But as much as he wanted to see the water market and canals of My Tho, Gregg knew that mostly he hated taking orders from JD. Being used like a sock puppet, with JD commanding the sock, always pissed him off. It made him want to do exactly the opposite of whatever JD told them to do, even on the outside chance it was for their own good. But if it was, how would they know, since he rarely deigned to tell them for what or why?
Gregg was about to ask Izzy for ideas when a couple of the guys who had left came back in and offered them a ride into town.
“Least we can do, Doc Del Mar,” said the lanky one who had called himself Dallas.
“That’s right.” The one called Bronx pointed the carved, clenched fist of his soul stick at Izzy. “The Bronx ain’t gonna desert a cool Brooklyn brother.”
Gregg and Izzy exchanged glances. Before Izzy could be a good Boy Scout and take a pass, Gregg said, “Hell, yeah, really appreciate it guys.”
Gregg wasted no time jumping into the back of the jeep Dallas was driving, Bronx riding shotgun up front. Izzy was slower to get in, next to Gregg, confirming his reluctance with a whispered, “You sure about this? If JD finds out, he’s going to be pissed.”
“Good. All the better if he sees us himself in town.”
Just as Dallas cranked the engine and hit the gas, out of the corner of his eye Gregg noticed the really messed up druggie hanging in the shadows of the building with two other guys. Most likely pushers. He had done enough drug-group counseling as a therapist to know when the junkies came out the pushers would be outside waiting, like jackals at a kill.
Although it wasn’t rainy season in this particular region, several drops hit the canvas roof and Dallas turned up the transistor radio hanging over the rear view mirror. While they sang along with CCR wanting to know “Who’ll Stop the Rain?” a deuce and a half truck pulled out from the clinic right in front of them. Their little caravan hadn’t gone far when the shriek of a rocket tore through the air.
An enormous, explosive concussion hit, and the ground shook beneath the jeep, shrapnel banging the sides and hurtling in all directions. Then another huge blast shook the ground, and what had to be a big, jet-fuel tank sent up a gigantic, orange-red fireball and monstrous black ball of smoke into the sky.
Rockets exploded everywhere. Outgoing artillery started up. The air turned to sonic thunder. The deuce and a half in front of them slammed to a stop and Gregg watched in horror as Dallas swerved in response, so close he was certain they would be crushed against the truck—
They came to a screeching halt. Nobody moved. Then Gregg heard screaming and registered that there were people in the back of the truck. Their jeep had escaped by mere inches and Izzy and Bronx were already scrambling out. As they raced to help whoever was trapped in the truck, Gregg leaned over the seat to grab Dallas and was in the midst of saying, “Great job, man, let’s go—” when he noticed a piece of splintered wood protruded from Dallas’ temple, like the end of an arrow aimed through an apple.
Dallas wasn’t moving.
Gregg shook his arm. “Dallas?”
A trickle of blood dripped off the jagged tip and onto Gregg’s hand.
“Fuck!” Gregg hurled the profanity skyward and leaped from the jeep just as CCR finished their tune and another blast hit. While Izzy and Bronx helped some guy who landed wrong off the ground, Gregg raced to the truck driver’s side and threw open the door. He wasn’t sure if the driver was dead or just unconscious, but the soldier next to him was moaning. Gregg yelled for help and Bronx came running to assist. He managed to extricate the wounded passenger while Gregg pulled the driver out, praying more flying projectiles wouldn’t do them both in before he could at least determine if the guy was breathing.
He was. Izzy showed up then, yelling, “Let’s move!” and between him and Gregg they half-dragged, half-carried the driver back towards the clinic and the safety of sandbags and bunkers. Bronx was just ahead of them, his shoulder supporting his own charge who was conscious enough to stumble along. Gregg took a quick look back to ensure they hadn’t left anyone behind.
They had. Dallas.
Then another round came down, right on top of the deuce and half. The concussion was so intense it dominoed them all to the ground.
Gregg lay there, shaking with adrenaline. His ears were ringing. He could feel the billowing heat licking over them just as another BOOM vibrated through his body, barely audible with his ears ringing ever louder while he saw their jeep catch fire.
“Stay here!” he yelled at Izzy, and realized he couldn’t hear his own voice. Even as he prayed he hadn’t gone deaf it seemed like a selfish prayer. There was a family in Texas who would soon get the news their son had died. He had to get Dallas out and sent home so his family could properly grieve their loss. It was important he did that for them, did it for Dallas, and did it for himself because it was the right thing to do.
Just as Gregg was getting to his feet the jeep blew and there was nothing left of Dallas to send home. There was only the brightness of hot, jagged metal coming straight towards Gregg’s face.
Gregg dove back to the ground. What the hell was he doing here? Why had he come back to this nightmare? His personal nightmare in Del Mar suddenly didn’t seem so daunting. He’d forgotten so quickly what this really was like, being in war.
The ground quit shaking. The flying projectiles stopped flying. The ringing in his ears continued but remained at the same buzzing hum. He thought he could hear blips of distant yelling and screaming, and maybe that was the “All Clear” siren going off; which was no guarantee of it being clear at all, since it often proved an invitation for more attacks once the troops came out of their bunkers to claim the wounded.
He watched Bronx slowly get to his feet. And just then he felt another blast and absorbed another BOOM.
Gregg only saw Bronx standing there for a moment. The piece of broken metal that sliced into him was so big, sharp and fast that it completely cut him in half.
Bronx remained there for too long with his upper torso gone. His severed remains fountained onto the wounded passenger he had been helping. Then what was left of Bronx toppled over with a wet smack on the road where they had been driving minutes before.
Gregg looked over at Izzy. His arms were wrapped over his head. The unconscious driver had come to and was making the sign of the cross while his mouth moved as if he was praying out loud, but Gregg’s ears were still ringing too loud to hear any words.
Gregg felt a hand grip his shoulder. He hadn’t been aware of anyone coming to help them, hadn’t heard anything but the buzzing in his ears overriding what he presumed was the faint litany of prayers. But now he could smell the distinct perfume of marijuana wafting on the acrid fumes of burning wood, metal, human remains and gasoline. And when he looked up there was the drugged-out mess he had last seen making a deal to get his next fix.
The mess shook his ratty head and said something.
“What? I can’t hear you!”
Druggie moved his hands then, signing, Can you hear this?
Yes, Gregg signed back. He was fairly fluent, having worked with deaf children in his residency.
Then wake the fuck up, signed the doper. And the next time I say don’t leave? Don’t. Leave. You aren’t in California anymore, Scarecrow. Use your brain and remember you’re in a damn war.
Chapter 13
He’d had to reinvent himself so many times on assignments like this that JD had lost track of who, what, and where he had become over the years. Sometimes he rather enjoyed it, entering into a completely new life. Other times, he couldn’t wait to get back into his own skin. He had begun training when he was still a young boy at the monastery and immediately loved pretending to be someone he imagined himself to be. It was like being an actor, only with real props and real people who didn’t realize they were part of the play.
But he had been doing this, playing these roles, for a very long time now. Perhaps that’s why he had recently tired of the game, the
constant pressure and challenges, and felt this unfamiliar urgency to get out before it was too late, to build a life with Kate, have a house, adopt some kids, learn how to mow a lawn.
All the things someone like Gregg would take for granted. At least before getting shipped over here. Looking at him now, with his all-American good looks, his all-American degrees, and all-American sensibilities, albeit tinged with a newly acquired cynicism about the way the world worked, JD could not imagine a species more different from himself.
And yet, maybe he was becoming more like Gregg and Izzy than he wanted to admit. Otherwise, why would he have risked blowing his cover and run like the wind in his junkie’s disguise to make sure they were still in one piece? He never would have done that before he met them. He wondered how much they had to do with what they would probably call an “identity crisis.”
Now that the “All Clear” had sounded twice and he detected no threats in the immediate vicinity, and now that he was assured Gregg and Izzy had escaped the harm inflicted in every direction around them, JD signed, You and Izzy get this guy up and head to the unit. I’ll take care of the others and follow behind you. Okay? Now get going.
JD didn’t wait for an agreement, signed or vocalized. As he staggered over to move the split torso to the side of the road for pick-up, Izzy and Gregg moved past him with their wounded charge.
Even without anyone else to watch, JD made a show of struggling to stay on his feet while he got the last survivor to his, then shuffled forward, slurring as they went, “Hey, man, got any good shit to sell?”
His first assignment in the art of disguise had been as a shoeshine boy. The monks had prepared him in advance by teaching him how to become a mirror, which he practiced for endless hours at school before they sent him to the Raffles Hotel in Singapore. A senior brother shadowed him, providing advice and basic necessities in private while he focused on what was a crucial and highly dangerous mission that required a young boy who could pass for being no older than ten.
To become a mirror he watched a specific shoeshine boy at the Raffles Hotel. Initially they did not look much alike beyond their size, but he and the senior brother managed a close proximity with a coloring agent applied to his skin, some discreet make-up to his face, with particular attention given to the focal point of his eyes—eyebrows threaded to make his eyes appear more slanted, brown contacts. He watched how the boy walked, talked, gestured and ate. He watched and mirrored how he talked with clients and his boss. He cut his hair the same as the boy and he twisted his left ear like the boy and blinked his eyes when he talked like the boy. He watched how the boy dressed and how his shirt had a cleverly sewn hidden pocket and how fast his hands could move when he stole. Then he begged the boy to let him learn and begged the boy to show him how to shine the shoes; and he did all the boy’s work and then he became the boy’s best helper; and then he gave the boy a sum of money to go away for a while and the boss didn’t even notice he was not the boy.
Now he had the boy’s job. Then, when the man who always wanted a “special” shine from the boy in his suite at Raffles came, he could not tell the difference from the boy he had so enjoyed the last time. He was so at ease and eager for his pleasure that he sent his bodyguard away in order to enjoy his “shine” in private. JD made sure it was his last.
Next he had been a cook’s helper at a fine hotel in Hong Kong for three months, waiting for a certain regular guest to arrive. It was possible to use a kind of venom as an ingredient in the favorite dish of the distinguished guest.
He had several more assignments that in conventional schools would be termed an internship, or perhaps apprenticeship, and in this particular area of study—as in the strategic game of Go—he excelled. It made up for the areas in which he struggled. Growing up in his brother’s shadow wasn’t easy. Zhang had excelled at everything. But Zhang, the step-brother who had adopted him, who believed in him in a way his own father never had, instilled such belief in an unwanted boy that he actually started to believe in himself.
Eventually he would become a drover on a huge sheep station in Australia where the owner apparently died from the bite of an eastern brown snake. He became a horse wrangler, and a famous guest at the ranch was apparently pitched from what had always been a gentle horse and broke his neck. He had been a smelly goat herder, a carpenter’s assistant. He had worked in brothels. For some of these he worked for a long time, staying in character, and he practiced his language skills, becoming ever more nuanced in local idiom and tone. Often he had been handicapped; sometimes a crippled soldier or fisherman, or mentally slow.
He aspired to be among a class of people who were invisible. To become one of the unseen multitude, passed unnoticed by everyone every day and, most importantly, never remembered. In his anonymity among the unseen, he could observe and listen and then, when necessary, find the place and moment in time to strike, kill, and disappear.
His teachers and the abbot had gleaned the ways of death from various cultures and centuries of study. The Shaolin had been front and center. It was they who earned and suffered the fame and notoriety of doing the dirty work of imperial dynasty after dynasty. But it was the Shadow Monastery, unseen and unknown, that generation after generation silently toppled kingdoms, warlords, banks and now corporations and governments.
Indeed, his had been quite the education. And it wasn’t from USC.
When starting, the best strategy is to spread the pieces far apart and stretch them out, to encircle and attack the opponent, and thus win by having the most points vacant. The next best strategy emphasizes cutting off the enemy to seek advantage. In that case the outcome is uncertain and calculation is necessary to decide the issue. The worst strategy is to defend the borders and corners, hastily building eyes so as to protect oneself in a small area.
Huan Tan (c. 43 BC–28 AD), in Xin Lun
The Blood on the Thorn of the Rose
The Thousand Nights
My lessons at the monastery were hard. Everything was hard. It was hard to wake in the chill before dawn every morning and run. It was hard to be the smallest and weakest. It was hard to be the slowest in learning the ideograms and the calligraphy and the brush strokes. It was even hard to pull the bow to shoot the arrows. But it was especially hard to catch up to learning the slow and the fast choreography of the martial arts that the temple had created and honed and refined and kept secret for hundreds of years. Each of the monks was a lethal weapon in full daylight or in darkness. Indeed, many of our lessons were at night so we might learn to move silently like shadows over, through and under walls, gates, doors, windows—any small opening.
I had excellent teachers, the most silently renowned in all of Asia’s temples. They taught me to be like a rat slipping through any crack or hole; how to walk in absolute silence across wood, tatami, stone or straw. All the animals I had watched as a small child had skills I strove to emulate. Patience was imperative. It was only with patience that I learned to remain absolutely still, barely breathing, while my fellow monks passed by, not even aware of my scent for their finely tuned senses to perceive. The abbot had told me I would learn to creep through grass and jungle like a panther, move through windows quieter than moths’ wings, and pounce on my unsuspecting fellow acolytes from angles not expected. And I did. But always I walked into every lesson and every test at every level in the shadow of the memory of Zhang. Was it true what the monks said? That my brother could literally run up walls and over roof tops? That he was even able to fly through trees?
No matter how hard or how long I tried, I could never be that good. But I did try.
When I was eleven, I learned to track a panther. It was not for a student to ask why, but the reasoning was clear: anyone who can track a panther can easily track another human, and tracking other humans was essential to the work for which we were being trained. I have a story about tracking the panther but it is long and so it will wait. Suffice it to say that, were it not for Zhang following me unawares, I would be
missing a hand if not two, and quite possibly the rest of me would have been digested as well.
By the time I turned twelve, I had sufficiently proven myself to be taken to the abbot, who said I was ready for The Thousand Nights.
“The Lesson of the Thousand Nights” was not really a thousand nights. It only seemed that long. It was exactly 108 nights and one day more, and it was one of the required lessons to become a fully ordained monk. All the students had to overcome a number of ordeals in the course of their education, but this one was feared above all. Many students never returned to the school after being led into the caves, and rumor had it that when they emerged they had done so without their minds, for the darkness that lived in the cave devoured their sanity.
Would I lose my mind, too? Would I, too, never return to the monastery, which had become my true home? I would do anything to never return again to the house of my father, where I was not wanted by him, and where my mother had died.
The small lamps that had been prepared for my arrival flickered in the slow-moving air of the deep cave. One by one they went out. Each of the hundred lamps had a precisely different level of oil so that over the course of just three days and nights it became ever darker. This allowed my eyes to adjust, of course, but this kind of seeing was with eyes dependent on light. Soon, maybe within hours, there would be only darkness. At least I would have food and tea brought to me, except…never to the same place. This would force me to learn to see without my eyes while finding the tea and food—to “see” with my nose and ears and hands and skin and, according to my teacher, eventually my skin would see and so would my mind. I kept to the schedule and rhythm of the monastery because, far off, I could faintly hear and also feel the vibrations of the great bells. I also kept to the schedule because teacher said this would better enable my mind to keep itself in order and thus keep the fear at bay. The fear would be out there waiting for my mind to become weak. It lived in the dark of the cave.
UNKNOWABLE (Murder on the Mekong, Book 2) Page 11
