Dragon Lady (18 page)

On to Cholon and Quyen, the cackling sister.
No answer either and no light showing from within. We rode to the Annex. As Ziggy caught a catnap, I wondered where the hell else she could be.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

19.

WE STRUTTED into the Annex and dumped the thirty adapters on a table. A moment of awestruck silence ensued. We had once again utilized a mysterious alternative
matériel
source, this time outdoing ourselves. No individual I personally know of through strip mall gossip in The Great Beyond walks on water (you’d have to prove it to me), but in the oddballs’ eyes we’d accomplished this masterstroke without getting our ankles wet.

“Thirty instead of twenty-eight.
Spares,” I said. “Close enough for government work.”

“You troopers are great Americans,” Captain Papersmith said, choking up in gratitude for us saving his career. “I may have misjudged you by not recognizing your daring in the name of a worthy cause and your innate patriotism.”

Ziggy said, “‘Patriotism. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of anyone ambitious to illuminate his name.’”

PFC A. Bierce ought to be here, I thought.

“'Patriot.
One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole.
The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.’”

“Zig, knock it off, okay?”

Good ol’ Captain Papersmith. He was inspecting and counting the adapters, to verify our loaves-and-fishes feat.

“Like Joey said, two of
them’s
spares, sir, in case some of them don’t work,” Ziggy said, withdrawing a magazine from a pocket and withdrawing from group participation.

I stood by as the oddballs plugged the gear together. When they were set to go, Captain Papersmith said, “I’ll check if Colonel Lanyard and General Whipple are available.”

He scampered to the 803rd HQ and returned with our commander. General Whipple was carrying his olive-drab watering can with the
silver star
on each side. He was in a distracted hurry, I supposed, and forgot that he had it.

The captain evidently put a bug in his ear about us because General Whipple shook Ziggy’s and my hands and said to each of us in a soft drawl, “Nicely done, son.”

Son.

I don’t recall my natural father calling me “son,” but he must have.
My pseudointellectual stepdad, never.
I was “you” when he wasn’t pissed at me. I was “that boy” when he was.

My biological father, Joseph Josiah Joe III, who’d bought the farm at Inchon, had been a captain and a reservist who’d been called up when the Korean War started. He was really too old to be there, as was my grandfather who didn’t come home from
Guadalcanal
. They were gung ho and then some. The family’s solemn-military-obligation gene died with them. They would not have been proud of me.

I hazily remembered Father. Not his physical appearance, but the aroma of pipe tobacco and his interaction with us. He’d been affectionate toward Jack and me in a manly sort of way. Roughhousing, tousling our hair, playing ball with us in the yard. He’d been an engineer in a shipyard who’d worked swing shift, so I hadn’t seen much of him except on weekends and in the summer.

Did Mother still miss him? When I connect with her here, I will surely ask. It was a question I could not bring myself to ask her in The Land of the Living. I’d known the answer would be a mix of words and tears.

Not only was General Whipple a duplicate of any and all TV dads, he said “son” the way Ward Cleaver and Jim Anderson said it when they gave their TV sons pats on the head for having brought home a B+ on an algebra test.

My dad.
My missing Mai.

I can’t remember last crying, but my eyes dampened to the point where it interfered with my vision and my dignity, such as it was.

The general snapped me out of it by announcing, “Your attention, please. Colonel Lanyard regrets that he will be unable to witness this historic event. He is facing a deadline on a vital report, so, by golly, let’s do our share to fertilize this rich albeit sparsely seeded topsoil called the Republic of Vietnam on the eve of Saigon’s worst kept secret, impending statehood. Let us nourish our chloroplast, let us augment the photosynthesis process. Gentlemen, let us push our mission forward, let us get the show on the road.”

“The state bird’s gonna be the mongoose,” I whispered to CWO Buffet, my thoughts centered on my Dragon Lady.

“Be serious for once in your life, Joe,” Buffet replied.

Well, I was damn serious on one topic. Was Colonel Jakie (Raw Ass) Lanyard’s report deadline a pile of bat guano and was he actually with Mai, getting his ashes hauled?

Mai’s baffling whereabouts might or might not be related to her Jakie. The accumulating unknowns were driving me cuckoo.

“Without further adieu,” General Whipple said, reaching dramatically to throw the main power switch, as if smashing a bottle of champagne on the bow of a ship. Oddballs fired up the auxiliary generators.

“Pardon me, son,” he said to Ziggy.

Ziggy was between the general and the switch. The larger-than-most-earthly-life Zigster was leaning against the desk at the main console, reading his magazine. The tin robot on the cover, bigger than King Kong, seemed bent on eating
St. Louis
. The only thing protecting the city was a human in a loincloth, who was the spitting image of Jock Mahoney playing Tarzan.

Intensely fixated on a story, Ziggy straightened and shifted out of the general’s way. In a clumsy fandango, he brushed buttons and switches on the console, a bunch of them. Ziggy brushing up to something was akin to ramming a ’57 DeSoto into it.

“Private!” Captain Papersmith shrieked at Ziggy, who looked up from his yarn, though too late.

The Cerebrum 2111X came to life with a vibrating hum. Air conditioners growled to life. Lights flashed and tape drives spun. Magnetic drums whirred. The keypunch printer started clacking like a jackhammer. The
thingamajigging
gizmos were at full throttle. These days, you’d say they were uploading and/or downloading.

The beaming general patted Ziggy consolingly as a swell TV father would and shouted over the racket, “There, there, Captain. Private Zbitgysz merely sprinkled on an extra dose of organic matter. The end result is what counts. Bless you,
people,
it is electronic music to my ears.
Verdant, nutrient-rich growth erupting in fertile loam.”

Meanwhile, the oddballs were shaking hands and hugging and jumping up and down like little kids.

The explosions put an end to that.

The first ones were the generators going into spasms, producing foul-smelling backfires. Various lights became strobes. Punch cards sprayed every which way out of a machine.

A far-larger explosion, a genuine
ka-boom
, came from out-of-doors. It gave me a flashback to tales of the VC blowing up the My Canh floating restaurant on the Saigon River. They lit off one bomb. Diners panicked and charged onto the gangplank and caught the second blast from a Claymore, a U.S.-made directional mine aimed at them.

Thirty-one dead.
A hundred wounded.

As in that and the Embassy attack, you had to be thinking past the first noise and you had to think in a split second. Ziggy was thinking faster than anybody, shoving down anyone who tried to run by him to the door as if he were flattening tall grass, yelling, “You wanna go and be
blowed
up?”

A weaker bomb went off, then another. During the chaos, the general finally dropped his watering can. He’d been on his feet throughout and nobody had the balls to throw him to the floor, not even Ziggy.

At the fourth or fifth explosion, General Whipple cried out, “Agents provocateurs!”

The double plural was correct usage, I thought idiotically, me
a fleeting
English major.

Ziggy held his hands up to dissuade the general, who ignored him and lurched outside.

“Agents provocateurs.
Communist agitators.
How could they have discovered our timing?”

Colonel Lanyard rushed onto the street from the 803rd in full uniform and steel helmet, cinching his pistol belt. He threw a massive arm around General Whipple. “Sir, back inside, please.”

The general stumbling along with him, the colonel marched a swath through the oddballs.

“Agents provocateurs,” General Whipple repeated, dazed.

Ziggy and I peeked out. There were more explosions accompanied by lightning-like flashes, but they were increasingly quieter and distant. A smattering of locals on the street carried flashlights and candles. Looking around, mostly in our direction, they appeared to be as pissed as afraid.
(Why did Hanoi need the VC when they had the Fighting 803rd?)

Air raid warning sirens were sounding, even though the VC had no aircraft.
The few lights still on in the neighborhood were winking sporadically, reminding me of a county fair’s carnival shutting down for the night.
A nice evening for looting and throat-cutting was upon us.

“Saigon’s electricity is antiquated,” offered an oddball. “Our generators automatically kicked in to it and overloaded our system and their infrastructure.”

I didn’t think I wanted be in town for the VV Day hoopla.

“A French system,” a colleague concurred.

The unhearing general said, “Agents provocateurs. How could they have known?”

“Agents provocateurs,” Captain Papersmith parroted, whether he knew the definition of the term or not. “I absolutely agree, sir.”

“The little monkeys would like us to believe it was an electrical malfunction. I’m going out to secure the perimeter,” Colonel Lanyard said, drawing his service-issue Colt .45 Model 1911 automatic pistol.

Ziggy and I entered the blackness too, safely to the colonel’s rear. We heard vehicles crashing in the distance. Our area already seemed secure. Enemy guerrillas were just as much in the dark as we were and would be as likely to shoot
themselves
as us.

Some oddballs followed tentatively. Captain Papersmith was the last person out of the Annex, tiptoeing in a crouch.

“Why the hell did you depend on local juice to help power your monstrosity?” I asked Buffet.

“We had additional generators coming. They were stolen from the
Port
of
Saigon
. There’s incredible pressure by the Pentagon and the White House to finish the project. The general felt we couldn’t delay.”

“This project, whatever the hell it is,” I said, pausing, waiting in vain to be confided in, then continued, “How long ago did you guys know the generators had been poached off the docks?”

“A week.
Two weeks. Word came down to get by on what we had. They hoped what we had would handle our needs, but they can barely run fifty percent of the air conditioners, let alone Cerebrum. The brass wouldn’t listen to us.”

“A whole entire week or
two
?”
Ziggy demanded in a tone that made them backpedal.

I said, “Jesus H. Fucking Christ, Buffet. You should’ve gotten us on the job. That hurts to the core, man.
You mistrusting
us. Okay, fine.
You doubting
our scrounging ability, that’s un-fucking-forgivable.”

“Joe, not so loudly,” CWO Buffet said.

“Alternative
matériel
sources, like we ain’t got ’em no more,” Ziggy said unpleasantly.

“We could’ve found out who snatched them and requisitioned them back or we could’ve requisitioned somebody else’s,” I added.

“There were security concerns,” Buffet rebutted.

“How much harm do you think this is doing to the Saigonese?” I asked. “Zapping their appliances that’re plugged in, appliances they can’t afford to replace and couldn’t afford to buy in the first place?”

“It depends on if they have fuses. It depends on how far the chain reaction goes until it peters out.”

We heard fading snaps, crackles, and pops. We saw what resembled flares. I didn’t want to know what they were.

“All personnel inside.
Double-time it,” Colonel Lanyard ordered. “The firefight has moved outside our perimeter.”

We did as we were told. We did not have to be told twice. For a split second I thought I saw Lee Harvey Oswald among the curious and angry Saigonese on the next block, his smirking profile a flicker as he lit a cigarette.

The colonel paused and looked up the street, and said, “Victor Charles in to mop up? We’ll see about that.”

I was halfway through the Annex door when Charlie tooled up on his motorbike. I figured he’d figured it out, having an uncle as a hardware expert. He wanted to see the fireworks’ origin firsthand.

Charlie reached us just as the colonel trained his pistol on him and cocked the hammer. “If a foreign national is on a suicide mission, I’ll be happy to accommodate the commie punk.”

“Friend, not foe,” I yelled, diving, grabbing the colonel’s arm with both hands as wide-eyed Charlie goosed his bike. It was like trying to bend a thick tree limb, but I did deflect his aim a millimeter or two. The round zipped above Charlie’s head by an inch. The colonel squeezed off the rest of the clip into the darkness. I thankfully did not hear screams or the clattering of a Honda striking pavement. But next time we saw Charlie, boy, was he gonna be pissed.