‘Professor, get inside that slaughter pen.’
Muir’s voice came from behind him. ‘With the hogs? You’ve got to be kidding!’
One of the Vietnamese men took a package out of his truck cab and walked back to their little group, handing it to the Caucasian man. The package was about the size of a briefcase and was wrapped in brown paper. The Caucasian man took it, holding it in both his hands. It all seemed to be happening too quickly, but with the Caucasian man’s hands full and with the others so distracted, there could be no better time. And if he did not act now, there might not be another time.
Condley leapt inside the slaughter pen. The concrete wall was waist-high in front of him. He drew the Glock from under his shirt and started to aim. But then he stopped. A lot of trucks came through the slaughterhouse district. A lot of packages passed back and forth. Even a few Caucasian men made it there with the trucks from time to time. Condley himself had done so in another life.
He was ready to kill this man. But before he did, he wanted to know.
‘Deville!’ He screamed it as loudly as he could. His voice echoed off the nearby trucks, above the screams of the dying animals and the sounds of machetes hacking through pork and bones. The Caucasian man dropped the packet, looking toward him and racing for the cover of a nearby truck. And Condley knew that he was right.
He fired Simolzak’s Glock but was unfamiliar with its trigger pull. The round went low, causing him to curse as it whacked into the truck. Behind him, Hanson Muir was screaming, scrambling to get his body over the wall and inside the slaughter pen. The men in front of him were pressed against the trucks, calling to one another and drawing weapons. He thought he could take all of them if he had to, but most of all he wanted Deville. The asshole’s head appeared and he aimed again, this time squeezing the trigger with a slow, deliberate pressure.
He didn’t get the round off. Without warning, a burst of fire came at him from further to his left. He turned toward it, stunned. A second round, a third, steadily pulled from a rifle. He spun to the ground, still cradling his pistol as a bullet tore into his shoulder. Another round and Muir dropped just beside him, holding a ripped thigh.
‘Brandonnnnn!’
‘OK, goddamn it, they brought five fucking trucks,’ he muttered to no one in particular, huddling against the wall.
‘Didn’t you say you knew how to improvise?’ screamed Muir, looking up at him and then over at a pen full of squealing, stampeding hogs.
He quickly checked his shoulder. Lucky hit, on the outside, not much in the muscle at all. The shoulder was bleeding, but he still could move the joint. Slowly he knelt, trying to look forward again.
* * *
On the other side of the street, inside the nearly blind old woman’s hooch, Manh and Dzung lay flat on the wooden slats that made the floor. After they had eaten, Manh had reached into his pack and ordered Dzung to slip black pajamas over his working clothes. They had sat quietly for two hours after that, watching the trucks move slowly past the slaughter pens, Manh’s electric eyes counting, calculating, waiting for some magical chimera that would cause him to send Dzung into action.
When Condley screamed Deville’s name, Dzung had immediately recognised his voice. He had looked quickly to Manh, taking deep breaths to burn up some of the adrenaline that exploded inside his veins. The Interior Ministry official had merely nodded, as if agreeing that it was indeed Condley. Dzung clutched his pistol, crouching. It was going to happen, whatever it was. And then it would, at least, finally be over.
The nine men from the four trucks now stood on the road just in front of them. They were all looking the other way, toward Condley, leaning into the trucks and using them as barricades. Four of them, including the large white man, were firing pistols in the direction of the slaughter pens. Off to their right Dzung could see another man behind a different truck, shooting slowly and carefully with a military carbine, as if he were a sniper. No firing was coming from the slaughter pen where Condley had fallen.
Maybe he is already dead. Maybe I won’t have to kill him.
Manh took a deep breath and then slapped Dzung on his back. ‘Now it happens!’ he said fiercely, his face wild with determination. He pointed toward the trucks.
‘The white man!’
Dzung had already crouched, ready to burst across the narrow road. He turned quickly to Manh. ‘That white man?’
‘With the mustache. At the truck. Go!’
Dzung bolted from the hooch, running wildly, fired by the reality that there were five guns in front of him, that he had only seven shots in his pistol, and that Manh had trained him repeatedly to kill only one man. One man. Seven shots. Two to the chest, three to the head, two back to the chest. Shoot only the man I tell you to shoot.
Bullshit.
They were only thirty feet away, and they were looking toward the slaughter pens. He held his fire until he was within five feet of his target, then put a bullet quickly into the back of his head. The other three with pistols were less than twenty feet away. He turned to the right, quickly shooting the single man on that side, and then rolled behind one truck bed, standing up and putting two bullets apiece into the other two on his left. One in the chest, one in the head.
He had one bullet left. The men who were not shooting before were scrambling in the dirt road, trying to find the weapons that the others had dropped. Two trucks down from him, the sniper with the rifle had turned around toward him and had a bead. Dzung had enough time to raise the pistol and fire a shot that careened off the truck, near the sniper’s head, causing the man to cringe for a second.
And then he was out of ammunition.
He was in the middle of the road and had to run across it, past the slaughter pens and down the dirt trail to the river. The sniper had a free shot, and the sniper was good. Dzung crouched between two trucks, preparing to sprint for his very life, and then three shots suddenly exploded in front of him. They crossed him, left to right. He looked quickly at the far truck and saw the sniper fall.
He had no more time to think. He bolted across the road, heading for the dirt path. And as he passed the slaughter pen he saw Condley leaning against its concrete wall. Condley was bleeding from his left shoulder and grimacing, his eyes wild with anger and pain. But seeing Dzung, he held his Glock in the air as if in victory and gave Dzung a thumbs-up with his left hand as the cyclo driver raced down the dark path toward the river.
* * *
Inside the pen, the slaughterhouse workers had raced away, taking refuge from the gun battle behind the far walls. More than twenty huge hogs were trampling the flesh of hog-tied and already-killed animals, grouping in one corner until a few of them would suddenly bolt and squirm, causing them to again rush madly until they reached a new hiding place. Muir lay against one wall, holding his bleeding leg, seemingly more fearful of the hogs than of the battle on the road.
Condley still leaned against the front wall, his pistol at the ready, watching to see if the other five men would open fire. But these were the drivers, and they seemed bent on escape. Instead of shooting back at him, they had quickly moved into the trucks and were starting the engines. One of the Burmese drivers had picked up the package and thrown it into his cab. Condley did not care. He wanted them to go. What he had come for was lying dead on the dirt road before him. He had no quarrel with them, and he did not want to fight another war over the contents of their cargo.
Then the other Burmese driver ran to Deville’s body and started to drag it by the belt toward his truck. Condley fired a round through the driver’s windshield, warning him, and another at his feet. The driver dropped the body, then put both of his hands into the air and ran wildly to his truck. Within seconds, the five trucks churned out of line, running over the bodies they left behind as they quickly made their way out of Klong Toey.
He sagged against the wall. It was over. All of it. The danger and the evil both were gone, and with them the anger. He was bleeding, but it was good blood, sp
illed in a just cause. A sense of peace passed over him, like the stroking of a large and gentle hand. For the first time in his memory, Condley felt content with himself. It occurred to him at that moment that now would be a good time to go home. If he actually had a home.
The hogs grew quiet. There was a dreadful hush, and then the people of Klong Toey slowly started howling. Condley stared cautiously around him amid the whines of little children and old women that were emanating from the nearby houses, testing the certainty of his victory. Then he stood at the wall, remaining for several seconds, almost inviting someone to kill him. No gunfire. And finally he walked slowly toward a corner of the slaughter pen where several hogs were cowering, causing them to squeal anew.
‘Brandon, what are you doing?’ asked a wheezing Hanson Muir.
Without answering, he picked up a machete that one slaughterhouse worker had abandoned in the dirt when the gunfight broke out. Then he slowly climbed over the slaughter pen wall and walked toward the bodies that littered the dust-filled street.
‘Head shots,’ he muttered, moving from one body to another and seeing the results of Dzung’s few seconds of work. ‘Look at that! The fucking guy was a pro.’
The body of the Caucasian man was lying face-down in the road. Three sets of truck tracks had squashed it from hips to ankles. Condley stood over it for a moment, taking deep breaths to control his seething fury. Then he grabbed it at the shoulders, turning it over so that he could see Deville’s face. Dzung’s bullet had exited just below the left eye, but other than that small hole, the face was smooth and oddly unlined. Life after Viet Nam had apparently treated Mr. Deville pretty well, despite his venal journeys.
‘Hello, Salt,’ he finally managed to say. ‘Marines are like elephants. We forget nothing.’ And then he took off the dead man’s left hand with one smashing blow of the machete.
He dropped the machete and picked up the hand by its thumb, a slick angry nausea growing within him. Inside the makeshift house just behind the man’s carcass he found an old green knapsack. He did not know it, but he had just put Theodore Deville’s hand into the pack that Dzung had left behind.
Muir had managed to stand and was leaning against the wall of the slaughter pen, testing his leg. He watched with amazed eyes as Condley walked back across the street and dropped the knapsack on the wall. And then he spoke quietly, in the careful tones of a nervously empathetic counselor.
‘And just what compelled you to do that, Brandon?’
‘I thought you’d want a set of fingerprints.’
‘That’s very kind, actually.’ Muir looked down the dirt path toward the river. ‘Who was that man?’
‘He looked Vietnamese,’ said Condley.
‘Where did he possibly come from?’
‘I have no idea, Professor. But the boy could shoot.’
* * *
Manh had prepared him well. Dzung jogged easily down the dirt path, familiar with its bumps and contours from the afternoon’s visit. At the riverbank he heaved the pistol with all his might into the muddy river. No one would ever find it in the turgid waters and the hog-drenched mud. Then he turned upriver, measuring his steps until he had gone as close to a hundred meters as he could estimate. At that point, as an afterthought, he removed his black pajamas, wadding them into a tight ball and then wading into the river, placing them underwater inside a thick bed of water hyacinths so that they would not float downstream. He then made his way uphill along another dirt trail until he reached the road.
It surprised him that the slaughterhouse district seemed to have quickly regained its calm. Far down the road he could see people gathered in front of the slaughter pens where the gunfight had taken place, but the trucks were again moving and the hogs were squealing as the workers again stood in the pens, hacking them up for food. The vacant lot where the man had kissed the little boy’s penis was just across the street. He walked slowly to it and then stood for a moment, waiting. But he did not see Manh.
He is angry at me because I killed so many soldiers.
Yes, soldiers, he thought insistently, because that was what he had done. He had again been ordered into battle and he had again survived. And like so many times before, his commanding officer’s orders had to be revised on the battlefield. Manh would have to understand that.
And then a cold thought chilled him. Maybe Manh had prepared him falsely on that one point, deliberately setting him up to die. The thought worked on him as he made his way toward the Vietnamese Embassy, checkpoint by checkpoint, just as Manh had taught him. Maybe all of Manh’s careful preparation was itself a ruse, designed to gain his confidence so that he would not fail in the actual attack. Maybe when he returned to the embassy the Thai police would be waiting for him, alerted by Manh himself that a Vietnamese national had perpetrated a heinous crime. For what did Manh, whose own father had died on the other side, owe a former enemy soldier from District Four?
Another thought visited him as he walked along Bangkok’s dark streets. He was free. He did not have to go back, either to the embassy or to Viet Nam. He could simply keep walking, or turn around and head in another direction, and never be found again. He could learn the language, find work, move to America or Australia, sleep in a bed, wear real shoes.
But after he had thought about such dreams for another block, he knew that they were pure fantasy. Manh had it right. He was as predictable as the rains. He wanted nothing more just then than to go back to Sai Gon, to somehow find where they had taken his cyclo and reclaim it so that he could pedal home to his family again.
Manh was waiting for him at the last checkpoint, two blocks from the embassy. The agent surprised him, stepping out from an alley and suddenly walking beside him. Manh’s face was still bright with amazement as he put an arm around his shoulder.
‘So, Mister Trong. You sold your rice very well. And more importantly, you came back!’
‘Yes, Manh,’ said Dzung. His earlier anger flashed, as if a release valve inside his usual serenity had blown. ‘So why did you tell me to shoot only one person, and only the person you said? Tell me the truth, Manh. It doesn’t matter anymore. Did you want me to be killed by the others?’
‘I will tell you the truth,’ said Manh simply as they walked. ‘There are not usually this many guns. My intelligence report was not complete. I did not even know that the man would be on the other side of the road and would shoot at them. It totally surprised me.’
‘It was Cong Ly.’
‘I swear to you,’ said Manh. ‘We did not think he would find the target so quickly. We wanted to kill the target before Cong Ly could convince other people to capture it. It was important that the target die before it could talk.’
‘You and Cong Ly were after the same man?’
‘For him it was a man,’ shrugged Manh. ‘For us it was a target.’
‘Who was it?’
‘You are not allowed to know. And you must never ask again.’ Manh looked at him with genuine awe. ‘I did not think you would be able to do that. I have never seen such shooting.’
Dzung relaxed for the first time. He began to feel sleepy, as if his feet were dragging behind him on the pavement. ‘I told you I was born to do this.’
‘I know,’ said Manh, lighting a cigarette as they walked.
‘My files,’ joked Dzung.
Manh nodded cerebrally. ‘Of course.’
‘So, another thing?’
‘Yes?’ said Manh.
‘How did my side lose the war?’
Manh laughed. He ceremoniously held his cigarette up in the air in the odd place that he always kept it, at the bottom of two fingers. ‘We are on the same side now, Mister Trong. The war is over.’
‘Maybe for you and me,’ said Dzung, thinking about what awaited him on his return to Sai Gon. ‘But for the others, I don’t think so. Not yet.’
They walked silently for a while. The Vietnamese Embassy was just in front of them. ‘We go back tomorrow,’ said Manh. ‘In case something go
es wrong in Klong Toey, I don’t want anyone to see you in Bangkok.’
It was bothering him. He deserved to know. He watched Manh’s face carefully. ‘As long as I am still Mister Trong, I have the right to ask. Who did I kill, Manh?’
‘It does not matter who you killed,’ said Manh. ‘You killed who you were supposed to.’
‘That’s not good enough. Tell me. Who was it?’
Manh grunted. The question was beyond his authority to answer. ‘I cannot tell you, and again I must warn you. Do not ask me that, and do not mention anything about this mission when you are back in Sai Gon. To anyone. I am serious. It never happened, do you understand? But you should not feel bad. It was like killing the devil.’
The embassy was very near. Dzung knew he would never have another chance to discuss it. ‘The devil was trying to kill Cong Ly?’
‘Yes,’ said Manh.
Dzung nodded. They were at the embassy steps. If all went well, he would soon have a good meal and a long sleep on a real bed.
‘Then I was on the right side,’ he finally said. ‘And that is good enough for me.’
* * *
The gunfight had become irrelevant in a matter of minutes. No one offered to help Condley and Muir, and no one asked them any questions about what had happened. At some point, perhaps tomorrow, the police would arrive and questions would be asked. But for now, it was simply another night in Klong Toey.
Condley eased Muir over the low wall of the slaughter pen, and they moved slowly across the street, finding a place to rest on the wooden slats that made the old lady’s floor. The rats came out, scurrying from beneath the raised slats and heading toward the river. The drivers of other trucks had dragged the five dead bodies out of the road, making a litter pile not far from where Condley and Muir now sat.
Lost Soldiers Page 39
