The Man Who Walked Out of the Jungle

by Jeff Wallace

  I retrieved the letter from his fingers. “Thank you for all you’ve done for me.”

  “My hope is for goodness for you and Tuy, and that you will choose wisely from now on.”

  * * *

  Before I left the house, I gave the second letter to Tuy, with instructions.

  I carried the first letter myself. I’d have preferred for Trong to have delivered it; I wasn’t sure of the reception I’d get at the yellow-brick apartment building. The French security men appeared no warier of me than they’d been before, and they accepted the envelope addressed to Simone. Was she home, I asked? Yes, they thought so. Would Monsieur like to wait for a reply? No, that wouldn’t be necessary.

  At the office of the Randolph Press Syndicate, Tuy insisted on seeing Alton Gribley in person. She had to wait fifteen minutes until he appeared. She didn’t introduce herself or say a word other than to ask him to confirm his identity. Then she handed him the envelope and left.

  It was important that both letters be presented nearly simultaneously. Depending on how the recipients reacted, the delivery of one might interfere with the other. I was expecting problems at the gate at Tan Son Nhut, but everything seemed normal when Lopez picked me up and drove through.

  Normally Lopez didn’t carry a sidearm. At the French Compound, I wrote out and signed an order directing him to draw from the arms room a .45 pistol. He was smart enough to show the armorer the order, then to fold it into his pocket for safekeeping. Having lost my own .45 to the fight in Tuy’s apartment, I signed out another. Then I reclined on the humidity-sodden cushion of the black vinyl couch Lopez dragged in. I had no trouble sleeping as the sun set and the breeze swept away the dung odor. Normally we locked the place after dark. Tonight it was open for business, Lopez at the desk sipping coffee, watching the moths cling to the screen, his right hand by the pistol in the open drawer.

  Doctor Wilcott had been right; I hadn’t recovered from the overdose. Amid syncopations of nausea and startling drug cravings, cataplexy quivered my lips. I gasped, thrashed, yelped. The substance must have burnished my retinas. Through them, the air wore a yellow tint, the shade of André’s kepi drink.

  Day 17

  __________

  When dawn reddened the louvers, I took a whore’s bath in the washroom sink. Peeled off the gauze, exposing a moonscape of scabs. I re-wrapped them in clean dressings and fell back to sleep. It was Sunday morning, and this corner of Tan Son Nhut drooped in the low-angle sunlight, even the new replacements compound slumbered. Occasionally I stirred to the tinny broadcast on Lopez’s transistor radio, the Armed Forces Radio channel’s censored news droning between songs by Melanie and Jimmy Hendrix and the Association. The hours milled on. By midmorning, the airfield had become screechy with jets—the Cambodia incursion still churned. After a while, I didn’t register the noise.

  Nothing seemed to be happening. What if, blunted and enfeebled, too pathetic to spark a reaction from my enemies, all I’d accomplished had been to cast myself beyond anyone’s goodwill, past my chance to take Tuy out of Saigon?

  Cobris was right. I was a delinquent.

  In the dung-laced miasma, I sweated.

  Eleven hundred hours. The phone jingled. Lopez handed me the receiver. “I asked who was calling. He wouldn’t say, just insisted I put you on.”

  I said, “Tanner.”

  “Could you stop by?” Stobe had real self-control. I almost couldn’t hear the stress.

  “Sure, why not?”

  I took my time getting ready.

  At the door, Lopez waited for orders.

  I said, “I don’t think anybody will come after you, but if they do, or if it looks like I’m never coming back, get the file from Hollis and take it to General Abrams.”

  “You sure you don’t want me along, to watch your six?”

  “Not this time.”

  At the airfield’s edge, the palm trees segmented an airliner leased to ferry home another increment in the Vietnamization exodus. The radar tower groped for things I couldn’t see, while by the hangar doors, Stobe waited in his flight suit. He saw me, and I had the impression that he had to steady himself. He led me inside, past the mechanics who turned wrenches on choppers, to a ship budding its cowl panels for inspection. In the cabin, we sat on the facing nylon benches, and he slid the door shut.

  “Something has gone wrong.” He sucked a breath. To utter those four words must have winded him. The mechanics’ tools clinked on the airframes, the sounds of dismantlement. I lit a cigarette, plainly in violation of the NO SMOKING signs posted everywhere. Enforcing regulations was the last thing on Stobe’s checklist today.

  “Simone came by last night,” he said. “It was late, around twenty-three hundred hours, but she insisted that I fly her to her place immediately. She said the general had okay’d it. I shouldn’t have taken her at her word.”

  I had to assume that being the general’s mistress somehow afforded Simone, a Frenchwoman, the privilege to move around a military base. That was bad enough. The notion that she could show up and demand a ride on a military aircraft was too outrageous for comment. “Her place. Meaning Cambodia?”

  He went on as if I’d stated a common fact. “I assigned a pilot I trusted. Certified and experienced in night flying. Then I called MACV, left a message for Cobris, and went to bed. My duty officer woke me a couple hours later to say that General Cobris himself had driven up, demanded his rig, and taken off, heading north. Alone.”

  “And neither of the choppers has come back?”

  Stobe stared down. Simone had been gone for twelve hours, Cobris ten.

  “So you’ve got three persons and two choppers missing, and you’re asking me if the lights are flashing red?”

  “I thought you might have an explanation for what’s going on.” His bloodshot eyes revealed a soul breached by doubts.

  I said, “You have a bad habit of handing out choppers to people they don’t belong to. Like the one Cobris flew on Tuesday loaded with rockets. What did you think he was going to do with those rockets, hunt tree monkeys?”

  I might have slapped him. His face stiffened. Then he seemed to relax, a momentary flashback to the man who’d have laughed off the question. It didn’t last. Casually I aligned the major’s insignia on my fatigue cap; his eyes locked on as if it were a hypnotist’s medallion.

  “André was an evil man,” he said softly.

  “So I heard. How he tried to coerce Simone to run drugs for him and his partner, General Huang. Wasn’t that the story?”

  “The heroin went to American GIs. He deserved to die for that alone.”

  “As you head north on Highway 13, you encounter South Vietnamese military checkpoints where the soldiers search cars. How many checkpoints would you say? Three? Four?”

  His bushy brows squeezed together.

  I said, “Do you know who controls those checkpoints?”

  “The ARVN?”

  I didn’t usually snicker when people were close to baring their souls, but this time I couldn’t help it. “Come on, Stobe. You’ve been around long enough to know that the ARVN is not a homogenous organization. It’s more like a collection of fiefdoms, each with its own warlord. So guess which warlord controls that sector?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Try General Huang.”

  “André’s partner?”

  “Not André’s. Simone’s.”

  He scowled. “That doesn’t make sense. If she was Huang’s partner, why would she need to fly when she could drive through the checkpoints?”

  “Because she’s not a very faithful partner.”

  Comprehension, or the beginning of it, darkened his face.

  I went on. “As long as things were going smoothly, she could share the profits with Huang and still make plenty to pay for her lifestyle in Saigon and to prepare her nest egg for the future. But a couple of months ago, the situation in Cambodia changed. An ambitious general overthrew the ruler, and the place fell into turmoil. When t
hat happened, our long tolerance for the communist border sanctuaries ran out. Simone realized that her time was running out too.”

  “There’s no way she knew about the invasion ahead of time,” declaimed Stobe. “Even Cobris didn’t know about it more than a few days in advance. I was with him when the orders came.”

  “She didn’t know. She guessed. She didn’t need a soothsayer to tell her that the one piece of her father’s legacy she still owned was about to be overrun, and her network in Cambodia disrupted, along with her profits. So she asked Cobris to help her close the old estate. She concocted a story that André was running drugs and coercing her so that she couldn’t use the road. To liberate her from all that oppression, and with your assistance, Cobris gave her a helicopter. André helped her locate Gerard. The man who flew those night missions had to be solid.”

  Stobe winced when I mentioned Gerard. I suspected that this was the first he’d heard about André’s connection to the pilot.

  I said, “The helicopter allowed her to move more heroin than ever before. Had she driven the road, the product would have been noted at those alert checkpoints, and Huang would have taken his enormous cut. This way, she kept it all. So Huang wouldn’t find out, she marketed it in Vung Tau, probably with Gerard’s help.”

  Stobe tried to keep himself from spiraling like a rudderless aircraft. “Christ, Tanner, that’s just nuts. A successful woman, why would she risk it?”

  “There’s no future for her in South Vietnam. Consider what she sees when she looks around: the Americans bailing out, the mandarins who run the place as corrupt as always. It’s just a matter of time before the communists shut the place down. She doesn’t want to be here when that happens. What she wants now is Paris, but not as some chased-home ragamuffin who only gets invitations to the lesser parties. Money fixes all that. She’s been collecting her fortune for a while. The invasion of Cambodia just meant she had to accelerate things.”

  Stobe was staring at his buffed boots, the naiveté peeling off him like the skin from a charred corpse. He would have preferred that my soliloquy had reached its end, but I wasn’t finished yet.

  “By this time,” I said, softly, trying to keep the edge off my voice, “André was a liability to her. He was doing his pathetic best to hang around. He let his own reputation take the hit for her drug smuggling—what did he care?—she was his reputation. What he wanted was for her to take him back. He was a dreamer, an outmoded vogue—too unsophisticated to hold her interest, too working-class to take to Paris, too shaky to jettison. Cut loose, he might divulge how she’d earned her money. The errand was too tricky to trust to Huang. So she found somebody else to kill him.”

  “Cobris went alone,” he blurted.

  “You got the ship ready, the rockets loaded.”

  It was no finger-pointing accusation, just a statement of fact: Stobe was an accessory to murder. The color drained out of his cheeks, his mouth twitched like a lab rat prodded with an electric probe. He muttered to himself, trying to cobble together an excuse, until he realized that I wasn’t the best audience. I was the one who hunted down people like him.

  I said, “If you want to know what happened to Cobris and Simone, we have to cross the border. Can you get another chopper ready?”

  Perhaps wondering why I wasn’t headed instead to MACV headquarters to deliver my evidence, he blinked.

  “We’ll need as many soldiers as you can suit up,” I added. “There’s no telling the situation on the ground.”

  Whether he agreed with me or was simply doing as he was told, grasping at whatever of his officer’s qualities remained, he nodded. He stared at the door handle as if it demanded all his concentration to open. By habit he stepped briskly, made it only a few strides before he slowed to a shuffle, his back bowed as if one of his helicopters had landed on him.

  * * *

  Off the chopper’s nose, the Saigon River wagged a brown dragon’s tail over the landscape. We passed the Gavet radio tower at such altitude that I could see the Annamite Mountains bulging to the northeast. Ordinary scenery, until I looked toward the northern horizon. Ten days had passed since U.S. and ARVN units had invaded Cambodia. We’d captured tons of supplies and chased the enemy back from the border. For the most part, our forces had encountered only small NVA elements left behind to harass them. The firefights nonetheless continued, and supporting artillery raised a crop of smoke plumes ahead.

  For years, the communists had sheltered in their border camps. Cambodia’s ruler Norodom Sihanouk had disliked their presence but hadn’t done anything about it. He hadn’t done anything about the B-52 strikes either. The Cambodia incursion had rekindled press reports—denied by the U.S. administration—that we’d been bombing the sanctuaries for more than a year. A single B-52 unleashed 30 tons of explosives. When Stobe’s helicopter crossed the frontier, I noticed square kilometers laid waste and pocked with hundreds of rain-flooded bomb craters, around which the broken trees lay like so many discarded cocktail umbrellas.

  Could we deny that?

  Whatever else they’d accomplished, the airstrikes apparently hadn’t dislodged the elusive communists. In January of this year, when Sihanouk traveled abroad, his pro-American Prime Minister General Lon Nol had seized power and offered the United States an alliance. Here was an opportunity for us to expel the enemy from the border sanctuaries and buy time for Vietnamization to take root. Lon Nol wanted our help to buttress his new regime. For both parties, a deal too good to pass up. Too good. But if Lon Nol had been reading his tea leaves, he’d have noted that conflicts in this corner of the world spanned decades. The United States already was withdrawing from South Vietnam. Who was going to step in to save Cambodia next time?

  I sat in the copilot’s seat. In the cabin behind hunched eight of Stobe’s quickly mustered soldiers. They bore no resemblance to the seasoned recon squad I’d flown with to Area Zulu. Joining the incursion into Cambodia wasn’t what they’d expected to happen to them today. Inadequately equipped, they had only their web gear, a mix of light weapons—M16s and shotguns—and minimal ammunition. A single item gave me reassurance—the PRC25 radio one of them carried.

  I plugged my headset into the intercom lead to talk to Stobe. He had no crew for this flight, and no other headsets were active, so it was a private line between us. I said, “Can you talk while you fly?”

  “Why not?”

  “Tell me about the chopper you gave to Gerard.”

  “A friend of mine was the investigating officer for a non-combat crash in a rice paddy on the Plain of Reeds. Happens all the time, some hot dog bellies in. The unit sling-loaded the damaged airframe back and stored it outside their hangar. When I learned what the general wanted, I offered to take over the incident investigation. My friend agreed—nobody likes paperwork. I was able to get hold of the wreck, which I wrote up as a total loss. No questions were asked. I had my mechanics overhaul it nose to tail, replacing broken parts—essential components only. When the ship was ready, I flew it at night to a spot near Vung Tau. That’s where I met Gerard.”

  “You repainted it and removed the data plates.”

  “Cobris specified that Gerard was to receive only untraceable equipment, and I did what I could to conceal where everything came from. I knew I’d have a problem effacing the engine inscriptions, but I figured that the chopper had an appointment with the South China Sea, once Simone was done with it.”

  “Where did you get the radio and the rifle?”

  “Four months ago, I flew into an LZ after a firefight, and an infantryman loaded them aboard my ship. I gave them to my supply sergeant to stash away. The Viet Cong had refitted the radio for civilian batteries—just right for Gerard for emergency commo. But when I tested it, the damn thing didn’t work. I had to get it fixed, and so doing created the paper trail you bird-dogged straight to me.”

  “Tell me about Gerard.”

  “I hardly knew him. Once he took possession of the chopper, he handled the functions himself:
piloting, simple maintenance, even the fueling. A couple of times he asked for spare parts. Simone would pass the requests to me via the general and Vangleman, and I’d send back the parts. He couldn’t have kept it up for long—maintaining a chopper is too complicated for one guy, but this was a short-time deal.”

  “And nobody in your unit thought it was strange, rebuilding a ghost ship and handing over those spare parts?”

  “They assumed I was doing a favor for somebody. Units trade favors every day—parts, equipment, whatever they need. It’s against regulations but greases an inflexible system. I used reliable men who kept their mouths shut.”

  I puzzled at his definition of reliable. The helicopter they’d refurbished had fallen out of the sky. With the general’s mistress aboard.

  Stobe went on. “Gerard was careful. He stored the ship under cover at Vung Tau and flew it only at night. A very professional character.”

  “He wasn’t professional enough. He told his fiancée about Simone and the flights. When Simone found out, she tagged her for a threat and put out a hit contract.”

  “What happened?”

  “They killed her.” My words clanged over the intercom, reminding me that Kim Thi’s death was my fault.

  Capping a plateau whose sides plunged into dense jungle, the old rubber plantation’s mint-green groves came into view. Stobe descended to skim above the treetops, a technique called ‘nap of the earth’ where he whipcracked overhead before anyone could take aim. The enemy reportedly had fled into the Cambodian hinterlands, but Stobe wasn’t taking chances. Scanning for activity, he banked over the trees. Everything looked prosaic and unmolested.

  Until the plantation house came into view.

  The white-framed manor posed above a rectangular lawn. Artillery had gouged holes in the roof tiles. In front, resembling a dead weed, a fire-blackened tree. Behind were buildings I judged to be garages and servant’s quarters, their roofs similarly marred. A truck lay on its side. Nobody was in sight. The invasion had passed through here like a bad dream, leaving the place to fall back into slumber.