Slash and Burn (20 page)

“I can be alert and stoned. I”m adaptable.”

“Bpoo!”

“Please.”

“You’re my only hope to stay alive today.”

“Oh, great. Play the ‘You’re my only hope to stay alive’ card right now, why don’t you? All right. But I’m drinking it when all this is over. Both mugs.”

“No problem. Now, we don’t exactly know who killed Potter but there are two, perhaps three people we can cross off the list of suspects. That leaves a very small select few to choose from. So I propose we take advantage of their temporary insanity. We’ll never have them in a more vulnerable state. We should focus on the weak and wounded.”

“Well, there she is,” said Bpoo, nodding in the direction of Ethel Chin. Even Geung had abandoned her. She sat alone now with tears streaming down her ruddy blistered cheeks.

“You’re right. A stray has wandered from the herd,” Siri agreed. “Sharpen your talons.”

They sat on either side of the personal assistant. When she looked up to see who had joined her, the crying intensified.

“I’m supposed to be getting married in October,” she snorted. “Now look at me. I’m so ugly he’ll never talk to me again.”

Siri nodded.

“Oh, look at you, deary,” said Bpoo. “You were hardly Miss Hong Kong even before your face erupted. Your fiancé’s obviously a very charitable chap. Fully sighted, is he?”

Chin howled her misery.

“I suppose he knows you’ve been rolling in the hay with your boss while you were on these missions. Or did you forget to mention it?”

It was as if the woman were so full of tears she couldn’t get them out in time. It was a job well done on Bpoo’s part. Intimate thuggery. At such close quarters, Siri was able to get a good look at Chin’s face. The makeup was doing a poor job of hiding her sores. In fact, it was probably exacerbating the infection. And then, in a sudden flash of obviousness, it came to him.

“Of course,” he said, and slapped the scar tissue on his forehead.

“What’s that?” Bpoo asked, still waiting for a pause in the sobs so she could continue her assault.

“Once again, it’s taken me several days to see what Inspector Maigret of the Paris Sûreté would have noticed instantly.”

“Who?”

“I’m a disgrace to the detective brotherhood.”

Bpoo raised her crayoned-on eyebrows.

“Desist from your random scratching and biting,” he told her. “We can now go directly for the jugular.”

“All right, old man. I’ll translate as meanly as I can.”

“Good. Then we’ll begin with a story. It’s the story of the Jesuits.” (Bpoo stared. He ignored her.) “Apart from importing their peculiar religion and cheese and braziers to our barbaric land, the Jesuits also introduced firearms. Installing religion was apparently not enough for them. They were expecting us to fight to the death to defend it. The weapon of choice, popular in Europe at the time, was the musket. The locals were a resourceful lot and they learned to reproduce these guns using local materials. As there was no quality control supervisor in attendance, our version of the musket carried the odd idiosyncrasy.”

Ethel Chin had dried up. Her red, bloated eyes were now staring angrily at Bpoo, who stared confidently back at them.

“It is incredible,” Siri continued, “given the availability of cheap weapons over the past thirty years of warfare, that the country folk still favor their old muskets. But one thing they’ve all learned is to hold the weapon well away from the face when they fire it. Forgetting to do so is likely to lead to a very nasty powder burn. Someone unfamiliar with this rule, someone who learned their gunmanship from television cowboy shows, for example, would very likely rest their cheek against the barrel.”

Chin turned to Siri.

“It’s a rash,” she spat.

“No. It’s not,” Siri told her. “And I can prove it’s not because microscopic gunpowder deposits remain embedded in the skin for months after. Luckily we have an electron microscope at our lab.”

Auntie Bpoo was taking great delight in the translation … and the lie.

“And why would I be shooting a musket?” Chin asked with a different type of tears welling up in her eyes.

“To remove suspicion from your employer. The assassination attempt on the senator was orchestrated to remove him from the list of potential suspects in the murder of Major Potter. In this way he was a victim. I doubt he was delighted that you actually made contact. I imagine the plan was to run off into the bushes where you’d secreted your musket and fire a shot perhaps two meters to his right. But, as I say, those muskets can be devils. Lucky you didn’t actually kill the blighter.”

“This is ridiculous,” Chin cried. “It was … it was an attack by someone who … who hates us. An assassination attempt. Murder? What do you mean murder? Potter killed himself.”

Chin was confused. Good. She was temporarily out of her comfortable mind.

“Well, of course you know that isn’t true,” Siri continued calmly. “You had to think on your feet once the attempt to blow him up failed. I’m assuming one of you snuck into his room during the evening meal and put an old, unstable stick of dynamite amongst his safe ones. Perhaps you armed it too. You can fill in the details for us later. I hate to interrupt a good dénouement. As I said, once that attempt failed, you had to look for a plan B. The major was a lecher, by all accounts. An autoerotic accident would fit nicely. Dead and discredited all in one go. Except you’d both been so sure plan A would work that you weren’t really prepared for this new show. You had to ad lib. Intercepting his coffee and putting in the sedatives wouldn’t have been that hard. Bit heavy on the drugs, I’d say. Lack of knowledge of how much it takes to knock out a big man so you threw in the whole pack. Am I right? So you go back to check. He’s unconscious and all ready for the main act. I noticed you stopped wearing your lipstick after you arrived here.”

“Why would anyone need lipstick in the jungle?”

She spoke now without the arrogance they’d become used to.

“Yet you were wearing a very impressive rouge when you first arrived. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we could match your usual shade with that on the major’s lips. And then there was the beauty spot.”

“Tell your old doctor to stop,” Chin pleaded, but Bpoo merely shrugged as if the process were irreversible.

“You were trying to be too clever there,” Siri told her. “I don’t know what type of relationship you have with the senator—”

“He’s a respected United States rep—”

“And I don’t really want to know. But I get a creeping feeling at the back of my neck when I imagine you two in the major’s room late that night. It’s as if you took delight in it. Your victim is unconscious. You strip him. You both drag him to the door and tie him up. I wonder how it is your boss knows so much about tying a noose with an escape knot. It isn’t something you learn in the boy scouts. And then the two of you go about the degradation; the underwear, the lipstick, and, as the pièce de résistance, the beauty spot. One detail too many. If a man has a late night hobby of making himself look like a woman, he’s going to know better than to use indelible ink.”

“It’s true,” said Bpoo.

“I took the liberty of stealing one of the pens you and the senator have been using on your flow charts. The one we found in the room was the same make and the fingerprints on it were identical.”

As he hadn’t sampled his wife’s tea, it was impossible for Siri to know exactly what was happening in Ethel Chin’s mind during all this. But it appeared her logical self was vying for equity. She laughed haughtily and rudely into the face of Bpoo.

“I’m a law graduate, you know?” she said. ‘Top five percentile at Yale. That’s pretty shit-hot lawyering, don’t you think? And you know what? Not one single thing you’ve told me would get you past a preliminary hearing in a court of law. You tell your coroner here he’s got nothing. He can go take a hike.”

Both Siri and Bpoo smiled as she passed on this regrettable news.

“I’m a medical graduate, you know?” said Siri. “Bottom ten percentile at Hôtel de Ville hospital in Paris. Not particularly hot, not even lukewarm, I admit. But I do know where to insert a common sewing needle in the spinal cord to cause permanent paralysis.”

Bpoo positively squealed with delight before translating.

“Which should serve to remind you of where you are. It’s irrelevant whether our evidence will make it through a court of law because we only have the one judge and he’s an idiot. And we don’t have any laws. And you’re in the deep deep wilds of Indochina with no friends, surrounded by hostiles. And you could scream injustice till your lungs popped out and nobody would hear you.”

Once she’d passed all this on, Bpoo sighed like a nail puncture in a tractor tyre. She took Siri by the hand.

“If you weren’t married….”

But Siri retrieved his hand. He hadn’t finished yet.

“I don’t know what this is all about,” he said. “Not yet. I haven’t worked out why you’re really here or what your boss’s real relationship with Bowrys senior and junior is, but I do know that Potter was on to him back in Ho Chi Minh. I’ve seen Potter’s notes about Vogal abusing his position at the embassy. I’ve also seen evidence that it was Vogal who got Potter kicked out of the war. There’s a copy of a letter from Vogal to the State Department citing Potter’s excesses. It recommends he be asked to step down. I don’t doubt Potter was a drunk or that he had issues. But the very fact that he was here heading this mission tells me how driven he was. And he’d have to have friends in high places who shared his convictions or he wouldn’t have been offered the position.

“So, the question is, what’s everybody doing here? According to the missing pages of Sebastian’s interview, there was a briefcase. Captain Boyd kept it with him in the cockpit at all times. He told his mechanic it was his insurance policy. He claimed it contained evidence enough to incriminate all the bad guys. If that briefcase survived the crash I’m sure there are a lot of people who’d like to get their hands on it. Well worth funding an MIA mission for. Well worth the senator flying in to prevent its contents being leaked. Well worth killing a few people for. I bet Potter was delighted to see the senator’s name on the shortlist, but it looks like he underestimated just how evil your employer is.”

Ethel Chin was crying now because she deserved to be. She was undone. Siri looked across at the wispy-haired senator, still high on his marijuana tea, still entertaining, still oblivious. In no fit state to fight or resist a citizen’s arrest. The villains were outnumbered. Inspector Siri saves the day. Solves another one. Hooray for Dr. Siri. And, not for the first time, while he was busy patting himself on the back, basking in his overconfidence, he failed to notice fate creeping up with its teeth bared to bite him on the backside.

21

ORE INSPIRING

They’d been walking for an hour through the type of jungle that Hollywood did so well in papier mâché and polystyrene. The group was low on oxygen and conversation. The mission had begun with Phosy and Lit as reluctant comrades on a trek to Phu Kum mountain. But they’d needed to show the photographs to John Johnson for a third opinion. It would have been a long walk to visit some swidden farm project in the hills. In order to talk to Johnson, they’d had to bring in Dtui. Johnson was fascinated by the photos and pointed out that slash and burn and napalm left tree stumps, sometimes entire charred trees that nobody had the equipment to remove. The area in the photographs showed a bald landscape that no known defoliant could have created. In Johnson’s modest opinion, this area had been cleared by the same unknown juice that had cremated the dead man’s field. Naturally, he’d insisted on going along. There was no denying him. And this created a further annoyance for Phosy in that Dtui would have to accompany them. The journey would take twice as long if they walked at her pace.

With the Phonsavan driver asleep in a hammock, they’d boarded his truck, released the handbrake, and sailed silently down the incline and through the front gate. The old musketeers saluted as they passed. They were a hundred meters away before they engaged the motor and set off in search of the nearest point to Phu Kum.

“Are you quite sure this is the way?” Phosy asked, not for the first time. They’d parked the truck beside the dirt track and headed off into a dense jungle. Lit chose not to answer. The smoke seemed to be clearing a little and he had a vague outline of the sun to guide him. He had his map and his nose and no Vientiane policeman would distract him from his task. He did, however, allow himself to compliment Nurse Dtui on her stamina, her sense of humor in times of adversity, and her skill in a foreign language. All Phosy could offer to counter this was, “Are you quite sure this is the way?”

When they arrived at the clearing, Phosy’s question was answered tenfold. It was as if a celestial hoe had been dragged across the jungle and removed all but a washed-out yellow topsoil. Thirty meters away on the far side the vegetation continued but to the north and the south of them was a barren scar where nothing grew. Dtui confessed that the hairs on the back of her neck were tingling. The men had the same feeling but none of them admitted it.

“Why the hell…?” said Johnson.

“The mountain’s off to the left,” said Lit. “Assuming it’s still there.”

And so they headed north, their boots crunching on the dead undergrowth. Their hearts heavy in their chests. Here and there Phosy pointed out tire tracks in the dirt. They came across plastic bags and empty petrol containers. This dead channel through the jungle had been used. After twenty or thirty minutes a fuzzy dark shape appeared ahead of them.

“That’s Phu Kum,” said Lit.

Dtui patted him on the back and complimented him on his orientation skills. Phosy slapped him a little harder than necessary.

“Yes, well done, comrade,” he said.

They arrived at what could only be described as a quarry. Enormous rocks littered the bare landscape. Craters were all around. Ahead, the mountain had been opened up like a spoon through a blancmange.

“Messy,” said Dtui.

“We’re here,” said Phosy. “But I’m not sure what it is we’ve found.”

“Somebody’s blown hell out of this mountain, is what we’ve found,” said Johnson. He climbed up onto a heap of rubble and looked back along the devastated trail. “How far are we from the Thai border, here?”

Dtui asked Lit.

“A little over forty kilometers,” she said. “Why?”

“I don’t know. It just looks like a lot of trouble’s been taken here to set up some kind of quick transportation route south from this point. To clear the land this dramatically using conventional methods would take half a year at least. The spooks were always experimenting with different chemicals. I wonder if they really did come up with some super napalm and some enterprising spark had the bright idea to use it to clear jungle. There has to be something in that mountain to make it all worthwhile.”

Dtui had broken out the space rations and water. They sat in the shade of a bellyache tree that had held out against the bombs and the napalm and somehow survived. Phosy wasn’t interested in eating. He threw back a cup of water and said he had to take a leak. He walked around to the rear of a ridge of dislodged boulders and began to work his way up to the cliff. He was a slave to his curiosity. A man less fit than Phosy might not have made it over the debris. It wasn’t an easy climb. But the scramble over the rocks left him barely winded. He knew he could be up and back before the others had finished their lunch. Geology wasn’t his strong point but the multicoloured veins in the boulders all around filled him with wonder. It wasn’t their beauty that impressed him, rather the fact that these whites and browns and greens had taken thousands of years to form and he was so new compared to….

The bullets peppered the overhang beside him and sent shards of rock into the side of his face. One caught his eye. He recognized the yap yap of an AK47—a second burst and he was on the ground now, his body pressed tight up against the cliff face. There was no cover. The shots were coming from above—far to the right. Blood stung his eyes so he couldn’t see the shooter. He tried to make himself as small a target as possible but he knew it would only be a matter of time before one of the 7.62 shells found him. At the end of the second volley, he heard a familiar voice.

“He’s one of ours, you idiot,” shouted Commander Lit. “Hold your fire.” There were a few seconds of silence before the shooter’s own voice echoed down from a cave entrance.

“How am I supposed to know that?”

“Because I’m telling you.”

Although Phosy couldn’t see, he could tell the security commander’s voice was coming from not far down the slope. He’d been following the inspector up the mountain.

“And who are you?” asked the shooter.

“Well, soldier, unless you stole that PL uniform you’re wearing, I’m your damned commanding officer so—”

“I don’t know that.”

“No, that’s true. You don’t. But my duty papers are in my pack here. If you think you can hold back from killing the pair of us, I’ll take them out and show you.”

“I’ve got my orders.”

“So have I. I’m Commander Lit Keovieng, previously security head in region five. Currently on special duty in Vientiane. The man you just shot at is the inspector of police in Vientiane. If you kill either of us you’ll be in front of a firing squad before supper time. Now put down your weapon and get down here and look at these papers before I climb up there and pull you down.”

There was another silence.

“They didn’t tell me anyone was coming,” said the shooter.

“They didn’t tell me anyone would be here trying to kill us,” said Lit.

“I’ll have to radio it in.”

“Are you relayed to Phonsavan?”

“Yeah.”

“Then tell Captain Chuan that Commander Lit is here from Xam Neua.”

“Right. Don’t go anywhere.”

“I’m going up to look at my colleague, if you don’t mind. Wouldn’t want him bleeding to death, would we?”

Lit climbed the final twenty meters where he found Phosy bloody but grinning.

“That was madness,” Phosy said.

“Nonsense.”

Lit removed a cloth from his shoulder bag, spat on it and started to clean Phosy’s face.

“You bleed a lot for someone with no wounds,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“What for?”

“Saving my life.”

“I did no such thing.”

“Standing down an armed guard. He could just as easily have shot you too. You aren’t in uniform. That was a brave thing you did.”

“I doubt he could hit a tank from two meters.”

“You’re probably right, but, thanks.”

They were hit by a small avalanche of pebbles from above as the shooter, his weapon now over his shoulder, scrambled from his roost to join them. He was wearing flip-flops so much of his descent was on his backside. He smiled a set of dark brown teeth.

“Comrades,” he said, holding out his hand. “No hard feelings, eh?” Phosy shook the hand. The shooter’s salute to Lit looked more like a backhander to his own ear.

“Commander,” he said. “Just following orders.”

“I’m sure you were.”

“Truth is, they told me to shoot to kill. But I usually just wound ’em. Then they can limp home and tell their friends not to come. If they’re dead, people come looking for ’em, right?”

“Right.”

They heard footsteps on gravel and the sentry reached for his weapon.

“Relax soldier,” said Lit. “I think that’s the rest of our party come to see if we’re alive.”

“Phosy! Phosy, are you all right?” came Dtui’s anxious voice.

“I’m fine,” Phosy yelled.

“Lit?”

“I’m fine too,” shouted Lit. He shrugged at Phosy. “Thanks for asking.”

Dtui, aided over the rocks by Sergeant Johnson, appeared around a huge boulder. When she saw the state of her husband she scrambled alone over the last few meters. She could hardly catch her breath.

“What’s he doing here?” the soldier asked when he saw Johnson.

“Prisoner. Don’t worry about it,” said Lit.

“Who did this to you?” Dtui screamed.

“That was me, comrade,” the soldier grinned. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

She glared at him, grabbed the cloth from Lit and began her own inspection.

“Always have to be the hero,” she mumbled. “Always have to run off on your own to show how clever you are. Can’t wait five minutes. Safety in numbers, ever hear of that? Heavens, Phosy, you’ve got a lump of rock sticking out of your face … and you’ve cracked a tooth. How, pray tell me, is that not as bad as it looks?”

“Could have been a bullet through his skull,” said the shooter looking over her shoulder at the wound.

She reached into her pack for her own medical supplies and pointed a bandage at the soldier.

“You,” she said, “I’ll get to you later.”

“Be nice to have the support of a good woman,” said the soldier.

“So what exactly is it you’re guarding up here so enthusiastically?” Lit asked.

“You don’t know, comrade?”

“If I knew I wouldn’t ask you, would I?”

“That’s true. It’s gold, sir.”

“Gold?”

“Lots of it.”

“We have gold?” Dtui looked up in surprise.

“It’s all around,” said the sentry. “The mountains in Xiang Khouang are chock full of the stuff. Locals have known about it for centuries but, until the war, nobody knew how to get to it. No heavy equipment. No roads. Some of the villagers would come up here to do a bit of mining. Trek a week up, a week back. All they could carry on a donkey. But by the time they’d sold it to the Chinese dealers, it barely covered the cost of sticky rice for the journey. Not worth it.”

“What do you mean, ‘until the war’?” Phosy asked.

The sentry looked at John Johnson.

“American, is he?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Speak Lao, does he?”

“No.”

“All right. Well, it was them, you see? The Americans. They got wind of the fact that the mountains of Xiang Khouang were full of gold. So they picked themselves the mountain nearest to Thailand and bombed the shit out of it. As you can see.” Dtui was shocked. She asked John Johnson whether such a thing was possible. He thought about it and laughed.

“No question,” he said. “The bombers were just offloading where they were told to. The Raven would lead them to a target, give them the coordinates and they’d drop their load. All you’d need is one Raven on your payroll and he could lead strike after strike on any mountain you had a mind to blow to smithereens. The pilots would have no idea they were bombing a hunk of empty rock. I mean, look at this. There must have been a hundred strikes here.”

Once they heard Johnson’s opinion, both Phosy and Lit became animated.

“Wolff,” said Phosy. “The Raven drinking with Boyd and Leon that night. The pilot was killed a few weeks later. I bet he was the FAC who led the strikes on this mountain.”

“And once he’d done his job, they didn’t need him any more,” said Lit.

“In fact, it would have been better for everyone if they could shut him up permanently,” Phosy agreed.

“And who better to make sure his plane had an accident than the chief flight mechanic, Leon?” said Johnson. “That’s why he’d been transferred to Long Cheng. To keep an eye on the pilots. You know? I bet he fixed Boyd’s chopper that night too. The young pilot was starting to get edgy. He was a liability.”

“But what was Boyd’s role in all this?” Phosy asked.

“He was the gofer,” said Johnson. “He ferried in the super napalm from Thailand. Did all their odd jobs. Might have even dropped the canisters to clear the land. Who knows? Once the mountain was broken and the swathe was cut to the nearest road, they didn’t need these guys any more. The fact is Captain Boyd was in it up to his neck and he had to go.”

“They’d need a factory on the Thai side,” Lit said. “Somewhere to process the ore, extract the gold.”

“And some sort of export deal with the Thai junta of the month,” said Phosy.

“Teak,” said Dtui.

They looked at her.

“Teak furniture,” she said. “It’s heavy. Comes in crates. You’d just need someone on the payroll at customs in the States to sign it all through without inspection. Exotic wood products from Southeast Asia. There was a war going on. Who’d give a second thought about dining room tables?”

“Bowry senior set the whole thing up,” said Johnson. “Business suddenly picked up during the war. He got so rich he bought himself a state. He was importing gold, goddamn it. He had Vogal, his best buddy from high school, based in Saigon altering all the orders and transferring people. He had a disbarred pilot directing things from Spook City. They had an FAC leading the bombing. Man, they had it all covered. I take back all I said about the CIA. They didn’t do this. This was a private deal. They had it worked out. Five or six guys on the inside. A bunch of hired help for the shifting and processing. It was a real neat little operation.”