his instrument the way Diz blew riffs, with a totality of sureness and startling economy of energies. D’Allesandro was fire and ice.
“Yeah,” I said, sobering up in spite of my best efforts. “Grave makers.” We looked at each other.
“Yeah. But whose?”
“Somethin’ wrong here, mano.” I shook my head. “Somediing very, very wrong.”
“You believe this shit.”
“Fuck no. I don’ even believe this fucked-up country is here. I sure as shit don’t believe this other bogus bullshit.”
“I feel a little tickle back in the seat of my pants — you know, like in the heinie region — feel something tryin’ to sneak up the ole South American pipeline.”
“Comin’ up the old choco-lah-tay highway, eh?”
“That’s the one, dude. The telltale tickle. Somebody’s waitin’ for us to bend over and pick up the soap and — wham-o!”
“Right up the poop chute. I know the feeling well.”
“There’s only one thing you can say about it, I mean, you got to look at the bright side, right?”
“Really.”
“They ain’t gettin’ no cherry.”
Chapter 8
“Hardly any of his assassins survived him for more than three years, or died a natural death.”
— Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus
on the life of Julius Caesar
We sit, transfixed, as the unblinking eyes of the cobra bore into the souls of every man in the hootch. A talking snake is not a good sign. Some of us in the room may have abused various controlled substances, and word groups enlarge and reduce at will in their attempt to penetrate the chemical data screens.
“. . . members of this spike team . . . greater risks . . . fullest extent of our military resources . . . every refinement of the combined civilian and military technologies . . . final analysis it will be you . . . carry out this mission.” Mission. The pounding on the door of the mind. Mission slams like steel hammers, admission, emission, remission. “. . . reason . . .” Yes, let us reason together. Reason about the mission. Communication breaks through:
“. . . situation . . . explained individually . . . Our political leadership cannot afford to let this flagrantly illegal station continue broadcasting, but there cannot be an incident that might compromise us at this time. We can’t be caught with a military unit across the fence, if that indeed is where Toledo Blade takes you. So your spike team . . .” I feel dizziness at “in the execution phase, but, should something go wrong out there . . .” The cobra blinks and I see him swallow as if the snake has ingested a mouse. Very dizzy.
“Your job is to find this base signal and sign it off permanently. Headquarters location: unknown. Transmitters: undetermined. Somewhere in this general area — ” The E-8 points up into the zone and my queasiness increases with the movement of his pointer. “Mobile ops: unknown.” He shrugs. “The station is broadcasting throughout Vietnam and across the border, into Laos and Cambo.”
The hooded cobra reaches down and activates a tape player and we hear a male voice say, “High-band monitor: Golf sector, Quang Tri Province, 338-MARS.” We hear a snap of static and a smooth, sexy voice fills the room.
“Canadian bitch goddess, age thirty-one, looks much younger, beautiful figure, is quote totally dominant end quote and into serious B&D and S&M, wants to hear from all submissive personalities who are willing to kneel and serve. I am an equal-opportunity employer.” Some laughter. “Send your recent photo and stamps for a quick, hot reply, to Miss Masters, 725 North Courtenay, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. And this is KILL Outlaw Radio!
“Looking for expendable aircraft from ultra-light kites on up? Fast boats? Disposable specialties? Write to us for a giant free catalog today. New China Arms, Box 866, Taipei, Taiwan 110.
“Don’t waste money on fake snuff films when we deliver the real thing. See hot snuff sex the way you like it. Write for catalog of 8-mm professional snuff titles to Mitsu Film, 9000 Ichibankan, Jinnan, Shibuya-Ku, Tokyo 150, Japan.” What is this shit?
“Personal to AG from Pete. That thing we talked about on R&R is going down. Get in touch with our mutual buddy and make the buy. Special to AG from Pete. That thing we talked about on R&R is going down, so get in touch with our mutual buddy and make the buy. And KILL has a brand-new call-in number on the half hour!
“Houseboy wanted for former officer. Your discharge will have no bearing on your employment. Preference given to gay, black applicants.” Laughter in the room. “Contact Box 11B, care of Mr. Blore — ” Raucous hoots of derision drown out the voice.
“Contact Mr. Blowjob,” I hear someone mutter.
“For a discharge.” More laughter.
“Bullshit,” a huge man in front says. The cobra turns his snake head toward the burly man, and the hoods on his distended eyeballs lift slig
htly.
“Yes?” He stops the tape.
“We gonna risk our life on — this is nothing but some bullshit. Fo-git about it. Never happen, all due respec’.”
“Yeah. Bogus bullshit,” somebody laughs behind me.
“I agree completely. That’s exactly what it is. Perverts advertising freak sex, crooks, hustlers, it’s bullshit. No doubt about it. But the black radio station you’re listening to is in fact so dangerous that it is one of the highest intelligence priorities at this moment in time. The transmissions you’ve just heard have nothing to do with that.
“KILL is the call letter code for a live message drop. It is used by mercenaries like some of you, hired guns, sexual aberrants, blackmailers, thieves, kidnappers, arms dealers, smugglers, sicko types of every description, every con game imaginable. Even ordinary people advertise, drawn into it by the bizarre format.
“The station is broadcasting at irregular intervals every day, sometimes for only a few minutes at a time. They advertise phone-in messages. Brief, free commercials that are uncensored, solicited by the various on-air voices. The messages are presumably placed by listeners anonymously by their calling in via landline.
“We don’t know the limits of the technology. But until you actually move against a hard target you’ll maintain the profile of a recon probe.”
Probe. From the Latin. A slender surgical instrument for examination of a cavity. A pointed tip for making contact with a circuit element. A device used to penetrate or — and I’m quoting Webster’s now — “send back information from outer space.” Uh-huh. The hooded cobra blinks again.
“The station airs messages that are placed by means of a succession of landline numbers that bypass our ICS jammers like they weren’t even there. Forget the nomenclature. All you need to know is they’ve got black boxing that’s beyond state-of-the-art. This station utilizes a telecom system that’s beyond anything we’ve got at Vung Tau or Long Binh, much less here,” he sneers. “They’re only doing one thing wrong. They’re on the air too much. And that’s where they’re giving up a shot.
“As long as they keep transmitting the way they are, they reduce their odds of escaping detection every time they sign back on. Without going into all the triangulation and signal-lock locator stuff, the basic rundown is this: we are close to having their main base transmitter targeted. Soon as we do — we send in the first-team varsity.” He glares at the faces. “It has to be put under. The station, all personnel — destroyed, and that means if it’s on the goddamn roof of the embassy and the chief announcer is the ambassador’s wife, I don’t care where, who, or what. I want this son of a bitch all lit up.