Daiwe got sucked into Blaster’s conversation like water going down a drain. “The nation always rewards its heroes, men. We need to find an appropriate reward for the Birdman.”
It was Preacher that came up with an appropriate medal, and they wouldn’t need the approval of Congress or recognition by the Commander in Chief. At a ceremony attended by the entire team, at the dispensary while the Birdman was removing a boil off the ass of an indigenous soldier, the Birdman was awarded the Purple Cross with six Band-Aid clusters, one for each person he killed in the camp. Blaster designed the medal. It was made out of two crossed tongue depressors soaked in grape juice. The original was hung, like a bad omen, over the door of the dispensary. Before Willy left camp for the last time, the Birdman had eight more crosses over the door. The word had gotten out amongst the troops that if you got sick, you’d probably have to go to the dispensary, and if you did, the chances were less than fifty-fifty that you’d survive.
Bacsi noticed that sick call amongst the troops was the lowest of all the teams in the central highlands. He put the Birdman in for a Bronze Star for meritorious service. Willy remembered the day the Birdman was reassigned to the “C” Team, they had the largest sick call of all time. If Charley would have known how sick they were, he could have taken their camp out in the twinkling of Ho Chi Minh’s eye.
The sign in front of him pointed to SURGERY in one direction, DOCTORS LOUNGE in the other. Willy took the hallway leading in the direction of the doctor’s lounge. It was time to shed the polyester and get some more appropriate clothing. On his way to the doctor’s lounge, he passed a nurse’s station marked ONE WEST. The nurses were all preoccupied, so he helped himself to a patient’s chart lying on top of a metal file cabinet. Willy marveled at how he was beginning to look more and more like a real doctor.
The chart in hand, he found a door marked DOCTORS LOUNGE, turned right, and pushed through the swinging door. Once inside, he paused to check things out. He noted a bin against the wall for dirty hospital greens, stuffed to overflowing. Seemed they had a lot more doctors than they had people to clean up after them. There were several rows of metal lockers and benches. It reminded him of the varsity jocks’ locker room at his high school. That was over twenty-five years ago. He pushed that thought out of his head, needing to stay focused in the present. At the end of rows of lockers and benches was a large wooden door with a one-inch gap underneath. Willy could see steam coming from under it. It must be the shower and a real doctor must be using it, he thought.
Willy quickly located an empty locker near a neatly folded pile of hospital greens. He took off his clothes, mentally noting that he put them into locker number 125, and put on a set of greens. He checked under the door to the shower. There was still plenty of steam coming from under it. Next, he nonchalantly put on a pair of paper slippers over his socks. He stood up and looked at himself in the mirror. Almost perfect, he thought. He rummaged through the pile of discarded greens until he found a used surgical mask. He slipped the rubber band over his head and let the mask fall on his chest. He noticed that the steam had stopped coming out from under the door. It was time to get out of there.
Willy walked quickly toward the exit, opening lockers, then closing them, as he went along. Near the end of the row, he found what he was looking for. He removed the stethoscope and threw it around his neck so the ear pieces dangled on one side of his chest and the listening piece dangled on the other. Just before he walked through the door, he checked himself in the mirror. Staring back at him from the mirror, in medical perfection, was Dr. William Baines Beal. Willy was truly invisible in his doctor’s disguise. “Your specialty, Dr. Beal?” he said to his reflection.
“Why, . . . brain surgery, Colonel Ho.”
Willy marched out into the hospital corridor, his paper slippers sliding awkwardly on the highly-polished linoleum floor. In spite of his footwork, he was feeling confident. He was on a natural high. He was ready to find and deal with the VC colonel and the traitor Gunner McConnell.
It didn’t take a brain surgeon to find out what room Vinh Ho was assigned. Pretending to be a relative, Willy simply picked up a hospital white phone and asked for admissions. “Yes, sir. Mr. Ho is in the cardiac care unit, Room 410.” Dr. William Baines Beal, Vinh Ho’s chart in hand and a stethoscope around his neck, got into an elevator and pushed the button marked “4.”
As he exited the elevator, he followed the signs to the CARDIAC CARE UNIT. He walked past the nurse’s station and approached the officer who was seated outside room 410. “Good day officer. I hope Mr. Ho had a pleasant evening.”
“Yes, sir as far as I can tell he did. His personal physician, Dr. Phun, is in his room running tests right now.”
“Sounds promising. His chart didn’t indicate whether Mr. Ho was allowed to have visitors. There have been some inquiries at the nurse’s station.”
“He’s had three men in there since he was admitted. Maybe you should ask Dr. Phun about that.”
“Thank you, officer, for your vigilance. I will confer with Dr. Phun later this afternoon.” Willy walked away thinking what a good doctor impersonation he had made. Private physician and three other men: Gunner and two other bodyguards. He had to separate them in order to take them out without raising too much suspicion. The cop on the front door would be a problem, but he didn’t seem too bright. A simple diversion could take him out of the picture.
Willy needed time to formulate his plan. He felt the waistband of his greens. His six-inch scalpel was there, hidden by his overhanging green smock. He headed down the corridor and entered the stairwell, choosing to walk back to the closed confines of the doctor’s lounge. No more closets for this trooper, he thought, remembering that the doctor’s lounge had a DRY SAUNA next to the shower room. God, he loved the signage in hospitals.
Each room in the cardiac care unit was monitored by closed circuit television, hard-wired back to the central console at the nurse’s station. The corridor was likewise monitored by a series of cameras located in the ceiling panels. Each television unit was cross-wired into the various heart-monitoring devices and set up so the nurses could manually override and view the patient or the cameras would automatically start on any alarm signal from the various monitors.
The phone rang in room 409. Jerry closed the door and went to answer it. “Jerry, this is Captain Davis. Go turn on your television set.”
Jerry looked at his watch. It was three o’clock. “Why, Cap? Is it time for Oprah?”
“Real funny, Jerry. Just turn it on. I’ve got a surprise for you.”
Jerry walked over to the television and snapped it on. He saw a split screen with one view of the hallway in front of Vinh Ho’s door, and another view of the inside of his room. “How’d you arrange this, Cap?”
“Never you mind, Jerry. I thought you needed some high-tech for your surveillance. I’ve got another surprise for you that should be coming in real soon.”
“Great, I can hardly wait.” Jerry watched the TV screen and saw a rather large, familiar-looking nurse walk down the corridor and enter room 410. She had a vase of flowers in her hands. She arranged them on a small table next to the bed and politely greeted the occupants. “These are from some well-wishers in your district, Mr. Ho. They heard about your illness and wanted to cheer you up.”
Gunner picked up the generically penned note and read it aloud. “Best wishes for a speedy recovery.” It was signed by the Merchants’ Association of Little Saigon. Vinh Ho smiled as he read it and nodded his approval.
As Nurse Rita left the room and closed the door, she winked into the camera she knew was in the ceiling panel just above room 410. “Notice the sound, Jerry.”
“Yeah, it started when she brought in the flowers.”
“The guys in the electronics shop rigged up a miniature pickup and amplifier. We hid them in the flower arrangement that Rita there brought into the room. She will be replacing the flowers each day with fresh ones to make it look good. So I guess you ca
n just lie back and get some well-needed rest. Watch some TV, I hear there’re some interesting shows on the tube. Oh yes, in case you’re wondering, we have a VCR hooked up to the main control panel and we’re taping the surveillance.”
Jerry hung up the phone, his eyes still glued to the TV monitor. The split screen showed Rita disappearing down the corridor. At the same time, he noted that there were four people in Vinh Ho’s room. One he recognized as Gunner McConnell, there were two others that looked like bodyguards and . . . a doctor.
“No shit,” he muttered as he stared at the split screen. “It’s Willy! Willy Beal, and he’s dressed like a doctor.”
Willy approached room 410 then stopped and began conversing with the officer. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, and unlike the congressmen President Bush had talked about in his last campaign, he couldn’t read his lips. They talked briefly, then Willy walked off down the corridor and out of view.
In the past, he’d thought about getting the remaining team members together and having a reunion, but he’d never done it. If you think about something like that long enough, it becomes a bad idea. Nobody has anything in common anymore. There’s nothing to do but drink and tell war stories. The more he thought about it, the more it began to remind him of a Chinese fire drill, or as Clint Eastwood might say, “a real clusterfuck.”
Well, hail, hail, the gang’s all here—no time like the present. This case was really turning into a gang-bang, and Jerry was right in the middle of it. He had no way of knowing whether he was going to be the fuckee or the fucker. He knew that he could bust everyone and hope for a break, but chances were that wouldn’t work. He had to sit still and hope for a real break in this case, especially since his two prime suspects had been brought together in the same place. Fate’s a motherfucker, he thought, as he continued to watch and listen to the action across the hall.
Vinh Ho had been talking about the election, then the drug trade with Gunner McConnell. He told his bodyguards, Thanh and Nguyen, to follow any instructions they got from Gunner. While he was in the hospital, Gunner McConnell was in charge. He lay there for over thirty minutes talking, sometimes in English, sometimes in Vietnamese. His dark glasses and high cheekbones made him look like a skeleton with shades.
Dr. Phun came back into the room and checked Vinh’s chart. Using a syringe, he added a clear liquid to the IV drip tube. “You need your rest, my old friend. This will help you sleep for a while.” He touched the arm of his old friend in a way that showed genuine concern. Jerry made a mental note, of the four people in the Colonel’s hospital room, one could be counted as his friend. Jerry figured that if the shit got real thick, the other three would head south. The two Vietnamese bodyguards had probably picked up the genetic trait of cutting and running from one of their ARVN ancestors. Gunner had picked it up during the war, because of his keen sense of survival.
The old man began to drift off to sleep. His head sagged, then tilted to the left. His dark glasses fell forward and Dr. Phun removed them. Phun looked closely. His eyes were closed tightly, the wrinkled lids shrouding what he wanted to look into. It was like an obsession. Jerry had never seen the man’s eyes, not even when he knew him in South Vietnam. He wanted to jump out of bed, burst into the next room and rip his eyelids off, but he repressed that desire and held his position.
Colonel Ho was under the influence of the IV medications. The doctor looked at Gunner then at Tranh and Nguyen. “Tranh, Nguyen, leave me with Mr. McConnell and Uncle Vinh.” Both men hesitated, not getting out of their chairs.
“You heard the man,” Gunner snarled, as he imposingly rose out of his chair. He towered over them, casting his giant shadow across them like the sun passing behind a mountain. “Go to the cafeteria. He’ll call you when the doctor and I are done.”
Tranh and Nguyen got up meekly, looked briefly at each other, then walked out of room 410. What the fuck are they up to? Jerry thought. Then it hit him. Dr. Phun was not such a nice guy after all. He probably had injected the Colonel’s IV drip with a psychotropic drug. The drama was building. Dr. Phun moved his chair next to the old man’s bed as Gunner stood nearby. As he sat down and began to slowly talk into the Colonel’s ear, Jerry sat up, anxious to hear every word. These boys were getting ready to do a number on the old man.
He had firsthand knowledge of what was about to happen to the venerable Colonel Vinh Ho. A similar thing had been done to him just before he left Vietnam. Some of them had seen a lot of action, or had been given assignments not necessarily in concert with actual ground combat, or just plain lost it after several tours. They were debriefed by a special section of the CIA. They used what was referred to as psychotropic drugs during the debriefing period. That period was anywhere from a few days to several weeks, depending on your level of concentration. There had been unsubstantiated rumors as early as 1967 of the Army using experimental drugs on America’s own troops. They turned whole units into guinea pigs just to see what their chemists had concocted and what effect it had on their ability to fight. Rumor had it that it was fed to a platoon in the Mekong Delta. One night, as the induced paranoia began to peak, a shot was heard from the perimeter. An M-16 rifle from one of the outpost guards had misfired. That one shot caused total panic. Group paranoia took over and it became a death dance in slow motion. The guy that had the M-60 began firing at everything that moved, killing half his own platoon in less than thirty seconds. He was bayoneted through the throat after he ran out of ammo and couldn’t figure out how to reload. Several hand grenades were tossed, and finally, the ammo bunker blew while most of the remaining men fought with each other on top of it. The CIA later passed the rumor that the platoon was wiped out by a sneak attack of NVA Sappers. Blaster talked about it one evening at their fireside chat. He said, “I hope that I’m long dead so those motherfucking CIA squirrels can’t use that shit on me.” Jerry remembered him going on and on that night about psychotropics, and how they were experimental and could affect a person many years into the future.
Blaster also talked about the defoliant that was being used, something called Agent Orange. “Sounds like something out of a James Bond novel, but a lot deadlier,” he had said. “Anything that can turn the jungle brown overnight, and kill every living thing it touches, can’t be that good for our health. Think about it guys. How many times have you walked through that shit? You think just because you have boots on that it won’t get into your system, or did you hold your breath when you walked through it?” Everyone in the team house looked at each other and nobody said a word. It was another one of Blaster’s ghost stories, and they were all scared shitless. The man definitely had a gift for gab. It wasn’t until that day that Jerry brought the six bodies to GRU that he last thought about what Blaster had said. He remembered thinking at the time, You guys are the lucky ones. No psychotropics and no lingering death from cancer.
This case and the Vietnam connection had his brain churning. It made him think about the team and those long nights in the team house. It made him remember his own exit from the theater of operations, and his memory got more and more vivid the harder he thought about it. More and more vivid, that is, except for . . . two months of his life that he couldn’t account for.
The more and more he thought about it, the more pissed off he became. He remembered dropping the bodies at GRU. He remembered having another bad headache and heading for the dispensary. He remembered lying down on the adjustable leather couch and closing his eyes. He remembered the needle going into his arm and his headache beginning to fade to the drum beat of his own voice counting in draconian cadence. “One-hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven . . . ” then nothing.
Two months later he woke up in Camp Drake, Japan. His hands and feet were tied to the bed frame and he was being fed through an intravenous tube threaded into a vein in his left arm. He remembered his eyes fluttering open and seeing a sign over the door. PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA WARD. He had no idea what the day or date was, let alone where he was or how h
e’d gotten there. Confusion, that’s what he felt. Confusion, then later, abandonment, then later still, disbelief.
They had kept him drugged, kept him mentally off balance all the time he was at Camp Drake. They had gotten to his outer mind, and the suggestions they offered were carried out with machine-like precision. He was their automaton. It was his inner mind, that deepest part of his subconscious that kept him in touch with reality. It told him what they were doing. It told him how to act so that his jailers would believe his actions. It was that inner mind that functioned like an animal in a trap; delivering cunning when he needed it, and pacificity when he needed that.
After three months of captivity in Japan, he was sent stateside. He had been debriefed. He was safe to enter society. He had lost most of his memories of what had happened to him during those months. Memories better left on the cutting room floor. Now after seeing Colonel Ho being drugged, the memories swept back into his head like the rising tide on an empty expanse of virgin beach. He remembered the psychotropic drugs. He remembered the Mekong Delta. He remembered Agent Orange. He remembered the assassination teams that some of them had been assigned to.
He closed his eyes for a second, choking back his tearless emotions. He would deal with them later. Right now, he had a serial killer under surveillance.
The voice of Doctor Phun was very clear. He spoke in English, the Colonel’s adopted language. “Count backward from one hundred, Colonel.”
The old man spoke slowly in a broken rhythm. “One-hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight . . . ” He was hard asleep. The drugs had done their job.
Doctor Phun left his side and took Gunner by the arm, leading him away from the bed. “Mr. McConnell, I want to make sure our arrangement is firm. I am to try and induce Uncle Vinh into telling me his Swiss bank codes, and for this service, I am to be rewarded with 25 percent of the money contained in them.”
Club Saigon Page 35
