Little Saigon

Chapter 23

They took the whaler from Edison’s dock, chugging across the dark water of the harbor. Mullet jumped and splashed around them, pale comets in the black. The air was warm, and Frye smelled Mexico in it. No stars. Rain any second, he thought. Hose us all down. He worked the engine and Bennett sat fore, facing him. Halfway between Newport Island and his father’s, Frye cut the power.

Bennett fixed his gaze on Frye. “There are some things I want you to know, and to do. These aren’t easy to talk about, Chuck. I’m not too good at that sometimes. First of all, I’m sorry for keeping you in the dark. I didn’t want you involved in... this. In me. But things don’t always work out the way you want.”

“No.”

“Chuck, when Li got taken, it was just like losing my legs. I felt this part of me going away and never coming back again. If she doesn’t make it back, I’m not so sure I want to stay here.”

“Move away, you mean?”

Bennett pulled. “Not exactly.”

Frye caught his brother’s expression in the dim moonlight, the shine to his eyes, the anxious lines on his forehead, the heavy downward pull of his mouth. “Don’t do that, Benny.”

Bennett worked out a cigarette and lit it. The smoke hovered, then vanished in a puff of breeze. “I wouldn’t leave any messes, Chuck. No loose ends. If for some reason I don’t make it out of all this, I want you to do what you can for Li. She’s capable, but she needs direction. She’s cut in on the Paradiso with me, but Pop might just gobble her right up.”

“Okay. Sure.” Frye sat back and gazed at a fisherman on a far dock, elbows tight to his body, hat drooping, pole bent to the water. “Is there some reason to think you’re not going to make it?”

Bennett exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Things are very... questionable right now. DeCord is CIA. We’ve been getting clandestine money from the agency for three years. Six months ago DeCord cut us off. He said the administration had a change of heart. I didn’t believe that.”

“Then why?”

“You just heard it on TV. Hanoi’s ready to deal on the MIAs. DeCord said there were high-level talks going on, and all their support was going to end. He didn’t say talks with who, and he didn’t say how high-level. Now I know. And he was adamant. He didn’t just want me to find other funding, he wanted me to shut the whole thing down. Hanoi’s got us by the balls again, and our government is following them right into the corral.”

“What did you tell him?”

“To take a flying fuck at the moon.”

“So you recorded the last few payments to Nguyen in case DeCord tried to hang you for the whole thing. So you could prove the government was involved.”

“Damn straight. That’s why he wants that tape back so bad. That’s why he took his pictures to Minh — to get the cops to do the dirty work, if it comes to that. Minh is just a simple cop, and he’s honest, but they can use him. And that’s why the guy called Lawrence arranged the break-in at your place. It’s clear to me that Lawrence is just another spook running around Little Saigon, trying to cover for the government.”

“A spook with General Dien in his pocket. It makes sense now.”

“Chuck, that tape was my protection. The plan was to copy it, put both tapes in a safe deposit box ready to go out to the networks if anything happened to me. But everything came down so fast. I kept thinking: I’ll do it tomorrow, I’ll do it tomorrow. Well, tomorrow came, Li got ripped off, and the best thing I could do was shuffle off that tape to an innocent party — you. If Lawrence got the tape to DeCord, my parachute’s got a big hole in it.”

“If the government wanted the pipeline stopped — would they have taken out Li?”

Bennett shook his head. “They’d have taken out both of us. DeCord is protecting the agency, he’s just doing his job. But they would never have taken Li like that. There are much simpler ways.”

“Is Li a bit player, or the star?”

Bennett hunkered inside his coat, lighting a smoke. “DeCord paid us money here for basic operational expenses, but the bulk of it was wired straight to Switzerland. Li made the pickups in Zurich to pay off our people at that end. Those tapes she always took? They had songs and news and propaganda on them, but also code. Meeting places, drop locations, contacts inside Vietnam, times, dates, places. Plans to coordinate military strikes with terrorist moves were coded into the programs themselves — the order of the songs, the first letter of the titles — things like that. We set it all up ahead. Li didn’t know what exactly was happening until she got there and played the tapes. That way, if they caught her, the whole operation wouldn’t be gutted. Li wasn’t just another part of the resistance — operationally, she was the key.”

Frye tried to collate the information now, make some sense of the details with this new light on them. “Who knew I had that tape, besides you?”

“Donnell. Nguyen Hy. And Kim, the woman you took to the airstrip.”

“Then one of them is a traitor?”

Bennett nodded. “One of them.”

“What about Kim? If it was her, what happens to the Secret Army? Will she let them tail her in, expose the network?”

Bennett sighed. “She made Vientiane. She was supposed to connect with our people, go south through Thailand, then slip into Kampuchea. The guns we flew from the Paradiso would be waiting in a village controlled by the Khmer Rouge. We haven’t heard anything, Chuck. Silence. We got confirmation that Thach was in place yesterday. That tells me Wiggins’s story of Thach being under house arrest isn’t true. But Kim’s silence either means she’s under the gun and holding her breath, or she’s sold out and my people are being greased while we sit here.”

Frye considered. “How much good does the Secret Army do? What do they accomplish?”

“Lots, Chuck. Programs broadcast on the Secret Radio, straight into Hanoi. Recruitment of the disenchanted. Gathering up the villagers who’ve been smashed down by the Communists. They blow a bridge, attack a depot. Harass the regulars.”

“It doesn’t seem like much.”

Bennett looked at him. “It’s how Ho Chi Minh started. We’re how revolutions breed. We’re how history gets written. That’s why Hanoi throws the muscle at us. That’s why they’ve cut Thach loose against us.”

“The radio transmissions from Saigon Plaza. Are they talking to Thach?”

Bennett nodded. “That’s my guess.”

Frye applied a little gas, easing the Whaler into a gentle bank that took them into deeper water. They chugged into the harbor through a canal. Once past the peninsula bridge, Frye could see the lights of the big restaurants wavering on the water, hear the halyards of the big pleasure boats pinging against their masts in the breeze. A bunch of people on the Warehouse patio lifted their drinks and waved.

Bennett stared up at them, then at his brother. “From where we are right now, Thach is the key. If Kim is working for him, the entire Secret Army will be slaughtered.”

“And you plan to kill him at kilometer twenty-one.”

“How did you know that?”

Frye told him of Nha’s request, of the film he developed. “I put it together with something you were saying in your office Tuesday night. On the phone.”

Bennett sat upright, a smile on his face. “I should have enlisted you a long time ago, little brother. You’re a good soldier.” The smile retreated. “We’ve tried to get to him a half dozen times. No luck. We’ll try again tomorrow night. Nine, our time.”

“And if you succeed?”

“I can quit. At least for a while. I want our prisoners back too, if there are any. I suspect it’s a game played by Hanoi — I don’t think they’ve got any Americans there who don’t want to be there. But I won’t stand in the way of them, if there are.”

Frye wondered again at this man in front of him, at his passions and secrets, his plans and campaigns. He’s holding off the CIA with one hand and Thach with the other, trying to assassinate enemies halfway around the world. Benny, always your own agendas. You just never give up. You don’t know when to stop. Down deep inside, it’s the biggest thing we have in common.

Bennett’s dark hair shifted in the breeze. For a moment he was still, clutching the gunwales in his hands, his stumps centered on the bench for balance. He looked up to the restaurant as the Whaler glided by. Pale lights washed across his face. In the long silence that followed, the first rain started to fall, resonant upon the boat. The harbor water began to boil. Bennett had the thousand-yard stare, all right.

“It was a night like this — rain coming down, and thick sweet air. Man, it was a hundred shades of green. Everything drooping and slow. You wouldn’t believe what I’d been going through with Lam and Li. I knew that one of them was tight with Charlie. Our patrols were getting intercepted. The fucking villagers would clear out way ahead of time. Some of Li’s information turned out wrong. But was it wrong when she gave it to us, or did it get wrong when she, or he, tipped the Cong? Which one? Lam or Li? Or was it both?”

Bennett looked up into the rain. The big drops slapped against the Whaler, a drumroll of water on aluminum. “I was in love with her, and he hated me for it. I could see it in his face. With Lam, you were either a friend, or he wanted to grease you. He didn’t have anything in between. I’d never known a guy so... singleminded. You know who I wanted the traitor to be — but how could I know?” Bennett shook his head. “So I set up my own trap. I asked Li to move to base with me. I knew that if she did, it meant she was innocent. And I knew that if Lam saw her moving to me, he’d know I suspected him. He’d try something. Our little triangle was over. Chuck. And I hated to see it go. Back when it started, we had it all. We were friends, and we got things done. Li’s information was the real stuff.”

Frye eased the Whaler into deeper water. The warm rain had soaked him.

“The night she was supposed to show, I waited. I really didn’t know what would happen. I was past thinking about it, past caring. When I saw her coming down the path, man, it was the best feeling in the world. She came through a stand of bamboo and stood a few yards from me. The jungle was black and shiny behind her. She had a guitar, a basket full of clothes, some cooking stuff, and this pack on her back. That was all. Her face was white. She was dripping wet. She stood there and I’ll never forget what she said. ‘Benny, there is something on me. Lam put it there, and said we must open it together.’”

Bennett lit another cigarette, cupping it in his hand. Frye watched his face glow orange.

“Fucking gift from Lam, right? So I helped her off with it. Real careful. I could tell by the weight that he’d packed in enough shit to blow a whole platoon away. I put it in an empty mortar pit, took her by the hand, and led her to a hootch I’d set up near the perimeter. I let her inside and helped her get arranged. The whole time I was thinking of Lam. He’d played the same game I had. He’d used Li. The difference was, I loved her enough to let her live, and he loved her enough to kill her. And me. So I got my ‘sixteen, and eight men, and hauled ass to the trail by Lam’s hut. I figured he had five minutes on us.”

The rain changed gears now, a steady shower of big warm drops. Frye guided the Whaler into a loose turn, heading back toward the Island. The ocean water boiled harder, and a mist rose from the surface.

Frye looked at Bennett, who tossed away the cigarette, then steadied himself on the gunwales.

“I couldn’t believe it when I saw lamplight in his hootch. The sonofabitch was just taking his time, packing up a few things. Tony was nowhere around, so I knew that Lam had wasted him. I went in alone and brought him out. He looked surprised, all right. It was hard, Chuck. He stood there wearing that necklace that I’d given him, and I wondered how in hell he’d managed to use me like that. I’d trusted him, almost all the way. If I’d been a little more naïve, I’d have opened that pack and blown up half of Dong Zu. I started to say something, but no words came out. He just looked at me, like he had no fucking idea what was about to go down. I ordered my men to take him out. I told my sergeant to sweat him, then waste him however they wanted. Then I got the demolition techs out and told them to get rid of the pack if it didn’t go off in the next couple of hours.”

Bennett huddled tighter inside his jacket. “I went back and sat with Li for a while in the new hootch. We made love for the first time. For her, it was the first time ever. I could feel the power going out of me, and into her, then coming back. She was mine. Awhile later, I heard a chopper lift off, and I knew what they were gonna do to him. Somehow, Li knew. She was crying. I couldn’t fucking take it, Chuck. I left her there, went to the Officer’s Club and drank half a bottle of Scotch in about half an hour.

“The guys came back a few minutes later. Two of them were laughing. No Lam. They said he wouldn’t admit a thing. He kept saying he was fucking innocent. The Cong were tough, Chuck. I saw a guy go for almost an hour strapped to a table with electrodes on his balls, and all he said was ‘No VC, no VC.’ He just died there, trying to chew off his own lips.” Bennett sighed. “Sudden Deceleration Trauma was what we called it. The joke was: It isn’t the fall that kills you, it’s the stop.”

They were quiet all the way back to the dock. Frye climbed out and tied down to a cleat. He ran the fuel out of the carburetor and stowed the cushions under the benches.

“Why don’t you just give up, Benny? The war’s over.”

Rain slanted through the dock lights, splattered the stanchions, tapped the sand. Frye walked slowly beside his brother.

“You feel something for Tuy Nha, don’t you?”

“Well, sure—”

“Then you have a little of what I have. I married it, Chuck. It’s part of me now. I love the way they love. The way they fight. The way they suffer and still fight. I love the way they look. When I woke up after the mine got me, she was the first thing I wanted to see. She was there for me, and she just plain wouldn’t let me die, Chuck. And she still wanted me when I came out of that hospital more gone than ever. What I hate most is the fact we lost when we could have won. We were almost there. Maybe someday, we will win.”

Bennett smiled through the rain. “When it comes down like this, it’s just like over there. It takes me back. I love it. I hate it.”

They moved across the small beach, Bennett laboring in the sand. Then up the lawn, a perfect green slope in the darkness. The yard lamps cast drizzly light toward the grass. “You go in one way and come out another, Chuck. You hope things’ll balance someday. What you want to be able to do is look your own eyes in the mirror and not be totally ashamed of all the shit they’ve seen.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ll never get it, because you weren’t there.” They approached the back door of the house. Bennett stopped on the porch. “Now Thach’s people are fucking with my head. It’s textbook PSYOPS. I got a plastic helicopter in the mail two days ago. After that, they left a GI Joe doll on my porch, with its head cut off. Three bottles of fucking champagne. Thach is ten thousand miles away, looking at a file on me, putting on his own electrodes. They called me again this morning. It was the same man who talked to me before they put Li on. They said to put two million dollars in two suitcases.”

“That was all?”

“Further instructions to come.”

“You tell Wiggins?”

“They know. I’ll have the cash tomorrow.”

“Why not call off the hit? Call off the Secret Army. It’s what everybody wants. Maybe they’ll let her go. Maybe they’ll let our POWs go.”

Bennett smiled. “There won’t be any hit tomorrow night. We’re going to take him alive at kilometer twenty-one. Hell either tell his men to let Li go, or they’ll kill him. His life for hers. By nine P.M. tomorrow Li will either be free, or they’ll both be dead.”