Red Flags (10 page)

I awoke once, around midnight, and ate some rice balls. Drops still pelted the large vulgar leaves overhead but the rain had stopped coming through. The deadfall on the floor of the jungle glowed, the rot luminous. The jungle was growing like a cancer, dripping and klacking, forcing and appropriating, choking everything within reach. Given the slightest opening, it wedged in. I draped my head in an olive-drab towel and slept.

I
T WAS BARELY
light. Ruchevsky took the lead along a faint animal track that wove over a ridge and into another valley. The track dipped behind a small hillock near the bottom, then went over it. As we neared the top of the smaller rise, we left the path and eased to the ground, crawling slowly forward through thick grasses into tangled foliage. I crawled after John on hands and knees, wishing that whatever the hell animal's trail we were using, the beast had been taller. It took forever. Eventually we crawled into a double-canopy forest of tropical hardwood trees speckled with orange flowers growing on their trunks.

The growth merged with a dense stand of elephant grass basking in a rare slash of light. The stalks loomed ten or twelve feet over us. Our continuing through would leave a visible trail. Not that we could. The individual blades were treacherously sharp.

Ruchevsky slid off to the left. I lost him momentarily and followed blindly, stepping onto another small animal trail on a hillside covered in creepers, praying that none was the thorny variety that latched onto you and didn't let go. A gang of yellow flies descended and bit our scalps. We slithered across the wet jungle floor, soft and quiet with dead vegetation, beneath broadleaf plants and nipa palms that looked like giant green shark skeletons. We were on a downward slope.

At the bottom of the hillside, the vines and thick undergrowth gave way to a crude road twenty feet wide, flanked by lush plants and sheltered on both sides by enormous trees that rose like redwoods, well over a hundred feet high, dwarfing us beneath their interlocked limbs and leaves.

At Ruchevsky's signal, we went to ground in a slight depression beneath a fallen log colonized by ferns. We camouflaged our position with fetid, damp rot and beards of moss, then waited, lying parallel to the road and facing in opposite directions, our feet touching. Sweat dripped from my chin and nose and ran freely down my face. I was exhausted and began to fade out as I lay still, hoping nothing too painful or deadly had decided to camp in my pants or under my shirt. A slight touch of John's foot had me instantly alert.

Small engines putt-putted through the stillness as scooters and motorized carts arrived, impossibly laden with goods. They parked and unloaded. Tradespeople began setting up shop by the roadside, piling their goods on tarps and erecting stalls for their produce, rice and dried fish, purple mangosteens, green jackfruit, yellowish papaya, even live fish in plastic bags filled with water. A rickety truck, a three-wheeled Lambretta, and a row of motorbikes soon lined the roadbed. Two women set out beer bottles and sundries, another piled cigarette packs on a tarp. The town market had come to the jungle.

Guards appeared—local Viet Cong. The guy in charge was stocky, his jowls shaded with several days' growth of beard. Unusual for an Asian. Judging from the rustling and talk behind us, we were within the circle of their security. Holy Jesus. What the hell had Ruchevsky gotten me into?

He was playing the odds that we'd be safe because the likelihood of anybody knowing that we would be out here was nil. Nor would anyone anticipate our presence, since no one in his right mind would do what we were doing. Me included, if he had warned me ahead of time. I desperately wanted to scratch the fly bites and dislodge whatever was feasting on my calf.

Guards trudged past, talking loudly. I held my breath. Vietnamese, thank God. Montagnards were great trackers and might have picked up signs of our presence. One of the sentries climbed high into a tree and perched in its branches to look for approaching threats, concentrating on the opposite ends of the road. A second guard posted himself with his ear to the trunk, listening for any signals the lookout tapped out.

Customers appeared, peaked and worn, their clothes threadbare. Up and down the road, passing the Viet Cong in their conical hats, armed North Vietnamese Army regulars strolled in shorts and black pajamas or pale green uniforms prudishly buttoned to the throat, confident they couldn't be spotted from overhead through the canopy. They all looked emaciated from living in the wild. None had more than a single magazine in his Kalashnikov, so their waiting comrades couldn't be far away. Their wants were modest—candy, cigarettes, beer, fruit—treats. Some small personal essentials: needles, thread, aspirin, that sort of thing. Each man bought just a few items and moved back into the forest, permitting other soldiers to funnel out of the jungle and take in the wares on offer. The entrepreneurs haggled loudly. Negotiations were short but intense, accompanied by loud banter. Everyone was enjoying the day. The surrounding foliage both muted and magnified the sounds, hollowing the air as it held it still.

The larger bulk purchases looked official: rice, cooking oil, live fish, mosquito netting, pharmaceuticals. Every soldier hefted a bag of supplies for the unit onto his shoulder as he departed, counted off by cadre. They exited in the same northerly direction they had come from.

A stick smacked the fronds behind us: a sentry wading through the ferns and leafy plants on the other side of the fallen tree trunk, beating the foliage as he went. I thumbed the safety off and breathed shallow, through my mouth. A bead of sweat inched down my spine. Another hung from my nose and dropped. An insect staggered past my eyes, dragging a vanquished enemy twice its size. Its cousins had taken up residence in the soft flesh at the back of my right knee.
Bo cho
ticks, judging from the pain of the bites.

Shouts erupted. A sentry hacked at the growth, bringing several others. They were chasing a snake, excited by the contest, yelping like children. The footfalls and shouts receded. I breathed again.

The shoppers thinned out, and the vendors hurriedly struck their stands and packed their wares. The sentry in the crow's-nest tapped out a signal, alerting those on the ground that somebody was approaching.

A two-stroke motor scooter came down the track, operated by a Vietnamese in green ARVN fatigues and aviator sunglasses. Behind him sat a Westerner in khaki pants, poplin shirt, and leather sandals: the USAID tough guy, wearing a shoulder holster. Their machine pulled up as a priest in shirtsleeves and clerical collar arrived on an ancient bicycle, its gears and chain clacking. A new white pickup truck brought a third Caucasian. What in the hell? I was dumbfounded.

The ARVN and each of the Westerners silently waited his turn and met briefly with the stocky Vietnamese leader. He exchanged a few words with each man and gave him a packet. When he'd met all of them he promptly left, walking into the jungle with his entourage of VC. The priest remounted his bicycle and pedaled off. Mr. USAID and the South Vietnamese soldier got back on their motor scooter, and the white guy climbed into his pickup. They all departed the way they'd come. The guards withdrew, and the last sellers straggled off, putt-putting away on their motorbikes and pedaling their bicycle carts.

We lay still. When we were utterly alone, Ruchevsky tapped me with his foot and we painstakingly crawled out through the tangle, our limbs stiff and numb. Back on the ridge, Ruchevsky drained his canteen and spoke for the first time since Little John had left us in the brush.

"Need more water," he whispered, sprinkling his face with the final drops, his cheeks bright red. "Let's pinch some from that stream near the rest station."

I raised my thumb in agreement. The new bunch of pilgrims would be snoozing by now and wouldn't be up again until they set out at nightfall. He led us up the hill near the rest station, where our faint animal track crossed their well-worn trail. The hut was to the right, the sound of running water to the left. We staked out the spot, listening and watching. The invaders slept. He handed me his two canteens and signaled
go.
Rifle slung, pistol out, I stepped onto the trail and padded toward the bubbling of the stream. It flowed rapidly with the previous night's rain. I filled all four canteens and hurried back, the fingers of my left hand hooked in the caps' plastic ties.

The discharge was faint but unmistakable. I ran to John. When I reached him, an NVA soldier in green shorts lay on the trail flat on his back, clearly terrified. Ruchevsky knelt on his arm, holding the silenced pistol an inch from the boy's forehead, a hand over his mouth.

He was no more than sixteen. Scrawny, gaunt, his hair overgrown, out for a walk in the beautiful woods to savor a minute's privacy, or maybe to fetch water to wash his clothes, boil his bamboo shoots. He must have been heading my way when Ruchevsky took him down. Shit. If only the boy had slept. A diagonal rice sleeve crossed his body.

The youngster whimpered. Blood streaked his arm. Ruchevsky made faint soothing noises to put him at ease and popped a shot into his temple. It didn't exit. Just banged around the brainpan for the instant it took to send him into eternity. He lifted the weapon away. The silencer had burned a red circle around the small black hole.

We each took a leg and dragged him off the trail and along our track, into heavier foliage. I went back and brushed away all marks of a disturbance while Ruchevsky stripped him of his rucksack and AK-47. He examined the weapon for a proof mark but it had none: a Chinese knockoff. He removed a bullet from the magazine, peered at it, and held it out to me. The base was stamped 1964: two-year-old ammo. I nodded in acknowledgment and signaled to hurry. If we were lucky, the soldier wouldn't be missed until tonight's march or might not be found at all.

"Take his rice," he whispered. "My people can identify where the grains came from."

I slipped the bandoleer sleeve off the body and draped it over myself.

Ruchevsky lifted the rucksack and rifle and what looked like a shiny penknife but turned out to be a harmonica. We covered the body with broad leaves and were off, back over the ridge toward our rendezvous with Little John.

 

We reached it two hours later. No Little John.

"He's supposed to be here ahead of us," John hissed and gulped water.

We stayed in the tree line back from the road and waited, trying not to talk, not knowing who might be nearby. After a while, curiosity got me.

"What do you think that little powwow in the jungle was about?" I said in a whisper.

Ruchevsky shook his head slowly. "God and Lenin striking a truce? Fuck, I don't know. Nothing good for us."

"What the hell's the story on Mr. USAID?" I said very softly. "I wasn't exactly expecting to see him confabbing with the Viet Cong."

"No kidding. His name is Whalen Lund. I keep wondering if he might be working for my employer."

"You don't know if Lund is one of yours?"

"Field people with different gigs aren't identified to one another. We don't coordinate—or cooperate. I'm here trawling the civilian population for Reds. I got a directive to make lists of VC and their sympathizers and order up air strikes. Lund? My station chief says he knew the guy a few years back, says he was a Marine looking to do dark deeds for God and country. Like running a Truong Son death squad. Offered himself to all the intelligence shops while he was still in the Corps. No takers—allegedly. Winds up a construction contractor for a short time. Well, a contractor, anyway. Then he joins USAID to push fertilizer and new rice strains, if you buy that."

"And the priest? There to bless the provisions, you think?"

"That was Father Calogaras, is my guess. I've only seen one old photo of him."

"The lefty French priest they say has gone native? The one the Berets talk about offing?"

"From a Greek family near Marseilles. Worker-priest in a factory there. Been in Indochina forever. Reportedly knows everything that goes on in the province. Has the locals' loyalty."

"Which locals?"

"Vietnamese—Communists, Catholics, Buddhists. It's kept him alive, so far. He's been in these mountains for two decades and everyone wants what he knows. But he stays completely off our radar, even while he's rumored to be running social services for the
other
provincial government."

"For the Communists, you mean? Like schools?"

"Schools, village wells, irrigation. Medical stations. Food for those on hard times. Some of our schools are his schools after sunset."

"God, what was he doing there in the jungle with Lund?"

"Beats me. Comparing notes on well digging?"

"And the Westerner in the Ford?"

"A local missionary, Judd Slavin. He and his wife are from St. Louis. Liked by everyone."

"Including the Viet Cong, apparently."

"He's the least worrisome. The humanitarian workers over here stay as neutral as possible ... for their own safety. Even so, the Viet Cong aren't very consistent in their official positions on Western do-gooders. Makes socializing iffy. They have a committee called Friends of Workers in Christ that's supposed to liaise with the missionaries. Slavin makes contact with them from time to time."

"The ARVN dandy looked nervous."

"Can you blame him?" Ruchevsky said.

"Think he's a turncoat?"

"He'd never be that obvious. No, he's there probably to negotiate new prices at the gas pumps or some other commodity his boss is dealing in. Must be a hell of a feeling, going in alone to bicker with armed VC."

"Who was the odd-looking dude with the jowls and five o'clock shadow?"

"He's the top comrade in the province. Chinh's counterpart. The VC boss, most senior official in the area. Outranks even their military leadership. Joe Parks calls him Wolf Man."

"Amazing he would meet so publicly with Westerners and an ARVN."

"Probably wants word to get around that they recognize his authority. Acknowledge his position."

"What bio have you got on him?"