The Kaisho (30 page)

Armies of his imagining rose to challenge each other to mortal combat. Blood spurted from grievous wounds, soldiers fell, were trampled underfoot by their own comrades’ inexorable progress across a plain composed of the slain.

Emerald twilight emerged from the heat of the colorless day. Sometime while they had slept, it had ceased to rain, but it began again soon after they awakened. They relieved themselves, ate hurriedly, dutifully swallowed their horse pills, and broke camp. Within an hour they emerged from the jungle only to be drawn to a series of flickering jewels in the near distance. These particular jewels were fiery.

“Laos,” Jin said from close behind him.

Do Duc nodded, said, “Butterfly,” and the men spread out. The butterfly was a patrol pattern revolving on multiple axes that gave the unit maximum protection as it progressed through unknown and presumably hostile territory. Despite their extreme vigilance they encountered no one.

The fires were less than a klick away and turned out to be flickering in the remnants of a substantial village. They paused at the perimeter. Here and there, the fires still burned white-hot, impossible in this weather unless they were of a chemical nature. The buzz of the insects was startling, rolling over them like a net. Soon the stench of scorched flesh was overpowering.

“Napalm,” Do Duc said. He knew the effects of napalm when he saw it, and there was plenty to see. A sea of corpses confronted them, blind eye-sockets cast in incongruous directions, silent and accusatory. Clouds of insects lifted and fell in sickening waves, feeding off the carrion. He kicked over bodies, studying them as if they yet had a tale to tell. Viet Cong or Laotian, it was impossible even for the Nungs to tell them apart.

“What d’you think happened here?” Rock asked. “U.S. Army cleanup?”

Do Duc shrugged. He knew what Rock was thinking: Was this another incident like the one Calley and his Butcher Brigade perpetrated at My Lai? “As far as I know, we don’t have any units inside Laos.”

“Face it,” Rock said, “neither of us know shit about where MI is operating or what it’s up to.”

He meant Military Intelligence, and Do Duc found himself wondering whether the elements within Pentagon East who had given Michael Leonforte his mission had been MI.

The Nungs, AK-47s at the ready, patrolled the torn-apart streets of the village with closed faces. Do Duc’s thoughts returned to Jin’s assertion that the Gwai were operating inside Cambodia. Could they also be active within Laos? Each question he asked, it seemed, was leading him northward toward the Golden Triangle. Abruptly, the rat he had been smelling ever since Bowel had given him the final briefing had a distinct aroma: it was the odor of money.

At that moment, Riggs gave a shout and the unit ran toward the eastern perimeter of the devastation. Do Duc saw the concrete bunker. He and Rock went down into the natural hollow to take a closer look. The curious thing was that, though it had been only half-hidden underground, the bunker was intact, the only thing spared utter destruction.

Do Duc motioned to Rock, who leveled his LAW at the bunker’s locked door, pulled the trigger. Donaldson was the first man into the hollow echo after the explosion, tossing a CS grenade into the gaping hole the rocket launcher had made in the concrete. They all backed away from the hiss of the riot gas, then sat back on their haunches, waiting for the air to clear.

Do Duc and Rock ducked inside the bunker, took a look around. There were no personnel inside; it was an armaments warehouse. The curious thing was that what they saw stockpiled were K-5Os, 7.62 submachine guns, all Chinese Communist manufactured. Considering Jin’s warning, that was significant.

They explored the entire bunker, came up with more Chicom weapons.

“This doesn’t look like Charlie,” Rock commented. “This ordnance is so new I can see my reflection in the oil. He’s never so well equipped.”

“You know about the Nungs?”

Rock nodded. “Did a patrol or two with some of ’em when I was with Big Dead One. We were always on the cutting edge of the war.” He laughed. “And I do mean cutting.”

“This look like them?”

“Fuck, they don’t have the kind of money needed for this cache.”

“You ever hear of the Gwai—a rogue group of Nungs?”

Rock shook his head. “No, why?”

“Jin mentioned them. According to him they’re very bad news.”

Rock grunted. “Fucking Nungs.”

Do Duc shrugged. The odor of money was becoming stronger. “Who has the capital for this, then?” Do Duc said.

“Easy. Soviet Union. Or Uncle Sam.”

The two men looked at each other for a long time. At last, Rock said, “You think this shit has anything to do with Michael Leonforte?”

“Maybe. Who knows what Pentagon East has on its mind.”

“If we bought this ordnance, who are we arming?”

“Good question,” Do Duc said. “At this point, I think Mr. Leonforte is the only one who’ll give us an answer.”

“If we can find him.”

“That’s why we’re here. But if he’s dead, I say we come back here and ‘liberate’ this ordnance. We’d get big bucks selling it.”

“Done,” Rock said.

They got up to leave, and Rock put a hand on Do Duc’s arm. “Whoever owns this has got to be close; maybe they’re already eyeballing us.”

They made their way out of the bunker. Both had the beginnings of a headache brought on by the last of the CS gas. Do Duc broke up the unit into teams of two, ordered them out on cloverleaf recon, so that they would loop back, overlapping each other for backup in this obviously hostile environment.

Do Duc and Rock explored the area around the bunker. They found nothing of interest. Within ten minutes they caught sight of Riggs and Donaldson returning from recon across the destroyed village. It was at that moment that the mortars began to fall, the sky caving in, turning to hot lead in a paroxysm of death.

The first or second round caught Donaldson, hurling him into the center of another black and red plume. Do Duc, who had taken cover alongside Rock, could not see Riggs through the smoke and explosions. The Nungs were nowhere in sight. Do Duc hoped they were trying to find the source of the attack.

The silence after such an attack is eerie because it is deafening in its own right. Do Duc poked his head out from behind a crumbling wall, saw what was left of Donaldson, not much more than a smear on the pockmarked ground. Nearby, amid the rubble, he could make out the enormous Riggs, who was propped up against another wall. He was staring down at the blood covering his lower body. His chest was heaving and shuddering.

“Ah, shit,” Do Duc said as Rock pushed up beside him to take a look around.

It remained quiet. Do Duc still had no idea where Jin and the other Nung were or any sense where the incoming mortar fire had emanated from. He saw Riggs’s chest moving in panting heaves, and he knew he had to get to him immediately.

“Cover me,” he said to Rock.

Taking a deep breath, he broke cover, zigzagging his way toward Riggs. No sniper took a shot at him, and he could see no sign of enemy infantry. He saw no evidence of the Nungs, either, and this worried him. What had happened to them? It was unlikely they had neutralized the source of the enemy fire since Do Duc had heard no weapons fire. Had they deserted?

He knelt beside Riggs. “It’s gonna be okay, big guy,” he said, breaking out an ampoule of morphine. “Just take it easy.”

He was just beginning to assess the damage when the air turned thick with the peculiar whistling of incoming fire. Do Duc launched himself toward the relative safety of a cracked-apart structure, but he could already feel the oppressive weight of the shells streaking inward on their high arcs.

Where are those goddamned Nungs?

Then the world was collapsing in on him with the shriek and wail of matter rending itself. The ground rippled underneath his boot soles, then came up and smashed against his stomach.

He lay for a time, dazed and so shook up that he swore later that he had actually glimpsed the phantom armies of his previous day’s dream on the march, the dread beat of their weaponry and armor shaking the leaves off the trees, his own helmed and masked silhouette striking down the last flames of the setting sun.

Then he blinked, saw Rock crouched over him, shaking him, shouting at him.

“What? What?”

“Let’s hotel alpha!” Rock was shouting. “I found the Nungs—or what’s left of ’em. We’re it from the first team!” He hauled Do Duc to his feet, steadying him. “Goddamnit, buddy, get your ass in gear now!”

Do Duc nodded, but now the shelling had started again, and together they staggered into the northwestern outskirts of the village, heading deeper into Laos, but that was all right for now because it was away from the barrage.

It seemed to Do Duc that night that he did nothing but dream. He lay beneath a palm tree, with the rain pattering all around, curled in a fetal position, exhausted and famished. He was in pain from the rubble that had landed on him, his skin was chafed raw, and he itched in so many places he had given up scratching. He took that as the best sign; he was still alive.

He slept… and dreamed, the images kicking in one after another as if his mind were a vehicle that had been thrust into high gear by the adrenaline rush of the war.

He spoke with the ravaged girl on the bank of the rice paddy. She had no eyes, but her bare teeth smiled at him in a most disarming manner. The darkness of her blind sockets was lit by the phosphorescence of memory like antiaircraft tracers.

The memories were not, of course, hers, but Do Duc’s, played out upon the grisly stage of his childhood, mangled by the terror it generated, so that by the coming of dawn, when he opened his gluey eyelids, there remained no pleasant sanctuaries, no safe harbors for him to withdraw into. There was only the war, and the war was where he had chosen to be, as if it were a country into which he could disappear like some dissipated expatriate disgusted by life back home.

Which, in a sense, was just what had happened.

Do Duc had taken the first watch, but sometime during it he had fallen asleep, not to wake up until dawn. It was lucky that the enemy had not come upon them in the night.

Distance was obscured by clouds. It was as if they were in the Cardamom Mountain Range, thousands of feet above sea level, instead of being in the low plateau country.

“Where the hell are we?” Rock said.

“I don’t know,” Do Duc said, doing some deep knee bends. The movement had begun to work the stiffness out of his body. “In this dense fog I can’t tell east from west.”

He took out his compass, but it had been smashed sometime during the mission, probably during the barrage, and was of no use. He looked at Rock, who was sitting on a blasted tree stump, his menacing LAW braced on his right hip.

“I want to get something straight right now, so we both know where we stand,” Rock said. “I don’t much care whether or not I get back. In fact, thinking about it, I’d like it a whole helluva lot better if I didn’t. The truth is I like it out here, away from all the bullshit of the Army bureaucracy.” He spat. “You know and I know that the bush is where it’s at when it comes to this war. The bush is where Charlie breathes and shits, and the bush is where we’re gonna put his ass in a sling.”

“What about support? You can’t wage war without it.”

“Fuck that. The kind of support we’re getting from Pentagon East can only get us killed. Count on it. Friendly fire or wrong coordinates on a drop or shit-stick intelligence about a green zone where Charlie is waiting for us alpha bravo”—he meant an ambush—“we’re the ones who’ll get it in the neck.”

“I can’t argue with you there.”

“Then why go back? I’m out here in the deep bush and I’m thinking the longer I’m here, the farther out I go, the better I like it. And d’you know why? Because I feel safe here. I only have to rely on me and on you—not a bunch of ass wipes in Saigon who do not know how to wage war. We do. And this is where we should be doing it from.”

Do Duc thought about that for some time. “There’s the mission to think of,” he said at last.

“You know this mission stinks to high heaven. Now that it’s just us, there’s no harm in talking about it openly.”

“What do you mean?” Do Duc knew but he wanted to hear Rock’s version.

“I think we’ve been put in the middle of a sensitive MI mission that fucked up in a major way.”

Do Duc nodded. “I agree. But I still want to reach the objective.”

“Michael Leonforte. Well, why not? If he’s still alive.” Rock took a minute to squash an insect between his thumb and forefinger. “You know the odds are that this mission is no longer what it once was.”

“It’s occurred to me that it never was what it was supposed to be.”

“All the better.” Rock rose, grinning. “I say let’s get the fuck on with it.”

Just before noon, they stopped to rest in a depression between two long fingers of muddy ground that before the war had perhaps been farmland. Do Duc ached all over.

If anything, the fog had thickened, so that it was impossible to see even a meter in any direction. All sound was muffled, but in truth, there was little to hear. It had seemed to Do Duc as if they had been moving across a landscape devoid of any other life, as if they themselves had become as insubstantial as ghosts, flitting across terrain already beyond their ability to touch or change.

Sensory input dwindled to a minimum of sight and sound; even the rank stench of the semitropical foliage seemed far away, as if dampened by the heavy fog.

In this state somewhere between consciousness and dreaming it was easy to assess even the most minute change in their immediate environment.

Do Duc stopped. “We’re not alone.”

“In all this shit no one could see us, not even with Starlights or infrareds,” Rock said. Nevertheless he hefted his LAW, planting the butt firmly against his right hip. “I’ll tell you one thing, if Charlie’s here, his ass is grass.”

Do Duc put a hand on his arm. “Don’t be hasty. It won’t help us to blow Mr. Leonforte to kingdom come.”

“If Charlie—or the Gwai or whoever the fuck
they
are—are holding him hostage, they’ll be sure to keep him well away from any incursion.”