While they waited for the trucks, Lincoln sat on the newly paved surface with Koob and Pos, smoking cigarettes and chatting. “You men have really made a big difference,” Lincoln said. “You’ve helped take us from a ragtag bunch of clowns into a real fighting force.”
“Clowns?” Pos asked. “What is that?”
Lincoln pondered ways to explain what clowns were but then shook his head. “Never mind,” he said. “Too complicated.”
“I understand,” Koob said. “Not clowns, but the rest.”
“I just want you both to know that I appreciate everything you’ve done. You and your friends, the other Hmong. They make me look good to my bosses.”
“You are the boss,” Koob said.
Lincoln laughed. “Not hardly. I’m just an enlisted schmuck.”
“Your boss is the president of US?” Koob asked.
“He’s one of them,” Lincoln said with a chuckle. “Most of them are officers with brass on their shoulders, but some of them wear suits. The president is one of those.”
“You know him?”
Lincoln shook his head and held out the backs of his hands. “In America, most people don’t get to know the president. People with my skin color don’t often spend time with people like that.”
“There are many colors there?” Pos asked him.
“A few. White, black, brown, yellow. No green yet, but maybe someday the Martians will come.”
“Yellow?” Koob asked. He pointed to some of the wildflowers that had sprouted along the road during the monsoon season. “That’s yellow, no?”
“Not yellow like those,” Lincoln explained. He touched the back of Koob’s hand. “Like you. This is what we call yellow skin.”
Koob and Pos both started laughing, lightly at first, then hysterically, spitting words in Hmong to each other when they could. Lincoln couldn’t catch what they were saying but assumed they were making fun of the concept of their nut-brown skin being called yellow. Then again, he had differentiated between black and brown, knowing full well that his own skin, and that of all the other black folks he had ever seen, was really brown. So was the skin of the Mexicans and Puerto Ricans he had known.
With that realization, he started laughing, too.
They were still at it when they heard the rumble of trucks, coming closer.
Instantly, everyone scrambled for their assigned positions. Weapons were checked. Lincoln took a last look before heading for cover in the trees and was pleased to note that he couldn’t see any of the men, even though he knew where to look for them. When it came to hiding in the brush, the Hmong were masters.
He took his position and waited.
The first truck rolled into the curve, then around it. The driver was intent on regaling his passengers with what must have been an entertaining story and didn’t even see the fallen trees until one of the passengers cried out. The driver slammed on his brakes and the truck shuddered to a sudden stop. It started to reverse, but the next truck was following closely, and by the time it stopped, there was no space. Only the fourth and last truck was able to try backing up, to get headed north again, but by the time it did, the Hmong had come out of the trees and blocked the road.
The front and rear trucks were filled with men, presumably to guard the convoy. They hopped down from the trucks, but gunfire from the trees cut them down before they could use their weapons. RPGs sliced through the air and disabled the trucks. Within five minutes, every man in the convoy was dead or close to it, and there hadn’t been a single Hmong casualty.
Knowing that the noise of battle could have been heard from the Pathet Lao post, Lincoln wrapped up the operation in a hurry. It didn’t matter what had been in the cargo trucks—whatever they might have held was in flames. Lincoln and his men melted into the woods and split up, knowing they would reunite at the jars before starting up the mountain again. Any would-be rescuers from the camp would find only burning trucks and corpses.
36
* * *
A week later, they hit the supply convoy again. This time, the government in the north had sent more trucks and more men. Lincoln moved the ambush point up a couple of kilometers and also brought more men. His side had two KIAs, but on the Pathet side there were no survivors.
Ten days later—the Pathet Lao having altered their delivery schedule—they took down another one. Still more trucks and more men, but with essentially the same results.
Three days after that, still another convoy came through, this time with a dozen trucks and a few hundred men. It passed without incident and went to the camp.
But while it was there, Lincoln and his men cratered the road out with heavy explosives. When the convoy tried to leave, it was unable to. Until the road could be repaired—a dangerous proposition, thanks to Hmong snipers who made it so—all the additional soldiers who had accompanied the convoy had to be housed and fed at the camp.
Lincoln had to laugh. Once the idea had occurred to him to become an insufferable pest, it had seemed like a stroke of genius.
By now, Lincoln had contacts in Hmong villages ringing the entire Plain of Jars. Scouts from the northern villages kept an eye on the road and alerted him or Koob whenever a convoy was on the roll, giving them a day’s warning before it would reach the camp. On the night before the next convoy’s arrival, Vang Khom’s own scouts—who kept the post in sight almost all the time—reported that a couple hundred men had gone up the road, getting in place to disrupt any ambush attempt.
Lincoln didn’t plan any more ambushes for a while, though. Instead, this was the moment he was waiting for. He sent a half-dozen well-trained sappers through the wire, using techniques similar to the ones he had used to kill Colonel Phan. With so many soldiers out on the road, security was sparse. They set timed charges at each of the eight generators that powered the camp, the backup generators, and the underground storage tanks for the motor pool’s gasoline supplies, and slipped out of the place before their presence was detected. At precisely two o’clock in the morning—Lincoln was waiting a few clicks south, checking his watch every couple of minutes—the bombs went off. Lincoln covered the distance quickly and saw that with the exception of the not-yet-extinguished fires, there wasn’t a single light in the camp.
The immediate result wasn’t disastrous for the camp. But the effect was meant to be psychological, not physical. Some soldiers would have died in those blasts. Worse was the knowledge the survivors had, that those who had perpetrated the attack had been inside their fences. The new, larger force, the expanded security measures, all meant nothing. They would be demoralized and frightened.
Being without electricity would be inconvenient for a few days, until they could rebuild generators or get new ones. Being without fuel for their vehicles would be worse, and it meant the next convoy would have to include fuel trucks. That might make for an interesting target, Lincoln thought.
Was it too soon to start hitting convoys again?
Probably so. Except one thing made the fuel trucks an especially tempting target.
With that in mind, he drew together three hundred of his Hmong warriors and set up an ambush a couple dozen kilometers north of the intersection—far from where any would be expected, based on past history. He let the first convoy pass through unmolested, because there were no fuel tankers in it. It had probably been on the move, or close to it, before word of the sapper attacks reached the north.
The next convoy, though, included four tanker trucks full of gasoline. This one, Lincoln stopped. A brief firefight ensued, and both sides took casualties. But when the smoke cleared, a dozen Pathet Lao vehicles and about a hundred and fifty Pathet soldiers were dead, and Lincoln’s people were behind the wheels of the four tankers.
It wouldn’t take long for word of the ambush to reach the camp or headquarters in the north. But Lincoln’s plan didn’t require much time.
The camp’s water came from a river that cut through the Plain of Jars, on its way from the Laotian mountains and in
to Vietnam, then to the sea. The road passed over the river about four clicks from the camp. A little too close for comfort, if the garrison was responding to the ambush. Lincoln didn’t think word would have reached them that quickly, and the action had taken place too far away for them to have heard anything.
He drove the first truck, and trusted drivers—there were not many among the villagers, few of whom had ever piloted big rigs—handled the other three. They left the road before the bridge and steered them into the river. Once the vehicles were all in place, they opened the tanks and ruptured them where they could without causing sparks or explosions. Fuel spilled into the river water. Within minutes, the smell was too powerful to bear, and Lincoln and his Hmong scattered back to their individual mountain redoubts.
The gas probably wouldn’t poison the water all the way into Vietnam, Lincoln figured—it would be diluted in time—but it had to affect only the people in the camp. Either they would drink it and get sick, or they would avoid it and become dehydrated. When the next rain came, they would capture what they could of that, but without dedicated storage tanks, it would provide only brief respite.
Again, the idea was psychological warfare. Lincoln wanted the soldiers to know that nothing was safe—not their defenses, not their electricity, not their drinking water. Soon, he hoped, the desertions would start.
To speed up that process even more, he started sending Hmong squads out to the post at night with mortars. They would lob in a few rounds, do whatever damage they could, then fade into the darkness. It was another tactic borrowed from the VC, designed to keep the men inside the wire anxious and scared. By the time the soldiers could react to the incoming rounds, those who fired them would be gone. The next night, they would wonder—will it happen again? And it would, but not on any set schedule. Sometimes four or five nights would pass without any attack. Sometimes it would happen every night for a week, then stop.
After a few days of that, Lincoln’s scouts reported that they had seen soldiers slipping away from the camp during the night. Others went out on patrol, then slipped quietly into the jungle while their comrades weren’t looking and never returned. First it was a trickle, then a stream, and finally a flood. Whether they went north or south or into Vietnam was of no concern to Lincoln—they were no longer threats, and that was all that mattered.
Little by little, he was knocking the pins out from underneath Colonel Sun.
Soon, it would be time to finish the job.
37
* * *
Vanessa was quiet after the rally, though this one had been rowdier than most, with a group of antiwar protestors running naked through the middle of it, high on God knew what, their bodies painted with peace symbols, flowers, and “Make Love, Not War” slogans. There had been cops in attendance at this rally, though they had just been observing, making sure things didn’t get out of hand. They chased down the nudists and hauled them off, much to the amusement of the other rally-goers. Ellis had thought the whole thing was pretty funny himself and was trying to elicit a smile from Vanessa with his exaggerated retelling of the tale.
“. . . should hire some hippies to do that at every rally, just to keep the cops busy,” he finished up. “We could even start charging admission for the show. Be a good source of income for the movement.”
Vanessa blinked a couple of times and looked away, not responding. They were back at the park in her neighborhood, just a block away from her house, and whatever she saw outside the window of Lincoln’s car seemed far preferable to what she saw inside it.
“Hey. Hey,” he said, reaching out with one hand to grasp her chin and turn her face back toward him. “What’d I say? What is it? What’s wrong?”
She just shook her head, whether to indicate there was nothing she wanted to talk about or to dislodge his grip, he wasn’t sure, so he pulled his hand away.
“Look, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about. I know you don’t approve of my lifestyle, and I understand why—it’s fast and violent and not the sort of environment you can raise a family in. I get that. That’s why I’m getting out—”
“Ellis, we can’t see each other anymore,” she blurted, the tears she’d been holding back coursing down her cheeks like a dam had broken behind her eyes.
“What? What are you talking about? Is it your parents? I was just trying to tell you, I got a job at the K&B, I’m going straight, they don’t have to worry—”
“No, it’s not them. They don’t even know about your background—I never told them. They would have forbidden me from seeing you in a heartbeat if they knew.”
“Then what? What happened? What did I do?”
She turned and looked at him then, disappointment and accusation written plain on her tear-streaked face, and he knew. That imagined visage had haunted him ever since the fur job, despite everything he’d done to make sure he never had to see it. Now here it was, his worst nightmare made flesh.
Vanessa knew about the warehouse. Despite Ellis’s warning, the donor had talked.
But he knew only about the Marcanos’ involvement—he didn’t know Ellis by name. Maybe there was still a way out of this.
“Why did you do it, Ellis? Why did you and your friends rob our biggest donor? Now he’s withdrawn all his backing from CORE and the other groups, saying we’ve shown our true colors and aren’t worth his support, let alone his money. And . . . you killed three men in the process?”
“That wasn’t me!” Ellis protested. “That was Giorgi. It was all his idea, once he realized who your donor was and how rich he was.”
A hard look came into Vanessa’s eyes.
“Don’t lie to me, Ellis. He saw you. He didn’t know your name, but he told Oretha all about ‘the black boy who was hanging around with the button girl.’ I was the button girl that day, Ellis, and you were the only black boy hanging around me.
“How could you? I thought you believed in the cause, in what we’re trying to do, and how we’re trying to do it.”
“Those guys are my friends, Vanessa! And I owed them. I pay what I owe, whether it’s a favor or anything else.”
“And that’s the whole problem, isn’t it?”
Ellis didn’t have an answer to that.
“Tell me, was it all just a ploy to get me to sleep with you?”
“What? No! Of course not. Vanessa, I love you!”
He hadn’t known the words were going to come out of his mouth until they were already spoken, and then they just hung there in the air between them, like a white flag raised on the field of battle after the war had already been lost.
“That doesn’t matter now,” she said after a moment. “You killed people, or you were involved in it. It’s probably not the first time, and it certainly won’t be the last. Violence is in your blood; you can’t escape it. I didn’t understand that before, but I do now.
“I can’t live like that, Ellis. I won’t. There are some things love can’t conquer. This is one of them.” She grabbed the handle of the car door, opened it, and climbed out.
“Vanessa, wait! I—”
“Good-bye, Ellis,” she said, and closed the door. And all he could do was watch as she walked away, into the darkness and out of his life.
• • •
Ellis drove around aimlessly for a while before heading back to Sammy’s. Where else was he going to go?
Besides, he needed the old man’s advice. Sammy had always been straight with him, even when they disagreed on something, which was more often than not these days. He needed to know if he should go after Vanessa, which every fiber of his being was screaming at him to do, or let her go.
She hadn’t said she loved him, after all.
But, then again, she hadn’t said she didn’t. Just that it didn’t matter, because she thought he’d killed people.
But it wasn’t just the killing, he knew. It was the robbery, it was paying off the cops, it was everything associated with the lifestyle. It was who he was, down at the core.
<
br /> Vanessa thought Ellis Robinson was a mobster, through and through. And maybe she was right, because right now all he wanted to do was kill somebody, and he didn’t much care who. He had only been fooling himself, with that nonsense about getting a straight job and leaving the life. She had shown him that there was a different way to live, and it had filled his head with mirages that could never be true. Not for him.
Giorgi was not only Ellis’s friend, he was his future. He could see that now. Giorgi would take Sal’s place one day, and Ellis would take Sammy’s. The two of them would run New Bordeaux. There would be no shortage of women. Not ones like Vanessa—she was one of a kind—but she could never be his. He would have to accept that and make the best of who he was and what he had.
When he got to the bar, Sammy was involved in a late business meeting. Ellis hung around outside the old man’s office, hoping it would be short and he could talk to his father before he went to bed. So he could hear bits and pieces of the conversation Sammy was having, and it didn’t sound like it was going well.
“. . . it’s high-quality stuff, man, and I’ve got a steady supply from Southeast Asia. More than I can sell in my current markets, so I’m looking to expand. What I’ve heard, New Bordeaux is the perfect place for it, and you’re the perfect man.”
“Well, then you heard wrong,” Sammy’s voice snapped back, annoyed and affronted. Ellis could just imagine his expression. He wondered what kind of “stuff” the other man was talking about. Drugs, obviously, but what? Southeast Asia . . . that meant opium. Heroin? No wonder the old man sounded so pissed. Ellis almost laughed. Wherever the other man had gotten his information, he’d been seriously misled. Sammy wanted heroin in the Hollow like he wanted a hole in the head. Wasn’t happening.
“Maybe you’re not hearing me right. We’re talking a thirty percent cut. I’m taking all the risk getting the product out of the jungle and into the States. All you have to do is move it.”
Mafia III Page 21
