Profane Men

by Rex Miller

  “Spread this,” I can hear D’Allesandro mumble.

  “Anyone serve with Captain Marvel be startin’ a immoral fund,” Oreo parodies in his announcer put-on, but he has run out of steam. Dusty has dialed the outlaw signal again.

  “Marco and his ladylove to get it on with other swinging couples. Clean, fun-loving, attractive young pair enjoy gentle B&D and quote water sports and giving enemas unquote. Send photo and sincere letter to Marco, in care of Box Seventy — ” scccreeeeeeeee.

  “Awww, motherforker, I was writin’ that address down,” Shooter says. We laugh. Dusty flips back to music, a song called “White on White.” A couple of us laugh because that is cop jargon for a male cauc assaulting a female cauc. This “White on White” is a love song and is ridiculously funny. The team is getting goofy, dangerously drug-addled, wired, and tired. Blade one has been a king shit motherfucker.

  “Corporal Sonny Annello, Charlie Company, 1st of the 4th wants to hear from anyone knowing the current whereabouts of Mark Eicherdt, 1st Air Cav. Anyone knowing the whereabouts of Mark Eicherdt or willing to pass along a message to Mark Eicherdt that is in his own personal best interests, kindly contact Corporal Annello, who has quote information of urgent importance unquote for Mark Eicherdt . . . You’re in tune with the big listen, KILL, and we bring you a new number on the half hour.

  “Code Name Tiger’s Eye asks — do you need a reliable stateside-based contact for any special mission? No job too hazardous. I offer discretion, field experience, dependability. Courier, bodyguard, etc. Contact me at Bot 10499, Portland, Oregon, U.S.A., or leave a recorded message with my service, at area code 503-779-9919.

  “Code Name Abracadabra — ” An outlaw voice dripping honey and mystery.

  “C’mon,” El Tee hollers, “let’s saddle up and cut the shit.” Sounds good. The alternate grid coordinates bisect the edge of a tree line less than a click away. We fall out in the tree line and set up our night defensive perimeter, such as it is, in fire teams essentially, alternating M-60 “pig teams” on the flanks, trip wires, claymores, all the usual goodies. Because of the terrain, El Tee says no illumes. For all the bull at least he and the gunny have their shit halfway together.

  My ruck has worn my shoulders raw. Me and Big Merle and Shooter and Jon are gonna get down on some Long Rats — some of that fast freeze-dried shit. We’ve got the water in the chili and we’re loading the fucker with Tabasco and peppers. I could eat the ass off a dead armadillo. Hot damn. I have my lucky plastic spoon out and I think I may live after all.

  I kick back in the grass and think about all the good things. I’d like to be lying with Chi right now, smoking some of her wicked laced Algerian and mellowing out on her warm, sweet parts. I love to think about making it with her and how she goes insane when I suck her nipples. The women I’ve known with the biggest cherries had the least response there for some reason. She goes bananas if I promise her I’ll suck those hard little erect nipples for a half hour or so before getting down to business.

  Chi is the first woman I’ve ever known that I would just as soon cuddle as I would ball. I lay there thinking about all her soft, hot places, all the secret places she loves me to touch. I can spend hours just kissing her throat, and below her ears, down the side of her neck, the backs of her knees, all the little hollows. I love to run my hands over her tiny body and feel the shape of the bones and the smooth delicacy of her.

  The noise cuts into my thoughts as a covey of C-123s and a humongous C-130 Hercules, the cargo monster, whirl out across the blue feature, pounding across the sky above the darkening tree line. You hardly notice the choppers over here, I think. It’s like living under an intermittent Casablanca fan with the unexpected whomp of whirling blades appearing overhead. You get so you don’t notice the birds so much unless you’re waiting for a dustoff or resupply or whatever. But now, this deep in the bush at an NDP that is fucking far from secure, you look up.

  I am so tired right this moment I could give a shit. Holy Jesus, I sigh to myself, a cranked-out hypno-zombie in biolectrical mindsnap. How did I get myself into this clusterfuck?

  Chapter 12

  “Wanted broadcast announcers and technicians to work overseas. Extremely high pay. Applicants must have minimum three years’ commercial broadcast experience and not be predisposed to seasickness, as programs originate aboard a mine sweeper.”

  — advertisement from 1963

  U.S. trade publication

  The young woman in the au dai gracefully crossed the foyer and entered the first door marked private: do not enter! in three languages. The tunic-like garment favored by young Vietnamese women flattered her figure, accentuating her slim-waisted, long-legged look. The lobby was freezing cold in the black-market air conditioning, and an incongruous Mantovani-like arrangement dripped from a hidden Muzak playback system ticking resolutely behind her, playing for an audience of no one as she went through the sound lock.

  Although she was deceptively strong for her build, it was all she could do to pull open the second door of the vacuum-tight sound-lock door. She was always relieved to enter the interior of Studio 8J.

  The lock trapped all the smells of the studio’s flow of human traffic. The joss sticks, cigars, booze, pot, sweat, fear, confusion, and other assorted odors were caught and preserved between the massive vacuum doors. Being slightly claustrophobic only added to her distaste for the passageway, and she breathed an involuntary sigh of relief each time the fates chose not to trap her between the huge, thick doors with their heavy steel fittings.

  Princess was not given to violent fantasies. And because she thought in Chinese, it was particularly irritating to note that her concentration was momentarily broken by the need to traverse the dreaded sound-lock passageway. She had been miles away, thinking not about the taping session at hand but about her next move. She wanted to line up something outstanding that would keep her upwardly mobile, and then as soon as that was done she’d get herself cut loose from this nightmare operation. Surely Beals would do his best to keep her. Transfer her upward within the ranks. She was deep inside this reverie when she hit the inner door and nothing happened. An ice pick of panic stabbed into her thoughts with the usual sound-lock fantasy of gunning her way out.

  There was invariably that quarter-second as she pushed on the metal hand plate and the vacuum reluctantly broke, when it appeared that the door wasn’t opening. She carried a small gun for security purposes; the one time she was always comforted by its weight in her purse was that moment spent going through the sound lock.

  The young woman carried a Mini FEG, an automatic pistol chambered in 9-mm Kurz caliber. She was highly trained and always conscious of the weapon’s presence. If that inner sound lock would ever stick for an extra second, she knew she would not hesitate to pull the pound of steel from her purse and fire the ugly, blunt-nosed weapon through the double-thick panes of glass set into the upper right of the sound-lock doors.

  She had begun to dread everything about this job in the same way she dreaded the sound lock. Only the incredible pay kept her coming back for more with what passed for a smile. It was one thing to read spots for sadists and ax murderers or God knows what. A lot of that went with the hocus-pocus of the format, and not even the air staff was ever quite sure how much of it was real, beyond the “exotics” that were mandatory programming in every sound hour. But lately the station had been broadcasting pitches for more than just sex and dope and criminal-related activities.

  These code messages that were taped to air at regularly prescheduled times were rumored to have darker connotations. The station was becoming a festering toothache that would soon demand the full attentions of professional exodontists. There were other announcers, but she was truly the voice of the outlaw. And that very role placed her squarely in the center of a bull’s-eye. Princess felt trapped.

  It was one thing to be broadcasting from the mine sweeper out in the estuary, wh
en her greatest worry was getting blasted out of the water by an irate naval gunboat, but when she left the relatively secure confines of Beals’s Radio One operation and came to Vietnam to work the KILL operation, it was with the absolute assurance that because of the constant frequency switching and the unique black boxing, the actual operation would never be touched. After all, they were replaying tape recordings. Even if the Americans or the DRVN decided to find, fix, and destroy the station, the best they could do was maybe blow up the main radio relay. It had all seemed so foolproof. And the bucks — my God, the money! It was a powerful attraction. Now she only wanted out.

  Princess had worked for Toby Beals for six years, in five different formats, including both his top pirates. She was considered among the top twenty straight female jocks living, and she could always find a gig. But Halstons and silk sheets and designer French jeans and Dom Perignon and beluga all carried a ticket. “Pay your dues” was the jock’s motto. Talk-jockey slots were limited. There were only so many first-level positions to be filled, especially in the formats that suited her. She knew almost with certainty that if she’d move up from here in market size, she’d move down the income ladder.

  Still, there were limits. The staff people were scared to death right now, taping more and more pitches obviously encoded by the program department. Routinely thumbing one’s nose right in the face of a wartime power structure. This was way beyond goofy sex ads or cheap gun-running or even dope-dealing. Anybody who got caught was not going to be dealt with gently. This was becoming more than mere contravention of somebody’s broadcasting rules and regs. If they kept on this way, everybody was going to be neck-deep in shit. She wanted out. Now, before everybody dirtied by the KILL thing became fugitives from the combined might of the Allied powers, she had to get clean of it. She’d talk to Beals. She knew him well enough to joke with. She’d seen him maybe fifteen times over the years, half a dozen times privately. He was a radioman. She’d reason with him, beg if she had to.

  But it wasn’t Toby Beals that worried her. There is always talk inside an operation like this, even with the constantly bugged studios and all. There was always a way to hear something from the grapevine of employee gossip. There’d been lots of talk about the people Beals was mixed in with. The dues he’d had to pay on both sides to get this thing running. First, with the bureaucracy and military clique here in the South, just to keep it on the air, then the talk about other, shadowy elements. Had Toby sold his soul to get the technology to carry it off? He was juggling a lot of balls in the air, including, no doubt, his own.

  How much danger would she be in if she asked to leave and they said no? Or even worse, if they said yes, how could they let her out with this much information? She knew where the programs were recorded, who some of the couriers were, where the base relays and the main transmitter and the auxiliary units were, who all the lower-echelon personnel were. Lord, she thought, I know where all the bodies are buried. No way will they ever let me out of this alive, not with the kind of money that’s involved.

  She had to snap out of it. She had to get to work, and she could feel her deodorant going even in the freezing studio. She was also going to have to pee soon. With a sigh she shrugged it all off for the moment and strode briskly through 8J, which was currently just a straight studio full of piano, table, booms, and various plastic plants, out another door, and down the hallway. She turned at the end of the hall and entered the room marked absolutely no admittance in three languages.

  The guard seated by the monitor screens appeared not to notice her as was his custom, and she stepped up into the control room without speaking to him. The balding man at the main console spoke to her without turning.

  “Four minutes late,” he observed dryly. The back of his head was like looking at those little caps Jewish people wear. She visualized the word in her mind, thinking of it in Chinese, then pronouncing “yarmulke” to herself mentally, giving it a passable Yiddish accent. She made a mental note to ask someone if it was “yom-” or “yahrm-” on the first syllable. It was her business to know things like that. If she hit the word in copy she would say “skullcap” smooth as silk, never missing a beat. Totally pro.

  “Ah, yes, I’m sorry about that. I — ” she started to say.

  “You’ve got a shitload of copy and we have another session behind us, so you might want to get after it, eh?” He was splicing tape with a vengeance as he talked, doubtless leaving a trail of ashes over the front of his shirt.

  “Ho-Kayy.” She was pro enough to know you didn’t hassle with engineers, many of whom were pricks and boring, unsophisticated ciphers. She quickly entered a single door to the tiny recording booth and turned on the light, pulling her chair up to the table and immediately beginning to read as she swept the pile of copy off the tabletop. She read aloud to herself in a somewhat lisping singsong, completely different from her announcing voice but projected at nearly the same decibel level. She saw only the shapes of phrases, never words, and was completely disinterested in the messages or the meanings, only in the word blocks. She could as easily read a paragraph of English obscenities, a haiku, or a few lines of Goethe, it was all the same to her.

  “Code Name Abracadabra,” she read aloud. It was a unique or at least highly unusual speaking rhythm, somewhere between the incessant dissonance of the locals and the speech patterns of a child with a slight impediment. Yet she read at a lightning pace, both speed reading and retaining the sense of each dissimilar message, never missing a word or mispronouncing any of the strange phrases or intricate nomenclature.

  She was in the midst of a page of copy when the bald man opened her mike pot to set a test level on audition, and he caught her flowing tones zip through the copy.

  “-to Fifty. Apply to this party care of Bill Gates. Box 8710. Valdosta, Georgia, USA . . . . And you’re havin’ a party right here on KILL Outlaw Radio! A new yata on the yata yata yata.

  “Afro and Bro-Tee have an important bulletin for their new commanding officer. Unless you want to be offed quote oh-fay white devil unquote, get off our backs. This is serious as cancer from Afro and Bro-Tee in the 1st of the five-oh-deuce. Shape up, new CO, or it will be Frag City for Mr. Chuck. You’ve been given the word exclusively over blah, blah lah-dee-dah.”

  “Princess,” the raspy voice spoke over the intercom, interrupting her speed rehearsal. She looked up with raised eyebrows.

  “You work the Sunday trick again this weekend?” he asked. She nodded in the affirmative.

  “Hold it a sec.” He cut the intercom, taking a call as the large red hot-line light winked. She resumed her reading.

  “Attention: anyone knowing the current whereabouts of Laird Seecoy, who used to be with USAID, please call Vince Christian with Air America at this number, yata, yata, yata . . .

  “Scorpio is a young, very sexy model who will pose nude for — ”

  “That was Deanie,” the engineer interrupted once again as the hot-line light extinguished. “The courier is running about fifteen minutes late, so we have a little extra time after all. Anyway, what I was sayin’ about the Sunday gig, you’re on the sub list for this one.” He held a sheaf of papers up to the double-paned glass partition. “I’ll bring it in there.” The intercom clicked. Now what, she thought.

  “I got your level,” he said as the door cracked ajar, “and you can glance at this, but as soon as we get the batch taped, don’t forget to put this in the eater. I shoulda given it to you before you went in, but you were running late. Oh — you have to turn on your own equipment Sunday for playback and you haven’t turned on the transmitters, have you?”

  “Um-hmm. Signed on for Nguyen two weeks ago. I know how to turn it on if we haven’t changed anything. We still sign on the big R-9K?”

  “Yeah. Main thing is the freq numbers. Make sure you aren’t leaving the thing on the same number as the last transmission. That’s happened a couple of times and it didn’t go o
ver too big.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. They weren’t too pleased about it upstairs,” he droned on. “Clerical error, computer error, whatever the hell. That’s one thing, see, but if it’s manual error it’s not going to be too cool for the individual involved, if you catch my drift.” The door closed and she began reading and memorizing the memorandum, which she immediately perceived to be total bullshit, and looked up smiling at the bald man who was back across the double glass from her. She keyed her cough switch, activating her side of the intercom.

  “Did you ever see that cartoon where the guy is showing this other dude how to operate the equipment on his new job, and the caption is — like there are these two buttons on the wall you know, and the caption says — now this one turns on the air conditioner, and this one blows up the world.”

  The young woman laughed over the intercom and the bald engineer laughed politely. The young woman with the heavily scarred and pocked face and the exquisite voice, looked back down at her copy, pitched it on to the tabletop and resumed memorizing the memorandum.

  confidential: do not remove or copy confidential: do not remove or copy memorize and shred or destroy

  From: Broadcast Control/Engineering

  To: Subscription List Personnel your eyes only!

  She read with amazing rapidity, committing the words to memory easily as she scanned, memorizing word blocks with the surface of her concentration as she thought how she would convince Beals of her needs as he countersold her on their manifest indissolubility.

  Princess had reached the last line of the ridiculous memo, which was an instruction about what to do in case of switching to alternate or emergency transmitters, and she heard the intercom being keyed just as she read “see emergency procedure,” their standard closing — as if you were so stupid you didn’t know to look up on the wall next to the transmitters where the procedure memoranda were posted. She made a conscious effort not to shake her head or sneer as she looked up.