“Sorry, mister. Here’s your newspaper back.” Willy pretended to dust off the paper as he set it back on the pile.
“Slow down, Willy,” he said to himself. “Remember the plan. Get up close and personal. Case the club but don’t do anything hasty. Look sharp, as sharp as you can, and above all, don’t be conspicuous.”
Willy looked down at his tattered threads. “Yeah, look sharp.” The garment district was just a few short blocks past the newspaper stand. Willy’s internal light went on. “Look sharp,” it said. He thought back as he ambled the remaining block to the squat buildings that housed the dollar-a-day seamstresses that made up the bulk of the Little Saigon sweat shops. It was here, he remembered, that the young student was killed several weeks ago. Killed and mutilated in the stairwell of one of these buildings. Just another dead VC sympathizer, he thought.
Willy saw the van that was backed up to one of the buildings. He noticed that the driver was loading it in a less than secure and proficient manner. He would walk up two flights of stairs, then come back down with an armload of clothes, which he’d hang in the back of his van, then go back up the stairs for another armload. Willy waited until the driver went upstairs again, then peered into the back of the van. Men’s clothes on the left, women’s fashions on the right. A lot of cheap polyester threads, but that was what these folks favored.
Willy heard footsteps coming from the building and retreated under the van. The driver loaded more clothes into the van then went back upstairs. It’s now or never, Willy thought. He hopped up onto the loading ramp, then into the van. He quickly found a sports coat, shirt, and trousers, all in large sizes. He gathered them into his arms and jumped from the van just as the driver came out the door with another armload of clothes. The driver never saw Willy as he crouched in the cool darkness under the tailgate. Willy Beal had made himself invisible again. Willy’s mind went back, as he clung to the shadowy underbelly of the truck, to the old fairy tale his mom used to tell him to make him go to sleep at night. The story was about the emperor’s new clothes. In his mind, he laughed at it.
Jerry and Gunner had been traveling in the column for three hours. Jerry had almost forgotten how humid jungle travel was. When he’d been over in Nam, he must have weighed a whopping one hundred and twenty-five pounds. No matter how much he ate, he could never gain any weight. After a while, the heat and humidity even made eating impossible for him. When he got off Gunner’s chopper, he had weighed two-ten, but he was sure that after walking for the past three hours he was down to one-ninety. Eat your heart out, Tommy Lasorda. No SlimFast for this big guy. Any ordinary wimp could do that! It took a real man to lose weight in the jungle while traveling with mercenaries and drug runners.
The column stopped abruptly and, taking the lead from the rest of the unit, everyone sat down. Xuan Ti set out a defensive perimeter. Jerry also noticed that four of Xuan’s men went out ahead to recon the area directly in front of them. He sure hoped Frank was nearby. He touched his collar, nervously hoping his attention would spur his homing device into action.
He recalled how Blackjack Baker used electronic surveillance devices in some unusual ways. Daiwe Jackson came to him one day and discussed the large amounts of medications that were missing from the team dispensary. Daiwe didn’t want to offend the ARVNs, at least not all of them, by accusing them of stealing. But if Jerry didn’t know better, he could swear that the ARVNs were genetically altered with genes for stealing. He wasn’t the only one with that opinion. Gunner thought they had the “T” gene implanted at birth. “T” as in thief. There was no doubt that stealing was as normal to the ARVNs as white on rice.
Blaster, being the ingenious guy that he was, formulated a plan to get proof positive that the ARVNs were stealing drugs from the dispensary. Waiting until the entire camp was asleep, he went to the dispensary. Daiwe had given him the combination to the drug safe, which he opened with the deftness of a skilled cat burglar. Blackjack painted the labels on the drug containers with a clear, high metallic substance that could not be seen, but could be picked up by a sensitive transceiver he had rigged up in their radio bunker.
Two nights after Blaster had rigged the drugs, he was standing night watch inside the team compound. Jerry had just finished a walking tour of the inside perimeter when Blaster came into the team house, holding a little aluminum box with a slowly blinking red light. “What the hell have you got there, Blaster?” Jerry said.
“It’s your basic truth detector, Jerry,” he replied with a twinkle in his eye. “I got the idea out of an Ian Fleming book.”
“Isn’t he the guy that wrote about James Bond?”
“Yeah, that’s him, Jerry.”
“What’s this all about?”
“You know, you’re the one that told Daiwe we had a problem with drugs being stolen from the dispensary. And you remember Daiwe asked us to be on the lookout for anything suspicious from the ARVNs.”
“Vaguely. But what’s it got to do with that blinking box?”
“I read about it in one of those James Bond novels and thought I’d try and rig one of these up for myself. I left some chemically marked drugs in the safe, and I know they aren’t there now. In fact, if you and I don’t saddle up really quick, the thief will get away, and we’ll never know where he’s taking the drugs.”
Jerry looked at him in total disbelief. “You’ve got to be shitting me, Blaster. You want me to get on my field gear and follow you and this blinking light out into the night. Tell me that’s not what you expect of me?”
“That’s exactly what I expect of you Jerry,” he said, pointing to his sleeve, which contained two rockers under his sergeant’s stripes.
Jerry looked down at his sleeve and saw the same old sergeant’s stripes with no rockers and knew Blaster was pulling rank. “Yes sir, Sergeant, sir,” he said sarcastically. Two minutes later, they were both out in front of the team house in full field packs.
“I notified Daiwe about what we’re doing, kid. Daiwe put the Preacher man on night watch to finish my shift after I told him we might be gone for a couple of days or a couple of weeks.”
Blaster explained to Jerry that the faster the light blinked, the closer they were to their man. All they had to do was stay a respectful distance behind him and they’d eventually find out who the thief was and where he was delivering the goods. Four days and a lot of dextro-amphetamines later, the two of them sat on the fringe of the jungle looking down a ravine into a clearing at several thatched huts. The light on the box was blinking frantically as they glassed what appeared to be a Montagnard village. Blaster focused the binoculars, then handed them to Jerry as they lay in the concealment of the dense jungle.
“See anything funny about this village, Jerry?”
“Looks like a typical Montagnard village to me, Blaster.”
“No smoke coming from cooking fires. No pigs or goats walking around. No naked kids pissing on the ground. Still look like a normal village to you?”
He was right. Jerry hadn’t looked beyond the obvious, while Blaster had focused on the reality of what they were looking at. Jerry looked harder. Men in black pajamas stood at the entrance to every hut. Jerry looked through some windows and saw the signs of a field hospital, tubing hanging from blood bags, dripping life-giving fluid into the veins of their enemies. “It’s a fucking VC MASH unit,” he said in a hushed tone.
“Give the boy a prize.” Blaster pointed down to the main longhouse. “You see who that is sitting on the steps?”
I swung the glasses in the direction he indicated with his finger. “Son of a bitch,” I said under my breath. “That’s Truc Xi, our ARVN medical officer.”
“Bingo. Give the man a prize for deduction.”
Jerry looked in Blaster’s direction. He had a grin as wide as a four-lane highway on his whisker encrusted, camouflaged, face. “You knew it all along, didn’t you?”
“Well, let’s just say I suspected it was him, because he was the only other person that knew th
e combination to the drug safe until Daiwe told it to me.”
Blaster got out his camera and clicked off several photos.
“What’s the game plan now, Blaster, are we going back to the camp and report this to Daiwe?”
“What good will that do. I got pictures of the prick. My box led us to the drugs. If the Daiwe suggested that the ARVNs were thieves he’d probably be relieved of his command, be busted back to second lieutenant and we’d have to break in another West Point dickhead.”
Blaster’s line of reasoning was beginning to worry Jerry. There was just the two of them, and it was beginning to look like he was suggesting they get into the John Wayne mode and attack what appeared to be a VC and NVA field hospital. By now the tiny transmitter Blaster had planted in the drugs was lighting up his fabricated meter like a Geiger counter over Hiroshima. He turned to Jerry and said, “Jerry, you see this black button on the face of the box?”
Jerry looked to where Blaster was pointing out a mysterious little button several inches from the blinking light. “Yeah. What about it, Blaster?”
“It’s an emergency locator. I told Daiwe if we found anything, I’d key the location and he could send in the cavalry.”
Jerry had begun to breathe a little easier at that point. It was beginning to look like Blaster wasn’t intending to take on the entire 15th NVA Division by himself with Jerry’s help. “So you’re going to call in the 1st Air Cavalry to attack this position, and we hang tough as forward observers ‘till the cavalry arrives.”
“Not exactly what Daiwe and I planned, kid. Why send in the Air Cav when we can send in the heavyweights?”
“What heavyweights?”
“The US Air Force, Jerry. All I do is key that button and leave my pack here and the Air Force will home in on it and level this place. Scorched earth. That’s what we told them, and they agreed.”
“What about the ARVN thief? How are we going to ever prove it?”
“That’s what I took the pictures for, Jerry. Daiwe doesn’t want to make it public, but he’ll let their captain know that he knows.”
Blaster pushed the black button and stuffed the device into his backpack. “They’ll be here in about ten minutes, so I suggest we get the fuck out of Dodge City.”
About ten minutes later, they heard the thundering roar of the F-4s as they flew low over the jungle. The noise of exploding napalm almost deafened them as they made their way west through the thick jungle. They hadn’t gone far enough for the green canopy to swallow up the sound. The wind shifted in their direction, and Jerry distinctly smelled napalm and burning flesh. It’s a smell that he had gotten used to over in Nam, but once whiffed, it never leaves your sensory banks. The jungle reverberated with the crackle of cluster bombs. The 20 mm canons sounded like a runaway elevator car as they destroyed everything in their path. Jerry imagined the death and dismemberment that was going on at the field hospital, wishing that he could stay and see the end result of our operation. It occurred to him that if this operation somehow became public, some bleeding-heart, draft-dodging, flag-burning liberal would probably turn it into the focal point for an anti-war rally. Let them . . . and let them eat cake, Jerry thought. After the airstrike had ended, Blaster and Jerry paused before continuing their departure to listen to the cries of the dying. That was another sound you never forgot. You just turned it over and over in your mind, telling yourself; “I’ll never allow myself to sound like that if I get hit.” But Jerry had seen a lot of guys go down, wounded in combat, and they all sounded that pitiful.
As they sat resting along this jungle path, Jerry wondered whether Gunner had noticed him slipping back to Nam. He felt his collar again, hoping that Frank was as good at electronic surveillance as Blaster Adams had been. He listened intently for the F-4s, but they were nowhere to be heard. He wondered if Frank had decided to send in the cavalry. If he did send them in, Jerry would really be screwed.
The message from Captain Henry Davis that was sent to the Cam Po Nam Hotel was short and sweet. It contained a copy of the headline from the L.A. Times. LITTLE SAIGON SLASHER STRIKES AGAIN. The brief message attached to the newspaper account said simply, “You are needed at home. Cut your vacation short and get your ass back to L.A. You must have been wrong. The killer is here. – Captain Davis.”
TWENTY-NINE
Willy stepped up to the table inside the front entrance to the Club Saigon. A pert Vietnamese girl dressed in a white Ao Dai was neatly printing name tags for everyone and handing out drink tokens and campaign buttons. “William Baines Beal. That’s B E A L,” he spelled it for her. “I’m a businessman.”
She responded in perfect English. “Here is your identification tag. Uncle Vinh will make an appearance in about one hour. In the meantime, here are some drink tokens. Mix and enjoy.” She handed him several gold-embossed coins with a picture of Vinh Ho on one side and the words “The people’s candidate” on the other. Willy rolled the coins over in his hand, then looked at the depiction. It reminded him of the portrait of Ho Chi Minh. Whenever he took a prisoner or searched a body, young Willy Beal would look for letters. They were a good source of intelligence. The postage stamps he had seen on most of the letters had the image of Ho Chi Minh on them. The lion of North Vietnam. “No getting around it,” he said as he stepped out into the sea of Asians, “a lot of similarity between those two pictures.” A smirk crossed his face.
Willy worked his way around the room checking out the people in attendance. He looked right in place in his cheap polyester suit. He avoided getting into conversations, and not once did he press the flesh with anyone. Willy Beal, the businessman, was visibly being invisible. The restaurant was beginning to fill with smoke, and the noise of the insatiable political banter was deafening.
Outside, a small contingent of Vietnam veterans were demonstrating on the sidewalk against the candidacy of Mr. Ho. “Old Glory” was held high by each of the vets, some of whom limped because of their prosthetic legs. Others sat in wheelchairs. The event was beginning to take on the magnitude and demeanor of the 1972 Republican Convention. Any second, you expected Vinh Ho to make his appearance holding two fingers aloft while the assembled masses shouted, “four more years.” Of course, this candidate was no Richard Nixon, but the thought of him becoming “Tricky Dick” truly scared William Baines Beal. He could be a new “Tricky Dicky” for this age, he thought.
Vinh Ho’s goons stood arm in arm in front of the Club Saigon. They resembled Asian pawns on an Oriental chessboard. They were all color-coordinated, each wearing a white turtleneck shirt, gray slacks, and coats. They looked straight ahead, ignoring the racial slurs being thrown at them from the ranks of the veterans. Standing firm and ignoring the insults was the only way they had of ensuring that the veterans’ demonstration remained peaceful and on the street. That was the orders they received from Uncle Vinh Ho.
The vets were angry at the way fate and their countrymen had treated them during, and after the Vietnam War. They were pissed at a system that rewarded injustice while laughing in the face of the hardships and indignities they had to endure both on and off the battlefield. The veteran’s ranks were beginning to collectively seethe with anger. The demonstration was intensifying and it looked like the word peaceful was not in the cards. Willy watched from his ringside seat inside the restaurant, hoping it would escalate and force a confrontation. That was just what Willy had planned to cover his intentions. He sat and calculated his chances as the veterans surged and pushed like a pulsing vein, closer and closer to the front entrance of Club Saigon.
Willy looked around the inside of the restaurant. He noted that there were no Hollywood stars pressing the flesh with the candidate from Little Saigon. It must not be popular anymore to support these pinkos, he thought. What did that mean, anyway, “pinkos?” Communism was dead. Russia was now a group of independent, free, and democratic states. Capitalism had won out over Communism in the end. But it wasn’t our presence in Vietnam that did it. It wasn’t bullet diplomacy that f
inally accomplished the deed. Willy thought about all the guys he’d seen killed over “the pond.” I’m sure all the dead GIs that were killed over in Nam will roll over and salute in their graves now that Communism is on the ropes. Not! He laughed to himself as he continued to watch the activities on the street.
Xuan Ti came back and told Gunner and Jerry the area was secure. Gunner looked at Jerry and pointed for him to follow Xuan. “Xuan will take us into the camp now, Jack. This is the cornerstone of my operation in Southeast Asia. This is where the raw product is bundled for shipment to my lab. I’ve got some business to take care of, then I’ll show you around. Xuan will take you to a hooch where you can rest up. I should be ready to leave in about two hours.”
Club Saigon Page 26