“And you believe this trip won’t be stressful? You do remember you’re convalescing?”
“A stroll in the cool forests. A little scoop here and there with a trowel. Lunch and a little rice whiskey with friendly local hill tribesmen. What better than a week in the cool fresh mountain air of Xiang Khouang? In Europe they pay huge sums of money for alpine spa retreats and here we are getting paid to attend one. Explain to me how that could be a bad thing, Madame Daeng. Nothing to worry about at all.”
“I’d like to believe so. Because it might have escaped your memory but not two months ago you were knocking on death’s door … from the inside. And trouble finds you, Siri Paiboun.”
“Trust me. Nothing can go wrong this time.”
5
CUEBALL DAVE
Cueball Dave still insisted on the ponytail. He got comments about it all the time. They called him pathetic. Guys over fifty don’t put their hair in a ponytail, they said. It’s an act of desperation, they said, especially when the top of your head’s as white and shiny as a cue ball, hence the nickname. But Cueball Dave didn’t care what they thought. He didn’t want to look like all those other old fogies. It gave him a style. Told them all he wasn’t a bank manager. Told them he had a wild background. And the girls in Pattaya loved tugging on that little tail of his.
He had a comfortable life. He’d lived in Thailand for ten years and couldn’t speak a word of Thai. Waste of time. Stupid tones he couldn’t get his tongue round, and besides, all the night people spoke some kind of English. He had a condominium room he’d bought and paid for, had shares in a restaurant he ate at, a regular bar he drank at, and a dozen or so regular serious night-time relationships. He had a wife and kids somewhere back in Boston, and a pilot’s licence, canceled, in some bureaucrat’s drawer in DC. Life had become very simple for Cueball Dave. There were those who could only dream of such a life. But Dave was always looking for more. Always had his eye open for something better. And then, in a moment of brilliance, he made it happen. Things were about to change.
He was out on the town celebrating his good fortune. He was in a Johnny Walker atmosphere vacuum where everything outside the bubble wasn’t really happening. He might not have been in that bar at all. In front of his nose were the ankles and too-large stiletto heels of a girl in a bikini, dancing-kind of. Some sixties rock was bellowing out of the speakers and there was a sweaty stale strawberry-tinted smell in the air. A dozen cheap air-fresheners hung behind the bar like decorations. A well-groomed homo was making eyes at him from across the stage. There was a gibbon on a chain begging drinks. Someone had rung the free-shots-for-everyone bell by accident earlier and the bar stewards had beaten him up when he refused to pay. Dave was on his third beer mat. The first two were his fretwork initials now. The drunk he’d been talking to had vanished. He wondered how long he’d been alone. He held on to his glass as if he might tip backwards off the stool should he let go of it. Then someone stepped inside his vacuum.
“Excuse me.”
Cueball Dave swiveled his neck around slowly as if it was starting to rust and saw the homo standing there. He was dressed as a man but any Asian in a place like this was after something.
“Look, son. I don’t-” he started.
“I’m sorry to trouble you, but aren’t you David Leon?”
“I might be.”
“You don’t remember me? I was one of your flight mechanics at Udon. Manuel Castillo. Manny. From the Philippines?”
“Well, yeah. Sure,” said Dave. He had no idea who this boy was but he didn’t want to make himself sound like he thought all Asians looked the same. Young for a field mechanic though. Perhaps he’d met him. Too much of a coincidence for it to be a pickup line.
“I’m so happy. I knew it was you,” said the young man.
Manuel Castillo, or whatever his name was, threw his arms around the ex-pilot before the old boy could get out of his way. His cufflink caught on Cueball Dave’s neck. Then the lights went out.
The Baby Booby Agogo didn’t exactly close. It wound down and then wound back up again depending on how many customers were there and how much money they were spending. Cueball Dave wasn’t spending any money and he was taking up valuable space. He’d been unconscious on the countertop for an hour and he made the place look low class. The
6
The Friendship Hotel in Phonsavan, designed like a hunting lodge, so they say, had originally been called the Snow Leopard Inn. It was very close to the old airfield and a short walk from one of the many jar clusters on the Plain of Jars. The hotel was built and occupied for many years by Corsican drug dealers in the heyday of the plain’s notorious opium trade. The building served as a warehouse for pressed opium and the mafia pilots made daily stops at the heroin processing plants before delivering their wicked wares to the poor saps fighting in Vietnam. When local politics and war forced the Europeans out of business, the building was renovated and rooms were added. There was nothing remarkable about the Friendship Hotel other than the miracle of its continued presence. It stood amid a landscape of craters in the most bombed area of the war. It somehow avoided the total decimation of every recognizable structure from hospitals to pig pens and nobody could explain why it was still standing, not even allowing for the well-documented lack of expertise of the Royal Lao bomber pilots. There was overwhelming evidence of near misses. The surrounding countryside was littered with unexploded ordnance and large signs at the hotel perimeter warned guests not to venture beyond the fence. The signs were written in Lao and Russian.
Whether the USMIA task-force members were aware they’d be sleeping in the one-time hub of the Indochinese drug trade was hard to say. But they’d certainly been briefed on the dangers of taking leisurely strolls through the countryside. The hotel manager, a small bubbly Hmong by the name of Toua, had assured the government that the grounds had been cleared of explosives before the extra bungalows were erected behind the main building. Even so, as they hurriedly assembled the bamboo chalets for the MIA teams, a worker had run his hoe into a cluster bomb and lost a foot. He’d become a member of a sizeable club. Few of the residents of Phonsavan could claim a complete set of limbs or appendages. Between 1964 and 1973 there were some 500,000 bombing missions in Laos. Two-point-three million tons of ordnance were rained upon the land. Almost half of this was in the form of cluster bombs; “bombies” as they were affectionately known. And a third of those hadn’t gone off. Not yet. Since the ceasefire, the sly little devils had claimed another twenty-thousand victims. Operation Rain Dance had begun to pepper the Plain of Jars with bombs in 1969 and no clearance operation could ever rid the region of the danger. To everyone’s relief, nothing untoward had happened since the arrival of the Lao and American delegations at the Friendship Hotel. But manager Toua was keeping his three remaining fingers crossed.
The key personnel of the two delegations were billeted in opposite wings of the lodge in rather basic but clean rooms. Those considered to be of a lower status were put up in the bungalows at the rear. These decisions had been taken by Judge Haeng, who, despite his socialist background, was ever conscious of class and status. The security detail comprised two elderly gentlemen with antique muskets who appeared to be on twenty-four-hour shifts as they were ever-present. Even with the noisy generator rattling and clunking at full throttle, electricity was only available from 6:00 until 9:00 P.M. Thence, the guests were left to their own devices. Flashlight beams sabred through the curtains of the American west wing and loud but incomprehensible voices were carried away on cool breezes into the tar-black night.
In the east wing, General Suvan, the Lao team leader, had retired early. The old soldier spent a good deal of
