Dragon Lady (21 page)

“Small world, sir,” I said, sitting uninvited.

“A world that is crumbling at my feet.
Among other things, the colonel’s Jeep was stolen and he’s on a rampage. You can’t trust these ungrateful subhuman little people, them and their petty thievery. We’re here at great sacrifice to preserve their freedom, Private, and their hands are in our wallets nonstop.”

He said “Private” with such permanence that I knew our promotion to private first class was fanciful.
“Sir, your crumbling world?
I don’t understand.”

“Our mission has been accomplished. The data and the personnel responsible for proving it are secured by MPs.”

Playing dumb, I asked, “It has? They are?”

Captain Papersmith gave me a basset-hound look, flinched as he gulped a jigger of
Rhum Caravelle
, chased it with
Ba-mi-ba
, and cleared his throat.
“A sad tale.”

Ziggy had meanwhile wandered off to a newsstand, leaving me to enjoy the captain’s sob story all by my lonesome. If it included the scoop on the Annex, it’d be worth the ordeal.

“Private Joe, if I’ve given you the impression that I actively participate in decision-making or information processing and data acquisition via CAN-DO, it is merely an illusion.”

“But you said the mission’s accomplished, sir.”

“My world is dissolving,” he said, his voice fading.

I resisted the desire to wrap my fingers around his pencil neck and squeeze, as I desired to do to CWO R. Tracy. Alas, violence would not accomplish zip except land me in Leavenworth. Fact was
,
I felt semi-sorry for the captain. Horse-faced Mildred must have been holding a blowtorch even closer to his family jewels.

He finally continued, “Upon restoration of power, Cerebrum 2111X’s operation produced grim data. While Colonel Lanyard notified MACV security forces and directed repulsion of the guerrilla attack on the city’s utilities, the CAN-DO personnel worked all night. That computer is devilishly fast, faster than our wildest dreams. It is the most powerful electronic brain in the history of mankind. Nothing will
ever
surpass it.”

“Wow.”

“I attended a fateful meeting prior to slipping out and coming here.”

“Oh?”

He sneered. “It degraded into a celebration.”

A Suzy Wong served a rum refill to the captain and me a cold
Ba-mi-ba
.
 

“The documentation has already been routed. To MACV HQ, CINCPAC, the DoD, the JCS, and ultimately―”

He leaned forward. “―The White House itself.”

“Double wow!”

“Joe, the war is ending in two months.”

“The VC
are
marching on
Saigon
?”

The captain slapped his forehead.
“No, you dolt.
We won.”

“Oh.
Uh.
Good.”

“I see you’re skeptical, but there is no mistake. We presently have 74,893 troops deployed in-country,” Captain Papersmith said. “Cerebrum 2111X and CAN-DO has calculated that the break-even point is 136,812 American armed services personnel, a figure projected to be achieved on 15 October 1965. Victory is assured at that point, on that date. We will have an overwhelming manpower advantage.”

Ah, hindsight.
Gotta love it.
Coincidence of coincidences, the fifteenth of October 1965 was the date of the first arrest in the U.S. of A. under a new law prohibiting burning one’s draft card. It wasn’t long before Brother Jack incinerated his own.

“Oh, swell, sir. Fantastic.”

“The overall force ratios, the ordnance tonnage multipliers, the negative psychological exponents―”

“Exponents,” I said. “This is damn serious business.”

“―the confrontation vectors, the war-of-attrition efficacy percentile, the escalatory intersects. Numbers don’t lie. There is no mistake. You may wonder why the computation was done here instead of in the safe confines of the Pentagon.”

CWO Buffet had covered it with us, but I said, “Did cross my mind, sir.”

“Because we’re ten thousand miles nearer the action.
We have insights that can and did fine-tune the raw data.”

“Oh, I get it now.”

“The statehood situation is the clincher. It remains a top secret to anyone but the highest levels in the White House and the Pentagon, but we’ve heard the good news through the grapevine.”

“Good news, sir?”

“The statehood rumor is no longer a rumor. It is the most prominent negative psychological exponent. It substantially lowered the troop break-even point. Machinery is in progress to make South Vietnam our fifty-first state. Proposals to Congress are being secretly drafted as we speak. A Constitutional Amendment is required. That is icing on the cake, the strongest confirmation of the accuracy of the CAN-DO numbers. The process is well advanced. I have it on good authority that rice has been chosen as the state grain, we’re that far along.”

Thanks to one quarter as a Constitutional Law major, I knew that an Amendment
wasn’t
required.
Article IV, Section 3, if I’m not mistaken.
“That’s great, sir.”

“You’re unaware of my background, Private. My prior duty station was as an ROTC instructor at a major university. I have a mathematical background, an MS in it. In conjunction with my ROTC curricula, I taught remedial mathematics, plane geometry and elementary algebra to jocks.

“The 803rd has the highest average educational level of any unit in the army, many personnel with graduate degrees too. Everybody is a commissioned or warrant officer, except you two and PFC Bierce. Incidentally, where is Bierce? I haven’t seen him in some time.”

I pondered the captain’s math skills.
A Mai connection there?

“Saw him not an hour ago, sir.
Hard at work at his desk.”

“Then where are his morning reports? They’re days in arrears.”

“I’ll ask him, sir. That’s intolerable. There’s no excuse for it. Ziggy and me, after we become clerk typists, we won’t shrug our morning report duties.
Scout’s honor.”

The captain didn’t respond. He hadn’t heard a word I’d said.

“So that’s what the celebration in the Annex was for, huh? When’s the VV Day party?”

“I did not take VV Day seriously when I arranged for the restaurant and the announcements. How wrong I was. It is not a unanimous celebration, Private Joe. I could not bear to revel with them. Isn’t it ironic?”

“Isn’t what ironic, sir?”

“That I did my part to save my Mai from communist enslavement and my success is hastening my separation from her. I don’t know how to tell her.”

Mai isn’t your Mai, she’s
my
Mai, I barely resisted saying.

The photo in the
Dien Bien Phu
book of the French being led off by the ants popped in my noggin. “You’re absolutely, positively certain we’ve won, sir?”

Captain Papersmith sighed. “Private Joe, it is the ironically sad truth. On October 15, the enemy has no choice but to capitulate.”

He guzzled his beer. So as not to be rude, I did too.

“Well, sir, that’s kind of swell, isn’t it? We can go home soon. You can be reunited with your family. Maybe take a shot at bringing whatshername with you.”

“Mai.”

“Mai.
If not as a nanny, well, you’ll come up with something,” I said, thinking, not a chance, pal; we’ll send you a wedding invitation.
                                          

The captain blinked, either summoning a reply or stifling tears.

The floorboards creaked. Ziggy lumbered in and sat. He tossed a rolled-up magazine on the table. His eyes were redder than the captain’s.

“What’s up, Zig?”

“Lookie.”

I unrolled the magazine, an August 6, 1965
Time
, the airmail edition they sold in Saigon, its pages as thin as toilet paper. Ziggy had it open to an article entitled
The Moon-Faced
Mars
.

I didn’t have to read the piece in toto. The picture of Mars taken from Mariner 4 was worth a helluva lot more than a thousand words.
Nothing but craters and rough lifeless terrain.
No canals and gondoliers, no vegetation, no Martians. The Red Planet was a meteor-pocked chunk of moonlike rock.

Flippancy may not have been the ideal approach, but I was desperate to lighten him up. “Hey, Zig, that’s good news, isn’t it? There’ll be no invasion from outer space.”

The captain was trying to focus on the article.
“Invasion?
What invasion? I told you, soldier, we’ve won.”

“They ain’t there, Joey,” Ziggy said.

“What are you babbling about, Zbitgysz? They are throughout the countryside. They have neither the resources nor the resolve to prolong their godless communist aggression against our overwhelming numerical superiority.”

A tear trickled down Ziggy’s cheek. “Don’t you see, Joey? They were and they weren’t there.”

“Were and weren’t?”

“Like I once told you, they’re on the street, disguised as humans. Soon as I saw this pitcher they went and started fading and vanishing, Joey. They’re going out of existence on account of they never were.
I seen
some by the newsstand. Seen ’em go
poof
.”

Captain Papersmith’s head jerked from Ziggy’s to mine.
“Who, what?”

The Martians winking out before Ziggy’s eyes.
They weren’t tooling toward Earth to herd us into feedlots. I tried to cheer him up.

“C’mon, Zig. No radioactive death beams, none of that
conquesting
and enslaving shit they do in your magazines. That’s terrific. Drink your beer. We’ll talk later in length. I know it’s a blow, but I’ll help you through it. C’mon, man. Bottom’s up.”

“Death beams,” Captain Papersmith said from
his
distant planet. “Ridiculous. The Vietcong don’t even possess aircraft.”

Ziggy blew his nose. If I’d had any doubts why he was taking it so hard, I didn’t now. He’d rather the Martians came in and roasted us than not exist at all. Maybe he didn’t deep-down believe they were real.
Ziggy’s not that loopy.

 
He did believe they
could
be
real. Now, all of a sudden, he didn’t and they couldn’t be. The insular world in which he was comfortable, within his piles of sci-fi reading material, in which he
was
accepted, was an imaginary one.

In his own way, he was as crushed as the over-religious zealots in the Great Beyond. Fire and brimstone and eternal torture of billions of heretics and atheists and agnostics was preferable to having their convictions dashed.

Ziggy
would not give up. “Joey, you think they doctored them pitchers?
A conspiracy by the government so people don’t panic?”

I shook my head. “Sorry, Zig. I love high-level conspiracies too, but that’s a reach.”

“Will you men make some sense,” the captain demanded. “Am I the only sane and sober person at this table? Am I?”

Ziggy and I didn’t answer. I simultaneously saw what Ziggy saw. The captain could not have seen what we saw because his back was to the door.

What he couldn’t see, what we saw, was what we didn’t see. The bartender and her girls had disappeared.

We were alone, the three of us and the two young Vietnamese males who were riding their motorbike onto the sidewalk. The kid in the rear jumped off. He carried a satchel, as innocuous-looking as a kid’s book bag.

We knew what was in the bag. Ziggy rose out of his chair with a banshee yell. I grabbed and shouted at him, “Down!”

Our best chance was to hit the deck, but pulling down Ziggy was like grabbing onto a freight train. He charged to the door, still howling.

The captain stood up and swiveled his idiotic head, asking what Private Zbitgysz’s problem was now. Problem was that the satchel was now trailing sparks and the VC was slinging it into the GiGi.

“Ziggy!” I screamed.

His only chance, too, was to dive low and behind something.

“Edward, no!
Down!”

Edward was Ziggy’s Christian name. I thought using it would trigger an obedience reaction, some dark family demon that’d make him listen. It didn’t.
 

The disoriented captain was between me and the table, standing like a total dipshit. I lunged for Ziggy, but got my feet tangled with Papersmith’s. We went ass-over-teakettle, me landing on top of him.

I dug for my peashooter pistol as the satchel bounced off Ziggy’s chest. He booted it and kept howling and lumbering ahead. The satchel blew up in midair.

Wanna know what the real deal sounds like?
A genuine
ka-boom
at close, close range?

Find an old war movie on the tube, okay? When a scene comes on with big guns firing, crank the volume all the way up, and press an ear to the speaker. It’ll be almost as loud, a reasonable simulation. But it cannot simulate the cordite stink that’ll burn your nostrils like battery acid. It cannot simulate the screams of the dying and the stink of the dead. All it can do is
give
you a nasty case of tinnitus.