It was a comic opera kingdom, the ‘Land of a Million Elephants’. Most Americans would never be able to find it on a map.
Reyes dropped off his bags at the Setthya Palace Hotel and made his way to the Purple Porpoise. It was only just afternoon and it was still quiet when he walked in; the ambassador of a large South American country was asleep in a rattan chair, snoring, the Lao Presse covering his face; two guys in aviator sunglasses and baseball caps sat in another corner, blearily playing poker and smoking marijuana. There was a bottle of White Horse whisky on the table between them, and two straws. Reyes noted their gold identity bracelets—they were Air America pilots.
The barkeep’s name was Monty Banks, an Australian who sounded like Prince Philip when he was sober. He was leaning on the bar in his shirtsleeves, sipping a pink gin.
“I’m looking for James Brandt,” Reyes said to him.
“James Brandt?” He pronounced it ‘Brarnt.’
“You mean Buzz?” He looked at his watch. “He’ll be here in ten minutes. Chum of his?”
“Friend of a friend. He said he’d meet me here.”
“What’s your poison, old boy?”
“Got any decent rum?”
“Havana Club.” Hav-arna. “That do you?”
“With lime and soda, thanks.”
When Buzz arrived, he saw Reyes and nodded. He looked more like a jockey than a spy, a small, whippet-like man with short sandy colored hair and steel-rimmed glasses. As soon as he walked in Monty slapped a glass of Jack Daniels on the counter. Buzz took it and led the way to a table in the corner.
“So, you’re Walt’s pal from Saigon.”
“We’ve known each other for quite a while.”
“He says you were an Agency man.”
“Not directly. A contractor.”
Buzz looked him over and nodded, as if he was everything he had expected. “He says you’re fucking crazy.”
“Crazy is as crazy does.”
“Yeah, I guess. This is not your first time in Laos?”
“I was here a few years ago.”
“Yeah? What were you doing?”
“I was an agricultural adviser.”
Buzz smiled. They both knew what that meant. “Well they sure now how to grow agriculture in this country; you must have advised them real good. So you know your way around, right?”
“A little.”
“And you want a ride upcountry.”
“There’s a village I lived in for a few weeks in ‘62, just out of Sam Thong. They’ll probably remember me, I guess they don’t see too many round eyes.”
“Oh, they’re seeing more of us all the time. But yeah, we can get you up there. Whether you’ll get out again, that’s quite another proposition.”
“I’m looking for this guy O’Loughlin. You know if anyone at the Embassy has made any efforts to get him back?”
“Hell, no, we’d rather he stayed lost. You find him, well that’s up to you, but you’ll get no official help from us. I’m doing this as a personal favor. Anyway, what’s your reason, is this guy a friend of yours?”
“Not really.”
“Not really? Then what the fuck, you don’t mind me asking. You know you could get killed?”
“It’s a favor for a friend.”
He grinned. “She must be some friend. Because I tell you, I wouldn’t give you great odds of getting out of that jungle again if you go ahead with this crazy idea.”
“I was born in Havana. It’s a big gambling town...or it was before Fidel took over. For a while I helped run a numbers racket in Miami, so I know all about odds.”
“Well, I wish you luck, pal, but I can tell you, I’m not betting on seeing you again.” He raised his glass.
Reyes returned the toast. “I think you underestimate me.”
“What’s your plan?”
“Your people get me to the village—it’s called Ban Soea. I’ll get a guide and we’ll go search the area. I figure the Pathet Lao will find us before we find them and when they do I’ll do some tough talking. I can speak the language.
“Or else they’ll shoot you, too.
“That’s the risk, yeah.”
“What are you going to bargain with?”
“Money. Everyone can be bought. But if I can find some other way, I will.”
“You must be out of your fucking mind.”
Reyes thought about the Nevada, all those empty years looking for something that would matter to him again. He was pretty damned sure he’d found it now. Dying for a reason now didn’t seem as bad as living without a purpose. “It probably seems that way to you,” he said.
Buzz clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re one crazy motherfucker. You should stick around if you pull this off, you’d fit right in around here.”
Chapter 26
Reyes took off from Wattay just before dawn in an Air America Piper. The airfield was still blanketed in mist. There were just two other passengers, both journalists heading to Sam Thong as part of the Embassy’s feel-good package. They wanted to talk, and Reyes didn’t. Reyes got his way.
They flew northeast over the Mekong plain as the sun rose over the jigsaw of green rice paddies below. In the distance he got his first glimpse of the jagged towers of limestone rising from the mountains of Luang Prabang.
Thirty minutes later they were getting ready to land in one of the most heavily bombed places on the earth.
Sam Thong was marked on all the maps and the airstrip was designated Lima Twenty by the Americans. They dropped into the valley between mist-shrouded pinnacles of rock. It looked like they were about to land in a Chinese feather and ink painting. The rest of the mountain city appeared through the fog; maintenance hangars, operations buildings and crew billets all clustered around the tiny airstrip.
The air base at Sam Thong was one massive public relations exercise. American aid agencies were based there organizing rice drops to the hill tribes in the surrounding mountains, who were beleaguered by the ongoing war between the government and the communists. What was seldom mentioned was that the villagers were starving because their men were all away fighting the communists for the CIA.
Reyes knew that as an accredited journalist, Connor would have had no trouble getting a ride up here in a Piper like this one or on an Air America Huey. He would have sat through the lecture about the beneficence of the US rice drops and the dangers of communism and then had the free tour of the two hundred bed hospital and the USAID schools.
How he got away from the Embassy officials and got a ride out of there was anyone’s guess. He plainly had balls and determination. Money as well, Reyes guessed, because he must have bribed someone.
What Connor didn’t know was that the real story was not in the jungle; it was right there on the other side of the hill.
After they taxied to the end of the strip, Reyes thanked the pilot for the ride and wished the two journalists a pleasant stay. A Bell 47 was waiting for him on the other side of the apron, courtesy of his friend Buzz at the Embassy. He clambered in and a few moments later he was soaring back into the air, heading for a town that didn’t exist.
In the fifties Long Tieng had once been a tiny Hmong village. Now it was the country’s second largest city, even though it did not appear on any of the maps. In fact, it was one of the largest military installations in South East Asia and the busiest airport anywhere in the world, more than four hundred flights taking off every day.
Its official designation was Lima Twenty Alpha, Sam Thong’s Alternate landing strip. It was hemmed in on three sides by jagged limestone karsts and there was an outcrop at the western end of the runway known as the "vertical speed brake." There was no control tower and no navigational aids. It was a pilot’s nightmare. You had to be crazy to fly in Laos; no wonder Buzz had said he would fit right in.
As Reyes climbed out of the chopper a few minutes later he marveled at how something so big could be kept secret from the rest of the world. He looked around the valley. It
was massive, a dusty city of noodle stands, thatched huts and jerry-rigged power cables. There were countries in South America where they would have made this the capital.
Walt had told him thirty thousand people lived here. It was the headquarters for the CIA’s private army of thirty thousand Hmong mercenaries.
There was another pilot waiting to meet him, leaning on a jeep at the edge of the dirt strip. He didn’t look much like a top gun, he had sparse grey hair and a paunch, but he was Air America right down to the Hawaiian shirt and the gold rings and ID bracelets.
“You must be Garcia,” he said. “You can call me Bear.” Bear held out a hand the size of a paw and Reyes shook it. “You hungry?”
“Well I didn’t get time for breakfast yet,” Reyes said.
“Great, I don’t like to fly on an empty stomach,” Bear said, which seemed evident. “Let’s get something to eat.”
He got in the jeep and the Hmong driver headed into the town. There was just one paved road with tin shacks and bamboo huts either side, pigs rooting underneath the stilts. They stopped at a noodle shack and Bear promised him the best beef noodle soup in Asia. He was right; a grinning Hmong woman served the best pho he had ever had, made with lashings of fresh vegetables.
Bear kept up a monologue the whole time they ate, complaining about his mortgages and school fees back home in San Diego. He had been a crop duster in Ohio, he said, then worked on the Alaskan oil fields, but nothing paid like this job. He cleared a thousand dollars a week. Sure, it was dangerous but so was crop dusting. Once he had paid off the mortgage he was getting the hell out.
Reyes heard a roar and watched a huge C-130 drop through the clouds and bounce down on the dirt strip, pulling up at the end of the strip with just yards to spare. However much those guys are getting paid to fly those things, it’s not enough, Reyes thought.
Afterwards all he wanted to do was sleep it off but as soon as he’d finished they were bouncing back across the strip. Bear’s Porter Pilatus was loaded and ready to go.
The hour after dawn was rush hour at Long Tieng and the strip was crowded with Royal Lao T-28s, Air America Bird Dogs and Raven spy planes. There were Hueys everywhere, like taxis on Broadway. They roared overhead one after the other and disappeared into the white ceiling of clouds.
Empty-eyed Hmong soldiers in black pajamas, most of them barefoot, shuffled out towards one of the Hueys. They looked exhausted. Some of them were no more than kids; their Armalites were bigger than they were. Walt told him that even Congress didn’t know about this war. It was the Agency’s private party. It was invitation only.
They flew northwest over thick, verdant jungle. It would be so easy to disappear in there, Reyes thought. Connor never really appreciated what he was up against.
“Looks peaceful, don’t it?” Bear said, through the headphones. “But there’s commies everywhere. Sometimes they take shots at us from the ground with their rifles, you don’t hear a goddamned thing. Then you get back to Long Tieng, there’s bullet holes everywhere up and down the fucking fuselage. You just got to watch out for the Magic Bullet is all.”
“The Magic Bullet?”
“It’s the one you don’t hear and you don’t see. Comes out of nowhere, lucky shot, goes through the skin and takes out the pilot or one of the crew. It happens.”
The wild green mountains rose all around them, wind-bitten karst thin as knife blades pierced the overcast, green with moss.
They dropped down into a valley and suddenly the hills were ablaze with red and white poppies, brilliant against the somber backdrop of the mountains. They flew over a Hmong village perched high on the side of a ridge, a cluster of thatched huts surrounded by poppy fields. Bear eased back on the throttle and the Piper dropped towards a landing strip that looked like it had been hacked out of the side of the mountain just the week before. From five hundred feet it looked the size of a postage stamp.
“You planning on landing on that?” Reyes said.
“Do it all the time, man.”
He saw villagers staring up at them, while their pigs and chickens scattered under the poled huts spooked by the sound of the engines. Bear brought the Piper low along the valley, the wheels almost skimming the forest canopy.
Reyes held his breath and gripped his seat.
“Relax,” Bear said. “These mothers are built for this. I could land her in your back yard.”
“I live in an apartment,” Reyes said.
“How big is your balcony?”
Bear knew what he was doing and he was right about the plane. The wheels barely touched the ground and they were taxiing to a stop. He’d had harder landings at LAX.
The Hmong rushed out to meet them, distinctive in their black pajamas edged with dark blue. Bear grinned at him. “Well there you go, man. Ban Soea. I hear the place is kicking on a Saturday night. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“When are you coming back for me?”
“My orders are four days. If you’re not here, you’ll have to ring for a cab.”
Reyes held out his hand. “Thanks, Bear.”
“Hey don’t thank me, man. I don’t know who the hell you are, but I just dropped you in the middle of nowhere and if it wasn’t for commies you’d be surrounded by nothing. It’s your business, but I don’t figure I just done you any kind of favor at all.”
Reyes jumped out, threw his knapsack over his shoulder and headed towards the village and the horde of screaming children running out to greet them.
Chapter 27
It was like any other Hmong village, a few bamboo huts on stilts with pigs, dogs and chickens roaming around underneath them, whole families living in one room above. Women were pounding rice, whittling bamboo, and cooking on open fires, while snot-nosed toddlers wandered around carrying their baby siblings in slings on their backs. In seven years nothing had changed; nothing had changed much in seven hundred.
The headman of the village remembered Reyes from seven years before. He grinned at him with broken and betel nut-stained teeth as if he was a long-lost brother. Reyes showed him the medicines he had brought with him in the cardboard box, explained what each one was used for. The headman was delighted and bent over and pulled down his pajama bottoms to show him the abscess on his right buttock. “Can you fix this?” he asked.
Reyes swallowed hard to keep down his beef noodles and found a packet of antibiotics. “These pills should do it,” he said.
The old man was delighted. He asked him if he would like to pay for a chicken for lunch. Reyes handed him some kip and pointed out a scrawny chicken scratching under the hut. The headman’s son caught it and expertly wrung its neck, then handed it to one of the women to cook.
There was an impromptu clinic—the villagers arrived at the door of the hut in a steady stream asking for medicine. He cleaned wounds and peered into ears and mouths and treated them all as best he could. If he didn’t understand the problem or he didn’t know what to do, he gave them sugar pills. In his experience placebos worked as well as anything, it was all in the salesmanship.
He stumbled over every other sentence, it had been a long time since he had to speak Hmong, and even back then he had never been fluent. But they seemed to understand him well enough.
Later he sat down in the chief’s hut with the headman and his son and they shared the chicken with white rice from bamboo bowls. As they ate, the chief talked about all that had happened since Reyes had last been here. Times were hard for them now, he said. A lot of the young men had been forcibly inducted into the army. They were paying a tax to the local Pathet Lao - the same ones who had captured Connor - but he didn’t know how much longer they could stay in the village. American bombing was becoming more indiscriminate. Last week they had opened fire on some women coming back from the market. All we can grow now is opium, he said, because that’s women’s work, and just a little bit of rice.
Reyes said he would talk to the President of the United States for him and see what he could do. The chie
f seemed satisfied with that. Reyes made a mental note to complain to Buzz when and if he ever got back to Vientiane, though he supposed there was nothing anyone could do if some hotshot pilot wanted to have some fun. There were no rules of engagement in Laos. If even Congress didn’t know they were fighting a war here, how could they control what their pilots did?
“So why are you here?” the headman asked him, after they’d eaten and Reyes had brought out the Mekong whisky he had brought with him from Vientiane. “We don’t want to send any more soldiers to fight the Pathet Lao. I’ve already lost two of my sons.”
“I’m not working for the government anymore,” Reyes said. “I’m here looking for a friend of mine.”
“What friend is this?”
“He is a crazy American who wandered into the jungle near here a few days ago and was captured by the Pathet Lao. Do you know of this?”
He nodded. “Yes, I know. The Pathet Lao have a camp not very far away from here. I have heard he is their prisoner.”
“Is he still alive?”
He shrugged: perhaps.
“Can you take me to him?”
The headman conferred with his son who shook his head and said it was possible, but that it would be very dangerous.
Reyes brought out a thick wad of kip from his shirt pocket and put it on the bamboo mat. “All I want is a guide to show me their camp.”
“Perhaps they will take you as their prisoner as well,” the headman’s son suggested.
“What’s their commander like? Do you know of him?”
“I have heard he is a practical man. He used to be a big teacher in the university in Vientiane many years ago. Perhaps he will listen to you. Who knows?”
They brought him a teenage boy, Tou, and said he would guide him. He was young, but he was able and cool-headed. But it was too late in the day to start now. They would start first thing in the morning. Reyes was frustrated at the delay but he knew the headman’s word was final; he would have to do as he advised.
Saigon Wife Page 10
