A Catskill Eagle (15 page)

CHAPTER 33

HAWK SPENT A LOT OF TIME AMONG THE Vietnamese workers. The fact that it was against the rules meant as much to him as the fact that it was dangerous. Which is to say it meant nothing at all. Someday I would figure out exactly what did matter to Hawk. I did. Susan did. He mattered to himself. Beyond that I hadn’t got. And since I’d known him for thirty years it said something about his containment. Or my powers of perception. Or maybe that’s all there was that mattered to him… On the other hand, how come he spent so much time squatting on his haunches around the Vietnamese cook fires at night.

I asked him one evening in the bar at the Pequod House.

“Forging alliances,” he said.

“And fomenting rebellion?” I said.

“Case we need one,” he said.

I nodded. Doreen rushed past us bearing drinks, frowning slightly.

“It’ll get a lot of them killed,” I said.

Hawk nodded.

“But if we do it right we’ll have our shot at Susan,” I said.

Hawk nodded.

I drank some beer from the bottle. “What becomes of them,” I said. Hawk shrugged.

“What is becoming of them now,” I said. Hawk shrugged again.

I shook my head. “No, let’s look straight at it. I don’t care what happens to them if it gets Susan out.”

Hawk nodded.

Doreen hurried by in the other direction carrying empties on her tray. She wore the same frown of concentration. Hawk watched her.

“You in their place,” Hawk said, still looking at Doreen as she ordered drinks from the service section at the end of the bar, “you rather do what they doing now, or take a shot at fighting your way out.”

The bartender put six long-necked bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon on Doreen’s tray, rang up the bill, put that on the tray, and Doreen charged back past us toward the big round table in the corner. The tip of her tongue showed in the corner of her mouth.

“Okay,” I said. I drank a little more beer, letting the bottle rest against my lower lip and then tilting it slowly down. “We gotta give them a chance, though. If it’s over too quick there won’t be a chance to get at Susan. We need a real battle. We need some real and extended chaos.”

“Or we need to win,” Hawk said.

I had the beer bottle halfway to my lips. I stopped and slowly put it back down. I looked at Hawk. He grinned and I felt my own face begin to broaden. We looked at each other, the smiles getting wider.

“They can take over the facility,” I said.

“Uh huh.”

“Transpan has the firepower,” I said.

“But the gooks got us,” Hawk said.

“We got the bastards cornered,” I said.

“Okay, boss,” Hawk said. “I sketch out the big picture. You fill in the details. How we going to do it.”

Doreen passed again, a faint sheen of perspiration giving tone to her forehead.

“By God,” I said, “you’re right. She is lovely.” Hawk gestured toward the bartender for two more beers.

“And getting lovelier,” he said. “But that don’t answer my question.”

“Okay,” I said. “Are they ready to go?”

“Yes,” Hawk said. “Fact I having trouble holding them down.”

“They got a leader?”

“Ky,” Hawk said.

“Can he control them?”

“Yes.”

“Can you control him?”

“For a while.”

“Can I talk with him?” I said.

“Sure.”

“We don’t really have to sweat the forces too much. They may have some personal weapons, switchblades, hideout guns; but the company weapons are in the armory every night.”

“So we secure that,” Hawk said.

“And all we have to sweat is security.”

“And the gooks outnumber security.”

“So if we get them some weapons, and secure the armory…”

“They might win,” Hawk said.

“And you and I will deal with Costigan’s bodyguards,” I said.

“And Costigan.”

I took a five-dollar bill from my pocket and left it on the bar.

“I gotta walk,” I said. “I think better walking.”

“I’ll join you,” Hawk said. “Nothing like an evening stroll on a summer night.”

“In Pequod, Connecticut,” I said, “there’s nothing else.”

“Except Doreen,” Hawk said. “True,” I said.

CHAPTER 34

KY LOOKED SORT OF LIKE A PLEASANT SNAKE. He was slender and easy in his movements, and his thin face was smooth and without lines. He smiled often, but there was about him a sense of contained deadliness. He wore only a pair of black loose-fitting pants as he squatted beside the fire under the tarp, and as he moved, the skeletal muscles moved languidly, but strong, under his skin. His black hair was long, nearly to his shoulders, and he had a drooping black mustache. Around us there were twenty or thirty Vietnamese men gathered, many of them in shadow at the edge of the firelight, squatting motionless. Ky spoke to Hawk in a clutter of French, Vietnamese, and pidgin. Hawk nodded and answered him in the same.

The summer night was warm, but the fire was kept up. There was a cookpot set at the edge of the ashes. The smell of the workers’ compound was not an American smell. It was a smell of different herbs and different food eaten in a different land. It was a smell of foreignness and difference. I wondered if the rest of the installation smelled that way to them.

“He say they recruited out of refugee camps in Thailand. Say if they make trouble they get shipped back to Vietnam.”

“Tell him that’s not so,” I said.

“Told him that,” Hawk said. “He doesn’t think I know.”

“And he thinks I do?”

“You white.”

“Ahh,” I said.

“Says he knows chocolate soldiers got no power. Wants to hear it from you.”

“What would happen if they did get shipped back to Vietnam?”

“Ky was working with us in counterinsurgency,” Hawk said. “Special task force. Root out the Commie vipers and kill ‘em. All of a sudden the Commie vipers in charge, and we fighting each other for a spot in the helicopters. Say the Commie vipers be inclined to kill him with bamboo slivers. Says most of the workers got that kind of problem.”

I nodded. “What color was the guy that signed him up to counterinsurgency?”

Hawk grinned. He spoke to Ky. Ky answered and looked at me and nodded and grinned. Hawk said, “Some honkie major signed him up. Said it would be to his advantage once us Yanks had rooted them Commie vipers out. Said he could count on us Yanks.”

I nodded. “So much for trusting honkies,” I said. Hawk relayed it. Ky replied.

“It lose a little in the translation,” Hawk said, “but he say he got the idea.”

“He’s got to trust me and you, or not trust me and you. There’s no way we can assure him that we won’t bolt, and leave him holding the ass end of a tiger. In fact we will.”

Hawk nodded. “Good point,” he said.

He talked some more with Ky. Ky nodded and made a short reply and Hawk spoke some more and Ky still nodded and then sat quietly and looked at me. No one else around us said a word. Nobody moved. All of them smoked cigarettes.

“I told him what we’re up to,” Hawk said. “I told him that we had some influence with the feds. I told him that we wanted them to tear this place up as a diversion so we could get at Susan.”

“What did he say?”

“He say the Vietnamese equivalent of un huh.” I looked around the bright circle that the fire made, at the semi-shadowed faces of these distant foreign men. Uprooted for decades, used in the service of other people’s goals. One of the things I noticed was that the way they sat shielded us from the sight of the Transpan security types.

“Here’s what I think,” I said, talking directly to Ky. Every few sentences I paused and Hawk translated for me. “I think that you are probably illegal aliens and run the risk of being deported if you get caught, as you are likely to if you leave here. But I think the deportation, if it happens, will be back to the refugee camp. I don’t think there’s any danger of getting deported to Vietnam.” I was getting very cramped squatting on my haunches. “We will speak to Ives about you, and he will assure us that you won’t be deported, and he might mean it or he might not. And if he does mean it, he might be able to deliver, or he might not.”

I waited while Hawk spoke.

“But,” I said, “what I would almost guarantee, is that when Transpan no longer needs you, you’re going to get worse than we’re offering.”

When Hawk spoke again, Ky nodded and looked at me steadily. Then he spoke.

“He wants to know what about you,” Hawk said. “I’m going to try and get Susan away, and if I succeed I’ll split,” I said. “Hawk too.” I was looking directly back at Ky. “You’ll be on your own.”

Hawk spoke it to him. Ky nodded some more. And was quiet, looking at me, smoking his cigarette in slow deep drags, holding the smoke in his lungs a long time before he exhaled slowly through his nose. Then he spoke.

“He wants to know how come you going to all this trouble. Whyn’t you just call up the immigration people and report a bunch of illegal aliens.”

“Because I need chaos. Immigration comes down, it will be legal and orderly and Russell will be long gone with Susan.”

Hawk translated, Ky nodded.

“I can try to get some kind of contact set up for them,” I said. “I can talk to Ives and see if there’s some Vietnamese underground they could disappear into.”

Hawk told him. Ky shrugged.

“But I can’t promise,” I said. “And I can’t trust what Ives will say.”

Hawk translated. Ky nodded and smiled. Hawk said “He like that, you don’t trust anyone, and he don’t trust you.”

“Calls for a lot of negative capability,” I said.

“They used to it,” Hawk said.

Ky said something to the men around us. There were murmurs, and one fast staccato of Vietnamese. I looked at Hawk. He shrugged.

“Too fast for me,” he said. “I don’t know what they saying.”

Ky turned back to me and looked at me while he dug a package of Camels out of the waistband of his pants and lit one from the butt of the old one and dragged in a lot of smoke and held it. And held it. And looked at me. And then the smoke slowly trickled out through his nostrils.

He made a sharp nod of his head. “Yes,” he said in English.

“Good,” I said. “We’ll need some planning.”

“We done some of that,” Hawk said, “already.”

“We get the arms room for them,” I said.

“Yeah. And they got some gasoline. Been stealing it a quart at a time and storing it.”

“This isn’t a new idea for them,” I said.

“Nope.”

My legs got a lot more cramped before we were through, Ky talking, Hawk translating, me replying. But before dawn we knew what we were going to do. And when.

CHAPTER 35

THE NIGHT MAN AT THE TRANSPAN ARMORY WAS a blond guy named Schlenker who spoke English with a German accent. He wore rimless glasses when he read; and-he was reading a copy of something in German with his feet up on the counter when I hit him behind the ear with the government issue sap that Ives had given us. He slid sideways out of the chair and his glasses fell off as he hit the floor.

I squatted beside him and fished the keys out of his right-hand pants pocket. I opened the door to the gun room and the sound of a siren exploded into the quiet night.

Behind me Hawk said something in Vietnamese.

A single line of Vietnamese men filed into the gun room. Each grabbed an M 16 rifle and a clip of ammunition and moved back out of the armory. Every fourth man took an ammunition box.

Ky stood beside Hawk speaking softly to the men in Vietnamese. Hawk said something to him in French. Ky nodded.

The siren screamed and a series of spotlights glared suddenly throughout the compound. I went out the side window headfirst and landed and rolled and got up running. Behind me I heard the first chatter of automatic fire. Then more of it. I was behind the nearest Quonset now, and behind me I heard soft footfalls. I turned with my gun out and it was Hawk.

“So there was an alarm,” I said.

“Don’t matter,” Hawk said. “They got the guns.”

I nodded toward the far side of the compound and we headed for it on the run. No one was worried about us. They still thought we were on their side and, like the rest of the forces, were running around wondering what the hell happened.

Behind us there was a sudden great whoosh, a giant thud, and the armory burst into a mass of immediate flame.

“Gasoline do work nice, don’t it,” Hawk said. We paused in shadow along the perimeter fence. “Lead free,” he said. The fire modified the harsh white glow of the spotlights and gave a bronze cast to everything and the men running across the open space became shadowed and distorted as the flames surged and wavered. The automatic fire echoed in short rippling bursts and then the ammunition left in the armory began to explode in festival bursts.

We edged our way along the fence toward Costigan’s compound. Something big went off in the armory and sent a volcanic spurt a hundred feet in the air. The gunfire had spread and came from everywhere, or seemed to. Someone had set off a fire alarm and the bell clanged steadily in counterpoint to the siren.

“Lucky they’re ringing that bell,” I said. “Never know otherwise there was a fire.”

“Alert,” Hawk said.

At the edge of the fire’s roar, and the siren’s shriek and the bell’s clang and the gunfire and exploding ammunition I could hear small sounds of human yells, but only bare wisps of sound, almost illusory, the cries of the men overwhelmed by pyrotechnics. Only when I saw the black shadowy distorted elongated forms flit briefly in front of the flames were the cries audible, as if it required the sight of near human form to connect sound with source. Around the mercenary barracks there was no sign of activity. Most of them had been in combat and most of them knew when to stay low and when to fight. When they had guns and you didn’t was the time to stay low.

CHAPTER 36

WE REACHED THE COMPOUND AND CROUCHED on our heels behind a low hedge. The picket fence was no problem. It was merely ornamental. Beyond the picket fence a big gussied-up Ford van was parked, with its motor running and its lights on. The van had been customized with porthole windows in back and a big chrome roof rack, and a lot of fancy custom paintwork in the form of swooshes and stripes. The back doors of the van were open and two men carried luggage from the house and stowed it away. Around the van, near the back doors, there were four men with Uzi machine guns and flack jackets. There was a light on upstairs in the house. The men carrying the luggage put the last of it in the van and closed the back doors. They both had Uzis slung over their shoulders. One of them got in the driver’s seat of the van, the other opened the side door nearest the house.

“They bailing out,” Hawk whispered.

“I figured they would,” I said. “I was hoping we oould get them while they did.”

Russell Costigan came out of the back door of the house, and Susan came behind him. She wore a black leather jacket and pants. Her face in the reflected light from the car headlights looked serious but not scared. The fire across the company area made everything look reddish and a little satanic.

The guards closed around them as they stepped to the van.

“No chance,” I whispered.

Hawk said, “Um.”

Susan got in first, Russell behind her. Then the bodyguards got in, the doors closed, and the car lurched slightly as the driver put it in gear.

“The roof rack,” I said.

And Hawk and I stood and sprinted for the van. It began to move slowly across the darkened compound. I caught it from behind and put one foot on the bumper, jumped slightly, caught the rear bar of the roof rack and slithered up onto the roof of the van. The van picked up speed, I felt it rock slightly and Hawk was beside me. Both of us sprawled out flat, side by side on the van roof, holding the front bar of the roof rack as the van moved faster but not yet fast through the flame-tinged darkness.

There was no one at the facility gate, and as we pulled through it the sound of gunfire behind us became desultory, as if the fight was nearly over. Outside the facility the van picked up speed and Hawk and I held hard as the wind began to rush past us.

“We stowed away,” Hawk said. “Now what?”

“Hope the road’s not bumpy,” I said.