Red Flags (34 page)

"We can sink him with these financials."

John shook his head. "We can't show anyone these numbers or the window will slam shut on the account and the paper trail will start disappearing. The guy eyeballing the deposits will have his peepers plucked out." I started to protest but John held up his hand to stop me. "We need to think this through when we're not so distracted," he said, and resumed prepping his weapons. "Your gear almost ready?"

I taped together two magazines of M-16 ammo, one upside down, so there'd be no rummaging around for another, then loaded up two pouches with full magazines—enough for a siege. John got out his Schmeisser.

He ran down the contingency schemes he and Little John had, places he might hide—assuming the duo from Saigon didn't already have him. The possibility was torturing Ruchevsky. I tried sleeping for an hour but John's impatience made that impossible. He was itching to get going.

By three thirty there was no holding him. I commandeered the signal detachment's jeep and we set off through the gate, hours before the night's curfew expired. We drove to Little John's home village, where by protocol we woke the headman before searching. Little John wasn't in the men's longhouse or anywhere else, although the chief volunteered that Vietnamese had come looking for him toward dusk in an ARVN vehicle. Both men were dressed in teal slacks, black shoes, and short-sleeved white shirts with epaulettes. No caps, no insignia—but white mice for sure. The taller one displayed a gold tooth, the other the gold-filled cap of a Parker fountain pen in his breast pocket. A status symbol—the suggestion of the pen—even if owning the whole instrument was beyond the man's immediate means.

"Great," Ruchevsky groused. "A bent cop too stupid to extort a whole pen."

 

Dark as it was, we drove down to the river and crossed on foot. The water was lukewarm and shin deep. In full monsoon season it would be chest high. Runoff streams that fed into the river during the wet season were still dry channels. We went along one of the sandy troughs and reached their emergency rendezvous point: a grove of bamboo on the bank of a tributary channel.

"Little John," Ruchevsky called quietly as we slipped inside the meeting spot, a patch of sand enclosed by a solid wall of bamboo trunks that soared fifty feet over us, each thick as a leg, making the grove impossibly dense. It buzzed with insects, the air inside hot and dead. The smell was almost as bad as the sight Ruchevsky's flashlight lit up: a head impaled on a bamboo stake.

A mass of tiny black beetles saved us from looking at his eyes. His features were rigid, teeth bared and jaw locked. I slapped away the insects with my hat. The ears were gone, lopped off. Coagulated drips of blood hung down onto the white sand, thick as paint. Ants scurried everywhere in a frenzy. Flayed, bloody soles protruded from the ground, the legs impossibly splayed. Fingerless hands, spiked to a bamboo trunk, held a halved chunk of bamboo with
Viet-gian
scratched into it: Traitor.

"I'd say he talked?" I muttered, my voice shaky, and swatted at the droning, blood-crazed flies.

"God, I hope he sang like a canary. Whatever got it over quicker."

Judging from the head's grimace, I figured the screams would have been unearthly. I thought of the live dogs Special Forces medics used in training, amputating legs and inflicting gunshot wounds they then practiced patching up. But first the medics disabled the dogs' larynxes.

I pointed at what had been his throat. "Doesn't seem like they were happy with what they heard. They cut his vocal cords after they got whatever they got and kept right on going."

Using a stick, Ruchevsky picked up a wedge of something that looked like a giant pig's knuckle. "Jesus."

It was a vertebra dangling loose. Ruchevsky dropped it and went to examine the hands.

"They bound his hands with wire—pierced it through his palms like he was a martyr."

My guts felt like strings being strummed. Big John didn't look so good either. He stepped back into the circle, eyes large, and held his hand over his nose and mouth against the slaughterhouse stench.

"Where's the rest?" Ruchevsky said, staring down at the carnage.

Turning slowly in the odd natural chamber, I saw what was draped in the bamboo all around us.

I had to wet my lips to speak. "We're standing in him."

Ruchevsky leaned closer to the staked head, swatting at the bugs.

"It's not him," he rasped.

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah, yeah. I think it's Tri, our best informant. Works as a cook for Chinh. Gave us the info on the NVA market." Ruchevsky looked like he wanted to throttle someone. "God, why'd they dice him like this?"

Agitated, he kept rubbing his upper arm. "Tri must have told them about this meeting place. But it wasn't enough. Little John wasn't here."

"Chinh must want him bad," I said.

We followed the dry streambed down to the riverbank, looking for signs of the inquisitioners and Little John. Finding none, we followed the sandy trough back to the bamboo cul-de-sac.

Ruchevsky and I decided not to try to reassemble the body, or what we'd found of it. We would need a story for Tri's family, but his wife and kids should be spared seeing him like this no matter what. Vietnamese needed to bury their dead intact, or at least diligently gather up all the parts. It meant everything to the family to have a whole body. A loved one missing his head was unthinkable. But this ... The torturers hadn't just painstakingly slaughtered Tri and expelled him from this life. They'd doomed him in the next.

Vietnamese souls didn't immediately leave at death, and beheading or mutilation disrupted the process of dying, arrested the spirit's departure. The soul would know no peace. Unable to find its ancestors, the disfigured ghost would haunt the family.

We built a pyre of dry bamboo and added as many pieces of Tri to it as we could. We torched the whole grove. The dead trunks, held upright by the surrounding live bamboo, had no room to fall and added to the impenetrable wall. They burned hot enough to ignite everything and cremate the inventory of ruined flesh. The green bamboo popped like small-arms fire as we trudged away.

"Any chance at all this is VC revenge on Tri for telling you about the jungle market?" I said.

Ruchevsky shook his head. "When Viet Cong do awful shit—disembowel somebody's kid in front of them or bury somebody alive—they do it publicly, cold, a merciless object lesson. This is a private message, to scare the piss out of me and Little John and anyone else who acts against Chinh."

Ruchevsky rubbed at his neck.

I said, "Has it occurred to you that maybe they're not after just Little John? That maybe they put out the warrant to lure
you
out of the compound in the middle of the night?"

Ruchevsky shook his head. "Chinh knows what my people would do if I got iced."

"Don't kid yourself. The C-four in our phone wasn't intended for Little John. You could have been using it as likely as me. He's lined up on us both."

Ruchevsky said, "The only good news is it means we're really hurting him."

We crossed the river in silence. Ruchevsky took the wheel for the next leg, checking more hamlets within a few kilometers. No Little John. Ruchevsky drove us down a perfectly straight and deserted road, nothing but scrawny trees and brush on either side. And amazingly, paved.

"Where does this stretch go?" I said.

"Nowhere, really. The French probably laid it down. It rolls for a hundred yards and just stops."

Where the pavement ended, a dirt track took us to an abandoned one-story house with a tiled roof that stood alone in the scrub, its two wings fronted by a long patio. The walls were pitted and falling away. It could have been the residence of a small coffee estate, but there were no abandoned fields, no scents of coffee blossoms. Aside from two sad-looking ylang-ylang trees and a jasmine bush, no domesticated plants had survived the neglect.

John didn't bother to check inside the dark building. He slipped around the side to a concrete bunker, holding his flashlight away from his body, just in case. I switched mine off and followed him down a few steps. John's Uzi hung from his neck, the Schmeisser on his shoulder. He picked up a Montagnard bush ax.

"Watch your head," he instructed as he opened the heavy door and ducked to avoid a beam. "Stay behind me."

The bare bunker had the racks of an old wine cellar. Shadowy roots hung down from the gridded ceiling. Ruchevsky blocked me from entering. One of the distended tubers lunged toward us, hissing.

"Jesus!" I said, tripping backward. Ruchevsky swung with the ax but missed, then beat at it with the flat of the blade until the thing was still.

He shone his light on the snake. A krait: the deadliest. The ceiling was studded with them. They appeared dead, but Ruchevsky didn't take chances. Once they were lashed to the grid, nobody would have dared untie them. He hacked them all in half to make sure.

I said, "What the hell is this place?"

"The provincial interrogation center." He pointed at the hanging snake carcasses with the ax. "Inducements for guests of the state."

The space smelled dank and worse. One wall was smeared with something dark and unidentifiable. I peered into a large jar in one corner and shone my light inside. My eyes teared at the acrid odor. It clawed at the eyes.

"What's this for?"

John came over. "Water spiked with lime. They hose it through the nose into the stomach, jump on the midsection until it gushes back out the mouth. Even if you make it out of here, your gut forever reminds you of lessons learned. Chinh's interrogator's nickname is 'the Bartender.'"

"Sweet."

"Yeah," Ruchevsky said. "That restraint board there makes it easier to tip you back. But first they shove a stake in your nostril and break the bone so you can't breathe through your nose when they force the water down your throat." He looked around. "I only made the mistake of hanging around one time. Listening was actually worse than watching."

We turned to leave. Something shone in a crack in the floor. Ruchevsky picked it up.

"Shit."

"What?"

"It's a little gold Buddha on a chain. Like Tri's."

"Lots of Vietnamese wear them, John."

He nodded. "The Cambodians pop them in their mouths going into battle."

I said, "How do you know about this place?"

"We underwrite the local security enforcers."

"You fund the people who do this?"

"We finance the interrogation centers in every province. That's just a fact of life."

John drove toward Cheo Reo with no headlights. Though we were filthy and shaken, our night's work was unfinished, and we drove to several other spots to check for Little John. The sun haloed the horizon. Reaching town, we drove the dirt streets slowly, hoping he would see us and come out. After the first circuit, we noticed an ARVN jeep driven by two National Police running parallel to ours. They turned toward us onto a side street.

Ruchevsky spun the wheel and drove straight at them. The passage was too narrow to play chicken. The cop swung left, smashing into the butcher's stand to avoid a collision, bringing down a rack of impaled creatures. The carcasses kept coming loose and falling on the cops. The driver and the butcher raged at each other, not quite daring to direct their anger at us. John backed our jeep out and we continued on, unmolested.

Big John stopped in front of the barbershop and hopped out. I beat him in. The proprietor sat in his barber's chair, waiting for customers. No, no one had seen Little John, and everyone seemed glad of it. The barber was openly nervous, avoiding eye contact and swinging a silver piaster coin on a silver chain, like a hep cat, until it wound around a finger. Then he spun it the other way, unwinding it.

We returned to the jeep. John Ruchevsky rested a foot on the fender, his forearm on his knee, and surveyed the town.

"He would've shown himself by now if he was here."

I said, "I assume our little run-in with the mice means they haven't got him either."

"That or they're done with him and looking to do something to us."

"Maybe we should put a watch on the airstrip," I said, "in case they've got him and try to fly him out."

Ruchevsky took the wheel. "You're right. Let's go. We're not doing any good here."

We made for the compound.

I said, "What were your instructions to Little John in case of trouble like this?"

"Aside from the bamboo grove, you mean?"

"Yes."

"I told him to hide where he was the most certain they wouldn't look for him."

"Did he ever say where that might be?"

"No," Ruchevsky said, "unfortunately." He braked sharply. We skidded to a halt in a cloud of grit.

"What the hell?" I blinked against the road dust rising around us.

"I think I know where," he said.

We drove back through town and hung a right onto a track. Ignoring caution, we went some kilometers and pulled up outside a Montagnard village near a river: half a dozen longhouses and a Western building with a corrugated metal roof. I pointed to two spears suspended above the gate.

"What are those about?" I said.

"A Jarai warning—contamination."

John drove in. A slight figure stood in front of the largest longhouse, seemingly waiting. Before I could even make him out, I recognized the glove. At Little John's feet rested a small valise made out of sheet metal repeatedly printed with a beer logo. He must have been relieved that Big John had found him but was too shaken to show it. Instead, he seemed rigid.

"Someone say Saigon police look to me," he said. "I hide. Two police drive into village at sundown. I run into bush."

That they had come all the way from Saigon and knew to look for him at the village had made him worry they might also know the emergency meeting place. Instead of going to the rendezvous point, he had snuck cross-country to the leprosarium, a place deeply feared by Vietnamese.

"Mother here," he said, "father here. He indicated the couple standing nearby. The woman looked normal except for malformations of her feet. The old man stood holding a cigarette, blowing smoke out of an opening in his face roughly where a nose might once have been. One foot was an ulcerated stump.