South China Sea

“Yeah, sure, that’s what I tell you. Okay?”

“Okay,” Baker said. He suspected the warning as well as the initial contact made with the note came from the villager’s son, “Saigon.”

“Tell whoever hired you, thanks.”

“Sure, okay.” Baker gave him another ten thousand dong. The boy snapped the bill and smiled, showing his brown-stained teeth.

As Baker walked across the pedestrian overpass from the Mai Building on a deliberate roundabout route to his hotel, he told himself to calm right down, as his mom used to tell him. “Just calm right down — don’t get so excited, all worked up.” Yes, it looked like the first solid info on MIAs he’d had in years, but it might be bullshit too. People everywhere wanted to make a buck and would tell you anything, right? But then how about the hotel room all messed up, and the damn snake in the village? All right, buddy boy, calm down. Call Saigon— not the guy, Ho Chi Minh City — tell them what you have, the people you’ve seen and so on.

He dialed 01-8, then moved his body so that Ha Ha, the good friend of the police permit department, on shift again behind the counter, couldn’t tell the number he was dialing in old Saigon.

“United States Legation. How may I help you?”

“Jean, it’s Ray Baker here. Got some info on MIAs.”

“Shoot!”

“I hope not,” he joked, aware of the .45 in his coat pocket.

“What?” Jean asked.

“Nothing. Listen, I might be a bit soft-spoken and oblique here, but try to follow me. All right?”

“Roger.”

“Two MIAs. No evidence, only verbal, but a bit of monkey business with yours truly.”

“A lot of business, Ray?”

“Not so far, but definitely business.”

“You want us to extend your personal liability coverage?”

“Let me see. Hmm… could you do that by tonight?”

“Might be difficult, Ray. We’re sort of busy up north.”

“Yeah, of course. Ah, don’t worry about it. I’ve got enough coverage for tonight.”

“You sure? I could always try our Hanoi rep.”

“Nah, I’ll be fine. I might even grab a flight down tonight.”

“I can tell you now they’re full — a lot of civil officials transferring south.”

“Okay. I’ll book tomorrow. I’ll be fine. Friends coming around anyway.”

“You sure?”

“Positive. One more thing, Jean. There’s been a complaint. Same two MIAs ran with the opposition. Now info is they’re guides for that movie The Killing Fields. They’re apparently doing a remake.”

“In their own studio?” Jean asked, right on the ball.

“Nah,” Baker replied. “Apparently they want to use the opposition’s.”

“Oh. So is that all?”

“No. They’re known as Salt and Pepper.”

“Oh?”

“One black, one white. That’s all for now. See you tomorrow night.”

“You sure about the extra liability coverage?”

“Yeah. ‘Bye.”

Yeah, sure he was sure about extra liability coverage. Like hell he was, but what did it sound like to Jean — scaredy-cat! Look, the .45 was in his pocket. What the hell anyway? There’d be enough damn beetles on the floor, you’d hear anyone tiptoeing in. Besides, he’d crush up newspapers and throw them about — they’d make a hell of a rustle if someone tried to sneak in. And he’d use the dead bolt, sit with the .45 in his lap — on the toilet too. No way he’d take a shower or bath.

After he walked up and put the key in the door, he took a couple of steps to the side so he was braced against the wall and pushed the door open with his toe. A few dead roaches, a couple of them live but stumbling. Everything looked normal. He did a check on the chest of drawers, having put a hair where the second drawer closed on the first before he’d gone to the village. The hair was still there.

He went into the bathroom and washed his face, surprised by how dark the bags under his eyes were. He put a finger under each eye and pulled out to the sides. It took at least ten years off him. Was he vain enough to get a face-lift? He had always wondered why people bothered, but now, in his early fifties, he had a different perspective on it. He was starting to go bald — not a lot, but he could tell the difference. Jean was going bald too, and right now she was his best chance for a relationship.

After a shave, a meal of cha ca—charcoal-broiled fish fillets with roasted nuts — salad, noodles, and fish sauce washed down by a bottle of Tsing Tao beer — the Chinese were being a real pain in the ass, but they sure as hell could make beer — he felt a lot better. The dangers he’d imagined during the day now seemed grossly overblown, and he contemplated the difference a good meal could make to one’s disposition.

He ordered coffee and started worrying about how much he’d already gotten through to Jean in his semiplain language code. He decided to book out on the earliest flight available— the next day at noon.

In his room, coat off, in his undershirt and trousers, Baker sat up on the bed as if on a desert island, ready to indulge one of his sins, and lit up a Camel no-filter, sucking the smoke in so he could feel it deep in his chest and see it flowing lethargically out in curlicue patterns, then watching it slowly dissipate above the land of the roaches. And if any creeps came through the door or from the side veranda, he would pump the bastards “so full of lead” that, in the words of James Cagney, when they fell they’d write!

Later, the night clerk said that the beer had probably made him sleepy. Whatever it was that put him temporarily off guard, by the time Ray Baker got off one shot, his throat was cut, blood bubbling from the carotid artery, his attacker having slid up from behind, coming out from under the bed. He was dead inside a minute.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

The mash unit had to be especially cautious when attending to Freeman’s wounds, not because he was a general, but because his Medic Alert disk showed he was allergic to certain antibiotics. When they got his wound cleansed and his hand bandaged up, they put his arm in a sling, which he immediately dispensed with. He walked back to the armored personnel carrier he was using as a mobile HQ, which, along with an armored cavalry unit, had made its way north along the Phu Lang Thuong road, then been airlifted into the west-east valley between Ban Re and Loc Binh.

Freeman was worried about the fading light. Soon it would be dark, and the Chinese still in the tunnels would be able to exit within the USVUN area and create havoc. Freeman and Vinh knew that if this occurred, there were bound to be many more blue on blue incidents. But to withdraw from the hillside would simply mean giving up the territory, the high ground, that the USVUN had fought so hard for all afternoon, and going back to the fields from which they’d started.

Freeman, like Patton, said he never liked “paying for the same real estate twice,” and elected to hold the high ground. Vinh, however, cautioned that it was possible the Chinese might simply elect to retreat through the tunnel system on this side of the southern slope of the ridge to the ridge’s northern side. Freeman readily acknowledged the possibility. At least if the Chinese did slip out of the battle, he wouldn’t have to worry so much about blue on blue, but he would be faced with the prospect of more than five thousand PLA troops slipping north across the border, troops which — like those who slipped across the Yalu River in Korea — could not be pursued by his Airborne cav units because of the political decision in Washington and Hanoi that USVUN forces could not cross the Vietnamese-Chinese border, which was only a mile and a half north of the ridge.

Vinh suggested through the interpreter that perhaps there might be a way of the USVUN “having cakes and consuming them.” He meant “having your cake and eating it.” Vinh said that if TACAIR attacks from the carrier USS Enterprise could keep up a steady bombing of the northern side of the ridge, bottling