Turn of the cards

Chapter Twenty-five

J. Bob Belew was sleeping in when they came knocking on his door with a Soviet RGD-5 hand grenade.

Before the plywood splinters settled, Belew was awake and rolling, off the bed. He came up with his Para Ordnance. Explosive entry was not just something you passed around among friends like chlamydia.

He double-tapped the first man through the blown-in door, easily controlling the big handgun’s kick. The intruder uttered a choking squawk, dropped his Kalashnikov, and reeled back into the man behind him.

Belew gave the point man two more in the chest. The 180-grain Hydra-Shok slugs expanded in meat, gouging great channels through him. Skinny as he was, they passed right along through to spoil the day of the man he’d stumbled against.

Compulsive tinkerer that he was, Belew had made a few alterations to his miserable back-alley flat with the dull Asian porno prints of Thai cuties in dowdy fifties bikinis shellacked to the wall. He grabbed his jacket and light pack and dove for the window. The whole assembly blew out into the alley.

It was dark and narrow, defined by shacks with crazily angled corrugated-tin roofs that threatened to slump into the right-of-way at any moment. Belew rolled clear of the debris – a new layer added to the accumulation of years – and came up with his pistol in both hands, drawing down on the window in case his drop-ins were following right behind. Instead another flash and crash and swirl of smoky rubble inside; with at least two punctured they had belatedly decided to play it safe by pitching another grenade.

It was that grimy time of day when enough light has spilled over the horizon to spoil the darkness, but not enough to really illuminate. That time of day beloved of cops and marauders: predawn, as in “predawn raid.” Fully dressed, of course, J. Robert Belew got up and raced between the slouching buildings, raising a bow wave in ankle-deep puddles.

A stutter of gunshots behind him. Holes splintered open in a rude plank wall right in front of his face. He hit a T-junction in the shanty labyrinth and cranked hard right. He was built low to the ground, not much for sprint speed, but still one hell of a broken-field runner. For one thing, though he aged normally in cosmetic terms, his ability to regenerate meant he had seventeen-year-old cartilage in his knees.

Another slow, heavy AK burst chewed the wall, long behind him. Somebody began screaming, whether in terror, pain, or sudden grief he had no way of knowing.

J. Robert Belew was a man who believed in always traveling first-class. It was just that his definition of first-class was skewed from the rest of the world’s, like so much about him. He loved fine wine, Vivaldi, satin sheets, and beautiful, long-legged women to slip between them as much as the next man. When those things fit the mission profile. On a gig like the present one – freelance; high-risk factor; no assets; a quick, clean death one of the more favorable outcomes he could hope for and a warm sense of accomplishment about the optimum – he had different criteria. Here he liked a low profile, incurious neighbors, a lot of traffic in the area to cover his moves, and ready escape routes.

You didn’t find those things in the middleclass neighborhoods that still managed to cling to existence despite the wealth-devouring propensities of socialism. You didn’t even find them in the precincts of the respectable poor, where everybody knew everybody for generations back, and the good people of the Earth stood ready to show their civic spirit by cooperating with the authorities at every chance.

You found them in slums. He found them on the Ben Nghe waterfront of District Four, dingy, dirty, dangerous, ripe with decay, where he wasn’t the only Lien Xo dog on the bum, and nobody asked questions – or ever, ever answered them when the Man asked – and the foul Southeast Asian river that defined the district and gave it its unmistakable ambiance lay handy for comings and goings and disposing of evidence. Such as his own xenovirus Takis-A-positive corpus.

Voices chased him as he exploded out onto a street, or at least a broader alley, a short block from the river. He dodged chicken crates and veggie carts and trussed depressive pigs and bicycles loaded like quarter-ton trucks and the sort of early-morning people who hadn’t waited for the sixth Party Congress to tell them it was okay to become entrepreneurs. Traffic was at low ebb, and it had nothing to do with the hour. There had been antigovernment riots the last two days, and much of Ho-ville was hunkering down in the old familiar wait-and-see mode.

When he hit block’s end, instinctive combat timing made him turn and kneel just as a skinny dude in generic black pajamas came flailing out of the alley-tangle with a stockless AKMS clutched in one hand. Just like the old days, Belew thought with a pleasant rush of nostalgia. He fired twice.

Only in the movies do people never miss, even if they’re combat-pistol experts, which J. Bob happened to be. Neither shot hit the boy in black pajamas, but he promptly fell on his skinny ass anyway. He went scrambling back to the alley on all fours, clattering his Kalashnikov on sporadic pavement, as a second triggerman poked his AK around the bend and started hosing.

The street had suddenly become a wasteland of primetime proportions. A fair share of the pedestrians and cycle-jockeys had been born since ostensible Liberation in ’75, but few of them were hearing full-auto fire for the first time.

Belew went left at the riverfront, jinking around water-warped crates and sampan drivers in rice-straw hats. Whoever his friendly visitors were – and there were any number of stinging-ant hills he could’ve bumped during his several days of discreet inquiry; that nasty Heisenberg principle again – they were being cagey. Most of the government’s watchdogs were running in packs down in downtown District One just to the north, and southwest in Cholon, the two main loci of trouble. They were poorly positioned to intervene in any running gun-battle this far north. Of course that didn’t mean the black-pajama killers weren’t from the government themselves. The Socialist Republic might think it had splendid reasons to off J. Robert Belew without appearing to have done so.

As he ran, his mind paged through options like flash cards. He had scoped out a number of escape routes in advance. But the riverfront was chaos, always flowing; always changing, always coming-going. It was never predictable, which made it such good cover for his shadow games.

He never relied on set plans anyway; only made them as a form of mental discipline. The opportunity that struck his eye was not on his shortlist of preplanned escapes. But his pursuers, half a dozen strong, had younger lungs than he did, if not knees. They were gaining.

A fistful of bullets missed him to the left, crackling with supersonic spite, and shattered a stack of boxes labeled SAIGON EXPORT. The dark reeking fluid that cascaded out sure wasn’t the Nam’s premium beer, nor even formaldehyde-laced Giai Phong. He didn’t stop to give it a taste test.

A fortunate toss of the yarrow sticks had caught his eye, a surreal flash between the rickety buildings that crowded down to the water’s edge. That was the lovely thing about chaos; it was in essence random, but it was random within limits. You had a measure of predictability if you knew the delimiters. This set of circumstances was just the sort of thing to be expected, down by the river.

He dashed between shacks onto a wharf that boomed beneath his feet like a Vachel Lindsay drum. This side of the river was given over to river-people shanties, go-down warehouses, and tiny tin-roof houseboats. The far side was choked with motor sampans with barrel-shaped wood or bamboo roofs, all nosing in toward the shore like Sea World dolphins hitting on a tourist with a bucketful of mackerel. The Ben Nghe was a poor cousin of the at least sporadically well-groomed Saigon River. But its left bank – the triangle formed by the Ben Nghe, the Te Canal, and the Saigon – was somewhat upwardly mobile. The boaters on that side were all running rice up from the fertile Delta to ever-hungry Saigon giai phong. Bowing to the inevitable, i.e. starvation, the government had recently legalized the trade. The boaters still had rumrunner moves, like all the other recently legitimized tu san enterprisers.

A boatman stood bent over in the stern of his covered sampan, fiddling with a balky engine. The boat rocked zanily as Belew jumped in. The boatman looked at him. His lower jaw opened like the rear ramp of a C-130.

“Sorry Jack,” Belew said, “but my need is greater than thine.”

The man continued to stare at him. His mouth kept opening wider. If he kept that up, he was going to strain something.

Belew repeated the phrase in Vietnamese. No response. He pointed the 10mm at the man. The boater understood that fine: he turned and half dove, half fell into the greasy brown chop.

Shouts from downstream, then shots. Bullets raised quick geysers, not uncomfortably close. Belew holstered his sidearm. He reached out to the wharf for the other object that had caught his eye, which in concatenation with the stalled-out boat had drawn him.

“I hope this boy was bright enough that this thing’s not out of gas,” he said. He laid his left wrist on the gunwale, raised the U.S. Marine-issue machete that had been lying on the wharf, and brought it down with a thunk.

The lead pursuer was still a good fifty meters away. He stopped short, staring in astonishment as the American’s hand flew off and a stream of dark red arced into the Ben Nghe. He couldn’t handle that. He dropped his Kalashnikov and went running in the opposite direction, spewing vomit.

His comrades had stronger stomachs. Several knelt down on a wharf and opened fire. Three kept running after Belew.

He thrust the spurting stump against the sampan’s motor. A stinging instant as dirty metal met raw flesh, then a sense of contact and completion as Belew’s spirit entered the machine. A clog in the fuel line, he knew. I can handle that.

He concentrated, frowning slightly. The engine coughed twice and barked into life.

His arm temporarily welded to the engine, J. Bob steered the craft out into the flow. He headed downstream, as though making for the Delta himself. The Mekong Delta was traditionally fractious and at the moment in a state approaching open rebellion. It was a customary kind of place to blow to when you had to blow Saigon.

Three of his attackers were tripping over each other trying to get down to the wharf he had stolen the boat from. That left three standing by the river downstream. They all stood bolt upright and blazed away at him as the current and the small motor carried him by.

Very few people can hit a damn thing firing an assault rifle on full rock ’n’ roll, even a twenty-foot boat not thirty meters away. Near-miss mini-waterspouts showered Belew. A couple of copper-jacket 7.62x39-millimeter rounds did crash through the plank hull, but none close to J. Bob, who lay on his back in the stern. Bracing his right hand on the gunwale, he returned fire, and was gratified to see one gunman drop his rifle in the drink and go down in a heap. He might have been scared, instead of hit, but he didn’t seem to move as the sampan pulled slowly out of range. Belew holstered his pistol and rummaged one-hand in his pack.

The two surviving gunmen were joined by their three brethren. Two of them dodged back up to the street to run after Belew in futile pursuit. The rest got into a good old-fashioned shouting match, waving their rifles under each other’s noses.

Suddenly one pointed at the receding boat. Belew was aiming a fat black tube at them, something that looked highly reminiscent of a grenade launcher.

One dove off the wharf into the Ben Nghe. The rest scattered.

“‘The wicked flee when no man pursueth,’” J. Bob Belew said, and unscrewed the telephoto lens from his camera. I can sell those pictures to Rolling Stone, he thought, or Soldier of Fortune, depending. He was on the masthead of both publications as contributing editor. The superior man thought of righteousness before gain, but what the hell?

Running the gauntlet of fire had been a final act of calculated ballsiness. That hit squad would be damned sure he was heading down to the Delta.

But he wasn’t. Out of their sight, he was going to cut left at the Te and then again on the Saigon. North, toward where that Ozzie soak at Rick’s had told him Fort Venceremos was.

He laughed out loud. He never gambled for money; he thought that was a waste. But he loved to stake his life and win.