by Jeff Wallace
“When I called, sir, I half-expected them to say you were in Cambodia.”
“Somebody has to keep the roads open.” The bitterness diminished him, and he seemed to know it. His voice now rose an octave. “I’m surprised to see you too, Tanner. Seems like they’d have pulled the plug on you by now.”
“They did. The investigation officially was closed last night.”
I unfolded Gerard’s map, laid it on the table, and related what I’d learned, knowing that Larsen the tactician would see the mosaic emerge from the fragments. I tapped the intersecting lines I’d grease-penciled. “He crashed here.”
The leathery skin squeezed. “We searched Area Zulu.”
“From the air. You missed something. I need a ride and some soldiers to help me search it from the ground.”
“I don’t own that turf anymore. It belongs to the units mounting the Cambodia operation. To insert you, I’d have to coordinate with them.”
“There’s no time to coordinate, sir. You’d never get permission anyway.”
In Larsen’s eyes, tiny specks floated like steel filings, the filter through which he viewed the world. Since the last time I’d seen him, his face seemed to have slackened, no doubt from the tranquility of occupying a pacified area. Now he modulated his voice so it wouldn’t escape the corrugated walls.
“Tanner, you asked me to hear you out, and I’ve done so. To my thinking, your premise strains credibility. You say that this Frenchman kept a bootlegged helicopter at the MACV villa in Vung Tau. I’ve been to that villa. The lawn extends barely far enough to land a single chopper. Hiding one there would be impossible.”
“So maybe he didn’t keep it at the villa proper. There must be another facility nearby.”
“There must be? You’re speculating. And you say that from Vung Tau, the pilot flew all the way to the Fishhook in Cambodia? That’s damned far.”
“One hundred ten miles. Double that for the round trip. With a light load, it’s within the operating range of a UH-1, just over an hour in the air each way.”
“According to you, the pilot was a civilian. No civilian with any sense would fly a route like that at night.”
“He was French ex-military. Maybe they trained him in night flying.”
“More speculation.”
“Yes sir. But not unreasonable.”
“What you’re asking me to do is to send young soldiers on an uncoordinated mission, to a place I can’t give them fire support. How do I explain if they run into trouble?”
“Cobris pulled you out of Tay Ninh Province so you wouldn’t find the chopper.”
“Keep your goddamn voice down!”
“Look where he dumped you.” I gestured at the seedy metal hut.
“There’s no proof he had anything to do with it.”
“Not evidence that would stand up in court. But the pieces fit together to form a picture. It’s a scheme of some kind, with Cobris behind it.”
“What does finding the chopper accomplish?”
“The only guarantee is, if I don’t try, Cobris wins.”
“Seems like you’re itching to bag yourself a general.”
“That’s not the reason. I have friends who are at risk because they helped me. A corrupt warlord has threatened my Saigon police contact. And somebody put a contract out on the showgirl Kim Thi. Two nights ago, I shot it out with two thugs who tried to ambush her in an alley.”
He stared into his coffee cup, and I was reminded of André searching the depths of his drink as if wisdom might bubble up. “A warlord, a showgirl, a shootout in an alley. Do you have any idea how fucking crazy it sounds?”
“Yes sir.”
“After twenty-six years in uniform, there’s a chance I’ll get my stars, if I don’t fuck up. Then I might be able to do something to save the Army from sons of bitches like Cobris. From everything you’ve said, to back you would be a fool’s gamble.”
“The cop and showgirl are my people, sir. Backing them isn’t optional for me.”
“Your people? They’re Vietnamese.”
I didn’t comment. Larsen didn’t strike me as a bigot; he was merely puzzled by a brand of loyalty he hadn’t encountered before. Outside, a flight of helicopters roared over heading northward toward Cambodia, and in the whop of rotors I could almost hear his thoughts. He was thinking about backing his people up. It was the reason he’d insisted on the investigation in the first place.
He placed his cup gently on the table. Perhaps he resisted the urge to slam it down. “You got a weapon?”
“I brought my .45.”
“We’ll scrounge up a set of web gear and a rifle. If you run into the enemy, firing a handgun will only let them know how weak you are.” He leaned over the map. “I don’t see a landing zone near your crossed lines, but Area Zulu is low risk, so you can go to treetop level to scout for one. A squad from the brigade’s recon platoon will assemble in twenty minutes and lead you to the helipad. There’s a chopper there on standby.” He checked his watch. “It’s afternoon already. I can give you about two hours on the ground, one time only.”
* * *
The rotors churned nervous energy into Lieutenant Zuniga and the six men from the brigade recon platoon. They sat fidgety on the chopper’s floor, their eyes watchful. Zuniga belonged to the category of officer who was competent and who didn’t like to be around those who were not. His face had gone taut when I’d explained our mission. Nothing incenses a soldier so much as to think that his superiors have handed him off to a crackpot.
The pilot’s voice in the headphones: “Coming up on Area Zulu.”
“Cut across the center,” I said over the mike. “Then loop around to the south.”
Zuniga leaned over water ribbed with half-submerged trees and toothed with broken trunks. “Looks like shit down there,” he shouted.
The pilot said, “I don’t know if I can put you down in that.” He swung over a patina the shade of chocolate milk. Like an exploding can of green paint, a flight of parrots scattered from our intrusion. I judged that we were near my crossed lines, but there was no obvious place to insert us.
“Circle around again,” I said.
He did so twice more. On the third circuit, I noticed a meadow of marshy grass jutting from submerged copses, pressed the push-to-talk button. “There!”
“That surface won’t hold the skids. You’ll have to jump.”
“What if there’s no bottom under that grass?” yelled Zuniga.
The sunlight blinded off the water, obscuring the depth. “Take us closer,” I said, and the chopper hovered down to a few feet. Past the skid, I made out mottled earth below the surface. Good enough. I pulled off the headphones. “Let’s go!”
The plunge immersed me to my waist. Pain shot up from my ankles. Zuniga and the recon team dropped in after me, their curses drowned in the rotor blast. They were traveling light: weapons, water, ammo, and commo gear only. Still it took ten minutes to get everybody out and to a mound of spongy ground.
Leaning against a spindly trunk, oozing water from the chest down, Zuniga pulled off his floppy cap and wagged his smooth-shaven head. “They told me you were an MP from Saigon. I never expected you to leap out of that chopper.”
Our insertion point was more than five hundred meters from the intersecting lines. On the azimuth I plotted, we marched northwest through the bog, sloshing through the groin-deep water, zigzagging around marled roots and deeper pools. The wetness seethed; to breathe gave the sensation of drawing on a hookah pipe. The mosquitoes found us and bit through our wet fatigues.
Zuniga advanced a security team and staked everybody else in pairs. We formed a human comb that glided through the roots and reeds. Soon he splashed over to me. “Let’s stop here for a few minutes,” he said. “I’m going to take one man to recon a clearing we just skirted. We might be able to use it as an extraction LZ—the water there looks only ankle deep. The chopper can hover low enough so we can climb on board. Those pilots hate to power
their skids out of the muck.”
“All right.”
“How long do we have to stay out here?”
“Until we reach the objective,” I said. “Then we search across a half-klick radius.”
“The objective? It’s nothing but swamp. Colonel Larsen ordered me not to get stuck here after dark.”
“We won’t.”
He peered at me, no doubt to discern if he could trust my judgment. He was right to be worried; we were isolated and vulnerable. Luckily he hadn’t asked me how I’d determined the site, by crossing strings that Lopez and I had stretched over maps taped together. A string’s width equaled thirty meters on the ground. Incomparable, to walk those meters in this bleak wetland. If Gerard’s flight route had been different from what I’d guessed, or he’d veered widely in an emergency descent, he’d have landed far off where the strings indicated.
Ten minutes later, Zuniga returned, and we resumed. In four teams of two, we made a dashed line, a formation that seemed orderly in the morass, imposing the illusion that I knew what I was doing. My partner was a private named Wells, a skinny kid with straight hair that drooped over his forehead. He wore his floppy cap rodeo-rider style behind his neck on a cord. No older than nineteen, still trusting the wisdom of his leaders, he was accumulating cynicism like pounds on his frame, the process sped by today’s experience.
“This is a wild fucking goose chase, right sir?”
“Maybe.”
“At least we ain’t dodging bullets.”
Indeed, the only reaction we stirred was to scare up water fowl, singly or in flocks. The birds weren’t used to people in their soggy habitat. As Larsen had appraised, no soldier would have much use for this place, even as a hideout.
We came upon a turret of dry ground bulging out of the water. A soldier spotted two empty C-ration cans, which Zuniga prodded with the muzzle of his M16. “No rust. Somebody left these here recently. Could be the enemy.”
I said, “I know who left them. He junked other cans by a tributary a few kilometers from here.”
“Whaddya wanna do, sir?”
I examined my map. To assume that Gerard had jettisoned the cans meant we should pivot along an adjusted line. It was a calculated risk, cutting off nearly half the original search area. Meanwhile, the clock was running.
I said, “We need to turn southwest.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. Reorient your men.” The assurance in my tone clawed at me. Wells had branded it correctly—this was a wild fucking goose chase. What had impelled me to bring these young soldiers out here today, gambling their lives on my guesswork?
Like a swinging gate, the line shifted until we faced our lengthening shadows. The water glimmered emerald. It grew shallower, only shin deep, and I no longer had to squint to see the root knobs. After twenty minutes we came upon another small mound. The sun picked out tree roots protruding from a clay bluff in the distance.
Zuniga said, “Looks like dry land ahead. Dry terrain means the NVA or Viet Cong. We don’t want to bump into either one.”
“Then we’ll shift southward.”
Zuniga edged close, spoke in a hoarse whisper. “Sir, there is nothing here. The chopper will be on station in fifty-five minutes, and we need to set up the LZ.”
“Keep going,” I said. “If we don’t find anything in thirty minutes, we’ll call it.”
* * *
Twenty minutes later, sloshing along, I wedged my foot under a root and twisted my ankle. I thought, wouldn’t these infantrymen just love carrying me through the bog? Somehow, Gerard had endured ten klicks, his journey ending in a white flash he probably never saw, at the hands of men he wouldn’t have encountered save for their delay in a thorn thicket. Enter the jungle and you played by its rules.
While the ankle pain subsided, I paused to drink water, and a wide leaf broke off overhead. Weighty on the stem end, it caromed awkwardly. The trees were taller in this part, the canopy forming black weaves where the branches and vines laced together, and through these the leaf jolted until it plopped in the water. Waves pulsed at my shins.
On the surface, a vague luster.
Oil?
I looked up.
In one of the weaves, I saw an olive-tinted surface. A succession of rivets chased around the edge.
An outline materialized.
Wells asked, “Whatcha lookin’ at, sir?”
“Go get the lieutenant.”
Nose down, the helicopter traced a disturbing form, like a human skull gleaned amid the clutter of an attic. Hard to discern which parts had sheared off in the crash and which the tree occulted. The rotors were missing; they must have fallen into the water or become snagged in the high canopy when the chopper impacted. Gone too was the upper tail fin. I imagined the grinding descent, the groans as the chassis bent, the nesting into vines. Jagged branches had breached the fuselage. Ensnared, the chopper might dangle for years before it settled to earth.
I’d brought a 35mm camera and was snapping pictures when Zuniga walked up. “Shit,” he said, probably feeling the same shudder as I had when I’d spotted the wreck. “That is a creepy sight. You say there were survivors?”
“One that I know of.”
His voice dropped. “Somebody might still be inside?”
“The only way to find out is to climb.”
“Daylight is slipping on us, sir.”
“I’ll go as fast as I can.”
I deposited my gear with him, minus the .45 that I buttoned in my right thigh cargo pocket, and the camera, secured in the left. Boosted by Zuniga and Wells into the lower branches, I scaled upward. The fuselage hung like a slumbering bat that slipped in and out of my vision. They talked me along at places where I couldn’t see past the leaves, and I nosed through a resistive thicket headfirst into a jungle spider’s gluey web. The spider waved its hairy legs centimeters from my face. I blew hard and it receded. Gripping to a vine, I swung in an uneasy rhythm with the trapped ship.
“Watch it, sir. You don’t wanna pull that bitch down on top of you.”
For the first time I had the fuselage in clear view. This close it lost its eerie vibe and gave off the same mundane aura as the husks of ruined cars along Highway One. The coat of unreflective olive was ordinary too, until you hunted for markings. Army helicopters normally manifested subdued black lettering on the tail, and units typically emblazoned their insignia on the nose. This one had no markings at all. I took out the camera and snapped more shots, for what they were worth, capturing a ghost ship from nowhere.
In its airy repose, the chopper over time would have traded its characteristic fuel scent for the odors of the deep marsh. The tang of aviation fuel lingered, proving it had crashed recently. No other flights had gone missing over War Zone C. I had no doubt I was looking at Gerard Penelon’s ride.
Standing on a branch, I kicked the frame a few times to make sure there wasn’t a snake or a bee’s nest lurking inside. The sole reaction was the blur of an ochre lizard across the riveting.
“You sure that’s advisable?” Zuniga challenged.
“The vines arrested her descent. I think they’ll hold. If not, you probably should stand back.” I heard my lookouts sloshing rearward, while I stretched half in, half out of the wreck. It gave no detectable slippage. I looked for something to hang onto. The nylon hand loops slumped against the ceiling, now a vertical wall to my left. In what had been the rear bulkhead I found one of the hinged metal cargo links, folded it out to grip, and balanced on the doorway lip. The fuselage shuddered.
I scanned the cabin. Thank God, no poor soul had been left here.
Jammed open in the crash, the near-side cargo door hovered above me like a guillotine. The opposite door had popped off its tracks and braced against the frame. No seats in the cargo compartment. Standard gray quilted insulation covered the interior walls and ceiling; the vertical floor showed bare aluminum with raised nubs for traction. Everything looked clean except for a honey-brown oil jib over
the nubs. Side-stepping along the doorframe to get a better view of the cockpit, I stretched for another grip. My foot slipped, and my fingers clawed across the oil.
I pitched headlong into the catcher’s mitt of vines.
“What the fuck are you doing up there, sir?”
“It’s okay,” I rasped. Nested in the vines, pulse drumming wildly at the side of my neck, I panted. My mouth, the only dry thing in this whole goddamn Area Zulu, tasted like I’d poured a can of talcum powder into it.
If the chopper had held through that, it would withstand any stress my puny one hundred sixty pounds might add. I gripped the skid brace and hauled myself back up and inside, not trusting my footing until I’d locked my fingers around clamps. From my perch, I gazed into the pilot’s compartment. The seats seemed undamaged; so did the instrument panel except for a burst seam sprouting plastic-coated wires. The left windshield had popped out, opening a gaping socket. Past the dangling shoulder belts, I spotted the buckled Plexiglas in vines at the chopper’s nose. Below opened a tunnel in the vegetation, through which I could see Zuniga and Wells. Maybe the tunnel was how Gerard had climbed down.
The pilot had been extremely lucky—the central cabin had stayed intact. In a chopper crash, the rotor blades striking an immovable object could torque out the drive train, usually frontward, half a ton of hot steel mashing everything in its path.
I needed the aircraft number. I poked around for a data plate, not expecting to find one. If Stobe had repainted the fuselage to obliterate the outside markings, meticulously chipped the serial-number plate off the PRC25 radio, he wouldn’t have overlooked an obvious plate inside the cockpit. He’d have had more trouble hiding the origins of the engine that bore multiple numbers inscribed in the metal. But the engine compartment rested above the cabin. To check it required climbing through the vines and removing the cowl. There wasn’t time.
Gingerly I dangled into the cockpit until my feet rested on the avionics array. There were hollow wells where instruments commonly fit. The radio rack was empty. Finding an intact gauge, with my belt knife I turned the plate screws, tossed aside the faceplate, and extracted the instrument that was about the size of a small loaf of bread. Severed the tethering wires and rotated it until I found the data plate: Attitude Indicator, Model 2061C-12, Serial 16028.