Dead and Kicking (8 page)

The sun had set, the last of the coffee had long gone cold and a column of hungry mosquitoes was circling above my head when Henk reappeared. If I could figure out a way to attract women the way I attracted mosquitoes, I’d be a happy man.

‘You feel like some dinner?’ Henk asked.

I nodded. ‘But a whisky might be nice first, a double.’

‘Think that’s a smart move on an empty stomach?’

He had a point. ‘Maybe I should have a beer to start, then.’

Henk smiled. ‘Spoken like a local. I know a friendly little bar down by the river. The sexy owner and all the gorgeous young waitresses have the hots for me.’

‘They must have heard about the size of your pension plan.’

‘Remind me again why I’m your friend, Alby.’

‘Because with friends like me you don’t need enemas?’

Henk smiled again. ‘I figured there had to be a really good reason.’

Asia is full of friendly open-air bars where expats congregate, and this one was pretty typical. All you need to start one up is some bamboo and thatch, a fridge to keep the beer cold, a tank of propane to keep the wok hot, a CD player for a bit of nostalgia and some smiling locals. The smiling locals and the restaurant staff, mostly female, gave the Dutchman a boisterous welcome.

The bar was squeezed in between the river and a roadway but, being late in the day, the traffic wasn’t too horrendous. We grabbed a booth by the entrance and Henk ordered us a couple of Heinekens and something crunchy to snack on. The crunchy things were deep-fried and had multiple legs and remnants of wings but were pretty tasty.

We had more beers and ordered an excellent red duck curry, which was sweet rather than hot, and an innocent-looking pawpaw salad that set my mouth on fire, and then more beers. Henk chatted to the waitresses in appalling Thai and they laughed a lot, which is what girls with mothers and grandmothers and brothers and sisters to support do when the rich farangs say pretty much anything. Of course, all over the world rich men have no problem getting good-looking women to laugh at their jokes.

At Henk’s request Ry Cooder was on the sound system, and we pretty much had the place to ourselves. The owner and the girls were in the kitchen making dessert and giggling about something or someone when a spray of lead from a submachine gun displaced the gaggle of mosquitoes circling above my head.

The shooter was perched on the back of a red Honda motorcycle stopped out on the roadway. I grabbed Henk and dragged him off his seat and down onto the floor. Luckily for us, the gunman was an amateur. The muzzle climb of a short-barrelled submachine gun firing full auto lifted the weapon upwards, and most of the contents of the shooter’s thirty-round magazine blasted into the restaurant’s roof. The thatched ceiling disintegrated in the stream of bullets, raining all sorts of bugs and spiders and crap down on top of us as we sprawled face down on the tiled floor.

The motorcycle screamed away, leaving us in dead silence except for the sound of Ry Cooder’s slide guitar and some whimpering coming from the kitchen. The Dutchman lifted a lump of thatch off his head and looked at me.

‘
Godverdomme
, Alby,’ he gasped. ‘You’re a dangerous bugger to know.’

I didn’t really feel I could give him much of an argument on that.

Henk made a couple of phone calls from the restaurant while I helped the owner and waitresses clean up the mess. Surprisingly, the damage was minimal and the smiles and laughter were back after about ten minutes, but neither Henk nor I felt in the mood to party on. The bill for the food and booze came to less than ten bucks, but I left a hundred to cover the repairs.

My mood improved a little when we got back to the Dutchman’s housing estate and found security had been beefed up and a dozen heavily armed men in uniform were watching the main gate.

‘This is where having a general for a landlord really pays off,’ Henk said, waving to the soldiers as we drove past.

The Dutchman decided to call it a night, but I was still pumping with the adrenaline rush from the near miss in the bar. I snapped on the TV in the living room and had the usual viewing dilemma of a thousand channels and none of them worth watching. Chiang Rai locals made regular cross-border forays into Myanmar to buy black-market Viagra and discount satellite dishes, though I always wondered what the hell you’d need a TV for if you were gulping down Viagra on a regular basis.

I settled down on a comfortable couch with the curtains drawn, lights off and the sound on the TV turned down, and channel surfed with the remote until my thumb fell asleep and the rest of me followed not too long afterwards.

According to my trusty old Omega it was just after ten in the morning when I woke up. There was no sign of the Dutchman so I made a pot of coffee and some toast and scrambled half a dozen eggs straight out of the local free-range chooks. I didn’t really expect to find any cream in Henk’s fridge but there was butter and milk, and with some chopped fresh chilli, coriander and ground black pepper the eggs came out okay.

The TV was still on in the living room, and when I wandered back in from the balcony a news broadcast out of Vietnam was showing an aerial shot of a smoking patch of heavily wooded hillside. There was some grainy old footage of a Vietnam-era Huey, the footage of the smoking hillside again and then they showed a couple of passport-type pictures – of Jack and VT.

Henk walked in from the recording studio. ‘Jesus, Alby,’ he said, ‘you look crook. Something you ate?’

I shook my head. ‘Something I saw.’

‘You sure you don’t need a Stemetil or some Imodium or something?’

‘Nope, but what I do need is some time on your computer.’

‘It’s in my bedroom – don’t look in any of the files marked “Don’t look in this file”.’

I tracked down several news reports on the crash in English and pulled up Google Maps to get an idea of the location. The helicopter had just taken off from the small airport at Dien Bien Phu when it was seen to crash and burn on a heavily wooded and difficult-to-access hillside. An aerial reconnaissance had shown no sign of survivors, and strong downdrafts and an impending storm had ruled out any attempt at a landing near the site. A ground party would be sent in to recover the bodies but it was likely to take up to a week.

Henk was in the living room when I finished.

‘What I need now is that little package you’ve been keeping for me.’

Henk went into his office and came out with a sealed buff envelope. There were similar envelopes collecting dust with friends all over the world. I ripped it open and dumped the contents on the table: a couple of thousand US dollars in used notes, a passport, a dozen passport-size photos, a driver’s licence and a credit card. The passport was issued in Fiji, as was the driver’s licence. Both documents were current and had my photograph on them. The licence and passport were in the same name as the credit card – Barry Jones.

‘What does Mr Jones need in the way of visas if he wants to get to Luang Prabang?’ I asked. ‘And then cross over the border into Vietnam near Dien Bien Phu?’

Luang Prabang was the old royal capital of Laos and the closest city with an airport to the Vietnamese border. I could get a direct flight to LP from Chiang Mai, in the next province.

Henk scowled. ‘Mr Jones is a real pain in the arse. But what else is new? You can get a visa for Laos at the port of entry easily enough, but Vietnam is trickier. They’re not keen on visitors showing up unannounced.’

‘Tell me about it. I’m starting to get a bit that way myself. What about a green visa?’

A green visa was a fifty or hundred US dollar bill folded inside a passport.

Henk shook his head. ‘Personally, Alby, I wouldn’t risk it. You might get the visa but you also might get some serious jail time or a bullet in the head for the rest of what’s in your wallet.’ He picked up the passport, a couple of the small photographs and several hundred dollars. ‘I might know a bloke who knows a bloke. Let me see what I can do.’

I made a fresh pot of coffee and went out onto the balcony to think things over. There was a beautiful view of the lake, but right now all I could see was that patch of smoking hillside in Vietnam. VT was a hell of a pilot, and he knew the UH1H Huey inside out, but sometimes even a great pilot might find himself with more grief than he could handle. But it was the sequence of events – me being on a hit list, Brett Tozer turning up as a floater, and now Jack and VT going down in a chopper – that was really disturbing.

Jack and VT and I had become good friends over the eight weeks of the film shoot, but our connection went much further back. I wasn’t sure if they remembered our previous meeting, and I hadn’t brought it up. It was on my first overseas assignment, when I was posing as a press photographer while working undercover for D.E.D.

I was young, impetuous and pissed as a cricket when I went to the aid of a female Swedish reporter in a Bangkok bar full of bored, boozed-up Aussie newspaper correspondents covering the latest half-arsed military coup. Maybe it was a language problem, but it really hadn’t been a good idea for her to walk into a joint like that wearing a tight T-shirt with the word ‘PRESS’ stretched invitingly across her chest.

The last-minute intervention by an Aussie ex-special forces type who was drinking in the bar with a Vietnamese bloke was the only thing that stopped me from being beaten to a pulp. The two of them had jumped in boots and all, dragged me clear of the scrum and dumped me outside in the street. My kidneys ached, my right eye was blurry and my cheek felt wet.

‘You gotta learn to pick your battles, sunshine,’ the Aussie had said. He knelt down and wiped some blood off my eyebrow with his thumb. ‘See if you can find a local quack to put a couple of stiches in that. I think you’ll live to snap another day and you can tell the ladies the scar’s from a near miss from a commie AK-47. With a story like that, I reckon you’ll be getting your leg over big time.’

The two men had walked away laughing while I’d sat in the gutter trying to stem the flow of blood with a handkerchief. That scar was the first of many, but like a first kiss or a first love it was the one that stuck in my mind. And now Jack and VT were missing, quite probably dead, and I wanted to know why.

Logically, the place to start looking was where the chopper had gone down. I wasn’t ready to give up on Jack and VT just yet, not until I saw the bodies. I held on to the thought that they might have survived the crash, even though I knew that was probably a long shot.

Henk got back a couple of hours later with the news that the visa would be ready first thing in the morning. I was getting gun-shy, literally, about eating in restaurants so I rummaged through Henk’s cupboards and fridge to see what I could come up with for lunch.

While I sweated down some shallots, garlic and chillies in a wok, I was thinking about Major Peter Cartwright VC. The bloke was supposed to be long dead and gone, and now it appeared that anyone possessing facts to the contrary stood a very good chance of winding up six feet under themselves.

After collecting my passport and visa, the Dutchman and I made the three-hour road trip from Chiang Rai to Chiang Mai. Henk had suggested I could make the journey on the back of his motorcycle, but I figured I’d already done enough dicing with death in the last few days to last me a lifetime, so we drove.

A Lao Airlines ATR turboprop was warming up on the tarmac when we arrived at Chiang Mai Airport, ready to take me over the border and into the Lao People’s Democratic Republic where Thai baht and US dollars turned into kip and ‘
sawaddi
’ turned into ‘
sabaai-dii
’ and the smiles just kept on coming.

The twin-engined ATR has a high wing so the views from the big cabin windows were spectacular. Six thousand metres below us, the wide brown expanse of the mighty Mekong River cut through the countryside on its journey to the delta where we had been filming only a few days before. It was hard to believe that the lush green jungle passing below us was the most heavily bombed piece of real estate on the planet.

Back in the sixties, while the war in Vietnam was getting all the publicity, a secret war was raging in Laos with the Soviet and North Vietnamese-backed Communist Pathet Lao holding the lowland areas and CIA-backed Lao and Hmong hill tribes occupying mountaintop strongholds that were secretly resupplied by Air America flights. In the meantime, the American Air Force was bombing the crap out of everything that moved in an attempt to stop supplies getting through to the Vietcong via Laos. The Pentagon logged almost 600,000 missions over the country, and given that around 30 per cent of the bombs that were dropped failed to explode and were still lying about, it wasn’t a great place to go wandering off the beaten track.

As we started our descent, the landscape beneath us began to change. The riverbank was dotted with red-roofed houses and golden temples appeared on the hilltops. As we dipped lower, closer to the airport, bigger buildings and roads busy with traffic filled the view. Then we were thumping down on a runway grimy with black skid marks from hundreds of landings and I was one step closer to finding out what had happened to Jack and VT.

Any other time Luang Prabang would have been a great place to rest up, but I was in a hurry. The joint has a UNESCO World Heritage listing, some great guesthouses, lots of interesting places to eat, museums, night markets and, of course, temples up the wazoo. And Buddhas – more Buddhas than you can shake a stick at. Plus enough saffron-robed monks to make shaking sticks at the local Buddhas seem like a very uncool idea.

I took a crowded and battered backroads minivan to Oudomxay and then another on to Muang Khua, trying to maintain a low profile by keeping my head down and my mouth shut. Maintaining a low profile also meant suppressing the urge to stick the pointy end of my balisong into the kneecap of every pissy backpacker who complained about the overcrowding and the heat. Give me screaming over whining any day. It made me think of my late colleague Harry, who used to snarl, ‘If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the tropics.’ He generally added, ‘dipshit.’