Half of the bar patrons unholstered their weapons. Some began firing into the roof. The bar-women were screaming. The midgets had revived Cyclopa and were helping her to her feet, their beady eyes wide with fear. Uncle Sam was holding a large Bowie knife.
“What in the goddamned Sam Hill is going on over there, people? Gearheardt, you better answer me, boy.”
Everyone screamed at the microphone at the same time. Except for Geepster, who took aim and blasted it to kingdom come. There was moment’s silence, and then sound exploded to a new and painful level.
Meanwhile, Gon had pulled out the elastic band of the raving Butty’s panties and was leering at her butt. He caught my eye and grinned. A soldier slugged him, and he fell into Geepster, who turned and whacked the soldier, which set off a chain reaction of slugging. Uncle Sam was slashing at knees to beat the band.
I saw Hoche slouched over the table, muttering into the top of a beer bottle. He was why I had come to Hanoi, and he was why I was still sitting in this crappy bar. I lifted him to his feet and began walking him to the door. He was light as a feather and didn’t resist.
The street was deserted. In the darkness I could just make out Hoche’s Corvette. I walked him to it, opened the driver’s side door, and dumped him behind the wheel. The car seemed to be the final thumb in the eye of the American soldier. Behind me I heard the bar door open and I drew my 9mm PPK. It felt good to finally have it in my hand.
Gearheardt marched toward me, Giap in front of him. He had a giant pistol firmly against the back of the fuming general’s head.
Gearheardt leaned down, “Tell me about ‘kill all America,’ you little shit.”
“Colonialism all dead. America live memory. Think France. Think British.”
“Think dead, you murdering bastard,” Gearheardt said as he dragged him toward the yellow Mustang, evidently feeling as I did about the communists’ use of American sports cars. “You’re going to get to be one of those millions of your countrymen that you don’t mind losing.” He opened the door of the car and forced Giap into the backseat.
I heard someone scream “New seatcovers never mind” just as Hoche began to stir. My pistol bothered his temple, and he brushed at it with a weak hand.
“I Prince Alber’ his can. Give me phone. I Tet his ass to Sunday.” His opened his eyes. They were cold as a reptile’s. “No shoot me. Take Butty back. Go home.”
His head dropped again and, after a large belch, he threw up in his beard. I put my pistol back against his temple.
I had a vision of the 9mm slug entering the chamber as I began to squeeze the trigger. “Tet his ass” zinged around my schizoid cranium. Nothing clicked. No bouncing ball settled in a red or black pocket. I should have a vision of this act meaning something, accomplishing something.
When I looked up, Gearheardt was backing out of the Mustang, holding Giap’s long pistol. Fire jumped at least a foot from the end of the barrel. I heard a scream from the backseat. Gearheardt fired twice more. Then he calmly pointed the pistol at the hood of the Mustang and pulled the trigger three times. He tossed the pistol into the car through the window and turned to me, smiling.
“Is this fun?” he asked.
The door to the Blue Daisy burst open, and one of the Russians rushed out. His wide, ugly tie glowed in the thin light of the Hanoi street. I aimed my pistol at the tie.
“Not so fast, Captain. Unless you don’t want a ride to the airport.”
“Gunny! Where in the hell did you get that tie?” Gearheardt yelled.
“Gon Norea isn’t going to be able to hold everybody in there much longer, Captains. I suggest we didi our asses over to his Fiat and get!” He grabbed my arm and began pulling me along. As we passed the Corvette, he looked through the windshield, and looked back at me for just a moment. Gon’s shitty little pretend car was parked across the street. I felt like downs at a circus as we all tried to get in at once. The engine sputtered and coughed and we pulled away. White smoke, or steam, rose from the hood of the Mustang. I couldn’t see the Corvette from my spot in the backseat of the Fiat and I really didn’t want to look.
The door to the Blue Daisy burst open. All three of us turned and pointed our guns. But it was Cyclopa, a midget under each arm. She ran toward the car.
“Take midgets. Take midgets to America,” she yelled.
The Fiat engine screamed and we rocketed up to about twenty-five miles an hour, leaving her in our exhaust. She dropped the midgets and extended her finger. Uncle Sam threw his Bowie knife. It clanged in the dark street behind us.
“I don’t want to complain, Gunny, but weren’t there any other cars you might have chosen?” Gearheardt asked.
The gunny laughed. “Not to worry, Captain. The aircraft we’re taking isn’t going to leave without us.” He looked back at me and then back to the road. “The fix is in. My Russian buddies have taken care of everything. They’re back there holding your friends at bay for you. And I got the vodka franchise from Singapore to Vientiane. By the way, you can fly an Ilyushin, can’t you? Old twin-engine job. I’m not sure what model it is. I don’t know much about airplanes.”
“They haven’t made a plane I can’t get airborne, Gunny. Who are these Russians—”
“Gunny, what will happen to Barbonella?” If Gearheardt didn’t care, I did. Somehow we were supposed to be part of her plan. Now she was half dressed in a crap bar after midnight in Hanoi surrounded by North Vietnamese, treacherous Cubans, and a sexually confused, beer-franchise-deprived Brit.
Gearheardt spoke up before the gunny replied. “I think Gon has his nose sufficiently up her butt, Jack. Or she may marry the Second Regiment of the People’s Army.”
“Don’t go all sentimental on me, Gearheardt. I’m just saying, you insensitive prick, that we might have—”
Gearheardt turned around in the seat. In the dark I couldn’t see his face. “Jack, I’m just saying that no one is going to shoot prime tits and twat if she plays her cards right. She knows how to take care of herself.” He turned back to the front.
“Uhh-hmm.” I was beginning to get deeply depressed as I watched and listened to Gearheardt work himself up to highly manic. If he’d had one, Gearheardt would have lit up a large cigar. If I’d been a real CIA agent, I would’ve been chewing on a cyanide pill. I had accomplished exactly nothing.
As we approached the Hanoi airport I was dimly aware of Gunny Buckles filling Gearheardt in on his adventures in Hanoi. He had been able to play the visiting Russian very easily, as the Asians were not quick to question Westerners who seemed to have a purpose in Hanoi. The Russians that the gunny had hooked up with really didn’t give a damn one way or another.
The airport was lightly guarded. The gunny had no trouble getting the little car through the gate and up to the side of the aircraft. As Gearheardt and I climbed aboard, the gunny hung back.
“Get in, Gunny!” I yelled as we made our way to the cockpit. I scrambled into the co-pilot’s seat beside Gearheardt and stuck my head out of the small side window. “What do you think you’re doing? Get in here!”
I saw the gunny give a lazy salute. As the engines popped and sputtered alive under the expert hand of Gearheardt, the gunny smiled and began directing us with his arms, indicating the way to the runway. He yelled something that was lost as Gearheardt gave power to the engines and we began to roll.
“Can you tell what he’s saying, Gearheardt?”
“He said, ‘See you in Danang.’ He already told me that he didn’t want to go to the Philippines with us.”
“Is that where we’re heading? The Philippines?”
“Promised the President that no matter what, we’d meet him in the Cave Bar in Olongopo. He’s probably got his fat ass, no disrespect intended, on Air Force One right now.” He was comfortable in the cockpit of the small Russian cargo aircraft, flicking switches and turning dials as we taxied to the runway. He brought the hand mike to his mouth as we turned onto the end of the runway.
“Hanoi tower
, Narsworthy One requests permission for an immediate takeoff from your pissant country. Sayonara, motherfuckers.” He applied full power and we were airborne before we reached the middle of the field, our wheels barely clearing a flatbed truck carrying Brits, tits, midgets, five-foot generals, a Cuban in a Kotex, and an old man with puke in his beard. They were firing every imaginable weapon at us.
I felt sad as I watched the frustrated Cyclopa hold the midgets toward us. Why did she want to get rid of two perfectly good Chinese midgets so bad?
Gearheardt was elated. “Man the gunnels, men, they’re loading the M-6 Midget Launcher.” He laughed. “Nam-a-rama!”
Which I suppose was about right.
We made a climbing right turn into the dawn showing on the eastern horizon. But instead of leveling off, Gearheardt continued the turn until we were heading back to the field. He shoved the nose of the airplane over and dove at the tower, pulling up at the last moment just as we saw little people abandoning the tower platform.
Then we made another hard turn and headed east, Gearheardt trimming and adjusting as he taught himself the vagaries of the ancient communist aircraft.
“You sitting on your hands all morning, Jack, or do you want to give me some help here? See if you can find any kind of manual. A map would be helpful. Take your mind off your troubles.”
I searched the cockpit, went back into the cabin, returned and strapped in. “Not much,” I said.
We leveled off at ten thousand feet. Gearheardt set the engines at cruise power, gently manipulating them until their roar was without audible conflict.
After a few minutes, I let out the breath I had been holding ever since I had grabbed Hoche and dragged him out of the club.
“I didn’t kill him, you know.”
Gearheardt made a minor adjustment and listened to the engines for a moment.
“Yep, I know.”
I looked at him. “What do you mean you know? Gearheardt, you bastard—”
“Take a look at your PPK, Jack. Pull back the slide and tell me if you see a firing pin. I assume when Whiffer brought back our weapons, they had already been fixed.”
“But, how did you … when did you—”
“I found out just before you went off half-cocked and grabbed old Hoche. Figured if I’d yelled at you that your pistol wasn’t working, that might have been a little embarrassing. So I just grabbed that Number One Vietnam Hero and followed you out.” Gearheardt looked over at me and grinned. “Not much for planning are you, Jack?”
I was hardly listening, trying to figure out what I had done. Gearheardt went on.
“I took the old pistola from Number One Vietnam Hero, so I could back you up.”
Silence in the cockpit except for the comforting rumble of the engines. I felt sick to my stomach. I wanted a cigarette.
“So you just wasted Giap and let Hoche go? Why would you do that if you knew I couldn’t kill him?”
Gearheardt made more maddeningly minor engine adjustments. Ahead of us the coast appeared below, the new sun touching the white edge of the shore.
“Nope. I didn’t kill him.” I couldn’t tell from his voice what he was feeling, regret or remorse. “Never does your career any good to put a bullet in someone’s head,” he went on. “Not up close, anyway.”
He looked toward me. “I made him shit himself though. That first round went between his legs. Then I blew a couple of holes in his white Naugahyde interior. He won’t be tear-assing around Hanoi with that engine either.” He paused. “I probably should have shot the little commie. No right to drive a Boss Mustang.”
The ocean below us was dark, whitecaps only visible where the rising sun broke through the high clouds here and there. Gearheardt put the aircraft in a gentle right turn, heading south toward clearer weather and supposedly friendlier shores. The sun rose to a height that gave gold to the billowing clouds on the horizon.
Finally Gearheardt spoke. “Did you pull the trigger, Jack?” When I didn’t answer or look at him, he continued, as if he didn’t want to hear my answer. “Wouldn’t have made any difference you know. And no one knows but you.”
I opened my mouth to say something but closed it again. Gearheardt reached out and tapped the glass on the sticking engine heat gauge, then flipped open the cowling door to cool the engine more. He watched the gauge and after a moment, flipped closed the cowling switch. He leaned back in his seat.
“Jack, I know you like a book. You’re sitting over there wondering if you did your duty. Aren’t you? Were you prepared to kill Hoche for your country? That’s what you’re thinking.”
It wasn’t. I wasn’t sure that Gearheardt would understand, but what I had really been thinking was, “Screw the bastards who wanted me to kill Ho Chi Minh and take the fall. No one had the balls to just tell me to kill him. And he had asked us to call him Hoche.”
Gearheardt leaned toward me and pointed ahead and down. It was an aircraft carrier. From our position we could see the launch of jets from its deck. I searched the sky and found the fighters that had already launched were bending in a shallow turn so the wingmen could join up. Against the low sun a flight of four Phantoms climbed toward us. The sun hit their wings and flashed against the dark water. The best fighter pilots in the world.
A second pig flew out of Gearheardt’s nose as he said, “C’est magnifique mais ce n’est pas la guerre.”
I found my sunglasses in my jacket pocket and put them on before I turned and raised my eyebrows to him.
“Marshall Bosquet on the self-destruction of the British at the Charge of the Light Brigade,” Gearheardt said.
For a moment I wondered if the Phantoms would rise up to shoot us down. Certainly the airborne command ship had us on radar and had tracked us out of North Vietnam. I was calm. I didn’t care, for one thing, and I figured if I mentioned it to Gearheardt he would say, “The fix is in.”
“This was a hell of a scheme you and the President cooked up, Gearheardt.”
“Jack, this little twerp country doesn’t even have toilet paper. And they need to keep their commie hands off of Saigon. Remember that. Hoche couldn’t leave well enough alone after the ‘Frog feast.’”
I rested my boot on the instrument panel, leaned back in my uncomfortable Russian chair and closed my eyes, daring myself to think about what lurked behind my lids.
Gearheardt spoke to me. “You want to take it, Jack?”
I shook my head. I wanted to think. I wanted to fully plumb the depths of my failures and insecurities. “No, thanks, Gearheardt. I’ll just let you keep it for a while.”
“Well, I was kind of hoping you knew how to get us to the Philippines.”
23 • Sucker-punched by the Pres
“It’s because she showers in her underpants, Jack,” Gearheardt said. He held out his hands and wrinkled his brow as if everybody should know that.
“I still don’t get it,” I said “Why would that make her the most popular girl in the bar?” forgetting that I was the one that had started the story in the first place.
The bars in Olongopo are considered by most military pilots to be among the most dangerous in the world. Gearheardt and I sat in the Cave sipping whiskey and watching the women. We had resolved not to indulge in womanizing, a promise that we made to ourselves when we were lost and running out of fuel in a thunderstorm over the South China Sea. We had also given up smoking, swearing, wearing loud socks, and talking ill of our superiors. In fact we had finally told God that if He would make a list appear in front of us, we would sign it without hesitation. When a list didn’t appear and we broke out of the storm and found the Cubi Point Naval Base in the Philippines, Gearheardt argued that the absence of a list was a sign from God that we were on our own and there was no deal. I finally got him to agree that we would not sin until after we met with the President. The whiskey was medicinal, Gearheardt successfully argued, since he didn’t really like it, but just used it to get inebriated.
The Shore Patrol treated us with some
suspicion after we landed. In fact, before we landed they threatened to shoot us out of the landing pattern. We called their bluff and made a reasonably good landing in the Russian airplane, taking out a row of runway lights and smashing into the fire truck, which helped slow us considerably after we found out that the Russians evidently didn’t believe in airplane brakes.
We left the base commander with a seriously throbbing temple vein. If Gearheardt hadn’t tried to pay for the damage to the fire truck with a bundle of North Vietnamese dong he found in our airplane, the interview might have been shorter.
“I’ll bet I can make him cry,” Gearheardt whispered to me as we were being led by a band of burly seamen into the base commander’s office.
He did. After jacking the poor guy around for a few minutes, Gearheardt requested a phone and got someone in the Pentagon to confirm that the President of the United States was meeting us in the Cave Bar, on his way to meet the president of South Korea. The Pentagon only knew because they had a flight plan for Air Force One, and they had loaded a case of nylons and lipstick on it, the President being from another era. It was during the discussion of where one would find nylons that the base commander more or less lost control. He seemed already a bit nervous about the President visiting his base. Careers are lost over lesser issues than the President getting clapped up or into a bar fight while under your jurisdiction.
“Just get out of my sight,” the captain said finally, dropping his head in his hands. Gearheardt wanted to wait around to hear him sob, but I pulled him away.
Tiptoeing up to the edge of our resolve while waiting for the President to show up, Gearheardt had asked the mama-san to point out the most popular girl. The girl was chubby, had frizzy black hair, beady eyes, and interior lineman legs. Her name was, the best I could make out, something like Lizzado.
“What do you think he’ll say?” I asked Gearheardt. “Do you think he knows what happened?”
“Who? The President? Who knows? He’s kind of a pisser. Not a bad guy really. Likes his troops.”
Nam-A-Rama Page 29
