Play the Red Queen

by Juris Jurjevics

  “That’s a hell of a way to eliminate the competition. And the green and red?”

  “Military politicals. Small-time traitors. Encouraging desertion or otherwise engaging in anti-Diem activity. Green and yellow are military criminals, I think. The gents with plain yellow badges, they’re civilian criminals.”

  “And some of the military and civilian criminals also get yellow armbands?”

  “’Cause they’re trustees. Orderlies. They pick the real hardcore guys and give ’em special privileges for keeping the others in line. They’re much worse than the guards.”

  “So is this their version of a chain gang?” Robeson asked.

  “This isn’t so bad. They’ve got other crews on the island breaking rocks. These inmates do all the fishing for the prison. Run a sea-turtle farm too. Raise them for food, carve their shells into bowls. Plus they man this giant mortar that grinds coral and seashells into a lime powder that’ll burn your eyes and skin real bad. Anybody in the cells gets out of line, and they douse him with it. Breathe it in and you cough up blood. Some of ’em even go blind.”

  “Ain’t that self-sufficient,” Robeson said. “Prisoners making do-it-yourself teargas for their own punishment.”

  The skeletal men working in the surf sang as they hauled.

  “That their chain-gang work song?” Robeson said.

  “A revolutionary chant.” The airman rose up on an elbow. “They only take it up when the warders aren’t close enough to hear.”

  “Singing about kicking our asses and fucking our women?” Robeson said.

  “Nah. It’s all glory and winning and shit like that. ‘The enemy has bullets of steel, we have hearts of gold.’ I wanted to tape-record them to send home, even offered them vitamins, but they wouldn’t go for it.”

  Two small groups of prisoners clustered in the shallow water being lectured by one of their own. The leader of the bunch closer to us called out something and everyone tapped the shells they were holding in unison.

  I recognized the dit dahs instantly. “He’s teaching them Morse code.”

  Rafe smiled. “Ho Chi Minh University.”

  The other group was listening intently to a white-haired gent whose voice carried toward us as the wind shifted.

  “So what’s that course?” Robeson said.

  The airman turned his head to look before placing fresh disks of cucumber on his eyes and lying back, face to the sun.

  “Don’t know, but the prof’s Dr. Phan. Harvard grad. One-time rival of the president. Diem tossed him in some lockup in Saigon and had him tortured, after which he was sent here.”

  “Communist?” I said.

  “Who knows? The guards like to brag that if the prisoners aren’t when they get here, they will be when they’re finished with them.”

  “Charming,” Robeson said.

  “You see the big cemetery yet?” Rafe said. “A lot of prisoners get sent to the island just for disposal. Easier here—no visitors. No fuss, no muss. They do it real quiet, the French way. Groups of thirty. Three men at a time blindfolded and made to kneel in front of a firing squad. Ten trios, ten volleys, and the guards are done for the day.”

  Chapter Nine

  Watching the skin-and-bones inmates had made us both crazy hungry. In the village market Robeson bought us a snack of rice-and-pork pancakes, while I bargained for six cans of beer and some fresh fish to cook for supper. I waved away the lady pushing C-rations, instant coffee packets and Klim, the brownish-yellow shit alleged to be powdered milk. Soap and cigarettes we picked up at a tiny indoor market.

  Back at the beach hut, we deepened the cooking pit with the green entrenching shovels, which doubled as our cooking utensils, and fired up some brush and wood to roast the fish on the spades. Wrapped in palm fronds, they cooked fast. We scarfed the white flesh with our fingers as the sun dropped, taking the light with it. Robeson lay back, patting his stomach. He sipped his beer, hummed for a bit, and absently sang: “Big brunettes with long stelets / On the shores of Italee, / Dutch girls with golden curls / Beside the Zuyder Zee . . .” Embers from the cooking pit zigged skyward.

  On the side of the hut hung an Australian shower bag filled with water warmed by the day’s sun. I wet down and lathered. Robeson sacked out on the sand. I rinsed off and lay in the hut to drift off to the sound of the surf.

  When we got up, it was night. Low tide. We took off our dog tags, put on olive-drab T-shirts, and cut the legs off our spare fatigues to make shorts. Clovis taped down his grandfather’s gold bracelet so it wouldn’t flash. I applied charcoal from the cooking pit to my face so I wouldn’t glow in the dark. I streaked my bare ears, neck, arms and legs, and handed the charred stick to Robeson. He dabbed the tip of his nose. Big joke.

  We slipped out of our hut and walked west through the surf. The faint ocean breeze cooled my sunburned neck, and my skin tingled with relief. The night was moonless so we cast no shadows. We were moving near blind except for starlight. A campfire flickered in the dunes beside a derelict French bunker made of concrete. A lone sentry slept on its roof under the riot of stars. More soldiers lay in hammocks inside the eroding structure, made visible by a lantern. We slipped by, fifty yards distant, keeping to the shallow surf, and pressed on for a few minutes before turning inland. We came upon a black-and-white sign on a post and used our red-lensed flashlight to read it: something-something Cấm Vào — entry prohibited.

  Once we reached the tree line, the foliage made the dark so impenetrable we stumbled the whole way to the cemetery. Now there were four fresh graves at the bottom of the slope. We risked using the flashlight again to make sure the first in the row was the one marked as Tam’s, and set to digging on our knees with our short shovels.

  “Funeral directors do not dig graves personally, Sarge. If my granddaddy seen me doing this,” Robeson panted, “he’d downright expire.”

  “Shh. You hear something?” I said.

  Robeson paused. “I hear ocean is all. Stop fretting. Nobody here’s stirring.”

  We resumed digging. “Granddaddy, he had this showroom full of fine wooden coffins. Me and my brother liked to play in there, and in the embalming room. Strictly forbidden to mess with the pumps and tubes and syringes. Did anyway, of course. Right in the middle of his showroom Granddaddy had this extra-fancy casket he kept filled with water, to demonstrate his boxes were tight as ticks. One time my brother and me dumped in these real ugly catfish we caught. Our Gramps opened the lid for some new widow and them fish set her to screamin’ . . .”

  We dug a foot deeper. The smell of decay grew stronger. Flesh rotted fast in the tropics. I pinched my nose shut. “Damn, he’s ripe.”

  Robeson tied his green T-shirt over his nose and mouth. Our shovels soon dug into something unmistakably fleshy. Taking quick shallow breaths through our mouths, we scraped the dirt away from the corpse.

  “Damnation,” Robeson said, holding his nose. “No legs, no arms.”

  “What the fuck,” I said. “No head.”

  Robeson shone the red light over the body. We’d uncovered the putrid diseased carcass of a hellish-looking pig.

  Robeson said, “I’m gonna throw up or dump a deuce.” He made a retching noise and disappeared with his shovel into the dark. Robeson was very particular about what he called bathroom etiquette.

  I backed away from the grave to get upwind of the rotting flesh and lay on the ground, wishing I could light a cigarette against the stench. The breeze blowing in from the sea chilled the sweat along my back.

  “Dừng lại!”

  A light blinded me. Not five feet away stood a scrawny beanpole of a sentry, shouting. Eyes huge and barking orders in Vietnamese, he leveled his rifle at the crazy grave robber.

  Did he want me to stand up? Raise my arms? I sat up slowly. He screamed louder, wailing like a banshee, clutching the rifle stock tight against his shoulder.


  “Easy, easy,” I said, heart pounding. I extended my hands toward him so he’d see they were empty, but that only aggravated him. Whatever he wanted, he was furious I wasn’t giving it to him.

  “Đụ má mày,” he growled—motherfucker.

  A thunk, metal on bone, knocked him to his knees. A second blow from Robeson’s shovel flattened him. If the little fuck’s head hadn’t been attached, Clovis would’ve knocked it right out of the park.

  “Holy Hannah,” he said, down on his hands and knees, sucking wind. “Where the hell did he come from?”

  I crawled over to the prostrate guard, grabbed his rifle, and groped him for other weapons.

  “Goddamn.” Robeson drew a shaking arm across his sweaty face.

  The sentry’s eyes had gone moon-white inside his head. I felt his neck artery to check his pulse.

  Robeson gulped air. “We’d better ease on outta here before he comes to.”

  “No rush,” I said.

  Robeson slid to his knees. “What—? No,” he pleaded, in a whisper. “He ain’t.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jesus. I killed him?”

  “Looks like.”

  “What are we gonna do? We gotta report this.”

  “No way.”

  “But I’m a cop.”

  “Fucking right you’re a cop. You wanna bunk down in that crap-hole of a prison and grind turtle shells into teargas until somebody gets around to dealing with us? If the inmates or the guards don’t do it first? Give me a hand.”

  We rolled the dead sentry into the grave on top of the pig, tossed his rifle in after him, and replaced the dirt, making sure to scatter any extra bulges and blur our footprints. Breathing rapidly, we snuck back down to the shoreline, angling our tracks into the surf like we were headed in the opposite direction. Once in the water, we turned around and waded along the beach, past the French bunker, back to our patch.

  We sat on the shallow floor of the South China Sea under the huge starlit sky, driving the spades into the sand to scrape away the stench, then tossed them toward the fire pit. I retrieved our bar of soap and we bobbed in the surf, scrubbing ourselves clean.

  “Better get in the hut,” I said to Robeson as we staggered out of the water. “They’re bound to start looking.”

  Robeson slumped on the sand and didn’t answer.

  “Clovis,” I said, “we can’t be out here all night. We gotta sleep.”

  “I can’t, man.” Robeson’s voice wavered. “I . . . I can’t.”

  “What’s your problem? You got sand in your pussy or something? Move your hind end, damn it.”

  I pulled him to his feet, marched him to our hut, and shoved him inside. We stripped off our wet clothes and hung them on pegs. I ate some of the fish we’d cooked and lay down, totally punched out. Robeson slouched in the doorway, looking out into the night.

  “Be strong in the Lord,” he said, “in the power of His might. Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may stand against the wiles of the Devil.”

  “You’re worryin’ me, Clovis,” I said.

  “The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth.”

  “You talking about me?”

  “Only if your name’s God.”

  Chapter Ten

  We spent most of the morning sitting on the tarmac at the airstrip, hoping hard for aircraft—any aircraft—going to the mainland. Nothing arrived, nothing left. The waiting was driving Robeson nuts. Did I think they’d found him. Did I think they were looking for us. He grew increasingly convinced we’d be arrested any minute. I tried to calm him down but there wasn’t much I could say. I recognized the demons circling his heart. There was no undoing what he’d done.

  A chopper landed to pick up some tanned Navy officers humping scuba gear and we begged our way on board, volunteering to sit in the open doorway by the gunner. The pilots took us to nine thousand feet to cool their beer and we clutched ourselves, hands jammed into our armpits, trying to stay warm. They got us as far as Vung Tau on the coast, where we lucked into a jump to Saigon on a C-47 transport and landed at Tan Son Nhut just before three.

  “Well, that was fuckin’ productive,” I grumbled, as we queued for a taxi outside the terminal.

  “Productive? Shit, I killed a guy! I never killed anyone before. Ever.”

  “That was an accident. It just happened.”

  “It didn’t ‘just happen.’ I bludgeoned him dead,” he said loudly.

  “Shut the fuck up,” I snapped. “Don’t say another word ’bout this—not goddamn ever.”

  “We don’t tell Captain Deckle?”

  “You lookin’ for a court-martial? Stockade time? Booking into a first-class penitentiary?”

  “They’re gonna find him.”

  “So what?” I said. “Maybe you’ve noticed, this place is full of dead slopes.”

  “Just another yellow nigger, huh?”

  He’d topped the guy but now he was pissy with me like I’d made him do it. I wanted to hammer him but thought better of it. He was scared and angry, skewered by guilt.

  “Listen,” I said. “At some point in the future you’ll mean to do somebody. That sentry wasn’t it. You weren’t looking to kill him. You were saving my ass. The shovel hit something that shorted out his head, is all. Now shut up about it or we’ll both be in deep shit.”

  Robeson crossed his arms, chin on his chest, unconvinced. A taxi took us on a silent ride to our boss, to report our progress—or lack thereof. I shot Robeson a don’t-you-say-a-fucking-thing look as we got out, but as soon as we sit down in front of the captain, he immediately spills his guts about the cemetery and the sentry, like the man was a priest.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God.” Deckle leapt to his feet. “You did not—you did not just confess to that. Fuckin’ A.”

  Deckle’s career was swirling down the crapper before his eyes.

  “Whatta we do?” I said, watching mine swirl away with his.

  “Nothing,” Deckle shot back and stood over me. “You damn well do nothing. You say nothing, you seen nothing.” He bent low to get in my face, hands on his knees. “You hear me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He turned to Robeson. “Stick it back in the tube. Got it?”

  Robeson sat silent, eyes downcast.

  “Verstehe, Sergeant?”

  Robeson’s chin rose slowly. “Yes. Yes, sir.” Deckle kept his eyes fixed on Robeson—hard.

  “You get a line on our missing boy, Cap?” I said, trying to get Deckle off Robeson’s case. I flipped open my notebook.

  Deckle returned to his chair behind his carved desk and consulted his notes. “On the phone you said Tam was delivered by Air America. So I called the Assistant Director at the USAID Office of Public Safety, who refers me to the Vietnamese Directorate of Rehabilitation, which sends me to their Director of Corrections, who . . .”

  “How did you keep all that straight, sir?” Robeson said, composing himself a little.

  “Wasn’t supposed to,” the captain muttered. “Finally the Director of Corrections passes me off to his American babysitter,” Deckle said. “A guy I actually knew. So I thought I’d finally lucked out. He manages to trace Tam from military field police over to municipal police in Da Nang, and finally to CIO, their Central Intelligence Organization. Who also claimed to know nothing.”

  “Flamin’ hell,” I said. “What a fucking runaround. Where have they stashed this dude?” I sure as shit hoped Tam hadn’t ended up in one of Diem’s prisons that specialized in tying detainees in impossible positions with barbed wire, or burying them up to their necks in sand as the tide was coming in. Those wardens weren’t going to be offering tours of any vegetable gardens you wanted to know about.

  “No telling.” The captain seemed resigned. “He’s one of theirs,” he said. �
�A Vietnamese national. We can’t do anything about that. They could have him squirreled away anywhere.”

  I was beginning to get the picture. “Tam’s got something the Vietnamese need to know real bad, or something they’re hot for us not to know.”

  Deckle popped a pill and swallowed it dry. This wasn’t territory he was comfortable messing with. I eyed him.

  “No matter who’s holding him,” I said, “we need whatever they got out of the guy about the Red Queen and Unit Eight.”

  “Hah,” Deckle groused. “Don’t hold your breath.”

  “We got an important question for the man, sir.”

  I broke the news to our boss about the language dilemma. Was her likely target the old American Fox or the Americans’ Old Fox?

  “Jesus,” Deckle said. “The Americans’ Old Fox has got to be Diem. But who’s the old American Fox? If they wanted another shot at McNamara, they had their chance when he was here ‘fact-finding’ last month.”

  “And given the less-than-encouraging facts, I doubt he’s coming back anytime soon.” I knew this would piss off Deckle, but I was too tired to care. “Harkins is about the only one who thinks the war is ‘well in hand.’”

  “What about Harkins, then?” Robeson asked. “Our senior military advisor would make a helluva prize.”

  “The VC approach to Harkins seems to run more toward plastique,” I said, reminding him about the blown-out wall at Harkins’s HQ.

  Deckle agreed. “General Harkins would be a much tougher close-range target, even for her. Lodge is new, he’s the top American in-country, and he can’t stop himself from parading around in public. If it’s an Old American Fox she’s after, my money’s on Lodge. So which Old Fox is she more likely to be after—our ambassador or their president?”

  Robeson bit his lip. “You’d think with potential targets like their president or our new ambassador they’d welcome our help instead of playing keep-away with the only informant.”

  “They don’t share,” I said. “The VBI’s only too happy to have our bulletproof vests and lie detectors and riot guns, and brag about the state-of-the-art crime lab CIA built for them. But ask ’em for information and they’re quick to tell you to fuck off, they’re a sovereign nation.”