“So we secure that,” Hawk said.
“And all we have to sweat is security.”
“And the gooks outnumber security.”
“So if we get them some weapons, and secure the armory…”
“They might win,” Hawk said.
“And you and I will deal with Costigan’s bodyguards,” I said.
“And Costigan.”
I took a five-dollar bill from my pocket and left it on the bar.
“I gotta walk,” I said. “I think better walking.”
“I’ll join you,” Hawk said. “Nothing like an evening stroll on a summer night.”
“In Pequod, Connecticut,” I said, “there’s nothing else.”
“Except Doreen,” Hawk said. “True,” I said.
CHAPTER 34
KY LOOKED SORT OF LIKE A PLEASANT SNAKE. He was slender and easy in his movements, and his thin face was smooth and without lines. He smiled often, but there was about him a sense of contained deadliness. He wore only a pair of black loose-fitting pants as he squatted beside the fire under the tarp, and as he moved, the skeletal muscles moved languidly, but strong, under his skin. His black hair was long, nearly to his shoulders, and he had a drooping black mustache. Around us there were twenty or thirty Vietnamese men gathered, many of them in shadow at the edge of the firelight, squatting motionless. Ky spoke to Hawk in a clutter of French, Vietnamese, and pidgin. Hawk nodded and answered him in the same.
The summer night was warm, but the fire was kept up. There was a cookpot set at the edge of the ashes. The smell of the workers’ compound was not an American smell. It was a smell of different herbs and different food eaten in a different land. It was a smell of foreignness and difference. I wondered if the rest of the installation smelled that way to them.
“He say they recruited out of refugee camps in Thailand. Say if they make trouble they get shipped back to Vietnam.”
“Tell him that’s not so,” I said.
“Told him that,” Hawk said. “He doesn’t think I know.”
“And he thinks I do?”
“You white.”
“Ahh,” I said.
“Says he knows chocolate soldiers got no power. Wants to hear it from you.”
“What would happen if they did get shipped back to Vietnam?”
“Ky was working with us in counterinsurgency,” Hawk said. “Special task force. Root out the Commie vipers and kill ‘em. All of a sudden the Commie vipers in charge, and we fighting each other for a spot in the helicopters. Say the Commie vipers be inclined to kill him with bamboo slivers. Says most of the workers got that kind of problem.”
I nodded. “What color was the guy that signed him up to counterinsurgency?”
Hawk grinned. He spoke to Ky. Ky answered and looked at me and nodded and grinned. Hawk said, “Some honkie major signed him up. Said it would be to his advantage once us Yanks had rooted them Commie vipers out. Said he could count on us Yanks.”
I nodded. “So much for trusting honkies,” I said. Hawk relayed it. Ky replied.
“It lose a little in the translation,” Hawk said, “but he say he got the idea.”
“He’s got to trust me and you, or not trust me and you. There’s no way we can assure him that we won’t bolt, and leave him holding the ass end of a tiger. In fact we will.”
Hawk nodded. “Good point,” he said.
He talked some more with Ky. Ky nodded and made a short reply and Hawk spoke some more and Ky still nodded and then sat quietly and looked at me. No one else around us said a word. Nobody moved. All of them smoked cigarettes.
“I told him what we’re up to,” Hawk said. “I told him that we had some influence with the feds. I told him that we wanted them to tear this place up as a diversion so we could get at Susan.”
“What did he say?”
“He say the Vietnamese equivalent of un huh.” I looked around the bright circle that the fire made, at the semi-shadowed faces of these distant foreign men. Uprooted for decades, used in the service of other people’s goals. One of the things I noticed was that the way they sat shielded us from the sight of the Transpan security types.
“Here’s what I think,” I said, talking directly to Ky. Every few sentences I paused and Hawk translated for me. “I think that you are probably illegal aliens and run the risk of being deported if you get caught, as you are likely to if you leave here. But I think the deportation, if it happens, will be back to the refugee camp. I don’t think there’s any danger of getting deported to Vietnam.” I was getting very cramped squatting on my haunches. “We will speak to Ives about you, and he will assure us that you won’t be deported, and he might mean it or he might not. And if he does mean it, he might be able to deliver, or he might not.”
I waited while Hawk spoke.
