Turn of the Cards

Chapter Forty-four

The rope-handled wooden box was longer than tall or wide and God knew how old. The stencils on its side were weathered to near-invisibility: U.S. ARMY MORTAR ROUND 81MM M301A3 ILLUMINATING. It sat in the middle of a clearing in the woods in the Kon Tum foothills east of Pleiku. The grass had been cropped close by grazing water buffalo. An array of other junk was scattered around the fringes of the clearing, including a clapped-out Ural truck.

A tall man with blue-black hair and a notable jut of jaw stood at the clearing’s edge, gazing intently at the box. A curl of blue smoke rose from it.

The box burst into flame.

Standing at the muscular man’s side, Mark jumped despite himself. “Hoo!” he half whistled, half exclaimed. “Uh … yeah. Yeah. So you can, uh, do that too.”

“Mark,” Croyd Crenson said, in a baritone Diskau would have killed for, “the problem right now really seems to be finding something I can’t do.”

He chuckled from the depths of his heroic chest. He laced his fingers together and flexed. Muscles heaved the skin of his bare arms and the olive-drab cloth of his T-shirt like the Loma Prieta quake.

“I feel great. Really great. I’ve never felt this way before. Except maybe when I’m just starting to hit the amphetamines, and they give me a rush instead of just keeping me going.”

Mark moistened lips that, despite the humidity, were dry as the thousand-foot cliffs of the Khyber Pass. “Great, man,” he said, though it cost him effort. Croyd was his friend. To feel this way

“Dr. Meadows.”

Mark sighed and turned. At least he had convinced the coalition’s Vietnamese rank-and-file to quit calling him “your Excellency.”

It was one of Bui Bam Dinh’s Annamese peasant guerrillas, a tiny brown man in black pajamas, a conical straw hat that overwhelmed the rest of him, Ho Chi Minh slippers, and an AK-47 with black electrician’s tape wrapped around a cracked fore-grip slung over one shoulder. He was the classic Time magazine portrait of a VC, circa 1966.

“Yes, Bui?” The man was also one of the leader’s cousins, or in any event part of his extended family. As far as Mark could tell, there were about twenty family names in common use in Vietnam. Telling everybody apart was not simplified by the Western media’s habit of calling Vietnamese by their last names, which happened to be personal names, not family names, as in most Asian cultures. Thus “Uncle Ho” for the late northern leader, used with jocular familiarity by people who thought “Ho” was a first name, like Frank or Ed; and thus Ho’s foremost general, Vo, was universally known as “Giap.”

This Bui was actually a blood relation of the rebel leader, in any event. He bobbed his head and smiled. He modestly kept a hand before his mouth, but Mark could see it was full of steel Soviet teeth.

“There is someone,” he said. “Perhaps you would wish to come and see.”

“Xin vui long,” Mark replied. As always he was surprised at how rapidly he was picking up Vietnamese. Moonchild handled the rising, fallen, and “broken” tones far more gracefully than any of the other personalities — another mystery, since Korean was not a tonal language. “Thanks. I’m coming.”

He glanced back at his friend. Croyd was staring at the derelict Ural. He had his right arm stretched out straight, palm down, fingers extended. He waggled his fingers slightly.

Obediently the truck was hovering about four inches off the ground.

Mark swallowed. “Later,” he said.

The newcomer sat on the hootch’s mat floor in a sprawl of complete collapse. He was gaunt. His clothes were shreds, scorched, torn, rotting from his frame, revealing fading yellow bruises and oozing sores. The tip of the gigantic lobster claw that was his right hand had been broken off. His eyes, sunken deep below what had been a domineering brow and was now a jut, stared through the bamboo wall of the hootch, outward toward infinity.

Evan Brewer wasn’t looking so dapper and self-assured today.

“They fragged us,” he said in a voice that made it sound as if each word tore away the lining of his throat in sheets. “I wasn’t in the bunker, but I think they were going for both of us. They didn’t want to hear about socialism anymore; all they wanted to talk about was how good nat blood tasted when you drank it, how it felt when you rubbed it on your skin.”

Mark glanced at Belew, who shrugged. Mark had ordered the best medical care to be made available — several Medicins sans Frontières doctors had joined the rebels’ permanent floating headquarters. In fact medical care per se wasn’t much of an issue, though supplies were low: the professional classes were deserting the regime en masse North and South, and physicians were leading the way.

If only Mark’s special pharmaceutical needs were as well tended to. The doubt about purity of his powders was one more constant strain. There was nothing to do about it but roll the bones, roll the bones.

Brewer had waved away medical attention. He needed to try to force the memories out of his mind in the form of words before his body was dealt with.

At one time Mark would have been kneeling at his former tormentor’s side in a frenzy of codependency. Now he sat, watching, listening, withholding evaluation. Maybe my conscience died with Starshine, he thought. Maybe that’s why I’m so heartless. Except, of course, gentle warrior Moonchild had always been his voice of compassion; Starshine was righteous indignation.

“I was in the latrine. It was just luck. Lucius was sacked out on his cot. They rolled a white phosphorus grenade right under him.” He broke off in a shuddering fit. Mark felt an urge to put his arms around him and try to comfort him. The impulse died without moving him to action.

“The blast blew off two of his arms. I got the fire put out by beating it with a blanket, rolling him in it. Mostly.”

He shook his head and shifted his unseeing gaze from horizon to Earth’s core. “It took an hour and a half for the chopper to get there. The base is ten minutes’ flight time from Venceremos. It took ninety minutes.

“We’d given him the last of the morphine — people’ve pretty much looted out the pharmacy, but the Colonel still had a private stash in a safe in his office. Nobody messes with the Colonel — yet. The way some of the young bloods are talking”

He shook that off. That was information, incidental, not the poison he needed to purge. “So he wasn’t screaming when the Hip came in, just thrashing around, moaning some, starting to come out of it. When they carried him aboard the chopper, you could still see those little flecks of white phosphorus where they’d eaten into him, glowing like little stars. Like little radioactive cancers, just eating away at him.” Mark shuddered.

“So after the Viets dusted him off for medical attention, what did you” Belew began.

Brewer turned his eyes to Belew, and for the first time they focused on something close at hand. They were practically black, and it was the kind of black something would turn if it could be heated so hot it emitted light in the ultraviolet, light too hot to see.

“He never got medical attention. Colonel Sobel went out himself to check on him the next day. He never arrived. Don’t you see, man? They got him up one, two thousand feet, and they rolled him out of the helicopter.”

There was a time when that would have sent Mark out the door with puke spilling from his mouth. It shook him badly, but the fish heads and rice he’d had for lunch stayed where they were. In fact he couldn’t help thinking how long ago they’d gotten there.

“The Colonel called them on it. Said they had to’ve murdered him; he was on the chopper when it left Venceremos, and he was fucking nowhere when it landed. And do you know what they told him? Do you know what?”

“What?” Belew asked gently.

“They said there’s a war on. They said there’s an emergency shortage of medical supplies. They said, ‘If your pet monsters want to murder each other that’s not our concern’!”

Mark found himself standing in the door of the hootch, taking in air in giant gulps. The monsoon had pretty well petered out, but the rebels had come low enough down that the air was thick and sticky. Eventually he came back to his place.

Brewer was looking off to nowhere again. He sat as if he was never going to move. “What happened then?” Mark asked.

Brewer’s chest and shoulders heaved in something that was half sigh, half sob. “Things were crazy. Too crazy. The young bloods were telling me, telling me to my face, that they were sorry they’d missed me, that they were going to do the job right real soon.” He shook his head. ’All the Colonel is doing is talking about how these new aces he’s bringing in are going to turn the tide. It’s as if he’s in his own private world.”

Belew shot a significant look at Mark. I know you think the Colonel’s crazy, man, Mark thought, but he’s under stress, he’s watching his dream unravel

And we are pulling at the threads, Moonchild concluded with infinite sadness. I worst of all. Oh, Eric.

“What aces?” Belew asked softly.

Brewer shook his head. “They hadn’t actually showed. They were all a big secret. Somehow I wasn’t interested in hanging around to see who they were. I went over the wire that night.”

The words Brewer released into the room overrode the ones tumbling around in Mark’s head. Thankfully.

“There was nothing else for me to do. Maybe I’m a coward, man. But there wasn’t anything left to fight for there. Nothing I could understand. I could stay there and die, and it would all be for nothing. I thought I was ready to die for la causa, you know, for la lucha. But not … for nothing.

“They chased me. One of the boys, joker-ace, used to run with the Geeks, he could smell the way a bloodhound could. Maybe you remember him. Little guy, and his face was all sad eyes and these humongous nostrils.”

Mark nodded. “Madison.”

“Yeah. After he hit camp, he started calling himself that instead of his joker name, Sniffer. I talked him out of that; I was real concerned about his dignity.

“They set him after me. He found me in an abandoned village next to a derelict sugar plantation. You maybe know the one? We went through it on patrols a lot, before moving up into the Highlands. It wasn’t abandoned then. The rebels, they — you — are right up against the wire at Venceremos every night now. They ran off the overseers, and the villagers fled. They wanted to get away from us. Made me sick when I heard about it. But that was before I had to run away.

“I killed him. I shed joker blood.” He held up the claw. “He was all over me, trying to strangle me, yelling that he’d found me. I jabbed this into his eyes and pushed as hard as I could. I pushed for all I was fucking worth. He screamed and struggled and flopped around, and then suddenly he was still. I had to break the end off my claw to get out of there.”

He put his face into his flesh palm. “I went into the sugar cane. It’s all dry and overgrown. I heard them thrashing around, coming after me. Then somebody started letting loose with flamethrowers. I don’t know if it was the Brigade or the People’s Army. Some of the boys got caught; I heard them screaming, worse than anything I’ve ever heard. Worse than Luce — he was too screwed up to scream very loud, even when he was conscious.”

He held up both his hands. “I got away. I hid in the woods. Eventually some of your bandits — your rebels — found me. I thought they were going to kill me. But they put me on a truck and brought me here.”

“We still get deserters out of Fort Venceremos,” Mark said. “The locals know to be on the lookout for them.”

Brewer sat with his head tilted, looking as if he had something more to say. Tears dripped from his face. Belew looked at Mark. Mark shook his head.

They rose and went out into the open-hearth heat of afternoon. “Sounds like your hero Colonel Sobel’s just about departed controlled flight,” Belew said, with unaccustomed nastiness.

Mark felt too hollow to flare back at him. “He’s a good man,” he said dully.

“Yes, he is,” Belew said. “And so what? A lot of good men have done a lot of harm, over the years.”

“I suppose you’d rather be a bad man,” Mark snapped, finally rising to it.

“Well, you recall what Mark Twain said about Hell: it’s where all the interesting people will go. I’d hate to miss out on good conversation in the afterlife.”

“Hey! Hello!”

Belew and Mark looked in different directions and at each other. Then, as one, they looked up. Mark felt as if he was part of a bad television skit.

Croyd was hovering thirty feet in the air. He waved.

“I just found out I can do this,” he said airily. “Whoops!”

He tipped forward in slow motion, hitting about a sixty-degree angle before he stabilized.

“Sorry” he called. “Still having a little trouble with my vertical hold. Or would you call it trim?”