New Title 1

by Lestewka, Patrick

  The pilot gave Tripwire the thumbs-up before lifting off. As soon as the Huey gained altitude, small arms fire erupted from the glade. The door gunner answered with his M60.

  Tripwire hustled to rejoin his unit. Oddy flagged him down beneath a banana tree. The Sergeant pushed a cluster of small green bananas out of his face and said, “Charlie knows they’ve been trumped. They’re royally pissed.”

  Just then, AK-47 fire erupted from the trees. Tripwire spied a few camouflaged uniforms crouching along the darkened wood line.

  Tripwire said, “So what are we gonna do?”

  “What we always do, son.” Oddy smiled, his teeth stark against the black skin and streaks of olive-green lampblack. “Go to work.”

  So. The Magnificent Seven got to work.

  Sheltered beneath drooping fleshy mango leaves, Blackjack sniper Neil “Crosshairs” Paris scanned the enemy line through the iris of a Gewher scope, sighting down a soldier whose fatigues roughly matched the bark of the breadfruit tree he was perched in. Crosshairs’s silenced G3SG/1 sniper rifle made a tssst sound and the VC’s head snapped back in a mist of red. The corpse slumped over the branch like a noodle on a chopstick. Crosshairs was able to pick off two more before Charlie got wise.

  A wave of VC soldiers crept out of the jungle on their bellies, AK’s pushing down the elephant grass. Then they reached a semicircle of M-14 toe-poppers and Bouncing Betties Tripwire had strung fifty feet off Blackjack’s position. Panicked shouts were followed by a sequence of muffled explosions; these were followed by a clotted rain of earth and charred cloth and ribboned flesh and enough bone-confetti to outfit a ticker-tape parade.

  A second wave charged hard, releasing a pack of attack dogs before them. The dogs, starved and murderous, caught the insert team’s scent and rushed headlong, yellow teeth bared.

  Zippo rose up from a copse of bushes, thumbing the pilot light on his LPO-50 flame-thrower. “Run along, little doggies.”

  He loosed a whip of liquid flame that turned the dogs into canine fireballs. They ran through the grass in maddened, helpless circles, fur burned away, flesh melting like candle-wax. They ran in herky-jerk circles, biting at the flames crawling down their throats and igniting their lungs. The smell of them was horrid, a tire fire in July. Soon they lay down, all of them all at once, lay still as stones and burned to black smudges on the grass. Zippo receded into the bush before the Viets could draw a bead.

  Now the second wave found themselves with their asses hanging out, exposed in the middle of the field. Tssst: one of their number was thrown out of his boots, the back of his head exploding in a spray, a stream of blood plastering his face, executing a graceless backwards-somersault to land facedown in the grass.

  Gunner swung around the trunk of a moss-covered tree hefting a Stoner M63A1 light machine-gun. The Stoner’s .223-in hollowpoints punched through the VC soldier’s uniforms, blowing their combat jackets out in billowy bell-shapes. The exit holes cast a lingering pinkish mist and their faces contorted and they tried to scream, lungs filling with blood. Gunner slipped behind the tree as retaliatory fire slammed into it.

  While the remaining VC’s concentrated their fire on Gunner, Oddy and Slash jack-in-the-boxed from their hidey holes. Slash took two of the four soldiers out with textbook K-5 shots. Oddy’s first shot went high, blowing a crease in the top of the second-to-last soldier’s skull. He lowered his aim and drilled a slug straight into the man’s face, spewing cartilage and molars out the back of his head. He sighted down the M16’s barrel and squeezed off a pair of shots that destroyed the last soldier’s kneecaps, dropping him to the dirt, screaming.

  Eight-and-a-half minutes had passed since the Magnificent Seven touched down.

  They waited to see if the wounded soldier would draw any lingering comrades from cover. The man’s screams tapered to moans, then to whimpers and, finally, to a pitiful sort of sniffling.

  Oddy whistled. The insert members assembled on his position. The rest of the team covered Gunner and Slash while they humped out to retrieve the wounded soldier.

  The second stage of their mission was Recon. Intel reported Charlie was stockpiling firepower at a location near the village of Bu Von Kon. Blackjack was to locate the weapons cache and frag it, killing any and all VC between here and there.

  One question: Where were the weapons?

  “Answer,” Oddy said, once the Viet was secure. “Get on it.”

  Randy “Answer” Blondeau was twenty years old, tall and gangly with a mess of carroty curls tamped beneath his helmet. He looked like any other grinning, inoffensive adolescent who might be found wandering college campuses in Anytown, USA. Looks can be deceiving: Answer was Blackjack’s interrogator, a post at which he exhibited a terrifying proficiency.

  Answer knelt beside the wounded soldier. The Viet’s face held a simple geometry in profile, flat and sunken, faintly mongoloid. Mucous ran from his nostrils in webby strands, across his upper lip and down the sides of his mouth in a snotty Fu Manchu. The shock had him trembling like a Parkinson’s victim.

  Answer whispered in his ear. The Viet shook his head.

  Answer nodded slowly. Then, with equal slowness, he probed the index and pointer fingers of his left hand through the bloody hole in the soldier’s right pantleg, exploring the inner workings of the Viet’s shattered kneecap.

  The VC’s neck tendons bulged out, hands seizing handfuls of dirt.

  Answer’s fingers twitched inside the wound. He cocked his head to one side, as dogs sometimes do when curious or perplexed. The Viet thrashed, incapable of screaming, the pain a living, all-consuming entity.

  Answer pulled his fingers free. They were red to the knuckles. He whispered into the soldier’s ear again. The soldier told him something. “He says the cache is southeast, Sarge,” Answer told Oddy. “Ten, twelve klicks.”

  Crosshairs pointed his gun at the prisoner. “So what do we do with him?”

  “For damn sure he’s never walking again,” Tripwire said.

  Gunner said, “Call a med evac.”

  “Med evac for a hobbled Gook?” Zippo said.

  “Ever hear of a little something called the Geneva Convention, Zippo?”

  “Tell that to the poor fucks Charlie’s got rotting in tiger cages.”

  “Gunner’s right,” Oddy said. “The enemy poses no threat. Slash, get on the PRC and call in a—”

  Before Oddy could finish the med evac order, Answer unsheathed a K-Bar knife and stabbed the VC soldier in the neck.

  The man looked mildly bewildered, staring first at Answer and then somewhere beyond him, up into the sky, where a black raven circled. Answer pulled the knife out. Blood leapt from the wound, painting a thick red scar across his fatigue vest.

  “Jesus!” Tripwire shrugged off his explosives bandoleer and knelt beside the VC soldier, who was gurgling like an infant, unable to scream or cry out because of the blood spurting from the slit in his neck. Tripwire pressed Kotex pads to the gash but it was futile: the blood pushed through his fingers in thick rivulets, and within seconds the pads were soaked. The soldier grabbed at Tripwire’s sleeves, fingers clenching and unclenching like a panicked infant’s. He burrowed his head into Tripwire’s stomach, mouth opening and closing, as though he wanted to eat his way inside, tunnel in where it was warm and safe to die.

  Oddy knocked the knife from Answer’s hand. “The fuck you think you’re doing?” Gripping the scrawny interrogator’s shoulders, he slammed him up against a banana tree; the rough bark made dry scratchy noises, slicing Answer’s cheek. Oddy slapped his face once, twice, three times, forehand to backhand to forehand, the sound of black flesh on white flesh sharp as a starter pistol’s crack. “That’s not how we do things!”

  Answer appraised his Sergeant through half-lidded eyes. Thin streams of blood leaked from the corners of his mouth and down his face. He turned and spat a tooth into the dirt. “This is a warzone, Sarge,” he said. “Different rules apply.”

  Oddy yanked Answer forw
ard until their noses nearly touched. “Not in this unit. Not under my roof.” Up close, Oddy was struck by the blueness of the young interrogator’s eyes, a color somehow devoid of pity. Cold eyes, he thought. Cold, dead eyes. He thrust Answer backwards with a mixture of anger, revulsion, and—the emotion rising quick and unbidden—fear. Answer stumbled gracelessly, tripping over an exposed root, falling on his ass in a puff of red dust.

  “Do something like that again and we’ll have serious words, dogface.”

  Zippo came over and knelt beside Answer. He lowered the muzzle of his flame-thrower until the pilot light’s flame touched the sole of Answer’s Bata combat boot.

  “There’s fair and there’s fair,” he said as the pilot light burned into the boot’s rubberized sole, sending up tendrils of stinking black smoke. Answer did not move his foot. “That, my little friend, was not fair. We got to keep our heads, get me? Keep our heads, keep our shit hardwired, and maybe—just maybe—we get through this alive.”

  By now the flame had melted through the sole. The smell of bubbling rubber was joined by another, thicker smell reminding Crosshairs of sweet pork barbecue. Answer stared up at Zippo with those cold blue eyes, face a mask of composure. Zippo raised the flamer’s muzzle with a look halfway between bafflement and grudging respect.

  “As long as we’re on the same wavelength,” he said.

  “I’m tuning in on your signal,” Answer said softly. He tore a strip off his fatigues and tied it around his injured foot.

  Tripwire cradled the VC’s head as the man twitched through his death throes. The young man died quickly, quietly. Tripwire rolled the head off his lap and stood up. Low-hanging storm clouds moved over the horizon, blocking out the sun, etching the foothills in clean-edged darkness.

  Oddy said, “Let’s get humping.”

  — | — | —

  Excerpted from the Slave River Journal,

  April 9th, 1986:

  THREE RESEARCHERS MISSING

  IN NORTHWEST TERRITORIES

  “No Physical Evidence Found as of Yet,”

  — RCMP Spokesman Says

  By Michael Fulton

  Fort Simpson, NWT: A three-member expedition team sent to observe and record caribou migratory patterns in the territory surrounding Great Bear Lake has gone missing. The crew (statistician Carl Rosenberg, cartographer Bill Myers, and Lillian Hapley, another statistician) took off from the Fort Good Hope airport on April 7th in a Cessna 340-S ultralight plane piloted by Rosenberg. Contract workers for the Department of Natural Resources, the trio were scheduled to fly a circuit over Great Bear Lake and outlying areas, recording the movement of the dwindling caribou herds. The last radio communication came at 2:30 p.m., when Hapley radioed the DNR home base to report no caribou sighted. Sid Grimes, Spokesman for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, issued a statement that a search-and-rescue team is currently combing the presumed crash area, but as yet, “No physical evidence has been located…”

  — | — | —

  II.

  Slaughterhouse Five

  (1987)

  20 Years Later

  Daniel “Zippo” Coles—Execution Poet

  Vancouver, British Columbia.

  November 30th, 1987. 12:05 p.m.

  Picture this: you’re knee-deep in elephant grass, walking point somewhere between the Delta and the DMZ, and you can smell the fucking Gooks, smell their stink on the breeze, and fear crawls like fire ants at the back of your throat and you’re thinking, I’m here to change things, make things better, but all the while it’s you who’s changing, changing deep inside.

  Soldiers deal with this change in different ways.

  Me?

  I lit the pilot light of an LPO-50 flame-thrower, 50,000 BTUs of Gook-cooking power, and laid down a scar of flame that’d turn a village full of militant Zipperheads into roving, raving, Roman-fucking-Candles in a New York minute.

  Talk about your motherfucking catharsis.

  Gritty noonday sunlight streams through a west-facing bay window to fall across white satin sheets. I rub sleep-crust from my eyes and stand, naked, to survey the dull vista. Rain falls in endless gray sheets over a horseshoe-shaped metropolis ringing Queen Charlotte Sound. Vancouver’s mayor, a huckstering blowhard in a ten-gallon cowboy hat, proclaims the city to be “The Florida of Canada,” on account of its lack of snow. The comparison is ridiculous, like proclaiming the seagull the “Bald Eagle of Canada.”

  After showering and dressing I sit on the balcony, drinking a Carnation Instant Breakfast and reading the Globe and Mail. A story on page five incenses me: some of these new-wave fags are trying to contract AIDS. It seems there’s these homo-lifestyle magazines—Turdburgling Today or Modern Man-Ramming or I don’t know what the fuck—painting a rosy picture of the disease. You’ve got glossy photos of pillowbiters climbing mountains and hang-gliding, all of them thin on account of the AIDS cocktails giving them chronic diarrhea. So now the disease has become romanticized, the latest must-have accessory, and these fruits are falling all over themselves to catch it. There’s these clubs where AIDS-positive men—“gift-givers”—meet up with negs—“bug-chasers”—and then flounce off to shoot ass-darts, passing the disease.

  Pisses me the fuck off.

  You see, Canada’s got socialized medicine. So who do you think foots the bill for these butt-monkeys and their life-prolonging cocktails? That’s right: John Q. Public. Specifically, me. Motherfuckers. I mean, a bunch of ass-pirates want to off themselves, fine by me. Just have the common decency to ventilate your cranium with a .44 and spare us hard-working taxpayers the expense, huh?

  The telephone rings. I answer on the third. “You got Coles.”

  “Kawanami’s in from the airport.”

  “Where?”

  “Princess Gardens. Penthouse suite.”

  “How much?”

  “Fifty large for Kawanami, twenty anyone else.”

  “Deal.”

  What’s the value of a human life, bypassing the ethics of the question? Human flesh and innards are worthless, unless you happen to know a black market organ farmer or an unscrupulous Chinese chef. Bones can be ground into fertilizer but that’s a buck a pound max, so risk outweighs reward. You can sell a decent head of hair to a wig shop but there’d be questions and who wants that hassle? So basically, the human body is worth less than the most worn-out trail nag, which could still net a few bucks as dog food. Ergo, the value of a human life is less, monetarily-speaking, than an animal’s. And we slaughter animals by the millions every day.

  Dig that logic, baby.

  I work for Slopes, mostly. Vancouver’s lousy with them. They cross the Pacific from Laos, Cambodia, Hong Kong, nailing down stakes on the first patch of soil they wash up on. The city’s infested to the point that local wags have dubbed it “Chan-couver.” Didn’t take the Yakuza and Triads long to migrate. These dudes hold 3,000-year-old grudges against each other; a fellow with my abilities can make a very good living settling their age-old scores.

  Truth be told, I enjoy killing Slants, except for Japs, who do their best to emulate us by drinking Coke, wearing blue jeans, shaking their narrow yellow asses to Elvis and Bob Dylan—they’re making a genuine effort. Amazing, isn’t it, how a couple Atom bombs can vaporize 4,000 years of stagnant history and tradition?

  The fictitious hitman as portrayed in movies and television is just that: a fiction. Guys wearing black leather trenchcoats or flash satin suits, calling attention to themselves with bowler hats or handlebar moustaches, killing with metal teeth or samurai swords or poisoned hatpins?—all bullshit.

  Here’s the lowdown:

  Rule #1: You’ve got to be invisible. It’s about being gray, about hiding in the sunlight. You have to be nondescript. Every aspect of your appearance must repulse attention. You shower, shave, brush your teeth every day. You don’t wear cologne or if you do only a hint, you wear off-the-rack suits that render your profession a speculative question—maybe you’re a lawyer, maybe a banker, ma
ybe a plumber who spends his toilet-snaking profits on decent threads. If you wear a tie make it dark and cheap, nothing with little golfers or Disney characters. No jewelry, but you want a decent watch, Seiko or Casio. You drive a domestic car between five and eight years old, rust- and dent-free. You do this and, somewhere between here and there, you might just become invisible. Part of the scenery. The last person anyone would peg as a cold-blooded killer.

  Rule #2: K.I.S.S.—Keep It Simple, Shithead. Hitmen swiss-cheesing their marks with helicopter chainguns, slicing people to ribbons with razor-tipped nunchuks or sending them into convulsions with blowdarts steeped in poison-toad venom? Only in Hollywood. Anything a real professional needs can be found at the nearest Home Depot: box-cutters, screwdrivers, leather punches, hacksaws. You want to use anonymous weapons, items that can be bought anywhere. If you leave a golden butterfly knife with your initials engraved in the hilt or—God forbid—a calling card at the hit scene, you’re fucking with Rule #1.