Slash and Burn

9

Day two of the mission began very much as had day one. The choppers landed at the site, the teams carried their equipment to Vang Pao’s house and set up the folding tables. Upon the arrival of Saint Siri, Ugly wagged his stub of a tail so frantically he threw himself sideways. Siri had saved him some breakfast so the relationship was cemented. The food, the newspaper it was wrapped in and a few mouthfuls of dirt were gone in ten seconds.

Whether the queues had remained in place overnight was hard to say but there appeared to be no changes in the lineup on the second day. The teams split into their groups and began to investigate the claims. An impressive array of objects was collected: tin ration trays, bootlaces, a complete arsenal of Zippo lighters, and, remarkably, a Charley Weaver mechanical bar tender without batteries. Where it actually came from nobody knew, although its owners claimed a pilot had given it to them as he was escaping a burning helicopter. You had to admire them for trying.

An hour had passed and still nobody had found a verifiable link to Captain Bowry. That was until the arrival of a group of old men and young boys dressed in black with spare sarongs worn as turbans. They had fashioned some sort of litter out of bamboo. On it, tied down with rope, was the tailplane of a helicopter with its directional rotors still attached. They carried it solemnly, like pallbearers, lowered it respectfully onto the ground in front of Vang Pao’s house, and stood back.

“My word,” said Siri. He left his table, abandoning a group of Hmong women who were trying to sell him a gold tooth. He stood beside the litter and was soon joined by all the other team members. Someone let out a low whistle. The tailplane had apparently been torn from the helicopter by an explosion. The metal at its base was jagged and black. The rest was dark green and had no military insignias but the figures H32 in white were clearly visible.

“That’s it,” said Dtui. “That’s the one in the photographs. H32.”

Major Potter had shown them the embassy pictures on the first day and now he was holding up the tailplane photo to compare with this new arrival. His excitement confirmed it was a match. He didn’t know who to hug first. He barked something to Peach who, in turn, asked the pallbearers in Lao where they’d found this wreckage. They smiled and nodded, but nobody answered. They attempted the same question in Hmong, Kang and Lu before Phosy finally hit the jackpot with his Phuan. The Phuan had once had their own kingdom in the region. But as hostility and violence weren’t their strong points they were eventually decimated by the warlords around them, finally to be forced into slavery by the Siamese. According to the ethnicity poll of 1977, there were barely ten thousand left in Laos. But this had to be a very isolated group if they had no other major languages between them. Phosy led the group to a chicken’s earrings tree, arranged for water, and as they drank they recalled their two-week journey with the dragon’s tail. The inspector showed them a map and although the group had no concept of how a vast wilderness could be shrunk and flattened onto a square of paper, they were able to guide Phosy’s finger via the setting and rising suns and the mountains and valleys and rivers, to their home.

After twenty minutes, Phosy joined the others. All interest had turned to the new arrivals. Phosy showed them a spot on the map, Ban Hoong to the east, where the group had apparently begun their journey. It was a mere forty-minute helicopter trip from where they now stood.

“They’re closer to Phonsavan than to here,” Dtui remarked.

“Their sorceress told them to come,” Phosy translated. “Said she’d seen a sign in a dream.”

“I take it there isn’t the slightest possibility she caught the government announcement on the radio?” Civilai asked.

“I doubt it,” said Phosy. “She’s been dead for seven years. It was her final request that they deliver the dragon’s tail to the wealthy overlords at Spook City.”

Peach was translating for the Americans.

“I guess that would be us,” said the major. “Did they tell you anything about how the dragon’s tail came into their possession?”

Phosy continued the story.

“There was an explosion one night and they woke up the next day to find this thing had fallen through the roof of their meeting hut. The sorceress told them that she’d been sitting in a tree-I get the feeling she wasn’t really in control of her senses-and she saw a dragon collide with the moon. The moon broke into a million pieces. They couldn’t convince her otherwise because she’d gone blind that night. Given the evidence, the head man in the group’s more inclined to believe it was a helicopter.”

“Was this the only part of the chopper they found?” Lit asked.

“Apparently.”

“How come only their sorceress saw the explosion?”

“There was always a lot of air activity in the region: bombings, anti-aircraft fire, crashes, the dumping of undelivered ordnance. They’d been visited and threatened by both sides during the war. All their young men had been forcibly recruited to fight. They were afraid. They weren’t about to go rushing out in the middle of the night to investigate an explosion. Just pulled the blanket up and hoped it would all go away.”

When word of this made it around the Americans, Sergeant John Johnson stepped forward.

“Did anybody hear anything before the explosion?” he asked.

“One woman seemed quite animated about the topic. She was awake that night,” Phosy said. “She was afraid of the helicopters and this one had circled overhead a number of times. She was sure he was looking for their village. Then, she says, the aircraft just went quiet, as if it was hiding in the silence of the sky. Then there was the bang.”

Johnson asked how long the gap was between the engine cutting out and the explosion.

“She says about ten breaths,” Phosy told him. “Does that mean something?”

“It could do.”

“Did the villagers find a body?” Siri asked.

“No,” Phosy told him. “But the vegetation around there is pretty dense.”

“Has the tail been in their village all this time?” Major Potter asked.

“Pride of place in the meeting hall where it landed, apparently,” said Phosy.

“Then do they recall anyone coming into their village and taking a photograph?”

Phosy asked the group and showed them the photographs from the embassy. They confirmed that it was taken in their meeting hall but didn’t recall anyone with a camera. None of the villagers had one, they said. Neither did they recognize the huts nor the American.

“Then I see just the one option,” said Potter. “We head off to their village and set up shop there, that’s if General Suvan and Judge Haeng agree, of course.”

Haeng told the interpreter that he was just about to suggest the same thing. The general nodded and asked about lunch. That just about summed the pair up. And so, with tens of disappointed but ultimately dishonest people sent packing from Long Cheng, the two Russian Mi8 helicopters with their young Lao pilots headed east in an arc to avoid the no-fly zone. Aboard were twenty mystified Phuan villagers scared out of their wits their first time in the sky. Four of them had started to be violently sick in the plastic bags provided even before they took off. The rest joined them in midair. The second chopper carried the tail section of a Sikorsky H34 suspended from a hammock.

As the old men and boys of Ban Hoong had never seen their village from the air, and the pilots had barely five hundred hours of flying time between them, it was left to Sergeant Johnson to guide them there from the maps and from landmarks on the ground. He leaned out of the open hatchway like a stuntman and signaled to Peach who was connected by headphones to the pilots. To everyone on board the carpet of green seen through the smudge of cloud and mist seemed featureless, but the sergeant had a knack and led them directly into the bosom of Ban Hoong. The village was so ramshackle, the kick of the rotors almost leveled it. They touched down in a clearing between the huts. As they climbed down from the choppers, Siri wondered whether the place was deserted. Nobody was about. The villagers in the helicopters realized where they were and gratefully leapt from the craft even before the rotors had slowed. One by one, women and children emerged from the stilt huts like field mice after a monsoon. Despite the fact that their elders and children had been away for two weeks, the homecoming was subdued.

Siri had seen many such villages in his days in the jungle. It was a collection of single-room grass-mat structures on stilts, each with a bamboo ladder. In the gap beneath the huts were humble family looms and well-used farming equipment and varied livestock. The site was a dip into the distant past. Only the corrugated iron roofs stopped this being a two-hundred-year-old community tableau. But the setting was idyllic. It wasn’t yet 10:00 A.M. and not all the mist had burned away from the surrounding mountains. The sun was still a fuzzy egg yolk behind a lace curtain. The air was fresh and tingled the back of Siri’s throat. The sound of running stream water provided the soundtrack. The second hands on the watches on the wrists of the Americans began to crawl more slowly around the faces. Time had altered.

It was too much for some. The US embassy personnel, Rhyme from Time, Judge Haeng and Cousin Vinai took one of the choppers to Phonsavan where they would queue at the post office to make their long-distance phone calls to Vientiane. It was time to pass on news of the amazing development of the day. Meanwhile, the others set up their folding tables under the still-damaged grass roof of the meeting hall. Siri, who liked to understand his environment, strolled around the village with Ugly at his heels. The doctor smiled at people he couldn’t talk to and inspected the sad garden fences and unloved plants that marked the boundaries of each family property. He looked hopefully for something to admire but was left with a feeling that this village had died along with its sons.

Perhaps the only anomaly in an otherwise normal village was the boy who dominated the tiny village square. He was fifteen or sixteen and he sat cross-legged on the dirt. Two or three bugs buzzed around his head. In front of him were a dozen bottles of various origins: Coke, soda, a petroleum jelly jar, all glass. And in each bottle there was an insect, different species, varying sizes from a beetle to a horsefly. And if a visitor looked carefully, he’d see a fine thread feeding down through the bottle’s stopper and tied around the abdomen of each creature. The result was that when released from their prison they could fly only to the end of the thread. And if a visitor was to take the time to notice, he’d see that the bugs buzzing orbits around the boy’s head were attached by thread to his baseball cap. The lassoing of the insects would have taken a great deal of patience. The doctor tried to speak to him but the boy laughed deep in his belly and ignored the old man. Ugly was fascinated by the display. It wasn’t long before other members of the team had gathered around the insect cowboy. Two of the Americans took pictures. Everyone agreed it was extremely cruel, but terribly cool. Ar, the head of the village, stepped up to claim the boy. Both father and son had cheekbones you could stack plates on.

“My youngest son, Bok,” he told Phosy. “Never been right in the head. Can’t talk.”

“Is this all he does?” Phosy asked.

“He thinks if he can get enough of ’em he’ll be able to fly,” said Ar. “But of course they all die the same day. So he spends all his time hunting for new ones. I tell him he’d need a thousand of them to lift him off the ground but he never gives up. If only we could find something with a longer life span….”

Ar had obviously given the proposal a good deal of thought. It was as if somewhere at the back of his mind he believed that if the insects lifted his son the boy might become normal.

But you can only stand and watch beetles on leashes for so long. Both teams gathered in the meeting room to discuss the next plan. Ar pointed in the direction in which their sorceress had seen the dragon crash into the moon. After lunch they would take a hike across that ridge to the crash site.

“You do realize,” said Civilai, looking off into the distance, “that if the explosion actually took place over there and the tailplane found its way here, the odds of finding even a little piece of this pilot are less than finding a gram of common sense in the Politburo.”

“Not necessarily,” said Lit. “He was in a confined space surrounded by metal. Even if there was a fire there could be some remains inside the cockpit.”

“I don’t know,” Dtui said. “All this expense and bother for one man. It seems unfair to me. These hills are littered with the dead relatives of families who can’t ever hope to reclaim their bodies.”

“Oh, Dtui,” said Civilai, about to launch into one of his famous, “You don’t think….” tirades. “You surely don’t think this is a mission to find a body? This is much more than that. This is the empty coffers of Vientiane cooperating with the bankers of Wall Street.”

“Good, Civilai,” said Daeng. “We’re doing this for the money.”

“Common sense, young Madame Daeng. Because we ride fearlessly on the back of the Vietnamese tiger we have to join them in their condemnation of China. Last month our prime minister stood up in parliament and said that China was a bunch of international reactionaries. As a result we are going to lose one of our most generous benefactors.”

“I thought you hated the Chinese more than anyone,” Siri laughed.

“Not true. I hate all evil-minded usurpers in equal measure. But any fool, even you, Siri, could not fail to notice that with Peking on its way out our beloved leaders have begun making overtures to enemies past. The Thais, a nation of corrupt capitalist pornographers, have suddenly become our useful allies. Cracks have appeared in our resolve and televisions and motorcycles are leaking through them. Cultural exchanges are being arranged. A famous short-skirted pop singer has been invited to sing at our next That Luang festival.”

“Nan … nan … Nanthida, I like her,” said Mr. Geung.

“You be careful, Geung,” said Dtui. “We don’t want anyone getting jealous, do we now?”

Geung blushed the colour of a week-old chili.

“See?” said Civilai. “Corrupted already. And now we’re encouraging a CIA comeback. Next thing you know they’ll bring their Beatles over here to subvert our youth.”

“I think you’ll find the Beatles are English,” Dtui told him.

“All much the same. Cultural terrorism.”

“I hope you had a chance to say all this to the embassy fellow last night,” said Siri.

“Obviously he did,” said Peach. She’d snuck up on them from the American team. “Major Potter was asking whether you might join him at his table for dinner this evening, Uncle Civilai. He’s very interested to hear your theories.”

“Just me and him?” Civilai asked.

“Well, unless you pick up English in the next six hours, or him, Lao, I guess I’m going to have to be there too. Sorry. But I’ll try to be as gecko-on-the-wall as I can. What do you say?”

“Your dream has come true,” Daeng laughed. “One on one with an imperialist tyrant.”

“Tell the major the match is on,” said Civilai.

“That’s good,” said Peach. “In fact, if the guys from the embassy get through to Bangkok you might even have a state senator to play with too. He’ll stay in Vientiane tonight then fly up here tomorrow. I’m sorry we can’t get you the president.”

“Wow, a real senator,” said Dtui in her best American accent.

“Why’s everything suddenly moving so fast?” Daeng asked.

“The discovery of the tailplane, I guess,” said Peach. “The scent of a photo opportunity? The helicopter wreck and a whole bunch of ethnic people gathered around. In a day or two he might even have a skull to put on his lap. All powerful stuff.”

“Wall Street,” Civilai mumbled.

Just a little beyond the village, Auntie Bpoo had laid out her grass mat, changed into her bathing suit, and was attempting to catch some rays. The villagers came to look at her. Some of them believed their sorceress was right. The sky had opened and all the misfit angels had fallen down upon them. But they had nobody to blame but themselves. They should have buried the dragon’s tail while they had a chance.