Finally, she did.
“Turn right up here.”
Ellis did as he was told. She gave him a few more directions and soon he was in a part of New Bordeaux he wasn’t particularly familiar with. Southdowns—Vanessa’s part.
They came to a small wooded area nestled in between big manor houses with sprawling yards and long driveways. There was a playground with swings, a slide, and a seesaw, where flower-lined walkways abounded. A sign warned that the starlit park was closed after 9:00 p.m., which would explain why theirs was the only vehicle in the lot.
Vanessa got out of the car and Ellis had no choice but to follow; he certainly wasn’t leaving her here alone, at night, even if one of these big houses turned out to be hers, which would probably be the case. He’d see her to her front door like the gentleman he desperately wanted her to believe he was. Whether she wanted him to or not.
She led him over to the swings and sat down in one. He took a seat in another.
“So, you’re part of the . . . mob?”
She didn’t look at him as she said it, instead staring off into the darkness of the humid New Bordeaux night. He didn’t want to be having this conversation. Ever, if he could have helped it, but especially not now. It was too soon. She barely knew him.
“My family is, yeah,” he hedged. He tried to laugh it off. “Some people run diners and dry cleaners; we run nightclubs and numbers.”
She didn’t even crack a smile.
“And the cops are afraid of you?”
Ellis chewed on his lip. She didn’t sound disgusted or condemning, just curious. Maybe being a mobster wasn’t the black mark against him he’d imagined it would be. He decided to answer her questions as honestly as he could, without giving away any family secrets.
“Some are, I suppose—they know what we do to people who get in our way. Some we pay off to look the other direction. Some get a harsher treatment.”
She nodded at that, still not looking at him.
“And you—what do you do to people who get in your way?”
He had to tread carefully here, he knew. But he couldn’t just lie to her.
“People don’t tend to get in my way, because of who I am.”
“And who is that, exactly? Just who is Ellis Robinson, besides a smart, handsome young man interested in the civil rights movement?”
His heart may have skipped a beat or two when he heard the word “handsome,” but he tried to focus on her question.
“You heard the cop. I’m Sammy Robinson’s son, and Sammy’s the head of the Black Mob in New Bordeaux. People mess with me, they know they’re messing with Sammy, and most of them don’t want to do that. So mostly I don’t get messed with.”
And that was true as far as it went. It didn’t include people like Lincoln and Sammy himself, of course.
“So why is the son of a mob boss—a man who lives and breathes violence—hanging around with a woman who preaches nonviolence as a way of life? We’re like day and night.”
Ellis surprised himself by having an answer.
“Because Sammy’s way of life can only get me so far. It’ll never get me the respect of the people in these big houses.” He stopped, took a deep breath, rushed on. “It’ll never get me someone like you.”
She looked up at that, and her eyes were pools of diamond in the starlight.
“Don’t be too sure about that,” she said, and leaned over to kiss him for the second time that day. Only this time there was no one to pull them apart, and the kiss soon turned into something more. Vanessa led him in among the trees, and there was some fumbling with jeans and skirt and underwear. Then she was drawing him down to the leaf-carpeted ground, into her embrace, into her.
I would do anything for her, Ellis thought, right before all thought was blown away on a wave of pleasure and passion.
“Vanessa,” he whispered into her hair, and then neither one of them was able—or wanted—to say anything coherent again for a very long time.
13
* * *
“What I miss most is pie,” Corbett said. “In Saigon and Vientiane they have these tiny little French tarts, but they’re not really pie. I mean, like a full-size apple pie, or blueberry, or cherry, with a good crust and all that delicious filling. These people, the Vietnamese and the Laotians, all they learned from the French is those stupid little tarts. Maybe if we’re over here for a hundred years or so, they’ll learn about pie.”
Brad Corbett was a pilot for Air America, which was a not-very-secret CIA front company, and he was flying Lincoln and Donovan into Laos in a U-10 Super Courier airplane. Donovan, as usual, was in the copilot’s chair, but even with the engine noise and the wind battering at the plane, Corbett’s nonstop monologue was loud enough for Lincoln to hear in back. Corbett was a big man with long, wavy brown hair and a five-day growth of beard, wearing a Hawaiian shirt with pictures of those plastic hula dancer figurines people put in their cars, with springs in their waists so they swayed with the motion of travel. He was supposed to wear a survival vest, Lincoln knew, equipped with a radio, flares, and other gear, but he’d explained that he found it too constricting, so he kept it behind his seat, easy to reach in an emergency.
“Maybe not, though. It could just be something in the Oriental makeup that they just don’t get pie, you know what I mean? Here’s what I do know about them—they just don’t care if you live or die. I mean, unless you’re related to ’em or something. If you’re just some guy, some round-eye especially, they wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire. Not that I’m prejudiced or anything. I’m not a, what do you call it, a bigot. I just know what’s true. Like your colored folks”—here he stopped and nodded his head toward Lincoln, in the back—“not you, if Donovan says you’re good people, then you’re good people, and anyone who puts on the uniform of the good old US of A is okay in my book—I’m talking about the ones that march around on street corners and complain all the time that the white folks are picking on ’em.”
He paused for a moment, scanning the ground ahead for landmarks, Lincoln supposed. Or maybe he was just trying to remember what it was he didn’t like about “colored folks.” Either way, when he started up again, he had shifted gears. “Anyway, whenever I get home, I’m having a nice big slice of apple pie. Maybe I’ll have the whole pie. With a glass of milk. We got the best milk in Wisconsin, I’m telling you. You’ve never had Wisconsin milk, you got to try some. Also the best beer. And blond girls—we got the best blondes anywhere. I know you colored guys like blondes. I don’t know why people like these Oriental chicks over here. They’re so tiny; I always feel like I’m gonna break ’em. Tell you what, you give me a blond girl I have to climb a ladder to kiss, a glass of Wisconsin milk, and an apple pie, and I’m a happy man.”
“I’ll make a note of it,” Lincoln said.
“Hah!” Corbett’s laugh reminded Lincoln of a mule’s bray. “Hah! He’ll make a note of it. That’s a good one. You got a ripe one here, John, a real ripe one.”
Donovan half-turned in his seat and met Lincoln’s gaze, raising one eyebrow. He had said before the flight that Corbett was an acquired taste, and Lincoln was learning what he meant. Growing up black in the American South meant he was used to casual racism, and even in the Army, where the uniform was supposed to be the great equalizer, it never really went away. All the kids at the orphanage had been black, and they weren’t allowed to use the public swimming pool during the prime hours, when it was reserved for whites.
Things were changing, but people like Corbett were a reminder that there was a long way to go. What was that line that Dr. King had quoted? “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Maybe that was true, but there was still a lot of bending that needed doing.
Before they’d left, Donovan had explained that Lincoln was officially on detached service to the CIA and confirmed his supplemental pay. Donovan would be his handler. He had filled in Lincoln more on what his duties with the Hmong would be—helping
to develop the village, bringing it into the twentieth century, along with supplying and training the men for combat against the VC, NVA, and Pathet Lao.
And he’d explained that despite his rough edges, Brad Corbett could be trusted. “Corbett’s kind of a madman,” Donovan had said. “But he’s earned the right.”
“Earned it how?” Lincoln had asked.
“Do you know what JACK was?”
“I don’t know jack shit,” Lincoln said with a low chuckle.
Donovan ignored the joke. “Joint Advisory Commission, Korea. It was a CIA-sponsored Special Forces op during the Korean War. Those guys went through hell, but they got the job done. Brad Corbett is a big part of the reason why. Now he’s under exclusive contract to Air America, and they keep him around because he can fly anything. Slap some wings on a Ford Mustang and he’ll get that bastard to twenty thousand feet in five minutes.”
The Super Courier was a small single-engine aircraft with overhead wings sporting what seemed like an unusual profusion of flaps. Corbett sometimes referred to it as a helioplane, but Lincoln hadn’t bothered to ask what he meant by that. Although it could seat five, at the moment Lincoln was surrounded by crates of gear intended for the Hmong in a place Donovan called Vang Khom.
Corbett’s apparel was far from regulation, but Air America was its own kind of beast—allegedly, a private corporation, but everyone seemed to know it was really CIA. Lincoln couldn’t complain, because he was out of uniform, too. He and Donovan were both wearing black uniforms like the one Lincoln had worn on the task force mission, with no identifying marks. It was just one more indication that this trip would be far outside the usual Army procedure.
Lincoln wasn’t sure when they had crossed into Laos. As usual, the landscape they passed over was a spectacular, almost crazy-making blend of green on green. Lincoln supposed the occasional river or groomed plantation could serve as landmarks for someone who flew it often enough. They were flying lower than Lincoln had expected, which Corbett had said was to avoid radar. Lincoln wasn’t sure the enemy had radar, but he wasn’t going to argue. He just wanted to get where they were going before someone shot them out of the sky, because he knew the enemy had guns that could reach their present altitude.
As if reading Lincoln’s mind, Corbett glanced over his shoulder. “Another thirty minutes, tops, and we’ll be on the ground at Vang Khom. Their ‘air strip’ isn’t much to brag about—it’s basically a slash of land on top of a hill where they cut away the trees and maybe graded, to use the word loosely, with shovels—but that’s the beauty of the Super Courier. This baby is STOL—short takeoff and landing—and she can touch down just about anywhere.”
Donovan pointed out the windshield. “See those mountain ranges ahead?”
They were approaching a series of them, each one seeming from here to be a little higher than the one in front. Lincoln nodded.
“That’s where the Hmong live. They like the highlands. Past that last one is the Plain of Jars.”
“Plain of what?” Lincoln asked.
“You’ll understand why when you see them. They’re not really jars,” Donovan explained. “More like big fucking urns. They’re in clusters, scattered all over the place on the plain. Some people think they were funerary jars, or crematories, or something. It’s strategically important, though—the juncture of Routes 7 and 13, at the western entrance, is critical, and right now it’s in Pathet Lao hands. We need to boot their asses out of there and take it, so we can control traffic through this sector. That’s going to be up to you and your men. The goddamn Laotian army is as useless as the South Vietnamese—like tits on a boar—so they won’t be any help, but the Hmong are tough bastards, and they’ll be glad to kill some commies.”
My men, Lincoln thought, wondering what his men would be like and how they would take to their new American chief.
He looked out the windshield again. They were rapidly approaching the first of the mountain ranges, and Corbett hadn’t seemed to notice. A jungle-clad wall loomed ahead of them. At nearly the last possible moment, Corbett put the craft into a steep climb, and they skimmed just above the treetops. At the summit, updrafts and downdrafts buffeted the plane, but Corbett jockeyed through them, and soon they were dropping into the valley on the other side.
“Loaded down like this, she doesn’t always like making the climbs,” Corbett said. “But she’ll do it—I just have to nudge her a little bit.”
“Long as you know what you’re doing, it’s okay with me,” Lincoln said.
“Oh, he does,” Donovan assured him. “He may be a racist son of a bitch, but he can fly a plane.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” Corbett added. “I’ve lost a couple. Well, four.”
“ ‘Lost,’ how?” Lincoln wondered.
“Crashed three,” Corbett replied casually. “Shot down once. A few broken bones, but no fatalities.”
“Well, that’s something, I guess.”
“I told you, Lincoln, if you’re flying into some heavy shit, there’s no one you’re better off with than that man right there.”
“Hah!” Corbett released another of his braying laughs and half-turned in his seat to address Lincoln. “That’s because the others are all dead! I outlived the bastards.”
Another mountain range was filling the windshield. “Uhh, you might want to keep an eye out front if you’re going to keep outliving them.”
Corbett adjusted the controls, and the plane launched into another climb. Lincoln thought he could make out individual branches on the trees outside his window, and at one point, he thought he saw a figure in the woods, half-dressed, holding a spear. It could have been a trick of the light, though, and when he looked back, they were too far beyond the spot.
If the man had been real, though, Lincoln was taking an airplane ride into prehistory.
This range was taller than the previous one, and the winds at the summit were even more ferocious. Corbett actually looked tense as he fought to control the craft, but once they were headed down the far side, he relaxed again. “Two more to go,” he said. “We’ll go over this next one, and then land on the one after that.”
“You sure you can put this down on top of a mountain?” Lincoln asked.
“Mister, I could land this baby on top of an Oldsmobile driving down Route 66.”
“I think the bastard really could,” Donovan affirmed. “But I don’t think it’ll be necessary. Like he said, Vang Khom has an airstrip. Or they did. I haven’t been out there in a couple of years—hopefully they haven’t let it get too overgrown. They’re good warriors, but not such great groundskeepers.”
“Hopefully,” Lincoln echoed. This mission was sounding more seat-of-the-pants every minute. They were flying into a neutral country where the American military was strictly forbidden from operating, so Lincoln could turn people who spoke another language and hunted with spears into a military force capable of wrenching a plain full of dead bodies in jars away from well-organized and supplied communist forces. Nothing to it.
He looked out the windshield again, as they plowed toward yet another mountain range. Lincoln didn’t know why they had to fly so low—the craft was clearly able to withstand higher altitudes, so they could have flown at a steady height above the mountain ranges, instead of making the ups and downs. For all he knew, Corbett thrived on the challenge or got his kicks from danger. Given that Lincoln was strapped into a rear seat and surrounded by wooden crates, he didn’t think he wanted to know which it was. He just wanted to get on the ground in one piece.
“This one’s the highest,” Corbett said. “She’s gonna groan a little going up and over, but don’t let that worry you.”
Lincoln didn’t answer. Corbett angled the nose up and they climbed past the steep walls of rock and brush. Near the top, the airplane did indeed start to groan, and Lincoln wondered if the effort of making the extreme climb weighted down with cargo was too much for it. But Donovan said Corbett knew his stuff, and he’d been flying around
Asia for years.
Anyway, they’d made it over the other summits, and this was the last. Soon they’d be on the ground. Lincoln tried to relax—worrying wouldn’t help Corbett fly the plane.
But then they were passing over the peaks and the winds were furious, updrafts and downdrafts hitting the tiny craft seemingly at once. Corbett looked worried as he struggled for control. The airplane buzzed mere feet above the treetops, then started to climb away from them—but just as suddenly the nose plunged down, and Corbett shouted, “Hang onto your ball sacks, gents! We’re goin’ down!”
14
* * *
All was chaos.
The Super Courier dropped to treetop height. Corbett fought to regain control, but Lincoln could hear—and feel—the impact of the trees against the landing gear and the bottom of the fuselage. Then they seemed to be snagged on something, and the plane’s forward progress came to an abrupt halt. Crates broke loose from their straps and slammed into Lincoln. He thought they would just come to rest there, but instead, the airplane flipped over, nose first, and then branches were crashing in through the windows and crates were splitting open, spewing out rifles and ammunition and foodstuffs and more, and they skidded along that way, upside-down.
Something struck Lincoln in the head and he must have lost consciousness for a few seconds, because when his mind swam back to awareness, he was dangling, held in by his seatbelt, and the plane was still. When he looked up—no, down—all he could see were the trees they’d become tangled in, and flashes of the ground below.
But he smelled something that wasn’t jungle foliage. It took a few seconds for the odor to sink in. Fuel. That meant the tank had ruptured. A single spark in the wrong place could kill them all.
“Donovan?” he said. “Corbett?”
No answer. He looked toward the front of the plane but couldn’t see either man. Tree branches filled the windshield area. Had they fallen out? Or become impaled on the branches?
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