UNBREAKABLE (Murder on the Mekong, Book 1): Vietnam War Psychological Thriller

by Hart Rivers

  Another Kind of Teacher

  JD wasted no time booking himself into his favorite suite at the old Rex Hotel in downtown Saigon. It was still a fine hotel but had certainly been a better hotel when the French had been here. The American kind of exploitation was rather crude compared to the French, at least when it came to food, service, ambiance, and architecture. But still the Americans had brought their own unique cultural refinements—including his beloved 1957 Chevy Bel Air convertible.

  The classic Chevy, a sweet sexy number wrapped in turquoise and chrome and a white rag top was a real head-turner, perfect for drawing attention when he needed to make a show. Now being one of those times, he made a complete spectacle of himself as he drove over to the Continental Palace, sat at a perfectly dressed table in the corner of the exquisite restaurant, and made sure he was very quietly noticed by everyone while he ate lunch alone. Even without the Chevy it was hard to miss his New York Yankees baseball cap—a prized gift from his friend Izzy—the pair of Ray Bans he continued to wear inside, and an Aloha shirt with bright yellow flowers.

  After a long, leisurely lunch that didn’t sit well with the anxiety roiling in the pit of his usually cast iron stomach, JD made his equally noticeable exit. Then, like the octopus, he disappeared. The local actor who had worked for him before was ready to step in. About the same height and build, JD had already outfitted the actor with a suitcase of his most American-looking clothes, including fake Ray Bans and a New York Yankee’s knock-off baseball cap—he knew the guy would say he lost them—gave him the spare keys to his Chevy, and told him to quietly go out to dinner daily, make sure he was seen, but avoid any contact or conversation. If anyone approached, he was to convincingly begin to cough, say he had a terrible flu, and leave. What JD left out was what his substitute should do or say if accosted in a non-public place because should that happen it would not matter; the actor would almost certainly be killed and the bait-and-switch discovered. But, by then, he would have the head-start he needed to track down Zhang.

  JD left Saigon disguised as a crippled ex-soldier who was clearly no longer of use to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the ARVN. Dressed in a ragged uniform and hobbling along with an ill-fitting crutch, he caught a fast barge heading north on the Mekong River to Phnom Penh. From there, he was able to hitch a long truck ride up to the mountainous Highlands. With time of the essence he made only a slight detour to ensure he hadn’t been followed, then joined up with a Hmong trading party returning to their village in the upper Highlands near Laos.

  The road they were on quickly diminished to a Jeep trail, which then turned to a path to the village, and JD saw that as his cue to bid them chúc may man và chào tam biêt—good luck and goodbye.

  He ditched the crutch and changed into a simple black Hmong tribal tunic with wide-legged trousers. Wearing sandals and carrying only a walking stick, a knife, and a small container of fresh pig blood purchased earlier at the river market, he followed a game trail that took him deeper and deeper into the Highlands jungle. JD felt like he was swimming again, only in a green sea of plants and trees. The seasonal rains had been heavy, and the jungle was a riot of growth. For most people this would be a Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness kind of hell. Hot, humid. Grasping vines with thorns and spiders and snakes. Biting ants and insects.

  For JD, it felt like home. He loved it, loved this entire greater Mekong region and its jungle inhabitants. Southeast Asian tigers were not necessarily rare here, but it was certainly rare to ever come across one unless it had decided you were going to meet it. There were stories told by the best tribal hunters that when you entered the hunting ground of one of these great animals it knew the moment you crossed the boundary of its prescribed territory. Like the echolocation senses of a dolphin or whale allowing them to see and know at a great distance the whereabouts of all prey, of each and every enemy, tigers seemed to have an extrasensory ability that made them the super-predators they were.

  Zhang was like the tiger. Zhang had that same kind of knowing, and JD truly believed that somehow his brother would sense the whereabouts that he was heading for, an old plantation not too far ahead.

  At least that had been his destination. A prickling sensation at the base of his neck stopped him in mid-step. The instinctive warning spread like fire put to dry timber up his nape and into his scalp.

  He was being tracked.

  Maybe it was a tiger. He could hope. He had been letting the pig blood drip out now and again on the trail in very small amounts; not enough to be that noticeable but like a dinner bell ringing for an animal that may be of use to him should there be trackers of the two-legged kind.

  JD walked another slow click, a kilometer, a little over half a mile. Whoever or whatever was following was getting closer. Whether their intention was to track him to his brother or just to see where he was going, he did not know. But the prize was too great to naively believe his best efforts would ensure he went undetected on this hunt for Zhang. After all, a fabled overlord of the finest opium poppy region on earth would be worth unimaginable sums. An irresistible kind of El Dorado; they didn’t make Poppy Kings every day.

  It was in the deep shade of a massive cashew tree that JD stopped. The forest giant was perhaps from a seed of the originals brought to Southeast Asia by the Portuguese, but now it sheltered and fed the whole ecology around it. This very area had been a plantation once, during French Indochina times. His earliest years had actually been spent on just such a place, a rubber plantation not far away. As for this one, what had once belonged to a neighbor had crumbled to a skeletal layout, most of the remains buried beneath an already thick layer of growth. Although the forest had only overtaken it perhaps a decade or two ago, it would very soon completely disappear.

  As will you if you don’t clear your head and calm down. Now breathe.

  Slow and deep… in… out. The breaths he had been trained to take in what was reputedly the most secretive, severe, and demanding school in Asia—where killing was as much of an art as calligraphy and meditative practices—helped steady his mind, his heartbeat.

  He could not be like Joaquin, a man he had once tracked in Peru. Joaquin, elusive and creative. Very difficult. Joaquin had somehow eluded him near Cusco in the Andes. How could he find him again? He knew Joaquin had been away from home a long, long time. Perhaps homesick? Homesick was a kind of real hunger and craving. The anxiety of knowing you are being tracked down to be killed certainly could elicit a craving for the kind of comfort that only comes from a taste of home. So, following his hunch, JD simply went back to Cusco.

  Joaquin died coming out of the only Brazilian restaurant there—and all because he had been anxious and made the mistake of returning home.

  Which was exactly what JD was doing now.

  He could feel his anxiety tick back up as he made the connection. He could feel a slight quiver in his breathing. His sensing of all things surrounding him was off; his highly tuned ability to focus, upset.

  Carefully, very carefully, JD crossed to the other side of the trail and made what would appear to a seasoned observer a quick exit off the path to the left. Just a couple of broken leaves, a bent branch. But it would be easily visible to another professional eagerly tracking prey. Not overdone, just enough to attract attention. Exactly what he needed, if indeed his tracker was human, not animal. All his pursuer had to do was pause and think about it and that would be all the time JD needed.

  Creeper vines ran rampant nearby, and that was where he completely buried himself, beneath the big leaves of the creeper. There, he disappeared. Like the octopus. Yes, there were insects crawling all over him, including on his face and across his eyelids, but it was not too much to bear; he had endured much worse. There was a loud scratching noise outside his right ear, but fortunately he had plugged his ear holes with leaves since an insect crawling down his ear would be unbearable—

  Wait. There it was. The vibration of footsteps approaching, he could feel them. Coming closer… closer�
�� closer. Only the footsteps kept going, didn’t stop or even pause to examine the planted distraction.

  Still, JD did not move. He waited. Waited some more. Once he was certain the tracker—most definitely human, not tiger—was well out of range, JD moved up and out of the leaves. Now it would be him doing the following. Who was this guy?

  As JD walked ahead slowly, quietly, on cat feet as he had been trained, he was aware that his breathing was still off and so was his focus. He felt not right, not like himself at all with the part of his brain that should be detached succumbing to worry instead. Worry was poison. Worry imagined reality instead of actually being in reality—

  And that’s when he felt the dart enter his neck.

  He jerked his arm up and pulled the dart out, but even his refined reflexes were too late to the party. A man dressed in camo, short and bullnecked and built like a battering ram, came at JD with a knife, expertly held.

  JD no sooner managed to kick it out of his hand and hear the crack of bone as the knife went sailing than another voice came from behind him.

  “Idiot! We were instructed not to get close to him, he’s dangerous!”

  But who was the idiot really, JD dizzily wondered, as he weakly withdrew the hidden knife from his Hmong peasant trousers. There were two of them here, not one. How had he missed that? And why was his grip so weak? Why was he unable to do more than command his wobbly wrist to wave the knife he should be planting into the nearest heart?

  Another dart speared him. JD felt the ground connect with his knees.

  He thought he saw three men in camo surrounding him now, waiting for whatever kind of tranquilizer the darts had delivered to take full effect. A bird sounded overhead.

  His vision swam, and he wondered if he was imagining the body of yet another man in tribal hunter garb drop from the tree branches, his face obscured by a tiger mask.

  JD thought he saw two knives impale the throats of two trackers. No longer surrounding him, they flopped beside his own supine position and gurgled what remained of their lives onto the jungle floor.

  The eye in the tiger mask seemed to wink as it ripped JD’s knife from his lax grip. In one swift motion the tiger masked man crouched, hurled the knife between his legs like he was hiking an American football, and in the blade went through the last tracker standing. Straight through the right eyeball and into his brain before the short, bullnecked, battering ram could pull the trigger.

  A Russian/Chinese issue AK-47—or was it an American M-16? Hard to tell when the world was fading and all JD could hear in his mind were the Rolling Stones singing “Paint It Black.”

  When JD opened his eyes, Zhang was staring straight at him.

  “Tch tch, little brother,” he said in a soft, amused voice. “You were slow and distracted. But at least it’s your trackers providing dinner for a tiger family and not you, eh? Here, drink this.”

  As he drank deeply from the coconut Zhang held out, JD realized he had been carried to the edge of forest that butted up to the rubber plantation he owned but rarely visited. This had been his childhood home—before Maman died, and his father remarried and almost immediately dispatched him to the monastery that raised him. But at least his stepmother had always been kind—far kinder than his sorry excuse for a father had ever been—and best of all, he had gotten his stepbrother Zhang out of the bargain.

  Zhang cocked his head, no longer hidden by a tiger mask. In the three years since JD had seen him, Zhang had not aged a day. He seemed eternally young yet possessed the wisdom of the ages. He was a poet, a warrior, a ruler, an outrageously wealthy and successful mogul who controlled the region’s major cash crop: the opium fields.

  And he was supposedly dead. A great deal of care and strategy had been necessary to create that particular myth, one that allowed Zhang to operate with the same chameleon-like invisibility as the octopus while wielding his power with the cunning lethality of a shark.

  “I have missed you, my brother,” Zhang told him. “But I must ask: why are you here?”

  “Bangmang,” JD confessed. “I need your help.”

  Bad Mouse

  Downtown Nha Trang, RVN

  The Beatles were wailing “Help!” from the jukebox close to where Mouse sat in the crummy enlisted club pushing a beer around and around on a wobbly table. For the millionth time he asked himself why? Why was he here in the sweatiest dirtiest war on the planet in fucking South Vietnam? He knew why. Because he was dumb. Right now he was remembering very clearly how he had been so very dumb.

  Maybe he wasn’t really dumb dumb. After all, the shrinks said he had above normal IQ. He just always did stupid stuff. Almost always he did stupid stuff when he got mad. Because when he got mad—which was often, okay—it was usually when people were making fun of him and, when he thought someone was making fun of him then, okay, he kind of lost control. The shrinks had all kinds of names for it. Stuff like “poor impulse control” or “rages” or “homicidal impulses” and then there was that other one… what was it? Oh yeah, “violent acting out,” that was it.

  Well, that’s what got him in trouble in Jersey and landed him here. If he had just been doing a job for his Uncle Louie that would’ve been fine; exemplary even. But he hadn’t been doing a job. He had been at his favorite local bar in Jersey and listening to the jukebox, just like now. That was all, just listening to the jukebox, to Bobby Darin singing “Mack the Knife,” his favorite song. Actually singing along to it and imagining the shark, imagining what it was like to be a shark and, sure, probably he was chewing his lip which always made him look like a mouse.

  He’d been wishing that his nickname was Sharkey instead of Mouse. Sharkey would sound cool. He was thinking about how maybe he could get everybody to call him Sharkey. He was imagining how even Uncle Louie and the “made guys” would give him the nod—you know that nod—and say “Hey Sharkey!” instead of “Hey Mouse” while gnawing their lips at him to poke some fun. Anyway, it was right about then, when he was almost “Sharkey,” at least in his own mind, that some guy… aw, fuck. How was he to know the guy was the nephew of some shitty judge? He didn’t have no way of knowing that; he just knew the guy put in some quarters and started playing some Janis Joplin shit, and the bitch was singing “take another little piece of my heart” when everybody knew, THEY KNEW, Mouse was playing Bobby and Bobby was what they were all gonna listen to as long as The Mouse was there.

  Only the guy didn’t seem to know who he was dealing with ’cause he got mouthy and then they started pushing and shoving. And Mouse saw red and finally kicked him hard in the balls. Shit. If he’d just left it there, it all would’ve been cool. He’d probably still be in Jersey and entertaining the guys with some of his song and dance numbers while working over some douchebag who had it coming.

  But no. Nooo. He couldn’t just leave the guy groaning on the floor. He had to go do something stupid. Stoooopid. He had to jump the guy and bang his head on the floor like a basketball. And then, okay, he had to go and bite the guy’s face a few times… well, all right, more than a few times, and he’d half chewed off an ear before five guys pulled him off and all he could think was, Shit. Mouse, Mouse, Mouse, you done it again. You ain’t never gonna be Sharkey.

  So he had to go see Uncle Louie and he nearly peed his pants he was so scared while he begged for forgiveness, even if he wasn’t that sorry, just really sorry he mutilated the wrong guy in public. But then Uncle Louie laughed, said he’d talked to the judge and, lucky for Mouse, it wasn’t a favorite nephew so he wasn’t going to jail. Instead, he was gonna get drafted and go in the fucking Army and… wait for it… go to Vietnam. Viet. Fucking. Nam.

  And now here he was, sitting at this crummy table in this crummy Drunken Dragon club and drinking crummy beer and trying to look on the bright side of things. Uncle Louie needed his help here and was giving him a big opportunity with the heroin operation—sending world class horse back to the states—and if he didn’t screw anything up, he could make a mint and get a nic
e leg up in the organization.

  Now, he did have to do his share of whacking over here when guys got out of line or stole product, and he guessed that was okay. Killing was killing no matter where you did it. Trouble was, doing this job in Nam, he could get killed just going to work. Blown up, shot, rocketed, bombed. This crazy place made Jersey seem like one great big year round Sunday mass with a line down the turnpike for confession!

  Mouse signed the cross and tried to think of more upsides. Like getting laid by pretty girls… even if he did have to pay for it, since they were all gook whores. But. He had picked up some nice souvenirs along the way that reminded him of home, right? Right. Like the cool stuff he inherited from a job just a few days ago.

  He stroked his chin, nibbled his lip. That had been a pretty weird job. He didn’t know who, and it wasn’t his business to ask, but somebody at the top wanted some cat in Saigon taught a lesson. No reason given—and again, it wasn’t his business to ask—but turned out there were five of ’em being sent in at once to make sure the target got almost iced, like in lots of pieces but not totally whacked. And it wasn’t like a regular gang thing neither, with the other guys being, well, more professional or something while he was a street smarts kind of guy that nobody paid much attention to. He may as well be invisible. So he followed orders and hung around some fancy restaurant to keep an eye out for a turquoise ’57 Bel Air Chevy with a white ragtop.

  Mouse backhanded a trickle of drool, just remembering how bad he wanted that car when he saw it. But he wasn’t a thief unless a job entailed it and, besides, where would he run off to in a hot rod that rubbernecked every head it passed, back to Jersey?

  He got the signal he’d been told to watch for from a hotel window across the street. This was their guy heading for the restaurant, all decked out in a flowery shirt, some cool sunglasses, and a New York Yankees baseball cap.