The Corsican (33 page)

Below, the deep blue of the South China Sea could be seen through breaks in the cloud cover. He twisted his head, again trying to see the fighters, which he knew would be above or below the wing tip. His neck cramped and he sat back, his broad shoulder overlapping into the empty seat next to him. They had been in the air seventeen hours, and had made two one-hour ground stops in Anchorage and Tachikawa, Japan, and the travel time was beginning to wear. He ran a hand through his closely cropped blond hair. Fatigue showed on his face, a face that had grown harder after three years of intensive training. Now the sharp features, handsome by American standards, seemed to sag, the normally square jaw appeared a bit pulpy. Only his eyes seemed unaffected. Fatigue had failed to dim the piercing blue.

Peter stretched his shoulders and grunted softly. He could feel the nervous excitement building in his belly. It had begun at Travis Air Force Base when he had boarded the aircraft, then had dissipated over the long hours of the flight. Now it was back, a tight, tingling sensation, an anticipation of finally returning to a part of the world which he had always considered his home. For weeks now, since learning his request for duty in an intelligence unit in Viet Nam had finally been approved, he had wondered if his boyhood memories would be reaffirmed. It was Viet Nam, not Laos. He smiled, and recalled the contempt Laotians had for the Vietnamese.

But he would go to Laos soon. And he would see his grandfather again, and learn about himself, and about a man who wanted him dead. He leaned his head against the seat and smiled slightly. The idea did not frighten him. According to those who had spent the last three years teaching him how to stay alive, there were also a few thousand others here with the same intention.

But still this would be different. This would have nothing to do with war. This was simply a legacy of the past, a past he was yet to fully understand. Ever since he had learned that the man was once a member of their business group, he had struggled to recall those faces from the past. It had been useless, but it had passed the time. Now he would soon have the answer, and he would do what had to be done. And he would use the army's intelligence apparatus to do it. He smiled to himself, wondering what the military hierarchy would think if they knew they were being used, not served. It was the only reason he still wore the uniform. That and the anonymity it gave him, returning under the cover of a war.

At least his grandfather would appreciate that he had learned one lesson well: Use them, but never serve them. Buonaparte had explained that lesson many times. Now he would have to explain other things, a lifetime of things. His grandfather had asked for his trust, and he had given it blindly. Now he had a right to the truth.

He closed his eyes, recalling his grandfather's face, the soft, rasping sound of his voice. The image was as clear as the day he left like an icon burned into his mind. The images of the others he had not seen had faded slightly, had become vague memories, like old sepia portraits that were no longer real. But not his grandfather.

Feeling the aircraft drop into a sharp descent, he looked out the window again. The South China Sea was still below. Closer to shore now, it was a white-capped pale green, dotted with the tiny dark forms of fishing boats, and beyond, the darker gray-green mass of dense tropical forest hazed over by the heat, so at a distance it almost seemed to pulsate. He reached for the small leather bag under the forward seat and removed the playing-sized deck of survival cards the army had issued him. On the face of the laminated cards were color photographs of reptiles and plants of the region. On the reverse were instructions about their dangers or suitability as food. They were intended for those lost in the bush, but for Peter they provided a small opening to his past, a return of boyhood memories.

The screech of the wheels touching down brought him back. Outside, the flat expanse of the airport sped by as the plane moved down the runway, and in the distance he could see clusters of military aircraft and vehicles. Near one C-141 transport a mass of silver reflected the sunlight, and he twisted his body to try to make it out. Military coffins in double rows of fifteen to twenty, stacked at least ten high. But no way to tell if they were incoming or awaiting an unhappy journey home. Either way, he thought, not a good first impression. And knowing the military, they'd expect to use every one of them.
Air KIA
. He leaned his head back and concentrated on the seat in front of him, allowing his mind to recall some of the slang used by men who had returned from their one-year tour in Viet Nam. Those who hadn't made it back, those who had been killed in action, were said to have bought the farm and booked a flight on Air KIA. This same plane, on its return flight, would be known to the men as the Freedom Bird, and those lucky enough to be boarding would be “going back to the world.” He drew a deep breath, and thought about his past three years of training. All the brutality he'd learned to inflict. All of it giving him a better chance of survival than so many others who were being sent. But even without that training he knew he would have had a better chance than most. Since childhood he had been taught to view the world as a dangerous place, one in which only those with an inner hardness survive. That knowledge was now a part of his being, and always would be.

The brakes of the Continental 707 groaned as the aircraft eased itself off the runway, and in the distance he could see the old colonial terminal, a dull gray-white mass, blurred by the heat, that seemed besieged by shimmering bodies moving in and out. The plane turned, cutting off the view, and across the airstrip now he could see the dense forest that lay beyond, the place where snipers were known to sit in trees and fire rounds at incoming and outgoing aircraft, even though they knew they would never bring one down. A simple act of terror. Or perhaps just a message of welcome or farewell, telling those arriving or leaving that they were still there.

He had asked a sergeant once why he thought the military had shortened the radio code name for the Viet Cong—VC, Victor Charlie—to just Charlie, but the sergeant had shrugged his shoulders and insisted that they had to call the little bastards something short. The answer had seemed typical of the derogatory attitude toward that invisible peasant army, and it had always made him think of Luc and the other Mua warriors he had known as a boy. Luc, who had been like a brother to him, with whom he had taken karate lessons, and who had always been faster and better at it than he. He doubted the Viet Cong were any different, and if history meant anything they had proved that sense of tenacity with the French, and the Chinese before them.

The plane lumbered slowly toward its place at the terminal, and he could make out the insignia on the various aircraft, the diverse species of Freedom Birds clustered together in their own nesting areas—TWA, Braniff, Pan Am, Delta, each gathering guarded by U.S. Air Force Security Police. Away from the commercial aircraft, the military contingent seemed overpowering, a sprawling expanse of war technology—fighters, sleek and needlelike; massive cargo planes; bombers; gunships and spotter planes; and around and above each, helicopters flitting like insects from place to place—bearing the insignias of the U.S., Korea, Viet Nam and others he could not recognize.

The 707 finally came to a halt, and the aisle immediately filled. Most standing now were young. Eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds. When the line had dispersed, Peter made his way to the front of the cabin, then stepped out on the deplaning ramp. The heat struck him like the first step into a sauna, and he instinctively glanced at his Rolex. It was nine in the morning, yet even now in late summer it seemed hotter than anything he remembered as a child. More intense even than the Everglades, where he had trained, and certainly worse than the dry, dusty heat of the Dakotas.

He knew it had always been hot, and recalled the need to take to the shade on the veranda of his grandfather's house. But this heat was worse. When Peter reached the bottom of the ramp he could already feel the perspiration running beneath his khaki blouse, and each breath felt as though it were being filtered through a hot, damp cloth. Perhaps it was a combination of the air conditioning on the plane and the nineteen hours of travel, he told himself. He started toward the terminal feeling the heat rising from the hot tarmac. No. It was just hot.

Suddenly he felt weak and tired. All around him the noise of aircraft engines mingled with the jabbering of incoming military and civilians, each punctuated by the sound of loudspeakers offering instruction in English and Vietnamese. Ahead, two Vietnamese women, one older and one in her early twenties, hurried past a sauntering, sweating line of GIs. The women were wearing brightly colored
ao dais
, their beautiful national dress which formed a sheath from neck to ankle, slit up to the knee to allow black-trousered legs to move without restriction. Peter watched the younger woman, her head erect, eyes fixed on the approaching entrance to the terminal, ignoring the suggestive remarks of a group of young enlisted men.

“Hey, baby. You in the blue pajamas,” one called after her.

“Ao dai
, asshole,” a second GI corrected.

Peter laughed inwardly. The knowledgeable soldier had misspoken the name, which was pronounced
ow-zigh
, something that would mark his ignorance and unworthiness in the oriental mind. These young men would have difficulty meeting anyone but bar girls, he decided.

The interior of the terminal was like a large ballroom, and much to his displeasure Peter found himself very much a part of the herd, struggling to find his duffel bag, which was among hundreds of others in the incoming-personnel area. Here the noise outside seemed meaningless and calm, as hundreds of voices swirled through the vast room. Noncoms wearing green armbands moved through the crowd, directing enlisted men to one holding area, officers to another, and civilians to a third. When he reached his designated area, Peter found a sergeant standing on a box, shouting instructions over the din, while an overweight spec-5 sat at a small table next to him checking documents.

“Records, orders and customs slips, captain,” the spec-5 snapped, when Peter's turn at the desk came. He handed them over.

The spec-5 glanced at the papers, then whacked each with a rubber stamp.

“Camp Alpha, captain,” he snapped as an afterthought.

“Right.”

“Green bus, out front. First one in line. That's for officers. Don't have no other markings. Don't wanna encourage Charlie's fragging instincts.” He handed back the papers and reached quickly for the next man's.

Walking away, Peter could hear the same routine being repeated. “Don't wanna encourage Charlie's fragging instincts.” The phrase followed like an echo, and he wondered if the man repeated it in his sleep at night.

When he reached the bus, Peter added his bag to a pile next to the baggage compartment. Looking up, he noticed the windows were covered with wire mesh, a grenade-prevention device to thwart Charlie's fragging instincts. The bus was a Japanese Isuzu, and as he stepped inside a smile formed on his lips as the air conditioning hit.

Peter stored his leather carrying case in an overhead rack, then fell into a hard plastic seat next to a Marine major about ten years his senior.

“You have any idea who it was who invented air conditioning, sir?” he said, closing his eyes and drawing a deep, cool breath.

“No idea at all, captain,” the major said. “But I know what you mean. Somebody ought to put up a monument to the sonofabitch.”

“At the very least. I hope it's not always this hot,” he said, again surprised it was not part of his childhood memory. But then, children were always playing, and weather never seemed to bother them.

“Normally, it gets a little worse in midafternoon, but not much,” the major said. “Outcountry's a lot worse, but everything there's bad. The whole godforsaken region's like that. When it's hot you pray for the rainy season and when it comes, you curse the mud. This your first tour?”

Peter nodded. “Very first.”

“Where you assigned?”

“Unassigned. But I'm hoping for Saigon.”

Peter smiled inwardly. He had been told not to reveal his intelligence assignment to anyone, even fellow officers. It was something he knew his grandfather and Auguste would appreciate. Perhaps the only thing.

The major nodded, knowingly. He looked like something out of an enlistment poster, square jaw, hard eyes; only the gray hair at the temples altered the image. “Saigon's not a bad duty, if you can swing it,” he said. “But then, you just might. You're young for a captain, even.”

“Part of the inducement to go indefinite after my mandatory three. Where are you stationed, sir?”

“I Corps, up at Danang, and let's drop the sir shit. I'm Jack Logan.”

They shook hands.

“Peter Bently.”

“This is a return trip for me. I got passed over for colonel, and they tell me this is the only way to redeem myself,” Logan said. “You'll like Saigon, if you end up here. Just watch your ass. Charlie moves around at will, and we lose almost as many drunken officers on Tu Do Street after curfew as we do in combat. VC pay a bounty on officers.”

The bus lurched forward, and Peter glanced back at the terminal. Despite the number of uniforms, it was hard to imagine any war was taking place. The mass of civilians milling outside the terminal far outnumbered the military, and even though some of them might indeed be VC as Logan indicated, the atmosphere was almost festive.

Beyond the wire that encircled the base there was a frantic movement of cars, trucks and motorized rickshaws called cyclos. He turned in his seat, watching it with amused wonder.

Logan noticed his interest. “Real-life bumper cars,” he said. “I think these zipperheads play with themselves while they drive. And you get in a bang-up with one of them, you'd better pay him off quick, or forty of the little fucks'll jump your ass.”