Dead and Kicking

by McGeachin, Geoffrey

  A Lao Airlines ATR turboprop was warming up on the tarmac when we arrived at Chiang Mai Airport, ready to take me over the border and into the Lao People’s Democratic Republic where Thai baht and US dollars turned into kip and ‘sawaddi’ turned into ‘sabaai-dii’ and the smiles just kept on coming.

  The twin-engined ATR has a high wing so the views from the big cabin windows were spectacular. Six thousand metres below us, the wide brown expanse of the mighty Mekong River cut through the countryside on its journey to the delta where we had been filming only a few days before. It was hard to believe that the lush green jungle passing below us was the most heavily bombed piece of real estate on the planet.

  Back in the sixties, while the war in Vietnam was getting all the publicity, a secret war was raging in Laos with the Soviet and North Vietnamese-backed Communist Pathet Lao holding the lowland areas and CIA-backed Lao and Hmong hill tribes occupying mountaintop strongholds that were secretly resupplied by Air America flights. In the meantime, the American Air Force was bombing the crap out of everything that moved in an attempt to stop supplies getting through to the Vietcong via Laos. The Pentagon logged almost 600,000 missions over the country, and given that around 30 per cent of the bombs that were dropped failed to explode and were still lying about, it wasn’t a great place to go wandering off the beaten track.

  As we started our descent, the landscape beneath us began to change. The riverbank was dotted with red-roofed houses and golden temples appeared on the hilltops. As we dipped lower, closer to the airport, bigger buildings and roads busy with traffic filled the view. Then we were thumping down on a runway grimy with black skid marks from hundreds of landings and I was one step closer to finding out what had happened to Jack and VT.

  Any other time Luang Prabang would have been a great place to rest up, but I was in a hurry. The joint has a UNESCO World Heritage listing, some great guesthouses, lots of interesting places to eat, museums, night markets and, of course, temples up the wazoo. And Buddhas – more Buddhas than you can shake a stick at. Plus enough saffron-robed monks to make shaking sticks at the local Buddhas seem like a very uncool idea.

  I took a crowded and battered backroads minivan to Oudomxay and then another on to Muang Khua, trying to maintain a low profile by keeping my head down and my mouth shut. Maintaining a low profile also meant suppressing the urge to stick the pointy end of my balisong into the kneecap of every pissy backpacker who complained about the overcrowding and the heat. Give me screaming over whining any day. It made me think of my late colleague Harry, who used to snarl, ‘If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the tropics.’ He generally added, ‘dipshit.’

  Located on the banks of the Nam Ou River overlooking a ferry crossing, Muang Khua has a bit of an American Old West border trading post feel to it, or it would have if you chopped down the jungle, whacked in some cactus and replaced the local Yunnanese, Vietnamese and Lao inhabitants with Mexican vaqueros.

  From Muang Khua it was just one final long ugly 65-k journey along an overgrown and deeply rutted dirt track in a local truck to the tiny border crossing point at Tay Trang. The geriatric Soviet Gorky truck I hitched a ride on may have had springs at some stage in its life but those days were long gone, along with its paint job and most of the tread on the tyres. By the time we reached the Lao-Vietnam border, my spine felt like it had been compressed by a good six centimetres.

  My visa passed muster on the Vietnamese side of the crossing and after an hour’s wait I managed to grab a ride in a battered Russian jeep with a local who was heading back to Dien Bien Phu after dropping off some Pommy backpackers. The driver had heard about the helicopter crash and he let me off in the general vicinity of where it had happened. This left me standing on a muddy track in the middle of nowhere, with only a vague idea of which direction to head in. The light was just starting to fade when the old man wandered by.

  I nodded and smiled. ‘Chao ong,’ I said in greeting, and then, ‘Anh co khoe khong?’ which I was pretty sure meant, ‘How are you?’

  ‘Bonsoir, êtes-vous français, monsieur?’ he asked.

  I shook my head, ‘Non, je suis australien.’

  The man was old, how old I really couldn’t guess, and he had the look of a farmer. He was limping, barefoot, dressed in a tattered black shirt and loose mud-stained black trousers, and his skin was tanned and leathery. He had squinting eyes that twitched constantly from too many years spent working in the blinding sun.

  I had an uncle, a farmer, with that same twitch and the leathery skin. He had a finger missing, casually plucked off by a potato-harvesting machine in a moment’s inattention. My uncle’s eyes had also held a hint of things seen and best forgotten, and when I was older and learned he had been in New Guinea, at Isurava, fighting the Japanese Army, I began to understand why. This farmer had that same faraway look – a look journalists in Vietnam had called the thousand-yard stare.

  ‘Monsieur,’ I said, using up the rapidly dwindling reserves of my schoolboy French, ‘Dites-moi, vous avez voir un accident avec un helicopter?’

  The farmer nodded. He had seen the crash. He looked west, towards the sun sitting low on the mountaintops, and asked, ‘Ong muon uong gi khong?’

  I gave him the internationally recognised quizzical look and tilt of the head to show I didn’t understand.

  ‘J’ai soif,’ he said, making a drinking motion with his hand.

  I nodded. That bit I understood. I could use a drink too.

  He led me further up the hill towards a small shack. It was a pretty steep grade but even limping he outpaced me. After a couple of minutes he stopped to admire the view, which was a polite way of letting me catch up. As we caught our breath, I pointed to his dodgy leg.

  ‘Un accident?’ I asked.

  He pulled up the left leg of his floppy trousers and smiled. ‘Une femme,’ he said.

  It must have been some woman. Between his knee and hip there was a hole in his thigh big enough to put my whole fist in. The wound was all scar tissue, with no sign of stitching or any medical treatment. It looked like a chunk of his flesh had been ripped out, and he’d been left to heal or die.

  ‘Une femme française?’ I asked.

  He nodded and smiled. ‘Beatrice,’ he said, and continued up the hill.

  Beatrice was the codename of one of General de Castries’ five hilltop outposts at Dien Bien Phu. Defended by French Foreign Legionnaires, it was attacked on the first day of the battle and fell just after midnight following some fierce fighting. My farming buddy had somehow survived the battle with an untreated wound that should have been fatal, General Giap’s troops being a bit light on for medical units. No wonder the old bugger could outpace me going uphill – he was one tough cookie.

  The interior of the shack was a jumble of clothes, bedding and farm tools. The old man picked up a battered teapot and smiled at me. I shrugged. He reached under some empty sacks and pulled out a bottle. It was unlabelled with a clear liquid inside. Probably ruou can, locally brewed rice wine. I nodded. That was more like it.

  There was something else interesting under those sacks and the farmer saw me looking. He tossed back the covering and handed me the weapon. It was an MAT-49, a French submachine gun. Produced by the Manufacture Nationale d’Armes de Tulle arms factory and adopted by the French Army in 1949, the MAT-49 is a lovely-looking gun, with a wire stock and shrouded barrel. This one was pitted with corrosion and looked like it hadn’t been used or cleaned for over half a century. I wondered if the original owner had fired his last burst into the leg of an oncoming Vietminh on a hill named Beatrice, but I didn’t ask.

  EIGHTEEN

  The farmer led me a half mile or so down the hill to a rock ledge overlooking the valley. We sat together and watched the last rays of sunlight kiss goodnight the mountain peaks surrounding Dien Bien Phu. Looking down into the valley, you had to ask yourself what kind of military genius had decided to pick this place for a showdown with the enemy, a place where from day one you had yield
ed the high ground. But that was fifty-plus years back, and vegetation now covered most of the remaining evidence of that debacle between the French Union forces commanded by de Castries and the Vietminh under Giap.

  We passed the bottle of hooch back and forth. I managed not to swallow too much of the booze since I wanted to keep my wits about me and save my throat from the burning liquid. As we drank and watched the moon rise, in a jumbled mix of broken French and charades I heard what the old man knew about the helicopter crash.

  The farmer mimed the chopper flying quickly up the valley, keeping low and then disappearing into the heavily wooded hillside. Minutes later, he’d heard the explosion and seen the flames and smoke. He pointed to a position way up the valley, but I couldn’t see anything.

  I pantomimed the two of us walking to the crash site, and he laughed and shook his head. It seemed it was on the side of a very steep hill and almost impossible to reach. It looked like the crash site had become just one more pile of burnt-out wreckage in a landscape with more than its fair share.

  It was getting cold when the wine was done and I was glad I had a liner for my sleeping bag. We staggered to our feet. The old man pulled down the front of his trousers and pissed a mighty stream over the side of the mountain and down into the valley.

  ‘Du-dit, français,’ he yelled suddenly, out into the darkness.

  It seemed like a moment for international co-operation and understanding so I joined in, yelling out, ‘Fuck you, Frenchies!’ as loud as I could.

  When we got back to the farmer’s shack it turned out I wouldn’t be needing my sleeping bag after all. A couple of heavy-set Vietnamese blokes in suits were waiting for us and each of them was holding a nice little TEC-9 submachine gun. They appeared out of the darkness when the hut and the hillside were suddenly lit up by the headlights of a big four-wheel drive.

  We stopped for a moment, but since there was nothing but open ground around us and nowhere to run, I figured we should just keep walking. As we approached, a third man came out of the shack. Unlike his companions he was wearing hiking boots, black trousers and the thick, rough linen indigo-dyed jacket favoured by northern hill tribes. He was holding the farmer’s MAT-49.

  I’d managed to get my butterfly knife past airport security back in Chiang Mai, but even if the MAT-49 was rusted beyond use, the other two blokes had me well and truly out-gunned. As if they’d been reading my mind, one kept me covered while the other quickly frisked me and pocketed the balisong.

  The third bloke just watched and smiled and then he casually tossed the MAT-49 back into the hut.

  ‘There were a hell of a lot of those left lying around after the French buggered off,’ he said, in Australian-accented English. ‘Vietnamese armourers modified them to fire Red Chinese 7.62mm ammo – cranked up the rate of fire from 600 to 900 rounds per minute.’

  ‘Nice,’ I said.

  ‘Not if you were standing on the other side.’

  ‘I guess you’d know a thing or two about that, Major.’

  The late Major Peter Cartwright VC smiled. ‘I suppose I would,’ he said.

  Being dead obviously agreed with the major. He was slim and fit looking, slightly tanned, with steel-grey close-cropped hair. If he was a politician you’d say he was ‘TV ready’. What else he was ready for was another question.

  I was kind of sorry I’d got the old farmer involved in all this. Peter Cartwright, it seemed, was intent on staying dead and it looked like he had no compunction about eliminating anyone who might think otherwise.

  The headlights on the four-wheel drive snapped off and left us standing in darkness. It would take a moment or two for everyone’s eyes to adjust to the moonlight, so now was probably the right moment to make a run for it, but I didn’t want to leave the farmer in the lurch.

  ‘The old bloke really doesn’t know what’s going on here,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you let him go? He’s so pissed he won’t remember anything in the morning anyway.’

  Cartwright looked at me. ‘Let him go where? He lives here, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Looks like it,’ I said, ‘so why don’t you and I and Heckle and Jeckle there take our business off somewhere down the hillside?’

  ‘And exactly what business might that be?’ Cartwright asked.

  ‘Seems like you could be tying up loose ends.’

  ‘What loose ends?’

  ‘I took a picture of you in Saigon a few days ago and now it looks like pretty much everyone who saw it is dead. Except for me, and that’s not for lack of people trying to do the job.’

  ‘You got a name there, sport?’ Cartwright asked after a minute.

  ‘Barry Jones.’

  He smiled and shook his head. ‘I took a dekko at Mr Jones’s passport in your backpack and something doesn’t smell right. Wanna try again?’

  ‘Murdoch, Alby Murdoch.’

  ‘The photographer, right? I’ve come across some of your snaps in the magazines in my dentist’s waiting room.’

  ‘I’m seen in all the best places.’

  ‘Not really. My dentist works in a bamboo shack and he fits me in between the swine gelding, the fertility rites and the exorcisms.’

  ‘Bet he still charges like a wounded bull though – they all do. So why were you in Saigon?’

  ‘You know, mate,’ Cartwright said, ‘for a photographer you ask a lot of questions and have a decided lack of camera equipment.’

  ‘Maybe I’ve got a new job – finding out who killed my friends and who wants to kill me.’

  ‘Sounds fair enough,’ Cartwright said. ‘Who might these dead friends be, if you don’t mind me asking?’

  ‘A bloke named Jack Stark and his mate VT, a pilot. I saw a story on TV about their chopper coming down somewhere around here. Stark told me you and he had a connection in another life.’

  ‘I saw the same story on TV,’ Cartwright said. ‘That’s why I’m here, too. Funny, but I’d heard Stark had died in an explosion a few years back. Ain’t life full of surprises.’

  ‘I’m with you on that,’ I said. ‘But it looks to me that whatever happened to Jack Stark and VT, and to a bloke named Brett Tozer, all happened because Stark recognised you in Saigon.’

  ‘And you think it was me who wanted them taken out? And this Tozer character? And you as well?’

  ‘Stark spots you, the word gets out you might not be dead, and next thing people start shooting at me, Tozer dies from a severe case of lead poisoning and then a chopper carrying Stark and his mate VT goes up in a fireball. As far as I can figure it, you were the trigger for all this.’

  ‘I might well have been the trigger,’ Cartwright said, ‘but believe me I didn’t have anything to do with any of the killing.’

  ‘Okay, so if it wasn’t you, then who?’

  The moon was fully up by this stage and I could see Cartwright’s face clearly. He seemed to be thinking this over.

  ‘You got your heart set on spending the night here?’ he said after a moment.

  I shook my head. ‘I’ve stayed in worse places, but I’m easy.’ I’m always easy when I’m outnumbered and out-gunned.

  He said something to one of the men in suits, who made a quick call on a mobile phone. Five minutes later a second shiny new Toyota LandCruiser pulled up.

  I looked around for the old farmer and saw him sitting by the doorway of his shack, mumbling quietly to himself. Even as pissed as he was, you had to wonder if all these guns were bringing back memories he’d rather not recall. And maybe, like me, he’d been wondering if it was all about to end out on this hillside tonight.

  Cartwright said something to one of his men, who went round to the rear of the second vehicle and came back with a couple of bottles of Martell cognac. The man put the bottles down next to the farmer and then pulled a wad of cash from his pocket. The old man accepted the money with a smile but it was easy to see he was a lot more interested in the cognac. He already had the top off one bottle when I walked over to say goodbye. I got the impression h
e wasn’t going to be sharing this little windfall.

  The two men with the TEC-9s climbed into the first LandCruiser and Cartwright and I got in the second. The doors closed with a very heavy thud and I tapped the window glass. The doors and windows on the vehicle would probably stop anything short of a .50-calibre bullet.

  ‘Expecting trouble?’ I asked.

  ‘Always,’ Cartwright said. ‘How do you think I’ve managed to stay dead this long?’

  NINETEEN

  Our two-car convoy headed down to the main road and then turned towards Dien Bien Phu township.

  ‘Cheese,’ Cartwright said suddenly, smiling. He was looking out of his window back towards the valley.

  ‘Cheese?’

  ‘Early on in the battle for Dien Bien Phu, Vietminh artillery barrages scored a direct hit on a major supply dump. It was a devastating blow to French morale.’

  ‘Ammo?’ I asked.

  ‘Cheese,’ he said. ‘And condiments.’

  ‘Not the bloody Dijon mustard?’

  He nodded. ‘At one stage later on during the siege, a group of French Foreign Legionnaires fought their way out through the perimeter and destroyed an enemy bunker. It was only after they were decorated for bravery that the brass discovered the real objective was to recover a load of army-issue wine concentrate called Vinogel that had been dropped by parachute and landed outside the wire.’

  ‘Dehydrated plonk? They send dehydrated water to go with it? Seems like a pretty weird way to fight a war.’

  Cartwright smiled. ‘The French do things their own way. The Americans handled it all a bit differently, of course. They choppered in hot meals to their troops in the field when it was possible, and the larger bases had all the comforts of home with burgers and steaks and ice cream and cherry pie. The Vietminh and the VC usually just carried rice and ate whatever they could beg, borrow or steal. When you’re hungry enough, rat and rice and some fish sauce is quite palatable. It’s the freedom-fighters’ diet.’