Red Flags

by Juris Jurjevics

  Miser shook his head ruefully. "You haven't a goddamn clue how to do this, do you, Captain, sir?"

  "Not yet."

  I left Miser to get acquainted with his men. Checkman, who had stood off at a discreet distance, fell in step as I passed and directed me back along the covered walkway to my new quarters, the third bungalow from the end. He didn't bother knocking, just showed me in.

  "Your roommate is a civilian. He leases a place in town, which is where he mostly stays. He's only in the compound when there's trouble or meetings run late."

  "Agency?"

  "It would be presumptuous of me to say, Captain."

  He had to be the spook-in-residence.

  The room was small. Two metal bunks up against opposite walls. Between them, a desk with two gooseneck lamps and a green Army field phone was pushed against the windowless back wall. A flag with a yellow star in the center of a red field hung above my roommate's bed. A Vietnamese farmer's hat and a forty-two-shot Zephyr automatic rifle with scope sights hung beside it on a peg.

  "What's his name?"

  "Ruchevsky. John Ruchevsky. Big John."

  Checkman left. I emptied my dopp kit of everything but shaving gear and soap, unpacked one set of civvies and shoes, additional fatigues, and an extra pair of jungle boots. At the foot of each bed was an actual bureau. I clamped some socks and underwear to my chest with my chin and opened the top drawer of mine. Inside was a perfect cone of fine wood shavings topped by the metal stem and trimmings of a handmade Montagnard pipe. Somebody's souvenir. Invisible bugs had devoured the wooden bowl, leaving only the aluminum stem and brass ring fittings cut from different calibers of spent bullets.

  I emptied the sawdust out the door onto the grass, tossed my stuff into the top drawer, and slid it back in place. The next drawer down held a large card. The English text addressed Advisers.

  There is a Reward for your capture and death!

  Surrender Now and Live! We will pay for your

  information on your training.

  As an afterthought it said This Girl and $10,000. Dead center was the girl, a sedate brunette in a coy pose.

  "Come on, Charlie," I muttered to myself, "give it a rest."

  I tacked the card over my bed—home sweet home—and went about draping the mosquito netting over the T-frames attached to either end. I shoved my agent's paper ID deep in my left thigh pocket and buttoned it shut. Outside, a spent artillery shell clanged like a gong, announcing chow. Struck repeatedly it would have meant an alert, all hands to the wire. Some things were the same all over Viet Nam.

  The mess hall was modest and served all ranks. Oilcloth covered a dozen tables. French-era Sten guns hung around the pastel walls, below the screens and shutters of the window openings.

  "Decoration?" I asked Checkman.

  Checkman shook his head. "More like fire extinguishers, sir. They're oiled and loaded."

  Dinner in the mess hall was thoroughly cooked and tasteless. The meat was white, the mashed potatoes white, the French beans albino. Miser and I declined the cream sauce. The potatoes, like the milk, were dehydrated and then reconstituted from powder and water. Forensics couldn't have identified the meat.

  Miser eyed his portion suspiciously. "This looks like it's been done with an acetylene torch."

  "No germs, that's for sure."

  "Tastes just like chicken," he said.

  Whatever unimaginable creature or organ we were eating, Miser always made the same observation. This time it actually was chicken. You could tell by the drumsticks. We went through the motions of eating and looked for the bar.

  A side door opened onto a modest concrete slab roofed and sided with thatch, not much more than a screened-in patio with half a dozen stools and a small bar that served all ranks. Team 31 was far too small to have separate drinking establishments for enlisted, noncoms, and officers. Over the bar hung Christmas-tree lights and a hand-forged VC submachine gun, its trigger housing and magazine holder welded to a gun barrel made from a lead pipe. Crude but lethal. The ashtrays were empty c-ration cans, with linked rounds of spent machine-gun ammo snapped shut in a ring around each one.

  Miser eyed the handcrafted receptacles skeptically. "Glad to see the campers are keeping busy."

  The bartender was a huge black guy named Westy whose chief jobs were keeping the main generator running and the water tower filled and treated.

  "What can I do you gents?"

  "Larue," I said. Everyone concurred and he served up bottles of cold Tiger beer all around.

  We were joined by the intel sergeant, Joe Parks, who was celebrating twenty-four years in the Army and his third war in Asia. Parks declared himself a homesteader who rarely left the compound. A major once, he'd been caught in the downsizing after Korea and given the option of leaving the Army or accepting a severe reduction in rank. Parks stayed, as a sergeant E-7.

  He unfolded a sheet of paper and slipped it in front of me. "No doubt you've seen these before," Parks said. Prominent in the middle, my rank and name—Di Uy Erik A. Rider—and the bounty on my head: sixty thousand piasters. Something like three hundred bucks, a small fortune in Indochina.

  He passed Miser one too. "Your reputation precedes you, Sergeant."

  Miser beamed when he saw the price on him. "I'm at a hundred thou!"

  I leaned over Miser's sheet. "Ellsworth Miser?" I said. He snatched it back.

  We carried on like it was funny, but here we were in the back of nowhere, and the VC knew us by name.

  "Makes you feel kinda important," Miser said. "Gives me the fucking creeps."

  Back in country less than forty-eight hours and the sarge and I were already on the local hit list. A cheap propaganda psych-out, but it worked. We needed to watch our asses if we didn't want to finance some VC farmer's next planting season. I slid off the barstool, took our sheets over to the one solid wall shared with the mess, and added our bounty chits to the two dozen others pinned around a red battle flag with a large yellow star in its center.

  As the light faded, several Montagnard aborigines drifted past, dark-complexioned and black-haired, their skin like bark. Three Montagnards, barefoot, dressed in black long-sleeved native shirts and matching loincloths trimmed in red. The fourth wore a French military shirt and shorts. An old soldier. All four shouldered or cradled vintage bolt-action rifles and smoked homemade pipes as they strolled.

  "Our night guards," Parks said as they ambled by. "Jarai tribesmen. There aren't enough of us to man the perimeter at night, so we've hired them. They're all veterans of the French colonial forces."

  Made sense. Vietnamese hated the Montagnards, looked down on them as repugnant inferiors. The Montagnards returned the sentiment and quietly despised the Vietnamese. When Americans took casualties, the Yards expressed regret. Chia buon. I share your sorrow. When the casualties were South Vietnamese, all you got were blank looks. Whatever courtesies might be observed during the day, no Vietnamese was allowed in the compound at night. The simple truth was, we all liked the Yards better and trusted them a whole lot more.

  In addition to the Jarai, an American stood guard on the gate and an American manned the shortwave radios all night in the MACV commo bunker, monitoring the three Special Forces camps in the province and periodically warning aircraft about impending artillery fire from the guns across the road so they didn't unwittingly fly into the trajectory. The signal detachment also maintained a separate radio link to Pleiku around the clock.

  One of the Jarai bent down, picked up a large beetle, admired it, stripped off the hard shell, and crunched down. Protein on the hoof. A delicacy. I'd seen hootch maids in Saigon do likewise with cockroaches.

  I turned back to Parks, a little embarrassed to outrank a man who had served longer than any of the rest of us and might have qualified for a general's star. "What's the lowdown on our ARVN friends across the road?"

  "It's the usual: awful morale and lethargy. We equip them with obsolete World War Two weaponry and boss them around. Their b
rass doesn't so much as house or even feed them properly, skims their pay, and lets them gamble and piss away what's left. After which they go grabbing up chickens and appropriating rice from the civilians. Endears them to everyone. Soldiers sell their military items and then nag us to replace them."

  "Meanwhile, their officers avoid anything that looks like a decision."

  "Yeah. Bugs the hell out of the colonel. Bennett is career military. He respects the idea of service. Here, government and military appointments go to whoever has the connections and the wallet. How many exceptional officers have you seen stuck at lower ranks because they couldn't afford the rank they deserved, while untrained incompetents parade around with generals' stars? You ever see anyone above the rank of captain out in the field?"

  "In their system," I said, "field-grade officers don't have to go."

  "If Bennett had gotten the combat command he'd wanted, he'd be leading troops like he did in Korea. Instead, he's stuck as senior adviser to this ingrate bunch. He's diplomatic, he does a good job, but any time we plot an operation, the ARVN go into slow motion. Every preparation takes forever. By the time the troops get done getting ready, the VC are long gone. Lately they aren't even bothering to go through the motions."

  "And why do we? I wonder."

  Joe Parks puffed on his pipe. "They're embarrassed to have us land on them with all our strategizing and machines as if they couldn't do it themselves. And they're embarrassed and resentful that they can't. They don't trust their lousy excuse for a government, and their government doesn't trust us. They see us pouring in men and equipment, erecting huge aerodromes and monster camps, and it makes them suspicious that we have permanent designs on the place, like the French."

  "Meanwhile, the Montagnards worry that we'll abandon them to the Vietnamese, who will grab up their land and evict them the minute we're not here to protect them."

  "The Yards in Pleiku call the Vietnamese land eaters," he said. "They're not wrong. The generals and cabinet ministers are busy snapping up the best land for their summer homes and business ventures. Our Two Corps commander, General Vinh Loc, and a bunch of his subordinates are building an amusement center up in Pleiku on Hodrung Mountain, next to where the Fourth Division builds its base camp this fall."

  Miser perked up. "Amusement center?"

  "Brothels and bars." Parks sucked on his pipe. "They're expecting to make a fortune. Plei Poontang, the enlisted call it." He relit the bowl with a wooden match. "The Jarai think that's the volcano they came out of at the beginning. Bellybutton, they call it. Holy ground."

  "Is that Titty Mountain?" Miser said, contemplating investments.

  Parks nodded and puffed. "Yup."

  Other members of Team 31 drifted into the bar, including Hump, the guard who'd been on the gate when we drove in, also his sidekick Lucky, and a pale newbie wearing fresh jungle fatigues and boots—no nametag, no patches, only his second lieutenant's bars. He nearly dove to the ground when an artillery shell shrieked by overhead, outbound. Hump offered him a Camel and Lucky offered a Lucky Strike to try and calm him down.

  Westy poured the guy a whiskey and said, "Just Harassment and Interdiction, sir. Vietnamese gun bunnies across the street blasting their cannons to rattle infiltrators and maybe waste some if the H and I lands lucky."

  Miser lifted his beer. "Your tax dollars at work, a hundred and ten bucks a shell. To attrition," he toasted, and sucked on his bottle.

  "Attrition!" we repeated and hoisted ours.

  "Infiltration traffic's growing all the time," Parks said to the lieutenant. "The guns go off a lot. You'll get used to them."

  Another artillery shell launched. The lieutenant flinched again as it screeched and rocketed across the sky.

  The lieutenant rubbed his palms on his uniform. "How far out are they firing?"

  "Seven miles max," Parks said. "The ground they can reach is nominally the government's. The rest is the Viet Cong's." He winked at us as he slid the lieutenant's bounty sheet over to him. "I think this is yours, Lieutenant Lovell."

  "Holy shit," the young man said, staring at his name on the poster. He knocked back his shot and offered the glass for a refill, blinking rapidly, eyes tearing up from the booze.

  Westy switched on the tape deck in back of the bar and blasted out some rock. Something stirred in the thatch overhead. The dinks' artillery hurled another shell. Westy replenished the lieutenant's liquor and poured himself a shot.

  "Yeah," he said, "nam lu," and downed the whiskey. "Attrit the funky bastards."

  My roommate took up most of the doorway. Ruchevsky was big. Six three or four. Over two hundred pounds. Thinning hair and a somber expression. He wore the requisite short-sleeved shirt, baggy khaki pants, and Hush Puppies, and looked like someone who sold sporting goods for a living. Anything but a spook. He dropped his backpack by his bunk.

  "Captain Rider?" he said. "John Ruchevsky."

  "Pleasure." I shook his hand.

  "I run the agents in the province," he said, "and spy on everybody."

  "I'm honchoing the signal detachment."

  "And freelancing intelligence for MACV. I just put in dibs on you myself."

  "For what?"

  "Mutual benefit. You can watch my back and tell me everything you get from MACV that's super secret. And I'll selectively brief you on the local doings."

  "Why doesn't that sound equitable?" I said.

  "Hey, somebody's gotta be the top bunny. And we are on the same side, no? If I don't help you sort through the avalanche of intelligence bullshit, you won't know what's important in the daily shitstorm of classified crap coming your way out of Saigon and Pleiku and clogging your encrypted channels. Besides, your colonel is okay with it. We're all a little thin on the ground in this place."

  I buttoned my jungle fatigue shirt. "You want me to go undercover downtown in Cheo Reo City?" I teased. "Blend in with the locals?"

  Ruchevsky snorted. "You may be smaller than me but you'd stick out a mile too. No, I need you for company when I go out in the woods. You could hold my hand, operate my fancy radio for me. Hey, you don't like country and western, do you? I hate C and W."

  "Rock. I like rock."

  Ruchevsky grinned. "We're golden. You absolutely get to play with my guns. Your jacket says you're good with them."

  Shit, had he really seen my file? "I didn't think your outfit liked to share," I said.

  "True, but I'm more generous than most. Besides, you're gonna get bored pushing classified paper. You'll want to get out from behind that desk, get a little fresh air. I can offer you some fun and frolic, nature hikes, introductions to interesting people."

  "We'll see," I hedged, not eager to take on more duties.

  His eyebrows rose. "Come on," he coaxed. "I'll keep your secrets if you'll help me with mine."

  I didn't respond. He sighed, disappointed. "Don't make me resort to blackmail."

  "Like what?"

  "Like who you really are and what you're really after. You and your pal from El Cid," he stage-whispered, using the slang for Criminal Investigation Division.

  So much for working anonymously. I gave him a cold eye and walked to the door, closed it softly.

  "You're smarter than you look," I said.

  "Hey, I've seen your shop in Saigon. You've got no backing. We've got two floors in the embassy, our own air service, Special Forces at our beck and call, the ear of the ambassador and his lips on the buttock of our commander in chief. You got Ellsworth Miser and a stapler."

  "You know anything about major dope fields in the province? Poppies? Marijuana?"

  "That your assignment?" he said with disdain. "You seriously looking to wage war on drugs here? Save the world from snorting, shooting, smoking that shit? How many fingers you got, Dutch boy?"

  "No. I just need to screw with this one operation."

  "Just the one? Why?"

  "At harvest time there's this Viet Cong bank account in the crown colony that grows fistfuls of American dollars wit
h every load they run from here. Dope is giving them a lot of purchasing power in the arms market."

  Ruchevsky blew a smoke ring. "Hmm. Maybe our interests do overlap. Did you know Hanoi is negotiating with Moscow for field-fired rockets?"

  "Jesus," I said.

  "Katyushas. Two meters long, black steel. Thick as your leg. A hundred pounds, forty of them high explosives. They'll fly maybe fourteen, eighteen kilometers. We're supposed to keep watch for one. Capture a sample, if possible. Can't you just see me hauling ass through the jungle with a hundred-pound rocket under my arm?"

  "Eighteen klicks. Damn. That would give them artillery, if they're accurate and they buy enough of them."

  "VC in the dope business," Ruchevsky said, musing. "Whaddya know. There's been nothing in my informants' reports so far. But it's an eye for an eye. We got a deal or what?"

  "Okay," I said, reluctantly.

  "Good. That's settled. You up for a walk in the woods?"

  "How long? How many of us?"

  "Just you and me, overnight. We'll stage out of my villa. My main man, Little John, will drive us. We'll hike in, hike out. It's not far."

  "Where are we going? What are we after?"

  "Little John gave me a lead on odd doings in the bush: a market servicing the NVA in the jungle. I want to see the scope of this thing, count customers, maybe get a handle on what kind of force is massing in the province."

  "Sounds promising."

  "Are you good to go without reporting your whereabouts?"

  "I have to tell someone I'll be away."

  "The colonel."

  "And my sergeant."

  "Okay, but that's all. It's our ass if the wrong people hear. We won't have backup."

  "The colonel says you think our security's compromised and there's a leak. Any ideas where we're sprung?"

  "Well, anything that goes across the street to ARVN is practically broadcast the next night by Radio Hanoi. We identify a target for the Air Force and it promptly vanishes. If there's a mole in the camp, I don't know where. We've looked at the usual suspects: Bennett's interpreter, old Mr. Cho. The hootch maids, food servers, cooks, the Montagnard guards—even our servicemen with security clearances."