Carl Hiaasen & William D. Montalbano Page 19

  “That is not important. When the people of Bright Star learn that you are our rice expert, they will not speak of you to members of the other production teams, or to the cadres at Man-ling. You will be safe then, do you not see?”

  “I must not stay here, Kangmei,” Stratton had insisted weakly. “I must try to help David.”

  “Yes, Thom-as. My uncles have cousins who work on the railroad. They think it would be possible to get you to Guangzhou.”

  Guangzhou in Chinese. In English, Canton, China’s sprawling southern metropolis across the border from Hong Kong. Canton was still China, but from all he had read of it, the city was also a curious East-West hybrid infinitely more relaxed than Peking. In a teeming and sophisticated city where foreigners were no novelty, he had a fighting chance.

  “Guangzhou would be fine.”

  He slept again, and when he awoke it was midafternoon. Kangmei laughed when he tried on clothes smelling of strong soap that had been neatly stacked alongside the bed. The trousers bottomed out four inches too soon. The shirt went across his shoulders, but only the bottom two buttons would fasten.

  “These are the biggest we could find, Thom-as. But you will never be a peasant. Come, let the people see their new rice expert.”

  Along the river there was a kind of promenade, a path of beaten earth flanked by shade trees. Stratton smiled at the peasants they met and tried to look knowledgeable.

  “This is the end of Bright Star,” said Kangmei. “Over there is Evergreen.”

  She gestured to the far side of the brown river, flanked on both sides by steep banks. The water flowed swiftly and looked deep.

  “And beyond Evergreen is Man-ling, right?”

  “Yes.” She led Stratton to a spot where the promenade had been widened to include a graceful copse of palms. He sat beside her.

  “This looks to me like Bright Star’s lovers’ land,” Stratton remarked.

  “I do not understand.”

  When he had explained she smiled.

  “It is true that many young people come here at night and that they do not always discuss politics.”

  They kissed.

  And then she asked the question that Stratton had dreaded.

  “Why are you afraid of Man-ling, Thom-as?”

  It was not so much that she deserved to know. To his surprise, Stratton discovered that he wanted to tell her.

  “I was there once. In a war. While you were a child.”

  She sat quiet for a time, tracing circles in the dirt with a stick. Stratton stared down at the river.

  “Was it very sad, Thom-as?”

  “Yes.”

  “I would like to know.” She spoke to the stick.

  He told her.

  MARCH 18, 1971

  A BLACK SERGEANT in plainclothes had brought the summons to the Saigon villa Stratton shared with Bobby Ho. An hour later they were in a briefing room protected by concentric circles of invisible guards.

  A squat, sweat-stained colonel abandoned an uneven struggle with a balky room air conditioner.

  “Captain Black,” the colonel said, shaking hands with Stratton.

  “Captain White. Congratulations.” The colonel gave Bobby Ho’s hand an extra pump. He had been a captain only for six days, but no one outside the room was even supposed to know that Bobby Ho was in the army. Deniability, they called it. Officially, Stratton and Ho were civilian psychologists on contract to the government: studying stress.

  “Rested up? Everybody’s talkin’ about it.”

  On the last one they had been close enough to see the lights of Hanoi.

  “This one should be even more fun.” He passed across aerial photos. “The Chinks are involved in this little old war up to their slanty assholes.”

  “Who is that, Colonel?” Bobby Ho asked quietly. Stratton stifled a grin. Bobby Ho’s parents ran a pawnshop in San Francisco. They had raised their son to be an American, but there was no way you could tell by looking at him. Vietnam had intercepted Bobby Ho between Stanford and medical school. He wanted to be a pediatrician, and he spent a lot of his time and most of his money with some French nuns who ran a clinic near the village. When the army made him White for missions that didn’t exist to places that were never named, Bobby Ho hunted with uncommon skill.

  The colonel had the grace to color.

  “The Chinese. The Chinese are teachin’ the Viets how to brainwash our boys. Remember what they did in Korea? I was there, man. The last thing you wanted to happen was to get captured by the Chin—Chinese. They turned people inside out; tell you Ike was a faggot and make you believe it.”

  The colonel poked a pudgy finger at the aerial photos.

  “What we hear is that the Chinese are trainin’ Viet interrogators in that building there in the middle of the picture. They got about a dozen of our POWs up there as guinea pigs.”

  “Where is it—the village?” Stratton asked.

  “Jesus, I just told you. It’s in China.”

  “Shit,” said Bobby Ho.

  “We supposed to go in and get them?” Stratton asked.

  The colonel nodded. “Yeah, go get ’em out and fuck Chairman Mao. Does that offend you, Captain White?”

  “Not a bit, Colonel,” said Bobby Ho.

  “What’s the name of this place?” Stratton asked.

  “Man-ling it’s called. You guys see Joe and the boys. They got it all worked out, pictures, models, the whole shootin’ match, just like usual.” The colonel’s eyes assumed a faraway cast. “If it was me, I’d take about four gunships and hit ’em so hard and so fast they wouldn’t have time even to find their little red books. That’s the only way to win this war, hard and fast. That’s how I’d do it, if it was me.”

  Hot air. Stratton would write the operational orders and the colonel knew it.

  “If it was you, I’d stay home,” said Bobby Ho.

  They took one chopper off a quiet carrier high up in the Gulf of Tonkin. Stratton, Ho and four sergeants. Captain Black was traveling light. If he needed help, it was only minutes away in the air behind them.

  For a landing zone, Stratton had chosen a paddy about three miles east of the village. He had wanted the farmland and the village between the chopper and the PLA camp that lay a few miles to the west. Intelligence said a regular infantry company used the camp. Intelligence had not said why it believed the nowhere village called Man-ling had been chosen to brainwash POWs.

  They landed in driving rain and gusting wind, ankle-deep in water—killers dressed for the country in dark, rough civilian clothes without nationality. In the distance, at night, they might pass for peasants. Close up it would be harder. Stratton’s peasants bore a Russian AK-47, Chinese grenades, a silenced East German pistol, a Thai killing knife and a cyanide capsule. On his back, each man carried a folding bicycle. They looked superficially like Chinese machines, but were half as heavy and twice as fast. Stratton had insisted. A question of image: See a man on a bicycle and you assume he lives nearby and knows where he is going. He belongs.

  The same reasoning had ordained the timing. It was midnight, and the helicopter would return one hour before dawn unless Stratton called earlier. They might have come later, but anything moving in the Chinese countryside between midnight and dawn would alarm sentinels accustomed to seeing nothing move at all. Even midnight was cutting it fine, Stratton knew, but he had not dared come until the village was asleep.

  They watched in silence as the chopper clawed for the clouds on muffled engines. It was the seventh time Stratton had endured that particular parting. The seven loneliest moments of his life.

  Even in the mud, the bicycles worked like a charm.

  They were the only thing.

  A sentry materialized, wraithlike, from the shelter of a tree about a mile from the village. PLA.

  The sentry hollered something that was lost in the wind. Bobby Ho, riding point, head down, waited until he was within ten yards of the man, until the pistol would bear. He answered in Chinese.


  Maybe the man had heard the helicopter. Maybe Bobby Ho said the wrong thing. The sentry coiled, unslinging his rifle. From the shelter by the tree, two more wet soldiers emerged. The six Americans slithered off their bikes into the mud like a satanic rank of marionettes.

  It ended quickly, but one of the sentries managed a shot. It ricocheted like flat doom through the blackness.

  For five breathless, unbearable minutes, Stratton’s team crouched by the road, safeties off, ears aching, praying. No one came. The sentry had died in vain.

  Bobby Ho tried to break the tension.

  “These Chinks ain’t even tryin’,” he whispered in jocose mimicry of the fat colonel. It didn’t sound funny.

  The single guard at the head of the village main street died in silence for his sloth. He must have felt the blade administered by a saturnine Puerto Rican named Gomez, but he never saw it. Stratton left Gomez and a fireplug Tennessean named Harkness to watch their back door.

  They met the boy a few minutes later, creeping through such stillness and total absence of color it gave Stratton the eerie sensation that the entire village was a two-dimensional fantasy.

  Bobby Ho flushed the boy from a pile of rags in the imperfect shelter of a shop doorway. Panofsky grabbed him, roughly clamping his jaw. The boy wriggled, a minnow in the maw of a shark. Stratton saw the knife come up and winced.

  “Wait!” Bobby Ho hissed. “He can’t be more than twelve, all skin and bones.”

  The knife wavered. Panofsky looked over at Stratton. Everybody knew the rules. It wasn’t even a judgment call. Stratton made it one. It was Bobby Ho’s play.

  Panofsky’s eyes flashed with anger.

  In a sibilant, harsh undertone, Bobby Ho tongue-lashed the boy in Chinese. Stratton watched the boy’s eyes: flat, emotionless. They showed intelligence, but no surprise, no curiosity. And most of all, no fear.

  At length, the boy nodded. Bobby Ho stepped back.

  “It’s all right.”

  Again Panofsky looked at Stratton.

  “Let him go,” Stratton said. Sometimes you break the rules.

  The rag boy massaged his neck. With arrogance that could only have been inherited, he turned his back and stalked away, vanishing within seconds up an alley on pencil legs that seemed unequal to their sixty-pound burden.

  “I told him we are on a secret training exercise with foreign friends, and that if he ever interrupts the PLA again, I will personally shoot him and everybody in his family.”

  “I hope he believed you.”

  “He believed me.”

  Panofsky snorted. Bloomfield grunted. Stratton sent them up to the far end of the main street to share their scorn.

  Lights burned inside an old movie house that now featured Mao slogans on its sagging marquee. Bobby Ho prised open a side door. They cached the Kalashnikovs in the shadow outside; assault rifles are useless for close work.

  Inside, the building smelled of molding concrete, stale tobacco and rancid bodies. Wooden chairs, neatly arranged, filled the pit of the theater. Empty, every one of them. The stage had been divided into four separate rooms, each with double doors facing the audience. All the doors were closed. From behind one set rose a high-pitched monotone that gave Stratton goose bumps.

  “…Delano Roosevelt… Harry S. Truman … Dwight David Eisenhower … John Fitzgerald Kennedy … Lyndon Brains Johnson … Richard—”

  “Baines,” a deeper voice interrupted. “Lyndon Baines Johnson.”

  The first voice resumed, a record returned to its groove: “Lyndon Baines Johnson … Richard Milhous Nixon …”

  The voices were Chinese. Stratton looked at Bobby Ho, who gave an elaborate shrug. A teacher and his student. What else could they be?

  Stratton gestured and Bobby Ho nodded. He would check the area around the stage and watch Stratton’s back.

  The basement, intelligence had said. The prisoners are held in the basement. They are paraded upstairs for onstage interrogation classes.

  Stratton found the stairs without trouble. He went down with a gentle rush until he came to a stout wooden door. He nudged it open with his boot and let the pistol precede him.

  Blackness. Absolute. And a terrible smell: fresh soap thinly overlaying the smell of fear and anger. Stratton let a cone of light from his Czech torch play around the room, and came within a heartbeat of firing at a sound in the far corner. Two rats, red-eyed and territorial.

  In took Stratton fifteen minutes to explore the basement thoroughly. Six cells. Stratton toured them, one at a time. In the fourth, scratched into the cheap concrete, a lover’s testament had survived its author: “Rick & Connie Houston ’70.” With the leaden movements of an old man, Stratton visited the remaining two cells. In the last one, he found traces of blood the cleaners had missed. They had come too late. How long? A day? Two? Stratton would never know and never forget. He ran the back of his hand across his lips to moisten them and tasted ashes. He had only another instant to mull his disappointment.

  From above came the unmistakable sound of boots hammering the tired floorboards. Not furtive. Authoritative boots.

  Stratton listened from the head of the stairs. Two men speaking Chinese. Plus the student and his professor. At least four. He and Bobby Ho had played against worse odds than that.

  From the back of the theater came Bobby Ho’s voice. Stratton understood none of the words. He understood too well what they meant. The tone was enough: arrogant, strong, with a touch of exasperation. An officer’s voice, informing more than explaining.

  Bobby Ho was playing the cover story, singing loudly enough to alert Stratton.

  The cover was pretty much what Bobby Ho had told the ragged boy: He was a PLA officer down from Peking on a training mission with East Germans en route to North Vietnam to help the heroic struggle there. It was not a bad story. There were plenty of Caucasian instructors with the Viets, even some Germans. In the jacket of his pocket, Bobby Ho had a set of orders that looked like the real thing.

  It might have worked. But it didn’t. Three or four voices speaking at once drowned out Bobby Ho. The shouts grew louder. Wood smashed. Bodies fell. Stratton didn’t hear Bobby Ho again until he screamed.

  Stratton rammed through the door with the pistol ready. The neatly ordered folding chairs lay in matchstick pieces. In their chaos stood four Chinese, two uniformed, the other two in bureaucrats’ white short-sleeved shirts, their red books of quotations clutched protectively. As Stratton’s eye recorded, his brain raced to establish target priority. The student and his professor were unarmed. Shoot last. The other two both had pistols. One was pressed against the head of a kneeling Bobby Ho. Its owner was screaming at Stratton.

  Stratton let his gun arm come down, slowly, with emphasis. He reversed his grip on the pistol. Holding it by the butt, he walked toward the Chinese.

  “Vas is los?” Stratton demanded in his own officer’s voice.

  The man with Bobby Ho barked something that brought the student and professor to life like wind-up dolls.

  “Comrade Commissar Wu …” they began together.

  “…instructs you to put down the gun and to raise your hands,” concluded the professor.

  Stratton forced a rictus grin.

  “English. Nein. Deutsch.” He tapped his chest. “Kamerad.”

  After a cursory search, they tossed Stratton into one of the rooms on the stage. He was alone for twenty-seven minutes by his watch. An important eternity. He listened to them working on Bobby Ho. The shouts became one-sided, the screams dwindled to pathetic groans.

  When they came for Stratton, they brought Bobby Ho unconscious. Stratton tried not to look at him.

  There were still four of them. No one had left; so, without phones, they had made no attempt to spread the alarm. Stratton asked himself why. Were they swayed by the cover story? Or were they simply in a hurry, trying for good information before seeking help?

  The commissar was a lean, gray-haired man in PLA green with red tabs
and a four-pocket tunic reserved for officers. The other uniformed man, balding and pot-bellied, wore the blue and white of the police. Stratton marked him as a local.

  The policeman did the heavy work. He jabbed Stratton in the belly with a truncheon. When Stratton involuntarily clammed forward, the policeman struck him on the head.

  The professor screamed. “How many men in your unit? Where are they? What is your mission? Talk or die, imperialist running dog!”

  “Deutsch.”

  It lasted about ten minutes. The policeman enjoyed his work. An expert, a fat man with bad breath, who stung without maiming. Stratton rolled with the blows and calculated his chances. The student, nearest the door, held a Chinese carbine with familiarity. The professor was unarmed. The policeman had his club and a holstered pistol. The commissar held a heavy Chinese military pistol.

  Stratton, fighting the pain, babbling in the few words of German he knew, realized that Captain Black was finished. Sooner or later they would alert the PLA garrison outside of town and that would be that.

  Then the Chinese made their mistake.

  From the night came the sound of small arms fire. Stratton heard the pop of Chinese weapons and the crack of AK-47s. The PLA already knew. The shooting flustered the Chinese. The commissar spoke in English for the first time.

  “There is no time for this. Pick up your friend.”

  Stratton stared dumbly. Only when they all began to shout and wave did he allow himself to understand.

  He picked up Bobby Ho the way a mother bundles an injured child. Blood from Bobby’s mouth ran off the shoulder of Stratton’s jacket. There was a jagged hole where his teeth had been. Stratton held his head gently and pressed him close. Bobby Ho rasped a final sentence onto Stratton’s neck.

  “It was the kid … sorry, Tom …”

  Bobby Ho spun from Stratton’s arms and lunged for the student. The carbine, shockingly loud in the small room, cut him in half. Impelled by momentum that the bullets did not reverse, the corpse of Bobby Ho collided with his killer.

  The commissar was too slow. A bullet from his pistol plucked at Stratton’s ribs. Stratton’s open palm drove the commissar’s nose into his brain.