Dead and Kicking

by McGeachin, Geoffrey

  ‘Sounds like heaven. So no interest at all in going back to your old life?’

  Cartwright smiled. ‘None whatsoever. I was pretty happy with what I had going so I stayed. It was home. First real one I’d ever had, outside the army.’

  You couldn’t argue with that.

  ‘Plus there was a complication. The army investigator who’d organised for me to infiltrate the quartermaster’s drug operation, and knew what was going on, had got himself shot dead in a cyclo outside the old Continental Hotel in Saigon a couple of days after the bombing.’

  ‘Those cyclos can be bloody dangerous,’ I said. ‘But that sounds like a convenient coincidence.’

  ‘For the bad guys maybe, but not for me,’ Cartwright said. ‘The military inquiry into the shooting concluded it was a random VC assassination. But in any event, the bloke wasn’t around to back up my story of what I’d really been doing, if anyone wanted to start slinging mud.’

  ‘So you decided to let sleeping dogs lie.’

  ‘In the case of these particular dogs, it seemed like a good idea. Peng and the quartermaster, a man called Captain Crockett, went on to bigger and better things.’

  ‘Would that be Peng of the Peng casino interests in Macau?’ Jack asked.

  Cartwright nodded. ‘You know him?’

  ‘VT and I live in Macau,’ Jack said, ‘and you hear the Peng family name a lot there.’

  ‘Old Peng, they called him,’ Cartwright continued, ‘even back then when he was young, because he was the head of the clan. A seriously nasty piece of work was Old Peng, let me tell you. People who crossed him usually lost a finger or a hand or their head, depending on the level of the transgression. Bastard moved into Macau, using his drug profits to bankroll a casino. A few decades on, he’s rich and respectable and revered for his charitable good works, support for the arts and the all-you-can-eat buffets in his casino.’

  ‘Story going around Macau is that Old Peng had a major stroke a while back,’ Jack said. ‘He’s stuck in a wheelchair and pretty much off with the pixies, I’ve heard, which is some kind of justice I suppose. His son Playford is running the casino now. But what happened to this Captain Crockett character?’

  ‘Vaughan Crockett left the military and used his share of the loot to build himself a nice little empire in construction and transport – what people now like to call logistics. In the eighties he got himself elected to the US Congress for a couple of terms, which was reasonably easy for a guy with no scruples, a ton of money and a chest full of medals, even if they were for clocking-in on time and meritorious distribution of Kool-Aid and toilet paper.’

  The medals bit sounded about right. I’d actually met a Yank soldier who’d been tasked with printing a unit newspaper when his CO in Vietnam found out he’d been a graphic designer before being drafted. The bloke ordered a printing press, which turned up in its own shipping container with a ton of ink and paper, plus a complete darkroom with cameras and film and chemicals. So he ordered three more presses and when they showed up he linked them together and set to work. This bloke earned himself a medal for being the first soldier to produce a full-colour newspaper in a combat zone.

  ‘Crockett bailed from government service two steps ahead of some awkward questions about his involvement with lobbyists, and used his contacts to expand his construction and transport empire. He also set himself up a contracting business, supplying mercenaries called the Black Falcon Group. Did very well out of Iraq.’

  ‘And this would be the same Vaughan Crockett …?’ I asked.

  ‘Yep. The Honourable, or I guess not-so-honourable to those in the know, Vaughan Tyrone Crockett, United States Ambassador to Australia, and according to rumour on several political blogs, a possible candidate for vice-president to the next occupant of the White House.’

  ‘That would seem to be a man with many, many things to hide,’ VT said.

  And he’d need to hide them well. The vetting process for a potential US vice-presidential candidate entails his own party ripping his life apart, looking for anything embarrassing – like did he pay his taxes on time or bonk the nanny or smoke dope and molest sheep or his roommates while in college? Then, once he was nominated, the media would get stuck in, looking for even the slightest hint of scandal – not, of course, in the interest of the American voter’s right to know and make an informed choice, but rather because scandal is guaranteed to increase circulation and raise ratings.

  ‘Crockett has become very adept at hiding things over the years,’ Cartwright said. ‘Anyone who gets even close to the real story is taken down by his spin machine at MB&F.’

  ‘Markham Barkin & Fargo handle his PR?’ I asked.

  ‘Yep,’ Cartwright replied, ‘and they’re bloody good at it. Crockett actually owns the operation. MB&F haven’t met a tin-pot despot, crooked politician or corrupt corporation they didn’t like. And if you threaten any part of Vaughan Crockett’s idyllic little life or his business interests, the fine folks at MB&F will dig up a twenty-year-old parking ticket and creatively infer you got it when you left your car illegally parked for five minutes while picking up some hookers, drugs or kiddie porn. Or all three.’

  ‘Nice people,’ I said.

  ‘Plus, for the things that MB&F can’t manage to spin there are a lot of other people on call to do Crockett’s really dirty work.’

  ‘I would guess we’ve met some of them recently,’ Jack said.

  I nodded. ‘I think that’s right, Jack, and I think I may have been the one who arranged the introductions.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  Over lunch, I filled in Jack, VT and Cartwright about my encounter with Brett Tozer in the lobby of the Indochine Luxe Royale.

  ‘I guess he mentioned our conversation to head office, and someone decided the best solution was to make the problem go away, permanently, starting with Brett.’

  ‘Poor bastard probably never knew what hit him,’ Jack said. ‘Talk about shooting the bloody messenger.’

  ‘Yeah, literally,’ I said. ‘I figure Brett was looking out for Crockett’s interests on the film and reporting any unusual developments back to MB&F, without really knowing why. Cushy job for him – a couple of months on a movie set in Asia and then Australia with excellent catering, accommodation and a nice per diem.’

  ‘Lousy termination package, though,’ Jack said.

  ‘You’ve got that right. Then after Brett gets eliminated, I find a bunch of goons waiting for me down a dark alley-way in a Russian jeep, a .45-calibre welcoming committee in Chiang Rai, and Jack and VT have problems in the Huey.’

  Cartwright nodded. ‘Plus my recent nocturnal visitors.’

  ‘That new plasterwork by the front door?’ Jack asked.

  So I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed.

  Cartwright nodded. ‘Last night while we were out looking for you, three men with submachine guns and an RPG launcher came visiting. They got through the perimeter wire without being spotted but the bastards didn’t make it closer than a hundred yards to the house, my people took care of that.’

  ‘Did Crockett send them?’ I said.

  ‘They didn’t say. Didn’t say much of anything, really. They’re somewhere out in the coffee plantations fertilising next year’s harvest.’

  I’d been about to get myself another cup of coffee but I changed my mind.

  ‘As I said,’ Cartwright continued, ‘a man with Crockett’s connections has a lot of people to do the real dirty work, like late-night visits or bringing down a chopper.’

  ‘And speaking of that,’ I said, ‘from what was on the TV news, that crash didn’t look like something you guys could’ve walked away from. What happened?’

  ‘Booby-trap,’ Jack said. ‘Some bastard blew up a perfectly nice chopper, and almost took us with it.’

  VT put down his knife and fork. ‘We went north from Saigon in short hops, necessary given the Huey’s limited range. Our plan was to hand the helicopter back to the People’s Air Force in Hanoi and
then rent a car and drive down this way. Jack was determined to track you down, Peter, and he had discovered that this place was listed as the headquarters for Tranh Fisheries and Aquaculture Enterprises.’

  ‘But when we hit Hanoi we still had a day to spare,’ Jack added, ‘so I figured we could fit in a quick side-trip to check out Dien Bien Phu valley.’

  ‘We got to Dien Bien Phu Airport late,’ VT continued, ‘so we decided to spend the night in town. I went through the shutdown checklist and then made sure the ship was tied down securely for the night. I also had the fuel topped off as we intended to make an early start next morning. During the evening my sister’s granddaughter, Miss Hoang, you remember her, Alby? The policewoman …?’

  I nodded. Boy, did I remember Miss Hoang.

  ‘She called me,’ he continued, ‘and told me what had happened to you and suggested that we be cautious. It was cold the next morning, and as I did my pre-flight checks I could smell fuel. I noticed some spillage around the fuel filler cap, like an overflow. Then, when I crawled under the ship to use the tap that bleeds off any water condensation from the fuel lines, I found this.’

  He pulled a shiny metal object from his shirt pocket. It was a circular piece of steel, like a large key ring, and there was a split pin attached to it. He handed it to Cartwright.

  ‘Safety pin,’ he said, ‘from a hand grenade.’

  VT nodded. ‘We Vietnamese became very adept at improvising weapons and making booby-traps. It comes from a long history of fighting off powerful foreign invaders using very limited resources.’

  Jack nodded. ‘An old favourite was securing the spring-loaded handle of a grenade with duct tape or a heavy elastic band and then pulling the pin and dropping the grenade into a fuel tank. The grenade is armed, but the tape keeps it safe.’

  ‘Until the fuel eats through the elastic or dissolves the adhesive on the tape and releases the handle,’ VT said. ‘The fuse is activated and four or five seconds later …’

  Jack smiled. ‘KA-BOOM!’

  ‘At which time,’ Cartwright said, ‘if they’ve used the right amount of tape or a thick enough elastic band, I’m guessing you blokes are at 1500 feet over some piece of trackless jungle?’

  ‘That’s the drill,’ Jack said, ‘and an explosion or fire in a helicopter at 1500 feet isn’t something you want to deal with ’cos there ain’t no bloody place to go. Some chopper pilots in ’Nam made pacts with their co-pilots that in the event of a hit and high-altitude fire, whoever was still functioning would shoot the other person and then themselves.’

  Nobody said anything. There really wasn’t anything to say.

  ‘Anyway,’ Jack continued, ‘this type of booby-trap is very hard to time accurately, so we assumed someone gave a signal by telephone or radio to drop the grenade into the tank just as we approached the airfield. It was the displaced fuel overflowing that tipped off VT. Saved by Archimedes’ principle you could say.’

  ‘So what did you do?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, there were a bunch of goons hanging around trying to look like mechanics, so we reckoned they had a Plan B if we twigged to Plan A, and Plan B had to be just as nasty. So we took a punt on having a safety window of at least ten minutes and took off, keeping low. I figured it would be better to put her down in a hard-to-access area, so we’d get a good head start on someone looking for bodies to confirm the kill. I don’t think either of us took a breath until we were on the ground.’

  ‘From what I saw on the TV it didn’t look like you could land a chopper in the middle of all that jungle.’

  ‘VT’s the man,’ Jack said. ‘He picked a grove of bamboo and dropped us down into the middle of it with the chopper blades tearing through the foliage. It was like flying a gigantic whipper snipper.’

  ‘That works?’

  ‘The rotor blades on the Huey have heavy counterweights on the tips,’ VT explained, ‘and if the vegetation isn’t too thick and you have a clear slot for the tail rotor, you can chop your way through.’

  ‘And if it’s too thick?’

  ‘That’s a whole ’nother ugly story,’ Jack said, ‘and if it had happened, we wouldn’t be here telling you about it. But VT got it right and we grabbed our backpacks and hit the frog and toad as soon as those bloody skids touched the dirt. Excellent timing, too. Probably didn’t get more than a couple of hundred feet away before the whole thing went up. Big bang, heat, concussion and we both got blown arse over teakettle and woke up several hundred yards further down the hillside.’

  ‘And nothing was broken?’

  ‘Nope. We were bloody lucky. Apart from the obvious scratches and bruises, I’ve got a couple of ribs that feel a bit ordinary and VT twisted his knee pretty badly, which is why it took us all that time to get down the mountain and find a friendly local to give us a lift to the nearest noodle shop, where you found us.’

  Jack looked at Cartwright and smiled. ‘Quite a coincidence,’ he said.

  I remembered that phone call in the Toyota and the bloke waiting on the motorcycle outside the café pocketing a wad of cash. I guessed Cartwright’s people had put the word out that they were looking for a couple of blokes who’d recently fallen out of the sky.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  After lunch, Jack and VT got ready to head back to Macau while Cartwright gave me the full guided tour, with Heckle and Jeckle and their TEC-9s following at a discreet distance. If you discounted the security fences, the bodyguards and all the firepower, Cartwright’s joint was an oasis of calm. Chickens were scratching about, the trees were heavy with fruit, the air was clean and staff were feeding the fish or checking the water quality in the ponds. You could see why a bloke wouldn’t want to leave.

  We took a breather out of the midafternoon sun in a small tile-roofed gazebo in a bamboo grove. It looked like it had been recently built on a landscaped area between two of the big ponds. A fresh pot of jasmine tea was waiting for us in a wicker basket.

  ‘This was the site of Pond 27,’ Cartwright said, handing me a cup. ‘I thought it would make a nice spot for a bit of contemplation and reflection.’

  ‘Pond 27?’ I said, looking around. ‘Given the lack of water, I guess the Yank bomb that hit this spot was a dud.’

  ‘There was a pond here but I had it filled in.’

  ‘Any particular reason?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you know about fish, Alby?’

  ‘Fresh is best,’ I said, ‘don’t overcook it and don’t order it in a restaurant on Mondays. And it’s probably wise to serve it with white wine to a purist like Jack.’

  He smiled. ‘Right now, the world is in a fish-farming frenzy. I’ve got pilot projects growing Finnish rainbow trout in the central and northern highlands. You can grow them up to one and a half kilos in just twelve months, with a projected yield of up to thirty tonnes per hectare. Other people are working with sturgeon from Russia.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘I had no idea it was that intensive.’

  ‘Here in Vietnam we do catfish, shrimp, even shellfish. And carp. The Vietnamese love carp, grow them in their rice paddies as well as on fish farms. They grow fast, too. Probably grow more carp than all the fish raised by aquaculture in Australia, but you can’t give the bloody things away to Australians – they don’t like the taste, reckon they’re muddy.’

  ‘Guess it’s all in how you prepare them. I’ve had carp in Japan and Spain, and even salt-roasted in Baghdad, and it was pretty damn tasty.’

  ‘People might just have to get used to eating all sorts of fish,’ Cartwright said. ‘Aquaculture has become the great hope for a planet with empty oceans. But one of the reasons the world’s stocks are almost depleted, apart from a century of mechanised overfishing, is that we have been scooping out fish from the oceans to make fishmeal to feed to farmed fish.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.’

  ‘Exactly, especially when it can take up to five kilos of fishmeal to put one kilo on a farmed salmon. There are researchers w
orking on this problem all over the world. They’re making fishmeal out of corn and soybeans and testing different qualities and quantities for different stages of the growth cycle. All well and good, I suppose, but now that corn is also used to make sweeteners and biofuels, other food crops are being displaced to feed this growing market.’

  ‘And your son is working on the problem?’

  ‘From a different angle. Peter wasn’t interested in better fish food: he was interested in a new and better fish.’

  ‘We don’t already have enough to choose from?’

  ‘What the world really needs is a robust, tasty, fast-growing fish that will eat almost anything and put on condition on the basis of a kilo of weight per kilo of food.’

  ‘I’d like to see that.’

  ‘So would I, Alby, but so far no-one has. However, it looked for a while that Peter might have been on the right track with something we were calling Project PB. We hoped it would become the world’s farmed fish of choice – a real coup for Vietnam and an economic boon for this region in particular. These people have been good to me, and they kept my secret for thirty years, so I owe them a lot.’

  ‘Can we whack one in a steamer with some ginger, soy sauce and spring onions and have a taste?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not. The first batch should have been reaching plate size by now, but unfortunately there were … complications.’

  ‘Complications?’

  Cartwright nodded. ‘Nine months ago Pond 27 was home to the pilot batch of PB, but we drained it, incinerated all the young fish with flamethrowers, filled in the pond, and the gardeners made me this spot to relax.’

  ‘Jesus, mate, flamethrowers?’