by Dale A. Dye
“I have reason to believe an American—an ex-soldier who fought in the Vietnam War—will try to violate your border in the next few days, Mr. Trinh. I’m not sure what his purpose is, perhaps sabotage, but he is headed for a place called Camp 413.”
Trinh ate with one hand and jotted notes with the other throughout dinner. Halley was careful to remain vague concerning the source of his information. He was more specific in letting Trinh know that careful, discreet handling of this situation would be considered a personal favor by men at the very top tiers of Emory Technology.
Trinh was packing his nose with Tiger Balm again as the waiter wheeled a dessert tray to their table. Halley made excuses about the press of other business, paid the bill in cash, and stood to offer his hand. Trinh took it with a smile.
“I’m not sure what my superiors will do with this information, Mr. Halley, but I will urge the utmost discretion as to its source.”
Halley favored the little man with a solemn nod and a sad smile. “I’m sure you and your government will do the right thing. Mr. Trinh.”
j
While the giant shoveled food toward his face with the right hand, Trinh Thi Thai picked up his left and laid it gently on her distended belly. The baby was kicking again and she wanted the father to feel it. If he understood there was new life inside her, he might realize they needed more food from the garden. If he would only work a little harder, be more careful with the planting and weeding, they could produce more than enough fruit and vegetables.
Then Thai would have some extra to take to the market at Yen Xa. Then they could get chickens, maybe even a pig. But the giant could be so difficult to control. She tried denying him access to her body but he was too strong for that. When the great snake that lived between his legs was hungry she submitted or suffered the consequences. He took her anyplace, anytime. Even now with her swollen belly, he simply rolled her over when the mood was on him and battered at her backside. When it was over, he was generally placid and manageable. She could get him to do things by asking.
Otherwise, she had to demonstrate what she wanted done, begin the work and talk to him until he got the idea and took over from her. It was the method she used to get their bamboo and palm-thatch house built, and it was likely what needed doing if she wanted it expanded to make room for the baby.
“Feel the baby kick? It is a boy. I am sure. Your son will require more room in this house and we will need more food.” There was brief spark in the giant’s dark eyes. She had come to recognize the rare moments when her words seemed to penetrate his misshapen skull. Thai smiled at him. He chewed silently on a mouthful of squash and then moved his hand over the arc of her belly, down toward her pubic region.
Thai sighed. It was never clear if the giant understood what she said. She spoke to him constantly, using simple words as if she were talking to a child, because she had a lot to say and there was no one else to hear her words. It would be different when the baby arrived. Then they would need to see other people. She would need to teach the baby and that would require some help that her black giant could not give. The market was almost a full day’s walk from the remote area where they’d been settled when they were banished from the camp. When she’d finally found the place where there were other people, Thai discovered they spoke a different language. It was only when she found someone who spoke Vietnamese that she discovered they were in Laos.
She got by on the rare occasions when she walked to the market, but the people were cold to her. She could never tell if she would be accepted or turned away. So Thai and her giant continued a solitary existence in the narrow green valley close to where the truck from the camp had deposited them. It was a truly isolated place. Sometimes they saw men with guns, but they were not soldiers or militia. No one seemed to know or care that Thai and her giant barely survived by cultivating wild vegetables, by gathering fruit, by trapping monkeys and jungle lizards for meat. And her giant didn’t seem to know or care that she had to do most of that just to keep them alive.
Certainly no one—perhaps not even the giant whose seed was sprouting inside her—knew how fearful she was for the baby. When it kicked, keeping her awake at night, she prayed for Grandmother Ba, for anyone who could help her with the difficult task that lay ahead after the child decided to come into the world.
She moved the giant’s hand away from her crotch to another spot on her abdomen and asked if he felt the baby kicking. He barely acknowledged her words but did not withdraw his hand. If only he would speak more, she wished. She heard nothing from him but grunts or a few words she barely understood when he wanted something. Sometimes he cries, she thought, standing to clear the meager assortment of bowls and cups she’d made out of bamboo. His pain runs very deep and so we are alike. And so we must shield our baby from that pain.
j
As he had so many times earlier in his life, Willy Pud conducted an area recon, quietly observing a narrow little valley from a patch of jungle. He lay prone observing Pepper—Theron Clay—through binoculars. It seemed impossible but there he was, the man who’d nearly killed him years ago on a jungle trail somewhere near here. The guy he was watching looked even uglier and more dangerous than he had on that day. His ebony skin was welted and latticed with the weal of old scar tissue. Pepper had been down some hard roads since the time when Willy Pud encountered him aiming a pistol between his eyes. His skull, perched above massive shoulders like a pumpkin resting on the thick vines of neck muscle, was oddly distorted.
As Pepper moved around a little bamboo and thatch hooch, Willy gained perspective and decided something had caved the man’s head in on one side. It looked like an under-inflated football that had retained the dent from a kicker’s foot. Still there was no mistaking the hard face on the front of that damaged skull. That man, milling around outside a primitive thatched but in the remote badlands of northeastern Laos, was Theron Clay, Pepper of the infamous duo.
The question that bugged Willy Pud, the puzzle that kept him from waltzing out of the bush, capturing Pepper, and stuffing him into Keo’s Huey for safekeeping, was why. Why was the man here in Laos? And why were there no guards anywhere in sight? And if he’s a free man, why is he living like this so far away from civilization?
Keo mentioned a woman. Where was she? Willy Pud swept his view away from the man squatted mindlessly in the shade of the hut and found her. She was waddling into view from the back of the hooch. He refocused the binoculars for a closer look. She was Vietnamese but different from all the Vietnamese females he’d seen. He watched as she took the man by the wrist and led him inside. It was her skin and hair that told the story. She was half-black, probably a kid from the pairing of a Vietnamese woman and a black GI years ago. It was possible that Theron Clay was the father and the woman was a grown daughter, but it didn’t seem likely. Who would be the father of the child she was expecting? Of course, it could be that…
Keo bumped his elbow, interrupting the speculation about incest. “You see,” he said. “The woman is very near the time for her baby. Maybe not so smart we take her for a ride in the helicopter. What you want to do, Willy Pud?” Keo’s Huey with just about enough fuel to make it to the Thai border was parked in a clearing about a kilometer to their rear. His sentries were agile and hostile, but Keo was worried about getting into a fight with rival guerilla bands in this area. He wanted to get the job done and get back to his own camp.
“Keo, I did not expect to find this man. I came after the white one. I still think he is across the border in Vietnam.”
“OK, so I take you to the border?”
“No…not yet…I want this one too now that I see he is alive. If I capture him, will you keep him for me until I return with the other one?”
“I think more money for that change in plans.”
“I’ll get you more gold, Keo. I promise you that.”
“Can do. What about the woman?”
“We’ll take her with us, I guess, if you�
�re OK to fly her in the helicopter.”
“We ask Sarang…”
They maneuvered on a circuitous course down a jungle slope to approach the hooch from the rear. When they were crouched behind a pulpy banana tree just 15 meters from the rear entry, Willy Pud handed Keo a pair of police handcuffs. “I’m gonna go in hard and pin him up against the wall. You come right after me and put these around his wrists.” Keo quietly checked the chamber of his AKM and nodded. Willy got a firm grip on the Steyr, locked his eyes on the doorway, and vaulted into action.
He heard the woman scream as he crashed into the gloom with his rifle shouldered. There was a rumble and bump as if something heavy had been upset. Willy Pud backed against a wall and squinted into the gloomy interior. When his pupils adjusted, he saw the woman crouched in a corner with arms wrapped tightly around her belly. Keo ducked inside with the pistol grip of his AK in one hand and the handcuffs in the other. Pepper was nowhere in sight. Likely he ducked out when Willy Pud crashed in.
“Where is he?”
Before anyone could answer his question, Willy Pud saw Pepper looming near the front door on the opposite end of the hut. His giant form blocked the midday sun as he slowly advanced, grunting and huffing, brandishing a hard, heavy teakwood pole in his hands, Willy swung the AUG and slammed it into his shoulder. Pepper’s brutal mask leapt at him through the scope sight.
“Drop it, you sonofabitch!”
“Hunh-hunh-hunh...” Pepper snarled, slowly shuffling forward on bare feet. At Willy’s side, Keo tried Vietnamese. It had no effect on Pepper, who arched his broad back, tensing to spring like an angry mastiff. Thai took the opportunity to influence the action. She came out of her corner like desperate boxer behind on points, arguing and scuffling with Pepper until she finally got his attention.
He turned dull eyes on her and made a pitiful whining sound. Keo tossed a translation out of the comer of his mouth, keeping his eyes and his muzzle steady on the giant. “She tell him to think of the baby. She say don’t fight.”
Keo slung his AK around his neck and cautiously edged forward with the handcuffs extended. Pepper growled like a wounded bear, swiped Thai out of his path, and started to advance. Keo ducked and disappeared out the back door as Willy Pud thumbed the selector on his weapon and cranked a three-round burst through the roof of Pepper’s hooch. The racket froze the action for a tense moment.
“Goddammit, Clay! Take another step and I’ll blow you away!” But Theron Clay continued to advance, slowly, methodically, as if the man threatening him with a loaded weapon was no more bothersome than a mosquito. Willy Pud shouldered the AUG and aimed center mass.
Thai instinctively moved into the line of fire and backed up to stop Clay’s advance. Then she spun to face him, begging and pleading, pointing to her swollen belly. She managed to get the club away from him and began to push him toward a corner. He stood in the shadows tamely as she spun to confront Willy Pud shouting a stream of rapid-fire Vietnamese.
“What’s she saying?” Willy Pud shouted to Keo who was peeking through the door at the action.
“She say what you want here? Why you don’t go away and leave them alone?”
“Tell her I’m here to take this man back to America. He is a traitor and must stand trial.”
She listened to Keo for a while and then turned an incredulous look on Willy Pud. She pointed to the giant’s scars and his damaged skull. Pepper didn’t seem to notice. He’d zoned out to somewhere behind his eyeballs where current affairs were meaningless.
“This is a traitor?” Thai screamed taking a step toward the muzzle of Willy Pud’s rifle. “This is an American?” Keo was translating as quickly and as well as he could while she ranted. “This is nothing! He doesn’t even know where he is. How can he know where he came from or what he did before?”
When she paused for a breath, Keo whispered in English. “I think we have big trouble with this man in helicopter. Maybe better to leave him here.”
Willy Pud leaned his rifle against a wall and drew the .45 pistol. He thumbed the safety off and aimed at Pepper from just out of arm’s length. Pepper didn’t even blink.
“Theron Clay, I know who you are and you ought to know who I am. Remember a day on a trail in Laos? You were on the other end of the weapon like this. And you probably should have shot me then. I’m here to take you back to the States so you can stand trial.”
There was no understanding or recognition in the man’s dark eyes, no defiant look, nothing at all. Clay’s stare was flat and shallow, as if the driver on the dark roads inside his head couldn’t find the switch for the headlights. Some sort of mental glaucoma had spread from his damaged brain to fog over those eyes, blocking all but the fuzziest perceptions.
The woman asked for a translation and Keo gave her a short version. She chewed on her lip, cutting glances between Willy and Pepper. Then she put her hands together as if she were praying, bowed to Willy Pud and began to speak.
“I ask you to understand me. This man is not the one you call Clay. Perhaps he once was such a person, but not now. He cannot give you the revenge you seek. His only place is here, with me, with the baby in my belly.”
Willy Pud waved his hand in front of Clay’s dull eyes trying to elicit a blink. He got nothing and he realized the woman was right. He’d get nothing from Theron Clay; no one would, not from this empty shell. No one would put this hulk on trial. No one could punish this man beyond what he was suffering now. And likely no one could sentence him to anything more or less than what he had here.
Willy took a long last look at one half of his worst post-war nightmares and decided that in the case of Pepper versus the World, an appropriate sentence had been rendered. He signaled Keo to follow him out of the hooch. Pepper is dead. Good riddance and God help whoever that is in there. The woman’s voice stopped him before he was completely out the door. Keo looked at her and translated.
“She say for her baby...she want to know what is his name...his real name.”
Willy Pud turned to look at the woman, her young face already beginning to sag under the strain of simple survival, a half-caste, outcast, orphaned spawn of American failures, foreign and domestic. “Tell her it’s Mustafa.”
Outside, Willy Pud stood smoking, looking east toward the jungle he had yet to traverse. Inside, they could hear the woman crooning softly. Keo jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “This one stays?”
“That one stays, Keo. The man I was after is dead…or good as dead.”
“And you?”
“Gotta push on, Keo. I’ve come too far to go back now.”
“OK…we go.” Keo started back in the direction of his helicopter. “I take you to border area and come back in one week.”
“Don’t forget me, Keo.”
“Never happen, Willy Pud. Sarang say she want to see you again.”
CAMP 413
Camp Commander Nguyen Pho Dang raised a slender finger in the air to emphasize a particularly trenchant remark about rebuilding through frugality and economy. He was gratified to see some light in the dull eyes of his audience. A sea of blank faces swiveled to look where he pointed. Startled by the audience reaction to a standard gesture at the standard place in a standard speech, Comrade Dang also raised his eyes. Through a hole in the thatch roof, he saw a giant shadow cross the sun. The old, dry palm fronds on the roof of the classroom began to bend and flutter.
Several of the students, particularly those whose wartime experiences made them familiar with marauding helicopters, headed for cover. Dang motioned frantically for his assistants to block the door and then dug his way through the throng. An excited militiaman met him near the mess hall, jabbering and pointing at the sky.
Dang shielded his eyes and saw the helicopter circling low, headed for a landing in the bean field at the rear of his quarters. He recognized the Army markings and the type of aircraft. It was an Mi-8, with five rotor blades, a long tail-boom, and a fat belly. Dang straightene
d his uniform, slowed to a dignified stride, and headed for the bean field wondering why, for the first time in the three years he had commanded Camp 413, he was being visited by a helicopter.
A hard-faced officer, bundled in combat equipment and wearing the insignia of a PAVN captain, stood outside the aircraft organizing a steady stream of heavily armed troops as they jumped to the ground. Dang walked toward him noting with some alarm that the helicopter bristled with rocket pods. His instincts and all the weapons in evidence told him this was not an inspection junket. The Army officer barely touched Dang’s outstretched hand before he began to bark orders. While the Camp Commander mumbled words of welcome, trying hard to look pleased by the unexpected visit, he heard soldiers being sent off to find the leader of the local militia while others were detailed to begin an inspection of Camp 413’s security measures. Finally the captain turned to Dang and looked him over from head to toe. His expression said he was not happy with what he saw.
“You are Nguyen Pho Dang, commander of Reeducation Camp 413?”
“I am…and you are most welcome here. May I ask why you came?”
The Captain just ignored the question and gave Dang another searching appraisal. “You are not wearing a weapon.”
“There is no need, Comrade. The people we have here…” He didn’t get a chance to finish his reassurances.
“Take me to your office. We will talk there.”
Dang led the way across the bean field, shouting for one of his assistants to bring tea to his office that served as both administrative center and Dang’s living quarters. When they arrived, the captain went immediately to Dang’s desk and sat in his chair with his rifle across his knees. The Camp Commander puttered around with tea and then pulled up the only other chair in the hut to smile across his own desk at the visitor.
“I am Captain Loan, 4th Special Operations Company. I have eighteen men with me plus the helicopter crew and we are under direct orders from the Ministry of Defense. You will provide us rations and any other support required during our stay here.”