by Jeff Wallace
On the front lawn squatted a helicopter, its rotors drooping. “That’s the general’s rig,” Stobe said. “But where is he? And where’s the other ship?”
“Put down and I’ll have a look.”
* * *
The skids bumped and I was out and running toward the general’s chopper. Leading the squad was a young sergeant named McAdams, normally a door gunner. He surprised me by doing the right thing—he dashed to the overturned truck, the only worthy cover nearby, and spread out his men. As soon as we’d cleared the rotor radius, Stobe throttled his ship skyward—a chopper on the ground is vulnerable—and debris from the vertical takeoff peppered us and clacked against the truck.
Up close, the parked helicopter revealed bullet holes stitched across the engine compartment. Oil bled down the windshield and dribbled from the nose. Nobody was inside.
I radioed Stobe and described the damage.
“I haven’t spotted the other ship,” he came back. “I don’t see anybody else. I’m going to do a wider circuit.”
I shifted my attention to the house where Simone had been born. On meter-high posts that protected it from flooding in the heart of the monsoons, the timeworn edifice loomed, a creepy visage that reminded me of the helicopter I’d spotted in the tree. Somebody might still be inside? Shredded porch screens flapped. When I kicked open the door, a bird fluttered frantically out. The foyer smelled of mildew and explosive residue—an artillery shell had vented its energy here, erupting wood and plaster. Overhead, electric wires suspended a fallen ceiling fan at a crazy angle.
I entered rooms: a dining salon and a parlor whose overturned furniture evoked Quartier Latin on André’s last day. Some things had stayed intact. On the flowered wallpaper hung oil portraits of women, their sharp chins hinting at their relation to Simone, their eyes gazing with detachment at the broken rear windows and swaying curtains. Through them I could make out the garage and a line of servants’ quarters past a tin-roofed walkway. On a ledge by the stair banister rested a silver plate, meant for the calling cards the colonialists had dropped off when they’d attended the social gatherings. I imagined the men and women resplendent in their linen suits and silk dresses in which they socialized amid the comforting hum of their own language. Colonialism is a state of mind. To have commanded this splendid plateau must have evoked a peacock’s pride, the Frenchmen raising their glasses to how they’d possess Indochina forever. Sixteen years after forever ended, I had to wonder why Simone had kept the place all tricked out. It was one thing to save her parents’ Cambodian estate, another to preserve the past as she’d done. Some eras shouldn’t be memorialized. They summon hate.
Peering up the stairwell to the second floor, I could see past the wood banister to the crashed-through ceiling where a shell had hit. I’d left the front door open, and the breeze swirled in and plucked at my hair, rousing the dangling ceiling fan into a drowsy pirouette. I was about to ascend when I heard footsteps pounding, and I turned to see McAdams leap over a tumbled divan as if it were a racing hurdle.
“Major Stobe just radioed,” he panted. “He flew over a concentration of NVAs at the western woodline. He said they saw his chopper land, and now they’re moving this way. We’ve got to clear out!”
I thought, the NVAs must have shot up the parked helicopter and waited, knowing that somebody would come looking for it. “How far?”
“Less than a klick away.”
I had time.
“Sir?”
“Get ready. I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”
I was already on my way up the stairs. In disbelief, McAdams watched.
He probably hadn’t smelled the perfume in the air.
A hallway opened at the stair top. On the floor, footprints marred the plaster dust. The perfume lingered. I wasn’t good at scents, but this one I recognized from the penthouse apartment in Saigon, a subtle fragrance mixing East and West. It seemed to emanate from close by. I eased toward the nearest door slightly ajar, and, remembering trip wires, quickly checked the edges. When I pushed it open, the tepid light through lace curtains revealed a seated figure enshrouded in a sheet, a bald mountain peak against a wispy sky.
As if the apparition might lunge at me, I crept forward, and with my thumb and forefinger pinched the fabric and tugged it up gently—there are superstitions about waking the dead—and exposed the oyster-white face of General Kyle Cobris. The thrown sheet had been an act of courtesy to keep the birds off. The bullet hole low in his forehead had hardly bled, a testament to how fast his heart had stopped beating. The killing shot had come from a small-caliber handgun at point-blank range—burnt gunpowder specked the surrounding skin.
On a table alongside, a jade ashtray, the sister of the one in Simone’s Saigon apartment, a cigarillo butt, and the general’s pewter lighter. He must have been reaching for the lighter when the shot came. The arm bridged to the face I conjured in its final illusions of potency. What a speech he must have made, pontificating about moral justice and virtue and seeing over the horizon, believing that his rhetorical theatrics would cow Simone into answering the questions he’d heard from the Randolph Press Syndicate preparatory to the release of a story. In the footsteps of his countrymen who’d resorted to force whose consequences they did not understand, he’d tried to intimidate her, managed instead to convince her that he’d get in her way, and he’d joined Kim Thi and André with a ticket to the land of the ancestors.
His horizon now was exactly zero.
How sad. I could hardly imagine a pair more made for each other. Elite, brilliant, confident, they’d regarded the world as an asset to be controlled, themselves as its masters, the one’s image revealed in the other, a mutual narcissism. How far had their relationship progressed? Had she cared about him, or simply used him for what he could give her, freedom to fly like a wraith at night over a land at war?
In the end, she’d killed him as easily as she’d click out a light.
I pictured her tearing open the envelope marked To Simone, From George.
Dear Simone,
Having returned one set of jewels to you, I bring another, perhaps more valuable. A bit of advice: Leave Saigon. The press is about to become even more nettlesome, for I’ve given them your story, true and detailed. They are whetted for interesting news these days, as long as they can quote someone, and now they can. If you go today, you may beat the headlines. Sorry not to have informed you in person, but time is a hellhound for me too.
George
Like a grave robber, I slid the lighter into my hand.
A mortar shell clumped authoritatively in the orchard.
* * *
I intended to recover Cobris’s body and carry it to the chopper. But first I had to check something.
Simone had come back here for a reason.
Returning to the first floor, I exited through the rear door and crossed the gravel turn-around to the garage, where I almost tripped over three cowering Cambodian plantation hands. Startled, they jumped up. I couldn’t blame them for being terrified. An invasion, landing helicopters, shells going off, and up runs an American with a lemur’s black eyes...
The garage doors hung open. I went in. Along the walls, farm tools rusted in the humidity—not much real plantation work had been going on here lately. In the center posed a couple as made for each other as Cobris and Simone: a red, three-wheeled Tri-Lambretta and a powder-blue Citroën Deux Chevaux. Behind the vehicles, a plain door on the back wall. I kicked and the flimsy hasp tore away.
An artillery shell had buckled the roof. Ceiling panels sagged. Glass fragments speckled a laminate table, the remains of odd-shaped beakers and metal tubing that dangled like the ivy my father used to rake off our siding in Massachusetts. Crunching over debris, I pulled open one of the lower cabinets and saw stacks of small, oblong boxes, U.S. military supplies pilfered and distributed on the black market. The lettering read: BAG, PLASTIC, CLEAR, 64 OZ, 100CT. There were at least a dozen boxes.
Heroin comin
g out of the Golden Triangle into Vietnam was reportedly the purest ever marketed, so potent that users could smoke rather than inject it. So why the lab? Had Simone’s Cambodian property been a transshipment point, or something more? I guessed the latter. And that the men outside were not plantation hands; they were her henchmen who’d doctored the heroin to buck-up the effect.
No wonder I still craved the stuff.
The hiding place formed a cutout in the floorboards the size of a child’s coffin. Probably it had havened the last hundred bags or so of the product Simone had come back to retrieve, no doubt to sell to her contacts in Vung Tau. Had her helicopter not crashed into Area Zulu, she already would have recovered the drugs and maybe a few keepsakes from her house. She’d have dismantled the lab. But last night she’d been in a hurry and left it for the Cambodians to clean up.
Maybe that was why they hadn’t run away. They stood now at the garage doorway, their expressions confused and agitated. One of them wore a dent on the side of his head, an old war wound. More densely muscled than his companions, he was Cambodia’s version of a Saigon cowboy—his army service probably dated to the First Indochina War, when, on behalf of the French, his thick hands and forearms had wrung the necks of rebellious peasants. He glowered menacingly.
I scanned the garage, found what I was looking for, a jerry can of gasoline, opened it, and sloshed the contents through the lab doorway and across the table and the broken beakers. Poured a trail to the driveway. Tossing the can aside, I pulled out Cobris’s pewter lighter. This proved too much for the skull-dented Cambodian. Rushing to the Tri-Lambretta, he withdrew an M2 carbine, and he might have gotten the drop on me had he remembered his old army lessons, but he was still tugging on the charging handle, peering at the chamber, when I shot him in the top of the head. Down he crumpled into a seated pose against the vehicle’s beak-like fender, his mud-covered boots kicked wide.
“Out!” I shouted. The other two backed away. I flicked the lighter and the gas trail came alive. Mango-colored flames licked the walls, smoke billowed through the lab roof and into the trees. For a few seconds, watching the flames engulf the vehicles, I mused that I’d vaulted the line of my authorities. But who else was going to stand for those who’d OD’d on the heroin this place had turned out?
I wondered if Giang, in the arms of his ancestors, was grinning that grin of his.
* * *
Running toward the squad, I still had it in mind to recover Cobris’s body. The NVA mortar gunners must have traversed their tube to sight on the smoke; the shells started dropping close. One went through the roof, another into the trees, showering me with bark. I reached McAdams just as a round burst at the driveway’s edge.
“They’ve got us bracketed,” he remarked, rather calmly, making me wonder if his grace under pressure was real or vacuous unfamiliarity with what mortar shrapnel did to the human body.
I took the radio handset. “We could use a ride out of here.”
Stobe’s voice crackled, “Bad news. The NVA has set up two hundred meters to your west. All that’s holding them is the hope that I’ll land where I did before. If I do, I’ll never get back into the air. You’ve got to hightail it to a better extraction site.”
“Which way?”
“Move in the direction of my line of flight. I’m coming over you in about thirty seconds.” A pause in the transmission. “What did you find inside?”
“Your boss. Dead.”
“Are you sure?”
“He took a bullet in the forehead. You’re welcome to have a look for yourself.”
Another pause. “Negative. Out.”
The wind shifted and the smoke from the garage and the now-ablaze house twined into an ebony column. Flames licked through the windows. There was no possibility of recovering Cobris’s body now. Rotor blades thudded and Stobe’s ship arrowed due east through the smoke.
Toward the rubber trees we sprinted. We had to cross three hundred meters before the terrain swooped into rough jungle and cover. If we could get that far, Stobe could direct us to a place where he could land and lift us out.
The NVAs saw us. Their bullets sheared off the tree branches.
* * *
They chased us. Amid the rubber trees, their brown uniforms looked like dabs of mustard on celery stalks. Stobe dropped a parcel that crashed through the branches. While McAdams scooped it up, one of the soldiers stopped at a rubber tree to pump out rounds from his shotgun, making a fat target of himself. I barely managed to grab him by the collar and pull him back before bullets shredded the trunk.
It was all I could do to keep running. These soldiers were stronger than me—they were younger and hadn’t just emerged from a hospital bed. Yet they didn’t know what to do. Through the orchard they bunched together like teenage girls going to a movie. No time to train them to disperse, I could only hope they’d imitate me cutting diagonally across the orchard rows, to prevent the shooters from sighting a machine gun along a row and dropping us all in a single burst.
The grove ended and the land broke over a slope. No pause, I plummeted like a log down a mud chute. To slow my descent, I clutched to vines, but I was going too fast and they sluiced through my fingers. Alongside me, a soldier roller-coastered headfirst.
I crashed to the bottom. “Get up, keep moving!”
Through the marshy undergrowth, tripping over protruding roots, I reached the base of a banyan tree. The bark sported scars from some long-forgotten shootout. The jungle was a vast graveyard for Frenchmen, Japanese, Vietnamese, Cambodians. I thought of the wounded men who’d toppled into it, never to be found.
The scabs from my tarmac skid had opened. Blood soaked the gauze. Barely two days since I’d left the hospital, the overdose still coursed in my bloodstream, and my brain sputtered like a motor-pool jeep. I was patently unfit to be leading these soldiers. One by one, they stumbled up, pummeled from the chase but unhurt, each as blank faced as the next.
McAdams unzipped the package Stobe had dropped, dumped out a pair each of flares and colored smoke grenades for signaling, a map, and a compass. I unfolded the map and strained to focus on the squiggly lines.
Past the chorus of heavy breathing, I listened for the sounds of pursuit.
Noises are hard to isolate in the jungle. The harmonics span the chit-chit of insects, water dripping, wind fluting through the hanging vines, the screeches of parrots. The leaf canopy triplicates itself upward, each layer its own ecology that echoes in a different way. Below, moisture and insects dissolve prostrate things and secrete them into the soil with an incessant gurgle. Any sound might be close or far off.
Stobe had grease-penciled a loop around a hilltop a kilometer away, meaning it was the closest place he could land. To get there, I had to lead McAdams and seven first-tour mechanics or door gunners whose combat experience, if any, was from above the canopy. These kids were so jumpy they’d shoot each other by accident. “We have to move,” I told them. “Make sure your weapons are on safe.”
I tucked the map into my thigh cargo pocket and pushed up on wobbly legs. Taking point, I doubted I could hike a kilometer.
Deeper into the undergrowth we pushed. It felt like being wrapped in a gigantic spring roll bound with creepers. None of the soldiers had been in the jungle before, and they shuddered when we slipped into a rainwater-etched fissure. Weaving through the vine curtains, we startled lizards and excited the monkeys above. The upper limbs interlocked like the beams in a basilica, and the monkeys leapt in a ceiling mural gone amok, their figures breaking the frail sunbeams. We squashed through sediment full of leeches. No time to stop and pick them off.
Lightly equipped, we didn’t make much racket, and I hoped we could stay concealed long enough to outdistance our pursuers, radio the chopper, and be lifted out before they got close. The danger was that the NVA knew this terrain, might guess where we were headed, and speed there on a parallel route. I paused only for compass sightings and to listen. If the enemy was following, he was too far be
hind to detect. Tempting to think nobody was there. And suicidal. Stories from the First Indochina War still made the rounds, of the enemy stalking cut-off French columns for days, over many kilometers, just to get the kill. I had to assume the NVA soldiers were tracking us and would close the distance eventually. Stobe had to extract us or bring help—American or South Vietnamese units must be nearby. Yet the daylight under the canopy already had begun to dim. No rescue would come after dark, and we’d be left to face an enemy whose métier was the night.
* * *
At eighteen hundred hours, sweat sodden, we trudged onto the hilltop. Not much of an LZ—the clearing barely would accommodate a single helicopter—yet the area was too big to secure with the inexperienced group I had. I positioned them in a crescent facing downhill, the radio operator with me a few meters within the surrounding brush. My attempts to radio Stobe failed; I heard neither a break in the static nor thump from the ship’s rotors. He must have flown back to refuel. Under my breath I cursed. Every minute narrowed our lead.
Half an hour passed before I picked out the whop-whop to the south. I grabbed the radio handset, reached him on the first try. “We’re at your site.”
“Pop smoke.”
I pitched a smoke grenade at the clearing’s downwind edge. A yellow cloud blossomed.
“Coming in on yellow,” he miked, using the standard identify-color procedure that kept pilots from guiding on visual signals the NVA might use to confuse them or lure them into an ambush.
The shooting started as soon as he hovered overhead. From across the clearing, machine-gun tracers spat upward. I seized the handset. “You’re under fire! Break off!”