Red Flags (23 page)

Hopp raised his hand, listening to Cheo Reo issue an artillery warning. Then he resumed.

"B-Fifty-twos bomb by radar. If the super bombers connect, the target gets vaporized. But often as not they're blowing up empty jungle—killing lotsa ferns. Most of the time the Cong moves out of the way beforehand. They know when we've got an Arc Light laid on."

"Their intel's that good?"

"Better than ours. They get tipped off way in advance. On the day of the raid, they get a heads-up from Soviet trawlers offshore that clock the azimuth and air speed of our bombers coming in from the Philippines and Okinawa. VC eavesdrop on our broadcasts that warn friendly aircraft of an impending air bombardment and pass the warning along. On the ground, their observers clock my Air Force colleagues overfly a target in advance of the bombers, and they sound the alarm. But by that time more than likely everyone's already long gone from the target area."

"Why didn't we take any ground fire earlier?"

"They know from the markings that I'm Army recon, not an Air Force forward air controller. They know I don't direct air assets and I can't call on artillery bases that can reach here. But if they fire on us, we'd technically be engaged and might just qualify for immediate support without having to go through the usual million steps and channels. Which is why they treat me tenderly, except of course when they try to snare me out of the damn sky with vines strung across the tighter valleys. I'm starin' down, not lookin' where I'm flyin', and they try to net me like quail. They'll only take the odd potshot to discourage my snooping when there's something on the ground they don't want seen."

Hopp adjusted course. We flew south for some minutes and descended.

"Here it comes," he said. "That badass field I was telling you about."

Hopp pointed to long geometric shadows—structures—projected out from a tree line by the sun. At altitude, the field looked like green savanna, but Hopp brought us ever lower until we shot across it with our wheels brushing the tops. It went on forever. Acres and acres, circled by a narrow track. The whole side of the mountain. Montagnards worked among the plants, their upturned faces visible in the six-foot-tall growth looming over them. We'd found part of the VC's revenue source.

A few green tracers sped by without our hearing them, drowned out by the drone of our engine and the slipstream.

"I'll be damned," Hopp exclaimed. "Some fool's poppin' off at us."

Metal crinched, like a beer tab pulled open. We'd been hit. He dinked the ship, and my elbow banged against the fuselage.

"Gonna need more duct tape," he said. "That was close. Must be important for them to drive us off like that."

"I think it's what I've been looking for."

We dinked the other way and climbed, right up through a thousand feet. At two thousand, we leveled off.

Hopp half turned toward me, chewing laconically. "Looks like we're not gonna make it to your Big Rock Candy Mountain today. I think that lone gunman put a knock in my engine. You mind flyin' to the coast? It'll take about forty-five minutes. We haven't got much by way of parts back at the Cheo Reo aerodrome."

"No problem." I shoved my face into the air stream outside. I was drenched in sweat and adrenaline.

We flew east, out over the peaks, winging across foothills and another mountainous region that gave way to a narrow band of rice paddies, heavily dotted with hamlets full of huts and livestock and farmers in turtle-shell hats stooped over their work. We crossed that skinny stretch in no time and were out over the pale green sea. A heavily populated strip flowed along the coast toward a formidable military base and airfield. A stubby peninsula drooped around a piece of the South China Sea, forming an azure bay. Despite the enormous air traffic, we were down in minutes.

I was happy to deplane and leave my combat harness behind. Hopp explained his problem to a mechanic as they inspected the bullet hole and the engine. A spec-4 drove us in to the base. We passed mess halls, the Post Exchange, and a beach dotted with GIs in bathing suits lounging on pristine white sand.

The jeep climbed up to a flattened peak with a hospital on top, an Air Force building, and hootches professionally constructed by contractors. Hopp led the way into the officers' club. The air conditioning nailed me at the door. The perfectly appointed bar was like a meat locker. I shuddered. Armed Forces Radio was reporting that young American anarchists waving Viet Cong flags had charged a phalanx of police in San Francisco.

A sign said
NO GUNS
, so we checked ours with an Air Force sergeant and pushed on past a row of slot machines onto a wide terrace. A Hawaiian-style bar covered with bamboo and thatch stood at the far end, elephants' tusks holding up the corners. A pair of jet jockeys, perched on the tiger-skin stools, leaned across, flirting up the Vietnamese woman tending bar. A medallion above the bottles read
BEVERLY HILLS HOME SECURITY
—
ARMED RESPONSE
. We took an umbrella-shaded table and slumped into our patio chairs. The air was soft.

A stunning Vietnamese woman in a white blouse and pedal pushers appeared and took our order, then came back almost instantly to pour our beer, angling it into chilled glasses to form perfect heads.

"This was worth helpin' the Charlies out with their target practice," Hopp said, "don't ya think?"

"Didn't at the time." I took a long swig. "Do now."

The waitress returned with our hamburgers, slathered with onions and cheese. Hopp parked his gum under the table, anointed his burger with ketchup and relish, and took a giant bite. I slipped most of the onions off mine.

I said, "What does Big John think about nobody being home for his air raids?"

"Well, every planned strike has to be run past MACV in Saigon and the whiz boys in Washington, and by our allies in our province, and their headquarters at Two Corps in Pleiku. Pleiku runs it by the South Vietnamese tactical headquarters in Saigon too. Four or five clearances. All this mostly to make sure friendlies aren't in the area we want to bomb. Takes weeks. The enemy knows within the first eight hours what we're planning. Just when we finally get all the okays to lay on the strike, the NVA ups and moves a coupla hundred yards next door."

"Into the neighboring province?"

"You got it. And the whole clearance thing has to start all over again, this time going through channels in
that
province. Eventually the raid gets the green light, but the Charlies up and move out again the night before."

"They're playing our bureaucracy."

"And winning."

"Saigon leaks," I said. "Pleiku must too, and Cheo Reo. The VC have agents everywhere."

"Yup," Hopp said. "The South Vietnamese military government is more penetrated than the whores in Saigon. But Big John Ruchevsky thinks there's a particular leak sprung in Cheo Reo."

"How can he tell?"

Hopp licked ketchup from his thumb. "We simulated a priority air strike a while back. Put in for clearance only at the sector headquarters level in Cheo Reo. Kept it entirely local. Just before the bombs were supposed to drop, the NVA carouselled out of its bivouac."

"That still leaves a bunch of possible suspects," I said.

"Yeah," Hopp said. "I guess. Though all of 'em in Cheo Reo."

I pointed to Hopp's Yard bracelet. "You've been initiated."

"Oh, yeah, yeah. Whenever I can, I tag along with Bennett on his visits to the Jarai villages to help with the kids. Have one from the Sedang tribe too. Had the ceremony and the moonshine. Got rightly drunk."

The terrace was several hundred feet above the beach, with no guardrail or barrier between us and the vista of the water below and the air base launching warplanes every few seconds round the clock, afterburners trailing fumes. The South China Sea spread to the horizon, so beautiful it nearly hurt. I turned my face to the sun, closed my eyes. It blazed behind my lids. The clear air smelled of blossoms and burned jet fuel.

"Where are we?"

"The land of flush toilets and hot water." Hopp groaned, basking in the sunlight. "Shangri-la, son. Shangri-la."

H
OW BIG?" RUCHEVSKY
said, munching his cigar while he tried to align two shaving mirrors to catch sight of the bald spot developing on the back of his head.

"Humongous." I plopped the exposed roll onto our shared desk, atop the open map where I'd marked their locations. "The field looks ready for harvest. Plants taller than the field hands." I told him about the warning shots we'd taken. "We didn't even make it to the Aussie's flower field, but Hopp on the way back from the body shop flew us over three other huge tracts of dope. They're all a few weeks from harvest, I'm guessing."

Big John gave up the beauty exam and put the mirrors back on his dresser.

"They're smuggling it south out of the province how?"

"Only two passable roads in and out of the whole province. Neither is paved. They couldn't move it overland with any confidence."

"Assume they're flying the dope out," Ruchevsky said. "Whose aircraft?"

"Vietnamese air force flies most of it for the various parties. Big shipments for the syndicates. The air corridors from Burma and Laos are choked with their flights."

Ruchevsky fussed with his hairbrushes. "We'd be aware of South Vietnamese military flights into the province, though."

"Sure. Our air controllers would log the activity."

"Civilian aircraft on the other hand—" He stopped and fixed me with his glare. "Shit."

"What?" I said.

"Air America—the Agency's private delivery and taxi service."

"You think they might be flying the dope out?"

"Those aren't Boy Scouts at the controls. Hell, we airlift opium harvests all the time for our favorite warlord in Laos to help him finance his huge anti-Communist army. Air America flies in four hundred loads of material every day to keep his forty thousand troops and their families supplied. No problem flying a few loads out."

I exhaled hard. "Doesn't sound like their aircrews would give a cargo of grass a second thought. What do they fly, DC-Threes?"

"Mostly. STOLs and helicopters too." Ruchevsky bit his lip. "You got any idea about load capacity and dollar value?"

I grabbed a pencil and did some quick calculations. "Bundled in forty-pound bales, a DC-Three load of marijuana would be around two tons. Each load would command—what—a quarter of a million U.S?"

Ruchevsky said, "To grow the weed and move it they need all sides cooperating. The Viet Cong for security. Somebody cultivating. Americans for the airlift. And Colonel Chinh's South Vietnamese military authorities to be struck blind at appropriate times."

"If you take off fifty thousand for pilots, bribes, and incidentals, that leaves a two-hundred-thousand-dollar profit. Could we interdict the air route? Can you do anything about Air America?"

"The pilots are contract players and hard to control. Did you see an airstrip near that first marijuana field?"

I shook my head. "Nothing flat or wide enough to land a plane."

"The closest is the strip by the Phu Thien District headquarters," Ruchevsky said, looking at the map. "Though I doubt they could steadily airlift quantities of anything from there without the Green Berets noticing. There's a split A-team at Phu Thien and two MACV advisers."

"So how would they manage it?"

"Road Seven is dirt but plenty wide in places," he said. "Only low scrub. No vehicular traffic to speak of. Seal off an open stretch and you can put down a DC-Three on it, no problem. Those boys can land on an eyelid. Haul your weed to a road like that, guide the plane down, toss it aboard, and go."

I scratched my sunburned arm, which was beginning to peel. "You think the Air America pilots cut their own private deals?"

Ruchevsky thought for a moment. "The odd trip? Sure. Five a month? Less likely. That many blacked-out flights would need someone like me to make them happen—or at the very least, somebody affiliated with our beloved State Department."

"Like a USAID rep?" I said. "Lund?"

"Or the geek sidekick of his."

"You said Lund might even be from your shop."

"Possibly."

"But you wouldn't know."

"No. We're not identified to one another." Ruchevsky drew himself up. "What size deposits are the VC making?"

"A hundred thousand U.S." I sat down on my bunk.

"So who's getting the other hundred thou?"

"Their partners."

"What do you want to do about that marijuana field you spotted?"

"Fuck it up."

"How do you propose to do that?" he said.

"A bombing raid." I peered at the map.

"If we go the official route, the South Vietnamese in charge of looking the other way will make sure we're denied permission. We'll just hear there are friendlies in the target area and we can't bomb."

"Not if we don't submit a request."

"How do we get B-Fifty-two sorties then?" said Ruchevsky.

"We don't. We don't order up heavy bombers from outside the country. We use lighter aircraft from bases in country, already airborne and carrying unexpended ordnance. Fighters carrying napalm."

"Go on."

"I'll get Major Hopp to do a little theater production: we'll fly up there and incur heavy ground fire. If we're engaged by the enemy, it might be enough to eliminate the requirement for prior clearance and allow Hopp to call in air support immediately."

"I've underestimated your less-than-sterling qualities, young captain."

"The fighters will unload their nape onto the crops, set the field ablaze. Burn it to an unsmokable cinder."

"You won't get more than a pair of fighters. We'll never get all the fields in one go."

"We Zippo the rest when we can these next few days, before the Vietnamese and MACV wake up to what we're doing."

"Yeah." Ruchevsky laughed. "Before they handcuff us."

"Hope you don't mean that literally."

Ruchevsky chewed his cigar with glee. "It's sort of perfect. Their troops always manage to scoot out of the way of our air strikes, but their money supply is rooted in the ground this time. No way to vanish." Ruchevsky sobered. "Know this: The folks we're messing with are not the type to amortize their losses. There's immediate blowback from this when they figure out who to be pissed at."