Turn of the Cards

Chapter Forty

Propelled by an arm the size of an elephant’s trunk, a fist slammed against the side of Ngo An Dong’s head and snapped it around. Sheet lightning went off in his brain. His red Rambo head-rag got loose and slipped into his eyes.

The spectating trio of PASF officers looked at one another in amazed approval as Rhino stepped back, rubbing his horny fist. “These monsters really are good for something,” said one.

“Yes,” agreed a second. “But we should tell him to go easy. We don’t want him killing the dog.”

“Yet,” added the third.

Through red-and-black haze that filled young Ngo’s skull limped the realization that you could, too, be too brave it wasn’t like rich or thin. Getting caught in a piddling little raid on a supply depot near the coast proved that. Now the dashing young warlord could only hope that he could find some way to die before he broke. Even the spirit of Woodrow Wilson — venerated by his sect — could not help him now. The fog crowded awareness from his brain.

“How many aces are working with you traitors?” the first officer asked. Ngo tried to spit defiance, but all that came out was blood and part of a tooth, and they slopped down his hanging lower lip.

“Khong?” the interrogator said: No? Then he turned to the squat American joker and said, in that English every People’s Armed Security Force officer assiduously studied against that happy day when the Americans woke up to their responsibility and started shipping major loot to the Socialist Republic so that its hardworking cops could fight crime like Miami Vice, he said, “Hit him again. Only this time not so hard.”

The door opened. Colonel Vo Van Song of the PPSF stalked in, smoking a cigarette and gazing around with slit-eyed disapproval.

The interrogating officers went rigid. Though none had had the pleasure of meeting him before, they recognized him at once. Colonel Vo had a Reputation. He was one of those delightful chaps who feel it is better to be feared than loved, by your own side as well as by the enemy.

“What have we here?” he hissed in English, for the evident benefit of the guest torturer. His words were slurred and slouched and misshapen, like jokers. “Is this what passes for modern police techniques with People’s Armed Security?”

The third officer stepped to a rickety wooden table and held up a pair of big alligator clips, dangling from thick red-and-black cables. “We were simply softening him up before we put these on, sir,” he said brightly.

“Oh, so? And perhaps even as we speak you are having an iron maiden brought up from the basement? A rack, maybe?”

He plucked the cables from the PASF man’s limp fingers. “The first important rebel leader to fall into our hands, and you interrogate him with this?”

The trio wilted into the collars of their summer-weight tan uniforms. They knew what was coming. In the complicated food chain of the Vietnamese internal-security apparatus, the People’s Public Security Force occupied a much higher niche than PASF And PPSF was a noted credit-jumper.

The colonel signaled. A pair of basic leg-breakers in PPSF khaki lumbered in. They undid the heavy leather straps that bound the now-unconscious Cao Dai leader to the chair, put hard hands under his armpits, hoisted him up, and hauled him out with his bare toes scraping on the cement floor.

“The Socialist Republic is grateful for your efforts on her behalf,” Vo said in his horrible voice, taking another drag on his cigarette. “She is also grateful your clumsiness did not deprive her of such a valuable prize. Good day.”

He threw the cigarette down beside the green-patinated drain grating in the middle of the floor and walked out.

“Have a nice day,” the squat joker said to his back. The door slammed shut.

“Tight-assed Northern cocksucker,” the second officer hissed. The PASF men were all Annamese, local boys.

“Did you hear his voice?” the third one asked. “He spoke as if he had a cleft palate. Chilling.”

The first nodded sagely. “It’s true, what they say of him.”

“Arrogant Tonkinese piece of shit,” the second said.

“One of those men he had with him didn’t even look Vietnamese,” the third officer said indignantly. “He looked … Korean.” He practically spat the last word.

“Indeed.” The first officer stood staring at the door. “A wise man might wonder why loyal officers of the state such as ourselves should run like dogs to the summons of a Northerner with a broomstick up his rectum,” he said at length.

“That’s true!”

“Injustice, that’s all it is.”

“Has it ever been different, since the Tonkinese won their Short Victorious War?” the first officer went on quietly.

“Not for one day!” agreed the second quickly. He wasn’t a weatherman, but he knew which way the wind blew.

“That’s right!” said the third, who didn’t, yet, but was determined to let it carry him along withal.

“War of Liberation, they called it,” the first officer said, his spine uncurling from the beaten slump Vo had put into it. “War of conquest is more like it, wouldn’t you say?”

The third jumped as if the alligator clips had leapt off the table and bit him. “But that’s —”

“Loyalty,” the first officer said, clearly and firmly. “Loyalty to our homeland — Annam. It is time to recognize invasion for what it is, violation for what it is.”

“We must be men,” the second officer said. “We must refuse to be victimized.” He’d been reading American self-help texts as part of his study plan.

“Absolutely!” the third man almost yelled. He’d finally gotten the drift and hoped the others wouldn’t interpret plain slow-wittedness as dissent. “Men! Not, uh, not dogs.”

“There is,” the first officer said, “but one thing to do.”

And they all three turned as one to the horrid Lien Xo joker, who had stood there throughout it all not understanding a word that was said, and smiled. He smiled back with his grotesque leathery lips.

“Thank you,” the first officer said, in English again. “You have been of great help. Return to your unit now and tell your colonel to await our report.”

“In Hell,” the second officer said in Vietnamese, as the being shambled out.

Because the three shared a single thought with total clarity: that night they were going to slip away across the paddies and join the rebels. The answer was blowing in the wind.

Ngo An Dong was unfortunate enough to come partially back to himself as the Soviet-made GAZ jeep pulled away from the police station and its bad suspension began to jolt his tailbone. He had osmotically absorbed the fact that he had fallen from the rice pot into the cook-fire.

The two who had hauled him from the interrogation room were sitting up front. There was something vaguely familiar about the back of the driver’s head; it seemed kind of square for a Vietnamese head, somehow. Ngo had gone to Saigon University after he got out of the Army, and was fairly sophisticated; he assumed the blow to his head had broken something and he was hallucinating. He hoped a subdural hematoma would finish him before the legendary Colonel Vo got him to wherever he was taking him.

The colonel sat beside him, which struck him odd somehow. He made himself turn to look his future tormentor squarely in the eye.

And screamed.

There was no Vo. Instead a man sat beside him wrapped in a black cape, grinning at him from the depths of a cowl. His face was hairless. It was also blue.

“Those assholes swallowed my act hook, line, and sinker. Did you see that, Kim?” He reached forward to grab the driver’s shoulder.

Kim Giau Minh, playing the driver, nodded his head. The cowled man settled back in the rear seat. Ngo caught a glimpse of what seemed millions of tiny lights in his cape. Lights like … stars.

“I’m slick,” he said, rubbing blue hands together, “so slick. I don’t see why Mark doesn’t choose me more. I’m really a lot more useful than the others. Much more versatile. Don’t you agree?”

Ngo nodded, though it made his head ring like a temple bell. The apparent fact of his escape from torture, degradation, betrayal, and death was beginning to penetrate the fog. If the blue man had asked him to confirm that he was Queen Victoria — another celestial personage for the Cao Dai — he would have nodded too.

The blue man looked at him closely. “Say, you wouldn’t have a sister, would you? I don’t get out too often.”

Dawn was graying-out the clouds over distant jungle. The patrol boat prowled between banks covered in grass grown thick and high from the summer monsoon. The crew kept their thumbs on the firing-switches despite the fatigue of a night’s patrol. The half hour before the sun actually popped the horizon was prime time for ambushers.

The boat was a Soviet copy of an old American RAG — River Assault Group — design, made especially for the Border Guards Directorate of the KGB. With the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan it had been retired from service on Central Asia’s Amu Dar’ya, where it and others of its class had been engaged in trying to prevent arms from being smuggled south cross river to the ’Stan, and dope from coming north. The boats had not been a conspicuous success in either endeavor. But the Vietnamese armed forces were intent on resembling the Americans they had outlasted a decade and a half before as closely as possible, so they just had to have the craft when they hit the market.

The rating drowsing upright in the forward twin 12.7 mount jerked fully awake. “Did you feel that? Did you?” he demanded in a shrill voice, tracking the gun barrels left and right at the mist rising off the river.

The warrant officer in command stuck his head out of the armored cabin. “What’s going on?” he yelled over the engine throb.

“I felt something hit us! Didn’t you feel it?”

“Vang!” yelled the man from the after-machinegun mount. “Yes! I felt it too.”

“It was just a snag, Linh,” the warrant officer said. ’A sunken branch caught on a bar. All kinds of things get in the river in the monsoon. Go back to sleep.”

Thump. The fifty-foot craft rocked perceptibly. The warrant officer lurched, had to grab at the hatchway for support.

“What in the name of all hell’s is going on?”

The impact seemed to have come on the starboard bow. A rating ran from the armor-plated cabin to peer down into the heavy water.

“Look!” he shouted, pointing. “I see something down there. Something gray, going away fast.”

Linh pointed his guns that way. “Shall I shoot? Shall I shoot?”

“If you do, you’ll blow To into tiny pieces, you cretin!” the warrant shouted. “Helm, cut the throttle. We need to find out what’s happening —”

“It’s coming back!” To screamed.

The engine sounds died. The boat slowed perceptibly as it coasted into the current, wallowing from side to side. And suddenly it rocked sharply.

To went headfirst over the rail.

At once he began thrashing, splashing, and screaming. If he could swim, he was keeping the fact well hidden.

“Nguyen, throw him a line. Linh, keep a lookout. If you see anything, shoot it.”

To’s shrieks rose an octave, and he actually came halfway out of the water. “Oh, Buddha, oh, Jesus, it’s got me, help, help, help!”

The warrant officer ran to the side — not as near as To had been. The rating was bobbing hysterically up and down, waving his arms. “Shoot!” the warrant officer yelled, dancing back. Then: “No! Don’t shoot!”

Linh, who was tightening his thumbs on the butterfly trigger, cranked up the barrels of his heavy machine guns in time to chew up the tall weeds on the bank instead of To.

And then To was staggering in the shallows, pushed to relative safety by some unseen force. “AHH! Ahh. Ah?” he said. He scrabbled up the bank on all fours, then sat down and covered his face with his hands.

“Now, shoot!” the warrant officer commanded. Linh dutifully began to rake the murky river just shy of the bank, throwing great brown sheets of water over To. To screamed and ran off into the weeds.

Linh stopped shooting. There was a terrific bang, so loud that the warrant officer thought for a moment a round might have cooked off in the chamber. The little boat rocked back.

When it fell forward again, it just kept going. Slowly but unmistakably.

A rating ran from below-decks. “The hull’s all caved in!” he screamed. “We’re sinking!”

“Ridiculous!” the warrant said. A big air bubble rolled to the surface, right in front of the bow.

A metal ammo box came sliding forward down the deck. The boat was settling heavily by the bows now. The warrant officer slammed his pith helmet on the deck.

“Why couldn’t the filthy Americans-without-money have sold us a boat with a metal hull?”

A shape burst from the water, big and sleek and streamlined and silver-gray. It hung in the air a heartbeat, grinning all over its rostrum at them. Then it fell back into the river with a splash that swamped the deck clear to the gun mount.

Linh turned and fled, screaming, “Sea monster! Sea monster!” The warrant officer grabbed him and started punching him.

“It’s just a dolphin, you coward!”

“Dolphins don’t sink ships,” Linh sobbed.

The beast broke the surface again fifty meters away, streaking off in a racing jump. Cursing, the warrant officer released Linh and jumped to the twin machine guns. The dolphin was moving away incredibly fast, shooting up out of the water at regular intervals.

The warrant officer fired the ammo cans dry. He never came close to hitting the dolphin. It vanished around a bend in the river.

He had to wade through ankle-deep water to abandon ship.

“What’s bothering that damned dog?” the sentry demanded.

His partner had his heels dug in and was holding the leash with both hands in an effort to keep the straining, snarling German shepherd from pulling him off his feet and dragging him out of the white high-noon glare of the floodlights that illuminated the ammo dump’s perimeter.

“I don’t know,” he said between panting breaths. “He’s never acted like this before.”

“Stupid animal. I should put a bullet between his ears. That would calm him down.”

“No! He must sense something. He’s a good dog.” The handler sounded wounded. He’d been through training with the dog; his fellow sentry was just somebody he’d been assigned to walk the wire with tonight. The dog was his buddy.

“I don’t believe it.”

“Here. I’ll let him go. He’ll show you.” He released the animal.

The dog sprinted forward in a black-and-tan blur. They saw him race into the black of the compound, saw his shadowy form leap as if at a victim’s throat. But there was nothing there.

Except the dog suddenly flipped over in the air and came down on its back so hard the two sentries heard the air burst out of its lungs. The shepherd rolled over and ran away with its tail between its legs, casting fearful looks over its shoulder.

The sentries looked at each other and began to unsung their assault rifles.

A woman appeared out of the darkness. Literally; it seemed she came into existence at the edge of the light — neither sentry saw a flicker of motion before she was abruptly there, running right at them. She wore tight-fitting black. Half her face was obscured by a black mask.

The dog handler’s hands were numb from holding the leash. He almost dropped his Kalashnikov. His partner got his weapon free first, started to raise it.

The woman ran up to them, jumped, sent both rifles flying away with a double kick. She burst between them, sprinting right for the three-meter fence.

She leapt into the air. Incredibly she soared up and over the high fence, tucking into a ball to spin over the razor-wire coils that topped it. As the sentries watched, jaws dropping, she hit the ground running. When she reached the far edge of the light-spill, it was as if she simply winked out of existence.

Behind the two sentries the ammo dump erupted in a cataclysm of light and noise.

The village security officer made his way home along the nighttime trail with the wobble-legged swagger of a man returning from a whorehouse. Which was just what he was doing.

To the last man who saw him alive he looked distinctly green. That was because he was being watched through an AN/PVS-2 — a so-called starlight scope.

J. Robert Belew tightened his index finger on the trigger. The American-made M21 sniper’s rifle roared and slammed his shoulder. The security officer dropped into the short grass with the pratfall abruptness of a man who isn’t rising again this side of judgment Day.

Leaving the rifle resting on its bipod, Belew rose and stole forward. He had two Khmer Rouge with him for security. They were small, watchful men, men from whom the youthful fire that had led them to drive the sick and old and crippled from hospital wards before their guns into the streets of Phnom Pen — hand to shoot, laughing, those who had not the strength to stagger — had long since died away, leaving them cynical, alert, attuned to survival for its own sake. Perhaps because it was all that was left them.

Though the Red Khmers as a movement were still as fanatically committed to their zany Maoist brand of revolutionary socialism as ever, few of the men who had taken part in the gang rape and murder of a nation still believed. They had seen too much. Now they were warriors, pure and simple, with no values and no past to fall back upon. Their ethics were those of the primal warrior through all human history: loyalty to buddies, qualified loyalty to a leader, if he had luck. Beyond that it was them against all humankind.

In their eyes Belew was both a comrade and an extremely lucky leader. To him they were useful, which made their moral failings irrelevant. He felt safe with them watching his back.

Belew dew his Para Ordnance sidearm in case he had misjudged and his quarry had friends following along behind. He paused, knelt beside the body. He felt the throat, held the back of his hand before the man’s nose and mouth. No pulse, no breath. No sounds came out of the wall of elephant grass from which the late security officer had emerged.

Voices were calling from the other direction, inside the bamboo fence of the village a couple of hundred meters away. Belew took a piece of paper from his pocket, thrust it into a pocket of the man’s blood-blackened tunic, and ran lithely back to where his rifle lay.

He picked up the weapon, folded the bipod, and slung it. Slinging a piece was usually the mark of a slovenly troop, something no self-respecting Special Forces soldier would dream of doing in the field. Except if Belew ran into real trouble there was no way he was going to fight with the cumbrous, slow-firing M21. His sidearm would serve better.

There were torches bobbing his way from the village now. “’Paranoia strikes deep,’” he murmured softly. Not all his aphorisms were classical.

The villagers would find a list of government informers on their late security officer. This would, with luck, have Ramifications.

For instance, the villagers would probably assume the security officer was trying to defect to the rebels and that the government had burned him. The official’s family would blame the government. The government would grill everyone in the area to find out who else might be disloyal, while going nuts trying to figure out who actually popped the poor son of a gun, since they knew they didn’t do it.

Meanwhile officials in nearby villages would be thinking furiously. The fact that one of their own had bitten it would remind them of their own mortality. Even if the rebels weren’t responsible for this killing, it might give them unhealthy ideas. And say the government really had rubbed this guy out: what if the government suddenly took the notion they were disloyal?

Finally, life was not going to be too comfortable for the people whose names were on the list, either.

The assassination, then, was not merely a random act of midnight murder; it was a cunningly planned act of midnight murder. An engine for generating maximum paranoia and ill will, it would put a lot of people seriously uptight and cause them to do much soul-searching about where their loyalties lay. He didn’t think many would come down foursquare for the Socialist Republic after this one. And even though most people wouldn’t do anything, he was planting seeds, planting seeds.

Best of all, he thought, as he slipped back to his quondam Young Genocides, to give them a thumb’s-up and be answered with flashes of teeth and eyes, Mark will never connect the act to Major J. Robert Belew, USSF retired. Belew genuinely liked and respected the boy, but he was in ways too good for this world.

What he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.