The Asian Mantrap

Thirteen

For a while I toyed with the idea of bringing Colonel Jeleff in on the problem. Willow spoke out against it at once. Offsetting the aid that Jeleff’s underground railroad could provide was the question of his loyalty to Martin. It wasn’t Willow’s disapproval that changed my mind. She countered with a most practical alternative endorsed by Bu Chen. I became mildly enthusiastic as the plan evolved with Bu Chen becoming a major contributor to its success.

To get it underway, Ambassador Cavendish turned over to us an inconspicuous automobile maintained by Colonel Jeleff for his clandestine activities. He also emptied his office safe of banded stacks of paper bills in three national currencies, explaining that instructions received previously had given him the task of assembling money for our use. He made me sign a receipt for the lot.

Bu Chen drove the black, unmarked sedan through narrow back alleys and fingers of fog reaching inland from the harbor. The odor of sea salt and drying fish nets hung in the air. Bu Chen came to a halt next to a paint-scarred firedoor in a high, windowless brick wall. A dim, bare bulb glowed above the door. Bu Chen got out of the car and rapped on the door. He hunched his shoulders against the foggy chill and waited. A full minute passed. He used his knuckles again.

The door finally opened a crack. Bu Chen spoke rapidly, using a dialect that sounded like western Cantonese. The door opening widened and Bu Chen slipped inside. Willow pushed against me in the rear seat and shivered. I took her hand in mine and squeezed it.

Willow and I got out of the car. She stood close to me, shivering in the damp chill. I put my arm around her slim waist. She pressed against me. “We can do it, Nick,” she said. “I know we can.”

Bu Chen stuck his head out and beckoned for us to enter. We stepped inside. The huge, open space before me was a jungle growth of hanging ropes, dangling sandbags, curtains of canvas, spotlight rigging, ladders and catwalks. We were in the wings of a darkened theater looking out onto the stage. It was spooky. Left-on red footlights gave the cavernous space an eerie, satanical appearance. A heavy smell of burned incense intermixed with grease paint permeated the atmosphere. “It’s a kubuki theater,” whispered Willow identifying it immediately.

The centuries-old-looking Chinese man in a long, black garment standing next to Bu Chen bowed slowly from the waist when introduced to us. Willow returned the bow respectfully and addressed him as “grandfather.” His stoic face cracked into a snaggle-toothed smile upon hearing that and Willow’s Chinese name. The frail Oriental gentleman’s face immediately returned to it’s spiderwebbed, wrinkled state after the formal greeting. His eyes remained bright and twinkling in the red glow of the footlights. He kept his hands tucked inside the ends of his wide-cuffed sleeves madarin-fashion.

“I will leave you to Hong See,” Bu Chen said. “In the meantime, I will make the other arrangements. I will need money... any kind. I have ways of converting it to gold. Without gold, we have little hope of making any deals quickly.” I gave him the bundles from Ambassador Cavendish’s safe. Willow knew I had slight misgivings, but I was forced to put my trust in him. Bu Chen eased himself out into the alley. Willow threw the lock bolt on the door behind him.

Hong See shuffled away silently on his padded, thick-soled shoes. Willow and I followed. We were taken to an ill-smelling dressing room. I was seated before a makeup table in front of a large mirror bordered by frosted light bulbs.

The ancient kabuki performer had me strip to the waist then began working on me.

The transformation was miraculous. I saw myself changed from an unmistakable Caucasian to a bona fide Oriental under the deft skill of the venerable Chinese. The application of a latex coating over my eyelids to conceal the folds of skin converted my appearance considerably. It gave my eyes the smooth, almond shape which is a telltale Asian facial characteristic. The addition of other subtle, yet fundamental changes, altered my angular western physiognomy to the broad, moonfaced features of an Asian. A penetrating ochre-shade stain was applied to all portions of my skin that may become exposed to scrutiny, including my feet and legs up to my hips. Eyebrows and hair were darkened, but only after a straightedge razor had revealed much more of my skull and left my ears apparently much lower on my head.

Willow stood to one side, nodding approval and voicing compliments to the deft Hong See. She was demonstratively pleased.

I had one worry: how long would it hold up. Willow translated to the old man who was adding the finishing touches. He seemed to be giving sincere assurances, but twice he punctuated them with high-pitched; cackling laughs. Their rapid conversation concluded with the old man eyeing me enviously. “What’s all the gabbing about?” I asked.

“Well,” said Willow lightly, “you’re not going to shed your new identity easily. The longer it stays on, the more difficult it will be to remove. I’m no stranger to stage makeup, you know, so I can make any minor repairs if necessary.”

“That’s not what you were laughing about,” I said.

“No. We discussed how much physical activity your camouflage could withstand. Hong See advises against prolonged immersion in sea water, but otherwise it should endure. When I mentioned what a handsome Vietnamese he’d made of you, Hong See revealed himself to be a dirty old man. He suggested we give his handiwork a critical test. It would bring to life one of my fantasies.”

The glint in Willow’s eyes was an unconcealed challenge. It was clear what she had in mind, and it took no more than that look to bring me in tune with her desires. She sensed my like-mindedness. Her words came faster. “Bu Chen is going to be busy for some time. Hong See says we can remain here, but must stay out of sight. He suggests the prop room will be safe.”

I turned back to look for Hong See’s reflection in the dressing table mirror. It was gone. “He’s digging out some appropriate clothing to fit the roles we’ll be playing. He’ll tell us when Bu Chen has returned.”

Willow took me by the hand and led me through a passageway and down some stairs to a storeroom under the stage. It was well-organized considering it was a catchall for hundreds of items used in conjunction with a variety of kabuki dramas. Few scenery flats were in evidence because kabuki concentrates on costumes, dancing, and music more than the trappings of a stage set.

A wide, low couch was pushed against one wall. A full-length mirror was fastened to the back of the door which Willow closed behind us. I used it to stare at my new self while Willow disappeared behind an ornate, handcarved wooden screen. I literally didn’t recognize a single thing about myself. I was still staring when another figure moved into view beside me in the mirror.

Willow wore a single sheer garment. It half-contained the jutting thrust of satiny tan breasts above while it flirted at mid-thigh with hinted-at shadowy depths beneath. I felt an increased stirring in my groin.

“We make a very attractive Vietnamese couple,” Willow said. “No one would think otherwise.” Her hands were busy with my clothing. Standing in shorts only, I looked a little absurd with yellowish-brown stained legs below a lighter-skinned torso. She wasn’t looking at either. The growing warmth between my legs responded to the eager heat in her eyes.

She led me to the couch. She was self-assured, bold, and skillful. With a paradise of sleek, passionate female in my arms, I lost all concern for the job at hand. Willow made the experience mind-bending. It was that way for her, too. We shared an explosion of frantic, muscle-gripping spasms which almost bounced us off the couch.

I rolled aside spent and momentarily exhausted. She rolled too, pressing her warm, yielding flesh against me. I got up finally and went to the mirror. The makeup was unsmeared and firmly in place. I was satisfied in more ways than one. When I turned back, Willow was smiling at me from the couch. “If you feel that experiment was inconclusive in its results, there’s another technique we might employ.”

She had to be kidding. I thought she was until she coaxed me back to sit on the edge of the couch. Willow was teasingly persistent, amazingly energetic, and deliciously abandoned. She left me limp, light-headed, and drained.

Willow awakened me by shaking my shoulder. She handed me a handleless mug of strong, steaming-hot tea. It helped a lot. The clothes she brought for me were dark, pajama-type peasant garb. They were identical to those she was wearing. The choke-collar quilted jacket I put on was loose-fitting around the waist, but short in the sleeves. The trousers had ample room around the middle, but were also a little short.

While I dressed, Willow described how Bu Chen had accomplished everything asked of him in remarkably short order.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“One fifteen local time. You’ve had almost five hours of sleep.”

“And everything’s set?”

“With the Thai police breathing down Bu Chen’s neck, and you giving him a free ride out plus a bonus to boot, what do you think? God only knows what it cost. I think Bu Chen’s laid some IOUs on the American Embassy, but you’re shopping list is satisfied. I can tell from the wide grin on his face he is. He’s sitting upstairs drinking tea with Hong See. The old guy’s reveling in the first excitement to come his way in twenty years. You’d think he was going along with us.”

“What do you mean, us?” I said. “I admit I would have been stymied without you so far, but now that Bu Chen is locked in he can take your place.”

“No way, Nick,” Willow snapped back. “This is my assignment, too, don’t forget. I got my orders directly from Hawk. If he’d wanted me to back off he would have keyed his message that way. He knows you need me.”

“I’ve got Bu Chen now.”

“And how much can you trust him? Sure, he’s set up the getaway scam, mainly because he’s saving his own neck. Once you clear the Thai border, he could disappear leaving you needle-naked despite your disguise.”

I knew she was right on all counts. There were other aspects about our tight relationship she could have mentioned, which I hoped she wouldn’t. It would be hard to argue against them.

She didn’t give me any peace. “Come on, Nick. You can’t desert me. How in hell am I going to get out of here by myself. By noon I’ll be on the Thai National Police’s most wanted list along with Bu Chen. The only way I can save my ass is to stick with you. In case Bu Chen can’t cut it later and bolts, I’m your insurance in a Vietnamese-speaking environment.”

I gave in to her and felt better immediately. I was glad that I did. She had more cogent qualities besides her sexual expertise that made her a most valuable companion. Lots of girls make it in the sack; Willow’s usefulness to me was measured on a far different scale.

Bu Chen and Hong See were engaged in animated conversation. A dozen rice bowls were on the table in front of them. Each one was heaped with gold coins. Most were British Victorian pounds, long the basic medium of exchange among men without trust or honor. “He’s telling Hong See who gets paid what,” Willow explained.

At last the two men stood up and exchanged formal bows. Hong See bobbed once more in my direction, then stepped back. Bu Chen handed me my trouser belt with the zipped compartment. It must have weighed twenty pounds. I could feel the U.S. quarter-size gold coins running along the length of the belt. He passed a sash similar to the one he wore around the waist of his own rice farmer’s trousers to Willow. It too was heavy with coins stitched and hidden in the cloth. We had plenty of bribe money on hand if the occasion to use it arose.

The black embassy vehicle had been replaced with a Toyota pickup truck with a camper top. The back end was crammed with paraphernalia indistinguishable under the fire door’s single, dim light. Still, I made a hasty inspection to assure myself that a few essentials I’d asked for were there. Bu Chen had lived up to his reputation. Everything needed to carry out our audacious expedition was on hand.

The three of us climbed into the cab. Willow crowded against me comfortably and promptly fell asleep. It takes a certain kind of person to be able to relax in the face of imminent calamity. The hasty, lash-up plan forced upon us by lack of time had scant chance of assured success. It was a long shot at a very tiny target.

Bu Chen drove through back streets until he reached routes used principally by commercial vehicles. We then Blended in with trucks carrying merchandise into and out of the city. We eventually reached an outlying road lined with hovels backed by terraced rice paddies. Within a short time we were following a chain link fence bordering a large flat field. At one point, Bu Chen pulled off onto the shoulder of the road. We were apparently in the middle of nowhere. He shut off the engine and turned off the lights.

Then we sat.

A dog barked in the distance. Bu Chen rolled down his window. The scent of night soil wafted into the truck’s cab. Willow stirred. I kept alert for any sound alien to the normal night noises. Crickets chirped and frogs croaked. The distant dog exchanged barks with another then fell silent. We waited quietly on the empty road.

A flashlight snapped on and off ahead of us. Bu Chen answered with the Toyota’s headlights. The flashlight signalled again. Bu Chen cranked up the engine. A gate in the fence opened as we reached it. The Toyota’s headlights picked up the dark shape of a large aircraft. The headlights swung, illuminating the red, white and blue roundel of the Royal Thai Air Force on the side of the four-engine C-130E Hercules transport. Its rear ramp was down. Bu Chen drove directly inside. The loading door closed behind us like the hinged jaw of a Venus flytrap closing on an insect. The powerful turboprop engines whined into action immediately.

A brown-faced crewman wearing a headset and dragging its long communications cord from a jack behind him, came back through the cavernous fuselage to the truck. He grinned widely, showing strong, white teeth. “Welcome aboard, sirs and lady,” he said in classroom English. “You please will seat yourselves outside the vehicle for takeoff.” He gestured to the jump seats along the side of the fuselage. Two other flight-suited Thai airmen began lashing the little truck to convenient anchor rings.

We had donned USAF parachutes and buckled ourselves in the jumpseats by the time the big aircraft began taxiing. “Where?” I asked Bu Chen, jabbing a thumb toward the bulkhead in back of us. There were no windows in the immense cargo bay in which we were the only passengers.

“This is Utaphao,” was his answer. He had to raise his voice above the tremendous scream of propellers whirling at takeoff speed. The plane vibrated as it rolled. Its tires rumbled, then lift-off occurred. The aircraft settled into a fixed-pitch climbing altitude. A signal came back that we were free to move about.

When Bu Chen made a move to stand up, I held him back. “How is using this military aircraft going to be kept under wraps? I thought you’d charter some civilian aircraft. How can we hope to cover the use of a military transport?”

“No sweat. This will show up on tomorrow’s flight reports as a scheduled trigger mission. The crew thinks they’re on a periodic Black Maria run.”

“What’s a Black Maria flight?” I didn’t like the sound of it.

“A pass along the border to keep everyone on the other side on their toes by generating a reaction from ground defenses. We’ll be watched and tracked by radar, but no overt reaction is expected. That hardly ever happens. We’ll fly northeast and reach the border in just over an hour. Then we’ll parallel it for twenty minutes until we reach Pak Sane. Okay so far?”

“Yeah, it sounds all right,” I answered.

“At that point we’ll introduce a slight navigation error as an excuse for an incursion. We’ll run in until it’s about time for night fighters to be scrambled. That’s where we get off. Isn’t that what you had in mind?”

“Sounds dicey. You think the crew will do it?”

“Do it?” repeated Bu Chen. “We’re paying the pilot fifty dollars a mile for each mile he penetrates beyond the border!”

“I only hope he doesn’t get us killed trying to get rich. Let’s check over the gear in the truck.”

We’d been wearing breathing masks for an hour, plugged into the main oxygen supply. It was time to get ready.

An emergency bail out bottle was strapped to each leg. They fed into oxygen masks fitted to our faces and were further held in place by knitted ski masks slipped over our heads to give protection from the cold. Tight-fitting ski goggles completed the head gear. We would be exposed to severe, sub-zero temperatures for as long as forty minutes during our ground-covering, slanting descent. Thick, fur-lined batties were on our feet to keep them warm.

Covering the distance we had to travel was made possible by the airfoil-design, glide parachutes strapped to our backs. The glide ratio of the steerable, high-performance parachutes was such that many miles of horizontal travel were obtained for each mile of vertical descent. Since the pilot had taken the C-130 to an altitude of over seven miles, there was no question about having sufficient lateral range. The only things working against us were the extended time we would be moving through frigid temperatures and the approaching sunrise. According to the time charts — if all went well — we would reach the ground during darkness with less than twenty minutes to wait for the first glimmer of light on the horizon.

Each of us had a compass strapped to one wrist and a penlight tied with a leather thong to the other. I spent ten minutes in the navigator’s compartment studying his maps and figuring a compass course that would take us across the narrowest neck of Cambodia and deposit us in North Vietnam fairly close to Hanoi.

Under our loose-fitting farmer’s garb, each of us had a knapsack. Because the long-range glide parachutes were harnessed to our backs, it was impossible to sling the knapsacks in the customary way. Until we were back on the ground, our backpacks would be carried as chestpacks. The knapsacks contained items essential for survival. Among them were identity papers, local currency, spare ammunition, first-aid packets, authentic footwear, some underclothing, high-energy protein bars, and a supply of lastafylene capsules to retain stamina and ward off fatigue.

Willow and Bu Chen made a last minute check of each other’s parachute equipment, then joined together to go over mine. An icy draft swirled in around us as the rear ramp was lowered. The engines slowed as the pilot reduced air speed.

I disconnected from the aircraft oxygen supply and switched to my first bail-out bottle. I eased to the rear, gripping the safety rail until I stood looking out into unending darkness. A thin line of ground lights, dim in the distance and punctuated with a few, well-spaced pockets of illumination, marked the coastline bordering the Gulf of Tonkin. The largest glow, a hazy canopy of brightness on the horizon, marked the location of Hanoi.

The jump light flicked on. Willow, standing directly behind me, slapped my shoulder.

I snapped on my penlight, drew down the ski goggles, held them and my oxygen mask tight to my face, and dove out into the void. Ordinarily, I find the period of free fall the most exhilarating part of the sky dive. But this was hardly recreation. My mind was not keyed to physical enjoyment. I looked back. Two pinpoints of lights first trailed, then caught up with me. Within seconds Willow and Bu Chen had reached my level and matched fall speed. I jerked my ripcord.

A moment later, in total, freezing silence, I tugged at the steering shroud lines to set a course. The rate of descent was rapid; the high altitude air was extremely thin. On either side of me I saw the lights carried by Willow and Bu Chen. We were together and on track.

Suddenly, something was different. I detected a subtle change in my surroundings. It was a sound, faint and ominous where no sound should be. The stillness of the cold, silent air had been invaded by an alien rumble that grew in intensity as I listened. Something was probing the environment in response to our being there.

I looked ahead and down in the direction of the oncoming sound and sucked in my breath.

Moving upward on a slant — roaring toward us with long, torchlike flames trailing behind — were two screaming jet fighters, their afterburners blazing. The intrusion of guarded air space by the transport we had left only moments before had unleashed the alert North Vietnamese air defenses. A pair of interceptors had been sent aloft. Our trio of vulnerable parachutes dangled directly in their pursuit path. We were not the target; we were merely unseen obstructions blocking the climbing course of the fighters being sent to chase the Thai intruder. There was no getting out of the way.

My eyes locked onto the bright-burning exhausts of the approaching jets. Climbing at top speed, they were upon us before we could do anything but cringe. The lead aircraft, a Russian MIG-21 night fighter, roared by not more than thirty feet above me. The air turbulence created in his wake caused a partial collapse of my parachute canopy. The bottom fell out from under me. I dropped rapidly, falling and spinning violently. I worked frantically, yanking at the tangled shroud lines to keep the parachute from becoming a “streamer.”

The wild, terrifying descent lasted for hundreds of feet before I got back on an even keel. Minutes passed before answering light signals from Willow and Bu Chen told me that we were together again.

We certainly hadn’t been seen by the pilots in the interceptors. The world was quiet around me again. It was doubtful that we had been picked up on radar.

Even if we were, there was no turning back.