the first idea what the guy in the next office is up to. Hell, I’ve heard about two identical operations set up by different departments run on the same day. Guys were tripping over each other.”
“Now, the reason this place comes to mind, is that some of the pilots I have in mind had that same odd thing going with their time records. They’d put in their sheets at the end of the month and there’d be four days unmarked here, a week there. But they never claimed holidays or sick days. None of the brass ever queried it. One of our fighter pilots called it the Tahkli lottery. If you got lucky and didn’t get yourself killed, you’d come back with a whole heap of money in your pocket.”
“And some didn’t come back?” asked Auntie Bpoo.
“You’d never know,” Johnson told her. “If anyone was MIA it was always swung around somehow to look like a regular mission gone wrong. You won’t find the name of any active US military personnel MIA in Laos unless they got lost. There was a lot of clumsy border misidentification, if you know what I mean. Guess you can’t always trust all that expensive cockpit equipment.”
“So, do you think Boyd might have been deployed on special ops by Air America?” Phosy asked.
“Why not? Air America was CIA.”
“But how would we ever be able to find out what he was involved in?” Dtui asked.
“Ask him,” said Civilai, ever hopeful.
“All right,” said Yamaguchi. “It’s the thing about the flight mechanic that worries me. Boyd returns quite unexpectedly from the grave and within a month his mechanic meets a mysterious end.”
“Not to mention the chief mechanic from Long Cheng,” Siri added. “He died within days of Sebastian. Then there was the pilot Wolff who’d drunk with them on their last night together. Odd that all the American witnesses to that last flight are now out of the reckoning.”
“Except for Boyd,” Civilai smiled.
“You think your pilot’s running around killing everyone, Civilai?” Siri asked.
“Why not? Revenge for getting him addicted to drugs. He’s probably been in an opium den for the last ten years.”
“See, this is something I’ve never really understood about the transfer of Leon from Saigon to Long Cheng,” said Johnson. “If he was involved in ‘inappropriate behavior’ serious enough to have his flying license pulled, what was he still doing in the service? I remember he was using drugs back then, he wasn’t the only one. He got a couple of warnings. So inappropriate behaviour could have been a euphemism for losing control of his habit, or dealing. But if you’re caught at either it’s a dishonorable discharge. You’re out. You don’t get transferred to an inactive post somewhere else in the war. Not even Air America would take you on.”
“So how do you think he got here?” Gordon asked.
“Well, either he didn’t actually do anything wrong and it was just a ruse to get him out of Nam and into this specific role in Laos for some reason, or he did do it and he had mighty big friends in high places who found him an easy well-paid job up here.”
“Which makes you wonder whether all this is about drugs,” said Dtui.
“Oh, I very much doubt they’d need clandestine operations for drug dealing,” said Civilai. “It was hardly a secret the CIA were buying up all the Hmong opium and selling it as heroin on the streets of Saigon. They had regular scheduled flights from Long Cheng to Vietnam full of the stuff. The pilots used to land upside down just from the fumes.”
“All right, so not drugs,” said Yamaguchi. “What else could he have been involved in?”
“I’m afraid war gives you a lot of scope for profiteering,” said Madame Daeng. “There’s no end to the possibilities.”
“Then let’s start with something we know,” said Gordon. “Boyd was carrying something he shouldn’t have been that night.”
He held up a sheet of typed foolscap.
“This is the official manifest for Boyd’s cargo when he left Udon,” he said. “Pretty standard stuff for those milk runs: rice, blankets, nails, canned food. But here, tucked away at the end is twenty tengallon containers of cooking oil. It was all destined for the refugee camp at Sam Tong.”
“You think there’s something suspicious about it?” Siri asked.
“I do. Air America flights stopped doing overnights in Long Cheng in sixty-seven. They had their own dorm in Sam Tong right next to the refugee camp. If all he had on board was refugee supplies, what was he doing parked at Spook City drinking with his buddies with a full aircraft?”
“And I can’t recall anyone mentioning cooking oil in any of the in-service courses I took on incendiaries,” said Johnson. “And I can’t see two hundred gallons of Crisco permanently destroying two acres of jungle, nor lighting up the night sky with fireworks.”
“Then what
“A lot of stuff. Magnesium can be nasty,” said Johnson. “I’ve seen a whole village burned down with one canister. I guess most commonly used would be the defoliants: Agent Orange, napalm. They can both do untold damage.”
“Aren’t there any rules for … I don’t know, fair war?” Dtui asked.
“Not for this kind,” Johnson told her. “You can put together any cocktail of benzene, polystyrene and gasoline and rain it down wherever you please and you haven’t broken any international regulations. Nobody cares, except maybe the kids that took shelter under the trees when they saw the bombers pass over. I thought I’d seen it all. But I haven’t ever witnessed anything that leaves a permanent scar on the landscape like that no-man’s-land at Ban Hoong. Napalm just burns the leaves off. Whatever Boyd was carrying destroyed the trees, permanently.”
“How would you send down something like napalm?” Daeng asked. “I mean, I doubt you’d just fly over in a helicopter, take off the caps and sprinkle it.”
20
There was a legend that extended far back beyond the Lan Xang era six hundred years before. One that could be read of in palm-leaf documents as far away as Lanna in Siam. It was the belief that the spirits of the dead may make a plea before passing on to whatever lay beyond. The spirit had the right, so it was told, to return to places once treasured in life, there to collect old footsteps. Once gathered, those footsteps became a memorial of all the happier times on earth. But the Party made it quite clear that such legends were ridiculous. Like the stories of religion and the fables of the ancient tribes it was all balderdash. No self-respecting socialist would be gullible enough to fall for any of them. But where did that leave a man who has seen the spirits of the dead and traveled to the Otherworld of the Hmong?
Siri sat on the major’s bed looking at the weathered parquet. He knew now why he’d come to this room on the night of the major’s death. The spirit of the king had summoned him here. They’d met, briefly, in life and as far as a man of royal blood and a bloody communist could ever find common ground, they’d developed a mutual respect. They’d shared two bottles of home-brewed rice whiskey and discussed issues as only two wise old men can through to the early morning. Siri had liked the man and, if this invitation to a late night seance was any proof, the king had found a fondness for the doctor. Siri knew the old man would find many a pleasurable footstep in his old fruit orchard in Luang Prabang.
If they’d talked while the king collected his footsteps from this room, Siri had no recollection. He didn’t know how he’d died or why he’d chosen to pass through this inn. Perhaps it was the last place he’d been shown respect. Perhaps he’d come to leave a message for the doctor. It was all a mystery. But the only thing for certain was that the last regent of the Kingdom of Laos was gone. Siri was no stranger to death, nor to the afterlife, but his feelings as he looked around the musty room were mixed. He felt sorrow for a friend. But he could not deny a sense of relief, perhaps even elation. In his own mind, this vindicated him from any and all involvement in Potter’s murder. He doubted the “locked in conversation with a dead king” alibi would gain him much ground in a court of law, but in his soul he knew he was innocent. A great weight was lifted from his shoulders. Despite the fact they hadn’t seen the sun in all its glory for three days, the room seemed brighter. The world offered up new opportunities. This, he
