by Mark Dawson
He got up and went out to stand at the rail that marked the edge of the terrace. “It’s been forty years,” he said. “Forty years.”
“Danny—what has been?”
He looked away. “It’s Dak Son,” he said. He shook his head, chuckling bitterly. “I can’t believe it. Dak Son.”
Beatrix stood and went out to stand next to him. “This is how it is, Danny: you are going to tell me everything I don’t know. I don’t care if you say you’ve forgotten about it, or you were holding it back. It doesn’t matter. Everything. If you don’t, I’m not going to help you any longer. Are we clear?”
He swallowed.
“We’re clear,” he said quietly. “You’d better sit down.”
32
“You have to remember how it was back then,” Danny said. “It was bad in sixty-eight. I mean—it was really bad. The Tet Offensive was in January and everybody was hinky. We were trying anything and everything to make progress, but nothing was sticking. Our SF guys were up in the hills trying to recruit the Montagnard—you know who they are?”
“No,” she said.
“‘People of the mountain.’ They called themselves the Degar. They were tough as nails. I knew Green Berets who fought with them, said they were the best fighters they’d ever seen. We all called them the Yards. It was funny—we had them working as spies, reporting back on the VC around the Ho Chi Minh trail. They got paid in bags of rice at the start, and when that didn’t motivate them any longer, they switched to stuff they could get from the catalogues that were getting sent out through the APO. I knew agents who were paying for grade A intel with kids’ clothes from Sears.” He looked over at Beatrix. “You got a smoke?”
She went to her bag, took out the packet and tapped out two cigarettes. She gave him one, put hers into her mouth, and then lit both.
“Back in sixty-eight, the VC massacred a whole Montagnard village, including women and children, and the Yards were looking for payback. Lincoln was given the job of recruiting them. He sent one of his men—this badass, Eddie Navarro—to go up into the Highlands to speak to them. There was a hamlet near Dak Son where they agreed to have a sit-down. Navarro and two other men trekked up there, but the VC had been tipped off. There was an ambush.”
He blew smoke.
“Go on,” she said.
“There are two versions of what happened that night. The official version, the one that meant Lincoln got to burnish his record, and the truth. Lincoln’s version is that he got an urgent radio call from Navarro that he was trapped behind enemy lines and that the VC were waiting for sundown to make their move. That story has Lincoln leading a platoon to get the men back, only there was a heavy storm and he became separated from the rest of the men. He said he arrived at the village alone just before the VC attacked. There was a firefight. Lincoln was hit in the leg but fought on and was able to get Navarro and the others out.” Danny shook his head derisively. “They got back to base, and Navarro wrote up his account of what happened: Lincoln showed valour, took selfless risks to get the others out. Yada yada yada. It’s a work of fiction from top to bottom, and he got the Intelligence Star and the Purple Heart for it. That’s the most ridiculous thing out of the whole sorry mess. He actually got decorated for that bullshit. Lincoln didn’t know one end of his rifle from the other. I was never anything special as a soldier, but I could’ve taken him out with one arm tied behind my back.”
He finished his cigarette and flicked it over the edge of the terrace. Beatrix gave him another.
“And the truth?”
“Two of the Yards came in a week later. They said the VC came back with reinforcements the next night and murdered everyone—the elderly, kids, everyone. I remember them well—two brothers. One of them had a broken arm. Lincoln had been signed off because he’d been shot, and Navarro was back out in the field. The brothers didn’t speak a word of English, so they asked me to see what they wanted. So I sat them down and interviewed them.”
He inhaled deeply; Beatrix could see that his hand was shaking.
“And?” she said.
“And what they told me doesn’t match up with what Navarro put in his report—it’s not even close. The thing about getting split up from the platoon was right. The brothers said he turned up in the village, soaking wet, practically shitting himself with fear. The VC were on his tail. Turned out that they didn’t know exactly where Navarro was hiding out, so they just followed him. Lincoln got lost because he couldn’t read his map, and then he gave away the location of the men he had gone in to rescue. There was a firefight. They said Navarro fought back, but not Lincoln. He panicked. He was the last one to try to get off a shot. He told them after that his rifle had jammed. They didn’t believe it. They said they found it afterwards, and it was fine. They said that he just hit the floor and hid until the smoke cleared.”
“So how did they get out?”
“Because of the Yards. The VC bugged out when they realised there was going to be serious resistance. Lincoln and Navarro called in a Huey for an evac, didn’t look back.”
“But Lincoln was shot?”
“Not before he left the village.”
“What? He did it to himself?”
Danny shrugged. “You tell me. Him or Navarro. Made him look better. And it would’ve made it a lot easier to give him a medal.”
Beatrix sat back in her chair, thinking about it. “And Navarro didn’t say a word?”
“Navarro was a snake,” Danny said. “He was in-country and Lincoln was his boss. He knew which side his bread was buttered on. Lincoln gets a commendation, and Navarro, who backs up the story, figures that he should stick with him and pick up the benefits when he climbs the ladder. Happy ending for both of them, and nobody the wiser.”
“Except you.”
“That’s right,” Danny said. “Except me.”
33
Beatrix brought the laptop out to the terrace and scrolled through the document again.
“It’s stolen valour,” Danny said. “If it ever comes out what really went down, Lincoln will be ruined.”
Beatrix kept scrolling. “Did he know you spoke to the Degar?”
“Yeah. He knew. He’d just come back from the infirmary, and he was mad as hell. He said I shouldn’t have spoken to them without him. I hadn’t filed the report yet and he told me that it had to go through him first.”
“And what did you do?”
“Collette had broken up with me the week before. I didn’t care about anything then, and I’d been drinking. I told him he was a liar and a coward. We went at it—I got a punch off, hit him upside the head and put him on his ass, but then Navarro came into the room and cold-cocked me. I woke up in a storeroom tied to a chair. They were both there. Navarro put a gun in my mouth while Lincoln told me what I was going to do. They wanted to make sure I was a team player. They wanted me to write up a report of the interviews with the Yards, but the report had to match what Lincoln and Navarro had been saying.”
“And you did.”
“Didn’t have a choice.”
“You could’ve reported him.”
He laughed bitterly. “To whom? Lincoln was my superior. I wore the uniform, but I was working for the Agency, not the Army. There was a lot of shit going on. It wasn’t just Lincoln. Everybody was getting what they could get, looking out for number one, making sure they stayed out of danger and feathering their nests.” He took a deep breath. “I didn’t know who I could trust. There were no whistle-blowers. I knew snitches who got fragged.”
“And he would’ve done that to you?”
He nodded. “In a heartbeat. He showed me a report that Navarro had just written up. The two Yards I’d spoken to had been found in the bush, shot in the head. The suggestion was that it was the VC, but Navarro told me he did it.”
He inhaled deeply.
“What happened in the village—or, at least, what he said happened—he knew that was his golden ticket. He’d already killed for it, and he
wasn’t going to let someone like me take that away from him. He would’ve killed for it again. Would’ve been easy, too. He could’ve made it look like I did myself in. I was miserable all the time. I had nothing left back home. Maybe I would’ve blown my brains out. No one would have doubted it. ”
He took a breath and stared out to sea.
“There was no one to corroborate my story, and what happened to those poor bastards could just as easily have happened to me. What was I supposed to do? Either way, I was done. I said I’d play ball. Lincoln took me to his office and stayed with me while I typed up the reports. I bugged out first thing the next day. Got on that flight and never looked back.”
“Until now,” she said.
He shook his head. “You want to know the funny thing? I hadn’t thought about it for years.” He got up and paced the terrace. “Probably didn’t want to think about it. All I want is to go home and see my daughter.”
34
It was midday by the time Danny had finished telling her the full story. Beatrix went into the kitchen to prepare lunch. In truth, she needed a moment alone so that she could clear her head. Her initial reaction had been one of annoyance that Danny had not been completely open with her, but, as she chopped tomatoes and cucumber for a salad, she came to the conclusion that she would likely have done exactly the same thing. Years had passed since the episode that had led to his desertion, and it was not unreasonable for him to have put it to the back of his mind. He was worried about his forgetfulness, too; perhaps those memories were harder to retrieve than they had once been.
Beatrix used the blade of the knife to sweep the chopped vegetables into a bowl and took it, together with two plates and a bottle of dressing, back out to the terrace. Danny was working on his fourth cigarette.
She put the bowl and plates on the table. “When you went to the consulate, did you give them your name?”
“They asked me at the desk, and I told them. Don’t look at me like that—what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t just make one up. I was there to get a passport. I’m not like you. I can’t pretend to be someone I’m not.”
“I’m not criticising,” Beatrix said as she used a serving spoon to scoop salad onto her plate. “I’m just trying to put together what might have happened.”
The cigarette trembled in Danny’s hand. “You think Lincoln knows?”
“Definitely.” She spoke carefully. “He’s on the CIA’s top table. Deputy director of Ops. You don’t have a career like he’s had without being careful about the secrets you’d like to stay secret. I think he might have had an alert out for your name. As soon as you surfaced, he would have wanted to know about it.”
“And now he does?”
“Your personnel file was classified just after you went to the consulate. That must have been him—he saw you’d appeared and made sure it couldn’t be accessed. He knows, Danny. And now he’s making sure that the story never comes to light. Suppressing your file is easy enough. But you’re a different matter.”
“But the guys on the boat—that was Wang.”
“I think we might have been wrong about that.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means it might have been Wang’s men, but that it had nothing to do with Michael Yeung. I’m going to have to dig a little more. I don’t think we have the full picture yet.”
“There’s one other thing,” he said.
He took the laptop and scrolled down until he found the second Article 15 notice. Danny had been charged with larceny under Article 80 of the Uniform Military Code of Justice.
“You were accused of stealing government property,” she said.
“We always recorded the interviews we did. It’s good practice, for a start—to keep a record. And although my Vietnamese is good, the Yards didn’t always speak it. I would have referred to the tapes when I was writing up the interviews. But when Lincoln came back and went crazy at me, I knew I might need proof to back up what I’d said. I went into the office and took them.”
“Do you still have them now?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. There’s a box of stuff I kept from ’Nam. If I have them, they’ll be in there.”
“And where’s that?”
“In my cabin on the boat. There’s a drawer under the bed.”
“I’ll go over to the boat tonight and have a look,” Beatrix said.
35
Beatrix reminded Danny to stay at the cottage, to call her only if it was absolutely necessary, and told him that she would be back later.
She drove back to Wan Chai, left the Mercedes and took the Tsuen Wan Line to Mong Kok. She climbed to the surface and walked to the Ladies’ Market. It was in full swing. A sea of shoppers, many of them locals, swarmed the stores that were wedged in along the edges of the tight streets. This part of Kowloon was even more crowded than the rest of Hong Kong. Men and women edged shoulder to shoulder between the stalls filled with purses, T-shirts, cosmetics, cheap household goods and tourist junk. Beatrix swung her go-bag loose and mounted it on one shoulder, anchoring it down under her arm with her elbow. A street like this would be heaven for even a halfway decent pickpocket, and practically everything she owned was inside the bag.
She walked on, glancing up at Langham Place, the upscale mall that loomed over the clutter of the older buildings that surrounded it. She headed south, following her nose as she came across the stalls on either side of the road where street food vendors hawked their fish balls, tofu and meat skewers, and deep-fried vegetables.
The Eight-Ball was a new club just off Jordan Road. It was themed around pool, and, as she stepped into the coolness of the air-conditioning, she glanced around and saw a dozen tables covered with green and blue baize, lit by lights that were suspended overhead. Some of the tables were occupied, and the click and thunk of balls was audible over the AC/DC track that was playing over the PA.
There was a club on the floor above that could be accessed by a staircase on the other side of the room. Beatrix made her way between the tables until she reached the staircase; it was blocked by a velvet rope, and, as she approached, a man with tattoos down both arms stepped out of an office and intercepted her.
“Closed,” he said.
“Not for me,” she said.
“You come back tonight.”
“I’m here to see Mr. Yeung.”
“He is not—”
“Tell him Beatrix is here to see him.”
The large room upstairs was divided into a bar and a dance floor, with a series of booths spread around the periphery. There were no windows and the lights were on, revealing the peeling paint and tacky patches across the floor that would all be hidden within the strobes and neon once the night began. Beatrix went behind the bar and helped herself to a bottle of the local Pawn Craft Ale from the fridge. She opened it and made her way across the floor to the nearest booth. She leaned against the table and took out her cigarettes as Michael Yeung emerged from the door to the office.
He crossed the floor until he was alongside her.
“Hello, Michael.”
“Beatrix,” he said. He gestured to the booth. “Please. Sit.”
“Thank you.”
“How are you?”
“I’m fine,” she said.
A woman came through the door and made her way to the bar. She assembled a decanter of water, a bowl of ice, a crystal glass and a ramekin with several neat slices of lemon. She added a bottle of sake and two glasses and brought it all over on a tray.
“You’re sure I can’t tempt you with sake?”
Beatrix raised the bottle of beer. “I’m good. This is fine.”
He took the sake, poured himself a glass and held the glass aloft. “You should have called first.”
“So you could say that you didn’t want to see me?”
“What do you expect? You failed me.”
“Perhaps,” she said.
“Wang is still alive. He is still causing me trouble. You failed.�
�
“I have a better idea what happened now,” she said. “I’m not making excuses—it’s my responsibility, and I accept that. But the intelligence I received was compromised. I’ll know for sure later, but I believe Wang has made some powerful friends.” Beatrix looked into Yeung’s eyes and saw only disinterest. “It doesn’t matter. You asked me to deal with Wang, and I didn’t. I intend to put that right.”
He drank, then put the glass down on the table. “So why are you here? You don’t need my blessing to do something you already agreed to do.”
“I’m here because of Danny. He needs your help.”
“You have seen him?”
“I’ve been with him the last few days.”
“He has spoken to you about what happened between us?”
“He said you argued.”
“He was defending you,” he said. He stared at her with cold, hard eyes. “I told him that you didn’t deserve to be defended.”
“And then?”
“And then we both said some things that we should not have said.”
“So he’s hurt your feelings?”
Yeung frowned, as if trying to translate what she had just said and, once he had done that, weighing up whether she would be so brazen as to poke fun at him.
He collected his sake and drained it, then refilled the glass from the bottle. “Did he tell you everything?”
“He said that he told you he wanted to leave, and that you said no. I’ll be honest, Michael—it’s all very childish. It’s the kind of nonsense I’d expect from toddlers.”
He stared at her, and, just when she thought she had overplayed it, he started to chuckle.
“You are brave to take that tone with me, Beatrix. Very brave.” He poured a second glass of sake and pushed it across the table to her. “Drink.”
She did, taking a sip, holding it in her mouth and then swallowing it.
