Dead and Kicking (10 page)

‘Cheese?’

‘Early on in the battle for Dien Bien Phu, Vietminh artillery barrages scored a direct hit on a major supply dump. It was a devastating blow to French morale.’

‘Ammo?’ I asked.

‘Cheese,’ he said. ‘And condiments.’

‘Not the bloody Dijon mustard?’

He nodded. ‘At one stage later on during the siege, a group of French Foreign Legionnaires fought their way out through the perimeter and destroyed an enemy bunker. It was only after they were decorated for bravery that the brass discovered the real objective was to recover a load of army-issue wine concentrate called Vinogel that had been dropped by parachute and landed outside the wire.’

‘Dehydrated plonk? They send dehydrated water to go with it? Seems like a pretty weird way to fight a war.’

Cartwright smiled. ‘The French do things their own way. The Americans handled it all a bit differently, of course. They choppered in hot meals to their troops in the field when it was possible, and the larger bases had all the comforts of home with burgers and steaks and ice cream and cherry pie. The Vietminh and the VC usually just carried rice and ate whatever they could beg, borrow or steal. When you’re hungry enough, rat and rice and some fish sauce is quite palatable. It’s the freedom-fighters’ diet.’

‘From what I know about Dien Bien Phu,’ I said, ‘those freedom fighters did a lot of their heroic advancing knowing that if they turned around to retreat, they’d get a bullet from their own officers or cadres.’

‘The soldier on the ground rarely understands the big picture. Just as well, too – it’s so easy to become disillusioned.’

‘That what happened to you?’

‘Perhaps,’ he said.

Ten minutes later, Cartwright got a call on his mobile phone. He spoke for a couple of minutes in Vietnamese then ended the call and spoke to the driver, who nodded.

‘It’s still several hours’ drive to our destination so perhaps we should stop for some food at the next village.’

Twenty minutes later the vehicle in front slowed down, flashed its indicator and pulled up outside a small roadside café. The place had a thatched roof and no walls, and the noise of a soap opera playing on the TV carried out to the roadway. Cartwright’s bodyguards jumped out of the first LandCruiser and gave the joint the once-over before beckoning us to climb down.

A bloke sitting on a small Yamaha motorcycle appeared to be waiting for us. He spoke briefly to one of the bodyguards and pointed into the café. The bodyguard handed over a wad of notes, which the waiting man pocketed before starting his bike and riding off.

The café had a dirt floor, an open kitchen and a decided lack of Michelin stars. The tables were plastic and most of the seats were overturned beer crates. It looked like we were the only customers, apart from a couple of blokes who were hunched over bowls of noodle soup.

I walked over to their table and said, ‘Are these seats taken?’

One of them glanced up and scowled. He looked exhausted. His shirt was ripped and muddy, and his face and arms were covered in scratches and nasty-looking welts.

‘Bugger me,’ he said, ‘a man almost gets blown up in a chopper and then spends a couple of days slipping and sliding down the side of a bloody mountain and getting bitten by mosquitoes and chewed on by leeches and ticks, and then he can’t even get to sit down to a bowl of noodles in peace.’

Peter Cartwright walked up behind me. ‘Hello, Jack,’ he said, ‘you look like something the cat dragged in.’

‘At least I’m alive, which is apparently more than we could say for you for quite a long time.’

‘I heard the same thing about you.’

Jack smiled. ‘Yeah, well a serious case of death tends to keep the bad guys off your tail.’

‘That was my plan, too,’ Cartwright said.

Jack gestured across the table. ‘This is my mate, VT.’

Cartwright and VT shook hands. VT was in the same battered condition as Jack.

‘How’s the soup?’ I asked.

‘Not bad,’ Jack said. ‘This is my second bowl and then they’ve got half a bloody water buffalo on the grill for us. Why don’t you blokes pull up a pew and join us?’

The only problem with sitting down to dinner with three dead men is you just know you’ll be stuck with the bill.

Jack and VT slept in the back of the lead LandCruiser for the rest of the trip and I snoozed in the second with Cartwright. Around two in the morning we passed through a prosperous-looking village and then detoured up a paved side road and stopped at a heavy-duty security checkpoint manned by half a dozen very alert sentries and a couple of German shepherd guard dogs. Cartwright and the bodyguards got out and had an animated conversation with the men.

While I waited, I studied the chain-link fence topped with razor wire that ran off into the jungle on either side of the checkpoint. In a couple of spots, rectangular metal boxes about the size of a hefty paperback were wired to the fence.

‘The Claymores are a nice decorating touch,’ I said when Cartwright climbed back into the LandCruiser.

He laughed. ‘We used to call ’em VC TVs.’

The curved front on the boxes did give them the look of a small television set, but the only programme they showed was a lethal anti-personnel blast of hundreds of steel ball bearings.

‘They’re not armed,’ Cartwright continued. ‘We just stuck ’em there to let people know I’m serious about my privacy. Okay, let’s go.’

On Cartwright’s order, we drove through the heavy metal gates, past the floodlights, the armed guards and the barbed wire, and continued up the hill. It was another ten minutes before we reached a large two-storey stone building with a wide verandah. Even in the dark, I could see the joint wouldn’t have been out of place in rural France. The masonry walls appeared to be a couple of feet thick, which would help keep out the heat of the day and the chill of the night, and probably even slow down the odd rocket-propelled grenade.

As Cartwright and I walked across the verandah, I noticed the plaster façade had been patched in a number of places. The patches were of varying colours and age.

‘In the old days this place was shot up on a regular basis by the Vietminh, the French, the Vietcong, the North Vietnamese Army and even the American Air Force on a couple of occasions,’ Cartwright explained.

There were a dozen or so white plaster patches around the front door. I rubbed one and it crumbled slightly under my fingers.

‘Plaster takes over forty years to dry in the tropics, I guess.’

Cartwright smiled. ‘Upkeep on an old building like this is a constant headache.’

The slamming car doors and barking dogs had woken our sleeping passengers and there were numerous servants waiting to corral the visitors, leading them off to guest rooms with offers of late-night snacks or coffee. I passed on everything but a bed, and found myself in a simply furnished upstairs room with a four-poster bed with mosquito netting, an ensuite bathroom and French doors opening out onto a balcony.

From the balcony I could see moonlight shimmering on water and hear a constant splashing. I figured whatever was out there was still going to be there in the morning and decided to take a long hot shower and then hit the sack.

While the water ran over me, I thought about the faint smell in the air I’d noticed as we’d climbed out of the Toyotas. There was the perfume of flowers but also something else, something more familiar. I guessed there could be a chance someone had been letting off fireworks in the major’s garden earlier in the evening, but those fresh plaster patches around Cartwright’s front door and the sentries on high alert made me think it had been fireworks of another sort.

Around ten the next morning I found Cartwright downstairs on a screened terrace overlooking the hillside in front of the farmhouse. He was sitting in a cane chair drinking coffee, the two bodyguards positioned at either end of the terrace, just out of earshot. A servant poured boiling water into a small metal container sitting on top of a cup, which he placed in front of me.

‘Sleep okay?’ Cartwright asked.

I nodded, waiting for the hot water to drip slowly through the tightly packed coffee grounds and down into the sweetened condensed milk in the bottom of my cup.

‘Sound of the water didn’t bother you?’

I shook my head.

Stretching down the gently sloping hillside and off into the distance were huge circular ponds, each with a fountain gushing in the middle or quickly spinning paddlewheels attached to a floating pontoon. From time to time there was a silver flash and then a splash as a fish jumped clear of the water.

‘The fountains and paddles oxygenate the water,’ Cartwright explained. He pointed to a sideboard. ‘We’ve got fresh croissants and
pain au chocolat
, baguettes and cold meats and cheeses, yoghurt and fruit, or the cook can do you eggs or whatever. And if you want grilled fish, we’ve got plenty.’

‘The coffee’s fine until I wake up,’ I said.

I looked at the view and sipped my coffee. Both the caffeine hit and the view were pretty spectacular. There were hills on every side of us, not quite as dramatic as those surrounding the valley at Dien Bien Phu, but still impressive.

‘So what was it like hearing they were making a movie about your life? Must have been a bit weird.’

Cartwright shrugged. ‘I’m a bloke who’s been awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross, so weird is all relative. Reckon it’s going to be a good film?’

‘You can never tell at this stage. Apparently the producers offered the cast and crew working on the first
Mad Max
film a profit share in lieu of wages and got laughed off the set. The picture took over a hundred million bucks worldwide, so that should tell you something. It’ll either be good or it won’t – that’s show business.’

‘I always thought Mel Gibson should play me,’ Cartwright said, ‘back when the idea for the film first came up. Much too old now, of course. What’s the bloke they’re using like? He looks the part, I’ll give you that.’

‘You’ve seen him?’

‘Not in the flesh. I’ve been checking out your stills on the internet.’

‘He’s an actor, what can I say. Intense, dedicated, committed, neurotic, psychotic, self-focused, self-obsessed, self-loathing, egocentric and gentle, caring and kind. Pick any two, except the last three.’

‘Not a poofter, is he?’

This was an interesting conversational turn. I shook my head. ‘Who knows? He’s got a wife and a couple of kids back in Australia, and if you’d had the local cops in Saigon dust most of our female extras for his fingerprints I doubt they’d have come up empty-handed.’

‘Still, you never know, I guess,’ he said. ‘I mean Jack Stark and VT … that was a bit of a surprise.’

I had a feeling I knew where this was going and I didn’t much like it.

‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘you never know. And people tend to use the word “gay” these days in polite company, just so you know. You fancy another coffee? I’m having one.’

Cartwright shook his head. I walked over to the sideboard and helped myself to a croissant and some more coffee. I’d hoped it might be a good way to change the subject, but it didn’t work.

‘VT is a good bloke,’ Cartwright said, after a pause, ‘and he’s still a good-looking bastard. Must have been drop-dead handsome when he was younger. It’s a bit of a shame, don’t you think? It just doesn’t seem right, somehow.’

I took a deep breath and turned around, but just before I opened my mouth to set Cartwright straight on a few things, I caught the twinkle in his eye.

‘I mean,’ he said, ‘you’d bloody think VT could have done a whole lot better for himself than a rough nut like Jack Stark.’

It was a nice little ambush and I’d walked right into it. Cartwright was smiling and seemed very pleased with himself.

‘You bastard.’

‘Had you going for a bit, didn’t I?’ he said. ‘And I’ve changed my mind about that coffee, if that’s okay.’

‘It’s great coffee. You grow it around here?’ I asked, handing him a cup.

Cartwright nodded. ‘It’s local, from up on the hillside. This whole place was a coffee plantation in the old days. French planter built the house in the 1920s.’

‘And you put the fish ponds in?’

‘Nope, they came courtesy of the United States Air Force back in the seventies. A B-52 strike took out a lot of the coffee plantation but left all of those nice round craters.’

‘What were they aiming for?’

‘God knows, probably the ground since there was nothing here but coffee bushes. Might have been someone in trouble making a run for home, back to Andersen Air Force Base on Guam or U-Tapao in Thailand. Jettisoned their bomb load after getting hit by a surface-to-air missile over Hanoi, maybe.’

‘Well, it’s a lovely place, no matter who did the digging. And it looks like the fish side of things is booming.’

He smiled. ‘Fish farming was the wife’s family’s business. They started with a couple of carp in a wooden bucket a few hundred years ago and now we own fish farms like this one all over Vietnam.’

‘Nice little earner.’

‘We have an excellent management team who are the public face of the business and I like it that way. I’ve always enjoyed the isolation, and after my wife passed away I found fewer and fewer reasons for leaving the place.’

I understood the sentiment. Sitting on that terrace day after day, seeing nothing but the ponds and the mountains in the distance and the constantly changing sky, could become addictive.

‘Going to Saigon was a mistake.’

‘Why did you go?’ I asked.

‘I had to see a man about a fish.’

‘Was your son, Peter, the man you were seeing?’

Cartwright nodded. ‘Peter’s a biologist, specialising in aquaculture. Smart bugger, too. Nothing about the fish-breeding side of the business he doesn’t know. But being spotted in Saigon was unfortunate. It seems to have set off a chain reaction.’

‘You got that right. Any idea why?’

‘Maybe. How’s your barbecuing technique?’

‘Napoleon had it wrong when he said that an army marches on its stomach.’

As comments go, it was a real barbecue stopper, especially if you were standing in the middle of a bunch of ex-soldiers. Jack and VT had finally surfaced after twelve hours’ sleep and they looked a lot better for it.