Dead and Kicking

by McGeachin, Geoffrey

  ‘From what I know about Dien Bien Phu,’ I said, ‘those freedom fighters did a lot of their heroic advancing knowing that if they turned around to retreat, they’d get a bullet from their own officers or cadres.’

  ‘The soldier on the ground rarely understands the big picture. Just as well, too – it’s so easy to become disillusioned.’

  ‘That what happened to you?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said.

  Ten minutes later, Cartwright got a call on his mobile phone. He spoke for a couple of minutes in Vietnamese then ended the call and spoke to the driver, who nodded.

  ‘It’s still several hours’ drive to our destination so perhaps we should stop for some food at the next village.’

  Twenty minutes later the vehicle in front slowed down, flashed its indicator and pulled up outside a small roadside café. The place had a thatched roof and no walls, and the noise of a soap opera playing on the TV carried out to the roadway. Cartwright’s bodyguards jumped out of the first LandCruiser and gave the joint the once-over before beckoning us to climb down.

  A bloke sitting on a small Yamaha motorcycle appeared to be waiting for us. He spoke briefly to one of the bodyguards and pointed into the café. The bodyguard handed over a wad of notes, which the waiting man pocketed before starting his bike and riding off.

  The café had a dirt floor, an open kitchen and a decided lack of Michelin stars. The tables were plastic and most of the seats were overturned beer crates. It looked like we were the only customers, apart from a couple of blokes who were hunched over bowls of noodle soup.

  I walked over to their table and said, ‘Are these seats taken?’

  One of them glanced up and scowled. He looked exhausted. His shirt was ripped and muddy, and his face and arms were covered in scratches and nasty-looking welts.

  ‘Bugger me,’ he said, ‘a man almost gets blown up in a chopper and then spends a couple of days slipping and sliding down the side of a bloody mountain and getting bitten by mosquitoes and chewed on by leeches and ticks, and then he can’t even get to sit down to a bowl of noodles in peace.’

  Peter Cartwright walked up behind me. ‘Hello, Jack,’ he said, ‘you look like something the cat dragged in.’

  ‘At least I’m alive, which is apparently more than we could say for you for quite a long time.’

  ‘I heard the same thing about you.’

  Jack smiled. ‘Yeah, well a serious case of death tends to keep the bad guys off your tail.’

  ‘That was my plan, too,’ Cartwright said.

  Jack gestured across the table. ‘This is my mate, VT.’

  Cartwright and VT shook hands. VT was in the same battered condition as Jack.

  ‘How’s the soup?’ I asked.

  ‘Not bad,’ Jack said. ‘This is my second bowl and then they’ve got half a bloody water buffalo on the grill for us. Why don’t you blokes pull up a pew and join us?’

  The only problem with sitting down to dinner with three dead men is you just know you’ll be stuck with the bill.

  TWENTY

  Jack and VT slept in the back of the lead LandCruiser for the rest of the trip and I snoozed in the second with Cartwright. Around two in the morning we passed through a prosperous-looking village and then detoured up a paved side road and stopped at a heavy-duty security checkpoint manned by half a dozen very alert sentries and a couple of German shepherd guard dogs. Cartwright and the bodyguards got out and had an animated conversation with the men.

  While I waited, I studied the chain-link fence topped with razor wire that ran off into the jungle on either side of the checkpoint. In a couple of spots, rectangular metal boxes about the size of a hefty paperback were wired to the fence.

  ‘The Claymores are a nice decorating touch,’ I said when Cartwright climbed back into the LandCruiser.

  He laughed. ‘We used to call ’em VC TVs.’

  The curved front on the boxes did give them the look of a small television set, but the only programme they showed was a lethal anti-personnel blast of hundreds of steel ball bearings.

  ‘They’re not armed,’ Cartwright continued. ‘We just stuck ’em there to let people know I’m serious about my privacy. Okay, let’s go.’

  On Cartwright’s order, we drove through the heavy metal gates, past the floodlights, the armed guards and the barbed wire, and continued up the hill. It was another ten minutes before we reached a large two-storey stone building with a wide verandah. Even in the dark, I could see the joint wouldn’t have been out of place in rural France. The masonry walls appeared to be a couple of feet thick, which would help keep out the heat of the day and the chill of the night, and probably even slow down the odd rocket-propelled grenade.

  As Cartwright and I walked across the verandah, I noticed the plaster façade had been patched in a number of places. The patches were of varying colours and age.

  ‘In the old days this place was shot up on a regular basis by the Vietminh, the French, the Vietcong, the North Vietnamese Army and even the American Air Force on a couple of occasions,’ Cartwright explained.

  There were a dozen or so white plaster patches around the front door. I rubbed one and it crumbled slightly under my fingers.

  ‘Plaster takes over forty years to dry in the tropics, I guess.’

  Cartwright smiled. ‘Upkeep on an old building like this is a constant headache.’

  The slamming car doors and barking dogs had woken our sleeping passengers and there were numerous servants waiting to corral the visitors, leading them off to guest rooms with offers of late-night snacks or coffee. I passed on everything but a bed, and found myself in a simply furnished upstairs room with a four-poster bed with mosquito netting, an ensuite bathroom and French doors opening out onto a balcony.

  From the balcony I could see moonlight shimmering on water and hear a constant splashing. I figured whatever was out there was still going to be there in the morning and decided to take a long hot shower and then hit the sack.

  While the water ran over me, I thought about the faint smell in the air I’d noticed as we’d climbed out of the Toyotas. There was the perfume of flowers but also something else, something more familiar. I guessed there could be a chance someone had been letting off fireworks in the major’s garden earlier in the evening, but those fresh plaster patches around Cartwright’s front door and the sentries on high alert made me think it had been fireworks of another sort.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Around ten the next morning I found Cartwright downstairs on a screened terrace overlooking the hillside in front of the farmhouse. He was sitting in a cane chair drinking coffee, the two bodyguards positioned at either end of the terrace, just out of earshot. A servant poured boiling water into a small metal container sitting on top of a cup, which he placed in front of me.

  ‘Sleep okay?’ Cartwright asked.

  I nodded, waiting for the hot water to drip slowly through the tightly packed coffee grounds and down into the sweetened condensed milk in the bottom of my cup.

  ‘Sound of the water didn’t bother you?’

  I shook my head.

  Stretching down the gently sloping hillside and off into the distance were huge circular ponds, each with a fountain gushing in the middle or quickly spinning paddlewheels attached to a floating pontoon. From time to time there was a silver flash and then a splash as a fish jumped clear of the water.

  ‘The fountains and paddles oxygenate the water,’ Cartwright explained. He pointed to a sideboard. ‘We’ve got fresh croissants and pain au chocolat, baguettes and cold meats and cheeses, yoghurt and fruit, or the cook can do you eggs or whatever. And if you want grilled fish, we’ve got plenty.’

  ‘The coffee’s fine until I wake up,’ I said.

  I looked at the view and sipped my coffee. Both the caffeine hit and the view were pretty spectacular. There were hills on every side of us, not quite as dramatic as those surrounding the valley at Dien Bien Phu, but still impressive.

  ‘So what was it like h
earing they were making a movie about your life? Must have been a bit weird.’

  Cartwright shrugged. ‘I’m a bloke who’s been awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross, so weird is all relative. Reckon it’s going to be a good film?’

  ‘You can never tell at this stage. Apparently the producers offered the cast and crew working on the first Mad Max film a profit share in lieu of wages and got laughed off the set. The picture took over a hundred million bucks worldwide, so that should tell you something. It’ll either be good or it won’t – that’s show business.’

  ‘I always thought Mel Gibson should play me,’ Cartwright said, ‘back when the idea for the film first came up. Much too old now, of course. What’s the bloke they’re using like? He looks the part, I’ll give you that.’

  ‘You’ve seen him?’

  ‘Not in the flesh. I’ve been checking out your stills on the internet.’

  ‘He’s an actor, what can I say. Intense, dedicated, committed, neurotic, psychotic, self-focused, self-obsessed, self-loathing, egocentric and gentle, caring and kind. Pick any two, except the last three.’

  ‘Not a poofter, is he?’

  This was an interesting conversational turn. I shook my head. ‘Who knows? He’s got a wife and a couple of kids back in Australia, and if you’d had the local cops in Saigon dust most of our female extras for his fingerprints I doubt they’d have come up empty-handed.’

  ‘Still, you never know, I guess,’ he said. ‘I mean Jack Stark and VT … that was a bit of a surprise.’

  I had a feeling I knew where this was going and I didn’t much like it.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘you never know. And people tend to use the word “gay” these days in polite company, just so you know. You fancy another coffee? I’m having one.’

  Cartwright shook his head. I walked over to the sideboard and helped myself to a croissant and some more coffee. I’d hoped it might be a good way to change the subject, but it didn’t work.

  ‘VT is a good bloke,’ Cartwright said, after a pause, ‘and he’s still a good-looking bastard. Must have been drop-dead handsome when he was younger. It’s a bit of a shame, don’t you think? It just doesn’t seem right, somehow.’

  I took a deep breath and turned around, but just before I opened my mouth to set Cartwright straight on a few things, I caught the twinkle in his eye.

  ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘you’d bloody think VT could have done a whole lot better for himself than a rough nut like Jack Stark.’

  It was a nice little ambush and I’d walked right into it. Cartwright was smiling and seemed very pleased with himself.

  ‘You bastard.’

  ‘Had you going for a bit, didn’t I?’ he said. ‘And I’ve changed my mind about that coffee, if that’s okay.’

  ‘It’s great coffee. You grow it around here?’ I asked, handing him a cup.

  Cartwright nodded. ‘It’s local, from up on the hillside. This whole place was a coffee plantation in the old days. French planter built the house in the 1920s.’

  ‘And you put the fish ponds in?’

  ‘Nope, they came courtesy of the United States Air Force back in the seventies. A B-52 strike took out a lot of the coffee plantation but left all of those nice round craters.’

  ‘What were they aiming for?’

  ‘God knows, probably the ground since there was nothing here but coffee bushes. Might have been someone in trouble making a run for home, back to Andersen Air Force Base on Guam or U-Tapao in Thailand. Jettisoned their bomb load after getting hit by a surface-to-air missile over Hanoi, maybe.’

  ‘Well, it’s a lovely place, no matter who did the digging. And it looks like the fish side of things is booming.’

  He smiled. ‘Fish farming was the wife’s family’s business. They started with a couple of carp in a wooden bucket a few hundred years ago and now we own fish farms like this one all over Vietnam.’

  ‘Nice little earner.’

  ‘We have an excellent management team who are the public face of the business and I like it that way. I’ve always enjoyed the isolation, and after my wife passed away I found fewer and fewer reasons for leaving the place.’

  I understood the sentiment. Sitting on that terrace day after day, seeing nothing but the ponds and the mountains in the distance and the constantly changing sky, could become addictive.

  ‘Going to Saigon was a mistake.’

  ‘Why did you go?’ I asked.

  ‘I had to see a man about a fish.’

  ‘Was your son, Peter, the man you were seeing?’

  Cartwright nodded. ‘Peter’s a biologist, specialising in aquaculture. Smart bugger, too. Nothing about the fish-breeding side of the business he doesn’t know. But being spotted in Saigon was unfortunate. It seems to have set off a chain reaction.’

  ‘You got that right. Any idea why?’

  ‘Maybe. How’s your barbecuing technique?’

  TWENTY-TWO

  ‘Napoleon had it wrong when he said that an army marches on its stomach.’

  As comments go, it was a real barbecue stopper, especially if you were standing in the middle of a bunch of ex-soldiers. Jack and VT had finally surfaced after twelve hours’ sleep and they looked a lot better for it.

  Jack’s first move after having a coffee was to take the barbecue tongs off me. Now he stopped, holding the marinated half-chicken he was turning in mid-air.

  ‘Okay, I’ll bite,’ he said, carefully putting the chicken back over the coals with the rest of the meat.

  ‘An army marches on its feet,’ Cartwright continued,’ and those feet need to be in boots and you need socks to go with them. And to stay alive you need a rifle and ammunition and a bayonet and a helmet. On day one at any military boot camp they don’t just give you a haircut and a ham sandwich – they give you the gear, all the crap a soldier needs to be a soldier. And all that gear they give you comes from where?’

  ‘The quartermaster.’

  ‘Correct. And with all the millions of pieces of gear coming and going at any one time, an officer in the Quartermaster Corp with their own private agenda has ideal cover for all sorts of mischief. In ’69 I was called in by the US Army to get close to a quartermaster who someone thought was looking a bit dodgy.’

  ‘And was he?’ I asked.

  ‘Depends on how you define dodgy, I reckon. Being in bed with a Hong Kong gangster in an operation to process opium from the Golden Triangle into heroin in a mountain village with its own laboratories and airstrip, and then shipping the heroin via military transport aircraft into Hong Kong and the US could probably come under that definition.’

  ‘Could do, I suppose,’ I said.

  ‘I got roped into the situation by a US military investigator – I did counter-insurgency training with his brother at a camp near Vung Tau. The thinking was that since I was from outside the Yank military, and had a bit of an awkward history with the police before I joined up, they could sell me as someone who might be into making some money on the side, no questions asked.’

  ‘And it worked?’ I asked.

  ‘Smooth as silk. They set me up to bump into the Chinese gangster – a guy called Peng – while I was on R and R in Honkers and I managed to get a lot of good background, including the location of the village where they were running this opium-refining operation. I was moving in with a company of Vietnamese Rangers to raid the village and gather evidence for a court martial when the quartermaster somehow got wind that his cover was blown.’

  ‘How’d that happen?’

  ‘I never found out, but somehow he must have twigged and decided it was time to pull the plug.’

  ‘Which involved?’

  ‘My men had the village staked out, doing surveillance on the operation, taking photographs, all the usual stuff. One afternoon a bunch of Hueys and a couple of C-123s flew in from Saigon. Place was chock-a-block with bad guys for what looked like a high-level management meeting. Everyone was there, apart from this quartermaster geezer and the
Chinese gangster.’

  ‘Which was pretty convenient for you,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘Almost too good to be true. Everyone together in a neat little package and all I had to do was tie up the bow. I guess I should have seen it coming. An hour later, the village, the couple of hundred people in it, the heroin-processing plant, the bad guys and my rangers were all gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Off the face of the earth. You can’t see or hear B-52s on a high-level strike and a three-plane cell can dump over three hundred 500-pound bombs in one go. One moment it’s all kids laughing and playing, women hanging clothes out to dry, dogs barking, pens full of pigs and chickens, and the next it’s hell on earth and you’re praying to God to take you somewhere, anywhere else.’

  Apart from the sound of the water splashing in the fishponds, there was silence.

  ‘From what I was able to piece together,’ Cartwright continued, ‘the rock formation under the mountaintop was limestone and the concussion from the first bomb hitting the village cracked open a fissure. I dropped straight into it, and out of harm’s way. I don’t know how far I fell but I had a broken shoulder and a couple of cracked ribs, or so they told me.’

  ‘You were the only survivor?’

  Cartwright nodded. ‘I staggered out of the hills about a week later and I guess I was a pretty scary sight – naked, sunburned, still half-deaf, covered in dried blood and talking gibberish. A buffalo boy found me and led me back to his village. The people there could have easily turned me in to the NVA but they’d already lost most of their young men, conscripted by the South Vietnamese Army or the VC, and I guess they figured they could patch me up and use me as a workhorse. They turned me over to a young girl whose husband had been conscripted by the ARVN and killed somewhere down south.’

  ‘Lucky break,’ I said, ‘for you I mean, not him.’

  ‘Definitely was, as it turned out,’ Cartwright said. ‘I was totally off the planet for a long time, shell-shocked, I guess, and it wasn’t until a year or two later that stuff started to slowly come back. By that time the Americans were already scaling back their involvement and the writing was pretty much on the wall. And there I was in a tropical paradise with a bit of a weak shoulder, in love with a beautiful woman who was in love with me, and with a kid, a dozen fishponds, a comfortable hut and my very own water buffalo.’