Red Flags (5 page)

"Shit," Miser croaked. "Who could play pool next to that?"

Checkman grinned. He shooed the kids out of the jeep and we got back in. We drove by some thatch huts roofed with metal sheets imprinted with beer-can logos and halted at the empty back side of town, a plain of dry, baked earth and scrub. We hadn't passed a pagoda, a church, not so much as a gas station or streetlamp.

Checkman nodded toward the landscape. "End of city."

Miser frowned. "Ass end of nowhere."

Turning back, we passed some two-story stucco houses with second-floor balconies edged with Chinese filigrees. Checkman showed us a shop front screened in at ground level, sparsely furnished with a few low stools and tables on a concrete floor. It was a bar in front and a brothel in back.

"Homey as a garage," Miser said. "What a place to get laid."

Checkman pointed out a stucco building that looked Mediterranean. "The Korean medical team's quarters and clinic. They treat Vietnamese. Two docs, three nurses. Dr. Towns's dispensary is on the other side, down that alley." He indicated a wide passage lined with shops.

"He European?" I said.

"She's American."

Miser's head swiveled around. "An American woman, here?"

"Yep. She does the health-care thing for the Yards. There's also a Christian Alliance missionary who runs a Yard leper colony a few klicks upriver. The Jarai never used to isolate their lepers but he talked them into it to reduce contagion. And there are two missionary couples: one here, the other in a Yard village way south."

I said, "What's the American headcount in the province?"

"Thirty Green Berets at the two Special Forces camps. Big one's north of here, the other's southeast. Also half a Special Forces team—that's seven Berets—and two MACV officers at a district headquarters. An A-team may soon go in on a mountaintop at Buon Blech too."

I said, "Thirty-nine. Is that it for our side?"

"Yeah, and the personnel here, and a dozen Army engineers bunking with us while they build the new airstrip."

"What've we got locally?"

Checkman downshifted to first as we bounced along a water-eroded stretch of road. "You gentlemen just brought the compound's total strength back to forty, sir."

"What?" Miser exclaimed. "Did you say
forty?
"

"Fifty-two, counting the engineers on temporary duty."

"How close is the nearest support?" I said. "You know. Firebases? Reinforcements?"

"Pleiku." Checkman braked for a goat. "Like, fifty miles."

Miser sighed. "Eighty klicks. So a plane with Gatling guns is the best we can expect if it hits the fucking fan."

Checkman said, "The First Cav is straight north at An Khe, about forty miles. I don't think we're a top priority for them either."

"South?"

"Empty for a couple of hundred miles until you get down around Saigon."

"Crap," Miser mumbled. "So eighty-nine Americans in a province the size of ...?"

"Like, Delaware," Checkman said, grinning. "We do have an ARVN battalion right across the road, and lots of strikers at the camps. Village militias too; most are Montagnard, a few are Vietnamese."

"And that's it for round-eyes?"

"Oh, the pinko French priest nobody ever sees. Likes to badmouth Americans and is supposed to be chummy with the VC. The Special Forces guys are always threatening to off him."

"You think they're kidding?" Miser teased.

"You never know with them, Sarge." He downshifted. "There are two American USAID reps in the little compound next to ours. They just built a reinforced bunker for the province chief—under his quarters—and a tennis court on the edge of town. The prov chief's playing with the AID guys. Sometimes with Major Gidding."

"Aren't USAID people supposed to do useful shit like dig wells and put in public-address systems?" Miser said.

"The province chief wanted a pool table," Checkman said, "he got a pool table. He wants a tennis court, he gets a tennis court. Everyone works at keeping the man happy. I'll show you." He veered left.

Miser's chin rose in indignation. "No sewage pipes or running water, no streetlights. Wish I'd brought my fucking racket. I'd love to bust some USAID balls."

We rolled up to the tennis court. A short, imperious Vietnamese in regulation whites was volleying with a lanky preppy in cutoffs and a T-shirt, his horn-rimmed glasses low on his beak.

"USAID taking on province chief Colonel Chinh," said Checkman.

The court wasn't much more than a concrete slab with no fencing. There was no net, just a clothesline strung across. A half-dozen Vietnamese troops acted as ball boys, and a dozen more formed a human backboard, though a horde of kids did most of the chasing of errant shots and passed balls. A plastic jug and water tumblers waited on a small table between two chairs draped with towels. A bowl of ice sat next to the tumblers.

A badly hit ball skipped past us, chased by a dozen boys. Miser took the opportunity to cadge a cube of ice to suck on.

"Would you mind keeping your hands out of the ice?" the USAID guy whined at him and pushed his eyeglasses higher on his aquiline nose. "That's very unsanitary, what you're doing."

Miser gave him the fisheye and slowly spat the cube onto the court. The guy's colleague glared at us from the sidelines. The USAID pair were familiar types. I'd have bet a week's pay the onlooker with the short hair was ex-military and the one on the court a pedigreed preppy who was getting a leg up on a foreign-service career while keeping out of the draft. The young man returned to his serving position at the base line. A local came up and engaged Checkman in animated conversation.

"He says something's going on down by the river that we should see."

It was only a few hundred yards to the river's edge and we covered it quickly in the jeep. Using scrub for handholds, we descended the steep bank. At the wide sweeping curve where the two rivers met, a huge waterlogged corpse lay beached on the sandy bank, face-up and nude, bloated arms outstretched like a sleepwalker's, its sausage lips exaggerated and swollen like its erect penis. The tongue protruded from the giant round mouth. The eyes bulged. The scrotum was the size of a grapefruit. Judging from his short stature and sparse body hair, I guessed he wasn't Caucasian.

Vietnamese circled the reeking body, awed and curious, as if some exotic form of sea life had washed up. They tried to move him with bamboo poles but the saturated cadaver was impossibly heavy, his features so distorted we couldn't tell whether he was Vietnamese or an aborigine, or even how he had died. "What do you make of this, Sergeant Miser?"

"Something fucking nasty going on upriver."

Checkman called out. They'd found another one, a long loincloth unwinding behind him. Definitely Montagnard, definitely dead—horribly so. The head, nearly severed from the body, bobbed alongside like an appendage, the neck crudely sawn, rending the flesh and leaving a jagged flap.

"I hope to hell he was dead when they did that," Miser said. He shook his head. "We're back in the shit for sure."

Little kids coming to see the odd floating thing called out to Checkman as we scrambled up the bank to the jeep on the road. Driving again, Checkman slowed for a Vietnamese girl hauling river water in two square cans hanging from opposite ends of a yoke pole balanced across her shoulders. A file of Montagnard women marched past her in the other direction, their woven back baskets laden with manioc.

We rolled up to the compound gate, guarded by a lone American in a big, open-sided sentry box with a wood roof. He lounged on a three-foot-high wall of sandbags behind a concrete barrier painted with the MACV shield bearing red ramparts, an upturned yellow sword, and
TEAM
31 below it in black. The sentry rose to his feet, his hands occupied with a baby civet cat the size of a mouse. He motioned us by with his chin. No barrier pole, no salute, no mirror under the chassis to check for bombs. Just the guard bottle-feeding the civet from a pricked condom.

W
E CROSSED THE
quad and stepped up onto the walkway, following Checkman to the sign that said
OFFICE
and into a cramped bullpen shared by the colonel's immediate staff and a local interpreter. Lieutenant Colonel Bennett came out of his tiny office to greet us. Bennett was tall and slender with the long-muscled build of a distance runner. His translucent-frame Army-issue glasses and wispy blond hair gave him a bookish air. A West Point class ring was prominent on his hand, like an extra knuckle. More than half a dozen Montagnard bracelets jangled on his wrist. We went into his office. A Vietnamese kitchen worker brought us lemonade from the mess hall.

Bennett said, "I was pleased to hear you're willing to lend us a hand. We don't often get volunteers here."

"Happy to help out, sir," I said. Miser eyed me suspiciously.

"You've both advised before. I have no doubt you will handle the duties. Between bouts of tedium, we'll try to provide some diversion, I promise."

"We look forward, sir."

"Okay," he said, smiling. "Your duties. You and Sergeant Miser will be running the six-man signal detachment that keeps us linked to the outside by multichannel radio and encrypted teletype. You need to keep the landlines open to the province chief at the sector headquarters, USAID, and so forth. What else? Maintain your vehicles and weapons, help harden the fortifications, and man part of the perimeter during alerts."

"Yes, sir," I said.

"Your people may also be called on from time to time to stand watch on the shortwave radios in the commo bunker. And to support patrol missions and assaults."

By which the colonel meant humping through the woods with a backpack radio and a whip antenna sticking up out of it like a
SHOOT ME
sign. Miser looked glum.

"Yes, sir," he said. "We know the drill."

"Captain Rider, besides your signal oversight, I've got you down for intelligence. Are you all right with that?"

"Absolutely, sir."

Jessup had outdone himself engineering that one. It was perfect, giving me access to information and the freedom to snoop around the province. Running the detachment was going to be the exact opposite for Miser—a ball and chain.

Bennett looked pleased. "You'll review the intel coming in, liaise with our three Special Forces camps and with the ARVN battalion across the way, gather up the local intelligence from them as well, and distill it all for me. Every evening you'll transmit
our
intel to the head shop at Pleiku and the Green Beret camps, and pass on to your Vietnamese counterpart across the street whatever's permissible to share."

"Yes, sir."

"Take extra care with security. It seems we've been compromised."

"Sir?"

"The harassing artillery fire put out from next door hits nothing. The VC seem to know our radio frequencies—even come up on them to gab. They monitor communications between our units so closely, I'm hesitant to put men in the field. Maintain radio discipline and be extra careful with your codebooks and shackle code sheets, and burn your work product, of course."

"Yes, sir."

Bennett leaned against his desk. "My door's open if you have problems. If I'm not here, my XO is Major Gidding, one door down. He's the civil affairs officer—coordinates building schools, repairing bridges, funding agricultural projects, and the like. Naturally, he's our go-between with USAID in the little compound next door." He pointed vaguely over his shoulder. "Most civil affairs projects stop halfway through, though all the financing invariably gets used up," he said, smiling ruefully. "It's a mysterious process. Education is our one big civic accomplishment. We've got three thousand kids in school in the province and so far the teachers haven't all been run off or murdered by the VC."

"Probably are VC in that case," Miser volunteered, "or they're cooperating with them."

I shot him a look—like,
What the fuck?
We just got here.

"You may well be right," Bennett said, "but they do a decent job of teaching arithmetic and reading." He sat down behind his desk and tossed his glasses onto the desktop. "The principal has a good head on his shoulders—and has managed to keep it there, so far."

"Sir," I chimed in, to deflect Miser, "has there been recent enemy activity?"

"Last monsoon season twenty-one battalions of North Vietnamese regulars infiltrated four Highland provinces, ours included." Bennett shifted uneasily in his seat, which squeaked as if in pain. "They surrounded and isolated us. Blew bridges, blocked roads, stopped all traffic coming into Cheo Reo. Then cut off our two district capitals the same way, pinned the ARVN there, encircled them, and took over the undefended countryside piecemeal. We couldn't go to anyone's aid and no one could come to ours. They jammed us up good. Did the same in the three other provinces."

"How did you defeat them?"

"We didn't. The Air Force flew South Vietnamese reinforcements into Cheo Reo continuously in Caribous. Our little airstrip can't handle any bigger aircraft. ARVN got bloodied. Third day of June they took three hundred casualties."

"In one day?"

"Yes, one day. They fell back on Cheo Reo and haven't really ventured out since. Which is why we still hold so little of the outlying rural areas and why going overland anywhere around here remains so risky."

"What's your main concern at the moment, Colonel?" I asked, worried that Miser might open his mouth again and get us on the colonel's shitlist before we'd even unpacked.

"Normally the North Vietnamese troops pass through, heading to objectives near the population centers on the coast. Lately they've stopped and are just hanging around. We don't know why. Last fall they tried to cut the country in half across the Highlands until the First Cav arrived to block them. If they'd succeeded it would've been checkmate—they win. They're cranking up for something like that again."

"Sir," Miser said, "if there are that many hardhats and VC in these hills and mountains, what's to keep the Communists from just shutting down Team Thirty-one?"