Red Flags (29 page)

We all convoyed back into the compound, convened in the empty mess hall, and collapsed.

"What are his chances?" I asked Roberta.

"Zero to none," she said, "but he's breathing." She headed to our medic's room to crash. "He needs a miracle."

Sergeant Durando and Joe Parks went around with flashlights and checked all the field phones, doors, bunkers, generators, firing positions, and the ammo bunker. A slab of C-4 explosive had been freshly cut. They examined all the vehicle ignitions too and sent Westy to check backup generators.

The Berets at Phu Tuc reported the stock of C-4 explosive in their ammo bunker showed signs of pilfering. Ours looked nibbled at too. Possible VC suspects at the Special Forces camps were too many to count. But we didn't have a thousand Montagnard strikers and their families in our compound. I interviewed the sleepy gate guards and went over their logs, looking to see what outsiders had been in the compound the last twenty-four hours. With most of the Vietnamese workers hunkered down in Cheo Reo, the log was pretty bare. Other than Judd Slavin and some Special Forces people who'd come by for their mail, the list consisted of Mama-san Duc and the old Montagnards who came into the compound toward sunset to stand guard through the night. Hump confessed Americans weren't always noted in the log. Mostly just waved by. He couldn't remember who might have passed through without being recorded. The USAID reps from next door walked in and out all the time.

 

Only one ship was available in the morning to fly us to the Baxters. Gidding assumed command of the compound while Slavin and the colonel and I set off for the airstrip.

"Ted and Audrey are old Asia hands," the reverend said, sitting with me in back of the colonel's jeep. "High-school sweethearts from Missouri. They've got two teenage boys in boarding school in the Philippines."

The sentry box was empty so we parked on the apron to wait. Two security guards and Macquorcadale arrived a minute later. The speck on the horizon turned into a helicopter. I went up on their frequency and made contact with the copilot. They landed quickly, had the six of us sitting on the pebbled deck in seconds and on our way at a hundred knots, the jet turbine above our heads whining. Colonel Bennett donned a headset and asked the pilots to follow Road 7 southeast so we could look for the Baxters' vehicle in case it had broken down on the way.

We stayed on the deck and followed the unpaved dirt track, looking for their pickup. We saw nothing and no one. Every few kilometers the roadbed was interrupted: washed out, nearly grown over. When we reached the Baxters' district, the river led toward their village. There was no one on the banks bathing or washing or fetching water. Not even kids frolicking. Bennett and I exchanged looks. The door gunners leveled their weapons on the passing scrub and jungle.

Our pilot buzzed the Baxters' house on the edge of the settlement. Neither Ted nor Audrey came out. We snapped our safeties off as we set down by the village, a short distance from their house. The door gunner yelled in my ear and flashed all his fingers at me twice like a fight referee: "You got twenty minutes, Captain. Then we're out of here."

The prop slowed but kept churning. We exited rapidly and spread ourselves out, except Slavin, who stayed close to the colonel. An old woman approached from the village, complaining. She and her husband had been left behind, Slavin said, along with one young boy tending buffalo.

Had the ARVN come and relocated the villagers, Slavin asked, and left her? No. The others.

"Guerrillas?" Bennett said.

Reverend Slavin questioned her and turned to us. "
Chin guy.
Army regulars. NVA. But she says a sunburned Vietnamese man with a heavy beard and filed-down teeth addressed the villagers in Rhade. Said they must all go work for the soldiers and carry their rice."

"Your friend Wolf Man covers a lot of ground," I muttered.

"They took the boy of a government militiaman," Slavin translated, "to execute him as punishment for his father serving in the Saigon army. The boy's mother talked them into taking her instead. They walked her into the forest near the grapefruit tree." The old woman looked toward the tree. "She didn't come back."

"And where were the Baxters during all this?" Bennett asked.

Slavin conveyed the question. She responded slowly. He turned to look toward the house.

"What did she say?" Bennett asked.

"They hid in their bunker, behind the house."

"Were they taken too? Where are they now?"

Slavin translated the questions. She gazed around and spoke.

Judd Slavin looked puzzled. "She says they're in the bunker."

The old woman walked with us to the house and around the side, leading us to the circular mound that was the Baxters' shelter against bombardments. I opened the straps on my musette bag. The bunker's entrance was a few steps down. Something wooden lay across one side of the rounded earthen top, flanked by some pots and pans and a bottle of cooking oil. I attempted to go in the entryway, which was partly blocked with boards and drifts of dirt on the steps.

"Audrey?" Slavin called past me. "Ted?"

Bennett yanked out the boards over the entry and flinched. He pulled the collar of his green T-shirt over his nose and ducked inside, Slavin behind him, handkerchief over his mouth and nostrils. They were in there only seconds. They exited amid a putrid stench. Slavin was pale. It clung to his clothes and hands. He seemed undone: mute and choking. Bennett held a kerchief to his mouth, coughing.

Bennett looked stricken. "It's them."

The Baxters were decomposing rapidly in the tropical heat. The old woman gesticulated as she spoke. Slavin listened and translated.

"They took shelter in the bunker when the army men appeared. The red-star soldiers surrounded the bunker and summoned them. Reverend Ted came out. He scolded them in Vietnamese. The bearded man shot him twice, went up to the bunker with a grenade like a masher, and threw it inside. After the village emptied out and they all left, she went to the reverend. He was still alive. She helped him to the bunker, as he asked. His wife had lost an eye. She was mostly unaware, barely alive. They were finished, finished. They died in each other's arms."

I turned back toward the bunker. Scratched faintly into the sides of the mound were symbols I had seen in the Jarai cemetery.

"I closed it as best I could," the old woman said, through Slavin, "and took the cross they knocked down from our chapel to put on their burial house."

Bennett stood on the bottom step and replaced the boards, adding the ones I handed down. The three security guards kept watch as the colonel and Judd Slavin hurriedly finished the job of sealing the bunker's entrance, Slavin mumbling Bible verses, voice trembling, face running with sweat.

"'New gods were chosen, then war was in the gates ...'"

His chest heaved as he labored, eyes tearing. They streaked the dirt on his cheeks.

"'Then I saw the beast ...'"

He was babbling from the heat and despair that clutched at us all, and maybe the knowledge that he had taken money from the hands that had killed his friends. Audrey and Ted Baxter had devoted their lives to helping others and proclaiming their faith. Their reward was watching each other die.

Red dust and grit rose around us and stuck to our sweating bodies as we emptied sandbags into the entrance well. Slavin scratched their names into the wood of the cross and planted it firmly on the roof of their tomb.

"'... and the glory of the Lord shone round them,'" he said to no one in particular. He didn't look like a duplicitous spook masquerading as a cleric. He looked like a guy who had just buried dear friends without a moment's ceremony at an isolated outpost in the middle of a jungle.

The aged woman's husband appeared, hobbling toward us in a black shirt and a loincloth and speaking loudly. Slavin's eyes widened.

"He says VC are approaching."

Bennett ordered the guards to the chopper while we rushed to the modest two-room house to retrieve the Baxters' personal effects. The rotors whined louder.

Bennett took up a position at the door while Slavin and I raced around. I took a pillowcase and filled it with photographs of two blond kids, someone's elderly parents, the Bible on the nightstand, a hairbrush. I didn't know what to snatch up, what held meaning. Slavin added small sculptures, a figurine made by a child, a heart-shaped rock, an address book, two framed wedding photos. Bennett urged us to finish as I pushed objects into the sack and Slavin searched for a photo album—seconds to gather up a lifetime. I made for the bookcase.

"We've got to go," the colonel said, and waved Slavin out. I grabbed a handful of volumes at random and ran after him.

We had intended to look for the Jarai woman Wolf Man had executed by the grapefruit tree. No time. The old woman accepted Judd Slavin's rucksack of supplies and my two packs of cigarettes but wouldn't come with us. Slavin urged her husband to convince her, to no avail.

"She says she isn't getting into our iron insect. Says she must look after the village until everyone comes back."

The crew chief was frantically waving for us to hurry. My heart hammered my chest. We bade them goodbye and ran to the churning helicopter. The pilot lifted off the instant we jumped on board.

Armed men stepped into the open as we rose. They hadn't yet seen the old couple nearing the far side of the clearing; they were all looking up at us. With a final glance skyward, the ancient woman and her man slipped into the undergrowth and disappeared.

T
HE HUEY STAYED
on the deck as we flew back along Road 7 toward Cheo Reo, eventually climbing up to a thousand feet. Treetops sped by. Colonel Bennett cupped his headset to his ears, listening intently. He tugged me nearer the door and pointed down. In a short open strip of the road a flatbed truck lay half tipped over on the shoulder, its load of long hardwood logs spilling out. Four male figures lay prone around the vehicle: two civilians and two South Vietnamese soldiers in green fatigues stained dark with blood.

I jabbed earthward. Bennett nodded and spoke into his mike. The pilot signaled his assent. The helicopter dipped and slowly spiraled down. The warrant officers set the Huey down right on the road, raising a storm of dirt and small stones. Five of us jumped off. The pilot barely decreased the rotations and the downdraft pummeled us with grit. Bennett and I approached the disabled truck warily while Macquorcadale and the others secured the perimeter. The windshield and cab were riddled with bullets. A shot-up tire smoldered. The gaping entrance wounds and the large exit holes were undoubtedly made by the nasty, spiraling rounds from Kalashnikovs.

The roadbed had been hastily swept in two separate places to cover tracks. A few feet off the road, both spots showed a mass of boot prints. Several hundred NVA had crossed in two files and disappeared into the heavy growth along the stream.

"Maybe the driver refused to stop," I said.

"Or the ARVN escort panicked," said Bennett. "I would have thought a safe conduct came with the logging deal."

"Maybe the People's Army hadn't gotten the word or wasn't interested. Or just didn't want to leave any witnesses to who was marching through, or how many, or what direction they were going."

The pilot signaled us back aboard but I needed a closer look. I motioned toward the load. Bennett nodded and took up a position facing away, rifle stock braced. I jumped up on the truck bed and touched the thick raw timbers, three feet across, freshly sawed and aromatic. Mahogany. The bottom timbers were cut in half lengthwise, the flat halves face-down on the bed to make a steadier platform for the ones piled on top and chained to the rig. The two topmost logs had skidded off and lay half on the truck, half off. They'd been cut in two lengthwise and rejoined. One log lay open, its innards filled with coarsely wrapped packages: a hollowed-out container for contraband.

The loggers were smuggling raw opium, probably had been all along. The wooden debris I'd seen floating on the current in the Katu River was man-made: the transfer point for the opium was a sawmill. Madame Chinh's loggers. I ripped open a package and pulled out two wrapped bricks of raw opium, tossed one to Bennett, and shoved the other in a thigh pocket.

The only two roads in or out of the province, 7 and 2, crisscrossed each other at Cheo Reo. The opium was undoubtedly loaded onto the truck somewhere along the lower leg of 7 and driven southeast toward its junction with National Highway 1, which continued south to Saigon and the refineries in the Cholon District. The bank deposits to the Hong Kong accounts were never interrupted because the real traffic never faltered. If we had disrupted their marijuana harvest and singed a few poppies, we'd done nothing to the mainstay of their opium trade.

It wasn't safe to investigate further. Bennett ordered Macquorcadale to puncture the gas tank, opened a jerry can of gasoline and splashed the logs, then threw two cans of motor oil atop the pile. I took a jar from the cab, spilled its contents on the road, refilled it with sawdust and gasoline, stuck a sock over the mouth, and set fire to it. I hurled the jar at the rig. The bark and exposed flanks caught instantly. We ran to the chopper. The gas tank went up before we left the ground, sending a thick plume of smoke rising toward the layer of black cloud cover.

 

I typed an encrypted message to Jessup telling him to have our MPs stop all rigs hauling timber south on National Highway 1, toward Saigon. That door would shut in hours.

I went to find Big John and let him know that we'd discovered—and sealed off—the land route. He wasn't in our room, but I could hear him yelling. He was in the colonel's office, berating both Bennett and Major Gidding. I tiptoed into the outer bullpen and suggested to the civilian interpreter that he go for a smoke. Slight and sensitive, Mr. Cho looked grateful to escape Big John's disturbing volume. Checkman volunteered to go too.

"You don't smoke," I said.

"Neither does Mr. Cho."

"Go." I sat at Checkman's desk in the cramped bullpen, listening to Big John vent his wrath on Major Gidding.