Turn of the Cards

Chapter Thirty-eight

“Weak sisters.” Colonel Nguyen said, sitting back in the chair to Moonchild’s left with his head arrogantly tipped, smoking an American cigarette in a black holder. He was tall for a Vietnamese, five-ten or eleven and lean, with a USAF mustache and khaki PAVN walking-out dress with all Vietnamese insignia carefully removed. He wore what Mark — buried currently beneath the expressed persona-recognized as American full-colonel eagles pinned to his lapels. His English was excellent, if occasionally archaic. He was almost as handsome as he obviously thought he was.

He rolled his head to give a highly overt eye to Moonchild. She disliked him. She felt guilty for it.

“Weak sisters are the greatest threat to our success.”

The meeting was taking place in the lantern-lit ballroom of a brick French colonial villa outside a remote Highland hamlet. The hardwood floor was black-mottled with mildew, and lizards ran the walls between patches where the whitewash had peeled away in sheets. They made Moonchild nostalgic for the sleeping Croyd.

The eleven resistance leaders and Moonchild were seated around a long table of imported oak. J. Robert Belew presided at its head. Though the shape and seating arrangements of tables had a history of being bones of contention at Vietnamese negotiations, Belew had handled the matter simply by pointing at the long oblong table and telling people where to sit. The attendees complied without demur, primarily perhaps because their hosts had the most powerful factions present, roughly a hundred New Joker Brigaders and a recently arrived company of one hundred seasoned irregulars from Cambodia, who had been — and as far as Mark knew might still be — members in good standing of the notorious Khmer Rouge.

“So all that stuff about Khmer Rouge massacres was just imperialist propaganda, huh, man?” Mark had asked the previous afternoon when the Cambodian contingent rolled in.

“Oh, no,” Belew said. “The stories are understated, if anything. They were exterminating angels in a way the Manson family could only dream about. Their main man, Pol Pot, is, demographically speaking, the top genocide in history. Stalin? A wimp. Hitler? A weenie. The KRs rubbed out a third of Cambo’s population.”

Mark gaped at him. It felt as if all his blood was draining into a seething pool in the pit of his belly. “These people were involved in that?” His words ended in a strangled squeak.

Belew shrugged. “I’m not sure. Probably. Lot of them are early-to-mid thirties now, which would’ve made them early-to-mid teens back in 1975. Golden age of the Khmer Rouge, those middle teens.”

“What are they doing here?”

“We fought the Vietnamese together, after they invaded and ran the KRs out in ’79.”

“But — mass murderers — they’re your friends?”

A shrug. “War, like its pallid reflection politics, makes strange bedfellows.”

“And why are they here now?”

“They’re combat vets. And we have history together. Blood is thicker than water; I can rely on them.”

Mark ached to ask about the thickness of the blood they’d shed, and he also did not fail to notice Belew’s use of the singular first-person pronoun. But somehow he had lacked the stomach for further questions.

Or, more accurately, further answers.

Now Moonchild glanced uncertainly at the Khmer Rouge leader, a round-faced, innocuous little man in glasses named Suon San, who sat on the table’s far side next to Belew’s Montagnard buddies, who answered to the names Bert and Ernie, and across from Colonel Nguyen. He smiled at her and nodded politely, shyly almost. Colonel Nguyen slammed his hand on the table. “Anyone who collaborates with the enemy must pay the price!”

The man on Moonchild’s left laughed softly. “A fine way to speak, for a man who stills wears the uniform of the People’s Army — complete with rank badges he was never entitled to, in any man’s army.”

The colonel purpled. The speaker was even taller and more dapper than he, in his white linen suit and Panama hat. His name was Dong. He was an out-and-out crime-lord from Ho Chi Minh City, whose grandfather had been a chieftain in the Binh Xuyen criminal sect, wiped out by Ngo Dinh Diem.

“We’ve all collaborated, in one way or another,” said the man to his left. Nguyen Cao Tri was quite young, his accent likewise Saigon. He represented his father, who was a power in Saigon giai phong’s more respectable resistance wing. Though his father’s followers were primarily thuong gia — “trading persons” (“yuppie wannabes,” was how Belew put it) — the younger Nguyen held himself like a soldier. He had made NCO during his compulsory military service, no easy task in the People’s Army.

“I haven’t,” said the man who sat at J. Bob’s left hand, next to Colonel Nguyen. He was short but muscled almost like a Westerner, bulkily powerful, and his iron-gray hair was cropped close to his head. He was Nguyen Van Phu, the third Nguyen in the room, none of whom was related. He was an authentic by-God VC, who had spent his whole life as a resistance fighter. In his day he had fought the French, the Americans, the ARVN, and the victorious North Vietnamese — who had been more assiduous about wiping out their former VC allies than any other group in the country’s history. He had spent eight years in a communist “reeducation” camp. He had entered the ballroom limping; he carried an American bullet in his left hip, a PAVN one in the thigh.

“Perhaps you would care to cast the first stone,” said Ngo An Dong from across the table. The fiery young warlord of the southern Cao Dai sect, he wore oddments of military uniform and a red headband around his bushy dark hair. Belew described the Cao Dais as “zany but well motivated.” Ngo was another former PAVN noncom.

“I won’t shrink from taking strong action,” the ex-VC replied, ignorant of or just ignoring the biblical reference,

“You’re talking terrorism,” young Nguyen Cao Tri said.

“The purpose of terror is to terrorize.”

Colonel Nguyen laughed. “I’m glad there’s at least one other man here. Fools will be tempted to betray us to the government if they are not given adequate —” Pause for word. “— disincentives. Our first priority is to make sure the penalties of crossing us outweigh any benefits.”

“I disagree,” Moonchild made herself say.

He narrowed his eyes at her. “The woman speaks,” he said deliberately. “It is because you are nurturing that you speak that way, no? Your woman’s heart bleeds for the unfortunates whom we would discipline.”

That was true, but she sensed that that line of argument would not get far with the exclusively male assemblage. She felt Belew’s gray eyes on her. He sat up at his end of the table serene and centered as an Occidental Buddha. He was testing her. She hated him for it.

If only they had listened to me, gone back to Fort Venceremos to explain to the Colonel why J. J. killed Spoiler. The Brigade is still fighting for justice, no matter how far off the path some of its members have strayed.

Yet how can I back out now?

“I feel compassion, yes,” she said slowly. For some reason she could not bear to fail in front of Belew, and she hated him still more for that. “How can we help the people by doing them harm? But more crucial, from your male perspective, is that by resorting to terror against noncombatants, we defeat ourselves.”

Nguyen puffed up as if to spit an interjection. Wondering at her lack of civility, she plunged on. “If we brutalize civilians, they will come to hate and fear us more than they do the government; they will come to see the government forces as the lesser of two evils. Just as villagers were driven to join the Viet Cong after they saw their homes and loved ones burned in napalm attacks.”

She glanced then at Belew; the remark was a barb. If it found its target, he showed no sign. “Also,” she went on, missing the single beat, “we play into the hands of the government: we allow them to portray us as bandits.”

“The world media are accustomed to making excuses for communist regimes,” Belew said. “They’ve been doing it have a powerful inclination to treat us as bad guys. We might be wise not to make it any easier for them.”

Though his body language still bespoke tense anger, Colonel Nguyen made an airy wave. “What do we care for world opinion?”

“We wish to be recognized,” said Duong Linh. The assembly’s elder statesman, except for Belew himself, he sat at the far end of the table. He was a wispy man with a wispy gray beard and round eyeglasses, who closely resembled Ho Chi Minh. A leader of Vietnam’s sizable community of covert Catholics, he had been born in Hanoi. As a youth in the early 1960s he fled south to Hue. He attended seminary school for a time, then dropped out, married, and began to raise a family. His wife, three children, and mother were killed in the communist massacres during Tet, 1968. He himself escaped only by chance. He had spent five years in the dreaded trai cai tao — “camp/transform/recreate,” reeducation camps. Since 1987 he had been living underground.

It was perhaps not surprising that he appeared elderly, though he was only in his late forties or early fifties.

“That gives us an immediate interest in what the world thinks of us,” Duong said in his barely audible voice. His accent had more soft Hue drawl than Hanoi harshness.

Colonel Nguyen grunted. “Very well,” he said without grace. “Then certainly we must all agree our first priority is to engage the government’s forces in battle, secure a victory as quickly as possible to establish our credibility”

Before she could stop herself, Moonchild blurted, “No.”

“Your impertinence disgraces this council,” Nguyen said, turning to her. His posture was still sprawled and casual, but the words squeezed from him like toothpaste from a tube, betraying his anger. His left hand suddenly swept around in a backhand slap to Moonchild’s face.

Her own right hand snapped up and caught Nguyen’s hand an inch from her face.

He jumped to his feet, his wooden chair slamming over backward with a clatter that sent the lizards scrambling up the wall to the shadow-hidden rafters. Fury leached the color from his face. His American .45 appeared in his hand. Moonchild was already up. As the tendons stood out on the back of the colonel’s hand, drawing his forefinger tight on the trigger, she whipped around in a spinning back-scythe kick, blinding fast.

Her foot struck the pistol. The weapon shattered like a rubber ball dunked in liquid nitrogen and hit with a hammer.

Colonel Nguyen stood there, the skin practically slumping off his face in surprise, holding the grip that was all that remained of his pistol, pumping the now-flaccid trigger. He threw the ruined weapon down and stamped out of the ballroom.

After an interval of very silent silence, Chou, the Hoa leader, spoke: “He’ll be back.” An ethnic Chinese, Chou compensated for having been a law professor at Minh Mang, the university in Ho Chi Minh City, by affecting warlord drag: thinning hair drawn back in a queue, Fu Manchu mustache, and two revolvers with what Moonchild very much feared were real ivory grips belted below his capacious belly.

The farmer who represented the Annamese secessionists from central Vietnam laughed. “Small loss if he doesn’t.”

The conferees sat very quietly to hear Moonchild’s objections to engaging the People’s Army in direct battle. These amounted to the fact that, desertion-riddled and dispersed though it was, PAVN was still mighty big and mean and would smash them flat in open conflict unless weakened substantially. It was a cogent argument, even the self-effacing Isis had to admit. Of course, her articulate advocacy might not be the only reason for her listeners’ respectful attention.

The discussion moved to the particulars of indirect strategy. Moonchild gratefully let the cup of conversation pass from her. She was uncomfortable standing out. Besides, her hour was drawing to a close. She would have to leave shortly.

A couple of Suon San’s bandy-legged little gunslingers walked in escorting a man in a yellow American-style polo shirt and white slacks. He was taller than most of the attendees, more squarely built. Belew rose to greet him with a smile.

“This is Kim Giau Minh,” Belew said, shaking the new arrival’s hand. “He’s an expert in the very kind of warfare we’ve been discussing. He fought as a counterinsurgency commando in Cambodia. His father was a North Korean engineer, and during his hitch in the People’s Army, Kim here was sent to North Korea’s famed schools for aspiring terrorists, where he studied death and destruction alongside the best and the brightest of Provo, ETA—Militar, and Nur al-Allah henchmen.”

Shaking hands around the table, Kim smiled and bobbed his close-cropped head shyly, as if embarrassed by vast praise. He came to Moonchild and his eyes lit.

“I have heard much about you,” he said in English, vigorously shaking the hand she offered him, then, “Choum boepgetsumnida. Kim Giau Minh rago hamnida.”

She stood there staring at him with horror seeping down over her face and body like blood from a scalp cut. She did not understand a word.

He said something else. The words struck no sparks of meaning in her mind.

He took her hand in both of his. “Asimnikka?” he asked, frowning with concern.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She pulled her hand back, turned, and ran.

Blindly she stumbled out of the derelict villa, off the grand veranda, several steps across granite flagstones laid to keep expensive European shoes from contact with the red mud. She dropped to her knees, hands on thighs, weeping soundlessly.

The Khmer Rouge standing to the left of the doorway with his Kalashnikov slung started forward. From the other side of the door Lou Inmon cleared his throat, held out a warning claw, and shook his head. The Cambodian stopped.

Grandfather, that had to be Korean he was speaking to me. And I did not understand a word.

What am I?

She breathed deep, from the diaphragm, trying to find her center. She wasn’t sure she ever could again.

Isis.

She stopped breathing. She had thought her name without willing it.

Isis. Do you hear me?

It was as if a voice was speaking in her mind. A… familiar … voice.

“Eric?” she whispered.

“Yes, Isis. It’s me. Surprised?”

“Yes.”

“Limited telepathy is one of my gifts, hon. Very limited, I’m afraid. I think our — closeness — gives me better range with you. By the way, you don’t have to talk out loud. Just think at me and I’ll hear.”

Where are you?

“Not far, I think, though I can’t say for sure. Where are you?”

Why?

“We’ve been looking for you. We want you to come back. We want you to come home, Isis.”

Is — is that all?

“I won’t play games with you. Rumor has it that you — you in person — are having a confab with some of the Republic’s heaviest criminals and traitors. The Colonel would very much like to find out where this is all going down.”

You want me to inform?

“I want you to remember whose side you’re on: ours. The wild cards’. These people are dangerous to our hosts. That makes them dangerous to us — all of us, hon. You included.”

She forced her breathing to a regular rhythm. She glanced back at the porch. Inmon stood with his great raptor head averted. The Khmer watched her with undisguised interest.

“I — that is, one of us, one of Mark’s friends killed Spoiler.”

“Don’t sweat that. Spoiler was a hothead. Haskell told us he drew down on Jumpin’ Jack Flash. It wasn’t Flash’s fault… Haskell’s fine, by the way. We got the infection in his arms under control.”

I am pleased for him. J. J. intended him no harm.

“We assumed that, or he’d be toast like Spoiler. Look, all is forgiven. Please come home.”

Mark led a mutiny —

“No hay importa, babe. His hand was forced. The Colonel says it’s a non-issue. Come back. We want you. We need you.

And you?

A pause, then: “Sure, babe, I need you too. That goes without saying —”

“Isis?”

She jumped, came up on one knee, turning. Belew stood behind her.

“Are you all right? You left the meeting pretty precipitously.”

“Isis. Just tell us where you are. You don’t have to do anything; we’ll come find you.”

She stood unsteadily, hung her head. “I am sorry if I have caused shame.”

“You’ll be a hero —”

Belew was shaking his head. “No. Indeed, I’d say you knocked their socks off in there when you busted Nguyen’s popgun for him. I couldn’t have dreamed up a better demonstration of what you’re all about if I had a year and infinite beer.”

“Isis —”

Eric, I love you. But she felt the contact stretch, and snap, and fall away into a void within her. She reeled. Belew caught her arm, helped her keep her feet.

She would not show him her pain. “What — what of what I said?” she asked him, stepping away and holding up a hand to forestall further help. “Did I pass that test too?”

He grinned. “With flying colors.”

“And you agreed with me?” For some reason it was very important for her to know these things. She could not imagine why.

“Well, I think you’re a little bit of a bleeding heart, it’s true. On the other hand, if the colonel and that commie hard-case Nguyen Number Two had their way, we’d have half the country after our hides. Just as you pointed out.”

“But that which I said about the bombers — you were not offended? I — aimed it at you.”

He shrugged. “Sorry. But it missed me clean. Special Forces were the hearts-and-minds boys; we saw how the populace reacted when granny and little sister got turned into crispy critters.”

She made herself stand erect, head up, shoulders back. She wanted him to know she was back in control.

“What of strategy?”

“You were spot-on. We need to soften PAVN up big-time. Otherwise they steamroll us.”

“Oh.” She had been prepared for assault, carping criticism at the least. Agreement caught her off guard.

“By the way,” Belew said, “Kim is half-blind from worry over what he did to upset you.”

“I am sorry. I —”

“It’s okay. I calmed him down. I understand; it’s just the time”

“That is a sexist remark!”

“Not time of month, kid. Time of day. Your hour’s almost up.”

She looked at him. “How can you know so much?”

“I do my homework. Now, git.”

Ten minutes later Mark staggered back into the ballroom. Belew had requested that he return after he came back to himself. The conferees looked up at him, then bowed their heads.

“Hello?” he said tentatively.

Bert the Montagnard stood up and shook his hand. “Please permit me to be the first to congratulate you,” he said in flawless Oxonian English. He had a gold incisor.

Mark blinked at him. He hadn’t even though the ’Yard spoke Vietnamese.

“What’s going on?” he asked Belew.

“Big news. The Command Council here has just voted your friend Moonchild in as head of the resistance. You’re her deputy and official representative to the Council when she’s unavailable.”

He stood up and slapped Mark on the back. Mark thought his eyes would fall out and roll away across the floor and under the table.

“But I’m not —”

“Yes, you are,” J. Bob said. “Congratulations. You always said you wanted a revolution. Now you’ve got one.”