The Cover of War (10 page)

It hurt.
He's
too big.

Then she felt
Thi's fingers, massaging her the way she had done yesterday. As Thi rubbed,
Amai let out her breath. Her hips relaxed and she felt herself getting slick.
Thi was looking directly into her eyes, and the Major groaned as he gained
deeper penetration.

Thi and the
Major worked as a team. Amai lost her sense of reality in the paradox of pain
and pleasure. Eventually the rhythm of their combined attention started the
feeling. It began as it had yesterday - in her feet, sweeping up into her legs.
Pins-and-needles enveloped her body. She felt like she was about to explode.
And then it came in a long intense wave, and she began to shudder. The pleasure
was unbelievable.

The Major rolled
off. Amai lay back with her arms above her head panting.

Then she thought
of Danny.

Then came the
agonizing guilt.

19

December 27, 0530
am

Bangkok
,
Thailand

D
anny woke to the sound of metal-on-metal. The cell door was opening.
He rubbed his eyes.

A short,
ginger-haired man came in, wearing a black suit with no tie. 'Danny Thorn?'

'Yes.' Danny got
up. 'Who're you?'

'Name's Blue. Friend
of ya brother's. He called me earlier. Sorry I'm late.'

Danny placed the
man's twangy accent as Australian.

'Turn round,
mate.'

Danny turned and
the Australian snapped handcuffs around his wrists.

'Gotta make it
look legit. Told em you were goin' out early on a military flight.'

Danny felt both
thrilled and edgy; Chaske had come through. But what would he do next?

How will I
get back into
Vietnam
?
He couldn't bare the thought of never
seeing Amai again. He loved her so much it hurt.

The Australian
marched him out through the police station's front doors by his cuffed hands;
he was actually hurting him.

'Realism's
everything,' he whispered.

The Australian
bundled him into a three-wheeled
Bangkok
taxi. The taxi drove off. Danny's hands were un-cuffed and the man
handed him back his denim satchel; his camera still inside. 'What did you say
your name was again?'

'Blue Creighton.
Friend-a-Chaske's.'

'How'd you do
it?'

'Easy, mate.
Showed em my ID and told em I was taking you out on an early flight. Piece-a-piss.'

'Thanks,' Danny
said. 'I owe you big-time.'

'Forget it. It
only took an hour or so. Anyway, I owe Chaske so many favors; I should get some
mileage outta this one.' He laughed.

'Can you get me
back in to
Saigon
?

Blue scrunched
his face. 'I don't see how. I'm flying in on a CAT flight tomorrow arvo'.
You'll have to figure that one out yourself, mate.'

Blue stopped the
taxi. 'Good luck, but my job's done.'

20

A
mai burned with anger.

Triet's truth
serum had failed, and it had put both her and Thi in extreme danger.

He could've
killed us . . .
Last night's sex flashed into her
mind and she wondered if the guilt would ever go away. She had let Danny down.
She felt cheap. She felt used. She felt wrong. Then she thought of her Nhu An,
and hoped that the failure would not lead to her harm.

It's not my
fault,
she thought.
It's his.

She was meeting
Triet at café La Camargue, their usual, and when she got there, she would let
him have it.

Meeting at the
cafe meant using the Trung Hoa cutout. She went to Thi's front door, but
stopped before opening it. Something didn't feel right. Something told her that
danger was close. She remembered Triet's training:
Be over cautious.
She
heard
Cam
's words:
Listen to
your intuition.

Amai turned from
the door, went to the window, and climbed out.

She was on the
third-floor and the ground felt a long way down. She leveled her eyes, and then
climbed onto the metal fire-escape.

Thi would
never take such a precaution,
she thought. She was
far too casual for Amai's liking.

The ladder
groaned as it took her weight. Rust stained her hands orange. She hoped it
would hold. The unsafe feeling made her rush. A third of the way down it
happened.

She felt the
entire ladder move to the sound of groaning metal. In a second, she imagined
the fall; the impact; her bones breaking against the hard ground. She felt
giddy.

She reached out
and grasped a storm-water pipe, and then moved fluidly off the ladder. The pipe
felt solid. She recovered her breath, and then shinnied to the ground. The
fright had made her palms moist.

Concrete block
walls hemmed in the tight rear yard, and she took the only exit, around the
siding to the street.

Everywhere she
looked children were playing: splashing in puddles; chasing each other down
narrow alleys; climbing anything climbable. Amai thought of the Tet attacks.
She couldn't hold back the images of Triet's
Saigon
slaughter.

I'm involved,
she thought.
I'm at the center of it.

A girl-child
smiled at her. Amai imagined her as a pale corpse, lying dead in the street.

This is so
wrong.

Amai performed
the Trung Hoa ritual, cut through the market, and stormed toward café La
Camargue. Outside the café, a handful of wire-work tables and chairs had been
carefully arranged on the buckled sidewalk. Triet sat at his usual table,
sipping black coffee. He wore a dark shirt, whose pointed collar highlighted
his sharp features. He didn't look at her breasts this time. His expression
said that he meant business. He looked straight into her eyes. His mouth opened
slightly and Amai could see strands of meat in the gaps of his teeth. 

Her words came
in a hot rush: 'We could've been
killed
!'

'Danny didn't
make it to Ubon,' he said. 'We don't know where he is. He is missing.'

She felt as
though an invisible hand had griped her by the throat.
What's happened to
him?
It took all of her strength to keep her appearance calm.

She sat down. She
couldn’t focus her eyes.

Triet spoke
evenly: 'Forget your anger and tell me what happened with the Major?'

Amai could
barely think. 'The serum failed,' she said. 'He fucked us both.' she looked
down.

'Damn,' he said.

She tasted bile.
   

'I need you to
meet him again, tonight.'

Amai felt dizzy;
she knew she couldn't do it again - not now that she was worried sick about
Danny. 'But the serum?' She said.   

'Be here at
Twelve o'clock
. I'll have more.'

'I can't go
through that again,' she said. 'Triet please.'

His eyes
hardened into black marbles. 'General Giap says this Major is the most
important target in
Vietnam
,
and
you-
' He pointed at her- ' Are the only one who can reach him.'

Amai felt
breathless. Thoughts of Danny lying dead, wrapped in black plastic, took her
focus.

'Don't forget
your niece,' Triet continued. 'You
will
do this.'

Amai was
crushed. 'What if the drug fails again?'

'War has risks.'
He got up. '
Twelve o'clock
.
Sharp.' He left.   

Amai stared into
space as her world caved in. She went out into the harsh
midday
sun and stumbled through the crowd.

Tears streaked
her face.

She had no idea
where she was going.

She had no idea
where she was.

She walked
aimlessly.

Everything was a
blur.

When she finally
looked up, she found herself outside Thi's flat in Rue De Varlin. She stood and
stared at Thi's red front door. In the time it had taken to walk there, dark
clouds had rolled in, laying the porch in shadow.

Amai hesitated
for some reason, and then went in.

21

N
ash threw down his crutches, and then limped aggressively toward the
PSYOPS interrogation room; the small cinderblock building dubbed the pit by
Intelligence staff.

The sky had
changed. A swelling mass of black cloud was consuming the mid-morning sun. Nash
felt that, in-a-way, the American forces took on the power of the sun: good and
right, true and just. He likened the Viet Cong to the dark mass: they could
block out the sun every-so-often, but the sun would always be there, waiting to
shine its light of truth and justice through the slightest crack. 

But there was no
obvious winner.

The sun could
shine without hindrance for a time, but the black mass would always return. It
was the nature of the deadlock that the war had reached. But somewhere, deep in
the recesses of his subconscious, Nash feared that the storm
was
winning, and that
Vietnam
's sky
would always be black, so long as the
United States
attempted to occupy her.

He shook himself
free of the daydream. He had a prisoner to interrogate.

After his bout
with Colonel Hitchcock, Nash had followed up a series of dead-end leads.
Dejected, he had gone to the O-club, where he drank solidly for most of the
night; the booze had helped the pain in his leg. However, in the early hours of
this morning, Nash had received an anonymous call, informing him that Amai
Nguyen and a
US
Army Major
could be found on the third floor of a Rue De Varlin building. General Loan had
gone missing, as he so often did, so Nash had taken Corporals Mancini and
Albertez to the location.   

The result had
been unexpected.

They had
arrested a girl named Thi Ling Nang. Wearing only expensive underwear, she had
been the building's sole occupant.
Nash's gut told him that he had
stumbled straight onto Amai's spy network. But at-this-point, several things
were causing him concern:
Is Amai involved?
He thought.
Surely. Is
Thi with her? Surely. Are they bribing this mystery Major? Surely.  So
what have they learned?

He crushed a
mosquito against his forearm, figuring that an underling like Thi would not be
privy to the Commander's location, but Amai would. Amai was a key player - she
would know everything. Still, he was keen to see what he could get out of Thi.

He was bitterly
disappointed that they had not been able to identify the Major. The mystery man
seen leaving Thi's building just before her arrest, had disappeared, and
something in the back of Nash's mind told him that this man was important.

Nash stopped
outside the pit and let Mancini and Albertez go in. He would give them a few
minutes to prep the victim. The torture technique was experimental; a
combination of water-boarding, and the CIA's new electronic lie-detector.

Thi would be his
guinea-pig.

Nash knew full
well that water-torture was frowned upon; in fact General Weyand had outlawed
it. But Nash was short on time, and this was the fastest way to get information
out of the unwilling. In two day's time, Hitchcock would put him back on
Delta-squads; killing his plans of uncovering the Viet Cong scheme; and killing
his chances of promotion. He knew however, that Colonel Hitchcock would turn a
blind-eye to the torture, whilst of course, maintaining a buffer of
deniability.

But
water-torture had its problems: because victims believed that they were dying,
they often said anything to stop the suffering. This made information
unreliable, and unreliable information was useless to Nash. He hoped that
coupling Westinghouse's latest lie-detection machine with the torture would
produce accurate results.

The spooks had
assured him that it would.

The new machine
was the CIA's. MI's regular polygraph would not work because the physiological
responses produced during torture disrupted the machine's calibration. However
the CIA's machine, which still used pulse, respiration, blood-pressure, and
skin conductivity to detect lies, was able to reset to the victims changing
metabolic profiles in seconds.

This ensured
accuracy ever under the most extreme duress.

* * *

Wearing translucent panties and bra, Thi
squatted in silence on the interrogation room's concrete floor.

She couldn't
believe that she had been caught, but the thin chord which cut into the soft
skin of her wrists and ankles, and the gag which forced her to breathe through
the nose, made it all too real.

Her shiver
became shaking.

She replayed the
morning: Amai had gone to meet Triet. Major Johnson had gone to the Embassy.
She had been lounging around the flat, admiring her figure in a long mirror,
waiting for Amai to come back. Thi had been eager to know why the serum had
failed. She hadn't minded that though; the sex with Major Johnson had been a
fantasy come true.

I could
contact him,
she thought.
He could get me out of
here.

The cell door
grated open and a wedge of light spread across the wall. Two human shapes came
in. Thi could tell they were American men. The door grated shut and a dim
fluorescent light flicked on.

The men stood
over her. One said: 'Stand up.'

Thi stood. She
could feel their eyes on her body. She felt defenseless. A strong pair of hands
grabbed her under the arms and lifted her onto a flat bench.

'Lie back.'

What is this?
She thought.

A hand went
between her breasts and pushed her onto her back. Then the men strapped her to
the board.

She couldn't
move.

The men worked
mechanically. They didn't speak, but she could hear their breathing and the
scuff of their boots on the concrete. One took out her gag. The other tied a
muslin cloth over her nose and mouth. Pads were stuck to the palms of her
hands, her temples, chest, and her inner thighs. He pushed hard with his thumbs
to make them stick.

Thi stared up at
the grimy ceiling, and thought:
What are they going to do to me?

* * *

Sweat trickled down Nash's nose and into
his mouth.

The heat of The
Nam was getting to him. It irritated him that it had no effect on
Hitchcock. 

Nash pulled back
the pit's heavy steel door and let his eyes adjust to the gloom. Despite its
small size, its concrete-block construction made the pit the coolest room in
the MI compound. Nash was glad of the cool.

He was allowing
Mancini and Albertez to carryout Thi's interrogation, and they were efficiently
preparing her for the torture. Nash neared the board and his eyes followed the
millimeter-perfect curves of Thi's body.

She's damn
hot
, he thought.

She looked
nothing like the usual Vietnamese women who were rough and aged through hard
physical work. And she was no prostitute.

Nash grinned.
She's
a spy alright.

The French
panties followed the arc of Thi's pubic bone with pin-up-girl perfection, and
the translucent material suggested a clean shaven pussy. Nash was rock hard. He
wished he could touch the smooth material - and what lay beneath - but he
couldn't. It would set the wrong example for his men, who in his opinion were
merely impressionable boys of dubious brainpower.

That's why
they use these beautiful girls,
Nash thought.
She'd
be impossible for any red blooded male to resist.

Nash forced his
gaze up to Thi's face. Her eyes were stretched wide and she emitted a pathetic
whimpering sound through the muslin cloth.

She'll break
easy
, he thought.

He began to think
that such an extreme method of interrogation might be overkill. A simple
beating would probably have worked, but that was the beauty of water-boarding -
it left no physical marks on the body - the damage it did was purely
psychological. He had heard of water-torture victims that later panicked at
rainfall; some never showered again; some even went into spasm if they heard
dripping water. 

Nash shivered.
'Hustle it up Corporal. I'm short on time.'

'Sir.' Mancini
stood over Thi's helpless form like a tarantula inspecting its prey. Mancini
was stocky and aggressive and Nash liked him. In his right hand Mancini held a
regular, galvanized watering-can, which he put down with a clunk.

Thi grunted with
struggle, but her straps prevented even the slightest movement. Her eyes were
all that she could move, and they showed pure fear.

Nash felt
incredibly powerful.

* * *

A shadow fell over Thi and a voice started
speaking in a deliberate, military-like tone: 'My name is Corporal Mancini. You
will be asked a series of questions. The answers will be recorded.'

A light snapped
on and she saw his face. He smoothed a thin mustache and Thi thought that he
was quiet good looking, with olive skin, and thick, dark hair, styled
fashionably with brylcreem.

You
will
answer truthfully,' he said. 'I say again. You
will
answer truthfully.
If you do not, Corporal Albertez here,' he pointed to someone beyond her field
of vision. 'Will apply - in a controlled manner - a sufficient amount of water
- into your airways - for a period of twenty to forty seconds - so as to cause
severe discomfort. I suggest you answer quickly and truthfully. This will avoid
any unnecessary pain, suffering or death. Do you understand?'

'Yes.'

A cuff inflated
tightly around her upper arm. Albertez appeared at the edge of her vision and
began adjusting knobs on a machine of some kind. She guessed that it was a
lie-detector. Triet had told them about lie-detectors. Albertez took the wires
from the pads stuck to her hands, head, chest and thighs, and then plugged them
into the side of the machine. The display consisted of six needles, positioned
one-above-the-other, which drew thin lines on a rolling sheet of paper.
Albertez wheeled the thing closer.

Mancini said:
'Ready?'

Albertez said:
'Yep'

Mancini said:
'What is your full name?'

Thi realized
that she was expected to answer. 'Thi Ling Nang,' she said. 'I live at-'

'Just answer the
question you're asked please Miss Nang. What sex are you?'

'Female.'

'What year is
it?'

'1967.'

'Have you ever
been to the Moon?'

'No.'

'Have you ever
committed a crime?'

'Ah - no.'

On her right, a
third man came up beside her. His face came close to hers. She could tell that
he was in charge, and she could tell that he meant business. 

His voice was
calm: 'Listen in Miss Nang. My name is Captain Nash. From now on,
the-balls-in-your-court. You control the play-book.'

She had no idea
what a play-book was.

What will
they ask?
She thought.
What will I say? What
will they do?

'We call this
place the pit. The amount of pain you feel in here is your-call. You must tell
the truth. You can't beat the lie-detector. But I swear to you Thi, if you
don't give us what we want, you will suffer-' His nose touched her cheek. 'Like
you have never suffered before.'

'What do you
want?'

The man laughed
and Thi feared that she would lose control of her breathing.

She knew that
Mancini's first questions somehow tuned the machine to her body. Triet had
taught them this in
Laos
, but
she had never imagined that it would be her who was caught - her who was hooked
up to a machine. She had desperately wanted to upset the tuning process, but
anguish had numbed her. She didn't want to let Amai or Triet down, but she had
no idea what the Americans already knew. Perhaps they knew everything.

Desperate to
avoid suffering, Thi fought to recall her cover-story: 
Something about
an attack at Khe Sanh,
she thought.
Damn. What was it?

When Triet had
recruited her, she had imagined a life of excitement and intrigue; in-fact,
Triet had promised her this.

Now look at
me,
she thought.

She began to
cry.

* * *

Mancini tried to focus on his job, but
found it hard not to stare at Thi's body.

He wanted to
touch her skin; but Nash had made himself crystal clear - there would be no
sexual violation on his time. Mancini wished he knew the consequences - they
might be worth it.

He pulled his
eyes off Thi to look at the polygraph. Now calibrated, it would uncover any
deception she might devise. 

Mancini said:
'Are you Viet Cong?'

'Yes.'

Mancini was
taken aback. He studied the chart recorder and saw that the readings for
perspiration and breathing rhythm would be useless for diagnosis. He put this
down to her extreme level of fear. It didn't matter though; the other
recordings were working perfectly. The even lines of scribble told him that her
answer was true.
'Good,' he said. 'Remember to answer quickly, Miss
Nang. What is your role within the Viet Cong?'